In the Old Testament, after man’s creation, God made the first covenant with man; after man’s fall He made the second covenant with man (Gen. 3:8-21).
After Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s word and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, immediately they knew that they had violated God’s prohibition and that the result of their transgression would be death. Therefore, they hid themselves from the presence of God, awaiting the sentence of death. However, instead of forsaking them, God came to the garden, to the place of the fallen people (Gen. 3:8); and instead of sentencing them to death, He preached the gospel to them. Therefore, Jehovah God came to the place of fallen man to make a covenant with man.
God not only came to the place of fallen man, but He came to seek and to call fallen man. He spoke to them in the way of seeking and calling, saying, “Where art thou?” (Gen. 3:9). Hence, Jehovah, the One who made the covenant, was such a God who came to the place of fallen man to seek and to call fallen man. Man’s fall did not cause God to give up His purpose in man. Since His will is established, it will never change. Many years later, God Himself became a man, the Lord Jesus, and came to the place of the fallen people to seek and to save us, the fallen and lost ones (Luke 19:10).
While man was in the Garden of Eden, God admonished him, saying, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). God’s intention was that man should exercise his free will to choose the tree of life and reject the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, man transgressed God’s prohibition and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Hence, man had an offense before God (Rom. 5:18a), and he also had Satan’s evil life and nature in him. Thus he became a fallen person.
When man ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Satan’s evil essence entered into man. Hence, within man there was an essence that was not created by God. This essence is the nature of Satan, which is also the sin that dwells in man, as mentioned in the Scriptures (Rom. 7:17), becoming the essence and constituent of fallen man. Therefore, the fallen man had sin and was constituted a sinner (Rom. 5:12, 19).
The fallen man not only had sin and was constituted a sinner, but he also had death and became a dead person (1 Cor. 15:22). First, the fallen man’s spirit was deadened, becoming insulated from God and losing its function toward God; eventually even man’s body died. Therefore, through the offense of one man, Adam, sin entered into the world, and sin brought in death, so death ruled over all men (Rom. 5:12, 17), causing all men to die. Although man fell into such a tragic and hopeless condition, God came to visit him and to make a covenant with him.