Christmas in Eden — Part One
December 4, 2013
Christmas in EdenGenesis 3:4-6, 13-15, 20Theme: God gives the promise.This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Lesson
Christmas in EdenGenesis 3:4-6, 13-15, 20Theme: God gives the promise.This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Lesson
Christmas in EdenGenesis 3:4-6, 13-15, 20Theme: God gives the promise.This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Lesson
Christmas in EdenGenesis 3:4-6, 13-15, 20Theme: God gives the promise.This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Lesson
Christmas in EdenGenesis 3:4-6, 13-15, 20Theme: God gives the promise.This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Lesson
Christmas in EdenGenesis 3:4-6, 13-15, 20Theme: God gives the promise.This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Lesson
Theme: Recovering the Amazing Nature of Grace
This week’s lessons show us how grace came unexpectedly to Adam and Eve when they sinned, and that this same grace is given through Jesus Christ to all who will come to him for salvation.
Scripture: Genesis 3:21
Theme: Where Grace Begins
This week’s lessons show us how grace came unexpectedly to Adam and Eve when they sinned, and that this same grace is given through Jesus Christ to all who will come to him for salvation.
Scripture: Genesis 3:21
So where do we begin? If grace is as important as I have been suggesting, it will not surprise you if I begin at the beginning, that is, with the early chapters of the book of Genesis.
Theme: The Need for Grace
This week’s lessons show us how grace came unexpectedly to Adam and Eve when they sinned, and that this same grace is given through Jesus Christ to all who will come to him for salvation.
Scripture: Genesis 3:21
Theme: A Time for Judgment
This week’s lessons show us how grace came unexpectedly to Adam and Eve when they sinned, and that this same grace is given through Jesus Christ to all who will come to him for salvation.
Scripture: Genesis 3:21
God doesn’t take the blame, however. He places it where it is belongs. And he judges it too, as he did in the case of our first parents. In this case he began with the serpent: “Because you have done this,
Theme: Amazed by Grace
This week’s lessons show us how grace came unexpectedly to Adam and Eve when they sinned, and that this same grace is given through Jesus Christ to all who will come to him for salvation.
Scripture: Genesis 3:21
Theme: God Gives the Promise
This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Scripture: Genesis 3:15
Our focus this week is on Christmas, and I want to begin by saying that if the birth of Christ is the center of the Word of God, together with his death and resurrection, then we should expect to find it everywhere throughout the Bible.
Theme: A Gracious Prophecy
This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Scripture: Genesis 3:15
Theme: The Raging Battle
This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Scripture: Genesis 3:15
Theme: Salvation through the Cross
This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Scripture: Genesis 3:15
Theme: Delivered from Satan’s Power
This week’s lessons teach us that God’s plans cannot be thwarted.
Scripture: Genesis 3:15
Our focus this week is on Christmas, and I want to begin by saying that if the birth of Christ is the center of the Word of God, together with his death and resurrection, then we should expect to find it everywhere throughout the Bible.
It is not surprising that we find a prophecy of Jesus in the Old Testament. But what is surprising is how gracious this is. Here is God speaking in grace in the context of the judgment, and I want you to remember that about Christmas. Christmas is God’s grace to people who deserve his judgment. Now what this verse speaks of is enmity. And it speaks of this enmity, or warfare, on three levels—between Satan and the woman, and presumably all human beings; between his offspring and hers; and then, finally, a conflict between the woman’s great descendant Jesus Christ and Satan himself.
What God has said here in Genesis 3 is that he is giving a divinely established struggle between the woman and her descendants and Satan. We are terribly depraved, but we don’t automatically assume that Satan is right. That is a blessing that results from the warfare that goes on. We have a fallen spirit within, and that is why we are in dreadful danger all the time of being drawn after Satan—because that within us inclines in his direction. But, you see, it isn’t wholehearted, and there is a struggle involved even when we sin as sinners.
This struggle between Satan and God’s beloved Son is evident throughout the life of Jesus. Probably the devil worked upon Joseph at the very beginning to suggest to him that Mary was pregnant by another man, and that he should therefore expose her. However, we are told that Joseph planned instead to put her away privately, but nevertheless to turn away rather than provide the protection that God put Joseph into the story to do. It required an angel to come to Joseph. God intervened so Joseph would take Mary under his wing and protect her from the kind of things that would be said and done if she were exposed in that manner.
To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray—that is why Jesus came. Make sure that you also trust in Jesus, as Adam and Eve did. You will find that this great purpose of all the ages, focused in Jesus Christ, is also accomplished in you. If you trust him, if you believe in him, if you place your faith in him, it is for you that he came on that first Christmas Day.
The human conscience is a very strange thing. Considering how evil men and women are, it is surprising that we have a conscience at all. Yet we do. At times it plagues us.
There is only one way in which conscience can be a sure guide to right conduct, and that is when the light of God’s Word is shining on it. When the light of God shines on the sundial of your conscience you get the right time. But apart from that the conscience is like a trained circus dog. You whistle once, and it will stand up. You whistle twice, and it will roll over. The third time it will play dead.
As we begin the forty-second chapter of Genesis, we come to this matter of the conscience. For in a certain sense the story of Genesis at this point ceases to be merely Joseph’s story, and becomes largely the story of Joseph’s ten brothers as God works through many devices to awaken their nearly dead consciences and bring them to repentance and cleansing.
When God is telling one of His children something the person does not want to hear, he or she often wishes that God would stop talking. But what if God actually does stop talking? Ah, that is much, much worse. Without physical bread a man or woman may die, but live forever. We can live eternally without bread. But what if we are deprived of God’s Word? We cannot live without that.
The pinch of want is never pleasant, but it is a gift when it brings us to our senses. David said, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your Word” (Ps. 119:67). May God awaken our consciences to that same obedience.
The second of these devices, after the pinch of physical want, was the pain of harsh treatment at the hands of Joseph. Before long this was to become harsh treatment of a physical sort; all of them were cast into prison, and one of them, Simeon, was kept in prison. But at the beginning this harsh treatment was merely in the form of words. The story tells us that when the brothers came down to Egypt to buy grain Joseph “recognized them, . . . pretended to be a stranger and spoke harshly to them” (Gen. 42:6-7).
It is not only insults that hurt us either. Even truth hurts, sometimes even when it is spoken kindly.
Joseph is God’s man in all parts of this story. He had been honored more than once as a prophet of God. God had spoken to him, guided him, protected him, and kept him from sin. Surely he was not left to his own devices now, but was rather acting as God’s agent in awakening the consciences of these brothers. His words were God’s voice to them.
If Joseph were re-enacting the scene at the pit, perhaps even repeating to the brothers the words they had hurled at him, which had been indelibly etched in his memory, then it is understandable that the brothers began to come around at this point. Joseph’s words were not an unbridled outpouring of invective or mere cruelty. They were carefully calculated words which proved effective in bringing the brothers to a necessary confession of their sin and so to salvation.
We must never resent or resist the harsh treatment God sometimes gives out as we study His Word or hear it proclaimed from the pulpit. God hates sin. Therefore the Word of God, which reflects His holy character, customarily exposes our sin and calls for our repentance. Comfort? Yes, the Bible contains great comfort, and promises too. But the comfort and promises are only for those who confess their sin, obey God and pursue righteousness.
In this next section of the story the guilty memory of the brothers becomes an open confession for the first time. They said to one another, “Surely we are being punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen; that’s why this distress has come upon us.” Reuben chimed in, “Didn’t I tell you not to sin against the boy? But you wouldn’t listen! Now we must give an accounting for his blood” (vv. 21-22).
What did God use to bring about this quickening of conscience and confession? He had used the pain of material want to bring the ten brothers (Benjamin had remained home with his father) to Egypt, where they were particularly vulnerable to God’s prodding. He had used Joseph’s harsh words to prick their carefully constructed defenses; the words had begun to get through. Now God uses solitude or physical imprisonment to set them apart from life’s incessant trivial demands and give them time to awake to His displeasure.
In the stillness of the brothers’ solitude, they began to hear the voice of God’s Spirit. The way the story is told we are introduced to the brothers’ thoughts only after Joseph had released them from prison after the three days and had begun to interrogate and deal with them again. But although their changing attitudes emerge in response to his prodding, I have no doubt that they merely reflect what had already been building up in their minds during the days of confinement. God was at work.
The second thing solitude did in the lives of these men was refresh their memories. So far as we know, there had never been a time previous to this when the anguish of Joseph had been openly discussed between them. Indeed, the narration itself does not mention it. It is only when their deep guilt has already been forced to the surface that they remember what we had long suspected but had not been told was the case, namely, that Joseph had cried and pleaded for his life but was not heeded. They say, “We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen” (v. 21).
The third thing solitude did for these guilty brothers of Joseph was cause them to reason spiritually. They were not godly men. In fact, they were probably not even saved men before the events of these chapters. They did not reason spiritually.
An instructive combination of ideas in Genesis 42:24 makes a useful introduction to this study. In the first half of that verse we are told that for the first time Joseph began to break down in the presence of his brothers and weep out of his great love for them. His weeping related to God’s work in bringing them to a confession of sin, which they had made to one another and which Joseph had heard, though they did not know that he had understood them. In the second half of Genesis 42:24 we are told of an entirely different action. “He [that is, Joseph] had Simeon taken from them and bound before their eyes.”
Before these men started for home, the story tells us, Joseph caused each man’s silver to be returned to him in one of his purchased sacks of grain. In addition, he gave them provisions for their journey. The use of these provisions would have kept them from opening their sacks until well along in their journey. But at last, for some reason or another, perhaps because the traveling provisions ran short, one of the brothers opened his sack and discovered the money Joseph had returned. What consternation! “My silver has been returned,” he said to the others. “Here it is in my sack.”
Yesterday, we concluded with the idea that when Joseph’s brothers found the money for the grain in their sacks, what bothered them was the providential nature of the event. However insignificant this discovery was, for them it was proof that God was present in their circumstances and that he was going to demand a reckoning for their sin where Joseph was concerned.
How do you know that you are beginning to come to grips with the true God of the Bible and not a mere figment of your imagination? It is when you become conscious of sin and are troubled by it.
I say again, as I often have in these studies: I cannot see your heart, and therefore I do not know what it conceals. I do not know whether you are hiding unconfessed sin. I do not know whether God is working through the pinch of want, the pain of harsh treatment, the press of solitude or the circumstantial proof of His presence to bring some sin to light and lead you to a saving repentance. But I do know this: If God is working (or has worked), there will be confession. Sin will be repudiated.
I think that we are often like Jacob when we complain that everything is against us. And we are just as laughable! Circumstances fail to treat us right, someone says something less than complimentary, we are faced by a difficult decision—and suddenly we feel that nothing has ever gone right for us in our entire lives, and we pout about it. Is that the kind of witness we are going to bear for God? Is this the way we are going to disgrace the summons He gave us?
When we speak of the world in the sense of its being our spiritual opponent we are not using the word in reference to the earth (in the sense of the “world globe”) or even to the people who inhabit the earth (as in the phrase “the whole world”). We are using it to refer to the “world system” which Jesus referred to when he said, “If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 15:19).
Jacob had said, “Everything is against me!” He was not right in saying this, as I have indicated. But he would have been right if he had acknowledged these three enemies: the devil, who was no doubt seeking to destroy him as well as Joseph; the world, whose godless values and goals were a constant threat to all of this chosen family; and the sins of his own fleshly nature.
What is it that surrounds us? Is it the world with its temptations and ensnarements? The flesh with its lusts? The devil with his malicious hatreds and eternal enmity against God? It does not matter: “Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”
Today you may seem to be alone in your determination to live for God in this wicked and spiritually hostile world. You may believe that everything and everyone is against you. But this is not the case. You are not alone. God is with you. He alone is greater than any opponent you may face. And in addition to God Himself, there are also thousands who have not and will not bow their knees to the pagan gods of our culture.
We want a good life, but most of us are willing to endure things that are not so good, so long as we are in control of the situation. We will bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things—we will willingly submit to great hardships—so long as we are doing the submitting and retain ability to manipulate the difficult circumstances to our ends.
A great deal had been accomplished in these sin-hardened brothers of Joseph, accomplishments vividly detailed in Genesis 42. But there is a proper break between chapters 42 and 43, since however much had been accomplished, it is still the case that the sin against Joseph would never have been fully brought out into the open, have been confessed and then forgiven were it not for the continuing hand of God in the events now narrated.
I see three kinds of necessity in verses 1-14. First, there is the necessity of nature, expressed in this case by the great famine. Instead of abating, as the brothers may have fondly hoped it would, the famine grew worse. The text says, “Now the famine was still severe in the land” (v. 1).
Does the pattern of necessity that God imposes on His people really bring changes? It did in this story. We see two changes: first, in Judah, and second, in the patriarch Jacob himself.
We pointed out yesterday that Jacob had learned his lesson about trying to wrestle against God at the Jabbok. Now, we see his attitude toward another God-ordained necessity he must submit to.
What awakens the human conscience and draws a man or woman to Jesus Christ? In Reformed circles it is customary to say that it is mostly a sense of need occasioned by awareness of sin. We know sin by the law. So we say that a person must first be slain by law before he can be resurrected by the Gospel. That is good theology. Yet in actual experience it is more often the case that an awareness of the great love of God is the decisive factor.
The story begins with the brothers’ fear, the same fear that had gripped them when the return of their silver had first been discovered. At their father’s insistence they had brought double the money on this journey, the first part to pay for the grain already purchased, and the second part to pay for a new supply. But when they presented themselves in Egypt and were immediately invited to eat with Joseph at noon, they suspected a plot against them.
If you are not a follower of Jesus Christ, you are in the same position as Joseph’s brothers at this point in the story. You have sinned against your elder brother, the Lord Jesus Christ, by denying His claims and refusing His proper lordship over your life. He has used means to awaken you to your need and bring you to an open confession of sin. But you have gone only so far as God’s tactics have forced you to go; even though He has been most loving and gracious toward you, you have not acknowledged His hand in these benefits.
Romans 2:4 puts the matter of God’s common grace to you and others in the form of a question: “Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience?” The answer is, of course you do, unless you have repented of your sin and turned back toward God through faith in Jesus Christ. By nature human beings are filled with ingratitude. By nature you show “contempt” for God’s kindness. Yet it is precisely this kindness that God is using to bring you to repentance.
There are no such excuses for us. We know there is a God; the Bible says that only fools deny it (Ps. 14:1). We know that all we are and have come from God’s hand; the Bible says, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17). When we stop to think about it, we even know that God sent the Lord Jesus Christ to save us by giving His life in our place. But do we acknowledge this? We do not, unless God awakens our consciences and turns us from our manifest ingratitude.
We have been looking at the work of God in the lives of Joseph’s sin-hardened brothers. Twenty-two years before these events they had sold their innocent and unsuspecting brother into slavery, and all the years since then they had lived with their terrible secret. No one knew—not Jacob their father, not Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin, certainly not their wives or children. But God knew, and He was working in them to expose their sin and bring genuine healing to their lives.
To understand Genesis 44 we must put ourselves in the brothers’ shoes as they started out from Egypt that final morning. They had gone to Egypt with gloomy apprehensions, fueled perhaps by the even gloomier apprehensions of their father. The last time they had been in Egypt, the prime minister had been suspicious of them. He had called them spies and had refused to believe their word about their family, particularly their testimony about their youngest brother Benjamin who had been left behind in Canaan. More than this, he had demanded proof that they were speaking the truth.
Jesus stands ready not only to expose but to forgive, not only to condemn but to cleanse and restore to useful service.
In yesterday’s study, we concluded with the idea that before forgiveness and cleansing can occur, Jesus must first reveal to us the depth of our sin and the reality of our impending judgment. When a person is exposed to this divine logic for the first time, it sounds wrong. It sounds as if a person who has undergone the experience of the brothers must now be broken psychologically and must be as useless to God and others as a brainwashed prisoner. But God’s ways are not our ways, and actually the opposite is the case.
Yesterday, we ended by wondering how the brothers might respond to the silver cup being found with Benjamin. How might they try to save themselves? What story would they perhaps make up to tell their father? Thanks to the work of God, none of these thoughts was now in the brothers’ minds. Years before they had willingly sold Joseph. Now there is not one of them who did not wish that the cup had been found in his sack rather than in Benjamin’s. And they did not abandon him!
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