Tuesday, Aug. 13
Genesis 2:4 – 3:24 Read it here

Where the first account of creation that we read yesterday starts with the elemental forces of light and darkness, today’s account begins in a garden where God walks alongside his creation in the cool of the day.
It is tragic but realistic that it is in this more intimate story of creation that we first encounter evil.
The account of the six-day creation allowed us the luxury of seeing creation as a scientific, almost mechanical, operation where everything, including God himself, had a place to be, and everything could be divided into neat compartments.
Human life, though, is messier than that.
Even in a world with only two people who have no responsibility other than to love each other and to love God, they quickly start going their own ways and trying to learn more and be more than they already are.
Rather than getting sidetracked trying to define exactly how the serpent relates to later understandings of the devil or Satan, it’s worth just acknowledging here that the Bible does consistently recognize evil as having characteristics of an intelligent, deliberate being who entices people away from the path God has called us to travel. Ultimately, learning to recognize and resist evil is the wisdom to be gained here.
Much of the rest of the Bible, maybe even all of it, recounts the effort to undo the grip that evil gained in the garden. That fact remains whether the story is understood literally or metaphorically: evil entices humanity to go ways other than what God intended, and because of that we live lives complicated by trouble and pain.