Adam and Eve were perfect, had perfect standing before God and perfect fellowship with God. They were created in God's own image!!! And yet they fell for the lie when the serpent came to them saying "don't you want to be like God?", they decided that God's word pronouncing them to be in his image was not enough and they decided that having the knowledge of good and evil ( MORAL LAW) would be able to make them more godly.
And so sin entered Adam's race through the seemingly good desire to be more godly
and our perfect standing and perfect fellowship with God was broken. God provided temporary forgiveness through the shedding of the blood of animals so that man could still have some semblance of relationship with his Creator. But the reason the blood of animals had any power was because of the blood of Jesus which would be shed at the right moment in history, once for all. God had a plan to completely destroy the power of Satan, and that plan was to forge a new covenant with man that was completely unbreakable!
This covenant was ratified by God the father and God the Son, Jesus, who became human in order to break the curse of sin and the law (which is the power of sin, not the other way around 1 Cor. 15:55-57) BECAUSE JESUS IS THE MEDIATOR OF THIS NEW COVENANT IT CAN NEVER BE BROKEN BY US. We enter into the new covenant simply by agreeing that Jesus may be our representative, by putting our trust in him. This, my friends, is the simple good news that we call the gospel!
So, Scripture is clear! We are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17), we are the righteousness of God ( 2 Corinthians 5:20-21. I hope we can all agree that we've been reconciled back to God and our original position in Adam before the fall has not only been restored but it has been restored permanently without any fear of our breaking the covenant this time...once again...because of Jesus...
Now, though Satan can never ever affect our relationship with God the way he did with Adam, he can still tell us lies which, if we choose to believe them, will produce unbelief in God. This unbelief will drastically undermine the level of freedom and power we walk in. In fact, unbelief will lead us to live according to the flesh under law rather than by the Spirit, and it will cause us to sin.
The saddest thing about this is that most of the church seems to be falling for the same lie Adam did! The serpent has slithered his way into the church and he is still expounding the benefits of the Law! After being restored back to our Creator's original design, we are still tempted to believe that we need the knowledge of good and evil, the moral law (the ten commandments!) to perfect us, faith in Jesus is far too simplistic.
I don't believe that the Law was given to reveal the character of God, for one thing, there is no evil in God. And if that were the case, the law would have been given to Adam and Eve in the very beginning. The law was given to reveal the fallen character of man,to uncover sin, to provoke sin, to make sin spring to life(Romans 7:4-6, Romans 7:9). Jesus was given to reveal the character of God!
"And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known." John 1:16-18
Do you really believe this? We could not intimately know God through the law which came through Moses, in fact, any of the Old Testament people who knew God knew God by faith. Though for hundreds of years the Jews worked to obey the law and thereby know God, Scripture tells us that no one saw God until Jesus. The law was not given to reveal God to us, the law actually separates us from God by producing fear in us (Hebrews 12:18-21), it perpetuates death and curse, it can only uncover our sin and it keeps us in bondage as slaves(Gal. 4:1-7).
Jesus came to reveal God to us for the first time (as fallen man) and he came to do battle with sin and the law (which are the weapons that armed the devil against us Col. 2:13-15), to die through the law to the law (Gal. 2:18-20), to cancel the written code that stood against us, to become the end of the law for all who believe (Romans 10:4), because he did not come to condemn the lost but to save them and the law could not save us! That's why Jesus came with truth and grace, not the law!
So next time the serpent comes to you extolling the beauty and wonder of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, why don't you pass...why don't you take the bread and the cup and feast on the love of Jesus? The serpent doesn't belong in the church anymore.
