Back to the Beginning No.7 The Terrible Curse

And the address which I bring this morning follows on from one of last week in which I further re-emphasized from this third chapter of the book of Genesis how the Bible views the modern dilemma which actually is just a resurgence of the dilemma that has encountered men and women in every generation. Who is to blame? Why is the world as it is? And the answer to that question, blunt though it seems and perhaps obnoxious to modern ears, is that our world is under a curse. That word curse is a very ugly word.

Perhaps when you first hear it you may think of some little mud effigy of a human being and the old-fashioned way of trying to inflict harm in a mystical, magical sense by piercing it with pins. You might think of a curse in terms of, say, the opening scene of Macbeth with the witches all gathering round. But the fact of the matter is that the word curse actually is a biblical word.

It's a somber word, and you find it in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. And here in this passage which has just been read to us, we have these thoughts in the 14th verse, and the 15th verse, or rather the 17th verse, of the cursing of the world. Verse 14, with the serpent in mind, we read, "'Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals.'" 17th verse, halfway through, "'Cursed is the ground, Adam, because of you.'" Now there is, I say, the curse declared.

But when you move on into the second half of the Bible, you find reference also made to the same curse. But it's not in the same context as in the third chapter, but rather in view is our Lord Jesus. How did He die? Well, we just sung about it in one of the famous hymns of the Christian church.

He died on a cross. What does the Old Testament have to say about people who die in that fashion? Well, in Galatians chapter 3, you read these words in the 10th verse, "'Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law.'" And then it goes on to tell us about our Lord Jesus and the way in which He has been cursed by fulfilling the law that we had broken. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

For it is written, "'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.'" So, if in Genesis 3 you have a curse declared, here you have a curse deflected, the death of our Savior. And when you move on to the last chapter of the book of Revelation, in symbolism which suggests a rerun of the Garden of Eden, but raised in its wonder and in its perspective glory, we are told about a society in which there is no more death, no more sin, no more sorrow. The second verse of Genesis 22, "'The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.' No longer will there be any curse.

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city," and so forth. A curse declared, a curse deflected, a curse deleted. The Bible in summary fashion depicts its whole story, its whole theology around this word curse and how God eventually deals with it.

Tom Houston has written a book entitled, I Believe in Creation, and in that book, part of the Hodda I Believe series, he says this, we live apocalyptically. What does he mean? Well, he means that particularly in the twentieth century man totters towards the precipice of disaster. And now, there is a sense in which just at the moment international tensions have been lifted.

We've seen the collapse of the Soviet Union. We've seen a moderate attempt to disarm, and President Clinton has been fortunate to inherit the presidency of the United States in one of its more peaceful periods. There is, therefore, the possibility that you and I might draw the conclusion that because all is right in Western Europe, all is right with the world.

But, of course, that would be a very faulty conclusion. Ask the people in Sierra Leone. Ask the people in the now newly called country of the Congo.

Ask the folks in Bosnia and Serbia who are still licking their wounds. Ask the kids in Afghanistan and Kabul who have lost limbs as a result of the planting of landmines. You know, and I know, that it is not being simply an attempt to outdo Jeremiah to suggest that we do live apocalyptically.

The world still totters on the verge of disaster. So, you come back to the question. There are two modern disciplines in terms of the study of human behavior.

One is called anthropology. It comes from the Greek word anthropos, and it speaks of man. Anthropology is the study of man from the very beginning that he is recognizable.

Psychology is a twin discipline. It studies not only man around the world in his tribal condition and in his civilized fashion. It talks about the behavior patterns of man.

Why does man behave as he does? What is it that is behind all this? Is it as a result of his genes? Are we conditioned by the improvement of society? We now have a new government in our country. It is a socialist government. And if you strip down social philosophy to its essence, it says if you improve society, you will improve man.

And all these disciplines of political theory, of anthropology, of psychology, they have this in common. They believe that man can be improved. Underlying most of modern theory is the idea that man has started low down on the evolutionary scale and is gradually making his way upwards and hopefully improving society as he goes along.

Now, why do I say these things? Well, for this reason, you see, that most modern disciplines are anti-Bible. I mean by that they start from a different point. The Bible says that man commenced in an idyllic situation and then came tumbling down from the ideal.

The Bible interprets the problem of man not in terms of his genes or in terms of his environment, but in terms of his soul, his spiritual condition. And it suggests that if you write that, then not only do you improve the individual, but as a consequence by evangelism, by the Christianizing of the world, ideally, you improve it. Modern discipline inverts what the Bible asserts.

Let me give you an ideal picture. At least I think it's ideal. I was brought up in North Derbyshire, South Yorkshire.

Used to stray across the border from time to time, for my city is almost just nestling into Northern Derbyshire. And one of the fun pursuits of my brother and myself when we were kids is we'd get out into the Derbyshire hills. Sometimes we'd go to the farms and we would watch the sheepdog trials.

I can think of nothing more wonderful in the realm of nature than to see a shepherd and his dog as they bond together in a most remarkable fashion. Let's just shift the scene for a moment. Let's imagine we're not in Derbyshire.

Let's imagine we're in Wales and here is a shepherd, a very famous shepherd. And he's got his dogs and he is away with the Welsh lilt in his voice and the dogs go. And he puts his fingers in his mouth and he makes a whistle, the like of which I've always tried to make but have never been successful and won't attempt another practice here.

And as a result of the sound, one dog will veer in this direction and the other dog will veer in the other direction. And remarkably, almost as though they have some magnetic control over the sheep and as though there is an incredible rapport between them and the shepherd, which actually there is. The sheep will be brought into the fold and the shepherd will close the gate and you have an idyllic picture of man and beast in a peaceful environment.

But if I tell you that that shepherd has not only two sheepdogs, he has six. And two of them have just been put down by the RSPCA and the other were in a state of incredible neglect. What does that do? It spoils the picture.

It spoils the picture not because there was something wrong with the landscape, but to coin an expression, there is something amatta with the in-scape. The landscape is what you see, what is out there. The in-scape is what you feel, what you are in here.

So Adam and Eve, a split second after Eve's transgression, a split second after Adam has simulated her disobedience, there was no changing Eden. The flowers were still as beautiful. The trees were still as majestic.

The animals were as striking as ever. But there is something fundamentally wrong. The in-scape.

Adam and Eve have blighted the scene by what has happened in their hearts. Now don't you see? What I'm doing is isolating a psychological point that the Bible makes at the very beginning and sustains throughout the two major books that constitute this holy book that we call the Word of the Lord. Something wrong in man qua man.

And to deal with the landscape and not to deal with the in-scape is to show the shallowness of your reasoning and your philosophy. William Golding wrote a book which became very famous called The Lord of the Flies. In it, some boys have the happy experience, at least the consequences happy, if not the immediate impact, of crashing down onto some island paradise.

I think it must have been where the Kennard family used to live, though they weren't there at the time. It was before their time. Can you imagine anything more wonderful? A blue, blue lagoon, lovely trees to climb, mountains, at least hills in the center of the island.

I mean, as far as these kids were concerned, it was idyllic. They turned to each other laughing excitedly. They didn't talk, they didn't listen, they just talked.

Ralph was faced with the task of translating all that he was seeing into some explanation, and so he stood on his head and fell over. This belongs to us, he said, and they agreed. Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination.

They were lifted up, and then their character changed, and in the plot, the domination of the island was not enough. Boys will be boys. They had to dominate one another, and the rocks which were good to look at, which had their own pattern and reflected the colors as the sun beamed down upon them, became instruments by which one boy would fight another boy, and soon there is death, soon there is cannibalism.

Eating the forbidden fruit gives man power to see objects both as objects of delight for their own intrinsic value or objects of evil. So it was in Eden. Ere long that the trees that were there for the glory of God and for men and women to benefit from, they became hiding places where our first parents tried to conceal themselves from the presence of God.

For paradise to be enjoyed within, or rather for paradise to be enjoyed without, there must be tranquility within. And on the island in the story of Lord of the Flies, the boys are hopelessly equipped as far as the inscape is concerned. Now, isn't it interesting that when you read through the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, you've got almost the same sort of situation as in this novel.

I mean, it's an ideal place. The world fresh from the hands of God. Good, good, good, good.

Adam, very good. He needs a partner, so God gives him Eve who will compliment him at every conceivable level that a woman can compliment a man and vice versa. But you go on from the second chapter to the fourth and get into the fifth and the sixth and the seventh and all the way through to the 50th chapter, and what do you discover? Soon you're into the first murder.

You're into incest, witchcraft, astrology, family breakdown, polygamy, the hints of ethnic cleansing. And if you come to the Bible and to the first book as a newcomer, you might be saying when you get to the 50th chapter, how was it that they got from there to there? What is the problem? Or rather, what is the solution to the problem? And the answer is that it's here. It's in this third chapter.

It's within these verses that you read the story of the fall of man with the twin cursing of the serpent and the earth. And if estrangement from God and expulsion from Eden adds up in your book to being cursed, then you can say that not only is the serpent cursed and the earth cursed, but there is a semblance of curse that is directed towards man and woman. So, when you get to the end of the third chapter, what do you discover? Adam and Eve are expelled, verse 25, banished from the garden of Eden.

Do you remember the children's mercy rhyme, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. The sex order may be wrong in terms of a reflection of Genesis 3, but what you do have here, brothers and sisters, is Adam falling and Eve falling, tumbling down, the crown broken, the image of God fractured.

That is, I put it to you, what is wrong. They move out of Eden and they are alienated. What is amiss with our world today? I would identify it in four different categories to these I made reference earlier, so I won't stay with them.

Man has a difficulty in relating to God, therefore there is a theological problem, and that's the basic difficulty, the most serious issue. Man does not get on with his fellow, therefore he has a sociological problem. Thus, the kids suffering in Kabul and the 60,000 homeless boys in Calcutta, repeated in many of the mega cities in the third world.

Man takes what God has given him as far as the habitat is concerned, and he pollutes it, with the net result that some of the largest lakes in Europe and Canada can now no longer sustain life. And the Bible tells you that if you sin against the habitat, you sin against God, you sin against a creative principle. Those of you who believe that this style of preaching has no biblical justification at all, I ask you to read the Scriptures more carefully.

God makes a covenant with the earth, God makes a covenant with the animals, God makes a covenant with man. And part of that covenant is to husband the earth, for the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, and our tenancy is only the right of tenants, not the right of owners. God is the owner of planet earth.

So to the theological problem and the sociological problem, you've got the ecological difficulty, and then on top of that you've got man. Purely poor, brilliant, creative, destructive man. He doesn't understand himself.

The good that I would, I do not. The evil that I would, not that I do. Oh, wretched man that I am.

How many of you have felt like that? I'm not speaking about other people, I'm speaking about yourself. How many of you have joined with me in failing to understand our own psyche? Okay, and don't you see, all these alienations are buried here, they're latent here, they're concealed here, but they're only just below the surface, they're there to be discovered. The analysis is here in Genesis 3. Get these alienations right, and you get man right.

When man is right with his God, then man is at peace with himself. When man is at peace with himself, he can look upon his brother as indeed his brother. When man is at peace with society, he can care for the world, he can till the soil, he can treat his fellow creatures with compassion.

God walks in the garden in the cool of the day. It's an interesting thought, isn't it? Here's a little bit of anthropomorphism. What that means is looking on God as though he is a man, not because he is, but because it's very difficult for you to conceive of God without the Bible writers make this sort of analogy.

And so, here is God in the cool of the evening with just a vesper of wind. Very often the introduction to the person of God in the Bible is as the ruach, as the wind goes by. Then the man, verse 8, and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

Isn't it wonderful to take a walk in the cool of even a worthy evening, to go down onto the seafront or up on the downs? So lovely when it's been a hot day to be there in the coolness. And here is this beautiful picture of God wanting to continue what has already been established, his relationship with this remarkable creature, man, and enjoy his company. But there is something wrong, and God gives expression to a dilemma which actually has such profound implications.

The Lord God called to Adam, where are you? Not that God has man lost as far as his knowledge is concerned, for God is omniscient, he knows everything. What is broken is communion. Something has gone catastrophically wrong, and here is man, here is woman, festooned, can you believe it, in aprons made out of fig leaves, covering their embarrassment with some idea that their private parts will not only be employed in the reproduction of their own species, but with the very reproductive act there might well be the passing on of the virus of disobedience, which has had its first initial impact.

Man in the presence of God is embarrassed. Man in the presence of God is afraid. It wasn't like that before.

It's the alienation, you see. Because man no longer feels comfortable in God's presence, the very grace gift of the trees which were there for him to admire and to profit in terms of its fruit is concerned, now become vehicles by which man endeavors stupidly to conceal himself. From God.

And what takes place following this, in summary fashion, are two inquests, and a couple of curses, and a couple of consequences. One of the curses will be resolute but not absolute, and the other curse will be fixed and final. That's a summary.

Let me unpack it. There is an inquest, I say. God realizes that something has gone wrong.

He knows, of course. He has every idea what will be the outcome of this creative project. And so God, returning to the natural order of things, brings Adam onto the stage, first of all, in terms of the inquiry.

The Lord God called to the man, where are you? The devil went to the woman first in terms of the temptation. The Lord puts responsibility where it belongs. Adam, the head, Adam to whom has been entrusted the care of the garden, to whom has been given this companion, this wonderful companion.

Adam, you are to answer for yourself. But lest you wring your hands in grief and feel that the situation is hopeless, let me stay to make this point, that when man is in trouble, God comes looking. He did at the beginning.

He always has subsequently. The good shepherd seeks after the sheep. Grace is always motivated by God.

He is the prime mover. And Adam is questioned. We went into the question last time, so I won't stay with it at this moment.

Sufficient to say that God holds Adam accountable for the wrong that he has done. It was not the eating of the fruit. That in itself was insignificant in terms of the constitution of the fruit.

It was the principle of disobeying God. It was the idea of man becoming more than he was, fresh from the hand of God. It was the concept of man vying with God for divinity itself.

This was the dilemma. And Adam is brought to book. And not only Adam, but also the interview progresses, and Eve is addressed.

Verse 13, the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? She endeavors to make a limp excuse. What she and Adam did was take a slight step towards disobeying God in doing something which he had prohibited, a small step for the first pair. It became a landslide for humanity.

Eve has really no more excuse than Adam had. You have no more excuse than I have. You break God's will.

You break God's law. You are accountable to the Lord for this. But I tell you again, there is still hope.

You see, Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, Adam first and then Eve. And the indication of Scripture is that even though they will come under the condemnation of God, the imago Dei, the image of God in man, though shattered, will still fragmentary remain. In other words, there will be that in Adam after the fall, that in mankind after the fall, that still has a semblance of the original.

And it will take our beloved Lord Jesus to come into this world and to release the grace of forgiveness and enable us to be born again, for that image to be remade and renewed and you to be restored in part to what Adam had in perfection before the fall, the image of God and to be called a son of God. The image of God in Adam is defaced but not effaced. So from Eve's limp excuse, the third being that is brought to book is none other than the serpent.

Once more, don't pay too much attention on the animal per se. That is of no more consequence than later on when God uses a rainbow to indicate His good pleasure, that the rainbow per se is of importance. It is what the serpent stood for.

It is who incarnated the serpent that is important, none other than Lucifer, the evil one himself. And there is no inquiry. There are no questions.

As far as God is concerned, there is only one thing you can do with Satan, and that is to confront him. There is hope for Adam. There is hope for his spouse because grace is there on the side of God, and it can in his love be doled out to undeserving sinners.

But there is no grace for Lucifer, no grace for the personification of evil. Cursed! Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals. You'll crawl on your belly and you'll eat dust all the days of your life.

The metaphor is piled one on top of the other to show the derision with which God encounters the evil one. And as the rainbow will eventually remind men and women of the goodness of God if they are thoughtful in their contemplation, so the hissing of the snake for all time as it makes its way along the ground on its belly and sometimes eats the dust of the earth will be a reminder to the malevolence of the evil one and what he did at the beginning, and the hiss and the venom that still is heard and injected into society down the ages. What are the consequences of these two inquiries and this one confrontation that God holds in this third chapter of Genesis? And taking them in reverse order, because reverse order to what I've just made reference, and following the order of Scripture, you will find that one of the consequences is the warfare that there will be between man and Lucifer down the years of his career.

I will put enmity between you and the woman. Here is God predicting that as the course of human history continues to unwind there will be a power of evil as well as a power of good which will continue to war for the souls and for the livelihoods and for the peace of humankind. And don't you see that though put in simplistic fashion this becomes the way in which you interpret Bosnia, this becomes the way in which we interpret Serbia, this becomes the way in which you interpret how it is that a mother can have her child done to death without even giving the fetus within her the possibility of life.

I speak with compassion, but I have to speak as the Bible teaches it. When we dishonor life, when we hold life as being cheap, then we go against the decrees of God and we fall under the temptation and the influence of the evil one. And sometimes these powers can be concentrated in countries, in societies, as well as particularly evidenced in certain individuals.

Here is the consequence of the fall. Spiritual warfare, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers. But not only spiritual warfare, there will also be marital duty.

Having dealt with the serpent, the Lord God addresses the woman. The consequence of her hand in the fall is indicated in the 16th verse and following. I will greatly increase your pain in childbearing.

With pain you will give birth to children, and your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. He will have an attraction to Adam, which in its worst expression will be a submission bordering on servility. But if you put it within the context of the grace of God in the Old Testament and the more wondrously revealed ethics and grace of God as shown by our Lord Jesus in His teaching in the New Testament, then a Christianized woman has no need to fear.

But the probability is, and history calls, much evidence to substantiate this. That woman has so often been the placing of man. Woman down history and in many societies have been nothing but man's chattel.

The pain of her giving birth has not always been rewarded with an ease of life. I think of my own grandmother, mother of 12, a life that was appallingly difficult. I speak with solemnity and pain in my voice, but what I illustrate is the principle of Scripture.

It took our Lord Jesus to come to rescue women and to heighten them and to give them dignity and standing. So He says to men, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Spiritual warfare is predicted.

Marital duties are referred to. And as far as Adam is concerned, manual labor is predicted. To Adam He said, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it.

Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground. The sorrow and the pain directed to the woman is also rehearsed by God as He directs the punishment to Adam. And you know that this is so.

You know that life can be far from the tonic of Eden. It can become a trouble. Life east of Eden is not how God intended it to be lived ideally, but that is how it has been lived down the course of history.

And so we move on and come to a conclusion. For not only have we highlighted the condemnation of the devil and Adam and Eve, but we must now just reaffirm what is plain here, and that is that there is a curse on this earth and to some degree on the animals. Both come from the same stuff as man.

They're indissolubly linked with man. The curse, however, of the earth is resolute, but it is not absolute. Cursed is the ground.

Well, it is cursed, is it not? You see the stretches of the Sahara Desert. You experience what our American friends in their use of the English language call an earth correction that we would call an earthquake. You'll be present when the Ganges floods into the delta and see those young men and women, those children and those old men as they try to cope with the floodwaters, not just once or twice in our lifetimes, but repeatedly.

There is that in the earth that speaks of its curse. But then you consider the rose, the flowers, the sunset, the sunrise, and as Adam, fallen though he be, still has fragments of the image of God, so our world still evidences something of the glory that it had at the from the hands of the Lord. And as for the animals, they're bound up in the story of man.

When Noah's generation sins, the judgment that falls on man falls on them. And as Noah and his family are saved, so the blessings of salvation that accrue to a handful of human beings accrue to the animals. When Jonah denounces Nineveh and predicts the condemnation not only of its citizens, he also predicts the condemnation or punishment on the animals.

And when there is repentance, the animals benefit as well as do the citizens of Nineveh. The earth and man, his habitat, those with whom he shares the earth, they are in some ways indissolubly connected with him. That is why, you see, the tragedy of the fall is so great.

The alienations are so pronounced. It's not only man that suffers, the earth suffers, the animals suffer, vegetation suffers. And again, just to forestall you going away upset and depressed, let me point this out to you.

For next week, we've just come back to this chapter, and I will crack open one of the most remarkable prophecies that you find in the whole Word of God, a prophecy that just radiates hope and rescue. But here, don't you see in the 20th verse, Adam, despite all that has happened thus far, names his wife Eve. The significance is this.

She will be the mother of all the living. Adam appreciates that even with the punishments that God directs towards him, there is a promise. One day will come into this world someone who will be able to bruise the head of the serpent, deal the death blow to sin, and remove condemnation.

And as Eve has a progeny, as Adam and Eve have their sons and their grandsons and their great-great-grandchildren, down the course of human history, although still in the future at this point, will come one whose name is the Christ, the second Adam, and He will take upon Himself the consequences of the disobedience of Adam and Eve and all the millions of Adams and Eve that there have been, and He will die on a cross so that your folly and my folly might be atoned for. And Adam, having heard what God is going to do, turns to his wife and he says, you will be the mother of all the living. And in the grace of God, thousands of years hence, you hear of a woman, a virgin with child who brings forth a son.

Eve, prime mover in sin, balanced historically by Mary, prime mover at the human level in redemption. And if that was not enough to make you ladies ecstatic, the first person who gives witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, yes, you guessed it, is a woman, the second Eve, Mary Magdalene, who speaks of Jesus and His resurrection. So though the tragedy of the fall is there encapsulated in the third chapter of Genesis, it also bespeaks a deliverance and a salvation which is so wonderful, we can do nothing more appropriate at this juncture than to stop and to sing about it.

And we go to one of the old hymns, for it's often the worthies of yesteryear that understood these points more than some of our modern hymn writers. Can you give me the number in a supplement, please? It's off the... 126. 126.

O love divine, what hast thou done, the immortal God, hast died for me, God neutralizing the curse that fell on our first parents. And if your parents and you want to slip out now and get your children, please feel free so to do. Let's stand.