Adam and Eve were the first two people on the planet. You will see them exercise their God-given free will to decide whether to do what God told them to do or do what Satan suggests they do.

At the time they were making this decision, they didn’t realize it but, they were actually deciding whether or not they would be spiritually alive or spiritually dead. God told them that eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would kill them; but, they decided to try it anyway.

The moment Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s instructions, they contracted a spiritual disease called sin. Because of sin, God could only influence them and all their posterity from the outside. This was the life of God’s people during Old Testament times.

Because of this spiritual disease, God had to use external pressure on every person so as to help them to do the right things; it was all up to them. They had be willing to hear God out, then use their own strength, and then try with their own efforts to follow those instructions.

God couldn’t come inside them and fill them with His love. His love would have helped them WANT to treat themselves, other people, and Him properly. If He came into them so as to empower them to be able to do what was right, it would have killed them. His holiness and purity would have destroyed them and their sinful nature. Somehow they were going to have to be delivered from this spiritual disease of sin first.

Haven’t you found it is so much easier to do things you WANT to do rather than do things you HAVE to? If God could just put His truths into a person’s heart, they would love to do the right things. God’s love would help them see things from other people’s perspective. They would be able to identify with other people’s problems, pain, and needs. That alone would help change their relationships with each other.

But, since God and His truths couldn’t come inside the people in the Old Testament without killing them, they lacked the power, the love motivations, and the desires to stop doing those bad things. Their sinful nature was pushing them to do things that were wrong and was keeping them from treating themselves and others right.

This sin factor they had contracted, pushed them into constant desires for being selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed, and sometimes evil. If they were to ever do anything right and stop doing the wrong things while in this condition, someone was going to have to force it on them. That is what all the Old Testament laws were all about; and, that was the kind of relationship they were going to HAVE TO HAVE with God.

If God was going to be able to save the human race, He was going to have to force these infected Old Testament people to be kind, fair, just, and merciful. If He failed to accomplish this assignment with the Old Testament humans, they would have destroyed the entire human race. That would have kept all those things He was going to be doing in the New Testament from happening. We wouldn’t have had a chance to live and experience all the wonderful things God is currently offering.

If somehow people could be delivered from all their sins, they could then be healed. Once they were healed from all the sins they had committed against themselves, others, and God’s plan, God and His Word could live inside them. The only way that was going to happen was through the perfect life and sacrifice of a perfect human; in other words, mankind needed a Savior.

God needed to send His Son into this world by being born a human. That would give Him all the rights to represent mankind and all the power for being able to live a perfect, sinless life. Jesus, as God and as a human, had all the rights of a human and all the power of God to provide a cure for us.

But, to get Jesus, Who is God, into this world as a human, He would have to be born in a female host; that required the perfect human candidate. Some WOMAN would have to be QUALIFIED spiritually and be WILLING physically to yield her body to the process.

All the activities of our heavenly Father, in the Old Testament, were devoted to helping produce such a woman. It took every one of those things our Father did during that time to create a special spiritual environment. It had to be an environment that would create the possibly of producing a woman who would be qualified and willing to give birth to our Savior.

These two qualifications proved to be incredibly difficult to find. God was going to have to do an extraordinary amount of work with the people in the Old Testament in order to develop such a woman.

In this devotional series you will see God work some incredible miracles and do some very scary things to accomplish this mission. Jesus wants to help you learn to respect God’s wisdom and love as you involve yourself in this week’s series.

May God bless you abundantly as you make time in your life for Him.