that which is to come, and put all thi ngs in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be Head over all things to the Church. The Lord Jesus, before His incarnation, existed in the form of God, and of His own choice laid aside His divine glory and took upon Himsel f the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men. In His pre-existent state He was with God and was God. He is a divine per·son pos sessed of all the attributes of Deity, and should be worshipped as God by angels and man. "In Him dwelleth all the full ness of the Godhead bodily." All the words that He spoke during His earthly life were the words of God. There is absolutely no er ror of any kind in them, and by the words of Jesus Christ the words of all other teachers must be tested. The Lord Jesus became in every respect a real man, possessed of all the essential characteristics of human nature. By His death on the cross, the Lord Je sus made a perfect atonement for sin, by which the w rath of God against si nners is appeased and a ground furnished upon which God can deal in mercy with sinners. He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse in our place. He who Himself was absolutely without sin was made to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. The Lord Jesus is coming agai n to this earth, personally, bodily, and visibly. The return of our Lord is the blessed hope of the believer, and in it God's purposes of grace toward manki nd wi ll find their con summation. The Holy Spirit is a person, and is pos sessed of all the distinctively divine attributes. He is God. Man was created in the image of God, after His likeness, but the whole human race fell in the fall of the first Adam. All men, unt il they accept the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior, are lost, darkened in their understand ing, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, hardened in heart, morally and spiri tually dead through their t respasses and sins. They cannot see, nor enter the king dom of God until they are born agarn of the Holy Spirit
Men are justified on the simple and sin gle ground of the shed blood of Christ and upon the simple and single condition of fa ith in Him who shed the blood, and are born again by the quickening, renewing, cleansing work of the Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of the Word of God. All those who receive Jesus Christ as their Savior and their Lord, and who con fess Him as such before their fe llow men, become children of God and receive eter nal life. They become heir·s of God and joi nt-heirs with Jesus Chr·ist At death thei r spirits depart to be with Christ in con scious blessedness, and at the second com ing of Christ their bodies shal l be raised and transformed into the likeness of the body of His glory. All those who persistently reject Jesus Christ in the present life shall be raised from the dead and throughout et ernity exist in a state of conscious, unutterable, endless torment and anguish. The Church consists of all those who, in this present dispensation, tru ly believe on Jesus Christ It is the body and bride of Christ, which Christ loves and for which He has given Himself There is a personal devil, a being of great cunning and power. "The prince of the power of the air:· "The prince of this world." "The god of this age." He can· exert vast power only so far as God suffers him to do so. He shall ultimately be cast into the lake of fire and brimstone and shall be tormented day and night forever. NOTE: This doctr inal statement, pre sented here as originally conceived by t he founders of the organization, has been and continues to be the stated theological posi tion of Biola University. In addition, the fol lowi ng explanatory notes indicate the or ganization's understanding and teaching position on certain points which could be subject to various interpretat ions. The Scriptures are to be interpreted according to dispensational distinctives with the conviction that the return of the Lord for His Church will be premillenial, before the Tribulat ion, and that the millennium is to be the last of the dispensations.
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