Genesis 2-3; Romans 5
You can be seated. Please turn
in your copy of the scriptures to Romans chapter five. Romans
chapter five, we’ll be reading verses 12 through 21. So beginning
last week and probably lasting into a couple of weeks into January,
we’ll be looking at the theme, the biblical theme of covenants. Last week, we looked at the covenant
of redemption, which would be what we glean from places in
the scripture where we see the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit determining to love a people from eternity past, loving a
people that the Son would be sent to seek and save. And then
as a reward for his obedience, he would inherit them as his
eternal inheritance, his bride, the church. Today, we’ll look
at the covenant of works, God’s requirement of perfect obedience
of Adam. And then the effects which have
come to us because of his disobedience. Next week, we’ll think of the
covenant of grace, God saving a people out of the impossible
covenant of works through the covenant of grace, his son, where
Adam failed in the garden of paradise, his son, the Lord Jesus
passed. that test of temptation in the
wilderness, 40 days without food, without companionship, 40 days
without all the helps that Adam had, yet Jesus remained faithful
to God’s will and purpose. Then we’ll think about the covenants
as they unfold with Abraham and with Noah and with David and
with Israel and Moses and the like. So hear now God’s word. This is Romans chapter five,
beginning at verse 12. Therefore, just as sin came into
the world through one man and death through sin, so death spread
to all men because all sinned. For sin indeed was in the world
before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there
is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to
Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression
of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the
free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one
man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free
gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for
many. And the free gift is not like
the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following
one trespass brought condemnation. But the free gift following many
trespasses brought justification. If because of one man’s trespass,
death reigned through that one man, much more will those who
receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness
reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore,
as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness
leads to justification in life for all men. For as by the one
man’s disobedience, the many were made sinners, so by the
one man’s obedience, the many will be made righteous. Now the
law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace
abounded all the more, so that as sin reigned in death, grace
also might reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Let us pray together. Lord,
help us to see our ancestor, Adam, but also our great big
brother, the Lord Jesus. One brought us death, but one
has brought us everlasting life. And may that be glorious to us
each and every day. Help us, we pray in Christ’s
mighty name. Amen. I would imagine every one of
us in here knows some scriptures. Maybe you like to cheat a little
and learn the little verses like Jesus wept. Nice little easy
one. Maybe you have memorized John
3, 16 for God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten
son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have
everlasting life. And on through the scriptures,
you may have some Psalms and some Proverbs and some epistles
memorized. And you can call those things
from your mind to your lips. I would suspect some of us know
Bible stories. We know about Adam and Eve. We
know about Abraham and Isaac. We can remember the story of
Noah building the ark and the flood and maybe the Tower of
Babel. We can think of David and Goliath. And we can go through
the scriptures and recall several of the big stories of redemption. But I wonder this, do we know
the whole Bible? In a couple of weeks with the
start of the new year, we’ll send out an email with a link
and it’ll have these read through the Bible plans. You know, some
of you will read it through in a year, some of you two years,
some of you might take a little longer. Some of you can do it
a couple of times in a year, but you can select a reading
plan that helps you. And the benefit, the blessing
of those through the year reading plans are that you go through
the whole Bible. You see things fresh, you see
things you missed the year before, you see things you missed maybe
20 years ago or 10 years ago or sometime in the past reading. But as we read through the whole
Bible, we get all of the Bible, we get all of the stories, but
importantly, we get the whole story. We get the whole story
of the whole scripture from the Garden of Eden all the way to
the picture of the temple in the New Jerusalem in heaven.
And from beginning to end, we see that God simply desires to
be with his people. He wants to be with his people
and sin, the fall, the effects of the fall get in the way of
that. And so today we want to think about the whole of scripture
and all that is in between being one big story of creation, and
fall and then redemption. If somebody asks you this week,
what’s the Bible about? Don’t get lost in the weeds.
Just say it’s about creation, fall and redemption. And so today,
as we think of, again, of covenants, last week we looked at the covenant
of redemption. We looked at how the son obligated
himself to the father to seek and save the lost. And that as
a promise for leaving heaven, going to earth, uh, being the
suffering servant of the book of Isaiah and living obediently,
dying righteously, uh, rising perfectly. and saving a people,
Jesus inherits those people as his gift for keeping the covenant.
We’ve talked about covenants. They have promises. They have
obligations. You keep the obligations, you
get good blessings, good promises. You fail to keep the obligations,
you get curses. And so we thought about how the
Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and the covenant of redemption
graciously out of their inner Trinitarian love determined to
show that love that they had with one another within the Trinity,
to show it to a people, a created people. Now we’ll think today
about God and Adam, how God made a special relationship with Adam,
a covenant of works. If he obeyed God perfectly, he
would get life. But if he disobeyed God, he would
get death. And so we, of course, know what
he chose and the effects of it. And we’re dealing with those
effects. But as we think through creation and then fall, but also
redemption, we have great hope. And we are, in fact, in Christ
Jesus now living out of the down payments of that great redemption
that has been somewhat realized, but will be fully realized at
the great day when Jesus Christ appears. Now, next week, we’ll
think of the covenant of grace where Adam failed to keep God’s
law perfectly. And so therefore we did. Jesus
keeps it holy. And when we come to faith in
him and are justified, as Romans 5 spoke of so many times, our
justification is God sees us just as if we’ve never sinned,
but just as if we always obeyed or were covenant keepers. So
Adam today is the covenant breaker. Jesus next week, the covenant
keeper. So the covenant of works, the
setting of this great conundrum of the human life is it takes
place in a beautiful garden. Remember in your reading of Genesis,
God takes six days to make the world and everything in it. He
takes what is formless and void and he forms it and he fills
it. And on day six, he makes Adam. He makes man and from Adam,
because he needs a helper suitable from his rib after a deep sleep
comes Eve. And so Adam and Eve are our first
parents. They are placed on the earth.
They are put in the garden. to work the garden, to make it
fruitful, to keep the garden and to protect it. And there
to have dominion over the whole earth. And the idea was that
they would expand the garden as they had godly, righteous
offspring. until it covered the face of the earth. And so the
whole earth would be covered with the glory of God. The whole earth would be covered
with a family of nations that were devoted to the living and
true God. When God made the world and everything
in it, it was a beautiful place. It was an orderly place. It was
a place of great purpose, of great delight. And when Adam and Eve came into
that garden, it was a true habitat for humanity. It was a place
that inspired life. It allowed life. It gave life,
it was fruitful, and it multiplied every plant, every animal, and
every human being. So Adam and Eve were put in the
garden to work and to keep. They were there as the first
parents to hear the word of God, to obey the word of God, and
to perpetuate or put out the word of God through their offspring
to the ends of the earth. But in Genesis 2.17, we find
God giving Adam a probation. We find Adam giving God a test.
We find Adam being put to the test to see if he would be found
righteous or if he would be found unrighteous. This is paralleled
so well in the gospels when Jesus is sent out into the wilderness.
And he sent out into the wilderness to be tested to see if he would
obey God perfectly. Of course he does. And Adam does
not. Now we’ve had a description read
to us from Genesis 1, 2, and 3 of the wonders of creation,
the beauty of the earth and all these delightful trees. There
was the tree of life. There were all kinds of trees
with good to eat fruit. And then there was also the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. And so God says to Adam
in this great probation, this great testing in 217, you may
surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it for in the
day you eat of it, you will surely die. How much? More did God need
to say? How clear was his command? How
clear was the obligation? How clear was the threat? And
so we, in our theology and our reading of the scripture, call
this the covenant of works. Adam, if he obeyed God perfectly,
would live righteously. But if he, disobeyed God, he
would die the death of a condemned person. And so righteous Adam
in an unstained, unbroken creation, righteous Adam in a God-blessed,
it is good, it is very good creation, uh, could live and he could live
well in that beautiful garden. Uh, he could work and he could
worship. You know, sometimes we, this
time of year when it’s really freezing cold, we, we see those
commercials on TV for, uh, blue water destination and think,
oh, it’s warm there. It’s, you know, if I went there,
it’d be perfect. You know, if I went there, it’d
be great. All the food I wanted, all the,
you know, the sun and the sand and, and all the rest. And we
think, oh, what, what it would be, or maybe it’s the mountains
for you. Whatever your happy place is, as we might call it,
it really ought to be the garden. It ought to be the place where
there was wonderful beauty that came from the voice of God as
He spoke and it came to pass. Not only wonderful beauty, but
perfection and provision and fellowship with God and just
all the things we need. You know, we can pick a destination
today and our plane will be late. We can pick a destination and
they’ll lose our luggage. We can pick a destination and
it’ll storm the whole time. We can pick a destination and
Something can go awry, but back in the garden, everything was
happy. Everything was perfect. Everything was bliss. There was
no sin. There was nothing to stain or
mar the happy life of worship and work. Now, God only said
one negative thing in the early days of creation. He said when
he saw Adam and his effort to name all the animals to be the
the great first taxonomist. He only said one thing, one malediction.
It is not good for man to be alone. And so he gave to Adam
a wife, a woman, a companion. And the two of them were to live
in the garden where God put them. They were to work and to keep,
there was to be the ordinance of marriage and the family. And
chapter two ends with what you might think to be a very strange
statement, but it makes sense in light of what comes at the
end of chapter three. At the end of chapter two, it ends with
Adam and Eve were naked and they were not ashamed. If you read
through the whole of scripture, you’ll see that anytime there
is nakedness, it always comes with shame. It’s the case with
Noah when he became drunk after the flood. And remember after
he was drunk, he was naked and one of his sons looked upon his
nakedness and God cursed him for it. The other two brothers
put a cloak on their backs and they walked backwards. and draped
their father’s nakedness, they covered his shame. Remember the
Lord Jesus, when he was put on the cross, he was stripped naked. He was a man of sorrows. He was acquainted with grief.
His shame, our shame, in fact, was before the watching world.
And so chapter two ends with their purity. With their lack
of knowledge of what was sin, what was evil, they were living
perfect and righteous lives. But then there’s chapter 3. Wouldn’t
it be great if Genesis 1 and 2 was just the way it was and
the way it stayed? But chapter 3 begins sort of
like the famous American story. It was a dark and stormy night. Chapter 3 begins, now the serpent.
was more crafty, the serpent was more cunning than any other
beast of the field that the Lord God created. Now, what do we
know about the serpent from the rest of the Bible? That ancient
serpent, I believe Peter calls him, the ancient serpent, the
devil, the one who, because of his pride, said to God in heaven,
as John Milton, the great poet, wrote, he’d rather rule in hell
than serve in heaven. He rebelled against God. He fell
from his place as a created being, a created angel, seeing the beautiful
wonders of the love and perfection of the Trinity, the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, seeing the wonders of heaven, the works of creation,
surely having a bird’s eye view of it. He said, I rather rule
in hell than serve in heaven. And so when he slithers into
the garden, he continues this effort. He continues this mission,
this wicked mission to take all that God has made and mar it
with sin and wickedness and rebellion. And so he comes into the garden
slithering in. He doesn’t go to Adam. He goes
to Eve. Now, before we proceed, you’ve
got a couple of questions in your mind. I know it. Could God
have prevented this? Yes. God can do everything. He’s holy. He’s righteous. He’s
perfect. He’s powerful. We say he’s omnipotent. God can do all his holy will.
Now, if God can do everything, is there anything he can’t do? Yes. He can’t sin. Is there anything
God can’t do? Yes. He can’t do bad math. Is
there anything God can’t do? What’s the old goofy proverbial
saying? Can he make a rock so big that
he can’t move it? Think on that one for the afternoon.
Could God have prevented this? Yes. But the real question is,
why did he permit it? And we carefully use the word
permit because God is not the author of sin. God cannot sin,
nor can he be the author of sin, but can for his own glory God
permit evil. Absolutely. And if you have doubts
in your mind, remember the cross. When Peter preaches in Acts chapter
two on Pentecost Sunday, or the day of Pentecost, when the spirit
rolled through Jerusalem and people said, oh, they’re drunk.
He said, no, they’re not drunk. It’s the promised spirit as the
prophets foretold. And then he proceeds to preach
a message about Christ and salvation. And he says, it was the definite
plan and foreknowledge of God. for the Savior, the Lord Jesus,
to be put to death unjustly by sinners such as yourselves. And so could God have prevented
the sin and the fall and the need for Jesus to go to the cross?
Absolutely, he could have. But he permitted it. And why
did he permit it? Well, the safest answer is for
his own glory, right? Remember, if you don’t know the
answer to something, it’s always Jesus or for his own glory. Or maybe
it’s best to say sometimes I don’t know. But he did this for his
own glory. And as we considered last week,
the covenant of redemption, we remember this inner Trinitarian
council meeting where the father said to the son, the son said
to the spirit, the spirit said to the father and the son, what
will bring us most glory? And we catch glimpses of this,
don’t we, in Ephesians chapter one, where in Jesus Christ, in
Him, we were predestined before the foundation of the world.
In Him, we were foreknown. In Him, we were loved. And so
this everlasting love of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, what will bring us most glory will permit a fall. and will send the second person
of the Trinity, the Savior, the Son, the Lord Jesus. Thou who
was rich beyond all splendor, for our sakes he became poor,
that we might become rich. That’s the story of the incarnation,
isn’t it? Why did Jesus come? He wasn’t on a religious tourist
trip to the Holy land. Now he came with a mission and
that was to seek and to save the lost who had fallen in Adam
in his sin and his transgression. And so another question may come
to your mind. Could Adam have obeyed God and
live forever? Well, think about Adam for a
few moments. He was created by God and he was created as a,
I love how our catechism puts it. He was created in knowledge.
and in righteousness and in holiness to bear the image of God. That’s
who you are according to Genesis. Now remember, zoom out about
a thousand feet over the book of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus
numbers, and Deuteronomy. God through Moses was giving
Israel a worldview. The Canaanites had theirs. The
Hittites had theirs. The Babylonians had theirs. They
all had creation stories. They all had flood stories. They
all had ways to be righteous and ways to not be righteous.
And so in a real sense, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy were the worldview from Moses by the spirit to the
Israelites and therefore to us. And so where did we come from?
Well, God made us. What’s wrong with us? Sin. How do we get over sin? Well,
the answer is Jesus, the second Adam, but could Adam have lived
forever in righteousness? And the simple answer is yes. If this probation said, if you
eat, you will die, what’s the opposite or the converse of this
option God gave him? He could have not eaten and lived. Now when Adam does sin and Eve
does sin, you know, we didn’t read that part of Genesis three,
but God lines them up and tells them, you know, Satan, you’re
going to crawl on your belly. Eve, it’s going to hurt real
bad to have kids. Adam, you’re going to plow and plant and you’re
going to get very little produce and you’re going to have busted
knuckles. And he said thorns and thistles and sickness and
sorrow. And there’s going to be this
cosmic ongoing battle between the seat of the woman, that’s
Jesus, and the seat of the serpent, that’s Satan. And when God removes
them from the garden, he puts an angel there. He used to think
it was quite mean. Why’d you banish them from the
garden, God? Well, Genesis three is very clear. He doesn’t want
them to take hold of the tree of life and live forever in sin. That would be hell. That would
be to live apart from God. And so could Adam have obeyed
God and live forever? Well, In theory, if he offered
life or death upon disobedience, he then offered life upon obedience. And so suppose Adam lived through
this probationary period and he obeyed God perfectly. He took
God at his word. He lived out of his commands.
He lived for his glory. He worked the garden and kept
the garden and he spread the glory of God and the beauty of
God across the face of the earth. At some point, he would have
eaten of the tree of life and lived forever in righteousness. Now,
some of you have been in the confession of faith, Sunday school
class, and you’ve heard the fourfold state of man comes to us from
St. Augustine, comes to us from the great Scottish theologian,
Thomas Boston. In the garden, it was possible
for Adam to not sin. But in the garden, it was also
possible for Adam to sin. We know that he did. After the
fall, it was only possible for mankind to sin. He couldn’t not sin. His heart
was bent towards wickedness and evil. But then in a state of
grace, when Jesus comes and he makes us new, he gives us a new
heart. It’s possible for us to not sin. We know the Apostle
Paul says in Romans 7, I know the thing I ought to do. but that I do not do. So it’s
also possible to sin. And so we live in a tension.
We live in a struggle as believers made new by the blood of Jesus
and the spirit of the living God. We struggle with living
by the spirit and living by the flesh. And that’s a lifelong
battle until we get to glory. And we are supposed to put to
death our sin and to live righteously. And sometimes we do, and sometimes
we don’t. And Paul says at the end of Romans
seven, And this is the apostle Paul that he struggled with it.
And he said, Oh, wretched man that I am who will deliver me
from this body of death. Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ,
our savior. But then when we get to heaven,
when we are glorified, it is only possible to be righteous. That is our future state. We’ll
be restored back to that great Edenic blessing where we love
God and we live for God perfectly. We don’t go off on our autonomous,
self-ruling ways. We don’t question God and say,
did you really mean it? You think about all the problems
in the American church today. And maybe you have a workmate
who goes to a mainline church. Maybe you have a friend or a
family member that goes to this kind of church. And they bring
up this social issue and that social issue. And because you
believe the Bible, you say, I don’t agree with that. And you begin
to scratch your head and you wonder why is the church dealing
with these issues? And it really goes back to the
garden, sola scriptura, scripture alone. What was Satan’s point
of attack when he came to Eve in the garden? did God say? You know, you can get into an
argument with another person, another Christian about gay marriage.
You can get into an argument with a person about, you know,
who should we ordain and who should we marry? You can get
into arguments about all kinds of social issues. Should we be
Republican, Democrat, you know, whatever. It all boils down to,
do you believe in solo scripture or not? Because if you drop,
the doctrine of the sufficiency and the authority and the power
of scripture. Everything else is a downhill
slide. And so it’s the big one, isn’t
it? And what has Satan’s point of
attack been on the church? Same as it was for Eve, has God
said, and what has the modern church and maybe they’ve crossed
the line and ceased to be the church because they don’t listen
to the king of the church and the voice of that great king.
But has God said, and that’s something for each of us to wrestle
with. Has He said? And the answer is yes. Is God
to be believed? Of course. Is God to be obeyed?
Definitely. Is He to be trusted? You know,
Adam and Eve in the garden, they had everything. I mean, they
had the sun, they had the sand, they had 70 degree balmy weather.
They had no need for sunscreen because there was no sunburn.
I mean, they had food to eat. They had a diet. They had exercise. They had work. They had everything
that they could have possibly needed. And Satan tempted them
with the one thing they didn’t have. And that was autonomy.
They should have been happy and holy and content with all that
God is, all that God had given and all that God had provided.
And isn’t that like us to say it’s not good enough? Isn’t that
like us to complain and to say, you know, God, if you would just
give me this, I’d be happy. If you just add this to my list
of blessings, I could sing louder in church. I’d even sing the
fifth and the sixth standards, right? That’s how we think. But
God was so good and gracious with them. And the serpent came
to Eve. and cast doubt in her mind, God’s
not been good to you. God’s got some more that he can
offer, but he’s been holding it back from you. And you know what you find by
the end of Genesis chapter three, there’s only one thing left for
God to give. And that’s his son, the Lord Jesus. He had given
them everything. And now the thing they needed
most was the thing he was willing to give. So we thought about
the covenant of redemption. Now we think of the covenant
of works. We think of God’s love and man’s failure. My brother for a time lived in
the District of Columbia and on his license plate, it said
taxation without representation. And we think of Adam as our head,
our federal head, like the federal government. And we think there
is no damnation. without representation, as the
book of Romans chapter five, and Paul also writes this in
First Corinthians, clearly tell us, by one man’s trespass, death
enters the world. But it’s by one man’s obedience
that the many are justified, their sins pardoned, and his
obedience credited to our account. When Adam and Eve sinned against
God, The ending verses of chapter two are no longer true, where
it says they were naked and they were not ashamed. They are now
naked and ashamed. Their sin has exposed them. And
so they go wandering off into the trees, thinking they can
hide from the omnipresent, omniscient God. He knows all things. He’s
everywhere at all times. And they wander off in the trees
and hide from them. And you can imagine the little sowing festival. Let’s get some leaves. We need
a covering. Let’s make a covering for ourselves.
Let’s cover our shame. And God comes looking for them.
And it’s a funny question. Where are you? He knows. What
have you done? He knows that too. And as he
calls them to account, he graciously pursues them and he graciously
holds them accountable for what they’ve done. I told you in the
day that you would eat. that you would surely die. Several
years ago, before R.C. Sproul died, it was at one of
the last conferences where he publicly spoke. And during the
question and answer time, somebody wrote this question. And it’s
the infamous, what’s wrong with you people video, if you’ve ever
seen it. The question went something like
this. After Adam and Eve had sinned, why was God so hard on
them? After Adam and Eve had heard
God’s voice and known the right thing to do and didn’t do it,
why was God so hard on them? And Sproul, I think it may have
been the last year he was alive, you could see his neck veins
bulging and he probably had to turn the oxygen up on his tank. He had COPD at the time and he
went ballistic. He said, these are the dust of
the earth. These are the people that God
made. God breathed the breath of life into them. He gave them
paradise and he gave them one commandment and they broke it.
And he told them, if you eat, you will die dead, gone. And instead of dead dying, he
delayed death and he covered them with the skins from an animal’s,
something died, something’s blood was shed so that those animals,
the animal skin could cover their sin and their shame and their
nakedness. And he said, you think God was hard on Adam and Eve?
And that’s where he explodes into his, what’s wrong with you
people? Do you see the grace of God from the love of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit to give even a type and a shadow already
of another who would die as a substitute in place of you. And where our
sin needed covering, it needed to be covered with something
from another. And for them, it was that animal
pointing to Jesus. And for us, it’s the righteous
robes of Christ. And maybe you’re today a little
bit entitled, God owes me something. Maybe you think you’re pretty
doggone good and it’s other people who, they got the problems. It
takes the blood of the son. It takes the obedience of the
son to cover our sin. And so two things to remember.
One is don’t, spurn or make light of the gospel of Jesus through
his son’s obedience, life suffering and death. But the other side
of that is you owe God something. You know, from time to time we
quote the Heidelberg Catechism, what is my only comfort in life
and in death? It’s that I belong to my faithful savior, Jesus
Christ. He’s bought me with his precious blood. Not a hair can
fall from my head without it being the will of the heavenly
father. And then second question, what are the three things I need
to know? And simply put, it’s guilt, grace, and gratitude. That’s what we need to know to
enjoy and live and die in that comfort. We know of our guilt,
our sin, it’s from Adam. We know of the grace of God in
Christ, but do we live lives of gratitude? Do we live lives
that say, God has saved me. I can’t live that way. God has
rescued and redeemed me. I can’t go back. God has bought
me at a great price. Therefore, I’ll live for him
as a living sacrifice. These are the things that we
must think and consider. Yes, sin and fall and corruption
are radical, awful, terrible things. But God has been merciful
to us in the person and in the work of his son, the Lord Jesus.
We’ll think more of that next week. But thank the Lord. This is not the end of the story.
It’s just the beginning of God’s gifts of grace. Let’s go to him
now in prayer. Lord, we thank you for the gospel
promise in Genesis 3, that you will put enmity between the seed
of the woman, Jesus, and the seed of the serpent, Satan. And
we thank you that in real space and in real time and in real
human history, the head of the serpent has been crushed and
his demise, his doom is sure. One little word shall fail him.
And we thank you that the gift of faith is ours. May we look
to Christ, not look back to Adam and his failure, but look to
Christ, his performance, his obedience of the covenant of
work so that we might take hold of the covenant of grace. Hear
us and help us. May we rejoice in Jesus, our great savior. Amen.
We want to respond to God’s word by singing number 58, O Splendor
of God’s Glory Bright. Let’s stand to sing.