We Only Know Right Through Wrong

It has pretty well been established that God’s purpose for humans is “to bring many sons unto glory,” glory being a vast family of sons brought to their highest conceivable destiny as co-sons and co-heirs of the universe with His own Son. He had this in hand before the creation, “according as He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world,” and this meant one thing – that the sons must be mature, capable sons, not a crowd of irresponsible little children, but knowing who they are as persons, knowing how to function as sons, and thus knowing their destiny and able to fulfill it.

That means training and development from little children to adolescents and then to sons who can represent their Father and do His business for Him. And this is the history of the human family.

There is one facet of mature experience which is often missed, yet it lies at the roots of capability on any level and none can be sure of himself and his proficiency in any profession without it. A THING IS ONLY A THING BECAUSE IT HAS ITS OPPOSITE. It has a right and a wrong and the one has overcome the other.

You cannot say a certain yes in a decision until you have first canvassed the alternatives and said an equally certain no to each of them. The strength of the yes is in swallowing up the nos! Not in having no nos, but in facing them and replacing them by the final yes. Then only is the yes a strong and certain one.

Proficiency is not in ignoring the wrong way of doing a thing, still less in denying that there is a wrong way; but proficiency is in having known the wrong way and tried it out and learned once and for all that it doesn’t work that way. Then the yes has its strength in swallowing up its no.

A carpenter, to be proficient, must first have learned that you don’t use your chisel this way, or make your measurements that way, but then these are the right ways.

No housewife can be confident in her kitchen until she first knows you don’t cook that meat at this heat or mix those ingredients in those proportions; then she is spontaneously at ease in her good cooking.

And so through every conceivable activity of life. You must know the wrong way and have proved it wrong, before you are secure and confident in the right. The one must “swallow” the other up.

And here we have God’s perfect wisdom in the birth of the human race, and in having a convenient opposite, the wrong one, the evil one, through whom He would bring His vast family of sons to maturity. This was His wisdom in allowing the devil to be His convenient agent. To have sons, they must find themselves in their freedom. They must discover that to be a person is to be conscious that there are alternatives and make their free choice; and ultimately their right choice through having first made the wrong one, and tasted the consequences.

And the wonder of our perfect God is that He knew this was the way His predestined family of efficient sons must take, from wrong first and then to right. And He knew the suffering that entailed for them with its possibility of a lost eternity. So He took it upon Himself to go that same way to its total final end, and in the person of His own Son, Himself in His Son form, to participate in the sufferings in their fullest measure. The writer of Hebrews says that this involvement to the full in the sufferings of humanity was the only way the perfect Father, to be perfect, could go so that “it became Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, to make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.” Tremendous!

Coming down the family tree from our first parents, Adam and Eve, we became misused selves. We became children of the devil as John says – that devil who is quite simply the created being who brought into manifestation the potential there must be in freedom, of being the opposite to God. And we have participated in this exposed opposite. But by doing so, we have gone along a necessary road by which a person must know and reject misuse before being established in the right use. And here is the meaning of the Fall, and its value.

We had to discover and experience what it is to be a wrong self before we are conditioned to be a right self. We have to learn misuse before we can settle into right use. Even Jesus Himself, to be a person, had to be confronted with the devil and come under the temptation of the “evil” way of self-interest. By that means He found His human self in its determined fullness with all its normal capacities and reactions.

From that first moment of the Fall and its consequences, there was the pronouncement of deliverance. And the deliverance is Jesus Christ in the seed of the woman, Eve, Who would “bruise the head of the serpent”. And what is more, though He would come to do this in due time in human history, in God’s timeless sight He was already, in that remarkable phrase in Revelation 13:8, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

So the first stage of training for humans is downward, not upward, and is necessary preparation for that vast family of sons of God. As we choose the wrong downward paths of sin, we hopefully learn that we do not have it within our human selves to control the wrongs and truly seek the rights. At this point, God would have us cry out for a Savior – that Savior provided “from the foundation of the world.”

And it is only by the act of choosing Christ as Savior and Lord that we can be born again and enter into that Family of God as sons.

Then God does an awesome and marvelous thing – Christ comes to live right within this new son or daughter to give this new son or daughter the ABILITY to overcome the wrong and choose the right. It is a lifelong process with many slips along the way – but it has the guaranteed results of growth and maturity as true children of God.

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