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Paul's letter to the Romans chapter 3 reading from verse 9. Romans 3 beginning at verse 9. This is God's word. Paul has been writing about Gentiles, well starting with the extremely wicked in Romans 1 and then and on to the Gentiles in Romans 2 and later on in the chapter the Jews and Shoah and each one falls short of God's glory in various ways. He goes on here at verse 9 and starts to sum it up. What then? Are we better than they? Not at all. For we have previously charged both Greeks, Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin. As is written, 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. Their throat is an open tomb. With their tongues they have practiced deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law that every mouth may be stopped and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight. For by the law is the knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets. Even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by his blood through faith to demonstrate his righteousness. Because in his forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time his righteousness that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not. On the contrary we establish the law. In its understanding of human nature, the Bible, and you look at the three passions that we read as very clear evidence of that, the Bible is radically at odds with our present world. The world, at the same time, overvalues and devalues man. The world's understanding is that humans are the product of gradual evolution from primitive creatures. We're gradually getting better and better and better as time goes on. The world sees nothing in a person which forces him to either good or evil, though of course on the world's understanding there's no basis for calling any act good or evil. They're just what actually happens by accident. But people don't want to see those like Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, Jack the Ripper as in any way normal. So they have a built-in assumption against that that somehow people are all basically good. The Bible gives you a much higher valuation of humanity, but also a much more sober understanding of present human nature. Mankind was created good, male and female in the image of God, spiritual, moral, precious in God's sight. But mankind did not continue in that unsoiled splendor. Rather than advancing steadily getting better and better as the evolutionists would have us believe, human nature was corrupted and we fell. Adam's seeing brought a dark and evil reshaping of human nature. The Bible teaches us that fallen man is fundamentally evil. We're not just tainted a little bit by evil somehow, but we're evil in our innermost core right at the heart. We're so misshapen by evil that we cannot possibly correct ourselves. You know, we can whitewash over that evil to varying degrees and look good and do things that are somewhat good perhaps, but we can't begin to get to the root of the sin that's in us. It's critical that you recognize this because knowing this on the one hand it protects you against unpleasant surprises when you deal with people around you when that evil pops out unexpectedly. Because it's not unexpectedly if you understand this. More important though, it gives you a sobering view of your own character. It directs you to pursue very seriously the only adequate provision there is for dealing with that evil at the heart of your being. It calls you to take seriously the call of Jesus Christ to salvation. Today we're going to consider the fall and particularly not so much the event as its effects on us and try to pick out the practical value of that doctrine for our daily lives. Four things. In seeking to be a God you make yourself less than human. In a fallen state you reject your proper responsibilities. In that fallen state you become a destroyer and the fall leaves you unable to fulfill yourself. These four things. First seeking to be God you make yourself less than God. Original sin was a desire to be a God. Pastor Bill is focused on that several times lately. Satan approached Eve with a temptation. He wasn't so foolish as to just try to tempt her with just a pretty fruit, you know. He made her an offer of benefits which were suited to the risk of God's anger. You will be like God, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3 verse 5. It's kind of like the appeal of the lottery, you know. You buy a lottery ticket. It's almost certain you're going to lose what you pay for your ticket. It's not a mathematician to know better until you get into this. But the potential gain is wow, more wealth than you could ever possibly hope to spend. And you say well it for that is worth a little risk. And Satan tempted Eve with an infinite prize. With the hope of advancing to Godhood. Formed to be God's children, Adam and Eve. First Eve and then Adam were not satisfied with that. Made with goodness built into their bones. They wanted to know evil too. They at that time walked in close friendship with God. They read of God walking in the garden as if this were a common occurrence. There to talk with them, to share with them. Their access to God was easy and direct. But it wasn't enough for them. They wanted more. So they sought to become gods in their own right. And since Adam was the representative for the whole human race to come, his choice was our choice, yours and mine and every other human beings. His sin brought corruption not only for himself, but for all his descendants, for you and me and all others who have ever lived since except Christ. And the penalty for sin was death. Spiritual as well as physical. That spiritual death came at an end to their communion with God. It made an end to their built in goodness. What had been created good was now sour and festered. From that time, every human being who was born was oriented toward evil. It's not that everything we do is totally evil, but it's all tainted by the evil that's in the depths of our hearts. Original sin was the desire to be a God. Continuing sin is a desire to be a God. Think about what's going on. God has no rules over him. There is no good or evil independent of God, which you can say, well, God, did he measure up to good or evil? You know, there are no rules for God. There's no exterior standard by which you can judge God. The rules are made by him and good. It's not just an arbitrary rule. God made it's the expression of his nature. In the Bible, God has chosen to give you his standard of righteous conduct. He was built into Adam, but it's lost to us or broken. And in the Bible, God defined for us clearly good and evil, righteousness and sin. Our catechism asks the question, what is sin? Some people, at least I know that know the answer. Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. Sin is failure to conform to God's will. It's either breaking his will by doing what's forbidden or breaking his will by not doing what's commanded. It's positive and negative. Brothers and sisters, friends, when you sin, you seek to be exempt from rules. Your sin, every sin has in it the pride which says, I'm not bound by the rules that anybody else sets, not even by God's rules. Your sin does not just set aside a minor rule here and there, as you can say, well, I'm pretty good, you know, we like to think that way. But in principle, your sin sets aside all rules. It says I'm not bound. In first John 3, verse four, the apostle writes, sin is lawlessness. It's stepping outside the law saying it doesn't apply to me. When you choose to deny that some very small rule binds you, you're setting yourself above the rule giver, above God. You're declaring that nothing binds you with that which you choose for yourself. You're putting yourself in the place of God. Sin is an attempt to act like God without having God's nature to make your actions good. Now, of course, nobody who's sane constantly thinks of himself or herself as God, we know that. But what we do is to seek the trappings of divinity without the name. You seek the freedom to do whatever you want. That leads at times to terrible tyranny. Because the desire to be God is at its heart a desire to rule. If you set your own standards, then what you do is by definition right. You're setting the rules. At least in your eyes, it's right. When you claim freedom from any other rules, it's quite natural then to go on to try to impose your rules on others. Because after all, the only way for you to be free of rules is to be the rule maker. And you can see how this works out. In our gender wars, we are seeing coming to a crisis point at this point. And back 40 years, I was a little bit younger, still a good age, but back 40 years, you know, we had a plea. Oh, go back 60 years, back to the hippies. Most of you won't remember them. Go back then. And what you had was a plea to be able to engage in whatever sexual acts you wanted. That was one of the big things they pushed to be free from any binding in that game. And then a decade or two later, you started hearing the plea for freedom to be homosexual. Not to be looked down on because you're homosexual. And then there was this insistence that people should approve of homosexuality. And of course, it went on from then for freedom to be transsexual. And now the insistence that LGBT views be imposed on small children in spite of their parents' concerns to the contrary. We're in a situation where a woman weightlifter has been punished for daring to say it's unfair that guys who call themselves girls can compete with her. It's... But that's what sin does. A rebellion is at root a claim to God-like authority, which we can impose on others then. It allows you to do anything to accomplish your purposes. It doesn't matter how it hurts others because you're right. And in your rightness, you can trample others into the dust. And that is very much the cause of a lot of the pain people give. People trying to be gods. And the effect, which is strange, but the effect is that people think of themselves as animals. How does a desire to be a god make you think of yourself as an animal? It follows naturally. God exists in himself. He has no beginning. He has no origin. But every sane human being knows that he or she has a source. And if you deny that God has made you, then what's your source? Well, with the atheistic evolutionists, you end up concluding that your ultimate source was less evolved animals. You're just a slightly more evolved animal. You're trying to make yourself a god. You become... You make yourself another animal. How much better? How much better, brothers and sisters and friends, to bow to the true God who makes you his child? Who lifts you up? Exalt you? The fall needs us to try to be gods with desperate effects. In the fallen state, then secondly, you reject your proper responsibilities. You don't want to do the tasks that you should do. You know, the fallen state is one of rebellion, breaking God's rules. You can see it. So every attempt to control you is automatically resisted. We see it especially in teenagers. Almost every teenager you have ever seen will... If you think back to your... Can you still remember your teens? I can still. You'll remember teenagers cry out, Don't tell me what to do. I can make my own decisions. Isn't that right? It certainly was for me. Everybody I saw around me was a teenager. The same principle is at work in all of us. Smaller children show it less because they are more dependent on adults. Most adults show it less because they've learned through hard experience the need to accept some direction. It comes out most prominently, usually in the young people. Prominently, usually in young people just growing up into adulthood. But sinful people's universal response when told to do something is, Who? Me? Sorry, I'm too busy. That's not my thing. I don't want to. Right? We don't want to do the things we should do. So what do you do? Will you cast your responsibilities on your husband or your wife or whoever is available to be blamed? We've already seen the. People taking the option of tyranny, trying to take over to grab power in the claim to God like authority to make the rules so you can be free yourself. But the alternative response is irresponsibility. Let others carry the lowhood. Freedom from rules means you're not responsible for anything. You go back to Adam. What did Adam say when God challenged him? The woman you gave me gave me the fruit, right? Eve's responsible. And behind her, you are responsible, God, because you gave me this woman who led me astray. Right? And then there was Eve. Verse 13 of Genesis 3, the serpent deceived me. Satan's responsible. The devil made me do it. If you hear that. I'm not responsible. So husbands. Take a marriage as an example. Husbands are appointed by God to act as the head of the household. And many come on as a tyrant. I'm the head of this house and you're here to do what I want or else. And if I beat you, it's because you deserve it. People today are very conscious of this attitude and at least publicly abhor it. It still happens nonetheless. But many men also abdicate. They don't want to be the head of the household. They let the wife discipline the children, make the decisions. They opt out of their share of family responsibilities. Don't hold me responsible. I refuse to be bound by your desires. Wives similarly cop out, perhaps by refusing to care for the children, letting them run wild, sometimes by escape by deserting husband and family. It's not just families. That's one obvious thing. Politicians have developed the responsibility avoidance mechanisms to an art. You know, an issue is brought up. There is a wide responsibility with noncommittal replies to requests for actions. We're taking this situation very seriously. We're taking it so seriously that we've appointed a royal commission to consider this. We can't act meaningfully until it reports. It's supposed to report in two years, but it's already asked for five more. You know, be responsible. They spin the issue to make something that's bad sound good. There's an old story, perhaps too old for any of you to have heard it, or many of you. I told it about a Cold War car race set up between the Russians and the Americans, and each of them entered one car in this race to see which was best. The results were reported in Pravda. In the great auto showdown, the Russian car came second while the American car was second last. Spin. The thing is that for the politicians, keeping power is their concern, not truth. They're certainly not taking responsibility for their actions. And we can go on to all kinds of things, but don't just point the finger at others. You need to look to yourself. I need to look to myself. I need to look to myself. Where do you opt out of your responsibilities? And where you do when you see that, then seek God's forgiveness, turn to Christ and ask him to cleanse you and to help you to correct that. God says you are responsible. Trying to be like God, rejecting responsibility. The third thing we want to look at, see in the fallen state, you become a destroyer. The desire to be a God is essentially self-centredness. When you turn against the rules, you declare, I'm the most important person whom I know. What I want is what counts. I'm the one who can go his way or her way. And at that point, you're saying that other people are either assets to help you do what you want or their obstacles to get rid of. And they have no other value than what they can contribute to your goals. You can see this very plainly in the cancel culture movement that's running through our society today. If you don't agree with us, we cancel you. We declare you worthless. We declare you to be ignored. We keep you off the social media and out of the newspapers and whatever. We silence you. Self-centredness breeds the desire to destroy your rivals. In the fallen state, you want to be free from rules. And any equal or superior is able to impose limits on you, which you don't like. So antagonistic competition is built into your sinful nature. It's expressed more plainly in some people than in others. It's expressed more plainly at some points than at other points in each of us. But we all share it. Think back. Perhaps, have you ever been bitter because somebody else got a promotion you wanted and thought you should deserve? Have you been jealous of somebody else's new car or new toy or new stove or whatever? Not just wishing that you had one, but upset that your neighbour got ahead of you. I think most of us have faced that. Cain and Abel showed it in an extreme form very early. Go on from where we read in Genesis 3 to Genesis 4. They brought offerings to God and Abel's offering was better received than Cain's was. So what did Cain do? Did he try to improve his walk with God so that God would receive his offering? Did he try to improve his walk with God so that God would receive his offering? Did he try to be more faithful so he would be closer to God? No. What he did was to murder his brother, right? He got rid of the competition, so he would be first. And even when you don't go as far as murder, the same attitude is visible. How often have you been angry because you lost a game? Some other small thing. And then think how Jesus in Matthew 5 equates anger with murder. Have you been glad when your opponent's best player was injured before your match with them? The destroying attitude seeks to better oneself by harming others, not by improving your own skills, but by harming others. And self-centredness encourages a claim to an absolute right to all things. That means you can use things the way you please. It doesn't matter who's hurt. Bulldozer for us for a quick profit. Destroy the top soil. So what? If nothing grows well there for 50 years, I won't be bothered. I've got mine out of it. No convenient place to get rid of the garbage. So what do you do? Out the car window on the side of the road. Walk down just about any street or road, and you see the fruit of that. The creative instinct with which you were made is turned to destruction by sin. When Adam sinned, he placed himself and us under the devil. In the passage we read in John's gospel, Jesus pointed the Jews to their desire to kill him. John 8.40. Though he'd done nothing to harm them. He'd done anything good, you know. Why that desire? Verse 44, he said, you are of your father, the devil. And the desires of your father you want to do, he was a murderer from the beginning. And so in our sin, under the influence of the devil, the corruption of the devil, we become ready to rend and to destroy. The fall makes us destroyers. And the fall, our final point, leaves you unable to fulfill yourself. You can't achieve at the level of a God. Nothing you do is perfect. It doesn't matter how hard you try or how skilled you may be, nothing you do is perfect. Nothing is fully satisfying in itself. Some things can give you a great deal of satisfaction, but they aren't complete. You're filled with the desire to be Godlike, but without the power or the character to manage that. You want to go your own way, but you need your paycheck and your boss insists that you go his way, that you do what he wants you to do. Or perhaps your boss, and then you're struggling with getting competent employees for as little as you want to pay them. You create your masterpiece and put it on display and people criticize it. And you yourself look at it and say, well, it's not really as good as I thought it was. And you're not satisfied. You know, there's a mantra that runs around today. You can achieve anything you want to achieve. That's the effect of the fall, claiming we're not bound by rules. You know, it doesn't matter how hard I tried. Think back when I was at the Royal Military College in as good physical shape as I've ever been in my life. It doesn't matter how hard I tried, I was never going to be as fast as Usain Bolt, not even close. As a sprinter, I was a total failure. Usain Bolt would have been a third of the way ahead of me when he got to the end of the hundred yard dash. No issues. I can't achieve everything I want to achieve. But our fallen, sinful nature makes us try to deny that we're limited. Though we have many limitations, one of them is critical. You cannot find God on your own. The fall and sin leave you isolated from God. And yet you were made for fellowship with God. You will never be complete until you have God dwelling in you, keeping you, loving you. You need God's presence. You need his presence to find real satisfaction. You need his presence to gain real joy. You need his presence to be the person you were designed to be. You need his presence to reach your potential. But since the fall, God's presence is something fearful, not joyful. Think back to Adam and Eve when God came to them in the garden. What did Adam and Eve do after their sin? They run up to the God who was their friend and say, good to see you again. No, they hid. They hid. They tried to hide from God. They were no longer willing to approach him. They were afraid because sin had made them vulnerable. Sin had brought them under judgment. That's where you and I stand without Christ. It leaves you with a horrible dilemma. You need God for fulfillment, and yet you're afraid to come to the true God. We should understand. You know, we hear all kinds of things about people searching out God. All man's searching for God and their own is a desperate mockery. We search for God like a child who has built a mental image of her absent father. She's got this picture in her mind of what her father should be. And when her real father returns, he doesn't match that picture. So she rejects him. She goes off, spends her life looking for her father. Because she he isn't that's the picture she has of him in her mind. In the same way, people look for a God to satisfy their image of what a God should be. They look for that kind of God, a God bound by the rules that they choose, which makes me a very small God, right? There's a God who's limited to your human imagination. If you ever pursue reading the mythologies of our history, I was interested in since I was very young, it's obviously the gods are small, limited. Many claim to be looking for God, but actually they're fleeing from the true God. Because he's too big. He's too challenging to fit their small mold. So in Romans three, which you read in that first bit was quotes from the Old Testament, a long list of them. One which sums it all up, there is none who seeks for God. Not one. Who seek for a false God, will seek for a new meditation God, will seek for a paper mache God, whatever. But not for God, the maker of this world. And when you understand that, it shows you how wonderful his grace is to us, his love for us. That he, when you're running away and trying to pretend something else must be God and doing anything but what he wants, that he seeks you and calls you to himself. That's what we see in Jesus Christ when he took on our humanity. He was born into stable, not to his palace. When he walked this world, he said all he owned was the cloak he was wearing. He paid the price of our sin right to the point of dying for us on the cross, experiencing the full wrath of God at our sin as he hung there. In Christ, God takes your fallen nature on himself and turns it back to righteousness. And if you put your trust in him and let him take over your heart, he restores your humanity. He renews his image within you, he reaches down into that dark evil spot that was placed in your heart by sin and puts his purity there. To start growing out through you and reshaping you. He makes you able to enjoy him. He makes you able to enjoy him. Our fall into sin leaves us no basis for valuing what we can do. Sin brought death and decay into the world and so all you do falls to pieces in the end. Sin throws away God's standards. It leaves no means of assessing good or evil because if you go the way of this world, whatever happens is an accident. Neither good nor evil is just what happens. The standards people invent change from year to year. Years ago, people looked at male advantages and physical strength and established women's sports leagues so women could compete effectively. Today, people are insisting that any guy who calls himself a woman should be able to play in a woman's league. You've got to wipe it all out. Total change. It leaves a deep awareness that our human standards are arbitrary. So how can you ever be satisfied? But in Christ, there is satisfaction. What pleases him lasts forever because he is eternal. He is the reality of what is good. His standards don't change every time some new philosophy becomes impopular. The way for you to find fulfillment is in Jesus Christ. Understanding the fall leads you to a changed life. It warns you against the pride that corrupts your nature. It teaches you to walk humbly before God as you see your own failures and before other people. It teaches you to work to limit the effects of your sinfulness. It shows you that you have no hope except in Jesus Christ. You need his death applied to you to take away your sin. His approval is your one enduring source of value. If you have never turned to him, he calls you and he would welcome you right now. Come to him, put your trust in him, ask him to take you and make you his. And he, when he takes you, teaches you to act responsibly. He teaches you to resist the attempt of tyranny. He teaches you equally to avoid dodging your own responsibility. Understanding the fall prepares you to make wise choices in this world. You can't assume that people are good. So we try to put limits on those who are in authority, to checks on them to limit the evil they may do. In business deals, we try to establish clear contracts. That prevents later quarrels over differing interpretations of the deal. Especially that's important in terms of dealing with friends and family. You sort of just say, we'll do this and that'll be good. And somehow because of sin, we understand differently. If you're conscious of human sinfulness, you can limit its unpleasant effects in you and upon you. Let's pray. Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you for giving us an answer to that sin, that evil that's in us that we can't change. Thank you for calling us to be your children, to turn to Christ, to find forgiveness in him and cleansing our renewal. Thank you for being more righteous than we are, more patient than we are, for being our God. We pray for any here who don't yet know Christ, that you would draw them to Christ, that you'd show them their self, show them their own guilt and their need for Christ, and that you would fill them with your love and your joy and your peace. Lift us up to serve you. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.