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Viewed from the world’s perspective, God’s ways are absolutely upside-down and inside-out. Whoever chooses to submit to these seeming contradictions triggers recurring battles from within and from without. “So you are engaged in the same conflict which you saw me [wage] and which you now hear to be mine [still]” {Phil 1:30} wrote Paul.

“What is born of [from] the flesh is flesh...and what is born of the Spirit is spirit”{ John 3:5}. The phrase “according to its kind” or “according to their kinds” is repeated seven time in the first chapter of Genesis, clearly establishing that like begets like. The King James Version renders this phrase “after its kind” or “after their kinds.” Just as an apple tree cannot produce a rhinoceros, neither can the carnal nature produce righteous fruit..

How humbling for the natural man to admit that the flesh, in which he has learned to place his dependence, hope and trust, is impotent to produce anything pleasing to God. Flesh can produce only flesh, and though man may cover it with outward elegance and display it with pride, that flesh never becomes less fleshly.

“How can we who died to sin live in it any longer?” {Rom 6:1} asks Paul. Christ died to deliver us from both the penalty and power of sin: “We know that our old (unrenewed) self was nailed to the cross with Him in order that [our] body [which is the instrument] of sin, might be made ineffective and inactive for evil, that we might no longer be the slaves of sin. For when a man dies he is freed -- loosed, delivered --from [the power of] sin [among men]” {Rom 6:6-7}.

Like Paul, we must rightly judge the flesh and its works: “For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot perform it -- I have the intention and urge to do what is right, but no power to carry it out” {Rom 7:18}. Only by reckoning ourselves dead to sin and alive unto God {Rom 6:11} can the spirit man rule from within. “...work out...your own salvation with reverence and awe and trembling [self-distrust, that is, with serious caution, tenderness of conscience, watchfulness against temptation; timidly shrinking from whatever might offend God and discredit the name of Christ]. Not in your own strength for it is God who is all the while effectually at work in you -- encouraging and creating in you the power and desire -- both to will and work of His good pleasure and satisfaction and delight” {Phil 2:12-13}.

To believe that our religious rituals and fleshly good deeds make us more acceptable to God is self-delusion and blindness. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, pretenders -- hypocrites! for you clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion -- prey, spoil, plunder --and grasping self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside may be clean also. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, pretenders -- hypocrites! for you are like tombs that have been white-washed which look beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything impure. Just so, you also outwardly seem to people to be just and upright but inside you are full of pretense and lawlessness and iniquity” {Matt 23:25-29}.

To follow Christ into the crucified life is to be deemed by the world as weak, foolish, stupid, and even scum. “We have been made and are now the rubbish and filth of the world -- the offscouring of all things, the scum of the earth:” {I Cor 4:13}.

Again the apostle Paul sets forth the contradiction between that which God chooses to use and that which the world judges to be foolish (dull, stupid, blockhead, absurd) and weak (feeble, impotent, without strength): “...the foolish thing [that has its source in] God is wiser than men, and the weak thing [that springs from] God is stronger than men. For [simply] consider your own call, brethren; not many [of you were considered to be] wise, according to human estimates and standards; not many influential and powerful; not many of high and noble birth. [No,] for God selected --deliberately chose --what in the world is foolish to put the wise to shame, and what the world calls weak to put the strong to shame. And God also selected -- deliberately chose-- [what] in the world [is] branded lowborn and insignificant, and branded and treated with contempt, even the things that are nothing that He might depose and bring to nothing the things that are; So that no mortal man should (have pretense for glorying and) boast in the presence of God” {I Cor 1:25-29}.

In Moses we also find God’s paradoxes at work: “[Aroused] by faith Moses, when he had grown to maturity and become great, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, Because he preferred rather to share the oppression (suffer the hardships) and bear the shame of the people of God than to have the fleeting enjoyment of a sinful life. He considered the contempt and abuse and shame [borne for] the Christ, the Messiah [Who was to come], to be greater wealth than all the treasures of Egypt, for he looked forward and away to the reward (recompense). [Motivated] by faith he left Egypt behind him, being unawed and undismayed by the wrath of the king: for he never flinched but held staunchly to his purpose and endured steadfastly as one who gazed on Him Who is invisible” {Heb 11:24-27}.

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