JANUARY 26, 2020

Adapted from my blog, 2015

There was a day when a man and a woman walked away from the feast aplenty, from a perfect garden--not a weed or pest in sight.  They walked away from everything pure and good, delicious and right.  Instead, they had chosen to bite into and share the forbidden fruit.  Their Father had warned them against it because He did not wish them to have the knowledge of good and evil, desiring them to have tender protection, innocence.

I was a little, or quite naive, much of my childhood, I must admit.  I longed for this for our children and now for our grand children: innocence.  It's hard as parents to protect our fledglings from this knowledge of evil.  Once it is seen, it is burned on their memories, stored in the brain indelibly.  It just takes any online availability, not just on phones or laptops, but  through game systems, even through security systems.  Sometimes all it takes is to type in three little letters beginning with an "S" and ending in "X."  Vigilance.  It's not a matter anymore of smutty magazines smuggled and looked at under covers with a flashlight and then hidden under the mattress.  Now, it has even gone beyond one of the largest money makers worldwide-porn-and has spawned into sex trafficking.   

I'll never forget when soon after we moved to our area and I had my two young girls with me, two perverted young men walked towards our van parked at the mall yelling, "We want your daughters!  Give us your daughters!"  It might have been done in a creepy jest, but now such things happen at the malls and even Walmart parking lots even in our area: kidnapping of innocents.

Mothers beware of the tainted thoughts as the milieu your daughters are growing up in is one where a majority of young men use porn.   Likewise, mothers beware of young women aggressive towards your young men.  Beware the deviants seeking their prey.  A few years ago, an umpire at our granddaughter's softball game, a "respected" individual who served in a community office, left the game to meet who he thought was an underage girl for his sick intent; instead he was busted and arrested as part of a law enforcement trap.

Loss of innocence is as close as a bite of an apple..."God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them.  For they have exchanged the truth of God for a lie (think Adam and Eve),  and worshiped and served the creature (the snake) rather than the Creator who is blessed forever."  Romans 1:24-26

But there is a rainbow of biblical proportions, a rainbow of hope after every dark cloud.  God would not have allowed the cross if it did not have power over sin because of the precious blood spilled there.  Jesus did not know the guilt of sin until He took it upon Himself on the cross, our sin. 

But there is a stunning thought that has gripped me recently: though God the Father, Jesus the Son already knew the depths of sin because of their knowledge of good and evil back in the Beginning, somehow God gave back a time of a virgin giving birth in a stable, His only begotten Son to lie in a manger as an innocent helpless babe. The shadow of the cross was there for Mary to ponder, but His infancy was His innocence.  How did that make God the Father feel?  Paradise lost.  Paradise regained in a barn.  We cannot separate the Second Adam from the first Adam, the manger from the cross, the tomb from the resurrection.  

I confess, I'm an apple snob.  I like them tart and crisp.  However, there's nothing worse than biting into a worm.  There is that.  But it is no matter that all have sinned and taken a bite of a rotten apple, we can be forgiven and washed clean of our sin.  Perhaps Jesus is not only preparing a place for us, building our mansions in heaven, but is growing a garden and an orchard full of apple trees for our pure, pleasure, innocence restored.