8-3-08
The Fall and the Curse
Building a Joyful Marriage: Part 5
Genesis 3:6-19

Summary: The reason marriage is fraught with problems is the curse so the only solution is reversal of the effects of the curse through the gospel.  When Adam and Eve put on fig leaves it shows the loss of intimacy and unity (which resulted in loss of intimacy with God).  The curse on female and male roles made partnership harder, and the curse on the relationship destroyed priority (self became the priority).  The curse was the removal of grace that must follow sin.  Worship the God who is the only power that decides blessing or cursing. 

Introduction: The effects of the fall and the curse on marriage
The problem: The Curse
The solution: Reversing the Curse
Importance of Genesis 3 in theodicy
Fig leaves - Loss of intimacy & Unity
Loss of intimacy with God
Blame shifting
Curse on Roles - loss of partnership
Roles made harder
Loss of partnership
Selfishness - Loss of priority
The woman
The man
Priority of self
Selfishness is miserable
Joy comes from love
Increased need, decreased help
Why the curse?
Conclusion: Worship the God of the Curse

6  When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" 10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." 
11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" 12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me--she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." 
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." 14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, "Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." 
16 To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." 
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 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." 

Introduction: The effects of the fall and the curse on marriage
The problem: The Curse
Why do marriages have so many problems?  You pick your absolute favorite person in the entire world and marry that person, and you cannot get along.  Why is that?  You get along just fine with people you don’t love nearly as much as your spouse.  Why is there so much conflict in marriage?  I have never known a single married person (including me) who has not had marital problems.  Tracy is absolutely one of the most delightful human beings on the planet – why do I have trouble getting along with her at times?
And why are there so many divorces?  I would be willing to bet that far more marriages break up than any other kind of friendships.  I doubt there is a 50% friendship breakup rate.  (And it is a lot easier and cheaper to break up a friendship than to get a divorce.)
And when there is a breakup, why is it so incredibly painful?  When you have two roommates who used to be great friends but now are not getting along so great, so one moves out – that is not the life-shattering, agonizing, bitter upheaval that happens in a divorce.  Why?  What is the problem with marriage?
The answer, as Ken Ham would say, is in Genesis.  Genesis 3 to be exact.  Marriage is affected by both the fall and the curse.  In Genesis 2 God had created the ideal marriage.  Adam was a very, very happily married man.  But when they sinned there were some drastic effects on not only their marriage but marriage in the human race in general.
The solution: Reversing the Curse
If we are going to fix the problems that come up in marriage, we need to do the same thing we would do if we were fixing anything else.  Think of how an auto mechanic will fix your engine.  He starts out with a thorough knowledge of how an engine is supposed to function.  Then he looks for what has gone wrong and then he fixes it by restoring the part that has gone wrong to the way it was originally designed to be.
There is an army of marriage counselors out there who are like auto mechanics who are able to figure out what is wrong, but instead of trying to restore it back to the manufacture’s original specs, they come up with their own creative ideas.  The solution to marital problems is not to say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and observe all the differences between men and women, and then come up with ideas of how to get along.  Nor is it what you read in most Christian marriage books, which tell you to give your spouse what he or she really needs in order to manipulate them into giving you what you want.  The solution is to follow what the Manual says about how to restore your marriage to factory specs. 
Importance of Genesis 3 in theodicy 
I hope you understand what an important chapter Genesis 3 is.  Do you realize that if we take Genesis 3 out of the Bible, or if we interpret it in some figurative way so that there really was no actual serpent, no actual Adam and Eve - do you realize what that does?  It makes God the source of evil.

Genesis 4-6
•	Estrangement with God
•	Evil
•	Suffering
•	Disease
•	Murder
•	Polygamy
•	Universal Death

Genesis 1-2
•	Paradise
•	Life
•	Perfect Creation
•	“It is very good”
•	Ideal Marriage

Genesis 3 tells us why there is evil and suffering and decay and disease and death.  Where did all that come from?  It did not come from God.  When God created everything it was very good – nothing was wrong with it.  There was no evil or suffering or death.  But then, in Genesis 3, man sinned.  And with sin came evil and suffering and decay and disease and death.  All of that is a result of man’s sin.
But if we come up with a way to interpret the creation account such that it lines up with the world’s theories of the beginning, and we say that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago before there were human beings, think of the implications of that.
The fossil record is a record of death, right?  Every single fossil they have ever found is dead.  And not only that, but in the fossils we also see evidence of disease and suffering.  There are dinosaur bones that give clear evidence of brain tumors, cancer, injuries, etc.  So you have animals suffering and dying with pain and disease and suffering and sickness long before any human being ever sinned  –  which means God just created it that way.
Have you ever seen an animal really suffer?  It is a horrible thing to watch.  Those who want to force-fit the Bible to match secular theories would have us believe that God created a world of pain and sorrow and suffering and disease and decay and death, and then sat back and said “It is very good.”
Genesis 3 is essential for us to make sense out of evil.  Remove that one chapter and the whole Bible no longer makes any sense.  God makes everything in Genesis 1.  In chapter 2 we have paradise – ideal harmony with God and with one another with full access to the tree of life.  Then in chapter 4 we have murder – a man kills his own brother.  He is estranged from God.  By the end of the chapter there is polygamy and a mass murderer.  In chapter 5 we see the phrase “he died” repeated eight times.  The whole human race is dominated by death – everybody dies.  And by chapter 6 we read The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

 6The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth  (Genesis 6:5-7)

If you did not have chapter 3 in between, it would make no sense.  There would be no explanation for how it went from perfect paradise to evil so horrible that God had to completely destroy it with a flood.
Man chose sin and death, and a lot of things were included in the package of death.  It came with a curse and brought susceptibility to sin, estrangement from God, sickness, pain, sorrow, suffering, decay, death and the domination of evil.  None of that was part of the creation.  It all came from man’s rebellion.  God’s response could have been to just let man die and be done with it, but instead He set a plan of redemption in place that would reverse man’s plunge into rebellion & death.  This plan cost Him His own Son.

Fig leaves - Loss of intimacy & unity 

So let’s take a look specifically at the effect of what happened in Genesis 3 on marriage.  The account of the ideal in Genesis 2 ended with the words, “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.”  Now watch the very first thing that happens when they sin.

6  When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 

So much for naked and unashamed.  Now they are ashamed, and they have to cover themselves up.  We have seen that naked and unashamed was a description of intimacy.  They were completely comfortable with each other, and totally safe.  There was no fear of the spouse having any negative judgment, which enabled them to be completely open with each other.
And the physical is symbolic of the whole relationship.  They had no fear of the other one criticizing or looking down on them or making them feel foolish or being disrespectful or unkind.  There was total vulnerability because there was absolutely zero threat of being hurt in any way.  But after they sinned they wanted to cover themselves up, because now there was some threat, so they had to watch out to guard themselves from being hurt.  They had to take up a defensive posture and that is a posture that destroys intimacy.
You cannot be in a loving posture and a defensive posture at the same time.  The more you focus on guarding yourself the less your focus is on loving your spouse.  So when they started guarding themselves they backed way off on loving each other.
Danger is always the killer of intimacy, because it destroys trust.  If expressing my feelings to you is dangerous – if it might result in me being mocked or ridiculed or gossiped about – then I will be slow to tell you my feelings.  If telling you my opinions might result in me getting shot down, if getting into a conversation with you about the deep desires of my heart puts me at risk of being looked down upon by you, I am naturally going to be reluctant to do that.  Instead I will just give you a façade, which means you are not even interacting with the real me.  The more danger there is, and the less I can trust you, the more our relationship will have to stay at the surface level.
Loss of intimacy with God
So the intimacy and oneness between Adam and Eve were broken.  And that is not surprising given what we read in the following verses.

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" 10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." 

Their sin destroyed their intimacy with God.  For the first time in their existence they are now hiding from God and attempting to avoid His presence.  They are ashamed before Him, and instead of seeking forgiveness or restoration they just want to avoid Him, so it comes as no surprise at all that their marriage is messed up.  The only way to have Genesis 2 marriage is by grace.  But if you are not close to God you forfeit that grace, and you will not be able to be close to your spouse.  Ninety-nine percent of solving the problems in our marriages is simply walking more closely with the Lord.  The more you and your spouse approach closer to God the closer you will come to each other.  The more intimacy you have with God the more anger and unforgiveness and selfishness will be pushed out of your heart, and you will be full of kindness and gentleness and patience and joy and love.  And when your irritability and selfishness are replaced by kindness and joy and love – all the problems in your marriage will improve.
We learned this in our study of 1 John - you cannot love people without loving God.  When they started avoiding God and distancing themselves from God it became inevitable that their marriage would go sour, because there is no true love for people when you are not loving God.

Blame shifting
And so we are not surprised that the very first words out of Adam’s mouth after he sins and then hides from God are selfish, unloving words.  God comes and demands an accounting from him, and he immediately just throws Eve under the bus to try to save face.

11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" 12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me--she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." 

The popular term for this is blame-shifting.  This is the natural response of the unrepentant heart when sin is pointed out.  “Why did you do that?”  “Well, you have to understand, she did this, and You didn’t help, and they did that and someone else did this and nobody helped me and everybody sinned against me…” and on it goes.  The flesh is like a wild animal.  When it gets cornered, look out – because it will go on the attack.
So Adam does not hesitate a second to point to Eve’s guilt.  You do not do that to someone you love.  You cover over their faults and sins if at all possible.  If you are late because your wife could not get ready in time then when you arrive you say, “I’m sorry we’re late.  We had trouble getting ready.”  Love takes such delight in the other person, and so strongly desires to protect that person, that it will gladly take scorn upon itself to protect the beloved.  But selfishness will throw the other person under the bus in a heartbeat to save face.  And it will stop at nothing – even to the point of blaming God, which is what Adam was doing.  (The woman You gave me)  “I didn’t ask for this.  I just went to sleep one day and woke up married – this isn’t my doing.  You’re the one who put this fruit-eating, serpent-befriending, ‘Here, honey, why don’t you take a bite’ wife into my life.  Before she came along I was just fine.”  
In v.13 God demands an accounting from the woman, and she blames the serpent.  Make no mistake – when we blame other people for our sin, or we blame circumstances, we are ultimately blaming the God who controls those circumstances and who brought those people into our lives.

Proverbs 19:3 A man's own folly ruins his life, yet his heart rages against the LORD.

Curse on Roles - loss of partnership

Starting in v.14 we read about the curse.  He begins by cursing the serpent.  Next comes the woman and then the man.

16 To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. 
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." 
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 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."

There are two parts to this curse.  One is that God curses the man and the woman with regard to their individual roles.  The woman is cursed in the area of childbearing and the man in the area of providing for the family.  And in between those two you see the curse on the marriage relationship itself. 
Roles made harder
First the roles.  The extreme feminists want to erase any distinct male and female roles.  They want to flatten out all the differences so that women and men are essentially the same and roles are interchangeable.  There is no role that is inherently feminine or inherently masculine in their thinking.  Not even the most extreme feminist, however, can get around the fact that pregnancy and giving birth are uniquely feminine roles.  That should be obvious even to the most limited intellect. 
And so God takes the woman’s role of childbearing and increases the difficulty of it.  And I do not think it would be a stretch to assume that this curse applies to the woman’s roles in general.  I think it spills over into all the woman’s roles, which is why not only is childbirth hard, but child rearing is hard.  It is why after you leave your wife home all day long with a house full of small children you come home from work at night and her eyes are the size of quarters and she is a hairsbreadth away from snapping in a complete nervous breakdown.  Childbearing, childrearing, homemaking, submitting to you – none of that is a walk in the park.
And the same is true for the man.  The curse on the role of the woman is ten words in the Hebrew.  The curse on the role of the man is 45 words.  God demanded an accounting from the man first and God lets loose with the most extensive curse on the man, because it is the man who is the head and who bears primary responsibility in the marriage. 
And so man’s role of being the provider for the family is cursed.  Going to work every day, and bearing the responsibility of providing for the family - that constant, relentless responsibility is a very heavy load.  The bills just never let up – it does not matter if you lose your job or get sick or get injured or need a break or whatever.  It is a hard yoke to have to provide for a family.  (And by the way, ladies, I just want to remind you that it is a heavy load that God placed on your husband’s shoulders, not yours.  You do not have to worry about finances.  Let your husband worry about that.  That is his responsibility before God.  Your role is to just sit back and enjoy being provided for by God through your husband.  Your curse is burdensome enough without trying to shoulder your husband’s as well.  God did not design you to be able to handle the stress of both.  So leave the breadwinning and all the worrying associated with it to your husband.)
And again, just as the childbearing was emblematic of the whole of the woman’s role, I think the same is true here.  It is not just farming that is difficult – it is the whole of the man’s role as head of the home.  Every part of masculinity in marriage is touched by the curse.
Loss of partnership
OK, so now her roles are a lot harder and his roles are a lot harder.  What is the result of that?  Why do the masculine and feminine roles exist in the first place?  Why did God create them male and female?  Why did He provide Adam with Eve rather than an animal or another man?  It was because Adam needed a suitable helper for his God-given task.  Remember, that is where the partnership aspect of the ideal came in.  Eve was created as a suitable helper to rescue Adam from the peril of having a task that was beyond his ability to accomplish without Eve.  And in order to be a suitable helper she had to be female.  That is why God created them male and female.
So, if that part of God’s ideal for marriage – the partnership that enables fulfillment of God’s calling – if that is accomplished by the man fulfilling his role as male and the woman fulfilling her role as female, what do you suppose happens when the male role becomes much more difficult for him and the female role becomes much more difficult for her?  It destroys that Genesis 2 partnership.  When they put on fig leaves it ruined the intimacy and oneness.  And when they were cursed with respect to their roles it ruined the partnership.

Curse on the Marriage Relationship - Loss of priority

Now let’s look at the other part of the curse – the curse on the marriage relationship itself.
The woman
Genesis 3:16 …Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

The word translated desire means to desire to control or dominate or conquer.  The only other time that word is used is in the next chapter. 

Genesis 4:7 sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it.

So this desire is the same kind of desire with which sin desires to control and overcome you.  So the first part of the curse on the marriage relationship itself is a tendency for the woman to want to be in control of her husband.
There is something in the heart of the woman that thinks, “If this family were just run my way everything would be a whole lot better.”  So you start seeing the solution to everything as your husband doing the things you think he should do.  No matter what the problem is, the solution is always your husband doing what you think he should do to fix it.  And women have a lot of methods for gaining control over their husbands.  The way to dominate someone is to use your power to coerce them into doing what you want.  The fact that you live with your husband gives you a huge amount of power, because you have the power to make every waking moment of your husband’s life miserable.  And all women are tempted to use that power to manipulate their husbands.
There are many women who hide behind a façade of submission who are as rebellious as they come.  They think they are submissive because they never do the opposite of what their husband decides.  But that is because they manipulate their husbands into deciding what they want.  The husband knows that if he does anything but what she wants in this particular decision there is going to be a steep price to pay.  She is going to be in a bad mood, or she will cry or mope around the house or be irritable or whatever.  Either that or she just badgers and badgers and badgers until he finally says, “Fine – I don’t care what the wise course is, I’m just going to do what she wants to get her off my back.”  So she has all these ways of pressuring him into doing what she thinks is best, and then she convinces herself that she is submissive because she follows along when he does what she pressured him to do.
The man
That is the effect of the curse on the woman’s side.  Now let’s take a look at the effect of the curse on the man’s side.

Genesis 3:16 …Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

That word translated rule is not a very nice term either.  It is not talking about male leadership or headship.  It is a word that refers to harsh, despotic, heavy-handed, suppressing, dominating selfish subjugation.
There is an old country song that says, “A woman’s place in this ol’ world is under some man’s thumb.”  And that is really about how it has been for most women throughout history.  The woman tries to dominate her husband through the powers that she has, but very often the bottom line is the husband has the brute strength advantage, and so he can force his way.  And so the history of mankind has been a history of horrible treatment of women.
When Jesus came along He radically overturned the cultural norms with regard to women, and showed women equal honor as men.  And that ideal was taught by Paul and the other Apostles so that now, wherever Christianity has had a significant influence, women are treated with some degree of respect.  In our country women have the same legal rights as men, and are considered persons, not mere property.  But that is not the case in most places where Christianity has not had a big influence.  I could tell you stories about how women are treated in Muslim countries that would absolutely turn your stomach.  The Koran teaches that men should beat their wives.  And it is not just Islam.  Hinduism gave us bride burning, which still happens to thousands of women every year.  Many elderly women in China are crippled because of foot binding (not to mention the forced abortions).
The norm throughout human history has been for women to be forced into subservience to men, and to be used and then cast aside.  And even though our culture has mitigated a lot of that, still the curse has its effect.  Even in many Christian homes there is shameful abuse of women.  Many Christian men think that headship means despotism.  They think it means, “I get to have what I want, and when there is a disagreement I get to have my way.”  And so you get husbands who order their wife around the house like some kind of domestic slave.  “Get me something to eat, get me a drink, do this, do that – while I sit here on the couch and watch TV.”  Men like that have no concept of the difference between submission and subservience.  Such a man has no concept of servant leadership.  Jesus taught that all things being equal, when some kind of serving needs to be done it is the role of the one in authority to do it more than anyone else.  If you are the highest authority then you are the greatest servant.  But in the world it is the other way around – those in authority use their authority to get others to serve them.  So in the world the ones under authority open doors and make coffee for the one in authority.  But in the kingdom of God the one in authority washes the feet of those under him.
Priority of self
So that is the effect of the curse on the marriage relationship.  Both the man and the woman try to dominate and control the other for their own ends.  In a word – selfishness.  I believe the biggest problem not only in all marriages but in all relationships period is selfishness.  And by selfishness I mean being self-focused rather than God-focused and other-focused.  When Adam and Eve started being concerned about protecting themselves, their focus switched from their spouse to themselves.  When you are loving someone your attention is on them.  When you are selfish your attention is on you.
Selfishness destroys all five of the marks of God’s ideal for marriage – companionship, partnership, oneness, intimacy, and priority.  And I think that last one is the key.  The fact that it destroys the ideal of your spouse as your highest earthly priority is what causes it to ruin the other four.

 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother”…

God’s ideal for marriage is for your spouse to be your highest priority.  But when selfishness dominates, self is the highest priority.  And when you place yourself above your spouse as the main priority, that destroys the whole marriage.  The covenant loyalty of marriage is the foundation of everything.  Remove that, and the whole superstructure collapses. 
Selfishness ruins companionship, because a self-absorbed person does not make much of a companion.  It ruins partnership because a selfish person is not concerned with helping you.  It ruins oneness and unity because the more you try to dominate and control the other person the more that person has to protect himself or herself from you.  It ruins intimacy because you cannot be naked and unashamed with a selfish person.  That person’s #1 priority is their own interests, not yours.  And so if protecting their interests and desires means hurting you, then they will not hesitate to hurt you.
And on top of all that, the trust is sapped out of the marriage, because you can no longer count on your spouse to be committed to you.  He will be committed to you as long as it seems to serve his interests, but when it doesn’t he will bail.  And so that confidence that nothing can destroy this relationship is gone.  And when that confidence is gone it short-circuits everything else in the marriage.  Instead of loving him you find yourself just trying to manipulate him into staying committed to you.  And doing that makes you harder to love, which makes the whole situation even more tenuous. 
By far the hardest thing in marriage counseling is reversing selfishness.  The wife comes in caring about nothing but her husband changing.  And the husband cares about nothing but his wife changing.  How she can be a better wife is the farthest thing from her mind.  And how he can be a better husband is the farthest thing from his mind.  And you tell him the things he needs to do and it goes in one ear and out the other, but she is sitting there taking detailed notes.  Then you tell her what she needs to do and her eyes glaze over and he sits in rapt attention.  That is just pure selfishness, and it is next to impossible to overturn.

Selfishness is miserable
And when you fall into this - when your focus switches to yourself – it is an absolute guaranteed ticket to a miserable life.  Do you know any joyful, selfish people?  There is no such animal.  Anyone here ever met a selfish person who has a terrific, fulfilling, delightful marriage?  It does not happen.  Most of the time the most miserable, unhappy people around are the ones that are the most selfish.
A selfish person says, “I need my spouse to love me properly so I can be happy.  I need my spouse to stop doing things that hurt me, and start doing things I want, or I can’t be happy.”  And those kinds of people do the same thing in all their relationships.   If you are one of those people, you are probably forever getting upset by your friends because they are always failing to love you properly.  People like this often cannot get settled in a church because no one there loves them properly.  When your focus is on how well people are loving you, you will be guaranteed to always be miserable. 

Joy comes from love
Joy comes when you focus on how well you are loving God and others.  It is a wonderful experience to love God by loving people.  In Jn.15:11 Jesus really wanted us to be happy, so He told us the secret to joy.

John 15:11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 

Told us what?

10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.

What is Your command, Jesus?

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 

You do not get happiness in life by being loved by people.  You get happiness in life by loving people in the way Christ commanded.  Your marriage will not improve, and your happiness will not increase if your spouse changes and starts doing all the things you wish he or she would do.  That is not what will make you happy.  What Jesus said will make you happy is if you love your spouse.
But the world and your own flesh tell you the opposite.  They tell you that your energy is best spent trying to get your spouse to love you better.  And the tragic thing is most Christian books on marriage just feed right into that.  Almost every Christian book on marriage I have ever read teaches some variation on this theme: “The best way to get your spouse to give you what you want is to give them what they want.”  You hear this all the time: “Men, show tenderness to your wife and she will give you the respect you crave.”  Or “Women, give your husband the honor and respect he wants and he will show you the tenderness and affection you desire.”  That is not love.  It is a selfish, self-focused manipulation technique.  You do not show your wife affection in order to manipulate her into giving you what you want.  That is not love.  Love is when you show your wife affection because that affection expresses something inside you that you cannot wait to express.
Increased need, decreased help
If Adam needed Eve back in Genesis 2, if he was in need of help then, how much more is he in need now that he has been cursed?  And the same is true for Eve.  Their needs for each other are far greater now after the curse than they were before, yet instead of ramping up their help, they both become selfish and try to dominate and control each other.  That is what happened to marriage.  Marriage is hard because of the effects of the curse.

Why the curse?

So why did God curse marriage?  We talk about living in a sin-cursed world, but the reality of Genesis 3 is that the curse came not from sin but from God.  It was God who cursed His creation.  Why did He do that?  Especially marriage.  Doesn’t He want us to have good marriages?  Doesn’t God desire that we have ideal companionship and partnership and oneness and intimacy and that we make our spouse our highest priority?  If He wants all that, why make it hard for us by cursing marriage?
The curse was the consequence of sin.  Think for a moment about why Adam and Eve’s marriage in Genesis 2 was so good.  What was the cause of all that wonderful intimacy and oneness and companionship and partnership and priority?  Were Adam and Eve the source of all that goodness?  No.  It all came from God.  It was grace from God that produced all that.  And there is a very important principle about grace in Jonah 2:8 - Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.  When you prefer some earthly treasure above God you forfeit grace that you otherwise could have had.  You absolutely cannot have it both ways.  Coming to God is like getting married.  A woman who wants to get married has to be willing to give up all her other boyfriends.  And a person who wants intimacy with God cannot be committing adultery with this world.  You cannot have both.  And so when mankind decided to rebel against God we forfeited the grace of Genesis 2.
So the curse was necessitated by sin.  It would have been an evil thing for God to continue to dispense the same grace even while man was rebelling in sin.  It would have been wrong for God to do that, and God never does anything wrong.  If your spouse comes to you and asks for money to pay for a hotel for the purpose of adultery, it would be wrong for you to supply that money.  And it would be wrong for God to supply us with grace as a reward for rebelling against Him.  It would be unloving for God to do that because it would just encourage us to do the very thing that is most harmful to us.
And so when we rebel God withdraws His grace.  And that is what happened in the curse.  The wonderful news of the gospel, however, is that the effects of the curse can be reversed in Christ.  Someday they will be abolished altogether.  And even now it is possible to reverse the effects of the curse in very significant measure.  Adam and Eve sinned and forfeited the grace of Genesis 2.
How is that done?  Well, if the curse was the removal of grace, then that is reversed when we pursue the means of grace.  By “means of grace” I mean ways of getting grace.  God has shown us various ways that we can gain access to grace and if we follow those we can get that grace that was forfeited in the curse.
And what are those means of grace?  What are the ways of getting back what was lost in the fall?  All of Scripture’s teaching about marriage is nothing more than descriptions of how to get that grace back.

Conclusion: Worship the God of the Curse

When you understand that all that is bad about this cursed world is bad because of the withdrawal of grace from God, it enables you to worship the God of the curse, because it shows that He is the only source of good.  If it is true that He is the only source of good, that means there is no other source.  It is not a situation where God can remove His blessing, but you can run to some other shelter or get joy from some other source.  If God withholds it, you don’t get it.  So both blessing and cursing should cause us to stand in awe of Him.  Disaster is the result of God actively withdrawing His grace.  And that is a wonderful truth, because it shows how good God’s grace is.  Did it ever occur to you that the only ultimately bad thing that could ever happen to you would be for God to withdraw His grace and favor from you?  No matter what else happens to you, if you have God’s grace and favor, then you have joy and peace and your highest good.  And if you have joy and peace and your highest good, what does it matter what else is happening?  So the only bad thing that could happen would be to lose God’s grace.  And if the only bad thing that is possible is the loss of God’s grace, what does that say about what an incredibly valuable thing God’s grace is?  And what does that say about what a wonderful God must be the source of such grace?
So the fact that God is the only determiner of whether we receive blessing or cursing should cause us to stand in fear and awe of Him, and it should cause us to be amazed at how priceless is His favor and grace.

Ecclesiastes 7:13-14 Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked? 14 When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other. 

Benediction - 2 Cor 9:8-10  And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. 9 As it is written: "He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever."   10 Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

Devotionals
Day 1: The importance of Genesis 3
Why do marriages have so many problems?  You pick your absolute favorite person in the entire world and marry that person, and you cannot get along.  Why is that?  And why are there so many divorces?  And why is divorce so incredibly painful?
The answer is in Genesis 3.  Marriage is affected by both the fall and the curse.  In Genesis 2 God had created the ideal marriage.  Adam was a very, very happily married man.  But when they sinned there were some drastic effects on not only their marriage but marriage in the human race in general.
If we are going to fix the problems that come up in marriage, then, we need to do the same thing we would do if we were fixing anything else.  There are an army of marriage counselors out there who are like auto mechanics who are able to figure out what is wrong, but instead of trying to restore it back to the manufacture’s original specs, they come up with their own creative ideas.  The solution to marital problems is not to say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, and observe all the differences between men and women, and then come up with ideas of how to get along.  The solution is to follow what the Manual says about how to restore your marriage to factory specs. 
Think of what an important chapter Genesis 3 is.  If we take Genesis 3 out of the Bible, or if we interpret it in some figurative way so that there really was no actual serpent, no actual Adam and Eve, it makes God the source of evil.

Genesis 4-6
•	Estrangement with God
•	Evil
•	Suffering
•	Disease
•	Murder
•	Polygamy
•	Universal Death

Genesis 1-2
•	Paradise
•	Life
•	Perfect Creation
•	“It is very good”
•	Ideal Marriage

Genesis 3 tells us why there is evil and suffering and decay and disease and death.  Where did all that come from?  It did not come from God.  When God created everything it was very good – nothing was wrong with it.  But then, in Genesis 3, man sinned, and with sin came evil and suffering and decay and disease and death.
All of that is a result of man’s sin.  God’s response could have been to just let man die and be done with it, but instead He set a plan of redemption in place that would reverse man’s plunge into rebellion and death.  This plan cost Him His own Son.

I believe You, dear Lord – every last word You gave regarding the creation in Genesis 1-3.  It is foolishness to this world, but I am resolved to stand steadfastly on Your Word regardless of what the world thinks.  Your words are trustworthy and life-giving.  Keep Your servant from departing from them.
This world insists there was suffering, disease, and death right from the very beginning.  But You have said that at the beginning man and woman lived in a sinless, deathless paradise.  Oh, how beautiful must have been Your creation before the fall!  It is so breathtaking even now, what must it have been like then?  The best of love relationships now is wonderful, what must it have been like in Genesis 2 before sin and the curse?  I know and believe, dear God, that You are the source of all good, and the evil does not exist and could not exist apart from the willful sin of created beings.  You are not the author of evil.  But I am.  This rebellious heart generates evil like a factory every day.  What folly to imagine that such a factory could produce any good on its own.  Teach me to look to You alone, dear Father, for good.

Day 2: Fig leaves - Loss of intimacy & unity 

The account of the ideal in Genesis 2 ended with the words, “The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame.”  Now watch the very first thing that happens when they sin.

6  When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 

So much for naked and unashamed.  Now they are ashamed, and they have to cover themselves up.  Naked and unashamed was a description of intimacy.  They were completely comfortable with each other, and totally safe.  There was no fear of the spouse having any negative judgment, which enabled them to be completely open with each other.  And the physical is symbolic of the whole relationship.  They had no fear of the other one criticizing or looking down on them or making them feel foolish or being disrespectful or unkind.  There was total vulnerability because there was absolutely zero threat of being hurt in any way. 
But after they sinned they wanted to cover themselves up, because now there was some threat, and so they had to watch out to guard themselves from being hurt.  They had to take up a defensive posture and that is a posture that destroys intimacy.  You cannot be in a loving posture and a defensive posture at the same time.  The more you focus on guarding yourself the less your focus is on loving your spouse.  So when they started guarding themselves they backed way off on loving each other.
Danger is always the killer of intimacy, because it destroys trust.  If expressing my feelings to you is dangerous – if it might result in me being mocked or ridiculed or gossiped about –then I will be slow to tell you my feelings.  If telling you my opinions might result in me getting shot down, if getting into a conversation with you about the deep desires of my heart puts me at risk of being looked down upon by you, I am naturally going to be reluctant to do that.  Instead I will just give you a façade, which means you are not even interacting with the real me.  The more danger there is, and the less I can trust you, the more our relationship will have to stay at the surface level.
So the intimacy and oneness between Adam and Eve were broken and that is not surprising given what we read in the following verses.

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" 10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." 

Their sin destroyed their intimacy with God.  For the first time in their existence they are now hiding from God and attempting to avoid His presence.  They are ashamed before Him, and instead of seeking forgiveness or restoration they just want to avoid Him.  So it comes as no surprise at all that their marriage is messed up.
The only way to have Genesis 2 marriage is by grace.  But if you are not close to God you forfeit that grace, and you won’t be able to be close to your spouse.  Ninety-nine percent of solving the problems in our marriages is simply walking more closely with the Lord.  The more you and your spouse approach closer to God the closer you will come to each other.  The more intimacy you have with God the more anger and unforgiveness and selfishness will be pushed out of your heart, and you will be full of kindness and gentleness and patience and joy and love, and when your irritability and selfishness are replaced by kindness and joy and love – all the problems in your marriage will improve. 
When we sin against God everything in us seems to want to run and hide from Him.  We do not want to face Him.  We just want to be distracted from our guilt.  Adam fled from God because he was afraid, and it was reasonable for him to be afraid.  When he did face the Lord, God demanded an account and then cursed Adam.  There was plenty for him to be afraid of, but still it was irrational for him to flee from God, because outside of God’s presence there is far more to be afraid of.  Avoiding God after you sin is like being in a ship in the middle of the ocean in a storm and diving overboard in order to avoid the storm.  Yes, the storm on board is unpleasant, but it is the only true safety from the storm. 

Day 3: Curse on Roles - loss of partnership

Genesis 3:16-19 To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." 

17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 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."

God takes the woman’s role of childbearing and increases the difficulty of it.  And it would not be a stretch to assume that this curse applies to the woman’s roles in general, which is why not only is childbirth hard, but child rearing is hard.
And the same is true for man’s role.  Going to work every day, and bearing the responsibility of providing for the family - that constant, relentless responsibility is a very heavy load.  So are the other aspects of the man’s role, as every part of masculinity in marriage is touched by the curse.
This results in a loss of partnership in the marriage.  The purpose of the male and female roles was to supply the “suitable helper” partnership that would enable the fulfillment of God’s calling for that couple.  That is why God created them male and female. 
So what is the solution to the effects of the curse on your male or female roles?  What should a woman do if homemaking and child rearing are an intolerable burden to her?  How does the Lord want a Christian man to deal with a job that is far more of a burden than a joy?  The solution to being burdened is spelled out clearly in Matthew 11:28-30… 

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Doing what you do for Christ turns what would otherwise be miserable into a grand and holy privilege.  It also gives you access to power, enablement, and motivation from the Holy Spirit.  It lifts the mundane into the heavenlies, and turns the trivial into the eternal. 
If you are frazzled by your kids, or bored out of your mind by your job, or if any aspect of what God has you doing right now is burdensome to you, the solution is to come to Christ and put on His yoke.  It is the wearing of that yoke, not vacations or lifestyle changes that gives rest to your soul.  Since His easy yoke always brings rest to the soul, then if you are not finding rest it means you are not wearing His yoke and coming to Him. 
Throughout the day today ask yourself, Am I coming to Christ and wearing His yoke resulting in rest for my soul? Or am I burdened? 

Day 4: Curse on Marriage Relationship – Loss of Priority

Genesis 3:16 …Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

The word translated desire means to desire to control or dominate or conquer (Genesis 4:7).  So the first part of the curse on the marriage relationship itself is a tendency for the woman to want to be in control of her husband.  There is something in the heart of the woman that thinks, “If this family were just run my way everything would be a whole lot better.”  So you start seeing the solution to everything as your husband doing the things you think he should do.  No matter what the problem is, the solution is always your husband doing what you think he should do to fix it.
And women have a lot of methods for gaining control over their husbands.  The fact that you live with your husband gives you a huge amount of power, because you have the power to make every waking moment of your husband’s life miserable.  And all women are tempted to use that power to manipulate their husbands.  There are many women who hide behind a façade of submission who are as rebellious as they come.  They think they are submissive because they never do the opposite of what their husband decides.  But that is because they manipulate their husbands into deciding what they want.  The husband knows that if he does anything but what she wants in this particular decision there is going to be a steep price to pay.  She is going to be in a bad mood, or she will cry or mope around the house or be irritable or whatever.  Either that or she just badgers and badgers and badgers until he finally says, “Fine – I don’t care what the wise course is, I’m just going to do what she wants to get her off my back.”  So she has all these ways of pressuring him into doing what she thinks is best, and then she convinces herself that she is submissive because she follows along when he does what she pressured him to do.

Genesis 3:16 …Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.

That word translated rule refers to harsh, despotic, heavy-handed, suppressing, dominating selfish subjugation. There is an old country song that says, “A woman’s place in this ol’ world is under some man’s thumb.”  And that is really about how it has been for most women throughout history.  The woman tries to dominate her husband through the powers that she has, but very often the bottom line is the husband has the brute strength advantage, and so he can force his way.  And so the history of mankind has been a history of horrible treatment of women.  The norm throughout human history has been for women to be forced into subservience to men, and to be used and then cast aside.
And even though our culture has mitigated a lot of that, still the curse has its effect.  Even in many Christian homes there is shameful abuse of women.  Many Christian men think that headship means despotism.  They think it means, “I get to have what I want, and when there is a disagreement I get to have my way.”  And so you get husbands who order their wife around the house like some kind of domestic slave.
Priority of self
The effect of the curse on the marriage relationship is that both the man and the woman try to dominate and control the other for their own ends.  In a word – selfishness.  I believe the biggest problem not only in all marriages but in all relationships period is selfishness.  And by selfishness I mean being self-focused rather than God-focused and other-focused.  When Adam and Eve started being concerned about protecting themselves, their focus switched from their spouse to themselves.  When you are loving someone your attention is on them.  When you are selfish your attention is on you.
Selfishness destroys the ideal of your spouse as your highest earthly priority (with self as the new highest priority), which in turn causes it to ruin the other four.  When you place yourself above your spouse as the main priority, that destroys the whole marriage.  The covenant loyalty of marriage is the foundation of everything.  Remove that, and the whole superstructure collapses. 
Selfishness ruins companionship, because a self-absorbed person does not make much of a companion.  It ruins partnership because a selfish person is not concerned with helping you. It ruins oneness and unity because the more you try to dominate and control the other person the more that person has to protect himself or herself from you.  It ruins intimacy because you cannot be naked and unashamed with a selfish person. That person’s #1 priority is their own interests, not yours. And if protecting their interests and desires means hurting you, then they will not hesitate to hurt you.
Furthermore, the trust is sapped out of the marriage, because you can no longer count on your spouse to be committed to you.  He will be committed to you as long as it seems to serve his interests, but when it doesn’t he will bail.  And so that confidence that nothing can destroy this relationship is gone, and when that confidence is gone it short-circuits everything else in the marriage.  Instead of loving him you find yourself just trying to manipulate him into staying committed to you.  And doing that makes you harder to love, which makes the whole situation even more tenuous. 

Selfishness is miserable
Selfishness lies to you.  The main motive of selfishness is pleasure, and yet it is actually a guaranteed ticket to a miserable life.  Do you know any joyful, selfish people?  There is no such animal.  Have you ever met a selfish person who has a terrific, fulfilling, delightful marriage?  It does not happen.  Most of the time the most miserable, unhappy people around are the ones that are the most selfish.
A selfish person says, “I need my spouse to love me properly so I can be happy.  I need my spouse to stop doing things that hurt me, and start doing things I want, or I can’t be happy.”  And those kinds of people do the same thing in all their relationships.  If you are one of those people you are probably forever getting upset by your friends because they are always failing to love you properly.  People like this often cannot get settled in a church because no one there loves them properly.  When your focus is on how well people are loving you, you will be guaranteed to always be miserable. 

Joy comes from love
Joy comes when you focus on how well you are loving God and others.  It is a wonderful experience to love God by loving people.  In Jn.15:11 Jesus really wanted us to be happy, so He told us the secret to joy.

John 15:11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 

Told us what?

10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.

What is Your command, Jesus?

12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 

You do not get happiness in life by being loved by people.  You get happiness in life by loving people in the way Christ commanded.  Your marriage will not improve, and your happiness will not increase if your spouse changes and starts doing all the things you wish he or she would do.  That is not what will make you happy.  What Jesus said will make you happy is if you love your spouse.

Day 5: The God of the curse

Why did God curse marriage?  Doesn’t He want us to have good marriages?  Doesn’t God desire that we have ideal companionship and partnership and oneness and intimacy and that we make our spouse our highest priority?  If He wants all that, why make it hard for us by cursing marriage?
The curse was the consequence of sin.  Think for a moment about why Adam and Eve’s marriage in Genesis 2 was so good.  What was the cause of all that wonderful intimacy and oneness and companionship and partnership and priority?  Were Adam and Eve the source of all that goodness?  No.  It all came from God.  It was grace from God that produced all that. 
There is a very important principle about grace in Jonah 2:8 Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.  When you prefer some earthly treasure above God you forfeit grace that you otherwise could have had.  You absolutely cannot have it both ways.  Coming to God is like getting married.  A woman who wants to get married has to be willing to give up all her other boyfriends.  And a person who wants intimacy with God cannot be committing adultery with this world.  You cannot have both. And so when mankind decided to rebel against God we forfeited the grace of Genesis 2.
So the curse was necessitated by sin.  It would have been an evil thing for God to continue to dispense the same grace even while man was rebelling in sin.  It would have been wrong for God to do that, and God never does anything wrong.  If your spouse comes to you and asks for money to pay for a hotel for the purpose of adultery, it would be wrong for you to supply that money.  And it would be wrong for God to supply us with grace as a reward for rebelling against Him.  It would be unloving for God to do that because it would just encourage us to do the very thing that is most harmful to us.
And so when we rebel God withdraws His grace.  And that is what happened in the curse.  The wonderful news of the gospel, however, is that the effects of the curse can be reversed in Christ.  Someday they will be abolished altogether, and even now it is possible to reverse the effects of the curse in very significant measure.  Adam and Eve sinned and forfeited the grace of Genesis 2.
When you understand that all that is bad about this cursed world is bad because of the withdrawal of grace from God, it enables you to worship the God of the curse, because it shows that He is the only source of good.  If it is true that He is the only source of good, that means there is no other source.  It is not a situation where God can remove His blessing, but you can run to some other shelter or get joy from some other source.  If God withholds it, you do not get it.  So both blessing and cursing should cause us to stand in awe of Him.
Disaster is the result of God actively withdrawing His grace.  And that is a wonderful truth, because it shows how good God’s grace is.  Did it ever occur to you that the only ultimately bad thing that could ever happen to you would be for God to withdraw His grace and favor from you?  No matter what else happens to you, if you have God’s grace and favor, then you have joy and peace and your highest good.  And if you have joy and peace and your highest good, what does it matter what else is happening?  So the only bad thing that could happen would be to lose God’s grace.  And if the only bad thing that is possible is the loss of God’s grace, what does that say about what an incredibly valuable thing God’s grace is?  And what does that say about what a wonderful God must be the source of such grace?  So the fact that God is the only determiner of whether we receive blessing or cursing should cause us to stand in fear and awe of Him, and it should cause us to be amazed at how priceless is His favor and grace.

Ecclesiastes 7:13-14 Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked? 14 When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.