The Shattered Interlock

The Shattered Interlock

God warned Adam: "In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17).

Did Adam die physically on the day when he fell to satan's temptation and ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? No, Adam did not die physically until he was more than nine hundred years of age. But when he defied and disobeyed God that day in the Garden of Eden, Adam did indeed die. What kind of death was it?

Death in the absence of life. What life did Adam lose that day? The Life of God! God withdrew His Holy Spirit from Adam's spirit. This was spiritual death.

As we have seen, God intended that a threefold moral interlock should govern our relationship to God and God's relationship to us.

1. Our love for God, reciprocating His love for us. The love is evidenced exclusively by -

2. Our dependence on God, because He created us in such a way that His presence is indispensable to our humanity and true function. This dependence can be expressed only by - 

3. Our obedience to God.

This threefold moral interlock on that day in the Garden of Eden when man believed the devil's lie, the lie that man can somehow be man without God; that the Creator is not indispensable to the creature, that we can carve our own destiny, be kind in our own kingdom, be our own god.

At this point of moral option, Adam fell, and at once things went wrong and have been going wrong ever since.

Picture in your mind a beehive (to take one example in the amazing vastness of the animal kingdom) when tens of thousands of bees all operate by instinct in performing their particular jobs - the queen bee who lays eggs, plus the scout bees, the worker bees, the nurse bees, the guard bees, and others. They all carry out their individual tasks by God's design for the continuing health and propagation of the hive.

Now imagine that one day the rigid interlock between the instinctive thrust and each bee's soul suddenly snapped. All at once it was every bee for himself. What would happen?

The result, of course, would be anarchy, chaos, and self-destruction, which is precisely what has been evidenced in the history of mankind all down through the centuries. Through satan's lying subdery, mankind embarked upon the mad experiment of disobedience and human self-sufficiency, in which we are still today so heavily and tragically involved, with all its terrible consequences.

Without God, we are like an animal, only worse. God did not create man to be an animal, governed only by instinct. Our "natural" man, who we are in our flesh, is void of true spirituality.

As heirs to a fallen Adam, we are born without any conscious sense either of a relationship with God or a capacity to have that relationship, even though this lack leaves instinctively a religious longing within us. Inherently we know there is a sort of vacuum inside which we try to fill with anything and everything apart from God Himself (Ephesians 4:17-18), with full cooperation from satan.

It is amazing with what enthusiasm human beings are prepared to allow their humanity to be prostituted by the devil! Nevertheless, though they seek to justify themselves and be persuaded of the virtue of their actions, there is still an intangible restlessness within that leaves them baffled and perplexed.

Are there such moments of perplexity in your life - a restless soul whispering that all is not well with you?

"You should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindn4ess of their hearts" (Ephesians 4:17-18).

~W. Ian Thomas~