Now Everything Is Ruined

Now Everything Is Ruined

He said to the woman, “I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy, and in pain you will give birth. And you will desire to control your husband, but he will rule over you.”

And to the man he said, “Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. . . . For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3:16-19

Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse.

Romans 8:20

Have you ever put something red with a load of white clothes in the washing machine? You pull the clothes out of the washer only to find that everything is ruined. Everything has been tainted with red.

This is what happened when the darkness of sin entered the pure atmosphere of the Garden of Eden. And when sin entered this perfect world, it wasn’t only humans who felt the effects. All of creation became cursed. The animal kingdom was no longer tame; the ground became full of thorns and weeds; and the atmosphere produced deadly weather conditions. Sin ruined everything, and everything changed. Nothing is the way it was created to be.

Death, disease, and destruction are the realities of a world that is under a curse. We regularly experience the brokenness of this cursed world in the form of natural disasters, an environment that is deteriorating, and bodies that die. Romans 8:22 says that “all creation has been groaning” under this curse. But the day is coming when that groaning will end. “Creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay” (Romans 8:21). This is what all of history is moving toward—when God restores his entire creation to the way it was before sin ruined everything.

DISCUSSION STARTERS

What do you think it was like to live in the Garden of Eden?

What are some of the ways you experience sin’s curse on the world?

What will be some of the best things about the day described in Revelation 22:3 when “no longer will there be a curse upon anything”?