SERMON ON GENESIS 3:1–13

The sermon of this review, delivered supposedly as an exposition of Genesis 3:1–13, bears the appearance of earnest instruction, yet underneath it lies a hollowness that must be named without hesitation: the Word of God adulterated. The introduction is feeble, suggesting only covering the first 7 verses, when in fact the sermon roams far.

For here, the minister stands before the sacred text of the Fall – the passage upon which the ruin and misery of the world is made known and the necessity of redemption depend – and he treats it not as divine revelation, but as matter for the vain conjectures of his own brain. 

Mr Preacher Man delivers a sermon full of cultural complaint and moral appeal, yet ignores the Saviour. He speaks much of the serpent’s strategy, of Eve’s supposed thought processes, of Adam’s behaviour as a modern man might display it, and of the many sins and distractions of our age; but of Christ, not at all. NOT AT ALL!

This is the first great shortfall of the sermon. It builds on last week’s disaster by continuing to ignore death itself. It reduces the Fall to a series of mental missteps. Mr Preacher Man imagines Eve as “upgrading the tree,” as “downgrading God,” as shifting boundaries, adopting the serpent’s vocabulary, and drifting toward self-deception. It’s as though these psychological inventions were the true marrow of Moses’ text. Has Moses really used such observations as the foundation for the first 5 Books of the Bible? Hardly.

Adam, too, becomes a moral fable – passive, uninvolved, inattentive – the very image in Mr Preacher Man’s mind of the modern male. Sin becomes misperception. Temptation becomes misinformation. The Fall becomes a confused moment of faulty reasoning. Such a reduction is not merely insufficient; it is untrue. This is not the solemn narrative of Man’s rebellion against his Maker. 

It is a shallow gloss, the idle speculation of the schoolmen, and it leaves the hearers needing coddling, not Christ.

If this vain-conjectural reading of the Fall were not grievous enough, the sermon commits a second omission even more severe: it passes over the covenantal structure of the text in silence. Genesis 3 is not merely a tragedy of two individuals; it is the collapse of the Covenant of Works, the moment in which the federal head of humanity – Adam – plunges his entire posterity into guilt, corruption, and death. Mr Preacher Man, you read the sentence, “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return,” yet you do not interpret it as the entrance of death into the world. Or as the fulfilment of the warning given in Genesis 2:17, or as the judicial curse that falls not only upon Adam but upon all who descend from him.

Despite preaching Genesis 3:1–13, the very text where sin enters the world, Mr Preacher Man-

• never defines death,
• never explains sin’s origin,
• never preaches sin’s universality,
• never connects sin to death,
• never connects sin to judgment,
• never connects sin to Christ.

Instead, Mr Preacher Man fills the sermon with:

• deception,
• confusion,
• wrong information,
• misperception,
• poor decision-making,
• “obsession” with the tree,
• psychological drift.

Mr Preacher Man, you prefer the fig leaves to Christ!

Mr Preacher Man, you’re not preaching Adam as representative. You’re not preaching original sin. You’re not preaching inherited guilt. You’re not preaching imputation. Instead, you speak of male passivity, of cultural patterns, of the way temptation “lets us down” after the momentary thrill. And just to be clear here Mr Preacher Man, if you insist denying Adam as our head, then you must also deny Christ as the last Adam. Your first error compels the other.

 Preacher Man-

Where is the guilt?

Where is the judgment?

Where is death?

Where is the wrath of God?

And so dear Readers, you are left with a Fall drained of its theological weight. It’s a Fall that demands little more than your self-improved discernment and psychological clarity. No wonder there is a famine of Christ in our Churches.

But these first and second failures pale before the third, and as I have already hinted at, Mr Preacher Man’s near-total absence of Christ, and with Him the complete collapse of the passage’s Christological foundation for the remainder of the Scriptures.

Mr Preacher Man, you stand in the pulpit given to you by our fore-fathers. But the tongues of the Reformers would have become flaming swords in response to your fumbling. For when Christ is hidden from the people, when the cure is withheld though the disease is mortal, when the serpent’s voice is amplified and our need for the Saviour’s victory silenced, then the preacher is no longer a minister of the gospel but a blind guide, and his pulpit is no longer a place of life but of bondage and death.

 Mr Preacher Man –

You preached psychology where you should have preached Christ.

You preached effort where you should have preached grace.

You preached vigilance where you should have preached victory.

You preached the serpent’s subtlety where you should have preached his doom.

If psychology is your interpretation of the Fall, what then is your understanding of Christ?

A counsellor?

A helper of the morally inclined?

A promoter of clearer thinking?

A mere example of childlike trust?

For the Christ of Scripture is not the remedy for poor perspective.

He is the Conqueror of death.

He is the Destroyer of the works of the devil.

He is the Second Adam who restores what the first Adam ruined.

He is the Mediator who reconciles sinners to God by His own blood.

He is the righteousness that covers the nakedness fig leaves cannot hide.

He is the Seed who crushes the serpent’s head.

He is everything Adam failed to be.

Yet you spoke of Him only at the edges – a closing formula in prayer, your passing reference, a name invoked as an incantation for good luck, but not proclaimed. You mouthed the words of the curse but refused to declare their meaning, for had you preached it truly, you would have been forced to preach Christ – and that you did not do. You gave us Adam’s faults but not the need of Christ’s obedience. You spoke of the curse but not the Saviour’s answer.

 And so, Mr Preacher Man: leave Pelagius to rot in his grave.

Away with every vain attempt of yours to raise that heretic from his grave with spells like shame, confusion, obsession, misperception, loss of innocence, “the letdown after temptation”. Leave also all your talk of clothing as self-presentation and modern cultural sins. These are trifles and shadows. They are reeds that snap beneath the weight of guilt. They bind the conscience but cannot liberate it. They dress a wound but supply no balm of Gilead.

Your semi-Pelagian preaching  of this gospel of self-repair, self-rising, self-clarifying  must be cast from the kirk. For where man’s effort is exalted and Christ is obscured, there reigns not the Spirit of Christ but the tyranny of Antichrist. And your sermon, Mr Preacher Man, is thick with that tyranny. You set the sinner to labour under the law while withholding the grace by which alone he may stand. You command him to resist the serpent while never announcing the One who has already crushed the serpent's head. This is cruelty, not care. It is not the gospel of Paul, Augustine, Calvin, or Knox. Happy day they all died before this sermon was preached. And if I am being too harsh, if you do truly know Christ, why do you labour so fiercely to hide Him?

Either set Christ before the people, or have a semblance of honesty and say you don’t know Him. 

Dear Reader, if you must torture yourself, the sermon is on YouTube