Is There A Way To Live
Forever?
MAN is a moral creature by virtue of transcendent wisdom intrinsic to a moral code that is immune to the instincts and impulses of any one generation — instincts that hold animals captive, but from which man is free to escape. However, when humans abandon absolute morality in favor of the rights and wrongs relative to their own time period, they voluntarily constrain themselves to the instincts and impulses of one generation. They thus partake of the same circumstantial basis to which animals are in bondage and, in so doing, conjoin themselves to animals, i.e., to a form of life that is incapable of moral behavior. As we have seen, animals are incapable of moral behavior in an absolute sense. They have knowledge provided only by their immediate environment; and in the absence of human intelligence, as they store, retrieve, and process this knowledge, they do so with an intent and expectancy whose only thrust is immediate gratification.
People, however, are able to defer their gratification, and practice self-denial. Imagine the chaos that would occur in a future eternal life if all of us freely expressed ourselves without obeying any laws. The only way to avoid the conflicts that would arise would be to subjugate our desires to the wisdom of an all-knowing governing Authority. The exclusively human trait of self-denial that this would require is practiced each time we stop at a traffic light, pay a bill, or use a court of law when wronged. Except for man, no other known species of life is capable of choosing self-denial for the benefit of another. Only man refuses food in times of hunger, elects pain when offered relief and abandons desire when invited to fulfill it. Animals do exhibit self-denial for their offspring; however, this is not by choice but
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by genetic mandate. Man's self-denial for his neighbor is a moral decision to which conscience speaks.
Self-taking leads to a pit of despair that communes with the animals; but self-giving aligns with hope for eternal life. And whereas self-denial builds character for eternal living, instant gratification digs mudholes that nurture progressive filth. Animals have no choice. For them, mudholes are the only alternative possible, and so their "filth" remains physical. But humans are capable of moral decisions that impose "mudhole" accountability to which the Bible imputes eternal consequences. Yet, is the Bible's message one of deliverance or one of judgment? The answer is both! It foreshadows life or death, hope or doom, joy or despair, and it says the choice is ours. It puts paradise on one side of the balance and eternal destruction on the other. With regard to which way the scale will tip, it makes quite clear that the love of God can never embrace what his holiness must condemn.
The Question of Context
Many people have an opinion of the Bible that is based upon what others understand it to say; but few ever take the time to read what it says first-hand. Were we to do this, difficulties could arise. One problem is that a special "lamp" is disclosed by its author as necessary to understand the Bible.1 Another serious problem is that the human writers who penned the manuscripts are not the Intellect who authored its content.2
The picture here is that of an orchestra with each book of the Bible an instrument. The book of Genesis doesn't read the same as the Psalms, and they in turn read differently from the Minor Prophets. Likewise, neither does a trumpet sound the same as a violin, or a violin the same as a piano. Yet they are all playing one song written by one author. An accurate understanding of any one verse of Scripture requires that the entire Bible be kept in view. When this is not done, context is destroyed and verses can be chosen to say anything that one desires. For example, consider the following quotes from Scripture: (1) "Judas went and hung himself." (2) "Go thou and do likewise." (3) "Whatever thou doest, do quickly."
In this example, Scripture is quoted, but the context is mutilated. In the paragraphs that follow, we give a sweeping overview of what the Bible reveals concerning our plight on earth and God's provision for escape. Although these truths have been expressed in terms of contemporary usage, I have sought to preserve the Bible's context. This will allow the message these truths contain to be easily understood by a casual reader.
I have tried to explain doctrine regarding mankind's dilemma and an individual's decision for deliverance from death in a way that is true to all of God's Word. To the serious Bible student, let me say that he or she will want to be careful to distinguish actual Bible teaching from one's cherished
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traditions or hidden agendas. To this end, the perspective here presented may be new, but its truths are entirely biblical.
What's in the Bible?
By way of overview, the Bible can be divided into three parts: the Old Testament (thirty-nine books) says that man is in trouble, but that God is sending a life raft. The four Gospels say that he has arrived and his name is Jesus Christ. The Epistles (twenty-three remaining books) say that he is coming again. From cover to cover, the Bible is a record of God's revelation to man concerning a God-anointed end-time King who will deliver man by judging the evil that afflicts him. The central Old Testament message is that the Messiah is the actual saving presence of God on earth, whereas that of the New Testament (Gospels plus Epistles) is that the words and deeds of Jesus are the words and deeds of God. With that summary introduction, let's rerun the script under a magnifying glass.
If we go back to the beginning, the Bible teaches that human intelligence is the object of conflict between a Supreme Intelligence who is the Designer and Creator of all that we see, and perverse intelligence who is in rebellion against his maker. The Supreme Intelligence is described as a Being of love warning mankind of impending disaster and announcing his provision for escape. The perverse intelligence is revealed to be actively at work to discredit the message as part of a plan to subjugate mankind. People are portrayed as living agents who communicate with one another through oxygen-burning organic machines called human bodies, and physical death is disclosed as entrance of the living agent into a new world in the form of a spirit that separates from a body when it ceases to function.
The Bible depicts man's spirit as the kernel about which a new "resurrected" body is to be later placed. The need for a future perfect body is justified in terms of incurable defects now present in all flesh, defects that were genetically propagated from mankind's earliest parents at the time the perverse intelligence engineered their fall.
Thus, the biblical diagnosis of man's problems is that he has a fallen nature that was produced when the flesh,3 originally designed by the Supreme Intelligence as a container to mold self-giving spirits, became altered to produce self-taking agents with a propensity to satisfy their desire while experiencing the least possible pain. Evidence has been published indicating that the genetic "triplet" code responsible for the assembly of flesh in every living creature came into being by a transition from a far more primitive "doublet" code of much greater information content.4 This is a discovery that is consistent with the biblical narrative.
Thus, the picture painted by the Bible is that the living agent (man) is a
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degenerate spirit (programmer) in degenerate flesh (hardware). To correct the problem, the Supreme Intelligence entered space-time to die in virgin-born flesh free of these defects for the purpose of both legally settling man's debt, and of releasing a perfect spiritual template suitable to regenerate (reprogram) human life. The Bible teaches that Christ returned bodily in full view from the grave as a public demonstration that eternal life is available to humans; but it also teaches that spiritual rebirth is necessary to receive that life. The reason is that God will not entrust a super computer (resurrection body) to a degenerate programmer (unregenerated person).
The Fall of Man
The biblical account of how man's nature became altered is that before the fall, Adam lived in a garden whose produce met all his needs. He was allowed to eat of every tree in the garden except the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." The command given to Adam was: "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17, NKJV).
The forbidden tree was in the middle of the garden beside another tree called the "tree of life."5 Since both trees were in the garden, before the fall Adam was allow to eat of the tree of life — an act the Bible identifies as synonymous with eternal life.6 Genesis 3 teaches that, after the fall, Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden without eternal life. Since physical death attends spiritual death, this change from life without an end, to life without ease until death, implies that, at the very least, the physical part of man's nature was altered at the time of the fall. This physical part being man's body,7 it means that the informational specifications along his DNA must have undergone a change. Other Bible texts dealing with sin confirm that Adam's flesh underwent a change at the time of the fall. These texts teach that man's flesh is an ally and vehicle of sin,8 that this was not the case before the fall,9 and that the change occurred at the time of the fall.10
Can Man Really Choose Right from Wrong?
Flesh by itself is nothing more than three-dimensional polypeptide chains described by high polymer chemistry, whereas sin is willful disobedience of God's laws. Therefore, sin is a matter of the spirit, because it involves an act of the mind.11 The alteration of man's physical nature into a vehicle of sin thus implies that man's present spiritual weakness traces to Adam's altered flesh. Genetically transmitted destructive defects appeared after the fall in the organic structure of man's brain that permanently altered his spiritual nature.
The absence of conflict between the flesh and the mind before the fall, and the waging of war afterward against rightly ordered affections within the mind,12 shows that the fall of man must have involved a change in the
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organic structure of his brain. This implies that spirits are molded or shaped on earth by flesh, and not vice versa.13 Since ants and elephants differ only in their information specification along the DNA, it is not surprising that man was changed when the specification along Adam's DNA was altered in the fall. Adam was able to obey God's command,14 but yet chose to eat from the forbidden tree.15 Therefore, Adam was free to choose wrongly but was not under compulsion of the flesh to do so. However, the Bible teaches that after the fall everyone chooses wrongly,16 and it explains that problem by revealing that the entire human race inherited defective flesh.17 The reason is that all people were procreated from genetically defective organic machines.18
As a boy, I recall asking how it was fair that God blamed me for something Adam did. In my youth though, I totally missed the biblical answer that my flesh traces directly back to Adam's body, and my behavior for which I'm responsible comes from a mind shaped by that flesh. Therefore, the only lasting solution to wrong behavior is a new mind.19
Only a self-sufficient being is able to make objective judgments of good and evil that harmonize with his entire spiritual and physical creation. Such judgments by a finite being such as man will always be from a self-serving posture that is limited by incomplete understanding. The result is a series of unforeseen consequences that are detrimental to the welfare of others. This is why we find the tree of life beside the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It teaches that only an eternally existing Intelligence is able to decide what is right and wrong. When Adam disobeyed, he assumed control of his life and took upon himself the divine prerogative of determining good and evil. The result was an altered nature whose physical part eventually ceased to function.20 The Bible attributes the deception that eventually produced such death to a perverse intelligence named Satan — a created cherub who rebelled because he had a jealous desire to become like God.21
How Can Fruit Change Flesh?
The Bible unambiguously teaches that the nature of every human being on earth was altered at the time of the fall 22 when mankind's earliest parents ate the fruit of a certain tree. However, many people find it difficult to understand how the act of eating vegetation can permanently alter human nature.23 In this regard, we note that certain Bible texts 24 suggest that the "trees" in the garden may not be intended as literal vegetation, but instead are a metaphor to communicate literal truths of past events whose context lies outside human experience. Jesus Christ himself confirmed that it was not the eating by Adam of the literal produce that produced the change because Jesus taught that nothing a man eats can defile him since it doesn't enter his "heart," but rather his stomach and is thus passed on. 25 The fruit described in Genesis defiled not only a man but the entire human race. Therefore,
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it should be inferred that the fruit was more than just something that went into Adam's stomach: it represented Adam's willful rebellion against God's authority.
Since flesh is the container by which the "spirit" is molded, the altered informational specifications along Adam's DNA produced a self-taking human nature bent on satisfying its desires with the least possible pain. Six elements common to the nature of all mankind emerged: hatred, envy, lust, pride, anger, and selfishness. Although these elements are with us today, they are masked by the contrived veneer of secular humanism — a religion promulgated in societies materially able to satisfy the physical appetites of its members. However, when these appetites go unfilled, man reverts to the self-taking behavior of his maligned nature. Since no human society can satisfy the appetites of all its members all of the time, human conduct is ultimately controlled by social deterrents that inflict pain on unacceptable behavior.
Why Is Secular Humanism Untrue?
Secular humanism postulates the inevitable evolution of man's goodness and, thus, the demise of such deterrents. There is no historical warrant for this assumption, however. As seen from the perspective of Scripture, neither can there be any rational hope of its future fulfillment because the goals of humanism are incompatible with the nature of man. Examples include the willingness of college-trained people to design Hitler's ovens, the slaughter of well over 100 million people in plans engineered by communist governments, and a nuclear holocaust that possibly awaits 26 mankind due to decisions by alleged brilliant minds.
The good news is that hope actually exists for mankind. But the irony is that it lies in a book hardly anyone ever reads, a book ridiculed by each generation but thereafter vindicated by the knowledge of a later generation. Today, millions of people regard the Bible as a poor history book sprinkled with fantasy and myth. This mindset employs Christianity as an ethical standard for young children, sees faith as the activity of fools, and explains biblical promises as a psychological crutch. Love is consigned to the action of lust, and historic truths are deemed intellectually unacceptable. It's said that the historical Christ is unknowable and that the history of his mission cannot be written.
God is regarded as the residue of a dark past, and spiritual truths are dispersed throughout a pietistic amalgam laced with the humanistic creed: All there is — is matter and matter in motion. But we have seen that such thought is not supported by twentieth-century science. Modern knowledge has not shown the Bible to be false. Appendix 11, "The Rise of Humanism," outlines how this erroneous belief developed.
Humanistic doctrines thrive because they are justified by the use of philosophies
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that impersonate science. As modern science uncovers physical truths, secular humanism colors them with philosophical innuendos. The influence of humanism can be seen in the way it has shaped widely held ideas about scientific discoveries. For example, in the public's mind, life came from slime, has been created in a test tube, and can be found in outer space. Yet not one shred of data exists to support these beliefs. The popular notion that speciation is explainable through natural processes is likewise without empirical warrant. The fact of change in the fossil record is not at issue. What's in question is the blind, humanistic conjecture that living structures of ever increasing complexity were systematically assembled entirely by natural processes. The Bible says that this is not so, and the New Generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics appears to confirm it.
Has the Bible Been Ahead of Us?
Modern knowledge is vindicating the Bible archaeologically, biologically, and anthropologically. Nuclear ruin, global famine, and human despair are knocking at our door, yet we continue to look to ourselves for salvation. This is not happening because the evidence supports such a view, but rather because most deem the alternative described in the Bible unacceptable.
We swim in a sea of providence while demanding proof that there's water; and we point our telescopes toward the fringe of our four-dimensional, space-time guppy bowl only to see our anthropic reflection illuminate an exterior design. Indeed, the creation is so overwhelming that it incapacitates our faculties to rationally comprehend it. It testifies to a way of escape against the din of those who say: "There is no God." One can jump off a high building and all the way down shout that there's no such thing as gravity, but eventually the bottom must come, and with it the price of such folly. Physical and spiritual laws really differ in only one respect: The latter have deferred consequences. Therefore, in the last analysis, it is not so much that we break God's laws as it is that they break us.
How Does One Have Eternal Life?
The Bible teaches that eternal life is coterminous with the Supreme Intelligence who created all that we see and are, and that the loving nature of this Intelligence is expressed when we cease to resist his initiative to overlay his life upon ours.27 But the "love relationship" he offers requires the voluntary surrender of one's self into his loving care — and this in turn requires an act of will.
How does this happen? First we are exposed to the truth. Then we give intellectual assent that what we have been exposed to is true. But the interchange of life occurs when we take the third step and make a personal commitment to that truth.28 To this end man is given freedom to choose in a world free from interference, due to certain limitations imposed by the Supreme Intelligence upon himself. These self-imposed limitations God has
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instituted are not unlike those we place on ourselves when we agree to adopt an orphan child. Although we are still sovereign in our home, we have nonetheless voluntarily obligated ourselves to guarantee the child's welfare, and to limit our activity in the home by subjugating portions of it to the needs of the child.
The Bible describes God limiting himself in a contract called the "second covenant" (New Testament). The agreement offered is this: In return for our love and submission to him, he promises to love and deliver us from a judgment with everlasting consequences that will otherwise follow our physical death. The Bible identifies these consequences that will otherwise follow our physical death. The Bible identifies these consequences with an eternal horror wrought by the perverse intelligence, but teaches that the Supreme Intelligence so loved man that he entered human flesh and died to pave the way for man to escape. Thus, the gospel becomes a message of hope, the Bible a "roadmap to eternal life," and Christ, God's provision for the escape."
The escape route is appropriated by the mechanism of faith 29 which can be thought of as the tube in a blood transfusion with Christ the life that flows through it. Faith requires that a person believe that God exists, 30 accept his plan for deliverance, 31 and trust that he is able to perform it.32 This means that a person must be willing to accept God's initiative to love and save him 33 — an act in which human free choice enables God to express his love. In other words, the Bible teaches that man was given freedom to choose so that God could express his love, and that God's giving humans the capacity of moral choice was for the purpose of our choosing him. However, not only are we free to choose otherwise; the Bible teaches that most do so.34 Some argue that if God is loving, why does he allow evil. The Bible has an answer. Let's see what it is.
Why Does Evil Exist
The Bible clearly explains the origin of evil: All evil results from the misuse of free will.
There are three kinds of evil: natural, biological, and spiritual. The Bible implies that natural disorders such as earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and the like, are the residue of Satan's misuse of free will on a cosmological plain. Spiritual disorders such as plunder, injustice, poverty, fear, wars, and famine are explained in terms of the misuse of man's free will. For example, consider famine. There are about 500 thousand species of known plant life on earth, of which at least 10 percent (50,000) are edible. Of these, only three hundred have been commercially cultivated; a mere thirty provide 95 percent of all human calories and protein.35 Thus, we need to ask, Do people starve because of lack of food, or because of our misuse of resources?
Biological disorders include cystic fibrosis, enzyme disorders, brain malfunctions, heart disease, allergies, muscular dystrophy and sclerosis, various kinds of cancer, diabetes, and so forth. More than two thousand five hundred
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diseases have been traced to flaws in our DNA.36 The Bible reveals that they originated in the degenerate flesh that materialized through the misuse of the free will. Human cells contain twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, each with over three thousand microscopic genes of which about six are defective in every person alive. They do not affect most of us because they are masked by normal genes.
Thus, thousands of people, although free of the symptoms, are carrying such genetic disorders as hemophilia, Huntington's disease, and sickle-cell anemia. Since the Bible teaches that death entered the human race at the time of the fall, it comes as no surprise that progeria — a syndrome of accelerated aging in which children become bald at age three, wrinkle by age ten, and die of "old age" at sixteen — has been genetically implicated. When certain vitamins (antioxidants) are advocated to promote health (by reducing free radicals), some of us choose not to accept them on the basis that taking pills is not natural. This attitude illustrates ignorance of the basic Bible teaching that mankind was natural prior to the fall, and that health afterward is simply the state of compensating for our defects — not only the physical things listed above, but also the spiritual shortcomings we see all about us.
Criminologists, for example, estimate that a male baby born with an extra Y chromosome is ten times more likely to end up in a maximum security prison than other males. This is due in part to a tendency toward extreme violence conjoined to a low IQ. Similar aggressive behavior in both males and females has been shown due to hormone levels during gestation.37 Although linked to prenatal exposure of synthetic progestins, gene-related hormone variations before birth, the data indicates, help determine aggressive tendencies in people.
The role of hormones in such behavior is seen, for example, in a study of university wrestlers. It showed that, after a match, winners had greater percentages of testosterone increase than losers even though both had the same level before the match. Several studies both in the U.S. and abroad indicate violent parents beget violent children, even when the youngsters are raised in nonviolent foster homes. Such genetic leanings do not excuse bad behavior, but they do help explain why the history of each generation of mankind is marred with prisons, wars, and bloodshed. It is not so much that man is bad, as it is that he is bad off. Thus, the biblical diagnosis of man's problems is not his political, social, or economic system, but rather it is man himself.38
Summary Overview
Sand and stars are before us, and the choice is ours. We can feed upon the scum of fleshly appetites, or we can enter the life outside of time designed by him who caused us to be. Shall we reach beyond the visible horizon to fulfill the destiny for which the universe was created? Or shall we slide into a mudhole from which we really did not come? All of life can look back
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to "origin," but only man can lay claim to "destiny." The choice is ours, the time is now, and the stakes are real. Life and death have cast their vote; the vote we cast will break the tie. Whatever you choose will be your choice forever; and if you abstain, then death will cast the vote for you. When all is said and done, we find ourselves at a fork between two paths: one that entices us into decadence, and the other that beckons us unto destiny. What will eternity show your vote to have been?
Appendices || Table of Contents
1. 1 Cor. 2:14.
2. 2 Tim. 3:16.
3. As used here, "flesh" primarily means the gray matter of man's brain. All other parts of his body only function to preserve this gray matter.
4. Yockey H. Jour. Theor. Biol. (1977) 67:365.
5. Gen. 2:9.
6. Gen. 3:22.
7. 1 Thess. 5:23.
8. Rom. 7:14-25.
9. Gen. 1:31.
10. Rom. 5:12.
11. The brain is an organic computer, and the mind is the expression of the spirit through this "computer." Thus all mental disorders are due either to spiritual (programmer) or physical (hardware) disorders.
12. Rom. 7:23.
13. The biblical doctrine of God's foreknowledge (Jeremiah 1:5), foreordination (Romans 9:11), preparation (Romans 9:17) and utilization (Luke 22:22) of human personalities is therefore not a matter of preexisting spirits, but rather of organic space-time containers that configure the substance of "spirit."
14. Gen. 3:17.
15. Gen. 3:6.
16. Eccl. 7:20, 9:3; Rom. 3:10-12.
17. Psalm 51:5; Job 15:14-16.
18. Gen. 5:1-32, 9:19.
19. Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23, 24.
20. Gen. 3:3, 5:5.
21. Ezek. 28:13, 14; Isa. 14:13, 14.
22. Rom. 5:12, 17; 1 Cor. 15:21, 22.
23. Some say that man's fall was produced by the act of disobedience rather than the eating of "fruit." But why should disobeying God permanently alter human nature any more than eating "fruit"? A more serious objection to this idea is Genesis 3:7 which clearly assigns man's newly acquired shame to the "fruit" rather than any action on the part of God (which occurs later in Genesis 3:16-19).
24. Ezek. 31:2-9, 16-18.
25. Mark 7:18.
26. Man has never made a weapon he hasn't used.
27. John 5:24; 1 John 5:11, 12.
28. John 5:21, 14:6.
29. John 6:28, 29; 8:23, 24.
30. Heb. 11:6.
31. John 1:12.
32. Heb. 7:25.
33. Rev. 3:20; John 4:14.
34. Matt. 7:13, 14.
35. Seventy-five percent of all human energy comes from only eight cereal species: wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats, sorghum, millet, and rye.
36. Hales D. Science Digest (1982) :28 Aug.
37. Reinisch J. Science (1981) 211:1171 Mar 13.
38. John 2:24, 25.
