Weevils from Within

Have you ever opened up a box of cornbread mix or a bag of grits (or rice, flour, pasta, or any starch) only to find that it’s been infested with weevils? Your delicious country meal has been overrun with disgusting little bugs that will eventually ruin everything in the box. If you don’t catch them soon enough they sometimes begin to spread to the neighboring boxes in the pantry.
Do you wonder where they came from? Did they follow the scent of stale pasta from outside, marching in like so many half-sized ants? Is my house infested with weevils, like roaches, who eventually and inevitably get into whatever’s laying around?

None of the above.

The weevils come in the boxes.

Your pasta and grits are prepackaged at the plant with a good number of weevil eggs (“Now with more arthropods! Watch them grow!” reads the sticker). You consume them every time you cook. If you leave the box alone for too long after its “best by” date they’ll hatch into tiny visitors.

Yes, it’s gross. I’m sorry that you won’t be able to eat any of those items I mentioned for a week. But the weevils who shared your dinner last night have a serious spiritual implication too: How often do we look past our own faults and put the blame for the problems in our lives on something else? It’s always his or her fault. It’s just my circumstances. The devil is ruining my life.

People, circumstances, and Satan are all very real causes of life problems. But when they become an excuse to relieve ourselves from blame, we need to reexamine our own role in creating the evil in our lives. We carry the seeds of our own destruction in our souls. When they hatch, we have to remember that they, like weevils, do sometimes spread from another source, but more often come from within ourselves.

This isn’t supposed to send you on some major guilt trip. Rather, a realization of our inability to save ourselves paves the way for the awesome, wonderful joy of knowing that Christ has done it for us. A gift we could never pay back, a grace we could never earn.

As for the weevils? I hear that some people just cook them in along with their meal. After all, they’re just turning your carbs into protein for you.

Backyard Eden

Today we hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner.  Family members drove up from Florida to stay with us for a few days and we had a great meal this afternoon.  My favorite part was picking vegetables out of our own garden to cook for the meal.  C and I planted our vegetables shortly after moving here, and these two crops reached maturity in time for the feast:

Mustard Greens

Green Beans

I was so excited to pick them out of the garden!  We’ve been watching these guys grow in the hard Georgia clay, getting bigger every week despite my infrequent watering.  It was really amazing for me to see what creation will yield despite my amateur attempts to help.

On the other hand, it reached my soul in a very deep level to harvest and consume something I grew myself.  A fulfilling, deep joy, almost addictive, that makes me look forward to the spring when I can plant in earnest.

Little wonder I feel this way: we’ve been hard-wired since the very beginning to take care of the earth and live close to it.

Genesis 2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

 

To dress it and to keep it: the Hebrew can be translated “to work in it and to protect it.”

Our work in the dirt is a mirror of God’s free, gracious attention to us dirty humans: he works in us, to improve us and increase our yield, and he protects us from danger.

Same Old Lie

CNN.com published a story today about a series of ads that a coalition of atheists in New York City has contracted to put up around the subway system.  These ads proclaim things like “No God, No Guilt: Debaptize Now” and other catchy anti-religious slogans.  Now, before you ask, I’m not writing about how riled up I am about these billboards.  People have always rebelled against God and asserted their right to his place, and some more vehemently than others.  He’ll deal with them later.  What strikes me is that although the atheist coalition is trying to be edgy and provocative, the sentiment (similar to the popular “Born OK the First Time” bumper sticker) isn’t anything new.  In fact, it’s just a rehash of the first lie ever told.

In the Garden of Eden, God placed Adam and Eve to tend it and to enjoy his company.  Their minds were free.  There was only one rule: Don’t eat the fruit of that one tree over there.  It’s special. It will kill you.

[But] the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Gen. 3:4-5

What the serpent told Eve was that God wasn’t being straight.  He’s keeping the good stuff for himself!  If you guys could get a hold of that knowledge, you would become your own gods!  You wouldn’t need to listen to that schmuck– you could make your own rules!

When the first man and woman took a bite of the fruit, the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes were indeed opened, as the serpent had said.  And they didn’t die immediately.  And they did become gods after a fashion.  Death, however, came inexorably as repayment for sin, which is fundamentally rebellion against God (cf. Rom. 6:23).  And men only became gods of themselves.  By replacing God on his throne with our own free will we all become feeble, distorted gods, doomed to corrupt everything we touch.

So what was the result of the first lie we believed, the same lie that’s become part of the fabric of every culture on earth because we hope that by repeating it we can somehow make it true?  We’ve become wise.   Human wisdom, the wisdom of the world, which tells us subtly and persuasively that we can be lords over our own lives, is a symptom of a fallen world that has rejected God.  When people say things like “No God, No Guilt,” they’re just repeating the same tempting fallacy that’s been whispered from mouth to ear since the dawn of time.

In an interesting side note, the atheist group responsible for the subway ads calls itself The Big Apple Coalition of Reason.  But they’ve really escaped from reason. I’ll talk more about that some other time.

[H]ath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. 1 Cor. 1:20-21