Genesis 3: The Fall, Part 2

Yesterday I had begun explaining how the God-given consequences fit exactly with my understading of the Fall. I had started with the serpent's punishment of crawling around on his belly eating dust which is just what he had tricked the man and the woman into doing with each other. The serpent will continue to attack man, his mortal enemy, and he will focus his attack on man's weak spot--his sexuality. Eventually, the seed of the woman will come to crush the head of the serpent; this is what Jesus does with His passion, death and resurrection (I'll explain that in future entries).

Next in line for a consequence is the woman. My theory is that God told the man and woman to be fruitful and multiply but not to have relations. This is the same test that Mary passed because she lost her life for love of God and so was rewarded with the Son of God. The woman sought her own life and acted in a way forbidden by God to her, and so she received death. She tried to gain her life and so lost it. Since she sought a child contrary to how God wanted to give it (virginally like Mary), now she will have a child, but God says, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing." If she had had faith like Mary, she would have conceived a son of God and given birth painlessly, but she conceived a son of man, and that is a painful enterprise.

As I said about Genesis 1:26, we are made to be the spouse or bride of God; that is the full sense of what being made in the image and likeness of God is. The woman is a spouse to the man, but more importantly, she is made to be the bride of God. She is made to have children with God as the Father (not sexually, but virginally like Mary). When she chooses to have her earthly husband as the father in a physical manner, and when she disobeys the one prohibition of God, she forsakes her primary husband for the secondary. Thus, God explains: "Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you." Instead of having God as husband who rules over her, she has chosen the man as her husband who will rule over her. She has rejected God.

This scenario closely parallels Israel's seeking a King during the time of the judges. It is recorded in 1 Samuel 8:7ff: "Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them." Samuel had been very upset that the people were asking to be like all the other nations and have a king rule over them. God responds that they have rejected Him as their king, but He is going to give them what they desire. He goes on to warn them how the king will take advantage of them and rule them as a cruel taskmaster; God was an infinitely better king, but they wanted to be like everybody else. The woman has done the same sort of thing, rejecting God as her husband and putting in His place the man. Not every king was bad nor every husband, but both tend toward a selfish domination that abuses and uses.

Fianally, we come to the longest and last punishment which applies to the man. This implies that God holds the man most responsible. My understanding of this is that he was the one primarily in charge and placed in authority for he is the one who names the woman and all the animals. Man and woman have a unity and equality, but the man has a unique authority and responsibility in his relationship with the woman.

God starts off with him saying, "Because you have listened to the voice of you 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; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field." God is man's spouse, too. Instead of obeying God, the man chose to listen to and obey his human spouse. He placed the voice of his wife above the voice of God and His explicit and singular prohibition, and he had relations with his wife.

The man and woman are not cursed, only the serpent and the ground. Why is the ground cursed bringing forth thorns and thistles? There are two things to keep in mind: first, a man's semen was considered his seed (the word semen even comes from the word for seed); and second, both the man and the woman are living dirt or ground. In the Fall, the man just finished planting his seed into the woman, and the result is Cain. Acting contrary to God's command and trusting in his own generative powers, the man's planting in the ground will bring forth a weed, a son of man. Trusting in himself and his wife, who are mere creatures, they produce the best that creatures can do--a son of man, not a son of God. Now because of the Fall, whenever man plants, either in the woman or in the earth, thorns and thistles will result or at least be mixed in with the good.

God concludes his words to the man saying: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return." God took the worthless dust of the earth and made in into an invaluable home for Himself; the man has rejected being God's home and has instead taken up his abode in the woman. The man has thereby chosen to be worthless dust once more. Man has chosen death, and God gives us what we want. Before the Fall, man worked/worshipped and God provided the fruit, but now man has chosen to work for himself and get his own food. In heaven, our work will be worship once more and God will again provide us our "food."

It is extremely important that the very first thing the man does after the punishments are meted out is that he renames the woman Eve. Throughout the Bible, people are given new names when they have become a new reality. Abram is renamed Abraham when he becomes the father of a multitude of nations, Jacob is renamed Israel when he wrestles with an angel and is blessed by him, and Simon is renamed Peter or Rock when Jesus decides to build His Church upon Peter. A new reality calls forth a new name. The Fall was the act by which Cain was conceived, so the woman is no longer just a woman. She is a mother. Now that she is a new reality as mother, Adam renames her mother of all the living.

Again, the time is past eleven at night, and tomorrow we are having Thanksgiving at our home. I'll have to finish up chapter three later.

Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2007.