Sunday Message: The rules

This week, I heard a discussion in a question and answer session of whether Jesus was Deity (man AND God) or Divinity (man, but at some point, probably at His baptism, imbued with the "spirit of God").  This debate, which I have actually had with certain people in these very Sunday Messages in the past, make me shake my head.  You can believe in a God who can speak creation into existence, with all that complexity at every level, but have trouble with the concept of God being able to do whatever He wants- including combining God and man in one.  It makes me shake my head.  And for a brief moment Saturday morning, I said to myself, "If God MAKES the rules, He can (from our perspective) bend them."  But does He?  No, we just have a flawed understanding of the rules.

So then the next logical question- what exactly ARE the rules?

RULE #1:  God Is Holy.  James 1:17- Every good gift and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.  God is bound by one thing- His own nature.  He is Holy, and all He does is holy.  Thus, while He makes the rules, He doesn't BREAK them.  This also defines Him as perfect, and all things that come before Him must be perfect to remain there.

RULE #2:  Man was made perfect, but blew it.  Almost immediately, in fact.  This forever denies him access to a Holy God- unless an atonement is made to erase his sin.

RULE #3: John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  Note two things here.  The word is "gave", not caused to arise, selected from man, caused to be born.  "Gave" indicates something/someone God already HAD with Him.  That should thoroughly upend those that think Jesus started just a man and got promoted.  The person I formerly debated this with got mad at me because he recommended I read this book and that book about how the Bible had been, I guess, manipulated into giving the crazy notion that a man could be God too.  I got unfriended when I chose to stick to the inspired Word of God rather than the musings of men.

Next, note the word "Son".  This Son is the "Us" and "Our" in Genesis 1:26, the "Kiss the Son, lest He be angry and you perish in the way" of Psalms 2:12, the "my Lord" who sits at the right hand of God until "I make your enemies your footstool" in Psalms 110:1 and Matthew 22:44, and whose life was so eloquently described in detail by David and Isaiah and concisely by Daniel.

Apparently a pastor mentioned in the Q and A session claimed that Jesus had to be born of the Adamic curse since he was born of Mary.  My Catholic friends would deflate that by saying that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception means that Mary was born without sin (because how else would she be worthy to bear the Son of God?  But if you think about that, wouldn't that necessitate Mary's parents also being without sin to create such a daughter? And how many generations would you have to go back before you hit someone with an"acceptable" amount of sin to start the process?  Newsflash:  All born of man have the Adamic stain.

So why not Jesus?  In human logic terms, I would venture to say that this is one of the "mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven" Jesus mentioned in Matthew 13:11, and that there are some things that man will not understand because he is NOT God- which of course was my whole point in starting this post, that we fall into heresy when we try to put God in a box that constrains Him to human logic and knowledge.  I will bring up one thing that may help though.  Robert Jeffres in a sermon I heard a while back explained (in trying to explain a totally different point) that the reason man gets the responsibility for sin is that Eve, though she sinned, was deceived by a being vastly more crafty and intelligent than herself.  Adam WILLFULLY committed the sin without being deceived- the serpent spoke to her, not him.  Therefore, one might speculate, that since the conception of Jesus did not include a man, therefore the Adamic sin was not passed on.  I don't think that whether that was the Divine mechanics of the thing or not really matters, though.

Upshot of all this- Jesus was both Man and God, throughout His time on earth.  And more, His PURPOSE for being here was to be that atonement required in Rule #2.

RULE #4:  You MUST be born again.  Jesus, in that same passage in John's Gospel, tells Nicodemus, "How is it you are the Teacher of Israel, and do not know these things?"  The Old Testament is the entire story of the rules thus far, and that man had died to sin.  To be brought to heaven, he must be reborn, the sin removed.  The sin MUST be removed through the atonement.  BUT- you have to ACCEPT that atonement- and that means that you must accept your sin, the Adamic curse, that needs to be lifted.  And there is but one way to get there.  And that is the way Paul spelled out in Romans 10:

9 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.


RULE # 5:  The evidence.  Are you saved?  Do you believe?  This is where the sermon before the Q and A comes in- the Parable of the Sower.  The seed that fell on good ground bore fruit.  If there is no fruit, there is no salvation.  Not that you need to do good works to be saved, but that if you don't do good works, then you are not showing the evidence of being saved.  To me, this is the second simplest constantly debated question in Christendom (the first being, how is there "three Persons in One God"), and it amuses me how Catholics and Protestants go back and forth, one accusing the other of "trying to get to heaven through works" and the other accusing them of "getting saved, sitting back and doing nothing", neither of which are true to the true believer.  The point of the matter is this:  When the seed is sown, the Sower expects a fruit.  A wheat plant without a head of grain is a weed.  A tare.  No seed gets planted and says, "Okay, here I am in the comfy soil, my job is done."


So, which rule are YOU stuck on?  Do you debate if there is a God, or why He allows certain things?  Do you deny that there is an ultimate moral good, as so many in today's society are trying to push us towards?  Perhaps you are stuck on the question of Jesus Christ.  Perhaps you need to make that decision for Christ.  Or maybe you haven't "gotten off the hammock" yet in order to be productive.  For myself, I feel a little like Gilligan, where getting into and out of that hammock the first time has been an adventure.  Hang in there, it's a lot easier once the rules are clear.