WITHOUT CHRIST'S HOLY SPIRIT, KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL SHRIVELS THE SOUL & KILLS THE LIFE.
GENESIS 3:22-23 And the LORD God said, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever..." therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
God our Father created the human race in His image and in His likeness. There is most definitely more to God's image and likeness in each of us than ever meets our dying, lying eyes. That old Eagles tune tells it straight...
You can't hide your lying eyes / And your smile is a thin disguise / I thought by now you'd realize / There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes...
The main points of Godly image-and-likeness in the human race are the powers of willpower and discriminating choice-making, both driven by the driving wheel of pure thought. Without thoughtful discrimination life on earth is an escalation of war.
Preachers, teachers, scientists, psychiatrists, and all the other credentialed experts who live off the always-failing human condition never do, and never will get down to the real nitty-gritty of what it means to be human and how they don't know anything but how to play-up and play-down the corruption, weakness, guilt, shame, and death of the human body which (for a time) houses the soul, the Breath of the living God, quickening each one of us in our millions and billions.
Pay attention when God Speaks:
And the LORD God said, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil..."
That Scripture has been a part of human history since Moses got it straight from God Himself. That Scripture is a crystal-clear statement which tells the whole world of humanity that knowledge of good and evil was KNOWN to God our Father and all the denizens of His Eternal Kingdom eons before the human race was created.
That fact is profoundly impressive on its face and yet, you can go to church, synagogue and mosque meetings your whole life and never hear a word about it. God Himself says, straight-up, "the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil..."
And this is the exact point where I could give in, like the big dummy that I am most of the time, to the strong inclination for a long-winded discussion of how Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then later on, Moses and the 12 tribes of Israel, and then the God-Awfully Detailed Law of Moses: how all of THAT was God's way of displaying for the whole world to see that no amount of mere human effort will ever be enough to overcome the influence, the corruption, the power, and the death caused by the once-forbidden, then disobediently misappropriated knowledge of good and evil.
How simple is that? It cannot be any more simple than that. The mystery of death is no mystery. The mystery of why the human race is continually destroying itself is no mystery. Disease, violence, monstrous perversion, you-name-it-you-name-it-you-name-it: none of it is a mystery because the source and power behind ALL of it—roots, stems, limbs and bitter, bitter fruit—comes from our woefully misused, abused, and totally misunderstood knowledge of good and evil.
Did you ever see that really beautiful verse of Scripture that comes from a conversation the LORD had with his great prophet, Isaiah?
If not, feast your eyes and mind:
Isaiah 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
Got that? Let us reason together. That's God Himself coming to the table wherever YOUR TABLE happens to be in Spirit and in Truth. Your prayer closet? The most-secret closet of your thoughts? He is there, waiting for You. The One who created the soul of your consciousness is making YOU an offer: "Come, let us reason together..."
And to make sure you don't miss the point, the LORD speaks of the monstrosity of Satanic evil afflicting every living soul in a body of flesh: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
In case you missed it, Isaiah is also the prophet God employed to announce the birth of His Christ, Jesus:
Isaiah 7:14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
The name Immanuel means "God is with us." Period. He is with all of us, right now. He knows precisely and absolutely how helpless we are against the Satanic rebellion that began long, long before God ever said, "Let there be light."
Yeah, you could start all sorts of stupid philosophical arguments about "why" God would create such beautiful things and then let the rebel apostate Satan mess it all up. Maybe the answer is as simple as everything else God does: He's looking for reasonable people who have sense enough to know the difference between good and evil; and then act accordingly.
The real sticking point at the moment is Satan. Satan is as real as You and I. And when it comes to understanding how thoughts, willpower and choice-power work in tandem, Satan knows more about You and I and all the rest of us than we will ever know about ourselves.
From the way it's laid out in Genesis chapter 3, it appears that Satan took what little he knows about the knowledge of good and evil and used it to poison the whole human race. Satan is not a god. He is a God-created being. Whatever Satan’s share in the knowledge of good and evil, it is the tip of that iceberg—but it’s enough to destroy the whole human race. Without Christ’s Spirit, that is exactly what would happen.
One of Satan's sickest tricks? Using humans to create all sorts of theologies, doctrines, religions, sects, cults, scientific theories, philosophies, doctrines and dogmas. All that man-made malarkey might contain grains, kernels, maybe even a trainload of fact that makes sense enough to be passed off as "truth."
Truth is One Thing and ONE THING only. Everything else is a fact that either does, or does not honestly, genuinely pertain to The Truth.
John 14:6 Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
How many different ways have you ever heard the word t-r-u-t-h employed? The old courthouse oath should read: …the facts, the real facts, and nothing but the facts.
Knowledge of good and evil makes it easy to discount what Jesus said about himself. And for this long painful moment that we call t-i-m-e, each of us is perfectly free to CHOOSE what we WILL THINK is true. God is allowing Satan to tighten the screws of facts disguised as “truth” and it’s driving people crazy.
Then there’s this: "If God really loves us so much, why does He let all this evil stuff happen?"
God ain't lettin' it happen, bub. We are. God's image and likeness in the human race includes (in large measure) the power of reason. The whole human race is now engaged in an global era of absolutely unreasonable conjecture; evil facts passed off as truth. It is not God our Father who allows these patently unreasonable things to happen in our world. It is us. You. Me. All of us. We may KNOW better. DOING BETTER is the hard part. God-ordained capital punishment is a blessing, not a curse.
The evil we've allowed Satan to visit upon us and the evil that we visit upon ourselves had a beginning, and will have an end. But it won't be us who finally puts out Satan's evil lights. In the Great Prayer of John chapter 17, we are told the end of the story:
John 17:11-13 Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Your name. Those whom You gave Me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled. But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves.
The son of perdition is Satan. The Books of Ezekiel and Revelation explain in detail how the final destruction of Satan takes place. In the meantime, Christ's Spirit abides with us. After Satan and his crew are gone, knowledge of good and evil will still exist in heaven and earth. But understanding of its meaning and purpose will be a whole lot better than anybody in a body of flesh understands it now.
Amen