God picked me to get this book to you.  He did so, to make sure you had no doubt about who to give credit to for getting it done.  Since I am not smart enough, dedicated enough, focused enough, or hard working enough, you have to give the credit to God.  I have no college edumication, and I barely got through high school.  God had a ton of Godlier, more respected, and higher educated people out there to pick from than me.  Heck, even in my own household, I should have been picked last.

God chose me, because it was the perfect way to show you that He was at work.  There is no way Uncle Bill could have done it on my own, I tried for 40 years.  God knew the day he put the writing bug in my heart, that I would rebel and do all the stupid things I did in the years following.  Yet, He still wanted me to do it?  Why?  Asking questions like this will help you grow closer to God.  He wants us to ask why.  The same goes for the Bible.  A good student of anything, will always ask why.  I’ll keep reminding you of this as we go along.

The biggest question we didn’t answer from chapter 1 was:  If God created this world and everything in it to be perfect, and God saw that it was good, why does it look and feel like anything but perfect now? 

It starts with Genesis chapter 3, but you can tell God knew it was coming in chapters 1 & 2.  As a reminder, when God created it all in those 6×24-hour days, everything was perfect.  There was no pain, no fear, no anxiety, no lies and most importantly, no death.  It was heaven on earth, because God was there.

In the Bible, heaven is defined as anywhere God is.  Right now, God is in His throne room which is outside the known universe.  That is heaven at this point in time.  If you have family members who believed Jesus was God, and that He came to save us, then they are in the throne room with God right now, in heaven.  In the future, Jesus will be with us here on this earth.  At that point, we will call this place heaven.  In the distant future, there is a new heavens and earth created, and then that will be heaven, because the fullness of God will live there with us.  Much more to come on the future locations of heaven later in the book.

How do we know that God knew beforehand that the events in Chapter 3 of Genesis were coming?   I’ll give you one clue:  He created this world with certain features that will not be around when the new heavens and earth are created. He created certain things for this universe, solely because He knew sin was coming.  Jump to Revelation Chapter 21 if you want to see what is missing in the new place we live in down the road, when there is no sin.

So, what happened that took what God created, and turned it into what we have today?  In short, sin.  I would imagine every one of you has heard the story of Adam & Eve in some capacity. I will also assume there is a lot from the story you have never thought of, or heard about. 

Let’s start with Adam, and how He came into existence.  The Bible tells us in Chapter 2 verse 7, that God formed man from the dust of the ground.  This is a very important detail.  It explains why our bodies decompose and go back to dust after we die, and why both our DNA and the dirt are built from share the same chore chemicals.  Remember this, we will get back to it shortly. 

The other detail that verse 7 gave us was that God “breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life”.  The meaning for the word “breath” in Hebrew is “spirit”.  It is telling us that God formed man as a shell first, then He gave Adam his “spirit”.  The spirit is what gave Adam life.  Adam needed both his spirit, and the physical body container, to live here on earth.     

The Bible teaches that everyone has two separate parts to us.  One is our physical body, often called “flesh” in the Bible.  The other is our “spirit” or “soul”.  Our spirit is invisible, and without it, our body would die.   We know all the ways the body can die; we see it all around us. But how does a spirit die? Hold on to that one, keep reading.

When God created Adam; his physical body, and the spirit God placed inside him were perfect. Since they were perfect, (without sin) they would live forever, and they could be in the presence of God forever.  God won’t hang out around sin, He can’t.  Because God is a perfect and righteous judge, He would have to judge sin at the moment He was in the presence of it.  The Bible tells us that the penalty for sin is death, so God is doing us a favor by separating Himself from us and our sin right now. ( see Romans 6:23)   

We also find out from reading the Bible, that mankind was created specifically to live on this earth.  We have physical bodies that are made to thrive in this environment.  If we were all in spirit form only, then we wouldn’t need a physical earth to live on. Remember, there are two parts to every human being: the body and the spirit/soul.  We know the physical body can’t live without the spirit, because we saw what Adam’s body was like before God put the spirit in him.

So, what happened to change everything?  Sin. It came into the picture from a source that is evil, Satan.  God had one instruction for Adam and Eve to follow:  “Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.  He told Adam that if he eats from this tree, he will surely die.  Both Adam and Eve could eat freely from any tree in the garden, just not that one. 

Satan, who we start learning  about in Genesis chapter 3, approaches Eve in the garden in the form of snake.  Satan is a spiritual being, meaning he doesn’t have a physical body like we do.  In fact, all angels and fallen angels (demons) are spirit only beings.  God the Father is also all spirit.  Jesus, when He came to earth as a man, was the only time God was in a physical body like ours.  Much more to come on that one. 

Since Satan is a spiritual being and not physical, he will at times indwell a physical body to help his cause.  He did this with the snake. The snake was just an innocent bystander; it was Satan inside the snake that caused the trouble.  We know later in the Bible that Satan also went into Judas and led him to betray Christ.   

Satan came in and deceived Eve.  In so many words, he told her that God doesn’t want her to eat the fruit, because she will become like God.  He told her not to believe God when He said they will surely die if they eat it.  These were the first lies ever told on earth, and look where they came from.  The Bible tells us Satan is the father of lies, a truth we can see from Genesis 3.  So, Eve ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and Adam followed right along.

What happened next is how everything changed.  Sin was now in God’s creation.  To put it simply, sin is anything that is an offense to God.  Who gets to determine what offends God?  Only God does.  Sin is like a virus, and once the host is infected, the whole thing dies.  It spreads and spreads, causing chaos and death.  It becomes part of our nature; it becomes who we are in God’s eyes.   

Flashback to Chapter 2 of Genesis, when God had man name all the animals, birds, and all living creatures.  When you name something, it means you have authority over it.  It means you have dominion.  I named Zach, so I have dominion over him until he becomes an adult or moves out of the house. lol  God gave Adam (man) authority and dominion over everything on this earth.  He was in charge of it all, until he gave it up.  

When Adam listened to the council of Satan instead of God, what Adam did was relinquish his authority and dominion here on earth over to Satan.  He gave it to him, not knowingly at the time, but that was the result.  Had Adam & Eve never sinned; they would have lived forever and would still be running the place. 

Now back to the first thing we read about after Adam and eve ate from the tree. They hid from God.  They were naked and afraid.  This is the first clue that something happened to them spiritually, as they never hid from God before.  They used to walk and talk with Him, now they are hiding.  That in a nutshell is what sin can do.  It not only separates us physically from God, but spiritually as well.  Both parts of us are affected by sin.    

God knew what Adam and Eve did before they confessed it to Him.  God knew they were going to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil before He even created the tree, or the two who ate from the tree.  In other words, God knows everything Adam did, will do, or is thinking of doing.  He knows the same about all of us.  There is no hiding anything from God.  He knew about it before you even thought about it. 

Now that sin was here, God had to judge it.  He is perfect, and can’t let them all off the hook, when the penalty He promised was death.  God never goes back on His word.  That wasn’t good news to Adam and Eve at the moment, but in the long run, it is awesome knowing God won’t change His mind on His promises.  You’ll see why that is so important later.  God also made noise when He entered the garden so that Adam and Eve would hear him and hide.  He did this as a show of mercy, because had they been face to face with God in their current sinful state, God would have had to judge them instantly.  Instead, we hear about how God judges their sin below.    

God first cursed the snake.  Snakes didn’t always crawl on their bellies, did you know that?  He also made woman and the snake natural enemies.  Ever wonder why snakes are always associated with evil, con-artists, and liars?  Well now you know.  This curse is also why very few people actually like snakes in general.  Before the curse, the snake was walking either on all fours, or standing up, and Eve wasn’t afraid of it. 

God next moved to punish Eve by telling her the pain from childbirth would be multiplied and that her husband would rule over her. Spiritually speaking, man was to be the head and protect women from anything like this happening again. It was Eve who was deceived by the snake, so God instituted this charge for Adam to be the lookout and guard against the lies of the enemy.  This didn’t make eve Adam’s slave, because the Bible tells us “all” are created equal in God’s eyes.  Any attempt to take this verse. or any others in the Bible. as permission for men to rule over women like task-masters is absurd.  This is strictly talking the spiritual, Bible teaching, defender against false truths, and protector of the home type rule. 

Lastly, to punish Adam, God cursed the earth.  Anytime in the Bible we hear about God cursing something, it always means eternal destruction.  As in, it will be destroyed at some point, and it will never come back.  When he curses a person, it means that person will be given eternal judgment and never has a chance to find or be with God forever.  It’s pretty rare when it does happen in the Bible, so we should pay attention to the “why” of it all. 

Notice that God did not curse Adam.  He cursed the earth.  This means the earth is destined to be destroyed.  2^nd Peter 3:10 is one of the verses that confirms the earth’s end.  God could have cursed Adam, but He didn’t.  God cursed the ground where Adam came from. Since the earth is destined to die out, and Adam and Eve and everyone born after them comes from the earth, we are all destined to die out.  If you know the rest of the book, Adam and Eve didn’t physically die right when they ate from the tree, but something did.  Adam lived until he was 930-year-old. 

What died the second they ate the forbidden fruit, was their spirit.  Not in the gone from existence type of dying, but as in now corrupt, full of sin, dead to God.  Their spirits that once were perfect, and would live forever with God, are now doomed to an existence without Him.  The Bible tells us that as a consequence of Adam’s fall, all humans born after Adam would inherit that same corrupt spirit, dead in nature, and separated from God.  We also know from studying God’s Word, that a person’s spirit will never cease to exist.  So, even though Adam and Eve’s physical bodies now had to suffer death under the same curse as the earth, their spirits will go on to live forever. 

Uh, Houston, we have a problem.  Adam and Eve, and anyone born after them, are now on a course to live in darkness, away from the light for all eternity. This is all of us. This is not metaphoric, this is real.  Since we know that your spirit lives forever, the sin nature lives forever with you too.  Remember when I told you God can’t be around sin without judging someone for it?  Well, that means if your spirit is dead and corrupt and sinful, you can’t be around God, ever. 

There is the problem,  now how do we get around it?  How can we change our spiritual nature, or our soul? At minimum we need a perfect spirit to be in heaven with God.  Since we know our earthly body dies, we know it won’t go into heaven with us.   It seems like a catch 22, as there is no way “humanly” possible for us to exchange out our spirit with a brand new in the box, perfect one.      

We have learned that every single one of us is made up of a physical body and a spirit.  We have learned like Adam, our physical bodies will die at some point.  We have also learned that part of us, our spirit, is going to live forever.  That’s pretty eye-opening stuff!  All of this within the first 3 chapters of the book.  Just wait until you hear the rest.

 Remember when I told you that God created our bodies to live and thrive on earth?  Well, guess what? We will all have physical bodies, beginning when Jesus comes back. We then keep the same perfect body through all the rest of eternity.  Anyone who died before you that is in heaven right now, is in spirit form only.  They don’t have a physical body; it is in the ground. They get their new physical body at the same time all Christians do, right before Jesus starts His rule as king on earth. 

Wow, lots to digest, and probably a lot to wonder about.  Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all right now, it takes time to take in all the incredible things we learn about in God’s book.  If anything, this should ignite your curiosity and get you to study more about it.  

To recap:  Most Bible scholars call the events of Chapter 3 in Genesis “the fall”.  This is when man fell from being perfect, and lost an opportunity to be with God. 

BEFORE FALL:  Adam & Eve had perfect physical bodies and perfect spirits.

AFTER FALL:  Adam & Eve had sinful bodies that would now die, and dead natured/sinful spirits, dead to God. 

TO GET TO HEAVEN:  You need a perfect body and perfect spirit, or a perfect spirit and no body. 

WHEN JESUS COMES BACK TO EARTH:  You will need both a perfect body and perfect spirit to enter into the Kingdom.  (Lots more to come on this one) 

God won’t let this problem we have go unsolved.  In fact, you don’t even get out of Chapter 3 of Genesis before we read that the solution is coming.