It may have crossed your mind that it seems pernickety of God to plunge the whole human race into sin because of one transgression regarding a choice in the Garden of Eden restaurant. Wouldn’t one warning have been enough? Paul would later say that in Adam all have sinned. 

It’s not altogether obvious why eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led Adam and Eve to realise they were naked. Some have speculated that the glory of God surrounded them, which was then removed when they disobeyed God. 

Having been deceived into thinking that God was withholding something, Eve now saw that the fruit was desirable for gaining wisdom, so she ate and gave some to Adam. This apparently ‘innocent act’ leads to catastrophe for the first couple. Now we can be sure that God had made Adam and Eve to relate with Him: there was no defect in them that meant they were deficient and so needed an outside agent. 

The heart of sin is the belief that God cannot be trusted to look after us. Look at the Ten Commandments and see how the breaking of the prohibitions suggests we need to take matters into our own hands.

The very start of the fall of humanity came with a question. The narrator tells us of the craftiness of the serpent (3:1), as if to suggest that the succeeding narrative may not be all that it seems, and so begins the journey for Eve and Adam to eat the prohibited fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

The New Testament has verses that we can barely comprehend, and this is one of them. The trouble is we have all been taught that if it’s too good to be true it probably is! Ever been seduced by an advert only to be caught out by the small print? But we have tons of evidence that the Bible is 100% trustworthy, and so how likely is it that the writers and in this case, Jesus are going to mix in some lies? 

Around 760 BC, God sent Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh, the Assyrians, that judgment was coming. When the Assyrians repented, God withheld His action. At the time, the Assyrians were the superpower of the day, they ruled the world, from Libya and Ethiopia to Babylon and beyond. 

This letter by Jesus’ half-brother doesn’t mince its words, as Jude feels the need to ‘contend’ for the faith (v3) and warn his readers to stick with it. These closing words to his short letter remind us that there is no ‘one size fits all’ response to people we might regard as struggling with their faith. 

Our English word ‘love’ is how translators typically translates each of four Greek words: philia, eros, storge and agape. This fourth is often, though not exclusively, used of God’s love, and this is the word for Christ’s love. 

Depending on what you count, there are forty-three occasions when Paul’s prayers are recorded in the Epistles, but this is one of Paul’s four main prayers, and the Ephesians knew exactly what he was asking God to do.