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Re: God's eternal purpose
Wow, I praised God yesterday as the revelation of the word flowed!
From the beginning the Lord foresaw the end. He also planned His will. He planned to create mankind in His image and have them filled with His Spirit for Him to live through. He foresaw how the enemy would attempt to thwart it by putting something else inside mankind to hinder God's presence in there from manifesting outward. That something was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Satan shared his own nature with humanity in wanting to be like God, for he knew it's what threw him out of heaven. And unless satan could get his nature into Adam and Eve to get them thrown out of the Garden, Adam and Eve would be filled with God's life and God would throw satan out of the earth through mankind.
The nature of the devil hinders the will of God. It is self-exaltation. God's Spirit cannot work through that, especially when we were created to be His Spirit's temple and our very flesh meant to house Him contains in itself the nature of self-exaltation.
But God allowed satan to remain in the world, allow him to attempt to thwart His plans, and willed to carry on with His plan nevertheless. Jesus went to the cross and laid down his life to get the new bride, the new Eve, as Adam laid his life down to see Eve originate from material within his body, the rib.
God also placed the tree of life in the Garden for mankind to eat and obtain another life other than their own, and live by it forever. Fruit of life. Satan tempted them to get something else instead... .essentially his self-exaltant nature. The words he used to the woman were bacically "You shall be like God." She went for it and so did Adam at her offer. God had to remove them from the tree of life. But it was temporal.
God manifested in flesh and took our sins into himself and died to remove the sin that separated us from Him. He could then place His Holy Spirit in us, which is why the Spirit could not come until Jesus was glorified.
But although our sins were forgiven and removed, the FORCE OF SIN is still in our flesh. It's that force that still urges us to exalt self.
With the devil still in the world and sin still in our flesh, God is making use of it all. He will not let self-exaltation in heaven again. So, if we can break down this self-exalting force of sin in our lives by humbling ourselves, and resisting what makes us feel good (pleasures of sin), and deny ourselves by taking up our crosses, as the devil consistently tempts us otherwise, then we will have proved we will not be self-exaltant in heaven once we get there. And He will have the BRIDE he always wanted -- His means of manifesting Himself through and into the world.
Every trial we go through is a battle where we must deny self so as to allow God's Spirit to continue to work increasingly more through our lives. Satan is a convenient agent to help "train" us.
When people offend us, and deny self -- deny that element in us that exalts self -- God's Spirit can work through us that much more. As much as we preserve SELF, that is how much God cannot work through us.
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...MY THOUGHTS, ANYWAY.
"Many Christians do not try to understand what was written in a verse in the Bible. Instead they approach the passage to prove what they already believe."
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