By Steven Lambert
But without faith[1] it is impossible to [walk with God and] please Him, for whoever comes [near] to God must [necessarily] believe that God exists and that He rewards those who [earnestly and diligently] seek Him.[2]
The first requirement regarding faith is: one must accept, receive, or activate it to become a Believer.
But what does it say? “THE WORD IS NEAR YOU, IN YOUR MOUTH AND IN YOUR HEART”—that is, the word [the message, the basis] of faith which we preach— because if you acknowledge and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord [recognizing His power, authority, and majesty as God], and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart a person believes [in Christ as Savior] resulting in his justification [that is, being made righteous—being freed of the guilt of sin and made acceptable to God]; and with the mouth he acknowledges and confesses [his faith openly], resulting in and confirming [his] salvation.”[3]
The second requirement is: You must be a Receiver of the Word.
But to as many as did receive and welcome Him, He gave the right [the authority, the privilege] to become children of God, that is, to those who believe in (adhere to, trust in, and rely on) His name— who were born, not of blood [natural conception], nor of the will of the flesh [physical impulse], nor of the will of man [that of a natural father], but of God [that is, a divine and supernatural birth—they are born of God—spiritually transformed, renewed, sanctified].”[4]
The third requirement is: You must be “an active doer” or operator or obeyer of the Word.
For if anyone only listens to the word without obeying it, he is like a man who looks very carefully at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he immediately forgets what he looked like. But he who looks carefully into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and faithfully abides by it, not having become a [careless] listener who forgets but an active doer [who obeys], he will be blessed and favored by God in what he does [in his life of obedience].”[5]
Unless a person is a believer, he/she cannot receive, act on, obey, perform, or do the Word of God. This statement can only be explained from a theological perspective, which requires a little foundation-laying.
In the Garden of Eden, God explicitly commanded Adam and Eve not to eat or partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for if they did they would “surely die!”[6] The fruit of that Tree was the nature of Satan, the sin nature, carnality. The primary law governing the Kingdom of God is righteousness. Preserving and protecting God’s Kingdom from corruption by its occupants—those who God chose to receive into His Kingdom for eternal fellowship or relationship, i.e., the Righteous—required the establishment of another cardinal law governing the Kingdom: “The wages of sin is death,”[7] so that any creature who chose to defy and disobey God, which is unrighteousness, would die and thereby be purged or removed from the Kingdom. This was the reason God admonished Adam and Eve that if they defied and disobeyed His explicit command not to eat or partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and eat it, they would surely die!
As we know, Adam and Eve did defy and disobey God’s explicit command and did eat or partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, yet, curiously we are informed that Adam lived 930 years before he died (ironically, we are not told how long Eve lived),[8] though we are not specifically told how long after the fall it was that he died. Critics of Christianity and the Bible sometimes point to this seeming contradiction in an attempt to discredit Christian beliefs and the Bible. But, the fact is that Adam and Eve did surely die the very moment they disobeyed God, but it was spiritually not physically that they died, that is to say their human spirit died not their human body!
Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the human race, were created as SPIRITS—for they were made in the likeness and image of God[9], and God is Spirit[10]— possessing a SOUL, with the spirit and soul being contained in a human BODY. Just as God is Trinity, i.e., three divine Persons in ONE Godhead, so also creating mankind in His likeness and image required He created Man as a “tripartite-being,” meaning consisting of three parts: spirit, soul, and body[11].
God created Man originally so that their spirit was the “tabernacle” or “temple of God,” i.e., the Holy Sanctuary where God dwelled. The human spirit, or heart, was the part of Man that continuously connected them with Almighty God, his Creator and Spiritual Father. Thus, it was the human spirit that was the predominant part of Man, which God intended to rule over the human soul[12], which consists of the mind, will, and emotions, and the physical human body.
That was the original Creational order of things for human beings. It is both interesting and telling that whenever you hear people of the world or even carnal or uninformed believers speak about this tripartite human constitution, they almost invariably speak of it in the opposite order of how God created Mankind: body, soul, and spirit. But, the order the Holy Spirit of God speaks of the three parts of human constitution is the opposite order, the proper Creation order, as evidenced by what the Holy Spirit spoke/wrote through the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Thessalonians:
“Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[13]
The tragic consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God’s explicit command not to eat or partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was that they died spiritually, in that their human spirit, the Tabernacle or Temple of God, the place where God lived in them, was mortified, or rendered dead and inoperable, because the wages of sin is death; and when their spirit died, as a result of their disobedience, God departed their human spirit, rendering it dead and lifeless. Now they were no longer connected with God in their human spirit. Their connection or relationship with God was now only with their soul, which meant they could from then on relate with God through their mental or intellectual reasoning (carnal mind), their human emotions, and according to their own carnal desires (will). The sad and dire result was that Adam and Eve’s—and by extension, Mankind’s—connection to God was now reduced to the vastly inferior realm of the natural and carnal.
After the fall, God had to speak to them physically or in the natural where they heard His voice with their physical hearing through their ears. Prior to the fall, God communicated with Adam and Eve by His Spirit in their human spirit! We see the evidence of that in Genesis 3:8: “They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” Whereas, prior to the fall their connection with God was by the Spirit in their human spirit, which meant their communion with God’s Spirit was not limited to their physical hearing. This is also the reason that when God called out to them after they had disobeyed, asking, “Where are you?,” (verse 9) Adam replied, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself” (verse 10).
It is because of this spiritual death that occurred in the Garden of Eden and was passed on to every human being afterward born in the lineage of Adam and Eve, that when people are birthed physically they are dead spiritually as the Spirit indicates in Ephesians 2:1-2:
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. (NASB)
And you [He made alive when you] were [spiritually] dead and separated from Him because of your transgressions and sins, in which you once walked. You were following the ways of this world [influenced by this present age], in accordance with the prince of the power of the air (Satan), the spirit who is now at work in the disobedient [the unbelieving, who fight against the purposes of God]. (AMP)
The only antidote to this unspeakably horrible predicament is that every person “must be Born Again,”[14] as Jesus told the Jewish elder and teacher Nicodemus, explaining to him that at physical birth people are born physically because human reproduction produces a human being, but the human being that is born is born spiritually dead because: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”[15] Thus, when a person is Born Again, accepting Christ as Savior and receiving Him by His Spirit into their human heart or spirit, their formerly dead human spirit is regenerated or made alive[16] or quickened by the infusion of the Spirit.
In the Spirit that transaction is the equivalent of when Jesus was resurrected from the dead: their human spirit that had been dead and dormant is instantaneously quickened or made alive or enlivened; and the moment that occurs that person is resurrected or raised from the dead, and instantaneously seated with Christ in Heavenly places[17] at the right hand of God![18]
Now with all that as our foundation, it is here that we connect it all to our topic of “spiritual faith!” When a person accepts the Lord as their Savior, and their human spirit is infused with the Holy Spirit, regenerating or quickening their human spirit, as a result that spiritual faith God originally embedded at Creation in the human spirit of all mankind is likewise quickened or activated or made operable in the life of that Born Again believer! In other words, at the moment of salvation, when a person receives the Lord Jesus Christ into his/her human spirit or heart, genuine spiritual faith in God, which had been mortified [put to death] with the disobedience of Adam and Eve[19], instantaneously comes alive and becomes active and operable in that person’s life.
WOW! That’s enough to make an Egyptian mummy jump up and shout, “AMEN!”
This active, alive, operative faith of the Spirit, or “spiritual faith,” is what theologians and Bible teachers sometimes refer to as “saving faith.” It is “the God-kind of faith” that instantaneously connects the genuinely Born Again believer to the heart/Spirit of God, and makes the God-kind of faith operable in his/her life. Whereas previously, prior to being Born Again, any “faith” the unregenerate or non-Born-Again person thought he/she had was in actuality only mental assent or “intellectual faith” and merely the “faith” of dead, lifeless, non-productive religiosity.
[1] To be “without faith” is to be “faithless.”
[2] Heb. 11:6
[3] Rom. 10:8-10; AMP
[4] Jn. 1:12-13
[5] Jas. 1:23-25
[6] Gen. 2:17
[7] Rom. 6:23
[8] Gen. 5:5
[9] Gen. 1:26-27
[10] Jn. 4:24
[11] 1 Thes. 5:23
[12] Col 3:15; et al.
[13] 1 Thes. 5:23; NASB
[14] Jn. 3:16
[15] Jn. 3:6
[16] Eph. 2:1-9; Jn. 3:6,7
[17] Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1
[18] Mk. 16:19
[19] Gen. 2:16-17
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