Genesis Chapter 3 part 4

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back to Unshakable Truth, Unshakable Faith. We're now in our fourth lesson in our Genesis series. And I want to remind you just before we get too deep into this, the journey that we've kind of been on together. We've watched the serpent and his crafty strategy, and we've watched Eve see, desire, take, and eat, and Adam stand there silent and then follow behind her. We watched them hide among the trees. We heard God ask the question that echoes through all of Scripture: where are you? And now God speaks judgment. In Genesis chapter 3, verses 14 through 19, it's one of the most sobering passages in all of the Bible because God here pronounces the curse on the serpent, and he speaks consequences over the woman and over the man. And the entire created order begins to groan under the weight of what happened in the garden. But here's what makes this passage extraordinary. Right here in the middle of the curse on the serpent, before God even finishes speaking to the enemy, he announces the gospel. The first promise of redemption in all of scripture is not found in the book of Isaiah and Psalm and the law of Moses. It's right here in Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, in the middle of God's sentence against the serpent. Theologians have called this the proto-evangelium. It's a Latin word, and it just simply means the first gospel. And so today we're going to see that Genesis 3, 14 through 19 is not just a passage about punishment, it's a passage about a God who could not pronounce judgment without also offering hope. So let's read the text here. In Genesis chapter 3, let's start in verse 14. The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the hill. To the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply you with pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. 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 will eat of it of all the days of your life, both thorn and thistles, it shall grow for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. So what we see here, there's six verses, and we read about three verdicts. And hidden inside the first one is a promise that changes everything. So let's start by looking at the curse of the serpent. Now notice the order of God's judgment. So we get here. God doesn't begin with Adam, he doesn't begin with Eve, he begins with the serpent, and that's significant because the serpent is addressed first because the serpent is most responsible. He came in as an intruder. He came in as an accuser. He came with the deliberate intent to destroy all that God had made good. And notice something else: God doesn't ask the serpent a question. He asked Adam, where are you? He asked Eve, What is this that you have done? But to the serpent, he doesn't ask anything. There's no invitation to explain himself, no opportunity to defend himself. There's just judgment. Because for Adam and Eve, there was still a future. For the serpent, the verdict was already written. The curse of the serpent has two dimensions, a physical dimension and a spiritual dimension. The physical dimension, on your belly you will go, and dust you will eat. Now, there's been a lot of debate about what this passage actually means. Did the serpent previously have legs? Many ancient interpreters, when they talk about this, believe that he did. It was origin in the third century, who believed that the serpent stood upright before the fall. John Christendom in the fourth century agreed and added that the crawling of every snake since is a permanent, visible reminder of that moment. So whether or not the serpent was previously upright, the theological point is really unmistakable. What once had dignity has been brought low. What once had influence is made to grovel in the dust. And so, and dust there, dust is a significant word. Because in verse 19, the man is told he will return to the dust, and the serpent is cursed to eat the dust, and the man is cursed to become it again. That's very important. The connection is intentional. The enemy feeds off of the death or on the death of the decay of humans. And here is something that would have been electrifying to the ancient world, to the ancient Israelite who was reading this. As we established in lesson one, the serpent in the ancient world was a symbol of divine wisdom, of healing power, of royal authority, of immortality. The Egyptians put the cobra on the crown of the Pharaoh. The Mesopotamians prayed to serpent gods. The Canaanites used serpent imagery in their fertility worship. In Genesis 3, verse 14 says, Cursed are you more than all the cattle of every beast of the field. They worshiped a symbol in the ancient world that in Genesis is declared to be the most cursed creature of all creation. And this is not subtle. This is a direct just demolition of everything the surrounding cultures believed about serpents. Like, hey, what your neighbors are bowing down to, God just put that on his belly in the dust. Now this brings us to the most important verse of chapter three, and perhaps the most important verse in the entire Old Testament. When God says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the hill. That word is a very interesting word. Enmity, because it means hostility or deep opposition. And so God is declaring that the relationship between the serpent and humanity will never be peaceful. There will never be an alliance, no eventual harmony to look forward to. But here's the remarkable thing when God says this, that I will put enmity or hostility. He is the one who places it there. God's the one that places the hostility there. So without God's intervention, man would have simply joined the serpent's side. Left to ourselves after the fall, we would have become fully aligned with the enemy and given to all of our desires. God placing enmity or hostility between the serpent and humanity is actually an act of grace. It means God is saying to humanity, I am not willing to let you go. I am putting something inside of you that will resist him, something that will keep you from fully surrendering, something that will keep you fighting. There's going to be this longing inside of you. And so every human instinct that recoils from evil, every conscience that still that still works, every soul that recognizes injustice and says, This is wrong. That's an echo of Genesis chapter 3, verse 15. God put that inside of you. And then God said this. He said, This is this is amazing. He said, and it will be between your seed and her seed. And that phrase, if you understand what that means, should absolutely stop you in your tracks. In the ancient world and in the Bible, the word seed referred to allspring through the Father, always. The genealogies of Genesis trace seed through the man. The covenants of the Old Testament run through the man. But here God says the seed of the woman, not the seed of man, not the seed of Adam, but the seed of the woman. Every ancient reader would have immediately noticed this. And linguistically, it's unprecedented and theologically is explosive. Because the only human being in history who was born of a woman without a human father is Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, seed of the woman, without a human father. And the early church fathers saw this immediately. It was Irenaeus in the second century writing about Genesis 3.15. He said it was the first announcement of the virgin birth. Justin Martyr in the second century drew a direct line between Eve and Mary and saying, Eve believed the serpent's lie and brought death, but Mary believed the angel's word and brought life. And so the undoing of the fall began where the fall began with a woman and a word. Now we come to the heart of the promise. God says of the seed, he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the hill. The Hebrew word translated bruise here means to crush, strike, or wound. It's the same word, it's used for both actions, but the locations are very different. And the location of the word changes everything in the sentence and everything about the meaning of the word. The seed of the woman will strike the serpent on the head. So this is the location of the strike. The head wound is fatal. The serpent will strike the seed of the woman on the hill. The hill wound would be painful, but you can survive that. So God is announcing in Genesis chapter 3, putting that word seed in different places in the sentence and then putting the word in different places where they would actually be struck, one on the hill and one on the head. God is announcing the entire outcome of the conflict that would come right here in Genesis chapter 3, verse 15. Before a single page of the rest of the Bible has been written, before anything about the New Testament has been written, the serpent would wound the one who is coming, the seed, the promised one who is coming would be wounded. But the coming one would destroy the serpent. And so I want you to tie this into the New Testament. The cross is a heel wound. Christ suffered, Christ died, the serpent struck, but the resurrection is the head wound. It was a fatal blow to the power of sin and death. Hebrews chapter 2, verses 14, picks up on this. It says in verse 14, in Hebrews 2, it says, Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise also partook of the same that through death he might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is the devil. In Revelation 2010, it gives us the final outcome. It said the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire. And so in Genesis 3.15, this is the seed. The entire Bible is unfolding, the unfolding of that seed. And the cross and resurrection are its final result. So the rest of the Old Testament is the story of just simply trying to seek out, hey, which woman will this seed come through? Who's it going to be? Which line? Which family line will it come through? Which nation? Which tribe? Which man? From Eve to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, and Abraham to Judah, and Judah to David, and David to the virgin in Nazareth. The Old Testament is tracking the seed until he finally arrives. Now, let's move on to consequences for the woman in verse 16. I need to draw an important distinction, though, before we read verse 16. Remember, God curses the serpent and God curses the ground. God does not curse the woman or the man. He speaks over them consequences. The effects of a broken relationship with God rippling outward into every area of their lives. And this matters theologically. The man and the woman remain image bearers of God. They remain in a relationship with him, a fractured relationship, but not a severed relationship. They're still in a relationship. The curse falls on the serpent and on creation. Grace is already at work in how God speaks to his people. And so to the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply your pain and childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children. The Hebrew word for pain is the same word used later in verse 17 for the man's toil. It's the same root word. In Eden, the bearing of life was meant to be the purest expression of human participation in God's creative work. Be fruitful and multiply, God said. It was a blessing. It was a calling. It's what you were supposed to do. Now, the very act of bringing life into the world will be marked by suffering. And this is deeply theological. That means every birth is now shadowed by pain. Every new life arrives through some sort of suffering. Life and pain are now inseparable. But even here, there is grace hidden in the judgment that God gives. Because God did not say you will no longer bring forth children. He said, You will bring forth children in pain. In other words, life continues. The blessing continues, but now it will be marked by the weight of the fall. And the apostles pick up on this. Paul writes this in Romans chapter 8, verse 22. He said, For we know the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. All of creation groaning like a woman in labor, waiting for the redemption that Genesis chapter 3, verse 15 has already promised. Next, God says this to Eve. He said, Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. Now, this is one of the most debated phrases in all of Genesis. And I want to handle this very carefully. The Hebrew word translated desire here is a word that appears only three times in the entire Old Testament. It's here in Genesis 3.16, in Genesis chapter 4, verse 7, and in the Song of Solomon in chapter 7, verse 10. And in that verse, it's a positive romantic context. But in Genesis 3.16 and in Genesis 4.7, it's where God warns that there's going to be a desire, a bad desire that's going to be there. In Genesis 4, 7, and God warns Cain that sin's desire is for him. And so that's very important because if it's the same word, which it is, used in Genesis chapter 4, verse 7, it's illuminating. God says to Cain, there in chapter 4, verse 7, sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you, but you must master it. And so most scholars understand Genesis chapter 3, verse 16 through this parallel. The desire spoken here is not a romantic longing. It's the desire of the woman to have control over her husband. Think about that for just a minute. To dominate him, to have the final word. Before the fall, the relationship between the man and the woman was one of harmony. They were equal image bearers. They complemented each other. They were naked and they were not ashamed. But after the fall, this harmony is fractured. The relationship now becomes a power struggle, each one reaching for control, neither submitting to the other or viewing each other as equals, each trying to master the other. And this is not God's design. This is God describing the consequences of the fall. He is not prescribing male domination here. He is diagnosing what sin is doing to the marriage. I'll tell you this: every struggle, every marriage that has ever been a power struggle, every relationship where one person strives to dominate the other and leads to resentment. Every home that's marked by control or manipulation is Genesis chapter 3, verse 16 lived out. And the gospel answers that question. The gospel's answer to Genesis chapter 3, verse 16 is Ephesians chapter 5, where husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loved the church and give themselves up for her, and wives are called to trust the model of the church and trust in Christ. And so the redemption of marriage is the undoing of Genesis chapter 3, verse 16. Christ is making what was broken beautifully again. No, I've been a pastor for over 20 years, and I've seen this in both marriages and churches. I've seen many marriages that where the wife tries to dominate the relationship and it always fails. And I've been in churches and I've seen women try to step up and dominate the leadership and rule in the church. It's not okay just being heard. They want to be in authority, and this is not God's plan. And that all is a result of the fall. Now, let's look at the consequences for the man because this is equally as important. God turns to Adam, and the first thing he says is this because you have listened to the voice of your wife, think about that in context of what we just said. Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, you have eaten, and you have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you. God is not saying that listening to your wife is wrong. That's not the point. The point is that you listened to her instead of me. Adam had the command directly from God, do not eat of this tree. Eve was not there when that command was given. And when the moment came, he followed the human voice of his wife over the divine voice of God. And really, if you think about it, this is the essence of all sin. Not that human voices are worthless, but that no human voice, however beloved, can ever override the word of God. Augustine wrote this. He said, Adam's sin was not that he loved his wife. It's that he valued her word more than God's. And because he loved his wife more than he loved God, that love displaced God and became idolatry. And so I was told when I was new in ministry long ago that Satan can use your family against you. And I also was told valuable advice that to all of you young men and young women, people getting married out there. I've been married for 28 years after the time of this recording. And let me give you a little advice. If a man loves his wife more than he loves Jesus, there will be trouble in the home. And so you have to put Jesus first and then love your wife like Christ loved the church. Now, the next thing we see is God speaks the second curse on Adam. He said, Cursed is the ground because of you. Not cursed is the man, cursed is the ground because of you, because of the man. All of creation bears the weight of Adam's sin. The ground that was meant to yield fruit freely now resists. The earth that was meant to be cultivated with joy now fights back. And God gave the specific signs of the curse, thorns and thistles, painful toil, sweat. And so work itself is not the curse. I don't want you to make that mistake. God gave Adam work to do before the fall when he told him to you will cultivate and keep the garden and you will guard over. So work was part of God's good design. What the fall cursed was the fruitfulness of the work. Now the work is hard. Now the ground will resist. Now effort uh does not always yield results. Every farmer who has ever lost harvest to a drought, every person who has ever worked hard and still fallen short, every moment when honest labor produced nothing but exhaustion, that's an echo of Genesis 3.17. Now I want to stop at the thorns for just a moment because the New Testament does something remarkable with this word thorns. In Genesis chapter 3, verse 18, it says, Both thorns and thistles, it shall grow for you. So in the ancient world, thorns were a symbol of curse. And so the sign of creation is fighting against humanity. This is a mark of a broken world. And when Jesus was crucified, what do the soldiers put on his head? Crown of thorns. And this is not accidental. This is merely Roman mockery, right? This is theology written in blood. Jesus literally wore the curse. He took the thorns of Genesis chapter 3 onto his head and entered into the full weight of what the fall produced. Galatians chapter 3, verse 13 says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. And so the thorns in Genesis 3 became the crown of the law. Of Calvary. The curse of the ground became the curse that he bore. And so the curse could eventually end. And in Revelation 22, the picture of the restored creation, I want you to catch this: there is no more curse. The tree of life bears fruit again, the river runs clear, and there are no more thorns. And then comes the word that hangs over every human life. When he says this to Adam, he said, For you were dust, and to dust you shall return. This is God introducing physical death into the human story. The warning of Genesis chapter 2, verse 17, the day you eat of it, you will die, is now being defined by God. I want you to understand this. Death is not natural. Let me say that again. Death is not natural. The secular world tells us that death is simply part of life. It's just the way of nature. Everything that is born will eventually die. Just get used to it. That's how it is. But the Bible says something entirely different. Death is an intruder. Death is a consequence. Death is not how God designed things. In Romans chapter 5, verse 12 says, Therefore, just as one man uh through one man's sin entered the world, and death through sin. So death came through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. So death came through sin, sin came through the fall, and the fall is why every human being from the first to the last will face that moment. But here's the grace in all of this. God said, You are dust, and to dust you shall return. He did not say you will be annihilated. He didn't say to Adam, This is the end of the story. Once you die, it's over. He said, You will return to where you came from. And the God who formed humanity from the dust the first time is the same God who will raise it from the dust the last time. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verse 42 through 43, the apostle Paul says, So also is the resurrection of the dead, it is sown in perishable, uh a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body, it is sown in dishonor, it is raised to glory. And so, according to the Bible, dust is not the final word, and it never was. So let's ask and answer a few questions here. First, why does God allow suffering? These are questions that every single person who reads these passages or reads through the Bible or really even contemplates the existence of God will eventually come to. Why does God allow suffering? And I think this is the question that every believer will eventually get to, right? And it's usually, it's most often used by someone who is hurting. And it'll go something like this: if God is so good, then why is the world so broken? Genesis chapter 3, verse 14 through 19 is the beginning of the Bible's answer to all of that. The suffering in this world is not God's design. It's not God's preference. It's not what he declared very good in Genesis 1 and 2. Pain in childbirth, conflict in marriage, futility in work and death, none of these were the original blueprints. They are the consequences of a creation that chose to rebel against its creator. And a creator who, rather than scrapping the creation, entered into it and absorbed the consequences himself. C.S. Lewis, the great theologian in The Problem of Pain, wrote, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain. It is his megaphone to reach a deaf world. And so pain is not evidence that God does not care. Sometimes pain is the loudest evidence that he does. Philosophers call it the problem of evil. How can a good God allow evil to exist? And Genesis chapter 3, verse 14 through 19 does not give us a philosophical response. It gives us something which I believe to be much better. It gives us a narrative. It tells us that evil is not original, that creation was good, that evil entered the world through a choice made by real people. That God responded to evil not with abandonment, but responded to evil with a promise. And that promise would cost God something. And the story isn't over yet. Now, the atheist has no satisfying answer to evil at all. If there is no God, evil is it's just the way things are. It's random and with no purpose, and there is no hope of resolution. But the Christian says, I know where evil came from. I know this isn't how things were meant to be. I know that God is redeeming us, and I know how things turn out in the end. This is not a philosophical argument. This is a story. And stories are what human beings actually live by. Now, I also want you to see here the New Testament fulfillment. And I want to close this lesson by showing you something that should take your breath away. Genesis 3.15 is the entire Bible in a miniature way. Enmity or hostility between the seed of the serpent, the seed of the woman, the conflict of all human history. And the seed of the woman, the promised deliverer, traced through every generation of the Old Testament. And that promised seed, he shall bruise you on the head, and the cross and the resurrection is all there where he just crushes Satan. And you shall bruise him on the hill, which is the suffering of Christ on the cross. Every book of the Old Testament, tracking the seed all the way to the time of Jesus. Again, Genesis tracks it through the patriarchs, Exodus through Moses and the covenant, Ruth through a Moabite woman who ends up in the line of David, which is miraculous in itself. The Psalms cry out for the coming of the king. The prophets describe this coming king in detail. And then the fullness of time. In Galatians chapter 4, verse 4, it says this. The Apostle Paul said, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those who were under the law, born of a woman, the seed of a woman. Genesis chapter 3, verse 15, literally fulfilled. Now let me give you the full, the full scope, the full picture here. In Genesis chapter 3, thorns enter the world as a sign of a curse. At the cross, Jesus wears a crown of thorns. In Revelation 4, Jesus wears a crown of glory. The curse became a crown of mockery. And the crown of mockery became a crown of eternal glory. In Genesis 3, death enters the world through one man. At the cross, death is defeated through one man. And in Revelation 21, there is no more death. In Genesis chapter 3, the ground is cursed. At the cross, Jesus is buried in the ground. And in Revelation 22, he bears the fruit of the tree of life again. Now every thread of Genesis chapter 3, verses 14 through 19 is picked up on in the New Testament, and it's woven in the story of redemption. And so I want to leave this word with you today. In the darkest moment, in the darkest chapter in the book of Genesis, God could not pronounce judgment without also offering hope. Before the serpent's sentence was finished, before the consequences fell on man and woman, before a single day of pain or toil or grief had been lived, God had already written the ending. He shall bruise you on the head. The serpent was already defeated in Genesis chapter 3. And he just had not felt it yet. And neither had we at the time. But the cross settled it. The resurrection of Jesus sealed it. And Revelation chapter 20 completes it. Now next week in our final lesson on Genesis chapter 3, we're going to see where Adam names his wife Eve. I want you to catch that. Up until this point, he actually never named her. It's the first act of faith after the fall. God replaces the fig leaves with garments of skin, which is the first sacrifice. And the gates of Eden are closed, and the exile begins. But even in the closing of the gate, God leaves a trail home for his people. Hope to see you next time. Until then, have a blessed day.