WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS LIFE?

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“So I (Solomon) became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also, my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 2:9-11

Solomon tells us that he had tried every earthly pursuit and pleasure and all were found wanting. Yes, this life does have its pleasures and satisfactions, and we should thank God for them (Ecclesiastes 2:24–25; 5:18–19; 8:15). But in the final chapters, he points to the ultimate answer once we have learned that nothing under the sun can completely and permanently satisfy. That can be the only reason, why this book is in the Bible.

The author puts himself—and his readers—in the shoes of the secularist, one who gives little thought to God. He wants us to look closely at the visible world and the answers it seems to give before he will do more than drop hints of where he is taking us.

In Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 11, he drops another hint of where he is going. He writes: “He [God] has made everything beautiful in its time.” This is an indirect reference to Genesis 1:31: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” He continues, saying God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Here is the implicit recognition that we have been created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), with the capacity to relate to Him personally. But from our creaturely position “under the sun”, without biblical insight and with an evolutionary mindset, this life looks like an untidy chaotic mess, with no apparent rhyme or reason. We never have the satisfaction of fully understanding what God is doing (Eccl.:16–17).

We need God’s revelation, this is the author’s whole point: we cannot plumb the mystery of life without God’s help. We have arrived in the middle of life’s drama, not knowing the plot. Without the backdrop revealed to us in the early chapters of Genesis, the truth about our beginnings, and why the world is now broken, will remain a mystery to us. The book of Ecclesiastes ends with the call to acknowledge the limits of our perspective and our understanding, and to accept our status as creatures under the dominion of our Creator. (Ecclesiastes. 12:1).

Throughout the book, the author continues his demolition of false hope and self-sufficiency. He notes the harshness of life (Eccl. 3:16; 4:1) and the breakdown of law and order (Eccl. 8:11) as part of the evidence of humankind’s bias toward evil. His observations are summed up in Eccl. 7: 29: “See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” This is another indirect reference to Genesis, this time to Adam and Eve, created originally “upright” before their disobedience in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1–6). In seeking to be “like God, knowing good and evil”, they chose to deny their creaturely status by reaching for more than God had granted them. Ever since mankind has had a propensity to evil, and the originally perfect world has become harsh and chaotic. G.S. Hendry comments: The eyes of Ecclesiastes are fully open to the vanity and the corruption to which the creation is subject (Romans 8:20 ff), and the whole book has been aptly described as an exposition of the curse of the Fall (Genesis 3:17–19).

By the end of chapter 10, the author’s work of demolition is complete; the site has been cleared. Chapters 11 and 12 point us to “the end of the matter” (Eccl. 12:13). These two chapters fall into three sections which can be summed up in three crisp commands:

Be Bold (Eccl. 11:1-6): We are here warned against being overly cautious: “He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap” (v. 4). Few great enterprises have waited for ideal conditions; no more should we. “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days” (v. 1). There is an element of risk in any enterprise, he says, but it is better to launch out and fail than to keep our resources to ourselves.

Be joyful (Eccl. 11:7-10): Verse 7 captures the bliss of being alive, but this is balanced by the knowledge that life’s pleasures will give way to “the days of darkness” (Eccl. 11:8). We are warned against letting life’s gifts beguile us into living for them alone. Verse 9 puts us on the right path: “Rejoice, O young man, in your youth … Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.” The prospect of divine praise or blame makes every detail of life significant. To know this is to be reminded that we reap what we plant.

Be Godly! Eccl. 12:1-8, 13-14. The final chapter speaks of honouring God with our lives while we can do so and before our strength fades and our bodies return to the dust. To “remember … [our] Creator” (v. 1) is to drop all pretense of self-sufficiency and to commit ourselves to Him. Verses 2–7 use rich imagery to remind us that death is inevitable.

In verse 2, the chill of winter is in the air as the rains persist, and the clouds turn daylight into gloom. In the verses that follow, the various members and faculties of the body are pictured as a household that has suffered the ravages of time. The scene in these verses brings home to us the fading of physical and mental powers that will always accompany advancing age. One by one, old friends disappear, familiar customs change, and hopes long-held must be laid aside.

One’s youth, then, is the best time to face this stark reality: “Remember … your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’” (Eccl. 12:1).

He has brought us at last to “the end of the matter” (Eccl. 12:13). Here finally is the goal for which we were made: the eternal God toward whom the eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11) was meant to lead us. When this world has given us its finest things, there is still a hunger in us that only God Himself can satisfy. These souls of ours cannot live on the wretched husks of a purely materialistic philosophy. Sooner or later a famine sets in. That immaterial part of us that we call the soul or the spirit can never quite delude itself that the atmosphere of a secular society is its native air. We were made for eternity, and nothing “under the sun” can fully or permanently satisfy us.

Centuries after this book was written, One greater than Solomon said to a lonely Samaritan woman standing beside a well:

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” John 4:13–14

THE REAL ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE WORLD AND MANKIND

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Part of this real history is the bad news that the rebellion of the first man, Adam, against God’s command, brought death, suffering, and separation from God into this world. We see the results all around us. All of Adam’s descendants are sinful from conception (Psalm 51:5) and have themselves entered into this rebellion (sin). They, therefore, cannot live with a holy God but are condemned to separation from God. The Bible says that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and that all are therefore subject to “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

 The good news is that God has done something about it. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Jesus Christ the Creator, God the Son, though totally sinless, took on human nature, so He could become our Redeemer. Then He suffered, on behalf of mankind, the penalty of mankind’s sin, which is death and separation from God. He did this to satisfy the righteous demands of the holiness and justice of God, His Father. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice; He died on a cross, but on the third day, He rose again, conquering death, so that all who truly believe in Him, repent (repentance = a change of mind) of their sin and trust in Him (rather than their own merit), are able to come back to God and live for eternity with their Creator.

Sadly, the world no longer takes the Bible as God’s Word divinely inspired by its Creator. Despite the overwhelming evidence of a worldwide flood: billions of dead things were buried quickly all over the world including abundant fossil fuels formed from buried vegetation, we do not want to believe there is a God to whom we are responsible for our actions. A god who judged the world just 4,000 years ago with the worldwide flood of Noah’s day. Look at the following two prophetic Scriptures written over two thousand years ago telling us that what we see happening in the world today will happen.

“You should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming?… For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these, the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.” 2 Peter 3:2-3,5-6

“But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, “In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.” It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit.” Jude 1:17-19

Jesus came to earth, two thousand years ago, to redeem us and there were 300-plus prophecies to warn the religious leaders of the day but they missed it. Likewise, there are almost 2000 Biblical prophecies about Jesus’ soon second coming to earth and many of the religious leaders of our day are missing it. Jesus is coming to take believers to heaven for a period whilst God pours out His wrath a second time on an unrepentant world. The end times Biblical prophecies are already playing out in our day and we are not too far off the prophesied last seven years of this age. The Bible gives us a lot of information about the events that will occur during those last seven years. Make sure you take advantage of God’s offer of redemption in Jesus Christ and avoid the coming wrath of God.

“When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” 2 Thessalonians 1:6b-8

“When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” Revelation 6:12-17

CREATIVITY IN THE MILLENNIAL KINGDOM PART 1

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What does the Bible say about our ability to create? First of all, it says we are made in the image of the greatest creator of all things, God our Father. We are then told that Adam’s rebellious son Cain built at least one city.

“Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch” Genesis 4:17

Just seven generations down Cain’s line we then learn that Jabal was a farmer who raised livestock, his brother Jubal’s family played musical instruments (lyre and pipe) and Tubal-Cain forged instruments of bronze and iron.

What does this say about evolution and stone age people?

“Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-Cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron.” Genesis 4:20-22

Despite the dreadful judgement of God with the worldwide flood of Noah’s day resulting in eight survivors, just a few generations on we learn that God judges the world again with the confusion of their language at the Tower of Babel. With just one language God says that nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. What does that say about our creative ability? Hence God creates the nations each with its own language.

“Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

Once God had decided to establish His own nation, Israel, we learn that God gifted and called Bezalel to be a skilled laborer, a master craftsman, and a God-glorifying artist. Bezalel and Oholiab were not only to create works of art but also to train apprentices to do so. The gifting and calling were from God:

“He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as craftsmen, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers—all of them master craftsmen and designers” Exodus 35:35

What about today: with the development of the internet, the communication problem that God initiated at Babel is now largely overcome and new technology is being developed at lightning speed in energy, healthcare, agriculture, communication, transport, and in fact every area of activity.

I believe there is no reason why this will not continue during Jesus’ reign in the Millennium. However, its development will be controlled by Jesus and the Saints who the Bible says will be ruling in this transition era with a rod of iron.

“The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron,” Revelation 2:26

“She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron,” Revelation 12:5

“From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron.” Revelation 19:15

In this post let us look briefly at ENERGY and TRANSPORT

ENERGY: NUCLEAR FUSION

A UK-based company called First Light Fusion came up with an idea to build a nuclear fusion reactor that hits nuclear fuel pack with a projectile, having a speed 200 times more than that of sound and releases enormous heat, which gets absorbed by lithium that transfers heat to water through the heat exchanger. The reactor will repeat the process of hitting the fuel pack with the projectile every 30 seconds, resulting in generating a pulse of energy that could generate 5800kWh of electric energy. They plan to put the first commercial nuclear fusion technology power plant within a budget of $1 billion, generating 150MW power.

A major group of American scientists has agreed to work toward opening a nuclear fusion plant by the 2040s. The timeframe is intentional, letting scientists work on and learn from giant projects like Europe’s ITER and China’s EAST before designing a prototype of a fusion plant for the United States.

TRANSPORT: FUEL CELLS

Like batteries, fuel cells generate electricity, meaning that any car that runs off a fuel cell is actually an electric car. Also, like batteries, fuel cells mix two chemicals that react to produce an electric current. However, the important difference with fuel cells is that, unlike batteries, they do not store energy internally. Rather, they have their “fuel” fed directly into the battery “cell”, thus the term fuel cell.

The most likely fuel cell is the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. There are others in development. In the case of the hydrogen fuel cell, the two chemicals that react together are stored hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen. When reacted together they produce water. So if you have a hydrogen car, you can drink its exhaust. Also, fuel cells aren’t limited to smaller vehicles, they can power buses and, even, tractors. Whilst many fuel cells are under development the Polymer Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMF) is one of the big favourites.

The Einride Pod driverless truck will begin operating for the first time on a U.S. public highway. The vehicles will have to stick to a defined route during a limited test program.

FREEDOM

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If God exists, then we also need to consider a positive aspect, which is sometimes called “freedom for.” Just like a car that has been designed by its creator to operate in a certain fashion, humans have been made in God’s image for a greater purpose and only experience freedom when they discover and live that purpose (Genesis 1-2). It is only when we know the truth, and align our lives to it, that we can experience genuine freedom.

LIVING IN ACCORDANCE WITH GOD’S DESIGN:
The secular worldview says to live as you want. The Christian view says to live as God leads.

The secular view emphasizes the individual as supreme. The Christian view says that loving God and loving others is supreme.

The secular view says that we create existential truth. The Christian view says we discover the truth.

God has done His utmost to reveal the truth to us by sending His only Son not only to reveal the truth about Him and us but to atone for our sins and rebellion by dying on The Cross in our place that we might have the opportunity to get back into a right relationship with our Heavenly Father.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.“ John 1:14

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John 1:17

“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:24

God has also made it clear as to what is the outcome for those that reject the truth about God.

“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” Romans 1:24-25

“He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury.” Romans 2:6-8

God has also revealed in great detail what will unfold in the last seven years prior to Jesus’ return and the wrath of God is poured out on an unrepentant people. For those that want to know the truth, God has given it to us in His Word. Literally, thousands of fulfilled Bible prophecies prove the Bible is God’s revealed inerrant Word. You reject it at your own peril as the following Scripture reveals.

“Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” Revelation 6:15-17

SATAN’S SCHEME TO DESTROY THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MEN AND WOMEN

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Filmmaker Jennifer Lahl of the Center for Bioethics & Culture Network details:

1. what is fuelling the rapid push to set children, teens, and young adults on a pathway of experimental transgender medicalization such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and body-disfiguring gender surgeries, and

2. the journey of making her latest documentary called “Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?”

This is much needed alert to the unknown dangers inherent in giving children puberty blockers and hormone therapy which essentially makes them sterile and interrupts and interferes with all aspects of normal body development.

Dr. David Kyle Foster is the producer/director of Pure Passion TV and many documentaries on Transgender issues. The following is taken from his article in Charisma News The Spiritual Reality Behind the Transgender Movement

There is a war of the worlds going on in the shadows of our everyday awareness—an unseen battle between the Creator God  with His army of heavenly beings and Satan with his fallen angels and demonic hosts.

Though already lost, Satan continues to battle in order to enlarge his dark kingdom before its inevitable implosion.

Nowhere is this battle more pronounced today than in the rise of the transgender movement. It is the front lines in Satan’s scheme to deface and destroy the image of God that is stamped into our personhood, sexuality, marriages, children and families.

The problem is, most transgender people are unaware of the unseen forces that drive them in unhealthy directions.

Spiritual Forces of Confusion

There exists today a convergence of six entities that collude with one another to promote dangerous and damaging lifestyles and identities—such as homosexual and transgendered—as being natural and healthy alternatives to what they dismissively refer to as an antiquated “male-female binary,” or the idea that there are only two genders.

  1. the Wealthy and powerful LGBT movement—which for most of its history distanced itself from transgender people—but who now see it as a cause that can be harnessed to increase their wealth, power and influence. The Human Rights Campaign alone—sometimes referred to as “Big Gay”—brings in approximately $40 million each year, pays out more than $11 million in salaries and spends more than a quarter of a million dollars every year on lobbying Congress. This is the same movement that once embraced pedophile and pederast groups like NAMBLA, allowing them to march in their “Gay Pride Parades” until several decades ago when it became politically inconvenient to do so. They have since focused on reducing the age of consent for sex acts with minors and changing the language of “child abuse” to “man-boy love”, as more publicly acceptable ways for achieving the same goal.
  2. Wealthy and powerful professional guilds, such as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, who ceased using science as the foundation for their mental health diagnoses when they began caving to pressure from homosexual activists 45 years ago. It began in 1973, when gay activists began attacking the meetings of the APA committee that decides what disorders appear in their official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The attacks continued until committee members, three of whom were secretly homosexual, relented and removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. The decision was not based on any science or new studies. It was based on fear and intimidation. In a poll several years later, 1979, the vast majority of APA members disagreed with the decision but were ignored. Today you can lose your license if you disagree with the decision—a threat that forces therapists to keep their mouths shut.
    For example, when Pure Passion Media attempted to interview therapists for its new documentary, TranZformed: Finding Peace with Your God-Given Gender, only one could be found (the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi) to go on camera to talk about the dangers of promoting transgenderism.
  3. The media. Ephesians 2:2 tells us that Satan is the “prince of the power of the air”. Almost all of TV, film and theatre, much of radio as well as most newspapers and magazines have thrown themselves wholesale into promoting this great deception. This is partly because the media is riddled with LGBT people who pull strings from within but is also a result of the agenda laid out by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in their book, After the Ball, which was a manifesto for how to manipulate the culture so that it becomes pro-gay and pro-trans. Their scheme has worked so well that any reporter who dares to report on the actual science related to such issues will be vilified and almost certainly fired for daring to be politically incorrect.
  4. Public organizations like government, education, the AMA, public schools, colleges and libraries and so on, which have likewise been pressured and deceived into promoting sexually immoral agendas. Today, you have gay and trans activists welcomed into elementary schools to teach children how to perform the most perverted of sexual acts, how to transition to the opposite sex, and worse. One recent trans activist actually encouraged a group of very young children to become drag queens while he danced around the room in his makeup, wig and glittery dress.
  5. The false church, a conglomeration of mainline denominations that have been taken over by non-believing liberals and gay/trans activists in order to provide religious cover for the doctrines of demons that they promulgate. Although they do not themselves believe in the authority of Scripture, they invent twisted versions of it in order to sow theological confusion among those who turn to them for divine guidance.
  6. Sew Confusion: as Kirk and Madsen proposed in their gay manifesto: “Use talk to muddy the moral waters, raise theological objections about conservative interpretations of biblical teachings, undermine the moral authority of [conservative churches] by portraying them as antiquated backwaters, badly out of step with the times. Set science and public opinion against institutional religion”.

But take heed, as the Apostle Paul warned in Acts 20:29-30: “For I know that after my departure, dreadful wolves will enter among you, not sparing the flock. Even from among you men will arise speaking perverse things, to draw the disciples away after them.”

Deceived public will continue to vote the deceivers into office, whether in government, on school boards, professional associations or elsewhere. As a result, those parents who have children who present as homosexual or transgender and who naturally turn to the world’s experts for guidance are deceived into accepting and encouraging the world’s fallen agenda. They want to do the right thing for their child and naively assume that cultural experts know what they are talking about, but it turns into the blind leading the blind.

Paedophilia and pederasty are the next frontier on the activist agenda. Already they have succeeded in having the wording in the APAs DSM changed so that paedophilia is now considered a disorder only if it causes distress to the perpetrator.

For Christians that understand the Bible is God’s Word know:

  1. The truth about the spiritual battle that is being waged in the heavenlies.
  2. The truth about our fallen nature and therefore sin.
  3. The true history of this world from a) Creation of a perfect world, b) mankind’s rebellion as a result of deception by a demonic spiritual being resulting in God’s judgement of suffering and death, c) God’s second judgement of rebellion with a worldwide flood leaving only eight human survivors, d) God created the nations by confusing language, e) God created the nation of Israel to reveal His commandments (law) for living on His planet and to introduce the sacrificial system to show that only the shedding of blood can atone for our sin of rebellion against God. f) This was a necessary precursor to God sending His Son, Jesus, to shed His blood to atone for the sins of mankind, g) Jesus birthed the church and made it possible for God, the Father to send the Holy Spirit to indwell and renew every person who repented of their rebellion against God and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Saviour, They had effectively died to self and raised to life in Jesus, h) God provided us with the Bible which reveals the truth of this world from its beginning to its prophesied end. Fulfilled prophecies are proof of its inerrancy and that the many prophecies of the future events prior to Jesus second coming to earth will happen exactly as God prophesied. We know the end of the story and God and His people are the victors.

ARE WE MADE IN GOD’S IMAGE OR EVOLVED FROM A MONKEY?

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It is unfortunate that despite the revealed truth of the Word of God, some still foolishly believe in the lie called evolution; that man came into being as a result of random acts of nature  and evolved from a monkey into a human being. If that were the case, why is it that monkeys no longer turn into humans? Also, how do evolved monkeys act in today’s world? Why should you love your neighbour as yourself and why not steal? If there is no God, and this is all there is, then make the most of it? Why care about anyone else? Perhaps, it is fair to say, that Man become as a monkey, when he rejects the truth of scripture, and does not reflect the image of God, His creator.

“The fool has said in his heart, there is no God…” Psalm 14:1

Image result for picture of evolution of man from monkeys

When Satan causes us to reject who we are in Christ, we face the threat of being destroyed in spiritual warfare. We are at war and the only way Satan can defeat us is to get us to forget who we are in Christ and identify with how we feel, what we do, and how others perceive us. Rather than who God created us to be and how He views us.
Walking in the image of God, which was our original nature before sin, is only made possible by Jesus. He made it possible for or Heavenly Father to send the Holy Spirit to indwell believers in Him as Saviour and Lord. The Holy Spirit is our Counsellor, Comforter and Teacher. He produces the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives: love, joy, peace, faithfulness, gentleness, goodness, kindness, patience and self control and provides the nine Gifts of the Spirit for ministry. He is sanctifying us, making us more like Jesus everyday, preparing us to receive our new bodies when Jesus returns.

“For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

The Holy Spirit is essential to living a successful life, knowing God’s best for us, and overcoming the spiritual warfare we face each day. There are seven characteristics to God’s image:

  • Spirit – God is not a physical being but an existing Spirit. The mistake we tend to make is to limit our existence to our physics, when that isn’t who we really are. Like God, the ‘real us’ is spirit and as mentioned, Jesus made it possible for our Heavenly Father to send the Holy Spirit to indwell believers forever.  We must allow our spirit to be activated by the Holy Spirit and let Him take full control over our physical being. The physical is limited, while the spirit is unlimited.
  • Eternal – God has no beginning or end. He is, was, and is to come. Like God, our spirit is eternal; not that we are immortal, but death is the doorway to eternity. What is important is where we spend eternity.
  • Holy – God is pure. There is no imperfection in Him. He calls us to be holy as He is holy. Holiness for us is not the absence of sin, but rather, it is the presence of the Holy Spirit, evidence of a dynamic relationship with a loving Saviour whose blood has cleansed us of all transgressions.
  • Creator – God is an innovator and is industrious. He has the ability to create. Of all His characteristics, entrepreneurs can best relate to this one because they understand the process of creating. Like God, whatever we imagine, we can produce. There are no limitations to our creative abilities.
  • Loving – “For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son…” (John 3:16.) God’s love is what led Him to send His only Son to die on the Cross. Like God, we must be love, and demonstrate our compassion for others. We must be willing to lay down our lives for others.
  • Just – God’s justice causes Him to judge wickedness and chastise those whom He loves. We must not cooperate with wickedness but take every opportunity to challenge it. We must resist the temptation to adopt “fairness” as a value. This is a dangerous attempt to play God, perhaps thinking that we’re going to make good decisions apart from submitting to God’s perfect righteousness and wisdom. God uses his perfect justice to ultimately yield redemption.

Ultimately, God is an eternal Holy Being who created everything that exists. Although sin brought destruction to His creation, His love for us compelled Him to come as a Saviour to redeem His creation and ultimately bring judgement upon the wicked.
Walking in the image of God is essential to our success in life. We need to be good stewards since that is God’s original and divine order. For us to conform to our original nature, we must make sure we have accepted His Son as our Lord and Saviour. We must have an active prayer and devotional life and submit to the Holy Spirit’s leading each day. This is essential in overcoming spiritual warfare.

My prayer for you today, is that God will give you the grace to recognise His presence and submit to His will, His guidance, so that you will be an overcomer and realise His plan and purpose for your life.

For more information on creation versus evolution go to http://www.creation.com