The World and the Word

        The Advents and the Judgments of Christ

Christ came to Adam and Eve after they had sinned to promise them a Savior, and He cursed only the Devil and the ground which contains the bottomless pit from which all evil emerges. Christ punished Adam and Eve and all of their descendants with hard labor and pain in life because of their sins, but He did not curse them, and He promised them that their good lives that He had created would always belong to Him. Genesis 3:14-20; Genesis 3:20; Luke 20:38. God also punished Adam and Eve and all of their descendants with physical death because of their sins. Physical death typifies the way God deals with His good systems that become tainted with sin because of evil. God causes dead bodies to dissolve in the earth in order to extract all of their good elements to feed plant life, but actual death itself, which becomes a false system, equals absolute nothingness.

The fact that physical death becomes an absolute nothingness can be illustrated by the use of mathematics. The formula that is 3+2=6 is a false system, similar to physical death. But all of the numbers and signs of this false system are good and useful individual elements that can be used in true systems, similar to the elements of the dead physical body. When all of these good elements become subtracted from this false system, similar to the dissolution of a dead body, only the idea of nothing is left. But the idea of nothing is also a good and useful element in consciousness. One of its uses is that it can indicate a deeper nothingness in a false system. The idea of nothing indicates that the life of a dead body equals nothing, but it also indicates that the consciousness of a dead body equals an absolute nonexistence. Nonconsciousness exists, in a sense, as nonexistence. It nonexists nowhere and at no time. Consciousness can recognize the falsity of a system because of the useful idea of nothing, but the usefulness of the false system itself equals an absolute nothingness. Isaiah 40:17; Job 10:21-22.

If Adam and Eve had chosen to eat of the Tree of Life first and had refused to sin, then after over 900 years of a blissful life on earth, God would have simply translated their bodies to spiritual bodies and lifted them up to live with Him in Heaven forever. They would not suffer physical death. God probably translated Enoch in this way. Of all sinful humans who ever lived, Enoch was probably the least sinful. Enoch walked with God, and he had so few sins in his life that God was able to save him by His grace, eliminate all of his sins and his evil, and translate him directly to Heaven. Genesis 5:24.