WILD WEED
The sin that plunged the world into a history of pain and suffering was not adultery or murder but eating a piece of fruit. Eating fruit per se is not evil. The evil was the thought that motivated the act.
God had commanded us not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If God is good, then the command is good, and God’s intention in keeping us from the knowledge of good and evil is to protect us from evil.
Adam and Eve took a different perspective. They believed that God wasn’t lovingly protecting us from evil but was being selfish and keeping a good from us. God, not the serpent, they believed, had deceived them. They doubted God’s goodness, stopped trusting Him, grew suspicious of Him, and believed the commandment was evil and broke it in an act of rebellion.
I don’t think most of us grasp this when we first read the Genesis account. I know I didn’t. I remember saying in my freshman theology class that “rebellion” was too strong a word to describe Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the fruit. My professor asked how I would characterize it.
“An innocent mistake,” I said. I saw it as merely a short-sighted momentary lapse of judgment of little consequence because I read each story of Genesis in isolation from the next.
But Moses’ point in selecting and arranging the ancient accounts in Genesis 1-11 as a unit was to demonstrate that that tiny decision made by Adam and Eve in the garden had far-reaching and devastating consequences. Adam’s son, Cain, following the envy in his heart, murdered his own brother.
The rest is history, and an ugly history at that. Genesis 1-11 depicts a prehistoric world in which human corruption ran unchecked, spreading and multiplying exponentially with each generation.
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6.5)
The misdirected inner life of each soul leads to the corruption of others, to a moral chaos and a societal instability that God never intended.
“And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to his heart.” (Genesis 6.6)
The decision to trust oneself over God is a rebellion, the root of an invasive, poisonous weed that spreads rapidly, recklessly, and ruinously. And every soul born into this world has that root within him. It starts to grow with our first breath.
It is from this that we need to be saved. Merely pruning this wild weed is not enough. It must die at the root.
God had commanded us not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If God is good, then the command is good, and God’s intention in keeping us from the knowledge of good and evil is to protect us from evil.
Adam and Eve took a different perspective. They believed that God wasn’t lovingly protecting us from evil but was being selfish and keeping a good from us. God, not the serpent, they believed, had deceived them. They doubted God’s goodness, stopped trusting Him, grew suspicious of Him, and believed the commandment was evil and broke it in an act of rebellion.
I don’t think most of us grasp this when we first read the Genesis account. I know I didn’t. I remember saying in my freshman theology class that “rebellion” was too strong a word to describe Adam and Eve’s decision to eat the fruit. My professor asked how I would characterize it.
“An innocent mistake,” I said. I saw it as merely a short-sighted momentary lapse of judgment of little consequence because I read each story of Genesis in isolation from the next.
But Moses’ point in selecting and arranging the ancient accounts in Genesis 1-11 as a unit was to demonstrate that that tiny decision made by Adam and Eve in the garden had far-reaching and devastating consequences. Adam’s son, Cain, following the envy in his heart, murdered his own brother.
The rest is history, and an ugly history at that. Genesis 1-11 depicts a prehistoric world in which human corruption ran unchecked, spreading and multiplying exponentially with each generation.
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6.5)
The misdirected inner life of each soul leads to the corruption of others, to a moral chaos and a societal instability that God never intended.
“And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to his heart.” (Genesis 6.6)
The decision to trust oneself over God is a rebellion, the root of an invasive, poisonous weed that spreads rapidly, recklessly, and ruinously. And every soul born into this world has that root within him. It starts to grow with our first breath.
It is from this that we need to be saved. Merely pruning this wild weed is not enough. It must die at the root.