If God is God, He's not afraid of questions.

Why is it that there are thousands of different denominations in the Christian church, all with a different interpretation of one book? How is it that someone can get a doctoral degree in some kind of evolutionary biology studies when evolution is a scientific impossibility? Why do well meaning people find themselves at impasses that are so irreconcilable, and that they are so passionate about, that they are willing to end friendships, leave family, divorce, or even kill for their belief. As Church Lady of Saturday Night Live fame would say, “Could it be…SAY-TUHN?”

In the Garden of Eden, there were two human beings. Their minds were clear, and they loved their Creator. Obedience was a natural expression of their love for Him. He gave them one VERY simple instruction. Don’t eat the fruit from one particular tree. They could eat the succulent, delicious fruit of all of the other trees without restriction. They could do anything else that they wanted to do, and they didn’t have sin dwelling in them pulling them in the wrong direction in spite of themselves. (Romans 7:13-20) They were highly intelligent. All that they had to do was to not eat the fruit from that one tree. How easy is that? Yet Satan was cunning enough to get them to do that one simple thing that God told them to not do. And while they were disobeying, they thought everything was fine. (Genesis 3:6) If Satan could do that to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, we’re pretty foolish if we think that he can’t do the same thing to us now – ‘en masse.

The fact that Adam and Eve thought the forbidden fruit was good is the key to understanding the problem: our vulnerability. For people to be able to respond to God’s love for us by loving Him back, He had to give us the ability to choose. Otherwise, we’d just be robots. With the ability to choose comes the inevitable vulnerability. We had to be vulnerable enough to choose to believe that a lie is the truth, or loving our Creator wouldn’t be possible.

Obedience is the ultimate expression of worship. (John 14:15) Satan’s desire is to take God’s place. (Isaiah 14:12-14) To do that, he must secure our worship. However, most people won’t openly worship Satan. Since Satan is completely crazy (there is no truth in him: John 8:44) and knows that his time is short and he’ll never take God’s place, he is evidently willing to have us obey him by our believing that God’s truths are lies and Satan’s lies are the truth. He accepts the outworking of that as worship. (Rev 13:3-4) “See; I REALLY AM like the Most High!” (Isn’t that special!)

Knowing that light and darkness are Bible metaphors for truth and lies, Jesus spoke some chilling words on the subject:

“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:22-23)

According to Jesus, we can be completely sure that we are completely right, and be completely wrong. We can be completely sure that we are obeying God, and be obeying Satan. I believe that what the enemy did in the Garden of Eden is so diabolically simple that we don’t notice exactly how he did it. That makes us sitting ducks – all of us. In my next submission, I’ll extract the two simple steps that he uses to make us think that darkness is light, and that everything is OK. That’s how he divides and destroys us.