Before the existence of this blue and white sphere called earth in timeless eternity, the infinite God chose by His omniscience to create (Gen. 1 & Rev. 4:11).
We are told in Ephesians 1:3-10 that it was according to the good pleasure of His will that in the dispensation of the fullness of times He would gather together as one all things created under His Anointed Savior.
Within Himself He has revealed to mankind the fact that although He is only one God, He is the triune Father, Son and Spirit (Gen. 1:2, Isa. 48:16, Matt. 3:16, Matt. 12:28, Rom. 8:27, Jn. 10:29-30, Jn. 14:1-7 & I Jn. 5:7).
One of the Godhead is the Word of God and it was through Him that all things were created (Jn. 1:1-3).
On the final day of creation God created man and God declared that man was "very good" (Gen. 1:26-31).
Man's nature was holy and pure like God's, and man could abide and flourish in the presence of the Lord in this hallowed state.
In order for man to be a true being of freewill, God had to make available alternative choices...so God made the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil grow within reach of the first man, Adam (Gen. 2:9).
The Lord does not conceal the fact of where this tree containing the knowledge of good and evil originated from. God Himself planted it in Eden (Gen. 2:8) and no apology is necessary.
The decision of what would happen to Paradise would rest upon the freewill of the most perfect man who would ever live - that is, until the birth of Jesus Christ.
God could have withheld the choice of evil from Adam, or He could have just created Adam without a freewill, but how then could Adam ever truly chose to love God and His ways? One of the most incredible miracles of those initial days of creation, in my opinion, was the planting of that tree in Eden in order to grant Adam the true ability to choose for or against God, especially when it is realized that the omnipresence of God foresaw both what Adam would choose and the immeasurable price the Word made flesh would require of Himself on the cross in order to redeem mankind from eternal death.
When Adam betrayed God's trust and chose to learn of evil (Gen. 3:6) he may or may not have understood the full impact of the consequences his actions would bring, but nonetheless all of his offspring and all of earth's creation under his dominion were affected by his fateful decision (Gen. 1:5).
The first time God identified this fallen condition of mankind with the word "sin," He was warning Adam's firstborn son Cain (Gen. 4:12) that he had to wrestle with this part of his now impure nature in order to keep it from ruling over him. Shortly after this warning Cain, full of jealousy, murdered his younger brother Abel (Gen. 4:7-8).
God never intimated that Cain could ever rid himself of his sin nature, only endlessly battle to keep it under limited control. Like his father Adam, Cain chose to give in to sin. Because of this perpetual condition of sin now infecting the heart and minds of mankind, God could no longer permit man to abide in His holy presence and had to be kept from the Tree of Life which gave man immortality (Rom. 8:7-8 & Gen. 3:22-24). Sin had become a permanent part of mankind and man was doomed.
Man is nonetheless still a spiritual creature made in the image of God's triune nature (Gen. 1:26) and an insatiable need to bridge the gap between himself and God remains at work in his spirit.
The problem is, man is still trying to approach God in an effort to restore the relationship with an inherently evil nature.
Since man is not capable of being holy and pure any longer, he mistakenly believes he is justified in his attempts to instead bring God down to his level of acceptance. Man usually offers God some determined or undetermined amount of what he considers good works to offset his bad in order to make amends. Mankind wants to ignore the fact that the quota of purity and good works, down to the very mind and spirit required to dwell with the God of Holiness, is 100%.
It is like the silly man who thinks a flat tire is still good since it is only flat on the bottom. It doesn't matter how many times he tries to bring the part that is still inflated around to the road it's still going to be damaged and unusable.
It only took one sin to destroy man's relationship with God.
If good works were all that were needed to restore everything as it was before, then that day in the garden would have been the perfect time to mention it to Adam.
The great tragedy was that it was out of Adam's hands, there was nothing God could ask of Adam to do to remedy the situation. Adam and his offspring were unusable for redemption.
Every religious belief in the world that offers good works to God for acceptance are assuming God will accept some kind of token effort or a balance scale for right and wrong.
In actuality the Scriptures reveal that Adam's sin was more like a mountainous boulder that was thrown on a fragile glass bridge called trust. It was upon this solitary bridge of lost history where men of freewill could once meet with the Holy God.
Man, by his divinely bestowed nature, is supposed to be good all of the time. Being good some of the time or even most of the time is nothing less than total failure.
Any religion which proposes that man can reach God through some kind of human effort is in truth trying to lower Heaven's standards. One will search the Scriptures in vain trying to find where God has done so. Instead what will be found is that God drove man from His presence in Paradise and gave him no instructions or hope of ever returning by any self effort (Gen. 3:17-24). The bar remains set at absolute perfection.
The question then logically follows, if God knew man was going to fall and would be unable to redeem himself, what was the point of creating man and imparting to him the divine attribute of freewill?
The answer is that God is omniscient and His final plan for mankind was not over.
Immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve God promised a deliverer would come forth from the seed of a woman in Gen. 3:15.
Isaiah prophesied more about this Savior in Ch. 7:14 when he wrote, "Therefore the lord Himself will give you a sign; Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel" (which means God with us).
And once more in Ch. 9:6 Isaiah prophesied, "For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."
These remarkable Scriptures reveal that God Himself was going to be the Savior that would be born of a virgin woman.
We can see the perfection in God's intervention since no ordinary mortal could get mankind out of its hopeless situation. Romans 3:10 & 12 tells us of men, "There is none righteous, no, not one...They have all gone out of the way; they have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one."
God's plan for salvation was direct. If one man born of a woman could triumph over the sin nature, that man could then offer his life as a sacrifice to take away the sins of the world.
In the Old Testament the offering of the sacrificial lamb put before z Israel was a continual depiction of this future provision. God also made it absolutely clear that a sacrificial death was not the only thing that was required to atone for sin, but the sacrifice had to give up its blood.
Quoting Leviticus 17:11 we read, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul."
As can be seen, God revealed that it would be no easy task to redeem man, because what man had done was no small matter. Man, by his fall caused untold pain and suffering and the restoration of all things would have to be purchased in like manner. Man may think he knows of an easier way, but man is a hopeless failure when it comes to doing things the right way before God.
The Lord explains that only He knows what had to be done. In Isaiah 40:13-14 we read, "Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, or as His counselor has taught Him? With whom did He take counsel, and who instructed Him, and taught Him in the path of justice? Who taught Him knowledge, and showed Him the way of understanding?"
And again in verse 28 we read, "...there is no searching of His understanding." And so it is that God determined that the price that needed to be paid for redeeming you and me from the curse of sin was the most precious elements ever created - the life and blood of His only begotten Son (Lk. 1:26-30, Matt. 26:26-29 & Rev. 22:3).
How could man be redeemed from the curse he freely chose?
Just as God had declared, a Son who would be called "God with us" would be born of a virgin.
Matthew 1:18-25 tells us this child was Jesus Christ. This magnificent child, according to Isa. 9:6, was to not only be a man, but also the Mighty God and the Everlasting Father manifest in the flesh.
John 1:1-3 & 14 tells us of Jesus Christ, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made...And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."
II Corinthians 5:21 tells us that Jesus Christ fulfilled the requirement to be the sinless sacrifice so that He could become sin in our place.
When the precious blood of the Lamb of God poured forth from His wounds as He hung in our place upon the cross, the word of God who created man, cleansed believers in Him of all sin by the scarlet life that flowed from his veins according to I John 1:7.
It is important to realize that the very first sacrifice ever offered was provided by God Himself in Genesis 3:21 in order to cover man's shame from sin (Gen. 3:7-11).
So too was it He that offered the final sacrifice for man of His only Son (Heb. 10:1-19).
It is the blood of the Lord that is the life that delivers mankind from the curse of sin. No believer should ever feel restrained to speak of Christ's precious blood. By it we are forever washed clean of all sin. Though our sins be like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow (see Isa. 1:18).
What man needed was another Adam - a second chance to resist the call of evil. What was needed was a man whose heritage was immeasurably superior to the sinful bloodline of the first Adam (I Pet. 1:23).
I Corinthians 15:45-49 tells us that that man was a man born both of heaven and earth.
Ephesians 1:5-7 reveals to us that it was only by "the good pleasure of His will"..."that we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace."
The word grace means unmerited favor. The Eternal Word of God who would become flesh owed mankind nothing. He offered
himself as a sacrifice because He loved us and He wanted man to be able to truly love Him back. That is why it is written in I John 4:19 & John 15:13, "We love Him because He first loved us...greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends."
Jesus Christ defeated sin by His virtuous life. He then destroyed the power that the curse of sin had over mankind by His sacrificial death on the cross and His resurrection from the grave. He has purchased, by His blood, a second chance for the sons of Adam.
The fragile glass bridge of trust has been rebuilt with a substance infinitely stronger than diamond. It is build upon Jesus Christ and any person who believes in Him immediately crosses over from death to everlasting life. The Lord has made it just that easy.
There is no Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil this time - the question of whether we could resist has already been answered. It is simply a glorious free offer for eternal life to any who will accept the sacrifice Jesus made of Himself for the forgiveness of their sins.
The Jesus Christ of the Bible was not just a prophet, He was not just a mere man and He was not a man who became a God as some perversely teach - He is God. Only God could restore man's access to the Tree of Life and that is precisely what Jesus Christ has done (Rev. 2:7 & 22:2).
There will never be banishment again. The moment we choose to believe in Jesus Christ our spirit is reborn sinless in Christ and that will never change. At that point we're eternally delivered from the curse of sin and absolutely no created thing can ever come between us and God's love according to Romans 8:37-39.
This is especially true of our own flesh which has not yet experienced the same redemption as our spirit's, but one day soon it will and once again it will be by God's doing (Rom. 7:17-25 & Phil. 3:20-21).
The same struggle to keep sin from ruling over our flesh that God warned Cain about continues, but now we can never fall away again since believers are held fast by the very presence of the indwelling Holy Spirit (Jn. 14:16-17 & Lk. 11:10-13). It is by this union with the Holy Spirit that one can rest in the eternal guarantee that the redemption of the entire body, soul and spirit will be accomplished without fail (Eph. 1:7-14).
It is because many believers don't understand this scriptural truth that the Apostle Paul asked in Galations 3:3, "Are you so foolish? Having begun in the spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?"
There are those who teach that a person is held responsible for maintaining their own salvation after trusting in Christ. This belief is an affront to the revelation of God's Word in its belittlement of Christ while exalting sinful men as co-redeemers along with Jesus.
According to Scripture, self efforts by believers are now viewed by God as a determination for the rewards and losses of faithful and unfaithful servants, never as some kind of atoning presentation to accompany the blood of Jesus Christ upon the altar of God.
Jesus Christ's sacrificing of His life did not purchase only a part of mankind's redemption, but all of it.
When Jesus cried out, "it is finished" (Jn. 19:30), in the Greek, "teleo" means to discharge a debt, or in other words pay something in full.
To add the requirement of good works for men to keep their salvation or prove their worthiness in Christ is to portray Jesus as a perjurer in that He only then made some kind of down payment and not a complete end of the debt as He avowed.
Keep in mind God is not mocked. All Christians are not striving equally in their walk before their Lord. It will not be all crowns and praise for believers.
There will be those that were such a failure in their flesh that God had to destroy them from off the face of the earth because of their vulgar witness. Believers will see eternal rewards wiped out and experience shame beyond mortal comprehension (I Cor. 5:2-5, I Cor. 3:11-17 & I Jn. 2:28), yet they are still saved. But oh what a heartbreaking way to enter Heaven.
Sinful flesh could not redeem mankind from death and sinful flesh cannot maintain one's salvation. Believers are free from the eternal damnation of sin while warned of their accountability before their Savior for mocking God with a life of licentiousness.
Then after the Judgment Seat of Christ, every sin will be forgotten and God will bury the memory of them in the depths of the sea (Micah 7:18-19 & Heb. 10:14-17).
Every believer's final placement in Heaven will be established from everlasting to everlasting. The freedom to choose good or evil will have served its purpose in God's perfect plan.
God already saw it from beginning to end in His eternal mind. He understood perfectly the genuine torment His Sacrifice would have to endure, the glory of Love His Word would establish forever, and the perfect way His Son would accomplish it.
Jesus Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" and no man comes to the Father except through Him (Jn. 14:6).
There is no way around it.
If you have not trusted in Jesus Christ you must eventually depart into an eternal darkness apart from God.
If you will believe in Him then rejoice and be exceedingly glad because He will be returning soon to take away His Church to Heaven and His reward is with Him (I Cor. 15:50-55, Jn. 14:1-3 & Rev. 22:12).
"But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you" (I Pet. 5:10).
Rejoice! It is God who perfects and establishes us - for it is His plan of Salvation.