Oh sweet revelation that has come to me…the love of sudden epiphany!
(If you start reading a bunch of poetry don’t be surprised when your speech mysteriously starts to rhyme 😉
While reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the greatest epic in English literature according to many, I discovered this truly simple yet profound connection between man’s eternal struggle to justify his disobedience with “wisdom”.
Listen to this account of Eve’s temptation by the serpent in the garden…
Serpent:
“Queen of this universe, do not believe those rigid threats of death; ye shall not die; How should ye? By the fruit? It gives you life to knowledge; by the Threat’ner? Look on me, me who have touched and tasted, yet both live, and life more perfect have attained than fate…God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;”
Eve:
“In the day we eat of this fair fruit, our doom is, we shall die. How dies the Serpent? He hath eat’n and lives. And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns. Irrational till then. For us alone was death invented? Or to us denied this intellectual food, for beasts reserved…”
Do you see this? Look from a human perspective. God said “eat this fruit and you will die”. The serpent said, “look, I ate it, and I didn’t die…logically speaking, God is a liar”.
Eve reasoned, and from a HUMAN standpoint, the logic was there; so she took a bite, and guess what? She DIDN’T die! And how easy, then, it was to convince Adam that God’s words were incorrect, and that their wisdom seemed, for the moment, to outwit His.
This dreadful, innacurate perception of truth set the whole course of mankind on a downward spiral to death; and Adam and Eve, in their short-sightedness, didn’t even know it.
God works that way. We would do well to comprehend it. He wasn’t a liar, and we know that now. When He said “you will surely die”, He didn’t specify the time.
Just because we disobey and don’t reap immediate consequences (or obey and don’t reap immediate rewards) doesn’t mean God is a liar.
Eve had no business reasoning about anything concerning that tree. There are some things God has said, and that’s that; there is nothing to question or to “apply wisdom” to.
Where God has spoken, leave logic alone. Don’t trust your human wisdom. Don’t trust the immediate consequences. Trust Him and obey.
8 comments
Profound words, indeed. Such a wealth of wisdom in a short post.
Wow, what I got out of that passage was more the moral relativism of the serpent… you know… God CAN’T hurt you and still be a LOVING God. Therefore you can do whatever you want, right??
Wrong.
Isn’t it neat to read different perspectives of relating to God’s Word? To see things we never noticed before.
I am so thankful I can always trust my Lord to know what is best for me!
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Let me repharase: He specified what SEEMED like the time to Eve..she didn’t fall over dead that day…but in her body, in that instant, she was made mortal and death had already begun its work…she was dying.
In his promise He conceded that “in the day that you eat”, death would be introduced to all of Creation.
Furthermore, “In the day” may not be as much the confusion as “you shall surely die”…for although she had not yet reaped the complete, physical, deathly consequence of sin, the innocence of her conscience died…her immortality died…her life in the Garden ceased.
Death certainly came that day, in many forms, and would continue invading the works of Creation until now.
It further proves my point–“God’s ways are not our ways”.
“Where God has spoken, leave logic alone.”
Can I keep this quote? What a profound yet simple statement.
Oh. It is one of those things where you take the story of Genesis literally, except when you don’t.
Perhaps it is more simple than that…there IS room for literal and figurative interpretation in the Bible, but in this story, it’s no different than the way we still use language. “Death” doesn’t always denote a physical death, or an immediate death, even now when we speak of it.
Why is it a “trap” for the Christian to believe that God meant what He said–“you shall surely die”? Adam and Eve did die that day…in a number of ways.
As a student of the Word, we do have to know when interpretations are to be literal and when they are meant to be figurative. The Greek language doesn’t translate congruently with English all the time, so what we read in our Bibles often requires further study to understand meaning.