Sin's Extensive Effects

But the problems caused by Adam and the woman's sin would affect God's creation in many negative ways for generations to come, including burdensome toil and miserable pain.

When Adam and his wife took that fateful bite, they could not have imagined the trouble they were bringing on themselves and all of creation. They were about to find out as God pronounced His judgment. But only over the years to come, as the sentence played out, would they truly experience the agony and grief caused by that choice.

After dealing with the serpent, God turned to the woman.

“Trouble
Will multiply
In your pregnancies
From conception to birth:
Discomfort, twinges of pain, aching spasms, deep pangs of distress.”

That was enough: to have to suffer during an act as natural, wondrous, and glorious as bringing a baby—a product of the love of man and woman—into being. But there was more. God continued.

“You will long and desire and crave to rule Your husband, but he will rule over you.”

There it was: the beginning of conflict in marriage. That was God’s punishment for disobedience meted out on the woman. Then He turned to Adam.

“Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree I told you not to eat from,

It’s your fault that the ground is cursed,
Getting food from it will make you thirst!
Thorns and thistles will come up with ease.
But produce food? Get on your knees
And work and sweat—yes, all day long!
Till, sow, harvest, coax plants along,
But still one day you will go down
Into the ground under a mound
Of dirt. That’s where you started out.
And there you’ll end, without a doubt.”

Even though God did not curse the man and the woman as He did the snake, He cursed the ground and all creation with it. Producing food from the earth was going to be difficult now. When God created the universe and all that was in it, it was “beneficial.” Man’s disobedience brought about the dissolution of the earth’s perfectly balanced ecosystem. Now all of creation has to go through a frustrating time—almost like the birth pangs of the woman—waiting for some kind of redemption, some kind of hope. And that hope would only come through the Promised One.