Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Genesis 3:14-19

Uh sermon text for today will be Genesis 3:14-19. We’ll focus on verse 16, but we want to read the entire context. Verses 14-19 of Genesis 3. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shalt 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 thou return unto the ground. For out of it thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for the gracious and wonderful gift you’ve given us of the word. But more than that, Father, we thank you for the gracious gift of the Holy Spirit given to us in the basis of our Savior’s work. We thank you for the historical reality of the events in Genesis and for the historical reality of our Savior’s work on the cross for his elect. And we pray, Father, that the Holy Spirit, this great gift you’ve given to us to teach us things of our Savior, might now take this text and write it upon our hearts.

Help us to understand it at the depth of our being and be transformed, formed, go from glory to glory and mature in our sanctification, are being set apart to be faithful stewards and servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated. Primarily chapters 2 and 3 as we have considered basically the topic of marriage, although we’ve also talked about some societal implications of these texts as well, particularly last Sunday when we spoke about the liberty that the gospel contains and God’s law brings to us and the grace of the Holy Spirit and the slavery that men as they move away from Christ impose on a culture and we see it in our culture today.

It’s very important that we see these events in Genesis, uh, these first opening chapters as historically true, not as myth. Certainly they have tremendous meaning, but they are literal events that occurred.

I have brought today an article, a three-page article from the latest Biblical Horizons by James B. Jordan. I brought, I think, enough copies for everyone on the distribution table at the by the door where you came in. I’d highly encourage each household to take one of those and go over what he has to say. Strong words about those that challenge the authenticity of the creation account and to try to turn it into some sort of literary device apart from historical fact.

Mr. Jordan calls one of these theories that’s popular and taught in most of the seminaries today, including the ones we would appreciate, the reformed seminaries. There’s this framework hypothesis taught. And he calls it what it is, a Gnostic heresy that moves the whole events of the scriptures away from actions and application to intellectual ideas and thoughts. And he says, and I think he’s right, that anyone who will not affirm the literal truth of the six days of creation should not be ordained, should not be allowed to teach in church schools, and really should come under the discipline of the church.

Now, those are strong words. They’re words that need to be said. These opening chapters are so vital for an understanding of who we are.

The Psalms 42 and 43, it’s good to go through the Psalms as we do emphasize the Psalms at this church. You know, you come to church and the tendency is to put on a happy face and the nice clothes and sort of pretend you don’t have problems, but we’re brought out of that immediately when we sing the psalms because the psalms are filled with allusions to problems and difficulties in one’s life. Why is our soul so frequently disquieted within us?

Well, I think we’ll find in Genesis 3 and the verses we read today and particularly in verse 16 much of the reason for the disquiet that lies within us. We’ll read about God’s sentence upon Eve relating to the relationship of men and women and also upon her pain in childbearing and the pain of bringing up children as well. Paul’s alluded to in the multiplication effect that’s spoken of. And indeed, often our souls are disquieted as we come to worship God through marital difficulties or maybe, you know, not big deals but just somehow not quite clicking like we know we should, or maybe big deals, or in reference to our children.

So this is an important section of scripture to consider. For some portion of our life that affects every day in which we live if we’re married, and even if we’re not, children, this text will tell you if you’re a woman what your basic calling in life is. How to be a spirit-filled woman is alluded to in today’s text. And young men, you will have responsibilities placed on you by this text as well. I’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

And single people, you’re not left out either because this text, while it describes the functional relationship of man and wife and the need for the wife’s submission to the man to form that beauteous order that we that we sang of in the processional hymn this morning that comprises the kingdom of God of relationships, structured order and relationships that God builds into the essence of the kingdom. These relationships are not simply, of course, husband and wife. They represent all functional superiors and inferiors.

So you’re a member of the church and this describes your relationship by way of implication to all functional superiors over you, whether it’s in the church, the state, or the workplace. And because it has implications for those in covenantal headship, which we’ll speak of, it also informs terms your relationship to those under you in terms of functional people who report to you.

So really the implications of this text are wide and diverse and should cover everyone here from the smallest of us to the oldest married as well as single, although obviously the primary interpretation and first application is to the marriage itself. So it’s a very important topic.

We kind of already practice this and we do these processionals where the men sing and the women respond because the women are seen as submitting to the leadership of the men as they start the song. And that’s the way our lives work. Now, we’re all women in a sense as we come before God because we respond to God. And so, the church is female. The church is the bride of Christ. And so, it has implications for us in terms of who we are in the church as well.

That by way of introduction. And what I want to talk about today is specifically verse 16, but I want to put it in a little bit of context very quickly. Remember that there are seven sections basically that we’re dealing with in Genesis 2 and 3. And you’ll remember that those seven sections form a structure that has correlation within the context of it. What I mean by that is the second section of chapters 2 and 3 was the section where God provided a helpmate for Adam. And you remember that he brought the animals forward so that Adam would see that there was not a helpmate suitable for him that had been created yet. And God then meets that need with the wife.

Well, this section is kind of the balance, the bookend to that section. Once again, we have Adam and Eve and the relationship of Adam and Eve now twisted and perverted because of the fall, but still alluded to, and the serpent is addressed as well just as the creatures were part of the mechanism by which God trained Adam and Eve, or Adam, to know his need for Eve.

So, the serpent is a very important part of this what I call poetic justice. Now, I call it poetic justice because there are several sections of Genesis 2 and 3 that are poetry, that are written in metrical form, that is Hebrew poetry as opposed to prose. You can tell the difference, and this text goes back to poetry.

Now you remember earlier the earlier poetry of chapter 2 was when Adam receives the wife and he his first words recorded in scripture are a love sonnet, as it were, in terms of the great gift of his wife. Very important thing for men to remember. Well here, on the other side of the fall, which we’ve discussed for quite some time now, here on the other side of that with God’s judicial pronouncements to the man and the wife and the serpent, we have poetry again, although as I mentioned to you before it’s not the regular structured beautiful poetry of Adam’s sonnet. It’s very kind of choppy metrical poetry. So there’s a severity to it. Poetry is an amplification of prose, and so there’s an amplification of the sentence of God by putting it into poetic form. It’s very important for us to consider, very important for us to listen to.

Now I wanted to go over very briefly and quickly, just we’ll read the outline only. We want to talk about verse 16 which is sort of the middle of this section, but remember that there are three creatures addressed here. First the serpent, and then the woman, and then the man. And we’ll deal with the man next, and then finally with the serpent. I’m not sure why I chose that order, but that’s the way I chose to do it and that’s what I said I was going to do. So that’s what I’m doing.

The serpent. Now, the serpent, obviously addressed in the text, is going to become very cursed. Cursed above all creatures of the earth, God says, because of his actions. And secondly, he’s going to be a belly crawler and a dust eater. Now, we’ll talk about this in a few weeks. I’m not sure this necessarily means there was a change in his anatomy, but what he was is now equated to this cursed earth that he has to eat. The whole earth will be cursed. We’re told that in the section on Adam in the same text.

Very importantly, there is no direct curse placed upon Adam and Eve. Specifically, the word curse refers to the serpent and then to the land which is cursed because of Adam’s work. Okay? And here that kind of correlation is made because the cursed serpent crawls on his belly on the cursed earth and eats the dust. So he’s a belly crawler and a dust eater.

Third, there will be, and this will be very important for consideration in a couple of weeks as we deal with this first portion of this poetic justice of Genesis 3, in the middle of Genesis 3, there’ll be a judicially imposed enmity. He says that there will be enmity between the serpent and the woman and between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed. There’ll be two lines of men, and that’ll become quite clear when we start getting to the genealogy of chapter 4, or at least allude to it in a couple of weeks.

Right away, you’ve got Cain and Abel and the two lines, the antithesis that God builds in judicially, not some kind of natural law fact. Judicially imposed hatred, enmity between the two seeds will follow throughout the rest of scripture. And it’s very important that we when we walk in the world, we recognize that there is this judicially imposed enmity, hatred. There’s an antithesis that God brings into the world between the elect and the non-elect, the seed of the serpent, the Pharisees, and those that rejected Christ, and then those that are really of the true woman, the church, judicially imposed enmity or hatred.

And fourth, very importantly, the woman’s seed will prevail in this. The end of the story is told right at the beginning of the story, as it were. It is a hopeful message. While God’s justice is poetic, it is poetic in the sense that it exhibits grace throughout it to those who are electing Christ. And here we have the first glimmerings of the gospel that indeed the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. The serpent will hurt his heel. There’ll be a cost to our Savior to achieve the great redemption alluded to. But the victory is his and the victory are those in Christ.

The world the Bible is, as some have said, postmillennial from the beginning to the end. And here at the beginning, the description is a postmillennial optimistic perspective toward the future of the world. The Lord Jesus Christ, the true seed of the woman, will indeed crush the head of the serpent.

Now, that’s important because that forms the context for what we read about in terms of man and woman in the sentence upon them. You see, it’s not given in a neutral way. They have heard the word to the serpent that they will prevail in Christ Jesus. Now, they don’t know Christ Jesus yet, but they will prevail, and God will bring that deliverance through the physical progeny of the woman. So, the sentence is in the context of grace and good news, the protoevangelium as some call it, the first glimmerings of the gospel.

In the context of that, then the woman is told specifically that she will have multiplied pain and sorrow in childbearing, and she will have a there will be an adverse effect on the marital relationship. Get to that more in a moment. And then the man, there’ll be a curse on the ground for his sake, for the sake of, because of what Adam has done. The land will be cursed. And then sorrow and sweat will be the accompaniment of his gardening and eating.

Remember his sin is eating the wrong thing. And so the poetic justice of God relates to his eating and his production of food. Now that production of food and tilling the land will happen in the context of sorrow. Sorrow and pain will be multiplied to the woman in childbearing, and that same Hebrew word is used when it talks about the man having sorrow in his tilling of the ground. And sweat is an evidence of the fall of man. So a sorrow and sweat and gardening, and then finally, of course, to dust he shall return because from dust he has taken. Death will be his.

Okay. Now in the context of that, then let’s talk about Eve’s sentence, but not quite yet. One more excursus, as it were, a little diversion to talk about male responsibility, the federal responsibility of men. Some of us have had a discussion going for the last five or six months about what it means and what it doesn’t mean. My Ezekiel 18 sermon related to this topic. And I want to address it again today at the beginning of this exposition for a very specific reason.

Men are given as the covenantal head of the relationship in marriage. That means they have greater responsibility. That means the buck stops with them. But what does that mean?

Doug Wilson is in an article on the federal headship of men just really essentially restating the basic concept that marriage is a covenant. That the Latin word for covenant was the basis for our word federal. The federal government is to be a covenantal government. That’s the whole point of it. And the marriage relationship is a covenantal relationship. It is a federal relationship. And the headship of covenantal bodies, whether they’re rulers in the civil sphere, rulers in the economic sphere, or rulers in the sphere of marriage, are all federal heads.

Okay? That’s another reason why these truths about the wife’s submission are easily translatable to the workplace, to the church, and to the state. You see, we’ll get to this in a little bit, but when the wives are told in the New Testament to submit to their husbands, the middle voice in the Greek is used there. And what that means is that it’s her kind of doing it. She puts herself in the mindset with the correct attitude and actions of submission. And it’s the same word and the same voice that’s used in other places in the New Testament where we’re told to be subject to the civil authority or to be submissive to our employers or to our masters.

So there’s correlation in the very Greek terms used in the New Testament to describe this. Well, Mr. Wilson, pastor Wilson, specifically addresses the federal headship of men in this column of his. And I wanted to read a quote from it. He concludes his article by saying this. There’s a couple of paragraphs here. One of the most difficult things for modern men to understand is how they are responsible for their wives.

Men come into a pastoral marriage counseling session with the assumption that she has her problems and I have mine and the counselor is here to help us split the difference. But the husband is responsible for all the problems. This is the case for no other reason than that he is the husband. This does not mean that the wife has no personal responsibility as an individual before God. She certainly does, just as her husband has individual responsibility. They are both private persons who stand before God. But he remains the head.

And just as Christ as the head assumed all the responsibility for all the sins of all his people, so the husband is to assume covenant responsibility for the state of his marriage. In reading these words, he may be entirely unsure—you may be, as you’ve just listened to this, if you’re able to keep up with what I’m reading, you may be entirely unsure, man, as what it means to assume federal responsibility for the sins of your wife. Given the divine pattern assigned to us for imitation, it is certain that no husband has a complete understanding of what he is called to do. That is why he had better get started.

End of article. He opens it up and doesn’t give us any direction. That’s okay. That’s okay. He’s basically right. I think he is right. But you want to be careful that you don’t go places where Mr. Wilson probably doesn’t intend you to go. He doesn’t mean by that if your wife sins, if she commits adultery or if she worships another god that you should be stoned for her sin, because the Bible doesn’t say that anywhere. Says just the reverse.

Your responsibility according to the case law of the Old Testament: if your wife was to try to seduce you off to worship a pagan god, your responsibility was to institute judicial procedures, ecclesiastical and civil, to cause her to be executed. That was your responsibility, to take care of it. The same sort of responsibility a president has for a country. Doesn’t mean if somebody, one of his subordinates does wrong, he should quit. Means he should do something about it.

Now, if he doesn’t, he’s not qualified. But what it says is he’s got to do something about it. The buck stops with him. He must take corrective action. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean don’t think that Christ died on the cross because it was his fault that we sin as the bride of Christ. We—if we think that way, we do away with the whole idea of substitutionary atonement and the perfection of the Lord Jesus Christ. He has no fault, no culpability that forces him to the cross for his people.

So husbands, you aren’t responsible in the ultimate sense where if your wife does something wrong—a death penalty offense, for instance—you should be executed. That’s not what it says. And I don’t think he says that. I can tell you one thing. It does mean that he doesn’t articulate, but he clearly points to, and this is why I bring it up now.

What it means is that if your wife has difficulties, if she has sin going on in her life, if she has a hard time conforming herself to the requirements of scripture, specifically in terms of what we’ll talk about today, what God’s word teaches she should be doing, then it’s your job, husband, to do something about it lovingly, graciously, nurturing, guarding her from her own sin. It’s your job. You see, he’s absolutely right.

When people come to counseling, typically with marriage, she’s got her problems, I got mine, split the difference. No, she does have problems. And what I’m going to tell husbands every time is part of your job is to fix your own sin and to work on it in the power of the spirit, but it’s also to try to fix the sin of your wife. Now, ultimately, it’s God at work in her just as it is in you, right? But in terms of secondary means, means God says men, if you’ve got a nonsubmissive wife, if you got a wife that is contentious, it’s not your fault, but it’s your responsibility to try to address it somehow.

Okay? It’s your responsibility. So now, I don’t mean by that you go home today and say, you hear what pastor said, you stop that right now. That doesn’t do any good. It does good to three or four or 5 year olds. That’s what I do to Charity. But I don’t do that to my teenage sons. I certainly don’t do that to my adult daughters. We work with them because they’re made in the image of God. We believe their sanctification process is in effect. And he’s going to use the word and people to counsel, exhort, and move them ahead.

And if necessary, sometimes to go to court, church court, and try to get the situation squared away. So, I’m going to say a lot of things about women, but men understand that every one of them, to some degree, in your home, you’re responsible to help her in these areas. These are things that drag her down. And if you love your wife, you ought to try to bring her up.

You know, one of the worst things—I was talking to Mike this morning as he drove us to church. My gals are all in Seattle today. But, I was telling him, you know, going to several homes, the people at church with Lana, my daughter, they’re courting, and I really appreciate those of you who have had him into your house. And he’s seeking advice, you know, and both of them are in terms of marriage. And, and, you know, I was thinking today and I said, you know, my strongest piece of advice—I don’t know if it’s my strongest, but one of the very important pieces of advice I’d give to him, I’d give to every one of us, I give to myself, I give to you men—is to not wall yourself off relative to your wife.

When you’ve got problems, when your soul is disquieted within you, Psalm 42, about your relationship to your wife, she’s an enigma to you, and she is. She’s different than you, and you’re different than her, and you’re probably just as much an enigma to her as you are to her as she is to you. That’s a God-given fact of the difference, the complementariness of the relationship. But in that enigma state, you can easily just wall yourself off. You think you can. It is the road to hell. It’s the road to the isolation that Adam had that we’ve spoken of several times now in the context of these messages. That’s the effect of the fall. That’s a continuation of that isolation as Adam blamed his wife for his sin and marital difficulties now start.

Do not do it. It is sin against the Lord Jesus Christ to wall yourself off against your wife and to just turn her over to her own devices, whatever it is, and to stop up the love that God through the has given to you through the Holy Spirit for your wife. Sin, plain and simple. And if you’ve done that sin, repent of it. And even if you don’t think you communicated it verbally to your wife, you best believe she knows it, usually. And that means you ought to repent to her. You ought to say words to her.

Maybe some of you need to before we come to communion today, tell her I’m sorry for, you know, cutting myself off. I have a tendency to do it. It’s a temptation that’s common to all men. It’s a hard thing. We haven’t been given the models that we would have liked to have seen in most of our families. We’re not strong in the Lord. Church is weak. You know, why does Reverend Jordan have to write about the historic reality of Genesis 1? Because people reject it today. Reject the word of God. They reject the sovereign Lord. The world is filled with Arminianism today. It’s hard then for us to do what’s right. But you know, God gives you strength. When things get difficult, it’s so that you might rely upon him.

So I’d urge you to if need be, talk to your wives today. Okay.

Now, there are two things, basically very simple, this poetic justice of Eve’s sentence. The first is multiplied pain and sorrow and childbearing. Now I’ve got the New International Version translation here. I don’t like that translation generally. It uses, I think, the wrong textual tradition. I don’t want to get into all that, but it is a better job, I think, than the King James does of interpreting or translating the text.

King James says, “I’ll greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.” In the Hebrew, the word multiply could refer to both sorrow and conception or just sorrow. And I think it’s rather obvious that conceptions being multiplied would not be a curse. Eve was supposed to have a bunch of children. Her whole point was to multiply and fill the earth. So, I think the NIV is right. I’ll greatly increase your pains in childbearing. But there they’re wrong. By the way, it’s not child bearing that first word is conception. Now it refers to the whole process, but it’s a kind of a specialized word. It’s only used three places, and I’ll allude to one of those places later on as we go along here.

So it can increase your pains in conception, and the second phrase isn’t different. It amplifies what that means. I will with pain you will give birth to your children. Okay. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

So the idea here is that—and this is, you know, no news to any woman or any man that’s sensitive to his wife—that God, as a result of the fall, changed things in terms of the anatomy of women somehow or what happens, the disjuncture between the woman’s soul and her physical—I don’t know what happened—but I do know that after Eve fell, what was supposed to not be painful and sorrowful childbirth, it was supposed to be a joyous thing, became an event that was greatly marked by physical pain from conception right through to the childbearing process itself, and actually right on into the child rearing years as well.

There’s nothing more painful than your children when they sin, and particularly as they become more and more advanced in their sin. Tremendous pain. So, but specifically childbearing in terms of the giving of birth to children. This is legendary. It’s proverbial, and it’s scripturally proverbial as well.

Now, as I said, this sorrow—I got here—is sorrow enough to go around because this sorrow that she’s have in pain or in childbearing is the same sorrow by which Adam will eat of the fruit of the ground all the days of his life. So there’s sorrow in both these judicial pronouncements, but the emphasis here is upon the physical pain.

And I’ve listed a couple of examples—Genesis 35 and 1 Samuel 4—of women who died in childbirth. Not uncommon, very common in the history of men. We live in a tremendous time of blessing when God has rolled back to an extent some aspect of that curse. But women still die in childbirth. It’s still dicey. And throughout most of the 6,000 years of history, women have died a lot in childbirth. And we have specific examples, of course, of Rachel giving birth to the son that she named, son of my sorrow, but then was changed to the name Benjamin.

So Benjamin, my son’s name Benjamin. It’s a reminder to us. This name Benjamin should be reminded to us of the pain and danger that childbearing has been to men, to women, in the context of the scriptures and created history and to our wives today.

Second example is 1 Samuel 4. You know, you had Eli. Now sometimes when I preached Ezekiel 18, I gave Samuel as an example of a man who seemed to be what an Ezekiel 18 guy was—the good guy—and yet his kids go bad. And some of you thought I mistake that for Eli. You know, you had Samuel comes to serve with Eli at the temple. Eli’s two sons go bad, and he explicitly—the script tell us—didn’t do the right thing with them. We know Eli sinned, and now that’s not why his kids went bad, but he sinned and he bare culpability for the sin of his children.

Samuel, it doesn’t say that his sons did go bad, but there’s no indication that Samuel did anything bad. Now, I know some people say, you know, he was too busy judging and all this stuff. The text doesn’t tell us that. But Eli did go bad. And this gal here who dies in this account, she’s the daughter of Phineas, one of his sons. And so Eli dies and Phineas dies in the battles that are going on there and the ark of the Lord is taken captive. And then this widow, she’s going to have a son and she dies as she’s given birth just like Rachel did. But she doesn’t give birth to a son of the right hand. She gives birth to a boy that she names Ichabod because the glory has departed from Israel. Ichabod. The glory has departed.

Well, there’s a sense in which the glory has departed from childbirth to a certain extent as a result of the judicial imposition of great pain and difficulty in childbearing.

Now, I list a bunch of verses there for you. I’m not going to read any of them. You probably know a lot of them, but a bunch of verses that talk about when things are really tough and people cry out to God. It’s always comp—not always, but it’s frequently compared to childbirth, the pangs of labor, you know, and that big, that’s a big model in terms of the word of God. It’s a big motif in God’s word. We’re delivered the way a child is delivered. And we’re delivered in the midst of pain and suffering.

You see, there are a lot of references in Jeremiah here for you to look up if you’d like to that compare pain and trouble and difficulty with childbearing and pains of labor. Well, why is that? Because Jeremiah was preaching the people are going to go into captivity. Now, they’d be delivered, but it would be after tremendous trials and tribulations like the pangs of childbirth. But it’s to the end that God’s people might be delivered. Because, see, the curse is given to Eve, as it were, the results of the curse in the context of that protoevangelium. In the context that the seed that she’s going to struggle to bring forth will come and will indeed crush the head of the serpent who is the great enemy of old.

So pain and deliverance—it’s proverbial.

Secondly, in addition to this pain and childbearing, the other curse upon Eve is an adverse effect on marital relations. And this is a little tough to understand. Text says, King James version, other versions, same thing. Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee. What does that mean?

Well, about 20 years ago, 25 years ago, a gal named Susan Foh wrote an article in the Westminster Theological Journal and drew a correlation between this verse and Genesis 4:7. Now, in Genesis 4:7, why don’t you turn to Genesis 4:7? We’ll look at this correlation. Now, you know what’s going on here. We got the Cain and Abel incident. And Cain, his countenance has fallen. Parents countenance is very important. Husbands, the countenance of your wife is important. And when our children start to struggle is demonstrated by their countenance, we should be like God. We should be going to them and offering them hope.

If you do right, God tells Cain, “You’ll be approved.” In the training I received from George Scipione, this is a verse that was used frequently to give people hope. Their countenance falls, depression, their soul is disquieted within them, and they need to be told, “Hey, you know, sin is crouching at your door. It wants to dominate you, but you got to master it. And if you do right, you’ll be approved. There’s good news at the end of this thing to those in Christ.”

Well, in any event, verse 7 says, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lies at the door, and unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.”

This word desire in Genesis 3:16—there’s only three occurrences of it in the entire Old Testament, or in the whole Bible. One is Genesis 3:16, you’ll desire be to your husband, but he’ll rule over you. Another is in the Song of Solomon where it says that the beloved, I am my beloved’s and his desire is toward me. And the word comes from a root that means to run like a river, fast, quick, kind of taken away, swept away as it were.

And then the other occurrence besides the Song of Solomon in Genesis 3:16 is this 4:7 where sin has a desire, a drive to dominate Cain. Now, it’s his own sin. It’s not some abstract concept. Although the book of Revelation, I think, does indeed draw a correlation between this sin crouching at the door and the opposition to God’s people that we saw in the first two chapters 2 and 3 of Revelation, the opposition to the church that lies at the door to the church. The devil sort of sits there. The beast sits there trying to kill people that come in. And we’ve got to plead the blood of Christ at the doorway, the way the blood was applied at Passover to the doorway.

So this again, this Genesis sets up models that run throughout the scriptures. You see, they set it up for us. And it’s so neat to take Genesis and teach our children these big models with these simple word pictures that are laid out. But in any event, sin is crouching at Cain’s door. Its desire is to dominate him. It’s desire is for him the way the woman’s desire is for the man, but you should rule over it. Same word there too. But he shall rule over you.

So Susan Foh comes along in the 70s and says, well, the traditional interpretation, which is that women have this strong desire, sexual, psychological, emotional, for husbands, and it comes kind of perverted in the fall. And then men have a desire to control women in a positive good sense, but then that becomes perverted into kind of a manipulation deal. That’s not really right. What’s right is that the woman wants to take over the man’s job.

See, now Susan Foh is writing in the 70s and women’s liberation is starting to perk along pretty good. So which is right? Does it mean that the woman wants to exercise control in place of the husband? That she wants to dominate him the way that sin would dominate Cain and take over his mind, as it were? Or—and it but the answer from God to that is you’re going to be dominated by your husband the way that Cain’s supposed to dominate sin. Your husband’s going to dominate you. Is that what it means?

Or does it mean she’s got this strong desire to be with her man? You know, we’ve seen that, right? If you’ve dealt with any abused women, and I mean I know that it’s a category that we tend to sort of, you know, we know that there’s abuse that’s spoken of today that is not abuse, but you know, I hope if you’re very old, you kids don’t know, but the way it works is women use their tongues against men and men use their fists against women in their perverted sense, in the fallen sense. It’s a picture of this.

See that women who are physically beaten by their husbands have a very difficult time detaching from them. That’s just a re—that’s what happens and has always happened in pagan cultures. They’re abused, but they don’t want to get away. There is this kind of sick cleaving unto the man in spite of his abuse of them, almost—it seems sometimes because of the abuse of them. And we talked about how if you reject the atonement of Christ you end up seeking atonement through some other vehicle. And some women seek atonement through their own death or their own punishment. To them that’s what that’s the basis of masochism. And there are men who tend to be sadists who beat women to make them atone for their sins. They get frustrated in life with relationship. They reject the atonement of Christ. They blame the woman and then beat her.

So, which is it? Is it this sickly desire or is it this desire to dominate? I don’t know. And I think that commentators who are honest say it’s a tough question. Nobody rejects, well, a few do reject Susan Foh’s view out of hand. But in terms of this correlation between Genesis 4:7, very close verses and this one, it sure seems like her view must be given strong consideration.

What we do know is that this text is not a description of something good. This text is a description of the result that God produces and will actually kind of naturally fall out in the providence of God from her sin. The result on the marriage relationship. So it doesn’t mean you’re still going to stay attached to your husband and he’s still going to have nice authority over you. It doesn’t mean that. It may mean you’re going to dominate your husband. And we know that women tend to sin in that area, at least in our culture, that women want to exercise authority over men. They don’t want the husband to rule. They want to be independent. They want to take over the job of the man. We know that happens. And we also know that when women are abused by men and dominated by them, they tend to stay with that, tend to have a sickly desire to stay with their husband.

So either way, either interpretation meets the general structure of the verse, which says that the relationship between a husband and wife which had been so beautiful, so good before, now is has big trouble. Trouble in River City, trouble in the living room, trouble in the kitchen, trouble in the bedroom. Leonard Cohen wrote a song a couple years ago and talked about the homicidal I won’t use the word—he used—complaining that goes on in the kitchen over to decide who will serve and who will eat.

Well, that happens in our culture every day, you know, in homes across this country because God’s prescription of order, that beauteous order, in which we’re arranged before God where the husband is the functional superior lovingly guiding and directing the family and his wife and the wife submitting to that authority—when that is turned on its head—and where does it come from? It comes from Eve’s sin and Adam’s sin. And it is the judicial imposition of God. Trouble in those areas. The sin works its way out.

So there’s adverse marital relationships. Now the husband is supposed to rule. That’s God’s prescription. I’ve got a reference here to Numbers chapter 30, verses 7-8 and 13. You don’t got to turn there. But what it says there is that if a wife enters into a vow or an oath, the husband has 24 hours to turn that on its head and say, “No, you can’t do that.” Says, specific in verse 13: Every vow and every binding oath to afflict her soul, her husband may confirm it or her husband may make it void.

Very clearly articulating this federal responsibility or headship of the man that Doug Wilson writes about in Credenda here speak of. She’s going to be twisted. She’s going to attempt to dominate or she’s going to attempt to have a wrong desire for her husband. And he his while his domination is twisted, nonetheless, remember that she has been set up all along as his compliment. He is supposed to guide and govern her.

And I don’t see any reason why this law from Numbers chapter 30 isn’t true for us today. If your wife enters into a sales agreement, you, she should tell you about it. You should have a day to think it over and say yeah or no. And that agreement should not be binding upon her. If you call up the company and say, “No, I’m canceling the agreement.” I’ve done that. And I think that still in this country, most companies would go along with that. Now it’s probably changing a bit, but at least historically in this country that was acknowledged in the context of the relationships that we have.

So the woman is supposed to will have this adverse effect on her marital relationships. Matthew Henry says that the pains of childbearing which are great to a proverb, a scripture proverb, are the effect of sin. Every pang and every groan of the travailing woman speak aloud the full consequences of sin. This comes of eating forbidden fruit. The sorrows of childbearing are multiplied, for they include not only the travailing thrones, but the indispositions before it. There is sorrow from the conception. There are people here in this church who have a real hard time with morning sickness and fatigue and the early stages of labor. Well, that’s you—see every time that happens, you should think about the fall.

The multiplication of sorrows in childbearing be the effect of the sin. Because goes on to say the nursing toils and vexations, and we know mothers here at this church and other places where nursing becomes very vexatious and can be very painful because of certain medical conditions, result of the fall. And after all the children prove wicked and foolish, they are—they are more than ever the heaviness of her that bore them as the Proverbs say, heaviness to the mother. Thus are the sorrows multiplied as one grief is over another succeeds in this world.

But he says it is God that multiplies our sorrows. I will do it. God as a righteous judge does it, which ought to silence us under all our sorrows, as many as they are. We have deserved them all and more. Nay, God, as a tender father, does it for our necessary correction, that we may be humbled for sin, and wean from the world by all our sorrows, and the good we get by them, with the comfort we have under them, will abundantly balance our sorrows, how greatly soever they are multiplied.

God is the just judge who brings is to pass.

Terms of the second uh element of the sentence, subjection to her husband. Matthew Henry writes: This sentence amounts only to that command, Wives be in subjection to your own husbands. But the issuance, the entrance rather, of sin has made that duty a punishment which otherwise it would not have been. If man had not sinned, he would always have ruled with wisdom and love. And if the woman had not sinned, she would always have obeyed with humility and meekness. And then the dominion would have been no grievance.

But our own sin and folly makes our yoke heavy. If Eve had not eaten forbidden fruit herself and tempted her husband to eat it, she would never have complained of her subjection. Therefore, it ought never to be complained of, though harsh. But sin must be complained of that made it so. Those wives who not only despise and disobey their husbands, but domineer over them, do not consider that they not only violate a divine law, but they thwart a divine sentence.

So these two aspects to Eve’s—and as I said, every day is filled with manifestations of sin. And Matthew Henry says it doesn’t do any good. It’s wrong to complain against the sentences of God against our sin. It is right to complain against our sin that brings these things to pass and magnifies them.

Well, the scriptures give us Eve’s recovery. Well, I don’t know if recovery is quite the right word.

Roman numeral four on your outline: These two basic things tell us, of course, that woman’s primary job in life is bear children and to be married to a husband to help him with his work. Now single women, you know, I’m not saying that you’re in sin. I’m not saying that at all. But the ordinary role for women and men is to be married. And women’s identity is all wrapped up—as this sentence tells us—in childbearing and in being a helpmate for her husband.

And God tells us in the New Testament of examples where this curse on Eve that I think is fairly directly alluded to. First, in terms of childbearing, the corrective or the recovery is godly childbearing. 1 Timothy 2:15, we read, “Nevertheless, she—that is the woman—will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with self-control.”

Not another passage that people argue about the interpretation. I believe that in this pastoral epistle that’s this quote comes from, Paul is addressing the overall status of women and links their salvation to childbearing, but a childbearing that is of a godly type. Continuing—they—all women, in other words, he’s addressing specific women, and all women—if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with self-control. I’ve studied this verse out when I preached through 1 Timothy. I know there’s other interpretations, my interpretation is that this allude to this curse and says that generally speaking, women’s salvation is linked to their obedience to bear children in spite of pain and to do it in a godly way.

Now, we know if I was to tell you women, your husband has a hard job and he has to sweat and therefore he doesn’t want to do it anymore. He wants to not have any more work for him because it’s hard. You know, you’d say, “Well, gee, that’s terrible. Guy’s not providing.” And yet, how often in evangelical churches do women say, “Geez, that was really painful. I don’t want to do that again.” And I’ve read about these women dying in the Bible. I’ve read about these terrible pangs. I’ve read about them since I was little, and I’m very fearful of pregnancy, and I don’t want to have children. I only want to have one or two.

I understand. I empathize with that. But it’s wrong. Bible says that just like the man should continue to work in spite of the difficulty and sorrow that it accompanies it, so women should continue to have children. I’m not addressing birth control here. I’ve got a couple of sermons on that. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use birth control, but I am saying that the scriptures say that we should want to have children and a lot of children for the Lord Jesus Christ and for his kingdom. It’s the whole purpose. The Bible says one of the big purposes of marriage. Malachi says, why did he create this marriage thing? Well, to seek a godly seed.

So, you know, I do think that Paul tells us in 1 Timothy that women are generally to be seen as child sharing in their childbearing years and doing it in a godly fashion before God.

Secondly, women are to be submissive to their husbands. You know, the repeated command to women, and I’ve got a bunch of references here, you know that from one end of the New Testament to the other, when women are addressed in terms of the marriage relationship, the word that’s used is submit. Now, the Greek word means to stay