EDEN: ONCE UPON A PARADISE
REALITY BITES
COMMUNION SUNDAY
DR. JIM DIXON
GENESIS 3:1-8
JUNE 8, 2008
In Genesis, chapter 2, the Bible tells us that there was a land called Eden. In that land God planted a garden. The garden was also called Eden and so, in the Book of Genesis we see the garden called the Garden in Eden and the Garden of Eden. The meaning of the word Eden is uncertain. Its etymology is unclear and there are some scholars who believe the word Eden comes from a Samarian word, “edenu” which refers to a “plain” or a “wilderness.” There are far more scholars who believe that the word “Eden” has Hebrew roots and it comes from a root word meaning, “delight” or “pleasure. We do know that this Hebrew word Eden was sometimes used to describe a garden, sometimes used to describe a vegetable garden, sometimes used to describe a flower garden. Most of the time this word Eden was used to describe a forest of beautiful trees.
The Garden of Eden had many trees, and, in the Garden there were two special trees. One was the Tree of Life. We took a look a couple of weeks ago briefly at the Tree of Life and we will visit it again down the road. There is also mention of a second tree, The Tree of Knowledge, The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We saw two weeks ago that at the Denver Botanical Garden there is a special garden called The Scripture Garden and The Scripture Garden is kind of a biblical garden with plants from the Old and New Testament. I mentioned that there was a plaque at The Denver Botanical Gardens outside of The Scripture Garden, a plaque which claimed that in all likelihood the Tree of Knowledge of Genesis, chapter 2 and 3 was an apricot tree.
Of course, scholars don’t know. Some scholars think that perhaps it was a fig tree. Some think it was a pomegranate tree. Some have even suggested an olive tree. All of those trees were indigenous to ancient Mesopotamia but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter what kind of tree it was. The Tree, in the whole Eden story, represents the boundaries of God. God said, “You may eat of any tree in the garden except this one tree. You shall not eat of it.” Of course, Adam and Eve crossed the line and they sinned against God. They sought independence from God and they entered a whole new reality. That reality was the reality of separation. Suddenly they experienced separation, separation from God and thus they sought to hide themselves from the presence of God—separation from each other, Adam and Eve, on the relational level and they began to blame each other as you read Genesis, chapter 3. Then of course even separation within the self as they began to feel shame and guilt and were suddenly aware of their nakedness.
This was, for Adam and Eve, the new reality. They were banished from Eden, separated from God, and being separated from God they would soon be separated from their bodies. The Bible says, “Dying, you shall die.” That’s what God said to Adam, “Dying, you shall die.” Dying spiritually, you will die physically. This is a literal rendering of the Hebrew. So this was the new reality. What do we do about it? Sin has now spread to all mankind. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” We all live in that new reality. We are separated. We are banished from Eden. How do we get back? How do we regain paradise?
Today I want us to, before we come to the Lord’s Table, take a look at sin and what to do about it. I want to take a look at three things the world does with regard to sin. I think all of us in this room and this Worship Center probably to some extent do these three things. First of all, there are some people in the world who, with regard to sin, overlook it. They ignore it. They don’t necessarily ignore other people’s sins but they do ignore their own sins. This is characteristic of the human race. We ignore our own sins.
Many years ago, I went to Westmont College. When I was 18, I was a freshman. That was 44 years ago and yet I remember it clearly. I remember that freshman year when I took an English Literature class from Dr. Donald Beacher. Dr. Donald Beacher’s class was in the morning and I didn’t like that because… In my first year of college my friends and I were not there to learn. We were there to have fun. And so, we stayed up real late and we tried to get nothing but afternoon classes. But we had to take this one morning class from Dr. Beacher and the real bummer was he took attendance. We had to force ourselves to get up and go to Dr. Beacher’s class on English Literature. We were always a little bit late because we’d been up too late. When we arrived in class there was nowhere to sit. It was this way every time we went, nowhere to sit but the front row. It’s kind of like church. A lot of people will sit anyplace other than the front row.
We would arrive late. There were about six of us. We were in sports together and we were good friends and we showed up together and we’d all have to sit in the front row right in front of Dr. Beacher. He’d begin to lecture and we’d begin to sleep. It was just kind of embarrassing. We’d try to stay awake but… He had a little bit of a monotone and we were just so pathetically tired and sometimes we even snored right in the front row. You know how it is when you’re kind of dozing off and you kind of jerk awake? Every time I’d see Dr. Beacher, he’d never look at me. He’d never look at my friends. He just overlooked our row. He couldn’t bear to look at us. It’s just hard to look at sleeping people in your class and it’s payback time because here I am in the ministry and God has put me into this deal so I can look out there and occasionally see some of you napping. I understand. It’s a normal thing to kind of overlook, to try to ignore what is unpleasant and I think we do that in our lives with regard to sin. I think sometimes we just try to overlook it, kind of ignore it and pretend it isn’t there.
In the Bible there are identified three different types of sin. You can look in the great book of 1 John, chapter 2, verses 15-17 and you see three types of sin in the world. The first is called “the lust of the flesh.” The second is called “the lust of the eyes” and the third is called “pride of life.” Lust of the flesh generally refers to hedonistic sins, a lust of the sarks, the Greek word for the “flesh.” It refers to hedonistic sins. Sexual sins are part of the lust of the flesh. Sexual sins, sins of overindulgence—whether it’s alcoholism, drunkenness or even gluttony, these are all lusts of the flesh and they are sins.
In the second category of sins, the lust of the eyes, this is a reference to materialistic sins, the sin of materialism. This involves envy, greed, coveting and really just living your life in the vain pursuit of “stuff.”
The third category of sin is the pride of life. This category, some people have said, refers to spiritual sins. I’m not sure how helpful that is but certainly the many prideful sins of man. I think most of us have a tendency to think maybe our own sins are not as bad as other people’s sins. Aren’t we like that? My guess is in this room right now many of us are sitting here feeling that “I’m a sinner but I’m not as bad as most people.” I think there are a lot of people who just feel like that. Somehow our sin doesn’t seem as bad as other people’s sins.
I was reared to some extent in a subculture that some might call Fundamentalism. In Fundamentalism there’s a great focus on sin but not all sins were equal and so, in Fundamentalism the biggest sins were the lust of the flesh. Those were the biggest sins. Sexual sins were huge for our subculture. Drunkenness was huge in our subculture. You just kind of looked down on anyone who was involved in sexual sin and you kind of looked down on anyone who was an alcoholic or struggling with alcohol. You just kind of looked down on them. Somehow you felt like your sin wasn’t as bad as that sin.
I will admit with regard to lust of the flesh, we kind of ignored gluttony. That was kind of the one sin that was acceptable so you could eat until you were over sated and it didn’t matter. We just somehow let ourselves off the hook on that one. We had this preoccupation with the lust of the flesh. These were particularly grave sins we thought. Our sin just didn’t feel as grave. My sin just didn’t feel as grave. It was easier to overlook my stuff, easier to ignore my stuff.
I want to read you a little quote from C.S. Lewis from his book “Mere Christianity.”
“If anyone thinks that sexual sin is the supreme sin, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are, in some ways, the least of all sins. All of the worst pleasures are spiritual rather than physical. The pleasure of putting people in the wrong… The pleasure of bossing people around… The patronizing of people… the pleasure of backbiting… The pleasure of slander… The pleasures of power and the pleasures of hatred—This is why the cold self-righteous prig who goes to church regularly may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute, but of course, it’s far better to be neither.”
Kind of a powerful quote, and I think C.S. Lewis on dangerous turf. I think you’re on dangerous turf when you begin to kind of compare and weigh sins. In 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, certainly Paul views sexual sin as particularly grave. But nevertheless I think it is true that we tend to ignore our own sin. We tend to overlook our own sin and we tend to view other people’s sins as more grave than ours so don’t do that. This is the first warning from God this morning. Don’t do that. Don’t think you can ignore your sin.
There’s a second thing that people do with sin and the second thing that people do with sin is they try to overpower it. They try to conquer it. There’s some nobility in this. Try to conquer your sin. Of course, we see a lot of this in the world and even in our own lives. We think that maybe through self-control and through self-discipline we can conquer our sin.
Have you ever gone to an amusement park and played “Whack a Mole?” Sin is kind of like that. The ugly head of sin just keeps popping up. No matter how much self-control you have, it’s hard to overpower sin. In California, near Watsonville, California, there’s a creek and that creek is called Salsipuedes. Salsipuedes is Spanish and it roughly is rendered as “get out of it yourself if you can,” or “save yourself if you can.” Historians have looked back at this creek called Salsipuedes and wondered how it got its name. It’s been there since the Spanish era in California. For a couple of hundred years this creek has been called Salsipuedes. They don’t know for sure but there’s a legend that it all went back to a bitter relationship between a Spaniard and a Mexican and that when the Mexican fell into the quicksand in that creek, the Spaniard said to him, “Salsipuedes,” “Save yourself if you can.”
Sin is quicksand and there are people in the world and maybe some people in this room who think you can get out of it yourself. There are people who think that you can just kind of be your own Savior because you’ve got so much self-control and you’ve got so much self-discipline you can overcome sin on your own. The Pharisees were kind of like this in the time of Christ. They really thought that they could conquer sin on their own and they were self-righteous. They didn’t need a Savior and they had taken all the law and they had broken it down into great detail.
For instance, they took the commandment of God that you shall remember the Sabbath Day and keep it Holy. “Six days shall you labor and do all of your work but the Sabbath shall be holy and a day of rest.” The Pharisees said, “Okay, that means we’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath. It would be a sin if we worked on the Sabbath so let’s define ‘work’ and they came up with sixty different categories of work. If you look at Pharisaical writings, you’ll see that they came up with sixty different categories or work. One of the categories was called “burden bearing.” If you bore a burden on the Sabbath, you sinned. So, they then had to, in a sub-category, define what it meant to bear a burden and they had to define what constituted a burden. They determined that anything as small as a sewing needle—if you carried that in your pocket or in your robe on the Sabbath, that constituted a burden.
I know you’re sitting there thinking, “My goodness! How neurotic were these people?” And they were but it was all part of saving themselves. It was all part of self-righteousness. They had to define it all so they could live it out perfectly and then feel proud which is part of the spiritual sins that C.S. Lewis was talking about. So, they felt pride and they looked down on everyone else as less than them and they felt like they were self-righteous. They had in effect saved themselves but of course Jesus looked at them and He grieved, even became angry. Jesus saved His most powerful weaponry for the Pharisees. His words were potent. He called them, “Whitewashed sepulchers, dead on the inside and sparkling on the outside.”
Jesus reminded the Pharisees that sin begins in the heart. The whole Sermon on the Mount was about what righteousness, true righteousness, requires. Jesus said, “You’ve heard it said of old, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ “I saw to you, whoever looks upon a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart.” Jesus is saying, “Sin begins inwardly,” and inwardly we’re all rotting. I’m not saying there’s not good inwardly but inwardly we’re all messed up. It’s a noble thing to try to exercise self-control in the area of sin but don’t think you can overpower it. That’s not the answer. That’s not the solution.
There’s a third thing that people do, and I think this, too, is common and that is that people seek to compensate for their sin. A lot of people think, “I know I shouldn’t ignore my sin and I also know that I can’t defeat sin but I’m going to try to compensate for sin in my life.” You see this in the religions of the world. In the religions of the world, you see a lot of effort put into compensation. In Islam you have the Five Pillars. The First Pillar is Shahadah and Shahadah means, “to witness” or “to confess.” The faithful Muslim confesses Allah and Muhammed and seeks to witness regularly as one of the very first pillars of the faith.
The Second Pillar is Salah and Salah means, “prayer.” And so, a faithful Muslim prays every day ritualistically. They pray five times a day at the sound of the Mullah from the Crier, from the Minaret, and they’re reminded of the hours of prayer and they fall prostrate and they face Mecca, forehead to the ground, seeking to please God. The Third Pillar is Zakat. Zakat means, “alms giving” and this is mandatory. This is mandatory giving every week, every month, every year. A subdivision of Zakat is Sadaqah. Sadaqah is the voluntary giving that every Muslim is also expected to supplement their alms giving with their voluntary giving and this is the Third Pillar of Islam.
The Fourth Pillar is Ramadan. Ramadan is the fast that takes place during the month of Ramadan in the Arabic calendar and it’s a daytime fast so during the daytime for that month, Muslims do not eat, seeking again to please God. They eat while it’s yet dark before the sun rises and they eat when the sun sets. When the sun sets there is great joy in Islamic households as people come together and break bread but it’s a daytime fast.
The Fifth Pillar of course is Hajj, pilgrimage, and it’s expected of every able-bodied Muslim to make that journey, that pilgrimage to Mecca, and to circle the Kaaba and to kiss the black stone that allegedly fell from heaven. All of this is so important to the Muslim and of course Muslims are supposed to live in submission. The word Islam means, “submission” so submission to the Koran and submission to the Sunnah. The Sunnah consists of all the oral traditions with regard to Muhammed and his actions and his statements. It’s all written down in the Hadith and so, the Muslim seeks to submit himself or herself to the Koran, the Sunnah and the Hadith and of course they also seek to live faithfully in accordance with Sharia Law. All of this is going to be weighed in the end according to Muslim theology and you know this that each Muslim believes that when they die there will be two angels. One angel will have a list of all the sins of their life and the other angel will have a list of all the good things, all the faithful acts of their life, and they just hope that the good compensates for the bad. They just hope that the good list is longer than the bad list and that they’ve been able to compensate for the sin in their lives and through the good stuff that they’ve done.
Religion is like that. It doesn’t matter the religion. You can look at Buddhism and Hinduism and all Eastern Religions and you have this concept of compensation. That’s really what Karma is about. You have bad Karma, you have good Karma, and you hope your good Karma compensates for your bad Karma. A lot is at stake because of the theological doctrine of reincarnation. You could come back as a llama or the Dalai Lama depending on how your Karma works. Compensation.
Frankly I think even here in the West in the nominal Christian world there’s a lot of compensation going on. I think a lot of folks think, “I know I messed up but if I can just enough good, maybe God will say, ‘You’re in!’” It’s all a mistake. It’s not the way to handle sin so how do we handle sin? How can we get back to Eden? The Bible says it’s all about Jesus.
I think many of you have probably heard the expression, “to own is to maintain,” right? It is true if you own something you have to maintain it. Sometimes you think, “I don’t want to own this anymore. I’m tired of maintaining it.” That’s true of a car. That’s true of a house. It’s true of anything you have.
Just this last week Barb’s car kind of broke down again. She has a VW Passat. I think Passats are wonderful, but she’s had some problems. I think this is like the 5th or 6th time that the car wouldn’t start. It could be the battery or the alternator. It’s always something different but cars break down. Then just this last week our clothes washer broke down and this is the 4th time that the washer has broken down. We called Sears. This is a Sears product. Sears products are wonderful. We called Sears and we said, “If the washer breaks down four times for the same reason, they deem it a lemon and they will give you a brand-new washer for free.” So, we’re thinking maybe we qualify but then we find out that at least according to their records our washer broke down for a variety of reasons and therefore we can’t get a new free one. We don’t have a lemon because our washer breaks down for a whole bunch of reasons and not just one reason.
Have you ever wondered how God views the human race? Are there any lemons? Do you think there are people in the world who are just lemons? You can buy a car that’s just a lemon. Do you think there are some people in the world who are just lemons? How do you think God feels? I feel like we’re all lemons and it happened in Eden. We’re all lemons. We’re all messed up but you see God wants to make lemonade so He sent Jesus. The Gospel is just so beautiful so God sent His Son and Jesus is called, “The Second Adam.” The First Adam blew it. The First Adam fell to temptation as have we all but the Second Adam, Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth and He took our humanity on Himself. He was tempted by the devil himself but Jesus didn’t bite. Jesus didn’t fall. Jesus didn’t sin. He lived the perfect life and He became the spotless Lamb of God who went to the cross for the sin of the world. How beautiful is that?
It says in 1 John, chapter 2, verse 1, “Jesus is the expiation for our sins and not for our sins only but also for the sin of the whole world.” Can you imagine that? So, powerful was His offering, so powerful His sacrifice, He covered the sin of the earth. Unbelievable. “If you come to Him,” the Bible says, “and you embrace Him, Savior and Lord, in that moment you’re washed whiter than snow. Your sin is forgiven you.”
I don’t know how you feel. When I come to Communion… In fact, every day I just marvel that I’m forgiven, that my sin is forgiven, all of my sin, even the sin I haven’t done yet. All my sin is forgiven me and it’s forgiven forever. That gives you a joy in life that cannot be quenched. How great is Christ and how great is the cross and how awesome is His sacrifice? So, you come to Jesus and you receive Him as Savior and Lord and you’re washed whiter than snow and your sin is forgiven. That’s what you do with sin and then you enter into this relationship with Christ and He indwells you and seeks to live through you. I’m seeking to let Jesus live through me. I struggle because the old man is still there but I seek to let Jesus live through me. I know He loves me. I know He’s forgiven me. I know His love is unconditional and I’m wanting Him to transform me. The transformation isn’t about self-righteousness. It’s not about my conquering sin by my flesh. It’s a relationship and it’s beautiful and I hope you have this relationship and you know that you’re going to return to Eden and you know your sin is forgiven and you’re in this great friendship with Jesus as you come to the table. As we come to the table, let’s say a word of prayer and make sure you’re right with God.