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In the counsel of God
before the creation of the world, it was decreed that man would have the
opportunity to experience the life of God by experiencing the Son of
God. Jesus said, ". . . as the Father hath life in himself, so hath
he given to the Son to have life in himself; And hath given him
authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man"
(John 5:26-27).
The Father has not only "given to the Son to have life within
himself," He has also given the Son to be the One that would enable
man to experience that life ("authority to execute judgment").
By the Son of God becoming the Son of Man, the created world could
experience the life of the Creator. The heavenly realm (the spiritual)
and the earthly realm (the physical) would come together in the Son of
God being made flesh.
Moreover, when God created man of the dust of the earth and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life (which would be the Holy Spirit
functioning as the Spirit of Christ), man became a creature of two
different worlds. Man would live the days of his life in both the
earthly and the heavenly domains.
He would have a flesh and blood body. With a sensing network of seeing,
hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching, man would encounter his
existence in the earthly world of physical and material experiences.
Although dwelling in the physical world, the essence of life for man
would not be the physical but the Spirit of God that animated him. With
his physical body being in-breathed by the Spirit of God, he would also
be a spiritual being.
In the original creation of mankind, the first man subsisted as a flesh
and blood body experiencing the Spirit of God. In the innocence of his
mind (his soul), man experienced his life in like manner as the rest of
creation. All creatures proclaimed and enjoyed the life that the grace
of God produced in and through them. They lived their lives in the
paradise of the manifested glory of God.
In the beginning, man was body and soul experiencing the Spirit of God.
There was no spirit of man. When man was enticed (an enticement that
James stated came about by man being drawn away of his own lust) to eat
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was an awakening to
a way of thinking that centered solely upon the creature itself. Man
would now attempt to experiences his life by the manipulation of his
physical senses. His world, once the reality of the glory of God, would
now become the fantasies and the imaginations of his own making.
God still ruled every action of the universe but in the make believe
world of his mind, man now thinks he can control the happenings of his
life. With the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil, the glory of man became the shame of man. The intellectual
might of man, the marvel of the created world, lost the controlling
influence of the Spirit of God. The mind under the influence of its own
making, the spirit of man, now has the propensity to become the monster
of the created world.
The early followers of Jesus seemed to understand correctly the
adversary to the ways of God. They knew the hostility that always rose
to the surface when the spirit of man came into opposition to the Spirit
of God. The Epistle of James, perhaps more than any other of the early
letters of Christianity, pinpoints exactly the great enemy of God
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