The Human Condition
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Good morning. Let’s pray:
Heavenly Father, some things are hard to think about. Thank you that because of the hope that we have in your Son, born that first Christmas, we need not hide from the truth about ourselves. Shine a light on us as we hear your living Word. Teach us to know both ourselves and you better. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
The Human Condition is my title. Our passage is Genesis 3.14-24. Please have that open in front of you - page 2 in the Bibles. Genesis 3 is critically important if we’re going to understand ourselves, others and our world. But it does make grim reading! That makes it good for Advent, though, because if we’re blind to the darkness we won’t see the light when it comes. In the words of Isaiah 9.2:
on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.
The first part of Genesis 3, that we looked at a fortnight ago, shows us why we live in a land of deep darkness. This second part shows what it’s like to live in that dark land. It exposes our human condition. In Genesis 1-2 we saw how God made a world to be our home with him, and abundantly blessed us. But then came deception and disobedience, and the darkness descended. And what we see here is all the blessings of creation spoiled one by one and in the reverse order that they were given. God made Adam from the dust. To dust he will return. God made the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve. They are banished from it. God gave Adam the good work of gardening. It becomes a toil and torment. God gave Adam and Eve to each other. The conflict between them begins. The snake comes on the scene. The snake is cursed. And the pivot in the middle of it all is that devastating act of revolution against the good God by the man and woman. The consequence of that is the human condition in which we live out our lives, and it will be until the day Jesus returns. He is our Advent hope. We need to be realistic about our lot before he comes again. Genesis 3.14-24 spells it out. I’m reading Robert Harris’s new novel, Precipice, set as the First World War was inexorably winding up to the cataclysmic conflict it became. “The war to end all wars” some called it. Win this, and we’ll be at peace forevermore. That went well. A false hope. Even great wars don’t change our twisted and distorted nature. Only Jesus by his Spirit does that. So here are five characteristics of our post-Fall human condition.
1. Wounding Spiritual Warfare
This is Genesis 3.14-15:
The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
We saw last time how the serpent represents Satan, the adversary of God and the people he has made. God’s curse falls on the lying and evil snake. He is confirmed as our implacable enemy. We’ll come back to Genesis 3.15, but one thing it makes clear is that there is continual conflict between the children (the offspring, the seed) of Satan, and the children of Eve:
I will put enmity…between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
As Jesus said to those who wanted to kill him (this is John 8.44-45):
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.
And 1 Peter 5.8 makes clear it’s not Jesus alone who is in the cross-hairs:
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
C.S. Lewis’s world of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tends to come to mind at Christmas. The frozen world of the White Witch. I re-read his science fiction trilogy this year as well. One of things he does so well is to convey the visceral reality of the continual battle with evil that we’re caught up in. The human condition is one of wounding spiritual warfare.
2. Pain and Conflict in Relationships
Genesis 3.16:
To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
It falls to Eve and to her female offspring to bear all the children who will populate the earth. That’s a painful enough process in these days of advanced medicine. That hasn’t been there through most of history. But the pain of bring[ing] forth children often only begins on the day they’re born. And there’s the pain for some women of not bearing children as well. I highly recommend Alasdair Paine’s short book on Genesis 1-4 called The First Chapters of Everything. He says there about bringing up children, poignantly I think, even though his is the perspective of a father not a mother:
It is such a blessing – yet what heartaches can go with it! One of life’s most sublime joys will also cause the woman some of her deepest worries and sorrows.
And the heartache goes beyond the children into the relationships of men and women. What does this mean:
Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
Surely included there is the inescapable and powerful magnetic pull between men and women – on both sides. There is also a hint of the physical vulnerability of women, in general, to men’s greater physical strength and willingness to use it. We cannot live without each other, but at the same time all too often we cannot live with each other. Living under the curse as we are, with our twisted natures, that tension all too easily descends into the devastation of domestic abuse. But there is more here too. Genesis 3.16 needs to be read alongside the closely parallel Genesis 4.7, from the story of Cain and his brother Abel. There, the Lord warns the murderous Cain:
…sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.
So this desire is the desire to master the other and overpower him. If that’s what’s going on in Genesis 3.16, then what it’s describing is the beginning of the battle of the sexes, with each seeking to dominate by different means. Conflict for control instead of love, respect and collaboration. So there, encapsulated thousands of years ago in a few words, lies the root of all the conflict in human relationships – not just between men and women and in marriage, but in families, and between communities and nations. All fractured and fighting for the upper hand. Another reading recommendation on Genesis is Derek Kidner’s brief, and now rather old but still brilliant Tyndale Old Testament Commentary. He comments on 3.16:
In personal relations there are the first signs of mutual estrangement and the brutalizing of sexual love. Here in embryo are the mistrusts and passions which will ravage society.
So our fallen human condition is marked and marred first by wounding spiritual warfare, and secondly by pain and conflict in relationships. Then:
3. A Struggle to Survive in Vain
Look at Genesis 3.17-19:
And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
We recently saw an amazing exhibition of photographs of the Lakeland Herdwick sheep farms. The struggle to survive was etched on the faces of the farmers. In the end it is etched on all our faces. I’m reminded of the sad end this year of Dr Michael Mosley. He spent his life encouraging us over TV and radio to do ‘Just One Thing’ more to keep ourselves fit and healthy for a longer, better life. But none of it helped him when last summer he went for a walk on a hot day in Greece and the conditions overwhelmed him and he died. In the end, we all do. We struggle, often painfully, to survive, but in vain. That is our fallen human condition. Wounding spiritual warfare. Pain and conflict in relationships. A struggle to survive in vain. We can sum it up as:
4. A Lost Paradise
That’s there in Genesis 3.22-24:
Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live for ever—” therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
We can try and put a brave face on it and take superficial Instagrammable photos of us apparently living our best lives, but they fool no-one. The truth is we have been banished from Eden. Our way has been barred. There, then, is our fallen human condition laid bare. It’s grim. But even in these chapters it is not without hope. So here’s one more characteristic of our human condition:
5. Abounding Grace
For all the consequences of our rebellion so graphically portrayed here, there are also signs of God’s grace scattered through these chapters as well. As Calvin put it:
Lest sadness and horror should overwhelm us, the Lord sprinkles everywhere the tokens of his goodness.
Here are six:
(i) The serpent is cursed. The father of lies and the embodiment of evil is doomed.
(ii) There is that wonderful anticipation of the gospel in Genesis 3.15, in God’s word to the snake who is Satan:
…he [the seed of the woman] shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
We read that as those who know that at the cross Christ crushed Satan’s head once for all. And death could not hold Jesus. But for Satan’s thrashing about, he is fatally wounded.
(iii) The curse is not laid directly on Adam and Eve, but on the snake and on the ground. We live under the curse, but we are not cursed irredeemably. The Lord’s purpose to bless us remains.
(iv) Despite our exile from Eden, life still abounds through Eve. Genesis 3.20:
The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
(v) It seems to me even the pain of the fallen existence of Adam and Eve is a strange sign of grace, because we are to take it as a warning of impending judgement, so that we will flee it and cry to God for mercy. As C.S. Lewis famously put it:
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.[The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis]
(vi) The Lord protected Adam and Eve and kept them warm. Genesis 3.21:
And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
Though we deserve it, he has not and will not abandon us. Grace will abound. These early chapters of Genesis may leave us with questions. That’s not surprising. We’re a mystery even to ourselves. And God and his ways are beyond our understanding. But he tells us what we need to know to find forgiveness and freedom, and to learn to love him and live for him. Things only get worse as history moves on to the downward spiral of sin and death told in Genesis 4-11. The Lord’s devastating verdict is in Genesis 6.11-12:
Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.
But then at the beginning of Genesis 12 God chooses Abraham, and promises that through him all the families of the earth will be blessed. And that promise is worked out across the centuries until that day 2000 years ago when our Saviour was born. God with us in the person of Jesus, who will crush the serpent’s head and set us free from sin and death. As someone has summed it up:
Genesis 2 and 3 together paint us a picture of an ambiguous, wonderful but broken world. That is the world we know, and in which we share. But we have more than even the author of these chapters could have dreamed. We have a gospel embodied in a Person who, in the power of his resurrection life, is making all things new.
Here, then, is something to be realistic about: the ravages of Satan, sin and death. And something to work for by grace through faith in the power of the Spirit as we serve the Saviour’s Kingdom. And something to yearn for, as we long for the day when he will return and the curse will be no more. In the words of the God-given vision of the new and better Eden in Revelation 22.1-5:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more.
Let’s pray:
Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of Jesus, light in the darkness, born to be our Saviour, who at the cross became a curse for us, so that we might know your blessing. Have mercy on us through him. Thank you for his victory over sin, Satan and death. And teach us more and more of what it means for us in this sad, sinful and sick world to live for him and to long for his coming. In his name we pray, Amen.