Hello, and welcome to Victory Briefings where we
use the word of God for a victorious
life.
Today, I'd like to talk a little bit
about the kingdom of God.
I wanna remind you that the ministry of
Jesus is centered and summed up in these
words,
the kingdom of God is at hand.
His whole purpose
was to rescue and redeem man to his
original realm and divine order.
We become stronger
and more grounded when we understand the kingdom
of God. Paul tells us that the kingdom
is not eating and drinking.
So it's not ritual or performance based, but
righteousness
and peace
and joy in the Holy Spirit. Romans
14
verse 17.
Now the logical starting point when we study
the kingdom of God is the Bible's opening
verse.
Here,
we introduce
the sovereign
of all the universe
whose realm, reign, and regency
are described
at the outset.
Here's where we meet God.
Genesis one verse one. In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth.
Wow.
The scope of his rule is his realm,
which is transcendent.
It not only includes
the entire universe,
but it exceeds it. He existed before all
creation.
He expands beyond it.
And since he has begotten it,
he includes
all that it is.
The power he uses to rule is his
reign and is activated by his words,
which is his will.
By his
own will, he creates,
decides,
and designs.
By his word, he speaks creation into being.
And by his works, his spirit
demonstrates
his unlimited power.
Now the authority to rule,
what we call his regency,
is in his preexistence
and holiness.
He was there before creation
in the beginning.
God has sovereign rights
over all creation.
He is
the creator.
His purpose in creating things good reveals his
holy nature
that is
complete and perfect.
It is his right to be creation's king.
All kingdom power and authority flow from him.
He is author and owner
of all.
Now we come to
man's
delegated dominion in
Genesis one twenty six through 28.
Then God said, let us make man in
our image
according to our likeness.
Let them have dominion
over the fish of the sea and over
the birds of the air and over the
cattle and over to all the earth and
over every creeping thing that creeps on the
earth.
Verse 27. So God created man
in his own image.
In the image of God, he created him,
male and female,
he created them.
Then God blessed them.
And God said to them, be fruitful and
multiply.
Fill the earth and subdue it.
Have dominion
over the fish of the sea, over the
birds of the air, and over the every
living thing that moves on the earth.
Dominion is a verb meaning to rule, to
have dominion.
This Hebrew word
conveys the notion
of exercising
domain
over those who are powerless
or otherwise under one's control.
It is related as
the exercise of authority by the priesthood in
Jeremiah five thirty one.
It's by the slave owners,
over the slaves in Leviticus
25
verse 43.
And it's used as supervisors
over the
workers
in king first Kings nine twenty three
and by a king over his kingdom in
first Kings
four twenty four
and five verse four.
Theologically
significant is the use of this word
to identify people's
god ordained relationship
to the created world around them. Genesis one
twenty six
and twenty eight.
Before he created man, god
had a plan to delegate to him dominion
over all the earth.
Man's power and authority to rule is part
of God's purpose
to make man in his own image and
likeness.
Genesis
two verses sixteen and seventeen says, and the
lord god commanded the man saying,
of every tree of the garden, you may
freely eat.
But of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, you shall not eat.
For in the day that you eat of
it, you shall surely die.
Notice the Lord God commanded
Adam.
Although the Lord gave Adam freedom of choice,
he also gave him a command.
The creator
is superior to creation.
We still have a freedom of choice,
but the only smart choice is to obey
God.
The choice of doing God's will is always
better than being separated from him, which is
the result of disobedience.
This is saying that man's power to reign
in life
will go only as far as his faithfulness
to obey God's word.
Romans six sixteen
in the New Living Translation says, don't you
realize that you become the slave of whatever
you choose to obey?
You can be a slave to sin, which
leads to death, or you can be or
you can choose to obey God, which leads
to righteous living.
Adam and Eve
didn't die physically the day they ate of
the forbidden fruit. Adam lived for nine hundred
and thirty years,
according to Genesis five five.
But Adam and Eve died spiritually
the instant they disobeyed God.
That is evidenced by their actions and words.
They immediately
became fearful
and ran from God.
You shall surely die, it says.
The Hebrew wording of this verse is interesting.
The word which is translated die is used
twice at the end of this verse.
Man's spiritual death was immediate,
which led to physical death, which was progressive.
The word death in the Bible never describes
a ceasing to exist.
It always indicates separation though.
Physical death is where the spirit and soul
separate from the body.
Spiritual death
is where our spirits become separated from God's
spirit.
Romans six twenty three makes it clear that
the wages of sin is death.
Just as the Lord told Adam here,
death means
spiritual and physical. Since all have sinned,
all have to die spiritually
and physically.
But God is a good thing to read
in in Romans six.
Praise God that He loved us so much.
He sent His son to die in our
place. John three sixteen.
All the judgment and all
the judgment and justice
demanded was placed on Jesus
so that we could pass from death unto
life.
Now before the fall,
which is recorded in, Genesis one thirty one,
it says, then god saw that everything he
had made and indeed it was very good.
So the evening of the and the morning
were the sixth day.
We need to recognize the difference between the
original order of man's environment,
on earth
and what it became as a result of
man's fall, the curse, and eventually the flood.
Isaiah 45 tells us though that the earth
was not created in vain.
Creation turned and fell with man.
It was man's sin that put thorns on
roses.
The agricultural,
zoological,
and geological,
even the meteorological
conflict of the earth
should not be attributed to God.
The will of God is not manifest in
confusion, death, and disease, and discord, and disaster,
any more than it is manifest
in human sin.
The world today
does not reflect
the kingdom order that God originally intended for
man's legal right on the earth.
And when we know this,
we should not attribute to God's will or
to acts of God
characteristics
our
world that are
characteristics
of our world that are results from man's
sin. God never made a mistake.
Paul tells us in his letter to the
Romans,
the whole creation
is standing on tiptoe
eagerly awaiting the revelation of the sons of
God.
That's Romans eight verse 19 of the Phillips
translation.
I believe that God sees the curse as
a temporary frustration.
The next two verses
says in the NIV says, for the creation
was subjected to frustration,
not by its own choice,
but by the will of the one who
subjected
it in hope that the creation itself will
be delivered
will be liberated
from its bondage
to decay
and brought into the glorious freedom of the
children of God.
Paul is saying that creation not only is
waiting with attentive
and earnest expectation
or looking forward.
The neck stretched out and a head thrust
forward
for something, but but that it is doing
so because it is linked with man.
Creation had no choice but to fall with
man.
When God's plan of salvation for people is
completed and the children of God experience their
glorious freedom from sin, Satan, and the physical
decay, then creation
itself will be liberty liberated
from bondage of decay.
Then all things will become new
according to Revelation 21 verse five.
Click on the link to watch a video,
legal stewardship of the earth.
And
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upcoming briefings. God bless you, my friend.