My voice is disappearing? Oh, okay. I have to get closer. Sensitive mic. All right. I shouldn't turn aside. Keep straight ahead. Okay, so the premonitionary period would be open-ended, which I reject. And if the probationary period is in fact a period of time, whether man sins or not makes God subject to man's free agency, which I reject. Okay, so he was seduced. and he succumbed to the temptation. He sinned. He sinned by the act of doing what God told him not to do. God permitted this sin because it was part of his plan, and to his own glory, he therefore has a second Adam in the wings, if you will. to redeem man. Now on to section two. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness in communication with God and so became dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the parts and facilities of the soul and body. Now this section deals with the consequences of sin to first man, Adam. First of all, man lost his righteousness. His rebellion and opposition separated him from God. And being separated from the source of spiritual life, man thereby lost his righteousness. Now, as I was studying this, I was thinking of justification and sanctification. Justification makes us holy. We can eventually be with God in heaven and stand in his presence and worship him. But in this life, we are still impure. And we have to proceed through acts of humility to sanctify ourselves and gain righteousness. So without holiness, you don't have righteousness. And having lost communication with God, he was immediately cut off from God. He could not walk or speak with God, and he had to hide from God and clothe himself. The initial act of sin was regarded as God said, you will surely die. God is a spirit, and when he talks about life, I think he's referring to spiritual life always. So to think of it as physical death is the wrong way to approach this. God speaks of life, he invariably is talking about spiritual life. And spiritual death is the instant separation from the source of all moral and spiritual things. Man became dead in spirit. He lost his righteousness, he became dead in spirit. In becoming dead in spirit, he became dead in all parts of his body. Original righteousness is the necessary principle of obedience. And obedience is a means toward righteousness. It's like A equals B, B equals A. Complete obedience to God's will is to pursue righteousness. Man was created holy in righteousness and was able to be in God's presence. Through disobedience he lost this and lost his ability to be in the presence of God. And this disobedience defiled him in all parts of his body. As Jesus says in Matthew 23, the holy People in the Jewish religion, the Sadducees, are like whited supplicants filled with dead man's bones. They look good on the outside, but they're defiled inside. Now, many of the divines use the word depravity in describing this, and depravity is not being as bad as you possibly could be, it's the fact that you are defiled. So, any questions? Adam. Yes. interesting tale about even the man who we culturally reference as the epitome of evil, Adolf Hitler, was not as bad as he could be. In fact, he displayed common grace in 29th row of life. I think it's important for us to remember that all humans here are that mixture of humans created in the image of God, yet we fall in. And we're preyed in all areas of our life, but as you said, not as evil as they could be. If we think of depravity as, as evil as you can be, it's a dichotomy, it's a dissimilarity. We make mistakes. It's not that assumption. Yeah. Well, there's no universal sinometer that says this sin is just a little sin, this sin is a great big sin. Sin is sin. Right? That's true. And we'll get into that two weeks from now. We've dealt with the consequence of the first man, and sections three and four deal with the consequences of ourselves as descendants of first man. Yes? So in the discipleship class, when we were bringing this up, There's a multifaceted sinfulness that takes place here. We often reduce original sin to that moment where Adam bit the fruit. But there's multiple things going on in there. So you touched on the the desire for knowledge against God's wishes. That desire pre-existed the bite of fruit, right? Right. We also have Adam's shirking of his duties in leading his wife through that because, again, it's all this hypothetical. What would have happened if Eve ate but Adam didn't? Yeah, he didn't say, stop, or what have you done, or God, how do we make this right? Correct. So he shirks his responsibility as the leader and follows his wife. So there's multiple layers of this, and you could probably go even deeper than I just did. But we always reduce it to just, well, he ate that forbidden fruit. And it's like, that was a manifestation of the sin that was building there. Well, desire for knowledge in itself is not bad. Correct. But the lust after the knowledge that God said was his alone, and he said it was his alone by virtue of saying, thou shalt not eat of it. Right. But we all kind of know that you brought up, we're all kids, right? First thing you say, you're not allowed to touch this, what do they want to do? They're going to find a way when you're not looking to touch it. So that curiosity developed and morphed into a lust for knowledge that they should not have had according to God's will. And so there's just, my point is, There's a lot more to it than just, well, I shouldn't eat the fruit. Yeah. Well, I don't think it was lust, per se. I would say that the desire for knowledge is a good thing, but they perverted it to go for something that they shouldn't have. Yes, Robert. Richard. Richard. Oh, sorry. But that only doesn't make it sin. If we do not stand upon the rock of faith, that temptation becomes something that says, Jesus told his disciples, I watched you with the Word. The Word is God's Word in the Bible. We have to live by it. We have to have the knowledge of what God has laid out for us. Otherwise, we don't find the way to the Yellow Brick Road. That's a metaphorical Yellow Brick Road. Well, we've been going through 1 Peter, and we got to Chapter 5, it becomes really clear what Peter's talking about, the humility of action. And these are all the works of sanctification. We submit ourselves to God's will and his word. And this This righteousness that we practice is our acts of sanctification. Humility, which we'll be studying further on this morning. Any other questions? Yes. The final act of humility. Ah, well, thank you for, yes. I was going to ask, I was just thinking about it, I thought this would be helpful, but I was just thinking in section one, kind of have it laid out there. You know, there's this idea of like the problem of evil and sin, if you will. There's a whole section of people that believe that God hates sin. So, sin exists, so therefore something else could be with God, a creature or whatever, you know, so God, there's no way God could be sovereign over sin, right? But you have it up there, and I think Piper said it once too, where it says, God wills that which he does hate in order to go for the ultimate end, right? just kind of way of stating that to help. And I don't think anyone here would argue with that, right? You have to kind of understand that, be informed, in under-informed circles more so. But there seems to be such a one-dimensional, flat view of God's will in much of the broader Well, this is really not a problem that people have been wrestling with for a long time. God does not create sin, didn't will sin. He created man with the capacity for sin, and man sins. And it's all on him, not on God, if you will. And it's part of God's plan that sin exists, that man created sin so that he could provide a redeemer. Say thank you. So just to piggyback on that, one of the things we were talking about in terms of God's providence in relation to sin was what you just said, that God is not the author of sin. But sin is part of his eternal decree. If it weren't, then it couldn't exist. It does exist, so therefore God allowed it to exist. He allows it. He permitted it. Yeah. But what Ben was talking about, how this caricature we make of God in our own minds in many churches today, et cetera, et cetera, is that God has nothing to do with sin whatsoever. You know, that's not strong enough of a statement. Because God does use sin. He orchestrates, He's not the author of it, but He orchestrates all things, including sin, in part of His providence. And He's still sovereign over it, and He governs it down to the detail, all for His purpose and His glory. You know, like the book of Job, Satan comes before God and says, you know, if I really press this guy, he'll sin. And God says, go ahead. And Job is not tempted in the traditional way. He's scarified and made horrible. suffers, but there's a temptation there for him to sin and curse God, and he doesn't do it. Richard. Right. Well, Jesus is the sacrificial lamb. If you read through the book of John, it's very much oriented toward Jesus as the paschal lamb, and he has to die as the paschal lamb had to die to erase the sin of the people. Exactly right. Well, I think we're going to end a little early today. Thanks for bearing with me. I haven't done this for 30 years, standing in front of a group of people. So I'll be better next time. All right, let's close in a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for this time together where we can meet and study your word and study the Westminster Confession. where this group of men have laid out the systematic theology for us to understand your will and purpose. And we thank you for all that you've done for us. And we pray that you'll be with Pastor Borg this morning as he preaches and opens your word to us. In Jesus' name, amen. I've got one question. Yeah. God told Adam to tend the garden. What kind of tools have you given him? Actually, what Rich just brought up actually triggered another thing in terms of sin in and around original sin was Adam wasn't doing his job tending the garden if he let the serpent in. That was another thing that was brought up. So there's a whole lot going on there. And we always just reduce it. Did you used to be a rabbi? This is really hair splitting stuff. I would argue that we split many hairs in our discipleship class. Maybe all we do is split hairs on things. But it was an interesting thing. Like, OK, what was Adam doing, allowing the serpent to enter the garden to begin with? That was, if not sin per se, that was him not doing his duty, intending to the garden. So anyway, just brought that up. Okay, when he was taken out of the tomb, what did he do for the time that he was taken out of the tomb? Sabbath day, Saturday. Well, a rabbi is a teacher. And I guess you could think of Jesus as a rabbi, a teacher. Yeah, he didn't see corruption. I can't comment on that. Yeah. Well, it's actually Sheol, which is the underworld. Right. And that's the nuance that I'm going for here. When we say he descended into hell, he didn't descend into the lake of fire. He was not frightened. But he experienced death. shield, grave, all of that. Not, he's in that place where every other sinner, non-believer, where they go and they die. That's not what we mean by that. In the cold, underworld, gathered around himself, victorious, he had won. And then he came alive. Well, as a man, he died. I mean, he was really dead as a man. Yeah, we just have to be careful. He literally died, yes. All I'm saying is he didn't go to the lake of fire. OK, just want to be clear. Right. Anything else? All right. Thank you.