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At church this morning, the sermon was about temptation. What interested me was the pastor's interaction with the biblical texts.
1. Genesis 3:7 says that, after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, their eyes were opened, and they realized that they were naked. The pastor said that, at that point, they were taking a moral and spiritual inventory of themselves---which is what we should be doing during Lent.
At first, I dismissed the pastor's interpretation in my mind. I thought to myself that the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened because that's the effect that the fruit itself produced in them, and so it had nothing to do with them feeling guilty about eating the fruit. After all, the serpent told Eve that eating the fruit would cause her eyes to be opened, and she would be like God, knowing good and evil.
But then I thought about the interpretation of Genesis 3 that I read in some writings by John Van Seters and Niels Peter Lemche. For them, eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil placed Adam and Eve into a situation in which they had to make moral decisions and were in charge of their own destiny. They were no longer in a state of innocence and security. And so, coming back to my pastor's interpretation, yes, Adam and Eve probably felt guilt and introspection after they ate the fruit, a guilt and introspection that they did not feel before. Eating from that tree put moral deliberation on their plate (even though, in a sense, it was already on their place, since the Tree itself presented before them a moral choice: obey and trust God, or eat from the tree).
I hang around with an online community of Christians who are disaffected with the institutional church, and, for some of them, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is actually significant in their own personal theologies. They associate the Tree of Knowledge with judging oneself and others, with guilt, with law, and with trying to appease God with one's own works---in short, with religion. They prefer to accept God's unconditional love and to love others unconditionally---which they term as freedom. They'd probably associate Lent---with its emphasis on repentance---with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
2. Matthew 6 has the Lord's prayer, and a line from that says, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." What was interesting was that the pastor didn't appear to agree with this line, even though he did not explicitly say that he disagreed with it. First of all, he said that we should actually want Jesus to lead us when we are in temptation, for Jesus overcame it himself, plus we especially need God's presence, strength, and guidance when we are being tempted. Second, the pastor said that, even though we may pray that we will never be tempted, the fact is that we will experience temptation in this life.
3. The pastor said that temptation tries to lead us away from God. We may be tempted to engage in a destructive habit, or to hold on to a grudge, both of which can hinder our intimacy with God and our following of Jesus. Personally, I find that, when I am wrestling with a grudge, I pray more than when I feel good. Plus, a grudge got me up this morning so that I could go to church! I did not know that I was supposed to set my clock ahead an hour last night, and so, when I got up at 7:30 this morning because I couldn't get back to sleep due to my grudge, it turned out that I was getting up at 8:30! Had I slept in until 9 (or actually 10), I would have missed church!
Would I feel closer to God inside of the Garden, or outside of it? Inside of the Garden is bliss. Outside of it are guilt, shame, anger, and conflict. I can do without guilt and the burden of having to appease a God of conditional love. And yet, I find that bliss doesn't always lead me towards God, but it encourages me to rest on my own laurels.
