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Sunscreen, the smell of steak on the grill, sunshine, ocean breezes, salty ocean waves, ice cream and strawberries, crickets chirping in the night…all of this reminds me of summer time! Praise the Lord for summer! Finals are done and over with, another semester has passed, and Lord willing I hope for a productive and enjoyable summer. How about you?

On the occasion of my first “summer” posting on this blog, I would like to talk about herbs. Awhile ago, I was reading in the book of Genesis chapter 1, and relishing in reading and re-discovering the beauty of the days of creation. God’s creation is just amazing!

Then I reached verse 29 of chapter 1 in Genesis, which said:

And God said, “See I have given you every herb that yields seeds which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. 

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I was intrigued with this verse, since it says every herb that yields seed..and every tree… for food. So God created every herb for us to be useful and edible, and all plants that give fruit to be for us to eat. Doesn’t that sound delicious and exciting?!?
Yet, as we all know, there are many trees, plants, and herbs out there that are poisonous and harmful for us as humans, not edible at all. So how does this little word every explain this dilemma?

We have to go to the original text. I wanted to make sure the word in the original text of the Bible was actually the word every. So I checked Genesis chapter 1:29 at this very handy website Biblos.  The interlinear tab at this website lets you see the original Bible text above the English text.

And guess what? The word for every in Hebrew is ko , which is written like this כֹּל ,
and it means all, the whole, all things, all its entire.

So yes, all the herbs of the field were for us humans to enjoy and cultivate!
We could use all the plants out there for our benefit.

Yet…. something happened that changed all that. Do you know what?

I realized the key to the dilemma, and I’m grateful to the Lord for revealing to me this interesting nugget of information: after sin entered the world through Adam and Eve’s disobedience, everything was affected.

Sin not only changed humans, it marred all of God’s beautiful creation. It brought ugliness, pain, death, poison. Things that were once safe, became dangerous.

The verse in Romans 8:22 explains the effect sin had on creation:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.  

So yes, when God first created the world, we humans could probably use and eat all the herbs and fruits and vegetables for food. But once sin entered the world, even the plants were affected and not all the herbs were safe anymore.

In a way it’s sad to know that we could have had access to a lot more plants, but then again, this passage helps explain questions like: “Why are some plants poisonous?” At least for me, it was a precious discovery since I like nutrition topics.

How about you? What did you read recently from the Scripture? In what way has God spoken to your heart the past weeks? What encouragements or answers to prayer have you received?