| Please elaborate on this point. Thanks. In post # 28, I drew a correlation between what Satan tells the lost and the saved as basically the same thing. Since the enemy's primary motivation is hate for all of God's creation (especially man because he is in God's image), his primary mission is to destroy us by preventing the lost from accepting God's free gift of Grace through the cross. Once the enemy fails in this (a person accepts Jesus), he does not simply throw up his hands and move on to the next target... because that new christian just became a real threat to him. If anything, Satan's attacks intensify upon the saved to relegate them to a status of non-threatening... as they were before their name was entered into the book of life. The tools of his destruction are the same... Guilt and/or Pride. Just because a person has been born again does not necessarily free him/her from the bondage or temporal consequences of sin in the future... however, it does free him/her from the ETERNAL consequence of sin. It is our eternal life that we are given which gives us confidence in our future and the resulting joy that allows others to see Jesus in us. This is what is threatening to the enemy. Therefore, any lie which can destroy that confidence will remove that joy. In this case, it is the suggestion that we are not as 'saved' as we think we are. Think about it... "you cannot be saved", "you were not saved", "you can lose your salvation"... are these statements not saying and attacking the same thing? Are we not free moral agents? do we not have free will? The answer is yes... we are, and we do... but just as everything else in God's creation, there are limits. Man does not have absolute free will... he has free will within the boundaries that God has established. When God saw that man had partaken of the tree of knowledge, He said let Us remove him from the garden lest he partake of the tree of life and live forever (making salvation impossible). In order to fully understand what salvation is, one must first understand what being lost is... which again takes us back to Adam. God said to Adam... do not eat of this fruit, for if you do, THAT DAY you will surely die. Did not Adam end up living for hundreds of years afterwards? So what gives? Answer: Adam's spirit is what died that day... almost instantly... separated from God for eternity. Before the original sin, Adam walked and talked with God in the spirit AND flesh freely. He was a COMPLETE being. WE TODAY ARE NOT THE SAME... We DONT Have the same free will which Adam had... because we are not in control of our spiritual bodies. Our FULL salvation will not be complete until our CORRUPTED physical bodies have been resurrected or translated into in-corruptible form. Until then, God protects that 'New Creature' He creates in us at salvation FROM our corrupted physical bodies, JUST as He protected Adam from the tree of life. |