If… Then

Human history is replete with examples of conditional promises, and consequences of action (or inaction).

This goes all the way back to the garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve were designed to live happily.

IF they didn’t taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil.

But they did.

After so doing, they were driven from the garden, rather than partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life, which might have made them immortal.

They had no way of knowing what awaited them as a consequence of disobedience.

The Almighty told them as He pronounced judgment before banishing them from the garden, but they probably had little inkling of what really lay ahead.

What was ‘sorrow’?

What was ‘sweat’?

What were ‘thorns’ and ‘thistles’?

To humans accustomed only to light and goodness, as had Adam and Eve had been before the Fall, those were probably just words, until they became reality.

And, as many of us know from bitter experience, reality often bites.

And, as they perhaps viewed the garden from a distance, Adam and Eve might have related to New Englander John Greenleaf Whittier, who, much later, would write in his 1856 poem “Maud Muller”:

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: