The Fall

It would be very nice if the world were still like that, but it is not.  No one now finds it easy to love God or to do what is right, and the Bible tells us why.

You’ll remember that the Devil wanted to get the world under his own power.  Well, he now thought he saw the way to do it.  He began by putting ideas into the heads of human beings.  “Why should you love God best of all?  Why not put yourself first?  Go on, please yourself once in a while: never mind about God”.  So human beings pleased themselves by doing on purpose what they knew to be wrong.

The Bible explains this by picturing the Devil as a snake who slides up and persuades Adam and Eve to disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

There was absolutely no excuse for human beings to sin against God like that because they found it so easy and pleasant to obey him.  However they did it, and from that moment everything went wrong.  Everything in the garden was no longer lovely.