SIN
Isaiah 14:12-17 and Ezekiel 28:11-19 describes the fall of God’s most beautiful creation, the angel Lucifer. After his fall, he became Satan, the Prince of darkness and the power of evil in this world. Isaiah 14:12-17 is addressed to the king of Babylon and Ezekiel 28:11-19 to the king of Tyrus, but both passages are directed past these kings to the real power of evil that supports them, Satan.
All of God’s creations are good. This means that all His creations are true and useful combinations. Their uses are beautiful and productive and redound to the glory of God.
All seemingly negative simple true ideas, such as hatred or lying, have useful purposes in true combinations. As Ecclesiastes 3:8, Psalms 97:10, and Amos 5:15 reveal, God hates evil and He expects His people to hate evil also. Even God lies to His enemies, as I Kings 22:13-28 and Ezekiel 14:9 reveal. These facts do not mean that God’s people have a blank check to lie to God’s enemies at all times, or to hate them at all times. God alone possesses the required perfect wisdom that always knows how to use negative true simple ideas in true combinations. Humans must be extremely circumspect in their uses of God’s ideas in making judgments, as Jesus admonished in John 7:24.
Sometimes, Jesus bent the law of the Sabbath as Matthew 12:1-8, for one example, records. However, Jesus, being God and Lord of the Sabbath as He said in verse 8, would know exactly when and under what circumstances to bend His own laws. Humans, having minds weakened by sin, are continually apt to make false judgments as to how and when to combine God’s ideas properly.
As Ecclesiastes 3:3 and 3:8 make clear, even killing and war have useful purposes at certain times. In Genesis 9:6, God commands when capital punishment is useful. In Deuteronomy 31:3-6 and other places, God commands His people to make war against His enemies in order to cleanse the promised land of their evil influences. War against evil is justifiable under certain circumstances. Most good people would agree that World War II was a justifiable war. Nevertheless, people should never become so proud as to believe that they can learn how to use God’s true negative ideas on their own. God’s people must never use His negative true ideas except exactly in the manner that God commands.
As Revelation 4:11 states, God created all things for His pleasure. Whatever pleases God is good for His creations because God is love and blessing. God continuously seeks to increase the love between Himself and His creations.
For this purpose, God created freedom. The idea of freedom has always existed in the mind of God, but one day God added freedom to one of His creations.
God first gave freedom to His most beautiful creation, the angel Lucifer. The name Lucifer means "day-star." God knew that the value of love would be greatly increased should His creatures freely decide to love and serve Him. In this process, more and more of God’s creative glory could be realized, blessing His creatures who, in turn, would love and praise Him even more, both God and His creations experiencing ever greater joy.
God is responsible for His creations. He is responsible for His gifts of freedom, and for His creation of potential existence within chaos, which He is always in the creative process of overcoming.
God is not responsible when His creatures use their gifts of freedom to rebel against Him. Of course, God risked that happening when He gave freedom to Lucifer, but no doubt God also had great confidence that Lucifer would make the right decisions. In addition, God was willing to take that risk because of the tremendous creative increase in the value of love that would have resulted from His creatures free decision to love and serve him. Without doubt, God is forever heartbroken because of Lucifer’s rebellion.
At this point, some would argue that because of His omniscience, God must be responsible for Lucifer’s rebellion because God had to have known that Lucifer would rebel before God granted freedom to him. However, this assertion is not true precisely because God’s omniscience is far greater than humans can imagine. Not only does God know every possible event in any historical process, but He also knows that infinite potentialities that could be made real by the decisions of finite duality. Not only that, God knows every detail of every potential historical process that can be made real by the decisions of finite duality. Therefore, God can take risks. God can simply wait for His free creatures to make their decisions knowing the infinite potentialities and the resultant historical process whatever they may decide. Of course, God also has the right to influence that process in order to cause His creatures to choose reality over absolute nothingness. In this way, both God’s freedom and His determinism are true and real in God’s eternal time.
Because of pride, Lucifer decided that he wanted to be God. Lucifer literally fell in love with himself. Lucifer led one third of God’s angels in war against God. God cast him and his angels out of heaven to earth. Lucifer became Satan, the god of this world and the Prince of darkness. He resides at the boundary of chaotic nothingness, still vainly trying to create a new kind of order from nothingness. He is still vainly striving to do what only God can do. According to Proverbs 6:16-19, God still hates pride more than any other sin, and all sins have their roots in pride. It is no accident that pride is also called vanity.
When God created man in His own image, He gave man a body, soul, and spirit. God breathed the soul and spirit into man. The soul is the individualistic mind and personality of each person. The spirit is a flowing connection between the finite mind of man and the infinite mind of God. Spirit constitutes both self-consciousness and consciousness of God.
God gave to man a limited appreciation of many of His eternal, simple true ideas. God gave to man limited intelligence, innocence, freedom, and a joyful paradise.
In Genesis 2:18-22, God created woman to be a help to man. This means that they were to be partners as husband and wife, working together in love to create and rear children in families.
In Genesis 2:19-20, God gave intelligence to man. Man acquired the ability to create language in order to name every living creature. Language can not exist without ideas and feelings. Therefore, by implication, God gave sensory perception so that man could acquire such simple true idea as "soft" and "hard." The higher simple true ideas such as "love" and "beauty", God gave directly to the mind of man, but they do not become real until those potential dualities that are tuned to receive them are completed by experience. In other words, when one feels an object and notices that it is "soft", that softness is a quality of the object that is conveyed to the mind through sensory experience, but when one appreciates "beauty", that beauty is not in the object, but is part of the mind itself. Thus, in combination with those simple true ideas that make language possible, man can acquire a set of simple true ideas that grows with experience. Man can analyze his experience, compare ideas, invent true and false combinations, and communicate it all through language. Man possesses rationality as a gift from God.
Genesis 2:25 relates that the man and woman lived in Eden in a state of innocence. Nudity, joy, and daily communication with God were all perfectly natural to them. They never considered their condition to be good because they had no opposite with which to compare it. Goodness can be known only by comparing it with the destructive effects of absolute nothingness. Adam and Eve had the idea of nothing in inner and outer duality, but this was a natural knowledge. They did not know that the idea of nothingness could substitute for non-existence; that is, absolute nothingness of which death is one form.
God placed Adam and Eve in the beautiful Garden of Eden to tend it, but the work was simple and easy. They spent most of their time in the ecstasy of play, making love, and talking to God.
However, God had also given them freedom. Since there can be no freedom without real choices, God created two trees that were opposites, as Genesis 2:8-9 relates. First, God placed the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and then the tree of the knowledge of good and evil beside it. Genesis 2:15-18 relates that God allowed man to eat freely of the fruit of any tree, including the tree of life. Yet, God commanded man not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and warned that if they did so, they would surely die.
God is everlasting life, as Jesus made clear in John 14:6. God desired that Adam and Eve should choose to eat of the tree of life and thereby live in love and fellowship with Him forever. In their innocence, Adam and Eve had no choice but to love God. Loving God was so natural that they hardly noticed it. Should they choose to love God, then their love would become far more real, and thus far more valuable.
Although Adam and Eve did not fully understand the purpose of the tree of life, they knew that God had given them life. Having been endowed with the gifts of certain higher simple true ideas, they had some idea of what "life" meant. The meaning was, at least, partly real to them.
They also had some sense of "freedom" because they knew that God had placed the tree of life in the middle of the garden next to a tree of which he had commanded them not to eat. They also knew that God wanted them to eat of every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They should have surmised that there was something special about the tree of life. Yet, they never partook of the tree of life. Perhaps, even before they sinned, Adam and Eve had failed to use their minds properly, and, perhaps, this failure had later been partly responsible for their falling into sin.
Satan, disguised as a serpent, beguiled Eve by presenting her with a subtle series of false combinations of simple true ideas. Genesis 3:1 states that the serpent was "subtle," which means that he was crafty. Satan is a master at inventing specious false combinations. Every idea that he used was a true one. The idea of God is a true combination when considered as Infinite Duality, but then He was a simple true idea when considered as a personal friend of Adam and Eve.
Apparently, the serpent had been spying on Adam and Eve for some time. He noticed that there were two trees in the middle of the garden that Adam and Eve avoided. He then endeavored to find out why.
In Genesis 3:1, the serpent begins with a seemingly harmless question. He asks Eve if God has not allowed them to eat of every tree of the garden. Verses two and three relate that she fell into the trap. Innocently, she answers by indicating the very tree that God commanded them not to touch, and the reason being that they would die.
The serpent, realizing that God had granted them freedom, immediately seized his opportunity to destroy part of God’s creation. In verse four, he created a false combination by using the idea of nothing to cause the appearance that the idea of death could be negated. In this way, Satan created the illusion that death is not possible. He told Eve that God had given them a false combination, and that his was the true combination. Eve could not have directly known about death; that is, absolute nothingness that hides behind the idea of nothingness called death. However, because even the faintest effects of simple true ideas impart some reality, she had to have known that God’s commandment meant that death was something bad to be avoided.
In verse five, the serpent created even more subtle false combinations. He avowed that God had withheld valuable information from Adam and Eve. Satan created a false combination using such simple true ideas as: "God" (as a personal friend) "knows," "wiser," "eyes," "open," "similar," "good," and "evil." Using these ideas and others, some direct and others suggested, Satan created the illusion that God was holding out on them; that is, that God did not want them to become something greater than they had a right to become. Again, the serpent called God a liar. Satan persuaded Eve to believe in his false combinations so that the absolute nothingness inherent in them would begin to destroy her.
Verse six relates that the serpent’s deception worked. Eve saw that the fruit seemed to look as good for food as any other fruit. So, desiring to be wiser and better, she took the fruit and ate it. There was probably nothing wrong with the fruit itself. The fruit merely symbolized the specious lies of Satan, and Eve’s eating of it symbolized her having already received those lies. It was not necessary for her to know exactly what "wiser" and "better" meant. She simple felt that somehow, there was something more for her. She certainly felt that she could become similar to God, as Satan had suggested.
Thus the serpent created illusions in the way that they are always created. All false combinations contain absolute nothingness hidden behind the idea of nothingness. Satan used the idea of nothing in an attempt to negate another simple true idea. He made Eve believe that she would not die. True simple ideas can never be negated by the idea of nothingness. True simple ideas can be hidden in the idea of nothingness, but not negated. By creating the illusion that death can be negated, he seemed to eliminate the idea of nothingness altogether, and with it any implication of absolute nothingness, By creating a false positive, Satan implied that there was something "more" for Eve.
After the lie succeeded, the serpent then used other simple true ideas in false combination to create a deeper illusion that there was "more" for Eve that she was missing. His tactics were similar to the way that simple true ideas such as "fish" and "female" are added to create the illusion called a "mermaid." A mermaid seems to be "more," but is, in actuality, simply the idea of nothingness hiding absolute nothingness.
Satan deceived Eve with a false combination that promised "more," but really delivered absolute nothingness. This is the precise reason why all false combinations do not work, and why all systems that contain false combinations always fail to be effective to the same extent that they contain false combinations.
Genesis 3:6 relates that Eve ate the fruit and gave it to Adam who also ate. Eve ate because she was deceived, but Adam ate because he was not deceived. Adam fully knew that he was disobeying God, and that the results would be bad. Adam ate because he felt a vast difference now existed between him and the woman, and he was afraid of losing her. His motives were both selfish and unselfish. In the former case, he was afraid of losing sexual relations, but in the latter case, he was afraid for her to lose his friendship and protection. He did not want her to be alone because she might need him, and he also needed her.
Adam’s action was typical of those who deliberately embrace false combinations because they are afraid of losing whatever they already have. Many people, for example bureaucrats, will go along with systems that they know, or strongly suspect, contain many lies and hypocrisies. Yet, they play along simply because they are afraid of losing their positions. His motive caused Adam’s sin to be deeper than Eve’s because not only did he deliberately disobey God, but he proved a coward as well.
In Genesis 3:7, Adam and Eve suddenly came to know that they were naked and they felt ashamed. They were not ashamed of the nakedness itself, but of their sudden knowledge of lust and greed. Becoming aware of their vulnerabilities, they desired to deceive each other and to gain sexual power over each other. In other words, they began to realize those feelings and ideas that hide a reduction toward absolute nothingness that had become a part of their beings. Their love caused them to cover themselves with fig leaves in an attempt to hide their new found reality which had brought such shame to them.
In Genesis 3:8-11, God comes to converse with Adam and Eve again. Adam and Eve hid themselves from God because of their shame before His holiness. They now knew good and evil as polar opposites. The rest of their lives would be spent in putting together combinations of ideas that would be good if useful and beautiful, and evil if useless and destructive. They also knew that they had not become gods, and therefore, their intelligence would never be strong enough to keep good and evil at an absolute separation. In their future, all their striving would seldom be completely good or evil, but mostly a mixture of the two.
They also knew that their relationship with God had drastically changed. They felt that their minds and spirits were no longer connected to God. They felt cut off from their innocent connection to God’s goodness and holiness. Being in spiritual isolation, they knew that they were not spiritually strong enough to handle this new reality. That which God had told them had come true. They were cut off from the source of life. They had become spiritually dead.
God quickly discovered that which He already knew, that Adam and Eve had eaten of the prohibited tree. In Genesis 3:12, the man, true to his cowardice, blamed his disobedience on the woman. He also implied that God was to blame for giving him the woman. In Genesis 3:13, the woman, at least, told God the simple truth. She had been deceived by the serpent, but she had also disobeyed.
In Genesis 3:14, God cursed the serpent because of his treachery. He condemned the serpent to be a legless creature that slithers on its belly through the dust, forever a symbol of loathsome sneakiness and deceit.
In Genesis 3:15, God prophesies the serpent’s eventual doom. God sums up the basic history of the human race as one of constant enmity; that is, constant warfare between the woman and her seed, and the serpent and his seed. As Genesis 3:20 makes clear, the woman became the sole source of the physical life of the human race. As such, history has proven that women have always been the keepers of love, home, family, and, by extension, of civilization itself. Women tend to be far less violent or criminal than men are. Women rarely go to war or cause them. Although women are sinners, on the whole, history has proven that women are far less sinful than men are.
Thus the real historical warfare has always been between those who practice love and nurture, and those who practice violence, deceit, and self-righteousness. Most of those who have practiced the latter have been men.
Those who are the seed of the woman, throughout history, have been those, both men and women, who have humbled themselves to God; that is, the meek who have repented of their sins and who look to God for mercy and grace. Those who are the seed of the serpent are those, both men and women, who have unrepentantly practiced sin. Human history has proven God’s prophecy to be precisely correct; constant enmity between the meek and the proud; that is, between those who desire true combinations and those who desire false combinations. Those who desire true combinations love truth and life. Those who desire false combinations love deceit and death.
The second half of Genesis 3:15 refers to a particular seed of the woman called "he." "He" must be a particular righteous individual who will personally bruise the serpent’s head; that is, He will destroy the serpent and all of his evil works. Those who are the seed of the serpent take part in Satan’s evil works, and are also thus destroyed.
The last phrase of this verse prophesies that the serpent will bruise the heel of this righteous person. The serpent will succeed in causing great pain and suffering to this righteous person, but the serpent will not succeed in destroying Him. In fact, as future events from the time of Eden have revealed, the suffering of this righteous person has proven to be the very method by which the serpent and all his evil works have been destroyed. In addition, the suffering of this righteous person has proven to be the only means by which those who are the seed of the woman can be rescued from the destructive effects of sin and evil.
In Genesis 3:16, God pronounced both a blessing and a curse upon the woman. The pain of childbirth will be greatly increased, but in that suffering, she will be the savior of the physical human race. Through women, human life will be preserved, but it will be a sinful life. Human life will still need to be rescued from physical death in a resurrection of a new kind of body. Moreover, man’s spiritual life will still need to be rescued from sin through a spiritual reconnection to God.
Childbirth is itself a physical prophecy about the resolution of these needs. The agony of childbirth corresponds to the suffering of the righteous person who is the seed of the woman. The Bible has revealed that that person is Jesus Christ who suffered on the cross to take away man’s sin and to give him a new birth as Jesus taught in the third chapter of John. The joy of new life being born into the world corresponds to the joy of Christ’s resurrection and the new birth and resurrection of believers that His resurrection insures.
The last phrase of verse 16 does not grant husbands the right to dominate their wives. God simply prophesied that in the course of history, men would mostly assume the places of leadership in the families, communities, and nations. Men do this because of their deeper pride and selfishness. Women often assume the roles of humble servants, as Jesus did.
In Genesis 3:17-19, God prophesies that men will need strict discipline. Because of Adam’s selfishness and cowardice, men will be sentenced to hard labor. Hard labor keeps men humble. Men are exceedingly sinful and wild if not controlled. Hard labor has proven to be a good method of control. Women have the best control because they constrain men to be civilized.
This sentence of hard labor was also a physical prophecy. Men preserve the lives of their families through the pain of labor, and through the pain and hard labor of Christ on the cross, God preserves the eternal lives of those He adopts into His family. Those who trust in the shed blood of Christ are cleansed from sin, forgiven, and preserved forever by the hard labor of Christ on their behalf.
Genesis 3:21 relates that God made coats of skin to clothe Adam and Eve. This entailed the killing of an animal and thus the shedding of its blood. This action constituted a prophecy as to the future method that God would use to cause a spiritual recreation and reconnection of man’s spirit to Himself. Adam and Eve, and their progeny, became spiritually disconnected from God. In time, they and their progeny become physically separated from God. Spiritual and physical separation means death, but not annihilation. A duality, once created, can never be completely destroyed by absolute nothingness. However, duality can forever sink into the idea of nothingness toward absolute nothingness. This eternal separation from God entails tremendous suffering because of the loss of the love and goodness of God. This condition is called Hell.
Because of God’s great love and compassion for fallen man, He prophesied through the killing of the animal that someday He would come to earth Himself to suffer in man’s place. He would suffer the agony of separation from God and the descent into Hell in man’s place. Jesus would be the individual seed of the woman, taking man’s sin and death upon Himself on the cross. The blood He would shed in that suffering would, somehow, become the cleansing agent that can wash away man’s sins and make possible his reconciliation with God.
In Genesis 3:22, God neither infers that man has become a god, nor does He hold out that possibility. God simply means that what God knows to an absolute degree, man now knows to a limited degree. God knows the absolute polarization of good and evil. He knows the infinite set of simple true ideas, all true combinations, and all potential true combinations. At the polar end, He knows that evil exists.
Because of man’s limited mind and disconnected spirit, he often becomes confused by what is good and what is evil. He does not possess the ability to separate the two completely. Having a limited knowledge of the simple true ideas, man often creates combinations that he believes will be good, only to find later that they prove to be evil or unworkable. Man often clings with stubborn pride to systems that do not work well. He tries to fill the emptiness that surrounds his spirit with systems of ideas that promise pleasure, power, or self-righteousness, only to fail continually to fulfill himself. That which man really needs is to become reconnected to the infinite mind and holiness of God.
In the last part of Genesis 3:22 and verses 23-24, God acts to prevent a great tragedy. If, in his desperation to correct his fallen condition, man were to partake of the tree of life, then the future would hold no possibility for his salvation. In body, soul, and spirit, man would become a paradox, a creature that is both alive and dead at the same time. Never able to die, man would sink into ever-greater corruption toward death. Life on earth would become a living, putrid Hell.
It is not that God would not be able to save man from that condition, He would simply have no desire to do so. By attempting to possess both eternal life and sin, man would eventually become as corrupt and full of pride as the demons are. Demons are incredibly putrid creatures, wholly given to absolute nothingness. God has no desire to save the demons, and God would have no desire to save man should he become demonic.
God, in His mercy, drove man from paradise to prevent man from falling into this horrible condition. Knowing that man was totally incapable of saving himself, God had plans to do all the work necessary to restore man in body, soul, and spirit to Himself. Man could never be restored to God in his sinful condition. God knew that man needed to be recreated. God determined that man needed a purified spiritual-body as He outlined in I Corinthians 15:51-57. Man needed a spiritual-body so completely fused together as to be interchangeable in body, soul, and spirit. The creation of this new kind of human being was a task that God set for Himself to accomplish through the work of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Genesis 3:24 relates that God separated the life of man from both hell and paradise. This act of God began the history of mankind. God created an historical process so that He could intervene in that process to effect the salvation of man. An historical process would allow God to come someday to earth as the Son of God. A life in paradise or hell could not be an historical process because the former is already salvation and the latter is a continuous plunge toward destruction. In an historical process, Jesus Christ would be able, in a supreme act of love and self-sacrifice, to take upon Himself, on the cross, the sin and death of mankind, thus expunging the penalty and presence of both for all those who will believe in His power to do so. Repentance is a necessary part of such a faith, for how can one believe that Christ can take away one’s sins if one is not willing to give up those sins. Thus, Christ provides the only way by which man can escape from the curse of sin, death, and hell; and become reconnected and reconciled to God in his body, soul, and spirit.
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