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No cell phones dying
on you. No worry about overdue rents or catching a cold or
having medical coverage. To say the least, it was the good
life!
Matter of fact, it was
so good that God said, “Listen you two, anything you want in
this Garden you can have or sample, but…leave that Tree of
The Knowledge of Good and Evil alone!”
“Are we clear on that,”
said God.
“Oh yes”, said Adam and
Eve, “we got the picture and will stay away from it!”
So, God leaves for a
moment but said that he will be back in the cool of the
evening to converse with Adam and Eve and see how things are
progressing in the Garden.
But, wouldn’t you know
it. Satan, the enemy of all things God, has access to the
Garden and hears what God told Adam and Eve about “that”
tree.
“Sweet!”, Satan says to
himself. “Now watch me!”
So, Satan waits a
while until Eve is by herself tending to the Garden and
Satan, appears as a talking serpent. Now talking serpents
don’t scare Eve for, after all, God can make animals talk.
Remember the talking donkey rebuking the prophet Balaam when
he, without mercy, beat his poor riding donkey for not
following his directions.
The donkey saw an
angel blocking his path and the donkey had enough sense to
stop moving forward. He knew something was up, but the
prophet was clueless until the donkey spoke and gave some
wisdom as to what was happening in the spiritual realm.
But I digress. Back to
the Garden story.
When Satan, appearing
as a serpent, told Eve that God was selfish and stingy and
he did not want them to be like him and knowing the
difference between good and evil, Eve got tripped up and
started listening to another other than God.
Bingo! That was the
opening Satan needed to issue those now famous words: “Did
God really say that if you eat of that tree you would surely
die?”
Matter of fact, Satan
plied his lie and said that if Eve and Adam were in fact to
eat the delicious fruit of that grand tree, they would be
like gods and would live forever!
So, Eve, beguiled by
the serpent did eat of the fruit and later Adam with her
encouragement also ate of the forbidden fruit.
What happened here in
the Garden that is now being multiplied around the world and
especially in the US of A.
Simple: a concerted
campaign of misinformation, alternate facts, internet bots,
fake news, trolls, false videos, engineered stories that
parade as solid news and thousand of lies that are gushing
from the White House.
Satan was able to have
Adam and Eve question their primary truth source and he was
able to convince them with appeals to their vanity and ego
that God was not to be trusted about his warning of not
eating from that particular tree.
No, Eve or Adam did
not have a cell phone to watch CNN or MSNBC or Fox News.
They had a relationship with God but allowed someone else
with a different agenda to corrupt their thinking and to
jettison what they knew was truthful.
If you examine current
events, it appears that people are vesting less and less
truth in previously solid institutions that they relied upon
for accuracy and truthfulness.
Now, for many, truth
is a scrambled salad full of sandy grit and questionable
lumps of fact or half-truths.
Governmental agencies are
being challenged for their veracity (remember Trump using
his Sharpie to re-do the Hurricane Dorian map?) and
venerated organizations like the FBI and the CIA and the
military are under severe strain of credulity because Trump
is playing the role of Satan in order to undermine pillars
of truth if it serves his purposes of becoming an autocrat.
When God found out
what Satan did to Adam and Eve, Satan, as the serpent, was
punished and had to now crawl on his belly (whereas before
he walked upright) and eat the dust of the earth.
As for Adam and Eve,
their innocence was lost, and they were banished from the
Garden for their rejection of the truth of God in exchange
for a lie.
Moral of the story:
There is nothing new under the sun and what we are now knew
as truth is being denigrated and dismissed. This assault on
truth has a long history and we are now seeing personalities
that are mimicking the same art of Satan’s distortion of
truth. This assault is being given a 2.0 upgrade via the
explosive use of the Internet, cell phones and social media
to reach the masses.
Apples, anyone?
Contact Lafe Tolliver at
tolliver@juno.com
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