Mai Ke finished reading the message before the text of "The Trick of Controlling Things", and then looked back, this is a preface. Mai Ke first took a quick look at it and made sure that it was talking about the relationship between man and other creatures.

The author focuses on the historical changes in this relationship, and the reasons that led to the changes.

According to the author's description, the result of this change in relations is a different state of man and other created relationships. It includes the initial state, the state after the crime, the present state, and the future state.

Mai Ke also paid attention to the genre of the book. This preface is like the previous message, and it seems that the author is chatting with Mai Ke throughout the whole text. He flipped back and found that the whole book was the same, until the end of the book.

The preface begins with the question: "Mai Ke, you have read the Bible, you must know how the book of Genesis in the Bible describes the relationship between Adam, the first human being, and various animals, right?"

Of course, Mai Ke is very clear. God created all kinds of animals first, and finally created man, commanded man to rule over animals, and commanded animals to obey man's rule. There is a clear sign in the Bible that reflects this relationship: Adam named these animals.

When Adam gave them names, all kinds of animals reported to Adam. Adam named them one by one.

It is not known what it was named after, but it was used by various animals anyway.

When animals have names, they are registered with humans and are included in the canon. This is also the earliest and most basic classification of animals.

Mai Ke continued to read. In particular, the author emphasizes the right and significance of people to name animals.

"You are from China, and you must know that the names of the younger generations are determined by the most honorable elders. In ancient China, only parents had the right and honor to name their younger generations.

"The name given to a person also means that the person who is named belongs to his family. If he had been wandering outside before, this name would mean that he was officially accepted and returned to his ancestors.

"Adam named the animal, and the essence was the same. The right to name these animals means that they belong to his sphere of influence. He has the right to rule over them, and they are all subject to his rule.

This is the earliest initial state of human-animal relations. This initial state is God's creation order, a state of harmony and without contradiction. This good state was maintained until Adam sinned. ”

This history is still relatively clear. What he clearly meant was not that he wanted evidence for specific situations, but that he believed that what the Bible said was historical fact. It is not only a historical fact, but also the most reliable history of faith.

The reason he believed in this way was because he believed that the Bible was the Word of God. This God of history is the God of history. God's control over history means God's control over time, space, and all that has happened in time and space throughout the ages.

God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, and who can say that he or anyone else knows better than God.

McKe also knew that Adam's naming of animals was nothing more than a rabbit with a weed. He had done the naming for some other purpose.

At that time, Adam probably felt a little lonely and wanted to find a confidant to help him. His original intention was nothing more than to find a partner. He set his sights on the birds and beasts, and asked them all to come to his prince and choose his concubine.

Presumably, Adam's orientation is still very normal, and he has not been polluted by the strange ideas of later generations. As a result, he saw that these strange-shaped birds and beasts were all so ugly and clumsy, and none of them were satisfied with him to be his princess.

None of the precious furs, the splendid feathers, these things that can move the hearts of this human prince. He vetoed the best of the creatures one by one.

It is estimated that all these animals came to see Adam and accept the choice of concubine with the good wish of being chosen by the people. Unexpectedly, this human prince had too high a vision, and these candidates who tried their best to express themselves - many of them were rare animals, none of them met the standard, and all of them were eliminated and had to return home.

In the end, God will solve the problem. To help Adam overcome his loneliness, God pulled a rib out of Adam's rib and created the woman Eve. Adam was satisfied, and called Eve a bone of bones and flesh of flesh, and accepted her as his spouse.

When Peter got married not long ago, Mai Ke and several of his American brothers were congratulated by a four-person chorus of a hymn describing this event, which they called the most beautiful love poem in the world.

After Eve was created, the two became husband and wife. This is the earliest husband and wife of mankind. Among them, women were created for the sake of men's loneliness, and women were created to be men's helpers.

Men have to take on their own responsibilities, and this responsibility is mainly to obey God's command and manage the rest of creation.

As a parent, Adam had to fulfill his responsibility to his wife and to communicate God's commands clearly to her. Because God gave His commands directly to Adam and not to Eve.

At the same time, he must protect his wife, his family, and his various possessions that God has given him.

The sum of this property was the Garden of Eden at that time.

Sadly, Adam did not fulfill his responsibilities as a parent.

God gave him a clear, non-negotiable, absolute command: not to eat the fruit of wisdom from the tree of wisdom in the garden. At the same time as giving him the command, God also prescribed a punishment: those who eat the forbidden fruit will die.

As a parent, he had to convey this command to Eve, supervising that she should not disobey it, lest the punishment of death befall her. At the same time, as the steward of the Garden of Eden, he also had to guard against enemies with ulterior motives.

What was the actual situation? Adam did not make clear God's indisobedient commands to Eve, and as a result, Eve listened to Satan's lie and thought it was true: eating the fruit of wisdom does not necessarily lead to death.

Adam left Eve and failed to fulfill his duties as overseer, leaving her alone in the face of Satan's temptations, leaving her to decide on matters concerning the fate of mankind according to her own desires. As a result, Eve disobeyed God's command and committed the mortal sin of mortality.

He did not supervise strangers entering the Garden of Eden. As a result, Satan infiltrated the Garden of Eden, and then into his family, directly seducing and conquering Eve, so that Satan's tricks succeeded.

In the end, he himself defended the law by eating the fruit of wisdom that Eve handed him, thus endorsing Eve's crime with his actions.

The course of these events was based on Adam's extreme negligence. This negligence on the part of Cheng Dù and his eventual endorsement of eating the fruit of wisdom together show that he was the first evil of this crime. Thus Paul later said, "Sin entered the world by one man, and that one man was Adam."

It is important to note that Satan appears in the form of an ancient serpent. This creates hostility between man and the rest of creation. Therefore, whether it is a human sin or an animal and a human hostility, there is Satan's black hand stirring in it.

Satan certainly leads people into sin through his temptations, but the root cause of sin is not Satan, but man's selfish desires, as God Himself reveals in 1 John in the Bible.

If it weren't for the fact that Eve thought that this wisdom fruit was good-looking and delicious, that it could make the person who ate it as wise as God, and that she would not necessarily face God's punishment, how could she have listened to Satan's temptation?

For example, if she thinks that the fruit of wisdom is ugly and unpalatable, and that she will be more stupid if she eats it, or that there will definitely be a death penalty for eating it, will she still eat it? If she thinks so in her heart, no matter how much Satan tempts, Eve will not eat it.

As a result of this sin, all four parties were severely punished by God. The direct punishment is recorded in the Bible, and the human race as a whole lives under the shadow of this original sin. Even more severe are the consequences and effects of this crime.

This sin shows man's rebellion against God, and Adam, as the representative of the crown of creation, is directly opposed to the Creator. This hostility destroys the most basic relationship between the Creator and the created.

Since man has done so, the rest of the creatures have done the same, and they have gone up and down: the animals have ceased to obey man's rule, and thorns have grown on the earth, and even the weather has become cold, and a cold north wind has blown.

As a self-taught theologian and a pastor who has successfully scored on exams, Mai Ke knows all about the ins and outs of these matters.

This is the basic status quo of the relationship between man and other created hostile beings after man sinned against God. If we do not understand and understand this situation, we will not know the basic problems of human beings, and we will not have the desire to work hard to change them.

But this is not the key content of the Christian faith. The key is to know God's plan of salvation. After the Fall, the great men of faith such as Abraham have maintained their hope for God's redemption. The kingdom of Israel even arose to restore the heavenly order in the Garden of Eden on a larger scale.

Although God once again drove these Israelites out of the land of Canaan as He drove Adam out of the Garden of Eden because of Israel's rebellion, He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus, into the world to deliver eternal salvation.

The Savior, Jesus, is the eternal hope of mankind. Believing in Jesus and having eternal life is not a human reverie, but a faithful God's unchanging promise.

When a person dies, everything is empty, and a hundred deaths are lost. Eternal life is the foundation of possession, happiness, and hope. Otherwise, life is short, a hundred years in the blink of an eye, and everything we talk about is to catch the moon in the well and see the flowers in the fog.

Although Mai Ke has also thought about this issue, he has never been so clear. Not only are there causes of tension between man and other creatures, but there is also a divine trajectory of salvation. All of God's actions of salvation are directly or indirectly repairing the normal relationship between man and animals.

He attributed this clarity of thought to the two purple fruits. After thinking about this period of historical changes, Mai Ke continued to read the book to understand the author's outlook for the future.

Don't think of Jesus' salvation as different from God's previous deliverance, as some misconceptions have been, but it's God's same plan of salvation. Jesus' salvation was nothing more than the extension of God's salvation to the whole world, and he paid the substitutionary penalty for sin, so that the effect of God's redemption could be seen more clearly. That is, more faith. God's principle of salvation is the same throughout history, both in China and abroad: justification by faith without exception.

It is only after man is saved that the relationship between man and animals, and between man and other creatures, can be truly improved. This improvement is the long-term hope of all other creations. Do you think they're willing to be hostile to people? No! They moan in pain all day under this hostile curse.

So God's salvation lays the foundation for the future of normal human relations with other creatures, and you, who are saved, are the forerunners of this vision.

"I'm going to hand over the clouded leopard and all the birds and beasts under his command to you today. These animals are specially preserved by God. They have always inhabited this primeval forest and are rarely polluted by sin, so they still retain their original innocence.

"You communicate with them according to the essentials of the things you'll get involved below, and do what you were supposed to do at first. They will be tame than the most obedient animals, but they will still retain their primitive wildness and strength, providing you with an unimaginable force to build a kingdom of heaven.

"Okay, now you can say hello to the clouded leopard first. ”