Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Paradise Promised

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Earlier in the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the Western world said it was our society and our institutions that were making us bad. If we changed them, then we’d get rid of atrocities, evil, war, racism, and poverty. But it hasn’t worked. More and more, the Western world is looking back at Genesis, and I believe if you’re smart, you will too. In Genesis, we can see how sin and evil came into the world, and we can see the results. What we have here is a diagnosis and then what God shows us we can do about it.  Let’s look at Genesis 3 to see 1) the disease of sin and evil, and 2) the healing of the disease. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 12, 2000. Series: Genesis – The Gospel According to God. Scripture: Genesis 3:7-20. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

The Book of Genesis is an ancient book that gets down to some of the most foundational questions we have. We get answers to the big why questions and the what for questions that have plagued us for centuries. Join us today as Tim Keller preaches from the Book of Genesis. The passage on which our teaching is based, it's Genesis chapter 3, we're looking at it again. Last week we looked at it, this week we'll look at it, next week we'll look at it. We're going to take this three times.

Genesis 3, verses 7 to 21. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked. So they sowed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, Where are

you? He answered, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid. And he said, Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? And the man said, The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you.

Above all the livestock and all the wild animals, you will crawl on your belly, and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head. You will strike his heel." To the woman, he said, I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing. With pain you'll give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. To Adam, he said, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it. Cursed it is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your

life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return." Adam named his wife Eve because she'd become the mother of all the living, and the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. This is God's word. Now, why are we looking at Genesis three times? In the last few years, there's been an enormous amount of interest in the book of Genesis.

There have been books and books and books reviewed in the New York Times, reviewed in the New York Review of Books on Genesis. Bill Moyers had this big television series on Genesis in which you got experts from all walks of life to come together and discuss it. Why? And here's the answer.

Earlier in the 20th century we got rid, in general, I'm saying the intellectuals of the Western world got rid of the idea of sin and evil. They said human beings aren't sinful, we're not evil. We just have, it's our society that's making us bad, it's our social institutions, our political institutions, we change them, we'll get rid of all this, of atrocities and evil and war and racism and poverty and so on, and it hasn't worked. And as you go on in the 20th century, more and more we're being forced reluctantly, sometimes I feel like the Western world is forced by the scruff of its neck, reluctantly to say there is sin, there is evil, but we don't have categories left, we don't have concepts, we got rid of that concept, and

yet here it is. If you want a perfect example of it, look on the front page of the reflections. Now this is a very fast example of this, but in the front page of the reflections, H.G. Wells, famous science fiction writer, he was also a great scholar and historian, before World War II, in his A Short History of the World. How would you like to write a book like that? That'd take a little bit of guts or what. Anyway, all right. A Short History of the World.

And he says, can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations that will achieve unity and peace, that our children will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we have ever known? Going on from strength to strength in an ever-widening circle of achievement? What man has done, meaning so far, the little triumphs of his present state form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do." Look at this optimism. Look at this idea. Science, democracy, social institutions were changing, we're on our way up.

Just nine years later, after World War II, now this happened fast to H.G. Wells, but this is a picture in miniature of what's happened to the thinkers of the Western world in the 20th century. Look what he says. After World War II, the cold-blooded massacres of the defenseless, After World War II, the cold-blooded massacres of the defenseless, the return of deliberate and organized torture, mental torment, and fear to a world from which such things had seemed well-nigh banished has come near to breaking my spirit altogether. Homo sapiens, which by the way literally means man the wise one, Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is played out.

The last thing he wrote before he died. Actually, that book came out after he died. What a name, huh? A mind at the end of its tether. But there you have, in miniature, the reason why the Western world is going back to Genesis. And why, if you're smart, you will too. That's not too disdainful a thing to say, but I really believe that. Now when we go to Genesis 1, 2, and 3, especially here in 3, we see, and we started looking at it last week,

how sin, evil came into the world. This week we're going to look and see the results. And what God shows us here, we can do about it. What are the results? Now, what we have here is a diagnosis, and we're going to look at this passage under two headings. First of all, we're going to talk about the disease itself. Sin and evil is a disease, and it has touched every aspect of life. And we're going to see what the Bible tells us about what sin and evil actually does. And it's an amazingly comprehensive view. And secondly, we're going to ask how does God go about healing it? What hope is there? Okay? The disease and the healing of the disease.

What the disease is and what we can do about it. Pretty simple, right? Number one, I should say first, what do we learn here about what sin does to us? And under this heading, we're going to look quickly, fairly quickly, at four things the Bible tells us here, and it's so comprehensive, how sin affects and touches absolutely every aspect of reality, every aspect of our world, every aspect of life. Here's the four things you see. Now you find them if you collect them as you look at these, the, of the whole passage. Number one, first of all, and this is the most obvious one, the minute they disobey God they are alienated from God. They experience spiritual alienation. They're cut off from

God. So see verse, verse seven and eight, the minute, verse 8, this is one of the most, these are some of the saddest words in the Bible, in verse 8. You know which ones I'm thinking of? They heard and they hid. What's so sad is, it says, they heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. Walking is a Hebrew idiom. It's not just a Hebrew word.

What I mean is, it doesn't just refer to the action of walking. To walk with God, to walk with somebody in Hebrew idiom meant to have fellowship, to have intimacy, to be friends, to be close, to tackle life together. And it's pretty obvious that every evening God would come and walk and they hid. Why? Because the first fruit of sin is you're cut off from God. You feel trauma in his presence. You feel uneasy. You feel afraid. You feel you're not right there. There's a sense in which you pull back. Isaiah gets into the presence of God, he says, I am undone. Peter gets into the presence of the Lord and says,

depart from me. Over and over and over again, you see all the way through the Bible, even the best people, even the greatest saints, if you want to call them that. Whenever they get near the real God, they feel like they're coming apart. They're terrified. They've hit the ground. They can't stand and look. And that's the first fruit. By the way, just, I mean, this might be nasty to say, but I know this is true. I will stake my whole life on this. I know this is true. If you say, well, I've never felt funny about God. I've always felt close to God and I've always liked God and I've never really sensed any kind of alienation from God. That's probably because the God you've got in your mind is a God you've created, a comfy God. I mean, I've actually, years

ago this actually happened. I saw a tape of it. Do you remember the David, you wouldn't remember that. If you've got a hairline like mine, you might remember the David Frost show. David Frost was a talk show host. And he, one time he had Madeline Marie O'Hare on. And she was a very famous, even though who she is, I guess you have to have a hairline like mine. She was an outspoken atheist who actually took to the Supreme

Court a complaint that her child was made to go to prayer in public schools. And actually she was one of the reasons why the Supreme Court said no prayer in public schools. Fine. I don't want to talk about that. But I remember what happened. She was arguing with David Frost. David Frost said, I believe in God, she didn't. And they were going back and forth. And finally, David Frost, even though he was British, he did a very American thing. He said, okay, let's settle this. And he turned to the audience.

And he says, how many of you believe in God? And almost everybody raised their hand, and he just turned around, see? There we go. That's how you win an argument in America, you take a poll. Now Madeleine Merrier here missed her chance. She just utterly missed her chance because all she would have had to do, if she knew this, and she kind of, she didn't believe this, but if she, this is what she's going to do, she said, well let me, let's take another pole. How many of you believe in the biblical God? How many of you believe in the God who

says, be ye perfect as I am perfect? How many of you believe in the biblical God who says, I will by no means clear the guilty? How many of you believe in the biblical God who comes down in smoke and fire on Mount Sinai and says, if you even touch the mountain while I'm on it, you will die? How many of you believe in the guy of the Bible who says, be ye holy, as I am holy? How many of you believe in that guy? I think she would have made out much better. Because you see, as soon as you actually bring out the God of the Bibles, everybody says, well, I don't know. You know, in 1992, there was a Supreme Court ruling, there was a Supreme Court opinion, a very famous case, and one of the opinions that

was printed in there, and therefore it's part of the official record, this decision said this, and I quote, at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, and of the universe. At the heart of liberty is the right to define your own concept of existence, of meaning, of right and wrong, you know, of the universe. Now, if that person was more careful and said, in America you have the legal right to worship as you believe right without harassment, no problem. But that's not what it said, because what it really said is what our culture really believes. And that

is that you have the right to decide what God looks like. You have the right to decide what is right and wrong for you. But the God of the Bible says, oh no, you don't. I created you. I will define your existence. I will define your meaning of life. I will define what is right and wrong. And we hate that. It wouldn't be long before Madeleine Marie O'Hare would have had no hands up. She just didn't know what to do. We're alienated from God. Secondly, the spiritual alienation leads to psychological alienation because the second thing we see is this, the eyes of both of them are open and they realize they were naked. Now next week

whole sermon is on this. Next week the whole sermon is on this psychological alienation because nakedness and what God does with the skins at the end and all that is a very important theme and we'll look at it all by itself, but here's all I want to tell you. This is the opposite of Genesis 2.25 where it said they were naked and what? Not ashamed. What is shame? Here's a pretty good definition. Shame. David Atkinson. There's a lot of ways to define it, but I think almost everybody would agree with this. Shame is that sense of unease with yourself

at the heart of your being. Shame is the sense of unease with yourself at the heart of your being. What he's saying here is, and what the scripture is saying here is, the minute we lost God, there was a deep, radical, psychological dislocation. We no longer are at ease with who we are. There's a sense of inadequacy. And we're going to get into that next week, but here's the important thing to realize, is that when you lose who God is, you lose who you are.

Oh, if we were created for God, that's only logical, isn't it? And psychological alienation means loss of identity and shame and painful self-consciousness and a desperate sense of insecurity and of anxiety, and of fear, and a feeling like I've got to do something to cover up the deep inadequacy that I feel. I've got to do something to prove to you and to me that I'm okay. Why do we come into the world like that? Huh? Why is it nobody, you know, according to the Bible, nobody believes they're okay.

It's not a matter of we come into the world believing we're okay and our family messes us up. There's some people who have much lower self-esteem than others, but it's not because some people had families that just sort of let our natural okayness come through and others kind of screwed it up. Your family can aggravate this deep sense of psychological alienation, but it doesn't cause it. Your family is the occasion of it maybe, but not the cause of it. Do you know the difference? It can hurry it up, it can aggravate it, it can deepen it, it can magnify it, but it's not the source. So spiritual alienation leads to psychological alienation. Thirdly, sin, see how this goes? Spiritual alienation leads to psychological alienation, psychological alienation leads to social alienation.

And why? Look at verse 7. Then the eyes of both of them were open and they realized they were naked so they sewed fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves. Why? God's not there yet. It's not till verse 8 that they hear him, not till verse 9 that he shows up. So, you know, see verse 8 and verse 9 is hiding from God but what's verse 7? It's hiding from each other? And it's simple as this, but let me press this. This is amazing how the Bible puts this. First of all, this is telling us that this is the cause for all of our problems in our individual personal relationships. If you cannot be transparent with God, if you can't utterly trust God, you can't be transparent with anyone else. You can't trust anybody.

Why not? Let me put it this way. Unless you know, unless you are resting deep in your soul, in the assurance that God absolutely loves you, that he delights in you, unless you know you're okay in your inmost self, how do you move out into relationships? You move out into relationships desperately, desperate to prove to yourself and other people that you're lovable. So you don't move out into

relationships to serve people. You don't move out into relationships to love people. You go out into relationships, yes, you think you say to love people, but you're going out there to use people. First of all, if you go out without absolutely knowing God's love and His delight in you, if you are not sure about your own lovability, first thing you're going to do is you're going to be very choosy about who you get into relationships with. You're not going to be kind to everybody. You're not going to just get into relationships with people who need relationships. You're going to choose people that make you feel good about yourself. You're going to drop people that don't sparkle. You're going to avoid people who you think are below you, either in talent or in class or whatever. And then when you get into a relationship with those people so selectively, you're going

to cover up. You're not going to let them know who you are. We'll get to this next week. But do you understand what that means? What this means is all of our superficial relationships, all of our problems in relationships, and they're really great. They're really terrific. We're needy people. Relationships are always breaking up and always falling apart. It's because of this. But it's not just that the sin causes all individual relationships to fall apart. More than that, sin also creates social alienation between groups.

Now, I know I'll make you laugh and that's all right, but I want you to see how serious this is. I want you to see what it's saying. God comes to Adam, and what's he asking? Adam, what have you done? Now, God's trying to get Adam to repent. Look, in verse 11, who told you you were naked? How did this happen? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you to eat? Now, Adam had a choice.

He could have decided to throw himself on the grace of God. He could have admitted he was a sinner. But he didn't. And if you don't admit that you're a sinner, you have to justify yourself, right? You have to find some way of bolstering up that desperately sinking sense of inadequacy, and you're afraid of it, so you have to justify yourself. You have to prove to... Okay, and how does he do it? He says, Lord, look at verse, what does he say?

You know how women are. The woman you gave me, women. She was supposed to do you help. Look what she did. Now we're not going to get into how the particular way that sin ruins gender relationships, because I don't want to get into that because it's a big subject and I will get back to it, I told you two weeks ago, I'll get back into it later in the year. I'll come back to this very passage. But here's the point. How do you deal with the fact that you, when you reject God's grace, how do you justify yourself?

Here's how we do it. We look at the other gender, we look at other classes, we look at other races, we look at other cultures, we look at other groups, and we say, I'm not like them. Racism and classism and sexism come. Not just, it's not just sin in general, it's a refusal to rely on the grace of God. It's a response to the fact we have this psychological alienation, our self-image is in the pits because we will not rely on the grace of God.

Most people think Christianity is either incredibly inclusive or unbelievably exclusive. But the fact is, Christianity is both radically inclusive and radically exclusive. How can this be? In his short book, The Gospel on the Move, How the Cross Transcends Cultural Differences, Tim Keller shows us how we can make sense of this apparent paradox. Through the New Testament story of Philip and the Ethiopian, we learn how the gospel allows us to humbly critique

our own cultural biases while becoming a united people of God. This month, we have an exclusive resource only available through Gospel in Life that we want you to share. When you give to Gospel in Life in October, we'll send you three copies of Dr. Keller's short book, The Gospel on the Move, as our thanks for your gift. This short book is a great way to present the Gospel to a friend or loved one. We hope you'll prayerfully consider who you could give each copy to and that it helps

you live more missionally. To receive your three copies of this short book, just visit GospelInLife.com slash give. That's GospelInLife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us reach more people with the gospel. So spiritual alienation leads to social psychological alienation leads to social alienation, last of all. Even physical. Sin even leads to this. Look at verse 17. Adam said, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it. Cursed is the ground. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce

thorns and thistles, and you will eat the plants of the field but the sweat of the brow you will eat food until you die because dust dust now here's what God is saying we weren't put here just to be residents we were put here to care for the creation and when we turned our back on God that put us at loggerheads with the creation we are things don't work well here. I had to wear a sweater tonight, it's cold.

We have to have a roof here. Why? I mean, we couldn't handle it. Nature isn't our friend, not anymore. See, disease, floods, too cold, too warm, all of that is because we're no longer in a right relationship with nature. Sin has put us out of accord with nature. Remember, you all laughed at it. Remember a couple weeks ago I quoted George Whitefield, the great Anglican evangelist. I know that

sounds like an oxymoron, but he was. And he says, what does he say? At one place in his sermons he used to like and say, you know why the birds screech at you and the animals growl at you when you come near? Because they know you have a quarrel with their master. Very vivid but he's making the point. Irma Bombeck, she used to, I think she died now, but she was a humor columnist and one time she said, you know, the public enemy number one of the housekeeper is dirt. You know, it's dirt. You start one end of the house to clean up and by the time you get to the other end of the house, the front end is dirty. And then you get to the other end and it's dirty. The back end is dirty.

And he says, fight dirt, fight dirt, fight dirt all of your life. And in the end, what do you get for it? What is your reward at the very end of your life? Six feet of dirt. That's exactly what it's saying here. Because we're out of accord with the owner here. Because we're out of accord with the owner of nature, we're out of accord with nature, and nature is just grinding us down, it's just wearing us down, and therefore poverty and famine and hunger and disease and death, physical alienation, war and racism and sexism and oppression and crime and violence and genocide,

social alienation, depression and anger and bitterness and lack of identity and anxiety and self-consciousness, psychological alienation, all comes because we're hiding from God, because we can't live with God anymore. Now, what's that mean? What's this mean? Here's what it is. First thing I want you to know, let's apply this for a second. If you get hold of this comprehensive view, it makes a huge difference in the way you

live your life. Let me put it negatively and positively. Here's the negative way. Everybody who does, anyone who does not grasp the world's view, any other world view, any other philosophy, any other religion, has a more simplistic way of thinking about what's wrong with the world, simplistic to the point of danger. What do I mean? I could give you a history of philosophy, I could give you a history of ideology, I

could give you a history of politics, and I would go through it and in every case I could show you how everybody who besides the Bible, everybody else tries to identify the source of our problems by looking at one of the aspects. Plato said the problem is the body, the physical. The soul is good, the physical is bad. It was disastrous. It still comes down to us because it creates a legalism and a fear of pleasure and a fear of the physical and an asceticism and a moralism and a phariseeism. Then on the other hand you have Rousseau who talked about the noble savage. He says all of our problems are social alienation. And from Rousseau and from the

romantics who said the heart's fine, it's society that's bad, see, came 200 years of people saying we can't believe in human evil, we just have to do social engineering, and that's been a disaster. And along comes fascism, you see? Fascism always says that group of people, the bad people. All forms of sort of fascism and right-wing stuff always says, there's bad people over there, us virtuous people alright, they're the bad people. They're the ones who are in trouble. And that's where you get war and racism and genocide. And you have Freud that comes along and people in his background, they say, well, the whole problem is psychological repression. The family has kept us from really finding our individual expression of our true selves.

individual expression of our true selves. Everybody but the Bible has a view of the origin of our problems that is too simple. And because it's too simple, it always results in some ideology, some utopian approach to politics or philosophy or just personal living that is a disaster. What's so intriguing about the Bible's view of sin is it is so comprehensive it says, no, wait a minute, the physical is good but fallen. The psychological is good, it was created by God but fallen. The social was good, created by God but fallen. And even the spiritual, my moral being, my conscience, it was good but it's fallen. Sin, somebody would say, if sin was blue it would be blue all over. Every other approach. The Greeks said, no, the body is blue and the soul is fine. And there are other people that said, no, it's the reason that's

good and the animal instincts that are bad. Everybody wants to find some villain. And the Bible says the villain is sin. And if the villain is sin then there's no Savior but Jesus. See if the villain is the body then the Savior is moral discipline. If the villain is society then the Savior is centralized state doing social engineering, okay? If the villain is that group of bad people over there, then the Savior is exterminating them. Everybody but the Bible becomes an ideologue, sin is the problem. Not those people, not that, you know, not religion, not irreligion, not society, not psychology, not the

repressive family, not this racial group, not that racial group, not this political institution, not this form of government. Sin! And if it's sin, then it's Jesus that's the Savior and no other thing, and that'll keep you from being extremist, that'll keep you from putting all your eggs in any particular political or psychological or sociological or even moral basket. Well, but practically, and we put it positively, what's practically that mean? What it means practically is this.

Fascinating. This is important. Some of you may have heard me say this before, but I have to say this every couple of years, or maybe more often than that, because it's the basis of how Redeemer goes. You're going to find churches that say, what is your job in the world as a Christian? You're going to find churches that are, I guess you could call them conservative, and they say the job of a Christian is to convert people. Hmm? It's to bring them to faith. It's to show them how to find God and make them good people.

But we don't get involved with social problems. We don't get involved with, you know, we don't worry about racism. We don't worry about poverty. We don't get involved with social problems because, you know, that's the world. Well, we're doing the spiritual thing. And then, of course, you have the liberal church. And the liberal church says, well, we have to make the world a better place.

We've got to work for justice. We've got to work for equity. We've got to work for equality. We've got to make the world a place like Jesus wanted, the kingdom of God, blessed of the poor, and so forth. But in those churches, they never want to say, and you're a sinner, and you need to be converted. Oh, no, that's pushy.

In other words, some churches want to work on the spiritual alienation, maybe the psychological. Other churches want to work on the social and they want to work on the physical. We should be working on them all. Because you see, everything that's wrong with the world is a result of sin. And therefore, now here we go, when Jesus Christ comes back, what's he going to do? How's he going to heal? In verse 15, we have a tremendous prophecy. The prophecy is here in verse 15. Oh, pardon, my other words. It's where God says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

Now what's so intriguing about this is, at first it looks like, what, what, what, who's he talking to? He's talking to the serpent. And what's he saying to the serpent? First of all, he's saying, there's going to be two lines in the world. He says, humanity's going to basically fall into two lines, two sets of offspring. First is the offspring of the serpent. Now you're saying, oh, the snakes?

I mean, human beings are going to fight against snakes? No. Because Jesus talks about this. There's one place in John 8 where he looks at the Pharisees and he said, you are the children of Satan because you lie like your father. And what we're talking about here are the people who buy the philosophy of the serpent. The children of the serpent, the offspring of the serpent, are the people who buy the lies.

And what was the lies of the serpent? It was very simple. Remember from last week? Let me give it to you in a nutshell. God is the enemy of your happiness. And if you're going to be happy and fulfilled, you're going to have to take your life into your own hands. That passes down into everybody's heart and that creates a hostility between us and God.

We don't want to hear that we're not our own masters and saviors and lords. But here's what God says, this is amazing. God does not say, but there will be some good people and I'll work with them. Oh no. He says, I will put enmity between thy offspring and the offspring of the woman. Now what that means is some of the descendants of Eve, God says not that they'll be good, he says I'll put enmity. That means I will take the hearts of the people who love the lies of Satan and I will actually create." See, he's talking about regeneration. He's talking about an intervention. God in his

grace will move into hearts and says, I will create some people who hate the lies of Satan and that therefore who love me. But what's intriguing is, if you look at the first part of verse 15, it's all plural. Notice that? It says, I'll put enmity between you and the woman between your offspring and hers. In other words, there will be two groups of people. There'll be the children of God, the children of Eve, the seed of Eve, and the children of the serpent in the world. Then suddenly he says, he will crush your head.

Suddenly it gets singular. What is this? This, well, and he will strike your heel. Now, who is this? Derek Hiddner, my favorite commentator, and he's written a commentary on Genesis, says this. Derek Hiddner says, well, this is pretty interesting. First of all, it's very odd that the prophecy would talk about the believers as children of Eve.

You all know how patriarchal ancient civilizations were. You know how the genealogy is always traced through the man. So why in the world is this savior to come, this one who's going to wrestle with the serpent, in other words, with evil and sin and death itself, and crush it, and all the works of the serpent. Why is this person called the seed of the woman? Because literally the word seed or offspring, it's the same word. Why is this person called the offspring of the woman? And Derek Kidner says it's kind of interesting because you know what? In the whole history of the world there was only one human being that was only an offspring of a woman.

A virgin shall conceive without a man and his name shall be called Emmanuel. This is a prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ and what Jesus Christ is going to do prophecy of the coming of Jesus Christ, and what Jesus Christ is going to do is he's going to destroy all the works of the serpent. Now what does that mean? When the king comes back, what is he going to do? We know this in Psalm 96. It says, let the heavens be glad, let the earth rejoice, let the sea roar and all that fills it, let the fields exult and all that's within him. Before the Lord, when he comes to rule the earth, when the king comes back, everything will get healed. Spiritually, psychologically, physically, and socially. Every area, right? You know, you're going to sing about it in about a month. There is a terrific, terrific hymn, which is a Christmas carol, which every single time

you sing, you're singing about Genesis 3.15. Do you know which one I'm talking about? He rules the earth, remember, with truth and grace. Okay? No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessing flow far as the curse is found. Now what does it say? When Jesus Christ comes back, is he only going to convert people? Or is he going to deal with racism? Is he going to deal with poverty? Is he going to deal with disease? Huh? Of course he is!

He's going to make his blessings flow far as the curse has found. He's coming to crush the serpent in all the works, all the results of the fall. And that means, if you are agents of the kingdom now, you're going to do all that. That doesn't mean every one of us does everything. Some of us are gifted to help people find faith. That's dealing with spiritual alienation. Some of us are gifted to help people find faith. That's dealing with spiritual alienation. Some of us are gifted to help people get through their problems. That's dealing with psychological alienation. Some of us, some

of you, for example, are musicians helping create beauty in an ugly world. Some of you can work to take an inner-city school and make it functional so the kids in that neighborhood are not locked in poverty forever, trying to bring justice to an unjust world. Because the king will do all of that. Because all of these are the results of sin. Do you see how comprehensive it is? Do you see the work of the king? Do you want to be part of that? As you know, I stayed away from J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, illustrations for a while. I don't want to get people upset, but when the movies start coming out, then everybody will want

me to use them again, I'm sure. But I'll just tell you one interesting one. There's a place where there's a man who's the true king of the country, who comes back, and he's outside the gate of the city. And inside, there's been a terrible battle and there's people in there dying. And there's a woman inside that says, well there's one way we will know if that guy is the real king. And she says there's an old proverb that says, the hands of the king are healing hands and thus shall the rightful king be known. And he comes in and he works with the people and he heals them because the hands of the king are the healing hands. That's as true of Jesus.

Jesus Christ crushes the serpent's head. And when you bring a person, you bring a relationship, you bring a marriage, you bring a neighborhood, you bring a heart, you bring a psyche, you bring a sociology, anything you bring under the kingdom of Christ, to the degree you bring it under the Lordship of Christ, that degree it begins to heal. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. And we, at Redeemer, are committed to working in all these alienations, to healing all the results of sin. That's the kingdom work. It's hard for me to even think sometimes of myself as leading a liberal or a conservative church, you know, because Genesis 3.

Are you with it? Let us pray. Father, we ask that you'd help us understand what it means to follow in the wake of the one who crushed the serpent's head. And he's going to come back and he's going to destroy all the work. He did that on the cross, but someday he's going to do it on the final day. We ask that you would help us to know what it means to really get behind that and be part of that. We ask that you would help us to be agents of your kingdom. There is no good reason why we cannot see so much of the healing of God and his kingdom

in our city. We do not just want to see people find faith and feel better psychologically. We want to see neighborhoods healed and marriages healed. We want to see bodies healed. We want to see people fed. We want to see people clothed. We want to see people put on their feet. We thank you for the comprehensive, non-ideological view of sin the Bible gives us and the incredible vision of what it means to work for the King.

We ask that you would make us a Kingdom center, a Kingdom community, and we ask it in Jesus' name. amen. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover

the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more. Today's sermon was recorded in 2000. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. you