The field of tension between faith and fall
Underlying topic(s):
- By John Eagles, April 12, 2001.
This page is part of an ERW course, Divine Principle.
People yearn for all kind of things. Some people want to become rich, others want to get famous. There are people who want to gain much knowledge, but those people who have chosen to get much faith have really made the best choice of all.
When you have decided that to gain faith is the highest you could reach in life, then you did not only choose for faith, but once you have built a good relation with God, God will give you all the other blessings of life just for free. When it is your only goal in life to develop good faith in God, then you eventually also will gain knowledge and dominion over creation. People and angels will come to love you very much. And even if you wished to live a hidden life, you would not be able to escape becoming famous. But if you really have concluded that faith is the most important asset of all, then all those other things you will take for granted. They are just part of your life, part of your world over which you took responsibility.
Those people who have chosen to develop good faith in God, those people really have made the wisest choice.
How can we gain faith?
This raises again the question of how we can gain faith.
God has created us according to a plan. God’s plan is a concept for man, and this concept is based on good principles. When man functions in the way that God wanted man to function, then man is good.
Good man is created from God’s Word. Before there was man, there was the Word. Man is an embodiment of God’s Word.
The highest goal of life should be that you become an embodiment of God’s Word. You should become an expression of God’s original Word.
How do you reach this? This is only possible when you build up faith. It is by building up faith, invisible faith, that you can become an original person. An original person is someone who is an expression of God’s Word. And because man is a free and responsible person, man himself or herself is responsible for becoming such an expression of God’s Word. You have to know God’s Word and you have to believe God’s Word. You yourself also are responsible to receive God’s Word. You must make the conditions so that God can give His Word to you and so that you can understand God’s Word and so that you have desire to live according to God’s Word.
How are you going to receive God’s Word? This you must do by building a Foundation of Faith. We could also say that you have to gain more and more faith, but we use the word 'foundation' to emphasize the fact that faith needs to be built upon foundations. You build a small foundation of faith, and upon this small foundation of faith, you build a larger foundation of faith. Faith doesn’t come to you just like that. It needs a long time of you fulfilling your tasks given by God to increase your faith.
How do you increase your faith in God? How do you make your Foundation of Faith stronger?
This is done by making offerings to God.
Daily offerings to God
To increase our faith, we must make a daily offering to God. Let us try to understand this from a practical point of view.
Each day is a day in which we can accomplish a creation or re-creation. A day was created by God as time period for a creation of something. Therefore, also after we fell away from God, we should use each day to accomplish something that can be offered to God.
What should we offer to God? This depends on the missions that you have gotten from God. Usually, the tasks that God gave you will extend over more than one day. That means that you must be aware of the all-over goal that God has given you for the mission or task that you are working on.
Let us say that your task is to build a certain company, for example a computer company. You did of course get more tasks than building a computer company, but for the purpose of this article we simplify a little. To build a computer company, a time period is given. Let us say that your time period is three years. You should have prayed what exactly is the final goal for your task and about the time period that God has given you. Then you need to pray over the way to reach your goal. If you have done this, then you have written this somewhere down, and you know more or less, what kind of sub-goals you have to fulfill in the first year, the second year and the third year. Based on all this, you can now find out what kind of goal you should fulfill for the coming day.
The coming day is the most important day of your life, because by fulfilling the goal for that day, you can bring a successful offering to God, and in that way you can also fulfill your goal to build a computer company under God.
In the morning you pray to God about the goal of the coming day. You find out what is that goal, and then you try to fulfill it. Maybe you are confronted with difficulties and you cannot fulfill the goal. But because you did seriously try to fulfill it, you could analyze the difficulties and in your prayers to God and in your report to your restoration parent you get guidance for how to solve the problem. It is not the most important that you always are successful in each day of your life. Most important is that you keep centered on fulfilling the final goal for your task and that you are taking serious each day and that you learn from your defeats.
It is most essential that you build your Foundation of Faith in the right way. That means that you must build on that foundation each day. That means that each day you must be very serious in trying to fulfill the day goal and that you also offer your accomplishments or your failings to God and to your restoration parent.
Foundation to receive God's Word
Creation goes day by day, and also re-creation goes day by day. A successful recreation for a day is the same as a good offering to God. Through your offering to God, which should be an offering that helps fulfilling a much larger goal for a task or mission you got from God, you build up your Foundation of Faith. The work that you do, the offering that you bring, this is external. But your faith you are building up, that is internal.
If you brought your offering in the right way, then you made yourself an object to receiving God’s Word. God’s Word is what recreates you. In God’s Word there is God’s love. So by opening yourself for God’s Word, you also open yourself to receive God’s love.
But it often happens that you bring an offering and you receive God’s Word, and then you don’t like God’s Word at all. You might even reject God’s Word given to you. How can this happen?
This happens when your offering to God was not pure. Maybe you thought you offered to God and maybe you brought some kind of external offering, but if your heart and mind were sinning while you prepared the offering, then God is not so happy with your offering. Maybe God does not accept the offering, or God can only accept your offering under the condition that something wrong in you is going to be exposed. God will then give His Word to you in a way that you might not like it.
Remember the offering that Cain brought. God could not accept Cain’s offering because Cain had sinned while preparing the offering and Cain did also have a self-centered motivation for bringing the offering to God. Cain’s motivation for offering to God was not to give something to God, but Cain wanted to get blessing from God.
Before you get blessings from God, you will first get God’s Word. And God’s Word comes to you in the way that you need it. If you are in need of judgment by God, then God’s Word could be given in that way.
It is smarter to bring your offering in such a way that you don’t need to be judged.
There always is the tension in your life between building up a Foundation of Faith and falling down. You do something in your life, and what you do is either to God’s liking, or it is not to God’s liking. You give or you take. You are doing God’s Will or you are not doing God’s Will. Of course, during a day, you might do some good things and some bad things. In that case, your offering to God is mixed, and God will try to make you aware of your need to cleanse yourself.
Nothing in life is just neutral. Always, you do something centering on God, or you do something because you are dominated by evil. To do something centering on God, this means to build up your Foundation of Faith. To forget about God, this means to fall.
Beware of the fall!
When Adam and Eve fell, it was because they followed false words of the fallen angel. After their fall, they continued sinning and each new sin was actually an offering to Satan. Each sin that you commit makes a false offering and builds up a foundation of false faith. As a result of your foundation of false faith, you become filled with false words.
The crux of life is to gain true faith. Nothing is more valuable than that. By building up a strong Foundation of original Faith, you become an original and good person, an embodiment of God’s original concept for man. But beware of the fall!!! All your good efforts can be annihilated in shortest time if you engage in false-love relations that make false offerings and that build up a foundation of false faith. From that you get filled with false and untrue words. You become an embodiment of antitruth, if you are not very serious in obeying The Commandment…
