T H E K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
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By H. Framer Smith This is the second and concluding part of a valuable Bible study by this outstanding teacher; another article from his pen will appear in the near future.
Adam’s sin. The tares of the third must be reaped and burned because of the sins of Adam's progeny. TI m Grad« of the Three Golgethas Passing by, for the time being, the many other bib lical truths that are predicated of the third Golgotha, we turn to all three crosses of our cosmos Calvary. On the first, He died for us: for our sins. On the second, we who believe on Him died with Him. On the third, the cosmos was crucified unto believers, and believers were crucified unto it. Many false prophets have gone forth into the cosmos, and are a present continuing part of it.? The spirit of the antichrist, refusing to confess that Jesus came out from God,* is now in the cosmos (1 John 4:1,3). Many deceivers, whom the Greek term describes as “wander ing seducers and impostors,” went out into, and hence are now in, the cosmos (2 John 7). Yet, despite this lux uriance of tares, God loves the cosmos (John 3:16), and has given His only-begotten Son as the propitiation for the whole cosmos (John 3:16; 1 John 2:2).9 The first Golgotha is born of this Father love: love of God com mended toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). We read: “ Behold what manner of love!” The Father sanctified and sent the Son into the cosmos (John 10:36): the Son who is not of the cosmos (John 17:16). He sent Him as the Sav iour of the cosmos (T John 4:14), that all who believe on the Son might live through Him (1 John 4:9). Jesus tells us that He came out from the Father (John 16:28): that he was born of a woman in order to come into the cosmos and there bear witness to Truth (John 18:37). He is sent, He says, by the True One, whose words He speaks to the cosmos (John 8:26). He declares that He came as Light into the cosmos (John 12:46): to judge the cosmos (John 9:39), yet not to judge it (John 12:47).!® He is Christ, the Son of God, who comes into the cosmos to save sinners (John 11:27; 1 Tim. 1:15). Though but a Babe in swaddling clothes, when He came into the world He addressed the Father, affirming the ineffectualness of animal sacrifice (Heb. 10:3,4) as the reason why God had prepared a body for Him (Heb. 10:5): a body in and through which, becoming sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21) as the climax to perfectly performing the Father’s w ill (Heb. 10:7,9), He sanctified believers once, and for all (Heb. 10:10).U The cosmos hated Him (John 15:8). It hated Him because He bore witness to its wickedness (John 7:7). The climax of this hatred of the cosmos was Calvary: the first Golgotha. For the believer the place of the skull, the hill far away, is not gray but green: it is the hill of the second Golgotha. There he is crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20): a third malefactor, “the old man,” is nailed to the cros? (Rom. 6:6). He is dead, and his life is hid with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). He is baptized into Christ’s death (Rom. 6:3). He reckons himself dead indeed to sin
When the Enemy Came in Like a Flood
^ I i HE TARES of the third Golgotha did not just grow: “ the enemy that sowed them is the devil” JL (Matt. 13:39). It is -not certain that the Garden of Eden was the site of his initial “ cultivation” of the cosmos soil. Angelic, rather than human, heavenly rather than earthly, yet nevertheless a created being, his tare-sowing presence in the cosmos-creation may have preceded the appearance of Adam and of Eve. That he was created before Adam is difficult to question. When multitudinous iniquity was found in him (cf. Ezek. 28:11- 19)1 he was “cast to the ground” (Ezek. 28:17): “ laid down" (Isa. 14:8). “How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! How art thou cut down to the ground!” (Isa. 14:12).2 The ground to which Lucifer is cut and cast down in these passages is taken by many erudite and Spirit-filled scholars to mean the earth2 of the primeval creation described, in their Judgment, only in Genesis 1:1.3 Hence when Adam and his helpmeet were placed in Paradise, the sower of tares was there to sow into Eve’s conversation the seed of doubt and into the later action of both Adam and Eve the corruptible seed of sin. How well the enemy sowed tares in Eden is expressed in a number of New Testament comments upon it: bet ter observed in a more literal rather than the commonly received translation of these pronouncements. “Through one man (the) sin made initial entrance into the world, and through (the) sin, (the) death . . . and in this way (the) death once and for all passed through to all man kind, in that4 all actually sinned” (Rom. 5:12). In con sequence “ the whole world lieth in the wicked one” 5 (1 John 5:19). If it be asked “How can sin make initial entrance into the cosmos here in Eden, if Lucifer’s fall brought sin into the universe prior to this time?” the answer lies in a thorough study made of the following New Testament use of kosmos. In 2 Peter 3:5,6 we read about a cosmos that then was; its heavens were of old, and the earth was standing out of the water and in the water. It perished, being overflowed with water. In 2 Peter 2:5 we are told of another old cosmos, further de scribed as an ungodly cosmos: a cosmos upon which the flood or deluge was brought. In 2 Peter 3:7 we are told of a cosmos that now is. On the surface it would ap pear that 2 Peter 2:5 and 2 Peter 3:5,6 speak of identical kosmoi. This, however, is not true. Each reference is to a separate and distinctly different cosmos.5 The cos mos of 2 Peter 3:5,6 is the cosmos of Genesis 1:1,2a. The cosmos of 2 Peter 2:5 is the renovated creation into whose Eden the enemy sowed the tares. The cosmos that now is, 2 Peter 3:7, is the field in which tares, of rich and luxuriant growth, ail but throttle the cross of the third Golgotha. Not that there are three kosmoi but rather that the cosmos-creation falls into at least three cosmos segments. The first segment became a chaos because of Lucifer’s sin. The second suffered deluge because of
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