GOD, THE HOLY SPIRIT AND MAN AT CREATION

 

When we are very young, precisely when in Primary School, we were taught that God, the creator of heaven and earth, lives in heaven and the teachers used to point to the sky to denote the heaven being mentioned. We wondered about the vastness of this sky which is hanging over there without being held by anything and it looks as if it is dropping or touching the ground somewhere. It usually amazed us to hear that this same God–who created the first man (Adam) and his wife (Eve- the first woman) through whom all humanity was brought to being – is kind. This was drummed into our sub-consciousness to the extent that we started making enquiries about who created this God if He had created all things? Our assumption then was:  if man, who was created by this God can create or make other things like fridge, cars, airplanes, etc., somebody else somewhere somehow must have created Him too. This question lingered in my heart for a long time until later on when we were growing up that we started knowing better from the scriptures that the Supreme Being behind the creation of all things who is called GOD never changes and that only Him is Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent.

God being Omnipotent means that He is all-powerful: have all ability, capacity and capability to do all things and anything He pleases; indeed, He is the Almighty. He is from everlasting to everlasting and without genealogy. He was not created but created all things. He also created His angels to be spirits including Lucifer who later became the Devil or Satan. God being Omniscient depicts the depth of His understanding which is incomprehensible to any creature. He is all-knowing: knowing the beginning from the end and the end from the beginning. No other creature knows all motives and the intents of the hearts except the Lord God Almighty who created them and programmed how they should function. He knows everything by name. He even knows the particles of sand on the sea shore both by names and numbers as well as the number of the strands of hair on each of us. He also desires good things for us. He loves us and wants each of us to have close relationship with Him here (on earth) and ultimately to reign with Him in heaven after our sojourn on earth. He being Omnipresent means He is everywhere at any point in time. He created time and is not bound by human time and timing; yet, He is timely and time conscious. His presence in every situation should give us an impetus to keep involving Him in all our endeavors. In fact, He sees and hears everything whether it is in the light or darkness. Nobody can hide from Him. What the Scriptures (the Bible) used to summarize all these characteristics of His personality is the GODHEAD (The Sovereign Deity).

The Godhead from the beginning comprises God, His Word and His Spirit i.e. God has the Word and His Spirit (Holy Spirit) in Him. God created the Heaven and the Earth by the power of His Word while the Holy Spirit (His Spirit) worked as the architect and the energy behind the work of Creation (Genesis 1:1-2& John 1:1-3). In essence, God usually works with His Word which is being energized by His Spirit; therefore the Word of God is the active ingredient in God’s functionalities propelled and powered by His Spirit. In other words, God’s Word cannot work without His Spirit and vice versa. That is why God, His Word and Spirit cannot be separated; they work together as One (John 1:1-10, 14). God is the Almighty; He can send His Word and or His Spirit to accomplish anything He pleases. Each part of God is essentially a personality in His wisdom and can speak; touch, feel, run, think, etc. but cannot commit sins as man does. Each of these personalities possesses or shares the same likeness and ‘form’. These three personalities fuse together and work as an entity, and the union is called the TRINITY. Each or any of them can therefore be called “GOD” - for wherever you see one, others are equally present because each does not work in isolation. God is the only being that is omnipotent, omniscience and omnipresent. It is only His Word that was made visible by becoming flesh in person of our Lord Jesus Christ (John 1:1&14; 10:30), whereas both the Spirit and the Lord God Himself still remain invisible to mortals. The Lord God Almighty purposely did this to enhance the rescue (salvation) of the human race from the dangers of hell which had been conceded by Adam’s sin; otherwise He would not have made His Word to become flesh [visible or tangible] (Matthew 1:21; Roman 5:7). This TRIUNE God created man in His own image and after His likeness also as a triune/tripartite being, different from other creatures.

Of course, if God had also decreed or called out man as He did when creating other creatures; humans would have also emerged possibly as another set or class of animals having physical structures different from other animals and would have been sharing the same instinct with them, just like the land animals that were also created on the sixth day. By this, human beings might not have had the uniqueness we now have and would not have been qualified to be accorded dominion over all other things (including the devil and his cohorts) as authorized and conferred on us by God in Genesis 1:26-28. In view of this, the All-knowing God took it all upon Himself to create humans in a special and conscientious manner by engaging in handcraft with the eventual and deliberate introduction or release of a special ‘package’ of His Spirit into man through His breath. This Spirit thus gave man a special and uncommon type of life which no other creature has. This makes human beings to be more valuable than the body/flesh which animals and humans possess alike. This means that what is in man is bigger, higher and more important to God than the flesh which he carries about. Therefore, if anything is capable of severing this Spirit of life from man, man would die to or be alienated from the things of God while he is still physically alive. The devil did just exactly this through our forebears, Adam and Eve. So, every human being has to be re-united to this Spirit of life in order to be genuinely God-ward if we are aiming at living and reigning with Him in heaven at last. Why? This is because it is only by the instrumentality of His indwelling Spirit that our souls can be re-connected to the life of God. Jesus in John 6:63a and John 10:10 revealed that:

“It is the spirit that quickeneth (gives life); the body profiteth nothing…..” and that “the thief (devil) cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they (human beings) might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (Emphasis in bracket mine).

This is why it is highly essential to safeguard and enliven our souls by linking it up with the Holy Spirit; because it is by virtue of this our exceptionally intrinsic quality (the soul) that man become accountable to God and can relate to Him quite understandably as the animals are not capable of doing this even with their instinct. All these prove that human beings are not related to animals in any way. Psalm 8:4-6 says:

“What is man that thou (God) art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet”.

To buttress this point, let’s also take a look at the findings of a carefully conducted scientific research on the purported hereditary/evolutionary relationship between animals (primates – the Chimpanzee) and humans published in The Guardian Newspaper (one of Nigerian Dailies) of September 8, 2005; page 35. Going through the excerpt, it is now clear that there is no ascendancy or ancestry between any class of animals and human beings though the scientists named us Homo sapiens; following their scientific system of naming as related to some group of Primates. When critically looked into, human chromosomes which is 46 is quite different from that of any animal specie and anything short of or more than 46 chromosomes is not a human being and cannot have the same intrinsic composition whether physically, spiritually or psychologically as human beings. Therefore, one can never find any animal transmuting into a man or vice versa except those exceptionally influenced by evil or foul spirits; which is an odious sin before God.