– A primer for beginners/A reminder for waverers –
(with editing help from a sister in Christ, Lynda Janzen)
We are the foot soldiers of Yahusha Har Mashiach, the God-man we Christians call ‘Jesus the Messiah, Christ the King, and Son of God.’ Down through the ages of His church, we have worked, within the power of the Holy Spirit, to help soften the stony hearts of multitudes.
Even as this age, that is, the world as we know it, passes, many millions remain ‘in Christ.’ However, at this time, this world of fallen man remains the province of Har Shatan, Satan. For the time being, it is to remain under his governorship. God, however, has placed definite time limitations upon the reign of the usurper until the ‘harvest’ of Christ Jesus is brought in.
I have prayed that this series might strike the heart of at least one who, with heart softened by the Holy Spirit, opens like the ‘Rose of Sharon.’ We writers speak with many voices but only one message. A fervent, humble prayer that ‘even just one more’ might receive the gift of atoning grace that will receive them into a joyous reconciliation with God.
‘Reconciliation’ is a term that can be defined as a situation in which two people or groups of people become friendly again after they have argued or who, previously in conflict, agree to make amends or come to a truce.
Oh, how well the definition describes the two sides in this pre-eternal conflict! Mankind, invariably the antagonist, is locked into a state of denial that refuses to acknowledge sin within themselves or, if acknowledged, to attempt reconciliation that recognizes the part that God will and must always play.
And as the antagonist, mankind attempts to remain locked within denial of God, placing ‘self’ above all. In doing so, man is immediately unable to discern the unequal nature of the conflict in which he, within the plurality of his created gender, has so foolishly engaged.
Fallen man, within the stricture of his denial, cannot ‘see’ God as omnipotent, powerful beyond measure, and the one who holds within His own hand all the ‘cards in the deck.’ Indeed, He is the one who fashioned the ‘deck’ and who knew from the start every card within it.
Our eternal Father could never be called ‘antagonist.’ By even acknowledging Him as ‘Father,’ we opine that He is ever-willing to offer terms for a truce through His Son, Jesus Messiah, that allows the conflict to cease forever. The ‘offer’ and its ‘terms’ are always on the table. They remain so until we draw our last breath of the life He breathed into us at birth. At that point, life in flesh extinct, ‘Last Card Louie’ (man) has played all the cards in his hand. He has passed from life in flesh toward the Second and final, endless death God has set for deniers.
The series has, at its core, yet another attempt to portray the love and compassion that is God in all that He personifies. We have shown that in all that God did throughout the process of creation, He found it to be good, He took divine pleasure in His handiwork, and from that time, upon the ‘Sixth Day’ that He created man-kind, He loved him. That love has never ceased.
That love also took the form of extraordinary care and concern as, for instance, where God placed the man to live (Eden), and also later when He gave the woman to man, sharing in Adam’s joyous response.
When God visited the sin resulting from the temptation, His love took the form of the righteous anger experienced by any father in the face of great disobedience to a situation that would cause both harm and grief to his children. And when a harsh discipline had to be applied, that is, the expulsion from the Garden and all that which fell upon man as the result, it was in fact discipline that was applied as the punishment and not the usual finality of retribution. For ‘retribution’ is an act of vengeance for a wrong or criminal act and more often brings not just separation but immediate death.
Not so with the serpent whom God cursed. Here we see not discipline but divine retribution. Such is the power of curse. Yet God only decrees retribution as the righteous condemnation for the finality of our refusal to humble ourselves, repent and accept all the gifts of the ‘heavenlies’ meant to flow to us.
Without scholarship, I therefore scribe only as a fallen sinner who, having repented a life of evil, has given himself to God in the sure and certain knowledge of having received thereby the atoning grace that only my Christ can grant within the power of His Father’s name.
Ultimately, this atonement of redeeming grace, bought with the pure blood of His Son, will restore all who have received it to the innocence and grace enjoyed by Adam as he walked in the company of God amidst the Garden.
Upon Christ Jesus, the rock of my salvation, I rest faithfully in the belief that within His loving arms, my God has reconciled my soul for his own.
Friends: what God did for me through Jesus, He will do for you. Reset the blades of the Plantation shutters of your heart so that the window of your soul becomes flooded with the light of goodness and grace. No one who asks is denied. Only your own denial forbids entry.
May your soul soon come to experience this.
WHO IS THIS JESUS?
The Deity of Christ
John 1: 1-2 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”
And again at 14a:
The Incarnation of Christ
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Jesus has always been.
He is part of what we know as the Trinity. That God, in His omnipotent power and might, so far and beyond our minute comprehension, has a persona of three faces (a face in three equal parts), and they are co-eternal in reach, omnipotence and power.
God is:
– The Father Creator of all things known and unknown.
– He is the Son whom, in flesh, was sent by God to redeem us from our brokenness.
– And he is the Spirit of utmost holiness.
Though we still lie broken in our fallen state, God loves us so much that in His Holy Spirit, He became our ‘great counselor.’ He remains with us as a constant defense against the work of the fallen one, Satan. And He has promised to be with us until the end of this current age, ‘the era of Christ’s Church,’ which is now passing away.
We may call it our ‘conscience,’ and ancient Hebrew sages spoke to it as ‘reason.’ I refer to it as my ‘inner voice!’ And through it, I am completely convinced that through faith and grace, I am permitted to communicate directly with God through Jesus. My life thereby is at all times guided by the Holy Spirit Himself. When we listen to our conscience or to reason, as we contemplate choices of good or evil, it is He who whispers, “This is not your best choice. Go back! You’re about to go the wrong way!”
Be then in no doubt: This triune God (God in three persons) is with us constantly.
“He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you.”
Jesus existed before God laid down the foundations of this present world. And as He is God Himself, He was with God in the ‘Beginning.’ i.e., ‘of everything in subsequence that God made by his own omnipotence.’
Manifest to us in flesh, Jesus came into existence in human form. And this, at the will of His Father Who had determined to reconcile fallen mankind back into the loving relationship He had commenced. That relationship was rent (not irrevocably broken) by the woman succumbing to the temptation set before her by Satan.
Adam, however, bore the ultimate responsibility for both his own behavior and that of his helpmate. Through Adam, all mankind continues to suffer the consequences of our separation from God.
That situation is forever rectified when Jesus, the perfect paschal lamb of sacrifice, freely gave up His life in flesh to suffer and die for us on the Cross.
Jesus is the only ‘way.’ He is the means through and by which reconciliation with God is made possible. This ‘way’ to God is found by submitting the whole of our life to being in the ‘will’ of God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God himself decreed that the blood of one sinless ‘man’ would become a ‘once and for all’ sacrifice to atone for sin. This sacrifice would buy the redemption of anyone of any color, religion, or even lack of belief who would seek it, in repentance, through His Son.
Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit of God Himself and was born of a virgin. In this way, He was born sinless, and the seed of fallen man was not found in Him.
For his thirty-three years, inclusive of the three years of his ministry, he lived a life of spiritual and temporal purity. In that state, Jesus was eminently a suitable sacrificial offering, whose blood, unsullied, was completely acceptable to God. Thereafter, it would wash clean the sinful denial of any repentant sinner who called upon the name of Jesus.
It is of the utmost importance that we understand what this sacrifice represented.
Once a year, under the Law of Moses, as given by God, unblemished lambs of absolute purity, of constant color with no spots and no blemish of any kind were sacrificed. Death was by the knife, and it was their blood that washed away the sins of the people. And their bones were not to be broken. The sacrifice was their blood because blood is the essence of life within the flesh of all beings.
No bones of our Savior were broken, either through the scourging He underwent or His suffering on the Cross.
Note this well:
It is the blood of man that is sacred to God. That is why it is abominable to ‘sinfully’ slay another, e.g., murder, abortion et al. The significance of this is that life within all flesh exists in and because of the blood.
It was the ‘unblemished’ blood of Jesus that constitutes the eternal and divine nature of His sacrifice. Scourged by the flailing of His body at the hands of Pilate, and later when the spear was plunged into His side by the Centurion, His blood flowed freely.
God the Father had proclaimed that only the pure, unstained blood of a perfect, sinless man was capable of washing the stain of our fallen flesh of corruption from any of us. To attain it, we would need to seek and proclaim it through and in the name of Jesus.
That was the price He paid for us!
Corruption of our fallen state lies imprinted within our DNA. It is carried by our bloodstream. God placed it there as he expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden. Only God can remove the impurity that stains our seed.
The atoning grace granted us through Jesus is the means through which this must occur. There is no other way back to God. It is the only way through which we may be redeemed. It is the only way our souls can be translated to heaven within a new, glorious and glorified body following our resurrection.
What is to happen to the redeemed in Christ is exactly what happened to Jesus Himself and is why He is called the first-fruits by Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 15:20).
What a God! What a Savior – Jesus Messiah, lover of our souls.
Maranatha,
Denis Bowden