Believers look to the Godhead when confronting humanity’s questions, doubts, procrastinations, temporizings and sins. Wherever mortals start, continue or end, disciples know that God’s Word remains constant, dependable and sure in any situation.
When God instructed the first pair in what he expected, he gave them a choice: obey his word or die. Had God he been a liberal theologian, he would have second-guessed himself: maybe he didn’t make himself clear; maybe he should give his mortals a second chance to obey. But God knew he made himself clear and that Adam and Eve understood the rules: eat every fruit from any tree and live—except one. Eat that one and you surely die! No second chance! Satan of course lied. First, they surely wouldn’t die Genesis 3:4. The con man’s hopeful denial of the facts—God didn’t mean that! Second, he blasphemously claimed that God didn’t want mortals knowing as he knows. Then...sensing that his listener had become interested, even thinking along with him, Satan casually wondered if God had a bigger fear in the prohibition: that Eve would find the wisdom hidden in the forbidden fruit—to think for herself, to determine her own destiny, to make her own rules. Obviously our common parents didn’t appreciate the enormity of the change that had occurred in disobedience. Adam for one lived for nearly a millennium, dying at 930 years Genesis 5:1-5. Nor could they anticipate that the “jungle” outside Eden would demand “sweat of their brow” effort to clear and cultivate—when all their previous work in Eden had involved none. Most importantly, Eve had no idea that her one sin had so altered her spiritual genome that every descendant in every generation would inherit her instinctive attraction to temptation, not the instinctive abhorrence God designed and demands. The original sin, then, wasn’t a contamination of every newborn, demanding baptism by sprinkling for forgiveness of Eve’s sin. That erroneous doctrine ignores the scriptural truth that sin is attributed only to individuals capable of making a CHOICE between God’s Word and human opinion. The original sin remains the ongoing sin of each person of accountable age, however. By nature “objects of wrath” Ephesians 2:3, our instinctive disposition--Eve’s sin as enticement—considers temptation favorably, with positive results, not in hostility, knowing its deadly end Romans 6:23a. Only the converted nature, and that not without effort, sees the real horror behind the mask temptation wears I John 2:15-17. Remember: Jesus didn’t say that evil thoughts enter the heart/mind, as if some unknown doctor of wickedness injects wrong thoughts into us. No, Jesus said OUT OF the Heart/Mind—the factory where evil is produced, wrong is produced, mistakes are produced, failure is produced—OUT OF it wickedness flows, gushes, floods. End Part IIA
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|