My twin grandsons are three years old. Their daddy asked one of them, “How old are you?” Boldly, he looked into daddy’s eyes and said, “I’m foe,” meaning four. “How old is your twin brother?” “He’s just free” ... three.
You don’t have to teach a kid to lie. You have to train a child to be truthful. We are born with a sinful nature. King David declared, “Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5, CSB).
Adam and Eve were created by God and lovingly placed in the Garden of Eden. There they lived in perfect harmony, until... sin!
God is a loving God, but God is also a Holy and Just God. As a Holy God, He can’t be associated with sin. As a Just God, He must righteously punish sin.
So, when Adam and Eve chose to reject God’s promise and plan, God was forced to act. In His perfect Holiness, God had to eject the first family from His Holy Presence. “He drove the man out” of the Garden (Genesis 3:24, CSB). In Righteousness and Justice, God had to allow death to begin its destructive process. At the moment they sinned, they began to die.
The Good News is that God created mankind to live in union with Himself. The really bad news is, every human that ever lived, except Jesus, has sinned. Every one of us is a sinner. The Apostle wrote, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, CSB).
Because of our sin, God acts in Holiness. “Your iniquities are separating you from your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not listen” (Isaiah 59:2, CSB)
Because of His Righteousness, God acts justly, condemning the sinner to death. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23, CSB). We, every human being, have earned the death penalty. We deserve death.
Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, said it this way. “Man was created to have fellowship with God; but, because of his own stubborn self-will, he chose to go his own independent way and fellowship with God was broken. This self-will, characterized by an attitude of active rebellion or passive indifference, is an evidence of what the Bible calls sin.”
The simple and concise Gospel is: Creation, Fall, Rescue, and Life. God created us perfectly, but then came the Fall... mankind fell into sin and death.
Tomorrow we will look at the really good news... Jesus comes to our rescue!
South Georgia Baptist Church
Amarillo, Texas
Mike Martin, Pastor
mike@southgeorgiabaptistchurch.org