Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Prophe-Zine Issue 088
PropheZine #88
Jan. 15, 2000
Bob Lally Publisher
Mimi Nila Senior Editor
Abraham George Asst. Editor
Lori Eldridge Asst. Editor
Bob Ippolito Asst. Editor
ARTICLES
Norman Grubb ROMANS 6 TO 8 PAUL'S KEY TO THE LIBERATED LIFE
Norman grubb....The Key To Everything
Ken Onweller....The Cure For Rapturitis
Gayle Erwin........No Exit
COMMENTARIES
Berit Kjos.........Pokemon Comics Add New Twist to Fad
POEMS
Submitted by Bob Lally (author unknown).......God Is
********************************************************************************
Greetings Everyone!
The Year 2000! When I graduated from high school in 1973 I remember discussing with friends what we would be doing in 20 years, 25 years. The year 2000 was so far away it never entered our minds! Well, here we are older, grayer (for those who still have hair!) and hopefully wiser. The thought of being a Born-Again Christian never entered my mind either (I am Jewish). It sure was in God's mind, no?
The staff or PropheZine would like to wish you a happy year 2000.
We have installed a new and modern Discussion Board (http://www.aciservices.com/prophezine/msgboard/index.html)
Please stop by and take a look. We have 420 users on the board and it is incredibly active. My best guess is that it may be the largest and most active Christian board on the Internet.
PropheZine has some needs in the areas of Assistant Editors (Newsletter), News Hounds for the News Bites and we always need Prayer Warriors. Please pray and consider joining the PropheZine ministry. We currently have a staff of 40 so you won't be alone!
PropheZine is growing. We now have had visitors from over 150 countries. What an honor and level of responsibility God has bestowed upon us at PropheZine.
Enjoy this issue. My first issue of PropheZine was #12. I became involved in PropheZine around issue 16. Here we are at issue #88. Amazing! Please feel free to email this to friends and family. They may subscribe from the Emails Lists on the Home Page (http://www.prophezine.com)
Bob Lally
Senior Editor
Owner
==========================================
|==========================================
|
| ROMANS 6 TO 8
| PAUL'S KEY TO THE LIBERATED LIFE
| PART 1
| by Norman Grubb
|
(Edited by M.F. Blume)
I suppose every eager searcher after God's truth for the liberated life knows that the biblical key to opening the door lies in Paul's letter to the Romans, chapters six to eight. I have been a persistent searcher for years, and these pages of my many Bibles have been well worn! I think now, in my nineties, as never before, I have in working focus what Paul is saying. So I am writing this for those who are also diggers and hopefully finders.
I will assume that we are already born-again knowers by God's Spirit (Rom. 5:5).
As confessed sinners, in our guilty and lost condition, we found "peace with God" through Christ, who was "set forth as a propitiation through faith in His blood" and "Raised again for our justification" (Rom. 3:25; 4:25; 5:1,5,10).
Now we come to the practical question of Rom. 6:1, as up to date today as when it was first posed. Is there such a sure provision for daily consistent and holy living as for having the past blotted out? "Yes, surely," says Paul. "Don't you know that it is all part of the gift of a full salvation?" So in these chapters he begins to explain himself, and we will follow along.
INTO DEEP WATERS
Paul starts by taking for granted that his readers have a deeper quality of spiritual understanding than most of us today had at our new birth. "Know ye not," he asks, "that when our Lord Jesus Christ hung on that cross, he represented us all, and therefore His dying there means you and I died there?"
Water baptism -- our being immersed beneath the waters and lifted out again --
is a symbol of the fact that when He died on the cross and was buried in the tomb, by faith we died, were buried, and then were raised with Him (Rom. 6:3,4).
And as the Holy Spirit entered the resurrected body of Jesus, which represented all ours, the same Spirit has entered us, delivering us from Satan, whose sin nature had entered our bodies and taken us over at the Fall (Rom. 6:5,6).
Therefore, we have died in Christ's death to the indwelling and operation of Satan's nature in us: we are "dead to sin" (Rom. 6:7-11). Sin, however, isn't dead to us as an operating power in our world, and thus we experience its pressures on us. But in our bodies we have died to its false claims to be still dwelling in us and thus expressing its self-for-self nature by us. Equally, the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is dwelling in us and living His quality of other-love by us. Thus, we are expressers of God's holy nature, just as formerly we were expressers of Satan's sin nature (1 Jn. 4:4,6).
"So," Paul says, "based on the historical fact that Christ settled the sin question once for all" (Rom. 6:9,10), "we now reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God" (Rom. 6:11). We therefore no longer yield ourselves as agents of that self-for-self sin nature, but as agents of God's other-love nature. This is strong meat, packed into a few sentences. But does it really work out in our lives?
A STARTLING STATEMENT
A much deeper problem needs to be solved in order to make workable the life of being dead to sin and alive to God through Christ. We must be dead to law, as well as to sin. But why? Is not the law a safeguard to keep us from running into loose living? "No," Paul maintains. "You have a much deeper reality to learn -- that you have no independent human self, which keeps or doesn't keep the law.
You are really just a slave to the deity who owns you, and it is his law you keep."
Paul slips in a statement here which sounds startling, but which turns the key in the lock for us when we know it. "Sin shall not have dominion over you," he states, "because you are not under law, but under grace" (Rom. 6:14). But what does that mean? Many would ask, "Is not the law the standard for right living, announced by Moses in those Ten Commandments and demanded of us by God, with the penalty of judgment and wrath if we disobey it? Is not the Law the means by which God exercises His control over us and by which we endeavour to live? Obviously, we would go wildly into lives of self-gratifying license, if the conditions of the Law were removed."
But this is our vast error. We have been under the Satanic delusion of being independent selves who can and must respond to law. And while we think this, we are actually still salves to Satan, who compels us either to try and fulfill or to resist God's laws, thereby obeying his own law of sin and death. So the more we think we should obey God's Law, the more Satan is aroused to make us break it. And we shall always have this problem while we blindly think we are independent selves who can keep the law.
THE GREAT DECEPTION
The main consequence of our yielding to Satan at the Fall was that he deceived us all (Rev. 12:9) into thinking that we have a human self which can operate and manage itself, even as he lyingly thinks he can manage himself. In fact, we are only operated and managed by the deity self -- Spirit of Truth or spirit of error (1 Jn. 4:6) -- who owns us. This was symbolized in the Garden by receiving the fruit of one or the other of the two trees. So when the Law, which is meant to expose Satan's lie, comes to us in our deluded condition, Satan has the laugh on us. We obey his self-for-self sin laws, being his slaves, and cannot obey God's laws.
We who are saved admitted our sins in their outer forms and received forgiveness and justification through our Lord Jesus Christ and the new birth of the Spirit.
But we were still too blind to recognize the depth of Satan's deceit in us. We thought that as saved and new creatures in Christ we could still take a share in managing ourselves. Paul explains the full meaning of redemption through our dying in Jesus' death to Sin-Satan's indwelling and becoming alive in His resurrection to God's Spirit now indwelling us. But it is meaningless to reckon and say that we are now dead to sin and alive to God while that root deception is not yet out of us and we think we are more than a people managed only by the deity spirit in us as vessels, branches, temples, slaves, or wives.
UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT
In order for us to learn this indwelling principle to its depths, Paul challenges, "Just try to keep the Law, and you'll find the very opposite occurring. You have been a slave to Satan and sin and are now a slave to Christ and His righteousness. But that change of owner and indweller doesn't truly lay ahold of you in its reality while there remains some sense of self-relying self in you as if you are not just a slave. So just try to keep the law and live the Christian life; and you will find you can't, because there never was a 'just you'."
Your trying is really the remnant of Satan's deceit on you that you are an independent self. Then you will respond to his sin controls and fall on your face in your failures to keep the law; and that failure will at last expose to you this lie that you can act and respond independently. There is no such thing.
your "I can" is still Satan having his lying hold on you.
Ten at last, it can become real to you that Jesus' dying for us and as us, and His rising by God's Spirit for and as us means a change of ownership. But we never did own ourselves. Satan owner is out for keeps and Christ owner is in for keeps. Now we just need to know we are Christ-managed, never self-managed, and no longer Satan-managed. The outer Law is now meaningless. We are dead to it because our "I" is solely the expresser of God's life; and he operates His laws and nature spontaneously in us, by us, and as us. That is our answer to every false claim in this Satan-infected world that Satan has a hold on us. Christ in us is our law; and He fulfills it by us, just as Satan used to fulfill his by us. Satan is out for keeps, Christ is in for keeps and now we can actually live what we said we do live in Romans 6:11 -- dead to sin and alive to God in our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:11).
THE BASIS OF THE SOLUTION: ONLY CONTAINERS
In eternity, God begat His Son, thereby transmuting His own fire self into a light self and becoming the self of other love. We understand from Genesis that our first parents were created in God's image, to be containers of His Spirit and expressers of His nature by means of their humanity. To symbolize this planned union, the Tree of Life with its precious fruit was set in the midst of the Garden.
Satan, on the other hand, his self of fiery desires into the self-for-self nature of consuming love. And this nature of his is what he infused into us all at the Fall, as though it were ours. So man, who was designed to be united with the Spirit of self-for-others, was tricked into yielding to the Satanic spirit of self-for-self (Eph. 2:1-3; Jn 8:44).
In the present, we have learned and by faith put into practice our Lord Jesus Christ's Calvary identification with us and as us. As a result, a tremendous change of indwelling spirit has taken place in us; and that deceiver no longer indwells and controls us.
NO SEPARATE SELF
When Paul tells us that we are no longer under that former outer law of Moses, doesn't that mean that we shall be given over to a spirit of license? "God forbid," pronounces Paul. In our new life our human selves are motivated, controlled, and spontaneously express the nature of God, by His Spirit united to our spirits. Laying the foundation for this assurance in Romans 6:16-7:6, Paul there presents one strong evidence after another that there is no intermediate, "independent me" to be taken over, unless we foolishly believe it.
"First," he says, "we were always slaves; and a slave just obeys his owner." We had handed ourselves over to owner Sin-Satan, to express his sin-nature. Now, however, we have become God's willing slaves through the obedience of faith which takes Him at His word, and we express His nature of holiness.
"Put it this way," Paul explains. "We were free in our sinning, with no response to God's law. Now we are free in our right living, with no response to Satan's law. And there is no 'you,' with an in-between or independent life of your own (Rom 6:16-20)."
Next Paul introduces a second illustration: a fruit-bearing tree. he describes how we are now producing right, good fruit in our lives, whereas we were ashamed of the former fruit (Rom 6:21,22). He wants us to understand that we are only branches which have changed trees. We never produced fruit without a tree!
To sum it up, we learn through the slave and branch analogies that we never exercised any kind of in-between life as self-operators. We are slaves of either one owner or another, or branches of either one vine or the other. Therefore, the idea that we humans were self-operating selves and had a "nature" or quality of life of our own has been a vast human illusion -- there never was such a thing. We have been created to produce the way of life of our Deity Creator and Operator. Only first we had to experience and discard through Calvary that false deity operator, who produced that opposite, negative way of life.
In Romans 7:1-6 Paul uses one further powerful and convincing illustration - the law of marriage, which he speaks of here as the "law of the husband" (Rom 7:2).
The wife is legally bound to her husband so long as he lives, and he is her "lord" (1 Pet 3:6); she receives his seed, conceives by it, and produces their family.
We humans were "married" at the Fall to our Sin-satan husband and became his sin family, he working in us the "motions of sins" which produced "fruit unto death" (Rom 7:5). We had to do this according to the law and demands of marriage, as any change of husbands would have been an "adultery." It looked hopeless; our husband was not going to die.
But there was One, representing the whole human family, who died as us. So the marriage was dissolved because we died "wherein we were held" (Rom 7:6). The dissolution of the first marriage and release from that husband meant that in Christ's resurrection we were immediately married to another, our risen Saviour, and are now under His law.
The law of marriage in Romans 7:1-6 is therefore a continuation by Paul of his two illustrations from Romans 6. For just as we have always been slaves to an owner and branches producing the fruit of a tree, we have always produced the fruit of a husband. We have never been widows conceiving without a husband.
A FRUSTRATING COMPLICATION
Now comes the burning question. If the new relationship has replaced the old, and given us fully-satisfying life, rich fruit, happy service, loving union and communion, and the conscious ability to be who we long to be and help others to be the same, why doesn't it happen? What is wrong? Where is this completion in Christ, loving as He loved, walking as he walked with the faith that overcomes, being more than conquerors, easily living out the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus said we would, as lights in the world? Hasn't Paul made it plain to us that we have been crucified, raised, and ascended with Jesus and inwardly confirmed by the Spirit? Then where is the snag?
This burning question has greatly disturbed and seemingly disrupted our first faith statements, by which Paul told us to "reckon ourselves dead indeed unto sin and alive unto God." It has also caused many sincere, born again, Bible rooted believers to use a nice little cliche: our position in Christ is one thing, but our condition in its outworking is quite another. And they usually add, "Of course, our condition does not level up to our position." But this is precisely what Paul's says does level up! Our position in Christ and our condition in living this Christ-Life are one and the same.
Next Paul reaches the least understood and most misused section of his Romans letter, or of all his writings. But when understood through Paul's own explanation and experienced by the inner confirmation of the Spirit, this section gives the desperate believer the one key that turns the lock and the whole freedom he seeks. In his need, the believer must find the full and final meaning of life, for which he was created and is now redeemed by grace. This section (which we shall cover in Part II) extends from Romans 7:7 through 7:25 and then is fulfilled in Romans 7:26 right through chapter 8.
ROMANS 6 TO 8
PAUL'S KEY TO THE LIBERATED LIFE
PART TWO: PAUL'S ANSWER
Norman Grubb
In Part One of this article, Paul had pointed out that in our redeemed experience of justification by faith and new birth of the Spirit, we do not continue in sin. The reason is that as our Lord Jesus Christ died and rose again as representing us, we then died with Him to being sin-indwelt and rose with Him to being Christ-indwelt, as symbolized by our burial and rising in water baptism. So now we live yielded to God and expressing His right living in our members.
But this is based on a further startling fact of a different kind -- that we are no longer "under law, but under grace," and that we are "dead to law" as well as "dead to sin." We are thus not only freed from the guilt of broken law, but from responding to and having to operate law at all!
But, steady! If we are not under law, do we mistakenly conclude that we shall easily slip back into sin living? Paul then opens to us the basic radical delusion that we have lived in since the Fall, under the Satanic lie of us being independent self-managing selves who must therefore see to it that we respond to law by our self-efforts. But the actual fact is that we were never created to be independent human selves, but were deceived into that delusion by Satan at the Fall.
Paul then points out that in fact we have always been just slaves, either to the sin-owner or the righteousness-owner: branches bearing the fruit of either the false vine or the True Vine: married and producers of the seed of either Satan-husband or Christ-husband. There has never been such a lie and delusion of us being independent self-acting, self-producing human selves, and responding by ourselves to a law of evil or good. Paul now proceeds to explain his own experience of discovery and release from his false deceived bondage to this radical misconception, and thus his freedom in Christ to a totally liberated life.
BACK TO HIS BEGINNING
In Romans 7:7-25 Paul turns from general statements to the strictly personal.
How do I find that the Christian life works? How do you? To explain this and to identify with us all, Paul does a big thing. He deliberately backtracks from his actual present experience as "dead to the law," and aligns himself with every born again believer, using the present tense of "I, I, I." He starts with his new-born experience, then shares with us his early years of spiritual adolescence, and finally his searchings and wrestlings right through to the final answer for himself, and thus for us all.
Paul's use of the present tense about himself, in sharing what he had long left behind, has been misunderstood though all these succeeding years by millions of sincere believers, who have themselves not entered into the release of the liberated "I." Thinking that the furthest a believer can know in lie is humiliation, struggles, and constant failures under sin's apparent dominion, they have falsely deduced a "two-nature" condition, as if we humans are permanently caught up in the opposing strife of sin and holiness natures. If, as they say, these natures were both a part of our very selves, then we would have to oscillate despairingly between them and take them for granted as our normal experience.
The truth is that our God-created human self is merely a neutral vessel, or container. In Romans 7:19 Paul described it as being in itself neither the good nor the bad, which he was only then discovering was the sin dwelling in him. It is merely the fruit producer of whichever vine it is a branch, and can never be a branch of both at once (Rom 6:20-22). And though vast numbers of God's people still labour under that mistaken interpretation of Paul's present tense, we say he boldly stepped back in order to identify himself as a true intercessor with what all believers must go through to find their permanent deliverance. So he is now saying, "I see myself with you. I am back with you confronting that old outer law, to which in actual fact I am dead." In order to underline the final necessary confrontation with the law and its final depth surgery on him, as on us all, Paul describes in detail his past dramatic experience. It was the sudden impact of that tenth commandment, with its "Thou shalt not covet," which so rudely awakened him. he had been blissfully ignorant of its having any personal impact. "I was alive without the law once," he says (Rom 7:9); and that is how all the world lives until confronted by the law. Paul had been "delighting in the law" (Rom. 7:22), as every new-born of the Spirit delights. But under the lie of independent self, when that "Thou shalt not covet" struck him, he blindly thought: "No, of course I won't and don't." He was under that fatal delusion of us all that there is such a thing as self-management and selfcontrol.
TROUBLE WITH "I"
Then the blast hit him. Paul found an inner uprising over which he had no control, which he named sin and which "wrought in me all manner of concupiscence" (Rom 7:8). he was devastated, not that there were these sin drives, but because he thought he ought to be able to control them. That was his condemnation and bondage.
This is how Paul put it: "In my newly-born and responsive condition, in which my whole desire is to fulfill the law and produce the fruit of the Spirit, there is this disturbing experience that when I want to do good, there is an evil presence controlling me (Rom 7:22). Yes, I want to and will live by God's law. I would do the good and not the evil [repeated in verses 15, 16, 18, 19, and 21], but I am driven by this humiliating condition to say that something grabs and enslaves me.
"I am carnal and sold under sin," Paul continues (Rom 7:14), "and there seems to be no escape. Here is the law, which I delight in, hammering at me with its godly standards. But I find myself helpless and hopeless. I have the will; but there is nothing in my flesh -- my human makeup -- which has the capacity to combat this negative power drive, which has me in its grasp (Rom 7:18). I am a wretched man (Rom 7:24): newborn, but still as sin slave! Where lies the trouble? Is there a remedy?"
The trouble is in that deceived, independent "I" (popping up thirty-two times in those nineteen verse) -- the enormous delusion, which the law came to expose. Independent self reaction is first of all Satan's delusion about his own created selfhood, and then the lie which he imparted to us all at the Fall.
SELF-EFFORT IS SATAN-EFFORT
We are all forms of God's fire-self, the self of infinite desire. But God, by the begetting of His Son, transmuted His fire-self into the Light-self which is eternally the Self of other-love. Satan, however, turned his self of fiery desires into the consuming love of self-for-self, and imparted his own fallen nature to us as though it were ours.
So all self-effort is actually Satan-effort, whether good or bad in appearance.
Paul's good self-efforts to combat his uprising sin desires, unknown to him, were still Satan masquerading as Paul. And our desires and self-reactions, good or bad, are still Satan's self-for-self expressed as us. Paul described his experience this way: "When I would do good, evil is present with me" (Rom 7:21).
The great light is lit when we finally see that our precious humanity has every ability to respond on soul and body level; but the forms the responses take are not ours. There is no such thing as plain self-reactions. Through the Fall, our responses formerly expressed Satan's self-for-self nature, whether in apparent good or evil form. But now through Calvary, having learned that our Romans 7 delusion of independent self-reaction is Satan, our responses express Christ in His self-for-others nature. This is who we really are, as we shall see further in Romans 8.
SLAIN BY THE DELUSION
In his self-delusion Paul was so ashamed and humiliated that he said he was like a slain man (Rom 7:7-11). In fact, that was what had happened. He had been slain by the delusion that he was an independent self who could manage himself, when there is no such thing and it was really Satan's self-effort. So he said, "Sin, taking occasion by the commandment [as if he could obey it], deceived me, and by it slew me" (Rom 7:11).
What a universal deceit in all us humans, and what an exposure and deliverance!
The shame and humiliation of Paul's defeat was just the necessary negative God used to make him desperate enough to find the answer, and thus that final usefulness of the law in exposing the lie of selfeffort. So down Paul had fallen by the exposure of his self-relying self, not yet knowing that self-effort is Satan.
Having used his own dramatic experience the underline the necessary negative operation of the law on us, Paul then asks, "Does such an exposure by the law make it a deathdealing and dangerous weapon? The very opposite!" (Rom 7:12-14).
Only by that sharp, personal law exposure of his helpless self in response to those self-gratifying desires could the roots of the independent-self lie be exposed. At first he struggled, wrongfully condemning himself instead of Satan-sin. But this drove him to the great final discovery: not of an evil human self, with the false self-condemnation, but to the great light of a right, God-made human self, with the sinner in him really being the sin spirit.
Paul knew, by the revelation he had when in Arabia (Gal 1:11,12,17), that Satan-sin had been cast out by Christ's body death on Calvary (2 Cor 5:14,21).
(We shall explain this in detail in Part III). But he had not yet come to the necessary point of personally appropriating that tremendous fact. He was still confused by the self-condemnation of false, independent self, instead of laying the rightful blame on sin. So by the use of the vivid present tense, as though he were a young, struggling believer, he underlines the value of the law in its disturbing effects on "me, me, me!" But finally there would be a right adjustment of the human "me" (See Part III).
A DESPERATE DISCOVERY
Have not I, like Paul, vainly thought there should be some way in which I could combat and overcome this evil bias in myself? Does not the whole world operate by doing its own stuff? Isn't "I must," "I can," "I will," or "I'm going to" the sole, absorbing incentive of human living?
Yes it is. That is humanity's vast, lost, blindness, even though sin is not imputed when law hasn't yet confronted us (Rom 5:13,14). All of us in this fallen world, with no exceptions, really live by that Satan lie, with which we were inoculated at the Fall: that self by itself, in its apparent independence, can run its own life.
While in our deceived, self-relying state -- "living in pleasure [and yet] being dead while we think we live" (1 Tim 5:6) -- we have to be confronted with the law and the standards by which the universe was created to function.
These laws were first embodied outwardly for our enlightenment in those Ten Commandments, from which any deviation finally brings total destruction. We are forced to accept the realization that first we didn't (conviction of sins), and second we cannot fulfill it, which is the final discovery of this Romans 7 chapter.
Why are we not able to keep the law? It is because we created humans can only function by the deity self who manifests his nature through our forms: our Creator-Father's "divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4), or alternatively, so that we might experience and get the opposite into focus, Satan's self-for-self nature (Eph 2:1,2). Always, we humans are vessels, branches, slaves, body-members; or in modern terms, we are computers, who can only develop what is programmed into us. There never was such a thing as a created selfhood which could operate by itself.
Paul, recounting in this Romans 7 crisis statement his former experience, was compelled to discover that he could not manage himself. And now we all, with whom Paul links himself, are compelled to discover that we cannot manage ourselves. "To will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not" (Rom 7:18). Precisely. Yes, I am a slave, "sold under sin" (the nature of self-for-self), with no escape. However much I want to, resolve to, or try to keep God's law, I CANNOT because I was never created with the ability to manage myself. I am a managed person.
Through the law's impossible demands on me, I have to discover that I started my human life in sin. "In sin did my mother conceive me" (Ps 51:5), as a slave, a branch, and a vessel. Of whom? Of that false upstart "god of this world," that "spirit working in the children of disobedience" (Eph 2:2). he is that "spirit of error," that "father of lies," that devil "who sinneth from the beginning";
and it is his lusts I have been doing and can't refrain from doing (Jn 8:44).
Then at last, as Paul says in Romans 7:14-25, I am driven to my limit. I am finally among the desperate ones who seek the highest and then I find I can't reach it. The poet Browning wrote, "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" But in my desperation, at last I can see my deceived limitations. A tremendous seeing!
I see plainly now that the disrupter is not the law, for the law is "spiritual"
(Rom 7:14). And it is not "me," because I hate these things I do. It is the intruder: the sin that dwells in me! Paul says that twice (Rom 7:17,20). This is a radical revelation, because all my trouble and the whole world's trouble is the deception that we are the operators of our lives. We are not! We are the containers, the manifesters, the vessels of wrath or mercy (Rom 9:22,23).
A vast weight, which burdens every believer in his false self-condemnation, lifts off us when this understanding comes. In our former delusion we would say:
"I'm the culprit. I'm the trouble. I'm ashamed of myself. I should be better."
No. That is a lie, and a delusion; it never was I. The whole intent of the cries of "I, I, I," in Romans 7:14-25 is that I don't like myself. I hate what I'm doing, when actually I am a God-made, beautiful self (Gen 3:26-28). At last I see it; and I had to be brought to my limit to be able to see it.
A BIG DIFFERENCE
All the world's people, including us the born-again, have always taken it for granted in their delusion that they were self-operating and therefore self-responsible persons, who could and would improve themselves. And at last I find that there never was such a person! Now I see I was always a slave of Satan-sin - "sold under sin"- and it is he who is to blame. In my unsaved days I went along with Satan's sin activities. In my saved days I have hated my slavery, been ashamed of it, and wrestled vainly against it.
Sin is the "other law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin in my members" (Rom 7:14-23). Now I have it clear that it is not I, but this evil power controlling me. Paul cries out for us all, as he had cried out for himself, "Am I tied and bound to this death in my body, or is there a deliverance?" (Rom 7:24). At last I have come to my limit. In my hatred of this intruder of my body, I find that I am not to blame, but sin. Is there a deliverance from sin for me?
Now I can see what Paul had already revealed in it completeness in Romans 6:1-13, and which had become his own liberation. Yes, thank God, there is deliverance for me now by the personal application in my desperate need of what I had accepted in my head and reckoned on as told to do (Rom 6:11). But while I remained ignorant of there never having been such a thing as human self-effort or human independence, I had not realized that all my own efforts to live a victorious life were really Satan expressing himself as me. And I had not realized that until I had made such a failure of attempts to live it. Only then was I ready to see that the only way to live the life is if Christ live my life as me, in place of that self-effort which was really Satan -- "good" or bad.
Paul had explained the key to total liberation (Rom 6:1-13), and we had reckoned on it as fact as best we knew how. It was this: my death in Christ's death to indwelling sin power, and my life in freedom from that power in His resurrection. But now I also have the human self in true focus as only the container and expresser, but never the originator. So I could see that the death and resurrection union with Christ which I had reckoned as fact and not He AND me in action in place of Satan and me, but only He AS me, and I the human expresser, replacing only Satan as me, and I as his expresser.
The big difference and final liberation comes when, after my exposure by the law, I have myself in my true eternal relationship to Him: not as kind of co-living with Him (or formerly Satan) as two on the same level of action, but as only He living His life in me as me. I now spontaneously, delightedly, and easily express Him with all the vigor of my God-endowed humanity. That is different! Seeing this as my total life, I move in from reckoning to realizing.
Yes, I thank God through Jesus Christ me Lord (Rom 7:25).
FREE AT LAST
The doors of my prison swing open by this one key turned in the lock! It is now possible for me, as it was with Paul, to do one simple thing. And it is not some self-effort act of consecration, as if getting out of the prison depended on me.
But it is recognizing, by heart affirmation now combined with my understanding, that I have always been a person released from sin, as from sins. Jesus settled that 2000 years ago on Calvary in His body death, in addition to His blood death. But I have been slow to recognize and receive what He had settled for me, as me, because I still had that Romans 7 delusion about myself.
But what is that prison? I had to find what I was blinded to at first: my only prison was myself. Taken captive by my false owner, as we all were at the Fall, I had been deceived into thinking I managed myself, as he thinks he manages himself.
THE LIE OF LIES!
So down I had to fall in my many failures of self-management, compelled to follow in many false directions, until at last it dawned on me that actually I was the one who was managed and utilized by my thieving owner. At last, in my misery, I was ready to call for help. Was there any way out of this prison? It was already provided. My True Owner had already paid the full redemptive price to release me, so that the false one has no further claims on me. So now I am joyfully free from that wearisome lie of self-management (which in fact never was), and love every new interest and enticing adventure of my True Owner. He is really not so much Owner, as Father and Lover. And along with multitudes of other freed prisoners, I share with Him in His simple multiple plans for the blessing of His whole huge universe.
With the veil of that independent-self lie removed, I can and do see that Christ freed me, a servant who had changed his owner - not change of me, but change of Him! I AM free. I just recognize, affirm, and thankfully praise. I say, along with Paul in Romans 8:1, that there is no more condemnation, because there is no illusory self-effort self to be condemned. The reckoning of Romans 6:11 is now Paul's and my word of realization in Romans 8:2 -- the law (principle) of the Spirit of life in Christ has entered and indwells me as He did Christ in the tomb, and has set me free from those lying claims of the law of sin and death.
No longer a prisoner, I am now free forever in Christ by His body sacrifice on my behalf (Rom 8:3).
The Spirit bears witness to what I affirm in faith (1 Jn 5:10). Once I affirm, the settling in of that witness is His timetable. For me, it was two years; for my wife, it was two weeks. But hold steady, maintain your affirmation, and HE makes you a knower.
ROMANS 6 TO 8
PAUL'S KEY TO THE LIBERATED LIFE
PART THREE: THE LOST SECRET
Norman Grubb
In this final part of our Romans 6 to 8 -- Paul's key to the liberated life --
let us start by reviewing briefly what has been said in the previous two parts.
In essence, the lost secret now revealed is that we humans were never created to be self-dependent or self-operating. There is no such thing as am independent human self. We were marvelously created in God's likeness to function spontaneously as expressers of Himself. Ultimately we will manage His universe as co-heirs with His Son, permanently operating in His perfect other-love nature.
But by the law of the universe, referred to in the previous sections, we understand that nothing can function except by having its opposite, just as light operates by swallowing up darkness. So we can only know and operate of human personhood by being confronted with the opposite: the false deity of the opposite ôsin" nature, which is self-forself.
We started our fallen human lives from the Garden of Eden by being occupied by that false deity and expressing his nature as though it were ours. Then our Saviour Christ, in His other-love nature, took our place as our Last Adam, representing us in His Calvary death and being "made sin" as us. In that death as us, out went that sin-spirit; and in His resurrection as us, in came His Spirit of self-giving love.
COMING HONEST
Paul's main point then, in Romans 6 and 7 has been to expose how we were deluded by Satan into thinking that we were self-operating selves. In actuality, however, it was Satan expressing his self-for-self (sin) nature as us. Then Paul tells us at length how God sent the law with its requirements to expose us when we come honest. We first had to learn that we had not kept the law as lost sinners, and then that we could never keep it because we have never been independent self-relying selves. We were deceived by Satan to think we were, but actually we were only expressers of Satan's self-for-self nature.
In unfolding the value of the law in Romans 7, Paul makes a unique contribution to exposing and removing the main blockage to effective Christian living. At last, in our agony and desperation at our failures, light dawns upon us. We are then capable of seeing that the evil was not in our beautiful, God-created humanity, but in the lie of the independent self (sin dwelling in us). Through Calvary, we now move in by faith to see and recognize that it is He, the Spirit of Truth, expressing Himself in our vessels -- branch containers -- in us and by us, in place of that evil one.
So by faith in the revealed fact, we find ourselves free just to be our human selves with no fears or condemnations. Through the Spirit's certain inner witness, we are expressers of Him: Christ in us as us. And now, after a brief law interlude, we go into chapter 8 of Romans, not as in our walking-Satan forms, but as walking Christs -- "more than conquerors."
A CRISIS MOMENT
Now we move with Paul into Romans 8. Here he comes right out with who he is.
What he said he had "reckoned" on in Romans 6:11, he now says he "realizes" (Rom 8:2). The governing principle, "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," has set him free. So there is a settled knowing. In "reckoning," you SAY it is so; in "knowing," you KNOW it is so. There is a crisis moment. The lives of the great men of the Bible -- Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, right through to Jesus Himself -- bear witness to this knowing.
So do I know? And how do I know? I began my new knowing at my new birth, and the Spirit bore witness. Now this is a total knowing. If you have seen this change through Calvary, from being Satan-sin indwelt and Satan expresser to now being Christ indwelt and Christ expresser, then be sure you have spoken the word of faith and recognition, as Paul did. "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus," he says, "has set me free." And in Galatians he proclaims, "I have been crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me."
Say YOUR word now, and say it to someone else! Then what you say echoes back to you, and you know (1 Jn 5:10). Maybe you cannot yet give a date for when you received that knowing, just as I mentioned (in Part II) about Pauline and myself. Only be sure not to pull back, if you do not yet know. What you have said, you have said. You stand on such a word as Galatians 2:20 or Romans 8:2, and God in His time makes you a knower.
THE CHANGE
Now at the summit there is no condemnation. We are freed from that false self guilt, for there is no wrong human self! We are Spirit people in outer bodies.
There is nothing to condemn (Rom 8:1). Our human selves are fixed expressions of the Deity Self, where we were formerly fixed expressions of that false deity self. That is the change.
Law (principle) is the way a thing works, and works no other way. We used to be under Satan's law with no escape, and now we are under Christ's law with no escape. There is this change of governing principle controlling our lives.
Strong terms! (Rom 8:2). That makes it easy and normal to walk this new way.
On Calvary, Christ put the old sin indweller behind bars on death row (condemned sin in the flesh), from where he is able only to shout at us. That old law standard, which had seemed unattainable, is now our normal way of living -- "the righteousness of the law fulfilled in us" (Rom 8:3,4). This is the Sermon on the Mount top standard of living, and the one who lives it in us is "the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus."
SPIRIT PEOPLE
Paul lays unique emphasis on life being the Spirit in us. Nowhere else in the New Testament is this said in such plainness. There are fifteen mentions of the Spirit in Romans 8, in place of those many "I's" in the previous chapter. Paul says, "Get this clear: we are now Spirit people. Christ is living our life. We are walking His way (Rom 8:3). We think His thoughts" (Rom 8:5,6). He in us counteracts those former self-for-self thought patterns, which set us at enmity with God.
"IF you walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh..." Paul begins, for he could not speak our word for us. But speaking for ourselves we say, "SINCE we walk that way..." Again, when Paul says in 8:11, "IF the Spirit dwells in you,..." we say, "He DOES dwell in us." And the Spirit puts those old body habits to death (Rom 8:13).
DAILY LIVING
Because we live in a world of self incitement all around us, to which our normal humanity (our flesh) has been formerly geared to respond, Paul does lay stress on walking after the Spirit and not after the flesh. Does that mean we had better be very careful, for surely we are inclined to flesh walking? The lie again! That would be guarding against independent self uprisings which might respond to those "ought to's." But that is not our Spirit drive. We don't walk fearfully, as if we still plenty of flesh. No! Our human selves are now Spirit kept and Spirit driven.
Certainly there are flesh pulls -- sin's self-for-self nature getting at us through all the world's atmosphere around us. But we don't resist them by any false self-effort. We recognize and admit them, but then we affirm who we ARE and know we are -- Spirit expressers, Christ in our forms; and our faith affirmation puts to death those "deeds of the body" (Rom 8:13). Light swallows up darkness. [See Norman Grubb's leaflet entitled "How to Handle Temptation".]
The Spirit, says Paul, also now permeates our physical bodies, though we remain mortal. The Spirit is the Quickener. So we walk not as body fussers. We accept where there are physical infirmities, but our bodies are His Temples; and in freedom of faith -- not in negative unbelief or foolish questioning -- we often experience His quickenings and healings (8:11).
The normal background to our daily lives is the Spirit's witness with our spirits that we actually are God's children (8:16). By the Spirit we are at home now with our Father/"Daddy," which is very difficult from our former fears of Him in our old false self-condemning life (8:15). We are naturally Spirit-led in the affairs and decisions of our lives, and take that for granted (8:14).
PERMANENT TENSION
From the moment in Romans 8:17 when he opens up the incredible destiny of us humans being co-inheritors of the universe with God's Son, Paul changes the tone of what we are to experience in our daily lives. This comes as a shock, until we see at the end of the chapter that those are devastating conditions in which we, as sons, operate triumphantly as "summit" people.
For the glory living, which will be our permanency through eternity, is first built strongly on a continual "suffering" condition. That sounds terrifying, until we find by experience that there is glory now in the suffering (Rom 5:3-5). The coming "exceeding weight of glory" is the product of these earthly "afflictions," which Paul called "light"! (2 Cor 4:17). These "sufferings" are first on a physical level. Face it, Paul says, the animal and material creation around us is engulfed in suffering -- "red in tooth and claw" -- living in permanent tension. And that, Paul continues, is a Godordained necessary opposite to the "glorious liberty," which will swallow up the "groanings." The deliverance will come through the sons of God, but the methods are not explained in detail (8:19-22).
Then Paul makes very plain that physical perfection on our human body level is not for our present life: a warning note to those who offer complete physical healings and major on a physical healing ministry. Paul tells us that our bodies remain corrupted and mortal. The replacement of corruption by incorruption is only at the Lord's coming (1 Corinthians 15:42-44;52-55). meanwhile, let's not fool ourselves on the physical level. We "suffer" with all the creation, and our "salvation" on that level is by hope, not faith. It is a prospect not within our present reach (8:23-25).
UNSHAKABLE CONFIDENCE
Added to the physical sufferings, we live in a sea of frustration of every kind, and inhibitions we cannot handle by ourselves. We are "compassed by infirmity" and "groan" in distressing experiences, about which we do not even know how to pray for deliverances (8:26-27).
Obviously, Paul is now speaking of the varied disturbed conditions of our daily living: not just the physical, but family problems, economic shocks, fatalities, social problems in our communities, crying needs of every kind, malicious personal hurts, family losses, and whatnot.
In these distresses we "groan"; but we people of the Spirit know that the Spirit Himself is carrying our groanings to the Father in intercession. This gives us our one solid unshakable confidence that, however totally confusing and apparently humanly inextricable, ALL THESE THINGS are actually working out for GOOD. Meanwhile we love our God, no matter how painful the situations, because we know the path of our calling, with outcomes always GOOD, GOOD, GOOD! What a word of faith, which has upheld millions! We might say that the air is full of verbal quotings of Romans 8:28, that great favourite.
TRAINING YEARS
Then Paul goes a glorious step further. He opens up the hidden purpose behind our sufferings and disturbed conditions. "Your destiny is to be a Co-Son with the Son in the development of His vast universal inheritance!" So these are necessary TRAINING YEARS on earth. "You have begun recognizing and realizing that you already are Christ in your human form (Gal. 2:20; Col 3:4); and it is necessary that you are brought, by the maturing grace of the indwelling Spirit, to exact conformity to Him." What a destiny! What a conformity, which John also foresaw (1 Jn 3:2). So there is a steady gradual conforming process in action by the Spirit, who is already indissolubly joined to our spirit (1 Cor 6:17). And we are being "changed into His likeness from glory to glory" (2 Cor 3:18).
We must not confuse God's transforming operations, taking place in us through those constant trials and pressures (which James said are used to establish us "perfect, wanting nothing" [Ja 1:2-4]), with the total basic transformation already taken place. We escaped from the lying independent self outlook of Romans 7 into the permanent liberation of Romans 8:1-2 by our faith recognition of the finished work on Calvary. Growth in conforming us to the image of Christ, which Paul is now speaking about (8:29), is the spontaneous development of Christ fixed in us as us: union fact.
Folks often do try to escape the necessity of the crisis and exchange of the independent self lie of Romans 7 for that glorious fact of Christ having replaced Satan as the fixed one now living our lives, by majoring on the subsequent changes conforming us to His likeness. These changes are constantly taking place in us merely as products of that crisis. They are not to be mistaken for it or used as a gradual improvement method, as though to escape from the rugged confronting of the necessary faith crisis.
POINTING FINGERS
Se we go on now, Paul says (8:30-39), through these processes being fulfilled in us under the cloak of human pressures. We are being conformed marvelously through predestination, justification, even to present glorification (8:29,30).
There is a glory even in our attitudes and on our faces, which really glow like Moses as he came down from the Mount; and others see it. And in this transforming process we are bold. We take ourselves to be blameless as God's chosen ones. We neither live in false selfcondemnation (8:1), nor are we disturbed by the pointing finger of others: certainly not of the world, but also not of our brethren.
We all need to learn plenty about not pointing fingers at our brothers in Christ, when we may think they don't measure up. See Christ in our brothers, and leave the Great Transformer to get on with His transforming work in them as in us. Where anything does disturb us, let our contribution be faith in God-in-action in our brother (8:31,33,34). We need a new quality of boldness, both about who we NOW ARE -- walking Christs in place of walking Satans -- and of saying and seeing the same faith of our Christ-indwelt brethren!
"MT. EVEREST" SCALED
The conforming process also includes appearances of need sand necessities of life abundantly supplied by Him, who "spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all" (8:32). But does Paul sum up his great victory chapter by our being immersed in a sea of prosperity and popularity? Just the opposite! His summation includes the rough, rough seas of every form of outer distress, persecution, material necessity, and subjective assault -- "killed all the day long" and "accounted as sheep for the slaughter." Constant physical dangers dogged Paul, and today most likely face modern-day oppositions to our "pilgrim"
walk, and experience, as did Paul, by lost reputations as Christ's fools (8:35,36).
Do we wilt? Do we question, "Why does God allow that?" Do we murmur about hard experiences, manifesting more disturbed feelings than enjoyment and praise? Paul used just one word: "conquerors." He stands, as it were, on HIS Mt. Everest, having scaled the jagged peaks of suffering and persecution (2 Cor 11:21-31) which had defied his ascent. How? Because it was Christ in Paul's form. A prisoner of Nero? No, a prisoner of the Lord; and his fiery trials were called the "sufferings of Christ" (1 Pet 4L12,13). Even Jesus Himself, when suffering came to Him by Satan's agents, called it "the cup which my Father hath given me"
(Jn 18:11).
"COME ON UP"
So by faith we see Christ in the garments of our outer tragedies and maltreatments, and stand on OUR Everest summit as "conquerors." And more than standing as "conquerors," Paul says we stand as "MORE than conquerors" (8:37). We have the extra -- "the cups running over" -- to help others climb their summits, when our own inner conquests are complete.
To all toiling climbers, we call out, "Come on up. Drop your heavy equipment."
We invite them to step out by faith right where they are now, and they will find by a miracle, grace leap that they are already on the Summit. Christ has already carried them there in His own crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension two thousand years ago. And the Spirit, Who came at Pentecost, will cause them to know their eternal inseparable love-union with the Father and Christ living in them as them -- MORE THAN CONQUERORS!
TO SUM IT UP
The main point has been the startling discovery that we have had really only one problem since the fall of man, and that has been our vast delusion about ourselves -- the lie of Satan concerning his own independence which he has imparted to us concerning ourselves. As a consequence, even when we are sinners saved by grace and in the new birth of the Spirit, and we have been taken further in the sixth chapter to know that through Christ's death and resurrection the control of us by Satan in his sin nature has been replaced by the control of Christ, we still deludedly regard ourselves as independent persons responsible for living our new way of life and therefore equally responsible for living our new way of life and therefore equally responsible for discarding the old.
The shock then comes when Paul says that old way of life will have no further control over us because we are "not under the law, but under grace." But our immediate reaction is, "Why, that is putting the cart before the horse! Don't we need the law to stop us from responding to the pulls of that old life? Take away the law and we shall be caught out again." "Not so," says Paul. "The opposite is true. Your great basic deception is that we are self-managed selves. Therefore what the law will do while you are still under that delusion, is to expose your helplessness and that you never were created to manage yourself, and your old sin-manager will take advantage of the law to show you that you can't obey it, but keep obeying him. But because you are too blind to see this until we have been shocked into it, first I will show you some facts."
Then Paul drives that home by three illustrations which certainly settles the matter when our eyes are sufficiently opened to see these facts; but actually they are not until we have had the necessary radical shock. But anyhow here are those three plain facts. First, we all are slaves and therefore compelled to do what our owner demands of us, and there is no middle condition in which we are just independent free humans. Second, we are branches and bear the fruit f the tree of which we are a part, and there is no such thing as we being independent, and not branches of either of the trees. Third, we are married wives under the marriage bond of our husbands and bearing his children. If our marriage is dissolved by the death of either husband, then we are immediately married to the other husband. We never were just single and unmarried. All of these illustrations, of course, mean that we are slaves, branches, wives, formerly of Satan in his sin nature, but now are the same to Christ in His holy nature, and there never has been a JUST OURSELVES in imaginary activities of our own.
But that point must be driven home never to arise again -- that in actual fact we never were self-operating and never did or could manage our own affairs: and it was in that point the Satan has so grossly deluded us, as he himself is deluded. So that shock has to come, as Paul tells of it in his own experience, and the means in his own experience was the impact of that pouter law on him. So down came the law on newborn Paul in it tenth "Thou shalt not covet" commandment: and because he was very much alive to that illusion of independence, back came his quick response, "Of course I won't and don't covet.
I am a new man in Christ." And he found all kinds of what he called "concupiscence" very much alive in him which he could not resist. He surely fell flat on his face and called himself a "slain man."
But Paul had made a unique discovery, to which he refers as his special revelation in his Galatian letter, when he spent three years alone in the Arabian desert. It was that there is this sin virus deposited in us since the Fall (to which he refers in Romans 5:12-21), and that as our Lord Jesus Christ has represented us on the cross, His body was as ours in God's sight, as though the sin-expresser just like ours ("made sin"); and when he died, out went that sin spirit and so out out of us, and in the tomb in His resurrection in came His own Spirit, and so into us. Now with the impact of the law and his inability to obey it through the apparent power of indwelling sin, he saw the great lie of the independent self, and that he was only able to respond to the drives of the false deity in him and the lusts, and it was the impact of the law with its demands that awakened him to this delusion. But now he also saw the great deceit of sin on him, because in Christ the sin-indweller had been replaced by the Holy Spirit indweller, which had been revealed to him in Arabia. So now suddenly he saw his freedom. All he had to do was to recognize and affirm as fact in himself that "the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death," and now the Spirit already in him since his new birth inwardly confirmed that to him.
So the key had been turned in the lock by the exposure of the lie of independent self through the law. This was the great value of the law for him and us. The claims of the law exposed the lie of his supposed ability to respond to it as though independent. The other lie now exposed to his new born self was that sin power still had its right and presence in him. No. "Dead to sin" in Christ and now alive in Christ to live by the Spirit.
As simple as that when the law had done its Romans 7 work by forcing Paul to find that there never was a Paul-self who could obey that law, and this his Arabian revelation of the body death of Jesus representing us and body resurrection, took Paul right out of Romans 7 into Romans 8 liberty. Then he shares what follows as the fruit of that liberty outlined in chapter 8 in the Spirit-operated life, in the glory of the family relationship with the Father and the Son, the sharing of the eternal inheritance, and the present prolonged period in which we still have the full impact of the consequences of the Fall on our humanity and world conditions, and live the life of overcoming faith, as Jesus Himself did. The sufferings of this present life give us our great constant opportunities for the conquests of faith in every kind of adverse conditions. In the walk and warfare of faith we are experiencing new ways of proving the goodness of God in all kinds of deliverances, though sometimes the highest is that martyrdom and extremity of suffering in the faith of the resurrection, as is says in Hebrews 11:35-38, "of whom the world was not worthy": and in all these the watching hungry world is seeing the inner victories outwardly demonstrated in peace, joy, hope, faith, and love for our enemies, by which Christ is manifested in our bodies "whether by life or by death," and countless others have been inspired to follow the same way.
==========================================
The Key to Everything
by Norman Grubb
Extract from the booklet The Key to Everything by Norman Grubb (Moody Press, no date).
The Position of the Believer
When I was in the British army in World War I, God very plainly called me, though I'd planned another career, to join a little independent missionary group just starting in Africa. I wasn't there very long before I deeply felt my inadequacy. It wasn't that I was lukewarm for Jesus Christ; it wasn't that I had turned away from Him to some other interest. I was a servant of His, and my whole interest was set on introducing my brother Africans to Him. The inadequacy I felt in myself first of all was the need of love. I deeply felt, when I got among them, that I just didn't have that love which bridges the gap.
With that went the need of faith -- and with that the need of power. All of these were linked together. Response to the Christian message in Central Africa, like the United States, appears to be quite large. But I soon found there was much more profession than possession. I began saying to myself, Are we bringing the Africans anything really worthwhile? Are we just bringing a code of ethics? Or a liturgy, or historic faith? Have we got something genuinely transforming to transmit to others? Then I made the question personal, "Have I?" As I asked these questions, I discovered that when your ministry is disturbed, it tends also to disturb your personal life. I found myself, as my wife well knew, irritable in a way I hadn't been irritable at home -- and critical of others to cover my own failures. As I doubted, asked questions, and searched the Bible for some kind of an answer to my inadequacies, I found some amazing answers. Some of them have shaken me considerably. They have changed my whole viewpoint -- and my experience. I can't call them revelations, because they are based on the revelation, witnessed to by the Spirit. To begin with, my attitude was that God should improve me. Well, I'm a servant of Jesus Christ, I thought. I've been redeemed by His grace, I belong to Him. I must ask God to make me a better servant of Jesus Christ. I thought He should channel in some love into my heart, some faith, some power, some holiness -- and improve me. I had to learn sharply that self-improvement is both a sin and an impossibility. It came as a considerable shock. But though my idea of how God should answer my problem was completely wrong, my sense of inadequacy was good.
It sent me to the Bible. And my first discovery came as I read one famous verse in the first letter of John: "God is love." Suddenly the is stuck out. What dawned on me went something like this: It doesn't say God has love, but God is love. If some body has a thing, it isn't he himself. It's something just attached to him, as if you've got a coat on or something in your pocket. You just have it, and you can share it. But the Bible doesn't say God has love, but
God is love.
I Could Never Love!
Love, therefore, must not be a thing I can have. Love is exclusively a Person.
God is love. Therefore, there is no other pure, self-giving love in the universe beyond Him Himself. Love is exclusively a characteristic of one Person only -- and that's not Norman Grubb. That was a deflation for me. I had thought I could have love imparted to me, channeled into me, and I'd be more loving. But I suddenly found God saying, "You'll never have one iota of love. I am love, and that's the end of it." Love is a Person; one Person only loving -- and that's not I, and that's not you. God is love and, therefore, love is God loving. That set a new trend of thought going. I began to relate this to my other need of power. And I suddenly found a verse in the first chapter of I Corinthians where it says that Christ is the power of God. Not Christ has the powe
r, but He is the power. Once again, I had thought power was something which was given to me, and I'd be a powerful servant of Jesus Christ. I suddenly found that power, also, is a Person. And that person is not I but is exclusively Christ, Who is God; it doesn't matter whether you call Him Father, Son or Holy Spirit. Then I came to the one thing every Christian claims to have. Every believing Christian accepts the fact that he has eternal life. He takes it that he has a life which will go on forever in Heaven. ("The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.") But I suddenly found that eternal life is not something I can ever have -- for Jesus did not say, "I have the life to give you" -- but, "I am life."
Once again I had found that something I had thought I had -- eternal life -- is one person only, and that's not I. Jesus Christ is that "eternal life." But where did I fit into all this? Finally I came to a statement which gathered all together and finished off my investigations by its absoluteness. The verse was Colossians 3:11, where it says of believers in Christ that "Christ is all and in all." Christ is all, not Christ has all. And if Christ is all, what's left for me? Not much by my mathematics! I had thought I was somebody, and something or could get something. I found God had taken the lot. Christ is all.
Then I got the link. Christ is all and in all. Then I saw for the first time that the only reason for the existence of the entire creation is to contain the Creator! Not to be something, but to contain Someone.
So there dawned a very important truth. We humans naturally regard the human self as important. But we've got the wrong ideas of the reason of the existence of the self. An immense distortion has come into the very warp and woof of humanity. It's the distortion of the ego -- of the self. Though we feel self to be important, all of this showed me that self is extremely unimportant. There is only one Self in the universe who is really important. I would almost say there is only one Self. Why? Because there's only one Person in the universe who ever said, "I Am." God said that was His name thousands of years ago when Moses asked what he should say when people would ask, "What is the name of your God?"
(Exodus 3:13, 14). We are told that at the end of the history of the universe it is God Who will be all in all. God all in all! Then what's left? It's terrific.
Why We Exist
There is only one Person, and the human creation is brought into a living relation ship with this One, so that He can manifest Himself in His perfection of life and love through us. The whole creation exists because Spirit must have a body in which to manifest Himself. As the Scriptures say, "The whole earth is full of His glory." They say that Christ ascended "that He might fill all things." If He fills all things, all things are containers of Him. Here is both the height and the dangerous depth in humanity. The height is simply this: the rest of creation can contain manifestations of God; we can contain God as a Person. A person cannot manifest himself as a person through anything else than a person. You can't fellowship with a dog or a stone. You can enjoy the marvels of the atom or of a precious stone, but you can't fellowship with it. But I can fellowship with you because we are of the same makeup.
God can manifest His marvels and His beauty through the flowers and trees. We can view them through the microscope and telescope, and marvel -- but we do not say, "That's God." The greatest marvel, the greatest height of personality, is when we can look at a human being and say, "God is there." The depth, the dangers, of humanity are that personality means freedom. Intelligent choice is the essence of personality. Therefore, God appeared to be on the horns of a dilemma when He created people. (Of course, He wasn't, for He knows His own business in the end.) But it appeared so because the people He created could turn around and say, "Thank you very much, I don't want You to live in me."
That's exactly what happened. We make self our god, not God. We just naturally run our own lives. And that's our whole trouble. There isn't a single problem in humanity except our self-reactions: not one. The Devil is no trouble. He was dealt with 2,000 years ago. Your neighbor is not your trouble. Circumstances are not your trouble. The only trouble is your reaction. Distorted self, self out of gear, is our problem. Once we know how to handle the human self and put it back where it belongs, we've found the key to life. That's what we're going to examine.
You Simply Receive
Essentially from eternity there has been only one Person. This is difficult to realize. Yet throughout the Word of God it is underlined. God was before all: He is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. He is love. He is inconceivable beauty. He is the all. If that is so, then the link between Him and us, whom He has created, is the link between the One and the means of manifesting or making known the One. In other words, our relation to Him is that of containing Him in such a way that He may be recognized. That is why the primary function of all creation, animate and inanimate, is receptivity. Your basic function, and mine, is the same -- simply to receive. This is demonstrated, silently, around us all the time. It's never better seen than in the springtime. If there were no receptivity in the trees and flowers and shrubs, we should have a desert around us. These things spring to life because of their quiet reception of the sunlight and moisture poured on them. What they receive they utilize. But utilization is secondary to reception. In Biblical language, we call this faith.
Better Seen Than Said But no finite language can completely portray the infinite. So different illustrations are necessary in order to complete the picture of our relation to Him. Look at the number of times the Bible calls us vessels. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us." We are "vessels, sanctified, meet for the Master's use, prepared unto every good work." Now you see at once the beauty of the illustration: a vessel is a hollow object made to contain something. And God has made us vessels. Of course, if God makes us vessels, He fills us. God doesn't fool with His creation; if He made anything to be filled, He must see to it that it gets filled. This is our receptivity. The whole func tion of the vessel is to receive something. Now get this clear: the vessel never be comes the liquid, nor the liquid the vessel. I add this because we humans are so proud that there creeps into us the idea that we can be deified. That is blasphemy. There is no such thing as self-deification, except that of Satan, the pseudo-God, and what we share with him. The divine can dwell in the human, but forever the human is the human and the divine the divine. God has said, "I will not give my glory to another." That is the vital importance of the vessel illustration: we are forever the container; He is that which we contain. That relationship never changes. But there are other illustrations which both Jesus and Paul used which give us an enlarged picture of our position as receivers. The famous one is that used by Jesus when He likened Himself and ourselves to the vine and the branches. Now we get a vital, active relationship. We begin to see that the illustration of the vessel is only part of the truth. A vessel is a dead thing and separate from that which is poured into it. From the vessel you might be led to picture us as simply passive containers. But we're not. So Jesus gave us the vine and branches illustration. Through this our eyes are opened to the secret of the universe union -- the mystery of the universe: how two can be one and yet remain two. In this dimension, infinite truth is always in the form of paradox.
We never get beyond facts that are seemingly contradictory to common sense. In this dimension we can never fully comprehend truth through our senses. Our reason cannot teach it to us. We have to live with opposites which don't meet, with facts that are, to our understanding, not completely logical. It is good for us to recognize this, and to learn to accept both sides -- both ways of knowing -- in their proper proportions. This illustration of the vine and the branches is one of those paradoxes. The living God, the living Christ, and I actually become one person and function as one person. Separation is impossible.
It has disappeared. We function entirely and forever and nautrally as one person. And yet we remain two!
The Mystery We Live In Two in one; one in two. We see the paradox in the vine and the branch illustration because, though the vine and the branch make one, Jesus says that the branch must "abide in the vine." Though the vine is the life and the branch the channel, yet the branch does things. It utilizes the sap and produces leaf and flower and fruit. But its activity is secondary to its receptivity. This is where we fail. We make activity a substitute for receptivity. It is its outcome.
Paul gave us another illustration: that of head and body. Head and body make one organism, one life. You can't divide head and body. My name is Norman Grubb. But my head is not Norman and my body Grubb! You can't divide the two. The Bible tells us the same thing. For instance, I Corinthians 12:12 speaks of the body of Christ as being Christ. It says, "As the body [the body is, of course, the believers joined to Christ] is one and hath many members, so also is Christ."
The body is called Christ -- not the head. We are part of a vital organism which is an ascended, glorious, perfect Christ -- the eternal Christ. We are part of Him, yet we remain, ourselves.
Self-Confidence Is Not Security
In that relationship we are all dependent. Exactly as the body is dependent on the head and the head governs the body, so we forever remain the dependent member in the union. And the union is never safe until we know that. So, until you have a few good knocks on the head and discover your conceited self, you're not safe to know the union. Maybe you've had plenty of knocks. They're the healthiest thing we can have. We've got to be made safe and understanding for this tremendous relationship. He is the Lord. We are the co-operators. We are receivers. Basically every one of us has regarded life as something we must live, although we are glad to have the help and grace of God to assist us. Even though we are redeemed people, without realizing our error, we rely mainly on our self-activity. Basically, every one of us has thought, "We're the people, let's get on with the work." That is the reason for the long periods of training through which we read God took all His servants in Bible times. Look at Moses. Few can equal his consecration.
He threw away a throne as "the son of Pharaoh's daughter," with all "the treasures of Egypt" and "pleasures of sin for a season." And he did all this for the mysterious Christ who had not even come -- for he "esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches," the record says. Yet there was one thing that Moses had not renounced. That was Moses. "Learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," highly trained, highly educated, "mighty in word and deed," it says he thought the enslaved Israelites would understand that he was their obvious deliverer, and he set out to deliver them. Angered by an Egyptian maltreating one of his people, he beat and killed him. But Pharaoh sent the police after him -- and what did Moses do? All he had left was a good pair of legs. So he ran. A healthy body is useful -- but you need more than two good legs to carry you through life for Godl Moses had thought he could do the job;
now he found he couldn't. He couldn't find God because, until he had come to an end of himself, God was a distant Person to him. Unless you have come to the bottom of self you don't know basically in a crisis just how to find God. You can't find God when He's found you. He's just there. The Spirit must teach you.
You just say, "That's fine, Lord, carry on." You are thoroughly natural. I believe in being thoroughly irreverent with God! That's putting it in extreme form, but what I mean is that a great deal of our pious talk and reverent attitudes and language is a cloak for insincerity. Men of God, God's familiars, God's friends, talk back and forth with Him in plain language. But Moses, like every one of us, had to learn that you don't do God's work by self effort and self-wisdom.
Unquenchable Energy
Forty years later, Moses saw what he had not been ready to see before. He saw a queer object where he was tending sheep in the wilderness. It was a common bush on fire. But the curious thing, as he watched it, was that it didn't go out.
That is where God showed Moses what humanity is meant to be: a common bush aflame with God. But a man must be common first. Moses, in his own opinion, had been a very uncommon royal bush, and God doesn't live in uncommon royal bushes.
Then Moses saw this sight: God's presence, God's word out of a common bush -- and as the divine fire consumes the bush, it refuels it. "The bush was not consumed." That's exactly what God does. The divine life keeps flowing in, as you give it out. That is receptivity: the key to true humanity. Then you move out into activity. No one is active like a Christian, because he is motivated by the divine resources, the divine power, the divine Person. We've got to learn by our hard knocks to clear out of the way and recognize Another functioning; get His voice, His plans, His resources. Then we come back into the situation as servant, not boss. Once you have come to understand that your basic function is a constant recognition of Another, the whole of life is transformed. It isn't a matter of continually allowing Him to come into your life, because you have received Him. But it is the recognition of Another. Another is the functioning one. Another is the Person who inspires the prayers and imparts the faith and thinks the thoughts through our minds and expresses His compassion through our hearts and puts our bodies into action. Once you've seen that, you see that He is the illimitable One. Then you relax and say, "This is what life is basically: Another living His life in me." You've got your key to everything.Every problem becomes an opportunity. Every tough spot becomes a chance to enjoy the luxury of seeing Him deliver us out of it. And you welcome such spots.
Norman Grubb (1895-1993) wrote a number of books expanding on these truths. Most are out of print but can often be found in secondhand bookstores. If you find one, buy it! There are also some books still available.
|==========================================
|
| The Cure For Rapturitis
| By Ken Onweller
| (kender@ix.netcom.com)
|
"Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we
will all be changed--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at
the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be
raised imperishable, and we will be changed." (1 Cor 15:51-52)
Do you want the Rapture to happen today? Does the formation of
thick, white clouds overhead make you look up in eager
anticipation? Do you sometimes wonder how you will ever last
until that great trumpet blast telling you to, "Come up
hither!" ???
I certainly do, but at the same time realize that if God didn't
want us to stay on the earth for a while then we would all be
instantly in heaven the instant we accepted Jesus Christ as our
personal Lord and Savior.
So what do we do in the mean time? Is there any biblical precedent for dealing with hard-core cases of rapturitis? Yes, there is. Surprisingly enough, Paul suffered from it too!
"Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile WE GROAN, LONGING TO BE CLOTHED WITH OUR HEAVENLY DWELLING, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while in this tent, WE GROAN AND ARE BURDENED, because we do not wish to be unclothed BUT TO BE CLOTHED WITH OUR HEAVENLY DWELLING, so that what is mortal maybe swallowed up by life, " (2 Cor 5:1-4)
But notice from verse 7 that it was God who put this
"rapturitis" into us for a reason:
"Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose [to be given our new bodies at the Rapture] and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come." (vs. 7)
Somehow the Spirit will be involved in this. And as we shall see, we have quite an amazing thing to do and experience before the Rapture. The Rapture, itself, is to serve as the motivation to keep on going, not to give up and just wait around all day, staring up at the clouds.
WHAT TO DO
"Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward [Rapture] in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should take such a view of things."
(Php 3:12-15a)
Striving and seeking after godliness is something that takes a
very active participation on our part. It is a sign of maturity, after all, to be striving for righteousness!
"For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say 'No' to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope--the glorious appearing [the Rapture] of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good." (Titus 2:11-14)
It is certainly hard enough to reach for the righteousness promised, but quite different to say no to the evils of our past with which Satan is ever eager to re-ensnare us. But the Holy Spirit does give us the very power we need to face such things and to, "JUST SAY NO." After all, doesn't the scripture also state:
"Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he wil come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded [you cannot have both God and the World].
Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom [repent, in other words]. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up." (James 4:7-10)
AN EXAMPLE
Allow me to give but one example of how this love of the world can hinder your race for the Rapture, causing you to miss out on the richness of your walk until then.
"I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing [Rapture] of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time [God's timing, not our own!]."
(1 Tim 6:13b-15a)
What is the command Paul is telling Timothy about?
"But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, and faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Firght the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called..." (vss. 11-12a).
And, what is the "this" which Timothy was to flee from?
"People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs."
(vss. 9-10)
What kinds of trouble, then, will this love of money lead you
into?
"If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teching, he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant frictions between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain." (vss. 3-5)
When you take your sight off of the finish line and become too focussed on the here and now, you can (and will) quickly lose sight of what really matters and wander into all kinds of errors. Do you know anyone evidencing such problems (envy, strife, malicious talk, ...) whom you would say is robustly happy and manifesting the love of Jesus Christ to the world?
No way!!!
So, what, then, is the proper attitude to take with regards to
money?
"Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.
What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins."
(James 4:13-17)
All of our material blessings were given to us that we could
use them to bless others, not just ourselves. When we see all of our personal wealth as the result of our labor, we lose sight of the one who gave us the ability to acquire it. We lose sight of why it was given to us. We lose sight of the blessings from generosity. We lose sight of the big picture.
We lose sight of Jesus Christ.
If you still feel that you don't have enough, you need to learn the secret of contentment by which you can appreciate what you have now and not let it take your eyes off of the Rapture.
"But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought
nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that."
(1 Tim 6:6-8)
CONCLUSION
It was recently told me that there are only two things you can do on earth which you cannot do in heaven: sin and witness.
It should be obvious which one God wants from us. But what kind of a witness are you if you aren't living what you speak?
You would be a hypocrite.
This is why so much emphasis is placed on our daily walk and of the need to go on to perfection. God is trying to use you to reach and to bless people. You could be his vessel for sharing the gospel or for putting food on the table of a hungry family.
The point is that God has a purpose for you while you are still on earth. As you walk according to that purpose you will experience such overwhelming joy and satisfaction that you can barely contain it.
So we see that the cure for Rapturitis is quite simple.
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward." (Col 3:23-24a)
|==========================================
|
| N O E X I T
| by Gayle Erwin
|
No Exit is the title of a one-act play written by the French
existentialist, Jean Paul Sartre. He attempts to portray the blankness of
life in terms of hell. For Sartre, hell is not a lake of brimstone, a
perpetual fire, nor a place where the devil and his torturers forever
hound their victims. To Sartre, hell is other people. There are four
characters in the play. The opening scene begins with a valet ushering a
man named Garcin into a room. The room is furnished with three sofas, a
mantelpiece, and an immovable massive bronze ornament on the mantelpiece.
As with other countless rooms in this hell hotel, there are no mirrors, no
windows, nothing breakable. A light burns continuously.
Garcin is left alone by the valet, expecting torturers with red hot
tongs to move in. However, in succession, two women are escorted to the
room by the valet. One is named Inez and the other Estelle. With their
arrival, the room is considered fully occupied.
Within a matter of hours, the past of all three people comes out.
Garcin was a deserter, untrue and cruel to his wife. Inez was a lesbian,
and Estelle murdered her illegitimate baby. In Sartre's play, these depict
some of the types of individuals who go to hell. Slowly it dawns upon
these people that this room is their eternal abode.
Inez says, "We're in hell. And no one else will come here. We'll stay
in this room together, the three of us, forever and ever."
They perceive that they are to be each others' torturers. Their
personalities conflict so strongly, they despise each other so greatly,
and their attempted dominance of each other is so acute, that at the
outset they make a pact to keep silent and thus reduce the torture of
their hell. The pact is short-lived. They cannot refrain from verbally
clawing at each other.
Sartre's hell is really a parable of life: The world is the room of the
evils of hell, and the people in the room are the citizens of hell.
There is no exit, for there are no doors and no windows. The biblical
hell is the one place where every hope is impossible, for there is no
hope. But for Sartre, human life is hopeless.
Think About It
We got here without being asked, acquired names we did not choose,
parents we did not pick, and environments we cannot escape. We may try to
get out. We may attempt to forget our desperation through ambition and
work, through alcohol or drugs, or by kicking aside the restraint of
parents, society, and sex. But, the harder you try, the closer the walls
of your room move in. You try to climb out, over, under, or through, but
there are no doors and there are no windows. There is No Exit. That,
ladies and gentlemen, is life.
What If...
You are the seventh baby born into a "dysfunctional" family, and your
home is filthy, and the rats eat on you when no other food is available.
Your father is absent and your mother is insensitive. There are other
babies in your room, and you will grow up in a condemned tenement and an
overcrowded street filled with gang and drug activity, attend a school
offering a second-rate education, and work odd jobs without security for
the rest of your life. No Exit for the baby in that crib.
You are a young child in Somalia. The rain has not come. There is no
crop to harvest. Your stomach is distended from eating grass and barks of
the few remaining trees. There are ten million others just like you. No
Exit.
You are a Chinese youth on a rusty boat leaving the only home you have
ever known. Your boat is overcrowded and filthy. There is not enough food,
and disease runs freely through the crowd. You've given your life's
savings to be on this boat, and if you make it, you will spend the next
twenty years trying to earn enough to pay off the contract you have signed
with these hoodlums. No Exit. You are a young U.S. soldier plucked from
the comfort of your home and taken to some strangely named place where the
last face you look at is aiming down a gun barrel. For both of you, No
Exit.
You are a twenty-five year old junkie who consumes more drugs than
food. You are so numbed by needles, weakened by chemicals, and emaciated
by hepatitis, that if an overdose doesn't get you, you may drown in your
own vomit. You contracted AIDS years ago and the clock is ticking toward
your death. No Exit.
You are a working man or woman. Every day you put the fifth bolt on the
left rim of an electronic instrument. You commute for an hour to get home,
and then drown the monotony by watching five hours of television. You turn
the lights out and start all over again, except on the next day, the
instruments you put the bolts on will be red instead of blue and there
will be different programs on TV. No Exit.
You are retired and in your "golden years." The company you poured your
life into went bankrupt and the pension funds are gone. Your house is
losing value every year, your health is poor, and Social Security won't
cover your monthly bills. The children you raised don't want to help. No
Exit.
You are a student not sure whether you are being educated or
manipulated by a system that can't seem to make men think right,
regardless of how many facts are taught or debates are held. No Exit.
Count them. Count the billions of men, women, boys, and girls. Count
the hopeless poverty and sin of their lives. No Exit. Bred, born, burned
out, and then buried. No Exit in life. No Exit in death. That is the story
of this age. In natural thinking, this is the conclusion. No Exit.
No Hope At All?
BUT THE GOSPEL IS NOT ACCORDING TO JEAN PAUL SARTRE. The Gospel is not
according to the despair of this age. No. One man entered history, not by
accident, but as the only man to ever truly "choose" to be born. That man
entered from outside the room; something no one has done. He entered with
faith, not fear; with hope, not despair. He was a carpenter. And he made a
door in the room. He said, "I am the door. If anyone exits after me, he
will get out."
He Entered the Room--He Left the Room
Having made the door, He went out of the room and "made a way for us to
escape from the evil world in which we live." He entered the room. He left
the room. He made an exit for us. What a difference from the room of
hopelessness to the room of life!
Can You Find "the Door"?
Are you in the room of No Exit? There is a door. It will do you no good
to stand there and say, "I won't go through the door because there may be
others. There may be a Muslim door, Hindu door, a Buddhist door." It will
not do you any good to close your eyes and say, "I do not believe the door
exists." The door is not dependent on your belief. The door is always
there.
The point is, if you want to get out, you must go through the door that
is open. Waiting to see if there are any other doors will not get you out
now; it will not gain you anything to insist on staying with the people
who are still looking for other doors or have their eyes closed.
Take the Exit
Go through the exit--Jesus Christ. And once you are out, stay out.
Spend your time and devotion following the One who got you out, instead of
useless debating on whether or not there was another door.
Find the hope and purpose in life which comes from knowing Jesus
Christ. You can know this Christ, this door, by talking to Him. Ask Him to
forgive your sins and become controller of your life; then accept the fact
that He does. He is the way, the truth, the life--THE EXIT.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Prophezine Commentaries
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Pokemon Comics Add New Twist to Fad
by Berit Kjos <www.crossroad.to>
For background information about Japanese anime (animation) and manga (cartoons or comic books), read "The Dangers of Role-Playing Games"
then visit the publisher at Viz Communications and click on "Going Global."
Definitions from Pokemon Comic Book
"Dream Eater: The gas pokemon's most effective attack. It sucks out the opponent's soul.... It's been preying on people and pokemon here for years. It appears suddenly, steals their souls, then vanishes as quickly as it came." 1
"Night Shade: A type of spiritual attack."2
The worldwide fascination with Japanese animation (anime) has fueled a revival in the comic books (manga) industry. Two years ago, when President Clinton called for after-school clubs and organizations that would mold our children's values to fit the new global blueprint, the 21st Century comics store was already beginning to serve the same purpose.
Today, anime fans who congregate at these new gathering places to read the latest Pikachu story will surely not be touched by Biblical values. Instead they will be surrounded by indexed boxes and crowded wall shelves filled with all kinds of wildly illustrated tales -- mostly imported translations. These range from the innocuous Pokemon tales to soft-core pornography. The hardcore pornographic anime so popular in Asia is usually filtered out. But what children find when they look beyond the Pokemon section will be as sensual, promiscuous, violent and occult as most R-rated movies, if not more so.
On my first visit to a local comic books store, I scanned the Sailor Moon display then flipped through the catalogued box of Dragon Ball Z comics. The latter, a more openly violent and occult set of Japanese anime-and-manga tales, have captivated millions of fans around the world.
Next, I looked for the Pokemon section. It didn't take long to spot the happy face of the familiar little pocket monster, Pikachu. In the midst of the fast-action violence all around, he seemed disarmingly sweet and innocent. I
picked up The Electric Tale of Pikachu, turned the cover page, and pondered a cardboard ad for Dragon Ball Z -- a brief reminder that seductive darkness lurks behind the sweet facade. Then I read the following story:
THE POWER OF PSI. Ash, the familiar young hero who has "always wanted to battle a PSI pokemon," arrives at the local pokemon gym which serves as a stadium as well as a training center for pokemon trainers like himself. He stumbles and falls on his face in front of the pretty trainer Sabrina. She was expecting him:
"I dreamt that a handsome young challenger was on his way," she tells her friend.
"I guess a powerful psychic like you gets premonitions all the time," says the friend.
Understating her impressive occult talents, Sabrina then demonstrates her skill in practical magic. She sees that the soy sauce is missing from her lunch, she wills it to come, and it appears in her outstretched hand. Telepathy, conjuring, divination.... nothing seems too difficult for her.
Soon afterwards, Ash and Sabrina stand on their pedestals ready for battle.
Their proxy warriors -- the two pokemon chosen for this particular fight -- have already taken their positions. Ash has sent Pikachu, the popular yellow mouse, onto the raised platform. Sabrina has dispatched Abra, her sleeping "PSI pokemon." Guess who wins. Not Pikachu! His impressive energy proved too puny for the combined psychic powers of Sabrina and Abra. (See also The Pokemon Movie.)
PSYCHIC (Ch'i, Ki, or PSI) Energy
Defined from an occult perspective in the Donning International Psychic Dictionary by June G. Bletzer, Ph.D."An intelligent, powerful, invisible force... capable of being controlled and directed by the human mind;
1. Capable of being channeled out through the brain, palms, and eyes;
2. Can be transmitted through space into other living organisms and through matter;
3. Occurs when willed or occurs spontaneously;
4. Invisible energy living in all organisms and matter, connected throughout all the universes;
5 psychic energy is an aspect of electricity...
6. Controlled and employed under certain conditions that mankind does not fully understand...
7. tunes into the etheric world vibrational frequencies reaching from cosmic consciousness....
9. Transmits knowledge to the mind, and manipulates matter....
10. Frequently comes from an intelligent, powerful energy field known as highly evolved soul-minds in invisible bodies...
12. A primordial form of intelligence pervading the universe and affecting its course." Ch'i or Ki(China & Japan) "An immutable principle in the... vital life force; Synonyms: Tch'i, Qi, Prana, Biocosmic energy, PSI (Psychic energy...." Psychic Conscious- ness"An altered state of consciousness... as in sleep, hypnosis, meditation, and the opening of psychic doors...."
HAUNTED BY BLACK FOG. A week later, Sabrina is found unconscious. While trying to save some friends from a Haunter pokemon, she had "fallen prey to the dream eater attack." The picture shows a huge demonic creature with long claw-like fingers encircling poor, screaming Sabrina. The comic book identifies the evil dream eater as "a high-level Haunter in this area, called the Black Fog." This monstrous pokemon, with no trace of the cuteness that characterizes more popular members of his species, "sucks out the opponent's soul." So much for the common argument that all pokemon are good (like Pikachu) or fun-loving (like other Haunters) and would never want to hurt or kill anyone.
Ash and his friend, Brock, join the search for a way to save Sabrina and free her soul. Their guidance comes from an ordinary pen with extraordinary power. It mysteriously floats into the air, lands on a piece of paper, then writes a message exposing Haunter's hide-out. In the real world, contemporary spiritists call this phenomenon "automatic writing." It's one of many ways they can receive or "channel" messages from their spirit guides. The comic book explains its feel-good example of this practice:
"It's Sabrina," shouts Brock. The comic book narrator (not a character) explains: "She's telepathic. The Haunter may have eaten her soul, but she's still able to tell us where it is through telepathy."
"All right!" yells Ash. "I'm gonna catch me a Haunter!"
"Don't be a moron," shouts Brock. "What makes you think you can catch that thing?"
"Hey, it's a pokemon, right?"
"I guess so, but...."
"It may be big, but we'll make a really big pokeball for it! This is a piece of cake!" 3
Equipped with their monster warriors and forceful weapons, Sabrina's would-be saviors soon arrive at the haunted tower where the vicious pokemon hides. Black Fog watches from a high balcony, peering out from behind the statue of a princess. In the cartoon picture, his claws seem to be groping the statue's breast and pulling at her low-cut dress.
The young heroes charge through the gate. The battle has barely begun when the "good" guys seem overwhelmed by the powerful assaults against them. But suddenly Sabrina's psychic pokemon gets the upper hand:
"Abra neutralized the haunter's attack!" shouts Ash. "I didn't know Abra had that kind of power!"
"It's Sabrina!" answers Ash. "Sabrina is combining her powers with Abra's."
It's also spiritual warfare, but not the Biblical kind. In the story, as in pagan cultures, one occult force fights another. The next two battle tactics --
Night Shade and Mirror Wave -- would determine the winner and loser. The comic book defines the two strategies:
"Night Shade: a type of spiritual attack."
"Mirror Wave: turns the enemy's attack back against it."
After a numerous pages of murderous assaults and angry growls, krakkls, wachhaaaahhs, and a final kkrrmmbll, Black Fog collapses and "self-destructs."
Sabrina re-appears with her soul restored, and the winners walk among the rocks listening to this bit of history:
"In ancient times, the people who lived here worshipped pokemon as gods. It's possible that the haunter grew accustomed to being treated like a god, until they abandoned it. That's why it wouldn't let itself be captured by a human.... It went out with an exit fit for a god."
ADDING "FACTS" TO FANTASY. True or false, "history" has a way of validating the myth in the minds of children. It gives the fantasy an air of factual reality.
Sure, if you ask pokemon fans if this really happened, they will answer no. But with their emotions they have walked with Ash, worried about Sabrina, battled a deadly pokemon, shared a great victory, and heard a plausible explanation. It felt good and won't be quickly forgotten.
To the anointed -- the children and adults who are captivated by these pocket monsters -- the pokemon world is more than just fantasy. Click on Comments and read the arguments from visiting pokefans. Notice how the evolving pokemon myth has taken on a reality of its own. It's an exciting illusion, and children who love it feel more at home in the pokemon world than in their own family. They have entered a secret society -- an unearthly reality with its own myths, rules, gods (or idols), powers, joys and sense of belonging. This enticing society welcomes joiners, not visitors -- enthusiasts, but rarely parents.
In contrast to the fervent and often angry arguments that "there is nothing occult in pokemon" this comic book demonstrates the promotion of "spiritual" or "psychic" forces that Desensitize children to the spiritual power God forbids in His Word Stirs a fascination with supernatural experiences that clash with the Bible Builds a craving for more psychic thrills and emotional stimulation Divides families and stirs rebellion against God and traditional authorities
SEEING FROM GOD'S PERSPECTIVE. The Bible shows us the heart of God. Only by pursuing His will and way can we rest secure in His love and promises. That may sound arrogant, exclusive and hateful to those who have chosen other gods and spiritual pathways, but then the world never did accept the unworldly teachings of the King who two millennia ago found no room at the inn. The apostle Paul, who faced unthinkable persecution in his days, understood this well. His prayer for his beloved friends in Colosse encourages us today:
"...we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light." (Colossians 1:9-12)
The only way we and our children can be "filled with the knowledge of his will" is "through the spiritual wisdom and understanding" that comes from seeking to know God and His will through His Word allowing the Holy Spirit to make that Word alive in our minds committing ourselves to following His Word yielding ourselves to Him, trusting His grace to enable us to do His will.
While His Word never mentions pokemon, it provides plenty of guidelines that show us what will or won't "please Him." One of those Scriptures is Deuteronomy 1810-13, which lists occult practices that are an "abomination" to Him. The list includes witchcraft (or magic), sorcery, spells, spiritism, and divination -- all of which were demonstrated in the above comic book.
When we choose to follow Jesus, He gives us the "endurance and patience" we need to stand firm in His truth, no matter the opposition. And in the midst of the spiritual battle, He fills us with His love, peace and joy. We, of all the people on the planet, need not fear the anger of those who would press us into their mold for 21st century conformity, for our God reigns! Blessed are the people who who know Him, share His love, wear His armor, understand His will, follow His way, and dare to shun evil. They will delight in the King forever and ever!"
To better understand how the Pokemon phenomenon fits into the global paradigm shift and the new worldwide education system, you may want to read Brave New Schools.
1. Toshihiro Ono, Pokemon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu (Viz Communications, Inc. www.viz.com), page 11. See also the Viz Internet magazines at www.j-pop.com
2. Ibid., page 13.
3. Ibid., pages 13-14
Berit Kjos at www.crossroad.to
andy-berit@crossroad.to
********************
********************
Poems...etc.
********************
********************
God Is ...
God is like Coca-Cola,
He's the real thing.
God is like General Electric,
He lights your path.
God is like Bayer Aspirin,
He works wonders.
God is like Hallmark cards,
He cared enough to send the very best.
God is like Tide,
He gets out the stains that others leave behind.
God is like VO-5 hair spray.
He holds up through all kinds of weather.
God is like Dial soap,
Aren't you glad you know Him?
Don't you wish everyone did?
God is like Sears,
He has EVERYTHING!
God is like Alka Seltzer,
Oh what a relief He is!
God is like Scotch tape,
You can't see him, but you know he's there.
God is like the American Express Card,
Never leave home with out Him.
********************
********************
