Is it a Sin to Listen to Your Wife?

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Tom: The question we’ve been addressing for the last few weeks is why Christ had to go to the cross in order to save mankind. And we’ve been reviewing the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis for the answer. Briefly, we learned that at the beginning of mankind’s creation, there was no need for a Savior, no need for reconciliation between man and God. But then Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and the penalty was death. They began to die physically, and their spiritual separation from God was immediate and eternal. Yet, God offered a solution to the problems of mankind.

Dave, we’ve gone over Genesis:3:15And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
See All..., when God offers, really, the first gospel.

Dave: The Messiah.

Tom: The Messiah to come.

Dave: Who will bruise the head of the serpent.

Tom: So, we’ve been talking about Genesis:2:16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
See All... and 17. God said, “The day you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in that day you will surely die. So that was the penalty.

Dave: Sounds like a mean statement to make. So, let’s go back and try to explain that just very briefly. This is the very nature of God and man (that He created). God has to be in charge. You know, you’ve got the New Agers: “You’re God, I’m God.” Well, if you’re God and I’m God, that would explain why the world is in a mess, you know. It wouldn’t offer any hope. I don’t want to be God. What we need is to willingly submit ourselves to the one true God. Now, if God is God, then He’s got to be God, okay? So, you can’t have rebels running around and doing their own thing, and rebelling against God. God gave the simplest command He could: “Don’t eat of this tree.” And probably there could have been a thousand trees exactly like it, same fruit. “Just don’t eat of that tree.” They did.

So, now we have rebellion in the universe. Well, is God just going to go along with that? Is He going to pat us on the head and say, “That’s okay, guys. Just try it again,” you know. No! It won’t work. It would be a horrible universe if when you jumped up, sometimes you stuck on the ceiling, or sometimes you went zooming right through the clouds—the Law of Gravity was on and off. You have to have laws even for a game—to play a game.

So, God sets the rules. He is God. Why wouldn’t I want God to be God? Now when we rebel against God, there is a separation. There’s a loss of fellowship. And if, indeed, as the Bible says, “God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life; he became a living soul,” then life itself comes from God. When you’re cut off from God, you are cut off from life.

So, man died spiritually in his relationship with God, and that then destroyed the life in his body. It’s a mystery to scientists today—why do we die? Why do we age? And why do we die? What is life?

Okay, so this is why death came into this world: because of sin.

Tom: Right. And God wanted a volitional response.

Dave: Amen.

Tom: He sets a condition, and He expects them, in love, to respond to His commands.

Dave: He gave us the power of choice, or we could not love Him; we couldn’t love one another.

Tom: And the consequences were devastating. Absolutely devastating. In the earlier verses in Genesis 3, we talked about…well, before chapter 3, we talked about the fellowship that they had with God, and then after chapter 3, you saw it—there are Adam not getting along with Eve, one blaming the other, Eve blaming the serpent. Life had changed drastically!

Dave: The kindest I guess we could be to Adam and Eve was to say they didn’t know what God meant when He said “you will die.” Because they had never seen death. They had never experienced it. Well, that tells us that whether we understand what God says or not, we’d better okay what God says.

Tom: I want to get into some of the consequences, picking up with chapter 3, verse 17, of Genesis: “And unto Adam He said, Because thou has 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 shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”  Verse 18: “Thorns also, and thistles, shall it bring forth to thee. And thou shalt eat the herb of the field. (19) In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

Dave, people would look at this and say, “Wow, this is really tough. This is going to be hard on them, it’s going to be difficult. It doesn’t seem to be fair” maybe, some might be thinking. But really, this is a blessing to them, isn’t it?

Dave: Well, explain that, Tom. Why is this a blessing? As a reminder, of course, well, the consequences…

Tom: For a number of reasons: They were now in a sin state, and consequently, when we’re in a sin state, if things are going winningly, smoothly, whatever, we tend to get into lots of trouble. Sin tends to compound itself. I know it’s not from the Bible, but there’s an axiom, you know, “Idleness is the devil’s workshop.” Well, that can be borne out in our experience.

So, these things that they had to do, working—physical work, hard work—it wasn’t a labor that they couldn’t do, but it just took concentration, energy, all that they could bring to it, I would think.

Dave: Well, it also tells us that when man sinned, he brought the whole world of nature down with him. Paul tells us, in Romans 8, the whole creation groans, waiting for deliverance. So the consequences were serious. The—not only man, now, but it had to follow that man’s habitat, where man is, everything man is involved with, it has to be in a state of separation from God, because this is what man has done. He has separated himself from God, and God can’t allow man to still be living in paradise, you know, in His presence. Paradise is like, in God’s presence.

So, it’s very rational, it’s very clear what happened, and it’s very serious.

Tom: Yeah, we had a statement—I think it’s in Romans—that the…even the earth, creation, groans…

Dave: That’s right. Romans 8.

Tom: Right. Looking for it’s redemption, in effect.

Picking up with verse 20: “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve because she was the mother of all living. (v. 21) Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them.”

Dave, I believe this is speaking symbolically about the death of Jesus Christ. These skins—where did they come from?

Dave: Well, it took the death of the animals, so this is the beginning of animal sacrifices for sin, but the Bible is very clear. And furthermore, you don’t just go out and sacrifice an animal, go through some hocus-pocus. This has to be a command from God, and we had it very clearly laid out in Leviticus, for example, the whole sacrificial system: the Jewish Aaronic priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, and the offerings and so forth. This does not condone animal sacrifices for sin. They are not efficacious at all. But they were looking forward to the Lamb of God, who would come and who Himself would pay the penalty for our sins.

So, we have that, I think, fairly clearly.

Tom: Right, and skins—“made coats of them”—really Christ is…His death, His blood, that is our covering.

Dave: That’s right.

Tom: That’s how God keeps us, in His covering, through the death of His Son.

Now to verse 22: “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever: therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims and a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.”

Now, Dave, I mentioned before the blessing, with work and labor, but this is also a blessing, isn’t it?

Dave: Well, Tom, first of all, verse 22: “The man has become as one of us, to know good and evil.” Satan said, “You can become little gods,” and that’s where we became little gods. So this is not a blessing that some people make it out to be. Man was not a little god, or they would have said to Satan, “What are you offering us to become gods? We already are.” But the major point here…

Tom: Well, the blessing that I meant was being sent out from the Garden, and not eating of the Tree of Life, because if they were under the penalty of sin, who wants to live forever in that condition?

Dave: And the main lesson here, Tom (I mean, there’s a lot of main lessons), but there’s  a flaming sword that keeps the way to the Tree of Life to prevent man from partaking of it. We fled that sword. Today people complain against the death penalty. God said, “The soul that sinneth, it will die.” We say, “No, no, that’s not just.” We all fled from that sword. One day, the second Man, the last Adam, Jesus Christ, walked up to that sword, and He took it in His heart for us. And that’s how He became the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I think we’ve quoted it before, the hymn writer said, “His blood that flaming blade must quench. His heart, its sheath must be.” So this is the only way back to God, is through Him.