HOW EVE LOST HER HOLINESS Part 3
The wisdom of the fathers
HOW EVE LOST HER HOLINESS Part 3
6. The next step after committing sin, is the?communicating?of it to others. "She gave to her husband and he did eat." If she had known the plan of salvation, as we now do, she might have, immediately after the act of sin, confessed it in deep penitence to God, and have been for given and saved. Even then she would have lost the Edenic state, and would have been a sinner saved by grace. Instead of this she began to scatter death.
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Her act of sin soon sprouted into a duplicate crop of thorns. So it is to-day. If the child of God is overtaken in a fault, or commits one act of sin, and he does not fly immediately to Jesus with full confession, for pardon and cleansing, he will find, like Eve, that the one act of wrong is spreading into a terrible harvest. Now back of this verse, and these steps of falling, which have been specified, it seems to me that a little secret of Eve's fall is given us in verse 3, where she slightly changes and tones down the exact word of the Lord. God said in chapter 2. 17, that if she ate of the forbidden tree, "Thou shalt surely die." But when Eve came to repeat, these words to Satan she said, we shall not eat "lest we die."
There is some difference between "shall surely die," and "lest we die." This weakening of God's word may have been the open joint in her spiritual armor, into which Satan thrust his fiery dart. How many have fallen from holiness because they took the liberty to misquote the Lord and tone down the word of God. Many a preacher has lost holiness, he hardly knew how, when he took the liberty of changing and toning down the exact Bible truth on holiness in his sermons and testimony. God means all He says, and for us to modify or change His word for any nice phrases of our own is a presumption that we are wiser than God, or else we secretly do not believe that God means what He says.?When we say "lest" where God says "surely," we are like Eve, on the verge of falling. There is not such a great mystery in the fall of Eve; it is being too often repeated almost in the exact manner by those who are falling away from the glory and power of entire holiness.
If Eve's faith had unwaveringly held to the exact words of her Lord in all their full meaning, she would never have fallen.?Let us watch, and pray, and trust, and confess, that we fall not from holiness after the same example of unbelief.?
(from White Robes" by G.D. Watson)