East of Eden: the Justice and Mercy of God - Genesis - March 1st, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)

Well, back when I used to be really involved in studying and teaching philosophy, I was fascinated by the problem of evil and suffering. This may be the number one intellectual reason that people give for not believing in God.

The idea is this, that if God is perfectly good, if God is perfectly loving, he would want to eliminate all evil and suffering. If God is all powerful, then he would be able to eliminate all evil and suffering.

But our world is filled with all kinds of evil and all kinds of suffering. Therefore, many people have concluded this God must not exist. In some ways, it's a really powerful argument.

People find it very persuasive and compelling, especially when it hits home, especially when some tragedy strikes in their life, and there seems to be no good reason for that tragedy.

If a child gets cancer, or if you lose your job and encounter financial ruin, you might sit there wondering, like, why would God allow this to happen? If God's loving, certainly he wouldn't want this to happen to us.

If he's powerful, certainly he'd be able to stop this from happening. And if you can't think of any good explanation, well, maybe there isn't an explanation. Maybe that God's just not real.

A lot of people have gone down that road and concluded that God isn't real because of these very reasons.

But as powerful as the argument might seem at first, when you really dig in, you start to analyze it and you look at the logic of it, in the end, it ultimately, you can show conclusively, it does not disprove the existence of God.

It does not disprove the existence of God. As a logical argument, it totally fails. We don't have time to go into all the reasons why it fails, but I'll just say a couple of things really quick.

First of all, God may want to eliminate evil, and he may be able to eliminate evil, and by evil I mean evil and suffering and all the bad things that happen in this world.

But what if he has a good reason for those things to exist for a period of time? If God has a good reason for allowing those things to exist, then it does not disprove the existence of God, the fact that those things exist. Think about it like this.

When you're a kid, you are forced to endure all kinds of evil and suffering.

I put that in scare quotes because kids, for kids, they might think of homework as a great evil in their lives that causes them great suffering, or bullies at school, or the dentist, or scrape knees.

Your loving parents may have the power to eliminate all of those things, but they have a good reason for allowing them, right? When you're a kid, if you fall down and scrape your knees, yes, you're suffering.

Yes, your parents probably could have prevented that from not letting you go outside ever, or ride a bike ever, or run, right? But they had a good reason for allowing you into that situation where you ended up getting hurt.

And we should conclude that the same is true for God. God has a good reason for everything that he allows in this world.

Once you realize that could be true, that God could have good reasons for evil and suffering, then the whole argument falls apart.

I say all this because we've been studying the Book of Genesis, and this question has been sort of lurking in the shadows the whole time. Think about it.

God creates this beautiful, perfect world, this amazing paradise, the Garden of Eden, and man and his perfect companion, woman, and they get married, and they're going to multiply and fill the earth and keep the garden. And everything's perfect.

And next thing you know, the devil shows up in the form of a serpent. Why? Why did God allow the serpent into the garden?

God could have stopped him. Why did he allow Eve to decide to eat the fruit? God could have stopped her.

Why did he allow Eve to give the fruit to Adam to eat? God could have stopped him. And now we're in the part where God lays out the consequences of their sin.

As we'll see in a moment when we read this passage in Genesis 3, God allows evil into the garden and the result is a whole lot of suffering.

We'll see that the result is suffering through pain and childbirth and broken relationships, and the toil of endless work and most of all, suffering through separation from God.

Before I read the text, I'll say one more quick thing about the problem of evil and suffering. Imagine that Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit and rebelled against God, but instead of punishing them, God lets everything continue as it was.

So the serpent comes in, starts talking to Eve, and Eve ultimately decides to eat the fruit, and then Adam eats the fruit too, and God says, okay, okay, okay, you guys disobeyed me, but I'm going to let it go.

I'm just going to let it go, and you can continue, you know, living in perfect harmony in the garden and all of that. They no longer have a relationship with God in this scenario, but everything else is great.

They live in the garden, there's no pain or sorrow or tired or some work, and all is well. If that were the case, do you think humans would value their relationship with God?

If their relationship with God had broken and their fellowship with God had broken, but everything else continued perfect, do you think that they would value their relationship with God?

Do you think they would appreciate and take seriously his holiness and goodness? Do you think they would think that way at all? Of course not.

They would eat and drink and be merry, and they would have no idea about the real consequences of sin. You see, ultimately, the point I'm trying to make is that the suffering that God lets us endure, it has a purpose, it teaches us.

And one thing, perhaps the most important thing that it teaches us is this. It helps us to see who God is and how much we need him. Please stand for the reading of God's word.

I'll read the text for us. Genesis 3, verses 16 through 24. To the woman, God 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.

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.

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.

The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them.

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, therefore the Lord God sent him out of 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 a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. This is the word of the Lord. May be seated and please join me as I pray for us.

Father, we pray for your help now.

As we examine your word, as we hear your words, as we think about these things, God, I pray that you would guide us into the truth, that you would guide us into obedience to your commandments, that you would guide us into deeper relationship with

you. God, I pray that ultimately through these things, Lord, we would come to value you and treasure you and love you more, to devote ourselves to you, to spend time with you, to cling to you, to trust you. You are what we need more than anything.

So I pray that you would help us to see that and believe that and act on it. We pray in the name of Jesus, amen. When you look at kind of the big picture view of this passage, one thing you see very clearly is the justice of God.

We're picking up right after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, and then God punishes the serpent. And now in our passage, he's laying out the punishments for Adam and Eve. And then the sort of the creation account wraps up.

And in this passage, it's the justice of God on display. Because they sinned against God, they rebelled against God, and God punishes them accordingly. And it's interesting because it's such a thorough and precise justice.

The punishment fits the crime, and it even fits the criminals. Notice how part of the punishment given to Eve is that her desire shall be for her husband, but her husband shall rule over her. It fits the crime, and it fits the criminal.

And at first, that phrase is a little bit mysterious. It's a little hard to see what it means. But we see those exact same words pop up.

One chapter later, in the Book of Genesis. And when you read the Bible, when you study the Bible, this is one of the most helpful things that you can do.

If you see a phrase or a word that's not making sense to you, look at the nearby verses, the nearby chapters, to try to find that word or phrase used again. And you can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle to determine what it means.

The context always gives you clues as to the meaning. So, the context here is Genesis 4.7. It's the story of Cain and Abel.

And God says to Cain in Genesis 4.7, if you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.

Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it. So God is saying that sin desires Cain, just like he's saying Eve, your desire will be for your husband. The same wording, right?

So sin desires Cain, but in what way does sin desire Cain? What's the message here? Its desire is to control him, but he must rule over it.

Sin wants to rule over him, but he must rule over sin. Sin wants to master him, but he must master sin. And so it is with Adam and Eve.

Eve desires to rule over Adam, but Adam shall rule over her, meaning the husband is the head of the wife as the New Testament teaches and all of that stuff.

And of course, Genesis is a book of beginnings that sets the pattern for the rest of human history. So these punishments apply to all the descendants of Adam and Eve. In other words, Eve is not the only wife who has wanted to control her husband.

This is part of human nature, henceforth. Eve is not the only wife who wanted to be the leader, just like she did when she gave Adam the forbidden fruit and he ate it. You see, the punishment fits the crime and it fits the criminals.

Eve wanted to rule over her husband. She wanted to lead in giving Adam the fruit. And now God says, no, you may desire that, but you're not going to be the leader in your marriage.

You're not going to be the leader in your family. We also see another element of this in that Eve was created to become one with Adam. When God originally joins them together, he says, you shall become one flesh.

She was meant to be united in perfect unity with Adam. And then they were going to have babies. They were going to multiply and fill the earth.

But now the punishment is that Adam and her are no longer united the way that God originally intended them to be. There's now a conflict between them. She wants to be in control.

But Adam is meant to be the leader in their family, which introduces a break in the relationship, a conflict, a set of competing desires. She doesn't want to be his helper. She wants to be his leader.

And she's created to have children with him. But that is now going to be a very painful process. God multiplies her pain in childbirth.

I want to pause to note just how countercultural all these things are. We've been talking about this for weeks, but we see it affirmed here over and over again. The world around us is filled with destructive, often outrageous lies.

I've been commenting on these things, but I can't help comment on them again because it's so important for us to recognize what's going on.

It's almost like the entire culture around us, all the universities and all the cultural influencers got together and said, let's do everything possible to contradict and oppose how God created us.

We'll tell everybody, we'll demand everybody agree, there are no differences between men and women. We'll make sure that everybody knows a man and his wife having kids and raising them together, that's just a construct of Western society.

And it might even be racist. We'll declare that men and women should, or we'll declare that women, not just men, but women should also lead and provide and protect, just like men do.

And if a man wants to stay home and raise kids, well, that'll be just fine. We'll minimize and pervert marriage, we'll let everybody pick their own gender, and it will all be great.

These are all things we see in the Book of Genesis, directly contradicted and opposed by our society. They want to do everything the opposite of how God created us to do things. And it will be great.

So is it great? How's it all going? Rebellion against God and His commandments always hurts, and it always fails.

What we see in our passage is that God is affirming again and again just how He created us. Notice how God hands out their punishments separately. First, He talks to Eve, and she has a set of consequences for her sin.

And then He talks to Adam, and he has a different set of consequences for his sin. Why? Because they're different.

Because men and women are different. Therefore, they have different consequences. Notice how God applies the punishments to what men and women do most naturally.

He doesn't tell Eve, you're going to be stuck as the assistant manager the rest of your life, and work is going to suck.

No, the punishments for Eve apply to childbirth, not to work, because women most naturally raise, their primary responsibility is to raise the kids. So for Eve, he makes childbearing painful. For Adam, he makes work painful.

Does that mean that Adam never helps with the kids, and Eve never works outside of the home? Of course not. But we're talking about basic patterns for human existence.

We also see how Adam is held accountable for two separate sins. First, he ate the fruit, but look at what God says to him. Second, he listened to his wife instead of leading his wife.

So God is affirming again just how he created us, and just how he desires for us to live as human beings. God is giving punishments that fit the crimes and punishments that fit the criminals. So clearly, God is being fair and just and appropriate.

And all of this stuff, I know it's countercultural. I know for some people it's offensive. I know for others it's uncomfortable.

Even now, maybe it's a bit uncomfortable for you to be faced so clearly with what the Bible says about men and women and marriage and how we're supposed to relate to each other.

So if you are taking any offense at this, I would just say, please listen to my sermon from a few weeks ago.

I tried to explain all of this stuff more thoroughly and explain how men and women are equal despite the fact that we're different, we have different roles that does not affect our equality.

So please listen to that sermon or you can talk to me after church. But kind of the big picture, the main point here is the justice of God, just how appropriate these punishments are for their crimes.

And yet, even in the midst of his justice, he's merciful. We're gonna talk more about the mercy of God in just a moment, but I want you to notice a really important lesson here.

It's the lesson that I shared with you just before I read the passage this morning. The consequences of sin are not merely a display of the justice of God. The consequences of sin exist to teach us just how much we need God.

To teach us just how much we need God. CS. Lewis once wrote that God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.

It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. I want to read that quote again because it's truly profound, absolutely brilliant. It's just true.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. So our pain is meant to show us that we need him, that we need his grace.

Think about all the pain that he just consigned Adam and Eve to experience, the pain in work, the pain in childbearing, the pain of broken relationships. Well, pain is God's megaphone to them, to remind them how much they need him and his grace.

We need grace from God to help us endure and fight against sin and its consequences. As the Lord said to the Apostle Paul, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

As Christians living in a fallen world, we need these truths. When work is hard, what do we conclude? That we need the grace of God.

We need his help. When marriage is hard, we need God, and we need his grace. When childbearing is hard, we need God, and we need his grace.

It's one of the reasons why God sent his son, Jesus, for from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. That's what the Apostle John says about the Lord Jesus in the introduction to his gospel.

When Jesus came, he said, from his fullness, the fullness of Jesus, the fullness of life that exists in Jesus, for from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.

Jesus is the key to unlocking the grace of God that we need to make it in this sin-cursed and sin-corrupted world. This passage also shows us another way in which we need God. Think about it like this.

If a broken relationship with God produces all of this pain and suffering, ultimately, that's what happened, right? When they ate the fruit, their relationship with God was broken, and now God's laying out the consequences.

So if a relationship with God produces all of this pain and suffering, what's the solution? The solution is a restored relationship with God. There's no other way to overcome evil and pain and suffering in this world.

If you just try to focus on the marriage without focusing on your relationship with God, your marriage will not improve.

If you just try to focus on helping your kids be happy and successful without teaching them about God and their relationship that they're supposed to have with him, your kids will not be happy and successful.

If you just try to earn money so that you can have everything that you need without going to God first to ask him for what you need, you will not have everything that you need. The relationship with God is the problem that needs to be solved.

Everything else is just a symptom.

Whatever we're facing in this broken and sin-cursed world, no amount of money in the end, deep down, for all these problems that we face in life, all of these pains that we face in life, all the suffering, all of the sorrow, no amount of money is

going to fix it. Not even the greatest marriage on earth can fix it. You can have all the success in the world. You can be respected and admired and appreciated by thousands.

You can have the most wonderful, beautiful kids and grandkids, and they all go to Harvard, and they all become doctors, and they all love you. But if you don't have God, you'll be just another broken sinner suffering in a broken world.

Another way to see this, another way to say it is to put it like this. Just look at what Adam and Eve had before sin entered the world. If you want to know how much you need God, just look at their lives when they had God.

When they had the foundation of a perfect relationship with God, it produced in their lives the perfect marriage relationship before sin, before breaking their relationship with God. They had a perfect marriage.

There was no shame, no lying, no blaming. It was the kind of relationship that everybody longs for, true love, true companionship, total trust, perfect harmony. When they had God before sin entered the world, Adam loved his job.

The Bible doesn't say that exactly, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it, that Adam loved his job, tending in the garden. Eve could have babies without any pain or discomfort.

God created a paradise for them where they had an abundance and variety of everything. They had their perfect unbroken relationship with God, and the fruit of that relationship was incredible.

There is a direct connection between our relationship with God and the life that all of us long for. You will never build a satisfying life without Him. When your relationship with God is messed up, these are the dominoes that fall.

Marriage, family, kids, work, health, all of those things are, that's what God is talking about in this passage. The consequences of sin affect all of these things, marriage, family, kids, work, and health. That's all right here in this passage.

And of course, we could mention 10,000 other things too. All of them are destroyed when our relationship with God is broken. Even the ground is cursed.

And yet, the positive correlation is just as real. Your relationship with God is so important that when it's right, everything else can be made right too. Marriage, family, kids, work, and health.

All of these things can be restored when our relationship with God is restored. That's the mercy of God. That's the mercy of God.

That all of those things that we destroy by our sin can be redeemed and restored when right relationship with God is the foundation in our lives.

What we're seeing here is that even as God lays down the law and gives them justice, he gives them mercy at the same time. Let me show you the mercy of God in our passage.

In verse 21, it says, The Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them. You see, before sin, they were naked and unashamed. But after sin, they lost their innocence and they were naked and very ashamed of it.

So does God send them off to live in shame? Like you guys now realize you're naked, you're ashamed, you're embarrassed, too bad, go deal with it. No, he mercifully finds a sacrifice, a substitute who will die in order to cover their shame.

Here in Genesis, it's a small mercy, but it foreshadows the culmination of the mercy of God as it's displayed in Christ. Look at the parallels here. Here it's an animal who dies to cover their shame.

But ultimately, it will be Christ who dies to cover all of our shame and all of our sin. 1 Peter 3.18 says this, For Christ also suffered once for sin, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

So we get this little illusion, this little picture of a sacrifice to cover their shame, that points us ultimately to Christ, the ultimate sacrifice that covers all of our shame and all of our sin.

We've been seeing this over and over again, especially in verse 15 of chapter 3, which we talked about last week.

But there are all these threads in the book of Genesis that begin here and they continue page after page throughout the entire Old Testament, and they all lead to Jesus. We see it again in verses 22 through 24.

Adam and Eve are banished from the garden where they walked with God. They're banished with the garden, so they can't eat of the tree of life anymore. And in one sense, it's a punishment.

God said that if they ate the forbidden fruit, they would die. So they have to be cut off from the tree of life if that promise of death is going to come true.

So God cuts them off from the tree of life, expels them from the garden, expels them from that communion that they had with him in the garden, and expels them from the garden where the tree of life is located, so that ultimately they'll die.

So it's a punishment and it's a just punishment. But in another sense, it's a mercy. Because you know what's worse than death?

Living forever in a sin broken and sin cursed world. Think about the punishments that he gave them, pain and childbirth and toil and labor all the days of their lives. Adam labored and toiled, working the ground for 930 years before he died.

I think everybody wants a long life, but 930 years is a long time, right? Adam and Eve lived the ups and downs and hardships of marriage and kids and life for 930 years. Imagine if they had to live that for 930,000 years.

So, in some way, God cutting them off from the tree of life was really a mercy, but it was also another thread that gets connected all the way to Jesus. Notice what God does to guard this tree of life.

He places cherubim with flaming swords to keep the people out. Cherubim are these spectacular, terrifying angelic creatures that we see throughout the Bible. We see them in the Book of Ezekiel.

We see them in Revelation. We see them in the Book of Exodus. In Exodus 25, we learn something really interesting about Moses' relationship with God.

It says in Exodus 25 that when Moses went to talk with God, to get the commandments and to talk on behalf of the people of Israel, when they built the tabernacle and Moses would go in to talk to God, God would speak to him from the Ark of the

Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant is this big gold-covered box, and it has the Covenant, the Ten Commandments, inside of the Ark. So it's this holy relic, this holy object that God instructed them to build that they would put the Ten Commandments in.

And Moses would go in there before the Ark and speak with God. And you know what was on top of the Ark? Cherubim.

Cherubim. And it says explicitly in Exodus 25-22 that when Moses talked to God, the voice of God would come from in between the cherubim. The same creatures that we see here outside the Garden of Eden were Adam talked to God.

It's an interesting connection, isn't it? But it gets even more interesting. The Ark of the Covenant was stored inside of the Holy of Holies.

It was a special area inside the Tabernacle and later inside the Temple, where the high priest and Moses would meet with God. So the Temple was this holy place and there were various sections of the Temple.

And the Tabernacle, if you're not too familiar with the biblical history, the Tabernacle was like a mobile temple that the Israelites set up in the wilderness before they later arrived in the promised land.

So early on, after the Israelites leave Egypt, they are traveling through the wilderness for 40 years to get to the promised land.

And during that time, God instructed them to build this like tent, which was their temple and they called it the Tabernacle. And then many centuries later in the history of Israel, they build a permanent temple in Jerusalem.

And it's much like the Tabernacle.

And in the Tabernacle and in the temple, this holy temple, these holy places, there were certain areas that were holy, and then certain areas that were more holy, and then there was the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was.

The Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest could go, or only Moses could go. And you know what guarded the Holy of Holies? Cherubim, cherubim.

There was, in the temple, there was a giant thick curtain or veil that hung from the roof to separate the holy parts of the tabernacle, or the temple, from the most holy part.

And that curtain, that veil, that kept everybody out of the presence of God, it was embroidered with cherubim. It was the same way in the tabernacle and in the temple. And here's the most interesting part.

We get all of these clues, all of these interesting threads and connections with the cherubim guarding the holy place.

But the most interesting part, one of the parts that it just makes it, the story is so good that no human could have ever made this stuff up. When Jesus died, that curtain with those cherubim was split in half from top to bottom.

Those creatures, the cherubim that prevented people from entering the presence of God in the temple and in the guard of Eden, when Jesus died, that barrier was removed.

So when you put all of this together, when you trace all of these connections, when you look at all of the analogies and implications in the metaphors, it's like Jesus is clearing the way for man to return to the garden.

Jesus is clearing the way for man to return to the garden, the garden where man walked in perfect fellowship with God, the garden where marriage and kids and work and life was just how God created it to be.

We all long to get back to the garden whether we realize it or not.

We were made for the garden whether we realize it or not, to walk in the presence of God in perfect relationship with God, so that the rest of life could be fruitful and blessed, and peaceful and joyful.

That's ultimately what all of us are longing for, and Jesus is the way back. Jesus is how we get it. Let's pray.

Father, I pray that we would truly trust in Jesus as our one and only hope for salvation, our one and only way back to the garden, our one and only way to find satisfaction in life, the way for our marriages to flourish and thrive, for our kids to

flourish and thrive. We need you, God. In order to have you, we need Jesus. So God, I pray that, really Lord, we just pray that we could have the relationship with you, that you designed us to have.

Lord, I pray that, that you would help us to put time into our relationship with you, help us to devote our energy to it, to devote our attention to it.

Pray that you would forgive us for all of our failures, all the 10,000 times that we decided to scroll on our phones instead of reading the Bible. All the 10,000 or 100,000 times that we found prayer too uninteresting to devote our time to.

Would you forgive us for all the ways that we have turned our backs on relationship with you? And would you forgive us and help us to recommit, to devote ourselves Lord, to walking in close relationship with you? We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.