The Man Upstairs – Unveiling the KING of Kings & LORD of Lords (Series Part 6 – Final)
Earth’s Antics:
The evil in the universe did not begin with man. Evil began with the angels, Lucifer, the highest of all the angels. Lucifer, later to become Satan the Destroyer, was originally God’s prime minister in the court of heaven until he revolted along with a third of the angelic hosts. The Fall of Lucifer preceded the “fall of man.” The scripture says in Isaiah 14:12, 13, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weakens the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven; I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will also sit upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.”
Hebrews 2:5 says that the age to come (the millennium) will not be under the jurisdiction or rule of the angels.
This statement implies that the age we live in now is under the rule and government of the angels. A careful study of the angels and their work, as revealed in the Bible, shows that God uses the angels not only as messengers but also as his instruments in the government of the forces of nature (storms, winds, floods, hurricanes, etc.). Angels are also mighty “princes” in charge of the affairs of nations (Daniel 10:10-21).
Man is physical and spiritual; we were designed to live simultaneously in two worlds, the material, and the “heavenly places.” At creation, man received three kinds of life, spiritual, soulical, and physical. The physical life known as BIOS is the lowest kind of life, and public life is possessed by all living things, including plants and animals. The soulical life, also known as Psuche, refers to the natural life, and it is the natural life of the fallen man. Man’s soul is man’s personality, and the soul has organs of volition, emotions, and intellect. God views the man’s soul as the man himself, as written in Matthew 16:26 “For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Our Spiritual life is meant to be Zoe. At regeneration, we receive the very life of God called Zoe in the Greek Language meaning Everlasting life. That is the life the Father has in himself, and He gave to the Incarnate Son to have in Himself. John 5: 26 says, “For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”The state of perfect harmony and state of innocence prevailed before the Fall. That is the meaning of the Hebrew shalom. Shalom (peace) implies wholeness and harmony between man and God, man and nature, and man and his fellow man.
In the realm of human behavior, death came into the world through the sin of Adam. Passages such as Romans 5:12-14 remind us that death was initially foreign to man. Death, as described in the Bible, means not only the dying of the body but spiritual separation from God accompanied by the symptoms of boredom, loneliness, loss of purpose, crime, violence, blights, disease, and a thousand miseries common to our daily human experience.
Despite all the advances in science and medicine, health, education, and sanitation, the mortality rate still stands at 100%. The human mind became wicked, and throughout the scripture, both in the Old Testament (OT) and New Testament (NT), were stories of human greed, lust, wickedness, hatred, sexual immorality, and other destructive behaviors. The human race had no character and no integrity.
Apostle Paul in his letter to Galatians, had this to say “the acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.’ Galatians 5: 19-21a
Darkness covered the whole surface of the earth by the sins of men. God got very angry once and destroyed the whole earth with water, but He swore not to do it again in His Name. But has the earth changed? No. The earth is still full of hypocrisy, but God’s love is unfailing. In His love, He sets out His redemption plan to save ‘downstairs’ from self-destruction. He sent His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. Romans 5:8 says, “But God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Fall of Mankind:
The man was created in the image of God. Then God said: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1: 26-27.
The Creation and Fall are important events in human history, influencing all our lives. The account of the Fall of man in the Bible is the image of every temptation put in the way of man and man’s surrender to it. By the Fall of man, the earth was transformed from a world of happiness, love, and perfection to one of sorrow, hatred, and wickedness. “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.'”
Rather than the threat of instant punishment, annihilation, or immediate extinction, the consequence of eating from the forbidden tree is stated as dying “thou shalt die.” Eating the forbidden fruit would produce immediate spiritual death and, in the long run (inevitable) physical death and mortality for the whole race of Adam. It is confirmed in the New Testament in Romans 5:12, which says, “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned—”
The tree of life is mentioned in Proverbs and re-introduced in Revelation 2:7, 22:2, 14, and 19 in the New Jerusalem. Both trees were indeed literal trees but deeply symbolic as well. The Tree of Life represents life and truth from God, freely available by simply taking and eating. The forbidden tree—literally “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”—represents truth available to man by revelation from God. “Knowing” good and evil means entering into moral dilemmas that only God can unravel. Only God can sort out good and evil and deal with the forces involved in their resolution.
Death Came into the World through Man. Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, death spread to all men because all men sinned; sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come (i.e., of the Messiah, or Last Adam). One consequence of the Fall of man is the so-called “curse on creation,” described in Genesis 3:17-19.
Adam’s sin reduced or disrupted the previously perfect “coupling” between the spiritual and the physical dimensions. Active evil also began to operate in the spiritual world as well as in the physical. God, who duly conversed with the man in the garden, had not left Adam ignorant of the events in heaven but must have acquainted him with the apostasy and the Fall of Satan and other angels for whose coming Adam was to be on guard. Therefore, Satan used the serpent to speak to Eve, thereby taking her unaware, which was no excuse for her misdemeanor of not listening to God’s voice. Eve went ahead and roped in her husband and partner, Adam.
And to Adam, God said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, `You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil, you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.” Genesis 3: 17-19. The Angelic Revolt disrupted nature, and the Fall of Man came into being when Eve yielded to the temptation of the fallen angel Lucifer in the form of a snake.
The disruption of the old creation resulting from the Fall of Lucifer and a host of angels is the root cause for death coming into the human experience. What is often overlooked is the fact that nature itself was also drastically affected (Gen. 3:17,18, Rom. 8:19-22) by the angelic revolt. Lucifer, before his Fall, evidently held “the highest and most important post in the administration of the universe; what we would call God’s prime minister using a human analogy.”. His defection from his high position in God’s government of the cosmos was severe indeed, not only for man but also for nature.
The creation waits eagerly, longing to reveal the Son of God, for the creation was subjected to futility. Not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope. Because the creation will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God, we know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now. And not only the creation, but we, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons of God through our repentance and believe in Him that God sent for our salvation – Jesus Christ.
The disruptions in the physical universe seem to have included some or all of the following:
- The “quality” of time experienced by our first parents in the Garden of Eden was drastically changed during their Fall.
- At least five separate “curses” from God, which are consequences of human sins, are mentioned in Genesis. In some way, we do not yet understand the fecundity of nature reduced by these curses, indicating a reduction of sustaining power from God into the physical creation. Some of the results are opportunistic weeds, bugs, diseases, and maladies.
- The Second Law of Thermodynamics was not in effect before the Fall; the universe was previously self-renewing.
The Second Law can be stated in three ways:
- Energy to do helpful work is becoming less available with time.
- Orderly systems tend to fall apart, collapse, rot, and decay with time, and
- The information content of a system (a measure of the degree of order) tends to decrease with time.
Our once orderly, perfect universe is running apart, losing its order and splendor and becoming more chaotic with time. There was quite possibly no radioactive decay before the Fall due to excellent stability of specific atomic nuclei, which are now unstable or marginally stable. Radioactive decay is undoubtedly a consequence of the Fall (Col. 1:17, 2 Peter 3:10). Catastrophes and “natural” disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, famines, and tsunamis, were unknown in the creation before the Fall. Predatory behavior in the animal world was unknown. Thorns, thistles, pests, and diseases were unknown.
The Bible tells us of the importance of the spiritual realm in all of life. The subject of events, happenings, and laws governing the spiritual world are off-limits to science, which must deal primarily with measurements and observations only of the physical realm. Sin came to the world through temptation. Eve was tempted, and she brought Adam down with her.
Gresham Machen observed in his notes on ‘Fall of Man’:
Certainly it was true that by eating the forbidden fruit Adam attained a knowledge that he did not possess before. That seems to be indicated in verse 22 of the same chapter of the Book of Genesis, where we read: “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.
(Genesis 3:22). Yes, it does seem to have been true that when he ate of the forbidden fruit man came to know something that he had not known before.
He had not known sin before; now he knew it. He had known only good before; now, he knew good and evil. But what a curse that new knowledge was, and what an immense loss of knowledge as well as loss of everything else that new knowledge brought in its train! He now knew good and evil, but, alas, he knew good, now only in memory, so far as his own experience was concerned; and the evil that he knew, he knew to his eternal loss. Innocence, in other words, was gone.
What would have been the advance that resistance to that first temptation would have brought to Adam and Eve? It would have meant that the possibility of sinning would have been over. The probation would successfully have been sustained; man would have entered into a blessedness from which all jeopardy would have been removed. The advance that successful resistance to the temptation would have brought would also have been an advance in knowledge.
That tree was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Well, there is perhaps a real sense in which it would have been to man a tree of the knowledge of good and evil even if he had not eaten of the fruit of it. If he had resisted the temptation to eat the fruit of that tree, he would have come to know evil in addition to the knowledge that he already had of good. He would not have known it because he had fallen into it in his own life but would have known it because, in his resistance to it, he would have put it sharply in contrast with good and deliberately rejected it.
A state of innocence, where the good was practiced without any conflict with evil, would have given place to a state of assured goodness, which evil would have been shown to have no power to disturb. Such was the blessed state into which God was asking the man to come. It was a state which included what I think we can call knowledge of good and evil. Indeed it was a state in which the difference between good and evil would have been discerned.
There was a right way and a wrong way of seeking to attain discernment. The right way was the way of resistance to evil; the wrong way was the way of yielding to it. That was the lie that the tempter brought to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The man was told to seek discernment in Satan’s way and not in God’s. Had man resisted the temptation, what heights of knowledge and strength would have been his! But he yielded, and what was the result? He sought to attain knowledge, and lost the knowledge of good; he sought to attain power and lost his soul; he sought to become God, and when God came to him in the garden, he hid in shameful fear.
The wages of sin are death, but the way to life is Jesus Christ. To get “Upstairs,” you must walk with God and be connected to Jesus Christ; the only way to the truth and life. It is time to get back on track; all you need to do is take the first step and climb those stairs. As you take the step, the tempter will come, but God will give you the needed victory over Satan. You can do all things in Christ, and he is our strength and Tower.
The inside of humankind is wicked that no one can fathom, and such are the deeds of humankind that led to the Fall of humankind. The rulers of the earth are the worst offenders; no wonder King David said this in his tune “Do not destroy” ( Psalm 58: 1-5):
