Check your Vision
Coulee Community Church
January 8th, 2017
Scripture: Genesis 3:6-7
Opening Illustration
A few months after we moved here, they started to tear up Dewey Street right out here in front of the church. First they tore it down to the foundation. Then they came through and updated some of the sewer and water lines. I remember one morning when Tammie was visiting in Kenosha, I woke up to take a shower, and there was no water. I tried a few different faucets and nothing. I looked out the front window and saw them digging in the middle of the street, and fresh water pipe on the curb and figured they were changing out the mains.
A few hours later, I heard the gurgling start in the pipes and went and turned on the kitchen faucet. Muddy, black goo came flying out the faucet, and then it shut off- the filter had clogged almost immediately. I took apart the faucet and cleaned the filter, and turned the water back on. The water was thick with sludge, sand, and just smelled awful. I spent the next several hours emptying the hot water heater, flushing it out, and running water through our system until everything was clear.
Fortunately, I had set up my coffee the night before…otherwise I’d have been very cranky. "Hypo-caffeine-imia"
It’s amazing how much it shakes you when something you take for granted as reliable goes bad. Under normal conditions, we can talk into the bathroom or kitchen in the middle of the night and get a nice clean cold drink of water and never have to look at it. But for days after this event, I always ran the water for a few moments, ran it into a clear glass to examine it, and then if it was clear, I’d drink it.
When something is as reliable as our water, or our electric power, we forget it’s even there, or what it takes to deliver these modern conveniences to our homes.
Adam and Eve ran into a similar problem in the Garden of Eden- their source had always been God. God was reliable, He was constant, and HE was always good to them. In fact, God was the source- period. There was nothing else.
But then an enemy came into the picture, and enemy that was bent on polluting God’s goodness in their lives.
Today, we are going to look at what happened in the beginning as told to us in scripture. Specifically, we will look at the seminal moment when Lucifer, also known as satan, tempts our ancestor Eve, and her immediate reaction to it.
Genesis 3:6-7
6 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 also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 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.
Prayer
Proposition- There are 100 different ways to faithfully preach from this scripture. I’m going to focus in on one single truth that we find here because it’s the basis for the rest of the truth we find in scripture.
This basic truth is something we all need to understand about our very nature-
Human beings, as originally created, were not created to be autonomous.
We are not like this cell phone
We were never designed to run on our own power. It’s not like we have a rechargeable battery that holds us from Sunday morning service to Sunday morning service.
Our design is to be constantly plugged into a power source to operate the way our creator intended. Anything powering us other than the power we were designed for is destructive and harmful to ourselves and to others.
ILL- If you have ever been to Europe, you have a great example of this. If you take your phone charger and plug it into a European outlet and then plug your phone into that, you’ll fry your phone. American power grids are designed to deliver 110 volts at most outlets, the exceptions being things like electric dryers or high capacity freezers- and they have special outlets so you can’t accidently plug in your microwave to it and x-ray your whole house.
European power grids deliver 220 volts- twice as much as their American counterparts. Plug your phone into that, and it immediately will fry either the charger or the phone, and you have a potentially expensive problem on your hands.
You and I are the same way- spiritual speaking we have an enemy whose primary goal is to make sure we plug into the wrong power source.
That point is key, as is the next point-
As a Christian, the enemy can’t touch our power cord. If you are not a believer in Jesus as Lord and Savior, you are already plugged into satan’s power source- he has complete control over what flows into your heart and you are powerless to change it without God enabling you through the Holy Spirit’s power to change and come to Jesus.
But as Christians, satan has no ability to forcefully unplug us from God’s power and into the worlds power source.
But he can get us to use the wrong outlet.
In essence, that is what is going on here in Genesis 3.
With that in mind, let’s take apart this scripture a little and grow to understand what in life tries to disconnect us from our power source.
The first thing I want to look at is
I. What lowers our vision
ILL- Last week I was sitting in the back of the ambulance returning to Black River Falls from La Crosse and noticed my phone’s battery was under 50% so I grabbed my charger out of my bag to plug it into the ambulance’s power to charge it. It was 3am, and very dark in the back of the ambulance and I was fumbling to find the outlet to get it plugged in. I didn’t want to turn on the lights because that messes with the driver, so I fumbled around until I finally got it.
I was thinking about that as I prepared this lesson- it’s exactly what the devil tries to get us to do- lower our ability to see clearly where and what we are plugging into.
This is what is happening to Eve here-
The enemy took her eyes off the express command of God
He did that by casting doubt-
Doubt about God’s intentions
Doubt about God’s goodness
Doubts about God’s provision for them
That’s why her vision lowered. Prior to that she saw God as only Good, and as her only source of strength and truth. But then Satan dangled the possibility of a second choice in front of her.
She focused on the creation being her source, instead of the creator.
That’s what lead Eve down the wrong path, and it’s also what leads us down the wrong path.
Like Eve, we focus on the things of this world.
Look at the progression of Eve’s vision being taken away from God.
Before you are too hard on Adam or Eve, remember it’s the exact progression you and I still follow today into sin.
1st, She saw the fruit was good for food-
Remember, God had told her
“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.” (Gen 1:29)
God repeated the command in Gen 2
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen 2:16-17)
To Eve, looking through her eyes of innocence, the tree looked like any other tree- full of fruit that God created and told her she could eat as much as she wanted. It wasn’t a tree surrounded by cackling demons, or under a huge dark foreboding cloud. It looked like any other tree.
That’s why Eve thought it was good for food- satan used the promise and provision of God and twisted it slightly to get Eve to consider going against God’s express command.
He continues to use the same tactic today
2. It was pleasing to the eye
Can I be honest for a moment this morning? This might be a little controversial to some but please hear me out before you stone me with the hymnals.
We in the church (the Christian church throughout history) have done a grave disservice to the world by denying the pleasure of sin. The reason people go against God express commands is that most sin causes some sort of emotional and/or physical pleasure or both- for a season. The enticement that was given to Eve here is the same enticement that you and I face every day.
I listen to a variety of pastors for my own spiritual growth- one of them being John Piper, and I was listening to a teaching by him yesterday and he referred to an article in Leadership magazine so I looked it up. The article was written by a well sought after minister who traveled extensively to give revival style meetings. In that article, he detailed struggling with lust for over 10 years before finally being delivered from it. The article was anonymous as he would most likely permanently loose his ordination if he ever went public with it, but it described his descent into a lifestyle that was fractured. HE called it a cognitive dissidence= believing with all his heart what the bible had to say on the subject, but being unable to change his behavior of pornography and visiting strip clubs when he traveled.
He cited a statistic that was staggering- that a recent survey of a major hotel chain had found that the highest usage of adult movies ever seen was during a youth pastor’s convention.
Shocking isn’t it?
There is one other thing that was very troubling to me about this article.
It was written in 1983. 34 years ago.
Do we think it’s gotten better, or worse since then with the advent of the internet?
It’s easy to dismiss people and especially leaders who fall into sin as failures, liars, cowards, and hypocrites, but to dismiss the sinner denies the obvious truth.
Sin is very attractive, looks good to the eyes, may even feel good for a season. We need to admit that.
Our message as the Christian church needs to be this-
“Sin may very well feel good now, but sin is something you have bought on credit. Sooner or later, you have to pay the bill, and that is when the suffering starts”
The bible agrees with this when it says For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
The third thing that lead Eve to disregard God’s commands was that she desired to know things that she was not able to handle knowing.
That’s another problem with sin- it gives us knowledge of evil that God never equipped us to handle.
We have a friend who was raised in a very strong Christian home. When Tammie and I first got saved we’d hang with her and her husband, and they mentored us intensively during our early days in the faith.
When we’d talk about spiritual things, we would talk about our past lifestyle of rampant sin. We’d get through talking and look at her and she’d say, “I think I swore twice in high school…”
I remember at the time kind of rolling my eyes at little miss goody two shoes, but now I know the truth-
She was blessed to not know what I know, or Tammie knows, or her husband knows- the deep depths of depravity that sin can take you into.
At the other end of the bible from the Garden of Eden, Jesus is talking to the church in Thyatira. As a church, Thyatira’s rebuke was tolerating rampant sexual sin within it’s membership, led by a woman named Jezebel. At the end of the letter Jesus says that He will not burden His church with satan’s so called “deep secrets”. Within this context, the deep secrets that Jesus is referring to is a full awareness of the deep horror and darkness of sexual depravity.
However, satan has these so called deep secrets tied to every sin.
The enemy uses our God given curiosity against us. We think that we have to know what is behind the curtain God has drawn over the evil side of existence to protect us from ourselves.
And that is the key to understand God’s prohibitions- They are not burdensome- they are protective.
God wants to protect our vision because what goes into our eyes immediately plants itself in our hearts.
Through protecting our vision, God keeps us from harm.
You know there is a common misconception that God doesn’t want us to enjoy life. Everyone thinks of God as this cantankerous old man sitting on a porch yelling at the neighbor kids. But that’s not the God of the bible.
God wants us to enjoy the life HE has given us. He wants to be able to pour blessing down upon us, but we have to have the foundation to hold that blessing.
Without the moral teachings of the bible, the things of this world are like pouring concrete without a form to hold it- you just create a big sloppy difficult to clean up mess.
Jesus compared it to pouring new wine into an old wineskin- the new wine would ferment and expand, causing the wineskin to stretch and burst, ruining both.
We know the rest of the story-The bible says that their eyes were opened. You could write a hundred page thesis on that one statement describing what happened at that moment in the spiritual realm. For our purposes this morning, we will talk briefly about what they were opened to see.
II. The Fall of Vision
A. There is a modern saying that information is not bad in of itself, it’s how you use this information that makes it good and bad.
B. I disagree, as does the bible. The bible clearly indicates that there are things that humanity was never meant to know.
C. Remember, we were designed for a single power source. When that power source is connected to the wrong outlet, it torches our souls and spirits and leaves us broken and useless. We might think this new found vision is liberating, but in reality, it totally blinds us to our spiritual condition.
ILL- Glasses and Vaseline-
I left home when I was 16 years old and lived among friends and spent a great deal of time partying. I remember walking down the street and having this feeling of total freedom- I could do whatever I wanted without consequence or some parent telling me what to do.
What I didn’t realize is that satan was in fact doing this- (clouded glasses)
Clouding my vision so that I couldn’t see God anymore and only what was right in front of me.
(this is what the worlds freedom of vision is like)
Upon eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve both experienced this. Two things immediately happened-
Their ability to see through Spiritual eyes was removed- it needs to be strongly noted here- Adam and Eve most likely had the same abilities as the resurrected Jesus did- including Spiritual power and awareness.
As a part of their and our created nature, God only allows us to use one set of eyes or the other. As fallen beings, we are born with the ability to only use the eyes located in our heads. In other words, we can only see with eyes of flesh the world around us. Those who have come to Jesus and made HIM Lord and Savior have gained access again to their true eyes- their ability to see through the eyes of the Holy Spirit what is going on around them, and ideally Christians should spend our whole lives perfecting that ability to use their spiritual senses. As the old hymn says, I once was blind, but now I see.
The second thing that happened was the very Spirit of God coming out of them and lifting off of them. Again, as innocent and perfect they had all of the manifold presence of God filling them but when they sinned, that presence immediately left.
And that is the nakedness they saw. One moment, the fullness of God was in them and upon them, and the next it was all gone.
Let’s consider that for a moment.
I would imagine that we have all lost someone very dear to us. For me, it was my maternal grandfather. For others, a parent or even a child. We carry that lose our entire lives as an empty place inside of us filled only with cherished memories of that person.
But imagine for a moment that your entire existence is one of knowing only the fullness of God living within you, and suddenly it’s gone.
How empty they must have felt. One other person has experienced that sudden emptiness, and that was the man Jesus on the cross when the fullness of God’s presence of was turned from HIM. The innocent man bore the guilt of us all so that through turning to Jesus in faith, we would never have to bear the eternal emptiness of not having God within us.
Instead of turning and crying out to God for forgiveness, They turned to a physical solution to cover their spiritual nakedness. That’s a whole series of sermons right there, but let’s move on.
God didn’t leave humanity without hope. Jesus’ sacrifice was written into the plan long before Eden was ever created, and through repentance and faith in HIM, we can have a promise of restoration, and a rebirth of our vision.
III. The promise of restoration and revision (a revised vision)
The word revision means a revised vision- to restore what was originally intended or improve upon it.
God wants to restore our vision and promised that to Adam and Eve as well as to their descendants- which is you and me.
Musicians/communion
I wanted to begin this year doing just that- allowing God to restore our vision.
To clean our spiritual glasses
To be able to see which outlet we are plugging into
And to cleanse our hearts from the satan’s so-called deep secrets that we might have delved into this last year.
That’s why we are going to have a time of fasting until the 22nd where we will break it together with a fellowship meal of celebration for what God is going to do this year in our lives, and the life of this church.
We are going to being it right now with a time of consecration as we share the LORD’s supper.
