THE POWER OF AN INDESTRUCTIBLE LIFE
Hebrews 7:16 “One who has become a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life.” NIV
What makes Christianity different from all other world religions, for true Christianity is not a religion at all, but a way of life; is
that its foundation rests on the predicate of the power of a human life that is indestructible.
Many religions peddle immortality, even secular humanism applauds the immortality that a commendable legacy, according to their standards, leaves for posterity. But the reality is that once you die, you are dead.
Let’s face it, if a person dies and ends up in hell, once there, its not going to matter much to the person that died what people thought about them or what their legacy to humanity really was.
If any thing, they will be more worried about those who are following in the footsteps of their legacy, for after all it was their wrong belief that got them to hell to begin with, especially if those loved ones they leave behind are following in the footsteps of what they themselves believed.
At the core of true Christianity is that it offers a personal and blissfully eternal human existence to those who are converted, in a new and physically recreated heaven and earth.
True Christianity offers the promise of a brand new physically eternal body into which the delivered soul of an individual will reside eternally.
A delivered soul is one who had to appear before the judgment seat of Christ after departing the physical body that died. As it is written: Absent from the body, present with the Lord.
When a soul appears before the judgment seat of Christ it undergoes a fire of purification, this is the place where all the information that the soul gathered after being saved, while still in the physical body, is judged.
2 Corinthians 5:10 “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.”
The judgment seat of Christ is for believers only, the soul of the unbelievers who die go to Hades, and there await the final judgment that takes place during the final resurrection.
The believers who die, go to heaven in soul form, and do not get their physically resurrected bodies until after the first resurrection takes place.
1 Corinthians 3:11-15 “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day (of the judgment seat of Christ) will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it (the foundation of Christ’s salvation when it was laid in the born-again person’s heart) endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.”
That means that after appearing at the judgment seat of Christ, the saved soul receives a non-physical body to be clothed with while it awaits to be furthered clothed with the physically resurrected body that it has been promised.
2 Corinthians 5:1-4 “For we know that if our earthly house (our physical bodies), this tent, is destroyed (dies), we have a building from God, a house (a spiritual body) not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having being clothed, we (our souls after leaving the dead physical bodies) shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent (physical body) groan (dislike our mortal physical bodies), being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed (die and become spiritual creatures), but further clothed (receive our physically resurrected bodies), that mortality may be swallowed up by life.”
All of that to say that the Bible clearly teaches that our physical human bodies were originally designed to be eternal.
What that means is that in spite of the fact that when we humans die in our present day, and our dead physical bodies dissolve back into the dust that they came from, someday they will all be raised from the dust and will be reunited with their departed souls, and live together for eternity.
The Scriptures that we’ve read told of the future that awaits those who have died, or will die in the faith, but what about those who after they die, end up in hell or Hades? What is their fate?
Revelation 20:11-15 “Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away. And there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their works, by the things which were written in the books. The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.”
The lake of fire is the place where the eternally resurrected physical bodies of the dammed are sent to spend eternity after they are reunited with their dammed souls.
The false prophet and the antichrist who rise up to oppose the Two Witnesses during the tribulation period, are both captured alive physically, and sent to the lake of fire one thousand years before anyone, that is because their eternally dammed physical bodies are brought up from the pit, where they were originally sent physically alive after they rebelled against Moses during Korah’s rebellion. Numbers 16:28-33
You can read the details of these events in my book Man’s Final Destiny, in the books section of the houseoffaithminsitries.org, in the chapter titled the identity of the antichrist.
In verse ten we read that the devil is cast into the lake of fire with all those whom he deceived to be: Tormented day and night forever and ever. Eternal physical damnation is the fate of those who are lost.
Paul tells us that for those of us who believe, mortality will be swallowed up by life. Since Jesus came to give us life and life in abundance, we know that it will be a blissfully eternal life.
In our opening text we are told that Jesus is our High Priest on the basis of an indestructible human life.
Let’s take a look at it from a scientific point of view.
What is the human soul? For those of you who are old like me, you may remember the old cassette recorders. They consisted of three main parts, the battery, the tape that stored the information, and the cassette player itself with the different buttons that you pushed. You pressed the record button, spoke into the built-in microphone and recorded a message, you then pressed the re-wind button and played back what you recorded.
The human soul is like the tape that records everything that the human body experiences, the recorder represents the human physical body with all its senses that will eventually grow old and break down to be discarded as soon as the energy, or power source runs out, which represents the human spirit leaving the body when it dies.
All the information however, remains recorded in the tape which is ejected from the player to be salvaged, which represents the human soul leaving the body after it dies.
In today’s technology you would just download the information from the tape into your computer, where you can edit the information and format it to be played or viewed through a new player.
When an unbeliever dies, his soul, or data, is unredeemable, for it is corrupted and cannot be downloaded, so it will not appear at the judgment seat of Christ to be edited and formatted.
Instead it is placed on a file called Hades, awaiting the final resurrection of the physical body from whence it came, at which time it will be reunited with it and discarded into the lake of fire for ever, which is like a containment place for all malicious viruses and malware.
When a believer dies, his soul, or data, has to be redeemed from the corruption from whence it came, so it goes first through a refining fire, where every selfish act, or virus, has to be removed before it can be uploaded into the heavenly mainframe.
In this editing, only those actions that were produced in the born-again believer’s heart by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and emanated as spiritual fruit, are accepted, everything else is discarded. For spiritual fruit always leads the believers into walking in self-control, which is the opposite of the destructive ways of selfish ambitions.
Once the redeemed human soul is refined in the fire of the judgment seat of Christ, it is placed in a house not made with human hands, a spiritual folder as its covering, if you will. While there, it is able to interact will all of the other souls that are awaiting the resurrection of their soon to come, eternally incorruptible physical new bodies.
We know from science that one of the main laws of physics that govern the universe states that no information is ever lost, no matter how scrambled the physical matter that produced it becomes. We also know from Scripture that all physical matter, which in now under the entropic law of decay, will have to go through the fire of purification, before the new heavens and the new earth that are introduced into a perfect and new physical creation is reunited with its future inhabitants.
2 Peter 3:12-13 “Looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat (refining fire)? Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness (no decay) dwells.”
What do you think was God’s purpose when He originally created the heavens and the earth?
We can safely assume that the purpose why God created the heavens and the earth was to introduce something new that He did not have before the creation. We can also safely assume, from what Scripture reveals, that before physical man was created, there was no physical realm for any physical men to dwell in.
Hebrews 10:5 “Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: ‘Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me.’”
Not just a body, but an indestructible body that secures the foundation of the entire creation of the heavens and the earth, that which is visible as well as that which is invisible, since the creation itself consists of both, to something that has always existed.
2 Corinthians 4:18 “...For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Everything in the universe is made of atomic particles, except for energy, yet without energy itself there cannot be any atomic particles, as Einstein figured out, that all matter was made by energy.
Where did the energy that made all the atomic particles that comprise the entire visible and invisible creation come from?
John 1:1-3 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He (the Word) was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him (the Word), and without Him (the Word) nothing was made that was made.”
What is the substance of the Word of God?
Hebrews 4:12 “For the word of God is living (means life creating, life sustaining) and powerful (means energy), and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner (the refining fire or energy that restores the soul and recreates the physical bodies that died, to their original settings) of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
Every single atom that comprises everything in the creation came directly from the Word of God, and answers directly to Him. If Jesus speaks to the mountain and tells it to be removed into the sea, every single atomic particle that gives body to that mountain would just instantly float directly into the sea. But here is what’s really important:
John 1:14 “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The human physical body that The Word of God came to indwell offered Himself as a sacrifice on God’s altar, the cross, on behalf of all the rest of the humanity that He created, His shed blood was taken by the Holy Spirit and sprinkled on the mercy seat of the heavenly Holy of Holies, after three days and three nights, the physical dead body of Jesus was infused with the energy contained in the Word of Promise, for it was written that He would not let the body His Holy One see decay, and He rose triumphantly full of that indestructible life that holds the universe together. May His name be forever bless, I bless You sweet Jesus!
Psalm 16:10 “For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see (undergo decay) corruption.”
How do we become partakers of this amazing life-giving energy? The same promises of God apply to all of us who are willing to believe them.
Romans 8:11 “But if the same Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.”