GLORY

The past three months have been fantastic.  I’ve tried to keep my blog updated, but I couldn’t possibly write down all the things I have experienced and everything God has been teaching me.  While the “purpose” of my trip was to study abroad in a new culture, improve my Spanish, and finish my degree, the most significant aspect of the experience is how God used it to further prepare me for my future in missions work.  God leads so perfectly.  His governing and sovereignty over my life blows my mind—I can’t even imagine what it will be like to get to Heaven and see how He perfectly orchestrated all of human history!

I think I can summarize my trip in three major themes God has been teaching me since I’ve been in Spain.  First, during Semana Santa while we were in Sotogrande, God was revealing to me (to some degree) the power of sin and its effects on our soul, then the power of Jesus’ perfect life and resurrection and the victory we have through his sacrifice on the cross.  Second, while spending lots of time in the prayer room back in Madrid God showed me the importance of hungering for more knowledge of God and how when we seek Him, He will reveal Himself to us.  I wrote about both of those things in previous blog entries.

The third lesson God has been teaching me the past month through the wonderful people at Kilometro Cero (the prayer room/evangelism school).  They are so dedicated to evangelism, preaching the Gospel in Puerta del Sol every evening (except Sundays) for the past 22 years.  I got to talk to Jacob, the guys who started it all and he told me a little bit about how he got started, how they went about adding a prayer room to their ministry, and the importance of preaching the true Gospel.  This is when God opened my eyes to the third major lesson of my trip. 

One day while I was in the prayer room I felt really compelled to talk to Jacob, ask him about evangelizing and ask him to pray for me.  He talked about how everyone in the Bible who evangelized first preached repentance.  It was John the Baptist’s message as he prepared the way for Jesus; it was Jesus’ first message; it was what the Apostles preached in the book of Acts.  He told me about Ray Comfort’s ministry ‘The Way of the Master’ and gave me a copy of Ray Comfort’s book God Has a Marvelous Plan for Your Life: The Myth of the Modern Gospel.  It was really impactful.  Comfort criticizes the sugar-coated (and very inaccurate) message of evangelism and Christianity that many modern churches have adopted.  The most popular modern method of evangelism employed by the church is to present a soft and loving God who has a wonderful plan for your life to attract nonbelievers.  The result is the presentation of Jesus as a life-enhancer rather than His true place as our Savior and the only way for a person to escape God’s wrath and Hell.  The effects of this non-Biblical method of presenting the Gospel are very dangerous.  It causes people to think Jesus is either unreal or unfaithful when they decide to give Christianity a try and their life doesn’t all of a sudden become perfect.  It also fills the churches with people who don’t really understand what Christianity is all about. 

This book revealed to me that often when I talk to people about God I leave out the most important part.  I am guilty of presenting Jesus as a life-enhancer for this life rather than the only way to obtain eternal life.  It challenged me to evaluate my understanding of the Gospel in order to examine my own salvation.  I think it’s important to examine yourself and the state of your soul, rather than wondering if or hoping you are really saved and will go to Heaven when you die.  I think that is what Philippians 2:12 means, “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

Therefore, I decided to try to write out my understanding of the Gospel—the heart of the Christian message.  Because God is infinitely complex and His ways transcend human thought, there is no way for me to understand everything that God’s plan for the salvation of humankind entails.  But the Holy Spirit has given me some insight, so here is my best interpretation/explanation…

So, in the beginning, before time even existed, God existed.  All of God—the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—was there, as described in Genesis.  God created everything that exists and to top off His marvelous creation, He made man and then woman, Adam and Eve.  He created them in order to have a relationship with them and He made them in His own image, so they would be capable of enjoying all the wonders of maintaining a relationship with the uncreated God.

God gave Adam and Eve a little something called free will.  The reason He did this is because He wanted them to choose to love Him, because forced love is no kind of relationship.  It’s only a relationship if there is mutual love—love must be a choice.  Unfortunately they, being prideful and evil, weren’t satisfied with the paradise God offered them.  They wanted more.  They wanted to be like God—something they were incapable of handling.  Satan caused them to doubt God’s nature—His completely holy, good and perfect character—and turn to their own ways instead of trusting God who always had a perfect eternal plan for them, to be with Him and enjoy His goodness for all of eternity.  However, Adam and Eve decided to go their own way and disobey God (the definition of sin), going against God’s nature and His good plans and thus bringing destruction to their souls.  That is when death entered into the picture. 

Death is separation from God, who is the creator of life.  When Adam and Eve chose to sin by disobeying God they not only rejected His nature and goodness and everything that He is, they also earned the result of sin, which is eternal separation from a Holy and perfect God.  Because God is holy and all his ways are just, He can’t be in the presence of sin—or rather sin can’t stand to be in His awesome presence.  God is light and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).  And darkness flees from His presence.  Because Adam and Even chose to sin, God had to separate Himself from them, which broke His heart.  But, because He is omniscient, He had a plan from the beginning for man’s salvation.

God gives each man in every generation a chance to be with Him, the only requirement is to live a life of holiness.  In order to teach us how to live holy lives, He gave us the law.  The law is contained in the first five books of the Bible and in it are rules for how to live perfectly, according to God’s perfect and holy nature.  The culmination of the law is the Ten Commandments, which God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Jesus (a few thousand years later) says that all the law (and the messages proclaimed by the prophets) center on the first two commandments, if a person keeps these two, he will uphold the rest as a result.  The first is to “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, and mind” (Matthew 22:37-29).  That is what it means to “have no other gods before Me.”  The second is to love your neighbor (fellow humans) as yourself, which is an outflow of the first commandment.  If we love god with everything that we are, we will love those whom God loves as a result of our love for Him.  If a man can keep all the laws God gave, then he is fit to dwell with God in his holy place: heaven.  The bad news is that there is no way a man could possibly keep all of God’s commandments.  We simply are not capable of being as good as God because we are not God, we are human and we fall short of God’s holy standards. 

Since sin cannot be in God’s holy presence, any creature who has sinned would die in the presence of such a holy God.  Because we choose to go our own evil way, rather than following God’s holy and perfect law, we all deserve to be separated from God forever.  More than deserving it, we have to be because sin can’t survive in God’s presence.  Because God is holy and perfect, he is also just.  He is the only one who judges rightly and ensures that true justice will be done.  He can’t contradict His nature.  He is all things good and nothing bad at all.  Therefore according to God’s perfect justice, all who have sinned deserve to be separated from Him forever.  Even breaking just one of His commandments makes us guilty, because it reveals an evil motive—that our nature is contrary to God’s because one with a holy nature is not capable of sinning.  When we sin, we become an enemy of God, allying ourselves with Satan and hindering the advancement of God’s kingdom.  God has to make sure justice is done; therefore anyone who has sinned is under God’s wrath and must pay the price for their sin: eternal separation from God.

We can’t even imagine how horrible Hell (complete and eternal separation from God) is because here on earth the forces of good and evil coexist—and are at war.  God and Satan are constantly battling to draw men’s souls to themselves.  God woos us with all his goodness and Satan deceives us and convinces us to misunderstand God’s nature and therefore resist Him, which breaks God’s heart and fans His fury towards Satan and all of his works.  So on earth we see aspects of God (everything good) and aspects of Satan (everything bad).

Because we have sinned we don’t deserve any of God’s goodness that we enjoy here on earth.  By breaking His law, and choosing sin over being with Him, we reject His goodness.  But God chooses to bless us with His gifts even when we reject Him over and over, in hopes that He will win our hearts and we will turn back to Him.  After we leave this earth, we, all who have sinned, deserve to be separated from God forever, in a place where none of His attributes are found—only things that are contrary to His good nature.  There will no love, only hate.  No joy, only sorrow.  No relationships, only loneliness.  No peace, only anxiety.  No consolation, only anguish.  No healing, only pain.  No pleasure, only torment.  Satan is everything contrary to God.  He is a cruel master, finding pleasure in hurting us.  And this is what we choose to subject ourselves to when we sin.  However, God is a good master, doing everything necessary to protect us and keep us safe from all harm, even sacrificing Himself.

God came to earth on a rescue mission in the form of the man Jesus.  Jesus is God in human flesh.  Jesus and the Father God are One, completely sharing one holy, good, and perfect nature (John 17:21).  Hebrews 1:3 says that “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”  Jesus delights in God’s law, and therefore never sinned, even though He was fully human and subject to all the weaknesses and temptations that we are (Hebrews 4:15).  God lived as one of us, coming down to our level and actually experiencing exactly what we experience, yet overcoming by not giving in to the temptation of sin.  This is the reason Jesus is worthy and able to save us.  In order for God’s justice to be done, someone had to pay the price for sin to satisfy God’s wrath.  Because He lived as a human, Jesus was able to substitute Himself and take our place.  The book of Romans explains Jesus’ role as our substitute, satisfying God’s wrath that we earned.  Romans 3:24-26 says “God presented him [Jesus] as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.  He did this to demonstrate his justice…so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”  Jesus, because He became one of us, was able to take our place—the Lamb that was sacrificed to satisfy God’s wrath.

Equally important to Jesus’ humanity is His sinless nature.  Because he never sinned, He was a worthy Lamb, pure and spotless, without stain, impurity or blemish.  And because He never gave in to sin, He had authority to defeat Hell—and with it Satan, death, and all sin.  That’s what He did after He died on the Cross.  And then He arose in victory on the third day!  Through His death, He provided a way for us to escape God’s wrath and through His life (resurrection), He provided a way for us to escape Hell, eternal separation from God.  Romans 5:9-11 says “Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!  For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!  Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God and through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

What Jesus’ death and resurrection means is WAY beyond human understanding.  We have no idea the sacrifice God made in becoming man.  A holy God dwelling with sinful man, and becoming sin when He took it from us on the cross.  And we have no idea the work it took to defeat Hell and sin’s hold on us.  And we have no idea of the power that resurrected Him death.  And we have no idea of the sacrifice that Jesus made when He laid aside His God-nature and became a human FOREVER.  There are so many mysteries within God, and this is the greatest of them all.

So what is most important is understanding what we need to do to respond to this great sacrifice.  While Jesus did all the work, we still must take action to accept it.  I started off explaining this lesson God is teaching me by talking about a book that emphasized the importance of preaching repentance when evangelizing.  Due to the popular (sugar-coated and false) message proclaimed by many modern churches, many people think that saying a prayer asking Jesus to come into their heart is all they have to do to be saved and go to heaven.  But that is simply not true.  That is not what Christianity is about.  It’s not about saying a prayer once and then living the rest of your life however you want and being comforted by the fact that you will go to heaven when you die because you are a pretty good person and because you said a prayer one time.

The truth is it doesn’t matter if we think we are a pretty good person, the fact is if we have sinned once we have proved our nature is contrary to God and therefore deserve to be separated from Him forever.  Being “good enough” to go to Heaven isn’t a subjective matter.  You don’t have to wonder if you are good enough to go to Heaven when you die.  The answer is NO, YOU’RE NOT.  None of us are capable of earning the right to dwell with God in His holiness.  Only God is holy and only He can dwell in Heaven, the place of His holiness.  However, another incomprehensible aspect of God is His love.  He loves us so much that He did whatever it took to make a way for us to be with Him in His holiness.  After all, He made mankind in order to have a relationship with Him.  So even though we have rejected Him over and over again, He still extends His arms out to us and accepts us whenever we choose to turn from our selves, from our sinful nature and to Him and His holiness.  He extends His arms out to us in the most loving embrace, by stretching Himself out on the Cross.

So that is what we need to do to flee from the consequence of sin and God’s wrath (Hell) and run into His love and holiness (Heaven): REPENT.  Repenting means turning away from and completely rejecting our sinful ways and pursuing the things of God.  Right after Jesus tells us that the gate that leads to life is narrow and few find it and that the road that leads to destruction is wide and many enter through it, He says tells His disciples how to recognize someone who is really following Him.  He says “By their fruit you will recognize them…every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:13-20).  If you are really following Jesus, you will bear good fruit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control for example-Galatians 5:22) and you won’t be able to produce bad fruit (sin).

That doesn’t mean that at the moment you decide to follow Jesus you will be perfect and incapable of sinning.  Becoming like Jesus is a process.  But once we do decide to surrender our lives to Jesus, He comes and dwells inside us by His Spirit and thus enables us to overcome sin.  The One who defeated sin forever gives us the power and authority to overcome any sin we come across.  When we surrender our lives to Jesus and His Spirit enters us, we cross over from death to life.  We come out from under spiritual death: the path under God’s wrath on the way to eternal separation from God, and enter into eternal life: freedom from sin and its consequences and the path to eternity living with God and His goodness!  Life is a process of walking out these truths.  What we do on earth is earning our reward in heaven that we will enjoy for all of eternity. 

God is SOOOO GOOOOOOOOD.   I could keep going on forever praising His goodness.  And I could keep on seeking Him forever and finding out more and more about Him each day.  Actually, I plan on spending all of eternity doing just that.  I hope you will be there with me!