It is very important for us to understand what Christ was so we know what we are to become.
There was war.
“And war broke out in heaven: Michael [Hebrew meaning “One who is like God”] and His angels fought with the dragon [Satan]; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” Revelation 12:7–9
War broke out in heaven and its peaceful atmosphere was completely shattered. Every single angel in heaven was on one side or the other in this war. But we see that Satan and his angels were unable to prevail and were forced out of heaven, cast out, banished to this world.
Before the war, heaven’s angels had lived happy and harmoniously with each other for millennia, but Satan had sewn doubt among the angelic host. Every war begins with some type of disagreement or argument between the parties involved. The war in heaven was caused by a disagreement. How could this happen? It is very important for us to know what the argument was about because it still exists in the world today, and each one of us must decide on whose side of the disagreement we are.
God had a problem.
“It was difficult to uproot Satan from the affection of the angels in heaven.” Christ Triumphant, 216
The Father could have stopped Lucifer immediately. Instead, He permitted him to continue his work of disaffection until it erupted in active revolt, and the true nature of his plans could be seen by all (The Faith I Live By, 70). God gave all the angels a choice. Believe the lies of Lucifer and join in his rebellion against God or trust and obey the Creator and remain loyal to His Son, Michael. Neutrality was not an option, neither then, nor now.
“He [Lucifer] took the position that the law of God was against the heavenly intelligences, and the warfare and controversy between Christ and Satan was started in heaven and is going on in the earth to the present day.” Ibid.
Satan’s assertion was that the law of God is too restrictive. He first insinuated that the angels, though created beings, were pure and strong enough to make their own decisions about right and wrong. The law was not needed for them. The great majority of people in the world today, even professed Christians, claim this as a right. They will say, “I have a right to choose what I will believe and do.” It is easy to see that they are opposed to one or more of the principles of God’s law.
Today, people everywhere, Christians, too, are breaking the seventh commandment, especially the young people. It is difficult to find someone who honors and cares for their parents as we are instructed in the fifth commandment. There are church-going people who believe that one day during the week is good enough to worship God, thereby breaking the fourth commandment. The devil says that the law of God is against us, that it is burdensome and unnecessary.
The devil was not alone.
“It is time for You to act, O Lord, for they have regarded Your law as void. Therefore I love Your commandments more than gold, yes, than fine gold!” Psalm 119:126, 127
Not only was the devil cast out of heaven. The angels who sympathized with him were cast out, too.
Sympathy is a good emotion. The Bible says to treat people the way you would want them to treat you (Matthew 7:12) and to esteem others better than yourself (Philippians 2:3). Sympathy causes us to reach out when someone is in pain, or when we observe the helplessness of a person in need, leading us to provide aid. But it can also be a very dangerous thing. When we sympathize with sin, we are on the devil’s side of the great controversy. God has no sympathy for sin of any kind nor for those who side with the devil. Christ said the law of God is honorable, and you need to keep it. But too many refuse to do God’s will, and thereby, are sympathizing with the devil.
“Angels of great power were expelled from heaven because of the spirit of self-exaltation. They felt that they should be above Christ.” Manuscript Releases, Vol. 6, 76
This will become more clear at the end of the millennium when all the wicked are raised. They have said that if you believe in Christ, you don’t need to keep the law. But the Christian world in this generation will see that they were wrong. They will see something they didn’t expect: Christ sitting on a throne, not as our Saviour, but as our Judge. In His hands He holds two tables of stone. It is then that they realize you cannot belong to Christ and break the law.
When Satan was cast out to this earth, he decided to take revenge on God by capturing this world and establishing his kingdom here. But the devil had a problem because he didn’t own this world. This world wasn’t his; it had been given to someone else. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So, God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ ” Genesis 1:26–28. God gave the entire world to Adam and Eve, including dominion over every living thing. The only way the devil could set up his kingdom in this world was to wrest it from its rightful owners.
A master strategist.
So, the devil set about developing a strategy to overcome Adam and Eve. He would persuade them to give their allegiance to him instead of to the God of heaven. He started by telling a series of lies and using trickery. Once the devil obtained control over Adam and Eve, it was a simple matter of continued deception and the world became his by deception.
However, if you obtain something, anything, by deception, is it really yours? Absolutely not. You stole it. “By whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage.” 2 Peter 2:19, last part. Adam and Eve were brought into bondage. By choosing to believe Satan, they were no longer free.
God designed that Adam and Eve would have children. Their character was perfect; they were sinless, and their children would be perfect and sinless. The children of Adam and Eve were to go out from the garden of Eden and establish other gardens of Eden all over the world; but the devil kept that from happening. It looked like for a long time that he would succeed, but there was only one Person in the whole universe that could actually solve this problem, redeem the human race, and give them back their freedom.
You can be free
God wants you to be free, but human beings are in bondage to sin. However, the plan of salvation was devised to set you free from that bondage. No sinner can have eternal life unless he has been set free from the guilt and power of sin; only then will he receive the gift of eternal life.
The angels who were cast out of heaven with Lucifer wanted to exalt themselves above Christ. They didn’t need to follow the law. They were created perfect, and therefore, they could determine right from wrong on their own. This was Lucifer’s argument in heaven, and it has been the same argument for over 6,000 years. Sin came in through the desire for self-exaltation
The plan of salvation was established by Jesus. It said that Christ would humiliate Himself by coming to this world as a man, and fighting the devil as we must fight him. Christ would prove that mankind can keep the law of God in spite of the devil’s temptations.
But that’s not what Satan wanted.
Lucifer had become jealous of Christ. He wanted, first, to be equal with Him, but soon he wanted to be like God, until he settled on being God. He would make heaven a place of freedom, where all could choose to live as they deemed right. After all, they were perfect, and they would make perfect choices; therefore, the law of God was not necessary for them, and neither was His government.
How does one change a government? By changing its laws. And what do we know about God’s law? It is the transcript of His character, embodying the principles of His kingdom (God’s Amazing Grace, 141). To abolish the law of God and His government, would mean God would have to change, and we know that He does not change (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8). Satan does not have the power to change God, His law, or His government.
“Satan wished to change the government of God.” Manuscript Releases, Vol. 16, 180
“Satan wished to change the government of God, to fix his own seal to the rules of God’s kingdom. … Working in secrecy but known to God, Lucifer became a deceiving character.
“He was expelled from heaven … .” Ibid.
Falsehood for truth, deceit, through these and many other tools of his trade, Satan created his kingdom on this Earth. He whose deceiving power was so great that he persuaded one-third of the angels in heaven to unite with him against God and Jesus Christ, their Creator, has found mortal man to be easy subjects.
His claims would be false.
“He knew that all his claims to the kingdoms of the world were false and could not be sustained unless he should overcome Christ.
“It is impossible to take in the depth and the force of these temptations. …
“Christ’s perfect humanity is the same that man may have through connection with Christ.” Ibid., 181
Alone, man does not have perfect humanity, but he may have it through connection with Christ. “As Christ humbled Himself to the nature of man, He could be tempted. He had not taken on Him even the nature of the angels, but humanity, perfectly identical with our own nature, except without the taint of sin.” Ibid., 182
His nature was perfectly identical to ours except without the taint of sin. If you cannot understand anything else about Christ’s human nature, you must understand this, it was “without the taint of sin.”
“A human body, a human mind, with all the peculiar properties, He was bone, brain, and muscle. A man of our flesh, He was compassed with the weakness of humanity. The circumstances of His life were of that character that He was exposed to all the inconveniences that belong to men, not in wealth, not in ease, but in poverty and want and humiliation. He breathed the very air man must breathe. He trod our earth as man. He had reason, conscience, memory, will, and affections of the human soul which was united with His divine nature.
“He was capable of yielding to temptations, as are human beings. His finite nature was pure and spotless, but the divine nature that led Him to say to Philip, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’ also, was not humanized; neither was humanity deified by the blending or union of the two natures; each retained its essential character and properties.
“But here we must not become in our ideas common and earthly and in our perverted ideas we must not think that the liability of Christ to yield to Satan’s temptations degraded His humanity and He possessed the same sinful, corrupt propensities as man.” Ibid.
We must not think that He possessed the same sinful propensities that human beings have. He had our weaknesses but not our guilt, not the taint of sin.
“The divine nature, combined with the human, made Him capable of yielding to Satan’s temptations. Here the test to Christ was far greater than that of Adam and Eve, for Christ took our nature, fallen but not corrupted, and would not be corrupted unless He received the words of Satan in the place of the words of God.” Ibid., 182, 183
To have an eternal kingdom of his own, Satan knew he must overcome Christ. He felt this could be accomplished when Christ came to Earth as a man. After all, man is so easily deceived. And we read in 2 Peter 2, that when man was overcome, he was in bondage to the one who overcame him. The entire human race was brought into bondage to Satan—Adam and all of his posterity. Now he must overcome Christ.
God had a plan.
”God made every provision in man’s behalf, creating him only a little lower than the angels. Adam disobeyed, and entailed sin upon his posterity; but God gave His Son for the redemption of the race.” Ibid., Vol. 6, 3. The word entail means “something transmitted as if by unalterable inheritance.”
The angels understood this from the beginning. They were sorrowful because they understood that all the descendants of Adam and Eve would not only have to die, but, they would never wake up, for the price of sin is eternal death (Romans 6:23).
The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
The Bible also says that when a person dies the body returns to dust and the spirit goes back to God who gave it. When a person dies in this world, they don’t go to a physical heaven or hell. They rest in the grave until everyone is resurrected—good and bad—just not at the same time.
If you are good, you will be resurrected when Christ comes. If you are bad, you will be part of the resurrection of the damned. The good will be changed from mortal to immorality and will go with Jesus to His home, a physical heaven. This is called the first death. But the bad, will not be resurrected until the end of the millennium, and ultimately will perish in the lake of fire. Not an ever-burning hell, but a fire so hot that it will not only burn up every man, woman, and child until there is nothing left but ash, but it will also destroy sin, root and branch. Sin and sinners will be gone forever. God sent His Son to this world so that we would never have to face eternal death, if we would only believe in Him.
We are born into this world as sinners with an evil nature (Psalm 51:5; Romans 3:23), and it is this nature that must be changed if we are to be with Jesus in the kingdom of heaven.
“It is at an immense cost that we have been placed on the high vantage ground where we can be liberated from the bondage of sin, which has been wrought by the fall of Adam.” Christ Triumphant, 215
An immense cost! The life of Jesus Christ so that I can be liberated from the bondage of sin.
“He [Christ] made the infinite sacrifice not only that sin might be removed, but that human nature might be restored, re-beautified, reconstructed from its ruins, and made fit for the presence of God.” Manuscript Releases, Vol. 6, 11
The Lord wants to reconstruct our nature back to His own image, like we were meant to be from the beginning. Have you been liberated? Do you want to go to the kingdom of heaven? Then this transformation must happen. And here is the really good news, it can happen to every person.
“It is the privilege of every believer in Christ to possess Christ’s nature, a nature far above that which Adam forfeited by transgression.” The Upward Look, 18
Christianity is a process.
Jesus accepts us the way we are, but He does not leave us that way. It is His supreme desire to change us, to make us completely over like Himself, and He can do it. No one can say they are too bad to be changed. If we yield ourselves to Him, obey and follow Him, He will change us and restore our nature into His own image.
“Let us realize the weakness of humanity, and see where man fails in his self-sufficiency. We shall then be filled with a desire to be just what God desires us to be—pure, noble, sanctified. We shall hunger and thirst after the righteousness of Christ. To be like God will be the one desire of the soul.”
The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, Vol. 1, 1087
“Salvation is a gift offered to you free; on no other condition can you obtain it, only as a free gift. But cooperation on your part is essential for your salvation. …
“There must be a cooperation of the human with the divine. Without holiness no man shall see the Lord; but Jesus is ready to receive you now; and if you will only believe that He is your Saviour, that He died to redeem you, He will be found of you as the most precious friend.” Manuscript Releases, Vol. 6, 19
If we could have paid the price of salvation ourselves, Christ would not have had to die. But we could not pay the price in the first place, so He came and paid it for us, making salvation free to all who would accept it.
Do you want your sinful nature to be changed? The Lord has promised to change every member of mankind if they will but accept His salvation and surrender themselves—heart, body, and soul—to Him. How much does God want to change us? Look to the cross and Christ’s life on this earth. Christ is the Pattern Man. Though we cannot change ourselves, we must never say that it is impossible for us to be changed. Every necessity needed for this transformation to occur is promised and provided, according to God’s promise if we will believe (Philippians 1:6, 7).
They were ready.
When sin entered the world, the Godhead was ready to meet the crisis. Christ assembled the two-thirds of the angels who remained faithful to Him, and they went to war, casting Lucifer and his angels out of heaven. Then He explained the plan of salvation to the remaining heavenly host.
“When Christ first announced to the heavenly host His mission and work in the world, He declared that He was to leave His position of dignity and disguise His holy mission by assuming the likeness of a man, when in reality He was the Son of the infinite God.” Christ Triumphant, 227
Sadly, however, when the Son of the Infinite God, came to His chosen people, all they saw was His humanity. They did not recognize the divinity of Christ. Their Messiah had come, but they did not know Him; and it is still so today. They could have, should have, known Him, but they did not see, and though they found no fault with His humanity, they killed Him because they could not accept that God, in the person of His Son, had come to be sacrificed to save them from certain death.
“As His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” 2 Peter 1:3, 4
God wants us to become partakers of His divine nature.
“The Lord Jesus came to our world, not to reveal what a God could do, but what a man could do, through faith in God’s power to help in every emergency. Man is, through faith, to be a partaker in the divine nature, and to overcome every temptation wherewith he is beset. The Lord now demands that every son and daughter of Adam through faith in Jesus Christ, serve Him in human nature which we now have.
“The Lord Jesus has bridged the gulf that sin has made. He has connected earth with heaven, and finite man with the infinite God. Jesus, the world’s Redeemer, could only keep the commandments of God, in the same way that humanity can keep them. ‘Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.’ 2 Peter 1:4.” Manuscript Releases, Vol. 6, 341, 342
Jesus is all powerful. He is a conqueror with the ability to subdue and overcome every evil trait of character we possess, completely transforming it to be like His character. This is true Christianity, the miracle of our religion. We do not have to stay the way we are. We can be set free from the bondage of sin, our natural condition, and be made a partaker of the divine nature; no longer reflecting the image of the devil, but now reflecting the image of Jesus Christ.
Do you want that miracle to take place in your life? Do you want it badly enough to cooperate with the Holy Spirit? That is the only way to have eternal life. At the end of this world, every single person will have to make this choice.
Pastor John J. Grosboll is the Director of Steps to Life and pastors the Prairie Meadows Church in Wichita, Kansas. He may be reached by email at historic@stepstolife.org or by telephone at 316-788-5559.