By Mary Carothers

God is love, the Bible tells us so. I have experienced it in my own personal life, and Jesus proves it!  Yet, have you ever felt that God was maybe a little bit hard on Adam and Eve when he drove them out of the Garden of Eden?  After all, we might reason, eating a piece of fruit wasn’t that bad a sin!

When the angels rebelled against God, they became eternally separated from Him.  Calvary and God’s forgiveness are not for them (see Hebrews 2:16).  Only to mankind is the opportunity given for repentance and restoration.

Remember in Genesis 3 when God would come in the cool of the day to fellowship with Adam and Eve?  God longed for fellowship with them, and He still longs for fellowship with us today.  Christ died not only to impart forgiveness for our sins, but that we might ultimately be restored to fellowship with God.  With our spirits reborn, we now have a measure of fellowship with our Lord (see John 3:3).  But our bodies are still sinful, as Paul tells us in Romans 7:22,23.

Would you want to live forever with a redeemed spirit, but in a sinful body?  Not me!  I want to exchange this sinful, mortal body for my immortal body (see I Cor. 15:53). That can only happen when this mortal body is put off.  And that can only happen when I die.  If God in His loving wisdom had not forced Adam and Eve out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life, we might have lived forever in our sinful state – and in broken fellowship with God!

I’m so thankful that God loves us with a perfect love, aren’t you?