AN OVERVIEW OF GOD’S PLAN REVEALED IN SCRIPTURE

The Angels and Pre-human History

God created many millions of angelic beings before he created the physical universe. They are God’s army of workers, each created and organised to help God achieve whatever project he is working on.

When he created the physical universe, including the planet earth within our solar system, the Scriptures indicate that God assigned a top contingent of angels, led by Lucifer, to a ground-breaking new project. Lucifer was the most powerful of his angelic creations and the goal of the project was to add many millions of children to God’s Family – perfect immortal Spirit Beings. They would also become God’s helpers and companions, but at a much higher level than the angels. In fact, they would become members of God’s own Family, just like Yeshua.

This was an awesome privilege and responsibility, and God had to be sure that he could fully trust these new members of his Family. His plan for achieving that was to create a temporary physical universe populated by temporary physical beings. God could then run these ‘humans’ through a comprehensive training course where they could exercise their own free will to learn to think and act as God does in a difficult and challenging environment. Establishing a habit of making right decisions under difficult circumstances would result in building a Godly character that could finally be trusted with the ultimate responsibility of becoming a powerful Spirit member of God’s Family. Those who didn’t qualify would be discarded.

It seems likely that Lucifer’s job was to take the raw materials that God had created and to use them to design and create this new temporary physical life. Starting very simple and small Lucifer and his team of angels created a whole succession of life forms. The record of that work is found buried in rock formations around the world. If this is true, then archaeology hasn’t uncovered a blind process of evolution – but rather the evidence of a long running sequence of design projects that were intended to result in the creation of man – a temporary physical being created to look like God, and with a spirit that could grow in character and become like God. It would include a world of physical life that would provide a complete environment for man to live in.

Before this was completed a major disaster occurred – Lucifer became proud of himself. Perhaps he wanted to shake off God’s control of the project and do it his way. God hasn’t revealed everything that went on in the struggle that followed, but it seems clear from the end result that Lucifer came to a point where he didn’t want God to add all of these new members to his Family. Perhaps he saw that as diminishing his position.

Likewise, when you look at the life forms that are recorded in the fossil record, and compare that with what God is planning to create in the new heavens and earth, it might have been that Lucifer had a different approach to building this physical world than God wanted. The violent nature of the physical life forms and the use of “survival of the fittest” to refine each level of creation may have been the products of Lucifer’s approach to creation rather than God’s.

The result of Lucifer’s rebellion was that he, and the angels that chose to follow him, were cast out from direct access to God’s throne in Heaven and confined to the earth. This was a cataclysmic event – the earth became “without form and void.” Then God himself took control and in six days rebuilt and repopulated the earth, creating Adam and Eve ready to begin fulfilling his ultimate purpose.

Lucifer, now renamed Satan, or ‘the Adversary’, continued to exercise dominion over the earth. God had a purpose in allowing that. However, while Satan was not allowed to destroy the family of humans that God had created, he was allowed to test and attempt to deceive them. This he did with great success to Adam and Eve and has continued to do so with all of their descendants.

Satan is still the ruler of the world we live in today. He is immensely powerful and limited only by the boundaries imposed on him by God.

One of the reasons that Yeshua came 2,000 years ago was to defeat Satan while living as a human being in Satan’s world. In defeating Satan he qualified himself to take control of Satan’s kingdom, which he will do when he returns at the end of this age. Satan, and the angels who followed him, will then be chained in a place where they can no longer deceive those living in God’s new Kingdom.

Until then Satan remains in control and is doing everything that he can to create confusion and division within the churches. Satan is the reason that we have so many ‘Christian’ churches today. By promoting so many different churches, each teaching different doctrines and following different customs, he has succeeded in hiding both the truth and the members of the Messiah’s true church from view.

The debate about Christianity has become focussed on doctrinal differences, the historical authenticity of the Bible, interpreting prophesy, evolution versus creation and morality issues. People are fascinated by the claims made in books like the Da Vinci Code that Yeshua might have had a child. The charismatic churches are focussed on the experience of worship and being anointed by the Holy Spirit. Many churches promote the supernatural healing of diseases. The divinity of Jesus is questioned. Should we keep the Ten Commandments and the Jewish Sabbath? Should we tithe? Is homosexuality wrong?

The questions are never-ending and there seems to be a church for every possible combination of ideas.

The ecumenical movement claims that all of these churches are part of the body of Christ and is seeking to break down, or ignore, the barriers that separate them. They don’t understand that God is not the author of confusion – Satan is.

Satan has created all this confusion as a smoke-screen to hide the true message about the Good News that Yeshua came to announce, including how we can become a part of God’s future kingdom.

By participating in the debate, we are encouraged to use our own reasoning to find answers, not realizing just how foolish this is in God’s sight. We have become fools in our own wisdom, which is exactly what Satan wanted us to do. We have become so blinded by our own intelligence that we cannot recognise or understand the simple and clear statements in Scripture that describe God’s plan for us.