I am a big believer in miracles. I love miracles – I want to see them every day. The first church certainly saw them. Acts is full of them. Mark says that miracles followed them that believed. They could heal the sick, take up serpents and drink poison without harm. I think we need that today.

I’ve read that line in Mark probably five or six hundred times, and yet I never wondered why that was the case.

This is probably because I always thought, I always assumed, they were exhibiting the power of God. Don’t we all do that? Read the Bible and just assume? We need to be really careful assuming anything about the Word of God though. This was Eve’s mistake and it is ours. She was deceived into thinking that God was withholding something good from her. Something she should have and deserved. In the beginning, it was not like that. It became like that - WE became like that.

Truthfully does Jeremiah 7:9 say that the heart is deceitful above all things and exceedingly perverse, corrupt and sick.

In the Garden of Eden, Eve rejected God. She rejected Him because she thought God should not deny her this obvious benefit of knowing good and evil. After all, she and her husband were perfect; why should God refuse them this? Why should He refuse them anything? Why would He not want them to be like Him?

When men have this attitude, though, that is when their hearts become sick, corrupt and perverse. Eve knew she was doing something God said not to do. Now because she was the creature and not the creator, she could not think as God thought. But God had given them freedom. So Eve was able to think, and act on her idea, that she deserved this thing God would keep from her. As free people we often cannot accept that there are limits on freedom. We then move to a belief that any limit on freedom cannot be from God. Eve followed this false thinking by essentially making God the evil one, for restraining her freedom. Don’t we do that all the time?

Especially when the issue is knowledge, it just seems patently obvious that this would be something God would want us to have; and therefore, just as obvious that God would not interdict this.

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