The Bible Study Podcast, episode 715.

Today's episode of the Bible Study podcast is a sermon called liar, lord, or lunatic.

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

This episode is going to be a little different.

This is a sermon I preached for my local church, Cupertino, California, for Bethel Lutheran Church.

And it's also available in video form.

If you go to the Bible Study Podcast.com, you can watch it, although it's just my face, so

you're not really missing anything at all. But here it is. I'm going to put the scriptures for

this sermon in the lyrics of the episode, as I always do, but I'm not going to read them here

on this recording. Take a listen. Good morning. First, I'd

like to apologize to those of you who are confused that we had two Old Testament lessons this morning.

That was my fault. As I looked at the lectionary, which says what passages of scripture we should

use on any given week, both the Old Testament lesson and the alternative

Old Testament lesson stood out to me, because when you combine them with the Gospel of Mark, I think

they tell an interesting story, unfortunately, a sad story about the people of God making some

bad choices. I was reminded of C.S. Lewis and his book, The Mere Christianity. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says that when we're presented with who Jesus says he is and what he did, that we end up with only three choices, is he liar, Lord, or lunatic. In these three lessons that we have this morning, the people of God

managed to choose wrong all three times. And so let's look at those lessons. In the first of these

chronologically, we start in Genesis and we see Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and they're

about to get kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

They're still in paradise, but they're hiding in shame

as they hear the Father Creator coming.

And they're doing that because God has told them not to eat

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