Saturday, July 27, 2019

Consequences of the Original Sin, Inherited by All

Genesis 3:9-19 
9 Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”  10 So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”  11 And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”  12 Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.”  13 And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you shall go, And you shall eat dust All the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel.”
16 To the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”
17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life. 18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, And you shall eat the herb of the field. 19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return.”

After Adam and Eve hid from God in shame for being exposed in their naked knowledge of evil, God called out to Adam.  He knew certainty where the man was, but called out to him for an accountability in response.  Adam confessed his fear for the disobedience of sin with the resulting knowledge.  God then pointedly asked if it was because he ate what was forbidden (for his own good) as commanded, and Adam relayed how he had not taken it from the tree, but that Eve gave it to him.  God then asked her what she had done, and Eve told how she was deceived by the serpent.  All these facts were true, but accountability for each one doing what was commanded not to was not admitted.  This is original sin.  Then God gives us three passages of judgement on the sin, one to each of the guilty parties.  First He condemns the serpent to an existence of humiliation and of ongoing conflict with the woman he deceived and all her offspring.  Ultimately, however, her seed would inflict a crippling wound on his ability to do harm after he attacked her head.  Second, God passed judgement on the woman who was first deceived (1 Timothy 2:14, 2 Corinthians 11:3).  She and her descendants would have more sorrow and have more pain in bringing children into the now cursed world because of her disobedience.  She would further be subject in desire for her husband and be under his authority (some recent scholars have tried to make this verse say that she was angry or opposed to her husband instead of desiring him, but that is simply bad translation of the meaning here).  Finally, God condemns Adam and his male descendants for listening to the voice of his wife over God’s words,and for the disobedience of yet eating what was forbidden by command of those words.  He would therefore no longer be given an easy work in being fruitful and filling the earth due to harsh toil in the soil to survive.  Going forward he will have to sweat and work for what God had freely provided in the Garden.  He was made aware of where he came from, the dust of the earth God made, and his end back to that dust of the ground he toils in.  His mortality is the consequence of the disobedience of sin in not trusting God’s absolute word and keeping it.  We are so born as the children of these two with the consequences, lifted only by the work of reconciliation in the second Adam (Romans 5:18-19, 2 Corinthians 5:18-19). 

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