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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504367042 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Why the Need for a Master Plan?
A Master Plan exists for human life so amazing that it goes beyond the scope of man's most vivid imagination. No fictional writer could conceive of it. The human mind could not give it birth, nor certainly could the human will bring it to pass.
This Plan defines in great detail the entire purpose of human life, giving man an identity and purpose of such grandeur that it is difficult for us to conceive of its reality. It makes the philosophies of history seem meager and the philosophies of existentialism and nihilism seem impossibly misconstrued.
The Plan is intended for any or all people who will take hold of it and claim it for themselves, regardless of race, nationality, sex, age or worldly status. As you read through these pages, you will gradually comprehend this Plan. The purpose of this book is to draw you into the Master Plan so you may have all of its promise, splendor, joy and victory for yourself.
Since it was not conceived in the mind of a human, it is not a natural or human plan. It is a supernatural plan. It was conceived by a mind of such magnitude that only as He reveals the plan to us individually, through reading His Word and talking with Him, are we humans able to grasp it. Let us start by calling that mind, the Lord God, the Creator.
The most remarkable part of this plan is that it was stated by God in His Word in the book of Exodus in minute detail in 1441 B.C. The Master Plan was given to Moses during his forty days of fasting on Mt. Sinai at the same time he received the Ten Commandments. The plan is revealed symbolically in the Tabernacle of Moses. Moses went into the Presence of God at the top of Mt. Sinai where he was given the Ten Commandments, the consequences and judgments for breaking these commandments, and the Law of God, which revealed His justice and order for Israel's life. After this, the Lord began to direct the building of a Tabernacle. It is described with precision in number concept, proportion, color, materials used, and the designs to be used for each piece of furniture to be placed within the portable tabernacle, which is a kind of elaborate tent. Exodus records it all in exacting detail in chapters 23 through 40.
Why is there a need for a Master Plan? Why do we find mankind in the position of seeking an answer to the seemingly insoluble problems of the human situation? Why did the Lord God give Moses the design for the Tabernacle blueprint, a design that defined His plan for human life? What great event brought about such a complex situation on earth, necessitating such a laborious effort on the part of the Creator? Let's explore the answer to these questions.
Rather than create people who were merely puppets responding to the commands of their designer, God created man and gave him free will, a freedom to make choices. It was God's desire that mankind would choose to respond to a loving Creator by returning that love and building a creative and bonded relationship with Him. His first plan was completed by the creation of Adam and Eve in a perfect and delightful relationship in which God created people in His image to live in loving harmony with Him, and who were to populate and maintain the earth.
God had one enemy, Satan, who chose to enter the creation in order to deceive Adam and Eve, and steal their lives from a relationship to God. Satan succeeded in enticing them to rebel against God, thereby destroying the first creative work of the Lord God. In this conflict between Satan and man, man destroyed his perfect relationship with God. Through the freedom to make independent choices, and by obeying the wrong voice of authority, mankind fell into a state of spiritual death and separation from his creator, a darkness which confronts all people to this day. This situation presented God with the need for a Master Plan of redemption and reclamation of His own creation.
How do we know about the existence of a Master Plan? The Lord God communicated His Master Plan to a chosen people set apart for this Plan. He named them Israel. He communicated with them personally, establishing His Word and His promise to them. To begin the task, He called out a man named Abram, and his wife Sarai. Their role in God's Plan would be to produce a nation that would bless all the nations of the world. He then had this nation of people allegorically live the message of the Plan, while He continued to guide and direct each of them individually. They revealed the Plan symbolically by their lives and actions. As a result, the history of the Jews became the history of the chosen people.
The Word of God, and the history of the people, Israel, are recorded in the books of the Torah and the prophetic books and worship books collectively called the Tenach or Old Testament, the first Covenant of God with Israel.
When the nation grew large enough to need collective guidance, the Lord presented the man called Moses to be a mediator between Himself and the people. It was to Moses that the Ten Commandments were given, written on stone tablets by God. At the same time, the Lord God gave Moses the direction to build a tabernacle which symbolically defined His Master Plan for human life.
It would seem that this Plan was simple and could be executed easily by the Almighty God, but it has obstacles to hinder it. Two powers are at work in our lives while on this planet; the Lord God and His adversary, Ha Satan in Hebrew or Satan in English. These two powers are dynamically working in our lives since Adam and Eve turned the world over to God's adversary through their original rebellion against God's Word to them. These two powers are diametrically opposed to each other in spirit, character, and purpose. Today, as in no previous moment in history, these two supernatural powers are at war, and their place of battle is in the soul of mankind, in you and in me. God is working to give us a vision of His amazing, glorious, eternal plan for us, while Satan desires to entice us to choose his will of destruction and chaos both on earth and in eternity. Everything that contributes to destruction, failure and sorrow on earth is from Satan, and the choices people make create their current and eternal destiny. The primary sorrow we experience other than from Satan is when we lose a loved one. That is a clean and loving sorrow.
To know God is the beginning of Life, here and now, and eternally. To live outside of God is to have Satan as master. That is the beginning of death, both a deadly existence on earth and eternal death.
Mankind is not an independent material being as many think we are, creatures with no purpose who die and no longer exist. Man is spirit and matter. See Plate IV. While the material body is subject to our will, our spirit is involved with one or the other of these two powers in a spiritual battle being waged within us. "No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will stand by and be devoted to the one and despise and be against the other." The character of these two forces cannot be left undefined or unidentified in their activities and manner of operation.
God has never created anything imperfect. He is the only Creator. The enemy can create nothing but chaos. Satan is the author of death, destruction, pain, and suffering. Since Satan has no creative power, his action is that of a mimic and destroyer, and he is the antithesis of God's character of love and holiness.
In Genesis we read the simple but authoritative message of the creation of the universe, the world and all of the life forms. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God is the beginning of life. By His command and will, by His vision of that which did not exist but which came into being through that majestic Mind, the whole of our life experience came into being. After each stage of creation, the Lord declared that it was good. His final and most supreme creation was man. On the sixth day of creation, God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Consider this idea. God decided to create a creature with His own characteristics, who would be a friend, a peer relation, one with His identity and skills, a creative being, holy and loving in character, powerful, and full of the mind of God, which is intelligence, wisdom, knowledge, understanding; a being full of all truth.
Man would be the resident container of the Divine Spiritual Being. Man would be the perfect union of God and a creature, the unity of the divine spiritual life in a material body, yet each creature having individual and unique identity. Each of these individuals would be said to be the light of the world, having the presence of God on earth. In the Gospels, believers are called the Light of the world.
Don't confuse this with philosophies and religions or religious meditation that consider all life divine and men as gods, or that people are part of all life joined with trees, bugs, mammals, reptiles and statues, to a non-being great life force. The one true God loves His creation and gives of Himself to His people, His life and His kingdom. The false beliefs reduce life to vagueness and meaninglessness, while the true God of Genesis makes each individual life have value and purpose. That purpose is gained from the Being Who imparts Himself to a creature who receives God's identity, yet retains the individuality of his own being throughout eternity. One robs man of the reality of his life in denying individuality and purpose. The true God gives Life and gives an abundant and victorious life of purpose and dignity.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." He gave the material world to humanity to have dominion over it and subdue it. Man alone was made in God's image. It was fully completed and it pleased Him. "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good."
So far I have been describing to you, in glowing words, a God Who has designed a beautiful and miraculous plan for your life, a plan that will bring into your life what most people truly desire — peace, joy, fulfillment, love, companionship, and a sense of achievement. I have also described His adversary, enemy, the destroyer of His creativity, Satan. As with obtaining or acquiring anything really worthwhile, it doesn't come easily. There is a price to be paid. It isn't as easily lived as it is stated. There are very real, tangible obstacles we must learn about, understand, and overcome. We must explore what prevents us from entering or completing the Master Plan.
The first great obstacle to the Master Plan is the blindness of man to a vision of his full identity and purpose, and to the identity of these two power forces, God and Satan. In the vanity of his narcissism, man rebels against the vision of God because he considers himself to be god. He prefers just a hand mirror for his vision rather than the infinite vision revealed in God's Word and available to man's spirit to enable him to see God, Truth, and the Master Plan.
We live in an affluent nation where the great majority fill their lives with various forms of hedonistic luxury, never facing the fact that all the thrills and symbols of status and identity in the material realm are transitory. All or some of them can disappear at any time, leaving a person devoid of identity and life because of the loss of job, money, health, youth, loved ones, houses and yachts, country club memberships, or physical prowess. Who is man then? What is the meaning of life when stripped of the outward, material veneer?
During the great depression of the 1930's, men committed suicide over this very confrontation. As they faced the self beneath the veneer, they found nothing but emptiness, futility, and despair. Most never knew the reality of their spirit and the meaning of life. They never found the Master of the universe and of His Master Plan for us, His people. Their own plans were devastated, revealing their puniness. Their strutting before the empires of men ended in a black grave. This doesn't make these disillusioned people "bad people," but it portrays graphically how our facades can be stripped from us when we are unable to restore our lives and renew purposes through a God Who loves us. A person's desire to construe an exalted self-image presents the first barrier to God to draw him into the Master Plan.
The second obstacle in man's pathway to becoming a part of the Master Plan is the person of Satan. This being whose force is great, but temporary, makes his purpose one of constantly thwarting the Master Plan of God in individual human lives. The eternal destruction of mankind is his goal. Although he is mighty, he is not almighty. People over the centuries have either taken Satan's power too lightly and become his captives through ignorance, or they have focused on his power and become his devotees completely swallowed by his grip. Others, like myself in my youth, just didn't believe in an evil power named Satan, and became victimized constantly. In any case, the identification of Satan's character and realm of operation has been missing from most religious organizations, leaving many victims prey to his force.
The Israelites of the Tenach knew who Satan was. In Genesis, Moses, the author of the Torah, describes the serpent who set out to plant doubt in the human mind about God's character and Word. The serpent accused God of the very deceit that resided only in himself, and he finally seduced the souls of the first family, stealing their life and their place in a relationship to God from them and from all future generations eternally. Although the serpent is not named in Genesis, his character is revealed as a liar, thief, deceiver and destroyer. He is named in the book of Job which is thought to have been written in Moses' lifetime, possibly by Moses himself. In chapter 1 of Job, Satan and God have a dialogue that reveals the contrast of their characters. Satan accuses God of sheltering man so completely that He, the Lord, will never know whether man loves Him or not since there is no test or choice under stress to demonstrate man's genuine love and worship of God. God gives Satan a time to give Job the most strenuous challenges in life to demonstrate that Job will indeed fix his trust and love on God under all circumstances. This is the allegory of all human experience. God is the Almighty creator, provider, and protector, Who uplifts Job by declaring him to be righteous. Satan is the accuser, the liar, the destroyer, and the source of pain and illness. Man is the place of warfare between God and Satan.
God is victorious through the upright and constant choices made by Job to believe God and to obey Him. Job does love God and finally comes through the many trials victoriously. His testing was not without the fire of suffering which purifies him to an even greater righteousness than he had before his trial. The book ends when God exalts Job over his peers, restoring to him double measure of what he temporarily lost, -a hint of the Master Plan.
Making those constant choices to believe and obey God is the responsibility that comes with having free will. At the very heart of being made in God's Image is the gift of free will which carries with it the responsibility to choose God moment-by-moment throughout life. Free will is the freedom to choose, to personally respond to our circumstances in thought, word, and action on a constant living basis, by choosing God's Light or Satan's darkness. (See Plate II.)
The allegory of Job reveals that the difficulty of having a free will came into being when man turned his Eden into Egypt; his paradise into a place of pain and slavery, which Biblical Egypt represents.
Originally, man knew only God, the Light of truth, love, goodness, and holiness. He lived in a paradise with no conflicts, pain, sickness, or deterioration. Man could obey or rebel against the loving, all-providing Creator. God asked one thing of man that he refrain from tasting of the knowledge of good and evil. The Lord said if he did learn to know both forces, he would lose his life. If God is Life, then that loss meant the loss of God. What God created in man was eternal; therefore, the death that man would experience was not annihilation, but a stripping of God from him, which is existing death. The choice was for man to daily choose love, life eternal, truth, total provision in Eden, power, health, and youthful continuity of life; or rebel and live out eternal separation from all of the above while experiencing its antithesis. Hate and bitterness, eternal death, deception and suffering, struggle for survival, impotence in maintaining dominion over the earth, sickness and pain, deterioration, and blindness to any lasting truth describe life stripped of God. Strangely, many are still choosing the latter to this day.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Exodus: The Master Plan"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Alice Gravatt.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
A Visual Glossary, xxi,
PART I. EXODUS: THE MASTER PLAN,
1. Why the Need for a Master Plan?, 1,
2. The Blueprint — Its Description, 11,
3. What Is His Name?, 36,
4. The Scale Model, 51,
5. The Coded Walk, 77,
PART II. OUT OF EGYPT AND THROUGH THE DOOR,
1. The Formation of a Nation, 173,
2. The Calling of a Servant, 180,
3. Eleven Miracles, 197,
PART III. THE BRAZEN ALTAR OF SACRIFICE,
1. Death Provides an Inheritance, 237,
2. Idols, 253,
3. Legalism and Judgmentalism, 282,
PART IV. THE SHEWBREAD,
1. What Is Shewbread?, 313,
2. Two Witnesses, 322,
PART V. THE HOLY OF HOLIES,
1. King Salmon Against the Current, 357,
2. The Cell of Life, 367,
3. The Two Work Weeks of the Lord God, 380,
4. Eden, The Place of Delight, 403,
About the author, 417,