When we first receive Christ we understand that the Father has chosen us to be a priest of God, prepared to offer spiritual sacrifices to Himself.

If we continue faithfully abiding in Christ, doing the Lord's will from the heart, we are re-created until we are perfectly acceptable to God, and also bread for the people whom the Lord gives us.

A lifetime of daily crucifixion and resurrection is necessary in order to create a member of the royal priesthood. What we have in the beginning of our salvation is the Divine pledge that we have been called to be a priest. But the actual formation of God's priest in our personality is a demanding, sometimes painful procedure requiring much patience.

Much breaking of us is necessary before we are entirely acceptable to God and entirely acceptable to people. God's priest must be able to enter the Presence of God and able also to touch the hearts of people.

The priesthood is given us as a gift. Then we must appropriate the gift, maintaining it, developing it, perfecting it as the Holy Spirit leads and enables us.

The material universe. Somehow the Christian churches have been convinced that the goal of redemption is to bring us to the spirit realm, the domain of angels. This hardly is the case.

Before the heaven and earth were created the spirit realm existed. When God created the heaven and the earth He brought forth a realm superior to the spirit Paradise.

The inheritance of Jesus is "the farthest reaches of the earth." In the last days the throne of God, the new Jerusalem, will descend from the new heaven to rest forever on the new earth.

The world of molecules, of things, is a better realm, a more desirable realm than the spirit realm. The physical body is a better body than the body of angels, even though temporarily it has been subjected to corruption.

The wicked angels left Heaven and came to earth because the physical environment is a better realm.

Christians seem to be eager to leave the earth and reside in the spirit realm. This is because they never have been there. The anticipation of the Father, Jesus, and all of Heaven is that one day soon the Day of the Lord will be here and all that we desire in Heaven will descend to earth.

Satan desires the earth because it is a marvelous creation of God. But God has given the earth and its inhabitants to Jesus, who then was required to buy earth's inhabitants with His own blood.

The earth is the inheritance of the meek, whom God loves.

The wicked can never inherit the earth. The earth belongs to the righteous.

In the Day of Resurrection the righteous Spirits of Christ and His Body will enter the material realm, displacing the lords of darkness. The thrones that govern the earth will be given to the victorious saints. Then nature will come alive as in the beginning.

The Kingdom of God is God in Christ in the saints filling, ruling, judging, blessing, the material realm.

The Kingdom of God is the removal of darkness from the material realm and the filling of the material realm with the Spirit of God in Christ.

To be continued.