Genesis 3_17-19 - Feminism, Weak Leadership & the Curse on Work
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Summary
In this episode, we continue our journey through what I believe is a very pivotal passage of Scripture, Genesis 3:15-16. This chapter is so important to the rest of the Scriptures that without it, life cannot be understood. In this chapter, we learn who our enemy is, what sin is, why pain exists, and why people die. We also learn of God's holiness, His justice, and His love. We see the very first messianic prophecy in Genesis 3, verse 15. And we know that he will come and have come and crushed the serpent's head to restore humanity's relationship with God.
Transcript
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Well, saints, we continue our journey through what I believe is a very pivotal passage of
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Scripture, Genesis chapter 3. I want to remind you, just real quick, that without this chapter,
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the rest of the Bible cannot be properly understood. This chapter is so incredibly
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important to the rest of the Scriptures, I would say life cannot be even understood.
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In this chapter, we learn who our enemy is. We learn what sin is. We learn why pain exists.
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We learn why people die. I mean, these are fundamental questions, fundamental realities
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that the vast majority of humanity has discussed. We also learn of God's holiness. We learn of his
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love, his justice. But most importantly, we learn that there is a promised Messiah. We see the very
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first messianic prophecy in Genesis chapter 3, verse 15. And we know that he will come and has
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come and crushed the serpent's head to restore humanity's relationship with God. Now, if you've
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been with us these past several weeks, you know that we are in part three of a three-part series
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on God's curse on the serpent and judgment on the sexes.
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Now, the reason I say that is because God doesn't actually judge or God doesn't actually curse Adam and Eve.
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We often use that language, but in the text, you only see God cursing the serpent
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and you see God cursing the ground, but you do not see God cursing Adam and Eve.
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Now, the first sermon two weeks ago examined God's curse on Satan.
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And I titled that sermon, The Gospel Before the Gospel.
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The second sermon, which was last week, was addressing the judgment upon the woman,
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which I titled, The Fall, Feminism, and the Fight for Order.
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Now, we saw the disorder between the sexes and how big of a deal that is
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and how big of a deal it has become all throughout time,
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this disorder in marital and masculine and feminine relationships.
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And so we also saw how Christianity is the only hope to restore order in the world.
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Christianity is the only tool that can restore order in America.
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Now we finally get to turn to God's judgment on Adam.
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Which, if you know anything about Hebrew poetry, we also know that there's an emphasis on the last thing.
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Now, there's a lot more complexity going on, but I'm going to say that this is the most important section
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that we're going to be talking about in this section around the curse on the serpent and the judgment on the sexes.
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We're going to see the weight of Adam's responsibility, the severity of his punishment,
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and the consequences that have extended way beyond Adam, even in to our own life.
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Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
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and have eaten of the tree of which I have commanded you not to eat.
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Now, it's important to note that when God speaks to Adam,
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He's not speaking to him merely individually, but he's speaking to him also federally, federally, as a representative of humanity.
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See, Adam is the head. He is the seed of the entire human race.
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In fact, if you think about it for a second, genetically, you were there when Adam sinned.
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Everybody that extends in this world comes from Adam.
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It says, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin.
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And so death spread to all men because all had sinned.
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For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
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This, of course, is the doctrine or the foundation for the doctrine of original sin.
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The idea that we are born with the original sin of Adam, even before we have committed acts of sin, we are born in sin.
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Now, this is all very important because according to Scripture, we have two federal heads.
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We have Adam and the old humanity, and we have Christ, the second Adam, the new humanity.
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First Corinthians 1545, it says the first man, Adam, became a living being and the last Adam became a life giving spirit.
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It goes on to say the first man was from the earth, a man of dust.
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So if you're born of Adam, you will die and return to the dust forever.
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If you're born of Christ, you will never die and go to heaven.
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I know there's complexities there with where our bodies go, et cetera, et cetera.
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But you get what I'm saying is that this gives context to why Jesus spoke the way he did during his earthly ministry.
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He says, truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.
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Again, it's this death and life motif that we see constantly.
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Whoever does not have the Son does not have life.
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If you're not reborn in Christ, you do not have life.
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Adam was given life, and he's a man from the ground.
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Christ, born of a virgin of the Holy Spirit, is a man from heaven.
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There's this constant motif and theme throughout Scripture that we must see here.
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Now, I want you to notice that God begins verse 17 by stating the grounds, the cause.
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And he starts this out with a causal clause in verse 17.
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because you have listened to the voice of your wife and so that is a coordinating conjunction
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and uh you did not obey the commandment of god so he gives these two reasons these two causes
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and a coordinating conjunction means that there's their equal weight and value and you put the and
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between them it's not showing superiority it's actually just showing both of them and so for
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is because Adam obeyed or listened to the voice of his wife
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and two, because he did not follow the commandment of God.
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Very fascinating. The judgment on Adam is not only because Adam ate from the tree, but
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listening to your wife has certainly been a masculine sin
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present in every generation, but it happens to become
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or pleasing your wife, men must learn to obey
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is that has not been true for about the last century.
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Now, as I mentioned in my last sermon, feminism
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is really the enculturation of the fall for women.
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That your desire will be contrary to your husband, yet he will rule over you.
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This disorder of the sexes has come in through first wave, second wave,
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and third wave feminism over the last hundred years.
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It has become essentially the institutionalization of the reversal of God's order we have seen on display, especially here in America.
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As a result, we birthed a series of what I would call effeminate phrases.
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Now, remember, you can be feminine, and that is a good thing if you're a woman.
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Now, if you're a man acting like a woman, that is called effeminate.
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And that is not good. It is a perversion of your masculinity.
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And we have birthed out of this culture a handful of effeminate phrases.
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And I'm going to share them because many of you have heard them already.
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It's saying, oh, you know what? The priority of my wife is the king and the ruler of how I ought to rule this household.
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Men say jokingly, I have to check in with the boss.
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Or, quote, she wears the pants in the family.
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Or, the recent one, he's the head, but I'm the neck.
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Not only are these what I would call emasculating phrases, but they are sinful statements of disorder and chaos.
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Now, how do we move from what I think, if you look back throughout history, I think there really was a genuinely heavy-handed misogyny in the 1800s and early 1900s.
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There was a lot of actual intense men that were not tempered by the Holy Spirit, right?
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So you've got to understand that patriarchy can be good, it can also be bad.
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But matriarchy is always bad, according to the Bible, okay?
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If you're not following the ultimate patriarch, Jesus Christ, then your patriarchy will be bad.
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But if you're following Christ, your patriarchy will be good.
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But the thing that's not good is matriarchy, where mom is essentially ruling the household over the men.
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So how do we go from the heavy handedness of the early 1900s to the kind of limp wristedness of, say, the 1980s?
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What happened there? What happened over that like 80 year period?
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It's very fascinating to understand our own history, our parents, our grandparents and what went on there.
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I believe as women rose in social power, men grew afraid of them.
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And I don't know if you understand this, but pastors grew afraid of women.
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In fact, I believe women were basically the unshepherded community of the church for about 75 years.
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Because men were afraid to speak to them, because they might be mansplaining.
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and so it was one of these things that women essentially were never corrected in the vast
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majority of churches so they rose into social power women became influential men grew afraid
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of them and instead of holding their ground they they chased the the feminine approval now why did
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they do this well typically for sex typically because they they didn't want their wives to
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withhold sex from their husbands. That's a real thing. And so it was a form of manipulation. So
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they parroted these extremely stupid slogans as social signals to show how they accepted the
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matriarchy. That's what happened. That's what happened. They started parroting these phrases
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to show kind of social signals as, hey, you know what? I'm kind of, I'm kind of with this whole
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feminism thing. I'm with that. The truth is, these men were cowards. It became so
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enculturated, these phrases, that I heard them all the time as a kid. All the time. Like
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Adam, they were unwilling to tell their wives no. Think about how much different it would
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be if Adam says, no, sorry, not going to eat that, not going to do that. On the other hand,
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feminism has become the perfect excuse for men to baptize their laziness so we got the other side
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of the coin men the the the default sin of men is passivity and laziness and when men don't lead
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you know what happens women step up it's a curse upon a man to be such an effeminate and emasculated
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leader that you don't take your family to church you don't shepherd your family and your wife does
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it for you. Do you remember the Norman Rockwell painting that I talked about a few weeks ago?
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It shows the man hiding in the chair and his wife
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caravanning the kids to church. And he's there with the
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And they pretended to be virtuous while doing it.
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now ultimately feminism is men's fault yes i do believe that women have fault they have sin
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they need to repent there's lots of issues going on with the women and they need to deal with that
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but the reality is just structurally if you just look at the scriptures and god puts the
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responsibility on the weight of the men that essentially feminism is the men's fault and
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what i mean by that is this weak men abandon their god-given roles as heads of household
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So you want to know why we had the feminist movement
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And the fruit of that rebellion goes back to the responsibility of the men of those children, those boomers.
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Now you go, yeah, well, there's a variety of reasons.
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They were war-torn from 1938 to 1945, traumatized from World War II.
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They had the issues going on with the post-Depression era.
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men are ultimately responsible in the same way that christ took responsibility for his bride
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the church men ought to take responsibility for their wives and children
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now by god's grace i really do believe this is beginning to turn i think we've had so much chaos
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between the sexes the disorder is disorienting it's frustrating young men can't find wives
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The gender pronoun garbage is annoying and frustrating.
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The rainbow Ramadan stuff that happens in June.
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And the next generation is rising up and is preaching the truth and is going to church and is looking for traditionalism and biblical orthodoxy.
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now i want to get back to our text but we come to this physical judgments we've shifted from this
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like sin that is marked so many men you've listened to the voice of your wife and you've
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disobeyed me uh this is so you you can look at that one sin and it's just a trail of destruction
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Now, I'm not going to walk through each one of them, but I want you to just know that they're there.
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I've been pointing out this idea of poetic justice for about three weeks now.
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Great. I'll use the woman to bring about your death.
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OK, we know that we saw to Eve, God said, oh, since you reached for rule and you wanted your husband to follow you.
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Now I will give you a desire to rule your husband, but he will rule over you again.
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It's poetic justice. OK, now in the next few verses, God does it again.
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Because you would not obey me regarding what you may or may not eat,
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eating itself will now become painful and difficult for you.
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in fact the word eat as we're going to see appears three times in the next few verses
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showing that the very area where adam rebelled will now be the very area where adam suffers
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god is a god of poetic justice i remember when i was a kid my friend and i got caught smoking
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to not make me do that because he didn't know what my dad would say. But I watched my friends smoke these
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five cigarettes and get very sick. And it was poetic
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justice. Oh, you like cigarettes, do you? Here, here's
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but I am saying that when we can do poetic justice
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We should follow God's design for poetic justice,
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from the way that God disciplines the serpent, Eve, and Adam?
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Because poetic justice returns to the sinner a reflection of his own sin.
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It returns to the sinner a reflection of his own sin.
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It makes the sinner taste the bitter fruit of what they have done.
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You know, if your child steals a toy, now what should you do?
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Well, I think you should say, well, you stole the toy.
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Now you have to work to buy toys for children who have no toys.
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If your child refuses to clean the room, okay, now you get to clean the room of not only your room, but also your siblings' rooms.
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It's giving consequences that directly touch the area of disobedience.
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Now, ultimately, we don't want to allow our punishments to be completely disconnected from the sin.
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They completely disconnect the punishment from the sin.
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One, the Bible doesn't even speak of prisons or jail.
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You get to receive the penalty that you tried to inflict on someone else.
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I remember watching a case, a court case, of a young woman who said that a young man had raped her.
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Now, this young man was a D1 sports athlete in football.
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And he had a full opportunity to go play professional football and lost that contract.
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And this woman eventually came out and said, I lied about the whole thing.
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Well, what should happen to her, according to biblical justice, is that she should get the full consequence of what it would be had he actually raped her.
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And we should learn how to implement it into our discipline.
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And we're going to see this actually how God does this.
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In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
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So as I mentioned last week, you cannot separate Adam from the Adama.
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Man will return back to dust, which is the same material.
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So in a sense, Adam's fall or in Adam's fall is Eve's fall.
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For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it.
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For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together until now.
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Waiting to be released from the curse that was brought upon it via Adam.
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Now again, I want you to notice how the text references pain.
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But now God says that gathering food to eat will be painful.
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And honestly, this generation is like totally disconnected from the pain of food.
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But if you just went back like 150 years, you start to really see, you know,
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you get an image of a man literally crying in the field with dirt in his hands because it hasn't rained.
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The text continues to speak of the land saying,
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thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you
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Now if you've ever had a thorn on your foot, you can thank Adam for that.
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I've had a thorn on my foot many times, or my hand.
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You know, the poison that comes from it stings for an hour after that.
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you can thank God for the rose, but you can thank Adam for its thorns.
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In Oregon, I used to meticulously care for our grass.
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I would aerate it, and I would dethatch it, and I would fertilize it.
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I would even put sand so we wouldn't have any certain weird depressions in the grass.
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and it was extremely frustrating at a very small level,
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Now, every gardener and landscaper and farmer knows the frustrating reality of weeds.
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My kids know the frustrating reality of weeds because we pull them all the time at our house.
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In fact, we have now polluted the earth with immeasurable toxins trying to kill these weeds and to avoid this curse.
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For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
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I think of the famous interview with R.C. Sproul.
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And someone asks him a question and kind of elevates man.
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And he responds and he says, we are dirt that disobeys.
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Now, to be clear, work itself is not a result of the fall.
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We were called to cultivate the garden before the fall.
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But work that was once joyful is now burdened with stress and difficulty.
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And as we remember, God struck the woman in the area her identity was tied to.
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And he now strikes the man in the area where his identity is tied to, physical labor.
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Oh, ladies, you're going to be caring for babies your whole life?
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Oh, men, you're going to be providing food for your family?
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Again, right here we see just the fundamentals of what it means to be a man and a woman right there.
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in our very weird world where women are in trying to be providers and men are trying to be stay-at-home
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dads it's super weird doesn't have to be it's been normal it's explained right here in genesis
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chapter 3 so essentially what god is saying is this eating will now be exhausting eating will
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now be exhausting. Before the fall, we lived to eat. Think about this. Before the fall, we lived
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to enjoy the garden and eat. After the fall, we now eat to live. It's a total shift around food.
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Spiritually, essentially, after the fall, we're dead. And physically, God sustains us through
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the very first time this word is mentioned in scripture is here in Genesis 3
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catch that word because it's a very important word throughout the Bible
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bread, we talk about bread more than we talk about
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almost some of the most crazy topics you would think about
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there's more instances talking about bread than that thing
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we know now why jesus essentially jesus is the manna he talks about bread but jesus talks about
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it he says man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of god
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it's also why jesus says i am the bread of life whoever comes to me shall not hunger
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Well, again, you've got to see that Jesus is thinking about Genesis 3.
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That's a very appealing statement to a society that grows their own food.
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Again, we're in a society where we're like, you've never missed a meal.
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It's just, we have no framework to understand the absolute difficulty it is to grow your own food and sustain a family of eight on it.
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I am the living bread that comes down from heaven.
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If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.
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And the bread that I will give you for the life of the world is my flesh.
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So this very first instance of Genesis 3 mentioning bread,
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it's a callback throughout the Old Testament and through Jesus' ministry over and over again.
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It points us from the curse in Eden and the need, the now need for bread,
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to the redemption of Christ, who is the true and living bread.
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The reality is, is he gives him a death sentence.
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So he starts off with, hey, work's going to be hard.
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Before the fall, Adam would have lived forever,
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But now God declares that this painful struggle to eat will continue until he returns to the ground.
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Now, the thing is, don't disconnect this from you.
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You are going to toil in survival to eat until you return to the ground.
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All of life is trying to earn enough money to get bread and survive until you return to the ground.
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Now, we cover it up with a life of denial and, you know, make life about all these other things.
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And that's good because God wants us to live godly lives for him.
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This whole situation that we're reading here in 17 through 19, and he lays it upon Christ.
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Adam's suffering becomes the suffering of the suffering servant.
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The sweat that marked Adam's agony becomes sweat of drops of blood on Jesus' face.
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The thorns that sprang from Adam's cursed ground become the thorns woven into Christ's crown.
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Adam's death by means of a tree becomes Christ's death on a tree.
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this is essentially the words of Christ in the Old Testament
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it says my strength is dried up like a sun-baked clay
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Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
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For it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
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And so ultimately what we see in the gospel is what happened to the first Adam is redeemed in the second Adam.
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Jesus essentially steps fully into the curse and he absorbs it all.
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The work, the suffering, the sweating, the thorns, the death, all of it.
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Christ takes on all of these things on behalf of his people.
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And not only that, he fulfills the demands of the fall.
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it is an incredible story of redemption truly we are redeemed in christ and it is something that
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we shouldn't ever forget amen let's pray father we thank you lord for this truth for these words
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for the beautiful connection of the first and second adam lord we ask that you'd help us to
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understand this in a more deeper level or that you would give us these truths that we might
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worship you more greatly. We pray for all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.