If we give ourselves to God it is amazing what he can do through us. We have to get to the root of the problem. If we don’t discern the real problem we are not going to find the real solution. We are to pray to our father, and having glorified and magnified his name our first request is to be that the kingdom should come and his will is to be done on earth the way that it is done in heaven. We need to understand what the kingdom really is; the Greek word means government or rule.
What we are asking for is that his rule or government would come. We cannot sincerely want that for our city or nation, without wanting that for ourselves. The kingdom has to begin within us, with you and me. If we don’t want God to rule over us the way that he ruled over the Lord Jesus, then we do not really want the kingdom to come.
The first manifestation of the kingdom on earth is in what we call the period of innocence, before Adam and eve made a fatal decision which has affected us all.
His first commandment to them was to have dominion or ruler ship over all that he had created. While that situation was maintained everything was just fine.
The necessary factor in all of this was Adam and Eve had a delegated authority, they didn’t have any absolute authority. For everything to work it was necessary for themselves to be totally under the rule and government of God. In the beginning that is how they lived.
When we are totally under the rule and government of God, God is able to pour the full power of his eternal life into us without restriction, and it is the power of that eternal life that gives us the resources to govern ourselves and all that is under our delegated authority. As long as we stay submitted to God we can draw upon his life. And by the power of that eternal life we are able to do everything that is right.
Adam and eve didn’t need to know what is right or wrong, we don’t need to know what is right or wrong. We just need to know what God had said. They didn’t make any moral choices; they just made the choice to do whatever God had said. They didn’t need to know what was right or wrong, they didn’t have to be their own moral judges, they let God be the moral judge. All they did was to just live in this total submitted obedient relationship. Whatever God said they just did it.
When we are filled with the Spirit and under his control what flows out is perfect love, wisdom, righteousness, everything is perfect because the source is God and everything in God is perfect, it is able to flow through us in that same perfection, because there is nothing in our soul blocking it, because of our total submitted relationship.
The kingdom is absolutely glorious because of who God is. We are not teaching a principle that works anywhere, but a principle that only works in relationship to God. When we come to God there is only one way to relate to him and that is to do entirely and everything he says without needing to know why? Just do it.
And then as a result things that we don’t understand, and things that we cannot judge, we understand the wisdom of it after we do it. These days we are faced with such awesome moral decisions that no one has the capacity to make the right decision.
Man is discovering that he can’t handle himself or the world that he lives in because he has lost contact with the only one who has the power and the ability to make it work properly. And this is the basic problem in society. And until this thing is fixed we are not going to see anything working the way that it should. We have to understand this principle. The way that the world comes under God’s government, is that it first has to start with us.
When man was under Gods government, pain, suffering, sin, sickness and death were totally unknown upon the earth. This was because everything within the kingdom was under God’s perfect rule.
God is perfect love and eternal life. In this state the kingdom was totally impregnable and impenetrable by Satan. He couldn’t come in to touch anything that God had made. The only way to come in was to come to God which was impossible or to come through the next link in the governmental order which was man.
While man lived in total complete submission to God and lived in total obedience man was as impregnable as God as long as he remained in that relationship. Satan could only stand on the outside and look in, but he couldn’t touch anything. If man had stayed in that relationship there never would have been any penetration.
Death would never be known, suffering would be an unknown experience and no pain and nothing in all of God’s creation could be polluted or corrupted in any way by any form of disease. This is how it was like until that fatal moment. Satan had no way of attacking or usurping God’s glorious kingdom.
God placed in the garden two trees. And they were placed there as prophetic representations of a choice that was open to Adam and eve. Part of God’s mystery is that he doesn’t want people serving him as puppets on an end of a string. He wants it to be done voluntary.
Imagine if you were a powerful hypnotist and hypnotizing your daughter or son so that they were completely under your control. And you say hug me, and they walks toward you puts thier arms around you. Kiss me and they kiss you. Would that give you any pleasure-no? If they came running into the room and threw their arms around you and said I love you, as a free agent, it would give you pleasure.
God wants this kind of relationship with us, where we love him voluntarily. God is not satisfied or fulfilled by being loved by a puppet.
We know as a parent how it feels when our children really love us. God is looking for worshipers, or lovers. Daddy I love you and I just want to be with you. When a woman or man really loves you, it does something to you. It is getting a taste of what God wants in a relationship.
God has set us free, that we might voluntarily come to him and love and worship him.
God has set us free, that we might voluntarily come back to him and in the pain of learning, we learn the safety and security of living this way once again with God. This is part of the mystery of why God allowed the fall to happen. He wants to have voluntary, joyful submission. The angles mechanically obey him, but we have the choice of obeying him.
The choice that he gave us has a risk factor. So he set in the garden two trees. They were prophetic symbols one was called the tree of life and if they partook of it they would live forever in the eternal life of God.
If they chose this relationship which is that you are totally submitted to God, totally under his control, you live in perfect submitted obedience to all of God’s will, you obey every commandment without question and while they did this his eternal life would flow into them without restriction empowering them to be his effectual delegated authority over all that he had made. This is what the tree of life represented. It was a choice; the choice was to walk with God in total obedience.
The other tree was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. While they continued to walk with God, His kingdom or government covered the whole earth and everything remained in perfect, incorruptible order. Satan had no access anywhere-anyway in all of creation and he couldn’t establish his own kingdom, he couldn’t bring darkness, he couldn’t corrupt or pervert anything or pollute anything that God had made. This was the situation.
But this second tree the knowledge of good and evil gave to Adam and eve at least theoretically a different choice, the choice was to have their own moral discernment and then to rely on their own resources to live out what they saw to be right and to avoid what they saw to be wrong.
So having the choice of moral discernment to know the difference between good and evil meant that they were cut off from the eternal life of God and to find the resources within themselves to fulfill the moral choices.
Now the fact is that pretty much ever religion on the face of the earth, basically states good things that we should do and bad things that we should not do. The problem is that none of them work. Because no one can find the resources outside of God to live what is right or wrong.
The law which God gave to us through Moses, was given to demonstrate how powerless we are to live to a good set of rules when we only have our own ability and resources to depend on.
Every principle of law we are told was good and it was perfect but no one was able to keep it, the law which seemed to spell out a way of life actually spelt out a way of death. Because there was no ability to live up to those God given good standards. We need to spend time meditating on these things.
The issue is dependence or independence, when our spirit is quickened we want to do the right things, but we do not have the wisdom in ourselves to make the right decision. We have to wait on the lord until he quickens us, until we hear his voice, until the light comes on, and then we know what he wants us to do.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil theoretically at least gave them moral discernment in determining good from evil but left them with only the resources of their own human nature and only their own inner strength to live the way that they perceived to be wise and right.
God commanded them not to eat of this tree and he warned them saying that in the day they eat of it you will die. You are moving now from God dependence to self sufficiency. We need to see what the heart of this thing is.
The devil didn’t tempt Adam and eve to sin, but to continue at the same high moral level that they were living at already, but instead of using the resources of God they were to do it by the power of their own strength and their own ability. And that was the temptation, he tempted them not to sin, but to move in independence, he tempted them to independence. When we really see this we will realize what frightening and terrifying thing independence is. Many times we are tackling the wrong thing. We are tackling the issue of sin and we are not going to the root, the root is independence.
Sin is only a fruit of the root. The root is independence. If we try and deal with the fruit by dealing with sin, we will never come to an end of the harvest of sin because we have never dealt with the root. It will just keep on producing another crop. Until we get this firmly into our spirit and into our own understanding we will never come to an end of sin.
Satan didn’t tempt the woman to sin but he invited her to change her totally God dependant lifestyle to one in which she became independent or self governing instead. She was promised that she would not die but would by developing the power of her own internal latent resources she would fully emancipate herself to become just like God in her own right.
This was the temptation. This is the root of every religion. They are pursuing a power with great energy and zeal to become like God but the failure is that they are trying to do it by their own strength. And of course they can’t do it. This is the lie that is still being bought. And much of Christianity has been perverted to say the same thing. It teaches moral behavior and then we use our own efforts to reach that moral behavior, which is impossible and futile.
Satan maligned Gods character by suggesting that God was only getting them to live in this totally submitted way because he wanted to keep control of them.
Why do you live under God’s rule, if you step out into independence and discover the latent resources inside of you and fully develop them you can live like God by the power of your own strength, and you will become like God.
This was the subtly of the temptation. When they fell they lost the power of God. The temptation was to a life of independence and self-realization, it was not a temptation to a life of sinfulness.
When they yielded to this temptation they stepped out from the kingdom of God. The root of the kingdom is a relationship; this is what the kingdom is. The kingdom is to live under the government or management of God.
The kingdom is a something, but that something comes into existence by those who are of the kingdom accepting a relationship where they say to God you are lord, you are king and I am going to live in a way where I do not make my own decisions, I do not make my own choices, I do not even morally judge what is right and what is wrong, all I do is to hear you and do what you say.
When we are truly born again, we are born with perfect spiritual hearing. We are able to hear God. It is a latent (hidden, present or existing, but in an underdeveloped or unexpressed form) gift in the new birth.
When we are newly born again if we are not fed, we can lose interest, and the things of the world enter in. The ability to hear begins to disappear through neglect. Just because we are born with the gift of hearing doesn’t not guarantee, that we will continually hear, it has to be trained and developed.
When we are born again the ability to hear God is as clearly given to us as it was given to Jesus in the days of his humanity. What we have to do as a first priority is to learn how to develop that gift of hearing.
The way to develop our spiritual hearing is to obey. And the way to lose our spiritual hearing is to disobey. If we continue to disobey we finally become deaf, so that God doesn’t even bother to speak to us anymore. And we are unable to hear God. We will never have a problem hearing God if we always obey what we hear.
We receive impressions, like a voice. There is a moment, if we obey God at that moment; he makes it easy for us. If we obey God when he speaks to us it is not going to be difficult, but we cannot decide to do it in our own time.
God told the children of Israel to take the land, no! The giants are too big. They tried to go in later being led by their mind, but it was not the time, they were in their own strength and were defeated by the enemy. If they went in Gods timing they would have been in the Promised Land in six weeks. When we hear God, now is the time to act, it is literally a kyros moment. We need to be hearing God and obeying God.
We don’t have any choice if we are in the kingdom, you just obey. Just hear God and obey him. This is how the kingdom works.
When Adam and eve lived that way and obeyed the father they were totally and absolutely impregnable to the devil, he couldn’t do anything to them or through them. All of creation was secure from any perversion of the devil while Adam and eve remained in right submitted authority to God.
There is a principle that we have to learn, as God started the recovery program the same principles apply. If we are living totally in the kingdom of God and if we are living like the first Adam (or like the lord Jesus Christ, because he lived like that on earth) then the devil cannot do anything to us. And all that he has given us authority to rule over, the father of a family, the pastor of a church, part of the eldership of a city, where we are rightly related to submitted authority to God then all that we have been given responsibility to govern over, that is also impregnable to the attacks of the devil.
So many kids of Christian parents are destroyed not by the power of the devil, but because they open the door by their disobedience as parents. Many churches are ripped to pieces because the leadership is not living according to these principles. And this is also true of a city, when every pastor of every church in the city is going their own independent way, how can they guard that city from the evil one.
We need to see the incredible powerful potential of getting this right and starting to live this way. A household divided against itself cannot stand. A city divided against itself cannot stand. It is vulnerable to the devils attacks. We need to let this principle get deep inside of us.
If there is a living God he has the right to rule over what he had created, so when we come to the lord, this awareness is brought to us. Gods rule over our life should already be understood before we become a Christian.
So there should never be a time when we do not accept that that is the only way a Christian could honestly live. But in the beginning we think we are going to suffer loss. When we receive the lord we think well that is the end of this and that, and also the end of the things that we enjoy. But I am just going to do it.
There is a reluctant compliance, but then as we get to know the Lord we realize it is foolish to think that way. Seek first the kingdom, this sounds too abstract, we need to make it personal, make certain that God is truly ruling over your life, we make sure that everything about our life, everything that we do, every moment of our time, every bit of our ability, our skills, all our finances, not just the bit we give to God in tithes and offerings, but the rest of it, put it all under the rule and government of God, as a first priority, and then all these other things will be yours as well.
The thing that scares us the most is to accidently get our will in anything. There is nothing more disastrous, anything that God has given us government over will be harmed by our own disobedience. It doesn’t just affect us it affects all that we have authority over.
The devil was just waiting for them to step into independence, then he could step into their life. He couldn’t touch them when they were in the kingdom.
Things happened to Adam and eve when they made this choice. Firstly they were moved from God’s protection. If you are not in the kingdom you cannot be protected. The devil has a right to attack you, and he will. It also affects those you have any governmental authority over. All that you rule over is vulnerable.
It was not only Adam and Eve who found themselves victims of Satan’s attack; all of creation was now open for the devils attack.
The second thing that happened was that they were removed from God’s presence and fellowship and immediately they were alienated or they were cut off from the life of God and they began to die.
Eph 4: 17This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth (no more) walk (all our activities, mode of acting, to be occupied with and follow) not as other Gentiles (the human race that does not have an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit) walk, in the vanity (empty pleasure in contrast to the fullness of the spirit of life) of their mind, (mode of thinking) 18Having the understanding (comprehension, thought, imagination) darkened (spiritual state brought about by their actions, to deprive of light), being (continuous existence) alienated (spiritual state brought about by their actions, non-participant, and an alien) from the life of God through (instrument-cause) the ignorance (lack of knowledge) that is in them, because (cause) of the blindness (insensitivity, hardness) of their heart: 19Who being past feeling (spiritual state brought about by their actions, callous, insensitive, lack of interest, indifference, incapable of feeling pain, not open to the conviction of the Holy Spirit)have given themselves over(to deliver over to the power of) unto lasciviousness (insatiable desire of pleasure), to work (practice, toil)all (totality)uncleanness (moral uncleanness, that which is not purely of His Spirit, that which falls short of His glory) with greediness (the root from which sin grows, longing to fill oneself with the lower objects of the natural world). 20But (on the contrary) ye have not so learned (specific point past, to have learned something, to have experienced it so as to understand) Christ; 21If so be that (if at least, spoken if that which is taken for granted) ye have heard (specific point past, hearken to obey-to understand) him, and have been taught (to tutor, direct, advise, to influence the understanding) by him, as the truth is in Jesus: 22That ye put off (specific point in time not continuous, to renounce, cast off, lay down) concerning (the object toward which anything tends or aims) the former (prior, previous) conversation (behavior) the old (former) man, which is corrupt (continuous, bring to a worse state) according to the deceitful (delusion) lusts ;( desire resulting from the diseased condition of the soul);and be renewed(continuous action, renewed in spiritual vitality) in the spirit(innermost part, disposition, vital principle, the breath of the spirit, the God part, the regenerated spirit) of your mind.(organ of mental perception, the consciousness preceding action)and that ye put on (a specific point in time 1-intimate union 2-go in or under- to put on as a garment, to clothe oneself.) the new(qualitatively new) man, which after God is created(definiteness of action, to create, produce from nothing, to create and form in a spiritual sense) in righteousness(the essence of him who is righteous, God himself the standard) and true(the unveiled reality lying at the basis of and agreeing with the manifestation) holiness.(holiness manifesting itself in actions)25Wherefore (wherefore, on account of)putting away (definiteness of action-middle, to put off, lay aside,” denotes, in the Middle Voice, “to put off from oneself, cast off,” used figuratively of works of darkness,) lying (a lie, conscious and intentional falsehood,) in a broad sense, whatever is not what it seems to be, of perverse, impious, deceitful precepts), speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.
They were not living by the power of God’s eternal life flowing into them, they were living by the power of their own internal resources and were hopeless and they became a prisoner of sin and of Satan, and they discovered the painful myth of independence.
Once they came out from the rule of God and the power and protection of his kingdom, they were immediately taken over and Satan became their ruler instead.
Genuine self rule for man simply does not exist, either God rules over us or the devil rules over us. This term self-government or independence is just another name for what the bible calls flesh.
If we live in independence and are not under the rule and government of God we are going to be doing or fulfilling the list of the works of the flesh. We are potentially capable of all of them; we certainly will do some of them. The flesh is the self-life, the union of soul and body that acts independently of God. When we live in independence we have I-eye trouble.
Many Christians and pastors who have great knowledge of scripture, great spiritual gifts and great abilities, but until we deal with the I trouble we are more of a menus than we are of value to God in the kingdom.
It is hard to put independent people together, they split on an issue. Adam and eve were the first to discover their utter helplessness to resist the power of sin or the rule of Satan and his angels once they were in the flesh. Once Satan had men under his power, he moved straight away to bring all of creation under his dominion through them.
Satan has to work through man, because man was given government and authority over all that God had made. Once Satan had got man to step into independence, and he became Satan’s prisoner, then through the agency of man, Satan could then reach out to all that Adam had government over and he could pollute it and corrupt it.
The more leadership responsibility we have, the more authority we have the more dangerous it is to walk in the slightest shred of self-life. It doesn’t just affect us; it affects all that we have authority and responsibility over.
When Luther was chased by a pope who wanted to kill him, he said I fear myself, more than a dozen popes. The pope could just kill his body, but his own flesh could destroy him completely.
We need an absolute godly fear of ourselves, as our own worst enemy. This is what it means to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. And we are going to take sides with God against that self-life, I am going to agree that it simply will not live, because this is the third aspect of the cross.
Jesus died for us becoming our sin, we died with him-the old man was put to death (three dimensions-heredity, parental and social influence-that shaped us, and that which we have foolishly done) the old man is taken in its complete totality and crucified with him and it doesn’t have any power or authority over us anymore once we appropriate it by faith. What we are still left with is the daily dealings with the flesh (the union of soul and body-that moves in self-our mind, will, emotions, attitudes, intentions, body not under the influence of our spirit in communion with God’s Spirit). Jesus lived a constant denial of self all thirty three and a half years of his life. We have to follow him and like him we have to take up our cross daily to put to death every desire, lust and appetite of the flesh.
Jesus was totally successful in this never ever once did the flesh have a moment of opportunity, it talks about hating the garment even spotted with the flesh. There has to come in us a new enmity, a new hatred of flesh. We don’t tolerate it, we don’t live in it. I am just human-no you are not. We are not just human if we have really been born again, if we have really entered the kingdom.
And we don’t have to give place to the flesh any more than Jesus did. And if and every time it happens we should be serious about finding out why, and dealing with why it happened.
In Romans it tells us in order to walk in the spirit, we have to begin by not walking after the flesh. It says it twice in the first few verses of Romans 8. We have to learn how not to walk in the flesh, we have to be able to recognize it. That’s how we learn to live in a victorious Christian life is by learning how not to walk in the flesh. Because we lived this way for years our first instinct is to take control and make our own decisions and forget to let God have his way in our life. This is a process we have to learn, how not to be the one that is still running our life even though we have claimed to have given ourself to God.
If we live in the spirit, then let us also walk in the spirit. And the way to do this is to live in the spirit. 1peter4:6 although put to death as men in the flesh, we are to live in the spirit like God. The most important thing we can learn is to learn how like the Lord Jesus is to be a man of the spirit who always has the spirit making the decisions and being the power and the resources of his life.
When we are first converted we don’t do it very often and when we do it, it is great until suddenly an emergency comes and we take charge, we take control before we even realized it. (When our soul becomes disturbed emotionally, we lose contact with the Spirit of God, unless we practice looking to him for our responses.) It is like grabbing the steering wheel of the car when we see a sharp bend coming up. (We do this subconsciously, until we learn how to be filled with the Spirit so that we are on a higher level and the things of this life do not affect us like they do others.) Gradually we learn not to do that.
There are longer periods between those moments of the flesh taking charge again, always it leads to a crash spiritually. Until we come to the place where we can learn to walk in the spirit. (When we walk in the spirit our subconscious mind becomes renewed). When we walk in the spirit we no never fulfill the desires of the flesh.
That discipline never comes to an end. The moment we stop walking in the spirit, we revert back to the flesh. And the flesh never changes or improves in the sight of God. I got less mad this time- you still have fallen short. Only when we can joyfully turn the other cheek where we are filled with the Spirit like Stephen being stoned do we glorify God.
The discipline of walking in the spirit never ends, there is no crisis experience, no one can lay hands on us-impartation, it is a thing we have to learn how to live in and walk in every minute of our human life. Because this is the way that Jesus lived. This is the cross that we have to take up daily. It is not a once for all crisis and event. It is a daily moment by moment decision that I am not going to live but Christ is going to live in me.
It is a very urgent priority that we should ourselves learn to live this way. We need to learn what makes us get out of the spirit into the flesh and deal with those things ruthlessly. Above all things we need to be a demonstration of this. And we need to know how to teach it to our people. Because if we can produce people who live this way, then we now have people who are going to be powerful in the kingdom
When Adam made that fatal decision and stepped out of the kingdom with his wife eve, he became immediately vulnerable to the devil, he was taken over and all of creation was taken over and as a result the kingdom of darkness was powerfully established instead of the kingdom of God.
As a result pain, suffering and sickness came upon all men.
What was God’s response to the fall? He had two options open to him. He could have destroyed the devil, but then it would be necessary at the same time for God to judge man. God could not destroy the devils kingdom without at the same time bringing man to judgment.
The second has two parts-governmental and the other was redemptive. He could restore fallen man to ruler ship,
The first part was he could leave fallen man as the ruling head but provide a righteous means of salvation and forgiveness, so that he could return to his former relationship under the rule and government of God.
The only way back was to come back under the ruler ship and government of God- This is the gospel of the kingdom. Saying that you can come back out of your independence and once again you can have God rule over you in total and complete authority, complete despotism.
But as God is perfect goodness, perfect love has all power, everything wonderful, fantastic and glorious; what is so bad about that. Because every decision that he makes is going to be perfect and the power he releases is going to be glorious. So total absolute submission to God is the most glorious freedom that we could possibly experience. Once we grasp this and joyfully embrace it, we could think of nothing more wonderful than to live that way, which was the way that Jesus lived.
When he brings back man under the ruler ship and government of God then he can set about the restoration of all creation. Because once God has established the man, through the man he can establish the kingdom once again on the earth. And once that begins to happen, then that kingdom has the power to drive out the kingdom of darkness that has already been well established.
But now it is a fight because that kingdom has been so well established. And by doing it that way God can bring man back to where he was suppose to be and recover everything and bring in a whole new era where we so learned our lesson we never ever want to live that way again. And no temptation is ever going to tempt us.
In the mystery of God it is well worth it to get a people that are so voluntarily convinced of the terror of self-government and self will that there is not the slightest danger of them ever, ever wanting to live that way. The kingdom of God can only be populated by people who have come to that attitude. This is why we have to preach it with all of our heart.
The teaching of- come to Jesus as your savior and then one day we hope for you to make him your lord is unbiblical. It is not there in scripture and produces totally the wrong results.
Those who come into the kingdom, they make their calling and election secure. They work out their salvation with fear and trembling so that they no longer trust self or yield to the flesh. They add to their faith all these glorious attributes of God but they do it by the power of God by grace pouring it into their lives
They don’t do a thing for themselves; they just simply know how to be good beneficiaries of Gods amazing goodness. We learn to be great receivers. Because we are incapable of initiating anything. But it is a glorious life where all the fullness of all that Jesus was on earth is capable of being manifested in our humanity the way it was in his. Because that was the way he lived. So God because he loved man chose the second option.
The first part was governmental, the second was redemptive. For this to be righteous God had to provide a way for that period of rebellion and sin to be fully paid for. We do not want to water down what God had to do to get that sin paid for. Isaiah 53, psalms 22. All that was being punitively done was being done to him by a loving father in order that sin was properly paid for. That sounds like nonsense to some people and offend their humanistic moral sense of right and wrong. It pleased God to bruise him. He is the initiator and cause of all the wrath that was poured out at Calvary. How can a God be wrathful and loving at the same time. We have to believe in God the way that he is. Propitiation-to satisfy outraged wrath. God doesn’t just wipe off our sin, it is totally and fully and gloriously paid for. Jesus cried out on the cross as he was about to give up his spirit, it is finished. The word was used in accountancies when someone had debt and owed money, when the debt was paid and across them was written this same word- Nothing to pay. So when it was fully paid for and only then could God say write that period of rebellion and disobedience which has cost the heart so much pain-fully paid for. And from now on Satan has no more claim on you, you don’t own him anything and you haven’t got to pay him anything. So this glorious cross deals with the debt. Paul preached on the cross for 18 months in Corinth.
The lord went through the agony of the cross to save us from our sins. If the revelation of this penetrates our heart it will bring tears to our eyes, but we are too complacent about it. We need a vision of Calvary, so we never lose the sense of wonder of it. The understanding of how horrible sin is and what it cost God to get it legally and fully paid for. So that we come to hate sin the way God hates it. If it is a cheap cross it is easy to go back into sin again. We need to see the cross in deep spiritual revelation. We cannot articulate in words some of the things that we have seen in our spirit. The idea of willingly and voluntarily or lightly going into sin, the thing is so horrid and we cannot understand why some people do it, they have never really seen the cross.
The second part of God’s plan was redemptive, it was to pay everything.
In his earthly life, Jesus was able to reestablish the kingdom of God, this is one of the reasons that he came. He was born of a woman, under the law, of the tribe of Judah.
It was necessary in his first coming to go through that whole process of human experience. He was not conceived in a natural way, so that he would not automatically receive the inheritance of sin. It was the Holy Spirit and not a man that mysteriously provided the sperm which created this baby boy in the womb of Mary. He was born with the same humanity that Adam had, it wasn’t any different from Adams humanity. It was genuine human weakness. Heb 2 he partook of the same flesh and blood, but his purpose was totally different. The first Adam was foolish enough to listen to the devil; this man knew perfectly well deep in his spirit that he was going to live every moment of his life in total obedience to the father. We see in Jesus the same adamic humanity apart from adamic sin nature.
It was the same weakness of humanity. He was just as capable of choosing to sin as Adam was, but he made a different decision. He was tempted in all points as we are yet without sin. What he did was choose to obey under all and every situation and all and every circumstance. Jesus showed us what happens when a man really lives in submission and obedience to the authority of God. And allows his life to just be an expression of that eternal life flowing into him and flowing out through him without restriction. He returned if you like to that state of the first Adam when he was innocent. This was his earthly life.
His risen life is totally different. All that Jesus was on earth and all that Jesus did on earth, he did as an ordinary human man apart from the adamic nature, just living out the life of obedience to God. He was living what adam could have been, if only he had made a different decision. He was able to say Satan has nothing in me, he cannot touch me. When you are in the kingdom you are impregnable, he was even able to say no man can take my life from me. The only way that any of us can die is because of sin. And the only way that jesus was able to die was when he took the sin of adams race upon him. And it was that sin that allowed the curse of death to come upon him.
But when he lived in sinless total obedience to the father, his glorious humanity was impregnable to every attack of the evil one, it was invincible to every kind of assault and it was absolutely eternal. He had power to lay down his life, and power to take it up again. No one can kill me and I am not dying a slow death like the disobedient adam was. In jesus’s death he took the nature of adam upon himself, when the moment came when that sin was paid for he cried out it is finished. And he himself choose the moment when he was going to die.