How Much Joy Did the Curse Cost Me?
00:00:00.000 | Well, how much joy did the curse cost me? By his curse on creation, didn't God
00:00:09.360 | intentionally put a limiter on the joy that we can have in him in this life?
00:00:14.600 | That is a really solid question from a podcast listener named Michael. Hello,
00:00:19.160 | Pastor John. Can you explain what the futility fall curse cost us today
00:00:24.400 | regarding our felt experience of joy? I believe this was the deliberate act of
00:00:28.880 | God, so for even obedient Christians, how does the intention of God to subject all
00:00:34.360 | of us and all of creation under futility fall curse cost us in God glorifying joy?
00:00:41.320 | It seems to me that God intentionally put a limiter on our joy experience in
00:00:44.760 | this world, and thus he likewise put a limit on how much we can glorify him, too.
00:00:50.080 | Am I wrong here? No, you are not wrong. When Adam and Eve sinned, when they
00:00:57.560 | preferred their own wisdom to God's wisdom and preferred their own perception
00:01:05.800 | of what was good and pleasant to God's perception, they died. God had said in
00:01:11.920 | Genesis 2:17, "Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. In the
00:01:17.780 | day that you eat of it, you will surely die." So when they ate, two things
00:01:26.400 | happened. The sentence of physical death and separation from God was bang,
00:01:33.920 | confirmed, gavel came down on the courtroom of heaven, guilty to be hanged
00:01:40.880 | by the neck until dead, sentence delivered, execution assured, time fixed
00:01:46.920 | in the mind of God. Done. You're dead. And the second thing that happened was the
00:01:52.680 | spiritual dimension of it happened in their souls. Oh my goodness, you can see
00:01:57.360 | it. Every relationship was ruined, corrupted. They were ashamed of
00:02:02.960 | themselves. They were blaming each other. They were blaming God. They were afraid
00:02:07.600 | of God. Everything came apart when sin entered the world. So in short, their
00:02:14.400 | preference for self over God, and there's the essence of sin, that's what entered
00:02:19.800 | the world, their preference for self over God pervaded and ruined every
00:02:27.000 | relationship. Self-exaltation, be another name for it,
00:02:31.320 | self-exaltation ruined everything. It ruined the relationship with self even.
00:02:37.680 | It made the self insecure because the human self could never be God and that's
00:02:48.160 | what the self had just chosen to be. It'll never work. Fallen human
00:02:53.160 | beings are built into failures because they can never be the God they want to
00:02:58.120 | be. Self-exaltation ruined the relationship with the spouse because now
00:03:03.080 | another person is just an encroachment upon my self-rule. Please get out of my
00:03:08.880 | life, you're in the way. I want my self-freedom, do what I want to do, and now
00:03:13.540 | the spouse, well she or he can never conform to your godlike demand for your
00:03:20.800 | own self. So others have to now be used to buttress the self because it's so
00:03:27.480 | hopelessly out of sync with its godlike expectation, and so we've ruined, I mean,
00:03:33.100 | sin and self-preference and self-exaltation has ruined relationships
00:03:37.420 | with other people, and then finally self-exaltation ruined the relationship
00:03:42.160 | with God because God is the only one in the reality that deserves to be exalted,
00:03:48.160 | and so our self-exaltation means we're in high treason against God and
00:03:53.000 | rebellion against him and alienated from him. Oh, what a misery was brought into
00:03:59.920 | the world because of self-exaltation and preference of self over God. All of that
00:04:07.120 | is called death. It is God's judgment, not just a kind of natural development. It
00:04:14.260 | was promised in 217, it was executed by God. God warned of death, and now he
00:04:19.780 | delivers. He hands them over actively into the folly and ruin that they have
00:04:26.700 | chosen. Now, Michael is right that when sin entered the world, therefore God
00:04:33.640 | subjected the world to a spiritual death as well as a physical corruption, and God
00:04:40.520 | put sinful man in a position where he could not glorify God from the heart,
00:04:49.120 | precisely because he could not see and savor the all-satisfying beauty of God
00:04:57.760 | with the heart. His heart was blind to the beauty of God, and therefore he was
00:05:03.760 | not able to delight in God, and therefore his joy was shriveled, and his
00:05:11.760 | capacities to glorify God by enjoying God were dead. Probably the best
00:05:19.240 | description of this fallen condition of the human heart, unable to see and savor
00:05:27.160 | the beauty of God, and therefore unable to glorify God from the heart, the best
00:05:32.280 | description is Ephesians 2, 1 to 3. You were dead in your trespasses and sins
00:05:37.560 | in which you once walked, following the age of this world, following the prince
00:05:42.640 | of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of
00:05:46.800 | disobedience, among whom we all once conducted ourselves in the passions of
00:05:51.960 | our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature
00:05:57.880 | children of wrath like the rest of mankind. Good night, that's awful. This is
00:06:03.080 | a horrible description of human nature. Until God breaks in, in verse 4, and
00:06:09.880 | makes us alive, we're called dead. Mankind is dead. But ironically, it's a very
00:06:19.400 | active deadness. We're sinning, we're trespassing, we're walking according to
00:06:25.080 | the spirit of the age, we're in lockstep with the devil. By nature, sons of
00:06:30.200 | disobedience, we're children of wrath. That's a really active dead man. So, we
00:06:36.480 | have plenty of desires as dead people. Desires of the body, it says. We're
00:06:41.800 | following the desires of the body, we're following the desires of the mind, but
00:06:46.160 | they were all dead desires. That is, they were leading to ruin, and were totally
00:06:53.440 | insensitive, dull, impervious, dead to the most thrilling desires in the world,
00:06:59.560 | namely, desires for God. That's what deadness means ever since Adam and Eve
00:07:05.160 | fell into sin. Dead to delight in God. We can't delight in Him because we're blind
00:07:12.440 | to His beauty, and we can't glorify Him because we can't delight in Him. So yes,
00:07:17.800 | Michael, yes, the fall was God's handing us over to a blindness and a deadness
00:07:26.720 | that kept us and keeps us from seeing the all-satisfying reality of God, and
00:07:33.840 | therefore keeps us from glorifying God from the heart. But, there's a great old
00:07:41.160 | sermon by Martin Lloyd-Jones about "But God," and it's based on Ephesians 2:4,
00:07:47.640 | "But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us,
00:07:54.760 | even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by
00:08:01.520 | grace you've been saved, and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the
00:08:05.880 | heavenly places," and here's the purpose, "so that in the coming ages He might show
00:08:11.960 | the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." So, we
00:08:19.240 | see here the ultimate purpose of all these years, centuries, of shutting down
00:08:26.960 | our joy and shutting down our ability to glorify God from the heart. Why? So that
00:08:35.800 | in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of grace. That grace
00:08:43.120 | shines all the more brightly because of the deadness and blindness from which
00:08:50.520 | God saves us. So, if we stand back from the fall of Adam and Eve and the fall of
00:09:00.080 | the whole human race into sin and spiritual deadness, and we ask this, "What
00:09:06.320 | was the purpose of all that? Why did God let that happen?" We can answer with the
00:09:14.000 | words of Genesis 50, verse 20, paraphrasing, "You, Satan, meant it for evil, you
00:09:23.200 | snake. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, and the good was this,"
00:09:32.920 | Ephesians 1:6, "to the praise of the glory of His grace." He consigned, Paul says, "He
00:09:42.640 | consigned all things to deadness and disobedience in order that in the coming
00:09:48.840 | ages He might make known or show the immeasurable riches of His grace and
00:09:56.240 | kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, and from that showing would flow
00:10:03.000 | joy and praise that never could have appeared without the fall." Amen. What
00:10:11.040 | grace that we can hope for a place where the curse is rescinded and all creation
00:10:16.440 | will fully praise its maker like nothing we can imagine right now, including us in
00:10:21.360 | Christ enjoying a full and unbroken joy for all of eternity. Thank you, Pastor
00:10:25.920 | John, and thank you for listening. If you want new episodes of this podcast
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00:10:37.000 | submit a question to us of your own, do that online at
00:10:39.480 | zeroingod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, speaking of a fallen world, we're in
00:10:45.800 | the middle of a recession, so what is God doing in this recession? Pastor John will
00:10:51.000 | help us make sense of this crazy year. That's up next time on Wednesday. I'm
00:10:55.040 | Tony Reinke, and we'll see you then.
00:10:58.480 | [BLANK_AUDIO]