CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF PARADISE―continued

I DWELT, in the last chapter, upon the narrative of the Fall, and upon its religious significance. There remain, however, two or three points of great importance arising out of the narrative, which I have reserved for a separate consideration.

In the account of the Fall, we have the picture of man's disobedience, and the penalty in which not only he is involved, but also all his descendants. Sin is represented as the cause of separation from God's presence; suffering, pain, death, as its penalty.

The great problem arising from the universality of suffering is thus presented to us in its simplest light. It is the consequence of sin, it is the chastisement for disobedience. In the third chapter of Genesis, suffering and death are very naturally regarded, according to the first and most obvious explanation of the passage, in the light of a punishment alone. But it is only a superficial view of the Israelite narrative that can regard the penalty of physical death (Gen. iii. 19), and all the woes

attendant upon our earthly frame, in the light of the curse. The only "curse" actually uttered in the narrative is pronounced upon the serpent and upon the soil (Gen. iii. 14, 17). The curse under which humanity lies, is the sentence pronounced upon the sinner, that of his expulsion from the presence of God. Physical death is but its type, the memorial of the power of sin, the emblem of its influence. In a colloquial sense, "death" may be "the curse" of the human race; but it is not truly so, and certainly not according to the teaching of our Genesis narrative. We know now that even the penalty of death was not without its mercies. That could be no curse alone which, not only in the Hebrew race, but in every nation under the sun, has been the supreme witness of love, and the highest possible offering of self-sacrifice. That could be no curse alone which leads us in thought to the foot of the Cross, where the Saviour died.

No; physical pain, suffering, and death, these are the witnesses in our flesh to disobedience-a physical penalty, indeed, but a penalty incommensurable with moral guilt. The curse rests upon the sin of our nature, upon all that prompts to it (iii. 14), and all that shares in it (iii. 17). But man is not without hope. Even in death the penalty is a pledge of victory (iii. 15). And even the sorrow and pain, the outward memorials

of the curse, are limited to "the days of life” (iii. 17).

Such seems to be the teaching of our chapter, when viewed in the light of later Revelation. The theology of the Old Testament follows a line of gradual development, which only recent studies have fully convinced us of. Nowhere, perhaps, is the advance in religious thought so noticeable as in the treatment of the problem of suffering and pain. In the early stages of Israelitish religion, every calamity that overtook individual or nation was apt to be interpreted as a punitive visitation, as a retribution, equivalent, or, at least, corresponding, in degree of misery, to the gravity of the offence. But, in process of time, obvious objections were raised. The cases in which the innocent suffered with the guilty, or in which the innocent suffered and the guilty escaped scot-free, were too numerous to be explained away, either as rare exceptions, or as instances of depravity, where the hypocrisy which eluded human detection was overtaken by the just punishment of God's anger. The sorrows of the innocent are the theme of a large portion of Hebrew poetry; sometimes it is the case of individual, sometimes of national suffering. The book of Job, many of the Psalms, the books of Lamentations and Ecclesiastes, and numerous passages among the Prophets, exemplify in different ways the mental disquiet which accompanied the conflict

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of the earlier traditional teaching with the fresh facts and new thoughts of a later time. The sorrows of the Exile, and the sufferings of the innocent "servant of the Lord," shed a new light upon the dark mystery, and gave a fresh significance to physical pain and earthly troubles.

The story of the Fall seems at first sight to belong to the earlier stage of thought, as if the proposition were laid down that man's offence was to be paid for in suffering. It may be so. But the language is certainly so chosen, that it is capable of conveying the teaching of the later and nobler development of religious conceptions. The Paradise narrative stands midway between superstition and the final Revelation, having, on the one side, the old and ignorant beliefs which roughly judged all calamity to be a Divine retribution for some known or hidden crime, and, on the other, the Gospel of the Cross of Christ. The Paradise narrative brings a message pregnant with evangelic truth. The punishment which is inflicted as the penalty and as the inevitable consequence of the transgression, is seen to be not vindictive but disciplinary. The infliction of earthly suffering is declared to be the constant witness of Divine displeasure towards sin. But, no less, death is God's appointed way for all flesh; it may be one of sorrow and sadness, it cannot be evil in itself. Death may be welcomewelcome as the grateful end to the assaults and the

ravages of sin, which desolate the earthly life of man: so much, at least, the story of Genesis taught. That death might even be the gate leading to eternal life, was the final step of the Revelation made known in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Towards that teaching the Genesis. narrative looks. It points us in the direction; it cannot show us the glory that should follow.

How deep and spiritual, then, is the beginning of that consoling lesson in our narrative! death, not the curse itself, but the penalty of it, reminding us of God's curse" upon sin; death, not evil in itself, but the last page in the book of earthly discipline; death, if the symbol of wrath against sin, yet the pledge of the conquest over sin itself. Instinctively we turn in thought to One who poured out His soul unto death, who became "sin" for us, who was "perfected through sufferings," who "was dead and lived again."

In that bright vision we realise, that the third chapter of Genesis tells no tale of an arbitrary Judge's severity against unoffending generations to come we see the discipline and the chastisement of man, the result of sin and the warning against it; we hear, in the curse upon the tempter, the wrath that goes eternally forth upon all sin and disobedibut we see too the crown of thorns, the cross of shame, the death of agony. Physical, mental, spiritual, woes are the pledge of perfect love, and

ence;