Why do our best dreams and highest hopes — for love, success, self-improvement, or ‘the perfect life’ — so often end in disappointment? Genesis 3 reveals the reason behind our frustration…and points us toward the remedy.
The broken world: why doesn’t it work?
Genesis 3:14-24
14 The Lord God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
17 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 your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 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.”
20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21 And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
This transcript has been automatically generated
Genesis chapter 3, starting at verse 14.
The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
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 your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth 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, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now lest he reach 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 ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Last Friday I attended the funeral of a man of pretty much my age. He’s a year older than me, and I knew him from 30 years ago when we worked in a church together. He was a man of extraordinary Christian character, a great leader, selfless servant, not an ordained man, working man in the world, and a model example to many, many people. Multiple people have been influenced by him, and there were between 400 and 500 people in the church, I would say, It was a great privilege to be there. He had died within 6 weeks of diagnosis.
On the way from the station to the funeral, I stopped for something to eat, and there was another old friend alongside whom I used to play in the football team that this individual who had died led, and in which he frequently told me how useless I was. As we walked together to the service, this other friend recounted to me how he’d recently suffered a neurological disorder that had resulted in partial paralysis. He showed me the limb that had become paralysed, muscles completely wasted away.
On entering the church building, there were many old friends, some now on walking aids, multiple with hearing aids, pretty much, well, most of my generation with white hair. We tried to persuade one another, you haven’t changed a bit, but even the members of the young people’s group from 30 years ago are now in their 40s and 50s, and that would be a lie. At least 2 people looked at me as if to say, I know I recognise you from somewhere.
The friend who showed me his withered limb did so, and then he said one word: entropy. I went home and looked it up in the dictionary: gradual decline into disorder.
Why is it that our world is plagued by gradual decline into disorder, whether it’s ageing or work or relationships or war? Why is it that the perfect garden paradise described in Genesis chapter 2, for which we all long, imagine, is so elusive?
Now, on my way down to Bromley, I’ve been considering Genesis chapter 3, the passage we just had read, and I’d been thinking of dystopia. A dystopia is a spoiled or unfair world in which there is much suffering.
And on the train, I thought to myself, forget the novels, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games, Katniss, forget the novels. Why is it we live currently in a dystopia?
And I think the answer comes in Genesis 3. And I want to suggest that without a right understanding of Genesis 3, we will always live naively in God’s world. We say God’s Word makes sense of God’s world. If we don’t have Genesis 3, if you like, in the locker, we will never understand the world in which we live.
So, there are 4 areas: evil, marriage, work, and then separation from God. And the reason why our experience in these 4 areas is always the same and will never be any different unless we take one key step is the judgement of God. We live in a world under judgement and there is only one way out.
Let’s explore the verses and let me ask you all the way through to be asking yourself, is this not a description of the world as you find it? Evil. Verse 14 and 15, because you have done this, the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, above all the beasts of the field, and on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
Now, you’ll remember last week that we saw the rebellion of Adam and Eve as they rejected God and determined to live life in defiance of God. Now we see God’s measured response. And first, Satan is cast down and then consigned to be the perpetual enemy of humanity. I will put enmity between you and the woman. And from this point on, Satan is painted constantly as roaming the earth.
He is described as a roaring lion, The enemy, the devil, the prince of the power of the air, the strongman.
He is declared by Jesus to be the father of lies. He is the deceiver of the whole earth. He is described as the accuser of the brothers.
So Satan is powerful. Satan is fearful. Satan is hostile. But Satan works through deception, accusation. He snatches away the truth of God’s Word.
He blinds unbelievers to the self-evident reality of God. He leads believers astray from God’s truth. And once having led them astray, he embarks on a campaign of accusation. God will never have you back.
But do you notice the cause there in verse 14? Because, because you’ve done this, cursed are you. And so, the constant presence of evil, the constant enmity between humanity and Satan, well, it’s actually caused both by humanity’s rebellion and Satan’s part in it, and by God’s judgement.
Modern man, in the late 20th century, determined deliberately to discount any supernatural cause for human wickedness. We believed we could explain the world without any reference to God, and having discounted the existence of God, we certainly wouldn’t allow the existence of a devil. And that left us unable to account for the constant failure of man. How is it that humanity, which surely has elements of real decency, fails and fails and fails again, and often in the most despicable way? The media and the politicians grasp at some way of describing the wickedness that happens in the world without having a personal devil involved.
But Genesis 3 tells us there is a real enemy, the devil, the roaring lion, the prince of the power of the air, the great deceiver and the accuser. There was a columnist in the Times newspaper many years ago now, after one particular wickedness, We don’t believe in the devil any longer, do we? He certainly believes in us. And the devil’s work is to blind us so that we fail to see God for who he is, to snatch away God’s truth so that we don’t take it seriously, to deceive us into thinking that good is evil and evil is good, and then to accuse us and to hold us captive. So, take one look at the City of London, The devil certainly believes in us.
Why is it in your office that people are so blind to the reality, the self-evident reality of a Creator God? Because the devil is at work blinding. Why is it in your neighbourhood that people refuse to turn to Jesus in his beauty, truth, and integrity? Because the devil is at work snatching seed away.
Why is it in our establishment institutions that our leaders can’t bring themselves to acknowledge Jesus?
The devil.
I will put enmity between you and the woman. But it isn’t simply Satan and the constant presence of evil. Verse 16 has the breakdown of male-female relationships, especially in the realm of marriage. You’ll remember that Adam and Eve, Adam together with Eve, was given the responsibility of filling the earth and subduing it. And this work of multiplying to fill the earth was to be joy-filled.
Chapter 2, verse 23, the man said, this at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, delight and joy.
And then the security and the contentment, the commitment, the intimacy of, therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And now joy is replaced with pain and intimacy with hostility, In 3:16, to the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing.
In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall dominate you, rule over you. Now, we had a guy on the staff here who once suggested that, as a bloke, he knew all about the pain of childbirth because he’d stubbed his toe on the bed foot of the bed one day when he was passing at night. We sent him to St. Andrews in Scotland, 468 miles away, and he hasn’t come back.
But if you want evidence of God’s judgement on humanity, go to the antenatal ward of St. Thomas’.
But I think the first half of verse 16 doesn’t simply refer to child, the moment of childbirth itself, it’s the whole realm of womanhood. From the production of each ovum to the rearing of the child through infancy and into adulthood, what was intended as joy and delight is now flecked with friction. I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children.
And added to that is the fracture of a relationship that we find in the second half of verse 16. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you. The language of desire there speaks both of a desire to be with the husband, you will want to be with him, even if he is impossible to live with, and of a desire to usurp his leadership, even though he has been given that responsibility by God. So, if you look at chapter 4 and verse 7, just across the column there, You’ll see, if you do well, it will be accepted. If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door.
Its desire is for you. Its desire is against you. So, that language of desire speaks not only, I think, of a desire to be with the husband, even if he is impossible to live with, but also of a desire to usurp his responsibility to lead, to question, to quibble, to challenge, to confront.
And then back in verse 16, he shall rule over you.
That idea of rule carries a sense of aggressive, irresponsible, unloving, and sometimes brutal domination. And you see that the world over.
And so, the dewy-eyed delight at the wedding day gives way to the bickering and contradiction and friction and fracture of of everyday life. The presence of evil, friction in marriage. 42% of marriages in England and Wales end in divorce. The median length of a marriage is 12 years and 3 months. The cost of divorce and family breakdown in the United Kingdom is estimated at £51 billion per year.
Some of us have very painful testimony, personal testimony of it.
Why is it that we find ourselves able to hurt most badly the person we love most dearly?
Entropy, the gradual decline into disorder. Dystopia, a spoiled world in which suffering and unfair rule is prevalent.
Judgement. Once having rebelled against our Creator God, God will not allow it any other way. Why is the world as it is today?
Our rebellion, God’s judgement. Work. From the world at large, verse 14, to the intimacy of the home, verse 16, to the world of work. 17 through 19, and its ultimate futility. Isn’t this a great subject for us here in the City of London on a Tuesday lunchtime as you’ve all just left your desks?
To Adam He said, again, because you’ve listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded, you shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life, Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth 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, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust and to dust you shall return. Notice that God does not curse Adam and Eve at this stage. Satan is cursed and the ground is cursed.
But work now becomes painful, frustrating, and ultimately futile because it’s judgement.
The alarm goes off at 5:45, you leave the house at 6:15, you’re on the platform at 6:43, the train draws in at 7:40, you’re at your desk at 8 o’clock, you leave your desk at 6 o’clock, you’re on the platform by 6:20, the train draws in at 6:57, you open the front door at 7:25, and the next day you do the same again. Until you drop dead. Oh, we may temporarily have found a way to buck the system, working from home 2 days a week.
Woo! We may take 12 weeks paternity leave, in which case our company is bound to go bankrupt. We may say, well, my work hours are under control, my hours are manageable. But if you say that, you’re most unusual in the world.
Work the world over is painful.
I’ll never forget visiting a government-endorsed sweatshop in Bangladesh. And to get there, you drive along the road and there in the midday sun, in the midday sun, are women with their children, their babies at their side, hammering bricks on an anvil with a hammer. To make gravel.
I remember thinking that the life of the Bangla worker is not so very different to the young associate at Allen Overy working 90 hours a week.
And we know that if you complain about your 90 hours, there’s a queue of people going around the building who will quite happily take your seat. The pain of work. But then there is the frustration of work in verse 18, isn’t there? Thorns and thistles which bring forth for you. Now we may not consider ourselves horticulturalists, but thorns and thistles in verse 18 are no less prevalent in the city.
You work 2 years on a project and at the last minute the CEO changes and the board decide that project isn’t going to go forward. You pour your life into soul, into developing a software programme, and at the last minute, the client changes or a glitch enters the system and the whole thing goes bottom up. You give yourself to the company, head office in New York decide your division is merging or up for sale, all change.
I mentioned this to one individual in the city once and he said, that has been my life. For the last 20 years.
Another friend was appointed to a new post in a large insurance company. Within weeks, the company sold their broking arm and his new post was completely gone. Another friend worked 25 years in an investment company and then there were changes on the board and somebody who didn’t like him very much got onto the board and he was out.
Frustration, thorns and thistles.
Oh, you may say, I’ve actually been in the dream job for the last 25 years and I’m completely secure. Well, verse 19, by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. You are dust and to dust you shall return. Futility.
Worth asking, how much do you honestly think you will be remembered?
If you leave your post?
12 months later? 6 months later? 2 months later?
And with what kind of adjectives?
There’s a verse in the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 2, verse 18, I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he is wise or a fool.
Entropy: gradual decline into disorder. Dystopia: an unfair or spoiled world in which suffering is normal.
I know some of you are young city workers, you’ve just started in your job, you think you’re going to change the city forever, you’re going to make a difference, you’re going to do something really worthwhile. Just keep breathing.
Finally, exclusion.
Verse 22, the Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. And so lest he reach out his hand and take hold of the tree of life and eat and live forever, the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. Exclusion.
Cherubim in the Bible are symbolic guardians of the holy presence of God. And here is humanity now, cut adrift, isolated, all, all alone, shut out of the garden. The dis-ease of separation from our Creator.
Well, after that happy observation from a happy analysis of the text in Genesis chapter 3, 3 very brief observations. One, we will never make sense of the world unless we have Genesis 3 in our locker. This is the judgement of God on our world. We live in a world which is currently under the judgement of God. You want to know that a final judgement is coming, Look at the world in which we live.
Here is God’s response to humanity’s rebellion against God. It is to pronounce judgement on humanity. We live in dystopia today. Yeah, there are wonderful moments, but ultimately, work, the presence of evil, home, and that disintegration ease of separation from God.
Secondly, judgement. As I made my way down to the funeral in Southeast London, I was considering dystopia, a very bad or unfair society in which there is a lot of suffering, the constant presence of evil, perpetual friction at home, frustration, hostility, futility at work, disease. Forget the novels, 1984, This is our experience, and God is the driver of it. Because you, because you, cursed is, cursed is.
And it leaves us asking, well, is there any hope? I mean, can you see any hope? Are we just going to go out of here, you know, dragging our feet towards the dust that we will return to? Are we just going to do that? Is there any hope in the text?
I think there are 2 snippets of hope. One, in verse 20, the man called his wife’s name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. Do you see God’s care of humanity there? That in place of the fig leaf that was so fragile and easily penetrated, animal skins.
God cares for humanity. Even as we live in this broken world, God cares for us.
Us and he provides for us. And the rain falls on the just and the unjust. And God is gracious to us generally in our life in this present order.
But then verse 15. Verse 15 is so interesting. I jumped over it initially. The second half of verse 15, well, I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring, notice that is a singular, your singular offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
And so, that looks forward, doesn’t it, to a day when the offspring of Eve will bruise the head or crush the head of Satan, even as Satan bruises the heel of the offspring of Eve. And from this point on in the Bible, we are looking for the serpent crusher. There is only one way out of this dystopia, but there is a way out of this dystopia, and that is when the offspring of Eve crushes the head of Satan. And it’s so interesting, isn’t it, in the Gospels that one of the first things we find is Jesus facing off Satan in the wilderness. If you are the Son of God, do this.
If you are— no, God said, God said, God said. And Jesus refuses to yield to the temptation of Satan. Then we find Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Father, if it’s Your will, take this cup from Me. Nevertheless, not Your will but Mine. And then we see Jesus on the eve of His death on the cross.
Now is the moment when Satan is driven out outside. And then we see Jesus on the cross paying the judgement for our rebellion against God. It is finished, so that we can be released from judgement.
So, is there a way out? Not with humanity. Not with our schemes, no. Now, we can try and create any number of ways out. One way out, God’s way out, as judgement is dealt with, and the only one who does that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
Well, let me encourage you, if you’re not yet a follower of Jesus, to look at that Christianity Explored course and make sure you come to it. It’s your only way out of the judgement that has already begun and will finish when Jesus returns. It’s your great hope for salvation. Come to that course, explore Jesus, turn to him, surrender to him, receive his forgiveness. Let’s pray together.
The Lord Jesus triumphed over all hostile powers, victorious over them through His death on the cross.
And we praise You, our Father, that in the midst of our rebellion and Your right judgement upon us, You do provide us with hope of salvation. And we pray, our Father, that Satan would not snatch seed of truth away from us, that he would not be enabled to blind us, but that we would see Jesus clearly, turn to him, surrender to him, and find reunion with you, our Creator, in Jesus Christ. And we ask it in his name. Amen.