Reverse the Curse: Expulsion

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

Right before service, between the meal and coming in here, Braelyn, who is running AV, asked me, “What’s your favorite Bible story?” I didn’t know how to answer that because I like a lot of the Bible—believe it or not—and I read it quite a bit. But I told him I like the histories of the Old Testament, and I also really like Revelation.

Truth be told, I really like Genesis and Revelation.

Genesis is the story of how we got here. Revelation is the story of how it ends.

Everything in between is just filler. It’s important filler, but it’s filler. All of the Bible either references Genesis or Revelation—or both.

Adam and Eve sinned. The curse was placed upon them: the curse of death; the curse of work unequal to results, or results unequal to work; the curse of pain in childbearing. And things go sideways quickly. In Genesis chapter 4, their firstborn kills their second-born.

And it just gets worse.

But at the end of Genesis chapter 3, God drives them out of the garden. He cuts them off from the tree of life so that they will not live forever.

And the question is: Why?

So that they would not live forever in their sinful condition and thus be forever cut off from God.

They had desired to be like God, and they found out they were nothing close. One interpretation understands the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as gaining the knowledge of evil by losing the knowledge of good—losing the knowledge of what is right. Adam and Eve recognized that they no longer knew what was good. Or, they only knew good as the absence of evil.

This is reflected when someone comes up to Jesus and calls Him “Good Teacher,” and Jesus says, “Why do you call Me good? Only God is good.” There is subtext there. He is saying, “You do not mean to confess Me as God. But to call Me good, you must confess that I am God.” Only God is good.

We are not.

And in between the bookends of Genesis and Revelation, there is us.

I often joke that Oklahoma is God’s country. Debbie informed me that I was mistaken. She told me on Tuesday that Texas is God’s country. As a native Oklahoman, I disagreed with her.

It seems wherever I go, residents tell me that their place is actually God’s country. Truth be told, all of creation is God’s country. But what we mean when we say that is that this is Eden. And it’s not. It’s a world wracked by sin.

I love sitting out in my garage in the spring and watching the storms roll in. But right behind me is my tornado shelter. Born and raised an Okie, I know what can happen very quickly.

We have been cut off from living with God for eternity. We would be helpless and hopeless if it were not for God Himself—if it were not for the Tree of Life that stands between the two Trees of Life.

What I mean is this: there is a Tree of Life in the garden, and there is a Tree of Life in Revelation chapter 22. And in between is the Tree of Life of Good Friday (the Cross). We are rescued from our sins in Jesus Christ because He takes our sins upon Himself. He takes the sins of all believers for all time. In fact, He takes the sin of the whole world for all time upon Himself.

We are made holy, and the gates of heaven have been opened to us.

The word we get for “paradise” comes from the word for “garden.” So when we talk about paradise, when we talk about Christ returning, when we talk about utopia—not as a place that does not exist, but as the place that will come when Christ returns, the new heavenly Jerusalem—the image is a New Garden.

God does not just walk in the cool of the day in the New Garden; He dwells with His people.

There is no longer sun or moon or stars, because the sun, moon, and stars were given to rule over times and seasons. And what is eternity? It is not time going on forever. It is the absence of time. It is not the sun rising and setting every day. It is that time itself no longer governs us. Your clock is always flashing 12:00, not because the power is out, but because there is no 12:01.

God delivers us to this paradise. He delivers us to the place where the Tree of Life bears fruit each month and its leaves are for the healing of the nations—not healing sin that happens then, but the full manifestation of the forgiveness accomplished long ago on the cross. We are restored fully to God.

The dry, cracked earth, the withered trees, the torrential rains, the tsunamis and hurricanes, the tornadoes and earthquakes—no more.

Instead, we truly live in God’s country.

A land that truly flows with milk and honey.

A land where there is no heartbreak.

A land where there is no sin—a land ruled by peace, love, and hope.

This is coming. At some point.

When? We do not know.

Someone recently pointed out that a blood moon is coming up, and now my social media feeds—because I consume a lot of theology online—are filled with predictions about Christ returning on some calculated date tied to this blood moon. I do not know how many times such predictions have failed.

We do not know when.

But we do have a job to do today.

Christ’s kingdom has come to us through the preaching of the Word and administration of His Sacraments. And when we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we pray that we would remain in that kingdom and that God would use us to bring His kingdom to others. We participate in the inbreaking of the new creation through the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins in Christ’s name—through the proclamation of Christ crucified for sinners, for the world.

Even though we still live on this side of eternity, still affected by sin, the invasion has already happened. Christ has invaded this earth, overthrown its prince, and cast him out. He has been defanged and declawed.

All we are waiting for is the victory parade.

And so we have work to do while we await the new eternity.

That work is to proclaim Christ and Him crucified—the reversal of the curse, the culmination of all curses. I will probably say this many times over the next four weeks: the ultimate curse is death.

But what happens on Easter?

Death is overthrown.

May we be proclaimers of the reversed curse, of the risen Christ—of hope, of love, of the promise of paradise—Christ our Lord.

In His name, amen.