Please turn with me to Genesis 3, verse 13. By doing all He came to do, the Son of God has fulfilled the ancient promise given to the man and woman immediately after they initially sinned: the seed of the woman shall bruise his head [the serpent's head]. He misled her with subtle deceit. But God said to Adam and Eve that He would send someone, that is, Jesus Christ, who would bruise Satan's head.
So we must view Christ coming into this world in terms of all that Satan had done and had produced. Christ came to fight it; He came with a mighty sword.
He came to destroy and to undo the works of the Devil and He did it like this. His coming in the flesh tells us one thing more than anything else: that God is love and that God has loved us with everlasting love.
Satan says God is against you, God hates you, and He enjoys making you slaves. But Christ came in the flesh, which makes a great statement that God loves us. And His sacrifice and resurrection even proves it all the more - that God loves us, and always has and always will. But He loves His church even more than the average human being. And we are so thankful for that.
So here is a world that has rebelled against God. It spat in His face. In arrogance, it lifted itself up against Him. A world like that deserves punishment. It deserves condemnation. Yet into that same world, God sent His Son. He came to contradict Satan's lies in His appearing and coming to undo the original lie. It is proof that God loves us because it is for us that He has done this. Often I wonder about the world's mentality when they are proven, or maybe scientists prove, that God exists. How in the world they can deny it?
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 it was the serpent's fault. If he hadn't really been crafty - if he hadn't just put the right twist on his words; if he hadn't used that kind of reasoning that he did; if he hadn't been a temptation and enticed me into doing what I did - I wouldn't have done it. Do you see that Joseph did not allow himself that, did he? He must have understood the principle that was involved here.
Back in James the first chapter, James' concern here is not to allow us to use the specious argument that Adam and Eve did in order to evade responsibility for wicked conduct. We have to understand that, yes, God did endow us with desires and appetites, but they are good and (when we understand it) necessary to the kind of life that God created for us to live and to enjoy. But it is when we misdirect the wonderful gifts that He gave to us that evil consequences result.
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?
