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“You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.” The woman was convinced.
She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her.
[Genesis 3:4-6 NLT]
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Self-absorbed
Self-absorption is a tragic watermark on the human spirit since Eve first tried to be her own god. We make terrible gods, something each generation reveals with heartbreaking regularity. As Jillian Kay Melchior recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, this current era is obsessed with the thoughts of Audre Lorde. Her essays have become the underpinning philosophy for much of the current university protest movement, especially Lourde’s rejection of any truth or god beyond self. As Ms. Melchior notes in her article (wittily titled “Lourde of the Flies”):
[Lourde] asserts, “Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.” She defines the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings.” If student activists seem irrational, they’re actually deliberately antirational, rejecting reason as “white” and “male.”
Salvation
Of course, the one true Lord will use this nonsense to His glory and for the blessing of people. As thinkers from Moses to Socrates to Jesus to Marcus Aurelius have proved, such self-righteous foolishness eventually collapses under its own weight. In the detritus of that collapse, there exists a great godsend: the inevitable recognition that we are not in fact able to craft our own reality. When the veneer of sophistry is thus stripped away, one recognizes the abject and immediate need for a savior. And the one who searches honestly learns that the only one who can actually save is Messiah Jesus. As the angel declared to Joseph 2000 years ago:
She [Mary] will give birth to a son, and you are to name Him Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.” Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
See, the virgin will become pregnant
and give birth to a son,
and they will name Him Immanuel,
which is translated “God is with us.”
[Matthew 1:21-23 HCSB]
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