ALIVE: Chapter 28 The Death Virus

ALIVE: Chapter 28 The Death Virus

Before I continue this tale about God's decision to destroy death instead of destroying life, as He did on a massive scale during the flood so He could be rid of evil, it occurred to me to again explain the word death and its origin. It can be confusing.

In the beginning Adam was made in the image and likeness of the all powerful, brilliant, and immortal God. He was given dominion over all the animals and living creatures. All of the laws of nature that we have today, we had then, the second law of thermodynamics, that copper conducts electricity, boiling point of water, the cycle of birth and death for animals and plants. Everything was the same except one thing.

Adam was born to be immortal because he and later his wife Eve, were two little replicas of the divine immortal God that He placed on His new planet earth. The death threat was not a farce. Not knowing good and evil, but being like God in every other way, Adam and Eve could not get sick and their bodies could not die.

Death has no substance. It is a virus that can only exist attached to a living organism. It is a parasite that has no form or breath of its own. God is pure life. Death cannot attach itself to God, because He is pure. He can't separate from Himself. Neither could death attach itself to Adam and Eve as long as they maintained their divine image, evidenced by their trust, and they stayed away from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Some people use the word "obey." They say Adam and Eve did not obey God's command. No, that's not what happened. The word "obey" has a dual connotation that is not accurate. "Trust" has a singular, unified, connotation which is more accurate. Adam and Eve did not disobey, they distrusted.

When Adam and Eve separated themselves from God, when they believed the serpent instead of God who said they would die if they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they created a breach, imagine a cut in your skin, into which the virus death could seep, latch on, and grow to feed on your life until it is entirely consumed. That is death. Some people call this cut "sin" because sin is nothing more than separation from God's will. Entering through their minds and hearts (i.e. their souls), death ultimately took over their entire bodies too. They died because they ate the fruit and they died because they believed the serpent's lie. They died because they distrusted (a separation) the source of pure life. Sin causes decay and disease which ends in death.

Eating the fruit placed them right smack in the middle of a tumultuous world where the combatting forces of good and evil tossed them to and fro. Sound familiar? Aren't we all as dizzy as can be in the middle of this world of good and evil? Would that good and evil existed without our knowledge of its fruit. Such ignorance would be blissful.

Adam and Eve were evicted from the one place in the world where God shielded them from the battling forces of good and evil. Adam and Eve immediately contracted the death virus. God did not lie to them. They immediately lost their immortality.

Distrusting God and knowing good and evil caused death. It still does. Spiritual death (i.e. sin) resulted in physical death for Adam and Eve and made death the result of a diseased sinful life for all human beings after them. Born divine humans, higher than animals, they fell to the level of animals who, being unlike God, were always vulnerable to the decay of nature.

God (and Perambula) knew that He had to destroy spiritual death, He had to close the breach created by distrust (I.e separation from God, i.e. sin), before physical death could be destroyed.

For God, to destroy death, now that mankind was aware of good and evil, and separated from Him in distrust required a long term and complex plan. It was a plan wherein humankind would know good and evil, like God, yet be reunited with Him in trust and love, hence they would be sinless. This reunion could repel the virus death and restore the image of divinity which is immortal. That was how God planned to destroy death. What a challenge God and Perambula had before them.

"Okay, can we please get back to the story of Abram?" whined Perambula. "I want to know what happens to him!"