The "Curse" of the Ground

"...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." Gen. 3:17b-19

It is interesting to note here that the curse pronounced at this time is not directly upon the man himself. It is instead a curse upon the ground which the man will have to work and sweat over in order to produce his food. As has been mentioned before, we should not confuse this with a curse of work. It is a myth that work was a curse given to man because of sin. As we see here the curse is the fact that work now becomes hard labor which produces a small gain, as opposed to the pleasure of work tending a beautiful and bountiful garden which generously supplied all that man needed or desired.

The line, "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread..." is certainly familiar to anyone who has tried to grow food on a farm or in a garden. Even with modern technology, long, hard hours of work are required and there are no guarantees of a good return. The curse of the ground in reality is the curse of the entire environment of the earth. Precarious weather patterns such as flood or draught, damaging hail, tornadoes, even earthquakes and hurricanes all are a part of this curse of the ground. Our sin, from the very beginning of man to now, is the cause of these kind of difficulties for without a sinful beginning, we would never experience the corrupt creation we are a part of now. (see Romans 8:19-21)

Finally, the sentence of death is given in that our bodies will die and decay and become a part of the very earth that we are doomed to scratch out a living from. We all, one way or another, will "return to the ground." At least, that is the fate of our bodies. Our spiritual selves await another fate which we will talk of in detail at a later point.

Your joyfully loquacious expositor
LEE