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Restoration Ministry

Restoration 2009: Expect It

Marc Swearingen

Love With a Risk

Running From Duty

The Pearl of Great Price

A Universal Cross

The Voice of Conscience

God’s First Promise

Iron Mixed With Clay

Christ Our Righteousness

By Faith or By Sight?

Questions and Answers with Marc Swearingen

A Knowledge of Evil

Our First Love

Today I'd like to discuss a subject called a knowledge of evil.

You know, years ago I can remember, this was probably about 3 or 4 years after I dedicated my life to the Lord.

Maybe a little bit, maybe not quite so long.

But I can remember leading up to my conversion I was a movie addict.

PG, PG-13, rated R, had a bunch of movies.

I had favorite actors that I would try to collect all of their movies of.

And I probably had 2 or 300 videos in my collection.

And when I came to Jesus, God, He convicted me basically that I needed to surrender that and get rid of those videos.

Because of the time involved and because of the fact that I was familiarizing my mind with evil.

Now fast forward to this point in time that I just mentioned.

1 time I was getting ready to go to a camp meeting with my future wife and her family and our washing machine broke in our house so I had to go down the night before we were going to leave to a laundromat and do my laundry.

And they had a television in this laundromat and it was playing a movie, a rated R movie that I had seen in my prior life, so to speak.

You know, like walking around the tree of knowledge, so to speak.

I caught a glimpse of this movie and soon I was being drawn.

It was almost like there was a magnet just drawing me to this spectacle.

And God was speaking through my thoughts, you know, basically warning me, look, I've given you victory.

Don't re-acclimate your mind to evil again.

And so I found myself wandering around the tree, watching the video, folding the laundry, and just curious.

And then it got to the point where my laundry was all done, but the movie wasn't over.

And so I got into my car and I began to drive home.

And you know, I drove by this place called the movie gallery and the pole was just pulling me in.

Man, I really want to see how that movie ended.

And the Lord was working with me every step of the way.

But I pulled into the parking lot and rented the movie, went home, watched the rest of it, then got up and went to the camp meeting.

And to this very day, I have to really watch myself when it comes to media.

Now, I've never been involved in any type of addiction that's inappropriate as far as videos, if you understand what I'm saying.

But I'm talking about worldly movies that are rated R and maybe even PG and PG-13.

I just really struggle with that whole medium.

And as a result, my wife and I are very careful in what videos we allow our kids to see because we do not want to replicate that addiction in our children because they've got our genes.

But I re-acclimated my mind to evil again.

And friends, what we need to realize is that when we dabble in things that were once forbidden, we reawaken the old nature again that should be dying and starving.

And I'm afraid that a lot of times we dabble too much and we break down the barriers of our spiritual defenses and again, we acclimate our minds to love sin.

And we need to realize that Jesus came to deal with sin.

And Jesus needs to deal with that in us so that He can prepare us for a sinless society where sin will never ever again arise.

There's a statement written back in 1881.

The statement goes, those who venture to indulge in a known sin will be more readily overcome the second time.

The first transgression opens the door to the tempter and he gradually breaks down all resistance and takes full possession of the citadel of the soul.

They, the people that break down the barriers, have become so familiar with sin that they no longer perceive its heinous character.

You see, friends, again, we need to make sure that we are not regaining a knowledge of evil.

I'd like to say also that again, these are probably things you already know, but the human mind records everything.

It's like a digital camera or a DV camcorder.

It is fed by what we think, what we see, and what we hear.

And if we think, see, and hear evil, it becomes attracted to evil, and conditioned to desire evil.

As a result, we become desensitized and dumbed down to the sinfulness of sin.

When we dabble in sin, barriers and defenses are broken down, and it becomes easier over time to indulge with less and less guilt.

Some of you might play the guitar, you've heard me say this before, but when you first start playing, you know, the fingertips are real sensitive and you, you know, they actually hurt when you're learning to hold down the strings, but then after a while they get calloused.

And you don't always feel that pain anymore until pretty soon they're hardened over.

And it's the same thing with a knowledge of evil.

If we indulge, our conscience becomes seared, and then we begin the process of going down the road of hardening the mind against God.

There's another statement that says, when a person once neglects to heed the invitations, the reproofs and the warnings of the Spirit of God, his conscience becomes seared and the next time he is admonished, it will become more difficult to yield obedience.

We want to all understand how the soul is destroyed.

It is not that God sends out a decree that man shall not be saved, but man at first resists a motion of the Spirit of God, and having once resisted, it is less difficult to do so the second time, less the third, and far less the fourth." And then ultimately, the statement says the sinner destroys himself through his own choices.

And so I don't want to be in your face too much today, friends, but what I want to tell you is that we need to be careful that we are not strengthening our knowledge of evil.

We need to be careful that we're not dabbling in forbidden things so that we gain an intimate knowledge of things that God never intended for us to have.

Some of you may have heard my personal testimony on how at the age of 10, after I was baptized and converted to Christ, in another denomination other than the 1 I'm in now, I was faced with a temptation to go to a party and God did everything he could to try to prevent me from going to that party because he did not want me to be familiar with evil.

But because I went to that party, I exposed myself at a very young age to many different temptations and as a result that 1 decision took me away from God for 17 years until the Lord mercifully and graciously brought me back.

But friends, please understand that sin is exceedingly sinful and God does not want us to gain a first-hand knowledge of evil by experiencing the conscious guilt that comes from separation from God and God wanted to spare our first parents of that very same thing He did not want them to experience that conscious realization that their relationship with God had been severed.

And so we need to be very careful as far as understanding the knowledge of evil.

I'd like to take you to Genesis for just a moment.

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as 1 of us to know good and evil.

And now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken.

Now of course we understand this to be after sin entered.

Our first parents were being banished from the Garden of Eden and it's very interesting that God drove them from the garden and placed angels there with flaming swords to prevent them from having access to the tree of life so that sin would not be immortalized.

But I find it very interesting that in verse 22 God says, the man is become as 1 of us to know good and evil.

You know, 1 day I was thinking about that statement by God.

Man is become as 1 of us knowing good and knowing evil.

And I thought to myself, well wait a minute, I know that God knows good, but how does God know evil?

To the experience that Adam and Eve knew it.

Isn't it impossible for God to sin because it goes contrary to His very character?

What did God mean when He said, man is like us, knowing good and knowing especially evil?

Well I've come to the conclusion that God can possibly know good, and know evil rather, in 4 ways.

Number 1, we know that God is omniscient, right?

He knows all, he sees all, And he sees things before they happen, right?

So 1 way that God knows evil is that he foresaw the rebellion of Satan.

And so in that sense he could know evil from a certain point of view.

Number 2, he knew evil directly through Lucifer's rebellion.

Because as a result of that rebellion, 1 third of the heavenly family, 1 third of the heavenly family were expelled from heaven as a result of evil breaking out in a place of perfection.

Thirdly, God also knows evil through the fall of man, that we just read a portion of right here in Genesis 3.

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Series

Restoration 2009: Expect It

A Knowledge of Evil

Transcript

Parent Series

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Recorded

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