Good morning. If I haven't met you or you have
forgotten me, which is you're probably better off for doing.
My name is Andrew. I'm on staff here at the church,
and I deeply love this church. But yeah, just as Cole had
mentioned, we're going to be back in Genesis after our Easter
sermon. So we're going to be in Genesis
chapter 3, verses 1:00 to 6:00. So if you're an old school
person and you want to turn in there, there, if you don't
didn't bring your Bible, there's one in the Pew back in front of
you. But Genesis 31 to 6:00.
So just to reset the stage and to properly frame our minds,
we've been looking at Genesis not as a scientific textbook,
but as a theological textbook that shows us the why of God
creating everything that we see and all the people that we see.
We, we framed it that and each sermon is kind of built on this
foundation and then we have used it to prop up further sermons.
So this one today is going to be the same way.
This passage is going to lead us into future passages because
that's how texts work, right? There's going to be some things
in here that are going to lead us into further conversation
here in the coming weeks and months.
And so I'm going to tease those out.
I keep I keep getting all these like build up sermons.
I don't know why, but apparently that's that's my calling here.
I get to get to throw softball tosses up for somebody else to
do stuff anyway, which I like to do.
So there's some things that we nerd out on here and then
they're going to be some things that we're going to skip over a
little bit because what we're going to talk about next week
and the week after that is going to, it's just going to build up
and it's going to support the, the, the coming sermons.
But I'm excited about this passage One, because there's
some weird stuff in there. And if you know me, you know, I
like weird stuff in the Bible. Two, it shows us, as Cole
mentioned, this new character in the book of Genesis.
So we're 3 pages in to the book of Genesis and something pivots,
something changes. And So what I want to do this
morning is to show you the significance of this shift and
for us to have a proper understanding of what temptation
is. I think that's a word that we
use a lot. I'm being tempted for this, or
temptation exists in this realm of my life, or I only did it
because I was tempted. So I wanted to establish a firm
foundation and an understanding of what temptation is.
So that's one of my goals today. My second goal today is to show
you how Jesus is the only solution to overcoming
temptation. Those are my two goals.
That's what I've got for us this morning.
So if you were able, would you stand with me as we read the
Word of God? Genesis 3 One to six.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the
field that the Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat
of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the
serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden.
But God said, You shall not eat of the tree, but the fruit of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that's in the
midst of the garden. Neither shall you touch it, lest
you die. But the serpent said that the
woman you shall not surely die, For God knows that when you eat
of it, your eyes will be open, and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the
tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes,
and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she
took of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her
husband Adam, who was with her, and he ate just the word of God.
Brothers and sisters, it is true and it is a good may be seated.
Father, I pray that you would help us this morning to
understand the gravity of temptation, that you would help
us to see that it sneaks in in subtle ways.
Sometimes it's overbearing. Sometimes we feel like we have
no power to resist temptation. That pray that you would help us
to see that you have equipped your people through the life of
your Son, Jesus, who overcame temptation, that we can overcome
temptation, that we can see the, the, the joy in fighting that
temptation. We're thankful that you've
brought us all here together. I don't, I don't know how
everyone's week has gone. I don't know the struggles of
everybody in this church. I know of some particular
struggles, some particular sorrows, but I'm thankful that
we're able to gather here together to read scripture
together, the sing together to be a part of the body of Christ
together. So it's in the powerful name of
Jesus that I'm thankful for this.
And it's in the powerful name of Jesus that I pray.
Amen. So if you've ever preached, have
you ever given the speech, one of the things that you're always
trying to think through is what is my zinger of an introduction
going to be? What what, what am I going to
talk to people about that's going to draw them?
And I was been thinking all week, what can I open this
sermon up with? And it finally happened on
Friday night. I finally got my intro to this
sermon into this passage. And shout out to the Cook family
and the Cruz family. We got to see the Pilgrims
Progress play that got put on. That was a lot of fun.
That was awesome. So shout out to Zane and Ray and
Mason and Olivia and Alana and Amanda who put in a lot of work
behind the scenes, literally and metaphorically.
But I was sitting through this play and I, let's tell you how
big of a homeschooled nerd I am. Pilgrim's Progress was the first
like actual word book that I read growing up.
So let's tell you a little bit about who I am.
But I was sitting through the, the play and I admitted to Will
and to Jay earlier. Like I, I cried a couple of
times. I'll, I'll be a man enough to
admit when I cry. You've probably seen me cry, but
there's a a part in the story of Pilgrim character.
This this is an allegory. His name gets changed to
Christian, but he winds up on his journey to the celestial
Kingdom. He winds up in a place called
Vanity Fair, winds up in the city where the city is just all
about trying to draw your attention away from your
journey, from wherever you came from to the celestial Kingdom.
All sorts of temptations, all sort, all of them pride, greed,
sexuality, all of these temptations exist in the city,
and they're trying to draw a Christian into their city.
He's just passing through. And our passage this morning is
showing us that temptation is something that exists to try to
draw our attention, to draw our affection away from the order
that God has created in his universe.
We've talked several times in the book of Genesis about God
ordering out the world. He separates things.
He puts things together. He separates man and then
creates woman and then brings woman and man back together.
So this book in these early chapters is about God ordering
things. Temptation for Adam and Eve was
about disorder and bringing disorder into God's good ordered
world. And it's the same for us today.
God has ordered things out and he's ordered our lives and how
we should function best. And the temptations that we
experience are little tugs on our hearts, on our minds, and on
our eyes to go into disorder. I think we can all agree that
disorder is bad, right? You look at your kitchen sink on
a Saturday night and you're like, got to wake up early for
church. But they're all these dishes in
my sink. That's a state of disorder.
Or you go into your kids bedroom one afternoon, you're like, what
in the world just happened in here?
This is a state of disorder. Or you look at your calendar,
you're like, oh man, I double booked myself or oh, I forgot
about this meeting or oh, I've got back-to-back to back events
with family and cousins and all this stuff.
It's a state of disorder. God did not create humans to
live in a state of disorder. He created them to live in his
perfectly good and beautiful and true ordered universe.
That's how he that's what he created man and woman for.
That's what he created humanity for was to live in a state of
order. Temptation, as we're going to
see, is the pull to disorder. And you can think about all
those, you know, playful illustrations I just gave.
But whenever your life is in disorder, do you feel joy?
Do you feel like you're flourishing and some sometimes
the disorder in our lives. We cannot control it's outside
forces bringing in disorder. God created this world good full
ordered temptation as we're going to see it from this new
character in the story is going to pull people into a state of
disorder. So I'm going to, if you give me
the time, I'm going to nerd out on a couple of things and then
we're going to talk about more what I think this passage is
actually talking about. So there's some interesting
things in here. Remember, we're not reading a
science book. This is not a biology class.
This is a theology class that we're in right now.
But we see this new character, the serpent.
Where did this joker come from? I want to nerd out more here,
but there's rumors about us starting a podcast up again, so
maybe I'll save this for later. But we got the serpent, an
animal, a Slytherin serpent, and he was more crafty than all the
other beasts of the field that the Lord God had made.
That's interesting. Why is there an emphasis put
here on this new character? Why?
Why is this detail given to us? OK, so you got to take your 21st
century North American mindset out of this equation here,
because we have to remember at the time that this was written
in the ancient Near East, things Telegraph to people differently
than they would Telegraph to us. And by that I mean sending a
signal. Oh, this word.
OK, that leads me to this understanding.
So we've got the serpent here, right?
And do you guys know, was Genesis written before Exodus?
No. So we've got God's people that
get rescued out of Exodus, and then we've got Moses recounting
all of these stories that have been passed down from generation
to generation and writing them down, codifying them.
And in the minds of the ancient Jewish person, there would have
been a lot of thought put towards the culture of Egypt.
Now that I learned this this week for the first time.
But a lot of ancient Egyptian rulers, they will wear crowns
that had serpents all on them. So a serpent as an image would
lead you to think a handful of things.
We'll go through just two diviners.
So someone who could take something and make it out of
nothing, or someone who could take an in an object and make it
a sacred object. Also, serpents were known as an
image, an icon, an idol for wisdom bringers.
That's pretty interesting. So we've got this serpent here.
He's not given a personal name. It's just nakash, which is the
Hebrew word for serpent or snake.
But that word also can be, it's kind of like a double entendre,
an animal serpent, snake, which whichever your preference is,
but also the shining one. So some scholars that I've
learned a lot from believe that this being right here, the
serpent, this nakash, this snake was a part of God's heavenly
host. But they were a divine throne
room, divine throne room guardian, which is which was
pretty common in the ancient Near Eastern world, that they
would have these Serpentine figures outside of their temples
or inside their temples or on their sacred items.
So the ancient mind would look at this and see this was someone
who is in rebellion against God, trying to lead other people into
rebellion against God. And that's definitely what we
have. So, you know, it's funny to joke
about, Oh, it was a talking snake.
That's funny. Did animals talk back in those
days? I don't know.
I'm looking forward to figuring that out one day.
But there's a lot going on here. And that God gave man the
mission, man and woman to subdue creation to make the rest of the
world look like the garden. OK, so that's one layer here.
Second layer is this is a spiritual being that Eve doesn't
seem shocked by a talking serpent.
So there, there's a layer here of there's probably some
familiarity with this serpent, probably seen him, maybe talk to
him a couple of times, knew what his job was.
There's that layer. And then there's the layer of
what God commanded Adam and Eve to not do.
And that's the focus of this passage.
They've got all this stuff to look at, all this stuff to eat,
all the stuff to enjoy. And we're focusing here now on
the one know that God had given them.
So we've got this serpent and that word crappy.
He's, he's wise, he's cunning, He knows how to lead you astray.
He knows what parts to poke you and to get you to be in
rebellion against God. Got that interesting stuff and
hear that word nakash. It's not a personal pronoun.
It's not a name, but the the New Testament authors associated
Satan, which is a, a proper name, a title with this.
So if you look at Revelation 12/7, that says now war arose in
heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and
the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated and
there was no longer any place for them in heaven.
And then the great dragon was thrown down.
Hold on that ancient serpent who was called the devil and Satan,
the deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to earth and
his angels were thrown down with him.
And then later on in the Book of Revelation, we see and he sees
the dragon, the ancient serpent who is the devil and Satan and
bound him for 1000 years. So the New Testament authors,
they were picking up on the language here that we see in
Genesis, right? This is written in Greek,
Genesis written in Hebrew. But they were seeing the
imagery. They were seeing that this was
not just a a funny joke telling serpent.
This wasn't just an animal that learned how to talk.
You know, think of, I can't remember the snake's name, but
in Jungle Book, like you're just kind of, yeah, like it wasn't
just that it wasn't just like, oh, there's a giant snake in the
tree that talks. They were picking up on the fact
that this was a spiritual rebellion, that this was a
spiritual figure who was trying to lead other people in war
against God, the creator of the universe.
So what? What's the the end goal of the
serpent? What is what does this
conversation look like? Well, he says to the woman, did
God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
But here's the first part of temptation.
It will take truth and then it will distort it.
It's the serpent here with Eve is trying to say, trying to get
Eve to doubt the commands of God.
Did he actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the
garden? He's finding the he's using this
linguistic of seeing that he knows that God said there's one
tree that you can't eat of. And so he just kind of
nonchalantly like did he did he say you shouldn't eat of any
tree in the garden? This is God's perfect good
ordered garden given we've looked at how he given Adam and
Eve instructions on here's all the things you can eat from that
one over there is not what you can eat from right now.
If you do, you're going to die. But the serpent is trying to get
their minds all mingled and mushed up, and to try to
disorder the words of God and disorder the garden of God,
because God never said no trees. The temptation it it, it tries
to draw us into seeing beauty as ugly and ugly as beauty, seeing
truth as a lie and lie as the truth and goodness is bad and
vadnais is good. It tries to just change these
little pockets of our lives and draw us away from what God has
ordered. Why would the why would the
serpent do this? Why would this person, this
being that was created by God, who is wise and crafty and
cunning, why would this being want to mislead humans, God's
imagers? I have a theory on that.
We'll talk about it later. Actually, no, we're going to
talk about right now. This serpent, as we see, who is
referred to throughout the Old Testament in the two passages
that that I read from Revelation, seeks to destroy the
identity of humans. Seeks to destroy the image
bearingness of humans. He still can't.
But he wants you to distrust God, to be brought into a state
of disorder, for you to not understand that you are an
imager of God. That's what temptation is trying
to tell you is you. You're not an imager, so God's
withholding something from you. So you got to go and take it.
Then you can become like God, not just creating this image,
but you can become Co equal with the God who created all of us.
That's what temptation is, draws us into and tries to make us
believe. And the woman, she responds to
the serpent who is trying to get her to disbelieve all that God
has said, to disbelieve her identity.
She says, well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the
garden, but God said you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree
that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch
it lest you die. Now here's an interesting thing.
What is Eve doing in this conversation?
Her mind's already getting distorted here.
She's adding things into what God had commanded her.
And Adam, God never said don't touch it.
He said don't eat of it. But now, even this conversation,
in this moment of temptation, she's adding words to what God
had commanded. And this is where my imagination
goes like this must have been an awesome tree to look at.
It must have been really cool or as Cole Cole would say, dope.
So God didn't say don't look at it.
Don't pretend like it's not there.
Don't pick up some of the leaves that have fallen.
He didn't say that. He said don't eat from it.
So the imagery here is that this is something that is true and
it's good and it's beautiful, but it's not for you to eat of
because God didn't want Adam and Eve just to try to source out
somewhere else for wisdom. But God was growing Adam and
Eve. He was the one raising them.
He was giving them wisdom. He was giving them knowledge.
But Eve is already starting to get her, her mind messed up in
this conversation with the serpent.
Serpent has already entered the the conversation and it's caused
Eve to start the spiral out of what truth is, what reality is,
what order is temptation. It's it seeks to lure us out of
what God has said is good into what we think is good, right?
It tries to pull us from this ordered good world to this
disordered chaotic world. And the serpent goes on.
He says you will surely not die, for God knows that when you eat
of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil. So this is the other thing that
temptation tells us, that God is withholding something from us,
right? He doesn't want you to be wise.
He doesn't want you to know good and evil.
So you got to go and take it. You got to go and get what what
you want. Temptation tells us life is
hard, so what's just one more drink?
Temptation tells us I'm lonely, so what's just one more video
that I look at online? Temptation tells us I just hate
this person in my heart. I'm not committed an act of
violence against them, so it's OK, temptation says.
I can talk about this person behind their back, but long as
I'm not telling them these words in person, it's oh, it's OK,
temptation says. I'm coming home from work and
I'm tired and I want to be a lazy dad.
That's OK. It's just dad had a hard day.
Temptation just takes these good things and tries to spin it in a
way that we get entangled with it and use it in a bad way.
There's nothing wrong with having a drink.
There's nothing wrong with having hormones coursing through
your body and giving you sexual urges.
There's nothing wrong with being frustrated with someone.
There's nothing wrong with having thoughts about someone.
But it's what we do with those things.
Tation is trying to tell us, hey, it's OK, you know better
than God. God just trying to withhold
pleasure. He's trying to withhold joy.
He's trying to withhold wisdom and knowledge.
So just trying to find it your own way, trying to get it
quicker than what he's telling you.
You should have it on I and that's where I find myself.
I, I'm, I'm a good church boy royal ambassador.
If you want to know the royal ambassador pledge, I'll give it
to you later. Like, but it's really easy for
me. Like I've never, my sins are
ones that are easily hidden. I'm not like flagrantly sinned.
And that's what the serpent is trying to put in the eye in the
head of Eve and Adam. It's going to be all right.
Gosh, just trying to keep this from you.
Just just go and do it and see what happens.
It's what temptation tells us. It's going to be OK.
It's worth it in this moment. You're on a strict diet right
now, Andrew. But that fast food, man, those
golden arches, they call, they beckon your soul right in the
moment. Or as some of us dudes were
talking about earlier, of Taco Bell.
And it's kind of hit or miss sometimes and you get a bad Taco
Bell experience and like, I'm paying for it.
Then you get the good one. You're like, it is worth it.
But temptation is us trying to tell us that the steak that's
waiting at home is not as worthy of the Taco Bell on the drive
home. It's trying to rob us of joy,
everlasting pleasures at the right hand of Jesus.
And So what happens is Eve to say, no, that's a lie.
And you know, I was just thinking about this.
I think I got my facts incorrect in this conversation.
So no, I'm not doing it. God told me not to do it.
I've I've messed up on that little don't touch the tree
piece, but I'm I'm going to reject your truth claim because
I know the truth claim of the God who created me.
It would be awesome if she did. It'd be awesome if I did that as
well. But we are a lot more like Adam
and Eve than probably we would like to admit.
So the woman, after hearing all this from the serpent, she says
in her mind that this tree, it's good for food.
It was a delight to her eyes, and that the tree was desired to
make one wise. So she took of its fruit and ate
and we're 3 pages in the Bible and this is a heartbreaking
scene. Nothing but truth, beauty,
goodness has happened up until this point.
God has ordered out everything perfectly, and now Adam and Eve
buy into temptation, and they let them take it into a place
where they were never created to be.
So she ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with
her, and he ate. This is a pattern we'll see in
the Old Testament, but this language of seeing the lighting
and taking the couple of examples, we'll look at this one
in Genesis chapter 6. That'll be fun, where we see
another divine rebellion. Then we also see this with King
David. He sees Bathsheba, she's
pleasing to his eye. Then what does he do?
Takes her and it leads to murder of an innocent man.
You're right, we're going to see this play out throughout the
course of Genesis of people seeing the lighting in and
taking and, and just how that path leads to murder.
If you are not seeing God, the lighting in God and taking God
just the next page over, we're going to see more chaos, more
disorder that results from from this.
So what do we do with temptation, right?
Being tempted is not sinning, right?
Temptation leads to sin. So you're being drawn in to do
something that you know that God has said not to do.
It's the action of actually doing that thing that you were
being tempted to do, whether that be mentally, spiritually,
physically. So what do we do with
temptation? How do we overcome that?
Well, I've got bad news for you. First, you can't do it on your
own. I've tried.
You can't do it on your own. And before I was following
Jesus. You can't fight temptation.
You can't fight chaos. Got this serpent that Revelation
tells us is the one who is misleading the nation so it's
this chaos agent in God's ordered world.
How do I fight chaos on my own? I can't do it.
You can't do it you might like to think again.
I'm a good, good church boy, legalistic for most of my life.
And you think I can go to church enough?
I can read my Bible enough, I can pray out loud with people
enough. I can give the homeless person
on the street a couple of quarters.
I can, you know, help set up chairs.
I can do all these things and that that will help me fight
this chaos agent in my life. It doesn't work.
You can try to be the best mom in the world.
It's not going to work. You can try to be the best dad
or husband or uncle in the world, It's not going to work.
That doesn't help you repel temptation.
Even whenever you get rid of some of the vices in your life,
that temptation is still there, gnawing at the back of your
mind. So what do we do?
That's a good answer. The only answer I have for you
is to turn to Jesus because he's the only one who's ever overcome
temptation. Got 2 scenes that you probably
already know what I'm going to say.
And the liturgy already pointed to these, but the first one is
Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus in the desert.
So he's just been baptized and the the Greek word literally
means the Holy Spirit hurled Jesus out into this place of
chaos because the desert wasn't People look at that.
And we just view it as a place of chaos, place of the unknowns,
a place where things weren't flourishing.
So Jesus is hurled into the wilderness and who shows up on
the scene? The chaos agent shows up and
what does he do to Jesus? Temps him kind of similar to
what we've just seen here in Genesis 3.
Timson 3 times in Jesus, instead of what Eve and Adam did, Jesus
rebukes Satan and the way that he was trying to twist God's
word. He replies with the proper
application of God's Word. He replies with the proper words
of God's Word. Jesus did all of that.
He overcame temptation and he didn't do it just for himself.
Just even after like this this week or this past week of Holy
Week and thinking through all the things that Jesus endured,
all the things that Jesus did, all the things Jesus didn't do.
It's like, why am I worthy of receiving Jesus's report card?
It doesn't make sense to me, but for some reason it makes sense
to God. So we have Jesus overcoming
temptation and then we also see in the garden before Jesus was
led to the cross and beaten and tortured, we see him in this
moment of knowing I'm about to absorb all of God's wrath and
he's he says, instead of my will be done, he says your will be
done. Adam and Eve should have said,
hey serpent, it's not about our will, it's about the will of
God. But they gave in, but Jesus
didn't and he didn't do that just for him to look good.
He did that so that we through faith could be transformed from
the Kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of light.
And so a practical application is just meditating on those two
passages whenever you're tempted.
Like Jesus overcame temptation for me to be changed, for me to
be transformed. Jesus prayed not my will,
Father, but your will be done. He prayed those prayers so that
you and I could be brought ends of the family of God.
And also just remember that temptation is sneaky like it.
It will creep up in places that you don't expect it to.
You might overcome 1 area of and defeat temptation 1 area.
And then next thing you know, it's creeping up to you.
That person really doesn't like you, or you should be more
valued than you are, or it's OK. It's just a little bit.
Temptation is sneaky. Be watchful, which is what Adam
and Eve should have been doing. Like, hey, talking snake over
here, he doesn't belong in here. He's trying to tell us to go
against God's word. Adam should have picked that
thing up and hurled him out of the garden.
They should have been watchful. So be watchful for temptation.
Then the last thing I have is just know that if you're a part
of this church, there are people who will walk arms with you and
warfare against temptation. Don't, don't keep it to
yourself. Let your fighter group know.
Let your community group know. Let your friend know.
Hey, I'm it just feels like this snake is just constantly in my
ear. I need help cutting the head off
of this thing. And then for that person to
remind you that Jesus has stomped the head of the serpent
on the cross and through his resurrection, Jesus holds the
keys to life, to death, and to hell.
Jesus wins. God, I thank you for what you're
doing in this church family. I thank you for people maybe who
are here for the first time or maybe you haven't been here for
a while, but I thank you that we've been able to come together
under the name of Jesus. It's not an accident that we are
here. All of us, one way or another,
are here because of Jesus. So I pray that as we continue to
reflect on Jesus's death and his resurrection, as we continue to
reflect on the truth of Scripture, I pray that it would
be joyful and that we'd be able to make a sweet sound that is
pleasing to your ears. And I love these people, and I'm
thankful that you love them more than I do because I'm going to
let them down one way or another.
But you never let your people down.
Adam and Eve let you down, but you didn't let them down.
It's in the Jesus name, I pray. Amen.
Let's stand in worship together.