To be losing the fight against the enemies of our soul is a subnormal condition for those who are called to be more than conquerors through Christ. Defeat is not expected. There is no need for defeat because of the abundance of Divine Virtue and power available to us. He who neglects his salvation will not escape the judgment of God.

He is lukewarm and will be vomited from Christ's mouth.

The overcomer is the true Christian, the victorious saint, the dedicated believer. All the inheritance we associate with being a Christian goes to him. The destiny of the nonovercomer is filled with lashes and outer darkness.

One of the principal differences between the spiritual condition of the overcomer and the nonovercomer is the degree of eternal life each possesses.

Some Definitions

Eternal life is the "knowledge" of God, in the sense of the "Presence" and "Virtue" of God.

The human soul and spirit can die, meaning they can be separated from the Presence and Virtue of God, from the eternal Life that God is.

A spirit can be "dead" (cut off from God's Life), or "alive" (in union with the Holy Spirit of God), but never resurrected. An angel or demon never can be resurrected.

It is true that our reborn inner nature has already been united with the resurrection Life of the Lord and has ascended with Him to the right hand of God (Romans, Chapter Six). However, the resurrection taught in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians has to do only with the resurrection of the material body, not with our inward nature.

To resurrect is to restore consciousness and function to the body.

The physical body can be spiritually "alive" (filled with God's Spirit) or spiritually "dead" (because of sin and the resulting loss of God's Spirit). It can also be "awake" or "asleep," referring to physical life or death.

To resurrect the body is to give it consciousness and function, and sometimes (but not always) eternal life. We know this is the case because Jesus spoke of "the resurrection of life" and "the resurrection of damnation" (John 5:29).

The degree and kind of life (no life, thirtyfold, sixtyfold, or a hundredfold) our body receives after consciousness and function have been restored to it in the day of resurrection depends on the degree and kind of life that have been developed in our spiritual nature as we have patiently borne our cross behind the Lord Jesus.

The spiritually dead body is void of the Presence of God.

To "sleep" physically (in the sense of physical death) is for the body to lose consciousness and cease to function.

The spirit, soul, and body may all ascend to God. But ascension is not an integral part of resurrection. The Lord Jesus Christ lived in resurrection glory in His body several weeks before His ascension. One of the areas of confusion caused by the doctrine of the pre-tribulation "rapture" is that the central hope of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God has been changed from the victorious resurrection of the body into an ascension of nonvictorious believers to escape tribulation.

To be continued.