“Were We Always This Messed Up?”

Sunday Sermon Transcript — Sun., 16 Aug 2020

Sermon: “Were People Always This Messed Up ”
The Rev. Albert Rhodes Stuart

The twin-illustrations on the first page of this chapter show two different compass-roses which would be used on maps to indicate true direction & declination for the one seeking to navigate by map.
The first illustration is of a “true” compass-rose that could, in fact, be used as a genuine tool in real navigation.  That is, one could line up a compass against the compass-rose and figure out where one was headed based on true lines of bearing.

The picture of the second compass-rose, however, is warped and squashed.  There is no way in which this compass-rose could be used for accurate navigation.  One’s points of bearing inevitably would be skewed; no accurate lines of bearing could be established and one’s destination would never be located accurately.

In short, the seeker would be lost.

These two illustrations, then, provide us with a telling stereo-optic “site-picture” of our available spiritual, moral and ethical starting points and destinations.

In a perfect world, our moral slates would be clean, our moral compass-rose would be uncompromised and pristine.  They could be trusted to allow us to navigate the moral world without error or deviation on our journey toward the promised eternal Kingdom of God.

We do not, however, inhabit a perfect world.  We live in a fallen and broken world that has been knocked askew, and is now, fundamentally warped and useless for proper navigation.  If our warped compass-rose and broken compass are utilized as we navigate, we will NEVER reach that coming Kingdom.

Some may find one of two other illustrations more apt, or more easy to understand.

A fellow Teaching Elder and friend of mine is a retired United States Air Force Lt. Colonel and master-rated navigator who was assigned — throughout his Air Force career — as a navigator on KC-135 Air Refuelers.  He once related, to a Pastors’ Study Group, his frustration with some navigators who relied too much on GPS navigation units over against standard sextant and compass bearing readings in figuring out navigation problems because they tended to become sloppy in their readings and computations.

He cited as an example the problem of flying over the North or South Poles where all lines of longitude converge into one fixed point.  If one is sloppy in one’s navigating then one may be only a degree or two of bearing off from ones genuine course.  Now, at the pole itself, this presents no horrible deviation from “true”; the distances involved are measured in inches, feet and yards when one is close to the pole, but if one is as little as one or two degrees of bearing “off-of -true” for a hundred miles, then those inches, feet and yards become miles, tens of miles and hundreds of miles the further south or north one flies from the Pole in question.  Suddenly one is irremediably off-course and irretrievably lost.

The second illustration comes to me from an experience I had when I was 19 or 20-years old.  It was summer break for me during my time in college.  My family and I were visiting with Bill Suter, a family friend who was a farmer in Crawford County, Pennsylvania.  He was taking us sight-seeing around his community, and in the process had us stop at a cemetery on a hill overlooking a wide valley.  In the distance was a large three-story white farmhouse that looked to be in pristine condition.

Now, this incident occurred the year after a cluster of F-4 and F-5 tornadoes hit most of South and Central Western Pennsylvania in one particularly destructive late-May weather disaster.  We were standing there with Bill and he pointed toward that farmhouse and said, “That farmhouse over there looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

I recognized his tone of voice and knew full-well what had transpired the previous summer — Bill had already showed us a large Methodist church building that had been cut in half by one of these tornadoes.  So I looked at Bill and said, “OK, Bill, I know something’s wrong down there, but I can’t begin to guess what it is.”

He said, “That house is condemned.  It was picked up 1 foot off of its foundation and dropped back down 6 inches off-kilter.  Every major beam and joist is off-plumb and every window and door in that house is stuck either open or shut exactly the way it was when it was set back down.  Everything in that building is 6 inches off-true.”

Now, in this chapter, we will consider the Heidelberg Catechism questions and answers for Third Lord’s Day (Questions 6 - 8).

To refresh our memories, under the previous first-part study of “Human Misery” in Week 2, we given a serious look to the questions of:
    ∙   “How we come to know our misery?”
    ∙   “What does the Law of God require of us?”
    ∙   “Can we perfectly live up to it?”

In that study, we firmly established that all of us a “broken puppets” whose strings are cut and are incapable of righteous moral action on our own.

It is time, then, for us to look at the over arching questions of “why” and “how” we humans are so terribly messed up and what that means for us and for any and all independent moral action of our own.

And as we see from the opening illustrations of the two compass-roses, the navigator’s challenge and the off-the-plumb house, there are clearly establish patterns that are the “fixed pattern” of what the “proper” or the “normative” looks like.  Further we see what happens when the normative pattern is broken or transgressed.  And we can “see” or “feel” intuitively that there is something wrong here with us, both individually as human beings, and collectively, as people.

But that leads us into a need to examine how and why these things are true, how they play out and how they make us “miserable” — even if we don’t immediately sense our own misery because of a heavy veneer of self-deception and moral malaise.  We know from the preceding study for Week Three that the Law of God, as it is found in the Old and New Testaments forms that perfect template or “Canon” of moral being and conduct, and that we are, by nature, flat-out incapable of measuring up to it up to it in whole or in part.  Even when we try to do so, our very motivations for “right action” are so suspect as to render the final product as off-plumb as that farmhouse, or as far off-course as that faulty or careless navigation problem.

But, in establishing that we ARE off-course, we need to ask ourselves if we, as a race or species, are created broken, or if something else has intervened to break us.  And this is precisely the question posited and answered in Q & A 6:
    Did God create people so wicked and perverse?
    No.  God created them good and in His own image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that they might truly know God their Creator, love Him with all their hearts, and live with Him in eternal happiness for His praise and glory.”

Further, we must know from whence this malignancy in our character has arisen, and what is its end prognosis in our lives if uncorrected.

And this is where our scripture texts for this Lord’s Days comes into play.

Reflection  upon  Genesis  1:1 - 31 and Question 6:
We can see from our cursory reading of the high points of Genesis 1, that God created all things in their own order and that He created them good.  Whether cosmic, heavenly, terrestrial, animate, inanimate, plant or animal or human, the  Lord God created them good.

Moreover, when Yahweh (the Lord God’s covenant name — which means “I Am” or I Will Be”) made ALL things good, they were in a perfect state of completion.  They would exist, live, grow and function exactly according to His design.  Nothing was out of place and all things, living and inanimate, were in a state of absolute harmony.  None were at war with each other and all was peace.

Most significantly, we know from Verse 27, we find that Adam and Eve are created good.  And in this case, good, is the hallmark of authorship and signifies God’s own quality control; they were created without error, fault or flaw.

Verse  21  says: “So God created Man in His own image, in the Image of God He created him; male and female, he created them.”  Further, we discover that, even beyond mere “quality control”, Yahweh endowed humans alone as His exclusive “Image Bearers”. And that imbues  humans with a spiritual/soul quality not possessed by anything else created by Yahweh. We are unique and share a special relationship to God.  This is why Answer 6 gives us the answers that it does.  This is Imago Dei — or image of God — comes from.  It is within this image that we find where our original innate holiness and righteousness.

We have no real idea how long this epoch of Edenic Perfection lasted.  Quite certainly, it lasted for some length of time, but the narrative between Genesis 1-2 and Genesis 3 is non-existent.  We do not know whether this narrative is entirely continuous and immediate, without and temporal break in the story, or if there is some lengthy period of idyllic existence, work, worship and fellowship with the Lord. So, we are left without definitive answer to the question. 

 What we know from the narrative of Genesis 2 (which, presently, we are not directly exploring) and, deduced by “good and necessary consequence”, from our logical look at both chapters is that there was enough elapsed time for Adam and Eve to be instructed by Yahweh in the duties of their conservatorship of their Edenic Paradise, to exercise their good stewardship of the entire extent of God’s earthly creation and to righteously know, worship and share direct fellowship with the Lord.

Now, we may ask, “How do we know any of this?”  After all, most contemporary people are either Biblically illiterate or they are dubious of, or outright hostile toward, a Christian understanding of both the narratives in question and of our theological and Biblical worldview of cosmic and human history.  But, we as believers have had our eyes, hearts and minds opened by the Holy Spirit to truly see and believe the narratives and perceive their truth.

We can see the repeated use in this passage of the Divine Benediction upon each stage of His Creation: “And God saw that it was good.”  Finally, in Verse 31, we see Yahweh deliver His superlative (best and most complete, the quality of absolute “mostness”) benediction following the creation of Adam and Eve when He views the fullness of His Creation (that is, of ALL that exists), and declares that it is very  good.

Reflection  upon  Genesis 3:1 - 24:
Now, it is into this glorious existence that we gain our next beyond that which we directly examined in Genesis 1, and touched upon (or glossed over in Genesis 2); then we emerge into the dangerous world of Genesis 3.

Adam and Eve, while created sinless, without error and bearing the unique and unblemished Imago Dei, were also endowed with an unfettered will.  They could and did choose to do good until they didn’t.

Satan enters the picture, described as the serpent.  We have no idea what physical attributes  that serpent possessed pre-Fall  because Scripture neither asks nor answers the question.  What we do know from the text of Verse 1 is that this creature was “more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.”  The context indicates that the serpent was possessed of some level of self-awareness and of a certain mental acuity.  Further, we know from the text of II Corinthians 11:3 & 14-15 that the Serpent was either inhabited (possessed) by Lucifer/Satan,  or that Satan disguised himself thusly.  These verses, while dealing with other topics, still offer us the following insight when they tell us: “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. . . .  And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.  So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.. . .”

So, Satan comes to Eve in the guise of the serpent or twisting its own attributes to do his bidding as he tempts her to choose to break God’s Law.  At this juncture, God’s Law is of limited extent for there was no need for a more extensive one in an Edenic state; God’s commands were more of the apodictic  (Effectively meaning “Thou Shalt”), than they were of the apophactic (meaning “Thou Shalt Not”) variety of law.  That is to say, God commands Adam and Eve was their positive, constructive duties were because they were engaged in the direct stewardship/conservatorship of Eden.

Still, there is ONE apophactic regulation they are to follow.  Genesis 2:15-17 tell us that God gave Adam a specific command of negation, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Returning to Chapter 3, we can see from the narrative, Satan’s shrewd temptation of humanity comes to Eve and not Adam, and it is directed precisely toward this command.  “He [the serpent] said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden”?’”.  (3:1b)   He then follows this up with a nonsensical and non-existent temptation to thwart death.  And this temptation is two-pronged.  It is one designed to separate the man from his wife and both of them from their fellowship with God.

First, Satan’s approach to Eve is designed to take full advantage of Eve’s subsidiary authority as steward.  She has been instructed by Adam as to the nature of God’s Law because, Adam having received the Law directly from Yahweh, had the duty to inform his wife.  Thus part of Satan’s temptation appears to be aimed at creating jealousy and dissension between the two because Adam received God’s commission directly.

Second, the Serpent attacks Eve’s understanding of God’s Law at the weakest point and invites interpretation where none is needed or desired.  In a perfect pre-Fall world, Law keeping was a simple matter of “Thou Shalts” and ONE known “Thou Shalt Not”.  Life was a simply a matter of “black-letter law” — “Do this!  Don’t do that!”  But Satan engages in a game of linguistic and moral “scrabble”.  In short, Eve is enticed into sin through word games.

As the narrative unfolds, we see that she is enticed by Satan’s words and guile.  And this comes  to pass because Satan, as an already-fallen and downcast Yahweh-created celestial being is jealous of humanity’s special status as God’s special image-bearers.  He desires to see Adam and Eve transgress the Law and become as he is so that he may usurp God’s sovereign and rightful rule in all things.

Our problem, as their children, is that we now are rendered as genetically incapable of keeping the Law as Eve is.

Eve falls by eating of the fruit becomes, in an instant, irretrievably and irreparably corrupt to the core of body and soul precisely because she has broken God’s command, and in transgressing the “Do Not” command.  She is now fully incapable of following the “Do These” commands, and by corruption, inclined to do exactly their opposite .  And it is in this new state that she approaches and entices Adam to share her fault, which he does just as readily and unthinkingly.  God’s good Creation is now as surely polluted as was the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon Oil Platform spill in 2010.

We must consider this carefully because it is profoundly true: In a perfect world where there  is only righteousness, holiness, goodness and abundance and a life of eternal righteous blessedness, we truly need not consider the nature of evil.  But there it is, in amongst the word games, Satan’s continual challenge to each and all of us —even in our current condition.

As it is, while they had not yet died, they were now, as never before, actually in the process of dying.  Their deterioration and even decay had begun.  And, in God’s mercy and grace, He spares them from compounding their sin beyond all hope of eventual redemption and salvation by ejecting them from Eden before eating again of the fruit of the Tree of Life.  He also offers them the hope of a coming Redemption and Redeemer Who will liberate them from eternal condemnation and punishment by means of a still-yet greater sacrifice of justifying blood.  In a temporal sense, however, which never existed previously, they are cast out, cut down to size and smitten,  and have rendered us equally so.

God, however does not abandon them, even as he punishes them. They, and we, are in desperate trouble temporally and eternally, but Yahweh Still has something more yet to say and do. And that is why Q & A 7 and 8 ask and answer the way in which they do.  Indeed, we are now fallen and broken beyond human repair apart from God.  In fact, in our new natural state, apart from the Sacrifice of Christ Jesus and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we are at enmity — literally at never-ending war — with Yahweh the Lord because of the disobedience of our first parents.  And thus, our own Imago Dei, while still present in every human being, dead, living, or yet to be, it is marred, scratched, broken and now produces only a dim reflection of God’s glory rather than the blazing, beacon bright “throwing back” the effulgent brightness of His glory in our work, worship and life.

Amen!