Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Genesis 3:1-21
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text today is found in Genesis 3:1-21. I’m going to be talking on deflection and defection. So, please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Genesis 3.

Now, the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the tree of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden. God has said, you shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.”

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”

So he said, “I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”

Then the man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”

The Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all the cattle, and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain, you shall bring forth children, your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

Then to Adam he said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. And you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your most holy word. And we pray now that you would reveal the meaning of this text to us in a way that reaches into not just our intellect or understanding, but into our characters and transforms us. Give us the gift of responsibility that our savior has. Help us, father, to shun the sin of deflection through this text. We pray that you might minister to us. May the voice of Jesus Christ change us. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

The worship of the church is to drive mission into the world. And I’ve articulated today what the mission should be for us. The mission of this portion of our worship service is to prepare you to give what might perhaps be the best Valentine’s Day gift that your wife will want. It’s also to prepare children to give the best Father’s Day or Mother’s Day gift that they might want. Fill in the blank in terms of what holiday you’d like to use this gift to accomplish.

But what I want to do today is call us to repent of and turn from a particular sin that’s quite common in our world and is sort of the mark of the fallen man, and that is deflection from responsibility.

Now churches in Oregon City have kind of declared February 7th to the 14th as marriage week here in Oregon City. There’s different events different churches are doing. This Friday, of course, we’re having a Valentine’s Day dinner that the young people of the church are putting on for us. It’s a week that we sort of think about our spouses and I guarantee you in some of your households at least—if you were to at the end of today commit yourselves afresh to not deflecting your responsibilities at home to your wife—this would be far more valuable to her than diamonds or rubies.

Now you know different men do better at this than others but I think that in general this text tells us that this is a tremendous temptation to all men. And so I hope that today we’ll focus upon this sin and then what we should be replacing it with by the time we get done.

I have not provided an outline. I have them. They’re actually right here, but when I proceed out, I’ll put them over here so I remember at the end of the service when I leave with the other elders. I’ll put them on the handout tables then in case you want to take one to review what I said today, but I thought it might be helpful. I know sometimes outlines can be distracting. And this message is really just a set of very simple statements—twelve of them—that I will make in reference to this text and to the sin of deflection. And so I don’t want you to read ahead what I’m going to be saying, and so I’ll just keep the outlines for at the end of the day.

Now I put this in the context of our Valentine’s Day celebration this week and focus on marriage which is a proper thing to focus on in terms of the preaching. Next week I’ll also be preaching on marriage. During the Christmas break I was asking people for advice on what topics I could preach on before I return to a book at some point in time. And one of the young men said that the topic he’d like to have preached on is how can you make your wife submissive? So I began to tell him what the answer to that was. And I thought, wow, that’s a pretty good sermon. Probably one we ought to hear occasionally.

So I’m going to talk about that next week. But in a way, this is the beginning of that sermon because if husbands will assume the responsibilities that they’re supposed to assume goes a long way to having a wife who will submit to you. And in fact, in the text today, as I’ll point out a little bit later, the wife kind of submits to the husband right away. It’s what she’ll do. So we’ll talk about that a little bit.

However, this sermon also is one of the most critical lessons we can teach our children. It is a critical thing that our children learn not to make excuses, not to blame other people, not to blame circumstances, not to blame their parents, not to blame their little brothers and sisters, not to blame their pets, not to blame the weather, not to blame their fatigue—not to blame anything else for the sins or mistakes that they make.

That’s what our children will do in their uncorrected state. The text kind of tells us that. So, this is a very important topic for parents to get down and go over regularly with their children as we’re trying to raise up a more faithful generation than we’ve been as we aim toward generational maturity. This is critical to accomplishing that task.

And we know it’s critical because it’s the essence of Adam’s fallen state. And we know that it’s what precedes—in terms of men’s lives—this deflection from responsibility. So, this is quite important and I want you really to focus on this if you would please in your families over the next week with your children at different points in time. It’s such an important truth to get down.

You know, I was thinking about how people have argued for many years whether what makes you who you are—your genes or your environment, right? So the argument goes on and on and on. Well, your genes are a direct result of the Father’s predestination of you. Right? The Father is sovereign and he’s contributed every little molecule to your genetic structure. And your environment is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit who’s created the world in which we live.

But the third component of that is the injection of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ at the heart of the whole thing—his word. And that’s what changes people. How does the world get better? I heard these jokes on Garrison Keillor’s show yesterday. Adam and Eve were both, you know, Adam was handsome, Eve was beautiful. Where did all these ugly people come from? Well, you know, as today’s text shows us, they’re both pretty bad sinners.

How does righteousness come about in the world? Well, it takes the injection of the Lord Jesus Christ and his word and the work of the Holy Spirit, submitting to the divine providence of God and our genetic makeup and every other detail in our lives. And the end result of that is generational maturity. It happens.

We’re into alchemy, right? We’re into the transformation of lead into gold. We’re into the transformation of old men into new men. And we’re into transformation of people that go beyond what we’re able to do, right? That’s why we need other people involved in our lives, with our families perhaps in terms of the schooling or other things as they get older. We don’t want them to do what we did. We want them to go beyond what we did. And this task is furthered as we really focus in on this particular sin.

Okay. So, first what I want to do is give a short statement of what I’m talking about by deflection.

Deflection is deflecting the responsibility for our sins, mistakes or failures, deflecting that responsibility away from us. Now, see our text today, Adam deflects for his sin. And that’s certainly part of what I’m talking about, but it’s not limited to that. I’m not just talking about sins. I’m talking about mistakes—things we tried to get done and couldn’t get done through no moral failure on our own really, but still, it was our responsibility to see it through. So, I want to make it a little broader.

I’ve noticed many times—maybe I don’t know why, I’m noticing it now—but I’ve noticed a lot in the last six months, even in the life of our church and certainly outside of our church, I’ve noticed men deflecting. The immediate tendency we tend to have as men when we’ve done something either sinful or when we’ve done something and just messed up somehow—a mistake that we aren’t able to accomplish what we set out to accomplish—we don’t want to take responsibility for that. We immediately start talking about this guy or that guy or somebody else or that set of circumstances that’s responsible for our own actions.

And so that’s what I want to talk about today: this broader term deflecting responsibility for our sins, mistakes, or failures away from us.

And that’s important, too, because the other side of this is some people are always assuming responsibility for stuff that’s got nothing to do with them. That’s sin, too. That’s a self-centered attitude that’s always saying, “I’m sorry for this. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for this,” when it isn’t your fault. Sounds a little more pious, but it’s not. It’s a focusing on yourself as the cause of everything or taking upon yourself the suffering of the world. And that’s not right. I’m talking about just the stuff that we’re responsible for, right? That we’re involved in this failure or sin or failing to meet our what we’re trying to do.

The Bible is full of situations. The text today, of course, is one that describes this. But you remember Aaron at the base of the mountain? They made this golden calf and they’re dancing around and God says, “Go back down, Moses, and deal with the people.” And God goes and talks to him about what was going on. And Aaron, instead of saying “I sinned. I was—I sinned. This is my fault that I made this golden calf. No, he started saying well the people wanted this, the people wanted that. So they gave me all this gold. I threw it into the pot and out came this calf. So Aaron shifts responsibility from himself over to the people.

Now the people were really sinful but that’s not why Aaron sinned. Aaron sinned because he sinned.

Saul, when he fails to do what God has commanded him to do—to kill all the sheep and all the men—keeps Agag around for himself. Confronted by Samuel, he begins to shift blame for that. Instead of saying, “Yeah, you’re right. You commanded me, but I didn’t do it,” he starts to give a whole set of reasons, including the people, including his desire to serve God, for why he disobeyed God. He tries to shift the blame, deflect responsibility away from himself.

Bathsheba—now she didn’t shift blame, but I have read an article a couple years ago about a man who, in my estimation at least, tried to use Bathsheba as an example of why it’s really not men’s fault when they fall into lustful thoughts. It’s that naked woman over there in that building that David had to look at. The guy said, “Yeah, David had his faults, but Bathsheba, she should have been a lot more modest.”

Well, there’s nothing in the text that says that Bathsheba was naked. Number one, it says she was cleansing herself. It doesn’t say she was naked. And the point of the article was that all you women, you know, here at church, if you don’t have, you know, everything covered up, then you know it’s your fault when guys start looking at you lustfully.

What does the Bible say? The Bible says sure you should dress moderately, but hey, you know, Job said, “I’ve made a covenant with my eyes that I would not look upon a maid.” He didn’t rely upon his environment to keep him in check. He exercised control. He took responsibility as a man for his own thoughts, his own sinful actions.

So this deflection goes on and on in the context of our world. There’s lots of examples in the scriptures about it. There’s lots of examples in our own lives. You know, well, I should have done that, but you know, I was really pretty tired. And I know I said I’d do this, but you know, I was tired and kind of got distracted and I just didn’t get to it.

You know, there used to be a saying that a man’s word was his bond. That’s a Christian concept. When our word says something, we’ll do this. Now, we’re not God. Sometimes we’ll fall short. When we do, we just say, “Hey, didn’t make it.” But we don’t make excuses. We don’t try to deflect over to external circumstances or to somebody else.

You know, the world is a complicated place and nearly everything we do, we do in relationship with other men, right? There’s very few tasks that we do completely on our own. We’re always kind of dependent upon other people and the circumstances of our lives. So, it’s very easy when something happens for you to say, “Well, yeah, but this guy didn’t follow through on his part, and that’s why I didn’t do my part.”

See, at home, our children, you know, well, why didn’t you get this done? Well, you know, you’ve already got me too busy doing this, that, and the other thing. Well, you know, brother, pile up the dishes in the wrong place. Well, I was too busy doing something else you told me to do. All these excuses—attempts to deflect our taking personal responsibility for who we are.

I had an example on Friday. Went to a political action meeting and took Isaac with me. Now, there’s two groups I’m involved with. One is a group—a coalition of groups, six groups. The other is I’m on the board of, and family council. Isaac—I’d gotten permission and he attended these coalition meetings with me. He had never attended an OFC board meeting. And I didn’t ask these guys, “Can Isaac come along?” He drives me and I’m kind of wanting him to see what’s going on and training him in some stuff. I didn’t ask him, can he sit in on the board meeting.

Now, the guy that arranges the board meetings, I think he knew. I’d sent him an email, but some of the board members said, “Well, you know, let’s talk about this.” So we excused Isaac and the other guy. The conversation was, do we want Isaac here or not? Because, you know, we’re deciding things. We’re talking confidentially about the plans of what we’re doing. We have had to talk to the Secretary of State in his office before about things we did supposedly in violation of law. There’s subpoena culpabilities, all kinds of stuff going on in these board meetings. And we’re not sure. Some of you guys think it’s great. We need to start mentoring young guys and get them in on this stuff.

And I asked their forgiveness. I told them, you know, I couldn’t preach my sermon on Sunday if I didn’t ask you all forgiveness. I could have said, “Well, you know, Nick knew about this,” which would have been true, that this other man knew that Isaac was going to be there. Or I could have said, “Well, you know, he was at the coalition meetings.” See, I could have come up with probably half a dozen easy deflections, but it was my responsibility to be forward thinking about these men and the confidentiality they would feel or not feel with the guy they’ve never met before and weren’t asked, “Can he be at this meeting with us?”

So, deflection is common in the scriptures and deflection is what we typically go to in order to save face with other people.

So, deflection—deflecting responsibilities from our sins, mistakes or failures. “I did my best.” This is another method of deflection. And the implication, you say to somebody, “Well, do this task.” They do the task. Well, you didn’t do it very well. Well, I did my best. No, you probably didn’t.

I don’t do my best at just about anything. I mean, I try hard. I work hard. But to do my best—I mean, that’s quite a concept if you think about it. It typically when our children tell us, “We did our best,” you can say, “No, you didn’t. I know you’re a better person. I know you can do a better job than what you just did. I know you could have got that floor cleaner. I know you could have done a better job with the dishes,” whatever it might be.

You see, our children tend to deflect responsibility by claiming their own insufficiencies. And the implication of that, of course, is that you’re somehow not a good person because you’ve asked them to do something more than they could possibly do.

See, so that’s another example of deflection.

**Two: Deflection is an abdication of responsibility and it’s associated with blameshifting.**

So here in our text before us, what happens? God goes to Adam and he says, “Well, you know what’s going on? Did you eat the fruit?” Adam avoids responsibility. He abdicates his responsibility for his own actions and what he ends up doing is shifting the blame over to Eve.

Now, that’s not always blameshifting, but frequently it is. And in our text today, that’s what the guy that deflects criticism wants to do. His goal, Adam’s goal, is not to hurt Eve. Adam’s goal is to deflect responsibility away from himself. But when he seeks to do that, the closest thing that immediately comes to mind in terms of somebody else involved in this matter was his wife. So, he’s not trying to hurt her. I don’t think he’s just—his sin is he’s deflecting responsibility and the end result is he ends up blameshifting.

So blameshifting is closely associated with deflection. And now of course this immediately happens with the wife. The wife then shifts the blame over to the serpent. She doesn’t accept her responsibility in terms of what Adam has just said. Instead she shifts responsibility and blame over to the serpent.

You know God has established men in households as the heads of the households. That’s why God goes to Adam first. And our responsibility in our homes is to accept responsibility for what happens in the home. May not be your fault. May not be sinful action, but you’ve got to bear the burden for what happens under your charge. Certainly for your own actions.

And what men want to do, in Adam, is just what Adam shows us here. They want to abandon responsibility in the home and shift the blame over to someone else and frequently it’s their wives. You know, the idea is that if I can get the wife, if I can weedle her into making a decision on a matter, then if whatever happens falls through, well, it wasn’t my plan. It was the wife’s plan, right? So now she’s the one that we’re shifting the responsibility to as well as the blame.

And it even looks like a great Christian thing to do this because we’re giving our wives full status in the home and letting them take on important decisions and we’re just counseling with them, but then we end up subtly shifting over the responsibility for these actions to our wives. That’s what Adam did. That’s what we do.

So, it’s an abdication of responsibility frequently associated with blameshifting.

**Three: Deflection is the most natural thing in the world to do.**

Nothing more natural to man than to deflect and to not accept responsibility. This is the record of modern man since the fall. This is the record of who we are in Adam. And this record tells us that the very first thing Adam engages in after he sins against God—the very first words out of his mouth—is deflection. It’s a deflection of responsibility.

Don’t be surprised. Don’t think, “What’s wrong with me? I know I did that yesterday or this morning or last week or I know I did it just real recently.” As God works on you with the Holy Spirit today through this word, don’t be surprised. This is going to happen. This is what you’re going to be.

You know, the problem we have at church sometimes is we all come here and pretend we don’t do anything wrong. And that’s a real problem because now none of us understand that yeah this sin is common to us. Don’t think that I’m horrible because I did it. Yeah, you are bad. It is sinful. But understand this is the most natural thing in the world to do. This is a sin that is one of those besetting sins of mankind.

Don’t be surprised.

**Four: Deflection is normally clothed in some degree of truth.**

Adam’s statements are true, right? The woman that you gave me, God did provide him the woman. She ate some and then gave it to me and I ate. Absolutely true. There’s no falsehood in that statement, right? But what it is—it’s positioning a certain truth in such a way as to deflect criticism, to deflect responsibility away from us.

As I said earlier, nearly everything we do is involved with other people. There’s almost always somebody else involved in a shortcoming or failure that we have actually engaged in. So it’s always very easy to immediately start talking about the other people in our lives that are connected with the activity we’re doing. You know, whether it’s your husband, your wife, your parents, children.

Adam deflects responsibility kind of both ways, doesn’t he? I mean, the most obvious way is he’s blaming his wife. And frequently that’s what we do. We blame those who have less power than we do, who are less able to defend themselves than we are. But Adam is also ultimately blaming God because it’s God who gave her.

Children, more typically than not, blame their parents when they blamshift, when they enter into deflection. “Why didn’t you get this done, Johnny?” “Well, how can I get that done? It was way too hard a task. Mom, or you know, you didn’t really tell me about it on time. You didn’t provide me the right tools. I’m hungry.” You know, children are regularly shifting the blame over to their parents.

And frequently that blameshifting, as I said, that deflection involves statements of truth. So just because you tell the truth about an incident doesn’t mean you haven’t engaged in deflection.

I could have truthfully said at the Oregon Family Council board meeting, “Well, I think Nick knew about this.” Oh, so now everybody says, “Well, Nick, did you know about?” Well, yeah, I guess I did. And now the focus is on the other man who’s putting together the meeting as opposed to me, you know, who’s the board member who’s decided to bring Isaac along without telling anybody. Truthful statement. Think Nick did. We had this email interchange. Truthful statement. Well, gee, he’s been at the coalition meetings. They’re more confidential than this.

But you see, those truthful statements really are the positioning of truth to deflect responsibility away from ourselves. And it’s sin. It’s a failure to step up to take responsibility for our actions and ask forgiveness of the people that we’ve wronged in that way. And that’s what I did in the grace of God this time.

**Five: Deflection may as a result involve significant self-deception.**

Because deflection as recorded for us in this text before us involves statements of truth by both the man and the woman. You know, I think that what we have to see from that—and what the Bible tells us in spades in the rest of the sixty-six books—is that deception, self-deception is what leads frequently to deflection. We are not self-consciously trying to avoid responsibility. It is a mechanism that we are habituated to and it’s a mechanism that’s tough to correct because we engage in self-deceit all the time. We don’t know ourselves.

You know, the Greeks say “know yourself.” God says you can’t know yourself. You need somebody else around you.

Let me read some verses here. Proverbs 21:2. “Every man’s way is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.” I mean, you know, some people know, “Well, I’m sinning now,” but most of the time it’s right in our own eyes. Well, well, yeah, I—Nick knew about this meeting. Why? That’s what we come to. And it’s we have self-deception involved.

Proverbs 12:15, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man is he who listens to counsel.”

So, in order to avoid stuff, remember we’ve talked about this the last couple of sermons. We want to be teachable because we need somebody else to come into our sphere of thinking and diagnose us better than we can diagnose ourselves. Well, wise men get counsel instead of just saying, “Well, gee, I evaluated my actions and they’re all okay.”

The Lord weighs the heart. We link that up with this last verse we read. And the Lord weighs our hearts typically by bringing other people along to say, “That wasn’t good. You deflected there. You know, you should have just taken responsibility.”

Now, God can certainly speak to us through his scriptures as we read them. We should read our Bibles daily. We should pray the Holy Spirit would convict us of sin as we read them. But normally, another mechanism that God uses are those counselors around us to avoid self-deception.

Proverbs 16:2, “All the ways of men are clean in their own sight, but the Lord weighs the motives.”

Again, self-deception over and over again in the Proverbs. And it seems like it’s not that big a deal to be involved in self-deception. It can’t be that big of a problem. But Proverbs 30:12 tells us it is. “There is a generation that is pure in their own eyes,” is what it says, “and is not washed from its filthiness.”

David Horowitz is kind of a well-known conservative these days. Wrote a book called The Destructive Generation years ago about the Black Panther movement and SDS radical liberal revolutionary politics in the late sixties of which he was a participant. And this set of verses in Proverbs describes a destructive generation. It goes on from the verses I just read to say that there’s a kind—oh how lofty are their eyes and their eyelids are raised in arrogance. There is a kind of man whose teeth are like swords and his jaw teeth like knives to devour the afflicted from the earth and the needy from among men. There’s a destructive generation.

This proverb tells us this is a generation that destroys people. But the root of what this generation is are people who are not washed from their own filthiness. They’re right in their own eyes. They are self-deceived. And we have a responsibility to each other to punch through self-deception when we see each other deflecting responsibility instead of standing up like men and women of God—strong men and women—and assuming responsibility.

Parents, if you don’t teach your children to avoid the sin of deflection and to assume responsibility, if you let them stay deceived in their own eyes, you will begin to see in your children the arrogance that this text talks about—the haughty look. “What do you mean I didn’t do the dishes right?” You’ll begin to see that. And what you should recognize is the next step from that. If they are matured to adults with that kind of ability of deflection and not seeing their own sins, they’re going to be a destructive generation to themselves, to community, and to the culture at large.

So, it’s very important that we understand that this besetting sin of fallen man is frequently made of statements of truth. And so, it shows us that self-deception is very much involved in this sin. And we need other people around us speaking into us to show us our sin.

**Six: Deflection is self-propagating.**

It has children, right? Adam, as I said, begins to deflect responsibility and immediately the wife is submissive. She does what the husband teaches her, not what he commands her, but she does what the husband patterns to her, right? And then the kids are going to—left unchecked, the kids will then pattern what the parents say.

And so from one perspective, this is a pretty devastating reality that deflection is self-propagating. It makes us very sad that our children are involved in that same sin. But really, it’s kind of the grace of God. There’s a fortunate aspect of the self-propagation of blameshifting because what it is a giant feedback mechanism that the Lord God in his grace has given to us to see our sins, right?

We see our—husbands, if we see our wives rather, our children participating in habitual sin, then yes, we need to correct them. But we also need to see the Lord God weighing our hearts and our motives, sweeping away the self-deception and saying, “You know, you probably got that sin, too, right?”

So, it’s really the providence of God that Adam should be able to look at Eve and say, “Oh, where’d she learn that? She learned it from me.”

You know, you parents have to understand, and I’m sure you do, but this is—if this is such an easy sin to participate in, you’re going to engage in it in probably the worst place in the world, which is the family. You know, people always say the family’s the best place in the world. Well, from one perspective, the family is the worst place in the world. If you want to go to a place of great sin, violence, abuse—go to the home. Sounds odd, but the home is where people can really be themselves. They can let their hair down in their homes. Everybody’s kind of themselves, reflections of themselves. That’s where we can really be who we really are, which is usually thought of in terms of the old man. That’s where our sin normally occurs regularly.

Husbands and wives say things to each other that if they said to their employee, they may be sued for abuse—abusive language. Or if they said it on the street to another man or to another woman, they might get punched right in the nose for taking that tone and attitude towards someone outside of the home. Now, partly that’s the grace of God because we need people who accept us. But partly that’s, you know, the sinful tendencies that will result in deflection becoming kind of a weed in the context of our home—people always pointing to something else instead of anybody stepping up and taking responsibility.

The best gift you can give to your children, men, and your wives is to commit today when you walk the aisle to try to assume responsibility and not deflect, because you’re going to raise a godless generation—a generation like these ones that we just talked about if you allow your children to pick up that sinful pattern in you. Rather, seeing that we have to make correction in my life first and also in the life of my family.

**Seven: Deflection often leads to scapegoating.**

And this is kind of like the blameshifting thing, but scapegoating. You know, the idea is that you got people involved in a conflict. And in that to resolve that conflict, they know they can’t really kill each other. So, they both can cooperate and shift blame over to somebody else altogether.

And by the end of the process in Genesis, what has happened? Adam has blamed Eve. She’s blamed the serpent. And now he gets the onus of the whole thing. It’s interesting the structure of this text in Genesis. God goes to the man and he talks to the woman. Then he doesn’t talk to the serpent. He pronounces judgment on the serpent. Then he pronounces judgment on the woman. Then back to the man. So there’s a structure. We go man, woman, serpent, woman, man. At the center of that is the serpent. At the end of the day, he’s been the one that all the guilt has been placed on. He’s become the scapegoat for their action.

This is a very typical sociological truth. You know, in America, World War II, Germans were scapegoated. In many cultures, Jews have been scapegoated. In our culture, the tendency right now is to scapegoat al-Qaeda. I make jokes of it myself. Al-Qaeda did it.

Scapegoating usually involves a member of the community with lesser power or influence within the community—less able to defend themselves. And so what you’ll see happening, and just watch for this as you watch men at your work or people, you know, when they shift blame over, they try to deflect the attention off themselves to something else. Usually it’s someone else. And by the time it’s all over, if that person and them have to work together, they’ll both begin to shift responsibility over to the third party who has little to do with it, really, but he makes a convenient scapegoat.

And then the scapegoat takes the sin of the people that are involved. So deflection often leads not just to kind of verbal recriminations and blaming the other person, but you know—you got to live together, right? They have to live together. They can’t kill each other. They want to coexist. And so what they end up doing by the end of the whole thing is placing all the blame on the serpent and in social dynamics and communities, this is what happens. Deflection leads to scapegoating, blameshifting, and ultimately to finding someone to shift blame to.

As one writer said, the covering of their behinds, so to speak, of Adam and Eve goes from literal to verbal, right? First, they have to cover their behinds literally. Then they cover their behinds verbally. And the woman goes from being the man’s flesh of his flesh to being his scapegoat, right?

I mean, the other words that Adam has spoken in this text a little earlier when he gets his wife—is what he speaks this great love poem about his wife. But now she becomes his scapegoat. And then ultimately that scapegoat responsibility is placed upon the serpent.

The words of Adam go from blessings. That’s what he spoke to his wife when she was first given to him. His words go from blessings to weapons. Right? All because he’s deflecting responsibility. He doesn’t want to take responsibility for his actions legitimately. He shifts blame to somebody else. So his blessings, words become attack words.

**Eight: Deflection then results in dysfunctionality in community.**

You know if deflection is allowed to go on in the context of a family, in the context of a church, in the context of a work environment, that community—that little picture of community—becomes dysfunctional. It may continue on in perpetuity for a long time but it’s not a happy place to be. It doesn’t accomplish the function for which it’s been brought together.

And when you have deflection and perhaps blameshifting and even scapegoating going on in the context of any community, the community begins to fall apart. Seeds of distrust are sown. Everybody starts imitating everybody else. Nobody will stand up and take responsibility for a particular thing that they’ve been assigned. And so that all goes downhill.

This is so important to what we’re doing now in terms of our strategy map. Roger W. sent me an excellent article from Mary Pride about the need to set standards for achievement for churches. Set failure standards among other things. She says, “How do we know if we failed?” Well, if our kids don’t know that book of Leviticus after three months, we failed somehow, right?

So to set up standards and the strategy map sets up specific goals, specific standards of things we’re going to accomplish and it tries to assign them to individual people, right? Now, if that individual person at the end of the time frame doesn’t step up and take responsibility instead deflects it over to other people’s faults for them not accomplishing the goal, then the community starts to fall apart. Dysfunctionality starts to mark that community.

And we see it here in the text. The deflection starts to become a real problem. The marriage relationship becomes torn asunder. What should be, you know, cooperative relationships become adversarial relationships. Then they blame the environment. Ultimately, they’re blaming God. And the whole thing starts to cycle downhill.

So it creates dysfunctionality in community.

**Nine: Deflection is defection.**

And this is kind of the big point, I guess. You know what we’ve got going on here—the serpent is (we don’t know when he fell, but the serpent is obviously the enemy of God by the end of the text). And what Adam and Eve do is they start, you know, being like the serpent—not speaking truthfully, not assuming responsibility. And they are in essence defecting from the army of God to the—to the frog demon army I talked about in Revelation a couple of weeks ago.

We’re called to be the army of God. The army of God is comprised of young men and women, boys and girls, men and women who assume responsibility. And when we do such a little thing as deflecting responsibility and not taking responsibility for a specific action we’ve engaged with—seems like a small matter—but at that point, we’ve defected from God’s community and we’re now working as an agent of the serpent in bringing dysfunctionality, blaming other people instead of assuming responsibility and creating these difficulties and tensions in the context of our community.

So it’s defection. And this defection, really, as I said earlier, it may be mirrored in blaming the woman but ultimately whom the child is blaming is their parent. Adam is blaming God here ultimately and that shows the nature of this kind of defection. It’s a horrible, wicked sin. Even though it looks so innocent. I mean, it’s truthful statements made. Seems like it’s an okay thing. And even if it’s not quite on target, at least he’s moving in the right direction, you think.

But no, the Bible says this is really bad. Adam is creating a dysfunctionality of community. He’s defecting from the army of God to the demon frog army.

**Ten: Deflection is linked to fear, alienation, and suffering.**

What does the text tell us? Well, Adam and Eve are frightened and they go hide themselves. So, as Adam, the context in which Adam’s statement of deflection is made is one of fear, alienation from God and suffering because of that.

You know, this section of Genesis shows us kind of the archetype of our human suffering. Adam and Eve first have a self-consciousness, and they have an internal separation, so to speak, from truth and righteousness. They become frightened and that frightfulness is the setting in which their deflection will occur. So there’s a self-consciousness. “We’re naked. Something’s wrong.” And so there’s problems within their own psyche that begins to manifest itself as they fall into sin.

The next stage in this movement of suffering is fear in the presence of God. They have true guilt. Guilt means separation from God. They have fearfulness of God as a result. And then comes this step of deflection where they shift blame. They make accusations. And this is separation from each other. There’s a sense in which their sin makes them separate from themselves, separates them from God. And then the deflection takes place and we’re separated from one another as well in the context of this progression.

And then and then finally there is separation from the environment. Not only do they blame each other, but now they blame the environment that God has placed in them as pictured by the serpent. So there’s alienation, suffering, a loss of connection, and that’s kind of the context for this sin of deflection of responsibility.

Now, you know what that means is that’s one of the motivating factors for our deflection. Why do we do it? Well, it’s habitual. That’s one part of it. But another part of it is we’re fearful. We know that if we say, “Yeah, it was my fault that I didn’t do X,” that people are going to think less of us, right? So, there’s a fearfulness that seems to be part of the motivating factor for Adam’s deflection and is part of the reason for our deflection as well.

And so, to cure deflection, one of the things I think we should do is make sure that we understand that God is on our side ultimately and that the people that we’re around are on our side, right? If we have an environment in our homes that every time our children tell us, “Yes, it was my fault,” we belittle them and make fun of them and, you know, just chew them out every time they do that, they’re going to become fearful of stepping up and taking ownership, right?

It’s a fine line to walk because you don’t want to let them just get away with sin. But you do want to provide an environment where they know you’re on their side.

Here in the church community, you know, deflection—one way to help eliminate deflection of responsibility is if we all get up every day and tell ourselves we’re on each other’s side here. We are partial toward one another. And if we know that about each other, we’re going to be less tempted to sin by deflecting responsibility and trying to cover our behinds up because we know that we’re amongst people who love us and accept us. And if we ask for forgiveness, we’ll get it. If we say, “We messed up. Wasn’t sin, but I should have gotten it done,” okay, great. Understand that. We’ll try to do better. Let’s try to build in mechanisms to create more positive results in the future.

The other side of that is that deflection is judged by God. You know, deflection is sin. And as much as we want to assure each other that we’re on each other’s side, we also have to remind each other that God judges sin.

Proverbs 19:3 says this, “A man’s own folly ruins his life. Yet his heart rages against the Lord.” See, that’s deflection, right? His own folly has ruined his life. Adam’s own folly ruined his life, but he rages against the Lord. And what our children or what our spouses or when our fellow parishioners here deflect from responsibility, we’re not stepping up and we should really admit that it’s our own folly that hurts our lives.

And Proverbs 19, this is set in the context of God’s judgment. Let me read the context for verse three.

Verse one: “Better a poor man whose walk is blameless than a fool whose lips are perverse. It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way. A man’s own folly ruins his life. Yet his heart rages against the Lord.”

See, he’s that fool who has perverted his speech by shifting blame away from himself toward his environment or toward God. And it’s not good to have this kind of hastiness in our evaluation of what we do as we miss the mark.

“Wealth brings many friends, but a poor man’s friend deserts him. A false witness will not go unpunished. He who pours out lies will not go free. Many curry favor with a ruler and everyone is the friend of a man who gives gifts.”

What is all that about? Well, it’s saying that when we deflect responsibility, it’s tied to this idea that we’re trying to curry favor with other people. We don’t want the other person to feel less of us. We end up lying with our speech. We blame something other than ourselves for ruining our way. And as a result, ultimately we’re blaming God. And the text puts all this in the context that a false witness—that’s the lie, that it’s not God’s fault, nor is it somebody else’s fault. A false witness will not go unpunished. This sin will be dealt with. You will not get away with it ultimately.

It appears from human wisdom that you do. The rich man has friends. The poor man doesn’t. If you can curry favor, if you can position the truth or your money to try to get friendship with people, it appears that it’s going to work. But God is not mocked. God doesn’t let that kind of sin of deflection go unpunished.

“He who gets wisdom loves his own soul. He who cherishes understanding prospers. A false witness will not go unpunished or he who pours out lies will perish.”

Repeats it again. The same verse repeated twice in this section. It’s saying that at the end of the day, don’t try to curry favor with people by getting a phony image of yourself that is not accurate and blaming other people instead of accepting your responsibility. The one who gets wisdom, who knows that he’s ruined his own life, he will be the one who loves his own soul. He’s doing well for himself ultimately, because God punishes false speech. The lie, the lie of deflection of responsibility, will not go unpunished by God.

And if you engaged in this sin this morning, yesterday, this past week, this past month, and the Lord God brings it to your conviction today, deal with it. Confess to him your sin. Repent of that sin. And if other people are involved with it, repent to them. Understand that as much as you are assured of your forgiveness of sins, you are also told that if you go on sinning willfully and deflect the responsibility, God has said it may seem like it works out in the short term with men, but it will not work out for you. Your false witness will not go unpunished. The Lord God will bring his wrath, anger, and punishments and chastisements upon you for your sin.

You have to know that God wants us to be fearful in a proper sense. You know, fear was part of what Adam fell into, but it was fear because he was truly guilty before God. And that part of the fear we don’t want to get rid of. We want to be fearful of transgressing the law of God. So fearful that when we engage in these sorts of sins, we as quickly as possible turn from those sins and repent before God. That’s what David does.

Psalm 32: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven. Doesn’t say blessed is he who doesn’t commit sins. It says blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven.” If deflection is such a common sin to mankind, you’ve probably done it recently. The question is, how will you be blessed? You’ll be blessed if your transgression of deflection of responsibility is forgiven. In other words, if you step up, confess it to God and to those you sinned against, seek forgiveness.

Yes, that’s the course of blessing. “Whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity and in whose spirit there is no deceit. The first lie of Adam that he images Satan is in terms of his own responsibility being not his responsibility. The heart of deceit or lying in the scriptures, the basic lie that Adam enters into is a lie of deflection.

“When I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all the day long.” When I deflected from responsibility and the spirit brought conviction, and I didn’t do anything about it. I just kept silent about it. My bones groaned all night long. If I would have sat in that board meeting, I started to feel bad. As we were discussing the matter that I brought up as an example this morning of deflection, I started to think, “Well, this isn’t good. What have I done? Something’s wrong here.” You know, my bones were starting to groan a little bit, but I was keeping silence. And I had to then speak forth and ask these men forgiveness for what really was a fairly small matter, but important one.

“Day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was turned into the drought of summer because he kept quiet about his sin. I acknowledge my sin to you and my iniquity I have not hidden. I said I will confess my transgressions to the Lord. You forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah.

“For this cause everyone who is godly shall pray to you in a time when you may be found. Surely in a flood of great waters they shall not come near him. You my hiding place. You shall preserve me from trouble. You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.

“See, I’ll instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I’ll guide you with my eye. Do not be like the horse or like the mule, which have no understanding, which must be harnessed with bit and bridle, else they will not come near to you.”

Those great promises that God is our preservation, he’ll guide us in the way—these are all set in the context of the one who receives all those blessings from God is the one who does not let sin then be his resident, you know, co-resident with him in his life. The one who confesses those sins of deflection, repents of them, and moves ahead. Not one who lets him sit there day after day until you formed a pattern of never assuming responsibility for anything.

You have no right if that’s your continued state of entering into this kind of deceptive sin day after day. You have no right if that is who you are and saying, “The Lord God is my hiding place. He shall preserve me from trouble.” No, you won’t. He won’t preserve you from trouble because you haven’t entered into the confession of sin that the psalmist advises us to do.

“Don’t be like the horse or like the mule who have no understanding which must be harnessed with bit and bridle.” We’ll do that for you. There are people you know that we can come alongside and hold you accountable to be responsible. Sometimes that’s what you know you have to do. The Lord God brings along, you know, chastisers like bit and bridle to hold you accountable and responsible. That’s not the goal. The goal is to recognize your sins and to turn from them so that other people don’t have to put you under the discipline of the church or the chastisement of your spouse, whatever it might be. The idea is to turn from one’s sin.

Be fearful of the consequences of God for your sin. “Many sorrows shall be to the wicked.” Which wicked? Well, the ones, you know, “He who trusts in the Lord, mercy shall surround him.” The two paths are wickedness and trusting in the Lord. But the ethical action has been given to us already in this psalm. Trusting in the Lord does not mean living a life in perfect obedience. It means confessing our sins when God brings them to our attention. That’s the difference between the wicked man and the one who trusts in the Lord. The path of curse and the path of blessing lies in relationship to will you continue to make excuses for your sin and in so doing lie, or will you embrace the truth, accept responsibility for what God has placed you responsible for in terms of, and believe that he’ll forgive you.

“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice you righteous. Shout for joy all you upright in heart.”

Looks bad if we admit we were responsible for blowing that thing. If I say “Please forgive me, guys,” we’ll lose all favor with that board. They’re not going to trust me again as a guy who sins and has to sin so much he’s got to ask for forgiveness. But the Bible says no—you engage in that activity of asking forgiveness from one another, confessing your sins to God and you’re the one who shouts for joy.

So the scriptures tell us that God judges our sin and we be properly fearful of the chastisements of God. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Galatians 6 says this, “Let each one examine his own work. Then he’ll have rejoicing in himself alone and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load.” Each one shall bear his own load. You’re responsible for a particular action. This week in your home, ministry at church, your vocation, the upbringing of your children, your obedience to your parents. You are responsible for evaluating your actions honestly in the sight of God, not lying about them, and indeed bearing your own load.

It is of the essence of the new man, the man who has been forgiven by the work of the great scapegoat, so to speak, the Lord Jesus Christ, to tell the truth.

Ephesians 4:24 says that we’re to put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. Wherefore, what does it mean? Righteousness and true holiness. Abstract concepts to our children. We tell them, “Be like Jesus. Be put on the new man. Act in righteousness and holiness.” Well, what does that mean?

Well, it immediately tells us, “Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.”

Can’t we see an echo of Genesis 3 in that text? The old man put on lying through deflection of responsibility. Not—and when he did that, he destroyed the community or at least tore at the community, not recognizing that we are members one of another. Not remembering that the Lord God has made one person out of my wife and I. No, he tore apart that community through the simple act of saying something very truthful, very true statements. And yet statements that were geared to deflect responsibility from his own actions.

God judges sin, but he judges it through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I would urge you today that as you come forward, bring your tithes and offerings, we have this altar call every week, right? We walk the aisle every week in response to the sermon. What’s our mission? Our mission today is to give our wives the best Valentine’s gift we could possibly give them. To assume responsibility in our homes, to step up to what we’re supposed to do, to put aside making excuses, blaming other people, events or circumstances, ultimately blaming God for our failures as husbands.

Put it aside. Believe me, wives in this church, godly women, they will value that so much more than gold or silver because that is working out the new creation. That’s putting on the new man, the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s putting away lying and deceit, putting on telling of the truth, remembering that that’s what builds community.

May God grant us the grace in our families in this church and in the communities that we create outside of this church to be those who repent of the sin of deflection of responsibility. It doesn’t work just to put something off. You got to put something on. And what you put on is truthtelling and assuming responsibility for your actions. No matter if they were sinful results that hindered you or not, if you’ve committed, let your word be your bond. Don’t let your immediate reaction, which will come in your mind—”Well, so and so should have done this and then I could have done it.” No, you just say, “My fault. I’ll do better next time. I’ll work harder at it.”

Commit yourself to that truth. May God grant us the grace in our homes, churches, and communities to put on that new man.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this pivotal chapter of Genesis and how much is there. And certainly we just touched on one aspect of it, but we thank you, Lord God, for driving home to us once more the ugliness of the sin of deflection of responsibility. Enable us, Father, as we commit ourselves to you. Grant us the responsibility of the Lord Jesus Christ, who didn’t blame others, but instead assumed the blame for us and took upon himself our sins. Give us, Father, his perseverance. Give us the truth, the way, and the life through him. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.