Thursday, February 20, 2020

The World and the Word

                                     The Fall

Adam and Eve had come to know good and evil, and they became ashamed of themselves. Like small children, they had been innocent in their nakedness, but now they could see that their innocence was ruined, and they made clothes of fig leaves to try to hide their shame. But they could not hide their shame from God by trying to hide in the garden.

Adam and Eve had now become both good and evil in their beings. They still retained their good, living image of God that He had created them to be, but they had also now acquired evil in their beings which is the same as spiritual death. They tried to cover that spiritual death with fig leaves, but found it useless. They had no power to save themselves. If no one helped them, then eventually that evil within them that caused them to sin would completely overpower their living souls and spirits until they would become totally evil and lost from God's fellowship forever. The Devil counted on annulling their good, living souls in order to prove that God can lose a part of His creations that He loves so much. But God's Love can never fail. I Corinthians 13:8; Ecclesiastes 3:14. Sin had caused evil to enter into their beings, but once there, evil caused them to unavoidably sin.

When God came to visit them, as He usually did in the evening, He called them out from their hiding place and asked them if they had sinned. God already knew that they had sinned, but He wanted them to confess it before Him. While the man blamed the woman, and she blamed the serpent, they did not deny that they had sinned. But the fact that they each blamed the other also demonstrated that they desired to be rid of their sin and evil and return to the innocent fellowship with God that they had enjoyed before they sinned. In their confession, they took the first step to become reconciled with God. They humbled themselves to God, and their desire to return to fellowship with Him demonstrated their repentance.

God did not blame the man or the woman for their sin after they repented. God cursed the Devil because he had deliberately ruined the innocence of Adam and Eve which was a horribly evil thing to do. The most horrible criminals on earth are those who abuse the innocence of children. God also cursed the ground because evil had come from the bottomless pit partly located within the earth. God also created the Sea for the best of the spiritual dead. God created Hell for the worst of the spiritual dead, but none of the regions of the dead exist as a permanent place for the living souls that God created and loves. God put faith into the living souls of every human. Romans 12:3. That faith may be dormant in atheists and the worst humans, but it is there nevertheless. God's plan is to reawaken that faith in every human in order to save them, some by His grace and all others in a general resurrection in the end of the world. In this general resurrection, God will raise the living from the dead. God will cast the spiritual dead and Hell and Death into the lake of fire, and He will eliminate the Sea by another means. God will recover all of His living souls from the regions of the dead because He will reveal Himself to them in a great worship service that will start in heaven. Revelation 5:11-14. God knows that when they see Him, they will all become so overpowered by their knowledge of His Love for them that they all will choose to repent and return to faith in Christ their Savior. God will recreate His living souls with new bodies to live on His recreated earth. Revelation 20:5; Revelation 21:1-5; Isaiah 45:21-24; Joel 2:28-29; Philippians 2:9-11; II Timothy 4:1; John 5:28-29.

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