Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 282 · October 9
The Simplicity in Christ
“But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.”
Nobody counterfeits a banknote by making it more interesting than the real one. The whole craft runs the other way, toward the ordinary, toward the thing you would hand over without looking twice.
We are poor at this, and it is worth admitting in the first person. We get bored of the simple thing. A gospel known since we were young starts to feel thin beside a teacher with a system, a framework, a set of terms nobody in our church has heard yet, and the appetite for that is embarrassment wearing the clothes of curiosity.
Paul's fear for the Corinthians is worded with painful precision: lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. Corrupted from. The movement he dreads is away from something they already had. A verse later he says what worried him: somebody came preaching another Jesus, another spirit, another gospel, and ye might well bear with him. They were not gullible. They were tolerant, and broad-minded, and pleased with themselves for it.
He offers no test. There is nothing in the chapter for telling the real from the counterfeit, only the warning that the counterfeit is presentable: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Yea, hath God said? was the first sentence that voice ever spoke to a human being, and it arrived as a question, mildly, from somebody who seemed to be taking the subject seriously. Read it once in that form and leave it standing without an answer beside it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 282 is Faithful to Forgive (1 John 1:9).