Whose Nature?

"You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of it." (John 8:44, emphasis added)

"Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust." (2 Peter 1:2-4, emphasis added)

"But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me." (Romans 7:20)

We have an expression in the English language: "It's human nature." The phrase is usually used whenever we hear of someone doing something negative (e.g., lying, being lazy, being greedy, etc.). Modern "translations" of the New Testament have carried over this thought in their interpretations of Scripture from the ancient Greek language, thus unconsciously adding a layer to the words that was not there originally.

Look at how various modern versions render Galatians 5:24 ("Now those who are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.") and thus obscure its meaning:

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires." (NIV)

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed their sinful nature to his cross. They don't want what their sinful nature loves and longs for." (NiRV)

"Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good--crucified." (The Message)

"And those who belong to Christ Jesus (the Messiah) have crucified the flesh (the godless human nature) with its passions and appetites and desires." (Amplified)

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there." (NLT)

"And because we belong to Christ Jesus, we have killed our selfish feelings and desires." (Contemporary English Version)

"Those of us who belong to Christ have nailed our sinful old selves on His cross. Our sinful desires are now dead." (New Life Version)

In each case, the flesh (as the agency through which sin expresses itself) is replaced by the thought that we have a nature which is inherently evil. However, Young's Literal Translation renders the verse as: ". . . and those who are Christ's, the flesh did crucify with the affections, and the desires . . . ." The Greek doesn't even personalize the affections and desires. It just says that there is flesh and there are affections and desires. Whose desires and whose nature?

John 8:44 reveals whose desires and whose nature they are. And, in Romans 7:20, Paul reveals through the Holy Spirit that the culprit is indwelling sin, not himself. Satan has a nature and God has a nature but the Scriptures don't indicate that we do. We have no independent nature. When God breathed into Adam he became a living soul. When that breath leaves we all return to dust. We are completely dependent on God. He did not create us to be separate entities.

We can contain either the living God or we can contain His antithesis, the spirit of error, Satan (for the Scriptures declare that the spirit of the prince of the power of the air is now working in the sons of disobedience, Ephesians 2:1-2). Our great fallacy is in thinking that we can live as empty vessels, operating with a life that is in us inherently, sort of like a watch that has been wound up by its maker and has been left to tick its life away.

But the wonderful truth is that the nature of the invader can be replaced with divine nature, with God Himself, and we become expressers of that One who is all for others rather than all for Himself. We were created for union and when we realize that union with the Lord Jesus we have found the meaning of life in living experience.

Read Romans 7 in the light of indwelling sin being an invader spirit, Satan, and the truth becomes startlingly clear. Paul is making every effort to distinguish the two: himself and the one who has control of him as a slave owner. In his light we see light. He wants us to see what he saw. It's as if he's saying, "I want you to see this. Look at what's really going on."

Let's see what he says.

"So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me." (Romans 7:17)

"But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me." (Romans 7:20)

He could not make it clearer but we have been blinded and conditioned by our own preconceived notions of what it means to be human and have taken our understanding of it from the world, which is also the expression of Satan, the deceiver. In our attempts to understand our own experience we have identified too much with what we feel and have been deceived into thinking that all those desires originate with us when, in reality, we are merely conveyors of the desires of another. We have been expressing Satan's nature. Now we have the privilege and freedom to express the nature of God or, rather, to allow Him to express Himself through us.

A fellow-worker of Paget Wilkes', Hubert Verner, recalled of him: "I never knew anyone who had the gift of expounding the Scriptures in greater measure . . . His zeal for God's glory and his longing to reach men made it almost impossible for him to rest . . . He could talk on any subject, but best of all on the power of the precious Blood to cleanse the heart from sin . . . He loved to put the two verses together, Romans 7:17 and Galatians 2:20--'Not I, but sin that dwelleth in me' and 'Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me'. I had been trusting for a full salvation, I had never seen until then that sin was something separate from myself. He made it clear that the sin mentioned in Romans 7 is something apart from you that controls you and renders your best desires powerless. It is that inherited sin that the devil put into our first parents and is in every child of Adam until cleansed through faith in the precious blood of Christ."

This is the wonder of the revelation of life that God has given us: that we can be expressers of divine nature rather than expressers of sin because of what Christ has done on the cross. As vessels, the nature of Satan can now be replaced with the nature of God and He can express Himself by us.