Women's Stories For God's Glory

We all know that one of Eve’s first recorded acts was to interact with the serpent, be tempted by him, and choose to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then offer it to Adam who also ate. God told Adam they were to stay away from the fruit of this tree. If you are someone who is not familiar with the Bible, many questions may come up for you about this story. I challenge you to take a deeper look into this story and its personal meaning for you. There was always something missing to me about this guilt-laden story of the two of them disappointing God and then being punished. I really didn’t get it. Over time, I’ve received further information about this story, and I’ve started to understand.

Imagine you were the first created woman in paradise with the first created man. Everything’s available; no problems exist; intimacy with God exists, and all is well, except for a snake that comes into in the garden. Then there’s the tree that we’re not supposed to eat of the fruit, and the challenge that the snake throws down to eat some fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What is this tree, anyhow, and how come we can’t touch it? This doesn’t seem to make sense. Everything else is taken care of. Why does God seem to know about good and evil, and what does he know that we don’t? Why do we have to follow this one rule?

It’s clear from the beginning. God created us with the ability to choose, or we’d just be robots answering to God exactly as he would have us do. All is not well in paradise, because we can choose to eat this fruit or not. We’re being tempted by this snake that seems pretty shady to us. Author Erwin McManus, in his book Uprising, shares these thoughts about this incident.

“Adam and Eve’s birthright was a life of freedom and pleasure. Yet with so much to discover, so much to experience, and so much opportunity, they chose to hang around the one tree bearing the one fruit that was forbidden them.” (1)

How much is this like life today? As children, most, but not all, have it pretty easy. We cry and we are either fed, changed, rocked, and comforted. Life seems like paradise as children. Some children are born into difficult situations from the start. Their life is one of great pain and suffering from the beginning.

For the most part, children are precious to their parents and life is paradise for them. This was true for me. I was born into a wonderful family to my parents, Jack and Betty. I was the fifth of what eventually became a ten-sibling family (six boys and four girls). I grew up having a lot of attention from my older sisters, brothers, Mom, and Dad. Mom says that I was a happy baby who cried very little. I was surely loved, as were all my brothers and sisters. Mom and Dad made sure I knew about Jesus by sending my siblings and me to the local Lutheran church. I loved singing “Jesus Loves Me” in my Sunday school classes. I sang “Away in a Manger” at the top of my little lungs with my brothers and sisters with the tender heart of a child at Christmas time.

Yet, I had a mind of my own. Sounds a little like Eve? I remember my dad calling me bullheaded when I was a kid. I guess that meant I was strong willed. I was determined to do things my own way. In high school, I poured that determination into activities, such as working after school, attending a special honors program, being in choir, involved with the school plays, being president of the Student Council, and attempting to do good things with my life. During my freshman year in college, I attended an Assembly of God church. When asked if I wanted to receive Jesus, I immediately went up to the altar. The next week I was baptized by immersion and that was the extent of my experience with the church. A girl in my dorm attempted to talk to me about her family members and her concern that they be saved. Just the language turned me off. I continued to read the Bible on my own, looking for positive verses that I could understand. I went in and out of churches that required little of me. Since my family had pretty much quit the church scene due to an abusive pastor at our primary church, there was no one looking over my shoulder to encourage me to seek God through organized religion.

I went through a rebellious period as a young adult. I graduated from college in 1973, just after the war in Vietnam. At that stage of life, I rejected the notion of church, even though I had attended many church services in college. Part of my liberation was to study other world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen philosophies… I see, similar to the description in Acts 9, when Saul was struck down on the road to Damascus to persecute early Christians and converted to Paul, the Apostle that God allowed me to be struck down in my life. I was living my own way and in need of healing. I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed the love of a savior. I needed the love of Jesus. By grace, he has extended that to me. I am blessed today beyond belief. I feel there is nothing I long for more in my life than Jesus to live in me, and that I’m empty of myself. I was blind, but now I see…

Perhaps you are in a situation where you are “out of paradise.” You find yourself suffering from trying to do life on your own. Describe your situation: