A NEW CREATION: DEFINING THE NEW BIRTH [Part 3]

In Part 1 of this series I referenced Adam and Eve, their original perfect life and later fall, and the future hope that all things would be made new again…

Imagine Adam making the fruitless attempt at trying to be what he once was after his fall into sin. From his new location out in the harrowing badlands of the wild, wild world, far from home and his former close walk with God, he knew he could never return to the Garden because his entire nature had changed (for the worse)—he was no longer a spiritual man. He was no longer comprised of body, soul, and spirit but only body and soul. Why? Because his spirit had died just as God said would happen if Adam chose incorrectly:

Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” [Genesis 2:15-17]

He was thus destined to spend the rest of his life on earth in a far lesser state and condition a far cry from the blessed paradise he and Eve had dwelt in before. How many times they must have looked back and pined away in brokenness and pain at what could never be again. Yet even with such an inherent never-ending sadness they still maintained a rebellious attitude of heart. They ended up spending 130 years in this condition, the number itself revealing it clearly.

You see, the number 13 is the Biblical number of rebellion and the number 10 is the Biblical number of ordinal perfection. This meant the full order of rebellion had to be lived out within them until it at last died out. Once it did the two fallen ones returned to God:

When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters. So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died. [Genesis 5:3-5]

One will note that Adam lived an exact 800 years after getting right with God. Of course, the Biblical number of resurrection, regeneration, and new beginnings is the number 8. And here we also have not just a 10 but a 10 times 10 or ordinal perfection times ordinal perfection proving to all that God saw his son Adam in perfect order again and also raised up again. However, this would not be a return to the bliss of the Garden but an ongoing remaining in the wild world hinterlands subjected to all the challenges thereof yet with a new found hope and restoration with the Lord. Was Adam’s spirit resurrected? Likely not. But his attitude changed for the better and God greatly blessed him for it. Rest assured, his final 800 years were far better than the preceding 130. The greatest proof of this big change was that the Lord blessed Adam and Eve with a new son, one like unto Abel. In fact, Seth was a replacement for Abel. His very name is defined as “compensation.”

One might also note that the death of righteous Abel by the evil Cain severed the Messianic generational line which meant the hope of the future Messiah was lost. For 130 years Adam and Eve were without this hope until they finally overcame their rebellion and surrendered to God. Nothing could be done until they made this monumental decision.

It is why every human being also must make the same decision because it is the only possible way out of the otherwise eternal bondage of sin and one’s deference to an inherent sin nature. It is why the Lord taught that no one can ever be truly righteous in His sight through any attempt at changing for the better while remaining in the flesh with a sinful fleshly fallen nature, which, incidentally, is exactly what religion foists upon people and what religious people strive to accomplish, especially within the realm of Christianity. They do this either because they are ignorant of real repentance or rebel against it, or likewise ignorant of the actual new birth or rebel against it. Maybe both.

In Adam’s case, once he ended his 130 years of self-imposed hard-hearted rebellion against his Maker, it opened the door for God to act and restore future hope by blessing them with a brand new son whose distant descendant would save us all with the hope of a new spiritual birth:

Adam had relations with his wife again; and she gave birth to a son, and named him Seth, for, she said, “God has appointed me another offspring in place of Abel, for Cain killed him.” To Seth, to him also a son was born; and he called his name Enosh. Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord. [Genesis 4:25-26]

THE EARNEST OF OUR INHERITANCE

In our modern parlance it is called a down payment. When one makes a major purchase but cannot afford the total purchase price, the lender will accept a relatively sizable payment up front as a pledge that one will pay off the rest of the price over time. Down payments vary from less than five percent to five-ten percent or maybe more depending on the type of loan and other conditions. The lender knows that one who pays a large amount down will do everything possible to protect that investment which makes the lender feel comfortable about future monthly payments. Nevertheless, if one fails to make consistent payments or stops making payments, the lender, who remains the rightful owner, has the contractual right to take possession over the whole of whatever was financed and the borrower loses his entire investment to that point.

Regarding the Lord God, He has done exactly the same in the spiritual realm. In the following passage Paul explains how this works:

…which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession… [Ephesians 1:14 KJV]

In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory. [Ephesians 1:11-14]

In this extremely significant passage of Scripture, the apostle Paul states that the Lord has given to His followers a sample of heaven, or an exemplification in our natural world of the holy spiritual world He dwells in, or as Paul stated earlier in the chapter, that which is akin to a spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (v3). The greatest of these blessings is His own Holy Spirit which He gives to dwell within His followers.

His indwelling presence, for those who actually receive Him, is as a pledge or down payment of the totality of heaven yet to come for those who will be blessed to dwell there.

Now, it should be rightfully ascertained that the giving of God’s Holy Spirit is a very, very, very great thing. It must be an enormously blessed event. It must have very powerful life-changing beneficial repercussions. Keep in mind, Paul says this is a taste of heaven. His Holy Spirit is like nothing of this earth or anything anyone can drum up emotionally or even by intellectual consent. It is thus a spiritual EVENT. There is no possible way such a thing can happen in a corner, so to speak, or “by faith,” or somehow somewhere along the way as if one receives the Holy Spirit of God by osmosis, that is, without conscious awareness or by an effortless unconscious assimilation. Such a thing is absolutely not Scriptural and can in no way be represented as “the earnest of our inheritance.”

DEFINING THE NEW BIRTH

And for all those Christians who reject the written Word of God or portions of it, or skip over the Book of Acts and go straight from the Gospels to the Epistles, they have largely deceived themselves into identifying with the Spirit-filled Christians Paul was writing to though never actually being Spirit-filled themselves. For proper New Testament reference, therefore, and to define what the New Birth actually entails, it is all set forth in the following passage which is confirmed by several additional passages in the Book of Acts:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance. [Acts 2:1-4][1]