The damage in the Garden of Eden was of momentous proportions. The damage was far greater than many believed. The consequences included more than instant spiritual death and progressive physical death. The tree of life represented Christ's life. Man was created to be a container, a vessel, and a dwelling place for the Most High. After the deception, humanity would have to wait till after the Cross to receive Christ’s life. Mankind's new propensity for sin would bring with it pain, sickness, disease, aging, and end- less work for the newly formed rebels.

The disobedience, manifested by eating of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was universally disastrous. After sinning, man became self- sufficient in his own eyes, separated from God, and for- bidden from eating of the Tree of Life. Man had thwarted the great master plan of God to give man his Spirit to indwell him and live life in him and through him. Sin had forced man to live in a way God never intended for man to live out of his own resources.

Centuries later a mystery would be revealed to the Apostle Paul—a happening, a momentous reclamation project that was never possible for Old Testament believers. This wonderful revelation, made possible by the work of the Lord Jesus, was that Christ would come to live in us—the hope of Glory! God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).

Why was this separation from God such a disaster? What was so bad about Adam and his descendents functioning out of self-sufficiency—independence and separation from God? Didn’t they have all it took to live life successfully on the earth? They had souls consisting of a mind, a will, and emotions, and they had bodies with five senses and the functions of speech and action.

The terrible consequence of separation from God was incompletion. Their human spirits, their innermost parts, were without the abundant life God had created them to enjoy. Humanity was like a lamp without oil, a car without fuel. They were running on only two of eight cylinders.

The incompleteness, or birth defect, comes standard in every descendent of Adam and Eve. Pediatricians can’t spot it in babies, teachers seldom know about it in the classrooms, and parents struggle to identify it, how- ever, it is a defect present in every person born into this world.

Dogs, cats, and other creatures God made have all of their body parts with eyes, ears, nose, lungs, and heart. If the other organs work well, they are pronounced normal! Normal for creatures mentioned above means they are whole and complete. It’s easy to jump to the reasonable conclusion that man is created whole and complete as well. Not so! Normalcy for man- kind is incompleteness, without divine life. It results in self-sufficiency. It means being weaker and less clever than Lucifer and his hosts because God is not in us. He is outside of us.

Read this carefully, if God’s great plan was that he would live his life in us, for us, and manifest his son Jesus Christ through us, then when his Son is absent from us, do you expect we should be able to handle the pressures of life? The pressure of this fallen world, the stress, the temptations, the hurt, the pain, the grief are impossible to deal with without divine life.

If God designed us in such a way that he would be our divine source of life, but due to his absence we had to rely upon our own resources, do you think depression would be normal or abnormal? Would anxiety be normal or abnormal? How about captivity, bondage, failure, and sin? All these things would be normal not abnormal! And yet, because the world does not know that we are all born abnormal with a birth defect, with- out a supernatural life, it has diagnosed all of the above as sickness and disease. The conclusion is that man’s inability to function well is due to bad circumstances, lack of opportunity, complications due to childhood separations, inadequate solutions, poor self-esteem, environmental stresses, bad fortune, and a lack of self- discipline.

Granted, our circumstances are often difficult, complicating the inability of the self-sufficient, but the number one problem you and I had at our entrance into this world was a birth defect! We were incomplete, without hope, and without God.... you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world (Ephesians 2:12).

Therefore, the Christian should be thinking that the abnormal is normal, and the normal is abnormal. Is it any wonder that those who advocate the popular descriptive phrase of co-dependency believe 90% of all people are co-dependent.

The mistake they make of course, is not under- standing that 100% of all people are co-dependent in their first birth. We all came into the dysfunctional world, having dysfunctional parents from the first fam- ily on down because we were all born incomplete: with a birth defect.