The Curse on the Man, Pt. 2
Genesis 3:17-19
Again tonight we come back to the study of origins in the book of Genesis and chapter 3. We have studied in chapters 1 and 2 physical origins, the origin of the world. In chapter 3 we have studied the origin and impact of sin. And what we're learning as we come to the text again for tonight in chapter 3 verses 17 o 19 is because of sin God cursed man. Let me read this text for you again, verses 17 to 19.
"And to Adam He said, 'Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I have commanded you saying you shall not eat from it, cursed is the ground because of you and toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow 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 because from it you were taken, for you are dust and to dust you shall return."
The curse on man was sweat, labor, work, toil. And this for men defines life. Life is work. The earth is a rich provider of numberless things but they are not easily procured. Everything man gains from the earth comes by hard work. And even when man doesn't work, even when he may be retired or he may have enough money that he can support himself, he still lives on the work that other people do. Every meal that you eat, whether or not you work to gain that meal is the product of the labor of some who tilled the soil, planted the crop, protected its development or who nurtured the animals to provide for your food. We live, essentially, by work.
Now in the original creation man was in a lush paradise, you remember, where everything grew perfectly and profusely for his pleasure and nourishment. And he did have a responsibility, a joyous one, to tend the garden, which probably meant that he went around plucking all of the good things that were there and expended no energy. But then came sin and dramatic alteration of man and his environment. And as we've been learning from Genesis chapter 3, when sin came, came decay, came disease, came disorder, came death along with sin. The original Eden fell into chaos and I could summarize the chaos we experience as decay, that is the tendency toward death; disease, that is malfunction and injury; disorder, that is the general chaos; and ultimately death. The original Eden fell into this situation. That's the general feature of life that we are moving down a path of decay, disease, disorder to death. That is generally true in the world of everything in the world. All physical creation as well as all of us who are human and spiritual beings.
But in addition to that general effect of sin there was some special effect of sin and these are called the curses. The persons involved in the original sin essentially there were three, there was Satan in the form of a serpent, there was Eve the woman, there was Adam the man. And starting in verse 13, the Lord pronounces curses.
First of all, on Satan in verse 14 and 15. The Lord God speaks in verse 13, He confronts the woman about her sin. She points to the serpent. The Lord then curses the serpent in verses 14 and 15. In verse 16 he turns to the woman and curses her. And then in verses 17 to 19 the curse is pronounced that effects man.
So not only did sin plunge, as we've learned, the whole human race into decay, disease, disorder and death, but there were some special effects, specific curses. For the woman there was a special painful reminder of the seriousness and destructiveness of sin. And that reminder came in the sphere where a woman lives her life, that's the home. And the curse fell on the woman in relation to her children. Verse 16, "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception." For the woman there would be increased conceptions. In fact, there would be many more conceptions that a woman would have after the Fall than before, that's what multiplying your conceptions means. And those conceptions would bring with them tremendous pain so that a woman is struck, as it were, in the domain where she lives her life and that is as a wife and a mother in the home.
Not only will she have pain from children, but she will have conflict with her husband. She will desire to rule him and he will desire to subject her. So women have been cursed in the home and we talked about how that is played out in human history. And I'll say more about that in a moment.
As far as men, they also were given a special effect of the Fall, a painful and relentless reminder of the seriousness and heinousness of sin in the sphere where they live out their life and that is in the work place. The woman's place, truly biblically, is in the home. Man's place is to work and provide for the family. And so the curse on man comes in verses 17 to 19 in the realm where man lives out his life, and that is in the work place. And the battle for bread consumes his life.
It's hard for us living in America in the twenty-first century, or the end of the twentieth century, to get a grip on this because we have it so good. But for most of the world today and through all of human history up until modern times, life was essentially a battle for bread. And as I said this morning, there really wasn't any such thing as life style unless you were the king, unless you were royalty or nobility. There wasn't any such thing as discretionary money. You basically had the clothes on your back, you lived in whatever place you could find to live and you existed every day to try to work to provide something for your family to eat.
If you go back, for example, to the thirteenth century, to the fourteenth century in Europe. And we would assume at that time there was a certain advancement in society, if you went back to that time you would find that the death rate was so close to the birth rate that population grew at about point-one-seven percent per year. The population would only double every 425 years because most babies died and life expectancy was about 30 years of age.
In the 1980's, that would reflect a great change. In the 1980's the population grew at 42 percent, a significant increase. And in the 1990's, at about 51 percent. We have it much better off. If you were to go back, for example, to the eighteenth century and check in on British Queen Anne who lived from 1665 to 1714, she had it as good as anybody in the world could have it. This is the Queen of England. You would be interested to know that she is pregnant 18 times. Now remember, this is part of the curse and before modern times there were essentially no ways to prevent pregnancy other than abstinence. And so women were prolifically pregnant, and that was part of the curse, part of the suffering. You would also be interested to know, five of her eighteen pregnancies, in five cases the children survived birth. None of them survived childhood. All 18 died before they could reach adulthood.
Now you ladies who are mothers can understand the depth of that kind of pain. Not only did she living in that day go down, as it were, to the edge of death in even burying that child but when all of that was said and done, she lost them all.
If you were to turn to the man's side in the eighteenth century, for example, in France, you would find that eighteenth century French farming produced about 345 pounds of wheat per acre. Modern American farmers produce about six times as much,l about 2,150 pounds of wheat per acre. Early fifteenth century French farmers produced about two-point-seven to three-point-seven pounds of wheat per man hour and the rate fell by half over the next two centuries. Modern American farmers produce about 857 pounds per man hour as compared to 2.7, about 230 up to 310 times as much as their French counterparts. French farmers worked very hard just to barely eke out a living. As the great French historian Ferdnand(?) Brodell(?) pointed out, "It became very difficult to sustain life when productivity in wheat fell below 2.2 pounds per man hour. For most of the 350 years from 1540 to 1890, productivity was well below that level."
I mean, if you go back to the French Revolution, that's partly why there was a French Revolution. People were starving to death. That's how it has been for most of the world, for most of human history. And you can look at the television from time to time and see the emaciated millions of masses who are still living out of that sad scenario, trying to eke out an existence. Mothers having a myriad of babies who perish before they ever reach adulthood.
This explains why earlier generations spent most of their time and most of their resources on food alone. Compare that with the United States. Under six percent of total consumer expenditures in the United States are for food...under six percent. We have 94 percent of our money going somewhere other than to feed us. Now in other nations today and in the past history, almost everything went just to provide a meal for your family.
And life was very hard. I don't know if you've studied any of that history. It fascinates me and whenever I have the opportunity I read as much as I can about it. We have...we have had some amazing development, folks, such as the invention of glass because glass admits light and heat but excludes cold and pests. That made a huge difference in the world. And then somebody invented screens to admit fresh air and exclude disease-bearing insects. And somebody else came along and developed ways to purify drinking water and process sewage. And then came mechanical refrigeration to prevent food spoilage and the consequent waste of food and also disease. Then came inventions that made work safer and travel safer and sanitary medical practices and antibiotics and so forth and so forth and so forth, modern surgical techniques.
Now you might think you would like to be Louis XIV, or Louis XVI, you might think you would like to have been Henry VIII and live in a palace. But if that were the case for you, even at best you would just be doing everything you could to make sure you ate, your family ate and all your subjects had enough food so they didn't starve to death and that your army was strong enough so that it could at least fight if another army engaged it. You might think you would like to have been in an eighteenth or nineteenth century king, but you would have had to do without electricity and all its powers, lights, telephones, radio, television, refrigerators, air conditioners, fans, VCRs, Xrays, MRIs, computers, the Internet, printing presses and all other industrial automation. You would have had to do without internal combustion engines and all that they power...cars, trucks, buses, planes, farms, construction equipment, trains, ships, etc. And every other synthetic thing like plastic, nylon, orlon, rayon, vinyl and thousands of other products from grocery bags to panty hose and everything in between, compact discs and you can go on and on. There wouldn't be any artificial body joints and organ donations and you couldn't enjoy air conditioning. You couldn't enjoy a cold drink because there wasn't any ice...unless you lived in the winter where there was ice on the ground.
You couldn't have talked with anybody other than have a conversation with them. In those days it didn't make much sense to write a letter to somebody because you'd have to deliver it. You might as well just go there and talk because the letter wouldn't get there any faster than you because the only way the letter would get there would be if somebody took it there. There was no way until telegraphy to send a message...the advent of the telegraph in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Prior to that you couldn't have communicated a distance in writing any faster than you could if you just went there and said whatever was on your mind. You couldn't have listened to recorded music. You couldn't have viewed photographs or television, as you know, or motion pictures or whatever...whatever.
And when you think about what they endured in terms of trying to survive with medicine the way it was...I was reading something I really didn't know about, in the eighteenth century there was a process, there was no antiseptic until a half a century after that, the doctor was more likely to kill you than he was to cure you because he had two techniques typically that he used, at least in Europe. One of them was bleeding you. When you went in and you had some kind of a problem, they just started sucking blood out of you. The very opposite of what anybody would do today. The other thing was called laudable pus. They had the idea that pus was a curative and so you took pus from one patient and spread it around to the others. You wonder why there were epidemics and plagues and all of that.
Hard for us to identify with some of that, isn't it? Now it's just a little tiny piece of time that we live in over the last 150 years when we've had the kind of things that we've had slowly developing. And as I said this morning, a lot of this is is the result of the Christian influence of working hard to make life better and mitigate some of the strain and stress of the curse. For the most part, the quality of living began to rise in that part of the world that was affected by Christianity.
The man has lived a tough life. And woman has lived a tough life. And we don't always see that in the refinements of our modern day. Well let's go back to the text for a minute. That was just kind of a general picture to make the point.
As we look at the curse that came on man, I mentioned there three things I wanted you to see...the cause, the curse and the consequences. The cause is in verse 17. God says to Adam, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you saying you shall not eat from it, cursed is the ground."
So, the cause was that Adam chose to do what his wife wanted rather than what God wanted. That's it, you listened to the voice of your wife. That's all God has to say about it. I don't think you can get too far beyond that because that's all we have in the text. No deception, no ignorance, no confusion, no subtleties, you have a premeditated willful choice to follow his wife's desire and disobey God. She ate. She wanted Adam to eat. Adam says, "I'll do what you want rather than what God commanded." That simple. He listened to the voice of his wife. It doesn't tell us what his motivation was, but I can tell you what it was, he was more concerned about what she wanted than he was about what God wanted, right? Obviously...obviously.
He thought she had a better take on the benefits than God did. He bought in to her desire because he believed that it was important to her and that it would bring about some benefit to him, that's why he did it. And the penalty was death. Back in chapter 2 verse 17 God said, "If you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die." And they deserved to die then and there. And the principle of death was operative immediately into their...into their lives. But God was gracious and they didn't die. And as we'll see in the next text, they were even given the opportunity for deliverance for salvation but there was a serious curse here.
The woman was to bear children, multiples of children. Now Queen Anne only lived a few decades and had 18 pregnancies. We don't know how long Eve lived, but Adam lived 930 years and Eve must have lived hundreds and hundreds of years. It would be almost impossible to calculate the number of pregnancies she had in that amount of time. So there was grace in the fact that they don't die then, but there's also a very, very serious curse pronounced upon a woman who is going to have the pain of childbirth and the pain of a struggle with her husband and it's going to last for almost a millennium.
And then there's Adam who has to go out and work the soil and it says in verse 17 all the days of your life and he lives for 930 years. So there is mercy and grace mixed with this serious curse. And I closed last time by just posing the question that some people ask, you know, why does...why is God so harsh, why does God let people die, why does God destroy people, why does God allow disasters, why does He allow death, why does He allow disease, etc.?
That isn't really the question. The question is why does He let any sinner live? I mean, we all deserve to die because that's what sin does. It kills. And the question isn't why does God let all the bad things happen, the question is why does God stop the bad things that should happen and give us grace, right? That's the question.
People continue to talk about that little question...why do bad things happen to good people? You know the answer to that? They don't. Bad things do not happen to good people. You say, "What do you mean?" There are no good people. You understand that? Bad things happen to bad people, or better, we could just say, bad things happen to people because people are bad and worthy of death. And the mercy and grace of God let's them live and according to Romans 2:1 to 4, the goodness of God that let's you live is designed to lead you to repentance.
Here's Eve, who knows how many pregnancies she has in the hundreds of years that she lives and the other women in that time, here is Adam slogging through the field producing fruit for almost a millennium, what incessant reminders they faced for hundreds of years over the seriousness of sin. That curse driving them to the recognition of their sinfulness and how serious it was and to the salvation that God offers the sinner.
So that's the cause. Secondly is the curse. And we started to look at that in verse 17, "Cursed is the ground because of you." The curse doesn't actually fall on the woman in verse 14 and 15, it doesn't actually...or rather verse 16...it doesn't actually fall on the man here, it falls on the sphere. The curse comes on the woman indirectly through childbearing and through her relation to her husband. And in comes on the man indirectly through the ground. Curse is the ground because of you. As I said last time, the king of the earth, man becomes the slave of dirt. Dirt becomes his master. Previously rich, flourishing, nourishing earth will be the enemy of man and he's going to have to battle to get what it will yield to him to survive.
"In toil you shall eat of it." Eat of it you will, but not by just going through in a leisurely way, meandering around paradise plucking whatever you want. It's going to take a tremendous amount of effort. And down in verse 23 it says that later on, of course, we read that the Lord sent that couple out of Eden to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. That's what Adam had to do the rest of his life.
All human labor is in view here, the whole aspect of working, of expending energy, the battle for bread, all human labor, not just agrarian work or agriculture. This is the realm of man's life and it will be that way, end of verse 17, all the days of your life. It is not possible for a fallen sinful man to live in a perfect world. He has to live in an equally fallen world which yields its riches with reluctance. And this would remind him of his sin, remind him of the burden that is on his back for disobedience to God and make salvation attractive to him as he struggles in the misery of his toil.
And if you go, as we did last time, to Ecclesiastes and you hear secular man speak, he says, "All is vanity, vanity, vanity," which is a word for emptiness, nothingness. You go to work and you work and then you wake up the next morning and you go back to work and you work and you work your whole life and then you die and everything you earned gets left to somebody else. This is vanity of vanities. Life takes on this cyclical sameness, this blandness, this lack of fulfillment, this meaninglessness.
I remember reading in one of Arthur Miller's plays years ago that he has a main character sitting at a table across from his wife and the main character says, "Life has deteriorated for them into a discussion of how many miles they get on their Volkswagen. It is the aeonian reality of an empty life. Man labors all his life for what? And his labor costs him his life because he wears himself out in toil. This is the theme of much of Ecclesiastes chapter 2 and also chapters 3, 4 and it's mentioned in chapter 6.
Now this raises the question, of course, that we are endeavoring to answer in creating a Christian world view, what is wrong with the world? Why are people the way they are? Why is life the way it is? Why is work the way it is? The answer is because this is the curse that God placed upon it. Life is hard because God made it that way. There is wonder and there is beauty and there is richness and there is joy and there is love and there is happiness. But it is not easy to hold on to. There are wondrous things to enjoy out of the ground, wondrous things to enjoy to eat out of the animal world which all have been created for our enjoyment. We have many beauties to enjoy in the world but it yields those things for us at great cost as we work our whole life to produce those things, or someone works to provide them for us.
So, what's wrong with the world? What's wrong with the home? Why is the home such a battleground? Because that's where the curse fell. The woman in the home feels the impact of sin on her relationship to her children, which have the potential to break her heart, to crush her physically and she also feels the weight of the curse upon her relationship with her husband with whom she battles life long. The man feels the curse in the work place. He feels the impact of sin on the earth as he works all his life that it might yield what is necessary for him to survive and to provide for his family.
And all of this is to help the woman and to help the man see what sin does and then to cause him to long for a better life, to long for a better situation, to long for better circumstances, to long for deliverance. Further detail of this curse is given in verse 18. "Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you and you shall eat the plants of the field."
Now He says the ground is cursed and the only way you're going to get anything out of it that you can eat is by work. That doesn't mean that nothing will grow in dirt. You and I both know what grows there very well, with no cultivation and no attention at all, and it is thorns and thistles. By itself with no help from man, you know how that works. You clear off a lot, get it ready maybe to build a house and for some reason you don't build the house. Six months later you come back and you have a jungle of weeds, inedible, not nourishing, toxic, tasteless or distasteful. The ground when left to itself will produce but it will produce not the rich food of Eden, it will produce thorns and thistles, inedible noxious weeds which provide no sustenance for men.
This, by the way, if you go back to chapter 2 for a moment, verse 5, in the original creation there was no shrub of the field in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted. In the original creation you had plants and you had trees, chapter 1 makes that very clear. Plants are identified as created by God in verses 11 and 12, and so are the trees. But there were plants and trees but there weren't, according to chapter 2 verse 5, what is translated shrubs of the field and plants of the field. I told you when we went through verse 5 of chapter 2, no siach and no eseb of the field. Eseb would be barley and wheat and oats. Those are planned crops. There were no planned crops in the original creation because you didn't need to do that. And siach is thorns and thistles, there were no weeds. In the original Eden you didn't have to have cultivated planned crops, and you didn't have any weeds. You had the natural flourishing of the earth producing all manner of food without crops, as we know them, that now produce flour and from that we make bread and there was no siach, no weeds which grow profusely now. And it also mentions in chapter 2 verse 5 that the rain contributes to that as we well know. Take a vacant piece of dirt, do nothing to it, just wait and let it rain and you will have a flourishing field full of weeds.
How does that happen? Two things contribute to seed dispersal, wind and birds.
Primarily wind and birds. The wind blows the seed in, that's why even when you put in a new garden in your house or a new lawn, you find some strange kind of things growing in it. That is deposited there by birds who somewhere else ate the seed, flew over your yard and deposited it. Birds are involved in seed dispersal and so is the wind. And they move across the earth and they spread these thorns and thistles. This means that while man has to cultivate the ground to start with, he has to develop the eseb, he has to develop the crops, he has to put them in the ground carefully, he has to take care of the soil to protect them, at the time that he's doing all of that all of his labor is carried on, he has to fight at the same time the natural inclination of the ground to develop all the weeds that are being dispersed all over that field in those natural ways. So that's why there's a battle in the life of man as he attempts to get his food.
So, thorns and thistles are going to grow and you shall eat the plants of the field. You're going to have the esebs, the crops will be there, but it won't be easy because of the presence of the thorns and the thistles. And that's how agriculture goes. That's the way it is. Now in modern times we've invented all kinds of chemicals to deal with these kinds of weeds and we all worry about what that's doing to us, don't we, as we ingest the chemicals that are intended for the weeds.
Well, so much for the curse. The consequence comes in verse 19. The consequence, so here's how it's going to be, "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread." In other words, you're going to eat but you're going to sit down to a meal sweating. "And you're going to do that until you return to the ground because from it you were taken and you are dust and to dust y