Before the Fall

One of the things which we all look forward to, and which always gives us a lot of pleasure, is going out with our friends or having them round to our home; and the more we like them the happier we are.

So when human beings first appeared on the earth, they were very happy because they and God were such good friends.  The better they knew God, the more they loved him and found it very easy to please him in everything.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis tells the fate of one family as typical of what happened to these first human beings on the earth. 

All the time human beings put God at the centre of their lives they were ‘at one’ with God; they were his friends.  The Bible calls this happy world of long ago the Garden of Eden, and as we say, everything in the garden was lovely.  God himself used to walk with them in the Garden, or to put it another way, human beings walked with God.  They enjoyed a personal relationship with him which was happy and unspoilt.  There was no sorrow, nor was there death as we know it now.  What would have happened when human beings’ life on earth came to an end we don’t know, but perhaps their bodies would have changed and they would have been taken to Heaven immediately to go on living with God there.