Genesis 3:19 “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Have you ever been demoted, moved backward in social status? Have you had a job taken away because of inability to perform? Have you ever flunked a class you were taking?
I have! What makes it worse is that it was in graduate school, and I was paying good money to take the class. It would have been very embarrassing if I hadn’t come to realize I was going to fail after about three weeks of the class. I just wasn’t prepared for it.
You see, it was a class on Medieval Church History. The problem for me was that I hadn’t yet taken Ancient Church History. So every issue in the Medieval period referenced the issues in the Ancient, and there was no way for me to get caught up! I was lost!
I remember by Dad telling me about teaching sailors to swim when he was in the Navy. They would get the sailors up on deck and then just push them off into the water. They learned to swim, or they were out of the Navy. I don’t think they allowed them to drown!
Our text tells us about the ultimate demotion. Adam and Eve had chosen to reject the LORD’s authority in their lives. They rejected the provision of God in the Garden. He had provided everything they could possibly want or need.
There was only one thing that was withheld. The LORD was not willing to give them the authority to choose what was right and wrong. That was His domain, and for good reason. Humans were still just learning how to live in this perfect place created especially for them. The lacked the breadth of knowledge necessary to make those decisions.
So by eating that fruit, whatever kind it was, they were rejecting the LORD’s authority over their lives. And there were consequences to their actions. That is what we are reading in our text. Each participant in this story receives a consequence for their part in the rebellion.
The serpent, the woman and the man all end up in a place very different from where they were before. The serpent ends up at the bottom of the animal kingdom, eating dust. His ultimate end is also foretold. He will end up getting crushed by the very creature he deceived.
The woman ends up in a struggle around conception and childrearing. Just remember all the struggles outlined in the history of God’s people, all the sibling rivalries and difficulty getting pregnant. The struggles among wives and slaves, all in an effort to have children. This is the woman’s punishment.
The man has a change in the nature of his relationship with creation itself. He was meant to be fruitful and increase in number, filling the earth and bringing order out of chaos. He was to rule over it all, but he ends up having to fight against the very things he was supposed to rule over. His role becomes instead a struggle to survive instead of living in the abundant provision of the Garden.
But the worst part of the man’s rejection of the LORD is that he will return to dust. The text tells us that it was from the dust that God created humanity. They were elevated in their status above the rest of the animals by being “created in his own image” by God. Instead of producing according to their own kind, humanity is created in God’s image. We were and are to bear the image of God in this world. We are to reflect Him.
Instead, man ends up being a product of dust and a recyclable object made of dust. Now that is a demotion. That is moving backwards.
The Arnold Journey 