Today’s Scripture Reading

¹⁶ 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.”

¹⁷ 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.

¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,

and you will eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ 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.”

²⁰ Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

GEN.3.16-24

Today’s Devotional Reading

A Firm But Loving God

God’s response to Adam and Eve’s disobedience is usually understood as a straightforward punishment, and it certainly reads that way. But God’s words are also a statement of the way things are: suffering is a fact of life, and it is caused by attachment. God then sends them forth and sets cherubs and a flaming sword “to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Throughout the Genesis account, God may appear afraid that humans will “reach out…and take also from the tree of life,” thus gaining sufficient divine qualities to become competitors for God’s power and reign. If this were indeed God’s motivation, it would come from attachment to power and glory, and the actions springing from it would be unjust. The cherubs and flaming sword, and the banishment itself, would serve to protect God against humans. Yet, when read with an appreciation of human addiction, Genesis becomes the story of a free and purely loving Creator who knows that Eve and Adam will not be able to withstand the compulsion to eat from that second tree.

Banishment is thus more protection than punishment. The cherubs and the flaming sword are there to protect humanity’s freedom rather than to defend God’s power. In a tender maternal moment before Eve and Adam leave, God makes clothing for them. This is not the action of a frightened God who clings to divinity, but of a free and loving God who knows that human life cannot be full unless it depends on its Creator.

—GERALD G. MAY

PRAYER:

Lord, thank you for reaching out to me in my powerlessness. Help me to look to you for day-by-day protection and power.

Today’s devotional reading is pulled from: NIV Recovery Devotional Bible