When God told Adam not to eat the fruit of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (I’ll just call it The Tree), He had not yet created Eve. This surprised me the first time I read Genesis 2:16-17, and then read further to verses 21-23 where God next created Eve. God told Adam not to eat the fruit, but not Eve.

So when Satan said Did God actually say, ‘You may not eat of any tree in the garden?’¹ I imagine his emphasis was not on the word “any”, but on the word “you”. Satan was really asking, Did God tell you not to eat from The Tree?

Satan’s semantics

It may seem a minor difference, but Satan relies on our logic to convince us of things we would otherwise never consider. Since Eve didn’t get the directive not to eat the fruit directly from God, she must have heard it from Adam, which means Satan could reasonably question her responsibility in following God’s directions.

Crafty as he is, I imagine he used numerous verbal tricks to get her to turn. He’d tell her God only told Adam not to eat the fruit and not her. I imagine he said something like, If God really loved you, he’d want you to know everything He knows, in an effort to appeal to her logical side, and her pride.

Dangerous liaisons

Before I was married, there was this guy I worked with whom I developed some feelings for. I believe he felt the same, though we never talked about it. We became good friends, but there was always this unspoken attraction that kept us from being “real” friends. It was an awkward sort of thing that made it difficult to go to his wedding, which made me relieved when our daughter got sick and we couldn’t go. Likewise, I was equally thankful that our wedding was held 250 miles away so it would be unlikely he could come.

The most difficult part of my relationship with him was giving it up when we both got married — to other people. I’ve always had lots of guy friends and fewer girl friends so it was tough when one of the few [Christian] guys I knew became a stumbling block for me. No matter how hard I tried to push him out of my heart, Satan was always there to tell me how sweet he was and how godly. Satan would remind me of all the little imperfections in my husband, telling me I’d be happier with this other guy.

I tried to argue with Satan because I knew in my soul I wouldn’t be happier anywhere else, that I would in fact be ruining two families if I were to indulge in my feelings, but Satan is cruel and very very smart. After a few years of the occasional saucy dream, and various lunches out with the guy, I began to feel like I was cheating on my husband.

For the record, my husband knew about my feelings for him prior to our marriage and he joked a few times that I’d be married to him if I hadn’t married him, but I knew it would kill him to hear these feelings hadn’t entirely gone away.

The long con

Satan’s most powerful tool in his belt is patience. He can work at you for days, weeks, or years; he’ll work as long as it takes to take you down. He had me convinced that my friendship with this guy was just that — a perfectly innocent and platonic friendship, that if ended, would break his heart and mine (never mind what it was doing to my marriage).

Getting back to Eve for a minute, I don’t think it was a short conversation that made her eat the fruit. I believe it was the ultimate long con. I imagine she passed by The Tree every day and sat beneath its shade, wondering what was so awful about this beautiful tree. With Satan’s prompting, I imagine she questioned God’s reasoning for creating the tree to begin with if it were going to do any real harm.

And so the con goes. Satan chit-chats with us through reason and logic, doing everything in his immense power to convince us to do wrong and believe we’re doing right. I was convinced my friendship with this other man was not only not a bad thing, but was good for me, and for him, and that if I were to end it, I would be hurting him somehow.

Strangely enough, I think he felt the same way because any time I tried to get together with him, I’d invite his wife and my husband, thinking it was “safer” that way, or it would make our friendship more legitimate. But he always had other plans. Then we’d end up going to lunch together another time… alone. For about four years this went on until we moved away.

And yet, even after I moved, we kept in touch. It was mostly via IM and email, but the connection was still there. Although I didn’t see him face to face, the connection I felt with him was still as powerful. As they say, I could run, but…

Clued in

As Satan chipped away at me, I knew in my heart I was allowing him to get between me and my feelings for my husband. What I didn’t want to admit was that I wasn’t strong enough to fight Satan and that the only way for me to defeat him would be to leave the battlefield altogether. And really, why should I be there in the first place? Why should I put myself in a position which allows Satan any control anyway, even for the sake of a friendship?

So I stopped responding to the IMs. I stopped emailing him, and eventually I stopped hearing from him. Maybe you wonder why I just ignored him, why I wouldn’t give some explanation, and Ms. Manners in me asked the same thing every few months when I’d get a message from him. Satan hounds me about it too, but I thought a lot about it, wrote out the pros and cons, and you know… the only pro I came up with was that it would make me feel better.

The con that kept coming up was that it would confess something unnecessary and worst case, it could prompt something in him to return the feelings and thus interrupt something in his own marriage.

If I’m really about doing the right thing here and not the polite thing, I have to keep mum. I confess it here for those out there going through something similar, but as I’ve said before, people who know me in person (in general) don’t know about this blog. Of course, there’s a chance he could read this and then he’d know and I’m sort of off the hook in a passive way, but that’s not what I’m trying to do.

I wish I could call him, tell him everything, apologize, and have him tell me his feelings are nothing for me and that he’s praying for me to get past this so we can be real friends, but I know it’s unlikely and even if he did, I’m back in the battlefield again.

It’s not about the fruit

The hard point here, and it took me awhile to get it, is that it’s not about the fruit. That thing Satan dangles in front of is is neither the goal nor the offense. Eve’s eventual taste test wasn’t out of hunger or a simple hankering for a snack. She wanted something she didn’t have, or didn’t think she had. She believed there was something more out there; it was something more that she wanted.

Likewise, it wasn’t her going after the fruit that was wrong. It wasn’t even the biting of the fruit. I couldn’t say I wasn’t cheating on my husband simply because I had never had a physical or even verbally intimate relationship with this other man. As the saying goes, it’s the thought that counts. My simply wondering what a relationship would be like with him was a betrayal just like Eve’s questioning God’s instructions to Adam were a betrayal both to Adam and to God.

I can’t imagine God was all that concerned with her actually eating the fruit as much as her wanting to in the first place. Sometimes it’s not enough to refrain from sin; it’s important to refrain from considering sin, and that’s where the real battle is. It’s easier to think about doing something than it is to actually do it, and yet to think about committing a sin is as bad as the sin itself².