(tm) The Four Aspects of the Divine Decree
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When the Lord God created man He made four decrees:
Man is to be in the image of God.
Man is to be male and female.
Man is to be fruitful.
Man is to have dominion over the other creatures.
Such is God’s eternal will concerning mankind.
There are to be two fulfillments of the Divine edict. The first fulfillment to a great extent is somewhat animal in nature. The second is of the Divine Life of God.
To the present hour, the only man that ever lived on the earth in the eternal fulfillment of the proclamation concerning the image of God is the Lord Jesus Christ.
As far as male and female are concerned, whether some form of gender will persist into the new world remains to be seen. However we do know that we are to be one in Christ in God. This is a true and eternal expression of male and female. Such union can never be true of angels for they were not created in half as we have been. Angels do not need another person to complete them.
We have been called to bear the fruit of the moral image of Christ in ourselves and then in other people.
Our dominion has been extended to cover all of the works of God’s hands.
I think Christianity as a whole has missed the mark throughout two millennia. No doubt there have been notable exceptions. We have missed the mark by not recognizing clearly the two distinctly different creations—the temporary flesh and blood, and then the Divine.
God has no intention of saving our first personality. Adam simply cannot enter the Kingdom of God. God’s provision for the first, adamic creation is the cross. The world has been crucified to us and we to the world.
Christianity has been a religion in which the first, soulish creation seeks to adorn itself so God will bring it to Heaven to be with Him. One might as well expect a pig to be a suitable guest in the parlor. The proud, stubborn, self-seeking, conniving natural mind of man always is the enemy of God.
We can neither see nor enter the Kingdom of God until we are born again of the Divine Nature. That which is born in us is Christ. It is the Kingdom of God. It is of God. Everything that God intends to preserve from our first nature must die in Christ and then be raised again in Christ. Nothing of the old sinful nature can remain in the Kingdom—absolutely nothing!
What then do we become? We become as our Lord is—son of man and son of God. Our adamic nature serves as a root on which is grafted the Divine Life of God. Our physical body is adopted. The coexistence of the human and Divine constitutes a new kind of humanity which can fulfill perfectly the four aspects of the Divine fiat concerning man.
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