There Will Be Pain In Childbearing

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church

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Good morning. Thank you.

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If you do have a Bible, turn to Genesis 16. We'll be continuing our study today on basic truths, and the basic truth that we are going to be discussing today is the truth that there will be pain in childbearing.

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So if you do have a Bible, turn to Genesis 3 .16, that's page number 3 in your pew

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Bible, and we'll be reading the first half of Genesis 3 .16 today.

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Please stand when you have Genesis 3. Genesis 3 .16a,

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to the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children.

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Amen? You may be seated. Let's pray.

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Lord, we do come before you as people today who are painfully aware of the realities of how the fall has affected the human race.

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Pray that you help us to learn great things from your word today. Pray that you help us as a people to understand your purposes for the world and how those purposes culminate in Jesus and the gospel.

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Thank you for all you do. In your son's name I pray, amen. Now, when we come to Genesis 3 .16,

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we do come to a passage that describes the first instance of pain in the

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Bible, and in some sense the problem of pain is the most fundamental problem that we experience.

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I mean, certainly that pain is coming from a source, it's coming from the root of our sin, but what

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I'm trying to suggest is that pain really is a broad term that describes all of the difficulties that we face in life, and as the curse affects both the male and the female's role in this passage, you'll see that pain is characteristic of its effects in both instances, so as you turn your attention to the nature of the curse as it is applied to the woman's role, you'll realize the truth that the woman's role is made more difficult as a result of the fall.

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So as I read Genesis 3 .16, it may be helpful to read it again, which says this,

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Genesis 3 .16, to the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you should bring forth children.

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Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. Today we're going to be discussing the first aspect of how the fall affects the woman's role.

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We're going to be talking about how it makes childbearing more difficult. Next week we'll be dealing with the second aspect of how the fall affects a woman's role.

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But the broader point to be made is the point that the woman's role will be made more difficult as a result of the fall, and these are the features that God chooses to bring to the forefront of our minds as we consider the nature of the consequences for Eve's actions in this narrative itself.

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For Adam and Eve, there are two sets of consequences. There's a set of consequences given to the woman.

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There's a set of consequences that's going to be given to the man later on as the representative for all humanity.

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These are obviously not disconnected, meaning the way in which the fall affects the woman because she is married to her husband will also affect him in a variety of ways.

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And the way the fall affects the man will affect the woman because they are one flesh and they are joined together.

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And yet these consequences for the fall are not just given in a blanket way to humanity in general.

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They're divided out between the different genders as the fall affects both of their roles.

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So God has determined consequences for their actions, and those consequences are going to be somewhat different.

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Now when you read the nature of these consequences, one of the things to realize is that God intends these curses, for lack of a better word, to reflect broad categories.

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So when you read these consequences, what you're not supposed to do is just interpret these consequences in the most narrow way imaginable and think that that's exactly what

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God is talking about. The point here is just to say that when we consider the consequences for the woman over the next couple of weeks, and then we see the consequences to the man and how that affects his role over the next couple of weeks, what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to consider these consequences to be short summaries of broader categories that shape all of human experience.

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So as we've said multiple times in our study here over the past couple of months, these opening chapters of the

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Scriptures are meant to be a paradigm to help us to understand all of human experience. These curses, they are meant to reflect broader categories for our consideration.

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In other words, there's a variety of ways that childbearing can be made more difficult, i .e.

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painful, as a result of the fall, and it would do us well to consider a few of those today.

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In the most specific, indirect sense of the word, this pain that accompanies childbearing where God says to the woman, surely

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I will multiply your pain in childbearing. In the most specific sense, what most naturally comes to your mind when you read a passage like that is probably going to be the pain that comes from physical delivery.

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Because that pain is the most pronounced kind of pain that affects the whole broad category of pain that accompanies childbearing, that might be the thing that comes to your mind the most.

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But I imagine if you're a woman here today, you'll realize that the pain that accompanies childbearing didn't simply start when you went into the delivery room.

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There's a lot of pregnancy discomfort that we can all thank our First Mother Eve for, if you are a woman in the room.

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And even if you're a man, because this pain does not leave you unscathed, as it were.

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But pregnancy discomfort seems to start very early, so very early on, women might experience morning sickness.

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My wife, Elizabeth, during our last pregnancy with Vivian, she had morning sickness the whole time.

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You know, so it wasn't just limited to the first trimester. She was basically nauseous and throwing up from start to finish.

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And that was a bit of a unique experience with all of our childbirths. So, early on, women might experience nausea, morning sickness, there's obviously back pain, there's pelvic pain, general fatigue that is a result of a woman's body adjusting to pregnancy.

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As pregnancy progresses, there can be heartburn, I mean, I'm uniquely aware of all these things because my wife has told me all these things.

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There's heartburn, swollen ankles, leg cramps, strain that comes from carrying extra weight.

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These are a lot of the physical kind of manifestations of pain that can happen. I mean, I remember most of our, well, my wife's pregnancies that I was along for the ride for, and the sleeplessness was a big problem.

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Once you get to be a certain size, one of the things you, and your baby gets to be a certain size, one of the things you realize is that if you're a woman, as you're up and about and you're moving, the moving can have an impact on the child such that it puts the child to sleep, and then when you lay down to go to sleep at night, that's when the baby decides it wants to be awake and kick you.

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But not only that, I mean, it's just difficult at times to get comfortable, difficult to sleep. I think most of the end phases of my wife's pregnancies ended with her being fairly sleep -deprived, and then you go into the delivery room.

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Most often, you go into the delivery room at very inconvenient times, and so you start out sleep -deprived, and then you go into,

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I think most of our pregnancies were early in the morning. So I think with Roman, when we went to the hospital,

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I remember I was working a hard job at that time, and I had literally, I was so exhausted, and I thought,

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I need to go lay down, I need to go to sleep, and it really, I barely had laid down on the bed, and my wife looked at me and said that the water was broken, and it's time to go to the hospital.

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And I remember the all -nighter that we had the first time with Gavin, I just thought, oh, man. I guess it's exciting that we're here, but man,

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I'm so exhausted. So think about that. I'm trying to get you to sympathize with my limited experience of pain in this, when

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Elizabeth had to experience the real pain. I mean, there's obviously the pain that comes from labor and delivery, there's the contractions, there's muscle and ligament strainings, possible tearing, as I said, all the sleep issues, all the intense pain that comes from all that, but it doesn't really end there, it doesn't end there.

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At that point, you have the recovery, you have the afterbirth pains, I mean, you could have hemorrhoids that come from all the straining and the soreness that comes from prolonged pushing.

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You may have a C -section that extends that pain out pretty long. Then you get to breastfeeding, you get to breastfeeding, you can develop mastitis as a result of all that, you have all those sorts of pains that I won't elaborate, not to mention the fact that the first few weeks, first few months of your life, you're going to be getting up multiple hours a night, you're going to be getting up over and over and over again because this baby has learned to be asleep while you're awake, and now they're adjusting to your new sleep schedule, and they don't seem to adjust very quickly.

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Kids in the room, I say all this to say that in order for you to be alive, it took your mom nine months of suffering or more, and that suffering doesn't stop then, and this is one of the reasons why we are to honor our fathers and mothers, we're to honor our fathers and mothers because as a child, you don't understand all the work and the toil and the suffering that it took to produce you.

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It's a very wicked thing to consider the ingratitude that comes so naturally to us as it relates to topics like that.

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I mean, I didn't understand all the pain and suffering that my parents had went through throughout their life in order to provide for me, just to get me there.

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I didn't understand all the pain and suffering just to produce me as a human being, to give me the gift of life and to take care of me and to provide for me every step along the way until I stepped into that role, but you would do well to reflect upon those things for sure.

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As I said, I mean, God intends these curses to reflect broad categories, so there is the physical pain that accompanies childbearing.

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There's the pain that comes from barrenness. The reason why barrenness exists is a result of the fall.

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If Adam and Eve had not eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, barrenness wouldn't be a problem.

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I know that we are living in a society right now that really praises barrenness and prefers that to the toil that is a result of childbearing, but from a scriptural world view, if you were governed by God's priorities, if you understand why you're here and what

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God made you to do, you would have the same perspective of barrenness that basically all the women in the Bible have.

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It's a source of pain, it's a source of tears, it's a source of sorrow, it's not a source of liberation for us.

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Proverbs 30, 16 says, shale, the barren womb, the land that's never satisfied with water and the fire that never says enough, barren womb, the

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Bible says, is never satisfied, so there's the pain that comes from that. There's the pain that comes from miscarriages.

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There's a certain sense mentioning the pain that comes from miscarriages in this kind of context is mixing two of the consequences together, so we see that death comes as a result of man's sin, and at the same time, a woman's body doesn't work the way that it should, and so you see that both of the consequences for both the man and the woman affect each other in this way, but there is certainly pain that comes from miscarriages.

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It's the kind of pain that would never be experienced in a world that's not filled with sin.

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But the pain's not just limited to that, I mean there's the pain that comes from failures of motherhood. Proverbs 29, 15 says, the rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his motherhood, to his mother.

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You know, when you imagine pain, often you simply imagine it in the physical realm, you're not thinking about it in terms of guilt, shame, condemnation, pain in the psychological realm if you want to use that term.

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But there is a pain that comes from failures of motherhood when you fail to raise a child as you should.

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There's pain that comes from foolish apostate children. Proverbs 10, 1 says, a wise son makes his father glad, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother.

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Proverbs 17, 25, a foolish son is a grief to his father and bitterness to her who bore him.

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There's little pain that's so pronounced as the pain that comes from the knowledge that your son, your daughter, making foolish, sinful choices to dishonor you, dishonor

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God, dishonor themself. And most parents, when they start out life, they're not starting out life hoping to produce children who are going to hate

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God and turn on everything that they were taught as a child. You spend years of your life thinking about their future, you think about what decisions they're going to make, hoping good things for them.

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Any good parent, any decent parent, any normal parent, even bad parents hope good things for their children, they didn't make the sacrifices that they make in hopes that their child would make a shipwreck of their life.

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And women certainly uniquely feel that sorrow and feel that pain that comes from children that make foolish choices.

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There's a pain that comes from children experiencing suffering in the world. I mean, the

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Bible describes this in the language of a she -bear robbed of her cubs. Of Mary, you know, part of the prophecy of the

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Messiah coming into the world and how that's going to affect her and affect her life is that one day the sinless man,

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Jesus Christ, would die on a cross to pay for our sins. And Luke 2 .35

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says, a sword will pierce through your own soul also so that the thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.

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Imagine yourself as the mother of the perfect God who made the heavens and the earth. Imagine yourself as the

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God -bearer having to see sinful human beings put him on a cross and kill him, knowing that he is the

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God who made the heavens and the earth, but he's also, from a human standpoint, he's your son. There's a pain that comes from children experiencing suffering.

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There's a pain that comes from intentional childlessness. It's interesting to think about the nature of the statistics along these lines today.

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So according to a 2022 study, 15 to 19 -year -olds currently are intentionally childless 97 .4

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% of the time, that's 15 to 19 -year -olds, and that's a pretty broad range of age group.

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You may think, well, thank the Lord that they're intentionally childless among those numbers, but at least on the upper end of those numbers you realize that the

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Bible says that rejoice in the wife of your youth, let her satisfy you at all times.

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Certainly, when you think about the scriptures, you think that God has designed human beings to go through biological maturation, and after they go through biological maturation, he's designed them in such a way that they're the most healthy they're ever going to be, the most strong they're going to ever be, the most prepared that they're ever going to be in order to give new life in the world.

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And we live in a society right now that has arranged its affairs in such a way that we put these basic parts of human nature off for decades, and we see the sexual sin that comes from denying our biology for years and years and years and removing the blessings that God has intended to come to us through us being obedient to his purposes and his plans.

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20 to 24 -year -olds, 82 .2 percent, so that's 20 to 24 -year -olds, so you see a noticeable jump there.

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You get another jump between 25 to 29 -year -olds, where 60 percent of 25 to 29 -year -olds are childless.

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That's pretty staggering when you think about that, 60 percent of women 20 to 29 are intentionally childless.

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It seems that 30 is the age where a lot of people start to wake up about their creative purpose, so 30 to 34 -year -olds, that's 38 .2

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percent in that way. One of the most sad statistics here on the list is 35 to 39 -year -olds are 22 percent, 40 to 44 -year -olds, 17 .7

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percent, and 45 to 50 -year -olds, 16 .5 percent. When the

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Bible says the barren womb is never satisfied, despite the fact that you live in a society that is so hostile to God's purposes right now, we still can't overturn the immutable laws of the universe that God has established.

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We may think that we are liberated from God's basic design for us as human beings, but there are always consequences that come from that, and you may deceive yourself for long periods of time to think that you're going to somehow escape those consequences, but one day you wake up and you realize that you can't.

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This pain that comes from conceiving a child after sexual sin, you know, once largely limited to poor women and minorities, single motherhood is now becoming the new norm.

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The prevalence is due in part to the growing trend of children born outside of marriage, a societal trend that was virtually unheard of decades ago.

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You do have to, when you look at the world today, take a step back and realize that things were dramatically different just a couple decades ago.

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Right now, about four out of ten children were born to unwed mothers.

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That's crazy. Nearly two -thirds were born to mothers under the age of 30, and two -thirds of those, you know, four out of ten.

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Today, one out of five children under the age of 18, a total of about 14 million, are being raised without a father.

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According to the U .S. Census Bureau, out of about 10 million single parent families with children under the age of 18, more than 70 percent were headed by a single mother.

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This has obviously ravaged the black family. Recent data suggests that around 64 to 70 percent of black children are born to unmarried mothers.

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That's crazy. I mean, it's hard to fathom when you think about numbers that are that high, considering the way that God has designed the world.

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Statistics from recent years indicate approximately 24 to 25 percent of white children are born to unmarried mothers, just to give you some kind of contrast to the nature of how this problem is manifesting itself.

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But imagine, I mean, all the pain that comes from childbirth, all the difficulties that come from parenting, imagine having to do that on your own as a result of your own sinful choices, as a result of the sinful choices of other people.

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All the trials that come from, not just physical pain, but all the trials that come from trying to raise a child in the world, with only half of the equation there present, because someone deceived you into thinking, telling you that they love you and they care about you.

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Get pregnant, they're gone, don't want any part of that. Because, like Eve, you were deceived, gave yourself over to sin, sold yourself in a way that you shouldn't, in order to get whatever you thought you needed in order to be okay.

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Point is, the women are not okay. Why do you think that antidepressant rates are so high?

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It's because in many ways we've abandoned the path to blessing, we're living in the consequence of the fall. So what do we do with these things?

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How do we think about these things? The reality is that there's a sense in which the sin that Eve committed was really the worst sin that any woman has ever committed.

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Okay? I mean, when you think about sinful acts, I'm not sure that we would think that eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like that act in and of itself, eating a fruit that God told you not to eat, would be the worst sin that anyone has ever committed.

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But you have to think about the nature of how this sin has affected the entire human race.

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So when you sin today, think about it, when you sin today, the impact of your sin is most often relatively contained.

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So if you're just on your own, living by yourself, you commit a sin in secret, no one knows about it, there's a,

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I mean, the person that's predominantly affected is yourself, and I'm not suggesting that any sin can only affect the individual.

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So as it relates to marriage and family and children and child raising, you have a lot of people who are committing personal sins, and those personal sins are keeping them in bondage and keeping them enslaved to their own lust and to their own appetites, and those sins are affecting their ability to connect with members of the opposite sex.

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So I'm not trying to suggest that sins are ever individual, but even take that, take a sin out, let's say that a person is just making irresponsible choice after irresponsible choice, and in doing so, they're taking themselves off the dating market, you know, what happens is, yeah, that sin, you extrapolate it out, it does affect some other person who may be looking for a spouse in that kind of way, and it does affect the amount of offspring that they're going to produce, and then if you extrapolate that out many years into the future, the possible impact,

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I mean, God's obviously sovereign, there's no possible worlds in which they can make different decisions or anything like that, I'm just trying to say, think about the impact on the world that they, them and their legacy could have had, certainly there's some kind of impact there, but in general, when you think about your own sins that you commit in life, there's a relatively small impact if you're thinking of it in very narrow terms.

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Now, I mean, if you commit a grievous sin, you might affect your family in certain ways, and that might dramatically affect their life in general, it may affect your church in a pretty significant way, with the rise of the internet now,

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I mean, you can commit sins on the internet, the internet can find out, and the circle of impact could be millions and millions of people that have become aware of your sin in that way, but think about the nature of Eve's sin, that act that she did, that Eve did, affected every woman that would ever exist throughout the history of the world, that act affected billions and billions of people, the consequences for her sin were more significant than the consequence for any other woman's sin throughout the history of the world on a human level, you understand?

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Her act sentenced the entire human race, women, and every woman who was ever going to exist, to have pain and childbearing and a fundamental conflict between them and their spouse, so there's a sense in which this is the worst sin that any woman has ever committed.

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Now we spent a lot of time talking about how much pain that has come from that sin, and even the thought process in your mind at that point might be, well, if childbearing has brought so much pain, why bother, as the calculation that most of the world that we're living in right now seems to be making, but the problem is that childbearing is still central to God's plans for blessing.

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We've read this, we've talked about this in Genesis 1, 28,

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God blessed them, God said to them, be fruitful and multiple, I fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heaven, over every living thing that moves on the earth.

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Childbearing is still central to God's plan for blessing. Now how did Eve respond to her punishment?

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Think about that. Eve is told, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the whole of creation, she's told that.

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She leads the human race into sin, Adam passively follows her like a worthless leader.

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How did she respond though? God tells her all the pain that is going to come from the action that she took is going to affect not just her, but the entire human race.

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How would you respond to that? Just curl up in a ball, say,

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I don't know if I can handle that? I imagine that most of us would be tempted to respond like Cain responded, wouldn't we?

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How did Cain respond when God tells Cain his punishment? He says to the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear.

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Imagine that. I mean, I think you put yourself in her situation, how would you respond to the knowledge that you've inflicted pain and suffering on the entire human race?

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You've fundamentally altered the nature of the world, your relationship to God, you're being cast out of Eden, away from the presence of the

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Lord. How would you respond to that? She didn't curl up in a ball like Cain, did she?

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No complaint is coming from her mouth. There's no, this is too much for me to bear. How could you do this to me?

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How could you treat this? It's just a fruit, God. It's just a fruit. Isn't this out of proportion?

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Does the punishment fit the crime? There's none of that. Notice she didn't reject

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God's commands because the path to blessing will be accompanied by pain. Notice what the text says.

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It says, to the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children.

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Look at the last phrase there. In pain you shall bring forth children. How does she respond?

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She responds in obedience as God says she would. Look, I mean, you are all here today because Eve didn't curl up in a ball and say,

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I don't want to avoid, I want to avoid pain at all costs, right? You are here today because she said, there's, yeah,

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I see pain on the horizon, but there's not just pain on the horizon, there's also blessing on the horizon.

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Just as you don't reject food because there's a pain that's associated with obtaining it, you think about the curse as it's directed to Adam's role.

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Just as you don't reject food because there's a pain associated with obtaining it, because it's not just going to be perfect, it's not going to be effortless, so also you don't reject childbearing just because there's pain associated with it.

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Eve didn't respond to the news that the blessing would be accompanied by difficulties and pain as a result of her sin with hopelessness, despair, and the surrender of the mission.

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There are obviously consequences of sin. When we sin against God, there are consequences. God has provided in us a sacrifice in Jesus that we can come to him and he will cast our sins in the depths of the sea and he will remember them no more.

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There are certainly consequences to our acts. There are acts that you can make right now that might affect your life for the rest of your life.

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There are decisions that you can make as it relates to this topic that might affect the rest of your life, the whole scope of your life.

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There might be consequences that you have to bear because of the decisions you made, the choices that you made, but that doesn't mean you double down and just reject all of God's purposes because you don't want to face any of the consequences.

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All you're doing is adding different consequences. Do you understand? There are consequences to sin.

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When you double down, you get more consequences. The path of faith is to accept the consequence and to pursue the blessing, not to wallow in the curse.

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If Eve would have thought like women today, the entire human race wouldn't exist. You know what?

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If your parents thought the way that the world is telling you to think, you wouldn't exist.

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We are all here today because someone followed Eve's example, faced that pain because there's a blessing on the other side.

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Notice the blessing of creation is the blessing of fertility. Genesis 128, God blessed him. God said, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heaven, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

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We know that there's pain that accompanies this blessing now as a result of what a woman has done, but we also know there's joy.

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John 16 .21, when a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish for the joy that a human being has brought into the world.

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Certainly, there's a lot of truth to be found. The path to redemption for women is not found in rejecting their design, but in embracing their role.

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Certainly, as a result of the fall, women's wall was made more difficult, but certainly, there's a path to redemption that's found.

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I'm not suggesting that women, in this path, are going to save themselves, justify themselves before their maker by participating in God's plan and unique design for them as women, fulfilling their role and their calling in life.

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That's not what I'm suggesting. We are all justified by grace through faith as a free gift of God, but God has designed women for a purpose.

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He's given them a role. We should be faithful to that role.

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Part of the curse is that that role is going to be made more difficult. We think today that the answer is to try to abandon that role, but that's not the way it works.

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1 Timothy 2 .12, I do not permit a woman to teach her exercise authority over man. Rather, she is to remain quiet for Adam was formed first, then

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Eve. Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet, she will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith, love, holiness, self -control.

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What does Titus 2 .4 say? So, the older women are to train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self -controlled, pure, working at home, kind, submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

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In the Scriptures, you're told not to even enroll a woman if she is not less than 60 years of age, having been a wife of one husband, having a reputation for good works.

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You're not to enroll her in the responsibility of a church to provide for her.

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It says, having a reputation for good works, if she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has watched the feats of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and devoted herself to every good work.

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1 Timothy 5 .14, I've had the younger widows marry, therefore, bear children, manage their household.

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What is Paul saying? Give themselves over to the work that God has called them to. They shouldn't just surrender the mission because there's pain associated.

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They shouldn't just be distracted with other missions. Give themselves over to the mission that God has called to. The issue is that children are blessings.

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The Bible says this over and over and over again. There's blessings. It's not just all bad news.

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Children are blessings. So, Psalm 127 .3, behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward like arrows in the hands of a warrior, are children of one's youth.

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Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks to his enemies at gate.

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What does Proverbs 31 .28 say about the excellent wife?

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What does it say? It says, her children rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also, and he praises her.

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The excellent wife, her children will rise up, they will call her blessed. There's a blessing to be found in faithfulness to God's purpose.

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It's not just, the last word is not just the fall. The last word is not just the curse. Notice, he gives the barren woman a home.

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This is Psalm 113 .9, making her a joyous mother of children, praise the

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Lord. So, God has a plan to bless the world through childbirth. It's not just a plan of pain.

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This is true in the natural sense in which we've spent a lot of time discussing, but this is also true in God's plan for redemption.

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Notice what we talked about last week. Notice what we spoke about in the curse as it relates to the serpent.

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God says, I'll put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

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There is going to be a coming Messiah that's going to be born of the woman who is going to ultimately conquer

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Satan, sin, death, hell, grave. Isn't it amazing that God's plans for redemption center on the concept of childbearing?

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You think about all the covenants in the Bible that you can imagine. They all have to do with blessings that come, not just to individuals, period, the end, but through offspring.

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So, the Abrahamic covenant, Genesis 28, 14, your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth and you shall spread abroad in the west and to the east and to the north and to the south and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

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Obviously, this is a collective singular in the same way that the woman's offspring in Genesis is a collective singular.

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And Galatians picks up on this in Galatians 3, 16, now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, it does not say and to offsprings, referring to many but to one, and to your offspring who is

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Christ. If you want to think about the storyline of the Bible, you think about it in simple terms.

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The storyline of the Bible could be summarized in a way that there are two men and there are two women. You got to be careful with the parallels that you make here, but think about this.

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Adam was the first man. He was a representative human. He brought all of us into sin as a result of his actions.

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As a result of one man's sin, death entered into the world and death spread to all men because all men have sin. We have

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Christ who has come to do what Adam couldn't do. He came to earth to live a perfect life, to die the death that we deserve, to take our guilt, to take our shame, condemnation.

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But in a similar way, not an exact way, but in a similar way you have one woman who led the whole human race into pain, difficulties in accomplishing their roles.

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Then you have another woman, Mary, who gave birth to Christ who is our redemption.

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Obviously the Roman Catholic Church takes these kind of parallels and does funny things with them and pretends that Mary is the co -mediatrix between God and man, conceives of her conception not just being a virgin birth but immaculate conception, sees her as a sinless

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Christ parallel equivalent. All that is nonsense. Ignore all that.

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The point here is just to say that there was one man who led us into sin and there was another man who led us out of it.

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There was one woman who led us into sin and then there was another woman who gave birth to the one who would fix our problem.

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What does the Bible say of Mary that every generation would call her blessed because of the role that she played being the

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God -bearer, bringing Christ to us? Revelation 12, verse 4, his tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth.

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This is describing the dragon Satan. The dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth so that when she bore her child he might devour it.

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She gave birth to a male child, one who was to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne.

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There's answers to these fundamental problems, brothers and sisters. The last word is not the fall.

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It's not just pain and childbearing and suffering, the end, therefore be afraid. There's good news and God has accomplished his good news through the natural mission that he's given to the entire human race.

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This is central to God's purposes and God's plan for the world. How are people, here's the thing, we have a mission to make disciples of all nations, to preach the gospel to every living creature.

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That's our mission. That mission is only going to be accomplished through women who follow the example of Eve and give birth to new life so we can share that good news to those new people.

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This is the point. We have two great missions. One, to fill the earth full of people. Two, to fill the world up full of disciples.

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What do we do with these things? Church needs to be decidedly countercultural on this topic.

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The statistics are bleak. Trends are bad. You're living in a world that is rapidly turning post -Christian.

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There's obviously no political salvation that's going to be found in any of those things, although God uses means to accomplish his ends, for sure.

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For many years the church, they've looked at these bleak statistics and they've thought that the primary thing that we should do is be understanding, be compassionate, redefine the nature of God's expectations for humanity, normalize new classes of individuals who are single in perpetuity forever, who reject childbearing.

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Make that the new normal. Try to figure out ways to uniquely minister to different demographics.

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The voices from our leading evangelicals at this point are telling us to not make an idol out of marriage and family and children because people are having difficulties instead of calling them back to these basic things that they should know from the opening chapters of the

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Bible in an attempt to try to warn them about the pain that's heading their way when they reject

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God's plan and design for them. The church needs to be decidedly countercultural on this topic.

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We don't need to be governed primarily through the lens of trying to come along and tell everyone that God's mission doesn't matter.

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It's okay to reject it. I know it's hard out there. It's rough out there. It's obviously being done in both directions.

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Our natural impulse is to primarily play the role of a mother who is trying to comfort a child who refuses to do what

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God has called them to do. I mean you're living in a time right now where the problems are so pronounced that you have a whole crowd of men who just decided to go their own way.

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You have an acronym that describes that kind of phenomenon.

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Problems are on both ends of things. Perhaps in all times in all places the men and women get what they deserve and we are certainly living in a time where there's irresponsibility on both sides.

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What do you do? What do you do with these things? I mean there's plenty of people who, I mean there's plenty of different types of people in this room who could be listening to a message like this not knowing what to do.

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What do you do with this? What does God want from you? How do you respond to these kind of things? What do you do if you've made a lot of them a lot of the mistakes that have come from the fall?

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What do you do with that? Don't be like Eve. I mean be like Eve. Don't be like Cain.

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Don't throw yourself a pity party. Give up. Say it's too much. Devote yourself to God's plan and God's purposes for you.

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What do you do if you're a single woman who's running out of time? You have biological clock.

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It's ticking. You're at the end of it. What do you do? Consider lowering your standards perhaps.

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Consider whether or not you're being so picky to the point where you're hostile to the project. Look around and see who's interested.

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Maybe give them a chance. Hide yourself away from people.

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What do you do if you're a young man who's having a difficult time finding an Eve? Same thing, right?

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Look, a lot of the pressures that we face in this life, pressures you look, because you are living in a world right now that is more interconnected than it can ever be, that cause you to develop ridiculous standards.

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Some of those can be ridiculous physical standards. Obviously when you look at fake people online all the time, you might develop a very unrealistic standard of what's reasonable.

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You do the same thing with spiritual standards. I mean there's, you look at the train wreck today that is most marriages in the

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U .S. You look at the train wreck and you may say, hey I don't want anything to do with that. That's just pain and that's just suffering and that's just sorrow.

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I don't want anything to do with this mission. I'm scared of it. I don't want it to end in divorce. You clam up.

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You get really tight. You say, I have perfect standards. Trying to meet someone, I'm trying to meet a pre -fall

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Eve here, right? In every respect I want to meet a pre -fall Eve, right?

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Problem is there are no pre -fall Eves anymore. That's the problem. There's not, there's no pre -fall Eves anymore.

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Sin has affected this project in every way imaginable and the hope is not found in trying to find someone who's never going to sin against you, who's always going to be smiling, who is always going to have a pleasant disposition, who would never desire to control you in any way possible.

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That's not the answer. The answer is to understand that there's a God who made us, a

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God who created the heavens and the earth and if he's at work in that individual, he's the only hope that you have of having a relationship that's going to honor him.

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The message of the fall is not just a message of pain and suffering, the end period.

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There is hope that is laced through the fall. There are consequences that can't be avoided.

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Those consequences are trials that are meant for believers good. It's not just that we're in the doghouse forever and you know all that we're gonna have is

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God's judgment and condemnation. If you're in Christ, there's no condemnation to be found. There's going to be trials and there's going to be difficulties and there's going to be a test of your faith to produce steadfast in you that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

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God has good purposes and God has good plans for you. You may look around the world and you say, hey it's all hopeless, it's all such a mess.

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When you do that, you're not operating from faith, you're not operating from trust, you're not offering from a position of confidence in the

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God who made the heavens, the earth, who is there, who will help you. Lord is my helper and strength, a very present help in time of trouble.

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What do you do if you're a married couple who never had kids? How do you respond to these things? Is the purpose of these messages just intending to heap condemnation upon you and make you feel guilty?

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That's not the point. The point is can we be honest about the pain that that has caused your life to remove these primary blessings that God has designed to be a part of your life?

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Can we be honest about that? Can we warn the next generation to not make the same mistakes? Can we do that?

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Instead of being, like instead of like our whole objective being to make you feel like you're normal and there's nothing wrong with your life, you never did anything wrong, can we make the objective to try to encourage

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Christians to be faithful to God's purposes, to face the difficulties of life with courage, to experience the blessings that he has as we are faithful to his mission?

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The issue is that God does not want Christians to live in condemnation forever. You can't fix all your mistakes.

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Adam and Eve couldn't fix every sin that they committed. They can't undo it. There's no way to undo it and praise be to God that we don't have to undo these things.

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Christ has done for us what we can't do. If we're going to be legalists who think that the only way we can be reconciled to God is by living a perfect life, avoiding all the dangers.

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The problem is going to happen when one day you sin, particularly in a huge way that you never imagined that you would sin.

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You're going to have to look that square in the eye and you're going to have to have a solution to that and God has provided a solution in Christ for all of us.

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What do we do with these things? The issue is there, this is a passage that teaches us about the basic human condition.

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There are, there are consequences that God has introduced into the world as a result of sin and there are blessings to be found in obedience to God's purposes.

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This is the basic storyline of the Bible. There's consequences to sin, there's blessings that come from obedience to God's purposes.

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We need a solution to this, to our fundamental problem and that solution is not going to be found in ourself.

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That's going to be found in another person doing for us what we couldn't do and coming to transform us in such a way that we don't just have to walk in sin forever but we can be made do.

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I pray for our church that we are faithful to the purposes that God has for us in the world.

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I pray that we are a counter -cultural church, particularly on this topic, who is a prophetic voice, was able to speak clearly about this subject for the good of the world and for the good of our church.

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Amen? Lord, we do thank you for the opportunity we have to think about these things.

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It is a sobering reality to consider the nature of the consequence of sin, what that has cost the human race, what that cost you in your death on the cross,

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Lord. We know that our sin, our shame, and our disobedience put you to the death on the cross,

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Lord. We are all a part of that. We know that it's my sin that nailed you to the cross.

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It's the sin of everyone here that nailed you to the cross. We thank you for being the substitute for us.

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We pray that you help us to be faithful people, loves your purposes, loves your plans, trusts in you to accomplish your will.