Jasmine didn’t know it yet, but she
was about to discover a pattern within the kingdom: when one embarks upon a
spiritual quest, synchronicities appear to guide the pilgrim upon her
path. Was it merely coincidence that a
few days ago, a whisper of mystery had prompted her to find out who Eve is and,
today, the radio preacher Jasmine turned on had chosen for his topic “The
Fall”? Carl Jung would say, “No, not
‘coincidence,’ but ‘synchronicity.’”
Jung defined “synchronicity” as “meaningful coincidence,” but it could
be further defined as “divine coincidence”: those connections that are divinely
ordained to help guide a seeker upon his path.
Cast from her church, Jasmine decided
that Sunday morning she would “do church” by listening to one of the popular
radio preachers. She had never heard of
this preacher, but she found one whose voice didn’t scream. Given Jasmine’s stereotypes of radio
preachers, his voice and tone sounded unusually rational. Little did she expect him to spend much of
his sermon on Eve.
Having been carefully taught from
her childhood church’s “BE” program to always bring her Bible to church,
Jasmine had her Bible opened to Genesis 3 to follow along. Unlike the pastors at the churches she had
always attended, this one did not begin with the scripture passage, but bounced
all over it, reading the passages relevant to his message, so Jasmine opted to multi-task
reading the chapter and listening to his sermon.
“Men, do you know why you toil at
work?” the preacher asked. “Do you know
why you are getting interrupted by people calling you to sell stuff you don’t
want nor need? Or why you are finding
your e-mail inbox overloaded, much of it with spam, while the messages from
your boss get hidden in the inundation?
Or why you find yourself unable to discreetly take leave from the office
gossip when you just wanted to warm up your coffee? Or why you knock heads with your supervisor
who insists on the most inefficient way to get the job done? Or why you’re fighting viruses on your computer,
battling red tape in your bureaucracies, or getting earfuls from clients who
blame you for their mistakes?” Jasmine
could resonate with all of his examples, and her mind added more of them,
not only from the businesses where she had worked, but also from the school
where she was now teaching. The preacher
continued, “Do you want to know why you face all of these seemingly unnecessary
pressures? It’s the thorns, men, the
thorns you toil at work.”
Jasmine’s mind stopped at the word,
“men.” She knew all of those thorns and
more, as did every one of her female friends.
What century, Jasmine wondered, is this radio preacher living in? Since he had perfectly nailed what “thorns”
are like in today’s society, his internal clock couldn’t be too far off. Perhaps that single word was an unconscious
slip from his early days as a pastor.
Jasmine decided to let it go and keep listening.
But
she felt another sting when he blamed the women for the “men’s” toil. As Eve had been the “first” to “fall,” the
preacher accused her of “tempting the man to join her as an accomplice in their
crime.” He added in a pre-caution: “Be
careful, men, not to heed bad advice.”
Reading along in Genesis 3, Jasmine smiled at the irony. The preacher seemed to be doing the same as
Adam: “She made me do it.” Had he caught
Adam’s words? “The woman you put here
with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it“ (Genesis 3:12,
NIV).
The preacher seemed not to have
caught the irony that he was playing the same blame game as Adam, but, at least, he included women in his following
admonishment: “This pertains to all of us.
We each need to heed good advice, as King David taught: ‘Blessed is the
man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked’” (Psalm 1:1). Naturally, the preacher put in a plug to
honor one’s leaders and accept the sound counsel of those in positions of
authority, presumably, of course, his counsel and that of other church
leaders.
Cynical though Jasmine may have
been, she was grateful she didn’t turn off the preacher mid-sermon, because he
closed with a disclaimer showing he did not believe Eve was all bad, nor did he place full blame upon
her alone. “Perhaps we place too much
blame on the woman for being the first to fall, when she was deceived by a
seemingly divine and, as the text states, ‘cunning’ creature. Adam fell fully upon the prompting of another
human, but Eve followed a ‘cunning’
creature she may have thought she could trust.”
Jasmine sighed some relief the preacher admitted this. He continued, “She should have known, of
course, to trust God. But we should not
over-criticize her for falling for a deception.
Instead, we should take precautions ourselves to be awake and alert,
ever following Christ, our Master, so as to avoid falling into the traps of the
Enemy.”
Jasmine
had heard many such messages. At least this preacher was not the
all-blame or Eve-is-all-black type, recognizing in her some understandably
human traits and giving her the benefit of the doubt as one who was, at heart,
neither “disobedient,” nor “a temptress,” but “deceived.”
Then,
in order to warn against the “cunning” ways the “Enemy” might deceive today,
the preacher added another precaution that caught Jasmine’s attention:
over-trusting one’s perception of seemingly divine guidance that is, in fact,
deceptive. He gave examples of visions,
dreams, and messages that could appear to be from the Holy Spirit, but, could
in fact be from the darker side of the heavenly realms.
Would
this include her “whispers of mystery”?
How could she be sure these messages were not from the dark, but from
the Light? She prayed the Spirit would
help her to answer this question, and, in the meantime, she would be cautious,
not taking them fully at face value, until she was sure they were from the
Light.
The
preacher moved to conclude his sermon, having never quite touched on Eve’s
curse. And it was quite a curious
one. Though he had skipped around the
passage and not read it, BE Bible-trained Jasmine had, of course, opened to the
passage in her Bible. To her
astonishment, Eve was cursed with more than just pain in childbirth:
“To the woman, He said,
‘I will greatly multiply
your pain in childbirth.
In pain you shall bring forth children.
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you’”
Jasmine
marveled over the final statement. The
Bible really says that?
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