and Christ's over the consequences and the is the general assurance that lies in the promise,— References "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's Authorities. head." The specific fulfilment we find in the work and triumph of the ever-blessed Redeemer, the Lord triumph Jesus Christ, who gathers up in Himself the great conflict between the spiritual man and the external power of sin, world of things, and wins the triumph; bruised in the heel with material bodily sorrows, bruising the very head of outward temptations by His triumphant maintaining of a perfect obedience to the Divine will and order; and so gaining the victory over Satan and sin in our behalf. Nature shall seem to be at enmity with man, but the very conflict he unceasingly wages shall culture him and help to bring him back to God. Woman shall suffer terribly in the disturbances brought about by the rule of self-will, but her sufferings shall bring her round to trust to God, and through her very motherhood she shall be saved from self-serving. Toil and the conscious brevity of life shall constantly bear gracious influence on man, and be sanctified to his deliverance from self. woes God makes redemptive. We are under terrible disabilities, but they are all All human redemptive. That is the truth for all the world and all the ages. God is in His redeeming grace working in all man's sorrows. But how fully this truth comes out for those who know Jesus Christ as the great redemptive leader. He is in our whole life turning everything for us into a redemptive agency. Toil, sorrow, mortality, are to us the sanctifying forces. Still they tell us of sin. Still they help us to win Eden back again. great Jesus the redemption leader, References and Authorities. Words NOTES ON GENESIS iii. 9-24. Ver. 14. Bishop Wordsworth deals with the question, worth, in loc. How could it be just to punish the serpent? Speak. Tertullian. Wordsworth. Delitzsch. Lange. Inglis. And he points out that all irrational and inanimate creatures and things are made in Holy Scripture to share in punishment with what is rational and living. "By the visible effects of God's actions upon them, they serve to show to man what he cannot see with the bodily eye, viz., the working of God's judgments in the moral and spiritual world." The judgment on the serpent is a continuous visible evidence to man of God's power over the evil one, and of the recoil of evil upon itself. Ver. 15. The promise is general. Though the seed of the serpent (mystically Satan and all his servants) shall continually wage war against the descendants of Eve, yet ultimately mankind (the whole seed of the woman) shall triumph over their spiritual enemy. It is inclusive of the promise of one person as Saviour. Ver. 16. Tertullian says, God punished woman, but He did not curse. God curses things, not people. MULTIPLY THY SORROW; intimating the pains of maternity were previously a part of natural order, and shared by the animals. DESIRE; the reverential longing with which the weaker looks up to the stronger. Dependence and subjection are implied in the phrase. RULE OVER THEE; “because thou hast acted independently of thine husband, and to his destruction and thine own." Delitzsch says there was a three-fold retribution. 1. Upon the relation of the woman's organism, in and for itself. 2. On the relation to her children. 3. On her relation to her husband. Ver. 17-19, Man is punished through the objective world of his masculine calling. Created to be a worker, his work must now become labour and sorrow. and "Now there is a tendency of nature to favour the References ignoble forms rather than the noble, the weed rather than Authorities. the herb." "A fruitless effort for the maintaining of his Delitzsch. existence, until at last he shall be subdued by the over powering might of death." "Sin has fallen into nature as a grain of sand into the Bushnell. eye; the same laws are working, but to totally different results." Ver. 24. CHERUBIM; see valuable note in Speaker's Commentary fully dealing with the Scripture teaching concerning these beings. "Cherub is the singular, and Cherubim the plural form. Two are mentioned in Exod. xxv. 18; four in Ezek. i. 4-14; Rev. iv. 6. The derivation of the word cherub is uncertain, and therefore nothing can be learned regarding the nature of the cherubim from the name. Their form and appearance are doubtful. The only fact concerning them of which we are told is that they were winged." It is not essential to their executing their mission of defending the "Tree of life," that they should have been seen by mortal eyes. TREE OF LIFE. "Paradise was left to be a memorial of the original of man, and of the bliss from which he had fallen, and so to authenticate the instructions of our first parents to their descendants; and the tree of life was not removed (apparently) till the flood, when another symbol (that of sacrifice) had so rooted itself that it was no longer necessary. This also was to pass away when Christ, who is our life and the Great Sacrifice, should come." Inglis. "The tillage of the ground began in Eden, and had been carried on after the Fall by the father of mankind. When Cain began to employ himself in agriculture, it had no doubt been brought into an advanced condition in many of its principal processes; and if Cain possessed auy of the inventive ingenuity which distinguished his descendants, it must have improved materially under his hands."-Kitto. and Man an active agent, with control First signs of this power. References OUR readers will remember that, in a previous Authorities. chapter, we set forth the fact that man was intended by God to be an independent, active agent, with ing power. ruling power over both material things and the entire animal creation. We have now to observe the first signs of man's activity and ruling power, and it would naturally concern first, the creatures which God had made with domestic habits; and then the land, in which God had set amazing possibilities of growth, seeding, and fruiting. The experience of one year of varying seasons would suffice to convince man of the necessity of skill, forethought, and labour; and he would soon develop The experience of the seasons. the faculties and devise the plans which his situa- References tion and circumstances demanded. It is easy to fall into two extremes in our representations of the knowledge and civilization of the first human beings, and both extremes should be carefully avoided. "The Bible describes man as originally living in a state of bodily nakedness; as placed in a garden which it was his business to keep; and as subsisting on the fruit of trees. It is a picture of rudest primitive simplicity. The Scriptures are not responsible for the extravagances of poets and preachers, who make the head of the race to have begun life as an accomplished gentleman, gifted with a culture and an intelligence that qualified him for holding high discourse with angels. Our unclothed progenitor, dwelling in a and Authorities. tremes in our idea of the Two ex first beings. not Scripture responsible for poetical extravagances. Adam's state. genial clime, had few wants, and those easily provided for. The barest elements of knowledge would Simplicity of suffice for his situation; and we are not warranted in supposing more to have been given. All that was further required for his temporal well-being would come by observation and experiment-a slow process, but equal to the occasion. savage. "Yet it would be the greatest of mistakes to call Adam not a Adam a savage. A child in experience and reflection he must have been; but certainly not a barbarian, for no degeneracy attached to his state. There was no corruption or evil bent to stand in the way of limitless improvement. Adam's condition was plain, but not gross; it had nothing in it to offend; it was free from the painful associations "Divine Footprints," p. 144. |