Your Prayerful Road to Calvary.
The title of this short work already presumes that you want to know more about the Calvary Road which Jesus trod, or you are curious about prayer and its function or effectiveness.
Your spirit.
Your spirit (of life), is given by God before one’s birth and is retrieved by God at death. Yet your spirit is not God’s spirit. His spirit is the Holy Ghost and you can only possess it at the new birth, called regeneration.
Adam and his human descendants retained interest and curiosity about the spirit world of the unseen dimension. This is very evident in the primitive and civilized populace of the earth. Whether they are the animists of New Guinea’s remote tribes or the peoples of first world advanced nations there is an insatiable quest to worship something or somebody.
The philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have a most difficult time refuting this inborn desire to worship. Many theologians and clergy mistake this propensity to worship as prayer, or a natural godly proclivity. Many evangelical Christians have sidestepped original sin and the curse. They falsely claim with Rome, Pelagius, and Jacobus Arminius that the human race universally retained the image of God, the Creator, and the ability to pray.
However, the Scriptures describe the worldling’s natural desire to worship as a warped activity of a cursed species whose very prayer is sin itself, and upon whom the wrath of God is exercised every day. The prophets and the apostles of Christ wrote of the inner iniquity universally endemic in humanity from birth. They also described in holy writ the degenerate volition, soul, conscience and mind of humankind. The saga of biblical history in the early books of the Bible confirms their veracity.
Eve, the first mother, in her wayward innocence preferred to talk to the spirit underworld about an alternative to the Tree-of-Eternal-Life rather than her Creator. Innocence was not original righteousness as the deviants of Scripture and the Counter Reformation claim. Adam had no original righteousness though his reflective mind, conscience, and spirit was created in the image of his Creator. As such both he and his wife could hear the voices of God and the spirit world. Until their deadly choice to rebel Adam obeyed the instructions of his Maker, yet his verbal intercourse was not prayer.
End of Part 1: Your Prayerful Road to Calvary
