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I received the following question from an online listener:
Thank you for your question. You have identified a real problem for people today; sinners living in this world of sin experience an uneasy restlessness within—a “void” as you say. People long for something more and, all too often, turn to harmful activities to try to fill that emptiness within. I agree that the only effective solution is to open our hearts to Jesus Christ and have the Spirit dwell within. This heals and restores us and removes that sense of something missing.
However, to compare the way sinners function today with the way sinless Adam and Eve functioned in Eden would be a mistake. Prior to their sin, Adam and Eve had no void, no defect, no unhealthy longings, no emptiness, and no deficiency of any kind. They were perfect. They just were not mature.
God can create sinless beings, but the character cannot be created; rather, it must be developed by the freewill choices of the sentient being. Eve didn’t sin because there was something deficient in her creation, but because she believed a lie. The acceptance of the lie broke her sense of love and trust, and she experienced fear and insecurity. This led to taking the fruit.
Adam and Eve did not seek to give up eternal life, but, having believed the lie, thought falsely that eternal life and a higher order existence would be obtained by taking of the fruit of the forbidden tree. The loss of their conditional immortality was not what they wanted, but was the unavoidable result of deviating from God’s design for life. Their actions changed them from perfect, healthy, sinless beings to terminal beings—they were dying from the result of what they had done to themselves.
Evidence that there was no manufacturer’s defect in the creation of Adam and Eve is found in Jesus, who was able to live a perfect, sinless life in a body subject to much more severe temptations—physical weakness, hunger, fatigue, and pain—than Adam and Eve experienced. Yet, despite Christ’s disadvantages, as compared to sinless Adam, Christ still lived a sinless life and developed a perfect human character.
Thus, there was no void in Adam and Eve in Eden that caused their sin—there was an enemy who deceived them and broke their trust in God.
Praise God that, despite this, He did not abandon us, but sent His Son to fix what Adam and Eve did to this creation. He revealed truth to win us back to trust, exposed Satan as a liar, and developed a perfect human character that He offers as a gift to all who will trust Him. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Thus, “It is no longer I who lives but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
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