Decisions, Decisions

"Decisions, Decisions"
Genesis 3:1-6


How many decisions do you think we make each day?  Take a guess.

According to several articles I read this week, the average adult in the USA today makes about 35,000 decisions each day. Most of them rather simple ones. Where will I sit, what will I have to eat, which spoon to take out of the drawer, what shirt will I wear (even though it may or may not go with my pants), which morning show to watch, should I call to let them know I'm late.  Or while driving a car, what lane to be in, looking for other drivers, music or talk show on the radio, putting on makeup while driving or not.  And there are sub-decisions within those decisions as well.

Most of those decisions are seemingly inconsequential.  Until you rear end a driver because you were concentrating on putting your mascara on instead of watching what was happening on the road.  But, I would guess a lot of our decisions out of that 35,000 are basically not the kind that rock your world.

There are those kinds of decisions.  What to major in in college, what career path to follow, whom to marry, what kinds of friends to hang around with, move to the United States from Germany to spend a year with a family in Pratt, KS.

Those are all huge, life altering, decisions.  The inconsequential decisions we make in seconds or less, assuming there will be few if any life-shattering consequences.  The big decisions, we may mull over for weeks or months trying to decide.  And there are some people, who when faced with even small decisions are like the comedian, who said, “I’ve been having trouble with decision making.  Last week I was at a four-way stop and ended up spending the night.”

And not making a decision is a decision in itself, with it’s own ramifications.  As in the following cartoon:

A case could be made that life is about decisions.  That life is basically about the decisions we make and how things shake out after those decisions, and what we decide after the consequences of prior decisions are experienced.  Maybe even, at the end of life, as you look back, who you are and what you’ve become is the sum total of all the decisions you have made throughout your life.

C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, wrote:
...every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than what it was before.  And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowing turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature…

So our decisions also have eternal consequences.

And, our decisions don’t effect just ourselves--they will have ramifications for many others as well.  With the scripture story we’re looking at this morning, we find out some decisions effect the rest of humanity and all of human history.

John Gardner once said,
We cannot evade the necessity to make decisions.  I was discussing these matters with a young man recently and he said, “I don’t mind making decisions that involve myself alone, but I object to making decisions that affect other people.
I had to tell him that would make it impossible for him to be a second-grade teacher, a corporation president, a husband, a politician, a parent, a policeman, a chef, a doctor, or a horse-race bookie--in fact, it would force him to live a hermit’s life.


So let’s look back at where it all began--with the first decision makers, Adam and Eve.  If this story teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that making bad decisions has been with human beings from the beginning.  Even living in an ideal place like Eden does not help the first humans from making flawed decisions.  So the question is, why have we not evolved into better decision makers after eons of bad decisions?  Evidently making decisions has nothing to do with heredity.

Part of the answer to that question has to do with the truth that we have yet to gain mastery over our primal urges or our unconscious needs or our basic human insecurities.  Those are the primary drivers of our history of poor decision making.  We will see them in operation in Eve’s first and fatal beg decision to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree.

Combine these with a whole bunch of mental biases, such as selective attention, or rationalization, and it seems we are mentally and psychologically fated to make flawed decisions.  In other words, we are fated to be human beings.

So let’s look at the first human beings and see how they made those first bad decisions which has been called “original sin.”

The first thing we learn from this story is, when making a big decision, pay attention to who you’re talking to.  Consider the source.  Right off in this chapter it says, “Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the LORD God had made.”  The serpent was the king of subtleties.  The serpent could make black and white look so gray with just a few words.  As the saying goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Certainly Eve must have known this about the serpent.  You would think God warned her about the snake.  “See that slithering thing over there?  (shake head no)  Listen with both ears with that one.”  Or maybe God didn’t warn Eve, and God was just letting Eve find out for herself.  She certainly got a lesson about who to listen to and who not to listen to, didn’t she?  She listened to the snake, but she didn’t talk to God about what the snake was saying.  And we have been paying the price ever since.

Secondly, in making decisions know where your “hooks” or weaknesses are.  Eve told the serpent that God instructed her to not even touch the tree.  But that wasn’t in God’s original prohibition.  Eve added to it.  She must have known that, for her, if she even touched the tree or it’s fruit, that was enough of a hook for her to make an ill-fated decision.  Eve had a sense of her own vulnerability, growing out of a character weakness, that would lead Eve down the wrong path.

God’s boundaries apparently offered some latitude--possibly even touch, but not taking.  But Eve knew in herself, in order to make a good decision about following what God said, she had to take a step further back, and not even touch the tree or anything on the tree.

These hooks, fashioned by our vulnerabilities and character weaknesses, are different for each of us.  Two of the key hooks for many of us are limited information and self-interest.  Recall, for a minute, a couple of decisions you’ve made lately.  How much information did you really gather to make as well an informed choice as possible?  Usually we find that out after the decision has been made.  Darn, I should have looked into that a little more deeply, we think to ourselves.  Uh, yeah!

Or how much of those recent decisions were made simply out of your own desire?  When you get down to it, most of the time we decide for or against things because that’s what we want.  Our self-interest is what wins the day in our decision making process.

So one the keys, in making important decisions, is having enough self-knowledge about where your weak spots are, and giving those to the Lord so a better decision can be made.  Notice, Eve, even after adding an additional level of protection--not even touching the tree--still succumbs, still crosses her self-made boundary.  And she never said anything like, “I better talk with God first.”  She allows her weaknesses and vulnerabilities to have the day, rather than seeking God’s help.  Only after touching, and eating the fruit does she have that conversation with God, but then it’s too late.

Thirdly, when facing decision making dilemmas, don’t give in to mis-information.  God’s rule about the tree was simple and straightforward and clear.  But in conversation with the serpent, Eve was dished both mis-information and mis-interpretation of that simple, clear rule.

When making decisions, err on the side of simple directness rather than on complex mis-information.  Mis-information and mis-interpretation of the simple aspects of the decision redirects our attention away from the simple guidelines.  The serpent was a master at making the simple into the complex, the clear into the cloudy, the ordered into the muddled, meaning into mis-interpretation.

Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6).  That statement is simple and direct.  It is the way that God has designed things from the start.  If Eve had abided by that, had checked out what the serpent was telling her, had Eve first gone to God who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and said, “This is what the serpent is telling me; I’m confused; what’s the truth,” she would not have been sucked in by the serpent’s misinformation and misinterpretation.  She allowed the serpent to interpret God.  Why not just go to the source and get the truth.  Eve failed that, and because of that made a fatal decision.

Fourthly, when making decisions, avoid rationalizations.  Rationalizations are the bugaboo of all good decision making.  Rationalization has to do with how we try to justify ourselves or our decisions with plausible sounding reasons, even though those reasons aren’t true or appropriate.

Eve was staring at the fruit.  The story says, as she stared at the fruit, she was thinking:  The tree does look beautiful and the fruit does appear tasty.  Those are rationalizations she’s using to justify her bad decision.  Those have nothing to do with God’s rule, which was simply, “Don’t eat the fruit from this one tree!”  It doesn’t matter if it looks beautiful or tasty, or if eating fruit would or wouldn’t make her wise.  Those are three rationalizations that seem to Eve to be reasonable and valid, but they are empty and hollow, having nothing to do with making this decision about eating the forbidden fruit.

Eve makes her decision.  We all know what it was.  It was the wrong one.  And where was Adam when all this decision making was going on?  Standing there like a doofus.  “Gosh Eve, you’re so beautiful and naked and all, I guess you must be doing the right thing.  Here, let me have a bite.”

That’s the last part of decision making--don’t get sucked into others bad decisions.  Eve may have handed Adam his own fruit so that now he was just as culpable, and now she doesn’t have to feel so bad if everything goes wrong because she got someone else involved.  Simply put, if you know what is right, and what the right decision is, man up.  It was Adam’s responsibility to not just stand there, but to say, “For all kinds of reasons, that would be a bad decision.  Just back away from the tree.  Just back away.”


As I said at the start, we are the sum total of our decisions.  For good or for ill, our lives will go the way of the decisions we make throughout life.  Each decision determines what you can decide next.

T.S. Eliot in the play, The Cocktail Party, the guests are discussing if people are free.  One of the guests says, “You are not free.  Your moment of decision was yesterday.  You made a decision.  You set in motion Forces in your life and in the lives of others which cannot be reversed…

So it was for Eve and Adam.  So it is for us.  The only recourse is to make great decisions based on what we learn from Eve’s life changing decision making.