Eternal Life; Healing for Our Greed

By Adeoye O Oyewole

ETERNAL LIFE is the only antidote for the universal monster we inherited from Adam after the fall. This little book is an unveiling of this Truth in practical terms for those earnest seekers that desire genuine CHANGE. Jesus Christ came to give this LIFE and to give it more ABUNDANTLY.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483576763

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Greed is an attitude to life emanating from a state of mind. It is universal because it cuts across race, nation and all social classes. It carries a somewhat universal human genetic coding. Oxford Advanced Learners’ dictionary (6th edition) defines greed as a strong desire for more power, food and money more than what one really needs and at the expense of others.

Dictionary thesaurus, Legal, Wikipedia and Hutchinson Dictionary defines Greed as an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than one need or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth. Greed has synonyms like: selfishness, gluttony, ravenousness, covetousness, insatiableness, egocentricity, and materialism. Simply put, it is an obsession with self.

Infants are spontaneously greedy without any formal training or induction. It suggests strongly that there is a classical, fundamental underlying state of mind that facilitates this vice in us. Nobody is free! Evidence of this mindset dots the pages of human history.

ORIGINS OF GREED

Greed has its origin in the fallen human nature; the heredity sin. We became greedy, self-conscious and materialistic after the fall. We lost touch with God then we became insecure, fugitives, self-serving and crude.

Man in his fallen state has become very desperate, very insecure and mindless of divine principles of relating to God again. He attempted to reconnect back to God in his own way by planning a restoration of relationship back to God for the cure of his depravity, his greed using his own method and for his self-preservation.

Romans 1 Vs 28: "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient".

All the approaches man had come up with independent of reconnecting vitally with God in the heart is futile because it can never be effective. It is the loss of fellowship, loss of connection with God that made man insecure. This insecurity then manifests in greed, materialism and crudity.

Man wanted to build a tower in search of God for selfish propaganda. Most of our religious principles had always been man in his state of rebellion attempting to get restored to God without a nature change. Greed is a nature state; a state of mind, basic and primordial that cannot be tackled effectively by surface psychological modifications.

This abnormal mental state that facilitates our greed was inherited from Adam as the progenitor of the human race. He ate the forbidden fruit – the fruit of knowledge of good and evil – thus becoming morbidly aware of his own self. His innocence, purity and simplicity were lost and he became insecure. This finds its greatest expression as greed, which has civilized expression as self-preservation and it is the bedrock for our psychological motivational theories.

Gen 3 Vs 7 – 8: And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the tree of the Garden.

Romans 5 Vs 12-14: Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world; and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men; that all have sinned. Nevertheless SIN reigned from Adam to Moses; even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.

PASSIONS OF GREED

Greed is a psychological entity with an underlying spiritual template. It is the bedrock of what goes with the name of inordinate ambition, desperate and aggressive pursuit of life goals. Man in the original plan of GOD was not supposed to be mindlessly aggressive in the pursuit of his legitimate role in life; the fall made him insecure hence his desperation.

1 John 2 Vs 15-16: Love not the world neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. For all that is in the world; the lust of the flesh, the lust of eyes and the pride of life are not of the father but of the world.

Our ambition at a very basic level is fueled by these three fundamental lusts - lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. It is the multidimensional expression of the greed.

The world system, rendered as ‘kosmos’ in Greek, suggests a state of highly organized sociological happenings propelled by the devil through the self-awareness occasioned and generated by the fall. This self-awareness manifest in the sociological substrate as those three deadly passions.

These lusts have permeated and tainted every aspect of our life with grave implications at the family, business, national and international levels.

Eugene Peterson describes the world system this way:

"World is an atmosphere, a mood. It is nearly as hard for a sinner to recognize the world’s temptation as it is for a fish to discover the impurities in the water. There is a sense, a feeling that things aren’t right, that the environment is not whole, but just what it is eludes analysis. We know that the spiritual atmosphere, in which we live erodes faith, dissipates hope and corrupts love, but it is hard to put our finger on what is wrong".

This is a very classical description of the feeling, the experience of ‘kosmos’ hijacking our thoughts and invariably our destinies forcing us to conform to the common