This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Genesis 1-6” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, January 22, 1978.
About this sermon
Genesis 3 sets Adam before and after his sin side by side, and its concrete geography grounds original sin and total depravity. God bars Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life, and he reverses that barring only because in the New Testament we stand, geographically speaking, in Christ himself.
Sermon transcript
In all honesty, it’s a lonely, lonely place. In all honesty, it’s a desert in the heart. Although this is home, a place of illusion. In all honesty, even though you courageously hold that you were meant for the living, We were meant to drool, yet thinking that drooling to our hands would be how we went to sleep, still. Making something that is never meant to be. We have heard of the tales of cows, It was supposed to be that we, dwelling with God, would be a certain peace when a sanctuary is established by Him. Don’t you think that was hell?
It started long before the Garden of Death started, because it was a sanctuary, and it’s a view of it that’s fine. The beginning of Genesis 2, verse 4, to the end of the fourth chapter is geography. This is great. This will not make it. The Lord has a kingdom in stone, and it has to be full. Here we are concerned with topography, biblical topography. of theology, of theology, and of grace.
And we understand what goes on in the Buddhist religious chapters, and we must understand them in terms of themselves. In this place, man wants to live life. in harmony with the world which God has made and pronounced good. Then, having that great gravity of vision, so that we’re enabled by the Spirit to understand things from the inside and out, to be able to look from the animal that God has made, at the animal that God brought to him, at which they will intuitively understand them by the Spirit, to understand them in their essence, from the inside out, so that with mind and with eye, never stop with the flesh. To live them according to the Spirit. and seeing the woman’s naked form in particular, brought to him now by his father-in-law and understanding her and saving her, so that his eye never stops with the flesh, and nakedness is never the product, because he sees her from the inside out. from the perspective of the spirit, and from the perspective of those things which are eternal and relaxed.
He sees that way too. Enter enters him. Him comes walking that vision, so that now, without the spirit, visions end with the flesh. He’s the first to go. He succumbs. And now you see Her Lord as standing before Her. He’s falling, Him not. He sees. He sees clearly what He is, and He sees Her from the inside out. He sees what he has become by virtue of her disobedience, and he is faced with a choice.
Will he choose that which he sees all too clearly now? Will he choose that wickedness, that evil, that perversity that is now so evident to him, which he sees? Or will he persevere in the spirit and come to her? What would be for her herself? Can the sin be false? Can it be false? Because he would rather the life be the pleasures of sin and the peace of heaven than give up his life for her.
That he will not do. This man will not die where he’s from. This thing, though you might be lost in between with what you consider it is, it is. This thing is monumental. It is a monumental act of selfishness, of self-denial. and their sins. What does the Bible teach us about sin, first of all? I hear that sin is a universal disease. Is that true? Is there anyone here this morning that can prove that it isn’t? Would you like to state? I’m sure we would all like to see.
The Bible teaches us that sin is a universal disease. Paul, quoting from the Old Testament in Romans 3, speaks about the beautiful condition of men and women with regard to relationship. There is not relationship, no, not one. After roughing off the number of verses quoted in the Old Testament, Paul has this biting conclusion, for we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. That is our condition. We are all sinners. We’ve been born into it. It is our condition since the fall. We come to call this. Maybe there’s no right or wrong. We come to call it original sin, something that might be different today. Well, an original sin is not the kind that causes us to comment, why? What is an original sin? That’s why.
Original sin is that sin which we have inherited from our father, and We are not innocent. We are not innocent even in our birth. You might want to note, Psalm 51, verse 5, David says this, Before I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. And even if I am a covenant child, even if I am born of believing parents, born into the Church, a child of the Church, I am not innocent.
My nature is sinful. And the guilt complex for which I suffer is not something that I’ve acquired. I was born with it. And this guilt complex is not some sort of psychological or sociological hangover from the age of the Puritan. I have a guilt complex because I am guilty. You feel guilty because you are guilty before God. The law has been broken on this regard.
I think it seems like a good story that the psychiatrist was trying to handle a young man who didn’t have a lot of self-confidence. to the man, and he says, I think I’m suffering from an inferiority complex. And the psychiatrist responds, you’re not suffering from an inferiority complex, you are inferior. So I’ve said, no original, no weird, boring, easily did something that was always a choice as well.
We think of these rather disturbing passages concerning the nature of our heart in each direction, particularly Jeremiah 17, verse 5. A verse that possibly some of you have memorized, though hard, is more deceitful than all else, and is definitely sick. Please understand the depths of that verse. It is a statement on the depth.
The year in which our actual sins the actual sins on top of the sin with which we are born, these sins which are a matter of choice, so that I’m a sinner not just simply because I was born into it, I’m a sinner because I’ve chosen that direction. I continue to choose.
This introduces us into the doctrine of what theologians have called total brutality. But what does this mean for us to say that we are totally betrayed? Does it mean that we’re as bad as we can be? It means that every aspect of our being has been affected by sins, and it will be the end.
It’s not that I confide in myself now, thinking that there are certain compartments of my being that have gone the direction of hell, but yet there’s that one part of me that’s still acclaiming God. In contemporary theologians, even among those who are conservative, there is the claim that my mind has been dispersed, so that in making appeals, proper appeals can be made to me by my mind. And we do it. We are totally affected by action, and totally unable to let go. The consequences are well known to you.
In a verse that you know by heart, Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is what? Death. and trying to bring together what the Bible teaches about sin. It’s original, it’s actual, it’s consequent in death. But what does this passage teach us about sin? Remember the theme. The theme is geography. The theme is topography. the theology of the slave, so that that being now will begin to discover for us exactly what Moses was and was not by the Spirit, the existence of the Spirit.
Sin, in terms of place, in terms of geography, means separation. Separation. It is a separation that occurs socially between people, here, husbands, and the wife, who now know one another only after the fact, and not before the experience. One is now multiplying in their experience, is the substituent. Doubt with regard to one another’s intentions. Pride, disappointment, and shame, rebel, cowardice, tragedy. false barriers must be pulled to it.
The barriers that now are necessary because of sin must protect ourselves, we have to. So it’s not just merely a separation from one another, it’s a separation, you see, as well from God. God is here walking in the gardens at the cool of the day, and man is in the manifestation of God, an actual theophany. Man is hiding himself from God.
A separation from self, a separation that happens inside of ourselves, in that now what is true Of us is that we are liars at heart. At one time, we were those who were fashioned after the image of God, but now the arch-liar has appeared on the scene, and we have begun to be fashioned after him and in his image. He’s the liar and the deceiver, and now we find ourselves to be lying, and that lie is something that divides us internally. And the other side of the lie now is that we begin to justify ourselves by root of the lie. Self-justification as why we begin to take on the characteristics of Satan rather than God. Division socially, division from God, division internally. and separation with Jesus from the paradise of God in this world.
The question that God asks, calling out to the human faculty is, where are you? I’ve known everything except God didn’t know where they were. He wasn’t asking for latitude and longitude. He was asking, consider your situation. Consider where you are and where you have placed yourself. Because others can.
This is the place now that can no longer be called home, in which that relationship that first existed between Adam and God no longer exists. It’s no longer, you see, a relationship between the father God and his son Adam. It can no longer be called that kind of a mode. It’s no longer a domain in which Adam is placed as a prince to rule under the sovereignty of his God. It’s no longer a place in which Adam can walk as a priest living in a consecrated fashion under his God in their sanctuary.
Rather, it is now become a place of judgment, a judgment upon yours and upon them, a place of misery and pain and futility, a place of death. This place is no longer a place of blessing. It’s a graveyard in which everybody wastes their time. It is a place in which there is no longer human life. There is death and living, pain, evil, and despair. Just in doing good for the rest of my life. Supermarket music. Wonderful little romantic tables, and I can only tell there’s water in the movies. This is the place in which to do it. That’s God. Not the law.
The magic finger is what it is. their sins abound with much more. What we’ve been trying to say all this time is, see, this is how the creation is living from the perspective of redemption. These Moses with the children on the other side of the Red Sea, they are the ones who are now recounting their origins. and declaring himself to be one who has always been, not just simply a god of judgment that Not just a God who judges with a thunderful cry out, but a God of mercy and loving-kindness.
This is what He’s always been, as He creates Himself in the Testimony Village, for there He has subjected Himself to the purpose of creation. Why do we have what David fell here in the first chapter of Genesis? What is its purpose? What is it that it teaches? It teaches us that God Himself has made Himself subjective and subjecting Himself to the currents of His creation. You live in the seventh day, He’s subjecting Himself to the seventh day. The world that you experience, He experiences. And experiences before you experience. And he did it because he loved Him. He loved His creation. That’s why. Why is it that we get the idea that the God of the Old Testament is only a God that comes in from finance and shows His grace and mercy?
It is about time that we as Christians, even in the quickest of missions and moments, are able to look back upon the even beginnings of the story of His people and redemption history, and see there that our God is a God of mercy and a God of love. God subjected Himself to the terms of creation by walking in the God-given tools of creation, God comes as the pastor, the first pastor. Is there needed now a model for pastors? Why don’t people start talking to God instead of Billy Grayson? There is a model. God comes speaking. Come to the Father, and have mercy on me. He is the Father, and he speaks. And those threatening and guiding humans promise.
And he gives promise to that first sinful thing. And yet, he’s weak on both ends. for he knows that the coverings with which they have clothed themselves are not worth anything. And when Adam then expressed his thanks, his thanks by calling T, Eve, named her name, that it’s still proposed that she is to be the mother of all things, then, in response to that thanks, God clothes them. As he did, ultimately, in Jesus’ Christ, for those who trust in Him. He percepts that another God is as well. Notice the end of the third chapter of Genesis.
One of the amazing pictures it is, here is God’s picture with His hosts in heaven, speaking then to them about the condition of Adam and Eve, and split off in the middle of the sentence, because the situation is so urgent. There’s twice this. Why? You’ve come to think about the bars and the layers of the divine component, an indication of God’s severity and judgment. It’s more than that. It’s an indication that it’s love and mercy. Why? Don’t you see why?
If Adam and Eve now understand the age of the tree of life and live forever, then we live forever too. And if the age of the tree of life, even those that are produced by Adam and Eve, will not die. How else is possible then to be saved from the dark? Must the will to see the light require the ability to see the light? Because there is no light.
This place, this place in which you live, is a cursed place. That’s true. It’s a place filled with sin and ugliness and wickedness and diversity. Don’t shut your eyes to it. Don’t turn to a fact that it’s pretending it doesn’t exist, and it’s not there. It does exist. It is there.
But know for certain that even though this is a first place, a sinful world, that it is well-placed for the God who is seen and heard. A place where God’s great love is observed and present through Jesus Christ. And if we trust God, we have a new place to live in. Where are you? The resounding answer of the New Testament in response to this question in regard is simply, in Christ. That’s where I am.
For we know that wherever the law stands, it speaks to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be closed. All the world is not accountable to God, because by the words of the law, no flesh shall be justified in this judgment, for through the law comes the knowledge of the Spirit. Now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God can manifest its meaning within the style of law and suffering, because the righteousness of God is based in Christ Jesus, for all those who believe. So there is no division. For all that sin and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift of His grace, truly energetic, and she is in Christ as He is.
I’m going to read it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
He was seen clearly now by His Spirit. The masses of them seemingly ran from Him and unified out into the perspective of His Son. This only because of the mercy that Jesus Christ now awarded Him. By Your mighty power, You have praised us in His name.
You have given up the right to speak. You know rightfully. We knew completely and done because of our sins. We, who were addressed by the question, where are you, had to answer in all sincerity, we don’t know. But now we do. There’s only no right to it. My whole father believed in paramaritality. All of the resources that you provide is currently in his hands.
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.