Why is Life So Hard?
Why is life so hard? Why is it hard to get out of bed in the morning, hard to make meals, hard to do the laundry, hard to solve problems, hard to find enough money to pay the bills, hard to raise children, hard to love your spouse, hard to love your roommate, hard to keep a house or apartment or dorm room clean, hard to make and live on a budget, hard to figure out new software, hard to stay focused when reading, hard to mow grass or trim trees or plant flowers, hard to exercise, hard to come to church?
Technology aims to make our lives easier. But why is life still so hard when we live in a period of history that’s seen the greatest proliferation of technology in the history of the world? Technology is everywhere, but toil remains.
And I haven’t even mentioned the hard things we face on the interior of our lives. Why is it so hard to find words that adequately describe what we feel? Why do we feel sad or angry or despairing and not even know why? Why do we have rage and restlessness and rebellion in our hearts?
Things are hard on the exterior and the interior of our lives. Tim Keller helps us answer our question. He says, “Something is wrong, and we may know the effects, but we fall short of understanding the true causes. Contemporary Western culture tries to account for this restlessness without recourse to the biblical doctrine of sin…Entertainment distracts us from our discomfort. And doing good helps bolster our identity as a good person. But the Bible locates the root issue as our separation from God.”[1] In other words, try as hard as we may to escape or numb or minimize the pains of life, they persist nonetheless because the entire world groans under sin. Life is hard because of sin.
Overview of Genesis 3
Genesis 3 tells us about the entrance of sin into the world. The serpent deceived the woman and she disobeyed God and then the man followed her in her rebellion. Amazingly, the Lord comes to Adam and Eve with questions rather than threats. They wiggle around the truth and minimize what they’ve done but eventually confess their sin. Then the Lord speaks to the serpent (vv. 14-15). He doesn’t ask him any questions. It’s all punishment and no grace for Satan. He’ll suffer the humiliation of defeat and be crushed by the seed of the woman.
Then, in verses 16-19, the Lord turns his attention to the woman and the man. Each person is punished according to what they did, and each receive consequences that involve a life function and a relationship. The woman will have pain in childbearing and conflict with her husband. The man will have pain in his work and conflict with the ground.
Because of sin, there’s conflict with Satan, conflict with the sexes, and conflict with the soil. Last week we looked at the conflict with Satan. This week we’ll look at the conflict between man and woman, and the conflict between man and the ground.
Our text (vv. 16-19) is highly relevant and practical. These verses tell us why life’s two greatest tasks – love and work, are so hard. Our text this morning tells us about the origin of this pain in life’s two great pursuits. We’ll see pain in love (v. 16) and pain in work (vv. 17-19).
Pain in Love
In verse 16, we learn that Eve’s sin will result in pain in childbearing and in conflict with her husband. In this fallen world, there will be pain in love.
As I said last week, there are no curses against Adam and Eve, only on the serpent and the ground (vv. 14, 17), which implies that God’s blessing on Adam and Eve hasn’t been utterly lost. Biblical scholar James Hamilton says, “Rather than being cursed directly, the man and the woman have their roles made more difficult.”[2]
Man and Woman’s sentences take the form of a disruption of their appointed roles. God made the woman to help the man (2:18) and they were to be “fruitful and multiply” (1:28). 3:15 says that they will multiply and that their seed will crush the serpent’s head. But then 3:16 says that the woman must bear the seed in pain.
The word “pain” is used two times in verse 16. The word can mean “sorrow” or “travail.” The perpetuation of the human race will only come through agony and suffering. The pain of childbirth is unrelieved by modern medicine. Epidurals may help, but the pain persists. Children are not Eve’s punishment; pain in childbearing is her punishment.
“To Desire and To Dominate”
There’s been some debate on the exact meaning of the last part of verse 16. One of the most basic rules of hermeneutics, or the science of interpreting the Bible, is that you let the clear parts of Scripture help you with the unclear parts. This verse provides us with an opportunity to do that.
The Hebrew word “desire” in verse 16 is only used three times in the Old Testament: here, in Song of Solomon 7:10, and in Genesis 4:7. Just a few sentences later, Moses uses this word again, so we need to read 3:16 and 4:7 in concert. The clear meaning of 4:7 illuminates the less clear meaning in 3:16.
In Genesis 4, Cain is rejected by God and is seething with anger. The Lord comes to him and tells him that, in his anger, he’s easy prey for sin that’s crouching like a lion waiting to jump on him, but that he must fight back, turn the tables and “rule over it” (v. 7).
Sin wants to master Cain, but Cain must master sin. This is the plain meaning of this verse, and it helps us understand 3:16. In a similar way, after the Fall, Eve’s desire is to master Adam, and Adam will want to master her. There will now be a struggle for mastery between the sexes, specifically between husbands and wives. This connection to 4:7 suggests that marriage will be like jungle warfare!
This “desire” the woman has for her husband isn’t a new sexual desire – she already had that before the Fall. It’s a desire for independence, a desire to live life on her terms with no regard for the headship of her husband. She’ll attempt to control her husband, perhaps through manipulation or threats or even abusive behavior. She will not be content to joyfully live under the safety of his protection and security of his provision.
After sin, as one commentator says, “‘To love and to cherish’ becomes ‘To desire and to dominate.’”[3] Yes, there are many wonderful marriages in the world, even among unbelievers. But because of sin, there will always be a gravitational pull towards the woman usurping the man’s authority and the man treating the woman with brutality.
Is Male Headship a Result of the Fall?
Using this text, some scholars have argued that the idea of male headship in marriage is a result of sin. But when we studied the end of Genesis 2, I pointed out how the man’s headship is woven into the fabric of creation, that it’s part of how God designed things before sin came into the world. I said there were several pointers in this direction in the text: man was created first, man received God’s word, man was told to name the animals, woman is called man’s “helper,” and man and woman were created in different ways (man from the dust, woman from the man).
Before sin came into the world, God made the woman from the man and for the man. In order to argue that male headship only shows up after sin enters the world, you have to ignore lots of clear evidence to the contrary.
The Husband Must Lead His Wife
The text also says that the husband will “rule” over the wife. God is telling Eve, “You will want to control your husband, but he must not allow you to have your way with him. He must not allow you to rule over him. He must lead you.” God is saying to the man, “You must not buckle under the ungodly pressure of your wife. You must lead your wife. You must be the head of your wife that God made you to be.”
Male Dominance is Sinful
This “ruling” is not punishment for Eve, but a call to lead for Adam. “Rule” here is the exercise of godly headship, not godless harshness. “Rule” doesn’t mean harsh, exploitive subjugation, which unfortunately has characterized the plight of women for thousands of years.
I started reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden recently and one of the things that struck me is how women were viewed by the men on the American frontier at the end of the 19th century. After Cyrus Trask’s first wife commits suicide due to his infidelity, he finds a seventeen-year-old girl to replace her within a month. Steinbeck describes why Cyrus married so quickly:
“Cyrus wanted a woman to take care of (his baby son) Adam. He needed someone to keep house and cook, and a servant cost money. He was a vigorous man and needed the body of a woman, and that too cost money – unless you were married to it. Within two weeks Cyrus had wooed, wedded, bedded, and impregnated her. His neighbors did not find his action hasty. It was quite normal in that day for a man to use up three or four wives in a normal lifetime…She never said anything unless she was asked. From Cyrus’s point of view this was possibly the greatest of her virtues.”[4]
This kind of male dominance and subjugation and exploitation is evil. It’s not wrong or woke to speak against the mistreatment and abuse of women. Bible-loving men should be the first to say that women are more than the services they can provide. The Bible says that they’re co-heirs in the grace of life and co-rulers of God’s world. God made woman to help the man, not to be his slave. The church of Jesus Christ, of all places, should be full of men who honor and cherish and protect and provide for and love and serve women made in the image of God.
The mistreatment of women by men is one reason feminism has spread throughout our culture. In his excellent essay on the exegesis of Genesis 1-3, Ray Ortlund says, “While many women today need release from male-domination, the liberating alternative is not female rivalry or autonomy but male headship wedded to female help. Christian redemption does not redefine creation; it restores creation, so that wives learn godly submission and husbands learn godly headship.”[5]
When it says that Adam will “rule over Eve,” it doesn’t mean that husbands have license to abuse or mistreat or ignore the thoughts and opinions, the hopes and dreams, of their wives. It simply means that men must take up the mantle of headship in the home.
Ladies, if you’re in an abusive relationship, please tell someone. You don’t have to suffer in silence. There’s help and healing for you in Christ, and in his church.
Hope in the Midst of Pain
The consequences for Eve’s sin first relate to her children, then her husband. What woman was to do and be as a blessing is now tainted by sin. There will be pain in love.
But the connection to verse 15 reminds her not to lose hope. At creation, childbearing was the center of God’s blessing (1:28). After the Fall, childbearing is again the means by which God’s blessing will be restored. Through the birth of a child, the serpent will be destroyed.
Birth pains are meant to remind woman of her sin and her redemption. Her pain will show her her need. This is probably what Paul means when he tells Timothy that the woman “will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim. 2:15). Pain in childbirth reminds the woman of her sin and of God’s salvation that comes through her seed.
Pain in Work
In verses 17-19, we see that Adam’s sin will result in pain in his work and conflict with the ground. The most time-consuming task of our lives, our work, will be marked with pain. In this fallen world, there will be pain in work.
Work is not Adam’s punishment, just as having children wasn’t Eve’s punishment. Both children and work were pre-Fall realities, good gifts from the Lord to his image-bearers. The punishment is pain.
At the beginning of verse 17, God says that the rationale for Adam’s punishment is that he abandoned his headship and broke God’s command. God doesn’t address Eve this way. He doesn’t say to her, “Because you listened to your husband.” The pivotal factor in the Fall was Adam’s disobedience, not Eve’s. God says to Adam, “It’s because of you that the ground is cursed.” He doesn’t say, “It’s because of you and Eve.”
“Listened to the voice of” is a Hebrew idiom for “obey.” Adam’s fundamental mistake was that he obeyed his wife instead of God. This doesn’t mean that husbands shouldn’t earnestly seek and listen to the counsel of their wives. Only a foolish husband would make decisions without carefully considering the thoughts of his wife. Adam’s mistake was that, instead of protecting her, he went along with her into sin.
Notice again in verse 17 that God’s curse falls on man’s realm, not on man himself, “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Work itself isn’t a curse, but because of sin, it’s now “painful toil” (v. 17, NIV). The ground will be Adam’s enemy rather than his servant.
The consequences for Adam and Eve are directed at their points of highest fulfillment. For woman, it’s in her capacity as mother and wife. For man, it’s in his capacity as breadwinner and provider. Adam will struggle to provide the bread that he and his family need to live. How painful it must’ve been for him to live with the memories of the lush and abundant garden. The agony of wondering how he’ll provide for his family will follow him for the rest of his life.
Adam’s sin spoiled Adam and Adam’s environment. He’ll be surrounded by “thorns and thistles” (v. 18). Adam will now eat “plants of the field” instead of the fruit of the garden. He’ll live the rest of his life as a toiling farmer trying to eek out a living while battling the elements. He’ll only eat after hard work (v. 19a). Like Eve, his pain will be a perpetual reminder of sins rewards. Pain, sweat, and dust are the result of his chasing the satanic fantasy of being like God.
Work is Fruitless
This curse on the ground is why we all experience toil in work. This is why work is often fruitless. Tim Keller describes fruitlessness in work like this: “In all our work, we will be able to envision far more than we can accomplish, both because of a lack of ability and because of resistance in the environment around us. The experience of work will include pain, conflict, envy, and fatigue, and not all our goals will be met. For example, you may have an aspiration to do a certain kind of work and perform at a certain level of skill and quality, but you may never even get the opportunity to do the work you want, or if you do, you may not be able to do it as well as it needs to be done…Even during times when you are satisfied with the quality of your work, you may be bitterly disappointed with the results.”[6]
Keller talks about how our grandparents and great-grandparents who lived through the Depression and two World Wars were grateful to have a job of any kind simply because it paid the bills. And how that compares to our generation that insists that work must be fulfilling and fruitful, that it must perfectly match our talents and dreams. Our grandparents perhaps had a lower view of work than the one found in the Bible, but, as Keller says, our generation “has a more naïve and utopian view of work than is suggested by the Bible.”[7]
In other words, yes, the Bible says that God made us to cultivate his world, to make something beautiful out of what he’s made. But the Bible also says that the ground is cursed, so work will always be painful toil. This is why you should expect to be regularly frustrated even if you have your dream job.
This means that, when it’s time to pick a job, we should be both optimistic and realistic, knowing that our work can be both rewarding and frustrating at the same time. We’re often overly optimistic and self-centered when it comes to finding a job, something we all have to do throughout our lives.
In their book The Gospel at Work, Sabastian Traeger and Greg Gilbert propose asking these six questions when if comes time to choose a job: Does this job glorify God?, Does this job permit me to live a godly life?, Does this job provide for my needs and allow me to be a blessing to others? (these are the must-haves). Then ask, Does this job benefit society in some way?, Does this job take advantage of my gifts and talents?, Is this job something I want to do? (these are the nice-to-haves).[8]
When it comes time to choose a job, we should begin with God, not ourselves, and realize that every job will be both rewarding and frustrating.
Rest for Those Who Toil
Adam’s situation was a permanent one, “till you return to the ground” (v. 19). Relief only comes when he dies. We often think, “If I can just get a better job or retire, then life will be easier.” No, it won’t. Life will never be easy in a world under sin. In this life, we’ll never be free from fatigue and toil.
This makes the discipline of rest all the more important. You’re going to literally work yourself into the ground one way or the other. On the way there, God has given us a gift of grace to ease our burdens and sustain our souls and heal our bodies and calm our hearts. It’s called the sabbath. It’s a blessed and holy day (2:3). “On it you shall not do any work” (Ex. 20:10). “Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that you may…be refreshed.” God wants there to be refreshment mingled in with your toil.
Brothers and sisters, please hear me: you will reap what you sow. If you sow a life of incessant work with no routine of regular rest, you will reap a life of exhaustion, anxiety, depression, fatigue, health problems, lower levels of productivity, and a lack of depth with the Lord and those closest to you. In kindness, God has given us a gift to keep us going while we journey home. Those who receive it taste something of home here. Those who don’t regularly rest only have toil to look forward to. Why not toil for six days and rest for one? What do you have to lose?
“To Dust You Shall Return”
God tells Adam that he’ll work until he dies and when he dies, he’ll turn to dust. His death is described as a reversal of the creation process, “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (v. 19). Adam’s name literally means “dirt or dust,” so his name is a perpetual reminder of his destiny. And ours. Despite the advances in medicine or cosmetology, every opened casket proves the truth of the statement, “you are dust.”
The Bible uses images like this to make sure we understand how transient our lives are. The psalmist says, “You return man to dust and say, ‘Return, O children of man!’…The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away” (Ps. 90:3, 10). In light of this, we should ask God to “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (v. 12).
Wise people understand that they will soon be dead. They understand that this life flies by and then we fly to God to give an account for the life he gave us. So wise people order their lives accordingly. They make every effort to know and follow and obey God, to serve others in sacrificial love, and to invest whatever material wealth they have in the only kingdom that will last forever.
God Will Bless the World Again
The end of verse 19 says that man will be ultimately defeated by work, as the ground will eventually swallow him up in death. But even in this punishment there’s God’s provision. Verse 18 says that there will be thorns and food. Work will be painful, but it will bear some fruit. And the man and woman will have offspring that’ll defeat the serpent. Evil and pain will follow man and woman around in the world. But they won’t stalk them forever.
In 5:29, Lamech thinks Noah may be the one who’ll undo the curse on the ground and bring humanity relief. Every generation since Adam and Eve has longed for the conflict with evil, with men and women, and with the ground to come to and end. Paul says in Romans 8 that the whole creation groans for this new era of blessing (v. 22).
Is such an era ever going to come? Yes, God will overturn the curse and bless the world again. In Genesis 12:1-3, God promises Abraham seed, land, and blessing. The promise of seed overcomes the difficulty of childbearing. The promise of land hints that God will once again live with his people. The promise of blessing means that the curse won’t last forever, that the seed of the woman will triumph over the serpent. And, remarkably, this promise of blessing is for the whole world.[9]
These promises are what feed the hopes of all who follow in the footsteps of Abraham’s faith. Pain in love and pain in work won’t have the last word. Our deepest longings in our relationships and in our work will be satisfied in God’s future.
There will be relationships without conflict and work without toil in the paradise of the future just as there was in the paradise of the past. So we don’t have to be ultimately discouraged in our relationships or our work because we know that this world is not our final home. We remember this reality every Christmas when we sing:
No more let sins or sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.
God will make good on his word. He will come again and swallow up all our pain in love and pain in work and set us free from toil and bring us into his garden of abundance again.
These promises are for everyone who turns away from their sins and sees Jesus as their only hope and greatest treasure.
Those who believe that Jesus toiled on the cross for their rest, that his pain was to take their punishment, will one day live in a land where love and work will be blessed, not cursed. Pain is our punishment, but rest will be our reward.
[1]Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), 79.
[2]James Hamilton, “The Seed of the Woman and the Blessing of Abraham,” Tyndale Bulletin 58, no. 2 (2007): 255.
[3]Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, vol. 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1967), 71.
[4]John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1952), 16.
[5]Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., “Male-Female Equality and Male Headship: Genesis 1-3,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, rev. ed., eds. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 109.
[6]Keller, 82-3.
[7]Ibid., 87.
[8]Sebastian Traeger and Greg Gilbert, The Gospel at Work: How Working for King Jesus Gives Purpose and Meaning to Our Jobs (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 78-81.
[9]Hamilton, 272-3.