Who Is Man, What Is Man — Paris Reidhead

Welcome to Southern Idaho Bible Conference with Reverend Parris Reedhead. This is July 1988. For additional copies of this cassette tape, write to Post Office Box 72, Twin Falls, Idaho, 833 -01.

Paul's Wisdom in Christ Crucified

Will you turn please to 1 Corinthians 2, verse 2. This is a background scripture. I do not intend to expound it. But rather to put it here as an anchor post to which we can refer later on. And Paul writing to the church at Corinth said,.

For I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

I wonder how far he'd get if he were ministering today without his qualifications. I don't think he'd get headline news, would you, if he were to come with, not with enticing words of man's wisdom. But that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

How be it we speak wisdom among them that are perfect, and not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world that come to nothing. But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world unto our glory, which none of the princes of this world knew.

For had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, I have not seen or heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for them that love him.

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man, or literally what part of a man, knoweth the things of a man, save the Spirit of man which is in him?

Even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God. Our Father, we ask that as we continue to explore thy word, to understand thy great purpose and grace, that thou wilt be the teacher, minister to us today, quicken our minds to perceive, our hearts to receive.

Grant to us, Father, that we'll recognize that everything that is said that will be to the glory of Christ will be that which thou dost do. Without us use lips of clay and the weak things of the world to bring to nothing the things that are.

And so minister to us now as we give ourselves to thee. We ask that we may see the Lord Jesus Christ lifted up, exalted and glorified, and we'll give thee praise in his worthy name. Amen. Yesterday we tried to deal with the question, Why did God make man?

Humanity Made for God's Love and Moral Choice

Answer, God made man to be the object of his love. He made him in his image and likeness because we can only love that which is like us. The only being that God has said to be in his image and likeness is man, and the only being that God has created that he has said he loves is man.

The next question is, why did God make man so that he could sin? Well, the answer to that is, if he had made man so that he could not sin, he would have made him so that he could not choose, because sin in its essence is the wrong choice.

And therefore, if he had made man so that he could not choose, he would have had a mere automaton or a machine. And obviously, a machine could not be the fit object of God's love, nor could a machine ever satisfy the ancient longing in his heart for a beloved.

So in order to have an object of his love, someone upon whom he could pour his love and with whom he could reveal himself and show himself, he had to make that being in his image, and in doing that, he had to give to him the ability to think and to feel and to will.

And to will is to choose. And therefore, he had to make him capable of choosing to say, no, I don't love you, so that when he said, yes, I do love you, that yes had meaning and could satisfy the heart of God.

Now, the next question that we sought to deal with was, if God could put an angel in front of the garden to keep Adam and Eve from going into the tree of life, then why couldn't he have sent that angel a few days earlier to keep Lucifer out so that he wouldn't have gotten there to tempt that first pair?

And the answer is that had he done that, then all he would have been doing would be to put his pair in a prison, if you please, in a darkened cell, so that the only way he could guarantee they would love him was that they did not know any alternative, and that would be another form of making man a machine.

The Fall and the Four Dimensions of Death

And so he permitted his ancient foe that he had cast out of heaven to come in with his lying fallacies and to put them into the mind, speak them into the mind of mother Eve and father Adam. He'd given them the power of choice.

They listened to this lying testimony of Lucifer in the form of a serpent, and they accepted it, and they chose, and they died. For he had said, The day thou eatest, thou shalt surely die. We saw that death in four aspects.

Man began to die physically. God had so made man that he could have had indefinite physical existence. Every few days we are told. I don't know what it is now, but years ago I read and had doctors confirm that most cells in the body are replaced every few days, every seven days, every 21 days.

I guess the enamel of the teeth is a little bit slower, but most cells in the body are replaced by new cells. Now that process could have gone on indefinitely. Aging was an insult to the creator. If a builder were to build houses that fell down every 70 years, he would not be considered a very successful builder.

And God made man. Well, you know the record of that first company. They lived 900 years. They lived 800 years, 700 years. That's pretty good. And it could have gone on longer, but for sin man began to die physically.

And he died legally. He forfeited all claim on the protecting love of God. He had no claim that he could make on God other than that God would be just in his judgment of him. Well, there's no consolation in that.

If that's the only claim a person has on God, that God will be just, he's not going to sleep very well at night if that's all he has. And that's the only legal claim that man retained on God. God had no responsibility to protect him, no responsibility to care for him, no responsibility to feed him or to house him or for anything because he had revolted against God.

He also died spiritually. That part of man made for converse with God we read here. The part of a man that knows the things of a man is the spirit of man that is in him. When man sinned, the capacity to tune in on God and to have converse and fellowship with God was disconnected.

We call it dead in sins. Like you speak of your radio that will not bring in the station you want to hear, the radio's dead. What do you mean? Well, it just doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Something is disconnected or something is blown out or some little thing has happened.

It doesn't have to be much. And that's what happened to man. He died spiritually. That is, the mechanism he had to know God didn't operate as far as God was concerned. And so man could still be in the very presence of God.

For in him we live and move and have our being and have no awareness of or communication with God. He died spiritually. Then he also became a subject to eternal death, eternal separation from God. Well, these were indeed dire consequences, and they continue until the present.

Humanity's Lost Dominion and the God of This World

But something else happened there, and we need to see that. You have to understand that God had given to man the authority to rule and govern his creation. Man was entrusted with the responsibility to name everything that God had made and to care for it and to tend it.

And so he was the governor of this recreated world. Now when man sinned, he then became subject to a new God. We saw that the attributes of this new God to whom man chose to give loyalty and obedience were just the opposite of the attributes of God.

God is light. The God of this world is darkness. God is truth. The God of this world is the father of lies. God is light, and the God of this world is the prince of darkness. God is life, and the God of this world is the God of death.

And so now Adam and Eve have placed themselves under the control of this God, the prince of this world, the God of this world, called Lucifer, known by us as Satan, who, with a company of angels, had revolted against God and cast down here to this devil's island in space we know as Earth.

But God had given the sovereignty over his creation to man. Man, in turn, turned the sovereignty of that same creation over to the God of this world. So when our Lord Jesus came, he said, The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me.

How came he to be the prince of this world? Well, Adam gave it to him. And he's described as the God of this world, who blinded the minds of them that believed. How came he to be God of this world? Adam and Eve gave it to him.

They relinquished the authorities that were theirs, and they gave it to him. And so it is thus to be understood that he is indeed the God of this world. Now, there is a very strange and marvelous thing that happened.

Cain, Abel, and the Rebellion of the Human Family

The first children born of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, illustrate what has taken place in the human family since. I have a feeling that in some respects Cain, and this is pure supposition, I have no scripture to support it, that in some respects Cain may have been a nicer fellow to be with than Abel was, probably socially more acceptable, more amenable to his parents.

Obviously, he was concerned about the household because he was there fixing a garden and the fruit of the ground. Anybody that does a lot of gardening has to have a family he wants to feed and people he wants to care for.

I really have a feeling that socially Cain might have been a fairly nice fellow. And this Abel, he's out there on the fields, he's out there tending sheep, and I think he had a pretty good understanding of the kind of a rascal he was.

And he discovered that he had need. And so when the time came that they were to prepare an offering, I get the feeling that Cain's looks sort of like the garden section at the county fair. Have you ever seen it?

When they've got the onions all nicely bunched and the radishes are all there in a pretty design and the carrots shiny and all. I think he had a fairly nice display. All the works of his hands in one sense.

And Abel on the other hand, he's a rascal. He knows that he's got to have help. And if his father and mother tell him that when they sinned, the Lord made a coat of skins to cover them. And knowing the kind of a guy he is, he knows that the works of his hands aren't ever going to get it done.

And so he finds a pile of stones and he takes the sheep and he puts it down there. And the blood is shed, the offering is made, and God accepts Abel. He's brought a lamb. He's brought a picture of the one who's to come who's to be known as the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

And Cain is over there looking at his lovely display that he was so thoughtful to grow for his mother and his father and the family. And he's saying, God took, I kind of sympathize with him, you know.

He says, here's this guy who's always out there doing just what he wants to do, doesn't care about anything. Well, he says, I don't think Abel was like that. All right, I'll give you my think and you give me your think.

And probably both of us are a little wrong. The point of the fact is that God accepted Abel's offering and he didn't accept Cain's. And Cain, in his anger against God, but he wasn't able to get to God.

But he could get to Abel. And so he took a stone. When I hear all this talk about gun control, I get a little bit upset about it because the first murder that was committed, they didn't even have a gun.

All they had was a rock. Next thing they'll have is rock control. No rocks will be released. Because it's a terrible thing. Murder doesn't take a lot of tools to accomplish. I've heard of people that did it with a pillow, just a nice, fluffy, soft pillow, pressed over someone's face, no marks, no nothing, and death.

And so here's a man who just is so furious that he picks up a stone and kills his brother and hides him. And then God comes, where is Abel? Am I my brother's keeper? Make me responsible for him. His blood cries to me from the ground.

And Abel is driven out, marked and cursed. And the result is that we have generations that come that are filled with hatred of God and rebellion and under the total control of the God of this world. In fact, in ten generations, the world has been so totally, so absolutely and totally corrupted that God regrets that he's made man.

He's sorry he ever started it in the first place. And he determines to do away with it. He has one seed that's not been corrupted and comes down through to Noah. And Noah then stands before the people and for 120 years preaches repentance toward God and faith in the promise of destruction and in the promise of salvation.

And he works for 120 years building an ark. I don't know if there on Mount Ararat, I just got a book the other day entitled Noah's Ship on Mount Ararat. I don't know if that's it or not. But I'll tell you, when you get the dimensions of whatever is there, you can understand that one man and two or three fellows with him would take a long time to build it.

Well, at any rate, for all that period of 120 years, Noah is preaching, proclaiming the fact that God is going to judge the world and only those that accept the salvation that God in his grace provides in the vessel that this crazy old man is building on the top of a hill.

You know, it doesn't make good sense, does it, if somebody out there building a ship 150 feet long and 50 feet wide and 30 feet high. And it's a big, big, big thing. And right on top of a little mound and no water and it's never rained.

But God is saying something to that generation, repent or you'll perish. Repent or you'll perish. And they don't repent. And they perish. All save Noah, his wife and his sons and their wives. That's all that's spared.

And those beasts that God had brought into the ark. Now, the reason for saying that is to give to you a picture of the state of rebellion of the human heart. Men are rebels. They choose not to repent.

They choose to revolt against God, against truth, against light. A few generations afterwards, with this beautiful illustration of the fact that God keeps his word that he's a holy God and that he hates sin, there's a chapter that comes on the scene that we don't pay much attention to.

Nimrod, Babel, and the World’s Threefold Lust

King James says Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord. But the fact is, the text literally is Nimrod was a mighty rebel against the Lord. And he led that generation in rebellion. Because, you see, the God of this world governs with three principles.

If you ever see a picture of Satan, and he has a pitchfork. And that pitchfork has more than three times, you know it's not biblical. Because the scripture tells us that all that is in the world. All that's in the world.

And there ain't nothing more. All that's in the world is the lust of the eye. The lust of the flesh. And the pride of life. That's all he has. My, it's like a three note chord. But the variations he's been able to get out of those three notes.

Astonishing. Lust of the eye. The lust of the flesh. And the pride of life. That's all he has. Now, we've come to Nimrod's generation in our attempt to understand the kind of a being man is. And Nimrod, this mighty rebel against the Lord.

Says to the people of his day. Look. This God who visited the world and who drowned everybody but that old fogey Noah and his children. And who were making our lives so miserable trying to tell us how to live.

Now look, that God is somewhere up there. Now let's build us a tower. High enough so we can get up there and yank him out of the sky. And destroy him. And we can run this thing the way we want to. And so they built the tower.

And they had material to build it with. They had a lot of rock out there. A lot of rock. And a lot of mud. And if you stick rock with mud and it'll dry, you can get fairly high. Well, it's just terraced and it's going up and up and up and up.

And he gets it up there. And the act of defiance is to set up a god. A goddess. That was where the women's lived first at its beginning. And Nimrod went ahead and took Semiramis, according to Hislop in his book Two Babylons.

According to some archeological records. Nimrod took his father's wife. Not his mother. But one of his father's wives. A woman by the name of Semiramis with whom he had an incestuous relationship. Well, not actually flesh of his.

But at any rate, he had taken her as his. And now he enthrones her as the god that the people are to worship. She's god. They've replaced this god of the heavens. They put their god, a goddess, up there in the heavens at the top of this tower.

Where periodically she would go for certain ceremonies. And they've made part of this tower a temple where she is enthroned. And she tells the people what to do. And she tells them that pure worship consists of intense sexuality.

And the whole worship was related to sensualism. Immorality. Uncleanness. That was the religion that Nimrod gave to the generation. Now, the only way he could build that tower was to have the cooperation of the people and their leaders.

All of whom apparently wanted exactly what Nimrod was offering them through Semiramis. And all the world now speaks one language. And they're all there. And they're all around. And they've totally given themselves up over to evil.

But what has God said? He put a bow in the sky, remember, after the flood. And he said, never again would he visit the world with water, with a flood. But by this time the world is so totally and completely corrupted that God has to judge it.

And so he does. First he puts forth a finger and that tower, as immense as it was, as tall as it was, crumbles into the dust and mud and rock that it was. And then the people get up in the morning and they find that they don't understand one another.

They can't. They're speaking different languages. Up until then they all had the same language. But now he has confused their tongues. And the people sort themselves out by tongues. By languages. And so they finally get together.

And the ones speaking this language trot off over there and start to live together. Because you've got to live with people whose language you understand if you're a human being. And another group trots down this way.

And somebody else gets in the river and floats down that way. And the people go off, organized now, according to their languages. And I tell you, when he confused their languages, he did a good job. He did a great job.

My goodness. My wife and I were given the opportunity, responsibility, when we got to the Sudan, to work for and with the Sudan government. The education department for the southern Sudan asked us to do an analysis of the ten tribes in an area along the Sudan-Ethiopian border.

From a little border town by the name of Kormuk down to the Sobat River. A distance of about 175 miles. And we didn't know how many tribal languages were used there. How many groups of people there were there.

Nothing had ever been done for them for education. Nothing had ever been done for them with missions. Well, a little had been. One mission society had gone in at one end at the top with two languages.

And another had gone in down at the bottom of that area at the south. But by and large, they didn't know what was there. And it was my responsibility largely because she was home caring for our son. She was with me on several occasions.

And to go down along that Sudan-Ethiopian border and find out how many languages there were. And get a sample of their language. Well, we got down to a post down there. A government post where they had a couple of soldiers.

A sergeant and two or three or four or five others there to try to keep peace on the border. And I asked them, were there any tribes? They said, yes. You see that hill over there? I said, yes. They said, you go over there.

And you'll find that there are four language groups. Now, it was a kind of a cone hill. It looked like it had been from a volcano of some sort. But it had some foliage on it, some shrubbery and grass.

And so, we went over. And we started around. The whole thing around that cone wasn't five miles. Maybe four, four to five. That's all. And we were up several hundred feet above the plain level. And here were these little clusters of huts on the little indentations and so on.

And there were some springs around. And there was a little creek that came down from further up. We went in. And here were about seven or eight huts. And they spoke a language. Well, I took a sample of it and put it together.

And then we went about a mile around further. And we came to another group of huts. And they spoke a totally different language. And only the people that lived closest to each other had some words in common.

Totally different. And we went another mile. And there was another group of huts. And they spoke another language. And we went to another. And there was a fourth. There were four languages up on the sides of that little hill.

And they were, for the most part, completely different. They had a few words in common. One of the things we found there was that everyone had the same word or almost the same word for ostrich. The ostrich makes a funny sound, root, root.

And so in each of these languages, the word for ostrich was root, root. And we could expect a root, a root, a root, one or the other. But it always had the O sound and the T sound, whatever else they thought they heard before.

And they all had the same word for mother. It was om or ma or um, something of that sort. But other than that, the words were different, completely different. And here, these were remnants of once great tribes of people that had been down in the Sudan.

And then other tribes had come in. There had been war. And there had been all this pressure. And they'd finally retreated until they had these little clusters of huts. And you know, there was a 98 incidence of syphilis among all the people on that mountainside.

And so in just a matter of another generation or two, probably by now, all or most of the less than 200 people in four language groups will have died. Because they were incapable. There were virtually no little children there.

And the ones that they did have, their bodies were covered with syphilitic ulcers. You could hardly put a silver dollar down on a baby's body and not touch an ulcer. So I want you to see now one of the extreme extensions of what happened there at the Tower of Babel.

200 people purposely not learning the other language. Why? Because they treasured their history. They were the custodians of their culture. And they were responsible to keep it alive as long as they could.

Because it was distinct from, different from the other people. When God scattered the people and confused their tongues, I just want to put in a good word. He did a good job. He did an awful good job.

There are still 1 ,700 tongues that have never had any portion of the Word of God put into them. But how many hundreds, even thousands of languages have been here and totally disappeared? That is a matter of enormous interest and enormous speculation.

We have no way of knowing anything at all about how many tribes and languages there may have been. Now, the one thing that these tribes that we saw there had in common was that they were all under the direct control of Satan.

The Prince of the Power of the Air and the Missionary Encounter

In a little while, I'm going to bring you to Ephesians 2. But before I do, I want to take you with me to a place that we visited before we got down to that particular post. We hadn't reached it yet. We had left the Abus and we were on our way down to the Coma Post.

And it was getting around four o 'clock, you know, in the tropics. It's not like here. In the tropics, there's no twilight. You're that close to the equator. The light is, it's light and then it's dark.

Sun goes and it's dark. There's virtually no twilight. And we wanted to get there because six o 'clock it was going to be dark and we had to set up camp and get set. I looked down. I was in the lead mule riding and I looked down ahead and saw the little cone shapes of some huts.

I knew I was coming to a village. So, beside me, walking beside me was my friend and assistant. He did the cooking and helped me in every way. Thatch. Thatch was a remarkable man. Remarkable in many, many ways.

And I said, Thatch, you see those huts down there? You run down there and find the chief and ask if it'll be all right if we camp outside of his village. Because if we could be there, we'd have some degree of protection.

There were a lot of lions in the area. And they were not circus lions either. These had never been trained. Nobody had been with a whip or a chair. They were just right out in the bush. And there were a lot of hyenas.

And I don't know which is the worst. If you're going to choice, I think you'd flip a coin if you want to have one come in after supper to make a visit. I just don't think there's much choice. At any rate, we thought if we got near the village, as we always tried to do, there would be some degree of protection from the lions and the hyenas.

So, as we drew nearer, I saw that a Thatch was coming out toward us. But in front of him, he was behind, there were two men and supporting an elderly man in between them. Each had a hold of the old man's arm, and they were helping him to walk.

We kept moving on our horses with the head carriers bringing our little bit of stuff. And he stood right in the middle of the path, being first. At that time, I got off and went over and respectfully greeted him as the chief of the village, for I knew he was.

In fact, the Thatch had told me that he was. And he looked at me, and he said, and translated for me, Why have you been so long? Why didn't you come before? We've waited so long for you. The government knew we were going down there, but nobody else did.

How could that happen, that he was waiting for me? Well, I said, really, I said, what do you mean? Well, he said, when I was a little boy, we always measured with the fingers up, the top of the fingers being the top of the head.

He said, when I was that high, I was over there where the sun sets, where the government is. That was at Malakal on the Nile River, straight west of where we were at the time. And he said, I went to the park with my father.

And you were speaking, and you were telling us about the God who made heaven and earth. And that he had a son, and that that God loved us. And you promised my father that you would come and tell us about this son of the God who made the world.

And you haven't come, why? Then I realized that I must have looked something like the one that was speaking that day in the park. And I must have been something of an age of the one that was speaking in the park.

And even though he was an old man, I guess he figured that we didn't get old. And he then said, when we got back every night, my father would come out here, and he'd stand right here. And he'd look up the path, and he'd look to the west.

And I would be with him, and he would say, they promised to come. They promised to come, and they will come. And then when he died, an old man like I am, he made me promise that every night I'd come out here on the path.

And now I'm an old man. I was on my way out here when your man came to me and told me, oh, why didn't you come before? And a tear gathered and rolled down the ashes on his ash-covered face. I followed him in to the village.

We agreed that that night we would tell him all that we knew about the God who made heaven and earth, who had a son that loved us. On the way into the village, past the hut on the right, a little path that we were walking.

And then just a few feet, maybe five, seven feet off the path, was something taking place. There was a young woman sitting there. Beside her was a witch doctor. The witch doctor had an old piece of spear blade that was worn way down.

There was a sharpening stone. There was a pot turned over with soot on the bottom. There was another pot over there. After all, the soot had been taken off. The woman's back was toward us. One half of her back had been cut with tribal markings.

I watched. I stopped. Everyone stopped. The witch doctor paid no attention to us at all. He took the knife or spear point, rubbed it on the stone. And then he held it up and he stretched the skin between his fingers, just pushed down, stretched.

And he took the knife, spear point, and he cut into the flesh quite deep. And while it was still spread and beginning to bleed, he reached over and took the soot off the cooking pot and rubbed it carefully into the wound so that the wound was filled.

The soot tended to staunch the bleeding. And when it healed, it would heal with a ridge on it, a tribal mark. I was overwhelmed. And I stood there and I started to pray. And as I was praying, it seemed to me that I had a vision.

I don't know whether my eyes were open or my eyes were closed. I don't know whether I saw it or I imagined it. And it doesn't make a bit of difference to me because it was so real. It seemed to me that standing there outside the little circle was the God of this world, Lucifer, Satan.

And he was mocking and scoffing into the face of the God of heaven and earth, raising his fist in defiance and shouting something like this. You made her in your image. You made her to love. You made her to love you.

But she rejected you. She chose me. She wants to serve me. And I can brand her and mark her and own her. And she's mine. I haven't cared enough to come and tell her about your love. It was awesome, frightening, horrifying.

I dreamed that I still am unable to escape. The woman sat there. She had, I can remember, a little piece of stick, a little piece of grass about three inches long. And while the witch doctor cut, she just turned that grass, never speeding up, never clenching her teeth.

Why? She was honoring Satan. And the old man said, come, come. We went into the village and that night we gathered the people for the first time. They heard the message that God had loved the world and sent his son.

The son had loved the world and died. And that we would send someone to them to live with them and tell them more about Jesus. But that night I understood more than I ever had before or since. What it means when it says, and you who were dead in trespasses and sins, who walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince and the power of the air, that very same spirit that now works in the children of disobedience, among whom you all had your manner of life in times past, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

That's what took place back there when our first father revolted. He transferred the godship of the world to his ancient foe. And ever since that time, everyone born into the human family, reaching the age of accountability, has chosen to side with the God of this world for the word is all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

And death is passed upon all men for all have sinned. That's the state, that's the condition, that's the way the world is. And most of its people are under that direct control of the God of this world.

The Lamb of God and the Mystery of Redemption

We read here something, but we speak the wisdom of God in the mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world under our glory, which none of the princes of this world knew. For had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.