Now Let Me Get This Straight

 Well friends, now that we’re one week into 2024, how are you all doing on your New Year’s resolutions?

Of course, our resolution never changes. Next to “Lose weight”, we just scratch off the old year and write in the new one. It probably won’t change as long as we love to eat like we do. This year, we’ve added “Don’t get Covid”, prompted by the fact that at least two of the family members we’ve loved on over the holidays have now tested positive. No worries, though; they’re both on the mend.

But as always, my number one ‘Resolution’ is to read more of my Bible.  Like the Living Book it is, it never fails to show me new understandings, even though often it’s a passage that I’ve read many times.

This morning, I got two “Thoughts”. I wouldn’t be so brazen as to call them “inspirations” because I’m no prophet. For that matter, I make no claims to authority other than that which the Bible gives me as a simple follower of Christ (and a woman to boot). You’ll have to take this all with a grain of salt when I share this thought about the fall of man.

Ok, first observation was God telling Adam in Genesis 2: 16 -17 not to eat of the tree knowledge of Good and Evil.  Then in the next chapter was the second observation of how Satan tempted Eve.

Now I had to go back and read this passage several times, and in different translations. God told ADAM, as they strolled thru the newly formed garden, “You are free to eat of any tree in the garden, But you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil for when you eat from it you will surely die.” 

Eve comes along in chapter 3. Now pardon me if I’ve missed something, but that means Eve hadn’t even been created when Adam got the warning about the tree. So later, when she quotes the rule, we have to assume she got the info from her husband, Adam.  

Now,  if you ladies have husbands, or know of one, the following conversation should sound familiar:

Wife to husband coming home from the doctor,  “What did the doctor say?” 

Husband: “Oh great, he said I’ve got everything under control and he’s never seen a more perfect body.”

Skip ahead a bit, then we have the Nurse on the phone:  “Hello, I’ve made all the specialist appointments for husband next week.”

So let me move on to the second thing I observed.  It seemed that no sooner had Eve been created; we’re not even sure if she’d even met God, when she encountered Satan in the form of a serpent.  This is what he said to her in Genesis 3:1, 

“Do I understand that God told you not to eat of any tree in the garden?”

Can you see what he did?  The verse before tells us that Satan was ‘clever’.  Instead of just tempting her, he hit her as a woman and a soon-to-be mother, who by definition is pre-wired to go around correcting misinformation!  What chance did she have, she HAD to set the record straight, and then when she did, (and she got the warning absolutely correct which I believe is a tribute to Adam’s communication skills, or her supreme intelligence at working things out….), Satan then went on to tempt her.  With the confidence she’d gained by setting him straight, she was cocky enough to fall for his skewed logic and the rest, sadly, is history.

But now I should add one more tidbit of information. The Bible tells us that Eve was deceived, but Adam on the other hand knew what he was doing when he bit into that fruit. That’s why, I believe, Scripture is always careful to point out that “sin came into the world through one MAN.”

Well, we hope you have a great upcoming week.  I don’t know about the USA but pretty much everyone here takes two weeks off around Christmas, so it’s been super frustrating getting businesses, doctors and the like to answer their phones. However, tomorrow everyone’s back to work, school summer holidays are almost over, so it should be a good week.

Never stop thinking and discovering what God is telling us,

Till next week, Marsha