Focus: Back To The Beginning

Text: Mt.19:8

"But from the beginning it was not so."

There has been a radical departure from God's beginning in everything that is connected with our whole life on earth, not only in the aspect of marriage. The book of Ecclesiastes is a sad commentary on life under the sun - life as it has become, life solely lived on the human plane without the due involvement of heaven.

Genesis 1 and 2 give us a clear picture of a perfect beginning, a beginning which God pronounced as being "very good." From Genesis 3 to Revelation 20, we see humanity shifting away and drifting into a life of vanity and self-destruction. Isaiah declares, "ALL we like sheep have GONE ASTRAY; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa.53:6).

In God's beginning everything was perfect and man functioned as God intended him to. Everything operated by God's standards. But from Genesis 3, everything went bananas, and has remained so till date. Life has gone awry. Our existence is warped and our values are swapped. We place great value on nothing and less value on things that matter most, and as someone else has pointed out, 'We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.'

Now nothing is functioning as God originally designed it to be. Life as it is, is actually a contradiction in terms. It is not life as originally intended by God. What man esteems, God sees as abomination. The moral fall in Genesis 3 is affecting us everywhere. We are damaged beings on all sides. Man is diseased from head to toe.

Is it not obvious that we cannot get to God's end without getting back to His beginning - the starting point of perfect order? I am talking about the beginning when God made all He wanted just the way He wanted it, and everything functioned accordingly.

Jesus Christ came to planet earth to radically change everything and fundamentally restore humanity to its original condition, and because of Christ, life is going back to God's beginning - to the original. So what we call 'future' is only a movement backwards, not a movement forward, as it were. According to Paul, we sinned and fell short of the glory of God. We moved away from glory and stepped into ignominy. Peter tells us that God has called us to glory and virtue (2Pet.1:3). That glory is now behind us; we are going back to it. Christ has recovered it for us.

In Genesis 2, God planted the garden called Eden, God's paradise for man and a place of absolute delight. In Revelation, the overcomer is promised Paradise, and that means that man's future is actually a movement back to God's Eden. Jesus says, "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the TREE OF LIFE, which is in the MIDST of the PARADISE of God" (Rev.2:7). Right here in the closing book of the Bible we are seeing the tree of life again. The Christian's future is indeed a return to the beginning. The future brings us back to the beginning.

In Genesis 14, we read of Jerusalem, known then as Salem, and having Melchizedek as its priest and king. So Jerusalem was both a temple and a city in which he served as priest and reigned as king (Gen.14:18).

In Revelation 21 and 22, we are back to Jerusalem, the temple and city of God, with Jesus Christ as its priest and king, and don't forget that Christ was ordained as priest after the order of Melchizedek (Ps.110:4; Heb.5:6,10; 6:20; 7:1,11,15,17,21).

You can see that the future is only a movement backwards. Even Christ came to the earth in the original body of the first man, Adam, not in His morally and mortally corrupted body. So Jesus Christ came in the original body of Adam - a body without sin or moral flaws. He also rose again from the dead and ascended back to heaven in that same body. He reentered His body, but left behind the burial clothes (Jh.19:40; 20:5,6,7). On the day of the believers' resurrection, we shall put on the same body as Christ's, and when we see Jesus Christ, we shall be like Him (1Jh.3:2).

The life Christ lived on earth, including His forty-day post-resurrection life, was a reflection of the life God intended for man at the beginning.

In the Eden of God there was a river, not a sea. In Revelation 21:1, there is no more sea, and in Revelation 22:1,2, we have a river. We are surely going back to the beginning. The future is really no where in front; it is a movement back to the beginning.

The new heaven and the new earth in the book of Revelation are simply the ones in Genesis 1 and 2, but made anew. They are but a recovery and transformation of the old ones. We know that nothing new exists under the sun, only an improvement of what has been.

We are surely going back to our root, and there we shall bear the kind of fruit that we were divinely destined for.

I love what John put on record about Jesus Christ. He says, "Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was COME from God, and WENT to God" (Jh.13:3). We are slowly, but surely going back to God's beginning. God will do away with everything that is, that shouldn't be. Evil and suffering are coming to an end.

We can confidently bank on Jesus Christ who is truly the beginning and the end. He says in Rev.1:8, "I am Alpha and Omega, the BEGINNING and the ENDING." In verse 11, He says, "I am Alpha and Omega, the FIRST and the LAST." In verse 17, He says, "Fear not; I am the FIRST and the LAST." In Rev.2:8, He says, "These things saith the FIRST and the LAST." In Rev.3:14, He says, "These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the BEGINNING of the creation of God." In Rev.21:6, He says, "I am Alpha and Omega, the BEGINNING and the END." In Rev.22:13, He says, "I am Alpha and Omega, the BEGINNING and the END, the FIRST and the LAST." God says in Isaiah 41:4, "Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the BEGINNING? I the LORD, the FIRST, and with the LAST; I am he." He says in Isaiah 44:6, "Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD of hosts; I am the FIRST, and I am the LAST; and beside me there is no God." Finally in Hebrews 12:2, the writer says, "Looking unto Jesus the AUTHOR and FINISHER of our faith…"

Jesus Christ is bringing us back to the beginning - to all that we have ever missed and have forever been longing for. In Christ we have got back on track and we are journeying back to God's Eden. Amen.

by Bishop Moses E. Peter