Excerpts from   Chapter Three    More Evidence from the Garden

Excerpt 1:

...Satan’s initial lie to humanity, and the only one noted in Scripture that I can think of, was that even if we sinned, death would not surely come(Genesis 3:4).  And the deceiver is so clever, that he has had Christians teaching the very same lie, and under the guise of “Biblical truth”, for almost 2000 years, in this teaching that all souls are eternal.  I showed you in the last chapter where John Macarthur and Kay Arthur both claimed that we will all live forever.  And I recently heard Tony Evans make the same statement.  It didn’t shock me.  I was well aware that these and all of the other radio Bible teachers that I enjoy hold a traditional view of eternal conscious suffering.  But when I hear them come right out and make statements such as, “No one will ever die” and “We will all live forever”, it just really drives home, for me, just how far Satan’s initial lie to humanity has inundated the body of Christ.  And what is worse, not only do we deny the Biblical claim that true death, a total cessation of life, will come for those who reject God, but we further distort the Biblical judgment message by claiming that unbelievers will exist in unbearable agony for all eternity, completely distorting our comprehension of a loving merciful Father, and turning Him more into some kind of cruel monster who actually desires and requires the unending suffering of those who failed to come to know Him, than a just judge who requires the life of those who fail to put their trust in Him.  I’m sure Satan is very pleased with himself and how he has worked his lies into our doctrines. 

     It is interesting to note that Paul, in 2 Corinthians 11:3, was concerned that the Corinthian believers would become deceived “as Eve was”.   When one reads the passage, they will see that Paul’s concern was that in being deceived in this way, it would affect their sincere and pure devotion to Christ, and that they might be deceived if someone came along and presented another perception of God than what he had been preaching.  Is that not exactly what has happened ever since Paul’s time regarding these theories of human immortality and that our merciful Creator eternally torments the lost?        

        So just how was Eve deceived?  The only thing Eve was deceived about was that she wouldn’t die.  It is often erroneously taught that she was lied to by the serpent about becoming like God, knowing good from evil.  God confirms several verses later in the same chapter that this in fact happened when He says that Adam and Eve had become like God, knowing good and evil(compare Genesis 3:5 and 3:22)  The only lie Satan told was that, even if they disobeyed God, they wouldn’t die. 

     The late Adrien Rogers was a classic traditionalist, and while I disagree with him on the doctrine of hell, I enjoy most of his teaching, and I really appreciated a broadcast of one of his sermons re-played recently on Christian radio.  The theme was that one of Satan’s favorite strategies is to confuse our understanding of who God is.  I couldn’t agree more.  If we don’t know Him, we’ll never love Him as we really should.  This is exactly what Paul was concerned about in his second writing to the Corinthians.  And it is exactly what Satan has accomplished in many of us through a false understanding of God’s final judgment of unrepentant sinners.  It kept me from loving God as I should for a long time, and it does the same for many others, keeping Christians from knowing God more fully, and causing many others to never accept Christ in the first place because the requirement of eternal suffering seems so out of character for a loving God who was whole before creation and certainly has no need to keep the lost in existence to be tormented without end.  Therefore many reject the entire gospel message because of the apparent lies and outrageous claims that come attached to it.