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‘So be drove out the man.’
Gen_3:24
I. Results of the Fall.—There are three great results of the Fall:
(a) The first of them is ignorance. Man has lost his knowledge of God. I know there are some people who persist in saying that there is no God; but you will never find a body of men, a tribe, or nation, who say, ‘There is no God,’ who have not some idea of God, who do not believe somehow in the existence of God. Nature tells us of a God, and there is something left in us still to tell us that there is a God. Positivism as against God has utterly failed to retain in its grasp any large number of people. Man has an instinct within him—let alone the evidence of nature—that there is a God. God has written the fact of His existence in nature, but He has not written His character. That is what Adam lost. When man had lost his hold on God things went all wrong, and so we find him beginning to build a tower from the earth, which should have its top in heaven, that man might reach to God. God has written the fact of His existence on our consciences, and He has also written it in the revelations of the Old Testament. There are the Jews; they have their Bible—the Old Testament. They were quite sure they knew the character of God, and yet, when God came, what did they do? They crucified Him.
(b) Then there was what may be called ‘weakness.’ Man had been made by God that God might take care of him. God’s one desire was to wrap His arms around that feeble creature man, and when man cast that protection off he found out his own weakness. Soon we find the heathen poet saying: ‘I know what is right, and yet I do what is wrong.’ While St. Paul even says: ‘Wretched man that I am.… I would … I do not.’ That weakness has fallen upon us as the second result of the Fall.
(c) The third result is ‘turbulence’—the want of control over the faculties of man’s nature. When we are born into the world we are born double. On the one side we crave for God—every man is made for God; on the other side we soon tire of religion—we begin to hate it. Once we can grasp the fact that in us we have both the image of God in which we were made, and what the Church calls ‘original sin,’ both together, side by side, then we see why we are such a mass of contradiction. ‘I know right, but I do wrong.’ Some of us know, of course—most of us know—how difficult it is to keep our lower nature under control. Most of us know that miserable struggle which is constantly going on between the right and the wrong in us. It was not so at first. Before man fell he was entirely in the Will of God. Now man’s will is at variance with that of God, and it was the Fall that brought this turbulence into our nature.
II. ‘Seven Deadly Sins.’—That turbulence expresses itself in seven great ways. They are sometimes known as the seven deadly sins.
(1) The first of them is pride. Pride is a knowledge of self apart from God. Man lost touch with God, and all he can see is himself. And so his whole horizon is full of himself. That is pride. Pride is the root sin; rather pride is the soil in which every other sin drops. If you take away the soil from the plant it withers and dies. So if you can root out pride there will be no other sin in the world.
(2) The second is covetousness—that evil feeling of displeasure at another’s good. Look at the harm which covetousness has wrought in the world. Half of the hatred, half of the sordid crimes one reads of, are the result of covetousness—that covetousness which drove man away from God.
(3) The third is lust. Pray God that you may be saved from the sin of worldly lust. The body is the temple of God, and yet people allow it to be defiled. Any man defiling the temple of God, him shall God destroy. If there is one sin more than another that is killing people at present it is the sin of sensuality.
(4) The fourth is anger. Think of our Lord Jesus Christ—while nails were driven through His Hands and Feet, and while the crown of thorns was pressed on His brow—what did He say? ‘Father, forgive them.’ And yet we have anger which springs up in a second.
(5) The fifth is gluttony or drunkenness. No one can fail to see the harm that is wrought by this sin in its worst form. You do not have to go far to see it.
(6) The sixth is envy. This sin it was which led to the first murder.
(7) Then, lastly, there is sloth, which shows itself in the general torpor of the spiritual life. Men cease to make an effort, and then they go down fast. Pray God to be delivered from that torpor. Pray God you may be saved from the dulling of your conscience.
III. Salvation from the Results of the Fall.—What is going to save us from the results of the Fall? There is none other way under heaven but the Name of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. He, the sinless One—His is the perfect human life. He stands in our midst; He hangs on the Cross, and as He hangs there He teaches us two great revelations. The first is the revelation of the justice of God; the second is the revelation of the hideousness of sin. If we would reckon rightly with ourselves we must look at ourselves in the light of the Cross. You will then pray to be filled more and more with the knowledge of Him, with the knowledge of His life, and with a hatred of sin.
I. Man’s fallen life, viewed externally and internally
(b) Internally. Strange and terrible possibilities of sin lurk in this human nature of ours. Who can measure the possible distance between himself now and himself twenty years hence? There seem evermore to be two wills in the mystery of the one will. There seem to be two men in the one man,—the two wills and two men of whom the apostle speaks in our text.
II. The redeemed life. As we have placed Adam at the head of the fallen life, we place Christ at the head of the redeemed life. Christ is here in these opening chapters of Genesis. Dim and indistinct the promise must be admitted to be; just as on some pale winter morning we see a shape dimly in the mirror, and yet recognise it because we have known it before, so in that dim winter morning of prophecy we can see Christ in that first promise, because we have met Him before in the Gospel and the Church.
The redeemed life includes: (a) forgiveness; (b) an emancipated will. In Christ Jesus the fallen life may pass into the redeemed life; in Him, exiles as we are, we may win a right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates and pass into the city which is our home.
Archbp. Alexander.
Illustration‘See how one sin may alter everything. It would be difficult to picture a greater contrast than between the beginning and the ending of our Lesson. The gladness of the sunlight has departed, and the heavens are overcast with cloud. Instead of quiet assurance before God, there is the guilty desire to escape Him. Instead of happy possession of the garden, there is banishment into the wide world beyond. All things are changed; it is a different world; it is as if every bird had ceased to sing; and one act of disobedience has done it all. Remember, then, that a single act or deed may change the current of a man’s whole life. One choice, made in a moment, often lightly—and the life will never be the same again. Let a man do one noble deed, and play the hero only for one hour, and the world will be noble to him ever after, and he will have the comradeship of noble souls. But let a man play the coward or the cheat, not twice but once, not openly but secretly, and life will be meaner and the world a poorer place until the threescore years and ten are run. There are great joys that meet us in an instant, but the light of them shall shine on till the grave. And there are choices we are called to make which—made in a moment—will determine everything.’