Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Work in the Curse
Pastor Dennis Tuuri, Reformation Covenant Church

For today, for today’s eighth sermon in the series on work, we turn to Genesis 3 for a consideration of work in the curse and specifically work in fruitlessness, thorns and bread. So the sermon text is Genesis 3:6-21. And as we read through this, what we’ll be talking about in today’s sermon is sort of the first part of what happens as a result of the fall and then the judicial pronouncements of God when he comes to examine Adam and Eve.

So it’s kind of those two things. So as we read it, listen for those two particular emphases. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Genesis 3:6-21.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of the fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” Then the man said, “The woman who you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I ate.”

And the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me and I ate.” So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”

To the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.” Then to Adam he said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it.’ Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground from which you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Also for Adam and his wife, the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text. Thank you for its tremendous implications for our work, that great gift you’ve given to us as image bearers of you. Bless us with a consideration of this text, what we’re facing when we go to work because of what this text describes to us and then also how you’ve overcome this through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Many years ago, I saw a man of letters, the chief literary critic of the New Yorker at the time, interviewed by Bill Moyers on television. It was a remarkable interview that I’ve mentioned several times over the last three decades. One of the things that this man, George Steiner, was his name, talked about was the horrible, rotten, stinking fact that none of us get out of this alive. They were commiserating about death and acknowledging it, acknowledging that’s what it is. We all are going to die and it’s a horrible, rotten, terrible fact.

But Steiner said, “We have refused to lie down. In light of this horrific reality, we have created the future tense. We can see and imagine past the day of our death.”

Now, that’s the way a lot of us treat troubles. We create some sort of imagination in our head that we think has some kind of effect on the reality of our death. But of course, it doesn’t. The future tense does nothing in terms of your death or your resurrection or lack thereof. It’s simply a way to whistle past the graveyard and to put up with what we know and the sinking feeling that we get in the consideration of our lives, that none of us get out of this alive.

Now, God has, of course, a much better answer than the future tense. And in fact, the future tense has as its foundation the future work of God in Christ who will raise up his people to eternal glory. So God has a reality. We don’t have to whistle past graveyards. We don’t got to make up future tenses. We don’t have to do imaginations and mental gymnastics to try to get past the difficult realities of life.

God’s word points to them and then tells us what the solution is and how we’re to interpret it. In fact, it is the failure to see God as the interpreter of all reality that leads to the death that we bemoan and all the difficulties we have in the context of our life.

Adam and Eve wanted an unmediated relationship to the fruit, to the garden, ultimately to one another—not being mediated through the word of God. And that’s what Steiner and others are all about: an unmediated relationship with reality in which we can decide and create future tenses and fix our problems.

Now the reality is we’ve got a tremendous problem. We’ve talked for seven weeks about the tremendous blessing that work is, but we know that work is work. You know, it has labor attached to it, difficult, sweaty labor. It has death attached to it in all kinds of ways. It has pain. It has frustrations. It has disappointments. If we ignore the effects of the fall on our work and all we talk about are all the grand things about our work, we’re talking about a worker’s paradise. Truly a worker’s paradise. A paradise in which we work. But that paradise has been lost, at least to a certain extent, and we have to deal with that.

So today, in the next couple of weeks, this is what we’ll be dealing with: the downside of what happened to our work as a result of the fall.

I saw this movie Interstellar, and there’s a great quote—and it’s not a spoiler because it’s in the trailer. Matthew McConaughey’s character is living in a world where the dust is sort of eating up everything and everything’s dying. And he says this: “We used to look up to the sky and wonder at our place in the stars and now we just look down and worry about our place in the dust.”

Well, that’s sort of what happened to Adam and Eve. Instead of accepting the mediation of God to all things and seeing a bright future ahead—looking up to the stars, to the heavenly realities, that’s what we do every Lord’s day: we go to heaven and see this perspective—but with the fall, dust, downward to the dust, is the direction. And that direction has greatly affected our work.

I mentioned paradise, a worker’s paradise lost. You know, the Marxist has that term, “workers paradise.” And it’s interesting that the symbol of Marxism—right, the flag, at least used to be, I don’t know if it still is or not, of Soviet Union—hammer and sickle was the big symbol. And we have a war bird as our kind of big symbol: the eagle with arrows and military might.

Now I praise God for America and that God in his grace let me be raised in this country and not the other. But I kind of like their symbol a little better because work is what it’s about. Hammer and sickle: agricultural work, industrial work. This is the blessing of God to a people. You know, Marxism is a perversion of biblical Christianity. It maintains an optimism about the future, a postmillennialism we could say, although they make it into a secular reality. And as a result, all they do is enslave people instead of make them free.

But men resonate with the truth of God’s word. And when the truth of God’s word—that our future is bright because we serve a God of regeneration and resurrection and transformation—resonates with people to have a long-term hope for the future. And when you’re told that your work is very significant to accomplishing what the world is going to be and what perhaps other planets and solar systems will be, that resonates too, because we know about our work and we know its tremendous significance.

So as we look at this series on work, we want to continue to emphasize that. But we want to say that we have a tremendous problem because of the fall.

I’m going to read Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” And I think it can be seen as sort of an indication of what is happening in our day and age and what always happens when men move away from the mediation of God’s word to any of their relationships—to one another, to the created order, etc.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loose and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

He’s talking about the fall here. This is what happened. This is what happens when we move away from the grace of God into unmediated relationships. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Wonderful lines describing what happens to a culture as it moves away from the mediation of God and his word.

Surely some revelation is at hand. Surely the second coming is at hand. The second coming—hardly are those words out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi, the spirit of the world, troubles my sight. And a waste of desert sand, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it wild shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again.

But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, the hour come round at last, past slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

A poem of dread, a poem of the implications of the fall of man. A poem perhaps made wonderfully visual in the movie No Country for Old Men. When the best of men lose their commitment to what they’re doing and the worst of men have great intensity, and the beast in the form of that villain and that character slouches with pitiless eyes going about his work of destruction. That’s what happens all too often in our work as well, in varying forms.

That’s what’s happening in the world today, I believe, as spiritus mundi brings forth its revelations of what the world is all about and what it’s going to be. We need to talk about the effects of the fall.

And so in the description we just read, what did we see? Well, we always, if we’re going to talk about work, would usually go right to the texts that talk about God’s curse on man’s work. We’ll get there in a couple of minutes. But we can’t ignore what happens before the judicial pronouncement of God, right? What happens when we seek an unmediated relationship to the created order and to each other?

And of course, the description here is this: the first thing that happens is alienation. It’s hiding from one another. It’s putting on clothes, recognizing our nakedness. Before Adam and Eve hide from God—which is a monumental fact of fallen man and each of us in our fallen state, right? They hide from God. But before they do that, they hide from each other. They hide from image bearers of God.

Fallen man in his relationships is secretive. He’s cloaked. He doesn’t reveal himself. And if you try to get him to, you’ve got to pull it out piece by piece. Fallen man doesn’t want you to know who he is, what he does, or to glimpse the true state of guilt that each of us resides in, in our fallen state.

So before we even get to God’s curse on our work, so to speak, we see that when we go to work tomorrow, we’re going to be dealing with fallen human beings, including ourselves, who don’t want to have open relationships, who don’t want to reveal themselves to one another, who wear our clothes not just for glory, but to cover our shame and our true guilt. That’s what we do. We hide in there.

Young men and women, young teens, that’s what you’re tempted to do as fallen people, just what Adam and Eve do here. And now think about the implications of trying to work together with people in whatever particular industry or job or vocation you have. Think of the implications for marriage. Is it difficult? Well, why wouldn’t it be? You’ve got two people who are trying to hide from each other.

In the grace of God, he overcomes this. Of course, you know, we have tremendous competence in the workplace that we talked about last week. You know, this last week, we saw this result of ten years of flying through space: man was able to cooperate together enough with other fallen men and women to shoot off a space vehicle and land it on a speeding meteor or comet. Incredible competence at work, right?

So I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture, but understand how amazing that is and how demonstrable of the grace of God overcoming what we see in the text before us: men and women whose nature now is to hide from one another.

Now before that, in our unfallen state, in our created state, we had a mutual openness to each other. Adam and Eve did, right? They were naked. They were exposed to one another in all that they were. That’s what the metaphor, I think, is really speaking of ultimately. It’s not just a physical reality. They were open to one another, right? And they were mutually open to one another. This is what man and woman have been created to be. This is what human community is to be: a community of openness to one another, revealing who we are, what we are about, what makes us tick, what are our thoughts, what are we good at, what do we have trouble with? That’s who we’re supposed to be.

But with the fall, that mutual self-revelation to one another is now destroyed. Is work affected? Well, how could it be anything but affected when you’ve got to work with people who all their lives are trying to hide who they really are from you, from themselves even, and certainly from God?

So as this text opens, we see a tremendous significance that explains why our work, under the best of circumstances, is difficult. You feel that, right? I mean, you know, you go to work and you’ve got plans to do X. I prepare these sermons, and there’s a time, usually each week, one point in time during the week, frequently it’ll be Saturday night, at which I’ll feel so jazzed about what I’m going to talk about today. And I know this is going to be a really good talk. This is important. This will be encouraging to people and challenging to them. And I get up on Sunday, and inevitably—well, almost always when I go home—I missed it. I missed it.

Now, that’s not just me. I’m sure there are my own problems involved in that. But that’s the way it is at work, right? We have ideas about what we want to accomplish. We have imaginations as to what we’re going to do. We can envision far more than we can carry out, right? We can see these things.

If in my life I had been able to do X… You know, one of these questions that they give Christian counselors to ask people is the “what if only” questions: I could ask you, “If only [fill in the blank], you’d be happy and satisfied in your life,” right? It’s a good thing to think about.

So God gives us ideas and visions and notions that we’re going to do—perhaps some great task for the church, perhaps some great task in the workplace, some cultural thing. I mean, all young kids grow up knowing they can be president of the United States and they can change the world. And in our day and age, unless you offer young people a job that will change the world, they’re not much interested. We are certainly not, as they say, lacking in self-confidence today.

So we have these visions of things, and under the best of circumstances, we never fulfill them. It’s Niggle’s Leaf, right? He has this vision. What’s he able to do? One leaf. The work is difficult. It has fruitlessness to it.

Sometimes some of the visions that God gives us, and I do believe they come from God, we don’t accomplish at all. We imagine some task at the church or in our family or in our neighborhood. We kind of would like to do it. Nobody really resonates with the way we do, and the task is left uncompleted, and we’re like, you know, it’s so frustrating. Fruitless work is fruitless. And in that fruitlessness, it produces a great deal of despair.

And one reason for that fruitlessness is that we now live in a world where everyone’s trying to hide, where we don’t really want to live in community. It’s very difficult to pull together to get anything done. And as a result of that, we see all these problems that abound. Relationships are tremendously impacted by the fall. And that’s what we see here.

Look at the text. In verse one, the woman saw that the tree was good for food. So there’s this description. What is she not thinking of? She’s not thinking of the command of God. She’s trying to achieve this unmediated relationship. She’ll decide if this food should be eaten or not. She’ll decide how to work in terms of this thing without the mediation of what the Creator, what the Father, has told her to do.

Do you understand the concept? I think it’s incredibly significant. It’s significant for our work as well. And so that’s the first thing that happens. And then, of course, once they enter into that and do the deed—eat the food that they were forbidden to eat—then what happens? Their eyes are open. They see that they’re naked. And so the self-revelation that they had in community together is broken and destroyed.

And now, whatever they’re called to do, and they remember they were created there to do work—it’s a worker’s paradise. It’s a paradise because they’re doing fruitful, wonderful work, imaging God, taking the culture of God into all the world and maybe even to other star systems. So that’s what they’re created to do. But right away, how are they going to do that? Because the second thing that happens, after the unmediated relationship is the eyes of both of them are opened, and the fall has happened.

And now human community is crooked and perverted. Lies, deceit, half-truths, positioning of truth—less than full statements are given to one another. You know what it’s like. Those of you that have been around teenage boys particularly, I suppose, but all of you I suppose have seen this at work, right?

“Don’t make me be a Philadelphia lawyer with you.” Because the response is half-truths, partial truths, under the best of circumstances. The bad kids just flat out lie. But the good kids are kids, right? They’re going to give you kind of half the truth, little bit of the truth, enough to make themselves not look so bad. They’ll see any kind of ambiguity in your instruction that they can make use of to not do a task or to explain why they didn’t do the task.

That’s what Adam and Eve do here, right? As God comes to them and they’re now hiding, their whole characteristic of their being is to hide from people and to one another and not to reveal themselves.

Then what happens next? The conversation between God and Adam is a reflection of that. We already see them covering up. And then we see it a second time as God begins to ask them things. “Where are you, Adam?” “Well, I hid because I’m naked.” “Well, who told you were naked?”

See, Adam doesn’t come clean, right? He never comes clean here. He sort of does. By the third question God asks him, he says, “Well, the woman you gave me, the woman you provided to me, you gave me the food and I ate of it.” So he finally actually admits to the sin. But is he admitting to the sin? He is not. He’s blaming God. He’s pointing to the woman and the woman that God gave to him. He doesn’t say, “Yes, you’re right, Father. I broke your word.” He doesn’t accept responsibility for his action.

Everything is affected by his fall. And this is what we do now in our homes, in our workplaces, in the church. This is who we’re characterized by now, right? That’s who we are.

And so it is the remarkable thing that is not that our work becomes fruitless at times. The remarkable thing is the grace of God that lets us get anything done. And then to imagine that man can actually put a space vehicle on a speeding comet after ten years—this is remarkable. This is the grace of God. There should be “alleluia,” not to man, but to the grace of God, that allows people like this—and this is the only kind of people that exist in the world: fallen people who hide and deceive and lie and cheat—to allow them to be able to work together to accomplish anything.

So Adam deflects. And so all this opening text, before we even get to God’s direct statements about Adam’s work, these opening texts instruct us as to why our work is fruitless a lot of the time and why we react the way we do. You know, a lot of times it’s not the other person’s perversion or lack of revelation of who he is and what he’s doing and honesty that’s at play. It’s our own sin that’s getting in the way, right?

Tremendous example that Keller uses in his book—and if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a little bit racy, but Amadeus, which tells the story, it’s based on a stage play, but it’s based on reality: a couple of real historical figures, Mozart, of course, and Salieri, another composer at the time. And Salieri, like all of us, like Nigel with his leaf or whatever it is, he wants to be able to be the best at what he is.

Isn’t that what we’re trained to do? Be the best. And he looks—he’s a competent guy. He’s hired by the king. He does all this good stuff. Makes a good living. But he looks at Mozart’s compositions and he sees perfection. He sees the voice of God. And compared to that vision of what he wanted, his own work can’t meet the muster anymore. And he’s driven by envy to strike out against Mozart, etc.

But what he’s driven by is an obsession with the fruitlessness—in relationship to Mozart—of his own work.

Now, now that’s going to grip us. We’re going to see people do things. I’m going to hear preachers preach a lot better than I do. And you’re going to see people do things better than you do, if you’re at all honest with yourself. And what the text tells us is, “Look, it’s okay. God has called you to do X, not Y. And expect yourself to be continually dissatisfied—the way that Adam and Eve were dissatisfied until they grabbed that fruit.”

So the text unwinds before us, and it unwinds in a way that helps us to understand the extreme fruitlessness of our work, at least as experienced at times. We don’t want to whistle past that. We don’t want to say we can invent the future tense. I want you to realize, you know, the dissatisfaction that you and I frequently feel about our work and how we just, “If only this would happen”—and it never happens. Okay, that’s there. It’s there because of our fallen nature, through this effect of the unmediated relationship to people and things around us—unmediated from the word of God.

And it’s also there because God himself actually places it there judicially, right? The text shows us the nature of fallen man: the deflection, the deceit, the hiding of ourselves, the covering up, the not revealing of who we are to one another. It shows us all that. But then it goes on to: the state becomes even worse because then God pronounces his curse.

And specifically, he curses man in his work, right? He says first to the woman, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.”

Then to Adam he said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which the Lord commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it.’ Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were formed. And to dust you are and to dust you shall return.”

So not only do we have the fallen state we’re in, but the Lord God then actively pronounces a curse upon what is the most important thing to us—actually the two most important things to us: our relationship with our spouse, that brings forth the next generation, community. He curses that, says the effect of the fall will affect that. And then he curses our work—the other most important thing to us.

You know, I think as we read these curses, by the way, I don’t think it’s useful to see them in highly individualistic terms. In fact, God links them together. When he tells the woman you’re going to have sorrow in conception, it’s the same word for pain or toil that Adam’s going to experience in his work. God links them together. And the same word for bringing forth children that’s talked about in terms of Eve here, later in other texts in the Bible, are talked about as men fathering or having children—same word. So men have kids, women have kids. And I think for both Adam and Eve, there’ll be pain involved in that process.

There’s the psychic pain, right, of two people who are highly alienated from one another, in rebellion against God, and really not revealing themselves to each other. There’s the pain of having a relationship well enough to actually bring children to birth. And then there’s the pain of raising those children together as well. So our whole family and child-rearing process, I think, is being alluded to in these opening verses of the Bible about the effects of fallenness.

And the same thing’s true of the Adam text, right? It doesn’t mean that you guys tomorrow, when you go to work, it’s going to be hard and sweaty and you’ll have thorns and thistles that get in your way. It means that whether you’re a guy or a gal, when you go to work, you’re going to experience these truths. So remember that from God’s perspective, Adam and Eve are one. And it’s the fallen perspective, you know, in which we would see them as totally separate from each other and see these curses as distinct. When in reality, I think they both affect—I think they clearly both affect each other.

So it’s difficult for men and women to bring forth children, although the woman is the one that births children, so she’s singled out. It’s difficult for both men and women in the workplace, because of their alienation, but also because of the curse that God’s placed on work involving thorns and thistles and not just herbs and things we get to eat.

So I think that’s the way it works. But because of God’s pronouncement here, work is even more difficult, right? So now it’s not just alienation, deceit, unmediated relationships from God affecting our workplace. Now God says there’s going to actively be difficulties. There’s going to be thorns and thistles as you go about doing your work.

Now, you know, before we get too depressed here, he also says you’re going to eat the herb of the field, right? You’re going to have thorns and thistles, but you’re also going to eat bread. So food’s coming, right? And actually, your raising of children will be difficult, but you’ll raise children and you’ll see godly seed descend, right?

And by the end of this text—which is why I read the last couple of verses—Adam is referring to his wife as Eve, the mother of all living. He’s looking at that. And God has made them coats, right, to protect them, but more than that to glorify their work. And so there’s blessing along with it. It’s not just thorns; it’s also loaves. It’s not just the curse on work, but there’s the sustenance of work and the production of work that will continue to go on.

So we don’t want to get too depressed about all of this, but we don’t want to ignore the realities of why it’s hard for you to go to work tomorrow and why it’s hard for you to imagine tasks that you never will even perhaps start, let alone accomplish, and the pain that brings to you and the frustration. It’s true. It is frustrating. It’s tremendously frustrating.

But the word of God says it’s okay, because this is part of God’s plan for working out who we are in him. He’s showing us what we can be redeemed in Christ and what the world will become eventually with the second coming of our Savior, and causing us to try to turn away from the unmediated relationships that brought us to this horrific point.

Okay, let’s talk now. I think I’ve got time with the time that’s left. I want to do kind of a quick overview of thorns and thistles. So part of what the text is telling us, one way to think of God’s pronouncement on us in the fall—after the fall—is thorns and thistles. He sets up this imagery, right? So he sets up this imagery so that we’ll understand what’s going on. And what this imagery tells us is that what’s going to make our work difficult are thorns and thistles.

What are these thorns and thistles? Because what we’ll see as we go through some verses on thorns and thistles is, they’re—there’s ways to deal with thorns and thistles. They’re not inevitable in the sense of making your work either fruitless or pointless. There’s ways to deal with it. There’s good news about thorns and thistles.

But let’s look at a little bit of scripture to see what the Bible tells us about thorns and thistles.

Well, one of the first things we want to recognize is that thorns and thistles are men—frequently. Not always, but in 2 Samuel 23, for instance, in the final words of David from his deathbed so to speak, he talks about the spirit of the Lord is upon him. And one of the last things that David tells us is he says, “The sons of rebellion shall all be as thorns thrust away because they cannot be taken with hands.”

So David tells us that thorns and thistles are ungodly, fallen men, okay? And they can’t be taken with hands. In other words, if you’re going to deal with thorny and thistly men, and we must, you got to glove up to work with them. I used to work blackberries out at my house in Hillsboro. Worked them every year. I took out acres of them over several years. And you have to have good gloves. You got to have the right equipment. You can’t let yourself get tangled up in them, right?

So the point here is that thorns and thistles are directly related in the scriptures to men—bramble men, okay? Now there’s other implications of thorns and thistles. But this is a very significant one. It means that as you go about your work, you have to understand that you’ll have people, men and women, in your work who will be thorns and thistles to you. And you have to be prepared as to how you’re going to deal with them, to avoid, you know, giving in to their thrust, thwarting your effectiveness.

So they are men. They’re related to culture as well, the culture of men. Numbers 33:55 says this: “If you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then it shall be that those whom you let remain shall be irritants in your eyes and thorns in your sides.”

So individual people can be bramble men, but now it’s talking about the culture of those that weren’t driven out of the Promised Land. And that culture is filled with thorns and thistles as well, and they’re going to be thorns to you. Judges 2:3 says the same thing: “Therefore, I also said, ‘I will not drive them off from before you, but they shall be thorns in your side, and their gods shall be a snare for you as well.’”

So pagan culture is a culture of thorns and thistles, and it will hurt, because God doesn’t want you coexisting with thorns and thistles. He wants you to do something aggressively about them and to, like I did with the blackberries, work them in the context of our culture as well, so that we might defeat them.

So the thorns and thistles are men. They’re the culture of men. And then there are particular characteristics that the Bible relates to thorns and thistles. And here’s one of them. Exodus 22:6, case law: “If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that stack grain, standing grain, or the field is consumed, he who kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.”

All right. So this is an agricultural case law about liability for what damage you do to somebody else’s yard. But, you know, it doesn’t just say it in those kind of abstract terms. It describes a situation where a fire is set, the fire catches thorns on fire, the thorns then create a problem for grain, okay.

Now, I think what’s going on here is this is talking about bramble men who are being set on fire somehow. And the effect of those men in the context of a culture or community is to damage the grain. And the grain is throughout the Bible—as well as thorns and thistles being an imagery of curse—grain is always set up throughout the Bible as an imagery of the people of God. We’re the planting of God. We’re this bread, etc. So thorns and thistles can have an effect on the grain, and that effect comes from people actually lighting them on fire.

Now, I think that probably one of the most significant ways that happens is with our tongues. Fire comes out of our tongues, I think, in the Bible. And so I think what’s going on here is we’re being warned that bramble men or people that set bramble men on fire are slanderers. Again, it’s their nature, right? Lies, deception, deceit. And that nature can affect good people and it can ruin good reputations and good “standing grain,” so to speak.

In Proverbs 24:31, we read that “there it was all over-thrown with thorns. Its surface was covered with nettles. Its stone wall was broken down.” What’s that a picture of? You know, that’s the sluggard, right? The guy that doesn’t take care of his business. The end result is more and more curse, as pictured in that verse by thorns and thistles.

Proverbs 15:19: “The way of the lazy man is like a hedge of thorns, but the way of the upright is a highway.”

Now, now young people, as you’re getting ready to enter into the workplace, what do you want? You want to have to walk through life, banging up against and getting cut, with your path impeded by thorns and thistles? Or do you want your vocation and your career to be primarily a highway, open to you?

Well, of course you want the highway. How do you get there? Diligence, competence, labor. Understand that in Adam, we’re all lazy slobs. And in that laziness, what we do is we bring more thorns and thistles into our lives, okay?

So one of the ways we’re to combat the effects of this curse—which are God-given, of course, but he also gives us the means to do something about it—and one of the ways we combat the kind of death-like loss of fruitfulness in the workplace, to whatever extent we can, is by diligence, so that thorns and thistles don’t grow over our land and don’t hedge up our way, so that we’ve got a highway before us.

Proverbs 22:5: “Thorns and thistles are in the way of the perverse. He who guards his soul will be far from them.”

Okay, so here’s another warning from God about, you know, what will increase the amounts of thorns and thistles. They’re in the way of the perverse. What does perverse mean? It means crooked, okay? It means deceit. It means not telling the truth. It’s not being a straight arrow, a straight shooter. It’s being crooked. It means people that are crooked in their lifestyle—perverse. They’re twisted, okay? They do things they shouldn’t be doing. And in their path is thorns and thistles. That’s the curse of God.

Now we have the option of avoiding some of that curse in the world by being people that are straight shooters and that won’t have much to do with people that are deceitful and lying in how they go about their lives. So God tells us, yeah, thorns and thistles are a curse. They’re going to bring a degree of fruitlessness to your work, but that fruitlessness will be worse if you don’t attend to what thorns and thistles are. They’re men. They’re fallen cultures of men. They’re pagan cultures. They’re people who don’t see the mediation of God between themselves and other people—primarily or themselves and the world.

We’ve got a pagan culture today that moves away from the mediation of God’s word in every respect. And that pagan culture is going all over the world now. Now, that’s a place where thorns and thistles abound. And we know that’s actually what’s going on. And so we can do something about it. And one thing we can do is stay away from people that are crooked, that aren’t straight shooters. Stay away from them. Avoid them. Stay away from the slothful. Don’t be a slothful person. Don’t be a deceitful person. Don’t be a perverse person. Don’t be a slanderer. And you will see yourself dealing effectively, even with the effects of the curse that God has brought into our lives.

There are bramble men, right? This is what the text has been telling us. There are kinds of men. And it’s interesting—one of the two stories that I want to mention in passing here is in Judges 8, where Gideon goes out against the armies of Midian, right? And he’s after these guys, and he goes to a town and he asks the town, “Where are these guys? I’m going to kill them because they’re evil people.”

And the town says, “Well, you know, you don’t have them yet, so we’re not going to help you.” Gideon is asking for bread, I think, and water from this town so he can continue his pursuit of the Midianites. And they say, “No, we’re not going to give them to you because we don’t see where you’re going to win necessarily. You got 300 guys. They got 15,000 guys. They’re not in your hand. No, go away. We’re not going to give you any sustenance to help you attack those Midianites, as evil as they are.”

And so Gideon says, “Well, I’m going to deal with them. And when I’m done dealing with them, I’m going to come back to you and I’m going to whip you with thorns because you’re bramble people”—essentially is what he’s saying. He’s going to whip them with the curse of God because that’s who they are.

Another town says, “No, not going to help you.” He says, “I’m going to come back and pull down your high tower and I’m going to kill you.” And that’s just exactly what he does. He pursues the warfare against the Midianites. They rout the Midianites, and then they come back. And these elders in the city that’s described in Judges 8—he asks the young men, “Where are the leaders of your city?” He says, “Well, here’s their addresses.”

Gideon rounds them up and he takes thorns to them and beats them with thorns and thistles because they’re bramble men, and bramble men have to be dealt with in sturdy, strong ways.

So you avoid them in terms of their slander, their laziness, their perverseness. And then when they are—when you’re capable of doing it through the legitimate authorities of the business, the culture, the church, whatever it is—you bring the judgments of God upon them if they won’t repent from their bramble ways.

Leaders are bramble people all too often, right? And most of you know this story: the story of Abimelech, the king, being made king. In Judges chapter 9, as a result of slaughter of 70 other sons, Abimelech is made king—a bad guy. And a man of God goes to the mount of blessing and curse and he shouts out to the people. And he says, “You know, the trees wanted somebody to rule over them. And they went to a cypress tree and cypress tree said, ‘I’m too busy doing this.’ They went to the olive tree, ‘I’m too busy doing my job.’ They went to the vine”—or the other trees that were being productive in kingdom work—”and they said no.”

“And then finally they go to the bramble bush. And the bramble bush says, ‘Well, yeah, make me your king. If you really want to make me your king, I’ll be your king.’” He becomes their king in the parable that’s told. And then the man of God who is telling this story to God’s people said, “This is what you’ve done. You’ve taken a bramble man and made him your leader.”

And you know, it’s easy to get bramble men for leaders, because godly men—right, grain men, standing grain, and good grain people, people who are part of the vine of God—they’re busy doing stuff. They’re busy doing their work. They’re busy doing their vocation. And all too often, civil leaders are those who got nothing better to do, who have failed in their particular vocations.

I was amazed when I used to go down and lobby Salem. I went down there thinking I’d meet the best and the brightest of the brightest. I haven’t been there in twenty years, but it was not that way then. It was a lot of people were there because they failed in the marketplace. They didn’t have vocation. They were bramble men. And bramble men are used by God to bring curse upon a people that would make them their leaders.

So the Bible has a lot to say about brambles. The Bible warns us about specific character qualities related to them. It warns us that the curse of God is really found primarily in men. And frequently, these bramble men are the leaders in a particular culture, as is implied there.

But there’s another interesting use of the word “thorns” in the book of Isaiah specifically. Let me read you a couple of quick references here.

Isaiah 7:23: “It shall happen in that day that wherever there could be a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels of silver, it will be for briars and thorns.” So describing the transition from being vines to thorns, right? So Isaiah is a prophetic book. The prophetic books are filled with references to thorns because the people of God had no—were no longer vines but they were bramble people. They were thorns.

Isaiah 33:12: “And the people shall be like the burnings of lime, like thorns cut up, so shall they be burned in the fire.” So over and over again throughout Isaiah and in other prophetic books, the people are referred to as brambles.

But interestingly, there’s only one reference that I could find after chapter 39 of Isaiah. Well, what’s so significant about that? Well, the transition from 39 to 40 in the book of Isaiah is so radical that people have suggested somebody else wrote the second half. Now, it’s not true. I believe Isaiah wrote it all. But it’s sort of like the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Through chapter 39, God’s people are being judged and they’re going to be taken into captivity. And then with chapter 40, “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people”—we jump forward past the time of the captivity into when God’s people are brought back into the land. It’s that radical a transition between 39 and 40. It’s the movement of the old world to the new world that would happen ultimately in what we celebrate this time of year: the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, his advent, okay?

So 39 to 40 is a big transition. And after that transition happens, here’s the only reference that I could find to thorns. Isaiah 55:13: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress tree. Instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree. And it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

The transition that’s happened with the coming of Jesus Christ is that while thorns and thistles once were the predominant feature of the fallen world, now those features are being cut back by God. The gospel is that thorns and thistles are now in the process of being replaced by people who manifest the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is turning back the curse.

And what we read in Genesis 3 is not simply the pronouncement of why it is that our work is so often fruitless. It’s the hope given to us that, in addition to thorns, you’re going to eat bread. And what’s going to happen is, yeah, kids are hard to have and hard to raise for the Lord. But as you do that, mankind, they’ll come—the Savior who comes down to be incarnate as a man who will crush the head of the serpent and begin the process of reversal of the curse. And our very work itself, of course, will be a direct recipient of that blessing and grace from God.

And so that’s the gospel. And that gospel is pictured for us.

Now we still have warnings in the New Testament about the thorns. Luke 8:14 says this: “Now the ones that fell among thorns are those when they heard go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life and bring no fruit to maturity.” This is talking about the sower of the seed. And one way that good seed is choked out is through the pleasures, the cares of the world. Those are the thorns today.

Now God says you can resist that. You can resist the cares and pleasures and anxieties of the world. But that’s what you’ve got to do. If you don’t, if you give into the world’s pleasures and anxieties and distress, then the word of God is choked out in your life and you’re left in the land of the thorn tree once more.

Matthew 27:29: Our Savior has put on his head what? A crown of thorns. He received is the curse for us. He’s the one who transitions us out of thorns and now makes us kings and priests with him with a crown purchased through him, becoming a curse for us on the tree.

2 Corinthians 12:7 says, “Lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelation, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me.” Even the thorns, Paul says, are now under the mediation and control of God. Even though it’s a messenger from Satan, God is superintending whatever thorns are in your life. Whatever fruitlessness happens in the context of your work, he’s using this to humble you, that you would become even more effective in your work.

Even the thorns—representatives of Satan’s temptations and results on fallen men—are under the mediation of the risen and resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.

And now what happens? Do we still have thorns? Yeah, we do. 1 Corinthians 3:11-20 talks about the foundation and how churches build on the foundation. That’s Christ. And he talks about two different kinds of people: gold, silver, precious jewels, wood, hay, and stubble. Stubble is kind of like those thorns we’re talking about. There’s two kinds of people.

And what he says is that when fire breaks out in the church, the wood, hay, and stubble get burned up, almost go to hell. They’re saved as if through fire. But what happens to the gold and silver and precious jewels? The fire stones shine brighter. The gold and silver is refined.

Churches, on occasion, have bramble people in them who set fires with slander and crookedness and lies and deceit, and it burns some people up. But it’s under the providence of God. What can seem like pointlessness or the fruitlessness of what’s happening in a church’s life at times is actually under the superintendence of God to provide the sanctification and brighter brilliance of his people, having come through a time of bramble men and fires created by them, consistently looking to the Lord Jesus Christ and his mediation.

That’s the key to the whole thing. What we see in the text before us is the reason why our work becomes fruitless and, as we’ll talk about next week, even pointless. But God says that he’s rolled all of this back, right? This is the time of year when we read about the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ coming.

Mediation is the key. Mediation is the key. By which I mean that when we look at our work, it must be through the mediation of God and his word to us. Salieri lost that mediation in his envy and desire to do things that really God was never going to let him do, right? But when we achieve—when we keep in mind the mediation of God’s word in our relationships, both to ourselves and to our work—that’s the path of blessing.

The Lord Jesus Christ came to what purpose? To roll back the curse, right? “No more let sins and sorrow grow.” What’s the next line? “Or thorns infest the ground.” He comes to make it so that “far as the curse is found,” “far as the curse is found.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for the truth of that message. Help us carry it into our Christmas season. Help us, Father, to recognize the difficulties of work, the presence of thorns and thistles. Help us not to be thorny and thistly people. Help us to see our relationships to each other and to our labor mediated by your word. Help us not to be transformed to this world, but to be conformed to—rather, but to be transformed by your word, that we might enter our work as those who seek to do it to your honor and glory.

Help us, Lord God, to be content with the fruitfulness that you give us and not despairing over the fruitlessness that sometimes appear in our work. Bless us, Lord God, with this season as we meditate upon the one who has come to drive back the effects of thorns and thistles.

In his name we pray. Amen.