THE EDENIC CURSE AND MODERN PROBLEMS
By D. M. PANTON, B.A.
Christianity
is above all things a religion of fact.
The deepest roots of our modern problems and perplexities, their radical
causes, were all laid bare in the dawn of the world and it is most wonderful to
ponder how the first drama of the human left forever a physical imprint - a
visible transcript of the great facts of the Fall - on a creation that has
borne these stigmata ever since. The sliding
serpent, the travailing availing woman, the ‘sweated’
labourer, the thorny hedge that prohibits like spiked steel - a four-fold curse
has stamped on the physical realm a constant proof and revelation of what
happened in the spiritual realm. And so
deeply intermixed and vitally inter-related is the whole creation that all that
has life - the human, the animal, and the vegetable kingdoms, and indirectly
the angelic above, and the mineral below - once infected, plunged together into
a common ruin.
THE SERPENT
The
first blow of the descending Curse leaves the serpent an utterly changed
creature. There is no other animal which
shows so sharp a contrast between its keen, even cunning intellectual powers -
the Saviour says, "Be wise as serpents"
(Matt. 10: 16) - and its creeping,
writhing degradation and deformity. "Upon thy belly"
- no longer the noble, erect head of the animal creation, even as its
deceiver had once been the shining chief of the angelic hierarchies "shalt thou go";* And the whole animal world plunged
headlong with him - "cursed art thou above all cattle,
and above every beast of the field" (Gen.
3: 14). The serpent spoke, and
lo, the first recorded miracle of Satan: the serpent crawls, and behold the
first recorded miracle of God!** Our
very horror of a snake is an unceasing echo of the Fall. And the sharp, two-edged sword out of the
mouth of Jehovah glances deeper, dividing asunder Satan and serpent, and
serpent and Satan; a single stroke flashes death and life; and the ruined Angel
overhears in the serpent's curse a hidden prophecy with a fatal venom for
himself. "It
[the woman's seed] shall bruise thy head" -
a vital part, with a mortal blow - "and thou shalt
bruise his heel" - the crucified but un-annihilated Christ, rising
triumphant out of murder by Satan.
"Death and life are in the power of the
tongue" (Prov. 18: 21) - how much more in God's! in one short clause is the doom of all the hellish, and the
salvation of all the godly. "Behold then the
goodness and the severity of God" (Rom. 11: 22):
judgment without mercy, and mercy unmasked. So the very crisis of the Fall held, in
germ, Paul's forecast - "The Lord shall bruise
Satan under your feet" - the wider seed, yet all included in
the single Seed shortly (Rom. 16: 20).
[*It
seems probable that the Tree of Knowledge was the Vine, which also now creeps
and crawls, snake-like, and which has been responsible for more than all other
trees put together; for knowledge and wine, both in themselves good, are
abused, among the most dangerous things of the world.
** "God in His wisdom
thought good so to blur and deface the mask whereby the Devil covered his
vileness, as to make the serpent an everlasting hieroglyph of the wicked
spirit's execrable baseness, a glass for all future days wherein to behold his
villainy " (Mede).]
THE WOMAN
The
Lord God now turns to the Woman. The
serpent's gait caught the blight: the woman's stigma falls on her
motherhood. "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow"
- thy travail - "and conception" - in
birth-intensity; "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth
children" - in the bringing forth and the bringing up a mother's griefs are full; - "and thy
desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" - a
subjection now passed into a servitude.
No mere prophecy of woman's subordination, and alas, too often tragic
degradation down the ages, but an investiture of man with perpetual supremacy;
as first of earth's transgressors, the woman now walks first in the train of
earth's mourners. Sorrow grips the very
birth of man; and, in the Woman, the Curse falls on the whole realm of
emotion. The woman's susceptibility to
temptation becomes the woman's susceptibility to sorrow. "She must pay
the penalty of her sin before she can rejoice in her child" (Chrysologus). Man thinks, but woman feels; and it is full
of poignant pathos that far the commonest woman's name in the Bible - they
fairly cluster around the Cross (John 19: 25)
- is Mary; and 'Mary' is supposed to be derived from 'Marah,' bitterness. The ancient classics - with tragic truth,
since the Curse - with one voice affirmed that tears are at the root of things.
Dr. A. B. Davidson, a great Hebrew
scholar, was, a friend has said, "a fervent and
almost feminine soul, who took up the long desolations of the world in the
priesthood of a sympathetic imagination, and whose only refuge was in the Most
High." "Do you ever," he asked an intimate friend,
"without any special reason for grief, fall into
uncontrollable weeping?". Then after a
pause he added:- "just
the other day I was alone; and there came such a sense of the mystery, the
uncertainty, the loneliness, the pathos of life, that I was for a long time
shaken by sobs which I was unable to control." Nevertheless in the travail is the Seed:
"the memorial of the deliverance and of the sin
is one" (Bonar).
THE MAN
But
the full blast of the Curse now falls on the responsible head of the race, the
bread-winner. "And unto Adam he said. In the sweat of thy face"
- ‘in it,’ not ‘by it,’ for all are not manual
labourers; but all shall eat in sweat of soul - "shalt
thou" - for through Adam God is addressing something un-escapable
by every human soul - "eat bread, until thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken":
a life of labour, and a doom of death; through troops of evils to the king of
terrors. All economic problems, all the
fret and turmoil of the labour world, all slaveries, class wars, and fierce
revolutions, are rooted here; all infirmaries, hospitals, lazarettoes,
madhouses; all plagues, monstrosities, abortions, physical hideousness:- the modern world lies bare before the primal Curse. The primitive diet-fruit, since strictly
rationed by a Nature made niggard by the Curse - would, springing out of a
world that was simply an orchard, be a lightening of world-labour almost
inconceivable.* But the internal corruption is worse
than the external scarcity. "Daily feeding, upon an accursed soil, we renew our dying
frames for a while, but the repair is never equal to the exhaustion; and while
the atoms of matter remain intact, they refuse to hold together in that organic
compact, which serves the spirit's use: they part company, and go to do other
work in the machinery of creation, for 'the dust
returns to the earth as it was.’" In Adam, henceforth, is nothing but
death. One whole book of the Bible - Ecclesiastes - is a heart-broken comment on this
single utterance of God. We never
see a corpse but we see the Curse.
How wonderful that in that doom of death lay the only hope of a
[* A physiological change probably passed over man -
as it certainly did, after the Flood, in the shortening of life - permitting or
compelling a herbal, and afterwards a flesh, diet.]
THE EARTH
But
the whole creation is so one that the descent of a part - or the redemption of
a part - is the fall, or redemption, of all; and we never enter a garden, but
lo, in the soil itself, the Curse!
"Cursed is the ground"
- your own original material - "for thy sake";
animals fell for Satan's sake, earth for man’s, man’s tragedy is not due to his
being made of dust, but the dust's tragedy is due to man being made of it.* "Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee":
sin's new home must be a barren world with, as its only spontaneous production,
thorns**: the leper must have a lazaretto. So all earth's noxious products - the thorn,
things hurtful; the thistle, things worthless - all blight, mildew, rottenness;
all noxious and poisonous swamps; all deserts and wildernesses: earth's
desolations spring, not from earth, but from sin. Christ's cursing of the fig tree meant more
than barrenness - it meant blight; and without the pardon of the sin, there can
be no cure of the blight.
[* This forever disproves the ancient and modern
Gnostic's contention that sin springs from matter, and is inherent in it: the
truth is the reverse - evil flows into matter from spirit, not into spirit from
matter.
**
In the unfallen earth, man was to "dress and keep" the garden (Gen. 2: 15), not to produce
it.]
FACTS
So the incalculably colossal mistake the world is making, and largely
the Church also, is the ignoring of these basic facts of life.
Men, doubting, or ignoring, or denying, or mocking Genesis, seek to solve earth's problems without
the remotest reference to the awful words out of the mouth of the Most
High. But the world's problems lie fathoms deeper than the attempted political, social,
economic, spiritual solutions; and the annihilating proof lies in a very simple
fact. No science, no reform, no
legislation, no revolution can re-erect the snake, remove the travail, assuage
the sweat, stop the weed from springing or revive the corpse: so long as these
things are undone, the Curse clings to the globe, and to mankind, like a robe
of Nessus.* Earth's
Problems can alone be attacked, where Christ attacked them, in the undoing of
the Curse. In the
words of Dr. Horatius
Bonar:- "The first Adam's connection with
earth (being made of dust) drew on it all evil when he fell; but the Second
Adam's connection with it - for He also has a body formed out of it - shall
undo the evil, cancel the curse, and perfect earth again."
[*All man-made alleviations of the Curse -
anaesthetics, labour-lightening machinery, chemical manures, etc - only reveal
a Curse too sore and deep for any to remove save Him who laid it. Man may check the flow of tears but he cannot
choke their fountain.]
THE ANTAGONISM
Meanwhile,
all present problems are met by the fact that, embedded in
the Curse itself, lies the first conversion, and all
later conversions, in the history of the world.
"I will put ENMITY between thee
and the woman." Eve had been in open alliance with the
Serpent; she had toyed with his temptations, and been influenced by his
reasonings, and acted on his suggestions: now suddenly, by Divine, sovereign,
electing grace, God sunders the alliance for ever, and makes them enemies, for
all eternity. The Curse is the
cradle of the Church. For in it
God put a deathless hate of sin into our hearts: He ranged us up against Hell
and all its works: He divorced us from the creeping,
crawling, revolting abominations of Satan.
He put an undying struggle into our breasts against the seed of the
Serpent in ourselves: He put us for ever on the side of holiness
and goodness and truth.
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AN IMPUTED CURSE
1. He
who was to remove sin must not himself be liable to it. He who was to be a substitute for the guilty
must himself be innocent. He who was to suffer in the stead of the
disobedient must himself be obedient in all things.
2. He
who was to be the substitute for all must have the common nature of all. He must not take the person of one individual
man (such as Abraham, Moses, Elias), but he must take the nature of all, and
sum up all mankind in himself.
3. He
who was to do more than counterbalance the weight of the sins of all must have
infinite merits of his own, in order that the scale of Divine justice may
preponderate in their favour. And
nothing that is not divine is infinite.
In order, therefore, that he may be able to suffer for sin, he must be
human; and in order that he may be able to take away the sins, and to satisfy
God's justice for them, he must be Divine.
4. In order
that he may remove the curse pronounced in the law of God for disobedience, he
must undergo that punishment which is specially declared in the Law to be the
curse of God.
5. That
punishment is hanging on a tree. That is
specially called in the Law the curse of God. Deut.21:
23.
By
undergoing this curse for us, Christ, He who is God from everlasting, and who
became Emmanuel, God with us, God in our flesh,
uniting together the two natures - the Divine and the Human - in His One
Person, Christ Jesus, redeemed us from
the curse of the Law. Thus,
having accepted the curse. He liberated us from it.
-
BISHOP WORDSWORTH.
Sin’s Venom
A keeper in the Zoological Gardens in 1852 – a man named Gurling
–drank [alcohol] somewhat freely, returned later to the Sanke
House, took a Morocco venom-snake, and twisted it round his neck. The assistant keeper, horrified, cried, - “For
God’s sake, put it back!” But the man
only replied, - “I am inspired!” Then he
took out a cobra; warmed it in his bosom; and then held it for an instant
opposite his eyes. Like lightning the
serpent struck between the eyes. The
blood streamed. When help arrived, Gurling was seated on a chair. He said:- “I am a
dead man.” First his speech failed; then
his sight; then his hearing: and in an hour he was a corpse. Behold the sinner! “He that believeth not” – he who averts his
eyes from the Serpent of Brass – “is CONDEMNED ALREADY” (John 3: 18) – he is,
as he walks, death-doomed.
The Antidote
Some time ago a man from south of
-( The Sunday School Times,
CHRISTIANS ALSO NEED TO BEWARE
OF THE SERPENT’S FASCINATION
“Take heed,” our
Saviour warns us (Mark 4: 24),
“what ye hear.” A gentleman in
Take warning. Beware
of fascination; it is one of the most powerful methods to ensnare the
unwary child of God. “Whoever neglects
the Second Coming,” says D. L. Moody, “has
only a mutilated Gospel, for the Bible teaches us not only the death and
sufferings of Christ, but also His
return to reign in honour and glory. His Second Coming is mentioned and referred
to over three hundred times, yet I was
in the church fifteen or sixteen years before I ever heard a sermon on it.” Why?
Because, “the god of this world [Satan] hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving,
that the light of the gospel [good news] of the GLORY
of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them”
(1 Cor. 4: 4,
R.V.).
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