I have a question about man before the fall…there was no evil in the world until man disobeyed God…is this somehow tied to the way Lucifer refused to serve God?
Could the fall of man and the revolt in heaven be all the same thing…I hope I am not taking us off track…if I am I apologize
To understand the difference between the fall of Lucifer and the fall of man, one has to look at Mt. 4, the Temptation of Jesus. Satan is the tempter of humanity. Humanity does not participate in his rebellion against God.
There is a very important point that has to be acknowledged here. The first Adam allowed himself to be seduced by the tempter. The human Christ is the new Adam and he refutes all of Satan’s temptations. Christ restores order to our humanity. Through Christ’s strength against the temptation to sin, we are encouraged that we too have the strength to resist temptations. We are not predestined to fall every time that we are tempted.
This was a common mistake made by the Protestant Reformers who looked at the fall of Adam and not at the triumph of Christ in the desert. They assumed that man was predestined to be ugly and sinful, because of Adam’s sin. Worse, they assumed that man could not resist sin without the grace of God, which is true. But they forgot that God’s mercy provides this grace freely to everyone, not only to a selected few.
When God creates Adam, he creates the human race. It is his desire to establish man by his side for all eternity. In other words, it is his desire that man go to heaven, not that some be lost. Those who are lost are lost by their own choice, not by God’s design.
If we look at Christ’s temptations in the desert and the temptation in the Garden of Eden, they are the same. In the garden, Satan says to man that he shall be like God if he disobeys. In the desert he says to Jesus that God will provide everything for him, even if he disobeys. In both cases, Satan tempts man to abuse God’s love. There is nothing new here. We still struggle with the temptation to abuse God’s love by taking things for granted, by assuming that we can do what we want and be forgiven just by asking for it, without any real contrition. We still try to abuse God’s love by abusing the gifts that he gives us. For example, is not abortion or the destruction of our planet an abuse of God’s love?
One final comment on the fall of Adam and the temptations of Christ, the three things that man wants most are power, pleasure and wealth. This was what Satan was alluding to when he told Adam that he would be like God. God is all powerful. God is all joy (pleasure). God owns all that he created, wealthy beyond our imagination since we do not know yet know everything that he created.
In Christian spirituality, the early Christians observed Jesus’ response to Satan and compared it to that of Adam. They observed that Jesus put into practice what they early Fathers called the Evangelical Counsels: obedience, chastity, and poverty. He was obedient to the will of his father. He would not give in to satisfy the longings of his body. He did not cave in to Satan’s promise of fortune and glory, but chose the emptiness of the desert to find God.
The temptations of Christ and the temptation of Adam go hand in hand. In Genesis we see man destroy himself in search of power, pleasure and wealth. In the Gospels we see the God-Man put these things into their proper place through the exercise of discipline: obedience, chastity, and poverty. These are called counsels, because Christ reveals to us how to respond to the most powerful temptations that are part of the human condition. He shows us that also in the human condition are the ability to resist and triumph. God’s grace has made it possible. He urges us through his own example to follow the counter path to temptation. Thus we call them counsels.
The rebellion of Satan and his angels was not about resisting temptation. It was about tempting God. There is the difference between the fall of man and the fall of Lucifer.
Fraternally,
JR
