Adam and Eve both sinned against love. They were deceived by a false love. How many things happen today that go by the name of love and are nothing but destruction and soul-murder!

True love wants the person of God to shine through the beloved: God remains the value by which love is measured and the final goal of love’s striving. But man, in a false love to the beloved, turns away from the highest good and thereby makes it impossible for God to shine through the beloved.

All this should be a serious warning to us, whether we are married or hoping to be married. God alone must be first in our lives, not our partner, not our children. In our own marriage, my wife and I learned that when God did not have the first and foremost place in our relationship, and when we did not turn to him for guidance even in small matters, we soon lost our closeness to each other. This affected our children too (even if they were not conscious of it), by making them disobedient and quarrelsome. I have seen the same occur in many families: when a couple drifts apart, their children act out their insecurities. In our case, as with many other couples, once my wife and I turned back to God and sought to rebuild our relationship, our children responded. When we idolize our partner or our children, our love becomes false. We cannot speak freely about our shortcomings or those of our family.

Like Adam, we no longer truly love God or see his countenance; we see only our spouse’s or our children’s. Rather than address issues head-on, we gloss things over. In this way, we eventually lose touch with God and with each other. Worse, we open the door to evil, especially in the sexual area, and to inner deadness and isolation. Adam and Eve lost their innocence because they lost their unity with God. And through the terrible emptiness that followed, man blamed woman and sought to dominate, and woman, resentful of man, blamed Satan. All unity was destroyed, and man and woman became rivals and were no longer one (Gen. 3:7–19).

When our marriages are separated from God, rivalry soon takes root and selfishness rules us. In competing with our partner to rule the roost, we strive to create our own little paradise on our own terms, and we soon sink into emptiness and deep discontent. Our inner bond is destroyed and we remain bound to one another only through infatuation. We continually blame each other and seek our own advantage and independence. The joy of total giving is gone and only the curse of half-heartedness is left. The enemy of life in God is an independent and covetous will. As my grandfather Eberhard Arnold writes, this will is “the commercial spirit of mammon, the legal spirit of property-based relationships, the detachment of sexual desire from the soul and from unity and community of spirit…All this is death; it is no longer connected with life.”

Anything that stands in opposition to life and love is evil, and we should never underestimate the power of evil. Sin always leads to separation, and the wages of sin are always death (Rom. 6:23). Sinful pride bears its bitter fruit in estrangement, separation from God, from our true selves, from others, and from the earth. Satan and sin shatter the most fundamental relationships we have.

From ancient times on, Christians have pictured Satan as a creature with hooves and horns. Such a notion has no biblical basis. Satan and his demons surround the earth as a force of evil – like an atmosphere (Eph.2:1–2; 6:12). His sole aim is to blind humans with self-interest and egoism: “You will be like God.” And instead of going the way of simple obedience, we allow
ourselves to be tempted.

(This excerpt is from the E-book: Sex, God and Marriage reprinted from www.bruderhof.com, copyright 2002 by the Bruderhof foundation, Inc., used with permission)



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