Look at how Adam and Eve, the first elect human souls, were created and caused to remain naked in the garden (Gen. 2:25). This was obviously a deliberate act of God and meant to be sign to us. It told us that Adam and Eve, who were sinless during that time, were not actually and actively working the righteousness of God. For they were not granted any garments. God and His angels wore garments at all times, since garments portrayed the character and attributes of a soul, as symbols representing a covering of just and loving deeds worked by them, as symbols of their subjective righteousness. But Adam and Even had none. Of course, they were not evil either, and did not wear garments symbolic of an evil character. They were both in a state of ignorance, which caused every “sin” committed in those days to be an unintentional and automatically forgivable sin. But God did give them one law, a command forbidding them to eat the fruit that would give them knowledge of good and evil, the ability to discern between good and evil. Both knew this law and could not plead ignorance if they disobeyed God by eating this fruit. Then the devil came to make them do just that. Thus, after they sinned, by eating the forbidden fruit, they gained the ability to discern between good and evil. So God, the Spirit who created their infantile spirits in His image, then judged them and found them to be culpable for their deliberate, intentional sin. Yet, at the same time, God also declared that they had become even more like Him (Gen. 3:22), since they gained the ability to discern between good and evil. And, after this, God felt the need to give them garments to cover their nakedness (Gen. 3:21). For they were no longer innocent, since they now had the ability to see that they were not doing the works of God. Now that they possessed the knowledge of good and evil, they could no longer be counted as innocent for their sins of omission, for all the good works they now knew they should do but did not do. Before this, they were innocent of all sins of omission. Now, on top of the intentional sin of eating the forbidden fruit, they were made culpable for an ever-growing list of deliberate sins.
The garments made from the skins of animals—who were sinless, because they were never able to discern good from evil, and never would be—were a kind of prototype. These garments of a sinless sacrifice preceded the garments of righteousness that would be later granted to them at the gates of heaven on the final judgment day. These animal skins symbolized the cleansing by the blood of the body of our sinless God, the body of Jesus. The sinless creatures, whom God had sacrificed for the sake of Adam and Eve, gave them hope in a future and truly worthy, effective, authoritative, just and plenary sacrifice for their whole lives of sin. And, since there had been no deaths upon the earth before this time, these animals had the first deaths. These creatures were the first blood shed, the first to be sacrificed through death, as sombre and stark symbols of the effects of sin, but also symbols of a future salvation from sin, which Jesus would work for them on the cross. Yet the sacrifice of Jesus would be the only real sacrifice, which those animal deaths merely symbolized, and also would bring them much more than forgiveness. For the bodily death of Jesus would open the doors of their hearts and allow Him to enter in, so His Holy Spirit could dwell beside their human spirits. Thus, Jesus, our God, could personally teach and train their spirits about His ways. Then they could receive infinitely superior garments, representing a perfect subjective righteousness, after He completed His work of teaching and training, after they were made mature and ready for heaven’s works on their final day.
The spirits of Adam and Eve were made in the image of God, who is a Spirit. But God was never naked. Jesus wore gleaming white garments at His transfiguration, and wore those same garments when He walked in the garden with Adam and Eve, as well as every other time His true Self was seen by men throughout history. Those will be the same pure garments He will wear when He will return to this earth from the clouds, and the same He will wear in heaven. Likewise, elect angels and all heavenly beings are dressed in garments of absolute purity, representing their true righteousness which God placed in them. And, in the very end, all God's redeemed human elect spirits also will be dressed in white garments, in His spiritual garments of perfect righteousness. For the elect, who will be alive on the day Jesus returns to earth are His bride, and “‘it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure’—for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (Rev. 19:8, ESV).
Notice how the above Scripture declares that these garments of righteousness shall be “granted” or given to the bride, to the true church, which consists only of the elect who have been made utterly holy by Jesus. These garments of righteousness will not be made by the bride herself, although these garments figuratively represent “the righteous deeds of the saints.” They represent the subjective righteousness of the elect, the subjective righteousness that Jesus has “granted” to them. The pure garment is the work of Jesus in us and through us. The effects of Jesus working in us is expressed by truly loving and righteous deeds. And all creatures in heaven, especially God Himself, will wear the perfectly clean robes of righteousness. So God created Adam and Eve naked in the garden without these robes. But God did this for a good reason, so we would know we are infants who need to be taught and trained by our Father and older Brother on this nursery and training ground of this earth.
On the day Adam and Eve were created, they were guiltless. However, they were not actively doing God’s righteous and priestly works either. So they were not guiltless and innocent through their own wills and their own strength. Nor had they done any truly good deeds, by deliberate choice, through the conscious and awakened minds of their spirits, through the motive of love, to sanctify or justify themselves. There is a big difference between being guiltless and being righteous. If one is ignorant about sin, one is guiltless if one commits a sin, since every sin would be unintentional. This is why a baby is guiltless, because a baby has not come to the age where he or she can discern between good and evil. Thus, when a baby does bad things, that child does so without malicious intent and does it overtly, not hiding anything. For the child sees nothing wrong with what it is doing with its little and clueless body. Then the parent protects that baby from causing itself and others harm, often by just placing the child in an environment which prevents him or her from harming oneself or others. Then that baby is called “cute,” even when he or she does something bad. But once the baby grows up and has learned to discern between good and evil, then deliberately does evil in a cunning way that tries to hide one’s evil intent, that bad behaviour certainly is not so “cute” anymore. It is now a real sin.
Adam and Eve knew nothing about the differences between good or evil until they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Until they ate of that tree, any sin they could possibly commit was already forgiven in advance, due to their inability to know it was a sin. And God kept them in that temporary Garden of Eden to protect them from themselves, and to keep them from harming any of His good creations. Not only that, but the atonement of their relationship with God was already purchased by the blood of Christ, since that blood was predestined to be shed in the future, causing their every unintentional lawless deed to be forgiven automatically, in advance. So it was impossible for Adam and Eve to feel any shame about their nakedness, that is, for their lack of righteousness. They received the same grace given to the spirits of all infants, heavenly angels and living entities.
However, God created Adam and Eve to eventually become actively righteous and loving, like God, who was their Parent, dwelling beside them in a body like their bodies, within the safe garden that was like a nursery. But God did not create Adam and Eve in His image so they could merely remain guiltless in the nursery of the garden. Adam and Eve were made naked, without righteousness, so Jesus could eventually clothe them in the garments of righteousness that He would create for them, a unique heir’s garment for each elect individual. Likewise, all the elect are born naked too, so all will eventually be clothed in righteousness, in Christ. For, in Christ, we are not just forgiven and granted atonement, but made subjectively righteous and fit for God's eternal kingdom, in the image of Jesus.
Now, after Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, they could discern between good and evil. They came of age. They were now a man and a woman. And, because of the lesson they learned through their sin, God said they became more like Him (Gen. 3:22). For God always knew what was good, what was according to His own nature, what came from Him. And God also knew what was evil, what is not according to His own nature, what did not come from Him. God knew that He had created Satan and his angels with a lack of His core attribute, without love, which would cause that devil to create sin and evil. So it was not the evil of the sin that made Adam and Eve more like God, since that sin was worked by Satan. Rather, it was the knowledge of good and evil, which Adam and Eve learned as an effect of that sin, which made them both more like their holy Father. At that very moment, their spirits knew that their intentional disobedience of the Father’s command was not a good deed, that there would be bad effects from that sin. Still, this sin had to have been ordained by God. For God predestined that they would become like Him before He even created their spirits in His image. And, actually, all sin on earth is predestined for this same reason. God hates sin. But He created this material universe to be different from heaven, by allowing sins to occur within it, since God wants the spirits of His elect children to learn the deep and subtle ways of His just, pure kind of love, and to be able to differentiate His ways from those which are not His ways, even from the fake righteousness of deceivers, who disguise their evil spiritual intentions behind outwardly good deeds.
Now Adam was created to be the priest of his generation and the teaching, counselling, judging elder of all who came after him, while Eve served as his helper in all the details of this work. Then God chose only one son of Adam and Eve, Abel, to be the priest of the next generation and the next elder of all their descendants. But his brother, Cain, killed Abel through jealousy, even though being the priest of God and an elder was not a position of prestige or status, just a type of service that God had created one’s spirit and body to fulfill humbly, thinking only of God and His creations, casting aside all pride and self-glory. But, because Abel’s body died, as a sign of conflicts to come, God provided Adam and Eve with another son, one whom God would later choose for His priesthood, named Seth.
God chose only Seth to serve as the priest and elder from that second generation. Then, from each subsequent generation of Seth’s descendants, God chose only one male to serve as His priest and elder. Much later, the great flood came in the days of Noah, who was the chosen priest and elder from his generation. Then only Noah and three of his sons, together with his wife and their wives, survived on earth, and God chose Shem to be His priest and elder from among Noah’s sons. After this, God waited until the number of people increased, and chose only one priestly elder from each subsequent generation. Finally, the time came when the population increased enough for God to create an entire nation of priests, which He did through three generational priests that had descended from Noah and Seth. God had chosen Abraham from the line of Seth, through Noah and Shem, to be the next priest. Then God chose one son of Abraham, Isaac, to be His priest. After Isaac, God chose Jacob and created His church, His nation priesthood of Israel, through Jacob. This nation of priests was brought into a relationship with God through an unconditional covenant that God had previously and eternally established with Abraham, which God only allowed Isaac, Jacob and all Jacob’s sons to inherit. So Israel did not become God’s priesthood or church through the conditional Old Covenant, which God revealed through Moses. Rather, it was almost half a millennium after God created this nation of priests, this church of Israel, that God bound this nation of priests in a highly conditional Old Covenant relationship with Him. But this Old Covenant relationship certainly was nothing like the relationship God maintained with any of the generational priests like Adam, Abel, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. Rather, all previous priestly relationships—especially His Abrahamic Covenant relationship with the priestly nation He created through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—was far more like His unconditional New Covenant relationship in the Messiah, Jesus. God’s priests had walked in an almost New Covenant relationship during the days from Adam to Moses. And the Word of God also declares that God ratified the New Covenant in order to fulfill the Abrahamic Covenant.
So why did God suddenly decide to establish that Old Covenant relationship with His priesthood so long after He created Adam, Abel, Seth, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? That Old Covenant came after His nation of priests, Israel, had grown exponentially, both with descendants of Abraham and with Gentile converts brought into Israel during the Exodus. God chose to define the relationship with Him through 613 laws, conditions to maintain that relationship, after their numbers had become sufficient for Him to begin to teach and train them for a more effective, world-wide ministry. But this conditional Old Covenant was nothing more than a temporary step in the full development of that nation-priesthood’s ministry to the whole world, albeit a very necessary step. For God first had to teach His priesthood to rely on Him alone, and not to rely on their own faulty and self-seeking minds of flesh, nor on the minds of their own infantile spirits. In addition to this, God had to teach them how to discern between good and evil, how to recognize their own sins so they could repent into the created truth. Then, once they repented into the truth, they had to be trained to wisely walk in that truth. Only after all this would they be ready to serve as His priesthood to the entire world around them. So the Old Covenant was a temporary instrument God used to accomplish all of this.
Through the Law of the Old Covenant, God’s priesthood began to see their great need to be clothed in the righteousness that can only come from God, from their promised Messiah or Christ. But their Messiah could not come until at least some were ready. Then, at the appointed time, God sent that Messiah, to replace that Old Covenant with His New Covenant relationship. Jesus came to actually write righteousness upon their hearts. His Spirit began to teach and train their humbled spirits. Now it was time for God to begin the completion of His priesthood, to make His elect ready to actually serve as effective and faithful priests to the world, and in His name. Jesus, our God, came to work loving righteousness in many of His elect children, and through them, to finally reveal and express the reality of His loving righteousness to all the rest of the world, to change His elect into His children worthy of His name, to make them fit to serve beside their Father in His utterly holy lands on earth and in heaven. Jesus came to eternally clothe them in His garments of genuine loving righteousness. Since then, the earth’s entire history, from that first advent of Christ, has been a long process of developing the maturity of the elect spirits God placed on the earth. His works in each individual elect life since that day, and in the whole history of all elect lives since Adam, illustrate this purpose of God. Soon, during the era of the sixth seal, His church will be made ready to receive Him, our God Jesus, in a body of flesh, and serve as His faithful priesthood to His earthly kingdom.
And, after being completed and perfected on the judgment day, all will serve as His heavenly priests.
So let us study this Old Covenant Law, this sketch or shadow of the reality of God, as an instrument to humble us and make us aware of our sinfulness and inability, so our spirits will then turn to Jesus for what we truly need. The Decalogue and Old Covenant Law is like a paper pattern of a garment before it is made, or like a designer’s concept sketch of what the garment of righteousness will look like. But we need the real garment, since the paper pattern or sketch will not do us much good, and we do not have the rare and costly materials, sewing skills or right equipment to make this garment ourselves. However, if we know the Designer—who has all the materials required to make it, and all the skills to make the garment perfectly, specifically to fit each created idiosyncrasy—that Designer will freely make a unique garment for each of us, because we are His brothers and sisters. As for the paper pattern and sketch of this garment, it reveals the garment’s wondrous functionality, easy yoke and so many other good things of loving subjective righteousness that we will never want to put on or wear anything else. Nothing offered by deceivers or the devil will ever be acceptable to any of us.
Until the day that Jesus causes the material space-time continuum to end, and lifts all His elect up to the gates of heaven, God’s Law will remain here, all 613 wise teachings or commands of the Old Covenant. The real meaning of these spiritual principles reveals the attributes of our immutable God, so they will not be altered before that final day, nor forever after in heaven. Thus, Jesus fulfills all 613 of these laws, greatly expounds on all of them, adds much new context and meaning, trains us to wisely apply all of them, but does not nullify even one of them. As a consequence, these 613 laws are a mere tiny subset of Jesus Christ’s New Covenant Law. Yes, God’s 613 laws surely reveal some of God’s attributes, but in shadowy and sketchy way. Yet the New Covenant Law that Jesus teaches directly to our spirits reveals all God’s attributes clearly, in a bright light, and allows us to see and truly know the real God Himself, even as our familiar Father and oldest Brother. Surely we must know that we need that New Covenant Law. For the mere 613 commandments of the Old Covenant clearly are not adequate. We need the power and wisdom of our God Himself, of Jesus, to make us utterly holy, like He is holy. Otherwise, we cannot enter God’s utterly holy heaven as His children.
Likewise, we also need each other. Those with a genetic defect that makes their skin whiter than Adam’s dark skin, whiter than Jesus’ dark skin, cannot delude themselves into thinking they are somehow superior solely due to that defect. The darker skinned people are their brothers and sisters, where some of their brothers and sisters have been chosen to be God’s more faithful priests or helper of priests. And the children of their darker skinned brothers and sisters are indeed their very own children, whose welfare is just as important as the welfare of our own children. Then those human beings whom God has gifted with some kind of ability to serve Him must not use their gift for their own selfish purposes, because absolutely nothing they receive from God—and all they possess has been granted to them by God through grace—was given to them for their own selfish purposes. And, no matter how gifted one may be, one still needs the not-so-gifted, to normalize and stabilize one’s own love and life. Then the not-so-gifted need the wonderful and good gifts from God, which God usually grants to much weaker and less stable elect souls. For God wants all of us to depend upon Him and each other, so we will not be tempted to commit Satan’s sin of making oneself into one’s own god. God’s gifts heal, enlighten, colour and enhance the love and lives of whole families, tribes and nations, never just selfish individuals. So the elect need to function as one unified body of Christ, one in mind and purpose, so we might together accomplish all that is necessary for the good of all our family, and for all the rest of God’s creation. But this also means that each mature man must learn to think independently, not in submission to men, but as a wise, understanding priest and elder who judges, teaches and counsels according to what His only Lord, Jesus, teaches him. Only our Father, who is one with our oldest Brother, Jesus, can make every individual priest and elder into a wise and loving builder of His kingdom. Only Jesus can make us all into a strong, invincible and united family unit. We cannot do this for ourselves. No man nor institution of men can ever do this.
Since none but Jesus can make us one, where nothing is left undone within the family and nothing is lacking in vast lands belonging to our Father, we seek only Him. Then, by His will and power, all the elect human souls who ever lived in all history will be completely purified together on the judgment day, after He replaces their unruly flesh with cooperative bodies made of a spiritual substance. Jesus will finish His work of fulfilling the Law inside all His people. And all the elect will be completed together, all at once, on that last day. For He will call each one to help the other, each in one’s own unique way, with Jesus as the only guide and Rabbi of all, since only Jesus is loving, wise, powerful and humble enough to do this work. On that day, He will calmly teach His judgments until every elect soul is perfect. Then, after literally all the elect who ever lived are ready, Jesus shall bring all down from the gates of heaven into heaven. All will descend together, as one priesthood and one family, into our eternal homes in the new Jerusalem. There we will all gather in glory, in the good opinion of our one Father. And every elect will be one who both “does and teaches” God’s intended, right and wise principles of His Law, even perfectly, not forgetting even the very least dot or iota in His words, and the wisest of these “shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” For, even after the earth ends, the spiritual truths in God’s Law will be perfectly and entirely fulfilled by the saints.
At the present time, so many churches like to teach against or nullify God’s Law, and even ridicule it. This is because they walk entirely according to their minds of flesh. So they only want to gratify the desires and lusts of their flesh. Most elect spirits are dull and asleep, while non-elect spirits in those churches love only darkness rather than light, which also causes them to pursue only the lusts and desires of their flesh. As a consequence, the world possesses very little understanding of Christ’s fulfilling spiritual Law. Furthermore, most people in those false churches actually want only to delude themselves into thinking they are their own gods, their own saviours who can control their own eternal destinies. As a result, even the elect there will esteem any fake preacher who teaches and practices covetousness, who strives to rule over them as their high god, who bullies and lords it over them, who exploits and abuses them, while claiming he does this for God. But that kind of preacher is not from God. And that kind nullifies and intentionally breaks God’s Law, while also teaching all others to do the same. Therefore, his righteousness certainly does not surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, and his spirit knows nothing of the loving righteousness of God’s Law. Thus, we know that such a one “will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus’ own words declare this. If we examine the lengthy process of God’s works leading to Christ, even from times before the Old Covenant Law, as well as times during the rule of that Law, nothing drew elect spirit closer to their heavenly Father except the Holy Spirit of their Father. No man and no law drew the patriarchs or the prophets closer to their Creator God. Then, after the New Covenant revelations came in Jesus, it was only His Holy Spirit that also drew us to Jesus. All history teaches us that salvation is through God’s works alone, not works of men to obey a Law. Therefore, if one rejects the Holy Spirit, who directly teaches each elect human spirit about the loving righteousness of God’s Law, one also rejects God, whom that Law describes. And it is indeed a rejection of God to esteem a man as one’s saving god.
From the days of Adam and Eve, God's desires and ways were never fully known. Yet all the elect in history have always begun to know and fulfill the core principles of God’s Law through a love that God’s very Spirit put in the minds of their spirits. God Himself has taught each elect soul about His attributes, even from the moment of birth. The Spirit of God has always striven to shape the wills of of all elect spirits from birth. All the elect in history had spirits that could learn from God’s Spirit to be grounded in the physical and spiritual realities which God created around them. All have been continuously turned toward verity and truth. And, because of His love and truth, all learned to care for needy brothers and sisters, as much as they were able, even to care animals and other living creations on God’s earth. All the elect who lived before the Old Covenant Law was revealed through Moses, strove to be loving and just, just as God’s Law later commanded. Likewise, to this day, there are many loving, just elect souls living in places where they have never physically heard or read God’s Law, but with spirits taught the basic principles of God’s Law and His attributes. Their elect spirits are learning to justly love and fulfill the core principles of God’s Old Covenant Law, without ever seeing or hearing that Law. Thus, many of these elect grow more loving and righteous than the vast majority of the members of the fake “Christian churches” around the world, since the members of those false churches are humanists who live only by their minds of flesh and worship man. Now let us search for these elect. All the potentially loving and righteous elect are our brothers and sisters with whom we fellowship, not the unloving non-elect souls who rule the fake “Christian churches.”
Now the time has come for all the elect to fellowship, and for the mature men, those called and sent out as faithful priests and elders assisting Jesus Himself, to teach genuine truths of God, including the Old Covenant Law, but in the way that Jesus wisely and justly applies the fulfilled version of it. Because Adam and Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, all their descendants, all mankind, inherited a basic knowledge of both good and evil. A basic knowledge of good and evil is not only inherited by elect spirits, but also by the non-elect. Yet only God’s elect children are taught the full meaning and a wise application of that Law by Jesus Christ’s Holy Spirit. And we must also realize that a knowledge of evil is taught to the non-elect spirits and flesh by devils, as well as to the flesh of the elect. In fact, the vast majority of mankind is now ruled and continuously corrupted by Satan’s subject kingdom of the world order, which God granted to the chief sinner, Satan, after Adam sinned. So most human beings live the lives of slaves, held captive to the dictates of that bullying and unjust “prince of the air,” that ruler of all within the atmosphere of the earth. And all, even the elect, are born bound to the ways of that evil spirit, who maintains his power by tempting all through their desires of the flesh. No human being can escape the subtle manipulations and laws of the lands ruled by Satan, not until their spirits are ruled by God’s Holy Spirit. Only God Himself, Jesus, can make them citizens of His higher kingdom instead. Unless Jesus comes and declares that a soul is to be His property, a citizen of His kingdom, one must remain a puppet of the devil’s subject kingdom.
Of course, it is true that God takes some elect from Satan’s kingdom, and calls all the elect from birth, with the desire to make them into citizens of heaven, exempt from the rule of Satan’s subject kingdom. God took the prophets and patriarchs out from the control of Satan’s world order, and took some from birth, by calling them His property, by sanctifying them for His purposes alone. Yet most elect descendants of Adam and Eve still wait for this salvation process to begin, for the righteousness worked by Christ. And these elect should know that the day God opened and made available the New Covenant relationship with Him has already occurred, on the day of the Pentecost. Let all those elect who die in bondage to sin, as citizens of Satan’s world order hear this true Gospel. Although all the elect in all history were predestined to be completed and perfected in Jesus, together with us, not all have yet begun to live as the faithful priesthood of Jesus, with fulfilling lives. But, as with all the other elect, living either before or after Jesus, God will finish His workmanship on the judgment day, after death. Jesus will not abandon any of them to hell. Still, it is always much better for the elect, during this life on earth, to know and begin to live this Gospel, even though the elect who receive an awakening and the know the Gospel of Jesus the Christ have not yet been perfected. “And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (Heb. 11:39-40, ESV). Soon all of us together, during the great fellowship in Christ on the final day, will be made perfect.
But God, from the moment of creation to this day, has always carried on the process of building up His kingdom, His plan to reveal and establish His ways of righteousness in each elect soul, to create a righteous and truly loving people who are fit for His kingdom on earth and in heaven. About 4,000 years ago, in a land called Ur of the Chaldeans, God willed, awakened, chose, and caused one man to leave the darkness of the Gentile nations, the citizenship of Satan’s world order, to be sanctified and set apart from Satan’s world order, so his whole life could be dedicated to God’s purposes and God’s kingdom alone. Through this one priest from the line of Seth, this Chaldean named Abraham, God began to form a nation priesthood for Himself, a church that would worship Him, so they could learn His attributes and ways. Through this priesthood, His only church formed in all history, called Israel, God revealed His attributes and truths to all mankind. After God called this Abraham, His elect began to receive a greater and purer truth directly from the mouth of God, through His church.
God made Abraham into the physical seed of His priestly people, the first member of the physically observable existence of His church of Israel, which some might call the “visible church.” But it was God who personally created the elect spirit in each and every true member of that church of Israel, then called each truly elect spirit individually, into His real priesthood of Israel, to do whatever that soul did for Him. And these elect spirits in the true Israel did not come from Abraham, but from God. Of course, there were many ele