From the Pastor's Study
Today we are going to look at the curses of chapter 3 to get an understanding of God’s grace-infused judgment. That may seem like an impossible thing to put together, but I think that is exactly the beauty that we are supposed to see out of this passage and by extension the rest of the passages in the Bible. We serve an incredibly merciful God that even when He is by no means clearing the guilty, He is merciful in His punishments. We pick up the story in verse 14. Adam and Eve have finally confessed what they have done, and judgment is about to fall. This is often called the “curses,” but what is a curse? Ross helpfully states: “"...'curse' has the idea of banishment from the place of blessing” (145). It begins with the snake. The snake is cursed beyond all the other creatures as a reminder of the heinousness of the crime committed. Now, as we have discussed before, this snake is later identified as the Devil in Revelation 20:2, but he has already been kicked out of heaven. This snake is now a symbol of rebellion against God and as such is given a unique place of dishonor and a humble diet of dirt. Now if I could place myself in the minds of Adam and Eve, I might think, “Yeah, the snake is going to be dishonored, but at least he gets to live.” They know that the penalty for eating of this tree is going to be death, but hearing that the snake is going to continue to live long enough to feel his new cursed position had to have piqued their interest. As we get into verse 15, I can only imagine what would have gone through their minds as they hear the words, “I will put enmity between your offspring and her offspring.” Wait. Offspring? Meaning, that there is going to be children? We aren’t just going to be annihilated right here? This is the first note of hope in this chapter, and it comes in the classic bad news-good news format. The bad news is that the snake is going to have offspring. The good news is that Eve is going to have offspring, and Eve’s Offspring will triumph. We who are reading this passage in light of the New Testament see this as the first proclamation of the gospel. If the snake is Satan, than this Offspring to come is Jesus Himself. He is going to crush the head of the snake, but unbeknownst to them, there is going to be a long line until we get there. This is something that we will see spread throughout the rest of Genesis. There is going to be the line of the faithful who will ultimately produce Christ, and there are going to be a parallel line of the unfaithful who try to destroy the godly line. Cain kills Abel, but the line continues through Seth, but the conflict continues. For every Isaac, there is an Ishmael. For Jacob, there is Easau, and on and on it goes. But God will triumph in the end with Christ. God didn’t have to do that. He could have just said, “Oh, do you want to serve the snake? Would you rather listen to him? Fine. Good luck. See how far that gets you.” He could have done that to Adam and Eve. Instead, He promises that the snake will not have the last laugh. Sin is not going to have the final word on anything. We need to keep this in mind that this promise is still operative. Do you look around and see that there is chaos everywhere? We see evil people serving the devil in unspeakable ways, and it seems like they always win! But they will not win forever! Jesus has crushed the head of the serpent at the cross, and one day as we will see in Revelation, Jesus is going to bind him to hell forever. This will be made new. But it will come at a cost. Crushing the head of the snake is going to mean getting a bruised heel. What does that mean? This means that while the snake is going to take a mortal wound, the Snake killer is going sustain an injury. This is exactly what we see at the cross. Jesus dies, but He rises again. This means that Satan is defeated forever! Death is his ultimate weapon, and Jesus took it and beat it. This is a glorious promise made to us here! This doesn’t mean, of course, that the path to this ultimate victory is going to be paved with flowery beds of ease. This offspring will need to come through childbirth, and this is not going to be an easy process from start to finish. It is worth noting that the word “curse” doesn’t show up when God is talking to Eve (Mathews, 248), but this doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to be harder for her as a result of sin. There are two areas that she is going to suffer in: childbearing and relationships. God says that He is going to surely multiply the pain of childbearing. Here, God uses the same word “multiply” that He used in His original command to Adam and Eve to go forth and multiply. God is multiplying the pain of multiplying. For a reason that we will discuss in a minute, God is not saying that you must make child-bearing as painful as possible. God isn’t banning the use of medication to help with pain, in other words. God is simply describing how the world is going to be rather than prescribing what it must be (Ross, 144). Of course, as any woman who has gone through a pregnancy can tell you, pain is an accurate description of the childbearing process no matter what medication they give you. We as husbands have every duty to make that process as comfortable as possible, but the inability to remove all trouble from this process is evidence of God’s judgment here. We are reminded that the pain of even the most precious arrival in a family’s life is there because of sin. Yet the fact remains that we are still able to go forth and multiply, and where a culture multiplies, a culture has hope. I came across a shocking statistic this week that said that China’s birth rate has dropped 70%. That is the deepest drop in birth rate that humanity has ever seen. Beyond the obvious implications that this will have for the rest of the world, that is a shocking loss of hope for a country. As painful as child-bearing is, it is punctuated with an undefeatable note of hope. As any couple who struggles to have children will tell you, the pain of not being able to have children outweighs the pain of being able to have children. But this isn’t the only area that Eve and thus all women will struggle with, as the verse continues to talk about her relationship with Adam. As we get to this section, it is worth noting that this is probably one of the most debated verses in this section, potentially the most debated verse in Genesis. A lot of it comes down to how we interpret the words “desire,” “contrary to” and “rule.” The reason why this is so debated is because the way we settle on these questions changes how half of the population reacts to the other half. Some look at this passage and say that male leadership in the home is the result of the curse while others look at the woman’s struggle for power as the result of the curse. Which is it? While we don’t have time to cover every move of every argument, I think we can look at two passages really quickly to answer this question. The first is in the very next chapter of Genesis. In Genesis 4:7, we see that Cain is thinking about killing his brother Abel. God tells him that sin’s desire is contrary to him, but he must rule over it. It is the same wording and virtually the same structure as our verse here in chapter 3. The meaning there is pretty clear: sin wants to control, but Cain shouldn’t allow that. It would appear, then, that Eve is now going to desire to be in control, but Adam is going to be the one in charge. This tells us what the word “desire” means, but it doesn’t answer the question of whether or not male headship in the home is a result of the Fall or reinforced after the Fall. For that, we go into the New Testament, specifically to Ephesians 5. Here, at the end of the chapter, we see that Christ is the head of the Church, and this is mirrored in the marriage relationship. Paul grounds this in the original creation of Genesis 2 and says that Christ and the Church was always meant to fulfill that. So here, the cause of conflict isn’t male headship but the resistance to that and the domineering of the husband in it. The fact that this is such a debated issue between men and women shows that there is a curse here. What this is ultimately talking about is the fact that there is going to be relational disharmony. And in fact that there is going to be disharmony in the very relationship that should matter most. Finally, we get to Adam’s curse, wherein the entire ground is cursed. One commentator puts it like this: "The ground will now be his enemy rather than his servant." (Matthews, 252). Now, all of Adam’s food is going to come through Adam’s pain (the word there used is the same as “pain” for Eve). Work is not a result of the Fall, but the things that make work so unpleasant are. This is why crops die, projects stall, drill bits snap inside the board, it all comes back to this. These things shouldn’t be surprises to us! But the final line is to dust you shall return. This is where the final line of God’s warning to not eat of the tree comes into play. Adam, Eve, and all the rest of humanity, is going to die. As one scholar put it, "'Dust you are' always overcomes the progress of medicine and the ingenuity of cosmetology; every opened casket proves it so" (Matthews, 254). We knew that this penalty was coming, but the surprising thing is that it doesn’t come immediately. Didn’t God say, “in the day that you eat?” Why didn’t Adam and Eve die that very day? Well, as many commentators have pointed out, that what Adam and Eve experienced that day was the separation from God, a spiritual death indeed (Belcher, 75). But this doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to also literally die. In God’s mercy, He extends their time, but that death march begins and continues unstoppably. I liken it to a cancer diagnosis. When someone is given that horrible diagnosis, even though death doesn’t happen that day, you are a different person walking out of that exam room than you went in. Suddenly, everything is a reminder of that diagnosis, every joy, every pain. We can grasp that as human beings who know from a very early age that we are going to die. Adam and Eve started out in literal paradise, and now everything is ruined and everything is a reminder of that ruin. Clothes are new, weeds are new, pain is new, arguments and bitterness—it’s all new and terrible! It’s a living death if there ever was one and a constant reminder of their failure. So to not put too fine a point on it, Adam and Eve will experience a literal, biological death, and while they wait, they endure the spiritual death of separation from God, from all things good and beautiful. They are expelled from the Garden and the Tree of Life. This is an act of mercy from God so that they would not have to live a cursed life forever. The world has gotten to such a point that one wouldn’t want to live forever here! Before He sends them out, He provides for them clothing, clothing of animal skins. One commentator writes about this: "'Adam took the leaves from an inanimate, unfeeling tree; God deprived an animal of life, that the shame of His creature might be relieved. This was the last thing Adam would have thought of doing. To us life is cheap and death familiar, but Adam recognized death as the punishment of sin. Death was to the early man a sign of God's anger. And he had to learn that sin could be covered not by a bunch of leaves snatched from a bush as he passed by and that would grow again next year, but only by pain and blood. Sin cannot be atoned for by any mechanical action nor without expenditure of feeling. Suffering must ever follow wrongdoing. From the first sin to the last, the track of the sinner is marked with blood.'" (Ross, 149, Quoting Marcus Dods,*The Book of Genesis*, 25-26). So what are we supposed to take away from each of these curses? Well, we see that because of sin, everything has gone wrong. Relationships and childbearing—two expected sources of joy and delight—often include pain and suffering. Work and production—two expected sources of purpose and accomplishment—often include toil and setbacks. But I think that Christ is able to redeem these very problems both in the future and present. These problems are actually meant to point us to God, to awaken in us a sense of, “this ought to be different.” It should! We aren’t meant to find our hope here! So hold this pain the world gives you and use it to let all the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. By all means let the joys that do come in this world wash over you. Enjoy them. But don't let them be the end in themselves. Don't look at them like scraps of food in the wilderness to keep you alive for another day. Instead look at them like the scent of bread baking in the kitchen. Enjoy the smell, but let it awaken you to the joy that food is coming! More is coming! Better is on its way! Not only will you smell but you will hold, taste, consume, and be finally filled. One day all things will be made right. Even in the present, Christ can give our sufferings purpose. When our work fails and is set back, God is both in control of that setback and will be glorified by that. If you do your work honestly and as if God Himself were your supervisor, then whether your efforts panned out like you wanted, God is still pleased. Toil in your work doesn’t defeat God. The same can be said of relational pain. When we dishonor God in our battle for control of our spouses, rather than lovingly, sacrificially leading and patient following, we can turn to glorify Him in forgiveness. And over time, you can glorify God in a marriage that was once defined by conflict and jockeying for supremacy, that is now in the power of the Holy Spirit defined by love. If this battle turns physical, you can glorify God by not allowing that to continue. If you have had a relationship turn sour, it doesn’t have to define you. Christ who defines you. Finally, when it comes to the snake, we learn that there are going to be two seeds, and two seeds only. One is either in the camp of the snake or the camp of Christ. The Bible simply doesn't see it any other way. Matthew 12:30 has Jesus saying exactly that. You are either with Jesus or against Jesus. There is no third option, no matter how much we might delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. Who's side are you on? Have you surrendered to Christ? Have you held up your sins to Jesus and said, “I want to be rid of these so that I can hold onto you”? Have you asked Jesus to forgive you? Jesus took on sin’s penalty by dying on the cross and rising again! He is the one we look to for hope, for one day, He will heal everything, as far as the curse is found! Image by Joe
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Sin is really hard to deal with honestly. We’ve all seen the fake apologies from politicians or celebrities that did something wrong and got caught. Sometimes the non-apologies are easy to spot: “I’m sorry you were offended.” That’s rookie stuff. Sometimes they are a bit more sophisticated: “Mistakes were made.” A phrase like that gently moves responsibility off of the speaker without it seeming like that. This is a phenomenon related in a really fantastic book Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). In the book, the author, though writing from a non-christian perspective, points out all the ways that we justify ourselves when we do something wrong. It is so automatic, subconscious, and universal, all of us can feel seen in a book like that. Seriously, I read that book and questioned everything I was thinking for weeks (or was I?).
However, once we look at our passage today, I think you will be able to see the roots of this sort of response to sinful actions. Right after the first sin on Earth is committed, the first appearance of shame and blame begin. Shame and blame are two ways of dealing with sin that when used in the wrong way just lead us even deeper into sin. We will see the wrong way of dealing with our sin, and then we will see how Jesus’ work saves us from both. As we dive into our passage, it is worth reminding ourselves where we started. At the end of chapter 2, Adam and his wife have everything that they could possibly want. They had food, paradise, each other, naked and unashamed. But after they were led down the path of sin through the Serpent’s words and their own desires, now their eyes are open. They see that they are naked and are filled with shame. Who would have seen that coming? One commentator saw the sudden shame Adam and his wife felt as being like if we were suddenly ashamed of our hands (Cassuto, 137). It would feel very foreign to us to have that happen, and I can only imagine how disorienting that was for them, as they didn’t even know what shame was. When we feel shame on something, our first instinct is to cover it up. This is what our first parents do when they have sinned against God: get some leaves! It would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic. Here they have sinned against God who has done nothing but good things for them, a sin so serious as to deserve death, and the best that they can come up with is leaves. That’ll fool God! He’ll never notice that! This is an example of shame used wrongly. The problem is not that Adam and his wife feel shame. They should! They’ve sinned against a loving and gracious God! They should feel bad. We should feel bad when we sin, too. God has been just as good to us. In fact, you might even suggest that God has been better to us than Adam and Eve, because he has blessed us despite our sin! Shame is an appropriate initial reaction to our sin. The problem comes when we try to solve our shame ourselves. Adam and his wife try to solve for their shame by putting leaves on themselves. Initially, this seems like a good solution. They are ashamed to be naked, so leaves will cover up the parts they aren’t comfortable with anymore. But what is this really doing? Is this actually resolving their shame? Not really. It is just coping with it. They’ve disobeyed God; they can’t undo that. All they can do is try to deal with the uncomfortable symptoms. Can we not relate? How many times when we sin do we just retreat into our computers? Retreat into our work? Retreat into our drinks? Guilt is such a powerful emotion. Can it not ruin everything? Everything else can be going perfectly, but when there is something we know we have to confront, even paradise is a living hell. Now some have an even more powerful and sophisticated way of dealing with shame and that is wallowing in it. They have done this terrible thing, and they cannot stop talking about it and beating themselves up about it. They don’t try to distract, but quite the opposite: they try to deeply punish themselves. They take on the shame as a massive part of their identity, making it so that no life ever really reaches them. They suffer for a completely indefinite amount of time, simultaneously too much and not enough. None of these ways of dealing with shame addresses the root problem: you have sinned against God. Adam and his wife have not truly covered up their shame, because as soon as God comes into the garden, they retreat to hide amongst the trees. This is an interesting little moment here, as they are trying to use God’s blessings of the trees to hide themselves from God. God isn’t fooled. He says to the man, “Where are you?” Scholars note that God isn’t actually confused about where they are, and the text itself hints at that by saying that God said this to Adam. In fact, as Matthews points out, God is very specifically talking to Adam in verses 9-11 as the words are singular when God says “you.” (240). God’s Word also demonstrates that God’s knowledge of all things is completely comprehensive. There is simply nothing that God doesn’t know about. But here, God is noting to Adam that he is missing from the usual place. Something is different, and it is time for Adam to confess what he has done. But Adam doesn’t really do that. He starts out by saying that he was ashamed to be naked in God’s presence. God won’t let him off the hook and asks specifics about their eating of the tree. Again, Matthews comments, “There will be no possibility for reconciliation if the guilty are unwilling to confess their deeds.” (240). If someone will not even agree that what they have done is wrong when they are wrong, there is just no way a relationship can thrive in that condition. Confession is the first and often one of the hardest steps. When it is clear that God already knows what Adam has done, Adam deploys the next trick for not dealing with one’s sin: blame. Adam begins by blaming his wife for giving him the fruit. There is also the not-so-subtle blaming of God Himself for giving Him his wife in the first place! One scholar notice that the word “gave” is used here twice, almost to say, “You gave me her, and she gave me the fruit!” (Matthews, 241). That same scholar goes on to say, “Now, like the serpent, he charges that God’s good gift was malicious, for she has led to his downfall. She is a mistake.” (241). Is that not chilling? Here, Adam has become snake-like. He follows those steps we talked about last week. God was stingy in not giving Him the right woman, whereas Adam would have been a much better person to evaluate the fitness of this woman for him (nevermind that this is precisely what happened!). He does eventually say that he ate the fruit, but wow, it took us a while to get there, and what horrors we had to endure to get through blaming! Adam admits to sinning, but only after blaming literally everyone else in the world first. His wife is quick to pick up this trick! When she is confronted by what she has done, then she turns and says that the serpent deceived her, so she ate. And while that can be seen as true, it wasn’t as if she didn’t know what the command of God was. The serpent was just successful in getting her to flat-out disregard what God had said. She also, after making this excuse, eventually confesses her own sin, and Matthews notes that she is able to do so without blaming God (242). Blame is just another trick that we tend to use when we are confronted with our sin, and often comes with shame. When it is undeniable that the sin has taken place, and it is equally undeniable that you have done it, the next step is to try to blame someone else for making you do it. When I was a new dad, I thought that my grumpy moods were due to my lack of sleep, and blamed my son’s sleep habits for my crabbiness. Getting sleep is needed, but all that sleep deprivation was doing was revealing what was really down there. It turns out that I am a sinner who gets mad when things don’t go my way. Sure, sleep deprivation brings that out (more), but it didn’t create it. Adam’s blaming brings this out really well, because Adam is ultimately blaming God for his sin. He says in effect, “If you hadn’t given me this woman, I wouldn’t have sinned.” How often have we heard that today? It is certainly not God’s fault that Adam sinned, and it isn’t His fault that we sin, too. Turn with me to James 1:13-15. Notice that sinners are led away by their own desires. The only reason why something is a temptation is because it is something that you already desire. I’ve not felt the temptation to steal anything because I have not had a desire for something that strongly. That doesn’t mean that I am incapable of stealing, it just means that I haven’t had the right desire stoked yet. When Eve took the fruit, she saw that it was “desirous,” the same word that is used for coveting (Ross, 136). She wanted what that fruit had, and it didn’t matter who was saying no. Blaming the serpent doesn’t change that. So what we have seen at this point is that blaming is just as effective a strategy for dealing with our sin as covering up shame. Blaming someone else for your sin is never going to get you anywhere. Now, can it be true that someone sinned against you? Of course! Can it be that someone sinned against you worse, even way worse, than you did against them? For sure! That said, it doesn’t excuse sinful response to that sin. Look at Jesus Himself. He is the ultimate example of someone who was sinned against in an absolutely horrific way. Jesus literally did nothing to deserve that kind of treatment, but He opened not His mouth. He didn’t curse those who harmed Him. He didn’t zap them with lightning, or even call ten thousand angels to His aid. He didn’t even so much as complain! Indeed, Jesus does the exact opposite: He takes the blame and shame onto Himself. All of the elects’ sins He takes the blame and shame for, and then dies with it. Oh, if you can just grasp this, you would enjoy your life so much more, because this is the gospel. This act of Christ removes the need for shaming and blaming and instead replaces it with forgiveness! Follow me, here! Shame comes from knowing that we have done the wrong thing, and blaming is the attempt to find the cause of the shame. When we rightly conclude that we have no one to blame for our sin except ourselves, we are left with shame. This shame can never go away because nothing will ever change the fact that we sinned except that Jesus offers forgiveness! Jesus doesn’t pretend that this sin never happened. Quite the contrary! Your sin was so heinous in all of its God-dishonoring, God-denying, pride-exalting ways, that the only way to get rid of it was to have God Himself in the person of Christ absorb all the just wrath aimed at those sins. Jesus has taken the true penalty of those sins, and offers total forgiveness. God chooses to not hold your crimes against you even though He is fully aware of them. That and that alone frees you from lasting shame. Do we still feel bad when we sin? Of course! But now that shame can drive you towards God to find forgiveness there rather than cover yourself in the fig leaves of your silly excuses and attempts to fix things. Knowing that you have such a way of dealing with your shame, you can now direct the blame where it needs to go: yourself. This doesn’t mean that we blame ourselves for things that we didn’t do wrong. Never blame yourself for something you didn’t do wrong. That’s lying. But where you do find your fault, you can admit to that fault, and then run to Jesus for forgiveness. This was the mistake that Adam and Eve made. When they sinned, the proper response should have been to say when they heard God in the Garden, “Here comes the Lord. We have sinned. Let’s go to Him and seek His forgiveness. He has been so merciful to us in all that He has provided; it is just His character and nature. Let’s be honest with Him, and throw ourselves at His mercy and love.” That should be our response to sin, and really the only way to have a response like that is being transformed by God. So what is our takeaway today? We will do anything with our sin other than confess it. We will hold onto shame by either trying to cover it up or wear it as a badge. If we don’t take that approach, we will blame anything and everyone, including God Himself, for our sin. Neither approach makes the sin go away. But what we find in Christ is freedom from guilt! Romans 8 declares that there is no condemnation for those in Christ, and if God is for you, who can be against you? Nothing can separate you from the love of God! All of this should drive you towards Him and away from your sin. Sin only brings shame and blame. It is Christ and Christ alone who can take it away forever. Image by Jonas 
Today, we discuss the very sad topic of sin. It is something that isn’t pleasant to think about and can trigger many painful memories of people sinning against us, or it can resurface deep regrets that we have in the ways that we have sinned against other people. Sin is not a very popular doctrine and has been watered down tremendously in our culture. Sinning comes up more often in the context of dieting than anything else! People feel guilty for that extra cookie and what it means for their waistline rather than their selfishness and what that means for their marriages.
We have to know what sin truly is. It is no exaggeration to say that if you don’t understand sin, you will not understand anything in this world. Why do certain approaches to government work and others don’t? Because one takes into account sin and the others don’t. Why do we have Christian leaders elevated to great platforms only to watch them fall in big ways? Because we don’t understand sin and take appropriate measures against it. Sin is our enemy, and if we are going to fight our enemy, then we need to know how sin works. By this, I don’t mean that we need to dive deeply into the world and consume all of these terrible things to understand sin. Sin isn’t going to tell you what it is. Sin is just going to lie to you (as we talked about a couple weeks ago). Instead, we are going to dive into God’s Word to see Sin lies about God and God’s goodness offers more than sin. Sin lies about God There are more places to go than Genesis 3 for an analysis of sin, but what better place to go than at the beginning? Let’s see how sin worked the first time, and as we will see, this is pretty much how it works every time. We begin with verse 1 which describes this serpent. It is worth noting that the serpent is described in relation to the rest of the creatures. This serpent is not a competing god that has a chance against the Almighty. This is just another creature that God made. How this creature became evil is never answered by the Bible. Revelation tells us that the serpent was the devil, but we are not told how the devil became evil. Ultimately, we wouldn’t be served by knowing the answer to that question. I want to know how to get rid of it so it never comes back! That is the question that the Bible answers. Of the two, I’m glad I have the answer to that one! Anyway, the serpent begins the conversation with Eve and gets right to the point: did God really say, “you may not eat of any tree in the Garden”? The question is meant to plant doubt in their heads (Belcher, 72). I think that this is meant to get them to think that God is being stingy with them. The question is designed for them to say, “Well, not exactly, He just said that we couldn’t eat from this tree.” That makes you focus on the negative, the thing that you can’t have, instead of remembering the positive, all the things that God has otherwise provided. Sometimes we lose the fight with sin in this way. I can’t remember who I heard this from, but some preacher once talked about how we fight against sin wrongly. When we feel temptation come up, we start thinking about how God told us we can’t do that, we pray “help me not do that” and go round and round like that. Instead, the more effective thing would be to say, “Yep God told me not to do that, and look at all the good things that He has given for me to do, and stop thinking about that sin! Fill your mind with something else! Bitterness doesn’t get better by focusing on the bitterness. Instead, focus on how God has forgiven you. Instead of dwelling on what that person did to you, refocus it by praying for them instead. But Adam and Eve don’t do that. Eve tries to correct the serpent, but the commandment is not exactly what God said. Instead, she gives a distorted picture of God’s command. Remember how I said that God was Italian when He told Adam to eat of all the trees? God says “Eat, eat!” pointing to the glad heart of God to be generous to His creatures. Instead, Eve just says, “eat.” Now, you may say that I’m being overly picky on Eve, but it does show how much precision matters. It is exactly this point (God’s generosity) that the serpent is trying to exploit as we will see in the following moves he makes in verse 4. Many will also point out that Eve said that they weren’t supposed to touch it, which God never said. Just about everyone will point out that Eve was being a Pharisee in that moment by adding onto what God said. Precision matters! She makes God to be a bigger rule-setter than He is and is making Him look less generous than He actually is. Adding onto God’s commands never helps, and forgetting God’s generosity never helps. Now, in verse 4, the serpent makes his next move and flat-out denies God's Word and builds an argument in five moves, the first of which we have already seen: 1) God is stingy (there is a prohibition here). 2) God is a liar (you shall *not* die) 3) The reason God is a liar is because God is selfish and insecure (He knows you will be like Him). 4) God really isn't all that different. You just need to know a little more. (You will be like God) 5) Humans have unlimited potential that they can create. Their fate is in their hands. The insidious thing about these moves is there is a little bit of truth mixed into exactly one point. That truth comes in His fourth move in that they will become like God. They do become more like God in the sense that they know more about good and evil now (God Himself confirms that in verse 22), but they have become so much less like God by sinning. What a cruel joke! Is this not how every temptation is made? We see something that we know we shouldn't have or do, and what is our reaction? Frustration or sulking! We close off our eyes to the bounty of blessings in front of us to focus on the red light! This gets us to think that God is stingy. "I deserve this high, this feeling, this person, this money, this house, this spouse" you can fill in the blank, "and if I don't get that thing, then it might as well be that I don't have any blessing at all." That's how it works, doesn't it? Let’s see how the other points work in our own lives. At that point we have a choice: do I listen to God's warnings or not? We hear in James 1:15 that sin brings death, and our own experience in life will tell us that sin doesn't bring us good consequences. But when we do sin, we think "God is a liar; bad things won't really happen to me if I do this." Move three is more implicit in our thinking than we realize. If we call God's rules false and say that God is a liar, then we would have to ask the question, "why would God lie to us?" Really the only answers to that are either: 1) God is just a big meanie who gets a kick out of our suffering or 2) God is insecure and selfish, so he forces us down and away from our full potential. Either lie we believe gets us right to the next step in the argument. Move four is also implicit in our thinking and a consequence of the three preceding moves. If God is a stingy, lying, insecure being, then He isn't all that different from us, is He? In our minds, God loses His transcendence and becomes one of us. Losing reverence and fear of God is a very scary place to be. If you don't fear God, then there really is nothing within to stop you from anything. Move five, if God is one of us, then one of us can be God. We can be the masters of our own destiny, and by moving through the world we see fit, we can create the world we want in our image. Watkins notices this move in verse 6 when Eve saw the fruit and it was good to the eye. Does that remind you of a phrase from chapter one? “God saw…and it was good”? Eve is stepping into the place of God by deciding for herself what was good and evil. After all, that was God’s work in creation. When God said that light was good as He made it or that the sea was good, God wasn’t comparing His work to some standard that was external to Himself; He was basing how good something was in creation solely on His own standards (Christopher Watkins, Biblical Critical Theory, 112-113). In other words, God wasn’t holding up an assignment worksheet like a student with a grading chart comparing His work to the standard. No, God IS the standard, and He, and He alone, determines what makes the cut or not. And it is this power that Adam and Eve are grasping at. We forget that Adam and Eve actually did know at least a little bit about what was good and evil. God’s command was a good thing and disobeying it was a bad thing, something that they shouldn’t do. Watkins further comments that the Hebrew word “knowing good and evil” can also mean “choosing.” When God called something “good” it wasn’t because God was looking at some chart that He had to follow and called it “good” when it matched. He called it good because He decided that it was good, and now Eve is stepping into that place (Ibid, 112-3). Van Till, a theologian, thought of it as Eve was gathering opinions about God’s commands from the snake and herself, and by doing so, she brought God down onto her level as just one opinion among many (quoted in Watkins, 113). My Hebrew professor, Alan Ross put it like this: “Adam and Eve lived in a setting that God himself had pronounced ‘good.’ Yet they were now led to believe that there was greater good held back from them, that somehow they could elevate life for the better” (Ross, Creation and Blessing, 136). In other words, despite everything that God had done for them, life itself, living that life in literal paradise with all the purpose and provision they could possibly have, married to people literally made for each other, but they thought they could imagine better. That's the roadmap of sin! Anytime we sin, we are doing the same things for ourselves. We say that we know better than God does about what will make our lives better. We look at all the blessings that God gave us and conclude that He is still holding out on us. Have you ever been to a kid’s birthday party where it was extremely obvious the kid was spoiled? No matter how many presents he opens, it’s never enough. When he begins to scream about this, do we not feel a mixture of indignance and sadness? At the same time we think “how on earth did this kid get so entitled” we think, “but then, that’s how I act inside when I don’t get my way, don’t I?” Every sin we commit is the rage of a toddler saying, “I want more; I deserve it!” It’s humbling to put it in those terms, isn’t it? That discontentment is all fed by telling ourselves those lies I mentioned already at the beginning. We think that we deserve more because we think God is stingy, a liar, insecure, pretty much just like us, so we can do His job for Him. All of those thoughts happen at lightning speed and with such frequency, we hardly notice them anymore. When your spouse said something unkind and we responded in the same way, what happened? We thought, “I know what God said about loving my spouse, but look at what I’m dealing with here. I don’t deserve that. God is withholding something good from me, that makes Him a jerk, therefore, I am going to suspend what He said because I’m right here on the ground, I see what’s going on, and instead of saying a soft answer to turn away wrath, I’m going to bring about my judgment on them right now with a harsh word.” Now, you may not have every step of that in your mind, but if we were to put those thoughts in slow motion, interrogate each thought as they went by, you’ll find it. Can you see why sin is so offensive to God? And can you not see the damage that these patterns of thinking can do over the long haul? Sin never stays small because once you have agreed that it is ok to disagree with God here, it doesn’t take much to disagree with Him a little bit more. When we have made our spouse out to be the bad guy unfairly one time, it is easier than it was before to do it a second time. Well by the time you have done that 20 years and 80,000 times later, it’s no wonder one’s marriage isn’t functioning. When you keep telling God He doesn’t know what He is doing, sometimes He just lets you find out for yourself. God’s goodness offers more than sin. So if this is sin—this easy to commit—what hope do we have of defeating it? Well, this is where Jesus comes in, and He always comes in. Jesus came to defeat sin, to overturn those lies that lead to our destruction. And this cost Him everything. His body would need to be broken; His blood would need to be poured out. And it all would need to be applied to us. You know, one of the commentators that I read this week noticed something very interesting in the Bible. It goes to show you how paying attention to the individual words of the Bible pays off. You’ll notice in our text that Eve saw the fruit and then took and ate it. There is an echo of this that shows up in the New Testament at the Last Supper. What did Jesus say when He broke the bread and poured the wine? “Take and eat.” (Kinder, quoted in Ross, 137). Jesus’ sacrifice undoes the curse of the tree! Instead of the fruit that lead to death, Jesus offers the Bread of Life! When Adam and Eve tasted of the fruit, they found the knowledge of evil, but those who taste of the Bread of Life will see that The Lord is Good. Instead of being bound to do evil you will be released to freedom to do good. That is the hope of the gospel. And at the end of it all, Jesus will usher you towards the Tree of Life, never to face sin and hardship again, that’s the good news. Have you tasted that bread yet? Have you put your trust in Jesus? Have you asked Him to forgive you of your sin? If you haven’t, taste that bread today. The world will offer you the fruit of sin and the sour wine of disobedience. It may taste good going down, but it is bitter later. You know that. You’ve experienced that, and if you haven’t, you will. Take of the bread of Jesus. Know what it is to be satisfied and filled with Him. Maybe you are here today and you think, “Well, I’ve been a Christian for a while, but the bread, if I’m honest, is feeling a little stale.” It could be because you are trying to coast on old bread you ate many years ago, if I may extend the metaphor. You need to daily stay close to Christ, daily consume the Bread of Life, because when you do, you’ll be amazed at how you aren’t as hungry for the things that don’t satisfy anymore. You will find joy in your Savior who tells you, “Eat, eat! Enjoy!” Further, when temptation arises, remind yourself of God’s goodness to you. When our kids disobey, our thought is, do you know how much good I’ve done to you? We need to take the same approach with God. Image by Anja 
Last week, we looked at the incredible idea that the God of the universe makes covenants with us. This week, in our last look at this incredible chapter for now, we are going to look at what it is to make a covenant with each other, specifically in marriage. There are many examples of covenants that we see made in the Bible. We see covenants made between two men for example in Genesis 31:44 between Jacob and Laban, and famously between David and his friend Jonathan (1 Samuel 20:16). Covenants have been made between nations, for example, in Joshua 9:15, when Joshua makes a covenant with people from another country.
But there is a special kind of covenant that is unlike the other ones that we have seen in these examples: Marriage. Marriage is a special kind of covenant, a promise of devotion, that points to something more than just a promise between two people. Ultimately, marriage is going to point us towards the relationship between Christ and His Church, a relationship that is the reason for everything existing in the first place. The Bible begins and ends with a marriage, some of the greatest joys and comforts can be found within marriage, which then shows why Satan is so bent on destroying or redefining marriage. When we hear something like that in Church, we tend to think then of the national state of marriage. We think that I am going to be preaching against the LGBT movement or national divorce rates. Certainly that is something that we will talk about today because the Bible addresses those things directly in our passage, but I don’t want us to miss the trees for the forest. Yes, we want to say something about these obvious assaults, but we can become so focused on national sins that we forget that there are personal sins in our individual marriages that need addressing. Single people don’t get to sit this one out either. Believe it or not, the problems we have in marriage don’t come from marriage. They are simply revealed in marriage. Selfishness, anger, greed, laziness, critical spirits, and lust are all just as available in the single life as they are in the married life. A lot of times, those sins are developed and more deeply entrenched during those single years, and how well you repent of those things now will give you a good indication of how you will repent of those things in marriage. The Christian life doesn’t start when you say “I do” to a fiance, it starts when you put your faith in Christ. So today, we are going to cover that and more as we dive into our last look at Genesis 2, looking (finally) at point number 3: God convenes marriage. God convenes marriage Here in verse 18, we get a very surprising word from God. So far, everything has been good! But then God looks at Adam and says, “It is not good.” Last week, we looked at the personality of God and the way that He forms relationships with human beings. Yet, we stressed that God didn’t need us for anything, and this is true even for relationships. God wasn’t lonely. He exists as a Trinity, three persons in one God, all existing in relationship to each other. God isn’t alone with Himself. But Adam is. So the Lord is going to fix that by making Adam a helper. Here the text says that God formed the animals our of the ground and brought them to Adam. Once again, this is not a contradiction where Moses forgets what order everything was made in. Remember that animals and human beings were made on the same day, but it does look like human beings were made last. In this case, I would say that God simply produces animals in the Garden just like He made the trees spring up in the Garden for Adam. Thus begins the parade of the animals as they are each brought to Adam to see what he is going to call them. One source pointed out that Adam was the first scientist! One scholar put it this way: "'Science was simply an advanced state of language. Language in any case is the form and condition of science, and in language the active naming is the first and indispensable operation.''" (Watkins, 109) What he is saying there is that all science is doing is giving us a way of talking about something, naming something. Gravity and how it works has always existed since the world was created, but now, thanks to scientists, we know what to call it and roughly know how it works. As an aside, I was talking to the 4th grade class last week, and their teacher told me they were talking about Genesis. The teacher asked, “Why did God have Adam name all the animals first before making Eve?” One of the students responded, “So this way there wouldn’t be any disagreement over what to name them.” Anyway, Adam is naming all these animals, but what we are really looking for is a helper, someone to complement Adam and he to complement. But no matter how many birds, bears, and other beasts of the field go by, Adam doesn’t have that match. This is something special because something like a bull or a cow is passed over. LET ME EXPLAIN! To a farming community, it is difficult to overstate how important animals were. If you didn’t have an ox or at the very least a donkey, your ability to grow food was greatly limited. Adam has just been charged to keep a Garden, so having something like an animal would be an extraordinary help wouldn’t it? That would be like being put in charge of a large field, and someone is offering you a tractor! But none of these animals fit, because Adam doesn’t really need a plow to complete him. This shows that marriage isn’t meant to be some sort of pragmatic move. Your spouse isn’t supposed to be someone that you exploit for your own ends. Adam doesn’t need someone to do their fair share of the yard work, a good horse will do that. Adam doesn’t need someone to be his employee, an ox will serve that purpose just fine. Adam needs someone who will complete him and he her. Adam needs someone who will help him multiply people to worship and serve God. Adam needs someone who will, with him, complete the image of God. Adam needs a wife. So God is going to make him one. Now, this is a really interesting procedure here of what God is about to do. We remember that God formed man out of the dust and breathed life into him. We might think that this is the recipe for humanity dirt + breath= living soul! But God has a different recipe for making a woman. It requires some surgery. Adam is put into a deep sleep, a rib is taken out and formed into a woman. Now, you’ve got to admit this sounds a little strange. Why do it this way? Well, I think there are a number of reasons for this. One this points to the care of a husband to his wife. Adam wasn’t kidding when he said bone of my bone. That was literal! Now, my wife was not formed of my body, but I am to treat her like it. What does it say in Ephesians 5:28? Love your wife like you love your own body. You nourish and take care of your body (or at least you’re trying to!). If you had a bruised rib, you would be very careful with that, wouldn’t you? You would do whatever it would take to ensure that it is healed up. Should we not treat our wives in the same way? We care for them gently and in an understanding way. What was physical for Adam is spiritual for us, but the responsibility is the same. I think a second reason for forming the woman like this was so that there is no doubt at all that she was made in the image of God and is just as human as Adam. History shows that women haven’t been treated very fairly, and it comes from not seeing women as equally in the image of God as men (in fact, as we will see in a moment, both are needed to image God). I like to make pizza at home, and I have a recipe that produces a large lump of dough that I split into two pieces. One piece is not “more” bread than the other. They came from the same lump. In the same way, the first woman was made from the first man and thereby has every claim to humanity as he does. I think a third reason why she was made this way was observed by Matthew Henry, a minister and Bible commentator in England in the late 1600s: “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.” Listen to how Watkins describes what marriage is: "The biblical view of marriage is one of a relation of utter spiritual, intellectual intimacy: this is, after all, how we will know God and be known by him in eternity, and marriage is used in the Bible as a picture of this eternal intimacy.… God did not make two humanities, one male and one female, equally and independently in the image of God, but one united humanity with two genders that together are in God's image. The image of God, it would appear in verse 27, is corporate rather than atomized and individualistic: male and female are in *the* image (not in two images) of God." (99). A parrot is not going to do that. Nothing else but a male and female are going to make a marriage. This is what God has decreed from the very beginning. We went through all the options here. No one else will ever do except Eve. God could have made another man, but He didn’t. He could have said that Adam will just pop children out of his ear or something. But for some reason (that Paul tells us exactly about in Ephesians 5), God has designed that marriage is only between a man and a woman, forsaking all others and becoming one flesh. This is the design that Jesus refers to as well as the rest of the New Testament. It is all grounded right here at the very beginning. And marriage was so good there. It says that they were naked and not ashamed. These two could be totally open to one another. There was nothing to hide—total trust of each other. That’s not how it is now. We all wear clothes because we all are hiding from each other. There is vulnerability and threat without clothing. Yet in the gift of marriage, that part of Eden is restored. There is one person, and one person only, who has the honor of knowing everything about you. One person who can see every single flaw that you have, physical and otherwise, and still be committed to loving you. That is what marriage should be. This picture of marriage is what we should be striving for with each other, because that is what we have with Christ! Ephesians 5 lays out for us that the entire point of creating marriage was so that there would be an earthly picture of a heavenly reality. The husband is supposed to be playing the part of Jesus and the woman playing the part of The Church. It would appear that this was prefigured in Genesis more than we might at first think. I was talking to one person this week who pointed out that Adam goes through what looks like a death and resurrection. Adam goes into a deep sleep, and when he rises, there is his wife. In a similar way, Christ dies, and when He rises again, His bride the Church stands before Him. You could even pile onto the imagery that Christ’s side was opened up, too! But whether these images were intended to be seen that way, the point remains that Christ provides loving leadership to His Church who in turn loving submits. We can be unashamed because Christ knows you better than your spouse does. He knows you better than you know yourself. He sees every single flaw as it actually is in all its evil, and yet He chooses to love you still. That is a great spouse. That is a loving Savior. So what does this mean for our marriages? We have marriage in a post fall world. We aren’t in paradise anymore, and we aren’t perfect anymore. But this is exactly where we practice the sacrificial love that God calls us to. The marriage we are called to emulate isn’t Adam and Eve. It is Christ and the Church. And it is only in Christ that we can. You aren’t enough to make marriage work. You need power from Christ that you get when you turn to Christ and ask His help. I have a wonderful marriage survey tool and devotional to take you through if you would like a check up on your marriage. |
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