Seeing with Fresh Eyes is a bible commentary by John W. Bullock. It involves the reader and the bible and is for believers, non-believers, and people who are just starting out their journey through the Christian faith.
It is for Christians who despite being raised in a church are yet to understand the key components of being a Christian. How they were saved, what salvation is, and what it means to be a Christian. In a revelation, the author explains and highlights the dysfunctional relationship between God and his people after Adam and Eve’s fall from Grace.
He uses Adam and Eve’s sin as an example of how people submit to the kingdom of the ‘’self’’ instead of committing or submitting to the Kingdom of God. ‘’The Kingdom of the Self’’ is a beastly trait that they adopted soon after consuming the forbidden fruit that was off-limits for them but good for the beasts in the garden.
To quote a sentence from the book, ‘’Only Adam was restricted, but Adam had been given a different kind of life than the beasts.’’ This tells us that the serpent knew that it was a beast. It knew that it had only a physical life and that Adam and Eve would not die physically but spiritually after eating the fruit. Thus to gain knowledge of good and evil they lost something special. This act not only shows us that it is only after giving in to one’s desires that sin is born and grows into death, the wages of sin, but that it correlates with the verse from Mark 8 verse 36 which says, ‘’For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and forfeit his own soul?’’
Adam and Eve at that time though possessing knowledge of good and evil could not grasp the gravity of their actions. That is why God forgave them because they didn’t know what they had done. Even Jesus pleaded with his father in heaven on the cross, ‘’Father please forgive them for they know not what they do’’
The book also highlights the manipulative way in which the human race was tricked into believing the lies of the serpent when the decisions, rules, and guidelines set for us by the Father (God) were meant to protect us as his children. The serpent took advantage of that naivety and manipulated how Eve saw the relationship between herself and God. It made her view the relationship as that of a master and a slave rather than that of a father and his child. It made her believe that she could also become a master thus making the fruit more desirable.
Seeing with Fresh Eyes is a wonderful book to have by your side as you read the bible, it even has questions for discussions at the end that expand and give clarity to points you might have missed as you read through. Edited exceptionally well I give it a rating of 4 out of 4 stars and recommend it to believers and non-believers of Christianity as a study guide.
Comments