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November 28, 2004
The Benefits of the Fall
The Benefits of the Fall
Genesis 3: 1-15 Romans 5: 12-21
November 28th, 2004
First Sunday in Advent
Every year our Christmas Eve service of Lessons and Carols begins with the passage from Genesis that Donna just read. Traditionally a child reads this. Isn’t it odd that at so happy a season we should read this opening tragic story of the Bible?
Why do we listen to a young voice read this passage? I wonder if it might be because there is a point-counterpoint to hearing what we think of as an innocent voice read of how humanity lost innocence. We hear the little voice ask God’s question to Adam, “Who told thee that thou wast naked; hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee not to eat?”
There is a hint of shock to hearing that question from a child’s lips in elegant King James English. It introduces the drama of the whole Christmas Eve celebration. Something that ended in grand humility in the birth of the Christ Child began with the serpent’s successful temptation of our first parents. A child reads of the first parents’ fall from grace. Jesus was born to lift us up by grace to grace again.
Of course, the reason why we read this lesson is because it was Adam’s sin that made Christmas necessary. Sin spread like a disease with a dreadful imagination. It took everything good on earth and polluted it. In the end it twisted the momentum of life itself, so that in thirsting for life, we look in the wrong places so that we head toward death. “The wages of sin is death,” Paul reminded us. So God introduced His remedy at Christmas. Over the next three weeks we’ll remember again the preparation God made to introduce this remedy to the problem of sin on Christmas Day.
Christmas is glamorous once a year, but sin has been glamorized throughout the year. The tabloids, put indiscreetly, deliberately where we wait at the counter in our grocery stores, lure us to read the seamy stories of the steamiest sins of our unhappy celebrities. The headlines promise tales of exquisite degradation. Why are these interesting?
Sin is rewarding financially. I was startled to read how many millions Howard Stern is paid to produce his sleaze. Sin toys with our imaginations, hiding its destruction behind ingenious disguises. We are lured by attractive images of power, raw sex, and wealth so that we don’t recognize what hides behind these façades. We never learn from the sorrows of others. The end of sin is death after death after death. It’s not only physical death that sin brings, but also the death of civilization, of decency, of happiness in homes, of personality and character, of hope itself.
Our government budgets billions of dollars annually to help undo some of the effects of sin. Anti-alcohol and drug abuse programs, a judicial system that clutters our land with prisons, and so many other costly attempts to cope with the effects of sin are unavailing. Something else is needed to cure sin’s tarnishing effects on life. Even those who work to mitigate the effects of sin add to the momentum of sin. Christmas begins to offer the answer to sin.
So we plead, “Keep Christ in Christmas,” as though Christ can be taken out—as we queue up in the shopping malls to buy our mountains of gifts for each other. How subtly sin has deceived even those who plead to remember the “religious” reason for this holiday season.
But hidden amidst the sin is the Savior. Paul wrote, “He became sin for us who knew no sin.” Even in the glitz and longing of the holidays Jesus is here to fill the empty heart.
Jesus was born to save us from our sin. God thought this was necessary.
But when we say “necessary,” I wonder what we mean. Seen from our side, if we were to be rescued from our plight, God had to do something.
But God, seen from God’s side, might have done nothing to save us from our sin. God could have left us to suffer the results of the momentum of our sin—unceasing, spiraling vengeance, never forgiveness, the desecration of everything good. Every violent evil epitomized in the Holocaust might well have been the story of our race until we simply died out, victims of our own sinful nature, gone like the dinosaur. But God said, “No.” He wasn’t through with us.
What is so grand is that from God’s view it was necessary to reach into our predicament to rescue us from ourselves because He loved us. I feel odd to presume to speak so easily of God’s mind—who created everything in the vastness of the “multiverses.” But it seems this is how God thought.
Theologians who are concerned with figuring out the mind of God have pondered the question of whether God planned our redemption before the Fall or after the Fall. If God foresaw all that would happen in human history, did He not also see ahead that after creating man and woman perfect, they would choose to fall from their perfection? So, God must have planned our salvation before there was any need for it.
The Book of Revelation refers to Jesus as “the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.” This suggests that not only before the Fall, but before creation God saw the event that took place on Calvary so surely that it was as though it had already happened. John Calvin went so far as to propose very explicitly that God decreed every sin that every person would commit. This in no way exempted anyone from responsibility for sinning.
There are times I think brother Calvin tried to explain too much. I am much happier to let some things remain unexplained that are not explained in Scripture.
The Apostle Paul was taught by the Holy Spirit the plan God had to resolve the problem of sin. He summarized this in the great resurrection chapter, “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” In our reading from Romans 5, Paul explained how this worked. “For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.”
So the story at the heart of the Christmas story is how God fulfilled a plan to undo a terrible moment that happened when the human race was very young. Christmas is inseparable from Good Friday and then Easter—that complete the work of grace.
Martin Luther reminded us that the wood all around the infant Jesus as he lay in the little barn behind the inn prefigured the wood on which He would die on Good Friday. This beautiful season of Advent and Christmas is not only about the birth of Jesus, but about the death He came to die to spell the doom of death itself. As the cheerful Christmas carol puts it, “He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.”
So this season is about God’s plan to bless the earth. In fact, so great was the blessing that there have been Christians who thanked God for the sin of our first parents.
St. Augustine encapsulated the mystery of suffering in his famous doctrine of “blessed fault”--that God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil at all. Francis de Sales, a seventeenth-century Catholic Bishop of Geneva, quoted St. Augustine, applying it rhapsodically, “O blessed fault, which merited to have such and so great a Redeemer!". . . that is, ruin brought us profit, since in effect human nature has received more graces by its Savior redeeming, than ever it would have received by Adam's innocence, if he had persevered therein.”
It is strange to refer to sin as a “blessed fault,” but maybe you can understand his sentiment. If we try to imagine how life would have gone for the human race without sin in the picture, perhaps life would seem far less interesting.
Think of the matters that fill our learned books and novels. There would be no murder mysteries had there been no murders. We’d not have Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, or Churchill’s remarkable landmark of prose, the History of the Second World War. We must eliminate every war and all the industry produced for warfare. We must eliminate lust, and the industry that promotes lust, and the novels that depict it. We must eliminate drugs, alcohol abuse, national and ethnic rivalries, religious controversies, and so much else that occupies the attention of the great writers and newspaper editors. We are so fascinated by the effects of sin that it is hard to envision much interest in a world without it. But we’ve not had a chance to see how beautiful would have been the world without sin’s defacement of what is good, true, and beautiful.
Somehow, as a truly happy home is truly pleasant, with mother and father speaking and acting toward each other lovingly, so there might be an entire civilization, or an entire world populated with those who cared for each other unendingly. We get hints of joy from watching those who experience joy in this life.
But the most bliss-filled home is never untarnished with sadness. I discover that every family has a soap-opera somewhere. We have to stretch our imagination to think of untarnished happiness. We need a Savior, one to save us from this dreadful pollution that afflicts us.
Gibson’s recent movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” has captured the attention of a lot of people. Shofar, the journal of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association is devoting an issue to this movie that will come out in the Spring. Its violence has caught the imagination of many people, Jews, Christians, and even non-religious folk. Many Christians learned to cry when Gibson taught them how brutal was Jesus’ suffering for their sake.
For me the most spectacular episode in the movie comes when the serpent slithers over to the heel of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. We hear the sound of a stomping foot that represents Jesus crushing the serpent’s head. The scene depicts the fulfillment of God’s words to the serpent in Genesis 3: 15, “you will bruise his heel, but he will crush your head.”
During the Advent season we remember that God remembered His promise to destroy sin at the very root. The moment this promise began to be fulfilled was when Jesus was born. But sin is still with us. Over-arching all the beauty, the beautiful carols, the beauty of Christmas ornaments, the happiness of homes with excited children is the great fact of God’s plan includes a second kind of Christmas—the Second Coming of Christ. Then there will come the end of war, of sadness, of death itself.
You and I need to make a practical response to all this. I am mindful as I share my life with people who are incarcerated that there is not only an over-arching beauty in life, but also an under-arching sadness that overwhelms many people. It is a painful thing to be locked-up by imperfect people for wrongs that very often were most hurtful to the ones who did them. This Christmas when you gather happily around the tree in your living room, there will be hundreds of thousands of very sad people in institutions intended to induce sadness. I am so grateful to see that Jesus Christ not only offers real joy to those who hunt for joy in many fruitless places, but He also offers joy and peace to those who are haunted by the effects of past sins.
I pray that you and I may demonstrate our gratitude to God for the wonders of His grace at Christmas by being agents of joy to others. You can always tell someone who is really grateful. There is a lavishness to the response of someone whose heart is filled with gratitude.
I wonder if this Christmas season rather than spending a lot on giving to those who expect to receive lavishly from you, you would consider copying God so as to make a lavish expression of love to someone who is really in need. I know of several.
This week I received an email from a young man in Zambia who was one of my finest students when I taught there three years ago. I had asked him how things are in his ministry, and without complaining he told me the rent on the building in which they worshipped was doubled, and they would have to find another place if they could not pay the increased rate. One of the predicaments of having had a ministry in other parts of the world is that I know first hand about the need. It stares me in the face, particularly as I serve here in a land of plenty. I would be so pleased to be the agent to connect God’s supply through you with some persons in great need.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank You for giving to us Your Son, Jesus. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at November 28, 2004 09:30 AM