An Explosion of Evil

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On Sunday nights, for the next couple months, there are going to be some times that we don’t have a Sunday night service for various reasons, Father’s Day is coming up, Memorial Day, things like that. But for the Sunday nights that we are here through a good portion of the summer, we’re going to talk about 12 events, 12 biblical events that shaped our world. Okay, I don’t intend for this just to be a history lesson, but to point back to things that happened in the Bible and see how we can still see the effects of these things today.

How what happened in God’s Word 4,000 years ago, 5,000, 6,000 years ago, how these things still shape the world that we live in and how because of that, God’s Word really, the Bible really does tell us some things that we need to know for how we live. A lot of people like to look at it and say, well, it’s 2016, the Bible’s outdated, nobody believes that anymore. Folks, the Bible is as relevant today as it was at the time it was written.

The Bible is more relevant for how you live your life today in 2016 than the newspaper or the TV news or whatever Oprah’s saying. I guess she’s not, she doesn’t have a show anymore, but whatever she’s telling you to do or any of the other people that the world looks to for advice, you know, what the Bible is still more relevant. And the first thing that we’re going to look at tonight is about the power of unintended consequences, that we don’t always know how things are going to turn out when we do something that we’re not supposed to or when we don’t do something that we are supposed to.

It’s hard for us to see what the consequences, what all the consequences are going to be for a given action. We don’t know how, because we can’t see ahead into the future the way God does, we don’t always see how one choice can change the direction of our entire lives. Back in 1914, and yes, I am talking about history because I’m fascinated by history, and there are some good examples from history that back up the things the Bible says.

Back in 1914, there was a group of young radical Serbian nationalists who called themselves the Black Hand, which is kind of a scary name for our group, but I guess if you’re the kind a group that gets involved in assassinations, you want to be scary. They decided that in order to protect Serbia, in order to protect the Serbs in Bosnia, they were going to assassinate the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was going to be their future ruler, and they said, well, we’ll just strike a blow against the Austrians, and maybe they’ll leave the Serbs in Bosnia alone.

So a young man, really kind of a loser, I know that’s harsh to say, but you look at his, and it’s true, kind of a down-and-outer named Gavrilo Princip, opened fire on the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in the streets of Sarajevo, and he killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his young wife. And these radicals thought that they were going to liberate the Bosnians from Austrian rule. What they didn’t realize, though, that this one act was going to have unintended consequences.

They didn’t realize that this one act was going to set off a runaway train that they wouldn’t be able to control and neither would anybody else. What they had actually done in shooting this man and assassinating this ruler, what they had actually done was to fire the first shot of World War I, if you remember that story. We like to think big wars like that have big causes.

No, it was one guy that shot another guy in the streets of sin. One act designed to remove, they said, we’re just going to remove this one guy from the throne. They didn’t realize they were going to set the whole world on fire.

And tonight we begin looking back at some of the biggest biblical events that have shaped the world we live in. And by looking at how the seemingly small beginnings of sin have led to unintended consequences. How sin also in the garden set off a runaway train of events that nobody could control.

And even disobedience that seems small like Adam and Eve’s, what they did in the garden, it seems relatively small to us. Oh, big deal, they ate some fruit. It led to, it was still disobedience, and it led to an explosion of evil.

And our world that we live in today still bears the scars of what they did. We still see the results of what they did all around us. We’ve spent so much time, I have spent so much time lately talking about Genesis chapter 3 that many of you can probably quote the story word for word or get close to it.

You can tell me what happened as well as I could tell you. So I’m not going to belabor the whole story, go into it in great detail, because you know. We are going to start there, though, and just move through it very quickly and see how this one act led to an explosion of evil, a shot heard around the world that’s not unlike what they did in the streets of Sarajevo.

If you turn with me there to Genesis chapter 3, we’re going to start in verse 1. It says, Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden.

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be open, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took up the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. Now again, I’ve spent a lot of time on this already the last couple weeks, so I’m not going to go into great detail.

But God allowed them to use any plants in the garden for food as they saw fit, except for this one. The only restriction he placed on them was telling them you cannot eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Just one.

One rule. And they couldn’t even handle that one rule. It says they saw the tree was good for food.

And so in other words, they saw the fruit, they desired it, and they thought they knew better than God. So they took the fruit without really caring what God had to say about it. And the overall philosophy of our society since the 1960s seems to have been if it feels good, do it.

You hear that all the time. Or people, even if they don’t say those words, they embrace that kind of thought process. That philosophy, though, is not anything new.

It didn’t start in the 1960s. It started that day in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve rejected God and instead embraced what the Apostle John calls the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, whatever we feel like doing regardless of what God says. They saw it, they wanted it, and they disregarded what God said.

Now, we look at this story, the fruit in the garden 6,000 years ago. Well, that was then. That is exactly what our world does today.

They see it. They want it. They do it.

Who cares what God said? With all the evil that we see around us, we might look at this story and ask ourselves, what’s the big deal? Like I said earlier, they took some fruit.

Big deal. It’s not like they murdered anybody. It was disobedience, though. And even though this disobedience might seem relatively small to us today, any disobedience is a big deal to God.

It’s serious business to God because He is holy. Growing up, I heard my pastor say all the time, what one generation does in moderation, the next generation does in excess. And we see that happen around us all the time today.

That’s exactly what happened with Adam and Eve. Their sin, which was already bad enough because it was disobedience, it lit a fuse, and that fuse exploded in the generations that followed them. As time went on, they had two children who were also born sinners because their parents were sinners, and they had to make their own choice also whether or not they were going to obey God.

So we’re going to look at Genesis chapter 4 and see what the next step was in this just explosion of evil that took place. Genesis chapter 4, verse 1, And Adam knew his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. and she again bare his brother Abel and Abel was a keeper of sheep but Cain was a tiller of the ground he’s a farmer and in that process of time in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof and the Lord had respect unto Abel and unto his offering now unfortunately we don’t have a written record of when God went to Adam and Eve and their family and says this is how you have to do sacrifices and offerings.

This is why you need to do it. But it’s clear to me, though, that God had made some kind of command on it because both brothers did it, and God addresses Cain and says, you know you were supposed to do this. So my personal theory on it is that it ties in with Genesis 3.

21, where God kills the animal to make a coat of skins, a covering. That animal had to die, an innocent animal had to die to cover the sins of the guilty. And so that’s likely where the concept of animal sacrifice began for Adam and Eve.

And Cain tried to get by with just bringing God produce. Okay, Abel knew and Cain knew also. You’re supposed to bring God an animal. There’s got to be blood here.

And Cain says, okay, I’m a farmer, so I’m going to bring God produce. I’m going to bring him fruits and vegetables. And we understand this because God explained later on in the book of Hebrews that blood is required for sins to be forgiven.

Somebody’s blood has to be shed. It says without shedding of blood, there is no remission. Last time I checked, vegetables can’t bleed, can they?

What’s that old saying, you can’t get blood from a turnip? Well, that’s true in more sense than one. So God was pleased with Abel’s offering when he brought in cattle, but he wasn’t pleased with Cain’s offering.

Verse 5 says, but unto Cain and unto his offering he had not respect, and Cain was very raw, He was angry, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth, and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?

And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. So Cain decided to pout like a whiny little baby, because God wasn’t pleased with his offering, because God had the nerve to demand what God deserves and what God expects.

God’s response to Cain was essentially to tell him, I don’t know what you’re getting upset about. You knew what you were supposed to do, and you didn’t do it. So I don’t know why you’re getting upset that your offering was rejected, is basically how I read this, God’s response to him.

There was a heart problem for Cain. This wasn’t just, well, that’s all I had. There was a heart problem, and there was rebellion involved here.

Adam and Eve ignored God’s word, and their son Cain took it a step further, instead of just ignoring God, he treated God with contempt. His attitude was such that he decided, you know what, I can just serve God in whatever way seems right to me. Whatever way is convenient to me at the time.

And he actually, folks, this is what is so galling about this, except we see it in our society too. We sometimes see it in our own lives. He actually expected God to be grateful.

He actually expected God to be grateful for whatever leftovers of his life he was willing to offer God at the time. Like he was doing God a favor by worshiping him with half his heart. He wasn’t doing God a favor and neither are we when we do that.

But God’s response made it clear that we’re expected to do things his way, not the other way around. God says how it’s going to be and we fall in line. So in a generation, man had moved from ignoring God’s word to now man is treating God with absolute contempt.

And the next step is man moves on to violence. In verse 8 it says, And Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?

Okay, God knows where he is. He’s letting Cain know that he knows. And he said, I know not.

Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of my brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

God says, What are you thinking? What did you do? Because you know you killed your brother, you know it, and I know it, and his blood cries out to me from the ground.

The first murder in human history took place because this one man was so filled with pride and so filled with contempt for God and his word that when God had the nerve to chastise him for his behavior, Cain could not bear to admit that he was wrong. Couldn’t possibly admit that he was wrong. Instead, he lashed out in jealousy toward his brother who had been obedient to God with his offering.

He went out into that field and he murdered his brother Abel. So Adam and Eve had passed down this sin nature onto their family, and that one sin they committed had these dire, far-reaching effects and consequences for them. It just ruined their family.

And after this, things just got worse and worse for this family, for their descendants. People drifted farther and farther from God. They rejected God and His ways more and more.

And if we’ll turn to Genesis chapter 5, there is one bright spot in all this, but even it, to me shows us how bad, how dark this time really was, how wicked this time really was. Genesis chapter 5, starting in verse 21, God’s been listing here all the generations of Adam, and he stops in verse 21, and it says, and Enoch lived sixty and five years and begat Methuselah. And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters, and all the days of Enoch were 365 years, and Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

Okay, so things couldn’t have really been that bad, right? I mean, there’s somebody still here. There’s still some good people here in that day.

God points one of them out, right? There was Enoch, and there was. .

. Think about that for a moment. How bad society must have been.

what does it tell us about a society when the historians are recording about it and they make an effort a special effort to point out oh yeah there was one really good guy who lived during this time he was great and they make a special effort to point that out and the story of Enoch is pretty impressive he walked with God and he had such a close walk with God that God took him to heaven while he was still alive told charla I I the other day I would love that she just kind I rolled her eyes and said, don’t hold your breath. I guess I’m no Enoch. But he was so close to God that God didn’t even make him go through death.

He just took him to heaven while he was still alive. But it doesn’t say much about their society that they had to, that the historian that Moses here recording this says, hey, wait, there was a good man who lived at this time. It kind of reminds me of conversations I have about politics nowadays.

And I hear people say, well, all of our elected officials, they’re corrupt or they’re lying to us. Well, I start naming names of the people in Congress or in the state legislature that I trust. Wait a minute. What does it say about our government when I can remember off the top of my head the names of all the ones who I know are trustworthy?

Shouldn’t it be easier to remember the names of the dirtbags? Is that an okay term to use in church? Shouldn’t we elect the best of us so there are so many good people that the real corrupt ones are the ones who stand out?

But I can name off the top of my head the ones who I know of are noticeably trustworthy. Well, that doesn’t say much for our government, does it? It doesn’t say much for them either that the Bible is able to point out and say, hey, there was one really good guy.

what’s it say about the rest of them so when genesis points out that enoch was a decent man goes through this whole list of names and says and by the way I’m going to stop right here on enoch and tell you he was a good man now it could just be because it’s so incredible that god took him to heaven but to me it sort of sounds like an indictment on the rest of their society when we know the direction their society is headed we turn to chapter six and we see how the sin just continues moving that direction continues to increase and gets out of hand, and God finally has enough of it. Chapter 6, starting in verse 1, says, And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and that they took them wives of all which they chose.

Okay, you may be wondering about who these people are. I know a lot of people wonder, who are these sons of God? Who are these daughters of men?

There are three major explanations about who these sons of God are that people generally accept. Sometimes people will say, well, they’re fallen angels. Sometimes people will say, well, they were great strong men who ruled over other men.

And some people say that they are the descendants of Seth, who was Adam and Eve’s third son. Okay, there are problems with each of these explanations, but the only one really that makes sense to me is the third one, that they would be the descendants of Seth. If that’s the case, then they were called the sons of God because they were part of a line of Adam and Eve’s family that was more likely to follow God, that was more inclined to follow God because they were following after the example of Seth, who was still a sinner, but didn’t set the bad example that Cain did.

And if that’s the case, then the daughters of men are the female descendants of Cain. So they’re coming from a family line that was more inclined. You know how you see some families are just for generations, scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells.

I looked through my family tree and there’s a lot of that in there. Just generation after generation. That’s sort of how Cain’s family would have been at that time.

They were more inclined to reject God. And so if all of that is true, I mean, go research that for yourself. That’s my understanding of it.

But go research that for yourself. If all of that’s true, then what God is getting upset about here is that you’ve got men who should have known better were intermarrying with women that they knew came from rough families who were going to lead them astray, and they didn’t care. They were choosing to embrace this family line that rejected God, and the only reason they were doing so is because they found them physically attractive.

Verse 3 says, And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he is also flesh, yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years. And there were giants in the earth in those days, and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And it repented God that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them. God was fed up.

God had had it up to here. He was going to give his creations 120 years to repent of their wickedness. I know that seems like a super long time.

Well, God is gracious. God is merciful and gives us time to repent. People also lived longer back then.

So he was going to give them 120 years to repent of their wickedness before he brought judgment down on them. We need to remember this passage whenever we start to think that the world has never been as bad as it is today. Because it’s actually been much, much worse.

We’re shocked by the evil all around us. And we think, we look at the world and we see how dark it’s getting. And we think there’s no way forward.

There’s nothing for us to do. We just huddle here and wait for Jesus to come back. But we have to remember that those days before the flood were much worse than our day today.

It says here that every thought from every person was nothing but evil all the time. That’s a low that even our society hasn’t gotten to yet. Not to say it couldn’t happen in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime, but we’re not there yet.

So I understand the pessimism, the negativity that sometimes we as Christians feel about the world we face. Sin is committed so openly and brazenly. The things that people 20 years ago used to whisper about and hide, they now brag about and drag into the open.

But the wickedness of society in Genesis chapter 6 was even more intense than today. In their day, there was nobody who gave a second thought to God or what he wanted or what he expected from them. Every time anybody thought or did anything, it was done with evil intention.

We’re not quite there. Over a period of about 1,600 years, and yes, these three or four chapters have covered a span of about 1,600. Over a period of about 1,600 years, sin had taken control of everything.

It progressed from that one single act of disobedience that Adam and Eve committed in the garden to an entire world that was overrun, completely overrun with filth and violence. And God was sick of it. He was sick of it.

So how does this story affect us today, this explosion of evil that took place in the early. . .

The explosion of evil between Adam’s day and ours, I’m sorry, between the days of Adam and Noah it really established the pattern for how the world was going to work and how it still works today. Sin has infected every part of our world and there’s really nothing that we can change that or to take that out or to make the world sinless anymore. The pattern is and has been from the beginning that sin, if it is left unchecked, will take over everything.

Sin is like kudzu. Y’all know what kudzu is? Back in the 1930s and 40s, the federal government handed out millions of seedlings of this quick-growing vine that they found in Japan.

And the idea was, well, we’ll just hand it out to the farmers, and they’ll plant it, and it’ll help keep the soil from eroding. It sounded good at the time. They didn’t realize, though, that unless they were consistent and aggressive in their efforts to control the kudzu, that it would spread almost uncontrollably.

Okay, so they handed out millions of seedlings back in the 1930s and 40s. And then they had people plant it, and they left it to grow unchecked. Well, it had this unintended consequence that sometimes happens in life when we don’t know what consequences will happen from a choice, that by the early 2000s it was choking nearly 7.

5 million acres of land in the southeast of the United States. I mean, covering everything. Growing over trees, growing over crops, choking out everything.

And you basically have to cut it back all the time, or it spreads. So seven and a half million acres of our land are taken up by these little seedlings, and there’s no slowdown on them in sight. So if sin is left unchecked, it’s going to take over the life of an individual. It’s going to drag a person down into greater and greater depths of wickedness.

If we leave the sin unchecked and don’t deal with it before God, it’ll drag us further and further down into the mud. It’ll enslave a person to the point where he or she is going to give in to whatever sinful impulse may strike. We think, the world likes to think that it’s free when it embraces sin, and that it would be enslaved when it, that it would be robbed of its freedom, and robbed of its fun and enjoyment when it trusts Christ. But the truth is, I have a choice whether to sin or not as a believer.

I have the freedom now to do the right thing for the first time. Separated from God, I’m a slave to sin, and whatever sin tells me to do, I’m going to do. Sin will take over the life of an individual. Sin will take over the life of a family.

When one generation rejects God, the next generation will usually be hostile toward God. When one generation indulges itself in a particular sin, the next generation is likely to follow and go a step further in what they’ve seen their parents do. Sin will take over the life of a nation.

You know what? Many in my parents’ generation grew up indifferent toward God in their Monday through Saturday lives. the baby boomer generation.

As a result, many in my generation have grown up hostile toward God. Not just indifferent, but hostile, because what they saw their parents live was different from what they heard their parents say, at least. And so they’ve grown up hostile toward God. The sins, again, that 20 years ago people hid and whispered about they now flaunt and brag about.

And when that’s met with cowardly silence from churches, sin has grown bolder and bolder. leading millions and millions to embrace a rebellion against God that’s going to harm them in this life. And we have done, not just this church, churches in general have done basically next to nothing to speak up and say this is wrong and it’s going to hurt.

The explosion of evil affects us because it set the stage for God’s redemptive plans that comprise the entire Bible. It established the pattern of behavior that’s been common to man ever since. Man sins and left unchecked, it takes over.

So if we understand these events and how sin works, we’ll better understand why our world works. So now we’ve talked about what happened and how it affects us. What do we do about it?

What do we do about it? Because I don’t want you to leave out of here thinking, well, that was depressing, and I don’t know what to do about it. We can see how sin spread and exploded from one act of disobedience into a world so wicked that God had to destroy it.

That’s what I’m going to talk about next Sunday night is Noah and the flood. The lesson for us here is that we need to fight against this pattern. We’ve got to stand against this spread and explosion of unchecked sin.

The only way the pattern stops is through confession of our sins and our offenses against God on a daily basis and a heart that shows genuine repentance toward Him. Not being sorry that we got caught, but being sorry that we disappointed our Father. And not saying, well, I sinned, I’m going to wander a little further and enjoy it for a while, then I’ll come back to God.

But I mean every day going to God. and confessing our sin, asking His forgiveness and getting things right with Him. Our response has to begin in our own individual lives.

We’ve got to take stock of our own hearts every day. We have to ask God to reveal to us any kind of hidden sin. Sometimes I don’t see the sin in my own heart because I so delude myself and thinking, well, it’s okay for this reason or that, and I justify it.

We’ve got to ask God to show us the hidden sin. Just like King David asked, search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me.

Lead me in the way everlasting. Ask God to show us the sin in our own hearts, the things that shouldn’t be there. And when we find something in our lives that doesn’t belong there, we can’t ignore it.

We can’t excuse it. We can’t leave it unchecked. We have to confess it to God.

We have to seek forgiveness that He offers through the blood of Jesus Christ. And with God’s help, we have to go in there and we have to rip that sin out by the roots like a weed. Our job is, as it says in 2 Corinthians, casting down imaginations and every high thing, this is talking about in our own hearts, every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. So we look in our hearts, we look at all of our thoughts and our feelings and our motives, and anything that exalts itself against God, anything that rebels against God, We pull it down. We cast those things down with God’s help.

And we bring every thought captive into the obedience of Christ. We do the same thing. It has to start with us in our individual lives. But we do the same things in our families, our homes, our church.

It spreads out from the center. The individual takes care of their sin. Then they deal with the sin in their home.

They deal with the sin in their family. They deal with the sin in their church. Repentance has to start here before we can call the nation to bow the knee before God.

And a lot of times we as Christians get this backwards. We see the sin that’s going on all around us. And we want to demand that the nation repent to God.

And they need to. But we’ve got to get right. And we’ve got to repent in our own lives.

We must not allow sin to reign unchecked in our lives. We must break that pattern. Just like the story that I began with on the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.

Guys, we never know what the unintended consequences, and repercussions are going to be from one single act of disobedience. And so we break the pattern by looking at everything we do and leaving no sin unconfessed, leaving no sin unrepented of. We deal with it.

We give it to God. We ask Him to pull it out of there rather than leaving it and wallowing in disobedience and setting off an explosion of evil that we can’t control and may not be able to come back.