Sermon manuscript:
Over the centuries there have been a lot of different ideas
about what an ideal human existence might be like. The Egyptians had their
views. The Greeks had their views. So on and so forth. There is also a certain
view of what our existence as human beings should be in our own time and place.
An important component of our own views that we should
mention right off the bat is that we don’t really care about those ancient
views because we have advanced far beyond them. The ancient people were
primitive and stupid. We are advanced and brilliant. So unless you want to be
primitive and stupid, you had better think like all modern people think. We are
essentially taught that there is only one right way to think about how we
should exist as human beings.
Let’s speak a little bit about the content of this modern
view. Perhaps its most important idea is that we are masters of our own
destinies. We are competent, and we have been empowered. We have invented
marvelous machines, marvelous drugs, marvelous systems of government, marvelous
financial tools, and so on. All of these marvelous things allow us to shoot for
the stars—literally. One day we might discover some wormhole in space-time that
will allow us to colonize other planets. We have the potential to dominate. The
only thing that can stop us is if we quit trying.
But all of this dominating doesn’t come without a cost. It’s
not very popular to talk about these costs. It hurts the narrative. But you can
judge for yourselves whether our belief in ourselves hasn’t come back to bite
us.
This miserable plague that has afflicted our planet for the
last 18 months seems to have been cooked up in a virology lab in Wuhan. Scientists
from around the world thought it would be a good idea to engage in some “gain
of function” research. What “gain of function” means is that they take normal
viruses that have appeared in nature and they see if they can somehow soup them
up and make them more contagious and lethal. Why? Who knows?
Another important example of the price we’ve had to pay is
with more immediate ways of destroying ourselves. Surprisingly we have managed
to refrain from baking whole cities at a time with our thermo-nuclear bombs. We’ve
had the technology available for 76 years. We’ve had the bombs on hand, ready
to go, ready to mutually annihilate one another, for about 60 years. I wonder
if some day there might be someone who believes that he has the potential to
dominate, and he will stop at nothing until he has brought it about. Perhaps
it’s better to rule over a wasteland than be a small fry, lost in the shuffle
of history.
A few years ago a massive machine called the Large Hadron
Collider was brought online in Switzerland. This machine smashes together atoms
and parts of atoms at tremendous speeds, just to see what might happen. The
theoreticians said that what might happen is that they’d create a black hole.
The possibility was ever-so-remote, but just maybe. The problem with a black
hole, though, is that they don’t get smaller. They suck into themselves
whatever might be around them. They are very mysterious, unimaginably powerful
things. A black hole in Switzerland would crush this planet in short order.
As Christians who confess what the Bible teaches, we believe
that this world is going to end. To be sure, it is God who is going to bring
that about. It seems fitting to me, though, that the way that God might do that
is by us destroying ourselves. In mankind’s relentless pursuit for the dominion
and the power and the glory, perhaps one of these experiments is going to blow
up in our own face. Perhaps they already are.
So if this is the modern view of how we should exist as
human beings, what is the Bible’s view? Our Old Testament lesson gives us some
insight into that question. This reading is from Genesis chapter two. Here
Moses is speaking about life in the Garden of Eden prior to the fall into sin.
God created Adam. He made trees grow from the earth—beautiful trees and
beneficial. He put Adam into that Garden to work it and take care of it.
And what was Adam thinking about while he busied himself? He
wasn’t thinking about buying the neighbor’s back forty. He wasn’t thinking
about ways that he could capture the market and take everybody’s money. I don’t
think he was thinking all that much about tomorrow. He was receiving his daily
bread, day by day. He was like the birds of the air. The birds are not wracked
with worry about where their next meal is going to come from. The heavenly
Father feeds them. Adam was seeking first the kingdom of God and all other
things were added unto him.
Instead of being preoccupied with his own glory, Adam was
having the best of times tracing the glory and beauty of God. We like looking
at the lines and contours of the things we love. Adam loved the Lord God. No
one had to tell him to fear God or trust God because Adam loved God. Adam loved
the Name of God. He called upon it in every trouble, prayed, praised, and gave
thanks. God’s Word was a lamp to his feet and light to his path. God’s word was
good to eat and nourished his mind. It gave him light and life and happiness.
So if Adam was happy, and Modern Man is unhappy, do we need
to get rid of our cars and computers in order to be happy? This thought shows
us how foolish we have become. We are always thinking that we can fix things by
manipulating the outward things in our life. We think, “If only I had this,
then I’d be happy.” Or, “If only I didn’t have this, then I’d be at peace.”
Whether a technology, a program, an institution, what-have-you exists or does not
exist is not what is important. It was not the presence or absence of gadgets
or what nots that made Adam happy. Adam’s love of God is what made paradise
paradise.
The way that paradise was lost was by Adam changing his
mind. He came to believe that he could secure his happiness by manipulating the
fruits of a created tree rather than dealing with the Creator. The Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil made Adam wise precisely in his being obedient to
God’s command and heeding his warning.
A lot of people think that Adam and Eve became wiser when
they ate this fruit. However, whatever knowledge they gained of evil, they lost
even more knowledge of what was good. I suppose they came to know evil in a
different way than before, but they most certainly lost their fear, love, and
trust in what is good.
Accordingly, immediately, they began to prepare for their
battle against nature and against God. When God, who is goodness itself,
strolled his way through the Garden in the cool of the day, Adam and Eve hid in
the bushes. There is no more tragic and awful scene than that. There is no
better description of the way that we are with our fallen nature—hiding from
God. Hiding, because we have sinned. The wages of sin is death. “In the day
that you eat of it, you will surely die.” The failure to know what is good,
and to believe in him, is terrible.
While cowering in the bushes, wishing that mountains would
fall on you, being terrified of God, is tragic and awful, it is the best and
the highest knowledge that we can attain with our fallen human nature. It is
the wisest we can get. It is far wiser to do this than it is to believe the
devil’s stupid lie that God just won’t care. There are precious few in this
world who hold to this knowledge—precious few who are afraid of God. They think
that they’ve somehow gotten some kind of special knowledge about God. As it
turns out he doesn’t really care whether we are sinful or not! Or they believe
that we’ve moved on from God and can do better by making our own way with our
own inventions and plans.
Not only have these people lost the knowledge of what is
good. They’ve also lost the knowledge of what is evil. They are stupider than
Adam and Eve, who at least still had the good sense to be aware of their guilt
and shame, and to take God at his word when he told them they were going to die
when they sinned against him.
God could have left them in that tragic and awful state, but
he didn’t. He did not wait for them to redeem themselves or even to come to
their senses, because that would never happen. Instead he spoke the truth to
them to undo the newly entered lies. He did not hold back on their sins. They
tried to wiggle out from under their guilt by passing the buck, but to no
avail. They were sinners. God also plainly told them that they would be cursed
because of their sin. No facet of this earthly life was left untouched, which
is true to this present day. Nowhere is the fall into sin more evident and
palpable than in our own darkened souls. But he also promised to give them
Jesus Christ, who is the light of the world. A second Adam would be born from a
second Eve. He would bind the devil and plunder him of all his possessions.
This Son of God and seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. God
received them back for Jesus’s sake.
God took them back, and he really meant it, but things were
never the same for Adam and Eve or for all the believers after them. The flesh
is fallen. The curses endure. We have to believe
in God’s goodness rather than fully experience it. There is a part of us that
is unbelieving and hostile to God and everything about him. That same part of
us loves and trusts in created things rather than in the Creator. All believers
have something of a split personality. We do not always feel like tracing the
fair beauty of the Lord our God.
This is a terribly humiliating and disappointing thing for
us believers who are still in our flesh. Thank God, it will not always be that
way. A day is coming when our sinful flesh will die and we will be raised with
purified bodies. Then, for the first time, we will know the joy of loving the
Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our strength, and
with all our soul. Once again we will be wise. We will know what is good.
But we do not sit idly by, waiting to be raised and healed
in the future, as though our baptism is ineffective in this life. A beginning
of the holy life is already begun in this life by the almighty Holy Spirit. And
thus there is something that we can learn from Adam in his pre-fallen state. We
can copy him. Outwardly our lives might be rather different than his. We have
clothes and tools, nuclear bombs and souped up viruses. But what is the same is
that we have the same Lord God. He loved and accepted Adam. He loves and
accepts us for Jesus’s sake.
We do not need to depend upon how we can supercharge this
life, escape to another solar system, or have our name written in a history
book. The goodness of God is to be seen in the so-called little things in life
that aren’t actually that little: He daily and richly provides me with all that
I need for this body and life. He gives me food, drink, clothing, shoes, house,
home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children,
devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather,
peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors,
and the like. We do not need to look for exotic and unusual things that are
good. His mercies are new every morning.
Because we value such different things, there will always
and necessarily be a disconnect between worldly people and believers in Christ.
Worldly people are always going to be looking for the next big thing that will
give them happiness. They will move, and they will shake. They will cut figure.
People will put their trust in them.
Believers always have to work on putting their trust in the
Lord our God. Sin has put cataracts on our eyes so that we have a hard time
seeing how God takes care of us every day, just like he did with Adam, and that
our future is secure in him. Our future is secure to the point where we can
say:
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff comfort
me.”
“I know that my Redeemer lives. At the end of time he
will stand over the dust. Then, even after my skin has been destroyed,
nevertheless, in my own flesh I will see God. I myself will see him. My own
eyes will see him, and not as a stranger.”
We are not looking for how we can conquer nature and extend
our lives and influence to the greatest extent possible. We are looking for
God.
No comments:
Post a Comment