Holy Spirit - Part 24: God’s Two Gifts
After the fall in the original garden, where mankind lived in closeness to God without shame nor sin, the human race from that moment onward lived lives with two great needs. One need was for forgiveness and the other need was for goodness.
We must never overlook the fact that our original relation with our Creator was damaged by our original sin, our disobedience. Mankind has not and cannot overcome that disobedience alone. Mankind has not and cannot walk the path of goodness in life on our own power. Evidence of these facts still surrounds us as we exist in a lost and darkening world.
Our Father knew these things would occur from the foundation of the world.
He arranged through His indescribable love, two gifts for His creation in order that man may come to understand that love and that man may come to meet those two longings while still in mortal flesh.
His first gift was promised in Genesis 3:15, called the “Protoevangelism”, meaning the first promise of deliverance. That gift is our promised redeemer, granted when Jesus came to dwell among us in the likeness of our flesh. The seed of the woman was promised to bruise the head of the serpent. That evil one was indeed conquered at the moment of the resurrection. Only through His sacrifice and death and resurrection, His perfection given for our sin, are we able to gain finally that constant and ancient longing satisfied. Forgiveness is found ONLY by grace, gifted through faith, and it rests ONLY in His righteousness, not ours. For among us none is righteous, no not one.
His second gift was promised by the first. To the great gift of forgiveness God added the great gift of the Holy Spirit. He is the solution to our need to gain goodness and to escape the misery of weakness that grips us in this life. Jesus, our Holy Redeemer, promised us this solution and the promise was filled with the gifting of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
In order to live as we should within this world corrupted by our own disobedience, we need this double gift which is the work of the Son for us and the work of the Spirit within us.
The first gift is the ONLY path to eternal life and the second is the ONLY path to walk in internal life to reach that promised eternity. Peter taught in Acts 2:38 that we receive the second gift by accepting the forgiveness granted in the first.