Difficult Question #8: Agreement, Spoken Word and GOD’s Handiwork

How many times have you heard the message that you have to “Say it and sign for it”, or that if you “profess with your mouth” that you will have what you profess. Belief is needed for the words to work, because those words you have to speak in true faith. If you profess without belief it will be a waste of air. However, professing with belief – even belief that is the size of a grain of a mustard seed -- brings about miracles beyond your imagination, blessings and a growth in your mustard seed faith.

Many biblical scholars will tell you that GOD spoke the world into being, the atmosphere and the stars were created when He said, “Let there be…” and that everything was created via His spoken word.

As I was reading Genesis 1 the other day on my way through the Bible for the second time this year I was surprised to realize that “spoken creation” is not what the Bible says happened. I was shocked I had never seen nor heard that before, but there it was. I re-read the words. I looked at them as my jaw gaped. It wasn’t true! Totally spoken creation was not true! Those who teach that “GOD spoke and it happened” are incorrect. Let me show you.

The creation story in Genesis 1 (KJV) states:

The Beginning

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The First Day: Light

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The Second Day: Firmament

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

The Third Day: Dry Ground

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

The Fourth Day: Sun, Moon, Stars

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

The Fifth Day: Fish and Birds

20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

The Sixth Day: Creatures on Land

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. 31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Note what it says in 1:1 – In the beginning GOD created, not spoke, created. He used his hands and “created” the heavens and the earth. He never spoke it. When we reach verse three “GOD said let there be light and there was light” and that is when we see the first spoken word.

Read the words of each verse of the creation story and you will see that sometimes He spoke and sometimes He created. There will be some who say that He created via speaking it all. Not true. The Bible is very specific and there are no superfluous or misleading words. A spoken word means a spoken word; created means something different than that.

In the “And GOD said” verses He is creating things with his spoken words, but in verses one, seven, sixteen, twenty-one, twenty-five and twenty-seven we have two words: “created” or “made”. Let us examine the different words GOD used in creating the “heavens and the earth”. Comparing the words of the Bible tells us that there is one word for “said”; two words for “created”; and one for “made” (Source: Hebrew Lexicon):

1:1; 1:27 (twice)

"created" בָּרָ֣א ba·ra 1254a to shape, create a prim. root

1:3; 1:6; 1:9; 1:11; 1:14; 1:24; 1:26; 1:28; 1:29

"said" וַיֹּ֥אמֶר vai·yo·mer 559 to utter, say a prim. root

1:7; 1:16; 1:25; 1:26

"made" וַיַּ֣עַשׂ vai·ya·'as 6213a do, make a prim. root

1:21; 1:27

"created" וַיִּבְרָ֣א vai·yiv·ra 1254a to shape, create a prim. root

So we see that the words are different and they have different pronunciations, with only two of them “created” having the same definition. “Ba-ra” and “vai-viv-ra” both mean “to shape, create”, but they’re different words. The word “said” in Hebrew is “vai-vo-mer”, meaning “to utter, say”. Uttering or saying is not shaping, creating, doing, or making, now is it? So we see that GOD did sometimes speak about creating but then He went about actually doing it with His own hands, as seen in verses twenty-four and twenty-five, for instance.

So GOD did not speak the universe into existence. Yes, words were part of it, but if you look at the words used to describe the actual events, the words prove that GOD also put His hands into it and “created”, “made” and “shaped” the universe and all that therein is.

Let’s take a look at the second discovery I made in Genesis Chapter 1. As I was reading it a specific idea jumped out at me. Look at how the story of the creation of the universe is worded. “Let” is throughout the story. “Let” denotes getting permission, or agreement. If your child comes to you and says, “Mom may I….?” Your response is sometimes “I will let you do that”, not necessarily in those words, but the equivalent to. “Let” is an agreement word, as in GOD was in agreement with the Holy Spirit and His Own Son, Jesus Christ. They had to be in agreement for the universe to be created; especially that most crucial to us portion in which another word is included (vs. 26), “Let us” make man. “Let us”: even GOD had to ensure agreement before taking that last step that was so important to them – creating Mankind.

Agreement between GOD, Jesus and the Holy Spirit was important enough that they ensured it throughout the creation of our universe: “Let”. If it’s that important for the Father, Son and Holy Ghost to have agreement on that how important is it for husband and wife, or any two people who desire the same thing to be in agreement?

Remember the Tower of Babel story in Genesis Chapter 11? That’s the story about how all of the people were of one language and they all agreed to work on the same thing: building a tower tall enough to reach up to heaven so they would be famous. GOD saw how united they were, how much in agreement and He came down to check them out. What He saw alarmed Him so much that He confounded their language because He saw:

“And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

What was that the Lord said: “and now nothing will be restrained from them”. They all agreed to work together and do this one thing and that meant that “nothing will be restrained from them”. Agreement amongst the people who all had one language meant that GOD Himself had to fear what they could accomplish. Look at the words: “now nothing will be restrained from them”! Nothing! That’s a pretty strong word!

GOD made the universe – with agreement from Jesus, His Son, and the Holy Spirit – and He did so with His own two hands as well as His words. It was possible because GOD had agreement with the other two who were around to agree (consider John 1:1-3).

Speaking agreement and believing it can accomplish many things; miracles can, indeed, happen. Since we are made in the “image and likeness of GOD” and our belief in His Son enables us to do “greater things” than Jesus did while He was alive, don’t you think it’s time we start agreeing and enabling us to do “greater things” (John 14:12). If you’re married get into agreement with your spouse so that you can have a united front. You can unite on child-rearing issues, budget issues, vacation issues: just hash it out until you agree. This will make your marriage more harmonious and more miraculous and isn’t that much better than what most people have?

Agreement and creation using His hands as opposed to the spoken word: two new things to consider when you are considering the creation of the Universe.

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© 2016 Linda McKinney All Rights Reserved

Difficult Queston #7: Why did it have to be Jesus Christ who died for our sins?

Question: Why did it have to be Jesus Christ who died for our sins? Why could it not have been John The Baptist, or Peter, or someone similar?

We know that we are sinners. We have lied, cheated, stolen, committed sexual sins of all sorts, broken the Sabbath, blasphemed GOD, worshipped people and things that are not The One True GOD (Hollywood and internet celebrities, jobs, vehicles, families, pastimes, or possessions), and because of that we need a Savior. We need a way to prevent our eternal soul/spirit from being eternally separated from GOD and being in eternal darkness and punishment. That’s the basic message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

One of the details of that basic message, though, is that we are not good enough to save ourselves. We have done the sinning, how can we atone for that ourselves? Even if we were the ones who tried to atone for our own sins how could we do so? We are too unclean to be able to make ourselves clean again.

Consider: If you have a white sheet that you drag through the mud again and again and again and you put oil, food and all kinds of other nasty stains on it, how do you clean it? You wash it in water and detergent, perhaps adding some bleach or an “oxy” product to make it as clean as possible. If you had a “twin” to that sheet, one that had never been dragged through the mud, had never been stained with anything, and had no spot to remove and you compared the two sheets, would the muddied, stained sheet be as clean as the one that had never been so much as taken out of the package? Of course not.

You will not be able to save yourself because that dinginess that results in dragging your soul through the mud is not clean enough to allow your soul into heaven. It’s not a matter of effort on your part, you can’t try hard enough, say enough of whatever people think would be the right words, etc. It’s a matter of simply accepting the gift of Christ’s blood to wash that sheet white again because that’s the only thing that can.

You see, it’s not just you who cannot clean your own sins. There’s no mere mortal man who can pay the price for another mere mortal man. The only truly sufficient sacrifice had to be Jesus Christ because He is part GOD part man. It’s the “part GOD” part that is the answer to our need for a Savior. It could not be John The Baptist, for instance because – although he does have a wonderful story of his conception and birth – he is still just a man; a man in need of a Savior himself. He had his own stains on his own sheet, so to speak.

Jesus, having lived a sinless life in which he has no muddiness, no stains or other marks on his soul (his sheet) was the only One who could have been clean enough to have paid the price. Most people who have accepted His gift of salvation – of covering our muddy sheets with His clean one – acknowledge that He is the only one who lived a sinless life.

The question is, was that enough? What if Jesus Christ had been only man? What if He had been a man who had been able to live a sinless life: no thoughts He should not have had, done nothing He should not have done, said nothing He should not have said, etc.? What if He was just a sinless human and not part GOD? Would that have sufficed for mankind to have been saved through His sacrifice?

In a word, No. In order for the sacrifice to have been enough the only way to accomplish that was to have Jesus be part GOD, as it says in the Bible. You see, the fact is that if Jesus had not been part GOD, He could not have known the truth of the separation portion of what hell is like. Jesus experienced that on the Cross when He cried, “My GOD, my GOD why have you forsaken me?” it was then that Jesus experienced for the first time in His eternal life separation from the Father that He’d been with since before time, before the earth was formed and before anything else was made (see John 1:1-3). It was separation. GOD, His Father, had to turn His back on Jesus Christ, The Son He loved so much because it was in that separation that Jesus took upon Himself all of our sins, all of our wrongs and disobediences, and because of that GOD could not look upon it. GOD had to put away His Son so that our sin did not contaminate, pollute, corrupt Himself. True separation was experienced for the first time by the two who did not deserve it in order to allow you and I to be able to experience an eternity in heaven in their presence.

It was in that timeframe, that separation, that Jesus Christ -- who had already been scourged, mocked, beaten, crowned with a crown of thorns, and was in such pain from all of that – that He paid the final bit of the price. He had gone through the physical part of the price, now this was the spiritual portion. If He’d gone through just the rest of it that would not have been enough. It had to be true separation for the price to have been paid for you and I. In that separation is when Jesus experienced what hell was like and what we would go through when we die without Him. That’s because hell is an eternity without GOD, love, peace, forgiveness, comfort, joy, laughter, acceptance, or any chance of escape. Jesus felt that separation and that’s when He paid the price in full. When He said, “It is finished!” and gave up His soul/spirit, the price was paid in full; it was “finished”.

That’s why neither John the Baptist, nor any other mere mortal, could have paid the price for our sins. John, having never experienced true union with GOD the Father, could never have known that separation. John may have understood intellectually what it meant, but his soul could never have experienced what it was like to have had his soul separated from GOD because as a human his soul was never there to start with. His body may have died and his soul/spirit may have separated from it, but since John never spent the part of his life prior to becoming human as – and this is the important thing – part of GOD, John could not have experience the separation as did Jesus Christ because of John 1:1-3:

“In the beginning was the Word [Jesus Christ], and the Word was with GOD, and the Word was GOD. The same was in the beginning with GOD. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

Jesus Christ was “In the beginning…. With GOD”. That’s why John the Baptist could not have been enough. Jesus Christ was with GOD and was GOD. Part GOD, part man; without which we could never have been saved.

Won’t you accept that great gift today?

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© 2016 Linda McKinney All Rights Reserved