Monday – October 10, 2016
Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. I am so thankful that I can freely choose to know Him better and better, there is no end-point of the knowledge possible of Him, of God. I for one choose to walk in the light as He is in the light, and be light as He is light. If He is in the light and I stay in Him then I am in the light. I am in His image and likeness, of like kind, so as He is light so can I be light. In fact, we are the only light available in the face of the gross darkness that engulfs the world and that threatens to engulf us all.
1 John 1:5-7 (KJV)
5 This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
6 If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:
7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
Wow, isn’t this just wonderful, He did the heavy lifting, then gifted us His salvation. God is so good! I didn’t get too far down that rabbit trail did I? Back to Ephesians.
Ephesians 1:17-20 (KJV)
17 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him:
18 The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints,
19 And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power,
20 Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places,
Verses nineteen and twenty tell us that the same power that was used to raise Jesus from the dead, a resurrection, not a mere raising from the dead to die again, restoring Jesus, the Word, as God and sitting Him at the right hand of the Father in Heaven is the same power at work in our lives and available to us.
I want to speak for a moment about the use of the term ‘resurrection’ with regard to Scripture. When we are saved, born again, there is if you will a resurrection of the soul, we are transformed from a dead soul to a living soul. The soul as I am using it here is the spirit part of us and is comprised of what is commonly referred to as spirit and soul. For a moment think of a house with a large entry way or foyer with a large section to the right and another to the left. Let’s say the one to the right with many subdivisions is the spirit man and is very dark until salvation. The area to the left is the soul and it also has many subdivisions and before salvation and the renewing of the mind it also is dark. Think of the foyer area as a part of the soul and spirit, it is the decision area, the middle man, in Greek the kardia commonly translated as the heart. Sensory information from the body, our own internal thoughts, communications from the enemy, and from the Holy Spirit arrive first in this area. We then make a decision as to if we will receive that information or not as part of our paradigm, our core beliefs.
The whole of this spirit man has connection to the physical man mainly through the soul, our consciousness. You may be thinking about now, what does this have to do with resurrection? Well at salvation we have a resurrection of the spirit man, and as we diligently seek the knowledge of Him there is a renewing of the mind making us more and more like Him. This renewing of the mind will continue in this life and if need be in the one to come until all the darkness, trash, of the world is replaced with the thoughts, words, and ways of God.
Okay, now what about physical resurrection? When we give up the ghost, our spirit and soul (living soul if born again), and die that part of us goes on to Heaven and looks just like we did here in the earth except better for it is free of the vestiges of the curse and aging. The body stays behind in the earth. At the Rapture, the catching away of the Church, for those who are alive receive an instantaneous change of their physical body from a corruptible form to an incorruptible form, just like the body Jesus now has. If we have died physically and have gone on to Heaven with our body left in the earth we will be with Jesus to meet the caught away saints and we also receive an incorruptible body. That is the totality of our resurrection. In verse nineteen of our text, we find the word ‘power’ used twice. The first use is ‘dunamis’ wonderworking power of God that heals and raises the dead. The second word translated power is ‘kratos’ which is a step up, it is resurrection power, the same power of the Holy Spirit that is with us, in us, at work through us and for us, and one day soon will complete our resurrection in Christ Jesus.
By: Dr. David Wood, Author, Bible Teacher, and Prophetic Voice
