No element of our personality is permitted to remain unchanged. Flesh and blood never enter the Kingdom of God. All must become new in Christ.

Because of the current overemphasis on imputed (assigned) righteousness, and the error of stressing we possess an experience merely because the Apostle Paul stated the principle in the Scripture, passages such as the above are taken for granted by those who have "accepted" Christ.

They do not understand that God speaks of things that are not true as though they were true, not because His Kingdom exists in words alone, having no reality, but rather with the intention of bringing to pass what He has declared to be true. God affirms the vision He has concerning us, and then we must through faith grasp and follow the vision until it becomes reality. Otherwise the reality never comes into being.

God calls us new creations in Christ with the intention of making us new creations in Christ. He begins the new creation the moment we receive Jesus. Our life now is to be one of total diligence in following the Holy Spirit in putting to death the original personality and bringing forth the new creation—the Wife of the Lamb.

To insist we have all of salvation "by faith" (which is not faith at all but mental acceptance), and then continue in the world as usual while we are waiting for the wedding ceremony to take place in Heaven, is the error of contemporary Christianity. There is no understanding, in such an approach to salvation, of the Kingdom principle of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping.

Every molecule of Eve was fashioned from the rib of Adam. Every "molecule" of the Bride of the Lamb will be fashioned from the Lamb. All things will be new and all things will be of God.

Adam's reaction, on being presented with his complement, is interesting.

Adam did not exclaim about her beauty or express pleasure and thanksgiving to the Lord for giving him a companion.

Adam declared: "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh."

Adam recognized immediately that Eve had not been formed from the red clay of the ground but from himself. Eve "was" Adam in another form.

Eve was a human being like Adam. She was the image of God. More than that, she was Adam. Adam was beholding himself in an external form, a part of himself that had been taken and formed into a fellow creature.

We realize, therefore, the importance of the formation stage of the creation of the Wife of the Lamb. We cannot just "accept Christ" and then wait until there is a wedding ceremony in Heaven.

If Christ were to bring into Heaven the believers of today, would He behold with delight a creation formed from His body and blood? Would He be viewing a spotless completion of Himself, created from the Substance of Divinity? Would Christ be seeing Himself in an external form, a part of Himself that complements Him, making it possible for Him to enter the fullness of His inheritance from the Father? (There might be many such pure believers from among the butchered Christians of Uganda but perhaps not too many from the Western nations of today.)

To be continued.