A beautiful book that i always prefer to read again - The Will of the Holy Trinity for Human Beings. Rev Paul C Jong's first book on Genesis.
I hope to cover important passages in the mentioned book, so that anyone reading this book review would be able to ruminate on the Word of God. Most passages are copied directly from the book to preserve the essence. I have grouped this review into three parts sin, salvation and contemplation. Sin describes the state of human beings, salvation addressing the solution to the problem of sin and contemplation the way forward in the Gospel of Water and Spirit.
The Bible says that the fear of Jehovah is the foundation of wisdom. In other words, it is someone who truly fears God that can come to know himself, realize where he is heading, know his sins, and even grasp all God’s plans for the entire universe.
The very first thing that God wanted to do to us is written here in Genesis 1:1-5. As a builder constructs a house for a purpose, so did God create His whole universe and everything in it according to His own plan. What was this plan? It was to make mankind His own people, and He achieved this.
SIN
The book starts with the first verse of genesis, where it says “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep,” this describes the condition of the hearts of those who are not born again. Everyone’s heart is without form like this, and that by its very nature it is fundamentally sinful.
“Darkness” refers to mankind’s sin. It refers to the condition where one remains unwashed from his sins, from his failure to properly grasp the gospel Truth of the water and the Spirit. That the darkness is lodged in the depth of the human heart, on the other hand, means that the sins of mankind are hidden deep in their hearts, filled with confusion and emptiness.
What, then, is mankind’s sin? First, it is the rejection of God’s Word of salvation, which brings the true remission of sin, and the refusal to believe in it with the heart. For mankind to disbelieve in God’s Truth of salvation is to commit a great sin against God. People often consider it a sin only when they commit a particularly grave transgression, but that is not the only sin. Not to believe in Jesus Christ, who is the Word itself, is a sin. The real, most fundamental sin is the failure to acknowledge and believe in the Word of God.
Everyone was born with sin from the very moment he was born into this world, and therefore all human beings cannot avoid but commit countless transgressions throughout their lives. God therefore wanted us to realize and know our own wickedness, and to grasp the gospel Truth of the water and the Spirit that He has given us.
we try hard to cover our shame with fig leaves. But how long would a skirt made out of fig leaves last? How effective is it to cover ourselves with our acts of hypocrisy? It is all too human for our shame to be exposed in less than a day, or even half a day.
We must realize the real substance of mankind. Yet some people do not know the real substance of mankind, and so even as they heard the gospel, they still try to live virtuously, and when this is proven impossible, they eventually end up giving up their faith in the righteousness of God. No life of faith can be lived like this. Through the Word, we must first realize who we really are.
He/she must first of all realize the condition of his heart through the Word of the Scriptures, you must realize that you are nothing more than piles of sin. Unless one acknowledges the Word of God, he can never realize his true self, and if one does not realize his true self, then he will be forsaking God.
SALVATION
God called the light day and the darkness night, thereby setting forth God’s indomitable will to drive out sin from the souls that are bound in it. It is saying that what drives out this sin, all this confusion, void, and darkness, is the light.
“I am the light of the World. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life” (John 8:12).
There is no darkness whatsoever in God, and there only exists the light. By accepting the God-given light of salvation, we have become righteous people. Whether we are actually saved or not, and whether we remain as sinners or become righteous, all depend entirely on whether or not we have this light of Truth.
What is it that God did on the first day? He shed light on people’s hearts, which were without form and void, and where darkness was on the face of the deep, and in doing so He made all darkness and emptiness disappear and brought true satisfaction, true order, true light, and true life. Jesus Christ is the light of salvation for this world. Jesus Christ is the Savior of sinners. Jesus Christ is the Lord of life to us. To all those who believe in this gospel of the water and the Spirit, to all those who believe that Jesus Christ is our Savior and has saved us through His water and blood, Jesus Christ has become the light of salvation. My fellow believers, the only true light in this world is the Lord Jesus Christ. It is this light that God saw and said it was good.
Adam and Eve, the common ancestors of mankind, were deceived by Satan. However, even this was included in God’s predestination. Maggots live for many years under the ground in the larval stage, but they eventually climb up to a tree and are transformed through metamorphosis to open their wings and become cicadas. To become cicadas, they must all invariably live as maggots in the dark underground. Like this, that we human beings were tempted by Satan and fell into sin was also predestined in God’s glorious plan. In other words, God permitted us to be tempted by Satan because only if we became sinners first could we be transformed into God’s children by believing in Jesus Christ.
our Lord says that He permitted suffering so that He may save all the sinners who had left God from sin and clothe them in His glory, so that He may allow them to look for and seek God. Mankind would not look for God if there was no suffering on this earth and everything was just fine. And if human beings had no insufficiencies or weaknesses, then they could not become God’s children by believing in Jesus. That is why God has permitted mankind to suffer on this earth, but just for a while. It’s because mankind’s thoughts and God’s thoughts are completely different.
Some people may then ask, “God shouldn’t have made hell. Why did He make it?” My fellow believers, it is not proper for a creature not to recognize its Maker. The Bible illustrates this point by drawing an analogy to a potter. If we were making a vessel, and for some reason we were not happy with it, and so we shattered it and threw it away, have we done anything wrong here? No, as its maker, we have done nothing wrong. When we consider this, we can grasp that all that we can do, as mere creatures before God our Creator, is just believe in Him and accept what He has given us, and that there is nothing for which we can blame God.
God made us according to His plan, allowed us to face hardship while living on this earth, made us look for Him through such difficulties, permitted us to find the gospel of Truth that has blotted out our sins through Jesus Christ, and in doing so, God adopted us as His Children and gave us His beautiful Kingdom. Like this, God has shown us that nothing depends on our own will, but everything has come only by His will. Therefore, as we live in this world, feeling and reflecting on these things, we experience for ourselves that what we want to do is not achieved according to our own will, but according to how God had already predestined originally; all that we do is enter into God’s domain by believing in and accepting His Word and then follow Him by faith. That is why Jesus said, “I am the Way” (John 14:6).
On the first day of His creation, God did the work of saving souls. In other words, on the first day God made sinners righteous, and He also clearly separated the righteous from the sinners. And on the second day of the creation of the heavens and the earth, God divided the water above the firmament from the water below it. Put differently, this means that God divided His Word from the words of Satan.
What, then, is the God-given Truth of salvation? It is the gospel of the water and the Spirit given by Jesus Christ. We can all be born again now, for Jesus Christ has saved us from all our sins and trespasses by receiving baptism from John the Baptist and then dying on the Cross. Furthermore, because of this Truth, it has become clear that there is no virtue in human beings. Whoever you may be, do not deceive yourselves. And do not be deceived by anyone else’s hypocrisy either. No one should regard himself highly.
CONTEMPLATION
“Darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). No one knows his sins before he hears the Word. It says, “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” In other words, it is by knowing Jesus Christ, by hearing the Word of the gospel of the water and the Spirit, and through the God-given light that we were able to know our true selves correctly, and came to realize that we had great sins in our hearts, and that we were terrible sinners bound to hell before God. That is how we could become light and God’s people. Truly, this is the grace of God.
Although we believe in the remission of our sins, do we not still commit sin again on this earth? Of course we do. However, even these sins are included in the sins of the world. The Lord has blotted them out also. Nonetheless, whenever we commit sin, our conscience is hurt and tormented. What, then, should we do with these sins? Should we believe in Jesus Christ again? No, what we must do is to instead confirm in our hearts once again that these sins were also passed onto Jesus Christ when He was baptized, and believe with our hearts that our Lord took all our sins away like this precisely because He already knew that we would commit sin again. In other words, we need to ruminate on the gospel of salvation once again in our minds. It is then that we can be freed from all the sins that we commit out of our weaknesses. It is then that we are washed completely. And it is then that we are wholly saved and made perfectly righteous.
There are two sorts of people in this world: The sons of the light and the children of the darkness (1 Thessalonians 5:5). The sons of the light are those who profess their faith, saying, “Before I knew Jesus Christ, I was indeed a pile of sin, where darkness was on the face of the deep, and my mind was confused. I was empty. I had no satisfaction. I had no choice but to be cast into hell. However, You have taught this Word to me through Your servants and Your Church. You have saved me perfectly. I believe in You, Lord!” To those who believed like this and received Him as their true Savior, God has named them the sons of day and given the right to become His children.
Before we really knew the gospel of the water and the Spirit, we could not realize properly through the Word of God what kind of sin we had committed. I, too, was previously like this. Before I came to believe in the gospel of the water and the Spirit and know Jesus, I did not know my sins that well. We have an instinctive tendency to justify our sins and to defend our sinful selves. And we have a predilection to hide our sins. However, when we try to hide our sins from God, our hearts suffer. In contrast, when we admit to God that we have committed such sins, and when we acknowledge our sinful minds, our hearts are finally quenched. Like this, it is those who honestly recognize their true selves before God that can reach true salvation through the work of Jesus Christ who has blotted out our sins with the gospel of the water and the Spirit.
Our lives of faith are also like this. Even after receiving the remission of our sins, we are still imperfect at first. In other words, although we are saved, we don’t really know that much, we feel as if nothing else has changed, and we aren’t sure what is right. So once we are saved, we actually appreciate our imperfection even more acutely. That’s because our lives must change, and we must live by faith. Before, we used to live just for our flesh and only by our own carnal strength, but now, if we rely only on the strength of our flesh, we will be accursed, and so we must rely on God, trust in Him, and live by faith. This is why we come to see our insufficiencies even more, and we get disoriented and struggle when we see our failing selves. Like this, our beginning is imperfect.
On the second day, God divided the water above the firmament from the water below it. Accordingly, we, too, must discern the words of Satan from the Word of God. How do we divide them? We divide the water above the firmament from the water below it based on the Word of God. We have to realize clearly whether or not we are now drinking the water below the firmament and our lives are controlled by the Devil. If you still have not become righteous even as you sincerely believe in Jesus Christ, then it can only mean that you are living drinking the water below the firmament, that is, the water of the earth. You have to realize that those who have become righteous without sin by believing in Jesus, and are living according to the Word, are those who live drinking the water above the firmament. The two must thus be separated clearly.
God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures.” Just as the water abounded with fish, even now, countless righteous people who believe in God’s Word continue to carry out His work faithfully. Even at this very moment, the Word of God is alive and works with the righteous who walk by faith. It is Rev. Paul C Jong's sincere hope that the righteous would keep on preaching the gospel of the water and the Spirit to sinners, as long as the Word of God exists on this earth.
