Lucifer Exiled to Earth
When God placed man on Earth, it was perfect. God exiled Lucifer, a fallen angel, to Earth to live out eternity as punishment for attempting to take over God’s throne. He and his followers (other fallen angels) angrily felt they deserved to be God. When God placed man in the Garden of Eden, Lucifer saw his chance to get even with God by destroying God’s perfect paradise for His creation.
Adam and Eve Tricked
Lucifer (also known as Satan or the devil) tricked Adam and Eve, the first couple in the Bible, into disobeying God’s rules. Although they tried to conceal what they did from God, He sees everything and knew exactly what they did and who encouraged them to do it.
God confronted them gently with their lie, trying to get them to confess their sin. Each of them blamed someone else for their failure (sound familiar?) rather than admitting their disobedience and asking God for forgiveness.
The First Lie
God reminded them that He was God and knew everything; therefore, lying was pointless. Consequently, they could not stay in Eden any longer. God expects and deserves obedience from his creation. He gave us everything in existence. We have nothing that we made ourselves. Everything is a gift from him and could be taken away in a moment at his wish, for He is God. Lucifer started with one of his first lies to man. He tried to convince Adam and Eve that they were as important as God and had a right to make their own decisions about their lives.
Realizing they were wrong because they owed their lives and all they had to God, Adam and Eve felt shame standing before God, naked and unclothed. Before that day, disobeying God never occurred to them. They honored and respected Him; therefore, obeying him was their pleasure. However, once Lucifer began to deceive them, bringing lying into their world and encouraging them to question God’s authority and insinuating they had rights that God was withholding from them, sin entered the world and took off too fast to stop.
Shame
Previously, Adam and Eve’s experience did not include embarrassment or shame. They walked around without clothes in front of God, their children, and grandchildren without a thought of shame or embarrassment (Adam and Eve were the parents or grandparents of everyone on Earth).
Expelled From Eden
After Satan, in the form of a serpent, convinced them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their disobedience and the evil created by saying to God that they felt they were as crucial as He was. Their action changed the close relationship God had with his creation, and in the same way God had to expel Lucifer from Heaven, God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden. Their hearts were no longer pure to Him, and therefore, they had to restore their trusting relationship before he could again feel confident of their loyalty. They now listened to Satan instead of God.
Foretelling of Jesus Coming to Save Mankind
Even in mankind’s darkest moments, God gave them hope. When He told the three their consequences for their actions apart from leaving the Garden, He told the story of man’s future redemption. Adam (man) would work hard toiling the fields for food. The serpent, which previously could move upright, would thereafter crawl on its belly across the Earth. Women would labor hard when giving birth to her offspring and she would try to dominate man causing tension in their union. However, God added that there would always be hostility between the serpent and the woman, and between the serpent’s offspring and hers. The serpent’s offspring would strike the woman’s heel, but the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head. This was a foretelling of Jesus coming through Eve’s bloodline to crush Lucifer’s hold on the world and crush his rule over the Earth forever.
How Do We Acquire Sin?
God has no sin. He created mankind not to have sin, but man was weak, and when Satan placed temptation before him, he fell for the trap, bringing sin into the world. The angels of Heaven also have free will, and therefore, sin was present in Heaven at the time of Lucifer’s rebellion. God found it necessary to expel Lucifer’s followers from among the angels in Heaven, along with Lucifer, casting them all to Earth in exile. God cannot allow sin to go unpunished, or Heaven will become like Earth, full of corruption. When he finds it, he removes it. He will not let sin enter Heaven from the outside.
God wants us all to come to Heaven. He will let anyone and everyone enter who is willing to commit to trying to be obedient to his expectations. His main expectation is to love and care for one another, essentially following the Ten Commandments. He knows that we are selfish people, however, and when he tried to let us do it on our own, we failed. That’s why Jesus came to this world, to accept our sins as his own, take on our sins until death came from being nailed to a cross, and through his death, bury those sins forever, rising from the grave with our sins fully forgiven. Without his sacrifice, we would have had no power to stop sinning and would have been destined for an eternity in Hell for disobedience to God.
Ask Jesus for Salvation
All we have to do to get into Heaven is ask Jesus to be our Savior. We are powerless to stop sinning. We must ask Jesus to forgive us, remove our sin, wash us clean as snow, help us stop sinning further, and help us follow Jesus always.
However, a lot of people don’t want to give up control of their lives to anyone and say they would rather die and go to Hell than follow someone they have to obey.
I wonder if they would feel that way if they understood what Hell was like? Here’s an interview with Dr. John Burke, who talked to people who died and went to Hell for a while before being brought back to life. They explain what they experienced. The second link is the contrast of what he found when he interviewed those who said they went to Heaven when they died and later came back.
