Holiness (obedience to God’s Word/Law) and sin (disobedience to God’s Word/Law) are options which He has afforded  mankind beginning with Adam and Eve.  One must choose one or the other.  Religious fence-straddling relative to those choices is not allowed for He views any such maneuver as sin.  Not one jot or tittle, Word or phrase, verse or other statement of His Truth can be altered in any way.  God is perfect.  Everything He does is perfect.  Perfection needs no alteration.  Those who seek Him are commanded to “Be therefore perfect EVEN AS your Father in heaven is perfect” (Mat. 5:48).  The English Word translated “perfect” in the Greek language is “teleios,” meaning perfect, complete, mature.  Simply put, TELEIOS MEANS TO BE LIKE GOD.  God’s people are commanded to be perfect, be perfected or to be in a state of perfection over a dozen times in the New Testament.  In each instance the believer makes the ultimate decision whether to obey God or to obey Satan.  Nowhere are we told that God makes anyone perfect by fiat (a grant).  We obey and serve either God or Satan (Rom. 6:16).  Perfection is reached when we obey God perfectly, which He commands.

Our spiritual condition is determined by our individual will.  God has provided for us His “roadmap” to the spiritual state He requires.  If followed, His map will lead us to His kingdom.  Of course, Satan also provides his perverted roadmap (Gal. 1:6), which his prophets pass off as God’s map.  It is up to us to diligently study God’s way so that we will know when Satan is trying to lure us off God’s way.  He uses his “ministers of righteousness” to do this.  It is only by studying God’s way that we can  1) know His way, 2) take His way and 3) to remain on His way unto the end.  Then, and only then, will salvation be awarded (Mat. 10:22).

Jesus of Nazareth, being a man like all other men, had the same choices as His peers.  In Hebrews 2:10 we are told that He was MAKE PERFECT by the things He suffered, not by fiat.  In 5:9 His being MADE PERFECT is directly tied to those who would spend eternity with Him: “And being MADE PERFECT, HE BECAME the author of salvation for ALL THEM THAT OBEY HIM” unto perfection.   Jesus had to BECOME–BE MADE–PERFECT just like any other human being.  He was given no spiritual “leg up” by His Father.  He had no advantage over other people.  For proof of this see Jesus of Nazareth: God, Man or God-man.  JESUS HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN TWO OPTIONS : HOLINESS AND SIN.  Using the power of the Holy Spirit, He made the right choices.  We have the same Holy Spirit available to us that He had available to Him.  He was tested and tried as all other men, “yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).  Therefore, God can command us to “walk as He walked” (1 Jn. 2:6), to “purify ourselves as He is pure” (1 Jn. 3:3) by the “washing of water by the Word” (Eph. 5:26).  Jesus had to obey those same commands.  The Word (water) cleanses the vessel which receives it.  EVERYTHING COMES BACK TO THE WORD OF GOD, which He symbolized as water–the universal cleansing agent.  Just as the physical body craves water when it has gone without it for a while, the spirit of a true saint craves spiritual water when he/she goes a while without it.  That water is God’s Word.  The Holy Bible is the spring from which His life-giving Truth flows.  We live by the faith that is formed within us when we continuously drink of that spring.

As noted earlier (and often), faith comes from God’s Word.  We prove our faith by obeying (“working”) His Word.  Faith that is not “worked” (exhibited/proven) is dead faith.  We live and die by our faith.  Living faith produces live people.  Dead faith produces dead people.  Man repeatedly chooses between living faith and dead faith.  One ordained preacher told me he sinned (chose dead faith) “thousands of times” each day and got away with it because he was “saved.”  Being under Satan’s spell, he “knew” that God’s grace made those thousands of sins disappear each night when he repented.  The fact that each time he sinned he “crucified Christ afresh” (Heb. 6:6) totally escaped him because he knew only the “headlines” found in God’s Word.  This “minister of righteousness” was much too busy sinning to search out, learn, believe and obey God’s fine print.  Concerning the re-crucifying of Christ, the exact wording used by the Apostle Paul in Hebrews 6:6 reveals that sinners crucify Christ “TO THEMSELVES.”  “To themselves” means that they choose to personally assume the guilt for spiritually crucifying the Son Of God repeatedly.  The Catholics have the system streamlined–they keep Him nailed to the cross.  This does save much time and effort.  They can just look at Him hanging there and say, “Handle it.”  But they are not alone.  Their religious brethren have their own sin-nullification strategy.   Protestants differ from Catholics only in technique.  While Catholics keep Jesus “the sin eraser” Christ permanently nailed in position,  Protestants allow Him to come down, then nail Him back up there (“afresh”) following each sin.  Though a bit more time and energy consuming, the Protestant method is believed to be equally effective.

Scripturally stated, faith is taking God at His Word.  Eve confessed her and Adam’s faith in God’s Words when she repeated them to the Serpent (Satan).  She confessed that they knew God’s Words, believed them and obeyed them, knowing that to do otherwise meant certain death (Gen. 2:17).  They knew this because GOD SAID IT.  Adam and Eve’s faith was total and rock solid, which was a problem for Satan.  He knew that as long as they believed God’s Words he could not lure them away from Him.  He had to destroy their faith, which was based on God’s Word (Rom. 10:19).  To destroy their faith he would have to CHALANGE THE BASIS OF THEIR FAITH–he had to nullify God’s Word.  The only way to do this was to offer them better words upon which to base their faith.

Adam and Eve knew they could choose to obey God’s command or the Serpent’s “better words.”  His better words are today known as church doctrine, which Paul called a “perversion” of God’s gospel in Galatians 1:6.  See the Introduction to this website for a few examples of Biblical perversions which the church has adopted from Chaldean/Babylonian heathenism.  To measure Satan’s success in nullifying God’s Word and destroying man’s faith, look in any phone book under “churches.”

Of the first four humans on earth, Satan seduced three of them.  In most any endeavor, a 75% success rate is welcomed.  However, for Satan that was not good enough.  Since Eden he has used his Word-nullifying, faith-destroying technique to deceive generation after generation of human beings.  There came a time when the entire world was under his spell, except for a man named Noah.  Noah was a preacher of righteousness.  He preached God’s righteous way to the masses of his day.  Without exception they rejected it.  Out of hundreds of thousands of people, possibly more, only Noah was true to God’s righteousness message.  Because sin had saturated the earth, God decided to destroy the sinners and begin again.  In order to repopulate the earth following the destruction, He saved Noah and seven other people.

Today we see that Satan’s original 75% success rate pales when compared to his future successes.  Today, of the seven billion plus people on earth, only a few thousand take God at His Word.  Though over two billion claim to be God’s children, when their words, thoughts and deeds are compared to His Word, very few believe and obey it.  And they are despised for doing so, just as He prophesied.  See the series titled Persecution for a full teaching on the subject.  See the instructions for downloading a specific series on the Introduction page of this website.  L.J.