The Truth About You: Day 3

You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.

Genesis 2:16

But God gave us another gift, another likeness to Him that, had He omitted it, would have rendered the others meaningless. Many believe it was the greatest gift of all; others see it as a truly terrible idea.

That wonderful/terrible gift is, of course, the gift of free will. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey, a glass cracked and shattered and the first couple stepped over the shards into a new world of possibilities. It is a world whose possibilities mankind is still exploring and whose limits he is still testing.

We are free to choose…

To use our creativity to distort and destroy.

To use our spirituality to relate to evil forces and satanic beings.

To use our ability to communicate to build unhealthy and destructive alliances.

To use our magnificent minds to think unwholesome thoughts that lead us to corrupt actions.

To use our morality to know good from evil and to deliberately choose the latter.

No one knows how long Adam and Eve lived in the garden in innocent perfection. However long, their free will during that period was completely intact; it is just that their world was one of only good choices and Godward thoughts. Each day their deepest joy (they didn’t know any other kind) was being with and learning from their Father.

Into that peaceful, perfect world came the lie of Satan: God is not enough. There is a bigger world than the one He has provided for you. His truth is limiting, His power is insufficient, His wisdom is narrow, His ways are restrictive.

That lie still plays to packed houses all over the planet.

We have a precious two-year-old grand-daughter who has been loved, cared for and doted on from her first breath. But, all of a sudden, she is aware of a big world out there, and the people who have only given her good things have become somewhat suspect to her view of things. Do knives really hurt you, are stairs really that harmful, can eating rocks really be that big a deal? In her case, the answers seem simple. How many of us, though, are asking the same kinds of questions and pretending (to God and ourselves) that the answers are any less straight-forward.

Nancy Shirah