The Journey To Bethlehem Begins in Eden

The Need for Bethlehem Begins at the Fall

Genesis 3:22 And the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become as one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever:”

Genesis 3:24 So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

When Adam sinned, everybody sinned in Adam. Sin is any personal lack of conformity to the law of God. The curse on Adam and Eve affected everything about them, including their natures. All that God made, including Adam and Eve, was good, but now these two humans became enslaved to sinful cravings. Like the other effects of the curse, this sinful nature has been inherited by us all.

Romans 5:12 Therefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so death passed onto all men, for all have sinned. Romans 5:19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous.

Adam’s sinful legacy becomes quite obvious when we turn the page to Genesis 4. Before Adam’s first sin, it would have been inconceivable for Cain to have been rejected by God, but now he was. This rejection led to further behavior that would have seemed impossible just a few years before: murder. So jealous was Cain of his brother, that he eventually murdered him (4:8); “through one man [Adam] sin entered into the world.”

Cain became a carbon copy of his sinful father, and Cain is a picture of us all. Why do we find ourselves alienated from God? Why are we weighed down with selfishness, bitterness, envy, and the like? Because we have inherited Adam’s sin nature; “through the one man’s disobedience, the many were made sinners.”

Through the inheritance of Adam’s sin nature, we have inherited the death that comes with it. Genesis 5 bears this fact out. “And he died” is the recurring refrain of the chapter and becomes the theme of the human race, from Adam to Seth to Enoch to us. Because Adam sinned, we became sinners. And, because of Adam’s sin and our own sin, we have God’s sentence of death hanging over our heads—“through one transgression [that of Adam] there resulted condemnation to all men.” (Romans 5:18)

Jesus Validates The Reality of Adam and Eve

Often people argue that Adam and Eve were not real people, so sin is not a reality. Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24 in Matthew 19:5, confirming their circumstances were real. “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.”

We Still Have a Problem Today, It is Sin

Our culture has declared war on sin and guilt because it does not want anything defined as sin. Everything is portrayed as a lifestyle choice, nothing is a sin.

In other words, if you feel guilty about certain things, do them, and just keep doing them until you no longer feel guilty anymore. Very few today treat guilt seriously.

Everything wrong with mankind is most often today described as some kind of an illness, not sin.

Perhaps the most prevalent means of escaping responsibility and blame is by classifying every human failing as some kind of disease.

We’ve got all these people trying … politicians, moralists, educators and university professors, sociologists, and many others attempting to fix society … and it cannot ever be done if they do not ever deal with the reality of what is the real problem.

The problem is the heart.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?

All humanity, no one escapes, has a rebellious, corrupt nature. The will is corrupt and the behavior is corrupt. Genesis 3 is crucial to understanding that.

Only God Can Correct the Problem

The following verses spoke to the future, when Jesus would come to the earth and fulfill what was spoken by God to Adam and Eve.

Genesis 3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, “Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.”

The order and culmination of events concerning the bruising and crushing of evil and sin would begin at Bethlehem.

There is evil in the world, but it is not supposed to be; it is unnatural. Jesus, in John 11, is upset when He sees what sin has done to His creation. The good news— He can fix it. Government, education, and environmental change cannot, but Jesus can. Journey with Him
this Christmas season, from Eden to Bethlehem.