The Serpent's Sweet Suggestion

I was checking out public domain images for a picture of the serpent of Eden—do you know that in practically every picture, the serpent had already lost its legs before Eve ever took the fruit! That is a lesson in itself: how we get locked into images that are not accurate and those images are perpetuated throughout our culture. Genesis 3:6 records that she took from the tree's fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. It is not until eight verses later in Genesis 3:14 that the Lord curses the serpent:
"On your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life."

But in many illustrations we see the fruit is still uneaten on the tree, yet the serpent has no legs, as if he'd already suffered the curse!  In the rare pictures where the serpent is walking upright, he looks like either an out-of-shape dinosaur or a character that frequents a StarWars bar. None looked like the the description of the serpent from Ezekiel 28:12,13—

    You had the seal of perfection, Full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.  You were in Eden, the garden of God; Every precious stone was your covering: The ruby, the topaz and the diamond; The beryl, the onyx and the jasper; The lapis lazuli, the turquoise and the emerald; And the gold, the workmanship of your settings and sockets, was in you.

I have wondered if KatieLyn didn't have a similarly skewed image of what marriage should look like, one where she was seeing things that had not happened yet—and never happened as pictured, and therefore made decisions based on unscriptural misconceptions.

Another part of the Eden story that frequently gets distorted is the misconception that God didn't want the first couple to enjoy the fruit. God was not trying to deny them pleasure; He was wanting them to trust Him to know what is good. We read in Isaiah 1:19 that the Lord really did have their best interests in mind: If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the good things of the land. The Lord does want us to eat the good things of the land, but there were two requirements, willingness and obedience.

It was a test. He asked them to obey because they believed Him, even if they didn't understand.
They decided to not believe it. 

 Notice the "set up" for this test. The serpent is subtle and crafty. He begins with a question that flatters the woman's intelligence. "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden'?"
This superficially puts the woman in the role of instructor! She gets to instruct the Serpent!  Although, it knew the answer better than she did.

KatieLyn's mom followed the serpent's pattern, asking questions and making comments that caused KatieLyn to doubt what God had told her, just as the serpent asked questions and made comments that caused Adam's wife to doubt what God had told him.

We can see the passive/aggressive manipulation at work. The serpent is not making demands or throwing out direct accusations at this point. He does misrepresent God in much the way that KatieLyn's mom would misrepresent Joe, but mostly once he has put the toxins in the environment, he backs off a bit and lets the woman make her own decision. You can almost see the serpent planning his defense should his action ever be brought to the court of heaven; the Lord never gave the serpent a chance to talk, but knowing the typical schemes of the devil, it is not hard to conclude that he'd have said something to the effect that when it came to consuming the fruit, the woman made the decision all on her own!  Certainly Gwen, mother of the runaway bride, did not want any share of the responsibility for putting toxic doubts in her daughter's head; she claimed that KatieLyn came to the decision to run away "all by herself." As the more passive one in a codependent relationship, the only decisions that KatieLyn made "all by herself"   

The serpent had made the thought of eating the fruit even more enticing. He sweetly made his suggestions as if he had the woman's best interest in mind; it would have seemed good to a naïve Eve. She really had no reason to suspect that the serpent was actually looking out for his own best interest.

The Lesson
 Genesis 3 lays out the original strategy of the Enemy for destroying God's creation, and it has not changed at all in its central intent.
• The devil's standard operating policy is to send temptations by hands we do not suspect, and by those that have most influence upon us. He used KatieLyn's codependency with her mom to his advantage.
• It is the craft of Satan to portray God's direction as uncertain or unreasonable, this will rob one of his/her faith that God is trustworthy. The mother of the runaway bride never settled God's direction in her own heart, and the devil was hanging around maintaining her confusion. She ought to have told him to flee, but she could not even admit he was there.
• Satan primary strategy is first causing a person to doubt, and then to deny. This is the method he used to attack Adam's wife. This is precisely the strategy he used on KatieLyn; once she doubted that the marriage would work, she denied that it was the right thing to do.
• The devil usually promises an advantage for "eating forbidden fruit." I am not sure what kind of advantage KatieLyn thought that she would gain by disobeying God's plan for her life, except possibly that it would end the fighting with her mother.
• God's enemy strategizes to make God's people discontented with their present state, as if it were not so good as it might be, and should be. Joe, the run-from groom, remains baffled as to why KatieLyn was discontented. She ought to make that clear to him, unless of course, she does not know why either. And as time went on, that seemed to be more and more a distinct possibility. Because she progressed from being unable to give a coherent reason to refusing to being unwilling to even try, it is highly likely that the devil is still deceiving to her and that she is still believing his lies. This explanation for her choices at least aligns with demonic protocols! She probably believes that her relationship with Joe was forever destroyed and that she must put it behind her. But the only thing that makes the idea true for her is that she has so much faith in it.
• The enemy will attempt to get his victim to exercise his/her own faith in a lie. (This is the cause of  all atheism, BTW.) Eve had faith that eating the fruit would make her like god. In KatieLyn's case, he got her to have faith in the lie that she is happier without Joe.



[It is interesting that Adam's wife did not have her own name of Eve until after the Lord pronounced the curses for disobedience. I'm not going to explore the ramifications in this post, but the timing is worth noting; now that there was a need for salvation, Adam and his wife had separate identities. The obedience of faith is greater than the disobedience of sin that messed everything up.]

The Two Trees

     God planted a garden in Eden, in the east. There he put man whom He had formed. God made all kinds of trees spring from the ground, trees beautiful to look at and good for food. The Tree-of-Life was in the midst of the garden, also the Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil.

     The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and care for it. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."  ~ from Genesis 2

  Trees are a resource, a means of supplying something that is desired. Trees today are resources for construction material, furniture, fuel, food, paper products, all sorts of cellulose based plastics and more. The two named trees in primeval Eden were not so much "re"sources as they were primordial sources; one, a source of life, and the other, a source of knowledge of good and evil.

  When I was very young and first becoming familiar with the creation account, I thought that God wasn't very fair to give Eve a chance to choose between the two trees, but no one else ever got to.  Many years later, I came to realize that everyone will get to make this choice almost daily; but it took some "real life" to figure that out.

   For the inexperienced, it may be hard to differentiate between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . Both are visually pleasant. But the Tree of Life is a source of God Himself.

For as the Father has life in Himself, so also He has granted the Son to have life in Himself.   John 5:26
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life.  John 11:25
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life.   John 14:6

The the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the one which the serpent claimed could make men gods, bears a very different fruit. It did not make them true gods, but in resulted only in their determining right and wrong. When Adam ate of the fruit of that tree, he determined what was right/wrong for himself. In the sense that Adam set the standard, he became a god, but it also brought a curse of death, of separation from God who is love and light and life.

Our choices in life are very much like the choice Adam and Eve had in the Garden; sometimes we are more like Eve and are deceived into making a wrong choice, and other times we are more like Adam, who seems to have made the decision because he was influenced by Eve; at lest, that was the excuse that he gave.  

The Runaway Bride chose the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as her source. She determined what was the right thing to do for herself, and did not choose the the tree of the Lord, who came to bring life abundantly.

I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.   John 10:10 

The Lesson
We all get to choose which tree will be our source. We can choose God's way, which is life, if we are willing and obedient. Or we can choose to be our own god and decide what is right and wrong for ourselves. 

Father's Day

I wish KatieLyn, the runaway bride, could have been in the Father's Day service at church this morning. Several things were brought out that I think pertain to her and her family's situation.  I took notes.

The background text was Jesus' teaching the parable of the Prodigal Son. KatieLyn is no prodigal. If anything, she is just the opposite and has more in common with the elder son in that parable. But this morning's sermon did not focus much on the prodigal son at all; it was about the father releasing the sons into manhood—and releasing them into the guardianship of God's word.

If you are not familiar with the story, you can find it HERE - The Story of the Lost Son. It will open in a new window.

You can derive a lesson from every character's point of view in the story, but the one that was explored this morning was how God the Father releases his children to grow. Release is not abandonment. From a man's-wisdom point of view, it could look like the younger son was released "too much!" But he did come to his senses and matured in a way he never would have at home.

KatieLyn's identity is closer to that of the elder son, who always did what he thought was "the right thing to do" even when he found no joy in it. Even though he always "did the right thing," we see that he had, in his own mind, become a slave to his father rather than a a son. He was still emotionally working for his father, even though he was legally the owner. He did not understand the inheritance that had been provided for him.

When the younger son came to his senses and returned to his father, he was willing to come back as a servant but his father recognized his "office" as a son. How ironic that the elder son, who actually owned the entire estate at this point and would have technically been his brother's boss, was the one whose offended heart caused him to act like a mistreated slave. 

1 Corinthians 2:5

...so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.


 This verse jumped off the pages of the New Testament, out from a sermon on hearing, and reflected from an earlier journal entry.  In other words, the central message was coming at me from different directions within a few days time.And it is central to the explanation of why the bride felt compelled to run away: She placed her faith more on the wisdom of men, or in this case, her best friend and mother (they are the same person), than she did in the power of God. 


Backing up to verse 4

Notice that verse 5 began with a "so that." You may be curious as to what happened "so that" the Corinthian's faith would not be based on men's wisdom but on God's power. Basically, Paul didn't use highfalutin' speech; he did not rely on prodigious vocabulary or impressive oratory. He just told it like it was and let the Holy Spirit's power do the convincing. The church people could see the practical evidence and did not have to rely on Paul's eloquence to be convinced. 

There had been an abundance of evidence that the Holy Spirit was working to bring KatieLyn and Joe together. Much of it has been outlined in earlier posts. But demonstrations of the Spirit, leaving no doubt, continued for several weeks after she ran back home. On what would have been the day after she returned from her honeymoon, a childcare job unexpectedly opened up which would have been a perfect fit for her in several ways: the scope, the flexibility, the pay and even the hours that would have coordinated well with Joe's second-shift. I am of the persuasion that the reason the job did not open up three weeks earlier was because the Lord had saved it for KatieLyn; three weeks earlier she was not around to interview for the position and it would have been filled by someone else.

We could see other places and provisions, even sales on furniture that seemed to be her style, that might have been taken as a demonstration of God's supply. A scoffer would say Joe was grasping at straws in seeing something that wasn't there, that the law of averages means that jobs are always opening up and furniture is routinely for sale, but these were hand-in-glove fits precisely timed and not random coincidences.

Moving ahead to verses 6 & 7

Right after Paul says that faith would not be based on human wisdom, but that they'd see a demonstration of God's power, he writes, "Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom—but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing." 

I don't have to make a judgment about KatieLyn's maturity. It is enough to observe two things: (a) Even though she had begun by seeking the Lord, she was now listening to her mom who had picked fights with her; at the end she had no solid faith in what God had told her. Since James 3:16 says that
"where strife is, there is confusion and every evil work," we can deduce that the strife her mother purposefully put into her life contributed to her confusion, and (b) the reasons she gave for running were based on the "wisdom" of this age, which is doomed. That is why KatieLyn's reasons never made any sense. 

Paul calls the wisdom of God mysterious and hidden. It has to be sought to be found, and it is revealed by the Holy Spirit. [Yes, oftentimes the Holy Spirit will use another person as an instrument to reveal truth, but He can't use a person who is causing strife and confusion.] Paul wrote, "But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory." I believe this. I believe that God had decreed before the ages that KatieLyn and Joe would be a suitable match, and that this match had the potential to give them the glorious place that is the center of His will. But KatieLyn rejected it. 


That is not to say that God did not foresee that or that He cannot work another way to accomplish His end for Joe, but KatieLyn and her mom need to realize that just because God can and will, God's mercy is not an excuse for lack of faith. KatieLyn was still disobedient to the vision that God had for her. 


The Lesson🐦
It may take years for KatieLyn to learn this, but if she lives long enough, she will eventually discover that the Lord's placement of Joe in her life was not as fungible as her mom told her it was. 
Your faith should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. It has been more than a year and still, to this day, I am amazed when I think about how KatieLyn's mother was virtually bragging about how wise her wisdom of this age was, and how little concern she had about advising her own daughter to question the Lord. They completely missed seeing the power of God. 


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Shattered Dreams ↔ Shut Up Heavens

Today's title speaks of shattered dreams and shut up heavens. One flows almost naturally into another.

Shattered Dreams ↔ Shut Up Heavens

Shatter the dream, and there is no faith to receive its blessing; it has been lost.  When the heavens are as bronze and no blessings are in sight, there is no hope left for a dream. This is the vicious cycle that Gwen plunged her daughter when she picked fights with her. Every cycle of bickering sapped away a little more of KatieLyn's faith. Four days before the wedding, KatieLyn spiraled so low that she ran back home.

When I began this blog, I was on a quest to find out what happened. Why did KatieLyn run off in the middle of the night when it was so clearly God's will that she and Joe be married?  I sense that I am nearing the end of my search, and the answers are as cruel as her run into the night was.

KatieLyn was disobedient to God's call. Her mom encouraged her in this disobedience in a manner that was extremely hard to oppose because her mom never heard God clearly.  Gwen never heard God clearly because she never totally surrendered herself to fully listen. Satan, who wanted to destroy a godly marriage before it could begin, used KatieLyn's mother to steal her dream so that KatieLyn would destroy her own love by rejecting God's plan for her and fleeing in disobedience.

There is an ancient curse for disobedience which is recorded in Leviticus 26:
     If you spurn my decrees, and if your soul abhors what I have ordained, so that you fail to carry them out, then I will do this to you: I will bring on you sudden terror, and I will sap your strength. I will set my face against you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you. 
       If after all this you will not listen to me,  I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze.

The curse continues on for another dozen verses, each round becoming more severe. But there is a way of escape. God does provide relief for those who repent:
     But if they will confess their sins and that they have walked contrary unto me; then I will remember My covenant... I will not reject them, nor will I so abhor them as to destroy them.  

The good news is that through Christ's death and resurrection, the body of Christ was redeemed from the curse of the law. KatieLyn is part of that body.

But redemption does not mean that there are no consequences. There are consequences. The Lord does not change. KatieLyn does not unilaterally get to make a "new" will of God simply because she changed her mind or got scared.

 The loving God wants her to grow up. If she does not, then she will become a woman who craves instead of a woman who finds delight. Growing up means taking responsibility for her actions—specifically, her action of relying more on her mother than she did on the Lord. If she does not do this, then she will end up marrying a man that her mother chose for her, not one that God chose for her. It is a sorry state of affairs. After she ran away, she "confessed" that she did not think things through. This is her self-deceiving lie because she spent hundreds of hours thinking things through, often while talking to Joe. God did not plant the idea in her heart that His plan would not work. The notion that the marriage would not work came from another realm and was introduced to her mind by outside forces; the attack did not come from God.
After she ran away, she failed to confess that she had not honored God's plan for her life but had run out on Him as well.

The Lesson
I don't know how many more posts are left in this blog.  I do know that KatieLyn was not obedient to the Heavenly vision for her life. I don't want to keep beating a dead horse.

I do know that running away and refusing to rise to address the issue did not honor the God who gives her the breath of life and controls her destiny! 
And lest you think that is me being melodramatic, here is what it sounded like when Daniel said it to Belshazzar:  You have proudly defied the Lord of heaven; but you didn't honor God, who holds in his power your very life and all your ways. (5:23)

How Jesus Closed the Door on the Devil - another look at John 11

In my last post, we determined that in most of the healings and miracles that Jesus performed, the person's own faith played a pivotal role. Raising Lazarus from the dead was a bit different because, well, Lazarus was dead, which made using his own faith problematical. So in this case, Jesus is seen teaching the mourners to build the faith level before raising Lazarus from the dead, (more on this later). Whereas generally, miracles were performed as a witness to unbelievers so that they would want to listen to the teaching that followed. In John 11:40, Jesus said, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God." We can conclude that some who heard his teaching believed because they did see the Glory of God that day!

As often happens, when I study one thing out, I'll see something new that is related to it. That is the precept upon precept principle of Isaiah 28:10 at work. In this case, I got a fresh view of the way Jesus closed the door on the devil when He raised Lazarus.

There were many opportunities for the devil to use fear, doubt, and unbelief that day. Those are the schemes that he uses to 'substantiate" his lies. People who concentrate on their fear, who dwell upon their doubts, and who wallow in unbelief put themselves in Satan's robbery zone.  This is how the devil succeeded in turning KatieLyn, Woman of Destiny, into a runaway bride. Satan got her to think that his lies proved that the marriage would not work. 

But back to John 11. Let's go through the chapter in order to see the progression:
(verse numbers shown for reference)

3.  The sisters, may and Martha, sent a message to Jesus: "Lord, the one You love (Lazarus) is sick." 

4. This is where Jesus begins shutting the door on the devil. Jesus' initial and immediate response was to speak faith-filled words:  "This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God." Lazarus was not dead—yet; Jesus declared the outcome at the onset. This was a "word" foundation to which He would later be able to apply an "act of faith."  With those two components in place, it would then be the Father's job to bring it to pass.  Man's chief role is to hear the word and act in obedience to it. 

6. When Jesus heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. He knew His Father's timing had a purpose: increased and amplified Glory. Jesus was coming into the home stretch of his earth ministry, which meant that he was ramping up and doing the advanced class levels now.  

7. A couple days later, Jesus tells His disciples, "Let us go to Judea again."

8. We can tell by their response that Lazarus' condition was not the top thing on their minds. They were far more concerned about being the targets of stoning. 

 9-11. Jesus gives them a metaphorical reply which basically says that His spiritual eyes are wide open, He has seen how to avoid that problem, but Lazarus needs help. 

12-13. Initially, Jesus uses 'sleep' as a euphemism for 'dead.'  This often puzzles many people, but once you see that Satan's strategy is to insert doubt and unbelief so that the disciples will have 'misgivings' about Jesus original statement that "the sickness would not end in death," You can understand that Jesus was walking circumspectly (cf Ephesians 5:15 'See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,') by not giving the devil any extra ammo to shoot (eg. fiery darts, Ephesians 6:16) at his already wavering disciples. (That watch-your-words to preserve-your-faith skill point, however, would remain over their heads until after Jesus was resurrected, had ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit to teach them.)

15. With a touch of foreshadowing, Jesus says, "I am glad for your sakes that I was not there" in Bethany when Lazarus died. The reason He was glad was so that the disciples could have the opportunity "to believe," which requires them to have faith in what He had said from the get-go. 
Notice that Jesus has now stated that, "for your sake I am glad I was not there." When He does get there, the first words out of the sisters' mouths will lament that he was not there. Two women, with the best intentions, will blurt out stuff that is 180° out of phase with the purpose of the Father, the purpose that Jesus will carry out with an act of faith when commanding Lazarus to "Come forth!"

17. When Jesus got close to Lazarus' hometown, He found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. This gives us a bit of insight into how Jesus communicated with and received revelation from His Father. Jesus had known by the Spirit that Lazarus was dead before he made the return trip to Judea, but he had not been given the full picture. 

[As an aside, this plays into KatieLyn's disastrous run into the night. She had been told the essential information—that Joe was the man God picked for her husband. But like Jesus, she had not received all the details. These were left for them to discover as they walked in obedience. Fortunately, Jesus' mom was not chronically looking over his shoulder, reading his mail, and fighting with Him about the "what-ifs" of Lazarus' being in a stinking tomb.] 

20-21. When Martha hears that Jesus is in the vicinity, she runs to him and blurts out,  "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." It was nice that she remembered to use a proper term of address, Lord. This tells us that even in her state of distress, she still retained half a clue about the position of Jesus and the power of God.

23. This is where Jesus keeps His hand on the closing door. Jesus responds, not with an apology, but with a strong statement of faith: "Your brother will rise again."  He says it as a fact, not as a hope or a wish. 

[KatieLyn had the same option available to her; she could have chosen to confirm what the Lord had told her previously. Unfortunately, she had a mother who was telling her that consideration of doubts was wise.]

24. Martha struggles. She wants to believe that Lazarus will rise again, but her mind is not renewed, and its thinking in worldly, fleshly patterns of reasoning.  Trying to make sense of it all, she goes to sounding very religious: "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." While true, that is not what Jesus had told her. This is another strategy of Satan; he substitutes an alternative truth that pulls your faith off the main point, but does not bother your conscience because you are still believing "a" truth.  The less that your conscience is bothered, the thicker that your pride can grow.

25-26. Martha's words had cracked opened the door to the devil and she had not even noticed it. She was convinced that she was "saying the right thing." But her future tense statement is one of hope, not one of faith. Without faith, it is impossible... (Hebrews 11:6) Jesus gets her back on point with His in-the here-and-now faith statement, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die."  
This call to believe the resurrection and the life, when acted on, shut the door to on the devil's lies.  

27. In the end, Martha makes the proper choice of whom to believe, and get her timing right as well. She concludes, "Yes, Lord; I have believed that You are the Christ, the Son of God, even He who comes into the world."

32. Martha went back and told Mary that Jesus was just outside the village. Mary get up and goes to Him,saying essentially the same thing her sister had said earlier, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."  

33. Although the wording was identical, the voice inflection and presumably her motivation was somewhat different because Mary was weeping when she said it. It would seem that Mary "didn't have her public face together" quite as well as her sister did. Jesus was moved by the weeping.  

34-35. Jesus response was different with Mary than it had been with Martha. "'Where have you laid him?' he asked. 'Come and see, Lord,' they replied." Jesus wept.

36-37. Those who saw this were of two minds. One group looked for Jesus' heart and commented on His love for Lazarus. Others analyzed his so-far inaction and questioned His power. 
With the benefits of being outside observers to this story, we know that Jesus' weeping was not soley for Lazarus; He had already heard from His Father and knew that Lazarus was due to return in glory.  Some, if not most, of the weeping was for the lost state of those standing around Him.  But that need was going to be met too—for some, but not all. It would be their choice.

41-42. Ultimately, the miracle greater than raising Lazarus was the miracle of having the crowd believe that the Father had sent Jesus. That is evident in the prayer Jesus prayed after the stone was rolled away.
"Jesus raised His eyes, and said, 'Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.'"
This is where Jesus finished shutting the door on the devil.  Faith was in place, and His action would be the catalyst to bring it to life—for faith without works is dead.

It was time for action. Jesus calls Lazarus to come forth and orders that the bindings be loosened. The story continues... 

45. Many of the Jews who came with Mary and saw Jesus in action believed in him.

46. But some went to the Pharisees and stirred them up further by telling them what Jesus had done.

48. John, the author of this Gospel, tells us the true motivation of the Pharisees: "If we let Jesus go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation." 

A man had been raised from the dead, the Glory had been seen, and the Pharisees were concerned about losing their rank and position!

The Lesson
Gwen is a Pharisee. The Lord was ready to show His glory by uniting a couple in marriage, If KatieLyn had believed, we'd have seen the miracle of two becoming one. But Gwen was concerned about losing her position, about Joe taking KatieLyn away from her! The codependency would crumble.
Gwen began acting exactly like the Pharisees did.
53. So from that day on, the Pharisees planned together to kill Jesus.

Gwen did not physically kill bodies, but she set out to kill the love in KatieLyn's heart. She did that.

Jesus closed the door on the devil when it came to those who would value His word enough to have their faith increased, but He did not change the intents of the hearts of those who considered worldly position and prestige to be more important than seeing God's glory.