Reconciling Yourself to the Fact of Sin

     From My Utmost for His Highest
This is your hour, and the power of darkness —Luke 22

One way to recognize and deal with sin in our lives is to look at it and it's effect on our lives from the beginning. This is a long post today, so I'll get right into looking at how the fall effected our lives with an excerpt from A Rooster Once Crowed:

What is the real EFFECT OF THE FALL on our lives?

The effect of the Fall was legion.

But buried inside the punishment that comes as a result of the Fall is a promise. I don’t pretend to know the ultimate truth on this, but I can see three things peeking through.

First, in the curse on the serpent, God speaks to Satan through the serpent saying, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.” Remember, Moses wrote Genesis under God’s instruction. In the following chapters, Moses begins to discuss the genealogy of Adam and, in every case, history is always passed from father to son. A few wives are mentioned, but names, property, and lines all pass from fathers to sons THROUGH women.

Isn’t it curious that God would address Satan in a context of woman’s seed? What does Scripture say? It says that this seed (of a woman) shall bruise or crush the serpent on the head—a potentially lethal blow to a serpent. Yet it also says that the serpent shall bruise or crush the seed (of a woman) on the heel—a potentially lethal blow to a man from a poisonous serpent.

I believe that this is God speaking to evil, saying that one day—that very day that humanity can bear it—He will send One, tiny as a seed, to earth through a woman who is untouched by any man. That seed will crush evil just as evil tries to crush the seed.

The second is the “thorns and thistles.” In a modern world, this seems like a strange thing to bring up. No one likes them but, by and large, we seem to have overcome them, right? Perhaps. Go to New York City and thorns are likely contained to a few small places in Central Park. But watch a movie about the end of the world, and what literally scales the buildings and brings them down? You got it.

With labor and activity, I can keep thorns and thistles out of my yard. But if I stop, if I cease my labor, they will creep back in. Jesus talked about seed planted among thorns, and the thorns (the world) came up and choked out the Word of God from the listeners’ grasp.

Where is the next most famous thorn in the Bible? In our story, there comes a day when the thorn will be turned, literally bent, into a crown. In that day, this unceasing, grasping, unbeatable force of the world will be tamed and turned into His glory. Man’s curse, overcome, will become God’s glory.

The last blessing, buried in the effects of the Fall, is death itself. Really? How exactly is death, stalking us as we just discussed, a blessing? With the Fall came a change in path. With the Fall, we went from walking in perfection with God to walking away from God. How long can mankind walk away from God? How far can you or I walk away from God? Each and every one of us has cancers within us that are so slow growing that they will never kill us. We would die of 100 other things before one of these cancers became lethal, so they go untreated.

But what about other things that death keeps from growing too fierce within us? What about anger? Laziness? Hatred? After the Fall, all types of sin came into our lives, into the world, and into our hearts. If death had not come too, and if our time here in a fallen world had not been limited, what kind of a horror could I become, given ten thousand years? How much (un-repented) anger could I hold? How much (remorseless) hate could I bear before I tore myself open in agony, begging for death to save me?

The beautiful thing in all of this is that it is completely beyond man to have established any of this. No one could have ever imagined it. To have Moses compose even the beginning of the book of Genesis and convey truths that are alive today is absolutely inconceivable without a Creator.

My favorite part is that even in the midst of what must have been an incredible betrayal, God’s love is already planning a day - That Day - when all will be made right. Each of these curses, problems, issues, dangers and losses will be undone.

From the Fall, God had a plan to make even this right, and your part in that plan is more important than you can imagine.  It was written in at Creation, prepared for this day, and is waiting on your response.  Want to know how?   

EXCERPTED FROM A Rooster Once Crowed: A Commentary on the Greatest Story Ever Told (without twenty eight linked Scripture provided in the book), Chapter 3-The Fall (pgs. 49-52). AVAILABLE FORMATS are linked at Full Porch Press.

The thing is, we refuse to deal with all kinds of junk in our lives each day. It's one thing to mess up our own house, but fear of the Lord comes when we realize it was never our house to wreck in the first place. Jesus' sacrifice was planned from the beginning, even within Adam's failure.

Don't you think that He's prepared for your failure, too? Realizing that-reconciling that in your life begins to change the nature of the struggle altogether.

I love you.

#thefall