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[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
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[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] 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.”
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.” - Genesis 3:14-19 (N.I.V.)
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.” - Genesis 3:14-19 (N.I.V.)
When God confronted
the Man and the Woman after the Fall (and one can see that the serpent was also
present there), he cursed them for their disobedience. But his curse for each
of the three involved in the act was very different. Being a woman myself, I
want particularly to understand the part that primarily concerns me, i.e., the
curse on Eve. But first, it is necessary to look for the principle behind the
curse, so that will be the focus of this blog post. Eve and her predicament will
have to be the subject of a subsequent write-up.
First of all,
what is a curse? Especially where God is concerned, I'm inclined to believe that a curse
is not so much a punishment as an outworking of cause and effect. Because
elsewhere in the bible it is written: “Like a flitting
sparrow, like a flying swallow, so a curse without
cause shall not alight.” (Proverbs 26:2, New King James Version). God respects the laws he himself has
put in place.
In the physical
world, things must happen according to the laws of nature – whether we know
them and believe them or not. Knowledge of the laws makes the outcome
predictable, such as: if you drop a stone it will hit the ground; if you drop
it in water, it will sink; if you touch a burning coal, it will burn your
fingers; and so on. All scientific discoveries and inventions are based on known
laws, which do not change and can be relied on to bring forth a predictable
outcome if the calculations based on the principles are correct.
In the same way, God
has set in place certain spiritual laws, which also follow the principle of
cause and effect. When God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil, he was warning them of the consequences
of breaking the spiritual law that he had put in place: that evil is harmless
if you don't know it, come in contact with it or practice it. But as soon as
you know evil by experience, it exerts such power that it takes over your life
and progresses until it destroys you. Adam and Eve only had God's word on this.
They had no experience of evil, because so far, everything around them and
about them was good and they did not know any different.
But the moment they
yielded to the suggestions of the serpent, doubted the goodness of God and took
matters into their own hands, they experienced the evil of disobedience. This
broke their spiritual connection to God and removed them from his preserving
and sustaining presence. In one instant, they stepped over from the camp of God
into the camp of the devil, who then quickly introduced them to guilt,
cover-up, humiliation, anger and blame that further tightened his grasp and
mastery over them. Bereft of the Spirit of God, Adam and Eve were helplessly
drawn by the devil in a downward spiral of one sin after another, that
progressively corrupted their souls and bodies until their ultimate physical
death.
This was Cause and
Effect in action in the spiritual plane. Adam and Eve painfully discovered that
God was right and the devil was a Liar and had tricked them into sinning. But
they were responsible for their own actions and had to bear the consequences.
And the consequences were unfortunately not limited to mankind alone; the earth
itself was cursed and suffered the effects of the introduction of evil in its
atmosphere.
But embedded in the
curse against the serpent, who started it all, God mercifully wove in a ray of hope. One day, the devil, the initiator
of evil, would be crushed by the offspring of the very woman he had used to
begin the whole story. The last word would not be his, but God’s.
~~~~~~~
Therefore the Lord
himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son,
and will call him Immanuel. - Isaiah 7:14
