There was a snake. He could talk. He made a suggestion. It was a lie. Eve believed the lie.

The lie? “God is about control and He is keeping something from you. His love isn’t perfect. He isn’t always good. He is not enough. He is withholding, uncaring, disinterested. An egomaniac, a liar, blah, blah, blah.”

When we lose track of our Father’s nature, we become deceived about our own. That’s what happens when a lie is believed; it causes us to feel separated from His love nature and then cuts off access to our identity as sons and daughters.

And that’s just what happened to Eve, and then to Adam. They made a choice to believe a lie regarding God’s always-good love.

Whenever we discuss this great tragedy, we tend to focus on the choice, the sinful decision. But what I want to focus on is who supplied the lie. 

The thought to disobey God didn’t originate with Eve. It was the serpent’s idea, he whispered into Eve’s ear. And neither was it Adam’s idea when he joined her in rebellion. Eve simply passed the lie along.

Understand. I am not absolving Adam and Eve. They made a choice to walk away from a perfect love relationship; they chose to give their God-given authority and freedom to Satan. They traded “prone to love” for “prone to wander.” It was a big deal. I am simply pointing out that the idea of sin didn’t originate with them, which I also think is a big deal. Why? I think it says a lot about our original value, how God designed and created us.

Many of us have been lied to. We have been told that we are inherently evil—prone to wander. That our flesh is desperately wicked. That, left to our own devices, we would always choose evil. But the fact is, we weren’t created with a proclivity to sin. The original idea to reject God didn’t even originate with man.

Sin didn’t first enter the world through the hearts or minds of a man. It came from a lie provided by Satan. It wasn’t Adam or Eve’s nature to sin that led them to sin. It was a lie believed that distorted the perfect love nature of their heavenly Father. Adam and Eve were created in God’s image and likeness, they were not sinners, they were saints. They weren’t created prone to wander, they were created prone to love.

Sadly, Adam and Eve sold humanity’s birthright, our original design, our full and clear access to transformative Love. Ever since then we have lived enslaved to a lie that we have a fallen nature, that we are prone to wander. And sin and death have plagued us ever since, they have become the evidence of sin.

But then… Jesus!

Love in human form, humanity perfectly revealed, our original design on display, lived powerfully. Then dying, He took the lie of a sinful fallen nature to its conclusion. And rising, Love triumphed! Jesus stepped inside our deception and won for us complete and full access to our Father! The same unveiled access Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden, the same access Jesus had with His Father!

In Christ, not only can we know our Father, we can live sure in Love and become transformed! Through Jesus, we once again have access to our original design! We no longer have to live prone to wander, we can live prone to love! Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we can know our Father and become transformed in His love. Isn’t that just the most beautiful gift!

The cross is the launching pad, the foundation, the slingshot that propels us into the victorious, miraculous, greater-works existence Jesus modeled and told us we had access to. The cross is only beautiful because of the empty tomb. We celebrate His death because of His resurrection. The power of love is perfected when sinners become saints. That was the whole point of Jesus’s death and resurrection—that we would encounter Love and become love.

Jesus never once was “prone to wander” or “prone to leave the God He loved.” He never once sinned. He came to the earth to settle that exact issue once and for all. He came to set us free, that we might be restored to our original value and design, that we might be transformed from “prone to wander” to “prone to love!”

Jason Clark is a writer, speaker and lead communicator at A Family Story ministries. His mission is to encourage sons and daughters to grow sure in the love of an always-good heavenly Father. He and his wife, Karen, live in North Carolina with their three children.