Ep 021 || Why the World is Broken

Well hey, Pando family, we are glad that you are here. If you were looking for the Pando exclusive podcast of Southeast Christian Church, you're in the right place, and so if you're new, welcome. If you are someone who listens each week, thanks again for being here. My name is Derek, this is Brandon, we are both on our online team here at Southeast. We have the pleasure of getting to serve you guys and do this sort of thing each week. And Brandon, this week we get to talk about another sermon in the In the Beginning sermon series. Yeah, we are in Genesis still, and we are in Genesis chapter three, and we've started these past couple weeks and everything is great, right? It is good, it is good, it is very good, God says. Until it's not. Until it's not, right. And it's very interesting that it doesn't take any time at all for us to mess everything up, right? That God creates this universe, he creates this perfect world, everything is right between God and man, everything is right between the man and the woman, like everything is going great and creation is humming along, it's functioning the way God intends. In fact, that's kind of what drives that word good, right, that we see in Genesis one and Genesis two. When God says it's good, what he's saying is this is functioning rightly, this is doing what it's supposed to do. The way God intended it to be. Yes, the way God intended it. Everything is humming along, and we get three chapters into the story, and by the end of the third chapter, everything is falling apart. And we see, Genesis two sets us up with the reality that when God creates the garden, he sets up one requirement for us, one rule, basically, he says you cannot eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Just this one thing, and we talk all the time about, or we think all the time about, oh,

we could keep rules, we could be moral, we can earn our way, and it's like God gave us one thing to do at the beginning, and we couldn't even do that. And you know this, like as soon as you tell, I don't know what it is about our nature, as soon as you tell us not to do something... We hyper-focus on it. Yeah, we're gonna do it. Like you tell your kids, don't touch the stove. Never entered their mind to touch, and now it's like... I'm gonna reach my hand up there and see what that does. Yeah, I'm gonna touch it, let's see what happens. So God gives them this command, and they don't follow it. In Genesis chapter three, we see that Adam and Eve are, I mean, their first mistake is they're lingering around the tree, right? They're just kind of hanging out there, and this one... There's probably something to be said there. Yeah, like all the trees in creation, they're like, let's hang around the forbidden tree. I think this is a good idea. They're hanging around the tree, and we're told the serpent appears to Eve. So really, this is a rabbit trail that I don't want to spend much time on. Okay. But it's interesting, like a snake starts talking to Eve, and she's cool with it. Right. Right? Like... Yeah, that's not odd. No, that's not... I mean, yeah. Yeah, because I guess we don't have any other, you know, story yet in scripture at all, where there's an animal that speak, maybe that donkey, you know, Balaam's several years down, but I'm trying to think of what another one would be.

Yeah. So it's a little bit odd. I don't know like what... My wife had texted me during the sermon, she was like, so could animals talk before the fall? And I was like, I don't know. Like my inclination is to say no, but it is kind of interesting that she's just like a talking snake. Right. This is awesome. Right. But also, I like the Hebrew language is pretty interesting there. The word for serpent also kind of has this literal translation of like shimmering one. So like kind of playing off the fact that, you know, snake scales are very reflective. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, there could be something there, like in terms of what exactly is she seeing or interacting with? At any rate, revelation will later make it clear what we would know from the rest of the Bibles. Well, this serpent is not just a snake, right? It is the enemy. It is Satan come to tempt Adam and Eve. And that's what he does, as Kyle pointed out this week, he does a masterful job at just getting them to question, you know, God's command, to question his authority, to question the consequences and say like, no, these things that God told you, these commands that God put on your life, like, are they really that important? Sure. Well, and this is, I think this is important for us to understand that this specifically here in chapter three, like, this is a core belief that we would have as Christians, as

Bible-believing Christians, that we can point back to Genesis 3 to be able to look at and say, okay, well, why do we need Jesus? Where did this begin? Because obviously, like you said, like when God created the world, He created the world us, it created Adam and Eve and the beasts and everything in the waters, that everything was good. Yeah. Right? Everything was good, and God told them that, hey, you can eat from any of these trees except for this one. Yeah. Right? Except for this one. And yet even in... What's mind-blowing to me is that even in perfect creation, right, there is an enemy of God. Yeah. Right? There is a perfect creation, there is an enemy of God in the midst of it that is trying to pull the attention from Adam and Eve and trying to point it towards disobeying the Lord. Yeah. Right? Which is interesting. So, Brandon, what do we do with that? What do we do with that theologically? And there may not be a perfect answer. Yeah. One of the things that Kyle kind of mentioned a little bit was that this tree was an invitation to trust.

Yes. Right? Yeah. But what do you think about that? What do we do with that? It's kind of the ever-present question of evil, right? What about evil? How does it get here? Where does it come from? And the Bible would kind of present us with this reality, like, evil is... I'll say it this way and then I'll clear up what I mean by that. That evil is created in the sense that Satan is a created being. The enemy is a created being who made the wrong choice. Sure. Right? And he chose to rebel against God. He chose to disobey God. And then he decided to pull us into that choice with him. Sure. You know, misery loves company, and I guess so does disobedience, right? He wants to pull us into his rebellion against God. And it's interesting in the prophets where we kind of catch a glimpse of this. You know, the prophets are writing to, like, the king of Tyre and things like that. And they're seeing, like, the evil that's driving these worldly kings. And as they start to prophesy against these kings, they catch a glimpse of, like, Satan's rebellion in the middle of it, right? Gotcha. They start to see, like, oh, there's more going on here. So this is in Old Testament. Yeah, this is in Old Testament.

I'm struggling now to think of which prophet it is. I want to say Ezekiel, but that doesn't sound right to me. He's looking back on it and he sees, like, oh, you thought you could ascend to the high place. You thought you could take God's place. And I think that's biblically kind of the background for how we understand the enemy, how we understand the spiritual warfare we're caught up in, is that Satan somehow got it in his mind that he was worthy of praise and that he could ascend to God's place. Maybe he could do a better job than God does. I don't know. But he decided that this is what he was going to do. And in the midst of that, he pulls Adam and Eve into this by getting them to run down the same path that he ran down. And it's interesting. You know, Paul will write in his letters that a new convert shouldn't become an elder unless they fall into the pride, which is the sin of the devil. And you kind of see that as the root of all sin is this, and that actually really is the root of all sin. For sure. The idea that I know how to run my life better than God knows how to run my life. We know what's best. Right. Yeah. I don't need him to tell me what to do. I don't need him to show me what life's supposed to be like. I can figure that out on my own. And again, I mean, it's just intriguing that when we look at the choice between Adam and Eve, or the choice that Adam and Eve have to make, is, you know, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Like, oh, I can get this knowledge for myself.

I can go and I can pick it off the tree. I can grasp it. I can take it. I don't need God to show it to me. I don't need God to give me that wisdom. I can grab it. I can take it. It can be mine. And I can do it. And that's really, I mean, when you get down to it, the root of all sin is pride, really, to think I am Lord of my own life. I can do it for myself. Yeah. That's really interesting. Like, is there, and there may not be a good answer to this question, do you think there's a correlation between that in terms of us wanting to just kind of grab that for ourself versus that wisdom being revealed to us? And when God's asking us to, hey, like, there's so many times, even throughout Proverbs, it's talking about asking for wisdom and wisdom being so much more valuable than money, all of these things. Is there a correlation there? Or is that maybe reading a little bit too much of it? Yeah. You know, I think there is a bit of a correlation, and to understand, like, you know, the choice before us, I mean, in Genesis, you get that imagery of God comes to walk with Adam and even the cool of the day, right? Are we going to gain wisdom and knowledge from walking with God, or are we just going to grasp it and take it for ourselves? Dang. And I think, like, I think there's a real dichotomy there for us to choose, because,

you know, I had James open here for a little bit. but because there's something else he talks about sin we'll talk about later. But in James one, he says, you know, if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God and he'll answer that. Right, yeah. Right, like, so we're told like, hey, if you want wisdom, ask God for it. And here at the beginning, we see like, no, this knowledge that they want, they're not trusting him to give it to them as they need it. They're just, they just want to take it for themselves. Taking the shortcut. Yeah, taking the shortcut. Taking the shortcut. And that's the, man, we're going down a rabbit trail. That's the very temptation Satan puts in front of Jesus. Right. Right, because, you know, what does he tempt Jesus with? Kneel down to me and all the kingdoms of the earth will be yours. Those will be Jesus's anyway. Right. You know, when he goes through the cross and is elevated to the highest name and Satan is just, it's not Satan's to give in the first place, but it's a shortcut to be like, you know, you can have the kingdom without the cross. For sure, and I think, you know,

we kind of look at those things, hold both of those situations that, you know, Adam and Eve in the garden and Jesus being tempted in the desert is that, you know, in both ways, you know, Satan is trying to, I mean, bring a lot of damage, you know, to the human race, right, to people, to us who have been created in God's own image. And yet, as scripture talks about, like, through Adam, all have experienced death. Through Christ, now we experience life. You know, and I'm so grateful, even as we, you know, we're processing Easter here over the next couple of weeks and heading into Easter, that one of the reasons why I'm so grateful that, yeah, like, not only did Christ die the death that we deserved, but he lived the life perfectly that we couldn't live, right, and it took him, it took this holy being being put on a cross for that sacrifice to mean something. Like, we could have never lived up to that. Anyway, but kind of to put kind of a button on that specifically, I wanna talk about one of Kyle's main points, and he kind of had three different things under it. He was talking about the serpent's strategy, right, the serpent's strategy. And so maybe let's do this. Let me just read really quickly a little bit of chapter three, and then dive into what Kyle said, just in case, I mean, even for me now

as a recordingist, forgetting a little bit of the scripture from Sunday. In verse one, it says, now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, indeed, has God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God had said, you shall not eat from it or touch it or you will die. And the serpent said to the woman, you surely will not die, for God knows that in the day you'll eat from it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And then when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate, and she gave also to her husband with her and he ate. And then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves Lloyd coverings. Yeah. So three things that Kyle brought up from that passage is this. So talking about the serpent strategy, number one, that the serpent questioned

the accuracy of God's word, right? Well, did God really say X, Y, and Z? The second one, he distorts the authority of God's word. Well, like surely you won't die, right? Like surely, like, you know, you won't die. Number three, he denies the consequences of God's word. So not only, you know, hey, like, are you really gonna die? But you're actually, it's not that you're gonna die, it's actually that God knows that you're going to become like him. Right. And knowing good and evil that actually he's causing them to reconsider like, well, can I trust what God just told me? You know, and so Satan, the enemy is the ultimate deceiver. The ultimate deceiver. Brandon, so as you, as we read through that, as we look through some of those points in terms of the serpent strategy, how do you feel like, you know, we can kind of look back at that and for Adam to even be like, well, God told you not to do it. Right. And you did it. But there's 100 ways that this plays out in our life every single day. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, you know, I mean, in many ways, you could argue like, you know,

this first time that Satan gets the man and woman to fall, like this is the genesis of it all. No pun intended. Yeah, no pun intended. But he's had years to like really hone and perfect that strategy today to where you see. those very same things today. And in some ways, those things have never been easier for him to do. Yeah. Because, you know, we get stuck today in, well, you know, the Bible was written in a different language and to a different culture and 2000 years ago. And so we can talk ourselves into all sorts of things. Well, you know- Did God really say- Yeah, did God really say this is wrong? Is that what that word really means? Is that really what it's saying? And you just kind of so, I'm not saying there aren't good hermeneutical questions we should ask ourselves. For sure. But that's certainly where some of that starts is just saying like, well, I'm going to keep asking the question until I get the answer I want. I mean, that's exactly what my kids do, right? Like, well, I'm going to keep asking until either I wear mom down or until I get dad and not know what mom said. I hate that. My kids do that to me all the time. They'll come home or I'll come home. My wife had gotten home from work a couple hours before I did. And sure enough, you know, as soon as she's not in the room, they'll ask me something and I'll give them an answer. And it's almost always different than what mom's told me. Yeah, this was the exact opposite. Yeah. So I think that's it. And we live in a day and age where it's so easy to keep asking that question until you get the answer you want. And keep Googling or looking up... It's what Paul talks about with the fine teachers who say what their itching ears want to hear. Like, I want to hear... I want this answer to... I want it to shake out to where God's Word agrees exactly with what I want in my life. So like, I think

he's absolutely perfected that. I think he's perfected the, you know, questioning the authority of God's Word, questioning the authority of even, you know, the church and teachers. Certainly, you know, we've done some of that on our own by, you know, compromising our integrity and things like that. You know, there have been very real leadership faults and things like that. But I think Satan uses that to be like, well, they don't really believe that, right? Like, they don't really... Like, when push comes to shove, they don't think that's actually true. He questions the consequences of it. You know, we live in a day where we are very much shielded from the consequences of sin in certain regards. Like, you know, there are things that we don't have to deal with, or we can, you know, we've made certain elements of things so easy to where it's like, well, this isn't gonna be as devastating to my life as it would have been, you know, a generation ago or a century ago. And I think we see again and again that Satan is just using these same old tactics, using these same old stories, getting us to question, getting us to wonder if it's really true, if we can really believe it, getting us to question if we're really gonna pay a consequence for it. You know, because Adam and Eve, you know, they didn't die immediately, right? Their sin didn't kill them right away. They just didn't understand like, hey, now that I've gone down this path, that's where it's ultimately gonna lead. And sin is so good at hiding its cost. You know, it's so, like, you don't see the price tag when you start down that path. And you don't, you know, when you get to the register, too late to put it back. And we don't always see it. But, you know, James, talking about that passage earlier in James, James 1, 14 through 15, talks about temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death. So I want you to think about the picture, right, he paints here, because I think it's so significant. He talks about that sin starts with a place of desire. She saw the fruit was desirable. It was good for food, it was pleasing to the eye. So she wanted that thing. That desire gives birth to sinful actions. She takes the fruit and she takes a bite out of it, gives it to Adam as well. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death. So this picture that James paints is like, it starts with just this thought, like this thought in your head that gets twisted a little bit of this is what I want. And I don't care what God says about it. I can decide for myself. That desire gives birth to an action where we jump out and do those things. But when sin allows to grow, and when it's allowed to grow,

it gives birth to death. And like, I've seen it so many times, sin always gives birth to death. And I'm not just talking about physical death, like you're gonna die because of sin. I'm talking about like the death of relationships. Sin kills relationships, it kills trust. I mean, I know people in ministry, it kills careers. Sin is a killer, and it does not reveal that price tag until it's too late. No, and that's why I think it's worthy of us going back to verse 6, where it says that the woman saw that the tree was good for food. So good, it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desirable, right? And what that reminds me of is that, you know, I'm sure there are some things in life that are sinful that on the outside probably don't look super enticing. There's probably a few, but I would say there are a heck of a lot of things that are like, you know what? That looks good, I think it's gonna feel good, and you know what? I can understand why people fall into sin's trap, because I do, right? Yeah. I do, in so many different ways in my life, and as Jesus will teach us in the New Testament, that gosh, it's not only just the things that we actually decide to do, right? Sometimes it's the lust that we have in our heart that we're struggling through, right? And not necessarily the temptation piece of that, but just who we are is so broken because of sin. And like you said, if there's something that I have learned in ministry, and I think maybe it's just the perspective of getting to see into people's lives, is that when we consciously and unconsciously live our lives differently than what Scripture tells us to, or more importantly, what God tells us to, it leads to death. Every single time. Every single time. There will always be a clock on that decision. Oh, yeah. Always. And sometimes it may have big ramifications in the moment, and sometimes it doesn't, right? But that clock always runs out of time. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, my wife was talking to my daughter about this earlier in the week, about this idea that we choose our actions, but we don't always choose the consequences of those. Sure. Like that decision we made that was against Scripture, like you don't get to choose how that consequence shakes out sometimes, but it's not gonna be a good thing, right? And I think that's something we gotta keep in mind. And Adam and Eve certainly had no idea what exactly

their sin would do. They had no... I mean, you think about the mountains and eons of human suffering from that one decision. I mean, if they could weigh that in the moment, I think their choice could have been different, to be like, hey, maybe we don't. Maybe we don't do this. It's hard to do that in the moment. Yeah. Like it really is, because there are some times when sin can just be so enticing and desirable, and it can... And a lot of times it can catch us when we're not expecting it. I think of King David, of when he ended up sleeping with Bathsheba. He's home from war while everybody else is out fighting, just kinda... Not scrolling, strolling. Back then they strolled, today we scroll. He was just strolling and ran into this situation that upheaved his life, and it just made one bad decision to another bad decision to another bad decision, and it can happen just like that. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, this thing that you're describing from Eve's perspective, what, that it was pleasing to the eye and good for food? Like, John picks up this same thread in 1 John. 1 John 2.16. Not 3.16, 2.16. He says, you know, for the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but from this world. It's the same thing, right? We want what we see, we want the things that we desire, we wanna feel good about ourselves. And that's probably, I mean, that speaks more to our culture than anything else, I think, is that we just don't want what feels good in the moment. We definitely want that, but we also want what's gonna make me feel good about myself, right? Yeah, for sure. Is, like, I want these things that are gonna make me feel like I'm something or I'm somebody or something like that, and it leads us down all sorts of paths that aren't constructive, that are, in fact, very destructive, not just for us, but for the people around us, as David found out. Oh, no doubt. And I think it's talking about that, you know, what is it, the root of all evil being pride, or the root of all sin being pride, is that it's self-serving, right? Like, it's self-serving, that so many of the things that, you know, we do that really put us in some rough places in life that God has to rescue us out of, like, a lot of times it's self-serving. Maybe not every time, you know, like, maybe there are times when, like, we make bad choices and we really didn't know any

different, right? But what we still see is, we still see the consequence of that, right? We still see, like, whether we—and I really think this is true no matter where you're at in the world, like, man, like, we're either following what God has intended for our lives, or we're not. And it doesn't mean that we do it perfectly, that's not the journey, like, it's not a destination, it's this journey of trying to align our lives as much as possible with what Scripture tells us to do, right? Because it's, again, it's not that, and I think this is what the world tries to convince us of, that there's this fruit on this tree, there's this thing that God is keeping from you, and it's actually going to make you really, really, really happy, and it's gonna be the thing that is going to complete your joy and a thing that satisfies you and makes you feel that way about yourself that you've been longing to feel. But actually, it's poison, right? It's poison, and it's actually gonna kill you, it's gonna rob you of joy, it's gonna suck the life out of you, and probably destroy relationships, right? And I think, but the hard part of that is that that's true for all of us, and it's a daily thing that we have to try to walk through and fight against. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think there's just this element that the choice that was before Adam and Eve on that day is before us every day. We always have a decision in each day to be like, am I going to trust in what God has said, am I gonna rely on Him for what I want, or am I gonna take it for myself, or am I gonna go my own way? And we do just get ourselves in, we talk ourselves into, I think we often know like, oh, I shouldn't do this, or I shouldn't, but we talk ourselves into it, and we convince ourselves that the things we want is what we really need, and then everything just kind of unravels from there. I do think, though, that when we look at Genesis chapter three, I think we get a pretty compelling explanation, though, for the suffering in the world a little bit. We often talk about, well, why do so many bad things happen, and why do we see struggle and conflict and war, and why do we deal with all of these atrocities and things like that? I think Genesis three, at least in my estimation, I know I'm saying this from a place of bias, but I think the biblical worldview on this explains the world we live in, that the world was great and it's perfect, and now it's not the way it was intended to be. Because I think we all kind of live with that recognition, right? Like something's not right here. Something is not the way that it's supposed to be. And we find out in Genesis three that it's sin. Sin is what is wrong, but it's not just sin out there, right? It's sin in here. Well, what's wrong with the world? Well, me.

Yeah, for sure. I'm what's wrong with the world, because I fall into the same trap Adam and Eve did. I make the same bad mistakes and decisions that Adam and Eve did. I trust what I want and what I'm reaching for rather than what God is giving to me. And I think when we look at the consequences of sin, as God pronounces them on Adam and Eve and the serpent, we just start to get this picture of everything is jacked up now. Nothing is the way it's supposed to be. I mean, you look at, what is it, 314 through 17, where he's talking to the woman, I'll sharpen the pain of your pregnancy. You will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you. Say there's this conflict in relationships. Even childbirth, one of the greatest joys in life, it's gonna be marred by pain. Even the best thing life has to offer, it's gonna be screwed up. And you're gonna be jockeying with position with other people for the rest of your life. To the man, you listen to your wife, and because of that, the ground is cursed because of you, and all your life you'll struggle to scratch a living from it. It'll grow thorns and thistles for you. The work that you try to do to make this creation better, it's gonna frustrate you. There's gonna be thorns and thistles. You're gonna get stuck. You're gonna get bleed. It's never gonna be right. And then the greatest curse and the greatest promise, and it's the one that's pronounced on the serpent. Because you've done this, you'll crawl on your belly, and I will put hostility between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel. That there is this promise that, hey, somebody's coming who's gonna fix it, who's gonna make it right, who's gonna crush the head of the serpent, undo what sin has done. And again, I think this is... The biblical worldview is the best explanation for the world we see around us, is this creation was great, it was beautiful, because there's a great beauty in it. It was beautiful, it was perfect. Our sin messed it up, and now God has to save us from that, and He did in the person of Jesus Christ. Because we can't fix it ourselves. No matter how much we try to make things right, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. Sure, yeah. I don't know. There's gotta be a better metaphor than that. But I think it just, it makes so much sense of our world. It makes so much sense of the shortcomings we see in ourselves, the shortcomings in the sin we see in the world. I think it explains it to us and helps us see,

like, this is what's gone wrong. No doubt. And so, because of Genesis 3, we... The sermon from this past weekend was called Paradise Lost, right? So Adam and Eve were able to walk in a perfect place, a perfect garden, walking hand in hand with God in this perfect harmony, perfect relationship, but because they ate from the tree that they weren't supposed to eat from, it brought sin and death, that disobedient decision created this massive canyon where we are on one side and God is on the other and what we're going to see is that God's actually going to banish them from the garden. He's going to banish them out and all of their life is going to be decided and described by what you just read of, hey, this is what your life is going to be like now because of this decision. But in the midst of that, God doesn't leave us, right? He didn't leave them, He's not going to leave us, and what Kyle reminded us was of God's response, right? That number one, He sought them out, right? He called for them. Number two, He communicated consequences, and number three, He promised a rescuer, right? And Brandon, as we head towards Easter here in the next, what, week and a half, the reason why if anyone watching this has ever heard a Christian or someone describe the gospel as good news, right, well, literally that's what that means is good news, but the reason why we call it good news is because Jesus has come to bridge that canyon, right? He is actually, if you're thinking of God being up on a mountain and we're down at the bottom of the mountain, He didn't ask us to climb the mountain, God came down the mountain, right, for us, and that's how we can call it good news, that of all the evil, of all the things that have been done to us, of all the things that we've done that are wrong, Christ has come to redeem all of those things and bring us back into a right relationship with God. Yeah. And when you think about it, and it's especially beautiful and poignant to think about Genesis chapter three in the context of Easter, right, because you do have Genesis 3.15, the very

first mention of Jesus, the very first promise, but you also get, like, when you start to think through the Easter story, you think about how much of those accounts are replaying the story of the Garden of Eden in the way that it should have gone. I think it was Tim Keller, who I was first reading, who kind of pointed this out, that the Genesis 3 begins in a garden where Adam and Eve are in paradise and everything is going right, and they're faced with this tree that God has told them not to touch, and they disregard it, even though they disobey, and it leads to death. And where is Jesus on the night before He's crucified? In a garden, yeah. He's in a garden. He's in the Garden of Gethsemane, and He's not in paradise, because the world is falling apart around Him. Like, He knows His time is short. He's in extreme stress. He's in extreme duress. And Adam and Eve knew that their disobedience would lead to death. Jesus, on the other hand, knows His obedience is gonna lead Him to death. And so Adam and Eve touched a tree that they had no business being around. Jesus went to a tree He had no business having to face. He goes to the cross, and He dies our death. He lives out this promise and dies this promise of Genesis 3.15 that He's gonna get struck by the snake. And it's so interesting how much imagery of the crucifixion ties into Genesis 3. Just two things, I guess, real quick. Like one is, you see there in Genesis 3.18, if you have your Bibles, it talks about how the ground is gonna grow thorns and thistles, even though you will eat of its grains. What do they make Jesus' crown of when He goes to the cross? It's thorns and thistles. They put a crown of thorns on His head. He's very literally wearing a symbol of the curse that would not exist were it not for

Adam and Eve's sin. Then also, He will strike your head, you will strike His heel. It's interesting that a lot of biblical scholars now believe that when, contrary to our kind of modern pictures of the cross, there's a growing idea that when you were crucified, your feet were on either side of the beam. So you're kind of like with your feet, and they would drive the nails through your heel to hold you on either side of the cross. And if you think about that, well, what would two strikes on someone's heel look like on each one? It would look like you got bit by a snake on your heel. and whether or not that's just a growing idea of the imagery there. But I do think it's so fascinating to think, like, Adam and Eve face this garden in paradise and everything is great, and they choose wrongly. Jesus is in the garden, everything is falling apart, He chooses rightly, and He dies so that we can live and so that everything that has been done can be undone through Him. Amen. I love how you put that. And Pando family, again, we're gonna have another Pando exclusive podcast coming out next week that'll actually be before Easter. We're excited to be able to be together with you and hope that you'll be with us to be able to talk about Easter and the sermon that's coming up this weekend. But that's the good news that Brandon just talked about, is that we've learned about the origin of sin, we've learned about why we are the way that we are, why are we broken, but also why is the world that we live in so broken? And I know that as Brandon and I and our team read your letters that you send us almost weekly, it's that for so many of you that are watching this right now, you come from really hard situations that you couldn't control. And I would bet most of your life you've been asking that question, why, and trying to maybe undo some of the things that have been done to you. Or, maybe at the same time, trying to undo some of the things that you have done to others. I know that that's how I feel in a lot of times of my life. But the truth that Brandon just shared about, that we just shared about, is the same for you as it is for me as it is for Brandon and everyone watching this, is that God doesn't leave us in our sin, right? He doesn't have us reading scripture to be able to tell us what we can and can't do because he's mean and demanding and a dictator. That's not who God is. God is a good Father. And if you've never had a father that you would say is good, I understand that can be hard

to believe, but he is. He is good, and he wants to lead us towards life instead of death. And that's why we get to celebrate Easter, is that even though we are broken and sinful and there's a huge canyon between us and God, Jesus came to bridge that gap and bring us back into a relationship with him. Y'all, but for Brandon, for myself, for our team behind the cameras, and us here at Southeast, we love you. We're glad that you're here with us each week, and we will see you next time for our Pando-exclusive podcast right before Easter. See you guys.