MANKIND’S SPIRIT AFTER THE FALLThe peace and fellowship in Eden were abruptly torn to tatters when the husband and his wife decided to disobey God. Their disobedience divided God and humankind from each other. At that bitter moment all spiritual light was extinguished in them. Spiritual darkness and obscurity of soul possessed them, and all of their descendants: Rom. 3:10-18,23. At this impenetrable black moment death was born: Heb. 2:14-15. Sickness and difficulties oozed into humankind’s soul and body: Isa. 53:4-5. Hatred, murder, deceit, rejection, immorality and sorrow attacked them in merciless, unstoppable gangs. Exploitation and destruction assaulted even the animal kingdom; overran the land and the sea. Chaos overpowered the whole planet in its smothering embrace of death and devastation: Rom. 8:19-22. And it all began that dark day of The Fall. “If Adam and Eve confessed their sin and asked God’s forgiveness,” someone once asked, “would God have forgiven them?” – 1 Jn. 1:7-9. The answer: Yes, of course. “Would they then have remained in Eden to live in the presence of God as if The Fall never happened?” The answer is a definite no. “But does God’s forgiveness not blot out all our sin?” Definitely. But the consequences of sin nevertheless reproduce. The reason why Satan was so eager to tempt humankind to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is because he is a spirit without a physical body. Until that moment Satan’s sin was confined to the spiritual world. But when humankind ate of the forbidden fruit, sin spread from the spiritual world to infest the physical level as well. Satan’s state of sin and -cursedness took possession of humankind. His evil nature came to dwell inside of them. His spiritual sin became “flesh”. Hamartia, meaning ‘from sin’, took on human form. Hamartanö, meaning to ‘miss the mark’ or ‘to fall short of the glory of God’, became the essence of humankind’s existence on earth. “Then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me.” Paul wrote in Rom. 7:17-18. “For I know that in me, (my soul), dwell no good thing; for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I do not find.” God warned mankind that they will “surely die” if they eat of the forbidden fruit. When they disobeyed, they did not fall down dead physically; yet their spiritual death occurred instantly. The spiritual death of humankind resulted in destructive consequences for all of creation, as at that moment Satan’s sin thoroughly corrupted the human rulers of planet earth. Sin is not so much to lie, to steal, and so forth. Sin is the state of sharing in Satan’s being while living without God. Satan’s hamartia is a place, a position without God, which is inhabited by a most evil kind of being. A wicked species that possesses the nature of Satan: Rom. 3:23; Jn. 8:44. When humankind ate of the forbidden fruit, they absorbed the ‘cell-structure’, the ‘DNA’ or “seed” of the fallen angel into their being, and descended to his level of uncleanness and ungodliness. Humankind became “flesh of his flesh”. From that day on all of humankind would naturally possess the evil nature of Satan, since spiritual/soulically children of the devil were born that terrible day in Eden. “By one man, [Adam], sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned…” - Rom. 5:12. From that day on all of humankind would inherit Satan’s evil nature; they would be conceived and born in his state of sin. For this reason, Jesus could say in Jn. 8:44: “You are of your father the devil, [born from evil], and the lusts of your father you will do…” Hereafter, corrupted humankind would ‘automatically’ live without God. In order to rectify this dreadful situation, it would have been necessary for God to cast the sin-nature out of humankind and to redeem them from their descended state. In fact, fallen humankind deserved obliteration, so as to be recreated into the glory of God and become partakers of God’s Holy Spirit – to possess His Nature, Breath or ‘DNA’ once more. Thank God, annihilation was never God’s plan for humankind; He intended to redeem us through a rebirth: Heb. 2:14-15. But it was impossible for humankind to experience a rebirth in Eden, as God will always remain the righteous Judge: Jn. 3:16; 1:12-13. God will never violate His holy nature by leaving any sin unpunished: Rev. 20:11-15. God’s sovereign decree prescribes a price for every transgression that we commit. God will only grant forgiveness and redemption once the total price – the punishment that suits the crime – has been paid in full: Rom. 3:23; 2 Tim. 4:8; Heb. 12:23. Heb. 9:22 states: “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” Some find the shedding of blood in the remission of sin repulsive, because they do not understand God’s righteous nature, the severity of The Fall and the requirements of His protective Law. As the human spirit died and the soul was corrupted at The Fall, God’s punishment comprised of a soul for a soul. Lev. 17:11-12: “For the soul of the flesh is in the blood; I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul…” A soul cannot be sacrificed without the shedding of blood. The prescribed price for the remission of sin was a life for a life – but the sacrificed life had to be a completely sinless one: Ex. 12:5; Heb. 9:14; 1 Pet. 1:19. Humankind could never pay the required price. They died spiritually and could not atone for their sin on a spiritual level, and their polluted souls were dragged down to the level of Satan’s obscure state. Every physical- and spiritual sacrifice they could possibly bring would be tainted with sin, for they now possessed the knowledge of evil. They were of Satan’s kind, his ‘species’. How could such fallen creatures, by their own merit, enter into a right standing with the Holy God again? None of the holy angels could pay the prescribed price either. They are simply the wrong species for this task. They do not share in the flesh; and so, they could not accomplish anything with the flesh-sin-state. Nobody could pay a price that would be suitable or sufficient. No sacrifice would have been high enough, holy enough, sinless enough, good enough or expensive enough to break the curse of hamartia - the separation from God to a place or position of sin and –cursedness, that infected humankind and all of their descendants at The Fall: Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:21. Only God Himself was worthy enough to become the suitable sacrifice. He was willing to pay the debt He did not owe, but only at the appointed time. At the right moment in history He would send His Son Jesus, Who is God Himself. His Son would take on human form, “become flesh”; be born as the complete God-man, in order to become the atoning sacrifice at Calvary. The One and Only sacrifice that would be able to reconcile humankind to their God again: Jn 1:1-4; Heb. 1:1-6. God’s sacrifice had to be so mercilessly high because the single deed of disobedience in Eden, committed by one human in two parts, namely male and female, divided God’s physical, recreated earth between light and darkness, good and bad, truth and lies. Adam and his wife Eve might not have realised it at the time, but their disobedience had indescribable consequences for the whole of planet earth. They actually sold humankind’s entire spiritual- and physical heritage for a meagre fruit: Heb. 12:16; Rom. 6:23a; 1 Cor. 15:21-22. And they and all of their descendants fell instantly from their righteous, sinless, spiritual place: Rom. 5:12. They lost their position of spiritual authority and royal reign: Rom. 3:10-18. They forfeited God’s honour and His glory departed from them: Rom. 3:23. God banished them from His holy presence: Gen. 3:24. The kings of God became the slaves of sin and Satan: 2 Pet. 2:19. Blessed humankind fell to a position of cursedness: Gen. 3:14-19; Gal. 3:10. Through their descent they raised Satan to the status of a god in this world and endowed him with immeasurable power in the physical realm: 2 Cor. 4:3-4; 1 Jn. 5:19. The consequences of their position of sin also infiltrated the physical planet. Systematically, their ruin oozed through God’s entire creation to contaminate and, in the end, destroy all the animals and plants, even the elements: Gen. 3:17; Rom. 8:19-22; Mt. 24:29; 2 Pet. 3:10; Rev. 21:1. Henceforth, everything and everyone on earth would be subjected to the consequences of humankind’s sin, and vulnerable to the destruction, deception and menace of Satan and his followers: 2 Cor. 11:13-15. Spiritually dead humankind could not worship God in spirit and in truth anymore. God, being Spirit, chose not to communicate with them on their physical level. They, being only flesh, (of fallen soul and feeble body), were unfit to enter into His holy presence. Divorced from their God, they could not communicate with Him anymore. Since that dark day of doom and destruction the spiritually dead, cursed human race would have to live without their God. He created them for His pleasure, but they grieved His heart: Gen. 6:5-6; Mal. 2:15. Separated from His life and blessing they would experience only degradation, pain and sorrow during their life on earth, for God simply restrained His presence from their state of sin: Rom. 3:10-23. They found themselves in a dreadful position without God. A place of utter misery. Since that forever-too-late day a deep loneliness, a yearning for love and acceptance that cannot be filled by any materialistic means, would be their constant companion. No matter how ambitious or driven they would work at it, no person, status, wealth or power would ever be able to satisfy that void: 1 Jn. 2:15-17. Dilapidated and ruined, humankind’s spirit lapsed into a coma-death inside of them. It became a heap of shrivelled, supernatural matter. From now on this comatosed spirit would only be able to send out pulses. Distress calls to the paranormal world. Cries of longing for the perfect spiritual life that once was humankind’s natural inheritance. This comatosed spirit would thirst in vain for the presence of the living God. Caught in this dreadful position, it would not know God as a reality any more. The comatosed spirit, yearning for its lost mystical life, became a breeding-ground for Satan to present himself with every opportunity as the ‘true’ god, and the ‘real’ way to spiritual enlightenment. He brought false understanding of God and His Word, false laws, false hope, false heavens, false preachers and false belief-systems: 2 Ths. 2:3-4; 1 Pet. 5:8; 2 Cor. 4:3-4; 11:4,13-15. It is the devil’s nature to work underground, underhanded and in secret. Since that day when Satan used the deceived snake to camouflage himself as one of Eden’s harmless animals, he always cuts his lies very close to the truth in order to confuse and deceive humankind, and to lead them astray. He hardly ever introduces himself as the personification of evil that walks about “as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour”; he nearly always introduces himself as good and honest. “Trust me,” he hisses sneakily. He knows very well how to do this; he was once the good and holy angel. In an ever-dwindling chance to find the real God and to live in a spiritual relationship with Him, Satan ensnared humankind with his religious hypocrisy. And he achieved all of this through his age-old masquerade of holiness and counterfeit salvation: Eph. 6:11-12. |
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and the truth shall set you free! |
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the truth |
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You shall know |