From Adam to Malachi (37 Biographical Sermons (One of over 850 messages on one data CD that may be ordered from The Pastor’s Pulpit, 2003 Lynn Ave, Anderson, SC. 29621 for $30 pluse $3.00 shipping.)
Sermon 1
(A. The Period of Beginnings - Genesis 1-11 Gen. 1:27-3:31
ADAM - THE ONE IN EACH OF US
THE WHEN
Turn to older editions of the King James Version and above Gen. 1:1 you will find the year 4004 B.C. as the date of creation. Bishop Usher derived this from an intensive study of the chronological lists of the Bible. Most scholars recognize the impossibility of correctly deriving so specific a date from chronological tables because they are filled with gaps. Modern anthropology says modern man, HOMO SAPIENS, evolved from his ape-like ancestors somewhere around 200 million years ago. Between these two extremes, probably around 10 thousand years ago God made man and woman.
THE WHO- CIVILIZED HUMAN BEINGS
Archeology reveals an amazing thing. When diggings go back more than ten -twelve thousand years, they find almost nothing - a few bones, a few burnt places and some crude rocks that look something like tools. But around ten thousand years ago an explosion of culture took place - suddenly, mysteriously, miraculously. They find jewelry, graves, altars, pottery and tools. The record of the rocks is that cultural man, intelligent man, Biblical man, burst suddenly on the scene near Nineveh. He did not evolve there he was placed there by the hand of God.
T his is the record of the Word of God. Somewhere near this time period God created man - Adam and Eve, in His own image, intelligent, cultured, and religious. He was not some grunting half-ape, eating bugs and berries until he accidently discovered fire. The first period of the Bible - THE PERIOD OF BEGINNINGS - in Gen. 1-11, shows man building cities (4:17); ranching (Gen. 4:20; playing music (4:21) and working with metal (4:22).
A REAL PERSON
This old argument between the Bible and science will never be settled and I simply take my stand that even if evolution is a fact (and I doubt that it is), man as we know him is not part of the evolutionary process. God created three things in Genesis 1-3: the physical universe (1:1); animal life (1:21); and man (1:27). Adam and Eve were real people, historical people, intelligent, God-like people who came forth from the creative hand of God.
A REPRESENTITIVE PERSON (Romans 5)
But Adam is more than a REAL man, he is a REPRESENTATIVE man. We are physically related to him and we are spiritually related to him. Paul writes in Romans 5: “Just as sin entered the world through one man (Adam) and death through sin, in the same way death came to all men, because all have sinned. Just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness (the sinless life and sacrificial death of Jesus) was justification (being declared innocent of sin in God’s sight) that brings life for all men.
For just as through the disobedience of the
one man, the many were made sinners, so also
be made righteous.”
(Rom. 5:12, 18-19 NIV,Parenthesis Mine)
THE DEBATED MEANING
This passage points out our spiritual union with Adam and the consequences of his fall for him and us. What this actually means has been hotly debated in the Christian church. Pelagius and his followers say there is NO CONNECTION. Like Adam we are created sinless and free to choose. One only has to look at a BIBLE or a BABY to disprove this. The Bible says we were made sinners (Rom. 5:10); we are conceived in sin (Ps. 51:5), and we are “by nature the objects of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). A baby tells us the same. Every parent knows the one thing you don’t have to teach a baby is how to be bad.
James Arminas and his followers soften the truth and say we inherit Adam’s depraved nature but not his guilt. The Bible says the whole race was condemned (Rom. 5:18) in Adam. Most evangelical Christians agree with Augustine and Calvin that Paul teaches we inherit both depravity and guilt from the sin of Adam.
If you say, THAT’S NOT FAIR! THAT’S NOT RIGHT! I agree with you. But I also remind you that you need to hear the rest of the story, not just the bad news of what Adam did, but the good news of what Jesus Christ did. Paul says in Romans 5 that just as we are lost in Adam, sol can we be saved in Christ. He is our REPRESENTIVE MAN IN HEAVEN when we accept Him. We choose to face God after death in Adam or n Christ. We are like Adam….
A. IN HIS TENSION (Gen. 1:27; 2:7)
Genesis (1:27) stresses his and our connection with the DIVINE NATURE (God’s image) and chapter two with the DUST OF THE GROUND. Adam, like us, knows the tension of living with a nature made of the divinity of God and the dust of earth. Every person is a walking civil war, where that which is good in him and that which is evil in him, battles for supremacy.
BIBLE BIOGRAPHY brings this out. David, in love, spares the life of Saul, who is trying to kill him. But when Nabal, the rancher, refuses to give him aid, David sets out to kill him and all the men who work for him. He said, “May God curse me if even one of his men remains alive by tomorrow morning” (1 Sam. 25, LIVING BIBLE). When the man’s wife intercepted David and begged for mercy, David said, “Thank God for your good sense! Bless you for keeping me from murdering the man. . .” (1 Sam. 25:33). Which one is the real David? They both are!
Read any man’s record or look in the mirror and you will find a torn creature. There is the upward pull and something in us responds. There is the downward pull and something in us responds. Paul lays bare this civil war within in Romans 7 when he says, “I do the thing I hate. . . “ There are HORNS and HALOS in human nature.
“Within my earthly temple there’s a crowd/
There’s one of us that’s humble, one that’s roud/
There’s one that’s broken hearted for his sins/
There’s one who unrepentant sits and grins/
From such corroding care I should be free/
If only I could know which one is me.”
(Author Unknown)
B. IN HIS TRIALS
He was created in perfection but God put him on probation by restricting what he could and could not do. We, because of Adam’s fall, are created in imperfection, but we too are on probation. We face the tests of life found in these early chapters. First, like Adam, we face:
1) The Trial of Sin (Rom. 3:11-18).
We have the chance to be good or to give ourselves to evil. Evil is not just the choice of some bad things, it is horrible beyond our darkest dreams because at its source is a personal devil. We all have chosen the evil side and the result is the cruel immoral world we live in. The most savage, animal on earth is man. Our name should not be homo sapiens “man the wise” but homo feros “man the fierce.” The Bible says of mankind, “Their feet are swift to shed blood, ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know” (Rom. 3:15, 16). There is no humble animal that does not flee from the shadow of a man like a little child from a wildfire.. Man kills for fun. He will butcher an elephant to have an ivory stair rail. He will train other animals to kill. He will blind goldfish with a needle to make them sing.
Nothing brought to the surface the savagery of man more than the Holocaust. There were sadists like Eichmann who helped slaughter six million human beings. But worse, there were businessmen who decided how to get gold from the Jews’ teeth or make rope from the Jews’ hair. There were Lutheran girls who spent all day typing Nazi death lists. There were German engineers designing, and German industrialists building, ovens designed for human beings. There were German doctors performing hideous experiments on Jewish children.
Illustration: A psychiatrist working in the mind of modern man is just like a coal miner, the deeper he goes, the dirtier he gets. Vance Havner used to tell us not to say the world was going to the dogs because that was an insult to the dogs. We all face the choice of siding with evil or with good. We also face….
2) The Trial of Sorrow (Gen. 3;16-19).
Because we live in a world of sin, we live in a world of sorrow. God, in His judgment on Adam and Eve for their sin, took the most blessed event in life – childbirth. He told Eve she would have to wade through pain and tears and blood to give life. God spoke to Adam in agricultural terms and told him his work with a cursed ground or universe would be a hard, uphill battle until the day the ground swallowed him up in death. How many of us to this day feel swallowed up by our work?
These two judgments are but the tip of the iceberg of this trail of tears we call life. Look in the Bible and look in the mirror and you will see what I mean. Job said, “. . . man is born to trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward” (Job. 5:7). A sign in front of a church said, “If you are not hurting, come in and tell us how you do it.”
There will be sorrows from THE BLOWS OF LIFE. This is the message of Job. Bam! He loses his wealth. Bam! He loses his family. Bam! He loses his health. Bam! He loses his friends. Life is like that. Friends tell David, “The baby is dead.” The doctor says you won’t get well! The boss says you’re fired. The wife says she loves someone else. The policeman says your son is in jail. The blows of life.
There are sorrows from THE BOREDOM OR BURDEN OF LIFE. This is the message of Solomon in Ecclesiastes. He had money, power, wisdom, women and anything else he wanted, but life to him was emptiness, what he called “chasing after the wind” (1:14). Look in the Bible and in the mirror and you will see the lines of boredom on your face and the tragedy of boredom in your life. Boredom gives birth to adulterous affairs, to experimentation with drugs, to depression and to suicide.
3) The Trial of Salvation (Gen. 3:8-21).
On the positive side there is the trial of salvation. When Adam and Eve fell into sin, all HELL broke loose. But praise God, all HEAVEN broke loose too. God came and looked (3:8) for his wayward ones and after pronouncing judgment, offered them a covering of animal skins (3:21) to hide their nakedness. There are two beautiful pictures of God’s gracious salvation offered through Christ. God comes to us in sin and offers to cover the shame and nakedness of our sin with the blood and goodness of His Son who dies for us.
Thus we face the third trial, that of salvation, where Satan bids us stay as we are, and where God bids us become like He would have us be. Salvation involves a war-fare. When Christ came to Paul on the Damascus Road to save him he said, “It is hard for you to kick against the prodding poles” (Acts 26:14). Like a crazed ox Paul was kicking back at the loving nudges God was making to his soul.
The trial begins when God COMES! The first glimmer of hope came when God came and called out, “Where art thou?” God knew where Adam was but He wanted Adam to know. It grieved God when David lay with Bathsheba and so, through Nathan, He called out, “David! Where are you?” God calls out in as many ways as there are to the human heart. He can call out to a young couple through the birth of their first child. He can call out through the death of that child.
But more than this, GOD COVERS OUR SINS (3:21). The devil led man to try and cover the shame of his sin with fig leaves as he leads us to cover ours with things like religion, morality, or denial of the after-life and a judgment day. But God, knowing the depths of sin needed a deeper cure than morality or religion, covered them with animal skins. Somewhere in what had been the beautiful, tranquil Garden of Eden, before the eyes of Adam and Eve, God took an innocent animal and killed it. The ground drank up its blood.
Adam saw PAIN When Adam saw the gasping, spent life of that poor creature and the crimson stain at his feet he knew for the first time what it meant to die.
But Adam also saw God’s PLAN of salvation, where the guilt of sin would be placed upon an innocent victim and the guilty person’s sins covered by the death of another. "How unjust this is! How unfair this is! How wrong this is!" This is man’s verdict and it is right; unless -- unless the innocent victim could be God Himself - punishing sin and pardoning sin in one great sacrificial act. And that is exactly what God has done. In Jesus God has taken the punishment for sin upon His own self so that He could "be just" and still forgive the sinner (Rom. 3:20). Paul said, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world back to Himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19).
This leads us back to Romans 5 and the harsh truth of our fall in Adam. The rest of the story is that Jesus Christ, the last Adam (1 Cor. 15:45), has undone the damage and won back our right to the garden and the tree of life (Rev. 22:1-2).
I am not sure of our relationship to Adam but I am sure of the relationship we can all have with the Lord. Adam will answer for Adam and I will answer for me. We are not lost in eternity because of what Adam did, but because of what we do not do with Jesus Christ. The title of Spurgeon’s great sermon sums it up - LOST THROUGH ONE: SAVED THROUGH ONE.
