would get a conscience. You would know right from wrong. You would no longer be innocent of right and wrong. And so Satan is not suggesting to Eve that she will know right from wrong and therefore plunge into immorality. Rather, he's suggesting to her that undoubtedly she will choose the right course. But it will be her choice, not God's choice for her. She will be in charge of her own life. She will be the captain of her soul. He's suggesting both really independence of her husband and of her God. Furthermore, the serpent does not suggest that Eve bowed the knee to him. Three or four thousand years later, when he was tempting the Lord Jesus Christ, four to five thousand years later, I should say, when he was tempting Jesus Christ, he did make that suggestion. You bow down to me and I'll give you such and such. But he did not say that to Eve. The temptation in the Garden of Eden was not to follow the serpent any more than it was to practice evil. Rather, it was an invitation to independence, to be your own master, to do your own thing. Why should God boss you around or bridle you with commandments or saddle you with burdens? You can make your own choices. You can be the top of the pile. This appeal by the serpent to Eve may have gone on over a period of many visits before she bought his line of thinking. It may have been a sort of satanic friendship evangelism, lasting days or even months. The Bible compresses the story and doesn't tell us whether it was just, he just came in once and said it once and she immediately succumbed. or whether this was a condensed version of a rather drawn-out appeal. I rather think it was the latter, that he made a lot of visits and established a friendship before she really bought the appeal. But I don't know for sure about that. The Bible merely tells us the essence of what the serpent said to her, not how many times he said it. But in these few short sentences in Genesis three... that are recorded for us, we have the pattern of temptation that continues today. Number one, a questioning of the goodness of God. Has God said you can't do this or you can't do that? Isn't he withholding something from you? A questioning of the goodness of God. Number two, an outright denial of the word of God. You shall not die. You'll not go to hell. There's no hell. There's no judgment. That type of thing. He does the same thing in people's minds today. He questions the goodness of God. He denies the word of God. And he challenges Eve to declare independence from God. Not to be wicked, but to be independent. There's a fourth aspect to this as well. Without apology, the serpent was making a frontal attack on the family of God. That man and that woman that God had placed in this beautiful garden in order to start the human race. To see this attack on the family of God, ponder with me about six questions. Now look at the scripture passage and then I'll give you the question. From verse one. Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast which the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman, he said to the woman, question one, why did the serpent go to Eve instead of to Adam? Adam had been the focal point of creation. Adam had been the challenge to fallen Lucifer here on planet Earth. Why not a direct attack on Adam instead of on the one who had been designed to be a helper and a partner to Adam? Skip down to verse six. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desirable to make one wise, she took. She took. Question two. Why did Eve decide on her own? Apparently not even consulting with Adam. Far from being a spiritual partner and helper, she took the leadership role and actually led her husband into sin. Now, that's not a help meet, is it? She made the decision, and it appears that she didn't even talk it over with him. She just went ahead and ate. Also in verse six, after she took, she also gave to her husband with her, and he did eat. Question three. Why did Adam comply so readily? No questions. No discussion. No effort to resist. Here is total capitulation. He let Eve take the lead in a spiritual decision. Where would the human race have been today if Adam had said to Eve, Eve, what have you done? Get down on your knees and confess your sin to God and tell him you've disobeyed him. Where would we have been today? Well, that's one of the theologians. I don't know if they've even written on this subject. It's very hypothetical because the New Testament says that as in Adam all die, it was through Adam that we got our sin natures. And it is possible that if he had rebuked Eve and got her to confess her sin, you and I would not have been born with sin natures. I don't know. That's very speculative. But that's what he should have done, isn't it? That's what he should have done. Why did he relinquish the headship of the family? You know, the problem of headship and submission in homes today may be much more with the men than with the women. Adam is certainly as much to blame as Eve is here. Men learn to be spiritual leaders in your home. Live it and then preach it. Live it first and then preach it. And let's not be too quick to blame the women for taking spiritual leadership if the husbands present them with a vacuum in the home and in the church. You come to the breaking of bread and you're a local assembly with empty hearts and empty minds and sit there with long periods of silence and then finally stumble up with a hymn or something like that. Don't be surprised if you start getting pressures from women who want to take part, who are sitting there with hearts full of the Lord who've been reading their Bibles at home and just have something to offer and feel restrained because they can't say anything. If you present the vacuum, I believe that if men are real spiritual leaders and have something to offer to the saints, they're not as likely to have that problem. because women will generally accept spiritual leadership for men, certainly much quicker than men will accept it from women. But when there's nothing to offer, and when the women are way farther ahead spiritually than the men, then you're going to have problems. And that's certainly what the case here. Adam just abdicated his leadership role in the home. And I tend to be, as a man, I tend to be much more severe on Adam than I am on Eve. Verse number nine. Now they have eaten of the tree. They've discovered they're naked. They've sowed fig leaves together to make a covering. And God comes walking in the garden as if nothing had happened. You know, it's interesting. The character of God here, he didn't get angry. He didn't come storming into the garden. What have you done? He acted as if nothing had happened. Comes walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And we get the impression that's what he did just about every day. But Adam and Eve hid themselves. They're the ones that had changed. And the Lord God called to Adam, verse nine, and said to him, Where are you? And Adam called out from behind one of the trees, I hid myself. Oh, God says, Why is that? How do you know? Did you eat of that tree that I told you not to eat? God almost acts as if you didn't know what had happened. Then the question arises out of verse nine. God called to Adam. Question four. Question four. Why did God call to Adam instead of to Eve? or why didn't he call to Adam and Eve? Is it that God is holding the man accountable for the family's actions when we stand before the judgment seat of Christ? Is God going to turn to the husband and say, I want an accounting from you of the spiritual condition of your family? Is it true? I think it is true that God holds the man accountable for the family, not the woman. That's question four. Verse twelve. Now, when God spoke to Adam, he... He said, oh, he said, the woman whom you gave to be with me. She gave me the tree and I ate it. It's her fault, God. It's sort of your fault, too, because you gave her to me. Question five. Why did Adam pass the buck? Harry Truman would have done better than that. Harry Truman would have said, the buck stops here. And some of our modern politicians would have said, look, it happened on my watch. I didn't do it, but it happened on my watch. Therefore, I'm responsible for it. That's the... That's the nineteen eighty eight expression of this principle of accountability that some of our government officials have been very good about acknowledging. Our president, for instance, acknowledged responsibility in the Iran-Contra affair because it happened on his watch. Adam totally opted out of spiritual leadership. Now let me repeat those five questions and then I'll give you the six. Question one, why did the serpent go to Eve instead of to Adam? Question two, why did Eve decide on her own? Not even consulting with Adam. Question three, why did Adam comply so readily? Question four, why did God call to Adam instead of to Eve? Question five, why did Adam pass the buck? And now in verse seventeen, when God begins to recite the consequences of this action, he says to Adam, Adam, because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you. Question six, why did God include this abdication of leadership in his indictment of Adam? Why didn't he just say, Adam, you've eaten the tree, therefore? He said, Adam, you have heeded the voice of your wife and eaten the tree. I've got two things against you. Is the breakdown of family order part of the fall? Does it contribute to the consequences that follow? And I think certainly that it does. Now let's look at the consequences that follow. At least start in verse fourteen. Because when Adam said, the woman, she gave it to me and I ate, then God turned to Eve and he said, well, what did you do? And oh, the woman said the serpent talked me into it. He deceived me and I ate. She passed the buck too. And nobody was going to hold responsibility. So God turned to the serpent in verse fourteen. And he says, because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field, on your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. I never minded it too much when I was young, when I heard the evolutionist saying that the snakes have the leftover bone structure that indicates they once had legs. I felt like saying, I mean, sure, you can read that in the third chapter of Genesis. The reptile went down in his belly. God cursed him. He became a snake. He did have legs once. The Bible says that. And that's why snakes crawl. And then he says in verse fifteen, I'll put enmity between you and the woman. Well, I think we see that, don't we? If you have women and snakes, you have a sort of a squeamish, screamy situation. If you have young boys, they pick them up by the tails and they carry them over to the girls. Look, look, look, look. And that's life, isn't it? There is more of an animosity towards snakes among the females generally than there is among the males. Not always that way, but it's written here in the book. enmity between the snake and the woman. But now we turn to the woman. And God says in verse sixteen, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception in pain you shall bring forth children. Pain, sorrow and pain in childbirth. You get down into verse seventeen to the man. Sweat and hard labor in the breadwinning role for the man. Verse seventeen about the middle of the verse. Cursed is the ground for your sake. In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and fissils it shall bring forth to you. And you shall eat the herb of the field in the sweat of your face. You shall eat bread. All you farmers know about the curse. And all you mothers know about the curse. But you experience it in different ways. The curse that came as a result of this sin in the Garden of Eden. It would no longer be an easy life for Adam and Eve. No longer they'd just go out and pick all the fruit off the beautiful trees and have no problems. They had had everything but one tree. They sought for more and ended up with a whole lot less. And in the end, physical death would end it all. Verse nineteen, the last part of the verse. Till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return. But notice how this has established the biblical pattern for the family. Now, you couldn't get it fully established before, because there was no need to be a breadwinner and plow the ground until sin had come along. The basic responsibility of the wife is in the home, bearing and raising the children. The basic responsibility of the man is in the field, plowing and tilling or doing whatever else was needed to supply the needs of that home. And the New Testament makes no attempt to change that pattern. It says if a man won't work, he doesn't eat. That's addressed to the men. They had a responsibility to provide for their own households. And what about the women? It says in the Bible that the Titus two, the older women, are to admonish the younger ones, to be keepers at home, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. Now, this pattern was not much of a problem. As long as you had the hard careers of plowing and fishing and working in steel mills and so forth, it's really only in recent years when these much more glamorous lighter loads in the offices came along with computers and everything else that the male careers have seemed so much more attractive. We spent our missionary days in the fishing villages of Newfoundland, four to six hundred people. And there was no feminist movement there. There was no crying out from the women to have the privilege of going out on the fishing boats on the cold Atlantic Ocean at three or four o'clock in the morning. They had enough to do to salt the codfish when the men brought it in. We also noticed in Prince Edward Island there was no appeal among the farm families for the women to get out and plow the potato fields. But it's much more understandable now that office careers are very different very much more rewarding we've taken out a lot of the uh... of the pain and the sweat and the toil out of them it's also very difficult for women today for young couples because our government is pushing women out into the marketplace by its quotas materialism is demanding the high family income that will provide for the luxuries of life and uh... whereas forty or fifty years ago the social agitators would be saying to the big corporations, you're not paying a man enough to support his family. Today, they don't have to say that. They only have to ask the big corporations to pay a man half enough to support his family because the wife can earn the other half when she goes to work. And this has been a nice thing for the big corporations. They only have to pay half enough now to support a family because it's more and more expected that everybody's going to work. Well, that's the direction we're going. So I can't tell, I can't say to young married women, stay home. You may have to work. You may have no choice. I can tell you to consider the options. It may be that you can stay home and raise children if you are willing to live in a rented house or to buy used cars or to get some of your furniture at the garage sales instead of the high-priced stores. There are sacrifices that can be made. sometimes but sometimes you may have to work and I can tell you this don't buy into the feminist doctrine that being a mother and raising children is second-class citizenship and don't buy into the doctrine that somehow that's a bondage to male dominance the fruit of the tree for Eve today is the idea that you can't be fulfilled unless you have a commercial or political career some of the early feminist leaders now are beginning to realize they've made a mistake one day on an airplane I picked up a coming back from Toronto to Chicago I the hostess came down the aisle and had a bunch of magazines and I pulled out that one one of those women's magazines I can't remember the name of it I hadn't read it before and lo and behold here was an article by a British prominent British feminist leader saying maybe we made a mistake when I was younger we we campaigned for careers and I wanted my career and I aborted my first three babies and then I discovered when I got to the place where I wanted a baby I could no longer conceive and look what I've done to myself so there is some rethinking I believe some of these feminist leaders are beginning to realize they cheated their sisters but The government is still pushing for daycare more and more to get everybody out, and I'm very thankful that one of our presidential candidates is at least saying, okay, if we're going to subsidize daycare, we will also make payments to the women who stay at home to raise children so we don't end up subsidizing the two-family, two-income families, at the expense of the one-income family. That's rather important. and I hope that I don't sound dogmatic on these things I try not to be I have three daughters and I I like to think I have some understanding of the problems of young women today I think most of us men don't I think most of us parents my age men or women don't realize the pressures that are being put on young women today especially in the universities to aspire to the governor's mansion instead of to being a mother with children but I made up my mind that I was going to see to it that my daughters had career opportunities and I paid for the college education of all three of them. One of them is a MSW, Master of Social Work, had a career already in supervising a big part of an adoption agency, just adopted her own first baby this summer. One is a registered nurse and one just graduated from Northern Illinois University in in the spring and started two weeks ago her first job as a public school teacher so if these girls choose when the children come along if they choose to be homemakers it will be by choice and by conviction not because they can't do anything else they are all trained to have a career if they so choose but the mother in the home my wife does what Titus II says and she teaches the daughters the importance of raising the children at home. I watched this news about this case of child abuse in that daycare center out in California. That's alleged child abuse because they've thrown out a lot of those and maybe the others haven't gone to trial yet. But I remember one mother who's child had allegedly been abused saying to the television cameras, there isn't anything I wouldn't do for my child. It's terrible what's happened. There's anything I wouldn't do for my child. And I thought to myself, oh yes, there is. You wouldn't stay home and raise that child. You take it down and turn it over to somebody else to raise. Don't say there's nothing you wouldn't do for your child. It's a great value to being a mother in the home and raising children, not to be lightly discarded. Now let's go on. If all this seems hard on the women, and sometimes it does, I would like you to notice that there is also a compensating role reversal here in verse fifteen. In creation, Adam was central, and Eve was the support person. In the temptation, Satan chose to attack on the flank That is to come up against Eve instead of against Adam. In the response from God, he accepted Eve as the battleground. That is, the battle will be on the right flank instead of in the center. And he announced that through Eve the ultimate victory will come. I will put enmity between you, that is between you and the serpent. God's talking to the serpent. I'll put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. He, that's her seed, Jesus, will bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. It's an allusion to Calvary here. Cross of Christ. It's one of those very early predictions of the Cross of Christ, not spelled out like it is hundreds and hundreds of several thousand years later in Isaiah. A virgin will conceive and bear a son. Very vague here, just that her descendants... are going to bruise your head and you're going to bruise his heel. Reference to the nails in the feet of the Lord Jesus. And of course, the allusion to the snake, if you get bit by a snake, you get bit on the ankle, not on the neck, unless you learn down the ground or something, he can't reach your neck, he bites you on the heel. But if you go to get a snake, you don't grab them by the tail, a poisonous snake, you don't grab them by the tail, you've got to crush his head. And so then the reference, veiled reference to the coming of the Lord Jesus, the seed of the woman, born of a virgin, he would crush the head of the serpent on Calvary. The battleground was going to be fought over the woman. Where does Adam fit into all this? Well, he now is the support person. He is the provider. He is the helper so that Eve can go about with the business of raising children and defeating Satan. And let's leave this passage now and turn to First Timothy two. Just got a very few minutes left here and I will conclude, I think, with First Timothy two. the last verse of the chapter very difficult verse to interpret all kinds of explanations have been offered for first timothy two fifteen talking about eve and the woman she will be saved in childbearing what does it mean well i think maybe i think maybe the best explanation i've heard of this verse is that eve in childbearing in being a mother regains the glory that she lost in Eden. Because the battle doesn't end with the Virgin Mary and the birth of Jesus. It continues with the promulgation of the race. Here on this planet, Satan's territory, God planted humanity, and God brings forth a people for his name, generation after generation. Satan continues to be defeated every time a woman bears a child and raises that child for God. Now, the central role of the battle may reverse, but it does not reverse God's plan for headship and the family. And you see that a little earlier here in chapter two, verse eight. Therefore I desire that the men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting, in like manner also that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel and so forth. And then in verse eleven or verse twelve I do not permit a woman to teach. So... The headship of the family and the leadership of the church has not changed just because the role reversal has changed. Just because the battle is being fought in the mother and the man has become the supporting person, the leadership continues as it was in the second chapter of Genesis. And so God says, I want the men... of the congregation to pray. It's very strong in the Greek here. It's much stronger in Greek than in English. There are two infinitives. I want the men to pray and I want the women to adorn themselves in modest apparel. The men are to take the spiritual headship in the home and in the church. And that's important. It's important that we, you know, sometimes some of us men are much better at preaching about what the women can't do than we are preaching about what the men should do. And the emphasis in this passage here is what God wants the men to do and want the men to lead. You look at your breaking of bread service, brethren, and consider your own participation in it. When you come to that table, do you come empty of anything to offer because you've been watching the late show or the football game and you haven't got a heart prepared for God? Do you come having something to offer, but it lacks freshness? One of the complaints many young people have about the predictable prayers of their elders. They could tell you in advance what that particular elder is going to pray on that Sunday morning because he prayed that same prayer every Sunday morning for ten years. And there's nothing fresh in it, nothing to indicate he's gotten something new from the Lord. The Lord Jesus gave us a formula. for preaching and praying and everything else he says the wise man brings out of his pantry some things new and some things old let's not have everything new and novel let's have a good stable roast beef and potatoes but let's have something fresh and different too like oysters or something we haven't had for a while you know it's a nice combination the formula from the Lord Jesus and when I get up anywhere pulpit or anywhere else I don't want to give up the old truths of the gospel but at the same time There has to be something in my heart that is fresh and new. Even when I preach a message and I might have extensive notes on it, I just feel totally inadequate if there hasn't been some re-going over it and some new fresh thoughts in the Word of God that will add a life to that message. So we don't want to come to the Lord's table with an absence of freshness. It might be good for some men to take a little tape recorder and set it down in the seat and just before they get up to pray to switch it on. and do this for two or three Sundays, and then listen to their prayers and find out whether there was anything fresh and blessing. You might be surprised if you listen to yourself sometime. And then it says, with holy hands, lifting up holy hands, an allusion probably to bribery, you see. The man who stands before the congregation of God, if those hands are taking... bribes or doing dishonest things during the week. Oh, that's devastating to the local assembly and devastating to his family. They've got to be holy hands. There has to be a real honesty of life and a real piety, not a pretended piety. Remember the lesson of Ananias and Sapphira. Peter said, you didn't have to You didn't have to bring all the money. You didn't have to give any of the money when you sold the property. But you pretended to give it all. You were pretending. And I don't think that we can harm our children much more than we harm them if we pretend on Sunday morning that we are totally devoted to the Lord. And those kids know that we are really totally devoted to the football game on Sunday afternoon and not to the Lord. Now, you don't have to give up football. to be a Christian leader. Your kids will respect you if you have a tremendous devotion to the football game or to sports. And they'll follow you in that devotion. What will turn them off is not that devotion to other things, but the pretense that it's not there, that you're totally devoted to the Lord. Be what you are, but don't pretend to a piety you don't have, because that is devastating to our children. And then finally in the home, family devotions. Dad, lead your family in prayer, your wife and your children. Bill Gothard in his seminar says, the husband ought to lead the devotions, but the wife, who is the organizer of the home, ought to see that the Bibles are there and the children are there and get everything ready and set it all up and the meal ends or the meal starts and you have it. She has it all set up. Here's the Bible. Dad take over. That's a good combination. I think Bill Gothard's probably right about that. And we used to gather our children around the table, and we'd have a Bible for each one of them, and we'd all read a verse. King James Version is probably the best version of the Bible to teach children to read for two reasons. First of all, the grammar is awkward, not our modern grammar, so they have to read every word and get it right. They can't just slur through it. And second, because the King James Version is a masterpiece of one-syllable words. Take for instance, John three sixteen, twenty-five words and nineteen of them are single syllable words. It rates at something like a sixth or seventh grade reading level because of the preponderance of one and two syllable words in it. And that's good for children too. The names are a little different, they're harder, but that's true in all the versions. Have it read around. And then dad, say a prayer, say a simple prayer. And mom, if your husband's a man who works with his hands and he's not very good with his voice, Tell him afterward, that was a good prayer, Dad. That was nice. Encourage him. It's hard sometimes for a man who doesn't do a lot of public speaking to lead and he's awkward about it. Needs that encouragement. And then, you know, you can take a Kleenex box that's sort of the square type and knock the top out of it and start putting missionary cards in every time you get one. And then sit down at the table and take the, if you've got five in the family, take the first five cards and pass them around. And every child and mom and dad will pray for the missionary on their card and put them at the back of the box. And then next time you go, you take the next bunch. So they all pray. And you don't have to pray long prayers and that type of thing. But you become a spiritual leader in the home. And then finally set standards for your home and let the children know that the standards are coming from dad, not from mom, but from dad. I wasn't raised in an evangelical home, but it had evangelical roots. We went to movies in days when evangelicals didn't go to movies. We went Friday night with mom and dad, and Saturday night we'd go down and watch the cowboy pictures. I lived in a suburb of Chicago. But we never went to movies on Sunday. And one day I said to my dad, Dad, why don't we go to movies on Sunday? And dad said, in our family, we don't go to movies on Sunday. That's all I ever got out of. No reason. In our family, we don't go to movies on Sunday. But I'm telling you, I was proud of that. I could go to school and the kids could talk about movies and what they went to on Sunday. I said, in our family, we don't go to movies on Sunday. I was proud of that because it represented a headship, a leadership in the home. My dad had set a standard, and we were a little different. We were a little different than others. We had something that came from dad, and we saw this when we raised our own kids. Because we had this evening family devotions, you know, and right after supper, when everybody wanted to go out and pray, this was in Prince Edward Island. Everybody, all the kids wanted to get out and play. All the kids were out and play, and they were just, oh, they were just agonized there that they couldn't get out because we were going to spend twenty minutes in family devotions, and then the doorbell rang. And one of the neighbor kids was there, and he came and he, well, we just sit down there in the step for a few minutes, and you can listen in, we're having our devotions. Okay, and the next day the doorbell rang again, same time. And we discovered that some of the neighbor kids realized we had something they didn't have and they wanted to be there. And after that we had no problem with our kids because they realized that they had a little something special. The others didn't have. Well, at the time is up and we'll stop at that point by asking the Lord's blessing. Father in heaven, thank you for the guidance regarding the family and the home that we find in the early chapters of Genesis. and in the New Testament epistles. Lord, help us who are men to be spiritual leaders, to take a leadership role in our home so that our wives and daughters won't feel the pressure so much from the world to comply with worldly standards, but we'll be glad and happy to have an opportunity to submit to a father and a husband who's worth submitting to. Just as we, Lord, submit to the Lord Jesus, and we're glad to do it because he's worthy of that submission. We pray in his name, amen.