First & Last Adam

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. My name is Carl, Carl Galeck. I am truly into origins. The JW Space Telescope that's gone up and is parked a million miles away or something. I don't know the specifics of it. It's just throwing up pictures and images and upsetting science and origins and how the universe began. I love listening to scientists say, we think the universe began this way. And then a week later, it's no, no, no. Or they add billions of years or they subtract millions of years. Whatever it is, I am fascinated by that and love what we learn. And certainly the heavens declare the glory of God are no phenomenon. One of the more interesting things I remember discovering is Hubble Space Telescope pointed itself at the darkest place that it could find in the sky. It took photographs of that and sent those back to Earth. We looked at it, you know, the darkest place. It was just blackness to the naked eye. But to the Hubble Space Telescope, when it focused on it, it found millions of stars. And then they sent the JW Space Telescope to look at the same spot. And it's sharper or better or clearer or bigger. I don't know what it is, but it looks further into the universe. And it said, I'm sorry, those weren't stars. They were galaxies. So that means there was millions of galaxies that contained millions of stars where we saw nothing but darkness. Does that not preach or does that preach? It was like, amen, amen. Amen. Every amen I hear extends a sermon by two to three minutes. So the echoes of Eden really resonates with me because the origins of what went on in Eden are having an incredible effect on us. Let me ask you one more sort of lead question before we kind of get into things here. And that is, what does access to God look like to you? What does access to God look like to you? When you pass from this world to the next and you will someday, you will have, Lord willing and through Christ, access to God. Like the song, I Can Only Imagine, will I absolutely be frozen in silence, overwhelmed in love? Can you embrace light? Will it be like walking in the cool of the day in the original garden? And God will be like, in Christ, a friend? I've been watching The Chosen and kind of keeping up with that. And there's some pros and cons to the whole thing. There's some extra biblical material. But I love the way they create the very human Jesus, not withdrawing from his divinity. But that's kind of critical to today because the text we're going to take a look at is going to talk about the origin of how we lost access to God. How did that happen? And where are we supposed to go from here? How do we do that? How do we get back? How do we get that access? In today's world, in today's culture, in today's political climate, how many of us, though this is a rhetorical question, I'm not taking a poll. How many of us are hopeful? Hope has kind of been shot at, hasn't it? It's been decimated. I can get myself hopeful for a while, but then I turn to the right and I read that article and I look at that information. Hope begins to sort of be eaten away like a cancer. How many of you can say you experience delight, are absolutely delighted? Not over something or somebody or someone, but are just people you say, you know, how are you doing? I'm delighted. Nobody ever says that. And if they say that to too often, you try to give them medication. It's like I'm delighted. What if what if. Our original place in time. Was with direct access to God, which provided us an incredible sense of hopefulness. We just lived in hope. We had to be hopeful. We have to muster hopefulness. We lived it. Imagine being surrounded and living in hope. A friend of mine who is my mentor in the ministry said that if fish could hit a phrase that said, if fish could speak, they wouldn't have a word for water. Right, because they're so encompassed by water. They couldn't speak despite the Disney cartoons. To the contrary. What if we lived in hope and it was just surrounding us and we anticipated that God's presence and power would overcome any difficulties, any sorrows, any issues. So what we're going to talk about today is the origin, not of the cosmological universe, but of sin. Where did this come from? How did we lose our access? What caused it? How did we lose our hopefulness? And what happened to delight? What happened to delight? Let's journey together, not to the edges of the universe as though we could find the edges of the universe, but to the edge of that and to see what our Lord's response is to that. Let's pray first. Gracious God, thank you for the opportunity to bring your word of hope and access and life. We pray for John and his family that they enjoy their time together, that they celebrate the exercise, which is theirs. We thank you for the opportunity to meet here and in a short while commission missionaries on t...