The Fall
Read: Genesis 1:27 Genesis 2:7 Genesis 2:21-22 Genesis chapter 3 I John 4:8 Genesis 4:1-15 Revelation 4:11
God created Adam and Eve in His own image, but He created them to be a finite image of His Infinite Self. This caused them to be like Him in finite ways but unlike Him in infinite ways. God created them to live in a state of pure but finite love and innocence. "God is Love" and one of the attributes of absolute Love is absolute Innocence. So God knew nothing about sin and evil until Lucifer's rebellion. Because of God's Innocence, the possibility of sin and evil had never occurred to Him. Sin and evil consist of false combinations of God's Ideas which attempt to reduce God's Ideas to absolute nothingness. But sin and evil cannot diminish God's Omniscience in the least because nothingness can never diminish infinity. In fact, nothingness never diminishes anything. A thing can temporarily be considered as being equal to nothing, but nothing can never annul or diminish anything. Things can change from one thing to another but they never become nothing.
God gave free will to the man and the woman because He wanted an historical process to occur which would be based on their decisions. God allowed Satan to have his part in this process because He wanted to prove to Himself and all of His creations that Love has an infinite value which can never be destroyed.
God created Adam and Eve to be neither mortal nor immortal but He simply waited for them to make their choice. God had given them permission to eat of every tree of the garden including the tree of life, except that God had forbidden them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die. God had given them a clear choice between mortality and immortality. Since God is the source of everlasting life, had Adam and Eve chosen to eat of the tree of life first, then their choice would have been equivalent to choosing God Himself, and the entire human race would from that time have lived in a paradise of love and innocence forever. God waited and hoped that Adam and Eve would choose to eat of the tree of life first. For reasons unknown, perhaps overconfidence in their innocence, they refrained from eating of the tree of life.
Their hesitancy gave the serpent, who was Satan, his chance to tempt them. Satan used false combinations and half-truths called "lies" to cause doubt in Eve about God's Word. Satan started out by questioning Eve in order to find out the choices that God had given them. When Satan discovered from Eve's answer that God had told them not to eat of a particular tree, then he knew that God had given them a choice between mortality and immortality. Satan then endeavored to trick Eve into disobeying God in his efforts to destroy a part of God's creations.
Because God had already created everything that can exist, whether material or in God's Mind, then Satan could not have created lies because there was nothing left to create. God's infinite creations leave nothing left over to be created. However, Lucifer discovered that he could take God's Ideas and form them into false combinations which effected untruths, destruction and nothingness. Lucifer invented sin and evil to be used in his efforts to try to destroy God's creations and eventually God Himself. Because of God's perfect Innocence, He had never thought that false combinations were even possible. But Satan's inventions involve nothing original, and because his inventions always effect nothingness, then they are no impediment to God's Infinity whatsoever.
After the serpent had discovered from questioning Eve that God had given them a real choice in that He had forbidden them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die, then the serpent began to tempt Eve with his lies in order to cause her destruction. Satan's first lie directly contradicted the Word of God to Adam and Eve, and the second lie deceived Eve into believing that she and Adam could gain a special power and glory that God did not want them to have. Every individual idea that the serpent used in his lies named a true and real creation of God. Even the word "God" denotes an Eternal and Infinite Self-Created Being. The word "die" is a true and real idea which God uses to eliminate all ideas which cannot be used in any particular true combination which He is creating. Thus God had told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed Him then He would eliminate them from the garden of Eden and from direct fellowship with Him. But the serpent used the real idea "not," which God uses to separate every individual idea, in combination with the real idea "die" to give Eve the impression that she and Adam would gain some special power that God was withholding from them and that knowing good and evil was good for them. Note that the serpent did not use anything original, but he simply invented false combinations of God's true ideas.
The word "gods" means any of God's most powerful creations, such as Lucifer himself. The word "evil" names false combinations which always comprise true and real ideas. All false combinations eventually reduce to nothingness, but even the "idea of nothing" has always been a true and real creation of God. The serpent's true intention was to attempt to cause a chain reaction that would eventually lead to the destruction of God Himself. Satan thought that if he could use lies to reduce Adam and Eve to an absolute nothingness, then this destruction would limit some of God's Infinite Ideas, which in turn, would cause God to become finite, which in turn, would lead to the eventually death of God Himself. But Satan did not know and did not count on the fact that God's Power is Absolute and that God's Infinity cannot be reduced even when God Himself subtracts from it by becoming a finite man.
The serpent tricked Eve into believing his lies that God had lied to her, and so she chose to eat of the forbidden fruit believing that she would gain some form of knowledge and power that she then did not possess. True to God's Word, she lost her innocence and her direct fellowship with God, but she gained the power to invent both good and false combinations. These abilities became a part of her very being. From the moment she ate, she gained an unavoidable choice between good and evil. She could choose to do a temporary good, but she also could not avoid doing a destructive evil. Spiritually, she died immediately because she lost her direct fellowship with God. Eventually, she would die physically because the evil within her would reduce her body to nothing.
Eve retained a part of her innocence because she had become the victim of a being who was powerful and crafty. On the other hand, she had chosen to disbelieve and disobey God's Word, and so evil had become a part of her being. She bccame trapped in a terrible dilemma. She could choose to do a limited good which would never be enough to restore her to a direct fellowship with God. and she could not avoid doing evil which would continuously separate her from God. She retained the possibility of regaining life and direct fellowship with God, but only through His actions on her behalf. Her future depended entirely on her own choices. She had become condemned to a choice between life and death called "freedom." The history of the human race had begun.
Adam knew that Eve had fallen when she gave him the forbidden fruit to eat. This put Adam into a terrible dilemma. If he refused to eat he would lose his wife since they could no longer be compatible. If he ate he would also fall from fellowship with God, but he would regain the fellowship of his wife whom he loved. He chose to eat and fall in order to remain with his wife. Like Eve's choice, his choice was partly good and partly sinful. Eve's choice was good in that she was an innocent victim of evil, which partly proved the great value of innocence. Adam's choice was good in that it was an act of self-sacrifice which allowed him to retain the love and fellowship of his wife. Both choices were sinful in that they disobeyed God.
The main meaning of the Hebrew word for sin is an "offense." This word describes sin exactly. Sin offends the very Being of God. Sin is a direct attack on the Being and Life of God. Lucifer invented sin by making false combinations of God's Eternal Ideas which is the Word of God which is God Himself. Sin is a misuse of God's Word with the intent of inflicting a fatal blow to God's Being. For this reason, every time Satan quotes the Word of God, he misuses it, misquotes it or misapplies it. We particularly see this pattern in Satan's temptations of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.
Adam and Eve now felt ashamed of their nakedness, and so they sewed fig leaves together to hide it. They were not ashamed of their nakedness to each other because they were on the same level. They were ashamed of their nakedness before God and so they ran and hid themselves. Their nakedness had become a symbol of the fact that they now knew that God could see the lust and selfishness that had become a part of their beings.
When God came in the evening for His usual fellowship with Adam and Eve, He called for them and asked them if they had eaten of the forbidden fruit. God already knew where they were and what they had done. God simply wanted them to present themselves to Him and admit to their shame and guilt. God had a backup plan to rescue them in case they fell, but he also knew that no one can be rescued from sin until they admit that they are in trouble.
Adam and Eve came out of hiding and admitted their guilt, but true to human nature they both tried to minimize their guilt by emphasizing the good parts of their choices. Adam emphasized his self-sacrifice and blamed Eve. Eve emphasized her innocent victimization and blamed the serpent.
God turned His wrath on the serpent first because he, being pure evil and the villain, was the most blameworthy. Using his superior knowledge and power, the serpent had deliberately violated an innocent person, and he was also indirectly responsible for Adam's fall. But the serpent had also failed to realize that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was exactly true to its name. God had created this tree as a symbol of His own goodness which had been violated by Lucifer's misuse of it. Some of God's goodness had been retained by Adam in that he demonstrated love in self-sacrifice. Some of God's goodness had been retained by Eve in that she was an innocent victim. Their condition gave God a reason to employ a plan to rescue the human race from its fall. God had no desire to rescue the Devil because pure evil cannot be rescued. But God loved humanity and desired to save it in order to prove absolutely that Love can never be destroyed or even diminished. God also desires to recover His own goodness which had become a part of man's nature in order to use it in a new creation of man and nature. The goodness of God that still subsists within man exists in a finite form, but this does not diminish the Eternal Word of God in the least.
This does not mean that humanity was worth saving. Just as a glass of pure water must be thrown out if even a drop of filthiness is put into it, so the whole human race was ruined by the fall which made it not worth saving. God would have been justified if He had turned the entire race over to destruction. Nevertheless, because of God's love for humanity and to prove the indomitable power of Love to overcome evil by employing free will as His tool, God revealed His backup plan to save humanity from evil and ruin. God had devised a plan to cleanse mankind of all of his filthiness and to perfect him by filling him with His own righteousness.
It is quite significant that God did not reveal His plan directly to Adam and Eve, but told it to the serpent as a part of God's curse. Ordinarily, the man is spoken of as bearing the seed of the race, but God told the serpent that the seed of the woman would kill the serpent. Every human born of the seed of man must necessarily receive the fallen condition because of the conjoined disobedience of Adam and Eve. But God told the serpent that He would bring a special person into the world who would be the seed of the woman only. Satan had victimized Eve's finite innocence, but God meant to bring in a Savior who would be both God and man, and who would be an Absolute Innocence that Satan could not destroy. The serpent would succeed in wounding the Savior, but the Savior would crush the serpent's head. God wanted Satan to know that his days were numbered. It is also quite significant that God did not tell Satan that the seed of the woman would also provide the means for the salvation of mankind. This was a matter between God and man only. This was none of the Devil's business.
God then cursed Eve and all future women with labor pains in order to bring new life into the world. God cursed Adam and all future men with hard labor in order to feed their families. God also cursed the bodies of all humans with death and a return to dust. By means of these curses, God's message to mankind was that, in the future, man's finite life could only be saved and preserved by suffering. God's message of bodily death and destruction was that sin always attempts to reduce whatever it infects to an absolute nothingness.
Satan attempted to destroy God through a series of cause and effect relationships. If Satan could use one of his false combinations; that is, a lie, to reduce one of God's creations; that is, humanity, to an unrecoverable destruction; that is, death, then Satan thought he would succeed in eliminating a part of God's Infinite Ideas and Plans, thereby causing God to become finite, which in turn, would limit His Power and bring about His eventual destruction. Satan based his plan on his knowledge that God's finite creations were but small sections of His Infinite Ideas and Plans. Satan thought that if he could destroy even a small section of God's finite creations, then this action would eliminate a part of God's Infinite Knowledge, leading to the eventual destruction of God Himself. That which Satan did not know and did not count on, but which he discovered through the death, burial and resurrection of Christ; was that the Infinite Word of God cannot be diminished even when God subtracts a finite something from it.
God then killed some animal and clothed Adam and Eve with its skin. By doing this, God's message to mankind was that, in the future, God would once again accept the direct fellowship of the person for whom blood had been shed, and who accepted, by faith, the cleansing by the blood of the One who would come. Adam and Eve did not need to understand all of this. They only needed to obey God and trust in Him. Indeed, as the story of Adam and Eve's sons Cain and Abel shows, in the whole future of humanity, God would only accept those who worship Him with a blood sacrifice and He would always reject those who attempt to worship Him with the work of their hands because finite work can never be enough to please God. Man must provide for his own finite life through suffering, but God would provide for man's eternal life through His own suffering.
God then drove Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden to protect them from eating of the tree of life in their sinful condition, and thus in bodily form live forever in an unimaginably putrid condition of constant decay toward nothingness but without death. In a sense, bodily death was a blessing as well as a curse. The whole point was that sinful man no longer belonged in paradise. Mankind went out into the world to start his history that would be determined by the free choices that he would make.
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