Relating to Sin and Shame

Gen. 3:1-20

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to RUF at KSU Podcast. Go ahead and turn to Genesis chapter 3. We're continuing our relationship series this fall. So we're doing something a little bit different. Normally we go through a book of the Bible in large group, but we're pausing and doing the series on relationships this semester because we actually believe the Bible has a lot to say about relationships. And it's a pretty important topic. I mean, every human interaction you have is a relationship of some sort. And as people who want to be faithful followers of Jesus, we want to know what he wants as people to understand about relationships. So we looked the first week at your relationship with RUF. Last week we kind of did a big overview of like the Bible's understanding of relationships in general. Tonight we're going to be focusing in on our relationship with sin and shame here in Genesis chapter 3. And the main thing I want you to take away, this is kind of our main theme going throughout all the messages, is that you were made to love and to be loved in relationship with God and with others. That you are made to love and be loved in relationship with God and with others. Alright, but don't just take my word for it. Let's turn our attention now to Scripture. Let's read Genesis chapter 3. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sowed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? The woman said, The serpent deceived me and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field, on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. And to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life, thorn and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us, in knowing good and evil, lest now lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Alright, so tonight we're looking at our relationship with sin and shame. And obviously that was a pretty heavy passage. So to turn to something slightly lighter, as I was thinking about sin and shame, uh, and relationships in particular. I was thinking about when I was dating my now wife, Kelsey. Uh I was visiting her where she was living in Knoxville. We went to Walmart to get a couple things. And uh we had just had lunch before that, and uh I had to go take care of some business, but you know, this is like a new relationship, so I didn't want to be like, I have to go to the bathroom. You know, I was like, I was trying to be polite, so I was like, I gotta go find something at the other end of the store. I gotta go by myself, I'll be back. I'll be back. And she was confused, but I'm like, okay, whatever. Uh because I'm trying not to embarrass myself, right? So I leave, like, you know, acting like I'm going this way, and then sprint to the front of the Walmart uh because I really need to go to the bathroom. Run right in the bathroom, uh, go in to take care of business, and I'm in the stall, and uh the voices are here are uh female voices, uh not male voices. And I realized in my haste, uh I had run into the women's bathroom. Uh there was no one in there when I walked in, okay? Um and so like after like sweating through my clothes and freaking out, like, what am I gonna do? And like, you know, if Kelsey's gonna be like, where are you? You know, like you said you're only be gonna be gone a minute. Uh I was like, alright, you know, you can do this, Chris. You just have to like walk straight out. Uh so you know, I walk straight out with my head down uh through a crowd of women who were very confused. Um and I walked straight into the men's room so I could wash my hands. Uh and then I had to go back to Kelsey and be like, yeah, everything's fine. I couldn't find what I was looking for. Uh I had to try to cover up my embarrassments. Uh right there in that story, you see my three points. Uh the lie, the shame, and the cover-up. That's gonna be the three things we're gonna be looking at tonight from this passage. Uh we're gonna see the lies of sin, the power of shame, and the cover-up. Uh and pro tip, uh, you know, if you want a relationship that lasts, just be honest and be like, I gotta go to the bathroom. You know, don't try to go through all this complicated stuff. Alright, so first up, we're gonna look at the lies of sin. The lies of sin here in this passage. So you gotta remember the context. This is uh the very beginning of the Bible here in creation, Genesis chapter 3. Before this, right, uh Adam and Eve and all of creation and God lived together in harmony. There was no sin, there was no brokenness, there was no sadness, there was no death, there was none of that. They had perfect relationships with one another. They wanted for nothing. But here in this passage, right, we see this serpent coming along and immediately trying to get Adam and Eve to doubt God's word and to doubt his creation. So the very first thing he asks is, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? You know, he's not even like, hey, I'm a snake, my name is Satan. Uh no, he doesn't even introduce himself. He just goes straight into like, I don't know, I think that God guy's a liar. You're like, cool, nice to meet you too. Uh, like that was fast. But we see here that right away, uh, sin involves lies of some sort. It involves not trusting God, and as we'll see, also not trusting other relationships as well. That the breakdown of all relationships usually involves the breakdown of trust. What are the lies that sin tells us? Well, like I said, the first thing that the serpent starts out with is that God is not good. You know, he says, Did God actually say not eat of that tree? And then later he says, Well, you know, you won't die if you eat it. Actually, if you eat it, you'll be like God. What he's saying there is, you know, God must be holding out on you. Like, he told you not to eat of this tree, but it's probably because he doesn't want you to enjoy something good. Like, man, you know, what a jerk that he would tell you to stay away from something that would be so enjoyable and pleasurable and make you more like him. That this is the lie of all sin. That if you say yes to it, if you give in to it, if you embrace it, that it will give you the one thing you lack. That it will make you complete, it will make you whole, it will make you happy, it will ultimately make you more like God. And once again we see the lie here that you lack something. I mean, think about it. Adam and Eve were in the garden, there was no sin. They didn't lack for anything. I mean, the lie of if you eat this fruit, you'll be like God is obviously not true because Genesis 1 tells us that we looked at last week. They were made in the image of God. They were already like God. The serpent is like, you know, the worst kind of like salesman type person who convinces you to buy something you already have. You know, if they convince you that you need it in some way in your life. And the funny thing is, as we looked at the other week, the only time in the garden before sin that they were lacking anything is when God looked down and said, you know, Adam, I think you're lonely. Like, let me create Eve. Let me create more relationships, let me create more companionship here. So we know that God had provided all that they needed, and yet that's immediately Satan's tactic to make you doubt that, uh, to make you distrust in God's provision. I love the way uh Lynn Blair puts this uh in one Christian rap song. She says, Look, sin captivates us by its forbidden fruit, pleasing the senses so we suppress the truth and eat the lie. Sin blinding us to you, the only objective beauty that's truly absolute. That sin is constantly saying, hey, like, God can't give you what you need. You actually don't have what you need. You need something else, and you've got to go take it, and you've got to figure out what it is. That you get to be the definition of what is good, true, and beautiful. You get to be the definition of what relationships are worth it or not worth it. But as we see, the lie of sin doesn't ever pay off. It's the lie we're constantly falling for that disobeying God is the route to what we want. But the truth is, sin further separates us in all relationships. I mean, look at the fallout from their sin. Immediately, Adam and Eve recognize that they're naked, and like before that wasn't a problem. Oh, but now it is. They have to cover each other, cover themselves and like hide from one another. And when they hear God coming, they have to hide from him. And then later on, when God is describing the effects of sin on the world, he says, you know, Adam, before you could go and just like pick fruit and eat it, and that'd be great. But now you're gonna have to work the ground, and it's not even gonna give you what you need all the time. Like thorns and thistles are gonna come out. And like, even in women's bodies, like childbearing is gonna be painful now. Like your own relationship with your own body is now gonna be affected by sin. That the lie of sin is if you embrace it, if you trust it, if you give into it, it will make you whole and complete. But the reality is all it does is separate. It separates our relationship with God, with each other, with creation itself, and even with ourselves. We don't even know ourselves, our bodies don't even function, our minds don't always function rightly. I love how one scholar put it, Serene Jones, she said, look, sin is a relational category, highlighting our separation from God. To be in sin is to be alienated from God. When sin is discussed in our culture, we often imply that it occurs when we do bad things. But a proper biblical understanding of sin, however, recognizes the relational separation that drives our unwanted behavior. The relational separation that drives our unwanted behavior. That's the effect of sin. Think about how this plays out in relationships in your life. You know, often we go from like, yeah, God is love to actually like love is God. You know, think of just how much people talk about love and want love and daydream about love and write songs about it and all that. Like, we make a God out of love, we make an idol out of it. We'll do anything for it. Or how about, man, a lot of people they go to college and like they have this real heartfelt, God-given, I would say, craving and need for community, for friendship, but it's hard to make friends. And so sometimes you kind of start to do things or say things or put yourself in situations that you actually know aren't good for you because you want to fit in, because you want those friendships. We want to be pursued and loved, and maybe we haven't felt pursued and loved by anyone. So the first time someone comes our way and offers us it, we jump at it. Even when we know this person is actually bad for us. When we, even if we see all the red flags and your friends are telling you all the red flags. You know, it's kind of like Isabella and Conrad in uh The Summer I Turn Pretty. You know, just like, come on, girl. Like, it's so obvious he's a mess. Like, stop pursuing him. You know? No, okay. My wife told me you shouldn't use that reference. They're not gonna like that. Uh it could be like, I want to make my parents happy. Doesn't the Bible say we should honor our parents? Isn't that a good thing? Yes. But we put so much weight behind that, that our parents' approval, that if we don't have that, then like we are not good. That all is wrong in the world, and I have to bend over backwards uh so that they will approve of everything I do in my life. We do this in our desire for physical intimacy. We look at porn or we hook up with people because they seem pleasing to the eye, but we have no desire to commit. And these things, they always leave us feeling worse off than before, not better. This is what the serpent does. He twists God's words, leading to sin, which actually further separates us from good, God-given relationships. And in our sin, we come to hate God, hate one another, hate the world, and even hate ourselves. This feeling, this leaves us feeling ashamed because we know that there should be more. So that brings me to my second point, which is the power of shame. Like sin only leads to further isolation, and then it leads to this thing that we talk about a lot nowadays, uh, but I think it's very present here in scripture and this kind of honor-shame culture of shame and how that affects us. This idea that, you know, I've done something wrong and I should be embarrassed about it, I need to cover it, uh, that, you know, people would look down on me. I am somehow less than now. That shame is a powerful force. What does shame do? Well, we see it here in this passage in multiple ways, right? Shame causes Adam and Eve to hide. They literally hide behind a bush when they hear God coming. They also blame one another. I love that. When Adam's like, uh, the woman you gave me made me eat the fruit. Do y'all catch that? He literally blames God for his own sin. He's like, I'm so embarrassed, someone else has to be at fault. Uh and then finally they try to cover up themselves, right? They sew fig leaves together. We've gotta hide ourselves. I don't want people to know how vulnerable I am, how weak I am. We hide from God, we hide from each other, we hide from ourselves. When they hear God, they dive into the bushes, they don't want God or anyone else to see them. And maybe you feel like that at times too. How might you be hiding from God and others? You know, maybe you're afraid that if people really knew you, not just like the public visible part of your life that you're okay with people knowing, but like the deep secret things in your life. You'd be afraid that they'd be disgusted and they wouldn't want to be your friend, they wouldn't love you. I was thinking of a story I read recently, this is a pretty rough story, of uh this lady who was processing with her therapist uh like child abuse that she had received. Someone had abused her as a child, and she told her therapist, look, like the reality is my family functions so much better if we just live the lie that it never happened. Like, the shame was so powerful that she was like, I'd rather just not deal with it. I'd rather just pretend that actually we're a good, happy family and nothing ever happened. That's the power of shame. The lie of sin and the power of shame keeps us from facing the truth. So we find elaborate means to cover ourselves which actually cause us to separate further in relationships. And look, maybe you're even hiding from God. You just keep covering yourself in busyness. It's really easy to be super busy in college and, you know, take a million classes and sign up for a million clubs and go to all even the church activities and all the campus ministries, and you're so busy that you never have to wrestle with what's going on in your heart and the ways that God may want you to deal with sin in your life. And not all hiding is obvious. You know, some people seem like open books. You know, they'll tell you everything that's going on, they're real honest. But there are sneaky ways of hiding. And you know it. You can hide your real struggles under a mountain of being honest and open. Or under a blanket of Christian phrases that actually keeps you from wrestling with your sin. I mean, I already mentioned this, but like the blame game, the blame shifting that happens. Usually people blame others when they feel someone is kind of poking at a sensitive area. You know, God says, Adam, like, where are you? What have you been doing? And he's like, well, look, you know, I was trying to be holy, but then that woman that you gave, you know, it's all someone else's fault. It's got to be God's fault or the woman's fault, certainly not my fault. We do this all the time. It's so easy to blame shift to avoid shame because we know that someone has touched on something that we don't want to admit to. And look, let me say real quick, like, some of you may be feeling shame about something that was done to you for no fault of your own. Uh someone mistreated you or abused you or took advantage of you. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not saying don't blame people for that. Like, God cares about injustice. God knows and God sees. Uh, I'm not calling out that right now. What I'm calling out is our all-too common tendency to lash out and to blame others when we feel ashamed about something we've done or some failure on our part. And we feel like we're not living up to the ideal image of ourself. We even blame God. You know, God, if I had gotten into the school I wanted, or if I didn't have to work and go to school, then I wouldn't struggle with this. Or, well, if other people were better behaved, then I wouldn't have stumbled. So sin and shame leads to hiding and blame. How are you hiding? Who are you blaming? And what are you trying to cover yourself with? Uh I was talking to my wife a lot about this passage, and you know, she was like, honestly, this reminds, this is her words. She was saying it reminds me a lot of my own testimony of like I grew up in church, you know, was really involved in all this Christian stuff, and like, you know, I can't remember a day where I didn't believe and love Jesus. And yet, like, there were so many things in my life that like I was really hiding from, even though I'd be very open about things. You know, there were so many ways I was covering up struggles in my life, you know, with all this just kind of flurry of Christian activity. Or I'd be quick to, you know, blame someone else for stumbling in any way. And she said, you know, it really took like God really beating her down in her college years to really come to terms with her own brokenness and sin. To really see, man, like it's not always someone else's fault. And then actually I too am a sinner. And I may be trying to cover myself with my own version of fig leaves, but at the end of the day, the fig leaves fall apart. We try to find a way to hide our nakedness so we don't feel vulnerable and weak, because we hate feeling weak. We often do this with the ways we try to self justify with our own sense of righteousness or accomplishments, but these always fail us in the end. What we need is a different kind of covering, one that only God can give. So that leads me to my last point here, which is. The cover up. Alright, so how does God respond to their sin and shame? We've been looking at Adam and Eve and their sin, their shame, their brokenness, but how does God actually respond to it? Well, there are three things I want you to see. The first is God looks for his lost children. It's kind of a sweet moment almost, right? They hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden, they hide from him, and then they just hear him say, Where are you? Like, I don't know how you read that, if it's like an angry, like, where are you? But the tone of the in the original language is very like compassionate and tender. It's like you're looking for something that's lost and you're concerned about it. Saying, Where are you? He could have been like, Adam, I know what you did. You know, come out here, stand in front of me. No, not at all. Very compassionately and tenderly says, Where are you? I'm looking for you. I care about you. You're my lost child. And I love when he says, Well, like, I was naked and I was afraid. His response is, you're not naked, or like, don't be afraid, you know, man up or something. No, he doesn't say, he says, Who told you that? You know, who told you that you had something to be ashamed of? Who told you that you had something you needed to cover? God didn't say that to him. You see, the lies of sin, the power of shame already shaping his thinking, but God is saying, look, that's not my message to you. That God seeks out his lost children and he seeks them out because he loves them so much. The next thing I want you to see is that God gives them hope. So it seems kind of crazy that in this like passage here from verses 14 through 19 where God is talking about how sin's gonna affect the world and all this, that actually there would be this nugget of hope here. And maybe you've never heard this before, but if you look closely at verse 15, in the middle of God telling Eve like the challenges of uh, or not Eve, uh talking about the serpent and all that, he says, Look, I'm gonna put enmity between you, the serpent, and between the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. That may sound really obscure to you, but scholars see this as the proto-gospel, meaning that right here at the very beginning, right after Adam and Eve have sinned, God is saying, Hey, guess what? Out of this same man and woman that just sinned, I'm gonna bring new life. I'm gonna someday send the Messiah who's going to defeat the serpent. That the lies of the serpent and the power of the shame that he brings is not gonna last forever. That the very people who disobeyed me and rebelled against me, I'm gonna redeem and save and use to deliver and heal the world. That God gives hope to his lost children. That the lies of sin that are affecting you today will not last forever, that sin will not have the final word, and that your shame will be taken away completely one day. The final thing is that God covers his lost children. Did you notice that? So, like they had covered themselves with fig leaves, but at the very end, it said that God made for them uh skins of an animal. Right? Verse 21 the Lord God made for Adam and Eve and for his wife, or for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. Ooh, sorry. That God trades in their fig leaves for fur skins. He says, look, like what you've tried to cover yourself with, it's not good enough. It's not gonna last. It doesn't work very well. But I care so much about you that I'm gonna give you a better covering. Something that will last. And the Bible is full of this rich language of being like putting on uh the the righteousness of Christ as clothing. It's this idea that uh we've been covered in sin, and yet God says, Look, if you're my child, if you've put your faith in me and I've redeemed you, then I'm actually gonna cover you in something new, something better completely. That just as if you tried to make clothing out of vines in your backyard, and then someone came along and gave you a big bear coat, right? Like, one of those would be way better than the other. And uh I actually kind of nerded out on this and started doing all this research about like leather and pleather and all that. Uh, I found this really interesting article that was saying, like, there's this huge market in pleather right now, you know, plastic leather. Uh, and they're saying actually, like, making pleather is this really awful process, like it pollutes the environment and then it makes these like kind of really low-quality pleather clothing that doesn't last, it's because there's like oil compounds in it, it catches fire a lot. You're like, Chris, why are you telling us all this? Um, their point was like, hey, uh, real leather, while yes, there is such a thing as like animal cruelty and overuse of animals and all that, the reason it was made in the first place was if you were in like a farming community and you killed a cow to eat, you had all this skin left over, and otherwise you'd just be throwing it away. So they found a use for it to make real leather, and it made really high-quality clothing that like you could make rainproof, that wouldn't rip easy, that would last a long time. Why am I telling you all this? God is saying, look, you've been making for yourself pleather coats, you know, out of your self-righteousness and self-justification and ways you're trying to cover yourself. And God's saying, look, trade in your pleather coats, and let me give you the real thing. Something that will actually protect you from the elements, something that will actually heal your relationships. Let me cover you in the righteousness of Christ. That they try to cover themselves, but it's not good enough. So God has to cover them in the sacrifice of his own son. That what we need is a sacrifice in our place, a new righteousness, a new covering in Christ. And that's what's truly shocking about this passage. That after God had been disobeyed, the word distorted, and God was even blamed for all of this, that his steadfast love and commitment to his lost and rebellious children has not changed. That he could have zapped them dead right then and there, and instead he promises Adam and Eve that he's going to use their broken relationship to bring about the redemption of the world. That one day the same Eve who took down from the tree in disobedience would be the ancestor of the one who would climb a tree in obedience so that he could be crucified on the cross for our sins and brokenness and shame, so that we could be covered in his righteousness. That ultimately, shame is not our destiny. God is still committed to his people, and that we have steadfast hope in his love and our new identity in Christ. So to close, uh, I was thinking about this and I was reminded of a story of my good friend Danny, who's a pastor here in Atlanta. And he grew up a missionary kid in Japan. His parents were missionaries there, and you know, he got into his like middle school teenage years, and like a lot of us, got real rebellious and angsty and just started really acting out and was really kind of mad all the time, mad at his parents, mad at God, didn't want anything to do with their missionary work and all that, and got wrapped up in a bad crowd. And one night, through a series of events, ended up getting arrested in Japan, taken to jail. And finally, after like a day there, they let him get a phone call. And so, you know, he had to go and call his dad. And he's like, I've never been more ashamed of my life to have to pick up the phone and be like, Dad, I'm in jail right now. Like, can you imagine just the embarrassment, the shame? You know, and he's he's crying as he's telling his dad, like, I'm so sorry, you know, I don't know what happened, but I'm in jail, I need you to help me. And he said it was quiet for a minute, and on the other end of the line, his dad said, Danny, I don't know what you've done, but I want you to know that I love you. And there's nothing you could do that would ever change the fact that I love you. And so I'm coming down to the jail right now, and we're gonna figure this out. Whatever it is, I'm with you in it. And I thought, what better picture of the father's love and commitment for his lost child? That it's out of that love and commitment that changed my friend Danny's life and his attitude towards God, and it can change your life as well. And if you're here tonight and you're feeling the power of sin and shame, if you're seeing the lies of sin at work in your life, the devastating effects it has on your relationships, I want you to know that there's hope. I want you to know that you don't have to hide or blame or try to cover yourself anymore. That if you trust in Jesus and his free grace, that will cover you in a love that will last, that won't be taken away. Amen. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for the good news of Jesus. That he would take on each and every one of our sins, that he would take away our shame. And Lord, we pray that you would help us. The lies of sin are powerful, and shame itself is an oppressive force. So, Lord, we pray that you would constantly remind us of the gospel, that you would use good Christian community and worship in church and all of these means of grace to remind us of the gospel, so that we would face the lies of sin with the truth of God's love for his lost people. And Lord, we pray all this in your name. Amen. Let's stand and sing.