The Word of God tells us very clearly that God is the “Father of spirits.”
Hebrews 12:9, “Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them, shall we not much rather be in submission unto the Father of spirits, and live?”
What Makes a Father?
A father is a person who has sired an offspring. You have come out of your father’s loins. One half of the 42 chromosomes that go to make you what you are physically come from your father. In your D.N.A you have the record of your ancestral line (the previous generations).
When God created our human race, He left a record of His great act of creation. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:26a, 27)
The word “image” is selem in Hebrew. It means a representative figure, a copy, a form, a shadow, an image”
The word “likeness” is translated from the Hebrew demuwth, “likeness, resemblance, model, shape, like-fashion, like-manner, similitude.” This is true of the original creation of your spirit.
In What Way Are You Like God?
Even as your body resembles the features and characteristics of your earthly father, so your spirit resembles your “Spiritual Father.” And even as your natural body came out of the loins of your natural father, so your spirit came out of the “loins” of your heavenly Father.
You were first of all originally a spirit beautifully fashioned in the very likeness of your heavenly Father. That’s why your spirit is the part of you that understands God and is able to communicate with the Father better than any other part of you.
We need to develop our spirits relationship with the Father
The prophet Malachi has given a prophecy that in the last days, “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord,” the Lord was going to do a new work of restoration between relationships; “And He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart o f the children to their fathers,… ” (Malachi 4:5, 6).
The original part of you is your spirit. So you have a closer and greater allegiance and relationship to your Father God than to your earthly father.
It is only in your temporal carnal body that you are like your earthly father. Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world. You need to look to the heredity that is yours in your spirit through your Heavenly Father.
“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you….” (James 4:8) Let His nature become your nature, His character your character.
If you learn how to walk in the spirit, you shall never fulfill the lusts of the flesh, not even those that you have seen in your parents. Your spirit within cries, “…Abba, Father.” (Romans 8:15) And the power of the Blood of Jesus is greater than your natural, carnal blood.
This great work of restoration of relationships takes place between us and the Father and will also affect the relationships between us and our children or other Christians.
The only way that we can be restored to each other and forgive each other of the hurts and the pains we have inflicted on one another is by finding each other in the spirit. We need to rise into a higher dimension of communication than the one we now use.
As the Holy Spirit quickens us and gives us discernment, we are able to rise above the hurts and see why our brother, our father, our friend has offended us, and this is the most important ingredient in forgiveness. We are “seeing them in the spirit.”
Jesus was able to do that when He hung on the cross and prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do… ” (Luke 23:34).
Can you, by your own spirit, rise that high until you, too, can see into the spirit of the one who has offended you, and know that that one, too, “does not know what he or she does”?
If you can, you have the great key of forgiveness; and forgiveness is healing, healing of the spirit within you first, then the soul, and finally the body.
But this great work of forgiveness cannot take place in your spirit without the help of the Holy Spirit. You must humbly ask the Holy Spirit to help you, and He surely will gladly come to you and help you.
He is the “Elijah” of restoration who has been promised to us in the last days. Elijah was endued with Him, Elisha had a “double portion” of Him, John the Baptist had the renewal of Him, and there is coming an “Elijah Company” whom God is raising up in the last days who shall indeed be indued with this same anointing of power, glory and authority, which, according to Malachi, will cause a mighty work of restoration between the father and child relationships.
If this is true, and we believe Malachi’s prophecy to be truth, then we shall surely see the same restoration take place in the spiritual relationship between our spirits and the Spirit of God, our Father.
We can never know God through our body’s senses, for God has limited them. Our eyes cannot see, our ears cannot hear God. But our spirit is the part of us that can communicate with God, for it was made in the likeness and image of God and is the closest resemblance there is to God on earth.
We need to learn how to relate more closely to our Heavenly Father and to find Him through the senses of our spirit with the help of His Holy Spirit.*
And not only can we know God in the spirit, we also can know each other by the spirit as it says in II Corinthians 5:16, ‘‘Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh:… ”
IN WHAT WAY DOES THE SPIRIT OF MAN RESEMBLE GOD?
The Spirit of Man Is Made in the Likeness of God
There are three ways in which the spirit of man truly resembles, or is a “similitude” (demuwth) of, God.
1. It Is Spirit Form.
It is created out of the same substance – intangible to the touch and invisible to the natural eye.
Ecclesiastes 12:7 says, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” The Preacher, or writer of Ecclesiastes, is speaking about the death of the righteous man.
The spirit came out of God, just like your body came out of your natural father, and the spirit will return to its Father, for your spirit loves God, even though you may have hindered it in its growth and development during the time it has been in your body.
But when the body returns to its origin, even the dust of the earth, your spirit will return to its origin, its Father.
A father is a creator. Your natural father participated in the creating of your body and imparting his life to it. So your heavenly Father also is the Creator of your spirit, and the source of its life.
Even as God intended that man should be conceived by an act of love, so the heavenly Father caused the conception of your spirit through an act of divine love.
Everything in the natural is a picture or symbol of the original which was in the spirit-world of the Father.
2. The Spirit Is Eternal.
Daniel tells us that at the time of the last judgment, “…many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2)
The spirit is eternal. The spirit of man within cries out for his Heavenly Father, but the flesh hinders it in its homeward journey, even as Paul explained so realistically in Galatians 6:8, “For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. ”
The spirit of man, because it is made in the image and likeness of God, has the same quality of eternal existence. How sad it is then if we do not work at perfecting it, that it might become a beautiful spirit, full of light and glory!
And how sad it is that the flesh-life, or the body in which the spirit lives, can be perverse, evil, rebellious and often demon-controlled that it contaminates the spirit consistently until it corrupts it and destroys its original God-like innocence and beauty!
The spirit of man is like a beautiful innocent child who comes to live in an evil family. Slowly it will become contaminated, unless it is set free by the power of God through the Blood of Jesus Christ.
3. The Spirit Is Able to Communicate with God.
It is the spirit within you which communicates with God and receives information and revelation which it imparts to the brain and thereby enables you to communicate with God.
Paul said in Romans 8:16, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:”
Galatians 4:6 he says, “And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.”
Because of the Father and son relationship between the Father of spirits and your spirit, there should be continuous communication between you and God. It should never be cut off.