Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Lenten Devotional – Day 13

Q. 15. What was the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created?

A. The sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created was their eating the forbidden fruit.

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, ... she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.” (Gen. 3:6)

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free. - C. S. Lewis

  A student once asked Dr. Carlyle Marney, "Dr. Marney, where was the Garden of Eden?" Marney answered, "215 South Elm Street in Knoxville, Tennessee."

  "Ah, c'mon, you're kidding me," said the student. "It's supposed to be somewhere in the Middle East, isn't it?"

  "Well, you couldn't prove it by me," Marney replied. "For it was there on Elm Street, when I was a boy, that I stole a quarter out of my Mama's purse and went down to the store and bought some candy and ate it, and then I was so ashamed that I came back home and hid in the closet. It was there that Mama found me and asked, 'Why are you hiding? What have you done?'"

Romans8-28  Each of us has our own Eden where we first betrayed our highest principles and purposes, discovered that there was a shadow-side within us and tried to hide from the reality of our deception. What happened to Adam and Eve is the story of all of us ...."

  Today the serpent still whispers in our ears that “we have a right.” This phrase has become one of our favorite words in contemporary society, “I have a right to live without loneliness”, and “I have a right to happiness,” without realizing we need to make the life giving choices. The lie tells us we don’t need to make the right choices, we simply have the right. The lie always appeals to our deepest anxiety and it’s too appealing to resist.

  Actually, we could have resisted, but we didn’t so now we can’t. Which is what John Calvin was trying to say in his doctrine of human depravity. We’ve become junkies to the serpent’s lie, and we keep believing that the next thing we reach for will make everything just right. It never does.

  “This independent, self-sufficient approach to life is the fundamental sin of so many of us...It is the refusal of grace. It is the failure to acknowledge Abba as the Divine Almsgiver. It is Adam and Eve reaching for the apple all over again. But, luckily, self-sufficiency can take us only so far. Sooner or later we run up against a brick wall. We get a sudden glimpse into our existential self-deficiency. We finish eating the apple and discover, a few hours later, that we are hungry again. We gradually realize where we actually are and where we truly belong.” - Albert Haase

  Without free will, men and women would not be created “in the image of God.” With it, we have the power to defy God’s wishes and to bring misery on ourselves and others.

  Jurgen Moltmann argues that the greatest mystery of human existence is not the reality of evil, or injustice, or hatred. Rather, the greatest mystery in the universe is human freedom - the freedom that God has chosen to give you and me that enables us to order our lives in any way we see fit. We are free to become a Mother Teresa or an Adolph Hitler. We are free to give our lives to God, or free to crucify Jesus the Christ.

  In his treatise, “On the Incarnation,” St. Athanasius claimed that our identity is directly derived from the God in whose image we are made. All of creation was created out of nothing, and thus even the dust of the ground that God used in forming humanity is derived from God. Turning away from God in the hope of finding a different source of identity, Athanasius warned, results not in becoming our own creations but in becoming nothing.

Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning Psalm: 26, 90
Evening Psalm: 45
Jeremiah 3:6-18
Romans 1:26—2:11
John 5:1-18

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