Do you have a bad attitude? Do your kids have bad attitudes? If you and/or they do, I know why: wrong or faulty expectations. It’s probably hard to overestimate how many people suffer from a bad attitude (sometimes it’s called depression or anxiety or frustration or disappointment or anger or . . .) because their expectations don’t take into account one small factor: reality! When things don’t work out the way they expect or want them to, they think something must be wrong, or this or that wouldn’t have happened. It’s silly that anyone would think this way, but we all tend to, naturally. It is the bent of our fallen, sinful human nature.
So it goes to reason that the solution to a bad attitude is a realistic understanding of the way things are, not the way we wish them to be. Strangely, one of the most comforting passages of Scripture I’ve discovered as if for the first time this past year is in Genesis 3, where we read of the consequences of the curse because of Adam and Eve’s fall. As a result of their disobedience, the Lord confronts them with these horrible words:
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
I could make a joke about listening to your wife, but Adam was charged with protecting Eve and the Garden, and he did neither. That’s why the Lord addresses him and not Eve. Plus he represents not just Eve, but the whole human race to come from him.
The result of his disobedience is that the physical creation is now “cursed,” and things becoming difficult, very much so. Originally created there was no struggle in nature. Now to make a living, as we would say today, or survive at all as was the challenge in the ancient world, will require “painful toil” and “the sweat of” our brow. In the midst of this struggle we can expect “thorns and thistles,” or we might call them obstacles, frustrations, difficulties, challenges, etc. These are what we should expect in life! Not ease and smooth sailing as we too often do. As if to confirm this, Jesus says in one of the great biblical understatements, “In this world you will have trouble.” Ya think! This world is trouble.
As I’ve been meditating on this depressing recitation of our fallen condition these last several months, I’ve noticed that the Lord says to Adam a perfectly biblical three times, you will eat, you will eat, you will eat. It may be terribly difficult, but God promises to provide for our survival, and mostly our flourishing, even if some of us wish we’d flourish more.
In the passage I quoted above, Jesus couches his understatement between two phrases. In the first he’s telling them “these things” (that they will betray him before his arrest) so that they “may have peace,” and that they should take heart because he has “overcome the world.” What Jesus is saying, is that we should never think of the troubles we have in this world apart from his purpose and work for us, his people. The goal of the Christian life isn’t our best life now, but sanctification. We can have confidence that all things work for our good, as Paul says, so that we might “be conformed to the image of his Son.”
When we think of this passage in Genesis about the curse, we can conclude that it’s no coincidence that Jesus wore a crown of thorns on the cross. He willingly took the curse of the “thorns and thistles” upon himself, and in this overcame the world that we might have peace, not an emotional equanimity primarily, but as Paul says, peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The antidote to a bad attitude is not only proper expectations about the frustrating nature of life in a fallen world, but that the ultimate fulfillment, hope, and purpose of our existence can never be found in this life. Only an eternal perspective of our mundane existed rooted in our relationship to a crucified and risen Savior is the answer for a bad attitude.
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