Wednesday, January 21. Genesis 3:1-7

The serpent must have been in advertising. Think about most of the commercials you watch on TV or hear on the radio. What is their tactic? They try to convince you that you are somehow incomplete until you buy their product. “If you have these jeans,” they tell us, “you will be happy and popular, like these half-starved models.”

They question our identity.

The serpent attacked both Eve’s identity and God’s identity. He tried to convince her that God had imposed the restriction about eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because God was afraid of Eve and Adam. The serpent said that, if they ate of the tree, then they would be like God, and God did not want that to happen.

Then the serpent attacked Eve’s identity. God is holding out on you. Don’t you want to climb that ladder and be better than you are? You are a lowly human. Don’t you want to be a god?

Crunch.

The serpent was right about one thing. Everything did change. Now Adam and Eve knew what it meant to betray a loved one. Now they knew they couldn’t trust each other. They knew good and evil first hand, and it plunged humanity into a long, bloody history of pain.

We read this passage today because our main text for the week is Matthew 3:1-17. Satan tempted Jesus to doubt his identity as well. Jesus, however, was a different kind of human than Adam and Eve. He did not doubt his identity and crushed the serpent’s head.

Here’s our lesson today. Turn off the false advertising in your head. Go back to yesterday’s lesson. You are a beautiful creation of God. You are a child of God. Like Jesus at his baptism, God, through your baptism, looks at you and says, “You are my child. I love you.”

You don’t need anything else to make you whole. You don’t need to chase after personal blessing. You have been blessed so that you can be a blessing to others.

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