Genesis 3:9-10 ( NKJV )
Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
Yesterday I began to look at this story and how God moved in Jesus to right what went wrong in the fall. Man sinned and that sin broke the vital connection that God had with man. The result was something called “spiritual death.” This is not the end of man’s spirit. It is the end of man’s spiritual connection to God who is life. It put man in a condition where he could not spend eternity with God but instead he inherited the devils future in hell. The good news is that God dealt with this situation in Christ. He paid for man’s sin and gave every individual the right to believe in that payment and receive it for himself. Anyone who would do that could be put back into right relationship with God and inherit eternal life in His presence.
What we want to look at today is the other side of that coin. God paid the price. Man is free, but he is still hiding from God. Why did Adam hide when God came calling. He was guilty. He had done something wrong and he knew that what he had done hurt the Lord and caused him to be separated from Him. The bible tells us that in the original creation God set a law in motion that said, “Everything will produce after it’s own kind.” When Adam and Eve reproduced the “kind” of people they produced were just like them. They carried the “spiritual death” that Adam and Eve carried. They were in the same state of separation from God that Adam and Eve were in. They also carried the guilt for that sin. This same condition and guilt passed upon every descendent of the original inhabitants of the Garden.
That guilt, I will call it genetic guilt, became a part of the human experience. Every culture has some sort of religion and they all exist to try and deal with this sense of guilt. Society is wrought with the evidence of this guilt. We deal with it in various ways. The Victorian era epitomized one solution. Their answer was, “Do nothing wrong.” The second part of this approach is to make doing anything wrong so socially unacceptable that the individual could not be a part of “polite” society. Instead of dealing with the guilt they embraced it and used it to try to control behavior. The problem with this approach is that it is based on law, and man without Christ is a law breaker. The harder you work to be perfect the more the imperfection grows like mushrooms in the dark. Underneath perfect and moral Victorian society lurked all the same sin that everyone else dealt with.
The next approach is epitomized by the “60’s in America. They dealt with the genetic guilt by declaring that nothing is truly wrong. Rules are just attempts to hinder man from fulfilling his true potential. It is societies attempt put everyone into one mold. If we just try not to hurt anyone then anything we want to do is OK. I”m OK and You’re OK. The problem is that things are wrong. The wages of sin really is death. Furthermore when you allow the flesh to have it’s way it will always choose excess and someone will always be hurt.
Finally we try and deal with the guilt through religion. Religion is the form that develops around our attempts at relationship with God. We pray, we study, we fast, we work in the church and we follow all kinds of religious practices and traditions to try to deal with the guilt passed to us from Adam. This produces dead religion with no life or power in it. We have a form of godliness put not the benefits of godliness. There is no joy, no peace, no love just obligation and service. In the end the guilt remains and is made worse by our failure to really connect with God.
The truth is that there is only one solution to this guilt problem. You see Jesus not only paid the penalty for man’s sin, but he also provided the way to wash away the guilt connected to it. Being perfect can’t do it. Nor can casting off morality. Dead religion and tradition only make it worse. The only solution is faith in the sacrifice of Jesus. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that Jesus who never knew sin was made sin for us so that we could be made righteous with His righteousness. We don’t make ourselves righteous. Someone else makes us righteous. That someone is God and he does through Jesus. Righteousness is the opposite of Guilt. Righteousness is the ability to come into the presence of God with no sense of guilt or condemnation. If this is true then we can carry that from the throne room of God to the world in which we live.
More tomorrow.
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