Meditations 1

Disobedience 

Recently, while helping at our Church’s children’s day camp, I noticed that some of the children were playing in the decorative fountain that adorns the stairway that leads up to the church’s entrance. I approached them to tell them to stop. However, they merrily continued and after a few futile attempts to get them to cease playing with the different stones in the fountain, not to mention throwing water around, I found myself joining in. Eventually, the main leader the camp saw what was going on and came over and with some stern words dispersed the playing children. He then told me to not let the children play in the fountain anymore, something which I hadn’t intended to do anyway, but found myself powerless to prevent!
Children are inherently disobedient, which I have often found to my cost whenever I have tried to work with them. Furthermore, they are inclined to do bad things. You don’t have to teach a child to lie; it instinctly knows how to do it, but you do need to use some form of discipline, usually administered by someone sterner than I, to get a child to obey in a correct manner. Obviously, there are different degrees of obedience and disobedience, but I would be very surprised if anyone could show me a perfect child, who never disobeys or does anything wrong.
Society often tried to explain these negative tendencies as being the result of the influence of external factors on children as they grow up. Maybe they haven’t received the care and attention they needed, have lived in poverty, lack a good education or have been mistreated by others. These factors could all have some sort of influence, but as Christians we know that the root of the problem is not external, but internal.
Adam and eve, the first humans, were created and put into a very good creation, where they had everything they needed. Yet they still went astray. No matter how much we improve someone’s outside circumstances, they still have a propensity inside to do what they shouldn’t.
We see this described in some detail in Genesis 3. This is the famous passage where Eve is confronted by a serpent that tries to persuade her to do what God had forbidden. Humans had been given complete freedom and jurisdiction over creation, with the exception of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, the serpent begins to question whether God’s words can be trusted. In verse one of this chapter he asks Eve if God had really commanded her not to eat the fruit. He then challenges the supposed consequences of eating the fruit by suggesting in verse 4 that they won’t be death and further on in verse 5 he even raises the idea that God’s intentions aren’t good, and that they are actually just to spoil the human’s fun and stop them from being like God.
Eve on her part allows herself to be drawn into this deception and in verse shows her own knowledge of what God had actually said to be ropey to say the least, as she doesn’t mention specifically which tree she is not allowed to eat from and also adds that she is not allowed to touch it, something that God didn’t say.
The rest is history as they say. Eve eats the fruit and gives some to her husband, who is passively standing by (and about whom much could be said). The results are disastrous with the humans hiding from God and then passing the blaming; the man onto his wife and the woman onto the serpent. God pronounces different punishments for the humans and for the serpent and concludes that the humans should be sent out from the paradise that He had created. 
Thus, we see that disobedience, and all the ensuing problems, come from doubting the goodness and correctness of God’s word. This is something that all humans struggle with from when they are born, and can not be resolved simply by changing our outward circumstance as it comes from within. Eve had perfect surroundings, but still succumbed.
There are nevertheless in Genesis 3 two signs of hope. Firstly, in verse 15 we read that the offspring of the woman will crush the serpent’s head, while the serpent will strike his heel. This is seen as a foretelling of Jesus’ coming. He was born of a woman, and although He was struck by being crucified, He then rose again to life thus defeating the power of the serpent, who had brought death into the world by deceiving Eve. In this sense, his head was crushed.
Secondly, in verse 21 we see something that could easily be missed. Here we see that, in spite of the human’s disobedience to God and the resulting punishments, God still cares for them. He makes garments out of animal skins to cover their nakedness. It is interesting that it is specified that the garments were made out of skin. When the humans had first realised their nakedness, they themselves made coverings out of fig leaves (verse 7), but now God makes better, more substantial clothes from animal skins.
This is significant not only from the point of view that it shows God’s superior love for the humans that He had made, even if they had disobeyed Him, but also it could be noted that in order to make the garments, it was necessary for animals to die. It is not specified whether they died naturally or whether God sacrificed them in order to obtain their skins for the humans. Either way, we see here the first notion in the Bible of death resulting in something good for humans. This is a theme that develops throughout the Bible, culminating in Jesus’ death, which brings the possibility of forgiveness and true life to mankind, reversing the effects of what Adam and Eve did.

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