Tuesday, October 19, 2004

What Kind of a Nature Do You Have?

Much of Christianity has been missing the point concerning "human nature". Even knowing that we are new creatures in Christ with a new nature, we often mistakenly think we have an old, scarred nature – we sometimes call it "the flesh" – which persists in being like an albatross around our neck, a constant rival distracting our attention and stumbling us in our walk. We think it is precisely that which made Paul cry out, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Was he wretched, yet a redeemed child of God?
It seems many Christians believe we acquired an old nature through the Fall, and now have a new nature in Christ, and the two remain deadly rivals, battling together, a struggle from which we are never free in this life – the old man-new man syndrome. And the best we can hope for is a means of the new counteracting the old; and yet with a sense that the old always remains in us, though we belong to Christ. It remains as a deadly element which Jeremiah calls "the heart deceitful above all things and desperately wicked."
Now understand that by "nature" I am not now meaning our natural faculties and capacities of body and soul. Our "nature", in that sense, means the type of characteristics we are wired with by God which are expressed through our soul and body. We may say someone has a kind nature or a harsh nature, a sensitive nature or an unfeeling nature, and so on. The nature I am speaking of goes much deeper than that. It is the true deep down personality of the person.

Two Views of Two Natures

The church seems divided between two convictions concerning these natures. Each persuasion is antagonistic to the other. One, by far the largest, maintains that we have two natures when redeemed; and we must live with that fact, battling away against the old nature as it seems in Romans 7, and affirming that there is a deliverance in Romans 8 which we must daily apply to relieve us from the pressures of the two nature battle of 7!
The other section of the body of believers is strong, persistent, and stoutly convinced that theirs is the truth – though they are in the minority in the whole company of believers and often are considered dangerous or suspect. They are given the general title of "holiness people". They use such terms as "entire sanctification", "perfect love", "full salvation", and are usually considered to be followers of the sanctification teaching that was reestablished in the church through John and Charles Wesley and John Fletcher. Their sincere conviction is that after the first stage of our new birth, which centers in justification, we must have a second radical experience of the fullness of salvation in Christ by what is often called the "baptism of the Spirit" which will bring about the elimination of the old man and his total replacement by the new man with a "heart purified by faith" – and that becomes the full application of our salvation and identification with Christ in His death and resurrection.
Both say we have a human nature. One maintains that our old nature corrupted by the Fall is supplanted by a new nature in Christ, but that the old remains – so that our new way of living is by recognizing the two within, but the new has the power to counteract the old. The other agrees that we all start with a human nature which has been corrupted through the Fall, but holds that the new nature of Christ comes in its totality by a second work of grace, the baptism of the Spirit, which then totally replaces the old nature.
But I am saying that the true revelation of the Bible is that WE HUMANS HAVE NO NATURE! We're not created to HAVE a deep down intrinsic nature, but to be containers of a "deity nature", a divine nature, and we humans can only truly express the nature of the one within us. All the Bible symbols of our humanity are those of being containers and expressers of one who is not ourselves, but is a god. All that matters is, WHICH GOD?

Biblical Illustrations

The illustrations used of us in our humanity are vessels, branches, body members, slaves, wives, temples. In every case that means we are the agent by which the occupant operates.
As vessels, we are said to be either "vessels of wrath" or "vessels of mercy", but we must be either one or the other. The vessel of wrath, of course, is a container of the god by whom we experience wrath; and the vessel of mercy of Him by whom we receive mercy (Rom. 9:22-23). So it is not the type of vessel that is of importance, but the nature of the contents.
The branch illustration is even more explicit, for a branch is but part of a vine, the two being in life-union. A branch is merely the living means by which a vine reproduces itself in its fruit. A branch has no distinct nature; it has the nature of its vine. The fruit is of the vine, not of the branch. And when Jesus said, "I am the true vine and you are the branches," He was obviously implying that there is also a false vine producing its fruit.
We are called temples, and the temple was only the outer means by which the living God manifested His presence. Thus the Glory of God shone through the tabernacle; and His glory is seen in us as His temples. In every place, a temple is only the dwelling place of a deity and reveals his presence, not its own. We are either a temple that contains an idol god, or one in which the living God dwells and walks. A temple has no nature but that of the god in it.
We are called married wives, and Paul distinctly says we all in the human race are married to the one husband or the other. According to Romans 7, the moment we recognize that in Christ's death we are cut off from our old husband, Satan, then we are immediately united in a new marriage to Christ who is risen from the dead. No momentary gap between the marriages! And the point is that here he is speaking of marriage in what we might call a biological sense: the wife receives the seed of the husband and bears his children, whether "the motions of sin" or "fruit unto God." The wife is presented as merely the fruit bearer, not the fruit producer.
Then Paul, in Romans 6:16-23, calls us slaves (as it is in the Greek) and says all of us all the time are either slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness – slaves of Satan or slaves of Christ. But slaves are merely the property of their owners, with no kind of a life of their own and doing only the work of their owner.
Finally, we are members of the body of Christ, and any body operates by the mind and will of the head, and nothing else. It has no body-led activity of its own.
So in each case the human is only the agent – as temple, manifesting the presence of the deity; as branch, expressing the nature and producing the fruit of the vine; as body member, set in action by the head; as slave, doing the will of the owner; as wife, bearing the children of the husband; and as vessel, only a container and nothing else.

One Nature At a Time

We must become alerted to Jesus' words as He confronted those opposing Him, as recorded in John 8:38-44. "I speak what I have seen with My Father; and you do what you have seen with your father," stated Jesus. As religious Jews they resented that, and indignantly responded, "We're not born of fornication. We have one Father, God." Jesus answered, "If God were your Father, you would love Me." Then He broke the truth wide open and declared outright, "You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do." The second phrase should especially strike us: "…the lusts of your father you will do." Not that we are doing our own lusts, but the lusts of our father. Then all we are doing as humans is not a product of some supposed HUMAN fallen nature, but actually SATAN himself expressing his own lusting nature by us! All we are, therefore, is merely the outer expression of this spirit of error, this god of this world, living his own Satan-lifestyle by our humanity. That is revolutionary to many of us. I had always thought I was fulfilling my own natural desires; but not so, because we have no nature of our own. We have all been fulfilling the lusts of the god of self-centeredness before our conversion and new birth, and what we thought were just OUR sins are ours only in the sense that we were joined to the nature of Satan as branch to false vine, expressing his thoughts and deeds. So when the Bible says "All have sinned," the real inner truth is that the sinner is Satan, and we in a secondary sense are participating in his sinning.
Examine 1 John 3:12 closely, in which John exhorts us to love our brothers, and adds, "Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother." When you read that you might ask, why are the words "of that wicked one" inserted? Why not just say, "Don't be like wicked Cain who slew his brother"? Because it was NOT "wicked Cain" who was the murderer, it was "that wicked one" who Jesus has said was "a murderer from the beginning," and HE murdered Abel by Cain's hands. "The lusts of your father you will do."
So there never has been a "human" nature. Therefore there is no point in considering whether we believers have two natures or one! No, we humans have NONE, but tragically or gloriously, we grow to express and manifest the nature of the deity in us.

We Are Free – Not Robots

What about choice and responsibility? Man is not a robot with no free expression of himself as a person. It is precisely the opposite. It is no paradox when freedom must make its choices and the free will then loves to be controlled by its choice. We still do what we WANT to do. There is no need to force a person's will. All the deity within need do is to attract and captivate our "want", and then we will love to act in harmony with him. People often ask, How can we conceive of God changing a person's will if he is free? The answer is: GOD CHANGES OUR "WANT", AND THE HUMAN WILL GROWS TO FOLLOW. Once God has captured our "wants" by drawing us back to Himself through Christ, then it is He in us who "wills and does of His good pleasure" (and it is always good!), and it is we who naturally, gladly freely work it out because we WANT to (Phil. 2:13-14).
It is because many Christian children of God still look back and see their pre-conversion days as simply themselves influenced by Satan, and doing their evil deeds, that much of the difficulty of the Christian life comes. When it is recognized that they were actually children of the devil and he was living his own lifestyle through them – he being the real sinner by nature – it is only then that true growth in the lifestyle of God can take place.
We are not battling two natures within us. In fact the container self does not HAVE a nature. God is instilling in our union with Him the WANTS of His NATURE. Christ will never leave us or forsake the process of directing our WANTS.


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