And so, in that moment (after the original sin), God did not wait for Adam's fall or his getting back up. He was waiting for the words, "Forgive me!"
Which means God is light and love; so says all of Father Staniloae's theology and all of Orthodox dogmatic theology as a whole.
In the moment Adam would have said, "Forgive me!", he would have been forgiven and Satan would have been broken and would have remained Satan for eternity.
In moment the woman would have said, "Forgive me!", she would have been forgiven and they would remained in heaven for eternity.
But they could not say these words, but rather they defended themselves in front of God as we defend ourselves during confession.
My husband is at fault, my wife is at fault, my relatives are at fault, my boss from work is at fault; as if God created all of them as being bad and only we are good.
Well, this is the dialogue and the roots of Satan in the universe.
Because in the moment man fell from heaven, our forefather Adam, he also rebelled against Satan for all eternity.
So he desired his unification with God in the most categorical sense; he no longer was kidding around about deification.
But Satan knew that if man arrives there again (in heaven), he can cause shame to Satan in front of God, because he too participated in man's falling.
And so God placed a barrier to heaven, and said, you will come back here, to the soil from which you were taken, and you will return back into dust because you are dust, but only once you atone for your sins.
How? Through the sweat of your brow, through the pains of birth-giving, through suffering, through hardships, through the working of the earth, through thorns and thistles.
And then Adam was placed under a trial, which he fulfilled with all stoicism. As evidence, he was one of the chosen people of the Old Testament.
We see Adam as being a Saint; we don't see him as a sinner. Because in the moment Christ resurrected, He did not take up into heaven the Old Testament's hierarchs or the whole Jewish nation. No.
He took Adam and Eve, as we say in the Evlogitaria of Eve; You Who delivered Adam and Eve and dried the tears of Eve, and returned them to rejoicing.
Well, in the moment Adam tasted again of Heaven...
you can imagine that Adam never again sat down to talk to the devil, but it took him 5000 years of seeing the havoc he left behind on Earth.
Well this havoc was worked by Satan, not only through Adam, but through all his descendants.
And as proof of Satan's hatred for mankind, and that he wanted to sink him as far away from God as possible, he even moved on to do concrete actions.
How many sons did Adam have? Two sons; Cain and Abel, one took care of the sheep and the other the trees.
And what did they do? They brought sacrifices to God on the stone altar. One brought from his worst, because the one who took care of the trees was greedy, and the other, the shepherd, brought from his best.
And the one brother rebelled against the other. "Why should he bring what is good, and I what is bad, and God to see him as being the good one?"
As we do today, "Why should he be faithful and I not to draw him to what is evil? Why should he go to Heaven and be saved, and for me not to pull him from there?"
"Why should he be righteous, when I can make him lawless?" And so he hit him over the head with a shaft and killed him. Behold, the justice system on Earth appeared when two people, citizens of the boundless universe, killed one another.
Not because they couldn't fit or because there wasn't enough for the both of them.
Because the Earth was already endowed. Even though the Earth had that fallen Adamic state, it was degraded, it remained triumphant.
Because it was the creation of God. But it was to support mankind. With sheepskin they were clothed, with milk they were fed, from the ground they got their bread.
So the Earth, under the profound care and dominion of mankind, was bearing fruits, as the farmers and agriculturists do today.
But this does not mean that the devil forgot his mission. So the devil for 5108 years stayed and worked like an ox at the falling of mankind.
So from fall to fall; from sin to sin.
Through this occurred Sodom and Gomorrah. Through this occurred the mistake of Lamech who married two wives. Through this occurred Cannan, son of Ham, from whom came the pagan tribes.
Through this occurred Ishmael from which the Muslims came from, and so on.
But Satan, himself, left on the Earth three great virtues.
If God left Faith, Hope, and Love.
Satan brought laziness, forgetfulness, and idleness.
So he too came with three giants of the soul.
And what is the role of Satan? What do the Holy Father's say when we read closely? The mind is a bridge for the devils.
Through the mind, one goes to the heart and to the soul.
The mind is like wax; the devil comes and stamps whatever he wants into it and puts it there.
And mankind has his divine rationalization to choose between good and evil. And this is called the works of the mind, but we won't discuss this now.
But in the moment you don't know how to control your thoughts, and you let the devils control you, comes the second stage, which the devil loves greatly, the imagination.
And from your imagination you learn to do perverse sexual acts, from your imagination you learn to drug yourself, from your imagination you learn to kill...
from your imagination you learn to become a satanist, from your imagination you learn to like to see blood flowing, from your imagination you learn to be sadistic, from your imagination you learn to become a criminal.
All these come from your imagination. And you see, Satan works at this imagination. What do we call Mass Media?
A permanent image of a world for consumption. Right? What does Mass Media provide to people when it wishes to destroy them?
Movies with anarchy, movies with fights, movies with killings, movies with crimes, movies with apartments being bombed, movies with exploding cars, with people fighting between each other and killing one another; cutting and shooting each other.
So look at this imagination, it is not only one of a rationalized and thought out nature.
But it is a real imagination; a hologram. Because what else is a movie besides a hologram?
So it is the pre-imagination of a subject. And psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, social workers, and psychologists say very nicely, "Sir we give these movies so that people can take away the essence of good from them!"
But if you were to be a true Orthodox Christian psychoanalyst, you would see that a movie has a gram of good in a ton of evil.
And therefore it is not necessary for me to watch a ton of evil images for a single gram of good essence .
Because that gram I can get from the Scriptures. Search the Scriptures and you will have within yourself eternal life.
Some people come and ask, "How can I know that the devil exists, if I don't see him?"
This forces us to recall the words of Christ Who told the Holy Apostles, when in a way He rebukes them: You don't know what you are asking for.
Our Christian teachings tell us that God is He Who made Himself seen.
And this was necessary, so that people could know Him. But people don't need to see the devil, because this sight, as the Church tells us, is one of the works of Hell itself.
In the records of our Church, in a so called catalog of the eternal works and punishments of Hell which await those people which will for eternity live separated from God...
One of the most frightful and awful punishments is exactly this vision of demons.
In which the soul, being so delicate and gentle in its essence, cannot suffer this vision without this vision provoking some suffering.
Which means that if a person would have this insanity or unconsciousness to want the devil to show himself...
it is as if he himself desires his own doom and death.
On the other hand, because the devil cannot be seen while God made Himself seen...
and He could be made seen...
On the one hand, shows the all-powerfulness of God, and on the other had it shows that the devil, despite his will, is subject to the will of God.
And that people not being able to see the devil is really a means of protection, of covering, and of guarding which God has towards his children, us people.
So that He can deliver us from it in the same way a parent protects their child from seeing an awful crime or a murderer, which could harm the child psychologically and physically.
And again Christ tells us, when He showed Himself to be the Image of God, being the Image of the Father as the Son...
He tells us then how, despite not being able to see the devil, we can recognize him.
First by the name He gives to him, which in Greek, devil means to divide or separate.
While God has a name that opposes the name of the devil; God also has the name of Sibol, which has the same etymology as the word devil but means the exact opposite of to divide; He is Who unites.
Because God shows Himself to be, in addition to Him Who creates and gives life, He is He Who unites all things which are separated.