23. Where Rationalism Began
Where Rationalism Began So she first allowed herself to listen, and then became willing to consider the “reasonableness” of what he said. That opened his way to reason still further that God’s will could hardly be what she thought it was, for if she would only eat of the fruit, she would at once, by an easy short cut, become like God, Who Himself knew good and evil.
Thus having “listened to reason” instead of believing God, she was deceived and blinded to the extent that she chose her own will and acted on it, at once achieving a fixed character, the central fact in which was a will set against God’s will. This is forever the inescapable result of “listening to reason,” instead of simply believing what God says, and acting accordingly. The whole of Eve’s personality was involved in the choice she made, and so in the effect it had on her. For when she “saw that the tree was good for food”—a physical appeal; “pleasant to the eyes”—a combined physical and psychic appeal; and a “tree to be desired to make one wise”—an appeal outstandingly psychic, “she took of the fruit thereof and did eat,” thereby committing her whole moral personality to the desires of body and mind (Genesis 3:6).
If Eve had refused to “listen to reason” by actively choosing and deliberately committing herself to God’s will, the result would of course have been the opposite of what it was. But choosing to believe and act on Satan’s lie in direct contradiction to God’s word, (everything that contradicts God’s Word is a lie), she went into guilt and unholiness, leading Adam also into the same terrible choice, and thus they both opened their beings to the certainty of eternal unhappiness and endless misery, unless some way could be found, outside of anything they could do for themselves, that could rescue them from such a destiny. The will of the creature has now become dominant over the whole race, which is in Adam, and the will of the Creator repudiated, self-love thus beginning its destructive reign over all mankind. The experiment has thus been entered upon which is ultimately to furnish the full and final answer to the question: Is my will or God’s will best? And when the answer is complete, with the close of human history, that question will never again be raised through all eternity, for the answer of experiment is final. With this outline of the nature of moral being before us, we now have a viewpoint from which we can understand moral action, thus giving us some knowledge of the nature of sin. And when that is before us, we should then be prepared to understand what God must do with sin.