Powerpoint Pictures: Egg; Smashed Egg

What do you love about living in this world?  But not everything about this world is great.  There is famine, there is war, and there are natural disasters.  There is lots of sadness in this world.  Why?

Back in Genesis 1, God saw all that He had made and it was good.  What went wrong?

Adam and Eve were living in the garden of Eden, the best place on the whole earth to live.  There were good things to see, good things to taste and good things to do.  As long as they obeyed the one good rule, they could carry on living in this wonderful garden forever.

But what happens next is one of the saddest stories in the whole Bible.  One day, a serpent comes along, sssing up to Eve.  “Did God really say you couldn’t eat from any tree in the garden?  Surely a little bite of the fruit from that tree would be okay.  You won’t really die if you ate from it.

We read that “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.  She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (Genesis 3:6).  They disobeyed God (which the Bible calls sin) and this caused them to feel sad and ashamed.

Now if you do something wrong, what happens to you?  You get punished.  At home that might mean no TV, no playstation, or sitting on the naughty step.  At school that might mean standing outside the head teacher’s office or doing lines.

Adam and Eve had done something wrong, they broke God’s rule, and so they were punished by God.  Their punishment was to live in the world as it is now.

[See an egg]  Imagine this egg represents the perfect world that God made.  The punishment God gave Adam and Eve was for this to happen to the world.  [Smash the egg]  The world is still a good world, like this is still an egg, but it is damaged.

Work was now hard for Adam.  Childbirth was painful for Eve.  They both had to leave the beautiful God and one day they would die.  This is the world we live in today.  It is full of good things, but it is a damaged world.

There was one bit of good news in this sad story.  God promises that one day someone would come who could put this world back together again!