God’s Word for You

Genesis 3:17-19 Thorns, thistles, and dust

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, September 22, 2026

17 And to Adam he said, “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground because of you. With painful labor you will eat of it all the days of your life. 18 Thorns and thistles will spring from the ground for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Professor Jeske brilliantly assesses the punishment upon Adam: “He gave up his fear, love, and trust in God as he transgressed God’s commandment and ate of the forbidden fruit. Yet all this happened when he listened to his wife. As a constant reminder of this sinful default in his God-assigned role, he was now to experience insubordination” (Genesis 1-11 p. 160). This insubordination would even come from the soil. Before this, he had complete control over the earth, in or out of the Garden. Now the very earth would fight against him as he heaved and dragged the plow to break the clods of earth and plant his seed.

This trouble and profound difficulty was introduced for man’s benefit; for our benefit. It was no longer a perfect world with sinless people living in it; the world itself, the very ground, is cursed in Adam’s curse. Thistles and thorns now appear as difficulties. We don’t need to debate about whether they were modified at this time or created outright; the fact is that we have them and we are not getting rid of them. They did not evolve to protect plant life or to aid plants in climbing or collecting dew. They are a curse to lead man to look to God for help in the middle of pain, exhaustion, and frustration. Man can say with joy, “I cannot accomplish anything without you, O Lord,” but most often man is only led to say such a profound thing when his own strength, sweat, and endurance are stretched to the very limit.

And yet God has added more troubles than these. The insubordination of the soil ripples out into the rest of creation. It is not only thorns and thistles, but annoying stinging insects, vermin that destroy crops, moths and mice and rats and rabbits that consume what we have worked for. But there are still worse things. Grasshoppers sometimes transform into locusts that raid the land and consume everything. There are frosts, storms, lightning strikes, tornadoes, hurricanes, surging and overflowing rivers that relentlessly destroy whatever happen to be in their path. In some places cliffs break off and fall into the sea without any regard for the houses that are built there. In some places, holes open up in the earth; in the far north, ‘holes’ even appear in the ocean, whirlpools that consume whole ships and their crews and then disappear again overnight. Earthquakes do not discriminate in whose property they damage; they destroy equally with the kind of ‘fairness’ we wish did not exist.

These misfortunes, and everything else that falls under the heading of the land’s curse and man’s painful labor, are there to warn us of worse things that will come about in the last days. They teach us first to fear God above all things, for he is truly almighty; there is nothing that he cannot do. Job cried out, “Have pity on me my friends, have pity, for the hand of God has struck me!” (Job 19:21).

We should also notice that God changes the bulk of man’s diet. He had said in the Garden that man could eat from any and every single tree that was there except for one. Now? There would still be fruit trees, but sometimes their fruit would be harder to find, or limited in number. And it would spoil. Man would mostly eat crops, “the plants of the field.” And God foresees that man would learn to grind flour and mix it with water and salt to make bread. Not that we should read too much into this verse, as if the bread of the Lord’s Supper is here in the words. There is nothing to suggest that it is. But bread to eat and to preserve man’s physical life is here indeed. And just producing this to feed the family will be hard and strenuous work.

In fact, all work is difficult, not only farm work. Luther knew many kinds of work, from his father’s copper mines to the fieldwork of the monastery to the rigors of preparing and teaching in the classroom in more than one language (Luther usually taught in Latin and only sometimes in his native German). He said, “It would be far easier and more pleasant for me to be in the garden, to dig with a hoe, and to turn the ground with a spade than it is to carry on the work which I am now doing (preaching and teaching). For work on the farm does not compare with this strenuous exertion of ours” (LW 1:211).

But what comfort do we have among all our troubles and struggles? First, we will be released from the difficult work of this world in the end. “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). Second, yes it is true that our labor is hard. “My groans are many and my heart is faint” (Lamentations 1:22), but this burden teaches us to look to God to hold us up. “Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me” (Psalm 54:4). Third, we are taught to look to God for all his blessings whether large or small. He is the one who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food (2 Corinthians 9:10). He will not let us go hungry (Proverbs 10:3), and if he cares about our physical needs, he certainly cares about our spiritual needs. Why spare our lives from starvation only to condemn us? No, he loves us and he cares for us, and so just as he sees to the needs of our flesh, he also will see to the needs of our spirits. He fills us with good things, even though there is hard and sweaty work ahead for us.

His curse ends: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” This is certainly true. But it is also true that on account of Christ, we will rise up from the dust, made new again, without stain or sin or guilt or shame, and all because of Christ’s obedience, we will live with him forever in Paradise.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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