We are involved in a study of origins, and looking at the book of Genesis. I would encourage you to open to the third chapter of Genesis. We have gone through Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, and we have studied the text of those two chapters, and we have launched from those texts to study other matters of scripture to try to fill in our understanding, and that will be the case in Genesis Chapter 3. Genesis Chapter 3 is familiar to us. It is a chapter that deals with the serpent in the garden, and temptation, and forbidden fruit, and a woman who was deceived, and a man who followed her in violating God’s word and God’s command. Then talks about the curse, and the price that was paid for that disobedience. Familiar to most everybody, to one degree or another, is the record of Genesis Chapter 3.
And at the very outset, I want to just lay down a simple statement that we’re going to build on all the way through, and that is this: Genesis 3 is an accurate historical record of what actually happened in the garden. You may wonder why I’m saying that. The reason I’m saying that is because most people who comment on Genesis 3 turn it into something other than a historical account of a real event. It is as the word of God says it is.
Now, this Chapter, before we get into the Chapter, it’s going to take us some time just to kind of prepare ourselves for it. This Chapter may well be the most important chapter in the Bible. Certainly, it is true that if you don’t understand this chapter, you don’t understand the rest of the Bible. You cannot understand the solution to the problem, unless you understand the problem. You cannot understand the cure unless you understand the diagnosis. You will never be able to understand God’s remedy for this world, if you don’t understand the malady under which this world lives and functions. I say it may well be the most important chapter in the Bible because it explains absolutely everything about our universe, and about life in that universe, and all of us who live in it. It explains everything about why things are the way they are, why we are the way we are, and what God is doing in history, and why He’s doing it in terms of salvation.
Genesis 3 explains the human dilemma. All the problems in the universe have their origin in the events of this historic account. Say that again: All the problems in the universe — physical problems, spiritual problems, moral problems, social problems, economic problems, political problems — all the problems in the universe have their origin in the events of this historic account. This Chapter then is the foundation of any true and accurate world view. And without this foundation, every and any world view is utterly wrong.
If you do not understand the origin of sin and its impact based on Genesis Chapter 3, then your understanding of the world is wrong. Everything then is misunderstood; everything is misevaluated; everything is misread; everything is misdiagnosed, and hopelessly incurable. You see, if you go back to the end of Chapter 1, it says: “And God saw all that He had made.” And He had made all that has ever been made, so He saw the whole created universe. “And, behold, it was very good.” When God completed the original creation, everything was “very good.” But frankly, folks, everything in our world now is very bad. It is anything but good. And it has been anything but good through all of human history.
When God completed his perfect creation, it was “very good” because: There was no disorder. There was no chaos. There was no conflict. There was no struggle. There was no pain. There was no discord. There was no disease. There was no decline. There was no death. Now we all live our whole lives with all of that. Life is defined by disorder, chaos, conflict, struggle, pain, discord, disease, decline and death. We look at the physical world around us, and we see it decaying and tending toward disorder and chaos, disintegration and death. That’s the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics; that matter continually tends to break down toward disorder. The physical world is breaking down. This is frightening to people when they take a look at, for example, the interplanetary world or the celestial world, the world of heavenly bodies, and they begin to fear that as big chunks keep breaking off various heavenly bodies and hurtling through space, they have a likelihood that they will at some point collide with this planet in a collision that will literally blast us into non-existence. And we watch in the national world just the history of civilization, and we see the cycle of rise and fall, and rise and fall, and rise and fall. We look in the animal world and there is this incessant process of struggle and death. We look in the human world, and every human relationship is a struggle.
Human life is a struggle. As soon as life is conceived in the womb, it begins to live and die at the same time. It begins to grow and to decay at the same time. And in the spiritual and moral world, everyone finds it easier to do wrong. Have you noticed? It’s much easier to do wrong. In fact, it’s really impossible to do righteous things. Even when you do right humanly, you generally do it to feel better about yourself, which is an ill-conceived motive. It’s much easier to do evil than good. It’s much easier to float down on the moral sewage than it is to buck the tide, stay above it. Hatred and crime and war, perversion, wickedness, those things just come with life. So we have to ask a question. If we come to the end of Genesis 1 and everything is “very good,” and we take a look at things, we have to ask the question: What is wrong with this picture? What is wrong here? This is not the way it was at the beginning.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
