In America there are churches everywhere. Religion is disseminated by radio and television 24/7 and libraries and bookstores from coast to coast have their shelves laden with books on the subject of religion. Almost unlimited religious information may be accessed by computer over the internet. Frequent religious crusades are attended by thousands in large public auditoriums and football stadiums and super domes scattered across the nation.
With all of these resources available it might seem that most Americans would have a rather well informed knowledge of what God expects of them. Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be the case. Apparently many don’t avail themselves of these resources and even those who do are too often confused by the many conflicting interpretations of the scriptures with which they are confronted.
Now let's examine what Adam and Eve did in the beginning which caused them and subsequently the entire race to be condemned by God. If we can understand what they did wrong, it should make it easier to understand what we must do right to get God to rescue us from our dilemma.
Everyone agrees with the premise that we do what we do because we love what we love, thus the old adage, “Love is what makes the world go around.” We may even venture further and safely say that love is what caused the world to be ushered into existence in the first place.
The Bible says that God is love. This must mean that in the final analysis everything that God does emanates out of His infinite love. Thus we may without fear of error say that God made man and the Universe into which He placed him because of His desire to bestow His love upon His supreme creature and enjoy being loved by him in return.
We are willing to invest our time and energy and resources into whoever or whatever the object of our love happens to be. That is, we are willing to do whatever is necessary to possess the things we want in life if our desire for them is intense enough. Therefore if God is the object of our love, we will do what He wants us to.
When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment is, He answered that it is to love God with all of one’s heart and soul and mind and strength – in other words, we are to love God with all of our being.
Adam and Eve obviously chose to love themselves more than they loved God and thus chose to do as they wished rather than do as God wished. By so doing, they committed the greatest of all sins because they broke the greatest of all commandments.
They were not condemned for eating the forbidden fruit. They were condemned for choosing to love themselves more than God and, as a result of that choice, they further chose to do as they pleased instead of doing as God commanded. This choice robbed God of His rightful authority over their lives.
The biblical record where God spoke to Adam about the forbidden fruit is found in Genesis 2:16-17. There the New King James Version of the Bible says, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’"
Careful examination of these verses reveals that God did not say Adam and Eve would die for eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but rather that in the day they ate of it they would die. Granted, it's easy to misinterpret God’s warning as an implication that their act of eating the forbidden fruit was the reason for which they were condemned.
Sin takes place in the heart. Eating the forbidden fruit merely served to reveal the sin they had already committed in their hearts. While God is definitely concerned with what we do, He is far more interested in what we are, because He knows that what we are will inevitably manifest itself in what we do.
Dr. Adrian Rogers, the former late pastor of the great Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, and several times president of the Southern Baptist Convention, illustrated this principle rather succinctly by saying, “A man is not a thief because he steals; he steals because he is a thief.”
So Adam and Eve were condemned for the evil choice they made in their hearts. This indicates that getting the curse removed must involve making a different choice in our hearts than the choice which was made by Adam and Eve.
The Bible supports this reasoning. In Romans 10:10 it says, “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
Adam became a sinner because he chose to love himself more than God which led to his decision to do what He wanted to instead of doing what God wanted him to. In other words Adam believed he would be happier doing what he wished rather than doing as God wished. He decided he didn’t want God telling him how to live his life.
This is the same fundamental problem of man today. We don’t want to allow God to tell us how to live our lives. Many somehow mistakenly envision God as some kind of cosmic killjoy Who wants to take all the fun out of their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus said in John 10:10b, “…I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
God’s laws are given to us because He loves us. They are for our own good. Before Dr. Rogers went to heaven, he often said, “When God says, ‘Thou shalt not...,’ He is only saying, ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’ and when He says, ‘Thou shalt...,’ He is simply saying, ‘Help yourself to blessings.’”
Adam became sinful by making an ungodly choice in his heart. We become sinless by making a godly choice in our hearts. And as strange as it may sound, only people who are sinless will be given eternal life and go to heaven when they die. Since we cannot make ourselves sinless, God must do it for us. This requires that three things be done.
First a man must give back to God the authority over his life that Adam took away. This means he must resolve in his heart to put God before anything else in his life and strive to do as God wants him to for the rest of his life.
It must be pointed out here that man does not gain favor with God for his striving. He gains favor with God through his choice to allow God to direct his life. His striving to do as God directs him thereafter merely serves to prove that his choice was sincere.
Secondly, since God is absolutely holy and just, He cannot simply ignore sin and act as though it never happened. Either the sinner must himself pay for his sins in hell forever or he must claim for himself the price that Jesus paid on the cross for his sins.
Some say that a God of love would never send anyone to such an awful place as hell and they are right. God doesn’t send anyone to hell – they send themselves there by rejecting His love gift of salvation for which He was willing to pay by giving His life on the cross.
In God’s eyes no man is good, but He loves man with an infinite love anyway. Jesus said, “Only God is good.” God’s concept of being good or being righteous is to be perfect and absolutely holy and without sin. Since we are not “good” there is no way we can do “good.” So the belief by many that people go to heaven by doing “good” just isn’t true.
Thus, first of all we must give back to God the right to direct how we live our lives. Secondly, we must rely only on the price Jesus paid as the payment for our sins. Thirdly, God must perform a miracle and make us righteous or sinless.
Here is the biblical support for these marvelous truths. In 2 Corinthians 5:21 we read, “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
God miraculously made Jesus guilty of all mankind’s sins even though He had never committed even one sin. Then He does just the opposite for us when we give our lives back to Him. He miraculously makes us righteous or sinless even though we are guilty of sin. Jesus took our sins so we could have His righteousness. And since Jesus is God, when we are given His righteousness, this makes us just as holy and sinless as God. What an incredible truth!
Furthermore, before He made the world, God knew every sin that every man would ever commit. When He forgives us for our sins, He therefore forgives us for all of our past sins and for all of our future sins.
At the moment we are saved and forgiven, God accounts us to be sinless in His eyes even though we will sin to some extent until we die. While the Bible teaches that He for our own good will chastise us for future sins, He will never use them against us to take away our salvation -- another phenomenal truth!
As God miraculously takes our sins away and saves us, so He miraculously keeps us saved for the remainder of our lives. God does the saving and God is the One Who keeps us saved. If we can’t save ourselves by doing good, it's only reasonable to conclude that we can’t keep ourselves saved by doing good.
In 1 Peter 1:3-5 we read that we are kept by the power of God --
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
Finally, in Romans 8:38-39 Paul was writing to Christians about how their salvation could never be taken away --
“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
