Clough Genesis Lesson 16

The curse: on the woman, Genesis 3:16; on the man, Genesis 3:17-19

…solves the origin of evil, that great historic moment when evil came into existence, and the fall occurred and as the curse was then placed upon the creation because of the fall, a lot of things happened that are basic to our existence today. One of the things, one of the big things that all of us want to derive from this section on the curse is that as awful as evil is, as horrible as it is, it is not something out of control, that even the way and the shape and the path that evil takes, that too is under the sovereignty of God, so that even the degeneration and de-creation back into chaos, that itself is a produce of the sovereign will of God. All is under the sovereignty of God and therefore the Christian, though he can be sad at what happens in evil, he doesn’t have to be shocked at what happens in evil.

Last Sunday we dealt with the area on nudity in Genesis 3, showing that there is a deep theology in the Scripture that cries for someone to study it and to expound it, that man as a mortal being was created, alone, of all the other creations, lacking clothes. No animal is naked; only man was created naked. This means man is lacking something in the way of clothes and this something that he lacks is to point him to the fact that God wanted him to clothe himself with righteousness, and this righteousness that God wanted him clothed with would come as a fruit, fruit to the obedience to the Scriptures. As these clothes were denied by the fall, men sinned, turned away from it, then they became very, very upset with their nudity, because the nudity was a physical reminder day after day after day that there was something lacking, something that could never be made up from that point forward in history by any act of man. It forced man and compelled him to become grace oriented, that if they were ever to be given clothes, the clothes could only come from the hand of God. So we said, then, that nudity, when we have a human viewpoint culture, is always on the rise because it more than just playing games; it’s man shaking his fist in God’s face and says I don’t need your clothes, I will prance about in my degenerate body the way I wish and if you don’t like it, get out of the universe; that’s the theology of nudity and thus the Bible is against nudity except in the marital relationship as expounded in the Song of Songs.

Genesis 3:16, now we come to the outflow of the details of the cursing. The curse was first given to the serpent; the serpent’s curse, however, is different from the woman’s. There are three people cursed, there’s the woman and the man, cursed in the obverse sequence with sin enters. First you have man making an excuse the woman making an excuse about the serpent, and then God, when He curses runs back from the serpent to the woman, to the man. The curse, however, on the surface differs from the curse on the woman and the man and that’s what we want to become aware of this morning; there’s a difference to the kinds of curses.

The first curse that’s given upon the serpent is a permanent ultimate curse, a curse that would be forever and ever, the death, “you will crush His head” is a mortal wound from which the serpent will never recover, and so we have an all-out absolute war against evil declared. And when this part of the curse, this first part of the curse against the serpent is made, we have revelation about God. God is progressively revealed in history. That means that He doesn’t always tell us all about Himself at any given time of revelation. He tells us a little bit here and a little bit there and there’s a progress, so we call that progressive revelation. So before the fall God’s character looked like this; God was sovereign, God exercised love toward His creatures, He was omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal, and this is the way God was perceived by pre-fall man. And although he had some inkling of righteousness and justice it was there, some inkling of his love that was there, of course. But in emphasis this is pretty much how man viewed God before the fall.

After the fall, when God began to curse three attributes showed up; actually righteousness and justice, thinking of it as holiness, and love came now so that man after the fall thinks of God with righteousness and justice because the curse shows this. The curse upon the serpent says that God will not tolerate the permanent existence of evil. Evil, if it exists will only exists will only exist within certain time and space boundaries; it will be limited by His sovereignty and it will be permanently eradicated later. His love that comes over after the fall is now a gracious love; it is not love that was existing before the fall; true, God’s character has remained the same, but His love now showed a greater depth to it in that He is loving creatures who do not merit it. God, of course, Himself is immutable and therefore He never changes but the revelation God has given of Himself increases.

The application of this is that if Jesus Christ is both God and man at the same time, then Jesus Christ shares this essence and therefore Jesus Christ shows after the fall His righteousness and justice and His grace. So this love actually should be grace, and then we have the Lord Jesus Christ showing this at two points. His grace is shown largely in the gospel and His righteousness and justice are shown largely in the book of Revelation when He comes to judge men the second time. That’s the curse as it is given to the serpent because it is an absolute total curse.

But Genesis 3:16 is a different curse; verse 17-19 is another curse. The curse on the woman in verse 16 and the curse on the man, verses 17-19, are curses that involve their mortal bodies, curses that are not eternal, are not permanent. God says nothing in these curses about man’s eternal destiny. He only says this is what’s going to happen to your temporal, mortal destiny. What happens in eternity is a product of your response to My grace in history, so therefore that question is not addressed.

Let’s look carefully at Genesis 3:16, the curse upon the woman. Much of the woman’s curse has become so normal to the woman that today she thinks of these things as part of her normal existence. There’s always a challenge as Bible-believing Christians to try to separate those parts of our being that are due to the effects of the fall and those parts of our being that are original and primary with creation. Therefore is we are to understand the woman we have to understand what has happened to her since the fall, and on this is much detail in verse 16. “Unto the woman [He said], I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and they conception;” now it sounds as though Eve is sorrowing before the curse, and indeed she is, because in Genesis 3:7-8 when the issue of nudity first arose she became sorrowful, sorrowful to the point of shame. But now God says, Eve, if you fret because you need absolute righteous clothes and you can’t get them, then Eve you’re going to fret even more for this is what I will do, “I will multiply your sorrow and your conception….” Now in the Hebrew when you strike something like this and you have two nouns or something, noun A and then “and” and then noun B, noun B is often just a focusing of noun A. In other words, what he’s saying here is Eve, I will multiply your sorrow especially in the area of child bearing.

So therefore, the last part of that noun pair focuses the object of the sorrow, the sorrow will strike the female particularly in the issues of childbearing and child rearing. And we want to make four points about this cursing of the woman at the point of conception and childbearing. Notice you have the conception and “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth” or deliver “children.” So it’s not just conception, it’s conception, pregnancy and the bringing forth of children, and metaphorically we can extend that to include child rearing.

The first point is that if the core of the curse where it impacts against the female is in the area of conception, pregnancy, child birth and child rearing, that pretty much tells us what the woman’s function is in history. God isn’t going to curse a peripheral item, a secondary or tertiary feature of her life. The curse is going to be directed to the very core of her being and therefore we have woman’s role defined in the Scriptures. And this means that the woman’s role literally is the homemaker. And no woman ever need be ashamed when you fill out an employment thing and they ask you what is your prior employment, etc. etc. etc., and you put homemaker. The homemaker job involves far more skills than that clown that’s sitting across from you in the personnel office could possibly do. So don’t feel ever ashamed, ladies, of putting down “homemaker,” it is one of the God-given jobs and done rightly will occupy all your attention.

So we have, then, the homemaking job of verse 16 defined secondarily through the curse; the curse, though not as powerful in defining the woman’s role, its original act of creation in Genesis 1, nevertheless, seconds the motion, so to speak, and emphasizes, puts in underlining, and capitalizing, that this is where the woman is to belong.

Now the second thing about this; this means, this curse coming upon the woman in the area of conception, pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing, this puts the woman in a place where she, more than any man, can appreciate a certain thing about the plan of salvation. And in this women in Scripture seem to have far clearer insight into the ways of God than men generally do. What are these insights?

Turn to John 16:21; the curse that was upon the woman was a curse that said, “in sorrow you will bring forth children,” notice the curse did not say to the woman, “in sorrow you will never have children.” Now what did the creation mandate prior to the fall say? If we have the fall at a point in time and before the fall we have the female and here she is, and she is giving {?} to children, she has childbirth already ordained from the point of creation. After the fall, sorrow is added to that, but the woman continues to bear children. In other words, the point is that evil, while awful, and while suffering, evil cannot stop the original creation mandate. The mandate was that woman was going to produce the human race and woman will produce the human race even after the fall. What feature does this give the woman’s soul? For one thing, it makes women, generally more than men, future oriented people because in the very core of their being they look forward to that which is to be produced from them, and so the woman has a patience about history.

And this is a patience that is then taken by the Lord Jesus Christ in John 16:21 and applied to history itself; and so He says, “A woman, when she is in travail, has sorrow,” same word as Genesis 3, “because her hour has come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembers no more the anguish, for joy that a man” or a person, “is born into the world.” And there again is the emphasis on the woman’s suffering before her glory, and this is a feature of Jesus Christ and His role in the plan of salvation that every woman can appreciate; she has been through a similar thing. This is why women in the Bible pick up this element of suffering glory and praise it.

Turn to Luke 1, the famous Magnificat of Mary. This is the one part of which we read in communion service, this general passage, the Magnificat actually doesn’t begin until Luke 1:46 which is where we want to start this morning, but when Mary sings this hymn of praise is what it is, it’s a psalm, notice the thing that she picks up about God that she praises, and it takes a woman to have picked this up. “My soul does magnify the Lord, [47] And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. [48] For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden; for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. [49] For He that is might has done to me great things; and holy is His name. [50] His mercy is on them that fear Him from generation to generation. [51] He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their heart. [52] He has put down the might from their seats,” these would be the people in Jerusalem, the king, King Herod, “and exalted them of low degree,” Mary, Joseph, the faithful remnant. [53] “He has filled the hungry with good things,” He has given us a child; “and the rich He has sent empty away. [54] He has helped His servant, Israel,” and it’s very crucial to watch how she terminates her praise in verses 54-55. “He has helped His servant, Israel,” notice she rejoices, she rejoices not just in Jesus, her baby, she rejoices in what the baby is going to do for the nation Israel. In other words, she’s a future-oriented lady who looks forward to her contribution to what’s going to happen in history. “He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His grace;” and she terminates with the Abrahamic Covenant, [55] As He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed forever.”

Mary is concerned that there be a triumph in history and though there must be the tragedy before the triumph there will be a triumph and she exalts that there has to be a triumph, there has to be a tomorrow and there has to be meaning next week, and that’s the woman’s mentality, and though the men can think that way, the woman who has gone through childbirth has a very personal experience that she can relate to and use that as a vehicle of general revelation to understand this sector of special revelation. And we could go and talk if we wanted to this morning, we don’t have time, we could talk about Hannah in 1 Samuel 2 and sometime when you get time to read 1 Samuel 2 and read Hannah’s Magnificat, her praise, and she does the same thing Mary does, she rejoices not just in a child but she rejoices in what the child is going to do, the future oriented lady, patient in pain who looks ahead.

Now that’s the second thing that we want to say about the curse and the woman; the first thing the curse on the woman does, it defines her role and underscores it, it emphasizes it. The second thing we want to say about the curse on the woman is that this curse gives her patience and allows her to become insightful as to the plan of God of tragedy before triumph.

Now the third thing; a third thing that’s very physical and the Bible connects this too with the curse on the woman, the curse of menstruation, Leviticus 15. In Leviticus 15 we have a very physical outworking of the curse on the woman. These are passages that have from time immemorial been connected in literature with Genesis 3:16, and because many of these have been misapplied we have to comment about these too.

Leviticus 15:19-24, “And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days; and whosoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. [20] And everything that she lies upon in her separation shall be unclean; everything also that sits upon shall be unclean. [21] And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening. [22] And whosoever touches anything that she sat upon shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the evening. [23] And if it be on her bed, or on anything whereon she sits, when he touches it, he shall be unclean until the evening. [24] And if any many lie with her,” a euphemism here for sex, “and her impurity be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days; and all the bed whereon he lies shall be unclean.”

Leviticus 20:18, another passage that has again and again in literature been cited. “And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness, he has discovered her fountain, and she has uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off form among their people.” That’s the way the Mosaic Law treated menstruation.

Now let’s go to the prophets to show that they picked up that physical picture, applied it metaphorically to sin. Turn to Isaiah 30:22, all of the imagery of the prophets depends upon the physical literal things of the Mosaic Law. “Ye shall defile also the covering of any graven images of silver, and the ornament of thy melted images of gold; that thou shat last them away like an menstrual cloth; thou shalt say to it, Get thee hence.”

And of course the classic passage in Isaiah, Isaiah 64:6, “All our righteousnesses are as menstrual cloths,” and so obviously God is picturing how our human good appears to Him through the use of menstruation.

Now why? Why is there this thread in the Scriptures about the woman and about particular things of her body? Why? Is this a curse against women in general? What is the reason why these kinds of things are in the Bible? For one thing, these kinds of things showed how deep the curse has affected; God always has to give physical signs of spiritual truths and one of the physical signs, what could be more appropriate than to attack the womb from which all life comes, and give the womb a sign of death. And so menstruation pictures death in the place where there ought to be life and it reminds us that since the fall, even the fountain of life has been affected. And to remind of this we have menstruation, periodically, always again and again, part of the general revelation showing us the fall, the fall, the fall, the fall, the fall, it’s affected you, don’t ever be thinking as the ancients thought, in terms of absolute fertility, in terms of the fact that fertility was the sine qua non of paradise, and so we have the idolaterization of sex in Baalism and the other ancient religions, that everything possible could flow from sex.

The Bible is realistic toward things of sexual nature; it just simply says it’s there, it’s to be enjoyed, but it cuts it down to size; it doesn’t permit us to idolize it. And so this is one of the meanings of menstruation, it cuts down the natural process of reproduction and contaminates and makes it appear unclean in our eyes so that we are reminded that we are unclean. And lest this be {?} against the woman we might also add the Mosaic Law says men’s sperm are considered to be unclean too. And so the very source of life are both condemned in the Scripture as unclean.

Now there is apparently, and I only speculate here, this would be up to someone trained in medicine, physiology and so on, but I believe there’s something else the Scripture is saying at this point. Over the years there have been a persistent thing, particularly in Jewish culture, that fertility is somehow related to certain rhythms, and particularly lunar cycles. And this has been cast out as astrology by modern people who have not done necessarily the final word in research. And the argument goes that a woman has a fertility cycle and it’s not the one that we normally think of ovulation and menstruation; that one certain researchers argue, is only responsible for her fertility 15-20% of the time, it’s the other fertility cycle, and this is why women can become pregnant while they are menstruating and this has been known. So obviously the curse, the cycle that is so familiar to us in the west in the 100-150 years is not necessarily the final word. Are women, therefore, we ask, physically, are they having a second fertility cycle more basic than the one we know and the second question is: is the one that we know, the ovulation cycle that we are acquainted with, is that just a post-fall edition that is imposed upon a primary fertility cycle that was operating totally and independently without menstruation. Since the menstruation is compared as unclean in the Mosaic Law and since God’s Word says that the creation that left God’s hand was clean, we deduce there was no menstruation before the flood, yet Eve was fertile before the flood, very fertile. Thus there must have been some means of ovulation other than the one we are familiar with. And so this is an item of interesting research for someone who would like to run with it.

A fourth thing we’d like to make about the course on the woman, turn to Matthew 9, for the Bible, after castigating this as an unclean thing must somewhere, in its course, deal with how the woman is to be relieved of this. And in Matthew 9:18 an incident occurs in the life of Christ that points to this direction. It’s an incident that occurs while Jesus is trying to show His Messianic credentials to the nation Israel. “While He spoke these things unto them, behold, there came a certain ruler, and worshiped him, and said, My daughter is even now dead; but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. [19] And Jesus arose, and was following him, and so were disciples. [20] And behold, a woman, who had been diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of His garment; [21] For she said to herself, I I may but touch His garment, I shall be whole. [21] Jesus turned Himself about, and when He saw her, he said Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith has made you whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour. [22] And when Jesus came to the ruler’s house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a noise. [24] He said unto them, Give place; for the maid is not dead, but sleeps. And they laughed Him to scorn. [25] But when the people were put forth, he went in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose. [26] And the fame thereof went abroad into all the land.”

Now the overall theme of this particular section of Scripture is life from the dead, and the question you have to ask is why, in the midst of this visitation to raise a dead daughter, a daughter that had died, why in the midst of this do we have this apparent interruption of this woman coming up and touching His garment. Well, Matthew is known for his economy of argument and he just doesn’t slap things together without having some sort of a literary design to them, and this little thing like filling between two pieces of bread in a sandwich fits with the whole. Now we know what the overall theme from Matt 9:18-16 is. The overall theme is the Messiah, the coming King, this Messiah has the power to reverse the curse of death and He’s demonstrating it by raising people from the dead. Now what better place for there to have occurred a woman who has an issue, and is genital bleeding here, and instead of performing a hysterectomy Jesus Christ totally heals her. What is that saying in the context…the context, life in place of death, is that He has the power over her organs to renew them again, and that it is not the Creator’s desire to have these organs that speak of life to be constantly proclaiming death. Jesus Christ can deal with the curse and that’s why He wants us to trust Him. Obviously this particular woman continued to menstruate, just as obviously the people that Jesus rose from the dead died but there’s the emblem, the sign, the symbol, of these acts that Jesus did, these miracles that he did to point to something future, greater in the future, the resurrection from the dead. And so Christ, then, is presented as the solution to the curse on the woman.

Let’s go back and look further for not just woman’s body is cursed but more. Genesis 3:16 once again, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow, especially thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” and now this strange thing at the end in verse 16, “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” One of the things about interpreting the Scripture is that one must go to the nearest context; can we find another place close by used by the same author with the same phraseology? Yes we can.

Genesis 4:7, the same phrase occurs. In Genesis 4:7 this time it’s dealing with the first murder in history, Cain and Abel. And to this murdered God says, the last part of verse 7, “Unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” Just above from that, “If you do not well, sin lies crouching at the door.” And the picture first physically is that of an animal about to spring, ready to crush, destroy and to eat. That’s the danger, that’s the physical picture but there’s a spiritual picture and the spiritual picture is the old sin nature. The old sin nature of Cain is desirous of Cain, but Cain must rule over his sin nature. Now that, in context, is how that phraseology is used. The desire is not a desire, the sin nature doesn’t have a passive meek desire to be subdued by Cain; it has a strong desire to dominate Cain, to make Cain do what the sin nature wants him to do, to steer Cain, to manipulate Cain, to produce through Cain the fruit of death. That’s what to you its desire is.

Now if that’s the meaning of Genesis 4:7 and we take it back and we go back over to Genesis 3:16 and we see precisely the same phraseology, what does that teach us about the woman’s desire after the fall toward her man. The desire there is the origin of the battle of the sexes, and in this case the woman’s desire is to manipulate the man. This is not a healthy thing, but this is something that is in the woman’s nature from the fall on. Some women will do it more aggressively than others, and others have all sorts of nice techniques for doing it, but nevertheless, all women since the fall have this fleshy desire to dominate, to use the man for their own purposes. You see it in young girls who think that they’re happiness, the millennium, is the next pair of pants that walks by, this kind of thing. And so they idolize a man, and then very quickly they become hostile, angry, rebellious and vengeful women, vindictive women, because they realize their idol didn’t offer what they thought it would offer, for their idol turns out to have a sin nature as vicious as their own, and their idol becomes a very good mirror in which they can see their own, and so they become furious, as anyone who worships a god and finds the god letting him down. And this is one way women idolizes men.

And so this strong desire and the frustration of the woman is that the man will rule over her and cruelly too, and this is the man’s sin nature, ruling back against her, and so the centuries of oppression, and this is what is good about the women’s liberation movement, it has drawn attention to the fact that men have misused women down through the centuries; men have ruled over her; it is simply an outgrowth of Genesis 3:16. The woman, in her sin nature, you actually have to sin natures here, the sin nature of the woman, the sin nature of the woman is to dominate, the sin nature of the man is to dominate and he fights back and so we have the two camps shelling one another. And this is why, once you understand Genesis 3:16, particularly the phrase, unto thee, your husband shall be your desire; now do you see why in the New Testament every time this area is addressed it says “submit.” It says “learn in silence.” It says in 1 Peter 3 be quiet, they will be won by your behavior pattern, not by your words. Why are all those New Testament imperatives particularly addressed to the woman? Because the Bible is a unit; the Bible wasn’t made up like the liberals it was, by 500 people writing 504 different ideas. The Bible is inspired by one great author and there’s unity from cover to cover and so the unity is the New Testament under the filling of the Holy Spirit reverses these cursed patterns that are all in here from Genesis 3:16, the war of the Holy Spirit against the flesh will be shown in modifying these patterns.

Well we know, pretty much then, the broad outlines of verse 16, the curse in the woman’s body, upon her childbearing role; we know on her curses to her second divine institution roles the {?} her husband, and we also know in our own generation how the unregenerate react against the sovereign work of God. Unregenerate man specializes in trying to smash the laws of God wherever he can find them and today the women’s liberation movement has done very much to this thing. For the last phrase of verse 16, “unto thee shall be your desire” could be taken as a creed of the modern liberation movement, the desire to manipulate and put down the man. This is the fleshy desire of the women’s liberation movement, well-known, and anyone who’s observed with half an eye can see this.

But today we’re going to go on to another strange side, to the theoreticians of the women’s liberation movement; their treatment of menstruation. No stone has been left unturned by these theoreticians; desirous as they are of completely reversing the work of God it’s not an accident that they have devoted much time and effort to this exact item of Genesis 3:16. In a book called The Curse by Janis Delaney and others, the central thesis of the book is this, expressed on page 81. “There is one final alternative to the problem of pre-menstrual syndrome,” if you don’t know what that is, you’ve got something to learn about, “one that is diagrammatically opposed to menstrual suppression. Rather than reduce or eliminate the menses, the visible sign of woman’s [sounds like: ova ness], we could instead psychologically embrace the blood that is ours, making the menstruation an affirmation instead of a denial.” In other words, we are proud; remember what the said the attitude of nudity was in Genesis 3 and at the fall? What was it in a human viewpoint society? We will go without our clothes and defy God, we are expressing our complete naturalness, we don’t need any covering from a sovereign gracious God, we defy Him. And so the menstruation that has come in to the world through the fall, we defy that too, we say it’s normal and we parade it about as our flag.

Now in the last chapter of this book, delightfully entitled, Lifting the Curse, one of these women libber theoreticians exalts in the art work of a California artist by the name of Judy Chicago. Judy Chicago in 1971 painted a work called The Red Flag, which has become the rallying point of women libbers from coast to coast. Said Ms. Chicago, “I wanted to validate overt female subject matter in the art community and I chose to do so by making red flag as a handmade litho, which is a high art process usually confined to much more neutralized subject matter. It really worked.” What she’s saying is, as I’ll describe in a moment, she paints this painting of grossness, but she does it with a fine delicate artistic technique so when you look at it with this technique your eyes are all prepared to see something delicate and what you see is something gross, it just smashes you across the face, and that’s exactly the attitude, the autonomous spirit of the women’s liberation movement.

The artist goes on, “Red Flag is at first shocking, a red flag” by the way, note the double-entendre here, “designed to enrage puritanical souls,” obviously translated means designed to rebel against that which is considered normal by Scripture. “The picture in tones of pink and gray and black shows one nude female leg softly shadowed; the other leg is obscured by a hand that is removing a reddened tampon by pulling on the string.” And then following this delightful painting we have the story of a painting of a play by David Turner entitled The Prodigal Daughter in which Jesus is presented as androgynous, with a quote, “If God menstruates then menstruation becomes godly.”

So this is the product of the great intellects behind the women’s liberation movement; this is what they specialize, so that Baptist girls at Tech can go sign by the hundreds petitions to exalt women’s liberation, taught as they are so well in their churches the Word of God.

Genesis 3:17-19, the curse on the man. The curse on the man doesn’t leave him unscathed either. But the curse on the man is slightly different; it’s more intense, more universal, more widespread. “And unto Adam He said, Because you have hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded you, saying,” do you notice in verse 17 something different, the curse on the man versus the curse on the woman? The curse on the man involves pulling the man back to the Scriptures because it is the man that is the spiritual leader. The woman, she is cursed, yes; she violated Scripture, yes; but the man’s violation is considered a direct transgression, whereas the woman’s violation is considered a deception, a theme Paul picks up and mentions in the New Testament. And so from verse 17, for about the seventh time in this chapter, the only Scripture that existed, you wouldn’t have trouble memorizing Scripture in the Garden of Eden, there were only two verses, the only Scripture that existed has now been mentioned seven or eight times in this one chapter. Notice, verse 1, verse 2, verse, 3, verse 4, verse 5, verse 6, verse 11 and now verse 17.

Do you see how heavy the Scriptures figure in the conviction of sin and identification of sin, because man is responsible to keep the Word of God. “Because you have done this,” and notice the verb in verse 17, I didn’t just say it, God says to Adam, “I commanded you,” and so what, “cursed is the ground because of you,” “for thy sake” in the King James sounds like I’m doing it for your favor; no, that’s the wrong connotation. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” notice, not because of Eve, not because of what the woman did, cursed is the universe because of what you, male, you did, because you bear the responsibility; I don’t damn the universe because of your wife, I damn it because of you. That’s what God is saying, “Cursed is the ground for your sake,” man, “in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”

In Genesis 3:18, when you go to produce, “Thorns and thistles it will bring forth to you;” and here we have the reversal of the chain of command, as God spoke to man, who through his wife would subdue the ground, now man spoke back to God and so now the ground speaks back to man, a perfect idiom as far as the poetic irony goes, the ground rebels against Adam as Adam rebelled against God. And so, [19] “In the sweat of thy face you are going to eat your bread,” again the physiological changes in the man’s body too, sweat is mentioned for the first time here, perhaps signifying as Dr. Arthur Custance suggests out of his background in physiology, that there was a great metabolic shift in the human body brought about by the curse. “…till you return unto the ground; for out of it you were taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

It’s no accident that the Bible uses “dust” here; let’s view our whole Genesis narrative a moment. From what, in Genesis 2:7 was man made? The dust of the earth; and so we have the work of creation bringing order out of the dust to man. And so what does evil do? And what does the curse do? It takes man back to dust; dust is the primary stratum of existence. Remember we said Genesis 1:2 gave you the primary stratum of existence and out of it you have the ordering process of God, and then the universe, when cursed sinks back, second law of thermodynamics, all the way back to Genesis 1:2; we’ll have more to say next week about the details of the physics of the second law of thermodynamics. But let us just say at this point that evil de-creates, it unravels the sweater that God knits. It removes the order from the system and so just as man was created by an act of God from the dust, now he crumbles as God removes His restraining hand.

Something else interesting about the words in Genesis 3:17-19, notice in verse 17 is the word “sorrow,” “in sorrow thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” Notice in verse 18, “thorns and thistles.” Notice in verse 19, “sweat,” and notice the word “dust.” One of the New Testament doctrines is that in the humanity, Jesus Christ was tested in all points like as we are. What is Jesus called in Isaiah 53 but the man of sorrow? And what was He crowned with during His trial but the crown of thorns? And what did He do in the Garden of Gethsemane but sweat; He sweat so hard that the capillaries broke in his forehead. And what was he reduced to, according to Psalm 22? Dust. So Jesus Christ in His humanity was tested in all points as man was. He experienced all phases of this curse. True, He didn’t menstruate as the women’s libbers say, but nevertheless, Jesus did partake all areas, major areas of the curse.

Now we come to the issue of death, the dust of death. Let’s watch how the New Testament treats this; turn to Romans 5. In Romans 5:12 we find a literal interpretation of Genesis commended by the apostle, for verse 12 says, “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin,” it doesn’t say by a couple, it doesn’t say by Adam and by Eve, it says “By one man sin entered into the world, and death passed upon all men.”

Turn to Rom 8:20; here we have the lordship of Adam for good or for evil and with the fall what happens? “For the creation was made subject to vanity, not willingly but by reason of him who has subjected the same in hope. [21] Because the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” Now notice the terminology of verse 22, notice the terminology in the light of the passage we just studied. “For we know that the whole creation constantly groans and constantly travails in pain until this present moment. [32] And not only they, but ourselves also,” that means all of the universe has been damned… all of the universe groans in pain. You see what Adam did? Remember how we started? We said Eve was always under the sovereignty of God, that God’s laws always controlled the outworking. When Adam went to sin, yes he sinned, but the results of his sin were perfectly tailored to the universe. Adam did not create new laws of physics when he sinned. Adam simply distorted ala the program of God, the existing laws of physics that were then in existence, and the physics spread throughout the whole universe. Man, not somebody from another planet, man is the one who brought damnation upon the earth.

Now for the most powerful passage of all the New Testament on death turn to 1 Corinthians 15. In 1 Corinthians 15:12 we have the beginning of a passage that leads to the only place where the Bible comes close to commending Epicureanism. Epicureanism is the idea, let’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, and you say that… that certainly can’t be in the Bible. Oh yes it is, and the Bible comes very, very close to urging you all to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.

In 1 Corinthians 15:12 Paul is dealing with the resurrection and what he’s saying is that when you look at the curse, as we have tried today, in all of its physical horror, of it just running down the flow of time in history, crushing everything before it, destroying man back to dust, all the universe groaning in travail, can you seriously, with a straight face, sit there and say you can bail out. Come on, nobody can bail out of this process unless God regenerates and resurrects. It takes a second creation to undo the effects of the fall. So permeating are the effects of the fall on the first creation, nothing less than a creative work of God can change it. That’s how serious the fall is.

In I Corinthians 15, that’s why, when the resurrection, which is the only second creative act possible to bail out, that’s why Paul brings it up the way he does. I always read this at a funeral to make people think. In verse 12, “If Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some of you that there is no resurrection of the dead? [13] If there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen? [14] And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching in vain, and your faith is also in vain. [15] Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ,” when in fact He didn’t, [16] “For if the dead rise not, then Christ is not raised, [17] And if Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain, and you are still in your sins.[18] And then also they who are fallen asleep in Christ,” dead Christians, “have perished. [19] If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of al men most miserable.” Why? Because you’re fooling yourself.

If the Christian faith isn’t true to what is there let’s stop playing the game. Let’s just flick the Scriptures in the nearest ash can and do something else; we can spend Sunday mornings doing something more convenient than going to church, and that’s what we ought to safely say, if Christ isn’t going to rise from the dead the hell with it, and say it that way.

Let’s look further in this passage to how seriously Paul takes this. In 1 Corinthians 15:32, “If, after the manner of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.” In other words, Paul was quite willing to take the logical conclusion that if the Christian faith wasn’t what it claimed to be, to hell with it. Just live for today, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die. That is a legitimate question and people all over the world have come to this conclusion.

We’re going to conclude with a little unusual presentation. I want to introduce this presentation, it was created by a fellow who attended LBC while studying architecture and art at Tech and is now in his advanced program at Tulane. And as he is circulating in the art and architecture circles, here he has the opportunity to come across people that are far down the line of taking Christianity to the logical conclusion, if it isn’t true. In your art community you tend to have people who perceive far better than the average Christian where the whole thing leads, and if you turn off the Scriptures you can’t do what many, many people in the United States did between 1925 and 1955; the whole generation that was raised in there that weren’t the godly Christians, that weren’t part of the faithful remnant, that whole generation between the wars did a very silly thing. What they tried to do was to hold on to Christian morals while dropping the Word of God. They said it doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s how you act. They only forgot one thing, you act according to how you believe and you can’t sustain an ethic up here, a high civilized ethic, if at the core you don’t have any trust that there is such a thing as the fall and there is such a thing as redemption. All of that is kissed off and so you have to go into despair.

This is a slide tape presentation that’s trying to communicate to a thinking, sensitive type person, what death is like, if viewed through the eyes of human viewpoint. And those of you, particularly if you haven’t been around these kinds of people this is going to be strange to you; I’m sorry, but that’s because you’ve just led a very sheltered existence. For those of you who have been around these kinds of people you know immediately when you hear the music and see the slides what he is getting at. Listen to the lyrics and he sings facetiously about praying to God and sing facetiously about his answers. Think of Baez as she sings in the imagery of the war in Spain in the 30s, the Spanish Civil War, of the babies being laid out on the sidewalk after they’ve been shot and she says, yes, let them rise to heaven and God will put candy in the bullet hole. This is the kind of thought, it may sound odd to you but I want you to see it, particularly if you’re not used to these kinds of people. This, people, is what’s on the outside sidewalks; this is the spirit of the world.

I have just taught you the Christian view of death, now to really sharply perceive what I’ve said, we’re going to contrast it with this.