Saved to the Uttermost

By Mike Cates

An irrevocable confirmation was given to mankind that he could be saved to the uttermost.  Yet if you ask anyone today if this were possible while living in this present evil world, he could keep the commandments to the full extent of the Lord's requirement, the response in general is an overwhelming, NO.  It is inconceivable to most that he could live any day, while on earth, without sin.  A life of goodness is just to difficult; yet no one enters heaven who has not lived a life according to the commandments. (Matthew 5:19-20)  There are some who teach that a good life follows faith as a thing of course, yet they deny it to have anything to do with, or even to form any part of it.  This is demonstrated by their belief that a wicked man can even be saved on his death-bed, showing that in their estimation that a good life forms no part of the way to heaven.

The very purpose of the Lord's first advent was to give us power to keep the commandments in the manner He requires.  It is not all that difficult!  Yet the voices most give into are those of the unfaithful ten who returned with Joshua and Caleb after spying out the land:  We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we.  And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.  And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.  (Num 13:31-33)

Why should we contradict the Lord when He told us His yoke was easy and His burden light?  Should not we put it on and follow Him and with the voice of Joshua and Caleb proclaim:  Let us go up at once to possess it; for we are well able to overcome it? (Num 13:30)

The words of the Apostle John in his first epistle should be our anthem cry:  Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for His seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God....We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.  (1 John 3:9; 5:18)

So again I ask the question, can we live in this earth, born of God, without sin, saved to the uttermost?  We can if we like the Apostle Paul will  follow after to apprehend that for which we have been apprehended of Christ Jesus, and reach forth unto those things that are before us, by pressing toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.  (Phil 3:13-14)  Through the regeneration process, we can partake of God's Divine Nature and escape the corruption that is in this world through lust.  

Hebrews 7:25 states: Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them.  For years I taught, based from the trinity doctrine (God in three persons) that Jesus, God's little boy was sent into the earth to bear the consequences for man's sin, to satisfy the courts of justice.  Once the courts of justice were satisfied, God raised His little boy from the dead and seated Him at His right hand, (calling Him God), where He would continue to plead to His Father for the salvation of mankind.  This idea of intercession is based on false doctrine, borne from human understanding of spiritual things.  There are not two deities that rule heaven.  There is only ONE God!  When the doctrine of the Lord does not lead our minds in the study of the Scripture, there is a tendency to view spiritual things from the light of the world, and the result will be to devise a doctrine that will elevate man to the throne as Deity, thus causing man to merit to himself what the Lord alone did.  He alone is God!  In Jesus Christ dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. (Col 3:9)

An earthly kingdom motivates man's thinking--the love of rule, the love of money, the love of self, etc.  The Lord's kingdom is not of this world; it was a heavenly kingdom.  Though the apostles received some revelation from time to time, they still apprehended most of the things the Lord spoke as natural men.  You hear the Lord saying to them, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?  (Matt 17:17)  It was not until the culmination of God's eternal purpose that these men, who had walked with the Lord three and one half years, could be witnesses unto Him.  Though they tried, they still vacillated.  At one moment would come forth, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God; yet at the next, the Lord would be rebuking the same apostle saying, Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art an offence unto Me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.  (Matt 16:13-28)

Man's mind in the world of spirits in that day and much like it is today was so bombarded by evils because of the false teachings that very little light was coming in from heaven.  The kingdom of heaven was shut up against men.  The scribes and the Pharisees had so skewed the law of God to their own advantage that not only were they not going in, they neither were allowing others who where entering, to go in.  (Matt 23:13)  They were creating a gridlock and false heavens in the world of spirits.  Man's idea of heaven and of God was fantasy, formulated by the senses.  The scribes and Pharisees were blind leaders of the blind.  Though men with their lips worshiped God, their hearts were far from Him.  They were under grievous and heavy burdens, and their leaders were not showing them the way of salvation; they were making them twice the child of the devil.  Darkness was over the land, a darkness that could be felt.  Had God not so loved the world and sent His only begotten Son when He did, man was in danger of losing all freedom of choice and perishing eternally in damnation.

What is the sending of the only begotten Son into the world, if there is only one God?  This question has perplexed the Christian Church from its inception, as it did the Israelite Church as to when their Messiah would come.  The Hebrew people knew their Messiah would be the One and Only God, the creator of the universe, and that He would come with a strong hand, and His arm would rule for Him.  (Isaiah 25:9:  And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us: this is the LORD; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.)  Yet because of the ensuing darkness that blinded their minds, they could not see with their eyes (spiritual eyes), or hear with their ears (spiritual ears) or understand with their hearts even when their deliverer was in their midst.  They were a Church looking for a king that would give them, as a nation, preeminence above all nations; they had no idea that their souls needed to be saved.  Because they were a Church, which the Lord (till the time of His coming) had used to re-present His mercy toward mankind, they perceived God dealing only in their natural circumstances, never realizing He was revealing the successive steps in the process of their regeneration.  Their minds were veiled to the spiritual sense of the Word.  Hence, the leaders of that Church took the truths the Lord had given them and formulated doctrines that gratified their flesh.  Everything they took from the Scripture, they applied naturally.  When the Lord brought the internal sense of the Word to them, from the saying of the Old Testament they had applied only to their external life, it angered them; their evil natures were uncloaked.  The Jehovah of the Old Testament had bowed the heavens and come down.  He put on flesh and came and revealed the secrets of their heart.

The human, which was conceived of Jehovah the Father, born of the Virgin Mary, was not a son born from eternity; He was a son born in time.  The Lord never set aside His laws of order at any time.  If He had, He would have destroyed Himself.  From the spiritual world, the Lord had to enter the natural world, without the receptacle of a man's seed to carry the life into a woman's egg.  A virgin, of the house of David, named Mary, had found favor with God who would hearken unto His Word.

Luke 1:31-38:  And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call His name JESUS.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His father David:  And He shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of His kingdom there shall be no end.  Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?  And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.  (When faced with what seemed an impossibility, the Lord reminds Mary of her cousin Elisabeth.)  And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.  For with God nothing shall be impossible.  And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy Word.

Because God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.  I emphasize the word only because this would be the only time the Lord would put on a human form, and the soul of the human form be divine.  Every man born into this world, though the life in him belongs to God, derives hereditary evils from his earthly parents, unto the third and fourth generation.  (Ex 34:7)  Let me explain this by example of a pecan tree.  When a pecan from a pecan tree is planted into the ground, that pecan is not the life of the new tree.  The life of the new tree is from God!  The original pecan fell into the ground and died.  When a sapling springs up where the seed was planted, we don't question if it is a peach or pear tree.  We know because a pecan was planted, its offshoots will be a pecan.  The finite seed only carried the life.  A Scripture you might make note of is John 12:24.  Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

Life entered the virgin Mary without the human seed to transmit it.  The power of the Highest overshadowed her.  From Divine Good proceeded Divine Truth.  These two components, Good and Truth, constitute life.  They are indivisible.  The holy thing, which was born of Mary, was called the Son of God, the offspring of the Divine soul.  Her egg provided the body for the Divine Being.  God walked among men manifest in a flesh body, and by successive acts of redemption, undergoing temptations, He combated the heredity evils derived from the mother.  The inmost of the Son of God was Divine, because there were no heredity evils from the Father.  But the human He assumed from Mary was not like that of an angel, but like unto the seed of Abraham, so that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest.  Deity had entered fully into a body!  (Col 2:9)

What a story of redemption!  God had come to free His man from the bondages of hell.  By Himself, through the human He had assumed, He would bring back into order that which was out of order.  He would suffer temptations, resisting sin to the sweating of drops of blood.  Let me be very clear:  Had He not assumed the human, no devil of hell could have approached Him.  It was the inherited tendencies toward evils assumed from the mother that allowed the hells to come near Him.

One example of how the Lord dealt with these evils was after the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee:  After this He went down to Capernaum, He, and His mother, and His brethren, and His disciples: and they continued there not many days.  And the Jews' Passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:  And when He had made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.  And His disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of Thine house hath eaten Me up.  Then answered the Jews and said unto Him, What sign shewest Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest these things?  Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.  Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?  But He spake of the temple of His body.  (John 2:12-21)  The parable or the sign the Lord was revealing to the Jews that day by making a scourge of small cords and driving out the money changers was that everything acquired from the heredity evils of the human have to be driven out in order that the house might be a true house of prayer and not a gathering place of thieves.

The Lord came to regain man's freedom of choice, which was much more than just dealing with man's depraved state.  Freedom of choice is a precious thing, so precious that the Lord would veil Himself over in human flesh and fight against the hells until they were subjugated and under His total rule.  He bought back man's freedom to choose heaven or hell.  He condemned sin in the flesh. 

Had not the Lord completely put off the human He had assumed from Mary by the final temptation, the death on the cross, He could not have risen from the dead with a glorified human, assuming all power both in heaven and in earth.  It is not His death that saved us; it is the power of His endless life flowing from the glorified human—the man Christ Jesus—that saves us.  The glorified human guarantees that the hells will stay in their place because of the continual intercession flowing from the Divine Good.  If we walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, we will be saved, and saved to the uttermost!  The prototype for our regeneration is established.  Step by step, the Lord revealed the process.  Unlike Him though, we do not have to fight from our own power.  It is the Lord who wins the battles for us!  Glory to God.  He ever lives to make intercession for us!