THE NATURE OF MANKIND
Audio: by Fred R. Coulter
The Elohim of the God Family Who later became Jesus Christ personally
created Adam and Eve with His own hands. He created them in the image and
likeness of God, or Elohim, but a little lower than God. Human beings are
made of flesh and blood and do not have inherent immortality. (See Salvation.)
However, God has added to the human brain a spirit essence called the "spirit of
man." This spiritual dimension in the human brain imparts reasoning power and
intellect, and gives human beings the capacity to think, to speak, to learn, to
write, to plan, to devise, to create, to build, to control, to teach, to choose,
to worship, to build character, and to experience every emotion. God made male
and female with the capacity to express intimate, personal love for each other
as husband and wife, and through this physical union to create children after
their own kind and produce families, clans, tribes and nations.
Adam and Eve were created sinless but with a nature that was subject to
temptation. God gave them freedom to choose between obedience and life, or
disobedience and death. After they sinned by eating of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, God sentenced them to suffer the pain and sorrow of living
with a sinful nature and finally to reap the penalty of death. This penalty of
death was passed on to all mankind by the physical inheritance of sinful human
nature. Human nature is inherently and naturally hostile to God and is not
subject to His laws and commandments. From birth, human nature is a mixture of
good and evil, and all die in Adam. When a person dies, his or her conscious
thoughts cease. The body returns to the dust of the earth, and the spirit of man
goes back to God. Only through God the Father's gracious and merciful plan of
salvation through Jesus Christ is it possible for a person to be redeemed and
saved from this sinful nature of death. God's ultimate purpose for each human
being is complete reconciliation with God the Father through Jesus Christ so
that he or she may enter into the Family of God as a literal son or daughter of
God, sharing the same eternal existence as God. (See The Resurrections,
Salvation and The Holy Spirit.)
Scriptural References:
| Gen. 1:26-27 |
Psa. 8:3-6 |
Zech. 12:1 |
| Gen. 2:7-25; 3:1-19 |
I Cor. 2:11 |
Ezk. 18:4, 20 |
| Mark 7:21-22 |
Rom. 8:7-8 |
Heb. 9:27 |
| Ecc. 3:19-21 |
I Cor. 15:21-22, 44-56 |
Rev. 21:7 |
| I John 3:1-3 |
Phil. 3:21 |
|
|
