Today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer talks about our biggest problem. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist, J.D.
Greer. As always, I'm your host Molly Bidevich. We're glad you're with us today as we continue our new teaching series called The Whole Story. You know, it doesn't take long to see how broken our world is, does it? Just turn on the news. Wars, hate crimes, mass shootings, political corruption, fill the headlines, and often those claiming to have solutions only make things worse. Does this sound vaguely familiar? So how did it all get messed up?
And is there any hope for fixing it? Pastor J.D. tackles these big questions today on the program.
Now, if you've missed any messages, remember to catch up online at jdgreer.com anytime. Right now though, grab your Bible and let's rejoin Pastor J.D. in Genesis chapter three. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden.
Neither shall you touch it, lest you die. Verse four. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. You see, God knows the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
And she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. In this story, we're going to see four very crucial things about our lives. Number one, we're going to see the nature of our sin. Number two, we're going to see our instinctive response to our sin. Number three, the devastating consequences of our sin. And then number four, the only cure for our sin. Number one, the nature of our sin.
There are several components that make up this temptation. The first is letter A, unbelief. Unbelief, the serpent launches his offensive with the words, did God really say?
Are you sure he said that? Then Satan assails the character of God. You know, God doesn't really have your best interest at heart. He doesn't really love you.
You can't really trust him. Next, the serpent tells her, you will not surely die. In other words, there will be no judgment. You don't have to worry about that. That's not really going to happen.
That's not a factor. Unbelief leads right into letter B, idolatry. The apostle Paul in Romans one says about this scene that it was the first worship of an idol. All right, what he says in Romans one is that Adam and Eve gave to one of God's creations, the glory that belongs to God. Glory in Hebrew literally means weight. So when you give something glory or you worship it, you're giving it a weight that you should give to God only. This all culminates in letter C, rebellion.
In the words of Frank Sinatra, who sings the Anthem of hell, I'll do it my way. Every sin, every disobedience, every time follows this pattern. Life idolatry rebellion. These lies surround you in your culture.
Where are you believing those lies? I'll give you the answer. It's in whatever part of your life you are not 100% sold out and surrendered to God. Number two, our instinctive response to our sin. This is going to be a mirror into your own heart.
Watch it. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked?
Have you eaten of the tree, which I commanded you not to eat? What did we feel? What did Adam and Eve feel when they had sinned against God? Nakedness. So what did Adam and Eve do? What did Adam and Eve do? They wanted to hide.
And this is a metaphor for the human condition. So how do we try to hide from God? Let me give you four ways. Letter A, by never being honest about our sin. By lying, not just other people, but to ourselves about it, by rationalizing it. Or maybe you just put your head under the bed and refuse to think about it.
That would be B, refusing to think about judgment. You might be 12 years old. You might be nine years old. You might be 21 years old.
You might be 71 years old. But what you all have in common is it is appointed to you once to die and you will stand in judgment. Letter C, by blame shifting. Well, I was in impossible circumstances.
They did me wrong first. My problem is I hung out with the wrong crowd and they influenced me to do bad things. We blame shift. We don't really take responsibility.
It's everybody else's fault but mine. Letter D, through religion. Through religion, they made for themselves fig leaves. Get this, fig leaves are the first religion in the Bible.
It's an attempt to cover up the sin and the ugliness within by something that we think will keep it covered and not expose it. I'll go to church. I'll read my Bible.
I'll give some money and then God will be happy. Is that not your story? Is that not the mirror of your heart? You have the disease.
Genesis three is about you. You don't need a better version of you. You don't need reform.
You need a new you. You need a resurrection. There's no amount of fig leaves you put on that's going to cover up that heart that cheats the system that rages against God and that prioritizes everything else above him and his will.
You don't need reform. You need resurrection. Number three, the devastating consequences of our sin. Verse 16, to the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and child bearing. In pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. The consequences of sin, the first one, letter A, amplification of pain. Pain was introduced into the human experience. Now he mentions childbirth specifically here, but I think he's talking about more than just childbirth. I think he's just talking about pain in life.
Life itself became painful. Here's the second thing, letter B, relational conflict. Relational conflict. Again, here he talks about the woman's difficulty in relating to the man, but I think this is also symptomatic of bigger things.
I say that because in the very next chapter Cain is going to get jealous of his brother Abel, his younger brother Abel, he's going to murder him. Listen, the fruit of idolatry. Whenever God is in the wrong place in your heart, the fruit of idolatry is constant unhappiness, which leads to hatred and conflict. St. Augustine said that hatred and conflict and bitterness and jealousy, all they are are smoke that arises from the fire that you have built at the altar of whatever it is that you're worshiping. He said, you want to know what you're worshiping, just follow the smoke of jealousy and bitterness down and you'll find it. For example, if you're somebody who believes that romance is necessary to make you happy, or you find your sense of worth from having somebody being paired up with somebody in your life, then when other people are getting hitched, they're getting into romances and you are not, then you despair. And if somebody close to you finds romance and you don't like a sister or a best friend, you can't not hate them.
You start to hate them because they have something that you feel like is necessary for your life. You show me in your life an area of hate, of worry, of despair, of unforgiveness or bitterness, and I will show you the idol that it comes from. Verse 17, now to Adam, he said, because you've listened to the voice of your wife, you've eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you, in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you instead of sweet fruit and vegetation. You will eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your face. You shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken. You are dust and to dust you shall return.
Let her see futility. The world was cursed against us. The ground was no longer our friend. The world began to be filled by natural disasters. Our lives were filled with heartbreak and dissatisfaction and all seemed pointless like sound and fury signifying nothing.
Letter D, death. From dust we came to dust we returned. This had not been God's intention for us, but it was his promise of what would happen when we sinned.
The day that you eat of it, you will surely die. Now, Adam and Eve did not drop dead when they ate the first bite, but they began to die. There is still life and light in the world and in the human race, but our bodies and the earth around us began to decay. Maybe even worse, our hearts got all out of order. We began to love the wrong things.
We began to rage against God. We began to love everything else more than God. One of the best descriptions of sin I've ever heard or descriptions of a sinful heart is by Dorothy Sayers who said that sin, a simple heart is essentially disordered loves. We have all these loves and they're all out of order now. For example, if a friend confides a secret to me and tells me not to tell anybody, but if the next time I'm with this other group of friends, I just have to tell them, then what I've done, we've all done this, what I've done is I've elevated my love of popularity above my love of loyalty to my friend.
There's nothing wrong with loving popularity, but now I've loved it more than I love my friend and so my loves are all out of order. That's essentially what a sin sick heart is. As we love things in the wrong order, we use people rather than love them.
We'll throw people under the bus if it's going to be helpful for us. That's what Adam does. He just throws his wife right under the bus in order to save his own skin. We oppress, we pray in the weak, we're vengeful and selfish.
Jesus Christ will give us the only picture of what it looks like to be healthy and alive. He is so surrendered to the father's will that when the father tells him to go to a cross, even though he's innocent, all he says is not my will, but yours be done. He is so loving that when they put nails in his hands and his feet on the cross instinctively, he says, father, forgive them.
They don't know what they're doing. He is so pure that he never entertains a hateful thought about anybody else. He is so humble that when the disciples feet are dirty, he picks up a towel and starts to wash their feet. And then he says to us, listen, Matthew chapter five, unless you are perfect, like I am perfect, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
I'm not doing these things. He's saying, because I'm God, I'm doing these things because I am a fully alive human being, which ought to make you despair. You will not go to heaven unless you are perfect. Like Jesus was perfect because he is how we were supposed to be. He lived the life we were supposed to live. We were supposed to be that surrendered and we were supposed to be that loving and that pure and that humble, but we died. Verse 23, and the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden. They drove Adam and Eve out and at the east of the garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim, the angels, and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
This was by far the worst punishment. It was letter E, the eternal loss of the presence of God. We lost the presence of our father. We had no way back in because to see God from this point on would mean death death.
This was the greatest of all tragedies. We lost relationship with the father who loved us. We lost our companion. We lost our best friend. We lost our shepherd, our Lily of the Valley, our bright and morning star, the one who made life complete, the one whose love we were created for. Nothing after this would ever be complete again.
Nothing would make sense. Nothing would ever give us true and abiding happiness that we yearn for. Sin's consequences were unspeakable and unbearable, but we brought them on ourselves. We chose eagerly to bring them on ourselves and we continue to choose to bring these things on ourselves eagerly to this day. We said, God, I don't want you in my life. And God said, then have it your way.
In every other story ever told, this would have been the end. Thank God not in this story. You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. We'll return to today's teaching in just a moment, but I want to introduce you to our featured resource this month. How many of you wish you knew more scripture? How many times have you searched for the right verse to share only to come up empty? Well, I think we know that one of the best ways to carry your faith into daily life is by remembering and recalling God's word.
So we're here to help. This month, we've created a set of 52 scripture memory cards for the upcoming year. These cards are small enough to keep in your wallet, stick on the fridge or pop on your computer monitor. They're also perfect for sharing. Add one to a greeting card to encourage someone else. We love starting every January by focusing on the importance of hiding God's word in our hearts. And this set is a great tool for doing just that. The cards are our gift to you when you support the ministry with a generous donation today.
To request your set, call 866-335-5220 or visit jdgreer.com. Start 2025 off right by going deeper in both your understanding and recollection of the word of God. Now let's return to today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Great changes in verse 9.4, the only cure for our sin. The turning point of the whole Bible, listen to this, a scene so shocking that the apostle Peter says the angels still look at it and just can't fathom what was happening. Verse 9, instead of God sending wrath and destruction to wipe out the rebels who have followed Satan, he comes looking for his lost son. This is where Jesus gets the story of the prodigal son because the father came looking. Where are you?
Where are you? And then when he found Adam and Eve, he made him a promise. It's the most important promise of the Bible.
It's the vertex on which all the Bible hinges. Genesis 3 15, I will put in between hatred, conflicts between you and the woman. She says to the serpent between your offspring and her offspring. And then he narrows her offspring to one individual. He, one day she's going to have a son who will have a son who have a son who have a son.
And one day, one of those sons, Satan is going to crush your head and you're going to bruise his heel. This is the very first promise of Jesus Christ. You see the woman's offspring one day would be Jesus. One day a woman named Mary will have a son named Jesus and God in Genesis 3 15 points to a cosmic battle that's going to take place where the serpent will bite Jesus' heel. That Jesus will crush his head. It's the first prophecy in every story in the Bible, every chapter in the Bible from this point on is going to flow out of that promise. You see Jesus would come Romans 5 14 tells us as a second version of Adam.
He would be a truer and better Adam who did what Adam and Eve should have done. That is what stood the temptation of Satan. And he would do so even when the stakes were higher and the temptation was stronger.
Think about it. Like Adam, Jesus was tempted by Satan. But unlike Adam, Jesus was in the wilderness having fasted for 40 days.
Adam and Eve were in paradise with all of their needs met. Jesus had been starving in the wilderness for 40 days. Unlike Adam, Jesus received three temptations not just one. And every single time Jesus resisted the temptation. And how does he resist? By doing precisely that thing that Adam would not do.
He focused on what God had said. Unlike Adam, Jesus actually felt the attack of Satan. You see in Genesis after tempting Adam and Eve the serpent slithered away. But when Jesus withstands the temptation of Satan, the serpent bites him. Yet in that moment on the cross when the serpent bit Jesus, and it appeared that the serpent had won, God was actually crushing his head.
Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from a tree and died. Jesus will obey God and climb up on a tree willingly to die to bring life. He'll climb up on the tree to take the curse so that you and I could be released from it. He's going to take the flaming sword of justice that guarded entrance to the presence of God. That sword that flaming sword of judgment is going to go into him not us so that you and I can walk boldly into the throne of grace. That's why verse 21, the whole scene ends with God taking an animal.
We assume it was a lamb and killing that animal and then taking the skins of that animal and clothing their nakedness, telling them that one day, one day the seed of the woman is going to come. And he is going to be torn apart like this animal was torn apart, and his death is going to clothe you in righteousness. Our sin was terrible. The consequences were terrible, and Jesus paid it all because Jesus's love for us was greater than our sin.
And he said, I don't want you to perish, so I'm going to take these effects for you. On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and my shame. And I love that old cross where the dearest and blessed for a world of lost sinners like me was slain. You see, the dividing line of history is this promise in Genesis 3.15.
Every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve is going to be on one side of that line. How do you relate to this person that was promised to come, to end the curse and to bring life? You see, Jesus would explain there's only one way to respond to this promise, and it's repentance and faith. Repentance means you acknowledge that you're the rebel and that you have lived in opposition to God. You wanted your will more than his. Repentance means you stop hiding.
Repentance means you stop blame shifting. It wasn't the woman that God gave you. It wasn't the circumstances he put you in.
It wasn't your spouse or your boss. You weren't just hanging out with the wrong crowd. You were the wrong crowd. That's why you chose to hang out with the wrong crowd because you liked them better than the right crowd.
You chose your friends. You got to own your sin. I wanted to be God. Didn't you? Didn't you think you were smarter? Didn't you choose your own way?
Can't you point to a hundred situations where you said, not my will, not God's will, but mine be done. You got to strip all that away and you got to come out from hiding and you got to say, I'm the rebel and I have nothing. All I have is judgment.
That's it. I had a friend who told me that when he was a little kid, when you're his mom gave him a shark outfit to wear at Halloween. So like five years old, he said, I love that shark outfit.
I wore it for days. It started to smell terrible. He said, my mom said, you got to take a bath, son.
You stink. So he said, I hopped in the bathtub with my shark outfit on. My mom said, you can't wear the shark outfit when you take a bath.
He said, my mom sharks like to swim. I'm going to wear this thing. I'm just not taking it off. And she said, my mom said, you can put it back on after I wash it. But son, if you're going to get clean, you got to get naked first.
So then one way to get clean and that is to get naked. My friend told me, he says, I wasn't trying to, I don't think my mom was trying to teach me theology, but she taught me a very important theology lesson. If you're ever going to get clean, if you're ever going to be healed, you got to come out from hiding and you got to say, I'm the rebel and I have nothing. So let me give you the greatest gospel irony.
Listen to this. The gospel irony is this. If you cover your sin, Jesus will one day expose it in judgment. If you expose your sin and repentance, he'll cover it in grace. The only thing that separates you from being received in the presence of God is your refusal to repent and your refusal to be honest with God about who you really are. Jesus never turned a sick person away.
Every dead person he spoke to in a grave came out. The only ones who missed what Jesus had to offer as those who would not admit they were so sick, they desperately needed a physician and a doctor. Come you sinners poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore. Jesus ready stands to save you full of pity, love and power. I will arise and go to Jesus.
He will embrace me in his arms, in the arms of my dear savior. Oh, there are 10,000 charms. Do you understand that Genesis 3 is your story? You're the rebel.
You chose your own way. Do you understand that God, just like he came for Adam and Genesis 3, 9 is looking for you? Maybe you've sensed that. That voice, it hadn't been shouting to you, but it's been there whispering. And you know, you know that he's been pursuing you.
It's why you're here this weekend. And there've been all these things that have been happening in your life and you recognize that's God saying, where are you? He's coming after you and the pleasures in your life. He's been whispering to you. These are for me and the pain of your life. He's been shouting at you.
You are desperate for me this weekend. He brought you here so that you could hear and you could believe and you could repent and you could come back to him. You see, there's a lot of you in this room and listening at all of our campuses who know a lot about Jesus, but you don't know him personally. You've never received him as your own personal Lord and savior. And so I want to ask you this morning if you want to do that, if you never have had a friend of mine tell me that he said, I'd heard the gospel many times, but it never made sense until my student pastor, my youth pastor told me to take John three 16 and put my name wherever it said, whoever he's, I don't know what it was, but it suddenly made sense. He said, for God so loved Alex that he gave Alex his only son that if Alex would just believe on him, Alex would not perish.
Alex would have everlasting life. He suddenly said, I realized that I knew a lot about Jesus, but I didn't know Jesus personally. And I believed. Have you received Jesus as your savior? If not, we'd love to help you take that next step of faith.
That is the solution to life's greatest problems. Give us a call at 866-335-5220. And you can always find more free resources on our website, JD Greer.com. You are listening to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and apologist, JD Greer. So pastor JD, I've said this before and I'll say it again. Scripture memory can kind of seem like an activity for kids in Sunday school. So tell us, why is it just as important for us as adults to keep up the practice? Actually, Molly, let me start with the kids thing. I mean, my kids do memorize a lot of scripture.
They do it at their school. They, the Awana program here, you know, I always tell them that at the time that you most need scripture, a time of temptation, a time of doubt, usually you don't have a Bible you can run to and try to look stuff up. What the Holy Spirit does is He draws on the resources that you've hidden in your heart.
And so I encourage them. I use these scripture memory cards with my kids. And of course, as you become an adult, you don't lose the need for scripture memory.
If anything, it increases. This is a tool that, especially as you begin the year, it's very doable. It's kind of one verse a week that you can take some of these core verses, read over them, man, it'll, it'll transform your life if you will get scripture in your heart. So if you haven't done it yet, reach out to us. We get these brand new Summit Life scripture memory cards. You can secure your set today at jdgreer.com. Yes, we'll send you a set as our way of saying thanks when you donate $45 or more to support this ministry today. It's easy to donate when you give us a call at 866-335-5220. That number again is 866-335-5220. Or you can give online at jdgreer.com.
I'm Molly Vidovitch. Join us again tomorrow when Pastor JD tackles the subject of God's love and His wrath. That's Thursday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
