The Doctrine of Salvation
"Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them."
Scripture gives us very little insight into the Kingdom of Heaven, the realm where The Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit dwell with the angels and other creatures of the Father's spiritual realm. One note of importance is scripture tells us that Satan, himself, was able to enter the presence of the Father. As for fallen man, this isn't the case. We can not walk into the presence of God. Nor are we able to intellectually or logically come to the realization that there is an eternal God.
With the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, God gave us new bodies¹ of the flesh. Our eternal spirit, the real us who lives forever, was placed into a physical body of the flesh that allows us to live and function in this world of the flesh. But this body of the flesh has us locked in, unable to interact with the spiritual realm. Or, more specifically, we are unable to discern that there is a God, let alone walk into His Presence, know Him personally, interact with Him, and call Him our friend. We only have access to the world that the human brain, the Mind of the Flesh, reveals.
To compound the matter, our Mind of the Flesh, that is, our human brain, is wired to demand total, unconditional control over our eternal spirit. It uses tricks such as deceit, paranoia, logic, etc., to convince us that there is no such thing as an eternal God, and that great evil will come upon us if we adopt any belief that Jesus Christ is the real Son of God and our Eternal Savior. Our human brain can't submit to God, nor is it willing to. It demands total, unconditional, complete control over our spirit and our life. As the Apostle Paul said,
"For the mind of the flesh is death ... because the mind of the flesh is hostile toward God. It does not subject itself to the law of God, nor is it able to do so."
It is only through God's intervention through the witness of the Holy Spirit that we are able to come to a realization of the real God. It is my eternal spirit that comes to this realization, not a "my human brain just figured it out" moment. Because, up to this moment, the only input from any source that has come to our spirit, our eternal being, has come solely from our human brain, our Mind of the Flesh. Then, out of nowhere, we hear or read about salvation through Christ, which our human brain immediately rejects. But God's Holy Spirit bears witness directly to our spirit, bypassing our human brain, that the words are true; Jesus Christ did come to earth to die on the cross for our sins; that the Father then gave Jesus back His life so that we can all now have eternal life in Christ through His miracle on the cross. Our spirit hears the words, choosing to believe the witness of the Holy Spirit while ignoring the demands of our human brain to dismiss those words as nonsense. Our choice to accept this reality as our new way of life - a Life in Christ, this is the moment of salvation.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world but so that the world through Him might be saved.² Whoever believes in Him is not condemned. But whoever does not believe is already condemned, because they do not believe in God's one and only Son."
As we saw in the article, Why Are We Here,³ Adam and Eve were cast from the Garden of Eden, from God's presence, and their bodies were changed to corrupted bodies of the flesh because they gave credibility to the Serpent's words and to their own desires while discounting God's teachings. The fruit of this sin became evident when they acted upon their sin, eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the very action that God warned would bring about their death. We are allowed back into God's presence and His Kingdom when we instead cling to the witness of the Holy Spirit, believing and acting on what He whispers to our heart.
Abraham believed God, and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Blessings,
Glen
_____
- See Article Why Are We Here - our fallen human body
- It is important to note that this world and its occupants stood condemned for termination prior to the coming of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not come to condemn. That had already happened. Jesus came to show us the way out so that we, ourselves, would not be a part of that condemnation, but, instead, spend eternity in God's Kingdom with the Father and His Son.
- See Article Why Are We Here - the fall