We are going to briefly return to our pasts and remember when we were preparing our lives, and we were thinking about what we wanted to do and what was going to be our picture-perfect life.
All of us have a family, and at some point we have thought about having family. Maybe not just with our parents, but we have thought about getting married, having children and living happily. Also some of us at some point have dreamt to finish school, start up a career, and have a great job, lots of money, a home or a car ... ALL OF US HAVE A DREAM!
We're going to leave "our dream" aside for a moment and we're going to think about the time when nothing existed. Before there were men, animals, or even nature. The time when only God existed - that is - Jehova (The Father, The Word, and the Holy Spirit).
Let's imagine God STRONG and POWERFUL, bigger than the universe itself, and all the planets and galaxies. Let's imagine God with all his power, being able to do whatever the heck he wanted, when he wanted ... being able to create whatever he wanted and for whatever purpose he wanted it for. Let's imagine God with thousands upon thousands of angels and archangels at his fingertips, ready to serve him, worship him, and praise him forever.
But one day an idea occurs to him, and he decides to come to the world. To THIS world! The Bible says that it was unorganized and empty, and he organized it. And during 5 days he made an amazing work of art and did something so spectacular that only the mind of God could create. He created a sky, water, nature, animals, the sun, the moon, the starts, and he gave all of it an order. The Bible says that ALL was perfect and good.
Parenthesis:
You know something? Even though the earth we see today is very beautiful and majestic with huge mountains of every color, valleys, oceans, rivers, and gorgeous nature ... what we see today is in no way comparable to what God created the very first time. You know why? Because when Adam sinned, the earth was cursed and since that day the animals became carnivores and began to eat each other, and many species began to disappear. But in spite of all this, several hundreds of years after man's sin, there was a flood. The entire earth was flooded and drowned, and all of God's nature was ruined. So everything we see today, in spite of its beauty, is just a small mark - a scar - of what was originally in the creation.
(End of Parenthesis)
But returning to the initial creation, a question comes to mind: Why did God do all this? He didn't create the world for himself. He didn't create it just to enjoy it. He definitely didn't create it to live in it! He already had the entire universe. So why did God create the world and make such a beautiful masterpiece of it?
And it is here where everything stops and we arrive at the sixth day of creation. It was GOD'S idea to create man!!
Okay ... man. But why man?
And here is where we find the BIG, All Powerful God. He who has everything, who can do anything, also has a necessity. He wants to have a family. He wants to have a son. God doesn't have a family. He was with the Word, and the Holy Spirit. But they were one. He had angels but they just served him.
God invented the word "family" and decided to create a son. But he didn't want a son that was also God, because his son wouldn't be able to depend on him as a Father. But he also didn't want a son like an angel because he didn't want someone who HAD to be his son without choosing whether he wanted to or not. So he decided to create a human. A being that was perfect without being God. A being with human needs, but someone who could see God not just as God, but as his Father, and a man who could love God voluntarily. And he created him - Adam - from the dirt in the ground with his own hands and gave him life out of his own breath. In creating this, God made the best work of art yet that he had ever made. He gave Adam his own image and similarity so that he would look like him - in other words - he gave Adam his heart so that he could love like his Father loves. And in order to make Adam totally free and give him the opportunity to decide if he wanted to be his son or not, he put a tree in the middle of the garden. Just one tree. Just enough to give him the ability to decide if he would voluntarily love God or not.
And God, apart from that, he gave Adam absolutely everything he wanted. ALL OF CREATION was made just for his son, he gave him everything, he gave him life. Everything was at Adam's fingertips just for his pure enjoyment. He gave him the authority over all creation. He even gave Adam a job so that he would be entertained and could enjoy it (the job was to give each animal a name). Adam didn't even have to go looking for the animals; God brought them to him. God brought everything Adam needed to him and Adam could see how much God loved him. Everything God did, he did thinking about Adam. When Adam felt alone, God made a woman from Adam`s own body to be his wife.
God gave Adam all he wanted and needed, God LIVED for his son!! He took care of him, walked with him, talked with him personally like a Father to a son, and he shared with him. But on top of all this, God gave Adam freedom. He created Adam to be his son, so that he would love him. But he also gave him the possibility to choose to do what he wanted - the ability to create his own dreams and live them. God gave him the ability to choose if he wanted to continue being God's son or not.
Here we find something really interesting. Adam - having absolutely everything - decided not to be God's son, and he chose to do the one thing that God told him not to do or else he would die. He ate, he sinned, and he died.
By eating the forbidden fruit, several things happened to Adam. First, he sold the relationship he had with God and died spiritually. In other words, he became separated from God because of the sin that entered in him and he lost the perfect heart that God gave him. Secondly, he began to age and whither away physically until the day he died at the age of 930.
It is here where we see almost entirely what it is that drives God’s love.
Think for a moment that you create a little clay figurine, and you have the ability to give this doll life. So you do. You created it so that it would love you and live its life to please you. But one day this doll decides to begin treating you horrible and it decides to forget about you. What would you do with this doll? You would probably destroy it and maybe create another one.
But here we see that no matter how powerful God was, and how able he was to destroy the world, Adam with it, and create a new one, he didn’t! Instead he continued loving his son Adam even after he sinned. It hurt God immensely that his son was lost because of his own poor decisions and so he decided to give Adam another opportunity. He decided to completely forgive Adam of his sins and redeem the relationship that Adam lost, on the condition that Adam recognized what he did and confessed his sin.
But Adam didn’t want to. So what happened??
Well, God came to walk and talk with his son, but he knew that his son had done something wrong and didn’t want to be his son anymore. So he starts to look for Adam and says “where are you?”, and Adam comes out from hiding and says “I am hiding here because I am naked.” God finds out what Adam has eaten and, because he doesn’t want to entirely lose his son, he gives him another opportunity to tell him what happened in order to be able to forgive him. He asks him, “Who told you that you were naked?” God needed Adam to confess what happened so he could be forgiven. But Adam didn’t want to and so he let his new sinful heart start to bear its first fruits. He responded: “The woman that you gave me offered me a bite of the fruit.” WOW!! Adam doesn’t only reject the opportunity that God was giving him to repent, but he actually blames GOD for his sin, telling him that it was because of the woman God gave him! He also didn’t respond to the question that God asked him in the first place, but instead he used excuses and blamed the CREATOR! Imagine how God must have felt in this moment!! But what did God do? God decided to give an opportunity to the woman - Eve. He asked her, “Woman, what have you done?” With this question God was giving the woman the opportunity to confess the bad that she had done and to repent. But no ... the woman didn’t want to either because just as the woman was taken from the flesh of Adam, the sinful heart passed also to her. She decided to do just as her husband did. She let her new sinful heart give its first fruit and she responded: “The serpent deceived me and because of him I ate the fruit...”
In the same way that her husband decided to use excuses and to not accept the bad he had done, they both decided to say to God: “WE DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR CHILDREN!”
Put yourself in the place of Adam or Eve and tell me: how would you have responded? Would you have confessed your sin? Would you have received the opportunity that God gave you to repent? Maybe yes, maybe no, but ask yourselves this: What do we do in today’s day and age when we sin? We hide from God. And what do we do when he asks us what we have done? We make excuses, right?
Now put yourself in God’s place. What would you have done? Personally, I would have probably destroyed them and created others, and perhaps even created a completely different world.
But what did God do?
And we see his love yet again. He says to them: “Adam, you are no longer my son but I am not going to destroy you. Rather I am going to let you continue to live.” And so the first sacrifice in history is made. God kills one of his own animals so that it pays for the sin of man and Adam and Eve do not have to die instantly. They are taken out of the Garden of Eden and he tells him: “Now you have to pay for the consequences of what you have done, and you will have to work for your food, and the woman will suffer and bear great pain giving birth, and the land will be cursed because of you. And so the animals all began to eat each other and the days began to be worse and worse. Natural catastrophes began to occur. Even though they chose not to be children of God, God did not kill them, but rather with the animal sacrifice he gave them another chance at physical life. But the problem is that when Adam died physically, he would go to a place that wasn’t created for him, but for the Devil and his angels. This place is hell. And this is what is known as the third death (eternal death). Because only two places exist where man can be when he dies physically; one is heaven, but it’s just for children of God and the other is hell and is for everyone who wasn’t a child of God when they died.
And we see some very interesting facts in chapter 5 of Genesis. Let’s read just the first 3 verses.
God created man in his image (in other words, with his heart), but after Adam sinned and that heart was replaced with a sinful heart, he lost the ability to pass on a clean heart to his children. So he passed on to all his descendants not God’s nature, but his own. A sinful heart and nature. The sinful heart has the same disadvantages that Adam experienced: spiritual death, a body that some day will die and the huge possibility that it will die eternally ...
From here we see ourselves. We can see this more clearly in chapter 5 of Romans and in various parts of the New Testament.
But let's come back quickly to God and think, What happened with God's dream? God wasn't going to let his dream die because of a human, so - seeing that Adam and Eve didn't want to take God up on the opportunity he was giving them - God immediately found a solution to the problem by giving Adam and all his descendants the possibility to repent and be born again. But of course, it was no longer enough to simply repent. It was also necessary to pay for every sin that every human had committed and were going to commit in the future. This means every human who sinned was going to have eternal death. But if every sinful human died an eternal death, God's dream would still not come true! God needed a human just like Adam to pay for all of this, but he needed to be a man that was not guilty of a single thing, just like Adam before he sinned, in order to pay for this. In other words, God needed a SON OF GOD. So, God gave the following promise:
God says: "I am going to create another son, but this son is not going to come from a man because if he does, the sinful heart will be transmitted from one unto another. Rather, my son will come from only a woman and he will not have anything to do with the bad. Instead of having just one tree to choose between good or evil, he will have many many many trees constantly throughout his life. But he will not fail where Adam failed. He will be perfect throughout the entirety of his life, and then he will die.
THE ANSWER TO GOD'S DREAM IS JESUS
So while Jesus came, the descendants of Adam who wanted to be saved had to believe in the Messiah and follow a series of commandments.
And who was this new son of God?
He was the same as Adam, with the same ability to mess up and sin, but he had many more temptations than Adam had. Jesus didn't have just one tree to tempt him, but thousands upon thousands constantly tempting him to eat the fruit and sin.
But unlike Adam, Jesus did it. Not only did he not sin even though he was tempted in every way, but he was able to pay for absolutely all the sins every person in the history of mankind ever committed. And he did not only pay for the sins with physical suffering and death on a cross, but also in Hades. Why was he able to do it? What was he thinking to be able to reach that goal?
And it's not like sometimes how we think maybe he did it for us because he loved us. No, this wasn't the main reason for why he was able to reach the goal that today we call "salvation".
And if we take a look at one of the last prayers in the garden, we find that Jesus didn't even want to die, we find that Jesus didn't want all of this to happen. But he wanted his father to be happy, and he wanted his Fathers dream to be fulfilled. Because of this he did it.
Do you believe that Jesus never fell in love with a woman? Do you believe that he never even liked a woman? Do you believe that he never thought about having his own family like we do? Maybe be a father, have children ...
Do you believe that he only wanted to live 33 years?
Jesus had his dreams as well. Jesus was a man like us and probably had the same dreams that we have today amongst ourselves. A family, comfort, a car, a house, etc. But he knew that those dreams of his did not come close to comparing with God's dream and he knew that it was much more valuable to see his Father smile because his dream had been completed. So he decided to die voluntarily and pay everything right up until the very last consequence so that his Father's dream would be fulfilled and completed.
And Jesus was the only person that I know until now that has lived his entire life not to fulfill his own dreams, but those of his Father, just to see his Father happy. The Bible shows us how Jesus was 100% obsessed with his Father and his happiness. No matter what city or town he was in, he always went saying "my Father, my Father, my Father, my Father". Every time that he spoke, he mentioned his Father: "my Father says this, my Father likes this, my Father wants this" etc. He just wanted his Father's happiness. Jesus's favorite person was his Father. He lived every second of his life for him.
Scientists say that the earth is approximately 6 000 000 000 years old. And if that is true we know that since the sixth day there has been man on the earth. That would mean that God has been waiting about 6 000 000 000 years for his dream to come true, but he is not going to wait for ever. What's more, the prophets tell us that these are the last times whether the end is this week, this year, or today itself. Today we are alive and God is giving us the opportunity to decide and do what Adam didn't do. Today.
Let's not wait for something to happen. Maybe this will be the last opportunity. Jesus already paid for everything; the debt is paid, we just have to receive this gift.
God has a dream and he is waiting for you. He is searching for you and he wants that YOU are part of his family. Don't wait until tomorrow, decide today if you want to be part of God's family or not. He is a gentleman and will respect your decision.
By Andrés Vargas
Translated by Jessica Foucher
Have you ever searched for the kingdom of God and his righteousness? How much time do you spend each day searching for the kingdom of God and his righteousness (having in mind that it doesn't mean praying, or fasting, or congregating, or even less doing “good things”)? How much time do you spend each day searching to know God and Jesus better? In other words, knowing them personally, like you come to know any other person.
