Dr. Paul Manuel—2003
The pervasiveness of evil, that it rears its ugly head even where we might not expect it, often requires strong measures to eradicate it.
The reason we need deliverance in the first place is because someone or something is preventing us from doing what God wants us to do. Consequently, deliverance often requires God to exercise force, even to the point of destruction. In the first message of this series, we noted that Pharaoh resisted God's attempts to deliver Israel and that it took the destruction of Egypt's crops, livestock, firstborn, and military before Israel was free. So it will be when God Provides Final Deliverance for His People. In the end...
A. God will deliver through destruction.
...and like Israel's deliverance, when God delivers you...
A third opponent of the believer is death. Paul calls it "the last enemy" (1 Cor 15:26), because after vanquishing your other foes, God will deliver you permanently from death.3
There is also a part of you that He must destroy. You will recall from the previous message that we struggle against two spiritual foes, one of which is external (Satan) and the other of which is internal. Your deliverance would only be partial if God dealt with your external difficulties and left the internal one intact. Thankfully, He does not, for along with your enemies...
Apart from the fact that giving in would only be the beginning of something and not the end of it, the cycle you now find yourself in, however difficult or persistent, is not vicious—going round and round without end—for God will one day break the cycle. In fact, God is breaking the cycle. That is why the Bible contains repeated calls to persevere, because your struggle against sin will not go on forever. Eventually, He will destroy your sin as well as your enemies.
God Provides Final Deliverance for His People by destroying the opposition, be it internal or external.
Nevertheless, deliverance should have two parts: a deliverance from and a deliverance to. For example, it was important that God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, but He did not mean for them to wander in the desert for the rest of their existence. He wanted to deliver them to a new home, a land He had promised to their fathers years before. Final deliverance is similar in that there is a from and a to. God will deliver you from this imperfect universe and deliver you to a perfect universe. He not only eliminates what is bad, He replaces it by what is good. God will deliver through destruction, and...
B. God will deliver through glorification.
Destroying your imperfect, sinful body may be necessary, but you need something to take its place. Only God exists incorporeally, that is, without a body.4 Everything He created, though, takes up space somewhere. (Some of us occupy more space than others, but that is another message.) Paul says,
There is more to you, of course, than just your physical body. What about your thoughts? In heaven, will you regret your sin? Will you remember your pain? Will you grieve for those who are not enjoying the resurrection with you? When God glorifies your body, will He also glorify your mind? Apparently so, according to the bat qol, the heavenly voice that spoke to John on Patmos, and according to what John heard from God Himself.
For most people, the body is their chief means of conveyance; few go anywhere without it. (Although there are some who seem a bit disconnected in this regard.) The reason you need a new body is that the one you have is defective, and God is recalling it, so to speak. But a new body is like a new car: it does not do you much good if you have no place go, and God is also recalling the only place you have to go because it is defective too. Peter says,
April 22 is Earth Day, an attempt to make people aware of such issues as global warming, threatened ecosystems, and the need for recycling. Indeed, God has given the earth to man as a trust. He told Adam to "subdue it" not abuse it (Gen 1:28). You should be concerned about such issues, but you should not kid yourself into thinking that you can "save" the earth in any permanent sense. Like your present body, your present home is fatally flawed, and God will eventually replace it with another. Like what He intends for your body, He will glorify your home.
I have been jumping around quite a bit from passage to passage, but I would like to light on one in particular, the continuation of a text we examined last time. Turn please to Romans 8.
In this chapter, Paul states that, as you struggle to make decisions between right and wrong, between sin and righteousness, you should include in your deliberations the incentive God offers to choose righteousness, the fact that you are His heir and that your faithfulness impinges on your inheritance. In the previous message, I asked you to reflect on what it means to be an heir of God and then remarked that it is difficult (if not impossible) to comprehend what God, with His limitless resources, has for us. In this, I was merely echoing Paul's statement in v. 18 that no matter what your struggle here costs you, it is more than offset by what you stand to inherit from God. Paul then describes some of what he means by referring to the two things we have just been considering: the renewal of your body and the renewal of your home.
I do not know how many times I have read Rom 8, but this one point has always escaped me: To be an heir of God means that He will grant you a share in His glory, and He translates that inheritance into tangible assets by giving you what no earthly inheritance could ever buy—a new body and a new home.
God will provide final deliverance for His people by remaking that which belongs to them. He will glorify their bodies and their home.
Final deliverance is similar to physical and spiritual deliverance in that it combines them. That is, God will deliver you from everything and everyone that stands against you, be it human enemies and death or sin and Satan. Yet, final deliverance is also different from physical and spiritual deliverance in at least two respects.
The first difference is that there is an uncertainty factor built into the physical and spiritual deliverance God makes available now.
The second difference is that on more than one occasion you will find yourself in need of the physical and spiritual deliverance God makes available now and, as long as you live in a fallen universe, you will encounter numerous dangers and temptations from which you will need deliverance. Final deliverance is from that fallen universe and, therefore, will require no repetition. When God Provides Final Deliverance for His People, it will be both completely certain and completely thorough. God will remove all that opposes you, and He will remake all that belongs to you.
A woman purchased a parrot whose previous owner had taught him profanity, and she decided to reform him, so she taught him a number of Christian words and phrases. One day, the righteous owner caught the bird cursing. She grabbed him and said, "I'll teach You never to talk that way again." She put him in the freezer and shut the door. A few minutes later, she took him out and asked, "Have you learned your lesson?" The parrot shivered and replied, "Yes, Ma'am."
After a while, the lesson wore off, and she returned the parrot to the freezer but forgot him for some time, so he nearly froze to death. She finally retrieved him and leaned him in his cage to thaw out. When he began to move and talk a little, she asked him again, "Have you learned your lesson?" "YES, MA'AM!" he replied. He sat there quietly for a few minutes, shivering, and then said, "May I ask you a question?" "Certainly," she answered. "I thought I knew all the bad words there were," the parrot began... "but just what did that turkey in there say?" (Adapted from Hodgin 1994:284-285)The parrot saw that evil may require strong measures to eradicate it.
The reason we need deliverance in the first place is because someone or something is preventing us from doing what God wants us to do. Consequently, deliverance often requires God to exercise force, even to the point of destruction. In the first message of this series, we noted that Pharaoh resisted God's attempts to deliver Israel and that it took the destruction of Egypt's crops, livestock, firstborn, and military before Israel was free. So it will be when God Provides Final Deliverance for His People. In the end...
A. God will deliver through destruction.
...and like Israel's deliverance, when God delivers you...
1. He will destroy your enemies (2 Pet 3:7; Rev 20: 10; 1 Cor 15:25-26).In this life you encounter different kinds of opposition. For instance, ungodly men may oppose you, and scripture contains several illustrations of believers petitioning God for deliverance from them, some of which are pretty graphic imprecations. Consider Jeremiah's prayer against his enemies:
Jer 18:21 [G]ive their children over to famine; hand them over to the power of the sword. Let their wives be made childless and widows; let their men be put to death, their young men slain by the sword in battle. 22 Let a cry be heard from their houses when you suddenly bring invaders against them....23b Do not forgive their crimes or blot out their sins from your sight. Let them be overthrown before you; deal with them in the time of your anger.We tend to shrink from the violence of this kind of prayer, but God is not going to be gentle with the ungodly.1 When He provides your final deliverance, it will entail their destruction. As Peter says,
2 Pet 3:7 [T]he present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the...destruction of ungodly men.Satan also opposes you. Peter calls him your "enemy [who] prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour" (1 Pet 5:8). God is patient with the ungodly, allowing that some of them may come over to His side before the end and, thereby, escape destruction.2 There is no such hope for Satan; his position is intractable, and God will destroy him as well. In John's Revelation, the apostle records Satan's fate at the time of the Great Judgment,
Rev 20:10 [T]he devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur [to] be tormented day and night forever.When I was in Bible college, I saw a fellow student, a known-charismatic, leaning up against the library building and praying. As I approached, he told me that he was casting Satan out of the campus. Now I spent a lot of time in the library and apparently had missed whatever spiritual warfare had been going on there, but—as I said last time—some people are more sensitive to this activity than others. After offering this explanation, he moved on to the next building.
- Was Satan in all of them,
- Was this student chasing the devil from building to building, or
- Was he just being thorough?
A third opponent of the believer is death. Paul calls it "the last enemy" (1 Cor 15:26), because after vanquishing your other foes, God will deliver you permanently from death.3
1 Cor 15:25 For [Jesus] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.God will deliver you from the ungodly, from Satan, and from death, for He will destroy your enemies.
There is also a part of you that He must destroy. You will recall from the previous message that we struggle against two spiritual foes, one of which is external (Satan) and the other of which is internal. Your deliverance would only be partial if God dealt with your external difficulties and left the internal one intact. Thankfully, He does not, for along with your enemies...
2. He will destroy your sin (Gal 5:24; Rom 6:6).Were that not so, as David observes, you could not live with Him.
Ps 5:4 You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell.You were once a "slave...to sin" (Rom 6:16), and there is still the possibility—even after your justification—that you can again become a "prisoner of...sin" (Rom 7:23), so, you are in no position to fix this problem. God must do something about your sin in order to make it possible for Him to do away with the "wages" or "sting" of sin: death (Rom 6:23; 1 Cor 15:54). Paul suggests that, unlike your enemies—who remain vigorous to the very end—God destroys your sin gradually. He begins the moment you accept Jesus' atoning work and finishes when you relinquish your present body. So Paul says,
Gal 5:24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.
Rom 6:6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.In your ongoing battle with sin, you win some and you lose some. It is a constant struggle, and the ever-present temptation is just to give in. Perhaps there is one particular, recurring enticement, a desire that will not go away. After a while you may think, "Aren't I merely postponing the inevitable? How long do I think I can resist this? Sooner or later I'll weaken, so why not just do it and be done with it?"
Apart from the fact that giving in would only be the beginning of something and not the end of it, the cycle you now find yourself in, however difficult or persistent, is not vicious—going round and round without end—for God will one day break the cycle. In fact, God is breaking the cycle. That is why the Bible contains repeated calls to persevere, because your struggle against sin will not go on forever. Eventually, He will destroy your sin as well as your enemies.
God Provides Final Deliverance for His People by destroying the opposition, be it internal or external.
Nevertheless, deliverance should have two parts: a deliverance from and a deliverance to. For example, it was important that God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, but He did not mean for them to wander in the desert for the rest of their existence. He wanted to deliver them to a new home, a land He had promised to their fathers years before. Final deliverance is similar in that there is a from and a to. God will deliver you from this imperfect universe and deliver you to a perfect universe. He not only eliminates what is bad, He replaces it by what is good. God will deliver through destruction, and...
B. God will deliver through glorification.
Destroying your imperfect, sinful body may be necessary, but you need something to take its place. Only God exists incorporeally, that is, without a body.4 Everything He created, though, takes up space somewhere. (Some of us occupy more space than others, but that is another message.) Paul says,
1 Cor 15:39 All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another.... 40a There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies.Even if you managed "to hang on to what you've got," it would not do you any good, because your present body is not suited for eternal life. Here is Paul again:
1 Cor 15:50 I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.What does Paul say that God will do?...
1. He will glorify your body (1 Cor 15:50-53; cf. Rev 21:4-5)....replacing what is imperfect with what is perfect, and there will be no such things as expiration dates or limited warrantees.
There is more to you, of course, than just your physical body. What about your thoughts? In heaven, will you regret your sin? Will you remember your pain? Will you grieve for those who are not enjoying the resurrection with you? When God glorifies your body, will He also glorify your mind? Apparently so, according to the bat qol, the heavenly voice that spoke to John on Patmos, and according to what John heard from God Himself.
Rev 21:4 [The heavenly voice said,] "[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." 5 He who was seated on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true."You experience sin and pain and grief now. Sometimes the effects of these things linger for years, long after their cause has disappeared, but no matter how deeply you may feel them or how long you have carried them, they will not haunt you forever. When God glorifies your body, He will also glorify your mind.5
For most people, the body is their chief means of conveyance; few go anywhere without it. (Although there are some who seem a bit disconnected in this regard.) The reason you need a new body is that the one you have is defective, and God is recalling it, so to speak. But a new body is like a new car: it does not do you much good if you have no place go, and God is also recalling the only place you have to go because it is defective too. Peter says,
2 Pet 3:5 [L]ong ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. 6 By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. 7 By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment.This would be very inconvenient for you, were it not for the fact that God does something else as well, for just as He will glorify your body, so...
2. He will glorify your home (2 Pet 3:5-7; Rom 8:18-30).In other words, when God says to John that He will make everything new, He means everything.6
April 22 is Earth Day, an attempt to make people aware of such issues as global warming, threatened ecosystems, and the need for recycling. Indeed, God has given the earth to man as a trust. He told Adam to "subdue it" not abuse it (Gen 1:28). You should be concerned about such issues, but you should not kid yourself into thinking that you can "save" the earth in any permanent sense. Like your present body, your present home is fatally flawed, and God will eventually replace it with another. Like what He intends for your body, He will glorify your home.
I have been jumping around quite a bit from passage to passage, but I would like to light on one in particular, the continuation of a text we examined last time. Turn please to Romans 8.
In this chapter, Paul states that, as you struggle to make decisions between right and wrong, between sin and righteousness, you should include in your deliberations the incentive God offers to choose righteousness, the fact that you are His heir and that your faithfulness impinges on your inheritance. In the previous message, I asked you to reflect on what it means to be an heir of God and then remarked that it is difficult (if not impossible) to comprehend what God, with His limitless resources, has for us. In this, I was merely echoing Paul's statement in v. 18 that no matter what your struggle here costs you, it is more than offset by what you stand to inherit from God. Paul then describes some of what he means by referring to the two things we have just been considering: the renewal of your body and the renewal of your home.
Rom 8:18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, [which is] the redemption of our bodies....28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers [= resurrection]. 30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.What you will inherit from God is that which makes possible the renewal of your body and your home. Look again at v. 18: "glory...will be revealed in us." How will that happen? Look at v. 30: Those whom God justified—including you!—"he also glorified." Notice, by the way, that Paul states this in the past tense, not because your glorification has already happened but to emphasize the certainty that it will happen. If God has predestined it, then it is as good as done.7
I do not know how many times I have read Rom 8, but this one point has always escaped me: To be an heir of God means that He will grant you a share in His glory, and He translates that inheritance into tangible assets by giving you what no earthly inheritance could ever buy—a new body and a new home.
God will provide final deliverance for His people by remaking that which belongs to them. He will glorify their bodies and their home.
Final deliverance is similar to physical and spiritual deliverance in that it combines them. That is, God will deliver you from everything and everyone that stands against you, be it human enemies and death or sin and Satan. Yet, final deliverance is also different from physical and spiritual deliverance in at least two respects.
The first difference is that there is an uncertainty factor built into the physical and spiritual deliverance God makes available now.
- Although God delights in providing physical deliverance for His people, He does not always do so—Paul's thorn in the flesh being a case in point;
- Although God provides several means of spiritual deliverance for His people, He does not force them upon anyone. You can, for instance, choose to lay aside the ethical system that protects you against Satanic attack.
The second difference is that on more than one occasion you will find yourself in need of the physical and spiritual deliverance God makes available now and, as long as you live in a fallen universe, you will encounter numerous dangers and temptations from which you will need deliverance. Final deliverance is from that fallen universe and, therefore, will require no repetition. When God Provides Final Deliverance for His People, it will be both completely certain and completely thorough. God will remove all that opposes you, and He will remake all that belongs to you.
For the Bibliography and Endnotes, see the pdf here.
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Jim Skaggs