Peril in Paradise

There is no word in the English language that is more misunderstood or less popular than the word “sin”. Many people regard the idea of “sin” as an outmoded religious concept that has no place in our modern world.

• In a pluralistic society, many people believe that there can be no such thing as “sin” in a moral sense; our behavior is simply a matter of our own personal preference. If anyone labels what I am doing as a “sin”, they are imposing their personal moral preferences on me. And that is not acceptable in a pluralistic society such as ours.

• Others believe that sin is the breaking of certain religious or social rules –

  • rules that have been devised by man

  • rules which have by tradition been accepted by society

  • rules that tend to change over time and from culture to culture.

• And most people, if they are willing to use the term at all, believe that “sin” really refers only to the breaking of the most serious of those rules (e.g. murder, rape, etc.). In other words, it isn’t appropriate to talk about minor matters, such as gossip, greed, or gluttony as “sins”.

• Still other people use the term “Sin” in a somewhat playful sense. They are thinking of those times when we “let our hair down” or “have a fling” or “go for it” – times when we venture beyond our normal, conservative lifestyle. Those moments of daring are when we act like “sinners” – and to be a sinner can actually be a lot of fun.

But the Bible presents sin in an entirely different light. The book of Genesis introduces the concept of sin very early on in the story of the human race. It tells us that sin is something that profoundly affected our original parents, affects all of us today, and is thus something that we all need to come to grips with. I am hoping that today, we can understand something about the nature of sin, how it works within us, and what God expects us to do about it.

Genesis teaches us that as human beings, we have been created in the image of God. We bear God’s image, and therefore, God expects us to reflect his nature and character. If we fail to do this – if we fail to think and act in ways that are consistent with God’s character and with his purpose – we bring God into disrepute, because we misrepresent him. And when that happens, we find ourselves in a position of being morally out of tune with God, and spiritually out of touch with God. There is a rupture in our relationship with him, because we are failing to be what he created us to be.

And that failure – which the Bible calls sin – separates us from God. It puts us on the wrong side of God’s justice, righteousness, purity, and holiness, and there are serious consequences to that.

When the Bible uses the word “sin”, as it does more than 600 times, it is using a word that essentially means: “to miss the mark; to fail to hit the target; to stray off the path” – the “mark”; the “target”; the “path” referring to the way that we should be reflecting the holy standard of God’s character. That is our goal. That is why we were created.

The Bible’s definition of sin implies 5 things:

1. There is an objective moral standard for human behavior: namely, to reflect the character of God

2. That standard is defined by God, not by me

3. The standard is universal; it applies to all human beings everywhere – if you are human, that’s your standard

4. That standard doesn’t change over time or from culture to culture – it isn’t one thing here and another thing somewhere else in the world.

5. There are serious repercussions when we fail to measure up to the standard

You say, “Okay, so how do we know this standard? How does God communicate it to us?” The Bible says that God has communicated this standard to us in two ways:

1. Through the existence of our conscience – general revelation (Rom. 2:12-15). I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of how human beings, who are supposed to have evolved from inanimate matter in a way that guaranteed their survival, could possibly find themselves in possession of a conscience – an inner voice – that condemns them for acting selfishly. The existence of our conscience is the way that God has written his standard on our hearts.

2. Through the written Word of God, the Bible – special revelation. God has spelled out to us, through the Scriptures, specifically how he wants us to think and act as human beings.

Now when we break the standard, we are “sinning”. And ever since Genesis 3, that has been our natural “default setting”. We find ourselves naturally disregarding and disobeying God’s standard for us. We are all sinners in fact, because we are all sinners by nature.

• Rom. 3:23

• Eccl 7:20

• Prov. 20:9

• Psalm 14:2-3

Sin is always an act of the will – it is when we fail to do what we know we should do, or we do what we know we should not do. It is a deliberate choice we make.

And God holds us responsible. We miss the mark because we choose to do so. We fail to follow the right path because we deliberately decide to follow the wrong one. There is nothing “accidental” about it. There is no excuse for sin on the basis of genetics, background, culture, influence, or environment.

We sin of our own free will - that’s why God holds us accountable for it. Sin may involve our emotions and our intellect, but it springs primarily from our will. We sin because we choose to. And that’s why God holds us responsible.

Look at Genesis 3:6…

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

This verse tells us that Eve based her decision to eat the forbidden fruit on three rationalizations.

1. She saw that the forbidden fruit was good for food

All of us have been born with inner physical needs. The need for food is one of them. We also have a need for security, for happiness and pleasure, a need for sexual fulfillment, and so on. One of the areas in which we will be tempted to sin is in the area of our physical needs. We tend to have the assumption that, because we feel a physical need, we should take whatever steps are necessary to satisfy that need irrespective of whether or not it takes us outside the will of God.

When Satan came to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, this where he made his first effort. Jesus was hungry. He had been fasting for forty days. He had a very definite physical need. So Satan tried to get Jesus to use his miracle-working power to turn the stones into bread in order to feed himself and meet that need. But that would have been a selfish, self-serving use of his power.

Satan tempts us to entertain the idea that we can satisfy our physical appetites; we can get what we need, by going against God’s standard.

This is how people become enslaved to physical addictions. The bondage of alcoholism, nicotine addiction, drug addiction, even addiction to sex through pornography or illicit relationships, are all the result of us acting on the idea that we can meet our physical needs in ways that are counter to God’s will.

There is a verse in 1 John that provides a pattern for what was going on here. It is 1 John 2:16 (KJV)…

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

The temptation to sin confronts us on three levels:

1. the lust of the flesh – our physical needs

2. the lust of the eyes – our soul needs

3. the pride of life – our spiritual needs

Eve saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food. She rationalized that going against God’s standard would potentially satisfy her physical need. But there was more than that…

2. She saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye—that it was beautiful to look at.

This may seem fairly innocent. What could be wrong with wanting something because it is nice to look at? After all, God created us with the ability to appreciate beauty and order and design. This is part of the image of God in us. We appreciate nice things. Yet this is an area in which we are sorely tempted!

We find ourselves thinking that, in order to really appreciate something that is beautiful and excellent, we have to possess it, we must have it, we must make it our own. Doesn’t matter what it takes, or what else we must sacrifice in order to get it. The false assumption we make is that beauty must be possessed in order to be appreciated. This is a temptation that is happening on the level of our “soul needs”.

Interestingly enough, this is the second way that Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness:

Luke 4:5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours.

Satan showed Jesus the world in all its beauty and splendor and said “All this can be yours if you just worship me.” This is what 1 John 2:16 calls the lust of the eyes. And this is what makes us willing to do anything we can in order to possess the “good things” in life. Our inner soul has a legitimate yearning for those things, and we think we can satisfy that yearning by going outside the will of God to get them.

Eve saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye

3. Eve saw that the fruit was desirable for gaining wisdom.

Last week, we saw that Satan had already suggested to Eve that God had lied to her. Not only would she not die if she ate the forbidden fruit, she would actually become like God, knowing good and evil. She would become better than she was: more alive, more alert, wiser and more discerning. She would become godlike. Her self-esteem, her sense of self-worth would be immeasurably improved if she just ate of this fruit.

This is what 1 John 2:16 calls the “pride of life”. It has to do with our view of ourselves in relation to God, which is a spiritual question.

Sure enough, when Satan tempted Jesus a third time, he took him to the temple. He took him up to the pinnacle of the temple and said to Jesus “Jump. God will miraculously save you, and that will prove to everyone just how important you are. Everyone will know that you’re somebody special in the eyes of God.”

Sin confronted Eve on these three levels:

1. the lust of the flesh - she saw that the fruit was good for food

2. the lust of the eyes - she saw that it was pleasing to the eye

3. the pride of life - she thought it would enhance her personal standing and worth if she ate it

So she made a decision: she took the fruit and ate it.

James 1:14-15 ..each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

This was a fateful decision Eve made. She disregarded the authority of God’s Word in her life. She doubted God’s goodness. And she decided to go her own way. And the world has never been the same since.

Q. What about Adam? The last part of verse 6 tells us that “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” Now from verse 1–5, Adam wasn’t even mentioned. While Eve was being tempted by the serpent, Adam apparently wasn’t around.

But now here he is, and the Bible just says, “she gave some to her husband, and he ate it.” No temptation. No persuasion. No coercion. She gave it to him and he ate it.

Did you know that what Adam did was even more serious than what Eve did?

He hadn’t been deceived by the serpent like Eve had. 1 Timothy 2:14 tells us that “Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived…” She had believed the lies of Satan. She was operating under false assumptions, but Adam wasn’t. He went into this with his eyes wide open.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that this was the forbidden fruit. You can’t say that Eve gave him this fruit without telling him what it was or where it came from. In other words, he didn’t eat it in ignorance—he knew exactly what it was. And because of that, God held him accountable for eating it.

Adam deliberately disobeyed the commandment of God without any inducement to do so by the serpent. And because he did, and because he was the spiritual leader of this relationship, he was the one that God held accountable for introducing sin into the human race.

Romans 5 tells us that “sin and death entered the world through one man—Adam. Not through Eve, but through Adam. It talks about what he did as a trespass—a deliberate going beyond the boundaries that God had set.

And this is how sin entered the human race. This is why we are all sinners—because Adam sinned. This is why we now have this “default setting” as sinners. He passed on to us this inborn tendency to disregard God’s will and to disobey God’s command. We all have this inner compulsion to go our own way. And it started back in the Garden of Eden.

Now look at the effects of sin in verse 7:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

The first effect of sin is that it makes us ashamed of ourselves. Before they sinned, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. They were completely open with each other, transparent, sharing their most intimate selves on every level.

But as soon as they sinned, they wanted to conceal themselves. They became painfully aware of the fact that they were physically exposed, and they wanted to cover up. They wanted to conceal themselves. There was now a kind of a chasm—a division—between them that made it difficult for them to relate freely and intimately the way they once had.

So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. You can just visualize them with trembling hands anxiously trying to sew these garments together—something they had never done before; something they had never needed to do before. It’s a sad picture.

And the fig leaves were not just an attempt to make themselves presentable to each other; they were an attempt to make themselves presentable to God. You see, because of what had happened, they didn’t feel comfortable in God’s presence anymore—because they knew they had something to hide. They had broken God’s commandment. They were guilty in his sight. And they were ashamed of themselves. These fig leaves represented their effort to somehow cover their sin—to make themselves fit to be in the presence of God.

All the way down through history, we have been frantically trying to sew together fig leaves to cover our guilt and our sense of shame before God. The fig leaves take many forms:

• Performing religious rituals and duties.

• Rites of purification.

• Going on pilgrimages.

• Doing penance.

• Trying to live a moral life.

• Going to church

But God says “There’s nothing you can do to cover your sin. There is only one covering for sin—and that is the blood of an innocent substitute—Jesus Christ the lamb of God.”

We are going to see, later on in this chapter, in v. 21, that, “the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” The fig leaves that Adam and Eve had made were not adequate, you see. God had another solution; and His solution meant that an innocent substitute had to die—and it was probably a lamb. And this was in anticipation of the Lamb of God who would die to take away the sin of the world.

The first result of sin is that it makes us ashamed of ourselves.

2. Sin makes us afraid of God:

Genesis 3:8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Adam and Eve had been accustomed to having fellowship with God. But now that fellowship was broken. And rather than running to the Lord when he came into the Garden, they ran away from him. They hid among the trees. They didn’t want to be with him, because God is holy and they were now sinners.

How foolish it is to run from God! Francis Thompson wrote a poem called “The Hound of Heaven”, in which he describes his own flight from God.

I fled Him down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him down the arches of the years;

I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind: and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him

The Psalmist wrote…

Psalm 139:7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me”, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

This is a poignant moment in the story. What does God do with Adam and Eve at this point? Does he come into the Garden, raging in anger and judgment? Does he expose them and blast them with his holiness? No. He comes calling gently for them.

Genesis 3:9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

This passage is the first indication in the Bible of God’s attitude toward sinners. God gently seeks out Adam and Eve and He asks them four questions: Where are you? (v. 9) Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree? (v. 11) What is this you have done? (v. 13)

Why does God ask these questions? Doesn’t he already know the answers? Of course he does, but he asks the questions in order to draw out Adam and Eve. He wants them to admit what they have done. He wants them to confess their sin, because it is only when we confess our sin—when we agree with God concerning our sin—that we can receive His help and His forgiveness.

But how does Adam respond to these questions?

Genesis 3:10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” In other words, “The reason I’m hiding is because of you.”

Genesis 3:11 And God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

In other words, “God, it’s Eve’s fault. She made me do it. And as a matter of fact, it’s really your fault, God, because you put this woman here. If you hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” You see how Adam tries to deflect the blame away from himself?

Genesis 3:13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

In other words, “the devil made me do it. And it’s your fault, God, for letting the serpent into the garden in the first place.”

You see what they’re doing? They are blaming each other and they are ultimately blaming God for their sin. This is another devastating result of sin. Sin makes us accuse others.

Have you ever noticed how quick we are to excuse ourselves and blame others for the way we are? We blame our parents, we blame our background, we blame our teachers, and our employers, we blame our environment, we blame our luck, we blame our genetic makeup, and ultimately, we blame God, because He’s the one who allowed all those things into our lives.

Sin makes us want to defend ourselves—to turn the searchlight away from ourselves and on to someone else. As sinners, we act like cornered animals.

But it is only when we come to our senses and realize that we are sinners because we have chosen to go our own way—we have chosen to turn our backs on God and run our own lives—that God can do anything with us and for us.

As sinners, we ought to be running toward God, not away from him. But our sin makes us want to run away from him.

Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, and they both blamed God, but ultimately, they both confessed. In the end, they both admitted “Yes, I ate the forbidden fruit. I sinned.”

When they reached that point, that’s when God could do something for them. And it’s the same throughout the Bible. When Jacob reached that point, God could do something for him. When David reached that point, God could do something for him. When Peter and Paul reached that point, God could do something for them.

I wonder this morning, have you reached that point? Have you ever come to the place where you’ve finally been willing to admit, “I’m a sinner. Plain and simple. No excuses. No rationalizations. No blaming other people or circumstances for why I am the way I am. I’m a sinner because I’ve gone my own way. I have turned my back on God.”

Psalm 32:1 Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

God’s forgiveness meets us the moment we confess our sins.

1John 1:9

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.