I sometimes get a little peeved at Adam and Eve. By doing the one thing God told them not to do—the ONE thing—they opened the door for every bit of misery in this world.
Exposing humans with free will to temptation is always dicey. I do realize that if the first couple had not rebelled against God and incurred His righteous wrath, somebody else down the line probably would have.
But since we have Adam and Eve to blame, I sometimes do that, especially when some of the misery they unleashed touches me.
That’s when I find myself mumbling, “Thanks a lot, you two.”
I was mumbling the other day as I tromped around one of our pastures looking for thistle plants to destroy. These prickly weeds are now flowering and sending their hellish offspring off to populate our land.
My husband says we need to nip them in the bud, so that’s what I was doing—nipping. (I’m such a compliant wife … cough, cough.)
As I itched and sweated and dug up thistles, I recalled that these insidious weeds were mentioned in the Bible as one of the curses God placed upon this earth after Adam and Eve’s disobedience.
It’s right there in Genesis 3:17, when God said to Adam, “… cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you … . ’ ”
There’s nothing like experiencing a curse up close and personal to grasp the seriousness of sin.
That thistle curse verse, by the way, comes right after God tells Eve that because of her sin, the pain of childbirth will be greatly multiplied for women. After not being able to sit for weeks after the birth of my nearly 11-pound, first son, I had a whole new take on that verse, and a very personal reason to be ticked off at Sister Eve.
But thistles and thorns? That particular curse didn’t mean much to me until we moved out to the country to claim and tame our little piece of this fallen earth. I didn’t even know what a thistle looked like for the first 54 years of my life.
I certainly do now. And these plants will forevermore remind me of the consequences of sin.
Of course, none of us has to look very hard or far to see the effects of sin upon our earth, or upon our personal lives.
I came in from my thistle battle the other day and within minutes heard the tragic news about the Boston Marathon bombings. There it was—the worst kind of “thistles and thorns”—pure evil.
Sometimes, when things look that dark, that fallen, that terrifying and painful, we want to shake our fists at God and rail, “Why don’t You do something? Why don’t You fix it?”
I think if we really want to know the answer to that, we will hear Him gently reply, “I did. And I will.”
The Bible tells us that God planned to fix things before we even broke them. Before Adam and Eve ever sold us down the river, God planned to send His Son, Jesus, to buy back those who would believe in Him, and to ultimately restore the heavens and the earth to perfection.
That’s a picture of the perfect, compassionate, gracious, loving heart of God. This current, fallen world is not.
It’s a mistake to look at what’s wrong here and assume there must, then, be something wrong with the character and motives of God. A tragic, eternal mistake.
“God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)