Angelic Conflict part 272: Defeater of death – Rom 5:12-21; 3:10-18.

Title: Angelic Conflict part 272: Defeater of death - ROM 5:12-21; 3:10-18; 8:18; 32

 

Hope is one of the theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking., but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided, you want other things more - food, games, work, fun, open air.

 

Most of us find it very difficult to want Heaven at all - except in so far as Heaven means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The Longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first thin of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longs which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. The wife may be a good wife, the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us. There are wrong ways of dealing with this fact and one right one.

 

The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, which does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same. [C.S. Lewis; Mere Christianity]

 

 

 

Death reigns as a foreign invader, given access to God's children by their fall in sin and it became the last enemy to be destroyed.

 

Hence there is in this worldview nothing "natural" about death. At least as we presently experience it, death was never part of God's design for creatures. It is, rather, the ultimate scourge of the evil one.

 

In bringing the kingdom of God, therefore, Christ came to destroy death by destroying "the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil."

 

1CO 15:50 Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

 

1CO 15:51 Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

 

1CO 15:52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

 

1CO 15:53 For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.

 

1CO 15:54 But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, "Death is swallowed up in victory.

 

1CO 15:55 "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?"

 

1CO 15:56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law;

 

1CO 15:57 but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

1CO 15:58 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.

 

ROM 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned — 

 

Adam was constituted in such sense the head and representative of his race that his sin and fall were held as theirs, and visited penalty accordingly - death.

 

Marxism, communism, socialism, progressivism, etc. would never have come to be if men had not first attacked the Bible teachings concerning God, man, and sin.

 

In these philosophies man is seen as being able to rise above the ashes of death on his own, in a collective fashion and relying on those who are good to control those who are not, as if there are some that are good.

 

ROM 3:10 as it is written [Psalms, Proverbs, and Isaiah],

"There is none righteous, not even one;

 

ROM 3:11 There is none who understands,

There is none who seeks for God;

 

ROM 3:12 All have turned aside, together they have become useless;

There is none who does good,

There is not even one."

 

ROM 3:13 "Their throat is an open grave,

With their tongues they keep deceiving,"

"The poison of asps is under their lips";

 

ROM 3:14 "Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness";

 

ROM 3:15 "Their feet are swift to shed blood,

 

ROM 3:16 Destruction and misery are in their paths,

 

ROM 3:17 And the path of peace have they not known."

 

ROM 3:18 "There is no fear of God before their eyes."

 

Mankind in general attack this truth since the world hates and attacks Christ. Yet Christ isn't able to be attacked anymore and the Father certainly never really could be since He did not become a man. Being unable to attack God directly, men attack the truths of the Bible in the hope of undermining the whole of it. It has never worked and never will.

 

Unable to attack God directly, men attack the truths of the Bible:

 

MAT 24:35

Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words shall not pass away.

 

C.S. Lewis wrote in the introduction to one of J.B. Phillips first publications [Letters to Young Churches] "In the earlier history of every rebellion there is a stage at which you do not yet attack the King in person. You say, 'the King is all right. It is his Ministers who are wrong. They misrepresent him and corrupt all his plans - which, I'm sure, are good plans if only the Ministers would let them take effect.' And the first victory consists in beheading a few Minister: only at a later stage do you go on and behead the King himself."

 

A tremendous example of this is the theory of evolution. Darwin published Origin of the Species in 1859. He acknowledged on pg. 152 that the lack of intermediate links was the most obvious and gravest objections against his theory. Back then it wasn't largely accepted. Today the theory is accepted to the point of being law. This is the beheading of Gen 1, attacking first the fringes and then eventually decapitating the whole notion of fallen man from the mind of man throughout all the world.

 

From Eden man was made upright and in the image of God and pure from the Maker's hand and afterwards, by his willful disobedience falling into spiritual ruin and death, yet today it is believed to be only a baseless legend.

 

Haeckel [German biologist, wrote in 1901 in Riddle of the Universe] - Sufficient for us as an incontestable historical fact, is the important thesis that man descends immediately from the ape, and secondarily from a long series of lower vertebrates.

 

If this is true then we are not fallen but actually on the way up, getting better, and with time will become able to correct all wrongs and create the utopia that is sure to come. [grant money is given to those who get in line with what the world system desires = bribery]

 

Just a note on another attack on the truth of Gen 1 and that is from those who attempt to blend Christianity with evolution with the false statement that God formed the first creations and then allowed them to evolve. This is popular for obvious reasons - it appeals to those who refuse to take a stand against the beheading of Gen 1.

 

It is an absolute contradiction to say you are a Christian and reject the Gen 1 account of creation:

 

MAT 19:4

And He answered and said, "Have you not read, that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female

 

MAR 10:6

"But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.

 

We are fallen, depraved, born spiritually dead, and in the genius of God and the grace of God that is, at least for us, the best place to start from.

 

God uses our puniness to call us away from ourselves. We live by one nose full of breath at a time.

 

ISA 2:22

Stop regarding man, whose breath of life is in his nostrils;

For why should he be esteemed?

 

Adam was not deceived and so sin came to the human race through him and not Eve. It wasn't a sin against another person. It was a sin directly against God. There is now one sin against God and that is the rejection of His Son.

 

We may be inclined to blame Adam, but we should look rather kindly upon Adam.

 

If death passed to the entire human race through one man's disobedience, cannot life pass to the entire human race through one Man's righteousness?

 

Adam had the pressure of standing for many and he completely failed. Christ had the pressure of standing for many and He completely succeeded.

 

This is why what is restored to us is not the life of Adam, even the unfallen Adam, but the life of the one from heaven, which is a resurrection life.

 

Death is abolished in Him.

 

ROM 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned — 

 

ROM 5:13 for until the Law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law.

 

"imputed" - evlloge,w[ellogeo] = (only here and in Philemon) to charge to one's account.

 

Philem 18

But if he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account;

 

Before the Mosaic Law it is said that sin was not charged to their account. Since this is a reference to the Law this is a reference to personal sin. Yet, they still died; physical death being a result of spiritual death. They still died because they were all sinners in Adam. They still suffered the consequences of sin (Cain and his progeny, flood, tower of Babel, destruction of Sodom etc.) but not the curses in the Law since these were not yet given.