Man's Unlearned Lesson

From Norman Grubb's book God Unlimited:

"Even the facts of the Fall [of mankind in the Garden of Eden] and our consequent condition are rarely known.  Few seem to have grasped that man is not just an independent self doing as he pleases and doing it in his own strength.  He never has been this.  He has always been indwelt by a god.  He has always had an inner union--to whom?  'Greater is He that is in you (the believer) than he that is in the world.'  Who is this second 'he' in the world, if not the Satanic spirit?  And he is actually named a few verses later (1 John 4:16):  'Hereby know we the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error'.  We have already quoted the great passage descriptive of the condition of fallen humanity--Ephesians 2:1-3--which includes that statement, 'the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience'; or the other, 'in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds . . .'

"The fact that is hidden from many is that sin is essentially a person, just as holiness is a Person.  Holiness is the 'Spirit of holiness' (Rom. 1:4), the Holy Spirit.  We have pointed out all along that since the human is the container of the Divine Person, all goodness, love, righteousness, wisdom, power, holiness and the rest are, not we, but HE in us, 'Jesus Christ who has been made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption'.  But the opposite is equally and logically true.  Sin is not a thing, but an indwelling person, the spirit of fear, the spirit of bondage, the evil spirit, the spirit of the world, the spirit of anti-Christ.  Sins are that spirit expressing himself through the human faculties and appetites, just as holiness and love are the Other Spirit expressing Himself through the same channels.  Thus a pregnant word is spoken of the first sin recorded after the Fall--the sin of Cain, when John says that he 'was of that wicked one and slew his brother'.  Precisely, it was not primarily Cain that was the murderer, but he whom Jesus called 'a murderer from the beginning'--through Cain.

"This is important because our very premiss [sic] is wrong if we think that our first father could have resisted temptation.  If he could, we can.  But can we?  Is not that our problem and failure, until we learn that the way to meet temptation is by recognizing the One in us, and not by struggling against it ourselves [Rom. 7 and 8]?  We start mixed-up, if we start by thinking that the Garden of Eden was a scene of probation to try men out.  God is no such experimenter, dangling men on a string to see how they will react.  God knoweth our frame that we are but dust, and He only puts us through absolutely necessary grades  of education that we may learn, even as the Son Himself had to 'learn obedience (recognition of His Father in action in Him) through the things which He suffered (temptations)'; and thus we can become eternally free, healthy, happy co-operators with God, knowing exactly who He is and who we are, and loving the relationship."