FOLLOWING IN HIS STEPS BY FAITH
"Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes on Him that sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgement, but is passed from death to life." John 5:24
We become the recipients of eternal life by receiving Yeshua's word and by believing in Yahweh God who sent Him. The moment we believe, we receive! We become possessors of eternal life by the simple act of believing. We were not worthy to receive it, nor can we become worthy recipients of it. It is totally an act of His divine favour to us which we did not deserve or merit in any way.
We begin by faith and it is by continuing in faith that we proceed on in the Way of eternal life.
"You are all sons of God through faith in Yeshua the Messiah" Galatians 3:26
There is a tendency to try and be worthy of so great a salvation that has been poured out upon us. This brings us into performing "good works" through our own human efforts to change, or to please God. This amounts to trying to come up to God's standard - His law, by our own effort.
"Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Yeshua Messiah, even we have believed in Messiah Yeshua, that we might be justified by faith in Messiah and not by the works of the law, for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." Galatians 3:16
"Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?" Galatians 3: 3 The apostle Paul is addressing a problem in the assembly at Galatia, where they were being wrongly taught that they needed to obey the law of God to be justified with Him.
This is a twisting of the principle of salvation.
No one has ever been saved from their fallen state by trying to keep God's laws. To begin with, it is impossible for man from the time of Adam, to keep Yahweh God's laws as he is in a fallen state, and in that state, he does not have the ability to walk in God's righteousness. Yahweh God imparted His own divine life and His own divine nature into Adam whereby he could walk in His righteousness and keep his divine laws. And, He instructed him that he needed to walk in obedience, in order to maintain the divine life which had been given to him. However, Adam chose to deliberately disobey.
As a result he lost the divine nature of God through which he was able to walk according to God's laws.
Now that the divine life is imparted to those who put their faith in Yeshua as their Redeemer, it is once again possible to keep Yahweh God's laws, but it is harder, as we now have a fallen human nature to contend with which will rise up and take over if we are not careful and will cause us to disobey. However, knowing the frailty of the human nature by His own experiences in the flesh, Yeshua made provision for that in His sacrifice on the torture stake for us. When we confess our sins, we are restored to relationship with Him.
This is the same provision that He made for Adam after he fell, providing a lamb for a sacrifice whereby he was able to come back into relationship with Him. By faith in the revelation of the Messiah who was to come, Adam was restored to relationship with Yahweh God by another impartation of the divine nature. After that, he was once again able to walk in God's laws, but with the hindrance of the fallen nature.
When Yahweh God took the descendants of Abraham out of the world and redeemed them unto Himself in the Passover to make them into a nation (Exodus 12:31-51), He only started giving them His laws and precepts when they were completely out of Egypt, baptised in water and in the Spirit (1 Corinthians 10:1-4)
His laws were given to them after they were a redeemed people and after they had received an impartation of His Spirit, not before (Exodus 20:17). Yahweh God had not placed upon them an expectation to keep His precepts and His holy laws until they had received this impartation from Himself to enable them.
The principle remains the same for us, we can only walk in His holy laws after an impartation of His life into our beings in a relationship that is based on a living faith and reliance upon Him. As we remain in relationship with Him, which is maintained by trusting and relying upon the life which He has given to us, we will naturally, without effort, be enabled to walk in His ways. The believers in Galatia were wrongly being taught that there were "works of the law" which they needed to do to be right with God. These "works of the law" were interpretations from the law of God of regulations and observances which they needed to keep in order to be accepted with God. Instead, they had already been made right with God by faith, now they just needed to go on and live out of that faith-based relationship with Yahweh God, obeying Him as He revealed His Word to them.
The "just" are those who have been justified by faith, and, "the just shall live by faith" Galatians 3:11b Those who have been justified by their initial act of placing their faith and trust in Yeshua as their Messiah/Deliverer/Redeemer are to continue on walking in the same way as they began, in faith. They are to live in this faith-relationship in every area of their lives, not by a set of man-made rules and interpretations of how to keep the law, but by the leading of the Spirit of God.
We are told, "But if you are led of the Spirit, you are not under the law." Galatians 5:18
"I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Galatians 5:16
Then the apostle Paul goes on to outline what the evidence in our lives of the divine nature is when we are living out of relationship with Yahweh God, and also, how to recognise the "works of the flesh" - those things which originate out of the fallen human nature when we allow it to control us.
"Now the works of the flesh are evident which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambition, dissentions, heresies (wrong teachings), envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in times past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." Galat. 5:19-22
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law" Galatians 5:22-23
This is not to say that Yahweh God's law has been done away with or put aside, for as the apostle Paul elsewhere says, "I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness except the law had said, "You shall not covet"" Romans 7: 7 (See 1 Timothy 1: 8)
"Therefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good." Romans 7:12
The law is a written expression of the holy nature of God, but in itself, it lacks the power to impart into us the principles of God which it outlines. That is why Yeshua, the Son of God, came in the flesh and manifested the divine nature to us in human form. He was the living Word, the written Word etched into a human life.
As Yeshua said when Phillip asked Him to reveal the Father to them, "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14: 9). Yeshua displayed the divine nature in His life in everything He said and did. He always spoke to them from the Spirit what the Father gave Him to say and to do (John 14:10).
As a result of walking in this way, He kept all the divinely appointed Feasts and Sabbaths, as well as all the statutes and principles of His Father in His daily life which had been given to Israel through Moses. It was by fulfilling all the commandments, statutes and ordinances of the Father that Yeshua became a perfect sacrifice to substitute for mankind's failure to do those things.
Because He lived a life completely in accordance with all of His Father's principles and laws for Adam's race and made a complete atonement for all of our sins and our iniquities, He became a new type of man, virtually a "second man". He was the originator of a new order in the Adamic race (1 Corinthians 15:45-49).
As a result we have a better covenant with better promises than that which Yahweh God was able to give to Israel at Sinai, in that we have imparted to us the Spirit of Yeshua Himself, a perfected man, whereas theirs was an only an impartation of the Spirit upon them which did not have the power to change their hearts.
It is from this deposit of the perfected human life of the Son of God which has been imparted to us, that we are to live. But there is a learning process involved to grow into the fullness of this divine nature.