The Fall
It is important to me that we understand where history went wrong. Like Jesus, I understand and believe the Bible just the way it's written. I have good company! When He spoke of what happened to Jonah, He spoke of it literally and not as though it was an allegory. When Jesus Christ spoke of marriage, He took the issue back to the Garden where He made them male and female, to literal, historical events upon which we base the relationship between husbands and wives.
Ok, so The Fall. Genesis 3. We need to see it so we don't go on repeating it and Jesus Christ came, defeated our foes, sat down at the right hand of the Father - where He is today - and poured out the Holy Spirit so that we would be restored to God's original purpose for us: to have fellowship with Him and live in His presence and to have dominion and rule Creation. These 6 steps of The Fall are very important to us all, and it is apropos that there are 6 steps to it and not 7. They are as follows:
1. Questioning God's Word, 2. Misunderstanding God's Word, 3. Contradicting God's Word, 4. Satan's Lie in place of God's Word; "You shall be like God and you will also disobey Him too," 5. Eve's flesh and pride, 6. Adam listened to Eve
1. Satan says to Eve, "Did God really say?" His question contained a lie in his craftiness, "...you must not eat of any tree in the garden?" It was absurd and he, of course, knew it.
2. Eve omits that they were to freely eat of the trees of the Garden, she says they were not permitted to eat from the tree in the middle of the Garden, and there were 2 in the middle and God didn't say they must not touch it. It's very important to understand she wasn't there when God told Adam these things and that it was Adam's job to teach her what God said.
3. Satan then, having questioned God's Word, directly goes against what God says and says, "You will not surely die." That is always the progression: questioning God's Word then contradicting it.
4. This is Satan's false message which he has never had to amend and which religion taught me from the beginning - and Satan is masterful at religion - "You will be like God and you will also be rebellious against Him." "When we see Him we will be like Him for we shall see Him as He is," it is written in the New Testament. Religion has no problem with relating that about Heaven and our introduction to it but what it outright rejects is the Lord's command that we be perfect and the teaching related throughout the Bible about our being dead to sin and alive to righteousness. This is Satan's false gospel which fills the seminaries and pulpits in this land. It destroys marriage and causes "the salt" to be without savor, something which Jesus condemns in the strongest of terms.
5. "When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was 1. good for food and 2. pleasing to the eye, and also 3. desirable for gaining wisdom..." Here is an immortal human being living in paradise. She does not age, has no pain, never gets so much as a mosquito bite. She pays no taxes, gets no bills and has no need to purchase anything - she doesn't even have the concept. She has no mental fogginess. She is perfect and her situation is perfect but she is not satisfied! She wants more!! Every Bible should come with 1 John 2:15-17 written next to Genesis 3:6, which states, "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world - the 1. cravings of sinful man, the 2. lust of his eyes and the 3. boasting of what he has and does - comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." See the 1,2 3's and how they aline?
6. When the Lord passes down His judgements on the actors here and turns from Eve to deal with Adam He starts by saying, "Because you listened to your wife..." Reminds me of where Abraham went wrong and brought about Ishmael with Hagar. It was Sarah's idea and Abraham listened to her. Wives are to be led by their husbands not husbands by their wives. If you feel something angrily rise up within you while reading that, that's the spirit of the god of this age that hates the Kingdom of God and the order thereof. There's only 2 Kings fighting out there: Satan and Jesus Christ. Chaos vs. order. Evil vs. good. Dark vs. light. Chaos, evil, darkness come with many labels to try and conceal from humanity who it really is, but order, good and light are only in and through Jesus Christ and Him alone.
1-6. Let's not keep repeating them. It is our enemy's path for us.