The actual mechanics of man’s creation
caused man to become a creature of two worlds. Being formed out of the
dust of the ground, he is of this earthly realm. He is a temporal, flesh
and blood person. When God breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life, he began to experience the heavenly realm. With the breath of life
being the Spirit of God, man experienced the eternal, spiritual essence
of life. Through the mysteries of the incarnation, man became a flesh
and blood vessel animated by the Spirit of God.
Although man has a corruptible, dishonorable, weak, and natural body, he
can experience the incorruptible, glorious, powerful, and spiritual
reality of the life of God. His mortality can be swallowed up by God’s
immortality. Being set free from the control and influences of the
earthly realm, he can experience the life of the heavenly realm.
Although clothed in a fleshly tabernacle (2 Cor. 5:1–4), he can be a
spiritual being.
The mind of man can be set free from man’s earthly tabernacle. With
each believer receiving the Spirit of adoption, whereby he can cry Abba,
Father (Rom. 8:15), he can expect fully the redemption of his body. With
redemption meaning ransom in full, or riddance, the
believer can experience freedom from the earthly house of his tabernacle
(2 Cor. 5:1). The believer can be rid of the flesh’s control.
The mind of man can be set free to enable the believer to experience the
glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom. 8:21). Man can continually
experience the realm of the Spirit unless he falls to the deception that
he can direct his life by the exercise of his mind. Being deceived that
he is free to make choices for good or evil, man is then forced to live
by the choices he makes. The exercise of man’s mind has always
produced his hells, has always produced the existence of being
controlled by the earthly realm.
Man was created with a free will, but it is not the freedom to choose
good or evil. The perception that man’s freedom is the ability to
choose good or evil is actually the product of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. It is not that man cannot choose. He can, but his
choices always take him down and away from God.
The events of salvation is the story of what God does for man in spite
of man. Man’s intellect, once his glory but now his shame (Phil.
3:19), has such control over him that his mind has to be brought into
captivity. The intellect of man not only has to be conquered by Jesus,
but man has to be dragged back to God and driven to others to experience
the manifestation of Jesus in his life. Jesus Christ is the only way
that the exercise of the mind, that which produces evil (John 9:41), can
be conquered. Every man must be saved from the contamination of his
warped or perverted age, must be saved from the thinking of natural man.
Jesus Christ came to take man to a place of rest, horizontal and passive
as opposed to vertical and active, This work of Christ would cause man
to fade out of sight until only Christ is seen. The Father has sent his
Son into the world of the believer to baptize him with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus came to overcome man and to save him from himself thereby giving
man a new way of speaking, a new way of seeing, and a new way of
thinking.
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