God Solves Sin Guilt and Shame

• Why Are We Reading This narrative about naked newlyweds, a talking snake, a forbidden fruit and the end of innocence?

Romans 4.20
Abraham never wavered in believing God’s promise. In fact, his faith grew stronger, and in this he brought glory to God.
²¹ He was fully convinced that God is able to do whatever he promises.
²² And because of Abraham’s faith, God counted him as righteous.
²³ And when God counted him as righteous, it wasn’t just for Abraham’s benefit. It was recorded
²⁴ for our benefit, too, assuring us that God will also count us as righteous if we believe in him, the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.
²⁵ He was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised to life to make us right with God.

Romans 15.4
Such things were written in the Scriptures long ago to teach us. And the Scriptures give us hope and encouragement as we wait patiently for God’s promises to be fulfilled.

• I stole this thought from John Mark Comer, quoting Willard:
  “The moral of the story often will have much more to do with what we learn of god than in identifying with a particular character. In other words, the characters are meant to be an example for us to avoid or imitate, but ultimately, we’re meant to encounter God.”

1 Corinthians 10.11
These things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us who live at the end of the age.

• V6 / Warning / Example GK = tupoi, which means mold or model a prototype of something later.

Genesis 3
The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?”
² “Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” the woman replied.
³ “It’s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, ‘You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die.’”
⁴ “You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman.
⁵ “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.
⁶ The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too.
⁷ At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.
⁸ When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the Lord God among the trees.

• Note this: They are guilty of sin, but they feel shame. And they feel shame about their nakedness. There is no admission of guilt or description of it. They make a covering for themselves and hide themselves.
• So what does shame do? Shame in its most innocuous form is the end of the anticipation of good. Shame is dread of further interaction because it tells us to believe that the only way to end the dread of no more good, oh no!
• Is to withdraw from relationship so we no longer have to deal with the disappointment of fractured relationship and the loss of anticipated joy.

Thompson:
“Guilt is something I feel because I have done something bad. Shame is something I feel because I am bad. We are sinners, God wants us to be saved. The Enemy says maybe some can have light and hope, but not us. God wants us lost.”

• In order for me to feel the kind of guilt God desires that leads us to him–

2 Corinthians 7.10
For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.

• I must in some way simultaneously feel the pain I have caused for another. In this sense, guilt tends to draw my attention to another and is often accompanied by a desire to resolve the problem by being closer to him or her, [admitting a wrongdoing, seeking and being offered forgiveness].
• Shame on the other hand separates me from others, as my awareness of what I feel is virtually consumed with my own internal sensations.

“Shame is deeply committed to exploiting the machinery of attachment in creating states of aloneness within us and between us, most substantially between us and God.
‘Shame wants very much to infect every element of the mind in order to distort God’s story and offer another narrative.’”

• Introducing Doubt - Shame’s Core Memory
  “The creature and the woman engage in a conversation that activates several emotional shifts within the woman. His initial query introduces the possibility for doubt to enter the woman’s mental framework. Doubt not only about God (Did God really say…?) But also about her recollection of history and by extension – and more importantly– doubt about the nature of her relationship with God.”
  Thompson, Soul of Shame pg. 101)

Michael Polanyi:
“In order for us to doubt anything , at the moment we do we simultaneously put our trust in something else.”

CT:
“We are invariably made for faith, to operate out of a need to trust something we cannot control.”

• Did God really say?

  1. Are you sure you are reliable about God?
  2. Are you sure God is telling you the whole story?
     More Doubt
     v4 lays claim to knowledge the woman doesn’t have.
     Why don’t you know this, but I do?

• Even More Doubt:
  You’ll be made like God by something other than God and something outside yourself.
  Inadequacy

• You don’t know the whole story - Knowing Both good and evil - you don’t have all that is required. You are insufficient, inadequate. You lack.

• Accusation Against the Woman or God
  You don’t have this thing you need. Why is God holding it back from you? Is he not good or are you incapable? Either God thinks you’re not enough or you know you’re not enough.
  Either way, two of you agree that you’re missing something vital, otherwise God would invite you to be like him.
  If God is good, he would. If you were good, God would give you the respect.

• Notice - all this ‘conversation’ is about God, the woman and the garden, and the tree in the Garden, but none of this conversation is with God.

Thompson:
“Doubt, though concerned with (some) facts, is not primarily about them but rather about our emotional sensation of connection, security, and confidence.”

“But there is a darker side to doubt, and the serpent in Gen. 3 has every intention of exploiting it. In this scene, doubt is planted as a way to discredit not so much Eve’s rendition of the facts, which could easily be resolved by waiting for God’s next stroll through the garden. Doubt from the Enemy is used to rupture relational connections. Doubt from the Enemy always invokes shame.”

Genesis 3
⁸ When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the Lord God among the trees.
⁹ Then the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
¹⁰ He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.”
¹¹ “Who told you that you were naked?” the Lord God asked. “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?”
¹² The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.”
¹³ Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?”
“The serpent deceived me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.”
¹⁴ Then the Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild.
You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live.
¹⁵ And I will cause hostility between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring.
He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

• Irredeemable Enemy: Eating dust, groveling in the dust: The thing that God made human life from will be a constant reminder. You are not The Creator. I make life from dust. You only crawl in it. And if you succeed and kill God’s image bearers, you are left with dust. Life was never and will never be yours to give. Satan is an irredeemable, defeated, and furious foe (Luke 22; Revelation 12; 1 Peter 5.)

Genesis 3
¹⁶ Then he said to the woman,
“I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy, and in pain you will give birth.
And you will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you.”

¹⁷ And to the man he said,
“Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree
whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you.
All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.
¹⁸ It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground
from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return.”

Paradise Lost: God’s Judgment
²⁰ Then the man—Adam—named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all who live.
²¹ And the Lord God made clothing from animal skins for Adam and his wife.

• What Is God’s Covering Today?

James 1
² Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.
³ For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow.
⁴ So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.
⁵ If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.
⁶ But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.
⁷ Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.
⁸ Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.

• Eve - Are children a curse? Is man your curse?
  Pain both physical and emotional in ‘the life you give’.
• Yet still, children are a reward from God (Psalm 127.3) not a curse.

• But there is pain all through it, emotionally, physically, an spiritually.
  The union that you were made for will be characterized by distrust, your heart will have control at war with the vulnerability you were made for and flourished in.

• Galatians 5: - I’m not free to carry out my good intentions.
  Holy Spirit grow fruit in my mind, will, and emotions. (My heart)
  Desire to control, but you can’t, and unless God intervenes, your life will be thwarted desire.

• Phiippians 2.13 - replace my desire and submit my power in the right direction. “God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.

• Ephesians 5.21 - submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

• Adam - Is the woman a curse? Is your family a curse? Is work a curse?
  Is futility and lack of productivity a curse?
  Because we didn’t produce loyalty to God, the creation will not produce loyalty to us.

• New Testament: provision
  1 Timothy 5.8
  But those who won’t care for their relatives, especially those in their own household, have denied the true faith. Such people are worse than unbelievers.

Ephesians 5
²⁵ For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her
²⁶ to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word.
²⁷ He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault.
²⁸ In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself.
²⁹ No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church.
³⁰ And we are members of his body.
³¹ As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.”
³² This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one.
³³ So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

• Creation is groaning in eager anticipation of God’s restoration.

Romans 8.20-22
²⁰ Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope,
²¹ the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.

Revelation 21
³ I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them.
⁴ He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.”
⁵ And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!” And then he said to me, “Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.”