Two young men came to my home, wanting me to change my faith from Jesus Christ. They were polite and very articulate, but I could sense that although they claimed to hold the Bible as one of their main texts, they were wildly off the mark.
"I guess I'm confused about your approach to sin, friends," I said. "I don't understand how you take way Jesus' saving work."
"Well, it's kind of hard to explain, sir," said one of the men, "but, you see, God had to create sin in order for the human race to understand about sex."
"See," he continued, "God created the Tree of Knoxwledge of Good and Evil, which told about the proper relations between a man and a woman in sexual union. Remember, after Eve had taken of the fruit and Adam also ate of it from that very tree, God tossed them out of the garden but then said, 'Now go, be fruitful and multiply.'"
"Gentlemen," I replied, would you take your Bible and go to the book of Genesis?"
They did.
"Would you look at chapter 1?" I asked "Read through the passage and tell me where the Lord tells Adam and Eve to be 'fruitful and multiply."
They found it in verse 28.
"Please tell me," I continued, "according to the narration, if that was IN the Garden or OUT of the Garden - was it BEFORE they sinned or after they sinned?"
The first young man looked and was literally speechless. He finally said, "uh, well, they said it before they sinned."
"In other words, " I continued, "Adam and Eve were given the gift of sexual union - it was not the cause of a sin. Sexual union is not borne of a sinful decision."
Both young men were taken aback. Their faith had made a distortion of the facts of sin.
What I'm trying to say here is that if we're going to claim to believe the Bible, then let's go by what the Bible says and follow it in the context in which God is teaching us. Distorting and bending truths to make the Bible more palatable or more malleable is a dangerous thing.
