Why Were You Born
Do you really know why you were born? Do you
realize God has a purpose being worked out?...Most fail to understand
that purpose! Read this booklet, you will be surprised.
NO LONGER do news commentators, top military men and scientists say "if
there is a world War III"--now they speak only of when, and how it shall come!
Leading world scientists say frankly they are frightened!
With atomic bombs by thousands--with other newly-invented means of mass death and destruction said to be even more horrible than the hydrogen bomb- imagination-defying weapons--an appalling picture is presented which ought to make everyone SHUDDER!
No one thinks, now, that MEN, swayed by passions and partisanship and greed, and with competitive national aspirations and interests to work for and protect, will be able to prevent the world-cataclysm which experts tell us may blast human life from the earth!
Gloomy picture? Yes, but it's REAL! It's the picture we have to FACE!
This is the world we shall have to LIVE IN--or DIE IN!
WHY Does God Permit Such Horror?
Is it any wonder so many people--if and when they do begin to think of the Almighty in this connection--ask: "WHY, if there is a God, does He permit war? WHY does God allow such unadulterated HELL on earth among men?"
"Surely," they reason, "if God is good-if He is LOVE--He would not wish people who are innocent victims to endure this indescribable anguish and if He is ALMIGHTY, then He certainly could prevent it? Why doesn't He?
Of course, that's a slightly unbalanced conception of God. It emphasizes His love, His tender mercy and compassion, and His power--but it overlooks God's righteousness and His wisdom; and it fails utterly of understanding God's great PURPOSE in putting human beings upon this earth!
But people have a right to the true answer!
War, of course, is not caused by the Almighty. It is caused by ambition and greed--by the wrong thinking and acting of men, swayed by human passions. It is the result of evil--of SIN. Still,--God permits it!
The PURPOSE Being Worked Out
Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill actually gave the answer when he said, regarding the war, before the American Congress: "There is a PURPOSE being worked out here below." Of course, he implied a HIGHER POWER, above, doing the working out! World War II was really a part of the working out of that PURPOSE!
But man, it seems, fails to understand that PURPOSE!
Naturally, it has to do with the Plan of Redemption. But even that Plan is not very widely understood today, nor rightly preached!
WHY, let us ask, and understand, should man need any redemption?
The popular teaching is that one is "saved" at the time he accepts Jesus Christ as personal Saviour. Well, WHY is it, then, that God does not then and there remove him from this unhappy world of SUFFERING? Why not take him immediately to his happy reward? WHY, after he is "saved," must he live on in this life of suffering?
WHY is it, that once a man is converted, "many are the afflictions of the righteous;"- "all who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution;"- "it is through much tribulation we must enter the Kingdom of God." WHY?
WHY, Ist) does God permit the world to suffer so much; and 2nd) WHY must even converted Christians go on suffering?
WHY is there such a thing as sin? We hear it came from the "original fall of man." Well, WHY the fall? WHY didn't God prevent that?
All these questions we shall answer. Let us come to UNDERSTAND these basic and most important questions of all life.
WHY did God create the human family? WHY did He make us different from and superior to all other creatures?
God is Supreme CREATOR--not supreme Destroyer!
Satan is the Destroyer!
What is God's work? For He does work - Jesus, you know, said, "My Father works, and I work." His work is that of CREATOR! God, then, creates!
Now look about you. Look at all the species and forms of living
creatures. How many of those whom God created and started living are able to
think, plan, devise, and then bring about, by making or creating, that which
was thought out, designed and planned?
What You Can Do
Of course none but God Himself can create in the strictest sense of
bringing into existence that which did not even exist. But changing existing
materials, and putting them together in a new and different way--in other
words, MAKING things--is akin to actual creating and often called that.
How many creatures can think, plan, design, and then execute the idea into MAKING things? By instinct beavers build dams. But all these dams follow the same pattern. The beaver cannot think out some new, different pattern and make some new and different thing. Ants may form ant hills; gophers, snakes and rodents dig holes; birds build nests. But they always follow the same pattern. There is no originality, no thinking and designing of a new idea, no new construction.
Man can design and build great dams such as Grand Coulee. Man can build the great tunnels under mountains or the Hudson River. Man can invent and build automobiles, airplanes, battleships, submarines. Man alone, of all God created, is capable of approaching real CREATIVE powers.
But God has limited man's powers!
Why?
Why Man's Powers Are Checked
It is only now, twentieth century A.D., that man at last learns about the
use of atomic energy. Now man is experimenting, striving desperately to
develop jets, rockets, and means of flight and transportation which might
take him to other planets.
Why has man been restrained?
Are we blind? Look at what man has actually done with the things God has allowed him to devise and to make. Thousands of years ago he learned to deal in iron, steel, and other metals. He made implements, constructed buildings--but he also made swords and spears and went out to DESTROY!
Man learned how to organize his kind into cities, groups, nations. But to what use did he put the organization he controlled? He organized the able-bodied of his men into armies, and set out to conquer, to destroy, and to acquire by TAKING, not by producing and creating. And, even in those peaceful cities, states and nations not at war, those men who run the government seek greedily to fatten their own pockets at the expense of their fellows, and the smell of graft and illegal influence ascends to high heaven!
Man invents and makes ships that carry him over seas, then he arms them and turns them into weapons of conquest. He makes tractors, trucks and automobiles, then converts them into armored tanks. He learns how to build airplanes and fly swifter than any bird, then bends all his scientific, inventive, and creative genius into producing mightier carriers for atomic bombs, swifter jet and rocket fighters. He discovers that the powers God gave him allow him to produce explosives, so that he could move mountains if necessary--but soon he is exerting the most frenzied energies of his nation, at cost of billions of dollars, endeavoring to develop atomic bombs faster than his enemy, and then producing the hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more destructive!
A philosophic country doctor once said to me it was his belief that everything man's hand ever touched of God's creation, man had polluted, befouled, besmirched, and ruined. That statement seemed radical then. But I have been observing, since he said that over twenty years ago, and I am almost persuaded he was right.
For example: GOD gave man the wonderful grain of wheat--the perfect food, containing every element needed to nourish man, and in perfectly balanced alkaline-acid proportion; and now, in his greed for million-dollar profits, the big flour miller grinds up this precious wheat, takes it apart, ruins it, and sells it to us in a form that produces rheumatism, colds and fever, kidney diseases, impaired digestion, heart troubles, and ills too numerous to list here. The sugar refiners do the same to sugar. Today it is almost impossible to obtain any food, unless a farmer raises his own, which has not been rendered partly or wholly foodless, often poisoned, by man. Thus man DESTROYS health, which is only another way of saying he destroys man!
I need not go further. Just look about you, and observe. If you are a
thinker, you'll see how man, endowed with a portion of God's actual CREATIVE
POWER--and the only being which has it--turns this power of devising,
planning, inventing, and producing into DESTRUCTIVE channels!
Science running Amuck!
Look at the great factories of American industry, of which we boast. Here hums and roars the CREATIVE activity of mankind! Man has made some slight approach toward actual GOD-powers, and GOD-activity, in his tremendous industrial development.
But there is one deadly fault with all this.
Man has learned to exercise scientific, inventive and mechanical powers in excess of his development in ability to direct the product of his efforts into right and constructive channels!
And in that he is defeating the very purpose of his being!
WHY did God place mankind here:' WHY did God endow humanity with a slight proportion of God's own creative Power? WHY, in a word, were you born? And WHY were we born mortal?
WHY has God allowed mankind to turn his near God-like mind and powers into perversion and destruction? WHY has God allowed mankind to bring on himself all this sorrow, unhappiness and suffering?
Many attribute all this rebellion--this SIN--to what they call the
"original fall of man."
A Repairing of the Damage?
Let's dare frankly to examine the common teaching about that "Fall."
The common teaching, as believed and taught by most denominations, is that God created man perfect and complete, in the very image of God--and placed him in the beautiful Garden of Eden. It is believed that GOD'S CREATION WAS FINISHED - COMPLETED! Everything was perfect.
And God was able to do all this, and to start our first parents out all right, when lo and behold! Satan succeeded in invading that peaceful and blessed retreat. He successfully overthrew the man. Satan succeeded in thwarting God's will--upsetting God's Plan for a happy and peaceful life for his perfected humans--alienating the man and woman from God--introducing the dreadful consequences of SIN--marring, wrecking, God's creative handiwork!
And now, according to this popular view, God's plan for a happy life and beautiful environment for His created humans was all disarranged! Now God had to commence all over again, and formulate a new Plan--a PLAN to repair the damage!
Redemption, then, is pictured as God's PLAN for repairing the damage caused by Satan in that "original Fall" of man!
And ever since, God has entered into a furious CONTEST with Satan. For six thousand years, God has desperately been trying to redeem humanity--to save, and RESTORE mankind back to a condition as good as God had originally created him, before the "Fall."
What's WRONG With This Picture?
That's the popular idea being widely preached today!
WHAT'S WRONG with that picture? When stated so plainly, we can see quite clearly something is wrong!
What are we going to do with the "fall of man?" If this popular teaching is correct, it makes Satan more powerful than God. It makes Satan able to wreck God's perfected creation, to thwart God's will.
And, after God in desperation has devised a Plan of Redemption, and spent some six thousand years trying to restore the original Edenic perfection, where does this picture leave us today? Why, with Satan winning the contest by a pitifully lopsided score! At least half the people who populate this earth today know nothing about Jesus Christ--are blinded by false heathen religions! Only a very small percent of humanity could claim today to be "saved."
Can't we see that at every turn this belief presents Satan as more powerful than GOD? WHAT, then, IS THE REAL TRUTH?
Could GOD Be Responsible?
Now if Satan did not succeed in thwarting God's will, wrecking God's
perfected and completed Creation, then the only alternative is to say that it
all happened according to God's will-exactly as God Himself originally
planned!
But do we DARE make God Himself responsible?
We have but two alternatives! Either Satan got in there against God's will, and in so doing proved himself mightier and more cunning than God--or else God Himself planned and permitted it all! LET'S UNDERSTAND THIS!
The True ANSWER to These Questions
The real answer was brought out by Job. "If a man die, shall he live again,"
Job asked,- and answered: "All the days of my appointed time will I wait,
till my change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have
a desire to the work of thine hands!" (Job 14:14-15).
The latter part of his quotation, most often overlooked, is the key to this whole riddle! Read it again!
"Thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands!"
STUDY THAT! Job knew he was merely the work of God's Hands! Merely a piece of divine workmanship in the Hands of the CREATOR! Merely a piece of plastic CLAY in the hands of the Master Potter! And in calling us forth from the grave, in the resurrection, God is having a DESIRE to FINISH this WORK OF HIS HANDS!
Even the RESURRECTION, then, is a final completing of GOD'S CREATION!
Adam's Creation NOT COMPLETED!
Now we come to the WONDERFUL TRUTH!
The first chapter of Genesis does not record a COMPLETED creation at all!
Adam's creation was not finished!
Read that amazing statement again! Be sure you understand it!
CREATION is still going on!
SALVATION is not a repairing of the damage,"-a frustrated effort of God to restore man back to a condition as good as Adam, before the "Fall"!
Satan did not break into the Garden of Eden in spite of God--did not do one single thing contrary to God's great PURPOSE! All that has happened had been planned before of GOD--and all is progressing exactly as GOD WILLS.
Oh, what a WONDERFUL TRUTH!
What God actually is creating in us humans is the SUPREME MASTERPIECE OF ALL HIS WORKS OF CREATION! Millions--yes, billions--of perfect SPIRITUAL CHARACTERS! It is a spiritual creation. And God is bringing it about in two phases! This DUALITY in fact, carries through every part and sequence of this tremendous work of creation!
The model, from which the finished spiritual product is to be molded, is material substance--just mortal, human CLAY!
The creation described in Genesis 1 is the first phase of this creation--the MATERIAL creation, only. And that is merely the beginning-- the bringing into existence of the SUBSTANCE out of which a model may be molded for the finished Masterpiece!
God formed man, not out of Spirit, but "of the dust of the ground." To the man whose creation is described in Genesis 1, and 2:7, God said, "DUST thou art." Not immortal spirit--just DUST. Man is MORTAL, not yet immortal!
Adam did not have God's HOLY SPIRIT!
He was a PERFECT physical specimen, yes! Whatever GOD creates is perfect, not imperfect. But what God created, in Adam, was a FLESHLY MAN--a mortal man of flesh and blood!
Adam, in other words, was not complete!
One vital thing was lacking--and this one thing he was made to NEED--to hunger and to thirst for!- the indwelling of GOD'S HOLY SPIRIT.
But God provided for that. In the Garden of Eden was one "tree" which would have supplied it! And this, God freely offered the man. But Adam and Eve had to make a CHOICE between this "tree" which would have given them LIFE--GOD'S SPIRIT--the one thing that would fill that void, that longing in the soul--and the "tree" which symbolized the ways of SIN. Adam made the wrong choice as, of course, God knew he would! HE NEVER RECEIVED GOD'S SPIRIT! OUR FIRST PARENTS NEVER RECEIVED IMMORTALITY!
Rather, they were driven forth from the Garden of Eden, lest they now take also of the tree of LIFE and eat, and gain immortality (Gen. 3:22-24).
This is the end of part one.