Repentance—Departing from Evil—Pre-requisite of Immortality

Chapter 27 of the book Yah Is Savior: The Road to Immortality

      A few of us humans will achieve immortality  when we are given a new spiritual  body  at  the  time  of the resurrection, the time of the Messiah’s return.  But not everyone that says that He is Master of their life will become immortal.  It will only be those who are alive and have the Spirit of God dwelling in them in a reality, or those who had the Spirit of God dwelling in them at the time that their earthly bodies fell asleep, these also will be given a  new immortal spiritual body during the first resurrection.

     You have a mortal, fleshly body at this time, but God Almighty has unlimited power and he is quite capable with the mere power of his word to give you a new spiritual body as it has pleased him in his eternal plan and purpose laid down since before the beginning of the world. (II Cor. 5:1).  He will have called many, but few are chosen for this the greatest of all honors—to be one of the many sons and daughters  that God is bringing to glory.  It is a great love  that  will  bestow  this  on  a  select few, for few there will be to find this way of truth.  It is quite easy to find the way that leads to destruction, misery, and  desolation.  A narrow gate awaits those who enter the way that leads to love, honor, and glory.

     The sole criteria in achieving immortality is that we receive the Spirit of God somehow into our bodies.  But therein lies the problem for mankind.  The Spirit God will not dwell in unclean temples.  The human body was created for the express purpose to house the Spirit of God, the essence of Himself.  God made  his crowning creation, man and woman, to house Himself.  Mankind is to be His temple.

     However, God cannot dwell in the fleshly, earthly tabernacle called the human being until He cleans out the temple first.  The old carnal nature dwells in unregenerated man.  Man in his original fleshly state is abominable before God.      

     If He were speaking directly to us, perhaps He would say, “Your actions toward your fellow man make you filthy before Me.  The inside of you is dirty.  It is your heart that needs cleansing.  Your nature of selfishness is an abomination before God.  You lie, cheat, steal, kill, commit adultery, want other people’s worldly possessions–even their sons and daughters and wives and husbands.  Nothing is sacred to you humans anymore, but then it was always that way.   I gave you a simple ten point law and you refuse to keep it because there is nothing in it for yourself. You worship other things besides Me, your Creator God.  And you don’t keep the one day that I said to keep holy, the sabbath.  A very simple law, but a very profound law.

     “You humans basically worship yourselves, think of yourselves first, put your thoughts for your lives first.  Always first, first, first.  And before you realize it, there is little if any thought for, or even about Me in your thoughts.  You see, your thoughts make the temple, your body, unclean.  Your center is not right, is not on Me the Creator, and so, man and woman live out their little mortal existences, leading their little desperate rut-like lives, never glimpsing the truth of the potential of what could be for them.  And that potential is immortality, never ending life, everlasting life, eternal life, a life of infinite years.

     “But man’s problem is that he wants his own life to go on without end.  He wants his own selfish little existence to continue unabated with everyone worshipping him and centering in on his every whim and inordinate desire.  He wants to live forever in his way of getting for himself.  And yet he doesn’t realize that that way of life cannot last forever.  The way of getting selfishly will end up in death.  Labor in the fields of selfishness, and all you are paid is death. In all man’s thoughts these things should not be, but that’s the way of all man’s flesh that doesn’t heed the higher call.  This is man’s grief—that he can’t take it with him.  This is the proverbial vanity of vanities.  No profit under the sun of all one’s labor spent upon oneself.”

     So God cannot live in the midst of all that selfishness—a lawlessness that is called sin, for the breaking of the ten commandments is sin.  And God hates sin because it is so against His nature.  He wants to live in man and woman, but He can’t because when man is full of himself, then there is no room for God.  Selfish action is a selfish spirit and  is  the  opposite  of  God’s  Spirit,  which  is the action called Love.

     So there again is man’s problem; he wants to live forever, but wants to live his own selfish life forever, and this thinking breeds mortality, the way of death.  In order to gain immortality, man must have God’s Spirit living within him.  But the Spirit of God will not dwell in temples (bodies) that are unclean (have actions done in them that are sinful in breaking the l0 commandments).  Mankind that comes as far as this knowledge on the road of life comes to a fork in the road.  He must chose to either remain as he is and how he has been living, or he must seek a way to repent, to change the error of his ways.  In other words, he must find a way to stop breaking the l0 commandments.

     And men have tried in the past to do just that to keep the ten commandments of God.  They have failed miserably, for they have tried on their own strength and power to do so.  It is impossible to keep them without God’s help.  We are created that way, so that we must, in order to please Him, turn to Him for his power and strength to keep His holy law.  The mightiest of body and the noblest of mind found among men cannot obey the law without His Spirit doing it in and through them.

     One would ask then, “What can a person do in order to keep the law?”

     First, he must through a broken and contrite spirit and heart be sorry for the way he has treated his fellow man and God.  This sorrow can grow and eventually yield a desire to not do those things again.  He will then repent of his sins, turn away from that way of getting for himself, and throw himself  on  God’s  mercy to forgive him.  God is rich in mercy and wants to receive his creation back into the fold of His plan and purpose.  If they are sincere, He will forgive them and cleanse them from the filth and uncleanness.

     We are cleansed by the shed blood of the Lamb, Yahshua, Yah-in-human-form, who gave Himself up in sacrifice for us. 

     It all hinges on faith and belief in the sacrifice that God has ordained–the only sacrifice that can  take away a person’s sins.  The sacrifice is the Lamb of God, the only one who lived a sinless life.  If you can really believe that your sin was placed upon him the day of His death, that when He died, your sin died with it, and that when He was buried, your sinful life was buried, and when He was resurrected, you also were raised again to walk in a newness of life—if you can believe all this, then you can receive into your body (temple) that same Spirit and power that raised Him from the dead.  It takes belief, faith.

     If you ask Him, He will give you a portion, an earnest, a down payment of His Spirit.  And that Spirit will come into you to replace that old spirit and will grow like a tiny seed in a large garden.  You must water it with your prayers and feed it with your study.  And that little portion of His Spirit will grow up into a full-fledged son and daughter of the Spirit who will someday be transformed in a twinkling of an eye and will be changed when immortality will come down out of heaven to swallow up that which can die.

     For without God’s Spirit dwelling within us, we are only a member of the walking dead who spend a few nightly whispers with loved ones and then bury their  dead  and  wait  to be buried in turn.  Without that entity, the Spirit of God, that makes alive whatever it touches and lives in, we are just as good as dead.  Without His Spirit, if we are walking around, we do it on borrowed air in an  incredibly delicate and fragile shell.  And our  shell will in a few moments, comparatively speaking, go back to dust from where it came, and our brief stint at self-glory here on earth will not be remembered anymore.  Every thing that man says and does without the Spirit of God is vain and of no profit in the final analysis. Kenneth Wayne Hancock

Understanding: To Depart from Evil

Step Five on the Road to Immortality: Repentance from Dead Works

“To depart from evil is understanding.” Job 28:28.   “Knowledge of the holy is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10

Chapter 26 of the book Yah Is Savior: The Road to Immortality

     So far we have taken some very necessary steps on the road to immortality.  We have discovered that Yahweh-Is-Savior is that Road to Everlasting Life.  We have learned how to be in awe of Him, which is the obtaining of wisdom.  We have learned His true name, His nature, and His eternal purpose and plan.

     But all these steps have amounted to the mere acquisition of knowledge—extremely important, of course, and necessary, but knowledge nonetheless.  In this next step, however, we must do and not just know.  We will learn to put this knowledge into practice.  We now start doing what we know to do.

     Talk is cheap; action is expensive.  “If you know these things, happy are you if you do them,” said the Master.  Conversely, if we gain knowledge of the holy things and do not begin to do them and walk in them, then we will not be happy. …The latter end is worse with them than the beginning.  For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. II Peter 2:21.

     Receiving knowledge of the high, sanctified, set-apart things of God is the gaining of understanding.  Now at first this does not make much sense to us because we have man’s definition of what understanding is, much like we had man’s definition of what wisdom was in step one.  When we think of the word “understanding,” we think of comprehending something—the ability of making sense of something. But this is man’s interpretation.  When we begin to attain knowledge of the holy things, the secret things, the things that the Supreme Being reserves only for those who fear Him and are awe of Him—that is understanding!  And this knowledge of the sanctified things, the things that the Almighty has set apart and reserved for only a few—that is understanding and that will bring us into the desire to flee the evil of our ways, to depart from the old life and get into the flow of His new life within us. …The knowledge of the holy is understanding. Proverbs 9:10…To depart from evil is understanding. Job 28:28.  Understanding is knowing about His true ways which leads us to depart from evil.

     True knowledge about the Most High’s sacred truths will lead us into doing something about it; it will lead us to fleeing the evil.  But how do we do really ever be rid of the sin in our lives?

Check Out My New Video–“He Shall Be As the Light of the Morning”

I composed the music to this song almost 40 years ago now.  The lyrics are taken from “the last words of David,” the great Psalmist and King of Israel, found in II Samuel 23: 1-4. 

As a young man, I was struck by the simple beauty of the words.  It was many years later that I received a portion of their profound meaning.  God said to David, “He that rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” And that ruler of men “shall be as the light of the morning.” 

In other words, projecting on into the soon-coming Kingdom of Heaven age after Christ’s return to earth, His rulers will have His Spirit within them, as their guiding principle; they will be impartial, for God “rains on the just and the unjust.”  They will not be respectors of persons, for they will be His children, made in His image.  

And because they are the “children of light,” they will “let their light so shine on all men.”  They will love all men, as the morning sun shines its rays on everyone on earth.

It’s on youtube here    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiJlJgd9x1s

Back to the Father’s Heart–The Eternal Purpose in a Bedtime Story

Chapter 25 of the Book Yah Is Savior: The Road to Immortality

 [I wrote the following bedtime story for my grandson Cody Hancock. I wanted him to know the truth about creation, about the Creator and His plan and purpose.]

 Long, long ago, before the earth or the heavens were, God, the Supreme Being, existed. He was and is the Self-existent One and needed nothing else to sustain His life, for He is Life itself. He was and is the great, wonderful, invisible Spirit. And in the beginning, He realized that even though He was great and all-powerful and magnificent, He was alone.

 He knew that He could be any way He wanted to be and make happen anything He wanted to see happen. He could create things only to destroy them and watch the fires consume them, or He could create beautiful things, things with meaning, things that would endure forever. So He had to make a choice whether to be a mean, selfish destructive creator/destroyer or to be a sharing, compassionate, kind and loving creator/sustainer. So He looked inside the core of His Spirit and heart and recognized immediately that there was nothing but Love inside. All He wanted was to share and give and spread around this goodness and peace that was His essence. His nature was Love.

 And because He was and is Love, He wanted to share His essence with someone else. That is the nature of true love—sharing and giving. Having all power and able to do anything that His nature of love could dictate, He began His creative power by making the Original Form.

 Now this Original Form was a body composed of spirit. Our bodies are made of earth, dust, and clay. His was a body that could not die, for it was made of His essence, which is Life. It was an immortal, spiritual body through which He could speak and listen and make Himself known. He could speak the Word now that would show and express what was His essence. This was the form that He chose to express Himself through.

 Through the mouth of His spiritual body He could express in a word what was inside Him. And this word that He could now express was “Love.” In the beginning was the Word and that Word is Love. He could now speak through His own mouth the things in His heart. He could speak into existence the heavens and the earth.

 He would create magnificent stars set in a universal expanse so vast and wonderful. He would create a home called Heaven for Himself and the helpers He would create. He would create a special star of undying energy and warmth, a star we call the Sun. He would create on a plane of physical existence a planet that would revolve around that warmth, a planet perfect for a special life He would soon create for His own purposes.

 And so He said, “Let the galaxies with their stars and planets appear.” And it happened! And as He framed the worlds and created the heavens and the earth He kept in mind His ultimate purpose for making all things. He wanted to reproduce Himself. He wanted to multiply Himself. He desired to multiply Himself as the seeds of the earth produce their own kind of fruit.

 And so He thought and thought about ways in which to express and demonstrate just what was inside His heart. He asked, “How do I show just what I, Love, am about?”

 So He looked around at the absolutely astounding heavens that He had created. And He said, “They are good. They are beautiful, but yet, they cannot appreciate who made them and the love wherewith they were made. For they cannot feel, think or love in return.”

 And so He thought and thought some more and came up with a plan. “I will create a living creature, a human being out of the dust of one of my planets called earth. I will create him with the mental and spiritual sensibilities and capabilities to be able to comprehend just who I am and what I am about–which is Love.”

 And He said, “But I will need helpers, emissaries, and messengers to help me carry out my plan to reproduce Myself. I will create immortal angels, composed of spirit, and they will assist me in ministering to the needs of the human beings.” And so He created the heavenly hosts and instructed them and assigned a third of them to the planet earth to prepare it for His crowning creation. And He called His crowning creation Adam, meaning in His original Hebrew tongue, “to show blood in the face, to flush or turn rosy, to be made red or ruddy.” In our language he is called “Man.”

 Over this third part of the angels He sent one of His arch-angels whose name has come down to us as Lucifer. Lucifer knew that God had a plan to reproduce Himself and that the earth was the place for this reproduction. But the archangel said in his heart, “I will ascend and be like the most high God. I want to be like God. I’m already immortal, I’m beautiful, and I don’t see why it can’t be us, who are doing all the work during the heat and length of the day. It is not fair.”

And so Lucifer became Satan and led the angels that were with him into rebelling against the Creator who had brought them into existence and had included them in His plan. These angels made a choice to rebel and so sin entered into the universe. Pride goes before a fall. But God knew beforehand what would happen.

And so they ascended up from earth to heaven to try to overthrow the Creator. Lucifer and his angels fought against Michael and His angels. After the greatest battle the galaxies will ever see, the faithful angels overcame the evil ones, who were cast out of heaven back to the earth.

After the heavenly dust had settled, the Creator went on to the next step of His master plan. He still, however, did not have in place what He needed to express Himself and multiply Himself.

So He thought and thought some more, and He continued His plan. He said, “In order to reproduce my nature of Love, I must testify as to what the greatest Love can be. Now there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friends. But I am a Spirit dwelling in a spiritual body, and I cannot die in this form, for I am immortal.

And then it came to Him. He would give up His life on His throne in heaven and would come to earth and dwell with his crowning creation, man, in a human body like theirs! He would walk among them and love them and care for them and show them how to do what He does and show them by His life what He is, which is Love.

He would heal their sick and raise their dead, and He would give them the example they needed in order for them to love like Him. He would be clothed in flesh for a time. He would walk humbly, knowing that it was the Great Spirit of Love within Him that was doing the works of love. And then He would do the ultimate act that would show Love; He would die for his creation; He would give up that human life He was walking in and then three days later, He would raise it from the dead. He would do this willingly and lovingly.

In doing this He would accomplish many things. It would set an example for man to follow. It would provide a perfect sacrifice to atone for man’s sins. And it would defeat His arch-enemy Satan on earth. And God would defeat Satan when God was at His weakest, in a human death. And He would show His most excellent power in raising His body from the dead. And then He would glorify that body that He had walked in and had laid down in death. He would change it into a spiritual body, an immortal body. And He would promise man that if they followed Him in spiritually laying down their lives for others, they would receive immortality also.

Yet the most astounding, beautiful, wonderful thing about this is that this glorified spiritual body of His that He raised from the dead, that body now is the same body that He originally made for Himself in the heavens before the worlds ever were created!

For He is the Beginning and the Ending, the first and the last, the root and offspring of David, the Alpha and the Omega. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.    Kenneth Wayne Hancock