WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON THE CROSS [4045a]

It says that one died for all therefore all died. It also says that we were crucified with Him. When He died, we died. When He was crucified, we were crucified. It is also apparent that all not “in” Jesus are dead under the law. Whichever way you look at it, we are spoken of as being dead and not alive in any form, whether physical or spiritual.

Therefore it is no surprise that what Jesus is doing is to reveal to us this state of death of the natural born man of flesh and blood. And “sin” is blamed, and all but Jesus are accounted as sinners who are “dead” under the “law of sin and death”.

It remains then for the grace of God to be revealed in providing some way out of death and into life, since our natural state is that only of death.

The death of Jesus did nothing* to change anything in itself. Jesus was a man just like us, so that His death could represent our death also, and make us one like Him and Him one like us. EXCEPT that His death was temporary because He contained the nature of God within Himself, so that once His body was dead, His spirit could by the power of God having given birth to newness of bodily life by that righteous spirit, rise to resurrection life in new bodily form.

So where does that leave us? Having already been declared dead in ourselves, God reaches out to us to say that if we recognise our own death state, and are prepared to leave it behind, that death being righteous because there being nothing of life worthy in us; then our death is forgiven by His mercy towards us and overlooked if we cleave to Him in recognition of His love as now provided through His Son, who in the new form of the Spirit is made available to us through His love being desirous of us to captivate us through our empathy with His empathy for us in revelation of the love that He is.

This above statement of account operates in reality by our spontaneous heart recognition of the pain and suffering we ourselves encounter in life and are concerned about, and then see in Him on the cross as being that which we deserve but which has been taken by Him on our account, for us. The revealing of sin having been dealt with in this way shows that we also must be sensitive to the pain of sin and especially our own sin.

This is why it can say that “those who are His have crucified the (our) flesh [with its passions and desires]”. Our empathy performs this crucifixion of self along with Him, as we “own our sin” which we now can do because He has paid for it for us. Truth demands we then operate outside of this former death which loses its power over us to conform us to itself and instead, we are released from the power of it and the structure of laws within our minds that confined us only to logical and defensive mechanisms: and now leaves us to follow His Spirit by way of its (His) immediate presence without regard for legalistic processes of rationalisation.

We gain a new ‘mindset’ unlike the former one which was forced to accommodate compromise and servitude to the sinful mindset, but which now places us in ‘servitude’ to Jesus the Prince of righteousness instead. His cross defined His and God’s love. We now allow love to control us in its outworking towards others, without regard for ourselves other than that we follow Him above all else.

So our sins fell on Him only in the broader picture of His love for us and our sinful condition falling on His conscience in conjunction with His own fleshly deficiencies which He ‘repaired’ by His own righteousness in the lead up to His death.

It is our recognition of and conformity to this truth that allows life enduing change to occur in us.

One web article on this subject is (https://credomag.com/article/what-really-happened-on-the-cross-part-1/#SnippetTab) 

[Just as Paul in Romans 7 revealed the fallen state of man, so too on the cross does Jesus reveal the identification with, and the healing of, this condition] [The cross was forgiveness for all but it has to be received to be effective] [We must be participant by our compliance as inherent in our belief] [As we trust in Him, our identity shifts from one of ourselves to that of Himself].

• The death of Jesus, though it ‘did nothing of itself’, ushered in the new covenant whereby a new commandment was given and various “laws” of grace appeared which superceded those of the old covenant.

CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT JESUS DEATH [4045]

It says that one died for all therefore all died. It also says that we were crucified with Him. When He died, we died. When He was crucified, we were crucified. It is also apparent that all not “in” Jesus are dead under the law. Whichever way you look at it, we are spoken of as being dead and not alive in any form, whether physical or spiritual.

Therefore it is no surprise that what Jesus is doing is to reveal to us this state of death of the natural born man of flesh and blood. And “sin” is blamed, and all but Jesus are accounted as sinners who are “dead” under the “law of sin and death”.

It remains then for the grace of God to be revealed in providing some way out of death and into life, since our natural state is that only of death.

The death of Jesus did nothing to change anything in itself. Jesus was a man just like us, so that His death could represent our death also, and make us one like Him and Him one like us. EXCEPT that His death was temporary because He contained the nature of God within Himself, so that once His body was dead, His spirit could by the power of God having given birth to newness of bodily life by that righteous spirit, rise to resurrection life in new bodily form.

So where does that leave us? Having already been declared dead in ourselves, God reaches out to us to say that if we recognise our own death state, and are prepared to leave it behind, that death being righteous because there being nothing of life worthy in us; then our death is forgiven by His mercy towards us and overlooked if we cleave to Him in recognition of His love as now provided through His Son, who in the new form of the Spirit is made available to us through His love being desirous of us to captivate us through our empathy with His empathy for us in revelation of the love that He is.

This above statement of account operates in reality by our spontaneous heart recognition of the pain and suffering we ourselves encounter in life and are concerned about, and then see in Him on the cross as being that which we deserve but which has been taken by Him on our account, for us. The revealing of sin having been dealt with in this way shows that we also must be sensitive to the pain of sin and especially our own sin.

This is why it can say that “those who are His have crucified the (our) flesh [with its passions and desires]”. Our empathy performs this crucifixion of self along with Him, as we “own our sin” which we now can do because He has paid for it for us. Truth demands we then operate outside of this former death which loses its power over us to conform us to itself and instead, we are released from the power of it and the structure of laws within our minds that confined us only to logical and defensive mechanisms: and now leaves us to follow His Spirit by way of its (His) immediate presence without regard for legalistic processes of rationalisation.

We gain a new ‘mindset’ unlike the former one which was forced to accommodate compromise and servitude to the sinful mindset, but which now places us in ‘servitude’ to Jesus the Prince of righteousness instead. His cross defined His and God’s love. We now allow love to control us in its outworking towards others, without regard for ourselves other than that we follow Him above all else.

So our sins fell on Him only in the broader picture of His love for us and our sinful condition falling on His conscience in conjunction with His own fleshly deficiencies which He ‘repaired’ by His own righteousness in the lead up to His death.

It is our recognition of and conformity to this truth that allows life enduing change to occur in us.

One web article on this subject is (https://credomag.com/article/what-really-happened-on-the-cross-part-1/#SnippetTab) 

[Just as Paul in Romans 7 revealed the fallen state of man, so too on the cross does Jesus reveal the identification with, and the healing of, this condition] [The cross was forgiveness for all but it has to be received to be effective] [We must be participant by our compliance as inherent in our belief].

THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST PERFECTED HIM [3083]

And the perfection of Him in His sufferings allows for us to be perfected in His sufferings also – as we recognise that they are the same as ours. The sufferings involved are the same thing, that righteousness is coming against unrighteousness and a conflict ensues that contains within itself pain and suffering.

There is physical pain but also mental pain. One film maker [Mel Gibson] has made much of the physical aspects of Christ’s suffering, being of Catholic bent. But the major aspect of it all is the mental anguish seen in fear, depression, anxiety, and every aspect of “life” that denotes separation from God who is love.

When people are “tortured” “in hell” or whatever – it will be the mental anguish and suffering that is involved [as on a cross], not so much the physical if at all; because whatever state they are in will be the consciousness of the loss of everything good that could have been theirs. Or in fact even the awareness of what they themselves never had in terms of good things, but everything they always had in terms of bad things. This will amount to physiological torment even if the ultimate nature of all things were to change – which it will, but those who are destroyed by the “second death” may never see that ultimate change or experience it because they will still be trapped in the physical state in which this torment will be experienced as the change which comes upon the ‘saved’ to immortalise them, also comes upon them the ‘unsaved’ to prove their mortality and bring it and them with it to ultimate destruction.

The “wrath of God” is only that righteousness which confronts unrighteousness and which then produces conflict between sections of the mental components of the mind and brain and which will either destroy that which is evil to the gain of the good; or destroy the good to the gain of the evil.

Jesus was made just like we were, yet He did not sin. But the internal stresses to urge Him to sin were in Him just as they are in us. To resist temptation is a “work” which only righteousness can do. To “fall” to temptation is to knowingly submit to evil and is to lessen the strength of righteousness and increase the state of unrighteousness [evil]. The life of Jesus was consistent in His resistance to evil so that His corresponding increase in the ‘righteousness’ of His body or bodily state and spirit condition; was what is called His “perfection” as in “He learned obedience through what He suffered”. It was an ongoing maturity or maturation process that led Him finally to His ultimate glorification on the cross where the last of it was to occur, it was to be “finished”.

His body could be immortalised because all the unrighteous components in the human frame which He also possessed just like us, had been corrected, confronted and either renewed in accordance with original divine purpose, or destroyed because they were against the divine purpose. Finally His cry went forth “It is finished” and He gave up His physical life in order to receive His Spiritual life in new physical form. “He became a life-giving Spirit” [in ‘physical’ form].

HE BOUGHT OUR LOVE WITH HIS OWN [2036]

OUTRAGEOUS THEOLOGY. 

The great transaction – reducing God’s love to a simple transaction that man could understand, or at least could not deny, given that it amounted to a series of events which culminated in the death of God’s only begotten Son.

His ownership of us – if we deny this purchase made in blood and suffering then we turn off the source of love, our possible participation in love is reduced to net zero.

The non repayable debt – a debt we could never repay, one which places us under the obligation to give Him our full devotion, attention and yes, love. Rom.8:12. ‘Therefore we are debtors, but not to the flesh’.

Bought with a price – that price was the cross. To set the prisoners free, prisoners to the law of sin as resides in this body of death.

To get man to understand God’s love it was necessary to cut through his spiritual blindness by one undeniable act of sacrifice that depended only on one’s belief that it took place within the context of God’s love. God proclaimed his ownership of us in an undeniable way, or which, if so denied then cemented the position of believer or non-believer, to make it evident where one stood in the matter of the true righteousness of love.

So the purchase was made to retrieve us from that sale to, and ownership by, sin which occurred from earliest times. “Bought with a price”.

[“We love because He first loved us”]

THE NITTY-GRITTY OF GOD’S LOVE FOR US [2008]

This reality of Christ is that God is and that He is love and that with His love, He loves, and He loves us. In and by accepting this and Him, we do become like Him and are accepted into Him, and will take our place with Him, both now and forever.

To accept God is to accept love. If you accept the God of love then He will accept you also. If you deny the God of love then he will deny you also. So you must accept Him who is love, that you also might be OF love, be OF the God of love, and therefore also love. To be of the God of love is to love in action as He is of action, for love is not static but dynamic where it needs to be, which is in the world where there is little love, that the world might learn of that love. Love must take place where that love is needed, which is wherever it is not, wherever it is in lack.

We love because He first loved us. If Christ had not come then that love would not have been revealed as it now has been. Those who do not love or have not known love must now be able to see in those of love that it does exist, and so that He exists.

All thought and action should now be towards loving all, as He has also loved us by removing all non-love in Himself so that we might also see that it is also removed in us even as He did so in Himself for us to see and believe the reality of it and of Him.

He has removed internally all that is not of love eternally, so that we might be unopposed even by the evil of the wrath that we once were in order to reveal in us the Son that He is.

 

GOD’S WAR ON SIN [2005]

EXPLORATORY THEOLOGY.  This could also be called ‘the wrath of the love of God’, or, ‘If Jesus took the wrath, why is it still around?’

Somehow, conflicting thought streams create wrath. PHYSIOLOGICALLY. The LIE itself creates wrath, STRESS. There is existing stress (past) and present and ongoing stress.

Adam and Eve lived in a garden of perfection, but when they failed to maintain this, they became creatures who were then ‘at odds’ with that environment. That environment of love would have destroyed them if they were not then removed from it, because they were no longer compatible with it, with God.

A time and place had to be made available for a condition of reconciliation to occur, when they could be returned to the love environment without harm.

Anything that is of God becomes in conflict with anything that is NOT of God. There is no conflict in heaven* nor in God, there can only be conflict outside of heaven where sin is allowed to exist, temporarily.

This confliction of identity, of nature, of manifestation or of spirit; is part of the systematic nature of the lie which has manifested in mankind, whereby and from where man is then brought to the understanding of the nature of God, and is placed in a position to be reconciled once more to Him, now being compatible with Him instead of being incompatible with Him. The prodigal son is allowed to return to the Father’s house once more, but now in complete understanding of his Father’ love for him, through understanding the nature of the forgiveness given him.

Jesus took this inner confliction within Himself to resolve the differences between man and God, between their natures, to bring man’s nature once more into line with God’s, by ‘doing it’ within Him and suffering the struggle and the pain of it within His own body. He allowed and confronted and absorbed this conflict until it was resolved, with the result that He Himself became the firstborn of the whole creation, to be brought to fulfillment as a new entity, the sum of the whole creative process.

Jesus having done this for us, having removed the law that was against us because it resulted in our death, means that the whole sinful nature structure that is inherently within us, has now lost its power over us, has, as the law of sin and death, been destroyed by Him in totality. We gain by this as we believe it to be true, and all else in contradiction of it to be the lie. Faith now replaces that past nature structure with that of the new nature in Christ, in which and in whom we now participate.

What then of our own inner pain, inner conflict, inner sin and death?

As we submit to Him, the expression of our own lives becomes subjugate to His. Gal.2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me”.

The ultimate conflict is between Spirit and flesh, as Gal.5:17 “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please.” 16 “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.” 18 But if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law. 19-21 Now the deeds [fruit] of the flesh are evident…all the bad stuff…against such things there IS law]. 22 But the fruit [deeds] of the Spirit is… all the good stuff…. 23 against such things there is NO law.

The flesh is the natural nature of man which must be changed to be like the natural nature of God. This involves the submission of our nature to His nature, and is governed by our recognition of His love through Christ for us, and the response of our inner emotion feelings and love for Him in return. Feelings of gratitude and release from guilt shame and condemnation [death] and the recognition of the cost to Himself and the great price He paid, which reflects the great worth He places on us. This invokes in us the recognition of the great inner loss we feel regarding our own ‘fall from grace’ and the suffering and hurt which has been done to us and which we have done to others.

So it is really the confrontation between love and the absence of love, with the absence of it having been replaced with all manner of ‘other than love’ to cover up the loss of the image of the son of God which we have suffered. Love calls us forward into the reality of all the ramifications of release from this prior sinful [non love] condition. Ongoingly this release will result in our nature being conformed to His nature, but not without an appreciation of the conflict which He endured, being represented in us as Godly grief. 

Faith working by love will bring about Spirit victory over fleshly defeat. 

God’s war on sin is simply His love in action to replace ‘other than love’ activity with that of love, and is represented in natural man as conflict and agitation, anguish and guilt, as God’s love meets those other elements not of Himself, and reveals them to be what they are, representations of the [Adamic] lie. Man sees this as wrath, ‘the wrath of God’, because man’s natural identity lies in all that God is not, man having deviated from God through Eve’s fall to temptation.

Capitulation to the Spirit in all things will by faith acquire the victory of Christ in our own lives. Your mind, yourself, your identity; must undergo transformation and renewal. In submission to Him.  Jesus won the war, and calls upon us to also claim this victory for ourselves.

[*”And there was war in heaven” may not mean what you may think it means] [Truth and lie are also opposed to one another][“Law brings wrath”]

CAN WE IDENTIFY THE TYPE OF SUFFERING FOR SIN THAT JESUS ENDURED? [1908]

Love was the motivation, was it also one side of the pain that He suffered? The effects of sin and the internal sin condition, “sin in the flesh” had exactly what effects on Him, and why and how?

Well, what effects do they have on US, NOW? There is guilt and anger (wrath) remorse and what happens when someone DIES that we call grief. Less than that which God is, experiences depression and anxiety, fear and dread. All these mental conditions come against us as enemies of the nature of God, and His image that we were made in. And all of these enemies are the very NATURE of that which is NOT GOD’S NATURE which is LOVE.

This disassociated self , this organised picture of independence from God which can vary from ‘sane’ to ‘insane’ and anywhere in between; is intent on harm anytime it is not involved in LOVE: and of course that is always because love is ‘a pure Spirit’ to quote “Avatar” the movie. And we are not that pure Spirit.

LOVE felt the pain and responsibility for every thought which appeared against God, Where Paul said “It is not I, but sin that dwells in me”, it was Jesus who came against this inner sin “in the flesh” and overcame it with much sorrow to himself. It is the nature of love to be concerned about everything that is NOT the nature of love, that is not the nature of itself. It is the nature of love to feel and experience the pain of the sick and suffering and to be in the opposite tension to it.

Jesus said “who touched me” because “I perceive that virtue (power) has gone out from me”. That woman was healed, and the same power was available to heal the faulty nature of man, but Jesus had to bring this about by direct conflict with the sin nature that lay in Him just as it does in us.

Any parent who has longed to see their child released from whatever predicament in which they may have become ensnared, will have insight into what the Father and the Son both felt for their fallen creation. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…”. And everyone who has been released from the sin condition INTO that love will understand.

He BECAME SIN for us. He became on the receiving end of the ABSENCE of His Father’s love as He reached into the darkness of OUR souls and sought to bring light to OUR darkness from His own inner resources which strained His very life’s ability to do so. Remote from the Father’s resources, from His love, He had to do battle from within Himself against those forces of darkness which lay within Him side by side with the elements of corruption and OVERCOME THEM.

All the sorrow and pain and hurt that we are capable of suffering, He did so suffer for us until these were made exempt from the nature of His own love just as they were exempt from the nature of His Father’s love, so that He and His love became perfectly positioned to extract us from that self same condition that He had gone through to free us of it, forever. Only His Spirit now can be grieved until the creation is fulfilled in us as it is in Him.

THE PURPOSE OF SUFFERING – CREFLO DOLLAR [1897]

Allied with his videos on “understanding the trials of faith” is also this one of the above title.

Link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydGwZzNksq8

WHAT IS WRATH AND ANGUISH? [790c]

(2018) Jesus experienced “wrath”, the “wrath” that we deserved, or which was coming our way regardless. So what is wrath? and have we, or how have we, avoided it through Jesus?

Wrath is conflict, and the pain and suffering within that conflict. So what was the conflict in Jesus? There were issues of responsibility for sin, because mankind had been brought into a sinful world, and had no chance to escape the consequences of this. There were issues of the sin that had been committed over the years, by all and sundry.

Simply put, man is at conflict with himself because he is aware of his own non viability. Being made like God, means that he knows he is guilty, in fact his whole being is stamped with this matter, that his existence is temporary and he is going to die.

What then has Jesus to do with this? Can he intervene and change this situation, and why does he have to suffer in order to do it. How can he, by suffering what we deserve, or what we experience, or what is coming to us; how can he reverse this problem? And what does separation from God have to do with it, or the presence of sin?

Jesus didn’t have to empathise with us, [but He did] because he was a sample of us, he had his own flesh problem to deal with. Being the son of God meant he had to encounter the inner evil of all men as it lay in his innermost self, in his flesh. He parried temptation and rebuked it, but in the end he had to confront the source of this temptation which was originating in his flesh. “Every man is tempted when from within, BY HIS OWN DESIRE (that which he originated or conceived) he is led and enticed…”

There was nothing within man to prevent this action from occurring, whether that man was us or Jesus, he was still a man. “In the likeness of sinful flesh”. Whatever causes anguish in us is the same thing that caused anguish in Him, he was not immune from it.

So what is “it”. Commonly referred to as “separation from God”, it suggests the operation of a will other than God’s will, and an existence other than God’s existence, and therefore not holy, not of God, not of good. “It” results in products of being that are other than God, and therefore are “evil”. Consciousness of this inner “evil” creates stress and strain between man’s consciousness and God’s consciousness. In Jesus case, it was the prime example of two opposing consciousness’s  being located within the same entity, the same being, between his “flesh” and his spirit.

Jesus would have been torn apart by this clash of natures, if any stress could be deemed to be “anguish” then this was it. The inner “heart” that was by man’s natural nature “unclean”, was in conflict with the pure “heart” that had been formed within by Jesus’ Spirit character. There was also deep remorse and sadness over the state of the fallen creation, of the state of his people who were lost and had no possible way of surviving the onslaught of this inner nature of flesh. If we experience guilt then he would have experienced it even more so, because of him being the creator’s son he would have shared in the responsibility for the sad state of affairs that this earth and those in it had become.

To this we are called to witness, that His eternal Will entered into and experienced all that we are suffering, all that we have ever suffered, and all we will ever suffer, and his suffering was complete and absolute. It ends with him, having experienced our spiritual death, then experiencing our physical death. Unlike him, He says of us that “the one who believes in me will never see death”. That means we will not experience spiritual death, nor will we suffer from the results of any spiritual aspects that may otherwise accompany our physical death.

We then also experience this conflict and tearing of two natures, but depending on any varying degree of depression or mental illness, we may not normally in this life experience these things to great depth. We may experience such things after death when we then also, if we have not aligned ourselves with Jesus, having not empathised with him and joined with Him in his  victory over the flesh, may very well find ourselves like Him, in the despair of our flesh, but unlike him, with no escape. This is commonly called hell. But just as the veil was torn, so too was his body torn for us, to bring us back to our sense of mercy, justice, and of love. It was his forgiveness of us.

When we by faith join with Jesus, we by the Spirit are able to reconcile all these conflictions in ourselves as we submit to his victory over them. We will grieve, but we will then also rejoice. He supplies, he is, the missing piece that completes us by forgiving us within the framework of his love for us. So He destroyed the personality of the entity of flesh within us, removing its power and freeing us from accusation and guilt. As He empathised with us, so also do we with Him as we join Him in His cause. By faith in Him we are purified even as he is pure. “Their hearts were cleansed by faith”.

How and why are we saved? – “As you come to Him….”.  –  The Him who has loved and does still continue to love us, Him who died for us, whose love has forgiven us.

What or who is the enemy? All that stands against and comes against the nature of love, and that love nature HE BECAME in this world, [to overpower the sin nature that he also became] even as he forever was/is in HIS world. He overcame this world for us, so we in Him, through Him, might also be overcomers.

Important. The mention of depression does not mean to say that this excludes one from this victory. No matter what the problem, it is a matter of allowing Him to have dealt with it, [which He has] and then instead of dwelling in it, to leave it in his hands. We cannot of ourselves fix any of this, because we ARE the problem. This is why it was necessary for HIM to do it, because He COULD enter into the problems of man’s deficiency, from the outside, and then overcome them from the inside out, something which only He was and is capable of doing.

The problem of man’s inadequacy to fix His own problem is then solved by REMOVING oneself from insisting on trying to “do it yourself”, and instead to cleave to him who has solved the problem in you, so you can then LEAVE the [past] problems behind and cleave to the solution in Him in the present. And I certainly do not mean to downplay the nature of depression, but simply to say that it is important for us to know that he has actually experienced it all out of his love for us, that we might gain strength from realising that all darkness has lost its authority over us. “He has abolished death”.

We like him, cannot understand these things if we continue to try to do it while remaining in the problem of ourselves, our “flesh”, because while we remain in the problem of ourselves, the solution to all problems rests only in Him, as we gain Him. “..and so we have come to know and rely on the love God has for us”. We must rest outside of ourselves, in the solution that He is.

[It has also been said that Jesus died of a broken heart, which raises the question of our brokenness also]

WHAT WAS THE AGONY OF THE PASSION OF THE CROSS? [1866]

Jesus suffered A LOT on the cross. While appreciating the physical aspects of it, the theology of it is something else, isn’t it? How does one bear sin in terms of agony of mind, of fear and depression and anxiety, of taking responsibility for the “sin of the world” upon himself. Of the feelings of abandonment and loneliness and utter wretchedness, of utter darkness and GUILT? Of loss, of misery and of grief?

To consider this from the matter of thoughts in conflict with one another, of “neurons” in the brain, of STRESS and ANGUISH and TORMENT.. Of THE “FIRE” of “HELL”?

What can such utter catastrophe of the human “soul” mean, how could it be overcome and changed from utter defeat into utter victory? If we consider the most wretched tormented person on the earth in his most desperate suffering, how could that compare with what Jesus bore for us?

WHAT WAS GOING ON IN HIM??

We can only imagine the answers? (without looking them up on the web). Did God take the responsibility for His wayward creation? Did God take the blame for all sin of all time? And to ‘lay that on His Son’ would surely create the most awful pain and suffering of mind consciousness of all time???

To think that bringing the creation into being, KNOWING what would then take place as a result, KNOWING of the ensuing evil, pain and suffering for many: Could that be offset by the wonders of His love and His sacrifice to restore that which was lost? The RESPONSIBILTY looms as a response to Paul’s denial of said responsibility that “It is not I, but SIN that dwells in me”. Certainly Paul [as Saul] acknowledged that this sin was coming FROM him, and INDWELT him, but he personally denied responsibility for it, that he had no control over it at all. “The good that I want, I CANNOT DO, the EVIL that I DON”T want, this I do.”

Man is by his original basic born of a woman nature, A CHILD OF WRATH. He is dead under the laws of sin and death, it is impossible for natural man to survive the ultimate spiritual test of perfection, ‘he and his father are one’ (‘You are of your father the devil, and the works of your father you do’). “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”

I would not have known sin if the law had not said do not sin. So being brought into the knowledge of sin and death had the effect of killing my consciousness of innocence, of introducing a consciousness of guilt, which then furthered my dilemma of being unable to rise to the goodness of God.

GOD HIMSELF took all this upon Himself as part of the creative process.

THIS DISPLAYS AND EXPLAINS THE NATURE OF LOVE. But how are we to understand it? There is a saying and song title that “love hurts”, but what is love’s suffering? Do we dare try and contemplate it?

Can we explain it by quoting about “grieving the Spirit”? Love and the Spirit of love, the very nature of God, as resurrected and manifested at Pentecost, which overcame it all. Christ suffered once for all, His suffering is over, but His Spirit as intercessor still grieves that great gap between man and Himself, still feels the pain of it and longs to dispel that pain, to remove it from the consciousness of His many adopted sons. In that sense “we suffer with Him”.

The only way to explain it or understand it, is to experience it, to pass through our own “fires” of purification as we assume to ourselves His victory over it all, so that from that victory we also can understand where that victory came from and the terrible ground that it covered in releasing us from the impossible obligation to make good all the wrong done by us, to Him and to His nature of LOVE. “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”. To be involved with His nature of love, to be participant in it, in Him; is to also become acquainted with that which He overcame.

Having said that, it still surely remains a great mystery. Any comments?