Lifetime Guarantee (11 page)

Let’s suppose your earthwalk were represented by the Main Street of an Old West movie set. Every episode in your life is represented by a storefront on the street (see Figure 4.4).

The letter “B” stands for your physical birth, the “H” represents your first haircut, the “E” is your entry into elementary school, the “S” is the day you invited Jesus Christ to become your Savior and Lord, the “T” stands for today, and the “D” is for physical death. To you, the portion from T to the left represents the past, T represents the present, and everything to the right of T stands for the future. This is because you are a time-bound creature.

God is, however, like a person who is hovering over your Main Street in a helicopter. Since He is not time dimensional, He can see the whole street all at once (see Figure 4.5).

God is all-knowing (omniscient); that’s one of His attributes. This doesn’t make us robots who are not free to make choices. Quite the contrary, you are a free moral agent who may make fifty choices before you finish reading this chapter. But God, being all-knowing, sees the fifty buildings representing your choices as present-tense reality. Read Psalm 139. It says He knows your thoughts before you ever generate them! Now, I can’t figure this out completely; no one can. I just have to accept the Word of God, which says His ways are higher than mine. And time is a meaningless concept to His perception, where everything is present tense.

Since God is not time dimensional, He can see forever into the future. That’s how He dictated the Revelation to John. But consider also that He can see forever into the past as well. If He couldn’t, He’d be limited by time just as we are.

The Bible states that Jesus Christ is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8
KJV
). Imagine this now! God solved the “problem” before the problem ever occurred in the time-dimensional setting by “seeing” the lovely, innocent Jesus crucified before the foundation of the world.

Now let’s bring Adam, the first man, into the picture. He produced a bunch of descendants, one of whom was you. But what would have happened to you if your grandfather had died before he ever got his wife pregnant (see Figure 4.5)? You would have died in his gene pool and never shown up on planet earth. That obviously didn’t happen, but Romans 5:12 says that in some manner it
did
happen to you
in Adam.
Somehow, when that first man died, all men died. How? What part of me died before I ever showed up? Let’s return to that garden scene. You, too, were there, in Adam’s loins (see Figure 4.6).

Thinking in terms of our model-of-man diagram again, the Lord and Adam fellowshipped with one another regularly because Adam was created with an innocent spirit that made him alive to God.

One day God said to him, “Adam, you may do anything in this garden you wish except one thing. You may not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” You see, God gave Adam a choice. Adam could either let God be
his
God, determining what is right and wrong for Adam, or he could write out his own declaration of independence, stake his claim, carve out his own little kingdom, and declare himself “Lord of the Ring.”
He
would determine what
he
thought was right and wrong. He didn’t need God’s opinion.

Then God said, “The
very day
you eat from that tree, you will die.” Notice, He didn’t say Adam would die hundreds of years later. He said he would die by sundown.

God was not implying a physical death by the end of the day. Had that been the case, we would have died physically at sundown in Adam, and none of the rest of us would have ever been born. Well then, did Adam and Eve die “soulically”? Did their personalities die? No, in that case they would have become robots who could not think, feel, or choose. In this condition, they would have produced “after their kind,” and we’d all be robots today.

We’ve ruled out all but one part of man, his spirit. Their spirits died! That part of Adam and Eve that made them alive to God died, and after sundown they could no longer fellowship with Him (see Figure 4.7). They then began to produce spiritually dead offspring whose normal, natural state was to be dead to God and, by nature, to rebel against His authority over them, claiming their “right to live their own lives.” They became the first Lords of the Ring.

The Scriptures say in Romans 5:12 that simultaneous with man’s first act of rebellion against God’s right to authority over him, something entered into the world called “sin.” On the basis of its subsequent use in much of Romans 5–8, this cannot always have reference to just one sinful act, but rather to a power called sin entering into man’s experience. I do not claim to understand exactly what this is other than to say what the Word says. It is an “evil…
present
in me” (Romans 7:21, emphasis added), a
“different
law in…my
body
” (Romans 7:23, emphasis added). Terms such as “the power of sin,” “the law of sin,” “the principle of sin,” or simply “sin” are synonyms. A quick scan over Romans 7 will demonstrate that “sin” often refers to an evil power against which the Christian battles. We will describe this battle in detail later, but let me just plant a seed for you to consider.

The word
sin
is first introduced in Genesis 4:7. God addresses Cain, who is contemplating murder: “Sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” The King James Version more accurately translates the Hebrew: “
He
is crouching…you must master
him
.” God personifies this power which He calls
sin.
Understanding this truth as we discuss it later in the book is going to play a vital role in your battle against sin.

When Adam sinned against God’s authority, not only did his innocent spirit die to God so that he had no life toward God,
but his spirit instantly became one with Satan.
Adam’s dead spirit was instantly unified with Satan’s spirit, the power of sin. This power of sin entered into Adam and took control over him spirit, soul, and body. He became Satan’s spirit-offspring, born of the same rebellion as he, a dead spirit being in human form totally submissive to Satan (see Ephesians 2:1,2).

Let’s briefly examine the disastrous change that took place in Adam’s life as a result of his having overthrown God’s theocracy on earth. Not only was his spirit now dead to God, but his soul and body were now dying by degrees as well. If he didn’t repent before he ejected from his dying earthsuit, he’d have to exist forever as a dead spirit-son of Satan in hell.

The Word describes a lost person as having a darkened mind, as having a veil over his mind (see Ephesians 4:17,18). This means that he cannot understand the things of God. He has no spiritual comprehension. The Bible will be meaningless to him in terms of being able to discern spiritual enlightenment from it. He may earn a Ph.D. in Bible but still not know anything about spiritual truth.

The lost person also has a rebellious will. He will not, indeed he cannot, submit to God’s authority over him. He chafes at God’s ways, seeing them as burdensome. He sees God as an authoritarian party pooper. His theme song is, “I Did It My Way.” He fits perfectly into the “Me Generation” of the world today. He is his own god. He insists on ruling over his own personal kingdom.

The emotions of a person like Adam are for worldly affection. He loves the world, the system of the world, the way it’s structured. He lives to satisfy his needs. He lives to feel good. He enjoys life separated from God. He’d like to be age twenty-one on earth forever.

Adam’s body was dying. It was headed for the dirt. It was just a matter of time before its warranty ran out.

This is what Adam became with the Fall. His offspring now abound.

Just what is the sinful nature, anyway? First, it is not a biblical term in that it does not appear in the original Greek text of the New Testament, even though some translations such as the New International Version employ it.
*
No doubt theologians have generated this term to describe a condition in man. It describes any person who is
dead to God,
any person with a dead spirit. Synonyms are “old nature,” “Adamic nature,” “old man,” “old self,” “unregenerate nature,” “lower nature,” “natural man,” “sinner,” and “in Adam.”

The word
sin
has several definitions, one of which is “rebellion against God.” The word
nature
means the “natural characteristics” of anything. Birds have a flying nature. It is a hog’s nature to wallow in the mud. No one need teach him to do this; it is instinctive to him.

Thus, the term “sin nature” simply means a natural bent to rebel against God’s authority, to view God as a party pooper, unnecessary in one’s life, someone I can live quite well without, someone to whom I refuse to submit. In short, I refuse to acknowledge Him as
my
God.
I
am my god. I do things my way. I am Lord of my Ring. God is not real to me if I have no intention of obeying Him. I can
believe
Him till the cows come home, but it will do me no good because I do not acknowledge Him as
my
God. He is not real to me.

Thus, for example, since I have a sex drive that I enjoy satisfying,
I
will decide the best way to satisfy it. I reject God’s plan as too limited. I will feast from the sexual smorgasbord, sating myself, my way. Perhaps I will choose to satisfy my needs homosexually because I declare that God made me this way. But no, God doesn’t make a person that way. That is a person’s unique version of the flesh (old ways). The truths in this book contain the key to victory over it.

Note a very important fact, however. We must not observe a person’s behavior and, from that point of reference, infer his nature. It isn’t the flying that makes a bird a bird; it’s his
birth
that makes a bird a bird. Similarly, it’s not a man’s adulterous behavior that identifies him as having a dead spirit. We must use the Word of God to make that determination, and the Bible will make such a determination on the basis of the man’s
birth,
not his performance. If he is still a spirit-son of Satan in Adam’s lineage by his first birth, he has a dead-to-God spirit. If he has become a spirit-son of God by a second, spiritual birth in the second Adam, Jesus, he has a live spirit. In either case, it is his birth, not his performance, that determines his identity according to the Bible (see Ephesians 2:4-6).