Two Gardens and Sufferingনমুনা

Death followed close on the heels of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God. He had commanded them not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Gen. 2:17). They did not die right away, but the process of death began. Adam lived for 930 years—but he died. And their immediate suffering took on a variety of forms. Eve would endure pain when giving birth; Adam would have to toil to produce food after God cursed the ground; and men and women would work against each other rather than with each other. The hardest consequence was that they lost the face-to-face fellowship with God when they were put out of the perfect garden that He had prepared for them.

That’s a lot of suffering. The very first suffering known to mankind was because of sin. The first suffering came from knowing that they were broken. And from that brokenness—that all of us are born into—all manner of sin and suffering has come forth. I want to rush to say that a whole lot of the suffering that we will talk about here has nothing to do with our own sin, but at the beginning, that’s what got it all started. They disobeyed God’s command, sin came into the world, and suffering was the consequence. All of sin is represented by “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” And I think we can pretty much say that when we disobey God’s command, we may suffer as a consequence.

The suffering that began in the Garden of Eden has been multiplied over and over again throughout the generations. God told Adam and Eve about how they would suffer because of their disobedience. There had to be consequences for sin. But He also spoke about how He intended to fix things. “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” (Gen. 3:15).