Again tonight we come back to the study of origins in the book of Genesis, and in Chapter 3. We have studied in chapters 1 and 2 physical origins, the origin of the world. In Chapter 3, we have studied the origin and impact of sin. And what we’re learning as we come to the text again for tonight in Chapter 3 Verses 17 and 19 is that because of sin, God cursed man. Let me read this text for you again, verses 17 to 19:
“Then to Adam He said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying ‘You shall not eat from it;’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow 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, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Curse on man was sweat, labor, work, toil. And this, for men, defines life. Life is work. The earth is a rich provider of numberless things, but they are not easily procured. Everything man gains from the earth comes by hard work. And even when man doesn’t work, even when he may be retired or he may have enough money that he can support himself, he still lives on the work that other people do. Every meal that you eat, whether or not you work to gain that meal, is the product of the labor of some who tilled the soil, planted the crop, protected its development, or who nurtured the animals that provide for your food. We live, essentially, by work.
Now in the original creation, man was in a lush paradise, you remember, where everything grew perfectly and profusely for his pleasure and nourishment. And he did have a responsibility, a joyous one, to tend to the garden, which probably meant that he went around plucking all of the good things that were there and expended no energy. But then came sin and dramatic alteration of man and his environment. As we’ve been learning from Genesis Chapter 3 when sin came, came decay, came disease, came disorder and came death along with sin. The original Eden fell into chaos.
And I could summarize the chaos that we experience as decay, that is the tendency toward death; disease, that is malfunction and injury; disorder, that is the general chaos; and ultimately, death. The original Eden fell into this situation. That’s the general feature of life; that we are moving down a path of decay, disease, disorder, to death. That is generally true in the world of everything in the world; all physical creation, as well as all of us who are human and spiritual beings.
But in addition to that general effect of sin, there were some special effects of sin. And these are called the curses. The persons involved in the original sin essentially were three. There was Satan in the form of a serpent; there was Eve, the woman; there was Adam, the man. And starting in Verse 13, the Lord pronounces curses. First of all, on Satan, in verse 14 and 15. The Lord God speaks in Verse 13 and confronts the woman about her sin. She points to the serpent. The Lord then curses the serpent in verses 14 and 15. In Verse 16, he turns to the woman and curses her. And then in verses 17 to 19, a curse is pronounced that affects man. So not only did sin plunge, as we’ve learned, the whole human race into decay, disease, disorder and death, but there were some special effects, specific curses.
For the woman, there was a special, painful reminder of the seriousness and destructiveness of sin. And that reminder came in the sphere where a woman lives her life; that’s the home. And the curse fell on the woman in relation to her children. Verse 16: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception.” For the woman, there would be increased conceptions. In fact, there would be many more conceptions that a woman would have after the fall than before. That’s what “multiplying your conception” means. And those conceptions would bring with them tremendous pain. So that a woman is struck, as it were, in the domain where she lives her life, and that is as a wife and a mother in the home. Not only will she have pain from children, but she will have conflict with her husband. She will desire to rule him and he will desire to subject her. So women have been cursed in the home. And we talked about how that’s played out in human history, and I’ll say more about that in a moment.
As far as men, they also were given a special effect of the fall; a painful and relentless reminder of the seriousness and heinousness of sign, in the sphere where they live out their life, and that is in the work place. The woman’s place, truly biblically, is in the home; the man’s place is to work and provide for the family. And so the curse on man comes in verses 17 to 19 in the realm where man lives out his life, and that is in the work place. And the battle for bread consumes his life. It’s hard for us living in America in the 21st century or the end of the 20th century to get a grip on this, because we have it so good. But for most of the world today and through all of human history up until modern times, life was essentially a battle for bread. And as I said this morning, there really wasn’t any such thing as “lifestyle,” unless you were the king, unless you were royalty or nobility. There wasn’t any such thing as discretionary money. You basically had the clothes on your back. You lived in whatever place you could find to live, and you existed every day to try to work to provide something for your family to eat. If you go back, for example, to the 13th century, to the 14th century in Europe, and you would assume that at that time there was a certain advancement in society. If you went back to that time, you would find that the death rate was so close to the birth rate, the population grew at about 17 percent per year. Population would only double every 425 years because most babies died, and life expectancy was about 30 years of age. In the 1980s, that would reflect a great change. In the 1980s, population grew at 42 percent, significant increase; and in the 1990s, at about 51 percent. We have it much better off. If you were to go back, for example, to the 18th century and check in on British Queen Anne, who lived from 1665 to 1714, she had it as good as anybody in the world could have it. This is the Queen of England. You would be interested to know that she was pregnant 18 times. Now, remember, this is part of the curse. And before modern times there were essentially no ways to prevent pregnancy, other than abstinence. And so women were prolifically pregnant, and that was part of the curse, part of the suffering. You would also be interested to know five of her 18 pregnancies, in five cases the children survived birth. None of them survived childhood. All 18 died before they could reach adulthood. Now, you ladies who are mothers can understand the depth of that kind of pain. Not only did she, living in that day, go down as it were to the edge of death in even bearing that child, but when all of that was said and done, she lost them all.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
