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WHY DOES THE GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SEEM SO MEAN?
The theme of the whole Bible is to teach man that he cannot live eternally by his own wisdom and and self righteousness. For this to be accomplished there needs to be a change in each individual to the point where they can be used by God. God needs to have fellowship and communications spiritually with individuals who have the same goals and desies of God.
Submision to God's will is allowing God to have control of ones life and allow God to lead mankind to a new and better life, a Christ lead and controled life. This was God's plan from the beginning. Even though this plan may seem to have gotten off course by many it is progressing exactly according to God's original plan. God is allowing mankind to stumble and fall with mankinds own wisdom inteigence ego and pride in order to bring humanity to the point of making a decision of either submission to God's plan or mans plan of self will.
God is bringing humaity to the point of being forced to making a choice. The choice is whether to keep ones self life or whether to give this egotistic self centered life away to save a glorified spiritual life in Christ. To keep ones life is is the road of pride egotism and then death. To give ones life to the Lord to be used in any way that God desires is the road to eternal life, an endless life clothed with riches of every kind, perfect health, perfect love, perfect joy, and a life with out pain or sorrow. Each person will be a blessing to all the others and all the others will be a blessing to that person. God, plan for mankind is shown in th etheme fo the Bible and we are able to see this through out the scriptures.
Garden of Eden
1. Adam and Eve had a choice and they made the wrong choice and chose the knowledge of Good and Evil over the Tree of Life. The tree of knowledge lead humanity to the knowledge self pride and all the lusts of the flesh because of this knowledge, The experienced pride, self righteousness, independence, and lead to mankind thinking they needed nothing from God. Then came the experiences of all the lust of the flesh and all kinds of immorality.
God's aim is to have a body of believers that he can live his spiritual life through. and the lusts of the Flesh and self will will not allow this.
The Flood
2. After the flood It wasn't but a few generations before mankind was following the desires of the flesh and no one was allowing God to have any part of his life. So God chose Abraham of all the people upon the earth to begin a new spirituality of a people who worshipped and loved God, so he could bless them with all that he had. So God started by showing man what he expected out of man. He expected man to be righteous. But mankind was not able to be righteous and God brought in the rule of the Law and ten commandments to show man that it was impossible for him to be righteous.
The Old Testament times of living under the law.
3. So in the Old Testament we have the law and we have God's standard of righteousness. If even one law was broken, it was like breaking all and every one of the laws. The punishment of breaking the law was death. The punishment God handed out was according to the law also with no leaniency or grace. So in the Old Testament we see the punishment by stoning people to death for such things as adultry.
When the law was broken there was no longer any fellowship with God until the sin was forgiven. So things with with humanity would naturally deteriate. The provision for having fellowship with God was to be righteous and to be righteous required the sascrifice of blood according to God's standard. So once every year each family sacriciced the blood of the best lamb from there herd. This was required each year by every family to keep fellowship with God.
The Old Testament is the story of trying to keep the law with the family of God which began with Abraham, then to the family of Abraham which became the 12 tribes of Israel.
Hundreds of years later we see King David committed adultry and had a man murdered, yet God said that David is a man after my own heart. David trusted God and wanted to be judged by the Law and God's promise of forgiveness by the shedding of blood.
We see the passover, when the people of Israel wiped blood on the mantle of the door at the top and on each side, so the Angel of death, that killed all the eldest sons of Egypt and passed over all the sons of Israel. The sign of the blood seen by the angel saved becasue this was a sign looking forward to calvary and the blood of the lamb of God shed on the cross.
The judgement of the law proved that man could not keep the law and we see men of God in the Bible committing the worst of sins. But the sacrifice of the Blood Lamb each year cleansed them from all unrighteousness, and dthe Bible speaks of these same men be heros of God. This was still a prophetic sign looking to when the blood of Jesus would be shed on the cross, even though no one at that time understood it.
Prophecy
4. From the beginning the Bible speaks of prophecy in events and prophets that spoke of the future events before they happened. The Old Testament spoke of a promise of a righteous person, a Messiah that would come and set up a kingdom and would remove the sins of the people. Bible prophecy is rarely correctly understood until after the event has happened and then it may only be a partial happening and other events may take place until every detail is fulfillend, this may take thousands of years.
5. The Lamb of God replaces the Law with Grace
Grace is not given to anyone who may deserve to receive it. It cannot be purchased, nor can it be earned. What can we compare with grace? Our human hearts are not hearts of grace, but are hearts of the law. God's heart however is a heart of grace.
The one that least deserves grace is the one to whom it is given. The fact that grace might be deserved or earned in any way is the factor that cancels out any concept of grace. Grace is what it is because there is not the tiniest element of merit in it.
Jesus Christ was that promised saviour and was born with God as his father and born of a virgin woman. So Jesus was born of a spiritual nature instead of the lusts of the flesh and lived his life in continuous communications with the father. Even the thoughts that Jesus thought were the thoughts given to him by the father. Jesus was living a life in the spirit.
Temptation had no control becasue he always resisted spiritually with power from heaven. He was not a puppet he had all the emotions saddness an joy's of any other person. The difference was that he always trusted God the father to get him through every circumstance. This was truly abiding in the father and he had access to God's mind and knowledge.
So God sent Jesus here to show mankind what God wanted his people to be. Man was created to be part of the rulership, even the same as Jesus, even a part of the God-head. Jesus was the spiritual Lamb that the Old testament sacrifice of the lamb was a forshadow of. Only the blood of Jesus was without sin becasue of his being Born without the inheritance of the sin nature of the Flesh. This was becasuse instead of human flesh with a sin nature mixing. Jesus was born with a human mother and a spiritual father. In my opinion Mary's submission to the spirit eliminated the nature of sin and Jesus was the spirit of God born through the subission to the perfect will of God.
This took place becasue God sent His son to to earth to shed this blood for all humanity, for every person that ever lived. But man has the flesh working and controling his life.
It is a natural thing of the flesh to want happeness, wealth and goes after this as his right and abition accordint to his fleshly desires. So if man can do this by himself, he is not ready to look at God and his free gift of salvation because he see's all the joy that this world presents. He is unable to look beyond the present time.
6. Why do things happen so bad to those trying to do good?
So how can God get through to a chosen vessel of God? If he bless's him, he gets more pride and wants more wealth and etc. So that does not work. The successesfull business man usually looks down on a man of God, becasue such a man if he is a true man of God won't lie for the company or take advantage by exagerating or lying to make a sale.
The man of God is still temped and as hard as he tries is still committing sins. But he has accepted the free gift of God and his sins have been for given. Even though he sins he is a resident of heaven spiritually and is really living as a foreign abassador on earth, he struggles with the sin nature.
7. The Righteous man becomes a target for Evil forces
As hard as this man tries every thing seems to go very bad. God is allowing all of these failures and evil things to happen. Satan is real also and has for-knowledge of what God is doing, so satan sees this man tying to do right and attach's such men spiritually. Why would God allow this to happen to a man of God. The reason is that God is determined to break this mans spirit or the outer man so his spirit of God can come forth in this man of God to be a blessing and tesimony to mankind.
Man must be broken
8. The breaking of the outer man so the spirit may break through to be heard. Every believer needs to go through brokenness to release the Holy Spirit for a greater work.
It seems the Lord usually spends several years working on us to accomplish this breaking. In some lives the Lord is able to accomplish this work after a few years. In others it is evident that after ten or twenty years the work is still unfinished.
When we really understand the cross, we will see it means the breaking of the outward man. The cross reduces the outward man to death. The cross must break all that belongs to our outward man, including our opinions, our cleverness, our self love; our all.
The release of the spirit makes it possible for us to abide increasingly in God. We touch the spiirit of revelation in the Bible, and without effort our spirit can receive divine revelation. Once the outward man is broken, man's spirit very naturally abides in the presence of God in how we conduct our conversations to others and in prayer.
Our spirit is released according to the degree of our brokenness. The one who has accepted the most discipline is the one who can best serve. The more one is broken the more sensitive he is.
Whenever we desire to save ourselves, in that very thing we become spiritually useless. Whenever we preserve ourselves of a trial, at that point, we are deprived of more spiritual sensitivity and supply. The way to serve is by accepting the discipline of the Holy Spirit. Remember, whatever happens to us, is measured by the hand of God, for our supreme good.
There is nothing more beautiful than the inner beauty of one who is broken. Stubbornness and self love give way to beauty in one who has been broken of God.
Our only hope of being used for a work of God is that the Lord may blaze a way out. Breaking the outward man to such a degree that the inward man may come out and be seen.
Only the person through whom God can come forth is useful for his work.
Everyone who receives the Lord has his spirit raised from death and at the same time receives the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
We often say that the Holy Spirit dwells in our spirit, but we find it is hard to discern which is the Holy Spirit, and which is our own spirit. The Holy Spirit and our spirit become mingled and are not easily distinguished.
So the release of the spirit is the release of the human spirit as well as the release of the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit is working, he needs to be carried by the human spirit. The Spirit of God employs the human spirit as his carrier and through it, he is brought to man.
Anyone who serves God will discover sooner or later that the great hindrance to his work is not others, but himself. He will discover that his outward man and his inward man are not in harmony, for they both are desiring to go in different directions.
He will also sense the inability of his outward man to submit to the spirits control, making him incapable of obeying God's highest commands.
There is just one basic dealing which can enable man to be useful before God. Brokenness, we must be broken. We must know that the one who can work for God is the one whose inward man can be released.
The basic difficulty of a servant of God lies in the failure of the inward man to break through the outward man. Each disciplinary working of the Holy Spirit has but one purpose. To break our outward man so our inward man may break free.
We may fret over difficulties and fret over small loses, but this is the work of the Lord preparing us so that we may be used. The Lord is preparing a way to use us. But when he touches us we feel unhappy, even to the point of quarreling with God and becoming negative in our attitude.
The Lord longs to find a way to bless the world through those who belong to him. When we offer ourselves to the Lord to be at his service, we cannot afford to spare ourselves.
We must allow the Lord to crack our outward man. So that he may find a way of working out his life in us. We may realize that all the troubles and trials which the Lord sends are for our highest good.
The Bible to me is teaching man to first know the law and the standard of God and the punishment of the Law. The New Testament reveals the Messiah. Life brings us to the point of a decision of acceptance of what the world has to offer or acceptance of the saviour.
Victory is giving up even trying and trusting God for all things to work it out his perfect way. Total submission is the way to toal power, total peace, total love and total perfection. The Bible says he is coming for a Bride with out blemish. Stated another way the Bible says he is coming for that perfect man. This is a group of believers totally submitted where God can do great things through them. God wants us to give our will to him to do his will.
It seems that this is through re-incarnation. The Bible does speak of re-ncarnation, one example is the promise to Zerrubable that did not happen in his life time (Haggai 2) of God making him as a signet among all the nations of the world. If this is a true prophecy it must be done through another life experience on earth. Another example is when the people ask John the Babtist if he was Elijah he said that hewas not Elijah. But when they ask Jesus about the promise of John the Baptist coming, He said that John was Elijah.
We all may have many lives and lived many of the events recorded in the Bible. Before the Flood, the Old Testament, the New Testament and today, with every thing in between.
So living in the times we are living in, if we are to do anything good we must must choose to do it God's way and not man's way. Man's way is through fighting, a miliia self survival. God's way is through the being saved and forgiven through Blood of Christ, then trusting, through hearing God's voice or through trusting some one as a prophet who hears from God.
Don't look to any organized church or church leader. God will speak to you through your gut feeling and lead you to the person he has to for you. This is like walking a fine line between life and death. If we follow the common sense oif our mind we will surely go the wrong way. Try to listen to your heart or gut feeling. At this point you must not listen to anyones reasoning unless it speaks to your heart.
Sift everything through prayer asking God to direct your steps. After you pray this prayer make the decision your heart says and not what those around you say if it does not line up with your heart.
This is a statement of my present understanding. I believe the spirit and theme of the Bible is true, but we may not yet understand it correctly. I can't change the meaning of the Bible to my understanding, instead I must seek a deeper understanding precept upon precept and line upon line to connect the dots.
Gary Larrabee
vinesbranch.com
The release of the Spirit
http://www.vinesbranch.com/view/?pageID=33055
