Clough Genesis Lesson 17
The curse implemented – Genesis 3:20-24
In our series on roots we have come to the place in the Scriptures where the fall of man takes place, and we have come to the ugly portions of the Scriptures and this is the problem with any section that denotes man’s depravity, and that it necessarily is ugly and it’s not very tasteful. Now God has an interesting way of communicating with us people and this system of communication was designed at the original creation. And this is why certain passages of Scripture are included. We want to explain a little bit more because I’m sure some people misunderstood last week, of why the Scriptures stress the physically abhorrent things in the universe. Why is this?
It goes back to how we’re made. Here is our soul and the soul is at least the place of our self-consciousness; that is, when you and I are aware that we exist, that we have a purpose in life, that God’s Word says a certain thing, the place where all that’s taking place is our soul. The soul is, at that point, functioning. Now we know from the Bible, because Genesis 2 tells us, the soul is dependent on two sides of our being. It’s dependent on one side on the human spirit; it’s dependent on the other side from the body. So the soul has this dual dependency, and therefore the soul, say when it thinks of things that are joyful, or when it thinks of yuk, it can be informed from either one or both sides of our being. Now this is a great advantage for God, and this is one reason, probably, why He made us the way He made us, so that it would ease the system of communication, so He could communicate with us not only the content of what we are to believe, but He could communicate to us the attitude that we should have towards that which we believe.
Now let’s look for a moment at joyous things; let’s take one thing that is anathema to fundies and that’s wine; someday we’ll mature enough in this congregation so we’ll have wine in the communion. Some of the people on the communion committee have often jided me about it, why don’t you try it some time and see if they notice there’s a difference. But anyway, someday we’ll have it, and the wine, of course, was used in the Old Testament, it wasn’t grape juice, it was wine. Try keeping grape juice from fermenting in a hot climate. Now obviously, to be balanced here, the wine wasn’t hard liquor; the wine in the Old Testament was not of high alcoholic content like today and to make sure it wasn’t they diluted it with two parts water. Now if you can get high on wine that’s diluted one to three you have a problem. But wine that’s used in the Old Testament was basically very dilute and it wasn’t there to make people bombed out of their head or anything like that. But it produced an interesting sensation and the sensation that a person got from drinking the wine is called joy in the Bible. In the Song of Songs that we’re going to study, there’s a passage in there that blew my mind on wine, and where God tells the couple to go drink it up and enjoy yourselves. And this is talking, again, not about grape juice, this is talking about wine, so you can blame me for many things but one thing you can’t blame me for and that’s the text. I didn’t write it, thank God for that.
And so the wine is then used to communicate the subjective feeling of joy, and this is why, then, God uses that as an analogy so then when he says hey, listen, the spiritual things that I have for you are to be enjoyed the same way you enjoy wine, because you see, your soul has inputs from both terminals; one from the body and one from the spirit and so the things of righteousness, the things that partake of our position in Christ, ought to be enjoyed with joy and to communicate what that means God says you experience what that means in every day physical life, so it won’t strike you as some ethereal spooky kind of experience. You’ll know what joy means. In that way man is a creature that lives on the interface of both the earthly things and the heavenly things.
Now let’s try to explain, maybe a little bit better, why there are these yucky things in the Scriptures. The yucky things in the Scriptures physically are to communicate to us what we ought to think spiritually about violation of the Word of God or sin. In other words, it goes back to the sin nature. The sin nature cranks out what we will call the exposed type sins and everybody recognizes those, and then it cranks out a more subtle class of cover-up sins which we’ll call human good. Now very few people recognize the ugliness of human good to God, and because very few people recognize the ugliness of human good to God, now He has to resort to special systems of communication. So what He resorts to is picking up the things in the physical world that we just don’t like, that are just yuk to us, and then with that response we have to those, He says all right now, now that is the way your attitude ought to be toward things of human good.
Now just watch how consistent the Scriptures are this way, we’re going to turn to two passages, one in the Old Testament and then one in the New Testament, and I want you to notice something about both of these passages of Scripture. Both of these passages use very yucky things to talk, not to the problem of these kinds of sins, the immoral sins, the overt sins that everybody recognizes, you don’t have to be a genius to see that, but these are reserved, this kind of vocabulary in the Word of God is reserved entirely for human good. I never noticed that before until I went back through and I noticed the consistency of this; it’s amazing.
First let’s turn to Isaiah 64. You say this is kind of a rough way to get the point across; yeah, but we’re stupid. You know God’s picture of us is a sheep, and there’s no dumber four legged being in the barnyard than a lamb and so God is not complimenting you and me by calling us sheep. You know, we get that sweet little Sunday School, oh Jesus holds this little sheep in his arms and that looks so sweet. No, sheep stink, and so God is not really saying you’re sweet things by calling us sheep; He’s really saying you’re kind of crude and to underscore this He will use other things in the physical world around us.
Isaiah 64:6, we all are as an unclean thing. “All our righteousness,” notice it doesn’t say our sins, at this point Isaiah is not talking about the things that you and I would say oh yeah, that’s a sin, the moral type things, the overt things, here he’s talking about the subtle things, the human good, the phony front, and that’s when he say sin verse 6, “are as menstrual cloths.” All right, what is that designed to do? It’s designed to produce a yuk response. Why? To communicate that that is exactly what He thinks of our human good.
Now let’s go to the New Testament, lest we not say well if he’d just stay in the New Testament he wouldn’t have to use all those passages. Ah-ha-ha, I’ve got news for you. Philippians 3:8, and notice the consistency, beautiful logical consistency in the text, and I think this is really a demonstration of the emphasis of the Spirit of God in trying to get this point across because it’s hard to get across, because we all have this inner reservation that certainly there are some good things that the non-Christian produces; certainly there are some good things that even though I’m out of fellowship I produce.
Philippians 3:8, “Yea, doubtless, I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord; for whom I have suffered the loss of all things,” and the “all things” in context, verse 3, verse 4, verse 5, those are the religious things, the things of orthodox Judaism, the things that were used by the Pharisees, the things that were of human good, all of those things Paul said I suddenly discovered one day on the Damascus Road didn’t amount to a hill of beans with God. And so therefore, “do count them but manure, that I may win Christ.” Do you see what he’s doing; he’s using excrement to communicate yuckiness. That’s how God views human good.
Now why do we have to have Isaiah 64:6 and Philippians 3:8 in the canon of
Scripture? It’s simple, that’s the only
way the Spirit of God can get it across to our fat heads, what our human good
looks like to Him, and this is why these kinds of things, menstruation,
excrement, these are used to communicate spiritual truth in a way that will be
unmistakable, shocking maybe, but it will be unmistakable and it certainly does
communicate. Well you say why; why does
God want us to understand all this for, why is He so angry at this, human
good? Why does He go to such extremes to
communicate His hatred, His abhorrence of human good? For this reason; human good more than the
exposed type sins, human good is what blocks grace. As long as we think we have some merit before
God we will never flee to the arms of grace.
Never! We will always have yes,
well, I trust God 50% of the time but I’ve got 50% back up reserve in my human
good and so what it destroys is the faith technique, because the faith
technique depends upon our realization of the necessity of grace. We cannot breathe, we cannot eat, we cannot
drink apart from grace, and this is why God is emphasizing this. The person who is the gross sins, hey, no problem,
they know what their sin nature produces, but it’s the goody-goody kind of
person over here that has all their class, that thinks they do not have to
depend on the bloody gory cross of Jesus Christ to pay for their autonomous
attitude toward God’s Word.
So this is why these things are in the canon of Scripture and they’re not pleasant, deliberately intended and designed not to be pleasant, designed to shock, yes, because there’s something worse than that, and we’ll get into that in Genesis 3 today. You thought nudity was bad and menstruation and death, we’ll get into the most horrible of all things today and that is hell, because that’s the subject of what God is showing us in the end of Genesis 3.
Let’s turn to Genesis 3. Now as God administers the curse there’s a resistance on the part of man to this kind of analysis. We’ve noticed so far three parts to the curse: part one, the final destruction of evil in verse 15. Modern man, including some Christians in certain circles of the charismatic movement, to cite one in particular, but also just kind of generally, a little Christianity is a dangerous thing in these kinds of things, and that is there’s a growing reticence in our society to discuss violence as in any way being good. For example, the conservatives have been largely behind this, oh, there’s too much violence on TV, it’s terrible to have all that violence on TV, why I turned on my screen and somebody actually hit somebody, we can’t have that kind of violence on TV. And so we have these campaigns against violence in the media; so what do we replace it with? Human good, now we talk about one-world government and what a blessing it is, that’s why we can get the antichrist sooner. And we have all the other kind of things and why deficit financing is a good program to discuss at the busy hour of evening television.
And we’re going to get rid of all the
violence, because you see, the legalist thinks when I get rid of violence off
the media well, boy look at that, got rid of the whole problem, just solved
it. No you didn’t; you just substituted
for an overt evil, and not always overt evil, but you substituted something
overt for something that’s sneaky, less obvious. This is why five years ago I’m sure I must
have bothered a lot of people in town when I testified before the city council
and they were having this ordinance being passed about the X-ratings or
something on the movies, and they wanted input from the citizens on what they
thought of movie ratings. I went down
and testified that they shouldn’t classify any movies, and some of my fellow
Christians just about gagged and I read them part of the most famous tract
against censorship ever written and it was written by a Puritan, Milton.
Now isn’t it amazing that the most vigorous and the most famous essay ever written in the history of the western world was written by John Milton against censorship. And do you know what his argument was? Put the machinery of censorship in the hands of the Christians today and tomorrow in whose hands will the machinery be? Brilliant argument; brilliant argument! There’s no answer to it. Far better to let there be gross things in the media, at least it’s gross and it’s obvious. If you don’t like the stuff on the TV there’s a little thing down on the bottom of your set called the off/on switch and all you have to do is exercise the first divine institution and turn it off; and if you’re worried about somebody watching your TV when you’re not around just pull out one of the tubes or short it out and then leave it there and say you can’t fix it for a while and you’ve solved your problem you see. So that’s a very easy thing to lick because you can’t lick the insidious nature of human good, not this side of the millennial kingdom. Therefore, that being the case, you might as well let evil take a gross form, at least it’s easy to see.
Well, one of the things that’s going on in our day is that when we come to something like Genesis 3;15 and we read that God says that the Messiah will “crush thy head,” oh, that’s violence, isn’t all violence evil? Well, if all violence is evil then God is evil because God is violent. Well obviously the syllogism doesn’t carry one too far and therefore we must conclude and back up and say hold it, not all violence is evil. The sword of the state exercised, exercise of the police, the military and the court, is that evil in itself? No it isn’t. It’s a necessity given a fallen world. When Jesus Christ comes back what does the book of Revelation say is on His garments? Gold braid. No, scabby blood, that’s how Jesus Christ looks when He comes back because He’s going to kill people when He comes back. Are you going to call Jesus bad because He’s violent? So obviously all violence is not bad. If you see some criminal element you ought to rejoice if they get clobbered. It’s righteous to rejoice in the destruction of evil. And so therefore all violence is not evil; that is a legalism that has recently developed.
And so we will read Genesis 3:15 in the eyes of 20th century American, “I will put friendship between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall hold thy hand, and thou shalt hold his.” God loves everything, He loves the snakes as well as the people, God is love. Now that’s the satanic line that you would hear today and that’s how most people would respond to verse 15, totally screwed up.
Now let’s go to Genesis 3:16, same thing, we went on that last week and I showed you from the women’s liberation movement what they do. They take the very emblems of woman’s depravity, do the same thing with them that the nudists do and say we don’t need clothes, we’re normal the way we are, we defy you; take your grace God and keep it in heaven, we don’t want one part of it. And that’s what the women’s libs do. That’s what they’re doing with this concept that I showed you last week. They’re just simply saying we’re all right, we don’t need your grace, keep it God, we’re all right. So it’s a confession and a denial of depravity, awful thing. The ugliness of it is the spiritual side more than the physical side and we would have this embedded in the literature of the world. Some of you know the story of Sleeping Beauty and you read that as a fairy tale, and so on, it’s very nice but did you ever notice that sleeping beauty pricks her finger and bleeds at age 15; did you ever notice Rapunzel shuts herself in a tower at age 12; what do you think those authors are talking about; it was a form of literary metaphor and this is the way it was handled in classic literature, we have people so stupid they go ahead and read it, oh, I think that’s nice, she pricked her finger, that’s too bad; and they take it this way. That’s the way it was originally meant to be taken, this is the way western literary tradition spoke to the problem and it’s been speaking to that problem for century after century and when people knew how to read literature they knew how to read it all right but today we don’t.
Genesis 3:17-19, the male gets his; we have this concept where the man faces death. No male likes to grovel in the dirt, pull out thorns and thistles, take them home to mama and say look what I produced. That’s not very edifying for any male I know. But that’s the lot of the fallen man, struggling to sustain himself in a damned world. See, this is an ugly passage of Scripture, and it’s deliberately designed to be this way, to awaken and quicken us to the need for God’s grace. In the literature of the world, verses 17-19 has been depicted many ways; think of Paradise Lost, think of the many essays and poems and stories written on the theme of death, how awful, the dread of death, the dread of aging, the laments about how people just keep on growing older and older and older and the wrinkles come and the gray hair comes and there’s death that comes. One of the most depressing things you can do is to go into an older person’s home and look at the pictures on the wall of what that person looked like 40 years ago and then recall that they too, one time, had smooth skin like your little baby has. And now look at them, look what age has done. What do you think that process is? It’s the curse. We ought to interpret that, it’s not natural for the human being to wither up like an old potato. This isn’t the way God made the universe to function. God made the universe to function so man wouldn’t have to face this horror of growing old and dying, and that’s why the Bible address it, it says no, this is abnormal; yes, your God-consciousness in your soul is right when it tells you that it’s wrong, there’s something abnormal about this whole thing. And the Bible fortifies this, you’re right, it is abnormal.
And so now we come to Genesis 3:20 and we watch how God deals with this situation once the curse is announced. Genesis 3:20-24 is the curse implemented. The curse has been announced and now each part of the curse is applied. Genesis 3:20, “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” A tremendous passage here… a tremendous passage.
Let’s go back to Genesis 2:19 to remind ourselves what it means to name things. In verse 19 after God had made all the animals from the ground, the soil, Adam had them brought to him. Remember our map of Eden, schematically it looked like this, drawing an oval for Eden, we don’t really know the exact boundaries, what they looked like, but this is something like it, and then in the eastern part we put that little circular area, indicating that is the garden in Eden; to the west we have the Mountain of God; from the Mountain of God and the presence of God we have a river flowing to the eastern part of Eden where it splits into four rivers, the Tigris-Euphrates of the antediluvian world, the Pishon and the Gihon of the antediluvian world. In that garden was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. Adam was placed there and what first happened in Adam’s experience? God had a little menagerie come in, a little parade of animals and they walked by him and he studied them, because God realized and treated Adam as a mature person spiritually, and he had to come to his own conclusions regarding the nature of the universe around him.
And then at the end of the parade of animals was this tremendous creature, and when he got to her and after the operation and so on in verse 23, when he saw her, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” he recognized on the virtue of his knowledge of verse 19, he recognized a difference setting her off from the animals, and called his wife’s name isha. This is the origin of the feminine gender in language. ish was the man, this is how the word looks in Hebrew for male, and isha, feminine ending. So Adam was the one who developed the feminine gender, it’s carried through into all the languages of the world. So we have ish and isha, and that was Eve’s first name, isha, and she got her name, not because she named herself, but because her husband understood her, studied her and under the framework of God named her.
Now we come to Genesis 3:20 and Adam is still doing his naming; that is, he’s still carrying forth the mandate to understand and subdue. But we want to watch what happens here, there’s a difference. Here’s the woman before the fall, here’s the woman after the fall. Before the fall her name is isha, after the fall it’s not Eve, if you had been there with a tape recorder it would have sounded like this, chavvah, Hon, you’re no longer to be called isha but chavvah, and chavvah comes from the Hebrew verb meaning life. And so her name changed.
Now since we know what naming means because we studied it in the past Scripture, we know therefore that when he renamed his wife he understood something different about her; she was a changed woman after the fall and after the gospel. Keep in mind that naming itself doesn’t change, he didn’t have a wand and say you will now be called chavvah, and boing, she just changed. He didn’t call her nature to change; he recognized the change that had already occurred in her. Now the question: when did his wife change on him? Did they have to get married? No, it’s true after he got married she changed here but not due to that; she changed because of the promise in verse 15. In verse 15 God said that her seed would last to the point of crushing, ultimately, all evil out of existence. And because Adam recognizes that his wife has changed, due to her new place in the plan of God, he overtly recognizes it by shifting her name.
At the point of Genesis
This mystique is mentioned in 1 Timothy 2:15. This verse has a difficult section to interpret and exegete and we’ll only be concerned with the first half, up to the comma in verse 15. Those of you who are careful readers will notice the first part of verse 15 speaks in terms of the second singular and in verse 15 at the end it’s talking about the third plural; there’s a shift from the singular to the plural and that has all sorts of implications about what’s going on. But we’re not interested in the plural section of verse 15, we’re only interested in the first section.
To warm up, notice what’s happened in 1
Timothy 2:13-14, as you lead into this verse what’s been the object of
discussion? It’s been the fall, in
particular it’s been the details of the fall, “For Adam was first formed, then
Eve. [14] And Adam was not deceived, but
the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression, [15] nevertheless, she,”
the antecedent of “she” is “the woman” of verse 14, “will be saved in
childbearing,” that’s the gospel of Genesis
Psalm 129:13; in the Song of Songs in the evening we’ll be discussing metaphor and metaphor is a rather sophisticated way of language. You can always tell a crude era in history because they drop figures of speech and talk directly, whereas your more refined people will make tremendous use of metaphor and metaphor here has been developed and one of the early metaphors was developed from the idea of the promise of this, that Eve was the mother of all life, a tremendous title of honor for the woman. Out of the depths of all the depravity and all the physical yuckiness of Genesis 3, God reaches down in grace and He pulls her up and He says I don’t care Eve, you may suffer with the emblems of your damnation and your depravity, but I say under My sovereign gracious plan you will be the mother of all life.
Now this has made deep inroads into man’s consciousness. Many of you have heard of the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, and Jung has made a big point about the discovery of the collective unconsciousness of man in which he thinks that you can find common symbols in literature and art in every place of the world; it doesn’t matter whether it’s a tribe, whether it’s 20th century New York City, men have seen children in the nursery when they first begin to sketch drawings, sketch these kind of designs that were sketched on the cave walls of France by Neanderthal man, and the question is, why does a child in the 20th century sketch with the same symbol system of Neanderthal man, what is the connection between children and the men that lived thousands of years in the past? Neanderthal would be classified as millions by evolutionists. What’s going on here, what’s the connection? Carl Gustav Jung hypothesized that there was this collective unconsciousness that popped up in us that we’re not normally aware of it but it’s just there.
Now as Bible-believing Christian we can speculate that Carl Gustav Jung probably was very close to something: he was close to the fact that we are all in Adam and we share a collective God-consciousness, and this is there. You’re not aware of it but if we could a little X-ray machine today and examine the depth of your soul, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find a record of the history of the human race in your soul. In other words, in the depths of our mind the great catastrophes that have happened to us collectively in Adam are programmed in us and on the borderline we’re just semiconscious of these things. And this, therefore crops up; it crops up in dreams, it crops up in other ways, in art forms and literature. Now where there’s human viewpoint in the air, every time man dreams these things and writes these symbols they just get totally confused and you have the rise of myth and in particularly the rise of the fertility goddess; a constant theme in history, from Venus all the way back to Ashtarte and the Canaanites. Where does this always come from? Why is it that every civilization, as far back as we can trace in the myth, has a fertility goddess. People say well, that’s just etiology, that’s just an explanation of child {?}. No, why is there magic associated with it though? Why are there these deep religious feelings associated with it? I say this is evidence that all men are locked into a God-consciousness and they remember, in some mystical way they remember the protoevangelium spoken to Adam and Eve. All men at bottom recognize they are sons of Adam; all women recognize they are daughters of Eve, in the depths of their soul and this has to be expressed and is expressed over the centuries.
Now one of the ways this metaphorical kind
of thinking is expressed is found in Psalm 139:13 and 15. This is David’s psalm about when he was being
formed in his mother’s womb. Psalm 139
is the key psalm for women while they are carrying children. It gives you the divine viewpoint of how to
carry yourself and what is going on in you during times of pregnancy. “For thou hast possessed my reins; thou hast
covered me together in my mother’s womb.”
That’s a statement, forthright and level as to what’s happening. But verse 15 goes back and speaks of it
metaphorically. “My substance was not
hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and embroidered in the lowest parts
of the earth.” Do you see, the earth
becomes the metaphor of the womb? Now
the question is, why? Why is the mother’s
womb looked upon as the earth? Because
it’s in the mother’s womb that you have a recapitulation of Genesis 2:7. Did you ever stop to think of it this way,
that when a baby is being formed over the nine months is what you’ve got is not
like the biologist is talking about, recapitulation; ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny, that’s not what we’re talking about.
What we’re talking about here is a recapitulation of Genesis 2 during
the time of the pregnancy, and that the womb of the mother is acting as the
soil in the ground of
So Eve, then, becomes the mother of all life, everywhere. Let’s turn back to Genesis 3; after the curse is explained and after Adam responds to the gospel, now in Genesis 3:21 God in turn responds to man’s response. “Unto Adam also and unto his wife did the LORD God make coats of skin, and clothed them.” It’s interesting that the first leather work was done by God in the Garden of Eden. God was the first landscaper, God was the first clothier, God was the first tailor. The word “coats of skin” in the Hebrew means tunic; the word “coat” is a tunic; a tunic came from your neck all the way down and covered your feet. A “tunic of leather” is what this means. Now in that very word “tunic” you see an expression of the gospel. Here Adam is and he’s got his little fig leaf operation, I showed you what real fig leaves looked like and I challenged you to cover yourself with them and see how far you got. Now we have, after the fall, what does God do when He goes to clothe. He clothes them literally from head to toe, perfect clothing. And so the very word “tunic” shows that when God does the job He does the job! The human good cover-up never even did the job to start with, but God’s gospel does it completely.
Something else about this leather tunic. Not only is it a picture of the righteous clothes that we will be given spiritually, remember the physical shows the spiritual; not only is this leather tunic that goes from head to toe a picture of the total clothing of righteousness that we have in Christ, not only is that true, but how do you get leather. Adam and Eve had to stand there in the garden while God slaughtered an animal and the blood splattered all over the dust that had never before seen blood, this is the first blood ever shed in the history of the human race. Some people say it was the murder of Abel when blood was shed; no it wasn’t. The first blood was shed by God in history after the fall; an animal had to die and have his skin peeled off so that men could be covered. And what do you have here? The substitutionary blood atonement of Jesus Christ. Somebody had to die in the place to generate covering. Do you see how consistent the Bible is, whether you read revelation, whether you read Matthew, Mark, Luke or John; whether you read Genesis it all is one ever-flowing logically coherent picture.
And for this point we have the rise of the second metaphor in the Bible, the metaphor of clothing. Clothing, forever after this, means the righteousness that man clothes himself to fulfill his mission as a created creature. And since we’re fallen and we can’t crank out righteousness from our sin nature, where do we get our righteousness from? Grace. And we clothe it, and this is why you see that metaphor occur again and again in the Bible. In Ephesians what do you have when Paul discusses… put off the old man, put on the new. What do the verb “put off—put on” mean?” It’s the word in Greek for taking off your clothes and putting on a new set of clothes. The metaphor is embedded in the rest of the Scriptures, all the way on down to the book of Revelation. Where does it start? Right here in the Garden of Eden. So here you have the rise of these powerful pictures that are used again and again in the Word of God to teach us.
And so the man and the woman are clothed,
and now in Genesis
Genesis
Now why is it that God wants to expel man from the garden? Well in verse 22 it says very clearly because He doesn’t want us to live forever, apparently this tree of life, whatever it was, and we see it again in Revelation 22, means that as creatures we could eat it, go for a while, eat it again, go for a while, eat it again, go for a while, eat it again, and live forever and ever. If you could package up in a little 8 oz. jar whatever was in this tree of life you’d be a billionaire. This was so powerful it would have kept people physically alive but they would have been spiritually dead, and because of this God said all right, I don’t want this person physically alive if they’re going to be spiritually dead. And what does that teach us about priorities in life? Which is more important, your physical state or your spiritual state? Answer: your spiritual state, because God considers it so important He literally has killed us; He has literally killed us; when man was excluded from the garden at this point that was the imposition of verse 19 curse, “to dust you shall return.”
You say wasn’t God cruel to kill us, to cut off the umbilical cord or whatever that stuff was in the Garden of Eden and cause us to just rot. No, God was gracious; in the context here it’s grace that’s operating to do this, so that in mortal history the life and the damned flesh in damned history, in degeneracy, doesn’t go on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever. Man wasn’t structured to take this kind of existence forever and ever. And this is why at times when you get depressed and you wonder, thank God I don’t live forever and ever; thank God it’s going to come to an end some day. Yes, because you haven’t been designed to take this kind of living, even with Christ in the present world system you still haven’t been designed to live this kind of existence year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year. So therefore God is concerned with the spiritual side.
And so in Genesis
Now let’s go back to our map and we’re
going to add another detail to this map and I think after we’ve added a few
more things most of you people that have had background in the Old Testament
are going to recognize that you’ve seen this map before in a totally different
context. But here’s the schematic again
of Eden, in the east of Eden you have the Garden, west of Eden you might have
had, this is speculation but there’s inference based on Ezekiel 28, you have
this Mountain of God, a river flowing down from the throne of God here, out to
the east of Eden where it broke into four rivers. Now man is driven out the east side of the
garden. So now man has been in three
places. When man was created he was
created in the direct constant presence of God.
For probation purposes he was placed in the Garden of Eden where God
visited him once every twenty-four hours, and now he is excluded to place three. Notice, it is still inside the big circle,
Well, apparently Adam and Eve must have given him static because of the next verse. Genesis 3:24, with a strong verb in it. “So He drove out the man;” now that’s the Lord Jesus Christ, and “drive out” is one of the strongest verbs in the Hebrew language. I think this is why classical artists have often pictured, if you’ve watched them, they’ve pictured the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden with Adam and Eve like this, with their hands up to protect them but not really moving, you’ll notice their feet are locked in one place as though they’re kind of defying God’s judgment but they’re not running out of the Garden of Eden, they’re being very reluctantly pushed out of the garden. But there’s a very strong word here and it shows you something of the character of the Biblical God. After being so gracious in verse 15 and verse 21, He still physically drives them out of the garden.
Genesis 3:24, “…and he placed at the east
of the garden of Eden cherubs, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to
keep the way of the tree of life.”
Looking at a little bit more detail of what’s happening here, here’s the
garden, the river comes out and goes this way, there’s apparently a gate here
because the “way” is the path, there was a path that came from the east of
Now what was this fire that blocked the entrance of man? It says in the Bible it’s a cherub. Now we have to disagree with our classic article friends who always picture cherubs as some little 15 oz. baby with wings on it. That’s not a cherub. A cherub is a flaming being of rather awesome proportions that in the Bible always pictures as around the throne of God and Satan was one of these cherubs, according to Ezekiel 28, he got fired, no pun intended. And this left a certain minimum set of cherubs around the throne of God and they are always pictured in Scripture after this point as guarding God’s righteousness and His holiness; that’s all they seem to do. There’s no other scriptural role for these cherubs, other than the fact that they express God’s holiness with fire. Now this fiery separation and expulsion of man away from God’s presence is now picked up and becomes the theme of hell.
So let’s turn to the New Testament where Christ picks this up and uses it again and again. Matthew 7, we’re looking quickly at a chain of verse references to show you two themes, the theme of fire and the theme of expulsion from the presence of God. Matthew 7:21, this is the Sermon on the Mount that everyone says they read and (quote) “live by,” (end quote). “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that does the will of My Father, who is in heaven. [22] Many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy name? And in Thy name have cast out demons? And in Thy name done many wonderful works? [23] And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you,” get out of My presence; same theme, expulsion from the presence of God.
Turn to Matthew 22:13, a parable that you all ought to be able to interpret very easily now if you’ve paid attention to the Genesis series because now you’re equipped, now you know the metaphors to watch for and you know what these metaphors mean. And so when you come to Matthew 22:11 and you see the garment issue here with the festival and the people being invited in to the festival and there was somebody that came with the wrong clothing, verse 13, “Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot,” and throw him out, “and cast him into darkness; where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” “gnashing of teeth” is not poetry; gnashing of teeth is you grit your teeth because of the pain, outer darkness and extreme pain.
Matthew 25:30, talking about the unprofitable servant, “And cast the unprofitable servant into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” again pain.
Turn to Luke 16:19; this is the Bible’s answer to what happens on the other side of the grave in spite of the movies and the books that you now see that purport to give you experiences from the other side. I remind you as Bible-believing Christian there’s only one authoritative source from the other side and that’s the only one who rose from the dead to come back from the other side and tell us about it. He wasn’t resuscitated either, He was resurrected. Verse 19, the story of Lazarus and the beggar, and the story goes how he was full of sores, verse 21 a very graphic description. He died in verse 22, and in verse 23, “in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and sees Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. [24] And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” Flame, expulsion from the presence of God, torture and pain.
Let’s turn to 2 Thessalonians, the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, the great shepherd but also something else. In 2 Thessalonians 1:9, when Jesus Christ returns, we’d better start with verse 7, “And to you who are troubled, rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, [8] In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; [9] Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power.” Eternal fire, pain, expulsion from the presence of God.
Turn to Jude, 6-7. “And the angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the day of the judgment of the great day. [7] Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.”
And finally Revelation 20:10, “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever. [11] And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven had fled away, and their was found no place for them. [12] And I saw the dead, small and great,” these are the people who have rejected the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, “and the books were opened; and another books was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.” That’s the corollary, anybody who wants to make it on their human good apart from the finished work of Christ, just try it, you’ll get your opportunity to try, and when these people tried it, instead of being judged on the basis of Christ they are judged on the basis of their works; these are all non-Christian here. [13] “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works. [14] And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. [15] And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast” the same strong verb that’s used in Genesis, get out, “into the lake of fire.”
Revelation 21:8, the new heavens and the new earth of eternity, “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and the murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars,” this is not talking about people that commit those particular sins, this is talking about people who in rejection of Christ have allowed these sins to become life-dominating patterns and show their unbelief by it, “they shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
Now you see there’s these yucky things in the book of Genesis. You see why we, in our soul, getting input from two sides, the spirit and the body, and we see excrement and we see the other things that are used in the Bible and God says look at it, your human good is excrement, that’s what it is, that’s the way I look at it; if excrement is offensive to you then your human good is as offensive to Me, and to communicate that from our body side God uses these things in the physical degenerate earth, and every time we see them we ought to think all right, if I’m really plugged into the Scripture, then I ought to have the same “yuk” reaction when I see human good, when I see rebellion against the Lord Jesus Christ, in my soul or in anyone else’s; that ought to be my reaction. Not condemning people, but just realizing it’s there and knowing it and being adverse to that kind of thing. And because God is so seriously concerned with a real literal hell and a real literal lake of fire, that’s why he goes to what are these apparent extremes in Genesis, of pointing out our degeneracy, of pointing out these physical emblems of depravity. And finally, of excluding man entirely from the garden with a sword that keeps turning either way, the sword of the cherubs, fire, that excludes man from the presence of God.
You see, God in the Scriptures is consistent; He never contradicts Himself. You see this theme now beginning in Genesis 3 and here we’re looking at it in Revelation 21; you couldn’t get more extreme if your references of Scripture citations, and yet what is it? One consistent theme.
For our closing hymn….