Word of Salvation – Vol. 59 No. 17 – September 2009

 

Punishment, Yet Promise.

Rev. John Haverland

 

Text: Gen 3:14-19

Readings: Genesis 3, Isaiah 65:17-25

Theme: God pronounced punishment on the serpent, woman and man but promised that Satan would be defeated.

Purpose: To explain the punishments for sin on men and women and to describe the first promise of the gospel.

 

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Many of you probably spend a number of your Saturdays during the year working in your garden or on your farm – mowing lawns, pulling out weeds, trimming hedges, digging over the soil. Every time we battle with the weeds in our garden and in our lawns we are reminded that life on this earth is not the way it ought to be – it is far from perfect. Sin has messed up our lives and it has scarred the earth. Every day of our lives we are conscious of the effects of sin on us and on the created world.

 

The passage we have just read explains where sin came from and why there is so much sadness and sorrow in the world.

It describes God’s punishments because of sin.

But it also describes God’s promise that he would defeat Satan and deal with sin and ultimately win the victory.

 

As we consider these we will first look at the punishment on the woman, then the man, and then the serpent, and then at God’s promise of victory.

 

THE PUNISHMENT ON THE WOMAN involved two significant areas of her life.

 

The first is described in verse 16. She is warned of pain in child bearing.

 

It was part of God’s original plan that women would bear children. God had commanded Adam and Eve to be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth….” (Gen 1:28). “Adam named his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all the living” (Gen 2:20). This was God’s purpose for them. One of the highest callings of a woman is that of being a mother. This means that God’s punishment touched women at the heart of who they were and what they were called to be and do.

 

God said to Eve, “I will greatly increase your pains in child bearing; with pain you will give birth to children.” (Verse 16).

Part of the effect of the fall is that some women cannot have children, which is often the cause of much sadness.

The women who do fall pregnant often have to cope with the sickness associated with pregnancy; and then there is the acute pain of the delivery itself.

Someone (no doubt a woman!) said that if men had to have babies the birth rate would go right down! But the pain is only one part of the effect of sin. Many women have died in childbirth, especially in the years before our current medical knowledge and skill; and many babies have died in delivery.

All of this is the general consequence and punishment for sin in the world.

 

But sin not only hurt the woman in her child-bearing, but also in the other area of her life that affected her most profoundly – her marriage. So we read in verse 16b: “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.”

 

Eve was created to be a companion for Adam and a helper suitable to him.

In the perfection of the original creation she was content with her role and place.

But in this perverted situation of sin wives are no longer content with their husband’s headship in marriage; they seek that for themselves.

Part of the effect of sin in marriage is that many women refuse to follow their husband’s leadership and instead they want to be in control. This is the root of many of the conflicts that arise in marriage.

 

This is why the apostle Paul specifically commands wives to submit to their husbands. He knew that usurping their husband’s authority was their particular temptation.

Keep this in mind, wives. Fore-warned is fore-armed. If you know from where the temptation is going to come then you will be prepared for it and in a better position to fight it. Resist the temptation to control your husband, to take the leadership, to step up to his role. Encourage him to lead and to be the head of your marriage and your home.

 

But the problem in marriage would also come from the other side – from the husband: “…and he will rule over you.”

 

God gave Adam the position of being head over his wife. He was to lead her and to take the responsibility in their relationship. Before the fall Adam exercised his headship in love; he treated Eve with respect and dignity, as a fellow heir of life, and as an equal partner in their relationship with God.

 

Sin perverted this headship and turned it into tyranny. Many husbands rule their wives and children in an authoritarian and domineering manner, which is a distortion of biblical headship.

We can see that in our own society where there is so much domestic violence and wife bashing and brutality.

We can see that in other religions like Islam that have a very low view of women and where wives often live in subjection to their husbands.

 

Here is a word of warning for Christian men. Avoid tyranny and an authoritarian rule; rather lead your wife in an attitude and practice of love.

Those who believe in the Lord Jesus are no longer slaves to sin. We don’t have to obey sin as a master. We are free to live as God intended us to and to obey his commands – to be loving husbands and wise leaders of our families.

 

This brings us to consider THE PUNISHMENT ON THE MAN, which also affected him in two areas.

 

The first was in his work.

 

Before the fall Adam had work to do – he was to care for the Garden of Eden and to work it – and that work was a pleasure and a delight; it was satisfying and productive. It was a pleasure to get up in the morning and go out to work!

That is not so for many men today. Work is hard. On some days there is too much to do and you are run off your feet; on other days there isn’t enough to do and the day drags by. Many men find their work to be boring, repetitive and frustrating.

 

Work is difficult because God has cursed the ground: Read verses 17b-19a….

The woman’s punishment affected her at the highest point of her calling; so too for the man. He had been put in charge of the earth, to rule over it and to subdue it. Now, as a result of the fall, the earth would work against him. It would produce thorns and thistles. These were probably not new plants that God created, but rather existing plants that got out of hand. For example, gorse is a useful shrub in England and forms neat hedges, but in New Zealand it is a pest. The thistle is a national symbol of Scotland but here farmers are constantly battling to get rid of them.

We eat food by the sweat of our brow. At some times and in some places the ground is dry and hard, and at other times it is boggy and flooded.

All this applies not only to farmers but it is a general picture of the difficulties and trials of work.

 

Mr Murphy knew this when he wrote up what are called “Murphy’s Laws”. Here are some of them:

“Nothing is as easy as it looks.

Everything takes longer than you think.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

Every solution breeds new problems!”

Murphy’s laws operate because we live in a world of sin where the ground has been cursed.

 

But just as marriage can be redeemed and restored through Jesus Christ, so too can work. Your work will never be perfect, but if you do it “as to the Lord” it can be satisfying and fulfilling! You can find pleasure and joy in what you do and it can be useful in the kingdom of God.

 

Yet we will always struggle in our work until the day we die. This brings us to the other area of punishment for man – death – and this applied to the woman as well.

 

This refers to a spiritual death in the sense of a separation from God.

But at also refers to physical death. One day each of us will “return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (vs 19).

Death came into the world through sin, as Paul explained in Romans 5; “…sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Rom 5:12).

 

Death is the last enemy. There is something unnatural and strange about death, something terrible and frightening. That strikes us whether one person dies, perhaps a member of our family, or whether tens of thousands die, as in a tsunami, or in the fighting in Iraq and the Sudan. We never get used to death.

 

But just as Christ has redeemed marriage and work, so too he redeems death. We will all die, but for the believer death is not the end; it is the doorway into eternal life; it is the entrance into glory!

So we do not face death with despair. And when a loved one dies we do not grieve like the rest of men who have no hope, because we know Jesus Christ who is the resurrection and the life! We know that he will give eternal life to all who believe in him.

 

All this is possible because of GOD’S PUNISHMENT ON THE SERPENT, described in verses 14-15.

 

God cursed him. It is significant that God did not curse the man or the woman, but he did curse the ground and the serpent: “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals” (v 14). Snakes are one of the most hated animals in the world. We recoil from them and are afraid of them. They are a symbol of all that is horrible and repulsive.

 

God said to him; “You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.” We don’t know where snakes lived before this or how they moved; did they live in trees or did they have legs? We don’t know. Maybe God was simply sending it back to the ground where it had always lived, but now its life in the dust was a symbol of its humiliation. Some of the children might remember the character Lowly Worm in the Richard Scarry books. The serpent was given a lowly position – biting the dust.

 

The serpent here is a symbol of Satan and his evil angels. It represents the demonic forces of evil, and the symbol has often been used in this way.

 

God warned of a continuing conflict that would go on between the Satan and the woman, between his offspring and hers.

 

The offspring of the serpent should not be taken literally. It rather refers to those connected with Satan – the evil angels and all the men and women who take his side throughout the history of the world.

 

The offspring of the woman refers to those who believe in God and who side with him – the angels of the Lord and his people, the church of all ages and all places.

 

This describes a continuing conflict between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. All through history there will be this opposition, this struggle, this warfare.

This battle is going on today. It is all around us. We are part of a spiritual battle between God and Satan, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, good and evil.

 

But the outcome of this battle is certain because the Lord Jesus has crushed the head of the serpent. This is not a battle fought between two equal and opposite forces.

No, the Lord Jesus is far superior, far stronger, and he will win the battle!

 

In the Garden of Eden, right after that fall into sin, God gave mankind the first promise of the gospel, the first announcement of good news. He gave them hope. He took the initiative in salvation. He promised to help his people. Here God “lights the lamp of prophecy”, a lamp that he kept burning until the Messiah came.

 

We know this referred to Jesus because we read this with our New Testament understanding. But Adam and Eve could not see him from so far back. They only saw a general statement of conflict and a promise of God’s victory. But as the years went on God repeated that promise over and over and kept adding more detail. He explained what the Messiah would do, and who he would be, and where he would be born. There are hundreds of prophecies and types and references to the Messiah in the Old Testament Scriptures. And the people waited.

 

And finally, in the fullness of time, he was born – the King of Israel, from the tribe of Judah, from the line of David.

Then the conflict between the people of Satan and the people of God became very personal; it came down to these two – Satan and Jesus – because Jesus came as the Second Adam.

As Jesus began his earthly ministry Satan came to tempt him, just as he had tempted the first Adam.

But Jesus resisted those temptations and rejected what Satan had to offer.

He continued to do that throughout his ministry, even during those hours of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. He held firm.

 

And then he went to the cross.

This was the decisive point in the battle. This was the centre-piece of the conflict.

At the time it seemed like a terrible defeat; it looked as though Satan had won.

But in dying for the sins of his people Jesus won the battle. In offering himself as the sacrifice for sin he achieved a great victory.

Paul wrote; “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” (Col 2:15).

In this conflict Satan struck Jesus on the heel, but Jesus crushed the serpent’s head.

 

Our Lord Jesus has redeemed birth and marriage and work.

Through his death he gave us life.

Through his resurrection he gave us victory.

 

The conflict is not over, but take heart, because “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you.” (Rom 16:20). Amen.