FOREWORD
It is over forty years since I was led,
I believe by the Holy Spirit, to write the first of this
series of books on the one reality which has absorbed me all
these years: Paul’s mystery, now made manifest, of
"Christ in you, the hope of glory."
The first book, The Law of Faith, was
followed by The Liberating Secret, The Deep Things of God,
The Spontaneous You, God Unlimited, and Who Am I? I have had
many evidences that the inner truth I’ve sought to share
has, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, become that same
reality in many.
Like a fiddle with one string, I still
write about this reality, which I boldly call Total Truth.
My "textbook," my authority, has always been
solely the Bible, and still is - the Bible inwardly
illuminated and made the sole key to life by the Holy
Spirit; just as Jesus said, "The words I speak unto
you, they are spirit and they are life."
I call this book YES, I AM because I
would not write it if it were not, by great grace, a
personally experienced reality to me, even as it is to many
others of you. For as Jesus said, "We speak what we do
know and testify to what we have seen."
I sought in my earlier years, as a
missionary in the Congo with C. T. Studd, the key to what I
call Total Living - complete satisfaction, complete enabling
- and the Holy Spirit turned that key in the lock for me in
a crisis of faith which became, though often with stumbling
steps, my inner knowing of this "mystery" word of
Paul’s.
From that time the inner knowing has
increased and stabilized through the years, until I could
"teach others also" and was better able to define
what Paul, Peter, James, and John explain in their letters.
This has been the sole heartbeat of my books.
There is a joy unspeakable and full of
glory, a peace that passeth understanding, and an
all-sufficiency in all things by which we are able to abound
unto every good work. Though we are always only the earthen
vessels in which "the excellency of the power is of
God, and not of us," there is a reigning in life by
Christ, a bearing of the good fruit of the Spirit, an
overcoming in all things. There is a self-release from
bondage into liberty, an overflowing of the rivers of the
Spirit, and a counting and experiencing of temptations and
trials as "all joy" instead of miseries to be
avoided or endured. Because all is centered in the one
Reality, our Lord Jesus Christ - crucified, risen, ascended,
who now lives His life in His body members - we experience
life as adventure, zest, thrill, and gaiety at the heart of
a desperate seriousness. Immersed in meeting the needs of
others, travailing in birth until Christ is formed in them
as in us, we are privileged to bear about in our bodies the
dying of the Lord Jesus, so that "death works in us,
but life in you."
If you have already read any of my
other books, I would say to you that you will find here a
repetition of the great foundational facts of our Total
Truth, starting with God Himself. I could not build without
a sure foundation. If you will go along with me, I am bold
to say that God has now given me many new clarifications.
These include some startling even to me, ranging from and
including the fall of man, what man’s real nature is, and
our two-fold redemption: not only through the blood, but
also through the body of our Christ. Then, at last, a
clarity has come to me on those vital Romans 6 to 8 chapters
which I have dug into a thousand times, which I can
therefore now more clearly share with others. Finally, I go
right on to new clarifications of ourselves as the free men
in Christ we’ve been redeemed to be. So we now can say, in
accord with the title of this book, "Yes, I am"
and we are learning to live positively in the perfect love
that casts out fear instead of in the bondage of negative
believing. We see where temptation becomes adventure. The
endless problems and frustrations in life, including
personality clashes, are seen to be the necessary negatives
by which He, the Positive, can reveal Himself; and we enjoy
the process with Him. We move right on to the simplicity and
constant use of the "word of faith" in our prayer
life, and to the highest of all, the life of intercession,
in which we are given a privileged and effective place in
meeting the world’s needs.
If you have not read any of these books
before, please be patient if the first chapters seem rather
detached from our own pressing life situations. We shall
surely get there, if you will follow through.
I have been wonderfully helped in
producing this book. I have a job in deciphering my own
scribble, and so several who are linked with us in
fellowship in Washington and Alexandria have sacrificed
their time to type while I have dictated. For this and other
vital help I especially wish to thank Dick and Laurie Hills,
Dart Cox, Maggie O’Bannion, Nancy Robinette, Lannelle
Campbell, Tony and Bette Ketcham, Kay Krattli, and Sylvia
Audi; also my son Daniel, a Ph.D. Professor of English
Literature, who gave my manuscript a thorough going-over.
And my editor at CLC, Robert Delancy. How wonderful the love
of God is when dear ones volunteer their labors for Him in
our oneness in Christ. My thanks and love to all of them.
This book has its background in the
sixty years since Pauline, my precious wife, and I married
and went to the Congo together, to take our share in
bringing the gospel to our brother Africans, with her
father, C. T. Studd. I give some details of this in the
book. Pauline, though now physically weak and unable to get
about, lies in bed resting in the Lord. Where should I have
been without her through these many years? She is now
lovingly cared for by one of our Worldwide Evangelization
Crusade family, Susie Wheeler, while my daughter Priscilla
cares for me.
In the course of the book I often refer
to my years with the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade
founded by C. T. Studd, and the Christian Literature
Crusade, born out of it, and my great joy all those years in
taking my share in the outreach of the Crusades. More
recently, the message God has given me to share in these
pages has taken more public form in a magazine called Union
Life, begun five years ago by Bill Volkman, a lawyer, to
whom "Christ in you" became a living reality.
Quite a company of us are now linked with its increasing
circulation, with many evidences of the seal of the Spirit.
Various ones of us share what God has made real to us as we
receive invitations to homes, house groups, and churches,
both here and abroad.
I am thankful to the Christian
Literature Crusade, which in cooperation with the
Lutterworth Press in Britain has published all the previous
books, and now is producing this one.
Finally, as one who years back
translated the New Testament from the King James Version,
helped by the Greek, into a Congolese language, Bangala, I
am used to the King James version and like its accuracy, so
my quotations are basically from it. I will, however,
capitalize the pronouns for Deity.
My greetings and love in Christ to all
who read this. May the Lord refresh and illuminate us by His
Word and Spirit.
Chapter
1
TOTAL TRUTH
To say something is total truth is the
final word! Yet what else can I say if it is total to me?
What follows has settled into me as Total Truth, as I have
soaked in the Scriptures, always my final authority, these
sixty years, and sought the interpretation by the Spirit and
His inner witness. Other interpreters of the Word by the
Spirit have been my helpers, both in print and in personal
interchange; but always I have sought for and found the
final confirmation for myself by the One of whom John
writes: He who by His inner anointing "teaches you of
all things, and is truth, and is no lie."
I have to start with what in itself is the
final word, and it is a staggering word to put in a few
sentences; but all the rest of the superstructure which
enables me to say "Yes, I am," can only be built
on this foundation. The Bible says, "In the beginning
God," and in the end, "God... all in all" (1
Cor. 15:28), as He will then be known by His universe - but
is already known by us through inner seeing (1 Cor.
2:10-12). And, quite simply, if He is finally to be known by
His universe as the All in all, He who is unchangeable from
everlasting to everlasting has always been "The
All in all." And that means what it says. If God is the
All in all, then all that exists is a unity of which He is
the Center, and everything manifests Him, on one level or
another.
That was what first truly opened my eyes
to the One whom I had always thought of as a far-off Person
quite apart from His creation, producing a new seeing of
Him, who is Spirit, as actually revealed in all created
forms, even if they have been distorted from their original
harmony. "The beyond in the midst." That was a
vast stride for me, for it gave me the "single
eye" which Jesus said will fill the body with light. I
began to be a "see-through-er" to Him
rather than a "see-at-er," in all that is
in His universe, whether man or matter, whether evil or
good. And I began to find the poise, calmness, hope and
faith there is in such single-seeing.
I see also how all the universe seeks
oneness, each individual part with the local object of its
desire: as shown by the positive proton and negative
electron which, united, form the atom; by the human marriage
union of male and female; even by the searchings of
individuals after political, national, and international
union. All these are shadows and symbols of a desire for
oneness with Him - most seeking with ignorance of the One
with whom they seek union. But millions of us today are the
privileged ones who have found that blessed oneness: Christ
the Head and we the body. Jesus’ prayer is being answered:
"That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me,
and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us." And
this right through to the final consummation we thrillingly
await... the marriage supper of the Lamb, whose bride,
ourselves by grace, "hath made herself ready."
We can know our oneness with Him, for as
He is Spirit we also are spirit. Jesus had said to the woman
of Samaria, "God is Spirit"; and we too are
spirits, for He is called "the Father of spirits."
So spirit is self: He the "I am" Spirit, and we
created spirits - like Father, like son. As spirit-self, I know;
Paul said, "What man knows the things of a man,
save the spirit of man which is in him?" As
spirit-self, I love; for God is love, and we too all
show love, whether rightly or wrongly applied. And as
spirit-self, I will; just as He "works all
things after the counsel of His own will," so I have my
freedom of will. This freedom was the first evidence of Adam
being a person, in the Garden of Eden. So to be a created
person in the image of the Creator is to be spirit as He is
Spirit - He infinite and I finite; and I as spirit have
knowledge, love and will. I know, I love, I choose; and my
soul and body are the external agents of my choosing spirit.
He who is Spirit is He who is love. By the
Scriptures, which reveal Him as love in the giving of His
Son that we might have life, we know that His love is total
self-giving love. He is the eternal person-for-others. The
reason why He is solely other-loving love rather than
self-loving love we will see later. But its unchangeable
consequence is that this universe becomes to us a safe and
perfectly controlled one when we know that He manifests
Himself solely in His other-love activities. We know that
other-love can only be harmonious love, in which all that
has its source in Him who is love - whether animate or
inanimate, on every level of existence from the sub-atomic
upwards - can only operate in "temperature" (Jacob
Boehme’s term for normality or harmony) when each is
"loving" the other; and to this the universe is
coming.
But how full of contradiction to this is
our present experience! We live in a world where self-love
is the basic motivation. It seems we are in an inextricable
chaos from which we can find no way out - unless it were
possible that all humans so love one another that we put the
interests of others before ourselves, a condition which, we
know, to the natural man is an unattainable ideal. But -
surprise of surprises - the ideal has its reality. We who
are born of the Spirit, joined to the Lord in one spirit, are
loving one another! The eternal kingdom of love is
already in evidence for those who have eyes to see it.
The world may point at Christians who
don’t appear to love one another, but the world-wide
brotherhood of those who do love one another is a visible
fact today, which can’t be suppressed or obliterated; and
we are part of it. One of the followers of Francis of Assisi
said in those days to some who sought to water down his ways
of perfect love: "There is an element in the gospel of
Christ so disturbing that the world will forever reject it,
but never forget it; and the Church will waver forever
between patronage and persecution. Yours is the present, for
the world will ridicule or crucify us; but I think the
future is ours." And he was right. That
"element" is alive in millions today, of whom we
are a part; and we are going to see again in these pages the
marvels of the way by which this has become our total
reality.
So here we start with our Total: God
Himself, in ultimate fact the only Person in the universe.
God is Spirit (hence we know Spirit is Person), and God is
love (and that means He is other-love). And part of this
Total we, the redeemed, have now become in our union with
Him.
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Chapter
2
THE SON AND THE
SONS
Now we can see that a universal of any
kind is invisible and meaningless unless it has its
manifested form, for any universal reality can only be known
by its manifested form. What is electricity? Who knows? But
we can perceive it through one of its manifested forms -
light, heat, power. Even the living God, the one ultimate
Person in the universe, would remain unmanifested for all
time as that Person unless He had from eternity His
manifested form, first called The Word, His beloved Son.
Why is He called The Word, this One who
"was in the beginning with God and was God"?
Because a word is the fixed final form that thought takes;
and by that word the thought moves into action. Thought,
word, deed. Father, Son, Spirit. So the eternal God, as the
living Person, speaks His Word of self-manifestation into
visibility in His only begotton Son, and that is why
"none but the Son knows the Father, and he to whom the
Son reveals Him." That is why those in religious faiths
who have not Jesus Christ at their center can never know the
living God person to person, as we the redeemed do.
But if the eternal universal One is
manifested only by His only begotten Son "in whom
dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily," then
all further manifestations of Himself will be by His Son. To
use a poor human illustration, this is much like the
procedure of many a human inventor: to expand and perfect
his invention he has his next level of cooperators, sons or
executives, who do the developing. Henry Ford produces his
first car for the people. His sons and managers reproduce it
in further popular models ("forms"), and expand
the enterprise as a world-wide Ford Company, applying in
detail all the resources and genius of the founder.
So now the Son (and later, marvelously, we
discover a parallel in the sons) becomes Himself the Word in
action, and by Him were all things created. Of what did this
active word consist, of which it is said, "In the
beginning was the Word, and all things were made by
Him"? How did He "speak" this word? Quite
simply, Scripture reveals. The first word was "Let
there be light" - and there was light. So the word was
"Let there be." That was no word of striving
effort to obtain something. No, it was having the authority
to understand what His Father purposed in love-action and
was pressing through by His Son-Agent into further detailed
manifestation. So the Son, the Word, makes a declaration of
what we now call faith, which was also a command, "Let
there be…." The word of faith. This meant that the
Father-Spirit, who is the eternal substance, would now come
into purposed manifested "forms" of Father-love,
channeled into visibility by the Son as His creating Agent.
"And there was light."
We are here getting a first glimpse, from
the very beginning of the Bible record, of how faith works;
in other words, the ease of true praying. The Son (or sons)
has (and have) an inner understanding of the love-purposes
of the Father. The Son then fulfills His prerogative of
being the One who speaks the word - and a word, as we have
seen, is a person going into action. He authoritatively
says, "Let there be" (that same word which Jesus
later told His disciples to use, "Say unto this
mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast....").
Faith, as the Scripture says, is substance. "And there
was light."
Here is our first glimpse of how a person
functions. A spirit-person, by his inner action of
spirit-choice, speaks the word, the decisive word of faith,
and that is really the Son interpreting the Father’s
revealed love-purpose; and from the Father through the Son,
the Spirit Himself, the Third Person of the Trinity, moves
into His creating work. At the creation, "the Spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters" and one by one
the six "Let there be’s" took visible
matter-form.
We have here diverged for a moment to take
this opportunity of showing that from the beginning, before
the human race was in existence, the only way a
spirit-person (which is what we humans are) can function is
by that simplest of simple spirit activities - the word of
faith.
But now back to Him "in whom are hid
all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." By Him,
with His word of faith, we see all things come into being -
those six "Let there be’s," by which the Father
manifested His Godhead in every form of marvelous visible
creation with all its beauties, harmonies, perfection - by
His Son. Indeed, we hear God’s recorded comment: "It
is good,… it is good,... it is good." But the
consummation of those eight "Lets" is beyond our
conceiving, except that it is revealed as His eternal
purpose from before He started the founding of the world.
When the eighth "Let" is recorded, it states:
"And God said, Let Us make man in Our image." The
Father, Son, and Spirit converged in Their final summit
"Let." For it was the beginning of a vast race of
sons... created spirits in the image of Him, the
Creator-Spirit… spirits who were predestined to adoption
on the level of sons, to actually be co-sons with
co-destiny, co-responsibilities and co-authority.
"Fantastic!" our astonished hearts say. It is at
such times we fall back on our final authority, the written
Word. By what other means could these bold facts be revealed
and declared?
So here we move from deity to humanity, to
discover how we are lifted to the level of deity, because we
are created spirits who can thus totally identify with Him
the Spirit, and be His perfect means of Self-manifestation.
How could we know what that means and implies if He, the
uncreated Deity-Son, had not Himself become fully a human,
and exemplified in human living what a normal human being is
and how he functions as such? So that John can say,
"Because as He is, so are we in this world" not
ought to be, but are!
Then if at this juncture we now take the
big leap into the eternal destiny of the human sons as
brother-sons of God with the Son, we are quietly told,
"If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs
with Christ." We then quite rightly ask, "What is
the inheritance?" And the answer comes back, "The
Father has appointed the Son as heir of all things,"
and that must mean the universe. Again fantastic! And we
follow that by asking, "What does it imply, to receive
an inheritance?" The simple answer is, "After the
first excitement at the news, then comes
responsibility!" An heir not only owns, but must manage
and develop his inheritance. And God has entrusted His whole
universe, in whatever its ultimate mind-boggling
developments are, to His Son and sons - ourselves!
Just one thing is obvious. He must know
that we are trustworthy; even as Paul caught sight of that
when he said, near the end of his life, "I thank Christ
Jesus our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that He counted me
faithful." And how can we be trustworthy and counted as
such by the living God? Obviously, only when we
spontaneously are as He is. Christ is love, as His Father is
love; so we as love are then safe managers of the universe
because we shall be for its benefit, not it for us, We are
then safe, spontaneous other-lovers, as are the Father, Son
and Spirit. That is what we are by grace - not (as we shall
see) ought to be, but are! Yes, I am.
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Chapter 3
WHAT IS A
PERSON?
So now we have laid our Total Truth foundations according
to the revealed Word of God - who He is, who we are, and why
we are.
The next stage of our inquiry, then, is equally plain. We
must now be sure of being who we are, as well as
understanding who and why we are. And this is our human
history. Not one thing out of place. What appears evil and
destructive, and surely mistaken and not planned, is found
to be His perfect love-purpose from the beginning and is
taking us to our perfection in the only way - and none other
is possible - by which we can be who we are (that is, as He
is!) even during our earthly pilgrimage, and in simplicity
possess our possessions. But this must be examined,
diagnosed, experienced in every perfect detail. We must, as
conscious persons, know what this "way of God"
is... so plainly that we can with total confidence walk in
it; even as it was said that Priscilla and Aquila expounded
to Apollos "the way of God more perfectly." God
could not create us like Himself, as conscious persons,
without fairly and squarely explaining to us how a human
perfectly functions and enabling us to be that.
The first question we must ask is, "What is a human
person?" We have already said, "One who loves and
knows, and therefore makes choices." That means we are
persons because we can discern between things that differ,
and thus make our choices. This is what we call moral
consciousness.
So we now come to another Total Truth - that nothing can
be known except by its opposite. There could not be light in
the first chapter of Genesis without, in verse 2,
"darkness upon the face of the deep." This is a
fundamental law of manifestation. Light cannot be known
except by contrasted darkness, sweet by bitter, hard by
soft, truth by lie, and so down all the list. A thing is
only to be known as a thing because it has an opposite. So
all conscious life is a recognition of opposites, and then
their rightful combination, so that one is built on the
other and one swallows up the other. You cannot have a soft
bed unless the mattress has a hard bedstead which it
swallows up. You can’t say a final "Yes" to this
without first saying a final "No" to that. One has
said that all life is the "rhythmic balanced
interchange of opposites." Even the positive proton has
to make captive the negative electron in order to form the
elements.
So this brings us to the fundamental principle of
opposites which condition a person. We know and we desire
and, as we are forever confronted by opposites, we choose.
Knowledge and desire lead us to choice. The "autonomy
of our freedom" is what the world today is so busy
defending, yet that freedom involves the necessity of making
choices. We are free, but we must choose. Freedom is not
some vague, windblown thing which floats about anywhere and
everywhere. No, freedom must make choices. It exists to make
choices, because life is only life by the interrelation of
its opposites. Those who have tried to escape to what they
conceive as ultimate freedom by some mind-blowing drug only
arrive at nothingness. Life consists of making choices. We
have to choose. But the curious effect is that we are all
slaves to our choices! We choose to go to a meeting: we are
taken over by the disciplines of that meeting. We choose a
profession: we are taken over by the know-how of our
profession. Our freedom has become a slavery! But because we
freely choose, we enjoy our slavery.
So now we see that to be a person means we have desire
and knowledge and will. Yes, we must make choices... and
want always controls will.
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Chapter 4
ONLY TWO
ALTERNATIVES
This brings us straight to the one and only total choice
of our desire and knowledge - which totally controls all
lesser choices of life. It is the choice between
ultimate opposites; and remember, our choice always enslaves
us and we become that choice. That one fundamental, total
choice is between the only two alternatives a living self
can and must make. I am made of love - and to love. I must
and do love myself. I must satisfy myself. I must fulfill
myself. In what direction - one of only two - shall my love
by free choice, in which I become so fixed that I am its
slave, take me? It can be by my fulfilling my self-love in
self-getting, and "to hell with the interests of
others!"; or, by my fulfilling my self-love by
self-giving, meeting others’ needs, and, if necessary,
"going to hell for them." When fixed in one or the
other of these two, every lesser choice is but a temporary
reflection of my one major fixed choice, to which I am a
slave.
The most striking revelation in the Bible, almost
incidentally recorded, is that the One Person in the
universe, our living God Himself, has made the equivalent of
that eternal choice. (Of course there is no such thing in
Him as a choice in time, such as we make, but we have to use
human terms.) This is when the remark is slipped in twice
(in Titus 1:2 and Hebrews 6:18) that God cannot lie; not
did not nor does not, but can not. For
a lie is one obvious form of self-seeking. A liar is seeking
his own ends, no matter what the adverse effect on his
neighbor. And the Bible says God cannot do that. In other
words, He cannot be a self-getter, a self-seeker. Thus there
has been that determined choice (to use human terms) by the
one conscious Self of the universe. Of course there
has been - for a self is only a conscious self by
confronting the alternatives: truth or lie, self-getting or
self-giving. And "cannot" means that a self is
only a self by its necessary choice, and this is the
fundamental total choice. So we have this marvelous
revelation: that the One beyond all knowing, in order to be
a manifested self-conscious Self, had to make the
fundamental choice and, as it were, made it. This
self-loving Being (for we read, "For Thy pleasure we
are and were created") is eternally fixed as the
self-giving Self of the universe. He is the God for others.
His self-enjoyment is in self-giving. As John writes,
"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He
loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our
sins." That alone is the meaning of John’s supreme
word, "God is love"; and that has its basis in, as
it were, an eternal choice that He would not be the
alternative, the self-getting God. As that great inner seer
Jacob Boehme writes: "There is a cross in the heart of
the Deity, not just of Jesus Christ, whereby He has
eternally ‘died’ to being a God for self."
That is why He is the safe God of the universe,
because He is the Lover-Father and can be nothing else. That
is why we can learn to have a positive outlook on a
world of very negative appearances; for we know those are
only temporary surface conditions, like barnacles on a ship,
like ripples on the surface of a large, transparent lake;
and we become those who live by "seeing through" -
now, in this present time, seeing His perfect creation, the
kingdom of heaven, shining through the surface disturbances.
That is why the only sin is unbelief questioning the
kind of person God is. We may say we can’t account for
this horror or that tragedy, but we must never say,
"What kind of a God are You to permit that?" We
can only say, if we are not to have a cloud over our
spirits: "What You do or determine is always perfect
love with a perfect outcome."
And so we see the corollary that, if this universe has
its safe foundation in its Lover-Father, it must necessarily
also be owned, managed and developed by safe sons -
lover-sons. And this is why we are so carefully
investigating how we are to be "real persons,"
experiencing our fixedness as safe lover-sons, and walking
confidently in that fixity - now, in this thoroughly unfixed
and confused world. And once again, there is a total answer.
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Chapter 5
THE NECESSITY OF
THE NEGATIVE
The first necessity, then, in the coming into being of
the human family in God’s own image, predestined to be His
sons and co-heirs with His own Son, is that we know and
understand what it is to be a person. A person must know how
he functions as a person, and with what faculties and
capacities, before he can take his place in the scheme of
things and fulfill his appointed destiny. Hence the old
Greek aphorism, "Know thyself."
So from the beginning, Adam and Eve were in a garden
where all things were provided by their Father’s love; but
until they were confronted with alternatives and had to make
an independent choice, they were not yet self-conscious
persons. (The nearest parallel we have is a newborn infant
who knows nothing except his parents’ tender care.)
Therefore, there had to be in the middle of the garden the
two trees with the special instruction given concerning one
of them: "Everything is yours; use freely. But don’t
eat of this one tree."
But more than merely the existence of the forbidden tree,
there was already the serpent (who was one of God’s
creations), and we are told who he is: "That old
serpent, called the Devil, and Satan." So God
deliberately planned that man should be confronted by the
author of evil in the midst of the garden in which all is
called very good. This is our first evidence, which appears
later all through Scripture and experience, that Satan,
though the enemy, is in fact God’s convenient agent,
always doing precisely what God determines he should do.
That makes a great difference in our attitude toward and our
handling of Satan, and of all the situations and people by
whom he is operating; for we then start not negatively -
looking at his lying, bluffing appearance as independent
power - but positively, by always recognizing that he
is merely God’s servant, unwittingly fulfilling God’s
purposed will in his activities.
So here it is Satan, the false god of self-centeredness,
put by God in the garden to be the tempter, who first
awakens Eve to the consciousness of the total oppositeness
between God and devil, between self-centered self-interest
and God-centered other-interest. But the significant first
fact is that by no other means than to be enticed to satisfy
her own self-interest could Eve be awakened to her own
self-potentials. Only when Satan said "Look, God is
forbidding you to have something you would really like"
was she awakened (and thus all humanity) to the reality of
human appetites - with the fruit looking so good to eat, and
she forbidden to have it. If she could have had it anyhow,
like all other fruits, then she would not have recognized
the power of physical appetites; but only when she could not
have it, but was tempted to want it, did she suddenly see
her physical drives. (The same with all that appears to our
eyes as so attractive to possess.) She was awakened to a
whole range of fascinating observations when she saw
something pleasant to look at but which she must not have.
And finally, the lying statement that God was withholding
from Eve the knowledge of the meaning of life in its
variety, awakened her dormant mind to its vast
possibilities. She had discovered herself as a person with
all the potentialities of personhood with which God had
created her - all of such unlimited use as can only be
suggested by what man in his fallen condition has discovered
and developed. How much more surely awaits us when the sons
of God operate in their full potential! It will be, as Paul
says, like "life from the dead." Flesh, sight,
mind are all marvelous gifts of God. Having been misused, as
in "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and
the pride of life," these gifts are restored to us in
all the adventure and delight of their right use when we are
back again as whole persons in Christ. But again we say,
Only through the enticement to be self-loving selves could
we know ourselves as selves. As Paul says, "O the
depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of
God."
Concerning this devil, Satan, who Jesus said was
"the father of lies" and John said "sinned
from the beginning," we are given two glimpses by
prophetic revelation of who he is and why he is the enemy.
In Isaiah 14, under the temporary symbol of the King of
Babylon, this far greater person of angelic status is shown
us in his determination to overthrow God Himself and take
His place. In Ezekiel 28, when the prophet is speaking
locally of the King of Tyrus, this Lucifer, "son of the
morning," is shown in his downfall through love of his
own beauty. "Lust of the eyes and pride of life"
took him all the way to becoming the god of a kingdom of
self-centeredness which should never have been in existence.
He is that self for self which, we have seen, our God, who
is the Self for others, cannot be. He is that light in
reverse which Jesus spoke of when He said, "If the
light which is in you be darkness, how great is that
darkness!" He is the one whose label is sin: for John
says, "Sin is the transgression of the law," and
Satan is the one who first deliberately defied the one law
of the universe, our God who is other-love. And if our God
of other-love is the light and life of the universe, His
opposite, who is self-love, must be darkness and death. Yet
he had to be, for nothing can come into existence which is
not God’s determined will; and we are beginning to see
that we can never be reliable sons of God in a world which
can only be manifested by opposites unless we have been
confronted with and involved in the opposites to which God
has "died," and have ourselves experienced a
transformation to the same fixity.
But we must keep it clear that, because there can only be
manifested life by the fact of opposites, neither side of a
thing is valueless, but each is necessary to the other. We
wrongly tend to label outer negatives, such as darkness,
hardness, and hate, as evil; but they are not so in
themselves. What then is the good and evil of which
we became conscious through the eating of the forbidden
tree? It is not in the outer forms of our existence: neither
in material things nor in our created selfhood, neither in
our soul emotions nor body appetites. It is purely spirit.
The name given to Satan is "the spirit of error."
God is "the Spirit of truth." Good is the true God
in the universe, evil is the false god. Knowing good and
evil, therefore, is knowing either the one or the other in
operation in our human form or material surroundings. Evils
are but misused forms of good. In that sense, John said not
that the world is wicked but, rather, that it "lieth in
the wicked one" (1 John 5:19, Amplified).
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Chapter 6
MAN'S FALL
DIFFERENT FROM SATAN'S
The full purpose of the serpent in the garden was
fulfilled when he enticed Eve to the point of direct
disobedience, by which she entered by experience into the
death condition... and was followed, by free choice, by
Adam. This was no unexpected fall. God intended it, in the
sense that He created the human family knowing for certain
that they would fall. The proof of this is in Peter’s
statement that God foreordained His Son to be the Lamb slain
for the sins of the world before the foundation of the
world (1 Peter 1:19-20). He was the Savior in readiness
before there were sinners to be saved!
Let us look at the progression of events during the
serpent’s temptation of Eve. Eve’s first step toward
capitulation was her acquiescence to Satan’s lie. Rather
than simply trusting God, she believed Satan’s assertions
and came to a decision. However, until she actually ate of
the fruit, Satan’s control over her extended merely to the
desires of her flesh and mind (body and soul), but not yet
her spirit. Her true spirit-self was still in living
relationship with the Father, for she was still capable of
hearing His voice, and only spirit can hear Spirit.
In her spirit-center, where choices are made in the
freedom of the will, she could yet have cried out to God,
admitted the power of Satan upon her soul-body desires, and
her inability to resist. Could He have rescued her? The
answer was already there. He would have turned her attention
to the fruit of the alternative tree which was within her
reach, because the trees were side by side in the midst of
the garden. If she had stretched out her hand to take that
fruit, the Spirit of Christ would have taken her spirit
captive (as He does ours when we cry to Him at our new
birth) and the self-giving love of God shed abroad in her
heart would have drowned out that false, deceptive,
self-getting love.
But she did not, and we almost say could not, for
we again repeat: We who are destined to be sons with the Son
have to find out the strength and potentials of our created
selfhood. This involves having to find the ultimately fixed
condition which only comes by being confronted with the two
alternatives, the one swallowing the other up - but only
when we’ve experienced both. This, as we should thankfully
see, turns out to be the one safe way for God’s vast
family of sons. We first must taste the full effects of
walking the hell way -with its guilt, deceits, sin, and all
those lists of horrors enumerated by Paul in his Romans 1
catalogue. Then, when our blind eyes have been opened (first
by law and then by grace), we have had such a fill of these
ways of death that, once we find the way of escape, we are
never going back to them. That is why we are safe sons,
because we are thoroughly disillusioned sons. We may
by temptation visit those old ways when no one is looking,
as it were, but we are not living there again, thank you!
A human illustration to this is the fact that in
acquiring a profession, or becoming competent in any skill,
we always have to learn the wrong way of using our tools and
turn from the error before we can become competent in their
right use. We call that "know-how." That is the
purpose of a training or apprenticeship period. We mean by
"competency" that the professional, whether a
carpenter, pilot, doctor, or what not, knows by now the
mistakes and misuses he must avoid, and so is reliable in
his profession. If we call in a plumber over some tap out of
order, we don’t pay his large bill for a simple turning of
the tap but for his competency in knowing which tap
to turn! In precisely the same way, God has His predestined
son-family, reliable and competent, because they have been
through their painful period of living their lives the wrong
way, but have now found the right way and are competent in
it.
But there is one historical reality for which we can all
be endlessly thankful, and that is that Adam and Eve’s
disobedience was not of the same quality as Satan’s. We
have seen how Satan rebelled against God in a total sense
from his central self - his spirit. He intended not just to
escape God’s notice in disobedience, but to replace God
Himself and be a god of the opposite quality, of
self-centered self. Eve, on the other hand, was deceived and
tricked into a self-gratifying action under the stimulation
of her soul and body desires, but not from her total inner
self, her spirit. She had no intention or desire to cast God
out of her life, but merely, as it were, to do something she
should not when He was not looking! Hers was sinning from
soul and body influences and not from the central self. So
she was within reach of the Father and, though a captive of
Satan, was not like a son of Satan. Indeed, fallen
men are called "children" of the devil, but never
sons - though they may ultimately become that by free
choice. And that is why, thank God, all members of the human
race not only are guilty but, hide it how they may, know
they are guilty, convinced by that light in their
spirits which still lights every man. We all know we should
live by brotherly love: all philosophies and political
parties have that as their main objective. Thank God that
though we don’t now know how to, we at least know
we ought to. We love our darkness, but we know there
is light.
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Chapter 7
WHAT IS GOD'S
WRATH?
The effects of the disobedience were the opposite to what
the natural guilty world would expect God’s reaction to
be. We would think God would, in anger and wrath, turn His
back on the two. But it was precisely the other way around.
It was Adam who hid from God, not God from Adam. Here was
God "walking in the garden in the cool of the day"
and looking for Adam. But where was Adam? Hidden in the
bushes. Nor was God displaying some wrathful retaliation,
but only questioning Adam…. to bring the reality of the
disobedience home to him. For when He came face to face with
the three, the serpent and Adam and Eve, there was not a
word of condemnation or wrath against the two, but only His
full curse on Satan. To Adam and Eve everything God said was
to clarify to them the "beneficial" consequence
which they, thankfully, could not escape - a way of life
which always has sorrow at its roots. God said in effect,
"Eve, you will have sorrow one way; Adam, you will have
sorrow another way." That was all. And of course, the
point of the sorrow would be that the whole human race
through all its centuries of history would always he
inwardly miserable, always knowing they were missing the
mark and meaning of life, always seeking a phony happiness
which would always escape them... and thus, always at the
heart of every man, however covered up, is a sense of
lostness and a longing for fulfillment. That alone was
God’s judgment on His disobedient children, a judgment
totally for their benefit.
Where then is what we would think of - and what the Bible
often refers to - as God’s wrath? The answer is that the
wrath is not in His eternal person, for He is only
love. But it is in the human race, who all have their being
in Him; for always, no matter how apparently apart from Him
in their way of life they be, they actually live and move in
His being (which was Paul’s unique revelation to the men
of Athens, in Acts 17).
The consequence must always be that we, in our separation
from God in His perfect personhood as love, have all the
effects in our persons of our wrong way of living; and those
constitute the wrath of God, experienced not in Him but in
us. This was well put by Paul in speaking of the effects of
certain sins in Romans 1 - that we receive in ourselves that
recompense of our error which is meet. Quite naturally, to
fallen man - seeing only with the external eye - it appears
as though God is the God of wrath imposing punishment
on us; and it is good in our blindness that we do see it as
that, for then the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom. But to continue in that misconception of God as the
God of punishment and wrath after we have become His
children by grace, and so should know better, leaves so many
people who are justified squirming under the misapprehension
that God is punishing them or has deserted them. Even when
we read the words of Moses or Paul about God hardening
Pharaoh’s heart and that God raised him up to show His
power through the hardening we should understand that the
hardening was actually in Pharaoh’s persistent refusal to
respond to Moses’ word of the Lord to him; so the
hardening was of his own heart and in himself, as one who
had his being in God and was misusing his being. That is the
truth of God’s wrath in His rebellious sons, for as Paul
said, the truth concerning Him is that "God has shut
them all up in unbelief that He might have mercy on
all" (Rom. 11:32, margin), not judgment on them.
Actually, what did God give Adam and Eve in that crisis
interview? The answer is in what was addressed to the
serpent: "You have sown your seed of enmity in My human
family, so that they are your children. But I have a seed
[one seed, Galatians 3:16] of this woman, My eternal Christ,
the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; and in all
who receive Him, that Seed will destroy your seed and crush
your head, though wounded by you in the process." That
promise was experienced in its truth by Adam and Eve’s
second son Abel, to whom God first witnessed that he was
justified with the offering of a slain lamb, the first
symbol of an atoning death as the gateway to life. And Adam
and Eve, as they covered themselves in the skins from slain
animals, with which God provided them, must have seen this
as the first symbol of atonement. So all God gave them,
after this first disobedience that separated them and us
from Him, was His all-conquering grace. That grace was in
the One who, from that first moment, they could and did receive
by faith, and who freed them from eternal death.
But the necessity still remained - again we say it - that
for us to become reliable sons in the love-purposes of the
Father throughout eternity, we must drink to its dregs the
reality of the opposite - the misuse of the self in
self-centeredness. We must so know it to the depth of its
wrongness and misery that, once we are wakened from our
blindness in seeking to make the false way be the true, our
disgust and hate and disillusion are so total that,
when and if there is a way of escape, we’re "not
going to go back to that again." In that we have one
secure basis for our new "reversed way" of life.
Even if we visit the old haunts under the lure of temptation
(as it were, when God is not looking), we’re not
staying there. Guilt, shame, repentance, confession
bring us shamefacedly back. Thank God, "once bit, twice
shy." A competent professional has learned and
discarded the wrong way of practicing his trade. And so have
we! Once again it is Paul’s "O the depth of the
wisdom and knowledge of God" - for God foresaw and
provided for the necessity of the human race going the
death-way and experiencing its vanity before we could
confidently tread the life-way. We are safe as well
as saved sons; not one stage in our history is out of
place, the negative any more than the positive.
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Chapter 8
HUMANS HAVE NO
NATURE
We now come to what I think is the most important section
of this Total Truth, because it has been missed in its
completeness by nearly the whole of the Bible-believing body
of Christ - a bold thing to say, but it seems to me to be
the fact. It concerns what we call our human nature, and
that is where our problems and entanglements lie. Even if
new creatures in Christ with a new nature, we mistakenly
think we have an old, scarred nature - we sometimes call it
"the flesh" - which persists in being like an
albatross around our neck, a constant rival distracting our
attention and stumbling us in our walk. It is precisely that
which made Paul cry out, "O wretched man that I am, who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
Wretched, yet redeemed!
It seems as if we acquired an old nature through the
Fall, and now have a new nature in Christ, and the two
remain deadly rivals, dog eating dog - a struggle from which
we are never free in this life - the old man-new man
syndrome... and the best we can hope for is a means of the
new counteracting the old; and yet with a sense that the old
always remains in us, though we are Christ’s - remains as
a deadly element which Jeremiah calls "the heart
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked."
By "nature" we’re not now meaning our natural
faculties and capacities of body and soul. Our nature, in
that sense, means the type of person we are, which is
expressed through our soul and body. We may say someone has
a kind nature or a harsh nature, a sensitive nature or an
unfeeling nature, and so on. But the "old nature"
or "new nature" is not the faculties and appetites
of a person, but rather the expression of the true
personality of the person.
The evangelical church seems divided between two
convictions concerning these natures. Each persuasion is
antagonistic to the other. One, by far the largest,
maintains that we have two natures when redeemed; and we
must live with that fact, battling away against the old
nature as in Romans 7, and affirming that there is a
deliverance in Romans 8 which we must daily apply to relieve
us from the pressures of 7!
The other section of the body of believers is strong,
persistent, and stoutly convinced that theirs is the truth
-though they are in the minority in the whole company of
believers and often are considered dangerous or suspect.
They are given the general title of "holiness
people." They use such terms as "entire
sanctification," "perfect love," "full
salvation," and are usually considered to be followers
of the sanctification teaching that was reestablished in the
church through John and Charles Wesley and John Fletcher.
There are many precious people among them, with whom I have
close links. Their conviction is that after the first stage
of our new birth, which centers in justification, we must
have a second radical experience of the fullness of
salvation in Christ by the elimination of the old man and
his total replacement by the new man "created in
righteousness and true holiness" with "the heart
purified by faith" - and that is the full application
of our identification with Christ in His death and
resurrection by the Spirit.
Both say we have a human nature. One maintains that our
old nature corrupted by the Fall is supplanted by a new
nature in Christ, but that the old remains - so that our new
way of living is by recognizing the two, the old being
counteracted by the new. The other agrees that we all start
with a human nature which has become corrupted through the
Fall, but holds that the impartation of the new nature in
Christ in its totality, by a second work of grace, totally
replaces the old nature. The term "eradication" is
sometimes used, though most "holiness teachers"
regard that as an overstatement of their position, not
sufficiently allowing for the continuance of
"infirmities."
But I am saying that the true revelation of the
Bible is that we humans have no nature. We’re not
created to have a nature, but to be containers of a
"deity nature," a divine nature, and we humans can
only ever express the nature of the one within us. All the
Bible symbols of our humanity are those of being containers
and expressers of one who is not ourselves, but is a god.
All that matters is, "Which god?"
The illustrations used of us in our humanity are vessels,
branches, body members, slaves, wives, temples. In every
case that means we are the agent by which the occupant
operates. As vessels, we are said to be either "vessels
of wrath" or "vessels of mercy," but we must
be either one or the other. The vessel of wrath, of course,
is a container of the god by whom we experience wrath; and
the vessel of mercy of Him by whom we receive mercy (Rom.
9:22-23). So it is not the type of vessel that is of
importance, but the nature of the liquid that it contains.
The branch illustration is even more explicit, for a
branch is but part of a vine, the two being in life-union. A
branch is merely the living means by which a vine reproduces
itself in its fruit. A branch has no distinct nature; it has
the nature of its vine. The fruit is of the vine, not of the
branch. And when Jesus said "I am the true vine and you
are the branches," He was obviously implying that there
is also a false vine producing its fruit - one vine
being He the true Life, and the other being the usurper
(John 15).
We are called temples, and the temple was only the outer
means by which the living God manifested His presence. Thus
the Glory shone through the tabernacle; and His glory is
seen in us as His temples. In every case, a temple is only
the dwelling place of a deity and reveals his presence,
not its own. We are either a temple that contains an idol
god, or one in which the living God dwells and walks. A
temple has no nature but that of the god in it (1 Cor. 8:10
and 2 Cor. 6:16).
We are called married wives, and Paul distinctly says we
all in the human race are married to the one husband or the
other. According to Romans 7, the moment we recognize that
in Christ’s death we are cut off from our old husband,
Satan, then we are immediately united in a new marriage to
Christ who is risen from the dead. No momentary gap between
the marriages! And the point is that here he is speaking of
marriage in what we might call a biological sense: the wife
receives the seed of the husband and bears his children,
whether "the motions of sins" or "fruit unto
God." The wife is presented as merely the fruit bearer,
not the fruit producer.
Then Paul, in Romans 6:16-23, calls us slaves (as it is
in the Greek) and says all of us all the time are either
slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness - slaves of Satan
or slaves of Jesus. But slaves are merely the property of
their owners, with no kind of a life of their own and doing
only the work of their owner.
Finally, we are members of the body of Christ, and any
body operates by the mind and will of the head, and nothing
else. It has no body-led activity of its own.
So in each case the human is only the agent - as temple,
manifesting the presence of the deity; as branch, expressing
the nature and producing the fruit of the vine; as body
member, set in action by the head; as slave, doing the will
of the owner; as wife, bearing the children of the husband;
and as vessel, only a container and nothing else.
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Chapter 9
THE ONLY TWO
NATURES
Now after this Biblical revelation of what we humans are
-containers and agents - we find the Bible distinctly says
that we have no nature of our own but express the nature of
the particular deity indwelling us. On the one hand, Paul
says in Ephesians 2 that while we were in our unredeemed
condition, dead in trespasses and sins, we "walked
according to the course of this world, according to the
prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in
the children of disobedience... and were by nature children
of wrath" - not some nature of our own but of our
satanic parent, his children in his wrath nature. Then on
the other hand, regarding the redeemed, Peter tells us that
by receiving "exceeding great and precious
promises" we become "partakers of the divine
nature." Quite obviously then, it’s not some human
nature, but God expressing His nature by us. Here are the
two deity natures expressed in our humanity.
This could not be more explicit than it is in the
Biblical account about the Garden of Eden. There we are told
life and death were symbolized by the eating of the fruit of
the trees. The Bible tells us that if Adam and Eve had eaten
of the right tree they would have received eternal life. Yet
we know that eternal life is not in a fruit but in a Person
- in Him who said, "I am the life." Therefore, if
eating the right fruit means that into our first parents
would have come the person who is eternal life, eating of
the wrong fruit means that the false deity, the spirit of
error, entered in and they became his dwelling place.
Now here is the point, the nitty gritty of the reality.
All we redeemed humans recognize, when our eyes have been
opened by grace, that we were sinners, were under the power
of Satan, did his works, were his children. But do we
realize that we actually were he, in the sense that
humans are always manifesting the deity who expresses
himself by us? Did any of us know, while unsaved, that we
were Satan walking about in our human forms, or that the
redeemed are Christ walking about in their human forms? We
should know it now, for we are plainly told this.
I remember the surprise when I first read in 1 John 4:4,
"Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the
world." I knew that "He in me" was the Holy
Spirit, but I suddenly woke up to the fact that there was
equally "he in the world" in fallen humans, just
as much as the Holy Spirit is in us when redeemed. And two
verses later John is saying, "Hereby know we the spirit
of truth and the spirit of error." That began to open
my eyes, and I began to relate it to the symbol of the fruit
of the garden.
Then I became alerted to Jesus’ words as He confronted
those opposing Him, as recorded in John 8:38-44. "I
speak what I have seen with My Father: and you do what you
have seen with your father," stated Jesus. As religious
Jews they resented that, and indignantly responded,
"We’re not born of fornication. We have one
Father, God." Jesus answered, "if God were your
Father, you would love Me." Then He broke the truth
wide open and declared outright, "You are of your
father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will
do." When I read that, my eyes were opened to the
second phrase as well as the first. The first says that we
humans - all of us who have not yet become children of God
by faith in Jesus Christ have Satan, not God, as our father.
But the second phrase especially struck me: ".... the
lusts of your father you will do." Not that we are
doing our own lusts, but the lusts of our father. Then all
we are doing as humans is not a product of some supposed human
fallen nature, but actually Satan himself
expressing his own lusting nature by us! All we are,
therefore, is merely the outer expression of this spirit of
error, this god of this world, living his own Satan-form of
life by our humanity. That was revolutionary. I had always
thought I was fulfilling my own natural desires; but not so,
because we have no nature of our own. We have all been
fulfilling the lusts of the god of self-centeredness, and
what we think are just our sins are ours only in the
sense that we are joined to Satan as branch to false vine,
expressing his thoughts and deeds. So when the Bible says
"All have sinned," the real inner truth is that
the sinner is Satan, and we in a secondary sense are
participating in his sinning.
This is the major area in which sin - or Satan, as the
Scripture has said - has deceived us; and deceit means
making us think that we are what we are not. Satan has
played his greatest trick on us in making us think that life
is "doing our own thing" - our own
self-expression. Who of us in the wide world would ever
suspect that we were not just "ourselves" in our
self-activity but Satan operating in our form? Of course,
Satan himself is the fundamentally deceived one, for he
vainly imagines that he made himself independent when he
rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven. He imagines
himself to be Mr. Independent Self, though actually he is
still eternally and totally dependent on his Creator, and
doing His will - as we see so clearly in the history of Job.
It is this same false concept of independence with which
Satan has infected the human race. We just naturally think
we are independent and doing our own thing. Independence is
the huge lie swallowed by fallen, blinded, deceived
humanity, and the great delusion from which we have to be
finally and fully delivered before we can be our true
selves. That is what Paul so perfectly explores and aims to
deliver us from in Romans, chapters 6 to 8. That is the
winning of the final battle over the delusion of the Fall.
Our whole life has been built on the false assumption that
we are just our own responsible selves, and when changes are
needed they are needed in us. We can see it in our
false self-righteousness, in our fallen days, when we
imagined that we ourselves were living our own lives
of good and evil (which we thought mainly good, with a few
evil touches). Actually, all our "good" was evil,
for it was a product of the spirit of independent self, the
spirit of error. Self-effort good is no better than
self-effort evil, being only Satan’s self-effort
produced by us. It is one thing to regard ourselves as
humans merely influenced by Satan; but quite another matter
to realize that it is actually he just being himself
and living his own quality of life by me... and I merely his
vessel, branch, slave, temple. I am Satan in my human form.
One reason why the natural man cannot easily accept this
fact is that he regards Satan’s activity to be mainly the
grosser evils like murder, theft, etc. But when our inner
eyes are opened, we fully see that the spirit of error, the
spirit of self-centeredness, can look highly respectable. We
recognize that the self-loving self is usually disguised to
make a nice appearance. So, for us who are enlightened, it
is not hard to see that fallen humans are Satan - Mr.
Self-centeredness himself - in his physical form. It is a
profound eye-opener to realize that all forms of our
apparent self-activity - even if good, helpful, and
beneficial to others - are expressions of our self-loving
self and thus, in actual fact, expressions of that Satanic
spirit of self-centeredness in us. Good deeds are merely a
product of the "good" part of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.
Two other scriptures also brought this into focus for me.
First was 2 Corinthians 4:4, which speaks of the lost as
those "in whom the god of this world has blinded the
minds"; so there he was within us, in our unbelieving
condition. The second is 1 John 3:12, in which John exhorts
us to love our brothers, and adds, "Not as Cain, who
was of that wicked one, and slew his brother." When I
read that I asked myself, why are the words "of that
wicked one" inserted? Why not just say, "Don’t
be like wicked Cain who slew his brother"? Because it
was not "wicked Cain" who was the murderer,
it was "that wicked one" who Jesus has said was
"a murderer from the beginning," and he murdered
Abel by Cain’s hands. "The lusts of your father you
will do."
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Chapter 10
WE HAVE BEEN
DECEIVED ABOUT OURSELVES
So we are seeing a tremendous revolutionary reality that
humans never had a nature by themselves. They were both
created and later redeemed to express in simple spontaneity
and naturalness Him who is God in us and who, Scripture
says, "dwells in us and walks in us" (2 Cor.
6:16). Likewise after the Fall, when we had freely joined
ourselves to Satan, we had no nature of our own either. So
there never has been a "human" nature. Therefore
there is no point in considering whether we believers have
two natures or one! No, we humans have none, but
tragically or gloriously, spontaneously manifest the nature
of the deity in us.
But as we investigate this actual, factual relationship
between God and man in which man is nothing but the agency
by whom God reveals Himself as God, and God in love-action -
it becomes obvious that man is not a robot, with no free
expression of himself as a person. It is precisely the
opposite. We see the total freedom of the Divine Person
fulfilling His love-purposes through the total freedom of
the human person. And how can that be? It is no paradox
when, as we have already seen, freedom must make its choices
and the free will then loves to be controlled by its choice.
We still do what we want to do. There is no need to force a
person’s will. All the other person need do is to attract
and captivate our "want," and then we will love to
act in harmony with him. Give a child another toy, and his
crying after the first one disappears. People often ask, How
can we conceive of God changing a person’s will if he is
free? The answer is that God changes our "want,"
and the will follows spontaneously. Once God has captured
our wills by drawing us back to Himself through Christ, then
it is He in us who "wills and does of His good
pleasure" (and it is always good!) and it is we who
naturally, gladly, freely work it out (Phil. 2:13-14).
He who is the "Freedom of the universe" can
only be His free Self by His sons as they are free.
Only with freedom can there be expansion and development, so
God’s universe can only be entrusted as an inheritance to
those free to develop it - to persons, not automata. If
there are two freedoms, that of the Creator Person and that
of the created persons, the one simple necessity is that the
Creator and created be in such a love-union that the sons
love to fulfill the will of the Father, and yet always are
consciously free in working it out. It still remains an
apparent contradiction to reason and logic, I realize, but
there is no contradiction in daily living. We who are in
this love-union know we are free, and we make our free
decisions and carry them out into action, yet we equally
laughingly and delightedly know we are doing what is worked
in us to will and do. So here is the perfection of freedom
which we who have found "the way" delight in, and
in which we freely operate.
This revelation from the Scriptures is so central to our
very being that we will go over it again, for the repeating
of something this important can only help settle the truth
more firmly in us.
Our failure to recognize that we Christians are never
independent selves and have no human nature of our own but
are always, eternally, expressions of the Deity Person whose
property we are, and that we manifest His nature, is the
root of all our confusion and frustrations. All redeemed
sons of God struggle with it in their newly awakened zeal to
be the kind of people we know we ought to be. It is the root
of our and Paul’s Romans 7 "wretchedness." It is
the blank wall of obstruction we appear to be confronted
with in all of life’s problems. It also appears to us as
an immovable block in our bringing Christ to others, with
their deafened ears or prejudiced hearts. The false concept
of independent self is the all-round blockage; indeed, it is
the only blockage of all life.
It is the great deception. The serpent deceived Eve; and
sin, which is Satan’s garment of deception, the Bible
says, deceives us. For sin’s principle is "I’ll do
things my way, not God’s way" - the precise character
of Satan. So what has happened is that Satan has tricked
fallen humanity into thinking that we, like himself, are
really independent selves, running our own lives in our own
way. He has totally blinded us to the fact that we are
merely expressions of him, the false deity - actually Satan
in our human forms. Who among the millions of us in our lost
condition ever thought that we were actually Satan
manifesting himself by us? When we responded to the
conviction of the Spirit - enough to know we were sinners,
under the condemnation of the law, without God and without
hope - we simply saw ourselves as slaves of Satan,
doing his evil deeds; even children of the devil,
having his character of self-loving self. But none of us
recognized that actually it was he, the spirit of error, who
was living his own life by us - he being the real
sinner and we walking Satans (just as the redeemed become
walking Christs). We were under this false conception that
it was just we who were the sinners, and the sins our
own evil deeds, and the self-centeredness our own distorted
independent self. And it is because we did not know
ourselves as "walking Satans" that we now have
great difficulty in knowing ourselves as "walking
Christs."
This is what ties us in knots. We have been so grossly
deceived - and deceit is much more dangerous than blindness,
because when blind we know we are blind, but when deceived
we think we are what we are not. We shall be seeing in
further detail how this illusion of our being independent
selves - and so having certain responsibilities and the
particular obligation to be the kind of people we know we
ought to be (despite our constant failures) - is precisely
what has so distorted our self-outlook. Does it not seem
almost blasphemous, or certainly ridiculous and impossible,
that we could actually be Christ expressing Himself in our
human forms? Look at us! Yes, look at us through the
illusion of being independent, responsible people who should
somehow become like Him. Now contrast this with the
"notion" that we are Christ in our human forms. It
is blasphemy! But we will clear this hurdle, and the leap is
clear, simple and sane.
So now we have had a first hard look at this
revolutionary fact, plain in the Scriptures, yet hidden from
(we may say) everybody who is not of the Spirit, and equally
hidden from the vast majority of Bible-based believers. It
is the fact of the deity-indwelt life being as much the
condition of the lost as of the saved. Recognition of this
is the key to living with all boldness the liberated human
life.
So we will now give time to an examination of how God
totally regains His stolen property, the countless millions
of free sons who become the "riches of the glory"
of His Son’s inheritance (Eph. 1:18). We will see again
how He had this planned from eternity - the adopted family
chosen before the foundation of the world. But it always has
been the prime necessity that if they are to be competent,
reliable sons by whom He may manage His universe in His own
only-way of love-management, then that positive, perfect
nature of self-giving love must first be built on the
certainty of the swallowing up of their negative nature of
self-getting love; for everything is established only by
swallowing up or building upon its opposite. And in His
eternal wisdom He has always had it planned that the
swallowing up would be so complete that the misused negative
could never show its head again. The predestined Seed of the
woman would tread underfoot and crush the serpent’s head,
fully removing his infection from His stolen precious sons
and restoring them to their perfected sonship.
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Chapter 11
THE EYE-OPENER
ABOUT OUR TRUE SELVES
We shall now turn to the subject of the restoration of us
humans to our true being, to the condition in which the
Living God, as love, is naturally operative in us and we are
"without blame before Him in love," as God
originally intended (Eph. 1:4).
The first problem is our blindness. How can that be
removed? A basic necessity is to recognize that the whole
human family has always had its being in God. We were
created in God’s image and likeness and are only Satan’s
stolen property; and for that reason we all instinctively
know that we should be living in the likeness of our Creator
people of love as He is, love which fulfills all law. We all
know the law inwardly before we come to know it in its outer
written form. Genesis tells us that Noah was "a
preacher of righteousness" in the years when "the
wickedness of man was great upon the earth" - and this
before the giving of any written law. Joseph, when tempted
to commit adultery with Potiphar’s wife, answered her by
saying, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin
against God?" He, too, knew God’s law inwardly.
Glimpses of the reality of eternal law are in the
writings of men of history like Lao Tse and Confucius of
China; in the Vedas and Upanishads of India; in Buddha’s
precepts; in Zoroaster and Jalal al-Din of Persia; in
Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato of the Greeks; in Marcus
Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus of the Romans, and countless
others lost in the mists of time. Paul puts it in one word
in Romans 1: that all men "know in themselves"
what may be known of the invisible God by His visible
creation, but "have held down the truth in
unrighteousness" and so are without excuse. All the
great religions of the world legalistically demand that
their followers adhere to certain standards by their own
self-effort. This is a total impossibility, for it is in
direct contradiction to man’s fallen, self-loving nature,
the nature of that spirit of error in the children of wrath,
"fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the
mind" (Eph. 2:3). So whether it is by Judaism, Islam,
Buddhism, Hinduism, or by Marxism or any other secular
philosophy of life, we humans who know what we ought to be
are more confirmed than ever in our blindness of heart by
these self-effort religions and philosophies. We build up
our own righteousness and call it the righteousness of God,
while in fact it is only this same Satan-indwelt self-loving
self producing its convenient good-and-evil fruit of the
fallen self.
In Romans 2, Paul mentions both "the law written in
our hearts" and God’s external, written law given
through Moses. What was God’s purpose in giving us the
Mosaic law? It was to prepare a way by which man’s
blindness can be removed. In that unfathomable wisdom of
His, He uses the pronouncement of an outward law not to
falsely establish fallen man in a phony self-righteousness
(as though he might keep it - a slave to Satan keeping
God’s law!) but for a totally opposite purpose. The law
was given to expose the deceit of man’s
self-righteousness, thus stripping him naked of any
righteous grounds for standing before God, outside of grace.
So the sending of the outer law by Moses was actually part
of God’s approach of grace to man! Paul’s inspired
understanding focused Mosaic law to this.
We will follow this through now, both in its preliminary
effects on us and to its ultimate completion. This makes
Moses the greatest of the law age, to be replaced, as he
foretold, by one "like unto himself," yet greater
than he, as the son is greater than the servant in the
house. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came
by Jesus Christ.
The outer law, given as a code of ethics on that mount to
Moses, was not God coming in fullness of grace to His
people, but was inserted as a necessary preliminary. God
came to them at Horeb precisely as He eternally is - as the
One who rescued them from bondage and brought them out
"as on eagles’ wings" to be His peculiar
treasure. But, even though they were His people, through the
Passover and Red Sea deliverance, many of them were like
carnal Christians today: they did not know the Lord in their
inner consciousness as Moses did. These people, therefore,
not yet realizing the exchange of deity in themselves, were
wide open to the lying controls of Satan, their former
indwelling deity, and thus "carnal, sold unto
sin." So to expose their blindness to their Satanic
slavery, God added the necessary demand which is the purpose
of the outer law. God said to them through Moses that they
would be His special people if they would obey His voice and
keep His covenant - the very thing they couldn’t do, but
this they did not know. And so they gaily responded,
"Of course we will keep it." They had to respond
like that, for this first claim of the law on them was
precisely to expose their still unrecognized and therefore
uncrucified self-reliance, which was Satan’s nature in
them.
So the famous law followed on its tablets of stone... but
significantly it was not given to Moses directly by the Lord
Himself on the mount, but by angels (Gal. 3:19), because God
