Relationships

The other great curse of the Fall relates to relationships. They had already taken a hit before the Lord announced his curse to the woman, the man and woman were hiding themselves in shame from God and one another. Not a good start down the relationship path to introduce degrees of separation.

After the Fall, the woman first gets word that relationships are going to be even more strained. The words God uses are the same as in Genesis 4 when He warns Cain after his sacrifice has been found unacceptable, words about desire and rule or mastery. There, desire clearly relates to temptation to sin and we should conclude here that this punishment of God relates to her action to introduce temptation. Mastery or rule means domination over something.

What does that have to do with life today in marriage and other relationships? Jesus broke the curse but we still have to deal with the reality that the law came to Adam whose responsibility then was to teach his wife. There is something there about male headship, but not in the sense of dominion. The way we love our wives is guided not by dominion but by loving them as Christ loves the church and gave himself for her. If we were better at that we would have fewer arguments about headship.

Original intent

So if God needed to curse in order to make it difficult for them to get their daily bread, does it logically follow that before that everything was blessed. If we look at that word, we see that it means something like endowed with the ability to do as intended or commanded. In other words, when He said be fruitful and multiply, the conditions had to be right, they had to be able to do just that. This curse on the ground isn't that it won't do what it was intended to do, but that creation would fight against the man's efforts rather than fully cooperate.

When Jesus curses the fig tree that isn't bearing fruit out of season in Matthew 21 does that mean that the original intent was that this tree would bear fruit at all times? It wasn't cooperating with the divine will. What does that have to say about our lives?

This cursing of the ground and the petition in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread" seem related. While the curse of difficulty may be painful to us, the fact that we receive our daily bread is itself a blessing of mercy to us. How do we pray for those who hunger and how do we fit into God's economy of provision?

Responses to deconstructionism

Did God really say...? is the first question in the Bible, before that everything was fiat and imperative and then obedience. Beginning here, a new way of thinking enters the picture. It seems that this is now the only acceptable way. It is easier (post Genesis 11) to play that game, because now we have the additional element of language in the equation and the problem of the original languages and translation and transmission is introduced. Can you really know what God has said or meant?

When they were placed in the garden there was one prohibition but other than that, complete freedom. Not only complete freedom but also everything truly working together for good, no impediments, no difficulties. Eve's initial response to the temptation though shows us another side of human nature, the tendency to legalism. Not only should she not eat of the tree, "neither shall you touch it."

In uncertainty we tend to go one of these two ways, license or legalism. Either can be a destructive response. Religion tends to grow out of the soil of legalism or vice versa. Religion likes rules. Tolerance, a religion of its own, tends to embrace license. How do you deal with uncertainty?

Deconstructing Creation

Deconstructionism is essentially taking a text or an idea and tearing it apart and proving that its meaning is limited in time and space. Because it denies that there is true "meaning" it is notoriously difficult to define.

Creation, it seems, is a purely altruistic act on the part of God. He created a beautiful tableau out of formlessness and void and then brought that tableau into being by imbuing it with life. A deconstructionist would say that once He put us here and gave us dominion, everything has been a will to power and dominion, but what did God mean by dominion? The fact that he circumscribed anything as bad would be taken as further proof that from the beginning this was all about power. I would argue that any being great enough to create all this has the right to circumscribe its use and the terms of life.

Deconstructionism of this sort, rebellion against the intent of the author of life, isn't a new phenomenon. It is as old as Genesis 3 when Satan posed the first postmodern question, "Did God really say..."

Harder because of sin

Our lives are harder than they should be and the truth is that this is due to sin, others sin, our sin, just sin generally. Genesis tells us that it doesn't have to be this way, Jesus tells us that it won't always be this way. In fact, He says it can be better now but we should get over the idea that it is going to be perfect now.

The Beatitudes tell us how to live in a broken world, change our values. Blessed are the poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, the persecuted and the slandered? There isn't a single secular book that embraces that worldview. We are like John Mayer, we're waiting on the world to change. The Bible tells us it won't change for the better. The Bible is a fatalistic book when it comes to human nature.

What the Bible isn't is fatalistic with respect to humans. It tells us right up front that sin is a human problem and it only gets worse. In fact, it got so bad one time that God completely gave up on humanity and wiped it out and started all over again, but not entirely from scratch, like sourdough bread, a little of the old starter was saved. Human nature remained, sin and all. The Holy Spirit is God's plan for a better world now, changing us from the inside out, so that we can be salt and light, and point to that better world by our lives.

Consequences and Punishment

Do we really understand the difference between consequences and punishment? It must have been easier for Adam and Eve to understand that difference. Think about it, before sin entered the picture everything they did was blessed. Everything cooperated perfectly to produce as intended and there was nothing difficult about life. God had said they would die if they ate and then they didn't, but life got hard.

They had been given only the plants of the field to eat and now the ground was cursed and only by the sweat of his face would they be able to eat. It would still provide for them but it wouldn't be without effort on their part, the natural order of things would now be fighting against them. Opposition was introduced into the mix. Where things formerly worked together cooperatively now there would be difficulty.

When I see hard times in my life I get mad. First I blame other stuff or people, just like Adam and Eve. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. When I realize that I am responsible for my own actions I then spend time working out what a fair punishment is when I can read right here in the beginning of the book that disobedience/sin, has a death penalty, period, end of sentence. Fair punishment isn't a Christan concept, it is a human concept. What we experience as difficulty in life is the consequence of sin, sometimes our own sin but generally the difficulty of life is the price for living at all. It should make us long for another world, the one the creator intended.

What if Adam said "No"

He was with her and he took and ate. What stopped him from saying "No, God really did say we would surely die." What the Lord said to him was, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree..." Adam had a problem, the first voice he ever heard, the voice of his creator, said one thing and Adam listened to the voice of the only "other" that existed, another created being, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, how stupid can you be!

I do it all the time, it is called sin. Eve can at least claim some level of deception, she hadn't heard God give the commandment, but Adam has no excuse. Certainly someone like me, raised in church, been to seminary, read the Bible who knows how many times, had the experience of being called by God, should know enough to keep me on the straight and narrow and never make a mistake, but I am like Paul, I desire to do what is right but have not the ability to do it. I need help to even want to do the right, much less to actually do it.

The bigger problem is that I spend way too much time listening to voices that bombard me all day every day and way too little time listening for God's voice. It requires too much of me, it requires me to actively listen and the other voices allow me to be more passive. Inertia is a powerful force in our lives. It takes determination to even hear God, must less obey. The cross is meant to break the hold of inertia over our lives.