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Counsels on Health
than to struggle against them, and go forward. Dissipation, disease,
and death follow. This is the history of many lives that might have
been useful in the cause of God and humanity.
Temptation Through Appetite
One of the strongest temptations that man has to meet is upon the
point of appetite. In the beginning the Lord made man upright. He
was created with a perfectly balanced mind, the size and strength of
all his organs being fully and harmoniously developed. But through
the seductions of the wily foe the prohibition of God was disregarded,
and the laws of nature wrought out their full penalty.
Adam and Eve were permitted to eat of all the trees in their Eden
home save one. The Lord said to the holy pair, In the day that ye eat
of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, ye shall surely die. Eve was
beguiled by the serpent and made to believe that God would not do as
He had said. She ate, and, thinking she felt the sensation of a new and
more exalted life, she bore the fruit to her husband. The serpent had
said that she should not die, and she felt no ill effects from eating the
fruit, nothing which could be interpreted to mean death, but, instead, a
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pleasurable sensation, which she imagined was as the angels felt. Her
experience stood arrayed against the positive command of Jehovah,
yet Adam permitted himself to be seduced by it.
Thus we often find it, even in the religious world. God’s expressed
commands are transgressed; and “because sentence against an evil
work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is
fully set in them to do evil.”
Ecclesiastes 8:11
. In the face of the most
positive commands of God, men and women will follow their own
inclinations, and then dare to pray over the matter, to prevail upon God
to allow them to go contrary to His expressed will. Satan comes to the
side of such persons, as he did to Eve in Eden, and impresses them.
They have an exercise of mind, and this they relate as a most wonderful
experience which the Lord has given them. But true experience will be
in harmony with natural and divine law; false experience arrays itself
against the laws of life and the precepts of Jehovah.