So angels, which are servants, just serve the father, and do what he tells them to do; they don't carry the nature of God and they're not heirs. The only ones that are heirs, that have the right to ownership of all of creation, and to share it with God, is man. That's the privilege we have.
If you're an heir you look at every task differently to a servant. If you're a servant, we just do what you're told to do. But if you're an heir, you're thinking: this is not just a job to do, this is my father's business, and I'm working with him to build something that I'm going to be a part sharer in. Think about that.
The Bible talks a lot about inheritance and how, when it came to inheritance, remember Jacob and Esau - how Esau despised the inheritance, but Jacob valued it; and even though he was crooked in how he went about trying to get it, God valued the fact that He valued eternal things. God raised him up.
We're created then, to be representative of God.
Genesis 1:26 - "Let them have Dominion"
Psalm 115:16 - "The heaven, even the heavens are the Lord's; but earth, he's given to the Children of men."
Who has he given the earth to? To men! Our whole legacy in the future is to rule the creation God gave us. Of course, since we've only got 70, 80, 90 years, whatever it is, we need to have a resurrected body to fulfill all of that; but that's all part of the plan as well. The design has never changed; that man would be a steward of the earth and everything that God has created.
Psalm 8:6 - "You have made him to have Dominion over the works of your hands. You put all things under his feet."
God has created man to rule as his representative. You've got to understand that one of your primary functions as a human being is to be a representative of someone. An ambassador is a representative of someone; they represent another country. They don't give their own opinions; they give the opinions of the country they belong to. You are called an ambassador for the Kingdom of God. Therefore, you are an ambassador, to speak and act on behalf of your father. You need to know what he has to say - about marriage, family, finances, attitudes, morality. He's got a lot to say, about a lot of things, because he's got the idea how to make it work. If I'm His representative, then I need to discover how he wants things to work.
It's great to see people doing a relational course, learning how to make life work according to the pattern that God gave. I'm sure those going through it would have found: I'm not doing it right! So dumb, how could I have done that for so long, and not known? Ignorance is the problem - we don't know God's ways! We do our own dumb ideas, and then it doesn't work. We end up yelling at one another, and that's not working either. No-one's listening. So we need to really get to know God's ways.
If you're chosen to be a representative, a representative stands in the place of another. So man, that's you and me, men and women, were called to stand on the earth, in the place of God standing on the earth, as His representative. That means you act on His behalf. You function to do what He needs done. That's why every one of us has got a call on our life. Everyone has got something you need to do.
We're called to display what He is like. To be a representative means you show up what someone else is like in the way you respond - a lot of Christians need to get that one. If you're the representative, then you act to advance His purposes; a representative - stand in His place; act on His behalf; show what He is like; advances His interests - that's what it means to be representative.
Here's the question: will you represent yourself; or will you represent what God your father? That's the core of the issue. So Adam, carrying the DNA of his father, could then make a decision: he could decide to be the representative of his father, and fulfill his purpose; or he could cast off the restraint and act on his own behalf, and do what he felt would be in his own interest - and therein is the cause of the fall. This is why man fell. This is why man lost his everything. This is why we have the problems in the earth. It comes down to this: instead of acting as God, his father's representative, and fulfilling what his father wanted; he decided to advance his own interests, to cast off the restraint of his father, cast off the boundary, his father set. I have a better plan for me to get ahead - that's the core of the fall. I have a better plan than God's plan, and it will get me ahead - that's the core of it.