Marketing of Evil - pt 1

As I had posted about, I spent the last two weeks speaking on a book by David Kupelian called, "The Marketing of Evil". Thought I would share a few excerpts from my talk. Since the book is called the "Marketing of Evil", I thought I would frame up my comments, as I did in my talk around the 4 P's of marketing

1. Product:
In Genesis 3 is the following passage:

Genesis 3
The Fall of Man
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

What was the serpent selling? He certainly wasn't selling them on the "fruit"...the apple. Adam and Eve had more than enough to eat, plenty of variety....no...the serpent was selling them on "choice"....on "freedom"...on living outside of the restrictions God had placed on them.

What I think is even more interesting about the passage, when you look at it is this. Adam and Eve knew God, so they knew "good" already. So, like most of us, even while the serpent was slick and not entirely honest, the serpent still told them exactly what they were going to get...they were going to "buy" into "knowing...evil".

So, Adam and Eve bought that, and ultimately they bought death as well. For even though they did not die immediately, just as the serpent said, they did kill their perfect obedience to God and thus their intimate relationship that they had with Him

Death. That is what is being packaged and sold to us in each case where evil is marketed to us. It might sound too extreme, but when you get down to the reality of whether or not what you are buying into is taking you closer to God, or moving you further away from Him, then the declaration of it being death is not inaccurate.

This post doesn't even talk to the topics in the book actually, but I do think it frames up the topics in the book in the right light. The specific topics of the book and some of the scary ways that evil is marketed to us will come in the other 3 P's of the marketing of evil.