Genesis 3:16
16 To the woman he 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.”
After God pronounces the ultimate demise of Satan, He turns to Adam and Eve to let them know the consequences of their actions.
There are two areas of her life where she will experience the results of the fall- childbearing and her relationship with her husband. Pain in childbirth is a reminder that we are sinners. If we can glean from this that if the fall had not happened then there would be no pain in childbirth, then it seems that the fall brought some major physiological changes. It is interesting to speculate, but we cannot say anything with certainty. We simply know that childbirth in sinless creatures would be absent of pain.
The words regarding her relationship with her husband are more clear. It cannot mean that because of sin, Eve will now desire her husband. She desired him in her sinless state. The husband was created to be the head of his home. Perfect, loving, beneficial leadership in the home. The fall brings Eve to want to take that leadership from him. She will desire to take the headship that is Adam’s. Adam’s response will be to turn the perfect, loving, beneficial headship into something that is distorted, sinful, sometimes cruel, and quite often anything but beneficial. Loving leadership becomes thinking that “I am the boss around here” or a complete neglect of any attempt to lead in the home at all. Both are equally wrong and they both are a curse upon wives everywhere.
This is what we see in marriages all the time. Wives who want to do what God has given husbands to do and husbands who are not willing to do what they are called to do. Marriages cannot prosper where God’s original design is ignored. Happy marriages will be what God has designed them to be. The husband will love and lead as Christ does the church (Ephesians 5:25) and wives will be the complement that her husband cannot live without and be the “helper fit for him”.
Nothing is effected by the fall as much as marriage and family life. Today, recommit yourself to have a home life that reflects the original intention that God had for it when He made the first marriage. The key to marriage success? Love God, in Christ, supremely, and love your spouse more than anyone else on the planet.
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