What Each One Was Made From

ONLY TWO THINGS WERE CURSED

There are only two.

The serpent is cursed, and it is spoken onto him. The ground is cursed, and it is spoken onto the ground.

In this chapter the man is never called cursed. Neither is the woman. Elsewhere Scripture speaks of men under a curse, and I am not saying otherwise. I am saying what these verses do and do not put on them. God does not speak to the three of them the same way.

SO CURSED AND SENTENCED ARE NOT THE SAME THING

To the serpent, thou art cursed. On him.

To the woman, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow. On her, and He says I will.

To the man, cursed is the ground for thy sake. Not on him. On what he works.

So the man is the only one whose sentence includes a curse spoken onto something else. It went onto the ground. His sentence still reaches him, and reaches him hard, the sorrow in the eating and the sweat of his face and the going back into it. But the word cursed was not laid on him. And of the three of them, the woman is the one nothing was cursed over at all, not her and not anything of hers.

They were sentenced. The serpent and the ground were cursed. Scripture keeps them apart, and so should we.

AND WHERE GOD PUT THE MARK

For thy sake. I have not looked into the Hebrew behind it, so I will read it the way the English gives it to me, on account of you, because of you. It is a consequence and not a favor.

But notice what He marked. Not the man. The ground the man has to work every morning.

And here is my picture of it. Every time he broke that ground and it fought him, he was reading his own history in the soil.

THE DUST ONLY SEEMS LIKE A PUNISHMENT

Dust thou art. Present tense, said to a man standing up on two feet.

He was already dust. God is not turning him into something. He is telling him what he had been all along, and He is telling him where it ends.

And here is what I make of that, and it is mine, because Genesis gives its own reason for shutting the way, that the man not eat and live for ever. It does not say the shutting was to let the dying come. But this is what I see. The dying is not only the sentence. It is a door, and the Redeemer came through it. And I am not going to say every man must die to be redeemed, because Paul says we shall not all sleep, we shall all be changed. What I am saying is that the redemption came by a death, and there was a death to come by.

SHE WAS NOT FORMED. SHE WAS BUILT.

Go back a chapter and put the verses up, because I am leaning on them.

Adam was yatsar, a word used for forming or fashioning, and also used of a potter shaping his work. Out of dust.

Eve was banah. He built her, and it is the word for building a house or a city, and He built her out of a living man.

She was not made out of the ground. The beasts and the birds were formed out of it and so was Adam. She came out of him.

And Genesis records that dust forming once, of one man. Her making is its own thing too, and nobody after her came out of a rib. But everybody after came the way she came in this one respect, out of a living body.

EACH ONE’S SORROW CAME THROUGH WHAT THEY WERE MADE FROM

Adam was made from the ground, and the ground is where his sorrow comes. Cursed is the ground, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it, thorns and thistles, sweat of the face, and back into it at the end.

And here is the pattern I see, and Genesis does not lay it out this way, so it is mine. She was made from the man, and the man is where her sorrow comes.

Read the verse and see how much of it has him in it. The desire is toward him and the ruling is his outright, and it says so. And a conception is not hers alone either. That is my reading of the halves.

So each one’s life now runs through the very thing they were taken out of. Dust for the man. Man for the woman.

AND NEITHER OF THEM WAS MADE FROM CURSED MATERIAL

He was formed before the ground was ever cursed, and she was built out of him before either of them had eaten. Clean and unfallen are my words for that, and what the chapters give me is the order. The ground was not cursed until chapter three, and by then they were both standing there made.

So neither of them was made out of anything cursed. What came after, came after the making. And Genesis has her eating first, so I am not telling you the falling reached her by way of him. What I am saying is that the material she was made from was not under a curse when she was made from it. She ate first, and Scripture still puts it on Adam.

AND IT COMES THROUGH HIM BECAUSE SCRIPTURE LAYS IT ON HIM

By one man. Not by the woman, and she was the one who ate first.

She knew it too, and she said it out loud to the serpent.

She was talked out of what she knew, and Scripture says Adam was not deceived.

And here is the difference I see. He had the charge. Genesis gives the command to the man in chapter two, before she was ever made. How she came to know it, Genesis never says, and I am not going to tell you it came through him when the text does not.

And even that is not a reason. It is only a thing I notice. Scripture does not explain why it runs through him. It says that it does, over and over, and I am not going to build a reason where God left one out.

SHE CARRIES CONSEQUENCES, NOT A CURSE

Nothing was said to her about the ground, and she lives under it anyway. She eats the bread it costs to get, and she goes back into it at the end.

Not willingly. That is Paul’s word for it, and it is the only word he gives me. The creation did not choose this, and it went under.

And it may look as though Adam had the hard way. Now the counting I am about to do is mine, so take it as a way of laying it out and not as something Genesis numbers. He was given one domain, the ground. Thorns and thistles, sorrow in the eating, sweat of the face, and dust at the end.

She was given three, and they are three different rooms. The body, the bearing, and the relationship.

And then his as well, because she eats out of the same ground.

He has what was spoken over his ground. She has consequences of her own, and she lives under what happened to the ground as well.

So she carries consequences and not a curse. And none of them are light.

BUT THE HOPE CAME BEFORE THE SORROW

Her seed. Not his. Her seed, and this one runs through her.

And read who He is speaking to. He says it to the serpent in verse 15, before He says one word to her in verse 16.

So it was not spoken over her. It was spoken about her, and it was spoken first.

AND ADAM NAMED HER BY THE HOPE

Mother of all living. Said to a woman who had just been told she would die, standing in a garden they were about to be put out of. And the first birth is not recorded until the next chapter, so as the account runs, nothing living had been born yet.

Genesis does not tell me Adam had verse 15 in mind, so this next part is mine. He did not name her by the sentence. He named her by the promise. Her sorrow was the conception and the bringing forth.

AND THE ROOM SHE WAS SENTENCED IN IS THE ROOM HE CAME THROUGH

A conception, and a bringing forth. Paul is not writing about her sentence there, and I am the one setting the two beside each other.

She took the three I counted, and the hope of the whole world came out of her.

AND THAT IS WHY IT COULD NOT BE A MAN’S SEED

So look at the wording in verse 15, because it goes another way than I expect.

The promises I can name run through a man, and here they are.

And the word is used of a man’s line again and again. Now it is not used only that way, and let me be honest about it, because of what God says to Hagar.

So I am not going to tell you the word cannot be said of a woman.

And God said her seed. Not his. And that is what I want you to sit with, because the promises I named a moment ago are traced through the man, and this one is traced through her.

And now I have to be careful, because this is where I could tell you more than I know. Here is what is on the page. Romans says sin entered by one man. Genesis says her seed. Luke says the Holy Ghost came upon her and therefore that holy thing shall be called the Son of God. What is not on the page is a mechanism. No verse here tells me sin travels in a man’s seed, and no verse here tells me that is why the conception went the way it went. So the joining is mine. Sin entered by one man, and I read a deliverer coming down that same line as arriving carrying the very thing he came to break.

Not of the earth. Now Paul is setting the first man against the second and he is not explaining a conception, so I am the one carrying it here. And I will not say He stepped into the line without coming down it, because Scripture puts Him in Abraham’s line and David’s, and Galatians says made of a woman. What I see is a coming that did not go through a man.

That holy thing. Luke says holy and Luke says therefore, and he stops there. So I will stop there too.

So He came by a woman and not by a man’s seed. And when I say He had to, that is my conclusion and not a line I can show you.

AND IT WAS NOT THAT THE WOMAN WAS CLEAN

Somebody will take that and say the seed came through a woman because the woman was undefiled.

Eve after that day was fallen. So was every woman down that line. And about Mary, men have argued a long time and I am not going to settle it here.

Her own words. She calls God her Saviour, and she says my. That is what the line gives me and I take it plainly.

So I do not read it as her cleanness that made it work, and Luke does not say either way. Read the angel again. Therefore also that holy thing shall be called the Son of God.

Therefore. Luke ties the holy thing to the overshadowing, and that word therefore is his. What he does not do is explain what did or did not come from her, so when I say the holiness is not from the woman, that is me finishing a sentence Luke left.

Sin entered by one man, and the conception went past the man altogether. I see the line not as cleaned, but as stepped over.

SO HEAR THIS

Nobody arranges that. The hope spoken about her before the sorrow was spoken to her. And the deliverance coming through the childbearing, which is the very thing she was told would cost her most.

Past finding out. Now Paul is writing there about God’s dealings with Israel and the nations, so I am borrowing his words and not his subject. But that is how it sits with me. Not that we cannot see it. That we cannot get behind it and see how it was done.

A pastor of mine used to say God is too wise to make a mistake.

His work is perfect. That is the saying with God’s own words underneath it.

And there is a half we forget when we are standing in the sorrow part of this chapter. Too wise to make a mistake, and too good to be unkind. So let Him do His thing, and we do all we know.