Honest communication

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, 
‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”  Gen 3:1-5

     The Scriptures can bite, but this is only to deliver us from the cancer that consumes us. God has to get it all out. The Scriptures can be many layered. One verse can have layers on top of layers of meaning; this is part of its beauty. But Scripture is never sarcastic, which is a form of lying. The foolish and cynical can be pitied. And the simple can be innocent. But the sarcastic are liars.

     I knew a boy in high school from which I learned to hate sarcasm with a passion. He was very smart and he knew it. And you never knew when you were talking to him whether he was telling you what he thought was the truth or lying with his words to make sport of you.  Did he actually believe just the opposite of what he was saying? You can’t have a relationship with such a person.

     My husband and I decided early on in our marriage that if we had a problem with the other we’d either directly tell the other what it was or we’d put up with that problem silently. But we would not engage in passive aggressive behavior or sarcastic comments to hurt each other. Not that we can keep this all the time! ;)  Likewise, poking fun in our family is fine and sometimes very helpful to learn not to take yourself too seriously, but only if they are laughing with you and not crying inside—“I was just joking…” My daughter who just started college this week was surprised to find a professor acting like what she had witnessed from high school teachers and making fun of certain students, who weren’t laughing about it but probably crying. I told her to privately call him on it in a gentle way. Give him the benefit of the doubt—he may just not know that he’s hurting them. Some may see my kids as contentious but I hope they learn how to not be afraid to speak truth to power.

     But the crafty one is not speaking truth to power. He is not trying to engage in conversation that builds up the other. He is the father of lies and the father of sarcasm. “Did God actually say?” “You will not surely die.” “You will be like God.” Truths or lies? The whole truth or just the bait that hides the hook as Tim said?

     We should speak to and question God and each other, but never sarcastically. There is health and wholeness in living truthfully with each other instead of becoming alienated through lying. Similarly, when the Holy Spirit speaks to us, “today if you hear his voice,” he may joke with you, he may hurt you in love, but he will never speak dishonestly.

     We often focus in Genesis 3 on what happened, but if you think of Genesis as God starting to answer humanity’s big questions like where did we come from and what is our purpose in life, we might look at the Fall differently. Most of us know inside that we’re fallen. We don’t think we’re perfect. The question in my mind is, “How did I get messed up so I can avoid it next time?” Seems to me the beginning of the answer that we find in Genesis 3 lies in not regarding the exceptionally crafty one over the simple Truth.