Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”
To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”
Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

• Genesis 3:1-24

“It is critical to understand why Christians believe this. Besides the biblical witness, the history of civilization along with our own experience attests to it. And why does it matter? Get this wrong and you get life wrong. Human responsibility is misunderstood, chaos results, and human hubris leads to tragically flawed utopian experiments. And you get God wrong because without human responsibility there is no need for a Savior. These questions are critical to understanding life and reality.
“So can we once again embrace the truth and take back our world for God? How? When nations are occupied, other countries mobilize great invasions of the occupied territory and set the people free. This has happened throughout human history, from the Greeks to today. My generation saw it up close. Much of the world was under the oppressive rule of Hitler’s brown shirts. But the West mobilized and invaded the enemy-occupied territory. God invaded our world as well, if in quite a different way.”

• Charles Colson (with Harold Fickett), The Faith

I have danced around Chuck Colson’s first point before in several posts.  A government that says they can fix something cannot be trusted, in most cases.  All utopian experiments have failed due to the failure of the people setting it up.  We have a sin nature.  If we do not take more than our share someone else will, and many people take more than their share knowing that the next guy will take advantage of the system.  And yet, the first guy took advantage of the system and justified doing so by knowing what others might do.

It was as if I married an angel.  My wife would take less than her share because she knew others would want more, but she had her faults.  Her sin nature came out in other ways.

The beauty of our existence is that God gave us a chance to choose, and yet, that same beauty became our downfall.  Adam and Eve chose unwisely.  And every generation since then has had the opportunity to choose wisely, but we are born with a sin nature.  Thus, we live in a fallen world, as much marred by the sin of Adam and Eve as our hearts are marred.

With that sin nature, we cannot fix the problem deep in our heart.  Only God can do that.  Only God is perfect.  And Almighty God sent His Son to die for us, for the wages of sin is death.

And what our response must be is that we must choose Jesus, trusting in Him, His Word, and His nature.  Inventing a god named Jesus so that we can choose sin does not work.

And then we still struggle to choose wisely.  We only partially succeed when we keep our eyes on Jesus.  So, does this mean we live a defeated life?  Not hardly.  God knows our desires and those of us who desire nothing but Him are richly rewarded.

I am reading a book by Corrie ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord.  It is a semi-disjointed story of experiences after surviving a Nazi concentration camp, often with flashbacks, a follow-up book to The Hiding Place.  In one story, she had gone back to Germany, something she dreaded.  She gave a talk and one of the people who came up to talk to her afterwards was a man she easily recognized, but he did not recognize her.  He talked about being a guard at Ravensbruck.  He had heard her mention Ravensbruck in her talk.  This man had been cruel, but now he had found Jesus.  He was a true believer, but he wanted to beg forgiveness one more time, to someone who had been a prisoner there.  Recognizing him and remembering the horrible things he had done and how her sister Betsie had died there, she just could not think that all that could be erased by a simple handshake.  But as she saw the earnestness in the man’s eyes, Corrie prayed, “Jesus, help me.  I will extend my hand.  You supply the feeling.”  But as they shook hands, a miraculous feeling came over her.  She told the man that she forgives him with all her heart.

Far too often, we choose unwisely, but when we choose to obey, it is not part of us, but God within us that makes wonderful things happen.

Lord, show me what are the foundations of “the Faith.” Help us understand that the brokenness in this world cannot be fixed by us.  We are the ones who got it broken in the first place.  But also help us to know that each time we obey, especially when we cannot obey on our own strength, we accomplish one small bit of your will on this earth.  In Your name I pray.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.