From Garden Ruin to Cross Victory

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

Today is always a heavy Sunday because we deal with the Fall all the way back to Adam and Eve in the garden, and we deal with the temptation of Jesus Christ. It is heavy because we want to go back. We want to rewrite history. We want to make Genesis chapter 3 unhappen. We want to make things right because we feel responsible. We bear original sin within us. We want to fix it—but we cannot. We are powerless to make it right with God.

So God Himself must come down—not into an unfallen garden, but into sinful creation—to contend with Satan himself. He must die in our stead and pour out His blood for us. Only God can make it right.

Someone else has to clean up our mess.

We often think of the world as generally a good place, but it is not. The world is corrupted by sin. Our society tells us that people are, by and large, good—just a few bad apples who occasionally do bad things. But this is false. The world is broken. The world is evil. Just look at the curses that were laid down.

To the woman, God said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” This is often reduced to labor pains, but it is far more than that. It encompasses everything surrounding children—infertility, miscarriages, fear.

Will everything be okay with my baby?

Every visit to the doctor brings that quiet tension as you hold your breath until you hear, “Everything looks great.” Then you bring the child home. That first night they sleep in their own room—however many weeks or months in—you wake in the night because they did not cry. You stand at the door with fear and trepidation before you open it.

You know Schrödinger’s cat: the thought experiment in which a cat in a box is both alive and dead until the box is opened. For parents, there is a dreadful version of that because of infant death and SIDS. You open the door—and the relief floods in.

But then they grow. They skin their knees. There are bullies at school. You want to fix everything for your child, but you cannot. You must raise them. You must teach them to become their own person. And on the back end of it all, just as you lost your parents, they will lose you. That is the hoped-for order of things. The worst possibility is the reverse—that you are alive when your child dies.

There is so much bound up in this curse of childbearing.

And then God says, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Later, Paul will use marriage as the image of Christ and His bride, the Church. Yet here, God declares that marriage will be marked by conflict. There is no perfect marriage.

What does this look like for us? We constantly try to remake Jesus in our own image. It would be convenient if Jesus were the most patriotic American who ever lived—but He is not. We cannot transform Jesus into our image. We are to be transformed into His.

Our sinful nature wants God to submit to us, rather than submitting to Him. Relationship after relationship is affected by this curse—layer upon layer upon layer.

Then God speaks to Adam: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.”

We call it the curse of the ground, but it is really the curse of results. The results no longer match the work.

I garden. Some of you do as well. This time of year, you are preparing beds, maybe starting seeds. There is a joke among gardeners: “I’m about to spend $600 and blood, sweat, and tears to grow something I can buy at the grocery store for twenty-five cents.” The results do not match the work.

You labor—and what comes up? Thorns. Thistles. Weeds. A weed is simply a plant growing where you do not want it. Even corn can be a weed in a soybean field because it steals nutrients and water. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve tended the garden, and what they desired to grow, grew. They were the best gardeners in the world.

Not anymore.

The curse is deeper than we often imagine. And it all ends in the same place: death. As we heard on Ash Wednesday, “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

The hard truth is this: we are not good. The world is not good. We cannot fix it.

But this is why Jesus came. This is the Gospel—the good news. We broke it. We shattered the vase. God does not merely glue it back together. He does not simply replace it. He remakes it entirely new. He has begun remaking you in your Baptism. And He will come again to make this world new, without sin.

The tears that rend our hearts, the sin that has broken us—all will be removed.

Every evil and wrong thing we have done has been accounted for at the cross. The blood has been poured out. The forgiveness of sins is yours. God fixes it for you. God does the work.

He does it because He loves you. Before we loved Him—indeed, because we could never love Him enough—He first loved us, so that we might learn what love truly is. He removes that which has killed us and says, “He who believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die.”

Jesus went toe-to-toe with Satan.

In the garden, Satan sought to destroy God’s creation. But God would not abandon it. He chose to redeem it. In the wilderness, Satan tried to derail God’s plan by tempting Jesus: “Serve yourself. You are hungry. Avoid the cross. I will give you the kingdoms of the world—just worship me.”

Jesus answered, “Be gone, Satan.” The devil withdrew for a more opportune time.

That time came at the cross, when Satan thought he had finally undone God’s plan. Surely God would punish those who killed Him. Yet it was always God’s plan to die for us—to take the sin of the whole world upon Himself.

Satan roars and prowls, but he is defeated. The battle has been won. The war is over. Death, sin, and Satan have been conquered. What we failed to do in the garden, God has done for us. What we fail to do in our lives, God has paid for.

Not as a license to sin—but to restore His creation to Himself.

This is the great love of God. This is why we gather. This is what we mean by the Gospel—the good news for all people of all times. Not just good news for here. Not just for your home. It is good news for Mustang and Tuttle and Blanchard and Union City and Yukon and Oklahoma City. Good news for Oklahoma. Good news for the United States, for Canada and Mexico, and for every nation on earth.

The good news for everyone everywhere: we are sinners, yet Christ died for us.

And we know it is true because of Easter—the day He rose from the dead. In His resurrection, we live anew every single day.

May this love carry you through the season of Lent as you prepare to face your own death, consoled by the empty tomb.

In Christ’s name, amen.