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  1. The Craftiness of the Serpent
  2. Where did the serpent attack man?
  3. What do you think Adam and Eve experienced instantly?
    1. What happens when we realize we made a mistake?
      1. What is the fallout of the sin in creation?
  1. Gen 3:17-19–Curse of Adam
  2. the woman was punished by the entrance of sorrow into the small subjective world of her womanly calling, man is punished by the derangement of the great objective world over which he was to have dominion. Instead of protecting his wife and shielding her from evil, he had passively followed her lead in disobeying God’s command; and therefore “the ground,” the adâmâh out of which Adam had been formed, instead of being as heretofore his friend and willing subject, becomes unfruitful, and must be forced by toil and labour to yield its produce. Left to itself, it will no longer bring forth choice trees laden with generous fruit, such as Adam found in the garden, but the natural tendency will be to degenerate, till “thorns” only “and thistles” usurp the ground. Even after his struggle with untoward nature man wins for himself no paradisiacal banquet, but must “eat the herb of the field” (Job 30:4); and the end of this weary struggle is decay and death. In the renewed earth the golden age of paradise will return, and the tendency of nature will no longer be to decay and degeneration, but to the substitution unceasingly of the nobler and the more beautiful in the place of that which was worthless and mean (Isaiah 55:13) (Ellicot Commentary).
    1. Adam listened to the voice of His wife over God.
      1. See Matthew 10:34-39
        1. Who are we to listen to?
        1. See Job 2:9
          1. Is Job more righteous than Adam?
  3. Verse 19 – thorns and thistles it shall bring forth.
    1. Hebrews 6 on apostacy verse 8 – But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.
  • Verse 21 – Benson Commentary  – Unto Adam and his wife did God make — By his own word coats of skins — Of beasts slain, either to show them what death is, or rather, as is more probable, in sacrifice to God, to prefigure the great sacrifice which, in the latter days, should be offered once for all. Thus the first animal that died was a sacrifice, or Christ in a figure. God clothed them: 1st, to defend them from the heat and cold, and other injuries of the air to which they were now to be exposed: 2d, to remind them of their fall, which had made that nakedness, which was before innocent and honorable, an occasion of sin and shame, and therefore it needed a covering. God also, by this act of kindness, probably intended to show his care even of fallen man, to encourage his hopes of mercy through a Mediator, and thereby to invite him to repentance.
  • Driven Out of the Garden
  • Behold man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.
    • Like one of us – typically thought of the Trinity.
      • Consider Isaiah 6 and specifically verse 8.  The vision Isaiah is seeing the Heavenly court.  Consider the us passage in Isaiah with Genesis 3:22.
      • Lest he take and eat of the tree and live forever.
        • Revelation 22:14 – Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates.
        • See Genesis 2:16
        • Was it a specific tree?
  • Verse 24 – God drove them out.
    • Matthew 21:12-13 –  And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 13 He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”
    • God placed a Cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
    • The Cherub were placed over the Ark of the Covenant.

Mentioned here without explanation, as if their character must be well known to the readers. The O.T. contains two representations of the Cherubim: (1) they are beings who uphold the throne of God, cf. 1 Samuel 4:4, 2 Samuel 6:2, 2 Kings 19:15, Psalm 80:2; Psalm 99:1; possibly, in this aspect, they were originally the personification of the thunder clouds, cf. Psalm 18:10. “And he (Jehovah), rode upon a cherub, and did fly,” where the passage is describing the Majesty of Jehovah in the thunderstorm: (2) they are symbols of the Divine Presence, e.g. two small golden cherubim upon the Ark of the Covenant, Exodus 25:18 ff.; two large-winged creatures made of olive wood, sheltering the Ark in the Holy of Holies, 1 Kings 6:23. They were represented in the works of sacred art in the Tabernacle, Exodus 25:18 ff.: and on the walls and furniture of the Temple, 1 Kings 6:29; 1 Kings 6:35; 1 Kings 7:29; 1 Kings 7:36, cf. Ezekiel 41:18 ff.

The description of the four living creatures in Ezekiel 1:5 ff; Ezekiel 10:20 ff., gives us the Prophet’s conception of the Cherubim, each one with four faces (of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle), and each one with four wings. But in Ezekiel 41:18-19 the Cherubim have two faces, one of a man, and one of a lion. It is natural to compare the Assyrian composite figures, winged bulls, and lions with men’s heads. In the present passage, the Cherubim are placed as sentinels at the approach to the Tree of Life, and, therefore, we are probably intended to understand that they stood, one on either side of the entrance to the garden, like the two winged figures at the entrance of an Assyrian temple. They are emblematical of the presence of the Almighty: they are the guardians of His abode.

the flame of a sword] It is not usually noticed that we have in these words a protection for the Tree of Life quite distinct from the Cherubim. The hasty reader supposes that the “sword” is a weapon carried by the Cherubim. In pictures, the sword with the flame turning every way is put into the hand of a watching Angel. But this misrepresents the language of the original Hebrew, which states that God placed, at the east of the garden, not only the Cherubim, but also “the flame of a sword which turned every way.” What the writer intended to convey we can only conjecture. Very probably it was a representation of the lightnings which went forth from the Divine Presence, and were symbolical of unapproachable purity and might.