Genesis 3:1-7, “Now the serpent [Satan] was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”
Now take a moment and imagine yourself temporarily moving into a room that has been recently refurbished. The room’s owner has graciously provided everything in it, from the comfy bed to the white, spotless carpet covering the entire floor. He also has kindly given you permission to use and enjoy the room; however, he has asked that you avoid doing anything that could stain the expensive, spotless carpet he installed.
The very day you move in, you invite a friend over. Said friend insists on bringing his most cherished beverage, grape juice, which you permit after some hesitation. Unfortunately, after pouring yourself a glass of it, you accidentally bump the table the glass is sitting on and watch in horror as its contents are spilled onto the formerly spotless carpet. After hastily searching for towels and a cleaning spray, all your desperate efforts have failed to prevent the grape juice from seeping deeply into the carpet and creating a massive, permanent stain in the middle of the room. As you succumb to hopeless defeat while staring at the stain you created, reality sets in: you have broken the owner’s rules, you are powerless to fix what has been tainted, and you are inevitably going to face whatever judgment the owner deems fitting for your disobedience.
Like this illustration, God has graciously and loving given us our physical bodies to live in throughout our temporary lives here on Earth. As Colossians 1:16 states, “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” Furthermore, Genesis 1 reveals that God’s original design for mankind was to permanently live in a perfect, painless paradise, enjoying uninterrupted fellowship with Him alongside the delightful work, delectable food, and other blessings He lovingly gave them.
However, we can very clearly see today that God’s original design for us has been completely distorted. Instead of unending fellowship with our loving Creator, all people from birth are completely cut off from communing with Him. In place of paradise, we all now suffer the excruciating pain, overwhelming grief, and inescapable death that plague this broken world. Rather than enjoying work and the blessings of this life, many are heavily burdened by the former and idolize the latter to their detriment. How did all mankind fall so far from God’s perfect design, going from absolute perfection to total brokenness?
This occurred because all people, like the carpet in the illustration, possess a permeating stain within their very nature. However, this stain is not a colorful beverage, but sin, which is any word, thought, or action we do that is in rebellion against God, falls short of His glory, and deviates from His perfect standards. Romans 3:23 reveals that, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” However, unlike the carpet, we were not born with just a small splotch of sin, but a nature entirely saturated in it, completely consumed by it, and tyrannically enslaved to it. The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2:1-3, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” These statements represent the wretched state that every person is born into: corrupted by our sin nature, enslaved to fulfill the passions of our ungodly lusts, and set against our Creator by our wicked heart.
So how did mankind become stained with sin and separated from God? Just like the carpet in the illustration was ruined by the owner’s rules being broken, our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, introduced sin and death to themselves and all their descendants by disobeying God’s rules. While God in His sovereignty could have prevented this from occurring, He willfully chose not to. He made this decision because He not only refused to force humanity to worship Him, but also, as John 4:24 states, He desires sincere, willful worship in spirit and truth. Because of this, He gave Adam and Eve free will and created two special trees in the Garden of Eden that respectively represented obedience and rebellion toward Him: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Unfortunately, our passage in Genesis 3:1-7 reveal how the first couple embraced Satan’s tempting promise of possessing wisdom of good and evil apart from God. By doing this, they willfully ate the forbidden tree’s fruit in selfish disobedience against God.
This single act of rebellion caused them and the rest of humanity to suffer catastrophic consequences. Specifically, God’s once perfect creation fell to corruption, sickness, disease, and death, for Romans 8:20 states, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him [Adam] who subjected it.” Also, Romans 5:12 states, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” This refers to how Adam’s sin corrupted his nature, and he then passed down this corrupted nature to all humanity. Because God is holy and cannot be in the presence of sin (Psa 5:4), this sinful nature caused all humanity to suffer immediate spiritual death upon birth. This means that on our own, we are all born deprived of the ability to commune with God or be in heaven with Him after death.
Furthermore, just like the carpet’s stain could not be removed regardless of how much cleaner and elbow grease were applied, no amount of striving to behave and do good can change or atone for our sinful nature. This is because we are incapable of making ourselves right before God, whose impossible standards to do so are revealed through His Law, which includes the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:1-7 (e.g., lying, stealing, murdering, lusting, taking His name in vain). James 2:10-11 reveal that failure in even one of these laws further establishes our guilt before God, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.” Additionally, Jesus states in Mark 7:20-23 that outwardly abstaining from these and other sins does not make us innocent, for our corrupted hearts produce internal desires to sin that equally defile us before God. For example, Matthew 5:21-22 explain that while we may never murder someone, having a strong hatred for that person still breaks God's Law by committing that sin in our hearts as an inward motive.
Finally, our sin nature and guilt in breaking God’s Law places those who are unsaved in grave danger, for Psalm 7:11 states, “God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.” Just as a good human judge would always punish a criminal who is proven guilty, God’s holiness and status as our judge require Him to properly punish sin. That punishment is revealed in Romans 6:23 to be permanent spiritual death once our lives on earth end, “The wages of sin is death.” Furthermore, Revelation 21:8, Matthew 13:50, and Revelation 20:10 and reveal the horrifying nature of this spiritual death: eternal, irreversible, and unspeakable torment in hell, “But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death… In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth… and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” Thus, because we are born with a sin nature and have personally broken the Law of our holy and righteous Creator who must punish sin, we are in grave danger of His righteous wrath and hell’s eternal torment while being incapable of saving ourselves, leaving all humanity undeniably and desperately in need of a Savior.
Thankfully, our loving Creator, despite having no obligation to save us from the eternal punishment we deserve, deemed our rescue so critical and necessary that He personally bridged the gap between our sin and His holiness. Although His attributes of justice and holiness clamored for our judgment, His love and mercy led Him to, as 2 Peter 3:9 proclaims, “not [wish] that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” To meet the righteous demands of the former attributes while fulfilling the merciful ones of the latter, God Himself came to dwell among sinful humanity through His Son, Jesus Christ, as John 1:1 and 14 state, “In the beginning was the Word [Jesus], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” As John 3:16 famously proclaims, Jesus came to Earth to fulfill the most selfless, loving, and miraculous rescue mission ever endeavored: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Jesus’ merciful intervention in our spiritual crisis was necessary for multiple reasons. For example, God required the blood of a perfect human sacrifice to atone for all humanity’s sins. Hebrews 9:22 states, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” Also, our sin natures disqualify us from fulfilling this requirement or producing any works that could please God, for Isaiah 64:6 states, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” Conversely, Jesus alone was eligible to be sacrificed for our sins because He was born without a sin nature by being born outside of Adam’s seed through the miraculous virgin birth (Luk 1:34-35). Additionally, we were further disqualified from redeeming ourselves or others due to our inability to keep God’s Law, for Romans 3:20 states, “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in [God’s] sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” Conversely, Jesus, being God Incarnate and having a sinless nature, was able to keep and fulfill the Law, proclaiming in Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Thus, Jesus alone was qualified to give up His body to pay for all humanity’s sins through His sinless nature and ability to fulfill the Father’s Law.
Although Jesus willingly gave Himself up to save us, doing so came at an immeasurable cost to Him. For example, He willingly chose to set aside the countless privileges and endless worship He enjoyed in heaven to live as a lowly servant for sinful mankind, as Philippians 2:6-7 state, “...though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Also, He willingly chose to endure the temptations, suffering, and pain common to mankind, as Hebrews 4:15 and Isaiah 53:3 state, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin... He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” Furthermore, He submitted to the most brutal torture imaginable, including being crucified on a cross, as Philippians 2:8 and Isaiah 53:5 state, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross... But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” Additionally, He willingly became sin, despite His innocence, to bear His Father’s righteous wrath for all of humanity’s past, present, and future sins, as 2 Corinthians 5:21 states, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Finally, the most agonizing, soul-crushing sacrifice Christ made for our salvation was allowing Himself to be cut off from the constant, perfect fellowship He had always had and cherished with the Father since eternity past, causing Him to cry out in Mark 15:34, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In an unparalleled act of boundless love, total selflessness, and absolute surrender, Jesus lived the sinless life we could not, spilled His perfect blood to pay for our sins, and appeased the Father’s wrath to fully pay humanity’s sin debt.
However, Jesus’ work did not stop with Him dead on the Cross, for He accomplished His greatest work for our salvation through His Resurrection. In being raised from the dead through the Holy Spirit (Rom 8:11), He performed the greatest confirmation of His deity, as Romans 1:4 states, He “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Also, His Resurrection confirmed His total victory over both sin and death, as Romans 6:9 states, “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.” Finally, Christ’s work continues beyond His Resurrection, with Him currently sitting at the right hand of the Father, interceding for those who believe in Him (Rom 8:34), and as Revelation 3:20 states, is actively pursuing those who have not placed their faith in Him, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
Going back to our illustration, we could never remove the grape juice which had fully soaked and dried in the carpet. No amount of scrubbing or other efforts of our own could clean it. However, if the owner is merciful, the stain could be completely taken care of if he uses his authority over the room and the available resources to completely replace the carpet with a new one.
Likewise, God does not expect us to clean the guilt-ridden life of our sinful nature before coming to Him; in fact, we are completely unable to do so. Furthermore, Jesus does not simply add Himself to our sinful life as one attaches a patch to a ripped garment. Instead, He came to us with His perfect, sinless nature and died in our place to give us a brand-new life, replacing what is defiled and sinful with His perfect, sinless life. As 2 Corinthians 5:17 states, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” This new life—His Holy Spirit regenerating our dead spirits, dwelling within us, and establishing fellowship between us and God—comes only through changing our hearts towards Jesus and accepting what He has done for us.
Rejecting this message to continue living for ourselves or insisting we can achieve righteousness not only causes us to miss out on the countless blessings God desires to give us in this life, but also causes us to indescribably endanger ourselves for when we die. Revelation 20:15 provides a solemn warning to those who reject Jesus’ salvation and are absent from God’s list of those who have accepted it: “if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” Furthermore, delaying your decision to accept Christ is greatly dangerous, for Proverbs 27:1 warns, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.” Thus, as Isaiah 55:6 pleads, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.”
1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 confirm God’s yearning for all who hear the Gospel to be saved, “[He] desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth… not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” He also proclaims in Ezekiel 18:23, “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?”
If you wish to cease striving to be good enough, stop running away from God, and have confidence you are right in your standing before Him, your heart must change to accept Jesus as your Savior and Lord, which requires two things. First, you must repent, meaning you change your mind about your sin and who Jesus is (i.e., stop rejecting Him). Acts 3:19 states, “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.” Second, you must place your faith in Him, meaning your trust is entirely upon Him for your salvation; not faith plus your works but by faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection alone. Ephesians 2:8-9 state, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Once your heart has changed to repent and trust in Jesus, you must proclaim to Him your decision, for Romans 10:9-10 state, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” If you desire His salvation, perfect protection from eternal torment in hell, and complete assurance you will enter heaven when you die, please pray this prayer (noting that the words are not magical, but save you if they are genuinely believed in your heart):
Dear Jesus, I know I am a sinner who deserves judgment. I cannot save myself; only You alone can. I confess my sins and receive You as my personal Savior. Thank you for this free gift of salvation You lovingly paid for with Your life. I repent of my sins and surrender my life to You and Your will. Amen.