Now turn in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 2. This morning I'd like to continue our study called Keep the Faith on the Basics, the foundational issues that are presented to us in the first three chapters of Genesis. Let's turn first to Genesis chapter 2. I'd like to read the first 18 verses this morning. So stand with me as we read the Word of God. Genesis 2, verses 1 through 18. Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished and all the seventh day God ended his work which he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made. This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth. Before any plant of the field was in the earth, and before any herb of the field had grown, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. But a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant in the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden. From there it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon. It is the one which skirts the whole land of Havala where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Delium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel. It is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. And the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helper comparable to him. This is the very word of God. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We pray you would bring this to us by your Holy Spirit. We pray, Father, the power of God in this place today to transform us, to help us to understand better and to appreciate more the Redeemer of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. Please help us here, Father, that we return to you all the glory and praise today in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. You may be seated. I'm intending a short series here of the basics. We do this from time to time. We go back to the basics. In this time, we're going to Genesis 1 through 3 for some of the foundational issues. that will help you to understand God's created order and to help you understand the world around you, to help you understand yourself better, to help you to understand your place in the world and to understand God's will for us. The foundations, these foundations have been very much under assault by the world, especially over the last 200 years. The destruction is incredibly fundamental. It's one thing to put a hand grenade into an apartment on the 48th story of an apartment building. It's quite another if you drill into the foundation, put a charge, and blow up the foundations. You see the difference? A hand grenade on the 48th story is not going to do as much damage as drilling a dynamite charge and putting it in the foundations of the building. So what's happened in our society today is they have drilled charges into the foundation of the building, and they have lit off the dynamite, and they have destroyed the foundations. So the foundations are very much destroyed. C.S. Lewis pointed out in his little essay, God in the Dark, said, modern man is far worse off than the ancient pagans, primitive man. We are in far worse shape today than primitive man wandering around in jungles in the year 547 A.D. We're in very bad shape. The modern world is far worse off than the pagans and the primitives. So I want you to know that. I want you to understand that about the world in which you live today. You live in the modern world. How have the foundations been destroyed? We're hoping for a salvaging operation. There'll be some that will be salvaged. That's what we're hoping for. That there'll be some salvaging in a post-Christian world. So how does this work? Well, the Word of God gives us clarity. You know, the Word of God actually does clear everything up for us. And we want to be sure that our minds are being renewed. So our response to this is first that we all repent. Again, it has something to do with the exhortation that we be correctable, that the word of God correct us, that we begin to see ourselves as mistaken, that we had it all wrong, that as we participate in the world's activities, as we imbibe certain things in the universities, as we've lived in the world around us, that we were very, very wrong. We were more wrong than we ever thought we were. And so the Word of God calls us to constant renewal of mind according to the will of God. So when you come into a church building, you can't say, well, I'm here not to learn anything, and I certainly don't want to repent, and the last thing I want is the renewal of my mind. If that's the case, you don't belong in here. No, no, we come in here for the renewal of the mind. according to the will of God. That's why we come into the church building. It's one of the reasons. Also, the other thing is that I think we do need to be the men of Ishikar. The men of Ishikar, they understood the times. And we've heard that phrase before, but oftentimes we don't complete that statement. The men of Ishikar understood the times. And then it said, so that they would know what to do. So what are you going to do tomorrow? How are we going to react to this? What are we going to do next? We need to understand the times so that we will know what to do. We need to be men and women of vision, that we understand the times. We repent ourselves and we will know what to do in this very confused world that we live in today. So that's the objective of this short series. But let's begin in Genesis chapter 2 now with the created order. We have more of the creation order presented to us here in these verses. Now I'm going to go through it rather rapidly. Let me say this also that I feel bad that we have to go through it so quickly. I wish we could drill into these things. Be careful on several accounts. Number one, don't just focus in on one thing. But on the other hand, don't be too superficial about all of these things that God gives to us. So much of this is something we should meditate upon. I mean, we should spend quite a bit of time meditating upon each of these principles. but I'm gonna go through them rather quickly and hopefully the Holy Spirit will enable you to understand some of these things and apply them in your life. Okay, verse 1, thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished and on the seventh day that God ended his work which he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had done. So the first thing we find is that God works and God rests and that is a pattern for us. There are two parts of work that God does. The first is the work of creation. The second is the work of providence. So that just breaks down the kind of work that we do day by day. Two kinds of work we do. We create things and then we maintain them. That's what creation providence is. So you build a machine, then you gotta maintain it. You build a car, gotta maintain the car. You plant a garden, gotta maintain the garden. So you see there's this creation and the care for it. So there's the both and. in terms of the work that is done. So now we know what our role is. Our role is to do two things. One is to work and the other is to rest. We must do both of these things because God has done these things. We are a little image of Godders. We talked about that last time that we are creating an image of God. We are a little image of Godders. So as little image of Godders, we are stewards, and we follow what God does, much like a son is taught how to work by working beside his father. So we learn what life is all about by finding out what God does. And then we are somewhat like him. We are created in the image of God such that we both work and we rest. All right, so that's the first point we get from the passage today, the first three verses have to do with God doing his work of creation and then resting. And then we also find in verses 4 to 7 something of the creation of man. A little more detail on the creation of man, especially in verse 7. So take a look at verse 7. The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground. and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. So this is something of an insight into the constitution of who we are. We are made of dust and breath, the breath of God. So we are made of two things, dust and breath. God has blown upon the dust and created human life. So there's dust sitting there. God blew upon the dust. God added his breath upon the dust. And we don't really know exactly what the breath of God is. We just know that God breathes upon dust And God has created human life. So man is two things. Man consists of both dust and the breath of God. Now, the breath of God is a spiritual thing. It's an invisible thing. So the human being is made up of the visible and the invisible, both the material and the immaterial. The breath of God constitutes something spiritual, a being, an existence, a personality that is in his image, that is created in his image. It's an immaterial thing. The breath of God constitutes something spiritual or immaterial within us. So every human being is both a material thing, a material body, as well as a spiritual being. So we have both. And to separate these in our minds in the way that we treat others is not right. So every doctor, every psychologist must always consider both the physical and the spiritual. I'm convinced that a great deal of the spiritual challenges that we come up with in our homes Our church today have to do with a lack of sleep. I shared this with the elders this morning. That when we lack sleep, it seems to have an impact upon the spiritual condition of ourselves. And so it's so important to have decent sleep. First question needs to be asked within counseling is, how is your sleep? Or one of the first questions. And so again, we are both physical and spiritual, and both of these work off of each other. can have an influence upon the physical and the physical upon the spiritual. Let's move on, verse 9. Now we find that God has created out of the ground every tree that is pleasant to the eyes and good for food. That's the first part of verse 9. And this is important. This is a fundamental in terms of human culture. God has created the concept of beauty. God has created man's eyes capable of enjoying beauty. we're doubtful that any of the animals enjoy beauty but we certainly know that man enjoys beauty and his mouth is capable of enjoying taste as well and so here we have the fruit bearing trees that flower and are pleasant to the eyes and also produce healthy edible and enjoyable food so here we find that God defines what is beautiful let's move on to verse 4 God has also made sacramental trees verse 9b the tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as well. These are two sacramental trees created by God. So this is something else we learn about human beings. Human beings are sacramental. That is, we understand the idea of signs and symbols. We know that some things point to other things. The way we dress, the way we do art, the way we decorate our homes, our architecture, et cetera, all reflects a form of signs and symbols or sacraments that point to something else. They have meaning attached to it. I step up here with a Playboy symbol on my shirt and everybody understands what that points to. They have that thing in their own mind. They understand sacramentalism. They understand signs. And so we have to be careful with the kind of t-shirts that we put on and such. So man is sacramental. We understand this idea of sacramentalism. These things point to other things of even more substance. God made two sacramental trees here in this passage, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To eat of the tree of life and to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would produce an existential difference. It would be something different than what it would be to just eat of any other tree in the garden. And to eat of this table here at communion sometimes produces a situation where people die in the church. You don't ordinarily die of drinking a little grape juice or wine or a little bit of gluten-free cracker or whatever. You typically don't die by just a cracker or two. And yet, at times, people have died from eating of this table. Why? Because it's a sacramental meal. It has something that has a high significance to it. Something that is largely missing today, but we'll talk about that in just moment so a sacrament is what it's a means or a channel by which we partake of a thing that is symbolized the thing that is symbolized so in other words we partake sometimes of an altar by eating of the sacrificial meal the pagans do this and this is what the children of Israel did in the Old Testament when they killed an animal they would eat of the animal that was sacrificed on the altar and thereby associate themselves with the sacrifice itself participate in the sacrifice itself and and of course others do that within demonic religions and thereby wind up communing with the demons themselves so that This is the way in which they establish communion with demons. They eat of the sacrifices to the demons and that becomes the sacramental meal. So we understand what it is to participate in sacraments. Extremely meaningful signs and symbols in our world today. So God establishes this at the very beginning. Man is sacramental because God has established man to be sacramental. Let's move on. Verse 11, God also establishes that which is of value. Verse 11, the name of the first is Pishon, the rivers. It is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah where there is gold and that gold of the land is good. So again, this is God establishes beauty in the trees. God establishes value by gold. He has established gold as a value to man and made it somewhat accessible to him. Move on to verse 15, this is number six. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and to keep the garden. Now the Hebrew words for these words, to keep and to tend the garden, first is to work or to serve. The second is to watch over it. The assumption is that he is a steward of the garden. He works the garden. He watches over the garden. because he is a steward of the garden. A steward is somebody who works in somebody else's garden and watches over somebody else's stuff or somebody else's garden such that wild animals or something else doesn't actually steal the things that he's working on. So man is created to take care of the things that God has provided in his world. Man is created to rule, as we said last time, to be God's steward over God's world. Man is created to do stuff, not to just sit around. So if you think, well, my goal in life is to sit around. You're disobedient to God. Don't do that. You're a rebel against God by doing that. I challenge you right now, if you don't have a focus in life, a calling in life, a sense of responsibility in life, you are rebelling against the true and living God. And I think we should say this to every young man or young woman that is wandering around and acting like he doesn't know what to do in life. No, no, you're a rebel against God because God has created you to be a faithful steward of the things that he has given this world. And you have a role in this world to do just that. So that's our seventh point now that God has created this world as something over which we take dominion. The world cannot order itself. We walk away from the world or the garden or the forest and say, Somehow all of this is going to cultivate itself. No, it's going to be full of briars and brambles and such, unless man goes in there and subdues it and takes dominion over it. Okay, that's again, number six. Now we move on to number seven, verse 16 and 17. The Lord God then commanded the man, saying, we're in verse 16, of every tree of the garden, you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. Okay, now this is the first word that God brings to man after his creation. So man is created. Man is a living soul. Adam sits up. What happens? He hears the voice of God, the voice of authority, the voice of his creator. I'm God, you're man. I command you to this. So that's it. That's the first revelation of God to man. And the assumption here is that God does not allow man to exist outside of a special communication. This is very essential to our existence, that man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God. That's what Jesus said as a quotation of the Old Testament as he approached the devil in the wilderness. So God communicates to man before the fall. He has to communicate to man after the fall as well, very essential. But the point is that man was never intended to live apart from the special revelation of God. Man was not to sit up, look around him and say, what is all of this? Who am I? Why am I here? Never. Man is never to be in that position. Man is always to receive the special revelation of God from the very beginning. And if he hasn't received the special revelation of God, he has no idea who he is, and he's bound for destruction. The only way in which a man can live is by the words of God. He must have the word of God. He cannot exist on earth without the word of God. Now you say there are scientists today, there are others who seem to be doing very well, thank you very much, without the revelation of God. They work off the scientists who had already received the revelation of God. Guys like Boyle, Newton, and others had already received all of the revelation of God, every founder of every form of science, including astronomical science and rocket science and all the rest, computer science as well, Babridge. All of those who have ever invented anything of any substance, any form of science on earth were committed godly Christians. And those who are now denying the foundations are eroding the foundations upon which they stand, and they are destroying the science they have inherited from Boyle and Newton. So please understand that even the science and technology that we received have come from godly Christian scientists of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s. It's only been the last hundred years where man has turned away from the special revelation of God and they're pretending that they can live without the special revelation of God. They can think without it. They can do stuff without it. Impossible. Impossible. Okay, let's move on. Verses 16 and 17, one more time, here the Lord God commanded man, we call this the covenant of works. And he says to man, to Adam, there in the garden, of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. God establishes his covenant with man. Now, important relationships are established by covenant. This is very important. You need to understand that if you're establishing an important, a solid relationship, a true marriage relationship, it has to be established by covenant. I don't establish covenant with a bus driver. He's taking me from here to there. I get off, I say goodbye, that's it. I don't sign any document. When I take a receipt from Safeway, I don't need to sign the receipt. But if I sell a piece of property, That's worth $480,000. And it's basically everything that I own. I'm probably gonna want a signed covenant. I'm probably gonna want a vow. Now, if you have a relationship with a woman, as you're getting married, you're a guy and you're getting married to a woman, you're gonna expect a vow, a covenant before God, a signed document. Not necessarily signed in blood, but almost so. that this indeed is something that you're calling down God's wrath and God's judgment upon yourself if you don't keep that vow. That's the kind of seriousness we apply to a marriage vow. Why? Because it is a fundamental relationship. It's an important relationship that's going to exist till death do you part. Now the modern world, we'll get to that in a moment, is not really big on this kind of thing. But it's very important, it's essential for man's relationship with God Do you understand how essential it is? Part of the reason for this is because man was created an eternal soul. So in order to have a right relationship with God eternally, now this is not just a relationship till death do you part, which is the average marriage goes for 40, 50, 60, 70 years, but we're talking about an eternal relationship here. In order to have an eternal relationship with God, you need a signed document. Does that make sense? If you're gonna have an eternal, not an 80 year relationship, If you're gonna have an eternal relationship with God, you need a signed document. Does that make sense? You demanded it for your marriage. You wanted it for your marriage. But certainly you want a signed document for an eternal relationship with God. That's what a covenant is. So I just wanna impress that upon you. This is the most important thing. You absolutely need a signed document. You need to know that God absolutely will abide by that promise, by that covenant, by that agreement. So children, God enters into a covenant agreement with Adam. If Adam obeyed, he would get life and he would get to eat of the tree of life. And children, if Adam disobeyed, he would get death and he would not be able to eat of the tree of life. So that was the initial covenant, calling for Adam's obedience to the single command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil upon the pain of death." Okay, verse 9. I'm sorry, verse 18, number 9. The Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helper comparable to him. What is this? Well, we're not going to get into marriage this morning. That comes up later on. But I just wanted to add this little piece because I do think it gives us insight into ourselves, trying to understand man. Trying to understand the sacramental nature, the covenantal nature, et cetera, of man. Who are we? Why are we different than dogs and cats and so forth? Dogs and cats don't enter the covenants. They don't have sacraments. Dogs and cats are different than humans. Okay, we get that. But here's one more thing that's different between dogs and cats and human beings. Now, there are some instances in which animals do live with each other. But this is essential for man. It is not good that man should be alone. That is, man is created for relationship. Man is never created to be alone. God was never alone. God doesn't want man to be alone either. Remember, from all eternity, we know that God has been in relationship with one another. And I believe this is extremely essential for our definition of what is good in our own world today. It is not good that man be alone. All right, so now the next chapter, chapter three, is where man falls into sin. Man falls in the garden and sin has come upon all mankind. So what happens here? After that, we have Cain who kills his brother, wanders further away from God, east of Eden. And this man wanders further away from God, the revelation of God. We get a little revelation from Noah and Shem. Abraham and Jesus, of course, but as man wanders away from Jesus, or as man has wandered away from Noah, as they've expanded out into the farthest reaches of the world, and man crossed the Atlantic Ocean and got over into South America and so forth, they wandered away from the trade routes from Israel, they had little access to any of God's commandments, et cetera, et cetera, man wandered away from the revelation of God, In some respects, the common grace of God extended to the Chinese and to the Japanese, maybe a little bit more so than other cultures around the world. But as man wandered further away from God and rejected the revelation of God, rejected the word of God, he abandoned the creation order and degraded himself and brought destruction upon himself and his society. And so this has been repeated again and again in human society. And so human society reverts to primitivism. cannibalism, cavemen, constituting a rebellion against God, a willful destruction of God's created order. And the demon world as well, deceived man, degraded man. Over and over again, the demon world, always deceiving, always bringing about as much destruction in God's world as possible. Demons walking up and down the beach, kicking over sand castles. You know, anywhere there's some kind of constructive sort of society that's come about by the common grace of God, The demons are running around kicking down the sand castles and making a wreck of everything. But praise be to God, we have redemption in Jesus and the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. But briefly, let's consider what happened to man, especially in the modern world. So the breakdown of the creation order, let's go over it quickly. And then we'll get to the redemption of Jesus, and then we'll be done for this morning's message. But let's look at what happens with the reversal of God's law order. We did this for chapter one, now we're gonna do it for chapter two. So as man is called to stewardship and maturity and responsibility over God's world, the fall brings about immaturity, irresponsibility, and slothfulness. The fall brings about the glorification of the youth culture. And immaturity becomes sort of the value to modern culture, such that you have 58-year-old men still listening to Beach Boys songs and dragging their surfboards down to the beach. Not responsible, seeing as this is the good life, as the preferred life. See, that's what happens in the revolt against maturity in the modern world. People haven't grown up very much. especially since the 1950s and 1960s. We turn ourselves into a recreation world, a world in which you're not supposed to grow up. You're not supposed to talk like an adult or act like an adult. And so we wind up with a world that is not really stewarded very well. There's not very much in terms of self-control. There isn't as much self-government in our world today. We talked about that being important several weeks ago. But then the fall also brings slavery to the world. Spent the last two months going over all of the slave-based societies that came out of colonialism in the 1800s, 1700s, 1600s. And I find that tyranny and slavery was so much the name of the game with the Christian lapse that came about through Catholicism, the breakdown of Protestantism in the 1700s. It was a very bad time for so many in the Eastern world, the Western world, the South, etc. Slavery came back. So what is slavery? Well, slavery is like debt and divorce. This is not God's initial intention for man. Slavery is introduced into a world of disorder, a sinful world where proper dominion and self-government have been cast aside, even by institutions. Entire institutions will sometimes say, no way, we're not going to do the stewardship thing anymore. And tyranny begins to prevail either in the local fiefdom or in large governmental tyrannies in which governments control 50% to 70% of the GNI, and so forth. So slavery becomes something of a constant in societies that have abandoned Jesus Christ. Is slavery a sin? The world seems to think so, that chattel slavery is a sin. It's a good question. Is debt a sin? Debt is a form of slavery. Is being in debt a sin? Is divorce a sin? None of these were intended by God for His creation. So again, I'm asking the question, is slavery sin? The world's very upset with slavery. The world's not so much upset with debt or divorce, but they're very upset with slavery. Why are they so upset with slavery? Well, slavery was never intended by God for His world. Slavery is sinful at some points, and a consequence of sin at every point. By the way, prisons are We form enslavement. We still have it today in prisons, for sure. There's plenty of other forms of slavery in our world today. It's just certain kinds of slavery people seem to get upset with. But slavery, slavery is not God's way. Slavery is always a consequence of a sinful world. Slavery was never God's intention. Okay, so the fall brings about a lack of stewardship. The fall brings about immaturity, irresponsibility, slothfulness, and tyranny. And secondly, the fall also eliminates rest. The fall into sin eliminated rest. There is no peace. There's no rest for the wicked. The wicked cannot cease from their works because they look to themselves. They look to themselves to establish their value by their own works. They don't look to God for His rest and his peace and their belonging to God as the sons of God and their value is set in God. They don't look at that. They don't see themselves as anything but working to establish their own value and sometimes trying to earn their way to heaven and such. But see, there's no rest from their works. One of the reasons we rest one day in seven is because we rest in the work of Jesus Christ. Okay, let's move on to number three. Man has also lost a sense of beauty, those things that are pleasant to the eyes. The standard of beauty is the fruit-bearing tree and the colors that God has placed in this world. Instead, what we find in pagan societies, primitive societies, and very much our society today is darkness and ugliness is everywhere around us. It really doesn't look like flowers. We don't look at the art that's presented, we don't think that looks a lot like the flowering trees. We have established a different value, a different standard of what is beautiful, and we don't see it in the flowering trees as much as we used to. And so the sin and consequences of sin and man's autonomous definitions of sin has destroyed the beauty of art. The beauty of art is supposed to be framed by God's artwork in nature. the flowering trees. And so the artwork of the Muslims is unity. It's boring. It doesn't look like a tree. It doesn't look like a flowering tree at all. There's too much unity in the artwork. If you've studied the Islamic art, Now you look at the chaotic work of polytheism, which is very much where we are today. And once again, we don't see a beauty there, rather a chaotic, meaningless character of the particulars. So we get boring unity and chaos. That's what's left in a destructive culture instead of the one and the many beautifully brought together into the flowering plants. If you go into the University of Toronto, the art school in Canada, there's a big sign that that you walk under as you walk into the art school and the University of Toronto. We are the destroyers, it says. We are the destroyers. Thus, the modern world has set out to destroy beauty and art and architecture and all the cultural manifestations, especially in mass culture. Fourthly, man is still sacramental, and yet what has happened to sacraments? Well, typically what happens to sacraments is man turns sacraments into idols and fetishes. He worships the bread and the wine at the table. It's what happened in Catholicism. He invents the wrong sacraments. Typically, sexuality is turned into a sacrament in a pagan worship associated with temple worship with the Hindus, the Aztecs, and others. As you read about them, you find sexuality is a very big, big part of their worship. And that's, I think, what's happening in our day as well. Today the sacraments of abortion and homosexuality and body mutilation are very important to the modern world. And usually the sacraments are associated with self-worship. So man is still very sacramental, extremely tied to his religious signs. And that's why he gets upset if you go after his sacraments. Okay, then fifthly, man is also turned away from that which God has established. in maintaining economic value. Most societies have respected gold, the value of gold, as a means of exchange, or honest exchange, or a basis of stable value until 1973. So for 5,973 years, most civilizations of any substance relied on that. That was the only way in which economies would ever survive. But now we have established new standards of values, federal reserve notes, federal bond notes, zeros and ones put into a blockchain on the internet. Oh, but don't worry about it. Technology is fixing everything. We don't need God's standard of value anymore. Modern man is technology will fix all of this, right? Isn't that what we're told? So here, the breakdown, the destruction of economy and culture and marriage is almost total in our society today. But at least we have some form of technology that should save us. And that's the impression, of course, that's given to all of us. Let's move on to number six, stewardship. Pagan societies abandoned the cultivation of the fields and the guarding of fields from rotting animals. That's why when So many came over to America. There weren't that many fields being cultivated. Rather, there was the worship of lions and cows and wolves and such. They would revert to hunting and gathering rather than the cultivation of fields. So you say, well, what about all these hunters and gatherers? The evolutionists say that hunters and gatherers was a form that developed in a very primitive society. No, that was a broken down society that was rebelling against God's standard. So when you come to these nations that didn't do much in terms of cultivation, and rather relied upon warfare, tribal warfare to steal other people's goods and hunting and gathering as means of survival. They almost always reverted to cannibalism and that was the end of those respective cultures. So again, man rebels against God's standard. Man refuses to steward his creation. We touched on how modern man worships the creature rather than the creator last time as well, so we won't go there. Number seven, man has also separated himself from God's special revelation and replaced that with his own ideas. And I would say because man is not meant to live without the word of God. And so when Aquinas said, let's separate out the two forms of knowledge, that build up on human reason, that which we can achieve by general revelation, Aristotle and all the others, away from the special revelation of God, the sacred doctrine, And he said there's two forms of knowledge, different in kind, allowed room for the university to develop apart from God's special revelation and that's the point at which the Bible came out of the public schools and came out of the universities in the 1300s, 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s and such. That's exactly what happens is the separation of this knowledge, sacred knowledge as in the Word of God from and the knowledge that is supposed to be obtained from general revelation occurred because Aquinas believed that man did not need the special revelation of God. Yet Adam had it before the fall. After the fall, man was even more disadvantaged by the fact that his mind had been corrupted by the devil. And now he was even more mixed up in terms of how he would develop his ethics, his view of reality and everything else in the world around him. Man was increasingly messed up. And then Aquinas said, we don't need the Word of God anymore as the standard for man's knowledge within the context of the modern university. And that, I believe, is the fundamental breakdown of Christianity in the entire Western world, and ultimately the destruction of knowledge, which is what we're seeing today. There are two forms of revelation that come. Actually, three forms. The first form to what I just mentioned, relying entirely on general revelation and increasingly moving away from God's revelation in His word as the definitions of what constitutes a right view of ethics and reality and truth. But also, sometimes prophets like Buddha and others would influence, would be influenced by demons and they produce these writings that would influence the people and displace God's revelation with prophets who were influenced by demons, and themselves, by the way, did not acknowledge their revelation to come from the one true and living God. They acknowledged these things to have come from the minds of men, guys like Buddha and others. But also, there's another form of knowledge that is effectively new books that are created to replace God's previous revelation by a new revelation, thus undermining the unity of God's revelation. And that's come by two means, the Book of Mormon and the Koran. And occasionally there are cults who say the Old Testament and the New Testament are so different, they present different religions. And so that itself is undermining the unity of the Testaments, similar to what the Muslims and Mormons do. So we have to be very cautious that we don't undermine the unity of God's revelation from Genesis to Revelation. There is a special unity in this revelation. And it is concluded, of course, in the Book of Revelation. Okay. And then finally, most devastating of all, man broke the covenant and abandoned covenant. But man has been abandoning covenant in the modern age as well, whether it be marriage, family, church, whatever it is, covenant increasingly a foreign concept in the modern mind. And modern man, I believe, is more and more okay with flimsy relationships, whether it be in the context of the church or the family. They've given up on the idea of a strong covenantal form of relationship. But this begins with the breaking of the covenant of works. Now, I want to go through Genesis 3 very, very briefly, the first seven verses. So let's do that. Just flip over there. And I want to walk through this with you so you understand a little bit of what it was, what Eve went through as she broke the covenant of works. in Adam as well. Genesis 3, now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, has God indeed said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? Okay, just stop there for just a moment. What has the devil done? The devil is deceitful. The devil is saying, God has said, you shall not eat of every, that is all, trees or any and all trees of the garden. Has God said that you shall not eat of any and all trees of the garden? That was the first statement. Now what's wrong with that? Well, it presents God as one who is stricter than he really is. It is undermining the goodness of God. It's questioning the goodness of God. Which is the very first point at which man rebels against God. It's questioning God's goodness. Now, of course, the devil does this in the pristine state. We live in a world of lots of difficulty, in which men are like to blame all of their difficulties upon God and question His goodness. But Eve is in a garden of pristine goodness, and all of what she sees around her are these wonderful things. And yet, even in that context, the devil is questioning the goodness of God, and Eve is giving way to it. So the very first demonic seed of doubt in our minds is in reference to the goodness of God, that somehow God is not good. God had allowed the consumption of fruit from, what was it? I don't know, a million, 560,000 trees in the garden, and there's only one tree from which Adam and Eve were not permitted to eat. So God is good. Think of all the goodness that God has lavished upon all of us. And yet this is the point at which man departs into sin. And I think this may be the point at which every one of us departs into sin. It's at the point at which we're not grateful. It's at the point at which we cannot see, for some reason, the 1,456,000 trees from which we are to eat. It's the point at which we We don't realize the goodness of God upon this world, despite our sin. And that this goodness can be immediately transferred into a realization of His common grace and His mercy upon each and every one of us. That God has been merciful. God has been gracious. God has lavished us with all this goodness. But this is the point of departure. for Eve in the garden. In verse two, the woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the tree of which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it lest you die. Well, just a moment here. I don't know that God had said anything about touching it. This is certainly adding something to the word. This is a twisting of the word. This is perhaps even a contradicting of the word. Then verse four, then the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. Now that's a blatant contradiction, isn't it? Man still lives under the pretense that God won't follow through on his promise. That somehow, when God says, you will surely die, that man says, yeah, but maybe not. Maybe not. Just maybe not. And that's the way that most men think around us today. They don't believe that they're going to die and face the judgment of God. It is appointed for men once to die, and after that, the judgment. And they say, well, maybe not. And maybe not for me. So once again, the devil steps in, questions the goodness of God, questions the word of God, that will hold people to account for their own sins and bring a judgment upon them as he has promised he would do. And yet in their minds, they continually block those thoughts. In fact, if there was an unconverted person in here today, that's exactly what that person is doing. The minute we read the threat of God's judgment that you will surely die and you will face the judgment of God, and hellfire itself forever and ever, and immediately the unconverted person says, not really. That's the demonic questioning of God's truth that creeps into the unconverted mind immediately. The contradiction of the word of God. The unconverted man. will not acknowledge judgment. Those words of the serpent just echo over and over again in his head, day after day after day. You shall not surely die. No, no, you shall not surely die. And by the way, most people won't face the fact that death is coming, physical death is coming because of the serpent's words. They keep coming back. You shall not surely die. You will not surely die. Now verse five, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, Your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Now that's a half-truth. Because there is something to be said that these folks do not know what evil is. But there is a half-truth here. The knowing of evil, in the case of Adam and Eve, will be the experiencing of that evil themselves. to eat of this fruit. Now, every person on earth would get to know experientially what death is like. They will get to know the evil of abuse, the evil of pain, of disease, of death. They will get a firsthand experience with it. And most of us here, all of us here have experienced disease and pain and brokenness and all of these things. We know the pain and the agony of it. But now we know it. We didn't know it before, now we know it. So in a sense, the devil was saying something right, and yet not knowing it as God knows it. It's a half truth. What the devil didn't point out is that God's knowing about good and evil is very different than man's knowing of good and evil. The devil presented this as a good thing. But what God has defined as evil is that which the devil defines as good. And that is that Adam and Eve would get to know experientially what evil is all about. Moreover, there's also, I think, an implication that God is the one who defines what is good and evil. And the implication is that Adam and Eve would be in the place where they could define or determine that what is good and evil. Now, God's knowledge is original knowledge. that doesn't involve an experiential and destructive experience that results from the knowing about good and evil, that's God's knowledge. Our knowledge is not originative. Our knowledge doesn't define it, doesn't determine it. And our experience of evil is a painful and a truly evil thing in and of itself. And these are the sorts of things that the devil did not give to Eve when she gave into that temptation. Verse six, so when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree desirable to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate it. She also gave to her husband and he ate. And so here, Adam and Eve children broke the covenant of works. They broke the contract. They mistrusted God. They mistrusted his word. They trusted the devil. The covenant of works is God's signed deal that governs his relationship with man. Eat of the tree, you will die. Don't eat of the tree, you will live. So let's continue on with the last point, and that is that man was made not just for covenant, but man was made for relationship. God walked with Adam in the garden, but Adam killed his relationship with God. He hid in the garden. Cain later killed his brother and wandered east of Eden. And then Cain's great-great-grandson introduced polygamy. It's not intended by God. It increased the level of anonymity within a marriage where there is Not one-on-one, but now one-on-two, or three, or five, or 10, or 15. There's much more anonymity, less relationship, far less relational living. This wasn't what God intended for man, but this is what man invented for himself, polygamy, murder. Sexuality is separated from relationship. In most of the world today, sexuality trumps companionship. I'm gonna get to that next week. But sexuality becomes the big thing. And then sexuality is decoupled from relationship. It was the next thing that happened, much like what polygamy does, but even worse in our world. Marriage is delayed in a sex-in-the-city anonymous world. Divorce, dysfunctionality, brokenness enters the world of relationship. The state and the corporate systems interrupted family life. The bar scene of the 1700s and 1800s and 1900s, the bar scene. social media, passive electronic media forms, interrupted family life, depreciated face-to-face relationships, modern churches reverted to programs, and short-term small groups to avoid any long-term relationships, because everybody knows that long-term relationships in small churches just don't work in the modern age. Isolation was captured in the life of the self-centered individual and the loner in the classic literature of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, always wandering east of Eden, always killing friendship, as in of mice and men. That guy killed his best friend. We get the institutionalization of the Cain life. This is the modern world, carefully worked out by philosophers like John Paul Sartre, and as hell as other people, existentialism. Popular music, movies took up the theme. La La Land, Barbie. The hero was oftentimes the loner. Jason Bourne, James Bond, Rambo, John McLoone. All these guys. The loner, the hero, the existential hero of the day. Always imposing the world of loneliness upon the modern mind. This is where we are today. Extreme loneliness. But the root of the matter was a self-centeredness. That was the point of John Paul's heart. It was a self-centeredness. It was the idealization of self. It was turning oneself into God and how to do it by self-definition and self-choice, making unconstrained choices for oneself, and thus you get the pro-choice movement and such. So it was all the self-centeredness and pride of modern man making himself into a God. always eroding the possibility of relationships with other gods. You shall be as gods is the end of relationship. The temptation of the Satan in the garden was the end of relationship. Because once you institutionalize the god of the individual, now you don't have opportunities. Now you cut yourself off from relationship with other gods. This is what John Paul Sartre came to realize. And that's why he finally said, it has to be. Hell is other people. We must isolate ourselves. Isolation is the only way to survive in the modern world of self-centeredness. Modern institutions have enabled the impression that all can be a god on their own terms without suffering any consequences. disabled relationships and family life by welfare, by social security, by abortion, by abortifacients, by self-gratification. In other words, all of these things have been created in order to institutionalize and make it so convenient that the entire world can live, can survive for a short while in the isolated life of Cain wandering east of Eden. Also, there's an attempt to circumvent the fall and enable the life of isolation. Well, brothers and sisters, this is where our world is today, but this is God's world. And I want to close with this, that God has come immediately in Genesis 3.15 with a promise that He will come to redeem it. He will come to save it. He will come to restore the world. Genesis 3.15, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head. and you shall bruise his heel." Meaning that Jesus is coming and Jesus is going to crush Satan and destroy his works. And we come face to face with, I think, an enormous problem. The dismal world of Adam and Eve falling into sin and then and then maintaining the self-conscious, self-consistent implications of all of that, we come into this dismal, terrible, terrible world with this enormous problem before us. And what is gonna solve all of this but Jesus, the very Son of God, the Creator Himself saying, I made this world, I'm gonna remake it. I'm coming down, I'm gonna fix it. Adam and Eve ruined it. Look at what happened. All the reversal of what we intended in the creation of the world at the very beginning, it's all been ruined. Now what? Jesus came down to fix it. That's it. Jesus has come to restore it. It's the renewal. It's the new creation, the second Adam. One more time, the 2.0. Jesus restores every aspect. Jesus is the mediator between God and man. Children, Jesus establishes a new covenant in His blood. And we get to eat of the tree of life as well now. Jesus restores everything, restores true dominion, true stewardship. All of us are stewards, not just for God the Father, but we are stewards for the Lord Jesus Christ. We call Him our Lord and our Master. He is assigned to us as our master, and he died on the cross for us. He's the best master and the best Lord in the entire universe. We submit ourselves to him gladly. Jesus restores marriage. Jesus restores rest as the very source of rest himself. Jesus reestablishes a covenant and fulfills it. He's the federal head of the second covenant, the covenant of grace. He represents the new covenant. As Adam represented us in the first covenant, now Jesus represents us in the second covenant. And where Adam failed, Jesus succeeds. And as with the first covenant, we're called to believe God now, to believe His word, to believe His covenant promises, and to believe in His Son. Whereas Eve didn't trust God, now we're trusting God's word. We're trusting in Jesus. And Jesus restores relationship between God and man, between man and man. Jesus grabs the hand of a Palestinian, grabs the hand of an Israeli, and then takes them to each other through him, and does it by the spear in his own side. He has abolished in his flesh the enmity to make in himself of the two, of the Israeli and the Palestinian, one new man, so making peace. You say it would be impossible for that to happen. Not with Jesus. He has gone so far as to reconcile God to man. He's obliterated the infinite gulf. Satisfied divine justice reconciled us to God. He can reconcile a husband to a wife, a Palestinian to Israeli. I don't care how bad the blood is. The baddest of blood between anybody in this church building can be resolved by the blood of Jesus Christ. Again, I have great hope and confidence in what Jesus Christ can do. He restores covenant. He restores relationship in the vertical as well as the horizontal. The church becomes ground zero for the restoration of relationship, the reconciliation of man to man, of man to God. People come and look at our church and they see there is more love here, there's more forgiveness here, there's more reconciliation here than they've seen anywhere else in the world around us. And why is that? Because we're all standing under the cross of Jesus. We're receiving the blood of Jesus. We're looking at the blood on ourselves and on my brother and sister. Where is this blood coming from? It's the blood of the Son of God. It's the creator of the universe bleeding on the cross for us to reconcile us to God so that he will forgive our sins and so that we can restore relationship with one another and not live in the cold, isolated, broken world around us, but in a restored and a renewed and a reconciled world in Jesus Christ. So here we have the amazing feeling of restoration of relationship, tears running down our faces as we realize that such offenses have been taken care of by the blood of Jesus. And these relationships have been restored between brothers and sisters because we believe in Jesus. Because we have received the blood of Jesus. Because we've been forgiven by the infinite price of the Son of God who has put on that altar for us. Because of that, we can forgive each other. We can restore relationship. We can live in reconciliation with each other. And tears running down our faces, we embrace our brothers and sisters as we realize our acceptance with God. As we realize we've been forgiven, we don't need to live in a hermetically sealed universe, isolated from one another in programs anymore. We can learn to trust each other again. We can have love that hopes all things and believes all things and bears all things and endures all things because we're under the cross and we're reconciled by the blood of Jesus. That's why. This church is a miraculous bunch of people who can love each other because we've received the miraculous love of God. And in a world of isolation and brokenness and fragile, superficial relationships, Jesus makes 1 Corinthians 13 possible for us. Amen and amen. He's restored it. And it's restored in the church of Jesus Christ where people believe in Jesus That's where it's restored Yes, the world is messed up. I get it. I've already presented that to you, but with all the emphasis that within me today I'm saying there is hope in the restoration of Jesus Christ That's why he came He came to restore all of this Hallelujah Hallelujah Amen, amen Father, thank you Father God, what a mess, but you've come in Jesus to restore it, to redeem it, to renew it. Oh, God, you've done a beautiful thing. You've restored beauty. You've restored peace, rest, belonging, identity, relationship, all in Jesus Christ. Oh, God, thank you. We bless you. We receive you because you've received us. And now we receive each other in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen and amen. We come to the table to the sacrament today. Here is the sacrament that he left for us. Remember where Adam failed, Jesus succeeded. where we had the bad news with Adam and we've seen the bad news and all the consequences of it, Jesus restored all of that and restores it. Today, we witness the restoration. We're seeing it amongst ourselves. There are three restorations and there are three new elements. So I'm going over the three new elements one more time. We touched on it, but one more time. First of all, the new covenant, that we are back in covenant through Jesus Christ Which means what? Back in relationship. Jesus signed the covenant in his blood when he says, and we're gonna read this one more time as we approach the table today, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. So number one, he brings a new covenant and he signs it in his own blood and fulfills the covenant. Number two, second new. You have a new covenant, second new is the new relationship. And we do have a new relationship. Adam broke the relationship with God, and then Jesus restores a new relationship, and we are back in relationship with God, but it's different. It's actually more of a relationship because, why? Because God became man. God had not become man to relate to man in the garden, but in Jesus Christ, God becomes man in order to have a better and closer relationship with man. So that's number two. New covenant, new relationship, and new sacrament. So let's talk about the new sacrament. Now, Adam was barred from the sacrament of the tree of life. if Adam had obeyed God, I don't know for what period of time, I don't understand any of that, but if he had obeyed God, he would have been able to eat of the tree of life and live forever. That was the sacrament in the garden. And then God barred, remember he put a fence up, I don't know, I guess it was angels that defended it so that there'd be no entering into the tree of life prior to the flood. So, but now we have access to life. and to eternal life through our tree of life and that is Jesus, yes. Jesus restores to us the sacrament of life at this table as well as at the end there will be something of a tree of life giving 12 fruits and all the rest. But Jesus is very much to us the tree of life. Listen to what he says. Hear what Jesus says. I am the resurrection and the life. I am it. Whereas we had no access to the tree of life, Jesus has come now as a person, as a human being, coming into our world and introducing himself there before Lazarus' tomb. He says, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, yet he shall live. And then again, John 7, 37, on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out saying, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scriptures has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. So much life within us that the life just flows out of us in rivers. as we believe in Jesus. Also the Apostle Paul in Galatians 2.20, I am crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, that is that Christ life, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. So Jesus is now the source of our life. And as you take the cup, believe in Jesus. As you take the cup, which signifies, is a sacrament of His life, the life of His flesh and the life of His blood. This is the sacrament, not the tree of life, but the sacrament of the blood and the body of Jesus Christ. As you take this, take it as the seal upon the covenant. Take the cup as a communion that you share in, participate in, partake of, and identify with the death of Jesus Christ. So that's what you're doing. We're identifying with, partaking of, and sharing in. That's what the word koinonia brings out to us. So take the cup believing in Jesus Take the bread, believing in Jesus, looking to Jesus, and as you believe in Jesus and look to Jesus, you will find life flowing through you. And you say, what would that look like? Typically love. You'll begin to be surprised by your own love. for one another in this congregation, or your love for one another in your family. As you look to Jesus, you'll be amazed. I was never this loving before. And why am I this loving? Because you've looked to Jesus. And as you look to Jesus, the life of Jesus flows through you like a river, and it begins to flow upon others as well. And you begin to share the life and the love of God upon others as well. So come to the table today and say, I am included in this. I'm included in the covenant by faith. I want in. I want to be part of this covenant, this agreement between God and man sealed by Jesus himself. I believe in the promises of God. I believe in Jesus. You know, the analogy is eating. Think about this one more time. Eve ate of the wrong tree and fell into death. We eat of Jesus by faith, right? And we get life. You see, again, eating being a great picture of faith. As you take this bread and eat of this bread and drink of this cup, I encourage you to believe in Jesus, to look to Jesus, and you will live. and you will live even more abundantly. That's what we all want, amen. Okay, let's pray. Our Father in heaven, as we come to this table, we're overwhelmed first by your grace, by your mercy that you would invite us to this, that you would send your son to be the ultimate sacrifice for us and to be the seal upon the covenant that you've made with us to bring us salvation, eternal salvation. and eternal life that can only come through your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Please, we pray that you would bring life to us. Oh, that we would increase our faith as well. Holy Spirit, work in us. Work in us faith and love and bring that life through us as we partake today. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.