John Swigert, Jr. and James Lovell who, with Fred Haise Jr., made up the crew of the US’s Apollo 13 moon flight, reported a problem back to their base in Houston on 14th April, 1970. ‘Houston,

Swigert: ‘Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.’

Houston: ‘This is Houston. Say again please.’

Lovell: ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a main B bus undervolt.’

‘Houston, we have a problem’ was used later as the tagline for the 1995 film – Apollo 13.

For the engineers among us who understand that the obvious is not always the solution, and that the facts, no matter how implausible, are still the facts…

Man says, I can fix this, I will work it out, I am the center of all

Not fewer than a hundred million people killed violently in the 20  century, this bloodiest of all centuries. You know what we concluded in the Western world at the end of the century? There is no such thing as evil. It’s all culturally defined.  I find the Bible’s account of evil a lot more believable than that one.

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

“This is the second time I have written you, and I don’t blame you for not answering me, because I kind of sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we’ve eaten, the whole

A freshman at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26, 1997.  He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmist practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment.  In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical “dihydrogen monoxide.” DHMO

And for plenty of good reasons, since it:

1. Can cause excessive sweating and vomiting.
2. It is a major component in acid rain.
3. It can cause severe burns in its gaseous state.
4. Accidental inhalation can kill you.
5. It decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
6. It has been found in tumors of terminal cancer patients.

He asked 50 people if they supported a ban of the chemical.  Forty-three said yes, six were undecided, and only one knew that the chemical was H20 (water).

The title of his prize winning project was, “How Gullible Are We?”  He feels the conclusion is obvious.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT in democracy, the Founding Fathers adopted several stances, accepted by few today, that were deeply indebted to the Judeo-Christian heritage. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers were all Christians. Many weren’t; they were vague deists. But among these biblical assumptions was the belief that human beings are not naturally good and have potential for enormous evil.

For that reason, when the Fathers constructed their political system, they never appealed to “the wisdom of the American people” or similar slogans common today. Frankly, they were a little nervous about giving too much power to the masses. That is why there was no direct election of the president: there was an intervening “college.” Only (white) men with a stake in the country could vote. Even then, the branches of government were to be limited by a system of checks and balances, because for the Fathers, populist demagoguery was as frightening as absolute monarchy (as we saw in another connection on January 20).

Certainly one of the great advantages of almost any system of genuine democracy (genuine in this context presupposes a viable opposition, freedom of the press, and largely uncorrupted voting) is that it provides the masses with the power to turf out leaders who disillusion us. In that sense, democracy still works: We belong to a democracy, “rule by the people.”

Why do we need a  cross, a resurrection?

  Genesis 3:7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons. 8 And they heard the voice of Jehovah God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God amongst the trees of the garden.

9 And Jehovah God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou? 10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. 11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? 12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. 13 And Jehovah God said unto the woman, What is this thou hast done?

21 And Jehovah God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them.22 And Jehovah God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever— 23 therefore Jehovah God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. 24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubim, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The first and greatest sin is not to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. The first and greatest sin is not blasphemy, it’s not Sabbath breaking, it’s not war. The first and greatest sin is the de-Godding of God, the dethroning of God. That’s what Genesis 3 is about. It’s not whether or not you eat this fruit or that fruit. It’s not just the breaking of a rule, although it is the breaking of a rule, it’s something much deeper.

The Fall

Sin, in the first instance, from a Christian perspective, is not merely a list of dos and don’ts, not simply doing things we shouldn’t do and not doing things we ought to do, except in a very profound sense.

Sin, in the first instance, is displacing God from the center.

It is difficult to get across the notion of sin in a contemporary context. Sin has become a snicker word. When anybody mentions sin, people snicker. There’s no odium or heinousness attached to it, it’s just a snicker word. People don’t think of themselves as sinners.

This God, then, can be accepted or rejected on the basis of whether or not I find him/her/it plausible. We start speaking of “The God I can believe in” or “The God I can’t believe in,” or we domesticate God, taking off the rough edges we find a bit uncomfortable.

If I am at the center of the universe, then what’s important in a family is that the family pleases me. If the family doesn’t please me, it can go jump in the creek. There you have the beginnings of breakdown and abuse and all these social,  family ills that beset a society where everyone is bent on pleasing himself or herself. You take what’s not yours because the culture owes it to you somehow, and on and on and on.

Our sin is deceitful repulsive

We are introduced to the Serpent. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” Exactly what the communication arrangements were in Eden, we don’t really know.

Whether the Serpent symbolizes the Devil or embodies the Devil, we cannot exactly know either. What is clear from later in Scripture is that the Serpent was certainly the locus by which Satan himself was manifest. In Revelation 12, Satan is described as “that old serpent.” We are told right away that this Serpent was not an independent or autonomous being.

“He was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.”

It’s not suggesting that God made him a bit of a sneaky character.

This created serpent was already beginning to be in rebellion and turning his prudence toward craftiness.

He begins with a question, not a contradiction. He merely entertains a possibility.

Satan’s focus is on the one thing that God forbid,  he made that the entire focus of attention in order to sneak in the assumption that whatever else God is, he’s an almighty killjoy. He exists to make life as miserable as possible for you.

Therefore you have the right to rebel.

Satan introduces a flat-out contradiction of what God says. The first doctrine to be denied is the doctrine of judgment. If you want to escape the authority of God in Scripture, begin by denying any sanctions. Then it’s safe to rebel against him. Emphasize that he’s the God of love. Forget that his holy perfection demands retribution.

The incentive is to become like God, to refuse to recognize my place as a creature and become like God. That’s the motive.

The temptation was not simply an invitation to break a single rule, though it was that. It was an invitation to begin a revolution, to start thinking differently about where the center of everything is. In the beginning, there was God. Human beings made in his image rightly related to him.

Now this human made in is image says,  “I will be God!” That is what this sin really is. It’s a revolution against God, against the Maker,

Now the woman says, She will define what is good and what is evil.

The initial consequences from this first  sin

There is massive inversion. The woman listens to the Serpent under her and Adam listens to his wife instead of to God.

Together they defy almighty God. It is a strange sort of notion to achieve divinity by inverting everything that God has made.

They now deepen the level of their moral consciousness, but from inside evil.

We human beings want enlightenment at all cost. Now so much torn up on the inside, they can’t even see that they’re lost. Just like a whole roomful of diseased people sharing the same disease may not see what it’s like to be healthy.

They sew fig leaves together for a covering. God himself suggests that they’re doing the right thing at this point. But it is not sufficient.

God takes skins of an animal, which therefore dies, and he covers them over. It’s as if he wants to see them as clean. This in due course leads to more generations of sacrifices. Sacrifices under Abraham, sacrifices under Moses, sacrifices prescribed by God until one day there is the Lamb that was slain.

In God’s mind, from before the foundation of the earth, to take our sin in his own body on the tree, the seed of the woman. Already God is covering them over.

Where are we today, we in the Western world with our polite company and our desire to make excuses and our religious pluralism?

This side of the fall, there is no going back to innocence. It does not matter what kind of religious stuff you try, you can not fix this mess yourself.

Then there’s broken fellowship with God, they have one sin and they hide from God. When we have defied God, we are not prepared to meet him.

The Bible is not a book about human beings climbing out of the primordial ooze and trying somehow to find God. The Bible is a book instead of human beings who have defied God and now spend their entire existence running from him, yet somehow drawn to him because they were made in his image, because there is still the stamp of God upon us.

If they don’t want him, they’ll find other gods or a distorted, twisted view of the true God.

God pursues them.

Already here there is grace, and it is only God’s Word that penetrates their concealment. “Adam answered, I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’  Here is fear of exposure and judgment before a God who has every right to condemn us.

Then there is broken fellowship with other human beings

God said to the man, Who told you that you were naked? The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.. She promptly blames the Serpent. Everybody has to blame somebody else.

These are the initial consequences that erupted from that first temptation.

There was an explicit curse that was pronounced because of the fall

“So the Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.’ ”

God still remains sovereign. He’s not jeopardized by rebellion. His sovereignty remains undiminished. It is now merely focused in a different context.

His first pronouncement of judgment is against the Serpent.

“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel

It’s applied in the New Testament to believers, for example in Romans 16:20. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” We too are the offspring of the woman. Not in the definitive way in which Jesus crushes Satan; nevertheless, as followers of him, we do crush Satan ourselves.

God did not leave us condemned and damned under all of Satan’s trickery.

We are not written off, though God could have simply destroyed us, pronounced the death that was our due and done no more. With perfect justice he might’ve done that.

The designated functions they had from the very beginning, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and to work and till the ground, both of these now become painful, harsh, difficult things. There are entailments to sin that now drag in the entire created order. Death is introduced

The entire created order is affected, Paul concludes in his great chapter, Romans 8, the entire universe groans in travail waiting for a solution to this thing, waiting for the adoption as sons.

The next chapter you get fratricide, the first murder, a brother killing a brother. Then the sin becomes so violent and awful that God sends a flood to destroy most of the race, except for Noah and his family. Noah comes out of it and immediately gets drunk. Then the race multiplies again, and they want to build a tower to God to protect them from any further flood and to be “in your face” against God too.

God disperses the race, but mercifully he reaches in and takes out a man and his wife, their family, Abraham, a new covenantal people. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs. Abraham is a good man, a friend of God, but he’s also a liar. Isaac turns out in some ways to be a bit of a wimp. Jacob is the deceiver.

The 12 sons, Talk about a dysfunctional family. Eventually the people go down into slavery and God pulls them out. Are they delighted that God rescues them?

No, it’s as if God has to talk them into being rescued. No sooner are they across the Red Sea, a few months down the road, receiving the Law … You’d think that after all of those miracles, all of those spectacular displays of grace and power, they would trust the living God. While Moses is getting the Ten Commandments, they’re having an orgy in front of a golden calf.

So it goes on and goes on. When they finally get in the Promised Land, things descend in endless cycles of rebellion and sin and corruption and decay until you get to the last three chapters of the book of Judges, and you can scarcely read them in polite company, they’re so grotesque. Even the moral reasoning of the good guys at the end of Judges is corrupt.

“In those days, everyone did that which was right in his own eyes. There was no king in Israel.” When God finally does provide a king, a man after his own heart, a great and good king, he’s also a murderer and an adulterer. So the race descends. Need I go on? This is who you and I are. This is who you and I are.

We are not to think of the Nazis of some special breed of some especially evil people. Germany was the most educated nation in the Western world … sophisticated, learned, wonderful universities, the top of Enlightenment civilization. Just give us the right parameters and this damned race could do it again and again and again. But already God has provided a covering.

O Lord God, amidst the many, many pressures in our culture to relativize sin, to make ourselves seem less evil and more noble, to give ourselves excuses, forbid that we who stand under the Word should ever fall into those traps. Help us, even in the rejoicing of the Easter season, to understand truly what it was that drove the Savior to the cross. It was my guilt that nailed him there.

Grant, therefore, merciful God, that without excuse, with deep shame, we may come before him who loved us even to death and cry again with gratitude and worship, “You are the Lamb of God. You are the hope of our race. You are our mediator. You are my Redeemer. You are my Savior. I cast myself before you and trust you, my living God and risen Lord. Forgive me for Jesus’ sake.” We ask these great mercies in the name of your dear Son, our Savior. Amen.