Something in their heart needed to change.
They had to learn to trust in God.
But right now, they are not ready for living with God forever.
As a result, God must kick them out of the Garden of Eden.
There are several reasons for this:
1) He promised them that if they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they would die.
In order for them to die, they must be denied access to the tree of life.
He must keep his promise.
He threatened punishment if they disobeyed and He must keep His word.
When I threaten to punish my children if they disobey me, I should carry out my word.
I believe if I don’t they may eventually not believe they will be punished.
I have seen it with many children, not just my own.
If you do not punish, they will become more disobedient.
2) Second reason - The man and woman are not responsible enough to admit their own sin but instead blame others.
To avoid punishment, to avoid dying, they will want to access the tree of life which is in the Garden.
That is only natural for man.
Nothing wrong with living forever, but living forever means living in the presence of God forever and they are not ready for that. They do not have what it takes to have a good relationship with God.
They do not trust God!
How can they be ready to live with Him?
It is not fair to God to expect Him to forever put up with someone who does not trust and cannot obey.
And just as importantly, God must keep His word.
So, they needed to be in a situation where they needed something . . .
. . . something only God could give.
Then they would have to trust God enough to seek Him.
When they seek Him, He will be found.
In other words, He will want to help them.
That builds up trust.
It shows God is trustworthy.
As their trust grows, their bond with God grows and they learn to love as God loves.
Notice the good things happened as a result of Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the Garden.
1) They will gain understanding of the awfulness and awful results of sin – they will experience the effects of sin by living away from God and very soon, its corrupting effect will be seen
2) They will have motivation to seek eternal life
3) They will have motivation to seek God who holds eternal life
4) They will be learning to trust God, to seek God
5) Not only they will, but their descendants will.
If there had been no punishment, all these things would not have happened.
So punishment shows God cares.
In fact, it is right to say God uses our sin to create something good, something that wasn’t there before.
This man and woman never had the proper relationship with God in the Garden.
It wasn’t God’s fault.
He had given them everything to win their trust but they did not learn.
God must kick them out of the Garden because if they live forever with this kind of attitude, it will not help them.
It will not be a good relationship with God.
They will have to learn trust the hard way – with hard work and pain.
The way we do today.
This should build up more trust within us.
As a result of our trusting God it should also make us more trustworthy.
It is all about trust.
However, sometimes bad things happen to us not
because of our sin or because of other people’s sins.
But there are still lessons to be learned and trust is one of them.
Ecclesiastes 7 – 13 Consider the work of God;
For who can make straight what He has made crooked? 14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, But in the day of adversity consider: Surely God has appointed the one as well as the other,So that man can find out nothing
that will come
after him.
Recall we started last lesson with a question.
It was “why me?”
Look at the Psalms 22.
My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
2 O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear;
And in the night season, and am not silent.
Joseph may have felt this God had forsaken him too.
No one could blame him if he did feel that way.
At first, it seemed that Joseph had it good.
When his many days of trouble started, Joseph was the special child of Jacob.
Joseph was loved, he was rich, he was treated special.
Joseph was fortunate in another way.
Joseph recognized God had a grand plan for him.
It happened because God gave him a vision of his future.
In his dream it appeared his older brothers and parents all bowed down before him.
That made them even more jealous of Joseph.
How could that be good?
And the vision was not so clear.
Joseph had no idea how to fulfill it.
He didn’t even know what was supposed to happen as a final result.
It just wasn’t clear.
He had to wait and see.
Wait on God and see how God would make it happen.
Then Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery and taken to a foreign land.
How far away it must seem from that vision!
How can this be for good?
After Jacob, his father died, his brothers thought their protection was gone. Joseph would harm then now, because that was what they deserved.
Genesis 50:19 – 19 Joseph said to them, “Do not be afraid, for
am
I in the place of God? 20 But as for you, you meant evil against me; but
God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as
it is
this day, to save many people alive.
God not only used Joseph to save his family, but he used him to save many people.
He saved the Egyptians from the famine.
He also saved all the nations that came to Egypt to buy grain because the famine was all over their world.
People back then were religious.
There were no atheists.
Everyone wondered why their gods had forsaken them.
Could it be we sinned?
Then they come to Egypt to buy their grain.
They have to buy it through Joseph.
He is a foreigner in Egypt and he’s in charge?!
They learn the story of how Joseph rose to power.
So the world learned about Joseph's God also, because it is God who is central to the story, not Joseph.
They learned God was also helping all nations, not just the Egyptians.
All because of a physical hardship that lasted many years with Joseph.
So, the question was “why me?”
Why does this bad thing happen to me if God cares?
The answer:
It happens precisely because God does care about you.
It also happens because He cares about others too.
Shouldn’t we care about others too?
Our physical suffering in this life can lead to eternal salvation for others.
Sometimes, oftentimes I think, we feel trapped.
Trapped inside this body.
1)
Why couldn’t I be prettier?
2)
I’m smart, why couldn’t I be born a man so I could be more successful?
Trapped inside this life.
1)
Why was I born in poverty?
2)
Why was I born with a dysfunctional family?
3)
Why did God allow me to be born to a father who abuses his children?
We have three daughters as most of you know.
平安, our middle daughter, has severe developmental delay.
She was diagnosed with that and a seizure disorder perhaps resulting from a problem with her brain.
The problem with her brain is very, very rare.
The characteristics of her problems are even rarer.
It is possible, she might be the only person in the world with this exact same problem.
Of course, no one knows for sure that is the cause.
We didn’t begin to know about this diagnosis until she had a serious seizure when she was nine months old.
I remember that day very vividly.
I was praying as I drove to the hospital. – “Please help her live.”
That was most important to me.
And help us cope with whatever problems she has.
God answered my prayer with an emphatic yes on both of those areas.
Yes, she is alive.
Yet I sometimes feel trapped in this role of taking care of her.
I could be doing something for God that is good.
I have plans to teach others about God’s word.
But I’m trapped taking care of our middle daughter.
I’ll have to stop it soon, because of my own health.
Then my wife will be taking care of her as long as she can.
She probably will never develop enough to live independently.
I can see a future of changing diapers, of picking her up as she gets bigger and heavier and we get more old until we will have to probably let someone outside the family do it.
That is hard to do also, to let go of her care.
We’ll have to live simple, perhaps sell our house someday.
Who knows?
The vision of the future is not so clear right now.
God did hear my prayer and spared her life.
He had prepared my wife and I for that moment before it happened, we just didn’t know it.
And He continues to prepare us along the way.
There has been so much we have gone through since then.
Perhaps He is preparing us for something even worse.
But why?
Because 平安 opens doors.
People do not question that we have been through a lot.
When we speak about waiting on God, they know we are speaking from the heart.
When we show our faith in God through all this, we preach a lesson that is much stronger than any I will preach.
Personally, I have benefited from her condition as well.
I look at 平安 sometimes and I realize that she gives me focus –
focus on what is really important.
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