03.1 - Lesson 03, Part 1: Consequences of the Fall: What Happened to the Perfect World?

Interlocked Series Lesson #03, Part 1
Consequences of the Fall: What Happened to the Perfect World?
August 8, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, it’s such a privilege that we have the ability to go through Your Word the way we’re doing it in this Interlocked Series and for all of the work that Amos and Jen Kwok have done in putting this together based on what Charlie Clough did, and a few others. Father, we’re just thankful that that is being put into print because it’s so important.

“Father, we’re just thankful too for the kids that we have in this congregation and for the opportunity to teach them because they are the battlefield for this next generation, for the future. It is so important for parents to train their children to think biblically. The future that we see now, or the reality that we see now for the future shows us our children and our grandchildren will not have the same experiences that we have had. We know the world still needs missionaries, and it still needs pastors, and still needs strong believers to stand firm for Your Word and to shine its lights in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation.

“Father, we pray that as this teaching goes out, that you would use that to really help parents, grandparents, Sunday School teachers, and others to teach Your Word faithfully. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slide 2

We are continuing tonight in the Interlock Series. This is lesson three, part one, and there’ll probably be only two parts in this lesson. It is not quite as detailed or as significant as the previous two dealing with a number of things, although everything here is significant. Actually, the lesson’s not quite as long to read.

There’s going to be some corrections that I make on the way the lesson is written and these are things that I have had very profitable discussions with Amos and Jen about. They sent all their material to me to critique it, so we’ve worked through some things that were not quite on target. I’ve already sent these slides to them earlier this afternoon so that they could look at those.

There’s no conflict on it. It’s just a little confusing about a lot of these important things in terms of the makeup of human beings and the whole issue of what spiritual death means and what regeneration means. There’s a man who has been a Bible student for most of his life. He’s a little bit older than I am, and he has been working on this problem of investigating what different theologians say about and define regeneration. He’s written about 350 pages on it.

It’s amazing how few theologians, and I’m talking about the guys that we would consider fairly decent, and they don’t agree on this. There’s just confusion. And a lot of it’s just based on what I consider to be some inadequate exegesis, but we’ll get into that. So we’re going to look tonight at the beginning of this third lesson, which you can download from the links that are there on the Dean Bible Ministries website. If you go back to lesson one, all the links are in there in the Text: notes area, and you can just download those.

I encourage you each week to read through these lessons. They’ve just done a marvelous job putting all of this material together. We learned about Creation in the first lesson. We have seen the alternatives to God’s, to the biblical view of Creation, the rise of paganism, and why in the second lesson. That, of course, introduced us to the Fall, and now the question is what happened as a result of the Fall, what happened to the perfect world.

Slides 3 and 4

First we’re going to stand up and work through our timeline. Does everybody remember your motions, your hand motions? Let’s get the blood stirring just a little bit as we can go through this. These are the main events in the Bible. It only takes us about 15 or 20 seconds to do all the motions so let’s begin.

Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, Call of Abraham. Then there’s the Exodus, Ten Commandments, and then there’s the Conquest. After the Conquest, there’s the Kingdoms. They split into the Northern and the Southern Kingdom, and then both Kingdoms are ejected from the land by God.

Next, there’s a partial return. Only some return. Following that, there’s a time when there’s no revelation, and then the Messiah comes, and Jesus is born. Then He is crucified on the Cross. He’s buried. On the third day, He comes forth from the grave, rises from the dead. On the 40^th day, He ascends to Heaven. Then He sends the Holy Spirit, and it’s the beginning of the Church.

The Church Age is the time in which we live, and it ends when Jesus Christ comes in the air and raptures us to be with Him forever. At the end of the Tribulation, He returns to the earth at the Second Coming, and He will establish His kingdom. At the end of the Kingdom, there’s the Great White Throne Judgment. We did that in just about a minute. If I hadn’t messed up, we’d have done it faster. That’s pretty good. You can be seated.

I saw a wonderful video yesterday that I would encourage you to find. Look for videos by Jason Lisle, L-I-S-L-E. Jason has his own ministry now and is a very solid creationist. He has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado and has written a number of books. He’s been very active in speaking and writing about creation science for the last 20 years.

This YouTube is a talk he gave at a Calvary Chapel about two months ago. It’s based on some of the more recent discoveries of the Hubble and James Webb telescopes. It’s very interesting about how many systems there are physically in the universe and how they all interact and their differences, too. How can anyone think they just happened or believe that there’s life anywhere other than earth?

It’s so clear that God made the earth to be inhabited and He didn’t make any other planets to be inhabited. This video is just very, very good. I was amazed watching it. It’s always impressive when we get into the details of God’s Creation, and we realize how much there is there.

The same is true of our bodies. Psalm 139 says they were “fearfully and wonderfully made”. That has nothing to do with our appearance but it’s referring to the various systems you have that make up your body. You’ve got your cardiovascular system, you’ve got the respiratory system, you’ve got your digestive system, you’ve got all the neurology and everything, your nervous system.

When Darwin came up with his ideas on evolution, a whole lot of this knowledge was not known. They thought the smallest thing related to biology was a cell. And now there are so many components that are sub-molecular. To believe that anything came together by chance, the probabilities are astronomically impossible, but they didn’t know there were all those different options.

Just think of all the components. Take your respiratory system and the kind of material that developed into your lungs. Then think about how many cells are in your lungs and they’re not all the same. They all have different jobs that they do. Who programmed all the information into those different kinds of cells so that when you breathe in air, which is made up of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and a bunch of other gases, it’s just perfect for our lungs? Oh, that just happened by chance. And our lungs know exactly what to do with that air and how to convey that into the bloodstream so that all of the cells in our body receive the oxygen that they need to go on living. How could that have just happened by accident?

Not only do you have that system, but that one system is made up probably of thousands of systems. Each one of those systems is comprised of thousands of subsystems. They all have to come together in the perfect way at the same time for any of it to be of value.

How in the world can you think that one little part of it evolved over 10,000 years and then another little component at some other time? Take sight, for instance. If your sight system doesn’t have all of the components working together at the same time, it’s just a blind eye. It’s not any good. You’ve got to have the nerves and everything else. It’s just remarkable to understand that this demanded a Creator with a mind and a power that is beyond anything that we can imagine.

We were studying about the creation. We learned three basic things, that there’s a distinction between the Creator and the creature. God’s ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. We can learn things about Him, but we can never fully comprehend Him. He is far beyond anything that we can imagine.

Next we have the creation of the spirit beings, the angels, and the fall of Lucifer, as he’s referred to by just about every literal translation of the Shining Star in the notes.

Slide 5

The focus on lesson one was on God’s Creation. and the divine institutions. Lesson two focused on wrong views of Creation, where they came from, and what the pagan worldview looks like today in terms of just some basic things about evolution.

Lesson three today is going to look at what happened to the world and the divine institutions as a result of the fall. We need to keep in mind Isaiah 55:8–9 where God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways.” God doesn’t do things the way we think they should be done because His thoughts and ways are very different. “As far as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Slide 6

The Creator-creature distinction means the creature cannot become the Creator. The creature cannot take God’s place. The creature cannot even come close. Yet that was the focal point of the temptation in the Garden.

We learned that God is the infinite personal creator God. Infinite applies to all of His attributes. He has infinite knowledge. He has infinite power. He has infinite presence. He is everywhere present to His creation. And He created everything out of nothing. If someone says God created man out of the dust of the ground, ask where He got the dust? He created the dust out of nothing that He made man out of.

There wasn’t even space. There wasn’t even empty space. There was just nothing. We can’t conceive of nothing. Then God spoke and the space-time continuum was created. He didn’t create the stars and the sun and the moon until later, but He created just this space-time continuum. God is the Creator.

Then He created the first humans, Adam and Eve. God created them in His image. They are distinct from the angels, even though angels have intellect and angels have all kinds of different powers, they were not created to rule the planet. They were created to serve God. Man was created to rule the planet. That is the core, I believe, of the image and likeness of God.

God created, as part of man’s physical nature, specific social absolutes called what? Divine institutions. Right. What are they? Responsible ...? Choice. Very good. And the second one is ...? Marriage. Don’t be so shy. And the third one is ..?. Family. Good. I have always thought understanding the divine institutions is critical to understanding history, to understanding causation in history, and many, many other vital things. It’s foundational to understanding law.

Slide 7

Six, we looked at things that shape a biblical worldview.

Slide 8

First of all, the Creator-creature distinction. It’s foundational. What is the ultimate reality? That’s the Creator, who is distinct. He’s not the same as His creation. We saw in the pagan worldview, there’s always something that’s there, and it just sort of burps out these gods and goddesses and planets or gases or whatever, but there’s always just this formless something.

In the Creator-creature distinction, there’s one God. He is totally different from man. Man is totally different from the animals and the rest of creation. We’re not on a sliding scale. You and I were taught that man was the highest form of animals, and that was a bald-faced lie. We’re not animals at all. There’s nothing about us that is connected to the animals.

Second, there is a personal, infinite, sovereign God. The gods and goddesses that people come up with and invent are either infinite, which means they’re so far out there, there’s no personal relationship whatsoever, or they are so personal they have all the flaws and failures and sins of every human being, and they’re not infinite. The Bible teaches a personal, infinite, sovereign God and that He is the ultimate authority.

Slide 9

In terms of His ultimate authority, it is Yahweh God alone who is the ultimate authority. And it is Yahweh God who determines right and wrong. The creature does not determine what right and wrong is. And Yahweh God created human beings in a specific way.

The more I think about this, the more I realize that there’s nothing about anything physical in our planet that was accidental. God created everything down to the smallest minute particle to the largest galaxy. Everything is created with a purpose. We may not understand what it is, but everything has a purpose and a significance. It all interconnects and intersects. Everything about us is the way it is because God has a plan or a purpose.

Most of you are probably old enough to remember when the medical profession said, you don’t need your tonsils and you don’t need your appendix, you can just take them out. A lot of you don’t have either and then later they discovered, about 30 years later, that our tonsils and appendixes are vital for building and developing and maintaining your immune system, as well as many other functions. Science is not always right.

Slide 10

It is Lucifer, the Shining Star, who wanted to slide up the scale and be God.

Slide 11

His attack plan as he approached Eve was to simply refer to God as Elohim, a way of diminishing God, because the other angels are often called elohims in the Scripture. He was trying to lower God down to the level of being just another angel, and so you can be like Him, you can slide up the scale and be God.

In the pagan worldview there’s this chaos and chance which rules everything.

Slide 12

In Satan’s appeal to Eve, Satan made her think she was in a position that she knew enough to be able to decide whether God’s claim that if you ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was true, or if Lucifer’s or the serpent’s claim was true, that no, you’re not going to die.

When she falls for that and doesn’t say, “Now wait a minute, I’m going to go check with Yahweh, He’s going to be here in a little bit, I’m going to see what He says about that.” She immediately falls into his trap and looks at the fruit and makes a decision based on her own finite knowledge.

Slide 13

That is the beginning of the pagan worldview from the Garden of Eden and in contrast to a Creator-creature distinction, you have the continuity of being where man can slide up and down the scale of being, instead of being ruled by a personal sovereign God. The pagan worldview says the world is ruled by impersonal fate and chance.

The ultimate authority in the biblical worldview is God, and there is no authority except the individual self on the pagan side. Now, in today’s world the self is so glorified that the cultures are fragmenting. When everybody’s an equal authority, the only thing that can bring order is power. Power becomes the great attraction. It’s all about who can control the masses.

Slide 14

Satan tricked Eve into thinking she had ultimate authority over her own life, not God, and so self became important.

Slide 15

Satan was promising Eve she could be like God and could just slide up the scale from creature to Creator. The pagan worldview always suggests man can move up the scale to be God, and we see that in evolution.

Slide 16

Satan, the Shining Star, wanted to promote himself to be God, and he failed and came under divine judgment. Then the Shining Star enticed and deceived mankind that they too could be God.

Slide 17

We saw that this pagan worldview came from Satan, and he deceived Eve and planted the idea in her thinking. After she fell for it, she enticed her husband.

Slide 18

What the pagan worldview looks like today is a continuity of being and evolution.

Slide 19

It is not science. We saw that science follows a process of hypothesis where you say, I think this may explain what I’m seeing. Then there are various controlled experiments so that you can repeat the circumstances and observe what is going on. If it holds true in numerous circumstances and experiments performed by different people in different places, then you can draw a firm conclusion. If you can’t, then you reject it.

If it’s not observable, if it’s not repeatable, it’s not science. Everybody thinks evolution is science, but no one has ever observed it. No one can test it. No one can repeat it in a laboratory. The use of scientific names only disguises the fact that nobody knows what they’re talking about. Evolution doesn’t follow the scientific method at all. It is fake science.

Now we live in a world where the people who claim to hold to truth have fake truths, and fake science. We’re going to expect more of that kind of resistance and hostility. Evolution claims that life differs only in degrees so there’s just a little bit of difference between you and a monkey, and between the monkey and an amoeba, and between an amoeba and a rock. We’re all just basically more advanced forms of the same thing.

Slide 20

We looked at what makes up a worldview. It answers the ultimate question of what’s there. Is it ultimately a personal infinite God, or is it the continuity of being? Does it answer the question of who are as human beings? Are we in the image and likeness of God responsible to the Creator for what we do? Or are we our own person answerable to no one?

What is truth? How do we know truth? How do we come to know truth? When we look to our Creator as believers, we see that God has revealed truth to us. We can know truth absolutely, but according to the pagan worldview, you can’t know truth. Everybody has their own opinion, since everybody’s their own god.

The purpose of life is defined by God for the believer. The purpose of everything is defined by God for the believer. But, in the pagan worldview, everybody just generates their own meaning, whatever makes them feel good today. It all boils down to emotion.

Slide 21

God’s Word, the Bible tells us, number one, that God is a person. He’s capable of thought. He has reason. He has relationships, and He makes real choices. Second, God controls everything ultimately, but He also chooses to give human beings and angels limited choices.

Then we have a passage, 1 Chron. 29:11, “Yours, O LORD, is the greatness, the power and the glory, the victory and the majesty; For all that is in heaven and in earth is Yours; Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and You are exalted as head over all.”

Slide 22

Every week, at least till we get through Lesson 8, I’m going through these lessons to give you parents, grandparents, and Sunday School teachers some ideas about how to present some of this material to younger children because they may have some difficulty grasping these abstract concepts. In the Interlocked Series, it was written for 15 year olds and older. For them you have more discussion on the worldview and the contrast between the pagan worldview and the biblical worldview related to evil. That is a big part of this chapter.

The children’s edition doesn’t talk about the worldview side as much, but it focuses on the bad results of the Fall. We should ask what are the consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience? That is really setting the stage for better understanding of the gospel and the importance of salvation.

So the point here is, first of all, to understand that the pagan worldview can’t answer the problem of evil. I’ve pointed this out for many, many times that when you’re talking to somebody and they say, “Well, I just don’t understand how a good God and a God who is loving can let all these horrible things happen in the world. You know, how can He let evil take place?” Too often we rush to try to answer that.

Maybe we need to practice what Jesus did, become a little more Christ-like in how we handle these things. Instead of just jumping in there to answer them, just say, “First of all, I want to understand what you mean by evil. And where did you get your idea of evil? Because evil implies right and wrong.”

I remember, as you do, back in 2001 and after 9-11, President Bush came out and talked about the perpetrators as evildoers. The left went ballistic. I’m convinced that the left hated George W. Bush because he bought into absolute right and absolute wrong by using that term at that time. Somebody got to him because within a couple of days he kind of backed off on his connection connecting that to Islam.

There’s real evil out there, but on the basis of a pagan worldview, we’re going to see in a few minutes that there’s no explanation for evil. Evil in a pagan worldview is normal. Not only is it normal but without evil, without death, without pain, without suffering, without the struggle for existence, you can’t have evolution, which is their main reason of explaining how everything got here. That is a real problem for those with a pagan worldview.

In a biblical worldview, evil is bounded by God. It had a beginning, it’s going to have an end, and then He’s going to restrict it off into a prison called the Lake of Fire and isolate that away from everything else in the Creation.

Slide 23

As we go forward we need to talk a little bit more, explain a little bit more, about the immaterial part of man and the material part of man. We’ll be correcting what is in the curriculum as it’s written now but which is going to be changed. So I’m sort of correcting what is in in the curriculum as it’s written now and is going to be changed.

What we see in the pagan view of evil is that the gods and goddesses sin. If you’ve read through any kind of mythology, you know that the gods and goddesses, whether they’re Roman gods and goddesses or the Vikings, the Scandinavian gods and goddesses (they’re all over Marvel comics and everything now), they all sin. They have all kinds of human flaws and failings. You study any system of religion, whether you’re talking about the gods and goddesses in India or in Peru or among the Aztecs or among the ancient Babylonians or Persians, they all have flaws and failings. They all sin.

Where did they come from? They came out of some primordial chaos. There was something there. In mythology pagans believe there was something there. No one doesn’t really define what it is but it was just chaos. Out of this chaos sort of spins out these gods and goddesses. Then they have all these problems and they’ll get in wars with one another and then one of them will kill another one and slice the other one up and out of those body parts they make the planets and the sun and the moon.

Then they will maybe take the blood and mix it with the dirt and make human beings. They have all kinds of different stories about this. Their stories differ but what you do have in all of them is evil. They conduct themselves in an evil way.

Since they sin, evil has always been there. In pagan worldview, ancient pagan worldview, sin and evil are always there. It’s part of the chaos.

Third point: Sin, evil, injustice of all kinds, social injustice, legal injustice, whatever it may be, economic injustice, inequity, unfairness, all of that is normal if you start with a pagan starting point. It can never be removed, because it is inherent to the nature of their ultimate reality.

When it comes to the modern view of evolution, death is what advances evolution. You’ve heard the phrase, the struggle or survival of the fittest. So you have these various life forms that develop, and it’s a struggle to survive, If the weak ones die then the ones who’ve had the so-called positive mutations will survive and be passed on to their descendants.

Of course, nobody’s ever witnessed that. Nobody’s ever seen it actually happen. And nobody can do anything except create a nice science fiction about it but according to evolutionists it takes death to advance evolution. That means if things don’t die, evolution can’t happen. So death is normal. Death is to be desired. Suffering is to be desired. That’s the only way you can advance to the next stage. There has to be all these problems of sin and suffering and social injustice and everything else.

When you’re having conversations with people about why bad things happen in this world you need to ask them first of all how they explain the origin of evil. Where do you get the concept of right and wrong or good and evil? Where do you get that if there’s no God and if everything just happens by chance? Where does morality come from? Where does right and wrong come from? How do you define evil if death and sin and suffering are the basic tools you need to advance civilization. Just let them chew on that for a while.

Survival of the fittest is cruel. They don’t have an explanation for where evil comes from. Christians should just say, okay, before we try to answer the question, you need to define your terms and where you get the concepts. What you’re doing is you’re borrowing absolutes from a Judeo-Christian worldview, and I’m not going to let you do that. You’re out of bounds.

Slide 24

The pagan view is this. Good and evil exist for eternity past. Good and evil exist into eternity future, and nothing changes.

Slide 25

In contrast, the Christian view says that evil had a beginning. God has existed forever and ever. He is eternally and infinitely righteous and just and He is immutable. He never changes. So that righteousness is eternal and everlasting in the character of God. That is our source of understanding what right is and what wrong is.

And then people ask what kind of God is it that would have all the Canaanites killed. They think they just asked you a “gotcha” question. You have to respond to that, and you respond to it with another question. “If that is so, if you don’t believe the Bible, how do you know that that ever happened?”

Slide 26

In a biblical worldview, at the upper level, at the level of the Creator, good is eternal. Righteousness is eternal, which would be a better term than good. Righteousness is eternal. And at the second level, in creation, you have righteousness ruling until the Fall. Then you have the coexistence of both good, relative good, you also have righteousness, and evil.

There was only righteousness before the Fall when God created Adam and Eve. He created a perfect environment in the sense that everything functioned as God intended it to function. There were no problems and that was normal. The moment Eve’s teeth hit the fruit, we went to abnormal. There’s nothing normal about human existence since that instant.

Death is not normal. Death is abnormal. I’ve said this at funerals for 40 years. When you grieve, that is something God set up in our emotional makeup. What you say and what you think when somebody close to you that you love and you love dearly dies, you say, this isn’t right. Of course it’s not right. God wanted to remind everyone that no, death is not right. It is not normal. It shouldn’t be there.

Why is it there? It’s a learning situation. Now we live in this time period between the Fall and the Great White Throne Judgment when good and evil exist and it’s all abnormal. After that, God will separate out that which is righteous to Heaven, and that which is evil is confined to the Lake of Fire, restricted and set off.

Slide 27

We read in Revelation 21:1–3, John says, “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth—that’s the one we’re in now,—the first heaven and first earth—actually the old heaven and old earth,—had passed away and there were no more seas. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men—the word tabernacle means dwelling—the dwelling of God is with men and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God.”

I want you to notice that there’s going to be a new heaven and new earth, and that in the new heaven and new earth there won’t be a salt sea. Now think about that. That has implications for understanding some things in Genesis 1, because you have a mirrored reflection between the two. We’re going to learn also in that section that there’s not going to be any light, there’s not going to be any sun and moon in the new heaven and new earth. Instead, God Himself is going to illuminate everything with His glory.

I have a question here. How are they going to tell time?

Slide 28

“ ‘God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.’ ” See, all that is associated with sin and evil is gone. “Then He who sat on the throne—which is always God the Father in Revelation—said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ And he said to me, ‘Write, for these words are true and faithful.’ And he said to me, ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts.’ ” That is a great passage for the freeness of God’s grace.

Slide 29

Then at the end of the chapter we read, “But I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light. And the nations of those who are saved shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it.”

That’s just phenomenal to understand that and think about, because what happens is because of Lucifer’s sin at the beginning, and then God renovates the earth and the universe, and puts man in it, and then man sins. Nothing since then has been normal, and everything that is happening throughout human history has to do with dealing with the results of that original angelic sin, and then restoring the universe back to what it was at the very beginning,

There’s no sin, and God is dwelling with man. He created man for fellowship, not that He needed it, because He has an eternal fellowship in the Trinity. He’s not like Allah, who’s just out there all by himself, alone forever and ever, and desperately needs something in order to be somebody.

Slide 30

Verse 25, “Its gate shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there). And they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it.” It’s kind of like living way up north in the North Pole during the summer. You’ve just got sunlight 24-7. “But there shall by no means to enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.”

We see that God is going to restrict everything. At the end, we see that the old heaven and old earth, that’s this one, is replaced by a new heaven and new earth. Then God is going to dwell with His people. Evil and all of its consequences will be removed.

Slide 31

How does God solve the problem of evil? How does He solve the problem of sin? That takes us to the next section which deals with the promised Savior. After you have the disobedience of Eve and then Adam, and then God outlines the consequences of their sin, God is going to give them hope. This comes as He’s speaking to the serpent. “Then the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all the animals.”

God is speaking to the serpent on the one hand, but He’s also going to be speaking to Satan who is behind the serpent. This happens several times in Scripture. It happens when Peter is coming up and telling the Lord that, oh, no, no, no, you’re not going to get killed in Jerusalem. And Jesus turned around and looked at him and said, “Get behind me, Satan.” He knows that Satan has been the one influencing Peter to think that way.

God addresses Satan through the human being, just like in Isaiah 14, he addresses Satan through the king of Babylon. He’s the power behind the king, just as in Tyre in Ezekiel 28, God addresses Satan, who’s the power behind the King of Tyre.

So, God says to the serpent in the Garden that there’s going to be a physical consequence. We don’t know how the serpent moved around prior to this point. No idea. But God instantly changed his morphology so that he would be crawling along on his belly and eating dust.

In Genesis 3:15 God says, “I will cause hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring.” I really like the word seed much, much better because that’s the literal meaning of the word in the Hebrew. That gets you the idea of that the seed of the woman is a male and that it’s a messianic prophecy. It’s not just general offspring. Anyway, “I’ll cause hostility between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.”

It’s interesting that when it’s translated, “you brood of vipers,” when John the Baptist is talking to the Pharisees and Jesus also uses the same term. Literally it’s “you seed of serpents.” So, it just connects right back to this, that they are doing the devil’s work. Between your offspring and her offspring, he will strike your head. That’s a fatal wound.

Like many of you, I was always taught that he’ll strike you on the heel is not a fatal wound. But it is a fatal wound if this is a viper. It doesn’t matter where a cobra strikes you, you’re going to die in about 15 or 20 seconds. Jesus died, but He what? He rose again. That’s right. It’s hard to keep a good man down, isn’t it?

Slide 32

We have this contrast between Satan and the Savior in Genesis 3. Satan uses the serpent as his disguise. God curses the serpent for allowing Satan to use it in this manner. On the other hand, there’s the promised Savior and it’s really odd. Women don’t have a seed. The Greek is SPERMA. Women don’t have that. Women have ovum. They have an egg.

Why is SPERMA used here in the Septuagint?  It is a hint of the virgin birth from the very beginning. That’s why this is called the first gospel. It’s the first mention of the gospel. PROTOEVANGELIUM. There’s no mention of a father, the Savior is born only of a woman.

God says Satan and his followers will be at war with the promised Savior and those who are allied with Him. The woman’s offspring will be at war with Satan and the Seed of the woman will destroy Satan. Satan will receive a head wound which is fatal, which will destroy him. But the promised Savior will receive a wound on a heel. He will die, but He will rise from the dead.

Slide 33

We have progressive revelation here. This is the first explanation of the gospel. Now this is a big term that’s important to learn, that God doesn’t just act like the farmer who was out always taking a load of hay out for his cattle, and then one time he only had two cattle that came in, and so he took the whole load out there and dumped it there for the two cows.

God gives us a little here, a little more there, a little more later on, and so there’s progress in revelation. They know a whole lot more about this promise of the Seed of the woman by the time you get to the end of Genesis than the beginning.

You have to follow the genealogies. That’s what they’re there for. You end up learning that the Seed is going to go through Noah, because the whole human race goes through Noah. And then it’s going to go through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and then the tribe of Judah. So it just narrows the scope as you go through. That’s the progress of revelation. God’s continually adding to it until He gets to the end of the Book of Revelation. He says, now you’ve got all you need. Study it and figure it out, and I’ll help.

Slide 34

We come to the first question here, which is what happened to the perfect world after the Fall?

Slide 35

So, there are three things that are impacted by the Fall. There is mankind. Human beings become corrupt. We become spiritually dead. And then Creation itself is going to be a groaning under the curse and under judgment. And then the third is the divine institutions are going to come under attack.

What happens to mankind? What happens to Adam and Eve the instant they disobeyed God?

Slide 36

Well, prior to sin, man was composed of three parts. He has a physical body. He has a soul which is comprised of his mentality, his conscience, his self-consciousness, and his volition. Then he had a human spirit.

The human spirit is that immaterial part that fits over those four parts of the soul like a glove. While the four parts of the soul are connected to the glove, then a human being is God-conscious. That means he can understand aspects of God, can understand the things of God, can have a relationship with God. And his intellect, his will, his consciousness, and his self-consciousness all work the way they were supposed to.

When Eve and Adam ate the fruit, the human spirit either became inoperable with them or something, but it’s no longer functional. We call that spiritual death, because the result of it is that without the human spirit, the soul could no longer connect with God. That is spiritual death, so that man now has a body and a soul. As a result of that, he is separated from God.

The legal penalty for sin was spiritual death. In the instant, at the moment, you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. God said, “you will definitely die.” It’s a very strong statement in the Hebrew.

Slide 37

Then you get to Genesis 3:17, and there are other consequences for the Creation. God says to Adam, because you’ve heeded the voice of your wife, and that’s not a statement that listening to your wife is a universal sin. Abraham gets in trouble for listening to his wife at one point, and then he gets in trouble later for not listening to his wife. So, the issue is not the issue of listening to your wife, it’s what she’s saying. Sometimes she’s saying a lot of things you need to listen to.

God told Adam, “because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying ‘You shall not eat of it’:” the ground is now cursed. The ground, the physical earth, is now under judgment. And that’s going to impact you. Before when you worked, you took care of the Garden and there were no problems, but now you’ll have to work hard all the days of your life.

Prior to sin there were no thorns and thistles, there were no weeds. I don’t know about some of you, but if you’ve been trying to grow a vegetable garden in Texas during this hot summer, then you probably just have a huge weed bed out there because it’s been too hot for you to go out and work the soil. Otherwise, you’ll have a heat stroke. All you’ve got is weeds that come up to your shoulders because we have had enough rain to keep the thorns and thistles growing. In Genesis 2:19 it says you’ll work in the sweat of your face and every other pore in your body till you return to the ground. “For to dust you are and to dust you shall return.” That’s the first mention of physical death.

Slide 38

The Bible talks about death in several ways. Three of them are the death of friendship, the death of that spiritual relationship with God who came and walked in the Garden and taught them and talked with them every day. Second, there’s the death of the body. Third, the eternal death called the second death in the Bible, which is the Lake of Fire.

You remember that when God made Adam, He made him from the soil. He made the soil a certain way so that it would have the necessary components so that when He started pulling it together, He could make a human body out of it. Most people just think that the dirt was already there. No, there was no dirt.

My favorite creation joke is when some scientists develop the ability to create life in the lab they said, we don’t need God anymore. We can create life in the lab. So they challenged God to a contest. God said, “okay, well, since you challenged Me to the contest, I’m going to let you go first. Create life. The scientists reached down to get some dirt and God said, no, no, no, no, no. You have to make the dirt first from nothing.”

We have God who creates Adam intentionally from the dust, the dirt, the soil. And God intended for man to live forever. The other known tree in the Garden is a Tree of Life. So, He intended for man to live forever. Death was not present. Death was not part of it.

Slide 39

Because of their sin, God told Adam and Eve that they were going to return to the dust of the ground. Genesis 2:7. God formed man from the dust of the ground, and then He breathed the breath of life into him. So it’s a clear distinction between the immaterial and material part of man. The material part can’t function without the immaterial part.

Slide 40

When man sinned, the spirit of man no longer functioned or was gone. That’s the legal penalty from the supreme court of Heaven and there’s a separation between man and God.

Slide 41

It’s evidenced right away because as the afternoon went on and the cool evening breezes came, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the Garden. So, they hid from God. Then God asks them where they were. They told Him they heard Him coming and we were afraid. There was no fear before that, and they had no reason to hide from God.

Slide 42

What had happened is they failed to recognize the Creator-creature distinction, and they were treating Yahweh’s words and His commands as if they had equal significance to Satan’s words. They were lowering God to the level of the creature, and thinking they had the authority and the ability to decide which was right.

Slide 43

In Ephesians 2:1 Paul writes, “And you He made alive.” Is that alive physical or spiritual? We have to look at the context. God is talking to them, so obviously they’re physically alive, so He’s not talking about physical death there. “You He made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins”. Not dead physically. It’s very clear that the death that He’s talking about in Ephesians 2:1 isn’t a physical death, and that’s further defined in Ephesians 4:18 as being alienated from the life of God.

What happened when they sinned?  It’s as if you’re enjoying a nice afternoon, you’ve got enough cool air, you’ve got the fan going, and then the power goes out. The fan still goes on whirring for a little while, but the source of life for that fan is gone. Eventually it’s going to die.

Slide 44

Another illustration is flowers. If you cut some beautiful flowers they’re going to look beautiful for a while but eventually they’re just going to wither up and die. What happened at the instant of Eve’s sin and then Adam’s sin is the human race died spiritually. We just think we’re alive, but we’re not. Every human being just has the appearance of life.

John 1:4 tells us that in Christ, in the Logos, was life and the life was the light of men.

Slide 45

Spiritual death is the loss of the human spirit. The soul cannot understand what God has revealed or relate to God. That’s what 1 Corinthians 2:14 says. The natural or the soulish man doesn’t have spirit. The soulish man does not understand the things of God.

You can trace that phrase, “things of God,” back to verse 9. It’s what God has revealed in His Word. The soulish man can’t understand God’s revelation. And he doesn’t know how to relate to God because he’s spiritually dead.

At regeneration, at that instant of belief, God creates and simultaneously imparts a human spirit into that spiritually dead person, making them alive. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:5, “Even when we were dead in trespasses and sin, He made us alive together in Him.” That’s regeneration. That’s new life.

Slide 46

The second form of death is the death of the physical body, which comes as a result of spiritual death and separation from God. At physical death, man’s immaterial part is separated from his physical body. If you’re an unbeliever and you’re spiritually dead, your soul is separated from your body, and it goes to a holding place called Torments. If you are a believer, you’ve been regenerated, so your immaterial part is composed of a human soul and spirit, and that goes into the presence of the Lord with some sort of, I believe, interim body.

Slide 47

Physical death is first designated in Genesis 3:19, “For dust you are, and to dust you will return.” The third death is the second death. It’s eternity in the Lake of Fire.

Slide 49

In Matthew 25:41 and 46, this has to do with the sheep and the goat judgment where Christ says He separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep are always on the right. Just remember that. The sheep are on the right. It’s the goats that are always on the left. That’s really the origin of right and left.

Christ will say to those on the left hand, the goats, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” There’s a lot of debate about that. Is God really going to send unbelievers and the fallen angels and Satan to eternity forever and ever and ever and ever and ever to have conscious torments in burning pain? Well, yes. That’s what the language suggests.

Five verses later, God says, “These will go away into eternal punishment.” The word there is AIONIOS. “But the righteous into eternal life.” The same word is used. So, if we’re going to say we get eternal life forever and ever and ever and ever with God, you’ve got to apply the same definition in the same context to the death. You can’t avoid that.

When we get to Revelation 20:10, we read, “The devil, who deceived them.” Remember that the lake of fire wasn’t created for mankind. It was created for Satan and his angels. But because man shifted loyalties when Eve ate the fruit and Adam ate the fruit, then they go to the lake of fire. They get the same judgment.

Slide 50

Revelation 20:10, “The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are.” They’re sent there straight from Armageddon. “And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” It’s the same word, AIONIOS.

Revelation 20:14–15, “Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.”

We see that it’s eternal. No one leaves the lake of fire. It was prepared for the devil and his angels. And people will be separated from God’s presence forever and ever.

Slide 51

Look at what 2 Thessalonians 1:7 says, “and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels—that’s talking about believers. The Lord Jesus is revealed—in flaming fire, taking vengeance.” And vengeance isn’t a personal vendetta in the Scripture. The word really means to enact justice.

He will be “in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” which is a command. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” Obeying it is to simply believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. “These shall be punished with everlasting destruction.” It’s the same word, AIONIOS, that’s over there in Matthew 25:41 and in Revelation 20. It’s difficult. It’s hard. “These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.”

Slide 52

At the end of time, after the Great White Throne Judgment, evil is restricted and confined to eternal punishment.

Slide 53

What happens in salvation is that God will restore a human spirit, so that man is once again as he was created. Body, soul, and spirit.

Slide 54

1 Thessalonians 5:23 tells us that there’s three parts. Now, there’s a lot of confusion over this. You’ll read a lot of theologians. I love is Dr. Ryrie, but I don’t agree with him when he says there are only two parts, the material and the immaterial and all these different terms are just synonymous.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:23 it says, “May your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved.” Clearly, in some passages, there’s a clear distinction between those three elements. And the Word of God is so perspicuous that it can discern between the soul and the spirit. It’s sharper than a two-edged sword and it can just slice the difference. In those two passages, it’s clear that they’re not the same and they can’t be understood to be synonymous concepts.

Slide 55

This is why when you talk about fallen man, his basic problem is he’s separated from God, number one, and he has a sin nature. That means he is mentally abnormal, he is spiritually abnormal, he is emotionally abnormal, and he’s physically abnormal. We’re just a bunch of “abby normal,” if you remember young Frankenstein. He was definitely abnormal.

The problem is corruption and the sin nature. In the nineteenth century Freud came along. He hated Christianity and he decided to get rid of sin. Everybody could do what they wanted to do because he said we’re all basically good.

Slide 56

Romans 3:10–12 says, “ ‘… There is none righteous, no, not one; There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.’ ”

Romans 3:23 says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Every one of us.

Slide 57

Sinless man’s choice was to live dependent on the Creator God. Fallen man’s choice is to either turn around, which is what the meaning of repent means, and to live dependently upon God or to continue his way as being independent.

Slide 58

In sinless man’s conscience, for the believer, our anchor is the Word of God. We know absolute right and wrong. Fallen man’s conscience is focused on himself and he accuses others basically of what he does himself.

Slide 59

At the end of Romans 1 and the first verse of Romans 2 it says, “who, knowing the righteous judgment of God …” This is talking about the Gentiles, all the nations outside of Israel. “Who knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death.” See, they know it. God has built this sense of right and wrong in their soul, in their conscience. They’re constantly suppressing that truth.

“… Those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.—we’re seeing that left and right now—Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself;” because you are practicing the same things.

Slide 60

The problem is this. All fallen mankind is headed towards the lake of fire, but no one wants to think about that. What is man’s solution to this problem? Shopping. Let’s get a thrill and go spend money. Makes us feel better about ourselves. Or education. We’re going to get educated so that we can do better in life and have more things and have more money in the things that money can buy or have a better career.

Or let’s try some supplements. Supplements like Jim Beam. Supplements like marijuana. Supplements like whatever it is that you turn to, to try to deaden the pain of a fallen, corrupt world. Maybe self-help books have the answer. Let’s try human psychology.

Man is full of false solutions, but God gives the only solution, and that’s Jesus Christ who died on the Cross for our sins. And the only solution is for us to trust in Him and turn back to God.

That wraps up the first half of Lesson three. Next time we’re going to see how sin impacted the divine institutions. And if you want a hint, just read current events and you will see that every divine institution is constantly under assault today by the cultural leaders and the elitists of the world. You would have never thought that it would get to be like it is today. Let’s pray.

Closing prayer

“Father, we’re thankful that we have hope. We have hope because You are in control. You have allowed man the freedom to reject You, to disobey You, and to rebel against You. But we know that when all is said and done, that Your righteous judgment will prevail.

“When we are with you at that time, we will not even remember what is going on today. It will all be separated from us, and we will only know the beautiful, perfect joy of being with You and serving You in Heaven and on the new heavens and new earth. 

“Father, we thank You for this, that our hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope is in His death on the cross, and our hope is in the truth of Your Word. That brings us stability and joy, even in the midst of whatever difficulties there are that we face. We pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.”