Sin has consequences. God wants us to deal with the deliberate transgressions, with the sins of ignorance, and to deal with inequity, the thing that gets into our whole family line. The blood is the remedy for all three. God says that rather than kill people the moment that they commit sin, He'll let them carry inequity or carry the consequence of it through their generational line.
I want you to open your Bible in Genesis, Chapter 2. We’ve started just doing a series on the blood of Jesus, and our foundational truth for your walk with God, and unless the foundations of the building are established, the building doesn’t stay very strong when the pressure comes on. I just want to revise what we saw last week, and we looked at a key verse in Ephesians 1, Verse 7; in Him we have redemption, through His blood the forgiveness of sin. So we saw about those terms and what they meant. This is basically what we covered last week, just for those who this is perhaps your first time here.
The first one we saw was, and we looked very much at the natural things, the one who designs something always knows how it works best. The one who designs something writes the manual how it works. You make something, design something, you create something, you set the manual how it works. God made the something – He made the design, the creation and He made the rules and we saw that there are clearly physical laws in place. There are also spiritual laws in place. Man is a moral being, and subject to both the physical laws and spiritual laws, and because God set the laws in place, He just set them in place. We can’t change the laws. We can’t break the laws. All we can do is understand them, and work with them, or violate them.
If we violate them, we see a third thing that we looked at last week, is God establishes the consequences of violation of His laws. He’s the one who set the consequences. We saw how with gravity you can pretend it’s not there, ignore it, deny it or whatever, but if you step off a building you will feel the consequences. You could lie there, and you could blame your father, your mother, you can blame the government, you can blame everyone – but in the end you’ve just proven that there was a law, and by acting in such a way in ignorance of it you have actually proven the law exists. Yet when it comes – so we would think that’s stupid that someone would blame someone else for something like that, but when it comes to spiritual and moral matters, when we violate the laws of God, there’s still a consequence, except we look everywhere but to the right place to find where the problem is, and also what the solution is.
So we’ll have a look in Genesis, Chapter 2. We looked at this and we saw in Genesis, Chapter 2, how God gave man consequences, and the consequences of sin, Verse 17, in the day you eat, you will die. It’s really clear isn’t it? You eat, you die. What could be harder about that? You sin, you die. You sin, there’s a consequence, and of course we think that we’re exceptional, that we could do things and there won’t be a consequence, that God just says you break the laws or the rules or the guides He set in place for a productive life, there’s always a consequence.
Romans 5:12, we found in Romans 5:12 that by one man’s sin, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and sins come on all – death comes on all. Everyone has sinned, so we saw this issue of sin’s a big problem, and you can dress it up. You can call it another name, but whatever you do with it, in the end it is the root behind the problems we have. No education can overcome it, no counselling can overcome it. There actually has to be a remedy for this issue called sin, and that’s what we’ve seen, so in Genesis, Chapter 3, when Adam and Even sinned, Verse 7, the eyes of them both were open. They knew they were naked, and sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves coverings. There was an immediate impact, firstly within them, of sin. The first place you experience the impact of sin is within you, and then you notice it turns up in all the relationships. They can cover themselves - then in Verse 8 they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden, in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord. God called Adam and said where are you? He said I heard your voice in the garden. Now notice what he is going through internally. This is the consequence of sin: I was afraid. Fear is an outcome of sin. I was afraid because I was naked. He was ashamed. He was ashamed of his condition, so he carried things in his emotions now, that he had never carried before.