I was teaching a tennis lesson this week to a group of 5 and 6-year-olds. It is a great age to start them in tennis, as most children that age are sponges when it comes to learning something new. The challenge, though, has to do with the attention span, especially of the boys. Seeing one of the boys a little too close to my racquet bag and gear sitting on the ground, I stupidly told him. “Please don’t step on my phone.”
What was I thinking? Immediately, he stepped on my phone. Luckily, it was in a case and he didn’t damage it. He suffered through a 5-minute timeout, and apologized. I don’t think he learned a lesson from the experience, but I certainly did. If I hadn’t said a word, he wouldn’t have stepped on the phone, unless it was a random accident. But with my request putting the idea in his mind, he was incapable of “just saying no.”
What is it in us that rarely evokes a different response? If you go to a restaurant and the waiter says, “Don’t touch the plate. It’s very hot.” As soon as the waiter puts down the plate and leaves the table, we have to touch it and see exactly how hot it is. Is it curiosity? Do we all want to be “Rebel Without a Cause,” who suddenly finds a cause? God certainly saw the same behavior in the Garden of Eden.
After creating the world and placing Adam and Eve in the Garden, God instructed them that they were allowed to eat anything they wanted EXCEPT one particular fruit:
15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Genesis 2:15
Did Adam understand what God meant? Adam certainly understood that God did not want him to eat the fruit of that tree, but he might not have understood what death was. Up to that time, there had not been any death, and though I am sure that God had explained the concept to Adam, Adam’s understanding certainly was not experiential. It wasn’t Adam that tasted the fruit first. It was Eve at the insistence of the slimy serpent tricking her into that taste. When Eve tasted the fruit, she then gave it to her husband with her and he ate of it, too. Did Adam die at the moment he ate the fruit? Yes, though it was spiritual death, rather than physical death. Years ago, I was in a Bible study taught by Hal Lindsay and he said, “If you are born once, you will die twice, but if you are born twice, you will only die once!”
The first sin caused all of mankind to change, as we are all relatives of Adam, the “sons of disobedience.” Now, as in every generation after Adam, we don’t choose sin. Instead we are born into sin. The little boy on the tennis court had no other choice, based on the nature inside of him. Can we choose not to sin? Yes, but without the presence of Jesus living inside of us, we don’t have the power to control that urge. As Christians, we will continue to sin, and in the same sense will continue to give in to the powers of trickery used by the slimy one. Yet, when we have Jesus living inside of us, the Holy Spirit gives us His power to choose another option. Just as Adam had the ability to walk away from sin, based on the walking/talking relationship he had with the Lord, we have the ability to turn away. Do we have any benefits over Adam? Certainly, as we are forgiven for those transgressions when we ask for His forgiveness.
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