Today is my spiritual retreat day. A couple of times every year, I pull away from my normal responsibilities and routines and spend a day by myself focusing on my relationship with God. That time includes prayer, reading scripture, journaling, and other things. It is a time to re-focus and re-center, making sure that I’m where I’m supposed to be in relation with His Will and plan for my life and that my relationship with Him is healthy, and at the same time, to spend the day relaxing out in nature.
This morning as I was getting ready, I got to thinking about the record of the creation of the world in the early pages of Genesis. My thoughts were drawn to Genesis 3, where the enemy convinced Adam and Eve to sin by doing the one single thing that God had said “no” to. This started me thinking about the process that the enemy took them through to get to that point of rebellion. The path that they went down didn’t start the way that I had anticipated.
You see, the enemy didn’t begin by trying to trick them into eating the fruit. That came later. The first thing that he did was to try to make them question God’s love, character, and motives. He tried to convince them that God didn’t have their best interest in mind, but that He was self-serving and holding them back from what they should be, what they deserved to be. After planting those seeds of distrust in their minds, it was then that he tempted them with how desirable the forbidden fruit appeared.
The road to sin begins when we bring into question the character of the One who loves us.
God tells us that He loves us and that He has wonderful plans for our lives. Which is all fine and good, until we go through difficult times in life, things don’t pan out when or how we had hoped or expected, or we see something that we think we want more. If we allow ourselves to bring His character and motives into question, especially in the midst of a weak point in our lives, the door is opened to allow our desires to carry us away from the plans He has for us.
The key is to remember the true character of God. To remember His love, wisdom, faithfulness, and trustworthiness. Even when things don’t make sense, even when circumstances and people and people try to convince us to the contrary, we need to remember what we know to be true about our Father.
He is worthy of our trust.