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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 051. The Eden Trail
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The Eden Trail
Eden was God's plan for man. Eden was a garden. God planned a garden for our home. There was perfect love, no questionings, no doubtings, no suspicions, but the sweet, full confidence of true perfect love. Love was the atmosphere of the garden. That meant that there was purity. True love always includes sweet purity. There was no sin, no blemish, no weakness, no wrong, but sweetest purity of heart and life, of imagination and thought and conduct.
And that in turn meant, too, that there was companionship between God and man. Each enjoyed the other. There could be fellowship because there was perfect love, and the perfect purity that belongs to love. There cannot be fellowship between Him and us except upon His level of purity and love. That rules us out now utterly, except as we come back by the reddened pathway made for us by our Lord's death. Through Him comes purity, and through Him love is made perfect.
There is God's plan—a garden with its beauty and fragrance, perfect love, perfect purity, full fellowship between God and man, among men themselves, and between man and the lower creation and all nature. That is the Eden plan, God's plan for man.
Then, then the tempter came. Why did he come? Because he wanted to get control of this earth. That dominion had been given to man. He held his title by obedience. The tempter came to steal away man's control and usurp the earth. If man could be made to disobey by so much as a half of a hair's-width, the title would be defective, and the earth's dominion lost; the tempter would have mastery, not simply of the earth but of the man whose worship he coveted.
Will you mark very keenly how he came? Because that is the way he comes. We want to learn the Eden trail. It will help us become good trailsmen, good trail detectors. And that is an immense help. To recognize a temptation sharp and clear is one-half of the victory over it. We are studying the serpent trail here.