Us Without God.

 Us without God. The concept is something so many believe. Think about someone you love and imagine for a moment that everything you love about them is no longer a part of who they are- they are a mere shell where before they were the love of your life. It's rare but it's been documented that a person suffering from a traumatic brain injury can lose their entire memory and even if that person were married they no longer know the person they married, that person is a complete stranger to them and the amnesiac treats them as such. The person is altered in personality as well, and isn't the same as before the accident. These kinds of things are awful and take a long time, if ever, to repair. Ideally the couple would fall back in love again over time, but that's not always the case. 

Us without God. We were perfect with God before sin entered into humanity.  When sin entered we took ourselves away from that perfection of who we were. We were altered traumatically. Humanity became something far different from what it was intended to be because of sin separating us from God. Make no mistake, right away God had a plan for our restoration- in fact there was a contingency plan in place before we existed. This contingency plan was not something God ever wanted to have to put into action. How many countless worlds have been created with other creatures that have not chosen the path of sin? We don't know the answer to that, and it could very well be none, but somehow I don't think it is none. Are there other human creatures, no, I don't believe there are, but my knowledge is very limited.

God created us to be united with Him, and us without God is unacceptable to God. The way of restoration was put into action- and our ability to recognize God as being all powerful, all loving, all perfect is something we need restored in us through Jesus Christ our Lord, through the Holy Spirit. The restoration is the reuniting, not our being altered by our own actions. The reuniting is a submission towards the expectation of the promised restoration.  May God open our eyes, our hearts, our spirits to His blessed truth!

(Excerpt) 

Then that takes entirely away from you and me the whole plan and everything about it as to the doing of it. For when I cannot measure the standard, how should I attain to it, even if it were given me to do? 

Then let it be settled also that as to the doing of it, it is put utterly beyond you.

This also was said long, long ago 9 (From the Book of Job) : "I know it is so of a truth, but how should man be just with God?

If he will contend with him, he cannot answer Him one of a thousand. . . . 

If I speak of strength, lo, he is strong; and if of judgment, who shall set me a time to plead?" 

And when I should come to plead, what then? "If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me." 

If I can measure up myself to the satisfaction of myself and pronounce the balance settled, when it is set alongside of his estimate, my own estimate is so far short that it condemns me utterly. There is in it no basis of justification.  "If I say, I am perfect, it [my own mouth] shall also prove me perverse."

"Though I were perfect, yet would I not know my soul: I would despise my life." 

My own standard of perfection,  when set in the presence of His and seen in the light of His, would be so far short that I myself would despise it.  "If I wash myself with snow-water and make my hands never so clean; yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me." Job 9:1, 2, 19-21, 30, 31.

That is as near as we could come to the standard, if it were given to us to do. Then let us forever abandon all idea that perfection is anything that we are to work out. 

Perfection is that to which we are to attain, nothing but that. 

God expects it, and He has made provision for it. 

That is what we were created for. The only object of our existence is to be just that--perfect with God's perfection.

And remember that we are to be perfect with His character. 

His standard of character is to be ours. Yea, His character itself is to be ours. We are not to have one made like it; it itself is to be ours. And that alone is Christian perfection.

To be continued…

A.T. Jones 1899