Changing Our Hope

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The "blessed hope" of Christian people is that Christ will return from Heaven and take us back to Heaven. This is not the hope presented by the Apostle Paul. The hope presented by Paul is that Christ will return and complete the work of deliverance from the presence of sin in our body; that we no longer will be trapped in a body of sin and death.

(12/4/2005) When I became a Christian I was told I was a sinner; I could not save myself. If I received Christ as my Saviour I would go to Heaven when I died. Naturally I regarded eternal residence in Heaven as my hope. This is what I had been taught.

As I have studied the New Testament I have begun to see that eternal residence in Heaven is not the stated hope of salvation. Anyone can read the New Testament and verify my conclusion.

What, then, is the hope offered by the new covenant? The hope of the new covenant is that we may be freed from the authority and power of sin.

Why do we want to be freed from the authority and power of sin? For two reasons. First, because we want to be pleasing to God. We do not want to live our life doing things that displease our Creator. We love God and want to please Him. It is as simple as this.

Second, we never shall enjoy lasting love, joy, and peace until we have been delivered from the sinful desires that dwell in us. Love, joy, and peace are the goals of every normal individual. The things, circumstances, and relationships we desire are thought by us to bring love, joy, and peace. This is why we seek them. But no thing, no circumstance, or no relationship can bring us lasting love, joy, and peace while we have sinful desires.

Let us think for a moment about the model of redemption.

We are redeemed from guilt.

We are redeemed from sinful motivations

We are redeemed from spiritual death

We are redeemed from alienation from God.

We will be redeemed from a cursed environment.

Each of the five are given us by our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ. But we have a role in acquiring each aspect of redemption.

The blood of Christ pays the price of redemption for the guilt of our sin, but we have to obtain this redemption by faith.

The Holy Spirit acting upon the authority of the blood of the cross drives from us the various aspects of our sinful nature. But we have to cooperate by confessing, denouncing, and renouncing each sinful motivation as the Spirit points it out to us.

We are given to eat from the Tree of Eternal Life, which is Jesus Christ, every time we obey Him.

Freedom from the guilt and power of sin, and growth in eternal life, enable us to have fellowship with God.

When these four areas have been redeemed, we are able to receive and maintain Paradise.

The conventional hope of the Gospel is that Christ will return and bring us to Paradise to live forever. But as long as we lack deliverance from sin, eternal life, and fellowship with God, we would be as miserable in Paradise as we are on the earth in the present hour.

The Apostle Paul states clearly that what he desires is freedom from his sin-bound physical body. Paul terms this deliverance the redemption of his body. A body free from the bondages of sin is the true hope of the Christian salvation.

So we see we are due for a midcourse correction of our hope. If we are to knowledgeably cooperate with the Holy Spirit today, and every day, we must keep going to the Lord every time we face a problem. It is our problems that point out the sin and idols in us that keep us from love, joy, and peace. We can be released from every sinful desire, every idol, if we will continue to cooperate with the Holy Spirit.

We enter the Kingdom of God by gaining release from the uncleanness in our flesh and spirit, not by dying and going to Heaven. Dying and going to Heaven have nothing to do with the operation of redemption.

In the evening we discussed the nature of sin. Sin, first of all, is a verb. "I have sinned," we might say. Second, sin is a noun meaning an action, a transgression of God’s laws. Adultery is a sin.

Third, sin is a noun referring to an unclean spirit. Paul spoke of the sin that dwelled in his flesh. The madman of Gadara was possessed by intelligent spirits. God told Cain that sin was crouching at the door. Obviously we are referring to spirits that possess some sort of intelligent life.

It may be true that one of the most important facts we ever shall learn concerning sin is that it is not guilt. Guilt is not a synonym of sin. Guilt is God’s reaction to sin.

Sin is not always a verb. Most importantly, it is a noun, a thing, we could say.

We cannot understand the Scriptures correctly until we define sin as a thing that can be removed from us.

"Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Christian scholars apparently without exception define sin as guilt. "The Lamb of God who takes away the guilt of the world." This is incorrect. The Lamb of God shall take away the thing that sin is—basically the evil presences that entered Eden in the beginning. He who commits sin is of the devil, John says.

The Book of Hebrews speaks of doing away with sin. To this day scholars view the new covenant as being superior because it provides a superior forgiveness of guilt. This is incorrect. The new covenant contains the authority and power necessary for the total removal of sin from the creation of God, beginning with those who are walking closely to the Lord Jesus.

So we have come to a midcourse correction, a change in our hope. Our hope is not to go to Paradise. Going to Paradise shall follow automatically as soon as we have been forgiven, delivered, filled with Divine Life, and are walking in fellowship with God and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is of great importance that we view sin as a thing, or a collection of things. These things can be removed from us. They can be removed from the world.

The thirteenth chapter of the Book of Matthew informs us that at the end of the age the messengers of God will remove all sin from the Kingdom of God. The removal of sin shall take place, as I understand it, in both the physical and the spirit realms.

Whether we are alive on the earth or deceased and in the spirit world, we shall be required to cooperate with the aspect of redemption that has to do with the removal of the alien presences we refer to as "sin."

The redemption of our freedom from sinful desires shall take place throughout a specific period. It is our point of view that this redemption is announced by the spiritual fulfilment of the Jewish feast of Trumpets; is the spiritual fulfilment of the Jewish Day of Atonement; has begun now, in our time; and shall continue throughout the thousand-year Kingdom age that will commence when our Lord returns from Heaven.

You can hear the morning sermon at listen. http://www.wor.org/audio/audio.htm

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