Who would deny the we are reaching the end of the Age of Revolution. Having turned upside down government systems, politics, morals, education, sexuality and myriad things more, the Revolutionaries are now focused on revolting against the natural order of things.
We can affirm without fear of error that the Revolutionaries are soldiers of the flesh. There are other revolutionaries who worked to contain and control the fleshly inclinations of man with mixed success but we are not going to look at their work today. The Revolutionaries we will study today are not free; they are the servants of a fallen spirit, the devil, the one responsible from the beginning for awakening mankind to the siren song of the flesh.
Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, [murder,] drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5:19-26 NRSVACE)
The revolution that started in the Garden of Eden had disastrous consequences for Adam and Eve. After foolishly abandoning the love of their Creator, they lost their original nature to sin, their original home, and the kind light yoke that God had placed upon them. It was a stupid act to join the Serpen’t revolution. It is always stupid to believe a lie and there are always bad consequences to gullibility. One old Spanish proverb reminds us: “El oro y el tonto se separan pronto” which is more or less the equivalent of the old English proverb: “A fool and his money are soon to part.”
Foolishness is lack of reason. When Adam and Eve sinned they had to force themselves into a disorderly situation in which their nature, ordered to reason, had to be bent to follow the lie, the temptation presented by the devil.
God always makes good of any evil because He cannot be tempted and evil is foreign to His divine nature. Soon after Adam and Eve failed to obey God’s just commandments, God had to take away their glorious nature. The rebels got a demotion, their acts were no longer ordered to reason. Sin was now part of them and distorted their perception of the world. Their intellect was dimmed, sin descended like a fog on them and they became more animal-like and less God-like. God arranged for them a new nature, similar to those animals that lived in the Garden. The combination of that new nature and their new sinful inclination conformed what the Scriptures call “the flesh” — Tria autem sunt quae nos tentant, caro, mundus, diabolus. In the revolutionary new order of things there were three things which tempted mankind, the flesh, the world, and the devil. Those still are the opposites of the original glorious nature of man, the glorious home that God had given them in the Garden, and the Spirit that guided them through obedience to the divine laws.
What was that Spirit? It has many names and attributes. It was Reason in the mind of man, it was the Love of God in man’s heart, and it was a sense of Grace as a sense of gratefulness for all the good things that God had given Adam, the first of them life.
All of that was replaced by the flesh, bitter strife in a hostile world, and the constant opposition and temptation brought by the dark spiritual forces that had tempted man to fall in disgrace.
Return to the Father through the Son
‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ (Matthew 11:28-30 NRSVACE)
The preceding verse is nothing less than Jesus’ invitation to return to the Garden by transforming our nature through submission to His will. He expects us to humbly declare: “Jesus, I give you my will. Give me Your Will” after the grueling lesson of human history has been learned by heart. We have to accept Him not only because He is our King, our Sovereign but also because it is the best thing that can happen to us. Revolution? I pass, no need to ask again.
In time God came in the person of His Son to invite us to return.
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law. (Galatians 4:4 NRSVACE)
And yet, in spite of many miracles, there were Revolutionaries who decided to adhere to the flesh, the world, and the devil. How? Why? The Revolutionaries rejected the Son sent to them as their Messiah, and they chose Caesar, who was both the king of the known world and the Pontifex Maximus, the Supreme Pontifex of all the religions of the Roman Empire. Pontifex is a title that means “bridge builder” used in a religious sense as “intercessor” for the people before a myriad pagan gods. So, that takes care of the world (the Roman order) and the devil (false gods) but what about the flesh?
They cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar!’ (John 19:15)
Jesus performed many miracles to show the people of Israel that he had divine power to submit the flesh to God’s will. He cured lepers, restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf. He even restored a number of people to life and changed the lives of many who were slaves to avarice, sexual immorality, and other moral disorders. But Jesus differed with the Revolutionaries in one thing that later, Saint Paul insisted in clarifying to all Jews:
What I am saying, brothers is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Corinthians 15:50)
Paul is referring to the flesh, the condition inherited from fallen Adam. And he also refers to blood, lineage, that we would call today DNA or racial identity, the very vehicle that moves our sinful inheritance through our biological history. Those two things are antithetical to God’s kingdom, they have no place in the Garden because they were born of the very disobedience that refuses to make God’s will our own will.
The dimwit Revolutionaries did not understand the grace that was placed before them! They thought that the promise made to Abraham was a fleshly promise, inherited just like any other fleshly trait. They were wrong: the promise was spiritual because it pertained a transformation of man, a reversal of the curse of Adam, a return of mankind to the original human nature that inhabited the blessed Garden!
They answered him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did, but now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are indeed doing what your father does.’ They said to him, ‘We are not illegitimate children; we have one father, God himself.’ (John 8:39-41 NRSVACE)
Christ was talking about the fatherhood of the devil. “We are the seed of Abraham!” they claimed but Jesus knew that they were of a different seed, “the seed of the Serpent” that always tries to kill “the seed of the woman” as predicted in Genesis 3:14-15.
The Revolutionaries adhered to the rotten inheritance of the flesh, rejecting thoroughly that Son who had proved to them that He could cure the flesh, defeat the devil and conquer the world through the Cross of Calvary. The Revolutionaries could not make sense of these things because their nature refused to accept the Logos incarnate.
Accepting the lie of a fallen spirit got mankind into the swamps of the flesh. Accepting the truth from the Son of God incarnate in sinless flesh can return us to the Garden but we have to incorporate Him into our reason. We had to recognize in Him the Logos, the agent of life, the impulse that moves history to its end, the reason we are here because we were made for Him. We have to sincerely say in our hearts “Thy will be done!” When that actually happens, He will lead us to a nature even higher than that of Adam, to the very life that God enjoys. God always turns evil into good.
When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1Corinthians 15:28 NRSVACE)
Our days are blessed
I am convinced our days will be blessed with the Great Passover into the next step of this cosmic adventure. I do not know how it is going to happen, I do not know the day when this big change in world affairs will be manifest to all flesh. But I think we have had enough signs so far to know that the day of our liberation is near.
The old lie of “liberty, equality, fraternity” will be quickly forgotten, erased from every human mind by a new glorious reality of true freedom and brotherhood without envy and strife.
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:18-21 NRSVACE)
This present flesh and all its miseries will be forgotten and the Spirit will rise again triumphant, guiding us to the end of history where we will meet our Maker face to face to finish the interrupted conversation. We will hear His Voice in the new Garden but we won’t hide. We will joyfully run to Him and call Him “Father” for the first time in a long time.
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