You Are Life

You Are Life

In Genesis 3, God pronounced a curse on the serpent, the earth, Adam and Eve, and all their descendants. So we might expect that Adam would slink away under the weight of all of the bad news. But Adam also heard hope in what God said. He heard the promise of an offspring who would reverse the Curse. Adam’s first words after hearing the Curse express his faith in what God had promised: “The man—Adam—named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all who live” (Genesis 3:20). God said Adam would die, returning to dust; yet Adam immediately named his wife Eve because she would be the mother of all the living. Adam caught the promise buried in the Curse, and by naming his wife “life,” he confessed his faith that God would indeed bring the blessing of life out of this curse of death.

Adam had failed the test in the Garden. He had failed to live up to all that God had intended for him. Yet here he teaches us to put our hope in the One who will not fail. Faced with certain death and inevitable suffering, Adam put his hope in the promise of the offspring who would crush the head of the one who led him into sin. The anticipation began for the Son who would come. The woman would experience painful labor to bring him forth, but the confident hope of all those who believed God’s promise was that when he came, he would put an end to pain.

Here is the hope for all of us who have inherited this nature of sin from our father, Adam: that we might also learn from him how to stare the curse of death in the face and celebrate the promise that this curse is not God’s final word. God’s final Word is his Son, Jesus, who said,

I tell you the truth, those who listen to my message and believe in God who sent me have eternal life. They will never be condemned for their sins, but they have already passed from death into life. And I assure you that the time is coming, indeed it’s here now, when the dead will hear my voice—the voice of the Son of God. And those who listen will live. (John 5:24-25)

Lord, you are life itself, and we believe you are the promised offspring sent to break the curse of death. Because of you, we do not have to live in this sin-cursed world of pain only to die. Instead, we live with the confidence that we have already passed from death to life in you.