“14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
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Decisions carry consequences. If you decide to work hard at your job and contribute to the mission of your workplace, that will bring consequences. You might be promoted. You might wind up earning more than your colleagues. Your boss might dump all sorts of extra work on you with no pay because, after all, you’re a hard worker; that could be a consequence. Your boss’s decision would bring its own consequence. Maybe you would set up an appointment to talk about this extra work with no pay. Maybe you would become sullen and withdrawn. Maybe you would feel taken advantage of and start looking for a different job where your work ethic is rewarded. Whatever decision you make, that decision would bring consequences. Decisions bring consequences.
The decision to sin brings consequences. That might sound obvious, but an astounding number of people believe that sin brings no meaningful consequences. Much of the society in which you live revolves around the belief that sin brings no consequence. This is why we promote greed. This is why we train our young people in seduction. Our culture promotes sin because we don’t believe we will suffer any real negative consequences for our participation in it.
Even we who believe, in theory, that sin brings consequences struggle mightily to come to terms with these consequences when we do, in fact, sin. We squirm against the reality of consequences like a child in trouble. We would be far wiser to own up to what is obvious: sin brings sad consequences. That’s the claim of this sermon on the fall into sin: sin brings sad consequences.
We will study this in regard to the first sin with three points. First: the curse upon serpent. Second: the pain in store for the woman. Third: the pain in store for the man. In verses 14-15 we see the curse upon serpent. In verses 16, we see the pain in store for the woman. In verses 17-19, we see the pain in store for the man.
First: the curse upon the serpent. Last week we studied God’s pursuit of Adam and Eve. After they sinned, God asked them questions to draw them out. He didn’t ask any questions of the serpent; verse 14,’So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals!”’
God saw no point in listening the lies of the father of lies. He cursed him. The Hebrew word translated here as “cursed” sounds like the earlier word for “crafty.” The craftiness of the serpent led to his curse.
The first part of this curse, “you will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life,” doesn’t imply that the serpent could walk before this even fly as some have thought. It merely highlights the fact that there is now something fitting about the fact that the serpent crawls. What was true now has a fittingness to it.
Think about it this way. My middle name is Taylor. Imagine that I got a job making, repairing, and altering clothing. I would be a tailor, right? If I had this job as a tailor, there would doubtlessly be family members who would draw attention to the fittingness of my middle name for my job. That’s what God was doing with the serpent crawling on his belly. He was drawing attention to the fittingness of it.
Crawling on your belly is a humiliating posture. The serpent will endure lifelong humiliation as a curse for what he has done. This is underlined by God telling him, “you will eat dust all the days of your life.” We see the humiliation of that in Psalm 72:9, “may his enemies lick the dust” and Isaiah 49:23, “they will bow down before you with their faces to the ground; they will lick the dust at your feet.” Eating or licking dust was a way of talking about humiliation.
This is a fitting curse because the serpent tried to make himself equal with God. As a consequence, Satan was cursed with humiliation. Considering that pride is the sin most often associated with the devil, this humiliation is a particularly appropriate and devastating curse. You never get the sense that the devil can laugh at himself. He takes himself too seriously for that. He takes himself too seriously to ever humble himself and so he is being and will be humiliated.
The second part of this curse upon the serpent has to do with us and him; verse 15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Satan’s attempt to turn Adam and Eve against God actually resulted in their turning against the serpent. He’s humiliated and he works to humiliate us. When the was the last time he was successful with you?
Our eternal conflict is with Satan. He does his best to blind us to this fact. He works to turn us against each other along political, racial, gender, and class lines because then we miss the fact that, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” We forget that because Satan wants us to forget it, and he wants us to forget it because he wants to forget it. He doesn’t like the consequences he needs to face for his decision.
We, the children of Eve, are in constant conflict with the devil even if we are his willing victims; our conflict comes to a climax through a particular offspring of Eve; verse 15, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” We’ve already seen this offspring. He is the seed promised to Abraham. He is the one who would bless the whole world. What we studied in Genesis 12-25 is just an expansion of verse 15, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
Now men try to kill snakes by crushing their heads. Venomous snakes try to kill men by biting them. The verb which is translated as “crush” and “strike” in verse 15, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel,” is actually the same verb. One very probable reading of this is that a descendant of Eve will inflict a mortal wound on the serpent while receiving a mortal wound himself. That’s the cross. That is the victory of humanity over the devil at the cross of the life of the Son of God.
Now what’s fascinating here, and we saw this with Abraham’s seed too, is the tension between the one and the many. Is the offspring of Eve one man or a people? Is this promised seed of Abraham the people of Israel or Jesus? It is both. Israel was to bless the whole world but only Jesus sufficiently blessed the whole world. Humanity in general that must fight Satan, but the victory will come down to one man. He is the one; we are the many, and we are connected. That’s why we are a blessing to the whole world—because Jesus is. That’s why Paul closed the letter to the church in Rome saying, “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” So who is going to humiliate Satan—Jesus or us? Yes. That’s encouraging as you think of the humiliation Satan has caused us. Satan is working to humiliate you. The question after the fall for every human is, “will you humiliate him?” Not if you’re not connected to Jesus.
That’s the curse upon the serpent; now let’s focus on the woman after the fall into sin. That’s our second point. I didn’t title this point “the curse upon the woman” because only the serpent and the soil are declared cursed in so many words—‘the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals!”’ and to Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you.” The serpent is damned to destruction. The soil is bound to frustration until the new creation. Humanity is in a different category. We are naked. The Hebrew word for “curse” here sound a good deal like the word for used “naked.”
We are cast off but not to the same degree. We who sinned can experience new creation before the new creation; that’s the new birth. Even with the new birth, though, we suffer the sad effects of the fall. Eve still did suffer consequences for her decision, though, and so do we; verse 16, “To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.”
God told Adam and Eve, “be fruitful and multiply.” There was and is a proper sense of fulfillment in having children. Throughout the Old Testament childbirth was pictured as a woman’s greatest glory. This shifts a bit in the New Testament as we will see when we study marriage and sexuality, but this verse tells you that this victory of childbirth is now tainted by Eve’s decision. It is accompanied with pain.
We tend to think of this pain only in terms of the moment of birth, but as John Walton argues it could be much more. Being barren would qualify. We saw that with Sarah. Losing a child would qualify. We saw that with Bathsheba. Dying in childbirth would qualify. You see that with Rachel. This glory of having children become fraught with sorrows. Anyone here have any sorrows having to do with their children? Genesis 3 tells you why. It takes you behind the psychology and family systems
The consequences for Eve’s sin would also infect her relationship with her husband; verse 16, “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This was not the introduction of the husband’s role as the head of the home, as if that were a curse; Paul makes that point a number of times. Instead this speaks to the competition that entered marriage. Before they sinned, Adam and Eve functioned as one flesh. Now that sin had been introduced into that relationship, they used each other; they blamed each other as we saw that last week.
The marriage relationship is now constantly threatened by selfishness and competition between the two partners. It is possible to read the first part of that sentence as, “your desire will be to dominate your husband.” Do you know of any homes in which the wife is trying to act as the head of the home? Is that a harmonious situation? Of this, CS Lewis famously said, “even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say, ‘[that poor man] Why he allows that appalling woman to boss him around the way she does is more than I can imagine.”’
Now for his part, Adam hasn’t led all that well in this marriage to this point. He abdicated his leadership responsibilities when he submitted to his wife’s offer of the fruit. The husband still doesn’t lead all that well; that’s what’s going on with, “he will rule over you.” A man is to lead his wife as Christ leads the church. He is to sacrifice himself for her good. He is to speak the truth in love for her good. He is to guide her toward holiness. For every one of those husbands, there are plenty who abdicate those responsibilities or who even subjugate their wives. That has nothing to do with Christ. That has everything to do with the consequences for this first sin. We humans are united in ways we can only begin to understand. You and your spouse fight because of Eve and her spouse.
Now Adam and Eve suffered together. The man suffers with the woman’s pain. Jacob suffered when Rachel died in childbirth. Husbands have their own sorrows having to do with children. Likewise Eve suffered because of the consequences put on Adam. We see these consequences in our third point: the pain in store for the man.
You might have noticed that the consequences upon Adam take up far more space than those for Eve. That’s because of Adam’s role as the head of the marriage. That’s because Adam heard God’s commands about the tree firsthand and Eve heard them through Adam.
The consequences for Adam cut to the heart of his God-given mission; “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” This consequence introduces pain into his work. This same word for “painful toil” in verse 17 was used to describe Eve’s pains in verse 16.
Work was and is no longer purely a pleasure. It has its own pleasures, but it has pains. I can tell you about the painful toil in my work. You could tell me about the painful toil in your work. That’s the consequence for Adam not doing keeping the garden as he ought to have kept it, meaning keeping the serpent out of it.
Now Adam and Eve would still fulfill their exalted purposes, they it would be accompanied by pain and sorrow. It’s a bit like this past year. Each of us had to continue fulfilling our responsibilities—working, being involved on boards, raising children—but these responsibilities were now accompanied by all sorts of pains. We still had to sell our hogs, but now slaughterhouses were shut down. We still had to attend meetings, but now we did so over zoom, which is enough to drive anyone to distraction. We still had to do what we were called to do, but it had all sorts of new pains. That’s a bit of what’s going on here.
Man was made from the ground and he will experience toil until he returns to the ground. Death here is pictured as something of a relief from work. Maybe you’ve felt that way on some days.
There is something humbling about all of this. Sorrows with children are humbling. Marital difficulty is humbling. Troubles at work are humbling. Death is humbling; verse 19, “for dust you are and to dust you will return.” The serpent claimed to be more than he was and so must eat dust. The man wanted to be like God and God gave him over to death to show him what he was.
Each of would do well to remember what we are; “for dust you are and to dust you will return.” We tend to miss that. After all, we are made in the image of God. We are remarkable in so many ways. We are as Shakespeare described us, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!” We are also dust.
The question now is, is this the end of the story—sorrows in victories, competition in the midst of love, futility draining our purpose? Where is the grace? There didn’t have to be grace. There doesn’t have to be grace. Once we believe we are entitled to grace, we miss the point of grace. Grace is perpetually surprising, and what’s surprising here is that the grace is tucked away in the consequences for sin. The woman will suffer pain with children, but it is through childbearing that this descendant promised to Eve would come; that’s what leads to, “he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” That’s what leads to the cross. That’s what leads to Jesus.
Consider the love of God. He tucks grace away even in the consequences for sin. He was thinking about grace even as He dealt with these two sinners who were, in every way other than physically, still hiding from Him. He used and uses the consequences for our sin to bring us back from sin. There really is nothing that we can break so badly that He can’t fix.
Adam and Eve’s decision to sin had consequences. The good news is that the Jesus’ decisions have consequences too. Jesus’ decisions have consequence of a bond that runs deeper than family. They have the consequence of opening you up to a love to which the best marriage can only point. Jesus’ decisions have the consequences of giving your life purpose well beyond work and of giving you glory even as you return to dust.
The consequence of what we see here in Genesis 3 are yours whether you want them or not. There is no truce with Satan. You will have family sorrows, marriage and relational struggles, a sense of worthlessness with your work, and you will die. Genesis 3 happened. The consequences of what Jesus did—the descendant of Eve promised moments after this sin—these are yours only if you trust in the promise tucked away in these consequences. They are yours only if you trust in Jesus. Amen.