Calling Evil Good

Genesis 3:17a, “To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you… “

Was it a sin for Adam to listen to his wife? No. If she had said, “Don’t eat from this tree,” then of course he should have listened to her. The emphasis here is that Adam listened to the voice of his wife, instead of listening to the voice of God. This was the tree “about which I commanded you.” He had the Word of God. And even though we don’t know just how he got from the point of trusting in that Word to trusting in the Word of his wife, we know that he got there. Adam, like Eve, chose to listen a voice that did not know, instead of the One Voice who knew.

And we have voices all around us. We have people who whisper all kinds of Satan’s ideas in our ears. Our very society is so turned against God that just in living here we are bombarded with messages that are contrary to God’s Word. I don’t want to get into too many specific examples, because I could go on indefinitely. But when our children go to school, they’re taught that God didn’t create the world, but it just happened by chance. They’re taught that being gay is perfectly normal. They’re taught through safe sex appeals that it’s okay for them to be sexually active before marriage. And they have a choice whether to believe those things, even though they disagree with the Word of God, or to believe the Word of God. I’ll tell you, when I was in high school, I didn’t have all the answers to refute evolution. I know a lot more now than I did then, but at that time, I knew very little that would help me. It came down to a choice. It was a choice of whether I would believe my science teacher or my God. Even when it seemed like what my science teacher said made perfect sense, I had to choose to believe my God, who sometimes it seemed made no sense at all.

The Bible has a message of morality that we in the Church have done a good job of preserving, at least in theory. But the fact is, that the Bible has a very strong ethical message too. God is very concerned about how we treat other people. God is very concerned when we take advantage of someone, gaining at their expense. But what does the voice of our society say? The voice of our society says, “That’s the way business is done.” Everybody does it. We’re just trying to feed our families. We’re willing to overlook something that we know God’s Word says is wrong, because it doesn’t seem to work in real life. The list could go on and on. We hear voices about faithfulness to spouses and families, how to raise kids, how to be successful, and a host of other things. And more often than not, the messages we hear conflict with what the Bible says. The trouble is that many times these messages make sense to us. Many times, we hear voices that sound like friendly voices. But these voices have only one aim. Their only goal is like the serpent in the Garden, to discredit the Voice and the Word of God. Trusting in God is listening to the Word of God, and obeying the Word of God, even when all around us we hear messages that it isn’t true.