Present at the Birth (Part 4): God’s Eternal Purpose – Why God Created Man (Genesis to Revelation)

What’s another one? A line all the way through the Bible about water. Yes, ma’am. There’s a woman. There are actually two women. There are two women in the Scripture.
I can tell you who one of them is. I don’t know who the other one is. I guess she’s Jezebel. No, there is a city who is a woman. And what’s her name? Jerusalem. Who’s her mother? Huh? Who’s her mother? Hagar is her mother. Hagar! Hagar is the mother of one, and Sarah is the mother of the other one. So, there is a woman who is a city. There are two Jerusalems, I guess we would have to say, but they are a woman. And of course, we begin to see a woman very clearly emerging in the Gospels.

Have you ever understood that the Gospel begins with a woman? It begins with a woman. Now, those of you who know that, that’s fine. Don’t show us how smart you are. Those of you who don’t, can you guess what I’m talking about? Can you guess what I’m talking about — the reference in the very beginning of the Gospels to a woman? How’s that possible? You never heard of such a thing. Well, John the Baptist declared, “I am the friend of the groom.” And who is Christ? The groom. Alright, and what’s John doing? He is introducing the groom to the bride. And that’s how the New Testament opens — with a tremendous…the Gospel opens with a tremendous declaration by a man seeking to get a girl prepared to meet her fiancé. Praise the Lord. You find this girl all through the Old Testament and all through the New Testament, and then finally — boom, wow, golly gee — into the ….

What were the rest of them? Two realms. Two realms.  Well, of course, that’s hardly worth commenting on, isn’t it? There are two realms all over the Old Testament, two realms in the New Testament, and there is a marriage of the two realms in eternity future — a marriage of the two realms.

Now, you said two fellowships? Alright, the fellowship of the eternal God and the fellowship of Adam in the garden. And that again is real. We begin to see something of His eternal purpose. God is seeking to enlarge the fellowship. He’s enlarging the Life, the participants of life. He’s enlarging the fellowship. Until you come to the New Testament, you see that fellowship brought to earth clearly. See, God is not stopped by the fall. Had Adam eaten of the tree of life, that fellowship would have been between God and Adam, like it was between the carpenter Jesus, the Lord Jesus, and the Father there in Galilee. Now, that enlarges in the Epistles — this fellowship — and finds its culmination in Revelation 21-22, so you should spend a lot of time looking at Revelation 21-22.

And are we out of the list yet? Is there anything else? Okay. Let’s see what else we can find here in this section. Okay. I don’t know what to do here, frankly. There was one other thing I added, and that is — and I need a term for this, being as I’m going to talk about it. Hidden in these two chapters is this: do you know the word deference? Deference. Deference — that’s the way it’s pronounced. What is deference? Can somebody tell me what deference is? Give me a definition of deference. Giving place to the other. Almost preference, but not so much preference as giving place to. Giving honor to. Not yourself, but the other one. Deferring to. Deference to the other person. This is here in Genesis 1 and 2. Now, there was one thing that, and we’ll find this in the Lord’s life, it’s in the Trinity. The Father gives deference to the Son, the Son gives deference to the Father, and the Holy Spirit gives deference to everybody.

I want you to go back to your list and review it. I want you to really pay attention to the word corporate, corporate, corporate. There’s a corporateness in God, and there’s a corporateness in man, for there is a corporateness in God’s purpose.

So, we come to the next thing, and that is — we come to the purpose for which God created man. The purpose for which God created man. Now, if there was ever a moment in your life to pay attention, it’s right now. You can find out what you exist for. You won’t like it. You want to exist for a Cadillac, a home, money in the bank, and a promise that nobody will ever disagree with you or get in your way or create a problem. That’s what you and I want to be created for. Now, here is an unfallen Adam, and he is told for what he was created. Now, interestingly enough, it does not declare that he is created for fellowship, but he does fellowship. He is not created for eating the tree of life, but he could eat the tree of life. But when we come down to the purpose, we’re talking here about function. The function of man. And I come back to impress upon you again — there is a line of two men throughout the whole Old Testament and throughout the New Testament.

I was sitting in a meeting one day in Los Angeles, California, minding my own business, and I got called to the platform to speak. And I got up and talked about those two men — talked about a lot of other things, but I talked about those two men. And I said some things that I shouldn’t have said, and I’m going to repeat them right now to show you that I have not lost my insanity. I said that one of these men is the old man, and he is religious; not spiritual, but religious. Now, he’s also very sinful, but he’s also religious. You never met very many people who are not religious. No matter how sinful, he’s also religious. And I don’t mean to pick on the Catholics, but they have this wonderful way of combining religion and sin. You go out and get drunk all night, and you go to the priest the next day, and you ask for forgiveness. This is wonderful, the way they can just…it’s just so beautifully solved. Religion and sin just kind of all mixed in there.

We Christian Protestants are really dumb. We try to quit sinning. And that is…the Catholics didn’t make any effort to do that, and that’s why there are more Catholics than there are Protestants. They had a head start. Huh? They had a head start. They really did. Well, they had a head start too, didn’t they? I’m not picking on the Catholics, but man is religious. And when he comes to religion, he builds his own building, and he builds it out of clay. He also just naturally organizes religion. And if you’ve ever read Our Mission, you know that I trace the history, the actual, physical history of that. There really is the history of how religion is organized, and Christianity will be stated in the history books clearly. It started out without being organized, and it adopted the structure of the Roman Empire. And all your denominations have basically the same organizational structure. And what we’re standing here to do and to be is to be people who are not organized, but who meet under the Lord. I’ve heard people say so many times, “You have to be organized.” That’s not true. I would not have wanted to grow up in a home that was organized. I was in a home that was organic. That’s why those of you who grew up in a military home were so miserable. It wasn’t so much organized as it was regimented. But it wasn’t organic. It wasn’t a living thing at all.

Now, a body is a living thing. It’s not organized. It functions. It’s an organism. And the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is an organism, and I tell you, brothers and sisters, the non-organized church is just about to die out on this earth, but then the non-organized church has been just about to die out on this earth from the very beginning, and then God raises up men to make sure it doesn’t. Isn’t it wonderful what happens in Nepal? Nepal was a tribal nation. It’s a very short step from a tribe to the church. Very short step. The tribe and the church are very similar in the way they do things. It’s tribal. The church is essentially tribal.

If you want a good definition, you’ve never been in a tribe, so you don’t know what that means, but it’s not organized. And tribalism is about to die out on this earth. In fact, it was predicted by some sociologists that sometime within the next 50 years, tribal life on this planet will cease to exist. Within the next 50 years, tribal life on this earth will… if that actually happens, Satan will have won this planet. For he works through organization. Now, I’m just hoping the church of the Lord Jesus Christ will still be around, because if she is, I mean, in her expression; I don’t mean…she’ll always be here…but in the practical expression, she needs so desperately to be a witness to the headship of Christ, not to the organization of man.

Now, my point in all of this is that there is a line of an old man that runs throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Man built Babylon. Abraham built an altar and kept moving. And in the New Testament, you have the organized religions opposing the church. The church is not an organization. She’s a man. She’s a man — or he’s a man. She’s a she until she’s under His headship as one. And then they are a new species, a new creation — a new, the Greek says, a new humanity. A new kind of a human.