Then God pronounced on the serpent without parley. As the devil “sinneth from the beginning,” so for this was the Son of God manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil. Untempted the wicked one fell, and became the habitual tempter in the circuit of Jehovah's earth, seeking the race of man as his prey, a murderer from the beginning, a liar and the father thereof. How complete the contrast with the divine and personal Wisdom, Whom Jehovah possessed in the beginning of His way before His works of old! He was set up from eternity, from the beginning, before the earth was, Who was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him, rejoicing in that scene and in those beings who were the object of Satan's ill will and destructive effort. All deliverance hangs on the woman's Seed, Who is none other than that eternal Word made flesh, bruised only by the Serpent, but his assured victor and destroyer. It is in the power of Christ's resurrection out of that atoning death which sets the believer free.
Whatever the fullness of light cast on this as on all else since God revealed Himself in Christ, it is important to observe that here and throughout the chapter, and in the O.T. generally, we only hear distinctly of divine government on the earth. Fuller revelation discloses more, especially in the N. T., as to God and man, Christ and Satan, the universe and eternity; and the Holy Spirit, Who includes the less (John 18:99That the saying might be fulfilled, which he spake, Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none. (John 18:9)) in the greater, could to faith bring out the greater from the less, as Abraham rejoiced to see Christ's day, and saw it, and was glad, looking too, not for Canaan only, but for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God. “Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old fathers did look only for transitory promises.” Nevertheless it remains true that the scripture here expresses divine dealings externally, and this in keeping with His relationship to the earthly people, unto whose keeping these oracles were primarily entrusted. So even the bruising of the Serpent's head, whatever else was implied to the pondering heart, is manifestly the destruction of his power over man on the earth; and this is the work of the Second Man.
To the believer at all times there were deeper questions behind. Not only the evil and its judgment, but redemption and the positive blessing of eternal life, are now fully brought to light in Jesus the Son of God. This is so true that to not a few there is danger of forgetting the importance of the earthly consequences because of the surpassing interest and weight of what is unseen and eternal. God made Himself known in the Son as to both His nature and His counsels as well as His will, and this accomplished by the only One, now man no less than God, capable of giving it effect for our reconciliation and blessing, even now for the soul, at His coming for the body also, when He reconciles in power all the creation so long dragged down into vanity and suffering through the sin of its first head. Therefore the apostle says that Christ annulled death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel. Again therein is God's righteousness revealed by (or out of) faith unto faith; while God's wrath is revealed (not yet executed, of course) from heaven against all ungodliness, or impiety, and unrighteousness of men holding the truth in unrighteousness—a still more solemn thing for souls in Christendom, whose orthodoxy if alone, where they be orthodox, will in no way shelter them in that day. Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Now we turn to our first parents with whose conscience He dealt Who loved and pitied them, however inexcusably wrong both had proved.
“Unto the woman he said, Increasing (greatly) I will increase thy sorrow and thy conception: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; unto thy husband [shall be] thy desire, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto thy wife's voice, and hast eaten of the tree [of] which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it, cursed [be] the ground for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all thy life's days; and thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat herbage of the field; in sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thy return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken. For dust [art] thou, and unto dust shalt thou return” (vers. 16-19).
As with the serpent, Jehovah Elohim speaks to the woman of the present governmental effects of her sin. Woman, more than any other female, was to have sorrow multiplied in her pregnancy and in her bringing forth offspring. Woman, not man, is the victim of reiterated sorrow in this respect. It was righteous, however sad. She first listened to the enemy, despising God and His word; then she drew her husband after her into the ditch. Henceforth she was to be subject; like a younger brother to an elder (chap. 4:7), her desire was to be to her husband, and he should rule over her. The fall would make this hard. How different the original position of companionship! Sin made God a judge: before it, He simply blessed. But grace in Christ leaves Him free now in better and eternal blessings for faith.
To Adam He condescends to explain the reason. His vain plea becomes the ground (and so it always is) of condemnation. He had sought to excuse himself by laying the blame on “the woman,” and aggravated his fault by even imputing it ultimately to God “The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me.” How irreverent as well as unthankful! His sentence is unimpeachably just, “Because thou hast hearkened unto thy wife's voice;” and his wife's voice echoed the serpent's in rebellion against Jehovah Elohim. Her solicitation ought to have deepened his horror of her sin; but, instead of this, he dared to transgress, not deceived as she had been, and ate of the tree in the face of the divine prohibition. How different the last Adam, Who suffered being tempted, obeyed His God and Father unto death, and bore in His own body on the tree the sins of those who are now His body and bride, “one spirit with the Lord,” and so made by a higher character and power than that of Adam and Eve who were but “one flesh!” His taking flesh was for our sakes, vindicating God, not in obedience only, but in sacrificially enduring the consequences of our disobedience, that we might be united by the Spirit to Him our glorified Head on high.
To Adam fallen the word is, “Cursed be the ground for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; also thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thy return unto the ground, for out of it vast thou taken. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
Here as before it is present and earthly judgment. On account of the man the ground is cursed. His
superiority entails wider and more serious results. He too must face sorrow here below all his days. Thorns and thistles oppose the food he needs and seeks; and hard toil must be his portion to eat bread, for the herb of the field was allotted, as to the subject beasts, to him who had lost through rebellion the beautiful and abundant garden which Jehovah Elohim had planted. In the sweat of his face he was to eat till he returned to the ground whence he had been taken. How evidently the body only is here regarded, and the end of life on the earth! Yet the source of man's soul had been carefully shown in chap. ii. as emanating from Jehovah Elohim's inbreathing, contrasted with every other creature on earth, to the confusion of materialists old or new. Present government is the theme, and neither hades nor the lake of fire. So in the Psalms, though Sheol or Hades appears appropriately, we read, in Psa. 146:44His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. (Psalm 146:4), man “returneth to his earth: in that very day his thoughts perish.” The body alone returns to dust, out of which the soul was not taken, but, as we are told elsewhere, the spirit returns to God Who gave it. All the notice here taken of man is to humble him who did not look up to God, nor obey Him: sorrow and toil, death and dust. We shall find that more is intimated even here in what follows. If the apostle tells us that the wages of sin is death, we ought not to overlook that the sentence does not mean the whole of sin's wages, but the first part; as in the Epistle to the Hebrews we are expressly told on the one hand that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment, on the other that Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time apart from sin to those that look for Him unto salvation: the portion respectively of unbelievers and of believers.