Excerpt From Spiritual Leadership

“I love the term ‘hand in glove’. It’s a fashioned relationship. It was not good for man to be alone. So God made a helper suitable, fashioned to fit him. Not just biologically, not just physically, emotionally, spiritually. This is a companion. And together they are the image of God. They are to obey God in the commission He’s given them. 

Of course, satan tempts the woman. She gives it to him. He takes and eats. In the curse section of Genesis 2 and 3, the whole storyline, we have to be careful. God does not curse the man or the woman. He curses the servant. He curses the ground, the context in which they live. The curse has an effect on each of them differently. She’s going to have pain in childbearing. She’s going to want to dominate her husband. 

He’s going to work and sweat and toil. And what was supposed to produce and cultivate and be a worshipful experience is now a labor of thorn and thistle. And there’s some deep meaning in all this. This isn’t just a garden trimming the hedges and weeding the garden. This is a picture of the fact that life and work are going to be difficult, fraught with trouble, fraught with unintended consequences. The fall affected everything. God exiled them from the garden. 

I have to believe there’s a garden glow right before they’re pushed out and it probably lasted a minute. Of course, Christ has to make clothing suitable for them. Man can’t hide or cover his own sin. God makes a temporary covering for his sin and that’ll require a blood sacrifice. This points to the eventual need for Jesus to die on the cross as a sufficient covering for our sin.”

Links Mentioned

The Danvers Statement

Watch the highlights and full version of this interview on our Youtube channel.

For more inContext interviews, click here.