“[14] The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
[15] I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
[16] To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”
[17] And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
[18] thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
[19] 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.”
[20] The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. [21] And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
[22] Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” [23] therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. [24] He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
PAINFUL CHILDBEARING AND BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS
Let’s start by looking at the words God spoke to Eve. To the woman, he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
In a surprising and almost tender way, I want us to notice the gracious nature of God here. Even as He announces the consequences of sin, He does so with grace. God doesn’t strip Eve of His good gifts; instead, He allows her to continue enjoying them, though now mingled with pain and conflict. She will still experience the blessing of bearing children, but that joy will come with pain. She will still experience a relationship and partnership with her husband, but it will now be marked by tension and struggle. Even in judgment, God’s grace is present. His justice and mercy work hand in hand.
The first portion of this verse seems to be pretty straightforward and clear. No epidural can truly mask the reality of this verse. Although there is no joy like holding your newborn baby, sorrow, anguish, and pain are present when a woman gives birth to her child.
Now, if the wording is clear in the first half of this verse, it’s relatively unclear in the second half. The second part of this verse can be somewhat confusing. So let’s try to unpack that a little bit!
“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
The Hebrew word translated “desire” appears only three times in the Old Testament: here in Genesis 3:16 (“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”), in Genesis 4:7 (“Sin’s desire is for you, but you must rule over it”), and in Song of Solomon 7:10 (“I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me”).
On one hand, the word can refer to a longing or yearning for something. However, the parallel with Genesis 4:7 provides the clearest clue to its meaning in this context. When we read these two passages together, it seems that “desire” carries the sense of wanting to control or dominate. If that’s the case, then God is saying that Eve will have a desire to control or dominate her husband, while her husband will respond by ruling over her. What was once a loving partnership—where Eve was a complementary helper suited for Adam—has now become a struggle for power and control because of sin. The harmony of mutual service has been replaced by tension: a sinful desire on the wife’s part to usurp her husband’s leadership, and a sinful tendency on the husband’s part to rule harshly over his wife.
Now, just to be clear, though, this does not mean that male headship was a result of the Fall. As we saw in chapter 2, God established Adam’s leadership and Eve’s complementary role in creation before sin entered the world. So, to claim that headship is part of the curse would be like saying that childbearing itself is part of the curse. It’s not the gift that’s the problem, but how sin distorts it. The Fall didn’t create headship; it corrupted the way men and women live it out. Sin fractured the harmony between husband and wife, turning partnership into conflict.
But here’s the beauty of the gospel: through Christ, God has begun to restore the original intent for harmony between men and women. In Ephesians 5, Paul calls wives to submit to their husbands as the church submits to Christ, and he calls husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church. So, where sin inserts an unhealthy desire to control or dominate, the gospel calls women to honor and respect their husbands, encouraging them to lead well. And where sin inserts an unhealthy desire to be domineering and oppressive, the gospel calls men to be servant-hearted leaders who lovingly care for their wives.
DIFFICULT WORK
Then, the LORD directs his focus toward man. He says to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ 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.”
Like the words spoken to Eve, we find God exposing how sin will impact the center of man’s life, his work. As we saw back in Chapter 2, work was good. Before sin entered the picture, Adam was commissioned by God in the garden to tend the garden. So, like childbearing and marriage, work is a good, God-glorifying thing. It is a key component in God’s design for humanity. So, God designed work to be good. But here we see that, because of sin, the ground now works against us. The ground is cursed because of Adam. In pain, we eat from it. There are now thorns and thistles that sprout up among our harvest. By the sweat of our face, we eat bread. All the days of our lives, we work hard as our work works hard against us. We labor with all our strength, yet our work seems to fight back at every turn. As we toil, the very ground toils against us. We struggle to master our work, and our work struggles to master us. Work is good, but work is hard, harder than it was originally intended to be.
But, again, the Bible paints a beautiful picture of how we as Christians ought to approach work— “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward (Col. 3:23).” We are to be hard workers, workers who work for the glory of the Lord, not the glory of man!
The apostle Paul displays this beautifully in 1 Thessalonians 2:9, "For you remember, brothers, our labor and toil: we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God."
Paul's example here ought to be a perfect demonstration of how we ought to work. Paul "labored and toiled, working night and day," meaning he worked hard. Hard work is a good thing that our early church fathers demonstrated well. Paul was well acquainted with sweat. He was familiar with the grind.
But, why? Why did he work hard?
He worked hard for the benefit of others— "that we might not be a burden to any of you." Paul demonstrated to us, by his actions, that Christians ought to work selflessly. Paul didn't see work as a means to serve himself. He saw it as a means to help others.
So, we are called to work hard, and we are called to work selflessly. But, most importantly, he worked hard and selflessly so that he could preach the gospel— "while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God."
The order here is critical for us to see and understand. Paul did not preach the gospel while he worked. He worked while he preached the gospel.
Why is that important? That's important because it teaches us the proper order of priorities. To Paul, advancing the gospel was more important than working productively.
But, here's the paradox of the Christian faith: when your main priority is work, you will be a terrible preacher. But when your primary focus is preaching, you will be a great worker.
Let me explain.
If you preach the gospel while you work, that means work is your main priority, and you will eventually never share the gospel because sharing it will become a threat to your work. But, when the advancement of the gospel is priority 1, you will do everything in your power to make Christ look beautiful! You will honor your boss because you want your boss to see, know, and experience Christ. You will serve and work hard for your coworkers because you love them and want them to see, know, and experience Christ. And because of the cross and by the power of the Holy Spirit, you will put to death the inner sluggard and wicked worker and begin to work honestly so that Christ may be glorified in your work!
We always want our words to align with our actions. So, when we give our lives to preaching the gospel, we give our lives to hard work. We work hard as employees, not for our own gain, but for Jesus to be made beautiful.
PUSH US TO JESUS, THE ALL-SATISFYING SAVIOR
Now, Kent Hughes draws a helpful application here. In his commentary on this passage, he highlights how all of the curses spoken here were intended to push us to Jesus. He says, “The grace in all of this is a sense of dis-ease and dissatisfaction in what ought to be the most rewarding areas of life. Bliss, perfect peace, is no woman’s lot in this world. And as we shall see, the center of the man’s life will also know the same striving. These punishments are God’s graces. Marriage alone will give no woman all she wants. Mothering is fraught with pain from birth onward. To be a mother is to experience a new and ongoing index of pain. Nothing completely satisfies. This is a grace because it will drive the willing soul to seek God. Augustine praised God in retrospect for this uncomfortable grace, saying, “Your goad was thrusting at my heart, giving me no peace until the eye of my soul could discern you without mistake.”
Motherhood, marriage, work. If we look at these things as a means to satisfy our souls, we will soon figure out how they all fall short. None of them can satisfy the deep longing of our souls that only God can fulfill. And that dis-ease and dissatisfaction is a grace from God because it should drive your heart to the one who can truly satisfy!
THE FIRST DEATH, A SHADOW OF THE DEATH OF OUR SAVIOR
Following this, we see further grace from the LORD in that He now provides garments for Adam and his wife, Eve. This is the first death in human history. And the first death in human history was instigated by God for man. The innocent died in the place of the guilty to cover the shame of the guilty. As Adam and Eve sought to cover their shame with fig leaves, God stepped in and provided a better covering.
Church, I hope we catch a glimpse of the gospel here. Hebrews 9:22 says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” In the same way that the animal died to provide a covering for the shame and guilt of Adam and Eve in the garden, Jesus— the lamb of God— died to “take away the sins of the world (Jn. 1:29).” As the prophet Isaiah puts it, “He has clothed us with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness.” The first sacrifice in the garden covered human sin temporarily, but Christ’s sacrifice covers sin completely and eternally.
KICKED OUT OF THE GARDEN
Notice then what God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—“ therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and the flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
There are some interesting observations here.
First, we catch yet another glimpse into the triune nature of God here— “the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.” Like chapter 1, when God created man in his image, “making man in our image, after ourlikeness,” we find yet another glimpse into the triune nature of God.
Second, what really stood out to me is that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of life, even though He never initially told them not to. If you remember, God gave Adam permission and restriction. He said he could eat of any tree, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was only one tree they weren’t to eat from.
So it makes you wonder: why now? Why did God suddenly prevent them from eating from the tree of life when they were once allowed to?
I think what we start to see is that this was actually an act of grace. God wasn’t just punishing them by sending them out of the garden; He was protecting them. If Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of life in their fallen, sinful condition, they would have lived forever separated from God, stuck in a state of sin with no chance of redemption. So even in judgment, we see God’s mercy. He prevented eternal life in a broken state, so that redemption and restoration could still be possible. But the tree of life isn’t gone forever. For us, whose hope resides in Christ, we look ahead to a day when the tree of life will be available for us again.
In Genesis 3, mankind was kicked out of the Garden; in Revelation 22, humanity is welcomed back to the Garden-City, where God dwells among His people, and the curse of sin is no more. In revelation 2:7, Jesus says, “To the one who conquers, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” In Revelation 22:2,14, the tree of life is in the restored creation, freely available again to those redeemed in Christ.
SUMMARY
In Genesis 3:14-24, we witness both the devastating consequences of sin and the astonishing grace of God. Sin brought forth death, pain, and misery. But Christ came to make things right!
After Adam and Eve’s rebellion, God pronounces judgment on the serpent, the woman, and the man. Yet even as He speaks these words of cursing, His mercy shines bright. To the serpent, God declares ultimate defeat: though Satan would wound humanity, a promised offspring would one day crush his head—a foreshadowing of Christ’s victory at the cross. To the woman, God allows her to continue enjoying His good gifts of marriage and motherhood, but now intertwined with pain and conflict. Sin corrupted the harmony between husband and wife, turning partnership into power struggle. But the gospel of Jesus restores what sin distorted. To the man, God curses the ground, transforming joyful work into painful toil. Yet even these pains and frustrations are a gracious reminder that the world cannot satisfy our deepest longings. The pain of labor, the difficulty of relationships, and the dissatisfaction of life under the fall… all of these are meant to drive us back to the God who alone can satisfy.
God’s grace abounds. God clothes Adam and Eve with garments of skin, an act of mercy that foreshadows Christ’s covering for sin. And when God sends them out of Eden, it’s not just punishment; it’s protection. He guards the tree of life so they won’t live forever in their fallen state, preserving the possibility of redemption through Christ.
In the end, Genesis 3 doesn’t leave us without hope. The story that began in the garden finds its completion in the gospel. The serpent’s curse is crushed, sin’s power is broken, and the tree of life reappears in Revelation, freely available to all who belong to Jesus. Even in judgment, God’s grace is hard to miss. Through Christ, the curse is being reversed, and one day, paradise will be restored.