14. The Nature Progression

My great grandfather had a ticket to go on the Titanic. My great grandmother got if for him because it would afford them a couple more weeks together before he took off for the U.S. However, he didn't think he could afford the extra couple weeks of time off of work here in order to pay to get them over. It really must have taken a lot of courage to leave family and culture to go to a brand new world in hopes and faith that you can earn enough to then send money to bring the whole family behind you. Yet that's what my great grandfather did much like many of yours!

So he sold his ticket and got on an earlier, much cheaper boat. According to the ship manifest, he should have been dead before ever reaching the States. Likewise, I wouldn't be here today if not for that urgent decision in his life. You see, I was in him before I was. If he had died, his "seed" would have died as well which means his future children would not be and their children and eventually me. Today I stand in his line because he lived.

OK, now that we got that settled, I want to look at how this "seed" business looks in the big picture of things 🙂

1. Adam was created by God as a man and I'm assuming with that came a "Man Nature." This man was in relation with God and all seemed to be good.

2. Adam and Eve decided to break from a pure relationship of trust and faith through love with God when they willingly chose to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Their choice introduced a "Sin Nature" to the human race where we tend to continue breaking off right relationship with Him in many ways.

3. God made a covenant with Abraham that his "seed" would bless all nations and yadda, yadda…The fulfillment of this promise came through Jesus. Jesus was fully man and fully God which baffles both Jews and Gentiles alike for different reasons (Jews would think of Him being fully man and they stumble with thinking He was God…Gentile Christians often think of Jesus as being fully God who somehow took on a human body temporarily but now He's back to be just fully God…The truth is that He's still fully man and fully God and will be for eternity!). Anyway, the short of it is that He lived, died and then rose again conquering sin and sins. That's a really huge point as a friend of mine from Water's Edge pointed out a few weeks ago. He conquered and paid for our sins while also conquering over the sin nature…He then has given us His Spirit as a new seed representing a new covenant.

What that means is that as much as I was "in" my Great Grandfather, I was also "in" Jesus Christ in the Spiritual realm. He's provided a way through grace and His sacrifice for us to enter into His seed as adopted sons and daughters…This transformation from the inside out is so much like a re-birth that people call it being "born again." In the end, what it does is shifts our nature one more time. We've gone from "Man Nature" to a "Sin Nature" to finally "God Nature".

I feel as though the term "God Nature" is going to mess some people up so let me clarify it a bit better. I don't believe we are all gods or anything like that…However, one of Jesus last prayers that we know of sounded like this:

                                                      John 17 (you really should sit down and ready the whole chapter though!)

Jesus' prayer was that we would be united with Him as He is with God the Father…When God walked among Adam and Eve in the garden, it wasn't complete. It wasn't enough. Some people struggle with the idea of free will or sin or why God would even put a "bad" tree in a good garden…Well, I think part of it is that He has always desired unity with us through love. There's no love without absolute freedom. Likewise, we could only be near Him in the garden. Jesus needed to come and become one of us so that we could become one with Him. It was impossible for us to become Him so He did the unimaginable and became human…to then give us a Spiritual seed with His own nature.

So then, what was His nature?
                                                       LOVE

If you can let those last couple paragraphs truly set in, it'll change your life…or at least it did for me and it's a continual changing. All of this nature changing is pretty "Big Picture" stuff even if it's foundational…so for those who are wondering how this changes anything tangibly or practically in your life, I guess I'd suggest going back to Jesus. Even knowing His nature as being from God, lived in this way to give us a practical example to follow:

In Philipians 2:5-7 the bible says this:

 ⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

   did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;

   by taking the very nature of a servant,