Beginnings: I Thought it Would Be Fine...

 

And I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; he will strike your head and you will strike his heel.  Genesis 3:15

 I have a precious loved one from whom I’ve often heard the phrase, “I thought it would be fine.” Needless to say, this is usually spoken once it turns out not to be fine at all. But I believe their heart and intentions in this. I don’t think they set out to be bad typically, we all have moments in our lives where we are seeking to be intentionally rebellious, but for the most part I don’t think this person has a heart for evil. What they have is a truly active thought life. I think this was likely the same for Eve.

 Much of scripture is told in snippets. We see the Facebook posts of history. There are frequently years, or even decades between verses that we are told nothing about. Who knows if the serpent made these suggestions to Eve and she immediately grabbed the fruit off the tree, or if the suggestion swirled around in her head for days, weeks, or longer before she finally talked herself into it. Let’s be honest, she was in the garden with a man, just one man. Odds are she had way more thoughts and words than he was able to tolerate listening to, so she probably had a lot going on in her head alone. For me, this is often where I get into trouble. When I am in communication with others about what’s going on in my heart, I am far more likely to make good choices in life. But when thoughts are left to swirl in my head without being fact checked, I can get pretty far off track. The serpent gave Eve a different perspective on the tree than she had from God. Really, than she had from herself because she had already added to what God had told her. In Genesis 2:16-17, God said, “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.” Then, in Genesis 3:2-3, when Satan asked Eve if she could not eat from any tree in the orchard she replied, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard; but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, 'You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.” Two things here. First, Satan was clearly bating her, asking if she could not eat from any tree. It must have been obvious that she could eat from most of the trees, I’m sure they did it every day. It’s like he was trying to make God come across and unfair and overbearing, not giving them good things. Or he was suggesting that God was withholding from them something even better. Secondly, Eve tacked on the bit about “and you must not touch it.” God hadn’t said anything like that, but she obviously believed it. Perhaps this was an admonition they had given themselves to prevent them from disobeying God. Perhaps this was how Adam had conveyed it to Eve since I don’t think she was around yet in 2:16 when he had the conversation with God. Who knows. But the reality is, when man added on to the commandments of God, he made them burdensome. We do that, don’t we?

 Like I wrote about earlier, God told us to rest on the Sabbath, but we got overly analytical about it. By the time Jesus walked the earth, there were a whole host of rules that man had made about the Sabbath – completely deteriorating what God had designed it to be. Where He had made it for restoration, we made it about legalization. We turned God’s gift into a burden. Sad, but I think that’s something we do with a lot of things in life. In fact, there were 39 categories of activity that were forbidden, and many of them had innumerable things under them. Here they are in case you were curious*:

1. Sowing

2. Plowing

3. Reaping

4. Binding sheaves

5. Threshing

6. Winnowing

7. Selecting

8. Grinding

9. Sifting

10. Kneading

11. Baking

12. Shearing wool

13. Washing wool

14. Beating wool

15. Dyeing wool

16. Spinning

17. Weaving

18. Making two loops

19. Weaving two threads

20. Separating two threads

21. Tying

22. Untying

23. Sewing stitches

24. Tearing

25. Trapping

26. Slaughtering

27. Skinning

28. Tanning

29. Smoothing

30. Marking

31. Cutting

32. Writing two letters

33. Erasing two letters

34. Building

35. Demolishing

36. Kindling a fire

37. Extinguishing a fire

38. Carrying

39. Transferring between domains

 I think the one(s) that really caught me were writing two letters and erasing two letters. So I could write one letter, but if I wrote two then I was working? How long did you have to go between writing one letter and the next one? Were two letters in one day a sin or just each hour? I’m just saying, I would really get caught up in the details here! The thing is, very little of this is found in scripture, in fact only two of them were mentioned by God. In Exodus 35:3, Moses told the community that they were not to kindle a fire in their homes on the Sabbath. Again, is this directly from God or was it by way of explanation that Moses was letting them know what “work” was? And then in Jeremiah 17:21-22, the LORD says through Jeremiah that we should, “Be very careful if you value your lives! Do not carry any loads in through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day. Do not carry any loads out of your houses or do any work on the Sabbath day. But observe the Sabbath day as a day set apart to the LORD, as I commanded your ancestors.” So these two things were found in the scripture as examples of work. People need examples, we don’t do well with vague ideas. But then the teachers of the law decided to add 37 more rules to this, and to expand upon the rules given here. It got so crazy that they determined that a Sabbath day’s journey, one permitted by their rules, could only be 0.6 miles. BUT, if you needed to go further, you could just get another house 0.6 miles away and you could go 0.6 miles further since it was still just 0.6 miles from your house. Yes, people literally would have additional domiciles so that they could “loop hole” the law and walk further. Talk about having trouble differentiating between the letter and the spirit of the law!

 I’m getting into all this to show that when people add to God’s Word it doesn’t go well. In fact, He warned us against this in Deuteronomy 4:2, “Do not add a thing to what I command you nor subtract from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I am delivering to you.” He knew that when we started messing around with His rules, adding to and subtracting from them to suit our purposes, that we would make a mess of things, and boy did we!

Here's the Thing: It started with Adam and Eve. “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” quickly became, “You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.” Perhaps it was initially a helpful admonition for them, but it led to an open door for Satan to tempt them. God’s law is perfect. When we start to ‘tweak’ it to fit our thoughts or desires, we just cause trouble.

* These were found on the website: What were some man-made Sabbath laws that were imposed?