1st Sunday of Lent, Year A
Previous Years: Year A (2020, 2017), Year B (2021, 2018), Year C (2022, 2019)
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/doubting-god-s-love-1677440417/
Transcript
Feels like forever since we talked about it. It was only November and October, but the definition of prayer, that we’ve been working off of is, prayer is aligning myself with the will of God. It’s spending time with the Lord so that I can get to know and understand his will. And then it’s continuing to spend time with the Lord so that my will can be formed to desire what He desires. But in order to do that, we have to learn to recognize the voice of the Lord. What does the voice of the Lord sound like? And also the voices that will distract us. Our own voice, the voice of our selfish desires, can easily pull us away from the will of God. But similarly, there is always the voice of the tempter, of the evil one. And we have to learn to recognize his voice as well, so that we can reject it and leave it aside and not be formed by the desires of the devil.
Well, our first reading today is a good analysis, a good breakdown of what it looks like for the devil to tempt us, for him to try to convince us of something. So how does he begin with Eve? He starts by saying, “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” Phrased as a question intentionally, again, the serpent is very subtle. He is on her side. He wants to make sure that her interests are taken care of, and he’s concerned that the Lord would have put such a heavy burden on her.
But notice, it’s a very extreme claim. At this time, humanity was not given to eat animals. That happened after Noah. And so the only source of food would have been the trees in the garden. And so the devil is essentially asking, Eve, is it true that God asked you to starve? Is it true that God isn’t taking care of you at all? He put you here and didn’t give you any resources? Eve knows it’s not true. She gives an answer. “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, you shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.” She knows better. She knows what God has said. But notice that her answer is slightly wrong. If you know Genesis and I had to read this again to make sure I was right before I preached it. God doesn’t say not to touch the fruit, although why would you touch it if you’re not going to eat it? But he doesn’t say that. He simply says, “Don’t eat of the fruit”. And so Eve here is responding with a command that is more strict than God Himself. It could reveal to us that Eve has been given over to doubt.
The devil pushed her really hard to knock her off balance. He made a very extreme claim. Is it true that God wants you to starve? And she’s off balance. And so when she gives her answer, she gives an answer that’s based on the idea that maybe God is that strict. Maybe God isn’t on my side. Maybe He’s not looking after me. And so, yeah, we’re not supposed to eat or even touch the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. The devil uses that small opening, that small doubt, and he goes for the jugular. Instead of just asking questions, trying to be on her side, now he directly lies to her. You will certainly not die. That’s a lie. They absolutely died. No, ‘God knows well that the moment you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil’. The devil is saying, God is lying to you. You will not die. And he’s lying to you because he feels threatened by you. If you eat this fruit, you will be like God. This whole exchange is trying to introduce Eve to a doubt about the goodness and love of God. It’s the idea that God is not looking after you and you have to look after yourself. And by doing so, by getting her to doubt the goodness and love of God for her. The devil is driving a wedge between Eve and God, to the point that Eve does not check any of this information with the Lord.
He’s in the garden with them. He’s shown to be walking with them regularly. They had regular conversations with the Lord. And yet, given all of this information, given the suggestion from the devil that God is not on her side, that He’s been lying to her, that these trees are not what they appear. She doesn’t ask Him because the devil is subtle, because he got her to not trust God. Why would she go to ask the one that is a threat to her? Why would she go to ask the one who might actually, in fact, be asking her to starve? Why would she go and ask the one who might blow up He because suddenly he feels threatened by the fact that she’s asking about the tree. No, the devil has made God an enemy of Eve through this exchange, and so she’s not going to go to her enemy. Instead, she is left alone. She is left unmoored and unanchored from the Lord and from His revelation. And so now she has to make a decision herself.
I don’t understand why, given two options, given two contradictory positions, Eve chooses to believe the serpent and not God. I don’t understand why she could not ground herself in God, why she felt so alienated from God already. But it’s the decision that she makes. Thinking that God wants her to starve because the devil put that idea in her head. She looks at the tree and sees that it is good for food.
Oh, I don’t want to starve. I don’t want to be denied food. This is good for food and for gaining wisdom. And apparently, if I gain wisdom, I’m not going to die. I’ll just be like God. I’ll take this fruit. This is great. This is in front of me. She takes it, she eats it, and then she gives some to her husband, who the scriptures say was with her. He was probably with her the whole time. He listened to the entire dialogue, didn’t speak up, didn’t say anything, didn’t challenge the serpent, didn’t challenge Eve. He knew just as well as Eve what God had commanded them to say. He was apathetic. He just didn’t care. He didn’t care enough to be engaged. He didn’t care enough to listen. He didn’t care enough to speak up. And because he didn’t care, he was easily swept along with his corruption. Eve might be the one who was tempted by the serpent, but Adam didn’t care enough to even know that he was being tempted. He was just moved along with the shifting sands of what was going on in Eden.
Well, as I asked myself what an analogy of this might be, where do we see the devil tempting us like this in today’s society? What came to mind, because I’m always praying about them and I’m always worried about them, were our middle school and high school students. What sort of messages are they getting? How are they being tempted? They’re being actively pulled away from the church all the time. What does that process look like for them?
Well, it looks like this, it looks like something coming up and saying, is it true that you are anti science? Is it true that you don’t believe in science at all? It’s an extreme claim. It knocks our students off balance. Whoa! Why would they ask that question if there wasn’t some truth to it? Because it’s so extreme there must be something. Why would any logical person ask us such a crazy question? And so the doubt is immediately there. Oh, man. If they’re asking that, maybe we are anti science, I don’t know. And maybe the students are able to provide an answer of some kind. The church invented science. It’s only because we have a rational God that we can have rational laws of nature. It’s only because we have an ordered God that we think the universe might be ordered. The Catholic Church invented the university system. We invented skeptical investigation. We are the ones who drove most scientific developments up until the late enlightenment. Maybe. Maybe the student has that on their lips. Maybe they don’t. But then double down. Doubly aggressive. The person who asked that question isn’t looking for an answer. The person who’s asking that question is going to come back and say, well, something about Galileo and something about evolution and something about the fact that you cannot touch or see God. He is just a wish fulfillment, magical sky fairy. And why would you believe all of these things if you can’t prove them? Only science can prove things.
Going for the jugular. Taking whatever doubt was introduced in that student by such an extreme question and capitalizing on it. And notice what happened in this process. It’s introducing doubt about God. He’s just wish fulfillment. You can’t prove Him. You can’t see Him, introducing doubt about the church. Something something, something Galileo means the church always hates science all the time. Introducing doubt about the scriptures. Oh yeah, evolution contradicts Genesis. You can’t believe the scriptures. And so where is this person going to go in their doubt? Well, they’re not allowed to go to God or the church or the Bible anymore because those are said to be stupid. They cannot resolve their doubt in faith. They’re unmoored and unanchored, and now they have to make a choice for themselves. And like Adam, they will be swept along with whatever their peers are doing, whatever society is telling them.
Or maybe somebody comes up and says, is it true that you hate women? Is it true that all you want to do is oppress and keep women down? And again, a very extreme claim. The students are knocked off balance. Maybe they know the answer. Maybe they’re like, well, look, you know, with abortion there are two lives involved and we want to be sensitive to both. Or, you know, with birth control, we just don’t believe that fertility is a disease. It doesn’t need to be medically fixed. Or, you know, with ordination of priests, we’re trying to be faithful to God and what He did. And He called male apostles. And maybe we don’t know why. Maybe the student can say those things. Maybe they can’t.
But it doesn’t matter because the follow up is going for the jugular. No, everything is about power structures. The power structure of the church is purely male. You cannot trust anything the church believes. The scriptures were written by men. It doesn’t have any women’s perspectives. You cannot believe the scriptures. They’re alienated from the places they might go to resolve their doubts. They don’t believe that the goodness of God, through revelation, the message is given to us through God, are trustworthy. And so they can only resolve their doubts through their peers. The shifting sands of society.
Or maybe it sounds like somebody saying, is it true that you fear that you are afraid of and therefore hate LGBTQ people? Again, an extreme claim that we would hate, absolutely despise, an entire class of people. Knocked off balance, doubt is introduced. They might try to answer. No, we believe that God was intentional when He created us. That He made the body on purpose, that there is reason to it, and that every function has a reason and a purpose. And we should try to respect what these things are and what they do. Maybe they have that answer, maybe they don’t. But it doesn’t matter. Because then they go for the jugular.
Using, and what is becoming clearer and clearer, studies that are not scientifically valid, but using these kind of hand-wavy studies, somebody’s going to come back and say, because you do not agree, because you do not support everything that we’re saying, you are causing an entire group of people to commit suicide. They are going to kill themselves because of you.
That’s the messaging. Going for the jugular. Taking the doubt and doubling down on it. And where can they go to resolve that? Well, they can’t go to the church because it’s hateful. They can’t go to the scriptures because apparently something being in Leviticus next to a dietary law means that everybody who quotes it is a hypocrite. Ignoring, of course, that Saint Paul also has that in his list of sins. They can’t go to God because apparently God hates people too. What are they going to do? Well, it’s going to be their peers. They’re going to be shifted like the sands.
So how do we resolve this? What does Jesus do when He’s tempted? He stays rooted in the love of God. Again, all of these doubts are about the goodness and love of God. Does He love me? Is He looking out for my happiness? Does He care about me? Eve is led to believe that He does not care about her. He wants her to starve, so she cannot go to Him or she will not go to Him. But Jesus, at every moment when He is tempted by the devil, always goes back to the fact that God loves Him and He can trust the revelation of God.
The doubt that the devil is trying to introduce for the Lord is whether He is the Son of God. Whether the Lord loves Him or not. Whether He truly has the identity that He thinks He does. So the devil says, “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread”. The devil is saying, God’s not here taking care of you. You are really hungry. You have to take care of yourself. If you’re the Son of God, don’t rely on your father. Rely on yourself. Jesus says, “No, one does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” Which is to say, my happiness is in radical dependency on the Lord. The Lord loves me and cares about me, and the more I pour myself into Him, the more I will be loved and cared about. You cannot drive a wedge between me and my father.
And so the devil says,” fine, if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down”. The devil says, fine, you’re going to rely on your father. That’s great. But can you really rely on Him? Are you absolutely sure? If there’s any doubt in you at all, resolve that doubt. If you really believe God’s going to take care of you, prove it to yourself so you don’t have to deal with doubts anymore. Throw yourself down and He will catch you. “Jesus says, no, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” I don’t need to jump down to know that God loves me. I am firmly rooted in His love and in His care. I am firmly rooted in the fact that what He asks of me is for my good. I don’t need to test Him.
Finally, the devil shows Jesus all of the kingdoms of the world and their magnificence and says, I shall give these to you if you will simply worship me. It’s the final test. God can seem so distant so often. He can be so far from us. The devil is telling Jesus I’m the one who is here right now. I am the one who is concretely speaking with you. I can make a promise to you like this. Maybe God, maybe your father has called you to some vague mission. You don’t know where it’s going. You know, maybe you don’t see the results right away. I can give you immediate results if you just bow down to me. Jesus said, I don’t need that. I don’t need that. It should also not be lost on us, that the scriptures imply that all of the kingdoms of the world, in their magnificence, belong to the evil one. We should not be tempted by the world and the magnificence.
Jesus says, “the Lord your God shall you worship, and Him alone shall you serve”.
At every moment He’s going back to the love of God. The fact that He does not doubt God’s care for Him, and at every moment He uses the scriptures. Not only does He trust God’s love, He trusts God’s revelation. He knows that God has spoken to humanity and that those words are trustworthy. As Catholics, we know that God loves us and He has spoken to us through Scripture and tradition, through the Bible and the church. They are trustworthy. What the devil wants is to divide you from your God, and he wants to do so by convincing you that God does not love you, that God does not care about you, that God is not going to be with you. And he introduces doubt about the things of God, about the presence of God, about the revelation of God.
So that when you have a doubt, when you feel alone, you will not resolve that doubt with His revelation, with His scriptures, and with His church. Don’t allow the devil to drive that wedge. Know that God loves you and know that He is revealed that love to you over and over and over again. If you ever feel unanchored and unmoored, if you don’t know what to do, if you have a doubt, which is fine, it’s okay to have doubts and skepticism. But if you have that doubt, go to God. Ask Him about it. Ask the scriptures about it. Ask the church about it. The Lord is going to give you light. He is going to give you love. Remain rooted in that love. Never doubt that He loves you and everything else will take care of itself.
Notes
INTRO
Prayer is uniting ourselves to the will of God. In order to do so, we must learn to recognize the voice of God. This also requires recognizing the voice of the evil one, who is constantly trying to pull us away from God.
PATERN OF TEMPTATION BY THE DEVIL
(1) “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?”
—->Extreme statement on one side.
—->Obviously, factually false. Easy to correct. But pushes the conversation to one side. “Overton Window”
(2) “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.'”
—->Person corrects, but slightly wrong. Doubt is introduced.
—->Oh no, of course not! (But maybe? Maybe God is not loving or good?…)
(3) “You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.”
—->Devil rejects all nuance and attacks forcefully and directly.
—->(Because you are doubting God…) God is jealous and you will not die!
—->Again, so extreme that it immediately pushes the conversation to one side, and even those seeking a middle are moved.
—->Cuts off recourse to God.
(4) The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it…
—->With no recourse to God, she judges for herself.
—->She does not even consider what God said to her, because she doubts him.
(5) …and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
—->Those who stand by idley, who do not bother to push back or enter into the conversation, are easily swayed. They just go along with the crowd.
NOTES
(1) Why did the woman no go back and ask God?
(2) The doubt is always, ultimately, about the love and goodness of God.
APPLICATION
Women Priests
—->Is it true that you hate women?
—->No, we only ordain men to be priests because we have to follow the example of Jesus, who only chose men for the priesthood, and sacramental theology, etc., etc.
—->Jesus was bound by the society of his time (doubt in the Scriptures, doubt in judgement of the Lord). And this is all about men in the Church desperately holding on to their power (doubt in the goodness of the Church).
—->With no Church and no Scripture, make whatever decision you want.
Gender Issues
—->Is it true that you hate all LGBTQ people?
—->No. We understand that sexuality is complex, but we believe that God was intentional when he created the human body and that certain actions have certain purposes, etc.
—->Leviticus also has dietary laws, so you are a hypocrite (doubt in the Scriptures). Jesus ate with everyone (doubt in the identity of the Lord). This is about religion being hateful and controlling (doubt in the Church).
—->With no recourse to the Scriptures or the Church, make whatever decision you want.
JESUS’ TEMPTATION
(1) Satan tries to introduce doubt about Jesus’ identity as the son of God.
(2) Jesus always goes back to the goodness AND REVELATION of God. Jesus just says “no”.
FINAL THOUGHT
(1) Why are we always so quick to believe anyone and anything other than the Church and the Scriptures? What has non-Christian society done for us that we trust it more than we trust the Bible?
Fr. Moore 