“Cursed is the ground for thy sake.”—GEN. iii. 17.
Are these words part of a curse, or part of a blessing? Are they a
sentence on man, the doom of his transgression, or the first stage of a
process destined to issue in the redemption of the heir of promise from
sorrow and sin for ever? Few phrases are more frequently on our lips
than “the curse of labour.” Men, women, yea little children,
overburdened and crushed by the stern toil which is the necessity of
their existence, easily catch up the sentence, and submit to the
necessity in the sullen bitter mood with which a slave accepts his
chastisement, or a criminal the sentence of doom. Few things are more
firmly fixed in our minds than that the toil and the strain of life are
God’s curse on transgression, having merciful bearings and issues no
doubt for the man who lovingly submits to the discipline, but in
themselves evil and hateful, born of sin, and a part of death.
I propose to examine this idea in the present discourse, and to
endeavour to estimate this curse upon the ground in its bearings on
man’s development as a spiritual being, and his relations to his
Redeemer, God. That toil, care, and pain spring out of the one great act
of transgression which every life repeats is the plain and indisputable
affirmation of the word of God. The dark tones of man’s present life
gloom against a background of radiant brightness and beauty; in the
childhood of humanity, as in the life of every human child, Eden shines
behind all the toil and sorrow of the world. There has been a grand
cataclysm in man and in nature. The structure of the world has been
rent and contorted, and the fractures and contortions repeat themselves
in life. “_Sin entered into the world, and death by sin_;” “_God made
man upright, but he sought out many inventions_,” are the sentences of a
sound philosophy, estimating the facts of consciousness and history, as
well as statements of the word of God. There has been a fall, a rupture,
by the sinful guilty action of the freewill of the creature, of the
pristine perfect relation between man and God and man and the world.
Transgression, the sinful exercise of freedom, is the fundamental fact
of man’s present nature and life; and the sentence on the transgressor,
the inevitable sentence, “_the soul that sinneth it shall die_,” lies at
the root of all the bitter anguish of the world.
There are abundant signs of the action of terribly destructive and
desolating forces in the physical structure of the world. The earth has
been torn and convulsed as by the spasm of some great agony, and the
signs of it lie thick around. Huge beds of rock, thousands of feet in
thickness, have been cracked and shivered like potsherds; streams of
molten metal have been injected into the fissures, and have surged
through the rents and swept vast floods of burning lava over the smiling
plains. There must have been times in the history of the development of
this earth, fair and calm as it lies now under the sun, when its whole
structure must have been shaken to the very centre; when there was dread
peril lest, like some lost planet, it should be shattered into fragments
and fill its orbit with a cloud of wreck. But some sure hand has helped
earth’s travail, and has brought forth out of the chaos of struggle and
storm an orderly, smiling, serene, and beautiful world. The signs of
past agony are there, to those whose eye can pierce the surface; but a
loving hand has clothed it all with a glow of beauty and a robe of
grace. The regions where the convulsion was fiercest, where the scars
are deepest, are the regions of glorious mountain beauty, whither
pilgrims wend as to nature’s most sacred shrine. The rents and chasms,
clothed with the most splendid forests, with streams leaping and
sparkling through the emerald meadows to the hollows below, breathe
nothing but beauty, and stir all hearts to joy and praise. The touch of
the destroyer is everywhere masked by beauty; and out of the chaos of
confusion God has drawn forth, what never could have been but for the
chaos, the infinite variety, the grace, the splendour, the glory of the
world.
This mystery of order and beauty, of cosmos, which reveals itself to us
in nature, unveils itself too in man’s spiritual world. Life, the life
of the human, bears traces everywhere of kindred dislocation. A great
convulsion has rent man’s nature, has torn it away from God and from
Eden, and scattered what, but for a redeeming restoring hand, would have
been blasted wrecks, about the world. Toil, pain, care, anguish have
chased the serenity and bliss of paradise from man’s heart and from
man’s world. Earth is full of wailing, and life of misery. Looking at
its surface aspects, we are tempted to call this life of man the
abortion of freedom, and to cry with Job, with Jeremiah, Why did it not
perish before it saw the sun? Look deeper. As in nature, so in man’s
life, a loving restoring hand has been working; the wastes of sin are
already clothed with some tints of greenness; flowers of rare beauty and
splendour spring up on what sin had made a dreary, blasted desert. The
moral chaos, touched by the hand of the Divine love, the love of God the
Redeemer, already puts on some dress of beauty; nay, it glows here and
there with a nascent glory whose fountain is beyond the stars. Some
vision of a grand and glorious purpose of redemption unveils itself as
we search the secrets of man’s sad history. “_Where sin abounded_,” we
read in the book of life as well as in the book of Scripture, “_grace
did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might
grace reign, through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ
our Lord_.” (Rom. v. 20, 21.) What we see accomplished helps us to
realize the visions of the prophetic word. “_The wilderness and the
solitary place, shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice,
and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even
with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the
excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord,
and the excellency of our God._” “_Then the eyes of the blind shall be
opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame
man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the
wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the
parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of
water: in the habitation of dragons where each lay, shall be grass with
reeds and rushes. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall
be called The way of holiness: the unclean shall not pass over it; but
it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err
therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up
thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs,
and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and
gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away._” (Isa. xxxv. 1, 2,
5–10.) Sin, the sin of the first parent, which every child of Adam
repeats, is the fundamental fact of man’s being; no religion, no
philosophy, which makes light of it can lay firm hold of man’s
conscience and heart. But, blessed be God, grace is the crowning fact;
and it is the crown which will remain conspicuous through eternity.
The sentence on sin then is a dread reality. “_The soul that sinneth it
shall die_” remains as God’s judgment record, which no art or effort of
man can cancel. But in this first sentence on His sinful child God has
wondrously interwoven benediction and judgment, warning and promise,
words of life and dooms of death. On the serpent the curse is decisive
and final: “_And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast
done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of
the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the
days of thy life._” (Gen. iii. 14.) But the sternness relaxes and the
doom melts into a promise, when the Judge addresses Himself to man. The
very curse on the serpent is pregnant with blessing to the woman and her
seed; the Executor of the Lord’s judgment on the tempter is the
everlasting triumphant Redeemer of mankind. And throughout the sentence
on our race blessing ranges in fellowship with judgment; and the
sternest words, prophets of many ills and sorrows, are rich benedictions
in disguise. And this “_cursed is the ground_” is amongst them. It
sounds hard and stern, and prophesies a long and hard apprenticeship of
toil and pain; but stern as it seems, it is part of the blessing and not
of the cursing, of the benediction and not of the doom. It describes the
first stage of the redemptive process of which the sentence on the
serpent had spoken, and is the condition of man’s elevation out of the
estate of a sinful, suffering, degraded creature to the friendship,
fellowship, and likeness of God. In order that we may appreciate this,
and see the true meaning and bearing of the judgment, I shall ask you to
consider with me—