From the beginning of God’s intervention with man, the “cunning” man has dreamed of ways of fooling God. Isaiah, a prophet from the Old Testament, declared, “Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men” (Isaiah 29:13). I want to insist that when we come to God, we ought to come with much fear and trembling, for we are standing before the One who knows it all. But we don’t. People start wanting something else, or they question God on topics that they do not agree with him about. Soon they start to make “accommodations” and then the accommodations turn into a full-fledged deviant doctrine. Before we turn around, heresy or even a new cult is started. Sometimes it seems to this mournful heart like man will never learn. An idea that I find myself dwelling on all too often lately, as I see so many signs of it.
It starts in the individual often first. Hath God really said? That is the question that they start with. Question God. And question Him again. Then go to the Word, and just like Eve, begin misstating the word of God. Oh, you missed that? Eve did misstate the word of God, for she says to the devil, “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.” (Genesis 3:3) God never said anything about not touching the fruit. Eve made that up. Commentors sometimes suggest that since Adam gave Eve the command, and she did not get it directly from God, that the message may somehow have become garbled. But the Bible does not say that. What we are left with is only the command God gave. In the day that you eat it, you shall die. To this command Eve adds her own command. In the day that you touch it, you shall die.
I think whether Eve did it intentionally or not is not declared; the Bible does explain that Eve was deceived, and Adam bears the graver consequence of sinning with the full knowledge of his disobedience. The point has to be made that for the first time, mankind has taken the word of God and twisted it into a more palatable form. Satan cleverly used her twist of the Scripture against her, showing her that she could indeed “touch” it and come to no harm. But that touch led her to look at the fruit and believe the lie and eat it.
Little has changed with man. We still figure that we can outsmart God. If we twist things a bit, turn them around here, and ignore them there, He won’t notice. But He always does notice. We have a God who is omniscient. There is not any fooling Him; there can be no duplicity when we come to him. The hymn’s words remind us, “Just as I am”. There is no other way to really come to him except just as we are.
Second Peter, written shortly before Peter’s martyrdom, contains plenty of warnings to the church about this very thing. Peter saw and foresaw clearly the nature of man inclined him constantly to be trying to “rewrite’ what God plainly declares. In part two, I will take a quick look at some of Peter’s admonishments.
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