Let us go to back to Genesis and I will show you where Paul and Peter got all this. This is in Genesis 3. It is in what I call the first prophecy. First, God made the prophecy about the Serpent and then He picks on the woman and then the man. We are going to go through both.
This is where these masculine and feminine virtues really got messed up. The reason? Hint: not because of God. You know, calling it the first prophecy is kind of a misnomer because God is prophesying but He is saying, Look, these are the consequences of what you two just did. I'm sorry, but this is how it's going to be. Eve, you and all your daughters are going to have pain in childbirth. (And this other thing which we will get to.) And He said, Adam, you and all your sons down through history are going to work and work and work and work and work and you're going to squeeze your sustenance out of the ground and then you're going to hand it off and die.
I mean, I am being dramatic, but that is basically what He said here. Women, you are going to have trouble. Your whole world is going to be your children. They will bring you pain coming out and they will bring you pain all the way through their lives. And this other thing. And men, you are going to find yourself working hard among all the bad things that man has brought upon this world. And then once you are totally dried out and have no strength, you are going to die. As I put it before, you will be there in the fields, hoeing, planting, whatever, and you will die between the corn stalks. I mean, it is rather serious, rather, almost morbid. But this is a result of sin. Sin brings forth agony and destruction and death. It is inevitable.
And God just told them, Look, I am sorry, but this is how it is going to be because you have brought sin into the world and you have not subjected yourself or submitted yourself to My way. So have fun! Yeah, this is your life.
But let us understand this. This is where Peter and Paul got their understanding of why men need to love their wives and why women need to submit themselves to their husbands. What did Eve do? She just went full ahead and spoke for both of them. Hey, apple, great, wonderful. Hey, Adam, try this. And he just did whatever she said. She took the reins, right? Adam, he did nothing, he just did whatever she said. And he was the one that sinned. She was deceived, he was not.
That is the way it happened. And so, if Adam had really shown any love for his wife, he would have said no, but he did not. He abdicated. That was not loving, that was just giving in, surrendering. And so he sinned.
So Peter and Paul are telling us that this is the way men and women and their relationship were destined from the beginning - because of sin. And because we are all human, we all react the same ways without God's Spirit guiding us to do what is right. And this is because God made us masculine. God made us feminine. He gave us these dominant traits, one way or the other, and they always go in one direction under sin. Some worse, some a little better. But this is the course of mankind without God's Spirit.
So what does He do here? In verse 16 God foretells the battle of the sexes. That is in that section we have not talked about yet. God predicts, and I want to emphasize this, God predicts that generally the wife will vie with her husband for control. Now, it is hidden in the Hebrew because it is kind of badly translated here. But the word desire, your desire shall be for your husband, it sometimes means a sexual desire. But it is pretty clear here that it does not mean the sexual desire. The other way it is used is desire for control, desire to overcome, the desire to prevail. It is almost militant in the way that it is used elsewhere. So He says here that in this second part of His prophecy to the woman, that most women are going to have a desire to wrest the wheel away from the man in the marriage and control the family.
But then there is that last … . . .
The first curse of sin is the pain in childbirth. And although each man is not born sinful, each of us is born under its curse, and each man immediately faces the almost overwhelming pulls of the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, which drives carnal nature that is enmity against God and continues to cause pain and hardship.
Again brethren, pain, grief, sorrow, is not in God's nature. It is the result of those living under the divisive flags of Satan and sin! However, immediately before God's curses on man for sin is God's first promise of the eventual deliverance from the curse of sin through One who would be born within the pain and sorrow of the human condition:
Immediately God gives the hope of realignment with Him through a descendant of Adam and Eve. This, of course, is the first promise of our Savior Jesus Christ. This is something that King David himself understood by the grace of God, and looked forward to, even in the midst of a culture so far from God, as we can see from his life and his inspired words in the Psalms.
The Governor - the Government - reacts by making a judgment and issuing a sentence. So we see here that another purpose, or responsibility, of government is to enforce its rules. We also see the warning that, because of law , the process toward disorganization will be sped up. That is what we begin to see, especially in those things regarding the curse that came upon Eve and then Adam. Especially the one with Adam - cursed is the ground for your sake.
We are beginning to see the fruit of disobedience to government - the process of disintegration, of disorganization. The movement toward chaos will be increased incrementally by the disobedience of the government, let us say, that is in power. Now, in chapter 4, we see a similar occurrence. We will not go through that, because it is very similar to chapter 3. But I want you to note that what we have here is a very clear record in regard to government, and we are only in the fourth chapter of this most important of all books.
Man has not used his powers very well, as both the Bible and secular history show. Go to Genesis 3:17. Adam and Eve have sinned. They have hidden themselves from God and have been discovered by God. God begins to make pronouncements regarding a judgment that is going to come on each one of them.
The beauty of the Garden of Eden begins to unravel through degeneration because very quickly mankind, represented by only two people, Adam and Eve, are not using their powers to cultivate and guard God's creation as God commanded.