The Perfected Spiritual Nature Will Govern the Material Realm

Let us consider what went wrong in Eden.

Adam and Eve were relatively simple creatures (we say relatively because man is a complex creation in any case) in that their spiritual nature was undeveloped. There was no ruling spiritual inner man in them, no Life of Christ, no experience in resisting the temptation to rebel against God or to break God's moral laws, no resurrection from the dead. They were neither a wall of resistance against sin nor a door of access to God.

Adam and Eve merely were flesh-and-blood beings, more intelligent than the animals, having a spirit in them capable of communication with God and a soul capable of moral judgment. Apparently their outer material form to a very limited degree resembled the spiritual form of the Lord God of Heaven.

They were relatively uncomplicated creatures compared with what God envisions for man when he has been born again and grows to maturity in Christ!

Adam and Eve were given Paradise. But since there was no ruling spiritual nature in them they were not able to possess what they had been given, although the challenge to their possession was elementary. (Compare the testing of Adam and Eve with the testing of Abraham, for example.)

God knew in advance that what He had given to Adam and Eve they would not be able to hold.

Before any human being can possess and govern Paradise he must be perfected in his inner spiritual nature. It is the inner spiritual nature that is to govern the material form of man and all his environment and circumstances. When man is governed by his material form or by his soulish, natural life, he cannot please God. He cannot possess and govern Paradise.

This is why the current doctrines of lawless grace and the pre-tribulation "rapture" of the believers are so harmful and opposed to the Kingdom of God. For in these doctrines there is contained the concept that God, because of His merciful Nature, intends to give Paradise to human beings in whom there has not been perfected a governing spiritual nature. If God were, through "grace," to give Paradise to believers in whom no governing spiritual nature had been developed, the tragedy of Eden would be repeated again and again.

The doctrine of lawless grace—the teaching that grace is a covering for our lust, and the doctrine of the removal of untransformed believers from the earth and the placing of them in Paradise, are not found in the Scriptures. They are not found in the Scriptures because they are not of God. God has not spoken them; neither do they accomplish the eternal purpose of God.

The eternal purpose of God is to create a kingdom that is material in outward form and governed by the spirits of righteous people made perfect—saints who, through the grace of God in Christ, have overcome every force that would invite them to walk in unrighteousness, spiritual uncleanness, or disobedience to the Father in any other form.

To be continued.