Chapter 25 - Man

Man was made for God’s pleasure and glory. God is seeking the glory which is due His name. He is seeking the pleasure which His loving heart has long sought in humanity. So, He always came in the cool of the evening, and He said to Adam, “Possess the earth; I have given you all the potentials for it. I have blessed you; given you all the intelligence that is necessary; cooperate with me, and possess this world. Bring it into subjection; release all its secrets of nature. Release all of these glorious, hidden things that are mysterious and strange.” All that glorious, marvelous concept of life was hidden away in the heart of God, and He wanted it to come forth in man.

God wanted this in His original thought and purpose. He says, “Adam, choose with Me; don’t argue.”

But, you see, the enemy, long, long before creation here, missed the whole thing in heaven. Fallen, now this enemy who had been cast out of the heavens, with a third of the angels with him, in the enemy’s resistance to God, and in his defiance, says, “Will you have a creation? I’ll damn it!” That’s the eternal, everlasting purpose of Satan; to defeat the things of God; to blast; to ruin; to steal; to kill; to destroy.

But we have a Redeemer; Oh, glorious Christ! Eternal Redeemer! You have paved the way back. You have defeated him. He is a defeated foe. He is defeated. You told us a little about the redemption. Help us to receive it in all simplicity.

The highest vocation of any spiritual manifestation is worship and adoration; not service,

You can’t define man; you describe him.

The tree of life causes us to know that in us dwelleth no life. God made man dependent and limited.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil is for our development; to release all the potentials that are hidden in us.

“Adam, I have blessed you, and am pleased with the product of your creation. Now I want to be pleased with a performance of it. That will come by a law of testing and proving.” Probationary law governs all growth. “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Gen. 2:16, 17) Just in the command there is a temptation, a testing. The subjects here, Adam and Eve, should not consider whether it is a good command or not; the command comes from an all-wise God. God cannot do anything that is not fair. He can do no injustice. He cannot lie; steal; Or do evil. He is all holy love in His essence. His foreknowledge does not compel Adam to sin. In his foreknowledge, He already had a Lamb slain,

His foreknowledge doesn’t destroy my individuality or personality, but the rest of my days He works, transforming, remaking, converting, recasting, until I can become partaker of the image and likeness of the Son of God.

It is so secure to be in a place of dependence.

Man is not to live by bread alone, but because he is a spiritual being, he, first of all, has to have contact in the spirit with God. Man is, first of ail, spirit, and should live under the power and inspiration of the Spirit.

Spirit—soul—body. Man always says: body—soul—spirit. Why? Because man is body conscious first, and knows little about this spirit, but knows a lot about the body. God always says: “Spirit; soul; and body” because His concern is primarily with the spirit. He is not too concerned about the body. It’s only the house that we live in: the vehicle.

The body, the flesh, is a sacred, holy instrument, and the redemption of God covers every aspect of our being. There is a trinity of being: spirit—soul—body. There is a trinity of personality: intellect—emotions—will.

There are two characteristic marks which govern in our human nature capacity, and in the structural law of being:

We are not on a picnic; we are in a warfare. We are engaged in a battle. We are in a tremendous process of being extricated, and conformed. God is dealing with us drastically; sometimes most ferociously, and sometimes very tenderly, He wants to extricate us; to get us on the grounds where we belong, with our vision where it should be, and to teach us how to walk with Him in the Spirit.

The discipline I may call forth from God takes a life-time. It is good we don’t see very much before; He can’t trust us with it. If I had known what I would have to go through the last twenty-five years, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to face it.

Adam was perfect in his potential: untouched by sin when he stood there at creation, but he was not perfectly developed. “Adam, I don’t expect you to know it all, but I will reveal to you the secrets, and you can possess this whole place down here. I’ll keep revealing to you the secrets; the knowledge; the whys; the hows; and as you abide in Me; come to Me; and deal with Me, and I deal with you, you will grow and develop.”

Never get your nature, and character confused. Adam had a perfect, God-given nature, but the character he built himself. How? By all the ten thousand choices he made.

We are too tied up with this ego-centric thing that we have been living with here. If we could just step over there, and judge it with the Lord, that would be a little sign of maturity. “. . . Lord, will You hold me while You look at it?” We have to be held, because sometimes we are quite faint when we know what this ego is like. Then we can side with Him against that ego. We choose to side against it; our choice is with Him. When we are in agreement with His choice, we are perfectly safe, but our own choice is not safe.

I am not what I am in my intellect, or in my emotions, but I am what I am in my WILL!