There are two great fallacies that hinder today’s Christians in their efforts to rationally proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. One of them has been with us almost from the beginning of humankind. I do not know just when the other one was introduced, but it has been around for a long while.

Fallacy number one was that Adam brought on physical death by eating the forbidden fruit. Satan first twisted man’s future out of kilter in the Garden of Eden by telling Eve and, by extension, Adam the first and biggest lie of all time; which was that by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil man would not die but would, in fact, become Godlike. The second part of his story was actually true. By that first act of disobedience, all mankind, instead of being forever innocent through blissful ignorance, would have the opportunity, by knowing sin and running up against temptation, to develop strong spiritual character. Thereby, as we grew in Christ-like stature, we would become like him.

If you think about it, that biggest of all liars only applied what many politicians and business people today refer to as “spin” to the truth. His purpose in this ruse was twofold. First, it was to establish in our minds that our physical demise—which Jesus would later refer to as the temporary condition called sleep—was the death that God meant when he told them they would surely die. His second purpose was to make us believe that physical existence is the only life there is and thereby make it more tempting to live in the most self-indulgent way possible.

Obviously, it was a remarkable success. Much of humankind accepts the premise still today that we die physically because of Adam’s sin. They believe that this death is final. But knowledgeable Christians know that there is also a spiritual death; and it was to this death that God was referring when he spoke those words to Adam.

We do not inherit life by being born on this earth; we inherit death. We are born alive. But each of us becomes a partaker of that well-known tree of death known as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when we first sin. From that moment on we are as the walking dead until we re-enter spiritual life by being born again. The first purpose of our mortal life is to reach toward that spiritual rebirth. In that quest both the possibility and the process of salvation reside.

But our reaching must be guided by the freedom and ability to reason intelligently. Such freedom was assured in the beginning on the condition that men would retain a close relationship with God. But they soon traded it for a fleeting moment of self-indulgent pleasure and thus were separated from God. To regain that intelligence, Adam and Eve had to re-establish their relationship with God. Everyone born into this life thereafter has been exposed to sin. And we are, therefore, required to follow that same process.