What really happened in Eden? What are the implications of the Fall of Adam and Eve? These questions and more deserve answers. By believing God at face value and choosing to disbelieve every phrase from Satan, we find substantive, scriptural answers to the following and more:
Did God intend our First Parents to disobey His commandment? Was there "no other way"?
God is "in charge" only insofar as He gave us, His children, the moral agency to choose our own path, to act according to our own choices and to fully own and experience the natural consequences of those choices. He stands by to offer hope, rescue, relief, comfort, healing and Eternal Life. God's great plan is for His children to individually and freely own options and to make choices--to choose life and eternal joy because we also legitimately have the option to fall. Betraying God in favor of believing the Liar is to choose and experience the opposite of God's joy: sorrow, suffering, misery and death. Yes, there was another path to His joy, the details of which are lost to us. Now, because of our First Parents, the only relevant way is the "way, the truth, and the life" who is our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.
What did Jesus really expect from us when He commanded us to be perfect?
Perfection is not what is often imagined, nor is it as unattainable. This book suggests that Jesus's command for us to be perfect was the same expectation that His Father had for Jesus to be perfect. In other words, Jesus must be perfectly loyal to His Father and never become subservient to the will of His eternal adversary. Therefore, His expectation for us to be perfect has nothing to do with meeting the random expectations of spouse, friends, children, parents, neighbors, church leaders, or anyone else. All it means is to be perfectly loyal to God and never to heed the words of the adversary. Perfection is very simply never to betray God by listening or hearkening to the devil--what God expected from our first parents. That's also what Jesus did, and it's readily within our own reach.
I invite you to read the book for satisfying evidence that exalting experiences of challenge, opposition and even recovery from failure can all lead to lasting happiness and ultimate joy. None of this is available from the fallen actions of betrayal and sin, except by changing our perceptions to be in alignment with God's thinking and will--repentance.
All Christians will benefit from this book that will liberate and lift spirits, exalt souls, and bring the pure truth of God to the context that He expressed in primary source scripture. The intent of this book is to open a conversation that will ultimately help shift the LDS perspective on the Fall, understand a God who was and is righteous from eternity to all eternity, then dignify and ennoble Jesus's atoning power. In the process, Lucifer's lying words are publicly exposed as "on the housetops" and flayed by the scriptural words of Life.
(Author's proceeds go to OURrescue.org)
