by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2024
(Dec. 13, 2024) — Curiosity has killed the cat, spoiled Christmas surprises, and perpetrated every funeral.
It is also a means of God’s grace.
While I can’t vouch for the cat, I know curiosity has stolen surprises and cost us our lives.
For instance, there was the Christmas of the orange football. My parents had bought our gifts and my brother wanted to know his. Four years older than me and therefore more cunning, he probed.
“What did I get?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Give me a clue.”
Well, clues contribute to the suspense of Christmas. You tell without telling, so I obliged.
“It’s about the size of a football. And it’s shaped like one.” I figured that was enough and fiercely protected the secret. “But it’s NOT a football.”
The only surprise on Christmas morning was the color: bright orange and a white stripe on each end.
As for curiosity costing us our lives, I see it in the Bible, right in the beginning when God created in Eden a means of knowing good and evil. The tree, by its very name, revealed the ignorance of our first parents. Adam and Eve were acquainted with nothing but the best—when God finished, He declared the creation “very good.”
Evil was new vocabulary.
Not that God didn’t want us to know about evil; it was doing evil, and the method of learning it, that He prohibited.
Satan stoked their curiosity. “Go ahead and eat,” he teased. “It won’t kill you. Rather, you will discover what you haven’t known all along: you are not as good as you could be. Eat, and you will be like God. You will know good and evil.”
We know the outcome. Death settled on our race, and we have buried our dead ever since.
A gift that God intended for good—the desire to learn and add to knowledge—we and His enemy twisted for evil.
But not forever.
Read the rest here.