Lesson 4 Study Notes
Well again, friends, Bishop Andy C. Lutie here, and I'm coming to you with this, my final lesson on this mini course on Adam and Eve. I've so enjoyed the time that I've spent and I pray that it has proven to be a blessing to you as well. Now, as I have explained in each of my lessons, I'm doing this as a compliment and a supplement to our efforts to restore our Christian education ministry. We recognize that the pandemic has precluded and interrupted so much of what we were doing prior to 2019.
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And as we rebound, and as we are attempting to be resilient and to recover some of the ground that we've lost these last several years, this is my contribution and my effort to do a little bit of Sunday school, a little bit of Christian education, and to make it available to as many people as possible. Now, today, as I put this together,
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I want to talk about the impact of the Adam and Eve story on Christianity, its impact on Christianity. One of the things that I want to help you understand is that the Adam and Eve story is found in the first book of the Bible and its first chapter and is actually the first story that is told in the Bible. But it has an enormous impact upon what we believe as Christians and the foundation of what we believe as Christians actually does not really occur and surface until we get to the New Testament.
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But as I have said to you time and time again, you can't understand Matthew if you don't understand Genesis. So this lesson examines how Adam and Eve or the Adam and Eve story, its impact on what we believe uniquely as Christians today, perhaps even more particularly as Baptists today or full Gospel Baptists. If you're watching this as a member of our congregation or even a new member of our congregation, we are full Gospel Baptists. And so I want you to be clear and I want you to understand what this story way off in the Old Testament has to do with our New Testament practice of Christianity. And then why Jesus and the New Testament, even though the Adam and Eve story is an Old Testament story, it directly impacts what we believe and what we practice in the New
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Testament. There is a connecting of dots between the Old Testament and the New Testament. I want to spend just a minute or two in this lesson today making that as clear as possible speaking with as much clarity as I can muster so that you can exit this experience fully understanding the connection between the two. Again, and I won't read it this week in the interest of time, but this is the scripture from Genesis 1, 26 through 28 that we have been examining and using as our biblical foundation for now, the fourth lesson on this topic. Let me begin here, and that is with the global appeal of the Adam and Eve story. All of the major western religions embrace the story of adam and eve so it's not unique
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to just christianity and if you look here on the screen there are three symbols all the way to the right immediately behind me is the symbol for islam well let me go in its chronological order the center sign or center symbol is that of the hebrews or the jewish
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the Hebrews or the Jewish faith community. That would be followed by the symbol to your far left and to my far right, and that would be the Christian cross which is symbolic of Christianity. Then of course, in the 7th century AD, we had the advent of Islam and all three of these major Western religions have a great deal of reverence and a great deal of respect for the Adam and Eve story. They all view the Adam and Eve story as the beginning of our faith narrative. The Jewish community does, and that goes back some 4,000 years.
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The Christian community does, that goes back to now over 2000 years, and the Muslim community does, and that goes back to the 7th century. And so, that would be for the last 1300, 13 to 1400 years. So, all faith communities of the Western civilization have a very high regard and respect for this story of Adam and Eve because it impacts what they believe, what they practice and how they view their own faith community. So remember, I've been talking in earlier lessons about the fall of Adam, the decision of Adam and Eve not to obey the commandments of God, to exercise
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free will which God gave them, but in that instance they decided to use that free will not to obey God, but rather to disobey God. That created a gulf, a chasm, a fall from grace, a separation between God and man. And in our faith community, we believe that it is uniquely Jesus who was God dressed up as a man who came to man in order to bring man back to God. And so it is the purpose of the Adam and Eve story
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explains man's separation from God and what I have taught you earlier as the original sin.
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We also talked about the image of God
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and how we were trying to get back to where God originally placed mankind. And that would need to happen via the new Adam. Now, there were some terms that I taught you in this mini course like incarnation and atonement at one minute. And since the old Adam, watch this, lost paradise, it became the responsibility of the new Adam in the person of Jesus to restore what the first Adam had lost. Christianity teaches that Jesus is the sacrifice that satisfies the Old Testament sacrificial system
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in order to redeem a covenant with God. Now, I don't want to get into this too deep, and perhaps in some of my future courses and Christian educational efforts, I can be a little more detailed, a little more specific here. But one of the efforts that humanity tried to do in order to appease and compensate the loss of covenant with God was to make sacrifices unto God. And that if God accepted the sacrifice, it would repair, at
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least for a season, the relationship between God and man. And in that effort, there was a very sophisticated sacrificial system that was devised in the Old Testament, where a paschal lamb would be tied, as you see here on the screen, and its blood would be offered to God as a sacrifice to try and reseal that relationship between God and man. You've heard the term, the Lamb of God. But when you hear people in church talk about the Lamb of God, they're talking about there was no animal that could repair the sin of man. So God had to come as a man, allow himself to be sacrificed in order to restore the relationship and the covenant between God and man. Let me say that. Since no animal,
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The sin of man, God had to, remember incarnation, God had to become a man and then allow himself to be sacrificed so that his blood could repair the relationships between God and man and his spilled blood would repair the covenant between God and man. So, through redemption, we are restored to the image of God, complete with the moral behavior that accompanies it and all of the other attachments and levels of accountability that we need to portray to demonstrate that we are indeed made in the image of God. We treat our neighbor right, we treat ourselves right,
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we treat other communities right, we value them, we respect them, we hold them up. We hold them with high regard and esteem because we understand that we all are made in the image of God. It is Jesus here and Jesus alone that repairs the breach between God and man. Where man has been separated from God and God was separated from man. It was Jesus who was God incarnate that brought man back to God and brought God back to man.
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Well, friends, again, that takes up all of my time. I certainly thank you for yours. This is the first in a series of many courses that I will be doing month after month to help you understand the very fundamental, basic Bible stories and Bible lessons that you certainly ought to be aware of and ought to understand as a member of the church, as a saved individual, and go in happiness. For a saved individual, and go in happiness. For
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the author of the saying goes with you.