Satan assumes Adam's control of this World System

Satan succeeded when Adam listened to Eve and ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve could eat no more of the Tree of (Eternal) Life and were sentenced to death that same day and expelled from the Garden of Eden. Satan also assumed Adam's authority and dominion over the Earth as the god [or Prince]of this world. Time, as we understand it, began to tick.

At the end of 7000 years the Tree of (Eternal) Life will be available once again in the New Heaven and the New Earth. Rev. 22:2. Jesus is presently our Bread of (Eternal) Life as well as our Well of (Eternal) Living Water. John 6:27-58

The need for someone to buy us back from Satan's control

We are all born children of Adam and we need to be redeemed or "bought back" from the curse of Adam and the control of Satan, the Prince of this World System. This is why Jesus suffered the punishment of sin and died the death of a sinner (He himself was sinless) in order that we might be "born again" and become a child of God (as Adam was originally in the Garden of Eden). ..... In Genesis 3:15 we have the promise of Jesus the Redeemer who is to be the Savior of fallen mankind and will "bruise the serpent's (Satan's) head" and restore us to God. The Redeemer's bloodline is carried forward from Seth, (the godly son of Adam and Eve), to Judah, the Tribe from which the Redeemer and Messiah, Jesus, was to come.

The First Murder

At first two sons were born to Adam and Eve: Cain, the firstborn, became a Farmer. Abel, the second son, became a shepherd and brought the blood sacrifice (a lamb) that God required and was accepted. Cain, on the other hand brought "of the fruit of the ground" and was promptly rejected by God, "If you do what is right will you not be accepted?" Rather than do as God commanded, Cain became furious with jealousy and killed his brother. Cain was given a "mark" so that no one would kill him. He did not repent even after God spoke to him, but went out from the presence of God to the land of Nod, [hebrew for wandering] on the east of Eden. [Gen 4: 1-16]

Since only a male, the head of the household, is allowed to offer a sacrifice... Abel must have been full grown, at least 20 years old when he began to sacrifice. If not, Adam would have made the sacrifice for his entire family... Cain was married. Abel, and Adam, had to have fire in order to perform the sacrifice God wanted. [Num 1:1-3] Cain and his wife had a son and named him Enos. Cain then built a city and named it after his son. [Gen 4:16-17] It was built before the Flood, east of Eden in the land of Nod. Uruk is recognized by many scholars, as identical with the Biblical word, Enos. The archaeological site is located at the juntion of the Iturungal Canal with the Euphrates River. Uruk was the largest city in the world of ancient Sumeria. It was the trading center of Sumer and was often called "the Marketplace of the Land." The patron deity of Uruk was the goddess Inanna, who was later known as Ishtar [ Easter] by the Babylonians.

If the fall of man were to have occurred in our times, one can hardly conceive of the consequences. I would imagine that the American Civil Liberties Union would immediately file suit—against God and in defense of Eve and her husband. The suit would probably be pressed on the grounds of an illegal eviction. “And after all,” we would be told, “this alleged sinful act was performed in the privacy of the garden, and by two consenting adults.” But most of all we would be told that the crime (if indeed there was one) and the punishment were totally out of proportion. Could God really be serious in what this account claims to report? Because of a mere bite of some ‘forbidden fruit’ the man and woman are evicted and will suffer a lifetime of consequence? And more than this, that due to this one act the whole world and all mankind continue to suffer the evils about us?....from bible.org

 Adam and Eve, who up to this point are sinless and living in a perfect environment in which death does not exist, and disintegration doesn't exist and disease doesn't exist, and dysfunction doesn't exist and decay doesn't exist; none of those things exist. It's a perfect world, perfect in every sense. It is complete in terms of its creation, and it is flawless and without any decay or anything that disintegrates. It is the perfect, Edenic creation of God. And they live in it without sin, enjoying all the wonders of God's creation..... we don't know how long from the time they were created until they sinned; it was certainly before they gave birth to children

 Satan is introduced to us in Verse 1. "The serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." And here we are introduced to  the one who solicits sin, the one who he is the tempter.  This was a "nachash"; this was some kind of reptile. The synonym to that is the word "tanin," used as a synonym in some places and translated "dragon." And Revelation 12:9 and Revelation 20 Verse 2 describe Satan as a "serpent" and a "dragon," some kind of reptile. And in this case an upright reptile, coming up and holding a conversation with Eve. More intelligent, more crafty -- the word "crafty" means intelligent or wise  Satan was talking through the animal and, therefore, the animal had supernatural wisdom;  Satan, as you remember, fell. He was Lucifer, "son of the morning,"  the praise leader of heaven. And he decided he wanted to be like God. He wanted to be like the most high God. And so God threw him out of heaven, along with a third of the other holy angels. And they constitute Satan and his demons.

So when cast out of heaven, he then goes down to earth and attempts to bring the rebellion into the perfection of the earth.  He still is behind evil in our world. Obviously, we are all sinful, and so evil is in us. But he is still the main solicitor. He  has developed a world system. He has developed a world cosmos, a world order, that becomes the source by which he tempts. Through many avenues in the world, temptation comes at people.  Since the time his own rebellion was quashed in heaven by God and he was thrown out, he has become the number one adversary of God, and the number one adversary of man. And so he continues even today, and will always be until he is cast into the lake of fire.

 Disguising himself as an "angel of light," he is really the angel of hell. Disguising himself as a speaker of truth, he is a speaker of lies. "He is a liar and the father of lies," it says in John 8:44. And what he wants to do is to get people to believe that God doesn't tell the truth; get people to believe that they have a right to question God, and they have a right to doubt that God has told them the truth. He really solicits people to believe God lies and he tells the truth. And that's what he did. He says in a very, somewhat benign way initially to Eve: "'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden?'" Is that what God said?  That is in fact a -- similar to what God said. God said they could eat from any tree of the garden, every tree of the garden, but there was one tree that they were not to eat of.

 At this point, Eve should have said: God has made it very clear, and that's all there is to that; we will uphold the word of God and we will honor God and we will trust God. But she got lured into the idea that she could sit, along with this being she was talking to, in a position of judgment on what God had said. In fact, the implication was that God was not really good. If God was really good and really cared and really loving, he would never have put a restriction at all on them. The idea is that God is restrictive, and God is narrow, and God is cruel. And Satan is generous, and Satan loves freedom, while God really is into bondage. That's the way the dialogue goes. And Satan begins to try to lead Eve to think of God as restrictive. So then you not only question God, you question God's goodness, God's nature. And Eve falls into this by responding and saying in Verse 3: "God said, 'You shall not eat'" from that tree "'in the midst of the garden or touch it, lest you die.'" And she adds this little phrase "touch it."

And that lie still dominates in Satan's world, doesn't it? It still does. You hear all the rhetoric that was going on the lin the anti-proposition 22 group? They were talking about, you know, why do people want to restrict our freedom? Why do people want to restrict our freedom? We are free to love anybody we want to love. What's wrong with loving anybody that you want to love? Love is a wonderful thing.. Why not love anybody you want to love? And that all sounds so good and so saccharine, and it's all about freedom and being whoever you want to be. That's always Satan's approach. And when you step into that environment and you say well, I would like to say this: God says that is a sin, and you're not to do it. And when you say that, that convinces them for sure that God is not about freedom. God is all about bondage.

So it's when she's internalizing this that sin comes into her heart. So she joins the cause of Satan and makes God appear harsh, by adding the words "or touch it," as if God had said that, when God's words in Chapter 2 Verse 16 and 17 don't say that at all. So her heart has set his course -- God has set its course. God is harsh; I'm beginning to feel that. She's not defending God, nor is she offended that God's goodness is being attacked and that God's commands are being questioned. The fall took place then when she stopped loving the Lord her God with all her heart, soul, mind and strength. And loving him means believing Him and trusting Him. She believed Satan was telling her the truth, and maybe God wasn't. And that Satan was offering her the true fulfillment and the true satisfaction that God was holding back from her. Satan knew he had her, so he pushed in for the kill. In Verse 4 he gets blatant: "And the serpent said to the woman, 'You surely shall not die!'   Whatever God says, he says the opposite. His subtleties end at this point. He's no longer subtle. He simply overtly says: ; God told you a lie. Satan said the lie is that you have to pay for your sin. The lie is that there's judgment. That's the big lie of God.  All these people living in this homosexual lifestyle, living it blatantly, overtly, living it almost flauntingly in front of our society, are doing that because they have believed the lie,  there is no judgment.
Well, there you have Satan's strategy: Question God; you have the right; question him. If his laws don't seem reasonable to you, if they seem restrictive, needlessly restrictive and narrow, if God seems like He's into bondage rather than freedom, you need to assess that. And if that's the case, then you have every right to doubt God's goodness,

<> The whole evil cosmos of Satan, the whole Satanic system  can be summed up in three things: The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. It all fits in there somewhere; the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, the lust of the flesh.
Now, all of a sudden, Adam's here. Where's he been when Eve needed him?  He wasn't there during the temptation. How do I know that? Because it says in 1st Timothy 2:14 that "Adam was not deceived." He wasn't there during the deception. Satan pulled her out from under her protector. But Adam appears, from where we don't know.  So he wasn't there through this whole process of deception, else if he'd have been there, he would have been in the conversation, believe me. But it just says: "She gave to her husband with her, and he ate."

 Maybe Eve took him back through the process of how she had been approached by this amazingly wonderful reptile, and maybe she said to Adam: Guess what, Adam? If we do this, we'll be like God. Isn't that good? Isn't that neat? We can be like God, Adam. Maybe she didn't tell him the whole deal. If that's the case, he should have stopped her and said whoa, whoa, whoa. You were talking to who? A what? A talking reptile? I named the animals; I never ran across it. I mean at some point it doesn't make sense for Adam to just say: Oh, really! A talking reptile told you to do this and you'd be like God?

Maybe she just said to him: Isn't it wonderful? Now I'm like God and, oh, Adam, you can be like God, too. Wouldn't that be great? And by the way, we must have misunderstood what he said. You know what? We kind of thought he said that you'll die, but I didn't die. Well, you say, does Adam have less guilt? No. In fact, whenever you look at the scripture in other places, the scripture always holds Adam accountable, not Eve, right? 1st Corinthians 15:22: "As in Adam all die." Eve has immense guilt; no question. So does Adam.

But both of them disobeyed God. God did say don't eat, and they disobeyed God. And that's sin. You say well, then why doesn't it say as in Eve all died? Because there's a principal of headship in the Bible, and it starts with Adam and it never ends. And it works in marriage, just as well as it works in the Trinity, as it works in the church. There's a principal of headship. The husband is the head, right? 1st Corinthians 11: The husband is the head of the wife, as "God is the head of Christ." And so he then becomes the responsible one. By God's design, headship is in the man. Man then bears the responsibility..... When Adam was confronted by God, he blamed God for giving him the woman. He said:  "The woman you gave me." He didn't really blame the woman; he blamed God for giving him the woman. He went to sleep single, woke up married.

So those are questions we don't know. But we do know that Adam bears the headship. And so whenever we talk about the sin of the fall, it goes back to Adam as the head. It doesn't lessen Eve's guilt; it doesn't increase Adam's guilt. It's just the fact that when referring to that, you refer to the head of the family by design. And that's a great reinforcement, isn't it, of God's design for marriage? We see that in the Trinity, and we see it even as Christ is the head of the church. So the one that God had given to Adam to be his helper became the instrument of his disaster and death. Since the -- since as soon as they sinned, as soon as Eve sinned, you know, on the inside she started feeling things she'd never felt, desires she'd never felt, lusts she'd never felt; lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life. And the moment Adam bought into deciding to be disobedient, immediately the principle of decay and death entered into his life. And at that point, the whole human race was plunged into evil. And whenever you refer back to that event, you always refer to Adam, because Adam is the head. And it takes the work of the last Adam to undo this.

Over and over and over again, Paul says that our sinfulness is the result of Adam's sin. When he sinned, he brought down the whole human race that would come out of that original couple. We were all in his loins; we were all in the genetics; we were all there. And when he was corrupted, everybody he produced was corrupt.

The other side of this, of course, and what Paul's trying to say here -- you see the question that Paul is answering here -- somebody's going to say when Paul talks about Jesus being the Savior and Jesus delivering you from sin -- and Jewish people would argue and say, well, how can one man die for so many? How can the death of one man apply to so many? How can the work of one man influence so many?

And Paul's answer is if you think you have a problem with that, wondering how the one death of Jesus could apply to so many, let me give you an illustration of the one man Adam, because one man literally catapulted the whole human race into sin. One man, the last Adam, can save many. That's the comparison. And so he makes it all the way through. In Verse 15 again, he says it was: "Much more through the grace of God" and "the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ to many." And in Verse 16 he says it again: "The free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification." Verse 17: "The abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ." "The one act of righteousness," Verse 18, "...brings justification of life to all men." Verse 19: "One man's disobedience" made many sinners; "The obedience of One" made many righteous.

They could cover their bodies.  it was a good thing to do. But they couldn't really hide their sin. And there's a beautiful picture of this. We'll see it in Verse 21. It says: "The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them." And I just point this -- we'll get to that later -- but I just point: In order for God to make them a garment of skin, what did God have to do? Kill an animal. That's the first time. And the little analogy that I would make here: You can try to cover yourself with your own fig leaves but, in the end, you can only be covered by God through a sacrifice. In the end, that's for God to do, to cover sin.

Let's pray.

That the entrance of your word gives light, illuminates our minds and our hearts and, Lord, we do learn so much when we understand the strategies of Satan. We understand what he wants to do is to kill and destroy, and that is exactly what he did in the garden, and he's still endeavoring to do it. Lord, God, how we thank you that we've been delivered from death and delivered from destruction, because we've been delivered from sin by your grace. We praise you for it. We thank you for it. In Jesus's name, Amen.