creation

Faith made Eve a mother  … and faith carries each of us through our life in this world

The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living. … The Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord” (Genesis 3:20, 23; 4:1).

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You can’t help but know that Mother’s Day has arrived.  We’ve been bombarded with TV commercials, print ads in newspapers, flyers in our mailboxes, emails and texts and phone alerts – all wanting to make sure we buy plenty of stuff for our moms. For this edition of The Electric Gospel, I’d like to offer something different from the commercial and sentimental emphases of Mother’s Day. Let’s consider some spiritual thoughts about the first mother, our first mother, Eve. She and Adam provide a lesson for all of us, for it is by faith in God’s promises that they were and we are able to carry on in this world.

When the first man and woman were created, they were made in the image of God, perfect and holy like their creator. Life was flawless for them in the Garden of Eden, the wonderful paradise God made as their home. It was a place where they were to live in love and friendship toward God and toward one another.

But you know the story well – and you’ve felt the impact of what happened. The perfect life of the perfect couple in the perfect garden was spoiled. Eve took the first bite of forbidden fruit. Adam followed suit. They consciously disregarded a way they were to honor God. When they broke away from God in that way, everything became broken. Satan’s temptation had suggested they would be like divine beings, able to distinguish good from evil (Genesis 3:5). That was a devilish half-truth. Adam and Eve did come to know things in a way they hadn’t known before, but not really in the way that God knows good and evil. God knows evil as the opposite of his character, “for God cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13).  God knows good as what he is, fully and absolutely. As the Word attests, “The Lord is upright … there is no unrighteousness in him” (Psalm 92:15). Adam and Eve had come to know things from an opposite perspective. They knew good as what they used to have, as perfection they had lost. They knew evil as a force that now inhabited them, as something they were fatally attracted to.  This was the great tragedy of humanity’s fall into sin.

After Adam and Eve’s sin, God confronted them in the Garden. There would be consequences to what they had done. 

To Adam, God said, “Now by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken” (Genesis 3:19).  The Garden of Eden would be closed to them.  Life would change. There would be sweat and work and weeds and toil.  

To Eve, God said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). So now, to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), as God had instructed them, would be no easy task.  Bringing children into the world would be difficult from start to finish. Sin had changed things.   

But even with those announcements of pain and difficulty in life, what Adam and Eve were hearing from God was good news. They had disobeyed God. They had defied God. They knew God’s warning – “The day you eat [from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil], you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Quite likely, Adam and Eve had expected to die immediately, on that very day, because of what they had done. They hid from God, afraid (Genesis 3:8). But God didn’t put them to death on the spot. He was letting them know life would be full of sorrow and hurt – but that meant they still would be alive, they still had a future. 

And God made the point even more clear. He turned to the serpent, through whom Adam and Eve had been tempted. God said to him: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). In those words Adam and Eve heard a promise of wonderful, renewed hope. A child born of woman would undo the damage that sin and the devil had done. God spoke of the woman’s offspring, so Eve and Adam knew that the future and God’s promise depended on her having offspring.

It was just then that the man (whom we know as “Adam”) gave his wife a name, Eve, which means life. “Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20 NIV). They were not dead but alive. They would have life, and their children would have life. There was hope for the whole human race. They did not give up in despair. They held onto hope and clung to God’s promise with faith. 

It was right after all that, right after being sent away from the Garden of Eden, that Adam and Eve began to have children. When they had their first child, they confessed their faith in what God had promised.  “With the Lord’s help I have had a baby boy,” Eve said (Genesis 4:1 NIrV).  In translating Eve’s words, it’s possible she was even thinking that this child, her first child, might already be the one that God meant in his promise – the one who would crush the serpent’s head and reverse the damage of sin. That wasn’t the case – the Promised One, Jesus Christ, wouldn’t arrive in the human story for several thousand years. But the hope and faith of Adam and Eve remained the same. God had given them promises on which to stake their faith. They grabbed onto those promises. Adam and Eve went forward to bring children into the world as an act of faith.

In my ministry days as a pastor in Texas, I met with young couples as they were planning for their weddings. In premarital counseling, I would ask couples about their plans as far as family, having children. I wanted to emphasize a reliance on God and being open to whatever blessings or challenges God might have in store. One young couple, when asked their plans regarding children, said, “Oh, we’re not planning to have children. We can’t imagine bringing children into this world. There’s just so much strife and pain – the crime and war and terrorism. And there’s already overpopulation. It just doesn’t seem right to subject children to a world full of as much trouble as this world.”

We spent some time talking that day. I talked with them about Adam and Eve. If there were ever a married couple on this planet who could say, “It doesn’t seem right bringing children into a world like this,” that would have been something fair for Adam and Eve to say. They had gone from absolute perfection in the Garden of Eden to a life of many pains. They knew that they and all their children would have to deal with sin and suffering and face death – all things they hadn’t known before.  It would have made perfect sense for Adam and Eve to say, “No. No way, no how are we going to have children. We will die for our sin, but we don’t need to subject any children to the same fate.” Yet that’s not at all what they said. They heard God’s mercy. They heard his words of promise. They went forward in hope, had children in hope, trusting God to give them life and redemption, to heal them from their sin.

And so it is with us today, not only for mothers but for every person of faith. Faith makes us ready to do whatever life asks of us. Faith in the promises of God, in the forgiveness of God, in the ultimate goodness of our God – that is what carries each of us through our life in this world. Consider the fact that Mother’s Day is not an easy day for many people. Many who have wanted to have children face the agony of infertility, or of a miscarriage, or the loss of a child. Families and individuals experience all sorts of strains and struggles in this world. As Christians, we live our lives as an act of faith, putting our trust in God to stay with us when times are dark and difficult. 

Faith made Eve a mother. Faith in Jesus gives us the strength to raise our children, to be families, to live our lives. God bless you on Mother’s Day and every day, in Jesus, born of Mary, descendant of Eve. In him we have life and hope forever. 

Scripture quotations, except where otherwise indicated, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.