Forbidden Fruit and the True Vine January 12, 2021

Forbidden Fruit and the True Vine

January 12, 2021 By Sherry Miller

“I am the true vine.” (Jn. 15:1b, NIV)

A recent study of the original sin took me down a path leading straight to Christ. You might not automatically think of Jesus when you read the story in Genesis 3, but on this particular day, it’s where I ended up. I had a little help from Matthew Henry.

This whole idea of sin is just messy. It is, after all, rebellion that we are talking about here. We see rebellion all the time, from the terrible-twos-toddler to the tongue-lashing-teenager. It’s ugly. It’s unpleasant. It isn’t nice. It doesn’t give you warm fuzzies, unless it’s heartburn. But wait, sin and rebellion aren’t limited to tykes and teens. We are all guilty, right?

So how do we avoid sin? Certainly Adam and Eve didn’t do a very good job of it. We might be hard on them, thinking how dumb it was for them to buy Satan’s lies and go against God, after He’d given them this wonderful, lush garden to live in. He even gave them dominion over the animals and provided for their every need. But, truth be told, we probably wouldn’t have done much better.

Matthew Henry’s commentary notes that Adam’s sin involved “disbelief of God’s word, confidence in the devil’s [word], discontent with his present state, pride in his own merits, envy at God’s perfections, and indulgence of the appetites of the body.” Wow. I wonder if Adam’s uncluttered mind was able to cycle through all of that before he took the first bite of the forbidden fruit?

Henry goes on to say, “We are often betrayed into snares by an inordinate desire to have our senses gratified…Christ is a tree to be desired to make one wise. Let us, by faith, feed upon Him.” And there is where I landed in my pondering of sin and how it entered the world. We are reminded in God’s word that Satan is prowling the earth, looking to eat us for lunch. Some things never change. We also are reminded of our own sinful nature and fleshly desires. And then there is the world, which is continuously telling us which fruits to be reaching for, under the guise that all of them are pleasing and none are forbidden.

But Jesus’ statement in John 15 goes right along with Henry’s commentary that He is the tree, the true vine, and we are to attach ourselves to Him, be His branches, and draw our nourishment from Him. If we can only desire this – desire Christ – more than we desire the forbidden fruit and other things that vie for our attention, then maybe that is the key to avoiding sin.

As we stand on the precipice of another year, my prayer is that we will not only have this desire – this hunger and thirst for Jesus and His righteousness – but that we will act on it, to lift His name, to be an example to those coming along behind us, and to grow into the people that God intended us to be from the beginning of time.