HOW TO LIVE FOREVER   PART ONE

Satan hates law, because law is the means through which humans can escape Satan’s chains of death.

Without law, and God’s unwavering adherence to His own law, humans would be born, would live, would die, and then….nothing. They would cease to exist, as though they had never been born in the first place.

Which is what Satan had devoutly hoped would happen, and what he did his best to make happen. But, as ever, Satan was soundly defeated. He was defeated two thousand years ago by the fact that God is true to His word.

In the beginning, God made a law:

“And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, You may freely eat of every tree in the garden, but you shall not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

If humans disobeyed and ate from the tree they would die, and their death, whenever it occurred, would be the permanent end of their existence.

“But I didn’t eat any fruit from any tree” one might say, “I wasn’t even born then, so why should I have to die?”

Because eating fruit from a particular tree wasn’t the issue, and eating fruit from a particular tree wasn’t the reason anyone had to die. The tree merely symbolised the fact that God had made a law, and to disobey that law would, eventually, result in permanent death. The issue was the breaking of a law.

The law which God explained to humans was that humans would have to behave as the Gods themselves behaved. The Gods wanted to have children, and the Gods naturally wanted their children to have the same nature as the Gods themselves. This is just common sense; who would want to produce a tribe of satanic selfish ferals?

So the law we are talking about is not some arbitrary law which the Gods have to obey, and in turn force humans to obey, the law we are talking about is simply the nature of the Gods themselves – what they are, and how they naturally behave.

But humans don’t naturally behave as the Gods behave, humans have to learn that behaviour. And the instructions on how to behave as the Gods themselves behave was the law which God gave to the humans in the Garden.

That law is called love. Treating others with complete respect. Treating others as we would like to be treated. That’s all the basic law of the universe is; just love.

When later God dissected the law into points easily understandable by humans and suitable for application on earth, He called them the Ten Commandments, but law existed long before the Ten Commandments and long before the earth itself. Law began with God.

And even without the Ten Commandments, or for that matter without any other written law, law would still exist. Because law is just the nature of God and exists apart from any legal code. Which is what Paul was getting at:

“For as many as have sinned without [written] law will also perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law....for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them.” (Romans 2:12, 14-15)

So, while we may not have eaten any fruit from any particular tree, we all come under the basic law of the universe, which says we must treat each other properly, according to God’s nature. And we have all broken that law, and so we have all qualified to die. As Paul also says:

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” (Romans 3:23)

The glory of God is love, treating others correctly, and we all have not loved.

So humans, from the very start, disobeyed, and would have to die. Which is not what God wanted, but what He would have to accept. Because that was the contract He had made with them – obey and live, or disobey and die.

But then if God later decided that humans could live anyway, even though they had broken the contract, then God’s word wouldn’t mean anything. And if God’s word didn’t mean anything then He could break it at any time. He could decide to take away life at any time on a whim.

So for humans, everything depends on God being true to His word and keeping His own law. (Because keeping one’s word affects others, and is therefore part of love and law.) And God proved His absolute reliability to His word in the most dramatic way.

We have been talking about God in the singular, but of course that isn’t correct. It’s just simpler to use the singular. There are two Gods, as the Scriptures reveal in the first chapter:

“And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)

In order to keep their word, one of these two Gods would risk His existence and the other would risk losing everything He loved. The incontrovertible proof that They can be trusted.

Once humans disobeyed the law which God had given them, humans had to die. The only way around that was to invoke another law, the law of ransom:

“...any that is near of kin to him of his family may redeem him... ” (Leviticus 25:49)

The law of ransom is that a person under an obligation of some sort may be redeemed by someone else.  That is, another person may take on the obligation in their place.

In the case of the human race facing death, that obligation could be taken on only by someone worth more than the human race. And the only One worth more than the human race was the God who had created human beings.

But only one of the Gods could qualify as the Ransom and Redeemer of the human race. The other God could not be the Redeemer, because He had not created human beings. So in the Gospel of John we read:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being.” (John 1:1-3)

This is talking about the God who became the Human, Jesus Christ. And the reason why this God gave up being a God and became a human, was so that He could become the Ransom, the Redeemer, of the human race and buy back humans from death.  The other God could not do this because He had not been the Creator of humans. The other God implanted the Human Seed of Jesus into Mary, and thus assumed the role of Father.

These are the lengths to which the Gods were prepared to go, and the risks they were prepared to take, in order to give humans an escape from the death which Satan had inflicted on them.  All because the Gods cannot break their word.

So one of the Gods became the Human, Jesus. He was murdered by Satan’s seed, through which death He bought back humans from death.

That was the foundation of the opportunity for humans to live forever, but on top of the foundation a process, a way to take up the opportunity, had to be built.

The process itself is simple. It’s just a matter of knowing and understanding what was done, who did it, accepting what is being offered, and performing the action required to accept the offer.

That process is explained in the Scriptures, but explained in such a way that it can be easily misunderstood. As Jesus said:

“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which said, By hearing you shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive; for this people's heart has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." (Matthew 13:14-15)

But if the whole point of Jesus becoming Human and dying was to enable humans to live forever, why hide from humans the way they could live forever?

There are several reasons. One was that the people whom God would eventually choose as His instrument, the Israelites, were not a good people.

We can easily assume, that since God chose the Israelites to be His special people, they therefore must be worthy of that choice. Which of course is not true. God chose the Israelites as His special people not because of any goodness or special characteristics they possessed, but simply because He had made a promise that salvation would come through Abraham’s line:

“And the Angel of Jehovah called to Abraham out of the heavens the second time, and said, I have sworn by Myself, says Jehovah; because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only one; that in blessing I will bless you, and in multiplying I will multiply your seed like the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore. And your Seed shall possess the gate of His enemies. And in your Seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” (Genesis 22:15-18)

But the people whom God would later choose in the line of Abraham would not turn out to be as good as Abraham:

“And Jehovah said to Moses, I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. And now leave Me alone, so that My wrath may become hot against them and so that I may consume them.” (Exodus 32:9-10)

And their descendants were no better:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets, and decorate the tombs of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Therefore you are witnesses to yourselves, that you are the sons of those who killed the prophets; and you fill up the measure of your fathers.” (Matthew 23:29-32)

So since the people whom God had chosen to be the instrument of salvation proved themselves unworthy of their position, the Scriptures would be written in such a way that, if necessary, salvation could be hidden from them.

The Israelites were still the chosen, and salvation would still come through them. And they would still be the instrument of blessing, because that was a promise. Indeed, the right to enter salvation first was theirs. But because of their nature, they rejected that right and disqualified themselves from being the first to receive the blessing. As it says in Acts:

“But speaking boldly, Paul and Barnabas said, It was necessary for the Word of God to be spoken to you first. But since indeed you put it far from you and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the nations.” (Acts 13:46)

The sticking point for them was Jesus. Because they, the chosen, had not chosen Him.