“Far as the curse is found…”
Yahweh. You are the Creator and sustainer of everything. Every … thing. Every thing that is not you came from you, the only self-existent one, including the original human couple; the parents of us all.
And when you created this world, you created it good, indeed very good. We can’t even imagine what it was like. No such thing as death, only life and that eternal and completely fulfilling. No mourning, no crying, not even any such thing as pain. Fully satisfying, unbroken fellowship with you. Man walking and talking with God, in a garden designed to meet his needs with only joyful tending. No such thing as shame, emotions of feeling ‘wrong’, no idea even of what the word ‘wrong’ really means. Only love, real love, between the two humans and you their God. Not even a clue about anything that would harm anything or anyone.
We really can’t imagine…what we’ve lost.
You didn’t create these humans as mindless automaton, just robots or puppets on strings. In fact you created them in your own image, the apex of your creation on this earth. In fact, you gave them the ability to truly execute a choice. Fully enjoy all this and unbroken fellowship with you in a love we can only imagine, or follow a tempter who was also present and his lie. A lie of pride, which is what had corrupted the tempter. So our original parents had this choice, in fact one you even called the “knowledge of good and evil”. They had only known good – absolute good.
It’s interesting how the choice was between enjoying God and all He is…or one bit of forbidden knowledge. There’s a lot there to think about. They were given one single prohibition and that being the knowledge of something called evil. The tempter, who already was filled with this knowledge, appealed to our parents to believe that this incredibly good God…was not to be fully trusted. He’s holding out something on you – this “knowledge.” You don’t know everything because he’s not let you, and because of that I’d doubt him. I, the tempter, can tell you this – with this knowledge you don’t have to settle to just be like Him, you can be AS Him. An absolute lie.
They took the bait and gained exactly what they desired, the ‘fruit’ of this knowledge of evil. It corrupted them, every part of them. The next words that are recorded are they suddenly knew they were naked. We must realize that it’s not that they suddenly felt like they shouldn’t see each other’s body, they’ve seen each other all day every day and it was normal; this was new internal feelings called shame and guilt that drove an internal desire to cover themselves – to hide. It was a powerful feeling that, as feelings do, worked outward in their behavior and thus attempts to cover their bodies trying to cover their internal guilt and shame.
Death also entered the world (Rom 5:12). They previously couldn’t have known what it was, only that God had promised it would happen if they rebelled by pursuing this one single prohibition of tasting the fruit of knowing evil. Death is defined as the absence of life, and so with this newly acquired knowledge of evil they died. The spiritual, eternal life of God that had been within them was now external to them. In the absence of that Life indwelling them, they died (a fuller treatment of this and the issue of evil is From Whence Came Evil?)
It left an utter emptiness that we today surprisingly call ‘normal’ as it is all we know; we’re born into it. It is death; it is the absence of God’s life within us. We, like they, go on existing physically, our chemical processes that sustain physical life in our physical bodies intact – but now with corrupted mind, corrupted emotions, and a corrupted will – all filled with this knowledge our parents didn’t resist called evil.
God, in his mercy, did not leave them or us to wander the earth eternally in this now dreadful state, and so that day they began the process of physical death as well. In the curse, he pronounced that he had created us from the dust, and to that dust our bodies would now return. But the far, far greater death – the loss of God’s life through His Spirit within them – was now the new normal. There was no gradual decline, the very first children born in this way had one brother filled with hatred and jealousy and murdered his own brother with his own hands. It was a precipitous fall, a drastic change from what was before we had this knowledge that God forbade us to have for our own continued good. But now that we knew it, we can’t unknow it.
So through this choice, this rebellion against the Creator and all His good by lusting after a forbidden knowledge of what would kill us, there was a necessary curse. As Paul tells us in Romans 8:20, the very creation itself was subjected to futility. We all feel it, and something inside pricks at us that it really shouldn’t be this way. So, our world today is the working out of us gaining this knowledge of evil, in which we – designed to be indwelt by God – aren’t. All the evil in the world, all the death, the hatred, the selfish lusts that drive all to harm, disease and destruction, the fears, the anxieties that are in and drive us all, are simply the result of a man created to be indwelt by God’s Spirit…when he isn’t. When he’s a dead man walking.
Nothing explains our world and the bloody history of mankind like this. Nothing. We all know inside that all this death, disease, and destruction isn’t “right”, but we all need to answer why? The answer that makes the most reasonable sense to me is this Genesis account. No other answer satisfies. Many people don’t think deeply about why the world around them is the way it is. They may have heard the Genesis account but put it in the category of myth, with the god described there as a petty deity like Zeus. A god who, according to the myth, blasted the original humans simply because they took a bite out of an apple. If that’s all it was, I’d agree with them.
So that’s the bad news and there’s a lot of it. But if we don’t stop and think deeply and appreciate why we are where we are, then this Christmas Jesus is really nothing more than another myth. The New Testament makes no sense without understanding the Genesis account. The Bible is then akin to Aesop’s fables, and I can use it to get some good moralistic stories to tell my children how to be nice and kind and obedient. And if that’s all it is, then I go slowly insane from all the death, disease, and destruction around me that has no answer as to why and certainly no remedy. The loss of all hope is the consequence of not thinking and understanding this. Either that or the deadening of all senses through intoxication until we die, cementing our fate.
But God.
This is not the end of the story, but the beginning. At the same time as God pronounced the just curse upon this world and our parents, He himself promised the remedy. He would not leave it this way. Before he even turned to the man and woman, he cursed the tempter and promised him that one day a child of this woman, a promised seed, would crush him (Gen 3:15). That child would be the second and true Adam. Where the first Adam had just miserably failed, this second Adam would wildly succeed. The Son of God would again fully indwell this promised future man child and he would be truly alive. The second man because He was man as God intended him to be. A man again fully indwelt by his Maker. But unlike Adam, this would be no ordinary man, He is the Son of God in His full divine nature, adding a human nature in the person of Jesus the Christ. This one is not a mere man, but the God-man. Fully God, fully man. Unique above all others, thus able to BE the remedy no other mere man could.
And able to save to the uttermost. We see him crush the power of death – by his own death on a cross – yet subsequently raised to everlasting life as death could not hold Him. We see Him live the life we can’t; a life of total and complete righteousness – untainted by the corruption that is in us. And then offering the great exchange to us – our sin for his perfect righteousness – if we only hear, assent, and then fully and finally trust in Him alone to do it for us. He then gives us what he calls a down payment (2 Cor 1:22), His own Spirit to indwell us again, to bring life back to the walking dead as we now await the fulness of it all at our eventual glorification and the restoration of all things.
As Isaac Watts wrote in “Joy to the World”:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
That nagging inside of us that all the death, disease, and destruction around us is not “right”? That this is not how things are supposed to be? It’s true. We are under a well-deserved curse due to our evil, but the curse is not permanent. Jesus will remove it in the fullness of time. The good, indeed the very good state in which He created us in which there was no death, no sorrow, no mourning, no tears, not even such a thing as pain? He promises this:
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
Rev 21:4 ESV
God is not done. He is not defeated and our knowledge of evil that corrupts us and our world is not the forever normal. He will overcome and restore through Jesus the Christ. The fall of man was not the end of the story; it was the beginning for us of a story that gloriously displays His amazing mercy and grace to sinners who simply believe and trust. And in the end, he will restore all that was lost and more, far as the curse is found.
Amen. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.