Transcription
[Music]
Into what a state that the fall brings mankind!
The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery. In this next question, we address the issue of the estate that mankind finds himself in as a result of the fall. As a result of the imputation of Adam's guilt, our estate has changed.
If you think back a few questions ago when we were addressing free will, we said there are these four states: we have the state before the fall, and we have the state after the fall of those who are unconverted. After those, we have people who are brought to faith in Christ, and then we have the final estate in heaven itself.
So, here it's saying the fall brought mankind into a state of sin and misery. It's describing the condition of mankind in their unconverted state in this world. The fall had an impact. Right? Here is man before the fall; he was in a state of holiness and happiness—perfectly happy, perfectly holy. The fall takes him down into a state not of holiness but of sin, not of happiness but of misery.
So now we have man, as it were, fallen. Picture a person fallen on the ground. Right? There, fallen on the ground, this is the state in which God has put us—this horrible state. The first sin brought misery. We need to understand that the idea of sin and misery are always connected. Sin and misery are always connected; they're inseparable. They go together. If there's no sin, then there's no misery. But wherever there is sin, it causes misery.
So we're in a state of sin and misery. A state means condition or status of sin and misery. Think about getting married. Right? Beforehand, you're in an estate of singleness. Then the wedding day comes, and you enter into the estate of marriage. You're now in a different status; now you are married.
For mankind, we were brought into this status, this condition, this state of sin.
So we'll think about these two things separately. First of all, we're in a state of sin. First of all, in a state of sin, and secondly, in a state of misery. We'll make a few comments about these and then go on to flesh it out a little.
A state of sin means we're under guilt. So we are guilty—not just feel guilty—but here's what the law requires, and we've broken that law. So the judge in heaven can say the verdict is, "You're guilty; you have broken the law."
We're also polluted or defiled. Our insides, our soul, are tainted with sin and affected. Every faculty, every part of us is affected by sin. We're told that sin has dominion over the unconverted person (Romans 3, Romans 6). Man is under the dominion or the domination of sin.
So now we're in a state where the kingdom of darkness, where Satan is the ruler, and he has dominion over those outside of the Lord Jesus Christ. He can control them; he's the Lord; he's got power. Sin has power over man. As we saw, we're not able outside of Christ to do what is good. We are controlled by sin.
We're also in a state of misery. Now, the state of misery comes as a result of the penalty of the law. Going back to our guilt, we break the law; what happens? Well, there's a price to pay.
So if you commit murder, that's against God's law as well as the law of the land. There are consequences. You know it could be capital punishment; there's a penalty or punishment that has to be paid. A person could be executed for murdering another person, and that's true for us. We are under the curse.
The world around us, the whole cosmos, is affected by sin and abides under this curse. We have to deal with death—the death of our bodies outside of Christ, the eternal death of our souls and our bodies. We are in a state of spiritual deadness.
We have a body that's decaying, breaking down; ultimately, we'll die. Then both, after the resurrection, body and soul have the threat of eternal death in hell itself. This is misery—it's utter misery. We feel the misery, the effect of sin in the common cold, in chronic illness, or when we feel pain in various circumstances. Our relationships are shattered and broken up, or people lose jobs and have inadequate resources. All of this breeds misery.
We're in a state of sin and misery, and there are a variety of ways in which the Bible describes this. It describes this state as a state of darkness. The sin and misery is described in terms of darkness in places like Ephesians 5.
We think of the sun coming up and a bright, beautiful sunny day without any clouds. This is a happy atmosphere, and we feel the warmth of the sun and so on. But to be in the dark, to be left in the dark, to not be able to see where you're going, means to be bumping into things and all of the fears that come with the dark and the coldness that comes with the dark. This is the state of sin and misery.
It's also an estate of distance. We are far, far away. Adam was kicked out of Eden in fellowship with God, and Ephesians brings this out: we are far from the Lord. So we're far away from His gracious, merciful kindness to us. We've been alienated from the Lord. The natural man outside of Christ is an enemy of God. There's opposition; there's hostility that's there. It's a condition of distance.
It's also a condition of wrath and condemnation. Wrath and condemnation, as you'll see in places like John 3— we are under the wrath of God. So those outside of Christ, while they live in this world, are living under the cloud, if you will, of God's wrath. He condemns who they are, what they are, and what they do.
There's this state of condemnation, which is also described in terms of bondage. We could say captivity, even slavery. We're in bondage to sin; we're in bondage to a kingdom of darkness. We've been brought captive to the powers of darkness. There's a slavery to sin; we have this harsh master called sin and the devil himself under which we live. That's miserable, right? That's the state of sin and misery.
The last thing I'll mention is a state of death. This is both physical, legal, spiritual, and eternal. Physical death comes; everyone dies. It doesn't matter how many vitamins you take, how much exercise you do, or how many veggies you eat. Having the best doctors and scientific labs in the world, people are going to die. We physically die; that's part of the misery of this estate of sin.
There's the spiritual, and there's also legal death, where we're declared legally dead before the Lord. We have no rights, no access to Him. We're spiritually dead. As we were saying in a previous lesson, we can't do what's pleasing to the Lord; we can't think what’s pleasing, speak what’s pleasing; we can't glorify Him. We can't do anything that would be honoring to Him. We're spiritually dead—we're blind, and we're ignorant, and so on.
Then, of course, there's eternal death. For those outside of the Lord Jesus Christ, there is hell—where it’s an eternal death where you never die, where there's eternal consciousness under the indignation of God. These are all descriptions that bring out this state of sin and misery.
So the whole world is guilty before the Lord. Every mouth has stopped; no one can protest; no one has an argument; no one can object. The whole world is guilty before the Lord. We have broken God's law; we have defied Him; we've engaged in a spiritual coup. All of that is the bad news.
This bad news is utterly essential for understanding the good news. Right? The word "gospel" means good news, but to appreciate the good news, we have to face reality. There has to be a reality check where we're owning up to the bad news. The bad news is that we're lost, condemned, without God, and without hope in this world left to ourselves.
Against that backdrop, God brings the good news, and He says, "I have made a provision for the recovery and salvation, the forgiveness of my people—for people to be taken from alienation and enmity, from being enemies of God to being brought into friendship with Him."
Then, we are brought into this loving relationship, where we're acceptable to Him and where He's blessing us and making us spiritually fruitful. He does the surgery on our hearts to take out, in regeneration, the hardest stone and to put in a heart of flesh, enabling us to be made more into the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The bad news is the backdrop for the good news. Because of the bad news, we need to learn to abhor evil. We need to learn to abhor sin as the greatest of all evils. We may not like this, and we may not like that. We don't like getting sick; we don't like when there's rainy days; we don't like when someone says something mean to us.
But the thing that we hate the most, the thing we abhor the most, is sin itself. We see it as the worst of all evils.
Now, everything that you have, everything that you are, everything that you own, everything that you've done—anything that has any value to it—you've received. God's given you a body; God's given you life; God's given you gifts; God's given you all sorts of things. There's only one thing you can call your own, and that is sin.
We realize that there is no way out of this pit, if you will, of sin and misery except through the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no way out of this state of sin and misery without the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord has to so work in our souls as to make us desirous to be out. The Lord has to give us a new heart, a new nature, that enables us to receive the gift of faith and to believe upon Him, to be brought into saving union with Christ, and to receive forgiveness, eternal life, and all the other benefits that come with it.
This leads us to admire the infinite love of God. Here is the infinite love of God in sending His own Son to save us from what? To save us from sin and misery. The Lord Jesus Christ comes to save His people from their sins and from the misery that comes with those sins.
So just as Adam enjoyed perfect happiness and perfect holiness in the garden, so far more so, the Christian is a recipient of true holiness, which results in true happiness that lasts for eternity.
And so we began with the bad news: into what a state the fall brings mankind! The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin.
[Music]
[Applause]