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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Sin Normalized

The title of my sermon today is Sin Normalized, and we'll get into that here in just a moment.

But to start off, I want to talk about texting and texting abbreviations.

I want to see how savvy you are at texting abbreviations.

What does WTTP mean when you send it in a text?

OK, well, copy and paste didn't work on that.

So all of you old timers can start using that this week.

If you still haven't gotten 1 yet, you should know this 1.

Even though that typically doesn't happen, we still say it anyway, LOL.

This morning I wanna look at a passage of scripture where somebody LOLed, if you will.

So if you have your Bibles with you, turn to Genesis chapter 17 and we're going to look in verse 15.

Genesis chapter 17 beginning with verse 15.

There's a story that you know well and we're just going to be here briefly this morning but it says, Then God said to Abraham, As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name, and I will bless her and also give you a son by her.

And then I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations.

Fell on his face and laughed, and said in his heart, shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old, and shall Sarah, who is 90 years old, bear a child?

Or maybe we could say more appropriately, he F-O-H-F-A-L fell on his face and laughed.

Well, he says right there, will a man bear a child at 100?

I mean, some of you are there sitting and thinking this morning, yeah, I would have probably laughed too, at 90, at 100, but I want to remind you this morning that Methuselah, the oldest man, had a son when he was, do you remember?

187 years of age was when his son was born.

Why was this all of a sudden so funny to Abraham?

Somehow the thinking had changed and my question is why?

I'm not going to dissect the whole thing, but you look at all these patriarchs here before the flood, starting with Adam and then Seth and Enos, the first part in green, that is how old they were when they had their first child.

And so Adam didn't have Seth until he was 130 years old, That's what you call a honeymoon period.

And then he lived another 800 years and he lived a total of 930 years.

Seth, when he was born, at 105, he had his first child.

And then he lived another 807, So his total, he lived 912 years.

And you can see on down the line, 905 years, 910 years, 895 years, 962 years.

Enoch, he only lived 365, But what happened to him?

And then you have a few others, but then you have the time of the flood and something changes.

The lines are getting shorter and shorter and shorter here, aren't they?

You know, before the flood, the average lifespan if you don't include Enoch because he didn't die was 912 that was the average lifespan 912 Can you imagine if we had somebody up here?

912 years old We could ask him any question we wanted to about World War I, World War II, the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Reformation, and Martin Luther.

We could ask him, was Christopher Columbus handsome?

After the flood, the first 10 patriarchs, from Shem to Abraham, you average their lifespan, it's only 316.

Abraham, by the way, only lives to be 175 years.

And so we get to this passage where Abraham LOL'd.

There's something about sustained exposure to certain conditions that changes the mind.

Something that abhors the first time after you view it again and again and again is no big deal.

And so now by the time we get to the time of Abraham, they're accustomed to a shorter lifespan.

From 912 on average to 316, now Abraham only 175.

But look at how Moses writes about Abraham it says in Genesis 25 7 and 8 this is the sum of the years of Abraham's life which he lived 175 years Then Abraham breathed his last and died, and what does it say?

Fast forward a little bit further, by the time we get to the time of David, he's writing this in Psalm 90, verse 10, the days of our lives are what?

And as sin became general, it appeared less and less sinful.

Degradation and deterioration of human life was becoming the norm.

Yeah, I mean, as the days of our lives, 70 years.

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Sin Normalized

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