In my last blog, I wrote about how mankind went into spiritual darkness/separation from God’s internal dwelling in man due to Adam’s rebellion in the garden. I likened Adam’s state to that of someone under a psychological condition called Stockholm Syndrome. I used that metaphor as it ties into the symbolism of the psychological condition of a victim’s subjectivity to their captor.
It is important for this foundation to be laid so that we can understand how we became separated from God at the beginning of our life on earth. We did not come into the earth being good, our nature had been hijacked by Satan. The best we could be without God was a good person which would be subject to the morals of the community we lived in.
Because Adam was God’s prototype for all humanity on the earth, as Adam goes, so goes the spiritual condition of mankind. Romans 5:12 confirms this, “from one man, sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” Sin is missing the mark that God had set for all men.
That being said, God had to come after His creation so we could be reunited with the Holy Spirit to fulfill His Plan in the earth. Therefore, we all were born spiritually blind to God unless God revealed himself to us. 2 Corinthians 4:4 says, “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” This is the background we need to understand to know that we were born into darkness and now must opt into Jesus Christ by being born again through our own individual acknowledgement/confession to reverse Adam’s action in the garden.
Let’s talk about the garden incident. Adam’s action set off a cataclysmic spiritual event. A spiritual event is indiscernible to the naked eye to those outside of God’s realm. Those in Jesus Christ must know that we are first spiritual beings before becoming physical beings (Ephesians 1:4).
The makeup of man’s spiritual existence was formulated in Genesis 1:26-28 and our body was created to house His Spirit and our soul in Genesis 2:7. Our soul encompasses our mind, will, and emotions. It is at that point that man became a living being designed to rule and reign bearing the image, nature, and character of God on the earth. So, the light of God, the mind of God, and the Spirit of God were a part of Adam’s original design along with Adam’s free will.
God wanted man to choose him willingly and therefore gave him the option. We see that the choice to obey provides life and oneness with God and to disobey brings death and separation. Just as with anything on earth, when we disobey a command from an authority there are consequences. Adam did not lose his ability to hear God’s voice externally, but he lost God’s Spirit which is his internal compass of righteousness. I needed to make clear our understanding of how man’s composition as a three part being (Spirit, Soul, and Body) plays in our understanding of how the spiritual realm works in regard to light and darkness.
Since God’s Spirit had departed from man, God’s light also departed, leaving man in darkness and subject to his new god that he obeyed when they ate from the tree. God demanded fidelity from the beginning. When we remove ourselves from His connection then we transition from light to darkness.
Darkness as defined in the Hebrew is “misery, destruction, death, ignorance, sorrow, wickedness.” Without God, by definition, darkness is man’s lot, and this is immediately demonstrated with Adam and Eve’s first offspring; Cain and Abel where Cain killed Abel. There was no previous pattern of murder according to scripture that Cain modeled himself after. Cain was driven by his soul; his mind, will and emotions that was no longer aligned with God’s Spirit.
All of Cain’s actions prove man’s nature was not that of God. Man has no goodness in him without God. Without God man developed his own moral code and established his own culture because he was representing his new father the devil. This is evidenced in Genesis 6:5, “and God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
Basically, from Genesis 4 to the coming of Jesus in the New Testament we can see the depravity of man and his allegiance to his new master. If it had not been for God coming upon man to establish a relationship through covenant and demonstrating his power, man would have no other example to show him the “way” that would come through Jesus Christ.
God was not settling for an external relationship with man because he wanted His original design to be resident in man from the beginning. He being the light had to dispel the darkness from the grips of Satan’s control. Our salvation was the restoration of our connection back to God. We did not know we needed it as never in our life were we searching for God. It was only through His love that He came after us and chose us, by presenting Himself to us (John 15:16). Acknowledging Jesus is the only way one can obtain redemption from the death sentence that is presently assigned to all men without Christ.
Scriptures for Further Study
These scriptures authenticate the darkness that man is under without Jesus Christ. Click to read:
