It is generally hard to work and relatively easy to avoid work. However, sin is an exception; it is very hard to avoid sin because it is in every cell of the body and even in the depraved blood!
Never were truer words spoken; the Apollo 13 mission said, “Houston; we’ve had a problem.” Of course, it was not the true mission who spoke these words but actors in Hollywood. Those words resounded all over the Earth and now most people believe they were spoken from outer space. That may be one of the only times in recent memory that Hollywood got it right; they do have a problem, and in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry, is a huge problem!
Those words were to be spoken by astronauts outside the atmosphere of the Earth. Indeed, worldliness admits, “Houston; we’ve had a problem” and although Houston was the central command center, the problem with being in outer space may be that mankind is there; it was “One giant step for mankind,” as they would say, but it was a “prick against the goads” to God.
The point herein is that indeed, “We’ve had a problem,” but it was more than with the mechanics of the rocket but with those in the rocket, not to exclude those in Houston back on Earth, and not to neglect the most problematic in Hollywood.
The problem with us is us. The problem that we have had is “original sin.” That phrase is nowhere to be found in the Bible, but it is the thread throughout. “God; we’ve had a problem!”
The world is “spaceship” Earth. “Houston” to us earthlings is God on His throne at the “base station” in Paradise. We have had a problem and to come back to Paradise means that “Houston” must intervene. The problem is that while mankind was on the Earth, they contacted an alien virus, and the serious crises is that all the earthlings might contact it as well. Well, that is exactly what happened here, but like Houston, God is still under control! The problem we’ve had here is sin; somehow it got into our flesh, yours and mine.
God made man (Adam) in his own image, male and female He made them. What is the “image” of God? God is Glorious: “…the Lord our God hath shewed us His Glory and Greatness” (Deut 5:24), speaking about the “Fire” on the mountain. The “Glory” of God is His substance — His “Weightiness” (Strong’s Definitions). That is likely that God is real and not just Spirit. The evidence is that man was made in all the substances of God — in mind, in body, and in the spirit. The weightiness (glory) of God was in our flesh since the flesh is the substance with weight.
Mankind had a problem! “For all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God” (Rom 3:23). That declaration seems so benign but there is esoteric meaning within it. Since original sin, the image in which man was made was despoiled. We have come short of the image of God; that Glorious Image in which man was generated.
God came to Earth in despoiled flesh but left it in glorified flesh (John 7:39). Jesus, God in the Flesh overcame the world, just as He said, “…be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Houston, the problem we’ve had is not insurmountable for God is in control! And just as God was the “Pilot” on the Ark, God remains the Pilot of “spaceship Earth” for those who rely on Him!
There was one command from the Control Center, Do not eat the fruit offered by an alien being (Gen 2:17). The other “image” was an alien one. That image was translated into English as the “Serpent” but not necessarily because angelic images can shape-shift from one form to another. The “Serpent” was just one of the many images of Lucifer and was perhaps his “shadow” within his “persona” as Jungian analytic psychology would suggest.
Something drastic
happened with original sin; earthlings had a huge problem:
11 For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. 12 Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous. (1 John 3:11-12)
Earthlings were to love one another but something went awry; there was a problem in the beginning, and that problem was evil — the “calamity” of “malignancy” (ibid). It was the most serious crisis ever which Lucifer would not miss! The malignancy of that “serious crisis” — wrong choices made — was that the earthlings would never be the same again! By grace, Adam and Eve were protected from further intrusion of the “Serpent,” providing that they would wear suits suitable for the contaminated atmosphere here on Earth.
Sacred literature has that their coats for this alien atmosphere were flesh from lambs, and for others that it was them reskinned with temporary flesh to withstand the wiles of the Devil. God protected the first two creatures ever generated from further contamination but the damage to their germline was done!
That the Bible begins with the Book of Generations (Genesis) is not by accident. God had generated Adam and Eve but with cunning, Lucifer had degenerated what God has generated. The Book of Genesis is all about the cycles of generation by the grace of God and degeneration by the ploys of Satan.
God, we’ve had a problem here — Cain is of the Wicked One! Eve, not God, had supplied to Adam a “man” (Gen 4:1). Eve had made herself the god just as the Serpent foretold (Gen 3:5). Like David long after who sought to make it appear that his germline was from Uriah, Eve made it appear that Cain was of Adam. However, since Eve is the “mother of all living” (gen 3:20); it is implied that Adam is not the father of all living. Because of the original sin, the Devil is the father of all of “Adam’s” children… “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8:44).
With that said, we are not all God’s children; we are alien to God and children of Cain and gens the Serpent. Perhaps the “Serpent” was the sperm of the Wicked one in that sperm appears to be much like them. Without going into detail about how it may have happened — perhaps by carnal knowledge — Cain received the image of Lucifer that overlaid the image in which God had endowed Eve. Eve had received the Divine Impulse of God from Adam, but Lucifer had shined his evil into Eve in some manner but with the sting of death — “The sting of death is sin” (1 Cor 15:56).
Just as rebirth is the “sting” of life from Jesus, spiritual death is the “sting” from Satan and since all have sinned, since Eve and the “Serpent” intercoursed, not only was Cain of the Wicked One, but so are all the “tares” that Lucifer planted in the Garden of God, or as Jesus said it, “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one” (Mat 13:38).
In other words, “original sin” was the “reseeding” that transformed God’s Garden wherein He planted man (Gen 2:8) into a Garden of human, depraved beings who looked human outwardly but inwardly they were “beasts.” What do beasts do? Whatever they desire to do! What is the problem that we’ve had here? Man does what is right in his own eyes as if there is no King and no Law (Jud 17:6). Ever since, original sin, genetically, men are all lawless. That has never been more apparent than it is now!
Why is it so hard to not to sin? It is not something one does but refrains from doing! Sin is so difficult because it is genetic. Evil is now in the identity of man; it is in the genes of alleged humane (sic) beings! David as much as said that he was born this way: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). “Iniquity” is depravity. David admitted that he was born a depraved being, alien from God. He lusted after Bathsheba’s flesh because lust was innate just like in the beasts. No wonder the golden calf was made, it was an image to which man could relate!
Why do we still have so much problem with sin? Because sin is in our genes and sin we will do. God pulls down strongholds of sin, “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor 10:5). “Strongholds” are our own wills that are fortified against encroachment from God. They are the things that when done in secret remain secret sins. They are the “Old creatures” worst sins in everyone that only the blood of Jesus and Living Water can douse!
Oftentimes, even sincere Christians, think about giving up because even with a willing spirit from God, the flesh is weak to temptation. The flesh must be appeased, and it will fornicate with about any appeasement unless the whole armor of God is worn as a “chastity belt” of sorts. Sin is essentially relaxing the “girdle” that retains the faculty of the will, and when relaxed, it does whatever there is a will to do because sin is in the flesh — in every cell and its chromosome!
Lucifer plants into the mind, unless the helmet is worn, that because you have sinned, just give it up! Inferred therein is that sin is stronger than God. With that thought, many just give in and fall away (apostasia; Heb 6:6). Yes, lions still eat Christians in the real world (1 Pet 5:8).
Jesus often reproved this generation. It seems that that generation as he spoke was the worst of the worst, but He was speaking of the general degeneration of mankind since original sin. It is always this generation that scripture speaks to! We are the problem that we’ve had, and the problem will finally be corrected at the regeneration of man — when some are “born again” (John 3:7), and literally, engendered from above by the Glory of God to which we all have come short theretofore.
“Glorification” is at the Resurrection when all those in Christ with Christ in them are made new creatures again as the original. Glorification is a regenning by God to replace the depraved genes of the Wicked One.
Scripture reveals that “Ye (Christians)are a chosen generation… a peculiar people” (1 Pet 2:9). “Chosen” in that passage is eklektos in the Greek; and that is very different from what is thought of as “election.” It is the choicest (ibid) of those that are available. The “elected” are those who can be persuaded to become Christians. Lucifer has such a stronghold on some that persuasion will never overcome their fortifications against the Divine Impulses from God!
No, God did not choose who would be regenned before the beginning of the world but endowed them with a mind to accept or reject the Divine Impulse — the genes in the “cup” (chromosomes) bled by Jesus as He lost Virtue that was so great that it could overcome the weightiness of the sins of the world.
Remember that “weightiness” from the start of this commentary. It is our own existence. It is the DNA of mankind that controls every aspect of our identity. Our DNA is our problem that we’ve had and giving up sin is so hard because it has become impulsive as we have inherited the nature of the “father of all living” — Lucifer. (Thankfully, God does adopt His fallen sons again much like the father of the prodigal son.)
That our minds are open to the call of God is “election” because so many are reprobate because of insolence.
We are a chosen “generation,” as it says. In the Greek, that is genos. Do not think of that as the time, but that “generation” therein is the gens, or family, of God. Not a family as in relatives, but our kind compared to other kinds. The gens of Christians are no longer alien genes, but them reseeded with the genus of God, making us someday like Christ and Him glorified with Christians no longer coming short of His glory.
As “peculiar people” it means much more than odd or different. “Peculiar” therein is not an adjective but a preposition, perhaps even a proposition! It indicates a movement into another existence (ibid). “People,” in that respect, are not persons but of a “different stock” (ibid). The difference between Christians and other peoples are that they are moving into a new race that scripture reveals as Jews inwardly (Rom2:29).
Your identity as a Christian — your genetics — move from common people into a race much like the Jews were intended to be when Abraham’s son, Isaac, was endowed with the seeds of God… when Abraham received the Divine Impulse, and his sperm became efficacious again. He is “Father Abraham” of righteous Christians and observant pre-Christian Jews because his genetics were regenned with the “Seed” of God, so to speak.
Christians are different on the inside, but because sin is so weak to temptation, they act the beasts; and only with the Holy Spirit Comforting their discomfit in sin can the iniquity in their flesh be overcome.
Sure, overcoming sin is hard, and even impossible, to overcome because it is in every nuclear cell of the body and blood. That the Eucharist is the “well-grace” of God is significant. The bread and wine represent the Body and Blood of Jesus of which each Christian is endowed with the genes of God. As the Son of God and the Son of David, Jesus would have both the genes of God and the genes of man in the sense that “son” in those phrases means the gens of both God and sinful man.
“Conversion” is the first process in rebirth. It is a change of mind that redirects the heart, meaning the faculty of the will. Conversion is the “fetal” stage of the new creature who is reborn at the resurrection — at the re-erection of the image of God back to the Designer’s intent!
So, if you think you can overcome sin; think again. Only Jesus can do that and when the time comes that you realize that sin is so prevalent in your genetic make-up, you understand that you are powerless to save yourself from what is inside of you!
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