It is difficult to piece together the life story of Eve. She was never a baby, never a child, never a pimply youth. She entered life as a wife after just a taste of youthhood for a fleeting moment with no one to guide or counsel her. She was created in
the image of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. She lived in the paradise with a do- not-disturb sign. That was the Eden before the fall. She had all the stuff fairy tales are made of. Adam looked as though he was in little boy paradise. But her
romantic world came tumbling around her ears like a house of cards.
Before the fall there were no unedible plant or fruit. They could eat from every tree. Why is it that God did not command Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of life? He wanted them to eat from the tree and live forever. He was so confident that they
would not violate His command not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Only when they disobeyed He took the precaution to keep them from the tree of life (Gen 2:16).
Every disobedience has acrimonious consequences. We lose many privileges by our disobedience. Eating a fruit looks like a minor sin but behind it was a serious matter — knowing good and evil! Yes, we too think some sins are not too serious but they lead to dire consequences. So get the devil on his side of the line.
See how Eve made it look less serious by dropping the “surely” (Gen 3:3). How important it is to know God’s word thoroughly! God had promised “sure” death and Eve missed it or didn’t give much importance to the word “surely.” The serpent took advantage
of it and outwitted Eve. You will not “surely” die said the serpent. He had picked up God’s words more accurately. He was eavesdropping in the garden when God was instructing man and the attack was well orchestrated.
Eve understood that it was safer not even to touch the fruit but at the face of temptation caution was thrown to the wind. It was an avoidable catastrophe. Don’t we make many decisions to steer clear of sin? Stand firm. Eve was punished because she had
clearly understood the command. She said, “God did say,” but trifled with the devil (Gen 3:3).
She confessed to God, “The serpent deceived me.” Beware of Satan. He knows when and where and how to trip you (Gen 3:13). So many animals are domesticated including elephants but serpents are not. They are wicked and crafty. Another problem is the
abdication of personal moral responsibility for sin, blaming it instead on the work of demons.
The Hebrew meaning of “good and evil” also has the shade of “blessing calamity.” God placed before Eve, life and Death, Blessing and Calamity. She chose death and calamity. The choice was hers (Dt 30:15). How often by our disobedience to God’s word we choose death and calamity. Every step of obedience brings a measure of life and blessing.
Unsurprisingly how happy the serpent was the moment Eve ate the fruit! She gave to her husband and he ate it too. He neither questioned her nor objected. That’s why God blamed him and he was the first to be questioned. Woman needed Satan to cheat her but
a man needed only a woman. Does this remind you ofAnaniah and Sapphira, Abraham and Sarah?
Eve’s wonderful fairy tale garden experience began to show cracks. Eden means delight. Adam and Eve failed God and lost the delight. Yes, many times we lose the delight that God gives because we don’t care to obey His word to the tittle. God lost no time
in securing the tree of life and chased them out of the garden. Because, now, God could not trust them. One failure undermines God’s confidence on us. He becomes wary. That’s why we should be faithful in small things. Then God will trust us with greater
things.
“Drove out” suggests that they were reluctant to go. God had to literally push them out. It is like putting you out of the house and slamming the door on your face. They left pensive and dazed. Terror and frightfulness darkened their faces. “Hard Master”
indeed. Don’t make God a hard master. Behave yourself and He will always be a gentle shepherd. Eve had to start at zero. Things would never be the same again. Now she chose the good and blessing and clung to the Lord. That was her only viable option.
Facing life-or-death moral choices, she refused to go back to her dark past. Eve brought forth her children without the assistance of a mother or nurse. They had no friends, no relatives.
If you can let loose your imagination and do some mathematics — Eve lived with Adam for 930 years bearing sons and daughters towards the first millenium from creation. Can you believe that she lived to see Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah and Lamech, Noah’s father? So eight generations had firsthand knowledge of creation.
You can be sure that when the past once again became alive for them, Adam and Eve gathered the early patriarchs, telling them over and over about creation, their fall, the punishment and God’s grace when they had been disobedient.
It would have been possible for Adam and Eve to have had thousands of descendants at the time Cain went to Nod, all of them having proliferated from Cain and Abel. She who taught Cain and Abel to worship God, would she not have taught her descendants?
Adam and Eve literally saw how by the blessing of God they were fruitful and filling the earth. They talked about the garden which was now out of bounds for them. They were lampooned by questions such as, “Why did you do such a foolish thing?” from their
innumerable disgruntled descendants and hung their heads in shame. “Because of your sin now we are all suffering,” might have been the charge they faced. They painfully saw their descendants sinking into moral decay.
How was Eve saved?
“Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Tim 2:14,15).
Four qualities are listed here for women to be saved, through which Eve was also saved.
First, she had faith. She acknowledged God’s help in bringing forth Cain and Abel (Gen 4:1, 23). She had love which she exhibited by living with Adam for 930 years proving that you don’t have to be made for each other to live together. “I have decided to stick to love — Hate is too great a burden to bear,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights activist (Gen 5:4,5). She had holiness because after the fall she learnt her lesson and lived a holy life. Tragedy was her teacher. We don’t read of any transgression in her life after the fall. She had propriety because the fall made her wiser.
She honestly confessed that the snake deceived her and accepted the garment (of salvation) that God gave her. She quietly accepted God’s punishment for her and reformed herself. She preached the goodnews for eight generations. She was saved through
childbearing because she was reminded of her awful sin at every birth pang. Though her sin was irreversible she was saved from the second death.
The name Eve, meaning “life” was given to her after the fall and implies both her being the mother of all living and her being the mother of the promised Seed. She gave rise to the human race now subjected to death. How wonderful that the woman who
brought death to mankind was named, “Life”! That shows God can use utter failures to be 100% fruitful. God never gives up on us. If He does, that will be defeat for Him before Satan. So he will never wash His hands off us. So be encouraged.
Ever since the tragic moment in the garden when Eve gave up God’s will for her own will, her name is dragged through the mud. How sad Eve must be today to see Paul’s grim reminder of her failure to the Corinthians and Timothy (2
Cor 11:3; 1 Tim 2:13,14). Yes, one grave sin can cancel out the memory of a lot of good. It became a stigma for life.
How did a mother’s heart feel at this bleak moment on seeing the badly bruised dead body of her son Abel? What was her reaction to Cain, the murderer, her son? She continued to see- saw between hope and despair at the sudden turns and twists that her
life had taken. She handled them well, clinging to the Lord. One major failure in life taught her a life-lesson—grab the Lord with both hands at all cost and that disobedience to the Lord is never an advantage. Now she had a widowed daughter and
fatherless grandchildren to care for.
You can see Eve weeping at the unceremonious depature of Cain and his wife, her children, from the presence of the Lord. The breaking away process is hard on those being left behind. How she rejoiced when he built a city and named it after his son Enoch!
(Gen 4:17). Did she attend the dedication ceremony? Her very first grandchild must have sent her heart a thumping (Gen 4:17).
She must have been shocked when Lamech married two wives, so far unheard of in history and another murder committed (Gen 4:19,23). Did she counsel him? She enjoyed Jubal’s Music Band (4:21). She would have received some gifts of iron and bronze from Tubal-Cain and perhaps learned to cut vegetables with a knife (Gen 4:22).
Coin heard of the birth of his brother Seth and probably paid a courtesy call.
There were times of joy also for Eve. She rejoiced at the godly life of Enoch amidst the sprawling wickedness. Eve most probably heard the prophecy of Enoch: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of His holy ones to judge everyone and to
convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against Him” (Jude 14,15). So she knew the great judgment day and that she would be blessed with thousands and thousands of holy descendants. But she did not live long enough to see Enoch’s translation (Gen 5:21-24). Her preaching and pleading had not been in vain.
Eve’s first-hand testimony of God’s grace and his grandfather Enoch’s habitual fellowship with God strengthened Lamech’s faith.
Lamech was sad at what he saw around him. So he named his newborn son prophetically as Noah, saying: “He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed” (Gen 5:29). He transmitted his faith to his
children. But Noah was the only one who responded to his father’s counsel. Upto Lamech it was seeing (Adam and Eve) and believing. After that for Noah and his offspring, it was faith.
Now the avenue is open to the woman to go to the tree of life. She who has an ear, let her hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To her who overcomes, God will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God (Rev 2:7).
Eve will eat the fruit along with us. It was a failure beginning that culminated in victory. Her wasteland turned once more into paradise.
Through the middle of the broadway of the city of New Jerusalem and on either side of the river will be the tree of life with its twelve varieties of fruit, yielding each month its fresh crop; and the leaves of the trees were for the healing and the restoration of the nations. Blessed are those who wash their robes that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. And if anyone takes words away from the Bible, God will take away from her, her share in the tree of life and in the holy city (Rev 22:2,14,19).
The victory promised in the beginning pages of the Bible (Gen 3:15) is celebrated in the last pages (Rev 20:10). When the offspring of Eve came to the earth, He crushed Satan’s head by His death and resurrection. The God of peace will soon crush Satan
under our feet (Rom 16:20). When two parties war, we join the winning side. So join Jesus!
The Bible begins victoriously and ends victoriously (Rev 15:2). It starts with a marriage and ends with a marriage (Gen 2:22; Rev 19:7,9). We see a tree of life, a garden and rivers in Genesis as also in the end!
Eve might have got very discouraged on seeing her wicked generation. Guilt hung like a millstone around her neck but she turned it into a milestone. She was a prime candidate for suicide but she lived her life as fully as she could. She kept stirring the
pot till a change came and out of her came one righteous Noah; out of whom came one faithful Shem; out of whom came one faithful Abraham; out of whom came one faithful Isaac, a Jacob, a David and then Jesus — and here we are, God’s faithful flock, like the stars of the sky and the sand of the seashore! Given the tragic circumstances it is a fairy tale ending nonetheless. Who can despise the day of small beginning? Your testimony can help the Kingdom of God explode in size.
Keep going, keep on going; keep doing, keep on doing; keep winning souls, keep on winning! One day you’ll have innumerable friends in heaven won through you to welcome you into your eternal abode!
Dr. Lilian Stanley
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91 9843511943
lilianstanley@gmail.com
Blessing Youth Mission
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91-416-2242943, +91-416-2248943
hq@bymonline.org
www.bymonline.org
Click here for more options
To buy books written by Dr. Lilian Stanley, kindly reach to us in the follwing address
Blessing Literature Centre
21/11 West Coovam River Road,
Chintadripet,
Chennai 600 002, India.
+91-44-28450411, 8806270699
blc@bymonline.org
It is difficult to piece together the life story of Eve. She was never a baby, never a child, never a pimply youth. She entered life as a wife after just a taste of youthhood for a fleeting moment with no one to guide or counsel her. She was created in
the image of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. She lived in the paradise with a do- not-disturb sign. That was the Eden before the fall. She had all the stuff fairy tales are made of. Adam looked as though he was in little boy paradise. But her
romantic world came tumbling around her ears like a house of cards.
Before the fall there were no unedible plant or fruit. They could eat from every tree. Why is it that God did not command Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of life? He wanted them to eat from the tree and live forever. He was so confident that they
would not violate His command not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Only when they disobeyed He took the precaution to keep them from the tree of life (Gen 2:16).
Every disobedience has acrimonious consequences. We lose many privileges by our disobedience. Eating a fruit looks like a minor sin but behind it was a serious matter — knowing good and evil! Yes, we too think some sins are not too serious but they lead to dire consequences. So get the devil on his side of the line.
See how Eve made it look less serious by dropping the “surely” (Gen 3:3). How important it is to know God’s word thoroughly! God had promised “sure” death and Eve missed it or didn’t give much importance to the word “surely.” The serpent took advantage
of it and outwitted Eve. You will not “surely” die said the serpent. He had picked up God’s words more accurately. He was eavesdropping in the garden when God was instructing man and the attack was well orchestrated.
Eve understood that it was safer not even to touch the fruit but at the face of temptation caution was thrown to the wind. It was an avoidable catastrophe. Don’t we make many decisions to steer clear of sin? Stand firm. Eve was punished because she had
clearly understood the command. She said, “God did say,” but trifled with the devil (Gen 3:3).
She confessed to God, “The serpent deceived me.” Beware of Satan. He knows when and where and how to trip you (Gen 3:13). So many animals are domesticated including elephants but serpents are not. They are wicked and crafty. Another problem is the
abdication of personal moral responsibility for sin, blaming it instead on the work of demons.
The Hebrew meaning of “good and evil” also has the shade of “blessing calamity.” God placed before Eve, life and Death, Blessing and Calamity. She chose death and calamity. The choice was hers (Dt 30:15). How often by our disobedience to God’s word we choose death and calamity. Every step of obedience brings a measure of life and blessing.
Unsurprisingly how happy the serpent was the moment Eve ate the fruit! She gave to her husband and he ate it too. He neither questioned her nor objected. That’s why God blamed him and he was the first to be questioned. Woman needed Satan to cheat her but
a man needed only a woman. Does this remind you ofAnaniah and Sapphira, Abraham and Sarah?
Eve’s wonderful fairy tale garden experience began to show cracks. Eden means delight. Adam and Eve failed God and lost the delight. Yes, many times we lose the delight that God gives because we don’t care to obey His word to the tittle. God lost no time
in securing the tree of life and chased them out of the garden. Because, now, God could not trust them. One failure undermines God’s confidence on us. He becomes wary. That’s why we should be faithful in small things. Then God will trust us with greater
things.
“Drove out” suggests that they were reluctant to go. God had to literally push them out. It is like putting you out of the house and slamming the door on your face. They left pensive and dazed. Terror and frightfulness darkened their faces. “Hard Master”
indeed. Don’t make God a hard master. Behave yourself and He will always be a gentle shepherd. Eve had to start at zero. Things would never be the same again. Now she chose the good and blessing and clung to the Lord. That was her only viable option.
Facing life-or-death moral choices, she refused to go back to her dark past. Eve brought forth her children without the assistance of a mother or nurse. They had no friends, no relatives.
If you can let loose your imagination and do some mathematics — Eve lived with Adam for 930 years bearing sons and daughters towards the first millenium from creation. Can you believe that she lived to see Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah and Lamech, Noah’s father? So eight generations had firsthand knowledge of creation.
You can be sure that when the past once again became alive for them, Adam and Eve gathered the early patriarchs, telling them over and over about creation, their fall, the punishment and God’s grace when they had been disobedient.
It would have been possible for Adam and Eve to have had thousands of descendants at the time Cain went to Nod, all of them having proliferated from Cain and Abel. She who taught Cain and Abel to worship God, would she not have taught her descendants?
Adam and Eve literally saw how by the blessing of God they were fruitful and filling the earth. They talked about the garden which was now out of bounds for them. They were lampooned by questions such as, “Why did you do such a foolish thing?” from their
innumerable disgruntled descendants and hung their heads in shame. “Because of your sin now we are all suffering,” might have been the charge they faced. They painfully saw their descendants sinking into moral decay.
How was Eve saved?
“Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Tim 2:14,15).
Four qualities are listed here for women to be saved, through which Eve was also saved.
First, she had faith. She acknowledged God’s help in bringing forth Cain and Abel (Gen 4:1, 23). She had love which she exhibited by living with Adam for 930 years proving that you don’t have to be made for each other to live together. “I have decided to stick to love — Hate is too great a burden to bear,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights activist (Gen 5:4,5). She had holiness because after the fall she learnt her lesson and lived a holy life. Tragedy was her teacher. We don’t read of any transgression in her life after the fall. She had propriety because the fall made her wiser.
She honestly confessed that the snake deceived her and accepted the garment (of salvation) that God gave her. She quietly accepted God’s punishment for her and reformed herself. She preached the goodnews for eight generations. She was saved through
childbearing because she was reminded of her awful sin at every birth pang. Though her sin was irreversible she was saved from the second death.
The name Eve, meaning “life” was given to her after the fall and implies both her being the mother of all living and her being the mother of the promised Seed. She gave rise to the human race now subjected to death. How wonderful that the woman who
brought death to mankind was named, “Life”! That shows God can use utter failures to be 100% fruitful. God never gives up on us. If He does, that will be defeat for Him before Satan. So he will never wash His hands off us. So be encouraged.
Ever since the tragic moment in the garden when Eve gave up God’s will for her own will, her name is dragged through the mud. How sad Eve must be today to see Paul’s grim reminder of her failure to the Corinthians and Timothy (2
Cor 11:3; 1 Tim 2:13,14). Yes, one grave sin can cancel out the memory of a lot of good. It became a stigma for life.
How did a mother’s heart feel at this bleak moment on seeing the badly bruised dead body of her son Abel? What was her reaction to Cain, the murderer, her son? She continued to see- saw between hope and despair at the sudden turns and twists that her
life had taken. She handled them well, clinging to the Lord. One major failure in life taught her a life-lesson—grab the Lord with both hands at all cost and that disobedience to the Lord is never an advantage. Now she had a widowed daughter and
fatherless grandchildren to care for.
You can see Eve weeping at the unceremonious depature of Cain and his wife, her children, from the presence of the Lord. The breaking away process is hard on those being left behind. How she rejoiced when he built a city and named it after his son Enoch!
(Gen 4:17). Did she attend the dedication ceremony? Her very first grandchild must have sent her heart a thumping (Gen 4:17).
She must have been shocked when Lamech married two wives, so far unheard of in history and another murder committed (Gen 4:19,23). Did she counsel him? She enjoyed Jubal’s Music Band (4:21). She would have received some gifts of iron and bronze from Tubal-Cain and perhaps learned to cut vegetables with a knife (Gen 4:22).
Coin heard of the birth of his brother Seth and probably paid a courtesy call.
There were times of joy also for Eve. She rejoiced at the godly life of Enoch amidst the sprawling wickedness. Eve most probably heard the prophecy of Enoch: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of His holy ones to judge everyone and to
convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against Him” (Jude 14,15). So she knew the great judgment day and that she would be blessed with thousands and thousands of holy descendants. But she did not live long enough to see Enoch’s translation (Gen 5:21-24). Her preaching and pleading had not been in vain.
Eve’s first-hand testimony of God’s grace and his grandfather Enoch’s habitual fellowship with God strengthened Lamech’s faith.
Lamech was sad at what he saw around him. So he named his newborn son prophetically as Noah, saying: “He will comfort us in the labour and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed” (Gen 5:29). He transmitted his faith to his
children. But Noah was the only one who responded to his father’s counsel. Upto Lamech it was seeing (Adam and Eve) and believing. After that for Noah and his offspring, it was faith.
Now the avenue is open to the woman to go to the tree of life. She who has an ear, let her hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To her who overcomes, God will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God (Rev 2:7).
Eve will eat the fruit along with us. It was a failure beginning that culminated in victory. Her wasteland turned once more into paradise.
Through the middle of the broadway of the city of New Jerusalem and on either side of the river will be the tree of life with its twelve varieties of fruit, yielding each month its fresh crop; and the leaves of the trees were for the healing and the restoration of the nations. Blessed are those who wash their robes that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. And if anyone takes words away from the Bible, God will take away from her, her share in the tree of life and in the holy city (Rev 22:2,14,19).
The victory promised in the beginning pages of the Bible (Gen 3:15) is celebrated in the last pages (Rev 20:10). When the offspring of Eve came to the earth, He crushed Satan’s head by His death and resurrection. The God of peace will soon crush Satan
under our feet (Rom 16:20). When two parties war, we join the winning side. So join Jesus!
The Bible begins victoriously and ends victoriously (Rev 15:2). It starts with a marriage and ends with a marriage (Gen 2:22; Rev 19:7,9). We see a tree of life, a garden and rivers in Genesis as also in the end!
Eve might have got very discouraged on seeing her wicked generation. Guilt hung like a millstone around her neck but she turned it into a milestone. She was a prime candidate for suicide but she lived her life as fully as she could. She kept stirring the
pot till a change came and out of her came one righteous Noah; out of whom came one faithful Shem; out of whom came one faithful Abraham; out of whom came one faithful Isaac, a Jacob, a David and then Jesus — and here we are, God’s faithful flock, like the stars of the sky and the sand of the seashore! Given the tragic circumstances it is a fairy tale ending nonetheless. Who can despise the day of small beginning? Your testimony can help the Kingdom of God explode in size.
Keep going, keep on going; keep doing, keep on doing; keep winning souls, keep on winning! One day you’ll have innumerable friends in heaven won through you to welcome you into your eternal abode!
Dr. Lilian Stanley
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91 9843511943
lilianstanley@gmail.com
Blessing Youth Mission
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91-416-2242943, +91-416-2248943
hq@bymonline.org
www.bymonline.org
Click here for more options
To buy books written by Dr. Lilian Stanley, kindly reach to us in the follwing address
Blessing Literature Centre
21/11 West Coovam River Road,
Chintadripet,
Chennai 600 002, India.
+91-44-28450411, Mob:8806270699
blc@bymonline.org
