At Easter we celebrate Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. The Bible teaches that Jesus came to fix a problem that started with Adam and Eve generations beforehand. Jesus came to demonstrate the difference between believing there is a God –– and believing God.
Which kind of believer are you?
Long before Jesus came, Adam and Eve turned against God. They didn’t believe God was telling them the truth. You know the story: God warned Adam and Eve about the fatal fruit, Adam and Eve were influenced by Satan and his lies. They ate it. But Satan didn’t forcethem to eat it. Adam and Eve decided God was a liar. Only at that point, when they didn’t believe God, were they able to grab and eat the fatal fruit.
The original sin wasn’t their eating. Their sin was choosing to believe God was a liar. That’s what shattered their relationship with God, just as your relationship with your wife or husband would shatter if they suddenly believed you to be a liar. How would you feel if your wife, your husband, your kids suddenlybelieved you to be a liar, even though you had been completely honest? What would happen? You may still love them, but how would that affect your relationship?
It wasn’t any different with God. How could God maintain a two-way relationship with Adam and Eve? They believed he was a liar. Adam and Eve suddenly became spiritual mutants, breaking the bond of trust and the ability to co-exist with an honest God. Not only had Adam and Eve ruined their own relationship with God, they ruined generations of offspring who would now inherit their spiritual mutation––with weakened genetic patterns, trying to live without God or his input.
We have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Maybe Adam and Eve had eight senses and God limited them to five when he made them leave the Garden. Maybe God reduced their number of chromosomes, changed their DNA, so they would no longer live forever. Jesus changed the molecular composition of water when he turned it to wine. God and Jesus created Adam and Eve. So it seems an easy thing that God and Jesus could tweak Adam and Eve’s DNA before they left the Garden of Eden.
Maybe what we now label “spiritual” things used to be part of our original DNA. Maybe spiritual things really belong to a part of the high-tech biology that God designed us to have. Maybe “believing” is the first of several gateway senses that begin to restore us and let us have a more loving, productive relationship with God.
God loves us so much, he sent Jesus to help us realize the benefits of “believing.” He sent Jesus to Israel when the Roman government, the most influential in history, controlled Israel. Since Romans kept excellent records, accounts of Jesus’s death and life-giving ministry would be preserved along with the disciple’s accounts.
Jesus was eventually murdered by the Hebrew mafia and the Romans. But because Jesus believed God and trusted him, he came back to life. He remained on Earth for about a month while doing impromptu visits here and there, eventually leaving Israel and his growing numbers of believers by floating upward out of sight. By agreeing to die and by his resurrection afterward, Jesus demonstrated the ultimate life-giving benefit of believingGod. Jesus restored the pathway to trusting God. The same one that Adam and Eve had corrupted.
Thankfully, if we believe, we can follow Jesus on that rebuilt pathway to an eternal and blessed relationship with our loving Father, God.
There are many things here on Earth that we don’t fully understand. Some think that if you can’t see, hear, taste, smell or touch something, it doesn’t exist––even though radio waves remain unseen, natural gas is odorless, and love has no height or width. Our five senses are hardly the end-all of learning and gaining knowledge.
Why must our infant science and technology be separate from spirit? Maybe spirit is advanced science and biology on a grander scale than we’re able to understand––and through earthly death we shed our prideful ambition and limitations gleaned from having only five senses inherited from Adam and Eve. Spiritual matters and believing exist beyond physics, beyond chemistry and are taught by The Spirit of Truth, a comforting intelligence who can teach us even more.
When Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” Jesus remained silent and didn’t answer. How could he? It was a stupid question based on a prideful limitation of having only five senses. Pilate should have asked, “Whois Truth?”
We have an enemy, called Satan who wants to keep us from Truth. He wants us to avoid God. He wants to convince us that we evolved from pond scum, argue that earth is a billion years old, and fight with each other about big bangs. Satan’s most deceitful trick, the same one he used on Adam and Eve, is that he will let us believe in God, but not believe God.
Jesus believed in Satan’s existence but did not believe Satan. Jesus defeated Satan and the pattern of death inherited from Adam and Eve. Jesus had ultimate reliance on God our Father, was obedient through death, burial and resurrection, and proved it to the entire world. We can follow Jesus to eternal life by believing God instead of believing Satan. Jesus showed us that we can experience a life beyond the limitations of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or fingers.
This Easter, instead of just believing that there is a God, may we follow Jesus and truly celebrate the love God has for us by actually “believing” him.
John 3:16. “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.