Gen 3:16–19 — East of Eden: Life Under the Curse

The opening chapters of Genesis are absolutely foundational for a biblical worldview. They help us understand who we are, what the world is about, and the nature of our relationship with God. One of the most fundamental truths we learn as the biblical story begins is that life is not as it should be: we live in a fallen world that lies under God’s curse because of sin.

The Common Curse on Fallen Humanity

The title of the sermon is East of Eden, Life Under the Curse. Of course, the East of Eden part comes from later in the passage, in Genesis 3, in verse 23, when the Lord sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden to work the ground, and He drove them out. And at the east of the Garden of Eden, he placed the cherubim with the flaming sword.

But already in the text that we just read a few verses earlier, God is already looking ahead to what life is going to be like east of Eden. God is pronouncing upon mankind. He is not just speaking to Adam and Eve as individuals. He is speaking to them as representative of the whole human race to come. He is pronouncing his judgment and curse upon all mankind and saying, this is what life is going to be like east of Eden. Life is going to be characterized by frustration and difficulty.

One of the amazing things about the Bible is that it meshes so perfectly with our experience. Yes, there are parts of the Bible that do not mesh perfectly, like the supernatural parts that we sometimes struggle to believe, but there are also these amazing parts of the Bible, especially here in the opening chapters of Genesis, that mesh perfectly with our experience. And this is one right here, this is one passage that we can say, yeah, this is empirically true, is it not? Have you ever noticed this reality about life? That life is a mixed bag. There are so many wonderful things in life. So many moments of true pleasure and enjoyment and satisfaction and happiness. But then there is also so much tragedy and sin and difficulty and struggle. This life is not easy. This life is hard. And it is that amazing paradox that things can be so beautiful and so amazing, and yet at the same time, things can be so frustrating and disappointing. And why is that? Why is life like that?

Well, it is because of what our text is revealing to us here. It is because God has ordained it to be that way. God is the one who has established this curse upon creation, but it is a curse that is not quite the same as total outright rejection and judgment. It is not the judgment of the last day. God is not saying to Adam and Eve, because you sinned against me, I am now going to cast you into eternal hell. He does not do that. Instead, He says, no, you are still going to be fruitful and multiply. You are still going to have families and marriages and create culture and live life. And I am going to sustain that. I am going to sustain that life. You will still work the ground. You will still have children and families. So there is going to be something good. It is not absolute judgment and hell just yet. There are going to be some good things about life and God’s going to make sure that those good things continue.

But by the same token, at the same time, it is all under this cloud. What is the cloud that it is under? Well, it is under this cloud that is stated there in the curse upon man at the very end of the text that we read in Genesis 3:19. 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. In other words, there is the shadow of death upon everything that we do in this life. And so that is why whenever we experience those things that are difficult, tragic, painful, the pains of life, the difficulties of life, even our own physical bodies. Experiencing all the aches and pains and sicknesses. That is why we experience those things, because death has been decreed for every single one of us. Unless we happen to be alive when Christ returns, then we will be transformed without having to experience death. Unless we are in that blessed generation, the guarantee, the reality is that we will all die. Death is a reality. And death is something that God Himself is imposing upon mankind here. He is imposing that death. Death is this shadow, this pall. It is like the gray skies over the beautiful world. There is this beautiful world. Yes, do not deny it. There are beautiful things in this world. Happiness is there, but over it all is the gray skies of death and the reality of death. It is a mixed bag. It is not completely just wrath and judgment and hell, but neither is it utopia.

All of the wonderful things that God had originally offered to Adam, if you go back to Genesis 1 and 2, all of those glorious things that there was this glorious cosmic temple that God was going to build through the work of Adam and Eve being fruitful and multiplying and multiplying the image bearers to fill the earth and to bring about this glorious consummation that would one day end up in the eternal Sabbath rest. All of that is seemingly, it is either on hold or it does not seem like it is happening. And certainly, Adam and Eve are not really fundamentally achieving it. They are still having children, but are they going to achieve this glorious cosmic temple that God had in store for man? Go back to Genesis 1:28, when God gave them what is called the dominion mandate or the cultural mandate. What did he say to them in Genesis 1:28? God blessed them, he made them male and female, and he blessed them and he said, be fruitful and multiply, so have lots of children, and fill the earth with those image bearers.

And notice this verb here, Genesis 1:28, subdue it. Now when we turn to our text today, you do not see that word subdue in there, do you? You see yes being fruitful and multiplying. You see yes is going to be a history where the human race is going to continue to exist and to thrive to some degree because it is going to be families and the world is going to be filled with people.

But the ground itself is now cursed. And so Adam, when he goes out to his work, to labor, yes, God will provide him with his necessary food to have survival so that he can continue and produce the next generation. But in pain, he will eat of the ground all the days of his life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth, and he shall eat bread by the sweat of his face.

The subdue aspect is gone. There is no subduing. In fact, now it seems just the opposite. It seems as if the created realm is fighting back against man and causing man to have all these struggles. He has to fight, he has to wrestle with creation to try to get some good food out of it, to get some fruit from it. And his labor is going to be exhausting and toilsome, and he is not going to always get the glorious fruits and benefits that was originally offered to Adam back in Genesis chapter 1.

He will still work the ground, but he is not going to be able to subdue it. In fact, just the opposite, he is going to return to the ground. So he is going to be subdued by the ground. He is literally going to die and be buried in that ground. And so, God is placing this curse upon mankind after the fall in order to signal that, number one, judgment has not yet come, judgment is delayed. But number two, there is going to be a history. The human race is going to continue and is going to continue to produce children and to fill the earth.

But it is going to be a history that is preparing for what? What is the reason why God is delaying the judgment and allowing the human race to enjoy family life and to enjoy having children and to enjoy, to some degree, even though it is mixed with toil, but to enjoy work and labor. Why is God allowing this? Why is God allowing this history of the human race to continue? He should have sent them to hell right there. That should have been the end of it.

But that was not what God had planned. And that is why I began this by reading verse 15, because the reason for the delay, the reason why God is allowing mankind to continue, is because of that promise that came out of the blue, completely unexpected, in the very midst of God coming in the spirit of the day and coming in judgment to find out and expose Adam and Eve’s sin, in the very midst of His wrath, He reveals this promise of grace. I will put enmity between you and the woman. You is the serpent. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring, the offspring of the serpent being all the unbelievers like Cain and the ungodly line that flows after him. Who are against God, I will put enmity between your offspring, the serpent’s offspring, and her offspring, that is the offspring of the woman, the covenant community, those that believe in this promise of grace. But this covenant community of those that believe in the promise is going to be narrowed down to one individual who is the offspring to come. He shall bruise your head, O serpent, and you shall bruise his heel.

God is placing this curse upon mankind in order to create a history. A history in which the human race will continue to grow and develop, families will occur, and labor will occur, but without subduing the earth, without achieving that cosmic temple. But that is because Christ is going to achieve it. The offspring that is promised here is the one who will come and bring about the fulfillment of God’s original purpose for Adam. Adam failed, but Christ the second Adam will accomplish what the first Adam failed to do. God is preserving the world so that the promise of the coming offspring might be fulfilled.

Through this tension of curse and also grace, God is turning what would otherwise be a vain history of human sin and suffering into the stage upon which God will accomplish his redemptive purpose in Christ. That is what God is doing in the midst of this world.

Let us look at the two curses. The curse on the woman and the curse on the man.

The Curse on the Woman

First, the curse on the woman. Verse 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, but he shall rule over you. I translated it as for. That is what most translations have, the NASB, the NIV. But the ESV, until recently, had in there, your desire shall be contrary to your husband. But recently the ESV modified that and said, no, let us go back to for. The preposition that is used there does not mean contrary to.

But here is the promise, or here is the curse that God is placing upon the woman. She is going to have pain in childbirth. Now, contrast that with before the fall. Before the fall, back in Genesis 1, this human couple was to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. It was a joyful thing. There was not going to be any pain involved in that. It was going to be a glorious future. There would have been no miscarriages, no children dying in infancy. It would have been a glorious populating of the world with the glory of God.

But now, This process of procreation, of having children, is marked by pain and sorrow. And just think of all the ways in which women today struggle with difficulties as it relates to children. Some women struggle with being unable to have children. In the Old Testament, that was called being barren, when God would shut the womb. Or maybe struggling with risky pregnancies that are very painful and difficult. This whole area of childbearing is now marked by pain and by sorrow.

But at the same time, God is still, again, it is that paradox. At the same time, God is not saying there is not going to be any more childbearing. He is saying, no, he is going to Even in the midst of the pain and the sorrow, God is going to make sure that his purposes continue, whether that is in terms of just the human race in general, or whether it is referring specifically to the offspring of the woman and the godly community that is a community of faith. They too will produce this line that will lead ultimately to the coming of Christ, to the Messiah. So for the woman, there is pain in childbearing, which is the primary purpose of womanhood. That is like the number one thing that God created women to be able to do is to have children. And so right here in this one area, this is the very calling that they have. God is like, it is almost like when Jacob was wrestling with the angel and the angel took his joint, his hip joint out of socket. And it is like now he is walking with a limp the rest of his life. This very thing that is like the most important part of being a woman, God is now putting a curse upon it. Not a total curse of there is no children at all, But a thing where that is characterized by pain and by sorrow.

Now for the ungodly people from the line of Cain, when you turn the chapter over to chapter 4 and 5 and so on, you see the ungodly line. They are going to experience this too, the women of the unbelieving covenant community. The apostate community, they will struggle with all of these things, with barrenness and miscarriages and risky pregnancies and difficulty in having children.

But what about in the believing community? What about in the community of faith? Well, you see the same thing. There is even stories in the Bible where you see godly women who died in childbirth. They gave birth to a child and they died in the process. So even the godly line’s going to experience the same thing, the same frustration, but for those that believe, for those that have faith in the Lord, there is a sweetness to it in the midst of the pain, is there not? Because of this promise right here, that he is going to create the offspring of the woman, which first of all, before we get to Christ, is that covenant community that will later become the nation of Israel.

And so the godly women within the covenant community, although they still struggle with this common lot of being under the curse and dealing with the frustration of all the pain associated with childbearing and the difficulty of it, yet they have this promise of the Lord. They have the Genesis 3:15 promise that God is going to use that pain for his glory and ultimately he is going to bring about the coming of the Messiah.

I do believe that Eve here is a type of Mary. You see that because Mary is like Eve. She is the one who is simply, I am your handmaiden, Lord, I am your servant. Do with me as you will. You are going to use me to be the one who brings about the birth of the Messiah. And Mary was no one special. She was a peasant girl. She had no authority, no power. She had nothing in this world, but she had this glorious promise when the angel came to her and said, you are the one that has been chosen to be my chosen instrument to serve in the whole plan of salvation in this special, unique way.

And so she trusted in the Lord. She said, let it be according to your word. And she submitted to God’s will for her life, even though there were also dangers and difficulties associated with it. When they came to the town of Bethlehem, there was no room for them in the inn. They had to go into a manger, to a feeding stall for barn animals to have the baby. That must have been a little bit awkward and difficult. But in spite of that, she trusted the Lord. She had that promise of God. To sustain her through her trials and through her sufferings.

And we see this throughout the Old Testament. Just think of Sarah. Sarah was chosen by the Lord to be the one that when God made the promises to Abraham that I will multiply you, I will make you into a great nation. You will have so many offspring, you cannot even count them like the stars of the heavens or the sand on the seashore. And yet right at the, as God gave that promise to Abraham, Sarah’s looking over here and saying, well, how come I cannot have children? Why am I barren? She is experiencing the effects of the curse. She is experiencing the curse right there in Genesis 3:16, directly in her own body.

And yet, she trusted in the Lord. Now, her faith was not perfect. She did laugh. Remember that one time when the angel came and said, you are going to have a child this time next year, and she laughed? And that is why she called her son Isaac when he was born, because Isaac means laughter. So her faith was not perfect, and none of our faith is perfect, but yet she did have faith in the Lord and that promise of God that he was going to use her to be the one through whom this glorious promise would be fulfilled, ultimately leading to the coming of the Messiah.

She trusted God in the midst of that. And she was able to hang on to the promise of God to sustain her through her trials as they related specifically to her experience of the curse upon her in this area. That is kind of the main point of this whole sermon is that, and we will see the same thing with Adam. With his particular curse. The main point of the sermon is that for those of us who are believers, for those of us who are in the covenant community, we have something that the world has nothing of.

We experience the same struggles, the same difficulties of this world. We experience the same pain in childbirth or the same frustration in our toil as we try to subdue the world and to produce support for our families and so on. We experience the same things that unbelievers do. But we have the promise. We have the promise of God to sustain us through those trials. Because we know that God is ultimately doing all of this. He is establishing this field, this context, this history. Of what we call common grace. It is also common curse. It is common grace and common curse, because it is for believers and unbelievers. And he is establishing it with a purpose in view, which is to bring about his redemptive plan to fulfill that promise in Genesis 3:15.

And so we walk by faith. We walk by faith, trusting in the Lord. We are going back to what I was saying before in the earlier part of the service. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. Right, to sustain us. We do not lose heart. Yes, we are perplexed. Yes, we struggle. Yes, we have difficulties. But we do not give up hope because we know that God is working within us an eternal weight of glory. What a wonderful thing that is.

We could go on, the next point there in the curse upon the woman is not only pain and childbearing, but also difficulty in the marriage relationship. Originally, in the creation order back in Genesis chapter two, and verses 18 to 25, we have the description of the first wedding ceremony in history, and we see this glorious reality of God making a helper for Adam. And so the original ideal of marriage was that Adam was the loving leader and his wife was the happy helper, and together they were serving the Lord and attempting to fulfill that creation mandate that God gave to them. But now, because of the fall and because of the curse, now even marriage is marred by conflict and struggle. According to our text, it says, your desire shall be for your husband, and he will rule over you. And there has been a lot of discussion about that phrase. Your desire will be for your husband. What does that mean?

This word desire only occurs two other times in the Old Testament. In Genesis four, verse seven, and also in the Song of Songs. Where it seems to be sexual desire. So what does it mean? Your desire will be for your husband. What is wrong with that? That should be the creation ideal. That is the way it should be. Well, clearly it is not talking about the ideal. It is talking about something that has gone wrong. It is talking about the curse.

So it could be referring to some kind of inordinate desire. Perhaps an inordinate emotional desire. Or perhaps it could be a desire to control the husband. I think personally that it is intentionally brought to cover all the different possibilities. The point is not to get specific and say what exactly is going to happen to the woman’s relationship with her husband, it is simply to say that the way that she relates to her husband will now no longer be healthy, but it will be distorted by sin. And that can be manifested in a myriad of different ways, as we even see in our own experience today.

And the man’s role in turn will also be distorted from being a benevolent leadership into being a harsh domination of the woman. I think the point is to take both of those statements together. Your desire shall be for your husband, whatever that means, and he will rule over you. To take them together and just say the point is this, that the curse will affect marriage. Marriage will continue. It is a creation ordinance. It did not end with the fall. Now God is going to continue it and sustain it in a common grace realm. Even unbelievers enjoy the privilege of marriage.

But, because of the curse, it is going to be characterized by disorder. There will be marital strife. There will be disordered affections and mutual sin. Between husbands and wives. The healthy submission of a woman will become distorted and will feel like a form of slavery. The loving leadership of the man will be distorted and become tyrannical and domineering. The pre-fall harmony between the man and the woman will now be changed into one that is characterized by discord and contention and strife.

And even we as believers in Christian marriage are not immune to this because we are living east of Eden. So this is an important thing to keep in mind is that so often as Christians we think in this very utopian way about marriage, especially if you have never been married before and you are longing to become married. And you just think, man, if I could just find a spouse, everything would be perfect. I will enter utopia. It will be heaven on earth.

The Curse on the Man

And the reality is that God has placed a curse upon marriage. I know that sounds a little bit strange to say. But that is what the text says. The text says that there is a curse upon marriage, and that affects unbelieving marriages and believing marriages. And so, we need to enter into those relationships, not with this utopian, starry-eyed, everything is going to be bliss, but with a healthy realism. And to realize, yeah, there are going to be struggles. But again, going back to what I was saying before, the difference with believers is that we have this treasure in earthen vessels. We have the resources of Christ and the Spirit to help us even through those difficulties. And then there is the curse on man. Originally, man was to work the earth, subduing it, leading it to its Sabbath rest, leading it to that glorious cosmic temple when the whole world is filled with the glory of God. That was his goal. He was the king and the priest under God who was assigned this task of bringing about the fulfillment of God’s eschatological purpose for creation.

But now, The ground is cursed. Now nature becomes adversarial. Thorns and thistles, pestilence and drought. Human labor becomes toilsome and vexing. You work hard all day and at the end you have so little to show for it. Man cannot subdue the earth. Human life is now reduced to a weary conflict. And it all ends in what? Death. You work hard and you work so hard at your job and then you die. It is not easy. It is difficult.

Common Grace amid the Curse

But the wonderful truth is that behind this curse there is this silver lining. There is this hidden blessing which is that the curse itself is not final judgment. Rather, it is promising the delay of final judgment. And the reason for the delay is to create a history that will allow the promise of Genesis 3:15 to be fulfilled. And so God imposes a curse. He does not impose cosmic destruction. He does not just send the human race and the whole cosmos into hell. But He restrains that judgment and provides common grace and common curse so that this redemptive program may unfold.

Just think of all the benefits of common grace, even for the unbelievers. Just for the world in which we live. And it is not just for unbelievers, it is even for us too. Just think of all these wonderful things. God is preserving the natural world around us. It is amazing how beautiful this creation is. You ever gotten out to the woods or hiked in the mountains or been to the beach recently? It is beautiful! That is kind of amazing considering the fact that Adam and Eve royally messed everything up and God has put this judgment upon humanity and this curse. Why is there still beauty in creation? Why is it that after a storm the sun comes out and the sky is so blue and perfect and the trees are all green? Why does he do that? It is his good common grace benefits to humanity. Even the unbeliever gets to enjoy that. And we too, as believers, we can also enjoy it.

What a wonderful thing that God has not ended the whole program in apocalyptic despair, but rather the sun still shines, the world still continues, you are still able to breathe oxygen and get up in the morning and serve the Lord. Amazing. God has not abandoned humanity to the ultimate end of being completely and totally depraved and totally blinded by sin. Yes, the unbelievers are still blinded by sin, but they are not yet devils. They are not yet completely demonic. God restrains sin from having the worst possible outcomes. There is still some degree of order in society. We have an orderly world around us. Yes, there is crime. Yes, there is difficulty. But God is sustaining the world, allowing culture to continue.

Just think of all the amazing things that humanity has accomplished in the past hundred years with technology. And medicine. Those are incredible things that to some degree actually offset the effects of the curse. Although not completely. And so we are always tempted to put too much hope in technology and medicine and think that it is going to bring in utopia. And God’s saying, no, it is not. Okay, it is not. They are still going to have sin and struggle and pain, but it is amazing that God allows humanity to do this, to use their intellectual resources and abilities as technology experts and scientists and doctors to provide these wonderful benefits for us. Let us enjoy the arts and technology as part of God’s common grace benefits, providing some degree of stability in this world.

But let us also remember that it is always characterized by the curse. That the shadow of death lies over everything. And therefore, it means that we cannot be utopians. We cannot. Now, unbelievers, especially those that are secular leftists, they believe that… They do not believe in this passage. They do not believe that God put a curse upon humanity. And so they think that we can make this world perfect. That is their basic fundamental philosophy.

The fundamental philosophy of left-leaning progressive politics is that all the social evils that we do see in the world, whether it is poverty or crime, are the result of oppressive systems like capitalism. If we can just get rid of those systems and dismantle those structures, we can actually create utopia. We can actually make this world perfect. But utopianism is a denial of our text. Utopianism is ultimately rebellion against God’s sovereign imposition of this curse that he has placed upon all humanity until the day when it is finally lifted when Christ returns.

Utopian progressivism is man raising his fist against heaven and saying, God, you are not in control. You did not sovereignly impose this curse upon the world. We can fix it. We can be God and we can make this world perfect. In effect, it is what? It is joining with Satan in his rebellion against God. That is ultimately what it is.

Living as Pilgrims East of Eden

But the thing is that we as Christians, we as believers, we often fall prey to the same way of thinking, do we not? We may not be quite as rebellious as the world in pursuing those utopian dreams, but we also tend to forget. I think it is very common for us to forget that this world is under a curse. To forget that we are going to die. To forget that this whole creation order is under this groaning, under the weight of this curse that God has placed upon it.

And so, what do we do? We tend to idealize certain things in this life that we think can be close to utopia. We idealize maybe our marriage or we idealize our career. And we think that is where things are going to really, we are going to be finally really happy when we get that career that we have always wanted. Or we idealize having a family and having children. We turn those things that are temporary and earthly into idols. And we say, that is where we are going to get our true happiness. We do not need to wait for Christ to come back. We do not need to wait for heaven. We can fight against it. We can fight against the curse. And we can get perfection and perfect happiness now.

But then the opposite also happens. Sometimes we have that utopian vision of placing too much hope in the idea that things in this life will get better. But we also have another problem, which is that when difficulty does come into our lives, we do experience physical illness or struggles with trying to find a spouse or difficulty in our careers, what do we do then sometimes? We start to grumble and we start to doubt whether God really loves us. Well, again, it is the same fundamental problem. We are fighting against the curse and we are trying to say, God, why did you put this curse on the world? It is not right, it is not fair. And we are questioning God. And so we need to learn how to trust the Lord, that He knows what He is doing. To remember that He has placed this curse upon the world for a reason.

And that when God gives us those reminders, when we wake up and realize, oh yeah, this is a cursed world and I am going to die. When God gives us those reminders in our lives, those are good for you. Those are good for your soul. Because it reminds you again. Oh yeah, I am not placing all my hope in this world. I am placing my hope in Christ and the second coming of Christ when he will make all things new. That is my ultimate hope.

And yes, along the way, he does provide for his children. He gives us our daily bread. He provides for our needs. But it is never going to be perfect. And it is never going to be the thing that makes us truly happy. The Lord reminds us that we are pilgrims. And therefore we are to live like I was describing the patriarchs before, like Abraham and Sarah, and all these godly men and women in the Old Testament were to live with embracing the reality of the curse, embracing that broken hip joint that makes us walk with a limp, but doing so in hope because we have the promise of Christ.

And so we can live in a way that the unbelievers know nothing of. What a wonderful, glorious hope that we have in Christ. He is going to accomplish it. He will put enmity. He will crush the serpent’s head. And he has already done that in the first coming of Christ. And now it is only a matter of time when the second coming of Christ happens. It is just a mop-up operation. The victory’s already been won. The curse has already been lifted in principle. And now we just wait. We wait for that day. And we wait in hope.

And in the meantime, we serve the Lord with joy. In spite of our bruised hip, in spite of the curse, in spite of all the struggles of this life, we serve the Lord with joy. What has God placed before you right now? Instead of thinking about all these longings of future things that you want, way off in the future, a spouse, a child, a career, just ask yourself, what has God put before you right now? It is pretty obvious, usually. You wake up in the morning, you go, okay, I know, these are the responsibilities God has placed before me today, so I am going to take those things and serve Him as best as I can and to trust Him for the rest.

Jesus said, seek first the kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added to you.