Hey guys, welcome back to week 14 of the Restored Bible Study series. I'm praying for you that you're growing in God, that Christ is being formed in you, and that you're finding this material helpful to establish yourself in Christ. There's nothing more important than having a solid foundation in Christ, relationship with Him, how to walk with Him, so that you thrive and prosper in Christ for the rest of your life. This week, we're going to take a look at, first of two weeks, looking at the grace of God and how we live by the grace of God. And today, I want to talk to you about every day choosing life over choosing law, or, and putting it another way, choosing the tree of life over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If you have your Bible ready, please open it to Genesis chapter 2. I want to read you a few things there. But first, I want to kind of share where we're going here in the next few weeks. There's a spirit called the Spirit of Religion. It is the, it's the oldest, it's the mother of all strongholds. It's the oldest trick in the book for the devil to keep us away from a genuine, authentic, life-giving relationship with our Creator. And it began in the Garden of Eden, as I'll show you in just a moment.
But here's what the Spirit of Religion looks like. In Christ, we now have a restoration. That's why we call the series Restored. A restoration of purity on the inside of us. All the reasons why we did everything we did that ruined our lives before was because we had cravings and desires, as we've looked at, that took us off track, that promised us the moon and the stars and all the heavens, and gave us nothing but misery, or a mixed bag of it. The things that we thought would bring pleasure to our lives had some pleasure in it, but it was like a poison pill in the middle of what we were eating.
So what we're looking at now is what religion does is it promises us a relationship with God that's based on rules. Instead of just relationship with God, we now relate with God as the rule maker in the sky. And as I shared with you last time, the killjoy of all things in the sky. In fact, I used to believe that the Bible was a book of rules, a book of do's, and a book of don'ts. And that that's what God was like. He was just there to make sure we knew how to stay in the lines, don't color outside the lines, and that life was this restrictive kind of box of do's and don'ts.
The truth is that God is life. That God, the promise of Jesus is life, and that more abundantly. And so he can't be a God who just is all about, hey, make sure you do as you're told, and don't go outside of all that. There's something more that God desires. And I want to show you how religion got introduced when we became the determining factor of what's right and what's wrong. So we're back in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve began their relationship with God, just walking with God in the cool of the day, just relating with him, enjoying him as dad, like we saw last week, relating with God as this beautiful creator and maker and lover of all things and especially of them.
And all of a sudden, in an instant, when they ate from this other tree, God became this scary, judgmental, harsh God that for the first time in their lives, they hid from God. We're not going to look deeply at that. We've looked some at that in the past already, this course. But for whatever reason that we'll look at today, now God became a scary thing instead of a, hey, I can't wait to see dad for our daily walk. So Genesis chapter 2, we have the Garden of Eden. And after God forms Adam from the dust of the earth, it says this, The Lord God planted a garden toward the east in Eden, and there he placed the man whom he had formed.
And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that's pleasing to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So it's like these, you can picture this, these two trees that are specifically named, are both in the middle of the garden, and they're right near each other, right within access of each other. So God said, He commanded the man, saying, From any treat in the garden you may eat freely. This is verse 16 now. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat.
For in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. Or another way of translating that from the original Hebrew language is, In dying you will die. In other words, that tree looks appetizing. It looks amazing. In fact, when you read chapter 3, Eden, Eve was looking at this tree, and it seemed like it was good to eat. It was pleasing to the eye. What could possibly go wrong? We know now all of what could go wrong as a result of that tree. Every disease, every war, every evil known to mankind was not in that tree.
It's not as though it was like a poison apple from a fairy tale that we read, you know, from stories that we told our kids. It's not like that. What happened with this tree was it opened their eyes to see some things. Now, is it because God did not want Adam to know the difference between right and wrong? Of course not. They already knew the difference between right and wrong, but here's the difference. This tree contained something that would open their eyes to be aware of evil in a way that they were never aware of it before.
You know, you can be good without being tempted to evil. There are certain things, like we have some of this left in us. You and I have not been tempted to sin in every way that's possible to sin. I had certain temptations that drew me in, and still to this day, there's some things I could be tempted with. And then there are other things I could walk right by, and I'm just not tempted to do that. You know, I've never been tempted to do hard drugs, for example. I saw my friends using hard drugs and such in college, and it just never appealed to me.
It was never a temptation. I could be the only sober one in a room of people smoking pot, and I was never tempted with it. Alcohol, on the other hand, that was a big temptation, and I fell hard and fast into that. To do something, doesn't mean we're going to do all things. What we find and what we learn about our heart from the Scriptures, is that there's the potential inside of us to do every kind of evil. Adam and Eve had the potential inside of them to do any kind of evil, but they were never tempted to do it. Why?
Because they didn't have the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe a helpful thing would be to understand the Hebrew understanding of knowledge. I think that knowledge means I know something in my mind. So, for example, I know Derek Jeter, because he's the best Yankee ball player who's ever been. Maybe now Aaron Judge might be going for that throne. But I know him, but he doesn't know me, and I don't really know him. I know of him. I know him in my mind. I know the ball player he was. Knowledge in the Scriptures is always experiential.
In other words, if you haven't experienced it, the Hebrews would say, you don't know it yet. You know about it, but you don't know it yet. So Adam and Eve might have known about evil, but they didn't know evil. Not until this day. And in fact, they may have been completely naive to the possibility of evil at this point, because they lived in paradise. They lived in the garden of pleasure, and there were no ways to corrupt it yet. They hadn't explored any of those. Now with the tasting from this tree, their eyes were opened, just like God warned them, or like the devil said would happen.
And now all of a sudden they were acquainted with evil. You know how we have appetites, like depending what culture you grow up in, there are certain foods that you'll always crave. And the thing is, you don't crave foods from cultures that you've never tasted their food. So I've never tried Himalayan food. And so I don't ever crave whatever Himalayan food means, because I haven't tried it. But you put a Greek gyro, gyro like we say it here in the West, gyro in front of me, and my mouth's going to start watering. In fact, just thinking about it right now, my mouth started watering.
I can crave food because I've tasted it before. We don't crave food we've never tasted. So if you've ever asked the question, yeah, come on, God, what would be the big deal? Let them take one bite from that tree, curiosity satisfied. Now they could move on and just enjoy paradise. Well, the problem is once you've tasted something, especially if initially it tastes good, if it's pleasing in some way, if it satisfies a desire of the flesh or a desire of the heart, now there's always, that door is now open and there's always the possibility. I'm going to go try that again.
And that's what's led to every single thing that we do that satisfies our flesh, that brings harm into our lives. That's where it began with one taste. So from that tree, that created the spirit of religion. And why do I say that? Well, it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What's religion? It's a man-made approach to get closer to God. So we make rules. And every religion throughout all history has had certain ways that you approach God. You make sacrifices of some sort. You do certain behaviors or withhold certain behaviors.
Some of the really nasty pagan religions, cut yourself until you bleed. Put your firstborn child on an altar and burn them alive. That was the god Moloch who was in Canaan. And there's all kinds of things that people have done through the centuries, through the millennia, to draw nearer to the gods as they perceive them. And the problem, of course, is that for one thing, we do some pretty crazy things thinking that that'll make us get closer to God. So we became, after eating from that tree, the ones who determine what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's evil. And we have a tendency to change the rules.
We move the goalposts. In other words, the root of all pagan belief is that I want to live this way. And so I'll create a God who always agrees with me. And we're amazing at doing that, aren't we? In fact, one of the things I'd like to warn you about now is that if you have a thinking about God or a thinking of what His ways are like, and you didn't test it in the Scriptures, or you find that the Scriptures disagree with you, always go with the Scriptures. Because the first sign or symptom of creating a pagan Christ is that He seems to always agree with us and see things our way.
When God is higher than our thoughts in every way, God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. His ways are exceedingly higher than our ways. And always when we're the one determining what's good, what's bad, what's right, and what's wrong, we're in need of checking to make sure, is that actually? The other thing we do with rules is we make them too strict. In fact, when you read in Genesis 3, when the serpent's talking to Eve, he says to her, Did God really tell you you can't eat from every tree in the garden? And her response was, Well, we can eat from every tree in the garden, but this tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God, we cannot eat from it or even touch it. God never said don't touch it.
You see what she did already? She added another rule onto what God told them. Just one rule is all God said. And in some ways, you can't even really call it a rule. It was more like a warning. It was a godly, loving warning. Like when we tell our kids, don't go play in traffic. We're loving them. We're not giving them a restrictive constraint on their lives. It's that we desperately don't want them to get run over by a car. And God was saying that tree right there, I had to create it.
Why? Because you need to have free will. If we're going to have a love-based relationship, this can't be a prison. You have to have the freedom to leave whenever you want to. And there's the tree that can give you that choice. You can choose life in relationship with me, or you can choose death, which will come through your own choices between good and evil. Now having an awakened craving for evil things that you'll see very soon will bring destruction. In the case of Adam and Eve, it was in their first and second born child.
One murdered, the other one. It happened that quickly. Their minds and hearts deteriorated to where Cain killed Abel because he got jealous. That's how quickly iniquity worked in them. And the thing we really ask and what we struggle with, and this is where we call it moral relativism, who makes the rules? Who gets to tell me what's right or wrong? You don't get to tell me what's right or wrong. You do you, I'll do me. There is no such thing as right or wrong. It's just however we choose to live our life.
Just don't hurt anybody. That maybe is the only rule. Other than that, do whatever you want. So that's what we do and that's what happened with that tree. So we made life and God all about rules. I think by now we're up to week 14 together. You know that's not what God's like and that's not what Jesus is like. We were saved by the grace of God. We didn't achieve the grace of God by obeying certain rules. We were given the grace of God as a free gift. To do with it whatsoever we will.
And here's the mistake we can make. That even after coming to Christ, we can begin to shift back into a rules orientation. The basic difference between living by the law and living by grace is that grace is a motivating factor that comes from within. That there's something alive on the inside of us. It's Christ in us. It's the grace of God at work on the inside of us. It makes us desire good things. It makes us know when we're heading down a wrong road, there's that thing in us that goes, I shouldn't do that.
We call it the conscience in some places. And there's something inside that motivates us to do right and not to do wrong. A rules orientation is when we need somebody else to tell us, this is what you should do. This is what you should not do. It's right or wrong. It's good or bad. And now we've made, there we are again. God, the cosmic rule maker, kill joy in the sky. And that's not what this relationship is like. That's not what we were born again into. In fact, Romans 10 verse 4 says it, as strong as it could be said, for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to those who believe.
In other words, once you have Christ in you, you don't need the law to be righteous anymore. You don't need outside influence to tell you what to do. You can just follow the inner guide of the Spirit of God. Now I have to hastily add this before we move on to one other scripture before we go today. And make sure that we understand. That's not the same as saying follow your heart. Because sometimes when we say follow your heart, it means follow your emotions. Follow the feeling of the moment when you feel compelled to do something.
That's as unreliable as thin ice. And that's not a good way to go about life. Learning to hear the voice of God is something we'll cover in this course. But learning to discern the voice of God, the voice of our awakened new heart and conscience inside of us is not the same as is following your passions and your desires wherever they may go. Because depending how long it took for us to come to Christ, we've spent a lifetime developing all kinds of other ways of satisfying the desires of our heart. And a craving for something can easily feel like a leading of the Holy Spirit or a desire that seems like there's nothing wrong with it.
We want to tune into Christ in us and do good and do what's right because of that. So the other scripture I'd like to go with you is a New Testament demonstration, really. Paul describing what it's like to have the law at work on the inside of us after we've come to the grace of God and wrestling with the old way that we lived, which was rules-based. Either rules where we said, I'm always right, God's wrong. I'm moving the goalposts to accommodate my own desires and cravings. Or a God who became so strict we wanted nothing to do with him. The law of God on one side.
And on the other side, we have the grace of God at work in us now, which loves what God loves and hates what God hates. And we have this new thing at work. And Paul describes like it's like a war going on inside of us. So I'm going to read you out of Romans 7. I'm going to kind of hop, skip, and jump through this for now. And in your devotions this week, you'll be reading this whole chapter. It's a gem of a chapter and really, really important to understand. Because what we're really about, Jesus did not come into the world to create a new religion.
He came to restore us to relationship with God the Father as it was in the beginning. And in fact, in many ways, better than it was in the beginning. Because Adam and Eve could walk with God in the cool of the day. We have Christ in us. He's actually alive on the inside of us now. He not only restored everything the enemy stole, he gave us an upgrade to our system. So Romans 7, and all of the book of Romans, the first eight chapters, we'll be looking at soon. We're going to Romans 8.
Romans chapter 8 kind of sums it up. But it's the case for grace, is what we call it. And it's Paul really, really writing as he's understood Christ to be and understood this new covenant to be. Really, really going after it with the Romans saying, I'm compelling you. I'm pleading with you. Get out from under the law. Stop living by a set of rules and guidelines and start living by the grace of God that's alive in you. It's so much more powerful than the law's condemnation. The grace of God is all the more powerful than that.
So, Romans 7, And don't you know, brethren, I'm speaking to those who know the law, that the law only has jurisdiction over a person as long as he lives. For the married man or the married woman is bound by law to her husband while he's alive. But if her husband dies, she's released from the law concerning her husband. So, that's just the section where Paul's saying you died to, you had to obey the law before you came to Christ. It was the only way that you were ever going to be righteous because inside of you were all these cravings for evil. So, you needed the law to constrain you. And in some sense, it's not all wrong to every once in a while read a Bible verse that says, you know, I probably shouldn't be doing that thing I'm doing.
Like, there are some sins that are accepted in the body of Christ. And then you go reading along in the scripture and go, oh, wow, I thought it was okay to talk about people when I'm together with my friends. But that's gossip. And that's really harmful. It's sinful even. I should probably stop doing that. Sometimes just being awakened to what's wrong can be helpful. But Paul's saying you're not bound to that any longer. So, now that we've been released to that, Paul says, verse 7, what shall we say then? Is the law sin or is there something wrong with the law?
No way, man. Never be. On the contrary, I would not have come to known sin except through the law. For example, I wouldn't have known about coveting if the law didn't say you shall not covet. So, for example, you know, I didn't know it was wrong to desire what belongs to somebody else until I read the Bible and the Bible said, hey, you shouldn't do that. No. Well, then I'll stop doing that. But here's the problem. Sin, verse 8, taking opportunity through the commandment, induced in me or produced in me coveting of every kind.
And so, now that I know I'm not supposed to do it, I found that all of a sudden I realize I'm coveting everybody's everything all the time. That's just one example of so many other things you could have used. So, in other words, you ever tell, you know when somebody, like I'm going to tell you right now, don't think about pink sheep. And what's the first thing that pops in your mind? You're thinking about pink sheep right now, which is a really weird picture. It's better than pink elephants. But because I told you not to, instantly your mind goes to thinking about it.
So, when the law says, hey, you shouldn't do this, what Paul's saying is, I found that there was this thing in me, all of a sudden desires it even more. Now that I know that it exists and I know that it's a wrong desire that's in me. And he goes on, I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died. Remember what God said about that tree? And the day in which you eat it, you shall surely die. Now, they didn't die in that day, did they? They didn't drop dead after they ate from that tree.
But what God was warning them about was now death is going to begin to work in you. The whole system of creation was made to work when the sons and daughters of God are living in perfect harmony with the Creator. The earth responds, the creation itself responds, Romans says, to the manifestation of the sons of God. We were created in a certain way. So as soon as we begin to think and our emotions begin to go down a road and our actions begin to follow down a road of sin, it actually wires, we're wired in such a way that it now reduces our lifespan. It's that powerful what happened in that.
And we're finding this out with all kinds of things we don't have time to get into. But one great example is unforgiveness. It is now well known in brain chemistry and brain research that holding on to unforgiveness actually releases chemicals in the brain that are an invitation for brain cancer. And actually cancers throughout the body, not just in the brain. So physiologically, we respond to sin. And that's what God's warning was. Hey, listen, if you eat from that tree, you could have lived forever by eating from the tree of life.
But now that you're eating from that tree, you're shortening your lifespan and you are going to experience death one day. So that's what that was all about. I'm going to hop down now to verse 14. We know that the law is spiritual, but I am of flesh and I've been sold into bondage to sin before. For what I'm doing, I don't understand. And this is a classic line. And I hope you'll find freedom in knowing that Paul the Apostle, dude wrote half the Old Testament, New Testament rather, he wrote half the New Testament.
And he was experiencing the same thing you and I experience. Here it is. What I'm doing, I don't understand. I am not practicing what I want to do, but I'm doing the very thing that I hate. If I do the thing I want to do, I agree with the law and I say the law is good. In other words, the good thing that I know I'm supposed to do, I agree that it's good. But now I find this other thing that's working in me. And now he says this, verse 17.
So now it's no longer I am the one who is doing it, but sin that dwells in me. We'll have more on that. And I know I've mentioned it before. But you are now the righteousness of God in Christ, right? He became sin who knew no sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ. You're not a sinner anymore. You were a sinner. You got saved by grace. Now you're a saint. That's who we are. So why do we continue to sin? We still have some sin that dwells in us.
It's like a disease. If I have cancer, I'm not cancer. I have cancer. So if you sin after coming to Christ, you're not a sinner. You just have sin in you. And sometimes it overwhelms you and it causes you to take action on those sinful desires. That's what Paul's getting at here. He goes on and here's the thing. I find then, verse 21, the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully agree with the law of God in the inner man, but I find another law working in the members of my body.
And then I become a prisoner again. And he goes on with this whole thing. And now it's become death to me again. And there's that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So in wrapping up Paul's long explanation of how to live by grace and how grace is so much more powerful, like in a whole other universe more powerful than trying to live by rules and disciplines and all kinds of hoops to jump through to stay holy and pious and righteous with God. He wraps it up by saying, I know that I'm saved because I love the law of God. I love the ways of God in my inner man, but I know I'm contending with it in my body.
And that's why he says, going on into chapter 8, verse 4, the requirement of the law, I'm sorry, verse 3, what the law could not do. In other words, what external rules couldn't do, weak as it was through our flesh, we couldn't keep the law. We tried our best to be good Boy Scouts and, you know, Girl Scouts. And we tried to do good things and not do bad things. And we kept falling on our face in the middle. It was weak through sin. God condemns sin in the flesh through Jesus Christ.
So the requirement of the law might be fulfilled. And those who don't walk according to the flesh, the law, the striving to be holy, the striving to be godly, we don't walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. When we choose to live according to our flesh and try to fight and strive to remain righteous, we're back eating in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, eating of that fruit. We're desperately trying to eat more good fruit than bad fruit. In other words, we're trying desperately to make our good outweigh our bad in our life. And oh my goodness, what struggle that is. Paul ends it, who will deliver me from this body of death?
I can't stand this struggle anymore. And he ends it with these words, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. He has set us free from that body of death. And here's our alternative. And I'm going to close with this. Back to the garden. It was really a choice between two trees. Adam and Eve did not have eternal life in and of themselves. They had to eat from another tree in order to have eternal life. And it was called the tree of life. From that, they could eat freely. That tree bears fruit in every season.
That tree has life and that more abundantly in it. And that tree has a name and it's Jesus Christ. I got good news for you. The way to overcome, the way to live by the grace of God, is not to fight harder against sin, but it's to eat more of the tree of life. Jesus said, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood, you have no life within you. Converse is also true. If you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink of his blood, that's embodied in the elements of communion.
But more importantly, it's embodied of taking our daily bread, of spending time in his presence and feasting on the grace of God and the Spirit of God and the joy of the Lord and the peace of the Lord and the righteousness of the Lord, his, not ours, then we have life and that more abundantly. And that, my friends, is the secret to walking out this salvation with joy and maintaining a peaceful, loving walk with God. I love you. I'll see you again next week.