The Gospel in Eden and Today
We need to know more about ourselves and our human nature. From the time we received the good news of the Kingdom of God, we have been informed of many things that are very different from what we believed in before. For example, our gospel tells us that there is no personal Satan that causes us to sin or who tempts us to do sin, as it is recorded in the Holy Bible especially in the book of James 1: 13-15.
Brothers and sisters, if there is no Satan and if the sin that we do comes from our evil desires, we need to dig further to find out what brings those desires within us. Although many people say that there is a Satan who plants these desires in us, is it really true? The answer is ‘No’. Read Mark 7:18-23. Having read this, the Bible says that all kinds of evil come from our heart (the first century term for what we now know as the mind). Yes, it is within our heart (mind) that evil originates.
Someone may ask, ‘How does the heart manufacture these evils within it?’ The Bible tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9). But why is the heart so deceitful? The answer is found in what happened in the Garden of Eden back in the time of Adam and Eve.
Remember, the Bible tells us that Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating from the forbidden tree. What was the name of that tree? It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What does that mean to us? See Genesis 2:15-17- the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened so that they knew they were naked. This tells us something about the tree: it was able to make men and women to know about things which they never knew before then. What does this mean to us? See Genesis 3:6-7. The Bible further tells us that the tree was able to make one wise! See Genesis 3:6.
Wise in what way? Remember it contained two things which are very special in themselves in transforming man’s thinking. Remember it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: knowledge is knowing about things. If this is so, then Adam and Eve knew good and evil from the day they ate of the fruit of that tree. Genesis 3:22-24 tells us what that means.
It means that all of us know good and evil. And this knowledge is in our hearts. It is part of our nature, making us able to do good as well as evil since we are born with this kind of nature inherited from Adam and Eve, our original father and mother. This shows us that sin originates from our heart because there is evil in us (Ecclesiastes 9:3-5).
Knowing our nature, we are ready not to blame anyone else about our sin. It is man that has sinned against God and it is God who wants to save us because we were all condemned on that day when our parents Adam and Eve sinned. Thus we need to be reconciled with God through Jesus Christ, the only man born of our nature who never obeyed its desires. He lived a selfless life and followed God in all his life by obeying through learning (John 3:16-19; Hebrews 2:14; 4:14-16; 5:7-11). We only have hope of life through believing in Jesus Christ. Amen!!
Bro Timothy Kaambeu (Kabombo, Zambia)
