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Genesis 3:1-13
If you are a human being who has blood pumping through your veins, and oxygen in and out of your lungs, you’ve got to ask yourself at some point in time, why do we suffer? And another question is, if we have accepted Christ as our Lord and Savior, why doesn’t He stop our suffering?
Those are questions that far more learned people than I have been debating for quite some time. There are volumes upon volumes of books that try to understand a loving God who has His creation in the midst of this broken world where it seems that evil abounds and where suffering comes even to those most faithful to God.
So let’s look at Genesis chapter 3
We know what happened leading up to this point. Most of us remember the account where Adam and Eve were told not to eat the fruit of a certain tree - The Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. And the serpent – Adversary – Satan – the Devil, convinced Eve everything wasn’t quite as God has told her. That it was good to eat the fruit so they could be like God. And so Eve eats, then gives some to Adam, they realize they’re naked and sew fig leaves for clothes.
Genesis 3:13-19 (NIV) Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
The point I’m making is this, we don’t live in the Garden of Eden. We live East of the Garden of Eden. East of anything in the Bible is never good, it denotes the imperfect, the not good. In the plans of the Temple, the East end is where the killing part of the sacrifice is made. The west end of the Temple is where the Holy of Holies is. This is where the sacrifice is presented to God, and things are made right, brought back into righteousness.
As long as we live East of Eden, there is going to be suffering. As long as we are foreigners in this world, there will be suffering. This world has not been reconciled to our Creator – the Father.
In all of this, we Christians need to remember that we serve a God Who is not only aware of our suffering, but is always present with us in our times of grief and loss, our times of suffering. He is with us through the thick and thin, and He is faithful to be trusted day by day.