The Fallacy of Having Two Natures
by Norman Grubb
Revised and Edited by Michael Nevins
In our first "little children" stage (I John 2:12,13), we only have our eyes opened by the law and Spirit to our outer sinfulness (or bad behavior), made plain by our committed sins. Therefore, our only understanding of Christ's atoning sacrifice is of Him being "evidently set forth crucified among you" (Gal 3:1; Rom 3:25), and being seen by us as a person separate from us, dying on the cross. His death was evidenced by the shedding of the blood, then experiencing hell for us on the cross during those "three hours of darkness" when he died spiritually being then forsaken by His Father (Matt 27:46) and then being "raised from the dead by the glory of the Father" (Rom 6:4). As we receive Him and confess Him by faith (John1:12; Rom. 10:9), the Spirit bears witness to us (Rom 8:16) that we are "justified by faith," and thus have peace with God.
But much more important than this, God immediately begins to bring into being His eternal purpose by us and as us through the Spirit beginning to express his other-love nature in our form. In our ignorance and our deceived ideas that we have which include thinking we have a nature of our own, we believe it is we loving Him, which is an impossibility because we humans do not have a love faculty: Man is not autonomous! He is not the derivation of any power or the cause of any independent act or action. The other love nature is that of the Spirit-Deity now indwelling us and manifesting His nature through our faculty, (vessel, body, temple). (2 Peter 1:4) What we think of in Romans 5:5 as our new birth experience is that it is us loving Him. When our eyes are open to that Scripture, we see it is His Spirit-given love by which we are loving Him. He has begun to be Himself in our form, (expressing Himself through us His vessel body). "The love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us." We are now "new creations" (2 Cor. 5:16-17) and by His operating nature in and as us, we no longer love self-for-self, but self-for-Him. By His Spirit, we see all men, even Jesus Himself, as Spirit (not flesh) people and, indeed, then all things are seen in a new light.
However, now begins our real problem. Sins are put out of sight forever, but what about the self that appears to keep sinning? Sins, the product, (outward behavior) are no longer our problem. The sinner-producer (Satan)--who speaks to us in first person and uses our vessel which appears to us to be our sinful self (is the problem). We who are desperate for the fulness of God in our lives start a second and deeper misery. The misery of the convicted sinner is his sins. The deeper misery of the born-again saint is his apparently inconsistent self! A radical discrepancy increasingly distresses him. He thankfully recognizes goodness (righteousness) proceeding from him in new love, joy, peace etc., and is quick to say they are not from him but are the fruit of the Spirit now being manifested in his newborn life (Gal 5:22,23). Good things proceed from him which are the fruit of the good spirit, but then bad things are also evident which must mean he has some bad nature expressing them. So then he says that he is twofold. That is where the fallacy, which has so taken over the evangelical church, is believed and accepted by the believer. If the good is from the Spirit, where does the bad come from? The answer supposedly is a bad nature still in me. But there is the fallacy and deceit.
We humans never had a nature of our own but were created to contain and manifest God in His divine nature. So we falsely attribute a badness to our human selves. But our question should be, if we don't attribute our goodness to ourselves but to the Spirit of Righteousness, why then don't we attribute our badness to the spirit of badness (or unrighteousness)? (I John 4:6) Why do we put our human selves in? We have been bemused and muddle-headed. So here is our agony, and we see at the same time the perfect purpose of God. Unless we see and experience the sin of sins, the lie of the independent self, and have come to a disillusionment and hatred of it (as Paul in Rom. 7:14-24: "O wretched man that I am...") as deep and thorough as our disgust and hatred of our old life of sins, we will never see our need to be free from it. Once we know the total truth of ourselves, we shall not revert to the falsity of the independent self, any more then a saved sinner reverts to his sinful condition (1 John 3:9). (We can be caught up again in a particular sin, but never again into occupation by that sin nature of Satan--this is the difference between sins (the outward acts) and sin (the person of Satan). We must get this clear!)
Therefore, it has been of necessity that we humans, if we are for eternity to be spontaneous expressers of the God of self-giving love in His nature, we must first have tasted to its roots the deceiving nature of the god of self-getting love, that god of the deceived independent self (Isa. 53:6"... every man turned to his own way...") and, at all cost, have sought deliverance from it -- which is that "hunger and thirst after righteousness" of Matthew 5:6. Even the man, Jesus, the Son of God, called the "Second Man" as the ideal of humanity, was confronted for forty days with the spirit of error, being "driven" to that confrontation by the Spirit of Truth. (Mark 1:12). Jesus being tempted of such intensity that he did not see his need for food (only "afterward was He an hungered" -- Mt 4:2). He was confronted with and finished with these temptations to act independently. So even He was tempted and tried as we are with the same flesh pulls and behaviors.
The temptation in the belief of a self-for-self person is the heart of the deception of the two nature teaching. It brings with it a message of despair commonly known as "worm theology". We are saved but not completely saved, we still have a sin nature to tame and deal with. We even sing songs about it. "Only a sinner saved by grace" Yes, we were a sinner under the control of Satan, but now we are saints set free because the enmity was cast out and slain. The very lie of Satan; is to get us to belief in ourselves as wicked and evil selves when the only real self is Christ in us now expressing his life through us. So we declare that we "are now the people of God." When we start believing in the Christ that is in us we will be set free from that double minded flesh believing in two natures.
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