In the beginning was God and God was alone. Or was He? Not really. As water has 3 essences – solid, liquid and gas, God has 3 essences – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the number one essence of God is relationship. God Himself IS a Relationship. And the number one essence of relationship is love. God loves relationship and loves it so much He decided to create more of it, thus He created the angels in order to have a relationship with Himself and with each other. It is all about love. You need two things to have love – one, a relationship and two, you cannot have love unless you have the ability not to love which means free will.
So God created angels in heaven, where He lives. They were each created perfect and without sin directly by Him in heaven in His presence and enjoyed His love and blessings and each angel had the very best God had to offer. He loves them and they love Him back.
Then the unthinkable happened. God’s most highly created angel, Lucifer, using his free will decided he, too, wanted to be like God and to be worshipped like God and his love changed from loving God first to loving himself first and this resulted in pride, the first sin ever committed. Not only was Lucifer’s relationship with God broken, but he was such a powerful influence with all the angels that approximately one third of the angels followed him and they, too, rejected God.
This is the “Ultimate” rejection – to live with God in His presence and to be receiving the very best God has to offer and then to decide that is not enough. That type of rejection is “eternal” rejection, an eternal fall and has no plan of redemption – no way to be right with God again.
Obviously, God was saddened by this event. Of course, being God and knowing the future, this did not catch Him by surprise. It was then that He decided to do something vastly different than He had done with His angels. If God creates a race of beings, angels, in His presence for all eternity and they can reject Him with free will, how about if He now creates a race of beings outside of His presence, human beings, and since He knows the future, He knows they will disobey Him and bring sin into the world. And thus He does something different – He creates a physical universe with something very different in it – time. Why time? Obviously, God does not need time. He is eternal and time is something temporary that has a beginning and an end. God knows that human beings due to their sin nature after the fall will be created outside of His presence in a “lost” condition and actually be children of Satan vs God. However, He loves them and because He is a God of relationship, His number one desire is for them to know Him, love Him back and spend eternity with Him.
When God created the physical universe, His plan was to live with the human race in His presence on planet earth forever. God is eternal Light and Life. The opposite of eternal Light and Life is eternal dark and death and that is what you have without God. It is also interesting to note that in “time” in a physical universe we have something that does not exist in heaven – time, light AND darkness, life AND death. We have both. The physical universe provides us time with day and night. Each new day is an example of light and life and each new night is an example of darkness and death when we sleep.
And since God’s plan includes creating a race of beings that would not know Him or see Him and each human being would be created lost due to their sin nature, in order to be able to find Him, know Him and love Him, they would need temporary “time” in order to do so.
So, here is a riddle. What is “both” the greatest gift and greatest curse God ever gave mankind? Time. Time is the greatest gift because time is what we have in order to go from being lost without God to being saved with God. God is Creator of everything and everything revolves around God and to come to know Him, love Him and be His child is the reason He created us and is the greatest gift any human being can receive. God has given us “time” for that to happen. Time is the greatest curse because time is death and destruction. Nothing can survive time but God Himself. Everything in the universe is dying – every form of life, every planet and star – everything.
Again, we know that God knows everything, including the future. God’s plan is to live on earth with human beings for eternity and in an environment that is without sin. Since God is Holy, Righteous and Perfect, there can be no sin where He dwells. When God created Adam and Eve He knew, of course, they would sin. In eternal heaven God created each angel directly Himself. On earth due to sin He creates each human being “indirectly” through human procreation. Thus, it has to be sinful man who “directly” creates sinful people. God has created two human beings without sin – Adam who was made without sin and Jesus who was born without sin by not having a human father. The Bible tells us that Adam’s sin would then be passed down to every human being in what is known as our sin “nature”. Satan and his demons were given control over earth and our sin nature causes us, whether we know it or not, to belong to him. When Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert, Satan offered Jesus the kingdom of this world if Jesus would follow him. Satan could not have offered Jesus the world if he were not in possession of it and Jesus did not refute Satan’s offer.
So we now have a huge problem that we ourselves can do nothing about. We all have a sin nature and we sin with it and since God is Holy and Perfect, He not only expects but demands that we, too, be holy, perfect and without sin. This is obviously impossible for human beings to remove sin and thus is something only God Himself can do and this gets us back to love again.
God created us first and foremost for His pleasure. He loves us immensely and desires we love Him back with our free will and to spend eternity with Him. Love is simply putting others first ahead of ourselves. Pride is the opposite. It is putting yourself first before others and that was the first sin committed by Lucifer in heaven when he put himself first before God.
The Bible tells us that the greatest “act” of love is to lay down your life in order to save another. It also tells us that sin is so abhorrent to God that it always brings death and that is why all human beings belong to not only physical death due to time but an eternal death after our time on earth is over due to our sin nature when we enter eternity. Since we are created in God’s image, God is an eternal being and so are we. What makes us different is we are created in “time” and time is NOT eternal. It is temporary. So being created in a physical universe with “time” means we have a physical body that dies in time and “then” our true eternal self will continue on in eternity “past time” and there are only two places that we can continue on to past time – with God in heaven or separated from God in hell. An eternity in Light and Life or an eternity in dark and death – not a physical death but a separation from God death.
Since God loves us and created us for His pleasure, He desires we love Him back and spend eternity with Him where He dwells. But since human beings cannot remove sin God has to do it for us and how does He do that? He does it with LOVE. The Bible tells us that sin is either judged and brings physical and eternal death OR it can be “paid for” by what it calls “the shedding of innocent blood”. What is “innocent” blood? It is simply “sinless” blood. Well, since no human being has sinless blood, how is that possible?
When God established a personal relationship with Abraham that led to the creation of the nation Israel through Abraham’s descendants, God then had a personal relationship with the children of the nation of Israel. If “anyone” enters into a “personal relationship” with God, whether an individual or a nation, the first thing that has to be dealt with is sin. Wait! Since there is no sinless blood to pay for the sins of the people, how is it possible to have their sins paid for? Ahhh, only one way. Animal blood. Animals are “not” created in God’s image and do not have sin and their blood is, thus, sinless. God set up an animal sacrificial system where for 2000 years or so, the Jewish people sacrificed millions of animals to pay for their sins in order to have a personal relationship with God. Since animals are not created in God’s image and animals are not shedding their blood out of love, their sacrifice is temporary and must be done over and over. God was showing the Jewish people their sins are serious and what they really need is a Savior who could save them from their sins once and for all eternity.
Now we are back to God’s love for mankind. Animal blood temporarily pays for sins. However, God’s love for mankind is so great that He decided the only way to save mankind from being lost to being saved would be to provide His greatest “act” of love to mankind – to sacrifice His life for the life of mankind and He did this by becoming a human being through His Son, Jesus Christ. By Jesus having a virgin birth and being born without the seed of a human father, Jesus was the only person ever “born” on earth without a sin nature – fully human but no sin nature and that is important since He would be the perfect sinless life and sacrifice who would “out of LOVE” be willing to die to pay for the sins of mankind once and for all. Sinless animal blood not sacrificed out of love is temporary. God’s sinless blood sacrificed out of love is “eternal” once and for all.
So, what has happened? Only the greatest thing that could ever happen to any human being. NOW each human being has a “way” to have their sins removed and to have a personal relationship with God now and forever. We can now go from a lost forever condition to a saved forever condition because Jesus by shedding His innocent sinless blood paid the price for our sins. His resurrection is God’s “receipt” to prove He paid the full price. God is allowing us our “time on earth” to be able to know Him, love Him and be His children now and forever. All we need do is accept and believe that Jesus died for us and paid the price for our sins and that we now “DESIRE” to know Him, love Him and become His child. His sacrifice provides the free “gift” of salvation and a personal relationship with Him but ONLY if the gift is “accepted” through desiring to know, love Him and be His child.
How big a deal is this really? This is a rhetorical question, of course. It is not only the biggest deal for every human being who enters into a personal relationship with God through Jesus but it is such a big deal to God that the Bible says the angels rejoice each time a person enters into a personal relationship with Him. Why is that and what do we receive when we enter into a relationship with God? Believe it or not, we receive God Himself “in us” through the Third Essence of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who comes to indwell each child of God.
It is a FAR greater thing, obviously, for an eternal lost human being to become saved and become God’s child than it is for an angel who is created by God in heaven and is already with Him. Because of this, God has blessed human beings in a FAR “greater” way than angels are blessed. Jesus says I am in the Father, the Father is in Me, I am in you and you are in Me and thus human beings are “grafted” into the Godhead in a unique way that angels are not. That helps explain why the Bible says we shall rule over angels.
An example of this is God is Windows. Angels are Mac. They work with and support Windows but are not part of Windows. Christians are a Windows upgrade. We are a small part of Windows in a way that Mac is not. And because we are a small part of God, we shall have free will but will never sin as God would never sin. We will love as only God can love. Our relationship with God in eternity will be the most SPECIAL relationship God has EVER created and this is all because of what humans have had to endure – a temporary physical body with “time” on earth living in an eternal lost condition on a sinful earth which brings all the good and evil that we see on earth. The Bible tells us that we cannot even imagine the great things that God has in store for us in eternity compared to what we now have on this sinful earth.
So, how does it all end? After Jesus comes back and rules planet earth for 1000 years during His millennial reign, God has His Great White Throne judgment in which all unbelievers of all ages will be judged and separated from God forever. It is at that time that there are no more “physical” human beings, which means no more sin nature, and God creates a new heavens and a new earth without sin and His city, the New Jerusalem will come down to the new earth and we shall live with God forever on the new earth. We will be back in eternity and temporary time will be gone forever which means no more night or darkness as we shall have eternal light and life from God in His presence. Thus, God’s plan all along of living on a sinless earth with us forever will finally be accomplished and we shall have an eternity of living with God and experiencing all the wonderful things He has in store for us that we cannot begin to comprehend now.
Conclusion: God is Creator and created everything and “everything” revolves around Him. WE are “eternal” beings and will live “forever” either with God or separated from God. Eternity is the KEY. Where we spend eternity is determined by where we are when we ENTER eternity – either with God forever or separated from God forever. There are only 2 ways to be lost for all eternity – fall from eternity like some of the angels did or enter eternity in a fallen state.
Our life “in time” on earth is like one second compared to a trillion years and a trillion years is like one second compared to eternity. All commerce, all business, all technology, the greatest things that we see on earth – all of it – means really “nothing” compared to eternity for it is temporary and will die. There is only one thing in the entire universe that is eternal – human beings – and eternal God’s main interest and desire is to enter into a personal relationship with each “eternal” human being during their time on earth and the ONLY things on earth that have “eternal” value are things that we do to show God’s love to others and to share the gospel message to others so that they, too, might come to know and love the Lord during their “time” on earth. And THAT, my friends, is what life and time is all about.
Maranatha Lord Jesus!!!