Out From Under The Curse
It is appointed unto man once to die, and after this, the judgment. Now, the question is this, which is perhaps the most dominant in man, or carries the greatest weight of preeminence in the human mind: did Jesus come to make void the judgments of God? The answer is no! Are sicknesses and sorrows the judgments of God? The answer is yes! Do these things prove to be chastisement that bringeth about correction? The answer is yes! Does God afflict man? The answer is yes! Does God afflict men willingly? The answer is no!
Now, let us see if we can get a clear understanding of this. If we do not clearly and fully understand God in His ways, our faith will waver to and fro, up and down, never to be firm in His promises of security, because of every intervening thought of doubt or wonder, with which Satan will attack the mind.
Now, let us see if these things are true. Let us see if we can understand these things. Let’s start with this one first as a confirmation: God does afflict, He wounds and He heals. How can God do this and be good and be all life and nothing that pertaineth unto death? David said, “It is good, O Lord, that I have been afflicted, for before I was afflicted, I went astray, but since I have been afflicted, I have learned to keep Thy commandments, for Thou hast afflicted me in righteousness, O God!” The Bible says that God does not afflict willingly. It teaches that healing is the children’s bread.
What do all these things mean? Here is the answer. God created the good and God created the evil. The Bible speaks of the evil that God thought to bring upon Israel, but He repented many times. The Bible also says the evil spirit from God troubled Saul. The lying spirit was sent from God that overthrew Ahab, the Bible says. What does it mean? It simply means that God, who made man, foreknowing all things, subjected man to evil to manifest His own personal attributes and greatness through man, while showing and bringing out man’s hidden ability to master and conquer, to make man see that he, himself, is a god by the strength of a Creator, using the evil as a stone to whet the axe, that it might be more sufficient in its work; also, to show the difference between light and darkness, good and evil, sweet and bitter.
Man, never having been acquainted with anything but good, would never have been able to recognize good in all its splendor and goodness without having felt the pains of evil. How can man give thanks unto God for daylight if he has never seen daylight, though daylight is all around him? How can daylight be recognized, when it has never been revealed? It takes the opposite of daylight, which is darkness, to reveal the light and the wonderful joys of greatness which comes with it. It takes evil, such as sickness, sorrows, and heartaches; it takes that kind of spirit to reveal a spiritual God that cannot be seen by the visible eye: a God of health, happiness, and life. For you and I to yield or surrender to the terrifying forces of evil in any way, to confess defeat to a power which is so weak compared to its Creator: to do this, we become a reproach to our Maker.
Evil gets its strength from the law of God, for as God receives strength in the human mind by the contrast of evil, so does evil receive strength by the revelation of righteousness, for as God builds the human mind, like a baby’s mind, God’s law or Word, which said, “Eve, thou canst not eat thereof,” also made Eve to know there was something evil revealed by God’s own Word, thus bringing evil out of the shadows by focusing the light of God upon it. It had now come into existence in the human world.
As a being, it could now be seen by the human mind, and since it could be seen by the eye of understanding, it had its opportunity to manifest itself to the human family. This is why God is the Creator of evil, because the very manifestation of Himself, of His eternal being, to a human being, which is a temporal being, is a revealing of the insufficiency and lack of man, which is evil. The revealing of His infinite mind, coming into contact with our finite mind, exposes our inability.
Let me give you an illustration. Take a man of great wisdom, education and understanding. Place him with a fool, who has no understanding, no wisdom nor education, who cares for nothing and is foolish in all of his ways. Put them together, and everywhere they go, the very actions of each one will reveal the condition of the other. All the foolish man does will only be a greater testimony in the eyes of the people in the behalf of the man with wisdom. Likewise, all the man of wisdom does will be a revelator to the human mind of the foolishness of the other man. Wisdom will reveal foolishness; foolishness will reveal wisdom to the human understanding.
God could have made man wise without him knowing it, but he would have been robbed of the joys of knowing that he had wisdom. The joy that is reaped from knowing wisdom is the spirit of life to the human body. For one to know that he is wise, he must first be ignorant, then the process of becoming wise will be a great comparison of each new light of understanding that you get to what you already are in your ignorance. This is why God had to make man in a primitive state, so as not to rob him of anything of life.
How can God enjoy a miracle, when He is a miracle within Himself? It is a simple thing to Him. His great joy comes from the revealing of Himself to us, who are overjoyed with a miracle.
This should explain why God credits His own self with afflicting man. The reason is because it could have been no other way. By simply believing that we are His, that He is for us, and by shaking out of our mind the disillusioning powers of contrast, we become gods in the earth.
Once the egg is taken from its shell, the shell has finished its work and is thrown aside. All of this was under the law, because the law is the revealer of sin. Now we are out from under the curse of the law, which is sin or evil: Christ being made a curse for us. God, Himself, in human flesh, making a body of sin, knowing that He was responsible for all things, in mercy and love, bore our sicknesses, griefs, sorrows and death in His body on the tree at Calvary. Now, we are under grace.
What is grace? Mercy! That is to say, we know that we are sinners. We confess that we are finite. We acknowledge that He is the omnipotent God, confess to Him that we are inferior to Him and that He is our superior, acknowledge His dominion over us, and we are automatically accepted through this form of believing into the Spirit of superiority by the denying or laying aside of our inferiority.
God, coming in human flesh, walked the shores of Galilee to fulfill our part of the judgment of God, for He bore our infirmities in His body, releasing man from the judgments of sickness, sorrow, and death. Not by omitting the laws of His great judgment upon the soul, for the soul that sinneth shall surely die, but rather by saying, “I am responsible for your state of being and your subjection to vanity, therefore I will take your punishment in My own body. The evil force of Satan to which I have subjected you for your training; from this, you shall be released.”
By believing that what God is doing for you is sufficient for you as payment for your crime, this is God’s love and grace to you. Now remember this, brother and sister in Christ, as you read: the law is a schoolmaster, Paul said, to teach you obedience until you come into grace. You are fully graduated from this school when you have made up your mind to do the very best you know how, to live in harmony with God’s laws of life, and have come to the place where you fully believe He set your boundaries and limitations of life, and that He does not require anything you cannot do, thus seeing Him as a God who forgiveth all thine iniquities and healeth all thy diseases, who giveth all things that pertain unto life: life, and that more abundant. You will believe in His mercy. Believing is faith, and faith is deliverance from all bondage contrary to life.
By Rev. George Leon Pike Sr.
Founder and first President of Jesus Christ’s Eternal Kingdom of Abundant Life, Inc.
Holiness Unto The Lord