“Because you have done this thing, you are the cursed one out of all the domestic animals and out of all the wild beasts of the field. Upon your belly you will go and dust is what you will eat all the days of your life. And I shall put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He [the woman’s seed] will bruise you in the head and you will bruise him in the heel.” (Gen. 3:14, 15) By such words God did not mean the seed of the literal serpent. He meant the seed of the false god who was like the serpent, Satan the Devil. In the same way, God did not mean the earthly children of the literal woman, the sinner Eve. He meant the seed or offspring of his holy universal organization, which he now, for the first time, compared with a woman, a wife married to him in heaven.—Isa. 54:5.

18. Whom did God mean by the woman’s seed?

¹⁸ The seed of God’s universal organization must be his first created and chief Son, who became the man Christ Jesus that he might be made the “one mediator between God and men.” (1 Tim. 2:5) With him is associated his faithful congregation of 144,000 footstep followers, who are pictured in the Revelation to John as the twenty-four “elders” seated on thrones around God’s heavenly throne. To these Christians who gain the victory over Satan the Devil as that old Serpent these words are written: “For his part, the God who gives peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly.” (Rom. 16:20) This links them with the fulfillment of God’s promise, at Genesis 3:15, that the woman’s seed must bruise the Serpent.

19. What did God directly tell Eve, and how did he then disabuse her mind of Satan’s lie?

¹⁹ God told the sinner Eve that she would not be put to death at once. She would be permitted to bring forth many children, but this with labor pains. Her husband would dominate her till death. Then God disabused Eve’s mind of the lie that Satan the Serpent had told when Satan said that she and Adam would not positively die for eating the forbidden fruit. In Eve’s hearing God said to Adam: “Because you listened to your wife’s voice and took to eating from the tree concerning which I gave you this command: ‘You must not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground on your account. In pain you will eat its produce all the days of your life. And thorns and thistles it will grow for you, and you must eat the vegetation of the field. In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.”—Gen. 3:16-19.

20. What food was Adam now to eat, what ground was cursed for him, where was he to return to the dust, and why did he not go to heaven at death?

²⁰ Adam was no longer to cultivate and take care of the Edenic sanctuary. He was unclean, unholy. He was no longer to eat Paradise food, but the “vegetation of the field,” getting it with the sweat of his face. It was not the Paradise sanctuary that was cursed on Adam’s account, but it was the ground outside; and this, and not the Paradise sanctuary, was the part of the earth that was to grow thorns and thistles for him. The Edenic Paradise sanctuary was not to be marred by graves of sinners, but it was to the dust of the ground outside the Paradise sanctuary to which Adam was to return. “The first man is out of the earth and made of dust; the second man [Jesus Christ] is out of heaven.” (1 Cor. 15:47) So Adam was not to go to heaven at death. Being of the earth, he went back to where he had come from, the dust. The life force that animated him then returned to God who had given it.—Eccl. 12:7.

21. To what other fruit was Adam now not entitled, and what did God do to prevent his trying to eat it?

²¹ To prevent Adam from taking hold of another fruit to which he was not entitled, the fruit of the tree of life along with which the grant of eternal life went, what was done? “Jehovah God put him out of the garden of Eden to cultivate the ground from which he had been taken. And so he drove the man out and posted at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubs and the flaming blade of a sword that was turning itself continually to guard the way to the tree of life.”—Gen. 3:22-24.

22. What would trying to get back into the Paradise sanctuary have meant, and what shows whether there was anything that happened to remove the sentence from Adam and Eve?

²² In any attempt to get back into the Paradise sanctuary Adam would have been blocked by those cherubs. Since he could not make his way back into the earthly Paradise because of those cherubs, much less could he make his way into the greater sanctuary of heaven, where many more cherubs would be ready to block him. Any trying to make his way to the tree of life in the middle of the garden to gain life on earth forever would have meant walking into destruction by the flaming blade of that revolving sword. Yet even outside the sanctuary Adam lived for hundreds of years. During all those centuries was there anything that happened that removed the death sentence from Adam and Eve? No; there was no change in the estrangement from God. “So all the days of Adam that he lived amounted to nine hundred and thirty years and he died.” (Gen. 5:5) Adam earned the wages that sin pays—death.—Rom. 6:23.

(To be continued)

Pursuing My Purpose in Life

As told by James O. Webster

JUNE 12, 1934, still looms up as the first Big Day in life for me, because that is the day when I (along with my parents and two brothers) symbolized my dedication to serve Jehovah. My father had been a “Bible Student” since 1918, the year of my birth. At the age of seven I was taken by him to hear a “pilgrim” who talked about the “prophet Jonas.” That started me off, and never again did I return to the Baptist Sunday school. I preferred to stay at home and listen to my father read the Bible and answer my questions.

But my progress was slow, due to our living on a farm thirty-five miles from town. In those days of northern Montana’s bad roads Jehovah’s witnesses visited us only once or twice a year and it was not until after finishing grade school that I finally had enough knowledge and courage to make a public declaration of my faith and preach from door to door. Dedication was to me a serious step, and I knew what it meant. From then on, pursuing my purpose in life, service for God was on my mind.

In late 1933 we left Montana for southern Missouri and there we passed two happy years. My father took up the “sharpshooter” work (equivalent of today’s part-time field ministry) and we boys became very active in the service. On foot or hitchhiking to towns and farms for miles around, we kept on witnessing. Though a serious young fellow, I wasn’t sad; I was getting something out of life and it moved me when I saw now and then some fruits for my labor.

At the age of seventeen, upon returning