A Review of a Woke Sermon on Genesis 3
A brief review of a woke sermon that belittles a Holy God.
If Mr Preacher Man knows Christ, it is a marvel that he labours so hard to hide Him. This sermon on Genesis 3 does not merely fall short. It falls silent where Scripture thunders. It drapes velvet over the flaming sword. It turns the holy ground of Eden into a counselling office. And in doing so, it commits an offense not only against the text but against the God who spoke it.
The first and clearest fault is this. The preacher nowhere acknowledges that sin is an offense against God. Not once. He catalogues what sin does to us. He rehearses the emotional debris, the relational friction, the psychological shadows, the disruption of human harmony. But the one thing he never says is the one thing Genesis 3 declares from the first verse to the last.
Sin is rebellion against a holy God. Sin desecrates the image He placed upon mankind. Sin breaks His command. Sin incurs His judgment. Sin awakens His righteous wrath. Sin renders Adam guilty and his children condemned in him. This sermon repeats the sin of Adam by ignoring God’s word. This is the heart of the chapter, the reason we are born as enemies of God, and the preacher never touched it.
Because he never names sin as an offense against God, he never explains the greatest catastrophe of the Fall. The image of God in man is not merely bruised. It is defiled. Not erased, but corrupted. Bent. Darkened. Turned from the God who made us to the self that now enthrones itself. Genesis 3 is the desecration of God’s likeness, yet Archer speaks of this as though it were no more than an unfortunate shift in self-awareness. A spiritual wardrobe malfunction.
And again, because he never names sin as an offense against God, he never names Adam’s sin as our sin. There is no mention of original sin in his sermon. No federal headship. No imputed guilt. No inherited corruption. According to Archer, we are troubled and distracted, but not depraved. We avoid God, but we do not offend Him. We suffer consequences, but we do not stand condemned. The god of this sermon is muzzled like a dog. If this is preaching, then Paul wasted his breath in Romans.
This shrinking of the problem of sin produces an even greater shrinking of the Christ who must answer it. A sermon that removes divine offense removes divine redemption. Archer presents Jesus as the one who helps us back toward Edenic well-being, not the one who satisfies the justice of a holy God. Christ becomes a restorer of relational balance, not the second Adam whose righteousness must clothe the unrighteous. A therapist, not a Redeemer. A companion, not a sacrificial Lamb.
This is why the sermon collapses. The preacher has created a new god. A god who is never offended. A god without holiness. A god who rules without law, judges without wrath, and saves without righteousness. A god tailor made to offend no one and to confront nothing. In short, a god who looks nothing like the God of Genesis 3 and everything like the god of modern spirituality.
And once that counterfeit god is enthroned, the First Commandment is broken before the congregation’s eyes. You shall have no other gods before Me. Yet this sermon puts another god before Him, a soft deity who nods sympathetically at sin but never condemns it, who walks in the garden but never summons Adam to account, who observes the Fall but never enforces the curse, who sends Christ but never requires His blood.
In such preaching, the offense is great. For when the true God is hidden, the true Christ is hidden with Him. And when the true Christ is hidden, sinners are left with nothing but the preacher’s conjectures and comforts, which cannot save a soul from the ruin Genesis 3 reveals. It is therefore, a sermon that by its very nature rejects the need for repentance.
A sermon on the Fall that never speaks of divine offense, original sin, guilt, righteousness, judgment, covering, or substitution is not Christian. It is a diversion. It is a retreat from the battlefield where God has commanded us to stand.
Archer did not preach Genesis 3. He walked around it. He sentimentalised it. He reduced it. He explained it away. And in doing so, he robbed God of His glory and God’s people of the truth that leads to repentance and faith. You would be better off watching an episode of Pride and Prejudice, for Austen offers sentiment honestly, while this sermon smuggles it in under the pretence of God’s Word.
If he knows Christ, why does he hide Him behind the curtains of moralism and therapy. If he knows the God of Genesis 3, why does he replace Him with an idol of his own design. Why hide the revelation of the cause of God’s holy wrath at fallen Man?
A review like this must ask plainly. Has the preacher forgotten the holiness of God. Or has he feared the displeasure of man more than the offense of sin. Either way, the result is the same. A sermon with no thunder. A Christ with no cross. A gospel with no power.
Let any who preach Genesis 3 tremble. For the God who drove Adam from the garden is the God who still reigns in holiness. And the Christ promised in Genesis 3:15 is the Christ who must be preached in glory, not hidden beneath the debris of human conjecture.
The sermon is available on YouTube: Sin and its Consequences . (Even the title ignores God).
