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The following message was given
at Trinity Bible Church in Powell, Wyoming. It has been over the last couple
of years that I have begun to understand a concept that we
really are all very familiar with, yet we struggle to really
identify and to be able to articulate well, and that's the concept
of shame. And in the labors that I go through
week after week working with people, I've realized that shame
is a much larger, much more integral part of our human experience
than I originally understood. And so I have begun to study
through that, read through that, and trying to profit my own understanding
for my soul and in those labors. And so this afternoon, I really
want to begin what may be a several part series on shame. So let's open up our Bibles,
if you would, to Genesis 2. We're going to begin in Genesis
2. With one of the most baffling
verses to me in the whole Bible, and that's Genesis 2 25. This
is the word of the Lord. And the man and his wife were
both naked and were not ashamed. It's interesting to me that this
is how humanness in creation is finally described. We see
all kinds of things in creation that were provided. We see all
kinds of ways that God provided for their physical needs, for
companionship or relationship with him. And then to sum up
the entire experience of humanness at this time, it is that they
were naked and were not ashamed. And I would take from that that
we are to know a great deal about what this means, to not be ashamed. But I struggle to see that. And my next message, we will
talk more about what it means particularly, because in order
for us to know what it means to not be ashamed, we have to
understand with great clarity what shame actually is. But as
I was working through this, trying to understand this, I realized,
first of all, we have to have a better understanding of what
it means to be naked. And the context of this nakedness,
and what is actually being described to us in this nakedness. And
so as I begin to work through this understanding of shame,
this first message really is going to lay out for us a better
context of the garden. So when we see what is broken,
we have a much clearer, much crisper understanding of the
how profound the brokenness was that produced this human condition
of shame this afternoon. We'll see three aspects of the
pre-fall condition that help us to better understand what
was broken by Adam and Eve when they sinned and why they felt
so much shame and how Jesus has encountered his creation again
to bring restoration to these things. And these three aspects
of the pre-fall condition are going to be summarized in perfection,
peace and purity. Perfection, peace and purity. The first aspect we see in this
pre-fall condition is that of perfection. I'm going to read
through several verses, just kind of skipping through the
end of chapter one into into chapter two, just to catch glimpses
of this. We see at the end of Genesis
125 that God says that as he's working through and arriving
at finishing his at these different aspects of creation, God saw
and it was good. And this is actually the fifth
time that God has looked at His creation and made this proclamation
that it was good. God, in His fullness of knowledge
and exacting judgment and understanding of exact detail, proclaims that
it's good. And we often determine something
to be good in our own life, in our own experience that proves
not to be good. Something about it. There's an
aspect of it that eventually we find out it shows itself to
not be good. But this is not the case. God
knows perfectly well. He knows completely and fully
to the furthest expanse. And he declares it to be good. And when God declares something
to be good, it is good in every aspect and every dimension. And
without any sense of corruption or corrosion, what was good would
be continually good. It was perfectly good. It would
be perfectly good in every way, every system, every process,
every structure, everything that was dependent on another entity
was perfectly ordered and perfectly good. without any flaw, without
any possibility of there being anything but goodness in it. And so we begin to understand
good. It's hard for us because everything
that we experience is has a component of corruption to it and decay
and disorder. But so we have to think, what
would it be like if every system structure, every dependent entity
was good, and was functioning in its most excellent manner. Added to this creation, really
as the pinnacle, we see God making man. And entering man into this
creation, Genesis 1, beginning of 26 and 27, then God said,
let us make man in our image after our likeness. So God created
man in his image. In the image of God, he created
him male and female, he created them. And then also in Genesis
2.7, Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground
and breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and the man
became a living creature. And here we have a special dimension
of creation. While God had created everything,
this is the first thing that is created in relationship to
God, in his image. And we see this that had been
created in his image was put into this creation. And we find
out after that that God says it is finished in Genesis 2.1.
The creation is now finished. Here we see that creation had
a purpose, and that was really to contain the pinnacle of creation,
mankind. We find in Genesis 1.29 that
that there was purpose specified for this creation, in that it
was to provide for the mankind that was created. Genesis 129,
and God said, behold, I have given you the humans that he
created, the man that he had created, I have given you every
plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth, and every
tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food.
And so we not only see that this creation has a has a intended
use to provide for and care for man, but we we see this intimate
purpose I have given to you, not just generally. They didn't
just show up and it was available. This is no. This is for you. Every plant and every fruit for
for them and the whole earth is bountiful and abundant. Pastor
Brian reminds us that God in creation is a bountiful, lavishing
his provision on mankind, and he's for them. We also see in
creation a special relationship with mankind. Throughout this
narrative, God has spoken several times, but man is the only one
who has created with the ability to understand and to respond. to man and man alone, God gave
language and the ability to reason. And so when now when God speaks,
he has a creation that can that can hear those that that hear
that speech and can reason through and understand. And so we see
even in this creation, God has his desiring this relationship.
He didn't just create him for him and turn him loose. He says,
no, I want to be in a relationship. And in order to do that, I'm
going to give you language. Because it's language that allows relationship. It's language that allows God
to be known and to interact with that that he has created. And
of all God's creation, it's mankind that has the ability to actually
reason and communicate in a way that God can communicate to them.
We also find a particular care on display. God made things pleasing
to man. It wasn't just a general creation.
where things were bland and nutritious, but without a pleasant sense. And here it's where we see it
in Genesis 29, where it says, out of the ground the Lord made
to spring up every tree that is pleasant in the sight and
good for food. And all of a sudden we see, oh
my God, not only created man with language, but he gave them
senses. to experience this creation,
but not just in a general sense of understanding the creation,
but to say, oh, this God that has created this creation knows
me and he has made this creation to please me. God shows his care
and his love for us by saying, listen, this is gonna taste so
good. I've created you with the ability
to interact with this and I have made it in such a way that you
are gonna delight in it. and the things we see, and the
colors, and all the creativity, and we think through all of our
senses, really, everything that we see, and taste, and smell,
and everything we hear and touch, God says, listen, I've given
you these senses so that you can interact with this creation,
and every time you're delighted, know it's from me. Know I had
you particularly in mind when I created this so that you would
enjoy it, you would delight in it, you would be pleased by it,
Really, we see God's heart on display in this, don't we? But
it was not just a general detached creation. God is saying, oh,
I love you and I want you to experience the fullness of creation
in every possible way, to the depth of it. It's all for you. And then within that, God creates
a special relationship between mankind. In Genesis 2.19, then
the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone.
And God provided more than just a mate. We'd seen the animals
come through, right? And Adam had named them. And
then God provided for him. But it wasn't just to be fruitful
and multiply. He said, it's not good for you
to be alone. I understand this relational
aspect. As a triune God who has this
perfect relationship, I want you to experience that impartially.
and I am going to create an entity where you can have this intimate
companionship. And then we see it actually described
as this one flesh relationship, as close as two human creatures
can actually become a close, intimate, one flesh relationship,
but primarily in companionship, one with another, so that you're
not alone. And so God has provided his creation,
he's present, And then he says, all of this is for you. Delight
in it. Rejoice in it. And I'm even going to give you
a companion to live in this with. And God puts on display his invisible
attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature perfectly on
display without any corruption, curse or calamity. We see Jesus
talking about The simplicity of this creation and how profoundly
we understand the nature of God as he describes the birds of
the air are perfectly fed without sowing and reaping. The lilies
of the field grow without toil or spin and display pure glory. Everything is perfectly ordered,
functioning as designed, no warranty necessary. Perfect communion
exists between God and man. The beginning of a perfect community
within the mankind is established. It's perpetual motion. It just
exists, and it's perfectly, every cog perfectly fits within the
other one. There's no resistance. There's
nothing to slow down the motion. It is perfectly ordered, perfectly
structured, and God has set man in the middle of it and said,
oh, I want you to know how pleased I am that you can enjoy this
creation I have given you. And as the final stamp on this
creation, God says, it's really a mic drop. He says, I'm gonna
rest. Look at that. My word, all that
I've created for you. It's wonderful, isn't it? It's
delightful, it's pleasing in every possible way. His perfect
creation was perfect in every way. It was perfect in content,
in quality, in quantity, in order, It was magnificent. It was a
perfect creation. But sin and the consequences
of sin, distorted, corrupted, disordered creation causing hardship
and suffering unimaginable to the original design. It is broken. And Adam did it. The second aspect
that we find in this pre-fall condition is that of peace. That of peace. While we don't
see this specifically identified in this passage, it is reasonably
inferred. If we have perfect order and
perfect structure and everything is designed to perfectly fit
together, and everything is operating in perfection as it was designed,
it creates a perfect peace. Shalom. is the Hebrew word that
we translate into our English as peace. Shalom. And what I
found, it's like I I was digging through this and I hit this this
bright, shiny thing way down deep in the soil. And I started
uncovering it. I was like, oh, my word. This concept of peace
is like one of the most beautiful, robust concepts in all of the
Bible. When we start looking at when
Jesus says, peace be with you. And we see in the blessings,
every blessing has peace in it. And there's this proclamation
that you're going to have peace that surpasses all understanding.
And we realize, oh, my word, this is what's missing, right?
This is what haunts us. This is what keeps us in turmoil.
It's this peace. But in the garden, this peace
is perfect. Shalom has as its essence of
welfare, stability, order, prosperity. Everything coexists perfectly
without effort. There's no, nothing needs to
be really super intended over. It's just working according to
plan because God and his creation provided the perfect context
for life, provided richly and abundantly and established the
perfect community with him. And man, there was perfect peace
established. Everything was in perfect balance
and proportion. Nothing existed to the detriment
of something else. Just hard for us to comprehend. Everything flourished. Everything
thrived. Resources were never scarce or
poorly distributed. There was never an experience
of want or need. Everything was completely at
peace. There was no falsehood or deception. Everything that
you saw was actually what it was. There was no hidden. There
was no facade. There was no sense of suspicion.
Everything was exactly the way it was presented. Trust is not
even a consideration because there's never been an inkling
of violation of trust. Everything in your creation and
community is for your good. It's all for my good. And I've never experienced anything
that has opposed me or hindered me. It's all good. And I see
it all as for my good. In every way, emotionally, spiritually,
physically, you only know blessing. Everything is labeled fresh,
new, organic. Ideas of joy, satisfaction, contentment
are irrelevant because they imply an absence of something or a
condition where they don't exist. Like we don't even reason through
what is contentment because I have never experienced anything but
full blessing, full satisfaction. Full joy is the norm. Contentment
is not even considered. I have never been dissatisfied.
My satisfaction rating is always 100. No one has ever failed me
or let me down. Your mind is at peace, your body's
at peace, your heart is at peace. Everything is restful. You have
no more inhibition to sleep at night than in the day. There's
no need for even a thought of protection. Like, I don't have
to do anything. There's no consideration that
I need to be protected. I've never known you to have
a poor thought about me. I know you're for me in every
way, and I can just rest in your presence. No action has ever
motivated by a need to be protected. There's never been a need to
establish peace. There's no war, conflict, hostility,
harm, or even a fragment of a thought against one another. Power has
never been used to harm or oppress. It's always been used to uplift
and for the good of those around us. Shalom. It's this full concept
of peace. And so when we hear naked, we
should understand this peace. Of course I'm naked. I've never
even had a consideration of myself. I've never had to cover in any
way because I've never had to wonder or fear. about anything. Naked is a beautiful term, a
robust term that talks about this existence of shalom. But sin and the consequences
of sin distorted, corrupted, and disordered shalom, creating
hardship and suffering unimaginable to the original design. The third
aspect of this pre-fall condition is that of purity. Purity. We've seen perfection, we've
seen peace and now purity. We see this in the concept of
not ashamed and also with the concept of naked. In creation
there was perfect moral purity. God created everything to be
perfectly moral. His presence mandated this moral
perfection. The fact that he could coexist
in it demonstrated that there was this moral perfection in
every way. There's no hint of moral impurity. And for us to understand this
concept, it's helpful to think about what Jesus said when he
was approached by the teacher in Matthew 22. And the teacher
said, which of the great commandments, which is the great commandment
of the law? And Jesus really summarizing all of the moral
law said, you shall love the Lord God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great
and first commandment. and a second is like it, you
shall love your neighbor as yourself." And here what we have is this
condition of moral purity. If we could go back and live
in the context of moral purity, it would be displayed as pure,
perfect love. A love for God and a pure, perfect
love for others. Completely and in every way honorable. It's hard for us in our culture
to think about shame, and we'll work through that next time,
but if we lived in a shame culture, we would know instinctively that
the opposite of shame is honor. We refer to those cultures that
are primarily structured based on shame and honor as a shame-honor
culture. At this time period, there was
only honor. Everything that was done was
honorable. Everything was done right. for
a right purpose with every fiber of our being. And our only motive
and instinct is love. We don't even have a remote instinct
to do anything other than love, love for God and love for others.
The moral purity of God was the nature of everything. There was
no distinction or consideration of what was right, right or wrong.
Every instinct was always the best thing for us to do. We had
no other instinct. We didn't even actually know
there was another possibility. Moral living was instinctual
and it was part of nature. It just flowed out of us. Nothing
had ever transgressed God's perfect morality or fallen short of his
perfect obedience. Every intent in the depth of
our heart was a pure intent for love. This moral purity is so
contrary to our condition, it's hard to even comprehend. Every
motive was others focused and done for the glory of God and
the good of our neighbor. Every action was a morally pure
action. Every priority was a morally
pure priority. Every consideration of another
was driven by pure love. Therefore, relations were morally
pure and free, fully known and fully loved. Every thought action
was morally innocent. We loved God purely, wholly. We delighted in our ability to
be in his presence and we loved our neighbor perfectly. We had
no thought of ourselves. If we could imagine the context
where I love my neighbor as myself, I was and then we read verses
like do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility,
consider others more significant than yourself. And we say that's
the context in your presence. My entire being was for your
good. My entire faculties and all of my energy was for you.
I was watching, I was waiting, I was eager to please, I was
eager to serve. I was 100% given over to you. I had actually never considered
myself. I didn't even know I was naked. I didn't even realize,
I didn't even have any comprehension of really my needs because you
were 100% for me. I knew that you were for me in
every way. You'd never had a bad thought
about me. You'd never judged me. You'd never seen a weakness. You'd never criticized, pointed
out a fault or a failure. In every way, I knew that when
I looked at you and you looked at me, you were pleased. And
you loved me. Purely. And I could rest in that. In all that I was as a created
being. And I could be naked. without
any shame because of this relationship that had been established between
us. We could look into the face of
God and one another and never feel the need to divert our gaze.
There's never a sense that I have to look away, just gaze. Every consideration has been
love, contentment, joy in your presence. God's creation was
perfect. God's creation was peaceful and
God's creation was pure. Man indeed could be naked, requiring
no covering for protection of anything in any way. Man was
honorable in every way because nothing had ever been done to
warrant a covering or a shrinking back or a drawing away from one
another. But sin broke everything. Every aspect of creation became
corrupt. Perfection was now broken and
God separated from his creation. Peace was now hardship, disorder
and harm. Purity was now contaminated and
unclean. And for the first time we see
shame. And what shame Adam should have
felt. He broke all of it. He is responsible
for all of the brokenness the world has ever known. He is responsible
for every feeling of fear, every anxiety, every doubt, every harm
that's ever come to anybody Adam produced. Every death, every
bit of corruption and contamination and corrosion and decay, Adam
did it. He is responsible for every selfish
thought, every selfish action flowed out of that one sin. Everything's
broken. And oh, the shame he should have
felt. And indeed. The shame he did
feel, we see him covering himself, trying to hide from God, trying
to undo that just had collapsed around him. And it is our condition
as well. We know shame very well. We might not be able to identify
it readily, hopefully, as we spend time together thinking
through it. we will have a better understanding of it. Knowing
this backdrop makes the gospel even more amazing. It is into
this situation. Not in infancy, as it was when
Adam began to break, but in maturity, when things are even more corrupt
and more devastation, wickedness has been played out for centuries
that Jesus entered into. The first Adam failed. and corrupted
and broke everything. But the last Adam, Jesus, entered
into that willingly, into the brokenness, into the contamination,
into the decay, into the vileness that was this uncleanness, entered
into it, took on our flesh so that he could rescue all of creation
and his people. Jesus set free all of creation,
which was in bondage to corruption. We see in Romans and he freed
these children. Creation had been groaning together
in the pain of childbirth until Christ came to set it free. And mankind had been groaning
inwardly, waiting desperately to be adopted as sons, to be
brought out of this, this contaminated situation in this lineage of
Adam. and to be redeemed and purchased
out of that and brought into this new relationship with the
father. Jesus bore upon himself the effects
and consequences of every broken creation, shattered peace and
contaminated purity. Jesus has come to purchase. A people out of that. And while
the transaction is complete and price payment is finished, The
funds have been wired and the goods are still being delivered.
The Holy Spirit. Puts his stamp on says this has
been complete and we are being transferred out of the kingdom
of darkness into this kingdom of light and finally delivered
back into a new heavens and a new earth with a new body, with a
redeemed mind. Where we will worship and enjoy
all that was broken and we will have a great appreciation Because
we've experienced the depths of the brokenness and the corruption
and we will live in profound gratitude with full worship Because
we will know where we came from and we will be overwhelmed With
the work of Christ and what that work secured for us Jesus the
last Adam purchases a new creation He is our peace that surpasses
all understanding. And we are cleansed by his blood
so that we can be brought into this new relationship with the
Father. It is important to understand
where we came from so that we have appreciation and gratitude
for all that Christ has done in our lives and where he is
taking us. Oh, Father, help us to not hear these things in a superficial
sense and just discard them. Oh, Lord, show us. Show us how
broken. Show us how far we've come. Show
us. Show us what corruption exists. Help us to understand where we
fell from so that when we realize the work of Christ in our life
and he has rescued us from all these things, we can be overwhelmed. We can be humbled and we can
love you. Lord, work these things out of
us. We're still impacted by this cursed condition we live in,
and the brokenness of this creation, and the fracturing of this peace,
and the corruption within. Oh Lord, we cannot wait for the
final culmination of your work, where we will brought it into
your presence, where creation will be restored, where peace
will be established, and where we will live out this cleansing
that Christ has provided for us. Oh Lord, be praised. We pray
in Jesus' name. Amen.
Shame I: Good and Naked
Series Shame
| Sermon ID | 313222221214836 |
| Duration | 31:24 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Genesis 2:25 |
| Language | English |
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