Creation and the Fall of Man
by Editor(s)

Part 3 of the Teacher/Trainer Outline

God created the universe, not out of necessity but out of His eternal love nature. All creation, animate and inanimate, is a visible manifestation of the invisible God and was designed to express His Person.

God’s climactic manifestation of the creative days was when He made man. His purpose in creating man was to have for Himself a container to express Himself through. So, it is in the image and likeness of God that man is created. Essentially then, he is spirit, enclosed in a physical body and having a soul.

The first man was created with his spirit joined to the Spirit of God. Man’s spirit has three capacities: desiring, willing and knowing. The soul is the seat of reason and emotion.

Man is created in the image of God and therefore has the innate capacity to choose. He does not, however, have a nature of his own, but is operated by the spirit indwelling him. Because man was not yet a fully conscious aware self, the serpent was permitted to present Adam and Eve with the fundamental choice all men confront.

Their choice wasn’t simply whether or not to eat the forbidden fruit. The underlying, fundamental choice was whether to be content to follow God’s way, or to eat the fruit in an attempt to add to themselves by this act of self-effort. As a consequence of their choice, they unwittingly received as their operator the one who offered the fruit. What they took, took them.

The tempter was Satan in the form of the serpent. Adam and Eve became linked with that "spirit of error," and man’s former union with God was broken and lost.

The consequences of Adam’s and Eve’s action were both immediate and far reaching. They immediately suffered shame and guilt, and as a result they covered themselves and hid from God in an effort to keep secret their disobedience.

God made temporary provision for their guilt and shame by making them coverings of animal skins. These skin coverings were symbolic of the permanent covering that would be provided later in the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. Then God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden lest they eat of the Tree of Life and live forever in their fallen condition.