Things that are seen are temporary but things that are unseen are eternal. I have come to see that we need to understand how eternal things change our temporal world. There are some really important issues here that need to be aired and then understood. Salvation is such a wonderful thing and we properly think of it as an event that happened to us based on something that Jesus did 2000 or so years ago. But then as we consider the various dynamics of it, it often becomes a blurred and indefinable set of principles that our minds find difficulty in putting together and making complete sense of. Yet salvation is fully understandable. What we need in order to put together the various pieces of information, is God's Spirit. Jesus, himself, the greatest teacher, said, If I go to my father, I will send you another counsellor, the Spirit of truth, He will teach you all things. The thing is, we don't understand much of eternal things because we are bound up in a temporary life situation and it's hard to conceive of what something eternal is when all that we have understood so far in life, are temporary things. Everything around us is on the wane, decaying and changing and all events are being measured in relationship to time. I'm not going to get too complicated here because we need to grasp this concept of the difference between God's world and our own changeable lifestyle. Let's look firstly at some of things that we are and then what God is, to try and show the differences: We live in time and measure everything against time. God is eternal and is everlasting. We change and from the time we are born start to deteriorate. God and Jesus do not change.
I'm just going to briefly interject at this juncture and say, don't look at this list and get depressed because we are going to come to the main point at some time of expressing what salvation will do to alter our situation to move us into God's territory and into His ways. So hold on there for a moment. We'll go on... We all the time look at the things that are temporary and get bogged down with the notions of that and so, live negatively. God doesn't regard time, He doesn't live by it, He is not temporary, He is permanent, so isn't bothered by negativeness, He is wholly positive. We suffer the effects of negativeness and stress (which is related to time). God has nothing in His being that responds to that, so is not affected this way. We walk through life with doubts about our future and live with doubt because of fear, which is based in the weakness of our thought processes, due to the negative effects of sin. God has no sin and knows no sin, so has none of these things and is not affected by them. We can't always see any hope in life because the initiative that we need, to see past our dilemma's, is not functioning properly. God has no weakness in His thinking because he is not affected by a sinful, weak nature, so His initiatives are boundless, there are no situations where he cannot find an overcoming solution to a problem. Humans live by the laws of sin and death (unless they have salvation). God lives by the law of faith and the laws of life (and so do the just people of the world). Mankind is naturally weak because the effect of sin makes him weak by continuously introducing the subject of negativeness to his mind. This has the effect of making his body and bodily systems negative and so his mind rules his body with these notions, making him (or her) less powerful in bodily function. This can occur in any part of the human frame so we can see how sickness can take so many forms. God and Jesus however, knowing and having no such sinful traits, are not weak in ANY way but are STRONG. God is ALL powerful (Omnipotent). Mankind is naturally destructive. There are no utterly cohesive actions in mankind that bring about growth and prosperity. The effects of sin distract from a creative attitude and make man naturally a destroyer rather than what God made in the beginning, someone after God's likeness and image, a creative, prosperous being. God is a creative, life supporting, prosperous and life enhancing being. We could go on stressing the differences but it may get very negative, which is not the idea of this study, rather it is to look at where the turn around that God has designed for us to have, will come about. We then, live in a temporal situation, God is eternal but He has no plans for us to remain temporal, His plan is for us to live in His realm, which overcomes the temporal. If we look at the scriptures, they state in 2 Corinthians verse 16, Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal....and further in 2 Corinthians 5, verse 4..., For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. Salvation, as we will see, needed to embrace all time so that everyone born would have the opportunity to have their negative sinful ways removed and to be saved from their downward trend towards death. God had to intervene if we were to recover from the position that Adam placed us in as the human race. God had made us in His own image and likeness. We had all sorts of natural
abilities and attributes that were overcoming in their method. We had initiative. We had prosperity. We had the ability to heal when our bodies came into contact with alien substances that could destroy us. We had dominion over all of creation, and much more. God gave us those things both as part of us being made in His image and likeness and by conferring on us by command, the ability to be stronger and more powerful than everything else around us. So what happened? Adam relinquished those abilities and rights and gave the authority we had, over to Satan and death. Since that day, the day that God spoke about when He said, The day that you sin, Adam, you will surely die!, Adam and his offspring have been dying. From the time we are born, we begin to die and life starts to deteriorate. The principle of death is there at work until we, by choice, invoke the new law that God gives us, the law of life in Christ Jesus. We call it salvation. The scripture says that God sent his son to us to save us from our sin. His name is 'Jesus', which means 'saviour'. He came to overturn the work that Satan's nature did to us. He came to destroy sin in the flesh of man. The flesh that surrounds the spirit and soul of man is corrupted by sin and is trained by Satan to be negative and downward facing. It is significant though, that after sin entered Adam, it took 930 years for that sin to eventually 'train-out' all the life and overcoming nature that Adam had. It took that long to convince Adam to die. But God instituted a salvation for man to replace that negative nature and gave him the possibility of choosing a 'new birth' for himself. Jesus said, except a man be born again, he can't enter God's Kingdom. So salvation was offered to man to bring him into victory over sin, sickness, disease, mental illness, anything that was the effect of sin in man's being. The question may be asked, How is it that Jesus died so many years ago and yet what He did, still works today? Because the salvation came from an eternal source. We live in time. We live in such a way that we measure everything we do against time. When things happen in our lives, whatever event we are talking about, from the most insignificant to the greatest event, we measure it in time. We note when it happened, we log it down and consign it to a date. We live in a time-orientated world. Because of the decay in our lives, we measure how long we might have left to live. We plan our lives around it and set our expectations by time. God never meant for us to do this because there is nothing in his nature that calls for time to be evaluated that way. He knows no decay, 'No change Jehovah knows'..., 'Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, today and forever! we can rattle off the scriptures that show God to be timeless and unaffected by time. And when it comes to salvation, we see that at whatever time in history you look at God, His plan for us is the same. Scripture clearly says that in eternity, God set about planning our redemption but when that happened, Jesus was already in effect slain for our sin. The Godhead: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, spoke together about our needs and designed our salvation. We tend to think of that moment as happening in time but it was an eternal event. Because God knows no change and there is no transience with Him, when He said it, it was in effect, DONE. The scripture states that He was, 'a lamb slain from the foundation of the world'. When Abraham took his son up the mountain to sacrifice him and young Issac asked, Where is the sacrifice father? Abraham confidently said, God will provide Himself a lamb! In effect, Abraham was looking at the situation with his faith, he was using an eternal attribute. Nevertheless, he followed God's request and when he raised the knife high in the air to sacrifice his son, he suddenly saw a ram caught in a bush, God had provided yet again! It was like God was saying, follow your faith Abraham and everything will turn out right. If we travel in time into the future and see what is happening in the book of Revelation, in John's Vision of the future, we see a, 'lamb looking as if it had been slain, standing in the midst of the throne in heaven'. John could see this because he had a vision of the spiritual and eternal realm. This is the real realm, not what we see with our eyes but the normally unseen realm, that which God has established. We see things with earthly eyes and we look all the time at the temporary. God
wants us to see what is eternal and what HE has established for us. The salvation that God has for us, reaches every time period. If you were alive at Moses time or Adam's time or Noah's time or David's time or Peter's time or Paul's time or Constantine's time or John Wesley's time, or whether it's next year you are thinking about, God's salvation would be effective for you, to do what God planned that His salvation should do for you. His realm is not affected by time, what He decides will work and do the job He has planned to do and it will not be affected by time. His work is eternal. It enters our time period but doesn't lose it's efficiency at what it needs to do. His saving us from the principle of sin at work within us, is still powerful in it's capability and activity. His healing us from the sickness in our body is still powerful in it's work. NO CHANGE JEHOVAH KNOWS! NO CHANGE JESUS CHRIST KNOWS. He is the same, yesterday, today and forever. Eternity why do we need to understand it? It's because when God, who dwells in a different incorruptible state to us and is not altered in His purpose toward us, designs a salvation to save us in all our ways, those conditions will not alter. It doesn't matter where you are, what colour you are, whether it's night or day, or summer or winter, whether you are a good person or bad, He has set His sights on you, to save you. He won't alter, He doesn't live in our type of world. He is here with us but doesn't get affected by the rottenness of where we live or by the degradation of our surroundings. He just loves us as He always has! It didn't matter that He had to come into our world and be one of us and undergo such awful suffering to save us from our sins and our sicknesses, our fears and our 'peace-less-ness'. HE JUST LOVES US THE SAME, AS HE ALWAYS HAS! He doesn't change. That may be hard for us to understand, but He is eternal. He entered this realm of time to destroy the changes that are altering us. He took on the destruction that destroys us and won the fight. He came to impart healing and His eternal ways to us. He wants us to become incorruptible like Him, to put on immortality, like Him. To have His nature back within us and His peace within our souls. Peace is not the absence of war, it is the presence of God! It is brought about when the threat of devastating change comes but God intervenes and says, There's no need to fear! I'm here in time with you and I'm not going to change! I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end, after time has been done away with, I'm still what I am. You know, whatever we fear or dread, God is still the same. His attitude to us doesn't change! Whatever you think may be around the corner, it doesn't matter, God is around that corner too! You may be like every human, measuring your life out and living in fear of this and that but God is eternal, so why not trust Him with your affairs? It just takes a simple step. Just hand over all of your life to Him and simply trust Him. He doesn't let people down. He is eternal. In 2 Corinthians we read, So that which is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. The Overcoming Power of God in us is not something that we see with our eyes but by faith we come gradually to know that it is there. We know the promises of God and after we commit ourselves to Him and ask for his Spirit to come within us, we have the promised 'deposit which guarantees what is to come'. God puts within us the eternal which overcomes the temporal. We need to look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen. It's hard on us as temporal beings to now accept that we have a nature within us which is eternal, a nature that is born of God that doesn't have weaknesses. That's difficult to accept but we need to understand it this way: we have in our bodies, the old nature that is weak and lustful, it has desires that have been with us all of our lives (that we have become used to) but we also have (less noticeably at first), the nature of God by whose Spirit we have been born again and has begun to inspire us to do things that are not natural to us but they are things which make us think in ways that are overcoming. This new nature will show us how to overcome our weaknesses and how to destroy our enemy, not only
the enemy of our souls but the enemy of our body and our minds also. We have to now live by faith. 2 Peter 1 says that, we have both His divine nature and His divine power. Now again, that's not something many are prepared to accept because we are brought up in this transient world and within our own changing bodies and taught to accept that we are just mortal and nothing else. That's NOT what God is saying and we should believe Him. The Holy Spirit is here to counsel us and to teach us, to re-train us and to make us understand the things that are eternal. We start with salvation, forgiveness of sins (an unseen area of our lives). But Salvation is a whole lot bigger than just having sins forgiven. Let me quote you from Isaiah 53, He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him and by his stripes we are healed. Salvation is a lot more embracing than just forgiveness of sins. In these verses, we see not only forgiveness for what we did in the spiritual area of our beings but peace for our minds, cleansing for those things where we transgressed and also healing for our bodies. God does a complete job for us. In the eternal realm it has been completed already, it's down to us to accept the facts of it, where we are today. Someone said, The victory has been won, it's up to us to enforce it! That's about the strength of it! We have been given the right to enforce it, we are sons of God now, by right (by God's gift of salvation to us and by the promised indwelling of God's Spirit). His Spirit communicates with us and tells us we are born of God. We therefore have the rights of the children of God. We therefore have the right to rescind the nature of Satan and all of it's effects. It's not a meagre salvation this! We have not been given some weak, wishy washy nature, or some trashy present from someone. THIS IS GOD'S SALVATION AND GOD'S NATURE AND IT'S FOR US! AND IT WILL MAKE US STRONG AND CAUSE US TO LIVE IF WE LET IT AND IF WE LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF GOD WITHIN US. He has said that he will lead and guide us into all truth. He will speak to us from the inside. The voice of His Spirit will teach us how to destroy Satan and all his works. The Overcomer http://www.theovercomer.org.uk