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One Gift Too Many
It was Christmas Day in my childhood home. My parents had done their usual masterful job of buying and wrapping gifts for my six siblings and me while keeping the contents of the pleasingly colorful boxes a secret. After a brief Christmas reflection, we eagerly unwrapped the gifts and spent the rest of the day playing with our newly acquired toys and gadgets.
The holiday season came and went and life for our family returned to normal, or so we thought.
Spring Cleaning Discovery
A few weeks after the holidays, my mother decided to do some early spring cleaning. Her first project was cleaning the cluttered hallway closet. As she started her task, she noticed an unusual bulge on the shelf. To her utter surprise, she discovered several unopened gifts.
My parents later confessed that in their quest to make that Christmas memorable, they had “overshopped” for their kids. During the harried weeks before Christmas, they bought and hid gifts around the house, planning to retrieve them later and put them under the tree. Unfortunately, they lost track of their purchases and overextended their gift stashing.
I remember sitting down and opening these generic gifts with my siblings. Since the aura of Christmas had past, the experience was less than thrilling. I conclude now that at least in this instance I received one gift too many.
A Spiritual Perspective
If this can happen in secular life, can it also happen in the spiritual? Can we human beings be given one gift too many by God?
The book of origins, Genesis, tells us that when God created man, He gave him five incredible gifts: life (Genesis 2:7), a magnificent home (Genesis 2:8), extraordinary earthly and heavenly companionship (Genesis 2:19-22), useful labor (Genesis 2:15), and the Sabbath (Genesis 2:1-3). Given the awesome nature of these gifts, what more did our first parents need?
Then it happened. God decided to give Adam and Eve one more gift. Genesis 2:16, 17 says: “God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
In the gift of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God gave Adam and Eve one more gift—the power [and freedom] to choose.
As a teenager, I watched the television forerunner of the movie Lost in Space. The story features the lost Robinson family, an eccentric stowaway named Dr. Smith, and Smith’s robot who would often serve as Dr. Smith’s conscience. Frequently, when the robot threatened to expose some mischievous plan of Dr. Smith’s, the doctor would pull out the robot’s power pack and silence it.
Well, if I were God that’s exactly how I would have made men and women—with a built-in power plug; that way, the minute they got out of line I would simply pull out their power pack.
When God created Adam and Eve, He didn’t fit them with a power pack; instead, He gave them the power of choice.
The question is why?
A Thought-Provoking Answer
One Christian writer offers this explanation for God’s additional gift: “Though created innocent and holy, our first parents were not placed beyond the possibility of wrongdoing. God might have created them without the power to transgress His requirements, but in that case there could have been no development of character. . . . Therefore He gave them the power of choice—the power to yield or to withhold obedience” (Education, p. 23).
Today, people frequently ask the question: “Can God be trusted?” But God’s question for Adam and Eve in Eden was not “Can God be trusted?” Instead, it was “Can man be trusted?”
I believe God is asking us the same question today, and every day we are answering it by assaulting and murdering each other; abusing our bodies with cigarettes, illicit drugs, and alcohol; selfishly satisfying our sexual urges at the expense of innocent victims of rape, sodomy, and pornography; destroying thousands of lives with countless acts of terror; hoarding wealth and withholding compassion from the disenfranchised, the poor, the mentally ill, and the elderly.
God’s Secret Desire
Far too often, we misuse our God-given power to choose, and yet God allows us to continue to make choices freely.
Perhaps He does so in the hope that one day we will choose Him over Satan; right over wrong; holiness rather than sin; the path of peace instead of the path of despair. I believe it is that possibility—as remote as it is from God’s viewpoint—that makes giving us the power of choice worth the risk to God.
So tell me, are you using your God-given gift of choice properly? Or did God give you one gift too many?
DONALD L. BEDNEY II, an ordained minister, currently serves as the executive secretary of the Lake Region Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in Chicago, Illinois.
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