Alright, well last Wednesday we finished the chapter on Providence, chapter 5 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which though in many ways a mysterious and sometimes hard doctrine for us to understand, it is nevertheless a very comforting doctrine to believers. The Doctrine of Providence reminds us that the all-powerful, all-good, all-wise God is not only our Creator, but also our loving Father. And He always, always, always acts in the best interest of His children. Even when He brings us great pain, and even when He allows us to stray from Him, In the end, providence reminds us that he is in charge, that he will be glorified and that everything ultimately will tend toward our salvation. So it's a very comforting doctrine. Now we're gonna move on to a less happy doctrine. We're gonna be in chapter six, which if you have the same book as I do is on page 33. and it is entitled, Of the Fall of Man, Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof. Before you read it, I'll just make a few remarks. The word gospel is derived from the old English word, Godspell, with God being the old word, meaning good, and spell, being a news or a story. It's a good spell. And so the gospel is, like we say, it's good news. The good news or the good story that Jesus lived, that he died, that he rose again in power, that he ascended into heaven and he did all this to save his children. But before we get to the good news, we have to acknowledge the bad news. We have to ask ourselves questions like, why do we need to be saved? What do we need to be saved from? Well, we have part of the answer to questions like that here in chapter six. And God willing, I hope that at some point one day we'll cover the entire Westminster Confession of Faith. And when we get right near the end, we'll discuss the state of men after death, as well as the last judgment. During those chapters, we'll get to discuss a lot more of what it is that Christ has saved us from. But chapter 6 speaks well to the bad news of sins. That's what we're going to look at now. Chapter 6, and I'm going to start by reading paragraph 1. We'll get through a couple paragraphs tonight, but I'm going to start just with the first. This is what the confession says. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptation of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. This, their sin, God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory. This is a very plain and accurate statement regarding the fall of man. However, I do wanna go a little bit deeper than the confession goes here in this paragraph. And also I do, I think this will be the first time in our series that I wanna offer a gentle critique of some of the wording here in chapter six. So first looking a little deeper. The catechism that we're teaching our children asks the questions, what was the sin of our first parents? And the answer is, eating the forbidden fruit. Then it asks, why did they eat the forbidden fruit? The question we've all asked ourselves, I think, if we're familiar with the Bible, why, why? And the answer is because they did not believe what God had said. I think most Bible readers, especially those who are raised in the church have thought Why? How absurd is it? How crazy does it seem that Adam and Eve chose to sin? They were sin-free in every way. They had been blessed with immortal souls and bodies. They had been put in this wonderful, fruitful, happy garden where there was harmony between them and God, them and the land and the plants and the animals. Everything was going great. And in addition to the moral law that God had written on their hearts, they only had one rule they had to follow, and it was don't eat from this particular fruit tree. When they had infinite possibilities before them, why would they choose to disobey God? Well, if we wanna know the how aspect, how could they disobey God, then we just have to realize and remember that Adam and Eve were sinless, but they were not unable to sin. God created them with souls and minds that could make free choices, including the choice to obey or disobey him. The angels are similar in this way. The angels were created sinless. Many of them remain sinless to this day, but they were created with free wills. with the agency to obey or disobey. They were created in the very presence of God, similar to Adam, how God walked with Adam in the cool of the day. Yet many of these angels also chose to sin. And because of that came under the curse of the God who created them. So they had this free will, man and angels. That's how our parents sinned. But if we want to understand why, what was it that made Adam and Eve sin? We need only to look at, well, first the Bible, but what we're working through now, the confession before us and the catechism I just read summarizes it well. At the end of the day, the problem with Adam and Eve was a lack of true and living faith. The catechism says that they did not believe what God had said. That's what it all boils down to. What is your response to the word of God? Do you believe what God has said or do you not? If you don't, you will sin. God said to Adam in Genesis 2, 16 and 17, 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. Then in Genesis 3, starting in verse one, we read this. 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 in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die. Then the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, 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. 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. She also gave to her husband with her and he ate. Now I want us to see here the lack of faith shown by Adam and Eve. For starters, when the crafty and cunning serpent began talking to Eve and leading her into sin, Adam should have stepped in and protected his wife and exercised dominion over the devil. But he didn't do this. He didn't lay hold to the charge that God had graciously given him. God explicitly gave him a charge of dominion in Genesis 128. And implicitly, there's a renewed sense of this charge when God brought to him his wife. But even more to the point of lacking in faith, look at Adam and Eve's response to the serpent here. First, Eve misquotes God. She messes up his word when seeking to correct the devil. As far as we see in scripture, God never said that you would die if you touch the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don't know if she's, Adam failed at communicating the message or she's confused or what it might be. It just says, if you eat of it, you'll die. Secondly, instead of believing what God had said about the tree and its fruit, that eating it would bring death, that it would kill you, instead of believing that, Eve believes the words of Satan. She believes, contrary to the very clear word of God, she believes that eating the fruit would not kill her or her husband. Now, Satan did say something very true here in Genesis 3. He said that eating the fruit would make Adam and Eve like God in a way, and that they would know good and evil. That's true. God even says that himself at the end of the chapter. But that is how the devil tends to operate. He mixes truth and lies together. If he only just told outright outrageous lies, fewer people would be deceived by him. But he mixes the truth with lies or he twists and perverts the truth toward his own evil ends. Like when he tempted Christ, who is our second Adam, in the wilderness. But where Christ, he refutes the devil by appealing to the word of God and believing it, Eve doesn't believe God in his word. She doesn't take him at his word at face value. She doesn't have faith. So she falls. She looks at the tree and the Bible says, she saw that it was good for food and pleasant to the eyes and desirable to make one wise. But she should have looked at it and known that eating of it would bring nothing but death and misery. She didn't have to make her own judgment. God didn't say, hey, here's this tree, you figure out what it's gonna do. He said very clearly, you eat this, you're gonna die. She looked at it and thought, no, I think it's gonna make me wise and it's gonna be delicious and happy. How ridiculous is that? And here's where I want to just very lightly critique the confession. Throughout chapter six, the divines are continually referring to Adam and Eve as a unit. It says, they were seduced. They fell from righteousness. In paragraph three, we read that because they were the root of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed to their posterity. But the divines could have been more precise here in explaining the fall. Eve was free to choose right versus wrong. She did commit a grave and terrible sin. She did have to answer to God for this, and she did receive punishment for this sin. But her sin and Adam's sin were distinct. They were different, different types of sin here. Eve was deceived. Adam was not deceived. Not only does Genesis not mention Adam being deceived, but Paul says very clearly in 1 Timothy 2, Adam was not deceived. That's what the apostle Paul says. Adam knew exactly what he should have done. He knew exactly what God said. God told it to Adam. Adam had to communicate it to Eve. He knew that the serpent was lying and that they would die when they ate the fruit. He knew this. And you just sat idly by. He was there the whole time with Eve. He just sat idly by while his wife was being led astray. And then he ate the fruit himself in a high-handed treasonous act of disobedience. So my critique of the confession here is that it is too egalitarian, which means it flattens out all the distinctions between Adam and Eve, between man and woman. It paints with too broad of a brush here when it talks about how Adam and Eve fell. Eve was deceived, Adam was not. And it's an important difference. Adam was derelict of his duty. He needed to shepherd his wife, he needed to rule his home, he needed to take dominion over every living thing. He wasn't doing any of that. Eve was in charge in this situation between the two of them, and he just passed the buck. Paragraph one closes with this. This their sin, God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory. And this is a great reminder of the truths that we've already learned in chapter three of God's eternal decree and chapter five of providence. God is in total control of this situation. Adam wasn't operating outside of God's ultimate plan. He was disobeying his prescribed will, but he wasn't operating outside of God's control. God did not, note this, God did not actively predestinate the fall apart from the will of man or apart from the craftiness of Satan. God foreordained the fall though. He decreed to permit the fall. If you remember back to chapter three, God predestinates people unto everlasting life on one hand, and then the confession says he foreordains people to everlasting death on the other. There's a difference. in his acts here. The way that God plans and executes righteousness and the way that sin, and the way that he ordains sin to occur, those are not identical. There's a difference in his action, such that God is not the author of sin. Rather, he permitted the fall for his own glory. Chad Van Dixhorn, who wrote the book, Confessing the Faith, a reader's guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith, writes this. He says, the fall is a shocking event to us. but it was not to God. He allowed our first parents to sin because he was going to work it all for his own glory. As the letter to the Romans reminds us, one part of his glory that he wanted to display is his mercy. God bound all men over to disobedience so that he might have mercy on them all. Romans 11, 32. It is perhaps the first irony," Van Dixhorn writes, and arguably the greatest irony in history that the creator planned to use Satan's supposed subtlety to display the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. Satan thinks he's being crafty and he's, you know, just deceived even God himself and he snuck into this perfect garden. He's going to ruin everything and he's going to win the day. God sits in the heavens and laughs. He has planned this to go a certain way. As one theologian said, as the crunch of that apple rang through the garden, Jesus began his journey to the cross. It was planned from all eternity that this is how things would go. Jesus was to save us. And we'll get into that Later, in a couple weeks, God was able to take the sin of Satan and Adam and Eve and turn it all toward his own glory, to magnify the glory of his name, to display his glory through love and mercy in saving an enormous number of wicked sinners through Jesus Christ, his son, and also to display his glory through the just wrath executed against Satan and all those who would remain in their sin. So God's purposes are going to stand here. Nothing is being foiled. His creation isn't being ruined to such an extent that God doesn't know what to do. God is in control. And before we move on to paragraph two, do we have any questions about paragraph one? All right, if we have no questions, I'll go ahead and read paragraph two here. By this sin, this is the eating of the forbidden fruit, By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God and so became dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. So though Eve believed the serpent, when he said that she would not surely die if she ate the forbidden fruit. Alas, Adam and Eve did die that very day, just as God had said. And they died in a couple senses. First, their bodies that day began the slow process of physical death. Their cells began to die that very day. Their body stopped functioning flawlessly that very day. And eventually because of this act, their bodies would completely die. They would be laid in the ground. So there's physical death. And then secondly, Adam and Eve died spiritually that very day. Before they ate the fruit, they were spiritually alive. They loved God, they obeyed God, they rejoiced in righteousness. And then after they ate the fruit, they became dead in their trespasses and sins. And you can see the effect of this spiritual death immediately. If there's any doubt that we're talking about a true spiritual death here, something that has gone terribly wrong inside Adam and Eve, immediately you see them being ashamed. You see them hiding from God. You see them not welcoming His presence. You see them start to make excuses for their sins. They don't tell the whole truth. They begin to quibble. They pass the blame. to others, they're ungrateful to God, the wife which thou hast given me. Think of how ungrateful that same man is who previously had said in praise, he said, at last, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman for she was taken out of man. He sang a song when God gave Eve to him and now he is blaming God in a sense for giving Eve to him. It's like they are totally different people than they were just half an hour before. And that's because their hearts are now dead and wicked and deceitful and inclined only toward evil, unable to do good. I'm just gonna read the account of, it's a little bit longer, but I'm gonna read the account of the consequences of their sin, because even though this is a familiar passage, I think it'll be really helpful for us right now. Genesis chapter three, I'm gonna start in verse seven. This is immediately after Adam eats the fruit. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, where are you? So he said, I heard your voice in the garden. I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? Then the man said, the woman you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And 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. To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain, you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. Then to Adam he said, because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, you shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you should eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return. And Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. Also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us to no good and evil. And now lest he put out his hand and take also the tree of life and eat and live forever. Therefore, the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So he drove out the man and he placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden and a flaming sword, which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. Consequences are immense. And notice who God calls on first after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. He calls on Adam. Adam was in charge. But instead of being in charge, he listened to the voice of his wife. It's after he sins, Adam sins, that God decides to step in and then he punishes everyone. And we'll get more into the promise given to Eve later when we discuss God's covenant with man and Christ the mediator, Richard chapter seven and eight. But for now, just see how all encompassing the effects of sin are here. Before the fall, Adam was blessed and free to worship God without hindrance, to enjoy the loving relationship of marriage without friction, to procreate, to take dominion of the animals and the land and to live forever. Now all of that's changed in a sense. We see here that Adam and Eve will die. They will certainly die physically. That the marriage relationship will have tension within it. The procreation will be very painful. that work will be difficult and less fruitful than before, that there'll be hostility between man and other aspects of God's creation. So sin didn't just close the door of heaven, though it certainly did that. Sin affected, as the confession says, all the parts and faculties of the soul and the body. One of the proof texts that the divine site here is Romans 3 verses 10 through 18. As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that understandeth. There is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way. They are together become unprofitable. There is none that do with good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher or open grave. With their tongues they have used deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes." See how cancerous sin is as Paul is describing it. Every part of us is infected by this disease. There's nothing left untouched. Paul says to Titus that even the minds and consciences of unbelievers are defiled. And this is of course also true of all men, in a sense, believers and unbelievers. That's why we can't trust our consciences as infallible guides. Our conscience is a gift from God. It's a good thing. It should be listened to, but always in submission to scripture. the Bible is the only infallible and inerrant authority over us. Because unlike our minds and our consciences and our bodies and everything else on this earth, the Bible has not been corrupted by sin. But the good news here is that our minds as believers are also in the process of being renewed. And we'll get to that later in the confession in more detail. They're not perfect. They're still massively affected by sin. They'll never be perfect guides in this life. But God is doing a work in the minds and consciences of believers that will be completed when we receive our new bodies at the final resurrection. Our hearts also, we can see they're not reliable guides for us. There's that cultural slogan that's so popular, follow your heart. Or even sometimes even worse saying only follow your heart. Or it's not new. Shakespeare wrote to thine own self be true. Well, which self? What if I'm a slave to sin? Do I just need to be true to that and embrace that? Don't do that. Don't follow your heart. The Bible says that the heart of man is deceitful. It's desperately wicked. Who can understand it? That's because of sin. Now we do get new hearts when we're born again, but they're still not infallible. Because alongside our new heart, we also have that old man within us that we're fighting. There's a war between our new nature and our old nature. So again, the Bible can be our only infallible and perfect guide. Now, before I close our teaching time tonight, I wanna just read paragraph three of chapter six here, and we're not really gonna get into the details. We have started to jump ahead a little bit to this next paragraph, and some of what I was just teaching on, but I'm gonna read this paragraph to close us, and then God willing, next week, we'll discuss it at much greater length. But this is paragraph three of chapter six. They, and the divines are referring to Adam and Eve here, they being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation. And of course, we'll get into that, if God willing, next week. But what questions do we have tonight about paragraphs one and two or anything related to the fall of man, sin, its effects, et cetera? Yes, Becca. Well, I don't know if most people think that. I think it's the clear implication of scripture. Let me just look here and see what God's word says. So, So when the, this is chapter three, 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. She also gave to her husband with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked. So I think it means that they were right there together. I don't think when it says her husband with her, that it's just like that she had a husband and she had to go find him. It seems very much like they're right there. Maybe he's standing immediately beside her or maybe he's just a few feet away, but he knows what's going on. I think that's, if not explicit, I think it's certainly clearly implicit. Yeah. Is there a particular reason you're wanting to know that? Last fall, I read Paradise Lost. We did. And John Milton's imaginative interpretation of it is that they normally were working together in the garden, and that that day Eve said, we can be more productive if we both work in separate places. And then Adam went against his better judgment and let her work on her. and that he wasn't there to help her not be deceived or something like that. And that he was so disappointed when he found out she had eaten the fruit that he decided he'd go down with her because he loved her so much. Okay, well let's not listen to Milton on this one. It's like a Romeo and Juliet story, not the Bible. I love you so much I'm gonna kill myself too. I don't think that's accurate. Does anyone else have any other maybe thoughts or if they've heard other explanations of this? Because I have not read Paradise Lost, perhaps to my shame, but. I recognize it goes beyond the text. It was sort of just an interesting imagination. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, no, I appreciate you sharing that. I'm going to make a note of that. What other questions do we have about the fall and sin? All right, well if you have no further questions, we will have a time of sharing prayer requests.