After the year 4026 B.C. - The Fall

As we have read before, the Hebrew Scriptures make it clear that Adam and Eve were born in the year 4026 B.C. The Bible does not tell us how many months or years they lived in paradise before they were thrown out of it by God.

Many wonder how it is possible that perfect angels and humans could sin and rebel against God. To understand this, people must be aware of the fact that if angels and humans did not have the capacity to turn against God, to fail to appreciate Him, and to disobey Him, they would not have been perfect especially in God's eyes. God did not want an automatic, robot-like, and forced kind of love and obedience from angels and people. He wanted love and obedience that were the result of sound reasoning power and sincere, voluntarily given appreciation.

The Bible makes it very clear how sin works. Sin starts with cherishing wrong desires. In this context, wrong means "going against God's will and His intentions".

If angels and people do not reject this kind of wrong desires in time and remove them from their minds, but start to cherish and feed them, the moment will come when they will turn their thoughts into actions and start to transgress God's commandments. What now was the wrong thought which Satan, Adam, and Eve refused to remove from their minds, which they cherished and led to their fall?

The circumstances within which Adam and Eve caused their own downfall make this very clear.

God gave them perfect freedom in their earthly paradise. There was no commandment at all that they could break, except for one very simple thing. In their paradise, God planted one, and no more than one, tree of which He said that they were not allowed to eat its fruit. By obeying this one simple commandment, they could show that they were willing to submit to God and His commandments. They could demonstrate that their common sense told them that they should be completely satisfied with the way God had made them and with the living conditions which God had offered them. They could also show that they loved God and were grateful for everything He had done.

By disobeying the commandment, they could demonstrate that they wanted more than they had received and that they thought it possible that going against God could make the quality of their lives even greater than it already was.

What could Adam and Eve want to possess that they had not already received? This question has only one possible answer. It is what the Bible itself gives. Adam and Eve had a lot. They were able to do a lot. But it was clear to them that God Himself had more and was able to do more. God could create and they could not. Obviously, God knew how to make a universe, how to make life and preserve it. God kept for Himself the exclusive right to possess this kind of knowledge and power.

God also claimed the exclusive right to rule the universe and everything He had created, including the angels and people, the way He wanted to, without having to explain His actions to anybody. God demanded angels and people to accept His authority and His decisions. He demanded them to do what He wanted them to do.

It is clear that first Satan in heaven and later on Adam and Eve on earth began to cherish the wrong idea that it would be possible and desirable for them not to submit to a situation in which God would be their ruler and they would forever be inferior to their creator. They began to think that it would be possible for them to become equal to God or perhaps even superior by rebelling against Him and not submitting to the restrictions that God had imposed on them.

The Bible does not tell us when Satan began to cherish this idea. However, the Bible does tell us in its first few pages when Satan turned these thoughts into actions.

He did this in paradise by advising Eve to rise against God by eating the fruit of the tree of which God had explicitly told her not to eat.

Satan told Eve that if she would rebel against God, she would become God's equal when it comes to knowledge and power. She would no longer be subjected to God, but she would be God's equal. She would get much more knowledge and a large quantity of possibilities that God had refused to give her.

As everybody knows, Eve believed Satan and rejected the authority of her creator. She would no longer be subjected to Him. She would no longer obey Him.

Later on, Eve advised Adam to follow her in her rebellion. At this point, he knew that the result of such act would not be a tremendous increase in their knowledge and power. The Bible says that Eve was deceived by Satan, but not Adam. Because even before Eve's Fall, Adam had cherished the same wrong ideas as his wife. He had so much understanding of her action that knowing what the consequences would be, he followed his wife and also disobeyed God's commandment.

In the process of cherishing wrong desires and finally doing a very wrong action, Adam and Eve lost their physical and mental perfection. They alienated themselves from their creator. This had very negative consequences for all aspects of their being: the body cells and organs involved in their reproduction as well as their qualities as educators of children.

Their children and all people who were born after them were the products of imperfect reproductive cells and organs and an imperfect upbringing. Moreover, all people who lived after Adam and Eve were born with hereditary qualities and the kind of upbringing which made them inclined to sin.

This situation made it very unlikely that God would ever be able to realize His idea of a planet earth inhabited by people who really love and appreciate Him.

God knew that all the people who would live after Adam and Eve would sin and thereby incur the punishment that sin automatically produces: death.

But in reality, the realization of God's intentions with the earth and man has never been in any serious danger. The Bible clearly teaches us that God possesses the power and abilities that make it possible for Him to realize His plans in all circumstances. God told Satan, Adam, and Eve right after the Fall how He intended to do this. He promised a seed, a person who would be born in the future, who would crush Satan completely. This crushing does not only concern Satan as a person. It also concerns Satan's ideas and actions.

Right after the Fall, God announced that in the future, someone would be born who would undo all the adversity that the Fall had caused. God's great plans for the earth and man would still be realized.

How God sees to it that this promise comes true in the course of human history is one of the great themes of the Bible. It runs as a continuous thread through the entire Scriptures, from the first book (Genesis) to the last one (Revelation). (It is very worthwhile to read the story of the Fall in the Bible itself. It is to be found in the third chapter of Genesis.)