3-13-26 Weekly Devotional – Created with Purpose
God created man (Represented in Adam) with a purpose; To glorify Himself. To accommodate that purpose He created man, body, soul, and spirit. The soul is the center of life, feeling, thought, and motivation. The body is corporal and performs the desire of man’s soul. Man’s spirit is that which governs his mental and emotional faculties that affect his soul. Also, man’s spirit connects him with God. In that connection Adam and Eve, the predecessors of humanity, were in complete harmony with God but sin entered and everything became distorted. Their souls were darkened toward God, no longer desiring fellowship with Him. Their feelings, thoughts, and motivations became about themselves, not Him.
God knowing what Adam and Eve would do, structured the soul in such a way that when sin would possess man a void would overwhelm them. A void that only a restoration of fellowship with Him could fill. That restoration would glorify God because only He could accomplish it.
Sin needed to be arrested, paid for, and forgiven before such restoration could occur. God created and used the nation of Israel as a testimony of that truth. Out of all of humanity, God chose the man Abraham to be the progenitor of the nation of Israel. God said to and of them “5 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine. 6 And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:5-6a). This was a conditional covenant (Vs. 5 “if you will”) meant to prove that no matter what God would do for them, they would not turn away from sinning. This of course is representative of all humanity.
Their failure did not take God by surprise because as we read that before He created the world He planned for man’s fall and the means of their redemption. This was vested in One referred to as the Lamb of God (Revelation 13:8b). The Lamb, identified by John the Baptist as being Jesus Christ (John 1:29).
This being said, consider John 3:16-18 “ 16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. 18 He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”
And Romans 5:8-10 testifies: “8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. 10 For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.’
Steve