Daily Lesson for January 1, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson is from Genesis 3 verses 14 through 24:


14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
15
And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

16 To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
18
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
19
By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

We stand now at the Gate of the Year -- outside the Gate in fact.  There is no going back to what was.  There are no mulligans for the decisions we made last decade. We have to live with the choices we made, and accept their consequences.  We cannot unlock the gate behind us.  Our future is in front of us -- East of Eden.

It is dangerous out here.  There are wolves and bears and the ground doesn’t grow like it’s supposed to.  There’s thorns everywhere.

But the good LORD didn’t send us out here without care.  We aren’t naked.  We’ve been given these skins for protection, skins which the rabbis said were made from the serpent who tricked us and St. Augustine said are the hides on which the scrolls of Holy Scripture were once written.
So off we go, stepping out into the first light of this New Year, the Good Book in our hands and a pair of quality, handmade rattlesnake skin boots on our feet. We’ll need both.

And, we’ll need each other . . .


Note: I will be reading through the Bible this year and Daily Lessons will come from the daily readings. Read along with me if you like! Tomorrow’s Lesson will come from Genesis chapters 4-7.