THE NATURE OF MANKIND

Audio:  by Fred R. Coulter

  The Nature of Mankind: Part 1

  The Nature of Mankind: Part 2

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.)

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