Friday, Feb. 8

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Friday

 To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”    - Genesis 3:16-19

This passage from Genesis 3 is commonly known as “the curse”, it is the part of the story where God spells out the consequences of sin.  Adam & Eve have already felt the consequences of their sin when they became ashamed of themselves and tried to cover-up, and when they became afraid of God and tried to hide from Him.  Here we see that their sin not only separated them from God and from each other, it also separated them from creation itself.  In other words, nothing is quite the way it is supposed to be because sin ruins everything.  

The Apostle Paul explains it this way...
The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.  - Romans 8:19-21

We must struggle so hard to make a living because the ground has been cursed. Man is reduced to unending toil and sorrow. Work is not the curse given to humans. It is toil that is the curse. If you do not have meaningful work to do, you are of all people most miserable. Work is a blessing from God; but hard, grinding, toiling work is the result of the fall.  It is sweat, anxiety, and pressure coming constantly upon us to create the endless rat race of life.

The second factor that resulted from Adam's failure is death. God said, “For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).  Isn't it this sense of death, lurking at the boundaries of life, that gives us a feeling of futility about life?  Remember the rich man who built barns and filled them up and then said to himself, “Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” But God said to him, “You fool!  This very night your life will be demanded from you...” (Luke 12:19-20). Then he asked this question: “Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”.

Yes, that is the question death forces us to face. You struggle to achieve, to amass property, to get all the good things of life, and then what a sense of futility there is in having to pass them along to somebody else, someone who didn't turn a finger to gain them.  Eventually, all that we built, accomplished, or accumulated will be gone.  Naked we came into the world, and naked we shall leave it. We have nothing that we can take with us but must leave it all behind. We are dust, and to dust we shall return. There is the consequence of sin; pain, subjection, toil, struggle, and death.

One of the key mistakes people often make when they think about the implications of this text, is that they tend to view everything hard or difficult in life as a kind of punishment from God.  However, when we examine the text closely, we see that God is not so much making up arbitrary punishments for the world, as He is declaring to us the inevitable results of our own sin and rebellion against Him.

It only appears to be punishment when we refuse it and resist it or rebel against it. They are instead intended to be helps to us, means by which we are reminded of truth, means intended to counteract the subtle pride that lurks in our hearts and would destroy our ability to trust God if we allow it to grow.

But we are constantly being reminded that these things are not true. Death, pain, toil, and subjection are limits that we cannot escape. They are there constantly to cancel out our egocentric dreams and reduce us to seeing ourselves as we really are. We are dust. We are only human. We are limited, we are totally dependent.  We are not in control.  We cannot go it alone—we desperately need other people, and we desperately need God.  The hour of greatest hope in our lives is when our eyes are opened to this basic fact and we say, “Lord, I can't make it without you. I need you desperately.”

Jeff Frazier