Sin - Empty Promise, Bitter Fruit

      When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also  desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Genesis 3:6
     So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more. Ephesians 4:17-19

Dan raised an interesting question in his comment about the posts on lying. He asked, “How do we understand the "lies of sin," and how do we help our children see they have been lied to?” Dan, thank you for this insightful question. I want to take at least two posts to answer this.

We are all familiar with Adam and Eve and the Fall. What drove Eve to taste the fruit is the same temptation that drives your children to see sin as a good option. As Dan states, sin at its core is deceptive.

This deception takes at least two forms.

The first is that a particular sin will be satisfying and will do no harm. Sin, however, is never satisfying, as Ephesians 4 teaches. And as Eve painfully realized, sin does great harm.

The second form is that we believe that sin offers a shortcut to getting what we want. Translated, this means that we think we know better than God what is good for us.

Your child’s struggles with sin are tightly connected to these two points. And—as I am sure that many of you are also concluding—so are your own sins. Give this some thought. Think about the biblical narratives and find some examples of the deceptiveness of sin. We will delve more deeply into this topic in the next post. Dan, thanks again!