Regaining Our Original Holiness

Regaining Our Original Holiness

In the first part of this chapter, I want to deal with a topic that has often been the cause of controversy among Christians. The basic question is, How can God be all love and goodness to His creatures, when the Scriptures also say that He hardened the heart of Pharaoh (Exodus 9:12), and that both good and evil comes from Him? (Job 2:10). "Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth" (Romans 9:18). God says, "I form the light, and create darkness" (Isaiah 45:7).

Why do we have so much difficulty reconciling such contrary things that are said about God? We know that He wills life and goodness, and yet evil and death are said to come from His as well. (Micah 1:12). Our difficulties with this arise when with our finite minds we try to consider the operations of God, or when we try to understand the contrary things as if they were said about anyone but God. The operations of God are vastly different from anything that can be done by human beings, and the only relation that His operations have to His creatures is the fact that He created them.

This, and this alone, is the working of the Deity in heaven and on earth. Through all eternity, nothing comes from Him or is done by Him in His creatures except an essential manifestation of Himself in them, which restores the glory and perfection of their first existence. He can be nothing else toward the creature besides the same love and goodness that He was at the Creation. Therefore, to the creature who turns from Him, God can be nothing else but the cause of its evil and miserable state. This is why the apostle wrote, "I had not know sin, but by the law ... for without the law sin was dead" (Romans 7:7-8). To clarify, sin comes by the law, because where there is no law, there is no transgression.

Now, the divine nature in man is the one great law of God from which all that is good and all that is evil in man has its whole state and nature. The life of a man can have no holiness or goodness in it unless the divine nature within him is the law by which he lives. He can commit no other sin, nor feel any kind of hurt or evil from it, except what comes from resisting or rebelling against the godliness that is in him. Therefore, the good and evil of man are equally from God.

And yet, this could not be so if God's love and goodness could change. What is He did not have only one will and work of love and goodness toward all His creation? The law is immutably righteous, holy, and good (Romans 7:12), and has only one will and one work toward man, whether he receives good or evil from it. The law is righteous and holy  because it never changes its good will and work toward man. Man, however, changes in his obedience to it. This is how God can truly say these two contrary things, "I cause good" and "I cause evil," without the least contradiction.

On the same basis, it must be said that happiness and misery, life and death, tenderness and hardness of heart, are also from God.

This is the one true key to the state of man before his fall, to his state after his fall,and to the whole nature of his redemption. All three of these states were, in a few words of our Saviour, set forth in the clearest and strongest light. John 15:5 describes man's state before the Fall: "I am the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit." This was man's first created state of glory and perfection; it consisted of living and abiding in God, communing with Him and having life from Him, just as the branch has its life in and from the vine.

Man's redeemed state is summed up in the following words: "I am that bread of life ... which cometh down from heaven" (John 6:48, 50): "he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever" (v. 58); "whoso eateth my flesh, and drink my blood, hath eternal life...[he] dwelleth in me, and I in him" (vv. 54, 56).

This is our whole redemption; it consists only of having the full life of God, or Christ reborn in us. In this way, our first perfection, our miserable fall, and our blessed redemption have all their glory or all their misery solely from God. God alone is all that is good, and He can be nothing else but good toward the creature who is in Him. Whether angel or man, a created being can only be happy when it has this one God of goodness truly living and operating in it. Otherwise, it is miserable.

So many things that come under the name of religion are immediately cut off by this! The only thing that brings life, happiness, and glory is the operation of the triune God of love and goodness within us. Death, evil, and misery come when we turn from this essential God of our lives, to something in ourselves or in the people around us. He is deluded who thinks that anything but the body, the blood, and the Spirit of Christ can make him into a new creature and be his atonement, his reconciliation, and his union with God. Only when Christ has made him into a new creature is he that first man whom God created, in whom He can be well pleased. But until then, he is a man whom the cherubim's two-edged flaming sword will not allow to enter into paradise.

The Life of God Revealed in Us

How, then, are we to regain that first birth of Christ? We are to regain it in just the same way as Adam first obtained it. How was that? How did he help promote God's creating power? He did nothing out of his own power. Restoring the first life that we had in God is exactly the same work as God creating us in the beginning. Therefore, we can have no more share of power in the one than in the other. As creatures fallen from God, our only responsibility with regard to our growth in God is not to resist what God is doing toward creating us anew.

All that God is doing toward the new creation of our souls had its beginning before the foundation of the world. Paul said, "He hath chosen us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4). This is the same as saying that God, out of His great mercy, chose to preserve a seed of the Word and Spirit of God in fallen man, and that, through the meditation of a God incarnate, the seed would revive into the fullness of stature in Christ Jesus in which Adam was originally created. This work of God toward a new creation is according to the same essential operation of God in us that first created us in His image and likeness. Therefore, man's sole duty is to yield himself up to it and not resist it.

Who are these people who resist being reborn? They are all who do not deny themselves, take up their crosses daily, and follow Christ. For everything besides this is the flesh warring against the spirit. The natural man resists all the essential operation of God that would recreate him in Christ Jesus. But the natural man is not the only one who resists the work of God. The believer also resists it when he takes anything to be the truth of piety, devotion, or religious worship, except faith, hope, trust, and dependence upon only what the all-creating Word and all-sanctifying Spirit of God work in his soul.

If you want to know how you are to understand this essential operation of the triune, holy Deity in your soul, and why nothing else can be the grace or help of God that brings salvation,consider the following analogy. The light and air of this world are universal powers that are essential to the life of all the creatures of this world. They are essential because the creature cannot see until light makes contact with it, and it cannot live until air is flowing through its lungs. Again, both the light and the air are universal powers, and the creature's light and air must come from these powers.

It is the same with the operation of the triune God in the life of all godly creatures, whether men or angels. The light and the Holy Spirit of God are universal powers, essential to the birth of a godly life in the creature. The rebirth of a divine life in the creature can begin no sooner than the Word and Spirit of God are reborn in the creature. Nor can the divine life survive any longer than it is united with and under the continual operation of that Word and Spirit. Hence, it is truly said that spiritual life and spiritual death, spiritual good and spiritual evil, happiness and misery, are from God, solely because there is no good except in God, and the only operation of God in and to the creature is that of heavenly life, light, love, and goodness.

Man, who was created in the image and likeness of God to be a habitation and manifestation of the triune God of goodness, had turned from his holy state of life in God because of the perverseness of a false will. He was therefore dead to the blessed union and essential operation of God in his soul. However, the goodness of God toward man did not alter, but it stood in the same goodwill toward man as at the first. Toward the whole human race, God willed that every individual might be saved from the state of death and misery into which he had fallen.

God's Providence Toward His People

From this unchangeable and unceasing love of God toward man, a wonderful demonstration of providences came forth. God used a variety of means and dispensations - visions, voices, and messages from heaven; laws, prophecies,and promises - all adapted to the different states, conditions, and ages of the fallen world. He did this so that every art of divine wisdom and every act of love could break man away from his earthly delusion and produce in him a sense of his lost glory. Then, man would be capable of experiencing again that blessed, essential operation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in his soul, which was the glory of his first creation.

In this demonstration of divine and redeeming providence, God had to deal with poor, blind, earthly creatures who had lost all sense of heavenly things. Even so, the wisdom of God must often humanize itself, as it were, and God must condescend to speak of Himself after the manner of men. He must speak of His eyes, His ears, His hands, His nose, and so on, because the earthly creature, the mere natural man, could in no other way be brought to an awareness of what God is to him.

But now, all these actions of Providence were only for the sake of something higher - the salvation of man and his reunion with God through Christ. Meanwhile, the mystery of God in man, and man in God, still lay hidden. Pentecost was the only thing that took away all the veils and showed the kingdom of God as it was in itself. It set man again under the direct, essential operation of God, which had given birth to a holy Adam in Paradise. Types and shadows ended because the substance of them was found. The cloven tongues of fire put an end to them by opening the spiritual eyes that Adam had closed up, by unstopping the spiritual ears that he had filled with clay, and by making his dumb sons to speak with new tongues.

And what did they say when they spoke with new tongues? They said that all old things are gone, that a new heaven and a new earth are coming forth, and that God Himself has been manifested in the flesh of men, who are not all taught by God Himself. And what are they taught? The same thing that Adam was taught in his first created life in God, namely, that the direct essential operation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is henceforth the birth-right of all who become true disciples of Christ. And so, the old creation and the fall of man ended, because God was manifested in the flesh, dying in and for the world and coming again in the Spirit, to be the life and light of all the sons of Adam.

~William Law~

(The End)