This week is about reviewing truths that we base our beliefs on.  Most of you may know these facts but it is always good keep our mind refreshed on why we believe what we believe.  If these truths are new to you then you are in for a great awakening in your spirit and your walk with God because these Biblical truths will set you free. (John 8:32)  God has given us the ability to understand His Word (the Bible) and the freedom to believe it and walk in the blessings of His Word.  After I began this post it kept expanding and is too lengthy for one week, so this is the first week of a three-week series I’m calling “Truths That Set Us Free”.  This week is about “The Beginning”.   As I said it may be a review for some of us but reviewing is always good because it reinforces our beliefs in God.

Genesis 1:1-31 – In the beginning God created man (mankind) in His Image and placed him in the Garden of Eden.  God breathed life into the first man, Adam, and he became a living soul, with God’s nature in him. God gave Adam the assignment and the authority to tend the Garden.

Genesis 2:9, 15-17 – In these verses God told Adam to tend and keep the Garden.  We need to understand that both the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were in the midst of the garden, and Adam was told to tend all that was in the garden; that would include those two trees too.  God told Adam that of every tree in the garden he may freely eat, EXCEPT he was not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for he would surely die.  The original meaning of the word die in this verse is, “in dying you shall die”.   Now I’m not sure that Adam actually understood the real meaning and consequence of disobeying the command of God; there had been no previous deaths for Adam to make any comparisons.  However understanding, or not understanding, doesn’t relieve us from the responsibility and consequence of our actions.  When Adam disobeyed it set into motion events that he could not fix himself.

We can look back and see that it was the spirit of Adam THAT died first – “in dying” – and then his physical body died – “you shall die”.  Adam lived 930 years!  So it took a while for that sin nature to overtake and to destroy his body.  We can see from looking at the Old Testament that as time went by the length of years people lived got shorter and shorter.  We must remember that there are consequences to both obedience and disobedience.

Another truth that every believer needs to know is the fact that when Adam disobeyed God, he (Adam) also lost the authority that God gave him to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. (Genesis 1:18).  This is the point where Adam lost his authority and Satan gained that authority and became the god of this world; and began to destroy it.

Adam’s sin brought the whole earth and mankind under the dark domain of Satan and his sin nature.  The big problem was there was no one to redeem and deliver mankind from Satan’s influence and dominion because a sin-natured-man could not redeem and deliver the sin-natured-human race.  Since there were no children born of Adam and Eve until after their sin, that means every person born since that time was, and still is, born with that sin-nature.

Now if you think that’s farfetched then think again, because every parent will tell you that they don’t have to teach their children to be selfish, stingy, unkind, hateful, disobedient, etc. it comes naturally to them.  BUT they do have to teach them to share, to be generous, kind, loving and to obey.  I think that says it all.

So let’s get to the answer to this problem which is that God had a plan.  He loves us so much that He was not willing to let us stay in that sin-nature forever; He already had a plan to redeem mankind from this predicament.  And since (as I stated earlier) a sin-natured-man could not redeem the sin-nature-mankind; God’s plan was to send a sinless man to redeem us; the seed of a woman. (Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 9:6).  That man was JESUS.

Next week we will talk about how God’s plan unfolded and the hope He gave mankind to be saved through the perfect sinless man-JESUS-God’s son.