Understanding Each Other's Curse

What I am about to share is likely to strike some of you as controversial. Not because of how I interpret the Word of God in arriving at this, but because of how you have been taught to look at the subject by modern, secular culture. I suggest to you that the modern view is sundered from reality and leads to dysfunction in relationships and the psychological dissonance involved in the perception of gender we see today.

What is the essential biblical truth in this matter? Biological males and females are different from each other both physically and psychologically.

Our society, as most western societies, has been laboring for decades under the false assumption that men and women are basically interchangeable. Fundamental differences in outlook, values, ambitions, etc. are seen to be superficial trappings artificially foisted upon us by developing under outdated patriarchal societal norms. Under such a view, gender is actually nothing but a choice in perspective, not a physiological assignment with psychological implications.

What I’ve seen anecdotally over my lifetime is that whatever our society has been trying to adopt in regard to the issue of manhood and womanhood has been a massive failure. I think we're collectively trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. It seems clear to me that the fallout has been the dissatisfaction, dissociation, divorce, and the sad state of gender confusion so prevalent today.

So what, exactly, does the Bible say? 

Genesis 1:26-27

According to the Bible, there is but one physical creature God made in his image, man, of which there is two physical sexes, male and female. This one creature, consisting male and female individuals, was made with one purpose by God in his pristine creation: to rule over the earth. There was no differentiation between the sexes in this and no implication of preeminence or authority in one over the other. There was, however, a differentiation in roles.

Genesis 2:15, 20b-24

Though male and female humans were undifferentiated in being (image of God), purpose (dominion), and authority (equivalent), they were made by God different in role, even in his pristine creation. The male was made to till and care for the garden God had planted. The female was made to relate to and accompany man, and eventually bear children.

Made as he was for his role, the male had a pristinely pure desire to plant, raise, maintain, and watch over the creation over which he exercised dominion. The female had a pristinely pure desire to stand beside (aid) the male she cared for and who cared for her as she exercised dominion. These purposeful conditions of either sex were implied by God's aim in creating them and verified by the dysfunction imposed upon them by God's curse upon them due to sin. 

Secular psychology will not make this distinction between the sexes, but the Bible can and does, and therefore, reality does.

Understanding this truth is to apprehend why males tend to be task-oriented and find identity in what they do, and females tend to be relationally-oriented and find identity in how they are connected to other people. Ask a man about his life and he’ll tell you about what he does or what he plans to do. Ask a woman about her life and she’ll tell you about the people in her life. A simplistic generalization, I know, but it certainly jives with my experience of people throughout my life.

This difference between the sexes is deep-rooted. It goes back to the purpose of God in creating us, and persists despite the flaws pervading our being since the Fall. Regardless of what we may say about gender differences in our politically correct affectedness, the difference is genetic, biological, and defeats our best efforts to erase it by social posturing or even surgery. Even something as mundane as video game preferences betray our innate differences: female players prefer The Sims and male players prefer Grand Theft Auto.

Genesis 3:16-19

Since the curse, Adam and Eve and all that have followed after, have been frustrated in their innate created purposes. Together in frustration, but distinctly so from each other, men and women live and die in an irreparably broken environment. Man was struck in body and in what he did: now all that he was purposed to do fights against his doing of it and then he dies. Woman was struck by death too and with increased difficulty in childbirth, as well as how she related to man. Instead of a mutually caring, egalitarian relationship, she is objectified by man, frustrated by subservience to him and then she dies.

In this age since the Fall, the differences between men and women are no longer strictly about their roles within a singular purpose (dominion in God’s image), but are also differences in the frustrations we experience with life led under the curse on the way to death. The things our natures were made to pursue are subject to struggle, are always out of reach, and then we die. So, we owe it to our husbands, our wives, and our children, by way of being examples of love, to understand the frustrations our mates experience because of the curse.

Husbands and wives do not experience the frustrations of life and death in the brokenness of this world in the same way. With patience, dedication and consideration we can make each other’s world better than it would otherwise be by understanding the burden our spouse experiences because of the curse. Jesus has broken that curse, but we can't get back to the unbrokenness of Eden in this life. We can, however, live by the light of faith, and help each other succeed despite the brokenness we encounter as we walk through this darkened age together in love and patience.

If We Would Just Catch Our Breath

It has been broadly accepted that mankind is nothing more than a highly evolved animal, not really any different from any other living thing out there. No other animal is even remotely like us in the ability to reason, or to will, or to communicate, or to abstract, but according to the modern conception that is only a matter of degree rather than substance. I don't believe that, but then, what makes man so special in my view? In the early chapters of Genesis, we are told exactly what that is and especially with regard to all other life.

The creation account in the beginning of Genesis is really an elucidation of God’s determination to make mankind in his image. The creation of the universe itself and all other lifeforms is treated as the backdrop to that ultimate aim. No more explanation than “and God said…and God saw that it was good” is offered for all of those creations, but for mankind a bit more needed to be said. The thrust is that mankind is unique, special among God's creations with something nothing else in all the physical world has.

Mankind was made in the image of God, which means they are a likeness resembling God. God is non-corporeal and outside of the created order (John 4:24; 1 Timothy 1:17), which means that man’s resemblance to God is not physical but something else. Physically, mankind is much like anything else that is alive and is separated by mere degree from all else. However, nothing else is like mankind in those areas of divergence noted above and that is where the image of God shines forth. God is the only thing other than man (and angels) that shares those qualities.

Presumptively, God fashioned man, physically, from the same material he had used to make other creatures. Whereas they were brought forth from the earth by a mere word, mankind was formed [Hebrew: yatsar] by God in the manner of a potter and then directly breathed into by God which granted man soulish life. Although later in the creation account, that word (formed) was applied generally to all the creatures God had made, I find it interesting that in dealing with the detail of creation, a clear difference in how that played out is specified.

Whereas a general, creative word was sufficient for every other creature, with man God got his hands dirty and infused his own breath into Adam. Every creature had living being [Hebrew: nephesh chayyah, the animation of living being] granted by God, but had so without any reference to breath breathed into it by God himself. For creatures, God merely said, "Let the earth bring forth..." For man, God took dust in his hand and formed the creature, then breathed out of himself into man's nostrils the breath of life.

What is important about this distinction, it seems to me, is that the quality that makes mankind living souls uniquely from God is also the means by which God’s image was uniquely communicated to man. We are in God's image, not just because we are like God descriptively, but because we came directly from God substantively. We are, in essence, breath from God. Human beings truly are the offspring of God.

As wonderful as that is, it has a drawback--it means we last forever, just like God. God is eternal and the breath that came out of God and was put into man (and made him a living soul) lasts forever too. Therefore, people never cease to exist, their soul is eternal. Ultimately, body and soul will brought together, as at first, and permanently assigned to their place of eternal abiding. So the only question about our future existence is not if we will, but where we will and under what conditions.

We certainly can't be destroyed, anymore than God can!

Most of us are only all too aware of our need for the redemption of our broken, dying bodies: physical death, and what leads up to it, is enough to get that message across. Thankfully, we have the necessary vicarious sacrifice in the death of Christ and his victorious resurrection from the dead for that, provided we place our trust in him. But what is the more essential need included in the mix is the redemption of our eternal souls, those whisps of the very breath of God which last forever. Everlasting life is in our hands from the scarred hands of Christ, if we would just pause in faith and catch our breath.

A Christian Worldview: Where Are We Going?

In the last post I mentioned that the antidote to the place we find ourselves in is Jesus Christ, but what is it that gets people to come to Christ the antidote? Certainly, God is the most fundamental answer, but if God's effort was all that was needed to get people to the antidote, God would bring everyone to Christ and everyone would be saved. But that is not what happens--it does not comport with reality scripturally or materially. Whatever God does in the hearts of people to draw them to Christ has to be coupled with something that is not up to God to accomplish, otherwise, everyone would come to Christ and be saved.

That something is faith.

It takes faith in the antidote to actually avail oneself of the antidote. Faith in Christ like this is impossible for the depraved mind we spoke of in the last post to express, but it is also impossible for faith like this to be imposed. It wouldn't be faith in that case, it would be something more akin to instinct. So two elements need to come together to produce the faith connection to Christ: God, the Spirit empowering; and a willful reaction to trust God from the human heart. Like epoxy, two elements mix together to make a bond that works.

The old adage says that one can lead a horse to water but he can't make him drink. The Holy Spirit convicts, draws, we might go so far as to say woos the sinful human, but the Holy Spirit cannot and does not believe for him. Enabled by the Spirit's action, we must believe for ourselves. If we won't, God will not do it for us, and we won't be saved. The snag in all this, it seems to me, is that big word, REPENTANCE.

Repentance means to change one's mind, to realize after determining a course, that it was not the right course, and so changing directions. We tend to fixate on the small population of our own misdeeds when thinking about repentance, but that doesn't really get to the root of things. To repent of the thing that really ails us we have to go back to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. True repentance lies in undoing what Adam and Eve did.

Adam and Eve thought their judgment was as good as God's, we have to unthink that. Adam and Eve saw themselves on par with God as to determination of the what and wheres of life, we must "unsee" ourselves as like that. The thing Adam and Eve despaired over with regard to God, we must repair by the application of the cross and the victory of the resurrection. Simply put, we must stop trusting ourselves and start trusting God.

Pop psychology pushes people to trust in themselves, and seems to assume that people don't do so enough. As far as I have seen, most people have “trust-in-self” in spades. They really aren’t interested in trusting God, but they'll trust in their self, independent of God, even if their lives are falling apart. Pride? Perhaps. Yet, so many of those same folks still want eternal paradise, they're just not so hot on the whole overbearing God thing.

But if one doesn't love and trust God, one wouldn't like heaven.

An all-expense-paid trip to Disney World would be totally unappealing to me. I’m not interested in Disney characters, I don’t like standing in line, I have no interest in animatronics and I’m much more interested in experiencing a thrill in movement than watching a cheesy production. To top it off, I hate Florida! The heat and humidity are as close to hell as I hope ever to be. Why would I ever want to go to Disney World, even if offered an all-expense paid trip?

A similar question could be posed rhetorically to some folks regarding heaven. Heaven is all about God. Everyone there trusts him implicitly, everything there serves him unquestioningly, everyone there is fascinated by him, everything there is perfectly aligned to his will (and the people and angels there, willingly so). You see, everyone there is conformed to the image of Christ. For some folks that holds no allure. They may not want to go to hell, but they really don’t want to have life revolve around Jesus either!

The point of this life is not to get an all-expense-paid trip out of hell, nor to have life cease working against us (as in reversing the curse here and now). The point is changing our mind about God and ourselves, about realizing our need for Jesus and embracing a framework for living that revolves around trusting God rather than ourselves. A Christian worldview arises out of repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ.

So where are we heading as Christians?

Toward Christ in trust. Toward knowing Christ as Lord. Toward becoming just like him. A Christian worldview sees life revolving around God. Anything less is a fallacy. So turn to him today. Follow him tomorrow. Be at it next week. Make it the principle that governs all your living. That's where a Christian needs to be going.

How then shall we live...

A Christian Worldview: How Did We Get Here? Part II

As established in the first post in this seriest, seeing life through Jesus eyes entails seeing the world and the life in it as created by God. None of us is an accident of chance (not even the lowly amoeba is); instead, all life is the result of God actively creating life at some point in the past and then ceasing thereafter from creating life. Furthermore, this perspective is one that actually comports with reality, whereas any viewpoint excluding the existence of a creator and relying upon random chance and processes that could be active today does not.

That, however, leaves us with the questions of why life is what it is and why humans are what they are. What of suffering, and death, and evil? What kind of Creator must we have when there is such misery in the creation that creator has made? The texts of Genesis 3:14-24 and Romans 1:18-32 yield an answer, which is really quite robust and needs to be braided into any Christian worldview.

Simply put, the reason that conditions are what they are is that God is angry. The word used to describe God’s attitude toward life, particularly human life (Romans 1) is wrath [Koine: orge]. Literally, the word refers to a swelling up, figuratively it refers to the state of being teeming in opposition. In other words, the wrath (orge) God feels towards humanity moves him to stand up and fight against them. That might seem a quaint idea to modern sensibilities, but it is biblical and it lines up with reality!

But why is God so wrathful? According to Romans 1, it is because mankind has endeavored, from the beginning, to marginalize and dismiss God in order to do whatever they have wanted to do. Whether we look at the story of Adam and Eve, or at the generations leading up to Noah, or at those who built a tower in opposition to God’s right to rule over and judge us, or anything since, the biblical history of mankind is played on one note: resistance to God. His counterpoint is wrath.

In this day and age, is that an idea that has any merit, any truth value to it? Look for yourself. Are people willful while they put their Creator on a bookshelf or ignore that Creator altogether? Does dismissing or neglecting the Creator allow them to pursue whatever course of action they see fit? Do they project upon God what they want him to be or what conveniences their willful agenda? That certainly jibes with my observations.

Even good people, the very best people, don’t take God seriously.

If they're not projecting their wishes and excuses upon God in one way, then they're dismissing and neglecting him on another. No one in the natural is truly unselfish or unwillful or God-seeking, and it has always been so.

God’s reaction to such was to pull the plug. Pull the plug on perfection, pull the plug on life, pull the plug on health, pull the plug on relationship, and leave us to our own devices since that’s what we wanted. The plug pulled, God removed himself from our realtime perception of him and left humankind to themselves, given over to a mind without God in it. As a result humankind lives flawed lives in a flawed world until death comes and each faces ultimate judgment.

Philosophers worry about theodicy, the justification of a perfectly good God given all the suffering and death here on earth. It’s not a thing a person looking at the world through Jesus eyes needs to worry about, for the fault lies not in God, but in humankind. The question is not how can God be all-good in the midst of so much evil, but why, since God is only good, it’s not a whole lot worse! At some point in time, given God's perfections, it will have to be.

So we wonder, “How did we get here?” and we see the Bible has an answer. In the beginning, God made everything, including life, and then he rested. He made humans in his image with divine-like powers of will, choice, creativity, etc. and placed them in a perfectly made world. But humans, in their god-like abilities, opted to trust their own judgment and do their own will rather than God’s. They rebelled and triggered the judgment of a perfectly just God.

Death and all the misery, weakness and suffering that comes with it is the price humans pay in the here and now for wanting God as he truly is out of the picture. Not only in themselves was the penalty inflicted but also upon the world around them God made for them. As it was for Adam and Eve, so it is for the rest of us. We have been given over to ourselves, separated from God, and the result is a depraved mind in a world broken beyond repair, leading to death.

But there is an antidote. God has a plan for fallen humankind, lost in isolation, brokenness and death--a redemptive plan. If we turn from our rebellion, from our rejection of God, and embrace him in our lives and living, he will welcome us into fellowship with himself and give us his very own breath so we can live in soundness of mind and fellowship with him now and forever. This is the message of Christ, this is what his death and resurrection secured for all who repent and accept the gospel.

A Christian worldview perceives that we are not accidents of chance but the creations of purpose--the purpose of God. A Christian worldview sees everything as a creation made by God but broken by sin, wrecked by death, and thankfully, redeemed in Christ. A Christian worldview sees that God has put us in this broken place so we would see the folly of our rebellion, repent, and put our trust in him.

A Christian worldview sees God in the face of Christ and realizes he is the only way out of the here we've gotten into.

What Does It Mean to Be Totally Depraved?

The one point that Calvinism and Arminianism agree upon is that humankind is totally depraved. It sounds like an incredibly harsh judgment against the creature, one that is not apparent, particularly, when looking at individual cases. This description, however, is not meant to suggest that everyone is as "bad" as they could possibly be, but to describe their spiritual condition in relation to God. In a nutshell, this characterization refers to the disabling brokenness that sin and death has caused to human nature since Adam's fall.

When Adam forsook God and was justifiably cursed by him, his innate connection to God was broken and his physical being was stricken with death. Adam was cast from the presence of God (the place where God walked) and frustrated in his relationship to the biosphere and with others of his kind (Eve to start). The individual became an island unto himself (so necessarily sinful) with no ability to get back to God, nor to truly understand and relate to him nor, for that matter, to do so with his fellow human (as seen from Jesus' high-priestly prayer). Locked in a self-absorbed prison of death and decay separated from God, debauchery ensued. If God did not initiate contact with humans, no contact, no interest, no desire would be forthcoming from Adam's kind.

Hopefully, it is evident that humankind's depravity should not be seen as something that renders humankind incapable, even in their depraved state, of responding to the interjection of God. God showing up in a way that can be responded to is sufficient in itself to break any barrier that would have kept fallen, natural man in the dark concerning God. Such is demonstrated over and over again throughout biblical history (e.g. Noah, Abram, Moses, etc.). To posit a theory in which God has to fix the depraved human being (i.e. regeneration) before that one can respond to him is unnecessary and not validated by scripture.

The truth is that what makes humans depraved in the first place is a lack of God in their lives. People are depraved in that they are like God (i.e. in his image) but are apart from and without God who's presence is what makes that image work properly. In their depravity, they have no desire to have God (as he truly is) in their lives. What they need they neither discern nor want. When God comes near in the mysterious ways that the Holy Spirit can, that lack is addressed at least to the level that the fallen human is able to see, hear, and respond to what wasn't there before. None of this requires any change in their nature and none is ever mentioned throughout the biblical record.

Human beings always had and have always maintained since the Fall the spiritual capacity to recognize God. That capacity was not such that it could independently discover God or engage him on the basis of executing that capacity in and of itself. God's direct intervention is necessary for each and every human being to come to know and understand him and his ways, but upon that divine intervention, awareness of what we otherwise would not have been aware becomes possible. However, if Adam in all of his pristine purity and perfection could ignore and forsake divine connectedness, than so can all his depraved sons and daughters.

Even the best amongst humankind is totally depraved, broken beyond their ability to help themselves--and yet even the most depraved among us can respond to the gracious visitation of the Holy Spirit. Depravity will continue to be an issue for us until Christ returns and our old dead, depraved natures are done away with once and for all, and new nature completely like unto Christ's is put in their place. That, of course, is predicated upon turning to Christ now. So let me ask you, have you responded to the Holy Spirit drawing you to Christ yet?

What Is Freewill?

Freewill is a description of volitional power which God, alone, has perfectly. He does as he pleases without disability or mitigation. He can do a thing or not do it.

When God created the heavens and earth and all that lives therein, he made a freewill choice to have that creation reflect himself, and in particular for man to resemble himself. To that end, he gave mankind a physical body made of the stuff that everything else was made of, including everything else living, and infused it with a spiritual animus that made mankind uniquely, specially in his image. Whatever a soul is (and I'm certain we really don't know what that is), it is something that came into being when the breath (spirit) of God was infused into the corpus of man.

It is that ethereal thing, the soul, which expresses itself through a physical being made for it, which makes a healthy human being a reflector of God's freewill and an expresser of it in its own accord. While an individual is in a body, that individual is beholden to that body for its expression of its soulish being. If a brain is damaged, malformed, underdeveloped, diseased or afflicted, the soulish power of freewill will be affected in its expression. God has created man as a discrete singularity made of body, soul and spirit, so that as the body goes, so goes the expression of soulish personhood.

A soul without a properly functioning brain will not express in the physical world the freewill it otherwise has the innate ability to. Without a body a soul is not a complete human, which is reflected, I think, in the crying out under the altar of those martyred souls in Revelation (and the fact that we get new bodies for eternity). When a person is intact and healthy, the existence of his or her soul, is what gives that person the capacity to express freewill. There are limits, of course, the most obvious being the physical laws of the universe, and what is more important in my opinion, the law of Spirit.

The Law of the Spirit determines the ability of the soul to express itself in harmony with God. After the Fall of Adam and Eve, spiritual death, or separation between man and the Spirit of God, was imposed upon mankind. Whatever sort of resting place the soul had been made to be for the breath of God, its connection to the breath of God was broken at that time and so freewill in mankind was incapable of willing in harmony with God. After Jesus rose from the dead and made the Spirit available to those who follow him, the born again have by that rebirth a renewed ability to will freely in harmony with God (though the not perfectly so long as they are in dying bodies).

So what is freewill? It is the volitional power human beings possess, which, among other things, allows them to be the expression of the image of God who possesses freewill in its ultimate sense. Though a soulish quality, it is communicated in the physical world through the auspices of the physical being (particularly, the brain). Natural human beings have no ability to express that capacity in line with God, supernatural human beings (the regenerated) have some capacity to, eternal human beings will be able to perfectly.

The Image of God in Mankind

I have established, minimally, that the image of God in mankind is reflected in mankind's freewill. Furthermore, I implied that since God is more than his will, his image in mankind must include more than freewill. Love, creativity, reasoning, communicability, and dominion are part of the picture as well. To take it a step further, I think a very good case can be made that it was through the instrumentality of God's breath that the image of God was communicated to man (i.e. Spirit became spirit). He is spirit and so is man (in some respect) which is why man can be like him.

Of all the creatures God made in the physical world, mankind alone was said to be made in his image and given dominion. Angels are not mentioned at all in the creation account, but appear suddenly, without explanation or specifications, at the Fall of Man. Only much later in the record of revelation are we told they were made to be ministering (sacredly serving) spirits by God. Yet, even though salvation and redemption hold a fascination for them, they have no ability to be redeemed through faith.

Though they are spiritual beings, as is God, many of them fell into rebellion with Satan. Those, at least, had to have had some kind of freewill capacity (see this as to why), although we can only guess as to its nature. We don't know why unfallen angels did not fall, nor indeed, if they even had the capacity to do so in the first place. Regardless, we can be thankful they, at least, are faithful to God and serve the heirs of salvation amongst mankind to this day.

Mankind is a strange word to generically refer to all human beings with, but it is a biblical way of looking at things. Today's feminists may be bothered by designations that seem better suited to males than females, but believers in the Bible recognize that there is nothing inherently wrong with such. Men are made in the image of God and are tasked with dominion--some are male, some are female. There is absolutely no distinction in the image of God that either gender bears nor in the mandate of dominion they were given.

Only sin, followed by the curse and death has affected the relative status of both types of men. Enmity between the sexes exists, because under the curse, females were placed beneath males in the dominion mandate. In the perfection of God's created order before the Fall, male and female had no more significance than reproductive utility. In Christ, post-redemption, after the curse is no more, there is neither male nor female to any spiritual consequence, which will be particularly evident after the Resurrection.

The Problem of Physical Evil

Why does an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God allow evil such latitude in our age? That God will judge such in a time to come, and cause it to cease thereafter forever is an answer, but it seems a marginal one at best to those living through this age. And to be honest, eternal judgment in the Lake of Fire for the evil done temporally seems only to exacerbate the problem, fighting evil with evil for all intents and purposes. Natural evil--catastrophes, pestilence, genetic abnormalities--seems capricious and only adds to the miserable mystery.

Physical evil certainly is a vexing problem. It rains (too much or too little) on the just and the unjust, earthquakes do not shake merely the morally shaky, tornadoes have been known to sweep through Bible-believing churches while the congregation was in the midst of worship and prayer, and pestilence, mutations and snakes strike apart from any discernment protocol. God may have pulled the plug on this creation because of sin, and let it slowly spiral down the drain, but on the surface, for those twisting in the vortex, it doesn't seem very just or loving. Who can make sense of it?

What needs to remembered in such considerations is that, according to God's standard, it's not the other guy who is evil, it's us--all of us, every single one that has ever come into existence. By God's reckoning, any opposition to his will is evil, even merely eating a piece of fruit he did not want us to. We think we are innocent (so long as we have not overtly harmed another creature), but that is just not the way God sees it. The truth is that humans do as they please, they do without regard to God, they do in opposition to God, and thus they demonstrate that they are, in fact, evil.

That humans have what opportunity they do have to live in a dying world is an accommodation of the magnanimous grace of God. "Wait just a minute," you might be thinking, "we didn't ask to be born at all, let alone the way we are where we are." How is allowing some of us to be particularly evil, while letting all of us live in an environment consistently evil, grace? Well, I think that it demonstrates that God has not written off the human race.

Everything could have ended with the failure of the prototype (Adam and Eve). God could have wiped out everything at The Fall, and been justifiably done with it. Starting over again would not have been an option, because in granting a creature freewill, the same evil to which the prototype succumbed would have been in play for any built like them (in the image of God, that is). The truth is, only God can handle being like God: those that are merely like God, but not God, must live submitted to God in love and faith.

So, though God cannot allow evil to stand and so pulled the plug on this universe, in his love for what was made good, he patiently continues what seems to us the slow, inexorable unfolding of judgment, which is physical evil, because there is a possibility of redemption. Evil creatures, which rebelled in the darkness of ignorance, can be illumined and change their mind and heart about going their own way. If they can truly take to heart the necessity of submission to and agreement with God, he can recast and reset them in a new universe untainted by the fall of the originals.

So there really isn't a problem with physical evil, but there's still a bit more I'd like to talk about...

The Nature of Freedom and Depravity

Human beings are free to do as they wish. God made them that way. Adam and Eve were free to do as they wished. They could eat anything that grew in the Garden, save that from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam could name the animals whatever he wished. He could have named them this, he could have named them that. They could have eaten this, they could have eaten that.

God made humans that way in making them in his image. God does as he wishes--it is his most fundamental quality apart from self-existence. No being is freer of necessity than God, for who or what is there that could impose necessity upon him? He could have created the universe, or he could have not. He could have made beings like us in his image, or he could have not. But God did make us in this image of freedom, excepting of course, that he could not make himself, so the image is not as powerful, nor as free, nor as able as the original.

Nonetheless, that created in the image has to be free in a way analogous to God or it would not be in his image. If God determines our desires or decrees our choices we are no more free than a robot, and nor more in his image than a robot can be in ours. If our choice is circumscribed by desire, the result is not freedom but mere instinct. The Bible generally (there are specific exceptions) shows humans in a light in which the kind of choice described thus far would have to be presupposed in order for the accounts to make sense.

Mankind, since the Fall of Adam and Eve, are not as free as they were nor as free as a being made in God's image could be. Humans, on their own, could never replicate or reflect the choices that God would make (and they've been on their own since the Fall). Dead in spirit and separated from God, they have no means of discerning the way or the will of God. This lack of ability to discover anything or to do anything truly godly translates into mankind having neither the inclination nor the power to choose as God would have them choose. Even with God's word giving mankind more information than they could have ever gotten on their own, without spiritual renewal (regeneration) mankind remains depraved.

Fallen humanity does has the power of choice--the freedom to do as they wish. Their wishes, however, can never rise to nor align with the choice of God. Apart from the Spirit of God communicating the word of God into the soul of a man and thereby enabling faith, that man is not free to do as God wills or, indeed, to know what that is. With the action of God's Spirit bringing to bear God's word on the human heart and giving faith the opportunity to arise, something other than the general depravity of mankind is possible.

Living Is a Gift from God

Since none of us has called ourselves or the space we live in into existence, our very existence, and any and every moment of our existence, is something that we receive from God. Life comes from his hands. If our lives at their most basic levels are what amounts to gifts from God, then everything that we hope will come our way in those lives gifted to us is a gift as well. The most fundamental description of our relationship to God, then, is that we are receivers of his gifts.

It is true that the nature of our present existence, even as given by God, makes some effort on our parts necessary in order to attain some level of and quality in life. We do eat by the "sweat of our brows" after all. But it seems to me that the necessity of earning at that level tends to makes us self-centered--we tend to think of living in terms of my effort, my reward, my ambitions, my desires. In the unending swirl of all that self-centeredness, one can forget (or even never awaken to) the fact that our very life, our very breath, is a gift from God.

According to the record of scripture, we only need to work so in order to get because of a curse imposed because of sin. Sin is in the world, sin is in us. If it was not for sin, however, we would not have death over our heads and we would not have to sweat to get our bread. Take sin out of the equation and we would have freely what God freely, liberally, gives us and it would be crystal clear that all was a gift from God.

This can be difficult for us to embrace. It is almost as if our sweating for our bread, the toil of scratching out a living separated from God all the while dying, plays a trick on us. Even if we happen to be aware of God's part in the big picture, we tend to project the concept of earning upon any blessing we could get from God. We think we have to earn whatever blessing we may be seeking from God, even as we have to earn to eat.

Even if we ask God for blessing we do so as earners, not as gift recipients. We seek his favor by making promises to him or by citing our rewardable behaviors. We try to find some valid reason for us to receive the reward we seek. Even if we haven't earned such a blessing in the past, we assure God we will do so in the future should he make that blessing ours.

All such boasting is antithetical to the purposes of God, and let's be clear, what that is, is boasting. Even more than that, it is living by the principles of the present darkness, it is living by sight. Sight, in effect,  says "give me what I deserve", but faith says "give me what you're willing to". Perhaps the greatest threshold faith must cross is getting over the boastful notions of humankind, borne of the reality of this present existence, that can only see life through the prism of getting what you've worked to gain.

Thankfully, God is willing to give us a lot without earning a bit. Most importantly, he is willing to give you what you could never earn by your efforts--everlasting life and standing in his eternal kingdom. All this is predicated upon us embracing, as a matter of faith, a new perspective which puts us in the mindset of receiving everything we receive from God as an undeserved gift. Living starts, really, when we see it as a gift from God.

What Makes Us Sinners?

That mankind has a sin nature is clearly taught in scripture. Romans 7 gives an adequate description of how it displays itself, even in those who are "good," but what, exactly, is the sin nature? I think it could be described in terms of the bondage of the will accurately enough, but where exactly did that bondage come from and how does it work?

I stated before that mankind was made in the image of God, but in ignorance (innocence). That condition was called good by God, despite the claim I've made that it was not his ultimate aim, nor will it be our condition in eternity. Our higher abilities (like will, choice and creativity) were made complementary to God's because he wanted mankind to live on his level as his family and friends. Though he is the omnipotent God, scary on so many levels, his aim is to have us be one with him.

What does all this have to do with the sin nature? Well, God alone is good: only he has what it takes to express Godlike attributes in harmony with his perfect will. Only he can manage those things which make up his image. The sin nature arose in mankind when Adam and Eve, despite having the breath of God (a living Spirit), exercised Godlike capacities in opposition to God. Sin is the exertion of will contrary to the will of God.

As a consequence, the breath that God imparted lost its connection with the God who breathed it (spiritual death), mankind was thereby separated from God, cursed, and whatever capacity pristine man had to walk in the will of God was lost irretrievably. Since then, we walk in dying flesh apart from God, godlike to some degree, but anything but like God. We possess some godlike capacities, but without the ability to harness them to "good." We do what we have an urge to do regardless of what God wants: some more, some less. 

That is the essence of our sinful natures. Adam and Eve had their life degraded to that level, and at that level they reproduced what would become all the rest of us. They passed on their broken nature as sinners, because it was all they had to pass on. The machinery of our soul cannot function without God being in us, and us being in agreement with him. That disagreement, and the disability that results in being without God is what makes us sinners.

The Thorny Issue in Healing

Continuing with the subject of Divine Healing, with a review of some pertinent scripture verses: Isaiah 53:3-5; 1 Corinthians 13:9-10; Romans 8:10-11; Ephesians 1:13-14; John 9:1-3; Luke 10:1-12; Mark 16:15-18; I Corinthians 12; Matthew 9:28-30; Mark 9:23-24; Mark 6:1-6; 1 Corinthians 11:27-32; James 5:14-20; Revelation 22:1-3

Let's review the basics I've presented up to this point:

1. Humans experience sickness because they are born in bodies that were stricken with the curse of death due to Adam's sin;
2. Only by getting new bodies not stricken by that curse will Christians not be susceptible to illness;
3. The Devil attempts to take advantage of that susceptibility to bring us to greater depths of misery than we otherwise would experience, but he is not the ultimate author of sickness and disease;
4. In expunging the curse upon sinners through his own unmerited death, Christ undermined the foundation of illness;
5. Therefore, when Christians do experience illness, they can call upon God for healing in very much the same way they would call upon him for forgiveness if they had sinned.

This all sounds so simple and straightforward, but if I'm honest I'd have to admit that things don' t work that crisply and cleanly in the real world. God, apparently, juggles more variables in governing our lives than we can ever be aware of. Just when we think we have it figured out, and have identified all the relevant factors, the unexplainable (or maybe just the entirely too complex) comes upon us and we face that same awe striking reality Job did. Our understanding distills in those moments like Job's did in his--God is God and that has to be enough for us.

Some issues Christians face are just thorny. Like Job, the Apostle Paul had his moment of clarity (or resignation?) concerning such perplexities. Even though we anticipate God watching over our lives to bring blessing, there are times we are pummeled with everything but blessing. What can we learn from Paul's or Job's experience? Even though Paul did what any person of faith should do when faced with a physical attack (i.e. pain, disability, or sickness), whether directly attributable to the Devil or not, he got none of the relief the atonement of Christ would have been expected to deliver.

Let me sketch out the particulars of his circumstance in the hopes that we'll see this the same way: 1) Paul was afflicted by a singular source of irritation that "beat" his flesh (which I find hard not to see in physical terms as pain); 2) the Devil was the agent which visited this suffering upon Paul; 3) Paul prayed diligently in faith for "healing" (as I've posited should be our approach); 4) God had a spiritual agenda operating for Paul's benefit which acted synchronously, almost symbiotically, with the Devil's evil one; and 5) in the end, Paul celebrated his "beaten but unhealed", condition because in not succeeding in destroying him, it demonstrated God's miraculous power (perhaps as much as healing would have).

When physical suffering is clearly from the Devil, as in Paul's case, the certainty that it is not ours to bear is that much more definite. We are the blood-bought, blood-washed children of God. The Devil has no business nor any right in afflicting us. Operating from that perspective, Paul asked once for it to be gone, nothing. Twice, nothing still. Thrice the charm? Not in this case.

Paul's faith in God's deliverance through Christ was sure, hence his importunity. Certainly, he understood the implications of Christ's atonement as well as anyone ever did. If ever there was a candidate for the healing ministrations of Christ, Paul was that one. And yet God did not heal Paul, he gave him a word instead. It was a promise of victory even though it wasn't a promise of healing.

Huh? God promised that even though the affliction remained, it would not get the best of him. Despite that thorn, Paul would go on and God's grace would be sufficient to carry him through whatever the Devil threw at him. I'm led to conclude that overcoming can look different from God's perspective than from ours.

I know dear brothers and sisters in the Lord who are full of faith and lead outstanding Spirit-filled lives of love and faithfulness, yet they are chronically sick and feeble or are lame. Diabetes, in particular, is a stubborn culprit for many dear brothers and sisters in God's kingdom. Did a lack of faith either create their conditions or does it keep them in them? No, I don't think so, but I do think we, like Paul, need to express the importunity of faith before we resign ourselves to those conditions.

Healing has already been won for us by Christ. It was provided in his atonement. There will be no sickness in his coming kingdom. Then why should any of us accept a thorn, that by rights is not ours to bear? Without a word like Paul received from the Lord I don't see how any of us could.

Does God Want Us To Be Sick?

We continue with the subject of Divine Healing, with a reminder of some pertinent scripture verses before we deal with the subject at hand: Isaiah 53:3-5; 1 Corinthians 13:9-10; Romans 8:10-11; Ephesians 1:13-14; John 9:1-3; Luke 10:1-12; Mark 16:15-18; I Corinthians 12; Matthew 9:28-30; Mark 9:23-24; Mark 6:1-6; 1 Corinthians 11:27-32; James 5:14-20; Revelation 22:1-3

As I have said in an earlier post, it was God's justified curse on man for sin which resulted in death and led to decay, infirmity and disease. A reasonable person might assume from that nugget of truth that God's will for fallen humans is that they be ill, at least at times. However, that same God sent his son Jesus to become the curse for us so that we could be freed from its effects. The penalty of death (and with it infirmity, decay and disease) was eradicated by the substitutionary death of the sinless lamb of God. 

Since God's wrath against sin was fully expended upon Christ in suffering his passion, none of God's wrath is left for the heirs of salvation. Logically (even if there was no passage like Isaiah 53:4-5), for the sacrifice of Christ to exhaust and expunge the curse of death, it would also, by necessity, wipe out the effects of death, namely, decay, infirmity and disease. Therefore, people who embrace Christ's vicarious sacrifice for sin through faith, should not only have the blessing of sins forgiven and eternal life, but they should also have the provision of healing, now.

The promise of divine health and healing for those within the covenant of faith is well attested in scripture. It is an established pattern, from of old, that clues us into God's management style. He wants those he redeems to be well. That Isaiah makes it clear that healing is provided for within the atonement of Christ only strengthens the point. Some of the last verses of the Apocalypse clarify the ultimate intention of God that those that are his be well.

But wait a minute here, we still grow old, get sick and die. Why, if all that I've written above is true? According to the Apostle Paul, these mortal frames formed from Adam and Eve's flesh (genes) must be put off before new bodies untinged by Adam's sin and not subject to death may be put on. We have a very rich inheritance in Christ, but we can only receive a portion of it now while in these dead bodies. We'll have to wait until the resurrection for the full package.

Until then all humanity, even the believing, will continue to die in their time. And while in dying bodies, even Christians can get sick, despite the provision of healing in the atonement. Is there anything that can be done about that? We'll take up that question and the whys and wherefores in the next post on the subject.