Curse and Consequences

On Friday, this picture was on the front page of the Toronto Star. It is the picture of a Jewish mother weeping because her 6-year-old daughter has just been brutally murdered by a Palestinian gunman who broke into their home.

There was no motive for the killing, other than that Palestinians hate Israelis. The gunman didn’t know this woman’s family, didn’t know her name or her daughter’s name. All that mattered was that she was a Jew and had to be killed in order to sow terror in the hearts of other Jews.

When you look into this woman’s face, you can see the agony, the despair, the bitter pain of all the suffering and evil in the world. A single day doesn’t go by on planet Earth when countless millions of human beings can identify with exactly what this woman is feeling. And that is because of the presence of sin and evil in the world – bringing pain, suffering, and death.

The book of Genesis explains to us the origin of evil. Evil is personal in origin. It came into being when a supernatural being – an angel – made a personal decision to challenge God; to go against God’s will. God, having created that angel, gave him the ability to make free choices. And God allowed that particular choice to stand, along with the painful consequences. As a result of that choice, that angel was expelled from heaven and became the devil.

When God created man and woman, he likewise gave them a free will. God put before them the choice of whether or not to obey Him. God didn’t coerce them, God didn’t force them to obey Him; He allowed them to choose.

Into that situation came the devil, and through a series of deceptive lies, he persuaded Eve to choose to disobey God. Adam followed Eve into disobedience, consciously and deliberately choosing to go against God’s will. And that was how sin entered the human experience.

As we saw last week, sin is when we fail to live up to God’s expectations for us. He created us in his image, he expects us to reflect his character, he wants us to love him and do his will. But when we don’t do this, when we turn our backs on God, we sin. Sin is literally “missing the mark” – failing to live up to God’s holy will for us.

And when we sin, there are profound consequences. We become separated from God; cut off from fellowship with Him. We find ourselves on the wrong side of God’s justice and holiness. We have broken God’s standard, and thus we are guilty. We are sinners. God must judge us. But even as He judges us, He extends an open hand of grace to us.

We come today to perhaps the most somber, serious passage in the whole Bible. Adam and Eve have sinned. They have admitted their sin. They are guilty. There are going to be consequences. And God speaks, and tells them what those consequences are going to be. Remember, God always has the last word – even when we sin. Even when we exercise our will against him, ultimately, it is His will that prevails.

Let’s look at what God says in Genesis 14ff…

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

God first pronounces a curse on the serpent, and this curse is twofold. First, there is a physical curse on the animal because the serpent was the animal that Satan used as his instrument. From that time on, snakes would crawl on their bellies.

Apparently, prior to this, the serpent had been an animal that had walked erect. Perhaps it even flew. And it must have been a very beautiful animal—the word serpent in Hebrew means “the shining one”. This is probably the reason Satan chose to indwell the serpent to tempt Eve.

But from that time on, the serpent was going to crawl on the ground, in the dust—a picture of humiliation. Have you ever wondered why, down through history, there has always been an almost universal fear and loathing of snakes. You say the words cobra, python, viper, and they bring fearsome images to our minds. This is why—because of God’s curse. There is fear and enmity there.

But beyond the physical curse on the snake as an animal, God pronounced a spiritual curse on Satan, who had indwelt the serpent.

Genesis 3:15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

Theologians call this verse the “proto-evangelium”—the first good news—because it tells of the coming conflict between the seed of the woman and the devil. Who is the seed of the woman? It is the Messiah, of course. Jesus Christ was born of a virgin—he was not born the usual way from the seed of a man. That is why he is called the seed of the woman.

And this verse tells us that the seed of the woman, Jesus Christ, would crush the serpent’s head. When you crush someone’s head, that is a fatal injury. Christ would be the death of Satan. But in the process, he himself would be injured. The serpent would strike his heel. That is not a fatal injury, but it is an injury. Jesus suffered and died on the cross. They struck him and flogged him and drove iron spikes through his body. They pierced his side with a spear. But none of those injuries proved ultimately fatal, because Jesus rose again.

So Genesis 3:15 is the Bible’s first prophesy of the cross of Jesus Christ and the ultimate solution to the problem of evil. And it was a prophesy that was not even addressed to man—God said this to the devil.

But what did God say to Adam and Eve? Let’s pick it up in verse 16…

To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Notice that God pronounced a curse on Satan, and he pronounced a curse on the ground (v. 17), but he did not pronounce a curse on Adam and Eve. What he did was to allow Adam and Eve to experience the consequences of their sin. And he does the same thing today. If we sin, God does not curse us. But he allows us to experience the consequences of our sin. And that is why the world is so full of pain and suffering – they are the consequences of sin.

Now the consequences for Adam and Eve were different. For the woman, there would be painful travail in childbirth and in the raising of those children, for that is what the Hebrew expression indicates. It includes the entire process of having and raising children, not just the temporary pain of giving of birth.

God originally had told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and he had given that command in the form of a blessing. God meant children to be a blessing. But now, because of the presence of sin, children would also become a source of great pain—especially to their mothers.

I think you mothers would agree that your children can be, at the same time, both the greatest blessing and the greatest heartache in your life.

And because of sin, there would be another source of great pain in a woman’s life. It would be in her relationship with her husband. Look at the last part of verse 16…

Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

This verse is often misunderstood. The word “desire” is an interesting word. In this context, it does not mean a positive desire; it means a negative desire. The same Hebrew word is used in Genesis 4:7, where the Lord says to Cain “sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” The word means “to control, to dominate—to gain the upper hand in a hostile way”.

So what is God saying here? He is saying that, because of sin, the relationship of companionship and harmony and teamwork that was supposed to exist between a man and a woman will turn into a contest of wills. It will be the battle of the sexes. The woman will want to dominate her husband, to usurp the place of leadership in the marriage, to control him, to manipulate him to get her own way.

And the man, because he is also a sinner, won’t take this lying down! He’ll fight back. And because of his superior physical strength, in many cases, he ends up ruling over the woman, domineering and dictating. And I would remind you that in most places in the world, that is exactly how things have turned out. It’s a man’s world. Down through history, women have been downtrodden and mistreated. And it all comes from this battle of the sexes; it’s a consequence of sin.

Women are relational. For a woman, the part of her life that is nearest and dearest to her is her family, her children, her marriage, and her relationship with her husband. And those are the very areas where she will feel the consequences of sin most painfully: in her relationships.

But sin also had consequences for Adam’s life. Look at verse 17…

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Women tend to find their significance in relationships. But men tend to find their significance in their work. And here, Adam’s whole work-life falls under the consequences of sin. God had created Adam to be the master over creation, but now, because of the Fall, creation isn’t going to co-operate anymore.

There would now be a new principle at work in creation—a principle of decay and disorder and chaos—that would make all of Adam’s efforts to bring it into submission frustrating and futile. He will sweat and he will labor painfully hard—the word is the same Hebrew word used for the woman’s labor in verse 16—but he will barely be able to scratch out a living from the soil.

And in the end, the very soil that he has to work so hard to get to produce anything is the soil he is destined to return to. Because now man is a dying creature. From the day he is born, he is destined to die. Recently I ran across a neat definition for health. You know what health is? Health is merely the slowest possible way of dying.

So ultimately, no matter how hard we work, when we finally step back and look at what we have accomplished, it is all futile, because we die and leave it all behind. And this is a consequence of sin. The author of Ecclesiastes said…

I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. A man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, but then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it.

Sin has painful consequences for woman in her relational life; sin has painful consequences for man in his work life. And in the justice of God, he allows us to experience these consequences. And if the story ended there, it would be a very sad story indeed!

But God always provides grace and hope. And that is what he did with Adam and Eve. Look at verse 20…

Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

Now, at first glance, this verse doesn’t seem to belong here. What does this have to do with anything? But it is a very significant verse.

God has just pronounced a curse on Satan and has explained the consequences of sin for Adam and Eve. The atmosphere of the passage is grim and somber because the shadow of death has fallen over God’s creation.

How does Adam respond to this grim situation? He responds by giving his wife a new name—Eve. Up until this time, her name was just “woman”, reflecting the fact that she was taken out of man. But now Adam calls her Eve. You say, “So what?”

I’ll tell you what! This is a stupendous verse! What does Eve mean? Eve means “living; or life-giver”. Adam gave her that name because he believed that she would become the mother of all the living. Why is that significant?

Because it reveals Adam’s heart, that’s why! Question: had Eve become a mother yet? No. She wasn’t even pregnant. Adam and Eve didn’t even know what it meant to be pregnant yet! So why did Adam suddenly decide to call her the mother of all the living?

Because he heard what God had said back in verse 15 about the seed of the woman, and about her offspring. He understood that the story wasn’t over. They weren’t just going to die. They were going to have children—descendants—and one of his wife’s descendants was going to be very special.

When he gave his wife a new name, Adam was showing that he believed God.

Even though there was no evidence. Even though all around him seemed to indicate that the story was going to have an unhappy ending—Adam chose to believe God. This verse is so significant because it is the first time in the Bible that a man expresses faith in God’s Word. In Genesis 3:20, Adam professed faith.

And that unlocked the fountain of God’s grace. I’m not saying that it takes man to be faithful before God will be grace-full. But it is only when we express our faith in God that we can begin to experience all the grace He has for us.

Adam gets a lot of bad reviews for what happened in the Garden of Eden. But here was one thing he did right – he believed God. He took God at his word.

Now look at what God did for Adam and Eve in v. 21…

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

God provided a covering for them. Remember, Adam and Eve had come up with a kind of a “fig-leaf fashion statement” to try to cover up their sin and guilt. But that was inadequate. All of our efforts to make ourselves presentable to God are useless. Only God can cover our sin.

And here he does so, by means of an object lesson. He provided garments of skin for Adam and Eve. That means that a couple of innocent animals had to lose their lives in order for their sin to be covered.

Hebrews 9:22 says “Without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins.” The first blood that was shed on planet earth was shed because God himself killed two animals—and I’ll bet they were lambs—to provide a covering for Adam and Eve’s sin.

That points us to the Lamb of God who shed his blood to take away our sin. Now look at verse 22…

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

What you have happening here is Adam and Eve getting banished from the Garden. They were now sinners, and subject to death. They could not be allowed free access to the Tree of Life in that condition. God said “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” Now exactly what that Tree was and what the nature of its fruit was, is a subject I don’t want to speculate on here.

But I would draw your attention to the fact that, from this point on, the Tree of Life disappears from the Biblical record until it reappears in the very last chapter of the Bible, Rev. 22, where we see it in the New Jerusalem giving healing to the nations.

Gen. 3:24 says that God “placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

I believe that this verse has been often misunderstood. We get the idea that the cherubim were there to keep Adam and Eve from getting at the Tree of LIfe. But look at what it says: “they were there to guard the way to the Tree of Life”. (KJV says “to keep the way of the tree of life”—to keep it open, in other words.)

But why would God want to do that if he didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Life?

What do we know about cherubim? Well, the Bible tells us that cherubim are angelic beings with a very special function. They are not just ordinary angels. In the Bible, the cherubim are always associated with God’s throne, God’s glory, and God’s mercy. The Lord is commonly described in the OT as “the One who sits enthroned between the cherubim.”

Ezekiel tells us that Lucifer, the angel who fell and became the devil, was once a guardian cherub himself, standing by the throne of God. His sin was that he wanted to make his own throne higher than God’s throne.

Now the question about Gen. 3:24 is this: Why would God put the cherubim at the gates of the Garden, along the way to the Tree of LIfe? If all He was interested in doing was in making sure that Adam didn’t sneak back in, any old angel would have done the job. No way could Adam get around an angel.

Why the cherubim? Because I believe that God placed them there to make sure that the way back to the Tree of Life stayed open, but stayed open on God’s terms.

God preserved the way to the Tree of LIfe. He was guaranteeing with nothing less than his throne and his glory that there would always be a way back to the Tree of Life. Satan succeeded in getting us thrown out of the Garden, but he will never succeed in shutting down our access to the gift of eternal life. But we must come God’s way. We must come by God’s throne. And seated on that throne is none other than Jesus Christ.

When God gave Moses the directions for the building of the ark of the covenant that he had him carve the image of two cherubim above the lid – the place called the Mercy Seat—the place where the high priest would make atonement for the sins of the people?

When they sowed the curtain that curtained off the way to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, they sowed images of cherubim into it.

God was reminding us that the cherubim have always safeguarded our access into His presence. God is telling us that Satan, the fallen cherub, can do nothing to bar the way; to keep us from God’s grace. And that grace is evident in Genesis 3, where

• Adam professed his faith

• God provided a covering for his sin

• God preserved the way to eternal life

Are you aware of God’s grace at work in your life this morning? Are you willing, like Adam was in the midst of failure and defeat, to put your faith and hope in God? God’s grace can make something very beautiful out of your broken life.