The prophet Ezekiel was certainly not a Calvinist, and neither is God. So many Christians err because God indeed is gracious, but His grace is limited to those who live a righteous life. Ezekiel the prophet has something to tell Calvin:
24 But when the righteous turns away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and does according to all the abominations that the wicked man does, shall he live? All his righteousness that he has done shall not be mentioned: in his trespass that he hath trespassed, and in his sin that he has sinned, in them shall he die…. 26 When a righteous man turns away from his righteousness, and commits iniquity, and dies in them; for his iniquity that he has done shall he die. (Ezek 18:24,26)
According to Ezekiel, who was the
“mouthpiece” of God, to wit: “The Word of the Lord came unto me again, saying…”
(Ezek 18:1); eternal life is dependent on the condition of his or her spiritual
condition; which can be measured by sins that he or she has sinned.
First off, we must consider the effect…
to die; “mut” in the Hebrew. Mut implies death in any language.
However, Solomon wrote that there
is “a time to be born, and a time to die (mut); a time to plant, and a
time to pluck up that which is planted” (Ecc 3:2). Solomon implied that human beings were the “plants”
(trees) of the Garden and as such, we all should have been of the branch of Adam
and live forever.
That brings up the question what
is it to live? In the Hebrew it is hayay. To live is to “belong” ostensibly
to belong to God (Gesenius' Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon). Man (Adam) was
made in the Image of God, so therefore man’s soul belongs to God. Life and
death are not about the flesh, but about the soul that belongs to God.
Now consider what Ezekiel wrote
about trespassing. Jesus even called sin “trespassing” (Mat 6:15). Your soul
belongs to God. Where it goes is His business. Going where He forbids is His “property”
going onto alien property — property that is not God’s. Property is more than
an estate but the economy of any estate. The economy of Lucifer,
the so-called “Serpent” was sinful.
That brings up the question what
is sin? It is trespassing against God. On God’s Estate, His will that is to
be done is not to trespass against Him. On God’s Estate there is a very
different economy with very different statutes. The economy is contentment and
peace both of which are dependent on nobody trespassing on the property of God.
Since man belonged to God, then doing
wrong to others is trespassing onto the property of God and doing ill things
against God is trespassing against the Proprietor of the Estate; hence all the
Ten Commandments hang on those two things, to wit: Love God and others (Luke
10:27).
Paul queried the Christians at
Corinth, “What? know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost
which is in you, which you have of God, and you are not your own?” (1 Cor
6:19).
It is not your body that belongs
to God but the Holy Ghost within you that belongs to Him. The “Holy Ghost” is
the same Image of God that was in the body of Adam. The Holy Ghost of God in
the Hebrew is “Selem;” it is the “Shadow” or “Phantom” Presence of God within
the Christian. Not only did the Jews belong to Christ because of the Holy Ghost
in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but because to be a Christian, Christ must be in
you, not in Body but in Spirit. The Pauline letters refer to that as “in Christ.”
It is having the “Word” of the Old Testament in you.
What is “The Word” of the Old
Testament? About the forthcoming commandments that God was about to write with
His “finger”, it is written, “God spoke all these Words, saying…” (Exod
20:1).
The “Voice” of the Garden of Eden
was the Invisible Image of God — “The Word.” The Word implies a dynamic.
Indeed, the commandments are right things to do and wrong things not to do. The
Word revealed the metrics of “righteousness” of which He spoke to Ezekiel. “Righteousness”
is operationalized by the Ten Commandments and “iniquity” is the opposite of righteousness.
The Ten Commandments were not
written for God to judge you but for you to judge yourself; whether you are
missing the “mark” or not in the manner of Cain who came short of the glory of
God. How would anyone realize how inglorious they are if there were no
parameters for measurement? As such, living outside of the Commandments is “unrighteousness”
and indeed the unrighteous do come short of the glory of God which was Adam with
the perfect Image of God.
God is not ignorant. He knows
that your genetic father is the Devil (John 8:44). So, He made allowances for
that. Because iniquity is within you as it was in David (Psalm 51:5), God has
mercy on His creatures because we are miscreants because of original sin. God
knows we all shall fail, so rather than measuring us by our actions, God
measures us on our willingness to comply with His statutes.
Paul compared life to the Olympiad
of which he seemed to be an admirer., “Let us lay aside every weight, and the
sin which does so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that
is set before us. (Heb 12:1). Hence sin does not condemn us, but it does drag
the Christian down. In Christ is the entry to the Olympiad of God and
the race, life itself. It is running the race with the gravity of the world
against us. To win the race, all must enter to obtain the prize. The starting
line is rebirth. As Paul wrote, “So run that you may obtain” (1 Cor 19:24).
Sin does not keep us out of the
running but bogs the runner down. It is like me running the Olympic challenge
carrying an extra seventy-five pounds. I can still run, I can still win, but
with that much baggage I might never finish the race to eternal life to obtain
the prize. We must limit the unnecessary baggage that burdens us.
Paul also wrote about what
Ezekiel heard from God; “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many
shall wax cold, but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved”
(Mat 24:12-13). “Iniquity” is the weightiness of sin. It is like an unrighteous
person who enters the race all doped up to appear to be an Olympian, but they
really are not!
Christians must be right; not
just perform! Anybody can perform to the standards — the statutes of God — but
if they do so just to be judged, then they perform for the wrong reasons and
miss the mark. They may run, but they will never finish the race even thought
the reward is in full view.
Churchmen perform well but being
in church is not the race. It is performing to Olympiad standards which The
Word burned on stone for all to consider. If you want to win the race, is it
worth doing and refraining from doing spiritually healthy things? It must be!
Remember that your flesh is just
a weight that you carry around that is burdensome. It is only how Satan hinders
you from finishing the race. The race is run by glorious creatures remade in the
Image of God to be living souls. Among them are unworthy runners whose desire
is only to trip the true runners. The Church is full of the unworthy runners.
So, it is not you in bodily form
that runs but your soul that is either the image of Lucifer (Nahas) or the
Image of God (Selem). The Image of God is in your soul — the vessel for
the Spirit of God. Jesus called His a “Cup.”
Nahas is a creeping being that
is alien to God. It is not a serpent at all but a cunning being alien to God —
an inglorious, unrighteous being that lies low and trips even Christians to do
wrong things, as was the case of Adam and his woman.
They were the upright beings who
after sin became nothing more than creeping things. Humble yourselves, you were
born a “creeping thing” that requires rebirth. But even with rebirth, once a
creeping thing; always a creeping thing unless Jesus lifts you up (Jas 4:10).
We are indeed born this way
but there is no need to think we must remain this way! Whatever, it is, “God
is greater than what’s the matter,” as Pastor William Rhodes so often repeated.
What’s the matter, is that we are born this way, there is nothing that we can
do to change ourselves, and only Christ can change you.
Once changed; not always changed:
speaking to the Christian elders, Paul warned them in his letter, “Be sober, be
vigilant; because your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walks about,
seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet 5:8). The Devil devours our flesh. He doesn’t
eat it but knows it as our weakness; the flesh is a burden for even a Christian.
The fiery darts of the Wicked One gets to Christians one “nibble” or “penetration”
at a time until the once righteous man belongs to himself!
Indeed, “in Christ” is safe
as the Greek word “sozo” can also be interpreted, but salvation comes
later:
Whom having not seen (Jesus), you love; in whom, though now you see Him not, yet believing, you rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory; receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you. (1 Pet 1:8-10)
Paul was saying in essence, that
is what Ezekiel was talking about in chapter eighteen! The end of your faith is
at the end of your life here on Earth. No longer can you believe or disbelief
because the dead in Christ shall know!
Paul wrote what the “prize” might
be — “the salvation of your souls.” It is not your flesh that is saved; it
remains a burden, but at the general resurrection those who died in Christ
obtain new incorruptible flesh… glorious flesh like in the Garden of Eden
before sin!
Salvation, therefore, is “glorification”
and that occurs for those who endure the flesh and remain upright, as measured
by the willingness to perform to the standards of God.
Adam and the woman believed
themselves to be safe, even trespassing where they were told not to go. Their
flesh did remain alive but it became a burden to them, so they covered their pudenda;
albeit that was not enough; God covered them sole to palm with his coats of
skin to ward off the fiery darts of the Wicked One. They remained safe because
of their sorrow but thenceforth, according to sacred literature, Satan continued
to have his way with them. Only when they died were they saved, only
awaiting “The Last Adam” Jesus to finish His good works in them.
It seems that Adam was finally glorified
again: As Jesus died, “The graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints
which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went
into the holy city, and appeared unto many. (Mat 27:52-53). In my book, The
Skull of Adam, I contended that Adam was the first “saint” since he alone
died in Christ because Eve was the new kind that he named. She was Satan’s kind
(Gen 3:2), and the mother of all of us who have lived. We are all Cain’s kind
and only Christ can change the genetics within us all.
Christians cannot perform and
change who they are; but Jesus can regen us to what we were meant to be. Jesus
called that action “born again” wherein He engenders us from above.
When God engenders, He will never
degenerate those that have been made upright again. However, Satan seems to
have the power of temptation to change even Christians back to the wicked ones
that they remember.
I asked my son one day, “How
would a clever man kill you?” He had not idea, saying, “I have never considered
killing.”
My point was the sure way
of getting away with murder is gradually making things so awful that even a
good man might kill himself. The way to cleverly murder someone and get away
with it is to “suicide” them; to make it the easy way out of whatever it is.
Indeed, Judas took the easy way, he thought, out of this world. Satan suicided
him (Luke 22)!
Satan also suicided Eve. He persuaded
her that his lack of the Law (the law of sin) was much easier than following
the Law of God, so she trespassed against God and died. It was not her flesh
that died, although it slowly withered, but she died within as her soul then
belonged to Satan.
It is not to whom your flesh
belongs, but to whom your soul belongs. Your flesh is the image of Satan and
the Wicked One, but your soul, if you have been converted, belongs to God.
However, God still expects you to respect the living soul that belongs to Him safe
by keeping the temple (the flesh) clean and free from sin. That is your responsibility
to keep the flesh clean while He remains in the soul You have a duty to perform,
“to dress and keep” the Garden (Gen 2:15) which was His Temple.
If you fail on your part, the covenant
of grace is broken, just as God used “Satans” to destroy the Temple building in
70 A.D to safe the Jews from suiciding themselves. God will never kill our souls,
but we can suicide them ourselves by serving the wrong of two masters (Mat
6:24).
My problem as a Christian may be
like yours; I try to serve one but serve two masters, and still sin often. Knowing how hard it is to be something we were
not born to be, God is merciful, and he forgets sin, not that He has a short
memory of sin, but if we are wiling servants, then He does not hold those sins
against us if we repent. Sinning without repentance is knowingly trespassing on
God’s territory without remorse. If that happens, then we lose our share of the
Estate of God. In fact, the entire Bible is God’s Last Will and Testament with
the newer Testament a codicil.
You can indeed fall away (Heb 6:6;
apostasia) but it is done so subtly that some never know how far they
have fallen; perhaps all the way down! In a sense, continuing in sin is us
suiciding our most inner self — our reborn souls.
"Suicide Man" - Pond5
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