Genesis 3 Consider: (1) some of the consequences, and (2) some of the corroborative proofs of the fall. I. Beside and behind the outward consequences, there were inward results far more terrible. A disease had appeared on earth of the most frightful and inveterate kind. This disease was (1) a moral... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:1 I. Satan's temptations begin by laying a doubt at the root. He questions; he unsettles. He does not assert error; he does not contradict truth; but he confounds both. He makes his first entries, not by violent attack, but by secret sapping; he endeavours to confuse and cloud the mind wh... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:4 I. There are many things against which God has uttered His voice in every man's heart; in which, even independently of written revelation, He has not left Himself without witness. He who lives in concealed or open sin knows full well that God hath said he shall surely die. But in the mo... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:8 I. That which strikes us first of all is, that Adam represents the average sinner. A man may do worse than Adam. Many men have done and do worse than hide themselves from God after outraging Him by sin. Adam's conduct proves that the sense of God's presence, awfulness, greatness, was st... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:8 As the account of Eve's temptation and fall truly represents the course of corruption and sin, so the behaviour of our first parents afterwards answers exactly to the feelings and conduct of those who have forfeited their innocence and permitted the devil to seduce them into actual sin.... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:9 I. Note here the anticipative sentence of the human conscience pronouncing doom on itself. The guilty rebel hides from the Divine Presence. II. The inexorable call which brings him immediately into the Divine Presence. III. The bringing to light of the hidden things of darkness. The... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:10 How deep are the lessons involved in the story of the fall, and how little are they affected by any of the numerous criticisms to which it has given rise! The lessons to be here learnt are moral, not ethnological; spiritual, not scientific. For even if the facts be not literal, they re... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:12 I. Adam, we find, was not content to be in the image of God. He and his wife wanted to be as gods, knowing good and evil. He wanted to be independent, and show that he knew what was good for him: he ate the fruit which he was forbidden to eat, partly because it was fair and well-tasted... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:13 I. The record before us is the history of the first sin. It needed no revelation to tell us that sin is, that mankind is sinful. Without, within, around, and inside us, is the fact, the experience, the evidence, the presence of sin. It is sin which makes life troublous and gives death... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:14 Several important difficulties suggest themselves in the text. I. The scientific difficulty. The serpent really bears no trace of degradation; its structure is as beautifully adapted to its place in nature as that of the lion or the eagle. Neither can it be said to eat dust: its food... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:15 I. The first intention of the work of Christ upon this earth is a declaration of war: His warfare and our warfare; the warfare of persons and the warfare of "seeds"; of the two great principles of good and evil. II. Christ did bruise and crush the serpent's head his strength, his bein... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:17 The ground is our first lesson-book. Notice (1) A man does not cultivate the land by waving his hand majestically over it. The land says, "If you want anything out of me you must work for it. I answer labour, I respond to industry, I reply to the importunity of toil." That is the great... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:17 This was almost the first curse revealed to us as pronounced by God, and yet it is almost the first blessing. I. At first sight we are _not_prepared to admit that labour is a blessing. We shrink from the misery of task-work, which must be got through when we are least fitted to carry... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:19 _(with Psalms 16:6)_ Notice: I. The necessity of toil, of hard, stern, constant strain, is at first connected with transgression. Like death, it is the child of sin. This broad fact of human experience is symbolised in the narrative of the expulsion from Eden, and the sentence on ear... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:21 An ancient interpreter of Scripture has not scrupled to declare that there are in the Book of Revelation as many mysteries as there are words. True as the words are as applied to that wonderful book, they are truer still in regard of the first three Chapter s of Genesis, above all in r... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:22 The temptation under which man fell in paradise was an ambitious curiosity after knowledge which was not allowed him; next came the desire of the eyes and the flesh; but the forbidden tree was called the tree of _knowledge_; the tempter promised knowledge, and after the fall Almighty Go... [ Continue Reading ]
Genesis 3:24 _(and Romans 7:24)_ I. Man's fallen life, viewed externally and internally. (1) Externally. Man was condemned to toil and sorrow, no longer fed by the sacramental fruit of the tree of life, exiled from the garden and debarred from entering the gate, which was closed against him by myst... [ Continue Reading ]