I made the switch from the Revised Common Lectionary to the Lectionary of the United States Council of Catholc Bishops.  Nothing personal high church Protestants, I just wanted to keep things fresh with a new Bible translation, one that I had never read, the New American Bible.

The past few days there have been these Old Testament readings I have never read before.  They are from the Book of Wisdom.

Apocrypha alert!  I've never been an apocrypha hater.  I've never read it extensively either.  I am apocrypha-neutral. Or indifferent. Or ignorant.

From yesterday's lectionary reading is the pithy pronouncement:

God formed man to be imperishable;
the image of his own nature he made them.
But by the envy of the Devil, death entered the world,
and they who are in his possession experience it. (2:23-24)

I always thought this kind of theological reconstruction of time and the Adversary's motive was shaped in Protestant tradition by Paradise Lost: 

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe...
for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who first seduc'd them to that foul revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent; (Book I)

This type of reading presented in the Book of Wisdom acknowledges the Protestant fixation on the consequences of original sin.  In Paradise Lost, and in much of Protestant thinking, the Adversary is fighting a cosmological and spiritual battle and acts primarily out of evil and not envy. What I find interesting about the Book of Wisdom's view of the Adversary's motive is that he was envious of our image, that we were icons of God.  This creates a tension of divinity and deprativity that is eclipsed by the tension of the cross and our daily lives: we re-enter the imperishable state of Paradise yet remain in the clutches of bodily death.  The Book of Wisdom expresses our current tension well:

But the souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and no torment shall touch them.
They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;
and their passing away was thought an affliction
and their going forth from us, utter destruction.
But they are in peace. (3:1-3)

We are in the hand of God.  We may appear to be dead. But just as Christ, the Second Adam has thrown off "utter destruction" so to we will arise as imperishable images of God.