Genesis 3:6“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.” When you strip away all the factors that were at play in the Garden of Eden the day Adam and Eve fell, you come to a fundamental question, “What went wrong?” Satan is wicked with a capital “W”, and his devices are too powerful for us to resist on our own. But what about Adam and Eve? After all, weren’t they perfect? Didn’t they commune with God face-to-face every day? Wasn’t their spiritual state far more superior to ours? I would say “yes.” But perhaps we’re not asking the right questions. The temptation that Satan leveled against Eve must have been well thought out. No doubt Satan, being the expert devil that he is, listened carefully to their daily conversations and looked for an opportunity to formulate an attack. Undoubtedly, Satan waited for the right moment to inject his poisonous challenge against God’s authority. But what would be the nucleus to the assault? Satan used his own words to twist God’s words in order to get Adam and Eve to question the ownership of the garden. Satan tempted Adam and Eve to forget about simply “tending” the garden. He suggested that they should own a piece of it. Yet, the Lord had told them to tend it, to maintain it, and to manage it. Satan put in their minds that this “stewardship thing” wasn’t enough. So the devil held out to them what today is still our greatest weakness – the deception of ownership! The Lord never told Adam and Eve to own the garden, yet they enjoyed the pleasure of it. He never told them to take it and make it their own possession, yet they lived as king and queen over a kingdom that had freely been provided them. God loaned it to Adam and Eve, but Satan said that wasn’t enough and told them to take it so that they could own it themselves! The verse says, “She took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband.” She took and she gave. The problem is, it wasn’t hers to take and it wasn’t hers to give. It was the Lord’s, and she and her husband had stolen what didn’t belong to them. The call of the new man in Christ, the Christian, is to be mindful that we are stewards, not owners, in this life. You and I will not be judged for what we owned, but for our stewardship of what God loaned to us and our management of it. Satan loves it when he can get us to think that the money in our pockets is ours. He loves it when we believe that what we drive, what we live in, and what we see around us are ours to own. The truth is, we own nothing in this life. We are stewards over everything God has provided. Dear friend, remember the words that we long to hear in the end from our Lord Himself, “Well done thou good and faithful servant.” Pastor Jack Have you been blessed by Pastor Jack’s Devotions? Email us now: CLICK HERE |
