Why Are We Not Born With It?

We've seen instances in the history of mankind when a kind of supernatural life has shown itself. We've all read fantasy stories of supernatural beings and magic spells, but these instances are different from those. For one thing, they are documented in historical records that are beyond dispute some of the most reliable we possess. For another thing, they have been handed down by people who have been some of the most respected and tested men and women in society. For another, many of these events brought death and persecution to the people who told of them.

This supernatural life has transformed physical sickness into health, and enabled thousands of people to cross dry deserts because of water that sprang from rocks when struck by men who exercised faith in the Maker of the world. It has changed the most cruel, savage men into kindly and gentle people. It has enabled others to leap out of depression and anxiety, into joy. It has even destroyed death and its power to end life. It seemed to reach zenith in the first century of our present era when a man called Jesus healed lepers paralytics, and raised people from death through touching them and exercising faith in the Creator whom he called His father. Even today, people experience the power of this life in their own personal day to day lives: they know that it is able to transcend the limitations we all so often experience in our natural lives.

Why then were we not born with this supernatural life? The answer is we were! But we refused it? But how could we? After all, we were given breath and blood circulation without any conditions or an option to refuse. Why was this supernatural life not given in the same unconditional way?

Because the Creator of the world wanted friends who would love Him because they wanted to -- that's what love is. It's freely giving yourself to another person for their uses whatever it costs you. That's what He did when He made us --and that's why He made us -- so that we would do the same for Him. This meant that He had to make us like Himself in every way -- especially in this matter of free will. He is a self-determining Being: He had to make us the same! How did He do it? After all, it is surely the most difficult thing to do in the universe -- to make a being that would be absolutely free from you -- free to oppose you if it wanted. We human beings just wouldn't do it -- it's too dangerous!

But this is what Our Maker did. He made our bodies of earth from the ground breathed in His own spirit of life, and we developed living souls or psychological capacities (Genesis 2:7). Thus He made us like Himself -- in His own image with the same physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capabilities as He has. Only if we were capable of the same attitudes and feelings as Him would we be able to love Him. However, the essence of His nature is not these capacities but His own spirit and inner attitude of perfect love and purity. These He has chosen of His own will. They exist only in His Spirit of life. He could not give this freely?chosen nature to us by compulsion as He gave us our physical, mental and spiritual capacities: such an act would be a contradiction -- an impossibility. The only thing He could do was to make it available to us -- so that we could choose it if we wanted!

This is what He did. In Genesis 2:9 "and out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." In verse 1, the choice is clearly presented -- "and the Lord God commanded the man, saying 'You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 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 die!"'

In other words, right from the beginning of man's existence on the earth the tree of life -- the supernatural life of God's own Spirit -- was available to enable him to develop the world by intuition and superhuman powers. Thus we would have been able to find the oil and the minerals through God's own guidance to the places He had buried them. Our minds would have been utterly unimpaired, our emotions balanced, and our wills strong. The world would have been filled with God's own life of harmony, and the order that God placed in Eden would have spread throughout the universe. If we had chosen to trust His direction to take His spirit-life into us by faith. But we thought we could become like Him and be independent of Him. We thought we could develop the world through trial and error by our own knowledge of good and evil. We thought that imitating Him was enough and rejected the closer relationship of trusting Him not only for what we could see but also for what we couldn't see.

Immediately that happened, we broke the mystic bond between us and Him and sank into a coarse existence that lost sensitivity to the world. Instead of controlling and developing it by His spirit?life we sank under its domination. Lacking His rule through free-will agents, the earth itself veered out of His will and fell into the power of the spirits He had permitted to test our free will. The only thing Our Maker could do was to withdraw the superhuman life of His spirit from our grasp to prevent us misusing it to spread our chaos throughout the universe (Genesis 3:22-24). From that moment on, we human beings have been born with only the natural, created life of God's destructible image while the supernatural, uncreated life of His indestructible image has been removed from our grasp. Let's look in the next article sat the effects of this deprivation on the way you and I live our lives today.