Don't Celebrate Eve's Misdeed

Ever since Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve were forced to confront God for their disobedience in consuming the Forbidden Fruit, mankind has sought to excuse his errant deeds (those actions once known as "sin" in a less politically correct era). Perhaps the most metaphysically ambitious excuse is the alibi that, instead of being the Fall as portrayed in the Bible, the lack of dietary discretion on the part of the original "First Couple" was in fact a step forward into spiritual enlightenment.

According to Ulysses Weldon in the 3/30/99 edition of the Prince George's Journal, Eve should be heralded as a heroine for having ushered humanity into a new era of knowledge and liberation. Wording it this way, one might conclude that Eve was opening a daycare center or embarking on a career as a librarian. However, her actions and those of her spouse were far more dire, impacting all of subsequent history down to this very day.

While Eve might have originally set out to increase her metaphysical awareness (to be God, as Satan says in Genesis 3:5) the results were really quite different.

Romans 5:12 says, "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned."

That's quite a price for knowledge. Most students knock off study for the evening at the first signs of eyestrain and a stiff neck.

While there is nothing wrong with knowledge, some things mankind was never meant to know. In the movie Jurassic Park, one character said in reference to the effort to clone dinosaurs, man was so excited that he could that he never stopped long enough to consider whether he should.

Anyone thinking that the Fall of Man was a fall forward should be required to explain to the patient in the hospital dying of cancer or to the family of an innocent murder victim since both kinds of heartache can be traced back to the efforts of Adam and Eve to take the moral law into their own hands. Perhaps Mr. Weldon can explain how we are better off for having been introduced to the wages of sin.

Theologians will no doubt continue to debate whether or not the knowledge of good and evil was actually something contained within the fruit of the tree of the same name or merely a reference to the lesson Adam and Eve learned after transgressing God's clearly delineated commands.

However, what cannot be debated is that those denying the Biblical interpretation of these events also deny the very sway of sin over the human heart and deny the only way to overcome this dark reality through the sacrificial death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

by Frederick Meekins