Genesis 3_16-24

8/8/2019 Genesis 3_16-24

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Well let me welcome you again to Christ Church. It is a joy to worship withyou all this morning. If you are visiting, we are really glad you are with us. We are achurch plant

About a year and a half ago, when our family was living in St. Louis, we were

maybe two months away from moving back to Bellingham to begin church planting.And one evening, we were all tidying up our house, getting things in order, and I wasdoing the dishes. And in our house in St. Louis, the sink was in the corner of thekitchen, so when I would do the dishes I would be somewhat isolated from the rest of the family in my own little world looking at the wall. And so I would often listento sermons on my ipod while I was washing dishes.

But on this particular evening, Shannon says to me, I don t think you shouldlisten to sermons while we are cleaning, we should all talk to one another, and it should be more of a family time, even though we are cleaning. And so I respondedto her saying, Darling, I m looking at the wall in the corner I can t really talk toanyone while I am doing this. And she says, Well I think this should be a family

time. And I said, Babe, I am going to be starting a church in two months, I havenever been a pastor, let alone given sermons every week, I need to listen to sermonsto learn how to do this, and there is no other time in my schedule when I can do that,and I can t talk to anyone anyways! But she insists, I feel like you are isolated fromthe family when you are listening to sermons.

So at this point I go into the bathroom frustrated and I begin to pray, Lord,please help Shannon to be more rational about this. And now, I am not a verycharismatic kind of guy, but at that moment as I was praying, I heard, not necessarily as an audible voice, but clear nonetheless: She doesn t care about thesermons. And as soon as that came into my mind it occurred to me that we weretwo months from moving across the country to start a church, we were eons frommeeting our fundraising needs to even start the church, we had three youngchildren and Shannon was pregnant with twins and I was taking 8 classes tograduate on time while fundraising and preparing for the church.

Now if you were here a month ago, I gave a sermon on a parallel passage tothis in Genesis 2 about marriage before the fall, before sin came into the world. Andone of the things I said in that sermon is that one of the differences between menand women is that for a woman her first instinct is toward relationships, towardattachment, a woman sees herself as complete and mature when she has stable andhealthy relationships, especially the relationship with her family. But for a man, hisfirst instinct is toward independence, going out into the world, making an impact,conquering something. It is when a man does that that he feels mature andcomplete.

Now, let me make clear what I am not saying. Am I saying woman don t careabout getting out and making an impact? Absolutely not. I am just saying that instinctively it is not her first priority. And for men, am I saying men don t careabout relationships? Ablsolutely not. But it is not their first priority instinctively.Their first step into the world is toward their work, toward doing something,accomplishing something, toward conquering something.

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And what we saw in Genesis 2 was that God has given men and women thesediffering instincts, these gifts really, to complement one another, to encourage andbuild one another up. And in fact, when two people are walking in the presence of God, and being who God made them to be, this complement is an enormous blessing.But what God is saying in the passage is that when we are alienated from God, these

gifts become pains, toils, and become the source of deep unrest and anxiety.And in fact that is exactly what was happening with Shannon and me. Ourargument was not about sermons and dishes, it was about here longing and instinct for attachment in our family and my longing to make an impact and accomplishsomething.

And what this passage says is that sin, instead of allowing these qualities inmen and women intertwine and reinforce one another, sin causes them to clash.Look again at these curses that the Lord declares on the woman and the man, verse16: To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in painyou shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shallrule over you. The impact of sin lands for the woman primarily on her experience

as a mother and wife, and that in both the case of children and the husband theexperience will be painful one. And then to Adam he said, Because you havelistened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commandedyou, You shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shalleat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; andyou shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.Here God says that Adam is going to work his tail off, and yet he is gong to find out that what his work produces is just the dismal thorn and thistles. There will be aminimum satisfaction compared to the energy and toil that went into working skimpy returns.

So what I want to do is look at these two consequences of sin, these twopains, that we as men and women face in a fallen world. And then to see that thehope God gives us in these pains is the hope of Jesus on the cross. Or to put it another way we are going to look at the Pain of the Family, the Pain of Work, andRelief of the Cross. So first, and this passage is largely aimed at you gals, but some of it will be true us guys as well

THE PAIN OF THE FAMILYNow in ancient Hebrew culture the blessing of children, preferably a lot of them,

would have been one of the most central aspects of a woman s identity. In fact, evenin the book of Genesis one of the biggest themes is the that of the seed, or offspring,and the book is filled with stories about families having children, or women facingbarrenness, and much of the drama is wrapped around when will women have ababy, who is having babies, how many are they having. And in fact, Genesis beginswith God making man and women after his image and the first thing he tells them todo is to be fruitful and multiply make babies.

And so when God says in verse 16, I will surely multiply your pain inchildbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, God is saying the only waytowards this central calling of a woman is going to be painful. And I don t think thisis just talking about the experience of going into labor, but all of the trials that go

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along with being a childbearer. This includes morning sickness and bedrest, andcertainly that growing a child is a delicate business, as we as a church areexperiencing right now as Shaun and Brittany have had their baby at 24 weeks andeveryday battling new complications, and are certainly in the middle of possibly thegreat trial they will ever face. And so obviously having children is painful, but it s

also true that not having children is painful, to be a woman, to want to have childrenor a family and to not be able to is equally if not more painful than all that goes alongwith having children. To be made by God as a childbearer, to have whole organs of your body whose whole purpose is for children, makes the pain of this curseespecially poignant. This is the reality of the world we are living in, a fallen world,life outside the garden, the paradise of Eden.

Now my children are an enormous blessing to Shannon and I, and I love themdeeply. But many people will say that when you get married, it is the most sanctifying experience that can happen to you you will have to face all kinds of ugly things about yourself. Well, for me having and raising children has done that for me 10 fold. And that is just the pain and difficulty of living in a fallen world, that

something that should be so central for our lives should include so much heartache.Now there is a lot that I could say about that, but I want to focus on this

profound little phrase that comes next: Your desire shall be for your husband, andhe will rule over you.

One thing to say immediately about this verse is that if anyone imagined that the Bible encouraged a vision of marriage where the husband was a chauvinist or atyrant bossing his wife around, you can t get a more patriarchal book than Genesis,and yet even here the Bible clearly says that a husband domineering over his wife isa fallen and sinful marriage, and in fact is a curse and not God s intention formarriage. God intends for wives to respect and defer to their husbands, andhusbands are called to lovingly serve and give themselves for their wives.

But there is something amazing about this little description of marriage in afallen world that is extremely revealing. On the surface when it says about thewoman, Your desire shall be for your husband, we imagine that to be what Idescribed earlier that a woman s first instinct, first move into the world, is towardattachment, relational engagement. And I think it does mean that. That is whygenerally for women, a man is a temptation not so much when he is wearing aspeedo (though Shannon is always asking me to wear a speedo), but when he sitsand talks to her, listens to her, engages with her thoughtfully. Guys are drawn in bysupermodels, and girls are drawn in by actors in romantic comedies. So on the onehand, the curse here says she is going to long for that connection, and he is going tobe cold and unresponsive and distant.

But on the other hand, this verse says something very different about marriage in a fallen world. It turns that this exact Hebrew construction ( Yourdesire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you ) is used again in Genesischapter 4. And Genesis 4 is the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain becomes jealousof Abel, and God comes to warn Cain, and he says: Sin is crouching at your door. Itsdesire is for you, and you must rule over it. This is the exact same Hebrewconstruction, except it is about sin. And when it says that sin s desire is for you, it means that sin wants to control you, it wants to direct you.

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If we use Genesis 4 to help us understand Genesis 3 we find out that yourdesire will be for your husband, does not just mean that she wants a relationalconnection, but also that she wants to control him and he is going to respond to that control with harshness and distance.

And I will tell you, that even though I am not a woman, I think these two

things are closely related: longing for connection and control. If a wife begins to fearthat her husband s heart cares more about his work, his friends, his hobbies, thanher, if she is in competition, then this passage says her tendency will be to grab ontohim nagging, controlling, and in many ways squelching him. And of coursetragically, all this will do is push him away more.

Now throughout the past century, it is been assumed that this kind of grabbing relationship is the norm for marriage marriage is a power grab,

grabbing for control, which the Bible denies. The Bible says marriage is a helping,giving, serving relationship, and is therefore a wonderful blessing, and that thepower grabs only come as a result of sin.

And a couple years ago I read a book by a woman named Sue Johnson called

Hold Me Tight I don t know if she is a Christian, but he book has some excellent insights. And as a gal who had done marriage therapy for decades, at the beginningof the book she describes how throughout the years she would have couple aftercouple come in who had been trained under the paradigm that marriage is a powergrab. And under that paradigm what they had learned was that if marriage is apower struggle, then what you need for a successful marriage is to be about tonegotiate well and communicate clearly your needs. And so she had couple aftercouple who were extremely articulate in their negotiating skills and could dissect their childhood masterfully, and yet their marriages were dead no life, no fire, nopassion.

And the reason why there is no passion is because they have let the fallenstate of marriage define marriage. Instead of acknowledging that it is sin that hascreated this power-grabbing relationship, they have tried to make power-grabbingwork (and it doesn t). And only when we acknowledge that our lives and marriagesare tainted by sin, that our nature is bent on being selfish, can we begin to moveback to being the kind of people and having the kind of marriages that God made usfor.

Now one of the things that is ironic about this passage is that one of thebiggest reasons that cause men to be distant, and rule over their wives is becausetheir work (or lack of work if that s the case) has stirred in them a deep andpervasive unrest, anxiety. And it is in that regard we see how closely related thecurse on the woman and the curse on the man are. So that brings us our secondpoint that not only does sin bring Pain into the life of a family, but also,

PAIN IN WORKShannon and I have a new room that just was finished this past week in our

house that Trevor and another guy have been working on. And one of final steps tocompleting the room and getting our house back in order was for a carpet guy tocome and install the carpet. And on Monday morning the guy came, he went up intothe room, got to work and was measuring and getting things ready. And I was down

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stairs, just got back from dropping the kids at school and hopped in the shower toget ready for the day.

And while I m showering, Shannon barges in and says, The carpet guy needsto use the bathroom RIGHT NOW you need to get out now. And I am like, What?Tell him to go up stairs. And she says, He can t, he sprained his ankle. And I am

like, What is going on out there?So I get out of the shower and come out in my towel and there is this poorguy sitting on the floor, with what turned out to be a broken ankle, and I don t knowif he was nauseous, or had a lower intestinal thing going on, and I m talking to him inmy towel and Shannon is in the kitchen busting up laughing at this poor guy becauseof the sheer awkwardness of the whole situation.

And you can imagine how frustrating of a day that would be. He s trying tomake a living, gets to use a trade that God has given him to bless a family, andespecially little children who are going to be playing in this little room. This has thepotential to be a satisfying day. It would have been hard work, but it would havebeen a day of benefit all around. Instead, he s not going to make any money, he s

going to go the hospital and wait in the emergency room, he s probably not going tobe able to work for a while, a not just for a man, but especially for a man, this is thekind of thing that just makes you depressed.

Work, which was meant by God to be a deeply satisfying part of being human,of being one of God s image-bearers, in a fallen world, is now a curse. It isfrustrating, it is disappointing.

Now of course, it is not always meaningless and disenchanting, but it isalmost always painful. You know, when I wanted to be a pastor, I thought, O I haveall these things I want to say about God, and I can t wait to give sermons. And Iimagined writing sermons as this inspired experience, where the Holy Spirit is just pouring through my fingers, with bursts of creativity and inspiration. Wrong! If you ve heard the little maxim that creativity, or writing a sermon, is 2% inspiration,98% perspiration, that is exactly true. I love being a pastor, at is rewarding and allthat, but if you ask Shannon she will tell you every week I am making some strangenoise as I try to grind out a sermon, pleading with God for mercy. Work is highsweat, high frustration, and skimpy returns.

And this is exactly what God says is the life of a man in a fallen world. Look at verse 17 again: And 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, You shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of yourlife; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you (you see that skimpy reward forwork) and you shall eat the plant of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust,and to dust you shall return.

This curse is not a small thing, especially in the life of a man. We have such alonging to make an impact, to create, to accomplish, and yet we put out so muchsweat and are often so discouraged by how little there is to show for it.

And we are living in a culture that makes it even more difficult. I mentioneda few weeks ago that I have been working through Fredrich Nietzcsche s book Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche was a German philosopher in the late 19 th

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century). And there is a section in the middle of the book that just has all these onesentence epigrams. And one of them describes perfectly the values of our culture.This is what it says: One is most dishonest to one s god: he is not allowed to sin.

What does that mean dishonest to one s god ? Well, what he is saying is that if God says you can t do somethings and you should do others, then you are not

being yourself, and if you are not being yourself with God, then you are beingdishonest.Now this of course is absurd. As Christians we know what it means to be

human is to be made in the image of God, and so when we are sinning and not reflection God s image, THAT is actually when we are not being ourselves, we not being who God created us to be.

But this value, of being yourself or finding yourself instead of being whoGod made you to be, has exasperated the pain of work in our culture significantly inthe last generation. A friend sent me an article from a urban arts magazine calledEye Weekly, and the article was called, Welcome to your Quarterlife Crisis. And Iwant to read you a little except:

³He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master¶s in Englishto proofread ad copy, and spends several hours reading music blogs and watching movietrailers, periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers. Hedoesn¶t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of thetime that he¶s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.

He listlessly works through lunch, then goes to the bar after work to meet up withsome university friends, where they talk about their jobs and make ironic jokes aboutother people. Back at home, he wonders why he feels so gross and empty after spendingtime with them, but it¶s mostly better than being alone.

This phenomenon, known as the ³Quarterlife Crisis,´ is as ubiquitous as it is

intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working,relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirtieswho are usually urban, middle class and well-educated«They can¶t make any decisions,

because they don¶t know what they want, and they don¶t know what they want becausethey don¶t know who they are, and they don¶t know who they are because they¶reallowed to be anyone they want.´ They have bought into Nietzsche¶s epigram, and their life is empty, and work is even more frustrating.

In generations in the past, a young man s life of work may not have beenexciting, but it was at least clear. It may be that if his dad was a tailor, he would be atailor, or if his dad was a farmer, he would be a farmer. But now we say don t let your parents, or society, or tradition tell you what to be. You can do whatever you

want, the sky is the limit. And of course there are great possibilities and excitement about that, but for many people it has only added to the toil and frustration withwork and made it more disenchanting because there is no clarity. What should Ido?!?

By the way, this is not only true with young people. If you have worked yourwhole life, even with a successful job, if your job defines you, you are settingyourself up for huge disappointment. IF you say, I ll get that job, then I will behappy. If I make this much money, if I accomplish this, then I will be a man. You

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will find yourself frustrated and disenchanted at the end of that endeavor as well.You will find that from dust you came and to dust you are returning. All thoseaccomplishments didn t make you invinsible.

And so here I have spent a whole sermon describing the pain of living in afallen world. At the places where we have our deepest longings, family,

relationships, and work, God says we will experience our most profound pain. Andso the question is: Where is the Relief? Where is the Rest or the Peace? And theanswer is that the hope is in Jesus on the Cross, where all the pain and frustration,and shame and betrayal, and toil are heaped upon him for us, for you, for me. And Iwant to show you how this passage points us to Jesus. So we have Pain in theFamily, Pain in Work, and lastly

THE RELIEF OF THE CROSSI have mentioned before in this series on Genesis that when you are reading

the Bible, one of the most important questions to ask in order to interpret it rightly,is What did this passage mean in its original context? What did the original author

intend to communicate to his original audience? Well Genesis was written byMoses to the Exodus community, that is, Israel after God had just brought them out of slavery, through the Red Sea, and they are in the desert on their way to thepromised land. And it says in the Old Testament that when they got to the PromisedLand God drove out the wicked people, and gave them this lush land.

Now, read again what this passage says about how these curses came uponthem, by kicking them out of his presence, verse 22: Then the Lord God said,

Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest hereach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever-therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the groundfrom which he was taken. He DROVE OUT the man The exact same thing that would happen to those nations God did to Adam and Eve. And what God is tellingthis community, is when I put you in the promised land, what I am doing isessentially putting you back in Eden, you will be like a new Adam and Eve. And heeven says in Leviticus 26 I will walk among you, just like he did in Genesis 3 in thegarden with Adam and Eve.

But there is one thing that is different (stay with me!). Look again at verse24: He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed thecherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to the way to the tree of life.The garden is guarded by cherubim, which are like angelic beings. And as it turnsout, when Israel goes into the promised land, and God dwells among them, God hasthem build a tent for him to dwell in called the tabernacle (they all live in tents andhe is going to live in a tent with them). And at the center of the tent was a Most HolyPlace where God s presence was most intense. And at the entrance to this most HolyPlace there was a thick curtain that said, Stay Out! And do you know what waswoven into the fabric of that curtain? Cherebim.

Even though God was driving out those nations, Israel did not have that easewith God that Adam and Eve did, to just be in God s presence unashamed, not for1500 years. But when Jesus comes, and as he dies on the cross for each of our sins,in Matthew 27 it says that this curtain is ripped from top to bottom. Adam had all of

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us ejected from the garden and the presence of God, and Jesus has made the wayback in.

This is the hope of a Christian, the Hope of the Cross, that Jesus has led usback into the presence of God. And what does that have to do with the pain of thefamily and raising children and pain of work and the toil and frustration of work?

Everything!Just look at the story about listening to sermons and doing dishes. I amagonizing about by calling and my job and if I am going to be a failure, and Shannonis agonizing about our family, and if we are going to be torn apart. And we are at logger heads with each other. And what happens? I go in the bathroom to pray (andby the way this not pat myself on the back, way to go Nate I was seriouslyfrustrated), but what I found there was a God who was walking with me I hadaccess to him. He was there! She doesn t care about the sermon! What did we needto find relief from the frustration and anxiety and disenchantment we need Him.Because what did Adam and Eve lose when they were expelled from the garden they lost God.

And the promise of the Gospel is that when you trust Jesus you get God back,and if you get God back you get the garden back. And I assure you if any of the painsand toils that I have described are burdening you, you will find relief nowhere else.You were made for the garden, you were made to walk with God. There is peacenowhere else. But Jesus says, Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and Iwill give you rest.

Let s pray.

ShenksBroken Bells

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Genesis 3_16-24