The God I Know Chapter Four

ADAM AND EVE – THE FALL


After the God I know, by love, had spiritually created the earth and all of us to inhabit it, They began the creation of the earth physically, still using the power of love. Each of us made our own unique contribution to that creation. Whatever scientific theories of the creation of the earth are still standing as truth when the whole of God’s truth is revealed, will be in complete harmony with the natural laws of God’s love. Each of us will recognize our own personality and part in the things of the earth which we love.

In the most all-consuming expression of love possible, God created a physical body for Adam, the first mortal man. Our of the same seed that formed Adam came Eve, his helpmeet – both formed in the image of God – man and woman. “It is not good for man to be alone” for the same reasons that God is not alone, but is two. Both masculine and feminine love-energy are needed for creation, and Adam and Eve’s calling was to create. Their covenant with God was that in their earth existence they would be the original parents of the human race, that they would, by the energy of their love for each other, create physical bodies for some of God’s spirit children to inhabit; and would pass on to their children the potential to do the same. They began the chain of mortal existence to which all of us are heirs.

God had at least two reasons for allowing us to experience mortality – both motivated by Their love for us. One was so we could obtain a physical body which could, in a later love-gift from God, be resurrected and perfected. The second reason was to expose us to the infinitely vital experience of comparison, so that we would be sensitively aware of ourselves and our surroundings. As spirits living with God in an atmosphere of pure love, we were free to be, but we didn’t comprehend our freedom; we lived in beauty, not comprehending that beauty; we accepted truth as part of our reality, but we didn’t comprehend truth; we lived in light, not knowing what light was.

We became mortals to be exposed to the opposites of godliness, so that we would know by our own experience the difference between good and evil, and then because we had personally lived through making the choices which proved what the difference is, we would be able to appreciate that difference. Only in that way could we internalize freedom, beauty, truth, light, and most importantly the Love of God, thereby becoming in the actual awareness of our being the person our intelligence had yearned to be.

We obtained our physical bodies through the power of God’s love. However, since God is only good, there necessarily needs to be another influence to provide the opposition. As God is the source of all good, the source of all evil is Satan. Satan is the opposite of God in his attributes. Where God is Light, he is darkness; where God is Beauty, he is ugliness; where God is Truth, he is deceit; where God is Peace and Hope, he is fear and despair. There is one vital way in which they are not equally opposite. The power of God, which is generated by Pure Love, is infinitely stronger than the power of evil, which is generated by hate. God will always be ultimately victorious in the lives of those who choose God. Satan is subject to the will of God; he cannot have power in any place where God does not allow it.

It is God’s will (at the point where it becomes our choice) for us to experience mortality. Satan, the influence of evil, is in the earth for God’s purpose, which is that WE might become as the Gods, knowing good and evil.

In order for Adam and Eve, and subsequently all of us, to be in a state where we could be exposed to evil, it was necessary for us to fall from the presence of God, where there is no evil. We had to willingly, by our own free choice, submit ourselves to a lesser law than God lives by, and a less comfortable state of being than that to which we were accustomed. But at the same time we knew we were also submitting to a more advanced state of being in relation to our eternal progress.

Partaking of the “forbidden fruit” was the act which changed Adam and Eve’s state of being from innocently divine to innocently carnal. All the rest of us inherited through them our carnal natures. The evil part of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” was the power and influence of Satan. The “apple” was Satan’s perversion of pure love. When God allowed the presence of evil into the Garden of Eden, They knew Satan’s purpose would be to pervert and corrupt love, to lie about it, to make it appear to be less than it is – and They knew Satan would succeed in that purpose. As soon as Adam and Eve believed Satan’s lies, they had partaken of the “fruit” and fallen into carnal law.

“Fall” is literally the correct term for what happened in the change from the law of love to the carnal law. God stayed where They were in the law of love. Their physical presence could not be experienced by Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve (men and women) fell below God through veils which blanked out memory of their life with God, silenced the harmonies of Heaven, and blinded their understanding. Adam (men) fell below Eve (women) through one last veil, which further cut off his spiritual connection with God and allowed him to compete for survival.

This fall precipitated circumstances which have come to be known as “the curse of Adam.” (To Adam: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground. To Eve: In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee. Gen. 3:15-19) God has erroneously been named as the author of this curse. The God I know, though, is not in the business of cursing. Their function is to bless. Rather, the “curse” was a natural consequence of living in an environment where evil exists.





The Perversion of Love

As soon as they fell into this carnal relationship, Adam and Eve were suddenly faced with some enormous challenges, which they didn’t even recognize as dangerous. They had never been lied to before, so had never had to consider whether or not something they heard was a lie, nor to face the consequences of believing a lie. Whatever Satan said to them, they innocently believed. By the time they had had enough experience to know what a lie is, it was too late. Love had already been perverted for all of mankind.

We cannot be sure what words Satan used, but we can be sure of the effect which they had, because we live with it every day. His lies convinced mankind (1) to fear God and worship a false god, (2) that man is basically evil, (3) that to compete with each other instead of loving each other is necessary.

He started by lying about God. As Adam and Eve began to experience the pain and loneliness and confusion of being estranged from God, Satan told them that God was punishing them for their wickedness. This one lie, which Adam and Eve believed, precipitated two disastrous results. First, they began to fear God. Just as it is true that perfect love casts our fear, it is true that fear casts out perfect love. Love and fear cannot abide together. As long as we fear God, we cannot truly love God nor really believe that God loves us. Secondly, Adam and Eve’s image of God became grossly distorted. As soon as they feared that God’s love was conditioned on their behavior, they began to be defensive. Then it was easy for Satan to convince them that his own destructive attributes of cruelty, jealousy and vengeance were the attributes of God. As this deceit has become magnified through the centuries – chiefly by religious leaders who gain converts through the fear concept – God has become an enormous contradiction for mankind. While we are drown to Them by the true concepts that still exist about Their nature, we are damned from reaching Them by accepting the false concepts forced on us through Satan’s lies. The being we try to worship is half god and half devil.

The next great perversion of love which Satan imposed on Adam and Eve was to make them question themselves and their own goodness. His first tactic was to make them feel ashamed by telling them they were naked. They experienced extreme discomfort as a result of this scornful accusation, and their reaction was to cover themselves, or hide. The only damage done in clothing their physical bodies was that “clothes” became a source of competition and pride. The real damage was done when Adam and Eve put a covering over their “naked” personalities and hid the divine in themselves with a façade of pretense. All of us have fallen heir to those feelings of guilt and self-condemnation which cause us to disbelieve in our own goodness. The lie that mankind is basically evil has grown into destructive proportions, as mortals have clothed their beautiful, free, god-like spirits with self-doubt, self-condemnation, self-hate, self-pity; and then to prevent the world from seeing their insecurity, with a steel façade of pride. We don’t know ourselves to be part of God, and therefore good, so we can’t love ourselves with pure feelings of self-acceptance. We see ourselves in comparison to other fallen mortals, and can only love ourselves with the false defense of trying to prove that we are better than somebody else, or hate ourselves because we don’t measure up to someone else.

So the groundwork was laid for Satan’s third enormous perversion of love, which resulted in mortals never being able to love each other purely. Adam and Eve in their divine natures were perfectly compatible and complementary. They were able to love each other freely and without inhibition, because they saw each other as good or “godly.” After they began putting up self-protection barriers, Satan played upon, encouraged and exaggerated the characteristics which by this time were forming their carnal or fallen natures, so that man and woman, rather than reinforcing one another, began to oppose one another. Satan became the third party who manipulated Adam and Eve against each other. He planted in Adam’s thinking the idea that Eve didn’t really love him, that she was only using him – and persuaded Eve that Adam didn’t love her because he thought she was inferior to him. He planted the seeds, which we have inherited, for men’s suspicion of and subjugation of women, as well as the seeds for men’s competition against and threat to each other. He nurtured the feelings of women’s rivalry with other women, and encouraged women’s mistrust of men.

Because the energy of love which can be created between a man and his wife in an ultimate relationship is the fulfillment most to be desired, Satan took advantage of this natural drawing power as he perverted man-woman relationships with the carnal feelings of lust, jealousy, guilt, hate, etc. These perversions of love exploded into all the murders, wars, lusts, cruelty, sadism, ugliness, etc. that have plagued the world ever since.

So “Adam fell that man might be.” The Fall was in fact a fall from Love, the highest order of law, to competition, its total opposite. It was a fall from good to evil, from life to death. Adam and Eve did surely die when they forgot how to love purely.