by Terri White

Before Adam fell in the garden, there were two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of God and Evil. All Adam (the man and the woman) knew was God. They didn’t separate God from any part of their lives or from the world around them. They saw God in everything.

However, the fall changed all that. Once Adam had eaten of the forbidden fruit, he began to separate good from evil. Instead of seeing God in everything, he separated what was good (calling it God) from what was evil (calling it the devil). What we desperately need to understand, though, is that God is in control of the devil - He uses him to bring about His purposes -  for God alone has ALL power and authority in heaven and earth. Notice, also, that before the fall, both the man and woman were called Adam. Literally, the man in Hebrew was called Ish and the woman Isha, one like me but different - his counterpart. After the fall, though, Adam named his wife Eve, "the mother of his children." Here is the first illustration of a sense of separation between the first two humans.

From then on humanity has continued to live with a sense of separation from God and each other. In the accounts of the Gospel, Peter is horrified that the Lord Jesus would suffer death on the Roman crucifix because he saw that as evil - he couldn’t see God in it. And Jesus rebuked Peter for that. Are we any different? Don’t we look at the world and all that is going on, separating good from evil? Don’t we say that the battle is good versus evil? And isn’t this way of thinking  a result of the fall?

Beloved, we are delivered from the effects of the fall in the New Covenant, through Jesus’ blood and His body that died and rose again. Jesus’ blood forgives our sins. But we must also know that we were IN Him when He died and rose again. That means our ‘old man’ - that sin nature bent on sinning - died with Jesus. Then our ‘old man’ was replaced with a ‘new man’ - a new creation bent on righteousness. We no longer have the nature to sin, but the nature of God which is holy, blameless, and righteous. That’s who we are. The Holy Spirit joins our ‘new man’ and we are ONE in Him. Just as Jesus said, "My father and I are one," so you can say, "Jesus and I are one" (I Cor. 6:17). This is what happened in your spirit when you surrendered your life to Jesus.

The truth, though, lies within our individual spirits where we are joined to God by the Holy Spirit. And that truth is that we are ONE in God and that God is in everything. (He is not in everything as a pantheist suggests, so that we go around hugging trees, but He does, indeed, hold everything together.) Back in Genesis chapter 50, Joseph saw God in his captivity; he saw that it was God who brought him to Egypt to be a deliverer for his people during the famine. God was working all things together (Rom. 8:28) for His purposes because He works ALL things according to the counsel of His will (Eph. 1:11). ALL things, not just what we call good, but ALL things.

Will we continue to think as Peter did when he proclaimed that Jesus should never die on a Roman crucifix? Will we continue to separate good from evil and be horrified by the current events surrounding us? Will we continue to look at the troubles in our lives as evil instead of instruments in the hands of our loving Father to bring revelation to us, so that we will actually live out the abundant Life already given to us (James 1:1-16; 2 Peter 1:3)?

Most of Christianity avoid teachings on suffering, but it is those very difficulties that God uses to show us that the answer is not always a way out, and that the answer is Himself, our ‘All Sufficiency.’ Troubles are like the dung out of which comes the compost. During the chemical process of changing dung to compost, however, the dung becomes hot and stinky. If you tried to plant seed in it then, the seed would burn up. So you wait (trust) until it converts to compost, that rich soil out of which we plant our gardens. We look around us and see a world of suffering - terrorist activities, war, abused children, divorce, perversion, violence, drugs - and we shake our heads, "How can this be?" As heartbreaking as all of this ‘dung’ is, our perspective must come up higher, to look at this life from a ‘heavenly’ view. God sees the end from the beginning and uses all of these difficulties to draw mankind to Himself.

When we truly see everything that happens as God, then we ‘rest’ in Him, knowing that He is in control. A more understandable translation of "Be still and know that I am God" would be "Relax, I’ve got it ALL under control" (Ps. 46:10). God wants you to know that, and when you do, you will do as Corrie Ten Boom so aptly exhorted, "Nestle, don’t wrestle."

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