Picking up from yesterday’s post, something else I learned from Jordan Cooper’s presentation on the Two Kingdoms and Creation. He pointed out that just as God established human culture by appointing the vocations of marriage, parenthood, and work in Paradise, the curses after the Fall are directed specifically to vocation: conflict within marriage; pain in parenthood; frustration with work.
Consider the texts: Eve is told that “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16b). Christians today argue about whether the husband’s authority over his wife was part of the created order or a consequence of sin. I would say that authority as such does not presuppose sin, since God exercised authority over the first couple before the Fall. At any event, the curse here seems to be the discord, the power struggles, the “contrary” desires that can be so devastating to marriages and so contrary to God’s design, that the husband and wife constitute “one flesh.” And this is still a curse on the marriage vocations to this day.
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16a). The woman has pain in childbirth. But I think this goes beyond that. The pain is “multiplied.” Parenting itself can be painful, as both Eve and Adam learned with their two sons, Cain and Abel. And today, parenting can still break our hearts.
Adam is told this:
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return. (Genesis 3:17-19)
Here is the pain of hard work. Also the frustration of hard work, when after all the effort, all you get are thorns and thistles. The “ground” is itself cursed. Not just our work, but what we work on, so that reality, on some level, resists our will. Our economic callings require working “by the sweat of your face.” And this is true, says Luther in his Genesis commentary, whether we are talking about physical labor, mental labor, or the cure of souls. And so it is today in our own vocations.
Finally, of course, is the curse of death, which afflicts and limits all of our vocations.
These curses do not displace the joys and satisfactions of our various vocations. But they represent trials and tribulations that will come in vocation, so that we should not be surprised when they come. What we must do, though, is to bring the Gospel to them.
Thus we see Eve’s vocation as a mother, cursed though it may be, becoming the means of Christ’s coming and our redemption from the curse of sin:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring[e] and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15)
