Spiritually connected or disconnected? It's your choice!
God created a place for us, a beautiful natural garden more beautiful than you or I can imagine. He created animals and creatures to inhabit this garden. Then he created another being to have a personal relationship with.
To protect this created being he established a boundry for our own protection. I can imagine God saying, "Look, you can have it all, except one thing. You've got to trust me on this and if you love me you will honor me and obey me. So make the choice." So did God know Adam and Eve would fall? I don't think the Heavenly Father sets us up for failure just so he can rush in and save us. God's not insecure to do that. He doesn't have to prove anything to anyone. He did create mankind with a special freedom called "free will" to make our own choice to love him or not. If we truly love and respect, we will freely choose not to hurt him but willingly obey because of our relationship together is founded upon trust and we love each other. This could be said of husbands and wives, children and parents and obviously our relationship with God.
In every one of these relationships there is a need for mutual love and respect. Without it, marriages fail, families are torn apart and our spiritual life is incomplete. In every one of these relationships if they are balanced correctly, there will always be a "head of the house" authority figure. Now before women everywhere start screaming and clutching their independence to their heart, let me say that Biblically, God expects the husband to love his wife as he loves, protects and provides for himself. If he does that he will honor and listen to his wife, take in her input and think of what's best for her and make the final decision as the head of the house. Ladies, is that anything worth rebelling against if your husband treated you like that? I think not but, oh, if our marriages were only that easy and perfect.
If men would be willing to lay down their lives for their wives their love would come across caring to their wives. She would feel protected and she wouldn't have an issue with submitting. (reference Ephesians 5:22-33)
So Adam and Eve were told not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This was for their own protection. God supplied everything else they could possibly need or want. Trust shouldn't be an issue but don't be fooled, anyone can be deceived if they forget the love of God in that situation. For a short while things were going pretty good for Adam. As the caretaker of the Garden one of his duties was to label everything. He named all the flora and fauna while maintaining a one-on-one personal relationship with the Creator of this masterpiece. He was a husband to this garden before God made him a husband to Eve. He was given a wife to be his partner and helper until tragedy struck. There was a stranger watching his wife and scheming to move in and seduce Eve into sin. The stranger was a deceiver who cunningly beguiled Eve with his sly, persuasive words of doubt. He was a liar, a deceiver, a manipulator, which influenced Eve to question God's authority and motives. Her own self-fulfilling desires led her to disobey the only rule in the entire Garden...just one rule. Imagine surrounded by beautiful and amazing reasons to obey only one rule, just one, you can do EVERYTHING ELSE but don't break this one rule.
Eve quoted God’s commandment to the serpent. She knew if she sinned there would be a consequence - death! “We can eat from the any of the trees in the garden. It's only the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, 'Don't eat from it; don't even touch it or you'll die.'" She knew nothing else but what God said until the Deceiver said to her, "You will not die”, (implying that God is the liar). “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.", (implying that God is just being selfish and mean and he doesn’t want to share his great insight with you). THE TRUTH IS REALLY THAT THE DEVIL IS THE ACTUAL LIAR IN THIS STORY AND THE SELF-SERVING CREEP WHO TRIED TO TAKE OVER HEAVEN AND WAS KICKED OUT SO NOW HE WANTS TO GET GOD’S KIDS KICKED OUT JUST LIKE HE WAS KICKED OUT FOR REBELLION.
When the woman saw (lusted after) the fruit of the tree now seeing it as a good thing and what she would get out of it—she'd know everything!— she began to see it as she was entitled to have it, how satisfying it would be as it is so pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. That is lust! You act on it and it becomes the thing that destroys you: adultery, theft, murder, etc.
She played the “free will” card and agreed with the Deceiver. Much like David would sin by lusting after Bathsheba on the rooftop, the more Eve looked at it, the more she just had to have it. It might as well have been sparkling diamonds. You know the rest of the story, Adam joined her and the two suddenly knew they had displeased their Heavenly Father and Creator. Immediately they both saw themselves naked and exposed! Their shame flooded through them. Can you imagine being the first time you ever felt shame and guilt?
Obviously the next thing they tried to do was withdraw from God and hide from him. Have you ever seen a child who knows he did wrong hide from his Daddy? They know what they did was wrong. It doesn’t have anything to do with fear of punishment so don’t even think its about getting a spanking. It is about the shame, its about covering yourself from the sin but you have no place to hide really. God called to the Man: "Where are you?"
I can just imagine it, no answer and then God would say, “Where are you kids?”. God knew where they were but it was more important for them to let themselves be found. (Its important to know what you're sacrificing before you make your choice -- weigh the matter carefully, consider the cost.)
One of my favorite lines is when they tell God they can’t come out because they were naked. God said, “Who told you were naked? Did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?". I’m sure God’s heart was broken that his children disobeyed his only rule because he knew it would mean spiritual death and separation from his kids. As hard as it was to send his children away from him, God was forced to turn his eyes away from sin and banish both Adam and Eve from this beautiful paradise.
Of course Adam ratted out his wife, ‘Basically its all her fault, this woman you picked for me as a wife, gave it to me and so I ate it’. When God questioned Eve, she blamed the serpent and said she had been seduced and tricked. Those were all truths but it didn’t change the action of disobedience.
This banishment from the garden was for their own protection to prevent them from remaining lost forever in their fallen state. In their sin, if they had eaten the tree of life, they would remain forever separated from God.
Genesis 3:22-24 (New International Reader's Version) The Lord God said, "The man has become like one of us. He can now tell the difference between good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick fruit from the tree of life and eat it. If he does, he will live forever." So the Lord God drove the man out of the Garden of Eden to work the very ground they were made from. The Lord God placed a cherubim on the east side of the Garden of Eden. He also placed a flaming sword there. It flashed back and forth. The cherubim and the sword guarded the way to the tree of life."
Now keep in mind that God turned to the serpent, the deceiver, the devil and said, “I'm declaring war between you and the Woman, between your offspring and hers. He'll wound your head, you'll wound his heel."
Forge ahead and enter Jesus (God's son, the human tree of life -- "I am the way, the truth, the life"). Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. Jesus left the splendor of being God and came to earth as a seed implanted in the womb of woman (mankind). Jesus succeeded in fulfilling the Father’s plan and by taking the keys to death, hell and the grave, he restored mankind to God the Father in one glorious battle. His battle was 33 years long. From the day he was born, satan tried to take his life but he could not succeed. God has a plan for our lives too and so does the enemy of God. Remember satan came for one reason and one reason only – to get back at God by hurting us, believer or non-believer. His only plan is to steal, kill and destroy. So from the moment we are born we are a living target and enemy. Prayer is so important because it invites God into a situation to act on our behalf, his beloved children.
We are beings created by God himself, created to be God’s offspring, created in his image, sons (and daughters) of God. God's plan of intervention was and is to send Jesus to die for our sin. God doesn't want any to perish but everyone to have everlasting life (John 3:16) ETERNALLY CONNECTED INSTEAD OF SEPERATED FROM GOD, THE FATHER. He made the way for them to become his children. EVERYONE WILL LIVE FOREVER IN SPIRIT BUT TO BE SEPERATED FROM GOD THROUGHOUT ETERNITY IN TORMENT, THAT IS HELL.
John 14:6 Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."
People are spirit, soul and body but when they are born on this earth they have to enter into this world through the blood and water of their mother’s womb, without a spiritual connection with God (born in sin). They have a spirit but it is spiritually disconnected to God, although He fully knows who they are. God desires that everyone on this planet be spiritually connected to him eternally, knowing him as their Father. The Lord created the heavens and the earth and the 3rd heaven (the spiritual realm) where many are searching for a spiritual connection. The first heaven is the atmosphere we can see above us in blue sky and white clouds. The second heaven is space/cosmos/universe/black hole, etc. The third heaven is the invisible realm called the spiritual realm.
This is why so many searching people are looking for something. They try to fill the hole inside them with everything else under the sun that was meant for God. They struggle with their identities, value and worth because they don’t know their purpose – why were they created – what difference do they make being here – what else is there -? They are hungry, empty, missing something. Some of them know it is in the area of the spiritual realm and they look for it in other spiritual formats but only Jesus Christ, the one true God, can satisfy that hole in their soul. The relationship with God can only be restored by accepting Jesus Christ as your Savior.
