Genesis 3:6 “The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So, she took some of the fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”
As I consider Eve in the garden before the Fall, my heart goes out to her, our poor first Mother. Yes, she sinned, and in disobedience and mistrust she brought death upon us all. But would I not have done the same? She was gazing upon a tree that was, “good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom,” and which God himself had placed in the garden. And she was being lied to by an unknown enemy.
It strikes me that the tree itself was not bad, but it was not the good that God intended for Eve. Eve desired the right things- goodness, beauty, truth. Indeed, she was made to know just those things. God intended them for her. He intended to give them to her as a free gift, poured out in generous measure. As she and Adam walked with God and grew in their capacity to receive His life, they would have known fully and perfectly the goodness, beauty, and truth they were created for by God’s loving design. He had forbidden the tree not to deprive her of good, but because he had better in store for her. Eve could see the goodness of the tree; she could not see the good God had in store for her. She had to choose to trust in the unknown and unseen good that God promised, over a recognized good that stood right before her.
This choice to trust is hard! It is easy to avoid sin when we are able to recognize the evil of it. I choose not to murder, not only because God has forbidden it but because taking some a person’s life appears vile to me. There is no temptation for me to violate this commandment. Similarly, Satan did not tempt Eve to do something that would be obviously wicked, like harm Adam in some way. Rather, he stirred up doubt in her heart by getting her to focus her gaze, her attention, on something that though good in and of itself, was not God’s will for her.
How often does our enemy work they same way in our lives? He is a liar, full of deceit, but often his deceits are so very subtle. They have to be in order to lead astray those who are seeking to faithfully follow the Lord, those who are not likely to be tempted to outright, obvious acts of evil. How often do we focus our attention on a perceived good, maybe something we know to be good but that it seems the Lord is withholding from us? We fix our gaze upon the good that we desire and in doing so lose sight of the good that God wants to lavish upon us. We lament this deprivation, our hearts start to mistrust in the same way that Eve’s did, the same question arises, “does God really have my good in mind?”
When we cannot see God’s plan for us it is especially hard to trust that it is better than the plan we can see for ourselves. When we weigh an unknown against something that we do know and understand it can lead to fear, to confusion, to sorrow, or sadness. But to give into that fear and confusion would be to make the same mistake that Eve did. For it is never truly the unknown that God is asking us to place our trust in. Rather it is Himself that we are asked to trust, his promise, his Word. Eve knew God, she walked with Him in the garden, and if she had turned her attention to him, rather than to the tree, she would have known that she could place her hope in Him and all that he planned for her. We too know God. He has become man in order to redeem us. He loves us personally, intimately, and perfectly, and if we turn or gaze to him, rather than whatever good we are desiring, we too will know that we can place our hope in him. Even when we do not know his plan and even when our own plan seems so right, we can trust because we do know Him. We know a God who is all goodness and love and whose plan always leads us to life.
Prose for the sake of Poetry 