Question from a reader:
I’m planning on distributing your Heaven booklet to my family as an outreach tool for them to come to know Jesus. As I am reading through the beginning of the booklet, you speak about the Curse. I understand the Curse that was given to us by God from the sin of Adam. However, as I am thinking of my family who do not know the Lord, and I would like a simple answer for them of what it means when you speak of the Curse with a capital C.
Answer from Chelsea Dudley:
Simply put, the Curse is the effects of sin on both humans and the earth. For humans, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). And for the earth, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field” (Genesis 3:17-18).
Through Jesus, God will end the Curse on both man and the earth. Revelation 22:3 says, “No longer will there be any curse.” One day God will redeem, restore, recreate, rescue, renew, and reconcile all that the Curse has touched.
Here is a short video from Randy.
And here is a quote from John Piper that I think will be helpful:
God had warned Adam and Eve that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would die (Genesis 2:17). But the devil-serpent told Eve that God was a liar. They would not die. They would become like God (Genesis 3:4–5)! And they believed him and ate (Genesis 3:6–7).
Do you see what happened? As long as Adam and Eve believed God, they would have life — abundant life, full of the joy of sweet fellowship with their Father. Trusting God with all their heart would have protected them.
But when they listened to a deceiver and trusted in their own understanding (Proverbs 3:5), it opened to them a world of horror. Their eyes, and the eyes of all of us descendants, were opened to evil and blinding complexities that none of us have the capacity to grasp. Fear and self-worship turned us pathologically selfish. We became susceptible to all sorts of deception.
And God pronounced a curse on them that we who sin like them have inherited (Genesis 3:17–19). Death entered the human experience and with it all sorts of affliction and trouble.
When Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” what he meant was that he had come to reverse this curse. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Jesus came to bear “our sins in his body on the tree that we might live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
