God’s Comforting Answer to Our Need for Salvation

Adam and Eve were given the ability to refuse temptation. While owning a perfect range of choices given them by God, they were not destined from creation to choose the wrong and reject the right. Yet they rejected the good. They fell into a temptation from the deceiver Satan: “You shall be as gods knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The statement was a lie! Why?
The creation story gives us an important distinction between “knowing” and “being.” The existence of Adam and Eve as humans, having life and vitality formed perfectly by God, meant that they knew good in its every possible meaning. They could not know evil in the way God did because He is all-knowing, while their knowledge was limited. The creatures cannot raise themselves to the level of the Creator. The full impact of Satan’s lie was that they came to know evil because they became evil by trusting the word of the Evil One. Because they had been perfect, Adam and Eve could have said “no” to him.  Instead, they became sinners. The fact that they succumbed had terrible consequence.
Sin became proactive in the human nature. It turned out to be a predator. It even passed to the next generation, involving Adam’s children, where its obvious power showed. Hoping to forestall tragedy, the Lord warned Cain about hatred. God said to Cain, “Sin’s desire is for you” (Genesis 4:7). Though forewarned, Cain let the predator close in: hatred consumed him and he murdered his own brother, Abel (4:8).
But there is another thread to be picked up and woven into this sad tapestry: the meaning of death. Our Lord’s warning to our first parents included a threat. They would surely die by rejecting His word. What did death mean? It meant our parents abandoned God. They forsook His holy will and went their own way, guided by Satan. And Satan’s will had the intention of leading them to hell. After all, this was the place God had made for Satan and his angels as the punishment for sinning, and the Lord cast him out of heaven (2 Peter 2:4). And so the old evil foe wanted to get even with God. He decided he would steal God’s chief creature from Him. Then an act of sheer mercy on God’s part occurred!
God spoke His life-giving word in a promise to Adam and Eve, even while it is as a death blow to Satan, who in the form of a serpent is listening: “I will put enmity between you, (Satan) and the woman, and between her seed and your seed; it will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit decided that the fulfillment of this promise of hope for sinful humans meant that the Son should take human nature to His person, assuming human flesh into His being, in order to accomplish the salvation of all people.
Why is Jesus Christ, the God-Man, able to save sinners? This will be the topic of the next article in our series on the Person and Work of Christ.
James Olsen is an ELS pastor emeritus living in Ontario, Wisconsin.