The Record of the Test
Read: Proverbs 8: 36 II Timothy 3:16 Hebrews 11:6 (KJB)
God recorded the test of His Love and free will in His Word as inspired by the Holy Spirit. As such, this record has to be inerrant and infallible. In the English language, the King James Bible has proven itself to be the most accurate translation from the Masoretic Text, which is the original Word of God. All other English versions have been, to some extent, based on perversions, and therefore cannot be the inerrant Word of God. Even though many enemies of God have tried mightily through the ages to destroy the Word of God, God has preserved and protected His Word in English through His inspired translation of His Word into the King James Bible. All other versions of the English Bible are but additional attempts by the forces of evil to attempt to destroy the Word of God slowly over time.
God chose a particular race of people to write and to preserve His Word and to bring His Messiah into the world for the salvation of mankind. God did not directly explain either to Abraham or to Moses why He chose the Hebrew people to write and preserve His Word, and He did not explain to King David why He chose the tribe of Judah to bring His Messiah into the world. Moses did tell the Hebrews that God chose them because He loved them, but then God loves all people, and so this could be no special reason why God chose the Hebrews. The Hebrews do seem to be a people who are especially faithful to their traditions, and so many of them have diligently taught each generation the Word of God exactly as it was revealed to Moses and the prophets.
Several distinct and consistent themes run through the entire Word of God. The first and most important theme reveals that God promised to test His Love by sending a Messiah, a Savior who would be God in human form, and who would in Love sacrifice Himself to save humanity from being destroyed by original sin. Many examples of this theme occur directly and indirectly throughout the Old Testament. In Genesis 3:21, the Bible relates that God shed the blood of an animal and clothed Adam and Eve in its skin, demonstrating that God will protect humans by shedding blood and clothing them. Genesis 4:1-5 reveals that God commanded that a blood sacrifice must be offered in worship to God in order for a person to gain God's favor. In Genesis, chapter 22, God spared Isaac by substituting a ram for Abraham to sacrifice, which was an illustrative prophecy of the vicarious suffering of Christ. King David wrote about the sacrifice of the Messiah in Psalm 22, and the prophet Isaiah wrote about Him in Isaiah 53. Other examples could be given, but the consistent theme is that God Himself would come to earth and sacrifice Himself in man's place in order to save him from destruction by the sin within him. God would also rise from the dead to justify and to give eternal life to all who would believe in His Love and His Power to save them. Through the sacrifice of His Son, God would pass the test of His Love, and thereby dispell any possible doubt that might adhere to any of His future creations. In this way, God made any future possible rebellions impossible. All of God's future creations would know beyond all doubt that God's Love will do whatever is necessary to save His creations from all effects of false combinations connected to the destructive effects of absolute nothingness. God took the destructive effects of absolute nothingness upon Himself on a cruel cross and not only survived the sin and death, but actually conquered them. God's Love passed its greatest possible test.
Read Revelation 21:1-8
By passing its greatest possible test, God proved that Love can never be destroyed and that it always prevails and can never fail. Had God not so proved His Love, then a hint of doubt about His Power to prevail over evil would have infected all of His future creations. Evil can only be defined as false and uncreative combinations of God's Ideas, which in turn connects to absolute nothingness. All of God's intelligent creations possess access to limited copies of God's Infinite Ideas which also connects them to free will. Had God not proven the absolute Power of His Love, then a hint of uncertainty would have haunted all of His creations making them secretly wonder if God would eventually be destroyed by evil. Evil constitutes a kind of filthiness within God's creations. By passing the test of His Love, God accomplished the justification to recreate His universe and all of His creatures with a complete cleansing of all evil. God will completely purge all evil from all of His future creations, and will thoroughly destroy it by burning it forever in a lake of fire. All of this means that evil and absolute nothingness can never diminish God's Infinite Ideas in the least. God survived and conquered all of the worst effects of evil when He rose from the dead.
In order to ensure that His test would be fair, God determined to maintain a balance between good and evil throughout the history of mankind. God's Word reflects this balance. The Bible offers no proof of God's existence, but simply begins with an assumption of His existence. God could allow no religious, scientific or historical proof of His existence since any such proof would invalidate His test because it would give mankind no choice but to believe. A forced love always remains in doubt, but love freely given removes all doubt. Those who freely choose by faith to love God hold no doubt that God has all Power over evil. At times, they may sinfully doubt but in their faith they cannot doubt because their faith has been given to them by God. Just as God would never allow a proof of His existence, He also would never allow a proof of His nonexistence. Such a proof would cause despair among mankind. God has determined to maintain a balance between belief and unbelief in His fallen race. This balance would ensure that free will would be preserved, and that the great value of God's Love would be forever proved in its Almighty Power by the free choices of His believers to receive His grace through faith.
God's Word records that God used various methods to maintain this balance throughout history. For instance, whenever evil became so strong that it threatened to overwhelm the faithful and crush goodness out of the world, then God would act to destroy evil so completely that the balance would be restored. God sending the great flood and the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah are two such examples. God would also sometimes allow foreign powers to gain control over His people when they were backslidden in order to discipline them and cause them to repent and return to living in accord with their faith. God allowed Babylon to defeat Judea and control the Jews for 70 years. Those who repented were mostly the same as those who returned to rebuild the temple and reestablish the nation. But God would not allow His people to be destroyed as the story of the defeat of Haman in the book of Esther records. God's Word indicates that God never had a problem dealing with sin in the lives of His believers. Two such examples involved His discipline of the backslidden Samson and king David which effectively caused their repentence and return to obedience to Him. God never removes faith from His believers, but He can and will correct their sinful ways. God's wrath was deeply stirred against idol worship among His people because this sin indicated that evil was causing widespread unbelief which threatened to crush goodness out of God's world. God often used very powerful methods to combat this sin. God's Word and history itself demonstrate that God has succeeded in preserving this balance between good and evil right down to the present day.
Satan, being the god of this world, is the evil force behind all attempts to overwhelm goodness and destroy God's people. Satan believes that if he can obliterate goodness from the world, he will cause God's love to fail and then the world will belong solely to him. But God has successfully countered every move of Satan to destroy goodness and eliminate God's Love from the world. God's balance between goodness and evil still holds to this day. While at times, evil seems to be on the verge of taking control of the world, and at other times, goodness seems to be holding evil at bay; nevertheless, the balance always returns. God maintains the balance because He has determined that His Love will have a fair test.
If God had not preserved the miracle of this balance, evil would have completely crushed goodness a long time ago. Good people tend to be innocent. Evil people tend to be very cunning and clever. Clever and cunning beats innocence every time. Without God's balance, evil would now control the world.
God also uses a psychological factor to maintain the balance between good and evil. Evil carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Evil adheres to false combinations connected to absolute nothingness. This means evil equals the idea of nothing since all false combinations reduce to nothing. But this use of the idea of nothing also indirectly indicates a deeper nothingness; that is, an absolute nothingness, a nonexistence. God can only know the Infinite Being of Infinite Ideas. God knows absolutely nothing about nonexistence. Yet, in some mysterious way that even God cannot understand, absolute nothingness seems to hold some strange magnetic power within itself to attract those toward it who learn about false combinations. When Lucifer invented false combinations, a terrible vanity, an emptiness, entered into him which caused an obsession within him to rebel against God even though he had to know deep within himself that this would result in his own destruction. Even in order to enhance this strange obsession, Lucifer invented other false combinations such as: "excessive pleasure" and "excessive excitement." He did this in order to cause a kind of fall through bliss toward self-destruction. Satan invented other false combinations to deceive those who might realize that they were being drawn to self-destruction. Satan invented such false combinations as "excessive self-righteousness" and "idols" to redirect man's worship away from God and toward false combinations that they falsely believe will save them from self-destruction. Satan also invented false political and scientific systems to mislead some away from faith and worship of God. Even so, deep within all who adhere to false combinations lies a subconscious awareness that they are being powerfully drawn toward self-destruction and absolute nothingness. This deep feeling is that which the existentialists call "angst" or "dread" or "nausea." They refuse to realize the truth because they are infected with that same terrible obsession and pride that caused the downfall of Lucifer. But God possesses the power to cause some to awaken from their hypnotic obsession and return to the Truth.
The only remedy for such pride and obsession is the grace of God displayed in the Love of Christ through His sacrifice, death and resurrection. Jesus sacrificed Himself on the cross to wash away the sin of man with His own blood. In His death and burial, Jesus literally descended toward absolute nothingness in order to take man's sin away. Jesus rose from the dead to prove that His Love holds all power over sin and death; that is, over all false combinations and absolute nothingness. Christ can give His own eternal life to all who will abandon their obsession with self-destruction, and who will trust in Him as their only source of salvation.
Those obsessesd with self-destruction falsely believe that they can attain the nonexistence for which they so yearn. They can achieve self-destruction but not nonexistence. God's Infinite Ideas and all of His creations based on these Ideas can never disolve into absolute nothingness. Nonexistence can never diminish an Infinite Being in the least. Lucifer, in his self-deceptive pride, put his faith in the false power of false combinations to disolve at least some of God's Ideas into absolute nothingness. Lucifer falsely believed that if he could use false combinations to reduce some of God's Infinite Ideas, which is the Word of God which is God Himself, to absolute nothingness, then he could begin the destruction of God. God can only be Infinite. Should He ever become less than Infinite, He would cease to exist. Lucifer counted on reducing God's Infinite Being. This is what his temptation of Christ was all about. Lucifer could certainly achieve self-destruction, but not the nonexistence for which he subconsciously yearned. Satan has made himself into a false combination of God's Ideas. The false combination can be destroyed, but not God's Ideas. God can subject Satan, as a false combination, to a perpetual destruction in a lake of fire in order to nullify his ability to concoct false combinations. In this way, God can recreate a false combination and turn it into a good and useful combination that neutralizes sin in His universe. Also, God can never destroy Satan's consciousness which is based on one of God's Ideas, since to do so would mean that God would have to destroy a part of His Word which is Himself.
Read II Peter 3:13 Revelation 21:5
God will succeed in recreating a new heaven and earth, and a new mankind completely purged of all obsession with self-destruction and of all false combinations. God means to cleanse His universe of all of the filthiness of sin and "make all things new." God will use a form of destruction called "the lake of fire" in order to nullify all sin and obsession with self-destruction. God can nullify false combinations, but He can never nullify His own creations, all of which are based on His Infinite Ideas. God will recover all elements of His creations and use them in new useful creations, and all left-over false combinations, such as Satan, will be turned into good and useful combinations.
Romans 5: 12-21 Romans 7: 13-25
Since the garden of Eden, the mind of man has been divided into two wills; the will to live and the will to self-destruction. The will to live stems from the knowledge of the good, and the secret will to self-destruction stems from the knowledge of the evil. The knowledge of the good causes man to invent good systems that improve the quality of life. The knowledge of the evil causes man to engage in false systems already invented by Satan that tend to destroy life. One possible interpretation of the Word of God could call this helpless obsession with evil: "original sin."
Apparently, when man disobeyed God in the garden of Eden; a terrible emptiness which is an indirect awareness of absolute nothingness that hides behind the idea of nothing, entered the very being of man as it had Lucifer when he invented false combinations. At once, Adam and Eve realized that something had gone wrong within themselves, and so in shame for their marred condition, they tried to cover their nakedness with fig leaves. The knowledge of false combinations carries with it an indirect awareness that the nothingness inherent in false combinations hides a nonexistence, or absolute nothingness, that one has never before encountered. This knowledge then becomes ineluctably fixed in the mind, and as such, a part of one's being. This knowledge, which no one can shake off, then causes a terrible feeling of shame and emptiness. One secretly feels that one has become worthless and worthy only of destruction. However, Satan makes this self-destruction more palatable by combining it with excessive pride and pleasure. Nevertheless, this feeling has become an obsession with self-destruction.
This obsession manifests itself in various ways in the history of mankind. Many people practice false combinations connected to self-destruction such as "excessive pleasure" and "excessive excitement." Those who are addicted to illicit sex, drugs, gambling, thievery, gossip or any other sin, fall into this category. Even people who try to be good occasionally fall into such sins. Because the will to live usually overpowers the desire to kill oneself outright, sinners use the slow method which provides them at least some excessive pleasure and excitement on their way to self-destruction. Some of these sinners do eventually kill themselves because, over time, they find that the pleasures and excitement become muted, and the feelings of emptiness and worthlessness become more pronounced. Most of the others die from ruined health. In any case, one can conclude that those who practice these lifestyles must know, deep within themselves, that they possess a secret will for self-destruction.
Read I Peter 3:18 John 16:7-11 I John 1:7
The only cure for sin and the will to self-destruction is the sacrifice of Christ; His death, burial and resurrection. God loves mankind and He does not want man to practice self-destruction. Jesus came to earth from heaven to save man from his sin and self-destruction. This is the gospel of God. When a person hears or reads the gospel, then the Holy Spirit visits that person and makes him or her keenly aware that sin has become a part of their being, and they cannot get rid of it on their own, and that it will eventually destroy them. They learn that Christ, in His compassion, has already taken their sin and self-destruction on Himself on the cross, that He has suffered in their place, and that He rose from the dead to justify them, to give them His own eternal life, and victory over self-destruction. They learn that Jesus' blood that He shed on the cross can wash away all of their sin, and that the Spirit of Christ can enter their cleansed hearts to justify them and give them eternal life. They learn that the only way that they can escape from sin and self-destruction is through the power of the salvation that Christ has already provided for them.
Read John 12:32 John 6:37 John 10:14 Revelation 22: 17
When a person hears or reads the gospel and comes under the conviction of the Holy Spirit that the Word is true, then that person can choose to repent of their sins and accept the gospel by faith, or they can reject it and remain in their sins. God has given them free will. God has provided His written gospel to be read, and God has sent His preachers to preach it to the people in order to separate the believers from the unbelievers. Christ is the good shepherd who knows His sheep. Because of God's foreknowledge, many unbelievers claim that God never gave them a free choice since He always knew the choice they would make. They are quite wrong to make this charge against God. God will bring every one who reads or hears the gospel to a moment of decision. Of their own free will they can accept or reject the gospel. If they sincerely repent and accept the gospel by faith, then their salvation has been absolutely guaranteed by the Word of God. Read John 6:37. The guarantee that God will accept them as one of His sheep is also the guarantee that they possessed the free will to accept it by faith. They cannot charge God with rejecting them by His foreknowledge because God has guaranted their acceptance if they only choose to believe. If they reject the gospel, they cannot object that they did so, and blame God for it because He knew from eternity who His sheep are. They cannot blame God because they had only to choose to accept Christ by faith and God has already guaranteed that He knew them as His sheep from all eternity. God has given everyone free will and those who choose to reject Christ can never charge God with rejecting them by His foreknowledge because God can always point to their moment of decision and indicate that had they only chosen to accept Christ by faith, then God would have been obligated to accept them from eternity because of the guarantee of His Word.
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