Lifetime Guarantee (10 page)

Let’s start by developing a simple biblical model of man. The Lord used Charles Solomon and his book
Handbook to Happiness
(Tyndale) to help me in this area, and I’m very grateful for his insights. I have taken the basic idea and modified it.

We cannot take the most complicated being God ever created and adequately represent him with a two-dimensional diagram. But our understanding of the Word of God can be greatly helped if we employ diagraming as a communication vehicle.

Each individual is, of course, a whole, but the Word teaches that the whole person is composed of three integrated parts: spirit, soul, and body (Figure 4.1; also see 1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Ask the typical Christian what his soul is and he’ll be hard-pressed to respond. “I don’t know,” he might say. “It’s like a puff of smoke or something.” The word
soul
and the word
psychology
come from the same root, meaning “personality.” The soul, then, is your personality—mind, will, and emotions—your unique version of them.

Your body is the vehicle here on planet earth that houses your soul and spirit. Second Corinthians 5:1-8 refers to it as an earthly tent. Author C. S. Lovett has called it an “earthsuit,” which seems a good way to describe it. It really is an earthsuit. God never designed it to live in Jupiter’s environment. You might be able to take it there, but you’d have to encase it in an “earthy” environment or it would die.

The earthsuit is simply a vehicle through which my soul interacts with the earthly environment. As I write this, my soul is commanding the muscles in my earthsuit to make its fingers hit certain keys on a computer, and the earthsuit is trying its best to obey. You are commanding your earthsuit to make its eyes rove methodically across these rows of print, and as a result, my soul is communicating with yours. If we were face-to-face, we could command our lips to wiggle on our earthsuits and make noises cross over from one to another, which we’d then process and interpret. Again, we’d be using our earthsuits to communicate.

If my earthsuit should happen to fall over and die while we were talking, you might phone the police and tell them you had just seen a man die. That would be the human view, but not God’s. This man wouldn’t have died. My earthsuit would have died. I’d still be alive and well and wingin’ with Jesus.

The earthsuit is good. It’s not an evil thing, but it’s vulnerable to being used by the devil to get or keep us in a lot of trouble. There are some very neat things to be experienced on planet earth through the earthsuit. It feels good to feed it Mexican food when it’s hungry. It feels good to give it a hot shower when its muscles are tired. It feels good to sex it when it’s sexy. All these are
good
things. God made the earthsuit and designed it to enjoy these things, but they must be done according to the Manufacturer’s handbook or we’re creating trouble for ourselves.

The Scriptures also teach that God is spirit and that humanity is made in His image. Therefore, we are spirit-beings.
We are not physical creatures with spirits; we are spirit-creatures with bodies.
God doesn’t have an earthsuit. He doesn’t need one. He’s using ours if we’re born again. He lives in here with me! However, for a few years He used an earthsuit that was exclusively His own. He called Himself “Jesus, Son of God.” Jesus
is
God. The Scriptures state, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19); “He is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15); “He who has seen Me [Jesus] has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

While He was walking here on earth, Jesus made it clear that there was a way for us to get our problem solved with God the Father. He said first that a person has to be born a second time, literally “born from above” according to John 3. Nicodemus said, “You mean I’ve got to get back inside my mom?”

“No, Nick, you’ve got it all wrong,” Jesus said. “That would give you two earthsuits, and you don’t need two. One to the customer is adequate. But you don’t have a spirit-vehicle. Your spirit is dead to God. You’ve got to get a live spirit, and then you can commune with My Father through that vehicle” (“Those who worship Him must worship in spirit” [John 4:24]).

By being born from above through receiving Christ as Savior, a redeemed person acquires a second vehicle through which he can express himself in addition to his earthsuit. He can now fellowship with people through his earthsuit and with God through his spirit.

The unsaved person has a live earthsuit, but a spirit which is dead to God. The Bible says he is “dead in his sins” (see Ephesians 2:1-10) and thus is not alive to God now, nor will he be so in eternity unless he appropriates Christ’s provision by choosing to get spiritually born from above. Figure 4.2 illustrates this.

Working with that overall model of man, let’s now break the soul down into its three component parts: mind, will, and emotions—your thinker, your chooser, and your feeler. Then let’s add a brain to our model. The brain must be a part of the body (see Figure 4.3). Logic will dictate that the brain and the mind cannot be the same, because the brain is made out of meat. It’s going to stay right here on earth when your earthsuit dies. If, therefore, your mind were your brain, your mind would stay here in your dead body. That would leave you nothing to think with after physical death, and that’s not the picture the Bible gives us (see Luke 16:22-31). Thus, your mind cannot be your brain. Your mind
uses
your brain here on earth, but the brain is simply a hunk of meat like a heart or a liver.

The brain does have a unique function, however. It’s a computer. The reason they call a computer a mechanical brain is that they got their inspiration for designing one by analyzing the way a human brain works. The brain is simply a data processing unit. It gathers information from the environment through the body’s sensory preceptors (eyes, ears, etc.) and organizes these data into structures we call “meaning.” “Printouts” would be the computer term.

Your brain generates 5,000 printouts per hour, I suppose, and it couldn’t care less what it processes. You let your eyes scan the covers of the sex magazines, and you’ll get printouts of naked women every time. Focus your ears on listening to the Word of God being taught in a church, and you’ll get printouts of that. Garbage in, garbage out; truth in, truth out. Your brain will process whatever is fed into it.

When you have a computer in operation, you must have some people available called computer analysts if you’re to benefit from it. Their job is to read the printouts, analyze them, and then make recommendations to the big boss. He then makes decisions based on their recommendations. As his decisions go, so goes company production (performance).

God has made human beings in a similar fashion. Your mind and your emotions are your computer analysts. They sort of sit in there and watch TV all day. As the printouts come flying through your computer, mind and emotions rapidly analyze them, react, and then quickly make recommendations to the big boss, the will. Now, the will has two polarities like a light switch: You either
do
or you
don’t.
You can’t sit in the middle, since that would be choosing not to choose, and that’s a don’t. You either do or you don’t.

Christians have a free will that can override the recommendations of both mind and emotions. The mind could say to the will, “I don’t understand why the Lord is letting this happen to me,” and the will can answer, “Well, rain on whether I understand or not; I choose to believe it’ll all work to my ultimate good, because the Word says so.”

The emotions could say, “I feel excited about the prospect of asking my secretary out to lunch today.” And the will can say, “Oh no you don’t, Tiger! I choose to do the will of my Father!”

You see, Christian, we’re really on the hook to obey God. We now have a free will that can rule over and resist the “recommendations” of our emotions. The trick is to understand
how,
which we’ll explain in great detail in later chapters.

Long after I had become a new creation in Christ, I made a startling discovery. I had always thought that eternal life was an extension or a continuation of my life. My life began in 1927, and I assumed that when I accepted Christ as my personal Savior, God attached an extension onto my life that would last forever. That’s not true. Why would God want to take the Lord-of-the-Ring life that had separated me from His presence in the first place and extend it forever? His plan was to exterminate my old life and exchange it for new life. And that life is a person, Jesus Christ.

“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life—and
the
life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you
the
eternal life…” (1 John 1:1,2, emphasis added). John claims he actually
handled
and
saw
eternal life! Eternal life is not an “it.” Eternal life is Jesus! Thus, a critical part of victorious living is comprehending
how
to let eternal life (Christ) be expressed through my personhood to do His will (see Appendix A).

A common objection the Evil One often serves up into the mind of a Christian is that this would rob us of our identity. We’d become a water pipe that Jesus flows through; we’d all be exactly the same. Let’s defuse that deception.

In my workshop I have a drill, a saw, and a grinder. All three serve different functions, yet all three are plugged into the same power source, the electric outlet. The electricity is their “life.” The “life” doesn’t make them all identical. It actually
gives them their unique identity.
So long as the “life” flows, each of these tools
manifests its true identity.
It’s the life that reveals their uniqueness and purpose for being. I’ll tell you when they’d lose their identity—if you unplug them. Without their life, they’d all be exactly the same…paperweights!

You were specifically recreated in Christ to offer your members to Him to express His life through you. It’s His Life that
gives
you your identity, that enables you to experience the true eternal you. Just think: You and the God of the universe cohabitating in the same earthsuit!

Eternal life (Christ) is not time dimensional. “All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:3). Christ created
all
things. Therefore, there is no such thing as a “natural phenomenon.” If it exists in its natural state, He created it. This includes the time dimension; time was created by the Lord. Therefore, logically, He is not time dimensional. If He were, the created would be superior to the Creator. Thus, Christ is not time dimensional. He is
supratime.
And the time dimension as we see it in our finite existence is actually present tense in His perception.