God's Response

Adam and the woman willingly  disobeyed God by eating of the forbidden fruit. Once they had eaten, God's warning that "when you eat of it you will surely die" took effect on all of creation. The eyes of Adam and the woman were opened and they now possessed the knowledge of good and evil. Seeing that they were naked they attempted to cover themselves with fig leaves and feeling shame they hid themselves when they heard God walking in the Garden to commune with them.

⁹ But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"

 ¹⁰ He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."

 ¹¹ And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"

 ¹² The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."

 ¹³ Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
      The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

Notice that both Adam and the woman would not take responsibility for their sin. Adam passed blame on his wife and the woman passed blame on the serpent. Don't we do the same thing today. Nearly every sin and addiction that comes down the pike is passed off on some genetic defect. When the real fact is that sin and the sinful nature has been passed off on all of creation since the garden. Look at what God's response is to Adam's and the woman's actions.

¹⁴ So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
       "Cursed are you above all the livestock
       and all the wild animals!
       You will crawl on your belly
       and you will eat dust
       all the days of your life.

 ¹⁵ And I will put enmity
       between you and the woman,
       and between your offspring ^[a] and hers;
       he will crush ^[b] your head,
       and you will strike his heel."

 ¹⁶ To the woman he said,
       "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
       with pain you will give birth to children.
       Your desire will be for your husband,
       and he will rule over you."

 ¹⁷ To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
       "Cursed is the ground because of you;
       through painful toil you will eat of it
       all the days of your life.

 ¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
       and you will eat the plants of the field.

 ¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
       you will eat your food
       until you return to the ground,
       since from it you were taken;
       for dust you are
       and to dust you will return."

And so it is to this day my friends. 

 ²⁰ Adam ^[c] named his wife Eve, ^[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.

 ²¹ The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." ²³ So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side ^[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

Adam and Eve's banishment from God's presence is the result of spiritual death, separation from God. All who are born of Adam are separated from God because of sin. Physical death also became a result of sin; "to dust you will return." The Bible states it this way: "the wages (what we earn) of sin is death." We all earn spiritual and physical death because of our sin. 

Ezekiel 18

The Soul Who Sins Will Die

 ¹ The word of the LORD came to me: ² "What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
       " 'The fathers eat sour grapes,
       and the children's teeth are set on edge'?

 ³ "As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. ⁴ For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son—both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.

You and I are in a seemingly hopeless situation. However, since God is love, he doesn't want us to die in our sins. God's promise in the garden that the seed of the woman would crush your head, was fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus the promised seed, the Messiah, the Hope of Israel, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah,would crush the head of Satan at Calvary. All who place faith in Christ's blood would be reconciled to God.

It is a decision that both Joe and I have made almost 20 years ago. If you have never considered a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, won't you consider it today. It is appointed for man to die and then face the judgment. 

Coming back full circle now to my earlier post. These supposed ghost sightings are not what they seem. When man dies he faces the judgment of God. There is no inter dimensional world where spirits go and roam the earth. These sightings and hauntings are the work of deception perpetuated by Satan and his demons. These demons seek out invitations to destroy peoples lives. Only a blood bought saint of God has power and authority over these spirits in the name of Jesus.

Paradise Lost

So what happened in the Garden? First we need to go back to God's command to Adam and the woman. From Bible Gateway : Genesis 2:16-17 (New International Version)

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

First, let's notice that the LORD commands and Adam and the woman had the freedom to obey God and therefore to continue in communion with God. Or they could disobey by a free act and incur God's judgment which verse 17 says was death.

Second, this death sentence held both physical and spiritual consequences. Both Adam and the woman were created to live with God, to know Him, to talk with Him and enjoy the blessing of the Creator's providence. By obeying they would continue in the blessing but conversely, by an act of disobedience, they would be separated from God by death. We will see that Adam would suffer physical death at the age of 930.

Altogether, Adam lived 930 years, and then he died. Genesis 5:5


But it was spiritual death that Adam suffered the moment he disobeyed.

Back in the Garden, the  woman is approached by the serpent (Satan) who begins to plant doubt in her mind concerning God's love and care. Genesis 3:1

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

Most likely this is not the first conversation the woman and serpent have had. Other translations substitute crafty with the word subtle.
SUBTLE:
a. Characterized by skill or ingenuity; clever.


b. Crafty or sly; devious.

c. Operating in a hidden, usually injurious way; insidious:

This was a sly, devious way to gain the woman's trust. Interestingly, the woman doesn't fall for the first attempt. She corrects the serpent. Genesis 3:2-3

2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "

The woman's prideful response of adding to God's Word (God didn't say don't touch it) puts her in position for the craftiness of the serpent to overtake his prey. Genesis 3:4-5


4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

The serpent had her. The woman was deceived into thinking she could be like God! All this time, Adam and the woman depended on God for everything. Now in rebellion, both Adam and the woman sin against God and decide to run their own life. Genesis 3:6

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Adam's sin had brought death into the world. Romans 5:12 12Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—

Next, God's response and Paradise Lost

In The Garden

Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

So God created man in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:27). http://www.biblegateway.com/ This made man superior to all of God's creation. God gave man dominion over His creation and Adam was given the task of naming all the animals. By the way, Adam had superior intellect which debunks the evolutionist view that man was dumb (caveman) and could do little more than grunt! No, Adam named every kind of animal.

Out of Adam, God created for him a helper, woman! Adam said she was now "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." God said that for this reason," a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh." God instituted marriage and sex (be fruitful and multiply). Wow, what a great God!

God took Adam and the woman and put them in the Garden to care for it. He told them that He gave them food from every kind of tree and they were free to eat of any tree at any time. However, God gave them one command that the tree of the knowlwedge of good and evil was off limits for them to eat its fruit.

Tomorrow, what went wrong in the garden and the loss of Paradise.

It is appointed

Michelangelo's fresco

In order for a proper understanding of why God has appointed man to die, we need to go back to the beginning. Genesis 1:1 states"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Two immediate points with this first verse of the Bible need to be made.

1) In the beginning there was God. Before anything was made there was God. He is eternal, having no beginning or end. Therefore, everything in this universe is subject to Him. It means that He is sovereign and in control. Nothing that takes place in this world or the heavens is without God's knowledge.

2)God created everything out of nothing (ex Nihilo) meaning that all matter was made by God's design and power. To think that the universe created itself by some cosmic burp is just not logical thinking. I know, some will argue that belief in creation is religious and not scientific. Well to believe in a big bang is just as religious because it takes faith to believe that the entire universe came into existence from a speck of dirt.

Which leads to the question, where did the dirt come from? Who made the dirt? The dirt didn't make itself because that would destroy the First law of Thermodynamics. After all, we are talking scientific here, right? What is the meaning of the word "science?"

This is from Wikipedia: Science (from Latin: scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about nature and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories.[1] As knowledge has increased, some methods have proved more reliable than others, and today the scientific method is the standard for science. It includes the use of careful observation, experimentation, measurement, mathematics, and replication — to be considered a science, a body of knowledge must stand up to repeated testing by independent observers.

The big bang is not observable, testable, measurable or replicable. Please don't insult my intelligence by stating that the big bang is science and belief in God is religious. Both theories are religious; one believes in the beginning dirt and the other, in the beginning God.

Tomorrow we go back to the creation of man. Why is man so special? Of everything created by God, only man was created in God's image (Genesis 1:27). Good night and God bless.

Ghost sightings

Have you ever had the experience of seeing a ghost? Most, if not all paranormal investigators, believe that ghost sightings are real! So do we.

Now that may surprise some who have checked out our web site and found that we are Christians who believe that there are real, explainable, scientific answers for paranormal activity. We don't deny that there are sightings, we just don't believe these are ghosts or spirits of departed mortals who for one reason or another, manifest themselves to loved ones or total strangers.

We believe that the real,explainable, scientific answer is that these manifestations are demons. These demons masquerade as ghosts and even use voices, mannerisms and knowledge of the person they are role playing. We at Answers For The Paranormal are willing and able to unmask these frauds.

I want to leave you with this thought from the Bible:

It is appointed for man to die once and then face the judgment. Hebrews 9:27

Tomorrow I will develop this Scripture passage as it relates to ghost sightings. Goodnight and God bless you!

Bill