Back to Basics: When the Story We Inherit Isn't God's Story

Many Christians inherit interpretations of Genesis 3 that emphasize guilt and condemnation, but reading the text itself reveals a different story. When Adam and Eve hide in shame after disobeying God, God doesn't abandon them but calls out with love, asking Where are you? This isn't a judge hunting criminals but a parent searching for hiding children. Instead of immediate punishment, God provides clothing and care, demonstrating grace even in the midst of human failure. Reading Genesis through Jesus' lens rather than inherited interpretations shows us a God who pursues us with relentless love, not condemnation.

Visit communitybrookside.com or facebook.com/communitybrookside for more information!

Transcript

This morning I'm going to start with a bit of a story, so stay with me. All right, here we go. There was a Sunday a few years ago when I was preaching at a different church where I was the youth minister, but also he started kind of a worship service that was geared for youth and their families. And I noticed about halfway back in the middle of the worship service, there was a man who was giving me a look that I couldn't really get. I didn't know what his face was trying to say.

I think many of you might know the look. Eyebrows down, kind of tight lipped, what? Leaning in, head half cocked. I had no idea what I had said to make this person give me that look, but it definitely gave some. Matt, after worship, we're going to have a conversation, vibes, right?

And once you see that look from this side, it's really, really hard to ignore it. Every time I glanced his direction, that same look stuck to his face all worship long. So, of course, as you know, a preacher, my mind starts spinning. Did I say something wrong? Did I misquote Scripture?

Did I accidentally wander into heresy? I finished the sermon, and I was already working on an apology for this guy. After the service, he walked straight towards me, and I braced myself because, you know, listen, not everybody likes what I have to say most of the time. And so sometimes you have to hear those things. And so I steeled myself, and I was ready to hear whatever he had to say.

And he said, matt, great sermon today. Sorry if I looked a little distracted. I left my glasses at home and I couldn't read a single word on the screen.

So in this moment, I had built this entire story in my head, this narrative, and none of it was true. This thing that I had made such a big deal of in my mind wasn't even a reality. I thought I knew what was happening, but I didn't even have the full picture. I was interpreting a moment through my assumptions, not what was really going on around me. And this truth is something that I constantly go back to.

If I can misinterpret something as simple as a facial expression, imagine how easy it is to misinterpret a story in Scripture.

And this is really especially true because often we're relying on somebody else's misunderstanding or understanding of scripture. Okay, I'm going to say that in a way that makes sense. Throughout this morning's worship, this last week, I had dinner with a friend of mine. You probably know him, Mike, Francie. And he said something that stuck in my head.

We all know about book clubs, right? Anybody been a member of a book club? Yeah. You ever have people in your book club that just. They never read the dang books, but they always have an opinion on the book, Right.

Mike looked at me and he said, matt, we are part of the largest book club in the entire world. And most people in the club have never even bothered to read the book.

If we call ourselves Christians, the Bible that we read is our book. And many of us haven't even read it. When we think about what we know about the Bible, much of what we know about scripture comes from sermons that we've heard, or podcasts we've listened to, or devotions we've read, or lyrics in a song on Christ radio, or what we learned in children as children in Sunday school classes. Instead of relying on Scripture itself to speak to us, we are actually relying on interpretations that we've inherited, sometimes years and years ago. Sometimes when there are issues with the stories in scripture, like when we're confused about the meaning of these stories, or we kind of get mixed signals about who God is in the story, the way that we understand God is different than the way that we're hearing about God in Scripture.

It's not because scriptures a problem. It's because we've inherited an interpretation. That's the problem.

The problem is the lens that we use to read scripture through. I'm going to tell you a fact this morning that might shock you. Most of us in this room, we don't simply read biblical stories. We inherit something different. We may think that we know the basic Bible stories, like the story of the flood.

We know the stories of the miracles of Jesus. We might think we know all the acts of the apostles that led to the creation of the church in the first century. But we don't actually inherit the stories of the Bible. We inherit interpretations of the stories of the Bible. And if we're not reading the book, we don't know the true story.

And this makes a huge difference. Sometimes those interpretations are beautiful and faithful to the scriptures, but sometimes they're, well, a little distorted. I think it is far too often that we hear biblical sermons and interpretations of scripture that are shaped by human biases, by cultural assumptions, by translations that don't quite capture the heart of the Hebrew or Greek text. If you really think about it, if you stop for a moment and kind of reflect on the Bible, it was written in a very specific time to a very specific people, in specific contexts over thousands of years.

And the best that any of us can do is to come to that beautifully inspired text with an open mind and a desire to hear from the Holy Spirit. When we read the words church, if we're honest with ourselves, a lot of us grew up hearing scriptures and versions of biblical stories that were more like echoes of personal opinions rather than the actual voice of God. Echoes of a preacher's worldview. Echoes, maybe of your particular denominational affiliation. Echoes of a translation choice made hundreds of years ago.

Sometimes these interpretations include opinions on God that don't match our incarnate God that we see alive and well in the person of Jesus. And over time, those echoes can get so loud that we stop hearing the truth in the stories, and all we hear are the echoes. This week, we're going back to one of the most misunderstood stories in the entire Bible. It's a story that many of us have learned through layers of interpretation that I believe don't always reflect the heart of God. The story that we're going to focus on this morning is a story that has been used to explain things like shame, guilt, and fear and brokenness of humanity since forever.

But the problem is that when you read it closely, the text is doing something far more hopeful, far more human, far more like the God revealed in Jesus than just pointing out humanity's failures.

Because here's the truth. When we let inherited interpretations speak louder than scripture, we end up with a faith that's cluttered, it's distorted, and sometimes can even be harmful. But when we get back to the words of God that are found in the text, when we listen for God's voice at work, instead of the echoes, we discover a God who has always been more gracious, more present, and more loving than we even expect. So today we're going to peel back some layers. We're going to read some scripture as it's written.

We're going to let the story found in Genesis chapter three speak for itself. And we're going to see what happens when we stop reading the story through fear and we start reading it through the lens of Jesus.

So let's read a little bit. Before we do, I want to just say, I bet that most of us grew up hearing the story of Adam and Eve in a very particular way, right? A way that emphasized failure. This is the breaking point of humanity. God created us good, Then we messed it all up.

And so forever we're going to be damned to hell, Right? Oftentimes we hear that it's a way to scare people into relationship with Jesus. That, to me, doesn't reflect who Jesus is.

But what if I told you the story that we inherited isn't the story the Bible is telling us? Would you believe me? The hard part is we have been trained to think that the story of the fall of humanity is a story that talks about our condemnation. It talks about our separation from God. But there's way more to that story.

What if, instead, God's story begins with God's relentless faithfulness? What if the story of the fall isn't the story of God pulling away from humanity, but humanity pulling away from God and God never letting us go?

So this morning, we're going to dive into the story of creation. My hope is that we can begin to shift how we see God working from the very beginning of time. I want us to recognize that God's word doesn't open with human failure. It opens with God's goodness overflowing into all of creation. If you remember Genesis chapter one, and we're going to start, I'm going to kind of like give you Genesis 1 and 2, and then we're going to read Genesis 3.

But if you remember the story of creation that we find in Genesis Chapter one, God is creating all of the known universe. What we read in Genesis chapter one is poetic. We read, God said, and it was so. And God saw that it was good, and there was evening and there was morning. Right?

It's very poetic. It's very repetitive. It repeats that way for every single day of creation. So while in the strictest sense it's not actually Hebrew poetry, it is a kind of a theological poetry. It's liturgical.

It's got artistic proclamation of God's goodness and God's universal control over all things.

But I'm going to get up on my soapbox for a second. Okay? I want you to hear me as your pastor for a minute. Genesis, friends, begins with two creation stories. It's not just one, it's two.

The first story is found in Genesis chapter one, verses one through 23. And it's this cosmic and liturgical version of the creation. It recounts God speaking the universe into being. Right? A God who's so powerful, when God just speaks, it becomes reality.

The second story is found in Genesis, chapter 2, verses 4, 4 through 25.

I misquoted this earlier. It's actually Genesis 1:1 through chapter 2, verse 3. And the second part is chapter 2, 4 through 25. And this is kind of a more earthly and intimate version of creation. It speaks of God forming humanity out of dust, right?

Rolling up a ball of dirt and shaping it as a potter would Shape clay. And then God breathes into humanity, making humanity real. These two creation stories come from very different ancient traditions, but they were intentionally paired together in the book of Genesis, side by side for a very important reason. Together, these two versions of the creation story tell us that God is both majestic and personal, both sovereign lord over all things, and also very intimately close with his creation, both the creator of galaxies and one who walks with humanity in the garden.

So any try of interpreting the creation story event literally will miss the truth of who God is. A literal reading of the creation event cannot be done faithfully because the creation story that we read In Genesis chapters 1 and 2 were not written to give a step by step accounting to the how of God's creation of the universe. That's not the purpose of Scripture for us in those stories. Genesis 1 and 2 aren't trying to explain the mechanics of creation or the exact formulaic posturization and the manipulation of time and space to tell us how God created all things. Instead, these scriptures are meant to reveal to us the heart of our Creator.

When we try to make Scripture do something that it is not designed to do, we present something that is weird and wrong. In those moments when we try to force fit Scripture into telling us a literal story, sometimes it does an injustice to the text and we end up with a skewed understanding of what the word is trying to tell us in Jewish thought. These two chapters are a theological declaration, not a technical explanation. The Scriptures tell us that God is both sovereign, that God creates through language. He speaks things into being, not through violence as in other religious traditions of the ancient Near East.

God is good, and all of God's creation reflects that goodness. God is orderly. And again, in the ancient near east, the stories of creation are very chaotic. It comes from battles and, you know, life springing up out of things and fights and Gods destroying one another. That's not the God we read about in the book of Genesis.

And we also read through these scriptures that God is proud of what God creates. We hear God say it is good. And when it comes to us, God says it is very good.

So now I'm going to get down off my soapbox. Don't read Genesis literally. Don't do it. Is that okay? You guys good?

Anybody mad at me now? You'll see me in the parking lot after worship, I guess. All right, so let's take a minute to recap Genesis 1 and 2, Genesis chapter 1, verse 1, through chapter 2, verse 3, we see starting out that the earth is described as formless and void. You know those words, right? In the beginning, it was all empty.

There was nothing. In the beginning, darkness was over the surface of the deep. Day one, God creates light. And he separates the day from the night. Right.

Day two, God creates in the sky a vault that separates the waters above from. From the waters below. That is a worldview we do not understand. That's the way that the ancient Hebrew people viewed their universe at the time.

At that time, he also produced the ground that gave us all the vegetation, all the differing plants. Day four. God created the lights in the sky to govern the day and the night. We know them as the sun and the moon. Thank you, both of you.

All right. Day five, God created the creatures of the sea, the birds in the air. Day six, all the other living creatures of the land were created, including us. Humanity was created on day six. Day seven, God rested.

And he said, everything I've done is good.

Starting in Genesis, chapter two, verse four, we have that second account of creation. Again, these two stories are not duplicates of one another. They are meant to be complementary, not to be harmonized. Like pieces of a puzzle put together, they are complementary portraits of God that give us a deeper understanding of the Go who loves us. In Genesis 2.

4 through 25, we see the Earth is already created and there's no rain. Scripture says there is no rain. There's never been any rain. What happens is the way the earth was watered is that the water would come up through the streams and water the earth, and then it would go back down. It was an interesting worldview.

God then began to form man, who we later read is named Adam. And he creates Adam from the dust of the earth. And then God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And then it says, God planted a garden in the east side of Eden. And in the middle of the garden, we have two trees.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. It's a tree of life. All right, so we. Yeah, I'm glad we're doing this. All right, so there are two trees.

One is a tree of life. One is a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And God says, hey, this whole garden, Adam, you get to be the gardener. You get to tend to all the plants, and you can eat anything you want. Doesn't that sound magical?

Fresh fruit, fresh veggies, all day. Just don't eat from that one tree. Have it all. But not the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Because if you eat from that tree, you're going to die.

God later in this story forms all the animals, also creates them out of dust, and then presents them to Adam. Adam, would you please name all these animals for me? Thank you so much. It's the small job. How many versions of beetles are there in the world?

Right. Like 40 million. I made that up. I don't know, but there's a lot.

But in the midst of the naming process, there was no suitable mate to be found for Adam. So God put Adam to sleep and he took a rib out of his body, and then from that rib created woman. The scripture was clear at the very end of this chapter that they were both naked and nobody cared. So now you've had a recap. All right, again, don't just listen to what I've told you.

Go back and read it. Friends, Genesis 1 and 2. But now that we recapped, I want to remind you that the point of this morning's sermon is for us to look at how such beautiful stories, the telling of this creation event, can be retold in a way that shifts focus from the goodness of creation to the problem of sin. That is two beautiful chapters that talk about how God was intentional to create the world and everything in it. So let's see what happens immediately after creation.

All right, now, if you've got your Bibles, I invite you to pull them out. We're starting in Genesis, chapter three, and we're going to read verses one through 21. Follow along with me, if you would. If you don't have your Bibles, you can follow along. On the screen, it says this.

Now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say, you must not eat from any tree in the garden? I don't know why I read the serpent with that voice. It's just the woman said to the. Thank you.

The woman said to the serpent, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. But God did say, you must not eat from the fruit that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it or you will die. Now, did God say that you must not touch it? No. So even in the very first story post creation, a woman is misunderstanding what a man has said.

Sorry. I'm sorry. Just kidding. I'm. Oh, gosh.

Okay. I'm in trouble. Listen, all right, all right. Listen, what I'm saying, this has nothing to do with being female at all. This has everything to do with us not getting it right.

We mess up all the time. Have you ever put together a piece of IKEA furniture, right? How many times you have to undo and start over because you've missed something every time. Every time you empty a box, there's stuff left over because we haven't done it right. If we can't put together IKEA furniture without getting that wrong, it is really, really hard to understand the God of the universe sometimes.

Hear that?

Verse 4.

You will not certainly die, the serpent said to the woman. For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She listen, men. She also gave some to her husband, who was there with her, right? And he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked.

So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Have you ever felt fig leaves? Fig leaves are not soft. They are kind of prickly, a little furry. It's like, you know, like a cat's tongue.

It's kind of what it feels like. You ever felt a cat lick? You don't. They're evil. But it has that same kind of roughness.

Could you imagine putting that on all your most sensitive bits?

This is like eternal punishment. Now you know you're naked. You're covering up with the most uncomfortable plant ever. I mean, except for poison ivy, that'd be a little worse.

But immediately there were repercussions for being disobedient.

Verse 8 says, Then the man and his wife. I don't know who married him. Nobody asked me to do the service. But now they're married, okay? The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And they hid from him.

They hid from him among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, where are you? He answered, I heard you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid.

Wait a minute.

And God said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? Now do you believe that God didn't know?

This is that moment, Moms and dads, where you go Now I'm gonna give you an opportunity to confess to me. Did you really not? Did you know that there was cookies in that cookie jar? Did you eat those cookies? Chocolate on their face?

Of course you know, they ate the cookie. This is an opportunity for God to say, yes, you can confess. Let's come clean. Let's fix the brokenness. Let's get after it.

What is his response? Here we go. The man said, the woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you've done again? God knows, right?

God is omniscient. Right is the word meaning all. What all knowing God knows.

What is this you've done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me, passing the blame from one to another, passing the blame. You don't see that today, though, which is good, right? All of us, we take responsibility for our actions. No.

Okay. The serpent deceived me and I ate it. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you among all, above all livestock and all the wild animals. You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers.

He will crush your head and you will strike his heel to the woman. He said, I will make your pains in childbearing very severe. With painful labor, you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. Hallelujah.

Don't read this literally, friends. Right? We just had that conversation to Adam. He said, because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree, which I commanded you, you must not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you, through painful toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return. Yeah, we've all heard it.

Adam named his wife Eve. So up to this point, she was just. Hey, baby.

No. All right. Adam named his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all the living. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, the man has now become like one of us.

Knowing good and evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of Life and eat and live forever. So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden. Cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life Church. Many Christians inherited a reading of Genesis 3 shaped more by ancient church fathers than by the text itself.

We inherited a story that often begins with, you are broken, you are sinners, you are detestable in the sight of God, you are unworthy. And much of the creation is left out of Sunday morning worship. We always, I mean, I remember being a young person hearing about how unworthy I was to be one of God's followers.

Genesis does not begin with sin. We just went over the fact that Genesis begins with a reminder that all of us are made in the very image of God. You are wanted. God called you very good. Before there is failure, there is belovedness.

Before there's sin, there's a relationship. Before there's shame, there is goodness.

Some of us grew up with a version of the Bible that says in the beginning, God was already disappointed. If you grew up in certain churches, you might think that Genesis 3 was God's version of the talk that we all got. Listen, I'm not mad at you, but I'm so deeply disappointed in you right now.

Genesis 3:8 says that Adam and Eve hid from the Lord among the trees of the garden. The all knowing personal God of creation has to seek them out despite knowing their mistake. We just talked about how God is all knowing and God calls out to them. God seeks them in the midst of their problem. God doesn't hide from them, they hide from God.

God doesn't storm off when he realizes that they disobeyed him. God doesn't say, you screwed up now. You've introduced death to all of humanity. Humanity. So now you go figure it out on your own.

In that moment, God comes up with a plan. God shows Adam and Eve what we call in the United Methodist Church grace. An undeserved, unmerited and loving action of God that provided in that moment for their needs. In the midst of a situation that literally could have been deadly, God said, if you do this thing, you will die instead.

God instead of God actually striking the first people dead instantly and starting over. God in this moment offers hope. While Adam and Eve were forced to deal with the consequences of their actions, they weren't destroyed, they weren't killed. I want to remind you friends, that the story of the Fall is not a story about God abandoning humanity. It's about God refusing to abandon humanity.

So there was a Wednesday night many years ago when I was a Much younger man at a church that I worked at. And on that Wednesday night, the church was all abuzz. It was in the middle of the summer. VBS was happening. We had children's ministry happening down at one end of the hall.

We had youth ministry happening. We had tons of adults in the building volunteering for all these different events. Everyone was popping in and out of my office. There was obviously somebody who was missing some keys. Hey, can I get your keys?

Someone who was looking for the curriculum they needed to teach the small groups on Thursday or Wednesday night. Someone else was needing to talk to me about the C that they got on their math quiz. Someone else, you know, just looking for the keys to our old beater minivan so they could go pick up a couple other kids to bring them to the church. It was just one of those crazy nights in the church that happens, you know, days where the church kind of feels like an airport terminal, everybody going in different directions. But instead of airplanes, all we have is attendance pads, right?

Like, at one point, I just needed just a minute, just a minute of some peace and quiet to finish thinking about what was happening that night. I didn't need a nap. I didn't need a vacation. I wasn't going on sabbatical. I needed five minutes of just some silence.

So I slipped down the hallway in the children's ministry area, and I ducked into a storage room, and I sat on an overturned box of used VBS decorations. And that was the only place in the whole building where no one. No one was going to come look for me. That's what I thought anyway. About two minutes into my moment of quiet, the door swung open and one of our volunteers froze like she had just seen a raccoon in the pantry.

Matt, are you hiding? And I said, I'm afraid of nothing, woman. No, I'm not hiding. I'm just checking out the integrity of this VBS box here. It's fine.

So she nodded and then slowly backed out of the room. Eye contact. You've seen those. Like, alrighty, just gonna leave you here. Shutting the door behind her.

In that moment, she saw something that I didn't think that anybody was going to see. And I realized afterward that we were both doing the same thing. We were interpreting an awkward moment based on what we thought we knew. She thought I was hiding. I thought I was being incredibly strategic.

None of us had the full story. And that's kind of what's happening here in Genesis 3. Most of us in this room could never read Genesis 3 with fresh eyes. Because even the first time that we read this story, we have probably already come to an understanding based on the things that we've heard about Adam and Eve's mistakes. Maybe it was because of the coloring sheets that we had created together or the songs that we sang in Sunday school as children.

All of these things play a role in how we were taught that the story of Genesis 3 should be taught. We inherited a version of the story, a version shaped by centuries of interpretation, misinterpretation, translation choices, theological debates and cultural assumptions. We were told what the story meant long before we ever had a chance to read for ourselves what the story was saying. As a result, Genesis 3 has become one of the most misunderstood and I would say, misused passages in all of Scripture. It's not because the story is unclear.

It's because the interpretations we've inherited are unclear. Because of this, we have to talk about how we got the story. And for us to get to that point, we have to talk about a man. This man's name is Augustine. You might know him as St. Augustine or as I learned Augustine.

Right? Like, no, yes. Okay, St. Augustine. His name was Augustine of Hippo and he was a 4th century North African bishop whose writings shaped Western Christianity more than almost any other person, with the exception of the Apostle Paul. He was smart, he was passionate, and he deeply reflected on his own life when he was reading Scripture.

So everything that he read about Scripture, he read through the lens of his own decisions, his own faults, his own mistakes.

Augustine wrestled intensely with his own desires and failures. One of his failures was women. He liked the ladies.

When he read Genesis 3, he read himself into that story. And from that moment on, he understood humanity's fall to be inherited guilt that all of us take in as a part of our lives. For Augustine, Adam's sin didn't just affect Adam, it damaged all of human nature itself, leaving every single person born guilty or broken or unable to choose God without the help of God's Holy Spirit. This interpretation led Augustine to see Genesis 3 primarily as a story of sin and punishment and catastrophic rupture of relationship between God and humanity. And because Augustine's voice became the most dominant voice in the Western church, many Christians today understand Genesis 3 through his lens.

Many modern preachers and pastors teach the story in a way that assumes the text about the fall of humanity, how it is corrupted, and how each of us deserve wrath. Even though the Hebrew storytellers emphasize the relationship restoration that God is still providing, in those moments, God's continues present, God continues with God's continued presence.

There's a lot sin for Augustine was the center or the focal point of the creation story. And because of his influence over much of church theology, for the first 400 years of the church, Genesis 3 began the doctrine of original sin. Have you heard that doctrine before? Original sin? The Hebrew word for sin in Genesis 3 is the word katah, which means to miss the mark.

Wait, there we. There we go.

It's a missed opportunity or to do something as a failure to not achieve a goal or to achieve your target. Sin is not something that means you are terrible, that you're going straight to hell. Don't pass go, don't collect $200. Sin literally means you aimed wrong. You aimed at the wrong thing.

And while United Methodists do believe in the idea and the doctrine of original sin, we don't see it from Augustine's perspective. For us, original sin means that all of us are born into the situation of sin. Our world has been damaged by the introduction of sin into the world by Adam and Eve. But none of us are guilty of Adam's sin. That is not good.

That's not good there, as a matter of fact. Our book of Discipline. I've got to read this to you. Our book of discipline contains a section called the 25 Articles of Religion. This is Article 7 and this is what it says about original sin.

You ready? This is 18th century English. Good luck in understanding it. Alright. Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk.

But it is the corruption of the nature of every man that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from the original righteousness and of his own nature inclined to evil and act continually. Did you get that, everybody? You good? Moving on. Just kidding.

We're gonna do. I want you guys to understand this from a better perspective. We're gonna read this together. I think you'll enjoy this. I have updated the language.

It's gonna be fun. We're gonna read this. Oh, come on, man. Can you change the background of that real quick? Because I messed it up.

I thought I fixed that, but I didn't. All right, here we go. This is. This is friends. A Gen Z version of Article 7 of the articles of Religion.

No, you'll understand it. This is so easy, fam.

If you start with fam, you know, it's good, fam. Original sin is not just everybody copying Adam like he's some messy E boy influencer. That's straight Pelagian cap. Sis, what we're saying is this. Humanity caught Adam's big yikes energy so hard that now every one of us shows up a little sus from day one because we're all part of Adam's fam tree.

We're born low key, salty. Not serving righteousness but giving main character in a cautionary tale. Left to our own vibes, we don't choose the W path, we take the L route on repeat bussin out bad decisions like it's a bop.

We're not talking cancel culture levers of petty. We mean the kind of spiritual chaos where if God doesn't step in we will absolutely ghost holiness and run straight toward whatever drama hits different at the moment. So yeah, humanity's default setting is extra chaotic and ready to catch these hands from temptation 24 7. Without grace, we're not snatched, we're not dripped, we're not given righteousness, we're just vibing in the wrong direction continually Bet.

Alright, good.

In the midst of humanity's sin, what God does in the garden when he can't find Adam and Eve, Scripture says that he calls out to them. The Hebrew phrase it's pretty hard to understand. It's everybody say yikra. That's actually pretty good. It's interpreted to mean a phrase that is God called out.

Where are you? It's God speaking this beautiful phrase. It means more than just speaking out. Hey, where you at? It is calling out by name, specifically Adam and Eve.

Where are you? There's individuality meant in this Hebrew phrase. It's an invitation to a response. God calls to Adam and Eve even as they hide. There's almost this feeling of desperation in God's voice.

Where are you? Does God not know where they are? Right. If he's all knowing, he knows exactly where they are, he's waiting to hear if they'll respond. He is emotionally and intentionally initiating a conversation here.

This is not really a question of location, it's a question of relationship. Are you still with me? Are you still in close relationship with me? We believe that God knows everything. So God knows exactly where they are physically.

Yikra means that God is making sure that Adam and Eve still believe in their own hearts that they love God despite their failure, despite their disobedience. God is asking, why have you hidden yourselves from me? Do you not trust that I will still love you? Parents, it's the same thing that we go through when our kids do something really stupid. They go hide behind their, you know, curtains.

Thank you. Couldn't think of the word curtains. In their room, like, you see their feet poking out. I know you're here. Where are you?

Right when we are guilty and shamed, the first thing that we want to do is go and hide from mom and dad, right? It's the same with Adam and Eve. I want to hide because I have guilty, done something awful. The creation story is not a story of God abandoning humanity. It's a story of God seeking to restore humanity.

And when we really read it, we can truly see that the first question that God asks after the Fall, it's not, what have you done? It's not, why did you fail? It's not, how could you? But instead, where are you? Do you still love me?

It's a question of longing, a question of love. It's God being in pursuit of his creation. When God calls out, where are you? It's not just the voice of a judge hunting criminals. It's the voice of a parent searching for a child who's hiding in shame.

St. Augustine would say that Adam and Eve's sin of disobedience would have broken the relationship between God and humanity forever. As a consequence, every heir and offspring of humanity was just as guilty of breaking that relationship of God from the time of conception as Adam and Eve were. But the Hebrew here suggests that God's heart is broken, not that God acts out of spite or anger and as confirmation that God still loves all of humanity. That same sort of emotion shows up again centuries later when we read some of the words that Paul writes when he talks about the difference between Adam and Jesus. For centuries, Christians have read all of this scripture through Augustine's lens, as if God were announcing guilt instead of seeking relationship.

And that misunderstanding, understanding doesn't just affect how we read Genesis, it also can affect how we read the words of Paul. So before we read, we read Romans 5 together, we need to remember the tone of God's voice in the garden. God is lovingly and emotionally crying out to Adam and Eve, where are you? I still love you. Our relationship is not over because you've messed up.

So let's read what Paul says in Romans 5:12 through 17. He says this therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin. And in this way, death came to all people because all sinned. To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not charged against anyone's account where there was no law.

Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command as did Adam, who is the pattern of the one to come. But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many? Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man's sin. The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation.

But the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if by the trespass of one man, death reign through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ? Paul, in this moment is contrasting Adam and Christ. Adam brings brokenness. Christ brings restoration.

Adam brings hiding. Christ brings healing. Adam brings shame. But Christ brings dignity. Genesis gives us the question, where are you?

Roman gives us the answer, where? Jesus is here with us for us, bringing to us God's grace. Paul isn't describing a God who abandons us in Adam. He's describing a God who comes searching for us in the person of Jesus. Genesis reveals a God who seeks.

Romans reveals a God who saves.

We've spent today looking at a story that many of us inherited long before we ever opened a Bible for ourselves. A story that told us that Genesis 3 was mostly about guilt, shame and God being disappointed. A story that taught us to see ourselves as broken people first and beloved by God second. A story that shaped. That was more shaped by Augustine's wrestling with himself than the Hebrew storyteller's hope.

But here's the truth. The stories that we inherit shape the world that we see. The Scriptures as we understand them shape the world and everything in it for us. If we inherit stories of guilt, we're going to look for stories of guilt everywhere. If we inherit stories of fear through Scripture, we will read fear into every page of the Bible.

If you inherit a story of eternal separation, you'll imagine a God who stays distant. But when God steps into the garden and yells out to every one of us, way Yikra, where are you? That is not the voice of a God who has given up on humanity. That's the voice of a God who refuses to let the story end in shame. And when Paul writes to the Romans about grace overflowing, he's reminding us that the God who called us in the garden is the same God who calls out to us in Christ, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

God did not give us Jesus to condemn us. God gave us Jesus to restore us. So the invitation today is simple.

Let Jesus be your lens, not Augustine, not me, not your childhood traumas, not your fear, not your mistakes, not the loudest voice in Christianity that you see today. Let our lens be Christ and Christ alone.

We should interpret everything we read in Scripture through the person of God revealed in Jesus.

So friends, let Jesus be the lens through which you read Scripture. Friends, let Christ be the lens through which you see yourself.

Let Christ be the lens through which you see your neighbor. Let Christ be the lens through which we see our world. When we as the body of Christ can do this, we will see every person around us as valuable and we can begin to work to bring about God's kingdom here and now. Church, you were loved before you were lost. Grace is both the first and the final word.

Let's pray.