Genesis 3: God's Actions ...

Thursday, Aug 22, 2013. We are in the middle of the Story about the “fall of man”. The first humans have eaten from the forbidden fruits, and a cascade of consequences is happening. First, we heard about the feeling to be naked, and about fear, about hiding, about accusations. Today we come to the reaction of the Lord. We continue reading Genesis 3:

God's Consequences …

14 So the Lord God said to the

serpent

, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all 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 make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor 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 fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from 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.” (Gen 3, 8-13) The lines here are quite tough. God is punishing all the parties which are involved in the events in the Garden Eden. All of them are guilty of disobedience, of not trusting the most high. And the consequences which we find here, are truly severe. What does it tell us? …**

Some of us struggle with the interpretation of the events after the fall of man. Is it just a nice story, a shocking story? Let us look at it in two steps.

First, the consequences which are described here, are clearly a part of our life. There is the relationship between serpents and men - not a very good one. There is the pain which childbearing brings, without doubt a part of our life. And there is the trouble of earning a living - if we interpret the last part in a general sense. It first talks about plants and fields, about the difficulties to generate food. But in a more general sense this also applies to the modern society, where we have distributed specialized work.

Humans wanted to know good and evil - and they find themselves in the middle of a creation which brings good and evil to them. The difficulties of our existence are part of the “evil” which comes to us from creation itself. Creation is also good, it has so many fantastic features. The words from Genesis 1 still apply: God saw that it was good. But it is also evil, it comes with natural catastrophees, it comes with ill-ness, it comes with the standard difficulties such as they arise in childbearing, it comes with all the difficulties to make a living.

In addition, there is evil coming from decisions of men and women. We have heard about the accusations already, and we will learn more about murder and death, when we read on.

We need to mention that the verses about the serpent and the offspring of the woman is later interpreted in a very specific sense: it is seen as words about the devil, who started this in the figure of the serpent, and about Jesus, the human son of God. He will be victorious when he fights the devil - pointing to the events at the Cross and beyond, the whole church history until today. (Roland Potthast) ... more texts