Earthy Lives What Are We?

Genesis 2:7 NIV

…the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

What Does Your Earthiness Say About Your Worth?

My senior year in high school, I took the highest level of math our school offered.  Everyone in the class was planning on attending a major university and were counting on a good grade to enhance their chances of being accepted or getting scholarships.  That is, everyone except me.  I am not sure why I was in the class; I had no intention of studying, I guess I just thought it would be a fun class to take.  The teacher was the strictest in the school.  Her name was Miss Sims and she was it seemed in her seventies although looking back she was probably younger than that.  Everyone called her behind her back Sargent Sims and she definitely fit that nick name. She had a practice of each class making one of the students go to the blackboard and in front of everyone work out a problem from the homework.  Having the last name Walkup was convenient for me although I knew the time would come when eventually my name would be called.  It was.  Of course I had not done the assignment and although I listened carefully to all that went on in the class, I had no idea how to work out the problem she gave me.  I slowly wrote the problem out on the blackboard, then began to just stare at it.  I may have thought that if I stalled long enough, Miss Sims would help me.  She did not.  She left me there to “hang in the wind”.  Finally Miss Sims called to me from her throne, “Mr. Walkup, you don’t know what you are doing, do you?”  I shook my head “no” and with all the stiffness her personality possessed, Miss Sims sent me back to my seat.  My friends looked over at me with pity in their eyes, embarrassed for me.  I just stared straight ahead, feeling like dirt.

To compare someone to dirt is to imply he or she is worthless.  And if you are “dirty”, it means you are morally corrupted.  Have you ever felt like dirt?  Perhaps you were a failure in athletics or your grades weren’t good.  Maybe you loved someone that did not love you back.  Perhaps you got mad and were embarrassed afterward by some of the things you said.  Have you been fired?  You probably felt like dirt then.   You might have gotten drunk or high and afterward felt like dirt.  Maybe you took an entrance exam or a placement test and didn’t do as well as you hoped.  It could be that you don’t feel respected.  Has there been a time when you felt like dirt? 

As we started to discuss this last week, the Bible indicates that all of us should feel like dirt and for good reason.  We are.  The first of us was made out of the dust of the ground and everyone since is descended from that man of dirt.  The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7 NIV) Should we be embarrassed?  Does this make us automatically inadequate?  There is something critical to remember when we consider how we were created. The dirt is the fundamental building block of everything God put together for us.  The creatures are from the dirt, the plants are from the dirt and of course earth itself is from the dirt.  Unlike the angels, the demons and Satan, we are connected to everything of earth.  It is our glorious heritage to be linked to all that we see and touch and smell and taste and hear.  God could have created us completely separate from this universe, a distinct outsider but He did not.  He created us a part of it.  We will return to this but it cannot be overstated that God made earth our home by creating us a part of it.  We are perfectly fit to do what our Lord made us to do, rule over the earth and make it bend to our will.  God blessed them (Adam and Eve) and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Genesis 1:28 NIV)  Remember, Satan was cast down to the earth: we were made part of it.

Now we must address the matter of our humiliation. Being earthy is to our glory but sin brought our disgrace.  After the Lord made us from the earth, the Lord breathed spirit into us.  Immediately we became what the Bible calls a living soul or “nephesh”: spirit and earthiness together.  We were, unlike any other being, the glory of God and the glory of earth combined.  Nothing else in the universe or beyond the universe could make that claim…not the angels, not Satan and not even God was both.  We were glorious, glorious with God, glorious with perfect earth.  To understand our humiliation, we must rethink what happened for Moses when he went before God in His glory.  The very first time Moses came into the presence of God, something about his body, his earthy body changed.  When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face.  But whenever he entered the Lord's presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, they saw that his face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with the Lord. (Exodus 34:33-35 NIV)  

It must have been spectacular for Moses to experience his body transformed in some supernatural way by being with God.  But why did Moses put the veil over his face after he met with God and the people saw the radiant transformation caused by God’s glory?  The Apostle Paul tells us Moses was embarrassed by how the glory faded.  We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. (2 Corinthians 3:13 NIV)  How very human of him; when he realized that he could not retain, due to his sin the radiance being with God provided him, Moses covered his face so he would not be embarrassed by everyone knowing it.  We assume that Adam and Eve desperately tried to cover themselves because they were humiliated by their nakedness in regard to their genitalia.  The Bible never says that.   It simply says that they sewed fig leaves together to cover their nakedness and later after handing down the consequences of their Sin, the Lord made clothes for Adam and Eve because of their humiliation in being naked. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. (Genesis 3:21 NIV)

There was in the bodies of Adam and Eve something of God that may have been as dazzling as the face of Moses or of Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration.  There he (Jesus) was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.(Matthew 17:2 NIV) The purity of body built by the hand of God is not known to us now but could it have been any less glorious than was Moses’ body when he met with God for just a short time?  When the glory of God left the bodies of Adam and Eve, they were appalled by how horrific their fall and all they could think of doing was covering their once glorious bodies.  Sin did not make Adam and Eve suddenly naked; sin made Adam and Eve unfathomably lifeless in their looks.  What is most horrific in regard to our bodies now is that we no longer even give a thought to our lost glory as God’s special creation; we pay far more attention to is the lust our bodies generate in one another.

Now we must in a much too cursory manner describe how God’s plan for putting humanity together as both earth and spirit worked out in the undoing of all the damage Satan’s rebellion against God brought to the universe of humanity.  When God became fully human, completely earthy, He did so for one purpose.  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21 NIV) Our Lord became sin, not just sins but Sin in its entirety.  This could not be done spiritually; it could only take place in the earthy realm of humanity.  In the body of Christ, that earthy body, the Sin of mankind was taken and then crucified.  It was not through angels or any supernatural force that God took apart Satan’s hold on the universe but through a human being, a human being made out of dirt, out of earth that our Lord ruined Satan.  Satan, and the demons that joined him, cannot be brought out of their rebellion; as just spiritual beings and that is all, they can only be sent into hell.  But people, earthy people can have their sin taken out of them which is what God was able to do when He was crucified.  Once Christ rose from the dead, Satan was completely wrecked because he no longer has death to keep humanity from God.  The body of creation can be remade, and the resurrection of Jesus confirmed it, and so the victory of God as man became also the victory of man as earthy soul, completely remade without sin and God will do this.  Not only that, God can come into our body and join us in it so that His spirit can empower our spirit to live out the perfect life of Christ in actual ways. 

Because of what Jesus Christ did in an earthy body which has its origin in dirt you can be a perfect overcomer of sin in actuality and not in some mythical, imaginary sense.  Unlike Adam who failed in perfection and holiness, you will not fail.  You will live out every word of God’s commandments, every word in the Sermon on the Mount and you will love perfectly God and all the people you have in your life.    The Great Society of perfect union with God and all His people will come to pass because our Lord became an earthy part of us and in the cataclysmic work of His crucifixion and resurrection we all are joined in what He did.  This work of God’s salvation starts now.  With Christ our Savior part of us, we can today work out what God has worked into us, holiness and real love.  Never say you can’t when God in you says you can.  Paul was not just blowing steam when he said to you, “I can do everything through Him (Christ) who gives me strength.”  (Philippians 4: 13 NIV)   Unlike the demons and all spiritual beings in rebellion against God, you can in your glorious earthiness be made new and live a perfectly holy and good life.  In Christ, you can do what is right and have all the joy of Christ working in you.

Mind Re-oriented

Philippians 3:15 NIV

 All of us who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.

Are You Aware Of Everything Going On Around You?

There is nothing quite as disconcerting as discovering something has been going on without you being aware of it.  We now have webcams that can keep tabs on our homes, our pets and cities that we have never visited.  The spy in the sky is now visiting our neighborhood and looking into our backyard.  It hasn’t always been that way and even now we can be caught off guard by what we didn’t know had been happening around us.  I used to read to my children just before bedtime and often I did it while lying down on the floor with the kids on each side of me.  I read everything from the Chronicles of Narnia to the Little House on the Prairie series.  When our two oldest boys were little, I started reading to them the Lord of the Rings.  Many times I found myself dozing off as I read; slurring the words and one or both boys would immediately start shaking me to get me to read further before falling asleep.  More than once I did fall asleep in the middle of a sentence and my kids knew I was then a lost cause.  I remember waking up perhaps at around one in the morning and finding that my wife and the boys were all up and about, playing, talking, making cookies.  I was stunned; why were they still awake?  Why hadn’t they gone to bed?  What else had they done while I was asleep?  For all I knew, they could have shaved my head, taken all the money out of my wallet, gone joy riding in the car and had a drunken party in the house while I was out cold.  I had no idea what I missed while asleep and no one ever really told me either.

Perhaps you too have felt like you were left out of it, not aware of everything that was happening.  Maybe at work others seem to know more than you about what the company plans are.  Perhaps your friends seem to have the “inside scoop” and you are oblivious to it.  You might feel like you are the only one who doesn’t get the joke at the company picnic or the only one in America who has no idea why Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton are as popular as they are, why your teacher suddenly blew up at the class or why your mom treated you and your brother so differently.  In our information age, there is much we do not know and have no way of finding it out.  The internet is a blank page when it comes to some matters you care very much about and no amount of research may help you understand why your parents got a divorce or what led to your son dropping out of college.

There is within our era of information overload, a serious degree of information poverty that must be considered.  The Bible hints at this and it would be important for us to consider the possibility that there is a vast array of knowledge we could access that we are not even aware exists.  We should be disturbed by an account in the Bible that alerts us to how little we really do know about what is going on about us.  The ancient prophet Elisha faced a grave crisis or so it seemed.  A foreign ruler wanted Elisha dead and sent his army out to find him and kill him.  Elisha was staying in a village that was unable to defend themselves, let alone Elisha.  Elisha’s servant panicked when he saw the soldiers descending upon the town.  Elisha’s reaction was surprisingly calm and relaxed.  He reassured his servant that all would be well despite appearances.  "Don't be afraid," the prophet answered. "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." And Elisha prayed, "O Lord, open his eyes so he may see." Then the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. (2 Kings 6:16-17 NIV)

We have here clear evidence that there is a significant amount of information we aren’t aware exists and never access.  Some would call this the supernatural aspect of our universe.  But it was not supernatural for Elisha or his servant.  It simply was not “seeable” before this but once their eyes were “opened”, they could see all the chariots of fire and hills full of horses and it was clear as day to them.  Afterward, if they had been asked how they could be certain of what they said they saw, they would not have an answer to give that would sound logical or even acceptable to most people.  That doesn’t mean that what they saw wasn’t really there on the hills; the inability to explain why they could see what they did doesn’t mean they hadn’t seen it.

Consider the situation here closely.  There was a great army of soldiers who had no idea that the hillsides around them were covered by horses and chariots of fire and there was an entire village that did not see any of this either.  Only two people in this huge crowd could see what was very certainly there.  This same sort of occurrence is described by the prophet Isaiah in the sixth chapter of his book.  He was in the Temple and Isaiah became aware of the Lord present there sitting upon the throne and seraphs with six wings flying about glorifying the Lord so loudly that the doorposts and thresholds shook and the room was filled with smoke.  Now it is highly unlikely that Isaiah was the only person in the Temple at the time but it may have been so.  If he was the only one present, it is strange then God’s question.  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" (Isaiah 6:8 NIV)  It seems that this is not a personal call directed only at Isaiah to go but rather a general call to anyone who is listening.  If that is the case, then who else was to hear this?  The Seraphs?  It doesn’t seem likely.  Was there someone else present who was to hear this too?  Perhaps it was all a dream…it just happened in Isaiah’s mind.  But again, the call for someone to go was not just for Isaiah it seems.

Is it possible that there were hundreds, maybe even millions to whom this call to go was directed but no one else was available to God; everybody within “earshot” was too busy with their own thoughts and concerns to receive God’s call?  Their natures were not adapted to comprehending anything so rich and pure as the call of God.  There is something largely overlooked which Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3.  Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. (John 3:5-6 NIV)

We must sit here at the foot of this great statement of Jesus and let its implications sink into us.  It is often misunderstood at a very great point.  Many think the kingdom of God is heaven, that to get into heaven one must be born again.  This of course is true but it is only part of what this implies.  The kingdom of God is all that God inhabits and it is His Kingdom where He rules as supreme over all.  That Kingdom can only be entered by the one who has been transformed by the Spirit into someone completely new.  The Kingdom of God is all externals for the one not transformed.  It is books and lectures and church buildings and music styles and talent and rules and entertainment and possessions and personal improvement and issues and did I say rules?  But entrance into the Kingdom of God through the transforming work of the Holy Spirit is all about God…His presence, His direction, His love, His power, His mercy, His goodness and His life.  Christ is the Gate, He is the Way, He is the Life…the Kingdom of God is Him in every place.

Why are we so out of touch?  Why are we so oblivious to God all about us?  Perhaps it is because there has been so little God worked in us that we are unaware of Him.  We face a problem…a problem person…a problem with our bodies…a problem with our family or friends…a problem with work or school…and we go at it within the confines of only this kingdom, the kingdom of mankind and that is all we have…none of what is Kingdom of God decides for us how we think about a matter and how we approach it.  Until you enter into the Kingdom of God you cannot see anything or hear anything with certainty beyond the kingdom of mankind.  But when the Cross of Christ has formed Christ in you and the Holy Spirit begins leading you deeper into the Kingdom of God, you shall begin to hear the voice of God guiding you in matters and the power of God will begin to work through you and accomplishments that are impossible outside the Kingdom of God will be done by you because you are not the you that existed before the Cross of Christ formed Christ in you.  You are now Christ and you and that is the personality that exists.  It is a new personality that can see God, hear God and be empowered by God and that personality as it goes further into the Kingdom of God becomes more and more alive to God.

The temptation of Satan presented to Adam and Eve ran along two lines and for us it is the same fundamental temptation.  Satan inserted into the mind of Adam and Eve two thoughts.  God is not good enough and God is not competent enough.  If we accept either of these two thoughts, our mind will be shut out of the Kingdom of God, we will become deaf and blind to all that is opening up to us in the Kingdom of God.  Only the Kingdom of Mankind will be accessible to us because to approach God you must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. (Hebrew 11:6 NIV)  Remember when the disciples wondered why they could not cast out the demon who was causing a boy to have seizures and Jesus replied, "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:19-20 NIV)  It is as easy as breathing to stay with simple-minded determination in the realm of the kingdom of mankind and not go any further than that.  If you do, you have access to all there is in the kingdom of man but nothing more.  Faith in Christ however opens your mind to the Kingdom of God where the wisdom and power of God seep into your mind like living water nurturing the lovely plant which is your life. 

Do an experiment this week.  Make yourself completely open for God to guide you and empower your work.  In faith ask Him to guide you, ask Him to talk to you.  Only by faith in Christ will your mind be prepared ground for God’s seed to be planted there and if God has built His life in you, there will develop even this week a growing awareness of Him thinking in you and His thoughts will become clearer and clearer.  Power will be given you to see what only God can show you and bit by bit the Kingdom of God will become visible to you.  But you must start to make your mind open for Jesus Christ to work within your mind and that takes discipline and determination to not fall for Satan’s lie that God is not good enough and not competent enough to guide you!   Breathe out this prayer to the Lord. “Enable me Lord Jesus to do Kingdom of God things in a Kingdom of Mankind world.  Fill my mind O Lord with You!”