School of

Evangelism
Online

TRANSCRIPT:
WILL GRAHAM INTRODUCES “THE FALL OF MAN”

Hello, I’m Will Graham, and welcome to our School of Evangelism Online.

[Music]

Hello, and welcome back. In our last lesson, we saw the content of the Gospel,
which includes the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and
that’s why it’s called good news. But why did Jesus have to suffer and to die
on a cross for you and me? Well, to answer that question, we’re going to go all
the way back to the dawn of human history. In Genesis 1-2, we see that God
created everything in this world, both the universe and this planet with all the
mountains, the trees, the plants, the animals, the birds, the fish.

He created everything, including both man and woman, and He placed man
and woman in a garden, the Garden of Eden, which was a beautiful garden. In
that garden, He gave him dominion, a place to work, and He said, “You could
have of every tree, of every plant you can eat of, except for one; you cannot eat
of it.” Then one day a serpent came, and this is where we pick it up in Genesis
3, a serpent came, the devil, and he came, and he talked to the woman and
said, “Listen, God didn't really say this.”

The serpent started making [her] doubt God’s word, and the woman listened
to this devil. She took of the fruit and gave it to Adam, and they ate together.
It’s interesting to see that when Adam and Eve, they disobeyed God, it says
their eyes were opened, and they realized that their relationship with God had
changed, things had changed. They realized for the first time that they were
naked. The Bible says there in verse 7, that “they sewed fig leaves together and
made themselves coverings” (Genesis 3:7).

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 1
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
Adam and Eve realized that they were naked, and they decided to take fig
leaves. Think of all the things in the garden—what was the most fragile thing
to take? Leaves, soon as you pluck them, they start to die. Here these leaves,
they sewed them together. It was such a temporary thing, and it was so
inadequate, and when God saw this, God realized that they were naked, and
they needed to be clothed. God had to take an animal, it says there in verse 21,
“For Adam and his wife the Lord God made tunics of skin, and clothed them”
(Genesis 3:21). I can only imagine as Adam and Eve stood there and watched,
God went and took an innocent animal, an animal that was not involved in any
of this.

It shows you that there’s consequences to sin, not only are you affected, but
others are affected by sin. Here this animal was taken, God killed this innocent
animal. They had to sit there, and they watched God butcher this animal, cut
and bleed this animal, skin this animal, and they were covered in this dead
animal skin to provide a covering, to cover their nakedness, to cover their sin.
It’s a beautiful picture of what Christ did. Christ came because mankind has
always tried to make his own coverings out of leaves. He’s tried his own
righteousness. He’s tried religion.

He’s tried good works. He’s tried all these different things, but they always fall
short, always fall short of what God demands. God had to come and provide.
This time it was just not merely an animal, it was His own Son, had to shed
blood in front of the whole world. He shed His blood, so now that when we
stand before God, God doesn’t see our inadequacies of our own fig leaves, of
our own coverings, our own attempts to be righteous, but God now sees His
own Son, His own Son’s perfection on us.

That’s why we can stand before God. There’s a beautiful picture here, in
Genesis 3, of how sin entered the world, but at the same time, how God was
providing an answer to man’s greatest dilemma in life, which is sin. In Genesis
3:14–19, we see God start to curse everybody that was involved in this
disobedience. He cursed the serpent, the snake. We don’t know what the
snake looked like, to begin with, but we see that afterward, that God said, “Now
you will be on your belly.” He went on to curse Satan later on in that same text
(cf. Genesis 3:14). In verse 15, He said, “I will put enmity between you and the
woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and
you shall bruise His heel” (Genesis 3:15).

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 2
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
This actually is the very first time of the proclamation of the Gospel—it’s found
in Genesis 3:15—the first time that we have a record of God going to do
something to rectify this disobedience, and it comes in the person of Jesus
Christ. But this is the first time we hear the Good News, there in verse 15,
basically, God is saying to Satan, “Satan, you may bruise His heel, but listen,
He’s going to crush your head.” This is the Good News, my friends. Christ wins
in the end.

He goes on to say to the woman, He said, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow
and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire will be
for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). Then God goes on
to man and says, “Man,” to Adam, “Because you've disobeyed, now you’re
going to have to work by the sweat of your brow. Thorns and thistles are going
to be the product of your work” (cf. Genesis 3:17–19). In other words, everything
is cursed. The serpent was cursed. Satan was cursed. The woman was cursed.
Man was cursed. Even the earth was cursed. That’s the world that you and I
now find ourselves in, this cursed world.

But yet, we see at the very beginning, even in Genesis 3:15, where God has a
plan to redeem mankind. That’s why we’re looking at the fall of man, because
it is the why. Why do we preach the Good News? Why do we go out to the rest
of the world and preach this Gospel? It’s not our message. This is God’s
message. Why do we do it? That’s what we’re looking at today. The reason why
is because we’ve been separated from God.

The Bible says in Isaiah that our iniquities, our sin, has separated us from God
(cf. Isaiah 59:2). Our sin has separated, and that’s what we see with Adam and
Eve. Sin separated them from God. When God came into the garden and
looking for them, they were gone, they hid themselves, that relationship had
been destroyed. At the very beginning of time, God created man in His own
image. In other words, we were created for a relationship with God, but
because of sin, sin has separated all of mankind.

When Adam and Eve committed this sin, it was transferred to each and every
one of us, because we’re all descendants of Adam and Eve. Even the Bible says
in Romans 5:12, it says, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the
world”—talking about Adam—“Death through sin, and thus death spread to
all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). In other words, you and I have all

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 3
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
been born with the sin nature, because we all come from Adam and Eve.
We’ve been given over to sin, in other words, we have a desire to disobey God.

Even starting in chapter 1, we see God condemning the whole world. In other
words, there’s no one that’s righteous. It starts off in Romans 1, it says that,
“Even the ungodly are sinners” (see Romans 1:18–32). In other words, they’ve all
broken God’s law. You think of the murderers, and the thieves, and stuff like
that, we say, “Well, of course that they’ve broken God’s law, that makes sense.”
Even the ungodly people deserve God’s judgment, God’s wrath. But Paul goes
on, he says, “Not only are the ungodly, but also the moral people” (see Romans
2:1–16). That may be shocking to a lot of people, especially in the world that we
live in today.

But the Bible says that even the moral people have broken God’s law. They’ve
sinned against their conscience, the Bible says. It goes on in Romans 2 that
Paul even describes how God’s own people—the Jewish people— were under
God’s judgment. This was a real shock to the Jewish people, they said, “Well
we’re the ones that are God’s chosen people. We have His law, we have His
word, we have His promises.” But yet, God says, “Yet, you’re still condemned.”
Then God goes on even after that and says that the whole world, and the Bible
says, “For all have sinned, for all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory” (cf.
Romans 3:23).

That’s you, me, everyone in this world. It doesn't matter what color, what creed,
what nation you’re from, we’ve all sinned. Each and every one of us has a sin
problem, and that is the why. That’s why we go out and preach the Gospel of
Jesus Christ, because every person is affected, every person is separated from
God. Just as it says in Isaiah 59:2, “Our iniquities have separated us from God”
(cf. Isaiah 59:2). Yet, though we were created in the image of God, we were
created for a relationship, that sin that came with Adam, that you and I
continue today to disobey God, that sin, just one sin separates us from God.
The Bible says, “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ
died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). In other words, Jesus Christ died for me,
even though I was a sinner. A few verses later, it says, “But God demonstrates
His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”
(Romans 5:8). Even though we had disobeyed God, even though we were
separated from God, God came down. God came down in the garden, and now
God came down to this earth to die on the cross for our sins to pay that price.

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 4
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
That’s why we need to go out, because everyone is affected, both me, you,
everyone that we know is affected by sin. We need to go tell people there is
still hope. Just as it said in Romans 1–3, where we see Paul talking about how
everyone’s condemned. That paints a very bad picture for humanity. But then
it says there in verse 21. Romans 3:21, “But now the righteousness of God apart
from the law is revealed” (Romans 3:21). In other words, there is hope. Even
though it seems bad outside, even though humankind is doomed by sin,
there’s still hope because of what Christ did on the cross.

Jesus died on the cross. Why? Because of our sin. Because we have fallen.
We’ve been separated from God, and that’s why we have to go out and tell
people about what Christ did on the cross, to restore that relationship that was
destroyed years ago in the garden. We go out and tell people about the Good
News, that there is hope, apart from sin.

In today’s lessons, we saw how sin entered the world, through the person of
Adam, which brought about the need for redemption. Yet at the same time,
we see the Good News. That Christ had a plan from the very beginning, on
how to redeem you and I, how to restore that relationship that was broken all
the way back in the garden. In our next lesson, we are going to see how God’s
plan is to take this Good News to the rest of the world. I hope to see you next
time. God bless.

©BGEA. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. ©1982 by Thomas Nelson,
Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved

Last modified: 3/20/2020 3:55 PM

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 5
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)