by David Kum
CHAPTER FIVE
WEAKNESS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE FLESH
Jesus lived and walked in the flesh, He didn’t have a celestial body. He lived in a terrestrial body and had all the weaknesses of the terrestrial body but He was never limited by them. We do not deny the needs of the flesh by preaching the spiritual kingdom of God in Christ, what we preach is the reality of the wonderful and powerful realm that has been opened for us by Jesus Christ, a realm in which when we walk, we can subdue all the weaknesses and the limitations of the flesh.
There are countless examples of people in the Bible who subdued the flesh whether in weakness or limitations.
Weaknesses of the flesh: when man fell in the Garden of Eden, God’s word had already said “… for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” GEN 2:17 talking about the tree of knowledge that God had told Adam not to eat of. From this day, man became a weak being so that the things that constitute his environment began to plague him. Sicknesses and diseases, pain and suffering of old age and so on.
We were made to be a super race, a race that knows no weakness. Time was not meant to tell on us our strength was never meant to be abated the nature that God gave us at creation was not the one of weakness. This is the nature that Isaiah prophesied of when he said “they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles they shall run and not be weary and they shall walk and not faint” ISH 40:31 “faint” and “weary” speak of the weaknesses of the flesh and this is where the Adamic nature brought us to.
A lot of people think that Adam was just created to sit and walk in the Garden of Eden, just eat and lazy around no! Adam was taking care of the Garden; he was maintaining it by labor. The scriptures tell us that “the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” GEN 2:15 so it was not the fall that made Adam a farmer or a gardener he had been a gardener from the very beginning. What made the difference between Adam’s works before and after the fall was that the former was without any form of weakness but the later came with weakness. Look at what God told Adam after the fall… “in the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread” GEN 3:19 the work now comes with weakness and grace is no more.
Back then maybe Adam could dress the garden and not get tired at all but now he’d feel back pain and get tired with everyday’s work until he could feel a headache, stomach pain, dim eyesight, weak bones that could no longer lift heavy things and eventually probably didn’t have enough strength to lift himself out of his bed.
Adam could withstand any change in the weather he was not feeling any cold at night nor any heat. He was naked and didn’t even know; he had no need for anything man-made.
We invent things to help our weaknesses and limitations but from the very beginning, God did not create us with these weaknesses and limitations.
Scriptures, talking about Moses said “and Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated” DEUT 34:7. From the time Moses encountered God, he began to walk in the supernatural, he began to function from the very realm that Christ has brought us into. From this realm, Moses’ weakness and limitations had to give way. At one hundred and twenty years of age, Moses could still see perfectly and his natural strength was not abated. In other words, there was no weakness in Moses. As a matter of fact Moses was still so strong when he died, he did not die of any sickness or any natural cause he was beyond that realm, God had to tell him to go up to a mountain and die.
Satan takes advantage of the weakness that is in the flesh to introduce sin because the weaknesses of the flesh makes it to feel that it cannot do without certain “needs” and the devil takes advantage of such weakness to introduce sin into our lives. This was his aim when he deceived man from the very beginning. The fall brought about a weakness and he capitalized on that weakness to bring about sin into the life of man.
Satan capitalized on the fact that Jesus was hungry to tempt Him into tempting God. Most of what Satan tempted Jesus with, were things that are intended to satisfy some form weakness in the flesh. If our flesh didn’t have this weaknesses we would not be tempted in things such as lusts, envy, jealousy, pride, etc.
Limitations of the flesh: there are natural laws that bind man and create boundaries to cage him, limit his abilities and limit his influence. But the “man” that God created was a man that had no limits to what he can do. Man was the only creature that God gave dominion over the birds of the air, the cattle of the earth and every creeping thing that creeps and over the fish of the sea. So man’s dominion was over all the spheres of God’s creation. That talks about a limitless life, a life where human influence is felt everywhere intended without any necessary inventions. This was the life, the power that Adam had before the fall.
Jesus showed us that such a life was possible in the kingdom. The life that Jesus led left His disciples and followers in awe. The life we live on the earth is a life that constrains us to plan how to fit into natural events as they unfold themselves but the life of the kingdom gives us the power to make natural events to unfold the way we want.
Joshua makes a perfect example when he commanded the sun to stand still for a whole day, Moses also bore witness to this when he divided the red sea, he caused night fall in Egypt when the sun should have been shining. Elijah held back rain for three and a half years by his word. The same Elijah sat down again and called back the rain in prayer and then without any means of transportation outran the chariot of Ahab to the gates of Jezreel. Elisha turned the economy of Israel in one day.
The man of the spirit is without limit! He is not constraint by the events of the world rather he determines what the outcome should be. Let’s look at Jesus’ example: “and straightway Jesus constrained His disciples to get into a ship, and to go before Him unto the other side while He sent the multitudes away, and when He had sent the multitudes away, he went up into the mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, He was there alone. But the ship was now in the midst of the sea tossed with waves for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went to them walking on the sea” MATT 14:22-25.
I’m sure the disciples most have wondered how Jesus was going to get off that island when he told them to enter the boat and go ahead of Him but no one wanted to ask. The action that Jesus took for Him to have that “alone” moment was one that was going to keep Him on that island even when He was done praying. The night alone would have limited Him from leaving that place even if He had a foot path He could follow. But even if the day had broken, He would have been grounded there by the sea until a boat came along. These were natural and harmless laws that any man would obey but not the man of the spirit!
Jesus could not be limited by the night or the sea and this is the life that the kingdom offers, this is the spirit-led life. It can never be limited by the changes that occur in the land. It makes the difference between the man who is led by the Spirit of God and the one who is not because the Spirit of God cannot be limited.
One time there was a famine in the land of the Philistines where Isaac was, and the LORD told Isaac not to go down into Egypt but to dwell in the land that He tells him to dwell. Isaac dwelt in Gerar by the commandment of God. As events unfolded themselves Isaac sowed in the land, the same land of famine and that same year, he had a hundred fold for harvest. “Then Isaac sowed in that land and in the same year received an hundred fold and the LORD blessed him” GEN 26:12.
Isaac was unstoppable because God was with him, famine could not limit his productivity. studying further, you will understand that even the philistines among whom he dwelt ganged up against him, they stopped all the wells that Abraham his father had dug but the scriptures record: “and the man waxed great and went forward and grew until he became very great” GEN 13:26.
A time of famine is no time to sow crop, this is when people observe the season and reason based on what they see, but the man of the spirit is never limi
ted by any condition whether human or natural. He is always above all situation and all things must work in his favor.
We in the human bodies are limited by the five senses and by the things that we have experienced, everything must make “sense” one plus one must equal two. So it becomes hard for the man of the flesh to understand the things of the spirit that’s why Paul said “for the Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom but we preach Christ crucified unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness but unto them which are called both Jews and Greeks Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” 1COR 1:22-24.
Of course the Jews overtime have been “taught” by signs and prophecies which formed the scriptures that they believed and the Greeks have learned through wise observations and studies of their environments so they both learned to relate to their world by what they were used to. If it is not the way they had known it to be, no one else can tell them otherwise so the Jews missed the fulfillment of the very scriptures they had studied for so long and the Greeks missed the wisdom that is beyond any wisdom they had ever known.
It is rather unfortunate that there are a lot of people in the world today who have heard this gospel and still would not believe in the power and freedom that it offers. Jesus said “the spirit of the LORD is upon me because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel (good news) to the poor he had sent me to heal the broken hearted to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight o the blind to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord” LUKE 4:18 notice that the gospel (good news) is all about “preaching” or “proclaiming” as it is said in the Isaiah. In other words Jesus was giving an announcement; He was declaring an already existing good news to those He had been sent to.
That is what it means to “proclaim”. Christ was telling the poor “you don’t have to be poor anymore there is wealth for you” He was telling the captives that there is freedom for them, He was telling the sinner that the year of liberty had come and all this is encapsulated in a place in the spirit higher than anything they had ever known; that’s why Jesus said to the disciples “… the words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life but there are some of you that believe not…” JOHN 6:63-64. True to the words of the master there are some who do not believe.
Many rely on their natural abilities and limited knowledge to make any meaningful move in life rejecting what the gospel preaches and some even call it “foolishness” some say we are blind. That is why the master declared “and this is the condemnation, that light came into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” JOHN 3:19.
They don’t even know that these limited knowledge and abilities are in themselves a condemnation. It is like the sun that has risen in the sky to give light to the whole world but someone holds on to his candle light refusing the sun to shine through his window. He believes that there is no light greater than that of his candle and on top of that, he says those who are walking by this greater light are walking in foolishness.
There is a limit to what your normal candle light can show you as there is a limit to what natural wisdom and knowledge can teach you. There is a limit to what experience can teach you so it will be foolishness to hold on to the things that we see and know by our natural abilities. God has shown us more than where we are and what we know by our natural senses by the coming of Jesus Christ.
