AN OVERVIEW OF GOD’S PLAN REVEALED IN SCRIPTURE

God’s Plan for Us

Why we were created

God is expanding his Family. We were created for the sole purpose of becoming part of his Family – the new brothers of Yeshua, the Messiah. We are here to learn how to be like God – to learn how to love others just as he does, and to focus our lives on pleasing him, just as Yeshua does.

One of the most important qualities of God’s new children is the character that they have built through willingly choosing to use the power of God’s Holy Spirit to overcome Satan’s temptations and their own natural human desires.

Human life is intended to be a comprehensive training course – learning how to live as part of God’s Family - being tested in all things and slowly building character by choosing the more difficult God-centred course of action over a long time.

Working with human life as a potter works with clay God wants to re-create us as independent persons who willingly exercise our own free will to make right choices about all aspects of our lives. 

Free will, combined with a strong desire to want to go the wrong way, can also result in failures. This is why God is working with human life instead of spirit life. Human life is temporary and disposable. At the completion of God’s plan, everyone who has not proven their ability to live as positive and productive members of God’s Family will be disposed of.

While this might sound harsh, the reality is that human life comes from the dust of the earth, lives for a brief time, and then returns to the earth – utterly worthless except for what might be achieved during that short time while alive. God’s plan provides the potential for something that is worth nothing at all to become something of greater value than everything else in the physical universe – a child of God. Greater by far than the angels. Perfect as God is. Immortal.

God could make us that directly, except that we cannot be trusted unless we have built the Godly character that we will need to use such awesome power wisely and to live in harmony within God’s Family. What happened with Lucifer’s rebellion must not be allowed to happen with the new spirit members of God’s Family.

Adam and Eve set the stage for how God’s Plan would be implemented

When God created Adam and Eve, they had the potential to fulfil his plan in their own lifetimes - to qualify to receive their planned inheritance to enter God’s Family on completing their natural human lives. When they deliberately disobeyed God they chose for themselves and their descendants the hard road. The tree of life was God’s preferred path. They chose the path of knowing for themselves both good and evil.

Ever since then, mankind has chosen to follow their own way – a way that seems right but which results in experiencing both good and evil. And we live in a world controlled by Satan, who continues to deceive us and to influence our choices.

Adam and Eve’s sin in the garden of Eden resulted in their death – an inheritance passed on to their children. All of creation became subject to suffering and death. Life became hard – a long struggle to survive in an unfriendly world. Life begins with the mother’s pain in childbirth and always ends in death.

God knew that this was likely to happen and he already had a backup plan in place to deal with it. Mankind had made its first crucial wrong choice and now had to write many generations of hard experience to demonstrate what it really costs to follow the way that seems right. We have had to learn tough lessons so that we will listen and be responsive when God shows us that there is a better way.

Throughout human history God has allowed men to follow their own paths – watching as each generation became more and more corrupt until finally destroying that generation and starting the process over again. The great flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the many cities and civilisations in Palestine and Egypt are all recorded. This was not random history. The hand of God was always there, guiding the learning experience and taking whatever action was necessary to keep everything on track. This is still happening today.

There were also men of faith who stood out from the crowd and who obeyed God. Men who focussed their lives on serving God and building the character that would make it possible for them to be trusted with their full inheritance.

But there was now a major problem that had to be resolved – everyone had sinned. From the very beginning God had made it clear that the penalty for any sin was death. Every man and woman since Adam and Eve lived under the death penalty. God had also planned for this, but his solution would not come until much later.

The Promises made to Abraham

With Abraham God found a man of faith who was willing to believe and obey Him regardless of his own desires. He proved this over a long lifetime of testing, finally proving that he was even willing to obey God’s command to sacrifice the young son that he had been promised and for whom he had waited for 25 long years. Abraham knew that God was able to bring Isaac back to life and that he would still fulfil the promises he had made.

Because of his faith God made a promise to Abraham and to all of his descendants -  an unconditional promise that included one very special descendent through whom everyone who adopted Abraham’s attitude would be blessed. That promise was the first step towards resolving the issue of sin and death.

It was a promise of such importance that God swore by Himself that He would make it happen.

Abraham had already fulfilled his part by believing and obeying God. There were no conditions. God absolutely bound himself to give Abraham so many descendants that they would be too numerous to count and that they would conquer all of their enemies. But most important of all was the promise that all the nations of the world would be blessed through one very special descendent.

The Establishment of the Old Covenant

Abraham’s descendants continued to sin and die. God knew that would happen. But rather than working with all of the different races of people inhabiting the earth, God now focussed his attention on the descendants of Abraham. Everyone else would ultimately be included, but only through the promise given to Abraham.

Abraham’s descendants through Isaac and Jacob expanded into twelve tribes who ended up living as slaves in Egypt before God raised up Moses to lead them out of slavery and into the land that he had promised Abraham they would inherit.

However, in spite of seeing God demonstrate his mighty power in bringing them out of Egypt, the Israelite people complained and continued worshiping the false gods that they had been worshiping in Egypt. God brought them out intending that they would go directly to the land that he had promised them. Because of their rebellion and complaining they spent the next 40 years living in the desert until all of that old generation had died.

God gave them a new set of laws – broken down into ten key principles – The Ten Commandments. He also inspired Moses to add complex and detailed instructions that would regulate every aspect of their daily life. These laws combined formed the basis for the Old Covenant that God made with the Israelite people. It was drawn up as a legal contract and formally agreed to by both parties. It was also conditional – the Israelite people had to keep their part of the contract to receive the benefits that God offered.

This was a law prepared for a hard-hearted people who had demonstrated that they couldn’t be trusted. It was a temporary legal relationship that prepared the way for the fulfilment of the promise that God made to Abraham – a promise that was finally fulfilled when Yeshua the Messiah brought the good news of a new Covenant to replace the old one – a Covenant based on the love relationship that God had always intended, and which would offer far greater benefits.

From the time of Moses until Yeshua, the Israelite people followed a chequered history that resoundingly demonstrated that the consequences of following their own way only resulted in misery, destruction and alienation from the very God that they continued to believe they worshiped.

The purpose of the written law of Moses was to convict the Israelite people of their guilt by showing them that they didn’t have the ability within themselves to even keep a law that was written down and which promised them physical benefits that they could understand. Not one of them had ever kept that law fully. Every one of them had broken their part of the contract and fully deserved to die as a result.

The New Covenant and what it really means

The New Covenant came in a whole new package – Yeshua described it as the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

First of all came the final solution to the problem of sin – the death penalty that applies to everyone because we have failed to live sin-free lives.

Yeshua, the Messiah, was God the Father’s representative throughout the Old Testament. He created the angels and our physical universe, was born as a human child and proved that it was possible to live a perfect human life – to fulfil every part of the Old Covenant contract. His life was more valuable than everything contained in the universe because he was the all-powerful Spirit Being who had created it. When he willingly suffered a terrible death for our sins, his sacrifice fully paid the price of the combined sins of all mankind.

We were all on death row with no hope of escape. Yeshua, after living a perfect life as a human, took our death penalty upon himself. At last we had a way to be free of the consequences of our sin and to be reunited with God as our true Father.

This was given to us as a free gift by Yeshua. We have done nothing to earn it. We only have to believe that Yeshua is the Son of God and to gratefully accept his free gift.

This was the blessing promised to Abraham through that one special descendant – a blessing for everyone who adopted Abraham’s attitude of believing and obeying God, and not just Abraham’s physical descendants.

One of the most important promises in this new covenant was that God would give a new heart, or attitude, to all those he called – one that no longer needs the legalistic written rules of the Old Covenant.

This doesn’t mean that God’s law no longer applies. We must now learn to use the power of God’s Holy Spirit to become perfect, even as God himself is perfect. God now demands that we keep the full intent of his law just as he does. And we will want to do this because of the new heart that God has given us.

We no longer have to give a tenth of our income but we do have to help everyone who needs help. We don’t have to keep special holy days because the messages of those festivals were fulfilled by Yeshua. For us every day should be lived as a holy day – doing whatever God has called us to do with all of our heart and soul.

The Ten Commandments were reduced to the command that we love God above all else and that we love everyone else as much as we love ourselves.

In his final instructions to his disciples before he was crucified, Yeshua raised the bar even higher by commanding that his disciples love each other as much as he loved them. That each must be willing to give his life for his brothers.

At the same time he made the amazing statement that his Father loved each of Yeshua' disciples as much as he loved Yeshua himself.

Love is the glue that binds God’s Family together.

It is not some 'feel-good' emotion. It is the result of God’s Holy Spirit working in us – the same Spirit that fills both our Father and Yeshua. It is defined by Yeshua’s example of how he lived at all times totally committed to pleasing his Father - doing everything that his Father wanted him to do, in the same way his Father had showed him, and all for the benefit and glory of his Father. And his Father’s response was to give everything back and to raise Yeshua higher than anyone else.

This is total commitment from both parties. This is the same relationship that we have been invited to participate in.

God has given us an example that we can relate to in our own lives. When a young couple first get to know and love each other, almost the furthest thing from their thinking is the idea that they should draw up a legal contract to regulate every detail of how they should live together. In that first flush of romantic love, each partner takes great pleasure in pleasing the other. Detailed rules that define just what and how much each person must do would seem obscene. Such rules are only of value in a purely contractual relationship – one in which real love is absent, or if the relationship is neglected and falls into disrepair.

Another example is in our attitude to work. As an employer, who would you rather employ – someone who comes to work on time, works at only what he is told to do, and then leaves on time whether or not the job has been completed - or someone who enthusiastically commits himself to do whatever it takes to get the job done?

In the first case we have a contractual relationship where the worker only gets paid for what he is instructed to do. In the second, the worker’s relationship with his employer is based on total commitment. And it is the same with the old and new covenants.

Building righteous character is not about following a set of legal rules even when it is difficult to do so. It is about using the power of God’s Holy Spirit to commit ourselves totally to loving and obeying God exactly as Yeshua did. To have an attitude of doing far more than we might legally be obliged to do just to please Yeshua and our Father who are offering so much back to us.

Yes, we will continue to be tempted. There will be times when it will be hard. We will make mistakes and need to go back to God to be forgiven and to learn what we should from the experience. Most importantly, while Christians do make mistakes and sin, they don’t make a habit of sinning.

Godly character is built by our total commitment to loving and enthusiastically obeying God regardless of anything else, even if that means being ridiculed, suffering, or even dying because of what we believe and how we live.

There is no longer a need to break down the law into minute detail because our commitment to loving and obeying God, and to loving our neighbour as much as Yeshua loves us, will resolve every issue that we are faced with in our lives.

But even with the best of intentions, we don’t have the ability to do this by ourselves.

God has provided for this also. To go with this new heart, or attitude, God has provided the power of his Holy Spirit to make it possible.

Using the Power of God’s Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit works within us, helping us to understand how to please God. He shows us where our weaknesses are and gives us the power to overcome them. He helps us to crush the power that Satan has over us. The Holy Spirit helps us to communicate with our Father and Yeshua. He helps us to grow in love, faith and hope for our glorious future. He provides us with special gifts and abilities that God can use to achieve his purposes through us. We cannot do any of this by ourselves.

The Holy Spirit teaches us everything we need to know about all aspects of our Christian lives. This doesn’t mean everything that we might want to know, and we shouldn’t get hung up on trying to understand difficult and obscure doctrines. The truth is gloriously simple and obvious for everyone to understand if their minds have been opened to receive it.

We have to make the effort to receive that knowledge, through studying the Bible and listening to the teaching of the leaders in God’s church, from evaluating our own life experiences, as well as directly from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us to understand and act on what we learn.

We are united with God’s Family by sharing the Holy Spirit. Being filled with the Holy Spirit is what guarantees our future resurrection into God’s Family. It is the sharing of God’s Spirit that makes us at one with God, even though we are each separate individuals. Without God’s Spirit in us we can never be part of God’s Family and will never enter God’s Kingdom.

If we follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit living within us, and stay close to Yeshua and our Father, then even the hard things become possible.

Yeshua demonstrated that all of this is possible - by living a perfect life as a human and leading the way as an example for us to follow.

God’s Family and the Kingdom of God

The most exciting part of the New Covenant is the Good News of God’s Kingdom.

Yeshua brought the amazing news that our inheritance isn’t just to receive eternal life – but that we are to become children of God – born into his own Family – living as he does. We will become as Yeshua already is – finally achieving what God had intended and planned for from the very beginning. We will be transformed from the perishable, worthless dust of the earth, into powerful, immortal spirit-born members of the expanded Family of God.

Does this mean that we are to be equal to God? Of course not! There is a structure in God’s Family. Yeshua isn’t equal to his Father. We will not be equal to Yeshua in power and responsibility. For those born into God’s Family there will be many different levels of power and responsibility that will be assigned according to how well we have used our time as humans to prepare for being part of God’s Family.

This is the news that Satan has suppressed and hidden from the time that it was first announced.

Satan couldn’t stop the members of God’s church from teaching it. In spite of intense persecution, the message kept going out. Satan’s answer was to fill the world with false so-called ‘Christian’ churches. Churches that might teach part of what the Messiah taught. Churches that would add their own human-devised interpretations to Yeshua’s message. Churches that would become successful, even state-sponsored institutions. But none of them would teach both the true potential that God intended for mankind and how to achieve it.

What happens when we die?

One of the most common false doctrines taught in these churches is that we have an immortal soul and that good Christians go to heaven when they die, while bad people are punished forever in the fires of hell. Purgatory is another possible destination, where those who have not committed mortal sins can be punished for a while to purify them before they can enter heaven.

What the Scriptures really teach is that death is like sleep. We lose consciousness. While our body decays and returns to the dust of the earth, our spirit returns to God for safe-keeping. We remain in this state of suspended animation until we are woken up again, at either the first or second resurrection.

We do not have an immortal soul. When Adam and Eve sinned they ultimately died, just as God had told them they would. Instead of believing God, who said that they would die, they believed Satan who told them that they wouldn’t die. God then prevented them from eating from the Tree of Life so they could not be healed and avoid growing old and finally dying.

The only way we can avoid that penalty is through faith in Yeshua, The Messiah. Christians will still die - but we now have the promise of being brought back to life when Yeshua returns.

When Paul described how he was ready to die, he knew that his very next moment of consciousness after death would be when he is woken up to be with Yeshua at the first resurrection. He will be woken up along with all the others who have been called and have remained faithful as he had. He will no doubt be amazed to see how much time has passed during that time while he was ‘sleeping’.

So there is no point in wasting time praying to the ‘saints who have gone to heaven’. They are sleeping in death and cannot help anyone! Yeshua taught us to pray to our Father. He and Yeshua are the only ones who can provide any real help.

There is a lake of fire described in Scripture. This is not a place where evil people are tortured forever when they die. It is where all those who do not qualify to enter God’s Family will be finally destroyed after the second resurrection.

God does not take pleasure in causing pain and suffering. He wants every one of us to succeed and take our place within his Family. He made us of mortal flesh and blood so that we can be put out of our misery if we set our minds to refuse the wonderful future that he is offering. The second and final death is just that – the end with no more chances and no further possibility of life.

The Three Main Stages of God’s Plan

Everything in God’s Plan is done in carefully planned stages.

The first stage of The Messiah’s church is not for all of mankind. It is a small group of people assembled over the 2,000 years since it was first established, and adds to those men and women of faith that God called from the time of Adam until Yeshua came. It is described as “The Bride” of the Lamb – the marriage partner of Yeshua at a wedding to be celebrated immediately after he returns in full glory to bind Satan and take control of the world. Yeshua told his disciples about this while he was with them. It is graphically described in the Book of Revelation.

After Yeshua successfully completed his mission of laying the foundation for the New Covenant, he returned to be with his Father. From then on the focus would be on growing his church – using the power of the Holy Spirit to help its members overcome in the toughest environment of all – a world still controlled by Satan.

God has provided us with many physical examples to help us understand his plan. Marriage, with the husband, wife and children family relationship is one. Plants, like the fig, which have a first-fruits crop prior to the main harvest is another.

Those who overcome during this first stage are described as the ‘first-fruits’ of a much larger harvest. This first-fruits church will reign with Yeshua when he returns to govern to whole world. The members of this church have been, and are still being, prepared to play an active role in working for Yeshua during this time. The Book of Revelation describes this as being for a period of 1,000 years.

During this second phase Satan and his government will be bound and unable to influence the world. Yeshua, together with the first-fruits members of his church, will rule the world, and demonstrate the much better way of living according to God’s laws and government.

However, this is an imposed government. Under Satan’s rule, mankind will be on the verge of self-destruction, saved only by The Messiah’s intervention when he returns in glory to take charge. Yeshua takes charge by force. There is no gentle request for people to change their ways. Those who refuse will die. Countries that refuse to submit will be starved into submission. There will be no free choice left to follow an alternative way.

This will be a time of rebuilding. It will also be a time of healing and of demonstrating the benefits of God’s way as opposed to man’s way. And it will be very easy to follow God’s way during this time. Knowledge of God will be freely available. There will be no Satan to deceive. People will learn quickly from ‘cause and effect’ which way they want to go.

This is the time referred to by the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, who described the world living in peace, with God’s temple in Jerusalem as the focal point for worshipping God. People will come there from all around the world to worship and learn about the true God. The whole world will be ruled from Jerusalem, where Yeshua the Messiah will be king, ruling with the help of his new brothers.

But a very important ingredient is missing.

The people living during this time will live in a very different world from the world we live in today. Everyone will know about the true God and will enjoy all the benefits of living as God wants them to. Satan will no longer be the ruler of our world and will be locked away and be unable to influence people to rebel against God. Following and worshiping God will be easy compared with living within our present world.

However, character strong enough to be trusted with receiving eternal life as a member of God’s Family needs to be tested so that God can be sure that all of these new members of his Family will never rebel as Satan did.

That is why, at the end of the 1,000 years, Satan and his demons are released for a short period. This is the time of testing that will refine and consolidate the character of all those who have enjoyed living under the rule of Yeshua and his first-fruits church.

Sadly, many will succumb to Satan and will rebel. Those who overcome, as did Yeshua and the first-fruits Church before them, will receive their full inheritance as children of God – children of the marriage of Yeshua and his first-fruits Church.

With this next major increase in God’s Family completed, the final phase begins – the resurrection from the dead of all those who have not yet had an opportunity of receiving salvation.

The real work for this stage has been done during the same time that the first-fruits church was being prepared. While Satan has deceived the vast majority of mankind, resulting in all the suffering and heartache throughout our entire history, God has still found it possible to save many of those lives. Every person will be judged according to how they have lived.

We don’t yet know how this will be done or how long it will take. There are many unanswered questions. We only know that everyone will be judged according to what they have done with what they have understood.

Conclusion

At the end of this time, everyone who has not qualified to enter God’s Family will be destroyed in the lake of fire that is the second and final death.

Our temporary physical world will have finally achieved the purpose for which it was created.

God will then wrap up the physical universe and replace it with a magnificent new one. It will be the beginning of a new eternity which each one of us has the opportunity to share.