A FORGOTTEN LEGACY – EVE
Written by Rev. Dorothy A. Jenkins
I am guilty! Guilty of remembering Eve, the first woman on the earth, known as the “life giver”, not for who she was, but for what she did. I am guilty of remembering Eve, you know the one that lived in the beautiful Garden of Eden; the one identified in Genesis 3:20 as the mother of all living (the human race), not for why she was created, but for the temptation she gave in to. I am guilty of saying, if Eve wouldn’t have disobeyed God, we wouldn’t have the war among the sexes, all be marriages would happy, and children in today’s society wouldn’t be caught up in gangs, sex, bullying, or drugs.
Who else is willing to admit to that their first thought about Eve is on what she did wrong in the Garden? How much of our focus is really on the original purpose for which God created her?
Not that long ago, I began to realize that in blaming Eve for all that goes wrong in my life, I am also, just as Adam did in Genesis 3:12, guilty of putting the blame on God. Let me paraphrase it this way, well God if you wouldn’t have given me Eve, then I would not have eaten off that tree. Eve did it too in Genesis 3:13. She put the blame on the serpent. “But God, the devil made me do it”. And we know who created the devil? Right?
So even today we as human’s still at times will put the blame on God after we have made the wrong choices. “If I wouldn’t have prayed so hard for this or that perhaps I wouldn’t have to go through this or that”, or do we really mean to say, “ If God wouldn’t have created Eve, she wouldn’t have listened to the devil and I wouldn’t be caught up in this mess!”
If we read through the end of Genesis Chapter 3, we will realize that putting the blame on others or God did not make things better for Adam or Eve and it certainly does not make things better for us. Because when it is all said and done, we each will be held accountable to God for what we have or have not done; whether we have done it alone or with someone else.
Have you ever witnessed someone whose life was changed after giving their life to Christ; but even in seeing the change in them, have said or have heard someone else say, “I remember when she/he used to….?
Well that’s how some of us have done Eve. We remember when she let the serpent deceive her into eating the fruit. What if we choose to remember Eve as the first woman whose life was touched and shaped by God? What if we choose to remember how she was created and the purpose for which she was created in the first place? What if we understand that the answers to those questions are part of our inheritance as her descendants?