Holiness

Scripture informs us that we are, to win heaven’s citizenship, so to be twice born.  Both births have to do with the creative acts of God.  We are God’s children in two meanings, one physical and the other spiritual.  In the physical we can and do become truant to creation (natural) and to God (spiritual).  We demand of nature more and/or differently than it can give without our full agreement and cooperation.  Good people live in a disciplined context that makes the physical world a practical place, and on aggregate, increasing the length of life to the degree that nature’s laws permit – and are kept.  Had Adam/Eve maintained that original ideal they likely would have, at some point in their long lives been graduated in some translation to the next transition God means to offer to mankind.  The sin against God in his purpose invited suffering and death as factors in physical mortality.  The sin against nature was a sin against God.  Aging to death is the ultimate penalty for the violation of nature.  That story too is introduced in the early chapters of Genesis.  It is illustrated throughout Scripture.  Death is the penalty for social/personal violation, and countered in nature through the children and the children’s children so to lengthen the tension of conflict between mankind and nature.  There is more to the story than our DNA informs us.  (We have no stated reason to believe that angels procreate, or that they were ever subject to a life context of mortal beings.)  Human tension increases and decreases as determined by the vagaries of mankind and nature.  It will only end when mankind and nature given of God are halted in the conflict, and transition heals.

The cessation of natural life (mortality) ends the natural conflict, but the spiritual conflict remains for resolution.  If that conflict is not personally managed during the physical sojourn, to the satisfaction of God, the consequence is negative.  In the simplest terms, all things from God are affirmative.  Those affirmatives are generated from God’s nature, and whatever violates that nature (holiness/yes) is negative (sin/no).  Unless the spiritual is satisfactorily addressed during earth experience, physical death closes any favorable resolution of the matter as we understand it.  All this appears too exotic currently for us – nature-bound mankind.  Scripture addresses human doubt and unbelief in meeting the spiritual threat of death, inevitable unless countered, by providing spiritual birth in a redemptive plan.  That plan provides a rather straightforward process of accepting human inability to overcome the inherited inability (depravity) to meet the requirements of the holiness of God.  Scripture calls on the individual for repentance, acceptance of God’s intercession in Jesus Christ, and faith that new spiritual life has been born in the individual that justifies God’s forgiveness for violation of the divine nature.  If the penitent is made aware the gift of immortality is bestowed, and the completion of the redemptive experience is the fulfillment of spiritual Hope – which is immortality within the confines of the Kingdom of God.  This is embraced by genuine faith, which is full trust in the promises of God.  Faith finds verification in the words of Christ, in his sacrifice and resurrection, taken together with the extensions of Scripture.  This last is based on the confidence Christians have in the Apostles.  It is from the Apostles that the New Testament comes to closure in The Revelation of John, the Apostle. He declared that his vision was not only the end of earthly matters, but also of God’s Revelation.

Our problem, of course, is that the spiritual is beyond the hard evidence of nature, as evidence is interpreted by much of mankind.  If I believe in the presupposition that there is God and that he communicates, I interpret the evidence of nature differently than the person who believes that nature is a consequence of a Big Bang that came in the course of evolution and that without an intelligent source.  I do have evidence such as: The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork.  (Psalm 19:1) Rejecting my presupposition the naturalist rejects my evidence.  Nothing in nature can afford stern evidence for the substitutionary atonement for sin offered and fulfilled in Jesus Christ.  In human context Jesus died at the hands of humankind, representing both the spiritual and natural victory of God in behalf of mankind.  The spiritual victory is accomplished in God’s justification of those affirming genuine faith in the atonement of Christ, with the natural victory shown in Christ’s resurrection.