"The Curse"
Gen. 3:16-19
May 5, 1996

Text Comment

v. 17 For the first time the NIV renders the Hebrew word "adam" as a proper name, Adam, and not as "man" which it also means.

Man's offense was "eating the forbidden fruit and so now he is punished in what he eats. Three times in the curse in vv. 17-18 "eat" appears. He had all the food he wanted in abundance and with no cruel toil, but he ate the one fruit he was forbidden to eat, and now all his eating is toil.

v. 19 Work itself is not the punishment, for, before the fall, in 2:15 man was placed in the garden to do work there. It is the hardship and frustration that now attends our work that is the judgment upon sin.

And the lifelong struggle must eventually end in death. Remember, physical death is only a part of the curse, only the mark and the foretaste of the true spiritual death that had been threatened in 2:17.

Now, we have before us this morning four verses of extraordinary importance. These are the Bible's original description of the situation into which sin cast all mankind. Here are the effects of sin as the Holy Spirit saw first to mention them at the very outset.

It is, of course, as all the rest of this narrative, remarkably compressed. Think of all the effects of the fall into sin that might have been mentioned but were not. Nothing is said of sickness or its suffering; of war and the tragedies that accompany it. Nothing is said of crime though we will see sickness, war, and crime soon enough in the Genesis narrative. Nothing is said of the corruption that will overtake human society and the relationships that human beings sustain with one another outside of the home, of the oppression of human beings by other human beings. Death is mentioned but nothing is said of the fear of death that the Bible says is a large part of the bondage of man in sin.

What we have here apparently, rather, is an account of some of the most fundamental consequences of sin, specifically for the woman and then for the man; apparently, the consequences that we should regard as most profound, or, at least, as most illustrative of the wrong and the sorrow and the frustration and the discontent and the disappointment that human sin has visited upon us. This is the first death that God has visited upon mankind because of sin. But of what does that death consist? And just as the creation of man and woman required separate, distinct acts, because God made them so different, unique; so their curse.

We have now to consider what is said, first of the woman and then of the man and something of the fact that each is addressed so differently.

In the case of the woman, in v. 16, the first half of the statement is plain enough. She was made to be a mother, but now the bearing of children is going to be very painful and, by extension, dangerous. That great calling of her life, the bearing and nurturing of children is now going to be full of complications of every kind.

But the second half of the statement is more difficult. Reading the English words, which are a fair enough literal translation of the text, reveals the problem:

Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

What does that mean? What desire is being spoken of and how does the second statement relate to the first?

So-called evangelical feminist interpreters of the passage tell us that what is meant is that, because of the fall, a truly egalitarian marriage has become a hierarchical one. The curse is that a woman will now experience an unreciprocated longing for intimacy with a man. She wants a mate, she gets a master; she wants a lover, she gets a lord. [van Leeuwen, p. 44] They then go on to say that the basic fallenness of women, her sinfulness, consists in allowing this to continue, in her refusal to take risks that might upset her relationships [p. 46]. Her unwillingness to insist on her rights!

Because of sin the man dominates and the woman lets her do it. That is what the verse is saying. Well, I do not doubt that there is some truth in that picture of the relationship of man and woman in human history and in the history of marriage in particular. Surely there is.

But, it seems doubtful to me and, in fact, to most commentators today who are not determined to make the Bible speak with a politically correct voice, that this in fact what the words mean. The phrase "your desire will be for your husband" is enigmatic because it is so terse, so cryptic. But, as it happens, the same Hebrew phrase appears once more in the Bible and, very interestingly and importantly, just across the page in Gen. 4:7. There the Lord warns Cain that "sin desires to have you, and you must master it." Literally, the phrase reads the same way as the phrase in 3:16: "sin's desire is for you and you must rule over it." Same few words in the same order.

Now it is a principle of sound exegesis or interpretation to compare like with like and to interpret the less clear in terms of the more clear, all the more if the two texts are close by one another.

In 4:7 sin's desire for Cain is clearly a desire to control, to master, which must, in turn be resisted by Cain. In 3:16 the woman's desire would then seem to be the desire for control, for mastery, for a reversal of the roles that God had assigned to men and women in creation. The relationship which was to bring both the woman and the man great blessing, the man the head of his wife, is now one under which she chafes. In the same way as her motherhood has now become painful to her, her being her husband's wife is now as well full of frustration. She will wish it to be different, but her husband will rule over her. In so many ways she will still be subject to him even when it galls her or frustrates her or dismays her that she is. Prof. Collins at CTS advises me that he feels this to be the simplest and most likely reading of the Hebrew of 3:16.

Her vulnerability lies here especially. She is subject to a man in a way that he is not subject to her. Listen, I can take my wife's head in my hands and can speak several sentences to her, and she will be in tears. She can take my head in her hands and talk all day and not a tear will fall! This is woman's vulnerability -- so easily hurt, so dependent for what she needs on others, especially her husband; wanting things to be different but not in the same position as a man to change, to alter the nature of her situation. In the ordinary course of most marriages a man can change a woman's heart and attitude far more easily than a woman can change a man's.

Now, this isn't all bad, of course. This tenderness of feeling, this dependence, that makes a woman so vulnerable is also a great advantage in regard to what matters most in life. As Richard Sibbes, the Puritan pastor put it: "For the most part women have sweet affections to religion, and therein they often go beyond men. The reason is, religion is especially seated in the affections: and they have sweet and strong affections. Likewise they are subject to weakness and God delights to show his strength in weakness."

What we see in modern feminism is just Gen. 3:16 writ large. A whole culture of women angry that their relationships with men are not what they want them to be, chafing under the various ways in which they are subject to men, less powerful, less in control of their destinies, more vulnerable, more dependent than men, determined to change their lot, but finding that, when all is said and done, much of this is impervious to change because it is rooted in the way God made men and women and ordered the relationship between them. After all the anger and all the feminist political revolution, it is being more and more widely admitted that, at the fundamental level, the relatedness of women to men has remained much the same. Women are perhaps still more unhappy about it, but they have not succeeded in changing the realities of their relatedness to men. The endless talk of victimization, of discontent, of frustration with the way in which women figure in the world is simply the outworking of the curse, of the particularly feminine form of human fallenness.

Now, hear me. I am not saying that men are not to blame here. Of course they are, profoundly; their behavior fuels this discontent! We will get to that. What I am saying is that sin has corrupted a relationship between men and women that should have been wonderfully fruitful, satisfying, and fun. Man was going to be the woman's head, but without sin that relationship would have pleased them both immensely and each would have found his or her own fulfillment in it with no thought of loss or disadvantage whatever.

But now the woman is dissatisfied, she chafes, she complains that things are as they are in her relationship with her husband, and with men generally. Now, brothers and sisters, this is reality here. The Bible is giving us an account of the real world, isn't it? Female discontent is a fact of life. Our language reflects it. We use feminine terms, such as "bitch," to describe the person who whines, complains, and constantly agitates. It is a vice we associate with women, discontent.

I have told you before that most all, if not everyone, of the difficulties in marriages that I have dealt with in my ministry through the years have been first reported to me by the wife. The man did not come to tell me that his marriage was not what it should be, the woman did. Time after time after time. It is no credit to the husband that this is so, but it is a fact that women are much more actively unhappy and less able to accept their unhappiness in marriage than men are, as a rule. Women consume the lion's share of drugs for depression.

In sum, what we have here in 3:16 is a statement that women are bound to their relationships to a greater degree than men and that those relationships are going to be a source of great frustration, especially their relationship with their husbands in marriage. So far the woman.

In the case of the man, in vv. 17-19, he is addressed not in terms of his relationships but in terms of his toil. Now the life of work in the world, his subduing of it as the Lord had told him to do in 1:28, was going to be not so much a matter of happy satisfaction as wearying, frustrating, life-sapping toil. The hardship and skimpiness of his livelihood is the part of his judgment that God saw fit to mention as standing for all the rest.

In other words, as Gerhard von Rad, the perceptive though hardly evangelical commentator on the Bible put it in his commentary on Genesis: "The woman's punishment struck at the deepest root of her being as wife and mother, the man's strikes at the innermost nerve of his life: his work, his activity, and provision for sustenance." [pp. 93-94]

Now, of course, this account of fallen human life does not account for every circumstance and situation, every single human being. There are unmarried men and women, women who never have children, and so on. What is more, even unbelieving marriage can and has often risen above the description of frustration and discontent we have in v. 16. But what we have here is a description of the life of men and women as it usually is and as that to which sin is always pulling us and inclining us.

But can you not see how accurate a picture of human life this is, how utterly relevant to our situation today? And in both respects: what it assumes about the difference between the woman's situation in life and the man's and what it describes to be the particularly feminine and masculine forms of fallenness.

Deborah Felder's recent book, The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time, was based on a questionnaire sent to the heads of women studies departments at colleges throughout the country. The top ten women of all time in order of ranking were: Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Jane Addams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, and the Virgin Mary. Now, quite apart from the fact that this list betrays the political and social agenda of modern women's studies departments more than any true acquaintance with history -- who are Jane Addams and Mary Wollstonecraft? and should they really be preferred to Elizabeth I, or even Margaret Thatcher? --; and quite apart from the fact that, beside Mary, the mother of the King of Kings, the Christian church could list in a moment off the top of her head any 100 women more important by far -- more influential in history and more to be emulated by other women or men, for that matter, than the other nine on that list; do you see how that list is its own powerful demonstration of the fact that in human life and human history in general the woman's greatest place and her greatest contribution has been in her home, just as Gen. 3:16 suggested it would be. There are no women on this list that rule history like Alexander or Napoleon or Churchill; no philosophers who have charted civilization's course like Plato or Aquinas or Kant; no scientists who have directed the course of discovery and invention as Copernicus or Newton or Einstein; no entrepreneurs that have reshaped the economic prospects of entire peoples as Rockefeller or Ford. These have not been the real places of women in human history, significant as her contributions to these aspects of life have no doubt been. The universal character of this fact (all times, all place!) and this universal fact shows it to be not socialization but nature that has distinguished men and women in this way. But, by and large, she has made her great contribution from the home. It is regarding her life there that her curse is pronounced because it is there, in her motherhood and her marriage that most women have found and find today the center of their lives.

As politically incorrect as that conclusion may be today, in our highly feminized society -- indeed, in the most feminized society in human history -- it is perfectly obviously true, even in America, even today. Just as the Israeli Kibbutz, built on purpose on the feminist principle of egalitarian role-interchangeability utterly failed to abolish the woman's role as the foundation of the home and the primary nurturer of children -- indeed, failed to abolish that role at the insistence of the Kibbutz' own secular women themselves --, so American feminism has failed at the same task. Women today are still wives and mothers first. The fact that although so many more of them are in the workforce they still see themselves this way is only the more striking demonstration of the fact that this is not some stereotype that results from a process of socialization controlled by men, but is simply what God made women to be.

Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher and early feminist was more honest when she argued that women should not be allowed to stay home to care for their children because, if they are, too many of them will do so.

We hear over and over again that women earn 68 cents for every dollar that a man earns, but almost never hear that most of that difference is accounted for because women work less hours per week and for fewer years in the workforce than men because of their mothering children. What is more, marriage and children typically tend to increase the number of hours a man works -- as he has more provision to make for his family.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that it is wrong for a woman to work outside the home. I'm not talking about that at all. I'm simply claiming for these verses in Gen. 3 the universal relevance and authority that the Christian church has always thought they had until very recently when it became impolitic to say so.

Men and women are not the same; God made them to be different, complements of one another, not mirror images. Those differences are of profound importance and so it is not at all surprising that God should address the woman and the man differently in the curse for sin and that sin should effect men and women differently -- that it should make women discontented and that it should make men irresponsible. We haven't had time to develop that last thought, but it is so clearly here in Genesis 3 and everywhere in human life.

Yesterday, at our men's morning meeting, we were treated to this quote from an Anglican Dean by the name of Church, through Amy Carmichael, regarding masculinity, the kind she was looking for on behalf of gospel work in India. "Manliness is not mere courage, it is the quality of soul which frankly accepts all conditions in human life, and makes it a point of honor not to be dismayed or wearied by them." How sin has degraded in men that sense of honor in meeting one's obligations in life, come wind, come weather!

Who keeps kith and kin together in my neighborhood? It is the women. The men are standing around on street corners. But who is most unhappy in my neighborhood? It is the women.

And so in suburbia. The man does not fulfill his duties as a father or a husband, rests content with his toys and his TV sports, while his wife and his children weep for more from him, or for something different and better. This is human life everywhere. It is what sin has made of it, it is the curse upon it on account of sin.

God chose to say these things about the effects of sin upon human life, because these things rest at the very bottom of life and human experience.

But do you also see the calling and the summons and the encouragement here? Not only in the affirmation of the woman's calling as wife and mother, the central affirmation of the home; not only in the affirmation of a life of hard work to provide for his family on the part of the man.

No, I am thinking rather of how God's grace, when it is at work in our lives, serves to reverse this curse. Do you not see what a beautiful symbiosis God's grace effects between a godly man and a godly woman in marriage. When by God's grace he takes up his calling to love and care for her, to provide for her and for their children, to treat her as his partner, but also to protect her as someone more vulnerable than himself, she rises above that discontent, that chafing at her place and role and relation to her husband, and finds herself instead wonderfully fulfilled and completed in the life God made her to live and lead. She finds that she is not in competition with her husband but that he has helped her to become all that she can be in her life as a Christian woman, whether working in her home or out. And the man finds that his toil, difficult as it may prove to be in this sinful world, is still full of satisfaction and of honor because by it he provides for the ones he loves and makes them happy, as it is his God-given responsibility to do.

In other words and very simply: for what we can observe everywhere to be the consequences of sin for women and for men, we find in the Gospel and in obedience to Christ the perfect answer. Because, after all, He came

to make his blessings flow
far as the curse is found.

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