Page 40 - The Divine Unfolding of God's Plan of Redemption

The question comes riding down the ages to every man, woman, and child that has
ever lived, “Where art thou?” Our position before God is of paramount importance.
The question, “Where art thou?” precedes the question, “What is it that thou hast

done?” If the first question can be satisfactorily answered, the second will not be
asked.
“If any man be in Christ [position], he is a new creature…God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them” (II Cor.

5:17-19). How blessed, how precious is this way of God‟s justification! How
inexpressibly glad am I that I have received Him and that I am in Him, that He will
never ask me, “What is this that thou hast done?”

Our poor first parents were unjustified, cowering there in their fig-leaf clothes.
When Adam comes before the presence of God, even though still clothed in his
fig-leaves, he admits that he is naked! True, man‟s own religiousness is the exact
equivalent of stark-nakedness in God‟s sight. He has chosen Satan as his lord and

father, and so he does the works of his new father. The Lord Jesus Christ at a later date
said to certain ones, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye
will do…for he is a liar and the father of it.”

God demands a direct answer to a question: “Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I
commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” But he gets disingenuousness and
deceit from both the man and the woman, and an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere,
rather than an honest and straightforward admission of their own guilt. The first

instinct of human pride is to absolve itself from guilt. Others may be wrong, but never
self. It was said of a certain young lawyer who held conversation with the Son of God
in His earthly walk that he was “willing to justify himself,” and of Israel, that they
were “ignorant of God‟s righteousness, and going about to establish their own

righteousness.”

It has ever been thus. God lets them say what they have to say, and then he cuts
through the flimsy fabric of self-defense and passes sentence, the moral judgment

upon the man, the woman, and the curse upon the earth. The inanimate creation
invariably reflects the attitude of its governing power to the sovereign God. Paul tells
us that “The creation was subject to VANITY, not willingly, but by reason of him who

subjected it.” The creation indeed had no choice in the matter but must share in the
punishment of its former federal head and be subject to the evil power to which Adam
had elected to delivered it.

It is to be noted that thorns and thistles were the symbols of earth‟s primal curse

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