The Consequences of Sin

I heard of a church which had just built a new sanctuary. It was a beautiful piece of architecture - modern and functional. One of the features of the sanctuary was a large, stylized clock-face that was built into the back wall, just below the balcony. It wasn’t a clock that you could remove or replace, because it was built right into the wall. It was an integral part of the design of the building.

Not too long after the church had moved into their new worship center, people began to notice that the clock wasn’t keeping the right time, and pretty soon, it stopped altogether. One of the builder’s technicians was called in to see if he could fix the problem, but to no avail. The clock wouldn’t budge. A clockmaker was called in to look at it, and he was able to get it moving, but pretty soon it quit again, the clock hands frozen at a quarter to seven.

Several months went by as the building committee tried to get their reluctant clock to work. In spite of all their efforts, they couldn’t seem to get it repaired properly, and they couldn’t just rip it out, as it would leave a gaping hole in the wall of their beautiful sanctuary. The clock became something of a standing joke among the people of the congregation, as it defied all attempts to fix it. Finally, they just gave up and left the clock alone - a mute testimony to the wrong time.

But the pastor, seeking to make the best of a bad situation, decided to use the clock to remind his people of an important spiritual truth. He persuaded the congregation to erect a plaque beside the clock. Engraved on the plaque were the words: “Don’t blame the hands. The problem lies deeper.”

Perhaps you make it your habit to read the newspaper each day, or watch the nightly news on television. You don’t have to do that for long before you become almost overwhelmed by the amount of evil and pain and suffering that that are done by the hands of man. But the Bible says that you could say the same thing about the human race as that church said about its broken clock. “Don’t blame the hands. The problem lies deeper.”

The problem is sin and today we are going to go back to the book of Genesis, chapter 3 to investigate the results of sin in the human race. We remember how God created Adam and Eve and put them in a perfect environment - the Garden of Eden. We remember how God gave Adam and Eve a free will to decide whether or not to follow Him and obey His commands. We remember how Satan, in the guise of a serpent, came into the Garden and tempted Eve to abandon God’s way in favor of going her own way. And we remember how he succeeded in getting Adam and Eve to disobey God. They sinned. And their sin brought inevitable consequences that would affect every area of their life.

By the way, Adam’s sin in eating of the forbidden fruit was even worse than Eve’s. Why? Because when Eve sinned, she was being deceived by the tempter. She ate of the fruit in the heat of the moment. But Adam took and ate of it in cold blood, knowing full well what he was doing. And even though Adam was to have been the leader in that relationship, he simply followed his wife meekly into sin. This is why the NT lays the responsibility for sin on Adam’s shoulders, not Eve’s. As the man, as the husband, he was to be the leader. He was the one who was ultimately responsible for their spiritual life. But Adam simply abandoned that responsibility, as many men do today.

Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death…

When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they began to die physically. But their sin also brought some other consequences . It brought with it the death of:

- innocence

- fellowship with God

- trust between each other

- joy, and fulfilment in living

- true companionship in marriage

And as those things were dying, a few other things were being born on that fateful day:

- a sense shame and self-consciousness

- separation from God and a desire to hide from God

- feelings of guilt and and a tendency to blame others

- pain and suffering and sadness

- rivalry and competition between the sexes

Genesis 3:7 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.

When God created Adam and Eve, he created them naked.

Genesis 2:25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

They felt no shame because their focus was outside of themselves. But when they sinned, they became for the first time self-conscious. This shame has nothing to do with sexuality. It was a shame that came from having something to hide. The man and the woman had sinned against God’s law - now they wanted to conceal themselves. They had acted in what they thought was enlightened self-interest, but in doing so, they had put themselves and not God at the center of their universe. That changed their focus. Before, their focus was on God. Now, it was on themselves. They had become shamefully self-conscious.

Now when you are ashamed of something you’ve done, you try to cover it up, don’t you? And when you are ashamed of yourself, you try to cover yourself up. This is why Adam and Eve attempted to make clothes for themselves out of fig leaves. They felt that if they could just cover themselves up physically, this would help them to cover up spiritually. They were looking at clothing as a way to give them a sense of adequacy - a way to make them feel better about themselves.

In many ways, this is the same today. Wearing nice clothing makes us feel better about ourselves. A lady once said “Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I buy a new hat.” Her husband replied, “I always wondered where you got them.”

Clothing has a way of covering up the real you - it has a way of making you feel that you are better than you are. This is why young people are so clothes-conscious. They’re going through a time of life when they’re really not sure about themselves. They haven’t come to terms with their self-image. So they use clothes to cover up this sense of inadequacy.

But clothes-consciousness isn’t limited to teenagers. Books have been written on how to dress for success. We talk about wearing “power ties” and “drop-dead” dresses. All this as a way of covering up what’s really inside and conveying the impression that we really have it together.

The first consequence of sin was shame. Adam and Eve tried to cover up their nakedness with clothes. The second consequence was fear.

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. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

If the first consequence of sin has to do with man’s relationship with himself - shame and self-consciousness, the second consequence of sin has to do with his relationship with God. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had rejoiced in God’s fellowship, now they fled from God’s presence. They hid among the trees of the Garden, hoping against hope that God wouldn’t find them, but knowing in their hearts that He would.

Things haven’t changed much. Sin still produces in people the same aversion to God. Today we don’t hide among the trees. We hide in the bushes of intellectualism and philosophy and psychology. We crouch behind the shrubs of a busy schedule, and we hope that God will not find us.

This is why we neglect to read the Bible. This is why people don’t want to come to church to listen to the Word of God preached. Because in all these things, they are afraid that God will say what He said to Adam and Eve: “Where are you?” They are terrified that God will seek them out and find them in their sin.

How foolish it is to run from God. Francis Thompson wrote a poem about God in which he called God “The Hound of Heaven”.

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

Another poet 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.

When God came into the Garden, He did not come as a thundering avenger to judge man’s sin. He came as a loving father, calling “Adam, where are you?” God has not changed. Jesus said that He came to earth

to seek and save that which was lost.

Don’t run from God.

Genesis 3:10 Adam answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” And he 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.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

The first consequence of sin is shame. It affects how we feel about ourselves.

The second consequence of sin is fear. It affects how we feel about God.

The third consequence of sin is guilt. It affects how we feel about others.

Martin Luther brings out something very important in his comments on this passage. He notes how sin is progressive - how it has a way of multiplying and compounding itself.

“Perversion and stupidity always accompany sin and sinners accuse themselves by their excuses and betray themselves by their defense, especially before God. This is the nature of sin. The sinner flees endlessly from God, and by excusing his sin with lies, heaps sin upon sin until he arrives at blasphemy and despair. Thus sin by its own gravitation always draws with it another sin till finally the sinful person would rather accuse God than acknowledge his own sin.”

When God confronted Adam with his sin, Adam took it like a man: he blamed his wife! But in reality, what he was doing was blaming God. He should have said “Yes, Lord, I have sinned.” but instead he said, in effect, “You have sinned, God, because you gave me this woman.” Not only did sin break the relationship between God and man, but sin broke the relationship between Adam and Eve. Sin isolates us not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal plane as well. Where once there was trust and mutual understanding, now there was blame and bitterness between Adam and his wife.

This is what sin does. It cuts people off from God, but it also cuts them off from one another. I have sometimes heard people say “Oh, I’m not worried about going to hell. All my friends will be there.” I say to them “No. If I understand the Bible correctly, it seems to be saying that sin brings isolation. The essence of sin is separation. In hell, you will be utterly alone, because hell is populated by people who have made themselves the center of their universe. So there can be no fellowship there.”

Eve found someone to blame, too. She blamed the serpent. “The Devil made me do it.” But indirectly, she too was blaming God. “You let the serpent come into the Garden. You’re ultimately responsible for this mess.”

Adam and Eve were guilty of sin. They didn’t just have feelings of guilt. They were, in an objective sense guilty before God. How did they deal with their guilt? They dealt with their guilt by denying it. They tried to excuse themselves. They argued that there were extenuating reasons - things in their environment, circumstances beyond their control - that made them sin.

People do the same thing today. They blame their parents, or the blame their children, they blame society, or the establishment, or their genetic makeup, or their financial circumstances, or whatever. Anything to keep from having to admit their own guilt and responsibility for disobeying God.

Psychologist Erich Fromm in his book The Sane Society says “It is indeed amazing that in as fundamentally an irreligious culture as ours, the sense of guilt should be as widespread and deep-rooted as it is.”

Why do so many people feel guilty? People feel guilty because they are guilty. We are guilty as sinners before a holy God, and no amount of denial is going to change that.

There are several more consequences of sin that I want to look at next week. But let me just say that, though Adam and Eve were guilty of sin, God did not announce the verdict and pronounce judgment on them there in the Garden. He certainly told them about the consequences of their sin, and we’ve seen that the consequences went into effect immediately. Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, but that was a consequence of sin. Consequences of sin are not the same as God’s judgment on sin. For example, we have today the AIDS crisis. AIDS is not God’s punishment on the sin of homosexuality or drug abuse. If that were so, then why is God punishing the innocent children who have contracted AIDS? AIDS is a consequence of sin. There’s a difference.

God’s punishment on sin is death. But God didn’t pronounce the death sentence on Adam and Eve there in the Garden. They didn’t instantly die and go to hell. As sometimes happens in our courts today, the judge delayed sentencing until a later date.

In His grace, God delayed sentencing on the sin of Adam and Eve until the day that His only begotten Son was nailed to a cross outside of the city of Jerusalem. The verdict that should have been pronounced on Adam and Eve and all who followed them, was pronounced that day against Jesus Christ instead, who offered himself as a perfect substitute. He bore their punishment. He became the sin-bearer for Adam and Eve and all of their children - that includes you and me.

Romans 5:17-19 For if, by the trespass of the one man - Adam, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass - Adam’s - was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness - Christ’s - was justification that brings life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man - Adam, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man - Jesus Christ, the many will be made righteous.

But only if you are in Christ can you gain the benefit of what Jesus did. If you are not in Christ, you are still in your sins. You are still, as far as God is concerned, guilty. The verdict remains to be spoken against you, and indeed it will be spoken against you on the Day of Judgment.

So how do you get to be in Christ? You get to be in Christ by receiving Him. That simply means that you understand what Jesus did when He died on the cross for you, and you’re welcoming Him into your life on that basis. The Bible says…

To all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, he gave the right to become children of God.

When you receive Jesus, what you’re really doing is inviting Him to come into your life. How do you know if you’re a Christian? Simple. Have you ever into Jesus Christ into your life as your Savior and Lord? The Bible says…

God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.

Sin still has consequences. We are not immune to them. We still feel them and struggle against them. But the penalty of sin has been paid for by Jesus, and if you are in Him, you are on your way to heaven.

I want to ask you to make sure that you are in Christ today.