This week, we are going to spend a bit of time with one of the oldest stories there is. The story of mankind’s descent into sin. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this new year, let’s start at the beginning and take a fresh look at what drives us to do the things we do.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

One thing that always interests me in this story, and I think it speaks to who we are as human beings, is this: there were two special trees in the garden. One was called the Tree of Life, and the other the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It seems our natural inclination from the start was to look at the one thing that was out of our reach. We had life and abundance for the taking, but instead, our desires drew us to the one tree whose fruit was forbidden. So it seems, even before we sinned, there was a natural curiosity and a set of desires in place that drew us to dangerous places.

Three primal desires

What were these desires? Were these desires sinful in themselves? Let’s consider these questions one at a time. If we look at this story carefully, I think there are at least three desires that can be identified. Some would sum it all up and say we fell into pride, but to me, pride is a sinful condition of the heart. Proud is what we became because of our mishandling of our core desires. I am looking at what we were before we fell, and it seems to me we had desires, and these desires, though not sinful in themselves, were easily exploited by the serpent to encourage us to choose to satisfy our immediate desires over obeying God’s long term desires for us.

Let me begin by listing the desires I see in this story.

Ascendancy

This is the desire to improve and increase ourselves. It is actually a useful desire considering our commission from God. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  

So, the desire for ascendancy is not sin, but it is what drew them to the tree in the first place. The desire to extend, increase, and subdue became a desire to push the boundaries. But even that was not a sin until it became disobedience. In this story, the desire for ascendancy was the thing that drove our desire for knowledge and wisdom and to be “like God.”

Autonomy

This is the desire for self-rule, and it is also necessary if we are to obey God’s commission to multiply. “Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”  But when we embrace this fundamental desire to grow and mature and to become responsible for our own well-being and establish our own family, this desire is easily subverted into the desire to be fully autonomous. Which in practice becomes a desire to be our own final authority.

Left unchecked, this desire will throw off all other sources of authority, including God’s, and turn us into self-serving rebels against our own creator. So we see again in this story that the desire for autonomy drove us to take matters into our own hands and take the things that we were not intended to have. This desire ultimately drove us to usurp God’s authority and place ourselves in the role of being our own god.

Physical satisfaction

The last desire in play here is the ever-present desire for physical satisfaction. The desire for physical satisfaction is so primal and so necessary that we could not live or multiply without it. Yet, as has always been the case, when physical desire overwhelms our love for God and others, when the desire for physical satisfaction becomes primary, a whole host of evils are born. We see this desire raise its ugly head as they looked at the forbidden fruit and thought is was beautiful and good for food.

The temptations never change

And so the story goes, all the way down to today. We still struggle with these primal desires, and we still allow them to lead us into various sins of pride and rebellion against God’s authority. We still feel that if we want it, we need it; if we need it, we take it. Sadly, we do this regardless of what God wants, and often with no regard for its long-term impact on ourselves or others.

These desires, though not evil in themselves, become the core motivations for evil. They are desires for our benefit, not God’s, and not others. When we allow these desires to rule us, we turn love on its head. Remember, love is benefiting others at my expense.

Jesus took a different path

Then he(Jesus) said to them,

As Jesus was contemplating the most difficult decision in human history we see him in the end making a very different choice than the one we continue to make from the beginning. Jesus chose God’s will and our good over his, the short term cost was immeasurable, but so was the long term gain. Jesus, in sacrificing his immediate desires and needs to God’s ultimate plan and wisdom, gained not only eternal glory for himself but eternal life for us all.

This week

This week, let’s commit to being more aware of how these desires affect us. When it comes to these basic nagging desires and the temptations that they bring, we are still faced with the same basic choice. Will we follow the will of God, or will we follow our desires and pursue our own satisfaction? Will we cave in to the pressure of our desires, or will we lean into Jesus, whose Spirit gave Him the strength to say no to his desires and yes to the will of God? Are we saying, like Adam and Eve, not your will, but mine be done? Or will we, like Jesus, trust in God’s strength and say, not my will but yours be done? This week, let’s encourage each other to follow God and not our lower desires and supposed needs, trusting Jesus and the Holy Spirit of God to give us the strength through our new creation to both desire and do God’s will.

Have a great week!