I want to start our time together with a reading from Genesis chapter one. This is the word of the Lord. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth. and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed and its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breadth of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there is evening, and there is morning, the sixth day. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this Lord's day, and we pray as we consider your word again this evening, that you would bless it, bless the hearing, the reading of your word. We pray as we consider your good creation, how we, the pinnacle of your creation, you made mankind, you made us in your own image. And yet through our sin and through the fall, that image is marred. But thanks be to God, we thank you that through the second Adam, we have salvation. That through his perfect obedience, we now have righteousness received and imputed to us, received by faith alone. It's in the name of this amazing Savior, it's in the name of Christ we pray, amen. Well, this evening I want to pick back up with our study of the Heidelberg Catechism. And by way of introduction, I want to remind us of just the first couple of questions. We've been looking at this off and on as we've gone through over the evenings or the past several weeks. But the first question is, what is your only comfort in life and in death? What is our only comfort in this life? And the only comfort we have is we all look ahead to death. And the answer is that I am not my own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ. That's our hope. And that question summarizes perhaps more beautifully than any other man-made document recording what scripture teaches about our great hope and our great savior. The second question is also important to ask and important for us to remember. It asks us, what are the things that we need to know in order to live and die in this comfort? What are the things that we need to know in order to appreciate this comfort that we have in Christ? And it says that there's three things. First, we need to know the greatness of our sin and misery. Second, we need to know how we're delivered from all our sin and misery. And then in the third, We need to know how we can thank God for such deliverance. So if you've been with us as we've considered this in the past, you know that these three things become the outline of the Hatterberg Catechism. And even more than that, they are the outline of the Christian life. This is the outline of our lives. We all must come to know our sin and misery in the first place. to know that we need a Savior, then we need to embrace that Savior, Jesus Christ, and we're delivered from our sin and misery, and then we need to know how can we live in light of the fact that we are saved? How can we live lives of gratitude and obedience to Christ? So we have those three things, and we can summarize them, we talked about the three Gs, the three G words, guilt, grace, and gratitude. Those are the three parts, those are the three things that we need to know. And the first one, guilt, that's the beginning of the catechism. That's what we've been looking at over the past few weeks that we've been together, that I've been with you. Questions three through eleven, they unpack our guilt and what that means. Last week, we looked at questions three through five or not last week, but I guess last time we were together a couple of weeks ago. And these questions, they help us to see that it's God's law. His perfect law reveals to us the depth of our sin and misery. It's the standard. It's the rule by which we compare ourselves to God's holy requirements. We see what God requires of us and that we're not able to keep it. We're not able to keep God's law because question five taught us that we're inclined by our very nature not to love God and love others. That's the fulfillment of the law is love, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves. But we're not inclined by nature to love God and love our neighbors. Rather, we're inclined to hate God and to hate our neighbor. That's what we've learned up to this point. The next set of questions then, they come up naturally. If that's the case, the next logical question is, how did this happen? Has it always been this way? Was this how we were created? And if not, where did this corrupt nature come from? Those are the questions we want to consider this evening. These are questions six, seven, and eight in the Heidelberg Catechism. I'll read them for us and we'll discuss them. So the next question, did God create man so wicked and perverse? So we recognize that we are by nature inclined toward hatred and evil, not toward good. Well, did God create us? Did he create us this way? The answer is no, by no means. God created man good and in his own image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that he might truly know God his creator, love him with all his heart, and live with God in eternal happiness for his praise and glory. Question seven then follows that up. Then where does man's corrupt nature come from? And the answer is from the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve in paradise. This fall has so poisoned our nature that we are all conceived and born in sin. And then the eighth question, the last one we'll consider tonight. But are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined toward all evil? And the answer to that is yes, unless we are born again by the spirit of God. That's the sum of the content we wanna discuss this evening, and I wanna summarize these three questions for us by asking a couple questions of my own. Hopefully that won't confuse the matter, but that will help as we consider what these questions are asking of us and what they're pointing us to. So two points for our conversation, our time this evening. First is, where did sin and brokenness come from? And then, Is there anything that we can do about it? Those are the two points tonight. Where did sin and brokenness come from? And is there anything that we can do? So where did sin come from? Where did evil come from? We're granting the fact that sin and evil exists. We proved that last time we were together, but it doesn't need much proof. You can look anywhere in the news or around us, or we can look in the mirror and we know that there's brokenness. We know that this world has been affected by sin. We know that sin exists, so where did evil come from? Where did sin come from? We could spend all evening wrestling with that question, this perennial problem of evil, and we'd never be able to get to an answer that resolved every tension and every question that we might have. That's a very difficult problem, but there are some answers that we can give. And rather than answering every possible question, the catechism, it helps us and gives us some guiding principles that will help us to live with the tension of being in a broken world. Because the first possible answer to this question, where did evil come from? Well, we know that God created everything, right? We know that he's the creator of all things in heaven and on earth. So one possible answer to the question of where did evil come from is, well, did God create evil? Did God, is he the author of some, in some sense, is he the author of sin? In our catechism, it so boldly states, so succinctly, no, by no means. This is the clear testimony of scripture, that God is in no way the author of sin, in no way is there any evil within Him. He's perfect, He is holy, He is righteous. There is no sin in God, there's no shifting shadow, there's no change in Him. So that cannot be the answer. And because this is who God is, that also means that everything that God makes is good. Which means that when God made mankind, male and female, he made human beings good as well. Because they bore his image. This is what the question gets at here. God created man good. God created man in his own image. That's what we read this evening as we began. In his own image, meaning that he created us in true righteousness and in holiness. And so that we might truly know God our Creator, to love Him and to live with Him in eternal blessedness. That's what it means to be created in the image of God. That's what it means. Not that God looks like us physically, but that we were created to bear and resemble his image of his perfect righteousness and holiness. So it gets at the biblical language about the image of God. True righteousness, holiness, and knowledge of God our creator. In knowledge, we were given an understanding. God made himself known to us. And we are able to know God and to know his good creation. In righteousness, we were created to love. Again, love is the fulfilling of the law. We were created to love the Lord with everything in us and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We were created in his image, in righteousness, to do what the law required, and his image also includes the holiness that we were created for, that we would be holy as he is holy, and that our wills would be conformed to his will. We were created in God's image, yet we're still creatures. So God, he alone is the one who is unchanging. God, he alone is the one who is infallible. We are unlike God in the sense that he has endowed us as his moral creatures, moral agents, with the ability to choose evil. And that leads us then to the answer to this first question of where sin came from. Why is there evil in the world? We don't know all the answers. We can't resolve all the tensions. But what we do know is God is not the author of evil and that sin and evil came into the world through our disobedience and through the willful choice of our first parents. That's where everything in the world, all the brokenness, all the evil, all the trials, everything that is so affected and plagues God's good creation comes from our rebellion against our good God. I like the way that Bethune summarizes this problem of evil for us and some of the tensions around it. I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly. But he has a commentary on the catechism. And he writes this. He's posing the question to us. How a pure being could fall into sin? He's thinking about Adam and Eve. How could a pure being fall into sin? We have not philosophy enough to explain. Nor has the Holy Ghost answered such curiosity. So we don't know. But he goes on. He writes, he, that is Adam, had the faculty of choice from the exercise of which God could not directly restrain him without destroying the essence of his moral being. But that he did sin, we know from the testimony of God, and that the punishment of sin came upon him we know by experience. So we see from the testimony of scripture, we know that he has sinned and that evil has entered the world because of it. And from our own experience, we experienced the effects of living in a fallen world. This is our experience. Scripture testifies to this very plainly. Romans 5, 12 says, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, And so death spread to all men because all sinned. You see sin and death through the one man's choice, through Adam. Psalm 51.5 says, behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. And these are only some samplings of scripture that testify to the reality of the indwelling sin in all of us, that we are conceived in sin even. Because of the guilt that Adam, as our representative in the garden, we are in Adam, we have fallen and sinned with him. So that's where sin came from. That's the answer to our first question, our first point this evening. That's where sin came from. What about the second question? What about the second point? Is there anything that we can do about it? What can we do? Well, the bad news, Carmen's already ahead of me. The bad news is there's nothing we can do. But the good news is that someone has already done something about it. Romans 5, 18. This is later on, Paul's making this argument there in chapter five. He just talked about how through one man, sin and death enter the world. Now he goes to Romans five, verse 18. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, So by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous. So question eight again, that we read earlier, are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined toward all evil? The answer is yes, unless we are born again by the spirit of God. unless we are transferred out of the kingdom of darkness and brought in to the kingdom of light. Unless we put our faith and trust in the one man who obeyed on our behalf, whereas we all disobeyed in the first man. That's what we must know. That's what we must see here. This is our great hope. John chapter three, Beginning of that chapter, the passage on spirit, new birth, regeneration, birth of the spirit, being born of the spirit, I should say it that way. John chapter three, Jesus answered him, talking to Nicodemus, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus replies, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. See, there's two kinds of people in the world. That's not a setup for some joke or some bit, but there's only two kinds of people in the world, truly. There are those who are born of the flesh, and there are those who are born of the spirit. Two groups of people, those who are of the seed of the serpent, Genesis three, and those who are the seed of the woman. Two kinds of people, those who are in Adam, and those who are in the second Adam, who are in Christ. See, there's only two ways of relating to God. Each of them is through covenant. God is a covenant-making God. Either we relate to God in the covenant of works through Adam, or we relate to God in the covenant of grace through Christ. By Adam's sin, we were made to be sinners, and we will continue to be sinners in the sight of God unless we flee to the other Adam, to the other man, to the second last Adam, to Christ himself. By this man's obedience, we are made righteous. This is God's gracious covenant that he enters into with his broken and fallen people. We enter into it by faith, receiving and resting in Christ. where we had failed, where we had sinned, where we had disobeyed and rebelled, Christ, he has succeeded. He has obeyed. He has earned our salvation through his meritorious life and his sacrificial death. He is the good news. So let's believe in him. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you again for this wonderful good news that we have. The gospel that declares it is done and it is finished. Where the law could only condemn us as we were under the law as a covenant of works. Lord Jesus, you satisfied the terms of that covenant on our behalf. And now you call us to faith as we enter into this, not a covenant of works, but a covenant of grace, a gracious covenant. where we receive your meritorious work, where we receive your righteousness imputed to our account, received by faith and faith alone. What good news is that? We thank you for that good news. And we, we pray that even as we consider and pray more this evening about all kinds of various things going on in our lives and different needs that we have, May we, first of all, always give you praise and thanksgiving for all that you've done for us, that you've secured our eternal future, that you've secured life with us everlasting, that there is nothing in this life that we can go through that could ever separate us from your love. So help us as you have first loved us, help us to love you and to love others in return. We pray all of this in your mighty name, amen.