Readied for the Test Arc

Eve is described in the Book of Genesis as having entertained the serpent's arguments, "And when she saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof..." (3:6, KJV).  The "saw that the tree was...to be desired to make one wise" notion is certainly a curious one.  One would think that the emphasis would be that Eve thought that the tree might make one wise; how she could "see" it as being a fact about the tree is strangely put.  After all, the only testimony she had about the tree came from the God that she now doubted, and from the creaturely serpent, who had relied on getting her alone.

It is inescapable that the force of the argument against Eve is that she allowed herself to be shaped by influences that she should have resisted.  Granted, it might well be said, as is the standard notion, that she was "deceived," but all that does is classify her sin as something short of outright defiance.  She allowed herself to be worked into a view of God--that he could be deceptive--and instead focused her attention on the Tree as she imagined it: "to be desired to make one wise."  One wonders if the tree had to be any special kind of tree at all--to serve for the test--since only Eve's view of it was needed to constitute the sin.  She sinned before ever she ate.

Eve failed the test.  Of course, it might well be wondered how many infinities of eternities of blissful life in the Garden would have gone by before Eve--indeed, any of us in her place--would have fallen to the temptation of the Forbidden Fruit.  It behooves us all not to be placed in the path of temptation, or vice versa.  It is in this vein that we can come to understand the "deliver us from evil (that is, from the test)" part of the Lord's Prayer--a petition that we hear again when, at perhaps the most crucial point of the Gospels, Jesus in Gethsemane awakens the disciples and tells them to pray that they may be spared the final test.

We, no differently from Eve, are constantly put through the "roused, readied, reaped" arc, and it is good for us to pray that we have such arcs interrupted by the beneficial intrusions of God or of godly people.  For indeed, we are all liable to go off track and allow our internalized versions of reality control us.  We ready ourselves internally to face the existence we recognize, which is in itself an internal phenomenon.  We look at the universe the way Eve looked at the tree, creating a reality that we can never hope to test against every shortfall or distortion.

Since the realities that surround us are partly of our own making (and the "partly" part need be of no great proportion to be dangerous), then we need reckon that the challenges we face are both common to mankind, and ultimately independent of any conceits we might have about our ability to confidently describe existence.  The chief example of this is the persistent notion that Jesus' end-times statements are to be attached to the calendar.  This is not so, just as surely as it was the case that Jesus was not lying or mistaken when he described the generation of his time as including people who would experience all Jesus described as the final events.

Each of us has our own universe, and only God can keep it all straight.  We are all liable at any moment to face what is, for us, the Final Test, and it is well that we pray to be spared the worst of it.  That is the test, as surely now as in the Garden of Eden.