The World and the Word

                                             The Fall

God created Adam and Eve with souls and spirits by which they could enjoy fellowship with God. The soul contains the seat of free will, intelligence, personality, and emotions. God created Adam and Eve on the seventh day because Genesis 2:7 does not mention a return to the sixth day. The pre-Adamic race had a consciousness of God but not intelligence and free will. On the sixth day, God had already scattered the pre-Adamic race over the whole earth. Genesis 1:26-31.

Satan noticed that God had given Adam and Eve free will. Satan thought that God had made a big mistake by giving Adam and Eve free will. Satan also noticed that God greatly loved Adam and Eve. Satan thought that he could use their free will against them, that he could cause their living souls and spirits to become so vile and rebellious against God that they would never repent, and God would have to completely reject them because their souls and spirits would be spiritually dead forever. In other words, Satan desired to turn a part of God's good creations to total evil. Job 2:9. The Devil believed that if he could cause God to lose something that He loved, then he could prove that God's Love is not Almighty, obtain an advantage over God, murder Him, and take control of His universe. Isaiah 14:12-17; John 8:44.

Little did Satan know that he was playing right into God's plans. Lucifer's rebellion had cast a pall of doubt about God's Love for all of His creations. That doubt had already caused one third of God's angels to rebel against Him. God knew in Himself that His Love was Almighty, but He had to test it for the sake of the doubts in His creations. God planned to use the free will of Adam and Eve to prove that even though they could fall into sin and evil, God had the Almighty Love and Power to intervene in human history to prove His Love on a cruel cross in order to cause every living human that He had ever created to one day return of their own free will to faith in Him so that He could reconcile them all to Himself. I Corinthians 13:8; Ecclesiastes 3:14; John 3:16; Revelation 5:11-14; II Peter 3:9; Colossians 1:15-23; Revelation 21:5.

Satan began his evil plans by tempting Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve had a weakness in their free will that could cause them to sin against God. This weakness was not God's fault. God knows only Infinite Truth and Goodness. God had no idea that free will could be misused to invent false systems called sin. God exists in a state of Holy Innocence. Free will was not a weakness in God's attributes because He only knows goodness, but it was a weakness in His creations because evil forces saw that they could exploit it. The weakness in Lucifer's free will that caused his rebellion entered into him from a nonexistent place of absolute nothingness that God came to call the bottomless pit. God could use the idea of nothing in His creations, but He knew absolutely nothing about absolute nothingness. Evil consciousnesses called devils from the bottomless pit remains a complete mystery to positive consciousness, even God's, because no positive consciousness can even begin to understand it. II Thessalonians 2:7. Lucifer, influenced by devils, became a negative consciousness called Satan even after God had subtracted every good idea that He had put into his system, even the idea of nothing. Ezekiel 28:13-19; Isaiah 40:17; Job 10:21-22; Revelation 20:3.

Satan tempted Eve and she fell into sin simply because she could choose to do so. But the presence of sin in her living soul caused the Devil to be able to inject pure evil and rebellion into her being as well. Sin resulted from free will, but evil is foreign to humans. This evil in her caused her to commit an act of deliberate rebellion against God when she willfully and selfishly gave the forbidden fruit to her husband just because she wanted him to be ruined as well. God would have forgiven her if she had repented of her sin because her weakness caused it, but God had a plan to purge her spiritual death because that would cause her eternal separation from His Love forever. Hebrews 2:9; I Corinthians 15:26.

Eve gave the forbidden fruit to Adam and he also ate it. God could have forgiven Adam's sin because he was partly motivated by his love for Eve. But Satan also injected evil into Adam's being because Adam knew full well that he had deliberately disobeyed God. I Timothy 2:14. Adam also acted selfishly because he was afraid he would lose his physical love with Eve.