Triumphant Love

Death is essential for new and higher life. This principle can be seen all around us. Nature gives testimony to this all-encompassing truth. A small, dry, seed, with the God-appointed germ of life within its hull, when b...uried in soil, gives birth to a new, and much greater entity, its roots expanding outward and ever deeper, established in the earth, and reaching upward toward the life sustaining rays of the sun.

The lowly caterpillar, drab and unnoticed, confined to the ground, and venturing not much beyond the locality of its birth, when it emerges in vibrant life from its spun sarcophagus of death, has no resemblance of its former self, and soars with graceful ease through the heavens above, its beautiful, higher form evident, observed and admired by all.

The seasons themselves speak of resurrection from death. Deciduous trees, with their lush, green leaves of summer, in the autumn, morph into new, colorful versions of themselves. Their life seemingly ebbs away and finally succumbs to the cold and barrenness of winter’s death. All seems lost, until at last, the warmth of the spring resurrects their life and begins the annual cycle once again.

Jesus said: “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25 Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” {John 12:24, 25} This is the spiritual principle and counterpart to that which is visible to us in nature. Jesus often used parables concerning the natural world to introduce higher spiritual truth.

In the same way that a single buried wheat seed produces a stalk with dozens of life-giving seeds, a life lived out of loving sacrifice, and to the glory of God, results in death to the desires of self, and produces a cornucopia of spiritual abundance. This was the path chosen by our Savior, His selfless life and death securing mankind’s redemption through His resurrection, in the abundant power of a vivified life.

However, a seed never planted, that is, a life lived to the gratification of self, and a refusal to die to self-will, generates great shame, and future remorse when summoned before the judgment throne of The One Who sacrificed His all out of His great love for mankind. The self-willed unbeliever struggles blindly through his days, refusing God’s treasures as he holds tenaciously to that which has no lasting value. The SECOND DEATH will provide the only means of remedy for such a person, a necessary cleansing of ethereal fire, provided by The God of Love, to prepare the lost child to receive His resurrection Life.

Fire is used by man for the purification of any unburnable substance, and the elimination of that which is impure. Metals of all types are subjected to the furnace in order to purify, and eliminate any dross from the crucible. The Lake of Fire will not be God’s eternal torture chamber as Christendom teaches, or the means for the annihilation of those entering its spiritual inferno. It is rather the Master Craftsman’s REMEDY of reconciliation for those who entered physical death, not having died to self-will. This burning lake represents His Flames of Purification, fanned by His infinite Love, to prepare those He created and redeemed, through the death of His Son, for their spiritual cleansing, and a new, resurrected life with Him.

Those yielding to the Spirit of God in their lifetime on earth, are joined to, and united in the Death and Resurrection of Christ now. It is this spiritual life that produces love and joy in the believer, and teaches him to discard the empty hull of his dead former Adamic self, and seek after those higher spiritual treasures secured for him by his Savior’s blood. It is the triumph of Love producing a harvest of grace within him. This God-required and God-supplied faith, transfers the believer into the very life of Christ experientially through the in-dwelling of His Spirit.

It is the privilege of the believer to suffer the rejection and distain of those around us. In doing so, we join in our Lord’s heartaches experienced during His days on earth from those He loved and ministered to. Let us suffer now with Him, without bitterness or regret. Let us keep our eyes focused on Him, and pray that we may be conformed to His Image as we gaze on His perfection, so that we can say with our apostle Paul:

“But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” {Phil. 3:7-14}