You Had One Job

There are these funny pictures that you see online about people messing up.  Usually it isn't a really bad one, like someone getting hurt; it is more like an every day job done wrong.  Then they have a caption on it, "You had one job".  Here is an example

 

or here's another...

And I could go on and on.  There are hundreds of them out there.  It's hard to say what makes it funny.  Corn in an onion bag isn't really funny on it's own.  I think it's the set up.  The phrase, "You had one job." sets up a story.  It is really saying, "You were only asked to do one simple thing, and you couldn't even do that right." 

So why am I writing about this?  Well one of the first stories in the Bible is based on this idea.  "You had one job." The story goes like this.  Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden, and every thing is great.  God tells them to do anything they want, but "you have one job..." don't eat from that one tree.  So they ate from the tree.  And things went down hill from there.  

In all fairness to Adam and Eve, we were going to mess it up eventually.  People have free will, and with the ability to choose for ourselves and the knowledge of right and wrong, comes the inevitability of messing up.  Which I believe is the entire point of the story.  We can choose right from wrong and we know the difference.  We will inevitably choose wrong from time to time.  It is who we are.

Watch this clip from Pastor Chris.

So they eat from the tree.  They gain the knowledge of wright from wrong and then they know that they did wrong.  And God says to them, "Really?, You had one job.  One job." And now its time to go.  He got the whole thing ready, then he handed us the keys.

God of course knew what would happen.  It is all part of the process.  Someone doesn't have free will if they can't make bad choices too.  And through our mistakes and through our poor decisions, we have the opportunity to rely on and draw closer to God himself.

Jesus said that the greatest commandments were to love God and love each other, which might be more like two jobs, but the idea is the same.  God tries to keep it simple for us.  Just do this.  Sometimes even the simple is beyond our abilities.