Scanning the New York Post website yesterday, my attention was caught by a promo box advertising the hit HBO vampire series called “True Blood.”

I clicked on a Q& A interview in which the show’s director, Alan Ball, was asked, “What would you say the theme of season two is?”

Ball answered: “Overall, season two is about the power of cults, whether that is a strange neo-Greco Pagan cult or a church -- organized religion. Sookie is on a journey of self-discovery this season and over the arc of the show. She's learning a lot of new things about herself.”

The second question was, “Why do you think vampires are so omnipresent in pop culture?”

Ball: Vampires are sex. Vampires are like the ultimate romantic rock star. The idea of being consumed by a vampire is a big turn-on. People are attracted to the bad boy or femme fatale -- the sexy person you know is not really good for you. Your conscious mind is going, ‘OK, move away, walk away from this.’ The one you know you should want don't turn you on as much.

The next question: “Do you think a show about vampires is inherently sexual or is that just the world of Bon Temps?”

Ball: Obviously the act of feeding is a very blatant sexual metaphor. There's penetration. There are bodily fluids exchanged. There's a cathartic, frenzied physical moment.

Question four: “Has HBO ever said you took a sex scene too far?”

Ball: “I'm never going into porn territory. Honestly, HBO, I've gotten a note about one specific sequence that's like, ‘Umm, could it be a little hotter?’ By me saying it's sexier [this season], when I saw the first episode, I sort of went, ‘OK, wow, it's very sexy.’ It's not a show for children, let's put it that way.”

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Any Bible student knows that Baal worship, from its inception in Genesis, has always been associated with drinking human blood, something strictly forbidden by God.

What’s so fascinating given today’s obsession with vampire entertainment is that the act of consuming blood is literally a re-enactment of the Original Sin in the Garden of Eden.

In author Arthur C. Custance’s 1980 magnus opus “The Seed of the Woman,” he lays out in exhaustive fashion just how the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a grape and that the swallowing of grape juice by Adam and Eve is comparable to eating blood.

Jordan explains, “Custance has got some fascinating things about how fermented grape juice—alcohol—effects the physical body and that’s why there are two great sins in the Old Testament that are forbidden over and over. One is drunkenness and the other is nakedness.”

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Genesis 3:6-7 plainly reports, “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
[7] And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

Likewise, Habakkuk 2:15 warns, “Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness!”

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Jordan says, “All of it replicates what happened in the Garden and when Adam and Eve took that grape it literally induced into their physical frame a physical defect that caused a genetic defect that we call death. It brought about physical death.

“There’s a great deal of study in our day about longevity and scientists are looking for the DNA formula that produces death. The problem is, if they ever found it they wouldn’t know what to do about it because it’s something beyond what they’re able to have a capacity to rectify.

“Now, when Adam watched Eve—‘she did eat’—with that grape . . . well, what’d God tell them would happen in they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? That they would die. Adam saw her die. ‘And she gave it to him and he did eat.’ He died with her.”

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As Paul informs in I Timothy 2, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”

Jordan explains, “Eve was deceived into eating the grape but, you see, Adam was not deceived. When she gave that thing to Adam, he knew exactly what he was doing.

“Now, the parallel passage in Ephesians 5 is, ‘Husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it.’ In other words, the Lord Jesus Christ chose to die for the church. The wife is told to ‘be subject to your husband as unto the Lord.’

“There’s this connection in the marriage relationship back there (in Genesis 3). If you think a little on what’s going on, Adam and Eve are standing there and their in this coat of many colors—they didn’t have their own clothing but they had this multi-colored garment of light that God gave them.

“And when the Lord Jesus Christ walked with them in the cool of the day, Adam had that same light of the glory of God. It was obvious they were His agents in the earth.

“But when Eve takes that fruit and eats of it, now she’s naked. That’s when the light went out and that garment went away. But not only that, that fruit affected her physically!

“Adam, of course, saw it, and rather than trusting the wisdom and love of God to fix the thing, when it says there in that verse ‘that she gave unto her husband WITH her,’ Adam’s there watching it take place.

“Now, if Adam had done what an instructed man of God ought to have done—he’d have done what’s over in Numbers 30. It says that when a man has a wife, and the wife is talked into making a contract, if the husband comes along and says, ‘No, that’s a bad deal, we’re not gonna have that—you deceived my wife,’ he can negate the whole thing!

“Go over to Numbers 30 and read it. What Adam should have done was say, ‘Wait a minute! This is a mistake! My wife’s messed up!’ Instead of trusting God’s love and wisdom to straighten things out, Adam made a choice. He said, ‘I love her so much I’m not willing to live without her,’ and in rebellion against God, he took the fruit.

“He was not deceived into it; he wasn’t tricked into it. He did it in conscious rebellion, choosing to love his wife more than God Himself. And so he fell into sin. And something happened to Adam and Eve when they ate that grape.

“Something happened with regard to their blood. Because God’s Word says the ‘life of the flesh’ is in the what? The blood.

“You see, they were created just like you and I are in the sense they had a cardiovascular system and a circulatory system and all, and they had blood, but it wasn’t contaminated blood. It wasn’t sin-cursed blood.

Remember, Jesus Christ had blood, but He didn’t have a sin-contaminated blood. He had God’s blood. Well, Adam and Eve they got—the old-timers used to call it ‘blood poisoning,’ and I guess that’s as good a thing as any to call it. And they got it by eating that grape.”

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Just after Noah and his family got off the ark post-Flood, God instructed, “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.”

Similarly, God warns in Leviticus 17:10, “And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.”

In Acts 15, when Paul meets with the Jerusalem apostles and the Christian church there, he says, “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;
[29] That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well. Fare ye well.”

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Jordan summarizes, “Folks, eating blood in the Bible is something you’re not to do. Moses commanded that you don’t eat blood. God told Noah don’t eat blood. And again, the reason is it’s a type of what Adam and Eve did in the Garden. When Eve took that grape . . .

“By the way, if you go down to the drug store or Macy’s they have lipstick counters with 60 different shades of lipstick. A (cosmetic salesman) once told me that between 60-75 percent of all lipstick sold is red and they have all these other colors just to placate people so they’ll buy the red too.

“Did you ever eat grapes? Drink grape juice? Could you maybe guess why people put red lipstick on? You say, ‘Aghh, Brother Rick, now c’mon, you’re pulling our leg!’ but your (Bible-believing) grandparents knew exactly what I’m talking about!”