Genesis 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;
There are still way too many men who listen to their wives more than they do to the Word of God. Of course, the converse is also true. Either way, those who prioritize their spouse, or anything or anyone else over God’s Word still bring the sorrows of the curse upon themselves.
Adam listened to his wife, but he was not deceived. On this point we have the direct testimony of Scripture, which alone is enough to settle the issue (1 Tim 2:14). However, careful thinking about the story yields more internal evidence. If Adam had been convinced by Eve’s arguments to eat the fruit, or if Eve had brought him the fruit without his knowing where it came from, then he surely would have blamed her, not only for giving him the fruit, but also for tricking him into eating it. Instead, his attempted self-defense excludes this point, and that alone is pretty solid evidence that he ate the fruit in full knowledge of his wrongdoing, which makes his offense even more egregious.
Yet while God cursed the serpent, he didn’t directly curse the man or the woman. Instead he promised them both lots of sorrow, which in a way is a blessing in disguise. If God were to shield them from suffering and sorrow, they would find it hard to understand the malignancy of sin until it was too late. Because Adam ate contrary to God’s commandment, God cursed the ground, and what it produced as a result gave Adam sorrow in eating for the rest of his days. (See Genesis 3:18).
The greatest curse placed on the ground was the cursed Serpent himself when God designated the ground as his roadway, home and playground (Genesis 3:14). Satan and his fiends were no longer limited to a single access portal, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but could now roam free all over the world to tempt, harass and deceive its inhabitants. Nor would the Serpent pass over the earth without doing all in his power to corrupt and poison it. Today he has perfected his deception and convinced humanity to trade the sorrows of simple eating from the family farm for the deferred sorrows of destroyed health, decimated by a sumptuous, chemically-permeated and processed diet from commercial farms and factories while also avoiding the beneficial sorrows of manual labor.
"The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left" (Isaiah 24:5-6).
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