Genesis 3:9-24
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.”
20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
21 Also for Adam and his wife the LORD God made tunics of skin, and clothed them.
22 Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— 23 therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.
The consequences of sin’s curse are swiftly given to all involved as Eve was deceived by the serpent deceiver (2 Corinthians 11:3) into disbelief and Adam went along to disobey God’s clear command also instead of resisting the temptation to follow his wife’s error. We all have suffered as the descendants of the first couple by inherited sin in our spiritual DNA and continued sin of disbelief and disobedience to His word to this day. Like Adam, when God calls us now we do the same in hiding our shame from not doing what the scriptures clearly tell us, often choosing instead to focus on some other obscure command to justify disobeying the clear one or at other times just letting our pride blind us as we imagine we know good from evil without hearing His word. We can pass the blame as Adam did to Eve when questioned by God, or we can blame it all on the deceitful devil who made us do it as Eve did, but we all answer to our Creator Lord nonetheless. Notice that when Adam did blame his wife that God immediately went to her to ask why she disobeyed Him. She blamed it all on the deceiver without confessing that she had a choice not to listen but instead desired the lie more than waiting to be taught good from evil by God, and so acted against the Lord’s word. The serpent offered no excuse or explanation. None. He knew perfectly well in his own rebellious nature that he could not answer his maker and so heard his sentence without reacting as he plotted how to further corrupt God’s created man and woman in the image of God whom the evil one sought and still seeks to destroy (John 10:10, Revelation 12:9) through deception and lies (John 8:44, 1 John 3:8). The consequences began with the serpent because he knew exactly what deception he had deceived himself with in full knowledge of the truth, having walked in heaven before the throne of God and heard His voice clearly for a long time. His willing disobedience and desire to corrupt God’s image in man brought eternal consequences which cannot ever be reversed. Unlike him, Adam and Eve received punishment but were also offered a way of redemption through the promise of a deliverer, the seed of the woman who was the Messiah to come! This promise in Genesis 3:15 here is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ who came to redeem us from our curse (Galatians 3:13) by His perfect righteousness and lifeblood sacrificed in our place as the price required to pay for our lives once forfeited by sin in Eden. Eve’s immediate consequences included a great pain and sorrow in childbirth and submission to her husband whom she would desire to please and serve not just alongside as originally designed, but with a more supporting role as a reminder her susceptibility to temptation was to limit her giving the final choices in matters now allotted to her husband who himself had not taken responsibility. He was given the consequences of hard work to survive instead of the freely provided food of paradise lost. Adam and his descendants would have to scrape a living out of the dust as a constant reminder we are but dust created by and given life from God (Genesis 2:7). Dust of us returns to the dust of the earth by physical death as we sweat and toil along the way. That is the wages of sin (Romans 3:23) we earned by inheritance, but we now have hope of the Son of God, the Seed, who has paid the price (Romans 6:23) and offered life from death and the dust. Some people would corrupt this truth by trying to make us believe that we are random creatures composed of star dust instead of the dust of the earth we stand on by God’s hand, but we who know the beginning also know the end of such deception. We see the end of this chapter with Adam naming his wife Eve meaning ‘life-giver,’ because all their descendants would be birthed through her (1 Corinthians 11:12) including every man to come, completing the circle of the first woman coming from the side of man to every man thereafter coming out of a woman. This shows our understanding of our equality (Galatians 3:28) in Christ but also the respective roles (1 Timothy 2:12-14) of each taking into account the order of our creation and the way continuing descendants come into the world, first out of the earth and later from the woman. The consequences to man and woman are still keeping us from the tree of eternal life until we find reconciliation in the Seed who is Christ with the hope of eternal life in Him by His sacrifice for us and the hope of a resurrection like His to enter the New Jerusalem, the Celestial City, where we will be allowed access to the tree of life (Revelation 2:7, 22:2, 14) at last by His work for us! Jesus Christ has opened access through the flaming swords of Eden’s Paradise lost into a new beginning to walk before His face with Him as in the beginning of creation. There will no longer be the presence of sin in that place where God lives among us or the deceiver to corrupt us again. That is Paradise regained forever from the consequences of the curse!
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