A personal relationship with Jesus Christ is the key to life, both now and for eternity. When God created man, man was designed to have perfect fellowship and harmony with God. The perfection that man enjoyed also gave him the ability to have complete fellowship and harmony with other human beings. And being perfectly created, man was given a will by which he could freely choose to obey God and stay within God’s fellowship, or he could choose to disobey God and follow the consequences of an independent course.

THE PROBLEM:  God’s command to the first man, Adam, for his own protection, was to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Lord warned him that if he disobeyed and ate it, he would surely die. Death involves separation. Spiritually, it means man’s spirit is separated from fellowship with God; physically it means man’s soul is separated from his body. Adam chose to disobey God, and that act caused him to die and lose his perfect fellowship with God. It also caused him to have a sin nature. By default, each individual since that time has inherited the sin nature. It manifests itself in wrong motives, wrong attitudes and wrong actions. God’s perfect justice demands that every person’s sin must be judged, and that judgment is “to be separated from God for eternity in hell.”