It is not that you are to cease working, it is that you are to cease from your own works and enter God's rest. While you are abiding in God's rest there may be times when you are working harder and are more extended than ever was true while you were attempting to create your own heaven and earth.

The first aspect, then, of the rest of God, is the awareness of the fact that everything has been finished from the foundation of the world. An individual must have this firmly fixed in his mind if he is to be able to cease from his own striving and move into the stream of God's wisdom and power.

The eternal Sabbath.

For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, And God did rest the seventh day from all his works. (Hebrews 4:4)

Of all the various areas of Christian doctrine that we teach, the most important may be that of entering the eternal Sabbath of God. To enter the Sabbath of God means to commit every aspect of our being and doing to the Lord for His direction.

One of man's worst enemies is his own brain. Until we learn of God's will for man we assume we were given a brain so we may plan our life and our destiny. It is not the purpose of the brain of man to plan his own life and destiny!

The purpose of the human brain is that we may comprehend God and make appropriate moral decisions. The plan for our life on earth and our eternal destiny is known to God alone. How then can we use our brain to plan our life and destiny when we do not know what God has in mind for us?

Knowledge makes us proud. The cultivation of the human mind leads to the strengthening of the adamic nature, not to its crucifixion. God's plan of redemption includes the crucifixion with Christ of our adamic nature. What is then raised is a new creation.

One cannot but marvel at the Jews, particularly the Orthodox. Some of the rabbis through their study of the Talmud and other literature, and their intensely disciplined thought and meditation, attain fabulous intellectual ability. They are dedicated to the cultivation of the mind along religious lines.

The revelation of the Scriptures that comes from God is a different matter. It is a different quality of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. The chief priests and elders who confronted Christ were brilliant expositors of the Law of Moses. But the Lord Jesus was filled with the Spirit of wisdom and revelation from God.

Intellectual wisdom and the wisdom of the Spirit are different in kind, different in quality. The student cannot proceed from one to the other. One is not a continuation of the other.

The average person, even the nursing child, can receive the wisdom of God and teach us all. But this individual could not master the Talmud or successfully debate with the scholars of Israel.

The wisdom to which the adamic nature can attain by intellectual exercise is astonishing. But such wisdom is of little use in the Kingdom of God and tends to resist and fight against the wisdom of the Kingdom. This is because the wisdom of the natural man tends toward pride and self-glorification whereas the wisdom of God leads to humility, mercy, righteousness, holiness, and the knowledge of God and His ways.

To be continued.