Human Destiny
Read Genesis 3:15–24. As a result of the Fall, what happened to Adam
and Eve?
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While God’s judgment of the serpent is explicitly identified as a
curse (Gen. 3:14), God’s judgment of the woman and of the man is
not. The only time the word “curse” is used again is when it is applied
to the “ground” (Gen. 3:17). That is, God had other plans for the man
and the woman, as opposed to the serpent. They were offered a hope
not offered to him.
Because the woman’s sin is due to her association with the serpent, the
verse describing God’s judgment of the woman was related to the judgment
of the serpent. Not only does Genesis 3:16 immediately follow Genesis
3:15, but the parallels between the two prophecies also clearly indicate
that the prophecy concerning the woman in Genesis 3:16 has to be read in
connection to the Messianic prophecy in Genesis 3:15. God’s judgment of
the woman, including childbearing, should therefore be understood in the
positive perspective of salvation (compare with 1 Tim. 2:14, 15).
Because the man’s sin is due to listening to the woman instead of
listening to God, the ground from which man has been taken is cursed
(Gen. 3:17). As a result, man will have to work hard (Gen. 3:17–19),
and he will then “ ‘return’ ” to the ground where he comes from (Gen.
3:19), something that never should have happened and that was never
part of God’s original plan.
It is significant that against this hopeless prospect of death Adam
turns, then, to the woman, where he sees the hope of life through her
giving birth (Gen. 3:20). That is, even amid the sentence of death, he
sees the hope of life.
As any loving parent, God had wanted only good for them, not evil.
But now that they knew evil, God was going to do all that He could to
save them from it. Thus, even amid these judgments, all hope was not
lost for our first parents, despite their open and blatant disobedience
to God; even though they—living truly in paradise—had absolutely no
reason to doubt God, to doubt God’s words, or to doubt His love for
them.
Though we tend to think of “knowledge” in and of itself as good,
why is that not always the case? What are some things that we are
better off not knowing?