The ultimate power on this earth is the power to remain focused on the moral demands of the Spirit Realm. It’s not even a question of the ability to act on such a focus, but merely to keep that focus as an eternal commitment that carries you beyond this life. The power to so act some portion of the time is a gift from Heaven.
As part of the Curse of the Fall, we bear within ourselves a weakness the hinders perfection in our use of that power. There is a sense in which it’s typical to look back and see places where we came up short. Confession that the fault is ours is a critical element in keeping ourselves in the grip of that power. We should never be surprised when we fail, and never surprised when that power overcomes our failures. The interplay between these two is a tense drama that becomes our normal here in this world.
Thus, the Blood of Christ releases us from the ultimate claims of the Curse of the Fall, and we find some varied measure of that release demonstrated here. We rejoice in the potential while longing for the final redemption that takes us out of this shadowy existence into the full light of divine clarity. For some limited time, He keeps us here and we cannot possibly grasp while here the full reason for it. What we can grasp is the utter necessity of wading through this Vale of Sorrow with an eye for ways to glorify Him.
We don’t fight the Curse itself, but we fight whatever it is within us that belongs to the Curse. The Curse remains a part of our existence here because this existence itself is accursed. There will never be a Heaven on earth in any concrete sense; only in the symbolism of our redeemed awareness. The earth itself is not fallen, but we are. We are born under a forfeit to Satan’s dominion over a Creation we were meant to manage for God’s glory. Our fallen presence is how Satan exercises his dominion here where he is confined. We quickly run out of room to explain it in human language; our minds cannot bear the load of such truth because they remain partially under the Curse.
Even the pronouncement of the Curse in Genesis 3 is full of symbols because it is written in Heaven. It characterizes our moral reality while we live in this form here below. The Curse marks a powerful distinction between male and female. This isn’t how it should be for us, but redemption is certainly not found in denying the Curse nor demanding that such distinction be removed. The distinction is a part of the conditions we accept in the challenge to bring Him glory until the final, ultimate moment of eternal glory. A critical element in revelation is both the symbolism which puts the ultimate truth within our moral reach, and the necessity of understanding that we are limited and must reach, indeed.
Throughout human history, beginning very close to the exit from Eden through which humans were expelled, humans have sought to argue with God. The Fall itself was a dispute with God, a decision to usurp the authority God said did not belong to us. Our fundamental fallen nature rests on the native inclination to insist that we are capable of defining what is good and right, that our human reason and understanding is sufficient to discern ultimate truth without having to rest on God’s living communion with us. And a critical element in this endless dispute our fallen nature has with God is a rejection of the natural moral order imposed by His revelation on the distinction between male and female.
Whatever it ought to have been, we bear the responsibility for not keeping it there. In the very act of eating the forbidden fruit, we have passed judgment on God’s declared order of how the sexes are to relate. We are born rebelling against what is in our best interest because we imagine that we could come up with a better way of doing things. We are telling God that if this is what He put into place, He certainly could have done a better job and we proceed to tell Him what’s wrong with His plan by acting contrary to that plan. So a part of the Curse is that things will never be perfect in how the male and female relate while here in this world.
The best we can hope for is still pretty messy. There is a sense in which we cannot possibly live long enough to shed enough of our fallen nature to ever get it quite right. Even if we could get it right, it would never feel quite right. We can strive for perfection, but we have to learn to live with optimal, and optimal includes a certain amount of tension.
(Yes, the title of this post is a pun.)
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Well put, curiously enough I was thinking along the lines of the first four paragraphs this morning. That happens quite often, I think about something then you just happen to write about it in a form that clarifies my thinking. Mysterious ways.
This is a sample of virtual fellowship. Our Lord is at work.