Welcome to Study, Grow, Know, where we discuss theology, prophecy, and current political issues from a conservative biblical perspective. Here's your host, Dr. Fred DeRuvo. Imagine for a moment if neither Adam and Eve had ever sinned. Instead of being deceived by the tempter and giving in to that, they simply said no and went on with their life. They eventually ate of the tree of life and Satan went away. Having passed the test that God allowed, they cemented their relationship with God and also would have become sinless from that point onward. Eating from the tree of life would also have provided eternal life to them. But what would relationships in the world look like had Adam and Eve refused to be taken in by Old Slewfoot, the supreme liar himself? Well, in my opinion, 1 Corinthians 13 paints a beautiful picture of what people would be like had sin never entered the world. Quote, love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It isn't easily angered. It keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. Those are the verses 4 through 8 of 1 Corinthians 13. Do you know anyone who is defined by this definition of love provided by the Apostle Paul? I mean, who does it perfectly? I know some folks who are much closer to that definition living their lives than I am, and that includes my own wife. However, in general, there is no one who has ever lived or is alive now who lives that definition perfectly, except, of course, maybe one person. Would you agree? Let's break it down quickly again. Here's what love is, patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not proud, not rude, not self-seeking, not easily angered, doesn't keep track of wrongs, takes no pleasure in evil, rejoices only in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. 16 ingredients. Would you agree with me that not only is that an intensive list, but it is an impossible list to live 100% of the time? Well, if you disagree with my assessment, then maybe it's due to the fact that you're not fully comprehending the ramifications of all of it. Notice also that most of them are presented in the negative with the word not before them. How can anyone live all 16 things consistently without fail? Well, we can't, and neither could Adam and Eve once they fell. However, Before they fell, they were every bit the human 1.0 that God created them to be. I can imagine that their conversation prior to their fall was always loving, never rude, boastful, proud, self-seeking, et cetera. Their lifestyles emanated loving kindness, not only to one another, but to the world, to the animals. So in essence, God had created an earth and filled it with animals and the start of the human race with our two parents in order to watch it run perfectly with love guiding everything. The animals were created not for eating, but for Adam and Eve's enjoyment, as they would watch and gain insight from the animal kingdom. Plants and trees also were there for the first two human beings, as well as the animals. Everything worked in beautiful harmony up until the whole situation was completely ruined by the introduction of sin, embraced by two people who literally had everything, but it wasn't enough, they wanted more. Well, it turns out when Eve then Adam sinned, they actually fell from their own first estate. We know that the angels did this in Genesis 6, but here, Eve and Adam also fell from their first estate. We're all familiar with that. That's what sin is. It is a falling away from what God had originally made and intended them to be. In effect, both Adam and Eve became less than their originally created human 1.0. Okay, well, let's segue to Jesus, who is rightfully called the second Adam in Scripture, 1 Corinthians 15, 45. What do we have in him? What do we see? Well, we have another human being, 1.0, just like Adam and Eve were before they fell. According to Philippians 2, Jesus is the God-man. He clothed his deity with humanity, and because of his virgin birth, he was born without a sin nature. So he was human. 1.0. This Jesus, this human 1.0 in the flesh, after Adam and Eve, was and remains the perfect definition of 1 Corinthians 13, love. Jesus never failed at it, unlike us or our first parents or anybody else you know. There was never a time or a moment when Jesus was self-seeking, rude, proud, or arrogant, who took pleasure in evil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He never did any of those negatives. The life he lived, he lived perfectly in line with the absolute definition of love 100% of the time because he was and is love. Now when faced with temptation, he consistently refused to follow its dictates. Unlike our first parents, unlike us, he didn't need to receive quote-unquote salvation because he was, is salvation himself, being perfect in every way. Adam and Eve would not have needed salvation either had they rejected temptation as Jesus did. Instead, they embraced sin and they became something they weren't meant to become. Jesus, as human 1.0, never embraced temptation to sin, never fell away, and therefore always remained and remains today human 1.0. So what does this mean for us? Anything? Well, yeah, it means a great deal, actually. What it means initially is that God clearly wants every authentic Christian to be brought back to being human 1.0. That's really what salvation is all about, and I'm not trying to oversimplify it. Certainly salvation includes ultimately receiving a glorified body and a full removal of our sin nature when we leave this life, but the entire process we go through while living here in this life is one which is designed to bring us back to the human 1.0 that we unfortunately have never experienced or lived fully. Now, For a very long time, I've been caught up in wondering, what does God want me to do in life? And it usually has to do with a vocation. Does he want me in the pastorate? Should I be involved in some other capacity in a church setting? It's as though trying to figure out specifically what God wants me to accomplish by way of vocation is the most important thing in life. Well, guess what? It's not. The most important thing I can ever be focused on and hopefully accomplish with the empowering, by the way, of the indwelling Holy Spirit, not on my own strength, is to become the very fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 13, 4-8. Now that may seem overly simplistic, but it's really not. In fact, I have come to believe that much or most of the Holy Scriptures are designed to help us understand that the way we live With respect to God and others, empowered by His Holy Spirit is the most important thing we can ever do in this life. Now, of course, God has a plan that's unique to each of us. Paul mentioned this in, I think, 1 Corinthians 12. For some, He may guide them to become pastors. For others, He may guide them to become teachers, nurses, doctors, or bookkeepers. But regardless of a vocation, God may guide people into, there is something that He values far more than that, in my opinion. It is the way in which we live from the heart. Now, if we look squarely at the Sermon on the Mount, we come to a section in which we're told that we should, quote, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. unquote, known as the golden rule that's in Matthew 7, 12, Mark 12, 30-31, Luke 6-31. Christians can fulfill that law of love in two ways. We can do it either in our own effort, conjuring up the needed strength to love people, in spite of how we might not like some of them, or we can allow God to work in and through us to recreate or at least become a vessel through which His love flows to other people, unhindered. I see the unsaved trying to do this, and you might see it as well. You can see the effort. They do it because they think they should, and more often than not, they want to get something in return. They want accolades or to be noticed and appreciated in some way by other people. Jesus said that we should not let one hand know what the other's doing, Matthew 6, 3. and to go into our prayer closet to pray privately before God instead of standing on the street corner and praying out loud to God is a show of religiosity, Matthew 6, 5-6. The person who makes a big show, for instance, of giving a large donation to some organization is not doing that out of love. Likewise, the person who draws attention to themselves when they pray or involve themselves in good deeds is doing it for pats on the back, accolades. Neither of these things has anything to do with actual love, but self-centeredness. I'm quite certain it was not long after Eve and Adam fell that they began to pick at each other. They became short-tempered. They became impatient with each other. This was completely unknown to them before they fell. Imagine that. but it became part of their lives together after the fall. Now we also know that as society grew on this earth, so did wickedness to the point that God felt the need to destroy man and all the land animals. The only exceptions at the time were Noah and his family, a total of eight people, and most of the animals taken on the ark with them, except of course for those who would be used in sacrifice after Noah disembarked from the ark after the floods receded. But of course the problem is that what God did by starting over was that this time he began with people who were already sinners. What this meant was that eventually he would be forced to rain down judgment on the entire earth. This is what the coming tribulation is all about, as spoken of in Revelation, Daniel, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, Joel, numerous books, ending with the physical return of Jesus and the inauguration of his kingdom rule over the entire earth. So during that coming time, which we call the millennium, The earth, for the most part, will look and act like what it looked and acted like during Adam and Eve's day before sin entered to destroy things. Now, of course, it won't be perfect, like the Garden of Eden was, because the people who survived the tribulation and go into the millennium will continue to have a sin nature. This is the reason why Jesus will rule that period with a rod of iron. Psalm 2 9, Revelation 2 27. A rod of iron is the only thing that will keep the sin nature resident within people during that period in check, in spite of the fact that Satan will be sequestered in the bottomless pit for the duration of the millennial kingdom period, a thousand years. Now, though much of the world's population and the physical world itself is resolutely moving toward the coming judgment of the tribulation period of seven years, Christians are not. We are not moving towards God's wrath. Paul tells us that we will never experience God's wrath, 1 Thessalonians 5, 9. Though God can and does discipline his children from time to time, just as a good parent disciplines a son or daughter. So while this world and most of the people in it are consistently moving towards some form of God's judgment, God is dealing with Christians in a completely different way. For the authentic Christian, the real one, not the professing one, not the person who says they're a Christian but aren't really because they were raised around it. They have a Bible at home that proves that they're a Christian. They listen to Christian music, whatever. I'm talking about the authentic Christian who's had that transaction in their heart. God is recreating within us the image of his son, 1 Corinthians 15, 49. That doesn't happen in unsaved people. Well, that sounds good, but what does it mean? Well, usually when people talk about God recreating the image of his son, the talk usually becomes a bit ethereal or spiritual. Certainly there is an element of spirituality associated with that. But where the rubber meets the road, what does it come down to? I believe, as I've alluded to, it comes down to the perfect definition of 1 Corinthians 13, 4-8. The section on the very meaning of what love actually is from God's perspective. Jesus, God, is love and in him there is no darkness at all. 1st John 1 5. What this essentially means to me is that our salvation will include the creation of Jesus's character perfectly within us. which is exactly what Paul speaks of in his chapter on love that he wrote to the Corinthian believers. In essence then, it is not dependent on our vocation in life, though God certainly directs there. It is far more dependent on how we live, what emanates from within us to other people, Christians and non. So there are essentially two types of people in life, the unsaved and the saved. So the unsaved increasingly follow and embrace Satan and his rebellious attitude as they move deliberately further and further away from God. So in doing so, those people become less and less human, the opposite of what God originally intended humans to be. as they continue in their aberrant, wayward, rebellious style. It's truly a downward spiral away from God, as Paul highlights in Romans 1. Now, on the other hand, saved people are moving closer and closer to God with the result of becoming more and more genuinely human as God intended, as evidenced by our love for God, for Christians, and for the unsaved. This, my friend, is our purpose. And when we embrace this purpose, things begin to fall into place in our Christian walk. But here's the problem though. No matter how loving we become in this life, no matter how well God is able to recreate His Son's character within us, which is the epitome of love, we will continue to have the sin nature that is constantly trying to pull us away from God. And instead of being loving as God defines, wants to push us to become more self-centered, the opposite of love. The struggle then, is to draw near to God on a continual basis so that the flesh, the sin nature is overcome and ultimately ignored. We will never be perfect at it in this life. However, one day we will be free of our sin nature and we'll also have glorified bodies. We will at that point be the completed picture of being human 1.0, the very thing that God intended when he first created. So consider your life and ask yourself, am I more loving toward people in general today, based on 1 Corinthians 15, four to eight, than I was last week, last month, last year? Don't dwell on it, but simply use it to figure out if there has been growth in your life, change for the better, as far as God is concerned. we should be in the act of becoming more loving, more patient, less self-centered, less arrogant, increasingly rejoicing in truth, bearing all things, et cetera, et cetera. The 16 things that Paul mentions. Ultimately, salvation given to us by God based on the faith we exercise in Him is saving us from death on the negative side, but it is also bringing us back to the intended creation of God originally, human 1.0 on the positive side. We will eventually get there, but it is our job to assist, to help, to participate in what God is doing by submitting to Him and His will on a daily basis so that the characteristics of godly love will be shed abroad in our hearts. Romans 5.5. I'll have other articles on this upcoming based on the many examples given to us in scripture. So I hope you'll join me for those. And in the meantime, until we meet again, I pray that God will open your eyes to show you how blessed you are in him. You've been listening to Study, Grow, Know with Dr. Fred DeRuvo. Please join us each week for new broadcasts that deal with theology, prophecy, and political issues from a biblical, conservative perspective.