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Themes: "Sin's Attractiveness, Sin's Danger and Consequences, Satan's Character J.D.M. "Paris! You're always making trouble for me!" shouted King Priam of Troy. "Why did you kidnap this woman?"
"Father! She's not just a woman," Paris cried. " She's the Queen of Sparta."
"Yes, but if you don't give her back to her husband, he'll start a war with me. Sparta is only part of Greece. How could we fight them?" King Priam lamented.
But Paris refused to give Helen back. Things went just as King Priam had said. The Greeks attacked Troy. The first battle was at sea, and the Greeks sunk many of the Trojan warships. But they hadn't won the war, because Troy was still standing and Helen was sill it in. So the Greeks pulled their ships on the beach in sight of Troy, and settled in for a siege. The Greeks surrounded Troy. No one could go in or come out, and eventually the Trojans would starve. But things didn't go as the Greeks had planned. Eight years later, they were still there.
Finally, the Greeks had an idea. Odysseus, their captain, wanted to play a trick to get soldiers into Troy in disguise, so they could win the war and go home. He ordered the best carpenter to build an enormous hollow wooden horse. It had a secret trap-door in the horse's left side. They gave this to the Trojans as a gift, to end the war, saying in words on the horse, that they were sailing back to Greece. Inside were Odysseus and twenty of his best Greek soldiers, sitting quietly. The rest of the Greeks set fire to their huts, launched their ships, and sailed off, but only out of sight. Really, they were ready to go back and fight.
The next morning, the watchman of Troy saw smoke coming from the Greeks' camp. King Priam sent servants to investigate, and what do you think they found? Above the ashes towered a huge wooden horse. On its left side were the words, "This is a gift to Troy. We want the war to end, and we have gone home."
They decided to bring it into the city on rollers. The people of Troy threw a great party to celebrate the end of the war. Afterwards, when everyone was asleep, Odysseus and his men opened the trap door and came out. Two of them went to open the city gates so that their friends waiting in ships could sail to shore and come into the city and defeat it.
You can imagine how surprised the Trojans were to wake up and find Greek soldiers in their city! The Greeks burned and looted Troy for three days. Then they went home. The war was over.
Just as the Greeks tricked the Trojans, so Satan tricked Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan pretended to be her friend, when really he wanted her to die. Along with the attractiveness of sin comes heavy consequences - death.
"and the devil that DECEIVED them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone." Rev. 20:10.
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Peter Orasuk
