1-16-2025

Good Morning All,

 Genesis 3:19; “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

    That didn’t take long.  38 verses were all it took.  38 verses ago we read where God formed man out of the earth and breathed into him life and he became a living soul.  Now Adam is told “dust you are and to dust you shall return.”  The truth is we have no idea of how much time elapses between these verses; we are not told.  What we are told is the definite break by man from God because of sin.  We often refer to this event as “the fall of mankind.”

     We use that phrase in a way that sounds like something you do when you trip over your own shoelaces. We may even have visions of the Three Stooges and their slapstick falls.  But the truth is that while we see the fall as a one-time event, it is really a continual process of sinful man.  We don’t just fall to the ground; this implies that somehow, we can get back up.  The real way to view the fall of man is not like the Three Stooges but more like the way they used to portray the astronaut whose airline gets cut when he is outside the spacecraft and he begins to tumble out of control and the last we see of him; he is hurtling out into the vastness of space never to be seen or heard from ever again.  That is how we fall; completely out of control with no way to stop and with no hope.  The fall of man is not a one-time event; it is a continual process in which we have no sense of bearing or direction; we have no way to stop; we don’t even realize how far we have fallen or where we are going.

     That is what sin does to us.  It throws us so out of control that we cannot even recognize how lost we are.  We may even think that this tumbling is the way that it is supposed to go.  Yet all this tumbling does for us is disorient us and cause us to leave God.  At this time, the fall of man, life went from a gift from God to a command of God.  We were lost, condemned to hard labor with the sentence of death at the end.

    This is where Jesus steps in.  He takes hold of us, stops our tumbling and hurtling out of control and brings us back.  He removes the command of life before God and returns it back to the gift of God.  This is part of being reconciled to God; we are brought back into his presence with his peace.  We are no longer enemies of God flying away from him at breakneck speed.  We are returned to his loving kindness not his holy anger and judgment.

    In many respects, that is one way to tell the Christmas story.  When the angels told the shepherds,” peace, goodwill toward men on whom his favor rests.” This is what Jesus was talking about when he referred to himself as the “Bread of Life” or the “Living Water.”  Jesus gives us life, the gift of life restoring us back to God’s favor, back to peace and goodwill.

Dear Father in heaven, your mercy overflows us daily.  Too often we choose to tumble rather than be rescued by you.  Forgive us for our arrogance and self-conceit.  For the sake of Jesus restore us to your kingdom by your grace.  In Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret