With the law of
sowing and reaping, sin increases, but where sin abounds, then much more so does
the grace of God abound, for while we were yet sinners, God commended His Love
toward us. And this is the faith that over comes the world, even the Love
of God in Christ Jesus, which passes all understanding.
God does not
change in any aspect of His infinite holiness. He remains constant in Who
He is, and so does His
Word by Whom He created the Heavens, the earth and all creatures, both great
and small. One sage, I forget who and when, said that God was hotter
than a hundred suns. Sin and the darkness it brings to mankind, can not exist in the presence of such a holy God.
Let's just say that God in His holiness is infinitely hotter than hell, and the wicked and
unrighteous soul will not be able to tolerate God's presence, without God's own
provisions, and garments of righteousness, which He gives as a free gift, to those who believe and
live within His Son, Jesus Christ.
The fallen angelic forces of
wickedness have thought to bring a great challenge,
to the integrity of both
the Righteousness of God, and His Holy Word of Power. With their continuing challenge over the
possession rights to the souls of men, the wicked thought to present a
great tension against the grace within the Love of God,
and that of His absolute Holiness. The Almighty's righteousness remains constant
within His holiness, so that He must judge the unrighteousness of sin. Sin
existed in man, long before God gave the law of Commandments to man, but now with the condemnation of the
given law, the legal force of
the Ten Commandments, reveals to the condemned, the evil works of sin that has held mankind in
chains, waiting on the souls final sentence of death, with separation from an
infinitely holy God.
The Almighty God, Who has created all that exist, is the Judge of His creation, and is
obligated within the Holiness of Himself to maintain the righteousness of His
holy Word of Power. What God declares, must come to pass. If God failed in His holiness, then the Truth in His
Word would fail, and if Truth failed, then all things that exist, would come
to nothing.
Understandably,
all of mankind is genetically linked to our first parents of Adam and Eve.
But
perhaps what is not well understood, is that we have all been partakers of the
forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and our rebel nature towards God,
stems from within the independent self will, rooted and ingrained, within the
neuronal minds of all of mankind. We have all sinned in the partaking of
the serpent's Tree, and apart from Holy God's mercy, we are all dead in our sins and
trespasses that are an affront to His Perfect Nature of Holiness.
Now, God the
Father, Who is consummate Love and full of mercy towards man, has no pleasure at
all in the death of His creation of mankind. Within God's infinite
holiness, He had a foreknowledge of sin's insurrection that would come into the
world, and through His Wisdom, He would make a way possible for those who have
faith in His Word of righteousness, to be justified in that faith. God would need a perfect sacrifice to satisfy the
justice and righteousness that His Nature of Holiness demands, and yet save
humanity from themselves. When the first man, Adam, with his own
free will, rebelled against God,
he thru off the cloak of God's love, and now his new master would clothe all
of Adam's prodigy in the chains of sin's death, and the imprisonment of the
grave. With the failure of the first man, God would need a redeeming sacrifice of
a man with Adam's genetics, and that man would need to be
of a perfect love and righteousness, to completely overturn the selfish
unloving nature of fallen man. In God's plan for the redemption of fallen
man, the second
Adam, Jesus Christ, was born of the genetic seed of a woman that was impregnated
by the Spirit of God, and the Eternal Word of God
was made the genetic flesh of man. Every man does right in his own eyes,
but this man would subject his own will to that of His father, even unto death. Thus, the Perfect Love of Christ Jesus would liberate His fellow man, by
breaking the chains of sins slavery to death, and to burst open the prison grave
that held the dead of mankind in their place of captivity. Jesus,
the Word of God,
says: I AM the Way, and the Truth, and the Life of Men, no man can come to the
Father except through Me.
In God's scales of justice, the
Holy Love and Righteousness
of God within Christ Jesus, the Son of Man, as the incarnate Son of God, far out weighs all of the unrighteousness and rebellion
of earthly mankind. For if death came to all men through the unfaithful insurrection of
the first Adam, then how much more shall God's loving grace abound to new Life, through
the obedient and loving sacrifice of the last Adam, Jesus Christ. To satisfy God's Justice
for the sins of mankind, God's righteous Word and only begotten Son from
eternity, was made
the genetic flesh of man, and as a man, He was put on trial by unrighteous men,
who were controlled by the
angelic forces of evil. For, God so loved the people of the world that He gave
His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ to be crucified to a tree for the sin of the
world; the just One for the unjust prodigy of the first Adam. The
faith in God was broken by the first man of the earth, but now faith in God, is
restored to man by way of the man, Christ Jesus, the first born from the
dead.
With Christ'
crucifixion death, burial, and then with His bodily resurrection victory over
mankind's sins of death, God's righteous justice, wisdom and mercy is set on record.
Now with Good News, the Word of the Almighty proclaims amnesty for the past sins, for
all who will come to receive of His grace. Now the man, who receives
amnesty through God's free gift of faith in the Word of the Almighty, is to live in the
freedom from sin and death that God's Son has procured for them, through the shedding of His
righteous Life
Blood, and His resurrection from the dead. (See
Romans 3 verse 24 thru 26.) But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which
God ordained before the world unto our glory, which none of the princes of this
world knew, for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of
glory. (1st
Corinthians 2 verse 7 thru 9.)For Jesus,
having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a show of them openly,
triumphing over them in it, and in so doing the Son of Man, born of the seed of
a woman, crushed the head of wickedness. (Colossians 2
verse15, and Genesis 3 verse 15.)
For
the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment unto the Son, so
that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He that
honors not the Son honors not the Father Who has sent Him. Amen, Amen I
say unto you, He that hears My word, and believes on Him that sent Me, has
everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from
death unto life. Truly, Truly, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now
is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear
shall live. For as the Father has Life in Himself, so has He given to the
Son to have Life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute
judgment, also, because He is the Son of Man.
(John 5
verse 22.)
And so in God's
judgment of mankind, the Lord of the harvest,
Jesus, the Holy One of God, would reap even the
whirlwind of the violence of our sin, with all of its causative manifestations of
defilements, and unrighteous judgments that would eternally separate us from the
love of God. God's eternal Word in His Son, was put to the test for all times,
even by God Himself: For thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with
all thy mind, and with all thy strength: And these words which I
command thee shall be in thy heart. This is the First Commandment. (Deuteronomy
6 verse 3 thru 7.) And the second is like, namely this, Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. (See Deuteronomy
10 verse 18 thru 19.with
Mark 12 verse 30 thru 31.)
Outside the walls of the city
of Jerusalem, at a place called the Scull, a cross, made from a tree was
erected with the life, soul and body of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross, and
left hanging from
that tree. The scriptures declares, Christ purchased our freedom, redeeming us from the curse
or doom of the Law and its condemnation, by
Himself, becoming a curse for us, for it is written in the Scriptures, Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.
(Galatians 3
verse 13. Amplified.)
(See
Deuteronomy
21 verse 23.)
Sent to earth to be a sacrifice by God, Jesus Christ, the innocent Son of Man, while
hanging on that cross of dead wood, was made to be in His Person, all of mankind's sin, with all
of its defilements and complicit unrighteous judgments, intertwined within the cursed
root of self idolatry that comes from the Tree of Knowledge. Now the cursedness
of God’s just law of the return, would seek out and exact the inevitable reward
of death upon the sin of mankind, being imposed with all of the authority of the fury of God's holy wrath,
being directed at sin. God, loving His Word and Son with the same love
that the Son had for the Father, trusted that that same perfect love would withstand,
and defeat sin and death at its source within the flesh of man.
The Lord did
not come to judge mankind, but to reap and save us from our own rebellious sin, with its
condemning judgments.
For God hath made Jesus Christ to be sin for us, Who knew no sin: that we might be made the
righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. (2nd Corinthians 5
verse 21.)
For it pleased the Lord to bruise Him: God hath put Him to grief when Thou shalt make His soul an
offering for sin.
(Isaiah 53
verse 10.) For humanity's sake and for His Word's sake, Holy God Almighty made His very
own Son and Servant, the Lord Jesus, being also the Son of Man, a scapegoat for the cursedness of sin itself. But
Scripture speaks: Who has believe our report? Behold, My Servant
shall deal prudently, He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.
Many were astonished at Him. His whole appearance was so marred, more than
any man, and His form more than the sons of men. So shall My Servant
sprinkle many nations. (Isaiah 53 verse 1 and Isaiah 52 verses 13 thru 15)(Click
here to see Matthew Henry's ,
The humiliation of the Messiah.)
Our
total death and separation from God, with the destructions of our defiling sin, with all its violent judgmental
reactions, rained down upon the Lord's body,
soul, and mind. In His death, the full judgment of sin, with the wrath of
God and the justice of His law was reaped by the man, Jesus Christ. Indeed, the
violence of our sin and unrighteous judgments were reaped, as in (consumed or
destroyed or ended or died), in the Lord's body, heart and mind through His
crucifixion and death.
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of
sorrows, and acquainted with grief and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He
was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried
our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But
He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities: The
chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All
we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way, and the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed,
and He was afflicted, yet He opened not his mouth: He is brought as a lamb to
the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so He opens not His
mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare His
generation? for He was cut off out of the land of the living, for the
transgression of My people was He stricken.
(Isaiah 53 verse 3 thru 8.)
For God's mercy sake,
the Lord Jesus Christ as the
perfection of God's love, was crucified, as the substitute, a scapegoat for the idolatrous
judgments and defilements of sin in man; and now the wrath of God’s just
Law is satisfied with the inevitable reaping of sin's seeds of death, with death.
Death could not hold the Lord of Life; for His Life was the same as His Father's
Word. Jesus says: No man takes life from Me, but I lay it down of
Myself. I have power to lay My life down, and I have power to take it again.
This commandment have I received of My Father. Now
that Christ Jesus is raised from the dead, through the resurrection power of
the only living God, our spirits also have been born of God’s Spirit in Jesus Christ, secured
through our daily living faith in our God, and the germinating seed of His Word
of new Life. Therefore, there is no law with its wrath to condemn those,
who through faith see themselves as dead
in the Son of Man. For all, who by living faith in God and His Christ, are
all see to have died to their old bondage to sin, through the death and burial of our sin bearer, Jesus Christ.
"For the Son of Man has not come to destroy man's lives but to save them".
(Luke
9 verse 56.) As sin begets inevitable death, so then the true Life of Jesus
Christ and His Father, begets for the person of faith, the inevitable Life of eternal abundance: For
DEATH IS SWALLOWED UP IN THE LORD'S VICTORY
over mankind's sin. How can
one comprehend the wisdom and majesty of the amazing love of God the Father and
His Son?
For this corruptible
must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when
this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put
on immortality and then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death
is swallowed up in victory. (see
Isaiah
25 verse 7 thru 9.)O death, where is thy sting? O grave,
where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin
is the law. But thanks be to God, Who gives us the victory through our
Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved
brethren, be you steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,
forasmuch, as you know that your labor is not in vain IN the Lord.
(1st Corinthians
15 verse 55 thru 58.)
Our eternal
resurrection into Jesus' Life, is our promised hope through God's grace alone;
therefore be self vigilant and do not let sin, with its willful defilements
continue to reign in your mortal body. For in our time and place, we Christians
in name, still have to contend with this body of sin, and the demands of sowing
and reaping, not only of ourselves, but also from the results of the failings of
others in this world. Once again, if our sin is not repented of, and confessed to
our Lord for the violence it is, then the consequences of God’s just laws may
find us out, and unravel us in the full fury of sin's destruction. God is not
mocked, for what a man sows so shall he reap: For he that sows to his flesh shall
of the flesh reap corruption; but he that sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit
reap life everlasting. (Galatians 6
verse 7 thru 8.)Godly wisdom is prudent in
its understanding. Having set our hands to the plow, we move forward, with our eyes
following the One Who has set the high mark for us. For Jesus said, "No
man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back (to the things he left
behind), is fit for the kingdom of God". (In context
Luke 9 verse 59 thru 62.)
The rebuke from
the Word of God, can be very hard to understand, and leave us in the place of
our stumbling. Looking back, thinking to return to the old life, is a no no. God's calling,
does not allow for us to return into our darkness, for there sets the devourer
waiting to reclaim our souls. In the reflection of Holy Scripture, be careful
not to set the love of selfish demanding flesh, above the Love of God.
But, in case you didn't know
it, we are all tilling the ground of our own individual earthly hearts. In the
daily plowing of our own turf, we will inevitably come face to face with the
over growth from the old seedlings of our own iniquities, and the harvest of our
own previous judgments may come back to slap us hard. Are you awake yet.
For with certainty, our flesh
is going to be tried and sifted by Satan, to see if the essence of our faith is
really espoused to Jesus Christ. The Holy One has gone before us in Love, and
having suffered our death in His Body, He knows of all of our iniquities and the
infirmities, which are caused by the sin within our flesh. This holy steadfast
faith we have in Jesus, tells us that our sins are vanquished with in Jesus Christ's
total victory over our adversary. But, how do we walk in the victory of the
cross?
Jesus says; Come unto
Me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My
yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I AM
meek and
lowly in heart, and you
shall find
rest unto your souls. For
My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.
(Mathew 11
verse 28 thru 30.)
The Lord
Yeshua/Jesus beckons all to come to Him, for with out Him our own labor will plow us
under. It is His yoke of supreme Love that sustains and enables us to overcome
the weariness of our own flesh, and sin laden burdens of guilt. According to the
New Covenant in
the Blood of Jesus Christ, when we give our sin to Jesus, and His
Life saving Blood, our heavy work
is lifted, and our hearts may rest in the security of His cleansing Love. Why
continue to carry the burden of guilt and shame, when the Lord has already
suffered the fullness of it all, and made provision for freedom in His Communion
Table of Grace. God has called us out of our own darkness,
and into His glorious light and the victory of His Son Jesus
Christ. Now, in His victory, our labors are born out of His Love, and that Love of Christ
Jesus, does not
bear condemnation and judgments with wrath. This Love of God overcomes adultery,
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred,
variances, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envying, murders,
drunkenness, reveling and finally, death. Why continue on the old path of
slavery, following sin's confusion, which only leads to continued destruction of mind, heart and
soul?
Years ago, when
I was young in the ways of the Lord, I struggled with my own burdens of shame
and guilt,
even for already confessed sin,
and then the Lord gave me a dream. Before me, in the dream, I saw a man who
appeared to be imprisoned in a
lion's cage. Be sober, be
vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walks
about, seeking whom he may devour: (1st Peter 5
verse 8.) Then immediately, I went from seeing the man, to being the
man behind the bars of the lion's cage. I was sitting on the floor with my knees
to my chest, and my back up against the rear bars. The front door of the
cage was wide open, but there was a large pile of trash and boxes in front of
me, apparently blocking my way to freedom. In my lowly seated position, I began
kicking the garbage out of the open door of the cage. I then righted myself,
and walked out of the wide open door. I stood next to the pile of
kicked out trash
and garbage, and while I was looking into it, a flame began to kindle in the
midst of it. I saw something in the pile that had been of value to me from
the past, but the guilt of sin was embodied in it. I started to reach for
it, so as to rescue it from the fire, but then remembered that the Lord had
already paid the
price for the guilt of its possession of me, and so then, I removed only my empty
hand. I watched, as the now roaring fire of the Lord's Love, consumed away
the guilt of my past sins, freeing my mind's entrapment from the trash and garbage of my old life.
The former record, of my transgressions, were obliterated from the sight of Yahweh
God, when I first came to Him in the amnesty He gave within His Son Christ
Jesus. Those confessed failures of the old man, which may remain etched in
our minds of flesh, are none existent where God is concerned.
In the Body of
Jesus Christ, none of us are left alone, for there to our left and right and
before and aft, we can find the Lord's members, born of His Spirit of Love. For
the Lord has sent His and the Father's Holy Spirit, to help each of us to be
over comers, and then
through His same Spirit of grace, He enables each of us to help others on our
mutual journey through this life. We may stumble and fall into crevices, and the
hard places of our hearts may hold us prisoners for awhile, but if the door of our hearts
remains open in repentance to Him, then He is always there to come along side, and
remove the burden of our heart when we can stand the afflictions of the flesh no more. He then picks us up, and refreshes us with His
Spirit of Holiness. In the trying of our faith, eventually our
patience will be tempered with the love and humility that only comes from the mind of
Jesus Christ, so that we may discern, through the Holy Spirit, the just and holy
will of the Father. And this is the will of the Father: That in knowing the
perfect love that is in His Son Jesus Christ, we would love God with all of our
heart, and His children, even as He has
loved us. The Love of the Father is calling to us through Jesus Christ, and even
now, He has a holy place for the members of the Body of Jesus Christ, where in Holy Communion He is always waiting to honor His beloved children,
begotten of His Perfect Love.
*******Forgiveness
triumphs over judgment, and releases imprisoned soul's*******
"Therefore, if you are
offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has
something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go
and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.
(Matthew 5
verse 24.)
Forgiveness works both ways. It takes more humility
and courage to ask for forgiveness of those we offend, than to forgive the
offender. In either case forgiveness releases both parties from the
imprisonment of judgment.