“Who Are These Men?”  Series: “Questions God Asks”

One of the more interesting parts of the work I do is the opportunity I get to interact with all kinds of persons in all kinds of professions.  For example, in one of my churches I was pastor to a State Trooper, or, as he was called at the time, a Highway Patrolman.  Contrary to popular opinion about people in such a job, he was a most congenial soul who saw the bulk of his work as helping people in times of distress.  But like all jobs, there were those parts of his that required him to play the heavy at times.

One day I was speaking with him about that heavy part of his job and I asked him the question, “What’s the biggest excuse people give you when you pull them over for speeding?”  And without hesitation, he answered, “Hands down, the one thing I hear the most from people I pull over is that they were just going with the flow.  If they were speeding, then so was everybody else.”

I remember thinking, “Well, there goes what I was going to say if I ever got pulled over.  I guess I’ll have to come up with something new.”

But isn’t that so like us?  Don’t we convince ourselves that if we’re just going with the flow, if we’re only doing what everybody else is doing, then our actions are justified, regardless of whether those actions are right or wrong?”

Make no mistake about it, influence is a powerful thing, which can be good or bad, depending on the kind of people we allow into our lives.   If we allow good people, then their influence upon us is helpful; it makes us better people.  But if we allow not so good people into our lives, there’s a price to be paid, there are consequences to be faced, and there is often damage that has to be undone.  As someone has said, “While we all do wrong, for the most part we do not do wrong all alone.”  We are a part of a web of creation that also is fallen and in need of redemption, and it is so hard to say no to the crowd.   

I love the story of the woman who was being interviewed by a reporter on her 102nd birthday.  When asked what as the best thing about living that long of life, her answer was unexpected and yet so profound.  “No peer pressure,” she told the reporter.  “No peer pressure.”   

Unfortunately, not many of us will be able to make it to that point in life.  The actuarial odds are against us.  So, what do we do in the meantime?  We make sure that the people who are around us will influence us in ways that help us to align our lives with God’s purposes.

That’s the primary lesson in the story that is before us this morning from the book of Numbers.  The book of Numbers is most likely not a familiar book to most of us, because we perceive it to be a book of lengthy genealogies and detailed counts of Israel’s tribes and families.  But the fact of the matter is that the bulk of it deals with Israel’s life “in the wilderness” as the nation moves out of Sinai and heads eastward toward the Promised Land of Canaan accompanied by the presence and providence of her Covenant God every single step of the way.

At this point in the story, the people have made their way to the Jordan River, just across from Jericho and the land of Canaan.  They have camped there in order to rest from their arduous journey and to prepare themselves for life on the other side of the river.  What we fail to remember when recalling Israel’s story is that her journey wasn’t without constant challenge.  Every territory she entered was occupied territory and the inhabitants of the land were more than uneasy over the vast nation trekking through their countryside.

Case in point is Balak, the king of Moab, who has heard about Israel’s victory over the Amorites and is now concerned that they will conquer and subdue his armies.  So, Balak concocts a plan.  He will bring together other Midianite rulers and they will pool their resources to hire a Mesopotamian sorcerer named Baalam to come and place a curse on the Children of Israel.   These rulers head out to Mesopotamia with money in hand to hire this professional “hit man,” but when they make their offer to him, he asks them to stay the night so that he can pray over the matter and see what the LORD tells him to do.  It is at this point that God appears to Balaam and asks him this question: “Who are these men with you?”

By now in this sermon series, you understand that when God asks questions, it’s not because God lacks some important bit of information and needs to be brought up to speed.  It’s because God is trying to make a point.  In this case, God wants Baalam to know that these men do not have God’s best interests at heart and they certainly don’t have the nation of Israel’s best interests at heart.  So, God wants this sorcerer to understand that from this point on God will be calling the shots because God has made a promise to His people that cannot and will not be frustrated or denied.  Israel will make it to Canaan and nothing or no one will be able to stand in their way.  God will turn even the worst of intentions to His people’s advantage.

What makes this story so significant to the storyline of God’s salvation is how it is bracketed by two other stories that speak to what happens when people allow others to influence them to doubt God’s promises and veer from God’s way.

The first is back in the 13th chapter, where Moses sends out twelves spies to explore the Promised Land, ten of whom come back and convince the people that the inhabitants of the land are too strong and the likelihood of their conquering them is too bleak.  Only two of the spies, Joshua, who will one day replace Moses, and Caleb, acknowledge the challenge that’s before them but are convinced that “if the LORD is pleased with us, He will lead us into that land” (Num. 14:8).  But the people go with the majority report and they rebel against Moses and Aaron and start a petition to go back to Egypt, which causes God to decide that none of those grumblers would live through their wilderness ordeal to ever set foot on Canaan’s shore.

The second occurs later in the 25th chapter, where certain Israelites begin to cavort with Moabite woman, even to the point that one man makes a Midianite woman his wife and brings her into the camp, which is an abomination in the sight of the LORD, who has commanded His people to maintain their ritual purity.  The fact that both the Israelite man and the Moabite woman are named in the story show how egregious this act was in the sight of God.  Needless to say, neither the man nor the woman nor any of the other men who cavorted with Canaanite woman will live to see the land of Canaan as well.

The fact that these stories bracket the story of Balaam is meant to show the people that if a foreigner, a Mesopotamian sorcerer, understands the importance of rejecting those who would influence him to veer from God’s will, even to the point of flashing big money in his face, how can those with whom God has established His covenant promise even think of doing anything different?  How much more should people of faith be steadfast in their obedience?

I can’t help but think that these stories were in Jesus’ mind when he encountered the Devil in his forty-day wilderness stay so that when the Devil tempted him to turn the stones around him into bread and satisfy the hunger he had experienced during his period of fasting, Jesus answered, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mt. 4:4).  Or when Jesus was preparing his disciples for what he was about to do in going to the cross and Simon Peter rebuked him for saying such a thing, Jesus answered, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men” (Mt. 16:23).  And that is why when the time came for Jesus to receive the cup of suffering in order that we might be able to enter the Land of Promise, the Heavenly Zion, Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8)!  Our very salvation depended on Jesus’ choice to reject faithless influences and to trust God with the consequences, which is of course, what Easter is all about.   

Can you follow the example of Jesus and strengthen your soul by rejecting the unholy and faithless influences that will inevitably come your way?  Can you not turn a deaf ear to those persons and a listening ear to God?

When I was in college, I sang for several years in our Baptist Student Union choir.  I sang even though I couldn’t read a note of music.  But what I learned to do in order to sing the tenor line of a given song was to position myself next to one of the music majors who were in the choir so that by following their lead I could manage to get through a number without ruining it for the rest of the group.

If it is true that we do not do wrong all alone, it is also even truer that we cannot be saved alone.  We need others around us who can help us keep our souls in tune, and we need God most of all to do for us what none of us can either do for ourselves or do for one another.

There was an old hymn we used to sing, which didn’t make it into this last hymnal – a hymn that was written by an English Baptist pastor, Samuel Stennett, titled, “I Am Bound for the Promised Land.”  What I like about the hymn is the way in which on one hand the words of the hymn challenge us not only to reject the flow of the crowd that is going at a pace and in a direction that is clearly not in keeping with God’s purposes and on the other hand those words encourage us to invite others to join us in our focused journey.  You know the chorus.  “I am bound for the Promised Land.  I am bound for the Promised Land.  Oh, who will come and go with me?  I am bound for the Promised Land.”

Indeed we are.  Together, with God going before us, we are bound for the Promised Land.  So, let no one seek to stand in our way, because by God’s grace in Jesus Christ, we are a people forever blessed.

James Thurber was a remarkably gifted author and journalist of the last century.  Most of you didn’t make it through high school without reading his most famous short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which would later be adapted for the big screen.  Thurber’s homespun wit endeared him to readers of all walks of life, and like so many humorists of his ilk, once you peeled back the more popular aspects of his work, there was underneath something of real substance.

For example, in his book, Further Fables for Our Time, in his short story, “The Shore and the Sea,” a tale that concerns a horde of lemmings who rush to their death on a false alarm, Thurber makes this remarkable statement: “All men should learn before they die what they are running from, (and what they are) running to, and why.”

So, what are you running from, and what are you running to, and why are you doing so? 

While many might struggle to answer such a question, I don’t think Jacob would have, not that Jacob was above a good struggle or two.  You know Jacob.  He is one of the main characters in the book of Genesis.  Born a twin to Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob came into this world with his baby fist wrapped firmly around his brother Esau’s heel.  His parents were so taken by their second son’s infant efforts to come out of his mother’s womb first, they named their son “Jacob,” which means “Deceiver” or “Supplanter.”  They thought it would be a cute name.  Little did they realize how in giving their son that name they had just branded his destiny.

It wasn’t many years afterward that Jacob managed to relieve his brother Esau out of the family birthright by taking shrewd advantage over his brother’s lack of appreciation for what the family birthright actually meant.  If that wasn’t enough, Jacob then teamed up with his mother Rebekah to get the jump on Esau and take away the family blessing as well.  When it became clear to Esau what he had just lost by being getting beaten to the blessing by Jacob, he was beside himself and vowed to exact his revenge once their father passed away.

Jacob, the quintessential “momma’s boy” fled to his mother’s homeland, where the Deceiver was deceived himself by his own uncle into having to marry his true love’s older sister Leah until he could marry Rebekah.  But deceivers like Jacob always manage to land on their feet so that he was able to turn the tables on his uncle by entering into an agreement with him only to take the speckled and spotted livestock, which he then made sure would be the strongest animals among his uncle’s flocks.  And then he fled back to Canaan, now a prosperous herdsman.   

This is where our text picks up Jacob’s story.  Jacob is on the verge of returning to Canaan where he will finally be forced to come face to face with his brother Esau.  He is understandably anxious about their reunion, to the point that he prays to God for help.  But being the manipulator that he is, leaning on God is not enough for Jacob, so he also sets aside a significant portion of his holdings and sends them ahead to Esau as something of a peace offering.  But at this point in the story he has received no response from Esau, which causes Jacob to assume that his plan to appease his brother has not worked.  So, Jacob moves to Plan B.  He sends his wives and their maidservants and the rest of his possessions across into Canaan and he is left alone to face his day of reckoning with Esau.  And this is where things get really interesting.

As Jacob lies down for the night, he has a dream in which he wrestles with a man, whose identity we are not given.  Jacob doesn’t even know him.  Now, I’m no psychologist, but I can’t help but believe that in some way this anonymous foe with whom Jacob locks up is actually himself.  Jacob is in some way wrestling with his own past, his own deceptive track record, his own controlling and conniving ways,  And, at the same time, Jacob is wrestling with this sense of blessing and purpose and destiny that has been passed down to him from his grandfather Abraham to his father Isaac and now to him.  And somehow God is in the midst of all of this.   

It’s quite a contentious struggle.  When the man sees that he cannot overcome Jacob, he touches the socket of Jacob’s hip, inflicting an injury that will make it impossible for Jacob to continue the struggle.  But Jacob will not give up in spite of his injury.  “I will not let go,” Jacob vows, “until you bless me.”   

But before the man pronounces the blessing, he asks Jacob a question, a very important question.  “What is your name?”  And for perhaps the first time in his life Jacob does not resort to trickery or deception.  He doesn’t hide behind his ancestors or his tribe.  He instead owns up to his name and his character.  “My name is Jacob.”  And when he does, the man grants Jacob a new name, Israel, “he who wrestles with God.”  It is a name that doesn’t pretend to put a new label on an old jar.  It is a name that no longer reflects who Jacob is and what Jacob has done but who God is and what God will be doing.  It is a name that is based not on Jacob’s past, but on his future.   

Can you not relate to Jacob’s struggle?  Can you not identify with his desire to try to keep controlling and manipulating his circumstances, until he finally realizes that he’s in something that is way over his head?  Can you not sense Jacob’s ambivalence over holding on and giving up, which he can only resolve by begging for a blessing?

I think you can.  I know I can.  We see a lot of Jacob in ourselves because of how we as humans are torn creatures.  On one hand, we long to tell who and what we really are, while on the other hand, we are so desperate to hide it.  We’re like the hostess who works so hard to clean the house for her guests.  She’d be mortified if they saw what a wreck her house usually is.  But when the guests arrive and begin remarking on how lovely everything is, what does the hostess do?  She says, “Oh, you should have seen it a few hour ago,” or “Just don’t look in that closet where I stuck everything.”  She doesn’t want them to see her mess, but somehow she is still eager to do so.  We are a mixed bag; so eager to hide our blemishes and imperfections, and yet so needing to get them out in the open.   

What is the reason for our shabby souls?  Might it be that we suffer from the fear that if others knew the true state of our hearts, they wouldn’t accept us, they wouldn’t respect us?  Might it be that we suffer as well from the fear that God wouldn’t either?   

But what the story of Jacob teaches us is that if we yield to God’s purpose and if we submit to His plan, it is at that point that, as the Apostle Paul said to the church at Corinth, we become “new creations” (2 Cor. 5:17).  We become transformed into the people God created us to be, before we fell from that place by our sin and rebellion.  We become blessed and gain abundant life, solely because, as Jesus taught, we become willing to lose the life we were living, which was a false life, in order to gain the true life that Jesus came to help us know (Mt. 16:25).   

Can you do that this morning?  Can you embrace your true destiny and a most hopeful future by locating your life not in your own strength and wisdom but in the strength and wisdom of God?  Can you follow Jesus’ lead and be willing to lose your life in order to save it?

Nikos Kazantzakis was a giant in Greek literature.  Many will perhaps remember him from his best-known novel, Zorba the Greek, while others of you may have heard of him because of his more controversial work, The Last Temptation of Christ.  In the book, God’s Struggle: Religion in the Writings of Nikos Kazantzakis, author Darren Middleton talks about a season in Kazantzakis’s life when feeling lonely and restless, he began to pursue an intense desire for meaning and purpose, which took him to a number of monasteries where he engaged the monks in intense discussions on faith and doubt.  One of those discussions was with a monk named Father Makarios at the monastery at Mount Athos in southern Greece.  As Kazantzakis tells the story, he asked the monk, “Do you still wrestle with the devil?” To which the monk answered, “Not any longer, my child.  I have grown old and (the Devil) has grown old with me (and) (H)e no longer has the strength.  I now wrestle with God.”  The monk’s response startled Kazantzakis.  “With God!  And you hope to win!”  “Oh, no!” answered the monk.  “I hope to lose, my child” (p.4).   

Too many people today are scurrying about their business without a clue as to where they’re running to, or running from.  But at some point along the way, God shows up and engages us in a way that promises to change us more than we can imagine.   

Perhaps that’s what has happened to you in recent days, maybe even today. If so, then what have you got to lose?  Only the disguises and illusions that have been robbing you of the blessing God earnestly desires for you to know.  

Genesis 16:8

“Where Are You Going?” Series: “Questions God Asks”

Summer is a time when people are prone to going out of town, and for good reasons.  Life gets pretty busy for all of us and we all need a season to break away from “the same-old, same-old” and have a chance to be refreshed and renewed.  So, a question that you hear asked a good bit around these summer months is: “Are you going any place special this summer; and if so, where are you going?”  I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked me that question in recent weeks.   

I think the reason people ask one another this question is in part because of our natural interest in what’s happening with folk with know, but also because we are always looking for ideas on what we might do to get away to places that might re-energize us for the business at hand, especially when what we’ve been dealing with in our everyday life has drained us and kept us feeling haggard and worn.

But what does it mean when that question comes from God?  What is it like when God asks us the question, “Where are you going?”  What is God trying to help us to see that might cause us to find rest and renewal in the places that would be the last ones we’d look to for such blessing?  That’s something of what is at stake in this text that is before us today from the book of Genesis.

I’ll be honest.  This text is a tough text, in large part because of how it offends so many of our modern sensibilities.  It is without question a politically incorrect text on all sorts of levels.  For example, you have a slave girl named Hagar who gets passed over to her mistress’s husband, only to be turned out to pasture when things get sour in the family household.  Who would have seen that coming, right?  And yet, in the midst of all the mess, there is a powerful lesson on how God’s merciful protection extends to someone to whom we might never have given the time of day.

If you’re the kind of person who’s into drama, then this is your kind of text.  It is a text that has a sort of “soap opera” feel about it with all the twists and turns, intrigue and suspense, character flaws and family dysfunction.  Why this text hasn’t been turned into a Lifetime movie is quite frankly beyond me.   

Consider, for example, the principal players.  There is Abram, “exalted father.”  God has promised Abram that he would be the father of a great nation and that all the peoples of the world would be blessed through him.  That’s quite a promise.  The only problem is that Abram’s wife is unable to have a child and how can her barrenness bring about any such blessing?  There is Sarai, Abram’s wife.  Imagine how Sarai feels knowing that the fulfillment of God’s covenant promise has fallen squarely in her lap, or, more appropriately, in her barren womb.   Consider how guilty she must feel when she looks at Abram and sees him staring up at the night sky counting the stars and mumbling about promised offspring.  There is Hagar.  We know very little about her except for the fact that she has been claimed from out of Egypt when Abram and Sarai had gone there during the days of the big famine and she had been taken into Abram’s house to serve her mistress Sarai.  From all outward appearances they were one big happy family.  Abram was prosperous.  Sarai managed the household.  Hagar served Sarai.  The only thing missing was the pitter patter of little covenant feet.  And that was when Sarai took matters into her own hands.

Sarai convinced Abram to have a child with Hagar, which was completely permissible in the patriarchal world.  Sarai’s logic was that Hagar could provide what she was unable to produce – a child of promise.  Clearly, Sarai thought, this is how God might fulfill His promise to Abram.  Abram agreed, not because he had any feelings for Hagar but because he bought Sarai’s argument that Hagar had come into the family for such a time as this.  Hagar could have the child.  Sarai would raise it as if it were her own.  Abram would be the father of at least a tiny nation.  Arrangements like this happened in the ancient world every day.  What could go wrong?  Well, plenty.

If in a situation like this, everyone behaves, there is a chance that such a plan might work.  But people don’t always behave, do they?  Hagar becomes haughty.  Sarai becomes jealous.  Abram becomes caught in the middle and just wants a resolution of some sort.  “Your servant is in your hands,” he says to Sarai.  “Do with her whatever you think best,” which Sarai takes as permission to make life miserable for her maidservant, leading pregnant Hagar to flee into the desert toward her home in Egypt.   

And that is where the fourth character enters the story.  Of course, He has been present all along.  It’s just that nobody thought to turn to Him.   

On the road to Shur, which marks the boundary between Canaan and Egypt, the angel of the LORD (which is another way of referring to God) finds Hagar and asks her where she is going.  Specifically, God asks, “Where have you come from, and where are you going?”

When I first was drawn to this text, I only paid attention to the last question, “Where are you going?”  But looking more carefully at it this week, I think keeping the two questions together are exceedingly critical to our understanding of the story.  The first question is a reminder to Hagar that as painful as her past was, her future could only be secured by doing something that to this point no one in the story had bothered to do – trust God in the face of the chaos. 

“Go back to your mistress and submit to her,” God says, which I confess makes no sense to me.  I would have told Hagar to head on to Egypt as fast as she could go, which only shows my ignorance of ancient customs.  If Hagar had taken my advice, she never would have made it to Egypt.  The only support system she had was back in Mamre with Abram.  That’s why God told her to go back.  “Go back and trust me in the face of the chaos.  I will so increase your descendants that they will be too numerous to count,” which is the same sort of promise that God had given to Abram.   

And what does this slave girl do?  She praises God for His merciful protection.  She calls him El Roi, the God who Sees, for she knows that while no one else has paid much attention at all to her except for what they could get from her, God has seen and God has heard.  She will name her son Ishmael (God hears) and she calls on God as El Roi (the God who Sees).  Her story points us past all the other principals to a God who is so loving and so merciful and so benevolent that His favor extends to a person everyone might think is beyond the pale of salvation, but God doesn’t.  God doesn’t.  And if God cares so deeply for those like Hagar who are not of His covenant people, how much more will God care for those who are?

Come to think of it, that’s the kind of question that Jesus often asked, wasn’t it?  When Jesus came across people who prided themselves on their own accomplishments or presumed upon their position or acted as if they were better than everyone else, Jesus often knocked out the props from under them by saying things like, “Never have I seen such faith in all Israel,” as he did when the Roman centurion trusted his suffering servant to him (Mt. 8:10), or “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham” (Lk. 19:9), as he did when the tax collector Zacchaeus pledged to repay anyone fourfold what he had taken from him, or when he pointed to a Good Samaritan as the model of neighbor love and told the expert in the law of Moses who had come to him to “go and do likewise” (Lk. 10:37).

When it comes to those crossroads times in life when we don’t know which way to go, instead of taking matters into our own hands, we always do best when we trust those situations to the God who Sees, to the God who hears, and to the God who loves in ways that far, far exceed our abilities to comprehend.  Whether you be a take-charge person like Sarai or a no-leg-to-stand-on person like Hagar, or whether you are simply the kind of person who, like Abram, just wants to see peace abound, can you not recognize the importance of aligning your life with God’s purposes and making sure that you stay one step behind God and prepare your heart to receive whatever it is God in His mercy and grace is willing to send your way?

As most of you know, this past week Judy and I got away to spend some time with our children and grandchildren, which though leaving us a bit weary and worn did our souls an immeasurable amount of good.  You grandparents know what I mean.  I’m still somewhat new to the grandparent game, so I’m still staggered by all that I’m learning about small children, which I somehow missed the first time around.  A case in point is what I learned when both my grandchildren wanted me to play “catch” with them.  Have you ever thought about why we call that game “catch” and why we don’t call it “throw?”  Throwing, after all, is as much a part of the game as is catching.  But here’s where I think the difference comes.  Throwing is natural.  You don’t have to teach a child how to throw something.  Catching, on the other hand, is not natural.  It doesn’t come easy for any of us.  And yet I don’t know that I would call it unnatural; I might instead call it super-natural, as we come to a place in life where we find it within us to extend our hands and arms in order to receive whatever is coming our way.  And that is why we call the game “Catch.”  We hold out our hands and arms in the promise that God judges us not so much for where we have been but for where we might go.

Wherever you go this summer and in the days beyond, just make sure you go with God, for only then will you find rest for your soul and a peace in the midst of the most troubling of times, which, once you receive it, nothing or no one will ever be able to take away.

1Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” 2And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. 3In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, 4and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, 5but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. 6The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? 7If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it.”

Genesis 4:1-7 (ESV)

The God Who Loves • Combined Sunday School • June 17, 2018

Genesis 3:13

“What Have You Done?”  Series: “Questions God Asks”

Some years ago, around the time I was born, the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai” garnered the Academy Award for Best Picture.  I remember seeing in on television late one night during my college years.  Those of you who have seen it remember it as a riveting depiction of a group of British prisoners of war who have been ordered by their Japanese captors to construct a railroad bridge for the Japanese cause.  The senior British officer thought that working on the bridge would be good for his men’s sagging morale; it would give them a sense of purpose.  So, they built the bridge.  They built it well.  They built it so well that when the Allied forces began closing in on that part of enemy territory, they had to organize a special expedition to blow the bridge up.  But when the senior officer sees what is happening to his bridge, he is outraged.  His first thought is, “How dare they do such a thing?”  But then, when he realizes the surge of angry emotion that has just come over him when the enemy’s bridge his men and he have built has been blown up, there is this moment when the officer buries his face in his hands and cries out to the heavens, “What have I done?”  “What have I done?”  The officer realizes that he had become so busy in succeeding in his enterprise that he had totally lost all sense of the bridge’s larger meaning and its value to the enemy.  “What have I done?”  “What have I done?”

I think the reason that movie has continued to receive acclaim even today is because of how so many of us relate to the storyline’s struggle where good people wrestle with their wrong actions, in large measure by initially projecting the blame on someone or something outside of ourselves.  “Look at my life.  Look at my situation.  Look at the people around me.  What else could I have done?”  And we continue to be mired in our rationalizations and self-justifications, all of which are designed to protect our fragile egos, until something happens or someone comes along to snap us out of our false narratives and force us to face the blunt truth that so much of what is rotten in our lives is something for which we are responsible.   

In a nutshell, that is the storyline of this part of the Genesis story, where God has called Adam and Eve out from their hiding place so that they might own up to their rebellion, which had sent them into the bushes in the first place.  These questions that God poses to the first couple – they are not for God to get caught up to speed on what has gone wrong with His human creation.  God knows exactly what has taken place and why it has taken place.  These questions are instead intended to help Adam and Eve understand what they have brought upon themselves so that they might be open to the remedy that only God could make possible.

There is an interesting sidebar to this story that points to the tendency each of us has with acknowledging our complicity in all that has gone wrong in our lives.  It is the element of blame.  Look at how difficult it is for Adam and Eve to be open to their responsibility for their rebellion against God.  God has placed them in the Garden of Eden and has provided all that they need for them to flourish.  There’s only one thing that God asks them not to do.  Don’t eat from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree that would deprive them of their dependence upon God.  On the day that you eat of it, you will surely die (Gen. 2:17).  So, what do Adam and Eve do?  They eat from that very tree, and they die to their innocence and dependence.  But what’s most interesting is their response to their new situation.  First, Adam says, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.”  In other words, in Adam’s way of thinking, it’s ultimately God’s fault that things went sideways.  And then, when God poses this third question, “What have you done?” Eve replies, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

This question that is before us this morning – “What have you done?” – has a certain forcefulness to it.  There’s no other way to put it.  Up to this point in the Genesis story, God has not been unduly harsh with the first couple.  But now, things have become a bit testy.  The question can actually be rendered, “How is it that you could have done such a thing?”  And that’s when things go off the rails in the story.  Adam blames Eve.  Eve blames the serpent.  And the serpent ends up not having a leg to stand on.   

The story makes me wonder, “What might have happened if Adam and Eve had simply confessed to their wrongdoing?”  How might their story have then been different?  Might it have been possible for Adam and Eve to have escaped banishment from the Garden if they had only confessed their sin and cast themselves upon God’s mercies?  Might a real apology, without the lame attempts to shift the blame for their sin, have changed the course of history, not only for Adam and Eve, but also for you and me?  I think it could have.  And, more importantly, for you and me I think that it still can.   

What this story is telling us is that confession is the first step on the road to redemption.  Nothing will change until we own up to our responsibility for the vast majority of what’s wrong with our lives.  Granted, not everything is our fault; there are some bad things that happen to good people.  But the bulk of our struggles in life are self-created ones.  We have no one to blame but ourselves.

I don’t say that to make you feel guiltier.  That’s not even what this story intends to convey.  God’s question – “What have you done?” – isn’t a question to determine the facts of a given situation, especially the fact of our sin.  God knows our sin; He is fully aware of it.  His question, “What have you done?” is, therefore, one that enables us to come to a place where we no longer live in denial to our sin so that it still controls us.  His question permits space to be formed in our souls where grace may abound and mercy may silence the shaming voices within.   

What about you this morning?  Are you willing to own up to the wrongdoing in your life and the rift your wrongdoing has brought about in your relationship with God?  Or do you prefer to look for some cause or circumstance outside of yourself to project that responsibility?   

Hear the good news of the Gospel:  Contrary to popular belief, God does not expect perfection from you, because God knows that perfection is something only one person has ever attained, that person being in Jesus, who lived a sinless life so that he could offer a perfect sacrifice for sin.  No, God expects and demands honesty from each and every one of us so that, as the first letter of John tells us, “when we confess our sins to God, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

The part of West Alabama where I grew up is timber country.  The only thing more numerous than paper mills where I grew up are Baptist churches.  As a boy, I was well-acquainted with what we locals referred to as “the smell of money.”  The log ponds, the fermenting pine pulp, and the chemical baths all combined to create these noxious odors, which the winds managed to blow over into surrounding communities.  When my wife Judy and I first married, when we would go over to visit my parents, Judy, who didn’t grow up in timber territory, would just look at me and ask, “How could you have stood this?”  And my standard reply was, “You just get used to it.”  “You just get used to it.”

But if you drive over to West Alabama today, the air is much better because of how not too long ago those paper companies installed scrubbers into the mill stacks so that the air is cleaned from the inside before it escapes out into the open skies.  Scrubbers work because they don’t try to cover up the bad smells, like some industrial strength perfume.  Scrubbers neutralize the odor by eliminating the molecules that create the offending smell.

You don’t have to get used to the stench of your own soul anymore.  Neither do you have to find an outlet to cast blame for it.  You can own what you have done, and in owning it, you can experience the fresh air of God’s spirit sweeping through your soul and know a grace that eliminates that stain of your sin and in the process makes all things new.   

Genesis 3:11

“Who Told You?”  Series: “Questions God Asks”

Influence is a powerful thing.  We humans find it necessary to take our cues for living from sources outside of ourselves because we know in our heart of hearts that we are the product of many factors beyond our control.  There is the family into which we were born and the upbringing they have given us.  There are the friends that we have made along the way and the sway they have held over us.  There are the teachers and the coaches and the directors and the bosses who have left their mark on us as well.  And I could go on and on.  To think that we are the product of our own individual effort is to ignore the web of relationships that ultimately shape our lives.   

Many of these persons are chosen for us.  Especially when we are at an early stage in life, we don’t always get to choose the people who are invited into our lives.  But as we grow older, we do have some choice; and as we consider how we want our lives to go, we are always wise to make sure that the folk we listen to will steer us in the right directions.  People who steer us in the right directions will influence us in ways that enable us to experience everything we were created to know.

That’s the point the writer of Genesis seems to be making as he continues the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis.  You’ll remember that last Sunday, as we began a series of sermons on “Questions God Asks,” we looked at God’s first question to the first couple (“Where Are You?”) and how that question points to God’s desire to be the ultimate Influencer in our life.

Now, the story continues as God confronts Adam with the circumstances that brought his and Eve’s rebellion about, a rebellion that influenced them to reject depending on God so that instead they might take actions that would enable them to become like Him.  As God follows up His initial question to the first couple, He points them in the direction of the evil influences they have allowed into their lives.  “Who told you?” God asks Adam and Eve.  “Who told you that you were naked?”

Last week, I called your attention to how the Hebrew word for “call” suggests a full-throated effort on God’s part to draw us into relationship with Him.  Now, this week, I call your attention to another Hebrew word and the irony it intends to inject in the story.  The Hebrew word for “naked” is the word arom.  The Hebrew word for “shrewd” is arum.  Do you hear the similarity?  There’s just one letter, one vowel, difference.  If we were to try to recapture the irony in our English language, we might consider the similarity between shrewd and nude.  In other words, Adam and Eve thought they were being so shrewd by rejecting the divine boundaries and taking control of their lives, when in fact, they were simply exposing their “nude-ness” and how vulnerable they were because they would never be able to lift themselves to the level of God.  “Who told you?” then becomes a question of what influence Adam and Eve had allowed into their lives that would have led them to go down a path that God had never intended them to travel.  Certainly it was not God who had robbed them of their innocence and caused them to be ashamed.

It’s somewhat easy for us to read the story of Adam and Eve’s transgression against God and act as if we had been privileged to live in Paradise, we never would have made the same mistake.  Let a talking serpent, like the one who tempted Adam and Eve, try to get us to reject God and see how quickly we tell him to take a hike.  The only problem is that the Prince of Darkness today doesn’t slither up to us as a wily serpent.  Today, the Devil employs more attractive and desirable methods to rob us of our innocence and expose our shame.  If Satan were to come up to you in the form of a snake, none of us would have any trouble saying, “Look, here comes the Devil; get thee behind me, Satan!”  We could handle him.  We could handle him without a problem.   

But that’s not how temptation works today, does it?  No, temptation today appeals to so much of what seems to us at first glance to be something very good, something that comes in the form of what appears right and necessary and obviously good.  Look at the story of Adam and Eve and how the Bible tells us that the fruit the serpent presented to the first couple wasn’t rotten and sordid.  No, the text says that “the fruit of the tree was good for food and desirable to the eye” (Gen. 2:6).  In other words, the Devil doesn’t waste his time tempting us to do something we know is evil.  He instead hides the evil in something good and then tempts us with that good thing.  And by doing so, he best exposes our naiveté, our nakedness, and our shame.

In my first year in seminary I was introduced to George Buttrick, the former pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, the editor of the Interpreters Bible commentary series, and a preacher considered to be one of the best of his day.  He was there to deliver a lecture on preaching and pastoral ministry, and I went.  I was so young and so dumb; I did not know what I did not know.  So, I was taken aback when Dr. Buttrick spoke about how any pastor can help people in times of need.  It doesn’t take a skillful pastor to be there with someone in the hospital or someone who’s experienced loss.  Moments when people are down and desperate are not the greatest tests of our ministry, he told us.  Buttrick said that the greatest tests are those times when people are not at the end of their rope.  It takes a real pastor, he said, to go to a family where someone has just been promoted at their work or given a special type of recognition and say to them, “I just received the good news, which I know is placing you in an extremely vulnerable position as far as your soul is concerned, and I just wanted to come by to stand with you at this time of potential temptation.  So, could we pray?”

I don’t know that if I’ll ever be that good of a pastor to be able to go to a person who’s received such a recognition in order to pray for them and their potential temptation.  But I do hope that in my preaching and teaching ministry I can remind people to be careful to make sure that they allow no influence in their life greater than the influence that the Spirit of God desires to bring.  I hope that I can remind them that the urge to rebel against God and go on our way is the default position of our human condition and just because we find ourselves in places where all seems to be well doesn’t mean for a moment that Satan is not lurking in that moment to bring us down and cause us to fall.  I hope that I can remind them that such opportunities are not necessarily seasons to be feared, but instead can actually become opportunities to develop spiritual strength as people reject selfish impulses and embrace sacred ones, as they reject unholy influences for the holy influence that attending to God always brings.

Because we require direction in life, we inevitably look for help from others.  The first Adam looked unwisely, but the Second Adam?  Not so.  You remember how Jesus was tempted in the wilderness.  Turn these stones into bread.  Jump down from the temple.  Bow down and worship and the kingdoms of the world will be yours.  Provision, prominence, power – so, what could be wrong with those things?  What could be wrong is that they involved indecent means for decent ends.  And because Jesus could see Satan in at all, he refused to bite.  Instead, he leaned on what God told him.  “Man shall not live by bread alone.”  “You should not put the LORD your God to the test.”  “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.”  And what God told him saw Jesus through.  And it will do the same for you.

There is no lack of voices vying for your attention, and not all of them are bad ones.  But any of them can be bad if they seek in any way to steer you away from your dependence upon God.  Life goes best when we attend first and foremost to the voice of God, for what God tells you is something that will make your life complete.