Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. What is your problem? The way that you answer that question will determine the direction of your life, and that's what we're here to talk about today. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Understanding the fall is one of the most important things that people need to grasp.

Romans 5-12 describes it, therefore just as through one man sin entered the world and death through sin and thus death spread to all men because old sin. Now here's why we're talking about this. If you don't understand the fall, you can't understand yourself. If you don't understand the fall, you can't understand what's happening in the news. Right.

If you don't understand the fall, you don't understand what's happening in your relationships, and you don't even understand the weather. So understanding the fall is really important. Well, and most people don't understand the fall, so they're misinterpreting everything that's happening around them. Something so profound happened in Genesis chapter 3 when mankind, who neither the man nor the woman Adam nor Eve had ever sinned before, the design of God was so good for all things, but when they plunged our race into rebellion against God, Things at the most fundamental level changed. The nature of mankind changed.

The Puritans use this kind of language. They said that our first parents launched a poison into the human race and and this is this disease called sin original sin that's transmitted through childbirth from one generation to the next. No one is exempt. It's the contagion of sin that is the result of the fall. Yeah, so the contrary view to what Scripture teaches is that little babies are born into the world as blank slates and then they're progressively ruined by circumstances, events that happen to them, external influences.

And of course, Christians don't discount that those things can have an impact on your life, but we understand that this isn't the fundamental problem, that we're actually born with the fundamental problem. And if you put us in a pristine environment, we would still be sinning because we have a bent towards sinning. This really is a summary of the whole narrative of the Bible. David nailed it in Psalm 14 verse 3. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt, there is none who is who does good, no not one.

Yeah, So until you understand this, you misdiagnose every problem, meaning you see something bad that happens and you say, this is the cause of it and you're wrong about the cause of it. So when you misdiagnose the problem, then you design a solution that is doomed to fail. And it's very expensive. Because when you misdiagnose the problem, you start throwing money and time and energy after bad. So we have two fundamental worldviews that can never be reconciled.

There's the worldview of the Bible and when I embrace the worldview of the Bible I say at the core of course when we get down to the irreducible, I am the problem. Well the truth is the problem is sin and both husband and wife have been corrupted by sin. And so when you see sin in another human being, rather than causing it a well-up in pride, it should humble you because you too have the same corruption. If you don't embrace that proposition, then your spouse is just an idiot. Why do they do the things they do?

Sometimes they don't do the right thing. Why is that? Well, they're an idiot. No, actually, it's deeper than that. Even if your spouse is a born-again believer, follower of Jesus Christ, they still have some remaining corruptions, and they're struggling against those corruptions, and sometimes those corruptions gain the other hand.

They need help with that. They need compassion for that. They need patience in the midst of that. How you are treated by others is a problem. But what the Bible tells us is that's actually gas on the fire.

And the fire is what's fundamentally wrong with mankind. And it might inflame things in your life. These problems might bring hardships into your life, but they're not the core of it. So Paul describes the core of it in Ephesians 2, just listen to this, Ephesians 2, he's writing to people who were just recently saved out of paganism and he's describing what they were before they were saved. He says, and you he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom we also all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath just as the others." So a couple things to point out here.

One, he's writing to physically alive people, but he says, you were dead. You were dead in your trespasses and sins. This is what the Bible teaches, that little babies, cute little babies are born in a condition of spiritual death, of having a nature that is actually bent against God. And then he ends up just essentially saying you lived that out, you proved that that was true, and you were by nature children of wrath. So that's worth camping on for a second.

By nature children of wrath. He's not saying you said things and did things that drew the anger of God. He says you were by nature children of wrath. Meaning deserving of the wrath of God because of just what you are like. So we're people, we like to navigate by evidence, so we want to see the sins.

But actually the truth is, the baby that's just been born in a local hospital, you actually know, 100% certain, that that baby is going to be self-absorbed to a radical degree, selfish, prideful, and is going to love things that God says he hates, this baby is going to end up hating things that God says that he loves. And you know there are no exceptions to that. Yeah, so that's another way to say all of the problems that we see are related to sin. And here's how it looks. All of the problems in the created world, birth defects, all kinds of natural problems that are in nature, genetic problems.

Those are related to the fall of nature, because nature also fell. And then you have sin, sin, distinguished from sins, the sin nature of man. So you have a fallen creation and you have a sin nature in man that's passed on through procreation. And then you have how it's out working. You have particular sins.

So That's sort of the range of the difficulty of living on planet Earth. And so as we look at whatever problems we're facing, we have to properly slot them in their proper category so that we understand them. I'm preaching through Genesis 3 right now. We just got done with the curse text. The curse on the serpent, the curse on the woman, the curse on the man.

And one of the applications from the sermon was, we have to stop thinking of these things as natural. They're natural in the sense that everyone experiences them. Women to this day experience pain, sorrow in pregnancy and childbirth. Women today, down until today, experience friction and conflict in the marital relationship. So we all experience it, so we say that's natural.

Actually, it's not natural. It's not the way God designed it, it's not the way God intended it. Men, their work is filled with thorns and thistles, toil and sweat." And we say that's natural. Actually, that's not natural. God actually created everything to be so much better than we experience it today and when we think, well that's just just how it is, It keeps us from hating sin like we should hate sin.

No, women, the pain and sorrow from pregnancy and childbirth should make us hate sin. The thorns and thistles, the toil and sweat of our efforts to provide should make us hate sin and long for heaven. So don't think that just because this is the world as we know it and how everybody experiences it, that that's how God designed it. No, hate sin. Sin did that to us and heaven will be free of it.

So hate sin and long for heaven. You know God through his son Jesus Christ has provided the remedy for the sins of the world. For the fallenness of the creation, he will bring a new creation. For our sin nature, He has justified sinners and has forgiven them in their inmost sin of their nature and he also is the remedy for their sins. So the Bible gives us Jesus Christ as the remedy for sin.

So Paul in Galatians 3 quotes Deuteronomy, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree and all of this is going to be paraphrased but he says see that man on the tree, see Jesus Christ on the tree, he's bearing the curse of his people And he's wiping away the curse for his for everyone who will entrust themselves in You can you can blame anybody you want to for your problems but all problems can be traced to the fall And that really creates a steady and a mature person who understands what's going on in the world. What's going on with the wars and the rumors of wars, what's going on in the tumult in politics, what's going on in the difficulties of relationships, and what's going on in the sort of the malfunctions in the natural world. We know, we can rise above the smoke and the fire and say, we know Lord what is happening and we know that you're the cure for all of it. If you properly diagnose the problem, I'm the problem. It sends you to the right remedy and Jesus Christ is the right remedy.

And really the only remedy, if you're prescribing anything else for these things, at a fundamental level, it's doomed to fail. Only Jesus Christ sets us free from these things. This also is so helpful to understand our feelings. It's so helpful to understand our troubles. It helps us to actually have an accurate and a mature understanding of our emotions and our troubles and our relationships.

And it actually drives us to the remedy, to the Lord Jesus Christ and His word. So it's good to know about the fall. It's good to know why what's going on is going on in the world. Amen. Okay.

Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope to see you next time. We encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com