The Evil One lied to us about where true life was found ... and we believed him.

God gave us the wondrous world as our playground, and he told us to enjoy it fully and freely. Yet despite his extravagant generosity, we had to reach for the one forbidden thing.

And at that moment something in our hearts shifted. We reached, and in our reaching we fell from grace.

So Helen betrayed Menelaus and her native Greece, and ran off to Troy with her lover. So Edmund betrayed his brothers and sisters, and all Narnia, and joined sides with the White Witch. So Cypher betrayed Neo and Morpheus and the last of the free world. So Cora fell into the hands of Magua. So Boromir betrayed the fellowship. So the Titanic struck an iceberg.

Our glory faded, as Milton said, "faded so soon."

Something has gone wrong with the human race, and we know it. Better said, something has gone wrong within the human race. It doesn't take a theologian or a psychologist to tell you that. Read a newspaper. Spend a weekend with your relatives. Pay attention to the movements of your own heart in a single day. Most of the misery we suffer on this planet is the fruit of the human heart gone bad. This glorious treasure has been stained, marred, infected. Sin enters the story and spreads like a computer virus.

By the sixth chapter of Genesis, our downward spiral had reached the point where God himself couldn't bear it any longer.

The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. (Genesis 6:5-6)

Any honest person knows this. We know we are not what we were meant to be.

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