He does not hold us responsible for what others do - or, allow themselves to do. When Adam and Eve blamed the serpent (I do not know whether you are aware of this), they were in effect blaming God.
Did you ever notice that? The woman that You gave me. It's Your fault, God, because if You hadn't given me that woman - and she wasn't the way she was, if she hadn't thought the way she thought, if she hadn't enticed me - then I wouldn't have sinned. And so, God, it's Your fault because You gave her to me.
So, you see, if somebody puts a gun into your hand and tells you to murder somebody, you can blame it on somebody else because they gave you the gun. I mean, that's the way Adam was reasoning. If a person imbibes too much alcohol, and he gets behind the wheel of an automobile, and then he crashes and kills somebody - we have a tendency to blame the alcohol, not the man.
You see this in the courts. If a man killed somebody with a gun, he would probably go to prison at least for life and maybe have his own life taken away. But if a man kills a person with an automobile while under the influence of alcohol, the chances are very great that the courts are going to be lenient because it was the alcohol - it was not the man. Strange reasoning, but that is the reasoning that Adam used here. It was because You gave me the woman that I sinned.
Have you ever noticed as you have read through the Bible how God likes to ask questions? For example, when He asked Adam and Eve questions in the Garden of Eden after they had sinned. Well, let us take a look at that quickly.
Everybody was passing the buck all the way down, and to this day human beings do the same thing in life.
God did not ask questions because He did not know the answers. He was not trying to figure out whether Adam was hiding in one or another of the trees. Later in the account of Cain and Abel when Cain was displeased that his offering was rejected, God asked him a series of questions.
So in both those incidences God asked a lot of questions.
In II Samuel 12:9, God asked David through Nathan, Why did you despise the word of the Lord? by doing what is evil in His eyes. In Isaiah 6:8, God asked Isaiah, Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us? And in Matthew 16:15, the Lord asked, Who do you say I am? The apostle John recorded many of Christ's questions as well. God asks questions to get us to face the situation. He asks us, we have to answer, and whatever we answer better be the truth. And then even if we answer the truth, often we have condemned ourselves, but that is one of the main reasons God asks questions - to get us to face the situation ourselves to more deeply realize what we have done.
There are two things that happened here that changed our relationship with God and each other. They go hand-in-hand with what has been the point so far in this sermon, because they are both, perhaps, the most significant part of the problems we face today. There is failure to stand by the decisions not to be disturbed in the truth of God's Word. And there is a drive away from God by Satan's own self-deception of, This is your right!
Brethren, we live in such divisive times that are only getting worse as rights are being demanded, and the making of decisions that are not built on truth, but on what is best for our side and convincing others that it is to ensure our rights! Do we really think that we can make proper decisions based on the truth of God's Word as long as we hold on to the this is my right, attitude that is trumpeted all around us throughout this world from all sides?
