This post is the third in a series exploring what it means to live in faithfulness to God. You can find the other two posts here and here. To sum those posts up, to live in faithfulness is to live in trust of reliance on God as we navigate our relationship with him, other people and ourselves and the whole rest of the world. Today, I want to continue exploring what the bible has to say about living in faithfulness, by looking at the story of the fall in Genesis 3.

Now, Of all the chapters in the Bible, I think the one that could make the strongest case for being the most misunderstood is Genesis 3. It begins in the Garden of Eden, with Adam, Eve a serpent and a tree with delicious looking fruit that God said bluntly, “do not eat this”. The Serpent then convinces Eve to eat the fruit saying that it will make her like the Lord, Eve then convinces Adam and the two of them partake, in the hopes of being God themselves. And just like that sin entered the world, because if there was ever a thing that it is sinful to do, it is trying to usurp God.

It is in the aftermath of this decision when misreadings of this passage tend to crop up. Up until this point in Genesis, people and God had walked side by side, but now they could not see one another. And so God asks the people if they had disobeyed him, to which the answer Adam and Eve give is a thing of wonder. For in the space of just a handful of verses, these two: a) say they hid from God because they were scared, b) blame each other for tempting them to make such a bad decision and then, c)blame a lowly animal for being the real cause of what they had just clearly chose to do themselves. And then the passage goes on, with a section called the curses. In which God ‘curses’ the world for choosing sin. The curses fall into three main categories. They are: a)curses that cause how people deal with one another to become more difficult, b)curses that cause how people deal with creation to be more difficult and c)curses that cause it to be more difficult for human beings to be in a good relationship with God (i.e. human beings were kicked out o the garden of Eden, where they once walked with God, never to return).

Now, here is my question for you. In Genesis 3, is God “prescribing” new curses that he will personally inflict on the world as a result of sin, or is he “describing” what life is going to be like now that sin has entered into the world? At a quick glance, it might read like God is prescribing new curses that he is going to inflict. He does, after all, say things like “I will put enmity between you…” in verse 15. That does sound quite a bit like God is inflicting something new as a result of sin, and so assuming this is how it should be read makes a certain amount of sense.

However, given the chapter as a whole, I think that reading God’s curses as instead a “description” of what the world is like now that sin has entered into it makes more sense. The reason I think this is the better understanding is because in the immediate aftermath of the eating of the fruit we already see that these curses have played out before God has even pronounced them. To begin, God calls out to Adam and Eve, and they hide themselves from God. Then, in trying to maintain face before the creator, Adam throws his wife under the bus, blaming her for his bad decision. And then Eve in turn blames the serpent for the decision she made. If all the curses can be described as impacting our relationships with God, each other and the rest of creation, it is odd that already before God makes them their effects are on full display. But if instead the curses are understood as a description of what the world will be like now that humanity has brought sin into the world, then this passage makes perfect sense.

And this difference in reading, between the curses being a prescription instead of description, impacts quite a lot about how we understand the state of the world and our place in it. Because if we understand this passage as a prescription, that is as God doling out judgement because human beings made a poor, but let’s be honest, an understandable decision, then all the worst of the horrors that the fallen world around has to boast seem to be in some way God ordained. Children are at times banes to their parents because God cursed us with that. Work becomes toil because God cursed us with that. Husbands rule over their wives like abusive tyrants because God wills that to be the punishment for the original sin. We come to think of these curses as the hallmarks of what human life should be like.

But, if you instead read this passage as God describing the results of what happened when sin entered the world, then the takeaway of Genesis 3 is very different. The message stops being that things are terrible but are in a way God ordained, and instead becomes that the way things are now in this fallen world, where human beings are separate from God, at odds with one another, and are destroying creation, is not how things are meant to be. This is not how we are meant to be. Instead, we are meant to be as we were before the fall, in a good relationship with God, each other and creation. If we are left to our own devices in this world that sin has entered into, then we will act as God’s curses describe, but that is not how we are meant to live at all.

And suddenly we have a much better understanding of why God reaches out to us throughout the rest of the Bible, as well as a much better understanding of what living in faithfulness to him is supposed to look like. Because with a descriptive reading of the curses in Genesis 3, God’s reaching out to humanity throughout scripture stops being about trying to save us from the curses that he himself inflicted upon us and instead it becomes about God trying to restore and reconcile humanity and creation to what it was meant to be in the first place and then more. With a descriptive reading of Genesis 3, we learn that to live in faithfulness to God is about living as Human beings were meant to be before sin entered the world; that is in God’s image rightly, in good relationship with our Lord, with each other and ourselves and with the whole rest of creation as well. And it is how we do this, learn to live as human beings made in God’s image rightly again, that God reveals to us as he reveals himself throughout the rest of the pages of the Bible.