THE WORD
The Word of God is the foundation of all created order. The Lord spoke and light shone, earth rotated on it axis, plants produced life-giving glucose, and the dust of the earth blew about helplessly. One phrase, “Let there be,” and everything that the eye sees was created out of nothing. The foundation for our creation, the Word, is also the foundation for our existence. God upholds all things “by the Word of His power”[1]. Our regard for this live-giving, energy-sustaining authority has been seriously undermined. If mankind truly understood and trusted the Word of the Lord, sin would have no place in his heart. This was the error in the garden.
Adam and Eve had, by the very mouth of the Lord, been given a commandment and told the consequence of disobedience. Because Satan caused them to distrust the God’s Word, they fell into sin. Satan’s primary purpose is to corrupt the Word of God in the eyes of man, thereby leading man to misunderstand and distrust the Word. If man doesn’t understand or trust this ultimate authority, this life-giving, life-sustaining power, then he will not respect it enough to obey it. Here in lies the foundation of the sinful nature of man.
Man’s sinful nature has its grassroots in the garden. When God had finished speaking created order into existence, He then spoke free will and voluntary love into existence by ordaining a law, “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 surely die”[2]. Man had a choice, heed the Word, or disobey and suffer the consequence. Satan knew that the only way he could get mankind to betray the very foundation of his existence, the Word, was to cause him to distrust it. Because Satan was successful in tainting Eve’s perspective of the Word, sin entered the heart of mankind for this present age. Had Eve’s paradigm of the Word and God’s intention in creating a law not been marred, she would have not disobeyed.
There was One, however, who lived free of Adam and Eve’s sinful nature. It is evident that Jesus, when tested, used the Word to combat temptation. When Jesus was tried in the wilderness, Satan’s primary purpose was to accuse the Word, similar to his accusation of the Word in the garden. Just like the garden, when Satan quoted the command that God gave to Eve, Satan quoted scripture in his temptation of Jesus[3]. Because Jesus understood the Word of the Lord, because He trusted the authority of the Father, He was not swayed by this attempted deception. Each time He was tested with another temptation, it was His wisdom and understanding of the Word that empowered Him to overcome sin. Jesus remained sinless because He was not compromised by the nature of man to doubt the Word.
This has been the favorite deception of Satan since the garden and will be even unto the end of the age. In the end, there will be a false religion based upon false peace. Many religious leaders will com forward and claim that there is more than one way to get to heaven in an attempt to unify the nations. This is deliberately in opposition to the Word of the Lord. The Word states that there is only one way to the Father, and that way is Jesus Christ[4]. By compromising the absolute truth that Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life, these religious leaders are falling into Satan’s trap, the very same trap that he used in the garden thousands of years earlier. Satan caused Eve to think wrongly of the Word in the beginning, and he will certainly try to cause the bride of Christ to fall in the same way.
The Word is the very foundation of the existence of everything man can see. Yet, when it is called into question, he is deceived into thinking lies about the goodness of its nature. This produces rebellion in his heart. Where rebellion is, there also is sin. The sinful nature of man is found in this root problem. The enemy is lurking at the door of the heart of man just waiting for the opportune moment to deceive him with a marred image of the Word of God. Sin began this way in the garden, and has been working tirelessly in the same way ever since. The church is not exempt from being tempted in this way. It is imperative that the bride of Christ recognize where Adam and Eve failed and watch that she doesn’t, in the same way, fall. By hiding the Word in her heart, she will overcome just as Jesus overcame in the wilderness. By asking for a Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation[5], she will be filled with the same Spirit that empowered Jesus to remain sinless. This is the hope of a new nature, of a life after sin – the Word.
