Retired Pastor
Pat Duffin,
High Prairie
Christian Centre
Way back in the beginning, our first parents lived in perfect innocence in a perfect world called the Garden of Eden. It was a wonderful existence where work was a pleasure. The ground easily supplied the necessities of life. There was no death.
And our parents enjoyed perfect health and harmony with each other and with the world around them. All creation lived in balance. Fear and hardship were unknown, nor could it ever come to mind. It was perfect paradise!
There lived our first parents, Adam and Eve. Among their many magnificent powers and capabilities was this amazing faculty called free will. They had the power and the sovereign right to choose for themselves who they would trust, love, or obey. There was also another creature who had already spoiled himself, along with a large number of angels with him, by wrongly using his power of free will to disobey God by leading a rebellion among the angels in heaven.
In a second perverse act of self-will, the serpent [Satan] took advantage of Eve’s innocence, ignorance and naivete to trick her into disobeying God. The one and only constraint on Adam and Eve’s freedom was a prohibition not to eat from the tree of ‘The Knowledge of Good Evil’ for in the day they did so they would surely die [Genesis 2:17]. Eve was seduced into eating from that tree and taking the fruit to Adam for him to taste also.
Perhaps a good lawyer could make a case that Eve was deceived and therefore not truly guilty of deliberate disobedience. . .perhaps. But, unlike Eve, Adam was not deceived [1 Timothe 2:14]. He knowingly chose to disobey God. Because he loved Eve more than God and did not want to be separated from her, he also partook of the forbidden fruit. Therefore, he deliberately chose to reject and disobey God, knowing full-well the consequences about which God had already forewarned would fall upon them if they ever ate of that forbidden fruit.
Whether he understood the full impact upon his progeny is not revealed to us. Nevertheless, through Adam’s knowing and willful act of rebellion we have all been condemned because we are his natural descendants and have, therefore, inherited his fallen nature [Romans 5:12].
Adam and Eve were childless until after their fall. The tragedy of their fall is revealed in their first-born, Cain, because the very first child ever born of a woman became the first murderer [Genesis 4:1-16].
Satan knew that disobedience against God would forever contaminate and change Adam and Eve’s original nature, thereby condemning them and all their descendants to both the First Death [which is
separation of the spirit from the body] and the Second Death [separation of the spirit from God, forever]. It would also alter all of creation by that same contamination [Genesis 3:17-19 & Romans 8:19-24].
But Satan had bigger plans than just sabotaging God’s masterpiece creation of Adam and Eve. He knew God had given Adam and Eve dominion over all the earth. It was theirs to build and do with as they wished except for the exclusion from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Satan also knew you are the servant of the one whom you obey [Romans 1:16]. If he could get Adam and Eve to obey him, dominion of this corrupted earth, perhaps even the rest of creation, would default to him.
To his everlasting satisfaction he would instantly obtain his own vast kingdom, right under God’s nose, and in His face, so to speak. Satan would have his very own corrupted realm, just like himself and in his own image, as his personal rival to God’s Kingdom.
“Oh, what sweet revenge,” he must have thought.
To be able to thumb his nose at God and flaunt his victory by ruining God’s beloved creation and stealing it right out of His hand. That would surely prove his greatness and superiority over God. That would surely vindicate Satan to his angels, minions, and enslaved masses.
Because Adam and Eve had not yet conceived any children, all the children they had and all those who followed after until right up to today, were conceived in the same fallen state as their parents. That is, we were all born in a permanent state of sin, rebellion, corruption, and condemnation doomed to die both the First and Second death just like our first parents [Romans 5:12-19]
Until Jesus the Messiah, appeared on scene, humanity’s only hope was the promise God made in Genesis, Chapter 3. This promise was repeated through the centuries, by the prophets, that God would provide a Saviour who would rescue us from the horrible curse under which humanity suffered.
He would also, at a later time, remedy the contamination under which the entire creation laboured. Through the sin of Adam, we were all made to be sinners. Consequently, both physical and spiritual death reigned over all humanity until God provided us with Jesus Christ the promised Saviour and our ‘Second Adam.’ He was, and still is, through the cross and His resurrection able to undo the physical and spiritual death brought upon us by the first Adam.
As the Apostle Paul explained to the church in Rome, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous [Romans 5:19].”
Just as Christ has brought forgiveness for many through the cross by taking our curse and judgment upon Himself and paying the just penalty for all our sin since the very beginning. By rising from the dead to give us new life in Christ He has resolved and reconciled the separation from God and restored us to right relationship with God.
And the very best of the good news is that He has not only done this for ‘everybody,’ but Jesus has done this for you and by doing so has resolved your personal sin problem and mine, too. To receive this gift, all you have to do is reach out to Jesus Christ.
Now is your chance. Will you do that?