The spiritual death which followed the perversion of the senses was attended, in time, by physical death. Indeed, the fruit had scarcely been eaten when the attention of the man and his wife was turned toward externals. The soul, which had enveloped the physical man as a shroud of light, withdrew, and the physical man appeared. A sense of their nakedness now appalled them. Something was lacking; and with all the glory they had known, with all the truths which had been revealed, there was nothing to take the place of the departed spiritual nature. “Dying, thou shalt die,” was the decree; and had not the Saviour at this moment made known to Adam the plan of the cross, eternal death would have been inevitable.
God, through His instruction, had taught that the result of faith would be immortal life. Satan taught, and attempted to prove his logic by a direct appeal to the senses, that there was immortal life in the wisdom that comes as the result of human reason. The method employed by Satan is that which men to-day call the natural method, but in the mind of God the wisdom of the world is foolishness. The method which to the godly mind, to the spiritual nature, seems natural, is foolishness to the world.
True education and redemption
There are but two systems of education,—the one based on what God calls wisdom, the gift of which is eternal life; the other based on what the world regards as wisdom, but which God says is foolishness. This last exalts reason above faith, and the result is spiritual death. That the fall of man was the result of choosing the false system of education can not be controverted. Redemption comes through the adoption of the true system of education.
Re-creation is a change of mind,—an exchange of the natural for the spiritual. “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” In order to render such a change possible, Christ must bruise the head of the serpent; that is, the philosophy of the devil must be disproved by the Son of God. Christ did this, but in so doing, his heel, representing his physical nature, was bruised. The result of the acceptance of the satanic philosophy has been physical suffering; and the more completely man yields to the system built upon that philosophy, the more complete is the subjection of the race to physical infirmities.
Physical degeneracy
After the fall, man turned to coarser articles of diet, and his nature gradually became more gross. The spiritual nature, at first the prominent part of his being, was dwarfed and overruled until it was but the “small voice” within. With the development of the physical and the intellectual to the neglect of the spiritual, have come the evils of modern society,—the love of display, the perversion of taste, the deformity of the body, and those attendant sins which destroyed Sodom, and now threaten our cities. Man became careless in his work also, and the earth failed to yield her fullness. As a result, thorns and thistles sprang up.
It is not surprising, after following the decline of the race, to find that the system of education introduced by Christ begins with the instruction given in the garden of Eden, and that it is based on the simple law of faith. We better appreciate the gift of Christ when we dwell upon the thought that while suffering physically, while taking our infirmities into his own body, He yet preserved a sound mind and a will wholly subject to the Father’s, that by so doing the philosophy of the archdeceiver might be overthrown by the divine philosophy.
Again, it is but natural to suppose that when called upon to decide between the two systems of education, the human and the divine, and Christian education is chosen, that man will also have to reform his manner of eating and living. The original diet of man is again made known, and for his home he is urged to choose a garden spot, away from crowded cities, where God can speak to his spiritual nature through His works.