As mentioned before, the devil’s attack in the garden was directly at the foundation of our lives. All of us are meant to live upon God just as we physically live upon the earth He created. What the devil did in the fall was attack the vital connection of each individual human with God, our “gravity” and foundation.

God’s commandments are not just about doing or not doing this or that, they are what we set our lives upon. Commandments are like the ground beneath our feet. This is why Jesus talks about how we must do what He tells us in order to truly build upon Him (Lk 6:46-49). This is how our lives work spiritually. Everything we believe, obey, follow, and fear is what we set our lives upon.

In the Garden, the devil began to set Eve upon something other than God. She didn’t realize that what she feared, obeyed, and followed was setting her on an entirely different foundation. Over and over God is trying to show mankind how we are dependent upon God for all life, not just the physical creation, but the spiritual. As God made the earth, trees, air, water, and food, so we are just as dependent upon Him for these spiritually.

Our nature is that we are designed to live upon God, but we can attempt to live upon other things. This is where the fall of mankind happened. Since mankind lived upon the words of another, built upon another, mankind became lost. And the only way to be saved from this lostness is to be built again upon God.

We all experience what it is to be lost. It is probably quite different for all of us. These are some of the effects that I have seen in my own life and in observing the lives of others: We don’t really know how to guide our own lives. We know we need to guide them into something meaningful and important, but we don’t know how. We feel this restless hunger for something “more” but have no idea how to find it. We live under the guidance of ambition and “our dreams”. We have a kind of spirituality and morality but it’s sporadic and doesn’t reach the full measure of what real goodness truly requires. We certainly feel we are wise, but we cannot see how foolish our ways really are. We do not see how vain we are, and how worthless our ways can be. We cannot hear correction very easily, and if we do, we often only run in despair about ourselves. We live by the law of self — whatever is to my personal advantage. And we cannot even see how easily we wrong others, in ways we always feel are justifiable in our own eyes. We are full of strife and contention, and do not really know how to live at peace. We may want peace, but we don’t build it. These are just a few examples of many.

Living upon God is meant to tie us back into the great Vine we are meant to live upon. This is what the Lord teaches us about abiding in Him. Everything that is broken in our being lost is broken in our believing, our valuing, our following, our obeying, etc. We are putting all of these upon places other than God, and we “reap” what we sow ourselves upon.

Many people feel jealousy over their own lives and souls, yet at the same time, we so easily give our lives over to false foundations. We take up some dream or plan, and we give ourselves over to it. Again, many people are jealous over their lives, to have them mean something, but they do not see that God is the only place they can put their souls and be safe.

Ironically, we give our souls so easily to false “gods” while being so jealous and guarded against the true God. This is greatly unhelped by all the false ways people preach in God’s name. Yet at the same time, we see God’s call to come and place our souls upon Him, to build upon Him, as only a burden and chore, and not as goodness and life, the place our souls belong.

The work of Jesus is to bring us out of this brokenness into true life in Him. The difficulty here is how much the devil hinders the way of this, and blinds people’s mind away from the truth, even among Christians.

As said before, a presence to these things means nothing, and yet what we have today is so many people singing songs and shouting about how they were blind but now they see, when in reality, they don’t see.

Part of the difficulty in this is the devilish lie that comes in and says these people aren’t believers, that they were never saved. This does so much harm among Christians.

In reality, learning God, life in God, obedience in God, understanding all His ways, the reason for things, the wisdom of what is good and right; learning spiritual discernment of what is truly of the Spirit of God and what is of the world and the devil—all of these things take a great amount of time and work to be accomplished. And what we have in our days is so many believers running around professing the work to be “finished” in them when they have hardly begun.

They think that this is them “glorifying God”, and indeed, the devil deceives them. Because they go out and show forth their own foolishness and sin, professing it in God’s name.

It is so important for us to understand that the only way we can truly glorify Christ is to actually be changed. And to not be ashamed or afraid to sit down, and be silent, for as long as it takes to be actually changed.

This “in-between” does not mean we are not saved, it does not mean we are not Christians—the devil’s lies and terrors—this is the process of what it means to come into the ways of God and learn of Him.

So much of our sin and foolishness today is how easily the devil gets us to go out and make fools of ourselves in Christ’s name. Saying that refusing to do this is being ashamed of Him… To make us speak of being lost and now found, of being light and salt, when we haven’t truly developed these in our own lives.

Part of this is because of our own sins. Our blindness to how much we are meant to walk in as believers. Our failure to “make every effort” (2 Pet 1:5-8). That we are either actually building on the Lord, or we still aren’t.

True religion is being found, it is coming into the real substance of light and salt, and these things are not cheap or free. All of this is made available to us in Christ, but we have to labor after them daily if we are to truly have them.

The devil works to blind the mind of Christians away from this true path of life found in God. How does he do this? By corrupting our beliefs about God, and causing us to abide in things that are not actually of Christ. What we believe is what we set our lives upon, and the devil works hard to ensure that our beliefs about Christ are not as they should be. We, like Eve, do not see the trajectory these beliefs take us. And the fruit of our ways is most evident, yet we refuse to blush and see our shame.

Some of the beliefs that corrupt us are wrong ideas of grace. Thinking that salvation is simply a removal of our accountability for our sins, when salvation is about this bringing us back to the foundation of life, and building us there. That in this work, we are preserved. In coming back into obedience to God, in following Christ, in turning from sin, our lives are saved from worthlessness and vanity, darkness and blindness, as well as we are made worthy of the heaven above, which is a home for all who truly walk in what is righteous. The sin in us is hating this well reasoned way of God. We do not see how in deepest self love, we reject the just judgment of God upon us, and call this “grace”.

In this, we also reject the call to obedience, seeing all commandments of God as “optional” or legalistic, failing to see how we are delighting in lawlessness, and deceived away and rejecting the very path to righteousness which is the means of life for us!

These are the tantalizing lies of the devil that too many eat! It agrees with the sinful desires in them, and they are blind to how they are choosing these things from the sinful heart in them, not from some obedience to God (as they assume). Part of the very lies they eat are that a Christian cannot be deceived! Thinking that this is promised in Christ. Yet just like Eve, God is always setting before all of us choices. We must choose the good way. We must choose obedience to God. Or, we can choose to believe things that agree with our sinful desires.

All of this has the outcome in us of what we have chosen. We are vain and blind, still full of self, ignorant of God and His ways, and yet very ready to speak and preach. All of this the devil uses to make a great mess in God’s name.

All of this is because we are not actually building upon God. We are refusing the work of doing so! We don’t want to be bothered with a real obedience and call to righteousness, and so we put it off, blind to just how costly this is. Our obedience to God is the very means of our life: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess.” (Deut 30:15-16)