[Aquila]

With all the talk of the sin nature, faith, obedience, works, etc.... I thought I'd include a brief summary on what I believe about salvation and our nature...

To many, salvation is a mystery. Some believe the born again Christian can sin and is saved no matter what. Others believe in a legalistic tight rope of obedience that keeps the born again Christian saved.

Both are lies from Hell.

Before we can delve deeper into what the Bible teaches concerning salvation, we must understand our sinful condition.

Man is a three part being. Man is composed of body (Grk. Soma), soul (Grk. Psuche), and spirit (Grk. pneuma). The body is the physical part of man. It includes a human being’s biology and anatomy. The soul is a man’s psyche, the mental, immaterial, and self aware portion of a man’s being. The spirit of a man is his essence of life, his very life force. Think of it like hardware, software, and electricity.

When Adam fell into sin, Adam was cursed. The curse resulting from sin changed Adam’s entire nature. The body became subject to pain, disease, and death. The soul became subject to carnality (desire to please the flesh). The spirit was cut off from union with God; therefore the very essence of Adam’s life began to fade into a state of spiritual death. This is our fallen nature. Our bodies are constantly craving pleasure and comfort as it slides into the grip of death. The soul naturally seeks to please the flesh and make it comfortable. And the spirit of man is dead through sin, unable to overcome the desires of the flesh to live out the life man was meant to live. This is our new fallen nature, the result of sin.

Every human being born is born in this state. You don’t have to train a baby or a young child to seek their own pleasure and comfort. It’s natural. You don’t have to teach them to be selfish, un-sharing, or even to lie to preserve self interest. It’s natural for them… it’s the fallen nature. It’s SIN. As human beings grow into maturity the soul learns socially acceptable ways to please the flesh and preserve the self. This is the carnal mind. This too is SIN. The spirit of a man is dead and lifeless, while the soul seeks answers to the unknown and the questions of morality, the spirit is incapable to attaining divine understanding and so false ideas, false religions, and heresies originate from the spiritually dead spirit of man. And these too cater to the carnal mind, which seeks to please the self and flesh.

This fallen state with its fallen nature is man’s default position before God upon conception. While the personal record of chosen sin is clean, the very nature of the unborn and the infant is fallen. It’s not what it was designed by God to be.

Praise God, our Lord had a plan from before time began predicated from start to finish upon His grace and mercy. In eternity past (before God even created the angels) God knew what would befall the creation. God knew every choice that would be made by His creation from Satan to the last man that will ever be born. And in God’s omniscient wisdom, God ordained every choice to be so… overriding nothing and essentially setting it in stone. Thus all things are predestined according to God’s foreknowledge. No choice ever catches God off guard. God is never on the edge of His seat hoping we’ll “choose to do the right thing”. God knows exactly what our choices and actions will be… and knew those choices and actions before the heavenly hosts were created. In the midst of this, God ordained a plan. The Cross. That Jesus would come into the world and die in man’s place, reconciling all who believe in Him and obey the Gospel will be saved. In God’s omniscient foreknowledge God chose all who He foreknew would obey the Gospel and recorded their names. Ah… the elect. Not one will be lost, for they are secured in Christ according to God’s will. Yet all will freely choose. The argument regarding free will and predestination is a false dichotomy. Both are absolutely true and necessary to preserve both God’s holiness and God’s providence.

When the Father begins to draw a man into a relationship, He does it through the Spirit. The Spirit begins to convict a man of sin and his fallen state. The Spirit begins to illuminate the mind to become spiritually aware of his need for a savior and often the basic things of God concerning the Gospel. It’s God’s desire that all be saved, and so the Father does draw and tug at most in some fashion, but only the elect are those who will surrender to the spiritual drawing of the Father. For them it is both their choice… and an irresistible destiny ordained in the foreknowledge of God.

Christ’s life and death provided atonement. That means that Christ’s life and death satisfied righteous demands of the Law of God. A sinless and pure man died in the place of all who would choose to believe, thus saving the human race as a whole from eternal alienation from God. Christ’s blood satisfied the legal demands of God’s Law, thus opening the door for the sinner who believes to be justified by faith alone.

The moment one of the elect chooses to believe in Jesus Christ according to the Spirit’s call, they are “justified”. This means that they are made just in God’s sight. It doesn’t matter what sins they have committed or are committing. Christ’s own righteousness is imputed to them judicially in God’s economy of justice. This means that this filthy, rotten, sinful, debased, creature (man) can approach God and request to be “born of the Spirit”.

When one is “born of the Spirit” the Holy Spirit comes to abide in that man’s very being. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just abide as one abides in a house. The Holy Spirit unites, becoming one with the very spirit of the believer. This infuses eternal life into the spirit of the believer, uniting them with God through the Holy Spirit. Now God is indwelling and is one with the believer. This is the spiritual regeneration that brings a man’s dying spirit to life. This union changes the very nature of a man’s essence. The very life force of the human being is now changed, infused with the divine nature of God Almighty. And the human being is now a partaker in God’s divine nature. The old man (old nature) is eradicated and man is essentially, on the very level of his essence, a new creature. This is known as regeneration. He is sealed and SANCTIFIED (past tense); the sanctification of his spirit complete.

To clear a man’s conscience regarding of his record of wrongs a man must be cleansed or washed. This is where baptism comes in. By being water baptized a man takes part in an outward demonstration of Christ’s own atoning work (death, burial, and resurrection). It is a type of circumcision, the sign of a covenant. When performed in the name of Jesus Christ, the man is now imaging Christ, and takes upon himself the name of Jesus Christ. Thus the record of wrongs that stand against a man is declared forgiven, the man’s conscience cleansed. Imaging Christ, being cleansed of the consciousness of sin, and taking on Christ’s name leads us to this next step… this is adoption. The man is now entirely in the family of God. Now one is born of both “water and spirit”.

TO BE CONTINUED...