
The Temptation of Eve by Lucas Cranach
Prayer of the Day
Lord God, heavenly Father, You created Adam in Your image and gave him Eve as his helpmate, and after their fall into sin, You promised them a Savior who would crush the devil’s might. By Your mercy, number us among those who have come out of the great tribulation with the seal of the living God on our foreheads and whose robes have been made white in the blood of the Lamb; through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Adam and Eve
Adam was the first man, made in the image of God and given dominion over all the earth (Genesis 1:26). Eve was the first woman, formed from one of Adam’s ribs to be his companion and helper (Genesis 2:18-24). God placed them in the Garden of Eden to take care of creation as His representatives. But they forsook God’s Word and plunged the world into sin (Genesis 3:1-7). For this disobedience, God drove them from the garden. Eve would suffer pain in childbirth and would chafe at her subjection to Adam; Adam would toil amid thorns and thistles and return to the dust of the ground. Yet God promised that the woman’s Seed would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:8-24). Sin had entered God’s perfect creation and changedit until God would restore it again through Christ. Eve is the mother of the human race, while Adam is representative of all humanity and the fall, as the apostle Paul writes, “For in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).
Reflection: The woodcut above is interesting for this detail: please note the one woman has a serpent’s tail which Cranach is telling us the devil has become a woman, but not just any woman. It has become Eve. Eve is being tempted by Eve, her own image. The image of man and woman, created in the image of God is powerful but it was to reflect the Lord’s love and dominion but not him or her self as a self-existing all attractive being. Romans 1:
1For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
Then immediately Paul teaches about homosexual passions: loving the same and not the other, literally, the “hetero”. It is easy to love the same. The Lord loves us, even when Eve bought the damn lie. We live in a society in thralldom to the self, from “Self” magazine to a talk show host who’s magazine only features her every time to the worshiping the stars. There are only two types of people: self-seekers or Kingdom seekers or seekers of the Savior. As the Christmas states it well: Christ was born for this. Born into a world in which everyone is looking out for #1 in sheer adulation, He came a mewling baby in a feeding trough, the Son of God. He came to be last and least of all. The Coming One who sought purely the reign of God for you. Colossians 1:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.