You Are Not Being "Tested" By God - You Are Being "Demonstrated To" By God

Mistakenly, we often seem to think that God put Adam in the Garden to test him, to see whether he would obey or not. Not so. It was because by no other means could God demonstrate to Adam his own innate quality of helplessness.

It was not, as we often erroneously think, that Adam could have done the right­eous act of rejecting the advances of Satan. If that were so, man could be righteous by his own unaided effort. No, he was placed between those two trees to learn that of himself he can do nothing righteous, and that he is not expected to!

He was put in the Garden to have demonstrated to him the basic fact of his creation, that his own human spirit is an empty, helpless vessel so far as living in righteous obedience to God is concerned.

In truth, we must learn the difference between being “good” and being “righteous”. Righteousness is a characteristic ONLY of God. It is living in obedience to the lifestyle of the Family of God; it is following the built-in spiritual laws which regulate everything. Righteousness is totally spiritual in nature. Man, on his own, can never be righteous.

Goodness or doing “good” is totally physical in nature. The “good” acts which people do have nothing to do with BEING righteous. Confusing? Don’t being “good” and being “righteous” both give JOY to those who receive their effects? Yes, they do. But many good deeds are done with the wrong motives. The MOTIVE is the key. And man, on his own, can never have righteous motives.

Man was not created to BE righteous! He was created to be INDWELT by the Righteous One. In Adam’s case, the negative command not to eat of the tree, followed by the direct temptation to do so, was not to stir into action some potential capacity in Adam for obedience and righteousness, nor to test whether he COULD live God’s lifestyle if he WOULD. It was to reveal to Adam the one essential point he had to learn about himself - that he was created helpless so far as being able to live in obedience to God’s built-in moral lifestyle law.

Adam was to learn that his little human spirit had one marvelous potentiality: his spirit could be the container of the Divine Spirit via the Tree of Life, and yet he would not lose his own individuality. The
glorious fact is that the two - human and Divine - can dwell together, each in the other, in an eternal fruitful bond of union.

This demonstration to Adam continues down through all history - through the Old Testament, New Testament, and through Church history right down to our present lives.

The Old Testament can be summed up in the following:
God said, “OK, people, I ‘m here to show you that you can’t live on your own. You can’t follow my built-in moral law in your own strength. You need Me! You can’t do it! You just can’t do it!”

The people responded, “We think we can do it. We know your built-in moral law is good for us, and we think that we’re strong enough to keep it and make our own decisions.”

So the people would proceed to TRY. And for a while they would be able to produce goodness (but not righteousness). But they would inevitably fail, (just as Adam failed). The Old Testament was a roller-coaster of goodness and then sin, goodness and then sin, but never righteousness because they were never INDWELT by God. God was demonstrating the futility of life outside of union with God. The people were “DEALT WITH” but not ‘DWELT WITH” by God.

Then, Jesus Christ came.

He continued to point out the Old Testament failures. He pointed a stern finger at the law and the people’s inability to keep the moral code.
Then came the turning point in the demon­stration by God which had been carried on since Adam: Jesus told the people that HE COULDN’T KEEP THE MORAL LAW OF GOD HIMSELF IN HIS OWN STRENGTH! He agreed with what God has said in essence through history: “You can’t do it! You can’t do it!”

Jesus said that of His own self He could do nothing. But then He began a new kind of demonstration. He said that God (His Father) lived within Him in a living union, and that this is the ONLY way that a person can be obedient to spiritual law. Then He proceeded to demonstrate the power that can come out of such a union: righteous thoughts, righteous deeds, even miracles beyond understanding.

The rest of His three and a half year public ministry was spent in this demon­stration, getting across man’s need for a living union with God - man as a container of divinity.

The people marveled at His message and His ministry. They saw the effects in His life of what He preached about union. But He was only one man! How could they, they wondered, see the same effects in their own lives? If He was the Son of God as He claimed, then Jesus was SPECIAL. The Father was IN Him, but the Father could never be IN them, they thought. They were just plain old humans, not Sons of God!

In the last weeks of His ministry before His crucifixion, Jesus began to put forth to His disciples a radical concept: After His death (paying the penalty for their sins), He would be resurrected from the grave and His Spirit, and the Holy Spirit, would come to dwell in any follower who would believe and accept Him as Lord.

There was the solution to the age-old demonstration by God: Believers from that point forward would be INDWELT rather than just DEALT WITH by God! Jesus Christ, as the first Son of God, would be followed by believers transformed into many Sons of God BECAUSE they were indwelt by Christ.

The apostle Paul proclaimed the message with the greatest power. He laid out the plan to the churches which he had founded. He put forth what he called the “mystery” (the solution to the demonstration down through history) of “CHRIST IN YOU, THE HOPE OF GLORY” (Colossians 1:27). The apostles John and Peter followed up on the message.

But the roller-coasters of humanity were not over. The Church of God founded at Pentecost has been on a two-thousand year roller-coaster where the message of “Christ in you” has been very prominent for a time and then recedes almost into oblivion for a period. Satan would love to have this message of indwelling Deity covered up. Without this understanding, believers are much more easily influenced by his deceptions. So through the time of this Church age, Satan has had his weak times and his strong times of influence on the Church. Whenever this “Christ IN you” message was strong, the Church was a strong influence for right moral leadership in the world. But whenever this message was weak or absent, the Church had a shameful record of internal dissension and external problems.

Now we come down to you and me in this twenty-first century. No matter how much you hear in the world about man being “tested” over right and wrong, this life of ours is NOT a test. Just as in Adam, just as in the Old Testament, just as in the days of Jesus, and Paul, and John, and Peter, just as in the two-thousand year Church - GOD IS DEMONSTRATING HIS WAYS TO US, NOT TESTING US.

The concept of a “test” is that it may be passed or failed. But this life is not really a pass or fail exercise. Certainly, we have choices to make but we must always look upon our circumstances and situations as DEMONSTRATIONS of our need for an indwelling union with Christ and our continual awareness of the truth of our new birth into that Living Union.

Our Creator is “persuading” each one of us by a demonstration, sometimes painful, sometimes gloriously joyful. If it is any kind of a test at all, it is what we referred to in school as an “open-book test” - you can look up and see the answers in that greatest book of all - the Bible.

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