Paradise Lost: The Consequences pt. 1

What a sad story.

We're in Genesis three.

I believe it is the saddest portion of all of Scripture.

It is dark, it is discouraging, it is depressing, and it is real.

Sin.

We have been looking at this chapter for a couple of weeks, and we'll be spending a little bit more time with it as well.

There we go.

If I can figure out this modern technology here.

So Genesis 3 talks about paradise lost.

We saw in Genesis 1 and 2 that God created the world and it was very good.

And man was at the pinnacle of that creation.

And man was designed to know God and reflect the glory of God and to rule over this portion of creation as stewards, as managers, as surrogates for God.

And then Genesis 3.

That paradise is lost.

It begins with a dialogue and a descent, a dialogue in which Adam and Eve, to their peril and to ours, entered into a conversation with the tempter.

And it led to their fall.

From the pinnacle, ultimately, as we see at the end of chapter 3, cast out of the garden, east of Eden, and very far from home where they belong.

It is a sad, sad story.

God then comes to them in verses 7 through 13, and he comes not slamming them, but calling them, probing them, asking gentle questions to help bring to their realization what in the world they have done.

What have you done?

Where are you?

What's happened?

Who have you been listening to?

Gentle, gracious, probing questions to draw them to himself.

The outcome of those questions should have been contrition, confession, and receiving forgiveness.

Oh, the consequences of sin would still be in their experience, and they would still be east of Eden and far from where they belong, but they, if they would have responded to God as He was seeking to draw them to Himself, they would experience the beautiful, blessed taste of forgiveness.

And would then go through this life having tasted forgiveness.

Now that's a picture for us as well.

We are still east of Eden and very far from where we belong, but God offers us forgiveness and grace and salvation and new life.

And we walk and we journey in this life in a difficult setting, which is described here in our passage.

And yet in this very description, which is so dark and so negative, there is, as we will see, a whisper of hope, a soft intimation in verse 15.

We'll look at it later, that then throughout the rest of the Old Testament becomes clearer and clearer a prophecy ultimately of Christ who would come and deal a mortal blow to the enemy.

And Christ would be victor and salvation would be accomplished.

And as that is unfolded in the New Testament, there's this free offer of paradise regained.

It won't fully take place until the consummation of all things.

But now we walk with an offer of salvation, and you and I may experience the sweet taste of forgiveness.

We're going to look specifically this morning at verses.

Boy, if I don't know what verses we're looking at, you guys are in trouble this morning.

We're going to be looking at verses 14 through 19, and then we'll pick up after a couple of weeks when we come back to Genesis the rest of this.

And the focus this morning in this passage is the reality of the consequences of sin.

The consequences of Adam and Eve's sin?

The consequences of your and my sin.

Choices always have consequences.

We can choose to do what we want.

We can assert ourselves.

We can seek to be autonomous.

We cannot ever ultimately escape the consequences of our choices.

And that's what this passage is all about.

Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve chose to do what they wanted, to assert themselves, to be the masters of their own fate, the captain of their own soul.

There is a poem which you may know.

I made reference to it at one point when we were going through James.

It's called Invictus.

And I want to use this as a way of understanding what sin really involves that bears the consequences in the passage before us.

Perhaps you saw the movie a number of years ago.

Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, did a fantastic job with a portrayal of Nelson Mandela, South Africa, after Mandela, played by obviously Morgan Freeman, was released from his imprisonment on Robins Island, Robin Island, and was the Prime Minister of South Africa.

And the title of the film is Invictus, which means Invincible.

And it is taken from a poem which is an accurate and horrible portrayal of the spirit that is behind sin.

There's a story behind the poem, it's worth knowing.

I'm not getting into British poetry.

That's not my purpose this morning, but you need to understand this powerful poem.

There was a young man in England, aged 12, 1861, who contracted a very ferocious version of tuberculosis.

His name was Henley, William Ernest Henley.

And as a young man, tuberculosis in that case attacked his left leg, and the only option was to have that leg amputated, and so he did.

Very shortly thereafter, his right leg was affected.

And apparently the only solution that was offered was to amputate his right leg.

And this man said, no.

Sometimes it's right to say no.

But what he wrote is the following, and this was the spirit of William Ernest Henley.

Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.

You get the spirit of it.

My unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced or cried aloud under the bludgeonings of chance.

My head is bloodied but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade, and in its day that was a reference to hell.

And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid.

Come, hell or high water, shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll.

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

Now that is a powerful poem that has had actually great influence in Britain and beyond ever since it was written.

And there's some very good things about it.

A spirit of resilience, a spirit of not giving up, a spirit of uh.

But behind all of that, there is an arrogance.

Behind all of that, there is a determination for self.

I'm going to do what I think is right.

I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my own soul, and I will do what I want to do.

The spirit of Invictus.

That is the spirit of Adam and Eve.

And in our passage today, God makes clear you can choose.

You can choose what you want.

But choices have consequences.

And no matter how you assert yourself, no matter how you seek to become your own person doing your own thing, the reality is, the truth is, the world that God created is a world where choices have consequences.

Now there is hope.

There is a way out.

But this chapter forces us to look at the reality of the consequences before us.

So let's walk through this.

There are consequences of sin.

God speaks directly to the serpent, to the reptile in the garden.

In verse 14, in verse 15, he speaks prophetically about what will happen when Satan and Christ go to battle thousands of years later.

The serpent, consequences for the serpent, consequences for Eve, for the woman, and consequences for man.

This is not a pleasant portion of Scripture.

However, we do well to deal with reality.

We don't help ourselves when we think that we can do what we want without consequences.

That's just not the way it works.

You can delay the consequences perhaps for a while, but sooner or later choices have consequences that are unavoidable.

So that's what is set forth.

So let's look at verse 14, consequences for the serpent.

The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all the beasts of the field, on your belly you shall go, dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

Now, what's very interesting here is the tone in which God is now speaking.

If you could reread this chapter, particularly the preceding section, where God was confronting Adam and Eve, but the tone was one of gracious, gentle probing.

Do you realize what you've done?

Who told you to do that?

Do you realize where you are?

God knew all of those answers.

It wasn't for his reason, his purposes to enlighten him.

Those questions were lovingly asked to bring them to their senses.

And again, they should have responded with a plea for forgiveness, and God would graciously have given it to them.

But when he speaks now to the serpent, the gentle probing, gracious questions don't come into play whatsoever.

We will read later that the serpent in the garden, a real snake, real reptile, was being used by that old serpent, the devil, as that is described in Revelation 12, 9.

Behind the serpent lies Satan.

Satan is at work through the reptile in the garden, and there is no offer of forgiveness and salvation for Satan and the demonic forces, the other fallen angels.

It's very interesting.

There's no offer here of salvation.

Not for them.

For us, for us, tremendous words of encouragement and hope.

So it's not surprising that what God does here is simply draw a correlation between what he did and what the consequences will be.

The truth of what he did and the consequences.

Actions have consequences.

So what we read is because you have done this, you will be cursed.

A curse of God.

A consequence of sin.

Specifically, for the serpent, on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

What we find here is not what sometimes is portrayed in some quasi-Christian children's literature, that this is a story of how the snake lost its legs.

No, this was a serpent, and he didn't lose his legs.

That's not what this is saying.

Neither is this a tale of how it came that snakes eat dust.

Well, the fact of the matter is, snakes do not eat dust.

And they didn't eat dust in Moses' day, and everybody knew that.

What we have here is a clear picture of defeat and abject humiliation.

In Psalm 72, verse 9, we have this, and a couple of other places, we have this reference to dust.

Psalms 72:9

And I got thinking about it, and I'm not a car guy or a racetrack guy, but I kind of remember in a dirt racetrack, or maybe it was just the guys out on the dirt roads racing against each other, something of a taunt of you're going to eat my dust.

And in a similar way, the the picture here is of humiliation.

In Psalm 72, verse 9, the psalmist calls for God's enemies to be humbled and defeated.

Psalms 72:9

And it says, May they bow down before him and may his enemies lick the dust.

It's a poetic expression of abject humiliation.

So that's the consequences for the serpent in the garden.

More pertinent to us is the consequences for Eve and then for Adam.

So let's look at that.

The consequences of sin.

Sin always bears consequences.

Decisions always bear consequences.

We do not help ourselves by ignoring that.

We don't help one another by smoothing that over.

It would be like going to a doctor and not reading the oncologist's report.

That's not a good thing, my friends.

The oncologist's report, though unpleasant and inconvenient, is a blessed thing to know what you're dealing with.

And God was graciously making clear the consequences for our sin.

So what he says is that you will experience suffering.

This is the very first time that human suffering comes forth in the scriptures.

To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing.

Your desire in pain you shall bring forth children.

Your desire shall be for your husband.

And we'll see that there's an alternate reading, which in the ESV is noted in the footnote.

Your desire shall be against your husband.

And both translations are possible, and we'll come back to that.

And he shall rule over you.

Now let's just unpack that briefly.

The very first reference to human suffering.

He's talking about pain.

This is a general term.

It is not limited to physical pain.

It's a very general term that deals with suffering in general.

It's often used for laborious toil.

Perhaps the best English word for us is an old-fashioned word of travail.

Laborious toil.

Jane and I were in Seattle last week, had got a chance to meet our ninth and youngest grandchild.

We were invited out there.

I didn't really fully realize that I was also being invited to help my son rehab his house.

So he bought a new house, and we started demolishing the house.

It was laborious toil, let me tell you.

Taking off the plaster, taking down walls, pulling the tile up.

My work was mostly picking up the pieces and carrying them out to a truck and then taking them to the dump.

I don't think Peter trusted me with a sledgehammer.

That's an example of the kind of toil that we're talking about with this general term pain, suffering, or the difficulties of life.

Winston Churchill, one of my favorite historical figures, a rascal, an awful person in some areas, and a mighty leader in others, captured the reality of what God is saying to Eve and eventually to Adam.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.

That in effect is what God is saying to humanity.

Blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

A grievous situation as we wander far from home here where we don't really belong.

I mentioned that, well, there's two aspects of this relative to Eve.

Her role in childbearing and her role in marriage.

The quintessential womanly experience of bearing a child.

I need to be very careful what I say about this because I've not experienced it.

But what I read is blood, toil, tears, I'm sorry, and sweat.

This week, Lord willing.

This week.

A constant reminder.

A constant reminder of the consequences of sin.

Not your personal sin necessarily, but the sin of the human race in which we participated.

And that's the reality of our lives.

Not only childbirth, but the marriage relationship.

And I made reference to the end of verse 16.

Your desire shall be for your husband, an alternate translation which is just as accurate.

Your desire shall be against your husband.

Now, what does that really mean?

Well, the word desire can be used in a wide variety of ways.

One of the common uses of desire in the scripture has to do with sexual attraction.

The Song of Solomon is filled with desire, sexual desire, appropriate desire, man to woman, woman to man.

A desire for another person can be beautiful.

That desire can turn ugly as well.

Desire is also used, and that is in opposition or desire against someone.

And this phrase may mean, and we we don't know anything more than what is said here, that her desire would be for her husband.

Very appropriate, very normal and right, and he will rule over you.

You will be drawn to a person who will have the tendency to dominate and abuse.

But you have this desire, this desire mixed with such horrible things, the consequences of sin.

Or you will have a desire against your husband, and he will still keep trying to dominate over and against you.

The twisted reality of human interpersonal relationships, going right back to the primary husband-wife relationships.

What is so interesting here in the traditional marriage vows, you have a pledge to honor and cherish, and yet the way sin affects that, my friends, is loving and cherishing the very vows of marriage often become a twisted attempt to possess and dominate the other.

You know something about this, married or not, that's the nature of our relationships.

If you have a marriage anything like the marriage I have, which happens to be a wonderful one, affected by sin, if we're not careful, we can hurt one another and try to get the better of one another.

And you do the same thing.

We do that's the nature of relationships east of Eden and very far from home.

The natural consequences of sin.

You can choose to go your own way.

You cannot choose to avoid the natural consequences of sin.

Invictus does not help.

You are not, and you don't live out being the master of your fate and the captain of your soul.

That may be a deep desire, but we can't pull that off because God loves us too much to allow us to go our own way, which ultimately leads not only to toil but to destruction and hell.

God loves us too much not to tell us the truth and to give us reminders in this life now of the evil consequences of our sin.

What a bitter price to pay for the spirit of Invictus.

Well, uh he also addresses Adam, verses 17 and 19.

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, that you shall not eat of it.

Because of that, cursed is the ground because of you.

In pain, that same word, you shall eat it all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat of the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of the ground you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The consequences of sin for the woman went to her primary, as we see it in the early chapters of Genesis, of a bearing children and being a partner for Adam, it went to what was given as a primary responsibility in Genesis chapter 2, of tending and taking care of the garden, providing and nurturing creation.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

So what happens now, what we're saying here is that man will toil in the recalcitrant soil, recalcitrant soil.

I love that word.

It may not be that familiar to you, but it is a wonderful word.

It's the word that describes my three-year-old grandkids.

Stubborn?

Opposing?

No! That's not what I want.

I want this.

Opposition recalcitrant simply means stubborn, obstinate, and unmanageable.

The terrible two.

The terrifying reality of who we are.

And the awful reality of the world around us.

The garden was intended to be a place of luscious delight, fruitfulness, and pleasure.

Cast out of the garden, the earth enters into the consequences of sin as well, and becomes obstinate and unmanageable soil.

And the struggle with the world around us, just like the struggle with childbirth or the struggle in human relationships, will only in this life be ended by death.

While we wait for the full expression of the solution in the new heavens and the new earth.

But I get ahead of myself.

So Thorns and Thistles is a picture, of course, a reality, but also a picture of nature that is untamed and constantly encroaching upon us.

We have a home in Indianapolis that one of these days we'll go back to.

It's now being tended.

The yard is being tended by my 10-year-old grandson.

That means that poor yard is in trouble.

Now, I don't know exactly what happens around here, but the grass down there, unless you do something like Scott's four-step grass treatment throughout the year, it's not going to grow very well.

If you do that, it'll probably be green.

But being green doesn't mean that the crabdesk doesn't grow.

You don't have to feed the crabgrass.

It just springs up.

It's just stubbornly encroaching where it doesn't belong.

And if by chance this portion of the yard is free of crabgrass, at least down there you can look and you'll find grubworms that are attacking the soil.

That's just the way our world is around us.

It speaks of nature that is broken and under the curse.

Tornadoes.

Somebody around here told me about a flood 20 years ago.

An enemy.

An enemy.

Hailstorms that destroy crops.

Crops that fail.

The dust that takes over.

Tsunamis.

The nature.

Nature is not under our control.

And it's encroaching upon us.

And it's in that setting that we toil.

That doesn't just refer to farmers.

It's a picture of the fact that your work is hard.

You may think mine's easy.

All I do is speak for several hours on a Sunday morning.

Work is hard.

There's days we don't want to get up and go to work.

There's days we don't want to go and face the problems at work, the calamities that come across our desk, the people that we have to deal with, the person next to us.

The fact that I work hard and I don't earn enough to accomplish what I want to for my family.

Those are all realities.

That's the blood, toil, sweat, and tears that is experienced.

The ground resists and eventually swallows us up.

What a powerful statement.

Cursed is the ground because of you.

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground out of which you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

It's a powerful picture of what happens to us.

We were originally formed from the dust of the soil in the Garden of Eden, which God formed and drew near and breathed into us the breath of life.

But on the day we eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we begin to die, and eventually we die physically, and eventually we return to dust, and it's as though the dust out of which we come or came swallows us up.

That's the consequences of sin.

It is a bitter and a discouraging reality of life out of the garden where they will soon be sent and where we live.

How's it going, folks?

Are you the master of your fate?

Are you the captain of your soul?

If you think you are, just live a little longer, my friend.

Well, there is in this passage, you'll notice I've skipped over verse 15, and that's intentionally because I wanted to save the word of hope in this passage for the end.

Verse 15, God speaking to, in this case in verse 15, he's now speaking to the one behind the serpent in the garden, to Satan, and he is saying, between Satan, your offspring and her offspring, he, an individual, an offspring of the woman, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

He will strike at your head, but you're only striking at his heel.

What we have here is the first word of gospel, the Protevangelium.

A couple of thoughts about this.

This verse has been understood almost from the very beginning, initially to be a reference to Messiah and what Messiah, the Jewish Messiah, would do when he comes.

And ultimately we know that Messiah is Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Christ, and we know where it leads.

At the very basic level, this is saying that though we are now under the curse of sin, we are not beyond the reach of God's goodness and God's grace.

God is still on the throne.

He intended from day one that mankind would be to his praise and glory and would be intended to rule and reign over a small portion of his great universe, as stewards, as representatives, and glorifying God and worshiping God forever.

And sin came in the way, and yet a time is coming, and it will come yet fully in the future.

This is a prophetic verse, verse 15.

It's a little bit hard to understand.

I suspect that the original readers just kind of puzzled, like we sometimes puzzle as we read the book of Revelation.

You kind of sense, well, I get something from it, but I don't quite get it all.

That's the nature of prophecy.

As Revelation continues, there's more given that helps us understand it more.

But this was, though initially unclear, in the New Testament we find that what is predicted here of Satan giving a non-mortal attack on Christ on the cross.

Yes, he died, but he didn't die.

He didn't stay dead, he's alive.

And Christ gave what will ultimately be an attack on Satan's head.

So a relatively minor attack, a major attack.

And that takes place, we find it being fulfilled on a cross in an empty tomb, and yet future at the consummation of all things.

So Satan strikes an ultimately non-lethal blow.

The cross was not the end of the story.

He lives.

Easter is just two weeks away, my friend.

This assurance that the cross was not the end of the story.

Christ on the cross dealt definitively with the enemy, and though he is still for a season allowed to have a measure of activity, the time will come, and it's clear in Revelation that he will be bound forever in the pit of fire, forever and ever, and utterly defeated and utterly destroyed.

It is finished.

This is a first whisper of the good news.

In this whole chapter that is so dark and so discouraging, where all we see is the painful blood, toil, sweat, and tears at every layer and element of our existence.

There is a whisper of hope.

God is not done with us yet.

God is still on the throne.

God is working to fulfill his original intentions.

Jesus reigns.

Christ is victor.

Read the last chapters of the Bible.

Jesus wins.

Genesis prepares us for the rest of Scripture.

But it is by no means Genesis 3, though true is not all of the story.

But we do well to be careful of the spirit of Invictus.

We who live in paradise are offered a way out.

We have left paradise.

Paradise lost is where we are now.

And through Christ there is a return.

And we have, as believers, if you have trusted in Christ, on the basis of what he has done at the cross, his victory on the cross, where the guilt and punishment of your sin and mine was placed on him that we might have new life, forgiveness, a totally different future.

Although we still live in this broken, lost world for a time, and though the realities of sin continue to affect us in our daily lives, a time is coming, assuredly coming, where Christ the victor will return and we will be with him forever in the new heaven and the new earth.

That will be paradise regained.

If those are strange thoughts to you, read the last two chapters of the Bible.

Jesus wins.

I am not the master of my fate.

Jesus is my master.

I am not the master of my fate.

I am not the captain of my soul.

Jesus mastered me and still does.

And Jesus saves my soul.

How about you?

How about you?

We have some choices.

Oh God, I need you.

The spirit of invictus?

No.

That's not what you want.

Hope and help does not come from Invictus.

It comes from the cross of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Do I like every moment of Christ's mastery over my life?

See, God tells me to do strange things.

He told me to come for a couple of years to North Dakota of all strange places.

The captain of my soul.

Is he yours?

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we want to bow before you.

We need to bow before you.

If we're mastering and captaining, we're standing with stiff necks.

And one day every knee will bow, willingly or unwillingly, before you.

And every soul will acknowledge that you are Lord.

May we be knowing you as our Savior as well.

May we joyfully experience your control in our lives.

May we give ourselves to you through faith in Jesus Christ.

Heavenly Father, I don't know where everyone is, or maybe not where anyone is in this room.

But I have to assume that there's some battles going on in our hearts.

To allow you to master us.

Oh God, whether it's to deal with our sins or to give our lives to you, I pray, Father, that we would not be stubborn and stiff-necked.

We cannot avoid the consequences of sin except through the cross, the empty tomb, and your coming again.

Oh Father, may we trust you for that individually in Christ's name.

Amen.

Let me ask you to stand for the benediction.

Well now, my friends, go into the world in peace.

Have courage.

Hold on to what is good and honor all men.

Strengthen the faint-hearted, support the weak, help the suffering, restore the wandering, comfort the grieving, and share the gospel.

And may the grace and the peace of our Lord and Savior be ours this day, this week, and forevermore.

God bless.

Amen.