Now as we bring to a wrap this understanding of the “New Commandment”, here are some things now that we know:  we know that God chose humans rather than angels to be His heirs.  We know that the basis of this choice was that humans were a very different kind of creation than the angels.  The angels were created as ministering servants.  Humans however were given a spirit and with this they were given the ability to love God.  The essence of free will is that it relates to the exercise of love.  The one thing that cannot be coerced, the one thing that cannot be demanded is love because if it were coerced and became a duty it wouldn’t be love, it would be obligation.

     Love is the spontaneous coming forth from a human being of the desire to care for another even up to and including the forfeiture of his own life.  This is a characteristic that is not present and that is not observable in any other creation except human beings and in human beings who know God and are born again of the very nature of God.  This is the essence of the whole matter.  The angels who sinned challenged God because their entire perspective was based upon the glory and the power of a superior creature versus an inferior creature.  God kept the matter of how He was going to demonstrate the rightness of His choice—humans versus angels—He kept the matter of how He was going to do that to Himself.

    When Jesus came, God did the unthinkable and in many respects it was a complete surprise to the demonic, the fallen angels.  God chose to come to the earth in the form of the despised creature himself.  This, by itself, confounded the demonic because in the pride of the demonic it would never consent to being found in the form of humanity.  You know there is often talk about how humans and these fallen angels engaged in sexual relations that produced the Anakim—that’s rubbish.  For one thing, the demons would never consent to a union with humans because they think they are greater than humans.  Why would they want to consent to a human, in activity that made them patently equal to humans when in their own minds the human is such a vastly inferior creature, leaving aside the fact that—according to Luke the 20^th chapter—these creatures were not made for procreation. (Inserted – actual verse-“But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels.  They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.” – Luke 20:35,36) they have no capability of procreating.

    But the main essence is that the demonic would never have consented to relationships with human beings on any level except abuse because in their minds they were the greater of the creation and God, in their minds, was wrong for choosing a lesser creature.  Now what God of course knew was that though the creature was placed, positionally, lower than the angels, the creature—humans—was given something by their Creator that the angels were not given and that is the ability to love. (Inserted – actual verse—“What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?  You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” – Psalm 8:4,5) Angels do not love; angels have no ability to lay down their lives for another—angels are ministering servants and they are incapable of loving.

    Now, when God chose to come in the form of the despised creature, this was a plan that could not have been anticipated by the fallen angels because they never assumed that God would lower Himself to take on the form and the stature of the very creatures of controversy.  And you can see how God manipulates the enemy through this weakness on the part of the enemy.  One quick example:  Satan, of course, controlled the world’s armies in the day when Jesus was born.  How would God hope to bring His Son into the world as a struggling human infant from an ordinary family unattended by legions of angels for His protection?  How would God hope to pull that off when the enemy was dedicated to His eradication once it became apparent to the enemy, based upon prophetic Scripture, that God intended to come in the form of human flesh?  Well the answer is simple:  God had His Son be born where pride would never look for Him.

    If it were Satan who was in the place of God anticipating this child being born he would have ringed the place where the son would be born with legions of his supporters.  He would have made sure that every available medical care came to his aid. Every security precaution and detail would have been attended to.  But God didn’t have to do any of that.  God simply caused His Son to be born of a very ordinary family; they were royalty but indeed a lesser royalty.  They weren’t the ruling house at the time.  They were members of the ruling house in that they were from the line of David but they were not the ones on the throne at the time.  So God brought Him through a lesser notable house and then God had Him be born “out back” in a stable among the animals.

   Pride, I assure you, would never have looked for the Son of God to be born in those circumstances but that’s exactly why God had Him come and arrive in those circumstances.  And later on after it became known that He was born—the wise men had told Herod this—Satan moved on Herod to kill all the children to try to exterminate Jesus ex post facto—after the fact.  How does God save His son again without these extraordinary precautions?  The answer is very simple.  He spirited Him away as it were.  He first told Joseph in a dream to take Him down to Egypt and then had Him physically taken to Egypt.  Why Egypt?  Because 2000 years ago, to a Jew, Egypt was about slavery, about being a second-class citizen, being without rights and so on.  But the enemy would never look for the Son of God in the form of a slave or in a second-class status because pride would never allow him to consider that as an option. 

    So first God hid the plan of how God would come and prove that His choice of humans was the only appropriate choice.  He hid the plan in Himself and then He brings the plan forward by having Himself show up in the form of a human being and then He did the thing that we said earlier which was that Jesus submitted Himself perfectly to God, every moment every day doing only what He saw the Father doing.  This was the definition that Jesus employed to describe the way He lived in relationship to the Father.  He said, “The Son can do nothing of himself, He can only do what He sees the Father doing.” (Inserted – actual verse –“Jesus gave them this answer: ‘I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.’” – John 5:19)

   That means that the Son, though He could do whatever He wanted to as an independent being, chose only to confine His activities strictly to the purposes of God as revealed to Him moment by moment.  Now this, coincidently, is entering into God’s rest if—and it would be entering God’s rest—if God were reliable.  But what Jesus teaches us is the absolute, total reliability of God and this reliability is the actual expression of the love of God. It is how God shows that He is God.  Jesus, being fully confident of this and completely trusting of the Father did not defend His right to an independent thought or action in thirty-three and a half years of His life.  He did only what He saw the Father doing.

    In this way, when the Father required that the Son die in substitution for all humans, the Son accepted death on a cross on behalf of all other humans.  God raised Him from the dead.  This act of total surrender to God had the effect of allowing Jesus to live His entire life without at any moment submitting himself to Satan or to the rule of Satan.  You see Satan had created an alternative to trusting in God; that alternative is called “the world” and “the world” allows human beings to live—and to believe while they are living—that they can understand the things of God and be independent of God completely apart from needing to or having to trust God.  The alternative would be that you totally depend on God and you completely surrender yourself to the purposes of God.

   Satan never intended to do that because he believed that God’s plan for humans was wrong—that God chose the wrong heirs and he based that on what he could have done for God.  As a superior creature, superior in the abilities of one species over another, he felt that these superior abilities, compared to human beings, gave him the right to be the heir of God.  But God was not looking for that because God is not interested in anything we could do for Him.  Why?  Because God can do anything for himself that He wants to.  The evil one based his conviction as to the rightness of God’s selection on what he thought he could do for God.  God, knowing that there was nothing man could do for God, but knowing that what He needs from man is a location in time—a body—out of which He could live and act and do, and that that body must be compatible with the Spirit of God.

    God created a human being with a spirit that was already compatible to God’s Spirit so when the Spirit of God comes into the human being the Spirit speaks to the human spirit and the human spirit has the capability of responding.  The problem typically of course is the human soul decides that it wants its own life; it wants its own abilities.  Oddly enough, it is to the human soul that the enemy makes his appeal and his entire craft—all that he has put together with which to entrap the human being—he has put together with respect to entrapping the human soul.  When the human being chooses to love he is inherently choosing a form of life and a pattern of life that denies the soul.  That is why it is impossible to do the will of God by the soul.

   Doing the will of God requires a submission of the human spirit to the Spirit of God because then the Spirit of God speaks to the human being Spirit to spirit.  The Spirit himself testifies with our spirits that we are the sons of God. (Inserted – actual verse-“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” – Romans 8:16)  This all being so, when the human being responds—his spirit to the Spirit of God—he’s doing exactly what Jesus did.  In the moments leading up to the cross Jesus described it this way:  He said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death…” (Inserted – actual verse-“Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.  Stay here and keep watch with me.’” – Matthew 26:38) indicating that it is in the soul that there is the desire and the ability to be independent in choice from God.

   The putting down of the soul, “…and what shall I say? Save me from this hour.” (Inserted – actual verse—“ ‘Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.’” – John 12:27) Jesus remarked, He said, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Inserted – actual verse—“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.  The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.” – Matthew 26:41) His spirit always saw the beauty of following the Lord and walking in God, obeying the things of God.  His soul had this independent streak to it and wanted to be independent, not necessarily sinfully independent, but to live and to preserve His life.  When, in this conflict, Jesus yields to the Father and allows the Spirit of God to direct His spirit, then He loves us perfectly because He has been willing to put to death His own interest; quite literally put to death His own interest, entrusting God.

   God put to death God’s own interest in fellowshipping with Himself—the Father with the Son—because of “another”.  Both did it; the Father did it and the Son did it because of their interest in “another”—the “other” being us.  When we now, who are the “other”, when we come to have the Spirit of God living in us and our decisions are based on following the Holy Spirit moment by moment; when we do that, we have the same attitude, we have the same character as God himself.  And in that way, when we love, our love is measured by exactly the same standard as God himself because when we submit our lives to the oversight and control of the Spirit of God we are doing exactly what Jesus did and before that we are doing exactly what the Father did.

   In this way it is proper for us to be considered to be the sons of God because we are of the same kind and we’re of the same nature as God himself.  We love in exactly the same manner as how He loves:  “as I have loved you.” (Inserted – actual verse—“A new command I give you:  Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” – John 13:34) And that manner is—and the quantum of it is—that we prefer “another” over ourselves because we are willing to allow God to take the use of these vessels and to work in these vessels and to work through these vessels to benefit others and we’re willing to forego what other choices we might have had for our own lives.

   This is not about things you can do for God because God doesn’t need you to help Him improve His love; God is perfect in love.  The matter is    showing forth the love of God.  What this is all about is how you yield your body and God comes and lives in you and shows forth His love.  He is perfect in love therefore every demonstration of His love that comes through you is the perfect expression of how He is able to love through you.  You cannot improve on that; you have no ability to love any more or in any greater capacity or in any greater way than how God loves.  Therefore God doesn’t need your help.  You cannot offer some benevolence to God so that others may see God in a better way than they would have seen God if God simply used your body out of which to live and to operate.  That’s why there is nothing you can do for God because you live to show forth the pleasure of God.

   The pleasure of God is to demonstrate His love to humanity; He doesn’t need your help to show that He loves.  It is His nature to love, it is the essence of His being to love and it is, quite frankly, foreign to us.  So when the statement is made that God doesn’t need anything from us, that we can’t do anything for God:  this is what is meant.  What is not meant is:  there is nothing for you to do.  What you can do is what Romans 12 says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice…” (Inserted – Romans 12:1a)  That means that God wants to live through you and you are willing to give yourself, just as Jesus did, and have Him come and possess that body—His spirit to your spirit—and then to inform your spirit, moment by moment in the use of that body.

   When that is true, this is what follows:  this is from the book of Colossians, Colossians says, “You no longer live but it is Christ who lives in you. (Inserted – actual verse—“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” – Galatians 2:20) Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.  For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” (Inserted – Colossians 3:1-4)  So that’s how the matter works out:  when you love as God loves, you will be as Jesus was in His example of total surrender and total self-sacrifice.  When you love as God loves, you will be as God himself is:  that He set aside His own pleasure in His fellowship with himself and accepted separation from himself because of “another”.

   When you live this way you are setting aside your right to relate to other people the way you would relate to them and you are giving up your body so that through you God could relate to others in the way that God would.  And in the way that God does, it shows forth the love of God.  You then are truly the sons of your Father in heaven and the measure of that is that you are like the only begotten Son of God.  You are like the first born of this new race and it is appropriate then for you to be included among those who are known as the sons of God.  This is the proof that will be advanced and that has been advanced that those that disagreed with God’s choice of humans as His heirs were wrong…they were wrong.  Because it is possible for human beings to throw off the self-preservation and to submit themselves perfectly to the will of God.  When that happens they are exactly like God in their nature.  They love as God loves and that’s the proof.

   Do you not know then that you will judge angels? (Inserted – actual verse—“Do you not know that we will judge angels?  How much more the things of this life!” – I Corinthians 6:3) This is the matter of the judgment of angels:  you will condemn by your righteous life—by your decision to submit your life to God and for Him to live through you by His Spirit—you will prove the truth that you are worthy, by this action, to be known as a son of God and that God was right when He chose humans because humans have the capability of loving as God loves.  Then the matter will be resolved.  God did not simply set down Satan by force of will but the inevitable triumph of the right.  That is why the age must conclude with the final testings of these things and in the end of the matter we shall overcome the enemy.  We shall overcome him by the blood of the Lamb, the word of our testimony and that we did not preserve our own lives. (Inserted – actual verse—“They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” – Revelation 12:11) The reason for this is that we are like our Father in heaven.  Now let’s go on from here, in the next broadcast, to talk about what does it mean practically to love as God loves, moment by moment.  I’m Sam Soleyn; God bless you and I’ll see you then. 

Scripture References:

Luke 20:35,36
Psalm 8:4,5
John 5:19
Romans 8:16
Matthew 26:38
John 12:27
Matthew 26:41
John 13:34
Romans 12:1a
Galatians 2:20
Colossians 3:1-4
I Corinthians 6:3
Revelation 12:11