Sunday, February 12, 2017

New Creation - Beginning

I have started writing about new creation in my last post. I will elaborate more on this post. Please go through my previous post to get the understanding. To summarize, I wrote about what God expects out of every Christian irrespective of his background and had mentioned that we are expected to live our life in Christ's way thus glorifying Jesus Christ in our thoughts and actions and being testimony of Christ for others. In this post, we will see how to live this new life in Christ.

To understand the new life or new creation, first we should be aware of the old life. As I had written the post of trinity, every human being is made of three parts called body, soul and spirit. We can see a reference to these three parts in the verse where we read about creation of man. We read this in Gen 2:7 as "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul". We can see a reference to the dust of the ground representing the physical body composed of skin, bone, blood and physical parts that can be seen. The body directly corresponds to the five senses. The second reference is to the breath of life and it refers to the spirit. The spirit is directly connected to the conscience of the person. The third part is soul as referred in "man became a living soul". Soul refers to the mind, emotions and will of the person. Soul actually determines who the person is though the body and appearance help to distinguish person to person. So, every man is a living soul dwelling inside the shell which is the body. Understanding this is essential to understand life and new creation.

God told Adam in Gen 2:17, "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." Even after eating of the tree, Adam and Eve lived for 900+ years. But, the spirit was dead immediately when they sinned. There is actually another way of interpreting this which is also very appropriate. For God, 1000 years is like 1 day but Adam died on 930 years of age that means he died on that day (at 930 years which is short of 70 years to 1000 years) and no man reached 1000 years in this world though couple of them translated and ascended (Enoch and Elija) to heaven. From that point on wards, the spirit of every human being is dead from their birth on wards though they have physical life and soul. Except for one identified generation from Adam through Seth until Noah, every humans in the world started to live as they wanted before the great floods of destruction because they were totally cut off from living God and their spirit was dead and they were not connected with God.

The physical body, also called as flesh is corrupted when Adam and Even sinned against God. It is no longer pleasing God and it wanted to please self. This is exactly a dead state of spirit. Now a days, we can see even small kids want to have everything for them and they don't consider the others. Still, we have life but spiritually we were all dead and self is in control that leads to selfishness wanting everything for ourselves. There are many sinful activities defined throughout new testament but all of them could turn to seven basic sins. The seven basic sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth and all of these seven sins have a root which is "self". If one serves his own self, he indirectly serves satan and he cannot serve God in this state. Every human is born in this state by default and there was no chance for him to please God or have an eternal life by himself. The good works the man try to do to save himself don't work. This was also shown in garden of Eden. When the eyes of Adam and Eve opened and when they realized they were naked, they tried to cover their bodies with the leaves of fig tree. But, that was not sufficient. But, God instead provided them clothes made up of skin. How true? Our good works in our own are like fig leaves and they cannot make us right or in front of the holy God. But, an animal was sacrificed by God and the skin was given to cover the bodies and this is a direct representation of lamb of God who was crucified on cross and the blood of Jesus Christ alone atones for our sin and covers every one who comes to Him.

Jesus Christ, the son of God, came into the world to fix all the issues and restore the humans back with God, the Father and that was not possible without sacrificing Himself on the cross and shedding His blood as it is written there is no atonement without the shed of blood. Heb 9:22, Lev 17:11. Every human being can be saved only by accepting this blood of lamb upon him by believing in Jesus Christ. This is what is called Salvation by Faith. How great is the Father's love? He has sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, again God Himself in the form of flesh, to atone on behalf of each and everyone of us. The cross of calvary is a wonderful exchange of our sins to God and receiving His divine blessings of salvation, peace, prosperity and protection. It is the point where the unthinkable happened, the Holy God and sinful man meet together. I know I am writing about New Creation but without the process of salvation, the new creation cannot even start. We will get into more details in next post.

All glory, honor and praise to the perfect lamb of God, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. How great is love of Jesus? He sacrificed Himself for us in cross. He alone deserves every glory. Jesus Christ is the embodiment and representation of the invisible almighty, Holy God. Amen.

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