Walking With Christ

Proverbs 3:5-6 (5)Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. (6)In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.(ESV)

I’ve heard it said that life is a highway. The song that just popped into most heads describes freedom and highspeed progress in a chosen direction. Let’s take a closer look at the analogy and see if that is really what the original design intended.

I think everyone knows what a highway is with the various features they have such as signs, lanes of traffic defined by the lines on the road, rest stops, etc. Sure, these highways do help to get large amounts of traffic from one place to another in short order. They might not be the quickest path though. How so? Does a highway travel from your front door to your destination? No. That would be absurd. You have to drive to the highway and merge then follow the highway to the appropriate exit and then find your way from there to your destination. The fasted point from point A to point B is always a straight line and a highway will almost never be that.

If your life were a highway, what would the street signs say? What would the speed limit be, and why? Are the lines of the highway painted by pride, anger, lust, envy, or love? Some people would agree that life is a highway, while others never get out of the parking lot.

The speed limit sign slows you down. Merging traffic slows you down. The path the highway actually takes does slow you down since it doesn’t take you directly to your destination. Every part of the highway system is designed to slow down the flow of traffic in some way or another. Our lives were never meant to have such limits.

In the garden, before Eve, Adam was given a single rule. In Genesis 2:16-17 we can read that Adam was told the only thing he couldn’t do was to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Yet, when the serpent pressed Eve on the rules of the garden in chapter three she said they couldn’t even touch the fruit. God never added that part. Adam did.

The reason for Adam to add that made sense, but without a full and proper explanation to Eve, she was left open to doubt. The enemy took full advantage of this. The serpent did not lie to Eve in Genesis 3:4-5. He used actual facts and a lack of understanding in Eve to twist her perspective.

Adam most likely falsely attributed the additional rule to God showing that he did not accept the authority that he had been given. This false attribution gave the serpent the wiggle room to twist events to create doubt. If Adam had taken the authority and responsibility he had been given and explained the actual rule to Eve as well as his addendum, it’s more likely that she would have been able to respond to the serpent. This isn’t to say that Eve couldn’t have also asked God directly, but that’s a story for another day.