Robert Berry Sermon Archive

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Sermon Preached 3/25/01

by Pastor Robert Berry

Covenant Reformed Presbyterian Church

Ft. Pierce, FL

Text: Genesis 1: 26-31, Genesis 3

Sermon Title: "Are You a Two- or Three-Point Man?"

Introduction:

Are you a two- or three-point man, woman, or child? I know you have no idea what I am talking about. Let me give you a hint; it has nothing to do with basketball. In fact, I am not going to tell you the answer, but let you think about it and find the answer in this sermon.

The Bible asks the question in Psalm 8:4, "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" That is an important question, isn't it? Man is capable of noble acts and capable of despicable acts. Apart from the Bible's teaching, man would be incomprehensible, an enigma, hard to know at any given time whether he will help you or hurt you; whether he will be kind or cruel.

Pascal once said of man "O the grandeur and littleness, the excellence and corruption, the majesty and the meanness of man."

This is a true story taken a few years back from an Associated Press article: "Walker Pushed Off Bridge!" It happened in Beaufort, SC, which is in the lower part of the state, that Fred Turner set out walking across America to prove that most people are good. For his trouble, he was robbed and pushed off a Georgia bridge.

When Turner, 53, left Beaufort on May 6, he said he wanted to prove to himself that only one of every 100 people is bad. "I found my one bad one," he said. Actually Turner found two. He said that they pulled up to him in a faded red pickup truck while he was walking across the Tackaseking Bridge at the Georgia-South Carolina line. They asked me if I was the guy walking across America. I told them, "Yes," and they said, "Good, give me your wallet." One of the men pushed him in the chest and Turner lost his balance and fell off the bridge, an estimated 75 to 100 feet. The sheriff estimated that it was Turner's backpack that saved him by cushioning his neck and by providing buoyancy until he could float to a nearby island. Turner still believes that most Americans are generally good people, and he said he would probably finish his nine-state walk to California one day. "I am going to make this trip. I've just got to regroup and think more about how to do it," he said. Maybe he ought to rethink his premise that man is basically good. Ideas, even bad ones, often die hard.

The fact is that we simply cannot understand man apart from the Bible. He remains an enigma, or puzzle, without the help of Divine Revelation, the Divine Revelation of God's Word. Our text helps us here, for our text teaches that man is:

1. Greatly made - made in the very image of God.

2. Greatly fallen - fallen into sin as a descendant of our first parents, Adam and Eve; and

3. Greatly redeemed - justly bought back through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, our Savior.

Genesis 1: 26, 27 "Then God said, let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the creatures that move along the ground. so God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Did you know that the Holy Trinity deliberated when they made man? "Let us make man in Our image." So man is the image of God. I Corinthians 11:7 says, "Man is the image and glory of God.' Man is the pinnacle of God's creation. He is the "imago dei, the image of God, and as such has a "sensus divinitas," a sense of the divine about him. He was made by God and for God and is like God.

A. You are distinct, different from the rest of Creation. God made all that is, plants, animals, stars, man, sun, planets, asteroids, comets, but of all that God made and all that He declared good, only man was made in His image.

I once read a humorous story of a man who was despondent because he had been beaten by a chicken at tic-tac-toe at a county fair. Well, even if beaten by a chicken, you don't have to be discouraged, you have but to remind yourself, Yes, but I am made in God's image, the chicken isn't.

The late Francis Schaeffer, in his book "Genesis in Space and Time", p. 46, said: "What differentiates Adam and Eve from the rest of creation is that they were created in the image of God. For twentieth-century man this phrase, the image of God, is as important as anything in Scripture, because men today can no longer answer that crucial question, "Who am I?" In his own naturalistic theories, with the uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system, with an evolutionary concept of a mechanical, chance parade from the atom to man, man has lost his unique identity. As he looks out upon the world, as he faces the machine, he cannot tell himself from what he faces. He cannot distinguish himself from other things.

Quite in contrast, a Christian does not have this problem. He knows who he is. If anything is a gift of God, this is it – knowing who you are. As a Christian, I know my differentiation. I can look at the most complicated machine that men have made so far or ever will make and realize that, though the machine may do some things that I cannot do, I am different from it. If I see a machine that is stronger than I am, it doesn’t matter. If it can lift a house, I am not disturbed. If it can run faster than I can, its speed doesn’t threaten me. If I am faced with a giant computer which can never be beaten when it plays checkers—even when I realize that never in history will I or any man be able to beat it – I am not crushed. Others may be overwhelmed intellectually and psychologically by the fact that a man can make a machine that can beat him at his own games, but not the Christian." So you don't have to worry when a computer or even a chicken thinks faster or better than you. You were made in the image of God.

B. Your likeness to God gives you great worth and dignity. "Let us make man in our image according to our likeness" and let him have dominion over all creation. Our likeness to God is the basis of our dignity. Let us use the analogy of a snapshot. The snapshot your camera takes of a family member is different from the person, but can be a reasonable likeness to that person, provided it is a good picture. So it is that we are like a snapshot of God, not God, but a reasonable likeness to Him. John Calvin in his commentary on Genesis I took a lot of time to discuss the implications of our being made in God's image, His likeness, because they are so important. So much of what we think about ourselves, about others, rests on our view of man. The Shorter Catechism, Question 10 asks "How did God create man? Answer: "God created man, made and female, after His own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness with dominion over the creatures."

C. As distinct from the rest of creation, only man has a soul or personality in the Image of God. Genesis 2:7 "The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being (or soul)." We are body and soul. Our soul is made up of: 1) intellect, 2) will, and 3) emotions.

A high school friend of mine got his doctorate in Wildlife Biology. Somehow we got into a debate over "Is man an animal?" When I said that man only can communicate with words, he reminded me of Lucy, the chimpanzee, who supposedly has a sign language vocabulary of over 500 words. But look what a vast difference there is in the intellect of a chimp and a person. When have you ever heard of a chimp doing geometry, logarithms, or balancing a checkbook? Of course, some of us can't do that. When have you heard of a chimp playing Rachmaninoff or Chopin on the piano? Quite a difference wouldn't you say? What if all the time and effort that was spent teaching Lucy the 500+ sign words had been spent on a child, what a difference it would have made.

1. You have an intellect. You have the ability to think God's thoughts after Him. You can read your Bible and know things that only God would otherwise know. Adam named the animals, which must have taken some doing and thought.

2. You have a will. You, like Adam, have the ability to purpose to do good, or to do evil. As such, you are morally responsible for your actions. Adam freely chose to do evil. The Christian is free to choose to obey God. He has both the will and the ability to do so, although not perfectly, for he still sins. The unbeliever can freely choose only between bad or worse sin as he operates within his sin nature and does not have the new nature that a Christian has. The unbeliever can do good only before man, but not before God as he is not in a right relationship with God, no matter what he does or doesn't do.

3. You have emotions. Adam walked in relationship with God in the Garden of Eden. They met together in the cool of the evening the Bible says, and Adam was at peace with God. Notice the change that took place after the fall into sin. Adam and Eve were no longer at peace, but hid from God in fear, which was an appropriate emotion given the circumstances.

Think of the implications for treating others, or even thinking of others, since man is made in the image and likeness of God, with a soul or personality, like God. I was once with my wife, Myra, and my brother- and sister-in-law at the Café du Mond in Jackson Square in New Orleans. We just had eaten beignets and coffee and I had remarked to my brother-in-law that New Orleans was a wild place (it was daytime, we didn't dare go there at night), when he said, "It doesn't look too wild to me." At that very moment a man dressed in a T-shirt and cowboy boots and nothing else walked by us. My brother-in-law said, "I see what you mean."

Well, what about that guy? The Scripture says that he has the image of God in him. In all his depravity, he still has worth and dignity no matter how far he has sunk into sin. That has implications for you and for me as to how we think of someone like that. We should love that person despite their sin and try to help them find forgiveness and a changed heart in Christ. That brings us to our next point.

C.S. Lewis, the great English Christian author said, "We are bent people." That means we are all bent by sin. All of us are like the Australians say about themselves, "A weird lot."

How did we get this way? Genesis 3 tells the story. Man was used as a cosmic pawn in a great battle between Satan and God. The serpent, the great serpent, Satan, who is elsewhere in the Bible referred to as the Deceiver, the Accuser, the Destroyer, sought to destroy man in his enmity against God. Was it a real snake in the garden? Yes, but Satan, an angelic being who had fallen from heaven after his rebellion and pride of wanting to be like God, had entered that snake and was talking through it. So we have in the Garden of Eden the first salvo against God when Satan first created doubt in God's Word, then outright contradicted God, and finally insinuated that God is not good, but by eating the forbidden fruit, you can be like God, knowing good and evil for yourself. Adam was being tested, would he obey God or would he give in to temptation.

I once heard of a farmer upon hearing this story say, "I raise apples and if someone is hungry and stops and picks one off my tree, I don't begrudge them an apple!" This wasn't about an apple, a fig, or whatever fruit it was. It was an act of cosmic rebellion, treason. It was man saying I want to decide for myself without your help, God, what is good and what is bad. Nobody has the right to tell me; I'll decide that for myself. The vast majority of mankind is still right there. I will decide for myself what is good or bad without your help, God. That is nothing less than rebellion and treason.

And what was the result of that first sin? As a result of Adam and Eve's sin, you have:

A. A broken relationship with God. Genesis 3:9, "But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’" Genesis 3:10, "He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked so I hid’."

There was anger and hatred; and there was fear as they hid in the garden. There was also shame. Nakedness represents a knowledge of sin, not that there is anything wrong with our bodies after God declared them good when He made us. But after our sin in the Garden, we were aware of our sin and a need for covering that sin. Our clothes are a reminder that we need a covering for sin which the blood of Jesus does for us. Nudists are saying, "I have no sin." whether they realize it or not. Finally, death is the end result of Adam and Eve's sin. My wife, Myra, lost her friend and cousin, Susan, to a brain tumor and I lost my high school and Citadel classmate, Perry, to Lou Gehrig's disease. Susan was 32, Perry was 39, almost 40. "The wages of sin is death." Death first began in the Garden of Eden.

Besides the broken relationship with God, there is:

B. A broken relationship with mankind. Adam and Eve began to immediately accuse one another. "The woman you gave me, God". This was the first marital argument. Neither Adam nor Eve wanted to accept responsibility for their sin. "The woman you gave me," said Adam. "The serpent deceived me," said Eve. Yes, but you are still responsible. People are still like that. We want to blame others; our parents, our socioeconomic condition, or anything or anybody we can think of for our sin. Also, think of man's inhumanity to man. Did you realize that at any one time there are somewhere between 30 to 40 wars going on in the world?

C. A broken relationship with nature. Not just man, but all creation, fell in Adam's sin. One of the Puritans asked, "Why do the animals hiss at you?" "They know you are in rebellion against their Creator." They can sense fear, they also fear man his hostility and fear exploitation. I have to drive by the billboard on Highway 1 every day that says, "Jesus was a vegetarian" by P.E.T.A. It's ridiculous, but serves to make the point that man does have a broken relationship with Creation. We do eat animals, you know, something that apparently never happened before the Fall.

D. A broken relationship with yourself. Adam and Eve, after their fall, not only became sinful, but miserable. They got a guilty conscience, they began to struggle with sin in their lives, daily temptations. Romans 7 speaks of that struggle of a Christian. "The thing I want to do I don't do and the very thing I don't want to do, I do." If you don't have that struggle going on within you, you are not a Christian. Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; Who can know it?"

Dr. Bob Reymond, my former professor at Covenant Theological Seminary, now a Professor at Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale, once told of a couple he was trying to witness to. The man, realizing the implications of their conversation said angrily, "Are you trying to tell me that I am going to hell for my sins if I don't repent and believe in Jesus?" Bob said he figured they were already angry so he might as well give them both barrels, so he said, "No, I am telling you that you aren't just going to hell for your sins, but for someone else's sin." To that they replied, "Whose?" And Bob said, "The sin of your First Parents, Adam and Eve!" They didn't exactly receive the news kindly, but at least they had something to think about, original sin.

What did you get from Adam and Eve's sin?

1. Imputed guilt - Adam and Eve's guilt

2. Inherited depravity - A sin nature

3. Your own rebellion against God - A worldly life

This brings us to our original question: Are you a two-point man or a three-point man? You are 1) Greatly made, 2) Greatly fallen, and the question is: are you 3) Greatly redeemed???

Notice in Genesis 3:15 the "protevangelium," the first gospel, "You shall bruise his heel and He shall crush your head." That is a prophecy fulfilled in Christ's coming and sacrificial death. Jesus Christ redeemed (bought back) a certain group of people: Those who would turn to him in repentance of their sins and have faith in the sufficiency of his atoning work on the cross. He paid for our sins, those who believe or trust in Him, with His life's blood. He was the seed of the woman who crushed Satan at the cross. Satan must have thought he had won a great victory by killing our Savior. Whereas, he had only "bruised his heel." Christ though mortally wounded and dead for three days, rose from the dead bodily, thereby crushing Satan and his power over the souls of mankind. By 1) His incarnation, 2) His sufferings and death; and 3) His victory over Satan, Jesus Christ, the Second Adam (Romans 5), overcame all the effects of sin and The Curse in the Garden. Adam overcame them too when he believed God at His promise of what the coming seed of the woman (Christ) would do for them. You have overcome them too when you believe the promises of God which were fulfilled in Christ.

You, too, must believe the Bible that though in Adam paradise was lost, in Christ paradise was regained and redemption completed, giving us who trust in Christ 1) a new life; 2) a clean record; and 3) a holy life. "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, old things have passed away, behold all things have become new." II Corinthians 5:17.

One’s relation to Christ is the key, for only in Him can mercy be found, only He can and has overcome our sin and guilt; only He can grant us forgiveness and restore us to God because he has accomplished redemption. He has, and does, provide redemption to those who trust in his finished work.

What is man? How do we settle the enigma or question of his character? How do we understand him? Our text has told us! 1) He is greatly made, 2) greatly fallen, and 3) greatly redeemed in Christ.

Have you come to recognize and appreciate man’s essential dignity by his being created in the image of God? God’s likeness in us gives us all great worth and dignity despite our sin and depravity. That is something no man loses in this life. Do you understand man’s capacity for sin and to do evil given that he is a child of Adam?

Have you admitted and repented (turned from) your own fall into sin, and the fall of your first parents? Remember, you were condemned to die for the sin of others as well as for your own sins. The sin of your first parents brought a lot of broken relationships, the most crucial being your relationship to God. You have that imputed guilt, inherited depravity, and unholy life, your own rebellion against God. These things unrepented of, bring misery and death, both physical and spiritual, and that forever. Are you sorry for your sin against God? Are you willing to turn from your sin to God in repentance and faith?

If so, have you grasped something of what Christ has done for you as the Second Adam, as the seed of the woman, the One who crushed the head of the serpent? Are you trusting in Christ’s shed blood for you as sufficient for your salvation? As a Christian you now have 1) a new heart, 2) a clean record, and 3) a holy life. You have been brought from death to life and that is just the beginning as we await that day when paradise lost becomes paradise gained, and we are in heaven forever.

Do you love Jesus for what He did for you? That’s how you know if you are a two- or three-point person. None here in this room is a one-point man, woman, or child. It is possible you are still only a two point: 1) Greatly made and 2) Greatly fallen, but those who trust in Jesus are three-point; the third being Greatly redeemed. If you know He has redeemed you, you will want to worship and serve Him, because you love Him. That is a sure indication that in Christ you have overcome the effects of the Fall; that you have passed from death to life.

May the Lord apply these things to our hearts. Amen.

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