My Origin, My Destiny

So many religions. So many choices. Some of the nicest people I have ever known have been Buddhists. If life was a "nice contest," they would win every time, hands down. I've also met some pretty cranky Christians. If life was a "human merit and demerit" contest, many of them would come in dead last. But the problem we have is not whether we are nice or cranky. The problem is at the level of our very natures as descendants of Adam and Eve. It's not about our behavior (although our behavior demonstrates symptomatically the level of our problem), it's about what makes us tick. We need a nature change, a complete species transformation so fundamental as to switch forever our relationship with God and, concurrently, to profoundly alter our eternal prospects. Being nice and behaving well is certainly commendable and, heaven knows, this brutish world could use more kindness. But, absent this spiritual transformation, our good behavior will only have made us better citizens of earth-we will remain completely unfit to be citizens of heaven.

"Old Time Religion" Still Rocks

There is a reason that Jesus Christ chose to use the now much–maligned term born again as the only way out of this cosmic dilemma. He was not given to excessive hyperbole. He picked his words carefully. Unless we get back to the state of our birth and start over, we're eternally done for. The problem is solvable, but you must overcome any objections you may have about there being only one way. There is one problem, and only one way out of it. Here is a tantalizing clue to God's ingenious plan of salvation from Chapter 7 of our book:

"Adam and Eve disobeyed a direct order of God and ate of the "Tree–of–Knowledge–of–Good–and–Evil." The resultant effects upon their formerly carefree lives were immediate and devastating. Among them were a searing sense of guilt and shame which drove them to fashion clothing out of fig leaves to cover up their nakedness. But then God comes along and instructs them to take off their makeshift coverings and to put on coverings that he provided from God's own hands. The next thing they saw were blood soaked animal skins from freshly killed innocent creatures who, up that moment, were just "minding their own business" in the garden. Thus, the principle of substitution-the innocent for the guilty-was introduced in a garden that had never seen death before. We have every assurance from this that Adam and Eve are in heaven today because they had the good sense to accept these coverings from God and put them on-finally they listened to God and obeyed his instructions and were saved from their own misadventures."

This ancient story forms the heart and soul of the Christian faith. God's means of redeeming the human race has never changed. It runs through the Bible from cover to cover. A particularly enlightening passage reads like this:

"The First Adam received life, the Last Adam is a life–giving Spirit. Physical life comes first, then spiritual-a firm base shaped from the earth, a final completion coming out of heaven. The First Man was made out of earth, and people since then are earthy; the Second Man was made out of heaven, and people now can be heavenly. In the same way that we've worked from our earthy origins, let's embrace our heavenly ends."[i]

Our title, “My Origin, My Destiny,” summarizes the most radical and yet least understood promises to mankind in the entire Bible: your eternal destiny is directly linked to your physical and spiritual origins-that is, to your genetic heritage all the way back in time.

In the physical world, we have no control over our origins (our parentage, place of birth, or social status, for example). As recently as two centuries ago, even in advanced cultures, people's origins pretty much defined their destinies, absent the extremely unlikely intervention by a member of a higher class legally adopting them. In England, if you were born of a coal miner, you were destined to be a coal miner; if you were born of landed gentry, your future was correspondingly blessed with sociological, educational, and economical advantages that the lower classes could only dream of. In some parts of the world, antiquated caste systems of hereditary social stratification still seal the fate of hordes of "low–born" children to lives of indentured servitude to the day they die. Millions of children the world over are born into conditions of grinding poverty that perpetuate their parents' disadvantaged status in life. Likewise, we descendants of Adam and Eve were born spiritually destitute and, absent divine intervention, will die that way.

But suppose there was a way to intervene in this otherwise determinative process to change origins and to produce an entirely different outcome. We're not talking about the natural realm here but the much more important and longer lasting supernatural realm. Suppose God could intervene and adopt us into his family, placing us in line for unimagined blessings. Suppose he could remove us from one family tree and transplant us into another-from "low–born" to "blue blood" in a single stroke.

Scripture divides all mankind into two "spiritual species"-either you are, from a positional standpoint, "in the First Adam," or you are "in the Last Adam." The stakes are high in this. If I choose to live my entire life in the First Adam, the condition of my natural birth, the eventual eternal outcome will be spiritual shipwreck. If, however, I choose to accept God's offer to switch my spiritual origin so that I will be included in the Last Adam, the result of my supernatural rebirth, my eternal prospects become instantaneously and irreversibly transformed beyond my wildest dreams.

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[i] 1 Corinthians 15:45–49 The Message (MSG)