[saturnfire16]

Originally Posted by tiffany

This is probably not going to be a popular opinion here, so I'm prepared for Please hear me out on this and don't hit me just yet. I don't think God put the tree there to temp us, but I do think there are things that are within our reach that he does not remove from our grasp that he teaches us to stay away from. For example, in the NT he says that gentiles are to abstain from blood. Blood is still in people, in animals, in our food, etc. He didn't do away with blood, just because we are not to mess with it. He just gives us the instruction to stay away from it. In the Torah, the command is given to abstain from unclean meat, but those animals are not wiped off the globe, we just have to stay away from them in our diet (if we are TO). He tells us not to look at another with lust, but He doesn't blind us. He tells us not to be sexually immoral, but He doesn't render us unable to do so - not by removing our physical abilities, our emotional abilities, or by removing the opposite sex from our interactions. All those things are still within our grasp, we are just instructed and taught not to go there.

I don't think it's healthy to remove any obstacle from out child's grasp and let them run 'willy nilly' - it's just not what God does with us. However, I don't agree with the idea that He put it there to tempt us either. There is a difference between doing something to tempt someone and teaching them not to get involved with something that is plainly there and that we have to learn to work around. Like dressing modestly. We are to be modest in our dress so as not to tempt other men, but we don't have to cut our breasts off so they don't show, ya know? There is balance. We have to be careful about working with the opposite sex. We need to keep things professional and not be one-on-one with a person of the opposite sex if we can help it, certainly not setting ourselves up for temptation, but women don't go work in environments where only other women work and vice versa. We just learn to navigate around it within godly limits. I think that's the hard part of parenting - finding the boundaries and teaching them to our children, so they will learn to apply boundaries to their own lives.

I have a friend who doesn't want to teach her children boundaries at all and there have been very uncomfortable situations with her children on many occasions. There has to be balance.

Self-control - that's part of the fruit of the spirit, and it has to be developed.

To me, the big difference is that all the things you mentioned- unclean animals, blood, breasts, the opposite sex- ALL serve another purpose besides being an oppotunity to use the wrong way. They aren't *only* temptations. They have a purpose. The temptation is to use them in a way other than the way God designed them.

A trash can has a purpose and *also* MAY be a temptation for a child to get into. A trash can placed in the middle of the living room for the *sole purpose* of enticing a child to touch it and then hitting them is not the same thing.