Genesis 2:16-17 - God Said
Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
And the first theologian (Satan) comes along and says, Yea, hath God said? (Gen. 3:1)
With his doubt implanted in the mind of Eve, he then hastens to say; Ye shall not surely die. The lie follows the implanted doubt. The implication is that man does not really die. There is a spiritual sense to this that must be taken, according to the self-appointed teacher. Death is sometimes spoken of as a separation from God. Some of the followers of the first theologian even go so far as to say that dead people are more alive than they were when they were living. The spiritists and the orthodox pretty well agree on this notion.
So death does not mean death, but a greater and fuller life. We are told that this is the spiritual sense of it. Spiritual sense? Nonsense!
The rest of the lie is, 'Ye shall be as gods' (Gen 3:5). The word used for gods here is Elohim, the same word as God in Genesis 1:1. So the liar would have us believe that we are in some way immortal, that we cannot die. He would go so far as to say that God cannot destroy or kill what He has created.
So the background is set for all Scripture that follows, and all must be interpreted in keeping with the doubt and the lies that follow. John 3:16 uses the words everlasting life and perish for the future of man, but we are told that the spiritual sense is everlasting bliss or everlasting misery.
We are told that when any prophecy of the OT speaks of blessedness in the future, it means the church is to obtain it. But if there is a curse, then that refers to Israel.
Now going back to Genesis again, we are told that eating the tree means learning good and evil, that there was no fruit and no actual tree. This does not explain the free eating of other trees in the garden, nor does it explain the eating of the tree of life and living on and on. The spiritual sense here might mean that education will give man immortality. That would conform to modern trends and thought, to say the least. Some say that the woman on the beast in Rev. 17:3-14 is Rome. But the name on her forehead says Babylon. So the spiritual sense might be stretched to make black mean white, if necessary, to bolster up a peculiar system of teaching. Or is it just a plain lie?
This spiritual sense, when applied to the ascension of our Lord, has been stretched to mean that when He and the disciples were out walking, He got a bit ahead of them and went up over a hill, and they never saw Him again, so they surmised that He went up to heaven. Was this story a product of faith?
We are asked to believe that everything that pertains to The Kingdom really pertains to the church. It would take a whole library to set forth all the lies and fables that have come from this system of spiritual sense which hides the truth.
