Conflict, Pain and Death

LaRue Baptist Church, OH iconLaRue Baptist Church, OH

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10/18/2020 Sunday Scripture Reading and Sermon

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The Old Testament scripture is from the book of Psalm, chapter 14.
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The fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds.
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There is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
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They have all turned aside. Together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one.
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Have they no knowledge all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the
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Lord? There they are in great terror, for God is with the generation of the righteous.
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You would shame the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge. Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion.
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When the Lord restores the fortune of his people, let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel be glad.
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New Testament readings in Ephesians 2, 1 through 10. And you were dead in your transpasses and sins to which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work and the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.
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And we're by nature, children of wrath, like the rest of mankind, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love in which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
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By grace, you have been saved and raises up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
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So that in the coming age, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.
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For by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing is a gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.
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For we are his workmanship, creating Christ Jesus for good works, which
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God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. You may be seated.
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Take your Bibles with me and turn to Genesis chapter three. I want to revisit this very, very, very important passage of scripture because I think it lays down a number of things that we need to understand in which to understand ourselves and our world around us.
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Now I forgot to make an announcement, but it'd be appropriate to make it here. We are not, we're having our services at 10 30, but we want to encourage you if you want to come early at nine 30 or 10 o 'clock or whatever.
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Some folks said, would it be okay if we came early and we spent some time in prayer together and said, well, that's a great idea.
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Now, of course that means you'd be in smaller groups and you need to be kind of separated from each other. But I think if you want to come and spend time in prayer or come a little early and look at the word with some of your friends or you're, you're, you're thinking of some issues together in the word and you wanted some time to do that, you can do it then.
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Now we're going to have to start to make some decisions now about nursery and Sunday school and harvest feasts and all things like that.
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So you pray for us in those areas. Okay. But that hour before the service, if you, you're used to coming at nine 30 anyway, if you want to come early and spend time in prayer, scripture, whatever, you're welcome to do that.
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All right. Genesis chapter three, let's, um, let's pray father once more, we're gathered together in order to hear your word and to fellowship with you around that word.
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This is how you make yourself present. And so we pray that in your presence now we would listen carefully and Lord, we would determine to seek to understand better and to change because of what we hear today.
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Lord, don't let any heart remain untouched today. Give new insight, bring conviction, give hope, whatever it is this congregation needs and the members of it.
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We pray that you would accomplish that. So help us now. We pray as we understand your scriptures in Jesus name.
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Amen. Your childhood friend from your childhood friend came home from Afghanistan last week in a body bag.
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You and your husband had a terrific fight yesterday and you're still not over it.
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Monday's coming and you have to get out of bed tomorrow and head off to another day of the same drudgery day after day, month after month, year after year in order to just get a paycheck.
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The reunion yesterday was bittersweet. It was great to see all your old high school friends again, but it was the first time you were there without your wife who had just died.
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You sat at the kitchen table yesterday morning looking at your grandchildren and wondering what's life going to be like for them?
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Because you're sure of one thing, they're going to face a life of conflict, pain, and death.
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Why is that? We've all enjoyed the beauty of the earth, the warm smiles of our friends, the love of a sweetheart, the taste of good food, we've all experienced all that stuff and yet there's no escaping the reality that all of life is full of conflict, pain, and death.
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It is what it is, we're told today. That's just the way it is. That's the way life is.
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That's the way it's always been. It's always been ruled by the survival of the fittest, tooth and claw, conflict, pain, and death.
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And yet, even the most diehard evolutionist yearns for a life where he can just love his wife and leave a world of peace for his children.
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Why can't that happen? It can never happen because our first parents lost paradise and left for us a world full of conflict, pain, and death.
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God clearly tells us that we experience misery in the world because we live in a fallen, broken world and the story of that fall can be found in Genesis chapter 3.
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Here is the reason why we experience unending conflict, pain, and death.
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You follow as I read this chapter. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the
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Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
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And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.
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But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
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So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
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And she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked.
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And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the
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Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the
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Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you?
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And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.
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He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman whom you gave to me to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate.
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Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate.
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The Lord God said to the serpent, because you've done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all the beasts of the field.
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On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring, and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
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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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Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. And to Adam, he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which
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I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
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Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken.
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For you are dust and to dust you shall return. The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living.
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The Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
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Then the Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.
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Therefore, the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
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He drove out the man and at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed a cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
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And so reads the beginning of conflict, pain and death, the misery that we face.
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Let's look at this chapter together. You experience misery because of sin. That's what the first seven verses tell us.
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You experience misery because of sin. That original sin begins with a temptation, enticing
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Adam and Eve to sin. A crafty serpent appears on the scene and begins a conversation with the woman.
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Now, although he's not identified as a supernatural being, we know from the rest of Scripture that this is a supernatural being.
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It is Satan. For example, in Revelation, chapter 12, verse nine.
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So that huge dragon, the ancient serpent, the one called the devil and Satan who deceives the whole world, was thrown down to the earth.
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And again, in Revelation, chapter 20, verse two, we read, he sees the dragon, the ancient serpent who is the devil and Satan and tied him up for a thousand years.
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And so we know that this is Satan. This is the deceiver. Now, it says that he's crafty.
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What does that word mean? What does it mean to be crafty? In Proverbs, chapter one, verse four, that word is translated prudence.
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It says, the Proverbs were given to give prudence to the simple.
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It's the idea of possessing an ability to identify traps, where they lay and what they can do and where danger lurks.
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That's what it means. But here it's used in a sense to lay the trap, an ability for cunning distortion.
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Now, I want to say right now, I'm not going to answer all your questions today. I mean, there's tons that pop up like a serpent that talks.
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What is that all about? And why didn't Adam and Eve figure out that that was strange? I don't know.
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That's not the point of the story to begin with. Let's not get sidetracked by a talking serpent. I'm not sure.
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Maybe they're new at this job of dominion and they haven't gotten to know all the animals really well yet.
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I don't know. The point is, Satan began with a cunning temptation.
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He begins by questioning the goodness of God in verse one.
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Now, note, the first temptation was to question the goodness of God. Can I just say something here as a footnote?
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Look at whenever you sin, look at whenever you do what God tells you not to do or you don't do what
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God orders you to do. You are, in essence, questioning the goodness of God.
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You disobey God because you think you have a better idea about what's good than God does. Right?
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So think about that. He begins by questioning the goodness of God. He makes it sound like God forbid them eating from any tree at all.
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In verse one, he says, did God actually say you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
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God prohibits you rather than providing for you. Eve starts to believe him.
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She exaggerates the prohibition to say, yeah, we're not even to touch the tree.
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And then the serpent denies God's word and again questions God's goodness by saying that God does not want them to be like him.
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He's saying, well, here's the deal. Okay, so God says you can eat from any tree except that one. You know why he kept that one from you?
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He's allowed you to eat from all the trees and he made only one prohibition. You know why? He doesn't want you to experience what he has.
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Again, questioning the goodness of God. Now, the tree is the knowledge of good and evil.
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What is this knowledge of good and evil? This has been the question that many have asked over the centuries.
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I'll give you my best at it. It cannot be knowing what is good and what is wrong.
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It can't be that. Because they already know what's good and what's wrong. They already know it's good not to eat from the tree.
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It's right to not eat and it's wrong to eat. So it isn't the idea that you know what's right and wrong.
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They already knew what's right and wrong and it's not omniscient. Satan isn't tempting them by saying
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God doesn't want you to eat from this tree because then you'll know everything like him. It is impossible for a creature, even a creature uncorrupted by sin, to know everything.
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By the way, many people have the idea that when we get to glory, we're going to be just like God, know everything. No, we won't.
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You will never have the ability to know everything. Only God does. An underrived eternal person.
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You are derived. You are created. You are finite. You will never have omniscience. So Satan is not tempting them with you'll know everything like God.
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No, it was impossible for them to know everything like God. They are creatures. They will never know everything.
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Good and evil are more than just ideas. Eating is wrong. Abstaining is good.
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Rather, good is what has a beneficial effect and evil is what is harmful and detrimental.
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That's what good and evil is that he's talking about here. Not the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, but the knowledge of what has a beneficial effect and what has a harmful effect.
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In essence, Satan offers independence that enables a man to decide for himself what has good effects and what has harmful effects.
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He is offering man independence, enabling him to decide for himself what will help him or what will hinder him.
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That's the temptation. In essence, the temptation says to Eve, you don't need revelation from God to determine what is helpful or hurtful.
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You don't need God to speak to that. You can figure that out on your own. You can make sense out of the world, independent of God's revelation.
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Hear me out now. His temptation is to say to her, you don't need God's explanations for understanding the world.
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You can understand the world, what is harmful, particularly what is harmful and what is helpful.
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You don't need God's explanations on that. You can figure that out yourself. In essence, he's saying, be neutral in this.
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For example, we hear this all the time. So we have naturalists saying, don't bring that God talk into scientific discussions.
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We want to investigate and learn about the world without any preconceptions.
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We want to be neutral. We don't want any preconceptions at all. Or you may hear this from university psychologists who say, don't use any of those religious concepts like sin or depravity to explain man's behavior.
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We don't need that. We need to have a scientific explanation for these things.
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You see, we're bombarded all the time with this idea of keep God out of it, be neutral.
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The problem with that is, that's essentially saying, I can understand everything without reference to God or his explanations.
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I don't need them. That's the temptation for Eve. You either seek to understand this world in submission to God, or you seek to understand the world in rebellion against God.
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Have you ever thought this thought? Knowing, learning, and understanding is a moral issue.
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We're often told, well, learning is outside of those categories of right and wrong. Not so.
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The way you choose to understand has moral implications. Either you choose to understand with categories that God has given, or you choose to understand independent of those categories.
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Inevitably, what happens is, number one, sin. Number two, you're going to have a skewed view of reality.
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You won't understand reality like you should. Without the categories that God gives us for understanding, you will not have a proper understanding at all.
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And so, the temptation for Eve is to seek understanding apart from obedient submission to the revelation that God has given.
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I can learn these things without any explanations from God. I can determine what is harmful and what is not.
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I don't need God to tell me that. Then comes the fall. The fall into that first sin, verse six.
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So, when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
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And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
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Taking that neutral, independent stance, Eve follows her impressions rather than her instructions.
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God's revelation to her was, do not eat from that tree because that tree means death.
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But operating now independent of that revelation, the tree doesn't appear to be a vehicle of death, but now it appears pleasing to the eye, good for food, and desirable for gaining wisdom.
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You see what's happened? Now the tree doesn't look what it should look like.
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Now it looks differently. She goes with her impressions rather than her instruction. And what's worse, her husband is with her through this whole thing.
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He's with her through this whole thing. And instead of leading her, he follows her into sin.
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She was deceived into sinning. He was deliberate in his sinning.
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One writer put it this way. He needed no temptation with clever words. He simply went along with the crime.
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His way that led to transgression was willful conformity.
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So instead of leading, he was led. And so, verse 7, their eyes were opened, but they were not enlightened.
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Their eyes were open, but they were not enlightened. What Satan promised would come to pass did not come to pass.
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They were no longer enlightened. Now their eyes were open, but they weren't enlightened. So you experience misery because of sin.
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Note this as well for the rest of the chapter. Here's what we find. You experience misery because sin brings consequences.
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You experience misery because sin brings consequences. Now, verses 7 through 11, the immediate consequence of sin, what is it?
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It's the corrupting power of sin. That's the immediate consequence, the corrupting power of sin.
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Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
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And they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the
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Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you?
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And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden. And I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.
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He asked, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?
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All right, so here we find the corrupting power of sin. Listen, sin has the power that brings about changes.
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Sin is not merely doing what I should not do, nor failing to do what
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I should do. But it is a powerful force that corrupts.
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It's a powerful force that corrupts. The issue is not merely the punishment that God inflicted, but the corruption that sin brought.
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Listen to me, we have to get over the oops view of sin. You've heard me say this before.
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The oops view of sin. What is that? It's the oops, I did something
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I shouldn't. Or oops, I didn't do what God told me to do. Oh, well, that's not sin.
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Sin has an incredible power to corrupt. And it's corrupted us from the very beginning.
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Let's note, sin corrupted the horizontal relationship. That is the relationship between man and woman, and all human to human relationships.
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Verse seven, right? They both were open, they knew that they were naked, and they hid, they served, they sowed fig leaves.
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All right, shame results. Here's the first instance of shame. And the point is not that they suddenly realized they didn't have any clothes, but that something had intruded now, destroying that relationship of perfect trust and openness.
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They had a relationship of perfect trust and openness, right?
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But now that's gone. That's gone. Hey, why don't we just show up next week without any clothes on?
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The rest, I know, you're all going, oh, what a terrible thought that is. Why is that?
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We all have this thing about our bodies, don't we? They're imperfect. And we don't want anyone to see those imperfections.
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That's one reason. We don't want anybody to see our imperfections. We even know exactly what kind of clothes to wear to hide those imperfections.
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I'm going to wear the dress that has the vertical stripes, so I don't look so fat. And because if I wear the ones with horizontal, everyone will see my hips, right?
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We're hiding our imperfections. We try to accentuate the strong points or what we consider our strong points.
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This part of the narrative is not about imperfect bodies, by the way, but the desire to hide so that you cannot see who
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I really am. And I have a lot to hide. That's what sin does.
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That's what sin did. It entered and corrupted human relationships so that the horizontal relationship has been forever changed.
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Well, until perfection comes. It's about the fact that you fight with your husband and your mother -in -law.
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Something had intruded so that we are not open and trusting, but suspicious and accusing.
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That's what's happened. That's what sin did. You see that clearly in verse 12.
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Again, some years ago, this dawned on me and it blew me away.
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Look at verse 12. The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.
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I want you to think about this. What had God said to them?
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If you eat that fruit, you will die.
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What does Adam do when confronted with his sin? He throws his wife under the bus.
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You want someone to kill? It's her fault. Boy, I always wondered how they got over that one, right?
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They lived together for another 800 some years. They ever get over that one?
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Man, that's a tough one, isn't it? He threw her under the bus. You want to talk about a disruption of your relationship from perfect, absolute trust and openness to punish her, not me.
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That's amazing to me. But that is what sin did. It arrived with this corrupting influence that all the conflict we experience today on this level, all the breaks in relationships, all those things happen because of what happened then.
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And we still want to do it. We curse people. We wish their deaths. We malign them with our words.
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We ignore them. We run away from them. We stay away from them. We do whatever we can in our conflicts to hurt.
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We don't want to deal with them. We just want, there's just this conflict and this pain.
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By the way, there was another relationship that was broken on this horizontal level, if you will, kind of horizontal, but man's relationship to his environment was broken because of the corruption of sin.
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His relationship to the earth was corrupted and made more difficult.
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But notice as well that sin corrupted the vertical relationship. That is the relationship between man and God.
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Adam and Eve hid from God because they were afraid. It appears that they met regularly with God.
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It appears that they had regular meeting times with God. And when he showed up for the meeting, they ran and hid.
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Now, again, God calling them and asking them questions is not a picture of ignorance, but investigation and interrogation.
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It's not ignorance. Like why are you hiding? As if God doesn't know.
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So you come into the kitchen and you see the ice cream on the table. And as you look up, you see the door to the basement closing.
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Your daughter is getting into the ice cream again, like she does when you're not around. And how do you respond?
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Samantha, are you in the basement? Have you been getting into the ice cream again?
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It's like, are you totally clueless? You don't see the ice cream? You don't see the door to the basement? Why are you asking that dumb question?
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You know why you're asking that question. You're getting her to show up and to admit it, right?
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That's why you're asking the question. And now fear characterizes man's relationship with God.
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The fear of judgment. Now he's afraid of the one with whom he had perfect fellowship. Do you see the corruption of sin here?
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I now am shamed and I'm hiding things from the people that are closest to me.
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And now I'm hiding and fearful of my creator. You see? So as you can see, it's been corrupted.
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Those relationships have been corrupted. The horizontal, the vertical. And lastly, sin corrupted man's integrity.
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Verses 12 and 13. What do Adam and Eve immediately do after they're caught? Here's the second sin in mankind's history.
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What's the immediate thing they do? They shift the blame. They shift the blame.
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Whom does Adam blame? His wife. Who does she blame? The serpent.
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No one takes responsibility. You see this constantly, don't you? Teacher calls you up and says, your child has just been a real hellion in class.
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And your first response is something like, well, it's the kid he's sitting next to. Or, well, what does she know?
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She's so inexperienced. Or, you know, he's got attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
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That's his problem. It's not that he's being bad. Or, you know, he's really struggling with oppositional defiance disorder.
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By the way, I didn't make that up. That's in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the
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Bible of Psychiatry. It's in there. Oppositional defiance disorder. ODD, it's called.
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It's not my kid's fault. It's someone else's fault. Listen, whenever you shift the blame or try to defend yourself, you will miss
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God's mercy. You will miss God's mercy. So we see the immediate consequences of sin is corruption.
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Look what it corrupts. That's not all. Verses 12 through 24, see the judicial consequences of sin.
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God inflicts punishment. All right? God inflicts punishment. God inflicts punishment on the serpent.
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Verses 14 and 15. Crawl and eating dust, by the way, doesn't mean that the snakes ran around on little feet and now they just got to slither.
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It's a metaphoric way of speaking of humiliation. Now, in the midst of that sentence comes the first glimmer of the gospel.
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Verse 15. I will put enmity between you, that is the serpent and the woman, and between your offspring, or if you have a little note there, they give you a footnote reading seed.
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That's the Hebrew word for seed. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
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This is the very first glimmer of hope in all of this, and it appears in the midst of cursing.
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The promise that the woman's seed will crush the serpent. Now, the seed of the woman is both individual and collective, all right?
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For example, in Galatians chapter three, verse 16, we see that the seed can be taken as an individual.
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Now, if you look at it, Galatians 3 .16. Now, the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, or seed, okay?
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So let's just put seed in there. I think it's better. Now, the promises were made to Abraham and to his seed.
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It does not say, and to seeds, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your seed, who is
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Christ. So the apostle Paul identifies the seed, first of all, with Christ, all right?
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But then you come to Romans 16, verse 20, and the apostle
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Paul says, the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.
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That is to say, all those who are related to the seed are also involved in crushing Satan.
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So there will be perpetual conflict between good and evil, between Eve's seed and Satan's seed, and we will see that played out through the rest of scripture.
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But notice at the end of verse 15, and he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
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There's the individual idea, which is speaking of someone will come who will deal with Satan.
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Someone will come who will deal with him. So God inflicts punishment on the serpent.
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God inflicts punishment on the woman, verse 16. To the woman, he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing.
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In pain, you shall bring forth children. Your desire should be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
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Pain now appears on the horizon. Pain when giving birth to children. Now I know women, you're always playing that as your trump card.
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All of you, you play that, that's your trump card. You don't know what it's like to suffer until you've had a baby, right?
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I forget one comedian said, the pain of childbearing is like taking your bottom lip and pulling it up over the top of your head.
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And some of you women are out there going, dog doesn't even come close. Now I'm not here to run you women down in your trump card, because the point is that pain now appears for the first time, and it appears in the area of where God blesses us the most, in the area of childbearing.
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I want you women and men, we can kind of identify with this. I want you to try to think about bringing children into the world without pain, right?
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That's the way it originally was. But now God says, I am going to bring pain into that.
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But that's not the only part of the curse. You ever noticed the last part? I'm sure you've noticed it, and I don't know if you understand what it means, but your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
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Now, right away, what goes in through our minds is, this is talking about sexual desire.
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So, you know, there wasn't any sexual desire before sin. No, that's not what it means.
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Here's the key to understanding this phrase. Your desire shall be for your husband.
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That word desire is used in the very next chapter. Chapter four, verse seven, okay?
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What does it say? This is God speaking to Cain when he's angry with Abel. And God says to him, if you do well, will you not be accepted?
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And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.
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Now, what's he saying there? The desire of sin at that point is the desire to rule you.
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Its desire is for you. Its desire, sin is at the door crouching, and its desire is to rule you.
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And so when you come back to chapter three, verse 16, you're gonna have a desire to rule over your husband, to dominate him.
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That's what it is. That's part of the curse. And what does it say? And he shall rule over you.
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And the word rule there means tyrannize. You're gonna try to dominate your husband, and he's gonna try to crush you like a flea.
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What do you have there? You have the battle of the sexes going on. Where do you think that came from?
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It's part of the curse. It's part of the curse. One has, one writer put it this way.
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Marriage becomes a battleground over who will control the relationship. Marriage becomes the battleground over who will control the relationship.
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So the very thing that God brought into their lives to bring them great blessing now becomes a battleground.
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Battleground rather than blessing. Here in this curse, you will find all the passions and mistrust that plague and tear society apart.
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This is the beginning of all the things that tear relationships apart, that lead to war.
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All found here begins here. It's part of the curse. All right, now we come to verse 17 through 19.
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God inflicts punishment on the man. Now notice, notice what he says.
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Because you've listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.
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Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field.
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By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken.
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For you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Notice, not only because he directly disobeyed
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God, but note, because he listened to his wife, he abdicated his responsibility as a leader.
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That's why he's in trouble. Now listen, guys, don't take this to mean that you never have to listen to your wife.
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That's not what God is saying here. He's saying is you didn't lead. You didn't lead.
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You were the first wall of defense, and you didn't exercise it. You followed instead of leading.
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The ground is cursed. That man has to wrestle his existence from it. It no longer submits willingly to him.
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And so it resists and eventually swallows him.
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Work before the curse. Now I want you to think about this. Work before the curse was an inviting prospect.
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If you can imagine there was work without any toil, that's beyond our capabilities of understanding, because we've only known a world where work is always toilsome.
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But work here now brings toil with it. The curse of God changes it largely to a burden where poverty is the taskmaster and death is the final word.
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God also mentions death here. It's a returning to dust, right? How did they die?
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How did they die? I think it's safe to say that scripture progressively reveals how they died, but at least the very first thing we have to understand is that it results in the soul losing
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God and the soul being separated from the body, resulting in physical death.
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Physical death is the result. And then there's not just that first death, but the second death results, which is eternal death.
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Now we don't know that here yet. We don't know all the full implications of that here, but as we progressively move through scripture, we see exactly what
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God was talking about here. God also inflicts punishment through the loss of paradise, verses 23 and 24.
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God banished them because they could then eat of the tree of life and live forever in their sin.
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And so he shuts that off. Verse 23 and 24, he drove out the man and at the east of the garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
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God stations cherubim with a flaming sword at the entrance to the garden, actively excluding the sinners.
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These angels keep man from the presence of God. And as we look at the rest of scripture, it seems like Eden was a temple garden where God would dwell with his people.
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Now, you can't enter the temple. Isn't it interesting that in the book of Exodus, what is sewn, what is that sewn on the big curtain that separates you from the holy of holies?
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What is on that curtain? You know what it is? Cherubim. You can see that in Exodus 36.
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Cherubim are sewn on that veil to keep you.
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I mean, that's the thing that represents you can't enter the most holy place. And then when
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Jesus died, the veil ripped and the way to God was opened again. All right.
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So God inflicts punishment through the loss of paradise. So we have misery because of sin.
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We have misery because of the consequences of sin. But the last thing you need to see here, you do not experience misery apart from God's grace.
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You do not experience misery apart from God's grace.
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God in his grace softens the blow. The first thing to see is they are not dead immediately.
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Did God not keep his word when he said, the day you eat, that's the day you die? No. I mean, yeah, he kept his word.
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They die, but he softens the blow. How? By not killing them immediately.
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That's how. Grace overcomes the doom of the curse.
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Notice, Adam names his wife Eve. The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all the living.
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The Hebrew word for Eve means living. So he names her Eve because she's the mother of all living.
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What's going on here? Eve becomes a pledge for the continuation of the race.
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It's as if Adam says, God is gracious. We may die, but life continues. We are not all wiped out.
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Eve will produce life. In fact, she will produce the seed that will deliver us from the curse.
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Notice as well that God's grace covers sin or shame. Here, God provides tender care as he proves on their faulty attempt to cover themselves.
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Have you ever wondered about this covering? Does it really say something about sin? Yeah. Listen to what theologian
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Marcus Dodds writes. I love this. It really, I think, explains it the best. The clothing which
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God provided was in itself different from what man had thought of. Adam took leaves from an inanimate, unfeeling tree.
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God deprived an animal of life that the shame of his creature might be relieved. This was the last thing
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Adam would have thought of doing. To us, life is cheap and death familiar. But Adam recognized death as the punishment of sin.
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Death was to 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.
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Sin cannot be atoned for by any mechanical action, nor without expenditure of feeling.
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Suffering must ever follow wrongdoing. God's grace covers the sinner's shame.
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Thirdly, grace prevents an unbearable life. Do you notice why he kept them from the garden?
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So that they would not eat of the tree of life and live forever. Now listen, can you imagine anything worse than eternal life under the curse?
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That what you experience now will never end. It's hard, isn't it?
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Can you imagine that? God was gracious in keeping them from the tree of life so that they wouldn't go on forever in this cursed existence.
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But most of all, there's grace in the promise. The seed will someday deliver us from the curse, bringing the final victory over evil.
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That seed is going to win in the end so that what? There's no more curse of conflict.
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Relationships will not be torn apart any longer. They will always be what they should be.
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Can you imagine that? Imagine that? Living a life where you're never at odds with anybody.
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It also means there's no more sickness. No more cancer.
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No more emergency surgeries. No more twisted lungs.
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None of those things ever again. None. No more wearing masks.
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You say, good enough for me. I'm ready. Right? No more death.
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No more death. Now, all that seems almost incomprehensible because the only world we've ever known is the world under the curse.
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But the seed, Jesus, is going to deliver us from it all. There's going to be final victory over evil.
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So why do you labor in agony and toil? Why do you live in conflict?
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And at the end of it all, you die. It's all because of sin.
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Nothing short of sin's removal will end the misery.
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In the conflict, pain, and death that we still face, we have a clear vision of the promise.
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You see the toil, the sweat, the thorns, the conflict, the tree, dust, and death are all found in Jesus, aren't they?
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He became the curse for his people. He sweat great drops of blood in his bitter agony.
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He wore a crown of thorns. He hung on a tree until he was dead.
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He died naked and ashamed. He was placed in the dust of death, but he rose again.
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By it, he begins to reverse the curse. Through Jesus, we no longer cower in fear before God.
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But through Jesus, we call God what? Father. Because of Jesus, we don't need to shift the blame.
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We all know we're sinners. We can openly admit our sin because Jesus took the penalty for it.
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I can openly admit my sin. He causes us to love rather than tyrannize our wives.
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And he causes you wives to submit rather than dominate. We can love our work for nothing we do is in vain if we do it in the name of Jesus.
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We may return to dust, but because of Jesus, we'll be raised again. You see,
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Jesus is the answer to the entire curse. There's no going back to paradise.
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There's no going back. For the only way is forward to glory and reunion with the last
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Adam. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the hope it brings us.
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Not just the hope, but it explains everything to us. It gives us the categories by which we can understand what's going on and why things are the way they are and what the answer is to it all.
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We thank you for a savior who already has begun to reverse the curse in the lives of his people.
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Where Lord, we as your people can now resolve conflict. We don't have to go on in conflict.
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Where now we can look forward to the end of pain. Where father, even the pain that plagues us, we see beyond it to the hope that Jesus brings.
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We see that he's begun to reverse the curse in every area of our lives, including death.
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For we will rise again to live in bodies that will never die. Because Jesus was raised in a body that will never die.
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Thank you for your word. Thank you for its explanations. Thank you for its hope. Thank you that it reveals to us
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Jesus, who is an all -encompassing savior.