In the summer 2006 issue of Spectrum magazine, Richard M. Davidson in "The Authority of Scripture: a Personal Pilgrimage" accuses Eve of making a serious mistake. He writes: Eve "was exhilarated by the experience of exercising autonomy over the word of God, deciding what to believe and what to discard. She exalted her human reason over divine revelation. When she did so, she opened the floodgates of woe upon the world" (39).

Pity poor Eve. Don’t be like her. Listen to and obey God. It seems simple enough. Just do what God says and all will be fine. And we wonder: whatever could have possessed Eve to behave in such a way? Her mistake is our woe.…

Fast forward to 1 Kings 13. One Bible on my shelf (the Revised Standard Version) titles the passage starting at verse 11 "the lying prophet." Here a young prophet (we know this because the Bible tells us so) gets into major trouble (actually, he is killed—in rather dramatic fashion) because he listens and defers to an elder prophet. The Bible does not seem to dispute—nor does our young prophet—that the elder man is, indeed, a prophet of God. But we also learn, in straightforward manner, that "he lied to him."

So it might seem that Eve’s mistake was that she did not trust God’s authority, yet our young prophet’s mistake was that he did trust what he thought was God. Little wonder, then, the paucity of sermons preached on 1 Kings 13. (Besides, the possibility that a prophet of God would deliberately lie is troubling enough—let alone trying to discern which ones might be lying.)

Other Bibles title the same passage in 1 Kings 13, "the disobedient prophet." This refers to the fact that the young prophet did not follow God’s original message. Instead, he turned away from God’s initial instruction—in deference to the authority of the older prophet, no doubt.

Common to each story, then, is the fact that both Eve and the young prophet had no apparent reason to doubt that their first instructions came from God. They clearly knew their task and knew with certainty that God had ordered it. This is not in dispute. The problem for many of us is that we also see—and experience in our own lives—another common thread. Namely, that it is possible for us to be lead astray into accepting that which is false. For in both stories, a voice—a voice of apparent authority—is present that did not in fact speak for God.

No one should suggest it is acceptable to disobey God, but who among us actually hears the intended message and correctly identifies it as coming from God with absolute clarity and certainty? To be sure, many people claim to have messages from God, but the fact that so many disagree with each other casts a chilling doubt on their validity. I may respect the claim—and the right to make it—but that does not compel me to take it as my own.

Thus, each of us lives with constant questions: Is the voice I hear actually from God, and what exactly is it saying? For the advice to "simply obey God" to make any sense, one must know for certain that the message has come from God and that it be comprehensible to the one for whom it is intended. But these precise issues perplex thoughtful people who realize their own susceptibility to deception, bias, and error.

This conundrum, or a similar articulation of it, might seem at first to result in a functional paralysis of actions that spring from faith. It has lead postmodernists to respond that there is no truth; that since all truth claims are filtered through individual minds—minds susceptible to bias and fallibility—no truth claims really matter except ones’ own.

The crippling flaw of this perspective is that in postmodernism’s hyper-awareness of the importance of discerning truth for itself it forgets the reality of an objective truth to which we can aspire. Our limitations in perception do not mean that God is not there or that he has not spoken to us. This flaw might be thought of as the bookend to the mistake of Eve and the young prophet, the flaw of not realizing (or forgetting, perhaps) the capacity we have for being deceived. Yes, God has spoken and his message is comprehensible, but our knowledge and perceptions of these realities might be faulty, skewed, and incomplete.

With this understanding, we have makings of tools to formulate a more proper way to approach our personal encounters with truth claims and God. First, if we have confidence that God exists and is speaking to us, we can have courage to listen to and understand his vision for us.

Second, however, we should also realize our own proclivity to embrace that which is not the true revelation of God. This second tendency proves more difficult; for our own selfish tendencies can cause us to doubt our vulnerability to deception. As humans, we seem to crave certainty, and we cling to it when we think we have found it. But once we grasp this reality and understand that God can use it to our own benefit, we learn the true balance between trust in God and distrust of self. This requires a healthy and judicious skepticism, for we learn to practice the same skepticism toward ourselves and our own judgments as we might toward our perceptions of God and his claims.

Thus we ask the same hard questions of God’s detractors as we might ask of God himself. For Eve and the young prophet, this would have meant more suspicion of the voice that offered an alternative to their first comprehension of God—just as it should for us. This is not to say we must always be loyal to our first impressions. However, humble awareness of our own capacity to get it wrong—along with a faith that there really is a God in heaven who relates with us in rational, comprehensible, and saving ways—can bring us hope and courage to pursue an ever-deepening knowledge of God and his will for us.

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