The Roadmap of Sin

Today, we discuss the very sad topic of sin. It is something that isn’t pleasant to think about and can trigger many painful memories of people sinning against us, or it can resurface deep regrets that we have in the ways that we have sinned against other people. Sin is not a very popular doctrine and has been watered down tremendously in our culture. Sinning comes up more often in the context of dieting than anything else! People feel guilty for that extra cookie and what it means for their waistline rather than their selfishness and what that means for their marriages. 

We have to know what sin truly is. It is no exaggeration to say that if you don’t understand sin, you will not understand anything in this world. Why do certain approaches to government work and others don’t? Because one takes into account sin and the others don’t. Why do we have Christian leaders elevated to great platforms only to watch them fall in big ways? Because we don’t understand sin and take appropriate measures against it. 

Sin is our enemy, and if we are going to fight our enemy, then we need to know how sin works. By this, I don’t mean that we need to dive deeply into the world and consume all of these terrible things to understand sin. Sin isn’t going to tell you what it is. Sin is just going to lie to you (as we talked about a couple weeks ago). Instead, we are going to dive into God’s Word to see Sin lies about God and God’s goodness offers more than sin. 

Sin lies about God
There are more places to go than Genesis 3 for an analysis of sin, but what better place to go than at the beginning? Let’s see how sin worked the first time, and as we will see, this is pretty much how it works every time.

We begin with verse 1 which describes this serpent. It is worth noting that the serpent is described in relation to the rest of the creatures. This serpent is not a competing god that has a chance against the Almighty. This is just another creature that God made. How this creature became evil is never answered by the Bible. Revelation tells us that the serpent was the devil, but we are not told how the devil became evil. Ultimately, we wouldn’t be served by knowing the answer to that question. I want to know how to get rid of it so it never comes back! That is the question that the Bible answers. Of the two, I’m glad I have the answer to that one! 

Anyway, the serpent begins the conversation with Eve and gets right to the point: did God really say, “you may not eat of any tree in the Garden”? The question is meant to plant doubt in their heads (Belcher, 72). I think that this is meant to get them to think that God is being stingy with them. The question is designed for them to say, “Well, not exactly, He just said that we couldn’t eat from this tree.” That makes you focus on the negative, the thing that you can’t have, instead of remembering the positive, all the things that God has otherwise provided. Sometimes we lose the fight with sin in this way. I can’t remember who I heard this from, but some preacher once talked about how we fight against sin wrongly. When we feel temptation come up, we start thinking about how God told us we can’t do that, we pray “help me not do that” and go round and round like that. Instead, the more effective thing would be to say, “Yep God told me not to do that, and look at all the good things that He has given for me to do, and stop thinking about that sin! Fill your mind with something else! Bitterness doesn’t get better by focusing on the bitterness. Instead, focus on how God has forgiven you. Instead of dwelling on what that person did to you, refocus it by praying for them instead. 

But Adam and Eve don’t do that. Eve tries to correct the serpent, but the commandment is not exactly what God said. Instead, she gives a distorted picture of God’s command. Remember how I said that God was Italian when He told Adam to eat of all the trees? God says “Eat, eat!” pointing to the glad heart of God to be generous to His creatures. Instead, Eve just says, “eat.” Now, you may say that I’m being overly picky on Eve, but it does show how much precision matters. It is exactly this point (God’s generosity) that the serpent is trying to exploit as we will see in the following moves he makes in verse 4. Many will also point out that Eve said that they weren’t supposed to touch it, which God never said. Just about everyone will point out that Eve was being a Pharisee in that moment by adding onto what God said. Precision matters! She makes God to be a bigger rule-setter than He is and is making Him look less generous than He actually is. Adding onto God’s commands never helps, and forgetting God’s generosity never helps. 

Now, in verse 4, the serpent makes his next move and flat-out denies God's Word and builds an argument in five moves, the first of which we have already seen: 1) God is stingy (there is a prohibition here).  2) God is a liar (you shall *not* die) 3) The reason God is a liar is because God is selfish and insecure (He knows you will be like Him). 4) God really isn't all that different. You just need to know a little more. (You will be like God) 5) Humans have unlimited potential that they can create. Their fate is in their hands. 

The insidious thing about these moves is there is a little bit of truth mixed into exactly one point. That truth comes in His fourth move in that they will become like God. They do become more like God in the sense that they know more about good and evil now (God Himself confirms that in verse 22), but they have become so much less like God by sinning. What a cruel joke!  

Is this not how every temptation is made? We see something that we know we shouldn't have or do, and what is our reaction? Frustration or sulking! We close off our eyes to the bounty of blessings in front of us to focus on the red light! This gets us to think that God is stingy. "I deserve this high, this feeling, this person, this money, this house, this spouse" you can fill in the blank, "and if I don't get that thing, then it might as well be that I don't have any blessing at all." That's how it works, doesn't it? Let’s see how the other points work in our own lives. 

At that point we have a choice: do I listen to God's warnings or not? We hear in James 1:15 that sin brings death, and our own experience in life will tell us that sin doesn't bring us good consequences. But when we do sin, we think "God is a liar; bad things won't really happen to me if I do this." 

Move three is more implicit in our thinking than we realize. If we call God's rules false and say that God is a liar, then we would have to ask the question, "why would God lie to us?" Really the only answers to that are either: 1) God is just a big meanie who gets a kick out of our suffering or 2) God is insecure and selfish, so he forces us down and away from our full potential. Either lie we believe gets us right to the next step in the argument. 

Move four is also implicit in our thinking and a consequence of the three preceding moves. If God is a stingy, lying, insecure being, then He isn't all that different from us, is He? In our minds, God loses His transcendence and becomes one of us. Losing reverence and fear of God is a very scary place to be. If you don't fear God, then there really is nothing within to stop you from anything. 

Move five, if God is one of us, then one of us can be God. We can be the masters of our own destiny, and by moving through the world we see fit, we can create the world we want in our image. Watkins notices this move in verse 6 when Eve saw the fruit and it was good to the eye. Does that remind you of a phrase from chapter one? “God saw…and it was good”? Eve is stepping into the place of God by deciding for herself what was good and evil. After all, that was God’s work in creation. When God said that light was good as He made it or that the sea was good, God wasn’t comparing His work to some standard that was external to Himself; He was basing how good something was in creation solely on His own standards (Christopher Watkins, Biblical Critical Theory, 112-113). In other words, God wasn’t holding up an assignment worksheet like a student with a grading chart comparing His work to the standard. No, God IS the standard, and He, and He alone, determines what makes the cut or not. 

And it is this power that Adam and Eve are grasping at. We forget that Adam and Eve actually did know at least a little bit about what was good and evil. God’s command was a good thing and disobeying it was a bad thing, something that they shouldn’t do. Watkins further comments that the Hebrew word “knowing good and evil” can also mean “choosing.” When God called something “good” it wasn’t because God was looking at some chart that He had to follow and called it “good” when it matched. He called it good because He decided that it was good, and now Eve is stepping into that place (Ibid, 112-3). Van Till, a theologian, thought of it as Eve was gathering opinions about God’s commands from the snake and herself, and by doing so, she brought God down onto her level as just one opinion among many (quoted in Watkins, 113). 

My Hebrew professor, Alan Ross put it like this: “Adam and Eve lived in a setting that God himself had pronounced ‘good.’ Yet they were now led to believe that there was greater good held back from them, that somehow they could elevate life for the better” (Ross, Creation and Blessing, 136). In other words, despite everything that God had done for them, life itself, living that life in literal paradise with all the purpose and provision they could possibly have, married to people literally made for each other, but they thought they could imagine better. 

That's the roadmap of sin! Anytime we sin, we are doing the same things for ourselves. We say that we know better than God does about what will make our lives better. We look at all the blessings that God gave us and conclude that He is still holding out on us. Have you ever been to a kid’s birthday party where it was extremely obvious the kid was spoiled? No matter how many presents he opens, it’s never enough. When he begins to scream about this, do we not feel a mixture of indignance and sadness? At the same time we think “how on earth did this kid get so entitled” we think, “but then, that’s how I act inside when I don’t get my way, don’t I?” Every sin we commit is the rage of a toddler saying, “I want more; I deserve it!” It’s humbling to put it in those terms, isn’t it? That discontentment is all fed by telling ourselves those lies I mentioned already at the beginning. We think that we deserve more because we think God is stingy, a liar, insecure, pretty much just like us, so we can do His job for Him. 

All of those thoughts happen at lightning speed and with such frequency, we hardly notice them anymore. When your spouse said something unkind and we responded in the same way, what happened? We thought, “I know what God said about loving my spouse, but look at what I’m dealing with here. I don’t deserve that. God is withholding something good from me, that makes Him a jerk, therefore, I am going to suspend what He said because I’m right here on the ground, I see what’s going on, and instead of saying a soft answer to turn away wrath, I’m going to bring about my judgment on them right now with a harsh word.” Now, you may not have every step of that in your mind, but if we were to put those thoughts in slow motion, interrogate each thought as they went by, you’ll find it. 

Can you see why sin is so offensive to God? And can you not see the damage that these patterns of thinking can do over the long haul? Sin never stays small because once you have agreed that it is ok to disagree with God here, it doesn’t take much to disagree with Him a little bit more. When we have made our spouse out to be the bad guy unfairly one time, it is easier than it was before to do it a second time. Well by the time you have done that 20 years and 80,000 times later, it’s no wonder one’s marriage isn’t functioning. When you keep telling God He doesn’t know what He is doing, sometimes He just lets you find out for yourself. 

God’s goodness offers more than sin. 
So if this is sin—this easy to commit—what hope do we have of defeating it? Well, this is where Jesus comes in, and He always comes in. Jesus came to defeat sin, to overturn those lies that lead to our destruction. And this cost Him everything. His body would need to be broken; His blood would need to be poured out. And it all would need to be applied to us. 

You know, one of the commentators that I read this week noticed something very interesting in the Bible. It goes to show you how paying attention to the individual words of the Bible pays off. You’ll notice in our text that Eve saw the fruit and then took and ate it. There is an echo of this that shows up in the New Testament at the Last Supper. What did Jesus say when He broke the bread and poured the wine? “Take and eat.” (Kinder, quoted in Ross, 137). Jesus’ sacrifice undoes the curse of the tree! Instead of the fruit that lead to death, Jesus offers the Bread of Life! When Adam and Eve tasted of the fruit, they found the knowledge of evil, but those who taste of the Bread of Life will see that The Lord is Good. Instead of being bound to do evil you will be released to freedom to do good. That is the hope of the gospel. And at the end of it all, Jesus will usher you towards the Tree of Life, never to face sin and hardship again, that’s the good news. 

Have you tasted that bread yet? Have you put your trust in Jesus? Have you asked Him to forgive you of your sin? If you haven’t, taste that bread today. The world will offer you the fruit of sin and the sour wine of disobedience. It may taste good going down, but it is bitter later. You know that. You’ve experienced that, and if you haven’t, you will. Take of the bread of Jesus. Know what it is to be satisfied and filled with Him. 

Maybe you are here today and you think, “Well, I’ve been a Christian for a while, but the bread, if I’m honest, is feeling a little stale.” It could be because you are trying to coast on old bread you ate many years ago, if I may extend the metaphor. You need to daily stay close to Christ, daily consume the Bread of Life, because when you do, you’ll be amazed at how you aren’t as hungry for the things that don’t satisfy anymore. You will find joy in your Savior who tells you, “Eat, eat! Enjoy!” 
​
Further, when temptation arises, remind yourself of God’s goodness to you. When our kids disobey, our thought is, do you know how much good I’ve done to you? We need to take the same approach with God. 

​Image by Anja