LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2010, Page 309

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309

THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

and he shall rule over you. And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded
you [singular], ‘You [singular] shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you [singular]; in
pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and
you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of
your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the
ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.” (Gen 3:14–19)
The righteous God will not be mocked, nor will He be hoodwinked by Satan’s schemes (2 Cor 2:11). God’s pronouncement of
judgment begins with Satan. The day will come when Satan will
receive in full what he deserves. As he deceived the woman and
led her into sin, so through her seed (offspring) his head will be
crushed. This judgment is accomplished through Jesus, the seed
of the woman, who crushed Satan’s power through His death and
resurrection.
To the woman, part of God’s judgment is that pain will accompany childbirth. Furthermore, the Lord God said to her: “Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you” (Gen
3:16).24 With the perfect harmony of marriage destroyed, competition and conflict now corrupt the husband and wife relationship.
The painful effects of sin will be evident in her vocation as mother
and wife.
God’s judgment was also addressed to the man. The “ground”
(adamah) from which Adam (adam) was taken is cursed. Only with
difficulty will the ground cooperate, however hard he struggles
to reap its produce. It will grow thorns and thistles so that by the
sweat of his brow he will have to fight the ground until the day
he physically dies. Adam’s sin, as he was duly warned, would ultimately lead to physical death. Like a drumbeat, “and he died”
becomes the repeated refrain in the history of Adam’s descendants
(see Gen 5). Tragically, the individual judgments imposed on the
man and the woman, and the burdens they bore, affected them both
by virtue of their one flesh union.
Against the dark backdrop of God’s righteous judgment, the
Genesis 3 narrative contains rays of light and hope for humanity’s
future. In addition to the first Gospel promise, God lovingly provides garments to cover their shame. Adam gives the woman an
honorable name: Eve (which means in Hebrew, “the mother of all
the living”). Whereas Adam is the origin of the human race, Eve is
the mother of the human race. They will remain together as husband
and wife, still able to have children. They will continue to know the
joy of love, though now tempered by the brokenness of sin.

plight. The God of Israel entered into the history of Israel. The Second Person of the Trinity took to Himself our human nature and
made it His own. Incredible as it sounds, the Creator of the human
race became a member of the human race (John 1:14). He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. The Son of
God became the true obedient Israel, the seed promised to Adam
and Eve, and later to Abraham.25 He became Israel’s righteous messianic king, of the house and lineage of David.

Salvation in Christ

Regenerated and renewed
Men and women, especially in their relationship to each other,
desperately need the power of Christ’s rescue and restoration in
their lives. Sin makes people “stuck” on themselves—often obsessively so. This ugly sickness has the potential to sap the life out
of once healthy relationships and to tear people apart, sometimes
irreparably. This bondage to the sinful self must be broken, and
Christ alone can do it.
Through Holy Baptism, sinners are joined to Christ and His
death and resurrection. “The old self” was crucified with Christ
“so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom 6:6). As
a result we are now dead to sin and alive to God in Christ (Rom
6:11). By Baptism, God regenerates and renews us by His Spirit
(Titus 3:5). We have been born anew by water and the Spirit (John
3:1–8). Everyone in Christ is a new creation. Baptism means death
to practices that make love grow cold and undermine a trusting

Through Adam’s rebellion sin and death entered into human
history and spread to the whole human race (Rom 5:12). Yet from
the very beginning the Lord God was intent on re-weaving His tapestry so that human relationships, including man-woman relationships, would reflect His original design. Already in the garden, the
Lord promised that the woman’s seed would crush the evil one’s
head. Faithful to this promise, He chose Abraham and promised
that through him and his seed all the families of the earth would
be blessed (Gen 12:1–3; 22:18; Gal 3:16–18). In Moses and the
Prophets, God repeated His promise and showed forth His work of
redemption throughout the history of ancient Israel.
The Incarnation
When “the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son,
born of woman” (Gal 4:4) to rescue human beings from their

The public ministry of Jesus
Baptized by John, Jesus of Nazareth entered His public ministry as Israel’s messianic king. Through His Son’s public ministry,
God the Father inaugurated His end-time saving reign promised and
foreshadowed centuries earlier. Now God’s kingly reign was invading the world in the One whose name meant “Savior” of sinners
(Matt 1:21). He lived up to His name. Jesus, at a very personal level,
brought the kingdom of God to both men and women. He healed
the sick—a man named Bartimaeus and Peter’s mother-in-law. He
raised the dead—Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter. He drove out demons—from Mary Magdalene and a man blind and mute in a synagogue. He forgave sinners—a paralytic in Capernaum and a woman
stigmatized as “sinful.” He publicly conversed with and dined with
sinners—a Samaritan woman and a tax collector named Levi. To
assist in carrying out His ministry, Jesus called 12 men to be His
disciples. Luke points out that a number of women also “were with
him” and “provided for them out of their means” (8:1, 3).
The last Adam
Once again we see the warmth and engagement of a God
who reaches down to love those whom He has made, but in a
way no human mind can fully grasp. In the words of St. Paul,
“Oh the depth of the riches and wisdom of God … how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom 11:33). The Word through whom
the first Adam was made became the Last Adam Himself
(1 Cor 15:45), the origin and representative of the new human race.
He lived a perfectly obedient life so that He might reverse and undo
the disobedience of the first Adam and his descendants. Just as sin
and death came into the world through the first Adam, so through
the Last Adam came righteousness before God and eternal life
(Rom 5:12–21). Apart from Christ, no man or woman is righteous
before God, because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God” (Rom 3:23). By His grace and because of Christ’s all-sufficient work, God has forgiven His wayward creatures—a gift which
we personally receive through faith. As St. Paul expressed it in another place, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor 5:19).

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