Month: October 2019

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God—Not of works, lest any man should boast.”                                                         (Eph. 2:8-9)

A biblical journey of faith through the second half of the cross as described in this book…is integral with and dependent upon the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith.

It is the security of eternal salvation that allows the new believer in Christ the initial encouragement and confidence to step-out into the risk of following Jesus Christ into the as-yet not fully revealed circumstances of our individual callings (Rom. 8:1-2).

No matter our station in life, our talents, or our cultural or geographical location, God has a unique and individual plan for each and every believer in Christ.  Like the value of the security that is put forward in a financial business transaction, the value of the blood shed by Jesus on the cross and the seal of the Holy Spirit given to the born-again believer, is God’s security put forward that backs His appeal to trust Him fully as we follow His lead.

God’s appeal to the believer to “live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world” (Tit. 2:12), to live a surrendered life (Rom. 12:1-2), to walk worthy of our calling (Eph. 4:1), to live a life of purity (1 Jn. 3:3), and to “be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58), are all based upon the eternally unchanging value of the security of our  salvation promised by God Himself.

The great biblical doctrines of grace (Jn. 10:27-29; Tit. 2:11-12; 2 Cor. 5:14-18; Rom. 1:17; 3:22; 4:24-25; 5:2; 5:17; 5:21; 6:14; 8:1) that support the promise of eternal security allows Christians to launch out into a God-led journey of faith, free to make mistakes and to learn hard lessons through life experiences without placing our salvation in jeopardy.

A journey of faith is a bold and daring adventure out into this broken and often tempestuous world, with Jesus Christ leading the way.

The teaching that a saved person can lose their salvation limits what people are willing to venture.  It confines the Christian experience to the relatively safe parameters of mere church attendance and church activities alone.

The teaching that a saved person can become lost contributes to a lower standard of Christian living because a vibrant and life-transforming journey of faith following God according to the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith…is replaced instead by standardized, risk-averse, and programmed activities based narrowly upon church needs.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 tells us that every new covenant believer from the least to the greatest shall all know God personally.  This requires personal interaction based upon some measure of a mutually shared journey of faith, secured by the promise of salvation through the blood of Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within the believer.

This is the solid rock of God’s word that allows Christians to adventure out into their individual journeys of faith, following the leading of Jesus Christ through the voice of the Holy Spirit.  

Salvation is a divine work completely of God.  It fully accomplishes for mankind what mankind cannot accomplish even partially for itself.  If salvation were a mix of God and self, if merit and demerit on man’s part contributed to salvation, then it would be partially conditioned upon man’s spotty, uncertain performance.

Salvation based upon our merit would rely upon a capacity for continuously perfect righteousness that we do not possess (Rom. 5:8-9). Salvation would then be limited, reversible, ineffective, and falling short of its divine intention to once and for all time set the captives free from bondage to sin.

Salvation is by God alone because this is the only way it can be absolutely perfect and complete as the sole cure for sin.

Divine grace is likewise one-hundred percent pure grace, or it is not grace at all.  Salvation as the “gift of God” can truly only be a gift if it requires absolutely nothing in exchange from us.  This is because some hybrid of grace plus works leads to an uncertain outcome (Rom. 4:16).

Salvation cannot be a process dependent upon man’s continued performance and progress, because salvation would then be forever in doubt.  Salvation is a divine act producing an eternal outcome because it is a work of God and therefore perfect in its entirety.

In the same way that salvation is divinely perfect, a God-composed journey of faith life-script is perfect in all of its details.  The positive narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible do not present a picture of perfect people.    But the life-plans themselves are perfect, because they are created by God (1 Cor. 1:8-9).

We need to stop thinking of the life-stories of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Hannah, Esther, Elijah, Daniel, Peter, James, and Paul as if their human frailties rendered partially ineffective the creative genius of God.

God is working with fallen creatures prone to make mistakes and fall short of absolute perfection.  But this reality does not take away from the imaginative capacity of God to compose life-scripts that individually match each of us perfectly, thoughtfully incorporating and channeling even our failures into lesson-plans yielding beneficial character transformation that will last an eternity (Rom. 8:29-30).

A journey of faith is also therefore “that not of yourselves.”  This is one element in the Bible that stands out from and above humanistic creative imagination.  “That not of yourselves” applied to our lives in harmony with the biblical examples of the positive characters in the Bible runs outside of human contemplation or contrivance.  Like salvation, stepping into a journey of faith following Jesus Christ is putting into action the scripture “the just shall live by faith.”

Pushing Power Downward

The tragic irony in all of this, on a truly galactic scale, is that God does not mind sharing power.  God is not only willing, but anxious to impart spiritual power to human beings (Lk. 9:1-2).

It is God who created us with the capacity for abstract thought, logical reasoning, and moral judgment.  A walk of faith through a life-script of varied situations and circumstances, carefully designed and orchestrated by God, is a guided apprenticeship in the right use of personal freedom and power.  The examples of the people of faith in the Bible are a demonstration of God’s enlightened management approach of pushing power downward into the lives of His faithful servants.

The management approach of pushing power downward, as a method of training, is an extraordinary trait to find within the character of God.

The God who created our universe is an unequaled perfectionist.  In our human experience, one of the most difficult things for a perfectionist to do is to delegate.  Yet God works in partnership with Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Deborah, Gideon, David, Esther, Daniel, Peter, Paul, and others through unique and unusual story-lines in the Bible…in order to give them the opportunity to experience the right use of power under direct apprenticeship to God.

God composes creatively different life-scripts, calls people by His Spirit, and orchestrates adventures of faith so that people can grow and stretch into the potentially Christ-like people that God intended us to be when He created us.  The fact that God enlists people into all sorts of varied enterprises in the Bible, which He could undoubtedly do infinitely better solely by Himself, tells us there is a profound purpose behind God joining… with us…along a walk of faith through life.

The writing of the Bible is a clear example of this concept of God pushing power downward.  The Bible has nearly 40 different authors, writing over a span of 1,500 years.  These writers were prophets, kings, shepherds, fishermen, a physician, and other common people with varied backgrounds.  They wrote from different geographical locations, about different challenges and circumstances, and through the lens of different cultural settings.

The fact that these men produced a consistent and cohesive message has enormously persuasive apologetic value in arguing for the divine inspiration of the Bible.  But it also demonstrates God’s willingness and ability to spiritually joint-venture with people to produce something as lofty as Holy Scripture.

Jesus says in Matthew 5:18 that the scriptures are so precise that not one jot or one tittle (Hebrew punctuation marks) shall pass from the Law until all be fulfilled.  Jesus says in John 10:35 that the scriptures cannot be broken.

That God can and would enlist human participation in the writing of the inspired word of God called the Bible, which mirrors accurately in written words the actual living expression of the Word of God embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, tells us plainly of God’s intention and ability to push power downward effectively into the hearts and minds of faithful men and women of God.

The fact that God created us with this “in-His-image” capacity is the clearest evidence of His loving desire to interact with us on the elevated plane of being able to responsibly, thoughtfully, and rightly use power.

At the outer limits of divine perfection…self-centeredness goes away.

One stereotype in the business world is of the manager who keeps information to themselves.  In any organization knowledge is power.  But the servant-leader approach informs, trains, and empowers others.  The servant-leader creates business reports and sends out memos with the aim to share information.

The servant-leader approach is a management philosophy of proactive thoughtfulness intended to liberate subordinates from complete dependence upon the all-informed and all-knowing manager.

The servant-leader, who manages to get people involved in the goals of the enterprise through personal participation in decision-making through shared leadership based upon trust, when done wisely…usually creates highly motivated, enthusiastic, and committed workers.

The servant-leader approach is the exact opposite of the autocrat who keeps all of the information and knowledge, and therefore the power…to themselves.

Lucifer wants to live out his dream of being god at the expense of others.  Lucifer’s approach is egocentric and requires the sacrifice of others to achieve his goals.  By contrast God wants to fulfill His will and way by enabling others to actualize their created potential through free-will participation, a personal relationship, and wise and prudent delegation of authority.  God’s approach is based upon unselfish divine love that will sacrifice Himself on the cross for the benefit and well-being of others.

The Bible set into words, and the journeys-of-faith callings portrayed therein, are the epitome of perfect unselfishness pushing power downward.  The incarnation of Jesus Christ is this expression in living form.  The gift of the Holy Spirit leading and guiding us into all truth from within our born-again spirits…through His abiding presence…is at the height of well-intentioned thoughtfulness in the deepest moral sense.

A God-composed biblical journey of faith is an individual one-on-one training mission.  God’s program is to set-up the circumstances unique to each one of our lives, whereby we can learn through first-hand experience to reach the point in wisdom that we knowingly and willingly choose the right, the noble, and the commendable course of conduct as a natural response of our improving Christ-like characters.

God wants us to grow into mature sons and daughters of light, who can react in partnership with His Spirit to every situation in this fallen world environment with the quality of character that will produce joy and peace for ourselves, for others, and for God, now and for all eternity.

Lucifer’s classically deceptive temptation in the Garden, that people apart from God could become “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), was of the most destructive and diabolical nature.

Lucifer had nothing to offer that was genuine on its own merits.  Lucifer saw the good thing that God had intended for mankind, seized the opportunity, and actually stole God’s idea, corrupting it for his own purposes.

By preemptively stealing God’s creative idea of a journey of faith, before God could establish a solid relationship with Adam and Eve, Lucifer effectively short-circuited the beneficial intentions of God’s program.  By replacing God with “self” in the spiritual equation, Lucifer created a counterfeit “journey of self” to match his own fallen attitude of self-worship, that is completely out-of-sync with the original plan of God for mankind.

This is why the temptation in the Garden was a deception and a lie, rather than a commendably viable alternative approach to life.  Lucifer stole and corrupted God’s idea of a joint-venture walk of faith with Him, making it into an autonomous and solitary “walk of self,” because Lucifer does not have a better plan of his own other than rebellious revolt fueled by pride-filled ambition.

In reality, there is no alternate plan for life in all of existence.  The “walk of self” is merely a lower, fallen, corrupted version of the higher walk-of-faith fellowship…that God created us with the capacity to enjoy.

The current, worldly conventional modern-day version of a “walk of self” displaces the walk of faith that God designed for us as the vehicle whereby we could get to know Him.

By getting the human race to depart from God through his upside-down deception of making rebellion as autonomous individuals appear as if it was commendably liberating, Lucifer effectively erased the apprenticeship training program that God had planned for us.  By going-it-on-our-own apart from the Holy Spirit, we shortchange ourselves from the character lessons that would enable us to happily and responsibly exercise our God-given capacity to learn to use power rightly for the good of ourselves and others.

Lucifer wanted power for its own sake, without being accountable to God or anyone other than himself.  By getting mankind to join his rebellion against God, Lucifer has instilled this same lust for power within the character of fallen mankind.

This explains why there is so much push-back against the gospel message of repentance, spiritual rebirth, and surrendering our will and way to God.  Being broken upon the living Stone that is Christ (Mt. 21:44) means giving up power.

But what is so sadly deceptive about sin, is that in willingly giving up self-sovereignty, the Spirit-led Christian is really only transferring power over to Jesus Christ, who intended all along to give back this self-same power to us, repackaged in a beneficially crafted individual journey of faith.

This ingenious creation of a walk of faith is a divinely guided set of life circumstances, originally designed to enable us to learn to use the power of our individual gifts and abilities properly.

The irony is that it is Jesus Christ who created mankind with the express capacity to be able to use spiritual power rightly and correctly.  Sitting upon the throne of our lives in spiritual rebellion frustrates the loving intention of God to fulfill our created purpose.

The Christian Salvation Experience

Lucifer attacks the pivotal Christian salvation experience, as would be expected, with one of his most deceptive and malicious lies.  Lucifer accuses the newly born-again Christian, through family, friends, and people at work or school, of being weak in character and “copping-out” by turning to Jesus Christ as a crutch to lean upon in life.

The world accuses the Christian of not being individually strong enough to go-it-on-their-own, without outside assistance from God.  This attack upon the Christian salvation experience subtly attempts to confuse and obscure the real truth behind going-it-on-our-own.

The real truth is that there cannot be a journey of faith with God…while we are in the condition of being our own autonomous god.

There cannot be two people effectively acting as sea captains aboard the same ship.  There cannot be two people acting as main chefs working in the same kitchen.  There cannot be two kings on the same throne.  There cannot be two leaders of the spiritual expedition of faith in a God-directed life.

By definition, a biblical-quality adventure of faith presupposes man in a subordinate position following God.  If we are sitting atop the throne of our lives, the only god we can follow, in that condition, is ourselves.

A journey of faith similar to any of the people of faith in the Bible, in which we can experience the ultimate God-composed life script leading to the discovery of eternal truth and purpose, necessitates first being in the correct spiritual condition of subordination…conducive to being able to follow God.

We are in our highest natural condition as human beings, not as gods.  Born-again Christians, who have stepped down off the thrones of their hearts to make room at the top for God, can now venture out into genuine walks of faith following Jesus Christ wherever He leads, precisely because they are now operating as human beings and not as a gods.   

The Christian salvation experience, of stepping down off the throne of our lives, and regaining through Christ the correct position of spiritual balance…with God above us in the leadership position…is the crossroads turning point of all of human experience.

Both God and Lucifer know that two kings cannot occupy the same throne.  Lucifer deceptively tells man to remain in his fallen nature as gods on the thrones of our lives.  Lucifer’s appeal is to the individualistic pride of man as independent rebels, sitting in the seat of power, freely exercising our God-given talents on the throne of our lives as gods.

God’s alternate appeal to man through the gospel message of salvation is to come down off the throne of our lives and to enter into a walk of faith in fellowship with Him.

Man’s eternal destiny hinges upon grasping and acting rightly upon this concept.  Get this fundamental issue right, and the redeemed Christian man or woman is poised to go forward into a God-composed life-script of trust and faith following Jesus Christ, utilizing the human gifts and abilities each of us were created with.  Get this fundamental issue wrong, reject the offer of pardon and restoration through Christ, and man is doomed to the hopeless individual pursuit of trying to validate himself as the god he is not, and was never intended to be.

One of the exceptional attributes that demonstrates the divinity of God in our world is His ability to take spiritual opposition and craft it into eternally beneficial lessons for the people of faith.  God did not create evil (Jas. 1:13).  But God is so intelligent He can take spiritual darkness and turn it around for His purposes.  The story of Joseph in Egypt is a clear illustration of this principle.

The crucifixion of Christ is the most powerful demonstration of God’s ability to take spiritual opposition, in its most deadly and threatening form, and shape it into a beneficial outcome on a massive scale.

God is so intelligently masterful over events and circumstances that He can even recruit death itself, the universal symbol of defeat and despair resulting from sin, and reshape it into a substitutional atonement from the penalty of sin, purchasing eternal salvation for us through His life, death, and resurrection as the divine Son of God in a human body.

Through the temptation in the Garden of Eden, Lucifer unknowingly handed to God the opportunity to inaugurate for mankind a faith-propelled search for truth involving the knowledge of good and evil…that is so richly illustrated in the life stories of the Bible.

By introducing sin into the world, Lucifer unintentionally brought into existence the major underlying ingredient of spiritual darkness for God to work with, whereby God can compose the fuller and deeper life-script callings of faith previewed for us in the Bible.

It is actually the existence of spiritual darkness in this temporarily broken world that enables us to experience in our own lives the invaluable lessons that expose and clarify the issues that lead to discovering the key to our everlasting peace and happiness (Rom. 8:18).

The Spirit-led Christian of today has the opportunity to understand the fundamental issues of eternal truth recorded in the Bible and developed through first-hand experience, which Adam and Eve would never have been able to comprehend even after thousands of years living in the idyllic environment of the Garden of Eden.

The ingenious creation by God of the vehicle called a walk of faith, through this physical environment of a four-dimensional world of space and time, enables the God-led man or woman to discover first-hand a fundamental eternal lesson.

This lesson is that true fulfillment lies in being unselfishly content in the inspired role of being who and what each of us were created to be, within a trust-filled and loving friendship with God our Father.

A biblical-quality walk of faith restores true reality by allowing God to fill the very large size shoes that only God can fill.

When viewed in this light, the decision to repent and to accept Jesus Christ into our lives is not a sign of character weakness, of supposedly taking the easy way out, of conveniently dumping our problems off on God.

It is instead the most clear-headed, rational, and sensible decision a person in their fallen and spiritually unbalanced condition can make.

A journey of faith in our natural intended role as a human being, with Jesus Christ leading the way, is actually the zenith of all of human experience.  It is at the height of what human beings can achieve.

The decision to accept Christ and to embark on a biblical-quality adventure of faith through life is the pinnacle of our very existence, not a compromise or a cop-out.  The fact that a world mired in spiritual rebellion would scoff, revile, and ridicule the Christian walk of faith following God, should actually be interpreted as an unintended confirmation that laying down our arms as rebels, and taking advantage of God’s current offer of redemptive pardon, is the one true right course of action.

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.  And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”                                                              (Rom. 12:1-2)

The first half of the cross is obviously vitally important.

Eternal salvation and the Christian life begin with repentance and being spiritually reborn (Jn 3:3).

But it is the second half of the cross which sets up the framework for the Christian life after conversion.  It is the second half of the cross which enables the Christian disciple to enter into a genuine adventure of faith following Jesus, to match the lives of faith previewed for us in the Bible.

It is the second half of the cross that opens up the great lessons of truth to be discovered first-hand by the willing disciple, following the promised leading of the Holy Spirit (Jn 16:12-15).

The second half of the cross identifies and exposes the basic human problem.  When we are sitting atop the throne of our lives as our own god, we are in an unnatural condition. When we are living as our own god, we are spiritually out of balance (Eph. 2:1).

God created us with the capacity to be human beings.  God did not create us with the capacity to be gods unto ourselves, outside of a relationship with Him.  In our unsaved condition, when we push God away and usurp the unearned and unqualified position of being a king atop the throne of our heart, we are in spiritual rebellion.  When we are in charge and in control, we have broken away into our own individual spiritual fiefdoms…within the borders of the realm of the king.

This is the basic definition of the spiritual condition called sin.  Only by stepping down off the throne of our lives, and reinstalling Jesus Christ in His rightful position as God and King in our hearts, is spiritual balance restored (Mt. 4:17).

This is one of the explanations for why newly born-again Christians experience an inward sense of joy, peace, and release.

Christians no longer have to continue the unnatural fiction of attempting to be the all-wise and all-knowing god that we were never created to be.  The blood that Jesus shed on the cross not only washes the repentant believer clean of the ill-effects of the rebellion of sin, but also sets in proper order and balance Jesus Christ on the throne of a person’s life.

Genesis 3:5 records Lucifer’s classically deceptive statement to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

This was the start of the human problem.  Possessing the knowledge of good and evil has no correlation to the capacity to be an autonomous, independent god.  Knowing the difference between good and evil is indeed one attribute leading partially toward becoming godlike, but having this knowledge alone falls far short of the requirements to make a person a god.

This is the full-disclosure portion of the half-truth of Lucifer’s recruiting campaign that he deceptively left out of the temptation in the Garden.

The resume for being God runs much deeper than merely having one’s eyes open to know good and evil.  Trying to be a god is much more difficult than anyone thought.

Rebellion by itself does not equate to having the elevated capacity to adequately fill the top leadership position that a rebellion creates.  Mankind has been learning the reality of this difficult lesson the hard way for thousands of years.  The basic problem with our planet earth is that there are multitudes of people trying to be junior gods-in-training on their own…who do not have the super-intelligence, wisdom, divine foresight, and perfect character to fulfill that job title.

When Adam and Eve rejected the council of God and ate the fruit from the tree in the midst of the garden, which God told them not to eat, by their willful action they unwittingly said “we do not know or love God well enough yet…to take Him at His word…as opposed to this new enticing offer.”

By this distancing action they pushed God off His rightful place on the thrones of their lives, moved away from the bond of friendship with God built upon mutual trust, and thereby damaged the basis of their relationship with God.

In unspoken words, Adam and Eve said loudly by their action: “we will trust the word of this seemingly better informed serpent instead.”

This fundamental, ill-fated decision left mankind “high-and-dry,” having eyes now opened to the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:8), but without having the divine character capacity to independently be able to cope with the new position of being our own gods.

The unanticipated consequence of their action was to reverse the leadership orientation of their relationship with God…demoting God off the throne as sovereign King…and placing themselves in the top leadership position…now exercising autonomous individualism regarding the course and the direction of their lives…above God.

Lucifer successfully got mankind to join his rebellion, by cleverly tempting us with the seeming allurement of the power of possessing an upper management position over the destinies of our lives, which we are not qualified to occupy.

Because none of us comes with the Operator’s Manual of how we are individually and uniquely supposed to function, the knowledge of good and evil…without the Manufacturer’s Instructions…is essentially worthless.

The long, sad history of mankind struggling unsuccessfully to achieve peace, harmony, security, and happiness as the sole managers of the purpose and direction of our lives…is a manifestation of the unbalanced spiritual condition of mankind trying to live above ourselves as gods, instead of as the potentially wonderful and remarkable human beings that God created us to be.

The Genesis 3:5 temptation in the Garden of Eden had pinpoint accuracy.  Lucifer crafted a cleverly designed temptation of mankind that is still functioning well even today.  Sitting atop the thrones of our lives is still as strong a temptation as ever.

Lucifer knew where to attack non-divine human beings created with free-will.  Intellectually convince someone today that the gospel is true, and at the end of the discussion that person can still decide to reject Christ because they do not want to give up control over their lives.

The in-built drive for excellence that God placed within each human being…lies at the center of the enticing temptation Lucifer offered in his deceptive short-cut around God to obtain the position of being gods onto ourselves.

If our God-created inner drive for excellence was not so strong, this temptation to eat the forbidden fruit would never have gotten traction with Adam and Eve.  If the opportunity to jump at the chance to possess a knowledge of good and evil as our own gods was not so appealing, Adam and Eve would have brushed off this whole encounter with Lucifer in the Garden as nothing immediately important, and would have simply remarked that they would discuss this issue with God and then get back to Lucifer in the near future.

The temptation in the Garden of Eden was a brilliantly aimed, well-executed assault using genuine insight into the nature of superbly crafted human beings made in the image of God, possessing free-will.  This is why spiritual rebellion on earth is as alive and well today as ever.