Our Fall and the Gospel

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Our Fall and the Gospel

November 7, 2021

The fall of mankind is the great fault in this broken world. It is a schism that runs straight through every person, family, and society on the face of this planet. We must come to grips with this terrible news before the gospel of Jesus Christ will become sweeter than honey to our lips.

1 Corinthians 15:22 : For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.

“I do think that the best preaching of the gospel is when the preacher himself enjoys it, when he himself is heartily in love with it; that is a part of the unction that God gives to go with it. When a cook is preparing a dainty dish, methinks he smiles as he sends it up to his lord's table, and he has some enjoyment of it himself. I love to preach a gospel of which I feel the sweetness in my own soul. So, dear hearer, if you begin to feel the sweetness of hearing the gospel, you shall feel more of it. Those who are tired of preaching are those who do not often hear it. If it is the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you have often heard it, you want to hear it again.” - Charles Spurgeon

Key Texts: Romans 5: 12,18-19

My guest joining me this week on the Sunday series is my brother Bryce. Bryce is getting his undergraduate degree in philosophy and hopes to get his MDiv. from a seminary after he completes his undergrad. He hopes to be a pastor shepherding Gods people one day.

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Transcript

If you have a problem with what happened to him happens to us theology, then you also have an issue with what happened to Jesus happened to us. And if you have a problem with that theology, then there's I don't know how Jesus is going to save you. If you think that kind of thought process is wrong, that somebody can represent you on your behalf.

That's really good, Rocky. Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do.

Jesus Christ is Lord of your life. Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life. Because God has given him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord.

Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

[Music] Revelation chapter one verse five.

Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. Welcome to the For the King podcast where we recognize and exalt and talk about the king. And that king is Jesus Christ.

And as we've seen, whenever I read that Revelation verse, this is the newer verse that we've been opening up the podcast with. We just see that Jesus is the ruler of all the kings, not just of the church or of the pastor, of the layman, of whoever in the church. This is also talking about just kings in general.

But no presidents, though. No presidents as well. We could easily insert any kind of ruler from any nation in there.

Yeah. So that's who this king is. What's this king like? Well, he's so powerful.

He's the ruler of every single king, every president, every prime minister, whoever, dictator, you name it. So that's what this podcast is about. And we've been going through a series about gospel foundations.

So we started off talking about the centrality of the gospel three weeks ago now. And took a quick break talking about fellowship because we just had a unique moment of fellowship. We thought it would be good to talk about it since it was fresh in our minds at my bachelor party.

And then last week I walked us through the idea of redemption, redeeming something that's broken in need of repair. It's going to be a cost to you to go out and purchase something back to your own ownership. And that's what God did for us on the cross in Christ.

So now why would God even need to redeem us when I talk about us not being inherently worthy? Why are we not inherently worthy of the death of Christ? Well, it's because we have fallen and destroyed the dignity and honor, not fully, but we have marred and spat upon the image of God we've been made in. And we don't reflect him as we once did, as Adam and Eve once did before they sinned. And we don't reflect him like we once did.

And now we're being in Christ, being restored to that image fully, although we never completely lost it. So we're just going to walk through. As we talked about in the Reformed Theology Tulip series we did about total depravity, knowing that the depravity of man is what warrants the gospel to come about and to give us hope.

And when we hear it, it should obviously make our ears perk up. Okay, I know there's something broken in the world, broken in me, broken in my family, broken in my nation, broken in the whole world. Who can save us from this? And there's different answers.

The atheists have secular humanism. That's their answer. They're on mind, science, empiricism, whatever.

All the other religions, but in Christianity, the solution is Christ, the one who redeems us. So the reason that that is warranted is because of our sin. So, you know, people will usually talk about Romans 3.23 when describing how pervasive this sin is to all of humanity.

And it says this, Romans 3.23, "For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." And then we see the idea of redemption coming up right afterwards and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, which is what I walked through last week. So the response that God has to everyone sitting is Him redeeming people from that sin that He chooses to Himself. And we know that the wages of sin is death.

That's in Romans 6.23. But really where we see how we've now after the fall, we've all inherited this sin and why we're all sinful and it wasn't just Adam that was sinful and why we're all like that. We see this laid out in Romans 4 verses 12 through 21. So we're not going to read all of it.

Chapter 5, you said 4. Oh, I'm sorry, Chapter 5. That's what I meant, Chapter 5, 12 through 21. So we're going to walk through that real quick. We're going to just spend a few minutes here and then we will wrap it up.

So do you have anything to add, Bryce? No, good. Okay, so I'm going to read it real quick. Do you want to get a historical background? Sure.

Genesis 1 through 2 or 1 through 3 real quick? Sure. I could do that. Yeah, go for it.

So God created Adam and Eve. He put them in the garden. And as Ecclesiastes says, He made them upright in His sight.

God gave them a condition of obedience saying of all the... You may eat of everything in the garden, but the only thing you may not eat of is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So that's the one command that God gave them. If they fulfilled this, they would live in everlasting harmony with God and they would walk with Him as we see in Genesis.

And if they disobeyed, He says, the day of Yevidah this, you shall surely die. So they had a condition placed upon them. They were to fulfill this and uphold it.

And as we know, they didn't. And that's where Paul gets into with this text right here, shows that Adam is the head of all mankind. And what happens to him happens to us.

And that's what we go into in this text today. Yeah, and if you have a problem with what happened to him happens to us theology, then you also have an issue with what happened to Jesus happened to us. And if you have a problem with that theology, then there's I don't know how Jesus is going to save you.

If you think that kind of thought process is wrong, that somebody can represent you on your behalf. That's really good, Rock. It's like in just a quick analogy for that.

If they're on the garden and they get kicked out of the garden, just it necessarily follows that whoever they birth is outside of the garden where they're at. Yeah, just like it necessarily follows. Exactly.

But Rocky brought up a really good point. Yeah. So just to lay that out real quickly.

So let me read the text. You only read the whole section. We could just hit on verse 12, honestly.

I was going to do 12 and then go to 18. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. So verse 12 says, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so death spread to all men because all sinned. Okay.

So we see death raining in Adam because of his sin that has been transferred to all of us and then vicariously through his sin. We have all sinned. Yeah.

And there's a kind of arrogance inherent when somebody would say, I would have done better than garden. I wouldn't have fallen. Yeah.

We would have fallen as well. Therefore, we have all sinned. We would have done the same thing.

We would have made that choice as well. Yeah. And we also inherit that guilt from him.

There is guilt inherited from him. Yeah. Nobody's created neutral.

Sorry. Nobody is born neutral. Right.

And then we see in verse 18 talking about Christ, therefore, as one trespass led to the condemnation for all men. So one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men. And that's what I'm getting at the beginning.

If you have a problem with Adam representing us, then it's going to be hard for you to reconcile how you would imagine Jesus saving you. And there's a lot of people, and I've talked to somebody who's decently close to me who minimizes the words that God says on the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. They're like, well, they didn't die that day.

Right. They're still walking around. But what Paul says here in Romans five is death came through that one man.

So sin came through the world through that one man and death through sin. So death spread to all. Everyone died in Adam the day that they were kicked out of the garden, the day they ate of the fruit.

Right. So death is a spiritual death is a legitimate thing. We cannot minimize the spiritual death that Adam and Eve acquired because of their sin and their rebellion against God.

They're rotting from the inside out. The outside rots last from the inside out. Yeah.

And that's what it means simplistically for death to spread to all men, because clearly we're all sitting here. Me and Rocky are sitting here right now. Right.

We're not. We haven't died. Right.

And so we're talking about a spiritual death that's occurred to the man. But a real death nonetheless. But a real death.

And then the lay out. Good point. So when we're talking about the gospel, the good news.

There is an antithesis inherent in a statement of good news. There has to be bad news to warrant good news. Something has to be wrong for you to hear something and then to say, whoa, that's good news to recognize it as good news.

So because of that, we must remember when we're sharing the gospel or even when we're being reminded of the gospel, we have to rehearse every Sunday our own sin, our own depravity. Jesus's victory over sin and death and us being raised in the newness of life in him. We rehearse that every week.

So if you're at a church that obviously does not rehearse that on a weekly basis, your own sin, your own depravity. Yes, we are saints now, but we're also sinner. We're sinner and saint.

So we should always be reminded of our sin, not bringing it up to condemn us. There's therefore not no condemnation. Romans eight one.

But you do need to remember and bring up the bad news often to remind you of how good the good news is. There's always a backdrop there that warrants the good news that reminds us of that. Right.

So when we're talking about the foundations of the gospel, one of them being there is bad news and the bad news is our sin rebelling against God, inheriting that from Adam and that we've all died. Right. Good.

Yeah, good. Last point. Hope that was solid.

Yeah, that was solid. Okay. Go ahead.

Yeah. Some people, just a lot of times people just really get tripped up on the whole idea that we are punished because of Adam. We have to recognize that Adam was our representative.

It's the same thing. Like if a president messes up and they say something stupid to another country and all of a sudden we get in the war with that country and we all get blown up. Like that happened to all of us for the president's sin.

And here's the thing we need to understand. Adam is in effect our king and because the king fell, the whole kingdom fell with it. Exactly.

Right. So we need to just recognize that he's our representative because he, as our representative, fell. We all fell with him.

Exactly. So that's just, it's very important to recognize that. And the root of why people oppose that thought process is because people hate hierarchy.

Right. People don't want anyone to ever rule over them or represent them. Yeah.

Our government obviously, representative democracy. No, that's a constitutional republic. A constitutional republic.

Yeah. So it's not, yeah. Anyways, we elect people that represent us in some sense, whatever.

I don't understand all the differentiations between all that. But nonetheless, the point is people hate hierarchy. People don't want anyone to represent them and to say, "Oh, I would have done better." Or, "This is being thrust on me.

I don't want this to because I didn't do anything wrong." And it's that whole, "I haven't done anything wrong" kind of thing when you have. Yeah. You have, your sin is evident.

You've inherited from Adam. This is not, yeah, this is a newer thought to do away with the whole hierarchy thing that someone could represent you. Yeah.

So, thanks for listening. I hope that was edifying and helpful. I'm going to end with 1 Timothy 1, 17, "To the king of the ages, immortal and visible, the only God, be honored and glory forever and ever.

Amen. Sully, Dale, Gloria.