Day 7: Man Has Rebelled Against God

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

»  Humanism says man is basically good while the Bible teaches that man is basically broken. What difference does it make where you start?

»  Where do you see the consequences of rebellion in your own life?

»  What kind of death have you experienced because of your sin?

»  Talk to God about the pain you have experienced and the pain

you have caused.

»  Practice this week’s memory verse.

QUOTE

“Whenever you see confusion, you can be sure that something is wrong. Disorder in the world implies that something is out of place. Usually, at the heart of all disorder you will and man in rebellion against God. It began in the Garden of Eden and continues to this day.”
- A. W. Tozer

SCRIPTURE

“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

- Romans 3:11-12 DEVOTIONAL

God created us to love, enjoy, glorify, and obey him, and by doing so, to flourish. Why then do we struggle so much to do that? Like a complicated and delicate piece of machinery that’s broken we don’t operate the way we were designed to, and that is because of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.

God created humans with the capacity to keep his law perfectly, but that was lost when the first representative of the human race, Adam, seeking to be like God, chose to rebel and disobey Him. He fell into a condition of sin and dragged us all down with him. The Bible describes that condition in a variety of ways—spiritual rebellion, blindness, illness, bondage, and death.

As a result of the fall of man we are not just spiritually impaired, but completely broken. We are not just weak; we have no innate power at all to obey God’s law and glorify him. We are estranged from our Creator, from one another, and from the rest of creation. In this spiritually disabled condition, we’re unable to obey God’s law even in our thoughts, attitudes, and motivations. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:19).

Therefore, we stand alienated and guilty before the holy God of heaven and earth.

But how did Adam’s sin find its way to me? Through the bloodstream. God has always forbidden the eating of blood because life is in the blood. So is sin. The life and sin of our fathers is passed on to us through the process of conception. That’s a very discouraging thing to consider, of course, but it is just the beginning of the story. To rescue us, God decided to give birth to the son of man whose veins contain the blood, not of fallen man, but of God himself. This perfect blood accomplishes for us what we can never accomplish on our own - perfect atonement.