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Forbidden fruit

Muriel Larson

When the Lord led me to buy a small camper some years ago, I began holding Bible clubs at campgrounds. Through these, I have reached hundreds of children, teenagers and adults with the good news of salvation; many have prayed to receive Christ as their Saviour.

At one club, when I told how Adam and Eve had committed the first sin by disobeying God’s one command, a boy exclaimed, “Yeah, they ate the apple!” I explained that their disobedience to God was the real sin, and didn’t think to correct the remark about “the apple”.

When I invited the children to pray to receive Jesus, a number of them prayed with me, including two 10-year-old girls. After they left, I began picking things up and putting them away. As I closed my accordion case, the two girls came running back to talk to me.

“Is it true that Adam and Even sinned by eating the apple?” one asked.

“We don’t want to disobey God,” the other declared earnestly. “We love apples, but if He doesn’t want us to eat them, we want to know!”

I smiled and explained that the Bible doesn’t say what kind of fruit it was except that it grew on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “I don’t think that tree is available to us in the world today,” I said. “We have no reason at all to think it was an apple that Adam and Eve ate.”

The two girls breathed sighs of relief. “Then we can eat apples after all!” one happily exclaimed.

After they left, I thought about those girls, how tender-hearted they were about wanting to please God and not disobey Him, even if it meant giving up their favourite fruit. No wonder Jesus said, “Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Luke 18:11). These girls illustrated that true salvation results in the desire to obey the Lord and His Word. Having this desire is evidence that we have truly been born of the Spirit into God’s family.

Muriel Larson is a freelance writer from Greenville, S.C.

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Last modified October 5, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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