Thanks HearMeOut for sharing your opinion. Grace, mercy, and peace, from God, our Father, and Jesus Christ our Lord. I liked how you shared that God does not want to force himself on people, rather let it be their idea; Yet this would be the God of all grace, and not the Law God in the story. For Law will always try to FORCE itself on everyone. Pure Grace does not.
For me, I finally had to ask the God who "upbraideth not" (noted in James 1:5) for His wisdom, because no matter how diligent I was, my own wisdom failed me. Only then did I began to get revelations and study hints from the Spirit of truth, to help guide (lead, not drive) me into all truth of all grace; Until I, of my own free will, put away all my legalism.
It was a like a three stage process:
OT Law → NT BetterLaw → Pure Grace is neither of Law1/Law2.
For me, learning about grace, mercy, peace also involved unlearning many erroneous things I had been taught by men, and believed to be true, when still one of "them", and even when the better them of them1/them2 (like Jesus first divided them into them1/them2 in Mt 13:11), which is not [yet] "us" of them/us in the biblical story. For,
upon revelation & study, I learned this:
Plural (elohyim) God (Gen 1) both created(bara) & made(asah) things, and then did NOT say let us create(bara) man, but DID SAY "let us make(asah) man" in Gen 1:26A; Yet also gave two before/after scenarios to play out for comparison in Gen 1:26B:
- Before: "in our image(tselem)", and
- After: "after our likeness(d@muwth)"
SO THEN,
"created" is not "made", and "image" is not "likeness".
But Then, in Gen 1:27 KJV plural God did this:
- created(bara) man in image(tselem) mode, as male & female Adam1, called "THEM" (of them/us). Seems plural God did such to set the stage for the Before part of a Before/After shew(unique KJV plural of show).
WHY?
Seems Ephesians 2:10 KJV explains it this way:
Even "we" (of they/we) first got "created" (of created/made) in "Christ Jesus" (of Christ Jesus/Jesus Christ; As if in "image" of image/likeness) to firstly walk in them (of them/us), which is the before (of before/after)... THEN
1Peter 5:10 KJV explains the "AFTER" of before/after:
The God of all grace (no law at all) makes you (of ye/you) perfect, AFTER ye suffer a while (not for ever) in CJ (of CJ/JC); Which is allegory like being made in the likeness of image/likeness. For the image mode is mirrorly the reverse of left/right, to right/left
What's the point of all this/that? Our learning... to learn Law is not Grace, and even BetterLaw is not [yet] Pure Grace.
So TheEnd to ENDure unto, does not mention law at all, only grace, and only the (pure) grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is not against any, but rather "with you all" from above the duality of law/grace on high:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ [be/is] with you all. Amen.
