God had commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the forbidden fruit (Genesis 2:17). The serpent came along and gave Eve some very bad advice (Genesis 3:1,4), just as people often give others very bad advice today.
People, although well-meaning, will destroy your
life if you're not very careful. Eve learned this the hard way.
The malicious advice which the serpent gave to Eve, caused her to start
looking for excuses to justify what she wanted to do in her heart, i.e.,
disobey God.
Notice in Genesis 3:6 that Eve had found 3 good reasons (in her own mind) why she should eat the fruit and disobey God's Word.
Eve reasoned that:
-
The fruit was good for food.
-
The fruit was pleasant to the eyes.
-
The fruit would make her wise.
Oh, foolish Eve. As a result of her errant thinking, she brought a curse upon herself, her husband, her children and humanity. God told them not to eat the fruit, period.
Don't be too hard on Eve though, for we all have a tendency to do the same thing, i.e., look for reasons to justify what we had already decided to do in our heart. Eve had already decided to eat the fruit, she just needed to find some excuses to make her feel justified in disobeying God. Is this not what we see today in the world?
Whether it be the sins of needless war, abortion, divorce, adultery, feminist rebellion, false advertising, homosexuality, pornography, greed or tyranny, people have a natural tendency to look for reasons to justify them. Anything can be justified, but that doesn't necessarily make it right or acceptable with God. What saith the Scripture? (Romans 4:3)
Adolf Hitler and Margaret Sanger, good friends, were both eugenicists, who believed it was morally right to forcibly sterilize young women, kill the weak and undesirables of society, and abort babies by the tens-of-millions. Hitler and Sanger sincerely believed they were doing a good thing; but God said, "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13).
It is true that abortion, sterilization and other population control methods do reduced the total population; but God said, "Thou shalt not kill" in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:13).
If you ask people why they do the things they do in life, they will give you sensible sounding reasons which seem to explain their decisions. We like to believe that we exercise sound judgment, especially in the important decisions of our lives.
I think that this is rarely true. I think that standard operating procedure for human decision making is to do what feels right to you at the time, and then to give logical sounding justifications for what you were already going to do anyway, whether you had justifications or not.
So, if you are pregnant, and want to get an abortion, you will be able to give any number of reasonable sounding explanations why this is the right decision. You're not ready to be a parent, or you need to finish your education or get to a better point in your career, or you don't have enough money, etc.
If instead you want to keep the baby, you will explain how even though you will have some extra difficulties due to the lack of money or whatever, you will certainly be up to the challenge to make your life work with the baby, how being a parent will be good for you, what a great parent you'll make, how it will bring you and the father closer together, and so on.
In either case, none of these will be the real reason for your decision. The real reason for your decision will always be, "I did it because I wanted to do it."
