Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries |
The new things that have come; the principle of equality in election and predestination. Part 2.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
d. The principle of equality.
Under the principle of election, God wills His highest and His best for each believer.
Under the principle of predestination God has “provided a plan” for the believer to have that highest and best.
The divine provisions of God go back as far as the trees in the Garden.
Under the equality factor, way back in the garden of Eden, God provided every thing that mankind would ever need, including the free will to choose for His provisions or against what He has provided.
Being able to discern the difference between what is divine good and what is evil or what is right and what is wrong.
They realized that without the divine provisions of God, they were completely naked or in need of a covering from the divine provisions of God.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that which the original man and woman ate from while the tree of life was protected and denied by God.
Note that every believer starts with the same kind of faith but none of us end up that way.
It all depends upon the operation of the filling of the Spirit in our lives.
We all start out with an equal amount of faith and with equal privilege and equal opportunity.
In eternity past the sovereignty of God elected us to privilege but we have the freedom to accept or reject His way of doing things.
But in contrast;
Some succeed,
Some fail,
Some are winners,
Some are losers,
Some are under discipline,
Some are under the sin unto death.
It is through the righteousness, virtue, and integrity of our God and Savior, TLJC, that we attain everything.
Grace always depends on the character and nature of God and man being dependent upon that character and nature.
For the spiritual believer, grace must be multiplied.
That’s why it’s always:
JOH 1:17 - “grace and truth”
ROM 1:7 - “grace and peace”
EPH 2:8 - “grace and faith”
1TI 1:2 - “grace and mercy
2PE 3:18 - “grace and knowledge”
in knowledge
prepositional phrase
en plus instrumental noun epignosei =
by means of the epignosis knowledge or through the instrument of metabolized doctrine of God and of Jesus our Lord.
(through the true knowledge - dia tes epignoseos =
through the means of epignosis doctrine or metabolized doctrine)
Everything we need pertaining to life or spirituality comes from metabolized doctrine or divine power provided by God.
Everything that is good for the creature depends upon partaking of the fruit of the tree of life which only the Creator can provide not the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The tree of life represents dependency upon the life of another.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil is self-dependency. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is legitimate for God because He lives in self-dependency, but it is not the type of fruit for man.
The sign of their salvation is given as leather clothing; for the animals had to die to provide the skins for man.
The animals had to die to provide the skins, a picture of the work of our Lord on the cross.
The word for clothed is the hiphil stem of the verb labash which means God caused them to be clothed.
GEN 3:22, Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”
HEB 5:14, But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.
The tree of life represents God’s perfect happiness, and God’s perfect happiness perpetuated, and both were cut off so that they cannot exist in the human race without God.
The analogy is that in the same way we can destroy the happiness of spiritual maturity by negative volition to God’s plan.