Genesis 2:2-3 records God’s Rest from his creative activity of forming the universe out of nothing, Hebrews 11:3. Then, by Christ’s authority, John 1:3, the Holy Spirit created order, beauty, regularity, creatures and humanity from a formless, empty deep Genesis 1:2.
Have we considered that our Biblical experience has been, and is even now, symbolized in history? Ancient Israel’s entrance into Canaan symbolized it. When at great cost of a long 25-year effort, time, energy and battles their REST included:
True, while some TV preachers falsely claim that Christians now experience financial and health benefits God granted Hebrews, immediate prosperity of every physical kind did come to them in obedience. The kind that Christians found in Christ was, and is, different and superior. End Part I
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(A pericope from 5/16/21 message.)
It's a breakthrough into an entirely different dimension. First, in the next world.
Second, in an entirely NEW world.
But how...with bodies of clay imprisoning our brain inside its limitations...HOW can we Become what we have never Been so we can share a Glory we've never Had? Aah...God's mystery revealed...his answer clear... "We will all be CHANGED" I Corinthians 15:51, TRANSFORMED Philippians 3:21. From Adam's likeness to Christ's own self Revelation 1:12-18. "And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so we shall bear the likeness of the man from heaven" I Corinthians 15:49. God's Promise. Our Home. Eternal Joy. Amen. Learn an essential spiritual truth. At the very beginning of human history God demanded forgiveness of any sin as the condition of fellowship with him. Christians must understand that before they urge repentance on their unsaved associates, friends and relatives.
The detailed Mosaic emphasis on that necessity continued in Christ’s life, with a specific difference: the SIN offering being a person, not an animal; and offered once for all PERFECTLY, not continually by incompleteness. Still, the most ancient rule applied: the SOMEONE worthy to offer forgiveness had to die before effecting it. Hebrews repeatedly stressed this truth 1:3, 2:10, 7:27-28, 9:11-14, 10:1-4, 11-17. Thus, in selected scriptures, we see Matthew 1:21: the Sacrifice would be named Jesus because he would save his people from their sins. Luke 1:46-47: Mary admitted being a sinner by needing a Savior. Luke 2:11: the Savior is Christ the Lord. Mark 10:45: Jesus came to serve God by giving his life to pay the price of our forgiveness. Luke 23:34: “forgive them,” Jesus prayed for all involved in his crucifixion. Matthew 27:50-53: the death of Jesus opened the Presence of God to all seeking forgiveness. Acts 2:38: the first Gospel message demanded repentance and baptism for forgiveness of sin. Hebrews 2:1-3 and 10:26-31: warns all humanity that rejecting Christ’s sacrifice exposes the unforgiven to God’s wrath. No mortal can ever soften this harsh truth, let alone eliminate it. Separation from God results when we appear before him unforgiven. This writer once told a congregation that no good people would be in Heaven. This shocked everyone: they were going to Heaven and they were good people. I explained: only forgiven people will be in Heaven, only those accepting Christ are forgiven, only those forgiven can be perfected, and only the perfected can be Glorified, and only the Glorified will be with God Philippians 3:20-21, Revelation 1:12-18. All of which means forgiveness of sin is essential, and Christians must urge the unsaved to accept Christ’s sacrifice for their sins and his Lordship of their life. He alone prepares them to face GOD! Why does this series refer to scripture after scripture in both testaments? Because it emphasizes what God said about sin: nothing impure, incomplete, imperfect will ever enter his presence. Because we need to understand what Jesus did about sin: he offered the one and only perfect sacrifice to overcome and remove sin. And we must believe in and obey Jesus to have our sins forgiven! If we don’t believe God’s Word teaching all this, why would we believe a writer writing it, a preacher preaching it, a saved person saying it? Fini (Note: my apology for putting the same information in Part I and Part IIA. Poor editing on my part. Virg)
Every scriptural truth has practical lessons for our discipleship. Consider just two of other ways Adam and Eve’s single sins tutors us. First, the depth of evil potential in a single sin. Think of Abram’s first lie to the Egyptians about Sarai’s identity Genesis 12:10-20. It nearly cost him his wife’s future. Or his second single lie about her to Abimelech. AFTER God had appeared to the patriarch in Mamre, and AFTER being told that his wife Sarah would bear the promised son Genesis 18:1-15, Abraham very nearly had her sexual purity contaminated in Gerar Genesis 20:1-18. The people of Shinar committed a single sin—exalting themselves in building a city with a tower on which they would build a temple to themselves Genesis 11:1-9. And it cost humanity the single language that united them and divided them into a multiplication of tongues and competitive, territorial, often-predatory nations determined to out-think, out-build, out-grow and OUT-GUN all others. Or think of David and Bathsheba’s single sin. A night with the king turned his entire family into a dynasty of immoral murderers, seducers and conspirators, with three potential successors to the throne dead by violence. One sin! Second, once sin is committed, it must be forgiven here, not in the hereafter. Henry Mencken lived as a confirmed secularist and agnostic. He joyously attacked whatever offended his tastes. While he treated individuals with respect, and had mercy on friends, he had harsh words for groups, including preachers, churches, service clubs, academicians, the government and the “fundamentalist South.” He had his own credo, of course, and a plan after death if he had been wrong. He’d appear at Judgment and be surrounded by the Twelve Apostles. To them he would deliver his well-practiced apology: he had been wrong! Readers Digest Most Unforgettable Characters, 376 However, to show that he hadn’t read the Bible, or didn’t believe what he read—the latter is as dangerous as the former is useless—NO ONE appears before the Apostles for judgment. Everyone appears before the Great White Throne Judgment of God Revelation 20:11-15. And any admission of guilt is TOO LATE! According to II Corinthians 5:10 and Revelation 20:11-15,in-life behavior seals our future state and nothing afterwards changes it. End Part IIB Believers look to the Godhead when confronting humanity’s questions, doubts, procrastinations, temporizings and sins. Wherever mortals start, continue or end, disciples know that God’s Word remains constant, dependable and sure in any situation.
When God instructed the first pair in what he expected, he gave them a choice: obey his word or die. Had God he been a liberal theologian, he would have second-guessed himself: maybe he didn’t make himself clear; maybe he should give his mortals a second chance to obey. But God knew he made himself clear and that Adam and Eve understood the rules: eat every fruit from any tree and live—except one. Eat that one and you surely die! No second chance! Satan of course lied. First, they surely wouldn’t die Genesis 3:4. The con man’s hopeful denial of the facts—God didn’t mean that! Second, he blasphemously claimed that God didn’t want mortals knowing as he knows. Then...sensing that his listener had become interested, even thinking along with him, Satan casually wondered if God had a bigger fear in the prohibition: that Eve would find the wisdom hidden in the forbidden fruit—to think for herself, to determine her own destiny, to make her own rules. Obviously our common parents didn’t appreciate the enormity of the change that had occurred in disobedience. Adam for one lived for nearly a millennium, dying at 930 years Genesis 5:1-5. Nor could they anticipate that the “jungle” outside Eden would demand “sweat of their brow” effort to clear and cultivate—when all their previous work in Eden had involved none. Most importantly, Eve had no idea that her one sin had so altered her spiritual genome that every descendant in every generation would inherit her instinctive attraction to temptation, not the instinctive abhorrence God designed and demands. The original sin, then, wasn’t a contamination of every newborn, demanding baptism by sprinkling for forgiveness of Eve’s sin. That erroneous doctrine ignores the scriptural truth that sin is attributed only to individuals capable of making a CHOICE between God’s Word and human opinion. The original sin remains the ongoing sin of each person of accountable age, however. By nature “objects of wrath” Ephesians 2:3, our instinctive disposition--Eve’s sin as enticement—considers temptation favorably, with positive results, not in hostility, knowing its deadly end Romans 6:23a. Only the converted nature, and that not without effort, sees the real horror behind the mask temptation wears I John 2:15-17. Remember: Jesus didn’t say that evil thoughts enter the heart/mind, as if some unknown doctor of wickedness injects wrong thoughts into us. No, Jesus said OUT OF the Heart/Mind—the factory where evil is produced, wrong is produced, mistakes are produced, failure is produced—OUT OF it wickedness flows, gushes, floods. End Part IIA Sorry, we've not had the blog for a few weeks. Judy had surgery, doing fine now, so we're back in business.
Christians must learn, believe, defend and proclaim four seminal Bible truths. The first is God’s direct creation of humans in his image. The second is God’s judgment against all sin, in every generation, in any person of accountable age. The third is Christ’s forgiveness of sin in every person accepting him as Savior and Lord. The fourth is God’s refusal to allow any unforgiven sinner into his Presence. As unpopular as the terms sin and sinners are, Christians must fearlessly proclaim that all people of accountable age, 12-14, but particularly adults, must be either forgiven by Christ or be subject to God’s wrath. No third alternative exists. When Adam and Eve chose Knowledge over Faith—their opinion over God’s word, they roused a deadly egotism in their descendants crucified only by Christ’s demand of self-denial. Where Faith in God would have led their innocence into eternal life, zeal for Knowledge that they misinterpreted as wisdom altered their genes and infected every generation afterwards with arrogant pride! Genesis 3 summarizes the entire Fall from innocence into guilt and from sin into forgiveness. They knew the rules: they could eat from any tree in Eden but ONE. Had God been a liberal theologian, he would have blamed himself for not making his position clear—the charge Bertram Russell leveled against God. But God gave clear rules, the duo understood them and had one chance to get it right. And when they chose their will over God’s word, the first response was SHAME with each other followed by GUILT before God. Not at all what they expected. They felt no awareness of nakedness in innocence. We understand that. Like children unaware of their bodies, Adam and Eve felt comfortable being unclothed. But being a sinner in the company of another sinner instantly became SHAME! And both felt GUILT when hearing the previously comforting footsteps of the Incarnate Jesus “walking in the Garden.” Both shame and guilt continue in humanity. When we see ourselves AS WE ARE, not as we PRETEND, shame proliferates and guilt deepens. Even men and women who publicly and shamelessly bare their bodies don’t readily admit their inner guilt. No, the privacy of our inner self, so important to our individuality, becomes a vault in which we secrete what we want none to know, and sins we dread confessing even to God—though he knows it all and wants to forgive I John 1:9. Like politicians, we boast of strength and deny weakness, though God has mercy on all who deny any strength and admit all weakness. All of this is why God forbade eating the fruit. He knew that once humanity replaced FAITH in his word with KNOWLEDGE of themselves, guilt and its shame would result. Which we see in everyday life any time our opinion replaces God’s truth. And in our fig leaf-excuses or explanations, we cloth ourselves in humanity’s oldest response to disobedience: fear, flight and furtiveness. Followed by shifting blame. Only Eve admitted being deceived. Which offered no defense at all since God’s clear instructions gave her every reason to resist the tempter. End Part I The people we will accompany include:
This entire blog is summarized in two categories. First, the person who thinks it’s all about him as the center of life. He won’t be in heaven. Second, the person who knows, believes and obeys Jesus because it’s always been, is now and always shall be all about God in Christ, and NO ONE ELSE at all! He shall be there. Jesus is now our righteousness and we his sin. But the promise is...one day to come, and from day on forever and ever, we’ll never again shame him by our sins, but only glorify him for his righteousness. Heaven will be filled with humans:
The people we’ll accompany include:
To answer the first, this illustration. Two American paratroopers had such a brawl in training that one vowed to kill the other if he ever had the chance. They both jumped into Normandy first thing 6 June, 1944. The one who feared being shot by the other got lost in the drop. What he didn’t know was the other guy also got lost in the drop. And who did the first guy see across a small meadow in France? Yes, the very man who threatened to shoot him on sight. And what did both men do? As fast as their overburdened legs could carry them they struggled toward each other, fell in each other’s open arms, pounding each other on the back, then going off together to fight Germans. In a crises greater than their differences they found a common cause—and lost themselves in it. In a joy greater than all our differences all in Heaven will forget everything but how glad we are to be together in Christ’s presence. To answer the second, a two-fold response, the first prophetic. The book of Revelation leaves no doubt: there is only agreement in Heaven among angels, elders and the saved that God’s judgments against unsaved sinners are always true, just and deserved. Therefore, if we can’t be happy in Heaven if someone we want there isn’t there, why think we belong there? Only those in absolute, perfect trust in God will be welcome there. The second response is pastoral. As Revelation 21:4 graciously promises, God will eliminate all sources of discomfort, loss, disappointment or pain from our new body and mind. In other words, all memory of what would otherwise surface questions, doubts, reservations, etc., will be erased from our minds. Therefore, we will enjoy permanent amnesia of people we have loved here but aren’t there. End Part V The people we will accompany include:
It does raise a point of difference between the couple and apostles. By doing God’s will, Paul and Silas began a great revival in Philippi, but took a savage beating as a result Acts 16:16-40. If anyone should ask God “why?”, Paul could write it in paragraphs and chapters. Read I Corinthians 4:7-13 and II Corinthians 11:16-12:10. Instead, he obeyed God’s will and took his chances at safety. By living in faith he would never understand those who live by their own choices but blame God when they miscarry.
The people we will accompany include:
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