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We're working through these early chapters of the book of Genesis and we're calling our sermon series Beginnings. So the beginning of the universe, the beginning of humanity, and this morning, the beginning of sin and death. And I wonder, what do you think we would miss if we didn't have this chapter in our Bibles? It's quite a good question to ask when we read the Bible ourselves each day. If you're in the habit of doing that in the morning, perhaps, and you're struggling to understand what you're reading.

The question to ask is, what would I be missing if this chapter weren't in the Bible? Well, what would we be missing if Genesis chapter three weren't here? Imagine if we left Genesis two with its account of life in paradise, the animals, Adam and Eve in innocence, unrestricted relationship between God and his creation, a creation that God declared very good. Suppose we had to make the jump from that chapter, chapter two, to the world that we now live in today with a brokenness that's all around us, sufferings. The headlines we've seen even in these last few days, knife crime of hostages, of injustice of one kind or another, of violence, of hatreds, of anxiety about who we are and what we're here for.

We would say, it doesn't make sense. Something must have happened. Genesis 3, I suggest, is one of the most important chapters in the Bible in order to understand this world that we live in, who we are, and so on. And this chapter may raise all sorts of questions for us. Perhaps we'll address one or two of them together.

But I suggest that it answers questions that we need. Without these answers, we wouldn't be able to make sense of this world. So I have three questions for us this morning. And as we answer them, perhaps we might scoop up one or two others. Here's our first question.

Where did sin come from? Where did sin come from? I think we have to say from the Bible that sin was not there at the start. Sin was not there at the start. It didn't come from God.

Chapter one, verse 31, if you have your Bible open, concludes. And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. There was no sin he saw that he had made, and it was very good. And the Lord said to Adam that he was free. Have you ever noticed those are the very first words that God said to the human race?

You are free. You are free to eat from any tree, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From the day you eat of it, you will surely die. That One tree stood as a reminder to Adam and his wife that they were not God themselves, that they were creatures. That as long as they trusted him and loved him and did what he said, they would be free.

They would enjoy the life that he had created them to live. That freedom was a gift from their Creator. And the tree offered them the opportunity every day to trust him and to express their love to him. Where did sin come from? It wasn't there at the beginning.

It wasn't from God. It marks, we might say, a departure from God and from his ways.

What about the devil? Well, even the serpent. Satan, Lucifer. He has a number of names in scripture. Even he wasn't evil from the beginning.

The Bible tells us elsewhere that he was one of God's top angels. Part of the unseen creation that's all around us, but most of the time is hidden from our sight.

He was beautiful, it says in Scripture. He was in the Garden of Eden. But he was tempted. He was full of pride. And saw in the Garden of Eden an opportunity to.

To take God's place. You said, I will make myself like the Most High. But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. That's Isaiah 14, verse 15. The Lord speaking of Satan.

Or maybe you thought, but what was God doing putting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, exposing them to the temptations of Satan? Wasn't some kind of fall inevitable bound to happen?

Do you know the Bible never talks about Satan and his fall as happening back in eternity or millions of years before. The Bible says there was one fall. One fall answered by one redemption.

That fall of Satan and of some of the angels seems to have happened at one and the same time as the fall of the human race. Ezekiel 28:12 19. Maybe you can look at it in your connect groups later on, but it says you, Satan, were in Eden, the Garden of God. You were blameless in all your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you. So I drove you in disgrace from the mountain of God.

Created good, but fallen in the garden. Lucifer or Satan or the serpent sees in the Garden of Eden an opportunity in Adam and Eve to push God out of the way. Adam and Eve are the means, but they are very willing. They are responsible for their actions, for all that they do. So.

One fall historic. And Adam and Eve real people.

Or maybe some of us find that hard to accept in the 21st century. Can we say Adam and evil real people, historic. The fathers and mothers of the human race. Well, Jesus Himself says so in Mark 10:6. The gospel writer Luke traces Jesus genealogy back to Adam.

And the apostle Paul draws the necessary parallels between the disobedience of Adam and the obedience of Christ in order to explain how we might be saved. Well, this chapter raises questions for many of us, I'm sure. And if it does, fine. Let's not be afraid of asking those questions. All of us, I'm sure, want to be growing in our understanding of Scripture, to having our ideas changed, corrected, perhaps to be growing closer to the Lord and asking for his understanding in His Word.

So let's not be afraid to admit if we have questions and doubts and things we don't understand.

The Bible, you know, doesn't really give sin and evil a being, if we might say, of their own. They are not the equal but opposite power of good and truth and righteousness. We don't live in a dualistic world, clash between good and evil. No, sin is a departure from what is good and right from God's ways. In a sense, it has no being of its own.

So how does it happen? Well, have a look down. First, the serpent comes in with a distortion of God's word. In verse two, Did God really say, you must not eat from any tree in the garden? Well, that is a distortion.

God said nothing of the kind. He never said, you must not eat from any tree in the garden. He said, you may eat from every tree except one. The serpent distorts God's word. Second, it sows a seed of doubt.

Eve responds with something else, adding to God's command. Oh, we can eat from trees in the garden. But God did say, you mustn't eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. And she adds, and you must not touch it or you'll die. The Lord had never said anything about that.

So from distortion to doubt to the deception, you will not surely die. The serpent said to the woman, for God knows when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Wouldn't you like that? So she took the fruit and ate it, and she gave some to her husband, who was stood passively by, and he ate it. She was deceived, but he was disobedient.

And as the head of the human race throughout the Bible, it's Adam who bears the responsibility.

Distortion, doubt, deception, disobedience. That's the pattern in Genesis 3, the pattern that is repeated that you and I know very well, I'm sure, in our own lives.

Somebody pointed out to me after the 9:30 service, a pattern that we often see on social media too, sowing seeds of untruthfulness that we believe so where does sin come from? Our first question it is a departure from God's ways of truth and righteousness. Second question this what does sin do? Where does sin come from? What does sin do?

Steven Pinker, who was a professor at Harvard University, a psychologist, he described an incident. Perhaps you've heard of this 50 or so years ago in Canada, he writes. As a young teenager, I was in proudly peaceful Canada during the 1960s. I was a true believer in anarchism, he writes. I laughed off my parents argument that if the government ever laid down its arms, all hell would break loose.

Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8am on Oct. 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. Perhaps some of you remember that by 11:20am the first bank was robbed. By noon, most downtown stores had closed because of the looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home.

By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, 100 shops had been looted, 12 fires had been set, 40 carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and $3 million in property damage had been inflicted before the city authorities called in the army.

Well, we know something of that in our own country, don't we? Even in the last few months. The riots that happened all over in the cities earlier last summer. Living on the borrowed morals of a previous generation, it doesn't take much to discover that the veneer of human morality is paper thin. Throw off Christ, decide for ourselves what is right and wrong and what happens.

Well, we know sin undoes piece by piece what God has created. Good. Genesis 3 shows us. Here are the headlines. Verse 7 if you have a look down.

Shame. Adam and Eve had been naked and they had felt no shame in chapter two. But now, as sinners, they are exposed. They're frightened that who they now are is on show, and so they try to cover up hiding. They hide from God.

The love and fellowship they once enjoyed with him is over, and they scurry around in the bushes like animals. Blame, refusing to take responsibility. And isn't that true of our world? Who told you that you were naked? The woman blames her that you put here with me blames the lord.

Pain verse 16 pain in human experience. Frustration at work, verse 17 and 18. Through painful toil you will eat thorns and thistles. A sense of meaningless as we go through life until the day we die and conflict to the woman your desire will be for your husband. The idea is struggling to dominate him, but instead he will rule over you.

No longer is marriage what it was supposed to be. What the Lord designed it to be is a picture of his love, Christ's love for his people. Pain, conflict, the environment, thorns and thistles. The creation we are supposed to guard is now frustrated. There are natural disasters, famines, floods, earthquakes, and sin lies at the heart of it.

Genesis 3 says the fall was universal. And finally, of course, separation from God, banishment from the Garden, verse 23, and physical death, verse 19, as the penalty for sin. For dust you are, and to dust you will return.

Have we improved as a human race since then? Have we developed over the centuries technologically? Of course we have. Morally and spiritually, or we haven't moved forward one bit. Genesis 3 explains why, for the last 300 years in the west at least, the myth has been that humanity is on an upward march of progress from primitive beginnings in every way.

Primitive, biologically, intellectually, morally, spiritually, we are moving to maturity. Isn't that what we have always been told in our generation?

Well, if we think really that evil is something that can be educated out of us, we can develop away from. I think we have to ask the question, when can we expect this to happen? It's been a very long time now, the Bible says, rather than us being on an upward march of progress and development, the reality is the other way. What began as very good in God's eyes has taken a second step. A cataclysmic event has happened that we now call the Fall.

We have fallen away from what God intended downwards, into sin and evil, with the consequences for every part of creation, not progress. A tremendous fall. Sin has gone very deep. The Bible says it has affected even our very nature. Out of a person's heart, Jesus says, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed.

It's been called the doctrine of total depravity. It's not that we're as bad as we could be. It's that in every part we are affected by sin totally. No area of life left unaffected.

So where does sin come from? From departing from the Lord. What does sin do? It spoils everything. It undoes God's good creation.

It creates a wasteland.

Finally, what has God done about it? The answer, amazingly, he has come looking for us. Have a look down at verse 8. Verse 8. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man. Where are you?

I still remember when I was four years old, having a fight in my first classroom, Heavers Farm Primary School. I was sent out of the classroom and I was terrified the headmistress would find me. So I ran away and hid in the school hall in a Wendy house. And I peeped out through the windows. Sure enough, she found me.

What are you doing here? I can still hear it. The Lord knew exactly where Adam and Eve were. The question wasn't for his benefit. It was for theirs.

Where are you? How childish. What are you doing? What have you done? Hiding in the bushes.

But as a race, haven't we been doing that ever since? Hiding. Trying to cover ourselves with the fig leaves of our own making. Things that we hope will give a good impression to other people and hide who we really are. Achievements that we think will impress other people in God and cover up what we know deep down about ourselves.

Things that we're ashamed of, insecurities that we have. He knows all about us. Where are you? He says for our benefit. All he wants is to call us out so that we might admit our need and he can save us and cover us up perfectly with his righteousness.

No, he refuses to give up. He comes looking. He promises in verse 14 that he will do something about it. Look what he says to the serpent in verse 14. Cursed are you.

That's the judgement. Satan at this point is thrown down from heaven to earth to crawl on his belly and eat dust. From now on, earth will be his home, not heaven. He has a long leash, the Prince of this world, as Jesus calls him in the New Testament. But one day he will be driven out.

Sin won't live here forever. All that he has done, all that he has spoiled will be healed and he will be evicted like the squatter that he is. Satan is cursed then. Verse 14, the ground is cursed. Verse 17.

But did you notice that Adam and Eve are not cursed? God is keeping the way open, that we can be redeemed. So in verse 15, he makes the most wonderful promise we might say he announces the gospel. He says to the serpent in verse 15, have a look down and I will put enmity between you, Satan and the woman, between your offspring, your seed and hers. He will crush your head and you will strike his Heel.

He's promising Jesus. He's promising the Messiah. He's promising his own future. Coming as the seed of the woman. Notice not of the man.

It's a virgin birth. The seed of the woman will come and crush your head, Satan, and destroy you. You will bruise his heel, you will wound him, but in your wounding of him, he will destroy you. He's talking of the cross. That promise will get fleshed out as we read through the Bible.

But there it is in embryonic form. In Genesis 15, the salvation of the world is pledged.

And I wonder what Adam and Eve's reaction was, especially in verse 21, when the Lord God made garments of skin for them and clothed them. When they saw for the very first time blood shed. An animal put to death for their sin. Bloodshed. And the Lord covering them.

They couldn't cover themselves, but he has covered them again. It's pointing forward to the cross and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. By his death and resurrection we might be covered with his perfect righteousness, his perfect record. All our sins and failures might be hidden, dealt with, paid for and covered over and never mentioned again. I wonder if you have made that personal for yourself.

Oh Jesus, your death and resurrection to pay for my sin. Please cover me.

So even in this chapter, all about the beginning of sin and death, there is a promise restoration. How will it end? Well, the cross will give the fatal blow to Satan. The return of Jesus will mean his disappearance from this world altogether. So, three questions.

Where does sin come from? From a departure from the Lord. What does sin do? It spoils everything. It brings death and separation and judgement.

What has God done about him? He sent his Son to come and find you and me, to pay for our sins and in the future to return and bring everything to perfection. Genesis chapter three must be one of the most important chapters in the Bible if we are to understand the world that we live in, if we are to make sense of what we see on our televisions and in the newspapers, if we're to understand ourselves without it, we would struggle to make sense of any of this, our frustrations and disappointments, broken relationships and so on. But Genesis 3 has shown us the answer.

And Genesis 3 has promised the rescuer, God himself coming down, becoming one of us, so that by his blood he could forgive us. And in a moment or two we're going to feed on him in our hearts by faith at the Lord's table. We're going to take for ourselves once again what he did 2000 years ago on the cross and say what you did there, Lord Jesus, you did for me. And I feed on you and all you have done.

So perhaps this morning, perhaps for the first time, can I invite you to come to his table, if you've never done it before, to take what he did there for you personally. It's what he wants. It's why he came for you. So, the beginning of sin and death. But there's an end to it.

The Bible promises that we're heading back to a garden, to a paradise. It's as if the front and back covers of your Bibles reach round and touch one another. Because In Revelation, chapter 22, we find the garden, the dwelling place of God. We see paradise, the river of life flowing from God's throne. The tree of life is there again, bearing fruit for all God's people.

No longer any curse, we're told. And Christ will be there, described as the lamb, sacrificed for our sins, to pay for them and cover us over. And the Bible promises we will be with God and with one another forever and ever. No more suffering or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away. And God says, behold, I am making all things new.

Amen.