Christian Living
“And the Lord God said, “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 3:18, NKJ). It is amazing how the human race has gotten so out of God’s order. It states in this verse that it was God’s own idea, without man’s help, that it was not good for the man (Adam) to be alone. In the first three chapters of Genesis, there is a clear order and culture as to how God meant to orchestrate and bring forth all of the necessities mankind would ever need to live a complete life. The earth, water, the ground, plant life, food, day, night, seasons, animals, work, rest and everything that our bodies and lives needed to survive and thrive, were all provided for by God Himself.
Before sin entered, Adam and Eve were in a perfect relationship with God and with each other. Whatever Adam and Eve didn’t know they lacked or would lack, God provided, and Adam and Eve received it and then made it fruitful. God carefully crafted man for these provisions and naturally brought them to Adam and Eve. There was no tug-of-war between God and man, but the natural evolution of how God wanted to provide a life between Himself and man. If you read and meditate on the first four Gospels of the New Testament, you will see this perfectly lived out between Jesus Christ and His Father God. Through the atonement, we too can live this out. God makes a person, provides for that person everything he or she needs, never forgetting anything. Perfect in God’s order and His culture. Man was to be humbly receptive to only God’s thoughts about himself and his life. Never needing, never wanting, but just completely content to know that God was in control of everything in his life and also in control of creation. God was simply everything to Adam and Eve and this, as children of God, we must adopt as the new order of our lives in Christ.
In the beginning, God set up His culture and His thought for man. And man was to receive God’s culture and thought as his own, with no independence in between. God of course gave man choices and freedom according to his God-given mind and spirit, in that God brought forth the animals to be named not by Himself, but by Adam (Genesis 2:19). Adam could choose any tree to eat from, with the exception of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). Because Adam was receptive to God’s order, culture and thought, he and God lived in perfect harmony with each other. We should seek to live in no other way with God, but this way. God’s culture, thought and order are just the same today for His people as they were in the beginning with Adam and Eve. God gives, brings forth and works all of life together for His children, and all we are to do is gladly receive and humbly obey. All the time and this is most important, fully knowing and trusting that God is good and all He does is good.
All this was originated by the Great Originator. Now thousands of years later, look where we are at. We have come from God’s thought and culture, and have fallen so far away from Him, that collectively and individually, we have worked out our own thoughts and cultures to our own dire demise. We have Western culture, European culture, Middle Eastern culture, African culture, etc. Within our own communities we have divided ourselves by creating ethnic cultures, work cultures, women’s cultures, men’s cultures, church cultures and the list goes on into infinity. We think this leads to a melting pot, but it has led to anything but. The only thing it has led to is chaos, hate, suspicion, violence, strife and total disenfranchisement of people from others. It has led to wars, riots, rich, poor, oppression, caste systems and the horror it just keeps going on and on.
What about thought. We as human’s love to boast of our collective and individual thought. We again have Western thought, Eastern thought, Middle Eastern thought, Asian thought. Personally within our own societies and countries we have political thought, secular thought, psychological thought, political correctness thought, liberal thought, conservative thought, African-American thought, Caucasian thought, Hispanic thought, homosexual thought, etc. Thought, thought, thought. And it’s all a lie. For what? So we can be our very own little gods and we can proudly call ourselves original and authentic. All the while, leaving God completely outside, not caring one iota about His thought.
This has all led to disaster and it’s all our own fault. But, it had to be this way. Very early on after the Fall of man, mankind gathered together and instead of seeking to be reconciled back to God, they sought to become a culture and thought of “one” and thus usurp God, “And they said, “come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4, NKJ). Meanwhile, God saw this and had His own thoughts, “But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:5-9, NKJ). Thus the consequences are the reverse as to what God had originally planned.
God had planned that mankind would take their individual, God-given creative and different idiosyncrasies to become melded together as one, but all under the authority and dominion of God. But since man took God’s gifts unto themselves to serve themselves and their own self-interests, God scattered all mankind and made us all foreign to one another. And we have never recovered. We are all now suspicious, fearful, prideful, hateful and resentful from one nation to another, one ethnic group to another, from one gender to another, one family to another, one person towards the other and ultimately mankind as a whole, feels this same way towards God, “they hated Me without a cause” (John 15:25, NKJ).
Instead of taking the unique beauty and gifts that God gave to each individual and individual groups, and uniting these gifts under God’s Lordship, we have distorted them and used them to lord it over other individuals and individual groups. All because man as a whole, refuses to give back to God what He gave us, so He can make us a part of His original beautiful purpose for the world, the church, our communities, to each other and ultimately between the individual and God Himself.
So now how do we as the children of God break the world’s mold and hopefully draw it back to God. By going back individually to God and seeking to live solely within His culture, order and thought. We need to seek to have God’s thoughts become our thoughts. We first need to do this individually. We then complete this collectively within the church. Consequently, we will be a living example of God’s glory, splendor and His original design. Living lives of peace, humility and love to God first, and then to one another. We are to seek unity as God ordained we should, “that we love one another” (2 John 5, NKJ). All of the Apostles fought vigorously for this unity to exist between believers and God is still fighting for this today. Go back and read all of the New Testament epistles written to the different churches and see if God doesn’t put such a high value on this kind of devotion, unity and self-sacrificial love towards our brother’s and sister’s in Christ. The unbelieving world would then take great notice of us, because God Himself would make sure that they took notice. This is not just a pipe-dream, but is a calling from God to us. The full reality of this though will only be seen in heaven, but God is calling us individually and collectively, to make it a reality in our own lives and in the lives of our people.
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