Far as The Curse is Found

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 ​