THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Opening Prayer
I praise You, my Lord, that You are in control, ever and always.
Read Genesis 3:14–24
For additional translations of the passage, use this link to Bible Gateway.
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
20 Adam[c] named his wife Eve,[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
Footnotes:
a Genesis 3:15 Or seed
b Genesis 3:15 Or strike
c Genesis 3:20 Or The man
d Genesis 3:20 Eve probably means living.
e Genesis 3:24 Or placed in front
New International Version (NIV)
Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Reflect
How do you feel when you have to confront someone with the consequences of their negative actions?God takes action, and says three things. To the serpent: you are cursed (14, 15). To the woman: you will have pain in childbirth (16). To the man: the ground is cursed (17–19). In other words, all those good relationships in creation are now a whole lot more complicated. Working the ground will be difficult, and bringing new people into the world to create new relationships will be difficult.
Notice that God curses the serpent and the ground, but not Adam or Eve. There is some comfort in that, and also in God’s caring for them in the post-garden world (21). He gives them “garments of skin” – so they will not enter the wider world naked or ashamed. He also stops them from obtaining immortality on this earth (24). Who, after all, wants to live with sin forever?
Genesis 1–3 affirms two fundamental things. First – the world is good. Second – the world is broken. Jewish and Christian faiths hold these two convictions in tension, and we won’t understand our world rightly without both of them. It’s not about being optimistic or pessimistic. It’s about being realistic – about both good and evil.
Apply
As you go through your day, look for signs of the world’s goodness and of the world’s brokenness. Give thanks for the goodness, and ask God to intervene in the brokenness.
Closing prayer
Jesus, help me to see the world through Your eyes, to see the beauty and the brokenness and to spread Your love through it all.
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