Well, I almost don't wanna get started this morning. I almost just wanna sing that name over and over again. I'm an emotional speaker as it is, and today might be a little more unusual. This is it. She's been with us the past two weeks, the past five weeks. This is the sixth week in a series we started on Genesis. How many of you have enjoyed our series on Genesis so far? I have, too. Today, we turn a page. Today, we round a corner. Every tear that you have ever cried in your life, every moment of fear, anxiety, and depression, every screaming bout you've ever gotten into in your life, every moment when you just wanted to run away and hide, every time you sat in a hospital room and watched a loved one slip off into eternity, every time you've gone through seasons of self-pity, every time that you've felt an overwhelming sense of doubt anger, frustration, confusion, heartache, heartbreak. I remember my first heartbreak. Still got over it. They all find their Genesis, their beginning in this passage that we're going to read here today. Every saga that you've ever read about or seen portrayed on a movie screen, every story you've ever read, They all find their source in one climactic moment in the history of mankind. That's what we're going to study today. If every single nuclear bomb was to be detonated at exactly the same moment, it still would not have the devastating effect that Genesis 3 had on mankind. God wants us to read this and really understand the magnitude of what happened to the earth and every person in it. This is one of the most climactic moments in history. And so as we go through this, I want to make sure that our mind is set right. Our mind is in the right place before we read. Because this is some serious stuff. I would be negligent in my duties as a pastor if I preached this message the same way that I would any other message. Because this is different. If you miss or don't quite grasp just how serious won't make sense. This is it. There's only one more important moment that happens in this whole book. This is a major thing, so don't blink. If I see you sleeping, I'm going to yell at you, because this is super important today. If you've ever cried out to the Lord in You almost want to demand that God explain why your circumstances are where they are. I've been there. You need to zero in on this passage. You know, when I walk my kids to school, it's really cool. It's only three blocks down the road. And so when Ashley and I found out our house was three blocks away, where they go, just kind of me. I see it as I walk my kids to school, or Wednesday evening Bible studies. I hear it when I'm alone with God in prayer. I can't even get through a single phone without it penetrating my mind. I see it when I walk through a mall. I see it when I'm standing, greeting you all as you come into church. I see it everywhere I go. Our world is saturated by it. With each passing year, it makes my stomach turn a little bit more. The more I fall in love with Jesus, the greater my hatred grows for it and its presence in my life. It's sin. it. It, make no mistake about it, it is the second most powerful force in the universe. Second, I say, because number one is love. The title of this message is The Second Most Powerful Force in the Universe. And I think as I unpack Genesis 3 for you, the first seven verses, you'll understand why I titled it that way. And it will be put down forever under his feet. he finished his work in creation on day six. And he did that by creating woman and then having man and woman joined together and they became one flesh. That's why we say when a marriage is, when someone gets married, they consummate the marriage on their wedding night. It is the completion of something, the final thing that needs to be done to make something complete. The moment that God consummated creation. The stage was set for the serpent to enter in. And the moment he entered in, everything changed. Forever. Now the servant was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the servant, we may eat of any of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, Father and Heaven, I pray for every person in this room that you would lay the weight on our hearts of what happened so many thousands of years ago in the garden between your man and your woman, the first of our kind. of her salvation today. We can't do it unless we know what we've been saved from. So dear God, I pray that every heart in this room would be open to hear what your word has to say. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen. Point number one for today's message is this. Sin separates you from God. It separates God from man. I want you to take a look at two He says, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? The second thing that the serpent says is, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. When we examine what the serpent said to the woman, a few days ago, a few weeks ago, but today we're really going to examine it. What can we learn about what Satan wanted to do here with Adam and Eve, and what Satan wants to do with you and I? What can we learn? When we examine it, I think we'll all agree that we come up with one main conclusion. Satan aims to disrupt the unity of Eve's mind and her connection with God. Okay? Notice here where it says, question. Can we really say that sin has power to separate God from man? That's a big question. That's a big statement. Sin has the power. Satan, using sin, has the power to separate something from God? Are we sure? Look at what Isaiah chapter 59 verses 1 and 2 says, because Isaiah makes it really ear so dull that it cannot hear." Now look what it says, "...but your iniquities, your sins, have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He does not hear." Now I want you to pay real close attention, because you can misunderstand what it says here. Isaiah is not saying that God can't see you or hear you. As a matter of fact, he's saying the opposite in the first hand. The first half, he's saying, God can do anything. He's the sovereign God of the universe. At a moment's notice, he can say, Satan, you're done. And that's it for him. He says, God doesn't. He won't. If you were with us in our Bible study last Sunday, we had a brief discussion about the topic that leads us into this. The only reason that we come here to worship God is because He is holy. That's it. if God were able to even be in the presence of the tiniest little sin, let's say, everybody loves to say, well, it's just a little white lie, okay, so let's use lie, okay, a tiny little sin that we think, it doesn't hurt anybody, if God were able to be in the presence of just someone who had told one lie, and that's it, the rest of their life, I want nothing to do with that God. I only want a perfectly pure and holy God. Because if He's able to be in the presence of even the smallest sin, well then He's just like me. I can worship myself. No, this God must be completely separated from sin. Completely. He can't, can't. Because of the kind of nature that He has in His character. Being in the presence of even the smallest of sins. That's what makes Him worthy of your worship. Because He's so different than you and me. He's perfectly good. Perfectly pure. And so, because God is so perfect, so holy, of the woman. He plants these seeds of doubt in order to do what? To generate a rift, a big separation between man and God. Think of it like venom. The serpent, venom, he's getting ready to spit it at the woman and he takes aim at a specific Because God can't be near someone who is a sinner. So, what is that part that the serpent takes aim at? It's one word. It's the central pivoting point around which every relationship revolves. You know what it is? It's trust. It's trust. Every relationship. is built on trust. God with man, God with nature, you with your spouse, you with your children. The moment trust is broken, relationship is gone. The reason why the wind and the waves obeyed Jesus when he stood up on the boat and said, be still, or whatever it was that he said to make them listen, is because they know the sound of his voice and they trust it. They know that voice. It's the voice of the creator God. And they trust it. Everything in nature, every bird, every tree, every mountain, they only are held together because of trust. They know the voice of the one who spoke them into existence. The moment that trust is broken, it's done. It's finished. And so Satan, Maybe he didn't really say what I thought he said. Maybe he meant something different. Satan knows that if he can get the woman to put her allegiance to someone else's word, anyone else's word, it's done. It's finished. He's won. And so, if he can get her to act, one small, simple little act like, ah, taking a bite out of the fruit, that's it. She has demonstrated, my allegiance is no longer to your word, it's to someone else's word. It's all about trust. We said a couple weeks ago, the Garden of Eden, that word means delight in the Hebrew. So here's the Garden of Delight. It's perfection. You're in the presence of Almighty God. You're walking with Him. The whole thing hinges on trust. The moment it's broken, guess what happens to the garden? Closed off. It's no longer the garden of delight any longer. Because it all hinges on trust. In your marriage, the moment trust is broken, even the smallest amount, in a marriage, something happens that needs work to be repaired. You get married and you think, it's you and me against the world, babe. This was supposed to be us against it. You let me down. Now I'm on my own. Now I'm isolated. Now I feel naked in front of the whole world. What did you do? I thought we had this thing. It's busted up now. Satan's aim in the garden was to get Eve to think that way about God. Think that way for just a moment. from God, and you just couldn't hear from Him, or He didn't answer the way you thought He was going to. If you're like me, you've probably said, where are you? I need you. Don't you see me down here? Don't you know what I'm going through? Answer me. I've been there. I've been there. on a nationwide scale. Like after a school shooting, we've seen more and more of these things popping up all over the place, all because of its presence in the world. And as I was thinking about how God has shown me in my life, and during those moments when I'm screaming out to Him and I need Him to speak, Huckabee. Mike Huckabee is a governor. He's an evangelical Christian. He was a presidential candidate for a while. And after one of the most recent school shootings, And I brought it with me today, so I want you to listen to it. It's about three minutes long. Well, maybe it's simply the attempt to express our collective shock when we say we're trying to make sense of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But we're not going to make sense, not from that which is totally disconnected from the cognitive capacity of any rational human being. The governor of Connecticut, Dan Malloy, got it right when he said evil has visited this community. President Obama, in an emotional statement from the White House, spoke more as a parent than a politician, and he quoted the Bible to bring comfort to the nation. Churches were filled in Newtown, Connecticut, last night as candlelight vigils were held to grieve for the 27 innocent people killed and the countless lives of those shattered by a few seconds of crazed carnage. On Friday, Neil Cavuto asked me, where was God? And I said that for 50 years, we've systematically attempted to have God removed from our schools, our public activities, but then at the moment we have a calamity, we wonder where He was. Well, the predictable left lit up the airwaves in Blagosphere with a vile and vicious reaction, and jumped to the conclusion that I said that if we had prayer in school, the shooting wouldn't have happened. I said nothing of the sort. It's far more than just taking prayer or Bible reading out of the schools. It's the fact that people sue a city so we aren't confronted with a manger scene or a Christmas carol, that lawsuits are filed to remove a cross that's a memorial to fallen soldiers. Churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful, and we call them disorders. Sometimes we even say they're normal. And to get to where that we have to abandon bedrock moral truths, then we are asked, well, where was God? And I respond that as I see it, we've escorted Him right out of our culture, and we've marched Him off the public square. And then we express our surprise that a culture without Him actually reflects what it's become. As soon as the tragedy unfolded, I think God did show up. He showed up in the lives of teachers who put their lives between a gunman and their students. He showed up in policemen who rushed into the school not knowing if they would be met with a barrage of bullets. He showed up in the form of hugs and tears for children, parents, and teachers who would live through the slaughter. He showed up at the overflow church services where people lit candles and prayed. And he showed up at the White House, where the president invoked his name and quoted from his book. And in a few days or weeks, we'll probably ask God to excuse Himself from view, and we will announce in our arrogant pride that we're now enlightened and educated, and we've evolved beyond needing Him. And somebody's going to suggest that we pass a law to stop all this kind of thing. I might want to point out that we don't have to pass a new law. There's one that's been around a while that works if we teach it and observe it. Thou shalt not kill. or there are about nine others. But to tell you about them would require bringing God back, and we know how unacceptable that might be. These are the times when we learn the most about God. Have you ever been in a situation where you knew that God was calling you to act a specific way, to respond to something a specific way, and you didn't? Or you knew that God was What the serpent aimed to do in the garden was convince Eve that walking with God down the path He wants you to walk on is to deny yourself the greatest pleasures that this world has to offer you. Did you notice in the passage it says that when she saw that the tree was specific aspects of the tree. Verse 4 and 5 says this, Satan says to her through the serpent, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. In other words, Eve, what God is not telling you is that if you eat this fruit, you're not going to need Him anymore. You'll be able to do this whole life all by yourself. I put together a little sketch. It's not real good. But you're going to have to deal with it. I took some things and I put them together, because this is what I think a lot of Christians think about God. I think about many Christians, a lot of people that I'm trying to witness to. This is the image that they portray to me. That's God. Like a ball and chain tied to someone's life. This is you, trying to move forward, trying to do life as best you can, enjoyment of life. And God is this giant weight that wants to just keep you from enjoyment. When I was a young Christian, this is the picture that I had of God. Everything that I thought was so cool and so much fun and things that made me feel so good in life, God said, uh-uh-uh. What a terrible lie. What a terrible lie. Do you know what happened in my personal life? When I decided to snap that ball and chain in half and say, God, get it out! And I started going towards all the things, I'm free now! And I got to have all those pleasures in life. And believe me, when I went to that tree, I went and I cut loose. Everything that I thought I was being held back from was actually a prison cell, believe it or not. But the lie of the enemy, the venom that he spits at you, here's what it is. It tells you that the ball and chain is your prison cell. That God actually wants to keep you from enjoying life to its fullest. The truth could be anything. The truth is the exact opposite. Remind you of the title of our message today. The second most powerful force in the universe is sin. The most powerful force is love. The main idea, what God consummates Think it through. You all know the one thing that you struggle with. I have several things. Lying. Jealousy. Coveting. Pride. Anger. Self-pity. Selfishness. Losing your temper. Sexual sin. Whatever it is, at its root, it's the same thing. It's idolatry. That's what Eve's sin was. That's what Adam's sin was. Whatever your sin is, it is making a statement to God. Even though there are a lot of lies that you think don't hurt anybody, I want to tell you something. It does. There's no such thing as a sin that is harmless. There's no such thing as rebellion that only affects you. It doesn't. That's a lie. It affects everyone else around you because it changes you. Every single sin is idolatry at its core. A lie, a little white lie is saying to God, God, I don't trust you to handle my circumstances. And so I've got to fix things on my own. In order to do so, I'll just alter the truth a little bit. I'll just change it a little tiny bit. No one's going to know. It's just me. This is idolatry. This is saying, God, you're on the throne of my heart, Satan's job. is to dethrone him, to kick him off, and you take that seat yourself. You ever heard a little voice in your head say, if God really loved you, he wouldn't prevent you or restrict you from doing anything. He would let you be your own boss. One of the most crucial lies I think that the enemy tells us is that if you were the manager of your own life, everything would be so much better. And so, because it is trust that has been broken, it's only by trust that the bonds can be restored. Trust is an exercise of faith. We learned that a few weeks ago. What the serpent aimed to destroy, God aims to restore in your life. Satan wants separation, God wants reconciliation. That's point number one. God separates, God is separated from man through sin. Point number two, sin separates man that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate it." Stop right there. The seeds of deceit that were planted in this woman's mind. I want you to think of it like a vine that grows. You know how sometimes a vine will grow around a tree like this, or it'll grow up the side of a house, and just little by little it starts invading every single area? like a vine. Before you know it, its tentacles go into every single aspect of what makes up your very nature. Every thought, every feeling ends up becoming tainted by this vine. It is just like a poison, like a disease that spreads quickly through every part of you. Every part of you. When sin entered the equation, Man could no longer even know himself, because it separated him from the only source of absolute knowledge. Here's Satan, through the serpent, saying, that tree is going to make you wise. And here's God saying, what do you need a tree for? The source of its knowledge is me. And you want to separate yourself from the source to go to the fruit? You're a dummy. You're a dummy. I'm the source of knowledge. You can't know yourself apart from me. Luke, you can't. The moment you separate yourself from me, you become estranged from yourself. Eve ate because she believed the serpent. She believed that she could be like God, knowing everything without him. I found this cool book. You can't get it anymore. It's out of print. It was published in 1940. And to be honest with you, it's kind of a boring book. It really is. It's very dry. But there's certain things, if you're looking to do real deep study, I can't let you borrow this book. There was a part of this book that really gave me some deep insight as I was preparing for today's message. I want to read it to you. It says this. Eve's fall was consequently due to dalliance with temptation. She didn't repel, but she yielded to it. Had she resisted at the very outset, she would not have fallen. For it is a universal law that if we resist the devil, he will flee from us. Nothing is more remarkable in the whole history of man's moral life than the powerlessness He never can say, you never can say, and neither can I, I was overpowered in spite of myself. All that we can say is, I was overpowered because of myself. Make no mistake, Eve was deceived. But she ate the fruit because she wanted to. She ate the fruit because she loved it. of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes, the pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. I want to try to do something with you here this morning. Let's see if we can re-examine verse 6 and see if we can deduct Eve's train of logic, okay? First it says, in verse 6, that she saw the fruit. So when the woman saw She's standing in the garden. Imagine that you're standing right with her and you're having a conversation. She looks at the fruit and she says, what's good for food? God wants me to eat. He told me so himself. I need to eat. That looks like great food. Step one, done. Step two, says this. And then it was a delight to the eye. Stop right there. She says, what's good for food? That looks really pretty. How can anything be bad that looks so good? God's a good, loving God. He made everything beautiful in this garden because He loves me. So it's good for food, and it's beautiful to look at. She's going to step three now. Step three, it says, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. So here's the final part. She looks at it and she goes, it's good for food, God wants me to eat. It's beautiful, and God wants me to see beautiful things. He gave my husband a job to oversee all of creation, the name, the atoms, and everything. I'm not wise. God's calling me to eat the fruit. Do you see the logic? Something that God clearly said with His own mouth, don't eat from that tree, Eve used a folded logic to get to a place where she thought God was saying something He wasn't saying. My goodness, how many times that has happened to me, where God clearly says something in His word, And I, through faulty logic, say, I think God's calling me now to do this. I know people who have said to me, who had no grounds to do so, I know for sure God has spoken, and he's telling me to leave my wife. Telling me to leave my husband. I know for sure God has spoken, and he's telling me it's okay for me to have an extramarital affair. I've actually heard people tell me this. I know for certain that God is telling me to quit my job and stay at home and study His Word all day long, and my wife to go to work. I'm telling you, I know people who have said, despite what the Scriptures say, that they've heard God for certain, will stick their life on Him, despite that it contradicts what God clearly says in His Word. This is faulty logic. It is the result only of that vine growing around in your mind and in your heart. It can't be anything else. When Eve got set on this course, she was set on a course of confusion. On this course of confusion that would be passed along to her children, and her children's children, and to you and to me. A state of confusion. Because of this gigantic explosion that happened in the garden, we are estranged from ourselves. 13, 12 up on the screen. Paul says this, for now we see in a mirrored dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I have been known fully. What Paul states here is exactly what God wants us to learn in Genesis 3, 6. The reason that you and I and Paul and everyone else in the world And yet, even still, this verse implies to us that because of our fallen state, we can never fully know ourselves. But what about somebody who has no relationship with the Lord? This person is not only starting out with a dim, dark mirror to look in, but they're going further and further and further away from any ability whatsoever to know themselves. Today, in our culture, we've started labeling ourselves according to our sins. Think of this through with me for just a minute. We say things like, oh yeah, I met that single mom, that divorced single mom that works at the yoga place. Oh yeah, she's that single mom. She's that obese woman that I see sitting in the mall every single week. Oh yeah, he's the gay guy that lives down the street with his boyfriend. Are the labels, how we identify ourselves, is by our rebellious nature. Isn't this one of the most tragic things that's happened in our culture? We label ourselves by our sin, rather than what God says about us. This is tragedy. A few years back, I read a book. I've probably mentioned it to you. If you've been talking with me for a while, or in our Bible studies, I've mentioned this book called The Mud and the Masterpiece. It's a book written by John Burke. If you haven't read it, this is a fantastic book. Another pastor gave it to me, and he said, Luke, aside from the Bible, this is the best book I've ever read. It has helped me really to change how I see myself and how I see people. I said, well, tell me all about it. I would have brought it here with me, but I lent it to another pastor. Here's what it is. John Burke was on a trip to Paris, and he loved museums, and so he was walking back one night from a trip to a museum. He was walking back to his hotel, and he passed by a really dark alley. And he thought to himself, you know, I wonder what happened. If I stepped into that alleyway, and back behind a dumpster somewhere, covered in mud, was a Rembrandt, would there be any fool in the world that would say, it's completely worthless? Even if I could just scratch off some of the mud and make out a quarter, it's still a Rembrandt. People would spend months, even years, trying to airbrush that thing and get it back to some kind of a restored state. Because it's a Rembrandt for good mistakes. And so this set him off, John Burke, on a course to like a three or four year study, looking at every instance that Jesus had an encounter with another human being. And he studied them, and then he compared them side by side with every instance that a Pharisee had with a human being. And he looked at them side by side, and he thought, I wonder what I can learn about how Jesus saw people differently than how Pharisees saw people. And then he wrote this book, and here's what he discovered. The book starts out with a woman at the well, which is just a great story. It's a great story. Here's the Pharisees and Jesus side by side, and they're seeing the same instance. One is seeing it through one lens, Jesus is seeing it through another lens. And the Pharisees, all they could see on this woman was a painting covered in mud. And their focal point was on the mud. And all they could see and they shouted and so on about the mud. And here comes Jesus. about one another, tearing one another down. Don't you understand that every one of us has been affected by this poison? The predominant motive in your heart ought to always be compassion and pity, because we have been affected by this poison known as sin. See through the mud to the masterpiece that God wants to draw out of people. If you are that kind of person, They can get around another person who everyone else can't stand because they're so grumpy. Such a pain in the butt all the time. And you can see past it and draw out the image of God in them. Look through the body. Sin separates us from ourselves. We can never know ourselves apart from attachment to the source. Point number three, sin separates man from others. Sin separates man from every other person, every other fellow man. Look back with me, verses 6b through 7. effect on someone else. It just happened to be the only other person that was there. It was not something that was harmless. Her sin had an immediate effect on another person. And so does ours. It's like a domino effect. Did you notice they immediately covered themselves? Why do you think that is? We talked about this a couple of weeks ago and even touched on it last week. Remember we said God was able to see their thought life and he approved of it. But the moment sin entered the picture, shame walked out onto the stage, and has been here ever since. Sin leads to shame, and shame leads to depression, anxiety, fear, addiction, the list could go on and on and on and on. one particular sinful habit, if you will, that has been overwhelmingly above and beyond any other thing that I've helped people get through. You know what it is? It's sexual sin. That is the plague of our day. That's it. I'm telling you, as a young adult pastor, I have sat with more young adults who are suffering just like you would a cancer through the addiction to pornography, I've sat with men in their 50s and 60s whose marriages are falling apart because of sexual sin. I put a couple of things, a couple of the effects of sexual sin that I've noticed in my own ministry. This is not all of them, just what I've noticed. The effects both men and women equally. I know some women that I've counseled myself that are just of themselves. It leads to hiding from God, hiding from love, and hiding from others. It leads to an idea that you aren't worthy of being loved. It leads to suicidal tendencies. It leads to a wrong view of God. And this is just scratching the surface. The tentacles of this vine, when you really let it go uncontrolled, If you begin to adopt a victim-type mentality, let me remind you, sin does not have authority over you. You enter into it because you love it. That's the only reason. So it can sound like, as I'm preaching through this message, man, what hope is there? If this disease is just spreading through and it separates me from God, and it separates me from myself, and it separates me from everybody else, where is there hope, Pastor? Let me tell you, we have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure, that's Hebrews 6. And hope does not put us to shame because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us, that's Romans 5. Praise be to God and our Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. In His great mercy, He has given us a new birth and a living hope through the resurrection Yesterday, as I was getting ready for the sermon, I dropped down on my knees in my study, and I worshipped the God who would sacrifice His Son to save a wretched God like me. If it's been a while since you've come back to the foot of the cross, broken, reminded of the effects of your sin, not just on yourself, but on everybody else who loves you, come back to the foot of the cross. I want to talk about one more separation. and his son on the cross. And believe me when I tell you, I don't get it. Martin Luther, the great reformer, the great thinker, he went away for two whole days just trying to understand how God could be separated, how the Father could be separated from God the Son. And he came back and he says in his writing, I was even more confused than when I left. I don't get it anymore than Martin Luther did. But it happened. God the Father turned his back on God the Son so that you could be handed the keys. Jesus said, I am the living one. I was dead, behold, now I am alive, and I hold the keys to death and Hades, and I want to give them to you so that you can break the binds of sin on your life. There is hope, but it only comes from one place. He can be found in coming back to the cross of Jesus Christ. Sin is the second most powerful force in the universe, but it has been crushed by the weight of love poured out from God the Father through His Son on the cross. the power of sin. May I ask this with full confidence in Jesus' name. Amen.