They Realized They Were Naked

From today’s reading…

For 1,000 generations humans have lived, grown, reproduced, and successfully nurtured their offspring—our ancestors—without the internet, antibiotics, computers, hospitals, anesthesia, electricity, blood transfusions, and every other modern creature comfort we take for granted today, yet in our narcissistic arrogance, we ignore the stories they passed on from generation to generation which helped them live and even thrive and which made our very existence possible.

Or, if we do pry our faces away from our screens long enough to pay attention to those stories it’s just to mock and ridicule them because we are enlightened, progressive, scientific, postmodernists.

To quote Paul in James 2:20, you fool! You ignoramus!

We are social creatures and for the most part, we are not smarter than a fifth-grader because politicians and technology have made us soft. Fortunately for us, our ancestors were smart and not soft because they knew how to tell a good story.

Research shows that Beauty and the Beast is about 4,000 years old. The origins of Jack and the Beanstalk go back 5,000 years, and The Smith And The Devil go back at least 6,000 years.

The Book of Genesis was committed to writing about 3,500 years ago, but how long had its various stories been told before it was written? 1,000 years? 3,500 more years?

Good stories, meaningful stories, don’t survive thousands of years—or thousands of generations—without being full wisdom and insight.

The fact you can’t tell a good story—or see the deeper meaning in the stories of the Bible—and choose to belittle those who can and do doesn’t make you cool. It makes you an ignoramus.

Adam and Eve were naive and were duped by an intelligent being and/or they placed too much trust in their own intellect, and paid a heavy price.

But they didn’t break a vow or a promise to God. God told them not to eat of that one tree, but we have no indication that they promised they wouldn’t. So they were curious, rebellious children who pushed things too far and had to live with the consequences of their actions.

Is it a bad thing that they were no longer naive and could see more clearly? Being able to see, and avoid, snakes has a great survival mechanism, as is seeing in color, which helps us know what fruit is ripe and nutritious.

But seeing how vulnerable we are makes us self-conscious, which, taken to its extreme, makes us vain and narcissistic.

It also can make us cruel because when we know where our soft spots are we know where our opponents’ softs spots are, so we know how to inflict pain, how to be cruel, how to be evil.

That’s why it was called the tree of the knowledge good and evil, not the tree of good and bad, and knowing your propensity for evil but choosing to do good is the only way to…

Stay the course. Keep the faith. Endure.

Now go sell something.