17To Adam he said, “Because you have listened to your wife’s voice, and ate from the tree, about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ the ground is cursed for your sake. You will eat from it with much labor all the days of your life.
18It will yield thorns and thistles to you; and you will eat the herb of the field.
19You will eat bread by the sweat of your face until you return to the ground, for you were taken out of it. For you are dust, and you shall return to dust.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you have listened to your wife’s voice, and ate from the tree, about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ the ground is cursed for your sake. You will eat from it with much labor all the days of your life.
18 It will yield thorns and thistles to you; and you will eat the herb of the field.
19 You will eat bread by the sweat of your face until you return to the ground, for you were taken out of it. For you are dust, and you shall return to dust.”
KJVKing James Version
17 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;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
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JPSJPS Tanakh (1917)
17 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 toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'
Ecclesiastes 12:7(v19)and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Job 34:15(v19)all flesh would perish together, and man would turn again to dust.
Romans 8:20-22(v17)For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also…
Psalms 104:29(v19)You hide your face; they are troubled. You take away their breath; they die and return to the dust.
Genesis 2:7(v19)Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Show all 62 cross-references
Genesis 5:29(v17)He named him Noah, saying, “This one will comfort us in our work and in the toil of our hands, caused by the ground which Yahweh has…
Psalms 90:3(vv18–19)You turn man to destruction, saying, “Return, you children of men.”
Ecclesiastes 2:22-23(v17)For what does a man have of all his labor and of the striving of his heart, in which he labors under the sun? For all his days are sorrows,…
Isaiah 24:5-6(v17)The earth also is polluted under its inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the…
Ephesians 4:28(v19)Let him who stole steal no more; but rather let him labor, producing with his hands something that is good, that he may have something to…
Ecclesiastes 3:20(v19)All go to one place. All are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.
John 16:33(v17)I have told you these things, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have trouble; but cheer up! I have overcome the world.”
1 Corinthians 15:21-22(v19)For since death came by man, the resurrection of the dead also came by man. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made…
Genesis 18:27(v19)Abraham answered, “See now, I have taken it on myself to speak to the Lord, although I am dust and ashes.
Job 14:1(v17)“Man, who is born of a woman, is of few days, and full of trouble.
Genesis 23:4(v19)“I am a stranger and a foreigner living with you. Give me a possession of a burying-place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my…
Job 5:5(v18)whose harvest the hungry eats up, and take it even out of the thorns. The snare gapes for their substance.
Psalms 22:15(v19)My strength is dried up like a potsherd. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You have brought me into the dust of death.
Psalms 104:14-15(v18)He causes the grass to grow for the livestock, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may produce food out of the earth: wine that makes…
Ecclesiastes 1:3(v19)What does man gain from all his labor in which he labors under the sun?
Isaiah 7:23(v18)It will happen in that day that every place where there were a thousand vines at a thousand silver shekels, shall be for briers and thorns.
Jeremiah 7:23-24(v17)but this thing I commanded them, saying, ‘Listen to my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. Walk in all the way that…
Daniel 12:2(v19)Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Matthew 13:7(v18)Others fell among thorns. The thorns grew up and choked them.
2 Thessalonians 3:10(v19)For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: “If anyone is not willing to work, don’t let him eat.”
Genesis 2:16-17(v17)Yahweh God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge…
Joshua 23:13(v18)know for a certainty that Yahweh your God will no longer drive these nations from out of your sight; but they shall be a snare and a trap…
Job 21:26(v19)They lie down alike in the dust. The worm covers them.
Job 31:40(v18)let briers grow instead of wheat, and stinkweed instead of barley.” The words of Job are ended.
Psalms 103:14(v19)For he knows how we are made. He remembers that we are dust.
Psalms 127:2(v17)It is vain for you to rise up early, to stay up late, eating the bread of toil, for he gives sleep to his loved ones.
Proverbs 22:5(v18)Thorns and snares are in the path of the wicked: whoever guards his soul stays from them.
Ecclesiastes 5:17(v17)All his days he also eats in darkness, he is frustrated, and has sickness and wrath.
Isaiah 5:6(v18)I will lay it a wasteland. It won’t be pruned or hoed, but it will grow briers and thorns. I will also command the clouds that they rain no…
Isaiah 32:13(v18)Thorns and briers will come up on my people’s land; yes, on all the houses of joy in the joyous city.
Jeremiah 4:3(v18)For Yahweh says to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem, “Break up your fallow ground, and don’t sow among thorns.
Hebrews 6:8(v18)but if it bears thorns and thistles, it is rejected and near being cursed, whose end is to be burned.
Job 1:21(vv18–19)He said, “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked will I return there. Yahweh gave, and Yahweh has taken away. Blessed be Yahweh’s…
1 Samuel 15:23-24(v17)For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim. Because you have rejected Yahweh’s word, he has…
Job 5:6-7(v17)For affliction doesn’t come out of the dust, neither does trouble spring out of the ground; but man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly…
Job 17:13-16(v19)If I look for Sheol as my house, if I have spread my couch in the darkness, if I have said to corruption, ‘You are my father;’ to the worm,…
Job 19:26(v19)After my skin is destroyed, then I will see God in my flesh,
Job 21:17(v17)“How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out, that their calamity comes on them, that God distributes sorrows in his anger?
Psalms 22:29(v19)All the rich ones of the earth shall eat and worship. All those who go down to the dust shall bow before him, even he who can’t keep his…
Psalms 104:2(v18)He covers himself with light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain.
Proverbs 21:16(v19)The man who wanders out of the way of understanding shall rest in the assembly of the departed spirits.
Proverbs 24:31(v18)Behold, it was all grown over with thorns. Its surface was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down.
Ecclesiastes 1:13(v19)I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under the sky. It is a heavy burden that God has given…
Ecclesiastes 5:15(v19)As he came out of his mother’s womb, naked shall he go again as he came, and shall take nothing for his labor, which he may carry away in…
Jeremiah 12:13(v18)They have sown wheat, and have reaped thorns. They have exhausted themselves, and profit nothing. You will be ashamed of your fruits,…
Matthew 25:26-27(v17)“But his lord answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant. You knew that I reap where I didn’t sow, and gather where I didn’t scatter.…
Romans 3:19(v17)Now we know that whatever things the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be closed, and all the world…
Romans 5:12-21(v19)Therefore as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; so death passed to all men, because all sinned. For until…
1 Thessalonians 2:9(v19)For you remember, brothers, our labor and travail; for working night and day, that we might not burden any of you, we preached to you the…
Genesis 3:6(v17)When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one…
Genesis 3:11(v17)God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
Ecclesiastes 1:2-3(v17)“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” What does man gain from all his labor in which he labors…
Ecclesiastes 1:13-14(v17)I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under the sky. It is a heavy burden that God has given…
Ecclesiastes 2:11(v17)Then I looked at all the works that my hands had worked, and at the labor that I had labored to do; and behold, all was vanity and a…
Ecclesiastes 2:17(v17)So I hated life, because the work that is worked under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
Matthew 25:45(v17)“Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to…
Luke 19:22(v17)“He said to him, ‘Out of your own mouth I will judge you, you wicked servant! You knew that I am an exacting man, taking up that which I…
62 distinct cross-references across this passage (64 total citations).
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (19 sources)
Historical commentary, presented as a primary source — not an endorsement.
John Calvin1540 · Public DomainOn vv17–1917. And unto Adam he said. In the first…
17. And unto Adam he said. In the first place, it is to be observed, that punishment was not inflicted upon the first of our race so as to rest on those two alone, but was extended generally to all their posterity, in order that we might know that the human race was cursed in their person; we next observe, that they were subjected only to temporal punishment, that, from the moderation of the divine anger, they might entertain hope of pardon. God, by adducing the reason why he thus punishes the man, cuts off from him the occasion of murmuring. For no excuse was left to him who had obeyed his wife rather than God; yea, had despised God for the sake of his wife, placing so much confidence in the fallacies of Satan, — whose messenger and servant she was, — that he did not hesitate perfidiously to deny his Maker. But, although God deals decisively and briefly with Adam, he yet refutes the pretext by which he had tried to escape, in order the more easily to lead him to repentance. After he has briefly spoken of Adam’s sin, he announces that the earth would be cursed for his sake. The ancient interpreter has translated it, ‘In thy work;’ but the reading is to be retained, in which all the Hebrew copies agree, namely, the earth was cursed on account of Adam. Now, as the blessing of the earth means, in the language of Scripture, that fertility which God infuses by his secret power, so the curse is nothing else than the opposite privation, when God withdraws his favor. Nor ought it to seem absurd, that, through the sin of man, punishment should overflow the earth, though innocent. For as the primum mobile rolls all the celestial spheres along with it, so the ruin of man drives headlong all those creatures which were formed for his sake, and had been made subject to him. And we see how constantly the condition of the world itself varies with respect to men, according as God is angry with them, or shows them his favor. We may add, that, properly speaking, this whole punishment is exacted, not from the earth itself, but from man alone. For the earth does not bear fruit for itself, but in order that food may be supplied to us out of its bowels. The Lord, however, determined that his anger should like a deluge, overflow all parts of the earth, that wherever man might look, the atrocity of his sin should meet his eyes. Before the fall, the state of the world was a most fair and delightful mirror of the divine favor and paternal indulgence towards man. Now, in all the elements we perceive that we are cursed. And although (as David says) the earth is still full of the mercy of God, (Psalm 33:5,) yet, at the same time, appear manifest signs of his dreadful alienation from us, by which if we are unmoved, we betray our blindness and insensibility. Only, lest sadness and horror should overwhelm us, the Lord sprinkles everywhere the tokens of his goodness. Moreover although the blessing of God is never seen pure and transparent as it appeared to man in innocence yet, if what remains behind be considered in itself, David truly and properly exclaims, ‘The earth is full of the mercy of God.’
Again, by ‘eating of the earth,’ Moses means ‘eating of the fruits’ which proceed from it. The Hebrew word עצבון (itsabon,) which is rendered pain, is also taken for trouble and fatigue. In this place, it stands in antithesis with the pleasant labor in which Adam previously so employed himself, that in a sense he might be said to play; for he was not formed for idleness, but for action. Therefore the Lord had placed him over a garden which was to be cultivated. But, whereas in that labor there had been sweet delight; now servile work is enjoined upon him, as if he were condemned to the mines. And yet the asperity of this punishment also is mitigated by the clemency of God, because something of enjoyment is blended with the labors of men, lest they should be altogether ungrateful, as I shall again declare under the next verse.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators1599 · Public DomainOn vv17–18The transgression of God’s commandment was the cause that…
The transgression of God’s commandment was the cause that both mankind and all other creatures were subject to the curse.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp1656 · Public DomainOn vv17–19Gen 3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou…
Gen 3:17 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;
Ver. 17. Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife.] Our English historian, {a} relating the deadly difference that fell out beteen those two noble Seymours (the Lord Protector, and the Admiral his brother) in Edward VI’s time, through the instigation of their ambitious wives, passionately cries out, "O wives! The most sweet poison, the most desired evil in the world," &c. "Woman was first given to man for a comforter," saith he, "not for a counsellor, much less a controller and director." And therefore in the first sentence against man, this cause is expressed, "Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife," &c.
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Cursed is the ground for thy sake.] Hence the Greeks and Latins borrow their words {b} for ground of the Hebrew word that signifieth cursed. The curse of emptiness and unsatisfyingness lies upon it, that no man hath enough, though never so much of it. The curse also of barrenness, or unprofitable fruits, "whose end is to be burned." {Heb 6:8} The whole earth and the works therein shall be burnt up. {2Pe 3:10} It was never beautiful, nor cheerful, since Adam’s fall. At this day it lies bedridden, waiting for the coming of the Son of God, that it may be delivered from the bondage of corruption {Rom 8:20}
{a} Sir John Heywood in the Life of King Edward VI., p. 84.
{b} ’Aρουρα et Arvum ab Heb. ארר ΰψυ
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole1685 · Public DomainOn vv17–19Hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, i.e. obeyed…
Hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, i.e. obeyed the word and counsel, contrary to my express command.
Cursed is the ground, which shall now yield both fewer and worse fruits, and those too with more trouble of men’s minds, and labour of their bodies;
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for thy sake, i.e. because of thy sin; or, to thy use; or, as far as concerns thee.
In sorrow; or, with toil, or, grief.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry1710 · Public DomainOn v17We have here the sentence passed upon Adam, which…
We have here the sentence passed upon Adam, which is prefaced with a recital of his crime: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, Gen 3:17. He excused the fault, by laying it on his wife: She gave it me. But God does not admit the excuse. She could but tempt him, she could not force him; though it was her fault to persuade him to eat, it was his fault to hearken to her. Thus men's frivolous pleas will, in the day of God's judgment, not only be overruled, but turned against them, and made the grounds of their sentence. Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee. Observe,
I. God put marks of his displeasure on Adam in three instances: -
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1. His habitation is, by this sentence, cursed: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; and the effect of that curse is, Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee. It is here intimated that his habitation should be changed; he should no longer dwell in a distinguished, blessed, paradise, but should be removed to common ground, and that cursed. The ground, or earth, is here put for the whole visible creation, which, by the sin of man, is made subject to vanity, the several parts of it being not so serviceable to man's comfort and happiness as they were designed to be when they were made, and would have been if he had not sinned. God gave the earth to the children of men, designing it to be a comfortable dwelling to them. But sin has altered the property of it. It is now cursed for man's sin; that is, it is a dishonourable habitation, it bespeaks man mean, that his foundation is in the dust; it is a dry and barren habitation, its spontaneous productions are now weeds and briers, something nauseous or noxious; what good fruits it produces must be extorted from it by the ingenuity and industry of man. Fruitfulness was its blessing, for man's service (Gen 1:11, Gen 1:29), and now barrenness was its curse, for man's punishment. It is not what it was in the day it was created. Sin turned a fruitful land into barrenness; and man, having become as the wild ass's colt, has the wild ass's lot, the wilderness for his habitation, and the barren land his dwelling, Job 39:6; Psa 68:6. Had not this curse been in part removed, for aught I know, the earth would have been for ever barren, and never produced any thing but thorns and thistles. The ground is cursed, that is, doomed to destruction at the end of time, when the earth, and all the works that are therein, shall be burnt up for the sin of man, the measure of whose iniquity will then be full, Pe2 3:7, Pe2 3:10. But observe a mixture of mercy in this sentence. (1.) Adam himself is not cursed, as the serpent was (Gen 3:14), but only the ground for his sake. God had blessings in him, even the holy seed: Destroy it not, for that blessing is in it, Isa 65:8. And he had blessings in store for him; therefore he is not directly and immediately cursed, but, as it were, at second hand. (2.) He is yet above ground. The earth does not open and swallow him up; only it is not what it was: as he continues alive, notwithstanding his degeneracy from his primitive purity and rectitude, so the earth continues to be his habitation, notwithstanding its degeneracy from its primitive beauty and fruitfulness. (3.) This curse upon the earth, which cut off all expectations of a happiness in things below, might direct and quicken him to look for bliss and satisfaction only in things above.
2. His employments and enjoyments are all embittered to him.
(1.) His business shall henceforth become a toil to him, and he shall go on with it in the sweat of his face, Gen 3:19. His business, before he sinned, was a constant pleasure to him, the garden was then dressed without any uneasy labour, and kept without any uneasy care; but now his labour shall be a weariness and shall waste his body; his care shall be a torment and shall afflict his mind. The curse upon the ground which made it barren, and produced thorns and thistles, made his employment about it much more difficult and toilsome. If Adam had not sinned, he had not sweated. Observe here, [1.] That labour is our duty, which we must faithfully perform; we are bound to work, not as creatures only, but as criminals; it is part of our sentence, which idleness daringly defies. [2.] That uneasiness and weariness with labour are our just punishment, which we must patiently submit to, and not complain of, since they are less than our iniquity deserves. Let not us, by inordinate care and labour, make our punishment heavier than God has made it; but rather study to lighten our burden, and wipe off our sweat, by eyeing Providence in all and expecting rest shortly.
(2.) His food shall henceforth become (in comparison with what it had been) unpleasant to him. [1.] The matter of his food is changed; he must now eat the herb of the field, and must no longer be feasted with the delicacies of the garden of Eden. Having by sin made himself like the beasts that perish, he is justly turned to be a fellow-commoner with them, and to eat grass as oxen, till he know that the heavens do rule. [2.] There is a change in the manner of his eating it: In sorrow (Gen 3:17) and in the sweat of his face (Gen 3:19) he must eat of it. Adam could not but eat in sorrow all the days of his life, remembering the forbidden fruit he had eaten, and the guilt and shame he had contracted by it. Observe, First, That human life is exposed to many miseries and calamities, which very much embitter the poor remains of its pleasures and delights. Some never eat with pleasure (Job 21:25), through sickness or melancholy; all, even the best, have cause to eat with sorrow for sin; and all, even the happiest in this world, have some allays to their joy: troops of diseases, disasters, and deaths, in various shapes, entered the world with sin, and still ravage it. Secondly, That the righteousness of God is to be acknowledged in all the sad consequences of sin. Wherefore then should a living man complain? Yet, in this part of the sentence, there is also a mixture of mercy. He shall sweat, but his toil shall make his rest the more welcome when he returns to his earth, as to his bed; he shall grieve, but he shall not starve; he shall have sorrow, but in that sorrow he shall eat bread, which shall strengthen his heart under his sorrows. He is not sentenced to eat dust as the serpent, only to eat the herb of the field.
3. His life also is but short. Considering how full of trouble his days are, it is in favour to him that they are few; yet death being dreadful to nature (yea, even though life be unpleasant) that concludes the sentence. "Thou shalt return to the ground out of which thou wast taken; thy body, that part of thee which was taken out of the ground, shall return to it again; for dust thou art." This points either to the first original of his body; it was made of the dust, nay it was made dust, and was still so; so that there needed no more than to recall the grant of immortality, and to withdraw the power which was put forth to support it, and then he would, of course, return to dust. Or to the present corruption and degeneracy of his mind: Dust thou art, that is, "Thy precious soul is now lost and buried in the dust of the body and the mire of the flesh; it was made spiritual and heavenly, but it has become carnal and earthly." His doom is therefore read: "To dust thou shalt return. Thy body shall be forsaken by thy soul, and become itself a lump of dust; and then it shall be lodged in the grave, the proper place for it, and mingle itself with the dust of the earth," our dust, Psa 104:29. Earth to earth, dust to dust. Observe here, (1.) That man is a mean frail creature, little as dust, the small dust of the balance - light as dust, altogether lighter than vanity - weak as dust, and of no consistency. Our strength is not the strength of stones; he that made us considers it, and remembers that we are dust, Psa 103:14. Man is indeed the chief part of the dust of the world (Pro 8:26), but still he is dust. (2.) That he is a mortal dying creature, and hastening to the grave. Dust may be raised, for a time, into a little cloud, and may seem considerable while it is held up by the wind that raised it; but, when the force of that is spent, it falls again, and returns to the earth out of which it was raised. Such a thing is man; a great man is but a great mass of dust, and must return to his earth. (3.) That sin brought death into the world. If Adam had not sinned, he would not have died, Rom 5:12. God entrusted Adam with a spark of immortality, which he, by a patient continuance in well-doing, might have blown up into an everlasting flame; but he foolishly blew it out by wilful sin: and now death is the wages of sin, and sin is the sting of death.
II. We must not go off from this sentence upon our first parents, which we are all so nearly concerned in, and feel from, to this day, till we have considered two things: -
1. How fitly the sad consequences of sin upon the soul of Adam and his sinful race were represented and figured out by this sentence, and perhaps were more intended in it than we are aware of. Though that misery only is mentioned which affected the body, yet that was a pattern of spiritual miseries, the curse that entered into the soul. (1.) The pains of a woman in travail represent the terrors and pangs of a guilty conscience, awakened to a sense of sin; from the conception of lust, these sorrows are greatly multiplied, and, sooner or later, will come upon the sinner like pain upon a woman in travail, which cannot be avoided. (2.) The state of subjection to which the woman was reduced represents that loss of spiritual liberty and freedom of will which is the effect of sin. The dominion of sin in the soul is compared to that of a husband (Rom 7:1-5), the sinner's desire is towards it, for he is fond of his slavery, and it rules over him. (3.) The curse of barrenness which was brought upon the earth, and its produce of briars and thorns, are a fit representation of the barrenness of a corrupt and sinful soul in that which is good and its fruitfulness in evil. It is all overgrown with thorns, and nettles cover the face of it; and therefore it is nigh unto cursing, Heb 6:8. (4.) The toil and sweat bespeak the difficulty which, through the infirmity of the flesh, man labours under, in the service of God and the work of religion, so hard has it now become to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Blessed be God, it is not impossible. (5.) The embittering of his food to him bespeaks the soul's want of the comfort of God's favour, which is life, and the bread of life. (6.) The soul, like the body, returns to the dust of this world; its tendency is that way; it has an earthy taint, Joh 3:31.
2. How admirably the satisfaction our Lord Jesus made by his death and sufferings answered to the sentence here passed upon our first parents. (1.) Did travailing pains come in with sin? We read of the travail of Christ's soul (Isa 53:11); and the pains o death he was held by are called odinai (Act 2:24), the pains of a woman in travail. (2.) Did subjection come in with sin? Christ was made under the law, Gal 4:4. (3.) Did the curse come in with sin? Christ was made a curse for us, died a cursed death, Gal 3:13. (4.) Did thorns come in with sin? He was crowned with thorns for us. (5.) Did sweat come in with sin? He for us did sweat as it were great drops of blood. (6.) Did sorrow come in with sin? He was a man of sorrows, his soul was, in his agony, exceedingly sorrowful. (7.) Did death come in with sin? He became obedient unto death. Thus is the plaster as wide as the wound. Blessed be God for Jesus Christ!
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill1763 · Public DomainOn vv17–19And unto Adam he said,.... Last of all, being…
And unto Adam he said,.... Last of all, being the last that sinned, but not to be excused:
because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife; which was not only mean but sinful, since it was opposite to the voice of God, which he ought to have hearkened to God is to be hearkened to and obeyed rather than man, and much rather than a woman; to regard the persuasion of a woman, and neglect the command of God, is a great aggravation of such neglect; see Act 4:19.
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and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee; saying, thou shall not eat of it; that is, had eat of the fruit of the tree which God had plainly pointed unto him, and concerning which he had given a clear and an express command not to eat of it; and had delivered it to him in the strongest manner, and had most peremptorily and strictly enjoined it, adding the threatening of death unto it; so that he could by no means plead ignorance in himself, or any obscurity in the law, or pretend he did not understand the sense of the legislator. The righteous sentence therefore follows:
cursed is the ground for thy sake; the whole earth, which was made for man, and all things in it, of which he had the possession and dominion, and might have enjoyed the use of everything in it, with comfort and pleasure; that which was man's greatest earthly blessing is now turned into a curse by sin, which is a proof of the exceeding sinfulness of it, and its just demerit: so in later instances, a "fruitful land" is turned "into barrenness, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein", Psa 107:34 hence, whenever there is sterility in a country, a want of provisions, a famine, it should always be imputed to sin; and this should put us in mind of the sin of the first man, and the consequence of that:
in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life, meaning that with much toil and trouble, in manuring and cultivating the earth, he should get his living out of the produce of it, though with great difficulty; and this would be his case as long as he was in it.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley1765 · Public DomainOn vv17, 19Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy…
Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife - He excused the fault, by laying it on his wife, but God doth not admit the excuse; tho' it was her fault to persuade him to eat it, it was his fault to hearken to her. Cursed is the ground for thy sake - And the effect of that curse is, Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee - The ground or earth, by the sin of man, is made subject to vanity, the several parts of it being not so serviceable to man's comfort and happiness, as they were when they were made. Fruitfulness was its blessing for man's service, chap. i, 11-29, and now barrenness was its curse for man's punishment.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke1810 · Public DomainOn vv17–19Verse 17. Unto Adam he said] The man being…
Verse 17. Unto Adam he said] The man being the last in the transgression is brought up last to receive his sentence: Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife - "thou wast not deceived, she only gave and counselled thee to eat; this thou shouldst have resisted;" and that he did not is the reason of his condemnation. Cursed is the ground for thy sake - from henceforth its fertility shall be greatly impaired; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it - be in continual perplexity concerning the seed time and the harvest, the cold and the heat, the wet and the dry. How often are all the fruits of man's toll destroyed by blasting, by mildew, by insects, wet weather, land floods, &c.! Anxiety and carefulness are the labouring man's portion.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson1811 · Public DomainOn vv17, 19Gen 3:17. Because thou hast hearkened to the voice…
Gen 3:17. Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife — Obeyed her word and counsel, contrary to my express command. He excused the fault by laying it on his wife, but God doth not admit the excuse: though it was her fault to persuade him to eat, it was his fault to hearken to her. Cursed is the ground for thy sake — It shall now yield both fewer and worse fruits, and not even those without more care and trouble to thy mind, and the minds of thy posterity, and more labour to your bodies than otherwise would have been requisite. The earth, for the sin of man, was made subject to vanity; fruitfulness was its blessing for man’s service, and now barrenness is its curse for man’s punishment.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary1859 · Public DomainOn vv17–19Thy work, sin; thy perdition is from thyself: this…
Thy work, sin; thy perdition is from thyself: this is all that man can challenge for his own. (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown1871 · Public DomainOn vv17, 19unto Adam he said--made to gain his livelihood by…
unto Adam he said--made to gain his livelihood by tilling the ground; but what before his fall he did with ease and pleasure, was not to be accomplished after it without painful and persevering exertion.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon1874 · Public DomainOn vv17–1917. Unto Adam he said — The examination began…
17. Unto Adam he said — The examination began with Adam, (Gen_3:9,) and the offence was traced to the serpent, (Gen_3:13;) the condemnation was pronounced first upon the serpent (Gen_3:14) and last upon the man. The curse pronounced against the man seems manifold. It contains, at least, five elements of woe: 1) On account of him the very soil is cursed, and, as a penal result of that curse, 2) the ground he tills will produce thorns and thistles along with the herb which is to be his food. Gen_3:18. Moreover, 3) the cultivation of the grain which is to be his food, will involve toilsome and tiring labour, causing the sweat to stand upon his face, (Gen_3:19,) and consequently, 4) his very eating will be in sorrow. 5) At last he himself must die and return to the dust from which he was taken.
Because thou hast hearkened… and hast eaten — To listen was a culpable weakness, to eat the forbidden fruit a crime. The plea of Adam (in Gen_3:12) is of no avail. For the weakness of hearkening to his transgressing wife he must expend his manly strength in life-long painful struggle with a cursed soil, and for his own transgression of the commandment he must return to dust.
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Cursed is the ground — Instead of a delightful Paradise, he shall find the ground becoming barren and unfruitful. Often since this general curse was uttered has God, by special judgments, cursed the land for the sins of the people. See Isa_24:1-6; Jer_23:10.
In sorrow shalt thou eat — עצבון, labour, distress. The same word employed in Gen_3:16 to denote the woman’s sorrow. Her perpetual reminder of the original sin is to be the pain of childbearing; his, the corresponding sorrow of oppressive labour for food in the midst of manifold vocations.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges1878 · Public DomainOn vv17–1917. cursed is the ground] The man is addressed…
17. cursed is the ground] The man is addressed as one who in the future is to be dependent upon the soil for the means of subsistence. Not man, but the ground for man’s sake, is accursed. Its fruitfulness is withheld, in order that man may realize the penalties of sin through the pains of laborious toil. The sentence, which, reverses the blessing of Gen_2:15, befalls the whole earth.
in toil] R.V. marg. “sorrow.” But see note on Gen_3:16.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers1878 · Public DomainOn vv17, 19(17, 18) Unto Adam (without the article, and therefore…
(17, 18) Unto Adam (without the article, and therefore a proper name) he said.—Lange thoughtfully remarks that while the woman was punished by the entrance of sorrow into the small subjective world of her womanly calling, man is punished by the derangement of the great objective world over which he was to have dominion. Instead of protecting his wife and shielding her from evil, he had passively followed her lead in disobeying God’s command; and therefore “the ground,” the adâmâh out of which Adam had been formed, instead of being as heretofore his friend and willing subject, becomes unfruitful, and must be forced by toil and labour to yield its produce. Left to itself, it will no longer bring forth choice trees laden with generous fruit, such as Adam found in the garden, but the natural tendency will be to degenerate, till “thorns” only “and thistles” usurp the ground. Even after his struggle with untoward nature man wins for himself no paradisiacal banquet, but must “eat the herb of the field” (Job_30:4); and the end of this weary struggle is decay and death. In the renewed earth the golden age of paradise will return, and the tendency of nature will no longer be to decay and degeneration, but to the substitution unceasingly of the nobler and the more beautiful in the place of that which was worthless and mean (Isa_55:13).
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary1880 · Public DomainOn vv17–19And unto Adam he said. The noun here used…
And unto Adam he said. The noun here used for the first time without the article is explained as a proper name (Keil, Lunge, Speaker"s "Commentary"), though perhaps it is rather designed to express the man s representative character (Macdonald). Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife. Preceding his sentence with a declaration of his guilt, which culminated in this, that instead of acting as his wife"s protector prior to her disobedience, or as her mentor subsequent to that act, in the hope of brining her to repentance, he became her guilty coadjutor through yielding himself to her persuasions. And hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it.
For which a twofold judgment is likewise pronounced upon Adam. Cursed is the ground. Ha adamah, out of which man was taken; (Gen_2:7) i.e. the soil outside of the garden. The language does not necessarily imply that now, for the first time, in consequence of the fall, the physical glebe underwent a change, "becoming from that point onward a realm of deformity and discord, as before it was not, and displaying in all its sceneries and combinations the tokens of a broken constitution" (vide Bushnell, "Nature and the Supernatural," Ge 7); simply it announces the fact that, because of the transgression of which he had been guilty, he would find the land beyond the confines of Eden lying under a doom of sterility. (cf. Rom_8:20) For thy sake.
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1. Because of thy sin it required to be such a world.
2. For thy good it was better that such a curse should lie upon the ground. Reading d instead of r, the LXX translate ejn toiv ergoiv; and the Vulgate, In operetuo. In sorrow. Literally, painful labor (cf. ver. 16; Pro_5:10) Shalt thou eat of it. Ie. of its fruits (cf. Isa_1:7 Isa_36:16 Isa_37:30) Bread of sorrow" (Psa_127:2) is bread procured and eaten amidst hard labor. All the days of thy life.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator1887 · Public DomainOn v17Cursed is the ground for thy sake
Gen_3:17
Cursed is the ground for thy sake
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A curse which proves a blessing
This was almost the first curse revealed to us as pronounced by God, and yet it is almost the first blessing.
I. AT FIRST SIGHT WE ARE NOT PREPARED TO ADMIT THAT LABOUR IS A BLESSING. We shrink from the misery of task work which must be got through when we are least fitted to carry it on; the very word repose suggests all that is most coveted by men. It was a true instinct which led the old mythologist to invent the fable of Sisyphus and his stone, and to see in that punishment an image of horrible torture. Labour which is only laborious is and always must be grievous to endure.
II. ON ALL THE SONS OF ADAM THERE IS AN ABSOLUTE NECESSITY OF LABOUR IMPOSED. We may recognize the necessity and submit to it with gratitude, and then we find in it every hour a blessing; or we may rebel against it, and then we turn it as far as we can into a curse. The sweetness of leisure consists in the change from our ordinary employments, not in a cessation of all employment.
III. LYING SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE BLESSING OF LABOUR THERE IS ALSO A CURSE--Thorns also and thistles, etc. Work is grievous and irksome when unfruitful--when, after much toil, there is nothing to show. But let us be sure that if the work is done for Gods glory, and in His name, the fruit will spring up in His time. (A. Jessopp, D. D.)
Need of toil
The ground is our first lesson book, Notice--
1. A man does not cultivate the land by waving his hand majestically over it. The land says, If you want anything out of me you must work for it. I answer labour, I respond to industry, I reply to the importunity of toil. That is the great law of social progress.
2. The ground does not obey the dashing and angry passions of any man. The green field does not turn white, though you curse over it till you foam again at the mouth. We cannot compel nature to keep pace with our impatience; man cannot hasten the wheel of the seasons; he cannot drive nature out of its calm and solemn movement; his own fields keep him at bay.
3. Then I see God stooping and writing with His finger on the ground, and when He erects Himself and withdraws, behold the Bible He has written. Behold the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and the latter rain; Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. See the earth inscribed with terms like these, and learn from the land how to live.
4. Spiritual cultivation, like the culture of the land, cannot be hastened. You cannot extemporise moral greatness; it is a slow growth.
5. Spiritual cultivation is sometimes very hard. Circumstances are heavily against us; we are not placed in favourable localities, or under very gracious conditions. Let us be thankful to God if, though faint, we are still pursuing. (J. Parker, D. D.)
A curse, yet a blessing
I. The text suggests some of the mysteries by which we are surrounded. There is
(1) the universal fact of sin everywhere existing;
(2) the sorrow which is stamped upon the whole race;
(3) the toil that is a condition of humanity.
II. The text supplies a solution by which these mysteries are brought into reconciliation with right views of the nature and character of the Eternal. Out of mans evil and mans transgression God contrives blessing. Sorrow in itself is an apparent evil; as God manages it, it is the harbinger of joy. It was the curse, but it also brings the blessing. There is hardness and difficulty in toil, but in occupation God has given us enjoyment. It keeps the mind and heart in active and energetic power. Even the curse of sin becomes in Gods hands a blessing. There is no brighter happiness for man than the sense of being forgiven. (A. Boyd.)
The curse on the ground for mans sake
The king is punished by a curse upon his kingdom in addition to the personal woe falling on himself, just as Pharaoh was cursed in the plagues inflicted on his people. The ground, out of which he was taken, is cursed on his account, as if all pertaining to him had become evil. It is not he that suffers on account of his connection with the soil, but it is the soil that suffers on account of its connection with him, affording proof that it is not from matter that evil flows into spirit, but that it is from spirit that evil flows into matter. That soil from which he had sprung, that soil which God had just been strewing with verdure and flowers, that soil whose fruitfulness had produced the tree whose beauty and desirableness had been the womans beguilement and his own ruin, that soil must now be scourged and sterilized on his account; as if God had thus addressed him: I can no longer trust thee with a fruitful soil, nor allow the blessing with which I have blessed the earth to abide upon it; thou art to remain here for a season, but it shall not be the same earth; in mercy I will still leave it such an earth as thou canst inherit, not a wilderness nor a chaos as at first, but still with enough of gloom and desolation and barrenness to remind thee of thy sin, to say to thee continually, O man, thou hast ruined the earth over which I had set thee as king.
1. The earth is to bring forth the thorn and the thistle. Whether these existed before we do not undertake to say, nor whether they are given here merely as the representatives of all noxious plants or weeds, nor whether the object of the curse, in so far as they were concerned, was to turn them into abortions, which they really are. Taking the words as they lie before us, we find that the essence of the curse Was the multiplication of these prickly abortions till they should become noxious to man and beast and herb of the field; mere nuisances on the face of the ground. Elsewhere in Scripture they are referred to as calamities. As the effects of judgments Job refers to them (Job_31:40), and Jeremiah (Jer_12:13). As the true offspring of a barren soil the apostle speaks of them (Heb_6:8). As injurious to all around our Lord Himself alludes to them Mat_13:7-22). And it is evident that all these passages connect themselves with the original curse, and are to be interpreted by a reference to it. They are tokens of Gods original displeasure against mans sin, so that the sight of them should recall us to this awful scene in Eden, and make us feel how truly God hates sin, and how impossible it is for Him to change in His hatred of it.
2. Man is to eat the herb of the field. Originally, the fruit of the various trees was to have been mans food; the herb was for the lower creation, if not exclusively, at least chiefly. But now he is degraded. He is still, of course, to eat fruit, but in this he is to be restricted. Whether it were that, the earth being less productive in fruit, he must betake himself to inferior sustenance; or whether it might also be from a change in bodily constitution, requiring something else than fruit, we cannot say. The sentence is, Thou shalt eat the herb of the field, not the pleasant fruits of paradise.
3. He is to eat in sorrow. There was to be no glad feasting, but a bitter eating, or, if there might be feasting, it should be like Israels, with bitter herbs--the sweet and the bitter mingling.
4. He is to eat in toil--to wring a stinted subsistence out of the reluctant earth with sore labour and weariness. He cannot live but in a way which reminds him of his primal sin. Each day he hears the original sentence ringing in his ears. And yet all this hard toil serves barely to sustain a dying life; and even that only for a little, until he return to the dust. This is the end of his earthly toil!
5. He is to die. Grace does not remit the whole penalty. It leaves a fragment behind it in pain, weakness, sickness, death, though at the same time it extracts blessing out of all these relics of the curse. Besides, in thus leaving men subject to death, it leaves open the door by which the great Deliverer was to go in and rob the spoiler of his prey. By death is death to be destroyed. Man must die! He came from the dust, and he must return to it. (H. Bonar, D. D.)
The first transgression condemned
I. THE CRIME PROVED. The judge condemns the criminals conduct in several particulars.
1. His listening and yielding to temptation.
2. His neglect of Gods Word.
3. His open, positive transgression of a known law.
II. THE SENTENCE PRONOUNCED.
1. Deprivation of all the fruits and pleasures of Eden.
2. Toil.
3. Disappointment.
4. Sorrow.
5. Increasing infirmity.
6. Death.
7. Justice is tempered with mercy.
Let the subject teach us--
1. A lesson of humility. We are the degenerate children of such a parent.
2. A lesson of caution.
(1) Mark the process of falling. Satan presents some suitable object. We appear, desire, covet, throw off restraint, and transgress, in intention, and in fact.
(2) Mark the danger of falling. Our first parents fell from their paradisiacal state, and by a small temptation. Wherefore, watch, etc. (Mat_26:41).
(3) For, mark the consequences of falling. All the evils we feel or fear.
3. A lesson of encouragement. Respited, we may recover our Eden, by means of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. Contrast--the first involving himself and us in guilt, pollution, and misery--the second the reverse of this (Rom_5:12-21). (Sketches of Sermons.)
Observations
I. THE CURSE, AS WELL AS THE BLESSING UPON ALL CREATURES, PROCEEDS FROM THE WILL AND DECREE OF GOD ALONE.
1. It can be no otherwise, seeing in Him all things consist (Col_1:17), and have their being (Act_17:28).
2. And it is fit it should be so, that all men might fear before Him Jer_5:24), depend on Him (Jer_14:22), and praise Him Psa_107:32-34).
3. And it is every way best for us, who know that God judgeth righteously Psa_67:4), and that those that fear Him shall want no good thing Psa_84:1).
II. IT IS OUR OWN SIN THAT BRINGS THE CURSE OF GOD UPON ALL THAT WE ENJOY.
1. Gods mercies are over all His works (Psa_145:9), and His hand in itself is not shortened (Isa_59:1), neither is there anything that He hates but sin, or for sin (Psa_5:4-5).
2. And it is fit that God should so show His detestation of sin, by manifesting His wrath every way against such as provoke Him thereby, as He did in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and upon His own land Deu_29:23; Deu_29:25).
III. THE GREATEST OF ALL CREATURES ARE UNDER GODS COMMAND
1. They are all creatures (Jer_14:22), even the work of His hand Job_34:19).
2. He could not otherwise be an absolute Lord over all (Psa_103:19) if any creature were out of His command.
IV. THE CURSE OF GOD UPON THE CREATURES IS A PART OF MANS PUNISHMENT.
1. We have interest in them, so that their destruction is our loss.
2. Our subsistence is by them, so that to lose them, is to lose the means by which our lives should be supported.
V. MANS LIFE IN THIS WORLD IS A LIFE OF PAIN AND SORROW.
1. To make us the more sensible of sin, by our daily tasting the bitter fruits of it.
2. To move to a holy delight, and earnest seeking after things that are spiritual, the ways whereof are pleasant and the paths peace (Pr Psa_119:165).
VI. THE SHORT PLEASURE OF SIN DRAWS AFTER IT A LONG AND LASTING PUNISHMENT.
VII. MANS FOOD IS OUT OF THE EARTH. (J. White, M. A.)
Weeds
It is the law of nature that plants should be diffused as widely as possible wherever the circumstances are favourable for their growth and welfare. For this purpose they are provided with the most admirable contrivances to maintain their own existence, and to propagate the species. But man interferes with this law in his processes of gardening and horticulture. His object is to cultivate beautiful or useful plants within enclosures, from which all other plants are excluded, and where an artificial soil and climate have been prepared. He wishes to separate from the struggle of the elements, and from the competition of other species, certain kinds of flowers or vegetables which are good for food or pleasant to the eye. In this he is only partially successful, for into the plot of ground which he has set apart from the waste common of nature a large number of plants intrude; and with them he has to maintain a constant warfare. These plants are known by the common name of weeds, a term which, curious enough, is etymologically connected with Wodan or Odin, the great god of the northern mythology, to whose worship in former ages, in this country, our Wednesday, or Odinsday, was specially dedicated. Any plant may become a weed by being accidentally found in a situation where its presence is not desired; but true weeds form a peculiar and distinct class. They are at once recognized by their mean and ragged appearance; their stems and foliage being neither fleshy nor leathery, but of a soft, flaccid description, and by the absence in most of them of conspicuous or beautiful blossoms. A look of vagabondage seems to characterize most of the members of the order, which at once stamps them as belonging to a pariah class. In the vegetable kingdom they are what gipsies are in the human world, and the same mystery surrounds them which is connected with that remarkable race. Like the gipsies they are essentially intruders and foreigners; never the native children of the soil on which they flourish. They may have come from long or short distances, but they have always been translated. There is no country where they are not found, and everywhere they have to encounter the prejudices which the popular mind invariably entertains against foreigners. There is one peculiarity about weeds which is very remarkable, viz., that they only appear on ground which, either by cultivation or for some other purpose, has been disturbed by man. They are never found truly wild, in woods or hills, or uncultivated wastes far away from human dwellings. They never grow on virgin soil, where human beings bare never been. No weeds exist in those parts of the earth that are uninhabited, or where man is only a passing visitant. The Arctic and Antarctic regions are destitute of them; and above certain limits on mountain ranges they have no representatives. To every thoughtful mind the questions must occur, Have the plants we call weeds always been weeds? If not, what is their native country? How did they come into connection with man, and into dependence upon his labours? No satisfactory answer can be given to these questions. As a class there can be no doubt that weeds belong to the most recent flora of the globe. Their luxuriant and flaccid look indicates their modern origin; for the plants of the older geological ages are characterized by dry leathery leaves, and a general physiognomy like that of the existing flora of Australia. Indeed, the flora of Europe during the Eocene period bears a close resemblance to that of Australia at the present day; so that in paying a visit to our southern colony, we are transporting ourselves back to the far-off ages when our own country had a climate and vegetation almost identical. The flora of Australia is the oldest flora at present existing on our globe. Our weeds came upon the scene long subsequent to this Australian or Eocene vegetation. In our own country they form part of the Germanic flora which overspread our low grounds after the passing away of the last glacial epoch, driving before them to the mountain tops the Alpine and Arctic plants, suited to a severer climate, which previously had covered the whole of Europe. They came from Western Asia and Northern Africa. They made their appearance in company with the beautiful and fruitful flora that is specially associated with the arrival of man, and spread from the same region which is supposed to be the cradle of the human race. In this way they are co-related with the Scripture account of the fall of man. Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, was the sentence pronounced by God upon mans sin. We are not to suppose from this circumstance that these noxious plants were specially created then and there for the express purpose of carrying out the punishment of man. They were previously in existence, though they may be said to belong very specially to the human epoch; but since that mournful event they have received a new significance, and are bound up with man in a new moral relation. Most of our weeds possess all the characteristics of a desert flora; special adaptations to a dry soil and arid climate. And the reason why they find a congenial home in our gardens and cultivated fields is because the soil of such places is made artificially like the natural soil of their native country. Our fields and gardens are divested of all unnecessary vegetation, and drained of all superfluous moisture, and thus are possessed of the dry, warm, exposed soil, to which the provisions for drought with which weeds are specially furnished are admirably adapted, and where in consequence they luxuriate and overcome other plants less specially endowed. They follow in the train of man, and show a remarkable predilection for his haunts, become domesticated under his care, not merely because of the abundance of the nitrogenous and calcareous substances to be found in the vicinity of human dwellings and in manured fields and gardens, but chiefly because he provides them with the dry soil and climate in which they can best grow. It is an essential qualification of a weed that it should grow and spread with great rapidity. For this purpose it is endowed with marvellous contrivances in the way of buds and seeds. A very large number of our weeds, such as the thistle, groundsel, dandelion, colts-foot, scabious, daisy, ragwort, are composite flowers. The apparently single blossom is in reality a colony of separate blossoms, compressed by the obliteration of their floral stems around one central axis. In most of our weeds the floral parts are small and inconspicuous. The reproductive act is so arranged as to economise material and to exhaust the vital force as little as possible, and the organs concerned in it are reduced to the simplest forms consistent with efficiency. Most of the species can be fertilized by the wind, which is always available, or by the help of insects that have a wide range of distribution and are abundant everywhere. In consequence of this floral economy, the vegetative system acquires a greater predominance in this class of plants than in almost any other, so that the life of the individual is carefully preserved even amid the most untoward conditions. A weed, by reason of the strength of its vegetative system, is able to stand extremes of heat and cold, and to recover from the roughest usage. It will hold on to life in circumstances which would prove fatal to most other plants; and in this way it can abide the most favourable time for the development of its blossoms and seeds. Nay, it can propagate itself as well without blossoms as with them. Many of our weeds form long creeping stems, giving off at every joint buds which will produce perfect plants, and greatly extend the area which they occupy. That weeds belong to the most recent and specialized flora of the world is evident from their wide distribution and wonderful powers of colonization. In our own country they number about two hundred and thirty, and constitute about a seventh part of our native flora. We are constantly receiving accessions from the continent, along with the seeds of our cultivated plants. In company with the wheat and barley that can be cultivated in India down to the tropic zone, because they can be sowed and reaped during the coldest quarter of the year, have been introduced a crowd of the common annual weeds of our country, such as the shepherds purse, the chickweed, the spurge, and the corn-pimpernel, which also run through the cycle of their lives in the winter quarter. Half the weeds of American agriculture have been imported from Europe; and of the 2,100 flowering plants of the Northern United States, 320 are European. Australia and New Zealand have sent us no weeds, and America only a very few. The solution of this mystery, as Dr. Seemann clearly proves, is not to be found in any consideration of climate, soil, or circumstances. It is a question of race. The present flora of the United States and of Australia is older than the Germanic flora which now constitutes the principal vegetation of Europe. It is very similar to, if not absolutely identical with, that of Europe during the Miocene and Eocene epochs. America and Australia have not yet arrived at the degree of floral development to which Europe has attained; consequently plants coming to our country from Australia and America would not come as colonists, with a new part to play in it, but as survivors of an older flora whose cycle of existence had ages ago run out there. Our system of the rotation of crops is based upon the fact that the soil which has borne one kind of harvest will not produce the same next year, but requires another kind of crop to be grown on it. And Nature in her wilds carefully observes the same law. Whatever our weeds were in the original state, they are now like the corn which man sows in the same field with them, endowed with habits so long acquired that they will part with their life sooner than abandon them. The original wild plant of the corn--if there ever was such a thing, and this admits of grave doubts--from which our corn was developed, may have been able to propagate and extend itself freely independent of man; but we know that without mans agency, the corn, as it is now modified, would perish. It does not grow of its own accord, or by the natural dispersion and germination of its seed. Left to itself, it would quickly disappear and become extinct. The one condition of its permanency in the world, of its growth in quantities sufficient for mans food, is that it be sown by man in ground carefully prepared beforehand to receive it. The same rule would appear to hold good in regard to the weeds which, in spite of himself, he cultivates along with it, and whose persistent presence makes the cultivation of the soil so difficult to him. We know them only in an artificial condition as abnormal forms of original wild types; and as such as they are incapable of continuing themselves without mans help. Left to grow in soil that has reverted to its original wild condition, they would soon be overpowered by the surrounding vegetation, the grasses and mosses, and in a shorter or longer space of time they would inevitably disappear. I have seen many ruins of dwellings in upland glens from which the nettles and all the weeds that once grew in the field and garden plot have utterly vanished, leaving only a dense thicket of bracken, or a lovely smooth carpet of greensward, to indicate among the heather that man had once inhabited the place. We are bound, therefore, to believe that so long as man cultivates the ground, so long will these weeds make their appearance, and in striking correlation with the primeval curse, compel him in the sweat of his face to eat his bread. When he ceases to till the ground, they will cease to grow in it. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Consequences of the Fall
The world was made for man, and man for God. The upper link gave way, and all that depended on it fell. Man rebelled, and carried away from its allegiance a subject world. (W. Arnot.)
The Fall robbed man of his glory
The harp of Eden, alas! is broken. Unstrung and mute an exiled race have hung it on the willows; and Ichabod stands written now in the furrows of mans guilty forehead, and on the wreck of his ruined estate. Some things remain unaffected by the blight of sin, as God made them for Himself; the flowers have lost neither their bloom nor fragrance; the rose smells as sweet as it did when bathed in the dews of paradise, and seas and seasons, obedient to their original impulse, roll on as of old to their Makers glory. But from man, alas! how is the glory departed? Look at his body when the light of the eye is quenched, and the countenance is changed, and the noble form is festering in corruption--mouldering into the dust of death. Or, change still more hideous, look at the soul! The spirit of piety dead, the mind under a dark eclipse, hatred to God rankling in that once loving heart, it retains but some vestiges of its original grandeur, just enough, like the beautiful tracery and noble arches of a ruined pile, to make us feel what glory once was there, and now is gone. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
Testimony to mans Fall
No man that takes a view of his own dark and blinded mind, his slow and dull apprehension, his uncertain staggering judgment, roving conjectures, feeble and mistaken reasonings about matters that concern him most; ill inclinations, propension to what is unlawful to him and destructive, aversion to his truest interests and best good, irresolution, drowsy sloth, exorbitant and ravenous appetites and desires, impotent and self-vexing passions, can think human nature, in him, is in its primitive integrity, and as pure as when it first issued from its high and most pure original. (J. Howe.)
The doctrine of the Fall, commended to man' reason
The two great systems of nature and revelation are sometimes supposed to clash--to be opposed to each other; as if the revealings of the one were inconsistent with the discoveries of the other; as if they were two volumes, of which the principles and details of one were opposed to the principles and details of the other. The truth of this matter seems to be, that revelation differs from nature only in this, that revelation pours a broader and a clearer light upon the mysteries of creation. When we look forth upon the face of nature in the dim and shadowy twilight of morning, and when again we look forth upon the same scene in the bright and unclouded splendour of noon, there is no actual change in the landscape; the mountains have not changed their place, the forests have not changed their trees, the rivers have not changed their course; the only difference is, that the splendour of noon has flung a brighter and a clearer light than the grey mists of the morning. We are too often met with high panegyrics upon the qualities and the powers of man, and we are told in every variety of language of the lofty virtues of man--of the dignity of human nature--of the towering intellect, the refined feeling, and the virtuous heart of man; and we are told of all this, as if his powers had never been impaired, or as if his intellect had never been shattered, or as if his virtues had never been blighted, or his heart been corrupted, or his feelings debased, and his whole nature become the wreck and ruin of what it once had been. The line of argument, along which we shall endeavour to conduct you, shall go to prove that this great principle of revelation is also a principle of nature; and that though it lies unexplained in the pages of natural religion, it is explained and accounted for in the pages of revealed religion. We shall consider the subject, first, in reference to the world, and then in reference to man.
1. And first we argue, that nature is ever presenting to us evidences of the Fall, and that those evidences discover themselves to us in the present aspect of our world. It is very true, that as the eye wanders throughout all the departments of nature, it can trace the evidences of the love and the benevolence of the great Creator. In the language of the apostle, He gives rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. And not only this, but we find that the smallest flower of the field has all that is required for its existence and its loveliness, as much as the stateliest tree of the forest; and the minutest insect of creation has all that enables it to fulfil the ends of its being, as much as the mightiest and the noblest in the animal world. But in the midst of all this living and breathing evidence, he will discover evidences of an opposite character; he will discover evidences of the going forth of wrath--that some evil has befallen our world; and he will discover that the evidences of Divine benevolence are not more palpable than these evidences of Divine wrath. We allude not now to the poverty, the wretchedness, the helplessness, the diseases, the deaths, that press and crush the family of man; but we allude to those physical phenomena, that are everywhere discoverable throughout all the fields of creation. If there be lands where all is beauty and fertility, there are also lands whore all is waste and sterility. If there be climates where all is balmy and delicious and calm, there are also climates where all is darkened with clouds and disturbed by storms. There are wide regions of our globe, so enwrapped in the mantle of eternal snows, and so defended by vast icy barriers, that like the very battlements of nature, they resist the foot of man. There are wide regions of our globe, even in the most delicious climes, where the stateliest trees of the forest and the loveliest flowers of the field and the richest fruits of the ground grow spontaneously with a strange luxuriance, where yet at the same time the fatal vapours and the envenomed atmosphere preclude the presence of man, as effectually as the angel with the flaming sword precluded him at the gate of paradise. And while these characteristics are discernible throughout the face of creation, there are at the same time mighty and tremendous agents of evil, called into existence by the Creator and sent abroad into our world; agents more destructive than the angel of the Passover that slew the firstborn of Egypt; and more terrible than the angel of destruction that smote the host of Sennacherib. If the going forth of these angels from heaven is to be regarded as a going forth of wrath from the Creator, what shall we think of the spirit of the simeon, that from time to time has lifted the sands of the African deserts, and has borne them onward like the waves of the sea, till the stateliest cities of Egypt and the most gigantic architecture the world has ever seen, lie even to this hour buried deep, deep, within their bosom? What shall we think of the spirit of the volcano, pouring forth rivers of burning lava and clouds of smoking dust, enwrapping whole regions in terrific conflagration, and, as in Italy, beautiful Italy, burying cities with all their miserable inhabitants? What shall we think of the spirit of the earthquake by which whole districts have been wasted, mighty nations submerged beneath the waves, stately cities sunk into ruins, and whole continents frighted from their propriety? But where nature is thus silent, revelation speaks. Where the volume of nature closes, the volume of revelation opens. Nature reveals to us the fact that our world is a fallen and a ruined world; revelation gives the explanation of that fact: that in consequence of sin our world has fallen under the curse of its Creator, that it has been a bright and a beautiful and a happy world, but that in consequence of sin a curse was uttered, Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life, and that from henceforth a darkening destiny has been enchained to our planet. Wrath has gone forth against it; and our once beautiful world has become a fallen world.
2. But, as we intimated at the commencement, this argument may be carried further, and may be applied to the moral condition of man, quite as conclusively as to his physical condition. Or perhaps, to speak more correctly, it may be applied to the present condition of man, quite as conclusively as to the present condition of the world in which he lives. The destiny of man is a destiny of trouble. The experience of every man justifies the statement of the patriarch, that man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward. It is the belief of the heathen; it is the creed of the Christian; it is the record of the historian; it is the maxim of the philosopher; it is the song of the poet. We will not believe--we cannot believe, that a God of benevolence and love, a God who must delight Himself in the comforts and not in the sorrows, in the happiness and not in the miseries of His creatures, originally created man for so melancholy a doom. And the same remark will apply to his moral condition. There are in the heart of every man the workings of evil passions, the strugglings of carnal tendencies, the violence of feelings that are not good: licentiousness of thought, the constant resistance to the empire of holiness, the striving of the flesh against the spirit. There are the anger, the malice, the hatred, the revenge, the covetousness, the ambition, the wars, the bloodshed, that characterize the whole history of man, so that it is little else than a history of the wars and the bloodshed that ambition and pride and revenge and every foul and hateful passion have called into existence. We will not believe--we cannot believe--that a God of benevolence and love, a God of holiness and of peace, could have originally created man in this state, or planted in his heart unholy passions like these. This sad condition of man is a fact that may be read in the pages of natural religion; but the explanation of the fact, and the causes of this sad condition, are a mystery in natural religion. But it is here that revelation interposes and resolves the mystery, Natural religion, like the astrologers of Chaldea, could not read the mysterious handwriting on the wall: but revealed religion, like the prophet of the Lord, reads and interprets the writing. The words of the Creator, as addressed to Adam, were--In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; and again--In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread; and again, to the woman--In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. (M. H. Seymour, M. A.)
Natural evidence of the curse
I. If this sentence was executed upon man and the earth, without all doubt it may at this day be distinguished; therefore let us inquire in the first place whether there are any signs of a curse upon the ground? Towards the latter end of the fifth chapter of Genesis we read, that when a son was born to Lamech, he called his name Noah, which signifies comfort, because he was to comfort them concerning their work, and toil of their hands, because of the ground which the Lord had cursed. Lamech knew, therefore, that a curse had been pronounced upon the ground, for the transgression of Adam; and he knew also, either by tradition, or the spirit of prophecy, that it should take place more fully in the days of Noah, whose favour and acceptance with God should give comfort to men, and render more tolerable that toil and labour which should be the necessary consequence of this curse upon the ground; which, therefore, was brought upon the earth by the general deluge. When the wickedness and violence of the human race had wearied out the patience and long suffering of God, and obliged His justice to inflict the punishment which had been threatened, He declared in His revelation to Noah that He would destroy man with the earth. St. Peter also confirms the same, where he takes occasion to inform ungodly men, that the world which then was, being overflowed with water, perished. Whence it appears that the flood should, and actually did, amount to a destruction of the earth, of which destruction and the manner of it, the earth in all parts has so many signs at this day, that a man endued with eyesight, understanding, and a very little experience, cannot choose but to see and acknowledge it.
II. A second consequence of the Fall, as it stands in the words of the text is, Sorrow to man in the eating of the fruit of the ground. And here it may be useful to observe how the punishment of man is suited to the nature of his crime. His first and great act of disobedience was eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree; and it was surely just and proper that he who had eaten in sin should thenceforth eat in sorrow. We are indeed upon terms with our Creator quite different from the lilies of the field, or the fowls of the air: they are now as He made them at first, but we are not so; and hence it comes to pass that labour and travel is a law of universal obligation, and that If any man will not work neither should he eat.
III. The third part of the sentence pronounced upon mans disobedience, is the prevailing of thorns and thistles upon the ground. If the powers and properties of these two sorts of vegetables be well considered, it will soon appear how well they are fitted to propagate a curse, by increasing the trouble and labour we are obliged to bestow in the cultivation of the earth. For these are much more strong and fruitful than such herbs and grain as are of the greatest use; and they are more apt to disperse themselves abroad and overrun the ground. With respect to thistles in particular, we shall discover a very plain reason for this, if we compare their seeds with the seeds of wheat. For the grain of wheat ought to be lodged at some little depth in the earth, to which it cannot easily reach without human assistance. It can only be shed, and fall down from the ear upon the surface of the ground, where it would be exposed, and ready to be devoured by the birds of the air, or the vermin of the earth, or perhaps lie till it rotted and perished with rain and frost for want of being covered with earth. But the seeds of thistles presently strike down roots in the earth wherever they happen to light, and need no such care and assistance. Then again the grains of wheat are naked and heavy, and can fall only as a dead weight at the foot of the plant which bore them, without being able to stir any farther, and shift themselves to a place fit for their reception and growth. But the case is much otherwise with the seeds of thistles. These are small and light, and are furnished with a fine downy plume, which serves them as wings, by means of which they are borne up and wafted about from place to place by every breath of wind, till they are transplanted to every corner of the field where the parent thistle grew, insomuch that when this plant is ripe, and its seeds hanging loose and disposed to fall off, it is common to see large fields covered all over with them, after any little wind. Nor ought it to be passed over that there is a great difference in the multiplication of these two kinds of seed. Some sorts of thistles bear thirty, some fifty, and some upwards of a hundred heads, with a hundred (and in some kinds several hundred) seeds in each of the heads. And if a moderate reckoning be made, and we suppose all the seeds to take rightly, grow up and fructify, then one single plant would produce at the first crop above twenty thousand: which succeeding in like manner, would bring a second crop of several hundreds of millions; an increase so enormous as can hardly be imagined: and it is plain that a few crops more, if not hindered by some means, but carried regularly on, would in a very short time stock the whole globe of the earth in such a manner as scarcely to leave room for anything else. But some thistles have other ways of planting and spreading themselves, besides that of propagating by their seeds. The common way-thistle, as it is called, besides its innumerable seeds, all winged and prepared for flight, hath its roots spreading to great lengths, and sending up suckers or new plants on every side of it. In a little while these, if suffered to continue, send up others, and they more, without tale or end. So that by this method only, one plant will overrun a vast tract of land in a very short time, suppressing, stifling, and destroying all other good and useful herbage. Besides, it is not every soil that is fit for the nourishment of wheat, and scarcely any will produce it for more than two or three years together, without great expense being bestowed on its cultivation: whereas there is hardly any ground or soil whatsoever, high or low, hill, valley, or plain, where thistles will not take and flourish for ages together. Having said so much upon thistles, I may be shorter in my remarks upon thorns; the rather because a great deal of what has been offered concerning the former is as true of the latter; which grow in almost every kind of soil, running on and increasing of themselves, and endued with the same worthless nature and mischievous qualities. For a proof of this we need only look upon the bramble, which occurs everywhere, and throws itself about without measure. The berries it bears are innumerable, and each of them contains a large mass of seeds. The roots push forward under ground, and the branches and suckers running on to great lengths, trail upon the ground, and send down fresh roots out of their sides; by which means they are diffused about, and multiplied without bounds. But as to thorns, the chief example we have is in that species which is known by the name of the gorse or furze. This is the vilest and most mischievous shrub upon the face of the earth. It will let nothing thrive or prosper, or so much as grow near it. It is so beset with prickles, that it is hardly possible to approach it in any way without hurt: and so fruitful withal, that for almost half the year it is covered or rather loaded with flowers, all of which go off into pods, charged with seeds. It shoots forth stubborn roots far and near, from which other young plants are growing up: these send up others as fast as the mother plant, so that we need the less wonder to see this noxious thorn so plentifully abounding, and such large tracts of land wholly covered and overrun by it. Other thorns are of so hard and stubborn a nature as to render it exceedingly difficult, and always impracticable without great labour and expense and patience, ever wholly to extirpate and clear the ground of them. If these things are duly reflected upon, it must be allowed that the sentence upon Adam, Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it, thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, was effectually put in execution; and that not only upon him, but more especially upon us, his posterity to the end of the world. When we think of this curse upon the ground, we should also remember that it extends to our own heart, which, since the Fall, is by nature barren and unprofitable. It is a soil in which every ill weed will take root and spread itself. There the thorns of worldly care, and the thistles of worldly vanity, will grow and flourish. As the husbandman watches his land, so should the Christian search and examine his heart, that he may cast out of it all those unprofitable weeds and roots of bitterness which will naturally get possession of it. If this work is rightly performed, the soil will be ready for the good seed of the word of God, which will spring up and prosper under the influence of Divine grace, as the corn groweth by a blessing of rain and sunshine from the heaven above. (W. Jones. M. A.)
Thorns the curse of Adam and the crown of Christ
Nature is a mirror in which we behold both the skill and character of the Divine Artificer; but the reflected image--owing to the peculiarity of the material, or of the angle of vision--is not always a true one. In every part of creation we find examples of wasted energy and frustrated design; foundations laid, but the building never completed; the skeleton formed, but never clothed with living flesh; an unceasing production of means that are never used, embryos that are never vivified, germs that are never developed. We cannot, however, in such things, measure the Divine proceedings by our human standards; for, taking a larger view of the subject, we find that the imperfection of particular parts is necessary for the perfection of the whole scheme, and all instances of failure are made to work together for the general good. It is to this tendency of nature to overflow its banks, to attempt more than she can execute, to begin more than she can finish, that we owe our own daily bread. For if the corn plant produced only a sufficient number of seeds barely to perpetuate the species, there would be no annual miracle of the multiplication of the loaves; and man, always at the point of starvation, could neither replenish and subdue the earth, nor accomplish any of the great purposes of his existence. Thorns are among the most striking examples of failure on the part of nature to reach an ideal perfection. They are not essential organs, perfect parts, but in every case altered or abortive structures. They are formed in two different ways.
When the hairs that occur on the stem of a plant are enlarged and hardened, they form rigid opaque conical processes such as those of the rose and the bramble. The so-called thorns of these plants are not, however, true thorns, but prickles, for they have only a superficial origin, being produced by the epidermis only, and having no connection with the woody tissue. They may be easily separated from the stem, without leaving any mark or laceration behind. True thorns or spines, on the contrary, have a deeper origin and cannot be so removed. They are not compound hardened hairs, but abnormal conditions of buds and branches. A branch, owing to poverty of soil, or unfavourable circumstances, does not develop itself; it produces no twigs or leaves; it therefore assumes the spinous or thorny form, terminating in a more or less pointed extremity, as in the common hawthorn. In some cases, as in the sloe, we see the transformation going on at different stages; some branches bearing leaves on their lower portions and terminating in spines. A bud by some means or other becomes abortive; there is a deficiency of nutriment to stimulate its growth; it does not develop into blossom and fruit. Its growing point, therefore, is hardened; its scaly envelopes are consolidated into woody fibre, and the whole bud becomes a sharp thorn. Leaves are also occasionally arrested in their development and changed into thorns, as in the stipules of Robinia, of the common barberry, and of several species of acacia. The middle nerve of the leaf in a few instances absorbs to itself all the parenchyma or green cellular substance, and therefore hardens into a thorn; and in the holly all the veins of the leaves become spiny. In all these cases thorns are not necessary, but accidental appendages, growths arrested and transformed by unfavourable circumstances; and nature, by the law of compensation, converts them into means of defence to the plants on which they are produced--not very effective defences in most instances, but still analogous to the spines of the hedgehog and the quills of the porcupine, and typical of the plan according to which nature supplies some method of preservation to every living thing that is liable to be injured. By cultivation many thorny plants may be deprived of their spines. The apple, the pear, and the plum tree, in a wild state are thickly covered with thorns; but when reared in the shelter of the garden, and stimulated by all the elements most favourable for their full development, they lose these thorns, which become changed into leafy branches, and blossoming and fruit-bearing buds. In this way man acquires the rights assigned to him by God, and nature yields to him the pledges of his sovereignty, and reaches her own ideal of beauty and perfection by his means. But when, on the other hand, he ceases to dress and keep the garden, nature regains her former supremacy, and brings back the cultivated plants to a wilder and more disordered condition than at first. A garden abandoned to neglect, owing to the absence or the carelessness of the owner, presents a drearier spectacle than the untamed wilderness; everything bursting out into rank luxuriance; stems originally smooth covered with prickles, and buds that would have burst into blossoms changed into thorns. It is a remarkable circumstance that whenever man cultivates nature, and then abandons her to her own unaided energies, the result is far worse than if he had never attempted to improve her at all. No country in the world, now that it has been so long let out of cultivation, has such a variety and abundance of thorny plants, as the once-favoured heritage of Gods people, the land flowing with milk and honey. Travellers call the Holy Land a land of thorns. This tendency of nature to produce a greater variety of thorny plants in ground let out of cultivation, as illustrated by the present vegetation of Palestine, throws considerable light upon the curse pronounced upon Adam when he had sinned: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. Many individuals believe that we have in this curse the origin of thorns and thistles--that they were previously altogether unknown in the economy of nature. It is customary to picture Eden as a paradise of immaculate loveliness, in which everything was perfect, and all the objects of nature harmonized with the holiness and happiness of our first parents. The ground yielded only beautiful flowers and fruitful trees--every plant reached the highest ideal of form, colour, and usefulness of which it was capable. Preachers and poets in all ages have made the most of this beautiful conception. It is not, however, Scripture or scientific truth, but human fancy. Nowhere in the singularly measured and reticent account given in Genesis of mans first home do we find anything, if rightly interpreted, that encourages us to form such an ideal picture of it. It was admirably adapted to mans condition, but it was not in all respects ideally perfect. The vegetation that came fresh from Gods hand, and bore the impress of His seal that it was all very good, was created for death and reproduction; for it was called into being as the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree bearing fruit, whose seed was in itself. We must remember, too, that it was before and not after the Fall that Adam was put into the garden to dress and keep it. The very fact that such a process of dressing and keeping was necessary, indicates in the clearest manner that nature was not at first ideally perfect. The skill and toil of man called in, presuppose that there were luxuriant growths to be pruned, tendencies of vegetation to be checked or stimulated, weeds to be extirpated, tender flowers to be trained and nursed, and fruits to be more richly developed. The primeval blessing consisted in replenishing the earth and subduing it; and in no other way could man subdue the earth than by cultivating it. But the process of cultivation of necessity implies the existence of thorns and weeds. For in cultivating any spot we have to contend against the great law of nature which spreads every plant as widely as its constitution will permit. What then, we may ask, is implied in the language of the curse, Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee? The Hebrew form of the curse implies, not that a new thing should happen, but that an old thing should be intensified and exhibited in new relations. Just as the rainbow, which was formerly a mere natural phenomenon, became after the flood the symbol of the great world covenant; just as death, which during all the long ages of geology had been a mere phase of life, the termination of existence, became after the Fall the most bitter and poisonous fruit of sin: so thorns, which in the innocent Eden were the effects of a law of vegetation, became significant intimations of mans deteriorated condition. It is in relation to man, solely, that we are to look at the curse; for though the production of briers and thorn-bearing plants may add to mans labour and distress, it supplies food and enjoyment for multitudes of inferior creatures, and especially birds and insects. Man, in Eden, was placed in the most favourable circumstances. It was a garden specially prepared by God Himself for his habitation, and stocked with all that he could reasonably require. It was to be a pattern after which his own efforts in improving the world were to be modelled--a coign of vantage, a select and blessed centre, from which he was by degrees to subdue the wild prodigality of nature, and make of the earth an extended paradise. And, therefore, though the native tendencies of vegetation were not altogether eradicated, they were so far restrained that the dressing and keeping of the garden furnished him with healthful employment for all his powers of body and mind, and conferred upon him the dignity of developing the perfection, which potentially, though not actually, existed in nature, and thus becoming a fellow worker with God. But when excluded from Eden, he had to encounter, with powers greatly weakened by sin, the full, merciless force of natures untamed energies; energies, too, excited into greater opposition against him by his own efforts to subdue them. For, as I have already said, the very process of cultivation, while it removes the thorns and briers of the soil, will, if it be given up, produce a greater variety and luxuriance of thorns and thistles than the ground originally produced. The very fertility imparted to the soil would, if allowed to nourish its native vegetation, result in a greater rankness of useless growth. And therefore the tiller of the ground must never relax his efforts. I believe that the thorns and briers thus introduced in connection with the human epoch, but before the Fall, were anticipative consequences, prophetic symbols of that Fall. We err greatly, if we suppose that sin came into the world unexpectedly--produced a sudden shock and dislocation throughout nature, and took God as it were by surprise--that the atonement was a Divine after thought to remedy a defect in Gods creative foresight and natural law. He who sees the end from the beginning, knew that such a mournful moral lapse would happen--that Creation would fall with its king and high priest, and had therefore made preparations for it, not only, in the plans of heaven, but also in the objects and arrangements of earth. There are many things in the scheme of nature which have a reference to the fact of sin before it became a fact; which remind us unmistakeably that God, in fitting up this world to be the habitation of a moral being who should fall through sin, and be restored through suffering, had filled it with types and symbols of that fall and that restoration. When God said to Adam, Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, He acted according to a plan uniformly pursued by Him in all His subsequent dispensations and dealings with men; by which in gracious condescension to our two-fold nature, and to the carnal and spiritual classes of mankind, He associated the natural with the spiritual, gave the outward sign of the inward spiritual truth. He set the field of nature with types of degeneracy and arrested growth, which should symbolize to man the consequences upon his own nature of his own sin. What then are the thorns, looking at them in this typical aspect, produced by the sinful, accursed soil of mans heart and life?
1. Labour is one of the thorns of the curse. All things, says the wise man, are full of labour. Without it life cannot be maintained. Unremitting labour from day to day and from year to year--except in the case of a few races into whose lap nature pours, almost unsolicited, her prodigal stores, and who therefore continue children in body and mind all their lives--is the condition upon which we receive our daily bread. Much of this labour is indeed healthy. In work alone is health and life; and it is for work that God has created faculties. But how much of it, nevertheless, is terrible drudgery, effectually hindering the development of the higher faculties of the mind and soul, wearisome effort, vanity, and vexation of spirit! How much of failure is there in it, of disproportion between desires and results! How much of it is like rolling the fabled stone of Sisyphus up the steep hill only to roll down again immediately--like weaving ropes of sand! How often does the heart despair amid the unprofitableness of all its labour under the sun! We plough our fields and sow our seed; but instead of a bountiful harvest to reward us, too often comes up a crop of thorns and thistles, to wound the toiling hand and pierce the aching brow.
2. Then there is the thorn of pain--the darkest mystery of life. Some maintain that pain exists by necessity, that it has its root in the essential order of the world. It is the thorn that guards the rose of pleasure--the sting that protects the honey of life. But ask any martyr to physical suffering if that explanation satisfies him. Why, if the purpose of pain is a purely benevolent one, should it be so excessive? Why should it rend and rack the frame with agony? Why should it last so long? Methinks, if pain were meant merely to warn us of the presence of evil, and guard us against it, that a much less degree and a shorter duration of it would suffice. The Bible, and the Bible alone, tells us the cause and the origin of it. It tells us that it is nothing else than a witness for sin--the thorn which mans body, weakened and palsied by sin, produces. Man feels in his body the physical consequences of the death which his soul has died. He has the thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him, that he may be reminded continually of his sin and mortality, and be induced to walk softly all the days of his life.
3. Then there is the thorn of sorrow. Every branch of the human tree may be arrested and transformed by some casualty into a thorn of sorrow. The staff of friendship upon which we lean may break and pierce the hand. The bud of love which we cherish in our heart, and feed with the life blood of our affections, may be blighted by the chill of death, and become a thorn to wound us grievously. That civilization which has lessened physical troubles, has rendered us more susceptible to mental ones; and side by side with its manifold sources of enjoyment, are opened up manifold sources of suffering. And why is all this? Why is man, so highly cultivated, the possessor of such vast resources of science and art, still born to trouble as the sparks fly upward? There is no possible way of accounting for it save by the primeval curse: In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.
4. And lastly, as the climax of all lifes evils, is death, the prospect and the endurance of it, from both of which our whole nature, originally made in the image of God, and destined to live forever, revolts with the utmost abhorrence. Such are the thorns which mans nature, under the withering, distorting curse of sin, produces. Cursed is the ground within, as well as the ground without, for mans sake; and in labour, in pain, in sorrow, and in death, does he eat of its fruit. From all these thorns Jesus came to deliver us. The second Adam in the poverty of His condition has recovered for us all that the first Adam in the plenitude of his blessings lost. The Roman soldiers platted a crown of thorns and put it upon the head of Jesus; but they little knew the significance of the act. Upon the august brow of mans Surety and Substitute was thus placed in symbol, what was done in spiritual reality, a chaplet woven of those very thorns which the ground, cursed for mans sake, produced. None of these thorns grew in the sacred soil of Jesus heart. But He who knew no sin was made sin for us. He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. He could, no doubt, by the exercise of His almighty power, remove the thorns of mans life. He who created the world by a word, had only to command, and it should be done. But not in this way could the necessities of the case be met. It was no mere arbitrary power that called the thorns into existence; it was justice and judgment: and, therefore, mere arbitrary power could not eradicate them; it required mercy and truth. And mercy and truth could be reconciled with justice and judgment only by the obedience and sacrifice of the Son of God. Jesus had, therefore, to wear the thorns which mans sin had developed, in order that man might enjoy the peaceful fruits of righteousness which Christs atonement had produced. And what is the result? By wearing these thorns He has blunted them, plucked them out of our path, out of our heart, out of our life. By enduring them He conquered them. The crown of pain became the crown of triumph; and the submission to ignominy and suffering became the assertion and establishment of a sovereignty over every form of suffering. Evil is now a vanquished power. Every woe bears upon it the inscription overcome. He bore the thorny crown of labour, and labour is now a sacred thing, a precious discipline, a merciful education. It is the lowest step of the ladder by which man ascends the Edenic height from which he fell. He wore the thorny crown of pain, and pain is now robbed of the element that exasperates our nature against it. By His own example He teaches us that we must be made perfect through suffering; and knowing this, we do not feel pain to be less, but we feel a strength and a patience which enable us to rise superior to it. As the Prince of sufferers, He wore the thorny crown of sorrow, and He has made, in the experience of His afflicted ones, that abortive thorn to produce the blossom of holiness and the fruit of righteousness. Sorrow is no more to the Christian the curse of Adam, but the cross of Christ. It is the crown and badge of his royal dignity, the proof of Divine sonship. And, lastly, He wore the thorny crown of death; and therefore He says, If a man keep My sayings, he shall not see death. He has indeed to pass through the state, but the bitterness of death for him is past. He has only to finish his course with joy; to fall asleep in Jesus; to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
A lesson from the ground
If my horse, if my ox, if my dog, do not do as I want them to do, says the angry man, I make them, and then with his blood boiling hot he goes out into the fields and he can do nothing! The ground says, If you want to do anything with me you must do it with hopeful patience; I am a school in which men learn the meaning of patient industry, patient hopefulness. I never answer the anger of a fool or the passion of a demented man. I rest. We cannot compel nature to keep pace with our impatience; man cannot hasten the wheel of the seasons; man cannot drive nature out of its calm and solemn movement; his own fields keep him at bay. He would like to get on faster, faster--it would please him to have three wheat harvests every year, it would delight him to have an orchard stripping on the first day of every month. He makes his dog go out when he likes--his own trees put out their branches without him and mock his fury. Nature says, I must have my long holiday; nature says, I must have my long, long sleep. Without recreation and rest, mans life would not be solidly and productively developed; he may be lashed and scourged and overdriven and maddened, but broad, massive, enduring growth he never can realize unless he operates upon the law of steady slowness. Such is the great lesson of nature. We sometimes think we could improve the arrangements of Providence in this matter of the ground. A man standing in his wheat field is apt to feel that it would be an exceedingly admirable arrangement if he could have another crop of wheat within the year. He thinks it could be managed: he takes up the roots out of the earth and he says, This will never do; why, I have lost my year herein--now I will command the ground to bring forth another crop, and this agricultural Canute, having waved his hand over the fields, is answered with silence. That must be your law of progress. There is the very great temptation to hasten to be rich. I see a man in yonder corner, not half so able as I am, never had half the education I have had, and by a lucky swing of the hand he makes ten thousand pounds, and I am labouring at my mill, or at my counter, or in my field, and am getting very little--and very slowly. I look in the other corner and see exactly such another man, and he, too, by a lucky twist of the hand, makes ten thousand a year; and I never make one, by long, patient, steady work. I know what I will do; Ill put off this old labourers coat, and buy a new fine one, and go and join these men and do as they do, and I will have a hundred thousand pounds in a month, and horses and carriages and estates, and I will not go at this slow snail pace any longer--why should I? I go--and I fail, as I deserve to do. Society never could be built upon the action of such men as have now been described. They may be doing nothing dishonourable, they may be acting in a very proper way, there are no laws that have not exceptions attached to them--I broadly acknowledge the honourableness of many exceptions to this law of land like slowness of cultivation and growth, but the solid everlasting law of human life is labour, patience, expenditure, hopefulness, little to little, a step at a time, line upon line, and if you trifle with that law you will bring yourself into a state of intellectual unhealthiness, into a condition of moral exaggeration, and you will labour upon wrong principles, and reach, by rapid strides, unhappy conclusions. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Spiritual cultivation
So it is in spiritual cultivation--you cannot grow a character in a week. There are some long thin stalks that you can buy in a garden market for about a shilling a dozen, and you put up these, and say, Do grow, if you please; do get up, and do broaden yourselves and make something like a garden about us, and the long thin stalks, spindle shanks, look at you, and cannot be hastened, though you mock them with their leanness, and scourge them with your unruly tongue. Look at those grand old cedars and oaks and wide-spreading chestnuts. Why are they so noble? Because they are so old. They have been rocked by a hundred wintry nurses, blessed by a thousand summer visitants, and they express the result of the long processes. They have told their tale to fifty winters, caught the blessing of fifty summers, waved musically in the storm, guested the birds of the air, and all the while have been striking their roots deeper and deeper, farther and farther into the rich soil. So must it be with human character; you cannot extemporise moral greatness, it is a slow growth. Money cannot take the place of time; time is an element in the development and sublimising of character; time stands alone and cannot be compounded for by all the wealth in all the gold mines of creation. This spiritual cultivation not only cannot be hastened, but sometimes it is very hard. As a general rule, indeed, it is very difficult; it is not easy to grow in grace. Some of us live too near the smoke ever to be very great trees, or even very fruitful bushes. Circumstances are heavily against us; we are not placed in favourable localities or under very gracious conditions. The house is small, the income is little, the children are many and noisy, the demands upon time and attention and patience are incessant, health is not very good and cheerful, the temperament is a little despondent and very susceptible to injurious influences, and how to grow in Christ Jesus under such circumstances as these, the Saviour Himself only knows. Be thankful to God, therefore, that the bruised reed is not broken, that though you are faint, still you are pursuing, that though you are very weak in the limb and cannot run hard in this uphill race, your eyes are fixed in the right quarter; and the fixing and sparkling of your eye has a meaning which Gods heart knows well. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Observations
I. THORNS AND THISTLES, AND ALL UNPROFITABLE WEEDS, ARE THE EFFECT OF GODS CURSE UPON MAN FOR SIN.
1. Seeing all creatures are His servants, as David calls them (Psa_119:91), He can bring them up, and plant them where He pleaseth, who doth whatsoever He will in heaven and earth (Psa_135:6).
2. Neither can God in respect to His own honour, do less injustice than to withhold His blessing from the creatures, that should be for our service, as we withhold from Him our service of obedience, which we owe Him by our covenant.
II. AS WE ARE MORE OR LESS SERVICEABLE UNTO GOD, SO WE MAY EXPECT THAT THE CREATURE SHALL BE MORE OR LESS SERVICEABLE UNTO US.
1. Gods blessing upon the creatures, is that only by which they are made useful unto us. Now God in justice can do no less than recompense all men according to their deeds (Isa_59:17-18; Psa_62:12), and that not only in that great day of judgment, but even at present, and in outward things, that men may see and acknowledge it, as Psa_58:11.
2. Neither is there a means more effectual to prevail with men in general, to walk in a course of obedience, than when they find all the creatures against them in a course of rebellion.
III. GOD MAKES GOOD HIS PROMISES, BY WHICH HE HATH ENGAGED HIMSELF UNTO US, THOUGH WE FAIL IN OUR COVENANT BY WHICH WE ARE ENGAGED UNTO HIM. See Psa_78:37-38; Psa_89:32-34; 2Ti_2:13. Reason--
1. Gods promises are founded upon His own goodness and truth which cannot fail (Psa_119:89-90; Psa_119:160).
2. God knew beforehand what we are, even before He engaged Himself unto us (see Psa_103:13-14).
3. And if He should take advantage of every forfeiture, He must necessarily undo His children, who trespass daily against Him.
4. And hath therefore given His Son Christ to take away our sins; if we hold fast the covenant, and do not wickedly depart from it though we fail many ways (1Jn_2:1-2).
IV. THOUGH GOD WHEN HE PARDONS OUR SIN, RESTORES US HIS BLESSINGS WHICH WE FORFEITED THEREBY, YET WE ENJOY THEM WITH SOME DIMINUTION AND ABATEMENT. (J. White, M. A.)
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread
The ordinance of toil
I. THE NECESSITY OF TOIL IS AT FIRST CONNECTED WITH TRANSGRESSION. Like death, the child of sin. Yet there is blessing in toil to him who can get up into the higher regions, and see how out of the wry extremity of human pain and endurance God can bring forth fruits which shall be rich and fair throughout eternity.
II. CONSIDER WHAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF THIS ORDINANCE OF TOIL.
1. Toil is ordained to restore man to a true and living relation with the whole system of things around him. On this sentence of labour God bases all His culture of our spirits; by this He keeps alive the desire and the hope of deliverance.
2. Toil is ordained to draw forth the full unfolding of the whole power and possibility of mans being, with a view to the system of things before him, the world of his eternal citizenship, his perfect and developed life. Be sure that it is the last strain that drags out the most precious fibre of faculty, or trains the organs to the keenest perception, the most complete expansion, the most perfect preparation for the higher work and joy of life. (J. B. Brown, B. A.)
Labour an earthward pilgrimage
I. LOOK AT THE HOPELESSNESS OF MENS LABOUR ON THE EARTH.
1. It cannot revoke the sentence of death.
2. It is degrading because of its necessarily sordid aims and occupations.
3. It is itself a living, lingering death.
II. THINE OF THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF THIS SORROW, SUFFERING, AND HOPELESSNESS.
1. To convince men of the fruitlessness of the life he had chosen.
2. To show him his need of the mercy of God, and prepare him to receive it. (St. J. A. Frere.)
Observations
I. MANS EMPLOYMENT IN THIS LIFE IS IN WEARISOME AND PAINFUL LABOURS.
1. The curse that is laid upon the earth for sin, by which without hard labour it yields no fruits for the sustaining of mans life.
2. The Lord hath so appointed it for mans good.
(1) To humble him by leaving him that remembrance of sin.
(2) To make him long for heaven (Rom_8:22-23).
(3) To preserve the body in health (see Ecc_5:12), and to keep the mind in frame (2Th_2:11), which unless it be exercised in useful and profitable things, is filled with vain and evil thoughts.
First, this reproves all idle slothful persons living without callings, or idle in their callings, or in unprofitable callings. Secondly, and should stir us up to diligence in such employments as we are called unto.
1. In obedience to Gods command.
2. And as therein serving God, and not men (Eph_6:7).
3. And being profitable (Pro_14:23) to ourselves (Pro_10:4) and others (Pro_21:5).
4. And thereby procuring us a just title to what we possess (2Th_3:12). Only--
(1) Labour that which is good (Eph_4:28).
(2) And with a desire to be profitable to community (Psa_112:5; Psa_112:9; 1Ti_6:18).
(3) In a way of justice (1Th_4:6).
(4) Depending on God for His blessing on our labours, which only makes them prosperous (Psa_127:2). Thirdly, long for heaven, where we shall cease from all our labours (Rev_14:13).
II. THERE IS PROFIT IN ALL THE DUTIES WHICH GOD ENJOINS US.
1. God who is in Himself all-sufficient and perfectly blessed, neither needs, nor can be profited by any creature.
2. Neither is it for His honour that His service should be unprofitable, as wicked men unjustly slander Him (Job_21:15).
3. Neither could His servants have otherwise any encouragement to go on in His service with cheerfulness, which God requires (Deu_28:47) and delights in (2Co_9:7).
III. WHATSOEVER WE UNDERTAKE IN OBEDIENCE TO GODS COMMANDMENT SHALL NOT WANT EFFECT.
1. That God is able to give success, and by His blessing to prosper mens endeavours, no man can deny.
2. That it concerns Him in point of honour to prosper that which He commands, is as clear as the former.
3. It is needful to be so, lest otherwise men should be discouraged in His service, if they should labour therein without bringing anything to effect.
IV. GODS SANCTIONS ARE CERTAIN, AS WELL OF JUDGMENT AS OF MERCY.
1. Both the threats of judgment, as well as the promises of mercy, are founded on the same grounds of Gods truth, and immutability, and power.
2. And have the same scope, the honouring of God in the manifestation as well of His justice as of His mercy, giving to every man according to his deeds (see Psa_58:11; Isa_59:18-19).
V. THOUGH GOD HATH FREED HIS CHILDREN FROM ETERNAL DEATH, YET HE HATH LEFT THEM AS WELL AS OTHERS, UNDER THE SENTENCE OF TEMPORAL DEATH.
1. That by it they might be put in mind of sin that brought death upon them Rom_5:12).
2. They have no harm by death, which is at present but a sleep, wherein they rest from their labours (Isa_53:2), and which severs them not from Christ (1Th_4:14), through whom it is sanctified to them (see 1Co_15:55), and is made an entrance into life Rev_14:13), and hurts not the body, which shall be raised up in 1Co_15:42-43).
VI. MENS BODIES ARE BASE EVERY WAY, BOTH IN THEIR ORIGINAL, IN THEIR PRESENT CONDITION, AND IN THEIR DISSOLUTION.
1. To humble us (Gen_18:27).
2. To magnify Gods mercy, in abasing Himself to look on such vile wretches (see Psa_113:6-8), to give His Son for them, to advance dust and ashes to such a glorious condition, as the apostle describes (Corinthians 15:42, 43, 49).
3. To move us to long for heaven (see 2Co_5:1-2).
VII. THE DISPOSING OF MANS LIFE IS IN GODS HAND. Which God challengeth to Himself (Deu_32:39). David acknowledgeth Psa_31:15). Daniel testifies to Belshazzar (Dan_5:23), and is clearly manifested by all experience (Psa_104:29); so that it is not in the power of men to cut it off at their pleasure (1Ki_19:1-21; Dan_3:27; Dan_6:22), though God use them to that end sometimes as His executioners (Psa_17:13-14).
VIII. THOUGH DEATH BE CERTAIN TO ALL MEN, YET THE TIME OF DEATH IS UNCERTAIN.
1. That men might not be hardened in sin, as usually they are when judgment is deferred (Ecc_8:11), but walk in fear, as being not assured of life for one moment of an hour.
2. To be assured of the term of life would not profit us any way.
IX. THE JUDGMENTS OF GOD ARE JUST AND EQUAL, ALL OF THEM IN ALL THINGS.
1. He cannot wrong His own creatures, no more than the potter can the clay; nay, much less.
2. His nature will not suffer Him to do otherwise; He that is God must necessarily do good (Psa_119:68); out of the Lords mouth proceed not good and evil (Lam_3:38).
3. Nor the respect to His own honour, magnified as well in His justice Psa_64:8-9), as in His mercy and truth.
4. It would otherwise discourage His own servants (see Mat_25:24-25), as the opinion of Gods favouring of the wicked and afflicting His own servants, had almost discouraged David (Psa_73:13-14). (J. White, M. A.)
The curse and the blessing of labour
I. The universal necessity of labour. The earth no longer produces fruit independently of labour.
II. The fact, asserted in the text, that labour is a curse. It is part of our punishment for the Fall that it should be so.
III. The manner in which we may lighten this curse, and cause it to be borne. We may not escape from it; but it may be lightened by--
1. Religion--personal, practical, and real.
2. The cultivation of knowledge.
3. The maintenance of good health.
4. The practice of economy. (J. Maskell.)
The penal clauses
Then come the penal clauses, and it is wonderful how the curse is tempered with mercy, so much so indeed that it is difficult to tell whether there is not more blessing than cursing in the sentence. The seed of the woman is to be mighty enough to crush the serpent; and the ground is to be difficult of tillage for mans sake. Hard agriculture is a blessing. To get harvests for nothing would be a pitiless curse indeed. To be sentenced to hard labour is really a blessing to great criminals; it breaks in upon the moodiness that would become despair; it taxes invention; it keeps the blood moving; it rouses energy. Many a man has been made by the very hardness of his task. But terrible are the words--unto dust shalt thou return. According to these words it is plainly stated that man was to be exactly what he was before he was made at all--he was to be dead dust, by reason of his sin. Whether any way of escape can be found out remains to be seen. The law is plain; whether mercy can modify it will be revealed as we proceed in the wondrous story. Perhaps there may yet be made a Man within a man, a Spirit within a body, a Son within a slave. That would be glorious, surely! Night has fallen upon the guilty pair, but in the night there are stars, large, bright, like tender eyes shining through the darkness--perhaps these stars will lead on to a manger, a Child, a Saviour! (J. Parker, D. D.)
The curse in labour
The curse in labour is the excess of it: labour itself is enjoyment. You will find that the horse feels it enjoyment to put forth its strength; and so man felt it enjoyment to put forth his energies in rearing the flowers that God had planted in the midst of Eden. The curse is not labour, but the excess of labour. It is a very absurd notion that prevails, that labour is a sort of mean thing: it is a most honourable thing; it was a feature of Adam in his innocent and Eden state; and the poorest labourer is just as honourable as the greatest noble, if he be a Christian. We must not estimate men as we do the cinnamon tree, the whole of whose value is in its bark, but by the heart that beats beneath, and the intellect that thinks, and the life that shines out in obedience to the will of God. (J. Cunningham, D. D.)
Labour a blessing to man
Man is condemned to eat his bread in the sweater his brow. He is doomed to procure it with labour and fatigue. But what would he have become, had he not been subjected to that salutary labour, which distracts his thoughts from himself, occupies his mind, mortifies his passions, and puts a certain restraint upon the corruption which dwells within him? A prey to his own reflections, master of his own life, and burdened with the weight of his days, he would have become the sport of his passions, and have plunged into every species of iniquity which a corrupt imagination could have invented. The punishment of sin, to a certain extent, deprives him of the power and opportunity of doing evil, in spite of himself, and sometimes becomes, in the hands of God, the means of bringing him to salvation. And what dissatisfaction, what weariness, what an insupportable feeling of emptiness must continually have attended an idle and useless existence! On the contrary, what a source of enjoyment and satisfaction, what a means of developing and perfecting his faculties does he now find in a life consecrated to useful labour! Blessed be God! Blessed be God for the thunders of His justice! Blessed be God for His curse denounced against sin! (L. Bonnet.)
Labour necessary to success
Turner, the great painter, was once asked the secret of his success. He replied, I have no secret but hard work.
Labour the best seasoning
Dionysius the tyrant, at an entertainment given to him by the Lacedaemonians, expressed some disgust at their black broth. No wonder, said one of them, for it wants seasoning. What seasoning? asked the tyrant. Labour, replied the citizen, joined with hunger and thirst.
Eminence and labour
When we read the lives of distinguished men in any department, we find them almost always celebrated for the amount of labour they could perform. Demosthenes, Julius Caesar, Henry of France, Lord Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Franklin, Washington, Napoleon, different as they were in their intellectual and moral qualities, were all renowned as hard workers. We read hove many days they could support the fatigues of a march; how early they rose; how late they watched; how many hours they spent in the field, in the cabinet, in the court; how many secretaries they kept employed; in short, how hard they worked. (Everett.)
The idealization of labour
The conception of labour as the creative intention, or end of human nature, is a comparatively late one, due to revelation or to philosophic reflection upon an already lengthened experience. And the feelings of persons born in these later ages of the world are not to be taken as an infallible guide as to what may have been the primitive instinct, the motive that impelled to human activity and invention. Carlyle, for instance, in a letter to his mother, when he was at the commencement of his career (1821), asks the striking question, Why do we fret and murmur and toil, and consume ourselves for objects so transient and frail? Is it that the soul, living here as in her prison house, strives after something boundless like herself, and finding it nowhere, still renews the search? Surely we are fearfully and wonderfully made! Now, as the process of idealization in respect of the aims of labour is closely connected with the sense of its influence upon temporal well-being, we cannot be far wrong in concluding that it is largely due to the experience of the advantages it secures. Work is the most direct and certain avenue to the satisfaction of bodily wants, to the acquisition of wealth, and to the social consideration and general influence that attend the possession of wealth. Upon the industrial energy of its people a city or a nation in the main builds its prosperity and its political power. Another source of dignity and consideration consists in the tendency labour reveals to enlarge the scope and the possibilities of life. In this respect it meets and fosters the growing, expanding faculties of our nature. To the young it opens up many a vista for vague longings and ambitions; and the great centres of industry are invested with a romantic, indefinite fascination, because of the careers they hold forth. Not only the legitimacy, but the social consideration of trades, professions, and occupations, is determined by their perceived tendency to promote civilization. Were it not for this criterion the secondary products of human skill and effort would go to the wall. So much of their value, their worth, is relative only to the circumstances and culture of their owners, that it would otherwise be all but impossible to appraise them. When the days task is seen to be a Divine appointment Psa_104:23) equally with birth and death, then shall a man rejoice in it, and labour on as in the great Taskmasters eye, looking diligently the meanwhile for the message it may enshrine, the glimpse of higher things it is sure to give, and waiting patiently for the last, the sure reward. In the great book manifold histories and teachings set forth for us the ideals of labour, and the commonest occupation is seen to have some spiritual significance. The diligence and faith of the husbandman, the daring quest of the miner (Job_28:1-28), the far venture of the mariner, the thoroughness of the builder, the care and compassion of the shepherd, are all given in illustration of the qualities and duties of our heavenly service. But not until that service itself is, according to our gifts and adaptation, revealed as our individual vocation, is the idealization of labour perfected.
That is a new day, the dawn of a new life to the boy, when he has taken himself out of the routine of the child, and resolved to be something in lessons, or play, or conduct; and the thrill with which the young man puts his hand on his earnest life work tingles yet along the very nerves of age. It makes us almost a giant to feel the birth throe of a living purpose. The lioness reproached because she gave but one at a birth, replied, Yes, but that a lion. And the one lion purpose born to a man, to grow into the one thing of life, is a birth to be proud of and never forgotten. After it we are never the same. It has lifted out of old conditions, limitations; it has put a new spirit in us, as the new inspiration towards a broader life, the quick play of whose pulses, vibrating through the whole man, impels us to thought and deed . . . It is a proud, a solemn, a sublime moment that sees the soul register its purpose and write it as with imperishable letters, This one thing I do, come weal, come woe, come ban of man or shock of time, come sorrow and distress and loss, though I stand alone, here I stand, this I do; and the life of slow, earnest, arduous toil that follows partakes of the grandeur of the birth. (Homiletic Magazine.)
Man, labour, sorrow
Look into the country fields, there you see toiling at the plough and scythe; look into the waters, there you see tugging at oars and cables; look into the city, there you see a throng of cares, and hear sorrowful complaints of bad times and the decay of trade; look into studies, and there you see paleness and infirmities, and fixed eyes; look into the court, and there are defeated hopes, envyings, underminings, and tedious attendance. All things are full of labour, and labour is full of sorrow; and these two are inseparably joined with the miserable life of man. (Timothy Rogers.)
Fallen man
In some respects manifestly made for a sphere higher than he fills, he appears to us like a creature of the air which a cruel hand has stripped of its silken wings. How painfully he resembles this hapless object which has just fallen on the pages of a book that we read by the candle on an autumn evening! It retains the wish, but has lost the power, to fly. Allured by the tapers glare, it has brushed the flame, and, dropping with a heavy fall, now crawls wingless across the leaf, and seeks the finger of mercy to end its misery. Compare man with any of the other creatures, and how directly we come to the conclusion that he is not, nor can be, the same creature with which God crowned the glorious work of creation. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
Man fallen
No man in his senses will venture to assert that man is today just as man originally was. He is a dismantled fane, a broken shrine, still lingering about him some gleams of the departed glory sufficient to give an idea of what he once was, and probably left as faint prophecy of what he will again be. But notwithstanding this, man is a changed, and fallen, and degenerate creature. Nothing we know explains this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon, except the Word of God, which tells us that man sinned, and fell, and has become what we now find him. The gold, in the language of a prophet, is become dim, and the crown is fallen from his head. He has exchanged the beautiful, the fertile, the happy Eden which earth once was, for the desert and the bleak and blasted condition in which we now find it. He must now water it with the tears of his weeping eyes, and fertilize it with the sweat of his aching brow, in order to gather bread from it. This was a penal and just retribution, and yet it embosomed the hope of an ultimate and sure deliverance. (Dr. Cumming.)
Man damaged
If you should see a house with its gable ends in ruins, with its broken pillars lying in heaped-up confusion on the ground, half covered up with trailing weeds and moss, you would not hesitate to say, This building has suffered damage at some time; it was not like this when it came from the hand of the builder. I say this of man. His is not in a normal condition. (Hepworth.)
Mercy in the curse
We are inclined to believe that it was not wholly in anger and in righteous severity that God made the cursing of the ground the punishment of Adam. We think it will not be difficult to show that the Almighty was consulting for the good of His creatures when He thus made labour their inevitable lot. We need not limit our remarks to the single case of agriculture; for we may safely affirm that there is nothing which is worth mans attainment which he can attain without labour.
I. Now there is, perhaps, an universal consent upon one proposition--that idleness is the fruitful source of every kind of vice; and it follows from this that the placing it in a mans power to be idle--supplying him, that is, with the means of subsistence without extracting from him any labour--is simply to expose him to the greatest possible peril, and almost ensuring his moral degeneracy. We know that there are fine and frequent exceptions to this statement, and that many whose circumstances preclude all necessity of toiling for a livelihood carve out for themselves paths of honourable industry, and are as assiduous in labour as if compelled to it by their wants. There is evidently a repressing power in abundance, and a stimulating power in penury; the one tending to produce dwarfishness of intellect and mental feebleness, the other to elicit every energy and intellectual greatness. We will not say that the battle for subsistence has not borne hard on genius, and kept down the loftiness of its aspirings; but we are assured that the cases are of immeasurably more frequent occurrence in which the man has been indebted to the straitness of his circumstances for the expansion of his mental powers. I wish no son of mine to be exempt from the sentence, In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. And the family which we regard as left in the best condition when death removes its head is, not the family for whom there is a fine landed estate or an ample funded property, but the family which has been thoroughly educated in the principles of religion, and trained to habits of piety and industry, and in which there is just as much wealth as may preserve from want those members who cannot labour for themselves, and start the others in professions which open a broad field for unwearied diligence. We would yet further observe, before quitting this portion of our subject, that after all God did not so much remove fruitfulness from the soil as make the development of that fruitfulness dependent on industry. The earth has yielded sufficiency for its ever-multiplying population, as though the power of supply grew with the demand; nor has it only yielded a bare sufficiency, but has been so generous in its productions, that one man by his tillage may raise bread for hundreds. This is amongst the most beautiful and wonderful of the arrangements of Providence. Why can one amongst us be a clergyman, a second a lawyer, a third a merchant, a fourth a tradesman? Only because, notwithstanding the curse, there is still such fertility in the ground, that more corn is produced than suffices for those by whom the ground is cultivated. The whole advance of civilization is dependent on a power in the earth of furnishing more food than those who till it can consume. A people who are always on the border of starvation must be manifestly a people always on the border of barbarism; and just as manifestly a people must be always on the border of starvation if every individual can only wrench from the ground enough for himself. Thus, when we come to examine into and trace the actual facts of the case, the mercy of the dispensation exceeds immeasurably the judgement.
II. We propose, in the second place, to examine WHETHER THERE BE ANY INTIMATION IN SCRIPTURE THAT THE SENTENCE ON ADAM WAS DESIGNED TO BREATHE MERCY AS WELL AS JUDGMENT. We are disposed to agree with those who consider that the revelation of the great scheme of redemption was contemporaneous with human transgression. We believe that, as soon as man fell, notices were graciously given of a deliverance to be effected in the fulness of time. It is hardly to be supposed that Adam would be left in ignorance of what he was so much concerned to know; and the early institution of sacrifices seem sufficient to show that he was taught a religion adapted to his circumstances. But the question now before us is, whether any intimations of redemption were contained in the sentence under review, and whether our common father, as he listened to the words which declared the earth cursed for his sake, might have gathered consolation from the disastrous announcement. There is one reason why we think this probable, though we may not be able to give distinct proof. Our reason is drawn from the prophecy which Lamech uttered on the birth of his son Noah: This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed. And therefore did he call his son Noah, which signifies rest, to mark that he connected him with deliverance and respite from that curse which sin had brought on the ground. But in what way was Noah thus connected? How could Noah comfort Lamech in reference to the ground which God had cursed? Some suppose the reference to be to instruments of agriculture which Noah would invent after the flood, and which would much diminish human labour; but this could hardly be said to be a comfort to Lamech, who died before the flood: and we may fairly doubt whether a prediction, having reference only to the invention of a few tools, would have been recorded for the instruction of all after-generations. But Noah, as the builder of the ark, and the raiser of the new world, when the old had pertained in the deluge, was eminently a type of Christ Jesus, in whose Church alone is safety, and at whose bidding new heavens and a new earth will succeed to those scathed by the baptism of fire. And as an illustrious type of the Redeemer, though we knew not in what other capacity, Noah might console Lamech and his cotemporaries; for the restoration after the deluge, in which they had no personal interest, might be a figure to them of the restitution of all things, when the curse was to be finally removed, and those who had rode out the deluge receive an everlasting benediction. Thus it would seem highly probable, from the tenour of Lamechs prediction, that he had been made acquainted with the respects in which his son Noah would typify Christ, and that therefore he had been taught to regard the curse on the ground as only temporary, imposed for wise ends, till the manifestation of the Redeemer, under whose sceptre the desert should rejoice and blossom as the rose. And if so much were revealed to Lamech, it cannot be an over-bold supposition that the same information was imparted to Adam. Thus may our first parent, compelled to till the earth on which rested the curse of its Creator, have known that there were blessings in store, and that, though he and his children must dig the ground in the sweat of their face, there would fall on it sweat like great drops of blood, having virtue to remove the oppressive malediction. It must have been bitter for him to hear of the thorn and the thistle; but he may have learnt how thorns would be woven into a crown, and placed round the forehead of One who should be as the lost tree of life to a dying creation. The curse upon the ground may have been regarded by him as a perpetual memorial of the fatal transgression and the promised salvation, reminding him of the sterility of his own heart, and what toil it would cost the Redeemer to reclaim that heart, and make it bring forth the fruits of righteousness; telling him while pursuing his daily task what internal husbandry was needful, and whose arm alone could break up the fallow ground. And thus Adam may have been comforted, as Lamech was comforted, by the Noah who was to bring rest to wearied humanity; and it may have been in hope as well as in contrition, in thankfulness as well as in sorrow, that he carried with him this sentence on his banishment from paradise--Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.--
Mans nature and destiny
I. THE FRAILTY OF OUR NATURE.
1. Its origin. However glorious our Maker, however exquisite the human body, God made that body of the dust of the earth.
2. Its liability to injury. No sooner born than fierce diseases wait to attack us. If not destroyed--injured--accidents. All the elements attack us.
3. Its tendency to dissolution. Behold the ravages of time. Human life has its spring, summer, autumn, and winter (Psa_103:14-15; Psa_90:5-6; Psa_39:4-5).
II. THE CERTAINTY OF OUR END.
1. We are born to die. Our first breath is so much of nature exhausted. The first hour we live is an approach to death.
2. The perpetual exit of mortals confirms it.
3. God hath decreed it.
4. Learn rightly to estimate life. (Sketches of Sermons.)
Mans origin and doom
I. MANS ORIGIN.
1. How wonderful.
2. How humbling.
II. MANS DOOM.
1. Inevitable.
2. Just.
3. Partial.
4. Temporary. (W. Wythe.)
The fearfulness of death
I. Men know not that they shall die, even though they confess it with their lips almost daily. If we consider what death is, we see that men who know its approach will act in all things as in the fear of it. There is no more startling paradox in the wonders of our nature than this, that men in general are thoughtless about death. When our own turn comes, and there is no escape, then, for the first time, we really believe in death.
II. Death is a fearful thing, because of the great change that it implies in all our being. Life is that power by which we act, and think, and love, and intend, and hope. And suppose that all our energies have been wasted on things that cannot follow us into the grave, then how can we conceive of any life at all beyond this? When we know that we must die, we feel about for something in us that shall not perish, some thread of continuity to knit our present and future life into one; and if we have never lived for God, never realized the difference between treasures of earth and treasures of heaven, we find nothing that shall assure us of that other life. We start back in horror from a grave so dark and so profound.
III. If these two terrors were all, some at least would not fear to die, would even court death as a repose. But there is yet another terror. Death means judgment. To die is to meet God. You tremble because you stand before a Judge of infinite power, whose wrath no man can resist; before a Judge of infinite wisdom, who shall call back your acts out of the distant past and lay bare the secret thoughts of your spirit.
IV. Accept the salvation purchased for you with Christs passion; then death cannot come suddenly upon you, for the thought of it will have sobered all your days. The day of account will still be terrible, but the belief that you are reconciled to God through the blood of Jesus will sustain you. (Archbishop Thomson.)
The frailty of human nature
The words do plainly show Gods offence and displeasure upon occasion of Adams miscarriage; and are in themselves partly declaratory and convictive, partly minatory and instructive.
1. They are declaratory and convictive. What! thou that art but dust, that so lately received thy being from God, not to listen to Him, but to follow thy own will, and rebel against the law of thy Sovereign? So they are declaratory and convictive.
2. They are minatory, and consequently instructive. For when God threatens, His meaning is, that we should repent, and turn to Him Jer_18:7). But to come to the words themselves, Dust thou art. Of this I shall give you an account in two particulars.
1. The meanness of it. For dust is a thing of little or no perfection, nor of any esteem, account, and value. Dust we are, every day sweeping away, as the refuse, as that of which there is no use. Dust, the ultimate term of all corruption and putrefaction. Dust--you cannot resolve a thing into anything of less entity and being. Yet all of man is not here to be understood, but only his worser part.
2. Dust thou art, which respects the weakness of this bodily estate. For dust can make no resistance. It may offend us, but it is of itself so light and empty that it is scattered up and down of every wind, as it is said Psa_18:42). Who can defend himself against the arrow that flieth by day, or the pestilence that walketh in darkness, or the plague that destroyeth by noonday? Neither is this all, but we have a principle that tends to corruption and putrefaction within us. To which also let us add the violence that we are exposed to from abroad, either by the contagion of others or from the force and violence of those that can overpower us. For we are so weak, that if any man despise God and the laws, he may soon be master of our lives. For all that they can do is but to inflict punishment upon the transgressor. But that will make us no satisfaction nor restitution. When we are assaulted by any sickness, then we are sensible of this our weakness; and we cry out with Job, What is my strength, the strength of a stone, or my flesh of brass (Job_21:23). Though, when our bones are full of marrow, we put the thoughts of sickness far from us, yet so it often falleth out that One dieth in his full strength, being in all ease and prosperity, as Job speaketh (21:23). Furthermore, what are we when bodily pain approach? So weak and frail are we, that we are not able to hold up our heads; and if to all this we shall have the sense of guilt upon our consciences, our condition will be intolerable.
Now for application.
1. It is a ground of humility. If it be so, that Dust we are, and unto dust we must return, it is fit that we know it so to be; and that upon three accounts.
(1) That we be not proud and conceited.
(2) That we do not trust to ourselves or any fellow creatures whatsoever.
(3) That we may take the best course we can to make a supply.
2. It is matter of satisfaction to us to know that we are but dust; and that lies here, that God doth not look for much from us, but accordingly--not more than He did at first make us. He knows that we were finite and fallible; and therefore, as the Psalmist saith, God considers our frame, He remembereth that we are dust (Psa_103:14), and makes allowance accordingly.
3. It is matter of great thankfulness to God that He doth so much consider such worms as we are; that He hath regard to us, that are but dust; and that He hath such patience with us, who are so inconsiderable, that He might bring us to repentance; and that He doth graciously accept from us any motion towards Him, or any good purpose, and that He is so ready to promote it.
4. This will give us an account of the folly and madness of those men who neglect themselves. We are dust. If there be not the remedy of culture and education to tame the wildness and exorbitancy of man, he will grow savage, wild, and ungovernable, unless the established government of reason shall be set up in his soul. Wherefore, let our great care and daily employment be to refine our spirits, by entertaining the principles of religion; and to inform our understandings, and to regulate our lives, by holding ourselves constantly to the measures of nature, reason, and religion. (B. Whichcote, D. D.)
The rationale of mans corporeal life and dissolution
I. WHY MAN WAS TO HAVE A BRIEF EMBODIED LIFE. How was this arrangement likely to affect his ultimate spiritual well-being?
1. Mans earthly life is his probation period. The opportunity of choice exists while soul and body are joined, but no longer. Death is the beginning of destiny.
2. A probation-period, to be just, satisfactory, merciful, must--
(1) Show the true nature and fruits of the objects to be chosen;
(2) bring out the true character and intentions of the individual choosing.
3. The body is a valuable agent in the accomplishment of this design.
(1) It brings out the nature of the objects to be chosen.
(2) It compels man to a religious decision.
II. WHY MAN, AFTER HAVING SPENT HIS PROBATION PERIOD IN THE BODY, HAD TO SUFFER PHYSICAL DEATH.
1. Death in relation to the saved--
(1) Delivers the soul from many sinful habits.
(2) Delivers the land from a fruitful nurse of sin.
(3) Introduces the soul to higher enjoyments.
2. Death in relation to the lost. A wicked spirit disembodied seems the most miserable, pitiable thing in Gods universe; like a man suddenly expelled from a brilliant and warm room, to shiver naked in the cold and darkness of a winter night--a night, too, that shall know no dawn, and to the fierce blast of which no stupor can ever render the wretched outcast insensible! (Homilist.)
The frailty of human nature
I. THE FRAILTY OF OUR NATURE. This may be inferred from--
1. Its origin: dust.
2. Its liability to injury.
3. Its tendency to dissolution.
II. THE CERTAINTY OF OUR END.
1. We are born to die.
2. The perpetual exit of mortals confirms this.
3. God has decreed and declared it.
III. THE GREAT BUSINESS OF LIFE.
1. To know and serve God.
2. To seek and obtain salvation.
3. We should always be living in reference to death and eternity. (Sketches of Sermons.)
Dust of death
Dust may be raised for a little while into a tiny cloud, and may seem considerable while held up by the wind that raises it; but when the force of that is spent, it falls again, and returns to the earth out of which it was raised. Such a thing is man; man is but a parcel of dust, and must return to his earth. Thus, as Pascal exclaims, what a chimera is man! What a confused chaos! And after death, of his body it may be said that it is the gold setting left after the extraction of the diamond which it held--a setting, alas! which soon gives cause in its putrescence for the apostrophe: How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! Yet there is hope in thine end, O Christian gold, however dimmed. There is a resurgam for thy dust, O child of God! (W. Adamson.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield1917 · Public DomainOn v19return Death (physical).
return Death (physical).
Gen 5:5; Gen 3:19; Heb 9:27
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0On v17The name Adam is the same as the Hebrew…
Adam
The name Adam is the same as the Hebrew word for "man." Some translations say "Adam" and some say "the man." You may use either form as it refers to the same person.
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you have listened to the voice of your wife
This is an idiom. AT: "you have obeyed what your wife said" (See: Idiom)
have eaten from the tree
You can say what it was that they ate. AT: "have eaten the fruit of the tree" or "have eaten some of the fruit of the tree" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)
You may not eat from it
"You must not eat from it" or "Do not eat its fruit"
cursed is the ground
The word "curse" comes first in the sentence to emphasize that the ground, which had been "good" (Genesis 1:10), was now under God's curse. This can be stated in active form. AT: "I am cursing the ground" (See: Active or Passive)
through painful work
"by doing hard work"
you will eat from it
The word "it" refers to the ground and is a metonym for the parts of the plants, which grow in the ground, that people eat. AT: "you will eat what grows from it" (See: Metonymy)
the plants of the field
Possible meanings are 1) "the plants that you take care of in your fields" or 2) "the wild plants that grow in the open fields."
By the sweat of your face
"By doing hard work that makes your face sweat"
you will eat bread
Here the word "bread" is a synecdoche for food in general. AT: "you will eat food" (See: Synecdoche)
until you return to the ground
"until you die and your body is put in the ground." In some cultures, they put the bodies of people who have died in a hole in the ground. Man's hard work does not end until the time of his death and burial.
For dust you are, and to dust you will return
"I made you from soil, so your body will become soil again." Translate both occurrences of "dust" with the same word in order to show that man begins and ends in the same condition.
Tyndale Open Study Notes2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0On v173:17-19 God highlighted his original command not to eat…
3:17-19 God highlighted his original command not to eat the fruit by speaking of eating several times in 3:17-19. The judgment affected humanity’s ability to get food, and it was proportionate to their offense of eating what had been prohibited. • the ground is cursed: The relationship of the man to the ground (see study note on 2:7) was now antagonistic as judgment fell on his primary role (2:5, 15). He must labor and toil to work the ground, but with diminished productivity. Human sin has broad effects on creation (see 4:12; 6:7; Lev 26; Deut 11:13-17, 28; Rom 8:22).
GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv17–19 17. And unto Adam he said. In the first…
17. And unto Adam he said. In the first place, it is to be observed, that punishment was not inflicted upon the first of our race so as to rest on those two alone, but was extended generally to all their posterity, in order that we might know that the human race was cursed in their person; we next observe, that they were subjected only to temporal punishment, that, from the moderation of the divine anger, they might entertain hope of pardon. God, by adducing the reason why he thus punishes the man, cuts off from him the occasion of murmuring. For no excuse was left to him who had obeyed his wife rather than God; yea, had despised God for the sake of his wife, placing so much confidence in the fallacies of Satan, — whose messenger and servant she was, — that he did not hesitate perfidiously to deny his Maker. But, although God deals decisively and briefly with Adam, he yet refutes the pretext by which he had tried to escape, in order the more easily to lead him to repentance. After he has briefly spoken of Adam’s sin, he announces that the earth would be cursed for his sake. The ancient interpreter has translated it, ‘In thy work;’ but the reading is to be retained, in which all the Hebrew copies agree, namely, the earth was cursed on account of Adam. Now, as the blessing of the earth means, in the language of Scripture, that fertility which God infuses by his secret power, so the curse is nothing else than the opposite privation, when God withdraws his favor. Nor ought it to seem absurd, that, through the sin of man, punishment should overflow the earth, though innocent. For as the primum mobile rolls all the celestial spheres along with it, so the ruin of man drives headlong all those creatures which were formed for his sake, and had been made subject to him. And we see how constantly the condition of the world itself varies with respect to men, according as God is angry with them, or shows them his favor. We may add, that, properly speaking, this whole punishment is exacted, not from the earth itself, but from man alone. For the earth does not bear fruit for itself, but in order that food may be supplied to us out of its bowels. The Lord, however, determined that his anger should like a deluge, overflow all parts of the earth, that wherever man might look, the atrocity of his sin should meet his eyes. Before the fall, the state of the world was a most fair and delightful mirror of the divine favor and paternal indulgence towards man. Now, in all the elements we perceive that we are cursed. And although (as David says) the earth is still full of the mercy of God, (Psalm 33:5,) yet, at the same time, appear manifest signs of his dreadful alienation from us, by which if we are unmoved, we betray our blindness and insensibility. Only, lest sadness and horror should overwhelm us, the Lord sprinkles everywhere the tokens of his goodness. Moreover although the blessing of God is never seen pure and transparent as it appeared to man in innocence yet, if what remains behind be considered in itself, David truly and properly exclaims, ‘The earth is full of the mercy of God.’
Again, by ‘eating of the earth,’ Moses means ‘eating of the fruits’ which proceed from it. The Hebrew word עצבון (itsabon,) which is rendered pain, is also taken for trouble and fatigue. In this place, it stands in antithesis with the pleasant labor in which Adam previously so employed himself, that in a sense he might be said to play; for he was not formed for idleness, but for action. Therefore the Lord had placed him over a garden which was to be cultivated. But, whereas in that labor there had been sweet delight; now servile work is enjoined upon him, as if he were condemned to the mines. And yet the asperity of this punishment also is mitigated by the clemency of God, because something of enjoyment is blended with the labors of men, lest they should be altogether ungrateful, as I shall again declare under the next verse.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv17–18 The transgression of God’s commandment was the cause that…
The transgression of God’s commandment was the cause that both mankind and all other creatures were subject to the curse.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv17–19 Gen 3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou…
Gen 3:17 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;
Ver. 17. Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife.] Our English historian, {a} relating the deadly difference that fell out beteen those two noble Seymours (the Lord Protector, and the Admiral his brother) in Edward VI’s time, through the instigation of their ambitious wives, passionately cries out, "O wives! The most sweet poison, the most desired evil in the world," &c. "Woman was first given to man for a comforter," saith he, "not for a counsellor, much less a controller and director." And therefore in the first sentence against man, this cause is expressed, "Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife," &c.
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Cursed is the ground for thy sake.] Hence the Greeks and Latins borrow their words {b} for ground of the Hebrew word that signifieth cursed. The curse of emptiness and unsatisfyingness lies upon it, that no man hath enough, though never so much of it. The curse also of barrenness, or unprofitable fruits, "whose end is to be burned." {Heb 6:8} The whole earth and the works therein shall be burnt up. {2Pe 3:10} It was never beautiful, nor cheerful, since Adam’s fall. At this day it lies bedridden, waiting for the coming of the Son of God, that it may be delivered from the bondage of corruption {Rom 8:20}
{a} Sir John Heywood in the Life of King Edward VI., p. 84.
{b} ’Aρουρα et Arvum ab Heb. ארר ΰψυ
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv17–19 Hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, i.e. obeyed…
Hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, i.e. obeyed the word and counsel, contrary to my express command.
Cursed is the ground, which shall now yield both fewer and worse fruits, and those too with more trouble of men’s minds, and labour of their bodies;
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for thy sake, i.e. because of thy sin; or, to thy use; or, as far as concerns thee.
In sorrow; or, with toil, or, grief.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On v17 We have here the sentence passed upon Adam, which…
We have here the sentence passed upon Adam, which is prefaced with a recital of his crime: Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, Gen 3:17. He excused the fault, by laying it on his wife: She gave it me. But God does not admit the excuse. She could but tempt him, she could not force him; though it was her fault to persuade him to eat, it was his fault to hearken to her. Thus men's frivolous pleas will, in the day of God's judgment, not only be overruled, but turned against them, and made the grounds of their sentence. Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee. Observe,
I. God put marks of his displeasure on Adam in three instances: -
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1. His habitation is, by this sentence, cursed: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; and the effect of that curse is, Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee. It is here intimated that his habitation should be changed; he should no longer dwell in a distinguished, blessed, paradise, but should be removed to common ground, and that cursed. The ground, or earth, is here put for the whole visible creation, which, by the sin of man, is made subject to vanity, the several parts of it being not so serviceable to man's comfort and happiness as they were designed to be when they were made, and would have been if he had not sinned. God gave the earth to the children of men, designing it to be a comfortable dwelling to them. But sin has altered the property of it. It is now cursed for man's sin; that is, it is a dishonourable habitation, it bespeaks man mean, that his foundation is in the dust; it is a dry and barren habitation, its spontaneous productions are now weeds and briers, something nauseous or noxious; what good fruits it produces must be extorted from it by the ingenuity and industry of man. Fruitfulness was its blessing, for man's service (Gen 1:11, Gen 1:29), and now barrenness was its curse, for man's punishment. It is not what it was in the day it was created. Sin turned a fruitful land into barrenness; and man, having become as the wild ass's colt, has the wild ass's lot, the wilderness for his habitation, and the barren land his dwelling, Job 39:6; Psa 68:6. Had not this curse been in part removed, for aught I know, the earth would have been for ever barren, and never produced any thing but thorns and thistles. The ground is cursed, that is, doomed to destruction at the end of time, when the earth, and all the works that are therein, shall be burnt up for the sin of man, the measure of whose iniquity will then be full, Pe2 3:7, Pe2 3:10. But observe a mixture of mercy in this sentence. (1.) Adam himself is not cursed, as the serpent was (Gen 3:14), but only the ground for his sake. God had blessings in him, even the holy seed: Destroy it not, for that blessing is in it, Isa 65:8. And he had blessings in store for him; therefore he is not directly and immediately cursed, but, as it were, at second hand. (2.) He is yet above ground. The earth does not open and swallow him up; only it is not what it was: as he continues alive, notwithstanding his degeneracy from his primitive purity and rectitude, so the earth continues to be his habitation, notwithstanding its degeneracy from its primitive beauty and fruitfulness. (3.) This curse upon the earth, which cut off all expectations of a happiness in things below, might direct and quicken him to look for bliss and satisfaction only in things above.
2. His employments and enjoyments are all embittered to him.
(1.) His business shall henceforth become a toil to him, and he shall go on with it in the sweat of his face, Gen 3:19. His business, before he sinned, was a constant pleasure to him, the garden was then dressed without any uneasy labour, and kept without any uneasy care; but now his labour shall be a weariness and shall waste his body; his care shall be a torment and shall afflict his mind. The curse upon the ground which made it barren, and produced thorns and thistles, made his employment about it much more difficult and toilsome. If Adam had not sinned, he had not sweated. Observe here, [1.] That labour is our duty, which we must faithfully perform; we are bound to work, not as creatures only, but as criminals; it is part of our sentence, which idleness daringly defies. [2.] That uneasiness and weariness with labour are our just punishment, which we must patiently submit to, and not complain of, since they are less than our iniquity deserves. Let not us, by inordinate care and labour, make our punishment heavier than God has made it; but rather study to lighten our burden, and wipe off our sweat, by eyeing Providence in all and expecting rest shortly.
(2.) His food shall henceforth become (in comparison with what it had been) unpleasant to him. [1.] The matter of his food is changed; he must now eat the herb of the field, and must no longer be feasted with the delicacies of the garden of Eden. Having by sin made himself like the beasts that perish, he is justly turned to be a fellow-commoner with them, and to eat grass as oxen, till he know that the heavens do rule. [2.] There is a change in the manner of his eating it: In sorrow (Gen 3:17) and in the sweat of his face (Gen 3:19) he must eat of it. Adam could not but eat in sorrow all the days of his life, remembering the forbidden fruit he had eaten, and the guilt and shame he had contracted by it. Observe, First, That human life is exposed to many miseries and calamities, which very much embitter the poor remains of its pleasures and delights. Some never eat with pleasure (Job 21:25), through sickness or melancholy; all, even the best, have cause to eat with sorrow for sin; and all, even the happiest in this world, have some allays to their joy: troops of diseases, disasters, and deaths, in various shapes, entered the world with sin, and still ravage it. Secondly, That the righteousness of God is to be acknowledged in all the sad consequences of sin. Wherefore then should a living man complain? Yet, in this part of the sentence, there is also a mixture of mercy. He shall sweat, but his toil shall make his rest the more welcome when he returns to his earth, as to his bed; he shall grieve, but he shall not starve; he shall have sorrow, but in that sorrow he shall eat bread, which shall strengthen his heart under his sorrows. He is not sentenced to eat dust as the serpent, only to eat the herb of the field.
3. His life also is but short. Considering how full of trouble his days are, it is in favour to him that they are few; yet death being dreadful to nature (yea, even though life be unpleasant) that concludes the sentence. "Thou shalt return to the ground out of which thou wast taken; thy body, that part of thee which was taken out of the ground, shall return to it again; for dust thou art." This points either to the first original of his body; it was made of the dust, nay it was made dust, and was still so; so that there needed no more than to recall the grant of immortality, and to withdraw the power which was put forth to support it, and then he would, of course, return to dust. Or to the present corruption and degeneracy of his mind: Dust thou art, that is, "Thy precious soul is now lost and buried in the dust of the body and the mire of the flesh; it was made spiritual and heavenly, but it has become carnal and earthly." His doom is therefore read: "To dust thou shalt return. Thy body shall be forsaken by thy soul, and become itself a lump of dust; and then it shall be lodged in the grave, the proper place for it, and mingle itself with the dust of the earth," our dust, Psa 104:29. Earth to earth, dust to dust. Observe here, (1.) That man is a mean frail creature, little as dust, the small dust of the balance - light as dust, altogether lighter than vanity - weak as dust, and of no consistency. Our strength is not the strength of stones; he that made us considers it, and remembers that we are dust, Psa 103:14. Man is indeed the chief part of the dust of the world (Pro 8:26), but still he is dust. (2.) That he is a mortal dying creature, and hastening to the grave. Dust may be raised, for a time, into a little cloud, and may seem considerable while it is held up by the wind that raised it; but, when the force of that is spent, it falls again, and returns to the earth out of which it was raised. Such a thing is man; a great man is but a great mass of dust, and must return to his earth. (3.) That sin brought death into the world. If Adam had not sinned, he would not have died, Rom 5:12. God entrusted Adam with a spark of immortality, which he, by a patient continuance in well-doing, might have blown up into an everlasting flame; but he foolishly blew it out by wilful sin: and now death is the wages of sin, and sin is the sting of death.
II. We must not go off from this sentence upon our first parents, which we are all so nearly concerned in, and feel from, to this day, till we have considered two things: -
1. How fitly the sad consequences of sin upon the soul of Adam and his sinful race were represented and figured out by this sentence, and perhaps were more intended in it than we are aware of. Though that misery only is mentioned which affected the body, yet that was a pattern of spiritual miseries, the curse that entered into the soul. (1.) The pains of a woman in travail represent the terrors and pangs of a guilty conscience, awakened to a sense of sin; from the conception of lust, these sorrows are greatly multiplied, and, sooner or later, will come upon the sinner like pain upon a woman in travail, which cannot be avoided. (2.) The state of subjection to which the woman was reduced represents that loss of spiritual liberty and freedom of will which is the effect of sin. The dominion of sin in the soul is compared to that of a husband (Rom 7:1-5), the sinner's desire is towards it, for he is fond of his slavery, and it rules over him. (3.) The curse of barrenness which was brought upon the earth, and its produce of briars and thorns, are a fit representation of the barrenness of a corrupt and sinful soul in that which is good and its fruitfulness in evil. It is all overgrown with thorns, and nettles cover the face of it; and therefore it is nigh unto cursing, Heb 6:8. (4.) The toil and sweat bespeak the difficulty which, through the infirmity of the flesh, man labours under, in the service of God and the work of religion, so hard has it now become to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Blessed be God, it is not impossible. (5.) The embittering of his food to him bespeaks the soul's want of the comfort of God's favour, which is life, and the bread of life. (6.) The soul, like the body, returns to the dust of this world; its tendency is that way; it has an earthy taint, Joh 3:31.
2. How admirably the satisfaction our Lord Jesus made by his death and sufferings answered to the sentence here passed upon our first parents. (1.) Did travailing pains come in with sin? We read of the travail of Christ's soul (Isa 53:11); and the pains o death he was held by are called odinai (Act 2:24), the pains of a woman in travail. (2.) Did subjection come in with sin? Christ was made under the law, Gal 4:4. (3.) Did the curse come in with sin? Christ was made a curse for us, died a cursed death, Gal 3:13. (4.) Did thorns come in with sin? He was crowned with thorns for us. (5.) Did sweat come in with sin? He for us did sweat as it were great drops of blood. (6.) Did sorrow come in with sin? He was a man of sorrows, his soul was, in his agony, exceedingly sorrowful. (7.) Did death come in with sin? He became obedient unto death. Thus is the plaster as wide as the wound. Blessed be God for Jesus Christ!
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv17–19 And unto Adam he said,.... Last of all, being…
And unto Adam he said,.... Last of all, being the last that sinned, but not to be excused:
because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife; which was not only mean but sinful, since it was opposite to the voice of God, which he ought to have hearkened to God is to be hearkened to and obeyed rather than man, and much rather than a woman; to regard the persuasion of a woman, and neglect the command of God, is a great aggravation of such neglect; see Act 4:19.
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and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee; saying, thou shall not eat of it; that is, had eat of the fruit of the tree which God had plainly pointed unto him, and concerning which he had given a clear and an express command not to eat of it; and had delivered it to him in the strongest manner, and had most peremptorily and strictly enjoined it, adding the threatening of death unto it; so that he could by no means plead ignorance in himself, or any obscurity in the law, or pretend he did not understand the sense of the legislator. The righteous sentence therefore follows:
cursed is the ground for thy sake; the whole earth, which was made for man, and all things in it, of which he had the possession and dominion, and might have enjoyed the use of everything in it, with comfort and pleasure; that which was man's greatest earthly blessing is now turned into a curse by sin, which is a proof of the exceeding sinfulness of it, and its just demerit: so in later instances, a "fruitful land" is turned "into barrenness, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein", Psa 107:34 hence, whenever there is sterility in a country, a want of provisions, a famine, it should always be imputed to sin; and this should put us in mind of the sin of the first man, and the consequence of that:
in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life, meaning that with much toil and trouble, in manuring and cultivating the earth, he should get his living out of the produce of it, though with great difficulty; and this would be his case as long as he was in it.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv17, 19 Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy…
Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife - He excused the fault, by laying it on his wife, but God doth not admit the excuse; tho' it was her fault to persuade him to eat it, it was his fault to hearken to her. Cursed is the ground for thy sake - And the effect of that curse is, Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee - The ground or earth, by the sin of man, is made subject to vanity, the several parts of it being not so serviceable to man's comfort and happiness, as they were when they were made. Fruitfulness was its blessing for man's service, chap. i, 11-29, and now barrenness was its curse for man's punishment.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv17–19 Verse 17. Unto Adam he said] The man being…
Verse 17. Unto Adam he said] The man being the last in the transgression is brought up last to receive his sentence: Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife - "thou wast not deceived, she only gave and counselled thee to eat; this thou shouldst have resisted;" and that he did not is the reason of his condemnation. Cursed is the ground for thy sake - from henceforth its fertility shall be greatly impaired; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it - be in continual perplexity concerning the seed time and the harvest, the cold and the heat, the wet and the dry. How often are all the fruits of man's toll destroyed by blasting, by mildew, by insects, wet weather, land floods, &c.! Anxiety and carefulness are the labouring man's portion.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv17, 19 Gen 3:17. Because thou hast hearkened to the voice…
Gen 3:17. Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife — Obeyed her word and counsel, contrary to my express command. He excused the fault by laying it on his wife, but God doth not admit the excuse: though it was her fault to persuade him to eat, it was his fault to hearken to her. Cursed is the ground for thy sake — It shall now yield both fewer and worse fruits, and not even those without more care and trouble to thy mind, and the minds of thy posterity, and more labour to your bodies than otherwise would have been requisite. The earth, for the sin of man, was made subject to vanity; fruitfulness was its blessing for man’s service, and now barrenness is its curse for man’s punishment.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv17–19 Thy work, sin; thy perdition is from thyself: this…
Thy work, sin; thy perdition is from thyself: this is all that man can challenge for his own. (Haydock)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv17, 19 unto Adam he said--made to gain his livelihood by…
unto Adam he said--made to gain his livelihood by tilling the ground; but what before his fall he did with ease and pleasure, was not to be accomplished after it without painful and persevering exertion.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv17–19 17. Unto Adam he said — The examination began…
17. Unto Adam he said — The examination began with Adam, (Gen_3:9,) and the offence was traced to the serpent, (Gen_3:13;) the condemnation was pronounced first upon the serpent (Gen_3:14) and last upon the man. The curse pronounced against the man seems manifold. It contains, at least, five elements of woe: 1) On account of him the very soil is cursed, and, as a penal result of that curse, 2) the ground he tills will produce thorns and thistles along with the herb which is to be his food. Gen_3:18. Moreover, 3) the cultivation of the grain which is to be his food, will involve toilsome and tiring labour, causing the sweat to stand upon his face, (Gen_3:19,) and consequently, 4) his very eating will be in sorrow. 5) At last he himself must die and return to the dust from which he was taken.
Because thou hast hearkened… and hast eaten — To listen was a culpable weakness, to eat the forbidden fruit a crime. The plea of Adam (in Gen_3:12) is of no avail. For the weakness of hearkening to his transgressing wife he must expend his manly strength in life-long painful struggle with a cursed soil, and for his own transgression of the commandment he must return to dust.
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Cursed is the ground — Instead of a delightful Paradise, he shall find the ground becoming barren and unfruitful. Often since this general curse was uttered has God, by special judgments, cursed the land for the sins of the people. See Isa_24:1-6; Jer_23:10.
In sorrow shalt thou eat — עצבון, labour, distress. The same word employed in Gen_3:16 to denote the woman’s sorrow. Her perpetual reminder of the original sin is to be the pain of childbearing; his, the corresponding sorrow of oppressive labour for food in the midst of manifold vocations.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv17–19 17. cursed is the ground] The man is addressed…
17. cursed is the ground] The man is addressed as one who in the future is to be dependent upon the soil for the means of subsistence. Not man, but the ground for man’s sake, is accursed. Its fruitfulness is withheld, in order that man may realize the penalties of sin through the pains of laborious toil. The sentence, which, reverses the blessing of Gen_2:15, befalls the whole earth.
in toil] R.V. marg. “sorrow.” But see note on Gen_3:16.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv17, 19 (17, 18) Unto Adam (without the article, and therefore…
(17, 18) Unto Adam (without the article, and therefore a proper name) he said.—Lange thoughtfully remarks that while the woman was punished by the entrance of sorrow into the small subjective world of her womanly calling, man is punished by the derangement of the great objective world over which he was to have dominion. Instead of protecting his wife and shielding her from evil, he had passively followed her lead in disobeying God’s command; and therefore “the ground,” the adâmâh out of which Adam had been formed, instead of being as heretofore his friend and willing subject, becomes unfruitful, and must be forced by toil and labour to yield its produce. Left to itself, it will no longer bring forth choice trees laden with generous fruit, such as Adam found in the garden, but the natural tendency will be to degenerate, till “thorns” only “and thistles” usurp the ground. Even after his struggle with untoward nature man wins for himself no paradisiacal banquet, but must “eat the herb of the field” (Job_30:4); and the end of this weary struggle is decay and death. In the renewed earth the golden age of paradise will return, and the tendency of nature will no longer be to decay and degeneration, but to the substitution unceasingly of the nobler and the more beautiful in the place of that which was worthless and mean (Isa_55:13).
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv17–19 And unto Adam he said. The noun here used…
And unto Adam he said. The noun here used for the first time without the article is explained as a proper name (Keil, Lunge, Speaker"s "Commentary"), though perhaps it is rather designed to express the man s representative character (Macdonald). Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife. Preceding his sentence with a declaration of his guilt, which culminated in this, that instead of acting as his wife"s protector prior to her disobedience, or as her mentor subsequent to that act, in the hope of brining her to repentance, he became her guilty coadjutor through yielding himself to her persuasions. And hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it.
For which a twofold judgment is likewise pronounced upon Adam. Cursed is the ground. Ha adamah, out of which man was taken; (Gen_2:7) i.e. the soil outside of the garden. The language does not necessarily imply that now, for the first time, in consequence of the fall, the physical glebe underwent a change, "becoming from that point onward a realm of deformity and discord, as before it was not, and displaying in all its sceneries and combinations the tokens of a broken constitution" (vide Bushnell, "Nature and the Supernatural," Ge 7); simply it announces the fact that, because of the transgression of which he had been guilty, he would find the land beyond the confines of Eden lying under a doom of sterility. (cf. Rom_8:20) For thy sake.
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1. Because of thy sin it required to be such a world.
2. For thy good it was better that such a curse should lie upon the ground. Reading d instead of r, the LXX translate ejn toiv ergoiv; and the Vulgate, In operetuo. In sorrow. Literally, painful labor (cf. ver. 16; Pro_5:10) Shalt thou eat of it. Ie. of its fruits (cf. Isa_1:7 Isa_36:16 Isa_37:30) Bread of sorrow" (Psa_127:2) is bread procured and eaten amidst hard labor. All the days of thy life.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On v17 Cursed is the ground for thy sake
Gen_3:17
Cursed is the ground for thy sake
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A curse which proves a blessing
This was almost the first curse revealed to us as pronounced by God, and yet it is almost the first blessing.
I. AT FIRST SIGHT WE ARE NOT PREPARED TO ADMIT THAT LABOUR IS A BLESSING. We shrink from the misery of task work which must be got through when we are least fitted to carry it on; the very word repose suggests all that is most coveted by men. It was a true instinct which led the old mythologist to invent the fable of Sisyphus and his stone, and to see in that punishment an image of horrible torture. Labour which is only laborious is and always must be grievous to endure.
II. ON ALL THE SONS OF ADAM THERE IS AN ABSOLUTE NECESSITY OF LABOUR IMPOSED. We may recognize the necessity and submit to it with gratitude, and then we find in it every hour a blessing; or we may rebel against it, and then we turn it as far as we can into a curse. The sweetness of leisure consists in the change from our ordinary employments, not in a cessation of all employment.
III. LYING SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE BLESSING OF LABOUR THERE IS ALSO A CURSE--Thorns also and thistles, etc. Work is grievous and irksome when unfruitful--when, after much toil, there is nothing to show. But let us be sure that if the work is done for Gods glory, and in His name, the fruit will spring up in His time. (A. Jessopp, D. D.)
Need of toil
The ground is our first lesson book, Notice--
1. A man does not cultivate the land by waving his hand majestically over it. The land says, If you want anything out of me you must work for it. I answer labour, I respond to industry, I reply to the importunity of toil. That is the great law of social progress.
2. The ground does not obey the dashing and angry passions of any man. The green field does not turn white, though you curse over it till you foam again at the mouth. We cannot compel nature to keep pace with our impatience; man cannot hasten the wheel of the seasons; he cannot drive nature out of its calm and solemn movement; his own fields keep him at bay.
3. Then I see God stooping and writing with His finger on the ground, and when He erects Himself and withdraws, behold the Bible He has written. Behold the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and the latter rain; Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. See the earth inscribed with terms like these, and learn from the land how to live.
4. Spiritual cultivation, like the culture of the land, cannot be hastened. You cannot extemporise moral greatness; it is a slow growth.
5. Spiritual cultivation is sometimes very hard. Circumstances are heavily against us; we are not placed in favourable localities, or under very gracious conditions. Let us be thankful to God if, though faint, we are still pursuing. (J. Parker, D. D.)
A curse, yet a blessing
I. The text suggests some of the mysteries by which we are surrounded. There is
(1) the universal fact of sin everywhere existing;
(2) the sorrow which is stamped upon the whole race;
(3) the toil that is a condition of humanity.
II. The text supplies a solution by which these mysteries are brought into reconciliation with right views of the nature and character of the Eternal. Out of mans evil and mans transgression God contrives blessing. Sorrow in itself is an apparent evil; as God manages it, it is the harbinger of joy. It was the curse, but it also brings the blessing. There is hardness and difficulty in toil, but in occupation God has given us enjoyment. It keeps the mind and heart in active and energetic power. Even the curse of sin becomes in Gods hands a blessing. There is no brighter happiness for man than the sense of being forgiven. (A. Boyd.)
The curse on the ground for mans sake
The king is punished by a curse upon his kingdom in addition to the personal woe falling on himself, just as Pharaoh was cursed in the plagues inflicted on his people. The ground, out of which he was taken, is cursed on his account, as if all pertaining to him had become evil. It is not he that suffers on account of his connection with the soil, but it is the soil that suffers on account of its connection with him, affording proof that it is not from matter that evil flows into spirit, but that it is from spirit that evil flows into matter. That soil from which he had sprung, that soil which God had just been strewing with verdure and flowers, that soil whose fruitfulness had produced the tree whose beauty and desirableness had been the womans beguilement and his own ruin, that soil must now be scourged and sterilized on his account; as if God had thus addressed him: I can no longer trust thee with a fruitful soil, nor allow the blessing with which I have blessed the earth to abide upon it; thou art to remain here for a season, but it shall not be the same earth; in mercy I will still leave it such an earth as thou canst inherit, not a wilderness nor a chaos as at first, but still with enough of gloom and desolation and barrenness to remind thee of thy sin, to say to thee continually, O man, thou hast ruined the earth over which I had set thee as king.
1. The earth is to bring forth the thorn and the thistle. Whether these existed before we do not undertake to say, nor whether they are given here merely as the representatives of all noxious plants or weeds, nor whether the object of the curse, in so far as they were concerned, was to turn them into abortions, which they really are. Taking the words as they lie before us, we find that the essence of the curse Was the multiplication of these prickly abortions till they should become noxious to man and beast and herb of the field; mere nuisances on the face of the ground. Elsewhere in Scripture they are referred to as calamities. As the effects of judgments Job refers to them (Job_31:40), and Jeremiah (Jer_12:13). As the true offspring of a barren soil the apostle speaks of them (Heb_6:8). As injurious to all around our Lord Himself alludes to them Mat_13:7-22). And it is evident that all these passages connect themselves with the original curse, and are to be interpreted by a reference to it. They are tokens of Gods original displeasure against mans sin, so that the sight of them should recall us to this awful scene in Eden, and make us feel how truly God hates sin, and how impossible it is for Him to change in His hatred of it.
2. Man is to eat the herb of the field. Originally, the fruit of the various trees was to have been mans food; the herb was for the lower creation, if not exclusively, at least chiefly. But now he is degraded. He is still, of course, to eat fruit, but in this he is to be restricted. Whether it were that, the earth being less productive in fruit, he must betake himself to inferior sustenance; or whether it might also be from a change in bodily constitution, requiring something else than fruit, we cannot say. The sentence is, Thou shalt eat the herb of the field, not the pleasant fruits of paradise.
3. He is to eat in sorrow. There was to be no glad feasting, but a bitter eating, or, if there might be feasting, it should be like Israels, with bitter herbs--the sweet and the bitter mingling.
4. He is to eat in toil--to wring a stinted subsistence out of the reluctant earth with sore labour and weariness. He cannot live but in a way which reminds him of his primal sin. Each day he hears the original sentence ringing in his ears. And yet all this hard toil serves barely to sustain a dying life; and even that only for a little, until he return to the dust. This is the end of his earthly toil!
5. He is to die. Grace does not remit the whole penalty. It leaves a fragment behind it in pain, weakness, sickness, death, though at the same time it extracts blessing out of all these relics of the curse. Besides, in thus leaving men subject to death, it leaves open the door by which the great Deliverer was to go in and rob the spoiler of his prey. By death is death to be destroyed. Man must die! He came from the dust, and he must return to it. (H. Bonar, D. D.)
The first transgression condemned
I. THE CRIME PROVED. The judge condemns the criminals conduct in several particulars.
1. His listening and yielding to temptation.
2. His neglect of Gods Word.
3. His open, positive transgression of a known law.
II. THE SENTENCE PRONOUNCED.
1. Deprivation of all the fruits and pleasures of Eden.
2. Toil.
3. Disappointment.
4. Sorrow.
5. Increasing infirmity.
6. Death.
7. Justice is tempered with mercy.
Let the subject teach us--
1. A lesson of humility. We are the degenerate children of such a parent.
2. A lesson of caution.
(1) Mark the process of falling. Satan presents some suitable object. We appear, desire, covet, throw off restraint, and transgress, in intention, and in fact.
(2) Mark the danger of falling. Our first parents fell from their paradisiacal state, and by a small temptation. Wherefore, watch, etc. (Mat_26:41).
(3) For, mark the consequences of falling. All the evils we feel or fear.
3. A lesson of encouragement. Respited, we may recover our Eden, by means of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. Contrast--the first involving himself and us in guilt, pollution, and misery--the second the reverse of this (Rom_5:12-21). (Sketches of Sermons.)
Observations
I. THE CURSE, AS WELL AS THE BLESSING UPON ALL CREATURES, PROCEEDS FROM THE WILL AND DECREE OF GOD ALONE.
1. It can be no otherwise, seeing in Him all things consist (Col_1:17), and have their being (Act_17:28).
2. And it is fit it should be so, that all men might fear before Him Jer_5:24), depend on Him (Jer_14:22), and praise Him Psa_107:32-34).
3. And it is every way best for us, who know that God judgeth righteously Psa_67:4), and that those that fear Him shall want no good thing Psa_84:1).
II. IT IS OUR OWN SIN THAT BRINGS THE CURSE OF GOD UPON ALL THAT WE ENJOY.
1. Gods mercies are over all His works (Psa_145:9), and His hand in itself is not shortened (Isa_59:1), neither is there anything that He hates but sin, or for sin (Psa_5:4-5).
2. And it is fit that God should so show His detestation of sin, by manifesting His wrath every way against such as provoke Him thereby, as He did in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and upon His own land Deu_29:23; Deu_29:25).
III. THE GREATEST OF ALL CREATURES ARE UNDER GODS COMMAND
1. They are all creatures (Jer_14:22), even the work of His hand Job_34:19).
2. He could not otherwise be an absolute Lord over all (Psa_103:19) if any creature were out of His command.
IV. THE CURSE OF GOD UPON THE CREATURES IS A PART OF MANS PUNISHMENT.
1. We have interest in them, so that their destruction is our loss.
2. Our subsistence is by them, so that to lose them, is to lose the means by which our lives should be supported.
V. MANS LIFE IN THIS WORLD IS A LIFE OF PAIN AND SORROW.
1. To make us the more sensible of sin, by our daily tasting the bitter fruits of it.
2. To move to a holy delight, and earnest seeking after things that are spiritual, the ways whereof are pleasant and the paths peace (Pr Psa_119:165).
VI. THE SHORT PLEASURE OF SIN DRAWS AFTER IT A LONG AND LASTING PUNISHMENT.
VII. MANS FOOD IS OUT OF THE EARTH. (J. White, M. A.)
Weeds
It is the law of nature that plants should be diffused as widely as possible wherever the circumstances are favourable for their growth and welfare. For this purpose they are provided with the most admirable contrivances to maintain their own existence, and to propagate the species. But man interferes with this law in his processes of gardening and horticulture. His object is to cultivate beautiful or useful plants within enclosures, from which all other plants are excluded, and where an artificial soil and climate have been prepared. He wishes to separate from the struggle of the elements, and from the competition of other species, certain kinds of flowers or vegetables which are good for food or pleasant to the eye. In this he is only partially successful, for into the plot of ground which he has set apart from the waste common of nature a large number of plants intrude; and with them he has to maintain a constant warfare. These plants are known by the common name of weeds, a term which, curious enough, is etymologically connected with Wodan or Odin, the great god of the northern mythology, to whose worship in former ages, in this country, our Wednesday, or Odinsday, was specially dedicated. Any plant may become a weed by being accidentally found in a situation where its presence is not desired; but true weeds form a peculiar and distinct class. They are at once recognized by their mean and ragged appearance; their stems and foliage being neither fleshy nor leathery, but of a soft, flaccid description, and by the absence in most of them of conspicuous or beautiful blossoms. A look of vagabondage seems to characterize most of the members of the order, which at once stamps them as belonging to a pariah class. In the vegetable kingdom they are what gipsies are in the human world, and the same mystery surrounds them which is connected with that remarkable race. Like the gipsies they are essentially intruders and foreigners; never the native children of the soil on which they flourish. They may have come from long or short distances, but they have always been translated. There is no country where they are not found, and everywhere they have to encounter the prejudices which the popular mind invariably entertains against foreigners. There is one peculiarity about weeds which is very remarkable, viz., that they only appear on ground which, either by cultivation or for some other purpose, has been disturbed by man. They are never found truly wild, in woods or hills, or uncultivated wastes far away from human dwellings. They never grow on virgin soil, where human beings bare never been. No weeds exist in those parts of the earth that are uninhabited, or where man is only a passing visitant. The Arctic and Antarctic regions are destitute of them; and above certain limits on mountain ranges they have no representatives. To every thoughtful mind the questions must occur, Have the plants we call weeds always been weeds? If not, what is their native country? How did they come into connection with man, and into dependence upon his labours? No satisfactory answer can be given to these questions. As a class there can be no doubt that weeds belong to the most recent flora of the globe. Their luxuriant and flaccid look indicates their modern origin; for the plants of the older geological ages are characterized by dry leathery leaves, and a general physiognomy like that of the existing flora of Australia. Indeed, the flora of Europe during the Eocene period bears a close resemblance to that of Australia at the present day; so that in paying a visit to our southern colony, we are transporting ourselves back to the far-off ages when our own country had a climate and vegetation almost identical. The flora of Australia is the oldest flora at present existing on our globe. Our weeds came upon the scene long subsequent to this Australian or Eocene vegetation. In our own country they form part of the Germanic flora which overspread our low grounds after the passing away of the last glacial epoch, driving before them to the mountain tops the Alpine and Arctic plants, suited to a severer climate, which previously had covered the whole of Europe. They came from Western Asia and Northern Africa. They made their appearance in company with the beautiful and fruitful flora that is specially associated with the arrival of man, and spread from the same region which is supposed to be the cradle of the human race. In this way they are co-related with the Scripture account of the fall of man. Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, was the sentence pronounced by God upon mans sin. We are not to suppose from this circumstance that these noxious plants were specially created then and there for the express purpose of carrying out the punishment of man. They were previously in existence, though they may be said to belong very specially to the human epoch; but since that mournful event they have received a new significance, and are bound up with man in a new moral relation. Most of our weeds possess all the characteristics of a desert flora; special adaptations to a dry soil and arid climate. And the reason why they find a congenial home in our gardens and cultivated fields is because the soil of such places is made artificially like the natural soil of their native country. Our fields and gardens are divested of all unnecessary vegetation, and drained of all superfluous moisture, and thus are possessed of the dry, warm, exposed soil, to which the provisions for drought with which weeds are specially furnished are admirably adapted, and where in consequence they luxuriate and overcome other plants less specially endowed. They follow in the train of man, and show a remarkable predilection for his haunts, become domesticated under his care, not merely because of the abundance of the nitrogenous and calcareous substances to be found in the vicinity of human dwellings and in manured fields and gardens, but chiefly because he provides them with the dry soil and climate in which they can best grow. It is an essential qualification of a weed that it should grow and spread with great rapidity. For this purpose it is endowed with marvellous contrivances in the way of buds and seeds. A very large number of our weeds, such as the thistle, groundsel, dandelion, colts-foot, scabious, daisy, ragwort, are composite flowers. The apparently single blossom is in reality a colony of separate blossoms, compressed by the obliteration of their floral stems around one central axis. In most of our weeds the floral parts are small and inconspicuous. The reproductive act is so arranged as to economise material and to exhaust the vital force as little as possible, and the organs concerned in it are reduced to the simplest forms consistent with efficiency. Most of the species can be fertilized by the wind, which is always available, or by the help of insects that have a wide range of distribution and are abundant everywhere. In consequence of this floral economy, the vegetative system acquires a greater predominance in this class of plants than in almost any other, so that the life of the individual is carefully preserved even amid the most untoward conditions. A weed, by reason of the strength of its vegetative system, is able to stand extremes of heat and cold, and to recover from the roughest usage. It will hold on to life in circumstances which would prove fatal to most other plants; and in this way it can abide the most favourable time for the development of its blossoms and seeds. Nay, it can propagate itself as well without blossoms as with them. Many of our weeds form long creeping stems, giving off at every joint buds which will produce perfect plants, and greatly extend the area which they occupy. That weeds belong to the most recent and specialized flora of the world is evident from their wide distribution and wonderful powers of colonization. In our own country they number about two hundred and thirty, and constitute about a seventh part of our native flora. We are constantly receiving accessions from the continent, along with the seeds of our cultivated plants. In company with the wheat and barley that can be cultivated in India down to the tropic zone, because they can be sowed and reaped during the coldest quarter of the year, have been introduced a crowd of the common annual weeds of our country, such as the shepherds purse, the chickweed, the spurge, and the corn-pimpernel, which also run through the cycle of their lives in the winter quarter. Half the weeds of American agriculture have been imported from Europe; and of the 2,100 flowering plants of the Northern United States, 320 are European. Australia and New Zealand have sent us no weeds, and America only a very few. The solution of this mystery, as Dr. Seemann clearly proves, is not to be found in any consideration of climate, soil, or circumstances. It is a question of race. The present flora of the United States and of Australia is older than the Germanic flora which now constitutes the principal vegetation of Europe. It is very similar to, if not absolutely identical with, that of Europe during the Miocene and Eocene epochs. America and Australia have not yet arrived at the degree of floral development to which Europe has attained; consequently plants coming to our country from Australia and America would not come as colonists, with a new part to play in it, but as survivors of an older flora whose cycle of existence had ages ago run out there. Our system of the rotation of crops is based upon the fact that the soil which has borne one kind of harvest will not produce the same next year, but requires another kind of crop to be grown on it. And Nature in her wilds carefully observes the same law. Whatever our weeds were in the original state, they are now like the corn which man sows in the same field with them, endowed with habits so long acquired that they will part with their life sooner than abandon them. The original wild plant of the corn--if there ever was such a thing, and this admits of grave doubts--from which our corn was developed, may have been able to propagate and extend itself freely independent of man; but we know that without mans agency, the corn, as it is now modified, would perish. It does not grow of its own accord, or by the natural dispersion and germination of its seed. Left to itself, it would quickly disappear and become extinct. The one condition of its permanency in the world, of its growth in quantities sufficient for mans food, is that it be sown by man in ground carefully prepared beforehand to receive it. The same rule would appear to hold good in regard to the weeds which, in spite of himself, he cultivates along with it, and whose persistent presence makes the cultivation of the soil so difficult to him. We know them only in an artificial condition as abnormal forms of original wild types; and as such as they are incapable of continuing themselves without mans help. Left to grow in soil that has reverted to its original wild condition, they would soon be overpowered by the surrounding vegetation, the grasses and mosses, and in a shorter or longer space of time they would inevitably disappear. I have seen many ruins of dwellings in upland glens from which the nettles and all the weeds that once grew in the field and garden plot have utterly vanished, leaving only a dense thicket of bracken, or a lovely smooth carpet of greensward, to indicate among the heather that man had once inhabited the place. We are bound, therefore, to believe that so long as man cultivates the ground, so long will these weeds make their appearance, and in striking correlation with the primeval curse, compel him in the sweat of his face to eat his bread. When he ceases to till the ground, they will cease to grow in it. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
Consequences of the Fall
The world was made for man, and man for God. The upper link gave way, and all that depended on it fell. Man rebelled, and carried away from its allegiance a subject world. (W. Arnot.)
The Fall robbed man of his glory
The harp of Eden, alas! is broken. Unstrung and mute an exiled race have hung it on the willows; and Ichabod stands written now in the furrows of mans guilty forehead, and on the wreck of his ruined estate. Some things remain unaffected by the blight of sin, as God made them for Himself; the flowers have lost neither their bloom nor fragrance; the rose smells as sweet as it did when bathed in the dews of paradise, and seas and seasons, obedient to their original impulse, roll on as of old to their Makers glory. But from man, alas! how is the glory departed? Look at his body when the light of the eye is quenched, and the countenance is changed, and the noble form is festering in corruption--mouldering into the dust of death. Or, change still more hideous, look at the soul! The spirit of piety dead, the mind under a dark eclipse, hatred to God rankling in that once loving heart, it retains but some vestiges of its original grandeur, just enough, like the beautiful tracery and noble arches of a ruined pile, to make us feel what glory once was there, and now is gone. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
Testimony to mans Fall
No man that takes a view of his own dark and blinded mind, his slow and dull apprehension, his uncertain staggering judgment, roving conjectures, feeble and mistaken reasonings about matters that concern him most; ill inclinations, propension to what is unlawful to him and destructive, aversion to his truest interests and best good, irresolution, drowsy sloth, exorbitant and ravenous appetites and desires, impotent and self-vexing passions, can think human nature, in him, is in its primitive integrity, and as pure as when it first issued from its high and most pure original. (J. Howe.)
The doctrine of the Fall, commended to man' reason
The two great systems of nature and revelation are sometimes supposed to clash--to be opposed to each other; as if the revealings of the one were inconsistent with the discoveries of the other; as if they were two volumes, of which the principles and details of one were opposed to the principles and details of the other. The truth of this matter seems to be, that revelation differs from nature only in this, that revelation pours a broader and a clearer light upon the mysteries of creation. When we look forth upon the face of nature in the dim and shadowy twilight of morning, and when again we look forth upon the same scene in the bright and unclouded splendour of noon, there is no actual change in the landscape; the mountains have not changed their place, the forests have not changed their trees, the rivers have not changed their course; the only difference is, that the splendour of noon has flung a brighter and a clearer light than the grey mists of the morning. We are too often met with high panegyrics upon the qualities and the powers of man, and we are told in every variety of language of the lofty virtues of man--of the dignity of human nature--of the towering intellect, the refined feeling, and the virtuous heart of man; and we are told of all this, as if his powers had never been impaired, or as if his intellect had never been shattered, or as if his virtues had never been blighted, or his heart been corrupted, or his feelings debased, and his whole nature become the wreck and ruin of what it once had been. The line of argument, along which we shall endeavour to conduct you, shall go to prove that this great principle of revelation is also a principle of nature; and that though it lies unexplained in the pages of natural religion, it is explained and accounted for in the pages of revealed religion. We shall consider the subject, first, in reference to the world, and then in reference to man.
1. And first we argue, that nature is ever presenting to us evidences of the Fall, and that those evidences discover themselves to us in the present aspect of our world. It is very true, that as the eye wanders throughout all the departments of nature, it can trace the evidences of the love and the benevolence of the great Creator. In the language of the apostle, He gives rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. And not only this, but we find that the smallest flower of the field has all that is required for its existence and its loveliness, as much as the stateliest tree of the forest; and the minutest insect of creation has all that enables it to fulfil the ends of its being, as much as the mightiest and the noblest in the animal world. But in the midst of all this living and breathing evidence, he will discover evidences of an opposite character; he will discover evidences of the going forth of wrath--that some evil has befallen our world; and he will discover that the evidences of Divine benevolence are not more palpable than these evidences of Divine wrath. We allude not now to the poverty, the wretchedness, the helplessness, the diseases, the deaths, that press and crush the family of man; but we allude to those physical phenomena, that are everywhere discoverable throughout all the fields of creation. If there be lands where all is beauty and fertility, there are also lands whore all is waste and sterility. If there be climates where all is balmy and delicious and calm, there are also climates where all is darkened with clouds and disturbed by storms. There are wide regions of our globe, so enwrapped in the mantle of eternal snows, and so defended by vast icy barriers, that like the very battlements of nature, they resist the foot of man. There are wide regions of our globe, even in the most delicious climes, where the stateliest trees of the forest and the loveliest flowers of the field and the richest fruits of the ground grow spontaneously with a strange luxuriance, where yet at the same time the fatal vapours and the envenomed atmosphere preclude the presence of man, as effectually as the angel with the flaming sword precluded him at the gate of paradise. And while these characteristics are discernible throughout the face of creation, there are at the same time mighty and tremendous agents of evil, called into existence by the Creator and sent abroad into our world; agents more destructive than the angel of the Passover that slew the firstborn of Egypt; and more terrible than the angel of destruction that smote the host of Sennacherib. If the going forth of these angels from heaven is to be regarded as a going forth of wrath from the Creator, what shall we think of the spirit of the simeon, that from time to time has lifted the sands of the African deserts, and has borne them onward like the waves of the sea, till the stateliest cities of Egypt and the most gigantic architecture the world has ever seen, lie even to this hour buried deep, deep, within their bosom? What shall we think of the spirit of the volcano, pouring forth rivers of burning lava and clouds of smoking dust, enwrapping whole regions in terrific conflagration, and, as in Italy, beautiful Italy, burying cities with all their miserable inhabitants? What shall we think of the spirit of the earthquake by which whole districts have been wasted, mighty nations submerged beneath the waves, stately cities sunk into ruins, and whole continents frighted from their propriety? But where nature is thus silent, revelation speaks. Where the volume of nature closes, the volume of revelation opens. Nature reveals to us the fact that our world is a fallen and a ruined world; revelation gives the explanation of that fact: that in consequence of sin our world has fallen under the curse of its Creator, that it has been a bright and a beautiful and a happy world, but that in consequence of sin a curse was uttered, Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life, and that from henceforth a darkening destiny has been enchained to our planet. Wrath has gone forth against it; and our once beautiful world has become a fallen world.
2. But, as we intimated at the commencement, this argument may be carried further, and may be applied to the moral condition of man, quite as conclusively as to his physical condition. Or perhaps, to speak more correctly, it may be applied to the present condition of man, quite as conclusively as to the present condition of the world in which he lives. The destiny of man is a destiny of trouble. The experience of every man justifies the statement of the patriarch, that man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward. It is the belief of the heathen; it is the creed of the Christian; it is the record of the historian; it is the maxim of the philosopher; it is the song of the poet. We will not believe--we cannot believe, that a God of benevolence and love, a God who must delight Himself in the comforts and not in the sorrows, in the happiness and not in the miseries of His creatures, originally created man for so melancholy a doom. And the same remark will apply to his moral condition. There are in the heart of every man the workings of evil passions, the strugglings of carnal tendencies, the violence of feelings that are not good: licentiousness of thought, the constant resistance to the empire of holiness, the striving of the flesh against the spirit. There are the anger, the malice, the hatred, the revenge, the covetousness, the ambition, the wars, the bloodshed, that characterize the whole history of man, so that it is little else than a history of the wars and the bloodshed that ambition and pride and revenge and every foul and hateful passion have called into existence. We will not believe--we cannot believe--that a God of benevolence and love, a God of holiness and of peace, could have originally created man in this state, or planted in his heart unholy passions like these. This sad condition of man is a fact that may be read in the pages of natural religion; but the explanation of the fact, and the causes of this sad condition, are a mystery in natural religion. But it is here that revelation interposes and resolves the mystery, Natural religion, like the astrologers of Chaldea, could not read the mysterious handwriting on the wall: but revealed religion, like the prophet of the Lord, reads and interprets the writing. The words of the Creator, as addressed to Adam, were--In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; and again--In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread; and again, to the woman--In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. (M. H. Seymour, M. A.)
Natural evidence of the curse
I. If this sentence was executed upon man and the earth, without all doubt it may at this day be distinguished; therefore let us inquire in the first place whether there are any signs of a curse upon the ground? Towards the latter end of the fifth chapter of Genesis we read, that when a son was born to Lamech, he called his name Noah, which signifies comfort, because he was to comfort them concerning their work, and toil of their hands, because of the ground which the Lord had cursed. Lamech knew, therefore, that a curse had been pronounced upon the ground, for the transgression of Adam; and he knew also, either by tradition, or the spirit of prophecy, that it should take place more fully in the days of Noah, whose favour and acceptance with God should give comfort to men, and render more tolerable that toil and labour which should be the necessary consequence of this curse upon the ground; which, therefore, was brought upon the earth by the general deluge. When the wickedness and violence of the human race had wearied out the patience and long suffering of God, and obliged His justice to inflict the punishment which had been threatened, He declared in His revelation to Noah that He would destroy man with the earth. St. Peter also confirms the same, where he takes occasion to inform ungodly men, that the world which then was, being overflowed with water, perished. Whence it appears that the flood should, and actually did, amount to a destruction of the earth, of which destruction and the manner of it, the earth in all parts has so many signs at this day, that a man endued with eyesight, understanding, and a very little experience, cannot choose but to see and acknowledge it.
II. A second consequence of the Fall, as it stands in the words of the text is, Sorrow to man in the eating of the fruit of the ground. And here it may be useful to observe how the punishment of man is suited to the nature of his crime. His first and great act of disobedience was eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree; and it was surely just and proper that he who had eaten in sin should thenceforth eat in sorrow. We are indeed upon terms with our Creator quite different from the lilies of the field, or the fowls of the air: they are now as He made them at first, but we are not so; and hence it comes to pass that labour and travel is a law of universal obligation, and that If any man will not work neither should he eat.
III. The third part of the sentence pronounced upon mans disobedience, is the prevailing of thorns and thistles upon the ground. If the powers and properties of these two sorts of vegetables be well considered, it will soon appear how well they are fitted to propagate a curse, by increasing the trouble and labour we are obliged to bestow in the cultivation of the earth. For these are much more strong and fruitful than such herbs and grain as are of the greatest use; and they are more apt to disperse themselves abroad and overrun the ground. With respect to thistles in particular, we shall discover a very plain reason for this, if we compare their seeds with the seeds of wheat. For the grain of wheat ought to be lodged at some little depth in the earth, to which it cannot easily reach without human assistance. It can only be shed, and fall down from the ear upon the surface of the ground, where it would be exposed, and ready to be devoured by the birds of the air, or the vermin of the earth, or perhaps lie till it rotted and perished with rain and frost for want of being covered with earth. But the seeds of thistles presently strike down roots in the earth wherever they happen to light, and need no such care and assistance. Then again the grains of wheat are naked and heavy, and can fall only as a dead weight at the foot of the plant which bore them, without being able to stir any farther, and shift themselves to a place fit for their reception and growth. But the case is much otherwise with the seeds of thistles. These are small and light, and are furnished with a fine downy plume, which serves them as wings, by means of which they are borne up and wafted about from place to place by every breath of wind, till they are transplanted to every corner of the field where the parent thistle grew, insomuch that when this plant is ripe, and its seeds hanging loose and disposed to fall off, it is common to see large fields covered all over with them, after any little wind. Nor ought it to be passed over that there is a great difference in the multiplication of these two kinds of seed. Some sorts of thistles bear thirty, some fifty, and some upwards of a hundred heads, with a hundred (and in some kinds several hundred) seeds in each of the heads. And if a moderate reckoning be made, and we suppose all the seeds to take rightly, grow up and fructify, then one single plant would produce at the first crop above twenty thousand: which succeeding in like manner, would bring a second crop of several hundreds of millions; an increase so enormous as can hardly be imagined: and it is plain that a few crops more, if not hindered by some means, but carried regularly on, would in a very short time stock the whole globe of the earth in such a manner as scarcely to leave room for anything else. But some thistles have other ways of planting and spreading themselves, besides that of propagating by their seeds. The common way-thistle, as it is called, besides its innumerable seeds, all winged and prepared for flight, hath its roots spreading to great lengths, and sending up suckers or new plants on every side of it. In a little while these, if suffered to continue, send up others, and they more, without tale or end. So that by this method only, one plant will overrun a vast tract of land in a very short time, suppressing, stifling, and destroying all other good and useful herbage. Besides, it is not every soil that is fit for the nourishment of wheat, and scarcely any will produce it for more than two or three years together, without great expense being bestowed on its cultivation: whereas there is hardly any ground or soil whatsoever, high or low, hill, valley, or plain, where thistles will not take and flourish for ages together. Having said so much upon thistles, I may be shorter in my remarks upon thorns; the rather because a great deal of what has been offered concerning the former is as true of the latter; which grow in almost every kind of soil, running on and increasing of themselves, and endued with the same worthless nature and mischievous qualities. For a proof of this we need only look upon the bramble, which occurs everywhere, and throws itself about without measure. The berries it bears are innumerable, and each of them contains a large mass of seeds. The roots push forward under ground, and the branches and suckers running on to great lengths, trail upon the ground, and send down fresh roots out of their sides; by which means they are diffused about, and multiplied without bounds. But as to thorns, the chief example we have is in that species which is known by the name of the gorse or furze. This is the vilest and most mischievous shrub upon the face of the earth. It will let nothing thrive or prosper, or so much as grow near it. It is so beset with prickles, that it is hardly possible to approach it in any way without hurt: and so fruitful withal, that for almost half the year it is covered or rather loaded with flowers, all of which go off into pods, charged with seeds. It shoots forth stubborn roots far and near, from which other young plants are growing up: these send up others as fast as the mother plant, so that we need the less wonder to see this noxious thorn so plentifully abounding, and such large tracts of land wholly covered and overrun by it. Other thorns are of so hard and stubborn a nature as to render it exceedingly difficult, and always impracticable without great labour and expense and patience, ever wholly to extirpate and clear the ground of them. If these things are duly reflected upon, it must be allowed that the sentence upon Adam, Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it, thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, was effectually put in execution; and that not only upon him, but more especially upon us, his posterity to the end of the world. When we think of this curse upon the ground, we should also remember that it extends to our own heart, which, since the Fall, is by nature barren and unprofitable. It is a soil in which every ill weed will take root and spread itself. There the thorns of worldly care, and the thistles of worldly vanity, will grow and flourish. As the husbandman watches his land, so should the Christian search and examine his heart, that he may cast out of it all those unprofitable weeds and roots of bitterness which will naturally get possession of it. If this work is rightly performed, the soil will be ready for the good seed of the word of God, which will spring up and prosper under the influence of Divine grace, as the corn groweth by a blessing of rain and sunshine from the heaven above. (W. Jones. M. A.)
Thorns the curse of Adam and the crown of Christ
Nature is a mirror in which we behold both the skill and character of the Divine Artificer; but the reflected image--owing to the peculiarity of the material, or of the angle of vision--is not always a true one. In every part of creation we find examples of wasted energy and frustrated design; foundations laid, but the building never completed; the skeleton formed, but never clothed with living flesh; an unceasing production of means that are never used, embryos that are never vivified, germs that are never developed. We cannot, however, in such things, measure the Divine proceedings by our human standards; for, taking a larger view of the subject, we find that the imperfection of particular parts is necessary for the perfection of the whole scheme, and all instances of failure are made to work together for the general good. It is to this tendency of nature to overflow its banks, to attempt more than she can execute, to begin more than she can finish, that we owe our own daily bread. For if the corn plant produced only a sufficient number of seeds barely to perpetuate the species, there would be no annual miracle of the multiplication of the loaves; and man, always at the point of starvation, could neither replenish and subdue the earth, nor accomplish any of the great purposes of his existence. Thorns are among the most striking examples of failure on the part of nature to reach an ideal perfection. They are not essential organs, perfect parts, but in every case altered or abortive structures. They are formed in two different ways.
When the hairs that occur on the stem of a plant are enlarged and hardened, they form rigid opaque conical processes such as those of the rose and the bramble. The so-called thorns of these plants are not, however, true thorns, but prickles, for they have only a superficial origin, being produced by the epidermis only, and having no connection with the woody tissue. They may be easily separated from the stem, without leaving any mark or laceration behind. True thorns or spines, on the contrary, have a deeper origin and cannot be so removed. They are not compound hardened hairs, but abnormal conditions of buds and branches. A branch, owing to poverty of soil, or unfavourable circumstances, does not develop itself; it produces no twigs or leaves; it therefore assumes the spinous or thorny form, terminating in a more or less pointed extremity, as in the common hawthorn. In some cases, as in the sloe, we see the transformation going on at different stages; some branches bearing leaves on their lower portions and terminating in spines. A bud by some means or other becomes abortive; there is a deficiency of nutriment to stimulate its growth; it does not develop into blossom and fruit. Its growing point, therefore, is hardened; its scaly envelopes are consolidated into woody fibre, and the whole bud becomes a sharp thorn. Leaves are also occasionally arrested in their development and changed into thorns, as in the stipules of Robinia, of the common barberry, and of several species of acacia. The middle nerve of the leaf in a few instances absorbs to itself all the parenchyma or green cellular substance, and therefore hardens into a thorn; and in the holly all the veins of the leaves become spiny. In all these cases thorns are not necessary, but accidental appendages, growths arrested and transformed by unfavourable circumstances; and nature, by the law of compensation, converts them into means of defence to the plants on which they are produced--not very effective defences in most instances, but still analogous to the spines of the hedgehog and the quills of the porcupine, and typical of the plan according to which nature supplies some method of preservation to every living thing that is liable to be injured. By cultivation many thorny plants may be deprived of their spines. The apple, the pear, and the plum tree, in a wild state are thickly covered with thorns; but when reared in the shelter of the garden, and stimulated by all the elements most favourable for their full development, they lose these thorns, which become changed into leafy branches, and blossoming and fruit-bearing buds. In this way man acquires the rights assigned to him by God, and nature yields to him the pledges of his sovereignty, and reaches her own ideal of beauty and perfection by his means. But when, on the other hand, he ceases to dress and keep the garden, nature regains her former supremacy, and brings back the cultivated plants to a wilder and more disordered condition than at first. A garden abandoned to neglect, owing to the absence or the carelessness of the owner, presents a drearier spectacle than the untamed wilderness; everything bursting out into rank luxuriance; stems originally smooth covered with prickles, and buds that would have burst into blossoms changed into thorns. It is a remarkable circumstance that whenever man cultivates nature, and then abandons her to her own unaided energies, the result is far worse than if he had never attempted to improve her at all. No country in the world, now that it has been so long let out of cultivation, has such a variety and abundance of thorny plants, as the once-favoured heritage of Gods people, the land flowing with milk and honey. Travellers call the Holy Land a land of thorns. This tendency of nature to produce a greater variety of thorny plants in ground let out of cultivation, as illustrated by the present vegetation of Palestine, throws considerable light upon the curse pronounced upon Adam when he had sinned: Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. Many individuals believe that we have in this curse the origin of thorns and thistles--that they were previously altogether unknown in the economy of nature. It is customary to picture Eden as a paradise of immaculate loveliness, in which everything was perfect, and all the objects of nature harmonized with the holiness and happiness of our first parents. The ground yielded only beautiful flowers and fruitful trees--every plant reached the highest ideal of form, colour, and usefulness of which it was capable. Preachers and poets in all ages have made the most of this beautiful conception. It is not, however, Scripture or scientific truth, but human fancy. Nowhere in the singularly measured and reticent account given in Genesis of mans first home do we find anything, if rightly interpreted, that encourages us to form such an ideal picture of it. It was admirably adapted to mans condition, but it was not in all respects ideally perfect. The vegetation that came fresh from Gods hand, and bore the impress of His seal that it was all very good, was created for death and reproduction; for it was called into being as the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree bearing fruit, whose seed was in itself. We must remember, too, that it was before and not after the Fall that Adam was put into the garden to dress and keep it. The very fact that such a process of dressing and keeping was necessary, indicates in the clearest manner that nature was not at first ideally perfect. The skill and toil of man called in, presuppose that there were luxuriant growths to be pruned, tendencies of vegetation to be checked or stimulated, weeds to be extirpated, tender flowers to be trained and nursed, and fruits to be more richly developed. The primeval blessing consisted in replenishing the earth and subduing it; and in no other way could man subdue the earth than by cultivating it. But the process of cultivation of necessity implies the existence of thorns and weeds. For in cultivating any spot we have to contend against the great law of nature which spreads every plant as widely as its constitution will permit. What then, we may ask, is implied in the language of the curse, Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee? The Hebrew form of the curse implies, not that a new thing should happen, but that an old thing should be intensified and exhibited in new relations. Just as the rainbow, which was formerly a mere natural phenomenon, became after the flood the symbol of the great world covenant; just as death, which during all the long ages of geology had been a mere phase of life, the termination of existence, became after the Fall the most bitter and poisonous fruit of sin: so thorns, which in the innocent Eden were the effects of a law of vegetation, became significant intimations of mans deteriorated condition. It is in relation to man, solely, that we are to look at the curse; for though the production of briers and thorn-bearing plants may add to mans labour and distress, it supplies food and enjoyment for multitudes of inferior creatures, and especially birds and insects. Man, in Eden, was placed in the most favourable circumstances. It was a garden specially prepared by God Himself for his habitation, and stocked with all that he could reasonably require. It was to be a pattern after which his own efforts in improving the world were to be modelled--a coign of vantage, a select and blessed centre, from which he was by degrees to subdue the wild prodigality of nature, and make of the earth an extended paradise. And, therefore, though the native tendencies of vegetation were not altogether eradicated, they were so far restrained that the dressing and keeping of the garden furnished him with healthful employment for all his powers of body and mind, and conferred upon him the dignity of developing the perfection, which potentially, though not actually, existed in nature, and thus becoming a fellow worker with God. But when excluded from Eden, he had to encounter, with powers greatly weakened by sin, the full, merciless force of natures untamed energies; energies, too, excited into greater opposition against him by his own efforts to subdue them. For, as I have already said, the very process of cultivation, while it removes the thorns and briers of the soil, will, if it be given up, produce a greater variety and luxuriance of thorns and thistles than the ground originally produced. The very fertility imparted to the soil would, if allowed to nourish its native vegetation, result in a greater rankness of useless growth. And therefore the tiller of the ground must never relax his efforts. I believe that the thorns and briers thus introduced in connection with the human epoch, but before the Fall, were anticipative consequences, prophetic symbols of that Fall. We err greatly, if we suppose that sin came into the world unexpectedly--produced a sudden shock and dislocation throughout nature, and took God as it were by surprise--that the atonement was a Divine after thought to remedy a defect in Gods creative foresight and natural law. He who sees the end from the beginning, knew that such a mournful moral lapse would happen--that Creation would fall with its king and high priest, and had therefore made preparations for it, not only, in the plans of heaven, but also in the objects and arrangements of earth. There are many things in the scheme of nature which have a reference to the fact of sin before it became a fact; which remind us unmistakeably that God, in fitting up this world to be the habitation of a moral being who should fall through sin, and be restored through suffering, had filled it with types and symbols of that fall and that restoration. When God said to Adam, Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, He acted according to a plan uniformly pursued by Him in all His subsequent dispensations and dealings with men; by which in gracious condescension to our two-fold nature, and to the carnal and spiritual classes of mankind, He associated the natural with the spiritual, gave the outward sign of the inward spiritual truth. He set the field of nature with types of degeneracy and arrested growth, which should symbolize to man the consequences upon his own nature of his own sin. What then are the thorns, looking at them in this typical aspect, produced by the sinful, accursed soil of mans heart and life?
1. Labour is one of the thorns of the curse. All things, says the wise man, are full of labour. Without it life cannot be maintained. Unremitting labour from day to day and from year to year--except in the case of a few races into whose lap nature pours, almost unsolicited, her prodigal stores, and who therefore continue children in body and mind all their lives--is the condition upon which we receive our daily bread. Much of this labour is indeed healthy. In work alone is health and life; and it is for work that God has created faculties. But how much of it, nevertheless, is terrible drudgery, effectually hindering the development of the higher faculties of the mind and soul, wearisome effort, vanity, and vexation of spirit! How much of failure is there in it, of disproportion between desires and results! How much of it is like rolling the fabled stone of Sisyphus up the steep hill only to roll down again immediately--like weaving ropes of sand! How often does the heart despair amid the unprofitableness of all its labour under the sun! We plough our fields and sow our seed; but instead of a bountiful harvest to reward us, too often comes up a crop of thorns and thistles, to wound the toiling hand and pierce the aching brow.
2. Then there is the thorn of pain--the darkest mystery of life. Some maintain that pain exists by necessity, that it has its root in the essential order of the world. It is the thorn that guards the rose of pleasure--the sting that protects the honey of life. But ask any martyr to physical suffering if that explanation satisfies him. Why, if the purpose of pain is a purely benevolent one, should it be so excessive? Why should it rend and rack the frame with agony? Why should it last so long? Methinks, if pain were meant merely to warn us of the presence of evil, and guard us against it, that a much less degree and a shorter duration of it would suffice. The Bible, and the Bible alone, tells us the cause and the origin of it. It tells us that it is nothing else than a witness for sin--the thorn which mans body, weakened and palsied by sin, produces. Man feels in his body the physical consequences of the death which his soul has died. He has the thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him, that he may be reminded continually of his sin and mortality, and be induced to walk softly all the days of his life.
3. Then there is the thorn of sorrow. Every branch of the human tree may be arrested and transformed by some casualty into a thorn of sorrow. The staff of friendship upon which we lean may break and pierce the hand. The bud of love which we cherish in our heart, and feed with the life blood of our affections, may be blighted by the chill of death, and become a thorn to wound us grievously. That civilization which has lessened physical troubles, has rendered us more susceptible to mental ones; and side by side with its manifold sources of enjoyment, are opened up manifold sources of suffering. And why is all this? Why is man, so highly cultivated, the possessor of such vast resources of science and art, still born to trouble as the sparks fly upward? There is no possible way of accounting for it save by the primeval curse: In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.
4. And lastly, as the climax of all lifes evils, is death, the prospect and the endurance of it, from both of which our whole nature, originally made in the image of God, and destined to live forever, revolts with the utmost abhorrence. Such are the thorns which mans nature, under the withering, distorting curse of sin, produces. Cursed is the ground within, as well as the ground without, for mans sake; and in labour, in pain, in sorrow, and in death, does he eat of its fruit. From all these thorns Jesus came to deliver us. The second Adam in the poverty of His condition has recovered for us all that the first Adam in the plenitude of his blessings lost. The Roman soldiers platted a crown of thorns and put it upon the head of Jesus; but they little knew the significance of the act. Upon the august brow of mans Surety and Substitute was thus placed in symbol, what was done in spiritual reality, a chaplet woven of those very thorns which the ground, cursed for mans sake, produced. None of these thorns grew in the sacred soil of Jesus heart. But He who knew no sin was made sin for us. He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities. He could, no doubt, by the exercise of His almighty power, remove the thorns of mans life. He who created the world by a word, had only to command, and it should be done. But not in this way could the necessities of the case be met. It was no mere arbitrary power that called the thorns into existence; it was justice and judgment: and, therefore, mere arbitrary power could not eradicate them; it required mercy and truth. And mercy and truth could be reconciled with justice and judgment only by the obedience and sacrifice of the Son of God. Jesus had, therefore, to wear the thorns which mans sin had developed, in order that man might enjoy the peaceful fruits of righteousness which Christs atonement had produced. And what is the result? By wearing these thorns He has blunted them, plucked them out of our path, out of our heart, out of our life. By enduring them He conquered them. The crown of pain became the crown of triumph; and the submission to ignominy and suffering became the assertion and establishment of a sovereignty over every form of suffering. Evil is now a vanquished power. Every woe bears upon it the inscription overcome. He bore the thorny crown of labour, and labour is now a sacred thing, a precious discipline, a merciful education. It is the lowest step of the ladder by which man ascends the Edenic height from which he fell. He wore the thorny crown of pain, and pain is now robbed of the element that exasperates our nature against it. By His own example He teaches us that we must be made perfect through suffering; and knowing this, we do not feel pain to be less, but we feel a strength and a patience which enable us to rise superior to it. As the Prince of sufferers, He wore the thorny crown of sorrow, and He has made, in the experience of His afflicted ones, that abortive thorn to produce the blossom of holiness and the fruit of righteousness. Sorrow is no more to the Christian the curse of Adam, but the cross of Christ. It is the crown and badge of his royal dignity, the proof of Divine sonship. And, lastly, He wore the thorny crown of death; and therefore He says, If a man keep My sayings, he shall not see death. He has indeed to pass through the state, but the bitterness of death for him is past. He has only to finish his course with joy; to fall asleep in Jesus; to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. (H. Macmillan, LL. D.)
A lesson from the ground
If my horse, if my ox, if my dog, do not do as I want them to do, says the angry man, I make them, and then with his blood boiling hot he goes out into the fields and he can do nothing! The ground says, If you want to do anything with me you must do it with hopeful patience; I am a school in which men learn the meaning of patient industry, patient hopefulness. I never answer the anger of a fool or the passion of a demented man. I rest. We cannot compel nature to keep pace with our impatience; man cannot hasten the wheel of the seasons; man cannot drive nature out of its calm and solemn movement; his own fields keep him at bay. He would like to get on faster, faster--it would please him to have three wheat harvests every year, it would delight him to have an orchard stripping on the first day of every month. He makes his dog go out when he likes--his own trees put out their branches without him and mock his fury. Nature says, I must have my long holiday; nature says, I must have my long, long sleep. Without recreation and rest, mans life would not be solidly and productively developed; he may be lashed and scourged and overdriven and maddened, but broad, massive, enduring growth he never can realize unless he operates upon the law of steady slowness. Such is the great lesson of nature. We sometimes think we could improve the arrangements of Providence in this matter of the ground. A man standing in his wheat field is apt to feel that it would be an exceedingly admirable arrangement if he could have another crop of wheat within the year. He thinks it could be managed: he takes up the roots out of the earth and he says, This will never do; why, I have lost my year herein--now I will command the ground to bring forth another crop, and this agricultural Canute, having waved his hand over the fields, is answered with silence. That must be your law of progress. There is the very great temptation to hasten to be rich. I see a man in yonder corner, not half so able as I am, never had half the education I have had, and by a lucky swing of the hand he makes ten thousand pounds, and I am labouring at my mill, or at my counter, or in my field, and am getting very little--and very slowly. I look in the other corner and see exactly such another man, and he, too, by a lucky twist of the hand, makes ten thousand a year; and I never make one, by long, patient, steady work. I know what I will do; Ill put off this old labourers coat, and buy a new fine one, and go and join these men and do as they do, and I will have a hundred thousand pounds in a month, and horses and carriages and estates, and I will not go at this slow snail pace any longer--why should I? I go--and I fail, as I deserve to do. Society never could be built upon the action of such men as have now been described. They may be doing nothing dishonourable, they may be acting in a very proper way, there are no laws that have not exceptions attached to them--I broadly acknowledge the honourableness of many exceptions to this law of land like slowness of cultivation and growth, but the solid everlasting law of human life is labour, patience, expenditure, hopefulness, little to little, a step at a time, line upon line, and if you trifle with that law you will bring yourself into a state of intellectual unhealthiness, into a condition of moral exaggeration, and you will labour upon wrong principles, and reach, by rapid strides, unhappy conclusions. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Spiritual cultivation
So it is in spiritual cultivation--you cannot grow a character in a week. There are some long thin stalks that you can buy in a garden market for about a shilling a dozen, and you put up these, and say, Do grow, if you please; do get up, and do broaden yourselves and make something like a garden about us, and the long thin stalks, spindle shanks, look at you, and cannot be hastened, though you mock them with their leanness, and scourge them with your unruly tongue. Look at those grand old cedars and oaks and wide-spreading chestnuts. Why are they so noble? Because they are so old. They have been rocked by a hundred wintry nurses, blessed by a thousand summer visitants, and they express the result of the long processes. They have told their tale to fifty winters, caught the blessing of fifty summers, waved musically in the storm, guested the birds of the air, and all the while have been striking their roots deeper and deeper, farther and farther into the rich soil. So must it be with human character; you cannot extemporise moral greatness, it is a slow growth. Money cannot take the place of time; time is an element in the development and sublimising of character; time stands alone and cannot be compounded for by all the wealth in all the gold mines of creation. This spiritual cultivation not only cannot be hastened, but sometimes it is very hard. As a general rule, indeed, it is very difficult; it is not easy to grow in grace. Some of us live too near the smoke ever to be very great trees, or even very fruitful bushes. Circumstances are heavily against us; we are not placed in favourable localities or under very gracious conditions. The house is small, the income is little, the children are many and noisy, the demands upon time and attention and patience are incessant, health is not very good and cheerful, the temperament is a little despondent and very susceptible to injurious influences, and how to grow in Christ Jesus under such circumstances as these, the Saviour Himself only knows. Be thankful to God, therefore, that the bruised reed is not broken, that though you are faint, still you are pursuing, that though you are very weak in the limb and cannot run hard in this uphill race, your eyes are fixed in the right quarter; and the fixing and sparkling of your eye has a meaning which Gods heart knows well. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Observations
I. THORNS AND THISTLES, AND ALL UNPROFITABLE WEEDS, ARE THE EFFECT OF GODS CURSE UPON MAN FOR SIN.
1. Seeing all creatures are His servants, as David calls them (Psa_119:91), He can bring them up, and plant them where He pleaseth, who doth whatsoever He will in heaven and earth (Psa_135:6).
2. Neither can God in respect to His own honour, do less injustice than to withhold His blessing from the creatures, that should be for our service, as we withhold from Him our service of obedience, which we owe Him by our covenant.
II. AS WE ARE MORE OR LESS SERVICEABLE UNTO GOD, SO WE MAY EXPECT THAT THE CREATURE SHALL BE MORE OR LESS SERVICEABLE UNTO US.
1. Gods blessing upon the creatures, is that only by which they are made useful unto us. Now God in justice can do no less than recompense all men according to their deeds (Isa_59:17-18; Psa_62:12), and that not only in that great day of judgment, but even at present, and in outward things, that men may see and acknowledge it, as Psa_58:11.
2. Neither is there a means more effectual to prevail with men in general, to walk in a course of obedience, than when they find all the creatures against them in a course of rebellion.
III. GOD MAKES GOOD HIS PROMISES, BY WHICH HE HATH ENGAGED HIMSELF UNTO US, THOUGH WE FAIL IN OUR COVENANT BY WHICH WE ARE ENGAGED UNTO HIM. See Psa_78:37-38; Psa_89:32-34; 2Ti_2:13. Reason--
1. Gods promises are founded upon His own goodness and truth which cannot fail (Psa_119:89-90; Psa_119:160).
2. God knew beforehand what we are, even before He engaged Himself unto us (see Psa_103:13-14).
3. And if He should take advantage of every forfeiture, He must necessarily undo His children, who trespass daily against Him.
4. And hath therefore given His Son Christ to take away our sins; if we hold fast the covenant, and do not wickedly depart from it though we fail many ways (1Jn_2:1-2).
IV. THOUGH GOD WHEN HE PARDONS OUR SIN, RESTORES US HIS BLESSINGS WHICH WE FORFEITED THEREBY, YET WE ENJOY THEM WITH SOME DIMINUTION AND ABATEMENT. (J. White, M. A.)
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread
The ordinance of toil
I. THE NECESSITY OF TOIL IS AT FIRST CONNECTED WITH TRANSGRESSION. Like death, the child of sin. Yet there is blessing in toil to him who can get up into the higher regions, and see how out of the wry extremity of human pain and endurance God can bring forth fruits which shall be rich and fair throughout eternity.
II. CONSIDER WHAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF THIS ORDINANCE OF TOIL.
1. Toil is ordained to restore man to a true and living relation with the whole system of things around him. On this sentence of labour God bases all His culture of our spirits; by this He keeps alive the desire and the hope of deliverance.
2. Toil is ordained to draw forth the full unfolding of the whole power and possibility of mans being, with a view to the system of things before him, the world of his eternal citizenship, his perfect and developed life. Be sure that it is the last strain that drags out the most precious fibre of faculty, or trains the organs to the keenest perception, the most complete expansion, the most perfect preparation for the higher work and joy of life. (J. B. Brown, B. A.)
Labour an earthward pilgrimage
I. LOOK AT THE HOPELESSNESS OF MENS LABOUR ON THE EARTH.
1. It cannot revoke the sentence of death.
2. It is degrading because of its necessarily sordid aims and occupations.
3. It is itself a living, lingering death.
II. THINE OF THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF THIS SORROW, SUFFERING, AND HOPELESSNESS.
1. To convince men of the fruitlessness of the life he had chosen.
2. To show him his need of the mercy of God, and prepare him to receive it. (St. J. A. Frere.)
Observations
I. MANS EMPLOYMENT IN THIS LIFE IS IN WEARISOME AND PAINFUL LABOURS.
1. The curse that is laid upon the earth for sin, by which without hard labour it yields no fruits for the sustaining of mans life.
2. The Lord hath so appointed it for mans good.
(1) To humble him by leaving him that remembrance of sin.
(2) To make him long for heaven (Rom_8:22-23).
(3) To preserve the body in health (see Ecc_5:12), and to keep the mind in frame (2Th_2:11), which unless it be exercised in useful and profitable things, is filled with vain and evil thoughts.
First, this reproves all idle slothful persons living without callings, or idle in their callings, or in unprofitable callings. Secondly, and should stir us up to diligence in such employments as we are called unto.
1. In obedience to Gods command.
2. And as therein serving God, and not men (Eph_6:7).
3. And being profitable (Pro_14:23) to ourselves (Pro_10:4) and others (Pro_21:5).
4. And thereby procuring us a just title to what we possess (2Th_3:12). Only--
(1) Labour that which is good (Eph_4:28).
(2) And with a desire to be profitable to community (Psa_112:5; Psa_112:9; 1Ti_6:18).
(3) In a way of justice (1Th_4:6).
(4) Depending on God for His blessing on our labours, which only makes them prosperous (Psa_127:2). Thirdly, long for heaven, where we shall cease from all our labours (Rev_14:13).
II. THERE IS PROFIT IN ALL THE DUTIES WHICH GOD ENJOINS US.
1. God who is in Himself all-sufficient and perfectly blessed, neither needs, nor can be profited by any creature.
2. Neither is it for His honour that His service should be unprofitable, as wicked men unjustly slander Him (Job_21:15).
3. Neither could His servants have otherwise any encouragement to go on in His service with cheerfulness, which God requires (Deu_28:47) and delights in (2Co_9:7).
III. WHATSOEVER WE UNDERTAKE IN OBEDIENCE TO GODS COMMANDMENT SHALL NOT WANT EFFECT.
1. That God is able to give success, and by His blessing to prosper mens endeavours, no man can deny.
2. That it concerns Him in point of honour to prosper that which He commands, is as clear as the former.
3. It is needful to be so, lest otherwise men should be discouraged in His service, if they should labour therein without bringing anything to effect.
IV. GODS SANCTIONS ARE CERTAIN, AS WELL OF JUDGMENT AS OF MERCY.
1. Both the threats of judgment, as well as the promises of mercy, are founded on the same grounds of Gods truth, and immutability, and power.
2. And have the same scope, the honouring of God in the manifestation as well of His justice as of His mercy, giving to every man according to his deeds (see Psa_58:11; Isa_59:18-19).
V. THOUGH GOD HATH FREED HIS CHILDREN FROM ETERNAL DEATH, YET HE HATH LEFT THEM AS WELL AS OTHERS, UNDER THE SENTENCE OF TEMPORAL DEATH.
1. That by it they might be put in mind of sin that brought death upon them Rom_5:12).
2. They have no harm by death, which is at present but a sleep, wherein they rest from their labours (Isa_53:2), and which severs them not from Christ (1Th_4:14), through whom it is sanctified to them (see 1Co_15:55), and is made an entrance into life Rev_14:13), and hurts not the body, which shall be raised up in 1Co_15:42-43).
VI. MENS BODIES ARE BASE EVERY WAY, BOTH IN THEIR ORIGINAL, IN THEIR PRESENT CONDITION, AND IN THEIR DISSOLUTION.
1. To humble us (Gen_18:27).
2. To magnify Gods mercy, in abasing Himself to look on such vile wretches (see Psa_113:6-8), to give His Son for them, to advance dust and ashes to such a glorious condition, as the apostle describes (Corinthians 15:42, 43, 49).
3. To move us to long for heaven (see 2Co_5:1-2).
VII. THE DISPOSING OF MANS LIFE IS IN GODS HAND. Which God challengeth to Himself (Deu_32:39). David acknowledgeth Psa_31:15). Daniel testifies to Belshazzar (Dan_5:23), and is clearly manifested by all experience (Psa_104:29); so that it is not in the power of men to cut it off at their pleasure (1Ki_19:1-21; Dan_3:27; Dan_6:22), though God use them to that end sometimes as His executioners (Psa_17:13-14).
VIII. THOUGH DEATH BE CERTAIN TO ALL MEN, YET THE TIME OF DEATH IS UNCERTAIN.
1. That men might not be hardened in sin, as usually they are when judgment is deferred (Ecc_8:11), but walk in fear, as being not assured of life for one moment of an hour.
2. To be assured of the term of life would not profit us any way.
IX. THE JUDGMENTS OF GOD ARE JUST AND EQUAL, ALL OF THEM IN ALL THINGS.
1. He cannot wrong His own creatures, no more than the potter can the clay; nay, much less.
2. His nature will not suffer Him to do otherwise; He that is God must necessarily do good (Psa_119:68); out of the Lords mouth proceed not good and evil (Lam_3:38).
3. Nor the respect to His own honour, magnified as well in His justice Psa_64:8-9), as in His mercy and truth.
4. It would otherwise discourage His own servants (see Mat_25:24-25), as the opinion of Gods favouring of the wicked and afflicting His own servants, had almost discouraged David (Psa_73:13-14). (J. White, M. A.)
The curse and the blessing of labour
I. The universal necessity of labour. The earth no longer produces fruit independently of labour.
II. The fact, asserted in the text, that labour is a curse. It is part of our punishment for the Fall that it should be so.
III. The manner in which we may lighten this curse, and cause it to be borne. We may not escape from it; but it may be lightened by--
1. Religion--personal, practical, and real.
2. The cultivation of knowledge.
3. The maintenance of good health.
4. The practice of economy. (J. Maskell.)
The penal clauses
Then come the penal clauses, and it is wonderful how the curse is tempered with mercy, so much so indeed that it is difficult to tell whether there is not more blessing than cursing in the sentence. The seed of the woman is to be mighty enough to crush the serpent; and the ground is to be difficult of tillage for mans sake. Hard agriculture is a blessing. To get harvests for nothing would be a pitiless curse indeed. To be sentenced to hard labour is really a blessing to great criminals; it breaks in upon the moodiness that would become despair; it taxes invention; it keeps the blood moving; it rouses energy. Many a man has been made by the very hardness of his task. But terrible are the words--unto dust shalt thou return. According to these words it is plainly stated that man was to be exactly what he was before he was made at all--he was to be dead dust, by reason of his sin. Whether any way of escape can be found out remains to be seen. The law is plain; whether mercy can modify it will be revealed as we proceed in the wondrous story. Perhaps there may yet be made a Man within a man, a Spirit within a body, a Son within a slave. That would be glorious, surely! Night has fallen upon the guilty pair, but in the night there are stars, large, bright, like tender eyes shining through the darkness--perhaps these stars will lead on to a manger, a Child, a Saviour! (J. Parker, D. D.)
The curse in labour
The curse in labour is the excess of it: labour itself is enjoyment. You will find that the horse feels it enjoyment to put forth its strength; and so man felt it enjoyment to put forth his energies in rearing the flowers that God had planted in the midst of Eden. The curse is not labour, but the excess of labour. It is a very absurd notion that prevails, that labour is a sort of mean thing: it is a most honourable thing; it was a feature of Adam in his innocent and Eden state; and the poorest labourer is just as honourable as the greatest noble, if he be a Christian. We must not estimate men as we do the cinnamon tree, the whole of whose value is in its bark, but by the heart that beats beneath, and the intellect that thinks, and the life that shines out in obedience to the will of God. (J. Cunningham, D. D.)
Labour a blessing to man
Man is condemned to eat his bread in the sweater his brow. He is doomed to procure it with labour and fatigue. But what would he have become, had he not been subjected to that salutary labour, which distracts his thoughts from himself, occupies his mind, mortifies his passions, and puts a certain restraint upon the corruption which dwells within him? A prey to his own reflections, master of his own life, and burdened with the weight of his days, he would have become the sport of his passions, and have plunged into every species of iniquity which a corrupt imagination could have invented. The punishment of sin, to a certain extent, deprives him of the power and opportunity of doing evil, in spite of himself, and sometimes becomes, in the hands of God, the means of bringing him to salvation. And what dissatisfaction, what weariness, what an insupportable feeling of emptiness must continually have attended an idle and useless existence! On the contrary, what a source of enjoyment and satisfaction, what a means of developing and perfecting his faculties does he now find in a life consecrated to useful labour! Blessed be God! Blessed be God for the thunders of His justice! Blessed be God for His curse denounced against sin! (L. Bonnet.)
Labour necessary to success
Turner, the great painter, was once asked the secret of his success. He replied, I have no secret but hard work.
Labour the best seasoning
Dionysius the tyrant, at an entertainment given to him by the Lacedaemonians, expressed some disgust at their black broth. No wonder, said one of them, for it wants seasoning. What seasoning? asked the tyrant. Labour, replied the citizen, joined with hunger and thirst.
Eminence and labour
When we read the lives of distinguished men in any department, we find them almost always celebrated for the amount of labour they could perform. Demosthenes, Julius Caesar, Henry of France, Lord Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Franklin, Washington, Napoleon, different as they were in their intellectual and moral qualities, were all renowned as hard workers. We read hove many days they could support the fatigues of a march; how early they rose; how late they watched; how many hours they spent in the field, in the cabinet, in the court; how many secretaries they kept employed; in short, how hard they worked. (Everett.)
The idealization of labour
The conception of labour as the creative intention, or end of human nature, is a comparatively late one, due to revelation or to philosophic reflection upon an already lengthened experience. And the feelings of persons born in these later ages of the world are not to be taken as an infallible guide as to what may have been the primitive instinct, the motive that impelled to human activity and invention. Carlyle, for instance, in a letter to his mother, when he was at the commencement of his career (1821), asks the striking question, Why do we fret and murmur and toil, and consume ourselves for objects so transient and frail? Is it that the soul, living here as in her prison house, strives after something boundless like herself, and finding it nowhere, still renews the search? Surely we are fearfully and wonderfully made! Now, as the process of idealization in respect of the aims of labour is closely connected with the sense of its influence upon temporal well-being, we cannot be far wrong in concluding that it is largely due to the experience of the advantages it secures. Work is the most direct and certain avenue to the satisfaction of bodily wants, to the acquisition of wealth, and to the social consideration and general influence that attend the possession of wealth. Upon the industrial energy of its people a city or a nation in the main builds its prosperity and its political power. Another source of dignity and consideration consists in the tendency labour reveals to enlarge the scope and the possibilities of life. In this respect it meets and fosters the growing, expanding faculties of our nature. To the young it opens up many a vista for vague longings and ambitions; and the great centres of industry are invested with a romantic, indefinite fascination, because of the careers they hold forth. Not only the legitimacy, but the social consideration of trades, professions, and occupations, is determined by their perceived tendency to promote civilization. Were it not for this criterion the secondary products of human skill and effort would go to the wall. So much of their value, their worth, is relative only to the circumstances and culture of their owners, that it would otherwise be all but impossible to appraise them. When the days task is seen to be a Divine appointment Psa_104:23) equally with birth and death, then shall a man rejoice in it, and labour on as in the great Taskmasters eye, looking diligently the meanwhile for the message it may enshrine, the glimpse of higher things it is sure to give, and waiting patiently for the last, the sure reward. In the great book manifold histories and teachings set forth for us the ideals of labour, and the commonest occupation is seen to have some spiritual significance. The diligence and faith of the husbandman, the daring quest of the miner (Job_28:1-28), the far venture of the mariner, the thoroughness of the builder, the care and compassion of the shepherd, are all given in illustration of the qualities and duties of our heavenly service. But not until that service itself is, according to our gifts and adaptation, revealed as our individual vocation, is the idealization of labour perfected.
That is a new day, the dawn of a new life to the boy, when he has taken himself out of the routine of the child, and resolved to be something in lessons, or play, or conduct; and the thrill with which the young man puts his hand on his earnest life work tingles yet along the very nerves of age. It makes us almost a giant to feel the birth throe of a living purpose. The lioness reproached because she gave but one at a birth, replied, Yes, but that a lion. And the one lion purpose born to a man, to grow into the one thing of life, is a birth to be proud of and never forgotten. After it we are never the same. It has lifted out of old conditions, limitations; it has put a new spirit in us, as the new inspiration towards a broader life, the quick play of whose pulses, vibrating through the whole man, impels us to thought and deed . . . It is a proud, a solemn, a sublime moment that sees the soul register its purpose and write it as with imperishable letters, This one thing I do, come weal, come woe, come ban of man or shock of time, come sorrow and distress and loss, though I stand alone, here I stand, this I do; and the life of slow, earnest, arduous toil that follows partakes of the grandeur of the birth. (Homiletic Magazine.)
Man, labour, sorrow
Look into the country fields, there you see toiling at the plough and scythe; look into the waters, there you see tugging at oars and cables; look into the city, there you see a throng of cares, and hear sorrowful complaints of bad times and the decay of trade; look into studies, and there you see paleness and infirmities, and fixed eyes; look into the court, and there are defeated hopes, envyings, underminings, and tedious attendance. All things are full of labour, and labour is full of sorrow; and these two are inseparably joined with the miserable life of man. (Timothy Rogers.)
Fallen man
In some respects manifestly made for a sphere higher than he fills, he appears to us like a creature of the air which a cruel hand has stripped of its silken wings. How painfully he resembles this hapless object which has just fallen on the pages of a book that we read by the candle on an autumn evening! It retains the wish, but has lost the power, to fly. Allured by the tapers glare, it has brushed the flame, and, dropping with a heavy fall, now crawls wingless across the leaf, and seeks the finger of mercy to end its misery. Compare man with any of the other creatures, and how directly we come to the conclusion that he is not, nor can be, the same creature with which God crowned the glorious work of creation. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)
Man fallen
No man in his senses will venture to assert that man is today just as man originally was. He is a dismantled fane, a broken shrine, still lingering about him some gleams of the departed glory sufficient to give an idea of what he once was, and probably left as faint prophecy of what he will again be. But notwithstanding this, man is a changed, and fallen, and degenerate creature. Nothing we know explains this seemingly inexplicable phenomenon, except the Word of God, which tells us that man sinned, and fell, and has become what we now find him. The gold, in the language of a prophet, is become dim, and the crown is fallen from his head. He has exchanged the beautiful, the fertile, the happy Eden which earth once was, for the desert and the bleak and blasted condition in which we now find it. He must now water it with the tears of his weeping eyes, and fertilize it with the sweat of his aching brow, in order to gather bread from it. This was a penal and just retribution, and yet it embosomed the hope of an ultimate and sure deliverance. (Dr. Cumming.)
Man damaged
If you should see a house with its gable ends in ruins, with its broken pillars lying in heaped-up confusion on the ground, half covered up with trailing weeds and moss, you would not hesitate to say, This building has suffered damage at some time; it was not like this when it came from the hand of the builder. I say this of man. His is not in a normal condition. (Hepworth.)
Mercy in the curse
We are inclined to believe that it was not wholly in anger and in righteous severity that God made the cursing of the ground the punishment of Adam. We think it will not be difficult to show that the Almighty was consulting for the good of His creatures when He thus made labour their inevitable lot. We need not limit our remarks to the single case of agriculture; for we may safely affirm that there is nothing which is worth mans attainment which he can attain without labour.
I. Now there is, perhaps, an universal consent upon one proposition--that idleness is the fruitful source of every kind of vice; and it follows from this that the placing it in a mans power to be idle--supplying him, that is, with the means of subsistence without extracting from him any labour--is simply to expose him to the greatest possible peril, and almost ensuring his moral degeneracy. We know that there are fine and frequent exceptions to this statement, and that many whose circumstances preclude all necessity of toiling for a livelihood carve out for themselves paths of honourable industry, and are as assiduous in labour as if compelled to it by their wants. There is evidently a repressing power in abundance, and a stimulating power in penury; the one tending to produce dwarfishness of intellect and mental feebleness, the other to elicit every energy and intellectual greatness. We will not say that the battle for subsistence has not borne hard on genius, and kept down the loftiness of its aspirings; but we are assured that the cases are of immeasurably more frequent occurrence in which the man has been indebted to the straitness of his circumstances for the expansion of his mental powers. I wish no son of mine to be exempt from the sentence, In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. And the family which we regard as left in the best condition when death removes its head is, not the family for whom there is a fine landed estate or an ample funded property, but the family which has been thoroughly educated in the principles of religion, and trained to habits of piety and industry, and in which there is just as much wealth as may preserve from want those members who cannot labour for themselves, and start the others in professions which open a broad field for unwearied diligence. We would yet further observe, before quitting this portion of our subject, that after all God did not so much remove fruitfulness from the soil as make the development of that fruitfulness dependent on industry. The earth has yielded sufficiency for its ever-multiplying population, as though the power of supply grew with the demand; nor has it only yielded a bare sufficiency, but has been so generous in its productions, that one man by his tillage may raise bread for hundreds. This is amongst the most beautiful and wonderful of the arrangements of Providence. Why can one amongst us be a clergyman, a second a lawyer, a third a merchant, a fourth a tradesman? Only because, notwithstanding the curse, there is still such fertility in the ground, that more corn is produced than suffices for those by whom the ground is cultivated. The whole advance of civilization is dependent on a power in the earth of furnishing more food than those who till it can consume. A people who are always on the border of starvation must be manifestly a people always on the border of barbarism; and just as manifestly a people must be always on the border of starvation if every individual can only wrench from the ground enough for himself. Thus, when we come to examine into and trace the actual facts of the case, the mercy of the dispensation exceeds immeasurably the judgement.
II. We propose, in the second place, to examine WHETHER THERE BE ANY INTIMATION IN SCRIPTURE THAT THE SENTENCE ON ADAM WAS DESIGNED TO BREATHE MERCY AS WELL AS JUDGMENT. We are disposed to agree with those who consider that the revelation of the great scheme of redemption was contemporaneous with human transgression. We believe that, as soon as man fell, notices were graciously given of a deliverance to be effected in the fulness of time. It is hardly to be supposed that Adam would be left in ignorance of what he was so much concerned to know; and the early institution of sacrifices seem sufficient to show that he was taught a religion adapted to his circumstances. But the question now before us is, whether any intimations of redemption were contained in the sentence under review, and whether our common father, as he listened to the words which declared the earth cursed for his sake, might have gathered consolation from the disastrous announcement. There is one reason why we think this probable, though we may not be able to give distinct proof. Our reason is drawn from the prophecy which Lamech uttered on the birth of his son Noah: This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed. And therefore did he call his son Noah, which signifies rest, to mark that he connected him with deliverance and respite from that curse which sin had brought on the ground. But in what way was Noah thus connected? How could Noah comfort Lamech in reference to the ground which God had cursed? Some suppose the reference to be to instruments of agriculture which Noah would invent after the flood, and which would much diminish human labour; but this could hardly be said to be a comfort to Lamech, who died before the flood: and we may fairly doubt whether a prediction, having reference only to the invention of a few tools, would have been recorded for the instruction of all after-generations. But Noah, as the builder of the ark, and the raiser of the new world, when the old had pertained in the deluge, was eminently a type of Christ Jesus, in whose Church alone is safety, and at whose bidding new heavens and a new earth will succeed to those scathed by the baptism of fire. And as an illustrious type of the Redeemer, though we knew not in what other capacity, Noah might console Lamech and his cotemporaries; for the restoration after the deluge, in which they had no personal interest, might be a figure to them of the restitution of all things, when the curse was to be finally removed, and those who had rode out the deluge receive an everlasting benediction. Thus it would seem highly probable, from the tenour of Lamechs prediction, that he had been made acquainted with the respects in which his son Noah would typify Christ, and that therefore he had been taught to regard the curse on the ground as only temporary, imposed for wise ends, till the manifestation of the Redeemer, under whose sceptre the desert should rejoice and blossom as the rose. And if so much were revealed to Lamech, it cannot be an over-bold supposition that the same information was imparted to Adam. Thus may our first parent, compelled to till the earth on which rested the curse of its Creator, have known that there were blessings in store, and that, though he and his children must dig the ground in the sweat of their face, there would fall on it sweat like great drops of blood, having virtue to remove the oppressive malediction. It must have been bitter for him to hear of the thorn and the thistle; but he may have learnt how thorns would be woven into a crown, and placed round the forehead of One who should be as the lost tree of life to a dying creation. The curse upon the ground may have been regarded by him as a perpetual memorial of the fatal transgression and the promised salvation, reminding him of the sterility of his own heart, and what toil it would cost the Redeemer to reclaim that heart, and make it bring forth the fruits of righteousness; telling him while pursuing his daily task what internal husbandry was needful, and whose arm alone could break up the fallow ground. And thus Adam may have been comforted, as Lamech was comforted, by the Noah who was to bring rest to wearied humanity; and it may have been in hope as well as in contrition, in thankfulness as well as in sorrow, that he carried with him this sentence on his banishment from paradise--Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.--
Mans nature and destiny
I. THE FRAILTY OF OUR NATURE.
1. Its origin. However glorious our Maker, however exquisite the human body, God made that body of the dust of the earth.
2. Its liability to injury. No sooner born than fierce diseases wait to attack us. If not destroyed--injured--accidents. All the elements attack us.
3. Its tendency to dissolution. Behold the ravages of time. Human life has its spring, summer, autumn, and winter (Psa_103:14-15; Psa_90:5-6; Psa_39:4-5).
II. THE CERTAINTY OF OUR END.
1. We are born to die. Our first breath is so much of nature exhausted. The first hour we live is an approach to death.
2. The perpetual exit of mortals confirms it.
3. God hath decreed it.
4. Learn rightly to estimate life. (Sketches of Sermons.)
Mans origin and doom
I. MANS ORIGIN.
1. How wonderful.
2. How humbling.
II. MANS DOOM.
1. Inevitable.
2. Just.
3. Partial.
4. Temporary. (W. Wythe.)
The fearfulness of death
I. Men know not that they shall die, even though they confess it with their lips almost daily. If we consider what death is, we see that men who know its approach will act in all things as in the fear of it. There is no more startling paradox in the wonders of our nature than this, that men in general are thoughtless about death. When our own turn comes, and there is no escape, then, for the first time, we really believe in death.
II. Death is a fearful thing, because of the great change that it implies in all our being. Life is that power by which we act, and think, and love, and intend, and hope. And suppose that all our energies have been wasted on things that cannot follow us into the grave, then how can we conceive of any life at all beyond this? When we know that we must die, we feel about for something in us that shall not perish, some thread of continuity to knit our present and future life into one; and if we have never lived for God, never realized the difference between treasures of earth and treasures of heaven, we find nothing that shall assure us of that other life. We start back in horror from a grave so dark and so profound.
III. If these two terrors were all, some at least would not fear to die, would even court death as a repose. But there is yet another terror. Death means judgment. To die is to meet God. You tremble because you stand before a Judge of infinite power, whose wrath no man can resist; before a Judge of infinite wisdom, who shall call back your acts out of the distant past and lay bare the secret thoughts of your spirit.
IV. Accept the salvation purchased for you with Christs passion; then death cannot come suddenly upon you, for the thought of it will have sobered all your days. The day of account will still be terrible, but the belief that you are reconciled to God through the blood of Jesus will sustain you. (Archbishop Thomson.)
The frailty of human nature
The words do plainly show Gods offence and displeasure upon occasion of Adams miscarriage; and are in themselves partly declaratory and convictive, partly minatory and instructive.
1. They are declaratory and convictive. What! thou that art but dust, that so lately received thy being from God, not to listen to Him, but to follow thy own will, and rebel against the law of thy Sovereign? So they are declaratory and convictive.
2. They are minatory, and consequently instructive. For when God threatens, His meaning is, that we should repent, and turn to Him Jer_18:7). But to come to the words themselves, Dust thou art. Of this I shall give you an account in two particulars.
1. The meanness of it. For dust is a thing of little or no perfection, nor of any esteem, account, and value. Dust we are, every day sweeping away, as the refuse, as that of which there is no use. Dust, the ultimate term of all corruption and putrefaction. Dust--you cannot resolve a thing into anything of less entity and being. Yet all of man is not here to be understood, but only his worser part.
2. Dust thou art, which respects the weakness of this bodily estate. For dust can make no resistance. It may offend us, but it is of itself so light and empty that it is scattered up and down of every wind, as it is said Psa_18:42). Who can defend himself against the arrow that flieth by day, or the pestilence that walketh in darkness, or the plague that destroyeth by noonday? Neither is this all, but we have a principle that tends to corruption and putrefaction within us. To which also let us add the violence that we are exposed to from abroad, either by the contagion of others or from the force and violence of those that can overpower us. For we are so weak, that if any man despise God and the laws, he may soon be master of our lives. For all that they can do is but to inflict punishment upon the transgressor. But that will make us no satisfaction nor restitution. When we are assaulted by any sickness, then we are sensible of this our weakness; and we cry out with Job, What is my strength, the strength of a stone, or my flesh of brass (Job_21:23). Though, when our bones are full of marrow, we put the thoughts of sickness far from us, yet so it often falleth out that One dieth in his full strength, being in all ease and prosperity, as Job speaketh (21:23). Furthermore, what are we when bodily pain approach? So weak and frail are we, that we are not able to hold up our heads; and if to all this we shall have the sense of guilt upon our consciences, our condition will be intolerable.
Now for application.
1. It is a ground of humility. If it be so, that Dust we are, and unto dust we must return, it is fit that we know it so to be; and that upon three accounts.
(1) That we be not proud and conceited.
(2) That we do not trust to ourselves or any fellow creatures whatsoever.
(3) That we may take the best course we can to make a supply.
2. It is matter of satisfaction to us to know that we are but dust; and that lies here, that God doth not look for much from us, but accordingly--not more than He did at first make us. He knows that we were finite and fallible; and therefore, as the Psalmist saith, God considers our frame, He remembereth that we are dust (Psa_103:14), and makes allowance accordingly.
3. It is matter of great thankfulness to God that He doth so much consider such worms as we are; that He hath regard to us, that are but dust; and that He hath such patience with us, who are so inconsiderable, that He might bring us to repentance; and that He doth graciously accept from us any motion towards Him, or any good purpose, and that He is so ready to promote it.
4. This will give us an account of the folly and madness of those men who neglect themselves. We are dust. If there be not the remedy of culture and education to tame the wildness and exorbitancy of man, he will grow savage, wild, and ungovernable, unless the established government of reason shall be set up in his soul. Wherefore, let our great care and daily employment be to refine our spirits, by entertaining the principles of religion; and to inform our understandings, and to regulate our lives, by holding ourselves constantly to the measures of nature, reason, and religion. (B. Whichcote, D. D.)
The rationale of mans corporeal life and dissolution
I. WHY MAN WAS TO HAVE A BRIEF EMBODIED LIFE. How was this arrangement likely to affect his ultimate spiritual well-being?
1. Mans earthly life is his probation period. The opportunity of choice exists while soul and body are joined, but no longer. Death is the beginning of destiny.
2. A probation-period, to be just, satisfactory, merciful, must--
(1) Show the true nature and fruits of the objects to be chosen;
(2) bring out the true character and intentions of the individual choosing.
3. The body is a valuable agent in the accomplishment of this design.
(1) It brings out the nature of the objects to be chosen.
(2) It compels man to a religious decision.
II. WHY MAN, AFTER HAVING SPENT HIS PROBATION PERIOD IN THE BODY, HAD TO SUFFER PHYSICAL DEATH.
1. Death in relation to the saved--
(1) Delivers the soul from many sinful habits.
(2) Delivers the land from a fruitful nurse of sin.
(3) Introduces the soul to higher enjoyments.
2. Death in relation to the lost. A wicked spirit disembodied seems the most miserable, pitiable thing in Gods universe; like a man suddenly expelled from a brilliant and warm room, to shiver naked in the cold and darkness of a winter night--a night, too, that shall know no dawn, and to the fierce blast of which no stupor can ever render the wretched outcast insensible! (Homilist.)
The frailty of human nature
I. THE FRAILTY OF OUR NATURE. This may be inferred from--
1. Its origin: dust.
2. Its liability to injury.
3. Its tendency to dissolution.
II. THE CERTAINTY OF OUR END.
1. We are born to die.
2. The perpetual exit of mortals confirms this.
3. God has decreed and declared it.
III. THE GREAT BUSINESS OF LIFE.
1. To know and serve God.
2. To seek and obtain salvation.
3. We should always be living in reference to death and eternity. (Sketches of Sermons.)
Dust of death
Dust may be raised for a little while into a tiny cloud, and may seem considerable while held up by the wind that raises it; but when the force of that is spent, it falls again, and returns to the earth out of which it was raised. Such a thing is man; man is but a parcel of dust, and must return to his earth. Thus, as Pascal exclaims, what a chimera is man! What a confused chaos! And after death, of his body it may be said that it is the gold setting left after the extraction of the diamond which it held--a setting, alas! which soon gives cause in its putrescence for the apostrophe: How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! Yet there is hope in thine end, O Christian gold, however dimmed. There is a resurgam for thy dust, O child of God! (W. Adamson.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On v19 return Death (physical).
return Death (physical).
Gen 5:5; Gen 3:19; Heb 9:27
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On v17 The name Adam is the same as the Hebrew…
Adam
The name Adam is the same as the Hebrew word for "man." Some translations say "Adam" and some say "the man." You may use either form as it refers to the same person.
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you have listened to the voice of your wife
This is an idiom. AT: "you have obeyed what your wife said" (See: Idiom)
have eaten from the tree
You can say what it was that they ate. AT: "have eaten the fruit of the tree" or "have eaten some of the fruit of the tree" (See: Assumed Knowledge and Implicit Information)
You may not eat from it
"You must not eat from it" or "Do not eat its fruit"
cursed is the ground
The word "curse" comes first in the sentence to emphasize that the ground, which had been "good" (Genesis 1:10), was now under God's curse. This can be stated in active form. AT: "I am cursing the ground" (See: Active or Passive)
through painful work
"by doing hard work"
you will eat from it
The word "it" refers to the ground and is a metonym for the parts of the plants, which grow in the ground, that people eat. AT: "you will eat what grows from it" (See: Metonymy)
the plants of the field
Possible meanings are 1) "the plants that you take care of in your fields" or 2) "the wild plants that grow in the open fields."
By the sweat of your face
"By doing hard work that makes your face sweat"
you will eat bread
Here the word "bread" is a synecdoche for food in general. AT: "you will eat food" (See: Synecdoche)
until you return to the ground
"until you die and your body is put in the ground." In some cultures, they put the bodies of people who have died in a hole in the ground. Man's hard work does not end until the time of his death and burial.
For dust you are, and to dust you will return
"I made you from soil, so your body will become soil again." Translate both occurrences of "dust" with the same word in order to show that man begins and ends in the same condition.
translationWords
Adam
curse
bread
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On v17 3:17-19 God highlighted his original command not to eat…
3:17-19 God highlighted his original command not to eat the fruit by speaking of eating several times in 3:17-19. The judgment affected humanity’s ability to get food, and it was proportionate to their offense of eating what had been prohibited. • the ground is cursed: The relationship of the man to the ground (see study note on 2:7) was now antagonistic as judgment fell on his primary role (2:5, 15). He must labor and toil to work the ground, but with diminished productivity. Human sin has broad effects on creation (see 4:12; 6:7; Lev 26; Deut 11:13-17, 28; Rom 8:22).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.