George’s Theology
I’ve spent more than thirty years of intensive study learning what the world’s greatest thinkers have had to say about God, man, and the creation of the cosmos. In general these great thinkers were sincerely doing exactly the same thing I was attempting to do—to arrive at the bottom line. To determine how we got here, why is there something rather than nothing, and now that we’re here, what’s the purpose of it all.
I’m finally at the end of my quest. I’m now satisfied that I have arrived at the “bottom line.”I got to my bottom line after I found that the wise of the world could not answer me with certitude. I learned those men have never, or ever could, get to a bottom line any better than I can. Most formal theology exists as a dull and boring mental game where theologians end up endlessly arguing amongst themselves, never reaching a consensus upon which they can all agree. Put any five of them in a room and you'll probably get five different positions on a given subject. Many of them are what God refers to as the “wise” of the world. “For the wisdom of this world is foolish with God. For it is written, ‘He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness’.” (1 Cor. 3;19).
So what is the “Bottom Line?” I believe that absolute truth is to be found only in Holy Scripture with God as its author. One needs not look further. I now subscribe to Sola scriptura ( "by Scripture alone"). It is the Protestant Christian doctrine that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of doctrine and practice. Sola scriptura does not deny that other authorities govern Christian life and devotion, but sees them all as subordinate to and corrected by the written word of God. Any Christian can be a theologian to some degree, but the task of interpreting the Bible is a challenging one. Even so God’s Word Is not an unfathomable mystery. But for many people today, the Bible remains a closed book. One reason is that some people have the mistaken idea that the Bible is a mysterious collection of encoded teachings that only a few wise or holy people can interpret.
The world knows nothing of God’s plan outside of the Bible. But it is by the totality of His Creation that we truly “believe.” After creating man and instilling His moral law, and revealing to him His Creation, God has man’s undivided attention; God can now reveal the details of that creation and become personal by means of Holy Scripture. He wrote: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead...” (Romans 1:20). That verse of Scripture alludes to what I call the Moral law of God that I believe was placed within the heart of man from creation.
The Bible is the only source of doctrines that are essential to the Christian faith. The core doctrines of Holy Scripture are: 1) the Deity of Jesus Christ, 2) Salvation by Grace, 3) Resurrection of Christ, 4) the Gospel by the Apostle Paul, and 5) Only one God. These are the doctrines the Bible says are essential. Though there are many other important doctrines, these five are the ones that are declared by Scripture to be essential (I call them primary essentials since the Bible declares them as essential.) In addition to those five core doctrines noted above, there are other secondary doctrines of scripture that become necessary.
The following is a list of beliefs central to almost all Christian faith groups. They are presented here as the essential doctrines of Christianity. A small number of faith groups who consider themselves to be within the framework of Christianity, do not accept some of these beliefs. It should also be understood that slight variances, exceptions, and additions to these doctrines exist within certain faith groups that fall under the broad umbrella of Christianity.
I’ve spent more than thirty years of intensive study learning what the world’s greatest thinkers have had to say about God, man, and the creation of the cosmos. In general these great thinkers were sincerely doing exactly the same thing I was attempting to do—to arrive at the bottom line. To determine how we got here, why is there something rather than nothing, and now that we’re here, what’s the purpose of it all.
I’m finally at the end of my quest. I’m now satisfied that I have arrived at the “bottom line.”I got to my bottom line after I found that the wise of the world could not answer me with certitude. I learned those men have never, or ever could, get to a bottom line any better than I can. Most formal theology exists as a dull and boring mental game where theologians end up endlessly arguing amongst themselves, never reaching a consensus upon which they can all agree. Put any five of them in a room and you'll probably get five different positions on a given subject. Many of them are what God refers to as the “wise” of the world. “For the wisdom of this world is foolish with God. For it is written, ‘He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness’.” (1 Cor. 3;19).
So what is the “Bottom Line?” I believe that absolute truth is to be found only in Holy Scripture with God as its author. One needs not look further. I now subscribe to Sola scriptura ( "by Scripture alone"). It is the Protestant Christian doctrine that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of doctrine and practice. Sola scriptura does not deny that other authorities govern Christian life and devotion, but sees them all as subordinate to and corrected by the written word of God. Any Christian can be a theologian to some degree, but the task of interpreting the Bible is a challenging one. Even so God’s Word Is not an unfathomable mystery. But for many people today, the Bible remains a closed book. One reason is that some people have the mistaken idea that the Bible is a mysterious collection of encoded teachings that only a few wise or holy people can interpret.
The world knows nothing of God’s plan outside of the Bible. But it is by the totality of His Creation that we truly “believe.” After creating man and instilling His moral law, and revealing to him His Creation, God has man’s undivided attention; God can now reveal the details of that creation and become personal by means of Holy Scripture. He wrote: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead...” (Romans 1:20). That verse of Scripture alludes to what I call the Moral law of God that I believe was placed within the heart of man from creation.
The Bible is the only source of doctrines that are essential to the Christian faith. The core doctrines of Holy Scripture are: 1) the Deity of Jesus Christ, 2) Salvation by Grace, 3) Resurrection of Christ, 4) the Gospel by the Apostle Paul, and 5) Only one God. These are the doctrines the Bible says are essential. Though there are many other important doctrines, these five are the ones that are declared by Scripture to be essential (I call them primary essentials since the Bible declares them as essential.) In addition to those five core doctrines noted above, there are other secondary doctrines of scripture that become necessary.
The following is a list of beliefs central to almost all Christian faith groups. They are presented here as the essential doctrines of Christianity. A small number of faith groups who consider themselves to be within the framework of Christianity, do not accept some of these beliefs. It should also be understood that slight variances, exceptions, and additions to these doctrines exist within certain faith groups that fall under the broad umbrella of Christianity.
- There is only one God (Isaiah 43:10; 44:6, 8; John 17:3; 1 Corinthians 8:5-6; Galatians 4:8-9).
- The Trinity (Matthew 3:16-17, 28:19; John 14:16-17; 2 Corinthians 13:14; Acts 2:32-33, John 10:30,17:11, 21; 1 Peter 1:2). Matt. 28:19, " Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (see also, 1 Cor. 12:4-6; 2 Cor. 13:14; Eph. 4:4-6).This doctrine is not represented by a single verse per se though it is hinted at. The doctrine of the Trinity is arrived at systematically by looking at the totality of Scripture. It is, nevertheless, the proper representation of scriptural revelation concerning the nature of God.The Trinity is denied by Mormonism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Islam, The Way International, etc.
- God is omniscient or "knows all things" (Acts 15:18; 1 John 3:20).
- God is omnipotent or "all powerful" (Psalm 115:3; Revelation 19:6).
- God is omnipresent or "present everywhere" (Jeremiah 23:23, 24; Psalm 139).
- God is sovereign (Zechariah 9:14; 1 Timothy 6:15-16).
- God is holy (1 Peter 1:15).
- God is just or "righteous" (Psalm 19:9, 116:5, 145:17; Jeremiah 12:1).
- God is love (1 John 4:8).
- God is true (Romans 3:4; John 14:6).
- God is spirit (John 4:24).
- God is the creator of everything that exists (Genesis 1:1; Isaiah 44:24).
- God is infinite and eternal. He has always been God (Psalm 90:2; Genesis 21:33; Acts 17:24).
- God is immutable. He does not change (James 1:17; Malachi 3:6; Isaiah 46:9-10).
- The Holy Spirit is God (Acts 5:3-4; 1 Corinthians 2:11-12; 2 Corinthians 13:14).
- Jesus' Virgin Birth “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us. (Matt. 1:23KJV). Without the virgin birth, we cannot substantiate the doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus being God in flesh. This would put at risk what Jesus said above in John 8:24(KJV) where he said, "I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins."
- The Deity of Christ . Jesus is God in flesh (John 8:58 with Exodus 3:14); Col. 2:9; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 1:8 ; John 1:1, 14, 10:30-33, 20:28; 1 John 4:2-3KJV: " This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.” The above verse needs to be cross-referenced with John 1:1, 14 (also written by John) where he states that the Word was God and the Word became flesh. is saying that if you deny that Jesus is God in flesh, then you are of the spirit of Antichrist.John 8:24, Jesus said that if you do not believe "that I am," you will die in your sins. In Greek I am is 'ego eimi,' which means ‘I am.' These are the same words used in John 8:58, where Jesus says " . . . before Abraham was, I am." He was claiming the divine title by quoting Exodus 3:14. The Greek Septuagint is the Hebrew Old Testament translated into Greek and done by Jews around 250 B.C. They translated Exodus 3:14 as 'ego eimi' "I AM").Jesus is the proper object of faith. It is not simply enough to have faith. Faith is only as valid as the person in whom you put it. You must put your faith in the proper person. Faith in something false has the same effect as no faith at all.Jesus became a man (Philippians 2:1-11).Jesus is fully God and fully man (Colossians 2:9; 1 Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 4:15; 2 Corinthians 5:21).Jesus was sinless (1 Peter 2:22; Hebrews 4:15).Jesus is the only way to God the Father (John 14:6; Matthew 11:27; Luke 10:22).
- The Doctrine of the deity of Christ includes: The Trinity--There is one God who exists in three persons: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are all coeternal and of the same nature.
- The Hypostatic Union--That Jesus is both God and man. The sufficiency of the sacrifice of Christ--The sacrifice of Christ is completely sufficient to pay for the sins of the world, and it is only through Jesus' sacrifice that anyone can be saved. As God--Only a perfect sacrifice to God is able to cleanse us from our sins. This is why Jesus, who is God in flesh, died for us. He had to die for the sins of the world (1 John 2:2). Only God could do that.
- As man--Jesus must be man to be able to be a sacrifice for man. As a man, He can be the mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5).
- Humans were created by God in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).
- All people have sinned (Romans 3:23, 5:12).
- Death came into the world through Adam's sin (Romans 5:12-15).
- Sin separates us from God (Isaiah 59:2).
- Jesus died for the sins of each and every person in the world (1 John 2:2; 2 Corinthians 5:14; 1 Peter 2:24).
- Jesus' death was a substitutionary sacrifice. He died and paid the price for our sins so that we might live. (1 Peter 2:24; Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45).
- Jesus resurrected from the dead in physical form (John 2:19-21).
- The Resurrection of Christ "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." (1 Cor. 15:14). "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins." (1 Cor. 15:17). To deny the physical resurrection is to deny that Jesus' work was a satisfactory offering to God the Father. It would mean that Jesus was corrupt and needed to stay in the grave. But, he did not stay because his sacrifice was perfect. These verses clearly state that if you say that Jesus did not rise from the dead (in the same body He died in--John 2:19-21), then your faith is useless. The Gospel "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God's curse! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God's curse! (Gal. 1:8-9, KJV). Verses 8 and 9 here in Galatians are a self-declarative statement that you must believe the gospel. The gospel message which in its entirety is that Jesus is God in flesh, who died for sins, rose from the dead, and freely gives the gift of eternal life to those who believe. Furthermore, it would not be possible to present the gospel properly without declaring that Jesus is God in flesh per John 1:1, 14; 10:30-33; 20:28; Col. 2:9; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 1:8. 1 Cor. 15:1-4 defines what the gospel is: "Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, (KJV). Within these verses are the essentials: Christ is God in flesh (John 1:1, 14; 10:30-33; 20:28; Col. 2:9); Salvation is received by faith (John 1:12; Rom. 10:9-10); therefore it is by grace; and the resurrection is mentioned in verse 4. Therefore, this gospel message automatically includes the essentials.
- Salvation is a free gift of God (Romans 4:5, 6:23; Ephesians 2:8-9; 1 John 1:8-10).
- Jesus is the only way to salvation "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.'" (John 14:6) Jesus declared that he was the only access to God the Father. To deny this is to deny what Jesus said.
- Salvation by Grace "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- 9not by works, so that no one can boast (Eph. 2:8-9, KJV). "You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace." (Gal. 5:4). This verse and its context plainly teach that if you believe that you are saved by faith and works, then you are not saved at all. This is a common error in the cults. Because they have a false Jesus, they have a false doctrine of salvation. (Read Rom. 3-5 and Gal. 3-5). You cannot add to the work of God. Gal. 2:21 says, "I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!" (KJV). "Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin." (Rom. 3:20). "However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness," (Rom. 4:5)."Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law." (Gal. 3:21). Salvation is not universal resurrection, rather, it is the saving from God's righteous judgment. Furthermore, salvation, which is the forgiveness of sins, is accomplished by faith alone (Rom. 4:1-11). Roman Catholicism denies salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ alone. The Bible is the "inspired" or "God-breathed," Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:21).
- Those who reject Jesus Christ will go to hell forever after they die (Revelation 20:11-15, 21:8).
- Those who accept Jesus Christ will live for eternity with him after they die (John 11:25, 26; 2 Corinthians 5:6).
- Hell is a place of punishment (Matthew 25:41, 46; Revelation 19:20).
- Hell is eternal (Matthew 25:46).
- There will be a rapture of the church (Matthew 24:30-36, 40-41; John 14:1-3; 1 Corinthians 15:51-52; 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12).
- Jesus will return to the earth (Acts 1:11).
- Christians will be raised from the dead when Jesus returns (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17).
- There will be a final judgment (Hebrews 9:27; 2 Peter 3:7).
- Satan will be thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10).
The Knowability of God
The knowability of God is a topic in Christian theology that deals with the degree to which God can be known by mankind. Some theologians contend that he cannot be known, sometimes arguing that God is so unique from humanity that it is absurd to think that finite humans can relate or know him in any significant way
Scripture does reveal that God can never fully be known. The Psalmist tells us that "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable," (Psalm 145:3). Paul adds to this idea, observing that "the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God," and later notes that, "no one comprehends the things of God except the Spirit of God" (1 Corinthians 2:10-12). David further emphasizes this when he says that, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it" (Psalm 139:6; cf. 17). This idea is ultimately summed from the very mouth of God, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9)."Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33) “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” (1 Cor. 2:11)
Not only do we not know what is in the mind of any man unless we are told, neither do we know the mind of God, until he reveals it. We know the Will of God revealed through Jesus Christ, the Word
made flesh. Scripture tells us that we can know more than facts about God – He wants us to know him as a personal being through Jesus Christ! Significant passages are found in the Gospel of John: "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent," (John 17:3). John later writes in his epistle, "I write to you, children, because you know the Father," (1 John 2:13). God is known to the degree he wants to be known, , and in knowing God we should take great joy, for by knowing God, we can pray to him, hear him, and commune in his presence.
The knowability of God is a topic in Christian theology that deals with the degree to which God can be known by mankind. Some theologians contend that he cannot be known, sometimes arguing that God is so unique from humanity that it is absurd to think that finite humans can relate or know him in any significant way
Scripture does reveal that God can never fully be known. The Psalmist tells us that "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable," (Psalm 145:3). Paul adds to this idea, observing that "the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God," and later notes that, "no one comprehends the things of God except the Spirit of God" (1 Corinthians 2:10-12). David further emphasizes this when he says that, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it" (Psalm 139:6; cf. 17). This idea is ultimately summed from the very mouth of God, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9)."Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33) “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” (1 Cor. 2:11)
Not only do we not know what is in the mind of any man unless we are told, neither do we know the mind of God, until he reveals it. We know the Will of God revealed through Jesus Christ, the Word
made flesh. Scripture tells us that we can know more than facts about God – He wants us to know him as a personal being through Jesus Christ! Significant passages are found in the Gospel of John: "Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent," (John 17:3). John later writes in his epistle, "I write to you, children, because you know the Father," (1 John 2:13). God is known to the degree he wants to be known, , and in knowing God we should take great joy, for by knowing God, we can pray to him, hear him, and commune in his presence.
On the Body of Christ
I am not ecumenical, I’m exclusive because God is exclusive. The Bible is a narrow Book! To compromise, to bend, to conform, is to be ecumenical. The Bible makes specific stipulations that God has laid on the human race, and those things are not broad and open-ended, but rather they are particular.
We must hold to what the Word teaches. Consider Ephesians 4:4. This is not a broad reign that just brings in the multitudes, this is going to do just the opposite. This verse brings us down into the narrow reigns of God’s dealing with the human race.
Ephesians 4:4a"There is one body,..." That means exactly what it says; the admonition is that the Body of Christ is to be one. Singular in purpose around the whole planet, the Body is to be one, but what has happened to the Church?
When we say the Church, we’re talking about the whole gamut of Christianity as it exists today. It’s fragmented. Hundreds and hundreds of groups, and denominations and divisions and so forth, and that’s not what God intended. What God has said in Ephesians is for us to be one, and now we are many. Satan has fragmented the Church. It’s is amazing how Satan can always bring about just exactly the opposite of what God intended
In Ephesians, God’s first intentions for the true Church made up of born again, regenerated, blood-bought believers were to be one. One in mind, one in purpose, and instead we’ve got thousands of fragmented groups all claiming to have some sort of Christianity.
But there is only one true Body of Christ, in which there are no unbelievers. In the true Body there are no professing Christians without salvation in the Body of Christ. Only a true believer ends up in the Body of Christ.
Here Paul is using the analogy of the human body.
"For as the body (the human body) is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. (or the Body of Christ, the true Church) 13. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink (or partake) into one Spirit." (I Corinthians 12:12-13). One Spirit is putting us into the One Body of Christ.
"For the body (or the human element or the Body of Christ) is not one member, but many." (I Corinthians 12:14). In verse 27 Paul is emphasizing this concept of the Body of Christ."Now ye (believers) are the body of Christ, and members in particular." (I Corinthians 12:27)
In Eph. 1 Paul makes another reference to the Body of Christ. Remember Paul is the only one that refers to the Body of Christ, the true Church. In verse 22 God is speaking of the Son.
"And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, 23. Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all." (Ephesians 1:22-23)
This is only a Pauline term, "The Body of Christ." And in Ehp. 3 he again makes reference that through one of the mysteries given to him that Gentiles are included in the Body.
"That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel:" (Ephesians 3:6)
The Body of Christ, that consortium of only the true believer. I’m talking about someone who has truly and completely placed their faith, by believing in their heart, that Jesus died for their sins, was buried, and rose again, plus nothing else, for their salvation.
Hebrews 13 is another reference to the Body of Christ. Hebrews was written primarily to Jewish believers. Even these Jewish believers were considered by the apostle as members of the Body of Christ.
"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)
We don’t put Old Testament believers into the Body of Christ. It’s true, they’re saved, and in a division all their own, and that’s why we make that separation as we learn that God dealt with Israel on the one hand, but He’s also dealing with the whole world’s population over here on this side of the Cross in the calling out of the Body of Christ. These are two separate entities, and even in eternity, they may never lose that identity. It appears the Body of Christ, and the Covenant people of Israel will always keep their identity. God has a special role for each of them, and I can find nothing in Scripture that refutes that. A mystery retained by God.
I am not ecumenical, I’m exclusive because God is exclusive. The Bible is a narrow Book! To compromise, to bend, to conform, is to be ecumenical. The Bible makes specific stipulations that God has laid on the human race, and those things are not broad and open-ended, but rather they are particular.
We must hold to what the Word teaches. Consider Ephesians 4:4. This is not a broad reign that just brings in the multitudes, this is going to do just the opposite. This verse brings us down into the narrow reigns of God’s dealing with the human race.
Ephesians 4:4a"There is one body,..." That means exactly what it says; the admonition is that the Body of Christ is to be one. Singular in purpose around the whole planet, the Body is to be one, but what has happened to the Church?
When we say the Church, we’re talking about the whole gamut of Christianity as it exists today. It’s fragmented. Hundreds and hundreds of groups, and denominations and divisions and so forth, and that’s not what God intended. What God has said in Ephesians is for us to be one, and now we are many. Satan has fragmented the Church. It’s is amazing how Satan can always bring about just exactly the opposite of what God intended
In Ephesians, God’s first intentions for the true Church made up of born again, regenerated, blood-bought believers were to be one. One in mind, one in purpose, and instead we’ve got thousands of fragmented groups all claiming to have some sort of Christianity.
But there is only one true Body of Christ, in which there are no unbelievers. In the true Body there are no professing Christians without salvation in the Body of Christ. Only a true believer ends up in the Body of Christ.
Here Paul is using the analogy of the human body.
"For as the body (the human body) is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. (or the Body of Christ, the true Church) 13. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink (or partake) into one Spirit." (I Corinthians 12:12-13). One Spirit is putting us into the One Body of Christ.
"For the body (or the human element or the Body of Christ) is not one member, but many." (I Corinthians 12:14). In verse 27 Paul is emphasizing this concept of the Body of Christ."Now ye (believers) are the body of Christ, and members in particular." (I Corinthians 12:27)
In Eph. 1 Paul makes another reference to the Body of Christ. Remember Paul is the only one that refers to the Body of Christ, the true Church. In verse 22 God is speaking of the Son.
"And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, 23. Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all." (Ephesians 1:22-23)
This is only a Pauline term, "The Body of Christ." And in Ehp. 3 he again makes reference that through one of the mysteries given to him that Gentiles are included in the Body.
"That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel:" (Ephesians 3:6)
The Body of Christ, that consortium of only the true believer. I’m talking about someone who has truly and completely placed their faith, by believing in their heart, that Jesus died for their sins, was buried, and rose again, plus nothing else, for their salvation.
Hebrews 13 is another reference to the Body of Christ. Hebrews was written primarily to Jewish believers. Even these Jewish believers were considered by the apostle as members of the Body of Christ.
"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body." (Hebrews 13:3)
We don’t put Old Testament believers into the Body of Christ. It’s true, they’re saved, and in a division all their own, and that’s why we make that separation as we learn that God dealt with Israel on the one hand, but He’s also dealing with the whole world’s population over here on this side of the Cross in the calling out of the Body of Christ. These are two separate entities, and even in eternity, they may never lose that identity. It appears the Body of Christ, and the Covenant people of Israel will always keep their identity. God has a special role for each of them, and I can find nothing in Scripture that refutes that. A mystery retained by God.
The Historical-Critical Method
I maintain the key to Bible study is the historical-critical method: the Bible can only be understood through historical knowledge and critical reflection. I view Scripture as a series of more-or-less historical accounts, written progressively. Since scripture was written from ancient cultures in ancient languages, it is clear that its teachings are not always self-evident, therefore historical knowledge and critical reflection are needed to assist in understanding their true meaning. The historical-critical method, the translating and paraphrasing from ancient to modern languages using lexical and archaeological knowledge, along with common sense about human communication is the means of establishing “what is there” in the text. But we must never exclude the “relevant” treatment of active Spirit-led engagement.
I hold that understanding scripture itself is contingent on God’s presence. The purpose is to discern “the Word in the words” of scripture. I understand “the Word” as the correlation of scripture and the communication of the Holy Spirit. The heart of Bible study is not only historical, but also a Spiritual process through which we pray to understand what the Holy Spirit is speaking through a particular text. It is not a matter of human capacity or experience, but rather God acting upon us and leading us to the truth. Spiritual FAITH is everything. Without faith it is impossible to please God(one of the absolutes of Scripture).
I maintain the key to Bible study is the historical-critical method: the Bible can only be understood through historical knowledge and critical reflection. I view Scripture as a series of more-or-less historical accounts, written progressively. Since scripture was written from ancient cultures in ancient languages, it is clear that its teachings are not always self-evident, therefore historical knowledge and critical reflection are needed to assist in understanding their true meaning. The historical-critical method, the translating and paraphrasing from ancient to modern languages using lexical and archaeological knowledge, along with common sense about human communication is the means of establishing “what is there” in the text. But we must never exclude the “relevant” treatment of active Spirit-led engagement.
I hold that understanding scripture itself is contingent on God’s presence. The purpose is to discern “the Word in the words” of scripture. I understand “the Word” as the correlation of scripture and the communication of the Holy Spirit. The heart of Bible study is not only historical, but also a Spiritual process through which we pray to understand what the Holy Spirit is speaking through a particular text. It is not a matter of human capacity or experience, but rather God acting upon us and leading us to the truth. Spiritual FAITH is everything. Without faith it is impossible to please God(one of the absolutes of Scripture).
Doctrinal Statement
I believe in a triune God composed of three persons; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. All individual personalities, yet functioning as one.
I believe our Bible is the inerrant Word of God, verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit, and holy men of God wrote without any other resource [II Peter 1:21].
I believe Jesus Christ, the son of God, was the creator of everything [John 1:1, Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1:2].
I believe God the Son became the incarnate God in the flesh by way of the virgin birth [Galatians 4:4, Matthew 1:23].
I believe the human race began with Adam, perfect and sinless, but after his act of disobedience, precipitated the fall of the whole human race [Romans 5:12, Romans 3:23].
I believe God has provided the way back to fellowship with Himself through faith and faith alone in Jesus Christ and his death for our sins, his burial of three days and three nights, and his resurrection in power and glory [I Corinthians 15:1-4].
I believe every believer of that gospel is baptized by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ “My Church.”[I Corinthians 12:13, Ephesians 1:23;Matt. 16:18; Rom.16:5; Eph.6:22-23].
I believe the communion table is the time of reverential contemplating of the finished work of the cross and that there is no set schedule in practice [I Corinthians 11:26].
I believe the true believer will live a life pleasing to God [Titus 2:1, 12, & 13, Galatians 5:22 & 23].
I believe in the pre-tribulation out calling of the body of Christ [I Corinthians 15:51-54, I Thessalonians 4:13-17], followed by a seven-year tribulation [Daniel 9:27], and the second coming of Christ to set up the thousand year reign of Christ [Zechariah 14:1-9].
I believe the lost of all the ages will be resurrected and appear before the great white throne and then each person individually will come under the perfect judgment of God. [John 5:28 & 29, Revelation 20:11-15].
I believe in a triune God composed of three persons; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. All individual personalities, yet functioning as one.
I believe our Bible is the inerrant Word of God, verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit, and holy men of God wrote without any other resource [II Peter 1:21].
I believe Jesus Christ, the son of God, was the creator of everything [John 1:1, Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1:2].
I believe God the Son became the incarnate God in the flesh by way of the virgin birth [Galatians 4:4, Matthew 1:23].
I believe the human race began with Adam, perfect and sinless, but after his act of disobedience, precipitated the fall of the whole human race [Romans 5:12, Romans 3:23].
I believe God has provided the way back to fellowship with Himself through faith and faith alone in Jesus Christ and his death for our sins, his burial of three days and three nights, and his resurrection in power and glory [I Corinthians 15:1-4].
I believe every believer of that gospel is baptized by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ “My Church.”[I Corinthians 12:13, Ephesians 1:23;Matt. 16:18; Rom.16:5; Eph.6:22-23].
I believe the communion table is the time of reverential contemplating of the finished work of the cross and that there is no set schedule in practice [I Corinthians 11:26].
I believe the true believer will live a life pleasing to God [Titus 2:1, 12, & 13, Galatians 5:22 & 23].
I believe in the pre-tribulation out calling of the body of Christ [I Corinthians 15:51-54, I Thessalonians 4:13-17], followed by a seven-year tribulation [Daniel 9:27], and the second coming of Christ to set up the thousand year reign of Christ [Zechariah 14:1-9].
I believe the lost of all the ages will be resurrected and appear before the great white throne and then each person individually will come under the perfect judgment of God. [John 5:28 & 29, Revelation 20:11-15].
The Doctrine of Heaven
The total number of people who have ever lived on this earth is estimated to be 100 billion. As of this writing in 2017, it is estimated that there have been about 13-13.5 billion Christians in the past 2000 years. Every person ever born (and those yet to be born) will spend eternity somewhere in a newly resurrected body. Only God knows how many of the total will spend eternity in heaven in the presence of the Risen Lord.
Based on Holy Scripture there is only One name whereby we must be saved, and this verse says it so plainly.(Philippians 2:10a)"That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,…And that every tongue (whether in this life or the one to come) should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
Heaven For Believers Only
Christians have an exclusivist Gospel. You cannot water it down with teachings of another and assume that God will accept it. He will not. He is Sovereign. He is absolute. And He is exclusivist. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:14). And how many find it? Few! Few! The majority wants to bend the rules and say, “Oh well, certainly God will accept me.” No, He won’t. God is absolute.
The pluralist believes that there are many paths to God, Jesus being only one of them. Since salvation can come through other religions and religious leaders, it surely follows that people do not have to believe in Christ to be saved.
The inclusivist. Although Jesus has accomplished the work necessary to bring us back to God, nonetheless, people can be saved by responding positively to God's revelation in creation and perhaps in aspects of their own religions. So, even though Christ is the only Savior, people do not have to know about or believe in Christ to be saved.
The exclusivist believes that Scripture affirms both truths, first, that Jesus alone has accomplished the atoning work necessary to save sinners, and second, that knowledge of and faith in Christ is necessary for anyone to be saved. Jesus is the only savior.
Why think that Jesus is the only Savior? Of all the people who have lived and ever will live, Jesus alone qualifies, in his person and work, as the only one capable of accomplishing atonement for the sin of the world.
“In the days when God (in the person of Jesus Christ at the Great White Throne) shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ (And how are they going to be judged?) according to my (Paul’s) gospel.” (Romans 2:16). So the vast majority of the human race is going to come before God lost, and they are going to be judged according to Paul’s Gospel. That’s what it says – “According to my gospel.” He said to teach no other Gospel other than what Paul had taught Timothy himself in I Corinthians 15:1-4.
Christ alone qualifies as Savior, and Christ alone is Savior. Jesus' own words could not be clearer: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). And the Apostle Peter confirms, "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Why think that faith in Christ is necessary to be saved? The teaching of the apostles is clear, that the content of the gospel now (since the coming of Christ) focuses directly upon the atoning death and resurrection of Christ, and that by faith in Christ one is forgiven of his sin and granted eternal life. Consider the following passages that support the conviction that people are saved only as they know and trust in Christ as their Savior. These claims are true of no one else in the history of the world. Jesus alone is Savior. Faith in Christ is necessary to be saved.
Therefore, since Jesus is the only Savior, only those people who believe in Christ will spend eternity in Heaven. One of the visions the Apostle John receives is recorded in Revelation 20 and concerns a judgment that will take place after Christ's second coming. This event is often referred to as the Great White Throne Judgment. It is the final judgment of God upon those of mankind outside the body of Christ. Believers in Christ escape the Great White Throne Judgment because their debts and transgressions have been paid for by Christ, a fact that Paul mentions: "And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13-`4). In the end, the Great White Throne Judgment underscores the fact that God's justice will be done and that, outside of Christ, that justice will be sure, and final. Unless a person puts his faith in Christ, he will stand before Jesus at His Great White Throne and be judged unworthy of spending eternity in Heaven with Him.
The Bible’s Revelation of Heaven
Heaven is the dwelling place of God(Deut. 26: 15;Matt. 6:9), His angels(Luke 2:15; Matt. 28:2; Heb. 12:22), and at death the soul of every saint(the body of Christ) leaves the human body in a state of conscious existence in the immediate presence of Jesus in Heaven(Ec. 12:7; Rev. 4-5; Luke 16:22, 25;Luke 23:43; Luke 16:22ff; Heb. 12:23; 2 Cor. 5:8; Rev. 6:9-11; Phil. 1:23).
There is no “soul sleep” or period of unawareness preceding heaven. (“Fallen asleep” in 1 Thes. 4:13 is a euphemism for death, describing the spirit’s departure from the body, ending our conscious existence on earth.)
Heaven is an actual place, to and from which Christ (John 1:32; 6:33; Acts 1:2), angels (Matt. 28:2; Rev. 10:1) and in rare circumstances people, even prior to their deaths, have traveled (2 Kings 2:11; 2 Cor. 12:2; Rev. 11:12). Most Christians think in terms of “going” to heaven, as going to a “place” somewhere in space. The Gospels tell us that Jesus on several occasions talked about God as being in heaven, and that he taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven…” Jesus said He was going to his Father’s house, to heaven, to “prepare a place” (mansions)for His believers.
There is ample evidence of physical objects in Heaven: The earthly Jewish tabernacle was an exact copy of the one in Heaven(Heb. 8:5). The holy city of New Jerusalem is in Heaven(Heb. 12:22).Palm branches are mentioned(Rev. 7:9). Horses are in Heaven(2 Kings 2:11; Rev. 19:14. A Temple is in Heaven(Rev. 15:8). The tree of life is physical and is found in Hew Jerusalem(Rev. 22:2). Enoch(Gen. 5:24) and Elijah(2 Kings 2:11-12) were taken directly to Heaven without ever leaving behind a body.
Taken together, these verses strongly supports the idea Heaven is a physical place to at least some degree, and Paul’s glimpse of Heaven also supports Heaven as a place.
Heaven is consistently referred to as “up” in location (Mark 6:41; Luke 9:51). We do not know whether it is a place “in the heavens” (the universe beyond the earth) or entirely outside the space/time continuum. We do know heaven is someplace, and presently that place isn’t earth. Heaven is where Christ came from (John 6:42), where he returned after his resurrection (Acts1:11), where he now is and from which he will physically return to earth again (Acts 1:11; Rev. 19:1-16). Heaven is described as a city (Heb. 11:16; 12:22; 13:14; Rev. 21:12). The normal understanding of a “city” is a place of many residences in near proximity, the inhabitants of which are subject to a common government. “City” may also connote varied and bustling activity. Heaven contains for believers a permanent inheritance, an unperishing estate specifically reserved for us. (1 Pet. 1:4). Heaven is the Christian’s home of citizenship (Heb. 11:16; Phil. 3:20). Christ is our King. We are his ambassadors, representing his agenda on earth (2 Cor. 5:20). While on our brief stay here, we are aliens, strangers and pilgrims (Heb. 11:3). Ambassadors, aliens and pilgrims identify themselves and plan their lives with a focus on their home country. Should they become too engrossed in the alien country where they temporarily reside, they can easily compromise their allegiances to their true King and true country.
Believing Christians people should long for heaven. This pleases our Lord, who has prepared a place there for them (Heb. 11:13-16; 2 Cor. 5:2). We should be ever-motivated by the anticipation of heaven (Phil. 3:14; 2 Tim. 4:8). Heaven and all that it represents should be a central object of our attention in this life. Our hearts or minds are to be continuously set on these “things above” where Christ is in heaven, not on “earthly things” (Col. 3:1-4). God commands us to be heavenly minded, and doing so will give us the perspective and motivation to live on earth as he has commanded us (Heb. 11:26-27).
The essential joy of heaven has been called the beatific vision, which is derived from the vision of God’s essence. The soul rests perfectly in God, and does not, or cannot desire anything else than God. When the soul is finally reunited with its newly resurrected body, the body participates in the happiness of the soul. It becomes incorruptible, glorious and perfect. Any physical defects the body may have labored under are erased.
Paul's emphasizes how different our heavenly bodies will be compared to our physical bodies. After their resurrection, the saints will stand before God, where their works will be judged. The issue and the outcome is not salvation, but rewards. Heaven will commence with the believer's judgment and the Lord's distribution of rewards for faithful service.. A glimpse of what our resurrected body will be like is revealed in the Scripture describing the 40 days after His resurrection.
During those 40 days the resurrected Jesus had all the outward appearances of another human being. He walked in step with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they didn't see Him as something strange. They invited Him into the house for probably the evening meal then suddenly He's gone. The Lord didn't go out the door, He didn't slip out a window; He was gone, and in a split second He was in the upper room in Jerusalem with the disciples. And again He just suddenly appeared to the disciples. Then we find Him up at Galilee, and He stands there on the seashore and waits for the men to come to shore in their little boat. And when they don't have any fish what does He tell them? "Breakfast is ready." The Lord had fish frying, and had the bread ready, and the Scripture says He ate with them. This tells us He had a Human appearing Body, and it could do all the things that the disciples did, but now it was an eternal body, it was the resurrected body. It was not of flesh and Blood, but rather flesh and bone. And the Spirit is the life-given aspect of that new body and that's our prospect. So when we die, and if we are buried and it goes back into dust then we know without a shadow of doubt that this is going to be resurrected to a new body fashioned exactly like His body.
Heavenly Rewards for Believers
Jesus on more than one occasion stated that not all who enter Heaven will enjoy its blessings to the same degree. Not that there will be any judgment or punishment for those who are believers. "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1). But Jesus did say that in His kingdom "many who are first shall be last, and the last first" (cf. Matt. 19:30). Heaven is not merely an extension of life here on earth; it is a whole new life, based on decisions and choices we have made while living on earth.
Upon resurrection, the saints will stand before God, where their works will be judged. The issue and the outcome is not salvation, but rewards. Heaven will commence with the believer's judgment and the Lord's distribution of rewards for faithful service.
All of the saints(body of Christ) will come before the judgment seat of Christ, the Bema seat. Bema is simply the Greek word for judgment seat. It came from the Olympics - the seat of the judges. It's a seat of judging not for Heaven or hell, but rather for what rewards believers will receive. This will only be for believers and the Body of Christ who one day will come before the Bema Seat for rewards. We will definitely get rewards based on our Christian walk in this life here on earth. Of course, the rewards are going to come to their fruition primarily in the Kingdom economy. When the Kingdom finally comes on the earth and becomes active, Christ will be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the world wide Ruler, and we will be ruling and reigning with Him.
Now here is where the reward aspect comes in, as we reign and rule with Him, our level of responsibility is going to be based on our faithfulness here. And that is why it behooves us as believers to labor, to work, and serve for the rewards we will use in the Kingdom Age. Most people would rather be active as opposed to being inactive and sitting on the sideline.
What is the nature of the reward that may be won or lost? Many passages speak of our heavenly reward in terms of the responsibility with which we will be entrusted by God when we reign with Christ in the new heaven and new earth. In Jesus' parable of the talents, He spoke of rewarding those who had been faithful by putting them "in charge of many things" in His kingdom (Matt. 25:21 23). In another place He spoke of putting some of us in places of authority over cities in His kingdom (Luke 19:17,19). To those who had stood by Him in His earthly trials, Jesus promised to place them "on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" in His future kingdom, as well as to seat them at His side at His table (Luke 22:28-30)! Not only would they be worthy of being entrusted with greater responsibility, but also capable of enjoying the closest fellowship with Christ!
In many passages heavenly rewards are likened to the "crowns" worn by victors in athletic contests. Whether literal or metaphorical, these crowns represent different aspects of our heavenly reward. The "crown of life" is promised to those who persevere under trial (James 1:12; Rev. 2:10), the "crown of righteousness" to those who long for Christ's return (2 Tim. 4:8), an "incorruptible crown" to those who exercise self control (1 Cor. 9:25), the "crown of rejoicing" to those who lead others to Christ (1 Thess. 2:19), and the "crown of glory" to those who serve unselfishly as spiritual leaders (1 Pet. 5:2-4).
The most important fact about our heavenly rewards is that they are based not on our position or ability, but on our faithfulness. Time and again Jesus told His followers that "he who is faithful in a little thing, will be faithful also in much" (Luke 16:10; 19:17).
Heaven is the certain outcome for those who have entrusted their eternal future to the hand of God by trusting in Jesus as the One who died in their place, bearing the penalty for their sins.
When Paul did speak of heaven, his most consistent emphasis was that heaven is the place where God is, and where men are privileged to enjoy His presence. To put it in its most concise form, heaven is to be "with Him." Those who have trusted in Jesus and who desire to be in His presence are rewarded with an eternity in His presence
The total number of people who have ever lived on this earth is estimated to be 100 billion. As of this writing in 2017, it is estimated that there have been about 13-13.5 billion Christians in the past 2000 years. Every person ever born (and those yet to be born) will spend eternity somewhere in a newly resurrected body. Only God knows how many of the total will spend eternity in heaven in the presence of the Risen Lord.
Based on Holy Scripture there is only One name whereby we must be saved, and this verse says it so plainly.(Philippians 2:10a)"That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,…And that every tongue (whether in this life or the one to come) should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
Heaven For Believers Only
Christians have an exclusivist Gospel. You cannot water it down with teachings of another and assume that God will accept it. He will not. He is Sovereign. He is absolute. And He is exclusivist. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:14). And how many find it? Few! Few! The majority wants to bend the rules and say, “Oh well, certainly God will accept me.” No, He won’t. God is absolute.
The pluralist believes that there are many paths to God, Jesus being only one of them. Since salvation can come through other religions and religious leaders, it surely follows that people do not have to believe in Christ to be saved.
The inclusivist. Although Jesus has accomplished the work necessary to bring us back to God, nonetheless, people can be saved by responding positively to God's revelation in creation and perhaps in aspects of their own religions. So, even though Christ is the only Savior, people do not have to know about or believe in Christ to be saved.
The exclusivist believes that Scripture affirms both truths, first, that Jesus alone has accomplished the atoning work necessary to save sinners, and second, that knowledge of and faith in Christ is necessary for anyone to be saved. Jesus is the only savior.
Why think that Jesus is the only Savior? Of all the people who have lived and ever will live, Jesus alone qualifies, in his person and work, as the only one capable of accomplishing atonement for the sin of the world.
“In the days when God (in the person of Jesus Christ at the Great White Throne) shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ (And how are they going to be judged?) according to my (Paul’s) gospel.” (Romans 2:16). So the vast majority of the human race is going to come before God lost, and they are going to be judged according to Paul’s Gospel. That’s what it says – “According to my gospel.” He said to teach no other Gospel other than what Paul had taught Timothy himself in I Corinthians 15:1-4.
Christ alone qualifies as Savior, and Christ alone is Savior. Jesus' own words could not be clearer: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). And the Apostle Peter confirms, "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Why think that faith in Christ is necessary to be saved? The teaching of the apostles is clear, that the content of the gospel now (since the coming of Christ) focuses directly upon the atoning death and resurrection of Christ, and that by faith in Christ one is forgiven of his sin and granted eternal life. Consider the following passages that support the conviction that people are saved only as they know and trust in Christ as their Savior. These claims are true of no one else in the history of the world. Jesus alone is Savior. Faith in Christ is necessary to be saved.
Therefore, since Jesus is the only Savior, only those people who believe in Christ will spend eternity in Heaven. One of the visions the Apostle John receives is recorded in Revelation 20 and concerns a judgment that will take place after Christ's second coming. This event is often referred to as the Great White Throne Judgment. It is the final judgment of God upon those of mankind outside the body of Christ. Believers in Christ escape the Great White Throne Judgment because their debts and transgressions have been paid for by Christ, a fact that Paul mentions: "And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing to the cross.” (Colossians 2:13-`4). In the end, the Great White Throne Judgment underscores the fact that God's justice will be done and that, outside of Christ, that justice will be sure, and final. Unless a person puts his faith in Christ, he will stand before Jesus at His Great White Throne and be judged unworthy of spending eternity in Heaven with Him.
The Bible’s Revelation of Heaven
Heaven is the dwelling place of God(Deut. 26: 15;Matt. 6:9), His angels(Luke 2:15; Matt. 28:2; Heb. 12:22), and at death the soul of every saint(the body of Christ) leaves the human body in a state of conscious existence in the immediate presence of Jesus in Heaven(Ec. 12:7; Rev. 4-5; Luke 16:22, 25;Luke 23:43; Luke 16:22ff; Heb. 12:23; 2 Cor. 5:8; Rev. 6:9-11; Phil. 1:23).
There is no “soul sleep” or period of unawareness preceding heaven. (“Fallen asleep” in 1 Thes. 4:13 is a euphemism for death, describing the spirit’s departure from the body, ending our conscious existence on earth.)
Heaven is an actual place, to and from which Christ (John 1:32; 6:33; Acts 1:2), angels (Matt. 28:2; Rev. 10:1) and in rare circumstances people, even prior to their deaths, have traveled (2 Kings 2:11; 2 Cor. 12:2; Rev. 11:12). Most Christians think in terms of “going” to heaven, as going to a “place” somewhere in space. The Gospels tell us that Jesus on several occasions talked about God as being in heaven, and that he taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven…” Jesus said He was going to his Father’s house, to heaven, to “prepare a place” (mansions)for His believers.
There is ample evidence of physical objects in Heaven: The earthly Jewish tabernacle was an exact copy of the one in Heaven(Heb. 8:5). The holy city of New Jerusalem is in Heaven(Heb. 12:22).Palm branches are mentioned(Rev. 7:9). Horses are in Heaven(2 Kings 2:11; Rev. 19:14. A Temple is in Heaven(Rev. 15:8). The tree of life is physical and is found in Hew Jerusalem(Rev. 22:2). Enoch(Gen. 5:24) and Elijah(2 Kings 2:11-12) were taken directly to Heaven without ever leaving behind a body.
Taken together, these verses strongly supports the idea Heaven is a physical place to at least some degree, and Paul’s glimpse of Heaven also supports Heaven as a place.
Heaven is consistently referred to as “up” in location (Mark 6:41; Luke 9:51). We do not know whether it is a place “in the heavens” (the universe beyond the earth) or entirely outside the space/time continuum. We do know heaven is someplace, and presently that place isn’t earth. Heaven is where Christ came from (John 6:42), where he returned after his resurrection (Acts1:11), where he now is and from which he will physically return to earth again (Acts 1:11; Rev. 19:1-16). Heaven is described as a city (Heb. 11:16; 12:22; 13:14; Rev. 21:12). The normal understanding of a “city” is a place of many residences in near proximity, the inhabitants of which are subject to a common government. “City” may also connote varied and bustling activity. Heaven contains for believers a permanent inheritance, an unperishing estate specifically reserved for us. (1 Pet. 1:4). Heaven is the Christian’s home of citizenship (Heb. 11:16; Phil. 3:20). Christ is our King. We are his ambassadors, representing his agenda on earth (2 Cor. 5:20). While on our brief stay here, we are aliens, strangers and pilgrims (Heb. 11:3). Ambassadors, aliens and pilgrims identify themselves and plan their lives with a focus on their home country. Should they become too engrossed in the alien country where they temporarily reside, they can easily compromise their allegiances to their true King and true country.
Believing Christians people should long for heaven. This pleases our Lord, who has prepared a place there for them (Heb. 11:13-16; 2 Cor. 5:2). We should be ever-motivated by the anticipation of heaven (Phil. 3:14; 2 Tim. 4:8). Heaven and all that it represents should be a central object of our attention in this life. Our hearts or minds are to be continuously set on these “things above” where Christ is in heaven, not on “earthly things” (Col. 3:1-4). God commands us to be heavenly minded, and doing so will give us the perspective and motivation to live on earth as he has commanded us (Heb. 11:26-27).
The essential joy of heaven has been called the beatific vision, which is derived from the vision of God’s essence. The soul rests perfectly in God, and does not, or cannot desire anything else than God. When the soul is finally reunited with its newly resurrected body, the body participates in the happiness of the soul. It becomes incorruptible, glorious and perfect. Any physical defects the body may have labored under are erased.
Paul's emphasizes how different our heavenly bodies will be compared to our physical bodies. After their resurrection, the saints will stand before God, where their works will be judged. The issue and the outcome is not salvation, but rewards. Heaven will commence with the believer's judgment and the Lord's distribution of rewards for faithful service.. A glimpse of what our resurrected body will be like is revealed in the Scripture describing the 40 days after His resurrection.
During those 40 days the resurrected Jesus had all the outward appearances of another human being. He walked in step with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they didn't see Him as something strange. They invited Him into the house for probably the evening meal then suddenly He's gone. The Lord didn't go out the door, He didn't slip out a window; He was gone, and in a split second He was in the upper room in Jerusalem with the disciples. And again He just suddenly appeared to the disciples. Then we find Him up at Galilee, and He stands there on the seashore and waits for the men to come to shore in their little boat. And when they don't have any fish what does He tell them? "Breakfast is ready." The Lord had fish frying, and had the bread ready, and the Scripture says He ate with them. This tells us He had a Human appearing Body, and it could do all the things that the disciples did, but now it was an eternal body, it was the resurrected body. It was not of flesh and Blood, but rather flesh and bone. And the Spirit is the life-given aspect of that new body and that's our prospect. So when we die, and if we are buried and it goes back into dust then we know without a shadow of doubt that this is going to be resurrected to a new body fashioned exactly like His body.
Heavenly Rewards for Believers
Jesus on more than one occasion stated that not all who enter Heaven will enjoy its blessings to the same degree. Not that there will be any judgment or punishment for those who are believers. "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1). But Jesus did say that in His kingdom "many who are first shall be last, and the last first" (cf. Matt. 19:30). Heaven is not merely an extension of life here on earth; it is a whole new life, based on decisions and choices we have made while living on earth.
Upon resurrection, the saints will stand before God, where their works will be judged. The issue and the outcome is not salvation, but rewards. Heaven will commence with the believer's judgment and the Lord's distribution of rewards for faithful service.
All of the saints(body of Christ) will come before the judgment seat of Christ, the Bema seat. Bema is simply the Greek word for judgment seat. It came from the Olympics - the seat of the judges. It's a seat of judging not for Heaven or hell, but rather for what rewards believers will receive. This will only be for believers and the Body of Christ who one day will come before the Bema Seat for rewards. We will definitely get rewards based on our Christian walk in this life here on earth. Of course, the rewards are going to come to their fruition primarily in the Kingdom economy. When the Kingdom finally comes on the earth and becomes active, Christ will be King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the world wide Ruler, and we will be ruling and reigning with Him.
Now here is where the reward aspect comes in, as we reign and rule with Him, our level of responsibility is going to be based on our faithfulness here. And that is why it behooves us as believers to labor, to work, and serve for the rewards we will use in the Kingdom Age. Most people would rather be active as opposed to being inactive and sitting on the sideline.
What is the nature of the reward that may be won or lost? Many passages speak of our heavenly reward in terms of the responsibility with which we will be entrusted by God when we reign with Christ in the new heaven and new earth. In Jesus' parable of the talents, He spoke of rewarding those who had been faithful by putting them "in charge of many things" in His kingdom (Matt. 25:21 23). In another place He spoke of putting some of us in places of authority over cities in His kingdom (Luke 19:17,19). To those who had stood by Him in His earthly trials, Jesus promised to place them "on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" in His future kingdom, as well as to seat them at His side at His table (Luke 22:28-30)! Not only would they be worthy of being entrusted with greater responsibility, but also capable of enjoying the closest fellowship with Christ!
In many passages heavenly rewards are likened to the "crowns" worn by victors in athletic contests. Whether literal or metaphorical, these crowns represent different aspects of our heavenly reward. The "crown of life" is promised to those who persevere under trial (James 1:12; Rev. 2:10), the "crown of righteousness" to those who long for Christ's return (2 Tim. 4:8), an "incorruptible crown" to those who exercise self control (1 Cor. 9:25), the "crown of rejoicing" to those who lead others to Christ (1 Thess. 2:19), and the "crown of glory" to those who serve unselfishly as spiritual leaders (1 Pet. 5:2-4).
The most important fact about our heavenly rewards is that they are based not on our position or ability, but on our faithfulness. Time and again Jesus told His followers that "he who is faithful in a little thing, will be faithful also in much" (Luke 16:10; 19:17).
Heaven is the certain outcome for those who have entrusted their eternal future to the hand of God by trusting in Jesus as the One who died in their place, bearing the penalty for their sins.
When Paul did speak of heaven, his most consistent emphasis was that heaven is the place where God is, and where men are privileged to enjoy His presence. To put it in its most concise form, heaven is to be "with Him." Those who have trusted in Jesus and who desire to be in His presence are rewarded with an eternity in His presence
God’s Eternal Plan for Christians
From Scripture we learn: Christianity rests upon a foundation made up of at least five basic facts:
Eternal life comes to those who believe in Jesus Christ, who is Himself “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). The fact that this life is “eternal” indicates that it is perpetual life—it goes on and on and on, with no end.
Eternal life is not just an unending progression of years. It is not really associated with “years” at all, as it is independent of time. Eternal life can function both outside of and beyond time, as well as within time. The moment you believed was the beginning of your eternal life. It is now your possession. John 3:36 says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.”. It is now your current standing in Christ.
The Person of Jesus Christ is our key to eternal life. John 17:3 when He prayed, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Here, Jesus equates “eternal life” with a knowledge of God and of the Son. There is no knowledge of God without the Son, for it is through the Son that the Father reveals Himself to the elect (John 17:6; 14:9).
To false Christian professors, Jesus will say, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” (Matthew 7:23). The true heart-felt believer will have a personal knowledge, not just an academic awareness.
Follow the teachings of Paul. The apostle Paul made it his goal to know the Lord, and he linked that knowledge to resurrection from the dead: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10–11).
In the New Jerusalem, the apostle John sees a river flowing from “the throne of God and of the Lamb,” and “on each side of the river stood the tree of life. . . . And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1–2). In Eden, we rebelled against God and were banished from the tree of life (Genesis 3:24). In the end, God graciously restores our access to the tree of life. This access is provided through Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).
Subscribe to the gospel of Paul for your salvation, to receive eternal life: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13). Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for your sins, and He rose again the third day. Believe this good news; trust the Lord Jesus as your Savior, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31; Romans 10:9 –10). John puts it so simply: “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:11–12).
From Scripture we learn: Christianity rests upon a foundation made up of at least five basic facts:
- The first is the fact that there is a God. There is a creator of this universe, one who sustains our lives. He will be our future judge someday.
- The second fact of Christianity is that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. It is not something written by man. Man held the pen, but God inspired or moved the men to reveal His plan.
- The third fact is that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Christians believe by faith that there is a God, that the Bible is His Word, and that Jesus Christ is His Son.
- The fourth fact is that Christ lived as a man, then died for our sins, was buried, and was bodily resurrected to eternal life.
- He fifth fact is that God’s Church which He calls “My Church” consists of allthose who believe in fact 4, will spend eternity in His presence.
Eternal life comes to those who believe in Jesus Christ, who is Himself “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). The fact that this life is “eternal” indicates that it is perpetual life—it goes on and on and on, with no end.
Eternal life is not just an unending progression of years. It is not really associated with “years” at all, as it is independent of time. Eternal life can function both outside of and beyond time, as well as within time. The moment you believed was the beginning of your eternal life. It is now your possession. John 3:36 says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.”. It is now your current standing in Christ.
The Person of Jesus Christ is our key to eternal life. John 17:3 when He prayed, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Here, Jesus equates “eternal life” with a knowledge of God and of the Son. There is no knowledge of God without the Son, for it is through the Son that the Father reveals Himself to the elect (John 17:6; 14:9).
To false Christian professors, Jesus will say, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” (Matthew 7:23). The true heart-felt believer will have a personal knowledge, not just an academic awareness.
Follow the teachings of Paul. The apostle Paul made it his goal to know the Lord, and he linked that knowledge to resurrection from the dead: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10–11).
In the New Jerusalem, the apostle John sees a river flowing from “the throne of God and of the Lamb,” and “on each side of the river stood the tree of life. . . . And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1–2). In Eden, we rebelled against God and were banished from the tree of life (Genesis 3:24). In the end, God graciously restores our access to the tree of life. This access is provided through Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).
Subscribe to the gospel of Paul for your salvation, to receive eternal life: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13). Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for your sins, and He rose again the third day. Believe this good news; trust the Lord Jesus as your Savior, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31; Romans 10:9 –10). John puts it so simply: “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:11–12).
Life. Consciousness and God
If there is one area of human thought that separates science from religion it is the concept of life and consciousness. Theists believe God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people. For theists the soul is the seat of consciousness. Science will have none of that.
At the present time the problem of consciousness for scientists is “Why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? How could your brain give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being. When we speak of consciousness, we mean the feeling of being inside your head, looking out, for theists it is having a soul. So the central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life is consciousness
There are eminent scientists and theologians, trying to reconcile the differences and promote the belief that science, religion and philosophy can all work together. Many scientists believe the ultimate goal of science and religion are one and the same: the emancipation of man, to actualize his full emotional intelligence/wisdom potential, to be good and do good, and to know and follow the truth. But theists contend that idea falls apart because scientists do not understand there is more to life than emancipation, being a good person, and understanding the forces of nature. Nonreligious liberalism is doomed to be ethically disjointed, at once declaring the supreme moral worth of the individual and that only the collective endures. The Communists, at least, were consistent in making the collective supreme, while the secular West finds itself in a love-hate relationship with liberal statism, as is proved by recent political history. If we were to hold only to our nobler inclinations, we would realize that only the prospect of personal immortality is consonant with the transcendent dignity that we recognize in each man. If there is no God, it is foolish to treat any ephemeral collection of matter as though it were a son of God, born with inviolable rights and other divine prerogatives. Although unbelievers like to say obtuse things about the insignificance of humanity, they mostly think highly of themselves, of their work, and of those they love. Their intellectual life is completely at odds with their ethical life.
Science simply ignores the idea of life eternal. Their only concern is for the “here and now.”But we all know that eventually everyone will die, and Christians believe every person ever born will spend eternity in a resurrected body somewhere. For theists the Word of God in the Bible reveals this truth. For science this falls on deaf ears.
It is the height of hubris to suppose those things will ever be understood completely through science alone. Humans have wonderful brains, that can invent thinking machines, microscopes and any number of intelligence-enhancers, but there are still limits, hard limits. There are properties of our universe so profoundly complex that no sentient mind, no matter how enhanced, will ever understand them fully. The universe has been deeply designed by God to stay mysterious to its inhabitants. Some scientific questions are answerable only by God. It is right here that the cross-over point from science to religion takes place.
Every Person is unique
The only thing I do not doubt about you is that you are conscious and have your own interior world of experience. It is at that point we can say, in one way, “Man is an Island unto himself.” All that I perceive of you is a projection in my mind. I can doubt what you say. I can doubt your thoughts and feelings. But I do not doubt that "in there" is another conscious being like myself.
There is no current scientific consensus as to how life and consciousness originated. It remains a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life. When did the first ancient biological cell become a living entity? Abiogenesis is the scientific term used to describe the natural process of life arising from non-living matter. Science already has a working hypothesis as to the building blocks of cellular evolution and they believe if those blocks were correctly assembled then life would result. Yet the mechanism by which life begins is unknown. There is no unequivocal definition of life. Biologists describe the origin of life as a random occurrence in a dead universe, but they have no real understanding of how life began, or why the universe appears to be exquisitely designed for the emergence of life. It becomes increasingly clear that life and consciousness are fundamental to any true understanding of the universe.
Science is increasingly pointing towards an infinite universe, but has no ability to explain what that really means. All of science is based on information passing through our consciousness, but science doesn’t have a clue what consciousness is and its connection to life, if any.
Your personal consciousness is that part of your brain that is storing all of your experiences (good or bad), education, faces, voices that have become your own unique personality; your psyche if you will. This is the consciousness that you have built your entire life and the consciousness that everyone around you communicates with. Consciousness determines every event, condition, circumstance, experienced In your life The conscious aspect of mind is what determines your normal or day to day level of awareness, and every aspect of your life. In addition to planning, reason and logical thinking processes etc. it's the conscious aspect of mind that enables us to be conscious of the fact that we are conscious at all first of all. The conscious or objective aspect of mind which is finite in nature is the aspect of mind connected to the world we live in. The human mind(the seat of consciousness) is not a "physical organ" and the functions of the brain are controlled by the mind. The brain in turn is the driving mechanism that determines what happens in the body.Self-awareness is that aspect of our consciousness that is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness.
Philosophical investigations of consciousness in the early 20th century concluded introspection is intrinsically problematic, Few philosophers believe that it is possible to be sure that one person's experience of the "redness" of an object is the same as another person's, even if both persons had effectively identical genetic and experiential histories. In principle, the same difficulty arises in feelings (the subjective experience of emotion), in the experience of effort, and especially in the "meaning" of concepts. As a result, many qualitative psychologists have claimed phenomenological inquiry to be essentially a matter of "meaning-making" and thus a question to be addressed by interpretive approaches. Alterity is a philosophical and anthropological term meaning "otherness". "Otherness", the distinction between "you" and "me” Human beings have a self—that is, they are able to look back on themselves as both subjects and objects in the universe. Christianity makes a distinction between the true self and the false self, and sees the false self negatively, distorted through sin: 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?' (Jeremiah 17:9) the self-concept is the idea of who I am, kind of like a self-reflection of one’s well being. For example, the self-concept is anything you say about yourself. The self is shaped by our social interactions and our physical environments. An individual's social interactions occurs when they’re in a specific society or culture. There is a relationship between the self and how cultures can play a major role in shaping the self and self-concept. It appears our view of self can change because of environment.
What is life?
As tough questions come, this is a good one. It seems simple at first, but even after great advances in biology and a sizable increase in understanding how life works, there appears to be no real conscensus on exactly what life is. There is no generally accepted definition of life. In fact, there is a certain clearly discernible tendency for each biological specialty to define life in its own terms. The average person also tends to think of life in his own terms. According to Holy Scripture life is in the blood(Lev. 17:11. For the life of the flesh is in the blood.
A dictionary definition of the word(noun) life, is “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death:” Synonyms: existence · being · living · animation · sentience · [more]creation · viability From a secular perspective life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entity having biological processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased (death), or because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate. Various forms of life exist such as plants, animals, fungi, archaea, and bacteria. The criteria can at times be ambiguous and may or may not define viruses, viroids or potential artificial life as something living. Biology is the primary science concerned with the study of life, although many other sciences are involved. Life is to biologists what gravity is to physicists. They know a lot about each, but neither knows exactly what it is. All that exists is matter, and for them life is merely a complex form or arrangement of matter.
At one time a term called Vitalism appealed to philosophers, anatomists, and chemists. Vitalism is now a discredited scientific hypothesis that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things". Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy" or "élan vital", which some equate with the soul.
Vitalism was simply an idea invented to express what is meant by “Life.” At present the term vitalism has no credibility within the scientific community because they refuse to admit they don’t have a valid answer to the term ”Life.” And it invokes the concept of soul. For this reason vitalism is an expression of ignorance.
Contemporary science has invented a new term to replace the idea of vitalism, called Emergent Processes. This is simply another cop out devised to dodge defining what they mean by the word “Life.”.
Emergent processes are those in which the properties of a system cannot be fully described in terms of the properties of the constituents. This may be because the properties of the constituents are not fully understood, or because the interactions between the individual constituents are also important for the behavior of the system. On the one hand, many scientists and philosophers regard emergence as having only a pseudo-scientific status. They have no answer.
In the meantime scientists at Glasgow University, are attempting to create inorganic cells that replicate and evolve(abiogenesis and chance). Obviously, there are still hurdles to overcome. And if those scientists are successful, there is still the question; is this life? The upshot of all this demonstrates that Science and philosophy skirt all around the question of “what is life” without admitting they simply do not know what it is.
In a 2013 scientists at Arizona State University’s Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, asked the question “What can be said about the chances of life starting up on a habitable planet?” They concluded that though only confirmed on Earth, many scientists believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. Some astronomers estimate there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy But without knowing the process that produced life, the odds of its happening can’t be estimated. They concur with most scientists that the origin of life on Earth was a “chance” phenomenon, which I have already answered before as a non-sequitur. They believe a result of a sequence of chemical accidents are so rare that they would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe.
They concluded that the surest way to settle the matter is to find a second sample of life, one that arose from scratch independent of known life. Yet, many distinguished scientists remain adamant that life will almost inevitably arise in Earthlike conditions somewhere else besides earth. So they are systematically searching the universe for planets that are conducive to their concept of the origin of life.
But those Arizona scientists suggest that evidence favoring life’s high probability could exist closer to home. No planet is more earthlike than Earth itself. If one believes life is most likely to pop up readily in earthlike conditions, then it should have started itself many times in a variety of ways right here on our own planet. They ask, did Darwin’s primordial pond of “evolutionary soup” occur only one time? They then theorize that several primordial ponds like that could account for the diversity they observe in the evolutionary process. Was there only a single common evolutionary precursor? Did Darwin consider that question? It could be that intermingled among the seething microbes found on earth are some that are so biochemically different they could be descended only from a separate origin. You couldn’t tell by looking, only by delving into their molecular innards and finding something so distinctly different as to rule out a single common precursor. The discovery of just a single “alien” microbe under our very noses would be enough to conclude that the universe was indeed teeming with life. Scientists would then be much closer to answering that age-old puzzle of existence: Are we alone in the universe?”
In line with the thinking of the Arizona scientists, a PhD biochemist named Periannam Senapathy at the University of Wisconsin came up with a new theory on the origin of life that reinforces their viewpoint. Although many of his objections to Darwin's theory are the same as those of creationists, he is not a creationist, and might possibly be an agnostic, so there is a modicum of objectivity here. His theory essentially replaces everything Charles Darwin and evolutionary biologists have put forward the last 150 years. It is a theory that rests solely on mathematics and biochemistry.
For our purposes here it is not necessary to go into the details of Senapathy’s theory other than to say that his research focuses on how all of life's complexity originated directly from the primordial pond, without a need for the origin of the primitive bacterium-like microbe that had to evolve into all organisms on earth through laborious genetic mutations. In other words, no single common evolutionary ancestor for all earthly life. Whether his theory can stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny is not our prerogative, the point here is that the Arizona scientists and Senapathy have offered new rational explanations for the overall diversity of life negating Darwin’s splitting-and-specializing phenomenon known as the "principle of divergence."
Although the pathway from primordial soup to living microbes may remain unresolved with certitude, at least the scientific community has more than one rational secular mechanism to ponder in addition to Darwin’s. I maintain all of those theories which omit the need for God are fruitless endeavors.
God cannot be omittedGod is so immeasurably beyond us . God is so pure, matchless and unique that no one else and nothing else even comes close. He is altogether glorious—unequalled in splendor and unrivalled in power. He is beyond the grasp of human reason—far above the reach of even the loftiest scientific mind. He is inexhaustible, immeasurable and unfathomable—eternal, immortal and invisible. The highest mountain peaks and the deepest canyon depths are just tiny echoes of His proclaimed greatness. And the blazing stars above, the faintest emblems of the full measure of His glory.
In the Old Testament time after time the book of Isaiah reminds us of the uniqueness of God: "I will not give my glory to another" (42:8). "I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God" (44:6). "To whom will you compare me or count me equal?" (46:5). "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me" (46:9).
When God became MAN with the Incarnation in the New Testament man could then identify and communicate with God-He was no longer “Other.” He made Himself known to the 12 Apostles and to Paul, and through them He became known to us. It is God who breathed LIFE into man.
What is the seat of consciousness ? Is it in the brain?Is it the soul? This is a mystery of modern neuroscience. For them it is a very complex question and they don’t yet have an answer, or even a consensus. They have studied the different mental states – altered states of consciousness, and how those differences relate to brain function in an attempt to tell something about the contribution of that brain function to full wakeful consciousness. But all studies to date have not brought them any closer to an answer to our question.
Experts in the field of neuroscience have determined that our brain which controls our body consists of over 16 billion neurons and 120 trillion "connection boxes" packed together into an unfathomably complex set of neuro-passways. All of this in a brain and spinal column that weighs slightly over three pounds! In comparison, a bee has only about 900 nerve cells, an ant only 250. In the large gauge fibers, nerve impulses flash along at 300 miles per hour. All told, the human brain and nervous system is the most complex arrangement of matter anywhere in the universe. One scientist estimated that our brain, on the average, processes over 10,000 thoughts and concepts each day—and some people process a much greater number. In the last hundred years science has learned a lot about the physical aspects of the brain but they are no closer to an answer to our opening question than they ever were. It appears only God knows.
The brain poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out.
Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. We know an astonishing amount about the brain: you can’t follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at first sight, or regret – and that’s only the research that makes the headlines.
Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence – which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one – has advanced stupendously. But the real problem still remains. When you stub your toe it hurts. What is pain, anyway? Some scientists say that conscious sensations, such as pain, don’t really exist, no matter what I felt when I stubbed my toe
Modern science has been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. Nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that you’re conscious. But what is consciousness and why does it exists? Your consciousness itself can’t be illusory. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be described. The mind must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didn’t abide by the laws of nature; it must have been bequeathed to us by God.
Descarte’s dualism(body & soul) remained into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But then the secular scientific establishment adopted the idea of physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – as its most basic principle. No convincing alternative explanation could be found. The topic was so difficult to deal with it was swept under the rug.
Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what happens to your consciousness. But how they were linked? A mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. But consciousness could no longer be ignored. Most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness– workers in these areas have yet to find any useful way of approaching the problem. The mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.It is not known whether there can be life without consciousness or consciousness without life.
It has been suggested that evolution could have produced conscious-free “Wannabes” instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!”
The Wannabes scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have found such a Wannabe. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that this person has no consciousness--- a “Wannabe”.
We know such non-conscious humanoids don’t exist. But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside, with no consciousness at all.
If a scientist were approached by me and this “Wannabe” he would be unable to tell us apart, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell the difference. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature-connected somehow to life.
Having come this far, scientists now believe that given enough time they will eventually answer any question related to physicalism. Men of science believe life and consciousness are products of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The believing Christian says that the answer can be found only in Holy Scripture with God as its author. It is beyond the wisdom of men without the help of God. Without realizing it evolutionists have come to a dead-end in their attempts to answer the question of what is life and consciousness. Yet they insist they will eventually answer that question-it's matter of unfounded faith!!
Any number of opposing viewpoints are on record. One viewpoint has been advanced that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the brain, and the brain doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness. They say common sense once told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. They consider the possibility of consciousness as a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness is almost as absurd as insisting that characters in novels must be made up of some peculiar substance; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the book characters do not really exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into total unbelief: neither side can quite believe what the other is saying. One side is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain. But explaining things away is exactly what scientists do. Difficult as it may be, they hold we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do?
The history of science is replete with cases where people thought a phenomenon was singularly unique, that there couldn’t be any possible mechanism for it, that we might never solve it, that there was nothing in the universe like it,”
At first, scholars were convinced that light couldn’t possibly be physical – that it had to be beyond the usual laws of nature. Consider life itself: early scientists were convinced that there had to be something divine that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But now most conclude life isn’t divine. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, it is predicted neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. They say the history of science reveals how easy it is to talk ourselves into this sort of thinking – that if my big, wonderful brain can’t envisage the solution, then it must be an unsolvable problem!
But then, what if we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving that problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as “mysterianism” –the essence of it is that there’s actually no mystery to why consciousness hasn’t been explained: it’s that humans aren’t up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe that’s because we are, in the position of a chimp trying to understand quantum mechanics. In other words: “It’s just not going to happen.”
Another viewpoint exists called by the term “panpsychism”, which is the notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. It has been suggested that panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop? Consider a dog. According to the Catholic church dogs don’t have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured – he appears to have an inner life. These days we don’t much speak of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human brains are conscious – that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. There seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. “God said the even the rocks could cry out!!(Luke 19: 39-40). Since we don’t know how the brains of mammals exhibit consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s only the brains of mammals that do so – or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Possibly an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious.
Physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. It may be possible that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organized. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesn’t resemble ours. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. Might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals?
A device has been constructed that stimulates the brain with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organized – how “integrated” – its neural circuits are. They found that when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering “locked-in syndrome” – who are as conscious as the rest of us – levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma – who aren’t – it doesn’t. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.
But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? It’s like black holes, we have never been in a black hole, and having no experience of black holes, but the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so we accept it.
It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to solve our problem. On the one hand, it wouldn’t require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldn’t need to accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, when it’s so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, it’s everywhere.
Is it possible for everyone to recognize that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself? Scientists claim an answer must be out there somewhere without resorting to God. And finding it matters: nothing else could ever matter more – since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Someday we might stumble on a solution to the problem, and we might not even recognize that we’d found it. Too Late!! God has already provided the answer.
If there is one area of human thought that separates science from religion it is the concept of life and consciousness. Theists believe God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people. For theists the soul is the seat of consciousness. Science will have none of that.
At the present time the problem of consciousness for scientists is “Why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? How could your brain give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being. When we speak of consciousness, we mean the feeling of being inside your head, looking out, for theists it is having a soul. So the central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life is consciousness
There are eminent scientists and theologians, trying to reconcile the differences and promote the belief that science, religion and philosophy can all work together. Many scientists believe the ultimate goal of science and religion are one and the same: the emancipation of man, to actualize his full emotional intelligence/wisdom potential, to be good and do good, and to know and follow the truth. But theists contend that idea falls apart because scientists do not understand there is more to life than emancipation, being a good person, and understanding the forces of nature. Nonreligious liberalism is doomed to be ethically disjointed, at once declaring the supreme moral worth of the individual and that only the collective endures. The Communists, at least, were consistent in making the collective supreme, while the secular West finds itself in a love-hate relationship with liberal statism, as is proved by recent political history. If we were to hold only to our nobler inclinations, we would realize that only the prospect of personal immortality is consonant with the transcendent dignity that we recognize in each man. If there is no God, it is foolish to treat any ephemeral collection of matter as though it were a son of God, born with inviolable rights and other divine prerogatives. Although unbelievers like to say obtuse things about the insignificance of humanity, they mostly think highly of themselves, of their work, and of those they love. Their intellectual life is completely at odds with their ethical life.
Science simply ignores the idea of life eternal. Their only concern is for the “here and now.”But we all know that eventually everyone will die, and Christians believe every person ever born will spend eternity in a resurrected body somewhere. For theists the Word of God in the Bible reveals this truth. For science this falls on deaf ears.
It is the height of hubris to suppose those things will ever be understood completely through science alone. Humans have wonderful brains, that can invent thinking machines, microscopes and any number of intelligence-enhancers, but there are still limits, hard limits. There are properties of our universe so profoundly complex that no sentient mind, no matter how enhanced, will ever understand them fully. The universe has been deeply designed by God to stay mysterious to its inhabitants. Some scientific questions are answerable only by God. It is right here that the cross-over point from science to religion takes place.
Every Person is unique
The only thing I do not doubt about you is that you are conscious and have your own interior world of experience. It is at that point we can say, in one way, “Man is an Island unto himself.” All that I perceive of you is a projection in my mind. I can doubt what you say. I can doubt your thoughts and feelings. But I do not doubt that "in there" is another conscious being like myself.
There is no current scientific consensus as to how life and consciousness originated. It remains a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life. When did the first ancient biological cell become a living entity? Abiogenesis is the scientific term used to describe the natural process of life arising from non-living matter. Science already has a working hypothesis as to the building blocks of cellular evolution and they believe if those blocks were correctly assembled then life would result. Yet the mechanism by which life begins is unknown. There is no unequivocal definition of life. Biologists describe the origin of life as a random occurrence in a dead universe, but they have no real understanding of how life began, or why the universe appears to be exquisitely designed for the emergence of life. It becomes increasingly clear that life and consciousness are fundamental to any true understanding of the universe.
Science is increasingly pointing towards an infinite universe, but has no ability to explain what that really means. All of science is based on information passing through our consciousness, but science doesn’t have a clue what consciousness is and its connection to life, if any.
Your personal consciousness is that part of your brain that is storing all of your experiences (good or bad), education, faces, voices that have become your own unique personality; your psyche if you will. This is the consciousness that you have built your entire life and the consciousness that everyone around you communicates with. Consciousness determines every event, condition, circumstance, experienced In your life The conscious aspect of mind is what determines your normal or day to day level of awareness, and every aspect of your life. In addition to planning, reason and logical thinking processes etc. it's the conscious aspect of mind that enables us to be conscious of the fact that we are conscious at all first of all. The conscious or objective aspect of mind which is finite in nature is the aspect of mind connected to the world we live in. The human mind(the seat of consciousness) is not a "physical organ" and the functions of the brain are controlled by the mind. The brain in turn is the driving mechanism that determines what happens in the body.Self-awareness is that aspect of our consciousness that is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness.
Philosophical investigations of consciousness in the early 20th century concluded introspection is intrinsically problematic, Few philosophers believe that it is possible to be sure that one person's experience of the "redness" of an object is the same as another person's, even if both persons had effectively identical genetic and experiential histories. In principle, the same difficulty arises in feelings (the subjective experience of emotion), in the experience of effort, and especially in the "meaning" of concepts. As a result, many qualitative psychologists have claimed phenomenological inquiry to be essentially a matter of "meaning-making" and thus a question to be addressed by interpretive approaches. Alterity is a philosophical and anthropological term meaning "otherness". "Otherness", the distinction between "you" and "me” Human beings have a self—that is, they are able to look back on themselves as both subjects and objects in the universe. Christianity makes a distinction between the true self and the false self, and sees the false self negatively, distorted through sin: 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?' (Jeremiah 17:9) the self-concept is the idea of who I am, kind of like a self-reflection of one’s well being. For example, the self-concept is anything you say about yourself. The self is shaped by our social interactions and our physical environments. An individual's social interactions occurs when they’re in a specific society or culture. There is a relationship between the self and how cultures can play a major role in shaping the self and self-concept. It appears our view of self can change because of environment.
What is life?
As tough questions come, this is a good one. It seems simple at first, but even after great advances in biology and a sizable increase in understanding how life works, there appears to be no real conscensus on exactly what life is. There is no generally accepted definition of life. In fact, there is a certain clearly discernible tendency for each biological specialty to define life in its own terms. The average person also tends to think of life in his own terms. According to Holy Scripture life is in the blood(Lev. 17:11. For the life of the flesh is in the blood.
A dictionary definition of the word(noun) life, is “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death:” Synonyms: existence · being · living · animation · sentience · [more]creation · viability From a secular perspective life is a characteristic distinguishing physical entity having biological processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased (death), or because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate. Various forms of life exist such as plants, animals, fungi, archaea, and bacteria. The criteria can at times be ambiguous and may or may not define viruses, viroids or potential artificial life as something living. Biology is the primary science concerned with the study of life, although many other sciences are involved. Life is to biologists what gravity is to physicists. They know a lot about each, but neither knows exactly what it is. All that exists is matter, and for them life is merely a complex form or arrangement of matter.
At one time a term called Vitalism appealed to philosophers, anatomists, and chemists. Vitalism is now a discredited scientific hypothesis that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things". Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy" or "élan vital", which some equate with the soul.
Vitalism was simply an idea invented to express what is meant by “Life.” At present the term vitalism has no credibility within the scientific community because they refuse to admit they don’t have a valid answer to the term ”Life.” And it invokes the concept of soul. For this reason vitalism is an expression of ignorance.
Contemporary science has invented a new term to replace the idea of vitalism, called Emergent Processes. This is simply another cop out devised to dodge defining what they mean by the word “Life.”.
Emergent processes are those in which the properties of a system cannot be fully described in terms of the properties of the constituents. This may be because the properties of the constituents are not fully understood, or because the interactions between the individual constituents are also important for the behavior of the system. On the one hand, many scientists and philosophers regard emergence as having only a pseudo-scientific status. They have no answer.
In the meantime scientists at Glasgow University, are attempting to create inorganic cells that replicate and evolve(abiogenesis and chance). Obviously, there are still hurdles to overcome. And if those scientists are successful, there is still the question; is this life? The upshot of all this demonstrates that Science and philosophy skirt all around the question of “what is life” without admitting they simply do not know what it is.
In a 2013 scientists at Arizona State University’s Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, asked the question “What can be said about the chances of life starting up on a habitable planet?” They concluded that though only confirmed on Earth, many scientists believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. Some astronomers estimate there could be as many as 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy But without knowing the process that produced life, the odds of its happening can’t be estimated. They concur with most scientists that the origin of life on Earth was a “chance” phenomenon, which I have already answered before as a non-sequitur. They believe a result of a sequence of chemical accidents are so rare that they would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe.
They concluded that the surest way to settle the matter is to find a second sample of life, one that arose from scratch independent of known life. Yet, many distinguished scientists remain adamant that life will almost inevitably arise in Earthlike conditions somewhere else besides earth. So they are systematically searching the universe for planets that are conducive to their concept of the origin of life.
But those Arizona scientists suggest that evidence favoring life’s high probability could exist closer to home. No planet is more earthlike than Earth itself. If one believes life is most likely to pop up readily in earthlike conditions, then it should have started itself many times in a variety of ways right here on our own planet. They ask, did Darwin’s primordial pond of “evolutionary soup” occur only one time? They then theorize that several primordial ponds like that could account for the diversity they observe in the evolutionary process. Was there only a single common evolutionary precursor? Did Darwin consider that question? It could be that intermingled among the seething microbes found on earth are some that are so biochemically different they could be descended only from a separate origin. You couldn’t tell by looking, only by delving into their molecular innards and finding something so distinctly different as to rule out a single common precursor. The discovery of just a single “alien” microbe under our very noses would be enough to conclude that the universe was indeed teeming with life. Scientists would then be much closer to answering that age-old puzzle of existence: Are we alone in the universe?”
In line with the thinking of the Arizona scientists, a PhD biochemist named Periannam Senapathy at the University of Wisconsin came up with a new theory on the origin of life that reinforces their viewpoint. Although many of his objections to Darwin's theory are the same as those of creationists, he is not a creationist, and might possibly be an agnostic, so there is a modicum of objectivity here. His theory essentially replaces everything Charles Darwin and evolutionary biologists have put forward the last 150 years. It is a theory that rests solely on mathematics and biochemistry.
For our purposes here it is not necessary to go into the details of Senapathy’s theory other than to say that his research focuses on how all of life's complexity originated directly from the primordial pond, without a need for the origin of the primitive bacterium-like microbe that had to evolve into all organisms on earth through laborious genetic mutations. In other words, no single common evolutionary ancestor for all earthly life. Whether his theory can stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny is not our prerogative, the point here is that the Arizona scientists and Senapathy have offered new rational explanations for the overall diversity of life negating Darwin’s splitting-and-specializing phenomenon known as the "principle of divergence."
Although the pathway from primordial soup to living microbes may remain unresolved with certitude, at least the scientific community has more than one rational secular mechanism to ponder in addition to Darwin’s. I maintain all of those theories which omit the need for God are fruitless endeavors.
God cannot be omittedGod is so immeasurably beyond us . God is so pure, matchless and unique that no one else and nothing else even comes close. He is altogether glorious—unequalled in splendor and unrivalled in power. He is beyond the grasp of human reason—far above the reach of even the loftiest scientific mind. He is inexhaustible, immeasurable and unfathomable—eternal, immortal and invisible. The highest mountain peaks and the deepest canyon depths are just tiny echoes of His proclaimed greatness. And the blazing stars above, the faintest emblems of the full measure of His glory.
In the Old Testament time after time the book of Isaiah reminds us of the uniqueness of God: "I will not give my glory to another" (42:8). "I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God" (44:6). "To whom will you compare me or count me equal?" (46:5). "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me" (46:9).
When God became MAN with the Incarnation in the New Testament man could then identify and communicate with God-He was no longer “Other.” He made Himself known to the 12 Apostles and to Paul, and through them He became known to us. It is God who breathed LIFE into man.
What is the seat of consciousness ? Is it in the brain?Is it the soul? This is a mystery of modern neuroscience. For them it is a very complex question and they don’t yet have an answer, or even a consensus. They have studied the different mental states – altered states of consciousness, and how those differences relate to brain function in an attempt to tell something about the contribution of that brain function to full wakeful consciousness. But all studies to date have not brought them any closer to an answer to our question.
Experts in the field of neuroscience have determined that our brain which controls our body consists of over 16 billion neurons and 120 trillion "connection boxes" packed together into an unfathomably complex set of neuro-passways. All of this in a brain and spinal column that weighs slightly over three pounds! In comparison, a bee has only about 900 nerve cells, an ant only 250. In the large gauge fibers, nerve impulses flash along at 300 miles per hour. All told, the human brain and nervous system is the most complex arrangement of matter anywhere in the universe. One scientist estimated that our brain, on the average, processes over 10,000 thoughts and concepts each day—and some people process a much greater number. In the last hundred years science has learned a lot about the physical aspects of the brain but they are no closer to an answer to our opening question than they ever were. It appears only God knows.
The brain poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out.
Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. We know an astonishing amount about the brain: you can’t follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at first sight, or regret – and that’s only the research that makes the headlines.
Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence – which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one – has advanced stupendously. But the real problem still remains. When you stub your toe it hurts. What is pain, anyway? Some scientists say that conscious sensations, such as pain, don’t really exist, no matter what I felt when I stubbed my toe
Modern science has been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. Nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that you’re conscious. But what is consciousness and why does it exists? Your consciousness itself can’t be illusory. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be described. The mind must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didn’t abide by the laws of nature; it must have been bequeathed to us by God.
Descarte’s dualism(body & soul) remained into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But then the secular scientific establishment adopted the idea of physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – as its most basic principle. No convincing alternative explanation could be found. The topic was so difficult to deal with it was swept under the rug.
Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what happens to your consciousness. But how they were linked? A mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. But consciousness could no longer be ignored. Most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness– workers in these areas have yet to find any useful way of approaching the problem. The mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.It is not known whether there can be life without consciousness or consciousness without life.
It has been suggested that evolution could have produced conscious-free “Wannabes” instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!”
The Wannabes scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have found such a Wannabe. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that this person has no consciousness--- a “Wannabe”.
We know such non-conscious humanoids don’t exist. But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside, with no consciousness at all.
If a scientist were approached by me and this “Wannabe” he would be unable to tell us apart, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell the difference. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature-connected somehow to life.
Having come this far, scientists now believe that given enough time they will eventually answer any question related to physicalism. Men of science believe life and consciousness are products of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The believing Christian says that the answer can be found only in Holy Scripture with God as its author. It is beyond the wisdom of men without the help of God. Without realizing it evolutionists have come to a dead-end in their attempts to answer the question of what is life and consciousness. Yet they insist they will eventually answer that question-it's matter of unfounded faith!!
Any number of opposing viewpoints are on record. One viewpoint has been advanced that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the brain, and the brain doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness. They say common sense once told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. They consider the possibility of consciousness as a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness is almost as absurd as insisting that characters in novels must be made up of some peculiar substance; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the book characters do not really exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into total unbelief: neither side can quite believe what the other is saying. One side is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain. But explaining things away is exactly what scientists do. Difficult as it may be, they hold we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do?
The history of science is replete with cases where people thought a phenomenon was singularly unique, that there couldn’t be any possible mechanism for it, that we might never solve it, that there was nothing in the universe like it,”
At first, scholars were convinced that light couldn’t possibly be physical – that it had to be beyond the usual laws of nature. Consider life itself: early scientists were convinced that there had to be something divine that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But now most conclude life isn’t divine. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, it is predicted neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. They say the history of science reveals how easy it is to talk ourselves into this sort of thinking – that if my big, wonderful brain can’t envisage the solution, then it must be an unsolvable problem!
But then, what if we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving that problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as “mysterianism” –the essence of it is that there’s actually no mystery to why consciousness hasn’t been explained: it’s that humans aren’t up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe that’s because we are, in the position of a chimp trying to understand quantum mechanics. In other words: “It’s just not going to happen.”
Another viewpoint exists called by the term “panpsychism”, which is the notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. It has been suggested that panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop? Consider a dog. According to the Catholic church dogs don’t have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured – he appears to have an inner life. These days we don’t much speak of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human brains are conscious – that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. There seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. “God said the even the rocks could cry out!!(Luke 19: 39-40). Since we don’t know how the brains of mammals exhibit consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s only the brains of mammals that do so – or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Possibly an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious.
Physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. It may be possible that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organized. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesn’t resemble ours. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. Might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals?
A device has been constructed that stimulates the brain with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organized – how “integrated” – its neural circuits are. They found that when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering “locked-in syndrome” – who are as conscious as the rest of us – levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma – who aren’t – it doesn’t. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.
But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? It’s like black holes, we have never been in a black hole, and having no experience of black holes, but the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so we accept it.
It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to solve our problem. On the one hand, it wouldn’t require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldn’t need to accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, when it’s so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, it’s everywhere.
Is it possible for everyone to recognize that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself? Scientists claim an answer must be out there somewhere without resorting to God. And finding it matters: nothing else could ever matter more – since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Someday we might stumble on a solution to the problem, and we might not even recognize that we’d found it. Too Late!! God has already provided the answer.
Doctrine of the Soul
The concept of the soul has been at the center of human thought from time immemorial, and by all mankind the world over. Bascially, it has to do with man’s awareness of consciousness, and self. From the outset the word “soul” has been used in that context. Once man began thinking about “thinking.” It wasn’t that long before the concept of “soul” came to the fore.
Our first permanent evidence of soul is found in the pyramids of Egypt. The Egyptians believed in an afterlife, and the tomb was an important part of that belief. It was practical, according to their beliefs, and aimed at preventing that person’s energy (spirit) from being re-absorbed into Nature’s spiritual force. For the ancient Egyptians, Ba animated a living person, whereas Ka was the energy emanating from that person. Although not an exact analogy, the Ka and the Ba are what traditional Western thought might refer as spirit and soul.
At bout this same time along comes the defacto Egyptian Moses(born a Hebrew) and his encounter with God. Following Moses we have the Old Testament. Then in the very first book of the Old Testament we find God reveals to Moses how He formed Body and Soul(Genesis 2:7).
The soul created by God as revealed in Scripture is probably the same soul found in antiquity but those ancients were as yet unaware of its connection to a Supreme Being.Their philosophical theories were more than likely connected to what they observed in nature(God’s creation).
Basically, there are three historic views on the origin of the human soul as it relates to a Supreme Being: pre-existence, traducianism, and creationism.
1. The theory of the pre-existence of souls was first expounded by the third century Alexandrian Greek Father Origen. But his views were quickly rejected by the existing church on a number of grounds, then resurfaced with the acceptance of the concept of re-incarnation by people recognized as “New Agers.’
2. An early African Father named Tertullian(c. 160-220A.D.) introduced the concept of Traducianism. He taught that the soul was handed down from parent to child. In procreation(of Adam), therefore, there were two different and distinct elements, body and soul which produced man, and so from one man(Adam) flows this whole stream of souls.
3. As for creationists, they believe that God creates and joins each soul individually from nothing at the very moment the newly procreated body is formed. This is now the teaching of most Protestants as well as the Roman Catholic Churches. It is argued from Scripture based on the text of Genesis. 2:7, which has been taken to show that the body and soul are distinct and have different origins—the body from the dust of the earth and the soul from God.
Both Traducianists and Creationists agree that the soul does not exist prior to conception. This seems to be the clear teaching of the Bible. Whether God creates a new human soul at the moment of conception, or whether God designed the human reproductive process to also reproduce a soul, God is ultimately responsible for the creation of each and every human soul(the image of God).
The Teaching of Holy Scripture
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion…"(Genesis 1:26a) Notice the plural pronoun is used here referring to God. The plural pronoun here in this verse referred to the Triune God, - God the Father – God the Son, - God the Holy Spirit.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27) Man is unique because nothing else was created in the image of God. For the first approximately 1600 years of human experience, from Adam until Noah’s flood, there was no written Law. Man was created with a moral law within his heart. Man simply had it on his conscience what was right and wrong. Neither was there any formal system of worship.
The Triune God is going to create a creature after His own image. Now this is hard for us to comprehend because at this point in time, God is Spirit. He was an invisible Spirit Being. You can’t very well make an image of something that is invisible, and yet God did. Our body is physical and visible, yet the real you, the real me, is invisible.
Some theologians speak of man as simply "spirit." Others say, "No, man is soul." Others say, "You can divide soul and spirit, because the Bible does." There appears to be a very close affinity between the soul and the spirit, and yet Scripture does divide them. Scripture speaks of man as being, Body, Soul, and Spirit. Then again, according to Genesis 2:7 God did not make a body and put a soul into it like a letter into an envelope of dust; rather he formed man's body from the dust, then, by breathing divine breath into it, he made the body of dust live, i.e. the dust did not embody a soul, but it became a soul—a whole creature
"And the very God of peace sanctity you wholly; (or completely) and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (I Thessalonians 5:23). So there you have the three parts that make up mankind in the body, soul, and spirit. Another verse found in Hebrews chapter 4,
"For the word of God is quick, (alive) and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12). Scripture divides the soul from the spirit, they are not one in the same, although they certainly have a close affinity, and it is hard to make a difference between them, but the Scripture does.
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:…" (Genesis 1:26a). Likeness here is not in the physical body appearance, because we know nothing of God having a body or a physical appearance, but the image is in the area of the soul and spirit which are invisible! In the area of man’s soul we can again liken it to a trinity of sort (mind, will, and emotions) , and this is definitely the invisible. We could call that the make-up of the soul. We certainly have a mind, and there’s no doubt about its being invisible. You can put brain cells under a microscope, surgeons can look at the brain and even determine what little parts of the brain make other body functions operate, but yet the mind is invisible. No one has ever been able to put the mind on a table and examine it.
It’s the same way with our will. The will is a definite entity or you wouldn’t be here today, because you came by the exercise of the will. But you can’t put your finger on the will, you can’t see it, nor analyze it, because it’s invisible.
It’s the same way with our seat of emotions. The emotions are the things that make us cry, laugh, happy, and sad. They are certainly bonafide entities. It’s something that we know is there, and yet we can never see it. These three aspects of our innermost being is the personality, or the real you.
When God created Adam, He gave Adam that invisible personality, He also placed within Adam a spirit concept that would connect Adam with his Creator. So right from the beginning Adam had total and complete fellowship with his Creator. Our physical body is just simply as the Bible calls it, a tabernacle. A temporary dwelling place. Another word for tabernacle is the simple word, tent. Something used temporarily, and that’s what our body is. Our body is just a tent in which God has placed a person, the personality, the invisible personality of the mind, will and the emotions.
God placed within the body, a spirit entity that is capable of communication and fellowship with his Creator. The body is something that is just functional in only what I like to refer to as the five senses. You take away the five senses and what do you have? You have a vegetable. If you can’t smell, see, hear, taste, or touch then you’re nothing. A tent then is all the body becomes with it’s five senses. It’s a tent, it’s a temporary dwelling place for the real you and the real me.
It is important to note that since this is the direct creation of God, and comes straight from the heart of God, then that makes it eternal. This soul part of us will never die. It’s as eternal as God is eternal. From Genesis we see that it naturally follows that since God has created man with a will, it is for the purpose of making a choice. And it’s going to be a choice between being obedient to God or we can be disobedient. And man is left with that exercise of the will.
Adam was created sinless, perfect, he had a body that would never have to die. He’s has a soul that is in perfect fellowship and communion with God as is his spirit. He is a perfect creation. All of this to say, God is creating mankind as the very epitome, the very crowning act of creation. We are created in the image of God, given a will, so that we can choose to either be obedient or disobedient.
So He created mankind to have someone that He could have perfect fellowship with. We now know that human fellowship with God resides in the Body of Christ for all eternity. As I see scripture, this is the primary reason for man being created in the first place. God created a creature that He could love and will see that love returned.
God is not only concerned for the soul, and that’s what most of us have heard over the years – the salvation of the soul. And that’s all that too many spiritual people and theologians concern themselves with. But what they’re missing is that God is just as concerned with our body. We’re going to have a new resurrected body someday, but until we do, it’s not just the salvation of the soul God is concerned with, but with the whole person – the body, the soul and the spirit.
Various Concepts of the Soul
All of the traditional views cited above appear to be inadequate and have been refuted or reinterpreted by various modern theologians so that no general consensus prevails. For our purposes here it all boils down to two principal opposing viewpoints: Trichotomy and Dichotomy.
The Bible teaches that humanity possesses a physical body, a soul, and a spirit. In regards
to how these aspects of the human nature connect with and relate to each other, there are four primary theories. Two of the views, anthropological monism and anthropological hylomorphism, deal primarily with how the three aspects of humanity combine to form the human nature. The two other models, dichotomy (anthropological dualism) and trichotomy, deal with the distinction between the human soul and human spirit. The distinction between the material (physical) and immaterial (spiritual) aspects of the human nature is straightforward. The distinction between the two immaterial aspects of the human nature is more difficult.
While there are Bible verses that use the terms soul and spirit interchangeably (Matthew 10:28; Luke 1:46–47; 1 Corinthians 5:3; 7:34), other biblical passages do not present the soul and the spirit as precisely the same thing. There are also passages that hint at the separation between the soul and spirit (Romans 8:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 4:12). Hebrews 4:12 states, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit.” This verse tells us two things: (1) there is a dividing point between the soul and spirit, and (2) the dividing point is only discernible to God. With all of these verses in mind, neither the dichotomous or trichotomous interpretations can be explicitly proved. Does the immaterial aspect of the human nature involve a soul and a spirit? Yes. Are the soul and spirit absolutely unified and united (dichotomy) or closely related but separate (trichotomy)? Unclear.
Those who believe that human nature is a trichotomy typically believe the following: the physical body is what connects us with the physical world around us, the soul is the essence of our being, and the spirit is what connects us with God. This is why the unsaved can be said to be spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1; Colossians 2:13), while they are very much physically and “soulishly” alive. Those who believe that human nature is a dichotomy would have the same understanding of the body but would view the spirit as the part of the soul that connects with God. So, the question of dichotomy vs. trichotomy is essentially whether the soul and spirit are different aspects of the immaterial human nature, or if the spirit is simply a part of the soul, with the soul being the whole immaterial part of the human nature.
Trichotomy vs. dichotomy of man—which view is correct? It would seem that it is unwise to be dogmatic. Both theories are biblically plausible. Neither interpretation is heretical. This is perhaps an issue we are unable to fully grasp with our finite human minds. What we can be certain of is that the human nature is comprised of a body, a soul, and a spirit. Whether the soul and spirit are one, or are somehow distinct, is not an issue God chose to make abundantly clear in His Word. Whether you believe in a dichotomy or trichotomy, offer your body as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1), thank God for saving your soul (1 Peter 1:9), and worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:23–24).
The concept of the soul has been at the center of human thought from time immemorial, and by all mankind the world over. Bascially, it has to do with man’s awareness of consciousness, and self. From the outset the word “soul” has been used in that context. Once man began thinking about “thinking.” It wasn’t that long before the concept of “soul” came to the fore.
Our first permanent evidence of soul is found in the pyramids of Egypt. The Egyptians believed in an afterlife, and the tomb was an important part of that belief. It was practical, according to their beliefs, and aimed at preventing that person’s energy (spirit) from being re-absorbed into Nature’s spiritual force. For the ancient Egyptians, Ba animated a living person, whereas Ka was the energy emanating from that person. Although not an exact analogy, the Ka and the Ba are what traditional Western thought might refer as spirit and soul.
At bout this same time along comes the defacto Egyptian Moses(born a Hebrew) and his encounter with God. Following Moses we have the Old Testament. Then in the very first book of the Old Testament we find God reveals to Moses how He formed Body and Soul(Genesis 2:7).
The soul created by God as revealed in Scripture is probably the same soul found in antiquity but those ancients were as yet unaware of its connection to a Supreme Being.Their philosophical theories were more than likely connected to what they observed in nature(God’s creation).
Basically, there are three historic views on the origin of the human soul as it relates to a Supreme Being: pre-existence, traducianism, and creationism.
1. The theory of the pre-existence of souls was first expounded by the third century Alexandrian Greek Father Origen. But his views were quickly rejected by the existing church on a number of grounds, then resurfaced with the acceptance of the concept of re-incarnation by people recognized as “New Agers.’
2. An early African Father named Tertullian(c. 160-220A.D.) introduced the concept of Traducianism. He taught that the soul was handed down from parent to child. In procreation(of Adam), therefore, there were two different and distinct elements, body and soul which produced man, and so from one man(Adam) flows this whole stream of souls.
3. As for creationists, they believe that God creates and joins each soul individually from nothing at the very moment the newly procreated body is formed. This is now the teaching of most Protestants as well as the Roman Catholic Churches. It is argued from Scripture based on the text of Genesis. 2:7, which has been taken to show that the body and soul are distinct and have different origins—the body from the dust of the earth and the soul from God.
Both Traducianists and Creationists agree that the soul does not exist prior to conception. This seems to be the clear teaching of the Bible. Whether God creates a new human soul at the moment of conception, or whether God designed the human reproductive process to also reproduce a soul, God is ultimately responsible for the creation of each and every human soul(the image of God).
The Teaching of Holy Scripture
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion…"(Genesis 1:26a) Notice the plural pronoun is used here referring to God. The plural pronoun here in this verse referred to the Triune God, - God the Father – God the Son, - God the Holy Spirit.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27) Man is unique because nothing else was created in the image of God. For the first approximately 1600 years of human experience, from Adam until Noah’s flood, there was no written Law. Man was created with a moral law within his heart. Man simply had it on his conscience what was right and wrong. Neither was there any formal system of worship.
The Triune God is going to create a creature after His own image. Now this is hard for us to comprehend because at this point in time, God is Spirit. He was an invisible Spirit Being. You can’t very well make an image of something that is invisible, and yet God did. Our body is physical and visible, yet the real you, the real me, is invisible.
Some theologians speak of man as simply "spirit." Others say, "No, man is soul." Others say, "You can divide soul and spirit, because the Bible does." There appears to be a very close affinity between the soul and the spirit, and yet Scripture does divide them. Scripture speaks of man as being, Body, Soul, and Spirit. Then again, according to Genesis 2:7 God did not make a body and put a soul into it like a letter into an envelope of dust; rather he formed man's body from the dust, then, by breathing divine breath into it, he made the body of dust live, i.e. the dust did not embody a soul, but it became a soul—a whole creature
"And the very God of peace sanctity you wholly; (or completely) and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (I Thessalonians 5:23). So there you have the three parts that make up mankind in the body, soul, and spirit. Another verse found in Hebrews chapter 4,
"For the word of God is quick, (alive) and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Hebrews 4:12). Scripture divides the soul from the spirit, they are not one in the same, although they certainly have a close affinity, and it is hard to make a difference between them, but the Scripture does.
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:…" (Genesis 1:26a). Likeness here is not in the physical body appearance, because we know nothing of God having a body or a physical appearance, but the image is in the area of the soul and spirit which are invisible! In the area of man’s soul we can again liken it to a trinity of sort (mind, will, and emotions) , and this is definitely the invisible. We could call that the make-up of the soul. We certainly have a mind, and there’s no doubt about its being invisible. You can put brain cells under a microscope, surgeons can look at the brain and even determine what little parts of the brain make other body functions operate, but yet the mind is invisible. No one has ever been able to put the mind on a table and examine it.
It’s the same way with our will. The will is a definite entity or you wouldn’t be here today, because you came by the exercise of the will. But you can’t put your finger on the will, you can’t see it, nor analyze it, because it’s invisible.
It’s the same way with our seat of emotions. The emotions are the things that make us cry, laugh, happy, and sad. They are certainly bonafide entities. It’s something that we know is there, and yet we can never see it. These three aspects of our innermost being is the personality, or the real you.
When God created Adam, He gave Adam that invisible personality, He also placed within Adam a spirit concept that would connect Adam with his Creator. So right from the beginning Adam had total and complete fellowship with his Creator. Our physical body is just simply as the Bible calls it, a tabernacle. A temporary dwelling place. Another word for tabernacle is the simple word, tent. Something used temporarily, and that’s what our body is. Our body is just a tent in which God has placed a person, the personality, the invisible personality of the mind, will and the emotions.
God placed within the body, a spirit entity that is capable of communication and fellowship with his Creator. The body is something that is just functional in only what I like to refer to as the five senses. You take away the five senses and what do you have? You have a vegetable. If you can’t smell, see, hear, taste, or touch then you’re nothing. A tent then is all the body becomes with it’s five senses. It’s a tent, it’s a temporary dwelling place for the real you and the real me.
It is important to note that since this is the direct creation of God, and comes straight from the heart of God, then that makes it eternal. This soul part of us will never die. It’s as eternal as God is eternal. From Genesis we see that it naturally follows that since God has created man with a will, it is for the purpose of making a choice. And it’s going to be a choice between being obedient to God or we can be disobedient. And man is left with that exercise of the will.
Adam was created sinless, perfect, he had a body that would never have to die. He’s has a soul that is in perfect fellowship and communion with God as is his spirit. He is a perfect creation. All of this to say, God is creating mankind as the very epitome, the very crowning act of creation. We are created in the image of God, given a will, so that we can choose to either be obedient or disobedient.
So He created mankind to have someone that He could have perfect fellowship with. We now know that human fellowship with God resides in the Body of Christ for all eternity. As I see scripture, this is the primary reason for man being created in the first place. God created a creature that He could love and will see that love returned.
God is not only concerned for the soul, and that’s what most of us have heard over the years – the salvation of the soul. And that’s all that too many spiritual people and theologians concern themselves with. But what they’re missing is that God is just as concerned with our body. We’re going to have a new resurrected body someday, but until we do, it’s not just the salvation of the soul God is concerned with, but with the whole person – the body, the soul and the spirit.
Various Concepts of the Soul
All of the traditional views cited above appear to be inadequate and have been refuted or reinterpreted by various modern theologians so that no general consensus prevails. For our purposes here it all boils down to two principal opposing viewpoints: Trichotomy and Dichotomy.
The Bible teaches that humanity possesses a physical body, a soul, and a spirit. In regards
to how these aspects of the human nature connect with and relate to each other, there are four primary theories. Two of the views, anthropological monism and anthropological hylomorphism, deal primarily with how the three aspects of humanity combine to form the human nature. The two other models, dichotomy (anthropological dualism) and trichotomy, deal with the distinction between the human soul and human spirit. The distinction between the material (physical) and immaterial (spiritual) aspects of the human nature is straightforward. The distinction between the two immaterial aspects of the human nature is more difficult.
While there are Bible verses that use the terms soul and spirit interchangeably (Matthew 10:28; Luke 1:46–47; 1 Corinthians 5:3; 7:34), other biblical passages do not present the soul and the spirit as precisely the same thing. There are also passages that hint at the separation between the soul and spirit (Romans 8:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 4:12). Hebrews 4:12 states, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit.” This verse tells us two things: (1) there is a dividing point between the soul and spirit, and (2) the dividing point is only discernible to God. With all of these verses in mind, neither the dichotomous or trichotomous interpretations can be explicitly proved. Does the immaterial aspect of the human nature involve a soul and a spirit? Yes. Are the soul and spirit absolutely unified and united (dichotomy) or closely related but separate (trichotomy)? Unclear.
Those who believe that human nature is a trichotomy typically believe the following: the physical body is what connects us with the physical world around us, the soul is the essence of our being, and the spirit is what connects us with God. This is why the unsaved can be said to be spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1; Colossians 2:13), while they are very much physically and “soulishly” alive. Those who believe that human nature is a dichotomy would have the same understanding of the body but would view the spirit as the part of the soul that connects with God. So, the question of dichotomy vs. trichotomy is essentially whether the soul and spirit are different aspects of the immaterial human nature, or if the spirit is simply a part of the soul, with the soul being the whole immaterial part of the human nature.
Trichotomy vs. dichotomy of man—which view is correct? It would seem that it is unwise to be dogmatic. Both theories are biblically plausible. Neither interpretation is heretical. This is perhaps an issue we are unable to fully grasp with our finite human minds. What we can be certain of is that the human nature is comprised of a body, a soul, and a spirit. Whether the soul and spirit are one, or are somehow distinct, is not an issue God chose to make abundantly clear in His Word. Whether you believe in a dichotomy or trichotomy, offer your body as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1), thank God for saving your soul (1 Peter 1:9), and worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:23–24).
Karl Barth,one of the premier theologians of all time, affirms the dichotomy vernacular of the Old Testament by defining Man in two parts: Body and Soul. But we just learned in 1Thess:5;23 that man consists of body, soul, and spirit.
Barth's study of man’s constitution is nearest to the traditional Dichotomists, because he believes that man is constituted in two parts: Body and Soul. He does not believe that the spirit is a third part of man, because he identifies the spirit with the Holy Spirit.
1 Thess 5:21 is used as the basis for trichotomy because it contains the phrase "spirit and soul and body" suggesting Man exists in three parts. Here Barth defends his dichotomist view: “The only biblical passage which can be regarded as ambiguous in this regard is 1 Thess 5:23 . . . Scripture never says "soul" where only "spirit" can be meant. But it often says "spirit" where "soul" is meant; and there is inner reason for this in the fact that the constitution of man as soul and body cannot be fully and exactly described without thinking first and foremost of the spirit as its proper basis.” Barth says we are nowhere invited to think of these three entities. Even Augustine, when he once gave the almost intolerably harsh formulation: there are three things which define a human being: spirit, soul and body, immediately corrected himself: these may, on the other hand, be called two, since often the soul is named together with the spirit.
Barth identifies the spirit of Scripture with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not another part of man. Man exists in a dichotomy of two parts: Body and Soul, and the Holy Spirit of God is what brings to life the Soul of the Body. Man exists because he has the Holy Spirit. Barth explains the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Man's Soul as follows: “Our statement that man is wholly and at the same time both soul and body presupposes the first statement that man is as he has spirit. We believe that it is the Holy Spirit, i.e., the immediate action of God Himself, which grounds, constitutes and maintains man as soul of his body. It is thus the HolySpirit that unifies him and holds him together as soul and body. If we abstract from the Holy Spirit and therefore from the act of the living Creator, we necessarily abstract between soul and body. If we consider man for himself, i.e., without considering that he is only as God is for him, he is seen as a puzzling duality, his mortal body on the one side and his immortal soul on the other, a totality composed of two parts inadequately glued together, of two obviously different and conflicting substances. And however much we then try to persuade ourselves that this duality is the one man, we stand in the midst of Greek and every other form of heathenism, which sees neither the real God nor real man, and cannot do so, because knowledge of the Holy Spirit is needed for this purpose and this is incompatible with heathenism. Our only relief will then be found in the back and forth movement between ideas and appearance, thinking and speculation and so on, which pervades the history of philosophy in every age. The Spirit is the Holy Spirit(Not A Part of Man), and it is the Holy Spirit that makes creation alive, as it is so panentheistically expressed in Acts 17:28: in Him we live and move and have our being. It is the Spirit that is in Creation and brings it into being. It is the movement of the Creator Spiritus towards Creation that makes all things alive, and there is no life or suffering that exists apart from the animation of the Spirit”.
We thus understand that man has spirit and is thereby man as equivalent in content that he is man, and therefore soul of his body, not without God but by God, i.e., by the ever new act of God. The Holy Spirit is, in the most general sense, the operation of God upon His creation, and especially the movement of God towards man. The Holy Spirit is thus the principle of man's relation to God, of man's fellowship with Him. This relation and fellowship cannot proceed from man himself, for God is his Creator and he His creature. He himself cannot be its principle. . . . This is what is meant when Scripture says of man that he has spirit or the Holy Spirit, or that he has done this or that in the Holy Spirit or through the Holy Spirit, or has said or done or suffered from the Holy Spirit. This never signifies a capacity or ability of his own nature, but always one originally foreign to his nature which has come to it from God and has thus been specially imparted to it in a special movement of God towards him. . . . The Holy Spirit, in so far as He not only comes but proceeds from God Himself, is identical with God.
The soul does not act on the body, but the one man acts. And he does it in that as soul he animates himself and is acting subject, but always as soul is soul of his body, animated by himself, determined and enabled to act, and engaged in action. Again, the soul does not suffer from the body, but the one man suffers. And this takes place in that as soul (namely, as acting subject) he is fundamentally exposed and susceptible to such hindrances and injuries, but as soul of his body must actually experience them. Again, the body does not act on the soul, but the one man acts. He acts in that as body he is animated by himself, determined and enabled to act, and engaged in action, but as body of his soul, animating himself and acting subject. And again, the body does not suffer from the soul, but the one man suffers. When this takes place, it means that as body he really experiences such hindrances and injuries, but that as body of his soul he must really make them his own.
The one whole man is thus one who both acts through himself and suffers in himself, but always in such a way that he is first soul (ruling, in the subject) and then body (serving, in the object)--always in this inner order, rationally and logically of his whole nature.
The Soul and Body of every person are one. For Barth the indivisible unity of Man's two parts is exemplified in Jesus of the New Testament, a supremely true man existing as the union of two parts of two "substances," He is one whole man, embodied soul and besouled body: the one in the other and never merely beside it; the one never without the other but only with it, and in it present, active and significant; the one with all its attributes always to be taken as seriously as the other. As this one whole man, and therefore as true man, the Jesus of the New Testament is born and lives and suffers and dies and is raised again.
Barth considers the idea that evil spirits are not excluded from what is given to man from the Holy Spirit: God remains free to give, to take, and to give again. He shows Himself free in the fact that He can also give an evil spirit to man--this too is a kind of commission imposed on the man concerned--as again with Saul (1 Sam 16:14f) and in 2 King 19:7 with the king of Assur; and it can again happen (1 Sam 16:23) that this evil spirit too can depart from him. Even the "lying spirit in the mouth of all false prophets" is, as we are told in the remarkable passage in 1 King 22:21f, one of the spirits that surround the throne of God, and it is called and empowered by God Himself for the infatuation of Ahab. There are other passages (Isa 4:4,40:7;Job 4:9) where the Spirit is the burning blast of divine judgment, a power of destruction and extermination. Hence we cannot be surprised to hear in Job 20:3 of a spirit "without insight", in Isa 29:24 of an "erring spirit," in Zech 13:2 of an "unclean spirit"; and even in the New Testament of a "spirit of bondage" (Rom 8:15), of "another spirit" which presents another Jesus and another gospel (2 Cor 11:4); and further, with a frequency which cannot be disregarded, of evil spirits, unclean spirits and spirits that cause sickness, with all the work of these spirits in and upon men. If God condemns a man and through him other men, He can give him such a spirit.
The spirit is not a third part of man, but is identified with the Holy Spirit, and it is through the Holy Spirit's free movement towards Man and through Man that Man is brought to life by the operation of God by his Holy Spirit in Creation. Man does not pantheistically exist in God, but there is no life apart from through the Holy Spirit”.
Leaving Barth, we find Traducianism is the theory that a soul is generated by the physical parents along with the physical body. The basis for Traducianism cites Genesis 2:7, Where God breathed the breath of life into Adam, causing Adam to become a “living soul.” Scripture nowhere records God performing this action again. (B) Adam had a son in his own likeness (Genesis 5:3). Adam’s descendants seem to be “living souls” without God breathing into them. (C) Genesis 2:2-3 seems to indicate that God ceased His creative work. (D) Adam's sin affects all men—both physically and spiritually—this makes sense if the body and soul both come from the parents. The weakness of Traducianism is that it is unclear how an immaterial soul can be generated through an entirely physical process. Traducianism can only be true if the body and soul are inextricably connected.
Scripture speaks clearly of man as being, Body, Soul, and Spirit. So there you have the three basic parts that make up a person. Within man we have a trinity of sort, which is definitely the invisible. It is the mind, the will, and the emotions that make up our soul. There is a very close affinity between the soul and the spirit, and yet Scripture does view them as two separate entities. God made man in His own image, by giving him a mind, will and emotion, the three invisible entities that are all attributes of God as well, and that were instilled when God breathed into every man the breath of life, and he became a living soul. We were created out of the natural earthly elements and that’s all our fleshly body really is. It’s just water and the elements that are taken from the ground. When we die the body decays back to those same elements. But, the crowning act of creation was when the LORD God breathed into man, the breath of life. Only the Lord knows what Life is.
Our opening paragraph summarizes the scriptural teaching on the creation of man which is readily accepted and understood by most Christians. It seems there is no end to discussion and debate over the implications regarding the two introductory verses in the Book of Genesis: “ . . . created in the image of God.”and “ . . . and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” (Genesis 1:11; 2:7).
There are so many questions man continues to ask about himself. When does human life begin? What is life? What is the origin of the human soul? Exactly how and when does the human soul come into being? What about original sin? When and how did the sin of Adam enter the soul of man?
Many Scripture verses are cited in attempts to answer those questions, but none of them are clinching or determinative to the satisfaction of not only bible scholars, but secular intellectuals as well. Regardless of the difficulty presented in the Scriptures on these issues, we cannot dismiss the fact that God is the author. For whatever reason, God has revealed only as much as He deems we “need to know,” and we have to accept it on this basis. These inspired words of Scripture are the foundational “beginnings” of everything that God has undertaken on behalf of humanity. The words and phrases are difficult to grasp, but they do require belief-- taking God at His Word. Man, when confronted with things hard to understand, must decide whether he will submit to the Author of that truth or reject both that truth and the Source of that truth—the Creator God. There is no logical middle ground.
Once we can envision the main outlines of God’s thought and have grasped his general point of view, we are able to see the meaning of everything else—the point of his poems and the moral of his stories, and how the puzzling passages fit in with the rest. We then find that his message has a constantcy we did not at first comprehend, and that elements in his thought which at first seem contradictory are not really so at all.
When all is said and done, the important question to ask is “What does all of this have to do with my eternal salvation?” Everything! All those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation. They are so clearly revealed and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, will ultimately arrive at a sufficient understanding of them. It is only over secondary matters that problems arise. Here, however, ignorance of the background of biblical statements and allusions, coupled (no doubt) with failure to enter adequately into the mind of God, at times cast doubt as to what the texts mean, and how they fit in with other texts and with the rest of the Word of God. But these uncertainties affect only minor aspects of the biblical revelation. And in fact, most of these problems are eventually resolved after patient study as our knowledge grows. In spite of our solving one problem we uncover another, we have no reason to expect that all the problems that crop up while searching the Scriptures will ever be completely solved in this world. God has said as much, and promised us complete revelation when we meet Him “face to face.”(1Cor. 13:12).
Barth's study of man’s constitution is nearest to the traditional Dichotomists, because he believes that man is constituted in two parts: Body and Soul. He does not believe that the spirit is a third part of man, because he identifies the spirit with the Holy Spirit.
1 Thess 5:21 is used as the basis for trichotomy because it contains the phrase "spirit and soul and body" suggesting Man exists in three parts. Here Barth defends his dichotomist view: “The only biblical passage which can be regarded as ambiguous in this regard is 1 Thess 5:23 . . . Scripture never says "soul" where only "spirit" can be meant. But it often says "spirit" where "soul" is meant; and there is inner reason for this in the fact that the constitution of man as soul and body cannot be fully and exactly described without thinking first and foremost of the spirit as its proper basis.” Barth says we are nowhere invited to think of these three entities. Even Augustine, when he once gave the almost intolerably harsh formulation: there are three things which define a human being: spirit, soul and body, immediately corrected himself: these may, on the other hand, be called two, since often the soul is named together with the spirit.
Barth identifies the spirit of Scripture with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not another part of man. Man exists in a dichotomy of two parts: Body and Soul, and the Holy Spirit of God is what brings to life the Soul of the Body. Man exists because he has the Holy Spirit. Barth explains the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Man's Soul as follows: “Our statement that man is wholly and at the same time both soul and body presupposes the first statement that man is as he has spirit. We believe that it is the Holy Spirit, i.e., the immediate action of God Himself, which grounds, constitutes and maintains man as soul of his body. It is thus the HolySpirit that unifies him and holds him together as soul and body. If we abstract from the Holy Spirit and therefore from the act of the living Creator, we necessarily abstract between soul and body. If we consider man for himself, i.e., without considering that he is only as God is for him, he is seen as a puzzling duality, his mortal body on the one side and his immortal soul on the other, a totality composed of two parts inadequately glued together, of two obviously different and conflicting substances. And however much we then try to persuade ourselves that this duality is the one man, we stand in the midst of Greek and every other form of heathenism, which sees neither the real God nor real man, and cannot do so, because knowledge of the Holy Spirit is needed for this purpose and this is incompatible with heathenism. Our only relief will then be found in the back and forth movement between ideas and appearance, thinking and speculation and so on, which pervades the history of philosophy in every age. The Spirit is the Holy Spirit(Not A Part of Man), and it is the Holy Spirit that makes creation alive, as it is so panentheistically expressed in Acts 17:28: in Him we live and move and have our being. It is the Spirit that is in Creation and brings it into being. It is the movement of the Creator Spiritus towards Creation that makes all things alive, and there is no life or suffering that exists apart from the animation of the Spirit”.
We thus understand that man has spirit and is thereby man as equivalent in content that he is man, and therefore soul of his body, not without God but by God, i.e., by the ever new act of God. The Holy Spirit is, in the most general sense, the operation of God upon His creation, and especially the movement of God towards man. The Holy Spirit is thus the principle of man's relation to God, of man's fellowship with Him. This relation and fellowship cannot proceed from man himself, for God is his Creator and he His creature. He himself cannot be its principle. . . . This is what is meant when Scripture says of man that he has spirit or the Holy Spirit, or that he has done this or that in the Holy Spirit or through the Holy Spirit, or has said or done or suffered from the Holy Spirit. This never signifies a capacity or ability of his own nature, but always one originally foreign to his nature which has come to it from God and has thus been specially imparted to it in a special movement of God towards him. . . . The Holy Spirit, in so far as He not only comes but proceeds from God Himself, is identical with God.
The soul does not act on the body, but the one man acts. And he does it in that as soul he animates himself and is acting subject, but always as soul is soul of his body, animated by himself, determined and enabled to act, and engaged in action. Again, the soul does not suffer from the body, but the one man suffers. And this takes place in that as soul (namely, as acting subject) he is fundamentally exposed and susceptible to such hindrances and injuries, but as soul of his body must actually experience them. Again, the body does not act on the soul, but the one man acts. He acts in that as body he is animated by himself, determined and enabled to act, and engaged in action, but as body of his soul, animating himself and acting subject. And again, the body does not suffer from the soul, but the one man suffers. When this takes place, it means that as body he really experiences such hindrances and injuries, but that as body of his soul he must really make them his own.
The one whole man is thus one who both acts through himself and suffers in himself, but always in such a way that he is first soul (ruling, in the subject) and then body (serving, in the object)--always in this inner order, rationally and logically of his whole nature.
The Soul and Body of every person are one. For Barth the indivisible unity of Man's two parts is exemplified in Jesus of the New Testament, a supremely true man existing as the union of two parts of two "substances," He is one whole man, embodied soul and besouled body: the one in the other and never merely beside it; the one never without the other but only with it, and in it present, active and significant; the one with all its attributes always to be taken as seriously as the other. As this one whole man, and therefore as true man, the Jesus of the New Testament is born and lives and suffers and dies and is raised again.
Barth considers the idea that evil spirits are not excluded from what is given to man from the Holy Spirit: God remains free to give, to take, and to give again. He shows Himself free in the fact that He can also give an evil spirit to man--this too is a kind of commission imposed on the man concerned--as again with Saul (1 Sam 16:14f) and in 2 King 19:7 with the king of Assur; and it can again happen (1 Sam 16:23) that this evil spirit too can depart from him. Even the "lying spirit in the mouth of all false prophets" is, as we are told in the remarkable passage in 1 King 22:21f, one of the spirits that surround the throne of God, and it is called and empowered by God Himself for the infatuation of Ahab. There are other passages (Isa 4:4,40:7;Job 4:9) where the Spirit is the burning blast of divine judgment, a power of destruction and extermination. Hence we cannot be surprised to hear in Job 20:3 of a spirit "without insight", in Isa 29:24 of an "erring spirit," in Zech 13:2 of an "unclean spirit"; and even in the New Testament of a "spirit of bondage" (Rom 8:15), of "another spirit" which presents another Jesus and another gospel (2 Cor 11:4); and further, with a frequency which cannot be disregarded, of evil spirits, unclean spirits and spirits that cause sickness, with all the work of these spirits in and upon men. If God condemns a man and through him other men, He can give him such a spirit.
The spirit is not a third part of man, but is identified with the Holy Spirit, and it is through the Holy Spirit's free movement towards Man and through Man that Man is brought to life by the operation of God by his Holy Spirit in Creation. Man does not pantheistically exist in God, but there is no life apart from through the Holy Spirit”.
Leaving Barth, we find Traducianism is the theory that a soul is generated by the physical parents along with the physical body. The basis for Traducianism cites Genesis 2:7, Where God breathed the breath of life into Adam, causing Adam to become a “living soul.” Scripture nowhere records God performing this action again. (B) Adam had a son in his own likeness (Genesis 5:3). Adam’s descendants seem to be “living souls” without God breathing into them. (C) Genesis 2:2-3 seems to indicate that God ceased His creative work. (D) Adam's sin affects all men—both physically and spiritually—this makes sense if the body and soul both come from the parents. The weakness of Traducianism is that it is unclear how an immaterial soul can be generated through an entirely physical process. Traducianism can only be true if the body and soul are inextricably connected.
Scripture speaks clearly of man as being, Body, Soul, and Spirit. So there you have the three basic parts that make up a person. Within man we have a trinity of sort, which is definitely the invisible. It is the mind, the will, and the emotions that make up our soul. There is a very close affinity between the soul and the spirit, and yet Scripture does view them as two separate entities. God made man in His own image, by giving him a mind, will and emotion, the three invisible entities that are all attributes of God as well, and that were instilled when God breathed into every man the breath of life, and he became a living soul. We were created out of the natural earthly elements and that’s all our fleshly body really is. It’s just water and the elements that are taken from the ground. When we die the body decays back to those same elements. But, the crowning act of creation was when the LORD God breathed into man, the breath of life. Only the Lord knows what Life is.
Our opening paragraph summarizes the scriptural teaching on the creation of man which is readily accepted and understood by most Christians. It seems there is no end to discussion and debate over the implications regarding the two introductory verses in the Book of Genesis: “ . . . created in the image of God.”and “ . . . and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” (Genesis 1:11; 2:7).
There are so many questions man continues to ask about himself. When does human life begin? What is life? What is the origin of the human soul? Exactly how and when does the human soul come into being? What about original sin? When and how did the sin of Adam enter the soul of man?
Many Scripture verses are cited in attempts to answer those questions, but none of them are clinching or determinative to the satisfaction of not only bible scholars, but secular intellectuals as well. Regardless of the difficulty presented in the Scriptures on these issues, we cannot dismiss the fact that God is the author. For whatever reason, God has revealed only as much as He deems we “need to know,” and we have to accept it on this basis. These inspired words of Scripture are the foundational “beginnings” of everything that God has undertaken on behalf of humanity. The words and phrases are difficult to grasp, but they do require belief-- taking God at His Word. Man, when confronted with things hard to understand, must decide whether he will submit to the Author of that truth or reject both that truth and the Source of that truth—the Creator God. There is no logical middle ground.
Once we can envision the main outlines of God’s thought and have grasped his general point of view, we are able to see the meaning of everything else—the point of his poems and the moral of his stories, and how the puzzling passages fit in with the rest. We then find that his message has a constantcy we did not at first comprehend, and that elements in his thought which at first seem contradictory are not really so at all.
When all is said and done, the important question to ask is “What does all of this have to do with my eternal salvation?” Everything! All those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation. They are so clearly revealed and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, will ultimately arrive at a sufficient understanding of them. It is only over secondary matters that problems arise. Here, however, ignorance of the background of biblical statements and allusions, coupled (no doubt) with failure to enter adequately into the mind of God, at times cast doubt as to what the texts mean, and how they fit in with other texts and with the rest of the Word of God. But these uncertainties affect only minor aspects of the biblical revelation. And in fact, most of these problems are eventually resolved after patient study as our knowledge grows. In spite of our solving one problem we uncover another, we have no reason to expect that all the problems that crop up while searching the Scriptures will ever be completely solved in this world. God has said as much, and promised us complete revelation when we meet Him “face to face.”(1Cor. 13:12).
In the book of Genesis God teaches that human beings, male and female were created in the image of God. "Created in the image of God" means that there is an equivalency of concepts in human anthropology to that of our Creator. The exact meaning of this has been debated throughout church history. What is the origin of the soul in each human being?
What does it mean to be human and to be made in the image of God? What does it mean to be a 'person'? What constitutes a human person? What does it mean to affirm that humans are free beings? And, what is gender? Theological Anthropology addresses complexities surrounding such questions.
So, what is a "person"? What constitutes a "human being"? What does Scripture teach with regard to the fundamental constitution of God's images? Theological anthropology, particularly as it relates to "what" we are really made up of, is a divisive subject. Not only has the origin of man challenged scholars for centuries, but so has the very nature of man as a biological, spiritual being. There no complete consensus as to what is "biblical" when it comes to the "mind-body problem" or what it means for man to be (or have) a "soul" and a "body.”
Everything based on Holy Scripture is largely denied by the academic majority. Materialism, monism, physicalism, and reductionism reigns. All this stuff about souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence is considered outdated, Platonic-based nonsense. Neuroscience claims it has proved these biblical truths wrong. Neuroscientists have discredited a dualist(body and soul) interpretation of the human person. In light of contemporary neuroscience a hard dichotomy between soul and body and a classification of separate faculties of the soul are no longer tenable…what St. Thomas called the faculties of the soul can now be explained through neuroscience.
Neuroscience says, “our brain is nothing but neurons,” which implies a denial of personhood and free will. It denies the very existence of consciousness, which in turn denies human freedom since it rules out mental causality.
It is a common assumption that the contemporary sciences of the mind conflict with Christian claims about the nature of the human person. However, although there may be conflict between these two, the prevalent impression that the neuroscientific findings unquestionably confute Christian claims about human nature seems in part at least to be the result of the greater publicity often enjoyed by strongly reductionist interpretations of neuroscience, of which Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994) is a prominent example, and common misunderstanding of the religious position on human nature.
Despite a widespread assumption that religious belief about personhood assumes dualism (i.e., the person is the soul, which is essentially distinct from body), Biblical scholars and theologians have for many decades insisted on the holistic picture of the human person as the most biblical one. Strongly reductionist analyses such as Crick's tend to rely on setting up classical dualism (generally assumed to be the natural religious option) and strong reductionism as the only alternatives in the mind-body debate. But not all neuroscientists interpret the implications of their data in the way Crick does, and equally distinguished scientists have interpreted the same data in radically different ways which are compatible with religious views of the person.
Crick makes a philosophical leap of faith from the observation that there are constant neurological correlates of humans' conscious states to the position that neurological (brain) states and conscious states are identical. This is a leap many of his colleagues refuse to make. At the other extreme to Crick, neuroscientist John Eccles has advocated a strong dualist view, while the positions of neuroscientists Sperry and MacKay belong between these two extremes. Steven Rose, although himself secular in outlook, has also refused strong reductionism of the sort neuroscientists like Crick endorse. Both dualist, and more preferably for most modern believers, nonreductive materialist positions are compatible with religious views of the person. Christian and nonreligious contributors to these debates have insisted, against authors like Crick, that the range of accounts of human nature offered up by scientists and philosophers of mind as consistent with the neuroscientific data is wider than generally believed. They also state that these accounts do not uniformly deny human personhood and free will. Murphy, Brown and Malony, in Whatever Happened to the Soul? (1998) argue for some form of nonreductive physicalism as the position which is most consistent both with modern Christian claims about the human person and with the contemporary sciences of the mind.
The issue of free will is a difficult one but not one which need present insuperable problems for faith. Eccles has defended genuine mental causality (and therefore free will), and others have appealed to a compatibilist conception of free will as a means of reconciling neurological determinism and subjective freedom. In addition, theistic determinism is a defensible theological position for some, although religious believers generally regard human freedom as a bedrock theistic assumption the denial of which is not consonant with religious belief.
It is further objected that religious claims about the ultimate destiny of human persons are incompatible with theories of human nature allegedly implied by the neuroscientific data. This is a complex issue, since there is some hesitation within theology about whether some modified form of dualism is a legitimate way of thinking about the continuity of the person between physical death and resurrection, or whether the theological conception of 'total death' (Ganztod) and a corresponding stress on the hope of resurrection as a new creation is more appropriate. In both cases, however, there is no necessary inconsistency with religious belief; if dualism (in something like the form John Eccles has defended) is the case, then the soul's survival of death is possible; if some kind of nonreductive physicalism is the case (as defended by a host of neuroscientists, and as seems more consistent with Abrahamic teachings concerning the human person), this by no means rules out the traditional teaching of bodily resurrection along the lines of 'total death' as defended by theologians such as Barth and Jungel. In any case, on the traditional assumption that God is omnipotent He can reassemble human beings at will, or keep their persons in existence in a way we cannot imagine (whether one accepts dualism or nonreductive materialism). Issues about the impossibility of the mind surviving apart from the body thus have no direct purchase on the truth or otherwise of theological claims about ultimate human destiny, since everything hangs not on whether minds can exist separately from bodies but rather on whether there is a God who has the power to completely resurrect persons.
This leaves the question of religious experience. The case is often made that because we now have a better idea about the neurophysiological correlates of religious experience this thereby explains away religious experience as something other than what it is claimed to be by believers. However, it has been pointed out by various neuroscientists, both believers and nonbelievers, and interpreters of the neuroscientific findings, that reductive explanations of religious experience which claim to explain religious experience away commit the common fallacy of believing that because an alleged religious experience is mediated via the brain it is therefore 'nothing but' a product of the brain. But on the assumption that the person (as the Abrahamic religions teach) is a mind-body unity, it is to be expected that God would work through brain pathways in causing a religious experience in a person; as has often been pointed out, what would be strange is if there were no neurological correlates to religious experiences.
"There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion," the research team announced at a conference for the Society for Neuroscience. "This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society."
Anthropologists and Darwinian theorists have frequently speculated that religion may have developed as a self-policing mechanism as cooperation with others became useful. With their intelligence and skills at making weapons, there was little to stop early humans from slaughtering each other like wild maniacs, until they began to fear unseen beings even bigger and badder than themselves. This sort of adaptation has always been considered a purely psychological function, but now we have the first evidence that the religious instinct may be physically hard-wired right into our noggins.
THE “GOD SPOT” BROUHAHA
Which brings us to the most intriguing conundrum posed by the discovery of the God Spot. The premier episode of the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole series featured Michael Persinger, whose “God helmet” uses weak magnetic fields to stimulate the right temporal lobe to create the illusion of a presence with the person wearing it. The show claimed that everyone who wears the helmet, no matter from what religious background, has what he calls a “religious experience” when the “God helmet” stimulates their brain. This whole idea smacks of the genetic fallacy: the error of trying to disprove a belief by tracing it to its source, or alternatively, the fallacy of Bulverism, explained in Is Belief in God a case of Christian wish fulfillment? The “God spot” does not prove that religion is “all in our heads”; at most, it shows that a certain spot in our brain interacts with religious feeling in some way, and that religious feeling can be counterfeited in certain situations. Neither of those things should come as a surprise to Christians. It's a double-edged sword shoved right through the heart of the science vs. religion debate, bearing either good news or bad news for the faithful masses depending on how you answer the chicken-or-the-egg question: does it mean that God created our brains, or that our brains created God? This question runs parallel with the idea that since everything that exists evolved from nothing, there is no need for God.
Christianity in particular is not disproved by the God spot research; this is because Christianity is not dependent on ecstatic experience. Rather, Christianity’s core claims are about events that happened within history. For example, there are at least 17 factors that meant Christianity could not have succeeded in the ancient world, unless it were backed up with irrefutable proof of Jesus’ Resurrection in history.1 This “God Spot” claim doesn’t impact on this historical evidence in the slightest.
Even if it were true that the “God spot” proved that all religious experience originated in the mind, and was solely in the mind, it would not affect the truth of Christianity’s central claims. The only real lesson from this is the danger of Christians relying on experientialism when witnessing rather than the propositional truth claims of Christianity and the evidence for them . Furthermore, it would not even disprove the effectiveness of prayer, the importance of worship, etc. Rather, it would only mean that our feelings (but not our rational thoughts) when we pray, worship, etc., originate in our own minds. But even that’s not proven; again, that would be like saying that figuring out how a transmitter works explains away the voices that come through it. One could even argue that a Designer who wants a relationship with His creatures would build them in such a way as to be readily able to communicate with them. In the naturalistic understanding, there is no God, and this ‘God spot’ has been somehow produced by evolution. But would it not have been a distinct disadvantage to the survival of our alleged primitive ancestors for them to be predisposed to believing in ‘presences’ that were wholly imaginary?
This whole idea smacks of the genetic fallacy: the error of trying to disprove a belief by tracing it to its source, or alternatively, the fallacy of Bulverism, explained in Is Belief in God a case of Christian wish fulfillment? The “God spot” does not prove that religion is “all in our heads”; at most, it shows that a certain spot in our brain interacts with religious feeling in some way, and that religious feeling can be counterfeited in certain situations. Neither of those things should come as a surprise to Christians.
"These studies do not in any way negate the validity of religious experience or God," the God module's discoverers took care to note, plainly anticipating a reception of fire and brimstone from certain quarters. "They merely provide an explanation in terms of brain regions that may be involved."
No matter how inconclusive or sketchy they label their findings as being, these scientists will inevitably be denounced as heathenistic blasphemers doing the work of Satan. Yet at the very same time, other equally devout worshipers will praise this discovery as a beautiful and wondrous epiphany that spells out God's great plan.
So what'll it be? A sacred temple in the temporal lobes, or an incidental conflagration of the synapses? The Kingdom of Heaven confined to the insides of our skulls, or "I think of God, therefore He is"? Touched in the head by an angel, or brainwashed into belief by biology? Believe what you want, but either way, I think those who draw any serious mechanistic or teleological conclusions from this research ought to have their heads examined, as well.
If you were to offer an account of theological anthropology, with the emphasis on the theological, how would you do it? Where would you begin? My position on this question comes down to accepting the views presented by Les Feldick as he searches the Scripture.
THEOLOGY IS WORSHIP
So, what are we doing here? As we read these academic papers, ask our questions, and participate in these discussions, what kind of task are we involved in?
If theology is all about recognizing that God wants us to know him and cares what we think about him, taking time out of our busy lives to orient our thoughts toward God and reflect carefully on him in all his glory, then theology is a very particular kind of task.
It is worship.
We’ve gathered this morning to think carefully about who God is as he has revealed himself to us and the difference this must make in understanding who we are and how we conduct ourselves as the people of God in the world. That is worship. It may not come with the warm fuzzies and emotional afterglow that we usually associate with worship. Instead, it may come with a headache and the frustration of finding more questions than answers. But it’s still worship.
And it must be worship, or we’re not really doing theology.
Paul routinely broke out in worship and adoration as he did theology. Just read his letters. In Ephesians 3, Paul lays out his prayer for the people in Ephesus: “for this reason I bow my knees before the Father…that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (vv. 14-19). His prayer is that the Ephesians might be empowered for good theology. And, then he immediately flows right into worship: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (vv. 20-21).
Paul knew what theology was all about. He knew that theology involved asking hard questions and trying to understand really difficult ideas. That’s why he prayed for the Ephesians to be strengthened in the task. And, I think Paul enjoyed the process. He strikes me as the kind of person who could get wrapped up in the pleasures of an intricate argument or a good discussion.
But, Paul never forgot what theology was really about. He made sure that he constantly kept his eyes on the skylight so that his room never grew stuffy or stale.
Paul knew that theology is worship.
What are we doing here?
We’re worshipping. And, worship is never a waste of time.
The Lutheran Benediction- Arthur Johnson
(Numbers 6:24-26)KJV
24The LORD bless thee, and keep thee:
25The LORD make his face(to) shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
26The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. Amen!
What does it mean to be human and to be made in the image of God? What does it mean to be a 'person'? What constitutes a human person? What does it mean to affirm that humans are free beings? And, what is gender? Theological Anthropology addresses complexities surrounding such questions.
So, what is a "person"? What constitutes a "human being"? What does Scripture teach with regard to the fundamental constitution of God's images? Theological anthropology, particularly as it relates to "what" we are really made up of, is a divisive subject. Not only has the origin of man challenged scholars for centuries, but so has the very nature of man as a biological, spiritual being. There no complete consensus as to what is "biblical" when it comes to the "mind-body problem" or what it means for man to be (or have) a "soul" and a "body.”
Everything based on Holy Scripture is largely denied by the academic majority. Materialism, monism, physicalism, and reductionism reigns. All this stuff about souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence is considered outdated, Platonic-based nonsense. Neuroscience claims it has proved these biblical truths wrong. Neuroscientists have discredited a dualist(body and soul) interpretation of the human person. In light of contemporary neuroscience a hard dichotomy between soul and body and a classification of separate faculties of the soul are no longer tenable…what St. Thomas called the faculties of the soul can now be explained through neuroscience.
Neuroscience says, “our brain is nothing but neurons,” which implies a denial of personhood and free will. It denies the very existence of consciousness, which in turn denies human freedom since it rules out mental causality.
It is a common assumption that the contemporary sciences of the mind conflict with Christian claims about the nature of the human person. However, although there may be conflict between these two, the prevalent impression that the neuroscientific findings unquestionably confute Christian claims about human nature seems in part at least to be the result of the greater publicity often enjoyed by strongly reductionist interpretations of neuroscience, of which Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994) is a prominent example, and common misunderstanding of the religious position on human nature.
Despite a widespread assumption that religious belief about personhood assumes dualism (i.e., the person is the soul, which is essentially distinct from body), Biblical scholars and theologians have for many decades insisted on the holistic picture of the human person as the most biblical one. Strongly reductionist analyses such as Crick's tend to rely on setting up classical dualism (generally assumed to be the natural religious option) and strong reductionism as the only alternatives in the mind-body debate. But not all neuroscientists interpret the implications of their data in the way Crick does, and equally distinguished scientists have interpreted the same data in radically different ways which are compatible with religious views of the person.
Crick makes a philosophical leap of faith from the observation that there are constant neurological correlates of humans' conscious states to the position that neurological (brain) states and conscious states are identical. This is a leap many of his colleagues refuse to make. At the other extreme to Crick, neuroscientist John Eccles has advocated a strong dualist view, while the positions of neuroscientists Sperry and MacKay belong between these two extremes. Steven Rose, although himself secular in outlook, has also refused strong reductionism of the sort neuroscientists like Crick endorse. Both dualist, and more preferably for most modern believers, nonreductive materialist positions are compatible with religious views of the person. Christian and nonreligious contributors to these debates have insisted, against authors like Crick, that the range of accounts of human nature offered up by scientists and philosophers of mind as consistent with the neuroscientific data is wider than generally believed. They also state that these accounts do not uniformly deny human personhood and free will. Murphy, Brown and Malony, in Whatever Happened to the Soul? (1998) argue for some form of nonreductive physicalism as the position which is most consistent both with modern Christian claims about the human person and with the contemporary sciences of the mind.
The issue of free will is a difficult one but not one which need present insuperable problems for faith. Eccles has defended genuine mental causality (and therefore free will), and others have appealed to a compatibilist conception of free will as a means of reconciling neurological determinism and subjective freedom. In addition, theistic determinism is a defensible theological position for some, although religious believers generally regard human freedom as a bedrock theistic assumption the denial of which is not consonant with religious belief.
It is further objected that religious claims about the ultimate destiny of human persons are incompatible with theories of human nature allegedly implied by the neuroscientific data. This is a complex issue, since there is some hesitation within theology about whether some modified form of dualism is a legitimate way of thinking about the continuity of the person between physical death and resurrection, or whether the theological conception of 'total death' (Ganztod) and a corresponding stress on the hope of resurrection as a new creation is more appropriate. In both cases, however, there is no necessary inconsistency with religious belief; if dualism (in something like the form John Eccles has defended) is the case, then the soul's survival of death is possible; if some kind of nonreductive physicalism is the case (as defended by a host of neuroscientists, and as seems more consistent with Abrahamic teachings concerning the human person), this by no means rules out the traditional teaching of bodily resurrection along the lines of 'total death' as defended by theologians such as Barth and Jungel. In any case, on the traditional assumption that God is omnipotent He can reassemble human beings at will, or keep their persons in existence in a way we cannot imagine (whether one accepts dualism or nonreductive materialism). Issues about the impossibility of the mind surviving apart from the body thus have no direct purchase on the truth or otherwise of theological claims about ultimate human destiny, since everything hangs not on whether minds can exist separately from bodies but rather on whether there is a God who has the power to completely resurrect persons.
This leaves the question of religious experience. The case is often made that because we now have a better idea about the neurophysiological correlates of religious experience this thereby explains away religious experience as something other than what it is claimed to be by believers. However, it has been pointed out by various neuroscientists, both believers and nonbelievers, and interpreters of the neuroscientific findings, that reductive explanations of religious experience which claim to explain religious experience away commit the common fallacy of believing that because an alleged religious experience is mediated via the brain it is therefore 'nothing but' a product of the brain. But on the assumption that the person (as the Abrahamic religions teach) is a mind-body unity, it is to be expected that God would work through brain pathways in causing a religious experience in a person; as has often been pointed out, what would be strange is if there were no neurological correlates to religious experiences.
"There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion," the research team announced at a conference for the Society for Neuroscience. "This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society."
Anthropologists and Darwinian theorists have frequently speculated that religion may have developed as a self-policing mechanism as cooperation with others became useful. With their intelligence and skills at making weapons, there was little to stop early humans from slaughtering each other like wild maniacs, until they began to fear unseen beings even bigger and badder than themselves. This sort of adaptation has always been considered a purely psychological function, but now we have the first evidence that the religious instinct may be physically hard-wired right into our noggins.
THE “GOD SPOT” BROUHAHA
Which brings us to the most intriguing conundrum posed by the discovery of the God Spot. The premier episode of the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole series featured Michael Persinger, whose “God helmet” uses weak magnetic fields to stimulate the right temporal lobe to create the illusion of a presence with the person wearing it. The show claimed that everyone who wears the helmet, no matter from what religious background, has what he calls a “religious experience” when the “God helmet” stimulates their brain. This whole idea smacks of the genetic fallacy: the error of trying to disprove a belief by tracing it to its source, or alternatively, the fallacy of Bulverism, explained in Is Belief in God a case of Christian wish fulfillment? The “God spot” does not prove that religion is “all in our heads”; at most, it shows that a certain spot in our brain interacts with religious feeling in some way, and that religious feeling can be counterfeited in certain situations. Neither of those things should come as a surprise to Christians. It's a double-edged sword shoved right through the heart of the science vs. religion debate, bearing either good news or bad news for the faithful masses depending on how you answer the chicken-or-the-egg question: does it mean that God created our brains, or that our brains created God? This question runs parallel with the idea that since everything that exists evolved from nothing, there is no need for God.
Christianity in particular is not disproved by the God spot research; this is because Christianity is not dependent on ecstatic experience. Rather, Christianity’s core claims are about events that happened within history. For example, there are at least 17 factors that meant Christianity could not have succeeded in the ancient world, unless it were backed up with irrefutable proof of Jesus’ Resurrection in history.1 This “God Spot” claim doesn’t impact on this historical evidence in the slightest.
Even if it were true that the “God spot” proved that all religious experience originated in the mind, and was solely in the mind, it would not affect the truth of Christianity’s central claims. The only real lesson from this is the danger of Christians relying on experientialism when witnessing rather than the propositional truth claims of Christianity and the evidence for them . Furthermore, it would not even disprove the effectiveness of prayer, the importance of worship, etc. Rather, it would only mean that our feelings (but not our rational thoughts) when we pray, worship, etc., originate in our own minds. But even that’s not proven; again, that would be like saying that figuring out how a transmitter works explains away the voices that come through it. One could even argue that a Designer who wants a relationship with His creatures would build them in such a way as to be readily able to communicate with them. In the naturalistic understanding, there is no God, and this ‘God spot’ has been somehow produced by evolution. But would it not have been a distinct disadvantage to the survival of our alleged primitive ancestors for them to be predisposed to believing in ‘presences’ that were wholly imaginary?
This whole idea smacks of the genetic fallacy: the error of trying to disprove a belief by tracing it to its source, or alternatively, the fallacy of Bulverism, explained in Is Belief in God a case of Christian wish fulfillment? The “God spot” does not prove that religion is “all in our heads”; at most, it shows that a certain spot in our brain interacts with religious feeling in some way, and that religious feeling can be counterfeited in certain situations. Neither of those things should come as a surprise to Christians.
"These studies do not in any way negate the validity of religious experience or God," the God module's discoverers took care to note, plainly anticipating a reception of fire and brimstone from certain quarters. "They merely provide an explanation in terms of brain regions that may be involved."
No matter how inconclusive or sketchy they label their findings as being, these scientists will inevitably be denounced as heathenistic blasphemers doing the work of Satan. Yet at the very same time, other equally devout worshipers will praise this discovery as a beautiful and wondrous epiphany that spells out God's great plan.
So what'll it be? A sacred temple in the temporal lobes, or an incidental conflagration of the synapses? The Kingdom of Heaven confined to the insides of our skulls, or "I think of God, therefore He is"? Touched in the head by an angel, or brainwashed into belief by biology? Believe what you want, but either way, I think those who draw any serious mechanistic or teleological conclusions from this research ought to have their heads examined, as well.
If you were to offer an account of theological anthropology, with the emphasis on the theological, how would you do it? Where would you begin? My position on this question comes down to accepting the views presented by Les Feldick as he searches the Scripture.
THEOLOGY IS WORSHIP
So, what are we doing here? As we read these academic papers, ask our questions, and participate in these discussions, what kind of task are we involved in?
If theology is all about recognizing that God wants us to know him and cares what we think about him, taking time out of our busy lives to orient our thoughts toward God and reflect carefully on him in all his glory, then theology is a very particular kind of task.
It is worship.
We’ve gathered this morning to think carefully about who God is as he has revealed himself to us and the difference this must make in understanding who we are and how we conduct ourselves as the people of God in the world. That is worship. It may not come with the warm fuzzies and emotional afterglow that we usually associate with worship. Instead, it may come with a headache and the frustration of finding more questions than answers. But it’s still worship.
And it must be worship, or we’re not really doing theology.
Paul routinely broke out in worship and adoration as he did theology. Just read his letters. In Ephesians 3, Paul lays out his prayer for the people in Ephesus: “for this reason I bow my knees before the Father…that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (vv. 14-19). His prayer is that the Ephesians might be empowered for good theology. And, then he immediately flows right into worship: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (vv. 20-21).
Paul knew what theology was all about. He knew that theology involved asking hard questions and trying to understand really difficult ideas. That’s why he prayed for the Ephesians to be strengthened in the task. And, I think Paul enjoyed the process. He strikes me as the kind of person who could get wrapped up in the pleasures of an intricate argument or a good discussion.
But, Paul never forgot what theology was really about. He made sure that he constantly kept his eyes on the skylight so that his room never grew stuffy or stale.
Paul knew that theology is worship.
What are we doing here?
We’re worshipping. And, worship is never a waste of time.
The Lutheran Benediction- Arthur Johnson
(Numbers 6:24-26)KJV
24The LORD bless thee, and keep thee:
25The LORD make his face(to) shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
26The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. Amen!
Doctrine of The Divinity of Christ
This doctrine asserts that Jesus Christ is the creator God and the Son of God incarnate. Jesus Christ is the central figure of Christianity and has been misread by many scholars. Many portions of Scripture completely affirm His deity, showing that at no time did He lose His divine nature. Yet the Bible teaches, equally strongly, that Christ became fully human. Understanding these things has proved difficult, but our faith leads us to the truth. "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."(John 8:31-32).
THE TEACHINGS OF SCRIPTURE
A Little Background
In Genesis chapter 3. Adam and Eve have just eaten of the forbidden tree. Sin has entered. Death came by sin the Book of Romans tells us, and along with that the curse fell. Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. But at the very same moment that all that took place, God did something tremendous. He promised a means of redemption that we find recorded all the way from Genesis 3 to the last book of our Bible.
So, in Genesis chapter 3, we’re going to see the first prophetic statement concerning the incarnate Son of God. How He had to become flesh in order to bring about mankind’s salvation.
"In the beginning was the Word, (Christ the Communicator, the One Who speaks the Word. And so it’s always God the Son Who is the Communicator) and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2. The same was in the beginning with God. 3. All things (everything) were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." (John 1:1-3). This verse shows how He is also the means that holds the whole universe together.
"And the Word was made (what?) flesh and dwelt among us. (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:14). The Word, the Communicator, that Person of the Godhead Who created every thing was made flesh and dwelt among us. And John says, we beheld his glory and the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.
"And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, (the God of Genesis 1:1) who created all things (how?) by Jesus Christ." (Ephesians 3:9). Yes, the Triune God was involved in creation. The Triune God came together before anything was ever created and delegated the work of creation to the second Person of the Trinity, God the Son. The whole Trinity is involved in creation, But it was God the Son, Jesus the Christ, Who spoke the word of creation and everything, whatever it is, made its appearance.
"Who (speaking of the Son in Col. 1, verse 14), in whom we have redemption through his blood. (That has to be God the Son) is the image of the invisible God, (in other words, Jesus Christ was the visible, physical, manifestation of that invisible God) the firstborn of every creature." (Colossians 1:15). "For by him (God the Son) were all things created, that are in heaven, and that in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things (EVERYTHING) were created by him, and for him." (Colossians 1:16) These two verses 15 and 16 show that Jesus Christ, the One Who went to that Roman cross, was the Creator of everything.
Who is Jesus Christ?
The same Person of the Godhead, Jesus the Christ, God the Son. "And he (the Creator) is before all things, and by him all things consist." (Colossians 1:17) (Another phrase for consist is "held together"). The entire cosmos and everything in it is held together by His power. The following verses provide additional proof He’s the Creator, the sovereign God, the sustainer of the universe. He’s even more than that. He is the Head of the Body, what the Apostle Paul calls, the Church-the Body of Christ.
"And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, (Coming from eternity past) the firstborn from the dead:…" (Colossians 1:18a). The verse makes it so plain, that He is the beginning, He is the firstborn from the dead.
Scripture makes a point that no one had ever been resurrected from the dead until Jesus Christ. He is the first to have ever been resurrected, never to die again. The term, "the only begotten Son of God" does not mean His birth in Bethlehem, but it means that He is the only one that was resurrected from the dead. Scripture makes it so plain that that’s what the term refers to. And here again, He is the firstborn from the dead, He is the first to have experienced resurrection power and here again is the reason,
"…that in all things (in everything) he (Jesus Christ) might have the preeminence. (He’s above everything). 19. For it pleased the Father (the whole Godhead has been involved in everything that Christ has done) that in him should all fullness dwell:" (Colossians 1:18b-19). Paul is saying over and over here in Colossians, that Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible Godhead. And the Godhead of course is the whole Trinity.
"Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. 9. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?" Jesus said, "if you’ve seen Me you’ve seen the Father." (John 14:8-9).
"Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?…" (John 14:10). We now know Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified Christ, is the physical, visible manifestation of that invisible Godhead. And we take it by faith. We can’t understand it. But the Bible teaches it. And so we take it by faith – that Jesus Christ is the Creator of everything, He is the visible manifestation of the invisible Godhead and that in Him, verse 19 again says, that it even pleased the Father. And I think that would also include by implication, the Holy Spirit. God promised that one day we’ll understand it, But for now, we take it by faith.
"For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell;" (Colossians 1:19). The moment a person recognizes that they are lost [Romans 3:23] and embraces by faith that Jesus, the creator God, took on human flesh, died the death of the cross, shed his divine, sinless blood as full payment for our salvation, was resurrected in power after being in the grave three days and three nights, they are saved. They recognize that this has defeated the enemies-- death, Satan, and our old nature. At the moment of true faith, the Holy Spirit places us by an invisible, unfelt act into the body of Christ.
INCARNATE CHRIST: GOD BECOMES MAN
The word incarnate is not Biblical. You won’t find that word in your Bible. It’s been coined by Bible scholars and others. The word incarnate simply means God-Man, or God who became human, and it should be noted that there is not a single religion outside of Christianity that teaches resurrection from the dead as we do.
They know nothing of resurrection. Their word is reincarnation. In other words, if you take the Hindu religion, you can start out as the very lowest of the low, and if you do pretty good, you’ll be reincarnated and come back as something a little better, reincarnating over and over until finally they attain a “god” position. That’s reincarnation, and that is not a scriptural concept. We do not teach a reincarnation. We teach only resurrection from the dead.
When the Apostle Paul was confronting the intellectuals of his day up there on Mars Hill, what was the one thing that upset them so? Resurrection from the dead. They said whoever heard of such a thing? Yet the very basic premise of Christianity is the resurrection from the dead—for salvation believe in your heart that Jesus died for your sins, was buried, and rose again the third day, as found in I Corinthians 15:1-4. And again, why did God have to become human? So that He could die. And why did He have to die? So that He could be resurrected from the dead and impart eternal life.
The first prophetic statement concerning the incarnate Son of God. How He had to become flesh in order to bring about mankind’s salvation. “And I will put enmity (Meaning a constant line of demarcation between these two forces that are going to be at enmity from here until the end of time.) between thee and the woman,…” (Genesis 3:15a)
This may already be a reference to the Nation of Israel. Possibly the woman here is a definite forecast of the demarcation between Satan and Israel, and how there will be a constant battle between the two as clearly depicted by Scripture.
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed;…” (Genesis 3:15a). That does appear to fit Israel. It is the Jewess Mary(a citizen of Israel) made reference to here. It fits all the way through that here’s the promise that God would put enmity between Satan and the woman. It appears to be a reference to all his demonic powers.
What is meant by the seed of Satan(the serpent) back in Genesis 3:15? The following verses are references to Satan’s underlings-his powers.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12).
In Genesis we see where there was going to be a running controversy between the seed of Satan and all of his demonic hosts and the seed of the woman, because that is what is really referenced.
“…enmity between thee (Satan) and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it (the seed of the woman) shall bruise thy head, ( A reference to Christ defeating the Satanic powers at Calvary.) and thou shalt bruise his (the redeemer’s) heel.” (Genesis 3:15b). The suffering that He endured at the cross.
In Romans chapter 8. We see that as soon as the curse fell, God set in motion the plan of redemption. There was no afterthought to it. It was immediately transacted.
When creation was subjected to the curse.
“For the creation was made subject to the curse, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. (That one day that curse will be lifted.) 21. Because the creation itself shall also be delivered from the bondage of corruption...” (Romans 8:20-21a). The bondage of corruption is the curse! God didn’t precipitate it, He simply allowed it. He does permit it. But it’s the curse that has plagued the whole creation, not just mankind, but everything in it for the last 6,000 years.
The Foretelling of Christ in Genesis.
As soon as the curse fell, God set in motion a plan of redemption. This plan of redemption would require God to experience humanity. Only a human could go the way of the cross. That’s why God became incarnate- becoming flesh.
From the Old Testament prophets we learn they were looking forward to the time when this invisible person of the Godhead would become flesh. He would become the God-Man.
“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14). The Jews required a sign. Isaiah was writing to the Jews(Israel), and he’s aware of the fact that they were a people who looked for signs. This is 700 years before the fact. The Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God. Here we have a prophecy 700 years before Christ that a little Jewish virgin girl would conceive and bring forth the God-Man. Immanuel translated, means God with us.
Those Jews should have known that prophecy. They should have known the prophecy in Isaiah had been fulfilled. They heard the rumors of Mary and Joseph. Here this young girl is pregnant and the father says he’s not the father. They should have been able to figure out from the Old Testament prophecies; this is the fulfilled prophetic promise.
Besides, the signs of the times were all around them. They surely recognized that they were under the Roman Empire. They should have recognized that prophecy was being fulfilled. They should have recognized that the promised Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. It was written back in the little book of Micah that He’d be born in Bethlehem of Euphrates. Those Jews knew full-well about that supernatural event in Bethlehem some years back. Of course they did. But they couldn’t put it together. Everything was foretold that Christ would come, be born in Bethlehem, at the exact right day and hour. He was not one hour late. He was not one hour early. It was when the decreed “fullness of the time was come” that Christ was born. And Israel was blind to all of this. But they should have understood. It was a sign of the time. Then it goes on to tell us that He was “made of a woman.” That makes Him the God-Man. That’s what makes Him incarnate. He did not just come as an angelic appearance. He did not just come as some miraculous manifestation. But in order to make Him the God-Man, God ordained that He should be born of a woman without the benefit of a fleshly, earthly father.
“In the beginning (We don’t know when that was.) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (So, it’s a designated personality.) 2. The same was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2).
“All things (The entire cosmos) were made by him; (this person of the Godhead called The Word) and without Him was not anything made that was made. 4. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:3-4) In verse 14 we have absolute proof of who we’re talking about.
“And the Word was made flesh, (The Spirit-being, the invisible God in the person of the Son, was made flesh. Born of a woman as Paul puts it and promised as the seed of the woman back in Genesis) and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) Verse 14 is making a direct reference to The Mount of Transfiguration, an event toward the end of Christ’s ministry. Only three of the Twelve could have said something like this, because it was only Peter, James, and John that were up there at the Mount of Transfiguration and saw Jesus transformed right before their eyes with all the glory brighter than the mid-day sun. That this is the person of the Godhead who was the creator of everything, so, he says, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Walked with us. Talked with us. Slept. Ate. All the normal functions of humanity.) (and we beheld his glory, (up there on the Mount of Transfiguration) the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Matthew chapter 1 ties us into that coming out of the Old Testament. In reference to the announcement of His birth—that He would be born of a woman. It would be a virgin birth without benefit of a human father; because, after all, He had to remain Deity. But He also has to take on humanity. “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, (In other words, before the marriage was consummated.) she was found with child of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18).
Here we see Joseph and Mary had not consummated the physical marriage, and yet she was already pregnant, not by a human being, but by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. As believers, we don’t have a problem with that. We know that with God anything is possible.
Isaiah prophesied that a virgin would conceive. How could a virgin conceive? Only by the work of the Holy Spirit. Matthew clearly states that before they consummated the physical marriage, Mary was found with child of the Holy Spirit.
“Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privately.” (Matthew 1:19). To hold secret the fact that she was pregnant without the benefit of a public marriage.
“But while he thought on these things, behold the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David,…” (Matthew 1:20a). From this we learn that this all goes back to the promises made to the patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were given all the promises of a Nation of people coming. Then sooner or later here comes King David, and what is David promised? That through his bloodline would come the Messiah, the King of Israel. So he says to Joseph--
“…Joseph, thou son of David, (the royal family.) fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 1:20b). It’s not of another man. It’s perfectly godly and legitimate.
“And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: (or in the Hebrew—Jehoshua. Why?) for he shall save his people from their sins.” This is all Jewish. Here we’re talking about the sins of Israel only. “And he shall save his people….” (Matthew 1:21). God’s people are the Jews.
“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 23. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call him name Emmanuel, which being interrupted is, God with us.” (Matthew 1:22-23). But in a human body, and then becomes the God-Man.
“Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25. And knew her not (had no relationship with her) until she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.” (Matthew 1:24-25).
It isn’t until He finishes the work of the cross and the Apostle Paul is sent to the Gentiles that He becomes the Savior of all mankind Prior to that he was fulfilling the promises first and foremost to the Nation of Israel. Here in Luke 1 we’re still dealing with the covenant people, the chosen people, the Jew, the Nation of Israel.
Here we have God dealing with the parents of John the Baptist. Zacharias a Hebrew priest whose wife’s name was Elizabeth. And as we know, Zacharias and Elizabeth were past childbearing age much as Abraham and Sarah were. But miraculously, providentially, she became with child and brought along the little baby John the Baptist.
“Now Elizabeth’s full time came that she should be delivered; and she brought forth a son. 58. And her neighbors and her cousins heard how the Lord had shown great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her.” (Luke 1:57-58). Much like Sarah.
“And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of his father. 60. And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called John. 61. And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name. 62. And they made signs to his father, (He had been stricken dumb at the very time of her conception, without ability to speak for the last nine months.) And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called. (or named) 63. And he asked for a writing table, and wrote, saying, His name is John. (Same as what Elizabeth had said.) And they marveled all.” (Luke 1:59-63). These Jews knew the custom and how unusual this was that this father who was up there at the temple serving as a priest gave the same name that Elizabeth had mentioned. His name would be John.
“And his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, (He got his speech back.) and he spake, and praised God. 65. And fear came on all that dwelt around about them: and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judea. 66. And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, What manner of child shall this be! And the hand of the Lord was with him.” (Luke 1:64-66) Talking about John the Baptist.
“And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, (Here we have a priest of Israel filled with the Holy Spirit before Christ’s earthly ministry began, and before Pentecost.) and he prophesied, saying,” (Luke 1:67a). He merely spoke forth.
“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel for he hath visited and redeemed his people,” (Luke 1:68). His chosen people. His covenant people. Not a word here about Gentiles.
“And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;” (Luke 1:69). There were no Gentiles in the house of David. Totally Jewish, because all the promises of this coming incarnate Christ were first and foremost to the covenant people.
“As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, who have been since the ages began: (Going all the way back to the Old Testament patriarchs and beyond. And this is what they wrote) 71. That we (the Nation of Israel) should be saved from our enemies(not sins), and from the hand of all that hate us;” (Luke 1:70-71). The Arab world was all around them—They hated the Jews. They would have done anything they could to obliterate the Jews. It persists to this day. So the whole idea that when this Messiah would come, he would suddenly bring safety and peace from all of these morbid enemies.
“To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, (the Old Testament promises) and to remember his holy covenant; (God’s covenant—what covenant?) 73. The oath which he swear to our father Abraham,” (Luke 1:72-73).It is so important to understand those covenants coming up through the Old Testament are all Jewish. Gentiles don’t have any part of that until after the work of the cross.
“That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, 75. In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life. 76. And thou, (Here it comes.) child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:…” (Luke 1:74-76a). God is the Highest. He’s the High One. So, John the Baptist is going to announce the coming of the God of Abraham. And who’s the God of Abraham? The Son. Jehovah.
“And thou, child, (John) shalt be called the prophet (or the forth teller) of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord (God the Son, the God-Man that’s coming.) to prepare his ways; 77. To give knowledge of salvation unto his people (Israel) by the remission of their sins,” (Luke 1:76-77)
“Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high (speaking of the incarnate Son, now) hath visited us. 79. To give light (spiritual light) to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. 80. And the child grew, (That is John the Baptist.) and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” (Luke 1:78-80).
Those verses from Luke laid the ground work for the appearance of the God-Man. Now we will find out why He had to become human in order to do the work of the cross. It wouldn’t have done for a spirit-being to somehow go up there on the cross. It had to be a human who could suffer and bleed and die and be raised again from the dead.
“Now to Abraham and his seed (or his offspring) were the promises made. He saith not, and to seeds, (plural) as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, who is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16). We now have the scriptural answer for Genesis 3:15. The seed of the woman who would come through the man Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish race, and here we have the appearance then of the Jewish Messiah.
The next verse is the only reference that the Apostle Paul makes to the birth of Christ at Bethlehem but in a uniquely different way. Here’s how Paul puts it.
“But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,” (Galatians 4:4). That verse is loaded. When the Sadducees and the Pharisees said, show us a sign, what did the Lord say? Why, can’t you read the signs of the times? He was referring to all the things that were happening associated with His first advent.
So everything was foretold that Christ would come, born in Bethlehem, at the exact right day and hour. He was not one hour late. He was not one hour early. It was when decreed “fullness of the time was come” that Christ was to be born. And Israel couldn’t figure it out. But they should have. It was a sign of the time.
Then it goes on to tell us that He was “made of a woman.” That makes Him the God-Man. That’s what makes Him incarnate. He did not just come as an angelic appearance. He did not just come as some miraculous manifestation. But in order to make Him the God-Man, God ordained that He should be born of a woman without the benefit of a fleshly, earthly father.
In the following Gospels of John we see these early-on mentions of the incarnate Christ, proving Scripture is not contradictory, but rather intricately put together.
“In the beginning (We don’t know when that was.) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ( a designated personality.) 2. The same was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2).
“All things (the entire cosmos) were made by him; (this person of the Godhead called The Word) and without Him was not anything made that was made. 4. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:3-4)
For absolute proof of who we’re talking about see the next verse.
“And the Word was made flesh, (The Spirit-being, the invisible God in the person of the Son, was made flesh. Born of a woman as Paul puts it and promised as the seed of the woman back in Genesis) and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14).
Here is a direct reference to The Mount of Transfiguration event toward the end of Christ’s ministry. Only three of the Twelve could have said something like this, because it was only Peter, James, and John that were up there at the Mount of Transfiguration and saw Jesus transformed right before their eyes with all the glory brighter than the mid-day sun. This person of the Godhead who was the creator of everything.
“The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Walked with us. Talked with us. Slept. Ate. All the normal functions of humanity.) (and we beheld his glory, (up there on the Mount of Transfiguration) the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
In Matthew’s Gospel we’re at the announcement of His birth—that He would be born of a woman. It would be a virgin birth without benefit of a human father because He had to remain Deity. He also has to take on humanity.
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, ( before the marriage was consummated.) she was found with child of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18).
Joseph and Mary had not consummated the physical marriage, and yet she was already pregnant, not by a human being, but by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. As believers we accept this on faith.
Isaiah prophesied that a virgin would conceive. But how would a virgin conceive? Only by the work of the Holy Spirit. This occurred before they consummated the physical marriage, Mary was found with child of the Holy Spirit.
“Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privately.” (Matthew 1:19). In other words, to hold secret the fact that she was pregnant without the benefit of a public marriage.
“But while he thought on these things, behold the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David,…” (Matthew 1:20a) That verse shows us once more that this all goes back to the promises made to the patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were given all the promises of a Nation of people coming. Then sooner or later here comes King David, and what is David promised? That through his bloodline would come the Messiah, the King of Israel. All right, that’s why we’ve got it in here. So he says to Joseph--
“…Joseph, thou son of David, (It’s all in the royal family.) fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 1:20b). Or the Holy Spirit. It’s not of another man. It’s perfectly godly and legitimate.
“And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: (or in the Hebrew—Jehoshua. Why?) for he shall save his people from their sins.” Now you see how uniquely Jewish all this is? We’re not talking about the sins of the world, yet. Note! We’re talking only about the sins of Israel.. “And he shall save his people….” (Matthew 1:21). Who are God’s people? Israel. The Jew.
“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 23. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call him name Emmanuel, which being interrupted is, God with us.” (Matthew 1:22-23). But in a human body, and then becomes the God-Man.
“Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25. And knew her not (had no relationship with her) until she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.” (Matthew 1:24-25)
To this point we have laid the ground work for the appearance of the God-Man. We will now see why He had to become human in order to do the work of the cross. It wouldn’t have done for a spirit-being to somehow go up there on the cross. It had to be a human who could suffer and bleed and die and be raised again from the dead.
It is necessary to look at the genealogies of Christ to show His heritage from two different viewpoints. Why two? First, we have Matthew’s account of the father’s side, the male element, and then Luke provides the mother’s or the female side. Matthew chapter 1 is the genealogy of Joseph. Even though he was not the biological father, he was the legal father.
“The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, (His genealogy.) the son of David, the son of Abraham.” We now ask the question, why does this genealogy only go back to Abraham? Why didn’t it go on back through Noah and Seth and all the way to Adam?
The answer is, because of the promise of a King, which was a spiritual element, and it only came after Abraham. There was no concept of a King and Kingdom between Genesis 1 and Genesis 12. Consequently, since Matthew presents Jesus Christ as the King, the Messiah, the Redeemer, the spiritual side, the genealogy only goes back as far as Abraham. That is exactly as it should be. That’s the supernatural part of the Bible. The average Bible student usually misses that. But we must understand that for a reason. Matthew’s genealogy only takes us back from the time of Christ’s birth to the beginning of the Jewish race. The promises of a covenant people and a Redeemer and so forth go to Abraham. Here we have the generations of Jesus Christ.
“…the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Here it begins.) 2. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren;” (Matthew 1:1b-2). And so on and so forth all the way up through the generations until we come all the way up to verse 16.
“And Jacob (Not the same Jacob of Genesis. This is just a common Jewish name.) begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, (but not the father of Jesus) of whom was born (speaking of Mary) Jesus, who is called Christ. (the Anointed or the Messiah) 17. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon until Christ (That is until His birth, His first advent.) are fourteen generations.” (Matthew 1:16-17). This shows God is on a timetable of sorts. All the way up through the Old Testament almost every prophecy was given in a time frame. God is so meticulous. Most think that He has nothing to do with time. He has everything to do with time. It’s all according to His timetable. Even today we are on the very day that He pre-prescribed for us to be. We are on His timetable.
Now to the maternal side of the genealogy of Jesus starting in Luke chapter 3. Here we have the genealogy of the female or Mary.
“And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) (in the rank and file of Israel) the son of Joseph, who was the son (Actually, he was the son-in-law, if I’m not mistaken.) of Heli, 24. Who was the son of Matthat, who was the son of Levi, who was the son of Melchi,…” (Luke 3:23a) and through the remainder of the genealogy to verse 38.
“Who was the son of Enos, (That’s Enoch in the Old Testament.) who was the son of Seth, (Seth took Abel’s place after Abel was murdered and Cain left. ) who was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.” (Luke 3:38). From God at creation.
In the genealogy of Matthew was Christ as the King, the spiritual side, the God side, the Deity side; Luke’s genealogy takes us all the way back to the beginning of the human experience – to Adam. Christ was not only the progeny of God Himself as the Redeemer, the King, the Savior, but this genealogy takes Him all the way back and ties Him in with the humanity side of Adam.
This is the miraculousness of Scripture. Here we have two genealogies with two completely different concepts—one going only to Abraham, but the other one going all the way back to Adam and tying us in with his humanity.
The following few verses show His human side. He suffered as a human; He got hungry as a human; He got tired as a human; and He prayed to the Father as a human.
“And the child grew, (Jesus in Nazareth) and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.” (Luke 2:40)A typical normal youth growing up.
“Then he cometh to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied (getting tired.) with his journey, sat thus on the well:…” (John 4:5-6a).He got tired and sat down to rest. So He, in his humanity, grew tired. He grew weary.
“And when he was entered into a ship, (Just an oversized boat.) his disciples followed him. 24. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the boat was covered with the waves: but he was (What?) asleep. (Matthew 8:23-24). There is His humanity again. Does God ever sleep? No. God in His total Deity doesn’t ever sleep. But here God is in His incarnate human body, and it says He was sleeping Why do we sleep? Well, we get tired. Just like in the Samaritan situation, He was weary and He sat down. Here He evidently went below deck, and He fell asleep. That’s His humanity.
“And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish. (We’re sinking.) 26. And he said unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?...” (Matthew 8:25-26a). He reminds them, don’t you know who I am?
We’re not going to sink. I’m the God of this lake. I’m the God of this Sea of Galilee.
“…Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.” (Matthew 8:26b). Think about it. How that this seemingly normal human being could simply arise from His bed of sleep, stand on the deck of that little boat and speak to the wind – be quiet. This is a perfect illustration of the power of His Godhead, even in human form. He never stopped being God.
In the womb of Mary He was still the God of Creation. Never lose sight of that. So He stood up on that little boat, and He rebuked the wind. He spoke to it, and there was a great calm.
“But the men marveled, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!” (Matthew 8:27). Why should they obey Him? He’s the creator. Everything is held together by His spoken word. The cosmos with all the billions upon billions upon billions of stars and galaxies are held together by the voice of this same Jesus of Nazareth. If He were anything less than that, He could have not paid my sin debt nor yours. But He did. It’s paid in full. Simply because of who He is. Yes, He was totally human, because He had to die in the realm of humanity to suffer and shed His blood for us.
Beginning with His first advent, we have God in the flesh. We no longer are looking at something that is invisible; that is impossible to imagine. He was here in the flesh. He said, “Handle me. Touch me.” Even after His resurrection. He was for real, and He never laid aside His Deity. Never! Matthew, Mark, and Luke depict Christ primarily from His human side. John depicts Him from the Deity side. So, there are things in Luke and Matthew and Mark that you won’t find in John, because he does not look at His humanity.
“And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the Mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him. 40. And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation. 41. And he was withdrawn to them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, 42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine be done.” (Luke 22:39-42). He was speaking of the horrors of the cross that were now right in front of Him.
“And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. 44. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (See, there’s His humanity.) 45. And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow, 46. And he said unto them, Why sleep ye? Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.’” (Luke 22:43-46). A constant exposure of His humanity.
“Then they took him, (He was completely submissive.) and led him, and brought him into the high priest’s house. And Peter followed afar off. 55. And when they had kindled a fire in the midst of the hall,…” (Luke 22:54-55)
“And the men that held Jesus mocked him, and smote him. 64 And when they had blindfolded him, they struck him on the face, and asked him, saying, Prophesy, who is it that smote thee?” (Luke 22:63-64). He never responded except in His humanity.
The Diety of Jesus Christ
The Day of Pentecost and Peter is preaching to the Nation of Israel. This is after His resurrection, about ten days after His ascension, and look what Peter says.
“Ye men of Israel, (Still Jewish-not a word concerning Gentiles.) hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs,…” (Acts 2:22a). On what basis did He do the miracles and signs? His Deity, but yet He was human. We’ve got the two sides of Christ’s humanity and diety all the way through.
“… a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: 23. Him, (This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate God) being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: 24. Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.” (Acts 2:22b-24)
“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; 2. For kings, (presidents, prime ministers.etc.) and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quite and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” (I Timothy 2:1-2). Without corruption.
“For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior; 4. Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” (I Timothy 2:3-4). He would that all should be saved, but they won’t. More and more people are subscribing to the idea that sooner or later everybody is going to end up in heaven. Universalism—but, that is not Scriptural. God would love to see all people come to a knowledge of the truth, but they will not.
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the (What?) man Christ Jesus;” (I Timothy 1:5).
Timothy has shown there is one mediator between God and men, and it’s the man Christ Jesus.
“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers (The Nation of Israel.) by the prophets. (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all the rest ) 2. Hath in these last days (Speaking of His first advent—His earthly ministry, His passion, His resurrection, and His ascension) spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made (or created) the worlds;” (Hebrews 1:1-2).
“Who (God the Son) being the brightness of his glory, (His Deity) and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, (There’s His Deity as the Creator, the upholder.) when he had by himself purged our sins, ( sat down (As a man.) on the right hand of the Majesty on high;” (Hebrews 1:3).
“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it,…” (Colossians 1:9a). That is of their salvation, because Colossi was one place Paul had never visited. This was a church that sprang up from the others. And after he had heard it, he wrote this letter to these believers in Colossi.
“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;” (Colossians 1:9). Paul was praying that we as believers would have “knowledge and wisdom and spiritual understanding.” Until you become a true born-again believer, this is a closed Book. But once you become a believer and the Holy Spirit will open it to you.
“For what man knoweth the things of a man, except the spirit of man who is in him?...” (I Corinthians 2:11a). That’s the world we live in. We learn the secular things, the things of this world, because that’s all most understand and that’s normal.
“…even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. (Not a university professor, but the Holy Spirit of God) 12. Now we have received,…” (I Corinthians 2:11b-12a). Paul always writes to Believers.
“Now we (believers) have received, not the spirit of the world, (We’re not intellectuals, but now we have received--) not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. 13. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” (I Corinthians 2:12-13). So we compare spiritual with spiritual.
“But the natural man (Meaning the lost person who has never become a believer.) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, (He can’t understand scriptural truth) because they are spiritually discerned.” (I Corinthians 2:14). That says it all!! If the Spirit doesn’t open your understanding, it’s a closed Book. But the minute the Spirit gives us understanding all of a sudden these things become truth and reality.
“…in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10. That ye might walk worthy of the Lord, unto all (Meaning unto God and fellow believers. That we can be unto all--) pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.” (Colossians 1:9b-10). That’s a daily process.
“Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness;” (Colossians 1:11). Verse 12 introduces us to who Jesus Christ really was in His earthly ministry and now is at the right hand of the Majesty.
“Giving thanks unto the Father, who hath made us meet (or has prepared us) to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:” (Colossians 1:12). Meaning all the things that God is preparing for them that love him.
“Who (speaking of the Father) hath delivered us from the power of darkness, (as lost people) and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:” Because we become members of the Body of Christ at our believing faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. And the Body of Christ is in the Kingdom of God. We already know that the Body of Christ is inside the Kingdom of God. This is in reference to our being members of the Body of Christ, and as such we, yes, “we have been translated into the Kingdom of His dear Son.” (Colossians 1:13).
“In whom (Here’s His spiritual side.) we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:” (Colossians 1:14).. He had to become man to shed His blood. It had to be. He had to become the God-Man so that in His humanity He could accomplish and finish the work of the cross which required His atoning blood. It had to be. But, He never lost His Deity.
Next we have God the Son, the God-Man, who is in His present day existence, coming out of His earthly ministry and finishing the work of the cross, ascending back to Glory.
Who is the image of the invisible God, (He became--) the firstborn of every creature;” (Colossians 1:15). He’s from eternity past. God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Father in unison came out of eternity past. We take it by faith. He’s pre-existent. He’s always been.
“For by him (God the Son, the God-Man—the visible, touchable, the One who’s been crucified, able to be raised from the dead bodily—that’s who this Christ is. That this Jesus of Bethlehem, of Nazareth, is the Creator of Genesis-- it’s who He was ) were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, (As in Ephesians—the principalities and powers in high places, demonic forces—they’ve all been created by God the Son.) whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:” (Colossians 1:16). They are for His pleasure and no one else’s.
“And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (Colossians 1:17). The One in whom we have placed our faith is more than capable of fulfilling all of His promises so far as we are concerned. And when He tells us about salvation in Romans 10:9-13—that whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Then in Romans chapter 8 when Paul says, I know that nothing can separate us from the love of God. How do I know that? Because if He can hold the universe together, He can hold me! He can hold you! We can rest on these promises that if we have trusted Him for our eternal destiny, He has all the power at His command to keep it intact.
“Unto me, (the Apostle Paul) who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles (At first it was all Jewish, but now this Apostle goes to the Gentiles.) the unsearchable riches of Christ; 9. And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things (How?) by Jesus Christ:” (Ephesians 3:8-9).
This doctrine asserts that Jesus Christ is the creator God and the Son of God incarnate. Jesus Christ is the central figure of Christianity and has been misread by many scholars. Many portions of Scripture completely affirm His deity, showing that at no time did He lose His divine nature. Yet the Bible teaches, equally strongly, that Christ became fully human. Understanding these things has proved difficult, but our faith leads us to the truth. "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."(John 8:31-32).
THE TEACHINGS OF SCRIPTURE
A Little Background
In Genesis chapter 3. Adam and Eve have just eaten of the forbidden tree. Sin has entered. Death came by sin the Book of Romans tells us, and along with that the curse fell. Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden. But at the very same moment that all that took place, God did something tremendous. He promised a means of redemption that we find recorded all the way from Genesis 3 to the last book of our Bible.
So, in Genesis chapter 3, we’re going to see the first prophetic statement concerning the incarnate Son of God. How He had to become flesh in order to bring about mankind’s salvation.
"In the beginning was the Word, (Christ the Communicator, the One Who speaks the Word. And so it’s always God the Son Who is the Communicator) and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2. The same was in the beginning with God. 3. All things (everything) were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." (John 1:1-3). This verse shows how He is also the means that holds the whole universe together.
"And the Word was made (what?) flesh and dwelt among us. (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:14). The Word, the Communicator, that Person of the Godhead Who created every thing was made flesh and dwelt among us. And John says, we beheld his glory and the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.
"And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, (the God of Genesis 1:1) who created all things (how?) by Jesus Christ." (Ephesians 3:9). Yes, the Triune God was involved in creation. The Triune God came together before anything was ever created and delegated the work of creation to the second Person of the Trinity, God the Son. The whole Trinity is involved in creation, But it was God the Son, Jesus the Christ, Who spoke the word of creation and everything, whatever it is, made its appearance.
"Who (speaking of the Son in Col. 1, verse 14), in whom we have redemption through his blood. (That has to be God the Son) is the image of the invisible God, (in other words, Jesus Christ was the visible, physical, manifestation of that invisible God) the firstborn of every creature." (Colossians 1:15). "For by him (God the Son) were all things created, that are in heaven, and that in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things (EVERYTHING) were created by him, and for him." (Colossians 1:16) These two verses 15 and 16 show that Jesus Christ, the One Who went to that Roman cross, was the Creator of everything.
Who is Jesus Christ?
The same Person of the Godhead, Jesus the Christ, God the Son. "And he (the Creator) is before all things, and by him all things consist." (Colossians 1:17) (Another phrase for consist is "held together"). The entire cosmos and everything in it is held together by His power. The following verses provide additional proof He’s the Creator, the sovereign God, the sustainer of the universe. He’s even more than that. He is the Head of the Body, what the Apostle Paul calls, the Church-the Body of Christ.
"And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, (Coming from eternity past) the firstborn from the dead:…" (Colossians 1:18a). The verse makes it so plain, that He is the beginning, He is the firstborn from the dead.
Scripture makes a point that no one had ever been resurrected from the dead until Jesus Christ. He is the first to have ever been resurrected, never to die again. The term, "the only begotten Son of God" does not mean His birth in Bethlehem, but it means that He is the only one that was resurrected from the dead. Scripture makes it so plain that that’s what the term refers to. And here again, He is the firstborn from the dead, He is the first to have experienced resurrection power and here again is the reason,
"…that in all things (in everything) he (Jesus Christ) might have the preeminence. (He’s above everything). 19. For it pleased the Father (the whole Godhead has been involved in everything that Christ has done) that in him should all fullness dwell:" (Colossians 1:18b-19). Paul is saying over and over here in Colossians, that Jesus Christ is the visible manifestation of the invisible Godhead. And the Godhead of course is the whole Trinity.
"Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. 9. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?" Jesus said, "if you’ve seen Me you’ve seen the Father." (John 14:8-9).
"Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?…" (John 14:10). We now know Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified Christ, is the physical, visible manifestation of that invisible Godhead. And we take it by faith. We can’t understand it. But the Bible teaches it. And so we take it by faith – that Jesus Christ is the Creator of everything, He is the visible manifestation of the invisible Godhead and that in Him, verse 19 again says, that it even pleased the Father. And I think that would also include by implication, the Holy Spirit. God promised that one day we’ll understand it, But for now, we take it by faith.
"For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell;" (Colossians 1:19). The moment a person recognizes that they are lost [Romans 3:23] and embraces by faith that Jesus, the creator God, took on human flesh, died the death of the cross, shed his divine, sinless blood as full payment for our salvation, was resurrected in power after being in the grave three days and three nights, they are saved. They recognize that this has defeated the enemies-- death, Satan, and our old nature. At the moment of true faith, the Holy Spirit places us by an invisible, unfelt act into the body of Christ.
INCARNATE CHRIST: GOD BECOMES MAN
The word incarnate is not Biblical. You won’t find that word in your Bible. It’s been coined by Bible scholars and others. The word incarnate simply means God-Man, or God who became human, and it should be noted that there is not a single religion outside of Christianity that teaches resurrection from the dead as we do.
They know nothing of resurrection. Their word is reincarnation. In other words, if you take the Hindu religion, you can start out as the very lowest of the low, and if you do pretty good, you’ll be reincarnated and come back as something a little better, reincarnating over and over until finally they attain a “god” position. That’s reincarnation, and that is not a scriptural concept. We do not teach a reincarnation. We teach only resurrection from the dead.
When the Apostle Paul was confronting the intellectuals of his day up there on Mars Hill, what was the one thing that upset them so? Resurrection from the dead. They said whoever heard of such a thing? Yet the very basic premise of Christianity is the resurrection from the dead—for salvation believe in your heart that Jesus died for your sins, was buried, and rose again the third day, as found in I Corinthians 15:1-4. And again, why did God have to become human? So that He could die. And why did He have to die? So that He could be resurrected from the dead and impart eternal life.
The first prophetic statement concerning the incarnate Son of God. How He had to become flesh in order to bring about mankind’s salvation. “And I will put enmity (Meaning a constant line of demarcation between these two forces that are going to be at enmity from here until the end of time.) between thee and the woman,…” (Genesis 3:15a)
This may already be a reference to the Nation of Israel. Possibly the woman here is a definite forecast of the demarcation between Satan and Israel, and how there will be a constant battle between the two as clearly depicted by Scripture.
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed;…” (Genesis 3:15a). That does appear to fit Israel. It is the Jewess Mary(a citizen of Israel) made reference to here. It fits all the way through that here’s the promise that God would put enmity between Satan and the woman. It appears to be a reference to all his demonic powers.
What is meant by the seed of Satan(the serpent) back in Genesis 3:15? The following verses are references to Satan’s underlings-his powers.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12).
In Genesis we see where there was going to be a running controversy between the seed of Satan and all of his demonic hosts and the seed of the woman, because that is what is really referenced.
“…enmity between thee (Satan) and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it (the seed of the woman) shall bruise thy head, ( A reference to Christ defeating the Satanic powers at Calvary.) and thou shalt bruise his (the redeemer’s) heel.” (Genesis 3:15b). The suffering that He endured at the cross.
In Romans chapter 8. We see that as soon as the curse fell, God set in motion the plan of redemption. There was no afterthought to it. It was immediately transacted.
When creation was subjected to the curse.
“For the creation was made subject to the curse, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. (That one day that curse will be lifted.) 21. Because the creation itself shall also be delivered from the bondage of corruption...” (Romans 8:20-21a). The bondage of corruption is the curse! God didn’t precipitate it, He simply allowed it. He does permit it. But it’s the curse that has plagued the whole creation, not just mankind, but everything in it for the last 6,000 years.
The Foretelling of Christ in Genesis.
As soon as the curse fell, God set in motion a plan of redemption. This plan of redemption would require God to experience humanity. Only a human could go the way of the cross. That’s why God became incarnate- becoming flesh.
From the Old Testament prophets we learn they were looking forward to the time when this invisible person of the Godhead would become flesh. He would become the God-Man.
“Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14). The Jews required a sign. Isaiah was writing to the Jews(Israel), and he’s aware of the fact that they were a people who looked for signs. This is 700 years before the fact. The Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God. Here we have a prophecy 700 years before Christ that a little Jewish virgin girl would conceive and bring forth the God-Man. Immanuel translated, means God with us.
Those Jews should have known that prophecy. They should have known the prophecy in Isaiah had been fulfilled. They heard the rumors of Mary and Joseph. Here this young girl is pregnant and the father says he’s not the father. They should have been able to figure out from the Old Testament prophecies; this is the fulfilled prophetic promise.
Besides, the signs of the times were all around them. They surely recognized that they were under the Roman Empire. They should have recognized that prophecy was being fulfilled. They should have recognized that the promised Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. It was written back in the little book of Micah that He’d be born in Bethlehem of Euphrates. Those Jews knew full-well about that supernatural event in Bethlehem some years back. Of course they did. But they couldn’t put it together. Everything was foretold that Christ would come, be born in Bethlehem, at the exact right day and hour. He was not one hour late. He was not one hour early. It was when the decreed “fullness of the time was come” that Christ was born. And Israel was blind to all of this. But they should have understood. It was a sign of the time. Then it goes on to tell us that He was “made of a woman.” That makes Him the God-Man. That’s what makes Him incarnate. He did not just come as an angelic appearance. He did not just come as some miraculous manifestation. But in order to make Him the God-Man, God ordained that He should be born of a woman without the benefit of a fleshly, earthly father.
“In the beginning (We don’t know when that was.) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (So, it’s a designated personality.) 2. The same was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2).
“All things (The entire cosmos) were made by him; (this person of the Godhead called The Word) and without Him was not anything made that was made. 4. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:3-4) In verse 14 we have absolute proof of who we’re talking about.
“And the Word was made flesh, (The Spirit-being, the invisible God in the person of the Son, was made flesh. Born of a woman as Paul puts it and promised as the seed of the woman back in Genesis) and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) Verse 14 is making a direct reference to The Mount of Transfiguration, an event toward the end of Christ’s ministry. Only three of the Twelve could have said something like this, because it was only Peter, James, and John that were up there at the Mount of Transfiguration and saw Jesus transformed right before their eyes with all the glory brighter than the mid-day sun. That this is the person of the Godhead who was the creator of everything, so, he says, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Walked with us. Talked with us. Slept. Ate. All the normal functions of humanity.) (and we beheld his glory, (up there on the Mount of Transfiguration) the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Matthew chapter 1 ties us into that coming out of the Old Testament. In reference to the announcement of His birth—that He would be born of a woman. It would be a virgin birth without benefit of a human father; because, after all, He had to remain Deity. But He also has to take on humanity. “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, (In other words, before the marriage was consummated.) she was found with child of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18).
Here we see Joseph and Mary had not consummated the physical marriage, and yet she was already pregnant, not by a human being, but by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. As believers, we don’t have a problem with that. We know that with God anything is possible.
Isaiah prophesied that a virgin would conceive. How could a virgin conceive? Only by the work of the Holy Spirit. Matthew clearly states that before they consummated the physical marriage, Mary was found with child of the Holy Spirit.
“Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privately.” (Matthew 1:19). To hold secret the fact that she was pregnant without the benefit of a public marriage.
“But while he thought on these things, behold the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David,…” (Matthew 1:20a). From this we learn that this all goes back to the promises made to the patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were given all the promises of a Nation of people coming. Then sooner or later here comes King David, and what is David promised? That through his bloodline would come the Messiah, the King of Israel. So he says to Joseph--
“…Joseph, thou son of David, (the royal family.) fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 1:20b). It’s not of another man. It’s perfectly godly and legitimate.
“And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: (or in the Hebrew—Jehoshua. Why?) for he shall save his people from their sins.” This is all Jewish. Here we’re talking about the sins of Israel only. “And he shall save his people….” (Matthew 1:21). God’s people are the Jews.
“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 23. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call him name Emmanuel, which being interrupted is, God with us.” (Matthew 1:22-23). But in a human body, and then becomes the God-Man.
“Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25. And knew her not (had no relationship with her) until she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.” (Matthew 1:24-25).
It isn’t until He finishes the work of the cross and the Apostle Paul is sent to the Gentiles that He becomes the Savior of all mankind Prior to that he was fulfilling the promises first and foremost to the Nation of Israel. Here in Luke 1 we’re still dealing with the covenant people, the chosen people, the Jew, the Nation of Israel.
Here we have God dealing with the parents of John the Baptist. Zacharias a Hebrew priest whose wife’s name was Elizabeth. And as we know, Zacharias and Elizabeth were past childbearing age much as Abraham and Sarah were. But miraculously, providentially, she became with child and brought along the little baby John the Baptist.
“Now Elizabeth’s full time came that she should be delivered; and she brought forth a son. 58. And her neighbors and her cousins heard how the Lord had shown great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her.” (Luke 1:57-58). Much like Sarah.
“And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of his father. 60. And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called John. 61. And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name. 62. And they made signs to his father, (He had been stricken dumb at the very time of her conception, without ability to speak for the last nine months.) And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called. (or named) 63. And he asked for a writing table, and wrote, saying, His name is John. (Same as what Elizabeth had said.) And they marveled all.” (Luke 1:59-63). These Jews knew the custom and how unusual this was that this father who was up there at the temple serving as a priest gave the same name that Elizabeth had mentioned. His name would be John.
“And his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, (He got his speech back.) and he spake, and praised God. 65. And fear came on all that dwelt around about them: and all these sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judea. 66. And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts, saying, What manner of child shall this be! And the hand of the Lord was with him.” (Luke 1:64-66) Talking about John the Baptist.
“And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, (Here we have a priest of Israel filled with the Holy Spirit before Christ’s earthly ministry began, and before Pentecost.) and he prophesied, saying,” (Luke 1:67a). He merely spoke forth.
“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel for he hath visited and redeemed his people,” (Luke 1:68). His chosen people. His covenant people. Not a word here about Gentiles.
“And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;” (Luke 1:69). There were no Gentiles in the house of David. Totally Jewish, because all the promises of this coming incarnate Christ were first and foremost to the covenant people.
“As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, who have been since the ages began: (Going all the way back to the Old Testament patriarchs and beyond. And this is what they wrote) 71. That we (the Nation of Israel) should be saved from our enemies(not sins), and from the hand of all that hate us;” (Luke 1:70-71). The Arab world was all around them—They hated the Jews. They would have done anything they could to obliterate the Jews. It persists to this day. So the whole idea that when this Messiah would come, he would suddenly bring safety and peace from all of these morbid enemies.
“To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, (the Old Testament promises) and to remember his holy covenant; (God’s covenant—what covenant?) 73. The oath which he swear to our father Abraham,” (Luke 1:72-73).It is so important to understand those covenants coming up through the Old Testament are all Jewish. Gentiles don’t have any part of that until after the work of the cross.
“That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, 75. In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life. 76. And thou, (Here it comes.) child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest:…” (Luke 1:74-76a). God is the Highest. He’s the High One. So, John the Baptist is going to announce the coming of the God of Abraham. And who’s the God of Abraham? The Son. Jehovah.
“And thou, child, (John) shalt be called the prophet (or the forth teller) of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord (God the Son, the God-Man that’s coming.) to prepare his ways; 77. To give knowledge of salvation unto his people (Israel) by the remission of their sins,” (Luke 1:76-77)
“Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high (speaking of the incarnate Son, now) hath visited us. 79. To give light (spiritual light) to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. 80. And the child grew, (That is John the Baptist.) and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel.” (Luke 1:78-80).
Those verses from Luke laid the ground work for the appearance of the God-Man. Now we will find out why He had to become human in order to do the work of the cross. It wouldn’t have done for a spirit-being to somehow go up there on the cross. It had to be a human who could suffer and bleed and die and be raised again from the dead.
“Now to Abraham and his seed (or his offspring) were the promises made. He saith not, and to seeds, (plural) as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, who is Christ.” (Galatians 3:16). We now have the scriptural answer for Genesis 3:15. The seed of the woman who would come through the man Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish race, and here we have the appearance then of the Jewish Messiah.
The next verse is the only reference that the Apostle Paul makes to the birth of Christ at Bethlehem but in a uniquely different way. Here’s how Paul puts it.
“But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,” (Galatians 4:4). That verse is loaded. When the Sadducees and the Pharisees said, show us a sign, what did the Lord say? Why, can’t you read the signs of the times? He was referring to all the things that were happening associated with His first advent.
So everything was foretold that Christ would come, born in Bethlehem, at the exact right day and hour. He was not one hour late. He was not one hour early. It was when decreed “fullness of the time was come” that Christ was to be born. And Israel couldn’t figure it out. But they should have. It was a sign of the time.
Then it goes on to tell us that He was “made of a woman.” That makes Him the God-Man. That’s what makes Him incarnate. He did not just come as an angelic appearance. He did not just come as some miraculous manifestation. But in order to make Him the God-Man, God ordained that He should be born of a woman without the benefit of a fleshly, earthly father.
In the following Gospels of John we see these early-on mentions of the incarnate Christ, proving Scripture is not contradictory, but rather intricately put together.
“In the beginning (We don’t know when that was.) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ( a designated personality.) 2. The same was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2).
“All things (the entire cosmos) were made by him; (this person of the Godhead called The Word) and without Him was not anything made that was made. 4. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:3-4)
For absolute proof of who we’re talking about see the next verse.
“And the Word was made flesh, (The Spirit-being, the invisible God in the person of the Son, was made flesh. Born of a woman as Paul puts it and promised as the seed of the woman back in Genesis) and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14).
Here is a direct reference to The Mount of Transfiguration event toward the end of Christ’s ministry. Only three of the Twelve could have said something like this, because it was only Peter, James, and John that were up there at the Mount of Transfiguration and saw Jesus transformed right before their eyes with all the glory brighter than the mid-day sun. This person of the Godhead who was the creator of everything.
“The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Walked with us. Talked with us. Slept. Ate. All the normal functions of humanity.) (and we beheld his glory, (up there on the Mount of Transfiguration) the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
In Matthew’s Gospel we’re at the announcement of His birth—that He would be born of a woman. It would be a virgin birth without benefit of a human father because He had to remain Deity. He also has to take on humanity.
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, ( before the marriage was consummated.) she was found with child of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 1:18).
Joseph and Mary had not consummated the physical marriage, and yet she was already pregnant, not by a human being, but by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit. As believers we accept this on faith.
Isaiah prophesied that a virgin would conceive. But how would a virgin conceive? Only by the work of the Holy Spirit. This occurred before they consummated the physical marriage, Mary was found with child of the Holy Spirit.
“Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privately.” (Matthew 1:19). In other words, to hold secret the fact that she was pregnant without the benefit of a public marriage.
“But while he thought on these things, behold the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David,…” (Matthew 1:20a) That verse shows us once more that this all goes back to the promises made to the patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were given all the promises of a Nation of people coming. Then sooner or later here comes King David, and what is David promised? That through his bloodline would come the Messiah, the King of Israel. All right, that’s why we’ve got it in here. So he says to Joseph--
“…Joseph, thou son of David, (It’s all in the royal family.) fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.” (Matthew 1:20b). Or the Holy Spirit. It’s not of another man. It’s perfectly godly and legitimate.
“And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: (or in the Hebrew—Jehoshua. Why?) for he shall save his people from their sins.” Now you see how uniquely Jewish all this is? We’re not talking about the sins of the world, yet. Note! We’re talking only about the sins of Israel.. “And he shall save his people….” (Matthew 1:21). Who are God’s people? Israel. The Jew.
“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 23. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call him name Emmanuel, which being interrupted is, God with us.” (Matthew 1:22-23). But in a human body, and then becomes the God-Man.
“Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 25. And knew her not (had no relationship with her) until she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.” (Matthew 1:24-25)
To this point we have laid the ground work for the appearance of the God-Man. We will now see why He had to become human in order to do the work of the cross. It wouldn’t have done for a spirit-being to somehow go up there on the cross. It had to be a human who could suffer and bleed and die and be raised again from the dead.
It is necessary to look at the genealogies of Christ to show His heritage from two different viewpoints. Why two? First, we have Matthew’s account of the father’s side, the male element, and then Luke provides the mother’s or the female side. Matthew chapter 1 is the genealogy of Joseph. Even though he was not the biological father, he was the legal father.
“The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, (His genealogy.) the son of David, the son of Abraham.” We now ask the question, why does this genealogy only go back to Abraham? Why didn’t it go on back through Noah and Seth and all the way to Adam?
The answer is, because of the promise of a King, which was a spiritual element, and it only came after Abraham. There was no concept of a King and Kingdom between Genesis 1 and Genesis 12. Consequently, since Matthew presents Jesus Christ as the King, the Messiah, the Redeemer, the spiritual side, the genealogy only goes back as far as Abraham. That is exactly as it should be. That’s the supernatural part of the Bible. The average Bible student usually misses that. But we must understand that for a reason. Matthew’s genealogy only takes us back from the time of Christ’s birth to the beginning of the Jewish race. The promises of a covenant people and a Redeemer and so forth go to Abraham. Here we have the generations of Jesus Christ.
“…the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Here it begins.) 2. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren;” (Matthew 1:1b-2). And so on and so forth all the way up through the generations until we come all the way up to verse 16.
“And Jacob (Not the same Jacob of Genesis. This is just a common Jewish name.) begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, (but not the father of Jesus) of whom was born (speaking of Mary) Jesus, who is called Christ. (the Anointed or the Messiah) 17. So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon until Christ (That is until His birth, His first advent.) are fourteen generations.” (Matthew 1:16-17). This shows God is on a timetable of sorts. All the way up through the Old Testament almost every prophecy was given in a time frame. God is so meticulous. Most think that He has nothing to do with time. He has everything to do with time. It’s all according to His timetable. Even today we are on the very day that He pre-prescribed for us to be. We are on His timetable.
Now to the maternal side of the genealogy of Jesus starting in Luke chapter 3. Here we have the genealogy of the female or Mary.
“And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) (in the rank and file of Israel) the son of Joseph, who was the son (Actually, he was the son-in-law, if I’m not mistaken.) of Heli, 24. Who was the son of Matthat, who was the son of Levi, who was the son of Melchi,…” (Luke 3:23a) and through the remainder of the genealogy to verse 38.
“Who was the son of Enos, (That’s Enoch in the Old Testament.) who was the son of Seth, (Seth took Abel’s place after Abel was murdered and Cain left. ) who was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.” (Luke 3:38). From God at creation.
In the genealogy of Matthew was Christ as the King, the spiritual side, the God side, the Deity side; Luke’s genealogy takes us all the way back to the beginning of the human experience – to Adam. Christ was not only the progeny of God Himself as the Redeemer, the King, the Savior, but this genealogy takes Him all the way back and ties Him in with the humanity side of Adam.
This is the miraculousness of Scripture. Here we have two genealogies with two completely different concepts—one going only to Abraham, but the other one going all the way back to Adam and tying us in with his humanity.
The following few verses show His human side. He suffered as a human; He got hungry as a human; He got tired as a human; and He prayed to the Father as a human.
“And the child grew, (Jesus in Nazareth) and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.” (Luke 2:40)A typical normal youth growing up.
“Then he cometh to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. 6. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied (getting tired.) with his journey, sat thus on the well:…” (John 4:5-6a).He got tired and sat down to rest. So He, in his humanity, grew tired. He grew weary.
“And when he was entered into a ship, (Just an oversized boat.) his disciples followed him. 24. And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the boat was covered with the waves: but he was (What?) asleep. (Matthew 8:23-24). There is His humanity again. Does God ever sleep? No. God in His total Deity doesn’t ever sleep. But here God is in His incarnate human body, and it says He was sleeping Why do we sleep? Well, we get tired. Just like in the Samaritan situation, He was weary and He sat down. Here He evidently went below deck, and He fell asleep. That’s His humanity.
“And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish. (We’re sinking.) 26. And he said unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?...” (Matthew 8:25-26a). He reminds them, don’t you know who I am?
We’re not going to sink. I’m the God of this lake. I’m the God of this Sea of Galilee.
“…Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm.” (Matthew 8:26b). Think about it. How that this seemingly normal human being could simply arise from His bed of sleep, stand on the deck of that little boat and speak to the wind – be quiet. This is a perfect illustration of the power of His Godhead, even in human form. He never stopped being God.
In the womb of Mary He was still the God of Creation. Never lose sight of that. So He stood up on that little boat, and He rebuked the wind. He spoke to it, and there was a great calm.
“But the men marveled, saying, What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him!” (Matthew 8:27). Why should they obey Him? He’s the creator. Everything is held together by His spoken word. The cosmos with all the billions upon billions upon billions of stars and galaxies are held together by the voice of this same Jesus of Nazareth. If He were anything less than that, He could have not paid my sin debt nor yours. But He did. It’s paid in full. Simply because of who He is. Yes, He was totally human, because He had to die in the realm of humanity to suffer and shed His blood for us.
Beginning with His first advent, we have God in the flesh. We no longer are looking at something that is invisible; that is impossible to imagine. He was here in the flesh. He said, “Handle me. Touch me.” Even after His resurrection. He was for real, and He never laid aside His Deity. Never! Matthew, Mark, and Luke depict Christ primarily from His human side. John depicts Him from the Deity side. So, there are things in Luke and Matthew and Mark that you won’t find in John, because he does not look at His humanity.
“And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the Mount of Olives; and his disciples also followed him. 40. And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye enter not into temptation. 41. And he was withdrawn to them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, 42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine be done.” (Luke 22:39-42). He was speaking of the horrors of the cross that were now right in front of Him.
“And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. 44. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (See, there’s His humanity.) 45. And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow, 46. And he said unto them, Why sleep ye? Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.’” (Luke 22:43-46). A constant exposure of His humanity.
“Then they took him, (He was completely submissive.) and led him, and brought him into the high priest’s house. And Peter followed afar off. 55. And when they had kindled a fire in the midst of the hall,…” (Luke 22:54-55)
“And the men that held Jesus mocked him, and smote him. 64 And when they had blindfolded him, they struck him on the face, and asked him, saying, Prophesy, who is it that smote thee?” (Luke 22:63-64). He never responded except in His humanity.
The Diety of Jesus Christ
The Day of Pentecost and Peter is preaching to the Nation of Israel. This is after His resurrection, about ten days after His ascension, and look what Peter says.
“Ye men of Israel, (Still Jewish-not a word concerning Gentiles.) hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs,…” (Acts 2:22a). On what basis did He do the miracles and signs? His Deity, but yet He was human. We’ve got the two sides of Christ’s humanity and diety all the way through.
“… a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: 23. Him, (This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate God) being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: 24. Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.” (Acts 2:22b-24)
“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; 2. For kings, (presidents, prime ministers.etc.) and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quite and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” (I Timothy 2:1-2). Without corruption.
“For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior; 4. Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” (I Timothy 2:3-4). He would that all should be saved, but they won’t. More and more people are subscribing to the idea that sooner or later everybody is going to end up in heaven. Universalism—but, that is not Scriptural. God would love to see all people come to a knowledge of the truth, but they will not.
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the (What?) man Christ Jesus;” (I Timothy 1:5).
Timothy has shown there is one mediator between God and men, and it’s the man Christ Jesus.
“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers (The Nation of Israel.) by the prophets. (Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all the rest ) 2. Hath in these last days (Speaking of His first advent—His earthly ministry, His passion, His resurrection, and His ascension) spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made (or created) the worlds;” (Hebrews 1:1-2).
“Who (God the Son) being the brightness of his glory, (His Deity) and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, (There’s His Deity as the Creator, the upholder.) when he had by himself purged our sins, ( sat down (As a man.) on the right hand of the Majesty on high;” (Hebrews 1:3).
“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it,…” (Colossians 1:9a). That is of their salvation, because Colossi was one place Paul had never visited. This was a church that sprang up from the others. And after he had heard it, he wrote this letter to these believers in Colossi.
“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;” (Colossians 1:9). Paul was praying that we as believers would have “knowledge and wisdom and spiritual understanding.” Until you become a true born-again believer, this is a closed Book. But once you become a believer and the Holy Spirit will open it to you.
“For what man knoweth the things of a man, except the spirit of man who is in him?...” (I Corinthians 2:11a). That’s the world we live in. We learn the secular things, the things of this world, because that’s all most understand and that’s normal.
“…even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. (Not a university professor, but the Holy Spirit of God) 12. Now we have received,…” (I Corinthians 2:11b-12a). Paul always writes to Believers.
“Now we (believers) have received, not the spirit of the world, (We’re not intellectuals, but now we have received--) not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. 13. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Spirit teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” (I Corinthians 2:12-13). So we compare spiritual with spiritual.
“But the natural man (Meaning the lost person who has never become a believer.) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, (He can’t understand scriptural truth) because they are spiritually discerned.” (I Corinthians 2:14). That says it all!! If the Spirit doesn’t open your understanding, it’s a closed Book. But the minute the Spirit gives us understanding all of a sudden these things become truth and reality.
“…in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10. That ye might walk worthy of the Lord, unto all (Meaning unto God and fellow believers. That we can be unto all--) pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.” (Colossians 1:9b-10). That’s a daily process.
“Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness;” (Colossians 1:11). Verse 12 introduces us to who Jesus Christ really was in His earthly ministry and now is at the right hand of the Majesty.
“Giving thanks unto the Father, who hath made us meet (or has prepared us) to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:” (Colossians 1:12). Meaning all the things that God is preparing for them that love him.
“Who (speaking of the Father) hath delivered us from the power of darkness, (as lost people) and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:” Because we become members of the Body of Christ at our believing faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. And the Body of Christ is in the Kingdom of God. We already know that the Body of Christ is inside the Kingdom of God. This is in reference to our being members of the Body of Christ, and as such we, yes, “we have been translated into the Kingdom of His dear Son.” (Colossians 1:13).
“In whom (Here’s His spiritual side.) we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins:” (Colossians 1:14).. He had to become man to shed His blood. It had to be. He had to become the God-Man so that in His humanity He could accomplish and finish the work of the cross which required His atoning blood. It had to be. But, He never lost His Deity.
Next we have God the Son, the God-Man, who is in His present day existence, coming out of His earthly ministry and finishing the work of the cross, ascending back to Glory.
Who is the image of the invisible God, (He became--) the firstborn of every creature;” (Colossians 1:15). He’s from eternity past. God the Son and God the Spirit and God the Father in unison came out of eternity past. We take it by faith. He’s pre-existent. He’s always been.
“For by him (God the Son, the God-Man—the visible, touchable, the One who’s been crucified, able to be raised from the dead bodily—that’s who this Christ is. That this Jesus of Bethlehem, of Nazareth, is the Creator of Genesis-- it’s who He was ) were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, (As in Ephesians—the principalities and powers in high places, demonic forces—they’ve all been created by God the Son.) whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:” (Colossians 1:16). They are for His pleasure and no one else’s.
“And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (Colossians 1:17). The One in whom we have placed our faith is more than capable of fulfilling all of His promises so far as we are concerned. And when He tells us about salvation in Romans 10:9-13—that whosoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Then in Romans chapter 8 when Paul says, I know that nothing can separate us from the love of God. How do I know that? Because if He can hold the universe together, He can hold me! He can hold you! We can rest on these promises that if we have trusted Him for our eternal destiny, He has all the power at His command to keep it intact.
“Unto me, (the Apostle Paul) who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles (At first it was all Jewish, but now this Apostle goes to the Gentiles.) the unsearchable riches of Christ; 9. And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things (How?) by Jesus Christ:” (Ephesians 3:8-9).
A Great Christian Apologist
Blaise Pascal(1623-1662) is one of my favorite Christian apologists who I discovered years after I began my own quest to learn about God. Being a scientist myself I have always known about his contributions to science and mathematics, but I’m delighted to say that in most things spiritual I discovered we are on the same page also. I can identify with him in so many ways. He was one of the greatest thinkers of the 17th century who was not only an outstanding scientist and mathematician but he became a brilliant lay theologian after prolonged illness interfered with more strenuous endeavors.
There is no need to belabor you with a detailed biography, it is available to all via the internet. What I found in Pascal was a man of great intellect, a member of the Catholic Church, living less than 90 years after the Council of Trent who(like myself) made it his goal to independently search for God’s truth, and share it with others. The key word here is”independent.” For all Catholics, Trent put the kibosh on the word “independent.” That was their main argument when dealing with the audacious Martin Luther. Pascal and Luther were cut from the same cloth, and sang the same tune. Pascal used the word “cauistry” to describe Trent and the Jesuits. He would have none of that. With his great intellect, he foiled their attempt to defame him and his views on Augustinianism(the depravity of man and the sovereignty of God's grace in salvation.).
In man’s search for the truth, Pascal did not deny the true powers of reason; he was, after all a scientist and mathematician, but he focused on the limitations of reason itself. Although the advances in science increased man’s knowledge, it also made people aware of how little they knew. Thus, through our reason we realize that reason itself has limits. “Reason’s last step,” Pascal said, “is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” Our knowledge is somewhere between certainty and complete ignorance, Pascal believed. The bottom line is that we need to know when to affirm something as true, when to doubt, and when to submit to authority. Our finiteness, our senses, our passions, and our imagination can adversely influence our powers of reason. But Pascal believed that people really do know some things to be true even if they cannot account for it rationally. Such knowledge comes through another channel, namely, the heart.
Pascal believed no one could come to God apart from faith. His oft-quoted statement “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” tells it all, and “Without faith it is impossible to please God.”(Heb. 11:6--one of the absolutes of Scripture.) In other words, there are times that we know something is true but we did not come to that knowledge through logical reasoning, neither can we give a logical argument to support that belief. This is a theme of central importance for Pascal; it clearly sets him apart from other Catholic apologists of his day. Faith is the knowledge of the heart that only God gives. “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason,” says Pascal. “That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.” “By faith we know he exists,” he says. “Faith is different from proof. One is human and the other a gift of God. . . . This is the faith that God himself puts into our hearts. . . .” Pascal continues, “We shall never believe with an effective belief and faith unless God inclines our hearts. Then we shall believe as soon as he inclines them.” Describing the faith God gives, Pascal said, “This is the faith that God himself puts into our hearts, often using proof as the instrument.”
I do not believe Pascal himself really understood what took place during his “religious experience” in 1646. I admit I know virtually nothing about the medical or psychological causes of such episodes that have been known to occur with certain people. But I admonish you to keep in mind the known medical history of Pascal.
A single religious incident like Pascal’s is not uncommon in history, and it is not far-fetched to believe those events actually did occur as described i.e.,Constantine’s “Vision.” But as with Constantine, there are valid answers(none of which require an act of God).
After this intense experience, his faith and religious commitment were intensified and he immersed himself in all manner of religious and theological subjects. His most influential theological work was published posthumously as the Pensées (“Thoughts”). This unfinished work was meant to have been a sustained and coherent examination and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne (“Defense of the Christian Religion”).
____________________________
Blaise Pascal(1623-1662) is one of my favorite Christian apologists who I discovered years after I began my own quest to learn about God. Being a scientist myself I have always known about his contributions to science and mathematics, but I’m delighted to say that in most things spiritual I discovered we are on the same page also. I can identify with him in so many ways. He was one of the greatest thinkers of the 17th century who was not only an outstanding scientist and mathematician but he became a brilliant lay theologian after prolonged illness interfered with more strenuous endeavors.
There is no need to belabor you with a detailed biography, it is available to all via the internet. What I found in Pascal was a man of great intellect, a member of the Catholic Church, living less than 90 years after the Council of Trent who(like myself) made it his goal to independently search for God’s truth, and share it with others. The key word here is”independent.” For all Catholics, Trent put the kibosh on the word “independent.” That was their main argument when dealing with the audacious Martin Luther. Pascal and Luther were cut from the same cloth, and sang the same tune. Pascal used the word “cauistry” to describe Trent and the Jesuits. He would have none of that. With his great intellect, he foiled their attempt to defame him and his views on Augustinianism(the depravity of man and the sovereignty of God's grace in salvation.).
In man’s search for the truth, Pascal did not deny the true powers of reason; he was, after all a scientist and mathematician, but he focused on the limitations of reason itself. Although the advances in science increased man’s knowledge, it also made people aware of how little they knew. Thus, through our reason we realize that reason itself has limits. “Reason’s last step,” Pascal said, “is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.” Our knowledge is somewhere between certainty and complete ignorance, Pascal believed. The bottom line is that we need to know when to affirm something as true, when to doubt, and when to submit to authority. Our finiteness, our senses, our passions, and our imagination can adversely influence our powers of reason. But Pascal believed that people really do know some things to be true even if they cannot account for it rationally. Such knowledge comes through another channel, namely, the heart.
Pascal believed no one could come to God apart from faith. His oft-quoted statement “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” tells it all, and “Without faith it is impossible to please God.”(Heb. 11:6--one of the absolutes of Scripture.) In other words, there are times that we know something is true but we did not come to that knowledge through logical reasoning, neither can we give a logical argument to support that belief. This is a theme of central importance for Pascal; it clearly sets him apart from other Catholic apologists of his day. Faith is the knowledge of the heart that only God gives. “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason,” says Pascal. “That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.” “By faith we know he exists,” he says. “Faith is different from proof. One is human and the other a gift of God. . . . This is the faith that God himself puts into our hearts. . . .” Pascal continues, “We shall never believe with an effective belief and faith unless God inclines our hearts. Then we shall believe as soon as he inclines them.” Describing the faith God gives, Pascal said, “This is the faith that God himself puts into our hearts, often using proof as the instrument.”
I do not believe Pascal himself really understood what took place during his “religious experience” in 1646. I admit I know virtually nothing about the medical or psychological causes of such episodes that have been known to occur with certain people. But I admonish you to keep in mind the known medical history of Pascal.
A single religious incident like Pascal’s is not uncommon in history, and it is not far-fetched to believe those events actually did occur as described i.e.,Constantine’s “Vision.” But as with Constantine, there are valid answers(none of which require an act of God).
After this intense experience, his faith and religious commitment were intensified and he immersed himself in all manner of religious and theological subjects. His most influential theological work was published posthumously as the Pensées (“Thoughts”). This unfinished work was meant to have been a sustained and coherent examination and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne (“Defense of the Christian Religion”).
____________________________
“MY Church” and Satan
The doctrine of Satan is properly a part of Angelology which is found in chapter 5 of my Treatise. In the present essay I have reviewed the overall plan of Satan as it pertains to “My Church”: “I will build My church ...” (Matt. 16:18).
As all Christian believers know, Satan is a person of Holy Scripture, a created being, having been created by God as a perfect being, originally wise and completely righteous. the most powerful of God's angelic beings. However, pride caused Satan to fall, he wanted to receive the worship due to God alone. At that point there was rebellion in heaven, when Satan convinced one third of the angels to rebel against God.
A Little Background
We know of his rebellion when he took on the form of a serpent in the garden of Eden to tempt Eve into disobeying God. He succeeded,”And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this…” and we all know His curse. In Romans 8 we see that the earth is right now groaning and travailing to be set free from its slavery and corruption which happened during the fall of man when God cursed the earth.
He put man in the garden knowing what he would do, and yet the moment he sinned, the very next thing that God does is put into motion the whole plan of redemption, where He promised the "SEED" of the woman in Genesis 3:15. And that began His whole plan of Redemption that goes all the way through the Bible.
Everything was foretold in the Old Testament, and the first half of it has already come to pass. There were more than 350 prophecies concerning Christ’s first coming. Every one of them were fulfilled to the last detail. And we believe that He will fulfill the last part because His Word has said so.
Now enter Satan. He being by virtue of his own free will rebelled against God. For the rest of the story go to Isaiah. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13. For thou hast said in thine heart, ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:" "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; (and he’s not going to stop there) I will be like the most High." (Isaiah 14:13) Do you see all of his "I will’s? Lucifer is in total rebellion against his Creator.
Who is the Most High? The God of creation. This angel that God had given dominion over an angelic kingdom that I think was on that earth. It was all there, it was beautiful beyond description, and it was an angelic host that populated it. Not mankind, but angels. And this Lucifer was ruling over the earth. But Lucifer, or Satan as we now know him, was never satisfied, and he still isn’t even tonight. So in his heart, he lusted to take the place of God Himself, and he honestly thought he could pull it off.
This Lucifer who was not content with the role that God had given him, now wanted to usurp the throne of God, but he was going to entice the angelic subjects that were under him to go with him in his rebellion. As soon as God took Adam and Eve out of the Garden, and promises that out of the seed of the woman would come the Redeemer of the human race, Satan immediately plans with everything at his disposal to stop the coming of a Redeemer. He does it by first bringing to death with the murder of Abel who was in the line of the coming of the Just One. Then when Abraham comes on the scene, and God makes that covenant with Abraham, Satan turns on that little nation that’s going to come out of that covenant agreement like no other group of people on earth. And if you ever look at what has happened to the Jew down through their history, never forget that’s it’s been the attacks of this same Lucifer, this same Satan who is trying to thwart the very plan of God.
Since God placed everything concerning prophecy on this little nation, everything concerning Christ’s first coming rested on the little nation of Israel. So if Satan could destroy Israel, he could destroy God’s plan of bringing a Redeemer. But resurrection morning Satan found out differently, he was defeated, but he still hasn’t quit.
Scripture tells us that Satan is the god of this world. Satan has been the head of the nations ever since Adam left the Garden of Eden. Satan is ruling and reigning the nations of the world today as well as anytime before. II Corinthians chapter 4:3-4, says it best: "But if our gospel be hid it is hid to them that are lost"In whom (the lost of this world) the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." Who is the god of this world even tonight. Satan is. This Satan, this Lucifer who rebelled and wanted to usurp the very throne room of God, and was cast down, and his beautiful kingdom was destroyed with water. And even though the fallen angels were locked upped, God in Omniscience again, and in His Sovereignty permitted Satan to roam free, and permitted Satan to become the god of this world. He is in charge of the kingdoms of this world, and he’ll promote good as well as evil, until the day he is finally removed as the god of this world.
Satan Promotes false doctrine
Even before the resurrection of our Lord, His chosen people repeatedly turned their back on Him, so why does this pattern, i.e. our continually turning our backs on God despite His proven faithfulness to us, keep repeating over and over throughout all of history and in our lives today? The short answer is because Satan knows how to find the openings and men to drive wedges between man and God.
Upon the death of Jesus His Apostles, and others close to Him began recording His teachings. By about 80AD a complete set of teachings existed that eventually became the New Testament. These teachings became available to all the newly formed churches early on through the widespread missionary work of the Apostle Paul. Most of the people understood what the Scriptures taught, but at the same time Satan sought out certain men in those churches to pervert what had been taught by Paul and his associates. As a result many people were led astray by false teachings which led to irreparable disputes. The history of Christianity is replete with evidence of Satan’s plan and its effects. Thousands of volumes fill bookshelves all over the world with accounts of Christian disputes and false doctrine, but very few authors reference Satan as its source. Satan wants every author and church leader to be pompous (arrogant), self righteous, and have the pride of the Pharisees (which is the pride of Satan). These authors and leaders are innocent dupes of Satan without even realizing it. With such arrogance and self righteous pride, they look down on you, trying to make you believe that they are the font of knowledge, even if you know the Bible better than they do. They are beyond correction, for Satan has perverted these men and uses them to turn away anyone following God and His written Word
In the first three centuries, the church found itself deeply divided(thanks to Satan). One field of doctrine that caused the most divisiveness amongst Christians was that concerning the concept of the God/Man nature of Jesus Christ. The churches were fractured by theological disputes, especially conflicting understandings of the nature of Christ, long a point of controversy. To counter a widening rift within the church, Constantine convened a council in Nicaea in. 325AD. A creed reflecting the position of Alexander and Athanasius was written and signed by a majority of the bishops. Nevertheless, the two parties continued to battle each other. In A.D. 381, a second council met in Constantinople. It adopted a revised and expanded form of the A.D. 325 creed, now known as the Nicene Creed.
As it turned out, The Nicene Creed became the most ecumenical of creeds. The Presbyterian Church joins with Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and most Protestant churches in affirming it. The western churches(In contrast to Eastern Orthodox churches) state that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but from the Father and the Son. The eastern churches hold that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son and threatens the distinctiveness of the person of the Holy Spirit. This issue remains unresolved in the ecumenical dialogue to this very day.
What we have here is “the tip of the (Satan’s) iceberg.” False doctrine after false doctrine, as well as variances in liturgy, and church governance, remain areas of dispute and contention with true believers throughout all of Christendom. Very few theologians and Bible scholars make a connection between Satan and that aspect of Christianity. Why this is so is simply baffling to me. Apparently Satan’s ability to lie and subvert is much more powerful than anyone knows. According to Scripture(1 John 2:14) Satan has no power over a believing member of the Body of Christ(“My Church”). If that is so, and I have no reason to doubt, then we must conclude that those particular theologians and Bible scholars who do not believe in a literal Satan, are not faith-sharing born-again members of the Body of Christ.
The doctrine of Satan is properly a part of Angelology which is found in chapter 5 of my Treatise. In the present essay I have reviewed the overall plan of Satan as it pertains to “My Church”: “I will build My church ...” (Matt. 16:18).
As all Christian believers know, Satan is a person of Holy Scripture, a created being, having been created by God as a perfect being, originally wise and completely righteous. the most powerful of God's angelic beings. However, pride caused Satan to fall, he wanted to receive the worship due to God alone. At that point there was rebellion in heaven, when Satan convinced one third of the angels to rebel against God.
A Little Background
We know of his rebellion when he took on the form of a serpent in the garden of Eden to tempt Eve into disobeying God. He succeeded,”And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this…” and we all know His curse. In Romans 8 we see that the earth is right now groaning and travailing to be set free from its slavery and corruption which happened during the fall of man when God cursed the earth.
He put man in the garden knowing what he would do, and yet the moment he sinned, the very next thing that God does is put into motion the whole plan of redemption, where He promised the "SEED" of the woman in Genesis 3:15. And that began His whole plan of Redemption that goes all the way through the Bible.
Everything was foretold in the Old Testament, and the first half of it has already come to pass. There were more than 350 prophecies concerning Christ’s first coming. Every one of them were fulfilled to the last detail. And we believe that He will fulfill the last part because His Word has said so.
Now enter Satan. He being by virtue of his own free will rebelled against God. For the rest of the story go to Isaiah. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13. For thou hast said in thine heart, ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:" "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; (and he’s not going to stop there) I will be like the most High." (Isaiah 14:13) Do you see all of his "I will’s? Lucifer is in total rebellion against his Creator.
Who is the Most High? The God of creation. This angel that God had given dominion over an angelic kingdom that I think was on that earth. It was all there, it was beautiful beyond description, and it was an angelic host that populated it. Not mankind, but angels. And this Lucifer was ruling over the earth. But Lucifer, or Satan as we now know him, was never satisfied, and he still isn’t even tonight. So in his heart, he lusted to take the place of God Himself, and he honestly thought he could pull it off.
This Lucifer who was not content with the role that God had given him, now wanted to usurp the throne of God, but he was going to entice the angelic subjects that were under him to go with him in his rebellion. As soon as God took Adam and Eve out of the Garden, and promises that out of the seed of the woman would come the Redeemer of the human race, Satan immediately plans with everything at his disposal to stop the coming of a Redeemer. He does it by first bringing to death with the murder of Abel who was in the line of the coming of the Just One. Then when Abraham comes on the scene, and God makes that covenant with Abraham, Satan turns on that little nation that’s going to come out of that covenant agreement like no other group of people on earth. And if you ever look at what has happened to the Jew down through their history, never forget that’s it’s been the attacks of this same Lucifer, this same Satan who is trying to thwart the very plan of God.
Since God placed everything concerning prophecy on this little nation, everything concerning Christ’s first coming rested on the little nation of Israel. So if Satan could destroy Israel, he could destroy God’s plan of bringing a Redeemer. But resurrection morning Satan found out differently, he was defeated, but he still hasn’t quit.
Scripture tells us that Satan is the god of this world. Satan has been the head of the nations ever since Adam left the Garden of Eden. Satan is ruling and reigning the nations of the world today as well as anytime before. II Corinthians chapter 4:3-4, says it best: "But if our gospel be hid it is hid to them that are lost"In whom (the lost of this world) the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." Who is the god of this world even tonight. Satan is. This Satan, this Lucifer who rebelled and wanted to usurp the very throne room of God, and was cast down, and his beautiful kingdom was destroyed with water. And even though the fallen angels were locked upped, God in Omniscience again, and in His Sovereignty permitted Satan to roam free, and permitted Satan to become the god of this world. He is in charge of the kingdoms of this world, and he’ll promote good as well as evil, until the day he is finally removed as the god of this world.
Satan Promotes false doctrine
Even before the resurrection of our Lord, His chosen people repeatedly turned their back on Him, so why does this pattern, i.e. our continually turning our backs on God despite His proven faithfulness to us, keep repeating over and over throughout all of history and in our lives today? The short answer is because Satan knows how to find the openings and men to drive wedges between man and God.
Upon the death of Jesus His Apostles, and others close to Him began recording His teachings. By about 80AD a complete set of teachings existed that eventually became the New Testament. These teachings became available to all the newly formed churches early on through the widespread missionary work of the Apostle Paul. Most of the people understood what the Scriptures taught, but at the same time Satan sought out certain men in those churches to pervert what had been taught by Paul and his associates. As a result many people were led astray by false teachings which led to irreparable disputes. The history of Christianity is replete with evidence of Satan’s plan and its effects. Thousands of volumes fill bookshelves all over the world with accounts of Christian disputes and false doctrine, but very few authors reference Satan as its source. Satan wants every author and church leader to be pompous (arrogant), self righteous, and have the pride of the Pharisees (which is the pride of Satan). These authors and leaders are innocent dupes of Satan without even realizing it. With such arrogance and self righteous pride, they look down on you, trying to make you believe that they are the font of knowledge, even if you know the Bible better than they do. They are beyond correction, for Satan has perverted these men and uses them to turn away anyone following God and His written Word
In the first three centuries, the church found itself deeply divided(thanks to Satan). One field of doctrine that caused the most divisiveness amongst Christians was that concerning the concept of the God/Man nature of Jesus Christ. The churches were fractured by theological disputes, especially conflicting understandings of the nature of Christ, long a point of controversy. To counter a widening rift within the church, Constantine convened a council in Nicaea in. 325AD. A creed reflecting the position of Alexander and Athanasius was written and signed by a majority of the bishops. Nevertheless, the two parties continued to battle each other. In A.D. 381, a second council met in Constantinople. It adopted a revised and expanded form of the A.D. 325 creed, now known as the Nicene Creed.
As it turned out, The Nicene Creed became the most ecumenical of creeds. The Presbyterian Church joins with Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and most Protestant churches in affirming it. The western churches(In contrast to Eastern Orthodox churches) state that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but from the Father and the Son. The eastern churches hold that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son and threatens the distinctiveness of the person of the Holy Spirit. This issue remains unresolved in the ecumenical dialogue to this very day.
What we have here is “the tip of the (Satan’s) iceberg.” False doctrine after false doctrine, as well as variances in liturgy, and church governance, remain areas of dispute and contention with true believers throughout all of Christendom. Very few theologians and Bible scholars make a connection between Satan and that aspect of Christianity. Why this is so is simply baffling to me. Apparently Satan’s ability to lie and subvert is much more powerful than anyone knows. According to Scripture(1 John 2:14) Satan has no power over a believing member of the Body of Christ(“My Church”). If that is so, and I have no reason to doubt, then we must conclude that those particular theologians and Bible scholars who do not believe in a literal Satan, are not faith-sharing born-again members of the Body of Christ.
Doctrine of Sin
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”(Roman 5:12)
Adam is the name given to the first man, whose creation is detailed in the first book of Moses (Genesis 1:27"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." the Triune God is going to create a creature after His own image.
Divide man into what the Scripture calls him, Body, Soul, and Spirit(the image of God). "You can divide soul and spirit, because the Bible does." So there you have the three parts that make up mankind in the body, soul, and spirit. Scripture divides the soul from the spirit, they are not one in the same, although they certainly have a close affinity, and it is hard to make a difference between them, but the Scripture does.
Genesis 1:26a "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:…" we know nothing of God having a body or a physical appearance, but the image is in the area of the soul and spirit which are invisible! n the area of man’s soul we again become a trinity of sort, and here is definitely the invisible. And that is we are made up of the mind, the will, and the emotions. They are all definite enmities. We have a mind, and its invisible. It’s the same way with our will. The will is a definite entity or you wouldn’t be here today, because you came by the exercise of the will. But you can’t put your finger on the will, you can’t see it, nor analyze it, because it’s invisible. It’s the same way with our seat of emotions. The emotions are the things that make us cry, laugh, happy, and sad. They are certainly bonafide entities. It’s something that we know is there, and yet we can never see it. These three aspects then of our innermost being is called the personality, or the real you. God also placed within Adam a spirit concept that would connect Adam with his Creator, or with God. So right from the beginning Adam has total and complete fellowship with his Creator. When God made Adam and Eve he said that it was good. So, Adam was created good.
"And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created
them . . . And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day." (Gen. 1:27, 31).
God’s goodness is a quality of God that Adam had, but God’s holiness did not extend to Adam. Holiness belongs only to God--being part of his nature, and we know that God cannot sin. So, in the case of the holiness of God, it would negate the ability to sin. Adam's righteousness lacked nothing. Being righteous is being acceptable to God. The idea that he was holy inasmuch as he had not sinned, and by constant development could increase his holiness, so that if he had not fallen he would have attained a still holier state, is incorrect, and betrays ignorance in this respect.
“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1John 1:5). God clothes Himself in a garment of light (Psalm 104:2, Rev.1:12-16); therefore it is reasonable to assume that Adam, prior to the “Fall,” being made in the image and likeness of God (Gen.1:26-27) must also have been clothed with light. The light of the Holy Spirit was passing through Adam’s spirit unimpeded, reaching into his soul and influencing his mind and will, directing his body. Before the fall Adam was in harmony with his Creator, his heart and mind were enlightened by the power of God. This is not to say that Adam was a robot controlled by God but a spiritually minded being with free will, to whom all things were possible.
Adam was created good, but was he holy? Therefore, his goodness did not mean he could not fall. We are what we become. Adam had some help in that the devil deceived Eve. She ate the forbidden fruit and gave it to Adam, who likewise chose to rebel. So, we could say that the sin Adam committed did not arise in his own heart because his heart was good. Instead, sin arose outside of him via the serpent, through Eve, and to him.
The Concept of Sanctification
To understand the concept of justification and sanctification, as well as the differences between the two terms, you must first know the Biblical background. According to the Bible, everyone has sinned and continually fall short of the glory of God, (1) and the consequence of sinning is death.(2) Comparable to the justice system in our present society where law breakers are brought before a court, tried, and judged, God judges each individual and finds each one guilty and, therefore, punishable by death.
Given that everyone has sinned and is destined for death, can you be saved? Or, can your salvation come from good works? The answers to these questions will help you make sense of justification and sanctification.
JustificationSimply put, justification is God’s act of pardoning the sinner and declares the sinner as righteous in His sight. This is possible through the sinner’s faith in Jesus Christ,(3)(4) who was punished for the sins of everyone so that anyone who believes in him will no longer suffer the consequences of sin.(5) In other words, Christ became the sinner in your place so that you will become righteous in the sight of God,(6) which makes you justified by God’s standards.
So to answer the question, “Can you be saved?” Yes, through faith in Jesus Christ and what He did.(7) Your justification or being made right with God is through the obedience of Christ(8), and not through your good works(9). Because of Christ’s obedience and death on the cross, your past, present, and future sins are forgiven, and you are no longer subject to the punishment that was once due.(10)
Sanctification means “to be set apart.” Morally, to be sanctified means to be pure or holy while spiritually, to be sanctified means to be set apart for God. God set you apart from wrongdoings to be more like Him and Jesus Christ. Although a sinner is forgiven and made righteous by justification through faith in Christ, sin continues to remain but it is one thing for sin to remain in you and quite another for you to remain in sin. This is where sanctification comes in.
Sanctification begins with justification. But, while justification is God’s act of forgiving your sins and counting you righteous through faith in Jesus Christ, sanctification is the continual work of the Holy Spirit in the believer in order for you to conform to the image of Christ, who is God’s son. And, while justification is a one-time act of God, sanctification is a continual process until you are taken to be with the Lord.
Once the sinner is justified through faith in Jesus Christ, the faith must produce outward results, which is good works.(11) Actions or good works that come from having faith in Christ is what sets real faith apart from a mere profession of faith.(12) While your good works will not justify or make you right with God, good works are the evidence of your faith in Christ as well as in God.
So, how can you produce good works? The Holy Spirit is the believer’s helper as He works within you to conquer sinful desires and inclinations as well as produce fruits of right actions or righteousness.(13) This is the process of sanctification.
Summary of differences:
The concept of “sanctification” is taken from the Latin word sanctificare, which is a combination of sanctus “holy” and facere “to make.” Sanctification, then, refers to the process of becoming more holy/righteous/good/etc, of growing or maturing in faith.
The difference between man in his original state and in the state of sin is similar to that between a healthy child and a sick man. Both must increase in strength. If the child remains what he is, he is not healthy. Health includes growth and increase of strength and development until maturity be attained. The same is true of the sick man; he can not remain the same. He must recover or grow worse. If he is to recover, he must gain in strength. So far both are the same.
But here the similarity ceases. Increase the strength of the sick at once, and he will be well, and what he should be. But add the full strength of the man to the child, and he will be unnatural and abnormal. For the present the child needs no more than he has. He lacks nothing at any given moment. To be a normal child in perfect health, he must be just what he is. But the sick person needs a great deal. In order to be healthy and normal he must not be what he is. The child, so far as health and strength are concerned, is perfect; but the sick person is very imperfect as regards health and strength. The condition of the child is good; that of the sick man is not good. And the former's healthy growth is something entirely different from the latter's improvement in health and strength.
This shows how wrong it is to apply sanctification to Adam before the fall. Sanctification is inconceivable with reference to sinless man; foreign to the conception of a creature whom God calls good.
"Excellent," says one; hence Adam was born in childlike innocence gradually to attain a higher moral development without sin; hence sanctification after all!
Certainly not. A believer's sanctification ceases when he dies. In death he dies to all sin. Sanctification is merely the process which partly or wholly eliminates sin from man. Wholly freed from sin he is holy, and it is impossible to make him holier than holy. Even for this reason it is absurd to apply sanctification to holy Adam. What need of washing that which is clean? Sanctification presupposes unholiness, and Adam was not unholy. Sin being absolutely absent, holiness lacks nothing, but is complete. Adam possessed the same complete holiness now possessed by the child of God in which he stands by faith, and by and by in actuality when through death he has absolutely died unto sin.
Yet in heaven God's children will not stand still -- their joy and glory will ever increase, but not their holiness, which lacks nothing. And to be more holy than perfectly holy is impossible. Their development will consist in drinking ever more copiously from the life of God.
The same is true of sinless Adam; he could not be sanctified. Sanctification is healing, and a healthy person can not be healed. Sanctification is to rid one of poison, but poison can not be drawn from the hand that is not bitten. The idea of holy, holier, holiest is absurd. That which is broken is not whole, and that which is whole is not broken. Sanctification is to make whole, and since in Adam nothing was broken, there was nothing to be made whole. More whole than whole is unthinkable.
Yet altho holy, Adam did not remain what he was, he did not stand still without an aim in life. Take, e.g., the difference between him and God's child. The latter possesses an unlosable treasure, but Adam's was losable, for he lost it. Not that he was less holy than the saint; for this has nothing to do with it.
Let us illustrate. Of two dishes, one is fine cut glass, hence breakable; the other coarse glass, but unbreakable. Is the latter now more whole than the former? Or can the former be made more whole? Of course not; its wholeness has nothing to do with its being breakable or not. Hence the fact that Adam's treasure was losable does not touch the question of holiness at all. Whether one is holy, or yet to be made holy, does not depend upon the losableness of the treasure, but upon its being lost or not.
How this holy development of Adam was to be effected we do not know. We may not inquire after things God has kept from us. As sinners we can no more conceive of such sinless development than of the unfolding of the heavenly glory of God's children.
Confining ourselves closely to Scripture, we know, first, that sinless man would not have died; second, that as a reward for his work he would have received eternal life, i.e., being perfectly able from moment to moment to do God's will, he would always have desired and loved to do it; and for this he would have been rewarded continually with larger measures of the life and glory of God.
We compare the contrast between Adam's condition and ours to that between the royal child born possessor of vast treasures, and a child of poverty that must earn everything or have another to earn it for him. The former lacks nothing, although he has only toys to dispose of; for his father's whole estate is his. Growing up, he does not become richer, for his treasures remain the same; but he becomes more conscious of them. So Adam's treasures would never have increased, for all things were his; only as his life gradually unfolded would he have had more conscious enjoyment of his riches.
Hence original righteousness does not refer to Adam's degree of development, nor to his condition, but to his state; and that was perfectly good.
All those unscriptural notions of Adam's increase in holiness spring from the unscriptural ideas which men, tempted by pantheistic heresies, have formed of holiness.
"Be ye then perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect," This only happens when you as a true believer become part of the body of Christ. Hence Christ's word means: There are rents in your being; the edges are chipped; you are injured and damaged by sin. This must not be so. There may be no break in your being, nor should defect mar your completeness. Behold, as your Father in heaven is unbroken, so as a member of the body of Christ must you will be be wholly sound, unbroken, and perfect. That is, as God remained perfect as God, so must you remain whole and complete as man, a creature in the hand of your Creator.
Of course, those who accept these fancies can not think of Adam otherwise than as created on a low plane of holiness and called to attain higher sanctification. But if there is but one sanctification, i.e., dying to sin and making the broken nature whole, then higher sanctification regarding Adam is out of the question. To Adam's holiness nothing can be added. He would have known his Creator, heartily loved Him; and lived with Him in eternal happiness to glorify and praise Him, in ever-increasing consciousness; but all this would not have added anything to his righteousness and holiness. To suppose this would betray a lack of understanding concerning holiness. Thus love is confounded with holiness; righteousness with life; state with condition; word with being; and the very foundations are wrenched from their place.
Yea, worse. Souls are severed from Jesus. For he that fails to understand original righteousness cannot understand how Christ is given us of God for righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. He desires Jesus most assuredly. But how? "Jesus finds the sinner sick and perishing by the wayside. He puts him on His animal, and takes him to the inn, where He pays for him until he is restored." Hence always the same representation as tho, after being redeemed, one must still seek for a righteousness and holiness which by constant progress will only gradually be attained.
If this is correct then Christ is not our righteousness, sanctification, nor redemption; at the most, He is a Friend supporting and strengthening us in our efforts to attain righteousness and holiness. No; if the Church is to glory once more in the comforting and blessed confession that in Christ it possesses now absolute righteousness, holiness, and redemption, it must first begin by understanding original righteousness, i.e., that Adam can not love, can not live in blessed fellowship with God, except he be first perfectly righteous and completely holy.
The doctrine of original sin is the concept of the entrance of sin into the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. God had prepared a perfect place for man and then gave them the gift of volition (the act of practicing free will). Volition comes with responsibility and consequences.
Satan tricked the first woman into eating the forbidden fruit by appealing to “the lust of the flesh,” “the lust of the eyes,” and “the pride of life.” Genesis 3:6 says, “when the woman saw that the tree was good for food (the lust of the flesh), and that it was pleasant to the eyes (the lust of the eyes), and a tree to be desired to make one wise (the pride of life), she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.”
Why did Adam disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit?
But Adam had not been deceived by Satan (1 Tim. 2:14) nor beguiled by the snake. So why did he eat the forbidden
Adam loved his wife and knew the truth. He had not yet sinned, so he was still good. What possible motive would he have to defy his creator and allow a snake to deceive his innocent wife?
Jesus declared that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, . . . he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).
In his first epistle, the apostle John informs us “the devil sinneth from the beginning” (1 Jn 3:8). In describing Satan, Ezekiel said, “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God” (Ezek 28:13). And in the book of Revelation, the angels identify the dragon as being “that old serpent, which is called the devil and Satan” (Rev. 12:9; 20:2).
The Bible warns us to be vigilant and put on the whole armor of God that we may be able to stand against the wiles, snares, and devices of the devil (1 Pet 5:8; 2 Cor 2:11; Eph 6:11; 2 Tim 2:26). Paul also warns us of “false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).
The devil uses deceit, delusion, and disguise to capture and destroy his prey. Eve, our first mother, was Satan’s first target. However he did not transform himself into an angel of light. Instead he took on the form of a serpent.
One of the most basic tactics in warfare is to divide and concur. Why take on the full strength of the opposition instead of only a part? Lone predators do not try to kill multiple animals in one attack; they pounce on a single prey.
Solomon said, “Two are better than one . . . though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him . . .” (Eccl 4:9-12 / ESV). And most people would admit that they are more tempted to sin when they are alone than when they are with a group of other Christians. So why would Satan risk trying to tempt Adam and Eve together rather than attacking them one at a time?
Satan is shrewd, not stupid. This was his first attack on humanity. He would have wanted to maximize his chances for success. It would only make sense for him to strike at one alone.
It should also be noted that this tactic would not have worked on the man. Adam had named all of the animals. So he would have known that serpents cannot speak. But that was before Eve was created. So she would have been more susceptible to this sinister stratagem.
When God asked the man whether he had eaten from the forbidden tree, his response was, “The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Gen. 3:12). By this answer, Adam blamed the woman for giving him the fruit and God for giving him the woman. He said nothing about the serpent.
Eve on the other hand blamed the serpent. When God asked the woman what she had done, her defense was “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (Gen. 3:13). She did not say ‘The serpent beguiled us, and we ate.” She did not blame or include Adam in any way.
The Bible does not tell us what Eve said to convince Adam to eat the deadly fruit. All we know is that he did what she said. She gave him the fruit and he ate it. Then God condemned Adam for listening to his wife and obeying her voice rather than keeping His command. So why did he do it? Why did Adam disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit? Why did the first man sin?
Ultimately, Adam’s action demonstrates that he loved the woman more than he loved God. Adam loved the gift more than the gift giver. He loved a creature more than his Creator (Romans 1:25). Eve had become the man’s idol. She had become more important to Adam than God.
When Jesus was asked who is good, he said no one but God. If no man is good, is this the same as saying no man is perfect? Adam was once deemed good and sinless, but wasn’t created perfect and holy.
The answer to the fall of Adam is found in our knowledge of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of sin rests on the doctrine Jesus Christ the reconciler and not on the imperfection of Adam and Eve. The context and meaning of Jesus’ coming is not sin, but the eternal will of God for man. Jesus was an event of self-determination, not the side-effect of sin and death. “ Adam is subordinate to Christ. Christ is the man from heaven and Adam was created by him. Adam isn’t the “Alpha,” Christ is. Adam was a “type” of Christ. The true nature of human beings is found in Christ not Adam. Therefore the Christ life is our true life.
Some theologians hold sin to be essentially based on the concept of human responsibility, while others hold God's effective act of redemption as the basis for his thinking about sin. Proceeding from the concept of responsibility, some seek the transcendental conditions of its possibility, while others begin with the story of sin's conquest by Jesus Christ, interpreting all other biblical material in its light. Even so they essentially agree in all five areas in which they were compared. (1) They both argue that sin can be known truly only from the revelation of God. (2) Both approaches agree that human beings have no neutral position vis-a-vis God, and that the sinful act is not free in the same sense as the obedient act. (3) Both viewpoints describe sin as a three-fold "no": to God, to true human nature and to the neighbor. (4) Similarly, the subject of the sinful act is the good human creature who is elevated by the address of God or the super existential. (5) Both views hold sin resulting intrinsically in slavery and condemnation; sin is Hell, and Hell is sin. sin results intrinsically in slavery and condemnation; sin is Hell, and Hell is sin.
We have to think through is not “Adam and Christ” but “Christ and Adam”. That is to say, Christ first then Adam, and therefore Adam only in the light of Christ. This reframes the doctrine of sin and the doctrine of atonement by placing the justification of the sinner first before the knowledge of sin and of the sinner, we can only know sin in the light of the One who conquered it! Furthermore, as best shown here, The fundamental nature of human beings is not in Adam but in Christ. Since this order is reverse, since we know Adam only in the light of Christ, we likewise can only know ourselves and human nature in the light of Christ.
“The parallel between ‘Adam and Christ,’ is not that the relationship between Adam and us is the expression of our true and original nature, so that we would have to recognize in Adam the fundamental truth of anthropology to which the subsequent relationship between Christ and us would have to fit and adapt itself. The relationship between Adam and us reveals not the primary but only the secondary anthropological truth and ordering principle. The primary anthropological truth and ordering principle, which only mirrors itself in that relationship, is made clear only through the relationship between Christ and us. Adam is, as is said in v. 14, typos toumellontos, the type of Him who was to come. Man’s essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round.“
“For Christ who seems to come second, really comes first, and Adam who seems to come first really comes second. In Christ the relationship between the one and the many is original, in Adam it is only a copy of that original. Our relationship to Adam depends for its reality on our relationship to Christ. And that means, in practice, that to find the true and essential nature of man we have to look not to Adam the fallen man, but to Christ in whom what is fallen has been cancelled and what was original has been restored. We have to correct and interpret what we know of Adam by what we know of Christ, because Adam is only true man in so far as he reflects and points to the original humanity of Christ.“
It is only in Christ’s defeat of sin that we can know sin at all. “The reality of sin cannot be known or described except in relation to the One who has vanquished it. In examining what Jesus Christ has done for us, we understand the sin Christ has conquered.
the chief sin of all is “unbelief” Unbelief is the sin, the original form and source of all sins, and in the last analysis the only sin because it is the sin which produces and embraces all other sins. Man’s sin is unbelief in the God who was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ who in Him elected and loved man from all eternity, who in Him created him, whose word to man from and to all eternity was and will be Jesus Christ… In Him God Himself is revealed as the One who commands in goodness…” The sin of mankind is unbelief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who is for mankind, the God who has from all eternity determined Himself to love us and elect us, to be our God. In short, our sin is unbelief in the goodness of God as revealed in Christ. We have failed to see that this God is for us, and not against us!—loves us and embraces us and is good to us. This unbelief is the chief sin and the root of all other sin.
We must know that we are loved by God and know it with certainty. We must believe in the goodness of God and bask in it. Only when we know that we are loved from before all time by God, can we learn to be free from sin and shame and guilt. When we see ourselves embraced by the goodness of God, we leave sin behind.
to outline the counter-action of man that is healed in Christ’s redemption. He does this in four points.
First, that the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This is the humility of God, the God who in freedom became man for our sakes. Sin, in this light, is that we as a human race desire to be Gods. God became a man to cure us of this sin. He humbled Himself and became one with us to destroy our prideful illusions of ever becoming God.
Second, that Jesus is our Lord as a servant. Jesus came not to be served but to serve, and this reveals the nature of God as the Lord. He is not Lord as we imagine, but Lord as the servant. He humbles Himself and becomes the servant of sinful man. Mankind, on the other hand, wants to be Lord over all, to pridefully command all things. Yet Jesus comes to heal our evil fixation with this illusionary Lordship, by revealing that true Lordship is servanthood.
Third, that Jesus is the Judge judged in our place. He alone is the righteous Judge of man, and He has, as this judge, suffered and died in the judgement we deserved. He is the Judge who steps down and dies the judgement He proclaims in the place of the unjust. Yet we, in our prideful humanity, desire to be our own judge. We desire to be the masters of our own lives and to judge for ourselves what is right and wrong. Yet Jesus reveals the high price of the Judge, and unveils the truth that only God’s judgement is truly righteous.
Fourth, Jesus dies helpless and in complete abandonment on the cross. He was crucified and buried in full trust that despite His helplessness, God, His dear Father, would come to help. Humanity, in our pride, attempts self-help, self-salvation. We try to be our own hero. But God in Christ shows that it is only when we are helpless and fully abandoned to His salvation, that we are free from our illusion, and He saves us.
dam and Eve, when they were created in the Garden of Eden, were without sin. Because of that, they were perfect and flawless.
However, if that is true, Why, if Adam and Eve were perfect, did they choose to sin?
Were they not perfect?
If we presume that they weren't perfect, then we have to see that God created them with the imperfection. If God created them as imperfect, would that mean that by creating us this way he caused us to sin?
(Being omniscient, he knew full well that if he created us to sin then we would sin. Therefore wouldn't his act of creation be the cause of the sin?) Finally, if he created us to sin, can God be held accountable for this sin?
Were they perfect?
Or, rather, did God create them as perfect and they chose imperfection? If Adam and Eve chose imperfection, how could they be considered perfect?
My question, in summary
Are there any doctrines that speak to the perfection or imperfection of Adam and Eve (particularly in regards to why they chose to sin)?
If the doctrine claims Adam and Eve were perfect, how do they reconcile this with them choosing imperfection (since that would indicate they were imperfect from creation)?
If the doctrine claims that Adam and Eve were imperfect, how do they reconcile this with the idea that God created imperfect beings? Furthermore, does that doctrine hold that God is partially responsible for the sins that Adam and Eve committed since he knew that they would commit the sin and chose to create them anyways?
The context and meaning of Jesus' coming is not sin, but the eternal will of God for man. Jesus was an event of self-determination, not the side-effect of sin and death.
Sin is found in relation to Jesus Christ, the victor over sin. It is therefore only in Christ’s defeat of sin that we can know sin at all. The reality of sin cannot be known or described except in relation to the One who has vanquished it.
So this essentially means that the way we understand sin cannot be an abstract moral definition of it, or even worse, what we judge ourselves to be what is right or wrong. Because this is in no way sin as God has defined it. Following the way in which we know God, only through Jesus Christ, the way we know sin is the same. We can only come to form a doctrine of sin in the light of Jesus Christ and particularly in the light of our reconciliation in Him. Only in the context of sin as it is defeated can we identify what it is. We maintain the simple thesis that only when we know Jesus Christ do we really know that man is the man of sin, and what sin is and what it means for man…
consider the Pride of Man, and examining what Jesus Christ has done for us, we understand the sin Christ has conquered.
The chief sin of all is “unbelief”. Saying, “It is true enough that unbelief is the sin, the original form and source of all sins, and in the last analysis the only sin because it is the sin which produces and embraces all other sins.”
But unbelief in what? In God Not just any abstract God, but understand the exact God who man has disbelieved. Man’s sin is unbelief in the God who was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ who in Him elected and loved man from all eternity, who in Him created him, whose word to man from and to all eternity was and will be Jesus Christ… In Him God Himself is revealed as the One who commands in goodness…”
The sin of mankind is unbelief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who is for mankind, the God who has from all eternity determined Himself to love us and elect us, to be our God. In short, our sin is unbelief in the goodness of God as revealed in Christ. We have failed to see that this God is for us, and not against us!—loves us and embraces us and is good to us. That his unbelief is the chief sin and the root of all other sin.
Our need for assurance requires we must know that we are loved by God and know it with certainty. We must believe in the goodness of God and bask in it. Only when we know that we are loved from before all time by God, can we learn to be free from sin and shame and guilt. When we see ourselves embraced by the goodness of God, we leave sin behind.
Let us outline the counter-action of man that is healed in Christ’s redemption in four points;
First, that the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This is the humility of God, the God who in freedom became man for our sakes. Sin, in this light, is that we as a human race desire to be Gods. God became a man to cure us of this sin. He humbled Himself and became one with us to destroy our prideful illusions of ever becoming God.
Second, that Jesus is our Lord as a servant. Jesus came not to be served but to serve, and this reveals the nature of God as the Lord. He is not Lord as we imagine, but Lord as the servant. He humbles Himself and becomes the servant of sinful man. Mankind, on the other hand, wants to be Lord over all, to pridefully command all things. Yet Jesus comes to heal our evil fixation with this illusionary Lordship, by revealing that true Lordship is servanthood.
Third, that Jesus is the Judge judged in our place. He alone is the righteous Judge of man, and He has, as this judge, suffered and died in the judgement we deserved. He is the Judge who steps down and dies the judgement He proclaims in the place of the unjust. Yet we, in our prideful humanity, desire to be our own judge. We desire to be the masters of our own lives and to judge for ourselves what is right and wrong. Yet Jesus reveals the high price of the Judge, and unveils the truth that only God’s judgement is truly righteous.
Fourth, Jesus dies helpless and in complete abandonment on the cross. He was crucified and buried in full trust that despite His helplessness, God, His dear Father, would come to help. Humanity, in our pride, attempts self-help, self-salvation. We try to be our own hero. But God in Christ shows that it is only when we are helpless and fully abandoned to His salvation, that we are free from our illusion, and He saves us.
We must place Jesus Christ at the center of our Christianity. Jesus Christ is not a footnote to our salvation! We can only know sin in the light of the Conquerer of sin. Only in the light of Jesus’ redemption can we truly understand the depravity of our existence. We preach the grace of God for all mankind, because it cannot be preached sin apart from the conquerer of sin, Jesus Christ. Sin is never without this grace!
Everything rests on the gospel. The Gospel is an announcement, not a threat And what is the one and only Gospel that saves?
Believing the Gospel Makes us Perfect in the Eyes of the LordWe receive the Holy Spirit through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. When we believe the one and only Gospel that he died for our sins and that he was raised from the death, at that moment we are born again, and become members of the body of Christ. At that very moment we receive the Holy Spirit.
many different things happen when we are filled with the Holy Spirit. Various things become evident.
Doctrine of Sin
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”(Roman 5:12)
Adam is the name given to the first man, whose creation is detailed in the first book of Moses (Genesis 1:27"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." the Triune God is going to create a creature after His own image.
Divide man into what the Scripture calls him, Body, Soul, and Spirit(the image of God). "You can divide soul and spirit, because the Bible does." So there you have the three parts that make up mankind in the body, soul, and spirit. Scripture divides the soul from the spirit, they are not one in the same, although they certainly have a close affinity, and it is hard to make a difference between them, but the Scripture does.
Genesis 1:26a "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:…" we know nothing of God having a body or a physical appearance, but the image is in the area of the soul and spirit which are invisible! n the area of man’s soul we again become a trinity of sort, and here is definitely the invisible. And that is we are made up of the mind, the will, and the emotions. They are all definite enmities. We have a mind, and its invisible. It’s the same way with our will. The will is a definite entity or you wouldn’t be here today, because you came by the exercise of the will. But you can’t put your finger on the will, you can’t see it, nor analyze it, because it’s invisible. It’s the same way with our seat of emotions. The emotions are the things that make us cry, laugh, happy, and sad. They are certainly bonafide entities. It’s something that we know is there, and yet we can never see it. These three aspects then of our innermost being is called the personality, or the real you. God also placed within Adam a spirit concept that would connect Adam with his Creator, or with God. So right from the beginning Adam has total and complete fellowship with his Creator. When God made Adam and Eve he said that it was good. So, Adam was created good.
"And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created
them . . . And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day." (Gen. 1:27, 31).
God’s goodness is a quality of God that Adam had, but God’s holiness did not extend to Adam. Holiness belongs only to God--being part of his nature, and we know that God cannot sin. So, in the case of the holiness of God, it would negate the ability to sin. Adam's righteousness lacked nothing. Being righteous is being acceptable to God. The idea that he was holy inasmuch as he had not sinned, and by constant development could increase his holiness, so that if he had not fallen he would have attained a still holier state, is incorrect, and betrays ignorance in this respect.
“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1John 1:5). God clothes Himself in a garment of light (Psalm 104:2, Rev.1:12-16); therefore it is reasonable to assume that Adam, prior to the “Fall,” being made in the image and likeness of God (Gen.1:26-27) must also have been clothed with light. The light of the Holy Spirit was passing through Adam’s spirit unimpeded, reaching into his soul and influencing his mind and will, directing his body. Before the fall Adam was in harmony with his Creator, his heart and mind were enlightened by the power of God. This is not to say that Adam was a robot controlled by God but a spiritually minded being with free will, to whom all things were possible.
Adam was created good, but was he holy? Therefore, his goodness did not mean he could not fall. We are what we become. Adam had some help in that the devil deceived Eve. She ate the forbidden fruit and gave it to Adam, who likewise chose to rebel. So, we could say that the sin Adam committed did not arise in his own heart because his heart was good. Instead, sin arose outside of him via the serpent, through Eve, and to him.
The Concept of Sanctification
To understand the concept of justification and sanctification, as well as the differences between the two terms, you must first know the Biblical background. According to the Bible, everyone has sinned and continually fall short of the glory of God, (1) and the consequence of sinning is death.(2) Comparable to the justice system in our present society where law breakers are brought before a court, tried, and judged, God judges each individual and finds each one guilty and, therefore, punishable by death.
Given that everyone has sinned and is destined for death, can you be saved? Or, can your salvation come from good works? The answers to these questions will help you make sense of justification and sanctification.
JustificationSimply put, justification is God’s act of pardoning the sinner and declares the sinner as righteous in His sight. This is possible through the sinner’s faith in Jesus Christ,(3)(4) who was punished for the sins of everyone so that anyone who believes in him will no longer suffer the consequences of sin.(5) In other words, Christ became the sinner in your place so that you will become righteous in the sight of God,(6) which makes you justified by God’s standards.
So to answer the question, “Can you be saved?” Yes, through faith in Jesus Christ and what He did.(7) Your justification or being made right with God is through the obedience of Christ(8), and not through your good works(9). Because of Christ’s obedience and death on the cross, your past, present, and future sins are forgiven, and you are no longer subject to the punishment that was once due.(10)
Sanctification means “to be set apart.” Morally, to be sanctified means to be pure or holy while spiritually, to be sanctified means to be set apart for God. God set you apart from wrongdoings to be more like Him and Jesus Christ. Although a sinner is forgiven and made righteous by justification through faith in Christ, sin continues to remain but it is one thing for sin to remain in you and quite another for you to remain in sin. This is where sanctification comes in.
Sanctification begins with justification. But, while justification is God’s act of forgiving your sins and counting you righteous through faith in Jesus Christ, sanctification is the continual work of the Holy Spirit in the believer in order for you to conform to the image of Christ, who is God’s son. And, while justification is a one-time act of God, sanctification is a continual process until you are taken to be with the Lord.
Once the sinner is justified through faith in Jesus Christ, the faith must produce outward results, which is good works.(11) Actions or good works that come from having faith in Christ is what sets real faith apart from a mere profession of faith.(12) While your good works will not justify or make you right with God, good works are the evidence of your faith in Christ as well as in God.
So, how can you produce good works? The Holy Spirit is the believer’s helper as He works within you to conquer sinful desires and inclinations as well as produce fruits of right actions or righteousness.(13) This is the process of sanctification.
Summary of differences:
- Justification is a one-time act of God, which makes it complete and finished.(14) Sanctification is a continual process since a believer is not completely freed from sin until the day of resurrection.
- Justification addresses the sinner’s guilt for committing sins. Sanctification addresses sin’s power and corruption over a believer’s life.
- Justification is God’s declaration that a sinner is righteous through the work of Jesus Christ. Sanctification is God’s transformation of a believer’s whole being, that is the mind, will, behaviors, and affections through the work of the Holy Spirit.
- To be justified, your good works are immaterial. To be sanctified, your good works are a necessary evidence of your faith in Christ, which the Holy Spirit enables you to do as you continually die everyday in your sin.
- Justification gives you the privilege as well as the boldness to enter heaven. Sanctification gives you the meekness for heaven, and allows you to fully take joy in abiding there.
The concept of “sanctification” is taken from the Latin word sanctificare, which is a combination of sanctus “holy” and facere “to make.” Sanctification, then, refers to the process of becoming more holy/righteous/good/etc, of growing or maturing in faith.
The difference between man in his original state and in the state of sin is similar to that between a healthy child and a sick man. Both must increase in strength. If the child remains what he is, he is not healthy. Health includes growth and increase of strength and development until maturity be attained. The same is true of the sick man; he can not remain the same. He must recover or grow worse. If he is to recover, he must gain in strength. So far both are the same.
But here the similarity ceases. Increase the strength of the sick at once, and he will be well, and what he should be. But add the full strength of the man to the child, and he will be unnatural and abnormal. For the present the child needs no more than he has. He lacks nothing at any given moment. To be a normal child in perfect health, he must be just what he is. But the sick person needs a great deal. In order to be healthy and normal he must not be what he is. The child, so far as health and strength are concerned, is perfect; but the sick person is very imperfect as regards health and strength. The condition of the child is good; that of the sick man is not good. And the former's healthy growth is something entirely different from the latter's improvement in health and strength.
This shows how wrong it is to apply sanctification to Adam before the fall. Sanctification is inconceivable with reference to sinless man; foreign to the conception of a creature whom God calls good.
"Excellent," says one; hence Adam was born in childlike innocence gradually to attain a higher moral development without sin; hence sanctification after all!
Certainly not. A believer's sanctification ceases when he dies. In death he dies to all sin. Sanctification is merely the process which partly or wholly eliminates sin from man. Wholly freed from sin he is holy, and it is impossible to make him holier than holy. Even for this reason it is absurd to apply sanctification to holy Adam. What need of washing that which is clean? Sanctification presupposes unholiness, and Adam was not unholy. Sin being absolutely absent, holiness lacks nothing, but is complete. Adam possessed the same complete holiness now possessed by the child of God in which he stands by faith, and by and by in actuality when through death he has absolutely died unto sin.
Yet in heaven God's children will not stand still -- their joy and glory will ever increase, but not their holiness, which lacks nothing. And to be more holy than perfectly holy is impossible. Their development will consist in drinking ever more copiously from the life of God.
The same is true of sinless Adam; he could not be sanctified. Sanctification is healing, and a healthy person can not be healed. Sanctification is to rid one of poison, but poison can not be drawn from the hand that is not bitten. The idea of holy, holier, holiest is absurd. That which is broken is not whole, and that which is whole is not broken. Sanctification is to make whole, and since in Adam nothing was broken, there was nothing to be made whole. More whole than whole is unthinkable.
Yet altho holy, Adam did not remain what he was, he did not stand still without an aim in life. Take, e.g., the difference between him and God's child. The latter possesses an unlosable treasure, but Adam's was losable, for he lost it. Not that he was less holy than the saint; for this has nothing to do with it.
Let us illustrate. Of two dishes, one is fine cut glass, hence breakable; the other coarse glass, but unbreakable. Is the latter now more whole than the former? Or can the former be made more whole? Of course not; its wholeness has nothing to do with its being breakable or not. Hence the fact that Adam's treasure was losable does not touch the question of holiness at all. Whether one is holy, or yet to be made holy, does not depend upon the losableness of the treasure, but upon its being lost or not.
How this holy development of Adam was to be effected we do not know. We may not inquire after things God has kept from us. As sinners we can no more conceive of such sinless development than of the unfolding of the heavenly glory of God's children.
Confining ourselves closely to Scripture, we know, first, that sinless man would not have died; second, that as a reward for his work he would have received eternal life, i.e., being perfectly able from moment to moment to do God's will, he would always have desired and loved to do it; and for this he would have been rewarded continually with larger measures of the life and glory of God.
We compare the contrast between Adam's condition and ours to that between the royal child born possessor of vast treasures, and a child of poverty that must earn everything or have another to earn it for him. The former lacks nothing, although he has only toys to dispose of; for his father's whole estate is his. Growing up, he does not become richer, for his treasures remain the same; but he becomes more conscious of them. So Adam's treasures would never have increased, for all things were his; only as his life gradually unfolded would he have had more conscious enjoyment of his riches.
Hence original righteousness does not refer to Adam's degree of development, nor to his condition, but to his state; and that was perfectly good.
All those unscriptural notions of Adam's increase in holiness spring from the unscriptural ideas which men, tempted by pantheistic heresies, have formed of holiness.
"Be ye then perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect," This only happens when you as a true believer become part of the body of Christ. Hence Christ's word means: There are rents in your being; the edges are chipped; you are injured and damaged by sin. This must not be so. There may be no break in your being, nor should defect mar your completeness. Behold, as your Father in heaven is unbroken, so as a member of the body of Christ must you will be be wholly sound, unbroken, and perfect. That is, as God remained perfect as God, so must you remain whole and complete as man, a creature in the hand of your Creator.
Of course, those who accept these fancies can not think of Adam otherwise than as created on a low plane of holiness and called to attain higher sanctification. But if there is but one sanctification, i.e., dying to sin and making the broken nature whole, then higher sanctification regarding Adam is out of the question. To Adam's holiness nothing can be added. He would have known his Creator, heartily loved Him; and lived with Him in eternal happiness to glorify and praise Him, in ever-increasing consciousness; but all this would not have added anything to his righteousness and holiness. To suppose this would betray a lack of understanding concerning holiness. Thus love is confounded with holiness; righteousness with life; state with condition; word with being; and the very foundations are wrenched from their place.
Yea, worse. Souls are severed from Jesus. For he that fails to understand original righteousness cannot understand how Christ is given us of God for righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. He desires Jesus most assuredly. But how? "Jesus finds the sinner sick and perishing by the wayside. He puts him on His animal, and takes him to the inn, where He pays for him until he is restored." Hence always the same representation as tho, after being redeemed, one must still seek for a righteousness and holiness which by constant progress will only gradually be attained.
If this is correct then Christ is not our righteousness, sanctification, nor redemption; at the most, He is a Friend supporting and strengthening us in our efforts to attain righteousness and holiness. No; if the Church is to glory once more in the comforting and blessed confession that in Christ it possesses now absolute righteousness, holiness, and redemption, it must first begin by understanding original righteousness, i.e., that Adam can not love, can not live in blessed fellowship with God, except he be first perfectly righteous and completely holy.
The doctrine of original sin is the concept of the entrance of sin into the world through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. God had prepared a perfect place for man and then gave them the gift of volition (the act of practicing free will). Volition comes with responsibility and consequences.
Satan tricked the first woman into eating the forbidden fruit by appealing to “the lust of the flesh,” “the lust of the eyes,” and “the pride of life.” Genesis 3:6 says, “when the woman saw that the tree was good for food (the lust of the flesh), and that it was pleasant to the eyes (the lust of the eyes), and a tree to be desired to make one wise (the pride of life), she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.”
Why did Adam disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit?
But Adam had not been deceived by Satan (1 Tim. 2:14) nor beguiled by the snake. So why did he eat the forbidden
Adam loved his wife and knew the truth. He had not yet sinned, so he was still good. What possible motive would he have to defy his creator and allow a snake to deceive his innocent wife?
Jesus declared that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, . . . he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).
In his first epistle, the apostle John informs us “the devil sinneth from the beginning” (1 Jn 3:8). In describing Satan, Ezekiel said, “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God” (Ezek 28:13). And in the book of Revelation, the angels identify the dragon as being “that old serpent, which is called the devil and Satan” (Rev. 12:9; 20:2).
The Bible warns us to be vigilant and put on the whole armor of God that we may be able to stand against the wiles, snares, and devices of the devil (1 Pet 5:8; 2 Cor 2:11; Eph 6:11; 2 Tim 2:26). Paul also warns us of “false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14).
The devil uses deceit, delusion, and disguise to capture and destroy his prey. Eve, our first mother, was Satan’s first target. However he did not transform himself into an angel of light. Instead he took on the form of a serpent.
One of the most basic tactics in warfare is to divide and concur. Why take on the full strength of the opposition instead of only a part? Lone predators do not try to kill multiple animals in one attack; they pounce on a single prey.
Solomon said, “Two are better than one . . . though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him . . .” (Eccl 4:9-12 / ESV). And most people would admit that they are more tempted to sin when they are alone than when they are with a group of other Christians. So why would Satan risk trying to tempt Adam and Eve together rather than attacking them one at a time?
Satan is shrewd, not stupid. This was his first attack on humanity. He would have wanted to maximize his chances for success. It would only make sense for him to strike at one alone.
It should also be noted that this tactic would not have worked on the man. Adam had named all of the animals. So he would have known that serpents cannot speak. But that was before Eve was created. So she would have been more susceptible to this sinister stratagem.
When God asked the man whether he had eaten from the forbidden tree, his response was, “The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Gen. 3:12). By this answer, Adam blamed the woman for giving him the fruit and God for giving him the woman. He said nothing about the serpent.
Eve on the other hand blamed the serpent. When God asked the woman what she had done, her defense was “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (Gen. 3:13). She did not say ‘The serpent beguiled us, and we ate.” She did not blame or include Adam in any way.
The Bible does not tell us what Eve said to convince Adam to eat the deadly fruit. All we know is that he did what she said. She gave him the fruit and he ate it. Then God condemned Adam for listening to his wife and obeying her voice rather than keeping His command. So why did he do it? Why did Adam disobey God by eating the forbidden fruit? Why did the first man sin?
Ultimately, Adam’s action demonstrates that he loved the woman more than he loved God. Adam loved the gift more than the gift giver. He loved a creature more than his Creator (Romans 1:25). Eve had become the man’s idol. She had become more important to Adam than God.
When Jesus was asked who is good, he said no one but God. If no man is good, is this the same as saying no man is perfect? Adam was once deemed good and sinless, but wasn’t created perfect and holy.
The answer to the fall of Adam is found in our knowledge of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of sin rests on the doctrine Jesus Christ the reconciler and not on the imperfection of Adam and Eve. The context and meaning of Jesus’ coming is not sin, but the eternal will of God for man. Jesus was an event of self-determination, not the side-effect of sin and death. “ Adam is subordinate to Christ. Christ is the man from heaven and Adam was created by him. Adam isn’t the “Alpha,” Christ is. Adam was a “type” of Christ. The true nature of human beings is found in Christ not Adam. Therefore the Christ life is our true life.
Some theologians hold sin to be essentially based on the concept of human responsibility, while others hold God's effective act of redemption as the basis for his thinking about sin. Proceeding from the concept of responsibility, some seek the transcendental conditions of its possibility, while others begin with the story of sin's conquest by Jesus Christ, interpreting all other biblical material in its light. Even so they essentially agree in all five areas in which they were compared. (1) They both argue that sin can be known truly only from the revelation of God. (2) Both approaches agree that human beings have no neutral position vis-a-vis God, and that the sinful act is not free in the same sense as the obedient act. (3) Both viewpoints describe sin as a three-fold "no": to God, to true human nature and to the neighbor. (4) Similarly, the subject of the sinful act is the good human creature who is elevated by the address of God or the super existential. (5) Both views hold sin resulting intrinsically in slavery and condemnation; sin is Hell, and Hell is sin. sin results intrinsically in slavery and condemnation; sin is Hell, and Hell is sin.
We have to think through is not “Adam and Christ” but “Christ and Adam”. That is to say, Christ first then Adam, and therefore Adam only in the light of Christ. This reframes the doctrine of sin and the doctrine of atonement by placing the justification of the sinner first before the knowledge of sin and of the sinner, we can only know sin in the light of the One who conquered it! Furthermore, as best shown here, The fundamental nature of human beings is not in Adam but in Christ. Since this order is reverse, since we know Adam only in the light of Christ, we likewise can only know ourselves and human nature in the light of Christ.
“The parallel between ‘Adam and Christ,’ is not that the relationship between Adam and us is the expression of our true and original nature, so that we would have to recognize in Adam the fundamental truth of anthropology to which the subsequent relationship between Christ and us would have to fit and adapt itself. The relationship between Adam and us reveals not the primary but only the secondary anthropological truth and ordering principle. The primary anthropological truth and ordering principle, which only mirrors itself in that relationship, is made clear only through the relationship between Christ and us. Adam is, as is said in v. 14, typos toumellontos, the type of Him who was to come. Man’s essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round.“
“For Christ who seems to come second, really comes first, and Adam who seems to come first really comes second. In Christ the relationship between the one and the many is original, in Adam it is only a copy of that original. Our relationship to Adam depends for its reality on our relationship to Christ. And that means, in practice, that to find the true and essential nature of man we have to look not to Adam the fallen man, but to Christ in whom what is fallen has been cancelled and what was original has been restored. We have to correct and interpret what we know of Adam by what we know of Christ, because Adam is only true man in so far as he reflects and points to the original humanity of Christ.“
It is only in Christ’s defeat of sin that we can know sin at all. “The reality of sin cannot be known or described except in relation to the One who has vanquished it. In examining what Jesus Christ has done for us, we understand the sin Christ has conquered.
the chief sin of all is “unbelief” Unbelief is the sin, the original form and source of all sins, and in the last analysis the only sin because it is the sin which produces and embraces all other sins. Man’s sin is unbelief in the God who was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ who in Him elected and loved man from all eternity, who in Him created him, whose word to man from and to all eternity was and will be Jesus Christ… In Him God Himself is revealed as the One who commands in goodness…” The sin of mankind is unbelief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who is for mankind, the God who has from all eternity determined Himself to love us and elect us, to be our God. In short, our sin is unbelief in the goodness of God as revealed in Christ. We have failed to see that this God is for us, and not against us!—loves us and embraces us and is good to us. This unbelief is the chief sin and the root of all other sin.
We must know that we are loved by God and know it with certainty. We must believe in the goodness of God and bask in it. Only when we know that we are loved from before all time by God, can we learn to be free from sin and shame and guilt. When we see ourselves embraced by the goodness of God, we leave sin behind.
to outline the counter-action of man that is healed in Christ’s redemption. He does this in four points.
First, that the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This is the humility of God, the God who in freedom became man for our sakes. Sin, in this light, is that we as a human race desire to be Gods. God became a man to cure us of this sin. He humbled Himself and became one with us to destroy our prideful illusions of ever becoming God.
Second, that Jesus is our Lord as a servant. Jesus came not to be served but to serve, and this reveals the nature of God as the Lord. He is not Lord as we imagine, but Lord as the servant. He humbles Himself and becomes the servant of sinful man. Mankind, on the other hand, wants to be Lord over all, to pridefully command all things. Yet Jesus comes to heal our evil fixation with this illusionary Lordship, by revealing that true Lordship is servanthood.
Third, that Jesus is the Judge judged in our place. He alone is the righteous Judge of man, and He has, as this judge, suffered and died in the judgement we deserved. He is the Judge who steps down and dies the judgement He proclaims in the place of the unjust. Yet we, in our prideful humanity, desire to be our own judge. We desire to be the masters of our own lives and to judge for ourselves what is right and wrong. Yet Jesus reveals the high price of the Judge, and unveils the truth that only God’s judgement is truly righteous.
Fourth, Jesus dies helpless and in complete abandonment on the cross. He was crucified and buried in full trust that despite His helplessness, God, His dear Father, would come to help. Humanity, in our pride, attempts self-help, self-salvation. We try to be our own hero. But God in Christ shows that it is only when we are helpless and fully abandoned to His salvation, that we are free from our illusion, and He saves us.
dam and Eve, when they were created in the Garden of Eden, were without sin. Because of that, they were perfect and flawless.
However, if that is true, Why, if Adam and Eve were perfect, did they choose to sin?
Were they not perfect?
If we presume that they weren't perfect, then we have to see that God created them with the imperfection. If God created them as imperfect, would that mean that by creating us this way he caused us to sin?
(Being omniscient, he knew full well that if he created us to sin then we would sin. Therefore wouldn't his act of creation be the cause of the sin?) Finally, if he created us to sin, can God be held accountable for this sin?
Were they perfect?
Or, rather, did God create them as perfect and they chose imperfection? If Adam and Eve chose imperfection, how could they be considered perfect?
My question, in summary
Are there any doctrines that speak to the perfection or imperfection of Adam and Eve (particularly in regards to why they chose to sin)?
If the doctrine claims Adam and Eve were perfect, how do they reconcile this with them choosing imperfection (since that would indicate they were imperfect from creation)?
If the doctrine claims that Adam and Eve were imperfect, how do they reconcile this with the idea that God created imperfect beings? Furthermore, does that doctrine hold that God is partially responsible for the sins that Adam and Eve committed since he knew that they would commit the sin and chose to create them anyways?
The context and meaning of Jesus' coming is not sin, but the eternal will of God for man. Jesus was an event of self-determination, not the side-effect of sin and death.
Sin is found in relation to Jesus Christ, the victor over sin. It is therefore only in Christ’s defeat of sin that we can know sin at all. The reality of sin cannot be known or described except in relation to the One who has vanquished it.
So this essentially means that the way we understand sin cannot be an abstract moral definition of it, or even worse, what we judge ourselves to be what is right or wrong. Because this is in no way sin as God has defined it. Following the way in which we know God, only through Jesus Christ, the way we know sin is the same. We can only come to form a doctrine of sin in the light of Jesus Christ and particularly in the light of our reconciliation in Him. Only in the context of sin as it is defeated can we identify what it is. We maintain the simple thesis that only when we know Jesus Christ do we really know that man is the man of sin, and what sin is and what it means for man…
consider the Pride of Man, and examining what Jesus Christ has done for us, we understand the sin Christ has conquered.
The chief sin of all is “unbelief”. Saying, “It is true enough that unbelief is the sin, the original form and source of all sins, and in the last analysis the only sin because it is the sin which produces and embraces all other sins.”
But unbelief in what? In God Not just any abstract God, but understand the exact God who man has disbelieved. Man’s sin is unbelief in the God who was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ who in Him elected and loved man from all eternity, who in Him created him, whose word to man from and to all eternity was and will be Jesus Christ… In Him God Himself is revealed as the One who commands in goodness…”
The sin of mankind is unbelief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who is for mankind, the God who has from all eternity determined Himself to love us and elect us, to be our God. In short, our sin is unbelief in the goodness of God as revealed in Christ. We have failed to see that this God is for us, and not against us!—loves us and embraces us and is good to us. That his unbelief is the chief sin and the root of all other sin.
Our need for assurance requires we must know that we are loved by God and know it with certainty. We must believe in the goodness of God and bask in it. Only when we know that we are loved from before all time by God, can we learn to be free from sin and shame and guilt. When we see ourselves embraced by the goodness of God, we leave sin behind.
Let us outline the counter-action of man that is healed in Christ’s redemption in four points;
First, that the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This is the humility of God, the God who in freedom became man for our sakes. Sin, in this light, is that we as a human race desire to be Gods. God became a man to cure us of this sin. He humbled Himself and became one with us to destroy our prideful illusions of ever becoming God.
Second, that Jesus is our Lord as a servant. Jesus came not to be served but to serve, and this reveals the nature of God as the Lord. He is not Lord as we imagine, but Lord as the servant. He humbles Himself and becomes the servant of sinful man. Mankind, on the other hand, wants to be Lord over all, to pridefully command all things. Yet Jesus comes to heal our evil fixation with this illusionary Lordship, by revealing that true Lordship is servanthood.
Third, that Jesus is the Judge judged in our place. He alone is the righteous Judge of man, and He has, as this judge, suffered and died in the judgement we deserved. He is the Judge who steps down and dies the judgement He proclaims in the place of the unjust. Yet we, in our prideful humanity, desire to be our own judge. We desire to be the masters of our own lives and to judge for ourselves what is right and wrong. Yet Jesus reveals the high price of the Judge, and unveils the truth that only God’s judgement is truly righteous.
Fourth, Jesus dies helpless and in complete abandonment on the cross. He was crucified and buried in full trust that despite His helplessness, God, His dear Father, would come to help. Humanity, in our pride, attempts self-help, self-salvation. We try to be our own hero. But God in Christ shows that it is only when we are helpless and fully abandoned to His salvation, that we are free from our illusion, and He saves us.
We must place Jesus Christ at the center of our Christianity. Jesus Christ is not a footnote to our salvation! We can only know sin in the light of the Conquerer of sin. Only in the light of Jesus’ redemption can we truly understand the depravity of our existence. We preach the grace of God for all mankind, because it cannot be preached sin apart from the conquerer of sin, Jesus Christ. Sin is never without this grace!
Everything rests on the gospel. The Gospel is an announcement, not a threat And what is the one and only Gospel that saves?
Believing the Gospel Makes us Perfect in the Eyes of the LordWe receive the Holy Spirit through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. When we believe the one and only Gospel that he died for our sins and that he was raised from the death, at that moment we are born again, and become members of the body of Christ. At that very moment we receive the Holy Spirit.
- “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” – Romans 8:9
- “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” – 1 Corinthians 12:13
- “In him (that is Christ) you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” – Ephesians 1:13
many different things happen when we are filled with the Holy Spirit. Various things become evident.
- God gives boldness to proclaim the Gospel (see e.g. Acts 1:8, 4:31, 7:55)
- God gives a desire to praise Him (see e.g. Acts 10:46, Ephesians 5:18-20)
- God gives a desire to obey Him (see e.g. Acts 5:29-32, Galatians 5:6)
- Live in obedience to God. When we live unholy lives, we grieve the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:25-32) and we will not experience his power in our lives.
- Pray with the expectation that God will do miracles and with the willingness to be used by Him (see Acts 4:28-31).
- Proclaim the Gospel. When we read that people were full of the Holy Spirit , often they are busy preaching the Gospel, or about to preach it (Acts 7:55, 9:17-20, 11:23-24, 13:9). God does not give his Spirit for us to enjoy privately, but to serve Him publicly.