No one knows what is in a man but the spirit. For all things were created in unity within God’s word. A person is of God, but lost from God in sin. Therefore he lives not who he is but who he wants, desires, knows he should be. Or does he? What does he want to be if he has not the created will dwelling in him? For being certainly is not separable from the desire to be. Even if one wishes to be dead, one wishes to be dead because one imagines that the state of non life is better than the state of life. If one is, one desires to be, for one cannot conceive of non-existence, much less desire it. If then he has lost his being as it is in God, the source of his being, what then is there left to produce in him any power that can be said to be a desire for good? This is not a void of desire, for being is desiring, rather it is a desire for the experience of destruction.

This is the awful predicament of sin. Not only does man not have in him what makes him a man, but he does not even have in him the power to desire it if God does not recreate this desire in him. For he has the law of God on their conscience, but with his every inclination he flees it! If then man does not even know himself or what to desire himself even to be, then how can he know another? No, rather outside of Christ the desire to know another must also be a desire for the spiritual destruction of another.

But do we not know of those who have not Christ yet seek good in this world? Certainly! But these ‘good’ individuals are masking the spiritual deadness by attempting to produce good symptoms. This then only alienates them from the knowledge of truth; that they are in fact dead in spirit. So even the act of ‘goodness’ becomes an agent to assure eternal destruction.

Thanks be to God who has desired for us what we could not. He has desired himself, and himself in us. For he alone is true being and life, and his desire is not idle but effective in word and efficient in action. Christ has desired for us what we could not; he desired that we be one in himself that God’s desires work themselves through us as we are brought into him. Having died for us, and desired to do so, not for independent gain, but in submission to the Father, for the prize of his own relationship which he has eternally with the Father, he denies all human desire for the preservation of the body, clearly showing that as a human he desired to avoid the pain itself, and desires God for us, putting all else aside. In fact, he took upon himself the human desire for the experience of self destruction and spent it utterly on the destruction of himself, conquering it through his resurrection and making it void of power in the eternal. Now that all desire of all goodness by man is accomplished by him it is by faith that we are then transformed into Christ’s body which desires the wholeness and unity of this true spiritual body in the love of the Father. In this way, man once again is.