1

This effort is dedicated with deep love

to my courageous wife,
Marilyn,
who has somehow endured my agonizing metamorphosis for these thirty-four years
and still loves me,
and to my three incredible kids,
Genevieve Kara, Elliot, and Damien,
who also endured,
and whose ministrations to me have been the matrix
through which I have come to understand the
Fatherhood and the Father-heart of God

Hebrews 12:1-29

Registered © 2010 R. Stephan Toman

(All Rights Reserved)
NO PORTION OF THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE REPRODUCED
BY ANY MEANS PHYSICAL OR ELECTRONIC FOR ANY PURPOSE
WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

2
 THE CALF PATH

One day, through the primeval wood,

a calf walked home, as good calves should,
but made a trail all bent askew,
a crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then two hundred years have fled,

and, I infer, the calf is dead,
but still he left behind his trail,
and thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day

by a lone dog that passed that way;
and then a wise bellwether sheep
pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
and drew the flock behind him, too,
as good bellwethers always do.

And from that day, o’er hill and glade,

through those old woods a path was made,
and many men wound in and out and dodged and turned and bent about
and uttered words of righteous wrath,
because ‘twas such a crooked path,

But still they followed,

do not laugh,
the first migration of that calf;

and through this winding wood-way stalked,

because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane

that bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road
where many a poor horse with his load
toiled on beneath the burning sun,
and traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
they trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet;

The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware
a city’s crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
of a renowned metropolis.

3
 And men, two centuries and a half,
trod the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout

followed the zig-zag calf about,
and o’er his crooked journey went
the traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led

by one calf
near three centuries dead.

They followed still his crooked way,

and lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent
to well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,

were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
along the calf-paths of the mind,
and work away from sun to sun
to do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
and out and in, and forth and back,
and still their devious course pursue
to keep the path that others do.

But how the wise old wood-gods laugh

who saw the first primeval calf.

Ah!
Many things this tale might teach ~
But I am not ordained to preach.

Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)

4
 AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER

After I wrote all of these thoughts down and then spent several months self-editing them, I shared them with a
writer friend who began the brutal process of actually giving me some unbiased outside critique, a process
which is still on-going. One of the things he suggested is that I move my long personal introduction to the end
of the commentary as an appendix, and limit my introductory remarks to a couple of paragraphs. Here, then,
are a couple of paragraphs of introduction to warn you about what you are about to get yourself into. You may
read the long introduction at your leisure at the end of the books. (APPENDIX A)

Please understand that I am, by many peoples’ definitions, a Christian fanatic. I do not regard myself as such. I
simply have come to believe in the New Testament reality fully. I also am, if I am to be regarded as politically
aware, a libertarian Constitutionalist. I think of myself more an annoying gadfly than a political activist. And,
of late, I have become annoyed...or perhaps a better word would be “deeply troubled”....at what the Bible refers
to as “the distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people
fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world.” Luke 21:25-28 My kids and grand-
kids have to grow up in this world.

I cannot be persuaded to moderate my Christian views: They are rooted in an encounter with the Living God
that is more real than the air I am breathing. I am more open-minded about my political ideas, provided you can
argue your position well. I am not a bigot, and try to be an equal opportunity offender. I believe that idiocy,
bigotry, hypocrisy, prejudice, unreflective narrow mindedness, racism, sexism, homo and other blind phobias,
stupidity, and human folly come in every color, race, intellectual quotient, and sexual “orientation” on the plan-
et. If I offend you, and the shoe fits, deal with it. If I step on your toes and you don’t deserve it, I apologize
sincerely. Those who know me best actually think I am a pretty nice guy (though a bit curmudgeonly and per-
haps eccentric). I have friends (and a few enemies) from almost every point on the
socio/ethno/gender/political/religious spectrum.

This “commentary”, while based soundly in scripture and, I believe, well-reasoned and well-written, is not a
“standard” work: It is more a collection of sermon/essays and observations than it is a review of the historical
context of Paul’s letters. As I explain in the body of my writing, I believe that I am reasonably qualified to
write such a commentary at this time in my Christian journey, both academically and experientially.

I do ask that you read through the entirety of my thoughts. I write more as an artist painting a picture, than as a
logician, and sometimes ideas I set forth and points I raise in one section are not fully clarified until you read
something I say in another section. For some this may be confusing, and I ask that you bear with me. I hope
that by the time you work your way through everything I have pondered over I will have cast a clear enough
vision for you to glimpse the vast horizon that our Father has begun to stretch out before my eyes.

Lastly, as I explain at points throughout the commentary, this stuff was originally in my mind to be put forth as
a “blog”, and it is still somewhat in that format. So it is not really structured as a book ought to be structured.
If any of this ever moves toward publication, I will make a serious effort to reorganize at least some of the path-
ways of my reasoning to help my readers navigate the arcane labyrinth of my thoughts.

RST ~ 10.17.2010

5
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

AUTHORS PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION page 7

SUMMARY INTRODUCTION page 8

PREFACE page 9

COMMENTARY ON ROMANS page 12

COMMENTARY ON EPHESIANS page 159

COMMENTARY ON COLOSSIANS 256

COMMENTARY ON GALATIANS 318

APPENDICES 363

Author’s Autobiographical Rant 364

CONCERNING THE PROGRESS OF REVELATION 378
RECOMMENDED READING LIST AND INTERESTING WEBSITES 387

6
 UNREASONABLE FAITH
ACCORDING TO PAUL

REFLECTIONS
on the

Letter to the Romans

By

R. Stephan Toman

COPYRIGHT 2010 by R. Stephan Toman

All rights Reserved: No part of this book may be copied

or reproduced or published in any form without written permission from the author

7
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION

{This bit of writing is my take on Paul’s thoughts at this stage of my walk with the Lord: 37 years into the
journey. After this much time in grade, and with a goodly collection of battle scars, I do believe I can claim
more than enough experience and credentials to dare to presume to put these thoughts on paper, but, in
the end, they are just my opinions. You can take them or chuck them as you like. I just need to get them
untangled, out of my head, and off my chest: Time will tell if they are worth anything.}

Note: I have quoted often from many places in the Bible. In order to keep my thoughts flowing
more smoothly, I have not always noted the chapter and verse of my references, but all of my
quotes are in Times New Roman typeface and are in red ink. The verses from Romans and
Ephesians are in a darker maroon red.

I stand firmly on the high ground that the entire Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that
therefore any and all such supporting texts quoted are equally valid to augment and underscore
Paul’s arguments in Romans and my thoughts about what he is saying. This assumption places
me squarely within the camp of conservative Evangelical Christian scholarship. I do believe in the
infalibility of the Bible as we have received it and in the inerrancy of the original autographs.

Most of the verses quoted are in the English Standard Version, which purports to be a substantially
accurate “word literal” translation of very well developed original language texts: I make the
assumption that God has done what is necessary to make sure that His word is available to
everyone who desires to know Him around the planet in the twenty-first century, so the ESV is
probably as good a version as most conservatively produced translations available today.
Anyone who wants to can look up any of my references for themselves; either using a good
concordance or online at http://www.blueletterbible.org/.. The exercise will do you good.

8
 Summary Introduction

Of all Paul’s letters, Romans is the longest and the most logically and systematically reasoned. It is
also the only letter, apparently, that he wrote to a fellowship base that he, himself, did not personally
plant. The letter was written as an introduction preceding a long desired stop-over visit to Rome on a
planned missionary journey to Spain, and is primarily a statement of Paul’s message about Jesus
Christ to the Gentile (“Greek” or non-Jewish) world, which was the lion’s share of the Hellenized Roman
Empire. The history of this is recorded by the physician/ historian Luke in the book of the Acts of the
Apostles.

The theme of the letter is stated in chapter 1:16–17: the Gospel (“Good News”) is God’s “power for
salvation”, because it reveals that the “righteousness of God” is a gift given freely by God
unconditionally through faith for all who truly believe, putting a final end to the striving of mankind to
achieve right standing before God by either acts of sacrifice or efforts of human good works. The
operative word here is “truly” or “sincerely” or “from the heart”: This is not simply an intellectual
assent to the idea of faith in Jesus Christ or in His teachings.

Paul explains the need for justification through faith because of the reality of sin in the world (1:16–
4:25). He then spells out the results of justification by faith in terms of both present real-time
experience and of future hope (5:1–8:39).

In the next three chapters, he expresses his sorrow that many of his fellow Israelites have not
embraced the Gospel because they have become trapped by their obsessive and pride-driven
conviction that by meticulously keeping the Law of Moses they can somehow live lives perfect
enough to win the approval of a Perfect God, and he wrestles with the theological implications of this
(chs.9–11). He concludes, as he does in all of his letters, by describing how the Gospel should
practically affect one’s everyday life (chs.12–16).

9
 PREFACE

Countless volumes have been written over the past centuries about Paul, who came on the scene as
the preeminent arch-persecutor of the first Jewish/Christian followers of “the Way” in Jerusalem,
about 5 years after Jesus’ execution and resurrection, and was subsequently converted to the new
Faith in a powerful visionary encounter with the risen and very much living Lord to become the most
vocal advocate and tireless missionary of the first Church across the Mediterranean world.

He ultimately wrote thirteen of the twenty seven documents of the New Testament (as well as several
letters that have been lost), and is the primary focus of the history recorded in the Book of the Acts of
the Apostles, which was written by his life-long companion on his wide-ranging travels, the
Macedonian physician, Luke. The Book of Acts records in detail the events of the first thirty years of
the nascent church, primarily through the circumstances involving Paul’s missionary ministry.

There is no credible argument against Paul’s legitimacy as the author of the letters that are credited to
him, or as a speaker of the Truth as he proclaimed and explained it. Liberal theologians would seek
to discredit his testimony in many convoluted and discursive ways, but most such theologians speak
from an anti-supernatural (materialistic and humanistic) bias, and therefore are prejudiced at the
outset in their arguments. They are not biblically Christian. They have been adequately challenged
and answered by an army of formidible conservative apologists.

Each one of us has to decide who it is to whom we are going to listen…who is most credible, and why
we want to believe what they say. This is important: Our eternal destinies depend upon it. As I have
stated I, myself, have experienced the supernatural Presence of the Living God and know Him. The
man or woman with an argument is always at the mercy of the person with an experience. I CANNOT
be dissuaded from what happened to me and transformed my life. Academics without such a
personal experience as I have had have little of consequence to say to me. They can only accuse
me of being delusional or of lying. I tend to confuse them. Many of them think I am crazy. This is of
no relevance to me. They have no paradigm by which they can relate to what I say. Anyone who has
experienced Christ understands from where I am coming.

The same divide existed between Paul and the scholars and pundits of his day. And between Jesus
and the Sadducees and Pharisees who ultimately killed Him. A lot of people simply don’t like the
implications of the Christian message, and take umbrage with its heralds. Almighty God and the
Realm He inhabits are very real. You can deny this if you choose: I cannot…and by command of the
God I serve, I will not ever surrender this ground. I will die first.

Paul’s integrity is unassailable, as is that of Jesus Christ. Those who would seek to diminish the
authority of what Paul says have another agenda and are not convinced believers in Christian truth,
no matter what they might say. Some are confused. Some seek to be Politically Correct, because of
the fear of man or because of ambition. Those who can be approached need to be gently but firmly
instructed in the Truth, or they must be removed from positions of influence over God's people
because they can cause confusion and much harm. Some are anti-Christ, and are demonically
motivated. They are actively doing battle against Almighty God. If they claim Christian credentials
they are enemies within the camp, and must be identified as such and publically opposed.

Paul’s defense of the Christian message for some 30 years cost him his family, his status as a leader
and rising star among the Jews, his career and livelihood, decades of hardship, physical torture, and
imprisonment, and ultimately his life (he was beheaded by Nero in Rome for his Christian faith in AD
67-68). The Truth he faithfully proclaimed has not been diminished. Most of those who denigrate
Paul’s integrity would snivel and pale, and perhaps sell their grandmother if it would help, if they
weren’t invited to the next cocktail party or political fundraiser because they dared express an opinion
that made their puppetmasters uncomfortable.
10
Paul served his Lord: They serve themselves. Jesus had a name for such as these: “HYPO-
CRITES”. (The word means “two faced play actors on a stage” and refers to the classic Greek
stage masks, like the “happy/sad” face we so often still see today. We call them “phonys” and
“posers” and “frauds”.)

(Please realize this: The guys who wrote the New Testament were Jesus’ closest friends (in Jame’s
case His half-brother), the personal assistants to Jesus’ friends, or, in Paul’s special case, an enemy
who killed Jesus’ friends, who Jesus personally recruited after His resurrection to become His most
powerful missionary. They were there, on the ground, when all of this stuff came down. They were
with Jesus when He walked and talked and taught and healed and cast out demons and raised the
dead, and when He died Himself and rose from the dead and ascended from the Mount of Olives to
His Throne in Heaven as Lord of the Universe. They recorded His words and His actions as He spoke
and ministered around Galilee, and Judah, and Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Most
were eyewitnesses to the hundreds of events and miracles of His ministry, and were His 24/7
companions; the others recorded the stories of these eyewitnesses, as they accompanied them as
companions in ministry and Kingdom service in the first century trenches and catacombs and
dungeons and arenas.

None of them were hero material, but they changed the world in under sixty years after He ascended
back to His Throne in Heaven to oversee the prosecution of the Cosmic War. And only one of them
actually died of old age (John, who also suffered severe physical persecutions)…The rest of them
paid for their faith with their lives as martyrs. None of them got rich as televangelists or big-time tent
healers or prophets. Every one of them had their relatively comfortable pre-Christian lives utterly
ruined by Christ. All willingly made this sacrifice. Liars and con-men don’t do this.)

Rabbit Trail:

It should also be noted that the First Church looked nothing like the organized church that began to
encroach upon the Truth after the passing of those to whom Jesus first delivered the Kingdom
message. But the very fact that a counterfeit “church” so quickly came on the scene speaks volumes
about the reality and value of the Truth of the Original Idea: Nobody counterfeits junk. The real thing
was so good that a whole lot of charlatans very early on tried to climb on the bandwagon and figure
out ways to cash in on what was clearly a very successful gig (cf. Acts 8:9-25).

The true first Church very early on became an underground movement living in caves and catacombs
to escape the persecutions that rose up against it, first from the Jews and then, later, from the
awesomely powerful Roman state and its sadistic Emperors. These early Christian guys (and the
myriad of gals who also were included in this amazing First Church) stand so far above the ivory
tower armchair “theologians” of today as to render their pompous pronouncements at a distance of
nineteen centuries little more than bombastic academic bloviation, (and a minor contribution to global
warming).

There is good theology and good church history being done by conservative Bible-believing
scholarship around the world, but liberal theology is, because of its anti-supernatural bias, garbage at
its foundational presupposition.... and as we all know: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It does not believe
in the God of the Bible. It does not take Him at His Word. Rather, it seeks to tell Him who it thinks He
should be. Most modern theology is academic BS…a continuation of the Jewish Talmudic tradition
that Jesus and the New Testament writers so eloquently railed against.

It sounds high and mighty, but as Paul long ago warned us would be, ever learning but never coming to
a knowledge of the Truth, it has the appearance of godliness, but denies its power. 2 Timothy 3:5-7
11
Please don’t get your theology from cable TV or from the mainstream of liberal Christendumb.
(Throughout this journal I use this word to refer to the world, the business, of organized Christianity.)
You will be led into error and confusion. Read the Bible for yourself. The Lord will be happy to
explain Himself to you without confusion. Just start with the Gospel of John in the New Testament
and then read Acts, and move on from there, and find a balanced biblically sound fellowship where
holiness is taught and the Holy Spirit is free to move through His people. I also encourage you to
connect with GodTV (http://www.god.tv/homepage?region=46) and with
http://www.morningstarministries.org/ both of which offer sound teachings and connections with
ministries that are very much in sync with what God is doing today. Above all listen to your heart as
you prayerfully read, more than to people…Always check out for yourself what people say against
the Book. “Be Berean”. (Acts 17:11)

End of Rabbit Trail.

There is absolutely no reason to question the integrity of the history or accuracy of the New
Testament records as written…any transmission errors that have crept in over the millennia as the
text has been translated out of its original languages are arguably minor, and have been fully
accounted for by the proper and time tested critical and scholarly methods for dealing with ancient
documents. NO ANCIENT DOCUMENT HAS EVER BEEN SO THOROUGHLY VETTED OR
VINDICATED, AS HAS THE BIBLE!!! ) (See “The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict” by Josh
McDowell: It is available through Amazon.)

Please note up front: As I mentioned in my introductory note, this bit of writing of mine is not a “stan-
dard” commentary on Paul’s letter. It is more an opinion piece, or a collection of short essays and
observations based on Paul’s writings. However, I have tried to stay close to Paul’s thinking, as I
have come to understand it, and in this I believe I have succeeded reasonably well. I have spent
countless hours quietly reading, listening to, and considering Paul’s thoughts, and I believe I have
come to understand him quite clearly.

But I have also included large chunks of thought from other New Testament writers to reinforce my
arguments. And I am not trying to explain, so much, what Paul was trying to deal with in his era,
though I do address some of these things, as I am attempting to recast his thoughts, without
overmuch distortion, for we believers who are facing into the challenges of the early 21st century.
Many others have dealt with these writings in their historical context.

In many ways, therefore, this bit of writing is much like the adjudication of a theoretical conversation
between several philosophers who wrote about different subjects at different times. They were not
necessarily talking about the same thing, nor were they arguing with each other, so trying to create a
dialogue between them becomes a bit of a creative exercise. When one person is talking about
apples, and another about oranges, and a third about bananas, an intelligent conversation, if one is to
be had, sometimes has to be about fruit salad or horticulture. I hope my fruit basket is reasonably
nutritious and wholesome, at least.

I believe that the Bible is written supernaturally by one author, God Almighty, through many writers
who wrote at diverse times to a diverse audience on many subjects and for many purposes that were
both immediate and practical to their local settings historically, and yet who all also were conveying a
single unified prophetic message that God manipulates and protects supernaturally across the ages
of man so that it becomes perfectly relevant to each generation of His people as they come of age,
and as His Plan proceeds toward its culmination.

“For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” Revelation 19:10

12
I have tried to discover some of that message, as I believe I have been privileged to hear it over the
past several years, adding my voice to the many that are speaking in our troubled times.

I hope that I have managed, at least in part, to make some sense of it to some of you.

So then, to the Book.

THE LETTER TO THE ROMANS

(Scripture quotes are in red in Times New Roman - Primary text is in burgandy)
~My thoughts are in black in Arial~

Paul,a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised be-
forehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,

All true Christians are servants of Christ Jesus.

As Paul explains later on in Romans, and in other places in his writings, and as is corroborated by
many other biblical texts, we human beings were never created to be independent agents. We are
created to be “vessels”, living containers, and symbiotes in intimate union with our Maker. It was His
intention, from the beginning when He created man, to express Himself in and through mankind.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of
God and not from ourselves; (2 Corinthians 4:7) (to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and
not to us.)

Jesus used the even more compelling imagery of the vine and branch:

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you,
unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that
bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away
like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me,
and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified,
that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. (John 15: 4-8)

But in the unfathomable wisdom of God, we are volitional vessels, not robots. We are made “in the
image of God”. (Genesis 1:26 5:1; 9:6; 1 Corinthians 11:7; Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10; James 3:9) We can make choices,
take initiative, and be creative. (We are different from angels, who seem to be much more limited, or
at least “other” than us, in these three areas.) We are meant to do this in a submitted harmony with
our Creator, in a dialogue following His lead, but He does not compel us to do so.

This is the beauty, and the danger, of true Love. Without true freedom of choice, of will, neither true
love, nor true happiness, nor true creativity, nor any of the highest virtues can exist or have meaning.

Love (that is “agape” ~AH-GAH-PAY~, which is God-quality love, in biblical terminology) cannot exist
where there is not absolute freedom to choose. (There are very subtle nuances in the ancient Greek
language for the concept of “love”: Four distinct words for love were in the Greek vocabulary in the
first century. Agape is a quality of love unique to God in the Bible: It is a benevolent unconditional
love of decision based in the will, not in emotion or upon expectation of a return of affection. The word
was specifically chosen by the New Covenant writers, and then enriched with enhanced meaning
beyond that accorded to it in Classic Greek. There is no English equivalent, and it takes a fair
number of English words together - as many as twenty - to express its full meaning. Cf. 1 Corinthians 13)

13
And since God describes Himself as being “Love in ESSENCE”, (God does not HAVE or SHOW
love, God IS Love, according to the Bible), when He created creatures (US) that are designed to
relate to Him solely through the bond of Love without coercion or manipulation, He had to take the
risk that those creatures might make bad choices until they learned (a function of freedom of will) the
difference between good and evil, wise decisions and unwise decisions and the consequences of
those decisions. (He, Himself, would have been evil if He had made it impossible for them, with their
creative minds, to ever do anything that is not perfectly good… He would have thus created them as
slaves to do His bidding, and made it impossible for them to ever understand what love is all about.)

And He had to take that risk even if He knew that some of them will ultimately embrace the evil over
the good, and destroy themselves through their choices. This difficult enigma was necessary if
others are to have the opportunity to choose the good, and, perhaps, it is best if we leave this
Gordian Knot to be untangled by the Hand of God. After all, we “are very small”, as Treebeard the
Ent might say. (“The Two Towers” the movie) I do believe that, if we approach the Lord humbly with
our concerns about this kind of question, He will guide us into answers that are satisfying. I know that
I have received some such answers over the past 38 years.

One of the immutable Laws of the Universe is this: Wherever there is the possibility for great good
there is always necessarily the possibility for great harm. The higher a creature ascends, the greater
the glories it can aspire to, and the farther it has to fall, if it falls. (The Bible speaks in several places
that God fully anticipated the rebellion of man, and that His redemptive plan was already fully
prepared against that inevitability before He actually initiated the human stage of His Grand Plan on
Earth. He makes no mistakes and is never caught by surprise.)

Peter writes in another letter:

Therefore, preparing your minds for action,and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be
brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of
your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written,
You shall be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each
one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed
from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with
the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foun-
dation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you who through him are be-
lievers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. (1
Peter 1: 13-21`)

And John writes in his Revelation:

And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise au-
thority for forty-two months. It opened its mouth to utter blasphemies against God , blaspheming his name and
his dwelling,that is, those who dwell in heaven. Also it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer
them. And authority was given it over every tribe and people and language and nation, and all who dwell on
earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the
book of life of the Lamb who was slain. (Revelation 13:5-8)

We are not simple hardwired creatures, like amoebae or hamsters, nor are we like even higher
soulish creatures such as horses and dogs: We humans are spiritual beings, given the gift of a spirit,
which is a Divine quality (God is a Spirit John 4:24), in addition to a complex soul (person-ality), and the
liberty of will that comes with having a soul, as well as an unbelievably sophisticated mind, and the
spiritual person we are temporarily inhabits a container called a body. All of this is interwoven. (We
are complicated, to say the least.)

14
With this freedom comes profound responsibility. We are allowed by God the privilege of the real joy
of the rewards and the real pain of the consequences of our choices. We are given by our loving
Creator/Father a lifetime (the Bible averages this,since Noah, at 70 years) to begin to discover the
ineffable potentials of a relationship with Him, or to reject the incredible opportunity into which He
wants us all to enter. (Jesus said that, “It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you His Kingdom!”) (Luke
12:32)

A lifetime is a long time. A lifetime is a short time. We can embrace it. We can waste it. Every
second of every day we have choices to make: toward God or away from God. This averages out to
2,207,520,000 chances in a lifetime, if I punched the keys on my calculator rightly, to make the right
choice,… or the wrong choice.

We are very different from primates and dolphins and whales, which are soulish creatures, but not
spiritual…still animals, not human. (OK, I am going to back away from the dolphins and whales on
this: The book of Genesis gives them a very unique mention, and they are certainly special creatures,
even alien…I don’t know where they stand in God’s economy. I do know we shouldn’t be hurting
them. They are wonder-full. There's lot's of stuff we don't understand: We should be careful and
humble, not heavy-handed and arrogant and blundering. God does judge us on our respect for other
life forms.)

As far as we know, (and we certainly do not know all that much), we alone, besides angels, were
created to have intimate fellowship with our Creator. Animals are not, though many were created to
have special relationships with us, apparently to give us pleasure and companionship, and to teach
us truths about ourselves, our world, and about our Creator. When they die, animals most probably
cease to be, though perhaps not, since the soul seems to have eternal qualities, and higher animals
are soulish creatures. Perhaps we who choose the Kingdom of God will find our beloved pets there:
Scripture is silent on the subject.

We humans certainly do not cease to exist when we die, because, according to biblical revelation,
spirit is eternal, and is meant to endure and grow into dynamic participation in dimensions beyond our
present three and a half: length, width, height, and the forward direction of time…(There is strong and
accepted theoretical and observationally confirmed evidence that there are at least 10 space-time
dimensions to our present universe: see the research and references at www.Reasons.org . And I
believe that Maimonides, the great Jewish rabbinical scholar also understood from the text of
Genesis some fifteen hundred years ago that there were ten dimensions to the Creation, but I don’t
have corroborating support for this at hand. And God certainly abides beyond and outside of the
limitations of this Cosmos, because He made it. He is, by definition, transcendent. It is reasonable to
assume, therefore, that there is at least one more dimension beyond those that contain our universe:
We ain’t seen nothin’ yet!).

We were designed to live and increase forever through an unbroken connection with our Creator…His
Divine Spirit supplying ongoing and undiminished life to our dependent spirit, like a root to a branch,
as Jesus said. I mean, think about it. God is infinitely creative. It’s absurd to think that we are going
to spend forever sitting around, bored, on clouds, playing harps, when we have all of everything He
can think of to explore and learn about and grow up into.

Paul puts it this way: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no one has even begun to imagine what God has in
store for those who love Him.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

However, because we can choose, our first parents chose independence from our Creator over
obedience to Him, and in so doing severed the spiritual lifeline, that umbilical cord supplying the
ambrosia of God. They thought they could run their own lives without His help.

15
This separation from the taproot of Life, the SOURCE of Life, and the inwardly-twisted ego-centered
selfishness that results from that separation, is called, biblically, “SIN”. It’s as simple as that. The
human soul began to feed off of itself, like some sort of a malignant cancer. Our first parents thought
that they could “be god for themselves, and make their own decisions, thank you very much”,
which is the fundamental act of rebellion that we all are guilty of, if we honestly look in the mirror. We
don’t like the idea of God telling us how we ought to live our lives.

Most all of us resent “RULES”. I know I do. Be honest: So do you. “You aren’t the boss of me!” We
all paste that bumpersticker on our butts at one time or another, usually pretty early on...Ever work
with a toddler? I have five grandkids. They don’t have to learn this one: It’s definitely inborn. Since
we are all Adam and Eve’s kids, we all now inherit the “bad gene”, and have the birth defect of
separation from the God who made us and from whom we are supposed to draw our life. It’s simple
genetics: It’s in our DNA.

Anyone who has ever grown up around the church has probably heard the term “original sin”: This is
what the theologians are talking about. Virtually every religion on the planet teaches that human
beings are sinful (naughty, dirty, scummy, guilty, whatever…) before whatever image of god they
have invented for themselves…That’s what every religion is about, figuring out some way to convince
ourselves that we are clean (enough) before God, at least for a little while. (There are exceptions:
Modern “New Age” and UFO cult religions, for example, go out of their way to teach that sin doesn’t
exist and that there’s no act to clean up…If there’s no such thing as sin then we can indulge
ourselves in whatever perverted pleasures that our deviant little minds come up with…How
convenient.) The sense of uncleanness in all of mankind is pretty much universal unless we work
overtime to bury it deep into our subconscious or, more radically, to literally burn our conscience over
with scar tissue until we can feel nothing.

The Bible says, simply, “All have sinned, and have fallen short of God’s Glory.” (Romans 3:23)

(There is a Standard. That Standard is God Himself. God is Perfect in every way: He is
flawless…beyond Photoshopped flawless. Everything He creates is flawless. Anything that is less
than flawless simply is destroyed in the presence of such perfection…disassembled, deconstructed,
undone.

Since nothing that is not perfect can be in Heaven, God’s Kingdom dimension, it doesn’t matter how
bad or how good you are…. You can be very very good...You can be the nicest person in town...in
the country...on the planet...It doesn't matter...Somewhere in your life you screwed something up,
simply because you're human....and humans screw things up. YOU AREN’T PERFECT. When you
die, you aren’t going to be able to make the cut. This is why we need Jesus, by the way. He wasn't
“simply human”. He IS perfect and He will share that perfection with us, on His terms and if we ask.)

Since Adam’s rebellion, we EXIST…We no longer LIVE, in the biblical sense of the word…The
ORIGINAL meaning of the word. We are all “dead in our sins”. (Ephesians 2:5) We are like cut flowers in
a vase. We may look pretty for a while, but we were dead the second the knife sliced the stem. The
stem was cut in the Garden. We were born spiritually dead! (John 5: 24-29; 21)

And it gets worse.

Most of us go through at least some part of our lives completely deluded, thinking that we are on top
of our world and in charge of our lives. But we are vessels; containers that are supposed to hold
something other than ourselves, and we are not designed to be independent. We do not have true life
in ourselves! We were never designed to be in charge! There is a space, a “control room”, inside
of us that is designed to seat a pilot and a co-pilot: And we are only supposed to be the co-pilot!

16
And the devil is very real (look around and try to deny it)…and he is a SPIRITUAL being (he is a
rebellious angel). And when he rebelled the Bible says that one third of the angels of Heaven joined
him…I don’t know how many angels that is, but I’m guessing that it’s a lot. So guess who moves into
the SPIRITUAL void that our ever so great-great-great grand-mommy and daddy created in us. (You
may have to struggle to get a handle on this since Lucifer (Satan’s real name) really doesn’t want you
to believe that he has his talons imbedded in your brain, and he is able to fog up your thoughts pretty
badly…but please make the effort. Think “The Matrix”. Take the Red Pill and stay in Wonderland.)

And we are completely out-classed by him…Angels and demons (fallen, sick, mentally deranged,
psychopathic angels) are SUPERnatural, and we are very mundane and puny by comparison, unless
we are filled with the Spirit of Christ. We humans are destined to become greater than angels, if we
do things God’s way, but not before we are grown up and matured…and that process was interrupted
by Adam and Eve’s rebellion. Right now we are sardines in a shark tank….snack food,...

PREY

We were created to be willing servants of our Creator Father, being blessed out of our socks
ourselves as we bless and serve the High King, but without Christ we are now Satan’s slaves, being
driven mercilessly and sadistically down self-destructive paths of lust and desire and addiction and
perversion, until he decides to terminate us, and drag us forever into the terrible separation from God
that is Hell. He hates God and he hates us, all the more because we are God’s most wonderful and
loved creations. He wants to hurt God by hurting us: He is obsessive about this. In our own strengh,
we cannot stop ourselves from yielding to him or escape his domination no matter how much we
might want to or try to…”The heart is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41) Servants may have
options…slaves do not. “Resistance is futile”. Satan is far far worse than Borg or Dalek or Gu’aold:
He is real. (For those of you unfamiliar with Borg, watch Star Trek, with Daleks, watch Dr. Who, and
with Gu’aold Stargate SG-1. They are really bad guys, but they are only bedtime stories. Satan is
not a bedtime story.) As Bob Dylan once sang: “We all gotta serve somebody…” Thinking we serve
our SELVES we are chattel slaves to Satan, because of Sin. We will continue this discussion and
discover the single biblical solution to the problem as we continue to explore Paul’s thoughts now in
Romans:

Called…and Set Apart

God is not a passive or disinterested alien intelligence “out there” somewhere…He is dynamic and
passionate and very purposeful, and He is incredibly interested in each one of us: (Indeed, He knows
each one of us by name! He knows you by name. Cf Isaiah 43;Revelation 13:8 ) We tend to be distracted and
overly busy with our very petty concerns, most of which really mean diddlysquat in the grand scheme of
things. I suggest that you set aside some time and go to a quiet place and ask this wonderful Person,
who wants you to call Him “Father”, even “Daddy”, to speak to you: You might be very surprised at what
happens.

The Gospel of God

The word “Gospel” (evangelion) means “Good News of victory and of peace”. It’s a military concept:
A declaration of a great battle that has been won, and of liberation. We will explore this as we go on,
but I am quite sure that many of you have a mental picture of God as some sort of stern-faced
scowling old man with a long white beard who is going to call you on the carpet for every little mistake
you’ve ever made, and then enjoy tying you to a hot hibache to watch you blister and burn. And a lot
of you also probably hold to the notion, when you think about it, that Heaven is a boring retirement
village where anyone (old people and geeks and nerds and homely girls mostly) who does make it
sits around playing a harp and singing Kum-by-Yah like some sort of throwback to Woodstock.
17
Nothing is further from the Truth! Or rather, the Truth is infinitely more extraordinary and
wonderful than those simplistic and erroneous myths from Sunday school, apologies to old deacon
Wittensniffel and Sister Mary Elephant. Every one of you who hungers after justice, and forgiveness,
and guilt-free peace, and the Love of God will be found by Him, if you don’t give up and turn away
from your search…That is His promise to you! And that’s just for starters.

But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal:”The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone
who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.” (2 Timothy 2:19)

But if anyone loves God, he is known by God. 1 Corinthians 8:3

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand and not a
shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf
snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. I am the
good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and
I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and
they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. John 10:11-16

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness
about me, but you do not believe because you are not part of my flock. My sheep hear my voice, and I know
them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out
of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me,is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of
the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” John 10:25-30

The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if
you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is
saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinc-
tion between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For
“everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:8-13

Participation in the Kingdom of God is living here and now without guilt and shame, having real inner
peace, and being full to overflowing with joy and wonder because of God’s Comforting Spirit. It be-
gins the moment you do serious business with Jesus and continues forever after that. The icing on
the cake for the immediate future is that you no longer need to be afraid of death or dying, but that’s
almost a side effect…a perk.

To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearch-
able riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God
who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to
the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized
in Christ Jesus our Lord, Ephesians 3:8-11

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in
our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him
and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the im-
measurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 2:4-7

These are all really good things and I think a lot of you would like them in your life, if only you could
believe that they were true and not some sort of pie-in-the-sky scam. THEY ARE TRUE! I and millions
of Christians confidently will affirm this. Tens of millions more have gone before us in the past two
Thousand years. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

18
They start the moment you bend your knee, and they expand exponentially far beyond the last events
the Bible describes of the coming ages. The Kingdom of God in its fullness is presently inconceivable
to us. We can no more imagine the wonder of Heaven than we can imagine a fourth primary color or
a five-dimensional hyper-cube. But we can begin to experience these things simply by surrendering
our broken heart to Christ in an honest prayer. And it is in the rich soil of spiritual experience that
living faith grows, not in the less fertile ground of intellectual understanding. Understanding follows
faith...it does not precede it. The rationalist says, “I have to see it to believe it”. The Word of God
says, “ Just choose to believe it, then you will begin to see.” We’ll get into this in depth a bit farther
down, but it’s like a lightning bolt: Faith, I mean….You send up a little leader of belief from earth, and
God will send down this huge answering blast of Faith from Heaven to meet you…And then you will
know what I’m talking about, and your life will NEVER be the same again! I am speaking from person-
al experience, not theory. And any Spirit-led Spirit-filled Christian will confirm what I am saying.

Again in Romans:

through his prophets in the holy Scriptures,

Prophets and prophecy

Prophecy is not always God predicting what He is going to do sovereignly in the future: It is also, and
perhaps predominantly, God telling us in advance what He knows is going to (or may) happen in the
future, and how He is going to respond to it when (and if) it happens. (I say “may” and “if” here
because of our ability to shape our own destinies, and in certain ways the future on a greater scale,
because of human free will…it’s a big discussion that we will deal with as we proceed.)

He gives us biblical prophecy, in large measure, to validate the authenticity of the Scripture as His
Word to us, and to confirm His faithfulness. Biblical prophecy is 100% accurate, but often cannot be
so judged until AFTER the events take place. It is not given to us to give us puzzles to work out, or
as material for interminable speculative cable TV shows. (I am not here saying that there is not a
predictive aspect to biblical prophecy, or that we should not be prayerfully seeking such prophetic
revelation for our times; I am saying that we are wrong in sensationalizing and commercializing such
sacred things.)

God says, “I have told you these things before they happen, so that when they happen you will know that I am
Who I say I am and that I am fully in charge.” (My paraphrase) (John 14:29;16:4) He clearly is saying, “since
all of what I have told would happened that has already happened has been spot-on, you can take it
to the bank that the stuff that I’m telling you will happen in the days ahead is just as certain. You
need to wake up and smell the coffee, people: Get right with Me now, ‘cause here comes the Judge!”

Somewhere between 1000 and 2000 very specific prophecies (depending upon how you read...some
say there are far more) are recorded in the Bible. About three-fourths of these have now been
fulfilled TO THE LETTER! About one quarter remain to be fulfilled. (I choose not to use precise
numbers, which do exist but which are subject to controversy...I don't want to get into that fight right
now.) Statistically, however, this degree of accuracy is simply impossible. Odds can be calculated,
but they are effecively meaningless. NO other so-called “holy” book, or any other “prophetic” or “psy-
chic” writing that has EVER been written, or any predictive word ever spoken has EVER come close
to being as accurate as the Biblical prophetic texts…not even remotely. This is a fact. For most
psychics and astrologers and other delusional charlatans, random guessing would be more accurate
than the drivel they spout. Most of these con-men and women are simply very good profilers. (Some,
who are demonically influenced, are more accurate, but their sources of information are corrupt: That
is another day’s discussion.)

19
There have been and now are accurate Christian prophets, since the Bible was completed: These
persons never speak in ways that change or contradict the biblical base-line of Truth, which was
established and finalized with the apostolic writers, nor do they modify the Plan of God, though they
do bring forth “new” information from the inspired databank “at the proper time” and “in the proper
season”. These contemporary anointed ministers are always held accountable to the Word of God by
other mature and equally submitted ministries in obedience to the Lord under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit. Their main purpose is to guide and encourage the Body in the prosecution of the War as it
advances on its many battle fronts toward the end of the “time of the Gentiles”.

No other major “Holy Book” on the planet includes biblical quality prophecy, and none can be
honestly compared to the biblical text. The Bible stands absolutely, qualitatively, uniquely apart from
all sacred documents in the world….PERIOD. There are plenty of researched discussions of this.

Because God is all-powerful and all-knowing, some would try to argue that God, in His Sovereignty,
predetermines everything. To do this He would have to negate all human freedom, and therefore no
person could be held responsible and be rewarded for his or her actions, or judged for his or her
disobedience. But, as the Bible reveals, God does hold us responsible for our actions and does
judge us for our sin, and He is not unjust in doing so. Therefore absolute predestination is an invalid
theology.

Paradoxically, both God’s Absolute Sovereignty and human free will are equally true and equally
valid. This is one of those transdimensional biblical “mysteries” (a Pauline word). It begins to make
sense once we delimit God from our very small four dimensional reality….Remember, we are swim-
ming in the aquarium: He is not. He is outside of the aquarium.

In fact, two jurisdictions apply: God has an over-arching Plan for His Creation, which is revealed and
described in great detail in the Bible, but, as the scriptures declare:

“The Heavens are the Lord’s Heavens, but the earth He has given to the children of man.” Psalm 115:16

This means that God, residing outside of our time dimension, certainly has a complete knowledge of
all things from before the beginning of our time dimension to beyond the end of our time dimension.
God knows everything that can be known. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that He has
a reason or an obligation to interfere with any given event or circumstance within the boundaries of
our time dimension, as it is confined to the world of men, and especially with any personal choice or
decision of any particular individual or individuals…you or me. We as unique persons are truly free
from cradle to grave to live our lives for better or for worse, and are fully responsible for our decisions,
and for the consequences of our decisions.

Certainly, because He knows fully the consequence of every choice and decision, and all outcomes,
He is able to act to alter circumstances and events to best accommodate those decisions and
outcomes to the furtherance of His own larger plans and purposes (which may well transcend the
boundaries of the “earth of men”, the specific realm of our stewardship). And because we are His
creatures, made by Him and wholly derived from and dependent upon Him, (Acts 17:28), He can act to
extend or terminate our lives as He wills, either directly or by circumstance: But in so doing He has in
no way actually made our choices for us,...except perhaps to override our complaint that we would
rather live than die. But this happens in any court of law. We have already established from both the
New Covenant and the Old that we are all guilty as lawbreakers. Few convicted criminals particularly
agree with the sentence handed down by the presiding judge before whose bar they stand. And
virtually all felons are self-professed innocent victims, as we all know (our prisons are filled with
innocent men and women). Nevertheless, the will of the court supercedes the personal desire of the
convict. That’s the way law works.
20
Quite often, God simply removes His protection from us and lets us go our own way, as we have
demanded He do, and soon enough our own bad choices do us in. Sometimes He passes judgment
upon our willful acts that break His law, and then sentences us to death and executes us. (This might
occur if our actions endanger others or if He needs to stop us from doing something of even greater
spiritual harm to ourselves.) It is the right of the High King to do so. He holds Sovereign power of life
and death over his subjects. That’s the way Kingdoms work: The old “off with his head” thing. We
Americans think in terms of democracy: God’s Kingdom is not a democracy. Sorry about that.

In both these cases it is we who have either asked Him to get out of our lives and leave us alone, or
have made ourselves lawbreakers; (actually the same thing, when you think about it). We often
blame Him for not watching our backs when things go badly for us, but we rarely thank Him for the
countless interventions that have kept us from harm throughout our lives, and we conveniently
overlook the fact that most of the time the troubles we experience are the consequences of our own
bad or foolish choices, and are deserved, or at least inevitable. As the old proverb goes: “ For want of
a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For
want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the king-
dom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. “

No parent is a good parent if he or she always shelters a child from the consequences of its
misbehavior and disobedience. Such a child will never grow up to be a maturely functioning adult,
but will become a detriment or danger to himself or herself and to society. Unfortunately, sometimes
consequences are dire or terminal: Hey, life sometimes sucks. Even you Darwinists can understand
this one….Unfit creatures don’t make the cut. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and all that rot. Life is
hard, then you die. It’s called REALITY.

Also, because the earth itself, and all that is in it, is His as its Creator and Sustainer, and is ours only
as stewards and tenants, because He gave us the responsibility to “take care of it”, (aren’t we doing a
great job? I wonder what our job review is going to look like?), God can certainly act upon the
environment as He wills, without breaking covenant with us, and without appearing capricious or
arbitrary before Satan and the various powers that would challenge His authority in Heaven, and
thereby compromising His Right to His Throne. (This part of the Story we will explore another time.)
The High King is Sovereign over His Realm. He spoke the Universe into existence, and when He is
done with it, He is going to burn this one up and make a new one. I do the same thing to my
woodwork all the time.

(But, quite honestly, if we weren’t so stupid as to build our cities on fault lines and on flood plains and
on the slopes of volcanoes and below sea level in the paths of hurricanes, then perhaps the tragedies
we like to blame Him for wouldn’t happen quite so often….Duhhhh. “What fools these mortals be.”
If you think about it, human avarice drives us to concentrate our populations where we think we can
make the most money in the shortest time, and this leads to all sorts of hardship and catastrophe and
dysfunction and disease and corruption. Sin turns man inward upon himself, corrupting his ability to
have healthy relationships and make wise choices. The root of virtually all of our problems is self-
centeredness…me-ism… “looking out for #1”: the lusts and addictions of the flesh, the lusts and
desires of the eyes, the pride and greed of life, …These things drive us to take risks, and to place
ourselves and others in harm’s way, and to abuse each other. It’s a miracle of Grace and a testimony
to His incredible love toward us that God has let us, as a race, go on this long, as He has sought by
every means short of force to woo as many of us back to Himself as He can before he shuts down
the experiment and eliminates evil from His creation altogether, which is the Plan, by the way. It is
quite obvious that the world probably would be better off without us, unless something radically
changes the insanely self-destructive stampede we are presently running.)

21
Returning to Paul:

CONCERNING HIS SON, WHO WAS DESCENDED FROM DAVID ACCORDING TO THE FLESH AND WAS DE-
CLARED TO BE THE SON OF GOD IN POWER ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT OF HOLINESS BY HIS RESURREC-
TION FROM THE DEAD, JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD,

This is the first blockbuster statement Paul sets out, and it is really the clearest New Covenant
declaration that defines the whole of what Christianity is all about.

Concerning His Son

First of all, let’s get past the idea of God having a kid. We are dealing here with SONSHIP, which is a
term of relationship and of the order of Authority, not of procreation. Jesus the Christ is the
second Person of the Tri-Unity (Trinity), which is God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), also
called , theologically, the “Godhead”.

There is ONE God. There is NOT a mono-God. There are NOT three Gods, and Christians are not
poly-theistic. We believe in one God revealed in three distinguishable persons. We accept this as a
“mystery” based in the fact of Divine transcendance. The word “Trinity” does not appear in the Bible.
The reality of the Trinity is clearly derived from systematic Bible study. The Trinity is a core doctrine of
Christian Truth. The fact of the Trinity is absolutely essential to the Truth of the Gospel and the
Reality of what God has accomplished through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, because it is only
through this Mystery that God truly could become human and could undo the damage done by man,
in his fall from grace, without violating His own law.

We cannot possibly try to discuss this multi-dimensional reality in depth in this present conversation.
Libraries have been written about the paradox of Three-Being-One and One-Being-Three, and you
can pick your argument, or you can simply rest in Faith on the biblical self-revelation that God has
provided that such things are true and are beyond our understanding. (I suggest the latter, since few
of us can even imagine anything beyond three dimensions anyway…you’ll just get a headache. Wars
have been fought over this: They were not necessary, and were certainly not good Christian behavior.
Christians are neither mono-theists nor poly-theists: God is bigger than that. As King David sang:

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me. Psalm 131

Paul simply and straightforwardly states that he is testifying that Jesus is the Son of God. (I can
supply a reading list for anyone interested in digging deeper on this subject of the Trinity.)

He is also the “Firstborn” (Colossians 1:15ff), which means, not that He is created, but that he is the
“HEIR” who is the designated inheritor of the whole estate and the title of the Father, with all the
Authority and the Power that belongs to the Father. Since the Father is the Almighty God of the Uni-
verse and Beyond, then it follows that Jesus Christ is also the Almighty God of the Universe and Be-
yond, but in a position of submission to His Father.

So yes, Jesus is God.

22
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph be-
fore they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a
just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things,
behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take
Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall
call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had
spoken by the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanu-
el” (which means, God with us). Matthew 1:18-23

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen
me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20:28-29

But of the Son he says,

Your throne, O God, is forever and ever,

the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.

You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;

therefore God, your God, has anointed you
with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” Hebrews 1:8-9

The Scripture says that “In Him was contained all of the fullness of the Godhead bodily” Colossians 2:9 ….He
was 100% God and 100% Human ~ The God-Man.

(And WE ARE NOT…God is NOT in each one of us in this way! We can talk about this in another dis-
cussion. We are NOT deity in any way, shape, or form…we are creatures. God is un-created. He
is ESSENTIALY divine. Shirley McClaine, and all those who think like her, are wrong. The New
Covenant does say that, IF AND ONLY IF we are Christians, we are “partakers of the Divine Nature”,
but this means that we are privileged to share in god-like attributes at His pleasure through Christ.
These attributes are imparted to us. In Him we are like Him. We have been blessed to receive a
quality of life not of ourselves. (cf. John 5:26) We dare not embrace these precious gifts as if they were
our playthings: All that we are and have is derived, rare, precious, privileged. So, in Jesus Christ the
Eternally Divine Son of God embraced mortality. Now we, as mortal Christians becoming immortal,
taste Divinity. We need to live on our faces in AWE. 1 Corinthians 4:7)

And, He is also called “the second Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:47), our “Do-over”. And, because He has
become one of us, He is not ashamed to call us His brothers and sisters (Hebrews 2:11-12), and to adopt
us into His family on the single condition that we agree to abide by Family Rules. He even says that
He’ll teach us to do the same sort of stuff He does, as long as we let Him lead and don’t get cocky.

Who was descended….according to the flesh

Paul then confirms Jesus’ Messianic claim to King David’s throne (King David was Israel’s second
and greatest king to whom God made some really wonderful promises, the most wonderful of which
was that the Liberator of the human race would be a descendent of his), which was legitimized by his
lineage both through His blood mother, Mary, and through His stepfather, Joseph. This was
necessary in order to establish legal credibility with any Jewish challenge to Jesus’ claims to the
Messianic Throne, because the prophetic texts of the Old Testament required that Messiah (the
Christ) be a direct blood descendent of David. These genealogies are listed in the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke. (I can come up with a reading list for anyone interested in Old Testament studies
on this stuff.)

23
Declared to be the Son of God….

Here is the Big One!

Unlike every other would-be savior of the world and celebrity prophet of the ages that has come and
gone throughout history, Jesus backed up His claim by His physical resurrection from the grave.
(Buddha, Mohammed, Maharishi Yogi, eventually Saint Barack and even Tom Cruise, all are or will
be moldering bones in a hole…actually, they probably fed the Yogi to the fish in the Ganges, so he’s
poo.)

Jesus was beaten, tortured, mutilated, crucified, speared through the heart ~watch The Passion of
the Christ~ and buried in a cold cave…quite dead…on a Friday afternoon, but on Sunday morning He
was very very much ALIVE! (You can try to disprove this bit of history, if you want. Plenty of people
have tried over the past two millennia. NOBODY has succeeded. Most who have tried have been
converted to the Faith by their own research. I challenge you (dare you...double dare you!!) to read
Lee Stroebel’s “The Case for Christ”.) And then He hung out with His people for another fifty days
before physically doing some sort of transporter thing in front of a large crowd of them from the top of
the Mount of Olives. This has only happened ONCE in all of history….

ONCE!

ONCE!
And billions of people have been hanging out with Him over the past nineteen hundred and eighty
plus years since: As I said, I’ve had one direct encounter, in which we spoke together for an hour
and a half, and a number of other more mystic experiences over the past 37 years, besides my
thousands of hours spent in dynamic deep prayer and worship in the Presence of the Holy. You can
call me crazy. Plenty of people have. I’ve “been there and done that”…And my life is very likely in a
whole lot better shape than yours…unless you’ve been there too. I’ll be happy to talk with you about
it if you want to make the time. My wife will share her experiences as well.

More ink and hot air has been expended trying to “prove” that this singular event didn’t happen than
has been wasted on any other controversial circumstance in all of human history (including, probably,
the recent debates on cap-and-trade, the stimulus package, health-care reform, global-warming,
Michael Jackson, Sarah Palin, and the Gulf Oil Spill put together).

It happened. People who say it didn’t happen are either ignorant, misinformed, or are deliberately
lying to you. They certainly don’t know their history.

Because it happened, Jesus Christ is now Lord of Earth and Heaven, having successfully challenged
the legal claim Satan has held against God over mankind because of Adam’s rebellion and fall, willing
and able to save from eternal horrible isolation and pain those who choose to stop fighting with Him
and come home to Daddy, and at some point preparing to pass one hell of a judgment on everyone
else for their willful disobedience to the laws of the Universe.

(Current trends seem to indicate that this Day of Reckoning really does seem to be coming sooner
than later, since the human race seems committed to self-destruction on its own unless Someone
intervenes, and this time around we really are able to pull it off in any of a dozen different ways ~ nu-
clear, biological, chemical, environmental, technological, shear mass boneheaded stupidity…have I
missed anything?

24
But I guess that’s for you to bet on. You could choke on an M&M in another minute anyhow. It
doesn’t really matter how you get there:

The Bible says: “It is appointed for a man (or woman) to die once, and then to face judgment.” Hebrews 9:27

You can take your chances on Karma if you like, but Jesus Himself said that the only One who really
knows what He’s talking about is someone who’s got experience. And Jesus is the only one who has
ever been both to Heaven and to Hell, and lived to talk about it…. WITH PROOF TO BACK UP HIS
CLAIM! I think I’ll take His word over some anonymous guru in filthy underwear who says I might get
a second chance as a cockroach, or some misogynistic mullah fantacizing about a paradisical orgy,
or some pontificating “scientist/priest” on the Discovery channel who is speculating about what might
be ‘out there - somewhere..… possibly....in theory..... maybe....if we can invent the technology to
discover it....someday....because we’re certain of it, at least theoretically”. )

The Spirit of Holiness

The word “holiness” means to be “set apart” or “separated for a purpose”. God’s Holy Spirit is an un-
mixed, untainted, unalloyed, pure, set-apart non-corporeal Being….Unique and of Heaven (that is
“transcendent and trans-dimensional”). For us now on Earth it means to be “set apart from sin and
separated unto God”. Here Paul uses the phrase “Spirit of Holiness”. As the Holy Spirit interacts with
mankind, with us, we are brought into the realm of “the holy”. In the same way that darkness cannot
dominate light, our un-holiness cannot affect God’s holiness. In the presence of God’s Holy Spirit we
either bow and are transformed, or we flee in terror and pain.

God’s Holy Spirit is the Essence of the Heart of God in action as the third person of the Trinity. Here
in Paul’s thought, it is He whose energy touched the mangled body of Jesus on the hard rock bier in
the garden cave, and channeled the Life of God through the stone cold corpse of the Christ with such
awesome power that the earth itself shook and the great boulder that sealed the grave rolled back
uphill from the mouth of the tomb. His touch paralyzed the armed guards outside, as the Risen Lord
walked free from the bonds of death. He was the Artist who created the mysterious three dimension-
al Shroud image that has confounded countless millions for generations in Turin.

And it is the Holy Spirit of God through whom Jesus Christ is now able to interact individually and per-
sonally and simultaneously with billions of His people…His “Body”, the Church. Through Him we live
and move in Heaven while we also grow in Grace and complete our assignments in the Great War
here on Earth. He is given to us as our “engagement ring” and our Comforting Companion and
Teacher against the day when our mortal bodies will be transfigured (the Greek word in the Bible is
“metamorphosis”, like a caterpillar into a butterfly) into the same kind of substance as that of the risen
Lord, at His Second Coming, when He culminates the age of man.

through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his
name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,

Received Grace

“Grace” is the Greek word for a “gift freely given with no strings attached” or a “completely
undeserved mercy”…In the context of the Gospel of Jesus Christ it always refers to the reality that
God Almighty has every right to judge us and condemn us for defying Him and for violating His funda-
mental Rules of the way things have to be. But because of His unfathomable Love He has done
everything short of forcing us to accept His forgiveness, and to completely remove all the burden of
the guilt we justifiably bear.

25
We all stand condemned! He has moved Heaven and earth to prevent us from having to receive the
full weight of justice that our rebellion demands that we receive, and from which God’s enemies
(Satan and his supporters) would never let Him simply and arbitrarily pardon us. (There is a profound
reason why such a pardon could not be given: It would be used as an unanswerable indictment of
the fundamental character of God that He is capricious that would challenge the fundamental Order
of all Creation…We will discuss this at another time.)

This is the whole reason that Christ had to become human, live human, die human…There is a very
big picture thing happening on a super-Cosmic level….All for us…all for YOU as a specific person
with a name: He would have done it if you were the only human being on earth.

Apostleship means “ to be especially sent out on a mission”: apostolos means “messenger” or “one
that is sent”.

Obedience…..the Gospel is ALWAYS about obedience! Not just belief. Belief is easy: The Bible says
that the Devil believes. But Obedience is not easy. Disobedience started the War in Heaven. Dis-
obedience was the cause of the human problem. Obedience is at the heart of the New Covenant that
solved that problem. (See Hebrews 10:5-7) Salvation is free…I mean there is nothing we have that
could possibly pay for it. God has made it free, because it is priceless. But it also costs us
everything. It cost God everything. Redemption in Jesus Christ is an absolutely fair and even
exchange. God says, “I will give you 100% of Me. You must give me 100% of you.” What He has is
beyond price. What we have is worthless. It is really a no-brainer: Yet so many of us insist on
hanging on to our autonomy. We are very arrogant. We are very foolish. We like the idea of
salvation, but we still rebel at the concept of Lordship, of submitting to rules. Yet the Bible talks about
Jesus as “Savior and Lord”, never simply Savior.

For the sake of HIS NAME

Again I go back to my discussion in my introduction about why Christianity has to be EXCLUSIVE. It

is the only correct Map out of the Dead Marshes (watch “The Return of the King”). (Proverbs 14:12;16:25;
Matthew 7:13,14) It is mercy to be shown the safe path, however difficult that path may be, when any
misstep, however slight, will cost you your life. It may sound insensitive and intolerant to tell
someone that they are pigheadedly wrong; But if you are trying to save their life, being tolerant, “PC”,
“nice”, not “hurting their feelings”, not “offending”, and all that sort of mollycoddling is so much
bullcrap…A lifeguard saving a drowning man sometimes has to punch him hard enough to stun him
in order to get him to settle down and not die.

I want to remark here that, biblically speaking, the concept of NAME has much more to do with
essential character than with a label of some sort. Jesus has a lot of “names”: Joshua, Jesus, Jesu,
Jeshua, Messiah, Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, etc…I have no idea what some of the more exotic tribal
pronunciations might be. And the Bible itself uses different names for the same people all the time
(Cephas, Simon, and Peter for the big biker fisherman apostle, for example). So it is my conviction
that a person can know Jesus in essence, but perhaps by a different “name” than I might expect. It
very well might be “Fred”. I would have to get to know such a person and “taste” the fruit of their lives
to know more about the depth of their spiritual understanding, before passing judgment about the
authenticity of their faith. I do believe that Jesus Christ is more than willing and able to meet any
seeking heart anywhere on earth, whether or not there is a Christian missionary with a tract or a Bible
around, and I can find myriad testimonies to back up my assertion. I have met several Muslims and
Hindus, for example, who certainly appear more consistently “Christian” than many Christians that I
know. I have also met very deeply Christian Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, albeit with screwed
up theology: Hmmmmm. (Glenn Beck is obviously and confessedly a Christian, though he is a
practicing Mormon.) And I have heard reports of many others.

26
 Of course, the person who has the New Testament will come to know the Lord more deeply and more
intimately and accurately than the person who doesn’t, so getting the Word of God to everyone is
much more than just a good idea, and we are under command to do so. And since you are reading
this study, you don’t fall into the category of “what about those who have never heard about Jesus?”
.... You have. I let God worry about those that I can’t talk to: He’s pretty good about that sort of thing.

Among all the Nations

God has an absolute desire that every human being who desires to return to eternal fellowship with
Him will be able to, and since the resurrection of Christ He has been calling, through the voice of the
Holy Spirit, to every heart on earth, saying, “ If you are listening, please pick up.”

Who are called to belong

We will deal with this a bit farther down. The call is universal, but unfortunately only a self-selected
group (Jesus calls them “you who have hearing ears”) is paying heed to it, while most of the world is
merrily partying their way into the abyss. It is to this attentive group (Jesus also calls them His “little
flock” and “my sheep” (Luke 12:32; John 10:14-30; 21:15-17)) that this study really is directed…It probably
works out to between ¼ and 1/3 of the people who are reading this. According to the “Parable of the
Soils”, as Jesus tells it, ¼ of you will either click right by, or say something imbecilic and hateful and
then feel proud of yourselves and gloat about your wit. ¼ of you will hang out for a while but will get
distracted, or bored, or offended when things I say get too personal. Half of the remaining group may
slowly find excuses to slip away, because Paul expects nothing but an absolute commitment to “The
Way”…And Jesus, Himself, said, “ anyone who sets his hand to the plow and then turns back, isn’t fit for My
Kingdom, so it’s better not to make commitments you aren’t prepared to keep.” (Luke 9:59) You’re going to find
that the disciplines of the Lord interfere a bit too much with your life and dreams. Some of you will
simply drift off: Others will feel guilty and will shop around for a weak “church” that will let you live a
compromised life and still call yourself a Christian. The Bible refers to you as “lukewarm puke”.
(Revelation 3:16)

The rest of you are in for the BEST** time of your earthly Life…As the Men’s Warehouse CEO says, “
I guarantee it.” (And it only gets better after this earthly life is over!) (**I am not saying the easiest
time...I am saying the most fulfilling and enriching time.)

To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints:

Saints: We Christians all are saints….The word simply means “Holy Ones” or “Set Apart People”. You
don’t have to be “canon-fodder” to be a saint. Also, while there is a possible biblical rationale for
praying to “the saints” (which I don’t believe is a correct notion, in any case), the Roman Catholic
practice of placing mediators between believers and their God is not in harmony with the New
Testament or with the clear instructions of Jesus Himself. And the RC, and other equivalent Protestant,
elevation of certain individuals to positions of high honor and veneration violates the spirit of the
Kingdom of God, wherein all believers are on equal footing in Christ’s Righteousness through Grace.
All fruit-bearing Christians are saints… non-fruitbearing Christians (technically an oxymoron) are pos-
sibly (probably) not Christians at all, just churchgoers and benchwarmers with guilty consciences or ulte-
rior social agendas.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Please NOTE: Paul makes a very clear distinction here between “God the Father” and “The Lord
Jesus Christ”. We Evangelicals especially have blurred and conflated this distinction in our study,
prayer, and worship, and in so doing have done damage to the depth and majesty of the whole of our
Christian theology, and to the majesty of the Plan and the Kingdom of God.
27
The High Church has preached God as Awesome and Majestic, which He is, and in so doing made Him
distant and unreachable. The Evangelical Church has emphasized that Jesus is our Friend and Brother,
and brought Him close to us, and this is wonderful, but in so doing has for many made God too familiar, too
human and too much a “buddy” , a BFF. We have really ceased to respect Him properly. Our confusion
has weakened our ability to live out our life in Christ. God is both terrifyingly Awesome and tenderly
intimate…both Divine and human, and we must maintain the biblical distinctions as He has revealed them
to us in order to learn of Him as He desires us to. There is a profundity to the Trinity, which is UNIQUE to
the Christian faith, and which is a Truth that proceeds not only from basic Christian theology, but also from
essential Truths far deeper than such human concepts as Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and String
Theory, and beyond even the very nature of our Reality itself as we seek to explore it: We cannot really
understand these things. Perhaps some minds are large enough to play with the math in some degree to
say they can conceive of some of this: I have no idea if they can or can’t. But Paul says in many ways and
many places that there is “One God, and One Mediator between God and Man, the Man, Christ Jesus”, and
that the Holy Spirit is somehow the liaising connection Who works together in and with and through us to
effect that mediating process.

The New Covenant very clearly maintains these divine distinctions!!!! And we must as well.

And Jesus Himself said, “DON’T worship ME, go to DADDY for yourself! I have made that possible
for you to do, and He wants you to climb into His lap and talk directly with Him.”

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem
those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has
sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if
a son, then an heir through God. Galatians 4:4-7

”ABBA” is the Aramaic familiar word for “DADDY”, the word spoken by small children in loving intimacy,
and never used outside the nuclear core family. It is the name by which Jesus addressed His Father
when He prayed.

In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he
will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may
be full. In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for
the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. John 16:23-27

Jesus is our “Pattern Son”, our Exemplar and our Big Brother. He shows us that it is possible to live
a God Quality life as a human being, because He lived 33 years completely as a human being
without drawing once upon His Divine attributes independent of prayer and worship (Philippians 2).

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall
back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father.”!” Romans
8:14-15

The writer of Hebrews says:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through
death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear
of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abra-
ham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful
high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered
when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. ...For we do not have a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Hebrews
2:14-18; 4:15

28
 He did everything in His Earthly ministry only through the communion of prayer, and in obedience,
and by waiting for His Father to give Him the go-ahead and the ability through the Holy Spirit. And
now, He gives us the SAME HOLY SPIRIT that He had, and says we can accomplish this mortal life
in exactly the same way that He did it! HE WAS ONE OF US!

That is the point! He could not have accomplished our redemption if He had not been. (We cannot
make the excuse, “Well, Jesus was God”. He has removed that option in both directions: He did not
live among us as God. He did not die for us as God. He did not rise from the dead as God. And He
does not presently mediate the New Covenant as God, at least not as God was before the
Incarnation. He is uniquely the God~Man. Indeed, when all of this Restoration is complete, He is
going to bow down before God the Father and return the whole of the Cosmos to Him so that “God
may be All and in All”…(1 Cor.15:28). Something utterly unfathomable to us in our mortality happened in
the Godhead through the Incarnation: I am not even sure that it is our place to ever try to understand
it. It may very well be one of those things that Paul says is “unlawful” to talk about.)

The Scriptures are quite clear that we are to honor the Son, an honor that does include worship and
therefore proves the Divinity of the Son; that He stands before us, as Diety, with the full approval of
and in the full Authority of the Father, and that the Father will remand us for dishonoring the Son.

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life;
whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. John 3:35-36

The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor
the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you,
whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but
has passed from death to life. John 5:22-24

“Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of
God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have
life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. John 5:25-27

Nevertheless, Jesus came to reveal to us The Father, and we are supposed to be doing business
with “our Father, who is in Heaven”.Matthew 6:9

So Jesus said to them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do
nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has
not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.” John 8:28-29

For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a command-
ment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I
say as the Father has told me.” John 12:49-50

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for
the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in
spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he
comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” John 4:23-26

Furthermore, the Holy Spirit shuns worship! Christ said that “He will not speak of Himself!”. (John 16:13)
That is “He will not toot His own horn or call attention to Himself.” He is the servant of another to
Whom He defers. There is a reason that He identifies Himself with the dove, which is a shy bird that
does not strut or display itself, and which quickly flees when it is exposed.

29
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority,
but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me,
for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will
take what is mine and declare it to you. John 16:13-15

It embarrasses Him to be called out. So when we focus overmuch on the Holy Spirit we are disregarding
the Lord’s own admonition, are risking slipping into a distracted idolatry and soulish sensuality, and again
are missing the point. I venture that sometimes our “worship celebrations” actually grieve the heart of
God and may become blasphemous. And we’re so hyped up on adrenalin and endorphins from the
drumbeat and the chant that we don’t even realize that the dove has flown the coup and we’re in the flesh.
The Spirit glorifies the Son. The Son declares and glorifies the Father. The Father honors and glorifies the
Son, especially now through His Church. We are to come to the FATHER…because He is OUR FATHER.
And it is our Father’s “good pleasure to give us His Kingdom!” Luke 12:32

Get this right and you will begin to rejoice with a rejoicing that will have you dancing truly in the Spirit
without the stench of sweat!

Continuing in Romans:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For
God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you
always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God’s will I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I
long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you— that is, that we may be mutual-
ly encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. I want you to know, brothers, that I have often intend-
ed to come to you (but thus far have been prevented), in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well
as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians,both to the wise and to
the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

Again, note the clear distinction between “my God” and “Jesus Christ”. Jesus Christ is the MEDIATOR
between man and the purely spiritual Being, God the Father/Almighty, God/the Creator of the Cosmos
and all the dimensions beyond. We are not able to comprehend God in His essential being: He is
BIG…we are puny. He is Spirit, we are flesh. He is immaterial, we are material. We are a little like Him,
because in a very reduced way we reflect His image, but He is not like us. You want to believe in aliens?
He is an Alien. According to many biblical texts, if mundane and physical creatures such as ourselves
were to come into the unveiled Presence of the Divine we would be consumed by it more absolutely than
if we were to plunge into a star or pass beyond the event horizon of a black hole. Deconstructed might be
an appropriate word. The experience wouldn’t be pleasant.

When the second Person of the Trinity “emptied himself” (Phillippians 2:6-8) and put on skin, Paul says “all
the fullness of the Godhead was contained in him in physical human form”.(Colossians 2:9) Jesus was the
pure heart of God and the sinless life of God wrapped in a protective shield (protective for US, incredi-
bly limiting for Him), and in a form that we could relatively easily relate to without freaking out. And
He, Himself, said, “When you look at Me, you see the Father: I and My Father are exactly the same
in Essence. That is one reason I have come to you: To tell you about My Father, who wants you
also to come home where you are meant to be because you are supposed to be His kids and you are
horribly lost.” (My paraphrase). (cf.John 12:45;John 10:30 ) And to give you some idea of just how
awesomely amazing and mind-blowing the Father is, people have been confused by and arguing
about Jesus now for almost two thousand years…And this simple Jewish craftsman, whose teaching
isn’t particularly difficult to think through in large part, is God in just about the most straightforward
and simple presentation possible….I mean, little kids get Jesus and crawl all over Him; it’s adults who
have problems with Him.

God delimited and in His full Glory cannot be imagined or described. …only worshipped.
30
I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony be-
fore Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until
the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only
Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light,
whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. 1 Timothy 6:13-16

Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— not that anyone has seen the Father except
he who is from God; he has seen the Father. John 6:45-46

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No
one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. John 3:12-13

No one has ever seen God; the only God,who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. John 1:18

In Romans:

When Paul speaks here of “all the world” he is referring to the Roman world…the Empire, which
dominated the nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea…elsewhere he uses the same phrase in a
larger sense, when he speaks of the work of the outpoured Holy Spirit upon the entire world of men,
that outpouring begun in Jerusalem on Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection (recorded in Acts 2).

Prayer:

As Christians, filled with and moved by the Holy Spirit, our greatest strength is in prayer…our most
powerful trans-dimensional weapon of warfare in the spiritual war that rages on this planet between
the forces of God and the forces of evil. Prayer is not simply bringing selfish shopping lists or thank-
you notes to the throne of God: It is the exercise of spiritual Authority through obedience by faith, to
change the tides of spiritual affairs across dimensions, and to affect the movement of events and his-
tory in the realm over which we have been given stewardship. We, in Christ, have now regained Au-
thority to drive back the pretender, Lucifer, from the realm he has presumed to rule. God does not,
except perhaps very rarely, move in the lives of individuals in any way that interferes with their
freedom of will, unless He is requested to do so…is given permission by the individual, or by groups
of like-minded individuals in agreement. He most often waits for us to ask for His intervention, and if
we do not ask, He does not intervene. He demands that we take initiatives toward Him through the
Faith He builds in us, and the wisdom and discernment He teaches us to exercise. Therefore, it is of
great importance that we, as Paul encourages, “pray without ceasing.”

(Sidebar: Prayer is a way of life, an attitude of heart and mind, not an appointment on our PDA or a
punch list to be checked off as a daily exercise. It is an ongoing conversation that is part of an
intimate relationship. The Lord has promised to “never leave or forsake us” (Hebrews 13:5-6) and is a
constant companion, so why should we have to make appointments to meet with Him? To think
about this in another way: myriad believers seem to imagine Heaven as being somewhere out
beyond the Crab Nebula in the deep reaches of intergalactic space. The New Testament teaches
that the Kingdom of Heaven is WITHIN the believer: Again, something that transcends our four-
dimensional limitations but brings the realm of our Father unimaginably close to each of us.)

Going back to the need for fellowship, as contrasted to living as a “lone wolf”: God seems to require,
except in special circumstances, that we “impart” things to one another by praying for one another
and by physically laying hands on one another…It’s not that He couldn’t do this another way: He has
and does. I have received many impartations when alone.

31
 But He wants us to be an organic body (The True Church is a living organism, not an organization
or society.), with no one of us thinking that we are complete without the others…This is because the
Body of Christ and the work of the Kingdom is far too huge for any one person to handle, and be-
cause of our predisposition to become ego-maniacs and succumb to HUBRIS, which is the precise
sin that took out Lucifer (a.k.a. Satan…which means, by the way, adversary) and precipitated this
whole cosmic war in the first place. Paul writes elsewhere that we are, “members in particular of One
Body, each with special purposes and gifts, all called to work together to grow the whole Body up into One
New Spiritual Man whose head is Christ.” (1Cor. 12:12ff; Eph.2; Col.2:19)

That’s intense, but the Kingdom is intense. I apologize if they didn’t teach you this in Sunday school. I
need you and you need me, just like my hypothalamus needs my eyeball or my big toe needs my kid-
ney and my kidney needs my tailbone. And we all need a Brain (which is Christ through the Holy Spir-
it).

In Paul’s world you had Jews, Greeks, and Barbarians. Jews were those who believed in the God of
the Bible and who were either directly descended from Jacob or had converted into Israel and were
circumcised. Educated “Greeks” included some Romans, who were the ruling Latins but who spoke
Greek, which was the Lingua Franca of the Empire, and the Hellenized Roman Empire (basically the
Greek world that had been conquered by Rome), and Barbarians were all the other people groups
(such as the Gauls, Celts, Britons, Cypriots, Spaniards, Egyptians, and other more tribal peoples who
were not as “cultured and sophisticated ”(sic) as the Romans and Greeks and Jews. In the Jewish
mind there were only Jews and Gentiles: God’s Chosen People and the “unclean sinners” which
meant “everybody else”).

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the
Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith,as it is written,
“The righteous shall live by faith.”

The Gospel is not an idea or religious dogma…it is POWER…Divine power for eternal salvation of the
human soul for everyone who believes. Belief is not a mental assent to an idea, it is a spiritual action,
a reconnection to a super-Reality, a decision followed by a commitment to a changed life empowered
by a Living God. There is an old and hackneyed story that, nevertheless, rather clearly makes the
point.

A crowd was gathered at the edge of Niagara Falls to watch a world-renowned daredevil ride a bicycle
across the high wire that he had stretched over the foaming cataract of the Canadian Horseshoe. As
he worked up the anticipation and excitement of the audience he walked confidently up and down in
front of them and spotted a particularly enthusiastic young man.

“You seem really excited about this show, young fellow,” he said.
“ Oh, yes!,” gushed the young man,” I’ve followed your career since I was a small child and I’ve
seen every TV special you’ve ever been on, and I even am practicing gymnastics and free-
running, and want to become a wirewalker myself. But when I heard that you were going to walk
the Falls, I just had to make the trip to watch in person! I drove all the way from St. Paul.”
“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. I can use it: There’s quite a cross wind today.”
“Hey, you’re the best. I know you can do it!”
“So, you’re absolutely sure that I can ride this bike all the way across that wire?”
“Absolutely! It’s no harder than the Twin Towers were, and you did that practically in your sleep.”
“Good, then you’re just the person I’m looking for to sit on the handlebars.”

True Belief is sitting on the handlebars.

32
This is the verse that kicked off the Protestant Reformation. Here is the bunker-buster with which
Martin Luther was able to breach the massive monolith of Roman Catholic dogma, and expose the
thousand year lie of the dark ages that a human being can work (or buy, or bribe) his or her way into
the favor of God…(A lie that has been the hook in religion since Nimrod built Niniveh.) Once you
grasp this profound Truth you are truly free. Until you lay hold of this Truth, and this Truth lays hold
of you, you are going to be carrying around the weight of your ever increasing lifetime of guilt, shame,
failure, inferiority, insecurity, inadequacy, and all the crap that accretes like hope-sucking barnacles to
it. Ultimately, when you can’t run anymore, you will die in agony of soul under that impossible burden.

The goodness we all know we are supposed to have, at least at the beginning of our lives before we
harden up, comes from God alone, AND the faith to live that God-quality of life itself comes from God
as well: All we are asked to do is to stop struggling against Him and to simply believe…

Believing faith is simpler than Power Faith. One of the contemporary confusions that plagues the
church is that we have to come up with Power Faith. We don’t! We have to come up with Believing
Faith…The Power comes from Christ!

Jesus talks about “mustard seed sized faith” from our end:

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from
here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20)

That’s all we need. “Mustard seed faith” is real faith, but it doesn’t have to be big, just vital. Vital just
means it has to be alive. If it is alive, God will make it grow. We do have to get on the handlebars and
not freak out so the bike flips off the wire. But the Lord is driving and balancing the bike: The bike
WILL NOT flip off the wire! (However, we, in our agitations of trying too hard, could possibly fall off
the handlebars.) We will get into this farther down, but I will mention it here also. In his letter to the
Galatian churches ( chapter 2:20) Paul writes,

I HAVE BEEN CRUCIFIED WITH CHRIST. IT IS NO LONGER I WHO LIVE, BUT CHRIST WHO LIVES IN ME. AND THE
LIFE I NOW LIVE IN THE FLESH I LIVE BY THE FAITH OF THE SON OF GOD, who loved me and gave himself for
me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

The key to the whole of the Gospel, the whole of the Christian Truth is this…Christ Himself lives in
the Christian!!! (We are VESSELS….CONTAINERS. 2 Corinthians 4:7) And through this symbiotic rela-
tionship we live by His strength and power…His life, His righteousness, His faith, His ability to deal
with spiritual enemies, even His physical strengthening while we are in this mortal body…He said that
the SAME Holy Spirit which empowered Him while He lived as a man among us would be IN us, and
that in Him and through obedience we would do GREATER THINGS even than He did.

He is the hand: We are the glove. He is the Root: We are the branches. I am not going to pursue
these incredible promises here and now, but these are things that Jesus said, and He wasn’t speak-
ing empty words or literary metaphors. Most of us just haven’t been lining up with His program well
enough to permit Him to let us “have the keys to the car” yet. This kind of power is not to be trifled
with. It is not kid stuff. In childish hands it is dangerous and destructive. We in this country have been
too selfish! We have to grow up now, because the world of men is very nearly at its end. The King-
dom of God is at hand.

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of
the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of
righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discern-
ment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:12-14

33
Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of
repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings,the laying on of hands,
the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits. Hebrews 6: 1-2

This is not religion…THIS is Christianity! And it is about to shake everything that can be shaken in
Heaven and on earth, so it is time for each of us to make a firm commitment and prepare to do battle,
(or admit we haven’t got what it takes, get our discharge papers, and stop slowing the rest of the
team down). By the way, I’ve skipped to the end of the book: The Christians are going to win.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their
unrighteousness suppress the truth.

This is not so much a vindictive anger, which is certainly what most of us probably subconsciously
think and cringe from because of suppressed memories of some moment when a parental figure lost
control, as it is the reality that IS where God IS NOT. Where God is, there is Divine Order. Every-
where else there is dis-order…non-order…chaos…This state of being outside of God’s order is to be
“abiding under the wrath of God”. It has pertained for man on earth since Adam’s rebellion.

He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way.
He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives
his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God has sent
utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all
things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see
life, but the wrath of God remains on him. (John 3)

All non-Christians exist in this state, under “wrath”, but God is still dealing with them in His mercy
while they are in skin, and therefore they are in a measure shielded. “Hell” is the eternalization of this
state, where ultimately God does as they have demanded of Him, and leaves their lives forever. This
is “the coming wrath”. (Matthew 3:7;1 Thessalonians 1:10) The Bible refers to this ultimate separated condition
as “outer darkness” (Matthew 8:12; Matthew 22:13; Matthew 25:30) and as “torment” (Luke 16:19ff; Rev.14:10-11; 20:10) .
Furthermore, there is a place called “the Abyss” that is also referred to as “Hell” and by other
frightening descriptions, such as “the Lake of Fire”, which has been specifically “prepared for the devil
and his angels” (Matthew 25:41) as a permanent “super-max”, when God shuts down His present
operation for good. Those who have chosen to serve Lucifer will join him there. How these “levels”
of eternal separation interact is a topic for another discussion.

God is not vindictive, as we in our twisted and sin-distorted delusions think of vengeance. We tend to
be mean-spirited. God is not. The Standard of His Law is derived from His own essential character,
which is Compassionate Unconditional Unbiased Love. His justice is pure, as is His mercy, and He
shows no favoritism or prejudice. He is not emotionally capricious, as we are. God is absolutely perfect
and absolutely holy. Every person is on exactly the same level ground before the Bar of His court.

The Standard is Jesus Christ and His Word. This Standard has now been in the world for two thou-
sand years. It was physically demonstrated for 33 years, and shown to be attainable under the terms
of the New Covenant. It is now permanently recorded in book form. It can be kept shut or be opened
as we choose. It can be burned or shredded. It does not argue back if you disagree with it. It can be
ignored. It can be lied about and slandered. It can be thoughtfully considered and respected.

34
And Jesus cried out and said, “Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoev-
er sees me sees him who sent me. I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not
remain in darkness. If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come
to judge the world but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge;
the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the
Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his
commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me.” (John 12: 44-50)

But it remains as a Witness to the Truth. It is immutable. It will be the Standard against which every
one of us will be judged. The two commands are: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with ALL your
heart, with ALL your mind, with ALL your soul, and with ALL your strength, and you shall love your
neighbor in the same way as you love yourself.” (Luke 10:27) Jesus did this. No sinful human being can do
this to His expectation on their own and without His help.

That is the Law, if you haven’t accepted Jesus. You are being held to this standard, and are
expected to meet it. It is simple and straightforward. It applies to all mankind equally. It is not a
particularly religious dogma. It is as appropriate for a simple peasant or idigenous tribesman as it is
for a Rhodes scholar or the Pope or an international powerbroker.

It is an impossible standard. We all will fail. That is the point. This is Paul’s first argument. The Law
was given to show us that we cannot live up to God’s expectations on our own...that we were not
created to be independent.

If you have accepted Jesus, He says, “Love Me, and do as I do. You’re Family. We’re cool.”

As a Christian you live symbiotically, 24/7/365 asking yourself the question, ‘What Would Jesus
Do?”….and then doing your best IN HIM to do it, always talking life over with Him and drawing upon
the infinite resources that He is more than willing to provide. That is all He asks of His people. That,
and our Worship of Father God. “ Those who live by the Spirit of God are the Sons of God.” Romans 8:14

Nothing that is imperfect or sinful can (or for that matter would want to) exist in His Presence. So,
when all choices have been made, and you or I “cross over”, God measures those choices against
the Standard of Perfection. We each stand together with Jesus in front of Daddy. One flaw, however
small, is still an imperfection, a defect. That which is imperfect cannot enter into the Realm of God
without being annihilated, and, since souls are eternal things and annihilation is not an option for
them, therefore the unregenerated soul must be turned away, and condemned to eternal separation
from Him, which is Hell.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”…..“Truly, truly, I say
to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. John 3

(Hell, by the way, is not going to be a big party with all of your friends…it is going to be your worst
nightmare on steroids, Groundhog’s Day style. Everybody is self-centered now, even with the moder-
ating influence of the Holy Spirit in the world, and you know how offensive that can be…Out there in
the O-Zone it will be absolute and un-restrained selfishness…Imagine: Everybody being the most
obnoxious and egocentric person you have ever known without limits, forever.)

Or He sees a vessel filled and overflowing with the Life and Righteousness of the only Man who has
ever lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, and lived to talk about it. The Christian (which means
“little Christ”) has “put on Christ” and is no longer being judged by the old rules of the Law. That is
what the Gospel is all about. That is why it is such “Good News”!

35
is revealed

This means that it is not hidden or secret, but open to view…obvious…to anybody….to each and
every one of us…to me…to you. Maybe it would be a good idea to take a lesson from someone
else’s misfortune before it becomes your own?

against ALL ungodliness and unrighteousness

Does your conscience bother you anymore? Or have you become so desensitized to the stench of
the filth around you that you can’t be sure what is right or wrong? Are you afraid to speak out
because you might not be “PC”? Are you “tolerant” of everything? Do you have the courage of any
convictions? Do you tiptoe around on eggs so that you don’t “offend” somebody? Do bizarre and
weird and obviously un-normal people at least give you some concern, make you feel uncomfortable,
or do you find them intriguing and fascinating? What kind of TV do you enjoy? What kind of
comedy? Where do you go on the Internet? What do YOU think about in secret? How jaded have
you become? Are you willing to die for something you believe in? Do you really believe in anything?

Because every year (good grief! Every DAY!!) the line of depravity is getting moved a little farther, the
erosion of decency is occurring faster and faster, but we all are so accustomed to it that we tend not
to notice the encroachments, except in passing. Are you a little frog...being boiled alive in the world’s
stewpot? Do you still have the wherewithall to jump out of the pot? Or has the hot-tub already
become too comfortable?

of men who

There are no punctuation marks in the original language of Greek…no pause for breath in this phrase.
And that makes a huge difference in this segment of Paul’s thought and how it must be understood
and applied. I know that I, for most of the past 35 years, have heard this verse read in such a way as
to implicate the entire human race, because of the comma that has been placed in several popular
English translations beginning with the King James Version. (“of men, who....”)

Endlessly preached from the pulpit with that little pregnant pause after “men”, and then rhetorically
linked with Paul’s subsequent statements a few pages later that “all have sinned and fall short of God’s
glory” ( Romans 3:23), and other similar statements in Romans and elsewhere, it is no wonder that the
majority of pew-warming Christians, who do not study much for themselves but tend to be rote
repeaters of the ideas of others, accept that the incredible indictment Paul levels in verses 18-32
applies to everybody who hasn’t accepted Jesus as Gospel Truth, when in fact this conclusion is the
result of sloppy exegesis and of the art of sermoncraft and oratory. But face it, if I approached many
of you assuming that you fit the profile of Romans 1:18-32, wouldn’t you feel a bit turned off because
down in your heart you honestly know that, while you aren’t perfect, you certainly aren’t in the same
class as the scum of the earth that Paul is referring to here?

NO! In these verses, Romans 1:18-32 Paul is specifically talking about what the Bible defines
as REPROBATES! *

*( a: foreordained to damnation b: morally corrupt: DEPRAVED~by corruption or evil; especially: perverted )

,whereas, once he deals with these specific individuals, “men (and women) who by their unrighteousness
suppress the Truth (deliberately and willfully)”, he goes on to deal at great depth with the more subtle
and complicated issue of sin and death as it applies to the human race as a whole.

36
 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them
.
There is a clear, self-evident revelation of the Creator in His Creation…His Signature is upon His mas-
terpiece. The same evidence that the atheist scientist interprets as evidence of random evolutionary
chance, the believing scientist clearly understands as an obvious miracle of Intelligent Design…And
the committed evolutionist has to distort the facts severely, and speculate and invent extravagantly, to
argue his case. Occam’s Razor cuts most cleanly on the side of the Theist, every time! It is no less
reasonable to believe in a Creator than it is not to believe.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since
the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

I once heard of the testimony of a missionary about an encounter he had with a indigenous tribesman
deep in a rainforest, in Africa I think, but it might have been Papua New Guinea. As he recounted the
story, the tribesman was from a typically animist belief system and had never even encountered a
white man. During some ritual ceremony, he began to have deep spiritual thoughts which weighed
heavily upon him and would not let him rest and he spent much time wrestling with them as conflict
and contradiction grew within his soul. The carved masks and rough idols of the forest “gods” of his
shaman grew less and less compelling to him, more and more hollow and repulsive. Finally he ran
out into the jungle alone. He was in great torment within and cried out to the sky, “Who ARE you? I
know You are “a Who”, because I am “a who”. And I know you are GOOD, because you have given
me good food, and a good home, and everything good that I need to live! WHO are you!?” Some
time later the missionary came to that man’s village and said that he had a book with the words of the
Living God written in it to share with them. And suddenly he was almost tackled by that man, who ran
to him shouting, “TELL ME HIS NAME!”

I have listened to similar accounts of entire villages becoming Christian and living fully Christian lives
without ever encountering missionaries or receiving a Bible or tract or knowing the name “Jesus
Christ”, but only because one or more persons met the Lord in a visionary encounter and were “born
again”, and then led their family and friends to their Savior. They were living entirely by revelation
until missionaries finally arrived with the Scriptures to explain “the Way” more fully. The world, of
course, denies such accounts. I have no reason to: The records stand to be openly reviewed.

I, myself, though in my case having been raised in a Christian environment and exposed to the
Gospel many times, nevertheless was ultimately converted by a direct visionary encounter with the
Lord that lasted over an hour and a half, which was as vivid and substantial as the room I am in right
now, if not more-so, and during which I heard His voice audibly and conversed at length with Him.
When I accepted His offer, I was instantly freed from drug addictions, healed of both hepatitis B and
hepatitis C, and had my profligate life completely invaded and transformed…a process, which has
continued unchecked for 38 years…This transformation can only be described as metamorphosis,
which is the biblical term. Again, such experience can only be acknowledged, denied, or in some
manner explained away: Your choice. Nevertheless, I have been there: Any problem you may have
with my testimony lies entirely with you.

There are two ancient verses in Genesis that refer to God as “the God who reveals Himself” (Gen. 16:13;
35:1) …Except that He does so, we would never have a clue that He IS or who He is, because He is
transcendent and He exceeds us in every way, and we are without the capacity to access, define,
measure, or more than barely comprehend the simplest equation that expresses His Realm. (Read
the old book “Flatland” by Edwin Abbott Abbott, the second part,

http://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Romance-Dimensions-Thrift-Editions/dp/048627263X )

37
There are two “books” given us by our Creator: One is the Bible, which is the complete Owner’s
Manual, with all the details for properly operating the human being. The other is the Book of the
Creation. As King David wrote in one of his many songs:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19)

The Book of Creation is sufficient to inform anyone of the Fact and Majesty of God, and to incite them
to humility and to seek to understand their right relationship to Him. It is sufficient to kindle worship.
When they respond to this large, open message He will be instant to answer their slightest inquiry of
Him, and to draw them gently and steadily into a more intimate communication with Himself until they
are inwardly ready to deal with their core issues and do business with Christ. There is no point in talking
of the Son of God to anyone who has refused to acknowledge God in this larger and more general
sense. Those who reject God, because they choose to worship Nature or man, will die in their sin, with
the invitation unopened in their hand. (John 14:15-24)

So they are without excuse.

So many people think that when they stand before St. Peter, or God, or whatever vague half-thought
they might have about the gates of Heaven they will be able to talk or charm their way in: It ain’t
gonna happen. When we come before the Throne of our Creator, the blindingly pure light in which
we stand will reveal to us fully our sin-stained condition, the impossibility of such corruption existing in
the same realm as the Perfection of God, the abject hollowness of our excuses, the numberless
missed opportunities we had in a lifetime to put an end to our estrangement from our Father….Or it
will reveal that we are completely clothed in the Perfection of Jesus Christ because we chose to sur-
render our autonomy to Him.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him,

There are no excuses. God has left His fingerprints on everything He has touched. And he has also
put into each human soul an annoying little thing called “conscience”, a God-meter….We all have a
sense of what “ought” to be…what is “fair”…what is “right”….That means we all know the difference
between right and wrong: And though this does vary according to culture and upbringing, the similari-
ties across cultures are far greater than the differences. (cf. Mere Christianity and The Abolition of
Man by C.S. Lewis)

And that means that there must be a Standard against which what is right and what is wrong are
judged. Kids are generally pretty open and clear with this stuff: It just has to be pointed out to them.
They intrinsically know about fairness and justice anyway. (Just try to give one kid two pieces of
candy and his friend three.)

As we grow we make choices that either refine these sensibilities, or form calluses or even scar
tissues over them until they are so desensitized as to become cauterized and dead. The Bible calls
this “the hardening of the heart” or the “searing of the conscience.” Ultimately such a heart condition
becomes terminal.

38
but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Like willful children who begin early to push back against their parents, and then grow up into teenag-
ers who defiantly stare them down or simply turn up the volume on the IPOD and ignore them, those
who chose to oppose the quiet voice of God (He rarely speaks loudly), step onto a slippery slope that
begins as a pleasant stroll but ends in a plunge off a cliff. What starts as calculated disinterest, be-
comes defiance, and ends as self-destructive out-of-control behavior.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools,

I didn’t say this…God did. Every one of those bloviating, loud, arrogant, pontificating, “expert”, “Elite”,
“Celebrity”, “World-shaking”, “Insider”, smirking, smarmy, “Ivy-league”, “Mover-and-Shaker”
hubristic little demigods out there today who think they can save the world and don’t need God….and
who are the first to make sure that you know how highly they regard themselves (and this also in-
cludes all the demigod wannabe’s who spend their lives complaining about the demigods) are

FOOLS!!!!
(When God Almighty calls you a fool, you ought to think about it….really.)

and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and
creeping things.

In modern Western culture our idols are “more sophisticated”: We worship technology, we have
shows like “American Idol”, we bow down to celebrity and icons of business and power, we worship
ourselves (our temples are our fitness centers and our discretionary plastic surgeries). We certainly
worship Money and the toys it buys. (The Bible calls this “Mamon”.) And we definitely worship Sex
and Fertility Gods and sacrifice our children to them by the millions (in the full exercise of the “rights”
of our rebellious “freedom over my own body”). But we also worship the environment, and GAIA, and
“The Universe”, (and I haven’t even checked to see what’s on today’s menu in California, the Land of
the Fruits and the Nuts). We have an all-pervasive global religion called Materialistic Scientism with
its Chief Prophet, Charles Darwin and its high priests such as Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, and
Steven Gould, and Carl Sagan, and the Goracle (who is much more a court jester, except he isn’t
funny…just a bad joke).

Oh yes, we are very much IDOLATERS!!!! Obscenely mocking a Creator whose first command is
“You shall have NO other gods before Me!” Ooops.

Did you know that the Bible says, pointedly, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God?”
(Hebrews 10:31)

Therefore God gave them up

There is a theological concept called “prevenient Grace”: This is the idea that God, knowing that
because of our estrangement from Him, and the catastrophic spiritual and psychological injuries we
have suffered because of sin, insulates us as much as He can from sin’s consequences without
interfering with our autonomy, while He seeks to persuade us to return to our rightful relationship with
Him so that we can be healed and restored. In His grace, He holds back the worst effects of sin and
the most aggressive of the devil’s attacks to give us room to think cf John 6:45. But there comes a point
where He knows that a person has made a final choice, and when that point in time comes, He “gives
them up”…He will never hear their cries again, because they will never cry again to Him. They be-
come “reprobate”.

39
in the lusts of their hearts

“The devil made me do it!” NOT! The devil does not “make us do” horrible things, at least at first. We
choose to do horrible things. Evil is in all of us because of sin. The devil may help us along if we ask
him to, and certainly does once we’ve yielded him influence, and he certainly works hard to inspire us
to new lows; but we can’t blame him for our actions. We could always choose NOT to yield to tempta-
tion, but we very rarely do so: We like the pleasures too much. If we only were to call upon God at our
moments of need, He would intervene, even before we come to know Christ: He’s that interested in
our well-being. Many non-believers have experienced answered prayers of desperation, though most
quickly forget. 99% of the time, it’s not that the devil makes us do bad things: We simply enjoy acting
like the devil.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future
and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and
find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the LORD, Jeremiah 29:11-14 cf.
John 14: 21-24

Paul continues:

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among
themselves,

There are all sorts of ways to sin, but sexual sins and perversions are right at the top of the list because
they are the most fundamental, the most debasing, the most animal and degrading, physically and psy-
chologically and emotionally ravaging sins. This is why they are so addictive and so destructive to indi-
viduals and to society as a whole, and this is why the enemies of God are so actively trying to force
more and more filth down our throats and our children’s throats at every turn.

God created humans as sexual creatures, and human sexuality as the nearest expression on earth to
the Divine Harmony, the Divine Unity, in Heaven. That was before the race fell. But that which can
express the greatest Good and Beauty can also be distorted and corrupted to do the greatest harm.
Human beings are designed by God to form single lifetime monogamous continually deepening and
enriching relationships between a man and a woman, initiated while relatively young and ended only
by death. Sexuality within that bond is to be full and free and private. (cf. The Song of Solomon) It is
designed to create a progressively maturing psycho-spiritual union and deepening communion, to
fuel the creativity of Passion and the passion of creativity, to give ecstatic mutual others-centered
pleasure, AND to produce children, because human beings are reflections of their Creator, creators
themselves, and Relational. The marriage covenant and family bond are in a very profound and
deeply spiritual way meant to be a reflection of the Godhead itself, and a training ground for far
deeper and more wonderful things yet to come.

BUT

because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Cre-
ator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Once God removes His protections from the reprobate heart, there is no hope. Such an unprotected
soul is going to quickly self-destruct. This is God’s mercy. It puts the condemned soul out of its
physical misery, and it protects many others from further harm: It is like shooting a rabid dog. It may
also serve to reduce the eternal consequences that such a soul will have to endure, because the Bi-
ble seems to indicate that the intensity of Hell for each individual is in some measure a function of the
accumulation of the evil of their lives. It is best that such lives are shortened. (cf Luke 12:46-48 and similar
glimpses).

40
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for
those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were con-
sumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the
due penalty for their error.

DON’T DODGE!

Paul is talking about Lesbians and Gays and related sexual perversions. Homosexuality is one (just
one) of the horrible consequences of the fall…It is a distortion, a brokenness, a confusion, a corrup-
tion of what God meant His creative masterpiece to be. So is egoism, so is feeling inferior, so is OCD,
so is depression, so is gluttony, so is anorexia and bulimia, so is drug addiction and alcohol abuse, so
is over indulging in chocolate, so is gossiping and obsessing on tabloids and reality TV and little
league, so is every major or minor psychological disorder or syndrome that we think we’ve identified
and spend billions of dollars annually trying to analyze and “cure”. The word “evil” means (in part)
“bent, twisted, broken, confused”. Sin is sin.

But homosexuality isn’t “simple” like a lot of sins, and it isn’t harmless. It is a very destructive lifestyle
on every level; personal, social, and societal. It wastes the body, rips the human psyche to shreds,
and warps the soul; it tears the family structure to pieces, destroys children, and it erodes the very
matrix of human civilization. It is an open door for demonic torment. It is uniquely fundamental: A sin
at the level of who we are, not just of what we do. In God’s eyes it is an abomination…psychological
and spiritual chaos. It is confusion: The Bible says that “God is not the Author of confusion.” 1
Corinthians 14:33

God made two sexes, not three. “Male and Female He created them”. Even an atheistic Darwinist has to
concede that a third sterile sex that lives only for physical and emotional self-gratification is an
evolutionary dead end: It has no useful purpose. According to the foundational Darwinian theory, it is
unfit to survive. Such an anomaly is an unnecessary drain on resources and is a threat to the
species because of this. It will go extinct according to the principles of natural selection, and should
not be artificially sustained or encouraged. Any justification for its continuation will be strained and
artificial. According to Charlie and his Chimps this is a matter of species survival, or am I misreading
“Origin”?

Only a man and a woman together can produce a child. Artificial insemination and surrogate parenting is
an unnatural intervention and is somewhat Orwellian. Pragmatically and biologically speaking
homosexuality is pointless and serves no function in the perpetuation of the race. Biblically speaking it is
a perversion of the original intention of the Creator for the human species, which is to “multiply and fill the
earth”. It requires a deliberate obnubilation of the biblical text to preach it in any way that supports same
sex unions or that blames God for creating a person deliberately to be gender confused. The “love” that
supporters of the gay agenda espouse, is erotic and filial love, not the strong, pure, biblical Love of God.

DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME!!! God judges all heterosexual promiscuity, all premarital sex, all
casual sexual relationships, all adultery, and perverted heterosexual deviance just as strictly as He
judges homosexual behavior. All human sexuality outside of the covenant bond of marriage is a
gross violation of Divine purpose and design and is spiritually and physically devastating sin: There
are no exceptions. The ultimate judgment for all unrepentant sexual perversions is equally strict,
because all sexual perversions are so degrading to the dignity of the human creature and so
antithetical to the Purpose of our Creator. All are gross violations of our fundamental design.

But here God, through Paul, makes it clear that the in-your-face out of control promiscuous gay and
lesbian lifestyle is destined for hellfire.

41
(There also seems to be a reference to STD’s…The Greek and Roman societies were very sick and
morally polluted and disease-ridden: The upper classes spent their lives in orgiastic pleasure-
partying and pedophilia and homosexual and bisexual group sex at the bathhouses and in their
palatial villas….they were decadent pigs riddled with syphilis and gonorrhea and probably HIV or
something similar. There is good historical evidence that this corruption and decadence was very
instrumental in the fall of the Empire. Sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it? “Those who will not learn
from history will be condemned to repeat it.”)

This does not mean that God does not love those who are trapped in homosexual confusion, because
multiplied tens of millions are, and this confusion is getting worse as moral restraint is cast off and
more and more young people are given societal permission to express their identity confusion: Our
Father loves the sexually dysfunctional man or woman or teenager absolutely, and Jesus poured out
His life to save us all! I was a really rotten-to-the-core person thirty-eight years ago when He saved
my butt. I fully know the forgiveness of God, because if anyone needed to be forgiven, it was me.

God is opposed to SIN, not sinners. Judgment falls upon sinners only when they refuse to admit and
renounce their addiction to sin after they begin to understand it, when they refuse to separate
themselves from sin as a way of life, and to declare their commitment to Christ. And the judgment is
against all sin, not just sexual sin. Homosexuals are simply sinners in need of redemption, like every
other non-Christian on the planet. But homosexual sin is catastrophically debilitating and viciously
destructive, and many LGBT activists are militantly inflicting it upon “innocents” (again, I use this word
with reservations), by the manipulation of the fragile psychologies of malleable young people, which
is really nothing less than rape.

There are two answers for the homosexual who has not sold his or her soul to the devil and to the
addictive animal “pleasures” of perversion. The first is temporary and is celibacy (and don’t say it
can’t be done…just get your head out of the gutter). Plenty of people live celibate lives. You can
channel sexual energy in other directions by mental and emotional disciplines and with support and
counsel. The biblical term is “chastity” and all Christian singles are expected to live chaste lives.

The second (and the only permanent resolution) is surrender to the Lord: He will restore you to
normalcy, body and mind. ..To the way human beings are supposed to be. All Christians can be
completely healed: spirit, mind, and body as they draw near to the Great Physician. We are
empowered to become as healthy and stable as was Jesus when He walked among us. There are
millions of testimonies to this reality. And once you’ve begun to heal up you can think about getting
married and finding out what a real healthy relationship is supposed to be about. You will be free…IF
you want to be free. Otherwise you are going to die in lonely misery, possibly very painfully ill with
wasting diseases eating your body from within. You may be “gay”, but you know you aren’t happy.
Deep down inside, behind the masks, you are miserable. You are reading this: Make your choice.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not
to be done.

You know what OUGHT to be done…In your heart of hearts, unless you are reprobate….You know.
We all do. Make the right decision NOW! And become free.

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness

Just to be fair and not seem like I’m picking on the LGBT Rainbow community only, let’s run down
Paul’s list of reprobate behaviors: After noting homosexual extremism he then continues with ALL
MANNER of unrighteousness.

42
Un-righteousness is that which is “NOT righteousness”…That which is not right, according to God’s
Standard of Right…which is Perfection, and which was demonstrated for us by Jesus Christ.
(See above: we are commanded to live our lives to the same standard of righteousness that Jesus
lived His, and as I said, not only did He do it entirely as a mortal human being to prove that it can be
done, but He said he will give us all of the same resources and tools He Himself had to do it with: We
do not have excuses!) We have already begun to make a distinction between the sinfulness we all
are guilty of and the in-your-face deliberate God-mocking attitudes of those Paul is identifying in
these verses. We all sometimes behave in some measure in ways that resemble these indictments,
but we usually quickly feel guilty about our behavior and apologize for it (because our conscience
bothers us…That’s our “God sensor” signaling to us). These truly debased offenders that Paul is
spotlighting in these first verses do not. (We will get deeper into this in detail in a bit. There is a great
deal of Hope.) In another letter Paul makes it clear that he is not singling out homosexuals, but is
equally including all sexual activity outside of marriage, as well as other undisciplined and out-of-
control self-indulgences:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the
sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the
greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Now the works of the flesh
are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, ri-
valries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you be-
fore, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 6:9,10;Galatians 5:19-21

Continuing with Romans:

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not
to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of
envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boast-
ful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s de-
cree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who
practice them.

This is Paul’s list of “the works of the flesh” as he sets it out in Romans: Please, check yourselves and
your friends-and-family circle against this list: (These definitions are all from Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary or Thesaurus, a few have my additional notes.)

EVIL, = against good, morally reprehensible, (bent, twisted, warped)

COVETOUSNESS = marked by inordinate desire for wealth or possessions or for another’s

possessions - having a craving for possession ~covetous of power.

syn COVETOUS, GREEDY, ACQUISITIVE, GRASPING, AVARICIOUS mean having or showing a strong
desire for esp. material possessions.

COVETOUS implies inordinate desire often for another’s possessions ~covetous of his
brother’s country estate.
GREEDY stresses lack of restraint and often of discrimination in desire ~greedy for
status symbols.
ACQUISITIVE implies both eagerness to possess and ability to acquire and keep
GRASPING adds to COVETOUS and GREEDY an implication of selfishness and often
suggests unfair or ruthless means
AVARICIOUS implies obsessive acquisitiveness esp. of money and strongly suggests .
stinginess ~an avaricious miser.

43
MALICE = : desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another: intent to commit an unlawful act or
cause harm without legal justification or excuse

syn : MALICE, MALEVOLENCE, ILL WILL, SPITE, MALIGNITY, SPLEEN, GRUDGE mean the desire to see
another experience pain, injury, or distress.

MALICE implies a deep-seated often unexplainable desire to see another suffer ~felt
no malice toward their former enemies.

MALEVOLENCE suggests a bitter persistent hatred that is likely to be expressed in malicious

conduct ~a look of dark malevolence.

ILL WILL implies a feeling of antipathy of limited duration ~ill will provoked by a
careless remark.

SPITE implies petty feelings of envy and resentment that are often expressed
in small harassments ~petty insults inspired by spite.

MALIGNITY implies deep passion and relentlessness ~a life consumed by

motiveless malignity.

SPLEEN suggests the wrathful release of latent spite or persistent malice

~venting his spleen against politicians.

GRUDGE implies a harbored feeling of resentment or ill will that seeks

satisfaction ~never one to harbor a grudge.

THEY ARE FULL OF ENVY, = painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another
joined with a desire to possess the same advantage , MALICE , an object of envious
notice or feeling ~his new car made him the envy of his friends, to feel envy toward
or on account of BEGRUDGE

MURDER = We all know what this is, but did you remember that Jesus said that when you think
about a person with hatred in your heart toward him or her, you’ve already committed
murder in the eyes of God? God holds us accountable for our thoughts as much as for our
actions.

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable ato
judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever in-
sults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”
Matthew 5:21-22

You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the
mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil
treasure brings forth evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word
they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Matthew 12:34-37

STRIFE = bitter sometimes violent conflict or dissension ~political strife, an aAct of contention
: FIGHT, STRUGGLE , exertion or contention for superiority

syn see DISCORD

44
 DECEIT = the aAct or practice of deceiving : DECEPTION , an attempt or device to deceive, TRICK ,
the quality of being deceitful : DECEITFULNESS

deceitful: having a tendency or disposition to deceive:

: not honest ~a deceitful child: DECEPTIVE, MISLEADING ~deceitful advertising~
syn see DISHONEST

deceived; deceiving ENSNARE, to be false, to CHEAT, to cause to accept as true or

valid what is false or invalid, to give a false impression ~appearances
can deceive —

syn DECEIVE, MISLEAD, DELUDE, BEGUILE mean to lead astray or frustrate usu. by
underhandedness.

DECEIVE implies imposing a false idea or belief that causes ignorance, bewilderment,
or helplessness ~tried to deceive me about the cost.

MISLEAD implies a leading astray that may or may not be intentional ~I was misled by
the confusing sign.

MALICIOUSNESS: given to, marked by, or arising from malice ~malicious gossip:

malice :a desiring or wishing pain, injury, or distress to another <they sought to ruin
his reputation out of pure malice>

synonyms despite, despitefulness, grudge, ill will, malevolence, maliciousness, malignancy,

malignity, spite, spitefulness, spleen

malicious mischief willful, wanton, or reckless damage to or destruction of

another’s property

malign evil in nature, influence, or effect : INJURIOUS ~the malign effects of illicit
drugs. MALIGNANT, VIRULENT having or showing intense often vicious ill will

MALEVOLENT syn see SINISTER

to utter injuriously misleading or false reports about : speak evil of

syn MALIGN, TRADUCE, ASPERSE, VILIFY, CALUMNIATE, DEFAME, SLANDER mean to injure by
speaking ill of.

MALIGN suggests specific and often subtle misrepresentation but may not always
imply deliberate lying ~the most maligned monarch in British history.

TRADUCE stresses the resulting ignominy and distress to the victim ~so traduced the
governor that he was driven from office.

ASPERSE implies continued attack on a reputation often by indirect or insinuated

detraction ~both candidates aspersed the other’s motives.

45
 implies attempting to destroy a reputation by open and direct abuse ~no
VILIFY
criminal was more vilified in the press.
CALUMNIATE imputes malice to the speaker and falsity to the assertions ~falsely
calumniated as a traitor.

DEFAME stresses the actual loss of or injury to one’s good name ~sued them for
defaming her reputation.

SLANDER stresses the suffering of the victim ~town gossips slandered their good
name.

malignant MALCONTENT, DISAFFECTED evil in nature, influence, or effect : INJURIOUS

passionately and relentlessly malevolent : aggressively malicious
tending to produce death or deterioration 〈malignant malaria esp
: tending to infiltrate, metastasize, and terminate fatally ~a malignant
tumor〉

THEY ARE GOSSIPS, = a person who habitually reveals personal or sensational facts about
others, a busybody…Do you read the tabloids? Watch Jerry Springer?
Overindulge in daytime TV?

SLANDERERS= slander stumbling block, offense — more at SCANDAL *

the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage
another’s reputation a false and defamatory oral statement about a person —
compare LIBEL —
*scandal

synonyms DETRACTION, backbiting, backstabbing, belittlement, calumny, defamation,

depreciation, disparagement, slander, tale

related words aspersion; reproach; discredit, disrepute

scandal verb

synonyms MALIGN, asperse, calumniate, defame, denigrate, libel, scandalize,slander, slur,

smear

HATERS OF GOD

INSOLENT = insultingly contemptuous in speech or conduct : OVERBEARING exhibiting boldness or

effrontery : IMPUDENT syn see PROUD see WISEASS

HAUGHTY = blatantly and disdainfully proud syn see PROUD: HUBRIS

46
BOASTFUL = to puff oneself up in speech : speak vaingloriously to speak of or assert with
excessive pride to possess and often call attention to

syn BOAST, BRAG, VAUNT, CROW mean to express pride in oneself or one’s accomplishments.

BOAST often suggests ostentation and exaggeration ~boasts of every trivial success,
but it may imply a claiming with proper and justifiable pride ~the town boasts
one of the best museums in the area.

BRAG suggests crudity and artlessness in glorifying oneself ~bragging of their

exploits.

VAUNT usu. connotes more pomp and bombast than BOAST and less crudity or
naïveté than BRAG ~vaunted his country’s military might.

CROW usu. implies exultant boasting or bragging ~crowed after winning the
championship.

INVENTORS OF EVIL = Creatively and proactively figuring out new ways to misbehave…pushing
the envelope…becoming increasingly jaded…needing ever increasing
stimulations just to “get off”. Looking for trouble.

DISOBEDIENT TO PARENTS = Do I need to comment?

FOOLISH= lacking in sense, judgment, or discretion ,absurd, ridiculous ,marked by a loss of

composure, HALFASSED

FAITHLESS= not true to allegiance or duty : TREACHEROUS, DISLOYAL ~a faithless servant~ not to
be relied on : UNTRUSTWORTHY ~a faithless tool — unreliable

syn FAITHLESS, FALSE, DISLOYAL, TRAITOROUS, TREACHEROUS, PERFIDIOUS mean untrue to

what should command one’s fidelity or allegiance.

FAITHLESS applies to any failure to keep a promise or pledge or any breach of

allegiance or loyalty ~faithless allies.

FALSE stresses the fact of failing to be true in any manner ranging from
fickleness to cold treachery ~betrayed by false friends.

DISLOYAL implies a lack of complete faithfulness to a friend, cause, leader, or

country ~disloyal to their country.

TRAITOROUS implies either actual treason or a serious betrayal of trust ~traitorous

acts punishable by death.

TREACHEROUS implies readiness to betray trust or confidence ~a treacherous adviser.

PERFIDIOUS adds to FAITHLESS the implication of an incapacity for fidelity or

reliability ~a perfidious double-crosser.

47
 Cowardly, spineless, and bullying probably fall in here.

HEARTLESS= SPIRITLESS, lacking feeling : CRUEL – WITHOUT NORMAL EMOTIONAL RESPONSES

Synonyms UNFEELING , callous, coldhearted, hard-boiled, hardhearted, obdurate,

stonyhearted, uncompassionate, unemotional, unsympathetic

RUTHLESS= having no pity : MERCILESS, CRUEL ~a ruthless tyrant- Without normal emotional
responses toward others

synonyms GRIM , implacable, ironfisted, merciless, mortal, relentless, unappeasable,

unflinching, unrelenting, unyielding

Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but
give approval to those who practice them.

We all sometimes seek to justify our misbehavior by implicating others in it, by making sure that we
can shift responsibility for our actions onto someone else's shoulders, by hiding in crowds. We also
seem to love inordinately the voyeuristic pleasure of watching others commit deviant and perverse
acts…we love our porn and our scandal. Somehow we think that if everybody is doing something
illicit it is less wrong, especially in today’s relativistic post-modern and post-post-modern culture. We
are lemmings, helpless before the tides of peer pressure, diving almost robotically off the cliffs onto
the wave blasted rocks into the cold, dark, seething sea… our endemic human misery loves
company…We cannot stop ourselves.

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to
be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true
that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not
been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ
have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. 1 Corinthians 15:14-
19

If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” vs. 32

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do
not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. Vs. 33-34

Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter
by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Mat-
thew 7:13

When we refuse to submit to the Righteousness of God we seem to release in ourselves a diabolical
cocktail of amoral and immoral poisons that progressively drives us into madness, and all manner of
what can only be called spiritual, psychological, and sometimes even physical terrorism. Those who
hate God, who are driven in their hatred by demonic forces playing them like pawns in a Cosmic
death match, feed with perverse pleasure upon the moral destruction of others. They are true vam-
pires: Parasites upon the souls of men and women and more and more, it seems, now on children.
Satan, in his obsession to destroy all that is good, consumes such people, uses them to abuse and
destroy as many others as he can, and then rips their souls to shreds as he gleefully watches them
die in agony and terror and pass on into eternal torment.

48
 Jesus accused the religious “Leaders” of His day of such a travesty against the Truth:

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For
you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypo-
crites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you
make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” Matthew 23:13-15

If He would so challenge those who professed to be serving God, how much more sternly still will He
indict those who spitefully spit in God’s face and openly blaspheme His Name?

Where do you stand in all of this?

49
 CHAPTER 2

Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you
condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.

In the very act of passing judgment we acknowledge that we understand the difference between right
and wrong: Otherwise we wouldn’t be having a problem. We wouldn’t be elevating ourselves as
being in the right by accusing another of being wrong unless we believed that a standard of right and
wrong exists.

We also acknowledge that we understand that there is a Good God, because unless there is a Good
God, there can be no universal Standard of Goodness or Rightness against which to judge anything:
Our appeal would be pointless …Goodness as a concept is arbitrary and relative, even meaningless,
without a Righteous God. We can’t even meaningfully talk about goodness and badness, right and
wrong, good and evil. In fact, the word “good” is etymologically derived from the word “God”. Good,
at best, becomes a parochial, unstable, fickle matter: merely personal and, possibly, pragmatic
though more probably opportunistic and arbitrary. Therefore, I may not like the idea that you just
killed my wife, for example, but I can’t say that it was wrong for you to do so. It may be inconvenient
for me, since you have deprived me of my companion…And it may really piss me off: But there is no
Standard by which I can ultimately argue that it was a moral or legal injustice for you to do so. I can’t
say that something is wrong or bad or evil unless there is an antipode to judge it against.

(There is no such thing as a good or a bad action among animals, only among human beings. You
cannot “blame” an animal for murder, because they don’t stand as free moral agents before their
Creator. A truly consistent Darwinist cannot argue that there is a fixed standard of right and wrong, of
morality, of justice, because, for the Darwinist, we are all just highly evolved animals, the accidents of
time and chance, and without ultimate meaning or purpose, and no different from or more responsible
than, say, a Nile crocodile or a great white shark or a gerbil. In a kill-or-be-killed world, stuff happens.

Thus, all morality necessarily becomes relativistic and post-modern, a thing of the moment and a
matter of convenience…which is very liberating, until I decide I want to do something to you that you
don’t like. (Like when I kill you for killing my wife in the above example.)

And, additionally, there is no fixed reference point for right and wrong, so whoever is in power at the
moment can pretty much call the shots, which, again, is cool, if I am the guy in power, or if I am
friends with the guy in power, and he happens to agree with me.

I think I prefer the idea of a Sovereign All-wise Good and Benevolent God writing the playbook for all
of us and holding us all to the same rules without playing favorites. It seems fairer.)

If there is a Good God, which my recourse to a Standard of justice that applies to both of us implies,
then I also, either openly or tacitly, acknowledge that it is probably a good idea to understand what
He expects of us, God, by definition, being bigger, smarter, more powerful, ‘way cooler, in every way
superior to us. Men have always curried the favor of “the gods”, however they have perceived them.
Most of us learn early on to suck up to the big kid on the block. (Atheists are a very small minority
among the peoples of the world…like flat-earthers. Unfortunately, some of them are ridiculously and
annoyingly noisy at the moment…They remind me of chihuahuas.) Interestingly, most of the time
humans perceive the gods as rather mean and vindictive and capricious …more or less reflections of
themselves. This makes for great myths and fairy tales, but thankfully, only so. Such is the pattern of
idolatry. I am glad the Bible paints a much more subtle and noble portrait of the real God. This is
why He says don’t make up images of Him. We always screw it up. Going on then....

50
And I have just hauled you in front of His Standard for killing my wife, and expected that Standard to
apply to you, and I have expected it to serve up some sort of “justice” on my behalf. So, apparently I
do believe in God, at least as a matter of convenience in this particular case. And thus, I am
acknowledging that, if I haven’t dedicated my life to pursuing that understanding, I am procrastinating
about the most important question in the Universe…

Which makes me a very stupid and foolish person. Common sense dictates that I should not ignore
someone Who can squash me like a bug, and who I am not sure likes me or not (since it is pretty
clear that I haven’t taken the time to get to know Him). (I point out that Paul, in the passage above,
lists foolish people among those who do not end well.) Only small cradlebabies actually believe that
people disappear when they cover their eyes so they can’t see them. So ignoring God doesn’t make
Him go away. God is not at our beck and call, a genie to do our bidding when we rub a lamp: It
doesn’t work that way. It seems like a good idea to me that we should maybe make the effort to get
on His good side? Jesus said,

Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Everyone who comes to me and hears my words
and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the
foundation on the rock. And when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house and could not shake it, be-
cause it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the
ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house
was great.” Luke 6:46-49

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of
my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name,
and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them,
‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. John 14:15 see also v.21; 1 John 5:3,4

So, by inexorable logic, in the very act of passing condemning judgment on some other person, you
are acknowledging that you are prideful and self-righteous and do not recognize that you, yourself,
are in need of mercy, because you also are guilty of sin, and have broken the fundamental Laws of
the Universe, and are in rebellion against the God who made you. If you are willing to self-righteously
condemn others, you stand self-condemned. You are at least as bad, if not worse, than the person
you are condemning (who may actually have realized that they are in need of forgiveness and have
already asked for it). You are without excuse and have caught yourself red handed. You are dead
meat.

You need Jesus…NOW!

We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—
you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of
God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s
kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

How often do we convince ourselves that God will overlook our failings, or that what we have done “is
not so bad…certainly not as bad as….”. That we can get away with the high-risk idiocy that we love
to indulge in? How many times have we crapped our pants as we have barely escaped death or
severe bodily injury, and even in our terror cried out to God, only to walk away congratulating
ourselves on our good luck or our machismo, buzzed on adrenaline, and instantly forgotten our
panicked prayer?

51
Don’t you realize that God is watching out for you? That He is calling to you? That every time He
covers your butt it is an attempt to get your attention, to get you to realize that He loves you in spite of
your reckless stupidity and foolish rebellion, that He wants you to return to your rightful place with
Him? Don’t you understand that, except for His Grace, you deserve to be dead? You are a fool if
you keep shutting Him out, because one of these days He isn’t going to save your sorry ass.
Repentance, by the way, simply means “to turn around and walk the other way”…to do a one-eighty:
If you are walking away from God, turn around and walk toward Him. He will run toward you if you do.
(Please read the Parable of the Prodigal Son and the Loving Father. Luke 15: 11-32)

But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when
God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

The hard and impenitent heart: unwilling to yield, stubborn, willful, rebellious, anarchistic and lawless.
God’s multi-dimensional multiverse is structured around the principles of Authority and Order, which
proceed from His own perfectly ordered being….In a very real way everything that is, is the material-
ization of the Thought of God, the expression of His exquisitely integrated Mind. Without this underly-
ing structure the entire matrix of Reality disintegrates into chaos. (Colossians 1:17)
the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials,and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day
of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority. 2 Peter 2:9,10

Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of
Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own posi-
tion of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the
judgment of the great day— just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged
in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal
fire. Yet in like manner these people also, relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blas-
pheme the glorious ones. But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the
body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.”
But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like un-
reasoning animals, understand instinctively. Woe to them! For they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned
themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error and perished in Korah’s rebellion. These are hidden reefs at
your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept
along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam
of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. Jude 5-13

That which opposes this principle of Order is fundamentally opposed to God and cannot co-exist with
Him. Human beings were not supposed to be subjected to this separation, but have become involved
through the disobedience of Adam. The Father has done all that He can do to resolve this problem
before removing evil from His Creation forever. He is extremely patient and long-suffering, but He
has set limits on His patience and has a timetable that He is following, and which certainly appears to
be now drawing near to its culmination. He has to, and will, deal with the rebellion of Lucifer, once
and for all. The Bible describes a linear history to the age of man, with finite parameters and an
endpoint. And the sin of our lives is cumulative: Not only do we die because of Original Sin and the
fact that we are even now spiritually dead while we live, but every thought and action of our rebellious
existence adds to our ignoble legacy…is a spreading stain on our raped and ravaged soul. We “store
up wrath”. (Romans 2:5) The Bible seems to teach that the depth of our depravity on earth determines
the depth of our torment in hell….Not that God turns up the heat out of some sadistic pleasure, but
that we prepare the intensity of our own doom by the way in which we live our lives, by how we relate
to and treat others. The more cruel and self-serving we are in the here and now, the more vicious
the kickback in the hereafter.

52
Jesus speaks much more about hell than about Heaven, and His descriptions could not be more vivid
or terrifying: He does not want us to ever have to experience that separation and punishment that
was created only for the devil and his co-conspirators. He really does try to scare the Hell out of us.

But we will find ourselves in Hell, if we become one of those co-conspirators ourselves.

He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and
honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but
obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being
who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the
Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.

For all of us, Christian and non-Christian, there will be an accounting of our “works”…the way we
lived our lives. This does not have anything to do with whether or not we get into Heaven: No one
can live a life perfect enough to make the cut, as we have already discussed above, which is why we
need Jesus Christ….why we MUST be spiritually reborn.

For those who do not know Jesus, who have not entered into covenant relationship with Him, entry
into Heaven is forbidden on grounds of which their misbehavior in life is only a superficial symptom.
But it does seem that the way they lived their lives has a consequence in the degree of torment they
will experience in eternity separated from God; that, somehow, in a Dante-esque actuality, there are
multiple abyssal depths to Hell just as there are apparently infinite heights to which to aspire in Heav-
en.

For those who do know Jesus, or rather are known by Jesus and have received His Life and walk in it,
their salvation is very secure, and the judgment of their works has to do with their ongoing spiritual
development in the ages yet to come. In the depths of its rich revelation, the New Testament seems
to teach that there is a complex continuum of the soul along which each individual human being
moves throughout his or her lifetime in skin, and that it is possible to move both into and out of
relationship with God, to even lose salvation once one has attained it, though this is not easily
accomplished, and requires an awful, final, decision to be made in full experience of Truth. Long
before such a terrible terminal choice is made, a believer can, however, wreak havoc on his spiritual
development by failing to become a disciple (an ongoing lifetime padawan learner, as a Star Wars
aficionado might understand) of the Lord, and many, many Christians are doing exactly this as they
warm the pews on Sunday and live like the world around them the rest of the week.

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthian church, teaches a hard lesson concerning these:

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is
building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than
that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious
stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it
will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone
has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss,
though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. Do you not know that you are God’s temple and
that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is
holy, and you are that temple. 1 Corinthians 3:10-17

Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that
he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in
their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast
in men. 1 Corinthians 3:18-21

53
 And Jesus, Himself, taught:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sis-
ters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after
me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the
cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish,
all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king,
going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten
thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great
way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not re-
nounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26=33

It is easy to say you are a Christian: It is not easy to be a Christian. “Many are called ~ Few are
chosen.” Matthew 22:14

We like to think that all we have to do is say a sinner's prayer and we will walk into a mansion in glory.
So what does Jesus mean when He says in Mathew twice (and in Mark once more)

And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise
and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one
who endures to the end will be saved. Matthew 24:10-13

Again Paul writes:

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he
has done in the body, whether good or evil. 2 Corinthians 5:10

So, God holds us responsible for our choices and our actions. He keeps “books” of remembrance. (2
The conditions of our eternal destiny depend in a
Corinthians 5:10:Job 34:11: Matthew 16:27: Revelation 20:12 )
most profound and personally important way upon how we spend our time here on earth, which is
certainly, among other things, a training ground and what might be called the “first interview”.

At the end of our time here, however long or short that might be, we either get to stay and move on to
round two, or we are voted off the island.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this over the past three and a half decades, and tens of thousands of
hours of study. Again, I emphasize that the scriptures do not reveal God to be petty or vindictive.
The biblical idea of “Divine vengeance” is not tainted with our human baggage. He is not like, for
instance, my Dad, who could remember, with bitterness, every slight done against him for 80 plus
years of his lonely life. (I do have assurances that Dad is with the Lord…such is God’s grace. Dad
knew Him, but not well: He was saved, but smelled of smoke. 1 Corinthians 3:12-15) God has no interest
in “getting even” with us for our offenses against Him.

It is recorded in the books of Moses:

The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to an-
ger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity
and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the
children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” Exodus 34:6-7

54
 Returning to Paul:

For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law
will be judged by the law.

As this verse implies, His judgments are pure and He is absolutely impartial…we might almost think
“cold” or “heartless”, except that we can feel the heart of God, the Father, beating in Jesus, and His
compassion puts us all to shame.

We will simply stand beside Jesus, and God will compare us to the Pattern Son. His Purpose is to
remove all that is evil and imperfect from His Creation so that all that remains will be free to
experience perfect love and communion with Him forever in perfect liberty and perfect harmony
without fear or blemish or taint or flaw. As The Artist, this is His prerogative.

I think that it is we, ourselves, who keep the records.

We all have heard the old saw that when someone has a near death experience their “life passes
before their eyes”. Our incredible brains are archives of every moment of our lives…every choice,
every act, every thought, every selfish and willful decision, every altruistic outreach of our heart.
Everything is recorded in absolute vivid detail in the neural folds of the gray matter. The dullest
human mind makes the most powerful supercomputer on the planet look like a cheap pocket
calculator: Even Steven Hawking is only using a fraction of its resources, at least consciously. When
we stand before the Bar of God, the book that we, ourselves, have written is going to be opened.
That lifetime 24/7/365 record is going to play back. And we, in full light, are going to see who we were
and are.

Jesus said

“Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent
me. I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If anyone
hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save
the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will
judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself
given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life.
What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me.” John 12:44-50

We will be self-justified or self-condemned. God may not even have to speak. He may just look at
us….Look through us. Neither will we have anything to say as the video plays. Whether or not
anyone else will be able to witness this encounter will be irrelevant. We will be alone with God even if
we are standing among billions. If you want to get a taste of what this sort of Divine moment might be
like, read about what happened to Peter on the night of the betrayal of Jesus (Luke 22:31ff esp. verses
61,62)

In Romans again:

He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and
honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but
obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being
who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the
Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.

55
 Paul’s argument becomes very complex here…much more complex than popular Evangelical
theology tends to want it to be. He is painting with a broader, and at the same time far more nuanced,
brush than we Evangelicals would like, because he seems to be talking about people who do not yet
“know Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior”, at least according to the standard party line,
and we find this troublesome. It is far easier for us to condemn the whole world to Hell unless they
think just like us, than it is to accept the idea that God may be much bigger than the boxes we want to
keep Him in so that we can better control the gameplay.

I have stated repeatedly that NO ONE gets into Heaven except through the single gate…a “born
again” experience through the Holy Spirit with Jesus Christ. But the scripture is also clear about
God’s deep desire to redeem everyone who wants to be saved:

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand
years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you,
not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. 2 Peter 3:8-9

This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to
the knowledge of the truth. 1 Timothy 2:3-4

Paul, himself, is the champion of the Gospel of Christ to the Gentile world, and of justification by faith
in Jesus Christ alone, so it is clear that he would not teach that salvation of the soul could be realized
by works, but here he is talking about those who by sincere efforts are “diligently seeking honor and
immortality”, (Rom. 2:7) and he has not yet spoken of them as “knowing” Christ, at least in what we, as
Evangelicals, would consider an “orthodox” way.

So, he does apparently acknowledge that God honors the works of the heart and rewards them
(though He rejects the works of the flesh). We will explore this further as we go on: But there is a
Fundamental Law, a Primal Directive, which I mentioned earlier. “You will have NO other God’s before
Me.” (Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7;cf. 2 Kings 17:35;Jeremiah 25:6-7) I believe it was Saint Augustine of Hippo
who summed it up this way: “Love God, and do anything you want”. Think about this: It is profoundly
true. Paul, admittedly in another context, talks about the life transforming effect the Presence of God
has upon the human soul:

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have
died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake
died and was raised. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15

John also makes reference to this transformational effect of the Spirit of God upon the human soul
and life:

No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning
because he has been born of God. 1 John 3:9

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. 1 John 3:8

And the scriptures (James) also promise that

whoever wishes to be (choice) a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to
no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But
he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but give grace to the humble.” Submit your-
selves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, (choice) and he will
draw near to you. James 4:4-8

56
This is the Universal Law, the Primal Law, very simply stated. It is the memory of who we are
supposed to be, written upon the heart of every human being, long dimmed in the fog of sin, but not
lost. This is the Law that can be as fully kept by the Down’s Syndrome child in the streets of Calcutta
as by the Mensa genius at MIT, by the homeless beggar on Bleeker Street or the billionaire on Wall
Street…. that puts everyone on equal ground. This is the Law which is coded into our DNA as the
Signature of the Creator, a part of the Imagio Deo… The image of God in which man was created.
This is the Law that pre-dates Moses and goes back to Noah and before him to Adam, and therefore
lies as cornerstone beneath every religious memory of humanity, however distorted and corrupted
that memory may have become. It is this Law to which Paul here refers, and by which God first
evaluates the soul of every human being.

WWJD…What Would Jesus Do?

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,

but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’ ”

When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in csacrifices and offerings and burnt offer-
ings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your
will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified
through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Hebrews 10:5-10

Jesus, as I said above, summed it up this way:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them
well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is,
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: “You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” And the scribe said to him,
“You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. And to love him
with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself,
is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he
said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more ques-
tions. Mark 12:28-34

Anybody who aspires to meet this goal, to truly seek and love God, will certainly receive the reward of
Eternal Life. I don’t say this: Paul does.

For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law
will be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the
law who will be justified.

Paul still is talking here about those who do not know Christ, and I don’t think, when he is referring to
sin, he is referring to “original sin”, but is still dealing with deliberate and willful sin, sinful choices and
behavior: He gets to the discussion of “original sin” and of its universal consequence of death a bit
further down.

57
It is clear from the context then that the law, here, that Paul still has in mind is the Universal Law that I
referred to above…He begins to discuss the “Law of Moses” just below. The Law of Moses (The
Torah) does not, and never has, applied to anyone but God’s Chosen people, the Jews: It has
nothing to do, legally and before God, with either the unbelieving world, or the Christian. (Of course,
there is wisdom to be gleaned from the depths of the Tanakh, the Old Testament, but it has as Law,
for the Christian, been fulfilled in Christ and is “rolled up and tossed out like an old pair of jeans”, (He-
brews 1:10-12; 8:13) as the letter to the Hebrews (my paraphrase) puts it. God has never applied the Law
of Moses to anyone but Israel, which is operating under certain special covenants that were made
between God and Abraham and with the patriarchs.) Paul, here, is reaching back toward the Primal
Law that echoes in the genetic memory of every human being: “You shall love and worship the One who
made you and gave you life with everything you are, and you shall treat others with the same respect with
which you treat yourself, because you all have inherent dignity and value in the eyes of your Creator.” (my
paraphrase) (Luke 10:25-28) And his argument is clear: Those who listen to their conscience and try to
live their lives according to the light they have will be honored by God for doing so. Their efforts will
be acknowleged as His outpoured prevenient grace gently leads them toward ever more clear
revelation. Those who harden their hearts and live in contradiction to their conscience will be held
accountable for their actions and will suffer a judgment, according to their understanding of right and
wrong. God asks no more than this of all who are still estranged from Him.

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even
though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their con-
science also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to
my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and
boast in God and know his will and approve what is excellent, because you are instructed from the law;

Here Paul is specifically addressing the Jews, who tend to think very highly of themselves as God’s
People, and to whom the intimate details of God’s self-revelation were entrusted as was the lineage
of the Christ, many of whom relied upon their “chosen” status as God’s Posse for their relationship to
God, rather than upon humble faith and God’s grace and mercy. A lot of these folks hung around the
baby Church, trying to convince the gentile Christians that they were second-class citizens of the
Kingdom.

and if you are sure that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the
foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth you then who teach others,
do you not teach yourself? While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that one must not commit
adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law dishonor
God by breaking the law. For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”

To put it bluntly, Paul is calling these folks hypocrites and bald-faced liars, Pecksniffians all: They
strut around spouting their inflated “knowledge” of the scriptures, but, like so many self-proclaimed
“born-again Christians” today, their lives are manifestly shipwrecked and indistinguishable from the
non-believers to whom they are preaching. Indeed, a lot of the non-believers are living more
sincerely and honestly than the so-called Christians who are preaching at them. And the non-
believers are turned off and turned away from the most liberating Truth in the universe because of
them. I, for one, do not want to stand before my God and have to explain myself for this kind of
hypocrisy. As Jesus challenged those who challenged Him:

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For
you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypo-
crites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you
make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Matthew 23:13-15

58
Paul continues:

For circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law, but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes
uncircumcision.

Here he is speaking of the Jews, “the Circumcision”, for circumcision was the mark of the covenant
that God sealed with Abraham, and by which Jewish men identified and separated themselves with
arrogant pride from all the “unclean” world around them.

We Christians, however, are not wrong in applying the spirit of Paul’s argument here to ourselves as
well…We are, in another place, referred to as having “circumcised hearts” (Romans 2:29; Deuteronomy
10:16; 30:6; Philippians 3:3) through the work of Christ. (The imagery of circumcision is an example of
what is known as biblical “typology”, a symbol or action prefiguring a New Covenant Truth.)

There is value in being “religious” and in having understanding of the “deep things” of God, if, and
ONLY IF they actually act as fertilizer to produce good fruit in our lives.

Rabbit Trail:

Let me indulge in a wander down a rabbit trail for a moment regarding the subject of fruit: Because
talk is cheap, fruit, alone, is the evidence of true faith; Good Fruit…Healthy Fruit…Sweet Fruit
...Seed-bearing Fruit.... (not bruised, or withered, or wormy fruit). The Lord looks for quality fruit, and
calls His people, in humility and with Spirit-guided discernment, to be “fruit inspectors”. We are
expected to assess the character of others by “tasting” the fruit of their lives.

Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down
and thrown into the fire. Matthew 3:10ff; Luke 3:9ff

You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every
healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a
diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus
you will recognize them by their fruits. Matthew 7:16-20

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will
of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your
name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to
them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away,
and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of
the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it
abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides
in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide
in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and
burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By
this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me,
so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I
have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy
may be in you, and that your joy may be full. John 15:1-11

59
 For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an
idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for
because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become part-
ners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light
(for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the
Lord. Ephesians 5:5-10

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him
who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promis-
es, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption
that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith
with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness,
and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For
if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowl-
edge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having for-
gotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to make your
calling and election sure, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. For in this way there will be rich-
ly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1:3-11

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control;
against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its
passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another,
envying one another. Galatians 5:22-26

End of Rabbit Trail

Paul continues:

So, if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as cir-
cumcision?

Then he who is physically uncircumcised but keeps the law will condemn you who have the written code and
circumcision but break the law. For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward
and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.
His praise is not from man but from God.

Again, it seems unavoidably clear that Paul is saying that God honors the works of the heart of the
so-called “unsaved” person who lives their life humbly pursuing whatever light they do have in hope
that they will please God as they understand Him.

I have to believe that the God-of-All-that-Is is more than able and more than willing to make a way for
every such person to come into a saving relationship with Him through the Savior Son of Man, regard-
less of whether or not that person ever has the opportunity to “hear the Gospel” from a Christian’s lips
or read the story of Christ in a New Testament or Gospel tract. Too many people die each day
around this sin-sick planet unreached by a missionary or unwitnessed to by a “born-again” believer
for me to believe otherwise. This is not to say that “all roads lead to Heaven”, but it might be to say
that all who walk honestly on sincere paths seeking to understand Truth are led to Christ as their Ad-
vocate, before they stand before the Throne of His judgment. If I am in error here, then at least I am
in error on the side of mercy. I will leave the judgment of such souls to my Father.

60
 CHAPTER 3

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the
Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

Of course, there is an advantage to being chosen of God. First of all, the Jewish people were given
the privilege of being the first people group on earth, since the fall of the human race, of knowing their
Creator as He really is.

Up ‘til the intervention in Egypt, when Moses led Israel out of its first captivity, only a very few
individuals among all the people on the planet had had any sort of a personal relationship with God.
And not even Abraham knew God by name, though God did cherish him as a friend. Everyone else
wandered in the confusion of idolatry…imagining God in bizarre fancies of their own ignorant
vanity…at best spiritually drifting, confused and lost…at worst sacrificing their firstborn sons and
virgin daughters to hideous demonic idols, and cutting the beating hearts out of their their captured
enemies on the altars of tyrant local deities.

Moses began to introduce the Self-revealing True God to a nation, the descendents of Abraham
through Isaac, the miracle son of promise, in the hope that that nation would grow to know Him and
would introduce Him to the world at large, and with the plan that Israel would be able to escape in
time far enough from the pollution of the rebellion of Adam to be able to produce a heart and a womb
faithful enough to bear Messiah, the Savior of the humanity (which they finally did in Mary).

What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God
be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,

That you may be justified in your words,

and prevail when you are judged.

As Paul explores further on, our faithlessness and our resistance to the Law of God and to His
personal appeal to our minds and hearts, rather than discrediting or disproving God, proves the point
that God has been trying to make all along about the intractability of sin and of our rebellion, and our
absolute inability to save ourselves from ourselves.

God has not, nor ever will, change in His character, His purposes, or His good intentions for His
creatures and His creation.

I will not violate my covenant

or alter the word that went forth from my lips.
Once for all I have sworn by my holiness;
I will not lie …...Psalm 89:34-35

“For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your fa-
thers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,
says the LORD of hosts. Malachi 3:6-7

Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down
from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought
us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. James 1:16-18

61
For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself,
saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.” And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the
promise. For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for
confirmation. So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable
character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impos-
sible for God to lie, (the swearing of an oath on His own name, AND the immutability of His own char-
acter) we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We
have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain,
where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever.... Hebrews 6:13-20

In Romans again

But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous
to inflict wrath on us? ( I speak in a human way.) By no means! For then how could God judge the world? But
if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not
do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.

Human-made gods invariably are capricious: The True God is not. He is absolutely unchanging and
constant. If God were capricious, He could not be trusted: We could not have faith in Him or in His
promises to us. We would never know if He was in a good mood or a bad mood: If He would look
upon us with favor or burn us to a crisp with a thunderbolt because He was having a bad hair day.
If He made arbitrary decisions or changed the rules of His “game” after the game had begun to be
played, then He would be no different from, nor better than, us…only bigger and more powerful, and
indeed, very scary; certainly impossible to love, only someone or something to fear.

This is precisely why He did not simply override the rebellion of Satan with a display of sheer power,
but has allowed it to play out as it has. This is precisely why He did not reset the board when Adam
screwed up, to give Eve and him a do-over. This is why the Son of God had to become a human
being; why he had to suffer with us and because of us, and why He had to die a terrible death as a
substitutionary sacrifice for us, for you and for me. Because if God had simply changed the rules
when the game went South, Lucifer would have called Him for it before all Creation, and rightly
accused Him of being arbitrary and inconsistent within Himself…and therefore unfit to claim
Sovereignty as Almighty God, the One who must be eternally Just and True and Stable.

And Lucifer would have been right. His own claim to the Throne would have been justified, because God
would have been proven to be essentially no different from or superior to His creatures. On the one hand
He would have been shown to have been caught by surprise (by the rebellion), and therefore not in
control. On the other hand He would have been caught cheating, because He was unwilling to play by
the rules of the game that He Himself invented (when it no longer appeared that He was winning). For the
Laws of Creation are derived from the core being of God Himself. His own integrity and character hold all
things together. No creature can make this claim. For God to arbitrarily “break” one of these “laws”, there-
fore, would be a fundamental self-contradiction, like dark and light existing in the same place at the same
time, or black and white being the same thing. Nothing could be more wrong.

He {Jesus Christ the God~Man, the Son of God} is the image of the invisible God {the Father}, the firstborn of
all creation. For by him {the Son of God before the incarnation} all things were created, in heaven and on earth,
visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or authorities —all things were created through him {the Son of
God before the incarnation} and for him {the Son of God at the command of the Father} so that in everything
he (the Son of God) might be preeminent. For in him (Jesus Christ: The incarnate God~Man) all the fullness of
God {the Father} was pleased to dwell, and through him{Jesus Christ the incarnate Son} to reconcile to himself
{the Father} all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his {Jesus Christ the incar-
nate Son} cross. Colossians 1:15-20

62
(I realize that this is a bit confusing... that's a problem we will have with multi-dimensional thinking.)

And those laws preceded the creation of the Cosmos. And they preceded the creation of the Heavenlies
and the angels who populate them. Those laws are the foundational infrastructure of Reality…They are
Order itself. For God, therefore, to simply and arbitrarily override or disregard even the least of those laws
would begin the deconstruction of Everything…It would be self-denial and an absolute and fundamental
contradiction.

Lucifer’s rebellion occurred when he, created as one of, if not the, highest of Archangels, decided that he
could run the show just as well as God could. He persuaded, according to the Bible “one third of the an-
gels of Heaven” to join him, and then rose up to challenge his Maker. (This is alluded to in the prophetic
writings of Isaiah and Ezekiel and in the Revelation of Jesus Christ that was given to John.) It didn’t work,
and he was banished, along with his followers, apparently, and for reasons that neither I, nor anyone I
know of, really understand, into the dimensions of reality that include Planet Earth. The Bible hints that
when this happened, terrible things happened to the planet. There are certainly evidences in the geologic
record of incalculable cataclysms in our distant past, as well as dim recollections of apocalyptic
catastrophe in the cultural memories of our most archaic myths and legends around the globe from
ancient days. All the libraries of speculation that have been written about such prehistoric ages and
events make for interesting reading and interminable debate.

But God, in His wisdom, and knowing that two thirds of Heaven needed full reassurance that Lucifer was
wrong in his claim that a creature, however magnificent, could stand in the place of God the Creator, then
established a beachhead on the Earth. The Bible says He planted “a garden in the land of Eden”, which
was an area that includes what is now the land of Israel and much of the current contested Middle East of
today. And into that garden He placed Adamic Man; Spiritual Man…A creature designed to discover what
it means to love and honor and have intimate relationship with his Creator/Father in absolute freedom,
simply because of Who He is. A creature whose purpose was to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth
and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living
thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28 God’s man was invested with the responsibility and the
authority to take back the Earth from the pretender to the Throne.

That garden was smack dab in the middle of Lucifer’s lair. It was an overt in-your-face challenge to
the would-be little god.

But Lucifer certainly knows all too well that the Law of the multi-verse says that nothing that is flawed
or imperfect can exist in the presence of God Almighty. After all, not only was he perhaps first before
the Throne, before he fell, but he was banished because sin was found in him and his corruption
rendered him unworthy to remain in the Kingdom. He was the first offender. The way that the Bible
puts it is this: “The soul that sins will die”. (Ezekiel 18:4,20) As Sly Stalone put it in Judge Dredd, “The Law
is the Law.”

And so our story begins. God gave his free creatures a perfect environment and wonderful things to do
and discover, and a Mandate with a purpose, and a personal training program, and just one simple rule
that they had to keep…one instruction about just one thing that they never should do under penalty of
death. They had an orchard full of the most wonderful fruit trees in the universe to enjoy, and just one
they were told not to touch.

And Lucifer convinced them to taste its fruit. And God’s most perfect and wonderful creature, man, be-
came flawed…sin-stained…depraved. And therefore, every child of Adam and Eve, every human child
who was created to climb into Father God’s lap and be loved and nurtured and instructed in Divine things,
was condemned to die and be cast into eternal banishment by Daddy’s own rules. And if Father God
Almighty had then come in and simply reset the board …Lucifer would have won by default. Who can
ever trust Someone, who doesn’t play by the Rules? Which is why we have the Gospel of the Kingdom.

63
Let’s go back to the top:

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the
Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the
faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,

“That you may be justified in your words,

and prevail when you are judged.”

But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous
to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) By no means! For then how could God judge the world? But
if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not
do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.
What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and
Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:

“None is righteous, no, not one;

no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be
stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will
be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Here is the point where Paul begins to transition from his specific rant against reprobates and
perverted individuals to the larger problem of “sin” as it applies to the entire human race. I am not
sure whether or not I want to try and parse out the details of his Old Testament justification of his
point above…this has been done many times before, and you can certainly find myriad volumes of
discussion to wrestle through, and I think it might sidetrack me from what the Lord seems to want us
to think about here. And we will address again the questions of our free will and the wrong-
headedness of our deliberately sinning in order to better showcase God’s righteousness in a
bit….Paul deals with this at length. (Something that you should understand about Paul is that he was
an absolute genius, incredibly brilliant and highly educated in both Hebrew and Greek culture and
literature and, of course, in the Hebrew Scriptures: He almost certainly had the Old Testament
memorized, as did most prodigy rabbinical students of his time. Before he converted to Christianity
he was being groomed to become one of the foremost rabbinical scholars of his generation, and was
clearly a rising star in Judaism. And also he tended to get distracted onto rabbit trails constantly as he
developed his complicated theses. He often returned to ground already covered to reiterate his
points, as was the custom of the rabbis of his time. Also, he wrote sentences that often were several
pages long, with enormous parenthetical digressions; and he wrote in koine’ { koy-nay } Greek, which

64
used no punctuation whatsoever, and did not even separate words from each other in written
sentences. Of course, there are no chapters or verses in the original autograph letters. Indeed, in a
very real sense the entire argument from Romans 1:18 to the end of at least the middle of chapter
twelve is of one piece, which is why it is such a bugbear in Christian theology, and has been a
cauldron of doctrinal controversy for at least the past 500 years. Trying to keep up with his multiple
lines of reasoning is a trip and a half…which is why I have listened to his letters being read aloud now
at least a thousand times…just to become familiar enough with Paul’s voice and cadence to be able
to follow his arguments well enough to weave together all the threads of the tapestry of his thoughts.)

What Paul is saying here is that everybody is in the same impossible situation before God…Whether
they are in complete ignorance of the details of their condition, or whether they have the Law of God
written by the Finger of God on Tablets of Stone makes no difference. They are in denial and are
delusional if they think that by anything they do they can please God enough for Him to let them into
Heaven. Indigenous aborigine, peasant farmer, ivory-tower professor, leader of a nation, or Pope,
we all have enough information to realize that we are not perfect. The non-Jewish world knows
enough, by virtue of conscience and the Primal Law, to understand the difference between right and
wrong and to realize that all of us routinely fail to do what is right. We all screw up. Most people also
are aware that all of us, at least at times, treat God like, please pardon my language here, crap,
(which, biblically speaking, is “blasphemy” …and that is not something you want to do to a Deity).
This alone is enough to condemn us to damnation. (“The Law is the Law.”)

The Jews of Paul’s world, to whom the Oracles of God have been entrusted since Moses received
them on Mount Sinai, have had nearly fifteen hundred years (thirty five hundred now, when we
include the New Covenant era) to study that information and to realize that the Divine Standard is
humanly impossible to achieve, and that they must be wholly reliant upon the Grace and Mercy of
God for the redemption of their souls. However, at least the elite leadership of the Jews has
convinced itself that it actually is managing to keep the Law so well that God will have to give it a
special reward for exceptional achievement. (I am speaking of the Jews of the first century, to whom
Paul was writing, but nothing has changed since, and the indictment as easily applies to much of
Christendumb today, who talk the talk of Faith, but still pride themselves on how righteous and holy
they appear in the eyes of others, and who “honestly” think that God cares about their appearances
and will reward them for their posing.)

Paul begins here to develop his argument that the Law was given, not to be kept, but rather to set the
bar so unattainably high that mankind would get over itself, give up trying to please God or suck up to
Him, and would simply surrender to Him so that He could deal with the sin problem on completely
other terms. But, again, because man has absolute free will, God could only put all the information
out and try to encourage people to care enough to search for the heart of Truth: He can’t force the
issue.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets
bear witness to it

After the fall of Adam, and the alienation from God that this caused, the memory of the intimate rela-
tionship that once was, that should have always been, began to be quickly lost, especially exacerbat-
ed by the severe mental and spiritual disconnect that had occurred, the soul-wrenching one hundred
and eighty degree turn from being centered in God to being wholly focused into themselves. They
were driven from Paradise and banished, to in many ways fend for themselves in a hostile world ruled
by force and deception by a cruel warlord false god. They were no longer able to fellowship with their
Creator, as they had been free to do on an ongoing basis, to ask questions of Him and learn from
Him, to draw upon His infinite resources, to expect His absolute protection. God still wanted to
communicate with them, but they had turned away from Him and cut the lines of communication at

65
their end. They were afraid of Him. He could only call to them from a distance, and only if they chose
to listen. They were sin sick and tormented by guilt. And they were daily becoming more and more
enslaved and deceived, and were all the while dying from without and from within.

After some time, Adam and Eve began to seek God through the building of altars, religious ritual, and
sacrifice, and apparently did try to transmit their fading memories of their experience in the garden to
their children. But the horrible effects of sin distorted those recollections, and, as the story of Cain
and Abel records, very early on began to wreak havoc upon the race. The genetic defect of
separation immediately began to produce its fruit of death. The kids quickly lost the vision of God
that mom and dad had shared with them. They had never known their Creator personally. They did
not have the internal capacity to comprehend spiritual realities. Selfish madness and violence further
clouded and distorted their minds. These ancient memories still haunt the entire human race, but in
almost unrecognizable forms, as myths and legends and spiritualism and religious distortions and
idolatries. There is no wonder in the fact that the plethora of human spirituality and religion is
contradictory and confusing and offers very little of real hope or clear direction.

As the malignant blight spread, and the Adamic memories further dimmed and warped, and human
hubris intensified as sin exploited and empowered egoism and lust, increasingly bizarre and
perverted religious distortions developed that became so pandemic and led to such aberrant and evil
behavior that God almost pulled the plug on the human experiment in the era of Noah, reducing the
breeding population of spiritual humanity to eight individuals whose hearts were “righteous in their
generation”, though by no means perfect.

After the Noahic flood, God resumed again His efforts to guide mankind back onto the course
originally set out for the species, selecting individuals through specific spiritually sensitive bloodlines
and eventually singling out Abraham, a Chaldean of Ur in Sumeria (now Southern Iraq) with a Truth-
seeking heart, and through Abraham, after about another four hundred and thirty years, finally raising
up Moses who midwifed the nation of Israel into being. This was about 1500 years before the birth,
through Mary, a descendent of King David, of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

To Israel, through Moses, God gave His first specific detailed self-revelation since the fall of our first
parents, through which He began to instruct them in His character, His ways of doing things, and in
His expectations for humanity, and to explain to them what the root problems of sin and death were
really all about. Since humanity was steeped in multiplied generations of ignorant idolatry and false
demonic worship, this would necessarily be a long and painstaking process. He gave them His “Law”
(a much more detailed explanation of the foundation of Authority and Order of the universe than the
Primal Law), and said “If you can keep this Law, you will be righteous before Me and I will not hold
you accountable for the sins you commit….But you have to keep every smallest detail of this Law
every moment of your lives...It is of one whole piece. If you screw up in one thing, you’ve broken the
whole Law as far as I’m concerned.”

He also gave them an elaborate ceremonial sacrificial system (because He knew from the outset that
the Law was impossible for sinful man to keep) that in it’s most minute details was an allegory and a
daily dramatic reminder, a play which revealed and explained the future Incarnation and work of
Christ, and which was meant to give them the hope that the Sin problem, and the Divine Justice that
all men face, as sinners and lawbreakers, would be resolved once and for all time.

If they had been thinking clearly, they would have realized that it was humanly impossible to actually
keep the Law, and that they needed to really lean into God’s Grace and Mercy absolutely and entirely.
And they would have realized that He had made provision in Grace for them to do so. The whole
beautiful picture was right there in front of them from the beginning, in the Levitical Ceremonies and
Ordinances of the Tabernacle, and in the Cycle of Feasts.

66
The Ceremonial System and the Tabernacle were given to anticipate the sacrifice of Christ, which
could not yet be made in our Timeline: God could, in Soveriegnty as His Word reveals, defer his
judgment of human souls, and prevent the devil from achieving their eternal damnation, by choosing
to accept the substitutions of the sacrifices He ordained until the Actual Sacrifice was fulfilled through
the Incarnation. However, until “the fullness of time was come”, (Galatians 4:4;Ephesians 1:10) the people
God was preparing and purifying as the “womb” for Messiah would have to “religiously” fulfill the
ceremonial sacrifices that legally permitted God to hold the ranting enemy at bay. And in order for
the sacrifices to be truly and eternally effective, those making them would have to do so in real faith
and humility from the heart and with true remorse and repentance for their sins: The same faith, the
same humility, the same obedience, that Abraham had shown. They would not be able yet to be free
from the curse of sin, but they could live free from its crushing weight of temporal condemnation on
an ongoing basis by regularly coming before their God to be forgiven, the servant slavery of the
priests and levites being accepted in lieu of their lives.

But, many of the Israelites convinced themselves, self-righteously, that they could actually keep the
Rules, and that by doing the Law externally they could avoid having to deal with their inner
personality and psychological issues, and the fact that they were selfish and rebellious and didn’t
really like the idea of God telling them how they ought to run their personal lives. They convinced
themselves they could buy or bribe or pose their way into righteousness, and that God would reward
them for their extra effort. Instead of becoming humble, they became more puffed up with pride.
They substituted external obedience of the mind for internal submission of the heart. They still
wanted to be in control. They substituted religious behavior for actually dealing with their personal
character issues. They went to church on Sunday (well, Saturday), and lived like the devil the rest of
the week. And, by hardening their hearts and cauterizing their consciences, they actually believed
their own hype. For them, in the eyes of God, the ceremonial sacrifices were just that, nothing but
ceremony. Paul, later on, talks at length about these self-deceived false Israelites.

Nevertheless, even as He was transmitting His Law to Israel, God was also clearly laying out His
plans and purposes in bringing forth Messiah, His Champion who would actually undo the cosmic
damage that Adam’s rebellion had caused. Some of the wise and humble in Israel were able to
understand at least portions of this larger Plan (some more than others), especially as it was clarified
through the Progress of Revelation and as the time of the Incarnation approached. This revelation is
chronicled in the Old Testament prophetic writings in increasing detail as the history advances toward
Christ’s birth. (It is especially clear in Isaiah’s writings.) It is to this progressive prophetic history that
Paul is alluding here.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets
bear witness to it—

the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

Here is the Old Covenant with Israel, given to Moses, and the New Covenant established by God, in
a very real sense with Himself, but also with mankind, because it was established by the work of a
Man, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ....the God~Man. The writer of Hebrews goes to great lengths to
prove conclusively that in Christ, the Old Covenant was fulfilled and made obsolete, and no longer
applies as a legally binding document. Everything pertaining to the redemption of the human soul
and the reinstatement of man to fellowship with his Maker now is under the terms of the New
Covenant established through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary and sealed by the resurrection.

67
The Old Covenant still is the Word of God, and still holds many promises yet to be fulfilled for blood
Israel, because of God’s commitments made to the Patriarchs and to King David, and it still is a
treasury of wisdom and history to be mined at depth, and it is given to us “as examples” (1 Corinthians
10:11; Romans 15:4) and to be a rich deposit of hope, but it does not have binding legal jurisdiction
over the Church. The Church is constituted under the New Covenant and its terms and conditions,
a “better covenant with better promises”. (Hebrews 7:22;Hebrews 8:6) This New Covenant is available to all
who believe, from “every tribe and nation” (Revelation 5:9), and not just to the Jewish people. All human
beings are equally sinners. All can be equally redeemed through repentance. The full body of believ-
ers, Jew and non-Jew together, constitute what the New Covenant terms “One New Man” (Ephesians
2:11) , the “Israel of God”. Galatians 6:16

and are justified by his grace as a gift,

Justification means, effectively, “just as if I’d never sinned” (a mnemonic device coined by the late Bible
scholar and teacher, Dr. Derek Prince). It means that the entire past is wiped clean, spotlessly clean:
That from the moment of the new birth, the believer is released to walk free from the burden of the guilt of
past sin and with the power, through the Holy Spirit, to live without accumulating any further burden. This
is done by the undeserved loving mercy of our Father (Grace) and is given freely to us just for the asking,
as long as the asking is sincere and our obedience is faithfully maintained with integrity.

through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,

Redeem :
1 a : to buy back : repurchase b : to get or win back
2 : to free from what distresses or harms: as a : to free from captivity by payment of ransom b : to
extricate from or help to overcome something detrimental c : to release from blame or debt : clear d : to
free from the consequences of sin

whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood,

The dictionary defines “propitiation” with words like “amends”, “satisfaction”, “appeasement”, “atone”,
“reconciliation” ...these are OK, but biblically the idea is much much bigger: I found a helpful discus-
sion online at http://www.arlev.co.uk/propitia.htm that you might like to spend some time with.

to be received by faith.

So incredibly simple…And again, I refer to my earlier thoughts about the difference between believing
faith and empowering faith…All this transaction takes, on our part, is believing faith…And even that is
augmented by God’s prevenient Grace…He will prime the pump. All we really have to do is want to
get out of the swamp. He is ready to bring all the resources of Heaven to our aid the moment we
show the slightest genuine interest in His offer.

This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

The enemy of our souls would have us believe, if he can’t get us to be bigoted atheists (all atheists
are bigots, otherwise they would be agnostics), that God is a mean SOB whose greatest pleasure is
our pain, or else, if that doesn’t work, that God is so magnanimously liberal that how we live our lives
doesn’t matter, and that we all will go to heaven when we die. In either case, we have little reason to
make an effort to get close to God, where we would actually learn what He is really like. So, by first
leveling the playing field and making sure that no one has any reason to climb on top of anyone else
and say that because they are a better person they will be treated better by God, and then by
establishing that everyone, serial killer or Mother Theresa, beggar or billionaire, can become
68
clean and right in His eyes simply by surrendering their self-destructive independence to Him through
Jesus Christ, God has completely dismantled the enemy’s only argument that can legally and
justifiably eternally separate man from God. He has both fulfilled the terms of His own Law, and then
done an end run around them. (Paul will argue in detail to this conclusion by chapter 8.) I want to
note here, and will discuss in depth further along, that Paul says that God “passes over former sins”.
(Romans 3:25) It is my contention, based upon scripture, that God does not hold human beings responsible
for actions that they do not understand…That he judges the human soul only against the light that it is
aware of. Original Sin guarantees that the un-regenerated soul will die separated eternally from its
Creator, but the “torment” of that separation is, in some measure at least, related to the way that soul lived
its life on earth. I do not believe that God is going to hold such a soul accountable for anything it did not
understand was “wrong”, and that God will honor those things that that soul attempted to do that it
believed were “right”, and that this will temper the alienation of the “outer darkness” of eternity. God is not
judgmental or vindictive, and all of His judgments are redemptive…He will not discipline or punish more
severely than is necessary to accomplish a redemptive and positive goal. (cf. John 15:22-24)

It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has
faith in Jesus.

God has established, before Heaven and earth, that He is absolutely True and Self-consistent….
morally constant and uncompromisingly righteous….eternally faithful and trustworthy. And therefore,
alone, is God, Almighty and Sovereign, and is qualified to sit upon the Throne of Creation.

Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the
law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Because all of this proceeds from and is entirely dependent upon Him, we have no ground whatsoever for
boasting or bragging…Nothing that really matters can be initiated by us apart from Him. Anything that is
our doing independent of Him is effectively irrelevant on an eternal scale. We can be proud of our little
accomplishments, I suppose, but we really need to get some perspective. We need to submit ourselves to
our Maker/Father and live humble lives of service to one another. Do you realize that, if each one of us
simply asked ourselves in every situation of our day, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and then acted
accordingly, virtually every problem in the world would be resolved? Not to mention our own personal
hang-ups? (Try this: Read Matthew 5,6,7...do one verse, don’t go to the next one until you’ve
accomplished that one and made it a part of your life.)

Listen to James, the half-brother of Jesus:

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he
himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire
when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. James 1:13-15

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?
You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not
have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your pas-
sions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore
whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no pur-
pose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives
more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves
therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep.
Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will
exalt you. James 4:1-10

69
In Romans again:

Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one—
who will justify the circumcised by faith

The Jews, who had the Law and its very unique and special promises as well, needed to realize that
they could not keep the Law but had to believe into the God who had set them apart to be His people
on the earth…That the Law was good, for it taught them more about God than anyone on earth had
known since Adam, but that, as Paul later says, “it was a schoolmaster to lead them to Christ”. Galatians
3:24,25

and the uncircumcised through faith.

The non-Jews, not bound to the Law, not having all the micro-details of the Mosaic Covenant, simply
have to embrace the work of Christ and receive the redemption available to them through the faith of
Christ alone. Their obedience is entirely in terms of the New Covenant, and their calling and work is
specifically defined as the “preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God”. (Matthew 24:14;Luke 16:16;Matthew
28:18-20) This is a different mandate than was given to blood Israel, though Messianic Jews are also
included in this Kingdom Calling. Messianic Israel has a distinct role to play in these end days.

(These issues have exercised the Church for all of the past two millennia and have caused (wrongly
and shamefully) countless contentions and divisions: I do not want to try to debate them here.
Suffice it to say, here, that while there are significant differences between Jewish Christianity and
Gentile Christianity on some levels, and that their callings, mandates, and rewards in God are
different and specific, the New Covenant is also very clear that the “wall of separation” has been razed
(Ephesians 2:14) and that the two communities are “one new man” (v.15) in Christ, and that there is one
“Body of Christ”, the Church, of which Christ is the Head. (Colossians 1:18:2:19;Ephesians 4:15,16;1:22) God is
vast, and His Plans and Purposes are huge, involving both this present earth and a “new heavens and
earth” (2 Peter 3:13), and the larger multi-dimensional multi-verse as well: We know that He doesn’t play
favorites, but we also know that He assigns very specific tasks, and that His promises and rewards
are very individualized, both to specific persons and to people-groups. The Jewish people are unique
in God’s eyes, and are to be honored. They are our Elder Brother. The Gentile church would not
exist if the Jews had not carried the torch of the Testimony faithfully forward for fifteen hundred
years.) They birthed Christ. They are presently God’s Timepiece in earth, and we will be held
accountable for how we respect or disrespect them, and whether or not we stand with them in the
face of the now-resurgent anti-Semitism of the post-modern Politically Correct world. Nevertheless,
the Church is also unique, reaches beyond and spiritually deeper than Israel, is especially called of
God to this time and generation, and has a preeminent place in the War that is now upon us. Paul is
focussed on the Church.

Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

The Law, therefore, as Paul will elaborate further on, is the Divine light shown into our darkness to throw
sin into stark and unmistakeable relief…to expose it for what it really is. Before the Law, after sin
entered our realm, mankind lived out its life in internal contradiction and guilt, and in external frustration
and rage, and then died in ignorance and fear of a vast metaphysical unknown. We had no fixed
reference point by which to judge the rightness and wrongness of behavior, just a guilty conscience and
the increasing burden of our lifetime of shame and failure and internal confusion at our lapses into
madness. God introduced the Law to begin to teach us of the depth of our depravity, the expectations
of the Soveriegn Creator God, and of the hopelessness of our situation apart from His intervention. It
is the hard diagnosis of a wise physician who cares for us enough to tell us that we have a terminal
disease. The introduction of justification by faith, far from negating or overthrowing the Law, proves that
the Law is absolutely right in its judgments.
70
 CHAPTER 4

What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justi-
fied by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

Human boasting is just that; human boasting. And if our “works” and accomplishments, however
grand, don’t impress God, then what’s the point in our trying to climb over one another to make
ourselves out to be someone in this life and to “toot our own horn”? We can’t take it with us. God
cares about people, not things. Biblically speaking, this life is all about relationships, and the Bible is
very clear that God is going to call us out on how we treated each other while we were in skin. He
has absolutely no interest in how much money we have made or how big an empire we have built.
He is beyond rich and He will give us anything we can handle…or not, as He sees fit: He takes care
of His own. He really has a lot to say about posing, about being a suck-up, and kissing-butt, and
favoritism and brown-nosing and arrogance and egotism and intimidation and manipulation and all
that sort of thing… He hates it all because it distorts and damages people. He likes kindness and
compassion and sharing and caring. There is wisdom in being humble… in doing everything possible
to keep the ego in its proper place. Our ideas of success are not His ideas of success.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.
Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd sepa-
rates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King
will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you
from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in
prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry
and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked
and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them,
“Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil
and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a
stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit
me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or
sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you
did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punish-
ment, but the righteous into eternal life.” Matthew 25:31-46

And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in
the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plenti-
fully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do
this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I
will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God
said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they
be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:15-21

Paul continues:

For what does the Scripture say? v“Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Now to
the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but
believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the
blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:

71
 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sins are covered;
blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”

Paul now begins to argue his case that Abraham, the patriarch of both Israel and Christianity (and
also claimed by the third “people of the book”, Islam, through Isaac’s half-brother, Ishmael), from the
beginning of his relationship with God was in that relationship on grounds of FAITH, not on grounds
of religious works, especially not of keeping the Law of Moses as a practicing Jew.

Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? We say that faith was counted to
Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It
was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteous-
ness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all
who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, and to
make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the foot-
steps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.

Paul presses his argument further, saying that the Faith covenant established between God and
Abraham preceded the “seal” of circumcision (which was the identifying mark of the Jewish male, and
the sign that the Jewish priesthood and leadership used to claim that they alone were God’s Chosen
People on earth). The Jews of Paul’s day argued that in order to be “saved” one had to be
circumcised and become a Jew and keep the Mosaic Law, even if one then decided to accept Jesus
Christ as Messiah. (Sorry, but women were regarded as second class by the Jews, and really had
little standing in the religious system of Paul’s day…Not so by the First Church, who cherished its
women as equal heirs to the Kingdom of God.) Paul’s point is that the terms of God’s faith-based
covenant with Abraham were established BEFORE the sign of circumcision was given, long before
the Jewish nation was even a quiet joke between Abraham and Sarah, and therefore circumcision
was not required in order for the terms of justification by FAITH to be in effect.

This Abrahamic Covenant still applies to those who do not have more “light” than Abraham had. THIS
Covenant, the Covenant with Abraham, is the “Preamble” to the New Covenant : The Law of Moses
is NOT! (And the church is in error if it teaches or implies that it - The Mosaic Covenant- is).

For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law
but through the righteousness of faith. For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null
and the promise is void.

Paul speaks of the rewards of the keeping of the commandments of the Law as “wages”…a paycheck
earned for doing a competent job. And we have already established that nobody can even come
close to doing a decent job of keeping the Law…of earning his or her pay. We are all screw-ups.
Everybody, Jew or Gentile, according to the terms of that contract, deserves to be fired… TERMINATED.
“The soul that sins shall die”. But Paul speaks of the Righteousness of Faith in terms of PROMISE. God
has made a promise. A promise is not a contract: It does not require two parties both keeping
complicated terms, though there might be terms involved. Terms of promise, nevertheless, are
fundamentally different from terms of contract. One person can bind himself by promise. God has
promised that if we simply believe in Jesus and submit ourselves to Him through His Holy Spirit, then
our entire backlog of guilt from sin will be erased and forgotten, and Christ’s own right standing before
God will be applied to us, with all the perks and benefits associated with that intimate relationship.
We cannot earn this righteousness: We can only accept it. Once we accept it all the good character
and faithfulness of God stands behind the promise.

72
For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.

If we refuse the offer, we remain under Law…minimally under the Primal Law, but for each of us the
Law according to our internal understanding of right and wrong, whatever that amounts to, and the
more we profess to understand Truth the greater that burden becomes, (cf. Chpt. 7), with the Jew
remaining under Moses’ Law, and we remain estranged from God, which is to “abide under the Wrath
of God”. (John 3:36) If we accept the offer, we “die to the law of sin and death”,(Romans 8:2) and begin to
live eternally according to the “law of liberty” (James 1:25;2:12) in Christ. We are no longer “slaves to sin”,
but are now “bond servants to Christ”, (Romans 6,7,8;Philippians 2:7;Romans 1:1;Revelation 19:5) who happens to
be the coolest, most wonderful benevolent despot Master in the whole Universe…. servanthood was
never so liberating as it is when we surrender and submit to our Creator/Father through the Pattern
Son and begin to truly live the life we are created to live. Nothing is ever happier than when it is
being exactly what it is meant to be. This is why King David, the most blessed King of Israel, could
sing:

For a day in your courts is better

than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
the LORD bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
O LORD of hosts,
blessed is the one who trusts in you! Psalm 84:10-12

Paul goes on:

That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his off-
spring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the fa-
ther of us all,

By condemning all of us under sin through the Law , God has been able to guarantee that every human
being once again has equal opportunity to come before Him personally and without fear, without having to
grovel before man or demon, shaman, priest, pastor, or guru, without having to come up to some accept-
able standard of self-righteousness, and do meaningful and honest business with Him with the real hope
of being free from guilt and shame, and of escaping the dark talons of death. In Christ we can know un-
equivocally and with absolute confident assurance that when we die we will stand clean before our God
and will be given entrance into His eternal Heaven. In Christ we can live our entire lives here and now
completely free from the shadows of the past, anxiety about the future, and fear of death. I know this to
be true, because I am doing it. I live this way each day.

as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed,
who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In hope he believed against hope,
that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.”

He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a
hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver con-
cerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God
was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” But the
words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us
who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and
raised for our justification.
73
 CHAPTER 5

Therefore

(A little Bible study trick: Whenever you see the word “therefore”, pause and ask yourself what it is
“there for”…It always introduces a conclusion drawn from a reasoned argument, and is always an im-
portant transitional word.)

“Religion” means “to restrain”…from two Latin words meaning “ to bind again”…But true Christianity
liberates: Freed forever from the bondage of the Law, in Christ the “therefore” means:

since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Our internal conflict of soul and spirit is over: We can look God in the eye without shame. He loves
us; we can learn to love Him fully in return.

Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand,

We have open access to the Throne Room of the High King of Heaven, and more than that, when we
go there we can climb into Daddy’s lap.

and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Ho-
ly Spirit. Romans 14:17

Until we know God we do not know what joy is. We might think we do, but at best we experience
moments of happiness. Happiness is an emotional high…it is transitory and moody. It fluctuates and
vacillates, and what makes us happy today often bores us to tears tomorrow. A perceived insult or a
minor inconvenience can steal happiness away from us in an instant. Joy, on the other hand, is
unaffected by circumstance or mood. True joy is not a human emotion. It is a Divine state of being. It
is birthed in God’s heart and draws from His infinite wellsprings. It provides sustained reserves to
endure through the most difficult of times and circumstances with peace and strength. It is a taste of
the atmosphere of Heaven now, a down payment, a small token of the Presence of God and a
glimpse of His Glory. True joy, in the manifest Presence of God, is beyond description. True joy
belongs only to God’s people. I experience it. All true Christians have experienced it and can testify
to the experience. No adrenalin rush or drug high or sexual climax comes close.

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings,

Because we Christians have the confidence of God’s acceptance and approbation, and have
experienced His joy, and have His explanation of the human condition and of the War in which we are
engaged, we can understand that the world is a dangerous place, and that we will experience trouble
in it. We can also understand why God does not simply insulate us from all hardship, or pull us out of
the world altogether. And we can understand that our sufferings and challenges are necessary
exercises designed to build our character toward eternal goals that our Maker has set for us. There-
fore, rather than complaining, we can rise to the challenge and embrace life as it comes at us, and
grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord, knowing that He himself went through the exact same
testing and proving process. He has promised that He will ask nothing of us that He will not also pro-
vide to us all the resources for us to overcome. Nor will He ask anything of us that He has not al-
ready endured.

74
.No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted
beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to en-
dure it. 1 Corinthians 10:13

let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is
set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him
endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:1

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,

nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father
does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate
children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them.
Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it
seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all dis-
cipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who
have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight
paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. Strive for peace with
everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the
grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that
no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that
afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he
sought it with tears. Hebrews 12:5-17

Therefore he (Jesus) had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and
faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself
has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. Hebrews 2:17-18

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was
able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obe-
dience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who
obey him, Hebrews 5:7-9

Paul continues:

knowing that suffering produces endurance,

We are not really tested unless we are tested for real. And all testing, really, entails suffering, whether
mental or physical, whether it is the stress of a pop-quiz in junior high, or the pressure of a graduate
exam, or the uncertainty of the loss of a job after nineteen years of loyal service, or the pain of a
rebellious teenage child, or the diagnosis of a malignant tumor, or being taken prisoner by Al-Qaeda
terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan. None of us knows who we really are until we find
ourselves in the fire without warning and without a cheat sheet or an escape plan. All of us can keep
up appearances, when the pressure isn’t on. And it is through such experience that we learn to be
strong…to persevere…to endure, to depend upon God….to “overcome” (Revelation 2-3). Or we discover
that we are weak, sniveling, hypocritical cowards who need to repent and reach out so that we can
discover how to depend upon God. And we pass… or we fail. And we get up and go at it again…or
we don’t. We learn about choices and consequences. And so, we prepare for eternity. It’s what this
life is about.
75
and endurance produces character,

The strongest, most resilient steel is hammer-forged. I don’t know a lot about metallurgy, but I do
know that such steels as make the finest swords are produced by taking carefully blended alloys, and
then heating them to near white-hot temperatures and beating them, time after time after time, with
sledgehammers on anvils until the very molecules of the metals are welded together. And after the
sword is shaped and balanced, then these hammer-forged metals are heated and cooled again in
another violent process, violent enough to make the metal scream, to temper them to make them
able to hold a razor edge, and make them strong, and also very flexible so they won’t break in battle.
In the Far East and Arabia the processes are even more subtle and arcane. I have heard that the
finest Japanese katanas are so sharp that in the hands of a master swordsman they can sever a
human head from its neck without it falling off, yet are so resilient that they can be bent nearly double
without breaking or taking a set. This is character: It only comes through time and intensely painful
process.

No one is born with character: Only with potential. Character must be forged. And the only forge for
human beings is the experience of the “school of hard knocks.” In today’s soft and indulgent Western
society remarkably few people graduate from this school, at least with grades worth remarking about.
Most drop out, if they even bother to enroll at all. The brilliant Oxford don, C.S. Lewis, lamented a
generation of “men without chests.”: without heart. I fear that we live in a nation filled with men and
women who, if they have chests at all, those chests are implants filled with silicone gel.

And most people are capable of wearing masks for extended periods that hide who they truly are,
even from themselves. Only when the Lord puts us into situations that keep us under pressure for
sustained periods, and pushes us to endure past our predetermined notions of what is an appropriate
length of time for such tests, do we actually begin to see who we really are. (For me the period has
been about 22 years….for at least 15 of which I was almost clueless as to what God has been doing:
I’ve been remarkably pig-headed. For Moses it was 80 years, but he had to bring a nation to birth
and write down the Law of God for them, so he probably required some graduate level preparations.
Even Jesus took thirty years to prepare.)

In the world, all load-bearing and potentially dangerous products are stress-tested beyond their
breaking points to discover just where those points of failure are. God tests people in much the same
way, often breaking them then healing them. He let Paul be stoned to death once. For the non-
believer, when they break, that is their time to bend the knee before God and surrender. God tests
them in His mercy to the end of themselves to lead them to life. Once in Christ, because we have His
infinite resources at our disposal, rather than breaking under the pressures, we have the option of
always growing stronger and more like Him. We are being transformed (biblical Greek:
metamorphosis ~ like caterpillars into butterflies) into “King’s Kids”. (Ps.51:17; Matthew 22:43-44)

and character produces hope,

Hope is the one thing with which human beings can overcome impossible challenges, and without
which we humans die almost more quickly than we do if we are deprived of air. Human beings are
incredibly hopeful creatures by nature, even in our fallen state. Hope, as it is revealed in the
scriptures, is a supernatural “force”, or property, related to faith, without which we cannot survive as
spiritual creatures. Hope is a Divine characteristic.

In Christ, as our experience of His sustaining Presence accumulates over time and we learn, not just
to tentatively expect that He will care as much for us tomorrow as He did today (as in “I hope that
Jesus will answer my prayers”), and as we become more like Him in our own character and in our
knowledge of the faithfulness of our Father, true God-quality Hope grows in our souls.

76
This kind of life sustaining Hope, hope that springs from eternal wells, becomes an anchor that can
hold us through anything this world might throw at us…And more than an anchor, this Divine Hope is
also the immovable mountain into which our anchor is imbedded, and is itself even the fixed star in
the Heavens by which we always can orient our course.

and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit
who has been given to us.

From the first glimmer of our redemption when we begin to think about God, to the Day we stand be-
fore the Great Throne and hear “Well, done, My good and faithful and beautiful child” (Matthew
25:21surr;Luke 19:17surr), God’s Love for us has been the song that has been calling us home. As we
learn the glory of His Grace, and experience the gift of His faith building in us, that ever-increasing
Love empowers us to move forward, and is a vast river drawing us deeper and deeper and carrying
us ever onward until we are wholly immersed in it and are being swept along by it. And as we realize
the reality of that Love, our understanding of God moves out of our heads and into our hearts and
becomes a vital and continuous conversation guided by the Holy Spirit, instead of a theory to be mem-
orized and debated in Sunday school.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

The Gospel is a revelation of Love, much much more than it is a revelation of judgment. The “Wrath of
God” is very real. As I have said, it is the chaotic and anarchistic condition that prevails wherever
God is not acknowledged as God. All enemies of God are under the Wrath of God; and all non-
Christians exist under the Wrath of God, and if they do not repent, will perish inevitably in the Wrath
of God when God deals finally with His enemies. And the judgment of God is certain, because it is
simple and reasonable logic that rules have to have teeth, or else they are meaningless, (we all know
this in our hearts), and it is necessary that the devil be held accountable for his rebellion. There are
eternal rules by which the creation is framed and sustained…they cannot be mocked without
consequences. Justice requires this.

But God IS love, and it is His Purpose that all of His creations fully and freely experience that love.
Every sentient creature who desires to participate in that experience will be able to participate in that
experience: The only condition is that we acknowledge our error and agree to abide by the Rules.
God has bent over backwards with extreme patience to make sure that this opportunity be extended
as far as possible for as long as is possible.

So even though it was essential that God, in mercy, first reveal to us the utter hopelessness of our
plight and of our condition in seeking to live independently of Him, by requiring that we keep an
impossible Law in the hope that we would realize that it is impossible to keep, His ultimate purpose
was to convince us of the futility of our rebellious resistance and the insanity of our desire for
independence. He then revealed the full depth of His love for us by emptying Himself (see Paul’s
letter to the Philippian church, chapter 2) to become one of us, by living our life with all of its
limitations and temptations but without succumbing to them to show us that it can be done if done
properly, by embracing our deserved guilt as His own, even though He did not deserve it, and by
absorbing the full blow of our required death under His own rules, in order to be able to look Lucifer in
the eye and say “It is FINISHED…I have paid fully the penalty that I myself established for human sin.
You no longer can hold humanity hostage against Me. And I claim the lives of all who seek refuge in
Me! If they willingly choose to come to me for sanctuary, I will accept them.”

He did this so that He could save us, save me, save you …from eternal hell. Because He loves us,
and there is nothing we can do to save ourselves.

77
This is GRACE: “God’s choice to treat us as if we deserve to be heirs of His goodness. In His mercy
God refrains from giving us what our disobedient actions and evil inclinations warrant. He took that
penalty Himself, as God the Son.” Dr. Hugh Ross, Why the Universe is the Way It Is, pg.200 (A book
I highly recommend. It is available at www.reasons.org )

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—
but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have
now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we
were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall
we be saved by his life.

Paul reiterates this point throughout his letters, as he does the other bottom line Truths of the Gospel:
We are very dull of hearing, and need to have these basic Truths pounded into our hearts over and
over again just to override the somnombulance of the deception that we all have been born into and
live under.

Unregenerate man tends to think of God only in terms of fear and anger and judgment, because we
are subconsciously aware that we are all under “the wrath of God”, and because Satan, who is the
warlord who runs this planet, has the advantage when we are afraid of God, and he works diligently
to feed into our fears: As long as we are afraid of God, or do not believe in God, we will not seek God,
or turn to Him for help. But God has done everything He can possibly do, short of forcible coercion,
to awaken us from our distorted misperceptions and to reveal to us who He really is and what is really
going on.

Here Paul begins his argument that if God has gone to such incredible lengths as the Incarnation at
such incredible personal cost as the crucifixion to save us from His judgment, He certainly is going to
protect and nurture His investment in each one of us, once He has convinced us to decide to make
our escape from the enemy’s camp to return to Him through Jesus Christ.

More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received rec-
onciliation.

And this should certainly cause us to rejoice.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all
men because all sinned

This is a very clear reference to the “original sin”- Adamic DNA-spiritual genetics issue that we have
alluded to above.

for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law.

Paul is quite clearly again stating here, in contradiction to what many in the Evangelical and main-
stream Christian church might say, that God is willing to overlook the sins (behaviors and choices)
that we are not aware of, that are committed in ignorance. We have said this before! God is just; He
doesn’t hold against any person those things that are not understood to be wrong. (See also Acts
17:30) Non-Christians will be judged according to the light that they have, not the darkness that they
cannot escape. If there is no awareness of a standard of judgment, then, in God’s eyes, there is no
standard of judgment to be applied. However, it must be remembered that every human being has a
certain inborn sense of right and wrong, of “oughtness”, as we have already discussed. Every human
being will be held to account, at the very least, for two things:

78
Did they love their Maker with ALL their heart, mind, soul and strength (however they may have un-
derstood this), and did they “love their neighbor as much as they loved themselves”? (The operative
word being “love”.) And, of course, none of us have. And the closer we have come to actually trying
to pull this off, the more we will have realized how far short of the ideal we actually have fallen. “For
ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) Paul will strengthen this argument fur-
ther as he continues. He has no problem repeating himself.

Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam,
who was a type of the one who was to come. (note the allusion to The Plan)

Though God may be willing to overlook many of the individual sins and failures of our lives because
he understands our ignorance and “lostness”, and He judges us only on those things we “ought” to
have known to do, nevertheless, death, both physical and spiritual, holds inexorable power over us.
“I’m going to die, You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.” (“What About Bob”, the movie )

We exist as cut flowers in a vase for our lifetime, however long or short that might be, severed from
the root, physically alive but spiritually dead, and then we inevitably succumb to mortality. We can
run, but we can’t hide. And if we have not reconnected with our Creator through the Holy Spirit in the
work of Jesus Christ, then we also remain spiritually dead and eternally separated, because,
according to the Bible, there is only one “Grace Period” offered to human beings (Hebrews 9:27). There
is no reincarnation, according to the Bible! (You can believe otherwise if you like, but you best be
certain of the credibility of the sources of your information. We Christians are ABSOLUTELY certain.
Can you say the same?)

To recap: Original Sin (capital “S”) guarantees our death and separation from God and our exclusion
from Heaven; our sins (small “s”) apparently affect the degree of our “torment” in the hell that
describes that separation. Redemption through Christ is the only Divinely appointed solution to our
dilemma.

Regarding “type”

Biblically a “type” is a prefiguring of something or someone…Something like an allegory but more sub-
stantial (beyond the Platonic “Ideal Forms”), a “shadow” cast into our world by something from a high-
er dimension. God, in scripture, uses type to reveal and instruct his people in advance of His larger
purposes. Usually this has to do with the Old Covenant events and images and people being offered
by God as prophetic word pictures previewing the Person and Work of Christ and the Revelation of
the Gospel of the Kingdom of God in the New Covenant.

Adam prefigured Jesus Christ. In a lesser measure so did such biblical characters as Moses and
Joshua and Joseph. The Tabernacle of Israel is revealed in the letter to the Hebrews as a direct
point-for-point type of the “true Tabernacle not made by human hands in Heaven” (Hebrews 8:1-5), a spiritual
reality beyond our understanding at this time. Abraham and Hagar and Sarah are revealed as a “typi-
cal allegory” of the relationship of God with Israel and with the Church (Galatians 4:21ff). Marriage
between a man and a woman are explained as a living modeling, a dress rehearsal, of “Christ and
the Church” (Ephesians 5:32). And so on.

The entire Bible is a supernatural book, the “Living Word of God”, and as such it is written by God
transdimensionally in order to achieve many purposes. It is unique. No humanly authored book is
comparable.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace
of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.

79
Paul uses contrast, rather than comparison, to try to convey the wonder of the work of Christ in our
behalf. He uses the phrase “much more”, not just here, but three times in this section, as he reaches
for words. (Romans 5:9,10,15,17; see also 11:12,24 and 1 Corinthians 6:3, 2 Corinthians 3:11) Adam blew it big time,
but God’s solution to the problem is orders of magnitude greater! Nothing man can do can “out do”
God…

except that I can say “no” to Him…and He will listen. That’s scary.

And the free gift is not like the result of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought
condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.

And the effect of Christ’s sacrifice was diametrically opposite to that of Adam’s rebellion. When Adam
turned away from God he set in motion a chain reaction that condemned a race to death and
destruction. When Christ, the Second Adam, turned back to God in obedience, He opened a
gateway into eternal life through which every individual is free to pass upon request, as long as he
leaves all of his or her accumulated baggage behind, and walks through the gate naked, and puts on
the clean clothes of righteousness (right thinking and right living….right BEING) that Jesus has for him
or her to wear.

For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive
the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

We all know the cold breath of death, much as we try to ignore it as we run the rat race and do all we
can to distract our way through our lives. Whether it is at the moment of a near miss collision on the
freeway, or during a cold-sweat nightmare at three in the morning, or while watching the twelfth
permutation of Freddy Kruger’s or Jason’s escapades with a date at midnight on Halloween….We all
have our reality checks. Death reigns on planet earth.

Paul says, MUCH MORE will those who accept Christ on His terms REIGN in LIFE!!!

This is huge! Reigning is a Kingdom word….It is something royalty does. It speaks of sovereignty
and authority and power. And remember, I have already alluded to the fact that our Father adopts us
as HEIRS to His Kingdom…Princes and Princesses, in effect.....IN REALITY. King’s Kids. We can’t
be cocky about this because this is all a completely undeserved gift, but it is, nevertheless, very true.
We are “participants in the Divine nature” through Christ (2 Peter 1:4): We have Authority and power
extended to us by right of adoption. In Christ all that belongs to Christ belongs to us, and we are
called to grow up into the responsibilities of wisely exercising our privileges. The implications of this
are staggering, since Christ not only sits on the Throne of Heaven, but has also regained the
dominion over Earth that Adam lost.

Paul says we reign in LIFE. This has a multiple level meaning. First, it is referring to the
superabundant supernatural life of Christ…Power to live fully and freely, forgiven, without the shame
and guilt and grinding burden of sin.

Secondly, it is referring to the practical effect that this power of abundant life has on our mortal
existence here and now. We are no longer the powerless brainwashed victims of our circumstances,
near zombie puppets in the claws of a demonic puppet-master.

We have the infinite resources of God to draw upon and the promise of God that He is watching our
back. We have the Spirit of God symbiotically living in us and empowering and energizing us at the
sub-cellular level. We “have the mind of Christ”, are able to be God-guided, and can think clearly for
the first time. We no longer merely exist, but now we truly LIVE!

80
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. AND THE LIFE I
NOW LIVE IN THE FLESH I LIVE BY THE FAITH OF THE THE SON OF GOD, who loved me and
gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflic-
tions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship
from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden for ages and
generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles
are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we proclaim, warn-
ing everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I
toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. Colossians 1:24-29

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you
also will appear with him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: Colossians 3:3-5

Please. If you name the Name of Christ, believe the Word of God for what it says.

We are called and equipped and are being trained as God’s Special Forces to move through this
fallen world “casting down strongholds and vain imaginations and everything and every thought that would
exalt itself against the correct knowledge of God”, (2 Corinthians 10:4-6) and taking back what rightfully
belongs to God from the pretender to the Throne…The souls of all who desire to be free. We have
escaped The Matrix, and it is our calling to demonstrate God’s good will in and through our lives, and
to liberate all those who desire to disconnect from the nightmare as well.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and
life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedi-
ence the many will be made righteous.

This opportunity is open to all who desire to avail themselves of it. God would have “all men to be
saved and come to a knowledge of the Truth”. (1 Timothy 2:4) He also knows that this isn’t going to happen.
But the offer is on the table. He has done everything He can do.

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as
sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ
our Lord.

As we have already observed, the Law was given, not to be accomplished, but in order to convince us
that we cannot possibly achieve by our own efforts the perfection of character required by God of
those who would stand before Him. It was never meant to be kept. It was designed to drive us to our
knees in utter helplessness, yet not without hope.

81
 CHAPTER 6

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died
to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized
into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection
like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to
nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin.

For many Christians the idea of living life free from repeated sin and guilt is at best theoretical, an
ideal to be upheld but not to be expected in this life….frankly, a great many people don’t even really
seem to think about it. Many Christians live guilt-ridden lives and try to dump their weekly burden of
failures and shame at the Sunday altar call in a never-ending cycle of religious one-step-forward-two-
steps-back (or on a good week two steps forward one step back). They never have any sustained
spiritual strength or victory in their lives. Unfortunately, far too many in church leadership perpetuate
this heresy either deliberately, because it gives them control, or unconsciously, because the errors in
doctrine have become the warp and woof of Evangelical “traditions of men”, and of popular theology
disseminated through our ubiquitous media outlets and bookstores by celebrity preaching. We
honestly think that we are preaching the Bible: We are not. We have simply stopped thinking about
what we are saying and are parroting commentaries and other preachers who are parroting
commentaries and other preachers. We may be preaching the letter, but we have lost the Spirit once
again.

We constantly hear from too many pulpits the mantra that we are still “dirty rotten sinners saved by
Grace”. The Roman Catholic church is built around that dogma, requiring its faithful to perform a
blood sacrifice on a weekly basis to maintain their salvation, effectively perpetuating the ancient
Jewish temple worship, and not declaring the New Covenant Truth that has made that paradigm
obsolete.

Much of the Protestant church still implies this as well if it doesn’t preach it outright. In both Catholic
and Protestant churches a dead Savior still hangs on the cross, and we are taught to mourn His
death and feel guilty for it. 80% of Sunday sermons are some variation of hellfire and damnation,
preached to the choir as much as to the declining number of non-believers who might have wandered
through the door looking for something to hope in.

In both camps “having faith” has become, in a very real sense for many, a work of the flesh, instead
of a confidence, with God’s children constantly begging Daddy to forgive them over and over again,
and let them come home…. Not realizing that they are dangerously close to accusing God of “child
abuse” and a cruel psychological and spiritual sadism: Like He enjoys our groveling and our begging
Him for forgiveness. Far too many believers are back under law, approaching our Father in fear
instead of in love. This ought not to be!

Or in the mainstream pseudo-christian “churches” that have sold out to progressive liberal humanism
and the social gospel or liberation theology, personal sin is downplayed to the point that it has
become just another bullet point in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disoders; After all, “we’re only human”.... While all the while social sin is being
trumpeted until everyone whose skin is not pigmented or who is not living in squalor is wallowing in
angst and generational guilt. The whole idea of Heaven, and perfect mental and physical well-being,
and healthy relationships, and all that stuff is pie-in-the-sky religious idealism, a fairytale fantasy to
help us cope with life’s hard reality…. People are basically idiosyncratic; on a continuum from

82
mildly eccentric to certifiably insane, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it beyond therapy
and drugs. There is no such thing as “normal”. God, whoever He, She, or It is, will just have to
understand, if such things matter to him, her, it at all.

Hogwash, Poppycock, Balderdash, Twaddle, Bunk, Rot, Bull…. Politically Correct horseapples! Did I
miss anything?

We WERE “dirty rotten sinners” that need to be saved by Grace…Now we are CHRISTIANS, if we
have met the Lord…NEW CREATURES in Christ! (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15) (Greek: Entirely new in
kind and quality.)

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All
this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself 2 Corinthians 5:17-18

Paul is flat out stating here, and he hammers this point over and over again in his other letters, that
THE LIFE OF CHRIST IN US BECAUSE OF THE DEATH OF CHRIST FOR US “HAS SET US FREE FROM SIN”. And
every other New Covenant writer concurs.

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

This is present reality, not just some future hope. Our life here and now with Christ is called “WALK-
ING with the Lord”! That means that the “newness of life” is for THIS life, and not for some Elysian
Fields outing after we die! What point is there in calling the Gospel “Good News of Victory” if it
effectively accomplishes nothing until after we croak? That’s what “religion” teaches…and religion
inevitably leads to bittersweet “hopeful” (sic) fatalism at best and bondage and psychological torment
at its worst. New Covenant Christianity offers life-transforming LIBERTY! That it why it is worth our
hope and the investment of our lives. Otherwise it is a waste of time. (1Corinthians 15:19)

I (Jesus) alone came in order that they might be possessing life, and that they might be possessing it in
SUPERABUNDANCE. (Kenneth Wuest’s translation of John 10:10)

Certainly we are still trapped in a mortal, weakened body, and will be, until we are glorified and given
a “body that is like Christ’s own immortal resurrected body” (1 Corinthians 15:35ff; Philippians 3:21), and we
are each one of us dealing with the residues and memories of our unique fallen pasts before we met
the Lord, which can be challenging, but not insurmountably so. Paul will state this in a few pages;

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may
discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

This means that even the folds and creases in the gray matter of our brains, the archives of our
memories, however traumatic, can be rewritten by the healing presence of the Holy Spirit as we yield
ground to Him. I know this to be true, because it has been and is ongoingly my own personal
experience.

And he writes in another letter:

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare
kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of
seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another
for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is

83
of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the
moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory. So is it with the resurrection of the dead.
What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown
in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural
body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written,“The first man Adam became a living being”; he last Ad-
am became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The
first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also
are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have
borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this, brothers:
flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I
tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be
changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the
saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and zthe power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives (Present Tense)
us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:36-57

Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.
For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of
Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly
things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will trans-
form our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to
himself. Philippians 3:17-21

Paul is clearly writing here of the transformation that will take place at the second coming of the Lord,
but even as he writes he must use language that extends into the present, and to the effectiveness of
Christ’s victory over sin and death and Lucifer’s claims HERE and NOW. Because our transaction
with Christ is absolute, all of my mortal life, past, present, and future, is “covered by the blood”, as
Christians are wont to say.

According to God’s word, when we do business with Christ, the past is erased: “It is
finished!” This is what Christ cried in triumph from the cross as He yielded up His spirit in
death:….Death…WHICH COULD NOT HOLD HIM DOWN!!!!

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised
from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to
sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive
to God in Christ Jesus.

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to
sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from
death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over
you, since you are not under law but under grace.

So what has been HAS DIED, and is now come to a new life!

84
THEREFORE, IF ANYONE IS IN CHRIST, HE IS A NEW CREATION. THE OLD HAS PASSED AWAY; BEHOLD,
THE NEW HAS COME. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

And because we are revived from our spiritual death into a symbiotic relationship with “the same
Spirit that raised Christ from the dead”, we are empowered to live the same quality of life that
He lived while on this planet as one of us. The final metamorphic transformation is still a future expe-
rience, but the transaction has been made and the process is NOW in full motion… Paul writes in Ro-
mans 8,

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does
not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because
of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does
not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because
of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in
you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who
dwells in you.

So then, brothers,we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the
flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. Romans 8:9-13

Paul is clear: We can live free from the domination of sin!

This does not mean that we won’t screw up…we will and we all do, especially as we are growing up
into this new life that we have been reborn into and are learning its rules, but it does mean that we
always have the real choice not to sin, and that we can actually MAKE the choice not to sin.

And it does mean that, as we grow up in Christ, we should sin less and less on an ongoing daily
basis: The mature Christian is not going to be sinlessly perfect, because this mortal flesh is Adamic,
but he or she is supposed to be very Christlike. We do not spend this life going around and around
the same mountain: We do enter the Promised Land, and we do slay the giants that live there. If you
are not doing so there is a problem.

Saint Peter, and Saint Paul, and Saint John, and Saint Augustine, and Saint Francis of Assisi, and
Pope John Paul II, and Mother Theresa were not the exceptions… They were the rule! We really
don’t have any excuses. They were no different from us…they just had the courage and the humility
to lean into God all the way and take Him at His word. I am supposed to be Saint Me, and you are
supposed to be Saint You! That’s what the Lord expects of us. The impetuous fisherman, Peter,
first among the twelve apostles, encouraged his fellowships:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him
who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promis-
es, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corrup-
tion that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your
faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfast-
ness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the
knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having
forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to make your
calling and election sure, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. For in this way there will be rich-
ly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 1:3-8

85
John, who was, as the youngest apostle, Jesus’ special “project” and friend among the twelve wrote:

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know
and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God
abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, be-
cause as he is so also are we in this world. 1 John 4:15-17

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he ap-
pears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies him-
self as he is pure. 1 John 3:2-3

Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; in is lawlessness. You know that he ap-
peared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who
keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices
righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil
has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
1 John 3:4-8
No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning
because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of
the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God… My little children, I am writing these things
to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the
righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. And
by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him”
but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him
truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him
ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. 1 John 3:9-10; 1 John 2:1-6

Jesus’ half-brother James, first elder of Jerusalem, wrote:

But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived
gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. James 1:14-15

According to Paul, we have been empowered, by the fact that the Spirit of God is inhabiting and
inspiring the true Christian, to resist the initial allurements and enticements of our mortal (biblically our
“fleshly” or “carnal”) desires…those temptations that arise because of rebellion and ego and pride and
hormones and fears, which were irresistible before we were made alive in Christ and freed from the
addictions of the lawless flesh and the enslavements our insecurities and of pandemic demonization.
And if we can resist the temptations, then we need never set foot on the slippery slopes of sin. It is a
matter of choice. Unfortunately, most contemporary Western believers never intend to live at this lev-
el of commitment, though they would not easily admit this.

work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work
for his good pleasure. Philippians 2:12-13

Regarding water baptism: Whereas the “prayer of salvation”, the so-called “sinner’s prayer”, is very
often a very private matter, baptism is the outward public sign of that inward spiritual transaction. In
itself it does nothing, but when a truly believing Christian submits to water baptism, he or she is
confessing before witnesses that he or she is accepting the terms of God’s covenant in Christ, and is
asking those witnesses to hold him or her accountable to that vow. He or she is also making this
confession and commitment before God, not just in the privacy of the heart, but verbally, which, as
we all know, is often when our good intentions are forced to become real, even to us.

86
And God both acknowledges that public commitment and confirms, through His Spirit, His promised
faithfulness in return. Water baptism is one of the three sacraments COMMANDED by Jesus Himself,
the other two being communion (the Lord’s supper) and monogamous heterosexual marriage.

Paul writes elsewhere:

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all
rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off
the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were
also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you,
who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, hav-
ing forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.
This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by
triumphing over them in him. Colossians 2:9-15

Peter writes:

Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to
God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the
right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him. 1 Peter 3:21-22

And Paul concludes:

if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,
you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is
saved. For the Scripture says, ”Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” Romans 10:9-11

Paul continues in Romans:

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised
from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin,
once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to
God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.

As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews puts it:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that
through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who
through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. Hebrews 2:14-15

(If you think about it, fear of death drives the world like a sadistic demonic slavemaster with a whip
made of poisonous jellyfish tentacles.)

Paul continues:

but the life he lives he lives to God.

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

This is not wishful thinking, not a panacea. Paul is not encouraging his readers to live in a fantasy
world of self-delusion. I am not deluded. (I will gladly meet with you over coffee to verify this.)
Because Christ has died to sin and lived to tell about it, and because He has made it possible for the
87
believer to literally and effectively participate in His death and resurrection through the symbiotic
indwelling of His own Holy Spirit, we who believe are being instructed … commanded…to reboot our
mental computer and walk through our lives in the bottom line actuality that this salvation and new life
are REAL! For the Christian, if I may put it bluntly, it is SIN not to understand and walk this out!
Nothing in scripture is more clearly explained. This is what our faith (His faith working in us!) is all
about. We do not believe in Jesus’ teachings, an idea or an ideal…We believe INTO Christ Himself!
This is the watershed difference between all religions and New Covenant biblical Christianity: Our
leader has the goods, not just the talk. (Not to mention that He is alive, not dead, and therefore is
able to deliver them.)

the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known
how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glo-
ry. Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone
mature in Christ. Colossians 1:26-28

And to not, moment by moment, be living in this Truth is faithlessness and laziness and selfishness…
a denial of the terms of our covenant with Him! Or it is ignorance, because you have been misled by
or lied to by people who should have taught you better. We serve an all-powerful God with infinite
resources that are ours for the asking, and with whom we made a binding pact paid for in blood ,…
and we are without excuses.

There will be an accounting:

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacri-
fice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone
who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much
worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has pro-
faned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know
him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful
thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:26-31

The apostle Peter writes:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him
who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promis-
es, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption
that is in the world because of sinful desire. 2 Peter 1:3-4

What is the point of our confession and a life of ridicule and persecution, whether picayune and petty
or massive and brutal, if our personal faith doesn’t have effective substance in our own life here and
now? We would be at least sensually more pleasured playing in the cesspools of the world around
us. (Again, I suggest that you watch the first Matrix movie…the sequels bombed, but the first one
touched on some rich veins of truth.)

Paul continues:

Let not (present imperative tense) sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.

We have been given the necessary tools and the power to walk through our lives without yielding to
sin…And we are commanded by our God to do so. How are we going to answer Him?

88
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to
sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from
death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over
you, since you are not under law but under grace.

Here is the crux of the matter. We “present” ourselves to compromising circumstance and temptation,
or we “present” ourselves to our High King and Lord, who will empower us to resist compromise and
temptation. Remember what James said:

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he
himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire
when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death. James 1:13-15

So the first simple step is to stop “presenting” ourselves to the wrong things. What do you do with
your time? Where do you hang out? What do you watch on TV…the movies? What do you read?
What music do you listen to? Who are your friends? Where is your head at? There is a reason that
Paul encouraged the believers at Philippi:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely,
whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these
things. Philippians 4:8

Because the scriptures have taught for thousands of years that As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.
Proverbs 23:7

out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good,
and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be
also. “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if
your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the
darkness! “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devot-
ed to the one and despise the other. ...Matthew 12:34-35; Matthew 6:22-24

If you honestly believe that black is white, then there is no way that you can ever understand what
white really is. That’s the horrible thing about deception. You are going to become what you most
practice. We all do. “You are what you eat, read, listen to, play, watch, hang out with.” And I can
guarantee that if you are trying to climb up a mountain with a backpack full of rocks, and with all your
companions trying to pull you back down…you are going to come down. It is far easier to fall than it
is to climb. It is far easier to go with the flow than it is to swim against the current, and if you swim in
the world’s mighty river you will end up being swept in the irresistable currents of the mainstream of
that river right over the biggest falls in the universe. You cannot escape: You must be saved. To put
it another way, the “on-ramp is wide and the road is an eight-lane freeway that leads to destruction” (Matthew
7:13-14) and, unfortunately, the vast majority of the lemmings are stampeding down it with lunatic
abandon. If you are even standing near the edges of that stampede you will, at some point, be swept
up in it and may not be able to break free from it even if you come to your senses and want to. There
does come a point of no return in every person’s life...that place where they have refused Christ’s
offer once too many times and they become reprobate.

No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is
not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. 2 Timothy 2:4-5

The battleground is the mind: Everything starts with a thought, which leads to a decision, which re-
sults in an action, which has a consequence. And a lifetime of such sequences becomes a destiny.

89
And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil,
correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of
the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him
to do his will. 2 Timothy 2:24-26

What you think about, privately and publicly, matters eternally. We are not in a game…We are in a
war. Paul continues:

What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

There were in Paul’s day, and are today as well, those who twist and rationalize their perceived liberty
in Christ into a license to indulge themselves in whatever turns them on… After all, if they are “dirty
rotten sinners”, as so many teach, and if the grace of God has done away with the judgment of the
Law, so that our sins can be forgiven just for the asking (as the gospel according to cheap grace
assures us that it does), then on the one hand they can’t help but sin, and on the other they simply
have to ask forgiveness for their transgressions whenever they feel guilty enough to make an altar
call (that is, whenever they get caught). Indeed, for some, the more they can show off the forgiveness
of God the better He looks, so it is all the better if they excel at sinning. In some more progressive
fellowships, they might even become the stars of Testimony Night. God doesn’t see it that way.

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but
through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: t“You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.”

As we have shown before from John’s letter, those who practice sin are not truly Christians, but are
either ignorant seekers who have yet to meet the Lord, or hypocritical frauds who will receive a just
punishment for their insincerity. Unfortunately, the cheap grace preached by too many Christian
ministers and their clones allows such camp followers to sometimes deceive themselves into
believing that they actually are going to enter into the Kingdom of God when they die: Hence the
need for a return to accurate biblical preaching in this generation, to begin to undo the damage that
has been cause by a compromised church and corrupted ministry. (Fortunately, such a revival of
Truth is now erupting around the globe and will, hopefully, soon ignite here in America. It seems to be
doing so in a number of places even now: Among the Morningstar Fellowships out of South Carolina,
with the young people at the International House of Prayer in Missouri, at Liberty University, and in
other such dynamic gatherings in many places around this nation and worldwide. Sparks are blowing
on the winds of the Spirit, and wildfire is spreading! I encourage anyone with a heart to pursue the
Lord to tune into GodTV, and catch vision of what is beginning to happen. “Aslan is on the move!” ~
Narnia the movie)

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom
you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?

Simple enough: As Dylan sang, “We all gotta serve somebody.” Paul has already established that
we cannot live our lives autonomously, because we are created as containers, designed to be in sym-
biosis with some other spiritual entity, so we don’t have the option of independence, as much as we
might like to believe that we do. We are either going to be chattel slaves to sin, and through sin the
playthings of Satan, because we don’t have the spiritual resources to resist sinning, the addictions it
leads to, or the sadistic demons who deal in them: Or we are going to voluntarily offer ourselves as
servant sons and daughters to God through Christ, who gives us all the resources we need to live
free from sin, as we enjoy responsible life and service in the palace of the High King of Heaven.

90
But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the stan-
dard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righ-
teousness.

There is no third option. Please note again, as this bears repeating: This is a “from the heart”
transaction. Simply joining a church, or agreeing to the “four spiritual laws”, or making an altar call
because you feel guilty at being caught in some misbehavior is not going to cut it. Please don’t fool
yourself: This is far too important.

Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Luke
9:62

And the writer of Hebrews observes:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from
afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus
make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they
had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a
heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. Hebrews
11:13-16

Unfortunately, the cheap grace “gospel” that has been promulgated for so long, especially in Western
cultures, now has misled uncounted millions into a false hope that is going to prove unsustainable as
the present age-ending shake-up intensifies and persecutions escalate, and many who believe
themselves to be Christians are going to fall away from the Truth in disillusionment, when, in fact,
they never really understood the Truth at all. And they will die in their sins. Conversely, a great many
also are going to embrace the Truth, because they are going to see it in its full Power and Glory for
the first time and it will grip them, and the True Church is going to truly be revealed in our generation
as

children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as
lights in the world Philippians 2:15

Continuing with Paul:

I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations.

In another letter Paul hints that if he were to try to describe this stuff the way he has been privileged
to see and hear it in the several visions and other experiences he has had of direct revelation it would
be “unlawful”.

I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught
up to the third heaven (this is at least one dimension beyond our four)—whether in the body or out of the
body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body
or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not
utter. 2 Corinthians 12:1-4

Basically, I take this to mean that if he were to reveal the incredible wonder of the full Truth, most of
us would be so mind-boggled that we would go off half-cocked with whatever we misunderstood and
would start some sort of a new-age cult with it or something. This sort of heresy always ends badly.
So, Paul tends to feed us baby food. And if God wants us to have more, then, as we humbly seek to
grow up in our understanding and learn more, and if we actually learn spiritual responsibility, He will

91
And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in
plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the
wisdom of men but in the power of God. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a
wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden
wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 1 Corinthians 2:3-7

He continues:

For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawless-
ness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. (separation from sin
and to God).

You have the option now!

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.

Before we meet Christ and receive the life enabling power of His faith and life through the Holy Spirit, we
CANNOT be righteous…It really is pointless and futile to try, though many of us still do… until we give up
in despair or become self-righteous monsters of some sort. That is why God, in mercy, gave us
conscience and Law to help us understand the situation, so that we would stop beating ourselves or
others up, would feel really rotten, and would just ask for His help.

But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of
those things is death.

Reviewing the past: Has anything you have done, or is anything you are presently doing, if you haven’t
done business with Jesus, really had or having enduring benefit? How much of the past still has
relevance for you? How many best friends have betrayed you? How many old relationships continue? Of
them, how many are really meaningful or beneficial? How many are just habits? How many “things” that
you “had to have” do you still have? What toys do you still play with that you “just couldn’t live without”?
Can you get your car into your garage past all the accumulated junk? How many storage lockers do you
pay for? Why? What memories are you proud of? Why? On a scale of one to ten, how truly happy has
your life been so far? What can’t you forget that you wish to God you could forget? How much guilt are
you carrying around? How many deep wounds haven’t healed? How many scars do you spend hours
trying to disguise? How many lies do you tell every day? How many masks do you wear? How many
hopeful dreams have faded into a sad fog? How many have become nightmares that haunt you? How
much has life become a disappointment, and hope a cruel joke? How young are you still trying to kid
yourself that you are? Have your idealisms soured in your gut yet, or are you still confident? Is there a
reason to be? Really? Are you becoming cynical or bitter, or are you still defiantly optimistic in the face of
the hard reality that the world really is going to hell in a handbasket, and that progressive utopianism and
the hope of whirled peas is a desperate grasping at a very flimsy and historically discredited straw? Have
you realized that while individuals can be decent, people in general and, as societies, are pretty mean-
spirited and nasty? That the trend is negative? What kind of future are you honestly expecting for
yourself, your kids, and your grandkids? On what, exactly, are you basing your hope and optimism?
Have you admitted yet that the human race is royally screwed up and really doesn’t have a clue how to
get out of the mess it’s in? That it is digging its hole deeper and deeper, and that the hole that it is digging
looks very much like a grave? Are you tired? Do you have thoughts of suicide? Are you hopeful for the
future? Why?

“Let God be true, and every man a liar.” (Romans 3:4) In all honesty, I don’t think that the good intentions
and plans of the world without Christ have very much to offer….They just don’t seem to be working
out all that well, and they are sounding more and more panicky and desperate. But, I am getting off
topic……

92
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctifi-
cation and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Je-
sus our Lord. (CHAPTER 7) Or do you not know, brothers for I am speaking to those who know the law—that
the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives?

Paul draws an analogy from the Law of Moses regarding marriage:

For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released
from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her
husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an
adulteress. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may
belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.

For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members lto
bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we
serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

This is clear and straightforward. Marriage is a binding covenant between one man and one woman.
Unfaithfulness on the part of either partner is a breach of that covenant. In Paul’s day, and even
today in some cultures, adultery was a capital crime. (Even in our hypocritically permissive American
culture we can get pretty ticked off about it, at least on a case by case basis….Ask Tiger the Cheetah
or John Edwards or Jesse James.) In Paul’s day, for Jews, there were only two legal ways to
dissolve the marriage covenant. Divorce was allowed for unfaithfulness, and the death of one partner
released the other partner to remarry. Otherwise, monogamous heterosexual marriage was a lifetime
covenant commitment. Adulterers and adulteresses were publicly stoned to death by the whole
community, as were any persons who slept around without being married. Sexually active teenagers
were non-existent…at least once they were discovered. There was no teen pregnancy problem.
Paul, in other places, reveals that God established marriage as a prophetic type of the relationship
God desires to have with us, but that is a profound discussion for another time. Here he is arguing
that even as the death of the husband or wife ends the marriage covenant, so our death to the Law
and its obligations, when we accept the New Covenant in Christ, ends absolutely our relationship to
that Old Covenant; either the Formal Law, if we are Jewish , or the Primal Law, if we are Gentile. We
are now “married to another” and under a new “marriage” covenant with new terms so that we “serve in
the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code”. We are entirely and truly free to bear
the sweet fruits of liberty and new quality of life. The Old Covenant has been canceled.

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have
known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But
sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart
from the law, sin lies dead.

Paul focuses in on his point about the Law being God’s merciful intervention to help humanity
understand its terrible situation.The Law, itself, is not sin or sinful. It is pure and righteous: A
statement of Truth. The Law describes, in human terms and point-by-point, the outward appearance
of a perfectly lived life…the life that is required of those who would live in the presence of God. (After
God inscribed the Ten Commandments, the people of Israel proved to be so obtuse that it became
necessary for Him to clarify the heart of Truth by having Moses spell out a long list of specific rules, in
addition to the entire Levitical Code of Worship. Unfortunately, these became a checklist, as the
priests and lawyers missed the spirit of the message and created the religious oligarchy which
dominated the nation for fifteen hundred years until the coming of Christ. Such is the nature of
bureaucracy.) Personally, I do not think that the Law is a description of everything of a perfect life,
only enough to show the futility of trying to actually live one by human effort.
93
When Adam rebelled against God he created a chasm between his Creator and mankind that cannot
be bridged by any human effort. At that moment of defiance both physical and spiritual death
became permanent curses (real curses, in the fullest meaning of that word ~ Curses are spiritual
cause/effect dynamics) upon the human race. However, neither Adam nor Eve fully experienced
death for hundreds of years after their banishment from the garden paradise that had been their
home.

(According to the Bible and according to ancient Sumerian and other accounts from around the world,
human life spans were significantly longer in the antediluvian epoch. Biological science supports the
fact that the human body and its components really don’t have to age and deteriorate as they
presently do. There really seems to be no biological reason for cells to stop replicating themselves
perfectly after a certain number of repetitions. Cell death is not understood by science. Our present
short life spans are the result of the deleterious ongoing effects of sin in the world over time, of a
direct edict from God after the Noahic flood that puts an upper limit on our lives, of environmental
degradation, and of our poor lifestyle choices and risky behaviors.)

As the memory of the garden and its fellowship faded, and the debilitating effects of sin compounded
and intensified over time with the increase of the effects of rebellion and demonic delusion, the
understanding of the real human problem was lost in confusion and myth until any accurate
knowledge of God all but disappeared in sensuality and idolatry and false religion. God’s standard
was distorted and rejected or forgotten, but death still claimed every soul, and the fear of death still
dominated and controlled every moment of life.

God, therefore, in His wisdom and at exactly the right time in His Plan, introduced the Law, through
Israel, back into the world of men so that we could begin to understand why it is that we are dying,
and why we have such deep spiritual angst, and why we can’t do anything about it on our own.

The Primal Law, the one that is “built in”, does give us a sense of right and wrong, of what “ought” to
be, of what is fair. But it doesn’t offer much in the way of specifics. If we are going to really get to
know our Creator/Father as He really is, we have to have details, so He began by giving us
something our heads could work with. The Law of Moses is extremely detailed. Israel was supposed
to spread the word around, both of God’s justice and judgments and of His mercy, but they kind of
failed pretty miserably to do this, because they became arrogantly parochial and xenophobic.

In the Old Covenant era, before Christ, before the Holy Spirit was “poured out upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17)
after the resurrection, God could not freely access the “hearts” of men and women. (This has to do
with the legal issues and the “rules” that we talked about which underpin the infrastructure of reality
itself.) Sinful man is very dull of hearing and is blind to spiritual truth and needs step-by-step
instruction in the simplest of things pertaining to righteousness. So, the Law is a point-by-point
description of behavior and action of how to be “righteous”. God says, “If you do these things, you will
be right before me and I will accept you.” (see, for example, Deuteronomy)

I don’t want to get into this at depth at the moment, but it is very important to note that the Old
Covenant deals with externals, with actions: Do this…Don’t do that. The New Covenant deals
almost entirely with ATTITUDES. This is because with the New Covenant comes the internal
empowerment of the Holy Spirit of God…the ability to change the inner man. The Old Covenant
could not deal with the root problem of “sin in the flesh”: In a very real sense it was “theory”. But the
successful spiritual assault by Christ on the Gates of Hell through the Cross did resolve the catch-22
of sin! Therefore, in Christ the heart issues can be addressed, not just the head issues of the
knowledge of sin.

I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

94
Paul is referring to physical life (our “cut-flower-in-a-vase existence”) and the fact that we are clueless
as to our spiritual death sentence until we understand the ramifications of sin.

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the
commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.

Once we become aware of the Law, be it the relatively simple statement of the Law in the Ten
Commandments (or even the very murky statements of law that might be glimpsed in the wisdom
found in other religions or philosophies where God has planted a seed of Truth), or the more complex
and detailed detailing of God’s expectations as they are recorded in the full library of the Old
Covenant (read in Synagogues), or are preached in churches through the Bible, we are awakened.
Or rather, the consciousness of sin in us is awakened. Our soul, which has known nothing but
darkness, is exposed to light. We begin to feel guilty for our actions that fall short of the Standard to
which God is holding us. As the burden of this guilt grows over time, if we are properly responding to
it, all hope dies in us that we will stand justified before God at the end of our lives.

THIS IS GOD’S MERCY! We must understand this, if we are going to escape the eternal consequences
of our separation from our Maker before the window of opportunity closes forever. The doctor must
first diagnose the cancer, and we must accept his diagnosis, before we will be able to submit to the
process of being cured.

So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

Did that which is good, then, bring death to me? By no means! It was sin, producing death in me through what
is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond
measure.

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own
actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good.

So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

This is the heart of the matter. And it is an issue that, in our rebellion and because we are deceived
and deluded, and because we have all our lives been conditioned to fear God, we do not want to
admit or deal with. We simply do not want to accept the idea that we are not in control of our lives.
But we aren’t. If God is not in control, then we are sin addicts, and because we are sin addicts we
are slaves to the big demon dealers, and ultimately to the devil’s cartel. If we want to be free from
that fatal slavery, we must surrender everything – body, mind, and spirit – to the God who made us
through Jesus Christ, who gave everything – body, mind, and spirit – to save our sorry asses.

WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THIS IF WE ARE TO LIVE!

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not
the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my
inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me
captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

95
Paul is now speaking to the seeker who is in profound internal turmoil. This is the person sitting in
the pew, or reading the Bible, or listening to the Evangelist on TV, or whatever, who hasn’t quite yet
bent their knee in full surrender. They SO want to live a good life…They are trying SO hard. But
every time they set out to do something good, they screw it up. They know what is right. They’ve
been reading the Bible. They’ve been listening to the preacherman. They want to give up the drugs,
the booze, the sex, the porn, the stealing, the lying, the fighting……They might even be going to
church every week now. They might have been going for years. Jumping through every
hoop….Even teaching Sunday school or serving as a deacon or elder. They might even be the
Pastor. They keep trying…They keep failing.

Or, as I argued earlier, it could be the indigenous tribesman in the jungles of the Amazon gazing at
the stars on a dark night, or the Muslim girl in Tajikistan trapped by Sharia…God is very big and very
compassionate: I am not willing to put the fate of these souls into the hands of some Christian
missionary or of myself, who may or may not “hear the call” and decide to answer it and find my way
to these seekers before they die.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ
our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

THIS is the difference between New Covenant Christianity and religion…

even the “Christian Religion”!

96
 CHAPTER 8

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.For the law of the Spirit of life has set
you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

This is the most amazing and life transforming news we can possibly receive if only we can grasp the
full implication of what Paul is saying, what he “did not receive … from any man, nor was … taught … but
… received … through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12) It is tragic how many “baby” Christians
seem to taste this incredible reality at the moment of their salvation experience, when they first look
into the loving eyes of their Lord and Savior, and for a time thereafter, only to have it sucked away
from them by the unrelenting ministrations of older “saints”, who systematically bind them with “sound
teaching” and the time-honored wisdom of the venerated giants of the faith, and steal their
effervescent and often inconvenient joy until they are good little pew sitting legalists like everybody
else in the church, memorizing the Book and spouting off the new law, “chapter and verse”, as
handily as any Pharisee ever could in Jesus’ day.

“When the Son of Man comes again, will He find Faith on the earth?” Luke 18:8

We can live our lives free of guilt and condemnation…free of shame…full of joy…full of peace….able
to give freely to others because we are not afraid that we are going to be diminished or degraded or
debased.

We have the approbation of God Almighty!!!

IF FATHER GOD APPROVES OF ME, IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER DIDDLYSQUAT WHAT ANYBODY ELSE IN THE
COSMOS THINKS!

I’m OK. I am secure. Jesus loves me. This I know. For the Bible tells me so. And the Author of the
Bible is living in my deep heart, whispering constant confirmations of His love to me 24/7/365! And
that means that I don’t have to put you down in order to climb on top of you so I can try to be
somebody…so you’re safe around me too. That’s good for you, whether you know the Lord or not.

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of
sinful flesh and for sin,he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might
be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according
to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds
on the things of the Spirit.

For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is
set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the
flesh cannot please God.

Paul has already established that the non-believer has no ground to stand on before God. But
neither does the so-called Christian who lives like the world. If, as James says, your faith doesn’t
show up in your day-to-day life, and especially if it doesn’t show up when nobody but God is looking,
then there is a real problem. Most likely you are not a Christian at all. At best you are building on
sand, and you will get into Heaven barely by the skin of your teeth. This is very strong language.
Even if you claim to be a Christian, if you are living like the devil then you have made yourself God’s
enemy! You are, at best, like the rebellious teenager who is getting in Daddy’s face. And Daddy,
even though He loves you bunches, is NOT going to put up with that kind of behavior for very long.
You wonder why your life is going off the rails? Maybe it’s because you’ve hijacked the train.

97
As brother James wrote:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If
a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be
warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by
itself, if it does not have works, is dead. .........Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show
you my faith by my works. James 2:14-18

In another context Paul admonishes servants to serve with integrity before God:

not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you
do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance
as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. Colossians 3:22-24;see also Ephesians 6:6-8

Both God and people are very observant of hypocrisy. And God does not look with kindness upon
those whose hypocrisy drags His good name through the proverbial mud.

many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. Their
condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. 2 Peter 2:2-3

Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about
yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! (2 Cor.13:5)

Paul continues in Romans:

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does
not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because
of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in
you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who
dwells in you.

We have already discussed this point at length above.

So then, brothers, we are debtors,

This is something that, I think, many Christians lose sight of as time passes. We owe a blood debt…

We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be
sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But since we belong to
the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.
For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so
that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. 1 Thessalonians 5:5-10

you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has
been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. Romans 7:4

that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. 2
Corinthians 5:15

It is a debt that we cannot possibly repay. Therefore it must bind us forever. We are usually very
aware of this in the “honeymoon” period of our salvation experience, when we first pass from death to
life, but, as Joni Eareckson Tada (look her up if you aren’t familiar with her story
http://www.joniandfriends.org/ ) is so fond of saying, “the trouble with life is that it’s so daily.”
98
Between the mountain-tops of Christian ecstasy and charismatic enthusiasm are those long
depressions called valleys. And you don’t get those amazing vistas and incredible sunrises and
sunsets of such places as the Rockies and the Himalayas and the Andes and the Alps without them.
(We all know what happens to people who live in a paradise like California, the “land of the fruits and
the nuts”, too long.) After a few years of the disciplines of the Lord, of living by faith, of resisting
temptation, of falling down and getting up and falling down and getting up and falling down and
getting up, and learning to confess and repent and understand just how dependent we are supposed
to be, and just how much the flesh hates discipline and structure, and how much the devil wants us
back, a lot of us get tired of the drill…The Way to life is not easy. Like I said a while back, it is a lot
easier to go with the flow. But the flow always is downhill.

We sometimes forget that we owe God our lives. We certainly don’t want to end up in Hell when we
die, but we like the idea of an open heaven without too many strings attached. We start to fudge.
We all experience intense temptations (even Jesus experienced intense temptations ~ Hebrews
4:15,Matthew 4:1), and have desires that would pull us away from what we know the Lord would want
for us, but we become really good at rationalizing such things, and at creating theologies that support
or excuse our dalliances and anesthetize our guilt feelings over our indulgences and indiscretions. In
worse case scenarios we church-hop until we find a place that overlooks our behavior and still lets us
be “good Christians” (In America this is very very easy to do). …after all, “tolerance” is a Christian
virtue, isn’t it? (NOT! I’ve checked: “tolerance” is very rarely spoken of in the Bible, and most often it
is denounced as a character flaw. Christians are supposed to have spines, and are supposed to
stand unequivocally for what is right and against what is wrong.

We are supposed to be patient and longsuffering and gentle and reasonable with those who “oppose
themselves” and the Truth: We are commanded to “speak the Truth in love”. But we are not
supposed to enable them in their opposition… we are not supposed to be tolerant, by the world’s
mangled and self-serving definition of that word. To “tolerate” the world’s sin is to be complicit in
condemning many people to eternal torment…And if you want to get a practical sense of what that
should feel like, it is far worse than, for example, if you were to walk down the streets of Port o’ Prince,
Haiti, and ignore the suffering and tragedy of the earthquake victims you have to step over to make
your way. You might as well go to Kandahar and “tolerate” a homicide bomber when you see him
getting ready to blow up a crowded market.)

We really need to remind ourselves what it means that Jesus died so that we can live, because the
more excuses we make for our own shortcomings, the harder it becomes to realize that we’re making
them, and the easier it becomes to drift farther and farther away from safe harbors until we may find
ourselves ultimately lost at sea.

So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the
flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led
by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

Jesus pointedly said:

Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of
my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name,
and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them,
‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23

Do we think He is joking, or that we are somehow the exception to the rule? Or have we forgotten
that the God we have claimed that we have done business with is no respecter of persons, and does
not play favorites?

99
He has asked Peter and Paul and James and John and countless others over the past several
thousand years to live and to die for Him. Do we think that we can get away with living

SLOPPY CHEAP GRACE

“IacceptedJesusasmypersonalsaviorandprayedthesinnersprayerandImhangingonuntilIgotoheavenwhenIdie”

lives,

and get the same reward as they get?

Bullshit…call it what it is.

Tens of thousands around the world today are dying horribly violent deaths because they have
accepted Christ. And we American Christians want some special exemption? I don’t want to get into
it here and now, but we need to come to terms with the fact that serious persecution is going to be
coming to Christians in the United States of America in the next few years as the culture continues to
unravel and our empire crumbles. Real persecution has been here before. It will come again. It is
starting already. And those who profess to be Christians, who have not come to grips with the real
implications of their covenant with God, are going to backslide right back into the world, deny the Lord,
and fall out of Grace. The Bible DOES NOT teach eternal security of the believer! And it does teach
that there will be “a great falling away”. How’s your grip?

Deal with it! Your soul and your forever depend on it.

Now therefore fear the LORD and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers
served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD,
choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or
the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
(Joshua 24:14-15)

Paul continues:

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as
sons, by whom we cry, Abba! Father!”

As I have said before, “Abba” is the Aramaic familiar word a child uses when running into Daddy’s
arms for love and comfort. Above Paul spoke of the Christian as slave to righteousness. Here he
speaks of the Christian as the child of God. Any parent holds total authority and power over his or
her children. This is a Divine right and is in the nature of things.

Modern liberal thought is completely and stupidly wrong in its opposition to this eternal Truth. In
contemporary American culture this authority has been degraded and mocked to the point where a
large percentage of our young people are running wild and catastrophically out of control, but in a
properly maintained society, children are under the jurisdiction of their parents, and that jurisdiction is
absolute. In effect, they are slaves, bound to their parents until they reach adulthood. And this is the
way God means it to be, for their safety and their nurturing. This is common sense. It is medical and
psychological insanity, and shear hubris, to ignore both the common sense understanding of the ages,
and the mounting hard clinical evidence, that the human brain and body are not matured until they
are in their mid to later twenties, and that until that time, at least, a human being is in need of strong
mentoring and disciplined guidance by wise adult teachers and counselors every step of the way,
until he or she has reached that level of maturity.

100
No young person should be left to be socialized by his or her peers, or to discover his own way in life
without close, constant, ideally lifelong, mentoring by multiple older advisors…It is manifest madness
and folly not to understand this. Children cannot think rationally. Any responsible adult understands
this. Adolescents are driven by chemical storms and irrational impulses, and have almost no ability to
visualize the unintended consequences of their actions. They do not see things with long-term
perspective. They also have little life experience upon which to draw and none of the wisdom that
comes only from such experience. Wise philosophers throughout the ages have recognized this
fundamental natural truth, it is nothing new: Young people cannot be trusted to rule themselves
without close supervision. Given the chance to answer honestly, most young people will agree with
this statement: They long for guidance, discipline, and boundaries, even as they struggle against
them, unless they are embittered by abuse or betrayal or spoiled by over-indulgence.

We of the West seem to have cast the place of parental authority aside in arrogance today in a fit of
lunatic anarchy. (Much of the rest of the world is appalled at us because of this. Indeed, at least in
some measure, radical Islamic Jihadism draws strength from this rejection of natural law by our
decaying Western society, though we are too blind and stupid to realize this. We really are, at least in
part, to blame for their assault against us, at least from their understanding of the world. We are not
innocent victims: They see our licentiousness as a malignant disease.) And, unfortunately, far too
many young adults never advance out of the teenage phase, because maturity comes through
disciplines they never are challenged to learn, because either the adults around them never,
themselves, grew up, or because they effectively abandon their kids to their own recognizance out of
frustration or laziness, and abdicate their responsibility as role models.

(This is not always entirely the parents’ fault: Many good parents have been completely
overwhelmed by the disintegration of the society since the 60’s, and the total catastrophic
deconstruction of the extended family and the traditional family paradigm by the progressive
Darwinian-Materialistic societal engineers who control most of the educational and political
infrastructure at this time. Left isolated and unsupported they have not had a snowball’s chance in
Hell against such a concerted and focused enemy force. Much of the mainstream of Christendumb
has completely bought into this post-modern lie and has served up its kool-aid to multiplied millions of
trusting faithful, Sunday after Sunday, who never have had a clue that they’ve been drinking from a
poisoned well, and whose brains are as washed in this modernist manure as were those of the
followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh in the heresies that killed them. Cultural Christianity
generally supports and applauds much of the modern humanist systems. This is a travesty. Our
semitaries should be chagrined and ashamed. We must actively rebel against this assault if our
society is to survive.)

the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is
under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. Galatians 4:1-2

(The escalating chaos among young people in our society is obvious testimony of the stupidity and
arrogant blindness of the so-called “experts” who have cast off the common sense of strong discipline,
and made most of the tools of sound parenting prosecutable crimes. Such false teachers will be held
accountable for the lies they have spread and the damage they have caused. If they do not repent
and recant, they will be damned when they stand before God.)

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For
you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you
make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Matthew 23:13-15

101
Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if
a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little
ones to sin. Luke 17:1-2

But because of the unique bond that is mother and father love, at least in truly God-centered homes,
our children are not treated as slaves. They are nurtured and groomed and disciplined and raised in
a loving environment with the full intention that when they have grown up and matured they will inherit
the power and property of the family and carry on its legacy, provided they have attained
demonstrated a level of maturity and responsibility worthy of that honor. At least, that was how it was
in Jesus’ day and when Paul was writing. Legacy and honor were passed down through family lines.
Today, far too many kids are abandoned, even if they still live at home, to fend for themselves. This
is not how it is supposed to be. Today, the demi-god Darwin rules the world of men. The lawless, who
prefer to be irresponsible animals and accountable to no one, lust and rut and indiscriminately mate
for recreation, and produce offspring as a by-product. And those spawn they don’t brutally kill before
they become inconveniences, they often let virtually raise themselves, in broken or blended or “non-
traditional” and very abnormal homes, or leave to be raised by their dysfunctional peers or some paid
surrogates, while their parents pursue their own selfish agendas; and then they kick them out of the
nest in relief, to figure out the rest of their lives for themselves or die trying. (Some are well paid by
their parents to do this, many are taught to lie, cheat, steal and do far worse to survive.)

And the mob rants and raves at why the Government, the chief surrogate, can’t do a better job at
solving all the problems that are giving them bad hair days and spoiling their fun. (Remember, that
government is being increasingly run by the grown up kids that got ruined, who have been
conditioned to believe that all of life is an entitlement...who have forgotten that Peter Pan is a fairy
tale and who probably have never read George Orwell or William Golding.)

“Professing themselves to be wise, they have become FOOLS.” (Romans 1:22) I really can’t use the language
here that describes how screwed up the non-believing anti-God society really is, lest I offend some
up-tight Christians who need to hear what I am saying. The Bible describes it as “upside down”. (Acts
17:6) (Here are some words you might substitute: %#*!&, *!%#@, !&%@$!!!!! )

(And, again, I certainly do not include in my indictment the significant number of truly loving parents
who are valiantly battling against this demonic firestorm that would consume our kids…I am praying
with all my heart for you. But I have little mercy left in me for you who blame your kids for their
behavior when you haven’t first dealt with your own. Shame on you! May God deal with you, as you
deserve. You are lazy, selfish, irresponsible bums. Your children are the mirrors in which you are
reflected!)

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

The “witness” of God’s Spirit is real. When we truly have met the Lord there is a confirmation that
cannot be mistaken for anything else, and if we cannot testify to that confirmation, then in all
probability we have not actually met the Lord and need to continue to press in with desperate
abandon until we do. There will be a battle, it is a life and death struggle, until we break out of the
demonic dungeon into which we were born, an awakening from a lifetime nightmare, and make our
escape. Again, think The Matrix. You will find the Lord only when you search for Him with all your
heart. This confirmation is not necessarily some sort of explosive fireworks experience, but it is,
above all, a clear sense of the permanent removal of the burden of the guilt and shame of our life up
to the moment before we are “born again”, and in an ongoing way thereafter a settling peace, and an
infusion of joy, which is an experience that no one but a true Christian can ever know. (If you are
arguing with me on this point right now, then you aren’t yet a New Covenant Kingdom Christian: This
is one of those “believe then you’ll see” things.)

102
Beyond that, there may be the immediate overflowing experience of the popularly described “baptism
in the Holy Spirit” with some accompanying supernatural signification like worship and prayer in
tongues (which are spiritual languages), and/or other miraculous signs. The Bible calls the indwelling
Holy Spirit “companion comforter” (Paracletos) and a “down payment” (arrabon) of better things yet
to come. It is interesting to me that the ancient Greek word translated “down payment” has come to
mean “engagement ring” in modern Greek. (Every Christian is supposed to be filled to overflowing
with the Holy Spirit. Paul says we all should be praying in heavenly languages and prophesying and
having dreams and visions and casting out demons…It’s all part of the “Christ in you the hope of Glory”
(Colossians 1:24-27) standard package. And, believe me, with the War intensifying, and with the enemies
that we are facing, we really should get over our aversion to the supernatural and gear up with the
best equipment God has to offer, don’t you think?)

And beyond that, according to the New Covenant record we’re supposed to be living lives that are
routinely miraculous (by this I mean supernaturally influenced and empowered) on a daily basis. God
has no problem with this…It’s we who seem to be in the way most of the time.

And of course, there is the bearing of good fruit.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a
result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:8-10

Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern
what is pleasing to the Lord. Ephesians 5:8-9

Continuing in Romans:

and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ,

We have already discussed what it means to be an heir. We Christians are joint heirs with the
Firstborn Son of the High King of Heaven. We will never sit on the Big Throne, but we are certainly in
line to inherit enormous good fortunes and responsibilities in the Kingdom….That’s Daddy’s idea, not
ours.

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;

if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he also will deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself. 2 Timothy 2:11-13

Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign
with him for a thousand years. Revelation 20:6

you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer
spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:5

you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may
proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 1 Peter 2:9

provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

103
 On the two conditions that we play by the Rules and that we grow up into responsible Princesses and
Princes fit to rule and reign in such a vast and noble realm. There is a bit of a strenuous learning
curve for about 70 years. (Cf. The grooming of Prince William as the future King of England.)

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who
gave a wedding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but
they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, See, I have prepared my
dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.’
But they paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his
servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them. The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed
those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those
invited were not worthy.Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.’
And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the
wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said
to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king
said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be
weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.” Matthew 22:2-14

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be
revealed to us.

Jesus said

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take
heart; I have overcome the world.” John 16:33

And His saints uniformly concur:

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange
were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be
glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of
glory and of God rests upon you. 1 Peter 4:12-14

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who
comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the
comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so
through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and
be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through
faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his
resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may
attain the resurrection from the dead. Philippians 3:8-11

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s
afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the
stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery hidden
for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among
the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Colossians 1:24-27

104
Paul continues in Romans:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to
futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from
its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

With this statement Paul reaches back long before the Big Bang into the expanse that exists beyond
the dimensions that established the boundaries of our reality 13.73 billion years ago. God knew,
before He spoke the words that gave form to our universe, before Lucifer rebelled, before Adam and
Eve were sculpted by His creative heart and hand, before they fell, that they would fail and fall, and
that He would have to limit them, and do damage control until He could ultimately and finally resolve
the problem of sin and evil through the Incarnation. And He planned for it before He laid “the
foundations of the world”. (Matthew 25:34; Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20; Revelation 13:8; Revelation 17:8; 2 Timothy 1:9;
Titus 1:2) The whole of creation has never been uncared for or unattended to (as deists and pan-
theists argue), but rather has been meticulously engineered in the smallest of details (literally down to
the sub-atomic level, as Dr. Hugh Ross has demonstrated). We have trouble comprehending this
from our side, because we are so small compared to the scale of God’s mind and Plan. Any
comprehension we do have, beyond the glimpses our limited science offers us, comes only through
revelation as God chooses to share it with us, and even then most of the time we, at best, can only
describe what we see, rather than understand or explain it. (Though a great number of pompous self-
important “scientists” puff and blow an enormous amount of gobbledeegook and nonsense about
what they think it all means…just try counting up the number of times you hear the words “may” or
“possibly” or “might” or “we think” or similar speculative terms in any single special on the Discovery
channel or PBS: Such foolish arrogance in the face of such enormous Mystery.)

Nevertheless, in a very profound sense, even the processes of decay and death that presently prevail
in our universe are absolutely essential to the present phase of what God is doing to prepare us for
the next and much larger phase of His Grand Project, when death itself will be forever undone. Life
itself, in the present order of things and under the present rules of physics, could not happen except
for the immutability of the second law of thermodynamics, which, in a very real sense, is the law of
death…of “futility”. At every level down to the single cell, all metabolism, all “work”, requires the
conversion of matter into energy: Something, animal or vegetable or at least something inorganic,
must die or be consumed so that something else can live. All things decay, all things disintegrate
from order to disorder…to chaos; entropy happens, heat is lost, the universe itself is destined to grow
so cold that all life, and eventually even thought itself, will stop, except that God plans to intervene
before that happens. (Mattthew 24:22; 2 Peter 3:11-13; Revelation 21:1) Our timeline has always been
linear…finite…temporary. The Watchmaker’s Watch is winding down.

This creation necessarily has been subjected to futility in hope, so that God might bring forth a kind of
creature capable of experiencing truly free fellowship with Him eternally, bound to Him only by the
power of agape Love, with no other strings attached. And thank God, it is a temporary condition: a
step in a process. When this “new man”, this god-like physical/spiritual creature, has been fully
formed, then God has promised that the old and futile creation will be replaced with a new and
uncorrupted one with an entirely new physics that is completely free from sin and its effects. There
really could have been no other way that this goal could have been reached, at least no such way
that God has revealed to us. Had Adam not sinned, the goal might have been reached many
thousands of years ago and God alone knows what would have happened or where the human race
might be. But Adam did sin, so we have had to work through the process to date. However, it is
almost over. The first intervention of Christ two thousand years ago set the final phase in motion, and
that final stage is now reaching its completion, just as it is supposed to: Everything is precisely on
track.

105
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not
only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for
adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not
hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Paul speaks of the “firstfruits”. He seems here to be both referring to the entire “born again” church,
but also to more. Jesus Himself spoke of a “little flock” (Luke 12:32) and of “overcomers” (Revelation 2,3)
that are identifiably different from the larger body of the Church. It has always been of interest to me
that the New Covenant records do seem to consistently reveal that the True Church is not
homogeneous. Certainly, we all stand equal in the Grace of our salvation, but there do appear clearly
to be hierarchy and structure and levels of reward in the Kingdom, much as many would prefer it
otherwise. (These are the same people who think that Sunday morning pew sitters deserve the same
rewards as St. Pete and St. Paul, which we have already determined to be absurd.)

This is obvious right from the git-go in the ministry of Christ Himself. When Jesus was on the ground
in Israel there were, at times, tens of thousands of people following Him around and listening to His
preaching. He once miraculously fed 5000 men, plus all their wives and kids, on a hill overlooking the
Sea of Gallilee. He was the biggest celebrity superstar of His day. But when these people kept
pursuing Him, even though He taught them and healed them and fed them, He rebuked them by
saying that they were really only interested in Him because He gave them a free lunch. In the end,
many of these people were in the mob that crucified Him. Yet among this huge crowd there were
hundreds who were following after Him because His teachings were compelling. They were
spiritually hungry and this amazing Rabbi taught like no teacher they had ever heard: “As one who
spoke with authority, and not as the Scribes .” (Matthew 7:29) These many followers were sincere disciples,
hungry for truth, and they hung in with Him for a long while. And out of these hundreds we know from
the record that there were at least seventy who were almost as close to Him as were the Twelve that
He specifically chose as His posse.

But when the time came for Him to face into the Cross, He had to cull the herd, and He began to
teach tougher stuff, and 99% of this crowd melted back into the countryside. They weren’t ready to
go to the mat with Him, and put their lives on the line by facing the homicidal wrath of the Religious
and Political machines in Jerusalem. That left Him with the Twelve apostles: His buds. (There were
others as well who didn’t make it directly into the record until after the Resurrection, especially the
loyal women that are remembered elsewhere with honor.) He asked them if they wanted to leave as
well. They said, “Where can we go? You’ve ruined our lives and we love you… We might as well go to
Jerusalem and die with Lazarus and you.” (John 6:68,69;John 11:16) (They were more resigned than
enthusiastic…Well, Peter was enthusiastic…But he ended up peeing his pants and denying that he
even knew Jesus when the stinky brown stuff hit the oscillating rotary device and all hell broke loose
a couple of weeks later.) And of the Twelve (one of whom, Judas Iscariot, turned out to be a traitor),
three, Peter, James, and James’ brother John (Jesus’ cousins), were really close intimates of Jesus.
And John, an enthusiastic youth among the twelve, seems to have been a special friend.

We talked about things in the Bible being “types”. This is a type. We, as Christians, have the
privilege of knowing Jesus Christ, our “elder brother”, and through Him our Father, God Almighty.
How well we know them seems to depend upon how deeply and passionately we want to know
them…how closely we want to walk to them and how far we are willing to walk with them. They will
share themselves entirely with us, but only if we are willing to give ourselves entirely to them.

My point is this: When Paul is talking here about “firstfruits”, I think that he has in the back of his mind
the hope that his words will fall upon the ears of those who are truly and passionately hungry: Those
who are willing to give their lives, if needed, for the sake of the Kingdom. Sold-out religious fanatic
types. “Fools for Christ”, as the Bible describes us. (1 Corinthians 4:10)

106
The call goes out, through preaching, to “all the world”, but only those with “ears to hear” hear it… and
listen. I hope that some of you are listening. Matthew 13:15-17; Revelation 2,3

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

The whole of the Cosmos has been watching and waiting for the day when all of this ends. Lucifer
declared a cosmic war that has raged for eons…a war of which we only know a smidgeon of the
implications. We don’t fully understand why it has taken so long to resolve this conflict, nor do we fully
comprehend our place in it at this time or in the future. But we understand enough to know that we
Christians, the fruit destined to be harvested from the planting of the human seed, play a key role,
perhaps THE key role, in the ending of this. And this is what Paul, who apparently was permitted
insight into these things when he was “caught up” into God’s higher dimensions, is sharing with us here.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait
eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

The New Covenant is filled with this Promise, stated in myriad ways:

But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being
transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the
Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:16-18

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he
appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies
himself as he is pure. 1 John 3:2-3

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our
lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.
Philippians 3:20-21

The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also
are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have
borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.1 Corinthians 15:47-49

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the
imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 1 Corinthians 15:50-
51

Continuing in Romans:

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we
hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

I honestly have not yet fully grasped this concept in all of my 38 plus years of my walking with the
Lord, though I am far closer to understanding it now than I have ever been. The Bible defines both
Faith and Hope as SUBSTANTIAL things, not intellectual ideas or philosophical theories: They are
supernaturally creative forces that we, in concert with God, exercise to move the events and
structures of Heaven and Earth, and employ to change the course of history itself on both an
individual and personal level, and on much larger national and global scales.

107
 I have no idea how this works, but it certainly does, and the Bible records thousands of years of
thousands of accounts of it working. And there are tens of thousands of other historical and
contemporary supporting testimonies on record as well. (If you want to explore YouTube, there are
myriad postings: But be honest, and also discerning. There are a lot of deceivers and liars posting
false information among the true accounts. You will have to separate wheat from weeds.) Neither
Faith nor Hope are irrational or blind, but they are not “rational” either, in the narrow-minded modern
“scientific” definition of that word. The rationalist says, “I will not believe until I see.” God says, “Be-
lieve Me, and then you will see.” And there is absolutely no way that the committed Materialist can
ever be convinced that the spiritually sensitive person is anything but completely nuts.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to
understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14

It is the Materialist who is blind, not the person of Faith. The Christian has, through Christ, connected
to a Reality that the non-Christian materialist has neither the will nor the means to comprehend. God
is supremely rational. His Mind is multiplied magnitudes beyond our comprehension. Without His
assistance, we simply do not understand what fully, trully, rational thinking is:

“Come now, let us reason together”, says the LORD: Isaiah 1:18

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways”, declares the LORD.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. “ Isaiah 55:8-9
Biblical Faith, and the Hope that is rooted in and grows from that Faith, is not blind. It is absolutely
rational, in the fullest and only proper sense of that word. It begins, as we argued at the beginning of
this discussion, at the Book of the Creation, and scientifically observes that the Materialist
explanation of the cosmos is utterly inelegant and deficient…and that the only logical and reasonable
explanation for the Universe and the “Big Bang” that birthed it is Intelligent Design. And from that
initial observation, the seed of Faith germinates, and a seeker is born. If that seeker is a seeker of
Truth, in truth, then, in time, his or her very limited but honest rational pursuit of Truth will lead to a
step, not of blind faith, but of a courageous and defiant movement against the pressures of the
atheistic naturalism of the world, and an act of trust, a decision, in a Person that they might have
once thought was either a myth or a legend, or was dead in history and only a flippant curse word,
but now quite unexpectedly have discovered to be Alive.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit
himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

I don’t want to wander onto a rabbit trail here, but Paul is alluding to the power of Spirit-led praying
and of intercession. We, on our own, are small and very limited: God is huge and His concerns are
vast. As His servant sons and daughters, symbiotically joined with Him and with real authority in this
realm, and as we are in training, we have important purposes and assignments. Prayer is, without
doubt, our most powerful weapon against the spiritual enemies we fight. Prayer is not supposed to
be self-centered shopping lists or the rote-memorized incantations of witchcraft (witchcraft is the
manipulation of spiritual entities by spell and formula…it’s a demonic mind-game. Many “name-it-
and-claim-it-in-faith” theologies border on witchcraft). We are supposed to be able to “move
mountains” and change the course of human events. We should be able to reach around the world to
comfort and heal those among God’s people, especially, who are in trouble. Beyond that, we who are
spiritually strong are called to “stand in the gap” for those who are too weak to fight for themselves
against the dark enemies that run roughshod over this world at this time.

108
 However, since we are Padawan Learners (remember Star Wars) and very often do not know how to
deal with the complex issues and circumstances we encounter, we are not always wise enough to
pray effectively, nor do we sometimes have the courage to move in the Faith of Christ that we are
supposed to exercise, because our own crap thinking gets in God’s way. So, Daddy gives us the
“Baptism in the Holy Spirit”. We should all be able to pray “in the Spirit” with Divine power, though
many Christians freak out at this idea because of screwball doctrinal teaching from the pulpit by “min-
isters” who know “neither the scriptures nor the power of God”.. (Matthew 22:29) But even if we fight God on
this gift, nevertheless He will often pour Himself through us in deep agonizing prayer that overwhelms
our heads and actually gets His work done. We may shake, rattle, and roll and speak in a prayer-
language of heavenly tongues, or we may dry heave and wail and cry our eyes out, or we may just be
lost in profoundly quiet depths for hours on end….but we pray effective prayers and get God’s
business accomplished, either because we willingly cooperate or in spite of ourselves.

And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God.

we have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:16

When I read these next verses I often imagine that Paul, writing from his prison cell is so high on God
at this point after the outpouring of the past hour that he would be floating somewhere up near the
ceiling except for the ball and chain around his ankle. (Remember, he is in prison in Ephesus.)

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according
to his purpose.

Or another way to translate the Greek is:

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are
called according to His purpose.

For those of us who have returned to our rightful place in the scheme of things life is no longer a
crapshoot, no longer chaotic or random. As long as we move within the “shield” that humility before
our Father and obedience to the rules of the house provide, Daddy, and an honor guard of warrior
angels that He assigns to every one of His kids, cover our every step. He still does not make our
choices for us, but He keeps close counsel with us. He advises us about every decision we enquire
of Him. He intervenes in our circumstances, provided we have given Him permission to do so. He
guards our backs and protects us from those things over which we have no control or of which we
have no knowledge. He goes ahead of us as our guide and warns us of any dangers that might be
around the next bend in the road, so long as we are listening. As Paul says, He takes what might
have been bad circumstances and, because He can see ahead in time, plays every board as a
Master Chessman so that no matter what the enemy might contrive against us, the game always
ends in checkmate and we win.

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he
might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom
he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

And so we come to the paradox of Free Will and Predestination. As I remarked ‘way back, both are
equally true.

Our God stands at least one dimension outside of all the dimensions that exist as boundaries on our
Cosmos (at least 10). This means that He can observe the entirety of our reality from His vantage

109
point simultaneously, if I can use the word. (If you want to try to get a handle on this stuff I again
encourage you, for starters, to spend the next few years digesting the volumes of information
available through Dr. Hugh Ross’s organization at www.Reasons.org .)

From this transcendent position, God therefore certainly knows everything there is to know about you
or me before you or I ever are born into the Timeline of the universe. That is what Paul means by
“those whom He foreknew”. (Romans 8:29) God, therefore, knows, in a very “Calvinist” sort of way, who
will be “saved” and who will be “damned”, who will accept Christ and who will reject Him…because
He can see the whole course of every human life, from conception to mortal death: every thought,
every decision, every action, every consequence, every circumstance, and He can, in His immense
wisdom and intelligence, comprehend the interweavings of them all. Therefore, those whom He “fore-
knew” He also is able to “predestine”. (This is why John Calvin could read the same texts as Jacobus
Arminius and come to exactly the opposite conclusions about the nature of salvation.) God knows,
“from before the foundations of the world”, whose names are to be written in the “Lamb’s Book of Life” and
He also knows which souls are destined to choose hellfire and damnation. Revelation 13:8

Yet He does not predestine either to these fates in the sense that He arbitrarily selects some to be
blessed and others to be condemned! This is a diabolical lie whispered by demons into the human
heart to discourage us, to confuse us, to try to create a fear in us so strong that it will keep us from
ever returning to our Father! It is horrible and paralyzing to think of God as being so heartless and
cruel, when He is so immeasurably loving and compassionate. Because He loves us, the Free Will of
man is NOT touched by God. It is autonomous. It is something that is uniquely formed at the
moment of conception: That even God Himself does not know the form or choices of until it is formed.

I would argue (and this is only my opinion) that once the soul is conceived, God only then is able to
know the destiny of a human being: He knew Jacob and Esau and King David and John the Baptist
from the womb, according to the record. But until the genes of the male and the genes of the female
join and life is born, it is my conviction that even God does not know the destiny of a man or a woman,
because it does not exist and cannot be known. That destiny will be the result of choices yet to be
freely made. Again, this is my opinion: arguments from scripture can be made both toward and away
from this point of view, and are very complicated. I don’t know if they are really that important.

After conception, God, from “outside the terrarium” then spends that human’s lifetime drawing that
soul, which is living freely “inside the terrarium”, toward Himself. He does not, without special
permissions, or at least not without exceptional circumstances, reach into the terrarium, as far as
individuals are concerned. Once, He joined us here, and lived according to the rules of the terrarium
Himself.

those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be
the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called,

He does not abandon anyone while they are in skin, at least until they seal their destiny and become
reprobate, though He knows who will accept Him and who will reject Him. The opportunity for
redemption is universal. Since the Resurrection, His Spirit is poured out upon ALL flesh and the “call”
is going out, 24/7/365, as we have said. Those who He knows will turn to Him, He knows will hear
His call, whether through preaching or through other vehicles or voices. “My sheep hear My voice.”
(John 10:27) This calling has been going on for nearly two millennia, (actually long before in the “proto-
evangelion”), and is now reaching an intensity beyond anything that has preceded this generation.
For this reason, many others and I believe that we are very near the end of the “time of the Gentiles”,
and that the Second Coming of Christ will occur in the foreseeable future. It is up to you to decide
whether or not you care enough to research this for yourself. I have no argument with you if you
believe otherwise.

110
Though He does not abandon anyone, and He desires that “all men be saved and come to a knowledge of
the Truth”, (1 Timothy 2:3,4) the Bible is clear that this will not happen, because the absolute freedom of
will that true love requires guarantees that a percentage of choices will be made toward autonomy.
Only those who answer the call will be saved from the horrible events that are about to tear the world
apart. The New Testament does indicate that there will be a huge number of people turning to the
Lord at the end of this age, while at the same time an unfortunately great number will rise up in
violent rebellion against Him and against those who follow Him. Life is going to become very exciting
very soon.

and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

We have been hammering this idea home for a hundred and eleven pages now. This justification is
the liberation from the bondages of sin and guilt and shame and addiction that comes, through Divine
fiat, the instant we surrender to Christ. The glory Paul speaks about begins to radiate through us at
that same instant as the “engagement ring” of the Holy Spirit is placed on our heart, and will be fully
expressed when we receive the “new creation” remaking of our bodies at the Resurrection of the
righteous. At this present time, around the world, vast numbers of people are experiencing the power
and presence of miraculous encounter with the God of Heaven on an intensifying scale as His Glory
rises again upon the stage of man: “Aslan is on the move!”. (You can also track this on YouTube, if
you are willing to honestly discern the good stuff from the garbage postings, and you can see a lot of
really good stuff on GodTV.) We have no real idea yet of the magnitude of what is about to happen,
but all indications are that it will be greater than the events recorded in the Book of Acts that birthed
the Church. The New Testament declares that the events of the End Times will be on an
unprecedented scale, both of Glory and of tribulation and terror.

Cool, eh?!!! Sounds like a science fiction fairy-tale, doesn’t it? It’s not. Jesus did it once before, and
He promised He will do it again at a specific point in our timeline. He’s as historically real as George
Washington or Will Smith or the late Michael Jackson, and you are being very foolish if you doubt Him.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own
Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any
charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—
more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

There has never been a promise more sure!!!!

The Law of the the Universe was decreed by the High King of Creation, and we broke it. We’ve all
seen the movie: The King CANNOT un-decree his laws. In the classic stories the beloved Prince
somehow screws up and the King ends up having to execute his own son, which he does with tears
pouring down his face and with regrets that ruin his life and destroy his kingdom.

In our story the Son voluntarily takes our place. He sacrifices Himself for us, but because He is pure
He defeats death itself and the enemy who uses death as his ultimate weapon. And because of this
we can walk free of our curse and live forever.

So, what does this mean?

1: The God of Everything that is, is on our side and has our back.

2: If He was willing to put His own Son through Hell for us because he loves us, then doesn’t it
follow that He is going to continue to manage and build on that investment, especially since He has
infinite resources upon which to draw?

111
 3: Is it reasonable for us, therefore, to walk around feeling like God is accusing us and making us
feel guilty all the time? Or, just maybe, could that be the devil and his minions whispering lies into our
religiously confused little pea brains? Maybe we need to get our heads straightened around?

IT IS GOD WHO JUSTIFIES! AND HE HAS! Who is to condemn? We broke God’s Law, not Lucifer’s.
So God is the one who has reason to be miffed at us.

BUT GOD IS THE ONE WHO HAS GONE TO THE ULTIMATE LENGTHS TO JUSTIFY US!

He, Himself, in Christ, fulfilled the legal requirements of His own immutable Law, which we, because
we really are guilty, could never fulfill, by taking our place and dying for us, even though He wasn’t
guilty of anything at all.

And now Jesus Christ, who has every right to point the finger at us as both victim and as Prosecutor,
chooses to be our Defense Attorney instead, to plead our case against our accuser, Lucifer (Satan),
before the Judge (God Almighty…our Daddy), who also wrote the Law, and who is also the High King,
and who has adopted us as His beloved kids and has promised us an inheritance with our Big
Brother, Jesus, the Son of God, the God~Man, who happens to be our Defense Attorney. (I realize
that this is complicated, but I’m pretty sure, though, that all of you folks who follow “the soaps” or
other complicated TV dramas should be able to figure it out.)

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or
nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

”For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

Paul is referring here to the hard realities of his time: Christians were being persecuted on every side,
often to the death in horrible ways. Some believers were questioning whether or not God still loved
them. Paul, who himself had suffered and was suffering very severe persecutions, assured them that
physical tribulation was actually a confirmation of the reality of the presence of the Holy Spirit in us
believers, and of the War. Rather than bad stuff happening being a sign of God being mad at us,
when we are doing God’s work, bad stuff happening is very often a sign that we are in the middle of a
firefight: War is Hell. (That is, bad stuff happening when we know we are in the right place with God:
Bad stuff happening when we are out of sync with Daddy usually means that He is trying to get our
attention. But even then, it is not punishment…It is more like a “DiNozzo headslap” from Jethro
Gibbs. Watch NCIS.)

For I fully expect and hope that I will never be ashamed, but that I will continue to be bold for Christ, as I have
been in the past. And I trust that my life will bring honor to Christ, whether I live or die. For to me, living
means living for Christ, and dying is even better. But if I live, I can do more fruitful work for Christ. So I really
don’t know which is better. I’m torn between two desires: I long to go and be with Christ, which would be far
better for me. But for your sakes, it is better that I continue to live. Philippians 1:20-26

It is the same today. More believers died for their faith in the 20th century than in the total of all the
centuries since Christ that preceded it. And that number is increasing as I write. In Muslim nations
around the world especially, those who convert to Christianity often die quickly at the hands of hate-
filled relatives or neighbors. Conversion is a blasphemy against Allah, and is a capital crime. This is
also true among many other belief systems. The War is intensifying. The Bible is very clear that a lot
of Christians are going to suffer as the age of man comes to an end and the devil goes ballistic. But I
said before, I’ve skipped to the end of the Book: We win.

112
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death
nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Does this make sense now? This is NOT your average pie-in-the-sky-I-hope-to-get-to-heaven-when-
I-die- gospel message, is it? This is HUGE!!!!!! We are “MORE than conquerors”! And this victory
starts HERE and NOW! If you are living a defeated life, and yet you claim to know the Lord, you still
believe a lie. You may have “accepted the Lord”, but you have not understood that you are free.

As the Lord said to Israel:

“your fathers put me to the test

and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’ Psalm 95:9-11

It is my heartfelt prayer that we, as God’s people, learn the way’s of our Father.

113
 CHAPTER 9

I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit

Paul again testifies to the internal “witness” of the Spirit of God that is the confirmation that every true
Christian understands, and which no one but a true “born again” Christian can know. Non-Christians
are clueless.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to
understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to
be judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the
mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:14-16

This is not simply the statement that “God told me”, or some sort of a warm tingly feeling. It may be
either or both of these, and I don’t discount them (I have had plenty of manifest experiences of the
Presence of God, including warm tingly feelings), but it is so very much more. It is the unshakeable
confidence of God’s Presence, of the companionship of the Comforter, backed up by the clear
teaching of the New Testament vanguard writers, and is always in harmony with that teaching; is
never in any way in disharmony or contradiction with the New Covenant; is supported by the rest of
the Bible as interpreted through the covenant terms of the finished work of Christ; and is confirmed by
the consistent quality of the fruit that grows in the life of the believer professing to have heard from
God. It will stand the test of being judged by other mature and wise and humble servants of the Lord,
and must be so judged, especially if it is a word that will affect the Body. Beyond that, God often
authenticates His Word and His ambassadors with supernatural signs and wonders and other
demonstrations of Divine power, but, as these can be counterfeited by demonic spirits in some
measure, supernatural manifestations, in themselves, are not to be trusted as evidence that a word or
a work is from God.

Jesus said:

You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every
healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a
diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus
you will recognize them by their fruits. Matthew 7:16-20

Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its
fruit. ….For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure
brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. Matthew 12:33-35

Paul continues:

that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and
cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers,my kinsmen according to the flesh.

Paul grieves, as we all should, for those who rebel against God. Our big brother, Jesus, grieved over
those who opposed Him. He even called Judas “friend”, as Judas kissed Him in the Garden of
Gethsamane to betray Him to His enemies. God “takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. Ezekiel
33:11

114
But I argued earlier that in order for some to be able to freely choose to love their Creator, others
must be free to choose to hate Him. God understood this when He opted to offer His love to His
creatures that it might be freely returned to Him, Jesus understood this when He sat upon the Mount
of Olives and wept over Jerusalem before offering Himself to the mob, Paul understands this here, as
he is turning his thoughts to his own people, the Jews, from whom his conversion to Christianity has
utterly estranged him and in whose eyes has made him a mortal enemy.

They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship,
and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is
God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

Paul lists the special privileges that belong to the “Chosen People” that make them unique, to this day,
among all the nations and people groups of humanity. Many of these unique promises and privileges
still pertain between blood Jews and God, and have yet to be fulfilled, in so far as Israel has met the
terms agreed to long ago: God keeps His promises. These promises and covenants apply to Israel
alone, and are moving on a parallel track to the Gospel of the Kingdom as it is proclaimed in the New
Covenant. The New Covenant in Christ, however, does fulfill entirely, for the Jews, the Old Covenant
regarding the fundamental enigma of sin and redemption. No Jew will be saved eternally apart from
Messiah, and no Jew will be saved through the Law of Moses. Faithful Israel will receive all that God
has promised her over the millennia in His personal covenants with the Patriarchs and with David,
and any other commitments He has made to them, provided the terms have been met.

The Church will also receive her full reward and inheritance as it is detailed in the New Covenant
through which she was created. In Christ the two groups, Jew and Gentile, have become “one new
man”, the “Israel of God”. And, as Paul will declare in a bit: “All Israel will be saved!” Romans 11:26

Paul now begins a complex argument to separate True Israel from those who may be genetic Jews,
but nothing more, because they refuse to believe. Genetic Jews, resistant to Christ, and having
broken the earlier covenant terms as well, will receive nothing under either Covenant, or any of the
other promises, but will be judged and condemned with the unbelieving and rebellious world. Jesus
once confronted his enemies on the Temple steps:

Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came
not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to
hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a
murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he
lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do
not believe me. Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever
is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” John
8:42 -47

Paul (who, himself, once violently opposed Christ and killed His followers, but who listened when
Christ called him on the carpet, and repented) echoes Christ’s thoughts:

But it is not as though the word of God has failed.

For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are
his offspring,

Having set up this premise earlier, Paul now goes for the jugular: God never promised (or promises)
salvation to people-groups, only to individuals, because people-groups and governments cannot
make moral choices.

115
Nations cannot be Christian, cultures cannot be Christian, and families cannot be Christian. Each of
these can practice Christian principles and ethics and can speak Christian words. Each can claim the
Bible as it’s guiding rule and can seek to follow Biblical principles as a collective or national policy.
But none of these social organizations have a conscience or a soul or a spirit. And each exists only
through the complex interweavings of the moral choices of the individuals that constitute it. Christian
words and Christian behaviors are not the ultimate identifying marks of the true Christian. That mark
is the redeemed spirit of the saved soul.

Rabbit Trail:

By this same reasoning, I believe that it is shallow, an almost axiomatic misunderstanding, often even
disingenuous and political purely “civil religion”, to end our “national prayers” with “and may God
Bless America”.

With the exception of the theocratic nation of Israel, as it was established at Mount Sinai under Moses,
God is not in the habit of blessing nations, though He certainly manipulates them and shapes their
destinies to accommodate His Plan:

God blesses individuals. He will bless nations, when the individuals who constitute those nations
bless Him.

The Old Covenant does state:

The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing;

he frustrates the plans of the peoples.
The counsel of the LORD stands forever,
the plans of his heart to all generations.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,
the people whom he has chosen as his heritage! Psalm 33:10-12

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their
wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14

But both of these passages are Israel-specific, and are also statements made under the Old
Covenant, which has been superceded in Christ, as we have already proven through our references
to the letter to the Hebrews, and others.

God constituted Israel: God DID NOT constitute America.

First the New World, and then post-Revolutionary America, was offered, at crucial times in its history,
to God by godly people, and God certainly honored them, and certainly inspired their hearts to create
a uniquely free and noble nation, from which His Word and His work proceeded with amazing
confidence and power.

In that sense America has been blessed by God. God has blessed His people in America, “the Land
of the free”, as they have sought Him and honored Him; and for much of our history they have used
this freedom to advantage, both to spread the Christian Gospel and to build the most prosperous and
demographically vibrant nation that has ever existed in human history. God has used America.

But He did not create this nation in the same way that He called Israel into being, and we
cannot invoke the same Divine protections and protocols over it as if He did. It is presumption and
arrogance to do so. Israel is the ONLY nation that has ever been so created!

116
And who is like your people Israel, the one nation on earth whom God went to redeem to be his people,
making himself a name and doing for them great and awesome things by driving out before your people, whom
you redeemed for yourself from Egypt, a nation and its gods? And you established for yourself your people
Israel to be your people forever. And you, O LORD, became their God. 2 Samuel 7:23-24;1 Chronicles 17:21-22

And the LORD has declared today that you are a people for his treasured possession, as he has promised you,
and that you are to keep all his commandments, and that he will set you in praise and in fame and in honor high
above all nations that he has made, and that you shall be a people holy to the LORD your God, as he
promised.” Deuteronomy 26:18-19

The only other DIVINELY CONSTITUTED PEOPLE is the Church.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may
proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a
people, but now you are God’s people; 1 Peter 2:9-10

American CIVIL RELIGION has co-opted the Gospel and its vocabulary for its own selfish ends,
especially since the 1950’s, and has conflated Christianity with nationalism and patriotism, and an
enormous percentage of God’s people in America have bought into this political heresy ~ tasty bait,
hook, line, and sinker…to the point where we cannot even have an intelligent discussion about it
without risking a fist-fight or a church split. Though the apostolic writers repeatedly warn against
having a partisan spirit, in many churches you can’t even be saved unless you are a registered
Conservative Republican. (Conversely, in many liberal mainstream social churches you are
anathematized if you aren’t a Progressive Liberal Democrat.)

(This is not to disparage the idea of patriotism and nationalism, but only to ask that we, as Christians,
keep it separated entirely from our faith and wholly within the secular arena to which it belongs. How
we personally address the issue remains a private matter. It is beneath Christ, and is a matter for
another discussion. We are to be “in but not of the world”.) John 17

We have believed a lie, and this has made us weak, and has distracted us from God’s larger
purposes for us in this time. This ought not to be!

America is not a “Christian Nation”. It is a cosmopolitan and worldly nation (still with a majority
Christian population, at least nominally), and has been so from the beginning.

It is a nation founded squarely upon Judeo-Christian principles that are drawn from the matrix of the
Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. Many of its earliest colonists were Christians fleeing
pressures or persecution by heretical state churches in Europe. Christendumb dominated Europe.

The majority of the founders of our nation were solidly Christian men (with solidly Christian wives at
their sides). Most were Evangelicals. Those who were less preachy were still deeply faithful. Even
the “deists” ( more equivalent to our modern Unitarians than to contemporary deists) among them
were respectful of Christian principles and morality, within their own parameters of interpretation. I do
not believe that any were atheistic, though several apparently were agnostic rationalists, and
definitely very progressive for their day. Those few who had bought deeply into the Enlightenment
were certainly on their way toward an anti-Christian bias.

None of the founders were blatantly reprobate or amoral, or opposed to sound Christian-influenced
ethics or the general worldview that Christianity holds, though a number were a bit profligate. Ben
Franklin tended to be a randy conundrum, at least in his youth. Most, if not all, of them were
respectful of other religions, and bent over backwards to make sure that all expressions of faith would

117
be able to be freely pursued in the new nation they were building, (that is what the First Amendment
is all about!!!). All hated religious bigotry and government interference with or limitations upon
matters of faith, and most, if not all, adamantly supported religious liberty and were willing to die for it.

I would venture to say that most of these men, while all were human and had flaws (some serious),
were of a quality of personal character that would make most men (and women) today look very very
bad, or at least very weak, by comparison, but that is just my humble opinion. I know that George
Washington, for example, was held in awe for his character by his friends and his enemies alike
around the world…that’s an historical fact. There aren’t too many persons in public service of such
stellar caliber that I know of today; not even close. This is to our great shame. I doubt that George
Washington would be allowed to survive in today’s Washington. Most (all) of these men would
probably be listed as radicals and be on the domestic terrorist watchlist. (You should read in the
materials available through www.Wallbuilders.com .)

I can tell you this: If I were again pastoring a church, and if that church had both the Christian flag
and the American flag displayed on the stage, (not my first option), I can guarantee you that the
American flag would be LOWER than the Christian flag. That is the biblically correct place for all such
national symbols. Personally, I do not think national symbols should be in a church.

As Christians, we are called to be PROPHETS speaking Truth to power, as real prophets always
have!!! All kings tend to become arrogant, as power corrupts them! And the Church MUST call them
to their knees, for their own good and for the well-being and safety of the people who they are called
to serve and to protect! Ultimately, this is God’s world, and we all are His servants and stewards of it.
We tend to easily forget this, and let our little bit of power go to our heads. We so want to be as God.

In America, we do not (yet) call our leaders kings (czars?), but they tend, nevertheless, to lust for
power and to abuse it, and we, God’s people, are the only voice for Truth that remains, at least in
theory, uncorrupted and able to call them back to integrity and justice and humility. How many of us
have the guts to rise into our calling and do our job? We are very much needed in our generation
today, are we not?! If we do not speak, who is going to?

July 2010

I need to offer an alternative point of view that has just occurred to me after listening to a
conversation with Dr. Peter Marshall on some program my wife happened across. I honestly don't
know if I can say I fully agree with what I am writing, but I think that it is a fair argument in support of
the statement “America is a Christian Nation”; one which I am surprised I find myself making. As I
said in my introduction, I am a weirdly open-minded person, and these thoughts are giving me great
pause.

Once you excavate you way through the massive accretion of lies and half truths that the Revisionist
Historians have foisted upon now five generations of Americans in the name of “progress” as they try
to destroy the foundations and build their godless utopia, you discover a vast world of truth about our
Founders, and those who blazed trail for them, which should make you angry enough to at least
storm the halls of Congress, if not to do something more militant. (Being Christian, however, you will
behave with greater dignity than this...for the time being, at least.)

What you will discover is that from Columbus forward, there was a very clear drawing of the Holy
Spirit upon the hearts of His people toward this vast land. (You may read of these things in Dr.
Marshall's writings, and, as I have already suggested, in the resources available through
Wallbuilders.com).

118
It will become clear, if you study the words of the journals of these people themselves, that they were
confident that they were all hearing from God as they left their familiar lands and sailed into the
unknown dangers of the West. Each one of them will indicate, in their own idiomatic way, that they
were following a Divine call to fulfill the Great Commission and the command of the Lord.

Columbus' own perception of his voyage was that he was specifically an agent of the Lord, confirmed
as such by prophetic scripture in much the same way that Cyrus of Persia found himself identified in
scripture. The Mayflower Pilgrims, who we have been long taught were fleeing persecution, much
more were deliberately fulfilling a calling to the mission field, which they were confident they had
received from the Lord. These are biblical patterns, no less credible than the journey of Abram, the
Exodus, the crossing of Jordan by Joshua, the fleeing of Joseph to Egypt with Mary and Jesus, the
sailing of Paul to Macedonia.

Now, to my point: Our Founders, a couple of hundred years later, were living in the proto-nation
these devout saints had dared to set first foot upon. At the time of the revolution, the majority of the
colonists were, at least nominally, Christians, and the Christian faith was the assumed faith of the
general population...to be anything else was to be very much outside the norm. The Bible had for
fifteen hundred years shaped Europe, and America was populated with pioneering Europeans. The
colonies had just experienced a tremendous spiritual awakening under Jonathan Edwards and
George Whitfield. The Founders themselves (we can list about four hundred individuals who
deservedly can be called this) were almost all very solidly Christian. This can be clearly proven from
their own words in original documents, and from the corroborating testimony of their peers. It is this
history that the Revisionists have deliberately distorted or erased to further their agenda. These
original documents are available through Wallbuilders.com.

When these nation-builders set about, after the Revolution (which itself is replete with hundreds of
records of Divine miraculous interventions on the American side), to establish the foundation of Law
upon which the American Experiment would stand, they struggled for years to discover a system of
government which would both respect the liberty and dignity of man, and still allow for order and
justice and the restraint of human depravity, which they all were very much aware of, because they all
were very familiar with biblical Truth and accepted its premises of the sinful state of mankind. Again,
you can read this for yourself in the records they left written in their own hand.

From the end of the Revolution to May of 1787 the infant nation had been trying to navigate using the
Articles of Confederation. These proved to be far too weak in establishing a working ground of
communication and commerce between thirteen disparate and viciously independent states. And in
the summer of 1787 the first Constitutional Convention was convened in Philadelphia.

From May 25 to September 17, 1787, fifty-five incredible men bound to one another and to History by
the inexorable forces of destiny locked themselves in an un-airconditioned room to birth a nation.
The majority of those men were evangelical Christians. That meeting, if you read the records, was
bathed in prayer and fasting. The debates and the decisions were held before and submitted to the
Lord. And the final document, our United States Constitution, was offered to the Lord as a covenant
contract between those Christian men and their Father God, and signed before Him.

Because those men were Christians and the Spirit of Christ filled them, and because they cut
covenant with their Father as they prepared the Law which birthed America, I would then have to
argue that America is a Christian Nation. We are different from Israel, because we initiated the
contract, rather than God as with Israel, but a contract was nevertheless signed. It does not matter
that we now have a cosmopolitan population or have become a melting pot. Our foundation is
Christian and is biblical. We are, by our own Constitution, NOT to be a Christian Theocracy, like the
Muslim nations are Islamic under Sharia Law. All Americans are free to believe and worship as their

119
 conscience leads them. But our laws and our government are built on the Judeao-Christian
foundation as it is defined into our Constitution and its twenty-seven amendments, and all of
our governance and justice are to proceed from that foundation ONLY (and never from the
precedent of International Law). And every citizen, regardless of their personal faith, is bound
by covenant contract, to respect our foundational Law and the Principles which underlie it.
Just because we stand two hundred and thirty five years distant from The Negotiation does not mean
we aren't bound by it. Time does not invalidate contracts. And no one coming in from outside has
the right to challenge it, because they are not party to it.

There is another, sobering, aspect to this argument. Since our Fathers did cut covenant with God in
the founding of America, it is absolutely obvious that we, the children, have failed to keep our end of
the deal. We have broken the contract a million times over. God does not deal lightly with those who
break covenant with Him. Worse yet, we have spent the past thirty or forty years blatantly mocking
Him and His people and His Word and His righteousness. (1963...Time Magazine...”God Is Dead”)

If we do not repent...NOW...we are done for. We will be judged. God does not take the breaking of
Covenant lightly and He has never had a problem removing rebellious nations from their places of
power.

End of Rabbit Trail

Let me go back to the top of chapter nine here and proceed on another tack:

I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit

I want to point out here just one of the numerous places in the New Testament where the writers
straightforwardly and directly make a claim of honesty and integrity for what they write. I am really
sick and tired of the plethora of so-called scholars from our liberal semetaries who waste forests of
perfectly happy trees trying to perpetuate the fiction that the New Testament documents are
somehow spurious, or are deliberately fictionalized accounts written for less than honorable purposes.
Paul, and the other apostolic first century writers, are better than that, and it is shameful and
intellectually dishonest to impugn their character, especially at a distance of almost two thousand
years and when they cannot defend themselves, simply because their claims are uncomfortably
challenging to self-important people with biased agendas who haven’t got the courage or the humility
to face into their personal implications. We all know what is said about opinions….and about most
“experts”. Somewhere I once heard it put this way about the degrees of academia: BS is Bull Shit, MS
is More Shit, and PHD is Piled Higher and Deeper: There may be more than a little truth in this. (I am
being a bit facetious; I have a high respect for education and academics, but there is a vast gulf
between knowledge and wisdom, between having brains, and having the good sense to use them
intelligently. As the brilliant academic, Paul, so bluntly put it, many, “professing themselves to be wise,
have become fools.”) Romans 1:22 There are an inordinate number of fools in today’s world, multitudes of
professional students overeducated far beyond their intelligence quotients, all patting themselves and
each other on the backs until they rupture their rotator cuffs, overwhelming the common-sense world
with verbosity and jargon, and throwing awards ceremonies for each other like actors at the Oscars.
Paul remarks:

Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. But
when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without
understanding. 2 Corinthians 10:12

I call them “Sophomorons”. Unfortunately, they can be quite dangerous. They are masters of weasel
words. They do need to be challenged, and exposed for the intellectual assassins that they are.
120
Paul continues in Romans:

that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.

For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen
according to the flesh.

Rabbit Trail:

There is a lie that has been foisted upon us, within the Christian community, which needs to be exposed.
This is the politically correct idea of the “brotherhood of man”, and the related notion that every Tom,
Dick, and Harry, Sue, and Jane is my “neighbor”, in the specific sense that all people are somehow all
privileged to receive the blessings and services of the church. In one sense it is true (but as with all
the devil’s lies, only in part true): We are all “kinsmen according to the flesh”, and God expects us to treat
each other decently and with respect. We all will be held accountable for how we acted out in our
relationships, one to another…In large measure, this is what our time in this life is really all about. This
includes the fallen world at large: Our relationship to it as believers, and its relationships within itself.
Everything else is props and staging. There is an inherent dignity in man, which derives from the “image
of God” in which we are created. Mankind is very special in the eyes of God. Steven J. Gould and other
such silly Darwinians, who argue that man is no more unique in the universe than a flesh-eating
bacterium or a clam, are profoundly and utterly wrong. And, to press the point, the Bible expects us to
respect animals and the environment as well. Life is sacred, though not to be worshipped. (I rather like
the Na’vi in Avatar, though the movie’s premise is a bit too pan-theistic…I highly recommend going to it
in IMAX-3D. There is a lot of truth in the story, and the cinematography is stunning. It is a morality tale
well told, and it won’t work nearly as well on DVD.)
But according to the Bible, since the rebellion of Adam, and since the coming of the Second Adam, we
are NOT all brothers and sisters (kumbaya). Christians are creatures of a different kind from
unregenerate human beings: A new species…. IN FACT, not just in literary metaphor.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ
according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
(Greek: “of an entirely new kind”) The old has passed away; behold, the new (Greek: a new order) has
come. 2 Corinthians 5:16-17

For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new (Greek: of a new kind and
quality) creation. Galatians 6:15

Jesus said:

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am
not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.
They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As
you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they
also may be sanctified in truth. “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through
their word, (That’s us) that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may
be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. John 17:14-21

We are born of God. They are not. We have been transformed. They have yet to be transformed, if
they chose to be transformed. (Greek: metamorphosis)

Some of them, those who have made the final fatal choice, are “of their father, the devil”, John 8:44 as I
quoted Jesus saying earlier. They are hopeless. The rest are chattel property in Satan’s immoral

121
 mines and sweatshops, (at least some of whom might want to “take the red pill” and escape “The
Matrix” when offered the chance). They are related to us only by defective genetic code…biological
“cousins” might be an appropriate, though simplistic, Darwinian, word. Chimps to our Homo Sapiens.
(Even Jesus distanced Himself from His own mother and brothers and sisters when they came for
Him….He claimed His lineage through His spiritual line, not His biological line. And in Him we are
now related to Him and through Him to our Father, God. Mark 3:31-35) And because of this we, as
Christians, are not obligated by some loyalty to the species to “save the world”. This is NOT the New
Covenant mandate! We are called to preach the Kingdom of God, and to offer terms of surrender to
all who would accept them from the High King who has already won the War, and who is now trying
to limit the collateral damages, and rescue as many as are willing from the final battle that is about to
be waged.

Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Matthew 28:18-19

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might
be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned
already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has
come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For
everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be
exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have
been carried out in God.” John 3:16-21

He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way.
He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives
his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God has sent
utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all
things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see
life, but the wrath of God remains on him. John 3:31-36

The New Testament does not mandate that the Church is to enable the world in its sin and rebellion, or
save it from itself. Our first obligation as the Church is to take care of our own, as the world goes
through the intensifying agony of its death throes. This may seem cruel, but for those who have rejected
God in their hearts, they have brought their destruction upon themselves, and, in truth, there is nothing we
can do to save them. We cannot even truly ease their suffering, because it is a suffering of soul that only
the God they reject can heal. We are only messengers of hope, hands of God whose fingers point the
way to Life. However, because we have infinite resources at our disposal, and because we are “con-
strained” by the overwhelming love of God pouring through us by the symbiotic indwelling of the Holy
Spirit, we have no reason not to share our blessings with all who are within our reach, and who sincerely
are crying out for help. God commands us to minister to all who we can touch, and not to withhold that
which He abundantly and freely supplies to us. We have Jesus as our example:

Now when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him,
and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. Luke 4:40

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one
knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle
and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew
11:27

122
The thing I note with the ministry of Jesus is that He almost never sought out those to whom He
ministered, but rather He made Himself available and waited until they reached out in some way,
however small, toward Him. Again, a mustard seed of believing faith releases a lightning bolt of
Power Faith. God requires initiative on the part of the seeking heart.

However, we should not do so without asking of them that they, at least, respect our Lord and the
Rules of His Kingdom. We are not a NGO Social Welfare program! We are under no obligation to
give aid or support to those who reject or refuse to honor our King, and we have every right to throw
them out of our house if they don’t behave. We do not have to expect those we help to “convert” to
Christianity, but we certainly are under no obligation to continue to give them handouts if they simply
walk away and continue to abuse themselves and others and have no intention of sincerely
considering our message or respecting our way of life. As Jesus instructed: “Let the dead bury the
dead.” “Aslan is not a tame lion!” (The Chronicles of Narnia). We are not doormats to be walked
upon.

We must NEVER, NEVER, NEVER let the non-believing world, OR the worldly social “church” (sic),
or ANY governmental authority define what Christianity should look like!!! They have no right!!!
Christ ALONE is the definition of our faith and practice! And He is quite clearly portrayed in the
Gospels for anyone to read for themself. NOT EVEN THE THEOLOGIANS OF THE CHURCH ARE
PERMITTED TO DEFINE CHRIST!! Again, whenever we seek to explain God in our terms we risk
creating an idol.

Rabbit Trail

(I heard Rosey O’Donnell and Janeane Garofalo say that some chick on “the View” wasn’t being very
“Christian” the other day…These two anti-Christian pinheads are absolute pompous idiots with no
right to define us! They and their trashmouthed elitist ilk (let me toss in Bill Maher) can be utterly
dismissed and publicly shamed. They are fools and worse. Stronger language should apply here.
Personally, I would have no compunction about shutting these two or any like them down in a most
publicly embarrassing way. They are disgraceful insults to all intelligent people. The New Covenant
alone as defined by Jesus Christ describes what is and is not Christian.)

End of Rabbit Trail:

They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship,
and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is
God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

Paul clarifies this point in his Galatian letter:

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to
many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. Galatians 3:16

This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by
God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise;
but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Galatians 3:17-18

Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions (the repeated and ongoing and inevitable lapses
of sin), until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through
angels (messengers) by an intermediary (Moses). Galatians 3:19

123
Now an intermediary implies more than one, (and therefore is a contract or a mutual agreement with
obligations, binding terms, and fulfillments required of both contracting parties: God and the nation of
Israel…See Exodus and Deuteronomy.) but God is one (and therefore able to make a promise, which
is something that a single person chooses to make and keep. You should compare also Hebrews 6:
13-18). V.20

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life,
then righteousness would indeed be by the law.

But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to
those who believe.

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be
revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. V.21-
23

(As we have discussed in detail beforehand: The Law was never meant to be kept. It was put in
place as a strong protector, a bodyguard/babysitter, to keep us from destroying ourselves, and as
God’s most strident statement of our impossible dilemma. He would/could not make our choices for
us: He could do everything in His power to make them obvious to us, at least to those with eyes to
see and a willingness to look.)

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God,
through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor
Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you
are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. V.24-29

Back in Romans:

But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel,
and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but Through Isaac shall your offspring be
named.”

This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise
are counted as offspring.

Paul clearly is not talking about the fact that the twelve physical tribes of Israel descended from Isaac,
because he already has separated Israel into two components, one of the flesh and one of the spirit,
but rather he is speaking of a line of faith-born believers descended through Isaac as the typical heir
of faith and the type of the coming Christ.

For this is what the promise said: ”About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.”

And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they
were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—

in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—

she was told, The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

124
This is not an argument for absolute predestination, as some would make it to be. Earlier I attempted
to introduce the line of thought concerning the transdimensional or superdimensional nature of our
God, and His knowledge of all things that can be known. He knew these twins in their entirety the
moment they were conceived, and He recorded in the Bible, as prophecy, portions of His knowledge
and of the way in which He would use that knowledge to further His Plan. They were predestined,
elected and called, but not pre-programmed.

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have
mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

So then it depends not on human will or exertion,but on God, who has mercy.

For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in
you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”

So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.

The Plan of God and the achievement of that Plan lie fully within His Sovereign authority as High King
and our Creator. Acting through His omniscience He makes such executive decisions as He sees fit
at His will. As I argued earlier, none (or very few) of these decisions violate our autonomy or our
freedom of choice within our realm (the earth which He has given to the sons of men), except in the
same way as the authority of human law overrides the freedoms of a human lawbreaker.

You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?”

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made
me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use
and another for dishonorable use?

Paul, here, does play to the extreme point of the argument, I believe, but only as a heuristic device to
drive home his point. Though, as I have tried to emphasize, I am convinced that the Bible teaches
that the whole plan of God is to create intimately linked yet absolutely free creatures who are bound
to Him forever only by the cords of love, nevertheless, it is logically reasonable to argue that a
Sovereign All-Powerful Creator God has the right and the power to do whatever He wants with His
creations: That which He makes He can un-make at any time. And his creations have nothing to say
about it. It is the ultimate case of, “ I brought you into the world, and I sure as hell can take you out.”
My argument is that the exercise of the freedom to choose itself determines whether a “vessel”
becomes a “vessel of mercy” or a “vessel of wrath”, and that this occurs through the spiritual~genetic
mystery of conception and the choices made thereafter, but Paul stretches the point, for argument’s
sake, and allows that a Sovereign Omniscient Omnipotent God, by definition, can do anything He
wants to do. We just happen to have a LOVING Sovereign Omnipotent God, who doesn’t abuse His
infinite power that way. Though he COULD decree that I be destined for hell and you be destined for
heaven, and would not be wrong if He did so, He does not so call the shots: That destiny is ours to
choose. We have a lifetime to consider the options: He will honor our choice. Nevertheless, as the
game is being played, it often looks, from our perspective, as if a soul is so predestined. And this is
why there has been such a doctrinal firestorm of confusion on these issues throughout the history of
the church. Sometimes it does look as if God shakes the world with the fist of a tyrant: But this is only
our misperception. We are very limited and have trouble seeing the big pictures. (I ask you again to
contemplate the compelling images of Chaos theory and fractals: countless unpredictable points on
an infinite graph in patterns so complex that they appear to be chaotic when in reality they are
sublimely and infinitely and perfectly ordered beyond our ability to comprehend.)

125
God certainly has, as one of His purposes, the declaration of His Glory before the entire Creation,
and He does seem to move the pieces on the vast multi-dimensional chessboard upon which this
game is being played so that His Name and His Glory will ultimately be acknowledged and His
Sovereignty forever secured. And He uses individual humans as pieces in the game (yet never as
robotic mindless pawns, because He will never diminish our dignity).

I am the LORD; that is my name;

my glory I give to no other, Isaiah 42:8

And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I deal with you for my name’s sake, not according to your evil
ways, nor according to your corrupt deeds, O house of Israel, declares the Lord GOD. Ezekiel 20:44

For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,

for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another. Isaiah 48:11

Then comes the end, when he (Jesus, the Christ) delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every
rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last
enemy to be destroyed is death. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet. But when it says, all
things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all
things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection
under him, that God may be all in all. 1 Corinthians 15:24-28

What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels
of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory– even us whom he has called,
not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

Lucifer has challenged God’s right to Rule, His Ground of Authority. All that has happened in the
ages since that gauntlet was thrown down has happened in response to that unholy challenge, in
order to set the Creation fully and forever right again.

As indeed he says in Hosea,

“Those who were not my people I will call ‘my people,’

and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ ”
l“And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’
there they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’ ”

And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: “Though the number of the sons of Israel be as the sand of the sea,
only a remnant of them will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence upon the earth fully and without
delay.” And as Isaiah predicted,

“If the Lord of hosts had not left us offspring, we would have been like Sodom and become like
Gomorrah.”

126
What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a
righteousness that is by faith; but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed
in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works.

I said earlier, Israel had fifteen hundred years to realize that the Law was a standard impossible to
meet: A “remnant” certainly did realize this, and they flocked to Christ when He came the first time,
and they still are coming today by the tens of thousands. But so many others missed the point and
relied on the religious system to protect them from God, rather than getting to the roots of their
personal issues and coming to Him in honesty. In Paul’s day they sacrificed hamburger and mutton
at the Temple: Today it’s chicken at the synagogue that’s supposed to save the soul. (Well, chicken
soup is nice on winter day when you have a cold, I suppose. If only it were the thought that counted.
But it’s not. There is no more sacrifice for sin on earth.)

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can
never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.
Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would
no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is
impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world,
he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,

but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’ ”

When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings
and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your
will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified
through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Hebrews 10:1-10

They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written, “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone of stumbling,
and a rock of offense; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”

I believe that one of the most compelling proofs of the validity of the Christian message is the
intensity of the reaction it evokes in those to whom it is offered, either positively or negatively. As far
as I know, in my 38 year Christian experience so far, no other religious topic will invoke such an
intense response in a person as the mention of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and the God
He reveals….either of attraction or of visceral rejection. This is because either the seeking heart
hears His voice and rejoices, or the demonically deluded soul, hiding in shadows, is exposed to Light,
and reacts in fear and guilt and intense spiritual pain. No other religion on earth, since all religions
are human constructs and have no real revelatory power, (or are demonic deceptions that worship sin
itself), can so touch the deep wounds in man and reveal the real problem of human sin and alienation
from God.

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the
fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are
being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance
from life to life. 2 Corinthians 2:14-16

127
 Jesus said:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I
have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And
whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and
whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 10:34-39

128
 ROMANS 10

Brothers,my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved.

And so it should be: None of us knows, from our end, who it might be who is responding toward the
Lord, or from how far away they are returning. I do know how far from Him I was when He revealed
Himself to me and I chose life, and this should remind me to be hopeful and merciful: “Love hopes all
things.” So it is my place to have hope and to lovingly teach the truth to anyone who would seem to
have a heart to listen to it. I am not called to judge where a person has come from, or where a
person is presently standing; but I am called to evaluate where they appear to be going, and to be a
guide, and to warn them if I see they are walking into danger or are turning back from the path of life.
I do have valuable experience. I am not, necessarily, called to chase them down if they do choose to
turn back. They are welcome to walk with me as I continue on my journey.

For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.

This is so key: This is the difference between Life and religion….18 inches between head knowledge
and heart understanding, so to speak. There are an enormous number of people who know ABOUT
God, but who don’t know the Lord at all.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of
my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name,
and cast out demons in your name,and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them,
‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23

For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to
God’s righteousness.

We must SUBMIT to righteousness. The whole problem of man is rooted in pride…hubris. This is the
weedbed of all sin. We don’t like to submit (ask my grandkids). We each think we can be our own
god, and we don’t like the idea of anyone telling us how to run our lives. We despise authority,
whenever it restrains us against our own will, yet the structure of reality itself is an expression of order
and authority. (The fine-tuned balance of the cosmos is staggering…almost incomprehensible. Again
I encourage you to study the research at www.reasons.org and at the links they connect with. The
fine tuning of the Universe will blow your mind.)

For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

The whole point of the Law, and the whole point of the coming of Christ, is to completely and
incontrovertibly level the playing field…to completely eliminate the quicksand ground of the pride of
man, so that every human being can be free to choose life without any peer pressure or shame or
competition. When none of us are in any meaningful way better or worse than any other person on
earth, then we are all equal before God and can claim neither special privilege nor excessive
disgrace, and we each can accept the simple terms of surrender that He offers, unconditionally. All
pride, positive or negative, is abolished…there is nothing left to us to be ashamed of or self-confident
in. How can we be ashamed, when our offended God, Himself, was willing to be humiliated, beaten to
the bone, and nailed butt-naked on a wooden cross in full view of hundreds, if not thousands, of
enraged and mocking rioters, to publicly die a brutally horrible death for crimes He never committed?
And with His dying breath He forgave us? All we can do is fall prostrate on hallowed ground and let
His gentle nail-scarred hand lift us up and dust us off and lead us home. And how can we dare be
proud, when this is what He had to do to save our miserable hides?

129
For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments
shall live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into
heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “ ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up
from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the
word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your
heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and
with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

Again Paul restates the simplicity which is in Christ: We believe (believing faith is the little bit of
sincere trust and hope we offer that is met by the Power Faith of God filling us in return), and we
confess our faith verbally and openly (which means we own up to our covenant commitment to Christ,
and ask others to keep watch over us).

For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction
between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him.

Therefore, in Christ, there is no distinction between blood Jews and non-Jewish believers. All are bound
under New Covenant rules. It is OK if cultural distinctions are maintained: Messianic Jews certainly
should celebrate Messiah as they discover Him through the Old Covenant types. They have waited long
and endured much in preparation for His coming. They should dance ‘til their yarmulkes fall off. And
Gentile Christians should certainly honor and bless their Jewish brothers and sisters. We would not be
here if they had not faithfully carried the torch from Sinai to Bethlehem. But there should be no pride of
place or heritage on the part of either. We stand as equals before the Lord.

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been
crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new
creation. And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.
Galatians 6:14-16

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom
they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach
unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

Paul again takes a swing at the question of “what about those who have not heard” about Jesus, but
this time more from the angle of “maybe you should be asking, what about those who have not been
listening?”.

But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?”
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed
they have, for ‘Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”

Paul is again referring here to the Word of God as preached in the creation, that word he invoked
back at the beginning of his argument in chapter one of Romans by which all mankind stands indicted.

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible
attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of
the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19,20)

But I ask, did Israel not understand?

He then returns to Israel, to whom the specific revelation of the Personal God was entrusted:
130
First Moses says,

“I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation;

with a foolish nation I will make you angry.”

Then Isaiah is so bold as to say,

“I have been found by those who did not seek me;

I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me.”

But of Israel he says, “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people.”

As we still so often say: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” The Lord has never hidden His Plan,
His purposes, or the clear statement of His Truth, or our awful dilemma from us. It has been
published in plain view for anyone to review and study since Moses wrote it down 3500 years ago.
And plenty of people have, over the many centuries since, gone to enormous efforts to make sure that
this fact is public knowledge. If you are reading this paragraph, what’s your excuse?

131
 CHAPTER 11

I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a
member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.

Paul again clarifies that God is working with us from a position that stands transcendent to our own
very constrained dimensions. God is fully aware of where each one of us, through our lifetime of
choices, will ultimately end up. He rejects no one capriciously: We either accept or reject Him. He
ultimately agrees with us. We choose the path upon which we walk...He waits for us at the end of
whatever path we choose and confirms our decision. All who He foreknows will accept Him He
predestines, calls, justifies, and glorifies in Christ.

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness
about me, but you do not believe because you are not part of my flock. My sheep hear my voice, and I know
them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out
of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of
the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” John 10:25-30

I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave
them to me, and they have kept your word. John 17:6

This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken: “Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one.” John 18:9

Paul continues:

Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he appeals to God against Israel? “Lord, they have
killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” But what is
God’s reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis
of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.

There is always a “remnant”, always a people of God in this world. The Testimony never dies, can never
be extinguished. The darker the world becomes, the brighter the flame of the Torch of the Testimony
burns and its light shines out. Darkness can NEVER overpower light, because darkness is only the
absence of light: And our light is Eternal and inextinguishable because it is the Light of Heaven itself and
that light emanates from the Person of God. “God is no where” always becomes “God is now here.”

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as
sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Romans 5:20-21

Jesus said:

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John
8:12

And John, Jesus’ friend, wrote:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but
have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world
might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is

132
condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment:
the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were
evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should
be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have
been carried out in God.” John 3:16-21

The Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, and now, the New Covenant, is the brightest light that exists in the
world of men today….that has ever existed in the world of men. My second contention of why the
Christian message is true is how strangely reluctant people are to open and read a simple Book, one
they know has profoundly influenced the course of human civilization and history for nearly four
thousand years as has no other.

What are they afraid of?

What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened,

Please recall, that GOD WILL CONFIRM IN HIS SOVEREIGNTY WHAT WE, IN OUR HEARTS, AFFIRM IN OUR
FREEDOM. HE WILL POUR HIMSELF INTO AN OPEN HEART. HE WILL HONOR THE DESIRE OF ONE WHO
WOULD SHUT HIM OUT, QUIETLY PULLING THE DOOR SHUT BEHIND HIM AS HE LEAVES.

as it is written,

“God gave them a spirit of stupor,

eyes that would not see
and ears that would not hear,
down to this very day.”

And David says,

“Let their table become a snare and a trap,

a stumbling block and a retribution for them;
let their eyes be darkened so that they cannot see,
and bend their backs forever.”

So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather through their trespass salvation
has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous.

However, as I have tried to explain, all of God’s judgments are redemptive in purpose, and He is
moving everything, in His purposes, toward good and positive goals. Here Paul reveals that God has
taken the rebellious and hardened heart of Israel and used it to bring about the salvation of all
mankind. And now, having brought Messiah into the world through the Jews, and then having poured
out the Holy Spirit upon all of the human race through the Church, He is now using the Church to
bring the Gospel back to all those in Israel who have “ears to hear” and a heart to understand, who
desire to be free from the stern schoolmaster of the Law of Moses to live in the Liberty of Christ. (cmpr.
John 12:36ff)

Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much
more will their full inclusion mean!

We have spoken earlier of the faithfulness of God: That His Sovereignty and right to Rule depend
upon it. So it is necessary…imperative…that the story come full circle. He will keep His word…His
Promises to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon….To us. Lucifer’s
insurrection will be eternally silenced. “All Israel will be saved: The Israel of God.” Galatians 6:16
133
this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for
everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the
church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly
places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord Ephesians 3:8-11

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and
inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted
the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not
themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good
news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. 1 Peter 1:10-12

Paul goes on:

Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in
order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them.

For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the
dead? If the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole lump, and if the root is holy, so are the branches.

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the
others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are,
remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.

There are those among the Church who would dismiss or diminish, even denigrate, Israel and the
Jews. This ought not to be! Our God will hold us accountable for how we respect or disrespect His
elder children. Many of them have carried the torch of Truth, as best as they understand it, faithfully
and with much pain and shedding of blood, for more than three thousand years, and they very much
need the mercy and grace that we have been given to share with them, especially today, when anti-
Semitism is again coiling like a venomous serpent around this dying planet. Christendumb has
treated them most disgracefully over the past millennia: We must regain their trust and reveal to
them their Messiah! They need us now more than ever before.

Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They were broken off
because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear.

HUMILITY, HUMILITY, HUMILITY. As TreeBeard the Ent observed to Merry and Pippin, the hasty
hobbits: “You are very……..small.” (“The Two Towers” the movie)...be small in your own eyes!

For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you.

Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to
you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off.

And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them
in again.

There are many who have a perception that “once saved” we are “always saved”. Perhaps you
should reconsider this theology. It’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure that the New Covenant supports it.
(compare Hebrews 6:4-6, 11:15, Luke 9:62)

For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated
olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree.

134
Lest you be wise in your own sight, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers:a partial hardening has
come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written,

“The Deliverer will come from Zion,

he will banish ungodliness from Jacob”;
“and this will be my covenant with them
when I take away their sins.”

As regards the gospel, they are enemies of God for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the
sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience,
so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive
mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.

Our God is no respecter of persons: We will all be judged absolutely fairly and impartially according
to the deepest motives of our own hearts and souls. It is always best to err on the side of Love, I
would think.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and
how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

“Or wwho has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be glory forever. Amen.

We all need to memorize Paul’s soliloquy to the Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And
if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to
remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be
burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not
arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at
wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for
knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the
partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I
know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide,
these three; but the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Romans again:

135
 CHAPTER 12

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Paul finally takes a breath, comes down off the ceiling of his dungeon cell, and moves from the
stunning glories of Kingdom theology to what it all means practically to be a true Christian living in this
Vale of Tears we call the world of men. This really is the first time he changes gears: (As I have said,
the guy had a mind like Steven Hawking’s, and virtually everything that has preceded this point in his
argument has been written as a single huge sentence without punctuation or pause).

(Just an aside: There is an account in Dr. Luke’s book of Acts where Paul was teaching at length on
the third floor of a building in Troas, in Greece. The room was packed out, and a teenager named
Eutychus was sitting on the windowsill. The night waxed long, it was after midnight, there were a lot
of smoking oil lamps burning, and apparently the young fellow finally dozed off, and he fell out of the
window, three stories to the pavement. The fall killed him, which freaked out the crowd and obviously
interrupted Paul’s train of thought. So Paul went downstairs and prayed over the kid, who revived
unscathed: Paul made sure he was OK, dusted him off, and went back upstairs to continue teaching
until after breakfast. Paul was an intense sort of rabbi.) (Acts 20:7-12)

Anyhow, Paul comes down from the anointed heights to which he has been carried by the Lord to
where the sandals meet the cobblestones, which is the way this passionate pastor always finishes up
his letters. There is only one proper response to the mind-blowing Revelation that Paul has just
attempted to share with us….Worship and unconditional lifetime service, on God’s terms. Paul’s
dictum was “Follow after me as I follow after the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 11:1) At the end of his life, relatively
few had managed to keep up. From Rome’s dungeon he wrote to Timothy:

Do your best to come to me soon. For Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to
Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia,Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him
with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry. Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus. When you come, bring the
cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments. Alexander the coppersmith
did me great harm; the Lord will repay him according to his deeds. Beware of him yourself, for he strongly
opposed our message. At my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. May it not be
charged against them! But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be
fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will
rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and
ever. Amen. 2 Timothy 4:9-18 cf. Colossians 4:14;Philemon 24

(And please remember, ONLY the one true Sovereign God is worthy of worship!!! This is not an idea
to be bandied about lightly or joked about. In its correct original meaning, “WORSHIP” is reserved
only to deity and cannot, MUST NOT, be offered to anything or anyone other than Almighty God. We
live in a world of ruined words: This should not be one of them.)

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,

The BATTLEGROUND FOR THE SOUL IS THE MIND!!!!

This is SO important! Just as the Creation is the objectification of the creative vision of God
(contemplate Genesis 1:3, John 1:1-3), so also is every aspect of our own experience of reality the
objectification of our own thoughts (“I think, therefore I am”, as Descartes put it, though he certainly
would not appreciate my using his thought in this context, I’m sure). Nothing we do, think, or are
comes into being without first being imagined.

136
The Bible says of a man, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7) The unregenerate mind is
completely screwed up by sin: Then the devil comes along and messes with our mental mess. It
follows inexorably that everything we do, think, and are, is, to a lesser or greater degree, messed up.
Biblically speaking, every man, woman and child in the world is certifiably insane, albeit some far
crazier than others. We are all somewhere on the cracked-pot continuum from cradle to grave
because of Grandpapa Adam and Grandmother Eve. The only truly sane person who has ever lived
on the planet, since Adam and Eve rebelled, is Jesus Christ, the Pattern Son. But, in Christ,
because of the life-transforming power of the Holy Spirit, we who join our lives with His begin to share
in His beautifully whole mind and its healthy thinking. “We have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:16)
When we are spiritually reborn we, in a real way, become newborn babies, with rebooted and rewired
minds, and we begin a process of spiritual and mental renewal that will take the remainder of our
mortal lives, and will then continue on for the ages yet to come. “All things are become new.” (2 Corinthi-
ans 5:17) The Scriptures, because they are a living and dynamic and supernatural “owner’s manual”
and life-support system for our ongoing instruction and development while we are in skin, contain all
manner of nutritious “food” for us at all stages of our development, from “formula” when we are
infants to rich and varied gourmet banquets as we mature and become more spiritually sophisticated.

Rabbit Trail:

However, and shamefully, so much of the Evangelical Church is addicted to pabulum, when the clear
teaching of the New Covenant is that we all are to grow up, steadily and relatively quickly, into
Christlike maturity, and dine on the richest of fare!!! Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesian church:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherdsand teachers, to equip the saints for the
work of ministry for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the
knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,
so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of
doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to
grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held
together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow
so that it builds itself up in love. Ephesians 4:11-16

And the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says:

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles
of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word
of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of
discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:12-14

Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a
foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God (Salvation and Altar Calls), and of
instruction about washings (Water Baptism and Christian Living and “Church Stuff”), the laying on of
hands (Baptism of the Holy Spirit and the Gifts and prayer and testimony services), the resurrection of
the dead, and eternal judgment (End Time Truth and Prophecy seminars and endless rhapsodies about
the Rapture): And this we will do if God permits. Hebrews 6:1-3

I cannot number the churches I have attended that do nothing but, week after week, march around
the same mountain of these “elementary doctrines of Christ”, preaching strained peas and
applesauce to the choir from cradle to grave. WE HAVE GONE AROUND THIS MOUNTAIN LONG
ENOUGH!!!! There is a war going on and a Promised Land to conquer, and a substantial percentage
of the church is catatonic in the pews! I fear that “ICHABOD” is inscribed over the doors of many of
our fellowships, and we are too deaf, blind, and dumb to even notice. (1 Samuel 4:21; Ezekiel 8-12)

137
Around the world today the Spirit of the Lord is moving in Power upon His people to raise them up
and build them up, not to bless them with the touchy-feelies or to give them a hundred-fold return on
the investment of their tithes,…but to make them a blessing to a dying planet, and an army capable of
defeating forever the diabolical and demonically cruel enemy who has enslaved it.

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy
arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey
Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your (our) obedience is complete. 2 Corinthians 10:4-6

But far too many potentially good warriors in the American division of this army have been
brainwashed into becoming near-thoughtless automatons who week after week, month after month,
year after year, go to church and meeting to hear again and again the same teachings that “lay again
the foundation of the elementary doctrine of Christ” (Hebrews 6:1) , teaching them to “live good Christian
lives”, and never move on to deeper things….who either fear the thought of the deep things of God,
or don’t even know they exist. (No wonder there is always a shortage of nursery workers: There are
very few adults in the house.) God alone knows how many saints have been ruined for the work of
the Kingdom by crap preaching of visionless party-line recycled sermons that tickle itching ears but
do nothing to build up the Body of Christ and make it battle-ready!

Thank God this is beginning to change, as the many tongued Flame of renewal again is igniting in the
hearts of our young people!! May this Holy Fire burn with white hot intensity and consume every
molecule of dross that contaminates our fellowships! May our lethargic leadership wake up to what
the Lord is doing!! And I warn, in advance of this revival, those who would seek to quench this fire.
will find themselves to be opposing God. He will not permit you to do this.

‘ And in the last days it shall be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.
And I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.
And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Acts 2:17;Joel
2:28-32

Paul continues:

that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Provided we have the senses of the “inner man” exercised to discern, we are fully equipped to
discern Truth from error, and to escape deception in these days of deepening spiritual and moral
darkness.

pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not
quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every
form of evil. 1 Thessalonians 5:17-22

138
 Jesus, Himself, before He ascended to His Battle Throne, warned of demonic deceptions powerful
enough “to deceive even the called saints of God” , as the end of the age plays out. So it is essential that
Paul’s warnings and admonitions be heeded. We are not playing games. There will be casualties.

For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if
possible, even the elect. (Matthew 24:24)

If you have joined yourself to the Lord only in order to escape hellfire or to be blessed, then the odds
are very high that you will perish in the days ahead of us. (You might do well to study the story of the
Exodus, which is a type: There were a huge number of people who left Egypt with the Israelites and
Moses….They didn’t make it to the promised land. See also Hebrews 3. God expects our motives to be
absolutely pure: our integrity uncompromised.) America is certainly not immune from the same
horrible catastrophes, natural or “man-caused” (quoting Janet Napolitano) , which we witness nightly
around the planet on our HDTV’s. Hell is on the march!

Continuing in Romans:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to
think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Paul again stresses the essential need for humility before God as our first defense against deception.
The taproot of all sin is pride: Paul has just spent an enormous amount of thought and energy
demolishing that evil stronghold. God has absolutely abolished all pretenses for pride across the
entire span of the universe: He has leveled the field for man and angel. And in place of pride He has
offered Himself, and His faith in Himself…”the Measure of Faith” in its fullness, from which each of us
is free to receive as much as we are willing to accept and nurture. There can be no boasting after we
accept this gift…only worship-filled thankfulness, and heartborn rejoicing that we have been set free
to serve and to truly love.

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would
save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he
gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? Matthew 16:24-26;
Mark 8:34-38; Luke 9:23-26

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though
many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

The Body of Christ is an ORGANISM, much more than it is an organization, a living and vital spiritual
being. We are, in FACT, spiritually part of one another with Christ as the “head of the Body” (Col.1:18,
Eph.4:15,16). The New Testament is absolutely clear about this Truth. (In an “all truth is God’s Truth”
sort of way, such plot lines as are spun in Star Wars, with “The Force”, and in Avatar with the
networked consciousness of Ey’wah are not entirely off the mark, though they are certainly pale and
distorted glimpses of the Glory of the God of Heaven. I am quite confident that our Lord uses such
artfully told bedtime stories of our modern world to whisper to the hearts of seekers. I am also
convinced that we need to be able to pick up on these conversation starters in the same way that
Paul used the “altar to the unknown God” in Athens, to help such seekers on their journey into Truth.
Acts 17:23)

Christendumb…the business of Christianity… has diminished and degraded what the Gospel is all
about, by turning the Living Temple into a commercialized social club, and an entertainment and
control enterprise, and a political action committee. “The Name of Christ is blasphemed because of you.”
Romans 2:24

139
 Certainly, organization and social structure is necessary. But it is not even remotely the primary paradigm
for the church that is proposed in the New Testament. None the less, as the arrogance and pride of man
has always infected the living Body of the Church, organization and bureaucracy and the politics of
theology has become a cancer which has inevitably and malignantly poisoned the mind of Christ in
Christians, and become a parasite feeding off of the people of God like some sinister vampire. The devil,
disguised as an ‘angel of light”, feeds upon the souls of compromised men and women who lust for power
and position, who themselves in turn feed upon the souls of naïve and poorly taught believers who blindly
trust their leadership. The same priestcraft that corrupted Israel, and early invaded the first church, and
then the Roman Catholic Church, and which precipitated the Protestant Reformation, exists now within
the denominations of the disciples of the protestors, as the sinister cycles repeat themselves, and prove
once again the Wisdom of God.

Jesus reamed out those who led in His day:

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For
you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you
make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Matthew 23:13-15

Every New Testament writer warns against the same spiritual predators. There are Scribes and
Pharisees and Saducees openly fellowshipping with, or in sleeper cells among, us today.

Paul continues with his analogy of the body:

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our
faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the
one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with
cheerfulness.

He uses the same analogy in his letter to the Corinthian church:

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I
do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Be-
cause I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the
whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be
the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all
were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. 1 Corinthians 12:14-
20

This only strengthens Paul’s earlier exhortation, and mine, that every Christian is called to effective and
dynamic ministry. So many of our gatherings, from traditional country churches to grand cathedrals, have
been configured to be auditoriums and concert halls…places of performance and entertainment, when
they ought to be places of ministry and Spirit-led interaction. Most traditional clergy are paid entertainers,
and most mainstream church members are a well-dressed audience going to the weekly show and tell.
Thank God, there are an increasing body of fellowships that are now coloring outside the lines. A new
paradigm is being proposed by the Spirit. New wineskins are being created into which new wine is being
poured.

“No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and
the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the
new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put
into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’ ” Luke 5:36-
39

140
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

abhor - find repugnant; abominate , execrate , loathe detest , hate - dislike intensely; feel antipathy
or aversion towards;

Could Paul have found a stronger word? I am a deeply committed, “sold out” Christian, a “religious
fanatic” by the standards of many, but I am not sure if I yet “abhor” evil, as I ought. I still watch my NCIS
and my Criminal Minds and my CSI, and enjoy them. And I still will go to an R-rated movie. Of course, I
root for the good guys, and love it when the bad guys get whacked. And I certainly know that these are all
modern bedtime stories: I can separate fantasy from reality pretty well. But it doesn’t bother me all that
much that the side stories of these shows are laced with sexual innuendo, and that they preach
righteousness and justice and truth with a liberal topping of the amorality and the immorality of the
world….I just choose to ignore that message and enjoy the show. And I haven’t yet been able to come to
ground on whether or not I should or shouldn’t. Of course, I preach against such things, and I have made
internal covenants not to fantasize about such things, but I do not “religiously” avoid such things either.
And the language of the world hardly bothers me at all: After all, dogs bark. I still bark sometimes. I
haven’t finished my race yet. And the best dramas tend to be more “adult” dramas, if they are not
produced by Christian companies. Jesus hung out with “publicans and sinners” all the time. He
frequented their clubs and cribs. Some of his friends were hooligans and whores. Of course, none of
them stayed that way. Nobody could hang with Jesus and remain unchanged…(Well, I take that back:
Judas managed to do it. Let me rephrase this: Nobody could hang with Jesus and remain “unaffected”.)
And Paul told his people NOT to avoid the sinners around them:

I wrote to you in my letter jnot to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the sexually
immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the
world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of
sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.
For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God
judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.” 1 Corinthians 5:9-13

So, Paul is definitely saying that once a person swears fealty to the Lord, if that person continues to
live like a pig and not try to change, we are not to enable him or her in any way, but rather we are to
diss him or her until she or he gets his or her act together. And if they don’t,

If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you
have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge
may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.
And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Matthew 18:15-17

Which, I take means that we are to assume that this person never was saved in the first place and
needs the Lord, so we are to start from square one with them again, hard as that might be, at least for
those who they most directly have offended. The whole thing becomes an opportunity for grace,
forgiveness, growth,... all that good Christian stuff. However, the offender certainly does not belong
in our fellowship. In many cases, we, being human and not all grown up in Christ, probably would
have to hand them off to another fellowship that has not been burned by them. In the worst-case
scenario the church leaders “turn them over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh” (1 Corinthians 5:5;1 Timo-
thy 1:20), in the hope that the spirit might be redeemed. I’m sure that for some, there is no hope. As
the elder John writes:

If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to
those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should
pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. 1 John 5:16-17

141
I do not here presume to fully understand what John means by this awful statement.

Nevertheless, I do have this persistent internal conflict that I wrestle with, what it means to be “in the
world yet not of the world” (John 17). I find myself very comfortable with some very worldly people, who I
find much more genuine and honest than many “Christians” that I know, especially after the betrayals
we have experienced in the past year, and I have in some measure ceased the incessant struggle to
keep up pious appearances, but rather have chosen to be true to myself and the Lord, and
transparent, if and when I choose to reveal myself to others.

I am, to the best of my understanding, honest before my God, living uprightly, and quick to confess
my faults and sins when He makes me aware of them. Either I am completely deluded, or this is
working: I have been walking in peace, without stress, and pretty much free of guilt and shame now
for a number of years: I am quite confident that my Father will tell me clearly whenever I step over
the line in my exploration of His liberty. “Love God, and do anything you want to do”...and be woman
or man enough to admit your mistakes and take your licks when you screw up.

So, for me the question remains, do I “abhor” evil strongly enough? I am thankful that I am still
wrestling with the question, and because I am struggling, have the assurance that I am still on the
right path toward an answer.

Paul continues: (I think I will let him speak for himself here: He’s pretty clear. You be the judge as to
where you are with all this.)

Love one another with brotherly affection.

Outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not be slothful in zeal,
be fervent in spirit,
serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope,
be patient in tribulation,
be constant in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another.
Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.
Never be wise in your own sight.
Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.
If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will
repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something
to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Now to kick over a hornet’s nest (again):

142
 CHAPTER 13

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those
that exist have been instituted by God.

Because of the conflation of civil religion and Christianity that I have already addressed, many good
folks believe that this admonition by Paul means that all good Christians are automatically required to
be good, squeaky-clean, law-abiding Caspar Milquetoast citizens because God has instituted human
governments in the same way that He has instituted the counsels of the Body of Christ, and moreover
that, in America, our government is supposed to be a Christian institution.... And so we are supposed
to obey the government as if it were the Pope or something: The official representative of the rule of
Christ on earth, or at least in the good ol’ USA.

Not so, as I have already argued. This is the wrong headed thinking that allowed the churches of
Germany to look the other way while Adolph Hitler butchered millions of not only Jews, but also true
Christians who stood against him in his demonic madness.

God has instituted AUTHORITY itself: AUTHORITY is the right, the Divine mandate, to keep order
and to prevent chaos. But human government is, at best, a stop-gap measure put in place by God to
keep sinful humanity from destroying itself before God has completed the work of redeeming His
people out of the world, and bringing to birth the new creation man. Human government is triage.
There is nothing godly or righteous about politics, neither can there be: The processes of
politics are inherently corrupt and corrupting. Politics is filthy business. God has never intended
to redeem this fallen world through human government...even theocratic human government.

God is not political. And He certainly does not pick our elected officials for us. We, by the exercise of
free choice, using common sense… or not…, or through the deceit and manipulation of self-serving
men and women, get the leaders, or non-leaders, we deserve, or the strongmen or women who seize
power. (I will allow that God may intervene in response to the prayers of His intercessors, and when
it is necessary, to the furtherance of His Plan: The scriptures certainly confirm that He does. But He
does not fix elections or stuff ballot boxes. He certainly may remove a leader as an individual.)

It is wrong for our government to impose its will upon the Church: It is arrogating to itself powers that
exceed its grasp and its wisdom. It is equally wrong for Christians within the government to impose
their Christianity upon the general population of our secular nation, though they certainly should allow
their faith to guide their moral and ethical decisions as they vote and legislate and administer the laws
of the land. To not do so would be to compromise their personal covenant with their God. When they
find they can no longer do this they must resign and influence the government from without, to
prevent themselves from becoming false witnesses to the Lord and to the Gospel.

Christians cannot and should not expect the world at large to conform to the standards of Christ: It
simply does not have the ability to do so. (The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God,
for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthi-
ans 2:14 ) At best those who do not know Christ can be instructed in the general precepts of the Primal
Law, and those precepts can be used to help shape the laws of the land…but not religiously….that is
not fair or just in a cosmopolitan society consisting of myriad people groups of disparate beliefs. This
is how our founders framed the Constitution. God, Himself, does not expect people to worship Him in
Truth, until they understand Truth: At best they can be restrained from the most destructive of
behaviors and guided toward justice and fairness in their dealings with each other. Ideally, where
civil government is doing its proper Divinely ordained job, the Church will then be free to instruct all
who desire to learn in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

143
Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for
the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those
who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality,
enslavers,liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the
glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. 1 Timothy 1:8-11

Certainly, the role of government is to be a very limited one: The bloating of government and its
grasping for power is simply a corporate manifestation of the human ambition to “be as God”, which is
the fundamental point of contention between God and mankind, as it was between Lucifer and God
prior to man’s appearance on the Great Stage. God’s people, however, are not supposed to be
relying upon or trusting in human government. (And quite honestly, I am not sure what I personally
believe about the place of Christians in politics….Part of me believes that a Christian influence within
the system is a very good thing. But another part of me is convinced that no Christian is capable of
swimming in the current political cesspool without becoming irrecoverably contaminated and
ultimately becoming more a liability to the work of the Kingdom than an asset. Biblically the
priest/prophets and the kings were always kept separated in their roles, and when lines were crossed
terrible things happened. Every king who stepped onto priestly turf, with the exception of David,
suffered a severe judgment from the Lord. And even David was strongly rebuked when he crossed
the line too far. Prophets who got too close to kings became false. Certainly Christians entering
politics must be cautioned to exercised great discernment in order to know when to leave before their
testimony becomes corrupted and their effectiveness is destroyed. And, of course, we must pray for
them diligently. Churches and church leaders must never be tangled in politics, but must stand above
them as watchmen.) This Divine antipathy to human government is most clearly seen in the record of
Israel’s demanding of a king during the prophetic Judgeship of Samuel.

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, “Behold, you are
old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” But the
thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the LORD. And
the LORD said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected
you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According to all the deeds that they have done, from
the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also
doing to you. Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the
king who shall reign over them.” ……

But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that
we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the LORD. And the
LORD said to Samuel, “Obey their voice and make them a king……

And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will
not answer you in that day.” 1 Samuel 8:4-18

So the Lord gave them Saul, and thus began the tragic saga of Israel’s many evil, and very few good,
kings…a saga that ultimately ended with the utter destruction and enslavement of the nation…a
tragedy that only began to reverse in 1948, as the prophetic timeclock switched on again. Our God is
not mocked. “The mills of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine.” God’s people are called
to be a THEOCRACY, and nothing less!!!! As with Israel, so also with the Church! He is presently
proving us, as He proved them. (We aren’t doing so well.)

God gave godless men government, because they would not listen to Him. It is a necessary evil…a
corollary of “the schoolmaster” of the Law to restrain lawlessness. It is not an end in itself. For us, for
whom the Law has been fulfilled, the “schoolmaster” has been retired, for his job is done.

144
So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that
faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s,
then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. Galatians 3:24-29

But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he
mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there
would have been no occasion to look for a second. For he finds fault with them when he says:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord,

when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,
not like the covenant that I made with their fathers
on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.
For they did not continue in my covenant,
and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord.
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my laws into their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor
and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
for they shall all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.
For I will be merciful toward their iniquities,
and I will remember their sins no more.”
In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and
growing old is ready to vanish away. Hebrews 8:6-13

But we do live, as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), sojourners, and heralds on a
diplomatic mission to a fallen world, and our Lord asks us to be a light and an example to them. They
certainly cannot understand our ways, we are truly “aliens among them”, and we are trying to save
them from themselves and from the certain destruction that they are blind to, so we must be sensitive
to conform ourselves to their world as we move through it, insofar as we do not compromise our
covenant with the Lord to do so. Therefore, Paul, and the other apostolic writers, admonish us

in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to
us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.
2 Corinthians 5:19-20

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to
governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of
God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free,
not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the
brotherhood. 1 Peter 2:13-17

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Romans 12:18

145
Among other things, we are trying to be living examples of the eternal value and necessity of
obedience to true Authority…Ultimate Authority. Therefore, to begin the conversation, we really need
to show respect for the mundane authority of petty kings and rulers and others who hold positions of
power in the world of men, which is the simplest demonstration available to us that they might
understand in their sin-befuddled confusion. We are called to expose the counter productivity of
anarchy, and also of enlightened self-interest, by living disciplined and orderly lives according to even
higher standards.

Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur
judgment.

It is easy to submit when we want to. It is much harder to submit when we are required to but don’t
want to, and especially to stupid or unjust regulations and to overbearing and antagonistic people.
But somebody has to be the example to the class…and we are far better equipped to do so than
anyone else, since we have infinite and eternal resources upon which to draw, both of self-control
and of necessary supplies. Also, it is a good self-test to see how far we have come in the Lord if we
honestly monitor how we respond to authority when we are required to yield to it.

For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority?
Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do
wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries
out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.

I must admit that I view this statement as idealistic and somewhat theoretical. There are a lot of
power-mad and evil rulers in the world today who are certainly a terror to good conduct, and who
reward and encourage the worst behavior imaginable. A good leader IS God’s servant, for a good
leader understands that he does serve the people, not himself, and is called to protect them and
minister justice on their behalf. And there are many good leaders still, even among the unregenerate.
But as evil waxes stronger in these dark times, vicious and cruel men and women will strive for power,
and they will not be servants, but will be tyrants driven by lust, and the paradigm will shift in their favor
for a season. And the devil will stir anti-Christ men and women to persecute more and more
aggressively those who bear the image of Christ. But even still we still must hold true to the heart of
God. Our example is Christ, and after Him every martyr of the last two-thousand years. History is
resplendent with accounts of strong Christians who stood peaceably and in love for righteousness in
the face of evil, and who actually broke the hearts of their tormentors and led them to repentance and
to life. “A soft answer turns away wrath.” (Proverbs 15:1; James 1:20) I don’t say that this is easy. I, myself,
would not find it so: I am potentially a fairly violent man, especially when it comes to responding
against injustice and when protecting my family. But I pray toward this every day, that if and when I
am so tested I respond as Christ would, and not in a way that will embarrass Him.

Jesus gave this pep talk to His guys:

When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to
say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through
you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents
and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the
end will be saved. Matthew 10:19-22

I am in prayer daily that I have internalized it when the time comes. And my commitment to your
freedom requires that I allow you to decide how you will face such decisions for yourself. God says
that whatever is not of faith is sin. The corollary, therefore, must be that if you make a decision from
a place of true faith you are not sinning, whatever that decision is.

146
Paul continues:

Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience.

For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay
to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom
respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

I have earlier said that I would fight for liberty, and to defend the innocent and the helpless. I haven’t
yet changed my thoughts on this, though I am very deeply meditating on all of these things as I look
into the days that are coming upon us. But I am growing less and less aggravated by such things as
taxes, and the arrogant stupidity of Congress, and the lies of the White House, and the rampant
insanity and greed of the marketplace and the damage that it is doing: My God is bigger than all of
the messes these morons are causing, and has resources beyond their comprehension upon which I
am free to draw. He has committed Himself to the care of my family and myself. So, I don’t have to
be overly aggravated at these little people, be they businessmen, politicians, or the President himself.
They are all just men (and women), like me. Very small, except for the Presence of God, if they know
Him. The worst they can do is kill me. I am not a doormat, but I suppose I can respect them, or
respect the office they hold, since the God of Heaven and Earth asks me to do so, and supplies His
grace; or at least not overly disrespect them. I am a fisherman: I expect, that if I need to pay more in
taxes, I will one day be fishing and will, as Peter did, catch a lunker bass with a check for the IRS
stuffed in its mouth. (I do admit, I still enjoy playing the role of gadfly and “sticking to the man”…The
Lord is going to have to convince me that I shouldn’t get some sort of pleasure out of this. They
squirm so nicely. One of my favorite TV shows is AFV: I do enjoy pointing out people’s
idiotsyncracies.) But they aren’t worth getting ulcers over. I am in a daily conversation with Daddy
concerning all of this. Nevertheless, these are intimately personal matters: I certainly try not to judge
another’s decisions regarding such things, if at all possible.

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall
not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.”

Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us
now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand.

So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light

Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality,
not in quarreling and jealousy.

But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

‘Nuff said.

147
 CHAPTER 14

As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions.

My Lord, but we do need to talk about this! How we love to fight among ourselves about things
much too high for us. As I have been contending, most Christians are parroting the opinions of
others anyway, and don’t really know much about the subjects about which they are pontificating.
And it is also quite obvious that very sincere believers, studying at depth the same biblical texts, have
come to remarkably different conclusions about what those texts mean. There are at least three
incredibly strongly held Evangelical theologies about the Last Days, all set forth as the final Word of
the Lord, by anointed ministers of the Gospel whose fruit is sweet and good. Entire denominations
have come into existence based upon these theologies alone. And these theologies are mutually
exclusive! The same can be said about theologies regarding the Holy Spirit, and Water Baptism and
the Lord’s Supper, and even which translation of the Bible to read. I think, maybe, we need to cool
down the rhetoric and build our fellowships on other ground….like declaring the Kingdom of the High
King, and worship, and prayer, and love of the Lord and service to one another.

Paul lambasted the Corinthian church for exactly this problem: So obviously it arose in the church
early on and has persisted ever since. (Actually, it was just as rampant in the Jewish community,
once they started actually studying the Old Covenant during the Babylonian Captivity….It’s a human
failing called “the party spirit” in the Bible, and is related to the spiritual distortions that cause strife,
division, contention, etc….We love to take sides, and then compete and have fights. That’s why we
are addicted to team sports, and love NASCAR, and spend millions on name brand personal care
products,…. and have wars. Competition is fine, it encourages innovation and excellence, but it
should be in the right spirit and for mutual edification and encouragement, not one-upmanship and
personal gain at the expense of others.)

Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife,
jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as
I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:19-21

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no
divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been
reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean is that
each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” Is
Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I
baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. (I
did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) For
Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the
cross of Christ be emptied of its power. 1 Corinthians 1:10-17

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of
God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 1 Corinthians 1:18-19

148
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish
the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it
pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks
seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God
is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers: not many
of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But
God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the
strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that
are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ
Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as
it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 1 Corinthians 1:20-31

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty
speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was
with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible
words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the
wisdom of men but in the power of God. 1 Corinthians 2:1-5

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection
and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and
of one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than
yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this
mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, Philippians 2:1-5

We must NEVER build our doctrines or our faith on obscure texts! When I was in Bible School, there
were many among us who could read nothing but the King James Version of the scriptures because
they had pet doctrines that required the specific wording of the KJV to be maintained. Such folks
tended to be extremely combative and contentious. When I was young in the Lord and naïve, I
bought into this idea myself, but over the years I have grown more and more confident that God’s
Word is far more secure than any translation that men might make. I do really fear that, on that
glorious morning after we’ve sung, “I’ll fly away, oh glory”, and the Trumpet sounds, an awful lot of
very disappointed and frightened people are going to discover that they were on the “no-fly list” be-
cause of their legalisms and dogmatisms. And if we are always bickering and arguing and damaging
each other and splitting up our fellowships….we aren’t ready. Paul, and the other New Testament
writers, repeatedly differentiate between cradlebaby believers and those who are mature. Mature
Christians can talk about deep things without coming to blows. And, clearly, there are an incredible
number of “deep things of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:6,7,10) to talk about. Cradlebabies and toddlers keep
whining and crying and messing their Pampers and whacking each other with toys, and cannot be
trusted with anything more dangerous than rubber duckies. Babies can be cute. When adults act
this way it is embarrassing. The strong Christian must always defer to the weak believer, because
the weak believer is not able to comprehend the revelation given to the strong believer…just as the
child cannot understand the reasoning of the parent. The wise parent is patient with the child,
condescends to it and, appropriately, instructs and guides the child through the stages of growth to
maturity. God does this for each one of us. We must do it in turn for those over whom He assigns us
watch and mentoring responsibility.

One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats
despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has
welcomed him.

149
It is the role of the mentor to instruct. It is the place of the disciple to yield authority, to accept
instruction in humility, and to respect the wisdom of those who have gone before. This, again, is
Divine Order and is the proper expression of the structure of Creation. In nature, those who defy this
order at best fail, and most often die.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And
he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

It is NOT our place, as individuals, to pass judgment (final judgment or judgment with a sentence). It
is our place to discern wisely in the Spirit. We are called to be “fruit inspectors”, and to not be naïve,
especially those of us who have gained maturity in the Lord, who have been released into
responsibility by our Father. We, as members one of another, are called to support and wisely build
each other up, not tear each other down. Furthermore, those in leadership in the Church are
especially anointed and given specific gifts through the Holy Spirit, and in these roles they do have a
limited authority to judge as they guide and protect the Body of Christ. That authority operates
through corporate prayer and under the protections of deep humility and mutual accountability, and it
is NOT humanly based, but Divinely derived.

That authority should not rest in any single individual, (one man ministries and dictatorial pastorates
are not supported by the New Testament), and if a single individual stands as first among equals,
then he (or she) MUST be in a submitted accountability relationship to other spiritually mature
counselor/advisors who have real and meaningful authority to challenge and shape his or her life. A
person who is unwilling to be corrected or taught is in rebellion and out of control and must be called
out! Such a person is dangerous to the Body, will influence and confuse others, and must not be in
leadership!!!

Ultimately, the Lord makes the calls: The leaders in the local fellowship act to carry out His decrees.
NO human being is in charge of God’s people! As with Ananias and Saphira, in the account in Acts,
the final judgment rested with God, not man. (Acts 5)

One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be
fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who
eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of
the Lord and gives thanks to God.

There are over six billion unique individuals on the planet at this time. Our infinitely creative God
wants it this way. The amazing thing about biblical Christianity is that the essential Truth of the
Gospel can be spoken in any of the multiplied thousands of languages of man and yet remain intact
and uncompromised, and that when Christ resurrects an individual or a people-group, their
expression of their new faith and Life looks both like Him and like them. The Church in Papua New
Guinea or in Changsha, China, or in Roorkee, India, doesn’t need to look like the Church in
Sydney,Australia, or Toronto,Canada, or Poughkeepsie, New York. Each local church is unique, yet
all True Christians are instantly known by each other and are one in Spirit.

For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die,
we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You
are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

150
Where are your eyes fixed? On the Lord? On yourself? On comparing yourself with others?

Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand
before the judgment seat of God; for it is written,

“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me,
and every tongue shall confess to God.”

So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

Paul writes elsewhere:

We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure
themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise. 2 Corinthians 10:12

Our only standard of comparison is to be ourselves measured against the example of Jesus as He
walked among us: WWJD….What Would Jesus Do?

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did
not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant,
being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient
to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:5-8

Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block
or hindrance in the way of a brother.

I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who
thinks it unclean.

This is an amazing statement. Paul’s argument below must be most thoughtfully and carefully prayed
through and balanced against the spirit of the rest of the instruction of the New Covenant, because,
taken wrongly, it certainly can become a license for all sorts of foolishness. Please remember that
Paul has already, several times, said that we must NOT freely sin in order to display the liberty and
grace of God in Christ!

All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be
enslaved by anything. 1 Corinthians 6:12

Putting this another way: Because the Law no longer applies, I am free to do pretty much anything I
want (as long as I don’t damage others…The Golden Rule is still in play (“Love God with everything I
am and have, and love everybody else as much as I love me because I love Him and He loves me.”).
But I have been freed from slavery to sin, to the flesh, and to Satan by the work of Christ, and having
chosen to accept His terms, I will never again do anything that will put me back into any kind of
slavery or bondage, however insignificant that bondage might seem to me. Conversely, in the
paradoxical world of the Bible, I am nevertheless a bondslave to Christ. This is the key to my liberty.

No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is
not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. 2 Timothy 2:4

“Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The
body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord
and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then
take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 1 Corinthians 6:13-15
151
Paul is talking here both about the base physical act of immorality, which no Christian should even
remotely be involved with…this includes fantasy and pornography.

And he seems also to be alluding to any behavior by believers that effectively has them trying to live
in two worlds. We are married to Christ. To consort with the world is to go awhoring and effectively
to commit spiritual adultery. As Christ put it:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one
and despise the other. Matthew 6:24;Luke 16:13

It is simply impossible to be committed to two all-demanding worldviews. And to teeter on the fence
is to enjoy the benefits of neither. As the patriarch general of Israel, Joshua, said: “Choose ye this day
whom ye will serve.” (Joshua 24:15) Either/Or not Both/And.

All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful, but not all things build up. Let no one
seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. 1 Corinthians 10:23-24

Christianity is the only belief system on the planet that both teaches human beings to live primarily
outside of themselves and for others, and gives them the power and resources to do so. All other
humanly contrived philosophies and religions start with and focus on the individual. Whereas the
great teachers of men have often taught “ Don’t do unto others what you would not want them to do
to you”, Jesus teaches, “ Do unto others, what you would have them do to you,” turning a self-serving
negative idea into a proactive positively motivated action. If each of us actually practiced the simple
teachings of Christ…The essential core instruction of the Gospel: “Love God with everything you are,
and love others as much as you love yourself” (Matthew 22:35-40;Mark 12:28-31;Luke 10:25-28) , virtually every
problem in the world would end instantly.

Of course, this cannot and will not happen, because of sin in the world. Unless and until everyone is
reborn in God’s Spirit in Christ, which we have already established as an impossible ideal because of
the nature of human freedom, the selfishness of man will continue to metastasize until it reaches
such a critical mass that God has no other option but to put an end to the experiment.

For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and
never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the
elect those days will be cut short. Matthew 24:21-22

Everything indicates that this terminal point is approaching at terminal velocity, simply because we,
as a global population, haven’t got a clue how to let go of the tail of the dragon. (Or rather, we aren’t
willing to repent and live. We prefer to take our chances with the dragon….we tend to get a rush from
the thrill of the ride.) Back to Paul:

For if your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. By what you eat, do not
destroy the one for whom Christ died. So do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil. For the
kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy
Spirit. Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then let us pursue what
makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything
is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. It is good not to eat meat or
drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble.

152
This simply means that when you or I, as Christians, are around weaker brothers and sisters, we
don’t do things that will cause them to question their faith. Be care-full and thoughtful. You may have
great liberty in the Lord, but the stronger person always has to protect the weaker person, to watch
their back. Over time, perhaps, you will be able to help them grow stronger. And, of course,
24/7/365, our Father is diligently helping His kids grow up. Nevertheless, because we are all unique,
all very different, all very limited and “partial” in our understanding and our abilities, there are going to
be many people and fellowships with whom each one of us simply will not be able to work all that
closely. This is OK. We must learn to agree to disagree.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And
he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

In essential things, unity.

In doubtful things, liberty.
In all things, charity. (St. Augustine)

The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment
on himself for what he approves.

Balanced against the full teaching of the New Covenant, and guarded by humble obedience, again I
quote St. Augustine: “Love God, and do anything you want.”

But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not
proceed from faith is sin.

But if you have doubts…If you feel a “check” in your heart about what you are doing or thinking, then
stop. Wait before the Lord. Dwell in His Word and learn more from and about Him. Pray…a lot.
Daddy will wisely help you grow and will teach you: As the writer of Hebrews says:

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by
this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of
God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness,
since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by
constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go
on to maturity, Hebrews 5:11-6:1
And Paul also writes elsewhere:

Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also
to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Philippians 3:15-16

153
 CHAPTER 15

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each
of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written,
“The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.”

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through
the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

I have said earlier that the Old Testament, while absolutely the Word of God, is NOT binding upon the
Church in the same way as is the New Covenant. This is a reference by Paul to what I mean. The
Old Testament is a record and a preview of God’s Plan and Purpose, and His commitment and
faithfulness to His people from before the conflict with Lucifer started to beyond its conclusion. As He
has worked out His purposes in our Time Realm, He has been absolutely faithful both to keep
immediate real time communication with everyone involved in an ongoing way, and to provide a
Prophetic timetable of the whole Plan,

Behold, the former things have come to pass,

and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth
I tell you of them. Isaiah 42:9

I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that I am he. John
13:19

And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe. John 14:29

As I said earlier, prophecy is much more purposively given to us to establish the faithfulness of God
than it is a prognostication of foreordained future events that God has sovereignly predestined. He
has provided an accurate record of everything He has done for the past thousands of years, so that
we, who tend toward doubt and fear, can always look back and confirm that He has never failed in
the smallest of details to keep His promises to us. And because of this we can, therefore, be certain
that we can move forward into the admittedly very frightening future with absolute confidence,
knowing that the amazing and mind-boggling events that are described as yet to come will also be
fully worked through and understood according to a precise and perfectly planned timetable. GOD IS
IN CONTROL. (cf. 2 Peter 1:19-21)

Returning to Paul:

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord
with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you,

for the glory of God.

For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm
the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

154
As it is written,

“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles,

and sing to your name.”

And again it is said,

“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”

And again,

“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,

and let all the peoples extol him.”

And again Isaiah says,

“The root of Jesse will come,

even he who arises to rule the Gentiles;
in him will the Gentiles hope.”

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you
may abound in hope. I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness,
filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. But on some points I have written to you very boldly
by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in
the priestly service of the gospel of God,

Of Priesthood, in Hebrews it is written:

For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer
gifts and sacrifices for sins. He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with
weakness. Because of this he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the
people. Hebrews 5:1-3

And Peter writes:

you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual
sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:5

you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim
the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 1 Peter 2:9

We are called, as Believers, to continue where Jesus left off…He said,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these
will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may
be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:12-14

And Paul remarked in another letter:

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s
afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, Colossians 1:24

155
We are New Covenant priests...The Body of Christ in the world. We are the anointed worshippers of
the True God, who “worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth” (John 4:23-24) , and we are the ministers of
life, who bring those who would come to God before Him, and intercede for them, and lead them to
accept His sacrifice and be forgiven and made whole, so that they also might enter into the Life and
service that we, ourselves, have been privileged to receive. This is our High Calling at this stage of
the Plan.

In Christ Jesus, then, I have reason to be proud of my work for God. For I will not venture to speak of anything
except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the
power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around
to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the
gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written,

“Those who have never been told of him will see,

and those who have never heard will understand.”

This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you.

But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to
come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I
have enjoyed your company for a while.

At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been
pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem.

For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their
spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings.

When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain
by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.

I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in
your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service
for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God’s will I may come to you with joy and be
refreshed in your company. May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.

All of this adventure is recorded in the book of Acts. Paul finally did get to Rome, though not quite as
he had planned, and there is good anecdotal evidence that he also made it to Spain to establish a
beachhead for the Gospel there before finally being imprisoned again and beheaded by Nero in
Rome.

156
 CHAPTER 16

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae, that you may welcome her in the
Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron
of many and of myself as well. Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their
necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well. Greet
also the church in their house. Greet my beloved Epaenetus, who was the first convert to Christ in Asia. Greet
Mary, who has worked hard for you. Greet Andronicus and Junia,my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They
are well known to the apostles, and they were in Christ before me. Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord.
Greet Urbanus, our fellow worker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys. Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ.
Greet those who belong to the family of Aristobulus. Greet my kinsman Herodion. Greet those in the Lord who
belong to the family of Narcissus. Greet those workers in the Lord, Tryphaena and Tryphosa. Greet the beloved
Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord. Greet Rufus, chosen in the Lord; also his mother, who has been a
mother to me as well. Greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers who are with
them. Greet Philologus, Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints who are with them. Greet
one another with a holy kiss. All the churches of Christ greet you.

Paul always finishes his letters with extensive greetings to his many friends and co-workers. Please
note the prominence of women in these mentions, and throughout the writings of the New Testament.
True Christianity is incredibly supportive of women, in the face of a world of misogynistic cultures, and
is not suppressive of or demeaning to them!!! Anyone who would argue otherwise is misreading the
text, and/or has another agenda they are pressing. There are guidelines and roles defined in the
New Covenant for men and women (and children), and there are extremely sound spiritual reasons
for them, but they have nothing to do with male chauvinism or the denigration of women. Jesus
Christ and every apostolic writer vigorously defend the spiritual and moral and social equality of men
and women before God and in the Church. All distinctions of office and role and requirements of
leadership and submission that are defined by the New Covenant are specifically related to spiritual
giftings and attributes and to the original design parameters for the human being, and to the exercise
of true authority, and the keeping of order within the organism of the Church and the family. Again,
the disputes and conflicts that have torn the fabric of Christendumb to tatters over the centuries on
these issues arise from the politics of the traditions of men and the encroachments of sin into the
Church, and not from the spirit of the New Testament. As such they are heresies.

I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the
doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them.

For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they
deceive the hearts of the naive.

All those who persist in causing division within a fellowship should be put out of the fellowship.
They are enemy agents. They can only do harm. We do ourselves no good abiding their presence if,
after two or three admonitions, they continue to be disruptive and spread dissention. And if they are
in leadership, they must be publicly rebuked and removed, because they have had greater influence
and that influence must be counteracted by clear reprimand and a decisive biblical response. (As with
all organizations, and with all of us human beings, much as we try to get along we have clashes and
conflicts of personality, at least until we have attained a very high level of maturity in the Lord. So, if
we sometime find ourselves in situations where such tensions are interfering with getting the job done,
then the gracious thing to do is to agree that we make enough room between us that we can each do
our jobs as the Lord asks us to do them, rather than butt heads. If we start trying to tear each other
up or down, we have moved out of Christ-likeness and are effectively committing treason….Not a
good idea in a war. And in a body, renegade cells that devour each other are called cancer.)

157
For your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise as to what is good and
innocent as to what is evil.

However, all of this must be done in the Spirit of Christ. We are all regularly in the enemy’s
crosshairs, and we must not do his work for him:

Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own
work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear
his own load. Galatians 6:1-5

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Timothy, my fellow worker, greets you; so do Lucius and Jason and Sosipater, my kinsmen. I Tertius, hwho
wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord.

It was the common practice in Paul’s day for a teacher or author to use an “amanuensis” or a scribe,
who would furiously write down whatever the primary author was dictating. This was Tertius’ role.
Paul would then, as he mentions in another letter, personally sign off the document to authenticate it.

Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother
Quartus, greet you.

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ,according
to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed

This is the clear apostolic declaration of the doctrine of Progressive Revelation…That God holds back
information until He decides it is time to reveal it to us, and even then He reveals it on a “need to
know” basis. This is why the Living Text of the Bible, uniquely, is able to speak across millennia with
fresh data, and to be as relevant today for us as it was to King David or to Paul or to Martin Luther in
their days.

and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the
eternal God,

It is NOT that today’s prophets are bending and twisting the text to make it fit into our modern times:
It is that God is opening up that level of the supernatural database which applies to this epoch of His
Plan and our history, and we are being permitted insight into it for the first time. Prophets
speak….other prophets evaluate and confirm or augment what is spoken: Everything is judged
through the lens of the inspired biblical text, and only that which is in harmony with the clear teaching
of the Bible is accepted. This is going to be more and more the prevailing reality as we progress into
this present and building Move of the Holy Spirit in the Earth today, and as our God reestablishes the
Apostolic and Prophetic offices to the Church.

to bring about the obedience of faith—

to the only wise God

be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ!

Amen.

158
 THE MOUNTAIN TREE
by
Loyal Marion Thompson

A mountain tree,
if it would see the far horizon and the stars,
may never know a sheltered place,
nor grow symmetrical in grace:
Such trees must battle doggedly the blasts,
and bear the scars.

In the end we all have to trust someone to save us…or not. Ourselves…Someone else…a government, small or
large…or God.

At that last gasp, a breath we all have to take, we all best hope that we were right…that our savior is
sufficient….Quite frankly self, people, and governments have never been and never will be sufficient.

I know, beyond all doubt, that I am already quite safe. There is nothing that anyone can do to me that can
jeopardize this. The worst that men can do is kill me. That’s what they tried to do to Jesus, and they failed.

I can tell you about Life, but I can’t do any more. I certainly can’t save you…I can only care, and do my best to
not give you reasons not to listen to the Truth. But, as Mulder and Scully always said, “The Truth is out There,”
and you need to listen to it with all your heart. The X-files are bogus (I think): The Gospel isn’t. As Paul said,
so also say I, “You can follow after me, as I follow after the Lord,” or not… I don’t feel particularly constrained
to wait around for too long before I move along.
copyright April 18, 2010
R. Stephan Toman

159
 PICTURES IN A GALLERY

Paul’s letter

To the

EPHESIANS

PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT WHILE I AM WHOLELY CONVINCED OF THE VAST MAJORITY

OF WHAT I WRITE IN THESE COMMENTARIES, AND AM QUITE CONFIDENT THAT I AM ON
THE RIGHT TRACK WITH THE REMAINDER, NEVERTHELESS EVERYTHING I AM WRITING IS,
IN THE END, MY HUMBLE OPINION. I DO THINK I HAVE BOTH THE CREDENTIALS AND THE
LIFE EXPERIENCE IN CHRIST TO EXPRESS MY OPINION AND EXPECT IT TO BE AT LEAST
RESPECTED IF NOT ENTIRELY AGREED WITH, BUT YOU ARE FREE TO PICK AND CHOOSE
THROUGH MY THOUGHTS AS YOU LIKE OR REJECT THEM ENTIRELY.
I WOULD EXPECT YOU TO “SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES TO SEE IF THESE THINGS BE TRUE”.
THE SCRIPTURES QUOTED, HOWEVER, ARE GOD'S WORD:
THEY ARE NOT OPEN TO DEBATE
AND YOU CAN REJECT THEM AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

ALSO, YOU MAY READ MOST OF MY COMMENTS INDEPENDENTLY OF THE LARGE SECTIONS OF
QUOTED SCRIPTURES I INCLUDE TO BACK UP MY POINTS,
BUT I DO ENCOURAGE YOU TO READ GOD'S WORD:
HE HAS A LOT MORE OF MUCH GREATER WORTH TO SAY THAN I DO,
AND THE EXERCISE WILL DO YOU GOOD.

Registered © 2010 R. Stephan Toman

(All Rights Reserved)
NO PORTION OF THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE REPRODUCED
BY ANY MEANS PHYSICAL OR ELECTRONIC FOR ANY PURPOSE
WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

160
 THIS COMMENTARY IS DEDICATED TO M. H. JOHNSON,
WHO ONCE SPOKE A WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT TO ME
THAT KINDLED IN ME THE REVELATION OF THE LORD WHICH I AM COMING SO POWERFULLY TO
UNDERSTAND AND EMBRACE,
AND WHICH I AM TRYING TO CLARIFY THROUGH THESE WRITINGS.

161
Please note: As with the Romans commentary, I have opted to quote the scripture in most cases
without noting chapter and verse. I am making the assumption that all the Bible is God's inerrant
Word, and therefore that it really doesn't matter, in many cases, where a quote comes from. You can
easily look up any of my references using a concordance or by accessing the Blueletter Bible on-line.
http://www.blueletterbible.org Most of my quotes are from the English Standard Version. All
scripture is in red in the Times New Roman font. Again, the primary text is in burgandy. I also
encourage you to read this commentary in close association with my thoughts on the Letter to the
Romans: I really have not made an effort to differentiate the direction of my thoughts between the
two books.

INTRODUCTION

The apostle Paul wrote Ephesians to the churches around Ephesus, where he had been pastor for
three years (Acts 19),  to remind them of  the scope of God’s eternal plan for all humanity―for Jews
and Gentiles alike. This is the mystery of God, hidden for ages but now made known in Jesus Christ.
The first three chapters focus on what Christians should believe and embrace, unfolding the glorious
riches of God’s grace in Christ. Spiritually dead sinners are made alive and gain eternal salvation and
infinite hope and possibility “by grace through faith” (2:8). The last three chapters explain the
implications of God’s grace for the church, for individuals, and for families. This second section
comes to a climax with a command to stand with the armor of God against the devil, reminding us
again that we are in a Cosmic war, and that the Church is, at this time, and above all, an offensive
and militant supernaturally equipped force aggressively holding ground already won by Christ on
Calvary. Paul wrote this letter while in prison, probably from Caesarea, or possibly while in Rome,
about A.D. 60.

162
 CHAPTER 1

Paul, ‍an apostle of Christ Jesus ‍by the will of God,

It is God who raises us up in our callings to His service, never ourselves. (“Apostle” means “one sent
forth”.) If we have sworn fealty to Christ (and really, even if we have not), we are not our own, as
Paul will directly state below. This is a difficult lesson to learn, especially for Americans, independent
by nature and indoctrinated, brainwashed, into the addictions of egoism from cradle to grave by a
culture gone mad in its pursuits of sensuality and the pleasures of sin and self-gratification.

For exaltation comes neither from the east

Nor from the west nor from the south.
But God is the Judge:
He puts down one,
And exalts another. Psalm 75:6-7

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, 1 Peter 5:6

Continuing:

To the saints who are in Ephesus, and ‍are faithful‍ in Christ Jesus:

All true Christians are saints…those who are separated from the sin that dominates the world, through
the symbiotic indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit by their acceptance of the grace-gift of the faith of Christ
Jesus (chapter 2:8), and are set apart to God. Those in “Christendumb” (the secularized, humanistic,
“pseudo-Christian” social/political religious structure that has co-opted the message and work of Christ
over the past two thousand years), who would “canonize” (declare by “official church law”) men and
women, and make them something special because of their devotion, even presuming to invoke the
name of God to justify the exaltation of these believers above others equally devoted but lesser
known, are not serving the Gospel, by which God has leveled the playing field for all humanity, from
peasant to Pope, and has done away with all pretension and pride of man. It is good for those so
elevated that they are dead and thus immune from the temptations of celebrity.

There is no room in Christ for merely human aspiration and worldly honor, especially when these
things tempt toward egoism and conceit. All who seek these self-serving rewards will stumble into
the pitfalls of hubris, and out of Grace. The devil will take them down, inevitably and inexorably. This
caution applies at every level, whether one aspires to be the cutest kid in kindergarten, the sharpest
“player” at the office, the the most successful entrepreneur showcased in Woman's Online Magazine,
or the President of the United States.

And those who look to men or women as go-betweens in their communications with God, whether
they be living “reverend holy fathers and mothers”, or “anointed brother or sister so-in-so‘s”, or dead
“Saint Looey”, are all in direct contradiction with the clear teaching of the New Covenant! Daddy
wants to look each one of us straight in the eye when we talk with Him and He talks with us. He
doesn’t want to hear from someone, speaking for us, who we think might have more clout with Him. It
doesn’t matter whether our excuse for such misplaced regard comes from Rome, or Canterbury, or
the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, or from the wizened sages of our myriad Protestant mainstream
wellsprings, or the elder-board of some independent local full-gospel fellowship. We owe each other
respect, where respect is due and has been earned, but none of us has anything of lasting value that
has not been given us by the Grace of God…None of us are particularly special, and the more gifted
and thoughtful we are the more we ought to realize this.

163
 vwhat do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive
it? 1 Corinthians 4:7

There is no place in Christ for hubris or presumptive pride. The older and deeper we grow in the
Lord, the more humble we should become:

“The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore
this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.” So said John the Baptist. John
3:25-30

Jesus said,

In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; ‍for the
Father himself loves you, because ‍you have loved me and ‍have believed that I came from God.  ‍I came from the
Father and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.” John 16:26-28

And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors,
for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself
will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Matthew 23:9-12

Indeed, to approach our Father through human mediators, through any priesthood, (living or dead),
Protestant or Catholic, or any mongrel breed that might have been whelped over the generations of
disputes between them, is to return to Mount Sinai of nearly four millennia ago, where the people of
Israel first rejected in fear the privilege of intimate fellowship with their Maker.

“These words the LORD spoke to all your assembly at the mountain out of the midst of the fire, the cloud, and the
thick darkness, with a loud voice; and he added no more. And ‍he wrote them on two tablets of stone and gave
them to me. And ‍as soon as you heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was
burning with fire, you came near to me, all the heads of your tribes, and your elders. And you said, ‘Behold, the
LORD our God has shown us his glory and greatness, and ‍we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire.
This day we have seen God speak with man, and man still live. Now therefore why should we die? For this great
fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the LORD our God any more, we shall die. ‍For who is there of all
flesh, that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of fire as we have, and has still lived?
Go near and hear all that the LORD our God will say and speak to us all that the LORD our God will speak to you,
and we will hear and do it.’ Deuteronomy 5:22-27

THOSE WHO GO TO OUR FATHER THROUGH MEDIATORS, MAN OR ANGEL, HAVE CRAWLED BACK UNDER THE
ROCK OF THE LAW TO HIDE THEIR FACE FROM GOD! THEY HAVE FALLEN FROM GRACE.

Why are you afraid of your Father, who loves you?

While the New Testament is clear that we all need mentors and accountability structures, especially
so when we are young in our faith and as we are growing in our knowledge of Christ and the
Kingdom of God, we are each able to hear the voice of our Father for ourselves!! And we are each
able to read His love letter to us for ourselves!!! Especially in our modern world of so many well-
vetted translations and paraphrases of the Bible. There are no excuses left to us.

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and
the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand
to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the
LORD.

164
‍But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put
my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall
all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and ‍I
will remember their sin no more.” Jeremiah 31:31-34

But ‍the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you.
But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and ‍is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in
him. 1 John 2:27

you have been acquainted with ‍the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith
in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and
for training in righteousness, that ‍the man of God‍ may be competent, equipped ‍for every good work. 2 Timothy
3:15-17

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, ‍he will teach you all things and bring to
your remembrance all that I have said to you. John 14:26

He has not made it difficult: He has only made it intimate. We will get out of the relationship what we put
into the relationship. If we approach God with an agenda, in pride, or with ulterior motives, we will twist
the Word of God into a labyrinth of confusion, and we will unavoidably and inevitably wander down deadly
paths, with legions of demons lurking in ambushments to finish us off at their pleasure.

And they will win. We will die in our sin.

If we approach the Word of God superficially or insincerely, we will never get past talking about the
weather, and about our feelings, and about controversial “doctrines”, and the latest “prophecies”, and
our favorite charts and conspiracies, and we will never grow in our knowledge of our Father or
ourselves. At best we will remain cradlebabies, destined to be “saved, yet as by fire”, smelling of smoke
with our hair singed and our clothes burned off and nothing to show for our lives. (1 Corinthians 3:10-23)

Many in this state probably have never been saved in the first place: They are “stillborn”, and “Chris-
tian” in their heads only, having made an emotional altar call because they got caught in a sin and felt
guilty for the moment, but not because they really wanted to stop living self-centered lives.
Unfortunately,... no…tragically and evilly… the cheap-grace elements of the church tend to allow
such persons to remain unchallenged and unaware of the precarious condition of their souls and
possibly innoculated against ever really coming to the Lord.

“But woe ‍to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you ‍shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For
you ‍neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single ‍proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you
make him twice as much a ‍child of ‍hell‍ as yourselves. Matthew 23:13-15

Jesus gave us His parable of the soils: (Luke 8). He was crystal clear that only about one quarter of
the human race is going to ultimately choose to come home to Daddy: The rest are going to make
excuses, and are going to either never receive the grace of God, or are going to fall from grace. (Luke
14:15ff)

The same story is retold in another way in Matthew 22: 1-14. (Please, don’t continue to kid yourself about
this, if you are presently doing so: Go look in the mirror, right now, and make sure). Only those who
have the love and the courage to speak with Daddy face to face will ever enter into the Kingdom of
God.

165
Paul writes:

 For consider your calling, brothers: ‍not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were
powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; ‍God
chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even
‍things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,  so ‍that no human being‍ might boast in the presence of
God.  And because of him‍ you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, ‍righteousness and ‍sanc­
tification and ‍redemption,  so that, as it is written, ‍“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 1 Corinthians 1:26-
31

And Jesus half-brother James writes:

My brothers, ‍show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, ‍the Lord of glory.  For if a man
wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes
in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,”
‍while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,”  have you not then made
distinctions among yourselves and become ‍judges with evil thoughts?  Listen, my beloved brothers, has not
God chosen those who are poor in the world to be ‍rich in faith and heirs of ‍the kingdom, which he has promised
to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and
the ones who drag you ‍into court?  Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable ‍name by which you
were called? James 2:1-7

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‍“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are
doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.
For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point ‍has become accountable for all of it. For he who said,
‍“Do not commit adultery,” also said, ‍“Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have
become a transgressor of the law.  So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under ‍the law of liberty.
For ‍judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. James 2:8-13

For God shows no partiality. (Romans 2:11)

I really don’t need somebody telling me that they know, better than I do, how I should share my deepest
heart with my own Father, when He has already established beyond all doubt that if I want to throw myself
into his lap and bawl my eyes out and make a complete fool of myself, it’s perfectly OK with Him! He
made me who I am and knows me better than I know myself: I’m quite certain that He can put up with my
idiosyncrasies. I am a Dad: I rather enjoy the uniqueness of each of my children and grandchildren, with
all their quirks of personality, and I get annoyed when outsiders try to talk to me about them overmuch or
meddle in my relationship with each of them. Again Paul says in Romans,

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be‍ against us?   ‍He who did not spare his own
Son but ‍gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?  Who shall bring
any charge against God’s elect?  ‍It is God who justifies.  Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who
died—more than that, who was raised—‍who is at the right hand of God, ‍who indeed is interceding for us. Who
shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness,
or danger, or sword? As it is written,

      “‍ For your sake ‍we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through ‍him who loved us.  For I am sure that neither death
nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans
8:31-39

166
Indeed, as we move now into the final phase of the “times of the Gentiles”, and the board is being set
for the last big campaign of the War, the word that is being spoken around the world in front-line
fellowships by prophetic men and women is that this rising great army of the Lord will be a “Faceless
Generation”. There will be fewer celebrity or “big-time” ministries, perhaps because persecution will
target them first, but rather there will rise up multitudes of supernaturally empowered “true saints”,
moving globally, doing “greater works” than Jesus Himself ever was able to accomplish, and, like
John the Baptist, “decreasing”, so that the Glory of God might increase in the Earth.

I am the LORD; that is my name;

‍my glory I give to no other, Isaiah 42:8

For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,

for how should my name‍ be profaned?
‍My glory I will not give to another. Isaiah 48:11

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than
these will he do, because I ‍am going to the Father.  ‍Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father
may be glorified in the Son.  ‍If you ask me‍ anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:12-14

Arise, shine, for your light has come,

and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples;
but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you.
‍And nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your rising. Isaiah 60:1-3

The mark of a “saint” is not some sort of halo: It is faithfulness…the keeping of the Covenant made
when the terms of Christ’s salvation are accepted, for then the approbation and the Glory of God will
be clearly seen upon the believer, whether head of state or washerwoman.

God says, “I will give you, freely, ALL of Me. In exchange, you must give Me all of you.”

The problem is that, in America at least, many of us seem to have forgotten what the word “commit-
ment” means…maybe we’ve become too corrupt and dishonest in our hearts to care, and have
conflated “commitment” with “convenience”.

I also want to remark here that those who would deliberately place themselves as mediators between
man and God…who would dare to take upon themselves the role that only Christ has earned, either
for the power trip or for money, or even as well intentioned busy-bodies, are blasphemers, and will be
judged as such.

For ‍there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man‍ Christ Jesus,  who gave himself
as a ransom for all, which is ‍the testimony given at the proper time. 1 Timothy 2:5-6

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with
greater strictness. James 3:1

All those who would aspire to be leaders of God’s people should look to their hearts, and most
carefully and prayerfully assess their motives to see whether they are standing upon the Rock, or
upon sand.

Continuing with Ephesians:

167
 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

‍Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ

I have discussed at great length in my remarks on Romans the importance of Paul’s careful
distinction, which he maintains throughout his letters, between Father God and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This distinction is unique to Christianity and is foundational to a mature faith. I will make further
remarks as we proceed.

who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing ‍in the heavenly places,

I want to note here that Paul speaks in the past tense: We HAVE BEEN BLESSED with EVERY
spiritual blessing. This is a present reality, not just a future hope, because we presently actively
participate in this dual citizenship in the many dimensions of Heaven. We do not have full access, at
this time, to all of the inheritance that our adoption into the family of the High King blesses us with,

For we know that ‍the whole creation ‍has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.  And not
only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as ‍we wait eagerly for
adoption as sons, ‍the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8:22 -23

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown
in dishonor; ‍it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a natural body; it is
raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man
Adam became a living being”; ‍the last Adam became a life­giving spirit.  But it is not the spiritual that is first
but the natural, and then the spiritual.  The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; ‍the second man is from
heaven.  As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, ‍so also are
those who are of heaven.  Just ‍as we have borne the image of the man of dust, ‍we shall‍ also bear the image of
the man of heaven. 1 Corinthians 15:42-49

I tell you this, brothers: ‍flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the
imperishable.  Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, ‍but we shall all be changed,  in a moment, in
the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For ‍the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable,
and we shall be changed.  For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and ‍this mortal body must put
on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall
come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”

  ‍“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.  But thanks be to God, ‍who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:50-57

(This victory is a present reality: see my discussion of Paul’s letter to the Romans.)

my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the
Lord your labor is not in vain. 1 Corinthians 15:58

but we are children of privilege,

“Fear not, little flock, for is (here and now) your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32

168
We do ourselves great disservice, and we perhaps disgrace and embarrass our Father, when we
grovel before Him like beggars expecting only crumbs and scraps, whining, “if it is Your will”. Of
course, it is His will!! If we are obedient children who respect, honor, and love our Father, and
respect His wisdom and judgment concerning our lives and well being. He is our Father, and what
Father, if He is worth the name, does not want to bless His kids out of their PJ’s?

“Truly, truly, I say to you, ‍whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these
will he do, because I am going to the Father.  ‍Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may
be glorified in the Son.  ‍If you ask me‍ anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:12 -14

And Paul says in Romans that we can, through obedient and faithful discipleship, know that will clear-
ly:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, (a) to present your bodies (b) as a living sacrifice,
holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (c) Do not be conformed to this world, but be trans-
formed by (d) the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may (e) discern what is the will of God, what is
good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1-2

But if we want to abuse His largess and run roughshod over His Grace, and not trust His guidance as to
our readiness to walk in the responsibilities of royalty and the power that comes with them, then we aren’t
going to get jack, no matter how hard we try to twist His arm!

 You do not have, because you do not ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask ‍wrongly, to spend it on
your passions. James 4:2-3

Do we think that He is an idiot? TO PRESUME THAT SOMEHOW WE CAN LEVERAGE THE HAND OF GOD
ALMIGHTY IS TO EMPLOY MAGIC! And magic is a tool of witchcraft, not of true Christians! Our God
doesn’t like witchcraft…at all!

There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who ‍prac-
tices  divination  or  tells  fortunes  or  interprets  omens,  or  ‍a  sorcerer  or  a  charmer  or  ‍a  medium  or  a
necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD.
And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you. You shall be blameless
before the LORD your God, for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to
diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this. Deuteronomy 18:10-14

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity,
strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I
warn you, as I warned you before, that ‍those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19-21

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers,
idolaters, and all liars, ‍their portion will be in ‍the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is ‍the second death.
Revelation 21:8

Please think about this stuff: It’s important. There is a lot of witchcraft being played with in today’s
churches. God cannot honor this and He will judge those who practice such things.

Returning to Paul’s differentiation between the Father and the Son: There are many profound and careful
nuances of Truth revealed in the Bible that we tend to gloss over and conflate by sloppy and simplistic
popular theology, to our confusion and to the detriment of the New Covenant mandate of the Church as
stated in Mathew 28 and in many other places throughout the New Testament writings. God put the
details in His Word for a reason.

169
The distinctions of the Trinity are among the most abused of these distorted and diminished doctrines.
The Godhead, the Triune God, is both the only true Deity, (“You shall have no other gods before Me”),
and the Source and Definition of all Order and Authority and of all submission to Authority in the
Cosmos.

All other concepts of God are at best distortions of the Truth, and are, by biblical judgment, false and
blasphemous idolatries, however sincerely held. (This does not necessarily mean that those who hold
them are consciously blasphemers, though they are idolaters: Vast multitudes globally are simply
ignorant of Truth, and, as I discuss at depth in my thoughts on Romans, God understands this and
does not hold people responsible for those things that they of which they are ignorant or cannot
understand. (John 9:41, etc.) The human race has long been in a deep spiritual black hole, and
enormous populations are completely deceived and hopelessly confused. God is quite aware of this.
He does, however, hold those responsible who, claiming knowledge, keep such people enslaved in
ignorance: ‍“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be
judged with greater strictness“. James 3:1

Temptations to sin‍ are ‍sure to come, but ‍woe to the one through whom they come!  It would be better for him if
a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little
ones to sin. Luke 17:1-2

The Trinity is the most profound and ineffable metaphysical Truth of all Truth. It is a concept unique
to the Christian faith. The entire Plan of the redemption of the creation centers in the reality of the
triune nature of God, and could not have been brought to its completion except that the Godhead is
triune. (I will not debate this point here: I am stating it as a fact. If you don’t agree, tough noogies. If
you seriously would like to explore this Truth, we can make it the subject of its own study at another
time.) The Bible declares this Truth as fact. We have weakened the message of the Gospel by
confusing this foundational Truth.

God Almighty, the Father, the only self-existent eternal being of pure Spirit, is Supreme. From Him
everything that is proceeds, and by Him all that is, is conceived: His is the Divine Mind. “In Him we
live and move and have our being” Acts 17:28 . Everything that is,in all the dimensions of Reality, is His
idea, expressed and made substantial, in fact, out of His own spiritual substance.

We do not understand this, and never will: We acknowledge this in Faith, and we worship…The Bible
does not attempt to “prove” God. It declares Him. Genesis begins with the statement, “In the
beginning God….”. The existence of God cannot be “proven”, neither by religion nor by science. Or
we reject this statement, in faith. It takes as much faith not to believe in God as it does to believe in
God. A non-believer cannot “prove” that all that I am stating is not true. Ultimately, his or her position
is just as “faith-based”, just as “religious”, as is mine.

Rabbit Trail:

You might read Josh McDowell’s “New Evidence That Demands a Verdict” for a thorough discussion
of the differences between scientific “proof” and historical “proof”, or “proof by authority”. No history
can be “proven” scientifically, because the past cannot be repeated by experiment…it can only be
remembered or inferred or reconstructed from an accumulation of evidences and recollections and
established to a high degree of probability.

And no single unique event can be proven scientifically, for the same reason. You cannot “prove”
that yesterday happened, though you can make a strong case that it did. To argue “scientifically” that
the biblical history and its metaphysical premise is hogwash is to argue apples against oranges.
Science has no business even speaking to the subject, except in terms of observation and

170
description of hard data correctly collected and collated (such as archaeological artifacts or the
myriad data now available about the origin and structure of the universe). And to date all hard
scientific data that has been correctly collected and handled has either supported or not contradicted
the biblical worldview, and the case for the biblical paradigm is growing stronger by the day. You can
examine the evidence for this for yourself at www.reasons.org and http://www.discovery.org/ just for
starters.

Much of the unintelligible and self-contradictory noise coming out of the scientific community against
the religious community is best called “scientism”, and is itself a religious philosophy being
promulgated by prejudiced priests and priestesses of materialistic naturalism who have long ago
abandoned the rigorous disciplines of science to wander into fields of grand speculation about what
“it” all means; who have decided, in their exalted wisdom and fabulous imaginations, that since they
are blind to God, He certainly must not exist. This is a thoroughly un-scientific position. They are
being dishonest and disingenuous when they refer to themselves as unbiased “scientists”. Their
speculations are priestcraft. The Bible calls such persons “fools”. They do not understand that the
human spirit is the appointed subtle instrument by which we are meant to explore the dimensions of
God, an inquiry that much of the scientific community dismisses and disparages as metaphysics and
pre-, or even anti-, scientific, and that faith, and specifically, the Christian faith, is the discipline given
to us by our Creator through which this exquisite instrument is to be correctly calibrated and used.

And much of the Christian opposition to the scientific community is being fueled by knee-jerk fears
and ignorance of what real science is all about. This is an historic bug-bear of Christendumb, born
out of a fear of a loss of power and control, and a lack of true faith in the Living God. I have argued at
length in my thoughts on Romans that no Christian need have any concern that true scientific
research will ever in any way discover anything that will threaten to displace God from His throne. Do
we serve a God so small as that, that the inquiring mind of His creature could ever succeed in turning
Him into a bedtime fairy tale that we as a race have grown too old to believe in? If you, dear
Christian, believe that, then your God is too small.

This Truth, that God is and that all that is proceeds from Him, is revealed to us fully ONLY in the
Hebrew-Christian Bible…nowhere else. If other “prophets” and teachers of other belief systems
remark about it, it is either because they read it in the Bible and borrowed the idea, or because they
have been listening to His voice as He draws them through His myriad subtle intrusions into our world
as He seeks to call home any who really desire to return to Him.

God, the Son, taking no initiative on His own but acting in perfect agreement with the Father,
executes the vision of the Father: He is, according to the Bible, the Creator, through whom all things
that have been made have been made. He is also the One for whom the Father has made all things.
God is, in essence, Love. (Greek: agape “ah-gah-pay”.) This is how He defines Himself. (1 John
4:8ff) Love cannot exist without an object: Love must be expressed, received, reflected, returned.
This is why the ancient Christian creeds speak of the Son being “of one substance with the Father”
and of His being “begotten, not made”. (“Begotten” means “made of the same stuff”.) Because the
Father is, and is Love, the Son is. The Son is the necessary object of the love of God: Co-existent
with Him and proceeding from Him. God, the Father, being infinitely creative, has woven the grand
tapestry of the Cosmos and beyond for the pleasure of the Son, as the First Object of love. (Think
about this long enough ,with prayer, and you will begin to see what I mean.)

The Holy Spirit is, to use a weak metaphor, the Hand of God in motion: He is the Power of God, the
Heart of God, carrying out the will of the Son as He reveals the heart of the Father. The Spirit
expresses and sustains the Creation, and through Him we experience the omnipotence, omniscience,
and omnipresence of our God.

171
 (God uses male gender nouns and pronouns throughout Scripture in revealing Himself. For this
reason we call Him Father, and use the terms Father and Son. The Holy Spirit is also described as a
person, (not a force), using male gender pronouns. However, God also uses many feminine images
and metaphors as He paints the gallery of self-portraits that constitutes the biblical revelation. And
when He makes mankind in His image, He separates them into Adam and Eve, man and wo-man,
male and female. Yet, He calls THEM Adam, and together they are created “in His image”.

The feminine is certainly deep within the masculine of God. I don’t want to go near this profound
study at this time, but there are incredible spiritual Truths being revealed to us through all of this, and
there is nothing sexist or chauvinistic about them. All such misinterpretation as has occurred over the
millennia has been the result of unregenerate and misogynistic men (almost exclusively) twisting the
scriptures to their own ends as they seek to dominate women rather than to love them. This, of
course, is very wrong, fundamentally wrong. In Christ, and in the New Covenant, we can see the
correction of this evil distortion, but again, Christendumb has severely muddied the waters and will be
judged for doing so. There is an Order in creation: The feminine is sub-ordinate to the masculine and
proceeds from the masculine, but is perfectly complementary to the masculine and in no way inferior
to it. Rather it is its completing component; the two elements making one whole.

For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman
for man. 1 Corinthians 11:8-9

in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is
now born of woman. And all things are from God. 1 Corinthians 11:11-12

The relationship is a perfect reflection of the relationship of the Father to the Son in the Trinity.) What
I have just written is a drastic over-simplification of something incomprehensibly beyond our grasp.
We will always create idols, or start wars, if we try too energetically to understand this Mystery, which
is the term that Paul often uses. We are called, rather, to worship and to humbly serve. We will
NEVER fully comprehend these things.

“But we see Jesus….” Hebrews 2:9

Jesus said,

“Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Do you not believe that ‍I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I say to you ‍I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.
Believe me that ‍I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else ‍believe on account of the works themselves.
John 14:9-11

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these
will he do, because I y‍am going to the Father.  Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that ‍the Father may
be glorified in the Son.  If you ask me‍ anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:12-14

‍If you love me, you will ‍keep my commandments.  And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another
Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees
him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. John 14:15-17

I will not leave you as orphans; ‍I will come to you.  Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but j‍you
will see me. ‍Because I live, you also will live.  ‍In that day you will know that ‍I am in my Father, and ‍you in me, and
I in you.  ‍Whoever has my commandments and ‍keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be
loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” John 14:18-21
172
 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”
Jesus answered him, ‍“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and ‍we will
come to him and ‍make our home with him.  Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word
that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me. These things I have spoken to you while I am still with
you.  But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, ‍he will teach you all things and
bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you John 14:22-26

Jesus is “the fullness of the Godhead in a body” (Colossians 2:9). He is God in protective clothing
(protective for us, really really restrictive and humbling for Him - Philippians 2). When we watch and
listen to Jesus, we can see, in human skin (so we don’t freak out too much) what the Father is like.
I argued at great length in my earlier writing that God transcends by at least one dimension the ten or
more dimensions that our limited sciences have now determined must constitute our universe in order
for it to exist as it does. It is impossible for us, being confined to just three and a half of those
dimensions, to imagine with any accuracy or clarity anything beyond the walls of our little 3D
terrarium.

It is like trying to imagine a fourth primary color, or a fifth-dimensional hypercube, or time travel: we
cannot do it. We do not have a frame of reference through which to speak about such things, and it
is a bit silly, and an exercise in futility, if we take ourselves too seriously, to try. We give ourselves
headaches. At our best we weave stories of science fantasy like Star Trek and Doctor Who, or
Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time. And this is OK. Such stories are great fun and they do help to
stretch our imaginations. But this is the realm of spiritual Truth and of Divine Revelation and of Faith,
not of time and sin-limited human reasoning apart from the Mind of Christ. As King Solomon wrote
millennia ago: “The fear (a healthy humble worshipful respect and awe) of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom.” Proverbs 9:10 • It is possible to know someone, and to grow to know them intimately, but still
not to understand them at their depths. (I'm still trying to figure out my wife.) It’s when we start
declaring that we have figured out the deep meaning of ultimate Truth, instead of simply
acknowledging that at best we are beginning to better observe and describe the amazing wonders of
a largely incomprehensible creation, that we get ourselves into trouble. We will never understand our
Father: He exceeds us by far too many magnitudes in every way. When we make such claims we
are beginning to aspire to His Throne. This is the primal sin:

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, ‍son of Dawn! (“Lucifer, son of the morning“)

How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’
But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit. Isaiah 14:12-15

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the
woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You‍  shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”  And the woman said to the
serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the
tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ”  ‍But the serpent said to the
woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you
will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:1-5

But if we choose a life as a seeker of Truth instead of aspiring to personal glory, we will always be
growing to know Him more intimately and to experience His love in deepening union with Him, unless
we abort the process by erecting walls of pride and presumption between ourselves and Him so that
we no longer walk with Him as humble learners.

173
“Seek the LORD while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
‍For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” Isaiah 55:6-11

Moreover, something absolutely stunning in its implications happened in the Incarnation. Jesus Christ
did not exist before the Incarnation. The Son of God did, being eternally coexistent with the Father,
but the man, Jesus of Nazareth, did not. Nor did the Messiah, the Christ, except as a prophetic
certainty. Both Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth and Messiah, son of David and anointed savior of
Israel, being entities in and of time, were events of history….dates on our calendar.

In the Old Testament we have accounts of theophanies or Christophanies. These were not “Jesus
Christ”: They were manifestations of God the Son, materializations of Spirit. It is incorrect to say that
they were “pre-incarnate appearances of Jesus.” (Please don’t obfuscate things by having Jesus
travel back in time and such: That kind of speculation goes into the same crock-pot as counting
pinhead-dancing angels and “who were the Nephalim?” For God, Jesus was slain from before the
foundations of the earth: For us He is a very historical figure.) Jesus of Nazareth was conceived
somewhere between 6 and 4 BC, when the human gamete in Mary was fertilized by the seed of God
through the Holy Spirit on the night of her visitation by the Archangel Gabriel, and the fetal God~Man
began to grow in her womb. It was only then that “Immanuel” came into our world (“Immanuel” means
“God with us”).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning
with God.  ‍All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.  ‍In him
was life, and the life was the light of men.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was
made through him, yet ‍the world did not know him.  He came to ‍his own, and ‍his own people‍ ‍did not receive
him.  But to all who did receive him, ‍who believed in his name, he gave the right ‍to become ‍children of God,
who ‍were born, ‍not of blood ‍nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And ‍the Word ‍became flesh and ‍dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the
Father, full of ‍grace and ‍truth.

174
And from ‍his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.  For the law was given through Moses; ‍grace and
truth came through Jesus Christ.  No one has ever seen God; ‍the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has
made him known. John 1:1-18

Now the birth of Jesus Christ‍  took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed‍  to Joseph,

before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being
a just man and unwilling ‍to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.  But as he considered these things,
behold, ‍an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take
Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and ‍you shall
call his name Jesus, ‍for he will save his people from their sins.”  All this took place c‍to fulfill what the Lord had
spoken by the prophet:

‍“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name ‍Immanuel”
(which means, God ‍with us).  When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him:
he took his wife,  but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And ‍he called his name Jesus. Matthew 1:18
-25

We all, I mean we “god-fearers”, agree that God is all knowing, all-powerful, omni-present. Yet I am
convinced that there are things that God did not (and still may not) know, cannot do, and has had to learn.
This is not heresy: It is simple fact, and is clearly stated or implied in the Bible.

God cannot be tempted and God cannot sin. God did not know experientially the horrible confusions and
chaos that sin caused in us after Adam rebelled. God did not understand experientially the overwhelming
allurements of temptation, or the difficulties of resisting them. God did not understand, except
theoretically, the weakness of the flesh: hunger, thirst, weariness, irritation, or uncertainty …or hormones
and lust. God never before had to learn, or to grow, or to submit to parents or to outside authority. God
had never experienced and did not understand doubt or fear. He had never before had to pray and wait
for an answer. Before the Incarnation, God never had felt hunger or pain. He had never laughed with a
child or looked into the eyes of a grieving mother. He never had suffered torment or felt a cat-o-nine rip
open his back to the bone. He had never been betrayed by a friend. He had never died. He certainly had
never experienced spiritual separation from Himself and felt the abyssal agony of Sin. I’m sure I’ve missed
some. Only when the Son of God emptied Himself of Deity (compare Philippians 2), and became mortally
weak, did He begin to understand these things as anything more than theory. So through the Incarnation
God learned something new. He learned what it means to be human.

Throughout the history of the Church there have been those who have argued that because the
scriptures declare that “God is One”, therefore the idea of the Trinity is blasphemous. Today this
argument is most loudly voiced by Jews and Muslims, but is also still voiced among various
peripheral sects of Protestant Christianity. Christians who hold this idea must therefore maintain that
somehow the Father in heaven was simultaneously manifesting Himself as Jesus of Nazareth while
remaining fully God Almighty in heaven. This becomes an incredibly complicated theology to
maintain in any of its forms.

But the real problem is that if God, as God, did what Jesus did on our behalf, then we would not be
saved from our sins and would still be damned, because God would have broken His own rules. I go
into this at great length in the Romans study. The Law is clear: “The soul that sins shall die”. God
did not sin: Adam did. And through Adam all of us “have sinned and fallen short of God's glory”.Romans
3:23 God's law is immutable. Even God Himself cannot change it in this Cosmos.

By man sin entered our world. By man the deed had to be undone. Jesus, the man, had to undo the
damage that Adam, the man, caused: That this is the essential reason that the Trinity must be
understood.

175
It was as a human that God fulfilled His own law and liberated us. He could not have done this as
God. The law was broken by man through disobedience, and the penalty for breaking the law be-
longed rightly to the children of Adam. A child of Adam had to accept that penalty.

Jesus is called “the Second Adam”.

God, the Father, completely distinct from God the Son, abides in Heaven. God the Son, uniquely
separate from His Father, voluntarily descended from Heaven and became fully human in order that
as a human being, born without sin, He could undo the damage done by Adam. (Phillippians) This He
did through a perfectly obedient life and a perfect death, empowered by the Holy Spirit. As a man,
Jesus did NOTHING using His deity...He lived entirely as He asks us to live...by and through faith.

If you study the record carefully you will see clearly how the Trinity is completely and intimately
involved in all aspects of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.

Jesus ascended to Heaven in a new creation physical body, different from ours, and also different
from anything that had existed in Heaven prior to the Incarnation and Resurrection. He now sits in
Heaven in a new creation physical/spiritual body. There is now a God~Man in Heaven…Something
beyond the pre-incarnate Son of God…Someone that is the Head of the ”One New Man” that
includes the Church, His Body, which is also made up of physical/spiritual beings. The pre-incarnate
Son of God was an unbounded spirit-being of some sort, like the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Someone new, someone “more”, now sits on the Throne at the right hand of the Father. The
Godhead has been changed for all eternity by the Incarnation. I might even use the word “increased”
or “enlarged”. (This does not diminish God as God: It only reveals that He is dynamic, not static.
When “All that Is” increases, it still remains “All that Is”….Call it what it is: Mystery.)

From His Battle Throne the God~Man now is directing the final campaign of the War that Lucifer
started, building and configuring and training His army, and preparing to ultimately liberate those
remaining of the human race who desire to be finally free of the devil’s chains. The War has been
won: We are in the clean-up phase. An analogy might be this: Calvary is like the beaches of
Normandy…Hitler’s Germany lost the second world war on D-day. But there was another eleven
months of the most intense fighting of World War II that followed that victory before the final surrender
and ultimate triumph. We are pressing now to that final triumph and liberation: V-E Day is before us.

To this end He has made it possible for each person who yields to Him to participate in the
Incarnation, in a two-step process. The first step is the spiritual “rebirth”, whereby the Holy Spirit
imparts Divine life and faith to the believer, and releases them from their bondage to sin. This new
God~Man embraces us in a real-time psychological-spiritual symbiotic union as “participants in the
Divine nature”, empowering us to prevail and overcome in the present battle.

The second phase will be the metamorphic transformation of the body into the same sort of
physical/spiritual anatomical structure as that which Jesus now has, the same sort of body that He
received when He emerged from the garden tomb. This will occur either at the so-called “Rapture” or
at our Resurrection: (There are all sorts of theological speculations about this…It doesn’t really matter
how or when, we just need to be ready.) In this same coming era, God has stated that He will
remake the Cosmos itself with a new physics: “All things will become new”. We have no way of
knowing, beyond speculation, what this means, but our limited science does say that it is perfectly
possible. (You can read at great depth about this at www.reasons.org . Dr. Hugh Ross and his team
have invested years in solid scientific research on these advanced subjects, and the science makes
sense.)

176
Here is where my larger vision gets scary big, and I admit, is speculative: But I am always searching
for closure…for big pictures…for the “why” of things, and this is where my search has brought me
after thirty seven years. And once you abandon the idea of taming Aslan (watch the movie “The
Chronicles of Narnia” to catch the allusion) I don't find it unreasonable.God blessed man with the
companionship of woman and gave us the analogue of lifetime monogamous heterosexual Marriage.
He has clearly stated that marriage is a direct type of “Christ and the Church”, and then He
repeatedly refers to the Church as the Bride of Christ. (This analogy is consistent through both the
Old and the New Covenants.)

It is my deep conviction that, in the Grand Plan of God, Our Father is ultimately creating a Companion
for Himself…a person who is going to be truly separate from the Godhead, but created essentially in
the Image of God, freely and willingly submitted to Him through the bond of agape Love alone, under
no coercion or compulsion, and without sin. (We see the analogue when He creates Eve out of
Adam’s rib and then presents her to Adam, saying “It is not good for the man to be alone.”.) Genesis 2:18

The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for
Adam‍ there was not found a helper fit for him.  So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and
while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken
from the man he made‍ into a woman and brought her to the man.  Then the man said,

    “This at last is ‍bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis 2:20-24

‍Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,  that he might sanctify her,
having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word,  so ‍that he might present the church to himself in
splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same
way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one
ever  hated  his  own  flesh,  but  nourishes  and  cherishes  it,  just  as  Christ  does  the  church,    because  ‍we  are
members of his body.  “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and ‍the two
shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
However, ‍let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
Ephesians 5:25-33

This created being, somehow made of the union of the multitude of redeemed unique souls of the
ages, will be able to truly fellowship with Him and share with Him on a level of intimacy that is fulfilling
to both God and to the Bride. This seems to me to be the only logical goal for the most creative and
probably the loneliest Person ever.

Think about this: God is Unique. He has eternally existed. His only meaningful and like-minded
companionship has been within Himself. He is infinitely creative. To our understanding, Man is the
most wonderful thing that He has ever created, up to this point. We have attributes that exceed those
of angels: According to the New Testament, we will eventually rule over them, and they already serve
us and look with wonder upon God’s dealings with His Church. In His revelation to us He has spoken
of these even higher ideals: Marriage, Conjugal Love, Joy, the Church as the Bride, the Marriage in
Heaven, “things unlawful to be spoken of”, etc., and He has painted word pictures in His gallery in
Scripture that bring tears to our hearts that we can’t even describe…

What is He doing?
177
I can only believe that He is making a “helpmeet”, to use the old KJV word: A Companion
appropriate for Himself…someone very much like Himself, yet not Himself. This is the complaint, the
longing, that we glimpse all the way back in Genesis, as our part in the story begins:

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for‍ him.”

Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed‍ every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and
‍brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature,
that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the
field. But for Adam‍ there was not found a helper fit for him.  So the LORD God caused a ‍deep sleep to fall upon
the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD
God had taken from the man he made‍ into a woman and brought her to the man.

Any goal less than this seems too small to me. I am a creative person. I cannot stop envisioning and
creating and expressing. I am driven…compelled. Creative energy must be released. Any
imaginative person can attest to this. I go crazy if I can’t talk about what is going on inside me. (Ask
my wife: She goes crazy because I talk, incessantly, about what is going on inside me.) And I don’t
want to be talking to myself all the time. (I’m not triune: When I talk to myselves people think I’m
schizophrenic. We would respectfully disagree, but that is another discussion ;) .) Neither is it very
satisfying to be surrounded by persons who I know will do nothing but affirm me and echo back
whatever I want to hear or whatever I say (of whom, thank God, there appear to be very few anyway).
I despise sycophants. The Trinity is always fully in agreement within Himself… absolutely self-
consistent and self-aware. (Would it be flippant to speculate that the Son and the Holy Spirit probably
could never throw a surprise party for the Father?) I want creative interaction. I want to be
challenged and stimulated and surprised. That’s one big reason why I love my wife. Only sincere
praise and sincere criticism has value and kindles true inspiration. How much more must our Father
long for the same? And since there are no others like Him, (“One is the loneliest number”) then He is
going to have to make Someone. He has no other options that I can think of. No seductive stranger
is going to suddenly catch His eye from across the galaxy. But that Someone must be REAL and
FREE! Not a Barbie Doll, however sophisticated. So, at the very least, we have the image of Star
Trek’s android, Data, struggling to discover what it is to be autonomous and creative and fully
human…a poor analogy, but for a bedtime story not bad: Or perhaps Pinocchio, becoming a “real
boy”.

This is the only storyline that has a truly satisfying ending. In fact, we tell it to ourselves all the time in
a thousand different ways: ASIMO, androids, WALL-E, CYLONs, R2D2, C3PO, AI, I-Robot. It is the
only Ultimate Story that I think really ties up all the loose ends. Of course, these stories are our very
poorly told human fairy tales: Our Creator certainly has the creative genius needed to exceed our
fictions…to make the fairy tale come true. He began with Adam and Eve. After a rocky start He
raised up a people, Israel, through whom He was able to bring to birth a Divine~Human “hybrid”,
Jesus. Through Jesus, He has been able to conceive and birth the Church, a spiritual organism
made up of millions of autonomous yet intimately joined individuals all in communion with God and
with each other through one Spirit and linked through a single Mind. Is the next step, the one I have
proposed, so hard to imagine? The fact that I can even pose the question says that it is possible.

To recast the metaphor of our storytelling: He spreads His sunsets across the sky…we try to paint
them and fill galleries with our noble and ignoble attempts. Every true artist will tell you that she or he
fails miserably to capture the essence of what they are seeing…they are only offering a momentary
static glimpse and an inadequate interpretation of something that can never be imprisoned in a
painting or a photograph. We are made in His image: Perhaps it is not overreaching to speculate
that in such fanciful dreams as we cast for our inspiration and entertainment, we are just glimpsing on
the edges of our peripheral metaphysical sight the distant horizons of the unfathomable realms of
God. If we can imagine Data, or Wall-E...Then could this not be some premonition, imparted to us

178
like a distant hazy vision of a far horizon that disappears over the curve of the earth, of our Father's
ultimate dream?

We have a long, long way to go. Especially if we don’t wake up and smell the coffee and realize what
this Gospel of the Kingdom is really all about, and stop playing our silly little “Christian” games.
I mean “we” as individuals: God is going to finish what He has begun. Whether our personal place
card is at the wedding banquet or not is up to us. For now, we ought to begin by learning to quit
whining, and to love each other, and to stop being selfish and throwing our binkies at each other.

Paul continues:

 ‍even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,

I know that I have written on this at length in my essays on Romans, but I want to think with fresh
thought on these things again, to see if the Lord might offer more insight. I have no doubt that it is
impossible for us to ever exhaust the depths of the Truths that Paul experienced by direct revelation,
much of which he regarded as “unlawful” to be spoken of 2 Corinthians 12:4, and some of which we are
privileged to glimpse in his moments of openness under the anointing of the Holy Spirit in these
letters. I believe that the vistas revealed in the letters to the Ephesians and to the Colossians may be
the nearest to Heaven that we will ever get in this life, if we approach them prayerfully in humility,
unless the Lord decides to open Heaven to us as well. These two letters, and sections of Philippians,
Hebrews, and, of course, the Revelation of Christ that John recorded are what I have come to regard
as some of the “High Doctrine” writings … speaking, when the Lord chooses to open them up, of
profoundly deep mysteries that call to those who would abandon themselves into the river of God.

In Romans, Paul opens the can of worms regarding free will and predestination.

For those whom he foreknew he also ‍predestined ‍to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he
might be ‍the firstborn among many brothers.  And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom
he called he also ‍justified, and those whom he justified he also ‍glorified. Romans 8:29-30

And in the letter to the Corinthians Paul writes:

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not ‍a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age,
who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, ‍which God decreed before
the ages for our glory.  None of the rulers of this age understood this, for ‍if they had, they would not have
crucified ‍the Lord of glory.  But, as it is written,

    ‍“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”— 1 Corinthians 2:6-9

And he holds to his theme here in Ephesians,

‍Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual
blessing ‍in the heavenly places,  ‍even as he ‍chose us in him ‍before the foundation of the world, that we should
be holy and blameless before him. In love  he predestined us‍ for ‍adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, ‍accord­
ing to the purpose of his will,  ‍to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

As I have often said, according to the accumulating weight of understanding coming to us through
modern science, the universe…the Cosmos…all that is, as we presently comprehend it, must exist in
at least ten dimensions, if not many more, of which we habitually ( perhaps it is better to say

179
experientially or consciously) live in, at best, four (actually more like three and a half…length, width,
height, and the forward direction of time, the “present” being all we actually experience with real
understanding or effect). We physically participate in these four dimensions, and mathematically infer
the others; at least this is how I, not a mathematician or theoretical physicist, understand it to be.
Through what we call spiritual or “paranormal” encounters we sometimes, and without much control,
do have experiences that interface with aspects of these “higher” dimensions. Most of us, those who
have not yet become Christians, have had one or more such experiences, and at least some of us
are willing to admit this. (Sometimes these experiences are legitimate, that is, are initiated by the Holy
Spirit as he draws us toward God or seeks to reveal Divine Truth; Most often they are illegitimate,
originating in the realm of the demonic, induced by our illicit experiements into the occult, or through
drugs, or by severe psychological trauma or other mental disturbance.)

God, by definition, transcends all of these dimensions, since, if you admit that He exists and is our
Creator, He must stand outside them, having made them, no effect being its own cause. He is the
“First Cause”, the “Unmoved Mover”. (Please don’t get hung up here on the “then where did God
come from” question. That is a question from inside the box, where we are trapped, and He is not
inside the box. Again, I refer you to Dr. Ross’ extensive work at www.reasons.org, and in the
resources available through the online store there. This question does have a reasonable answer,
confirmed by science, but you will have to do some research and thinking to get your head around
it.) If you don’t accept this premise, then my entire argument sounds completely insane to you
anyway, and you have already written me off as a certifiable wing-nut. Please read my thoughts on
Romans: I dismiss you at length there. You may go watch Bill Maher, or American Idol, or RAW, or
Jersey Shore or the Kardashian’s now. There’s a beer or some Kool-Aid in the fridge.

From this transcendent dimension beyond all other dimensions, God is certainly able to observe
everything that happens in all the other dimensions “below” or “beneath” Him. We would regard Him
as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent …God Almighty: The Biblical Deity.

(This, by the way, is ‘way bigger than any other concept of deity that any other religion or philosophy
has ever proposed, and is just one of the myriad reasons that New Covenant Christianity is different
from and demonstrably superior to all other belief systems that mankind has ever invented. Man
could not have invented this. There is NO other God like the God of the Bible! Period.)

From His transcendent realm, therefore, He would “know” each of us, inside and out, from the
moment we are conceived, every thought and breath, every act and decision and consequence of
those decisions. As is fancied in the old story, Flatland (second part), He would be able to “see” into
us essentially (And we, of course, would be oblivious to Him, except through His revelation of Himself
to us.) From His point of view, we would be able to be completely foreknown and predestined.
Yet, He would never have to make a single decision for us, nor would he ever have to compel us to
make a choice, however large or small…We are able to live absolutely free lives, and are able to be
held completely responsible by Him for our choices and our sins, which are His greatest gifts, in Love,
to us.

Now the Lord‍ is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 2 Corinthians 3:17

Therefore, free will and predestination are not diametrically opposed propositions. They are a
paradox, resolvable as soon as they are elevated above the limitations of our four dimensional reality.
The fact that our Creator knows everything about each one of us, and the ultimate consequence of
every choice we make, in no way necessarily means that He has a sovereign dictatorial will that He
exercises over our lives, or a fixed path through life that He predetermines for us. Though he does
have a perfect will that He desires for us, and which we can enter into if we choose to, we determine
our own destiny: He acknowledges our choices, and accepts them. He has given us our world.

180
The heavens are the LORD’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man. Psalm 115:16

Then God said, ‍“Let us make man‍ in our image, ‍after our likeness. And ‍let them have dominion over the fish of
the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping
thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male
and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill
the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over
every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed
that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. ‍You shall have them for food.  And ‍to
every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything
that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.  ‍And God saw everything
that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Genesis 1:26-31

The universe that God has crafted moves according to “natural laws” and rules of physics and such,
immense balances and harmonies and complex interrelationships from the gravitational fields of galaxies
to the precise number of atoms that exist in the whole of the cosmos. Billions of sentient and non-sentient
creatures live out individual lives and interact in near infinitely complex communities upon the earth.
Countless random and non-random events occur every second of every day throughout the world.
These things are not all individually planned and orchestrated by God, though He intimately monitors, and
in many ways certainly conducts, the whole wonderful symphonic ballet. There is a “clockwork“ aspect to
our universe, but only in part. Of course, as with any complex design, there are many programs and sub-
routines and functions that can run, more or less, on “auto-pilot”: Common sense and smart engineering
require them. ( And sometimes, much more often than we might realize or admit, the Lord “interferes”
very directly with “miracles”. These are not arbitrary magic tricks or spooky mindgames. Most often they
are answers to specific prayers, as He works together with us. Miracles are best understood as
alterations of our time-line as He fast forwards His “natural laws”* (sic), or segues across time to better
conform our circumstances to His plans. He is not “breaking” His rules or contradicting Himself, and you
will find the God of the Bible doing no “silly parlor-tricks” to show off His power or dazzle us. People who
argue such things are speaking foolishly. You might read some of C.S. Lewis’s essays on the subject for
greater insight.)

(* Please realize, that when we talk about these “laws” we are really only using the word to describe “the
way things normally behave”. These physical rules are not “laws” in the same way that the rules of the
road, for example, are laws: They cannot be “broken”, and have no moral aspect, and the non-sentient
elements of the creation do not have a choice as to whether or not they will abide by them. God has built
the creation according to principles and designs that work in certain specific ways, and as a perfectly
designed “machine” the creation does what it is meant to do. There is no contradiction if the Designer
decides to adjust or interfere with His creation to cause it to better conform to His desires any more than
there is when I tweak the software in my PC to improve its functions.)

For by‍ him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether ‍thrones or ‍dominions
or rulers or authorities—all things were created ‍through him and for him.  And ‍he is before all things, and in
him all things ‍hold together. Colossians 1:16-17

Long ago, at many times and ‍in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,  but ‍in these last days he
has spoken to us by ‍his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, ‍through whom also he created the world.
He is the radiance of the glory of God and ‍the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the
word of his power Hebrews 1:1-3

‍In the beginning was the Word, and ‍the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning
with God.  All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.  ‍In him
was life, and ‍the life was the light of men. John 1:1-4

181
He has designed His creations to be self-actualizing and self-sustaining, and to be in an infinitely
varied degree free, according to His own purposes and plans, some things being far more free and
others much more “hard-wired”. And above all of this He has created spiritual man…Adamic man, to
whom He has granted complete freedom of will and choice and the ability to participate in the very
heart of God.

Then God said, ‍“Let us make man‍ in our image, ‍after our likeness. And ‍let them have dominion over the fish
of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping
thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;
       ‍male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and
have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves
on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the
earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. ‍You shall have them for food.  And to every beast of the earth and to
every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have
given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was
very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:26-31

(Please read my thoughts on Romans for more insight into this…The dark side of this story is that the
world He gave us to care for and rule was already under enemy siege, and that Adam failed in his
first mission, which was to expose, oppose, and depose that enemy, and made a very bad choice,
which is the prologue for the Gospel.)

The prophet Ezekiel speaks of those pre-Adamic times when Lucifer still walked in glory :

“You were the signet of perfection,

‍    full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in ‍Eden, the garden of God;
‍    every precious stone was your covering,
      ‍sardius, topaz, and diamond,
beryl, onyx, and jasper,
sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle;
and crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings.
    ‍On the day that you were created they were prepared.
You were an anointed guardian cherub.
I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.
You were blameless in your ways
from the day you were created,
till unrighteousness was found in you.
In the abundance of your trade
you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned;
so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God,
        and I destroyed you, ‍O guardian cherub,
from the midst of the stones of fire.
  Your heart was proud because of ‍your beauty;
you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.” Ezekiel 28:12-17

182
However, Adam's failure was not unexpected, and was fully planned for. God is never taken by
surprise. Anticipating our choices, like a chess master, our Father~Creator makes His moves
accordingly. If we choose to be on His side, He wins and we win: We walk with Him into His perfect
will and into Kingdom glory. If we choose not to return to Him, He wins, and we lose.

The game has already been played and won: Christ declared His triumph when He cried, “It is
Finished”, on Golgotha. That resounding Victory Cry signals the beginning of bringing to an end
forever the insurrection of Lucifer, which began long before mankind came on the scene, and of the
eternal supremacy and absolute sovereignty of the High Throne of Heaven. Adam and Eve entered
into that conflict well after it began, and failing in their original mission, became “prisoners of war”.
And through them, all of humanity fell under the power of the enemy warlord for a long season, which
captivity inaugurated the process of the Incarnation, and the Gospel, and the Victory over the devil
and sin in the world, and the redemption of human souls that this secured. Though this appears to
us to have been a tragedy, when viewed through unredeemed eyes, it was anticipated and fully
planned for by God, and was transformed into the circumstance of the greatest of all good, the
ultimate breaking of the power of sin, and the conquering of death itself, and the elimination of evil
from the creation forever.

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age,
who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before
the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have cruci-
fied the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2:6-10

Our Father, because He loves human beings and is gracious, is doing everything He can possibly do
short of forcible coercion, to convince as many of the human race to join Him in His victory, before He
moves forward into the next phase of His Plan, when faith yields the field to sight and it becomes
eternally impossible for us to do so. He can, for our entire mortal lives, both continually offer to us the
opportunity to choose to turn away from the rebel camp and toward Him to receive His grace, and at
the same time order the events and circumstances surrounding our lives in ways that serve His larger
purposes, all the while maintaining a watch of prevenient (“assisting”) grace over our lives to improve
our chances and increase our opportunities of interacting with Him in redemptive ways, in the hope
that we will come to a knowledge of the Truth and accept the Covenant terms offered to us by Christ.
Throughout our lives, even with those who He knows will never chose Him, He will always keep the
offer on the table, at least until a person reaches that point of final irreversible reprobate rejection
where the continuation of his or her life will either bring unnecessarily cruel torment to him or herself
or overmuch harm to others, and God ends their mortal suffering in His mercy, which is His sovereign
right as Creator and Lawgiver and High King.

Even then He has not arbitrarily over-ridden their free will: Rather, He has chosen to end His grace
period, and to execute justice against a lawbreaker according to His universal Law. (“The soul that sins
shall die.” Ezekiel 18:4;20) They have freely chosen to defy Him: There are consequences for defiance.
This is something that we, in our own justice systems, do all the time. Most of us have little problem
with it when we feel justice has been served…at least when it has been served to someone else.
When we are the guilty party we may not like it. Tough noogies.

183
 (I probably need to qualify this statement: In the post-modern Western world the idea of the death
penalty has gotten all mixed up with God knows how many other philosophical speculations, and
certainly with the angst of the sinful world about death itself, so for many “progressive thinkers”*, at
least, the whole concept of justice itself is a mucked up swamp of illogical and emotionally charged
contradictory ideas that makes no clear sense. This is a discussion for another time.)

*an oxymoron, if I have ever heard one.

Continuing in Ephesians:

In him we have ‍redemption through his blood, ‍the forgiveness of our trespasses, ‍according to the riches of his
grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight

I think I will refer you here to my remarks on Romans, regarding the Gospel of the Kingdom, rather
than reiterate them at length. Here I will only note Paul’s extravagant language, his use of the words
“riches” and “lavished” when he speaks of redemption, and forgiveness, and grace. God Almighty is
certainly fearsome in the execution of His justice, and those who have violated His law have good
reason to hide their face from Him. They should be absolutely terrified.

For ‍if we go on sinning deliberately ‍after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a
sacrifice for sins,  ‍but a fearful expectation of judgment, and ‍a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
‍Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.  How
much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one ‍who has spurned the Son of God, and has
profaned the blood of the covenant ‍by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?  For we
know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, ‍“The Lord will judge his people.”  ‍It is a
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:26-31

For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome
for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And “If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the
ungodly and the sinner?” 1 Peter 4:17-18

But He is also infinitely compassionate and gracious, and all He asks of us is the honor and respect
that He is rightfully due…as our Creator, as the High King of Heaven, as our Father.

“ It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom”, Luke 12:32

Daddy God wants to bless us: To lavish (be extravagant in giving) upon us the infinite riches of the
manifold dimensions of the Creation itself. This is unimaginably mind-bogglingly awesome. (By the
by, this is the only legitimate use of the word “awesome”. Awesome is a God word. It really should
not be wasted on pop songs, hot rides, and video games.)

If only we would just behave.

Paul continues:

in all wisdom and insight ‍making known‍ to us the mystery of his will, ‍according to his purpose, which he ‍set
forth in Christ as a plan for ‍the fullness of time, ‍to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Atheists, in blind arrogance and willful ignorance, say there is no God. Agnostics, more reasonably
and honestly, but still wrongly, say that we cannot know anything about God. Deists, having a
whispering conscience but wanting to avoid the issues it would raise, say that some sort of god
burped the universe into existence, and then wandered off to do other things, leaving us on our own
184
to fend for ourselves against the heartless void. Theists have a multitude of theologies, most of
which either imply that some anthropomorphic god created a failed or imperfect world or actually
somehow is responsible for evil. Some theists require two equally powerful and diametrically opposite
gods in eternal tension and conflict, like a bad marriage, with us as the kids; they fail to understand
that there is no way to determine which of the two squabbling deities wears the white hat and which
the black, or that there is no way to say which is right and which is wrong. Some, to escape the
moral dilemma and the hard fact of sin, simply redefine good and evil until the terms mean nothing
and the foundations of morality are built on relativistic quicksand. The permutations of such theories
are virtually endless, and purely speculative and, ultimately, wholly illogical. Mankind is amazingly
imaginative, especially when he is trying to evade responsibility for screwing up. The great religions
of Judaism and Islam (and some other systems, such as the mythology of some of the Native
American peoples) speak of a much greater deity who is much more interested in us. But only the
Christian faith has a founder and leader with valid historical credentials of real substance, and not just
words: Only Biblical Christianity has a Living Head

WHO WAS DESCENDED FROM DAVID‍ ACCORDING TO THE FLESH AND WAS DECLARED TO BE THE SON OF GOD IN
POWER ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT OF HOLINESS BY HIS RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD, JESUS CHRIST OUR
LORD, Romans 1:3-4

Who Himself said,

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No
one has ‍ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. John 3:12-13

Plenty of religious leaders have made high and mighty claims, even claims to be God or the Son of God.
NO other religious figure in all of human history has made this claim AND BACKED IT UP. You can
deny it if you want to. A boatload of folks have done so over the past two millennia. The world is full of
stupid people who talk a lot and say very little, who spent their lives denying Christ: They pop up every
generation like mushrooms. The claim of Christ has stood unshaken against every challenge for nearly
two thousand years, but you are free to add your skull impression to the brick wall if you like. ‘Nuff said.

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:

‍ ‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.
And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”
Matthew 21:42-44

Christians, of course, having the Bible, have developed much more sophisticated theologies and
cosmologies as they try to explain the indisputable realities of good and evil and suffering and death,
and the conundrum that is man. There are vast libraries in thousands of seminaries and Bible
Schools lined with countless volumes of subtly argued and contradictory theology about what life and
death are all about. (You can add this little journal of mine to the pile, if you like: What I am saying
has to be tested against the scriptures, just like all the rest.) Some Christians even propose
theologies that include the predestination of souls to damnation so that God might be glorified. (This,
of course, is heresy: God is love at the core…To disparage His character with this sort of garbage is
blasphemy.) Some Christians believe that there is no hell, and that God will save everyone, even
Satan, but they have to disregard the fact that Jesus, Himself, spoke more of Hell than of Heaven to

185
do this. And they have to delegitimize the concepts of law and justice and the dignity of free will. It is
hard to resist the almighty love of God, but it can be done, and He will let us do it. Our free will is the
one thing, in all the universe, that can face off against God and win (or lose, depending upon how you
think about such a victory.)

The Bible subsumes most all of these things under the rubric of idle and vain speculation, on a level
with UFO-logy and the search for Atlantis, and cautions us against wasting our time on such
distractions. Above and beyond all of these human speculations, God has a Plan. He has revealed
at least some of this Plan to us in the inspired communication of the Hebrew~Christian Bible. This
revelation remains “sealed” until and unless the Holy Spirit of God, the Author of the Book, Himself,
decides to un-seal it and explain it to a seeking heart. This is why a person who all their life has sat
in Church resisting Christ, who has heard the scriptures being read every week and has understood
nothing, who has listened to sound preaching and attended Sunday School since childhood and been
bored to tears, can, in a moment of time, have the Bible become their most cherished book, when
they accept the Lord.

None of us knows the whole Plan. Not even Jesus knew the whole plan when He was among us. It
belongs to the Father. (Mark 13:32) Paul knew quite a bit of it, having been taught much by direct
revelation in the wilderness of Arabia, and having been “caught up to the third heaven” on at least
one occasion. (Galatians 1:12; 2 Corinthians 12) I believe that much of it is hidden deep within the biblical
text in its original languages, if for no other reason but as proof that the text is from God, and is
supernatural. (We see hints of this in the matrices of the so-called “Bible code”. The writers of
scripture, through inspiration, were moved in such a way that this “coding” was imbedded in the
original texts to be “activated” by God at His discretion. It is inhumanly complex, and could not have
been humanly conceived.) Other aspects of the Plan are more directly recorded as biblical prophecy:

 For we did not follow ‍cleverly devised ‍myths when we made known to you the power and ‍coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the
Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‍“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well
pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.
And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention ‍as to a lamp
shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all,
that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.  For ‍no prophecy was ever produced
by the will of man, but men spoke from God ‍as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 1:16-21

“Remember this and stand firm,

      recall it to mind, ‍you transgressors,
remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is none like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done,
saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ “ Isaiah 46:8-10

Insight into the Plan is given to us progressively. Divine Revelation is progressive, unfolding in
planned stages as we have been prepared to receive it. God deals with us in very specific moments
of time: The “fullness of time”… “at just the right time”….(Galatians 4:4; Ephesians 1:10; Romans 5:6; 1 Timothy
2:6; 1 Timothy 6:15; Titus 1:3; Hebrews 9:26; 1 Peter 5:6) We are creatures bound in time. Also, and perhaps of
equal importance, much of what God has to say to us is given to us on a “need to know” basis, and
only if we have reached a level of maturity that He feels makes us responsible enough to handle the

186
revelation He desires to impart. (Daddy will not let us have the keys to the car until he decides that
we are responsible enough to drive the car, no matter how much we might beg Him for them, or how
big a tantrum we might throw. Daddy ain’t no fool: Most believers get tricycles, or bikes with training
wheels, at best.) This Plan has been fully developed from “before the foundation” of the world, but has
necessarily been revealed to us in increments, both because we are very finite and limited, and are
incapable of understanding deep things without much preparation, and because we exist within a
linear, finite, timeline, subject to cause and effect sequential events. It has taken many thousands of
years, since the fall of Adam and Eve, to fully implement the Plan to its present final stages. It has
required hundreds of generations of selective human breeding to clarify the royal line that the birth of
Messiah required. (Not so much physical genetics as spiritual qualities.) The Revelation of Christ and
the New Covenant inaugurated the last stage of the age of man and the beginning of the Church.
God opened up the details of this phase to the writers of the New Testament, and they recorded them
as the inspired text of the New Covenant scriptures. All the New Covenant was recorded: Some
information was immediately available for all Christians to access and understand; some, like many of
the prophetic texts of the Old Covenant, was “sealed” ** and left for generations yet unborn to open
when the Holy Spirit anointed them to do so. In His Wisdom and according to His timings, He is now
un-sealing critical updates in this “data bank” through the prophetic people that He is presently raising
up to lead His body forward into the last battle of the War, the battle which is breaking upon us in our
generation. (**Is.8:16;29:11,12;Dan.8:26;12:4,9)

Returning to Paul in Ephesians:

that we should be ‍holy and blameless before him. In love  ‍he predestined us‍ for adoption as sons through Jesus
Christ, ‍according to the purpose of his will, ‍to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in
‍the Beloved.

What Adam and Eve were meant to become, had they never messed things up, we don’t know. We
may find out “in the ages to come” Matthew 12:32;Ephesians 2:7 as we fellowship among the “great cloud of
witnesses” Hebrews 12:1 that have gone before us, but the Bible doesn’t seem to offer much insight into
what might have been. We do understand that our Father, in His foreknowledge, fully anticipated and
planned for their rebellion, and that Christ was the archetypal sacrifice to deal with the consequences
of their sin from “before the foundation of the world”. John 17:24;Ephesians 1:4;1 Peter 1:20;Revelation 13:8

knowing that you ‍were ransomed from ‍the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable
things such as silver or gold,  but ‍with the precious blood of Christ, like that of ‍a lamb without blemish or spot.
He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest ‍in the last times for the sake of
you who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your
faith and hope are in God. 1 Peter 1:18-21

everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb
who was slain. Revelation 13:8

I have written at length about the redemptive work of Christ in my ruminations on Romans, and I offer
those thoughts to you. Here I want to note particularly Paul’s choice of the words “holy and blameless”
and “adoption as sons”.I argued from Paul's words in Romans that we can, indeed, are commanded to,
live lives free from habitually or even frequently sinning. I do not mean that we are, in this mortal
body, sinless, or will ever be sinlessly perfect. Until we are glorified we still can, and we will, sin.

As John says:

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an
advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, 1 John 2:1-2

187
 In the New Testament, the word “perfect” (as in “You will be perfect, because my Father in Heaven is
perfect” or “as many of you as are perfect”) means “mature”, not “flawless”. Jesus was sinlessly perfect
in His mortal body because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and did not have the Adamic
genetic defect of original sin. We, however, all come from Adamic stock and are born flawed. We
also each have a past. However, when we accept Christ we are changed: We begin what in the
Bible is actually described as “metamorphosis” (as in caterpillar to butterfly), and in full
metamorphosis the old actually does die and a truly new life does begin. (You should do a study on
“holometabolous metamorphosis” sometime: It will blow your mind! And then go back over my
remarks in my Romans essay on “typology”, remembering the accepted exegetical rule for correct
bible study, “first the natural, then the spiritual“.) This is a two-stage process. I discuss this in detail
in my first commentary. The first stage primarily involves the resurrection of our spirit and the
revitalization and rebuilding of our soul. The second stage will culminate with the remaking of our
physical body into a new creation anatomy and with a new physiology and physics like the body
Jesus has since His resurrection, at Christ’s second coming. But, the fact that we are presently in a
symbiotic union with God through the Holy Spirit also has an ongoing and restorative present effect
upon our mortal bodies, according to Paul.

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact ‍the Spirit of God dwells in you. ‍Anyone who does
not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because
of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in
you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies ‍through his Spirit who
dwells in you. Romans 8:9-11

When we are “saved” or “born again” a great many profound things take place. Among these, God
instantly obliterates and forever forgets our entire past history: every sin and rebellious or willful
thought that we have ever had vanishes from the record. We are justified: Regarded as blameless in
the sight of God. As the late bible teacher/scholar Dr. Derek Prince liked to put it, “Justified means
God sees me just-as-if-I’d never sinned”. This makes us “Holy”. Holy is rather a ruined word. It
simply means to be taken away completely from one thing, in this case our old sinful past life, and set
apart for a special use for something or someone else, in this case God’s service. It is from the same
root word as “sanctified” or “saint” in the Bible. In a practical sense, if I take an insulated drink
container and designate it “For Ice Tea Only”, I have made it “holy”, in a profane sort of way. When
we accept Christ we are liberated from our slavery to the devil and to sin, and we become, according
to the scriptures, “bond slaves” (Greek: doulos...the word for the most common sort of slave: like a
field slave, or a galley slave,... what prisoners of war became) to a new Lord, God Almighty, through
Jesus Christ.

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in ‍newness of life. Romans 6:4

For ‍if we have been united with him in ‍a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection
like his.  We know that ‍our old self‍ ‍was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to
nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. Romans 6:5-6

For the death he died he died to sin, ‍once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  So you also must consider
yourselves ‍dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Romans 6:10-11

But ‍thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the ‍stan­
dard of teaching to which you were committed,  and, ‍having been set free from sin, have become slaves of
righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once
presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present
your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification. Romans 6:17-20

188
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.  ‍But what fruit were you getting at
that time from the things ‍of which you are now ashamed? ‍For the end of those things is death.  But now that
you ‍have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, ‍the fruit you get leads to sanctification and ‍its
end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:20-23

We were ‍buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in ‍newness of life. Romans 6:4

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection
like his.  We know that ‍our old self‍ ‍was crucified with him in order that ‍the body of sin might be brought to
nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.  For ‍one who has died ‍has been set free‍ from sin.  Now
‍if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  We know that Christ, being raised from
the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin,
once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  So you also must consider yourselves ‍dead to sin and alive to
God in Christ Jesus. Romans 6:5-11

Let not ‍sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.  Do not present your members to
sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but ‍present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from
death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.  For sin ‍will have no dominion over
you, since you are not under law but under grace. Romans 6:12-14

However, the revelation given to Paul does not leave us in chattel slavery to a tyrant Deity. Paul
always emphasizes that our Father loves us. Our God, our Creator, does not want slaves: He
desires children. He longs for the joy of love freely returned. So He offers the bond-slaves of His
house the signet ring of adoption, and the security of full acceptance as family with the prospect and
privilege of maturing to the status and inheritance of sonship.

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything,
but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were
children, were enslaved to the elementary principles‍ of the world.  But when the fullness of time had come, God
sent forth his Son, born of woman, born ‍under the law,  to redeem those who were under the law, so that we
might receive ‍adoption as sons.  And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, “Abba! Father!”  So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then ‍an heir through God. Galatians
4:1-7

Even the eloquent Paul never seems to be able to find adequate words to fully describe the wonder
of what our God is bringing to pass. Over and over again, he keeps trying to describe the grace that
God wants to pour out to those who want to receive it:

l‍“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,

    what God has ‍prepared ‍for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even ‍the depths of
God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one
comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received not ‍the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this
‍in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, ‍interpreting spiritual truths to those who are
spiritual.  The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are ‍folly to him, and ‍he is
not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is
himself to be judged by no one.  ‍“For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But ‍we
have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:9-16
189
Oh, the depth of the riches and ‍wisdom and knowledge of God! ‍How unsearchable are his judgments and how
inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”
    “Or ‍who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”
 For from him and through him and to him are all things. ‍To him be glory forever. Amen. Romans 11:33-36

Nearly thirty years into the experience that utterly ruined every worldly aspiration that this genius
scholar of Israel ever had, his body significantly scarred and weather-beaten, possibly with serious
eye-problems, but with his zeal undiminished, Paul wrote:

Not that I have already ‍obtained this (the goal of fully knowing Christ) or ‍am already perfect, but I press on to

make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my
own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward
the goal for the prize of the upward ‍call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:12-14

Continuing in Ephesians:

‍making known‍ to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he ‍set forth in Christ as a plan for
the fullness of time, ‍to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

When, in the pre-Cosmic past, the self-existent lonely God began to express Himself beyond His
tripartite nature, the hints we have in scripture indicate that He first created what we understand to be
the realm(s) of Heaven and the spiritual beings we call angels (including seraphim, cherubim, and
archangels). We do not know much more than this: There certainly must be much much more. The
scriptures do indicate that these dimensions are vast and are qualitatively different from the four
dimensions in which we live and move. Recent theoretical science and mathematics propose, as a
necessary minimum, six dimensions beyond the four with which we are familiar, for physics and the
universe to “work”, and ancient rabbinical scholarship supports this; (Maimonides, I think, deduced a
similar understanding from the Pentateuch). At some point after this, God then “created the Heavens
and the Earth”, which most biblical scholars agree, means the physical (visible) universe, as we
perceive it. Science has come to call the moment of this creation the “Big Bang”, and there is now
almost universal consensus among cosmologists that such an event occurred somewhere between
13.73 and 14.5 billion years ago, though there is a substantial amount of disagreement at this time as
to the details. The key point is that the event occurred, and that it occurred in a very finite past time.
This pertinacious fact alone establishes that there is a Creator. The alternative explanation that
absolute nothing accidentally produced everything in the universe is an absurdity.

According to the biblical revelation, the archangel, Lucifer, who was possibly the highest of these
exalted spiritual beings, rebelled against God and led an insurrection involving what the Bible
describes as “one third of the angels” of Heaven. This insurrection failed. There are at least four
scriptural windows accepted by conservative biblical scholarship as giving us insight concerning this
matter (Isaiah 14; Ezekiel 28; Revelation 12; Luke 10:18). Lucifer, along with his supporters, was banished from
the presence of God. From the biblical record we understand, in part, that these outcasts were “de-
ported” or banished or restricted into the lower dimensions of reality that include our universe, and
specifically the realm of the earth. God has not chosen to share all of His reasons for doing this with
us, though He does grant us insight into these things as we grow up in our life in Christ. This action
was not without good reason, and the scripture details a fair accounting of this reason for those
willing to study humbly. This insurrection significantly affected the balance and order of all of creation
on every level and in all of its dimensions. It was a direct challenge to the foundation of Authority

190
itself, and was an “in your face” assault against the right of God to be God. Because it tore one third
of the living fabric of creation from the Grand Tapestry that God had woven, this rebellion opened a
horrible wound up that cannot be left un-healed. The problem was fundamental: The solution is
necessarily radical. When Paul speaks of “uniting all things” in Christ, he is talking about the healing
of this wound.

Peter, standing on the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem many years earlier and before Paul met the
Lord, referred also to this ultimate reweaving of the Divine tapestry:

But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent
therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the pres-
ence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the
time for restoring all the things (the restoration of all things) about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy
prophets long ago. Acts 3:18-21

Paul goes on in Ephesians:

In him we have obtained ‍an inheritance,

The New Covenant speaks of two inheritances. Here Paul speaks of our inheritance as “heirs together
with Christ” in the full blessings of the estate and Kingdom of our Father, the High King of Heaven.
You should do a study of the word “inheritance”, and be encouraged: (Matthew 19:29; 25:34; Ephesians 1:11;
14; 18; 5:5; Colossians 1:12; 3:24; Hebrews 6:12; 9:15; 1 Peter 1:4) In a little bit, Paul will speak of our Father’s
inheritance in us:

having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you,
what are ‍the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,

And Peter writes:

But you are ‍a chosen race, a royal ‍priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may
proclaim the excellencies of him who called you ‍out of darkness into ‍his marvelous light.

Far too many Christians think that the sacrifice of Christ is somehow all for them…at least they seem
to live that way. But it is not. God has, from the beginning, invested Himself in man for much larger
purposes than our personal blessings and small satisfactions, though these are certainly important to
Him in their proper place. We really need to get over ourselves and catch vision as to how big all of
this God thing really is. Returning to Paul:

In him we have obtained ‍an inheritance, ‍having been predestined ‍according to the purpose of him who works all
things according to ‍the counsel of his will,  so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise
of his glory.

Since Paul has already offered plenty of opportunities for discussion on these subjects we don’t need
to rehash them again. However, I should remind those of you who have not had the chance to read
my other thoughts, of Paul’s remark that

we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to
his purpose. or, to put it another way,

we know that God ‍causes ‍all things to work together for good to those who love Him, to those who are called
‍according to His purpose. Romans 8:28

191
It is always good to be reminded that the foundations and promises upon which we are privileged to
build our lives are eternally secure. (Please notice, I said that the FOUNDATIONS are eternally
secure, not that our salvation as individuals is eternally secure.) God has given us the full freedom of
our will, and we can in that freedom, choose to condemn ourselves to eternal separation from the life
we were created to have. Or we can choose to yield our lives and our will to our Creator through
Christ, surrendering our suicidal independence in exchange for disciplined obedience and
servant~sonship. Having made this covenant commitment then, however we might want to
understand it theologically, when we walk in the obedience of our faith, we grant our Father
permission to “interfere” in our lives, to make certain decisions on our behalf. We yield , in significant
measure, our autonomy to Him, granting Him authority over our lives. And in so doing we allow Him
to shape our destiny so that it conforms to His purposes and plans for us. By this submission, we
place ourselves within the sphere of His protection and provision, because He will never ask us to do
anything that He does not fully prepare us for, and equip us to accomplish.

This paradigm of order, discipline, command, and supply is military, as well as familial. Many of the
word pictures in the New Covenant are military. And the paradigm is appropriate: We are, after all, in
a cosmic War.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all
things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise
of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in
him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire posses-
sion of it, to the praise of his glory.

When Paul refers to those who “first believed”, he is referring to the apostolic core of the first church,
and to those Jews and Gentile proselytes who were initially impacted by Jesus’ ministry and
resurrection in Jerusalem. For a number of years the first church was exclusively a Jewish sect.
Even after Peter experienced his vision in Joppa (Acts 9-10), and witnessed the conversion of the
Roman centurion Cornelius, the followers of Jesus were pretty much restricted to the region around
Jerusalem and were very Jewish in appearance, though they were beginning to include more
outsiders in the fellowships.

It was actually Paul, when he was still going by his birth name of Saul of Tarsus, and was the
firebrand arch-persecutor of the Christians, whose aggressive attacks as an enforcer for the
Jerusalem Sanhedrin scattered the Jerusalem believers and began the spread of the Gospel beyond
Israel. (See Acts 7:52ff) After his conversion during his pogrom against the Damascene believers, Saul,
now known by the Greek name Paul, became the “Apostle to the Gentiles” who revealed the very
Jewish “Messiah” as “Jesus, the Christ”, the Savior of the world. Now, some twenty-five years later,
Paul is looking out over a nascent church that includes believers from every people group of the
Roman Empire, and even beyond. He, himself, has been used by God to reinterpret and perfect the
entire Old Covenant to embrace the non-Jewish world, and has given his life to the promulgation of
the Gospel of the Kingdom of God to all mankind.

I have written at length of the steps to our redemption in my previous essays. There is no such thing
as “cheap grace”. (A phrase originally penned by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the author of The Cost of
Discipleship, who himself was martyred at the hands of Adolph Hitler's SS.

"Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace." db)
Those who offer the Gospel as a simple assent to “Four Spiritual Laws” or who say that “All you have
to do is accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior”, as if you were filling out some five minute
survey, are selling you a bill of goods, at least if you think you are going to “get saved” on those terms.
192
.If you want to be a biblical Christian it is going to cost you your life, certainly in obedience and service and
alienation from unbelieving friends and family; possibly in strong persecution and shed blood. You cannot
be a sincere Christian and maintain fellowship bonds with the world. (James 4:4) More Christians have
been martyred in the 20th and 21st centuries than in the total of all the preceding eighteen hundred years
since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And it is about to become much worse. There will be harsh
persecution on American soil: It has already begun in some places.

The reason that the salvation of your soul offered by Christ is “free” is that there is nothing you have to
offer that could possibly repay what it cost Him to gain your liberty. Therefore, He offers you a priceless
treasure, and does not attach an invoice. But there is a price. In exchange for your eternal life, He
requires your everlasting love and loyalty…unconditionally and absolutely. His life for your life. This is not
a yard sale. He does not negotiate. We have nothing to bargain with. We are not to try. The terms are
unconditional in both directions. Unconditional Love.... Unconditional surrender. The alternative is that
we will remain “under the wrath of God” (John 3: 16-18, 36) until we stand before Him to be judged,
condemned, sentenced, and “cast into outer darkness.” Matthew 8:12;Matthew 22:13; Matthew 25:30 Therefore,
those of us who (a) hear the word of truth AND (b) believe in Him on His terms (c) receive the bona
fide redemption of Calvary with all its benefits and empowerment and are

sealed with the ‍promised Holy Spirit,  who is ‍the guarantee‍ of our ‍inheritance

The word translated here “guarantee” is the Greek word “arrabon”, which means a “down payment” or
a “deposit” on a transaction in business terms, but carries deeper connotations, and actually is a
transliteration of a primitive root in Hebrew that was used when speaking of social blood bonds,
ancient Middle-Eastern “I will die for you” sort of stuff, and of a “bride price” or dowry. The same
word, in modern Greek, has come to mean “engagement ring”, which, when you think about it, is
pretty cool.

until ‍we acquire ‍possession of it, ‍to the praise of his glory.

The full adoption comes when Lucifer and His hordes are finally run to ground, and brought before the
“White Throne” of Christ’s judgment, and the whole Body of the Church is finally “transformed” (Greek:
metamorphosed –Matthew 17:2; Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Philippians 3:31;) into its fully realized new
creation form. (1 Corinthians 15:12-58; 2 Thessalonians 2:8ff)

For this reason, ‍because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love‍ toward all the saints,

There is hard evidence, when a Christian is created. Something tangible happens: Postive, visible,
immediate and ongoing CHANGE. This is the meaning of transformation. Faith, as it is described in
Hebrews 11, is SUBSTANTIAL not whimsical…Not an intellectual concept, but a fixed point of
reference:

Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

‍This ‍hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which ‍‍enters ‍‍within the veil,
Hebrews 6:19

and one of the evidences is the turning of the ego from self-centeredness to others-centeredness. Of
course this happens, because a new, holy, others-centered Ego has taken root within the spirit and soul
of the sincere convert. Where this is evidenced in practice, Christ is truly present in His people. Where
it is not evident you have a false church…a social club….an organization, but not the living organism of
the Body of Christ. In most congregations there is a mixture, the true Church corrupted by nominal
“christians”....”camp followers”. This ought not to be, but it will take some time to sort the wheat from the
chaff, if and when a church decides to really preach and practice the FULL gospel.
193
Eventually, the fire will become far too hot for those not recreated to live in it to remain, and they will
leave. The wind of the Spirit will blow away the husks and leave the wheat on the threshing floor.

I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers,

Paul’s care reminds us that we are, as believers, “members one of another” Romans 12:5;Ephesians 4:25 in
Christ’s Body, and therefore very much “our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers”. (I have argued elsewhere
that we are NOT so obligated toward unbelievers: We have concern for them on other grounds).
Prayer is a proactive supernatural “multi-tool” that we are all given, and are expected to use as both
an offensive and a defensive weapon in the War, and as an incalculably powerful life-giving resource
through which we can strengthen and guard each other. We are not supposed to limit our prayers to
bedtime shopping lists or rote-memorized incantations (Mattew 6:7,8): Our lives are to be lived in prayer
24/7/365. Paul says, in another place, that we are to “pray ceaselessly” 1 Thessalonians 5:17;2 Timothy 1:3 .
Prayer is the medium of communion and communication that flows uninterrupted between our spirit
and the heart of our Father through the Holy Spirit who has joined us symbiotically with Daddy God.
This is what Paul means: Prayer circulating like blood from the Heart of God through the Body of
Christ. The word the Bible uses of the working of the Spirit is “inspiration”…breathing…Prayer is
breathing with the life and breath of God.

that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory

Again, Paul distinguishes between the Persons of the Godhead.

may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him,

Because we are confined to our little blue terrarium and its four dimensions, we cannot discover
anything about the Truth of God unless He chooses to reveal it to us.

For  who  knows  a  person’s  thoughts  ‍except  the  spirit  of  that  person,  which  is  in  him?  So  also  no  one
comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received not ‍the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this
‍in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, ‍interpreting spiritual truths to those who are
spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and ‍he is
not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is
himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we
have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:11-16

This process of revelation is offered to every seeking heart, and is progressive. God will not give us more
than we are able to handle. This is for our own good. Spiritual Truth is immensely potent, and potentially
very dangerous. I was considering this yesterday with my wife. Jesus said that with a bit of faith we could
cast a mountain into the sea. This sounds pretty cool, but I have never been able to do it. (Actually, I’ve
never been motivated to try to do it.) Nor have I known anyone who has been able to do it (and I have
known some pretty incredible men and women of God). So, what is the catch? I know that these mature
saints have vast faith, but they haven’t been tossing mountains around (at least that they have talked
about). Then it occurred to me: There is a lot of responsibility that goes with mountain tossing. If you
drop a mountain into the sea, you displace probably twenty or thirty cubic miles of water. That means you
create a tsunami...actually, you would create the mother of all tsunamis, if you want to be technical about
it. And that means that you potentially might drown a couple of million people or more and wipe out
trillions of dollars in infrastructure (depending upon where you drop the mountain), which is not a good
thing (think of FEMA trying to clean up THAT mess). Therefore, even though the potential is there, in faith,
for every Christian to chuck Mt. Everest into the Indian Ocean, (or Mt. Shasta into San Francisco Bay,
which might be more useful) God doesn’t let us do it on our own judgment…. because we are not wise
enough. Hence, the need for the “spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him”.
194
 (Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. Knowledge is relatively easily gained. Wisdom is not.
Knowledge can be acquired through some hard work, and lots of loans, reasonably quickly. Wisdom
takes time and life experience and cannot be learned through books, or rushed. Many people seek
knowledge: Some actually acquire it. Far fewer ever gain wisdom. (And vast multitudes are
educated far beyond their intelligence: The Bible talks about the folly of putting gold rings in the noses
of pigs.))

We all start out our Christian lives as newborn cradlebabies. Babies are cute, cuddly, generally
adorable, self-centered, thoughtless, impulsive, irrational, emotionally driven, messy, often incredibly
stupid creatures in need of constant, sometimes dictatorial, supervision and frequent diaper changes.
Over time, if they are properly disciplined and strongly guided and shaped by mature and loving
parents, they (usually) grow up. (In today’s world this is a crap shoot.) And as children grow up we
give them increasing privileges and greater personal freedoms, with which come increasing
responsibilities. And with increasing liberties and the freedoms to make personal choices come the
rewards of making wise choices, and the consequences of making poor choices. The more
significant the responsibilities, the greater the rewards for accomplishment. For grown children who
haven’t matured well and who then make poor choices, the consequences often are very
bad…sometimes tragic. We see this every day. In this case Darwin was right: The clueless or
renegade members of a species tend to die out.

We are, as Christians, given the privilege of becoming the sons and daughters of the God of All That
Is. That’s a lot of privilege. That’s a lot of potential responsibility, and a lot of potential consequences.
As I have said before, the greater the potential for good, the greater the potential for evil if that good
impulse turns to the dark side.

We need to live on our knees, and be very willing to receive the “spirit of wisdom and revelation in the
knowledge” of this Awesome God who has chosen to recover us from our alienation from Him and to
call Himself our Daddy. We need to realize, and accept, that we are going to be very small children,
in God's eyes, all of our mortal lives, even as very matured Christians.

(I have cringed often at a really inane bumper sticker that some Christians have liked to flaunt: “God
is my Co-pilot”. GOD IS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE THE CO-PILOT!!!! It is shear presumptuous
arrogant ignorance to dare to put such drivel on our backsides and advertise such heresy to the world.
“THE NAME OF CHRIST IS BLASPHEMED AMONG THE GENTILES BECAUSE OF YOU.” ROMANS
2:24 If you have this plastered on your car, get it off now, PLEASE! You’re getting in the Lord’s way.)

Paul continues:

having the eyes of your hearts enlightened,

The New Covenant talks about the Old Man, or the Natural Man, or the Outer Man, and the New Man
or the Inner Man or the New Creature in Christ. As we have senses in the body that allow us to
navigate our world, so also do we have senses in our spiritual being that serve a similar purpose as
we communicate with the dimensions above our physical four. Before we are spiritually reborn these
senses are either completely dead and non-functioning, or are severely malfunctioning, because of
our congenitally sin-damaged condition (“psychic” awareness being one that some people seem to
have some access to). After we are regenerated through the rebirth experience and the subsequent
symbiotic indwelling of the Holy Spirit, these senses are awakened. As with newborns and children,
these senses then have to be exercised, and we spend time, often many years, learning to use them
with finesse and subtle coordination. The “eyes of our heart” speak of one aspect of these senses.
Others involve spiritual discernment and the “ears” to hear the voice of the Lord.

195
that you may know what is ‍the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance
in the saints,

What is HOPE?

Paul writes, in the first letter we have to the Corinthian fellowship (chapter 11), that three things last
eternally: faith, hope, and love. On earth, in our relationships and interactions, love rules supreme,
because it is through the living medium of agape love and the actions to which it constrains us that
our eternal character is forged, the character upon which our eternal destiny will be constructed.

And faith, the “faith of the Son of God” by which we live (Galatians 2:20), is the power cord (perhaps “umbil-
ical cord” would be a better analogy) that connects us to the Divine reservoir of Love upon which we
draw, and hope is the link that maintains that connection and gives us the confidence that the
oftentimes strenuous training we have to go through is worth the pain we sometimes must endure.

(Love is very much a present time thing of comfort, Faith has qualities which touch both the present
and the future, Hope is primarily oriented toward the future. I realize that these analogies all are
terribly inadequate: These three supernatural qualities are not separate from each other and cannot
be compartmentalized. They each flow from and inform the others: All are rooted in the heart of the
Father. Our efforts to explain them always fall short. They are living things: Whenever we vivisect
living things to try to “understand them better”, we end up killing them.)

Hope is the one thing with which human beings can overcome impossible challenges, and without
which we humans will die almost more quickly than we do if we are deprived of air. We human
beings are incredibly hopeful creatures by nature, even in our fallen state: This apparently is part of
the Divine image in which we are created. Hope, as it is revealed in the scriptures, is a supernatural
“force”, or dynamic, intimately related to faith, without which we cannot survive as spiritual creatures.
Hope is a Divine attribute. It is a word that describes, in some measure, the confidence God has in
Himself, and is a part of Himself that He shares with us. In Christ, as our experience of His sustaining
Presence accumulates over time, we learn, not just to tentatively expect that He will care as much for
us tomorrow as He did today (as in the phrase we so often use, “I hope that Jesus will answer my
prayers” which means about the same thing as “I hope tomorrow will be a nice day”), but to live in
proactive hope. As we become more like Him in our own character and in our knowledge of the
faithfulness of our Father, true God-quality hope grows in our souls. We become secure in certainty!
Our lives are stabilized. We become overcomers.

This kind of life-sustaining Hope, Hope that springs from eternal artesian wells with sources in Divine
bedrock, becomes an anchor that can hold us through anything this world might throw at us…And
more than an anchor, this Divine Hope is also the immovable mountain into which our anchor is
imbedded, and beyond that, this Hope is itself the fixed compass star in the Heavens by which we
always can orient our course. (How’s that for mixing metaphors?)

and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit
who has been given to us. Romans 5:5

All of these working together result in the love of God being strengthened and confirmed in and
through us in every aspect of our lives, driving out from us the residues of uncertainty and fear that
might still lurk in the shadows of our memory from before we encountered the Lord, and as love
grows stronger it empowers a self-perpetuating cycle through which our faith and hope increase still
more.

THIS is the Hope to which He has called us.

196
that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance
in the saints,

I remarked above, and it bears repeating, that we American Christians tend to be insufferably self-
centered, though quite often in a magnanimous sort of way because we are culturally a generous
people, most of the time. Reflecting from above, I share Peter’s thought again,

But you are ‍a chosen race, ‍a royal ‍priesthood, a holy nation, ‍a people for his own possession, that you may
proclaim the excellencies of him who called you ‍out of darkness into ‍his marvelous light. 1 Peter 2:9

I emphasize! We really need to get over ourselves and catch vision as to how big all of this God thing
really is. God regards us, “the saints”, as His inheritance, His “glorious (radiating glory like
sunbeams) inheritance”! Paul will try to find words to convey a bit of what this means, but even he
fails. What any of us can grasp is this; When God does something, He does it “to the max”…And
whatever He is doing with the Church in the grand scheme of things, He is doing it to the max. The
fact that we get blessed out of our socks is a bit of icing on the cake. God is not selfish…He has
plenty of goodness to spread around and He enjoys doing so: But He also appreciates being
appreciated for who He is, and He alone rightfully commands our worship. It is our only appropriate
response to Him. (Romans 12:1,2) If creatures do not understand what they are in relation to their
Creator, you get such chaos as the Luciferian rebellion, and everything gets screwed up. No creature
is happier than when it is being exactly what it is meant to be.

and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe

Note the word choices: “immeasurable” and “greatness”. That means really, really, really, really,
really super humongously great. More than “Jesus, would you please help me pass this math quiz”
or “Oh, God I really need a parking place!” or “Lord, please find me a (cute) godly boyfriend“ great.
Even more than “Lord, bless our President and save the whole world” great. Moses split the seas;
Elijah stopped the rains; at Joshua’s request the sun itself stood still; Jesus called Lazarus back from
his tomb after four days; Peter called out Ananias and Sapphira for lying to God and both of them
dropped dead; Paul preached Eutychus to death and then healed him back up so he could finish
listening to the sermon and still get a healthy breakfast: And the record continues on for the nearly
two thousand years after the New Testament covers close. It is being written by the minute, all over
the world, as you read this.

I needed healing: I contracted both hepatitis B and hepatitis C in 1974. These both are noted in my
military medical records. However, I do not have any indications of either at this time. All blood tests are
perfectly normal. My liver is perfect. I don’t even have the antibodies. These are incurable terminal
diseases. But the Lord has told me that He has work for us to do yet. Terminal diseases would interfere
with this. So He healed them. When I met the Lord thirty-eight years ago, I also was instantly released
from four years of heavy drug use, including nearly two years of almost daily meth-amphetamine
dependence: I simply stopped because the Lord said, “You don't need this anymore.”, and removed the
problem. At the same time He removed all desire for tobacco, and I quit a two and a half pack a day
Marlboro and Camel habit cold turkey and without withdrawal. These are small personal “miraculous”
interventions, though certainly not insignificant, at least to me. There have been many others. This past
year has been an ongoing miracle for Marilyn and me, far too rich and complicated to detail here. It will
take a book to tell the story of His protection and provision as we have had our lives utterly remade, (a
book I will probably try to write at some point). Much greater things are happening daily around the world.
This power is directed toward us who believe: i.e. born-again Christians. So why are so many of us
Christians prone to walking around in fear and doubt and worry? What’s wrong with this picture?

Either God is God, or He isn’t.

197
 Paul could say with absolute confidence:

“I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that
day. ” 2 Timothy 1:12

I have a question I ask myself on a daily basis: “Do I really believe whom I say I believe?”

Returning to Ephesians:

‍according to the working of ‍his great might that he worked in Christ ‍when he raised him from the dead and ‍seat­
ed him at his right hand ‍in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and
above every name that is named, not only in ‍this age but also in the one to come.

Remember Paul’s gauntlet thrown down in Romans heralding the Victorious Champion of our Creator,

CONCERNING HIS SON, WHO WAS DESCENDED FROM DAVID‍ ACCORDING TO THE FLESH AND ‍WAS DECLARED TO
BE THE SON OF GOD IN POWER ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT OF HOLINESS BY HIS RESURRECTION FROM THE
DEAD, JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD, Romans 1: 3-4

Our God is powerful…Incomprehensibly powerful! We are speaking of power, not just in terms of
strength or brute force, but of ORIGINAL CREATIVE AUTHORITY. God is self-existent. God’s
Authority and the power that He exercises are underived. We cannot wrap our pea brains around this
concept, but this is how He reveals Himself to be. We can accept it or reject it. We cannot
comprehend it. How we respond to this revelation changes nothing but our relationship toward Him;
whether we are able to be in His Presence or not. He exceeds all of our definitions and terminologies
and formulations. Because we are made “in His image” we are a little like Him: He is not like us.
Our proper response to Him is worship. We either believe in Him, or we don’t. If we try to remain
ambivalent the choice will be made for us (or rather, we will have found ourselves to have made the
wrong choice by default) when we die: This is inescapable. The positive choice toward God requires
believing faith (and, actually, the negative choice away from God requires UN-believing faith). As
soon as we can see (that is, as soon as we die and our soul is released from its mortal constraints
and limitations and we are fully in His realm), faith no longer remains possible.

God makes Life happen: He is the source of Life. God speaks dimensions and universes into being.
He imagines them and they become real. In Genesis 1:3 the Hebrew text reads, “ And God said,
‘Light Be…And Light Was.’” A thought…A Word…A Creation. In the same way God keeps everything
from deconstructing.

Long ago, at many times and ‍in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,  but in these last days he
has spoken to us by ‍his Son, whom he appointed ‍the heir of all things, through whom also he created ‍the world.
He is the radiance of the glory of God and ‍the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the
word of his power. Hebrews 1:1-3

In a real and profound way we are figments of His imagination.

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him
all things hold together. Colossians 1:16

198
Of course we can’t understand this, not with the mental and physical limitations under which we
presently are constrained, at least. But we can begin to grasp the greatness of our God, and to
choose to become humble enough to become true lifetime learners (disciples). He will impart His
own Spirit to His children (those who have yielded to Christ) for this purpose. This submitted posture,
plus the Mind of Christ that is given to each of us, (For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to
instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ), will allow us to grow in our knowledge of, and in our
intimate relationship with, our Father, beginning now, if we choose to have it so, and on into the ages
to come.

Continuing:

seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places,  ‍far above all rule and authority and power and dominion,
and above every name that is named,

Paul is speaking here not primarily of human governments, but of spiritual beings, and especially of
the demonic “principalities and powers” that presently dominate the sin besotted world of men.
Wherever Christ is not Lord, these dark “authorities” influence and often dominate the men and
women who are in positions of power. All human governments are corrupted by them. This
ubiquitous demonization is the heart of the matter, and a key reason for the cosmic conflict in which
we are embroiled, and for which the blood of Christ was spilled.

Lucifer challenged God. God, in Christ, has finally and eternally answered that challenge.

not only in ‍this age but also in the one to come.

The Age of Man, the last segment of which we are now calling “the Church Age”, is just the first
act…It is the cleaning up of a bit of a mess, albeit a necessary and completely planned for mess, so
that the really spectacular stuff God wants us to share in can get underway;

nothing less, or more.

And he put all things under his feet

Again, this is part of the finished work of Calvary…Finished in the eternal Plan of God; still in process
in our time-line. We, as individuals, are each walking into our personal unique destiny in our own
time, until the “full number of the Gentiles” Romans 11:25 has come in and “all Israel, the Israel of God” Gala-
tians 6:16;Romans 11:26 is restored to its heritage.

and gave him as ‍head over all things to the church,

The ascended God-Man, Christ Jesus, this New Creation Firstborn Son I have dared to describe
above, is now the Intellect and Directive Will who guides the spiritual Organism of the Church, which
is the living union of all of those unique souls who have covenanted with Him through spiritual rebirth
and are now one in spirit with Him. He is not “our great moral Teacher”, or some historical religious
figure we venerate, or even just “our Savior”: We are to call Him Lord, with all of the medieval
implications of that word fully attached!

(The people of the Bible lived in a world of kings and absolute rulers, not of democracies and party
politics. Sovereigns were sovereigns. Sovereign authority is ABSOLUTE, non-negotiable, completely
undemocratic, “off with his head” authority. This is a difficult concept to come to grips with in our 21st
century individualistic “looking-out-for-number-one-you-ain't-the-boss-of-me-have-it-your-way-you-
deserve-it” world...but the Bible says that our world is upside down (Acts 17:6)....that we are all wrong.
199
Our God is a king, not an elected president or prime minister, and we are His subjects, not His
constituents. You might watch Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” masterpiece to better understand
these ideas.)

He is our Life and our Heart and our Mind and our Soul, for we have made a full and fair exchange of
our worthless lives for His priceless Life, and we are now and forever joined in symbiotic union with
Him in fact, not in theory. In Him we have become part of Him, and He is very much the greater part
of us…at least the part of us that really matters. Until we understand this, we are missing the point of
our Faith and have failed to truly “put on the mind of Christ” , as the scriptures admonish us to do. We
do not lose our identity: Rather, we gain His identity, and our identity is “hidden with Christ, in God”.
Colossians 3:3

For as many of you as ‍were baptized ‍into Christ have ‍put on Christ. Galatians 3:27

But ‍put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, ‍to gratify its desires. Romans 13:14

Again in Ephesians

‍which is his body

The Church is described, in the New Testament, in many ways using many metaphors and allegories,
as we are privileged to view the many-faceted jewel that is the revelation of Christ and the Plan of the
Father in scripture. One of these facets uses the analogy of the human body, the complexity of which
we, with our infant sciences are only now beginning to comprehend. Christ is the Head, the “brain”,
the intellect, the infinitely complex Mind whose order and discipline and wisdom is bringing back
under control our renegade and rebellious wills, and is restoring us to the full and useful function that
we are created to have, as individuals joined in a corporate spiritual entity. In Him we are becoming
what we are meant to be, and He, Himself, is increasing, as I have suggested above, because of us.

we are to ‍grow up in every way into him who is ‍the head, into Christ,  from whom the whole body, joined and
held together by every joint with which it is equipped, ‍when each part is working properly, makes the body
grow so that it builds itself up in love. Ephesians 4:15-16

For just as ‍the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one
body, ‍so it is with Christ.  For ‍in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves‍  or
free—and ‍all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many.  If
the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a
part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would
not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If
the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?

But as it is, ‍God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.  If all were a single member,
where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I
have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the
body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we
bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more
presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked
it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If
one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. 1 Corinthians 12:12-27

200
He is the image of ‍the invisible God, ‍the firstborn of all creation.  For by‍ him all things were created, in heaven
and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were
created ‍through him and for him.  And ‍he is before all things, and in him all things ‍hold together.  And ‍he is the
head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be
preeminent.  For ‍in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,  and ‍through him to reconcile to himself
all things, whether on earth or in heaven, ‍making peace ‍by the blood of his cross.    And you, who once were
alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order
to present you holy and blameless and ‍above reproach before him,  ‍if indeed you continue in the faith, stable
and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed ‍in all creation‍
under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister. Colossians 1:15-23

Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions,
puffed up without reason by ‍his sensuous mind,  and not ‍holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body,
nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. Colossians
2:18-19

Back to Ephesians

‍the fullness of him ‍who fills all in all.

On record in the Book of Acts Paul, apparently not having his King James pocket New Testament handy,
dares, when speaking to the Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus on Mars Hill, as he pointed to one of
the myriad pagan altars that dotted the grass, to quote from Epimendides of Crete, who says, “ in him (the
Unknown god) we all live and move and have our being” Acts 17:28 (thus making a pagan philosopher a
contributor to the inerrant inspired Word of God). I have taken a swipe earlier at the concept that in a
very real sense we are all figments of God’s imagination….His creative thought expressed and given
material existence somehow out of His own spiritual substance because He wants it to be so. Because
He exists beyond all the dimensions that contain anything we might conceive of, it must be that somehow
everything that is exists “within” Him and comes from within Him. Thus, Paul can say here that He “fills all
in all”. In other places he says such things as:

When all things are subjected to Him (the Son - Jesus Christ), then the Son himself will also be subjected to
Him (God the Father) who put all things in subjection under Him (the Son - Jesus Christ) , that ‍God (God
the Father) may be all in all. 1 Corinthians 15:28

There is one body (the True spiritual Church) and ‍one Spirit (the Holy Spirit)—just as you were called to the
one ‍hope that belongs to your call— ‍one Lord (the Son - Jesus Christ) , one faith, one baptism,  ‍one God and
Father of all (God the Father) , ‍who (God the Father) is over all and through all and in all. Ephesians 4:4-6

‍He (the Son - Jesus Christ) is the image of ‍the invisible God, ‍the firstborn of all creation.  For by‍ Him (the

Son-before the Incarnation) all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether
‍thrones or ‍dominions (angelic/spiritual) or rulers or authorities (human)—all things were created ‍through Him
(the Son-before the Incarnation) and for Him (the Son-before the Incarnation and as the Risen
Bridegroom). And He (the Son-before the Incarnation) is before all things, and in Him (the Son-before
the Incarnation) all things hold together. And He (the Son - Jesus Christ) is the head of the body, the
church. He (the Son - Jesus Christ) is the beginning, ‍the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He (the
Son - Jesus Christ) might be preeminent. For in Him (the Son - Jesus Christ) all the fullness of God (the
Father) was pleased to dwell, and through Him (the Son - Jesus Christ) to reconcile to Himself (God the
Father) all things, whether on earth or in heaven, ‍making peace ‍by the blood of His (the Son - Jesus Christ)
cross. Colossians 1:15-20

For ‍from him (God the Father) and through him (the Son) and to him (the Son and God the Father ) are
all things. ‍To him (God the Father) be glory forever. Amen. Romans 11:36
201
And John also writes:

In the beginning was the Word (the Son) , and the Word was with God (the Father or the Trinity), and the
Word was God (the Son as the second member of the Trinity before the Incarnation). He was in the
beginning with God (the Father or the Trinity).  ‍All things were made through him (the Son before the
Incarnation), and without him (the Son before the Incarnation) was not any thing made that was made. John
1: 1-3
Reality cannot be otherwise.

And yet this Christian view is not pan-theism…God is not “everything” and everything is not god. God
is very much separate and transcendent from His creation, and the creation does exist in its own right,
completely separate from Him. (Let the how of this go: You will get a migraine....Just worship.) As I
have argued before, this is why we can be held fully responsible for our choices. What to us seems
impossibly contradictory is, once we step outside the box, simply paradoxical.

(This may be hard to grasp, perhaps impossible to comprehend apart from revelation, but it is, on the
grandest of scales, no more than what I do as a sculptor when I conceive of a piece of art in my
imagination and through the gifts and skills with which the Lord has graced me bring that vision forth
and make it substantial so that you can touch it with your eyes and hands and appreciate it. Our
Father has made us in His image: I reflect, in oh so small a way, that inconceivable Creativity that
called the Cosmos into existence from nothing at all and filled it with Life and beauty. This should not
be difficult to understand, or at least appreciate, once bias is relinquished, or at least is admitted and
temporarily suspended, and faith embraced (or at least acknowledged as a reasonable augmentation
to pure logic).)

(Not to mention that it very elegantly resolves the impossible conundrum of having the whole mind-
bogglingly humongous universe compressed into an infinitely small infinitely hot infinitely dense
singularity with no mass that came from nowhere out of nothing at all at the timeless moment of the
Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago.)

Good ideas don’t take up any room at all ~ “God said, ‘Light be…and Light was.’” (Genesis 1:3)~ and yet
they can be infinitely large.

Intelligent design with creative imagination better and more elegantly describes the origin of things
than does the theoretical notion of random and purposeless blind accidental happenstance without
mechanism or materials.

It is no more difficult to believe in God than it is to not believe in God, and it is far more reasonable.

Rabbit Trail:

I was reading one of C.S. Lewis’s brilliant essays and he made a point that I think I might have
grasped a little bit of. He was talking about the difference between picture and story as an illustration
of the differences in world view between ancient “pre-scientific” peoples and modern “rational”
scientific thinking. He used as his illustration the tale of “Humpty Dumpty”. Not to reargue his point, I
would like to make this observation.

Though I am a writer, with a fair command of the English language, I think in pictures, more than
stories. This is probably because I have spent more than half of my life as an artist now, and have
had less time to read than I once did. (I used to read a book a day.) I tend to get almost dreamlike

202
images in my mind of creative ideas, which I then can either render as drawings or sculptures or can
wrestle out into words on paper, which, oddly enough, also tend to move through my mind as pictures
and dynamic conceptual “motions“…like visual poetry.

Lewis was arguing that the scientifically rational mind tends to view the world as a story, a linear
narrative…proceeding through life and every moment of life methodically and systematically
…grammatically and logically…a to b to c to d.

I, the artist, on the other hand, tend to be able to see the whole of things, the big picture, but very
likely may not be able to tell you exactly how to get from a to z in clear steps. I can get you from
beginning to end, usually very elegantly, but I do it very “organically”, not linearly. I live by fuzzy logic.
I can lead you, and I seldom get lost, but I might not be able to draw you a precise map.

For example, I am working on a very large carving right now…a monumental family crest. (You can
see its companion carving at my web gallery). At any given time I might be carving anywhere on the
piece. My sessions are almost like something out of chaos theory: I bounce around as the “muse”
moves me, a chip here, a chunk there, trying to find my way through a five foot wide, three foot tall,
nine inch thick block of wood to make something wonderful out of what once was a tree.

If I try to stick to the big concept drawing I have hanging on the wall, or if I try to focus too long on one
section of the carving at a time, I can guarantee that I will absolutely ruin it. If I keep the big picture of
the finished piece in mind at all times (and this internal picture, my “creative vision”, is much grander
than the sketch I have made - too grand to easily draw or paint), and I let the details of the design
“flow” loosely through me without locking me down, very much letting the sculpture create itself as I
invade its world, I am absolutely confident that the final carving will be a masterpiece (“Feel the
Force, Luke”) ...though it will certainly not more than approximate the initial concept. It will exceed my
initial imagination in every way. As soon as I can’t do this, I stop for the day and go fishing.

If I were to meticulously draw out a blueprint for the carving and then photographically reproduce
what I have drawn, the end result would be truly “wooden”…dead and lifeless and without any in-
spired character. Such pieces might be created by CNC technology, but I doubt that I could even ac-
complish such a pointless exercise by hand and eye. It would not be art in any case. Machines were
invented to do such work, efficiently and cheaply and repetitively....by rationalists, not artists.

The rationalist is locked in to reading the story. I am quite certain that very few, if any, such minded
people could ever accomplish the carving I am doing. They cannot think the way I do, even as I
cannot think as concisely and sharply as they do. They can probably work like Energizer Bunnies as
they methodically forge forward on their projects. Their patience is probably phenomenal: Their
mental disciplines extraordinary. They are superbly suited for their work.

I know several engineers and I have some idea of the way that they think, the lens through which
they view the world. We do not communicate all that well. Those who do woodworking can make
beautiful cabinets and other straight line furniture: They can follow blueprints and shop drawings to
the thousandth of an inch. They cannot carve, at least flowing free-form designs. (And I know that,
especially in the pure sciences, the serendipitous picture-thinking minds certainly do exist and thrive,
so I apologize if I paint with too broad a stroke here. There are many meta-physicians in the
theoretical scientific community today, and I applaud them. )

Lewis, in his essay, was making the point that the rationalist cannot make any objective determination
about the existence or nature of the “super” natural, or of God, or of the origin or ultimate end of the
universe. His conclusion was that the modern rationalist, because he is trying to read the cosmos as
a story, and because he is severely constrained by history, and by time itself, has opened the book

203
somewhere at random in the middle, and has been able to read effectively only enough to be able to
conclude,

“Humpty Dumpty is falling”…..

The person reading the story has neither access to the Introduction to the book about who built the
wall upon which Humpty was sitting, nor to information about who laid Humpty in the first place, nor
any insight as to how he got on the wall, nor whether he lost his balance or was pushed, nor
knowledge of who the King is, nor any understanding as to whether or not there might be another
solution in the Kingdom to Humpty’s problem besides the horses and men. The reader is locked into
the few pages opened before him. He certainly has no information whatsoever about the author of
the book. This information is completely beyond the reach of the naturalistic materialist, and never will
come within his or her grasp. It cannot be discovered from the material at hand. The rational or
scientific thinker can only deal with what he or she can observe: These things can never be observed
by the rational mind or the materialist eye. They exist either in a past that cannot be returned to (we
cannot by any means reach back farther than 10 to the minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang…a very
FINITE point in time), or in a future that extends far beyond the point of extinction of the human race,
and actually reaches into a distance where the boundary of our universe will always be beyond the
reach of our best technology, no matter how marvelous that technology becomes. (Dark energy and
the acceleration of spatial expansion guarantee that in the future the light from the edge of our
universe will never reach us, so we would never be able to study the ultimate beginnings or endings
of things, even if we were still around to do such studies, which we won't be.)

The person who sees the whole picture, however, might be aware of these things, or at least more
aware. (We all know that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, because a picture contains much
more information than words can ever convey.) That awareness may not be communicable by “ratio-
nal” language, any more than a sunrise can be described in words, or a symphony can be rendered
as an essay. I have elsewhere used the illustration of vivisection: A naturalist can go to some wild
place and live among the creatures there to learn of them…In recent decades many have: Joy
Adamson with her lions, Jane Goodall with her apes, Lynn Rogers with his black bears are just
three. But this is a recent trend: In the nineteenth century the scientists would capture or kill the
animals and bring them back to the laboratory and there would take them apart to “study” them. They
learned quite a bit, but they killed the creatures they were studying. They really never got to know the
truth about them…only about their pieces. Vivisection in truth is always “Die-section”....The
experience of anything always exceeds its description, but may extend beyond our ability to
communicate what we have experienced.. The Bible is in many ways much more a picture book than
a story book: Such is the nature of revelation. The Bible is “living“, it defines itself so,

Having  purified  your  souls  by  your  obedience  to  the  truth  for  ‍a  sincere  brotherly  love,  ‍love  one  another
earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, ‍not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through
the living and abiding word of God; for

  ‍“All flesh is like grass
and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower falls,

‍but the word of the Lord remains forever.”   And this word is the good news that was preached to you.
1 Peter 1:22-25

‍All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for  correction, and for training in
righteousness,  that the man of God‍ may be competent, equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17

204
knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.  For ‍no
prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the
Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 1:20-21

and is the only authorized gateway to the dimensions of God. (Indeed, the whole of creation is a
dynamic tableau of God’s power and glory as well, for those with Truth-hungry hearts, though it is
certainly not a portrait.)

The heavens declare the glory of God,

and the sky above‍ proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
          Their voice‍ goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19:1-4

But if the picture is hanging in a gallery somewhere, and the person who prefers stories never visits
galleries or decides to learn to appreciate art, they simply never are going to discover what the story
is really about.

All they will ever see is a fat falling egg.

End of Rabbit Trail:

Let’s get out of Einstein’s world for a bit, and back to the practical matters of hellfire and damnation
and being born again and such.

205
 EPHESIANS 2‍

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins  ‍in which you once walked,
following the course of this world,

Paul is referring again to the human condition, which we have already discussed at length: Our
common starting point, our consanguineous curse, which is the crux of the biblical message. ( I
should note that “trespass” emphasizes more the willfulness of our actions while “sin” refers to the
results or consequences that follow: The difference is subtle…the end result equivalent and fatal.) I
cannot stress enough that unless and until we each acknowledge and make personal this
fundamental and universal fact, that we are congenitally and terminally sin sick, we are doomed to
walk blindly through our lives building every hope and dream upon sand...and then we die. There
can be no greater tragedy than to come to the end of what appears to be a marvelously successful
life according to our culture’s standards of success, and to find that none of it is worth diddly-squat in
the eyes of God because we didn‘t rightly factor Him into our equation. We all, each one of us, have
exactly one lifetime to figure this out. This is the whole purpose of life. Whatever else meaning we,
as a species, have sought to ascribe to human existence over the millennia, if this is not of first
importance, is vanity: We love to hear ourselves talk, even if we have nothing of value to say.

The wisest of ancient Kings kept a diary of his thoughts that is timeless in its counsel because the
Spirit of God also held the pen. Solomon, son of David, who himself wrecked his own life and his
kingdom through hubris and excess, failing to listen to his own words, wrote:

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after. Ecclesiastes 1:2-11

206
 Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw
near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon
and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the
house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those
who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of
the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought
low— they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the
grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the
mourners go about the streets— before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the
pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth
as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 12:1-8

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom;

all those who practice it have a good understanding. Psalm 111:10

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,

and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. Proverbs 9:10

The fear of the LORD is ‍a fountain of life,

“Not unto us, O Lord, but unto thy name give glory” Proverbs 14:27

I am not drawing water from the Old Covenant well without New Covenant justification: I am only
echoing Jesus’ own clear admonition.

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross ‍daily and follow

me.  For ‍whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.  For what
does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself (loses his soul)? For whoever is
ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed ‍when he comes in his glory and the
glory of the Father and of the holy angels. Matthew 16:24-27;Mark 8:34-38;Luke 9:23-26

And he said to them, ‍“Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in
the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, ‍“The land of a rich man produced
plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‍‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I
will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up ‍for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’  But
God said to him, ‍‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will
they be?’  So is the one ‍who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:15-21

“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? Luke 6:46

I also will include here Question 104 of the Westminster Larger Catechism, a standard question
asked of those seeking First Communion in many Protestant denominations:

“What are the duties required in the first commandment?

The duties required in the first commandment are, the knowing and acknowledging of God to be the only true
God, and our God; (1 Chron. 28:9, Deut. 26:7, Isa. 43:10, Jer. 14:22) and to worship and glorify him
accordingly, (Ps. 95:6–7, Matt. 4:10, Ps. 29:2) by thinking, (Mal. 3:16) mediating, (Ps. 63:6) remembering,
(Eccl. 12:1) highly esteeming, (Ps. 71:19) honouring, (Mal. 1:6) adoring, (Isa. 45:23) choosing, (Josh. 24:15,22)
loving, (Deut. 6:5) desiring, (Ps. 73:25) fearing of him; (Isa. 8:13) believing him; (Exod. 14:31) trusting (Isa.
207
26:4) hoping, (Ps. 130:7) delighting, (Ps. 37:4) rejoicing in him; (Ps. 32:11) being zealous for him; (Rom. 12:11,
Num. 25:11) calling upon him, giving all praise and thanks, (Phil. 4:6) and yielding all obedience and
submission to him with the whole man; (Jer. 7:23, James 4:7) being careful in all things to please him, (1 John
3:22) and sorrowful when in any thing he is offended; (Jer. 31:18, Ps. 119:136) and walking humbly with
him.(Micah 6:8)”

Again quoting Jesus:

And behold, a ‍lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”  And he answered, ‍“You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and ‍your
neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” Luke 10:25-
28

Anything less is to “fall short of the Glory of God.” To fall short of the glory of God is to sin. To
practice sin is to live in rebellion against God‘s order.

John writes:

Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; ‍sin is lawlessness.  You know that ‍he
appeared to ‍take away sins, and ‍in him there is no sin.  No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; ‍no one who
keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.  Little children, ‍let no one deceive you. ‍Whoever practices
righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil
has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was ‍to destroy the works of the devil.
No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s‍ seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning
because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of
the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, 1 John 3:4-10

To live in rebellion to God is to guarantee that you will face judgment and condemnation after you die.

Nothing is more certain.

The prophet Ezekiel wrote:

‍The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the
iniquity of the son. ‍The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, ‍and the wickedness of the wicked
shall be upon himself. But if a wicked person turns away from all his sins that he has committed and keeps all
my statutes and does ‍what is just and right, ‍he shall surely live; he shall not die.  None of the transgressions that
he has committed shall be remembered against him; for the righteousness that he has done he shall live.  ‍Have I
any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way
and live? But when a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does injustice and does the same
abominations that the wicked person does, shall he live? None of the righteous deeds that he has done shall be
remembered; for ‍the treachery of which he is guilty and the sin he has committed, for them he shall die. Ezekiel
18:20-24

(and I remind you that the Old Covenant terms still apply to all who have not entered into the New
Covenant reality. There is no neutral ground. Please read my essays on Paul’s letter to Romans for a
detailed discussion of this.)

Paul continues in Ephesians:

following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in
‍the sons of disobedience—
208
Paul is referring here to Lucifer, to whom he also refers in 2 Corinthians 4:4 as “the god of this world”,
and I refer you to my previous discussions of the first chapters of Romans about Lucifer’s arrogation
of authority and his presumption to dominion over this world for a season, and his spiritual access to
the souls and unregenerate minds of mankind.

among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body‍ and the mind,
and ‍were by nature ‍children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

Please read my previous thoughts on Paul’s discussion of our degenerate humanity in the first seven
chapters of Romans.

Most all of us live under the misconception that there are “good people” and “bad people”, “guilty”
people and “innocent” people, in the world. We must do this in order to remain sane and to maintain
civil society: somebody always has to be “worse” than us, and there need to be heroes and saints to
whom we can look up, and toward whose “ideal” lives we can aspire. In terms of human society and
our standards of comparison and justice and morality on the level of human civil organization these
distinctions are in some measure valid, though only relatively so.

But in God’s eyes and before the Bar of Divine Justice every human being since the rebellion of
Adam, serial killer or saint, homeless beggar or billionaire, pervert or Pope, toddler or centenarian is
“by nature a child of wrath”, unless and until he or she is “born again” by the Holy Spirit through a
personal relationship with Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, the ONLY mediator between God and
man. (I will concede that small children are regarded differently by God until they reach what the Bible
refers to as the age where they know the difference between right and wrong…the “age of
accountability”. We are not held responsible for what we do not know or understand, as Paul has
established clearly. See also John 9:41. This is a controversial topic for another discussion.)

Born estranged from our Creator, every human being either is dominated and driven by egoism, self-
centeredness, lust and uncontrolled and uncontrollable passions, and is in rebellion against the
foundational Order and Rule of Creation itself, or is in a continual exhausting and ineffectual struggle
with their rebellious nature as he or she is being drawn toward God by prevenient Grace. This is the
condition commonly called “original sin” or “human depravity“. It is the universal state of mankind.

According to God’s eternal law, every human being, having violated this Created Order, and living in
willful rebellion, deserves the condemnation of eternal separation from the life of God, and of
banishment from the realm of the High King. This is both just and necessary.

But‍ God,

BUT GOD!!!!

BUT GOD!!!!

being rich in mercy,

One of the lies of the enemy of our souls is that God is angry and wants to see us suffer torment for
our sins. This is a half-Truth, as all of the most powerful and effective lies always are.

God is angry, but not with OUR kind of anger. His anger is directed at Lucifer, and at those who
have chosen to ally themselves in rebellion with Lucifer, and at the harm they cause. This Divine
Anger is the anger of a rightful King whose throne has been challenged by an upstart pretender who

209
has created diabolical chaos out of perfect order through his defiance; who will not cease his
insurrection and destruction, even after being defeated at Calvary. It is a pure, righteous anger.

God hates sin, because of the horrible damage it inflicts: Lucifer is sin, personified. His righeous
anger toward Lucifer is not the same as is his disappointed anger toward us. Lucifer looked His God
in the face, in full light, and defied Him. Adam did not. We, the race of Adam, are caught between, in
the crossfire of this cosmic conflict, and while Lucifer will never find redemption, we still have that
possibility open to us. God is angry, but not with OUR kind of anger. The Wrath of God is Holy and
Pure. Human anger is sinful anger. Divine anger is RIGHTEOUS anger. We get angry with actors.
Our Creator's anger is much more against actions, and the attitudes that lie behind actions. Before
God, unrepentant actors are judged because they are associated with actions, and actions have
consequences, even eternal consequences, but God does not degrade or diminish the actors as
individuals: Even in judgment they will be respected and their dignity will be maintained. (I remind
you that Jesus called Judas “friend” even as he betrayed his Lord with a kiss in the garden, and that
Jesus also forgave His executioners and tormenters from the cross on which they had nailed him).

We find it difficult not to dehumanize those who offend us. We desire to hurt those whose actions
have hurt us...to “get even”. Even if we say that we want to “rehabilitate” offenders, we find it difficult
not to want first to see them “pay” for their offenses, and by “pay” we mean “suffer”. God would
prefer to separate those whose actions are hurtful from the malignancy of sin in them that is
producing the action and, if it is possible, to heal the offender. (And, contrary to much of
Christendumb’s dogma, He doesn’t require the sinner to “do penance”, only to BE repentant.
Repentance means to be willing to turn away with a positive attitude from something we are doing
that is wrong...to be willing to change course and start over.) If there is suffering involved, it is always
redemptive, in the same way that a surgical patient “suffers” pain from the surgery that saves his life.

We often find forgiveness very difficult. Our Lord finds it very easy. He will forgive instantly and
totally anyone who sincerely asks forgiveness of Him. We remember offenses even after we “for-
give”: He does not. Our forgiveness is more often than not conditional and probationary: His is
unconditional and absolute.

For I will forgive their iniquity, and ‍I will remember their sin no more. Jeremiah 31:34

‍Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from

his way and live? Ezekiel 18:23

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for
kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every
way.  This is good, and ‍it is pleasing in the sight of ‍God our Savior,  who desires ‍all people to be saved and to
come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the
man‍  Christ Jesus,  who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is ‍the testimony given ‍at the proper time. 1
Timothy 2:1-6

Paul describes this here as His being “RICH” in mercy.

Some would argue that the God of the Old Covenant is mean-spirited and cruel, even an altogether
different God than the Father of the New Covenant, but He is the same God who has revealed
Himself to us in Christ. Only under the Old Covenant He was limited in how deeply He could reveal
Himself to us, because the Holy Spirit had not yet been poured out upon the whole of mankind and
there was no internal light for the sin-darkened mind, and He was speaking to a toddler people who
were infested with pagan and idolatrous cultic and occultic religions with hundreds of years of
heritage in horribly brutal cultures.

210
 (Believe it or not, but the Law of Moses was vastly more just and merciful than any of the “laws” of the
nations among whom ancient Israel trafficked. It took nearly fifteen hundred years to clear out the
bulk of the pollution from the minds and hearts of Israel, so deeply brainwashed and morally
contaminated were the Jews.)

The spiritual context was entirely different (cf. Jeremiah 31:31ff). Only a comparative few, among the
multitudes of Israel, caught sight of the vision of who their God really was and what He was really like.
Paul goes into this in great depth in Romans and in Galatians.

One clear Old Covenant statement of the heart of the Father is found in the Psalms of King David:

I will listen to what God the LORD will say;

he promises peace to his people, his saints—
but let them not return to folly.
Surely his salvation is near those who fear him,
that his glory may dwell in our land.

Love and faithfulness meet together;

righteousness and peace kiss each other.

Faithfulness springs forth from the earth,

and righteousness looks down from heaven. Psalm 85:8-11

There are many more such statements seeded throughout the Old Testament. The Gospel of Grace
is clearly revealed from Genesis forward. God has not changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,
and Moses, and the Lord and Savior of Peter, John, and Paul is the same immensely complex
Person, the Father revealed in the Son:

‍“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
 ‍“You shall have no other gods before‍ me. Exodus 20:2ff; Deuteronomy 5ff; Exodus 34;

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in
the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  ‍You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I
the LORD your God am a jealous God, ‍visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the
fourth generation of those who hate me,  but showing steadfast love to thousands‍ of those who love me and
keep my commandments.

 ‍“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes
his name in vain.

The LORD ‍descended in the cloud and stood with him (Moses) there, and ‍proclaimed the name of the LORD.
The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast ‍love and faithfulness,  ‍keeping steadfast love for thousands, ‍forgiving iniquity
and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the
children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, ‍the faithful God ‍who keeps covenant and steadfast love with

those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations,  and ‍repays to their face those who
hate him, by destroying them. ‍He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face.

211
Ah, Lord GOD! It is ‍you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by ‍your outstretched
arm! ‍Nothing is too hard for you.  You show steadfast love to thousands, ‍but you repay the guilt of fathers ‍to
their children after them, O great and ‍mighty God, whose name is the ‍LORD of hosts,  ‍great in counsel and
‍mighty in deed, ‍whose eyes are open to all the ways of the children of man, rewarding each one according to his
ways and according to the fruit of his deeds. Jeremiah 32:17-19

And Jesus said:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.  ‍Every branch in me that does not bear fruit ‍he takes away,
and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, ‍that it may bear more fruit.  Already ‍you are clean because of
the word that I have spoken to you.  Abide ‍in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless
it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever
abides in me and I in him, he it is that ‍bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.  If anyone
does not abide in me ‍he is thrown away like a branch and withers; ‍and the branches are gathered, thrown into
the fire, and burned.  If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ‍ask whatever you wish, and it will be done
for you.  By this my Father is glorified, that you ‍bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.  As the Father
has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my
love, just as I have kept ‍my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.  These things I have spoken to you,
‍that my joy may be in you, and that ‍your joy may be full. John 15:1-11

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. ‍The works that I do ‍in my Father’s name bear witness
about me,  but ‍you do not believe because you are not part of my flock.  ‍My sheep hear my voice, and I know
them, and they follow me.  ‍I give them eternal life, and ‍they will never perish, and ‍no one will snatch them out
of my hand.  My Father, who has given them to me, ‍is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of
‍the Father’s hand.  ‍I and the Father are one.” John 10:25-30

‍If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me;  but if I do them, even though you do not
believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the
Father.” John 10:37-38

Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me—  ‍not that anyone has seen the Father except
‍he who is from God; he has seen the Father. John 6:45

“Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip?  ‍Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Do you not believe that ‍I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I say to you ‍I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.
Believe me that ‍I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.
John 14:9-11

‘I tell you that ‍to everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be
taken away. But ‍as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here
and slaughter them before me.’ ” Luke 19:26-27

And John the Revelator recorded in the final great prophecy of the Bible:

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called ‍Faithful and True, and ‍in
righteousness  he  judges  and  makes  war.    ‍His  eyes  are  like  a  flame  of  fire,  and  on  his  head  are  ‍many
diadems,and he has ‍a name written that no one knows but himself.  He is clothed in ‍a robe dipped in‍ blood, and
the name by which he is called is ‍The Word of God.  And the armies of heaven, ‍arrayed in fine linen, white and
pure, were following him on white horses.

212
  From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and ‍he will rule them with a rod of
iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.  On his robe and on his thigh ‍he
has a name written, ‍King of kings and Lord of lords. Revelation 19:11-16

Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone,
slave‍ and free, ‍hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains,  calling to the mountains and
rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb,
for ‍the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” Revelation 6:15-17

To quote from the movie “Narnia”, based upon C.S. Lewis’ allegory of Christ,

“Aslan is not a tame lion.” (I should also probably add “Aslan is on the move” in our present day.)

Our present big problem is that many of us may have redefined Jesus into a long-haired globalist
flower-child vegan environmentalist progressive neo-socialist peacenik almost-Buddhist guru
philosopher of some sort, when in reality He is much more a radical un-politically-correct anti-
establishment anti-corruption anti-self-serving anti-self-indulgence pro-marriage pro-life pro-personal-
responsibility pro-God anti-religion non-political non-partisan highly disruptive troublemaker who
claims to be the Lord of the Universe and demands unconditional obedience and total commitment
than most comfortable Christians, 99% of mainstream Christendumb, and 100% of the secular
society want Him to be.

The real Jesus is very annoying and in-your-face. There is a great deal of Lion in the Lamb of God.

Remember, we are created in God’s image, not the other way around. Our personal opinion about
God or Jesus, or our personal interpretation of the Bible, means absolutely nothing unless it happens
to line up with the clear teaching and interpretation of the text as written. Read it and kneel…or read
it and weep.

Why aren’t we Christians at least as committed to our Lord as the radical Muslims are to Mo’ and to
Allah? I mean our Lord is the real deal, and they're blowing themselves into hamburger for a book of
confusing contradictions and a lusty lie.

Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? Luke 6:46

“Not everyone who ‍says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will ‍enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who ‍does the will of
my Father who is in heaven.  ‍On that day t‍many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did we not ‍prophesy in your name,
and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them,
‘I ‍never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23

‍“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. ‍I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  ‍For I
have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her
mother­in­law.  And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.  ‍Whoever loves father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And
‍whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  ‍Whoever finds his life will lose it, and
whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 10:34-39; Luke 12:51-53

Let’s get back to Paul:

213
‍because of the great love with which he loved us,  even ‍when we were dead in our trespasses,

Paul says this over and over and over again in his letters…It is SO central to his message: We must
grasp this Truth if ever we are to be free in the Lord! God cannot have gone to more extreme
measures to redeem us: Therefore, it is inconceivable that He will not protect and nurture His
investment. I cannot tell you how many Christians I have known who cannot enter into the deep
abiding peace of God in which we should all dwell because, having accepted the salvation that is in
Christ, they cannot fully accept and embrace the security of the Truth that He actually regards them
as blameless and clean in His sight and cherishes them, and they still feel that they have to
continually earn His approval.

Within these boundaries it is His pleasure to give us His Kingdom. Now we do good and live right
because He loves us and we love Him and His “seed abides” 1 John 3:9 in us, not in order to curry His
favor or to work off the guilt of our sin. This is the reality of unconditional love, perhaps the most
precious eternal Truth that the bitter hatred that has consumed Satan has stolen from mankind.

If God is for us, who can be‍ against us?  ‍He who did not spare his own Son but ‍gave him up for us all, how will
he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God
who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is
at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall
tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

    ‍“For your sake ‍we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through ‍him who loved us. Romans 8:31-39

For while we were still weak, at the right time ‍Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a
righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—  but ‍God shows his love for
us in that ‍while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Since, therefore, ‍we have now been justified by his
blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.  For if ‍while we were enemies we were
reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by ‍his life.
Romans 5:6-10

Back to Ephesians

‍made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved

and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

Once more Paul writes in Greek grammatical structures that have no English equivalent, but which
convey the concept of actions fully completed in the past with substantial ongoing present effects that
continue uninterrupted into the timeful future. Our relationship with our Father in Christ through the
Holy Spirit is not “pie-in-the-sky”, is not some “crutch” for weak-minded underachievers, and we
presently “ARE seated“ in the “heavenly” dimensions beyond our familiar four in Christ as children of
the High King of Heaven (that is, Princes and Princesses, for want of better words), and are able to
exercise a significant portion of the privileges of our royal birthright here and now, though certainly
not the major portion.

Beloved, we are ‍God’s children ‍now, and what we will be ‍has not yet appeared; but we know that when he
appears‍ ‍we shall be like him, because ‍we shall see him as he is.  And everyone who ‍thus hopes in him purifies
himself as he is pure. 1 John 3:2-3

214
We can see clear evidence of Kingdom power and authority being exercised on Earth in the records
of the Gospels and of the Book of Acts. The King exercised Power and Authority while He was
visiting us, and said that we would “do greater works” still. John 14:12 There are many references and
allusions to Kingdom activity on Earth throughout the rest of the New Covenant documents as well,
and clear prophetic statements that such authority will continue and increase as the Age of the
Church proceeds and the time of the Gentiles passes. The history of the Spirit-filled Spirit-led Church
over the last two millennia is replete with testimonies of multiplied millions of those who have moved
in or been touched by the manifest power of the Living God. Christian history is replete with the
miraculous. You have only to search the archives of this history to discover these things: They are
not hidden. And today, if you are willing to separate the “wheat from the chaff”, you can go on-line
and find thousands of authenticated and valid testimonies posted on YouTube. (I do caution you that
there are also thousands of really spurious and fallacious postings stirred into this Internet stew, so
PLEASE be discerning and prayerful as you explore. I might suggest that you also look up the
ministry of an evangelist named Billy Burke: There are several video clips posted there which are
quite compelling. As well, the records of the ministry of Reinhard Bonnke. And look up the video
record of Delia Knox, which is incontrovertable.)

The only reason that such authority and power has waned upon the earth over the past twenty
centuries is that the organization of the church…what I have termed “Christendumb”…has so watered
down the Truth of the message of the Kingdom of God that faith has failed in the hearts of many of
God’s people, and most of us, especially in the West where rationalism dominates, simply don’t
believe that such “supernatural” stuff can happen anymore. Where faith fails, even the hand of God
is restrained, because we are created to and expected to work in cooperation with our Creator, and
He rarely moves in the affairs of us humans apart from our participation. (Mark 6:1-6) Many of the
theologians of the liberal church (and some conservatives as well) have filled libraries with faith-killing
weasel words explaining away the power of God: This is heretical garbage. They have poisoned the
hearts of God’s people; some through negligence, some through ignorance, some very deliberately
through arrogance and for power, and they will be judged for this.

But understand this, that ‍in the last days there will come times of difficulty.  For people will be ‍lovers of self,
lovers  of  money,  ‍proud,  ‍arrogant,  abusive,  ‍disobedient  to  their  parents,  ungrateful,  unholy,  ‍heartless,
unappeasable, slanderous, without self­control, brutal, not loving good,  treacherous, reckless, ‍swollen with
conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, HAVING THE APPEARANCE OF GODLINESS, BUT ‍DENY-
ING ITS POWER. ‍Avoid such people.  For among them are ‍those who creep into households and capture weak
women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions,  always learning and never able to ‍arrive at a
knowledge of the truth. 2 Timothy 3:1-7

God has not changed and does not work through “dispensations”, other than the two great distinctions of
the Old and the New Covenants. He has always been and will always be the God of the miraculous.

“For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. Malachi 3:6

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Hebrews 13:8

He has not limited Himself to our graphs and charts and hyper-analyzed time-lines and prophetic
timetables, and does what He wants as He chooses to do so. Around the world, in places where the
people are more comfortable with the idea of the supernatural and with spiritual manifestations, and have
not been indoctrinated as much as the West has into post-modern materialist naturalism and rationalism,
the power of the Holy spirit is much more evident in Christian meetings and in response to prayer. Our
Western “scientific” mindset prejudices us against such things and prevents us from moving freely in the
full liberty of the Holy Spirit that is our birthright and heritage as Christians, and which we must now learn
to do as the full force of the enemy continues to muster.

215
And when Jesus had finished these parables, he went away from there,  and coming to ‍his hometown he taught
them in their synagogue, so that ‍they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these
mighty works?  ‍Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not ‍his brothers James
and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these
things?”  And ‍they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his
hometown and in his own household.”  And he did not do many mighty works there, ‍because of their unbelief.
Matthew 13:53-58

Thankfully, as the present Awakening gains strength and faith builds, we will be seeing greater
outpourings of the Holy Spirit in America and in Europe and the British Isles and other Western
nations. Young people, especially, have deepening hunger and great expectation to see the moving
of God. God always precedes times of battle and judgment with revival. And before this time of the
greatest of battles, we are going to experience the greatest of visitations. We can once again learn to
think with both sides of our brain, especially so since we now “have the mind of Christ”. 1 Corinthians 2:16
Some of God’s people are now starting to really listen to the persistent songs of the Battle Horns on
the hills and watchtowers, and are finally starting to come together once again as the Lord’s Army.

There is a global crisis breaking upon the world of men…It is time for a global, truly Christian,
response, because the world of men has run out of answers and is about to tear itself to pieces, and
there are many among them who still desire to escape the coming cataclysm who need to be led to
liberty, and we are the only people on the planet who can do this.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against l‍the cosmic
powers over ‍this present darkness, against ‍the spiritual forces of evil ‍in the heavenly places.  Therefore ‍take up
the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in ‍the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.
Ephesians 6:12-13

The enemy we face, though he often works through fallen men and women, is supernatural, and fights
with unholy supernatural weapons of frightening power and effect. If we don’t bear even more effective
weapons, and are not fully trained to wield them with skill, we will be cut to pieces on the field of combat.
Right now, a pitiful lot of Christians couldn’t fight their way out of a soggy paper bag…far too many don’t
even believe that there is a war, or are too consumed in their indulgence of personal pleasures to care.

Paul continues in Ephesians:

so that in the coming ages

How many of us as believers really ponder what this means? It seems to me that I hear people talking
about the “Lord’s Return”, and the “Rapture”, and the “Millennium”, and sometimes about the “New
Heaven’s and the New Earth” (though not that often), but most folks seem to be thinking very much in the
near term: Either “What’s in this being Christian gig for me in the here and now” or “I’m hanging on to the
end until the Lord rescues me from this hell hole” sort of stuff. And their expectation of “Heaven” seems to
be a somewhat vague imagination of a fabulous country club sort of place where everybody has a “man-
sion” with a gold-plated driveway on the first tee of the Universe‘s greatest combo theme park and
eighteen hole golf course, and we all simultaneously are doing everything we always dreamed of doing
while we are all at the exact same time somehow worshiping before the great throne of God every
moment of eternity….It’s a rather blurry and confusing picture that makes less and less sense the more
closely I examine its details.

There are miles of shelves in the bookstores that purport to make all this speculation clear, but I’m not
sure how many folks actually have more than a fuzzy, pixilated, low- resolution picture in their minds if you
try to pin them down about what the Lord is actually proposing to do after they die or are “raptured”
(whichever comes first).

216
Paul speaks here of ages to come toward which we are even now being prepared so that we will be
able to receive continuing revelation of the Person and Majesty of our Creator/Father, and during
which He is going to display His grace and Glory to and through the Church. (For now we see in a mir-
ror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.)
1 Corinthians 13:12

Time simply is not big enough to contain our God, and He is simply going to do away with time as we
understand it or transform it into something larger and more appropriate to His purposes. We are
now at the very beginning of the first moments of what our Father has desired to share with us of
Himself: He is correcting Adam‘s mistake, and eliminating Lucifer‘s mess and it‘s consequences and
those who refuse to recant their allegiance to him .

The imagery that Jesus and the writers of the New Testament use to whet our appetites is little more
than baby talk (Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave
you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 1 Corinthians 3:1-2 )…it
is all that we can presently comprehend, and most of us do a lousy job of understanding even the ba-
sics of the basics. We must not let ourselves be deceived into believing that what is just the starting
gate of our wonderful race is somehow the finish line, or else we will think that we have run the race
when we have not even really done much more than some simple training exercises before stepping
up to the starting blocks..

We think we have run: We have just begun to toddle. This is OK. We are small children, and small
children aspire to great childish things and don’t realize how small they are, and their parents are
delighted at their dreams and pour their hearts into helping them grow up to see those dreams
fulfilled.

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him
who called us to‍  his own glory and excellence,  by which he has granted to us his precious and very great
promises,  so  that  through  them  you  may  become  ‍partakers  of  the  divine  nature,  ‍having  escaped  from  the
corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement
your faith with virtue, and virtue ‍with knowledge,  and knowledge with self­control, and self­control ‍with
steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness,  and godliness ‍with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection
with love.  For if these qualities‍ are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or ‍unfruitful
in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he ‍is blind,
having forgotten that he was ‍cleansed from his former sins.  Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to
make your calling and election sure, for if you practice these qualities ‍you will never fall.  For in this way there
will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 2 Peter
1:3-11

Brothers, ‍do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. 1 Corinthians 14:20

‍speaking the truth in love, we are to ‍grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,  ‍from whom
the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, ‍when each part is working
properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Ephesians 4:15-16

Therefore ‍let us leave ‍the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of
repentance ‍from dead works and of faith toward God,  and of ‍instruction about washings, ‍the laying on of hands,
‍the resurrection of the dead, and ‍eternal judgment. Hebrews 6:1-2

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age,
who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before
the ages for our glory. 1 Corinthians 2:6-7

217
(I do realize that even Paul did use language that also speaks of his finishing his race in this life, of
his finishing his course and being richly rewarded for doing so. I don't want to diminish in any way the
magnitude of what this present life in Christ is all about: Our time here and now is immensely
important and very significant.

But there is ever so much more yet to come!!!! We MUST not fail to hold this larger horizon in our
vision. Remember my speculations above: They are just one vision that keeps me fired up....I think
I'm on the right track, but it's just my studied opinion....I hope God shows you something equally
amazing as you search His word and seek His face.)

Returning to Ephesians:

he might show the immeasurable ‍riches of his grace in ‍kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Again Paul uses superlatives to try and convey the indescribable grace and awesome depth of the
love of God toward us. The classical Greek language was perhaps the most expressive human
language ever devised: Modern American English is a close second, but is not as nuanced and
subtle as was the ancient Greek.

And yet Paul still often stretched for words to try and convey what God was revealing to him. There
are times when even he, the eloquent master wordsmith, seems to cry out in frustration and admit
defeat because there simply were no words available to him. Again, I remind you, when this happens,
we have recourse to worship. This is our only reasonable and correct response: The experience of
God always transcends any attempt we might make at a description and analysis of God.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning
with God. John 1:1-2

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he
has spoken to us by (in or through) his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he
created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the
universe by the word of his power. Hebrews 1:1-3

No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (revealed Him)
John 1:18

Oh, the depth of the riches and ‍wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how
inscrutable his ways! Romans 11:33

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For ‍we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but ‍the Spirit
himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.  And ‍he who searches hearts knows what is ‍the
mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit ‍intercedes for the saints ‍according to the will of God. Romans 8:26-27

For in this tent ‍we groan, longing to ‍put on our heavenly dwelling,  if indeed by putting it on‍ we may not be
found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but
that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal ‍may be swallowed up by life.  He who has prepared us
for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. 2 Corinthians 5:2-5

‍I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, ‍to present your bodies ‍as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by
‍the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may ‍discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable
and perfect. Romans 12:1-2

218
Returning to Ephesians:

For ‍by grace you have been saved ‍through faith. And this is ‍not your own doing; ‍it is the gift of God,  not a
result of works, ‍so that no one may boast.

This is the key to our Christian hope, the essence of the power of the Gospel of Christ. Herein lies
our liberty. Here also is where the enemy works hardest to sew his most subtle and diabolical lies
and half-truths to confuse us, and to recapture us again, once we have escaped his grasp by casting
ourselves upon the mercy of the Lord and receiving our Father's forgiveness and salvation in Christ.

We have been saved by Grace (undeserved favor). According to His own rules God is bound to
eternally banish from His presence, and therefore from life itself, any sentient being who willfully
refuses to abide by those rules. I try to argue elsewhere why the rules are immutable, even for God.
It cost God an incalculable personal price to both abide by those rules Himself, and to make a way for
us to survive them. This price He chose to pay because He loves His sublime creation, the human
creature.

This is Grace born of a Love that we are probably never going to fully understand.

The medium of exchange by which this transaction is effected on our behalf individually is faith. ( We
are saved by Grace through Faith which works through Love.) I have tried to discuss this transaction
at great length in my Romans study, and you should read what is written there. (I, like Paul, repeat
myself in many different ways, because these thoughts are so important, and our spiritual confusion
makes them very difficult for us to grasp. I know I appreciate many repetitions of complicated ideas
from lots of different angles, and I hope you do as well.) This faith transaction, while it certainly
requires the exercise of a measure of believing faith on our part, originates in God and derives its
operative power from Him.

This is the gift that Paul refers to here. Faith, not Grace, is the opposite of works in the New
Covenant economy. Paul is saying that saving faith itself is a gift from God. It is essential that we
understand this, or we inevitably will revert to some conscious or subconscious works-based effort to
secure our relationship to our Father, and will ultimately return to living as defeated or “carnal”
Christians, or will even fall completely away from the Lord in frustration, discouragement, and
exhaustion...and probably with a bitterness that will make it difficult or even impossible for us to ever
return to faith. And so Satan will win.

All of this is done by sovereign gifting from our Father, so that He may be absolutely glorified, and so
that we are all equally and unequivocally rendered incapable of daring to claim any credit for our own
righteousness or our own salvation. By this God levels the playing field for the entire race, and
makes all of us equal before Him: We no longer have any justification for climbing upon each other to
strive to be king or queen of the hill, or for diminishing and degrading one another, or for boasting and
pride.

Thus we are made free, as Christians, to love and to give and to receive. Made equally low we all
can now be lifted up equally high, by our gracious Father, without competition or jealousy or envy or
bitterness, “for it is God who is in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure”. Philippians 2:13

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives ‍in me. And the life I now live
in the flesh I live by faith in (Greek: the faith of) the Son of God, ‍who loved me and gave himself for me.  I do
not nullify the grace of God, for ‍if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose. Galatians
2:20-21

219
Paul seems to very naturally speak of faith both as something substantial that originates in God and
is given to those who believe, and as the willful act of our own confident believing itself. It is not
simply “belief”, especially not in the weak way we use the word today. Paul does make distinctions
between faith and belief, though at times he uses the words interchangeably.

Belief, as the scriptures speak of it, is much more a “mind” thing than is faith, and is where our
apprehension of faith begins… but the faith that “moves mountains” is a work of the Spirit, and is
something that is born in and of God in us, not in us alone. I have wrestled at length with these ideas
in the Romans study, trying to separate them clearly enough to discuss them from both directions
(that is, from the Heavenly perspective and the Earthly point of view). It is difficult: I don't think the
two aspects of faith are really meant to be separated...They are the two sides of one coin, as it were
(or maybe better, the two ends of “Jacob's Ladder”, one touching Earth, the other Heaven Genesis
28:12;John 1:51).

Once again, it is my argument that God plants the seeds of His own faith in Himself in us through
Christ, (Gal.2:20,2 Timothy 2.13), and then through the Holy Spirit causes those seeds to germinate and
take root in us and to generate and amplify our own faith responses back toward Him as we move in
a symbiotic cooperation with Him. (We are “earthen vessels”, clay pots – 'Adam' means red earth-
that He fills with Himself...but clay pots with free will. In another word picture He describes us as
“branches” drawing our life from Him as the “root”.

An even richer typology is the biblical imagery of heterosexual marriage: As with the male/female-
husband/wife relationship, the Husband is the initiator and the giver, the wife is the receiver and the
reflector and the responder, and in profound ways even the amplifier.… Independent, yet not at all
independent. She recieves, amplifies, and returns the love of the husband. This is why Paul
commands the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, but only tells the wife to respect
her husband (Ephesians 6): The faith-filled wife will always love deeply the husband who rightly loves
her. It is the way our Maker made us to be. All of this reflects, as type, the intimate interrelationship
of the Trinity within itself.)

Therefore,  since  we  have  been  justified  by  faith,  ‍we‍  have  peace  with  God  through  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ.
Through him we have also obtained access by faith‍ into this grace ‍in which we stand, and we‍ rejoice‍ in hope of
the glory of God. Romans 5:1-2

we know that a person is not justified‍ by works of the law ‍but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have
believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, ‍because by works
of the law no one will be justified. Galatians 2:16

now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian,  for in Christ Jesus ‍you are all sons of God, through
faith. Galatians 3:25

Repeating Paul's statement in Ephesians:

For by grace you have been saved ‍through faith. And this is ‍not your own doing; ‍it is the gift of God,  not a
result of works, ‍so that no one may boast.

As it says in Hebrews

So there is a special rest still waiting for the people of God. For all who have entered into God’s rest have rest-
ed from their labors, just as God did after creating the world. Hebrews 4:9

Faith is interwoven with Rest:

220
This is a hard concept for us Americans to wrap our heads around, we who have the birthright of the
Protestant Work Ethic (a tradition of men), and the American Dream, and Ben Franklin's apocryphal
admonition that “God helps those who help themselves.” (Which is NOT in the Bible, by the way, and
is NOT in easy harmony with the teachings of Christ!!!) all robustly supported by patriotic American
Civil Christendumb (The patriotic politicization of the Christian religion especially since Eisenhower).

From the beginning of time God has spoken of rest. And from His earliest specific dealings with
Israel He has commanded that a Sabbath (a solemn rest) be observed...a day of reflection upon
origins and priorities...of focus upon Who it is from Whom and to Whom and about Whom everything
is. There is nothing wrong with hard work and a job well done. God designed us to achieve and to
aspire and to create and to excel, and to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Adam was a husbandman and
an agriculturist even before he fell. But in Christ these things are to be the fruits of Grace, not of
ambition or of selfish desires or of prideful competition. Fruit simply grows on healthy trees...it just
sort of “happens” as they do what comes naturally. (You don't get too many fights between posses of
Granny Smith's and MacIntoshes and the other apple gangs trying to be top fruit in the orchard.)

Material success is not necessarily an evidence of godliness or of God's approval or blessing, nor is
poverty or difficulty a sign of His disapproval. Life happens, and we live in a broken world. For the
confident Christian God turns all things together for good as He weaves the tapestry of His Plan.
(And I can speak of this from experience, not just from theory.) Righteousness, Peace, Contentment,
Joy in the Holy Spirit...These are the valid evidences of God's approbation upon a life. The Lord
strongly admonishes (actually He commands) us not to run after “the things the Gentiles run after”,
and He assures us that our Father will provide our every need on a daily basis, provided we invest
our best energy in the things that matter most to Him.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your
body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of
the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of
more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why
are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I
tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the
field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of
little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall
we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore
do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trou-
ble. Matthew 6:25-34

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone
who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of
you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If
you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is
in heaven give good things to those who ask him! Matthew 7:7-11

The “rest” of God is to cease from our own striving, our own self directed efforts, and from all of the
worry and anxiety and manipulation and scheming that attend them. “The servant of the Lord must not
strive.” 2 Timothy 2:24 Jesus did nothing except He first saw the Father doing it. Human effort smells of
sweat...It stinks. Godly effort doesn't.

So Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he
sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. John 5:19

221
Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. John 14:13

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your
fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. John 15:16

In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the
Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. John 16:23-24

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. John 14:15

God's entire purpose in ending the Law and establishing the Gospel is to completely eliminate all
grounds for ego-driven competition and material and unrighteous spiritual ambition: If our entire
salvation and spiritual restoration depends upon the Grace of God from start to finish, then we have
no more ammunition left to us with which to fight with each other… we have been completely
disarmed. Our fight is over.

And having nothing left to prove to God, to ourselves, to others, the covers having been pulled off the
great deception of Satan...that we are in charge, and therefore have to be able to display the trophies
of our accomplishments,

We at last are truly free… we can be held hostage to nothing by no one. We neither can be
diminished, nor do we have to destroy others to promote or protect ourselves. God loves us for no
other reason than we are who we are and that we matter to Him. He has chosen to value us.

If God loves me unconditionally, then it really doesn't matter at all what anyone anywhere...man,
woman, angel, or devil...thinks or says about me....It really doesn’t matter at all. (1 Corinthians 4:3,4)
This means I am no longer dodging shadows and fighting phantoms. The past can evaporate like a
morning fog before the bright sunrise: All those family ghosts and middle and high school nightmare
memories and festering scars. (If I choose to let them go, that is.) I am accepted: I no longer need
feel compelled to hide or to isolate myself in order to feel less insecure. I can lower my defensive
perimeter, deactivate and disarm the mines and booby traps I've set to annihilate anyone who dares
invade my space to aggravate one of my open wounds.

So it also means that everybody around me is safer, because I no longer have to prove anything by
climbing on top of them or putting them down.

As Paul writes in Romans, “If God is for me, who can be against me?” Romans 8:31

For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel,
“In returning (that is “repentance”) and rest you shall be saved;
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” Isaiah 30:15

In your patience you will possess your souls. Luke 21:19

There is also another analogy-metaphor-allegory-word picture that the Lord paints to help us understand
this dynamic “resting” relationship we are supposed to maintain with Him. He speaks of the rest that
comes when we become “yoked together” with Him.

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one
knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am
gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Matthew 11:27-30

222
In the twenty-first century in Western cultures, we are not generally familiar with yokes or the use of
teamed animals, but when, for example, oxen are yoke together to harness the immense strength of
the paired beasts, one of the oxen is always a dominant “lead” ox to whom the other ox yields leader-
ship. This “nigh” ox is older, wiser, better disciplined. The yoke across their shoulders binds them to-
gether and the load is attached to the yoke, where their combined strength can pull evenly upon it
and be focused through it. The lead ox sets the pace and listens to the drover. The “off” ox cues off
the lead ox.

Whether the Lord is inferring in this parable that He is the “lead ox” with whom we are to be yoked to-
gether, or that He is the “drover” and we are to be harnessed into His yoke and under His direction in
order to effectively do His work, the imagery works.

Yoked with Him, his strength and His lead lets us move through life without growing weary or stum-
bling.

Or under His guiding hand and harnessed into His yoke, perhaps with the Holy Spirit as the “Nigh Ox”,
we accomplish His work, with the yoke carrying the bulk of the weight of the the load.

The key lesson is that we are not independent, not self-initiating, not “in charge” of our lives (“with
God's help”). This is a terribly hard lesson for fallen human beings to learn, and especially we Ameri-
cans, who all our lives have been raised to succeed by our own efforts and achievements. (Again I
note the heretical bumper sticker: “God is my co-pilot”, as a typical example of American Evangelical
crap popular theology.)

Returning to Paul in Ephesians:

For we are his workmanship,

“Ay, there's the rub”...We are creatures...Things made. Were we in our right minds we would
understand this and accept it without grousing. And as we mature in Christ, if we do ever mature in
Christ, we do come to understand this and to appreciate the wonder and rightness of this. Nothing
is ever more content than when it is being what it is meant to be.

But as fallen man, sin sick and insane and wholly rebellious, and even as redeemed but undisciplined
young children of God, still more often clinging to the putrid corpse of our old man than willing to risk
the trial and error sometimes painful training of the new creature in Christ, we don't like the idea that
we are “not our own, we are bought with a price” 1 Corinthians 6:20. We so very much desire “to be as god”;
arrogant petty sovereigns of our little kingdoms. (Remember... who was it, Shirley McClaine?
Standing proudly as a little dust mite against the Cosmic Void bellowing in a stentorian squeak, “I AM
GOD!” Gen 3:5) We struggle against submission and servanthood, even as we profess to worship a Lord
who epitomized both, and commands us to emulate Him if we want to walk with Him.

But we are not now, nor ever were, anything but a desire of God's heart... expressed; a dream of
Deity given substance and meaning and creative aspiration for no other reason but that He wants it to
be so. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28 Without Him, we are nothing. And
anything we do without Him is, ultimately, a waste of life.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you,
unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that
bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. John 15:4-5

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus ‍for good works,

223
This is the purpose of man: Nothing more, nor less. It is a truly wonderful calling and destiny, if it is
embraced, because the good works of God are beyond our imagination, and because among His
greatest pleasures is the fulfillment of His creations.

as it is written,
What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him 1 Corinthians 2:9

Or does this idea still bother you? Even after you have “accepted the Lord”? Does it still grate, that
you were never meant to be able to “do your own thing”? My wife and I have been part of a lot of
fellowships over the past nearly four decades, and it seems to me that an awful lot of believers chafe
at the idea of God “micro-managing” their lives. So many folks seem to say to God, “ You can have
have the gambling and the drinking and the porn and I'll clean up my mouth and pay my tithes, but I'll
keep the gossip and my impatience and my self-indulgences if you don't mind.” I don't know if I could
even make a list of all the “theologies” I have heard over the years that people have come up with,
twisting and warping the scriptures, to keep themselves in the driver's seat at least some of the time,
and able to justify their headstrong running of their own lives. Yet Jesus Himself said, “I do NOTHING
except I first see My Father doing it.” John 5:19 ;John 5:30ff

We should think deeply about why is it so hard for us to accept the idea that things work best when
they are doing what they are designed to do, at least when it comes to US. Is a train a prisoner
because it is confined to its tracks? Would it be more free if it decided to jump those tracks and take
off cross-country wherever it wanted instead of where the tracks and the engineer directed it to go?

Of course not: it is free precisely because it is “limited” to its tracks. We so like to “do our own thing”,
and resent it when anybody poops on our party by making rules...But most of us have played
Monopoly, or baseball, or Final Fantasy, or Poker....What happens when somebody decides to break
the rules? Does the game work? What's the point of playing if the rules don't matter, or you use
“cheat codes” all the time?

God made us for reasons that He understands a lot better than we do, and He made us never to live
independently of Him in any way. Until we understand and accept this we are off the tracks...we
aren't where we're meant to be. If we think about this clearly, we should realize that being a train off
its tracks is dumb. There is a terrific tract, called “The Harness of the Lord”, that is the record of a
vision that a man of God named Bill Britton had some forty-five years ago. Because it is prophetic it
is still timely: You can read it at http://www.godfire.net/harness_of_the_lord.htm . When the Lord
says that “many are called, but few are chosen”, He is talking about just this bit of understanding:
Christ is seeking disciples, and disciples understand who they are in relation to their God.

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate
his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot
be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of
you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?
Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying,
‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’・ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war,
will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him
with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for
terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Salt
is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for
the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Luke 14:25-35

224
Returning to Paul

which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Think this through please: If these works have been prepared beforehand, then Daddy, who never
gets caught by surprise because He “knows the end from the beginning” Isaiah 46:10 has anticipated all
the outcomes and contingencies related to these works. Therefore, all the resources for these works
have been foreordained and fully supplied in advance. Therefore, if we walk in the will of God, we
have nothing to worry about…all of our needs are met and all of our circumstances are anticipated.
We need only to be walking in obedience and in faith. This should be, biblically speaking, a “no
brainer”

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your
body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of
the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of
more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why
are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I
tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the
field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of
little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or What shall we
wear?”・ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do
not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
Matthew 6:25-34; Luke 12:22-34

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these
will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may
be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:12-14

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit
should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. John 15:16

In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the
Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. John 16:26-27

We can only worry about that over which we have no control. If we have control over a problem we
do not worry; we solve the problem. If we do not have control over a situation, then we cannot do
anything about it and cannot solve the problem, and therefore worry is at best pointless and at worst
counterproductive, because it drains us of energy and distracts us from possibly discovering ways in
which we might gain some control over the situation; it is nearly impossible to think or pray clearly
when our emotions are filling our minds and spirits with static.

What we have done, to our shame, as believers, is to go to great lengths to redefine anxiety and
worry as anything other than the very serious SIN that it is. To be anxious, to worry is to FAIL IN
FAITH: To not trust our Father to be who He has sacrificed His Son to prove to us that He is.

If we are still habituated to worry then we must stop excusing ourselves and repent, or we will
continually be aiding and abetting the enemy in rendering us helpless and ineffective in our calling
and ministry. We will remain Christian cripples, and may even become liabilities to others when all
Hell breaks loose in the days ahead and real persecution comes upon the Church in America.

Therefore remember

225
Because this is all God's doing...because we have absolutely no claim to any credit for our
redemption or our adoption into God's family we need to remember, and remember often, just where
it is we came from and Who it is to Whom we owe our lives. We are now “royals”, but God forbid that
we should start acting like we somehow deserve the life of privilege that we have been adopted into.
The Bible, in both the Old and New Covenants, is filled with admonitions to remember: Perhaps this is
because our sin-damaged minds so easily revert to old habit patterns of thought and addictions, and
wander again down the dark paths that were once our only familiar habitations.

that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which
is made in the flesh by hands, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the
commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the
world.

This is where we have come from...

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he him-
self is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by
abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in
place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby
killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were
near.

Paul uses the word “Peace” four times against the foil of “Hostility” twice in these five verses. And re-
member, it is Christ Himself who is our peace...not His teachings, not His church, not the “religion”
or creeds that have assumed His name. Everything that is truly Christian is “Christ in you, the hope of
Glory....Christ, who is our life.” Colossians 1:27; Colossians 3:4

For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

I have dealt with this at great length in my essays on Romans and above: We must understand that
Jesus came to reveal the Father, if we are to grow in our knowledge of God and become mature in
our faith. If we do not grasp this truth we will never feed on anything stronger than pabulum, and will
never become mature Christians.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the
household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the corner-
stone,

In many ways this is a theological argument for Paul's time dealing with the very combative issues
between the Jewish and the Gentile believers and the radical reinterpretation of the Mosaic Law
which Paul's Gospel entailed. I have, I hope, wrestled with these things at depth in the Romans com-
mentary, so I am going to skip past them here. The main point Paul is making is that in Christ both
the Jews and the Gentiles have been fundamentally “desegregated” by the cross, and that the new
paradigm is the Church.

in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are
being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

This is vastly important and somewhat difficult to grasp. Before Christ, God met with His people first
at various sacred “altars” on sites designated as “holy ground”, then after Israel escaped Egypt, in the
“Tabernacle”, and finally, after David conquered Jerusalem, in the Temple that David envisioned and
Solomon built.

226
 He then abandoned the Temple when Israel abandoned Him and went apostate, and His presence
never returned to it, even after Herod rebuilt it to magnificence in the days of Jesus' incarnation.

The clearest statement of these things is summarized in the soliloquy of the first martyr of the new
Church, Stephen, before the Jewish Sanhedrin. It was at the stoning of Stephen that Paul, then
called Saul, held the cloaks of the enraged elders who hurled the stones; a brutal scene which never
left his mind over all the years of his own persecuted missionary work to which the Lord called him.

And the high priest said, “Are these things so?” And Stephen said: “Brothers and fathers, hear me. The God of
glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him,
‘Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I will show you.’ Then he went out
from the land of the Chaldeans and lived in Haran. And after his father died, God removed him from there into
this land in which you are now living. Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot’s length, but prom-
ised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child. And God spoke to
this effect—that his offspring would be sojourners in a land belonging to others, who would enslave them and
afflict them four hundred years. ‘But I will judge the nation that they serve,’ said God, ‘and after that they shall
come out and worship me in this place.’ And he gave him the covenant of circumcision. And so Abraham be-
came the father of Isaac, and circumcised him on the eighth day, and Isaac became the father of Jacob, and Ja-
cob of the twelve patriarchs.

“And the patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt; but God was with him and rescued him out of all his
afflictions and gave him favor and wisdom before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, who made him ruler over Egypt and
over all his household. Now there came a famine throughout all Egypt and Canaan, and great affliction, and our
fathers could find no food. But when Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, he sent out our fathers on their
first visit. And on the second visit Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and Joseph’s family became
known to Pharaoh. And Joseph sent and summoned Jacob his father and all his kindred, seventy-five persons in
all. And Jacob went down into Egypt, and he died, he and our fathers, and they were carried back to Shechem
and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.

“But as the time of the promise drew near, which God had granted to Abraham, the people increased and multi-
plied in Egypt until there arose over Egypt another king who did not know Joseph. He dealt shrewdly with our
race and forced our fathers to expose their infants, so that they would not be kept alive. At this time Moses was
born; and he was beautiful in God’s sight. And he was brought up for three months in his father’s house, and
when he was exposed, Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him and brought him up as her own son. And Moses was
instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds.

“When he was forty years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel. And seeing
one of them being wronged, he defended the oppressed man and avenged him by striking down the Egyptian.
He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did
not understand. And on the following day he appeared to them as they were quarreling and tried to reconcile
them, saying, ‘Men, you are brothers. Why do you wrong each other?’ But the man who was wronging his
neighbor thrust him aside, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you
killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ At this retort Moses fled and became an exile in the land of Midian, where he
became the father of two sons.

“Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of
fire in a bush. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight, and as he drew near to look, there came the
voice of the Lord: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.’ And Moses
trembled and did not dare to look. Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place
where you are standing is holy ground. I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and
have heard their groaning, and I have come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send you to Egypt.’

227
 “This Moses, whom they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’—this man God sent as both
ruler and redeemer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. This man led them out, perform-
ing wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who
said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers.’ This is the one who was
in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our fathers. He
received living oracles to give to us. Our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside, and in their hearts
they turned to Egypt, saying to Aaron, ‘Make for us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses who led us
out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ And they made a calf in those days, and
offered a sacrifice to the idol and were rejoicing in the works of their hands. But God turned away and gave
them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets:

“ ‘Did you bring to me slain beasts and sacrifices,

during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?
You took up the tent of Moloch
and the star of your god Rephan,
the images that you made to worship;
and I will send you into exile beyond Babylon.’

“Our fathers had the tent of witness in the wilderness, just as he who spoke to Moses directed him to make
it, according to the pattern that he had seen. Our fathers in turn brought it in with Joshua when they
dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our fathers. So it was until the days of David, who found
favor in the sight of God and asked to find a dwelling place for the God of Jacob. But it was Solomon who
built a house for him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands, as the prophet says,

“ ‘Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord,
or what is the place of my rest?
Did not my hand make all these things?’ Acts 7

At the end of his speech Stephen quotes Isaiah, the prophet who saw most clearly the coming of
the Christ, and who best understood prophetically what the Kingdom was all about. And Paul often
alludes to the true temple that God always has had in mind:

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You
are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what
fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share
with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living
God; as God said,

“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be
my people.

Therefore go out from their midst,

and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.” 2 Corinthians 6:14-18

228
Jesus Himself spoke of these things:

Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God
is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the king-
dom of God is in the midst of you.” (Greek: WITHIN you) Luke 17:20-21

The God of All That Is is too vast to fit into any box that man can construct to contain Him, be it made
of concrete or of concepts, of wood or of words. The human being has been created to be the Tem-
ple of the Living God.… This is what I was trying to convey with my clumsy hypothesizations about
the “COMPANION” earlier on.

Perhaps, in another essay, I will explore this thought in greater depth: It is too grand to deal with here.
Suffice it to say that somehow, in a supernatural trans-dimensional way, we, the daughters and sons
of the Living God, are the True Temple that He has designed from before the foundation of the Uni-
verse as the place He wants to call “home”.

229
 CHAPTER 3

For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—

Paul probably was writing this from his rented home in Rome where he was under house arrest await-
ing his first trial before the emperor Nero, by whom he was apparently acquitted of the charges
brought against him by the Jews of Jerusalem. After this, according to strong tradition, he made a
missionary trip to Spain, then was again arrested and imprisoned in Rome where Nero, on a rampage
of persecution, finally condemned him to be beheaded in 65 or 66AD, about the same time as he con-
demned Peter to be crucified upside down.

assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery
was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly.

This is a reference to the fact that Paul received his understanding of the New Covenant directly from
Jesus Christ through personal encounters and supernatural revelation while in the deserts of Arabia
after his conversion and on several other occasions.

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did
not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. …
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out
of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the
body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may
not utter. Galatians 1:11-12;2 Corinthians 12:2-4

Back to Ephesians

When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the
sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

This is, again, a reference to the biblical truth of “progressive revelation” which I have discussed at
length in other places above and in my Romans commentary and in my appendices.

This mystery

Paul uses the word “mystery”, if I have counted correctly, twenty times in his letters as he speaks of
the Gospel of the Kingdom. I think it is a word exclusive to him among biblical writers, but he had the
unique experience of learning his Gospel by direct revelation and by at least one visit to the home
office, which is a bit out of the norm. We need to dial down and hear what this odd little religious fa-
natic is saying.… we who stampede to every prophetic conference and end-time truth seminar we
can max out our credit cards on, because he knows what he is talking about. Much, if not MOST, of
our God is a MYSTERY! And we aren't going to figure that mystery out unless Daddy decides to re-
veal it to us in His time. Even Jesus made this pretty clear:

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one
knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. …“But concerning that
day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only. Matthew 11:27; Mat-
thew 24:32

We are not called nearly so much to know, as we are to trust and to obey. It is enough that we know
God and that He knows us and loves us. Beyond that we are instructed to be content where we are,
doing what we are doing, so long as we are confident that we are resting in the rest of the Lord, and
that we are neither being willful nor defiant. Daddy will prepare us completely for each challenge He
230
sets before us, and He will equip us with everything we need and instruct us fully before we meet that
challenge. We will be ready for whatever comes, when the time comes. We really don't need to try to
figure it all out… We just need to wait, patiently, upon the Lord, and to listen, and to be
learners...disciples.… And this usually saves a lot of time and energy that gets wasted cleaning up
our messes from our being presumptuous and sticking our pudgy little kid fingers in His affairs.

Is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus
through the gospel.

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working
of his power.

Again Paul remarks that any and all true Christian ministry is born in God and proceeds from God.
No ministry is valid if it is created by man, nor does a valid ministry need to be upheld by human effort.
God validates His ministers and His ministries. If a ministry stinks of sweat it is not of God. This does
not mean that a God ordained ministry may not, or should not, ask for support: Everything in this
world needs finances and material resources to exist and do its work, and ministries are no exception.
This is common sense. But if a ministry spends more of its time and energy focused on money than
on ministry, and if the fruit of its efforts are disproportionately small and of inferior quality when com-
pared to its financial statements or its fund raising appeals or its buildings, then something is wrong.
As with individual Christians, so with ministries: They shall be known by their fruits. True Christian
ministry is obvious: Both to Christians and to the world. (Unfortunately, false Christian ministry is also
obvious, but often the world is much more able to clearly discern this than are Christians.)

To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearch-
able riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God
who created all things,

Again Paul uses huge words: “unsearchable riches”, “plan of the mystery”, “hidden for ages”, “God
who created all things”

so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God

“Manifold” is an old word, used today mostly as a technical scientific or mathematical term. It means:

adj. 1: Many and varied; of many kinds; multiple

2: Having many features or forms
3: Being such for a variety of reasons
n. 1: A whole composed of diverse elements

Such a word speaks well of our God.

might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

I think that this is perhaps one of the key verses of the New Covenant… of the whole of scripture.
Paul here, in a single sentence, sums up at least one of the major goals of the Plan of God, the “why”
of all the pain and drama of the creation of Israel, of the preparation for and and incarnation of Messi-
ah, the death and resurrection of Christ, of the birth of the Church and its two millennia of training to-
ward the coming final battle. It is through the Church that the Sovereignty and the Love of God will
finally and fully put to silence the mocking challenge of Lucifer, and rectify and realign forever the terri-
ble imbalance and distortion that his rebellion has inflicted upon the Creation, removing from it evil
itself, and the sin and death that evil brings.

231
There will be a holy creature who chooses obedience over independence because of love alone, with-
out coercion, without manipulation or bribe: Who will freely live a fully submitted life and not complain,
but rather will rejoice and revel in fulfilled liberty, being EXACTLY what it was created to be. And that
creature will truly come to know their God. That creature will be the corporate Church, the Bride, the
Divine Companion, seated beside her Lord judging angels and ruling with Him His Creation into the
ongoing ages of Eternity future.

This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord,

This eternal purpose HAS BEEN REALIZED!!!!! Our Lord cried out from the cross a moment before
He released His spirit back to His Father, “IT IS FINISHED!!” The heavy lifting has been done. Sa-
tan's illicit power over this planet and over humanity has been broken. What was once his universally
by legal fiat, albeit gained through deceptions and lies, now only remains his by the continued permis-
sion of individuals, who have every right, in Christ, to turn him out. So now it is up to us, the individu-
als, to stop listening to the miserable liar, and realize for our selves this awesome Truth.… and then
to embrace it, and tell “Old Slewfoot” to go to hell.

in whom we have boldness and access with confidence

Please think about Paul's words, “BOLDNESS” ….”ACCESS WITH CONFIDENCE”, and remember
that he is most probably a prisoner being guarded by Roman soldiers while he is writing this, waiting
to go to trial before an absolute tyrant who happens to be a raving lunatic: (Nero was the guy who “fid-
dled while Rome burned” and later used tar-covered Christians as Tiki Torches for his debauched
luau's). I should also remark that, in today's world, “access” is a prize worth dying for to many people.
“It's not what you know; It's WHO you know that matters.” Access gives you privilege and power and
“clout”. With this tainted paradigm in mind, please think, deeply, about what it means for each one of
us to have “bold confident access” to the God of All That Is. (A hint: It's better than being able to walk
into the Oval Office whenever you want to.)

through our faith in him.

Please re-read my several discussions above and in my stuff on Romans about the anchor-points of
our faith.

So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.

Paul says in Romans:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be re-
vealed to us. Romans 8:18

We (Americans) complain too much: It is appalling and disgusting. We grouse when the Dish Network
satellite blacks out our game during a storm. We piss and moan when the Internet runs slow. We bitch
when we get stuck in traffic or when the sun goes behind a cloud when we're at the beach. Paul says
in another place, “ having food to eat, and clothes to wear, be content.” 1 Timothy 6:8 When he talks about be-
ing content, he uses a word that has the deeper meaning of being “independent of your circumstances”.
If God is watching my back, then I should worry??????? Duh...uh...uh...uhhh. I once had friends who
have enormous amounts of money: They complain constantly. They are never happy or restful. Their
lives are a train-wreck in slow motion. At this time their home and family is disintegrating. And even
though they profess to know the Lord, they just don't get it.… one of them has sold out to materialism
and is denying the Lord that brought blessing to their lives, and the other is blaming God for not solving
the problem. I don't understand. For a year and a half now we have had virtually nothing. We have

232
 been walking through the toughest battlefield of our Christian lives. I have never been more restful
and content. (Even on the bad days, I find it almost easy to “center” myself in the Lord and get past
the rough spot.) 'Way back when, Kris Kristofferson wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” with the chorus
that begins, “Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose...”: It's a worldly way of saying a God-
ly truth. King David, Israel's greatest King, sang:

For a day in your courts is better

than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
the LORD bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
O LORD of hosts,
blessed is the one who trusts in you! Psalm 84:10-12

I have written at length elsewhere of these things: Please take the time to find those thoughts and
ponder them again, especially if you are panicking about the state of the world at the moment and
your inability to do a damn thing about it. Paul continues:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,

I grew up, as I have shared before, with a dysfunctional dad. It is my conviction, after nearly 60 years
of soul searching and thought, that he must have been an abused kid… I only had glimpses into his
past over my lifetime, but I grew up with him, and I know me. There came a time, after I knew the
Lord for a number of years and before I had fully challenged and overcome the demons of my past,
when the guilt and pain of my deeply-damaged relationship with my dad was so overshadowing every-
thing in my life that I myself was becoming so dysfunctional that I was destroying my wife and my kids
as well as myself.

( “I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the
fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and
keep my commandments.” Exodus 20:5-6; Deuteronomy 5:9-10

This does not mean God holds children responsible for their parents' sins, (Ezekiel 18), but rather that
unless and until such generational curses are dealt with in Christ they will haunt a family… What the
parents do in moderation the children very likely will do in excess. The Lord was dealing deeply with
me during those years, and I can't possibly cover that ground here, but I remember ever so clearly
that one day (or night), He spoke to me and said, “Son, let him go: I will deal with him… I will be your
Father.” And, by His grace, I was able to do this, and my really deep healing and restoration began.

Let me go back before that moment of conversation to the birth of my daughter in 1980.… well, even
before, to set the stage. Before I met the Lord, in 1974, I knew little, or nothing, of what a father, or
the love of a father, was. (My own dad did not say “I love you, son” to me until two months before he
died at the age of 85. And on the day I was born, he had decided to go bluefishing. I have no un-
marred happy memories of my childhood.)

After I met the Lord, I met Marilyn and fell in love, probably for the first time really. We were married,
and for about five years I was taught by the Lord of the love of the Bridegroom and the Bride… the
love of Christ for His Church. This is a beautiful love: It is the first love one has that instructs in oth-
ers-centeredness... the beginnings of unceasing unselfishness.… living with another in view all of the
time.
233
But, at least on a human level, it is still selfish in many ways, because I know that I got a lot of purely
selfish pleasure out of having a beautiful young woman that I could exclusively “possess”, whose pri-
mary purpose was to “serve” me. (Admit it, its a guy thing.) Nevertheless, married love, covenant
love, is a good beginning... orders of magnitude beyond casual hook-ups or playing house by living
together. But then, five years into our marriage, along came Genevieve. The moment we discovered
we were pregnant my heart began to change and a new sense of responsibility gripped me. I was
deeply involved in my undergraduate schooling at Houghton College at the time, but as I watched
Marilyn blossoming with our daughter and felt that new life animating, every thought that was not aca-
demic was more and more parental.

The events surrounding Genny's birth are a book in their own right, but here I just want to make a sin-
gle point. The time came about mid-night on October 5th. The hospital was nearly thirty miles away
(Houghton is deep in the country in the Genesee River Valley of Western New York). I borrowed a
friend's BMW because our car was in the shop, and luckily the cop who pulled me over doing 80 de-
cided to escort me into the emergency room with lights flashing rather than to ticket me. Genny was
breach, so Marilyn had to have an emergency C-section. I was not allowed to watch.

At about five in the morning a little, somewhat premature, pink grub was wheeled out of the surgery in
an isolette incubator. I looked at her. In that moment my life was forever changed. I became “a fa-
ther”. (The sense of transformation was almost physical and was virtually instantaneous.)

There is a cosmic difference between the love of the Bridegroom for the Bride, and the love of the Fa-
ther for His Child. The Bride is someone who comes from outside, who is loved because of who she
is as a unique individual, as a person; who is desired, sought after, wooed and won. The Child is a
part of the Father, of the same essential material. I saw Genny, and everything in me instantly was
transformed. In that microsecond there was no question but that I would live for this grub, slave for
this grub, die for this grub, defend this grub against every threat at any cost. This grub is now almost
thirty years old. She has a life of her own. She has done amazing things. She has made mistakes.
Nothing of my love as her father has changed. She is in my thoughts and prayers continually, and I
would readily die for her. The same goes for my two other grown grub sons. And my five grand-grubs.

from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,

Paul uses a word here, patria, translated “every family”, which might better be translated “all father-
hood”. God is “our Father”, as Jesus so often insisted. Fatherhood itself is defined by our Heavenly
Father. This is a MOST important point. To the Jews of His day, the term “Father”, for God, was a
title of formal respect: They were forbidden to use any familiar name for the Deity (they could not say
“Yahweh” but could only write YHWH in the scrolls, and use euphemisms when referring to God-
speech). Their use of the title “Father” was along the lines of our 19th century First People calling the
President “the Great White Father” or us calling George Washington “the Father of our country”.
This is why, when Jesus called God “My Father”, and specifically when He called Him “Abba” (Daddy),
they tried to kill Him. This was 'way too personal: In their ears, this was blasphemy. Paul says that
all true fatherhood comes from and is defined by God. We live in a broken world. Many, perhaps
most, of us have experienced neglect or even some degree of abuse, psychological or physical, from
our fathers, or have been in some measure abandoned by them (sometimes because they walk out,
sometimes because they are working themselves to death for us). We do not understand fatherhood.
This is why most of us have difficulty is drawing near to God. And this is one reason why the Father
sent Jesus to us as a simple man, a common blue-collar craftsman who liked sinners and women and
kids: So that we could see what the Father really is like in a non-threatening form, and get the picture
of a grumpy old man with a long white beard out of our heads once and for all. All true fatherhood is
defined in God. And once we discover this we can come home and find comfort and rest and joy.
Home is a happy place, and Daddy is a fun guy to be with.

234
that according to the riches of his glory

MORE riches....MORE glory...

he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,

We have talked earlier in this commentary, and in the Romans stuff, about the real us...the Inner
Man...the New Man....the New Creation Man that our new birth in Christ has caused us to become.
This New Man feeds on ambrosia,the food of the gods, sits at the heavenly banquet table and is sus-
tained and empowered by spiritual energies… If we fail to nourish this vital and vibrant life, like any
life-form it will languish and waste away and eventually grow sick and it will, in the end, die.

so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have
strength

If you try to do this with your head, if you try to figure this out with your mind, your brain will explode
and you will go off into all sorts of crap theology and cult nutso weirdness. We learn by waiting on the
Lord, by prayer, by humility, by patience, by obedience, by repentance, by honesty, by faith, by time-
in-grade life experience, by falling down and getting up and falling down and getting up and falling
down and getting up and falling down and getting up.… by walking with the Lord. If we are holding
His hand we can't very well run ahead of Him, can we?

to comprehend

This means “to completely understand” or “to become one with”

with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

It seems to me that Paul is trying to convey a higher-dimensional idea here: It only takes breadth,
length, and height to describe anything in three dimensions. To comprehend God is to venture out-
side our comfort zone and take the risk of going “where no man has gone before” (and not been
harmed without Jesus as companion and guide).

and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,

And then he goes even deeper still....Methinks he's run out of words again.

that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Like, WOW! “Feel the Force, Luke.”

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work
within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

235
 Chapter 4

Please, take a breath. Now Paul descends to earth and becomes practical.

I therefore,

When you see a “therefore”, ask yourself what it's there for.....

a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all
humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in
the bond of peace.

We have covered this ground: Jesus said, “Why do you say you love me and not do what I ask you to do?”
Please don't embarrass yourself and the Lord by being a hypocrite: Either be a Christian, and act like one.
Or get off the bus and go have fun with your friends, and stop trying to live a double life. You are making
it deucedly hard for the rest of us. The scriptures are perfectly clear: “Be absolutely sure that your sin is go-
ing to find you out.” You will be caught eventually, and then there will be a big messy scandal that will
mess up a lot of people, and then we have to deal with the mess. As Joshua said a long long time ago,
“Choose you, this day, whom you are going to serve.” Luke 6:46;Numbers 32:23;Joshua 24:15

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Does it, or does it not, seem here, that Paul is saying that our tendency toward partisanship and denomi-
nationalism might be a little “off”? He argues much the same point in many of his other letters. We so like
to factionalize and split and compete and argue about stupid things, and confidently tell others that we
know exactly what God has in mind about anything and everything. Silly children.… fighting over binkies
and toy trucks in the sandbox. How can a Lord who is so single in Person and Purpose as Paul here de-
scribes be so self-conflicted and apparently schizophrenic as our myriad diverse and opposed fellowships
make Him out to be? Is He nuts? Or are we?

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says,

“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives,

and he gave gifts to men.”

Whatever we are or have, once we covenant with God we are only and wholly His: Prisoners of war, cap-
tives of His unfathomable love, emancipated slaves, adopted homeless street beggars... Prisoners and
slaves have no rights, no properties, no anything.… and truly grateful people ought not have anything to
quarrel about, seeing as they all have received blessing from another, in our case wholly undeserved.

(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He
who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.)

He who came from infinitely above and beyond us, has Himself plunged to the bottom of the deepest
abyss into which we might ever fall to make certain that none of us ever again gets trapped in that hell-
hole, and then He has returned to that exalted place from which He came. But not alone: He has built a
road upon which each one of us may walk, to join Him where He is, to share with Him freely and fully the
glory that He has there; and He has promised that He will, upon our simple sincere request, join us on
that road and walk with us the entire way as our companion and our mentor and our guide and our friend.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of
ministry for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the
Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,
236
There are “professional” ministers… the so-called “five-fold” ministry, about which ten thousand books
fill the shelves, if one has been written. I don't want to wade into that swamp right now. But what do I
want to notice is this: These four or five designated ministries all are appointed to serve one specific
purpose. This purpose is to, “ equip the saints for the work of ministry for building up the body of Christ “
Ephesians 4:12. The churches of Christendumb have, for far too long, conditioned their congregations
to be “audiences” who go to church on Sunday (and sometimes on Wednesday evening) to be
preached at by “the minister”, who expect “the minister” to do the visitation at the hospitals and nurs-
ing homes, who expect “the minister” to do all the counseling, who hire an “associate minister” to pick
up the slack and run the “youth ministry”, etc., as if the church is a business, and the congregation
are the stockholders or the BoD. This is garbage.

In some cases, of course, we may need “professional” clergy working “full time”. Our modern world is
hectic and complicated. Larger organizations need staffing, and usually can't run with voluntary help.
Paul, however, often held down a job (he made tents) while he did his missionary work. So did oth-
ers among the early church leadership. So the idea of self-supported pastors and other ministries is
certainly very valid. But the purpose of the so-called “five-fold ministry” is to teach “the saints”, that's
everybody else who's a believer, as I have remarked elsewhere, to get up off their butts and to be-
come ministers who can move in the spiritual gifts and in the knowledge of the scriptures, and who,
themselves, can teach others to get off their butts, grow up, and do the same thing. The whole pur-
pose of this is to grow the whole church of Christ up into a mature New Creature in Christ that can
whup the devil and finish up what Jesus began at Calvary so we can get on with the main program
(outlined above). EVERYBODY is supposed to be “a minister”!!!!! That's what being a Christian
is all about: It's what we sign on to when we sign up! We are joining an ARMY. Our lives are no lon-
ger “our own”. We never again are supposed to “do our own thing”. If we want to be independent
and let someone else do the work, then we should not have joined up in the first place!!!! We signed
up under false pretenses: WE LIED TO THE LORD! This was a dumb thing to do. Thankfully, a
whole bunch of folks, and especially young folks with lots of fire and energy, are catching on to this as
we speak, and good stuff is starting to happen around the world. Which is a good thing… because
some really bad stuff is starting to happen around the world, too.

so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doc-
trine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

There are many places in the New Testament where Paul and the other writers refer to we believers as
children....Jesus often calls us children. Sometimes this is very complimentary. Sometimes the word is
used as an illustration of how we are to be in our attitude toward God as our Father. And sometimes, as
here, we are being told to grow up. (Matthew 11:25; 18:3,4; 19:14; John 1:12; 13:33; 21:5; Romans 8:16,17; 9:7,8; 1 Cor-
inthians 2:1-6;3:1,2;14:20; Galatians 4:3,19,24-31; Ephesians 4:14; 5:1,8; Philippians 2:15; I Thessalonians 5:5; Hebrews 5:11-
14;12:7-11; 1 Peter 1:14; 1 John 2:12-14)

Small children are delightful creatures: faith-filled, joyous, spontaneous, full of wonder, trusting, forgiv-
ing, ridiculously amazingly wonderfully hopeful. They are also naive, and gullible, and silly, and rath-
er stupid much of the time. We love them to death, and we love to watch them grow up. And if they
don't grow up well, and on (or in “advanced” Westernized cultures, “ahead of”) schedule, we get ex-
tremely worried. An adult who acts like a child is considered, to be Politically Correct, “special”. Unfor-
tunately, there are a great number of very “special” people warming the pews in our churches and
fellowship halls today. This is because somewhere in the past hundred or so years, an awful lot of
Christendumb has let the subtle cancers of the world metastasize throughout the Body of Christ until
the so-called professional “ministry” knows “ neither the Scriptures nor the power of God “Matthew 22:29, and
can no longer fulfill their mandated calling to raise up “the saints” to do “the work of ministry for building
up the body of Christ” Ephesians 4:12. These hired hands (John 10:11-13) have “ the appearance of godliness,
but deny its power “ 2 Timothy 3:5, and stand condemned before God as false teachers . Continuing:

237
tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in
deceitful schemes.

Does this not speak ever so clearly to our contemporary Evangelical, and especially “Spirit-filled”
Evangelical, American Christian church; always restless, never quiet, buying the latest books and
CD's, constantly seeking out “teachings”, traveling great distances to the most hyped and current pro-
phetic conferences and chasing the most “anointed” ministers like star struck teen-aged groupies idol-
izing a boy-band. Dangerously near to “ever learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the Truth?” 2
Timothy 3:7 And not only within the Church: We are continually bombarded by slick advertising, by co-
vertly biased “news” reporting, by carefully engineered “spin” (read misinformation and bald-faced
lies), by the weasel-words of lawyers and politicians and “experts”... Manipulative, scheming, always
with a hidden agenda in mind. And if it is coming from the world, it is guaranteed to be, at its heart,
“anti” Christ, because everything in the world is upside down and is unable to see things God's way.
And if we remain children, and don't grow up in the wisdom and stature of the Lord and learn to see
things the way He sees things, then we are going to be sucker-punched every time. “Fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Rather, speaking the truth in love,

There are two ways to speak Truth: It can be spoken with brutal honesty, and it can be spoken with
love. Brutal honesty tends to get the job done, but it also tends to leave the other person in some
degree of total ruin. Love works better, and generally tends to promote healing. When I go hunting I
can use a number of different weapons to harvest a deer. I could use a Claymore mine, but that
would leave me scraping hamburger off the trees and still having to fish shrapnel out of my meatloaf.
I could use a shotgun, but shotguns still tend to ruin quite a bit of good meat. Or I could use a rifle,
taking one clean shot through the heart. The deer feels virtually no pain, dies almost instantly, and
there is almost no collateral damage to the meat.

If I go to the doctor and he tells me that I need heart surgery or I am going to die, he is speaking the
truth. He would be doing me a great disservice if he had told me that my recurring chest pains were
indigestion and that I should take TUMs whenever they flared up. However, if, when I was rolled into
the operating room, I noticed that there was a chainsaw and a large meat-cleaver on the tool table
next to the surgery theater, and the doctor was listening to Grind Metal music to set the mood, I
would be very concerned. This would not be my idea of dealing with my very serious condition in
love. On the other hand, if when I was rolled in, there was some quiet classical music playing and I
saw an array of sophisticated scalpels and other instruments laid out at hand with a team of nurses
ready to assist, I would feel assured that I was in the best situation possible. We are to be attentive
to each other with the same attention that our Father has toward us as His kids. We are to always
encourage each other, always think redemptively. And when something is wrong or out of order, we
are to approach each other with concern for the immediate and the eternal well-being of the other per-
son first and foremost in our heart. If we can't do this, then we have to go to Daddy and ask Him to
calm us down and help us get our own act together so we can, or else we have to ask someone else
to deal with both the other person and with us.

we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and
held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body
grow so that it builds itself up in love.

In other places Paul talks about all of us being body parts of the one spirit body of the supernatural New
Man that Christ is the Head of, and how every miniscule gland and corpuscle and cell, right down to the
spiritual mitochondria is every bit as important as every other miniscule gland and corpuscle and cell, not
to mention the heart and lungs and ever so cute eyes and lips and holy tush (whomever thinks she might
be that).
238
 We are ONE BODY, and there is only ONE HEAD, who is in direct and constant communion with
each one of us (so long as we are not getting in His way by trying to do our own thing somehow), just
like our own physical head is in sync with our whole physical body all the time, waking or sleeping.
When all of this is “working properly” the whole spiritual body of the true Church grows so that it
“builds itself up” into the spiritual adult it is supposed to be.

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their
minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is
in them, due to their hardness of heart.

Paul reiterates the qualitative difference between the true Christian and everybody else, the funda-
mental fact that a spiritually regenerated human being has been transformed and is as different from
an unregenerated human being as a caterpillar is from a butterfly.

The unregenerate mind is dark. It has little or no awareness of spiritual Truth or of the true nature of
Reality. It is virtually blind. It cannot comprehend the Universe as God has designed it, and because
of its radically inverted worldview and absolute egocentricity it cannot imagine God except in terms of
itself. If it glimpses light at all, it is because of the prevenient grace of God. Without this grace, the
unregenerate imagination runs wild.

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impuri-
ty.

I would refer you here to my discussion of the first chapters of Paul's letter to the Romans.

But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him,
as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt
through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after
the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Paul goes to great depth in Romans on these things. Suffice it to say, that once in Christ we have
sufficient faith and power to meet fully and accomplish the challenge set to us above. Please read
the discussion in my other commentary, and be encouraged.

I will, I think, let Paul speak without comment here: It's no harder to understand today than it was a
couple of thousand years ago: Either you do this stuff, or you don't.

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are mem-
bers one of another.

Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may
have something to share with anyone in need.

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion,
that it may give grace to those who hear.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

239
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Chapter 5 There-
fore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us,
a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Jesus put it this way, “ A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like
his teacher.” Luke 6:40

How many times have I heard people say, “I trying”....”I'm doing my best” ? The problem is, Christ is
in each one of us, if we are Christians...and we're not supposed to be doing “our best” anymore, but
His best, because He is “in us to will and to do of His good pleasure” Philippians 2:13 . And He has given us ,

“all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and
excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may
become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful
desire.” 2 Peter 1:3-4

So, the “I'm trying” line is, really, very likely just an excuse for spiritual laziness and, for want of a bet-
ter word, backsliding. If you are prone to this excuse, you would do well to check your motives.

But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness

Please read over my detailed discussion of this in the Romans commentary when I am dealing with
Paul's first several chapters: This is really really serious stuff, and a lot of the modern church, even
the Bible-believing Evangelical church, has dropped the ball on these things.

must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints.

Paul says “must not even be NAMED”, yet I have been around God knows how many fellowships,
and especially around youth groups and Christian young people, who are completely unaware of how
deeply affected they have been by the propaganda of their world. Their conversation, dress, and
comportment is in many ways almost indistinguishable from their non-Christian friends, yet they are
clueless about this, and if you speak to them about such things they do not seem to understand the
point you are trying to make, so deeply has the world mind penetrated into their worldview.

Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be
thanksgiving.

This has to do with off color stories, “soft” porn, “guy talk”, “girl talk”, dirty jokes, an awful lot of sit-
coms and other TV shows, far too much of Hollywood....you know what I'm talking about. And it has
to do with being strong enough in character to walk away from your peer groups and your buds at
school or at the office when the conversation swings in these sorts of directions, if you can't get them
to clean it up.

For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an
idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons
of disobedience.

”that's SO yesterday”...“Don't be such a prude”...”But I love you so much”...”If you really loved
me”...”everybody's doing it”...”I dare you”...”the assured results of modern science”...”the experts
agree”...”trust me”...”I will drain the swamp”...”we will be the most transparent administration”...”when I

240
 get to Washington”...”OK, you're on the list, but he can't come in” …”She's with me”...”BUT WAIT,
there's more!”... (Examples of “empty words”)

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the
woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the ser-
pent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree
that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” But the serpent said to the woman,
“You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like
God,...” Genesis 3:1-5

Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of
disobedience.

Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the
Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true),

When we believe and become Christians our lives must change: If they don't, then something is
wrong...the fix hasn't taken. There can be no such thing as a non-fruitbearing True Christian. (Ok, the
Bible does talk at length about bad Christians whose fruit is wormy and rotten....I've dealt with that
elsewhere. Please let me be a bit extremist here...to make a point.) When we become Christians, the
Spirit of God, Himself, becomes a part, a dominant part, THE dominant part, of us. A very bright light
is turned on. Since the world we have been living in is pitch black in spiritual darkness, when that
light turns on those whose eyes are not accustomed to it are going to react. Some, like moths to a
flame, will be drawn to the light. They, too, are “the called” of God, and all their lives have been seek-
ing a glimpse of light so that they can begin to find their way out of the darkness. We become bea-
cons and guides. But others are going to recoil violently from the light, because it hurts their eyes
and, more, it exposes them and their activities.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved
through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come
into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone
who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But
whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out
in God.” John 3:17-21

We, as New Creatures, may be moved by the compassion of God to try to liberate them from the
bondage in which they are trapped, but we can NEVER return to that realm of bondage ourselves!
As Christians we are no longer part of that world, and to return to it is to be traitor to the King we have
pledged our lives to honor and serve, and to “crucify again” the Lord who saved us.

These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved.
For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping
from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For
whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the
world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and over-
come, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to
have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered
to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, af-
ter washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”… For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once
been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the
goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them

241
again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up
to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for
whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and
near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned. 2 Peter 2:17-22; Hebrews 6:6-8

Our effectiveness as Ambassadors of the Kingdom of God comes from our difference from the world,
not any outward (or ,God forbid, inward) similarity to it. WE MUST NEVER AGAIN revert to the pat-
terns of life from which the Lord endured such humiliation and agony to liberate us.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ accord-
ing to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old
has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not count-
ing their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassa-
dors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:16-21

And this may very well mean that we will have to leave behind old friends, and even family as we
grow in grace...We have set our steps on a different path than they are walking...they may, at any
time, join us. We may never return to them.

Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suf-
fered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human pas-
sions but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in
sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are
surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give
account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. 1 Peter 4:1-5

It is a tragedy, and worse, heresy and even blasphemy that so much of the modern American and
European church cannot really be distinguished in any significant way from the world around it. The
greatest fault lies with those who call themselves leaders, “the clergy”, for it falls to them to rightly in-
struct their congregations in the Word of God, and they have utterly and miserably failed to do so.
But since the Word is quite freely available and is perfectly accessible to every man and woman in
every pew, and in every living room, and in every five-star hotel, and in every no-tell-motel and to
every john and whore in every brothel in the civilized world, and on every cable or satellite connected
TV, and all over the Internet, the fault also lies with each one of them. At least in the West, we are all
without excuse.

Again, please read the first sections of the Romans commentary.

and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead ex-
pose them.

We are not particularly effective when we don sandwich boards and stand on street corners preaching
the end of the world...(unless the Lord has instructed us to do so, and I certainly am not saying here
that He does not ask some of us to do this). But we are ALL called, as “the saints”, to be ministers of
the Gospel and to stand boldly for the Truth and not back down or compromise in the face of opposi-
tion or threat of personal hardship or loss.People around the world are dying daily because they have
chosen to bend their knee in allegiance to the High King of Heaven. And we in America often tend to
cringe and become apologetic when someone at the office mocks us by calling us “the Preacher” or
“a holy roller” at the coffee machine, and we call it persecution, and we slink back to our desk. Some-
thing is wrong with this picture.
242
We are commanded by our King, the Commander in Chief of the Army in which we have enlisted, to make
a stand and expose the darkness of Satan's world to Holy Light, whenever and wherever we are and that
darkness tries to dominate. To do so will not win us many friends, and it may cost us dearly. Our King has
noted these things, but that is not of much significance when compared against the larger issues at hand.
We are under orders: We must carry out those orders, or be in violation of them in time of war.

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take
heart; I have overcome the world.” John 16:33

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I
have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And
whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and who-
ever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 10:34-39; Luke 12:51-53

Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house!’ And if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest up-
on him. But if not, it will return to you. …...Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before
you. Heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ But whenever you enter a
town and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet we
wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’ Luke 10:5-11

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would
save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:24-25

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters,
yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me can-
not be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether
he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin
to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter
another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who
comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation
and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disci-
ple. Luke 14:26-33

No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:62

Paul continues:

For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret.

Again Paul emphasizes the need to watch even the things that we let ourselves talk about: This, I believe,
extends to overmuch talking about other folks in detail “so we can pray for them”. (This kind of “Christian
talk” not only lets us indulge our fantasies as we give voice to the vices of others, but really is simply
“sanctified” GOSSIP, and we are nothing more than busybodies.. We can pray without going into the gory
details, under most circumstances and unless the Lord specifically prompts us to.)

But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. There-
fore it says,

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

This brings us back to “speaking the Truth in love”.....

243
 Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the
days are evil.

This is certainly an appropriate admonition for the times we find ourselves in.

You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in
the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Share in suffering
as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the
one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. Therefore do not be
foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. 2 Timothy 2:1-5

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit,

Quick point: Neither God, nor Jesus, nor Paul, nor any other biblical writer, was a teetotaler. The
Bible does not condemn alcoholic beverages, nor the consumption of them. What it does condemn is
overindulgence in them, or in ANYTHING, and addictions to anything. Paul writes:

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be en-
slaved by anything. “All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all
things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. 1 Corinthians 10:23-24;1 Corinthians 6:12-
13

We, as Christians, are free from all law except for the Law of Love. We can eat or drink anything, and,
technically speaking, do just about anything (please read my Romans commentary to get the balanc-
es for what I am saying.... I can't rewrite everything here). As Augustine put it, “Love God and do any-
thing you want.”

But Paul is very careful to establish the New Covenant parameters of our Liberty. He first of all says that
while we have been given virtually unlimited freedom through the work of Christ and the victory won on
Calvary, nevertheless, if anything threatens to become to us an addiction that controls us, it is wrong, is
sin to us, and we must not do it or expose ourselves to it. (I have an addictive personality: I can have a
drink now and again, because alcohol has never been an issue with me. However, I must be very careful
with prescription drugs. And I cannot enjoy a pipe, which I have always loved, because I once smoked
cigarettes heavily and if I even tasted pipe tobacco I would most likely be snared back into cigarettes in a
heartbeat.)

Coming at the same point from another tack, Paul says that if something does not edify, is not positively
helpful, breaks us or another down rather than strengthening and encouraging and building us up, then it
is to be avoided. We are to think first of others, before we indulge ourselves. I may be able to have a
drink, but if my friend is a recovering alcoholic, then at least when he or she is around, there must not be
even a beer in my home. Whether I smoke or not may be a personal decision, but the fact that second-
hand smoke injures those around me requires that I never smoke anywhere, or at anytime, that others, or
at least that others who are non-smokers, are anywhere in the area, or where the residues of my habit
might affect them. Moreover, since smoking is addictive, it falls under the first argument that Paul makes.
And, it also defiles the Temple of God, which I have become. And it also damages my body and my ability
to fulfill my covenant with my King. Therefore if I am a smoker, and a Christian, I must seek the Lord, find
grace, and give up my addiction in order to grow in my Christian obedience and become mature. (And I
know this can be done: I was instantly delivered from several addictive drugs AND from a 2 ½ pack a day
cigarette addiction in May of 1974.)

addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with
your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

244
I will testify from experience that if I choose to live thankfully and to fill my mind with uplifting and opti-
mistic thoughts, and if I also make the effort to share them with those around me, my days and my life
generally work out pretty well. And if I don't, then they don't.

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Proverbs
23:7;Matthew 12:34;Luke 6:43-45

Continuing:

submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Before we plunge into the Class 5 whitewater below, I want to point out that Paul remarks above that we
all are to SUBMIT TO ONE ANOTHER out of reverence for the Lord to whom we have ALL sworn fealty
on the same grounds. There is no weakness in Christian submission, and no place for abuse, because
true Christians will not take advantage one over another.

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles
lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But who-
ever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of
all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Mark 10:42-45

True submission is first seen in our Lord, who would ask nothing of us that He has not already Himself
demonstrated as our example as the Pattern Son.

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection
and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of
one mind. Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among
yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with
God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of
men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even
death on a cross. Philippians 2:1-8

Paul now addresses the Prime Unit of the Christian organism on Earth.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Sav-
ior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

I want to say, up front, that I do not believe that Paul is saying that the Christian husband is somehow a
“Vicar of Christ” to the Christian wife, much as the language here might allow some to press that misinter-
pretation. Such an idea, in any expression, is heresy. The rest of the New Covenant adequately counter-
balances Paul's strong statements.

Each of us, man or woman or believing child, stands before God in Christ as an individual son or daughter
of our Father in intimate personal communion with Him. Even in the biblically ordered family this individual
relationship is maintained. No human being is to ever presume to the role of mediator between God and
man except the risen Lord.

Paul is speaking here of a different aspect of the marriage relationship… a biblical “type”...a profound illus-
tration of spiritual truths about Divine government, and of the interrelationship of the Persons of the Trinity
and of the Bridegroom to His Bride. (vs.32)
245
I have discussed at length, above and in my thoughts on Romans, the nature of Divine Order and the
fundamental Truth that Reality in all of its manifold dimensions is defined by and reflects the essential
character of its Creator. Without Him as its ordering Center, its Reason for being, the creation would
be unmade.

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in
him all things hold together. Colossians 1:16-17

When God created Adam, He formed him from the elements of the earth and breathed into him His
own life, His spirit, making him, uniquely, spiritual man, created “in the image of God”. But when He
created Eve, he made her of the stuff of Adam himself: She was made Adam's perfect complement.
There was a reason for this. “In the image of God He created him, male and female He created THEM” Gene-
sis 1:27; Genesis 5:2 . As the Son was begotten from the substance of the Father, so also was Eve “be-
gotten” from the substance of her husband. (In fact, the word “beget” means “made out of the same
substance as”, while the word “create” implies “made of a different substance from”.)

I am not going to try to do a complete study here of why God created man and woman as He did:
maybe another day. But one reason is that He wanted to give Adam and Eve, and their children after
them, a living illustration of the Godhead, the “Ground of All Being”, and of His great Plan. They them-
selves, meant to live in unbroken fellowship with their Creator in the garden, and as they grew to un-
derstand what it meant to become “one flesh” in their union, and as they conceived and nurtured sons
and daughters, would be the best show and tell possible of what Daddy had in mind when He set
about building His family. Unfortunately, they screwed up, and what should have been the world's
most perfect marriage started having problems. Adam and Eve started blaming and accusing and
distrusting one another; they started lying to God and to each other; they got kicked out of Paradise,
they no longer were able to hang out with God, and the kids couldn't get along (actually the oldest
son killed his brother out of envy, and then ran away from home)...and things went downhill from
there.

But now, in Christ (the “second Adam”) 1 Corinthians 15:47 , we are called to begin to unscramble the
eggs, as it were. Or better yet...To simply start over and make a better breakfast.

The unsaved world CANNOT accomplish Christian marriage, though it should give it it's best shot.
Christian marriage requires a degree of unselfishness that can only be accomplished through the in-
dwelling Spirit of Christ. Nevertheless, whether Christian or not, marriage is a Divine institution at its
heart. Civil governments have muscled in because they saw a way to make money and control peo-
ple, as usual, but they have overstepped their sphere of authority. Marriage is a sacred thing: Cae-
sar is far too filthy and corrupt to touch it.

A rare few non-Christian marriages do work reasonably well. But the big problem with virtually all
non-Christian relationships, and, unfortunately today, far too many Christian relationships as well, is
that, at best, the partners approach them as just that: Partnerships. Where they are ostensibly egali-
tarian, and not abusively male dominant or otherwise completely perverted, unions are set up on a
contractual basis with 50/50 terms, if not openly, then tacitly. And this is NOT the way that God has
created us to operate. Christian marriage is supposed to be a 100/100 exchange, with each partner
giving everything of themselves to and for the other. If this occurs then, effectively, each person is
benefiting close to 200% from the relationship, having really lost nothing of themselves in the giving,
and having gained everything of the other. And even if one person starts to lose some steam, since
both have the infinite resources of Christ to draw upon, the other can continue to give in a fullness
until the weary half is refreshed and restored.

246
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fel-
low. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together,
they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone,
two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

From the git-go, God has established that there is an ORDER of headship and subordination in the
family structure: Husband =>wife => children. This is precisely the same order as exists in the Trini-
ty: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It has nothing to do with superiority and inferiority. (Paul argues else-
where that in Christ men and women are absolutely equal. Gender egalitarianism before God is a
Christian principle.) It has everything to do with Authority and Divine Order: The way the universe
works.

It also has to do with the significant created differences in spiritual giftings and sensitivities between
men and women, and with the need children have for protection and nurture and boundaries. (The
opinions of Feminazi's and progressive liberals notwithstanding, there really are differences between
the sexes and between children and adults.) Men are designed by God to “cover” (protect, guard)
women, who are spiritually more sensitive and whose constitution is framed toward nurture. Both
stand as Guardians, Mentors and Nurturers of children, but each with unique perspectives to impart,
and are, together, meant to reveal in living illustrations much of the nature of God to their charges.
Through loving parents children are to be led quickly to their own personal relationship with their Lord.
The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual matrices of each of these three are distinctly shaped to
these roles, and evolve dynamically throughout the many stages of life.

On every team there are particular positions that particular persons play for particular reasons. When
those particular skilled persons play those positions to the best of their abilities, the team plays its
best. When they do not play as a team, the team loses. Any time one of those team members tries to
be a prima-donna, the team falls apart.

More crucially, in a military unit every soldier has a specific role that he or she is intensively trained
for. The entire unit is under the command of a single designated leader whose word is absolute, final,
and is to be instantly obeyed. In a firefight with an enemy if one member of the unit fails to do his or
her job or to instantly follow an order, the lives of the entire unit are put in jeopardy. This authority
structure and order is essential to military discipline, and because of it the unit is strong and is able to
accomplish its mission.

A marriage is more complicated than either of these illustrations allows. In a marriage there are con-
stant dynamic interactions and changes and growth. There must be dialogue and compromise be-
tween a husband and a wife. A husband is not a military officer whose word is the order of a dictator,
and a wife is much more than just a player on a team.

However, there is also a designated chain of command, with Christ at the top, the husband next, the
wife beside and just under him, and the children subordinate to both. The husband and the wife are
to be in constant intimate communion and cooperation, but if the buck has to stop somewhere, it
stops with the husband, and, in Christ, the wife yields the field. In this way things get done, and the
children are sheltered in a sanctuary maintained by two parents in loving agreement.

And we are in a war, so the military paradigm is valid in certain ways. As I remarked before, it is sig-
nificant how much of the New Covenant speaks of military things and uses military vocabulary.

247
Paul admonishes,

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,

This is the ground zero point of True Christian Marriage: And I speak from personal experience. If
you have read the personal introduction to my commentary on Romans, you will remember that 'way
back when I was still young in the Lord and hadn't yet fully caught on to what this Christian thing is
really all about, I was still in pretty rough shape. I was recovering from two plus decades of growing
up in a dysfunctional family and living an out of control life. And, unfortunately, I was not doing a par-
ticularly great job at marriage. So, our love boat hit the reef on our tenth anniversary, and the only
thing keeping us together was our vow before the Lord that “divorce was not an option”, (Justifiable
homicide still being on the table).

Being a man, and with a quiet wife, I had not seen this coming, and the revelation that my wife was
very near to walking out on me hit me upside the head like a hard swing by Darrell Jeeter. I started
taking long walks in the woods, and praying a lot, and, of course, in an effort to be honest and fair, I
was trying to split the blame for the problems pretty equally between myself and Marilyn.

The Lord would not hear a word of it. He got on my case like white on rice. And this was the scripture
He beat me over the heart with. He said, “I DID NOT hold you responsible for your sin when I saved
your sorry butt! I loved you in spite of your crap even though you were ENTIRELY to blame! I DIED
FOR YOU! Now, you go and save your marriage and love your wife like I love you!” (He might not
have put it exactly like that, but that was the way it came across to me.) I can remember that I was
shaking, on the side of the back country road as the sun was coming up very early one summer morn-
ing, when He got done reaming me out. But I do love my wife, and I do love and fear my King. So, I
stopped blaming Marilyn for the problems in our marriage, and accepted responsibility for ALL of
them, and I started working on me, and serving her. It's taken twenty-five years...so far. The mar-
riage still isn't perfect...But Marilyn tends to rate it 8 or 9 on a 10 scale, which I find disconcerting,
since I don't think I deserve more than a 6 or 7 at best, most of the time.

It took Marilyn about four or five years to actually believe that the changes that I was going through
were real, and that she could trust me again. The kind of transformation that the Lord was working in
me was much too fundamental to take place overnight, and 'way too radical to be easily believed, es-
pecially after my behavior as the angry jerk I had tended to be for ten years. And it came in bits and
pieces and not all at once. And there were some momentary setbacks, me being male. But, as I
learned to reflect the love of Christ to my wife, my wife began to first trust again and respect me, and
then to return that love to me. And the Lord has helped her work on her stuff (the stuff I was not per-
mitted to hold against her) without my help, too. (Because I was no longer getting in His way...at least
most of the time. Or maybe I should say that it was because there was a lot more of Him showing
through me, so He and I were on the same page...and so Marilyn, in learning to submit to me “as to
the Lord” was really submitting to the Lord in or through me.)

We are a team. We were brought together by the Lord at Bible school. (Another story worth the telling
sometime.) I am not going to say that all Christian marriages are necessarily so specifically matched
as ours was (the Lord does seem to have something specific in mind for us to do when He is done
training us: We have a lot of prophetic confirmations concerning this that have been shared with us
over the years) , but I think that if Christian young people have the backbone to discipline themselves,
and hold their hormones in check, and wait on the Lord instead of caving in to peer pressure and let-
ting the world around them press them into its mold, the Lord will put each girl together with EXACT-
LY the right guy (and vice versa) at exactly the right time and place. In our case He more or less did
it in spite of me, because I still was too hot to handle in a lot of ways and a bit of a loose cannon, but
the Bible school environment put a lot of boundaries on me that helped.

248
 Another thing: If Marilyn and I were to take the E-harmony profiling stuff I am absolutely certain that
we would never in a million years be matched. It has taken God to make us the team that we are be-
coming. (I am not saying that E-harmony is necessarily a bad idea, just that in our case the Lord
made exceptions.) What we are discovering, as I have learned to truly love my wife and she has
been released to love me back, is that because we are so different from one another we are almost
perfect complements to one another. Where I am weak, Marilyn is strong: Where she is weak, I am
strong. I have the gifts she lacks. She fills in my gaps and has eyes to see past my blind spots. It
has taken almost 37 years to understand much of this. And the learning curve has been very steep
some of the time. Couples who bail on a relationship after three, or five, or ten years because they
“don't love each other anymore”, will never learn what real love, God's love, is all about. You have to
stay in the crucible to be refined.

(There is an old sermon illustration that's probably been around for a hundred years about the refining
of gold. As with any ore, gold from the earth is amalgamated with other crud...not that the gold itself
is contaminated, but that the junk deposits have attached themselves to the gold tenaciously. Gold
has to be purified, refined, cleaned up to be useful. The crud has to be cleaned off. And the only
way to refine gold is to heat it up until it melts (1945 degrees Fahrenheit, which is really hot!). So the
gold ore, with all its attached junk, is put into a crucible, and the crucible is put into a particularly
fierce fire. And after a while the gold becomes molten. When the gold, which is really dense and
heavy, turns liquid, all the stuff that has been stuck together with it either vaporizes from the heat or
floats off. Being less dense, this dross then rises to the surface of the liquid gold as a scummy layer.
The refiner then skims this layer off and tosses it. This process continues until all the contaminants
are removed and the gold is 99.999% pure. The refiner knows that the gold is pure because he is
able to look into the crucible and see a mirror-clear reflection of his face in the molten surface. If the
gold doesn't stay in the crucible and in the fire long enough to be fully refined, the crap remains mixed
in, and the metal is pretty much useless. Christian marriage is a lifetime crucible. (I did NOT say a
“life sentence”!))

When Eve was taken out of Adam, he lost something of himself. When she was returned to him, that
which he had lost was returned, but this time as a creative companion with free will, and with love to
give back, and with independent ideas and unique vision. The two were supposed to become one
again, but in a new way, much more than Adam, alone, could have ever become.

This is what the wife is to be to the husband... As he loves her, she reflects and amplifies and intensi-
fies and expands upon what otherwise could not have been expressed at all. And he takes all she
returns and lavishly pours it back upon her. Imagine what this could be like if no selfishness interrupt-
ed the feedback loop.

Here are some more scriptures to think about:

For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman
for man. 1 Corinthians 11:8-9

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the
head of Christ is God… That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the an-
gels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made
from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. For I feel a divine jealousy for you,
since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands,
as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. 1 Corinthians 11:3,10,11

Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker
vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. 1 Peter 3:7

249
 Paul continues:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her,
having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in
splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same
way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ev-
er hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of
his body.

How many of us as Christian husbands are walking this out... I mean taking it full strength, not wa-
tered down? Even as I am writing my way through these thoughts I am painfully aware of how short I
am falling of this challenge now, after all these years of actively rebuilding our marriage. I have been
aware of these scriptures for over three decades: I am sure I have heard these verses preached on a
thousand times over the years. I have been living them to the best of my understanding.

But now I have undertaken to come to grips with Paul and the revelation of the Kingdom which the
Lord imparted to him, and I as I have been writing the Lord has made one thing very clear, that He is
willing to open His Word to me more deeply than I have ever imagined, but that the price I will be ex-
pected to pay for such insight will be complete obedience to what I discover. The best of my under-
standing has not been particularly deep, to date. Sometimes I am afraid of what I am putting into
words on paper, because the Lord is not permitting me to write theory anymore. For all of these
thoughts, He has been saying, “This is the way, walk in it.” Isaiah 30:21

As Christian husbands we are charged by the Lord to so live with and serve our wives that they are
able to fully become all that Christ has called them to be. They are not our “trophies”, or our “sex
toys”, or even more nobly, our “wife and the mother of our children”. They are God's daughters, and
we are expected, by Him, to live and die for them.

For each of us this will certainly be a unique experience, for for each of us our wives and our marriag-
es are unique, but as near as I can tell, for all of us it means that we are to live more for our wives
than for ourselves, or at least first for our wives before ourselves. There really doesn't seem to be an
escape clause in this. Ideally we, as committed Christian men, permitted the Lord to match us to the
mate that He knows is our perfect Christian complement, and we are neither unequally yoked with an
unbeliever, nor are we married to a Christian whose vision differs overmuch from our own.

But there does not seem to be, here or anywhere else in the New Covenant, an exception available
for less than ideal marriages. Even in situations where one partner is an unbeliever, breaking up the
marriage except for unfaithfulness is forbidden the Christian and must be initiated by the unbeliever.
The Christian is always called to serve and be an ambassador of the Kingdom. And I have already
spent several hundred pages proving that because Christ is in us, we have all the resources neces-
sary to live fully up to the standard to which He calls us.

So, apparently I have boxed myself, and you, into a corner. If you are a Christian husband you are
bound by covenant before the Lord to live as Paul sets it out.

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you
love his wife as himself, Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:5; Mark 10:7

Paul also expects much of the wife:

and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

250
I really should let my wife write this next section, but she is occupied with other things, so I will speak
just a little, and carefully. Having done a fair job of calling husbands to the line, I don't feel too bad
about reminding all you Christian ladies that your Lord commands you to respect (honor, obey, yield
to) your husband. As I said above, you don't have to try to love the guy all the time (except with
God's agape kind of love, of course). If he is treating you like I just got through saying we're sup-
posed to, you are going to love him. And there certainly will be times when neither of you like each
other very much: That's just an emotional thing that has nothing to do with the determination of will
Paul is talking about. We all go through such mood swings. Feelings change like the weather. When
I am feeling good I like spicy food: When I have a headache, spices make me sick.

But even if he isn't coming through 100%, you still have to do what your Lord tells you to do. Guys
tend to shine up the more respect they feel they are getting, so you are shooting yourself in the foot if
you spend your days running him down and making him feel lousy about himself. If you respect him,
as your Lord commands, he will love you for it. And if he loves you, then he is doing what Christ re-
quires of him. And that feedback loop I mentioned a while back may just have a chance to get start-
ed. The alternative is a descent into some interpretation of hell on earth. We've all either seen it, or
been a part of it. I'm watching it tragically play out in a once Christian household right now, in a partic-
ularly nasty way. Husband, wife, kids, reputations are all rotting away like necrotic meat from a leper.
Christ has been cast out of the home: There is nothing to be done.

I know what I have been saying is frighteningly strong. I have been speaking in pretty sweeping gen-
eralities, and everybody's circumstances are different. Each circumstance needs to be considered on
its own merits, and our Father is no legalist. But I have grown weary of the habit that we ministers,
and Christians in general, have of softening the expectations of the Lord because they seem difficult
or impossible to us, or because we don't want offended people to diss us. “With God nothing is impos-
sible.” Luke 1:37; Matthew 19:26 We cannot adjust the Word of God downward when everything the Lord
has said to us compels us to “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Je-
sus.” Philippians 3:14

251
 Chapter 6

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first com-
mandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

Parents are given to children to nurture them into maturity and to reveal to them the life and the love
of their Creator. This takes somewhere between fifteen and twenty years to fully accomplish, as a
general rule. Until they are fully grown, children are commanded by the Lord to respect and yield to
the authority of their parents. Common sense, as well as the behavior of virtually all “higher” crea-
tures on the planet, tells us that kids are kept from danger and are taught what life is all about by par-
ents, because parents both know where kids are at (having been kids themselves), and are wiser and
more experienced in life. (Kids, of course, rarely acknowledge this fact.) Until they are launched on
their own, children really do not have rights, so much as privileges, the current pronouncements of
the “enlightened” experts and the government, notwithstanding. (Since Adam's rebellion, this entire
paradigm has been distorted and twisted into a million travesties or negations of God's original design.
We have done the distorting, not God.) Children who are not under strong loving parental authority
tend to “go bad” at an early age, and it has been pretty well established that a “spoiled” child will not
recover from this damage and will become a spoiled adult. This corruption spreads across a continu-
um from annoying to sociopathic, and after about the age of eighteen to twenty even the Lord has
difficulty in reversing the process and calling such young people to Himself. (I am speaking in general-
ities: There are certainly many cases of repentance and spiritual rebirth among older folks, but when
compared to the number of those who ruin their lives in rebellion, these conversions are much more
the exception than the rule.) Christian parents who neglect the nurture and discipline of their children
will certainly be remanded by the Lord for their neglect.

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Who-
ever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child
in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be bet-
ter for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Mat-
thew 18:3-6

The promise that Paul is referring to here is a reminder that when one follows the ways of the Lord,
life generally goes well. And when one doesn't, life doesn't. More specifically, in the early decades of
Israel's nationhood, after they had left Egypt and were given God's law through Moses at Mt. Sinai,
the law was specific and hard concerning rebellious children. If a young person persistently defied
his or her parents and was disrespectful and disobedient to them and to the law, then the parents
were commanded to bring that child before the whole community and the community was to stone
him or her to death, with the father of the child casting the first stone. In this way the nascent nation
was protected against internal corruptions and the cancers of rebellion, and their long term conse-
quences. God's purpose was to keep each succeeding generation of His people as pure and faithful
as possible. Because this commandment (and many others as well) was not enforced after Joshua's
death, and the tribes became more and more contaminated and compromised, the whole nation be-
came infected with moral decay and idolatry and eventually was conquered by first Assyria and then
Babylon, and scattered from its land.

In today's America, parents are hardly permitted to discipline their children without risk of breaking
some law and bringing the wrath of Social Services down upon their heads. And our children are
more and more demonstrating the complete stupidity of this liberal attitude. More and more of our
young people are increasingly out of control, and many are becoming sociopathic in their behaviors.
The Lord's kind of discipline is the only solution to this problem, but having ”sown the wind” for almost
four generations, we are now “reaping a whirlwind” that may be too vast and powerful to be opposed.

252
We must have a true revival, a Divine event, to begin to deal with these issues, and for that the
Church has got to clean up its own act if it wants to have any credibility with those to whom it is sup-
posed to be reaching out. If we do not, then a realistic evaluation of the media, the news, and the
general trends in our country offers us very little to hope for as the older generation dies out and to-
day's youth rise to power and influence. (Thankfully, there seems to be a rising up taking place
among young people with a desire to return to moral firmness and cultural sanity.)

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

I know what happened to me. I grew up in an angry household with a dad who only criticized and
punished and rarely, I might dare to say never, complimented me or gave me an unqualified word of
approval. Of course, the early childhood wounds and confusions festered and metastasized into re-
sentments that eventually became a deep hostility. In my case this manifested more in a personal
rebellion and in self-destructive behaviors, but I realize that it just as readily could have moved me in
the direction of criminal activity. I did a few things as a teen of which I am not proud. There were sev-
eral occasions over my teen years when I was angry enough to want to harm or kill my dad. And I
have already alluded to the weight I bear that my own children are having to work through hereditary
baggage that I was unable to prevent myself from passing on to them.

Such is the death spiral of a young man in a hypocritically Christian home whose father had provoked
him to anger. And, had the Lord not radically intervened in my life, I would have certainly continued
to fall into the abyss. We so often blame the young people who snap and do horrible things, but we
tend not to care overmuch about their parents who may have done their share in creating the monster
such kids become. Certainly the kids are responsible for what they have done, but the rage in them
began somewhere, and probably with “good” reason.

Not every child raised well by loving parents turns out well, but the odds are that loved and firmly dis-
ciplined children will tend to progress positively through their lives, and will be much more likely to
bend the knee to the Lord at a young age. So, to any young people who might be reading this, I
would really encourage you to abide by Paul's admonition...You will appreciate the fruit of your obedi-
ence after you have lived a while longer.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the
way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, render-
ing service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he
will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.

Once we have submitted to Christ, everything we do in life is done as servant/sons and daughters in
His household. We live in and for Him, not ourselves. The provision for our lives is in His keeping:
We no longer are racing rats in the world's mazes. Paul is speaking here to slaves, not because he
necessarily condoned slavery, but because much more of the Roman Empire was either enslaved or
was indentured than was free. Though some slaves were treated exceptionally well, most were sim-
ply tools, the property of their masters. Of course, they tended to resent this, especially as many of
those masters were cruel. But in Christ, freedom is internal, of the heart and mind. External circum-
stances do not have any effect against this liberty we have. Paul was writing as a prisoner of Rome,
accused of capital crimes. Even a slave was internally free, and was also an “ambassador of Christ”,
called to reveal the Kingdom to all those around him or her.

To this end, Paul admonishes slaves to behave as God's kids should behave. On the one hand they
would be bearing witness to the reality of the life of Christ in them, and ought not do anything that
would bring shame to His message. On the other hand, they might very well win their master to the
Lord, because of the integrity and consistency of their lives.

253
Today we have, for the most part, done away with slavery in America (though, disgracefully, it seems
to be returning as the culture decays, and it certainly is rampant around the world). But many of us
work for someone, who may or may not be a decent boss. The same admonition applies, and for the
same reasons. If we are a Christian and our employer is not, then we are called to reveal the Lord to
our employer and to the other employees around us. If our boss is a Christian, the we are to submit
to him or her as kin.

And we are not to stand around the water cooler wasting time and grousing about our employer or the
job. Even if we are in a difficult situation, our Father has the resources for us to be able to excel.
Paul also warns against being a “brown nose” (insert your own epithet). God is in charge of our sup-
ply, our rewards, our promotions. Our work before Him should be consistently outstanding, whether
or not anybody else notices or appreciates it.

Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is
in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

There is no separation between “business” and the ways of the Lord: For the Christian, it does not
matter how the world plays the games of the market and commerce. We abide by Kingdom rules. An
employer, of course, needs to maintain discipline and to do excellent work and produce a premium
product. But he should never abuse his employees, verbally, in terms of working conditions, or by not
paying them a fair living wage. Good employees should be recognized and rewarded. Bad employ-
ees should be fairly treated, their concerns heard, their situation understood; they should be improved
when possible, fired when recalcitrant, but never diminished or degraded or abused.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Please note again where our strength lies: It is NEVER in ourselves.

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not
wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over
this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

There is probably no clearer a statement in the New Testament of the reality of the war in which we
are engaged, or of the nature of our enemies. Nor is their any clearer statement of the reality of evil
spirit beings and of the malevolence of their intentions toward us. There are many theologians and
so-called Christian ministers today who “pooh-pooh” the idea of a person called the devil, or of de-
monization and demonic possession. But Jesus and his chosen team certainly did not. They faced
off against Satan and his followers on a daily basis. There is no one more vulnerable to spiritual at-
tack than the person who does not believe such things possible: Such people fill psychiatrists' offices
(both as patients and as therapists). Billions of dollars are wasted trying to diagnose and “cure” men-
tal “disorders”, when the reality is that many of these are symptoms of demonic attack and the patient
needs deliverance and Christ, not therapy and pills.

Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done
all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righ-
teousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circum-
stances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take
the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,

There are myriad books and sermons on these five verses: I will defer to them here. Paul was sur-
rounded by Roman soldiers, who not only were his guards, but who also were the police force of the
Empire. The Roman army was the most formidable military in the West during the heyday of Rome.
254
It is their battle dress that Paul uses as a heuristic device to help his readers grasp the military aspect
of our faith.

praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.

Please note the repetition of the word “all” in these verses. In another place Paul speaks of unceas-
ing prayer. I wondered much about this idea as I studied to better know my Lord. At Bible school
everybody was encouraged to have long, regular, scheduled times of prayer and Bible reading, (mine
used to be at three in the morning), but this never seemed to me to explain what Paul was driving at.
I see disciplined prayer in the New Testament, but I also see that our early leaders, including Christ
Himself, did not always seem to have these devotional disciplines.

As I have matured in the Lord, I think that I have come to some understanding of this idea. For many
years now I have been “practicing the presence of God” (quoting a medieval monk named Lawrence).
Obviously, according to the New Covenant, my Father is always with me: He is not “out there” or “up
there” or in some particular “holy” spot. So I began to live my life as one who has a companion.
When I have something to talk about, I talk. When He has something to say, I listen and respond.
Sometimes I do find a quiet spot and really hunker down to pray or intercede. Sometimes we just sit
together quietly. I am never without a conscious awareness of my Dad hanging out with me. This,
for me, adequately explains what Paul is saying.

To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words
may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an am-
bassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.

Please read over my thoughts in my stuff on Romans about God not doing all that much in the affairs
of men unless we ask Him to and work together with Him. He does move sovereignly at times to bet-
ter move things into line with His Plan, but He gives us an awesome amount of authority and influ-
ence with Him as His kids. Paul is not speaking idlely here when he asks for prayer support: His
work and ministry were empowered and enabled as the corporate Body of Christ strengthened the
particular member named Paul.

So that you also may know how I am and what I am doing, Tychicus the beloved brother and faithful minister
in the Lord will tell you everything. I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we
are, and that he may encourage your hearts.

As always, Paul closes his letter with some practical information about his affairs, in this case remark-
ing that Tychicus, who would be carrying this letter, would fill in the details upon request. Tychicus
may very well have been from Ephesus or its sister fellowships, having come to Paul in Rome to sup-
port and comfort him. Now he would return home to encourage them with Paul's return gift.

Peace be to the brothers, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all
who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible.

Paul always closes his letters with a prayer of benediction. Please note that, as always, his regard is
for the believers in Christ. He does not expect the churches to be an undiscriminating NGO of some
sort to the unbelieving world around them. We cannot save, nor even really help, those who who will
not admit the real depth of their need.

255
 Observations on Paul’s Letter to the

COLOSSIANS

256
 As I begin to write these thoughts on Paul’s letters to the churches around Colossae and in the
regions around Galatia, please cut me a bit of slack: I most probably will repeat some of the things
that I have said in my commentaries on Paul’s letters to Rome and Ephesus.

First of all, I am not, at this juncture at least, trying not to be repetitive. These essays are somewhat
stream of consciousness as I move through Paul’s letters, and I do have certain “pet” ideas that seem
to prowl almost ceaselessly through much of my ponderations. These will, I’m sure, make appear-
ances: I will try to make them interesting and worth the repetition.

Secondly, Paul, himself, was writing as a pastor to the many far-flung and diverse congregations that
he had planted or influenced as he traveled on his missionary journeys, and he often says much the
same thing to each of them, and we have thirteen of his letters in the New Testament. Therefore, as I
explore his thoughts, I naturally am going to be covering with him some of the same ground multiple
times, though I hope with a bit different insight each time.

Lastly, and I don’t think of least importance, I will say with all the apostolic writers that the truths of
God are of enough importance to our present safety and nurture and to our eternal progress that they
bear repeating. (Philippians 3:1; 2 Peter 1:9ff) We children of Adam are, by habit, spiritually dull and lazy
creatures, readily (and often willingly) deceived and easily distracted, and we are living in a diabolical-
ly wicked war zone with a supernaturally powerful enemy arrayed against us whose primary assault is
upon our minds: We need to be constantly reminded of who we are and Whom it is we serve, of what
our weapons are, and of how to use them, and of what our High King and Father expects of us. We
are foolish stupid prey if we think we can navigate this cosmic conflict without such repeated slaps
upside the head. There is, I think, at least some Truth in what I have written.

As with the earlier explorations of Romans and Ephesians, I have no intention of covering ground that
has been trampled to sterility by generations of both well-meaning and unbelieving scholars who
have propagated like mushrooms, whether edible or poisonous, in the dark and hallowed catacombs
of Christendumb over the past two millennia. You may discover all that historical information for your-
self, as I have done, by countless hours of old fashioned Bible study and research: Just be sure to
winnow out the chaff from the wheat…there is a great deal of chaff. (A word to the sincere seeker:
Conservative scholars tend to actually believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that
Paul and the other writers received what they wrote from God and were telling the Truth. Liberal
scholars don’t. While liberal scholars possibly can offer informative hard data insofar as that data is
derived from purely objective observation, their interpretations of that data, being based on naturalis-
tic assumptions, cannot lead to conclusions that take the supernatural into account: Garbage in, Gar-
bage Out.)

Neither am I particularly interested in commenting on the obvious: I most likely will let text that is
straightforward speak for itself, and I will expect any serious student of the Bible to refer to any of the
multitude of commentaries that have already been written for insights on most things that might be
regarded as practical day to day Christian life and practice. The stuff that interests me tends to be
what I perceive as lying behind Paul’s thinking… what is written between the lines in his letters, and it
is this sort of thing that I will most likely comment upon. Having listened to Paul’s letters being read
aloud in their entirety a couple of thousand times, my desire has been to try to understand the man
behind the letters and how the revelation that informed and motivated his life applies to us today in
our generation, which I happen to believe is either the last, or the next to the last generation of the
“times of the Gentiles”.

257
Regarding my own thoughts to follow:

I have made it clear in the personal introductory comments that I included as an appendix to these
commentaries that, by virtually all non-Christian and most “mainstream” Christian standards, I am a
fanatic. Personally, I simply believe that I am what anyone who calls themselves a disciple of Jesus
Christ ought to be. I am as committed to Christ as any sincere Muslim is to Allah. I simply believe
that anything worth living for should be worth dying for. This is what I understand New Testament
Christianity to be. My kids think I am out of my mind (and are proud of it) because I haven’t compro-
mised my position in 38 years. I don’t believe that I am, but that is my own personal opinion.

If I am wrong about the things upon which I muse, then any of you who chooses to toss my rants into
the trash is perfectly free to do so. Those of you who believe that when we die we all turn into inter-
stellar dust will not even be able to say “I told you so”. Nothing I, nor you, have ever said or thought
or done will matter at all: I am as irrelevant as you are. You will have been proven right. And no one
will care. Those of you who believe that we all ascend into some sort of paisley painted Nirvana may
mock me to my face over tofu and bean sprouts when we all get there, unless the universal love in
your hearts so overwhelms you that you can’t because we are just so happy together as one big cos-
mic family. Or unless we’re all so lost in our great cosmic soul that you don’t know who either you or I
am anymore. But if I am the least bit right, then I hope at least some of you listen to what I am trying
to say, so that at least you and I will be able to hang out together and commiserate about good things
to come….I’m sorry that the rest of you won’t be there to join us.

I am writing these things after having spent three-plus years simply listening to the New Testament,
and especially Paul’s writings, being read out loud, without interruption in their entirety, as they were
meant to be received in the predominantly oral culture to which they were originally penned. (And I
listened to a particularly fine reader, Alexander Scourby, who did not “dramatize” the texts, but read
them as letters and other such documents ought to be read…. I highly recommend the experience.)
I have listened to each of Paul’s most theological letters (Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians,
Colossians ) somewhere around two thousand times straight through and without interruption, and
the rest of the New Testament perhaps a thousand times. At this point I have lost count. These pro-
found texts have become very much a part of me at this point in time, especially when added in this
way to the disciplines of formal theological, academic, and personal study that I have pursued over
the last almost four decades. These current writings are a personal exercise in ordering my thoughts
after this period of devotional discipline. To this end, there are some verses which I spend consider-
able time reflecting upon, and others that I give less attention to. Also, I am not particularly con-
cerned with the issues Paul was dealing with in his immediate place and time, though I am well aware
of these. I believe that the Lord has much grander purposes in mind as He inspires His writers, and
that He has a very direct message for us, who stand at the end of the age of the Church, which must
be brought to the fore if we are not going to find out too late that we have been asleep on our watch.
It is this message I am most interested in discovering and understanding because I believe that if we
are at the end of the age we are entering into what will be the most troublous times in all of the bibli-
cal history.

At times I will allude to things that I have written earlier in the Romans and Ephesians essays. I am
going to try not to overtly rewrite the thoughts that I explored there and I ask you to acquire and read
those essays as well as these, especially as my thoughts will tend to jump around a bit, and only by
reading everything I have written will you really get the whole picture I am trying to paint. I will have
to make the assumption that you will labor to put all of my ramblings together and will make whatever
effort you need to fully begin to glimpse the same wonderful vista that the Lord seems to be allowing
me to begin to see. Please be fair and don’t pull my words out of context. I am trying to paint an ac-
curate picture of a spectacular sunrise: All true artists know it can’t be done. What you are getting is
more like a gallery of my attempts to capture different moments of the dawn sky.

258
As with my earlier commentaries, the scriptural quotations will be in red, and my own thoughts will be
in black. The bulk of the quotes will be from the English Standard Version . I make the assumptions
that God is quite able to communicate His Word to the many diverse peoples of the human race over
the millennia of time, that He is speaking to “common” people and not elitists, and that most (though
not all) of our modern translations are quite clear enough expressions of that Word. As far as I am
concerned, overmuch reliance on returning to “the original languages” and “the original Greek”, espe-
cially when 99.9% of Christians are completely incompetent in the study of these complex ancient lan-
guages, is either a fool’s wander into heresy or a Pied Piper’s pathway into the same subtle
entrapments of priestcraft that were so much the stock in trade of the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’
and Paul’s day, and which became the power-base of Rome and the Papacy, and are still the tools of
enslavement used by the lords of Christendumb today.

The heart of Truth is clearly written on the face of scripture, in whatever language into which it has
been translated. No one needs a priest, or a minister, or a theologian to interpret it for them: Only the
relationship of a child to its Father, and the Mind of Christ, and the Life of the Teacher/Comforter flow-
ing through them to “guide them into all Truth, and to remind them of everything that He has taught them.”
John 14:26

I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. But the anointing that you received from
him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about
everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him. 1 John 2:26-27

(I am not saying that teachers and the teaching gift is unnecessary or unscriptural! I am only saying
that the Word of God is open and clear to each and every believer who comes to it with a teachable
and humble spirit, and is not the exclusive province only of especially anointed “clergy” or “experts”.
Of course, older, wiser, more mature Christians are called to nurture and teach younger and less ma-
ture believers…This is common sense. Experience does count for something.)

As before in my other writing, I may, or may not, give chapter and verse references to my scriptural
quotations. It is always a good exercise for you, the reader and hopefully a “disciple“, to crack open a
concordance and search out the case I am arguing for yourself: “Be Berean” (Acts 17:11). You can do
this the old fashioned way with a hard-bound copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance or Young’s
Analytical Concordance (or one of many others), or by using a good study Bible like The Spirit-Filled
Life Study Bible, or you can go online to The Blueletter Bible.

I do feel that I am qualified to write a commentary such as this. My testimony is significant and intact
after 38 years, and can be read on my website at www.rstoman.com (That is, if I have managed to
maintain that part of the webpage. I will send it to you as a PDF if you ask.) My wife and I were at
Pinecrest Bible Training Center (now Bethany Bible Training Center) for several years, where I was
mentored by Wade Taylor, Steve Wilber, Millie Bertell, and Ben Bertell. I also have a considerable
academic background in biblical studies, sociology, philosophy, and world religions, and a summa
cum laude degree, well earned, from Houghton College. I have a bit of formal seminary training
(unfortunately…or fortunately…interrupted by the realities of life). My wife and I have been pastors,
and I taught for a time, back in the day, at the college level at the church based seminary program at
Tulsa Christian Fellowship, where I also spent three years in a ministerial internship program under Dr.
Charles Farah and Elder Jim Garrett. I have continued my own study of the scripture for the past 25
plus years since I left formal schooling. Of course, the seeds I scatter here will have to germinate and
grow, and their fruit will need to be judged in its time.

259
 HISTORICAL SETTING

Colossians is another of Paul’s “Prison Letters”, written most probably from Rome in the years pre-
ceding his martyrdom (A.D. 62-65). It was written to a fellowship Paul had never visited that was be-
ing exposed to a stew of false teachings and “mystery religions” that were confusing the believers
away from the simplicity and clarity of life in Christ. Paul writes to clear the air of all the confusion of
spirits and demigods and rituals that accompanied the various cultic beliefs and philosophic mumbo-
jumbo, and to exalt Christ to His proper place above all such foolishness. The city of Colossae lay to
the East of Ephesus in Asia Minor, and the church there may have been started by Epaphras and
was probably meeting in the home of Philemon.

260
 The Letter to the Colossians

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brothers
in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father.

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

I have remarked at length in my other writings on Paul’s carefully maintained distinctions between the Per-
sons of the Triune Godhead, and upon why it is foundational to Christian growth and maturity that we, as
believers, grow lifelong in our comprehension of the Trinity, Its relationship to us, and our relationship to It.
Without an unfolding understanding of this Mystery, as much as God is willing and able to reveal to us, we
will never be able to “grow up into the fullness of the stature of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13) I do ask that you read
what I have written in my other essays on these things, and that you continue to prayerfully ponder the
concepts of Jehovah’s fatherhood toward us, of Christ’s lordship over us, and of the operations of the Holy
Spirit in and through us.

when we pray for you,

“When” ~ Paul does not speak of prayer as a formal exercise, a reciting of lists or incantations: He was
death on such things. He prayed much, in many ways and in many settings, but he speaks in another let-
ter of “unceasing prayer” (1 Thessalonians 5:17 cf. Luke 18:1) . For him, prayer was the upwelling of the deep
compassion of the heart of God within him for human beings, and of his own concern for those to whom
he had carried the message of the Gospel and into whom he had invested his life. His prayer life was a
constant conversation with his Lord, his Father, his friend. “When” his thoughts alighted upon some such
as these, or “when” the Spirit of Christ within him moved him to “stand in the gap” in intercession for some-
one in need, or “when” some other concern lay upon his heart he spoke conversationally with his Father
concerning these matters; they talked things over….He prayed. His letters are full of mentions of his
prayer life and allusions to his habits, and do indicate that he spent much time both alone with God and in
corporate prayer. He seems also to have kept up some “formal” disciplines of prayer, whether for his own
purposes or to “become all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9:22-23) not being made clear. All prayer is good
and no discipline of prayer is to be gainsaid. But prayer should be “warm” and meaningful, not a religious
formality, and when we pray we should be engaged in a real communion with our Father, and not simply
be going through a routine of motions and memorized words.

since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope
laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel,

John, the beloved apostle, writes:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest
among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not
that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if
God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides
in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of
his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of world. Whoever con-
fesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the
love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this love
is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the Day of Judgment, because he is so also are we in
this world. There is no fear in love, but love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears
has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his broth-
er, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And
this is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. 1 John 4:7-21

261
 John, in a concise and almost poetic way, expands Paul’s implication: God, because of His great
love for fallen man, sent His Son, the Christ, to resolve our irresolvable problem of sin. Through His
self-sacrifice, the Lord Jesus Christ, the God~Man, has created a way for us to return to our proper
place with our Creator, and has empowered us through His Spirit to enable us to do this: This is the
Gospel, the “good news”. We know this is true because it is a radically life-changing and on-going
experience. We are transformed by it: Therefore we have confidence and hope. And because His
life is in us and we have this extraordinary Hope propelling us forward, we have an infinite resource
upon which to draw for ourselves and out of which to bless others. If we do not exhibit these Christ-
like characteristics developing in our lives in a progressive and increasing way we most probably do
not know Him in Truth. If at some point in the past we have come to know Him, then for some reason
the progress of our relationship has been interrupted, and it is imperative that we discover and deal
with that issue so that we can resume our forward progress. Biblical Christianity is not a creedal be-
lief system….it is not a religion: It is a way of life.

Returning to Colossians:

which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—as it also does among you,
since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth,

The Gospel, since the Day of Pentecost, has been in the world in two ways. The Holy Spirit was
“poured out upon all flesh” (Acts 2:17) on that day. This is a profound Truth. Prior to the Resurrection of
Christ, this world lay under the heavy hand of Lucifer, “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), and had
been so besieged since Adam ceded the deed to the pretender in the Garden in Eden. God had giv-
en this world to Adam (Genesis 1:28-30), and when Adam lost his throne, even the Sovereign God would
not trespass upon another’s dominion against His own rules and in violation of His own justice: Luci-
fer (Satan…”the Adversary”) had “won” control, albeit by deceit, and Adam and Eve and their descen-
dants after them were legally enslaved. (Luke 4:6)

The Holy Spirit, therefore, had no free access to the world of men, after the Fall. Whereas before Eve and
then Adam broke covenant and tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
God had walked daily with His children in Paradise, now that sweet and open fellowship was lost. God
had, by His own immutable laws, been banished. (See my earlier thoughts on Paul’s letter to the Ro-
mans.)

Until the coming of Christ, then, we discover through the Old Covenant writings that the Holy Spirit
and the other members of the Godhead would only meet with certain select individuals…generally
men and women of great faith (“righteous in their generation” cf. Genesis 6:9) and usually by “invitation” of
some sort, and would only move in limited ways in the affairs of men. (I say this with care…please
read my other thoughts to get a fuller picture: I am not implying that God is not Sovereign, and He
can, did, and does move in the affairs of men to further His larger Purposes that over-arch merely hu-
man activities, but words are very imprecise and inadequate tools to use when speaking of eternal
things. I am speaking here of His dealings with human beings as individuals and communities, and
as regards His operations within the realm that He had deeded to Adam and his legacy.) As it is
clearly defined and recorded in scripture:

The heavens are the LORD’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man. Psalm 115:16

This realm, “the earth”, was legally lost to Lucifer by Adam’s act of rebellion: This is clearly stated in
the following passage recorded in the Gospel of Luke.

And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him,
“To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I
will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Luke 4:5-7
262
At the time of His temptation in the wilderness Jesus did not challenge His enemy on this point. How-
ever, after the Resurrection, everything changed. (The Resurrection is the watershed between the
Old Covenant and the New Covenant.) Whereas before the Resurrection and ascension of Christ,
the Holy Spirit had only limited access to certain faithful persons, entirely new conditions prevailed
once Christ regained “all authority in Heaven and on earth.” Matthew 28:18

Peter quotes, in Acts 2, the prophet Joel:

“ ‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, (the whole world; to prepare as many who are willing to
hear)

and your sons and daughters (the Church) shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants (the Church)
in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. (They shall speak the Word of the
Lord and the message of the Kingdom to the Spirit-prepared world)
And I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke;
the sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood, (There will also be undeniable signs given that even those whose eyes
and ears are shut will be unable to ignore)
before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.
And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

When the Risen Lord ascended, He sent the Comforter (the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete… “the one who
comes alongside” ) into the world of men. And with the Comforter came the message of the Gospel
to “every creature under Heaven”. Colossians 1:23 (see also John 16:7-15)

I argued at length in the Romans-Ephesians essays that in the world there is, and has been through
time, a body of persons that the Bible refers to as “the called according to His purposes” (Romans 8:28) or
“the elect” (Romans 11:5-7). Since Satan was defeated and God’s law was fulfilled and the Holy Spirit was
released by the “Finished Work of Calvary”, the Paraclete-Comforter has been present 24/7/365 in
the world of men “calling” to Himself every child, woman, and man “with ears to hear”.

Jesus said “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10:27). There are those who are “His sheep”. There are
those who are not. (Please read my other essays on how such distinctions come about and on the
paradox of predestination and free will.)

Even in the Old Testament allusion is made to the “voice of God” speaking through the creation itself.
Once Christ rose and ascended that voice became a spiritual summons that can be heard in every
heart that even minimally desires to escape from darkness and discover light…a voice which grows
louder and clearer with every stumbling step away from sinfulness and spiritual death and toward san-
ity and Life.

It doesn’t matter from where a soul begins the journey….all sincere seekers will eventually be found
by (or will find…it is impossible to separate these images) Christ, and through Christ will find their way
back into a right relationship with their Creator and Father.

263
 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never
perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all,
and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. John 10:27-29

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. (prevenient grace) And I will raise him up
on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and
learned from the Father comes to me. John 6:44-45

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the
Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. (non-Jewish
seekers worldwide) I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one
shepherd. (The global Spirit-filled, Spirit-led Church) John 10:14-16

This is the reason Paul can say that the Gospel has “gone forth into all the world”.

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have, for

“Their voice has gone out to all the earth,

and their words to the ends of the world.” Romans 10:17-18

(I just finished rereading C.S.Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. I had not read the whole series in
many years and was surprised at how much it was not a children’s story, though perhaps in Lewis’
mind it had started out to be. In the last chapter, The Last Battle, Lewis does a masterful job of ex-
ploring this idea of the heart of the true seeker. I suggest this set of novels to you as a delightful and
insightful read.)

Continuing:

And in a far more specific and individual sense, the Holy Spirit is personally and symbiotically “in”
each Christian who has surrendered to Christ. He becomes the believer’s source of Life…the way by
which they “participate in the Divine Nature”. (2 Peter 1:4)

When a seeker “accepts” Christ, a transformation takes place. Paul uses the word metamorphosis,
and uses it with at least its full (caterpillar to butterfly) meaning in mind. I have argued that the heart
of Paul’s theology of Christ is fully revealed in his statement in Galatians 2:20, which we will explore
in a bit.

At the moment of the beginning of this transformation, the infant believer is “born from above” (John 3:3-8)
by the Holy Spirit…as Jesus put it to His twelve:

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another help-
er, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him
nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. John 14:15-17

The Holy Spirit, who, in prevenient grace, has been moving upon all who have even the slightest hun-
ger for Truth to convict them of sin and to lead them toward Christ, at the moment of their surrender
joins Himself in union with them and is the Life of Christ (Col. 3:4) that transforms them into children of
God. (Romans 8:11,16) This is the biblical “New Birth” experience that creates a true Christian (as con-
trasted with a “nominal Christian“, who may have assented to a creed and be attempting to religiously
practice the teachings of Christ, but who has not yet surrendered their will to Him in full repentance,
or accepted His Sovereign lordship over their lives.)

264
 Through His mediation (1 Corinthians 2:14-16) we now enter into participation in the Mind of Christ and
begin to learn what it is to be heirs of the Kingdom and sons and daughters of the High King of Heav-
en with the promise of full inheritance if we grow into maturity. Through Him, we begin to understand
the love of our Father: We begin to learn how to say “Abba”…. “Abba” is the Aramaic familiar word for
“Daddy“, and is the name by which Jesus addressed God the Father, during His incarnation as the
Pattern Son. It was a special intimate name used only by small children when speaking to their par-
ent, and Jesus instructed us that it is the name by which we are to address our Father in prayer. No
non-Christian will be able to do this: This degree of familiarity with God will be impossible for them to
accept. (Mark 14:36; Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6)

just as you learned it from our beloved servant.

Most of the time the Gospel message comes to us through preaching and teaching….mano a mano,
as it were. It is a living message, conveyed and displayed by and through living messengers (Greek:
angelos). As words alone it is insufficient: It must be demonstrated, imparted, implanted, and out-
worked. It is a way of life, not a good idea. Jesus is not a “great moral teacher”. It is ignorant and
foolish to try and define Him as such. He is either who He claimed to be, the Son of God and the Sav-
ior of the World, or He is a megalomaniac madman, or He is a diabolically evil creature of some sort.
No man or woman can make the claims He makes and bind so many millions of souls to themselves
against an alternative of eternal condemnation as has Jesus Christ and be a “great teacher”. He is
either True or He is sadistic, sick, and horrible. (please read C.S.Lewis’ Mere Christianity, from which
I borrowed this thought.)

NO! The character and quality of the person on record are too stellar! Even His enemies have con-
sistently acknowledged this for two thousand years. It must be true!! Two thousand years of history
and testimony are sufficient proof beyond reasonable doubt. The record has stood the test of time.
(And the many failures among Christians along the way only serve to prove its validity, because there
are also very many successes. Just because the Way is narrow does not mean that it is a myth. Je-
sus Himself clearly taught that a significant portion of those who began to follow Him would fail to
meet the challenge. Matthew 7:13-14; Matthew 22:14 ) He is the unique God~Man. The expectations He
has of us, and which He himself demonstrated for over thirty years, cannot be met by human aspira-
tion, however sincere or noble, or achieved by merely human labors. He deliberately set the stan-
dard far too high: They are impossible by all unassisted human effort. We are “saved by grace through
faith” (Ephesians 2:8) that comes through Him, not us.

However, when there are no human messengers to bring the Word, then God certainly is not going to
abandon those who are seeking Truth: He will meet them as they search for it, wherever they are.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future
and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and
find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the LORD, Jeremiah 29:11-13

(I know that these words were spoken to Israel in her captivity in Babylon, but based upon New Cove-
nant truths about who constitutes “the Israel of God” I am willing to extend them to apply them to any-
one who is in exile in a foreign or hostile environment, surrounded by ungodly situations, and isolated
from godly influences, but who desperately desires to escape their captivity and to live righteously. I
am unwilling to commit the eternal destinies of lost souls only to the fickle and vacillating obedience
of Christian missionaries who may or may not be willing to obey the call of their Lord when He asks
difficult things of them. And there are thousands of testimonies of believers who have been sover-
eignly saved through visions and dreams and other supernatural visitations where no mortal Chris-
tians were in any way involved.

265
God desires “all men and women to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the Truth” 1 Timothy 2:4, and
He does not require our help in His efforts to accomplish this: Rather, He gives us the privilege and
the blessing of being part of His grand Purpose. It is best to be saved through the witness of others:
It is not essential.) **

** And I would like to point out this troubling example to back up my case. I did some research: At
this point in our history, North Korea seems to be the most closed and anti-Christian nation on the
planet. (Some Muslim nations may come close, and I am sure there are other isolationist communi-
ties around the world as well.) Communist North Korea has a population of some 23 million people,
most of whom are nearly starving to death. If you are discovered to be a Christian in North Korea,
you are at the very least isolated and persecuted, and, if you are at all evangelical, are probably im-
prisoned immediately: Very likely, you are executed. No one is really sure because the country is so
isolationist and xenophobic. There are proportionally very few Christians among the native popula-
tion: There are some. Few Christian missionaries can enter the country from outside its borders:
They must do so clandestinely, and if they are caught they are imprisoned immediately. South Kore-
ans do have some access, I believe, because of family ties across the border. The general popula-
tion of North Korea is cult-like, and has been brainwashed from the cradle into the worship of Kim
Jong IL, who with his father Kim Il Sung have been deified by an all pervasive national personality
cult. Now that Kim Jong IL has died, this worship will in all likelihood be transferred to his successor
son, Kim Jong-un. The vast majority of the population has never had any contact with the world out-
side of the borders of North Korea. There are far too few Christians within the North Korean popula-
tion, and they are far too hidden, to minister to such a vast xenophobic, brainwashed, and paranoid
population. This means that the great majority of North Koreans certainly have had little or no oppor-
tunity to be exposed to the Gospel, and they are victims of brutal and suffocating mind control. Ac-
cording to traditional Fundamentalist Evangelical dogma, every such North Korean who dies will go to
Hell because they die in their sin and have not accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. According to
the most recent CIA statistics I was able to find, about 10.5 persons per 1000 population die per day
in North Korea. If I figured this out right, this means that a bit under 24,000 people (adults and chil-
dren) die each day. A Fundamentalist is required by their statement of faith to consign these souls to
Hell without mercy: I cannot do this. For me, such a dogmatic belief denies the heart of the Father as
He has revealed Himself in the scripture, and especially in the New Covenant in Christ. There must
be a provision in God for such persons as these who might be caught in such a hell-hole as North
Korea or other such closed societies (e.g. Saudi Arabia, where witnessing Christians are routinely
killed), but who are actually crying out from such darkness, to find a glimmer of True light. I believe
that Paul clearly speaks of such a provision as it was revealed to Him by Christ Himself. I have ar-
gued this case in my essays on Romans and Ephesians. You may believe what you like, but you
must live with your conscience and be willing to defend your position before the Lord when the time
comes for you to do so.

In Colossians:

He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit. And so, the
from day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his
will in all wisdom and understanding,

A thousand books have been written and a million sermons preached on the subject of prayer. How
many of us have reached this deeply concerning the requests we are to be making to our Father for
one another? What does it really mean to be “filled” with “all” knowledge and spiritual wisdom and
understanding of the will of God for our lives? Do we even really want to be so filled? The implica-
tions of such knowledge are staggering, for “of him to whom much is given, much is required.” Luke 12:48

266
We all know that with increased privilege comes increased responsibility. As we live out our Christian
lives the question we need to be regularly returning to, regularly asking of ourselves, is do we really
want the responsibilities of “ruling and reigning with Him?” 2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 20:6 “Uneasy lies the
head that wears a crown.” Shakespeare’s King Henry laments. The warnings of Christ to count the
costs before beginning to build a tower come to mind. Luke 14:28-33 It is better, I think, to decide early
on that the paths of discipleship may not be the paths you want to walk than it is to boldly set out on those
paths with brash bravado only to decide to turn back when the going begins to become a bit strenuous
and you begin to have second thoughts about your decision. True Christian discipleship is ultimately go-
ing to cost you everything… including your life. (However, so is rejecting the Gospel and living according
to the “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we shall die” alternative... and we’ve already discussed the
futility of “religions” as a way around the sin and guilt problem. You might as well spend your life in a no-
ble cause rather than waste it swimming in the cesspool.)

Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Luke
9:62

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I
have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And
whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and
whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Matthew 10:34-39

In Colossians:

so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, pleasing to him,

“I’m trying”….”I’m doing my best”….”Hey, nobody’s perfect”…”Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven”….

Somehow, if Paul were alive around today I don’t think he would accept these excuses, at least not glibly
spoken. Nothing short of Christlikeness was the acceptable standard held up by the original apostles.
That’s what Jesus demanded of them and commanded them to teach others to meet. “You will be perfect,
because my Father in Heaven is perfect.” Matthew 5:48 That’s what Jesus said. (He meant holy and spiritual-
ly mature, not flawless.) “How can you say you love Me, and not do what I ask?” Luke 6:46 They all died
reaching after that goal. Paul was twenty-five years into his Christian journey and only a few years
from his martyrdom when he wrote:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ
Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forget-
ting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the
upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you
think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Brothers, join
in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. Philippians 3:12-
16

And he was able to say, at the end of his life from a Roman dungeon, awaiting Nero’s headsman,

For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the
good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righ-
teousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all
who have loved his appearing. 2 Timothy 4:6-8

267
 So who are we, just because we might have convinced ourselves after two thousand years that no-
body is really looking, and that Daddy is really just as “tolerant” as we are (“tolerance” meaning that
“I‘ll let you get away with what I want to be able to get away with” or “I don’t want anybody to be upset
with me”), to water down the standard because so many people are whining that it’s so hard to make
the grade, (and because when they leave the Sunday assembly for greener pastures the bottom line
tends to suffer and we can’t make budget projections)?

There’s a “great cloud of witnesses” Hebrews 12:1, many of whom have paid for their testimony with their
lives (see Hebrews 11, and Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and visit http://www.persecution.com/) who are
watching us wimp out and figure out all sorts of ways to say “has God really said?” Genesis 3:1 about the
more “strenuous” teachings of the Word. No, sometimes it is very difficult to walk in a manner worthy
of the Lord… very costly indeed to be fully pleasing to Him, but no price He asks us to pay can be
greater than the one He paid for us. He is asking nothing of us that He Himself has not already en-
dured. (Hebrews 4:14-5:7)

In Colossians:

bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God

Paul prays this constantly for those he midwifes into the Kingdom…And I think that in many fellow-
ships today we have lost sight of this. Marilyn and I gave ten years of our lives to a terrific local
church which, unfortunately, we finally had to admit has been so focused upon “saving the lost” that it
is really and habitually doing a good job of losing (or at least neglecting) the saved.

It isn’t doing this deliberately. It’s just that the vision of the church is skewed so intensely toward the
unsaved, that it ends up neglecting the nurture of those it so energetically rescues out of the hand of
the enemy, and far too many who joyfully join the fellowship after they meet the Lord through its out-
reach ministries eventually move on to other places where they can be better fed and are able to
grow “in the knowledge of God.” Colossians 1:10; Ephesians 4:13; 2 Peter 1:2 Those who don’t drift away begin
to go “around and around the same mountains” Deuteronomy 2:3: Deuteronomy 1:6 week after week, month after
month, year after year, not even really realizing that they are stagnating. They just never grow up be-
yond a certain point…And the assembly rather looks like Peter Pan’s Neverland in a sanctified sort of
way. This is a pattern typical of hundreds of local fellowships around our nation, which end up becom-
ing parochial social clubs throwing two or three worship parties a week, or dynamic charitable out-
reach organizations lasting sometimes two or three generations before they finally run out of energy,
atrophy and wither, and die away. Other “home groups” and “house churches” simply delight and
take great pride in being tiny and insular and effectively useless…remnants and off-scourings “minis-
tering unto the Lord until He comes”. (Thankfully, there are many fellowships that DO NOT fall under
these chastisements, who are ministering both to the Body and to the world around them.)

We are to grow forever into a vital mirror reflection of the Lord who inhabits us symbiotically. As I
have argued in my earlier essays, we are without excuse. He is the root, we are the fruit (or more
accurately, the fruit bearing branches). His life is our life.

He has imparted to us in this mortal life ALL the same resources He Himself drew upon when He emp-
tied (Romans 8: 11; 2 Peter 3:1-8) Himself and became one of us. Our primary complaint tends to be that
boot camp is tough and that the drill sergeant is a drill sergeant. But when we accepted our New Life,
we did sign up for this. It is not His fault that we didn’t take time to understand what we were agree-
ing to: It is written in red letters, not in fine print, after all. We did not accept just a Savior: We accept-
ed Jesus Christ as Savior and LORD. (Again, I suggest you watch Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”

268
Trilogy to get an idea of what lordship means. It is a difficult concept for us Americans to grasp. Jack-
son does a pretty decent job of depicting the roles and relationships of sovereign kings and their sub-
jects as well as telling a wonderful story of a war between good and evil. Sovereignty, and Lordship,
and Kingship in the Bible are absolute terms.)
I will point out that there is an escape clause in the contract in Hebrews 11:13-16, but it is a one time
deal ( Heb 6:4-8) with consequences (Hebrews 10:31;11-13).

Think about these scriptures:

whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31

with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as servants of
Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man,
Ephesians 6:5-7

not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do,
work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as
your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. Colossians 3:22-24

not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. 1 Thessalonians 2:4

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to
please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Galatians 1:10

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,

and to turn away from evil is understanding. Job 28:28

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse ,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
And Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. Isaiah 11:1-2

The man declares, I am weary, O God;

I am weary, O God, and worn out.
Surely I am too stupid to be a man.
I have not the understanding of a man.
I have not learned wisdom,
nor have I knowledge of the Holy One.
Who has ascended to heaven and come down?
Who has gathered the wind in his fists?
Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is his name, and what is his son’s name?
Surely you know! Proverbs 30:1-4
269
Returning to Colossians:

May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might,
for all endurance and patience with joy,

Would Paul pray a prayer such as this if he did not expect it to be answered? If he thought it were
just a fine sounding pious platitude that would make him appear anointed and prophetic to the shee-
ple in the congregation to whom he is writing the letter? I don’t think so. Paul knows his Lord and the
resources available to him through Christ for the asking. And he has no trouble asking for ALL of
them, so that the Colossians can be fully equipped for the challenges they are facing. As he wrote to
Timothy:

do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel
by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his
own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which now has been mani-
fested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality
to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher, which is why I suffer
as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard
until Day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words you have heard from me, in the
faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrust-
ed to you. 2 Timothy 1:8-14

I have argued before that we are to spend most of our prayer time in communion with our Father, but
here it does seem, if I am following Paul’s use of pronouns rightly, that he is talking about asking
these things of the Risen Lord Jesus Christ, which means that I must moderate a bit my earlier strong
statements about prayer to our Father: (See the essays on Romans and Ephesians). Here Paul does
seem to be saying that he is seeking the empowerment of the Holy Spirit through the directing hand
of the Risen Lord under the oversight of the Father, and that he is requesting these things of Christ
Himself in his prayers, and not of our Father in Christ’s name. (You can work through the other side
of my argument on this in the Romans/Ephesians essays.) I am not so much a legalist as to argue
that we cannot have good conversation amongst all the members of our Family - children, Firstborn
Big Brother, and Dad - though I will stand upon my earlier argument that the Son came most deliber-
ately to teach us to communicate directly with our Father face to face, and I believe that we miss the
opportunity for greater intimacy with our God if we get into a habit focusing on Jesus only in our
prayer.

strengthened This is spiritual strength much more than merely physical

with all power (by every enabling power being constantly strengthened)

, according to his glorious might, (Expositors says: “The equipment with power is proportioned not simply
to the recipient’s need, but to the divine supply.”)

This takes myriad forms. It is the same spiritual supernatural power that raised Christ from the grave.
It includes both physical power and strengthening of character. It is the spirit of prophecy and the
creative word. It is none of our own. It is HIS might. We do not have to work ourselves into a Pente-
costal frenzy or agonize for hours in prayer or bluster and bellow and shout to somehow invoke this
power… All of these things might or might not happen depending upon the emotional state and psy-
chology of a person, but they aren’t necessarily evidence of the presence and power of our God in
and through us. Sometimes the Lord is very quiet, sometimes He is extraordinarily loud. The mature
believer is in tune with His Father’s moods, and in control of his own. (“and the spirits of prophets are sub-
ject to prophets. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”) 1 Corinthians 14:32-33

270
for all endurance and patience with joy,

We are to be a stable, unhasty, patient people, not impulsive; disciplined and self-controlled. And joyful,
not prisoners of our emotions. Joy is not a feeling: It is a state of being. It is far beyond being simply hap-
py or feeling good. It is much more the sense of confident hope-filled stability that is secure in eternal real-
ities that are fixed and unchanging whether or not the present world is in upheaval or is relatively calm.
Joy is a state of mind that is independent of circumstances, which is anchored immovably in the bedrock
of Divine self-confidence, that is, God’s confidence that He will always accomplish that which He has set
out to do. Our God is joyful. When we are at rest in Him we also are joyful.

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the
Holy Spirit. Romans 14:17

do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your re-
quests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your
hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:6-7

In another letter Paul talks about being “content in whatever circumstance” Philippians 4:11 he finds himself.
The word “content” (autarkes) carries in it the idea of being wholly independent of those circumstances, of
drawing upon resources from a source of supply from somewhere else. This confidence that we are “in,
but not of, this world” John 17 is the soil in which joy is rooted.

In Colossians:

giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He delivered
us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have re-
demption, the forgiveness of sins.

I have spent a lot of time already exploring the Trinity and the “emptying” that the Son of God submitted to
in becoming the God~Man. Ultimately, through Christ, all of creation returns to the Father, cleansed of
evil. It is the Father whose good pleasure it is to give us His Kingdom. It is Him to whom we are to ever
more be thankful. And it is to Him, ultimately, our worship must always be directed.

But it is Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel, the Christ of the Gentile world, the Second Adam, the
God~man, who put on skin and entered our realm to reveal to us the Father, God Almighty,

Paul says of Jesus Christ:

He is the image of the invisible God,

Our Father is pure spirit: We have no senses capable of even detecting Him except as He chooses to
reveal Himself to us, and even then we cannot comprehend what we are experiencing. There are no
adequate criteria of comparison in our realms. The scriptures say that God the Father

is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells
in light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. 1 Timothy 6:15-16

And they teach that the Son of God entered our dimensions to reveal and to begin to explain the Fa-
ther to us

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only,who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. John
1:18

271
Paul says a bit further along of Jesus of Nazareth, the God~Man, that

in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, Colossians 2:9

We all, I venture, or at least most of us in the West, if we have a thought of God, probably imagine a
vague image of some white-bearded stern old man recalling a figure from Michelangelo or Dante or may-
be Homer or Virgil glaring down from a high and regal throne of some sort, with a look of deep disappoint-
ment if not blazing anger in his eyes. Most of us are aware, deep down, that we’ve screwed up big time in
lots of ways, and that we deserve a stern dressing down, if not much worse. And we don’t want to deal
with this, or face Him. Who would?

But that’s not what the Gospel, which means “Good News”, is all about. And that’s why Jesus had to put
on skin. He managed somehow to cram all the glory of God into something we could relate to without
freaking out, and He spent thirty-three years (plus/minus one or two years) with us on our terms to show
us what our Father is really like and how much He wants us to come home where we belong.

Which is what Paul means when he calls Jesus

the firstborn of all creation.

Paul does not mean that Jesus of Nazareth is a creature like all of us sons and daughters of Adam.
He is not essentially, but rather Paul means that He was truly born into our realm as a mortal being
by His own choice to “empty Himself” (Philippians 2:6-7) in submission to His Father’s will. I discuss this
at length in my Romans/Ephesians essays. The second Person of the three-personal God became
one of us so that He could communicate Himself clearly enough with us, who are so horribly es-
tranged from Him, that we could begin to understand how to find our way back into the relationship
with our Creator that we are designed to have.

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether or dominions or rulers
or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all
things hold together.

The Apostle John writes of this same truth:

He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made
that was made. John 1:2

I have tried to explore this mystery at depth in my earlier essays, and I don’t want to rehash all of that
again here: As a commentary, this stuff tends to be repetitive enough as it is. The Son of God, the sec-
ond Person of the Trinity, is described throughout the biblical revelation as the creative executor and ad-
ministrator of the vision of the Father, and as the reason for which the Father expresses Himself. Please
work through my other thoughts to get some idea of where I think Paul is going as he reveals as much as
he is permitted to reveal of all of this.

And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything
he might be preeminent.

I have proposed, I hope soundly, that the Father’s desire is to create for Himself true companionship that
will be able to stand in full freedom bound only by love beside Him and be, in a real sense, unique and
independent from Him (See the Ephesians essays). This “divine creature” is to our present understand-
ing referred to in the scriptures as “the Bride”, “the Church”, “the Body of Christ”, though I believe that
these names all refer to a holy being that is still in process of formation and will someday be even more,
as the scripture seems to prophesy
272
When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in
subjection under him, that God may be all in all. 1 Corinthians 15:28

What this actually means, I do not think it is wise to speculate about. The biblical revelation, if it ex-
tends this far, certainly does not extend farther. We have no need to understand more than this, and
our Faithful Father will, as always, instruct us in whatever else we are to learn when such time comes
as we have need of such instruction.

Returning to Colossians:

who has qualified you

I want to note again here Paul’s inference that we are saved because of an act of God, not because
of something we do. The New Covenant is not a contract between God and man: It is a promise that
God has made and sworn to keep (cf. Hebrews 6:13-20). All we are asked to do for all of the promise to
apply to us is to accept this as true and to enter into it according to its terms.

to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and trans-
ferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

The Apostle John writes “ We know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil
one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him
who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.” 1 John
5:19-20

For thousands of years astrologers and astronomers studied the heavens using only their eyes and
then telescopes that captured more light and allowed their eyes to see fainter objects at greater dis-
tances. And they came to imagine that they understood the universe.

But then our sciences advanced in their understanding and it was quite recently discovered that the
human eye can only see a very small spectrum of wavelengths of radiation, and that the cosmos is
filled with a vast range of energies on wavelengths both below and above those visible to our naked
eyes, the electromagnetic spectrum, spanning a range from ultra-low frequency radio waves to ultra-
high frequency gamma radiation. So we invented instruments of observation which can detect these
hitherto “invisible” spectra, and we have discovered that our cosmos is almost unfathomably huge and
complex, with new revelations being observed almost every hour and with our “assured results of
modern science” being overturned on a daily basis. Most recently we have begun to realize that most
of the universe consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy” which we cannot even detect with any in-
strument, however sophisticated. We are discovering that many, if not most, of our earlier theories
need to be reformulated if not entirely scrapped. (And, unfortunately, instead of being humbled many
hubristic scientists still think they understand the universe.)

There are invisible spiritual realities which the Bible speaks of consistently and which are not meta-
phorical or mythological. The realms of spirit are as real and substantial as are the myriad invisible
radiations of the electromagnetic spectrum, if not moreso. The spiritual aspects of the human being
are the instruments designed to “see” into these places: But since the fall of man these instruments
have been terribly damaged and either don’t function or malfunction, with Christian restoration the on-
ly means of rehabilitation. This is the biblical statement of the facts: The Divine assessment of the situ-
ation. (1 Corinthians 2:6-16 and similar)

273
Before Christian rebirth the unredeemed human soul is inescapably imprisoned in “the domain of dark-
ness” Colossians 1:13, whether or not the person is consciously aware of his or her condition. All un-
saved human beings are vassal slaves to a very real devil in a world overrun by demonic spirits. It
does not matter whether or not a person believes that this is true: It is a fact.
At the moment of its surrender to Christ, that soul is instantaneously liberated into “the Kingdom” of
the Son of God, with all of its promise. This is a reality, not an imagination. The spiritual senses re-
quired to perceive and comprehend these dimensions once more begin to operate as they were
meant to and the believer begins to learn of reality as it actually is, becoming more and more aware
of spiritual things as he or she matures in Christ and grows in the knowledge of God. (Romans 12: 1-2;cf.
2 Timothy 2:25; 2 Peter 1:3-8 )

This makes absolutely no sense to the non-Christian “un-believer”. They are looking at the universe
with their naked eyes only. They think they understand reality. In truth, they are pretty much clueless.
The Bible diagnoses all men as being deceived: How deep this deception goes varies on a case by
case basis.

The “born again” believer, however, now has the “instruments” with which to see reality as it really
is…in all of its multiple dimensions. These are the senses of the “inner man”, the “eyes” and “ears”
and such of spirit (Ephesians 1:18; 3:16; and all references to ‘ears to hear’, etc.) And as he or she learns
to use these gifts and tools the infinite riches of the Kingdom of God are all made available to them
because they are “heirs together with Christ”. Romans 8:17

But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of
God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one com-
prehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but
the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in
words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritu-
al. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not
able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is him-
self to be judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have
the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2:9-16

In Colossians:

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

This, of course, is a clear statement by Paul of the mystery of the Incarnation: The New Covenant
fact that Jesus of Nazareth was both 100% human and 100% Deity. While with us in skin, Jesus was
absolutely one of us and did NOTHING by calling upon His own Divine authority. EVERYTHING He
did He did through communication with and permission from His Father by the power of the Holy Spir-
it in perfect obedience.

274
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of
the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, because he was before me.’ I
myself did not know him, but for this purpose I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.”
And John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did
not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and
remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son
of God.” John 1:29-34

And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he (Jesus) departed and went out to a desolate
place, and there he prayed. Mark 1:35

And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. Matthew 14:23

I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but
the will of him who sent me. John 5:30

“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that am he, and that I do nothing on my own au-
thority, but speak just as the Father taught me. And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I
always do the things that are pleasing to him.” John 8:28-29

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,

but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’ ” Hebrews 10:5-7

So also Christ did not exalt himself to be made a high priest, but was appointed by him who said to him, “You
are my Son, today I have begotten you”; as he says also in another place, “You are a priest forever, after the
order of Melchizedek.” In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and
tears, to him was able to save him from death, and was heard because of his reverence. Although was a son, he
learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salva-
tion to all who obey him, Hebrews 5:5-9

Had He even once moved in direct autonomous Divine Authority as God while He was among us as a
man, He would disqualified Himself to complete the sacrifice He came to make at Calvary in our place,
and the condemnation of humanity brought upon us by Adam’s disobedience would remain.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and
life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedi-
ence the many will be made righteous. Romans 5:18-19

For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so
also in Christ shall all be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15:21-22

The Fullness of God was somehow poured into a perfectly human vessel in Jesus Christ. He said that He
came to show us the Father, to teach us both that the God from whom we are estranged is a terrible Be-
ing with Rules about how His Creation has to work and how His creatures are to behave, and that He is
the most loving Being there is, and that He made us to be with Him and enjoy that love, and that He is
willing to go to the most extraordinary extremes to help us to find our way back to our birthright and our
heritage.
275
And He has promised and proven over and over and over again that all of the resources upon which
He drew when He walked with us are ours for the asking so that we also can walk through this hell-
hole of a world that we find ourselves in with the same Grace and authority and power that He Himself
demonstrated for 33 years in Palestine.
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our
home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but
the Father’s who sent me. John 14:23-24

“These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the , the Holy Spirit, the Father will send in
my name, will teach you all things and to your remembrance all that I have said to you. John 14:25-27

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact Spirit of God dwells in you. who does not have Spir-
it of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is
life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised
Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. So then,
brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh you
will die, but if by the Spirit you to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are by the Spirit of
God are of God. For did not receive spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of as
sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,
and if children, then — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we
may also be glorified with him. Romans 8:9-17

PLEASE read my earlier thoughts and grab hold of this stuff! It WILL change your life!

Continuing in Colossians:

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds,

The battleground for the soul is the mind. With all of our science we have barely begun to scratch the
surface in our understanding of the human brain, and the mind is much much more than the brain that
seems to “contain” it. I only have to call up the menu on my Direct TV remote to be offered a smorgas-
bord of choices of shows about everything from octopus and whale intelligence to dream interpretation,
and depression, and aberrant psychology and what we imagine we know about these things, to prodi-
gy genius and savants and autism to psychic prognostication and parapsychology, and even shows
about brain surgery and neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and the idiocy of Tele-therapists and
alien mind control. We are obsessed with the “mind” and the implications associated with the psychol-
ogy and psyche of man.

There is a reason for this. It is in our DNA that we all at least vaguely remember what we are sup-
posed to be as God’s creations, and how far from that ideal we have fallen away. We are like lost and
abandoned children searching for our birth parent as we dig dig dig deeper into the ruins of our hu-
manity trying to discover and recover our heritage. We are lunatics in an asylum searching for identity.
We are obsessively vivisecting ourselves trying to find ourselves.

276
 The battleground for the soul is the mind. When Lucifer convinced Adam to rebel, and in so doing
wrested from him the authority to rule this world, he became “the god of this world” 2 Corinthians 4:4 …the
“prince of the power of the air” Ephesians 2:2 …. “the deceiver” Revelation 12:9; 1 Timothy 2:14 ... “the accuser” Revela-
tion 12:10 … “Satan (the adversary)” Revelation 12:9. And as an immensely powerful angelic being, a spiritual
entity, hating God and coveting worship, he enslaved the souls of men:

In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the ac-
knowledging of the truth; And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are tak-
en captive by him at his will. 2 Timothy 2:25-26

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, fol-
lowing the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—
among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind,
and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Ephesians 2:1-3

We are, of course, cut of whole cloth, marvelously woven together; We are nearly infinitely intricate
living beings and we cannot be dissected without being destroyed. Our spirits reach into the heaven-
lies, our bodies are material structures, our souls and the minds and personalities that are the expres-
sions of them are somehow regions or zones of interface along this continuum of dimensions.

be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is
good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

Continuing:

he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death,

Let’s play with words for a moment:

The word “conciliate” comes from a Latin word meaning “to meet” or “meeting” and contains the mean-
ings:

1. To overcome the distrust or animosity of; appease.

2. To regain or try to regain (friendship or goodwill) by pleasant behavior.
3. To make or attempt to make compatible; reconcile.

This is what the Bible is all about: It is not the story of a tyrant God who wants to rule mankind with
lightning bolts and brimstone, but rather the plea of a benevolent Sovereign Deity who desires His
renegade and confused creatures to understand their place before Him and to revel in who they have
been created to be. In Jesus Christ our High King has sent a Champion both to fight the enemy of
our souls in single combat and to offer terms of healing peace now that that enemy has been defeat-
ed and victory has been won.

The word “reconcile” is filled with many implications of meaning. At its first level it means a “bringing
back together”: Because of Adam we all are born estranged from our Father. In Jesus Christ we are
able to return to Him. We are brought back together.

Deeper in the word “reconcile” we find the meaning “understanding”. This speaks to us of a sharing
of our hearts, Dad to kid talking, and of our starting to comprehend the “heart of the Father” and His
compassion toward us, of our misunderstandings and our fears going away, and of our coming into
agreement with our God.

277
There is an old Bible word, “propitiation”, which has to do with the sacrifice and atonement of Christ.
It is a word that speaks of the legal finality of the sacrifice for sin in the eyes of God. In the word pro-
pitiation is contained the idea of settling an issue once and for all…of closing the case….of “calming”
things down. The word propitiation has as part of its definition the word “calming”. When we climb
into Daddy’s lap, and lay our head on His vast chest in prayer, and hear His Almighty heart steadily
beat, and we begin to realize that it beats eternally with unfathomable love for us…. we become calm.
This is what the Bible refers to as “the peace of God which passes all understanding.” Philippians 4:7 Jesus
Christ is called “the Prince of Peace”. Isaiah 9:6

There is another bit of meaning in the word “reconcile”: “to harmonize”. To harmonize is to bring or to
come into agreement. And it is not simply to come into lockstep clone-like agreement, I would like to note.
I have stressed that it is God’s desire to have us live in liberty with absolute creative freedom bound to
Him only by our love for Him. Harmony, for example in music, is not everybody singing the same note. It
is each individual singing unique notes that work beautifully together.

When our amazing Father finally finishes this Project of His He will not have some monotonous droning
herd (like a crowd at Nuremburg crying “Heil Hitler” or in Tahrir Square chanting “Death to America” or on
the National Mall in Washington shouting “Yes We Can!” or “No New Taxes!”). He will have a symphony.
A symphony ( a “sound together”) is the amazing result of a huge number of individual instruments all play-
ing different things at the same time actually sounding wonderful (euphony). The reason this is possible is
because each of the musicians has his or her eyes on both the music and the conductor and is willing to
be part of the body of the orchestra: An individual of immense talent choosing to become part of one great
corporate instrument being played by one guiding hand. (The opposite of euphony is cacophony which is
chaotic dissonant noise. This is the sound that would persist if all these musicians insisted on doing their
own thing. Such is the sound of the world in rebellion to God.)

As a last thought: We can experience this without necessarily understanding it. Thankfully, the experience
of love doesn’t require rational thought. We simply have to yield ourselves to it. Over time we will grow in
our understanding, if we submit to the Divine process and practice the Presence of God. (Col.2:2) We do
not have to understand with our heads the Gospel of Christ when we bend our knee, we have to accept
the Lord Jesus Christ into our heart.

In Colossians:

He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death,

Please read again my previous thoughts on the Incarnation

in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

The goal of our salvation is not to save us from Hell and get us to Heaven when we die… God’s pur-
pose is to complete His masterpiece, of which humanity is a key part and for which we can be nothing
less than flawless. To reduce the Gospel to a fire escape plan is a travesty.

Let us rejoice and exult

and give him the glory,
for the marriage of the Lamb has come,
and his Bride has made herself ready;
it was granted her to clothe herself
with fine linen, bright and pure”—
for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. Revelation 19:7-8

278
“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.
Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with
them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom delayed, they all became drowsy and
slept. But at midnight there was a cry, ‘Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those virgins
rose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are go-
ing out.’ But the wise answered, saying, ‘Since there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the deal-
ers and buy for yourselves.’ And while they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready
went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins came also, saying,
‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he answered, ‘Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ Watch therefore, for you
know neither the day nor the hour. Matthew 25:1-13

Continuing in Colossians:

if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard,

I don’t think that Paul can be any more direct here in his implication that it is possible to fall away from
the Grace of our salvation. To be sure, it would be wonderful if we could all rest easy in the guaran-
tee of “once saved always saved”, as many preach, but the New Covenant doesn’t seem to support
this notion any more than it supports the notion of sovereign predestination: Both theologies require
much stretching and pulling of the text. God respects our autonomy of will and our liberty to choose
too much to absolve us of the responsibility of our choices after we cut covenant with Him in Christ.
The New Covenant states that it is very very difficult to “lose” one’s salvation: It does not say that it is
impossible. (I explore these things in the Romans/Ephesians essays.) You can believe otherwise if
you prefer: You may be right, in which case we all win…but I would be sure, if I had even the slightest
of doubts about this point. I, myself, tend to agree with C.S. Lewis who wrote (paraphrasing), “In the
end there will be only two groups of people: Those who have said to God, ‘Thy will be done’, and
those to whom God will say, ‘Thy will be done’”.

which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

I have written at great length earlier of why I believe that Paul teaches that the outpouring of the Holy
Spirit upon all flesh at Pentecost makes it possible for all sincere seekers of Truth, whether or not
they ever are “witnessed” to by a Christian missionary, to encounter the risen Christ and to be led into
a redemptive relationship with Him. I am not going to rehash this here, but as it is a very controversial
idea for some Evangelicals and virtually all Fundamentalists, I ask that those who struggle with it re-
read the essays on Romans, and Paul’s letter, especially where Paul makes his case in the first chap-
ters. Our God of Love does not leave the eternal destinies of human souls solely in the fallible and
clumsy hands of His children. We are not trustworthy enough.
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for
the sake of his body, that is, the church,

Christ, in the flesh, suffered and died for all of us, and, in a real way, for each of us as we embrace and
enter into His sacrifice. And beyond our timeline in a very real way the moment of His sacrifice endures
unendingly, as it has from before the foundation of the world. But we live in time, and His work stands
above us and overarches our time, reaching into our time in and through each one of us who join our-
selves with Him. Some two thousand years have passed since His Incarnation, and billions of human
beings…souls in need of redemption, of reconnection…have been born and have lived and have died.
Over this span individual Christians have moved through the world bearing the light and life of the Gospel
to myriad individuals. As Spirit-filled “little Christ’s”, each of us who know the Lord have lived out our
Christian lives suffering in small or larger ways for and with those individuals we have ministered to. In
becoming Christ to them we each act to “fill up what remains” of His suffering, and will continue to do so
until He returns.
279
Suffering, in Christ, has purposes: God does not necessarily “send” suffering to us…Suffering is part
of the human condition, the result of sin in the world. God allows suffering and uses it as His servant
and a tool to further His purposes. In Christ all things are transformed and made into redemptive ex-
perience as we choose to embrace them in obedience and trust.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together good, for who are called according to his
purpose. Romans 8:28

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as
sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of
God, and if children, then heirs – heirs of God and and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him
in order that we may also be glorified with him. Romans 8:15-17

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who com-
forts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the com-
fort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so
through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation;
and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same
sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you
will also share in our comfort. 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

For we do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly
burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence
of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us
from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.
You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us
through the prayers of many. 2 Corinthians 1:8-11

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain
Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which
comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and
the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means
possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Philippians 3:8-11

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ
Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: for-
getting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of
the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you
think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Philippians 3:12-
16

Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.
For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of
Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly
things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will trans-
form our lowly body be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to him-
self. Philippians 3:17-21

280
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers
and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and
come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and
count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able
to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or
what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able
with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet
a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not
renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26-33

Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for
the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but
because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, and which
now has been manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought
life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher,
which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that
he is able to guard until Day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words you have
heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the
good deposit entrusted to you. 2 Timothy 1:8-14

Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has
suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human
passions but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, liv-
ing in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. 1 Peter 4:1-3
Conversely, to live an easy Christian life is very much a contradiction in terms… What the Old Testa-
ment refers to, and condemns, as “settling back on one’s lees”. (Jeremiah 48:11; Zephaniah 1:12; cf. Amos 6:1ff)
“Lees” or “dregs” are the residues that accumulate at the bottom of a bottle of aged wine…wine that
has been long undisturbed and is fully fermented, which has become “complacent”. Old wine is gen-
erally preferred over new, sweet wine, which obviously packs less of a “punch“ (“sweet wine“ is the
old word for grape juice)…Aged wine is heady and rich, often of rare and costly vintage, but it is not
fresh…it is old…never contemporary…always of the past. And when one drinks a bottle of such wine
“down to the dregs”, one is rendered dull….more than dull: stupid, and witless, and somnambulant.
The scriptures do not condemn the drinking of “old wine”… there are appropriate times (Matthew 13:51-
52)…. But they warn strongly of its dangers.

The challenged Christian is always alive; is always vital, is always pressing into God and through God
to the people of God and beyond. By “filling up the sufferings of Christ that remain” we continue to care
and to be truly compassionate. The drunk feel little. The dead feel nothing. That which is alive can
suffer and therefore can empathize with others at depth: That which is dead cannot. That which suf-
fers can come to understand its own mortality and its own need: That which has not suffered tends to
remain in the delusion that it is invulnerable and immortal and has no needs.

The soul which has not experienced suffering remains a selfish soul. The person who all his or her life
runs from suffering never grows up…never matures. This is at least some of the reason why Christ
remarked that “it is hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:23 Those who are “rich” nev-
er allow themselves to be uncomfortable…they are able to insulate and isolate themselves from reali-
ty (at least until they are forced to face their mortality.) Suffering, rightly accepted and embraced, is a
counterbalance to hubris, and is a safeguard for the soul. We each need to “fill up what remains” of
Christ’s sufferings: He has conquered death for us, but unless we suffer we will not fully realize the
abyssal depth of our need for His life in us. (I recommend, to those of you who have the interest, the
book The Problem of Pain by C.S.Lewis, for a deeper discussion of this subject.)

281
Continuing in Colossians:

of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the
word of God fully known,

Ministry is a calling…a stewardship. It is not to be coveted. It is not to be abused or manipulated into

some instrument of gain or advantage. To be the Lord’s minister is both a privilege and a burden. In
many ways a calling to minister should be one of those things that you should wish you could be doing
anything else but, except that it burns in you like a fire that can’t be extinguished, like a nuclear critical
mass, and it brings joy.

If you want overmuch to stand in front of people and be a “man or woman of God”, if you revel in the
crowd and the glory and seek the spotlight, then you are not ready to be a minister. You will become a
people pleaser, and God often asks His ministers to say things that are not pleasant for people to hear.
You will not be able to do the Lord’s work. You will falter. You will fail. You will fall.

Please remember this, that there is a very high price asked of all who would serve the Lord: He requires
of us everything we are. In one way or another He will ask us to give up our lives in the fullest sense.
And he holds us accountable for everything we say and for every soul we affect for good or ill.

After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the Twelve, “Do you
want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal
life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” John 6:66-69

So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” John 11:16

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of
the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and
count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my
own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that
depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, be-
coming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Philippians
3:7-11

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with
greater strictness. James 3:1

I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your
words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. Matthew 12:36-37

Paul continues:

the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints.

I have explored at length in the Romans and Ephesians essays, and in the appendices to them, the bibli-
cal fact of the progress of revelation, and I would ask that you reread these thoughts. If you try to under-
stand the biblical paradigm without understanding that God’s purposes are progressive and are revealed
to His people in very specific and scheduled increments throughout the span of our dimension of time,
you will completely miss much of what He has been bringing to pass since the beginning of the Creation
and with Israel and with the Church since the rebellion of Adam. To the unredeemed soul, the Bible is a
book of confusion, because “the natural man cannot comprehend the things of the Spirit of God.” 1 Corinthians
2:14 But even to the redeemed soul, the Word of God is only discernable by revelation, and that revela-

282
tion only comes when God decides it should come…it is not for us to pry the book open, and if we try to do
so we will inevitably fall into error leading to heresy.

As Peter writes,

just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters
when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ig-
norant and unstable twist (pry) to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. 2 Peter 3:15-16

The foundational Truths of our salvation in Christ are open to all who are seeking: Even those who have
not yet “met” the Lord have prevenient grace to begin to hear His voice with increasing clarity above the
cacophony and confusion of the sin darkened world: His “sheep” will “hear His voice”. However, the “deep”
things of God are not for cradlebaby Christians, nor are they for rambunctious and impulsive “young men
and young women” in Christ, who regularly explode halfcocked into action without much wisdom or dis-
cernment. God offers his treasures of wisdom and knowledge according to His assessment of our maturi-
ty and of our sense of responsibility, and according to His timetables, on a “need to know” basis.

And in His living word, a Truth may rest “hidden in plain sight” for generations until He decides it is the
proper time to unveil it and make it known, when He opens the “eyes of the hearts” of His prophetic people
to see and understand. Paul here, as he does in myriad places throughout his letters, makes this perfectly
clear. We would save ourselves so much grief and so much internecine bickering and division if we would
simply take him at his word and learn to live patiently, at rest with our Father’s confidence that He knows
what He is doing and will tell us what we need to know when we need to know it.

To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery,
which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

This is the Gospel. Here, and in Galatians 2:20 Paul reveals the heart of Truth as clearly as words can
express it. I have tried, with everything I have come to understand, to unpack this mind-blowing reality for
you in what I have been writing in as many word pictures as I can think of, because once you lay hold of
this you finally really do begin to understand what EVERYTHING is all about. Life and the universe actual-
ly do begin to have meaning and purpose. And until you lay hold of this Truth and this Truth lays hold of
you very little, if anything, makes any real sense at all.

What most see when they look for truth in the fallen world, are at best glints of light reflected from the
shards of a billion broken mirrors. You can as easily see your reflection in wind-blown water as find Truth
in the chaos of sin. For a smaller number of individuals on deeper spiritual searches the light they are dis-
covering might better be described as an ever-changing kaleidoscope of patterns; at times almost making
sense and having order, sometimes beautiful, but mutable…unpredictable. Another analogy might be a
portrait by Picasso, or a surrealist painting of a landscape by Dali: a distortion of reality…fascinating….
and as often as not disturbing and confusing.

For the Christian, alive in the Holy Spirit, having the Mind of Christ and the awakened senses of the New
Creation man, the vision of Truth clarifies as he or she matures into an ever-brightening dawning over a
vast and wonderful panorama rising tier upon tier before them until it is lost to sight in the golden distance
upon ranges of mountains that seem to lift upwards forever.

The greatest tragedy of all is that the Truth of Christ has been reduced to a mere “religion”, and that the
Christian religion has become the surest vaccination that exists among men against the Truth of Christ.
The “Christian Religion” as often drives people away from Christ as toward Him because of the public’s
misunderstanding of what the true Church is as contrasted with what they see on the TV and so often en-
counter in the form of “mainstream Christianity” and the herd mentality and group-think ignorance with
which much of mainstream Christianity is presented.

283
Of course the Gospel is to be found in virtually every sect of Christendumb! Mainstream churches
would have no appeal except they offer a reasonably close facsimile of the reality of Christ. The
most seductive error is always a half-truth. And God is going to be faithful to meet every searching
heart that steps across the threshold of a traditional church in expectation of meeting Him within its
sanctuary. But so often the Gospel of the Kingdom of God is so encrusted over with hundreds or
even thousands of years of the barnacles of dogma and ecclesiastical politics that it can scarce be
heard. What might start out as Truth and speak of freedom and liberty becomes increasingly confus-
ing and begins to bind the soul: After all “religion” means “to bind again”. True biblical discipleship is
a rare thing to be found where religion and the traditions of men have overruled the life of the Spirit.

And this is not even to begin to address the insidious infection of the Truth in liberal churches by the
spirit of the age and the devious manipulations of naturalistic scientism (itself a false religion with
enormous authority in the modern world), which eat away at the foundations of faith like demonic
leeches feasting on the believer‘s spiritual lifeblood.

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self,
lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, dissobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeas-
able, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lov-
ers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. 2 Timothy
3:1-5

In Colossians:

Him we proclaim,

The Gospel is a proclamation of which we are called to be heralds. It is not another metaphysical phi-
losophy to be debated and intellectually dissected ad nauseum. It is not one of many “paths” to en-
lightenment upon which men may ascend or evolve to some higher plane of consciousness. It is not
one of the myriad “religions of the world”. It is a declaration of victory by a triumphant High King who
has defeated His enemy on the field of battle, and who is offering terms of surrender and peace to
His reconquered lands. We who serve Him are not sniveling doormats trying to “persuade” or “win”
or bribe “the lost” to join our club. We are warrior ambassadors sent forth on a mission to clean out
pockets of enemy resistance, to locate and identify “the called” of the Lord, and to liberate all those
who desire to be liberated from enemy hands.

If we debate and persuade and patiently teach we do so for those who ask honest questions and who
share honest doubts and fears as they begin to experience true hope and to learn to trust for the first
time. We are not to waste our time on those who willfully choose to oppose the Truth and to spit in
the face of the God to whom we have sworn allegiance. If we cannot ignore such enemy agents, we
are to shut them down using the weapons of the Spirit we have at our disposal. (Acts 16:16-18; Acts 13:4-
12; Acts 8:9-24; Acts 5:1-11; 2 Corinthians 10:1-6)

warning everyone

This was important in Paul’s day…It is critically important today. There is a place for the study of
“End Time Truth” and eschatology, but it really isn’t necessary to parse a lot of prophetic scripture to
realize that something very spiritual and very scary is building up like a tsunami even as I am writing
this paragraph. Virtually every Islamic nation in the Middle East is on fire with riots as Shariah begins
to become a very real possibility as the foundation of law for the entire region very soon. Islamisized
Europe is being sucked into this intensifying firestorm. Christians are being killed throughout this re-
gion. Radical Muslims are more and more openly speaking of their goal of establishing a Caliphate
globally, a goal which is being driven by a passion for the will of Allah as deep as is my passion for

284
the will of Christ. A growing number are actively anticipating the advent of the Mahdi or the 12th Imam,
their messiah. These people hate the West, and the United States in particular and desire our
destruction…and from a purely economic and political point of view, they are sitting on the fuel supply
we have made ourselves dependent upon.
And Israel is surrounded. And the US is obligated by treaty to defend Israel: (treaties which we seem
to be backing away from as I write). Whether we do or not is irrelevant. If these Arab and Persian
nations move to eradicate the Jews, which is their avowed intention (along with destroying Western
Culture and society), Israel will defend herself by whatever means she needs to. It is her right to do
so. And she has an arsenal of nuclear weapons backed up by the best trained military on the planet.
She is not going to wait forever for our permission to preserve her life, especially with our present ad-
ministration. Read Luke 21 thoughtfully, please. (And if I haven’t mentioned it elsewhere, I highly rec-
ommend that you wrestle through the materials available from Walid Shoebat (http://www.shoebat.com/
). You will be entering a firestorm of controversy when you do, but his arguments are very strong and
very well presented and will certainly cause you to think about the times and seasons we are in. I per-
sonally think that what he says makes more sense than does the popular “Left Behind” prophetic sce-
nario that has dominated Evangelical circles since Darby and Scofield in the 19th Century.)

So, we Christians are not doing our job if we are simply telling people that they need to stop behaving
badly and should accept Jesus and go to Heaven when they die. We are to be proclaiming a warn-
ing!!!!

ALL HELL IS ABOUT TO BREAK LOOSE!!!! And most of America is in denial. The world as we have
grown so comfortable with it is about to end, and biblically “troublous times” are about to begin. (Per-
sonally, I do not believe that we Christians are going to be “raptured” out of them before they get pret-
ty rough, but that is my theology and we can discuss it at some other time. I prefer to be ready for
trouble and to be pleasantly surprised if I find myself flying away “on some bright morning”.)

and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

We are to be very aware of our times and the state of the world, but this is not our first concern. We
are to be preparing people to meet the Lord and to do spiritual battle, first and foremost. Whether or
not we are to engage in physical warfare is another and a complicated issue, one on which Christians
have never been able to come to a unified agreement.

At this time, I fear, a significant portion of the American Church is nowhere near “maturity” in
Christ…not even close. And this is primarily the fault of the leadership of the Church. Certainly not all,
but a sizeable portion of pastor/teachers in degrees from minor to major spend most of their time and
energy scratching the itching ears of the people who pay the bills, rather than daring to speak fully the
Word of the Lord without weighing first the personal inconveniences of the impact of their words.
Such is human nature.

But, as Paul says…”If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” Galatians 1:10 How
many of our ministers are really willing to pay the price, say, of eating bugs and thrice digested bee
puke in the desert (cf. John the Baptist) because they have the courage to speak the whole counsel of
the Lord to the comfortable and influential powerbrokers on the church board? How many have the
courage to preach their tithe-paying camp followers out of the congregation? How many of us are
willing to risk losing everything, like Paul? How many of us are really willing to die for our faith, like
James the Less, or Steven, or Peter, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nate Saint, or Jim Eliot? Or would we
figure out a cheap grace way to rationalize a recantation of Christ if some Jihadi extremist put a sword
to our throat? Or to the throat of our wife….. or our kid? (I ask myself these sorts of questions on a
daily basis…and I don’t like some of my answers. How about you?)
285
 I submit that, in America at least, when the fire grows hot, as it is now about to do, there will be a
“great falling away” (Matthew 24:10; 2 Thessalonians 2:3; 1 Timothy 4:1), because a huge number of people have
joined themselves as groupies to the church, desiring the blessings promised by sycophantic leader-
ship preaching prosperity and heavenly rewards, but wholly ignorant of the true cost of discipleship
because they have been sold a bill of goods.

In the First Church believers were often kept in a “trial period” of a number of months to two or three
years between the time they confessed their faith and were baptized and the time they were admitted
into the Lord’s Supper (communion). During this period they received instruction and their lives were
observed to “confirm” the sincerity and efficacy of their commitment to Christ. Once they were “con-
firmed” they were admitted as full participants in the life of the fellowship. (This ancient practice is still
remembered in the rites of catechetical training and in “confirmation”, though in many churches which
practice these things they tend to have become formalized and ritualized and emptied of most of their
depth of meaning.) This is a far cry from the practice of many Evangelical churches today, where
membership means that you sign your name to a list and pledge to pay your tithe, and, perhaps, you
go through a few weeks of Sunday orientation classes and agree to a statement of faith. Perhaps we
should review our current policies and take some cues from those who have gone before us in these
matters.

For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.

“And the servant of the Lord must not strive”. 2 Timothy 2:24 When we move in our own strength, “in the
flesh”, nothing of eternal value is accomplished. The room stinks of sweat. “Apart from Me you can do
NOTHING!” John 15:5 (Jesus’ words, not mine.)

Our relationship with the Lord is symbiotic: We are volitional vessels. Until we grasp this Truth and
come to rest with it we will struggle….Before we meet the Lord we are fighting against God Himself.
After we covenant with Him, but while in our childhood and youth in Christ, we still struggle against
both the authority of our Dad, as we seek to impose our will upon Him, and against the tenacious
memories of our fallen past life as slaves to sin under the whip of the devil. Paul here speaks clearly
that the mature servant warrior in Christ lives and moves entirely within the context of an exchanged
life.

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,

but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, Hebrews 10:5-7

Chirst does not “help” us to live our lives on this earth….Christ IS our life.

Anything less than this is not biblically New Covenant Christianity.

(I can recommend a small study by Wade Taylor, The Secret of the Stairs, which explores the pro-
gression of the deepening relationship between the Lover and the Beloved in the Song of Solomon.
http://www.morningstarministries.org/store/books/wade-taylor/secret-stairs)

286
2 For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have
not seen me face to face,

Ministry is struggle. It is a life of intercession, of warning, and of rescue. It is a life of birthing and
commitment to nurture. It is a life of mostly small successes and sometimes large defeats and disap-
pointments. Its rewards are sometimes tangible and in the present, but much more often are intangi-
ble and are stored away to be realized only in the future, sometimes by others whom we may never
meet. Throughout the New Testament it is compared to farming, and the fruits of farming always
come only after long hard labors and much patience. It is compared to fishing, and fishing is often
frustrating and exhausting with its returns not reflecting its investments in time and energy. Ministry
sometimes might be glorious, but more often than not it is tiring. It’s greatest reward, in this life,
comes from the knowledge that our Father has entrusted to us a concern of His heart, and that we
are keeping that trust with joy, that we also “run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Je-
sus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured…” Hebrews 12:1-2

In Colossians:

that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love,

Paul’s greatest concern was not for material blessings, or for prosperity, or for physical safety or free-
dom from persecution.

the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built
together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. Ephesians 2:21-22

Rather it was for the nurturing and maturing of the “one new man” Ephesians 2:15, that “new creation in
Christ” 2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15 for which all the generations of faith since Abraham had been the
preparation.

until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, Ephesians 4:13

It is interesting, and somewhat confusing, to parse out how Paul speaks in both singular and corpo-
rate terms of this “structure”. He never loses sight of the individual believer, yet he always speaks of
a corporate “manhood”, in which each individual has attained to a “unity of the faith” and has been
“built together” “into a holy temple”.
This, when it is completed, will be the divine creature that I call the “Companion”, and which ineffable
idea I tried to explore in my essays on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. I will dare to say that all other
theologies that men have invented either ultimately leave the individual selfishly intact in a heaven of
supersized carnal fulfillments, or lose the individual altogether in a soup of souls that somehow is also
the god that is the object of worship.

so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doc-
trine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Ephesians 4:14

We are to be childlike in our faith, but not like children in our approach to our faith or in our behavior.
The faith that a child has is simple and pure. A child does not question the love or good will of its par-
ent. A child simply trusts its parent and reaches to its parent for the fulfillment of its needs. A child
expects its parent to care for it and to love it, and it takes horrific abuse to damage this inborn trust.
This is the example Christ uses to teach us of how we are to respond to our Father.

287
But children are also impulsive and naïve, creatures of emotion not of good sense and clear
thinking…silly, living on the skin of life. Children generally believe what they want to believe, are full
of fantasies and vanities, and lack discernment and wisdom. Children have great potential, but they
can behave very stupidly. We are not to behave like children any longer than is appropriate.1 Corinthi-
ans 14:20; Ephesians 4:15;Colossians 2:19;Hebrews 5:11-6:3;1 Peter 2:2

Christians who behave like children tend to live vicariously on the testimonies and teachings of others.
They feed upon diets that have been prepared for them and are spoon-fed to them rather than by culti-
vating their own fields of study and prayer and feeding upon the ripened fruits thereof. They run from
church to church and from conference to conference chasing after the latest “anointed” word or minis-
try. They hop like bunnies from fellowship to fellowship seeking soothing fingers to scratch their long
itching ears. They live for the experience of the “Worship Service”, and measure the presence of God
by the intensity of their experiences, blown like falling autumn leaves by every spiritual breeze. They
are easily misled and deceived, because they interpret the Word of God by their preconceived expec-
tations and imaginations of their world, rather than interpreting their world through the clear teachings
of the Word of God imparted intimately and vitally to them by the Spirit of God as He shares with them
the mind of Christ. They paddle and splash on the surface of faith, but never immerse themselves in
its mighty stream.

Imitation is to be expected of new believers and of toddlers in the faith: Small children learn by imita-
tion. It is sufficient that new believers emulate their elders in the Lord. But we are not to remain chil-
dren in Christ…We are each to aspire to sonship: The place of maturity and independent thought
where in the cultures of Christ’s era a father felt confident in passing his estate and his authority on to
his appointed heir.

There is a difference maintained in the Bible (and not always clear to us today) between being a child
(which is a fact of being born) and being a son or a daughter (which is much more a title of status in
the household). The first did not always lead to the second. Even today irresponsible children some-
times find themselves “cut out of the inheritance”. In Christ our next step is to “grow up”, to “become
sons (and daughters) of God”. We each are to learn the best that those who have gone before us
have to teach us, and then to go farther still than they were able to go as we carry forward the Torch
of the Testimony and “look unto and hasten the coming of the Lord” 2 Peter 3:11-12 in our generation. The
revelation of the Kingdom is progressive and we each as individuals, and as a corporate Body, are
called in our generation to progress with it.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ
Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forget-
ting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the up-
ward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way…, Philippians 3:12-15

Rabbit Trail about “growing up”

In Ephesians Paul writes:

Rather, speaking the truth in love, Ephesians 4:15

We are always to speak the truth. This means if we are not prepared to speak the truth about some-
thing, we should not speak at all, rather than speaking in half-truths or “little white lies”.

I, myself, have a problem with what I have just written, because there seem to me to be times when
speaking the truth could be itself the catalyst for immoral or evil actions.

288
When I was in college I knew several Christian pacifist idealists who felt, because of this scripture and
others similar to it, that if an ax murderer were to knock on their door and demand to know where
their wife and children were hiding, they would have to tell them. They argued that the Lord would be
obligated to prevent the murderer from harming the family in such a case, and that if He didn’t then
somehow His will would be accomplished. I found this position impossible to agree with. Personally,
I could not see myself doing anything less than resisting the ax murderer, to the point of killing him if
necessary. And I certainly would not tell him where my family was hiding: I would most probably lie
and take up the issue with the Lord at a later date. I think I still feel this way.
In the Old Testament there are a number of instances on record where God either overlooks or actu-
ally seems to reward lying and deception when it was done for what I would define as “right” or “noble”
reasons. I am thinking of Rahab, when she hid the spies on her roof in Jericho, or Jael, who de-
ceived and assassinated Sisera, or the many times David relied on deception as he evaded Saul.
But these are Old Covenant examples, and we are living in the New Covenant.

I do not find any such examples in the New Covenant writings, but there is far less of a record of such
historical incidents there. Paul does seem to use some “manipulation” on occasion to move circum-
stances to his advantage. ( e.g. His reliance on his Roman citizenship in several situations and his
gentle “nudge” of Philemon to reinstate Onesimus come to mind.) Otherwise the texts are relatively
silent, and it is never wise to argue from silence.

In this particular passage in Ephesians it is clear that the context is one of believers speaking to be-
lievers, and it seems obvious that within the Body we are to never be deceptive or coercive or to lie to
one another. Paul also speaks elsewhere that there is a very real distinction between the Christian
community and the unredeemed world outside of the Christian community. A quick perusal of the
New Testament will show that almost all of the discussion of “truth”, of “lies”, of “lying”, of being hon-
est and of other such related ideas is focused upon and within the Christian community and its inter-
nal interactions: There is not much attention given to its relationship to the surrounding non-Christian
society.

In our dealings with the world around us, we are to be Christian (Christ-like), “as much as lies within
us”, and obviously if we are to declare the Truth of God we are going to have to live out the Truth of
God. But it is clear from the scripture that the world does not play by the same rule as we do. I am
going to leave it open, at this point, that there may be times when, in good conscience, it becomes
necessary to be at least less than forthcoming when the darker elements of that world confront us. In
times of persecution or war especially there may arise situations when it is best for the people of God
to guard their hearts and their secrets very closely. I also believe that the Lord will be most faithful to
give clear counsel in such times.

Nevertheless, within the Church, we are admonished to speak the truth. However, there are different
ways in which the truth can be told. Paul emphasizes that we “speak the truth IN LOVE”. This is
God’s quality of love, agape, the love that puts others first. Truth can be spoken with honesty, even
with “brutal honesty”, and it becomes a destructive force. Truth, spoken in love, is a redemptive, heal-
ing, creative force. Whatever we do or say as Christians, this should be our prevailing motivation. If
we cannot speak redemptively, then we should not speak.

we are to grow up in every way Ephesians 4:15

289
In the Lord there is balance…there is harmony. Unfortunately, relatively few of the assemblies of His
people reflect this balance as they ought to. Far too many local churches seem to fall into the traps
of emphasizing one or two good things at the expense of too many other good things: Evangelism
and missions while neglecting discipleship and looking after the needs of those in the assembly who
are hurting, for example; or teaching the Bible and ministry and outreach but falling short on worship
and the operation of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit; or focusing on Bible study and prayer and personal
holiness at the expense of evangelism and outreach. Our Faith is a way of life, not just a series of
bullet points on a checklist. We are to be Christians: Waking, sleeping, at work, at play, at church, at
home, at the store, in the car, in groups, alone…we are to be Christians. Every breath and thought is
to be increasingly Christlike, from the moment we first bend the knee and give our heart to the Lord
forever more. And this means that as we grow in the Lord we are to become more and more bal-
anced out: Our lives are to be more and more in harmony in themselves and with other believers. We
are to do all things well. (Mark 7:37) We are altogether like musicians: We first learn to play our instru-
ment more and more expertly. Then we join the orchestra. When an orchestra first is tuning up, it
doesn’t sound particularly well, but when the conductor calls it to order and begins to play it as HIS
instrument, though every musician may be playing some unique part in the symphony, the whole is a
sound beyond compare. Our God is the Conductor. We are the musicians. The Church in worship
is to be His symphony.

into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with
which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Ephesians 4:15-16

So, at the very least it seems clear that under all normal circumstances and within the body of believ-
ers we are certainly to be both truthful and loving with one another. I have already remarked in other
places of Paul’s insistence that the Christian is motivated by a Spirit that compels him or her to live
outside of himself and to put the well-being of others first. In this present context, I would take this to
mean that if we truly love another with Christian love, we will seek every way to both encourage, and
if necessary, to rebuke and correct, that person redemptively and without any motive to injure them
or gain advantage over them. And even if that person is not a believer, other injunctions pertaining to
the Christian way of life would clearly restrain us from behaving in an unseemly, deceptive, or manip-
ulative manner toward them as well. There may be extenuating circumstances which press us to re-
think the meaning of these injunctions, and I am not going to deal with those here and now. I would
leave open the option for each one of us to work these things out personally with the Lord in prayer
and to be able to act according to what our measure of faith allows us.

End of Rabbit Trail.

Returning to Colossians:

and have put on the new self,

Again, Paul alludes to the metamorphic transformation of the Christian. Darwinians are always specu-
lating about the next evolutionary leap of the human species: It has already happened. It began on
that Sunday morning in Jerusalem when a new kind of man conquered mortality and began to procre-
ate.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2
Corinthians 5:17 (The word “new” used in this verse holds the meaning “qualitatively new, entirely new in
kind”. With the conquest of sin and death and the enthronement of the Second Adam, a new species
of humanity was born. This idea is not original to me: I want to thank C.S. Lewis for the insight, I be-
lieve in The Problem of Pain, but perhaps it was in Mere Christianity.)
290
In Colossians:

which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circum-
cised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. (Colossians 3:10,11)

and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and
ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. (Col 2:18)

to reach all the riches of full assurance (Colossians 2:2)

I have noted elsewhere that Paul often needs to resort to piling on superlatives in order to try to build
large enough words to describe what he is trying to convey of the blessings that our Father desires to
lavish upon us. Even the magnificent vocabulary of ancient Greek was insufficient to the task of com-
municating the fullness of the Kingdom revelation.

of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery,

Before all else, before the manifestation of healing and the miracles and signs and wonders that are
so exciting, before the operations of the gifts of the Spirit through us in power and service, before ma-
terial blessings and prosperity, the treasures of the Kingdom are to be found in the renewal of our
mind…in the health of renewed thought…in the Mind of Christ and in the opening of the eyes of the
Heart to see beyond the curvature of the Earth and of space into the Heavenlies…..These are Eternal
things, while the others are temporal and of the moment. We can never grow beyond that which we
can imagine or what we can aspire toward: If our goals are only of this world, then we will never reach
beyond this world. Therefore, our Father first must open our eyes and expand our understanding to
comprehend His goals for us, so that we will, from the heart, believe that in Christ we truly can aspire
to and attain to them.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the
things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spir-
it, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the
Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually dis-
cerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood
the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2:12-16

I want to make the observation here that Paul separates between “knowledge” and “understanding”. I
had not considered this before, but it seems significant to me now. Knowledge is not the same as
understanding. Knowledge is a precursor to understanding. I can know something without really un-
derstanding it. This can easily be demonstrated by visiting any high-school or college during exam
time. There you will find numerous people who have the knowledge to complete the tests but who
could not put that knowledge to any use the moment they leave the auditorium. I am at this moment
writing this essay on a very sophisticated and complex computer which I am able to use quite well:
Yet I have remarkably little understanding of how this machine and its technology works. We all know
many things which we don’t understand.

291
We as believers enter into a life-long life transforming process, one which we begin effectively as
fetuses/infants when we experience the new birth in Christ and which we continue to experience
throughout our mortal lives until we are glorified at death or at Christ’s coming, if this occurs in our
generation.

The scriptures use many word pictures to describe this lifelong process. In the Psalms and the Prov-
erbs we read such things as:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; Psalm 111:10;

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; Proverbs 1:7

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,

and knowledge of the Holy One is insight. Proverbs 9:10

Our deep “fear” (awe-filled love) of the Lord (our Father and Creator) is the BEGINNING, the incep-
tion point, of knowledge and of wisdom (or true productive understanding). We, as Christian infants,
come to this process as pretty much self- centered and ignorant “blank slates” (or maybe, better, bad-
ly graffiti-scribbled and gang-sign tagged slates). And we begin to receive “knowledge”, through the
Bible, and through the Comforter/Teacher Who is within us and Who has imparted into us the “Mind
of Christ”, Who is also the Author of the Bible, the “owner’s manual” that He has provided for us as
His wonderful creations. We, as we pray, and repent, and “study to show ourselves approved” 2 Timothy
2:15, and pray, and repent, and study, and pray, and repent….grow in the knowledge of God.

And over time, we begin to “understand“. Children grow up. They begin to connect the dots: I don’t
think anyone really understands how this happens, though we (I mean our plethora of “experts” and
generally over-educated professionals) certainly wax eloquent in our ignorance. Life begins to make
sense to children. They first play as kids, then as adolescents, then with increasing responsibility as
young adults, and then, hopefully, they mature, and “put away childish things” 1 Corinthians 13:11 and be-
come fully developed and well-adjusted adults.

The apostle John, the writer of the three letters bearing his name, the Gospel, and of the Revelation,
identifies three “stages” of Christian maturity:

I am writing to you, little children,

because your sins are forgiven for his name’s sake.
I am writing to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I am writing to you, young men,
because you have overcome the evil one.
I write to you, children,
because you know the Father.
I write to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning.
I write to you, young men,
because you are strong,
and the word of God abides in you,
and you have overcome the evil one. 1 John 2:12-14

292
“Little children” are those who are newly rejoicing in the comfort and security of their “born again” expe-
rience with the Lord. They know that they are saved and that they have been forgiven, and they are
overflowing with the joy that comes with the infilling of the Holy Spirit. They are voraciously devouring
the Word and living at the church, and they are witnessing to everybody they see. But they probably
have very little understanding of the scriptures they are quoting or the theology they are spouting.
They believe themselves to be “on fire” for the Lord and are ready to save the world. However, to the
mature believers around them they are cradlebabies in need of frequent diaper changes. They can
be both amusing and somewhat disconcerting and embarrassing.

“Young men” have some time in grade. They have been studying the Word for a while and have some
depth of understanding, at least of the first principles of the faith. (Hebrews 6:1-2) They have spiritual
gifts in operation in their lives and have some authority in spiritual warfare. They range between pre-
cocious spiritual adolescence and the holy “twenty-somethings”. They may be in ministry positions.
But they tend to be a bit hard-edged and cocky, and as often as not a bit proud. They may have be-
come unteachable, thinking they know “it” all. They have grand ideas and aspirations for their work
for the Lord. They “stand on the Word”, and (try to) convey an image of invincibility when in public.
They often perceive themselves as “warriors” championing the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ and
fighting for His Kingdom, which is a good thing: as “God’s man or woman of Power for the Hour,”
which is not so good. They might be compared to short distance sprinters: They have not yet proven
themselves to be long distance runners.

“Fathers” are a bit more gray and worn. They have scars and may be slow to speak. Like Jacob, they
may walk with a limp because they have wrestled with God. They may be quiet and retiring. But they
also are viable: They are able to reproduce and they are able to nurture. They have been forged and
tempered in God’s school of the Spirit by the slow, hot fires of circumstance. They have been long
time in the crucible and on the anvil. They are strong, keen edged, and flexible. They are wise, be-
cause they have long relational experience with their Father. They have learned to listen more than
to talk. They bear the authority that comes only through experience and time in grade. And they are
patient to teach those who follow them because they understand that only long experience with many
hard challenges bears the fruits of wisdom and patience. They have come to understand what Paul
means when he speaks of the three great abiding realities of “Faith, Love, and Hope”, and how these
three divine substances are sown and cultivated in the believing human soul. They have come to
know “the Father” on intimate terms, as “Abba”. They can comfort, because they have been comfort-
ed by God. Their inner fires are very hot, but are banked and under discipline. (I don’t dismiss the
ladies here: The above quote is as it is. The New Covenant very much equalizes the sexes before
the Lord. There are equally little girls, young women, and mothers in the Israel of God.)

Knowledge is relatively easy to acquire. It can be learned from books and sermons. It can be memo-
rized and repeated. In itself it is superficial and, at best, simply pragmatic. It tends to be legalistic. It
certainly can be used, and misused, for material gain and for great personal advantage, and many do
take advantage of this, for in America especially, and increasingly throughout the developed world,
we tend to worship a false god of knowledge and are easily deceived and manipulated by those who
exploit this cultural vulnerability.

But the understanding of the Mystery of God cannot be so easily obtained. It comes only by revela-
tion and through humility and the processes of our Father’s “school of the Holy Spirit”. And that
comes only from our Father at His will and to those to whom He chooses to reveal it as they prepare
themselves to receive such precious insight and to be responsible to Him for it.

He made known his ways to Moses,

His acts to the people of Israel. Psalm 103:7

293
Only those who come to our Father on His terms will begin to know Him in this way: All others will be
left on the outside looking in.

Again returning to Paul in Colossians:

which is Christ,

Once again Paul emphasizes the single central Truth of the Christian revelation: We are not following
the teachings of a teacher, or performing the rituals of a religion to please a lofty deity, or practicing
arcane disciplines to train our minds and bodies to become one with some elusive universal spiritual
force. The “mystery” of Christianity is Christ, Himself, a Person, and it is by uniting our selves with
Him in personal relationship that we participate in the wonderful experience the Father is revealing to
us as “The Kingdom of Christ and of God” (Ephesians 5:5)

in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Paul goes on to say that it is “in Christ” that ALL that our Father desires to reveal to us will be found.
This word “in” as used by Paul is one of those words that I remarked earlier has been filled with new
levels of meaning. As readers, we tend to skim over such small prepositions as “in” and “of” and “to”
and “from”, but in the New Covenant these little words are in many cases hugely significant and need
to be carefully considered with prayer when encountered. Such is the case here. Just as an exam-
ple of what is packed into this particular phrase, consider that many Christians live their entire lives
reading and memorizing and quoting back the written Bible as “the Word of God”, yet John 1:1-18
clearly states that Jesus Christ Himself is the fullness of the Word, and in John 5:39-40 Jesus Himself
rebukes the Pharisees for failing to understand this.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness
about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

Nevertheless, many Christians today still believe that the proper and best way to know God is to
memorize and to act out the written injunctions of the Bible, when they should be rather step by step
ongoingly discovering that the written Word is a doorway into an ever richer and more vital dynamic
and living moment- by- moment companionship relationship with Christ and through Him with their
Father through which the truths of scripture become who we are not what we do. To live only “by the
Book” will invariably lead to some form of dying or dead religious behavior, while to live “in Christ” will
lead to a life of liberty and out-worked love, the strong love of God Himself.

I certainly don’t mean that it is wrong to study the Bible, or to put its teachings into practice! Its writ-
ings are the records of what the Lord has left to us of His dealings with mankind and with His people,
and of His sojourn among us, and of His plans. And they are the eyewitness accounts of His incarna-
tion, death and resurrection. The Bible is an anchor fixed in solid rock!! It is the only Eternal Com-
pass always pointing to True North. It remains constant when the whole world around us spins
chaotically, and it records accurately the counsels of our God. It is an immovable reference point in
human history to which all of mankind must one day refer and by which the human race will be judged.
It is and always will be the one authoritative physical manifestation, other than the Incarnate Christ,
given to the human race of the metaphysical realities of the one True God, YHWH (Yahweh or Jeho-
vah). It is the Word of God.

But since Easter morning AD 33 the God~Man about whom the Bible is the story has been seated
upon the throne of Heaven and Earth, and it is to Him and to the Father He came to reveal to us that
we who have heard and believed the story must now always give our fullest attention.

294
There is little point in only reading an autobiography, over and over again, when the Author of the auto-
biography has invited you to spend eternity hanging out with Him in intimate relationship. It is foolish,
having received an invitation to a date with a wonderful person, to miss the date because we are ob-
sessed with studying the invitation.
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and
eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also con-
quered and sat down with my Father on his throne. Revelation 3:20-21

Paul goes on:

I say this in order that no one may delude you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I
am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ.

The Book alone is insufficient to prevent the deception of false doctrine and heresy. It will either be-
come an increasingly rigid prison that eventually entombs the assembly, or it will become a fountain of
all manner of speculative idiocy as its words are plucked piecemeal from its pages and rewritten into
flights of fancy or into the traditions of men. History is replete with examples of those who have twist-
ed the scripture into damnable teachings that have led to dead denominations worshiping sterile litur-
gies, to pseudo-Christian cults wandering down labyrinthine paths drawn on maps created in their own
imaginations, and even to catastrophic tragedies like the mass suicide of 909 brain-washed victims of
the false prophet Jim Jones in Jonestown in Guiana in 1978.

The guarantee of the impartation and transmission of living Truth requires the indwelling Spirit of God
in a group of humble servant Christians submitted to one another who are in prayer before the Lord,
and who have a thorough grasp of the clear teachings of the New Covenant, and of the Spirit in the
Old Covenant as viewed through the lens of the New Covenant.

And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp
shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all,
that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by
the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. 2 Peter 1:19-21

This sort of corporate approach to the present day Truth of the Lord should be a sufficient protection
against error and against deception: Matured prophetic people submitting to one another to allow the
Spirit of prophecy to judge and fine tune His words and the vision He casts through the Mind of Christ
in them using the clear text of the written Word as a standard of authenticity for all new vision and di-
rection. This sort of leadership in concert with a well-taught and Divinely ordered assembly will be a
living vessel through which the Lord can freely move and through which His plans can proceed.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds amd teachers, to equip the saints for the
work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowl-
edge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we
may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by hu-
man cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every
way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint
with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in
love. Ephesians 4:11-16

295
It is the way of the world is to use “logic” and “reason” and “debate”, the things Paul calls “plausible
arguments” to make and win its points. And those who employ these tactics often are very skilled
with them. The lion’s share of the teaching in the New Testament instructs us not to even engage
with such tactics as these on their desired fields of battle.

Jesus very rarely debated with his opponents: Rather he would reframe the questions that they
raised, often by reflecting their questions back upon them, move them off the ground they tried to am-
bush Him on and onto a battleground of His choosing, and then confront them with the Truth, usually
in very personal terms as the Holy Spirit gave Him insight into the depths of their hearts.

Paul, who was a skilled debater in both Jewish and Gentile arenas, himself avoided what he called
“idle” talk and meaningless argument that raised more questions than it offered answers. When he
was dealing with larger generalized audiences he tended to preach, rather than to teach. When he
taught, it was to groups who were most often predisposed to hear him out respectfully. On the few
occasions for which we have record (I’m thinking of Mars Hill in Athens Acts 17:22ff, and also when he
stood before Festus and Agrippa at Caesarea Phillipi Acts 26:12ff) when he tried reasoned argument as
a strategy of evangelism, his results were mixed at best: The Mars Hill incident, especially, seems to
have convinced him of the ineffectiveness of such an approach, as he seems to indicate in his letter
to Corinth (1 Corinthians 2: 1-5), which was written just after his encounter with the Athenian philosophers.
We do have much argument and reasoning in his letters, but all of his letters were written to relatively
strong and established groups of believers, and we would expect them to be generally open to hear-
ing him out and seriously dialoguing with him.

There is a good reason for this. There are almost an infinite number of possible questions that can be
raised by an unbeliever. And many of them either are nonsense questions that have no good an-
swers, or are questions that cannot be answered well in a few words or in hostile and argumentative
environments, which is where many of them are posed.

Additionally, the inquiries of skeptics and unbelievers are often the kinds of difficult questions which,
when answered, lead to many more equally difficult and confusing questions. Such questions require
classrooms, not street corner debates, to be fairly addressed. And where there are difficult and com-
plicated questions raised about spiritual things there are often doubts and fears raised as well, at
least until the questions are well answered. Doubts and fears are the antitheses of faith. Most often,
unbelievers and troublemakers raise these kinds of questions in “machine gun-like” rapid-fire fashion
in public or group settings where there is no opportunity to properly explore the questions or the an-
swers to them, and where there are multiple individuals all hearing bits and pieces of conversation
with varying degrees of comprehension or, more likely, of misunderstanding and confusion.

Our God is not the author of confusion, but the devil thrives upon it. We live in a culture today where
people are conditioned to hear sound-bytes and slogans and have thirty-second attention spans, and
where witty one-liners and scornful put-downs win more applause than intelligent reasoning and ex-
planation. Where the audience is so prejudiced and handicapped as this, there is little hope for nu-
anced thinking, so among these sorts of audiences there will be many people who are left in great
internal unrest and conflict with more questions than answers, perplexed and disoriented. These peo-
ple are very vulnerable to spiritual attacks and deceptions, ready victims of false teachers and cults.

This is why it is best to preach the basic New Covenant message clearly and forcefully to such large
groups, declaring the foundational Truths of the Kingdom, (1 Corinthians 2: 1-7) and to let the Lord,
through the Holy Spirit, deal with each individual. Teaching of the Word in its details and depths
should be done in controlled settings with those who truly desire to listen and to learn.

296
 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isaiah 55:10-11

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish
the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it
pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and
Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to
those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolish-
ness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 1 Corinthians 1:20-25

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to
understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of
God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,

and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 1 Corinthians 1:18-19

I am not here saying that Christians should be thoughtless and ignorant people who believe in sim-
plistic fairytales and avoid difficult and complex questions and issues. We have the answers to the
deepest questions of the human race, and ours ought to be the clearest and sharpest minds on the
planet because we have the Mind of Christ.

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age,
who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before
the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have cruci-
fied the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2:6-10

What I am saying is that many questions and arguments are idle and pointless and not worth our time
because they are based on erroneous premises. Their arguments sound “plausible”, because they
appear to be logically sound, but the questions themselves are wrongheaded.

There are two ways an argument can be wrong. Its reasoning can be wrong in any of a number of
different ways. (There are at least twenty five of what are called logical fallacies or failures in correct
reasoning that most of us commit one or more of regularly.) http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/;
http://www.logicalfallacies.info/

297
Or its reasoning can be completely sound, but its fundamental premise can be wrong. Because the
natural man simply is clueless about the things of God, most of the “plausible arguments” that arise
from the mind of the non-Christian or from the mind of an anti-Christian are wrong in the second way.
The world without God is “upside down” (see Acts 17:6), and every philosophy, ideology, -ism, religion,
or world-view that bubbles up from that world is in a lesser or greater degree screwed up. If we don’t
realize this at the beginning, and we let ourselves go on a walkabout with such people, then we can
find ourselves a very long way down the wrong road before we realize that we have made the wrong
turn and have wasted a lot of time, or in a worse case, have ourselves become lost. Only Spirit-filled,
Spirit-led study done humbly and prayerfully and in concert with others who are also united in the
Body of Christ and mature in their progress in the faith can guarantee that we will stay the course.

The presentation of Kingdom Truth is generally done in two ways. First it is preached, or declared.
Declaration is not a Q and A format. It is a proclamation of fact. The preacher heralds the Kingdom
of God, declaring that a battle has been fought and won; that the High King has conquered His enemy,
and has victoriously reclaimed His throne, and is offering terms of surrender to all who would choose
to accept them. There is no room left for debate. Secondly it is taught.

And this teaching is not offered to the same group as is the preaching. The preaching precedes the
teaching, and is more like shooting a shotgun. It is the Word going forth to the multitudes. It is the
scattering of seed on the field of the world. It is a loud trumpet heard by friend and foe alike. It is a
statement of fact and a drawing of a line in the sand. Teaching is, in this analogy, the shooting of a
rifle. A shotgun blast covers a large area indiscriminately: A rifle shot is aimed at a select target.
Teaching should be offered only to those who are hungry to learn, to those who choose to step across
the line that has been drawn. There is not enough time in life, and we do not have enough energy to
waste, for trying to teach those who do not want to learn. Teaching is food for those who are hungry;
who have bent the knee and sworn allegiance to the King; who have agreed to join His household
and to live by His rules.

And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp
shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all,
that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced
by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. But false prophets
also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destruc-
tive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many
will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they
will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not
asleep. 2 Peter 1:19-2:3

And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to
the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some
things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as
they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not car-
ried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. But grow in the grace and knowledge of
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. 2 Peter 3:15-18

Remind them of these things, and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but
only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to
be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. But avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more
and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene. 2 Timothy 2:14-17

298
 Rabbit Trail:

As I was thinking through these things I rediscovered this verse in Isaiah that I think also applies to the
discussion at hand. One of the things that I hope I have been able to convey with all this blather of the
past several hundred pages is that the Word of God is an organic, living, creation that is woven of a su-
pernatural “whole cloth” which must not be cut up or dissected.

Yet we do dissect it. We have long ago organized our Bible into chapters and verses, which in itself
probably isn’t a bad thing since it does help us navigate the text; but then we have taught ourselves to
think of the Word in chapters and verses as well. And in teaching ourselves to think of the Word in
such a piecemeal and disjointed way, we have, I believe, in large part blinded our eyes and deafened
our ears to the hearing of the Word of God as the Lord means it to be understood. We have, in effect,
turned the Word into sound bites, and in so doing we have lost much of the context and the continuity
of the Truths of the Kingdom of God and of Christ. An analogy might be that we have chosen to spend
our lives looking at picture postcards rather than visiting the places the picture postcards are being sent
from.

And the word of the LORD will be to them

precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
here a little, there a little,
that they may go, and fall backward,
and be broken, and snared, and taken. (Isaiah 28:13)

End of Rabbit Trail:

New Rabbit Trail:

I also think one other point deserves mention. Very much of the mockery and criticism of the un-believ-
ing world against Christians caricatures us as ignorant uneducated morons who believe in children’s
bible stories and irrational nonsense. Unfortunately, when I talk with a lot of Christians, this is the im-
pression I get as well. I fear that a significant percentage of believers really do not engage with their
faith and enter into a life of penetration into the depths of the Kingdom of God. There was a time when
“theology” was regarded as the “queen of the sciences”, the first pursuit of knowledge and wisdom and
the foundation upon which all other understanding is built. In the eyes of the world that time has long
passed, but it seems also to have fallen into great disrespect in the eyes of many who call themselves
Christians. Today among most mainstream churches the emphasis has shifted from biblically sound
doctrine to social justice and political idealism, or to far lesser things even than these, using random
biblical texts as bullet points and justifications; and among most Evangelical churches the teaching per-
petually revolves around what the New Testament calls “first principles of the doctrines of Christ” (see He-
brews 5:12-6:3) and never moves beyond them. Yet the clear teaching of the New Testament writers over
and over again is that there is a virtually infinite depth to the knowledge of our God and Father, which
He is more than willing to share with anyone who is willing to aspire to the challenge of attaining that
knowledge and level of intimacy with Him.

Jesus, Himself, was thirty years in preparation for His ministry among us. Hebrews 5:8 He spent three
years in continual intimate fellowship with His twelve companions imparting to them the foundation up-
on which they were to build His Church, and even then He told them that they were incapable of under-
standing the real depths of what His plans and purposes were all about and that they would have to
wait until He sent the Holy Spirit to them after His resurrection to receive this deeper revelation. John
16:12-15 And their writings that they have left to us are full of allusions to their own sense that at no time
during the decades after Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit did they ever feel that they really
and fully comprehended the fullness of the plans and purposes of the Lord they loved and served. Philip-
pians 3:12-16; 2 Peter 3:16-17; 1 Corinthians 2:9-16

299
The greatest commandment is “to love the Lord with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your MIND,
and all of your strength.” Mark 12:28-31 Christians once were and should still be respected as the deepest
thinkers on the planet, the wisest sages, the most sensible and successful counselors, because we
know the One who really does have the answers to mankind’s most unsettling questions and deepest
anxieties. And our answers should be rich and full and satisfying, both spiritually and intellectually,
not simply Bible verses quoted out of context and thrown into the faces of non-Christians who are
clueless as to what we are talking about, and who may be angry because they have already some
preconceived, and probably in their mind justified, misconception about Christ and about God.

We who do know the Lord should have no higher purpose, no more important employment, than to be
spending our entire life in the pursuit of knowing our Lord and Savior better and more fully. We
should every day know Him more intimately and more richly at the end of the day than we did when
we awakened in the morning. None of us should be satisfied to discover that we have only been con-
firmed in what we already believe when we walk out of a Sunday sermon or a Bible study group. We
should always be discovering something that we didn’t know about our God; should always be chal-
lenged to press on…otherwise, our God simply isn’t big enough. Nor have our leaders led us any-
where.

When an unbeliever or a non-Christian walks away from a conversation with a believer, at least a con-
versation about spiritual things, they should not be mocking or laughing: They should be shaking with-
in with holy fear and under conviction of the Holy Spirit. They should be deeply disturbed. Is this how
they walk away from you or from me? If not, then something is wrong. Better yet, they should not
walk away at all; they should be on their knees with us, before the Lord dealing with their issues and
doing business with Him. This should be the heart-cry of all of us who know Jesus Christ.

But this is so rarely the case. Rather, Christians are ridiculed and mocked and made to look the fool.
And, unfortunately, a hell of a lot of us don’t seem to have a leg to stand on in our own defense
against these charges. We need to get our act together. We need to “study to show ourselves approved”
2 Timothy 2:15 , both in the understanding of the sound doctrines of the scripture for ourselves, and not
as pre-digested food from the minds and lips of others, and in our understanding of our times and the
issues of our times.

If we are going to speak a word about such things as the “Intelligent Design - evolution debate”, or
“the age of the universe/big bang controversy”, or “LGBT-Homosexual marriage/traditional family” is-
sues, or debates about coming global conflicts, or any of the other great and volatile topics of our gen-
eration, then before we speak we need to be truly educated upon both our own side and the other
sides of these issues, and not just front-loaded with some King James Version quotes with which to
bludgeon people, or with unsupported arguments based on fringe extremist opinions or theories long
ago set aside because of the accumulation of more accurate data.

We need to have wrestled through to our own intelligent conclusions and convictions on the issues,
and not merely to be echoes of the opinions or manifestos of others. Ours is a reasonable faith, and
there is no argument of science or philosophy or politics that it cannot intelligently engage. We live in
a culture and among neighbors who do not always respect the authority of the Word of God, but who
do sometimes listen to reason, and if we want them to hear us out we need to be able to show them
that we who do believe that God has spoken are also reasonable. Many of them are extraordinarily
well informed. They will not believe us if we persist in acting and sounding like idiots.

300
With the incredible availability of information available to us in our generation, we are without excuse:
To be uninformed on topics about which we choose to speak is laziness, a failure to “redeem the time”
Ephesians 5:16; Colossians 4:5. Our examples are Jesus Himself, who had no problem hanging out with
“publicans and sinners” and yet was always able to gain their attention and their respect and to “speak
with authority” Matthew 7:29, and Paul, who “became all things to all men” 1 Corinthians 9:22 and who was as
cosmopolitan as the best politician or diplomat in Washington or New York City today. We each
should make every effort to become the most knowledgeable and best informed person in whatever
circles within which we tend to orbit. And if we are not so informed, then we need to learn to carefully
listen and be humble and to hear what is being said and to understand where others are coming from
and to spend time before the Lord and in personal preparation before we enter into the conversation.
Our discussions of world events and politics can clearly be focused through the lens of the Bible with-
out necessarily succumbing to parsing the prophetic texts down to play-by-play and minute-by-minute
details and pulling out complicated charts and graphs. All we really need is an intelligent awareness
of the tides of our times and a solid biblical understanding to be able to engage most people in a pro-
ductive conversation.

And there is nothing that will be discovered by modern science or unearthed by modern archaeology
that will ever disprove or contradict the Truth of God. The priests of scientism and naturalism and
rationalism will always loudly proclaim otherwise as they hold up “the latest discovery” and pontificate
about their “expert” opinions. But history has demonstrated over and over that “the assured results of
modern science” are often no more substantial than a morning fog, and that the Rock of God’s Word
and God’s Truth has always remained unmoved after the assaults of whatever storms the anti-Christ
spirit might stir up in any given age of man.

Our modern tools of science are extremely useful at observing and describing Nature, and some-
times at finding practical applications for what they discover. They are totally inappropriate for discov-
ering anything about Supernature or about the God who dwells there. When science begins to
speculate about these things it becomes Scientism, which is a modern pagan religion. As such it has
stepped into our arena and onto our battleground, and there it is completely overmatched. We, as
intelligent believers, need to be well informed about science, which is the subject du’ jour of our times,
and about Scientism because it’s proponents are false prophets proclaiming belief in a false god and
leading multitudes into self-destructive idolatry. ( Again I recommend www.reasons.org ,
http://www.khouse.org , http://www.ankerberg.com for insight into these issues.)

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days
are evil. Ephesians 5:15

Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, sea-
soned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. Colossians 4:5-6

End of Rabbit Trail…

Back to Paul:

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him,

“Therefore” is a word of action. We who are Christians have received Christ with an act of total surren-
der and commitment: We are to walk out and work out our life in Christ with the same total commit-
ment. We Americans, at least, live in a culture and in a day and age when the very idea of
commitment, of loyalty, of duty, of staying a course no matter how difficult it might become and keep-
ing a promise once made is quite a foreign idea to many of us. In business, in marriage, in our day to

301
day affairs we so easily make those decisions that are most convenient and beneficial to ourselves
regardless of what we might have said or agreed to at some earlier time…our modern ethical matrix
has been rendered relative and malleable and if we feel we can get away with taking advantage of
the spirit of our age it is altogether easy to do so because most of the time our society will lend us its
support. When something grows old, or inconvenient, or in some way malfunctions we throw it away
and find or buy or marry a new one. But this is not the way of the Kingdom of God. The scriptures
are clear that the Lord expects no less of us than he is willing to give of Himself to us: We have no
right to dilute the strength of their statement. He gave and gives all of Himself and requires us to do
the same. The Book speaks to us of narrow paths and severe disciplines and of the training regi-
mens of athletes and soldiers. How often do we hear sermons about the great net of evangelism cast
out to catch multitudes of lost souls for the Kingdom? But how often do those sermons speak of the
by-catch in the net…the many fish that are thrown away as unfit? (Matthew 13:47-50)

Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, If anyone comes to me and does not hate
his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot
be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of
you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?
Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying,
‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war,
will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him
with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for
terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Luke
14:25-33

Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him,
No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” Luke 9:61-62

“ ‘ know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are
lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered,
and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy
from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and
the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom
I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears
my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I
will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. He
who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’ ” Revelation 3:15-22

O LORD, who shall sojourn in your tent?

Who shall dwell on your holy hill?
He who walks blamelessly and does what is right
and speaks truth in his heart;
who does not slander with his tongue
and does no evil to his neighbor,
nor takes up a reproach against his friend;
       in whose eyes a vile person is despised,
but who honors those who fear the LORD;
who swears to his own hurt and does not change;
who does not put out his money at interest
and does not take a bribe against the innocent.
He who does these things shall never be moved. Ps.15

302
Returning to Paul:
rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

When I think of roots I think of plants. When a seed germinates in the soil, before it sends up its stem
above the ground, it sends down a root (called a radicle) which assures that the new seedling will re-
main viable. Roots serve four functions.

First they provide food and water. Plants also manufacture food by photosynthesis, converting carbon
dioxide into sugars and other organic compounds using the energy of sunlight, but they need other
nutrients that come from the richness of the soil in which they are growing, and they must have water.

Spiritually speaking, we might gain strength and energy from such “Sonlight” as a good worship ser-
vice, but we must have the more enduring supply of deep roots in the living Word and in a life of
prayer and intimate communion with the Lord as well if we are to grow into mature believers. The
“sugar high” of spiritual experiences is not enough to sustain us when the tribulations of our times and
the “cares of this world” assault us after we leave the sanctuary, as they certainly will.

Roots also anchor the plant into the ground. Plants with strong, deep, roots can withstand storms.
Plants with shallow roots are easily ripped up and overthrown. Spiritually speaking, a fellowship of
strong believers, rooted and grounded in the Word and bound in unity in the Spirit can weather great
storms. A fellowship of weak believers, believers with poor “root systems”, is vulnerable to the
“storms of life” and is easily blown about by “every wind of doctrine”.

This analogy can be drawn out in two directions, both as an encouragement and as a warning: When
trees, for example, grow too closely together in a forest, they do not need to send down deep roots,
because they are each one supporting the others. The winds cannot easily blow through them be-
cause they are so close together, so the forest stands in most storms. Forest trees generally have
very shallow root systems that spread out just below the surface of the soil, which itself tends to be
quite thin, so that they can catch as much water as possible. They are at the same time actually both
supporting and competing with one another.

But if for some reason one of these trees gets exposed to a blast of wind it is very easily uprooted and
overthrown, and when it falls it tends to take down many others with it. This happens to the trees at
the edges of the forest or in cleared areas, and when particularly severe storms or natural catastro-
phes occur.

As a contrast, the solitary oaks that one often sees in the middle of a farm field have root systems that
may be half again as large as the drip line of the canopy of the tree itself and which go down some-
times as deep in the ground as the tree is tall. Some such trees send down a great central tap root 50
or more feet into the ground. Though such trees often are weather beaten and lightning scarred they
many times have stood their ground for centuries. It is virtually impossible for such a tree to be blown
down by any wind.

There is a lesson here, also. We as believers are certainly to be in fellowship with one another. But
we must each one of us stand in our own testimony before the Lord and before men! We must not
depend upon others to walk out our faith for us. To be a biblical Christian is to live both a corporate
and a solitary life in the Lord.

Roots are food banks for the plant: They store extra nutrition for hard times. Many believers think
that it is enough to go to church on Sunday morning and to listen to a sermon. It is not. I cannot
stress enough that for the disciple, Christ is not part of our busy life: Christ is our life.

303
Roots prevent erosion. Where there are strong plants with deep roots and these plants are working togeth-
er, the land is stable and is not easily ravaged. We are coming into certainly the hardest times any of us
have ever seen, and perhaps the hardest times on record. The world has never been so small, so close
to itself. There are going to be frighteningly erosive forces in play from many directions. Every effort we
make to do damage control on the effects of these forces in one arena is going to unleash unintended and
consequential effects in other arenas that will continue to compound and domino catastrophically as the
age draws to its conclusion. Only if we have deep roots will we be able to withstand these forces as they
break upon us. Without each one of us having deep roots we as individuals are made vulnerable, our fam-
ilies are made vulnerable, our relationships and our fellowships are left exposed.

I should also add that as a plant grows and experiences environmental stress such as the pressures
of the wind and the stress of drought, its roots are stimulated to grow stronger and deeper. We tend
to complain about our troubles and our trials, but we need to remember that for us who know the Lord,
“all things are being worked together for our good” Romans 8:28 and are the disciplines of a loving Father,
teaching us the skills of leadership and the character of King’s kids. Hebrews 12:3-11 We are now in that
time spoken of in the letter to the Hebrews:

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned
them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. At that time his voice shook
the earth, but now he has promised, Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This
phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—
in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom
that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is
a consuming fire. Hebrews 12:25-29

Now is the time when our roots are being strengthened and deepened.

Paul continues:

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according
to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

Without laboring over the subtleties of the original Greek phrasing, Paul here is strongly warning us as be-
lievers to no longer let ourselves be pressured to “fall into step” with either the weasly-worded arguments
of the world’s philosophies or the official group-think mentality to which eventually most established Chris-
tian groups succumb. Whether these traps are set by the anti-Christian world or by the myriad religious
confusions of Christendumb, Paul refers to their end effect as “captivity”. He and the other writers of the
New Covenant have a lot to say about such things.

On the one hand all man-based man-centered or naturalistic philosophies are fundamentally flawed, be-
cause however elegant they may sound they each begin with a flawed premise and cannot, therefore, ar-
rive at a sound conclusion. Virtually all humanistic philosophies only succeed in leaving more and more
questions unanswered, and no two philosophers can be left in the same room together without having an
argument. If you can succeed in deciphering the arcane and confusing jargon used by most philosophers
as they wander through their thoughts, if you somehow succeed in avoiding becoming yourself paralyzed
by confusion, you will always end up, sooner or later, either in some fantastic utopianism or in black de-
spair.

On the other hand, most Christian fellowships eventually succumb to our human need for order and
predictability, and what may have genuinely begun as a spontaneous moving of the Spirit of God
sooner or later is almost always…I would dare to say always…. “tamed” and made to behave in a dig-
nified or at least controllable manner.

304
It is noteworthy in the Gospels that Jesus Christ never performed a miracle twice in the same way,
nor did He care about appearances: Our Lord is infinitely creative and spontaneous, and, if the minis-
try of Christ is anything to go by, seems to enjoy keeping us a bit off balance. (I have pondered for a
long time that our Christian life is called a “walk”: Walking is a state of continually falling forward… of
being perpetually off balance.)

But both for pragmatic reasons humanly understandable and relatively innocent, and too often for rea-
sons much more selfish and with ulterior motivations, those who rise into the leadership of fellowships
of the Lord’s people over time begin to organize what began in creative spontaneity as a moving of
God’s Spirit, and a body of written explanations (which eventually become guidelines that petrify into
liturgies and rules) of what God has been doing emerges. Though efforts are made to be sure these
explanations are “supported by scripture”, nevertheless, eventually the scriptural foundations are sim-
ply assumed, and the doctrines of the group are preached without question or further reflection. Con-
currently, the initial fires that birthed the movement burn down to embers over time to become the
hallowed cremains of history to be replaced by programs and policies and progressive ideas. Eventu-
ally, the doctrines themselves take on the full weight of the scriptures that are used to support them,
becoming dogma.

And thus, over time, and with the continual additions of the “inspired” thoughts of generations of
preachers and teachers, these doctrines become the traditions of men, and the scriptures are inter-
preted through them rather than the other way around.

Paul refers to these things as “the elemental spirits of the world”. By this he means “basic principles
which cause people to walk in step like soldiers”. We might use phrases like “peer pressure” or
“groupthink” to describe the same thing. We all are susceptible to it. We human beings tend to be
more comfortable when we behave as a herd. This is probably because of the sense of support we
feel when in a group, on the one hand, and on the other because of the ability that the appeal to the
group gives us to justify our behaviors without accepting personal responsibility. It is certainly easier
to “go with the flow”.

But our Father did not make us to be “herd” creatures: He made us to be creative individuals in union
with Him and in a corporate cooperation with each other. (I would argue that our “herd” behaviors,
our “sheep-like” qualities to which the scriptures so often make reference, are post-Adamic rebellion
attributes: But that is another discussion.) Ours is to be a unity of diversity, not some sort of a lock-
step march. As I have remarked, the Church is to be neither a droning instrument of a single note,
nor a discordant cacophony, but a symphony. A symphony is a large number of skilled individual mu-
sicians each playing a unique musical score under the guiding hand of a conductor, and its majestic
sound is the result of its incredible diversity. If every musician played the same note there would be
monotony. Without the conductor there would be clashing dissonance. Under the conductor’s wand
there is ineffable harmony, and a music that no one of the musicians could ever produce in a solo per-
formance. At times, to stretch the analogy, we might even move into the creative realms of jazz and
similar forms, which when well played push the envelope of harmonies and musical relationships.

The counter to being ambushed by peer pressure or by the unending verbal barrage of the world is
our personal knowledge of Christ, the confidence we have through the intimacy of our own relation-
ship with the Lord and our ongoing, ever growing, knowledge of Him and of our Father. (Romans 12:1-2)
When we are able to hear God for ourselves, to draw near to Him with absolute confidence, to trust
that we are walking strongly in the full assurance of faith, when we have given ourselves wholly to the
effort to engrave His Word deeply into our heart, then we will not be able to be deceived or taken cap-
tive by anyone who might try to persuade us with subtle arguments. We will know the truth, and in
knowing the truth we will be kept secure. (John 8:31-32)

305
And if we each press forward to attain to this level of maturity, then our gatherings can be both free
and spontaneous and orderly. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” 2 Corinthians 3:17 certainly
can coexist with “God is not the author of confusion” 1 Corinthians 14:33 and “let everything be done decently
and in order.” 1 Corinthians 14:40 “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:36

Paul continues:

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily,

I have explored at length in the Romans/Ephesians essays Paul’s revelation of the Incarnation. Here Paul
is emphasizing that if we want to know anything about God, then we need look no further than Jesus
Christ. Before the coming of Christ all the religions of mankind were either fragments of worship and obe-
dience cobbled together from more or less distorted memories out of our Adamic past and the glimpses of
Truth afforded by the prevenient Presence of the Spirit of God in our realm, or they were Satanic heresies
worshipping demons, born of the Fall, feeding upon our sin, and celebrating rebellion and chaos. After the
coming of Christ, anything “new” in the way of religion is either one of these ancient errors in new clothes,
or some counterfeit of Christianity twisted to avoid or to redefine its “narrow gate” of entry or its “straight
path” of discipleship or both.

“Religion” is always mans’ effort to reach to Heaven or to escape from Divine judgment on human
terms: Whether man-made or demonically inspired, all religion ultimately leads to bondage and to
idolatry, to no hope or to false hope and to ultimate disappointment and deep anxiety and elemental
fear. Only Christ truly deals with the angst of a guilty conscience, liberates the soul from its myopic
self-centeredness, and leads to a spiritual intimacy with God which is sufficient to bring a human be-
ing all the way through the inevitable experience of our dying not just comfortably, not even comfort-
ably and peaceably, but hopefully and with Joy.

and you have been filled in him,

Christ is the fullness of true Deity, and we who have traded our lives for His are to be filled to overflowing
with as much of that fullness as the fragile frame of the creature can contain. If we are not brim full it is
not His fault: It is ours. It occurred to me a long time ago that it is possible to pour an ocean into a thimble
as long as you let the thimble overflow. The New Covenant revelation describes us as “vessels”…. Thim-
bles capable of holding the fullness of God:

And God is able to make all grace overflow to you so that because you have enough of everything in every way
at all times, you will overflow in every good work. 2 Corinthians 9:8

We are without excuse.

In Colossians:

who is the head of all rule and authority.

Before Christ came mankind was subjected to law…to rule and authority: It was the “schoolmaster”.
But now the Head of all rule and authority has come. And we who have accepted Him no longer are
subjected to lesser things.

In him also were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by
the circumcision of Christ,

Here is another way of saying that what was external under the Old Covenant has now been fulfilled
and internalized by the New.
306
 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful
working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumci-
sion of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the
record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Here note the use of past tense verbs. The work of Christ is a finished work. In other places in the
original Greek text the verbs used speak of a finished work with effects that are present realities
which will continue ongoingly into the future. What we must understand as sons and daughters of
God is that we were at the moment of our surrender, are now, and forever more will be fully alive in
Christ and that the fullness of His life is presently available to each one of us.

This doesn’t mean that we are going to have Heaven on earth: Jesus Himself didn’t have Heaven on
earth, and He clearly said:

In this world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. John 16:33

Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or
children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses
and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal
life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” Mark 10:23-31; Luke 18:29-30

What it means is that we can walk through this world with the same confidence and authority and joy
that Jesus demonstrated, because He has provided us everything we need to do so.

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of
him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great
promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corrup-
tion that is in the world because of sinful desire. 2 Peter 1:3-4

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these
will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may
be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:12-14

In Colossians:

He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

The Law, with all of its details, was fulfilled in the Cross. Paul is writing specifically against those divi-
sive Judaizers who were following him in his journeys who would infiltrate the fellowships of Gentile
converts and insist that in order for a believer to be a disciple of Messiah he or she must also first be-
come a Jew and keep the Law, but for we who stand in Christ today this is relevant in that there are
many who would teach that believers need to behave in any of a multitude of ritualistic ways in order
to be proper Christians.

Christians are under no “religious” laws whatsoever, but rather are under the constraint of the Holy
Spirit, bound to Christ by the Law of Liberty, which is the moment by moment outworking of the strong
Love of God in the transformed heart of the disciple. If there are any “rituals” mandated in the New
Covenant, they are only water baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Anything beyond these two, however
useful or comforting, are traditions of men.

307
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or new
moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

Substance versus Shadow….A shadow is a patch of darkness that is cast as an effect because something
substantial is being illuminated by a bright light. It is a two dimensional silhouette of a three-dimensional
form; a vague representation and a distortion of something real. Before the Incarnation and the Resurrec-
tion a shadow was all that we were able to see: The whole world was imprisoned in darkness. Even a
shadow might seem bright against such a backdrop. But with the finished work of the Cross the light of
Heaven has burned through that darkness with the brilliance of a supernova. Now, if we are looking into a
shadow, it is because we have our back turned to that light. (To take a cue from Paul on Mars Hill in Ath-
ens, a bit of the prevenient Grace of God that illustrates this point showed up in the Allegory of the Cave ,
a conversation between Socrates and a disciple recorded in Book VII of Plato’s Republic. It is a very
thoughtful extra-biblical supporting text and a bit of ancient literature that is worth the read.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html )

Let no one disqualify you,

It is now time for all of us who really love the Lord (Luke 6:46) to stop being “nice” and to stop putting up
with bad church leadership and garbage teaching. “Nice” isn’t anywhere in the original Greek or Hebrew
text of the Bible. It is time for believers to stop being Politically Correct, and to shake up any and all fellow-
ships that call themselves Christian, but which are not preaching the full Gospel in its full power and in the
liberty of the Spirit of God! And if a fellowship insists on being legalistic or on quenching the Spirit or on
trying to please both God and the world, then it is time to leave that fellowship and gather together where
we can let God be God on His terms and not on those of some pig-headed pastor or Pharisaic elder board
or ossified and compromising congregation. The washing of the water of the Word can soften old wine-
skins and make them useful again and able to hold new wine, but if those who are stiff-necked and hide-
bound prove themselves to be unwilling to submit to a bath, then it is time to prepare a new wineskin and
to let the old wine turn to vinegar.

insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his
sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together
through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

We are coming, once again and perhaps for the last time, (if those mature saints wise in such things are
reading rightly the signs) into a time in history when the natural and the supernatural are drawing very
near to each other…where the fabric between these realms is being stretched very thin. And even as
there are many who are wise in the ways of the Lord, there are many spiritually sensitive, but proud and
willful, people who for a multitude of reasons will not bend the knee to Christ but who want to traffic in
metaphysical things. These people are wide open to demonic deception. They will be deceived, and they
will become deceivers as malevolent forces far larger and more powerful than themselves use them as
pawns. And they are as often within the churches as without because the spiritual environment of the
Christian assembly is attractive to them; it draws them like a flame in the night attracts bugs out of the
darkness.

If we are not protected by humility and steadily growing in our intimacy and knowledge of the Lord through
worship, prayer, and the sound study and application of the Word, we are very easily going to be misled
by such people as these because they are constantly having “spiritual” experiences, and they are very
much demonically assisted in their “insights” into spiritual things: They can act and sound very “anointed”
and powerful at times, even operating with apparently miraculous signs and compelling and “prophetic”
words. Only a rich personal relationship with the Lord and a solid understanding of the New Covenant
“rightly divided” offers sufficient protection from these empowered deceivers, for it is through these two life
disciplines alone that we are taught to discern the difference between the Truth and a lie, between the real
and the counterfeit, between life-giving fruit and poisoned fruit.

308
Paul also emphasizes here that believers function and are kept safe as a BODY… We each contrib-
ute life and strength to others, are necessary to and are in need of others, and our prayer is empow-
ered when we pray in gatherings. Matthew 18:20; Hebrews 10:24-25 Like a flock of sheep, a metaphor often
used in the scripture, we are protected when we are in community under the Chief Shepherd’s watch.
But the “wolves” will always seek to isolate a single sheep from the edge of the flock: They will sys-
tematically separate a weak or overly independent sheep from the protection of the group by stealth
and guile, and then will take that loner out. This metaphor also holds true for us. Marilyn and I have
known many believers who are no longer part of any fellowship for any of a thousand different rea-
sons. They are either growing dark and cold like coals that have rolled away from the heart of a fire,
or they have joined themselves to tiny cult-like groups with bizarre teachings that produce no fruit, or
worse, produce poisoned fruit and peddle it. We, ourselves, and especially I, are continually bom-
barded by what seem to be valid reasons why we should isolate and forsake the assembly, especially
after the battle we have been waging personally for the past three years. Yet both our deep hearts
wherein abides the Holy Spirit, and the clear voice of the Lord through the scriptures and especially
through the New Covenant documents, have always insisted that we seek out the accountability and
covering of the larger body of Christ. And because of this we have continued to grow stronger and
gain Kingdom ground in spite of the intense warfare that has been our continuing experience.

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you
submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they
are used)—according to human precepts and teachings?

These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the
body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

I have tried to maintain distinctions between true New Covenant Christianity, and the “Christian Reli-
gion” (what I have been calling Christendumb) and “religion” in general. New Covenant Christianity is
not “religion”, though for want of other words, we think of it as religion, and, unfortunately, in the
minds of a majority of people Christianity is just another religion among the many religions of the
world.

Religion, which derives from the Latin words meaning “to bind again” or “to bind fast” (in the sense of
the gods and man being bound together, or man having a reverential obligation to the gods) is always
some more or less complicated and ritualistic form that is humanly created by which man seeks to
approach and appease some contrived and crafted concept of deity. It doesn’t matter here what deity
we are talking about or what that ritualistic form might be. Paul’s argument is that however simple or
sophisticated or self-abusing or self-satisfying such forms and rituals might be, they are all exercises
in self-indulgence and do not achieve the one goal that is necessary, which is the solution to the prob-
lem of self-centeredness itself and to the ultimate problem of sin in man and of death and the eternal
separation from God which is the result of sin.

All religions are man-made. (I will add here that I believe that some, and perhaps many, belief sys-
tems are also in lesser or greater degrees demonically “inspired”.) All religions are also idolatry.
This is because, being man-made, they are anthropomorphic and invariably create their god or gods
in the image of man. As soon as this is done, an idol has been created. Whether they are mono-the-
istic like Islam, or poly-theistic like Hinduism, or pan-theistic like many New Age cults, or even agnos-
tic like Buddhism (in theory), the gods that are worshipped are invariably human on a large scale, with
large scale human flaws and often hideous distortions and perversions, and are not truly transcen-
dent; and if transcendence is explored at all by the belief system it is done so in arcane and unintelligi-
ble ways that ultimately end not in the redemption of the individual (the self or soul) but in its
dissolution.

309
Many modern “religions” have abandoned the idea of sin and of a transcendent deity altogether and
now worship the self and the human being as god…the ultimate desire of fallen man since Lucifer
deceived Eve. (Not to go off topic, human beings are worshipping creatures, and whether or not we
choose to acknowledge the vocabulary, even such things as excessive self-indulgence and obses-
sive behaviors and pursuits really are expressions of the need to worship, are “religions” to those
who focus their lives around them.) Beyond the human traits and flaws that all such “gods” exhibit,
many such false gods also reveal themselves to have characteristics that can only be defined as evil
or “demonic”, their true nature showing through their anthropomorphic disguise. And those few who
do show off any “good” side invariably look to be piecemeal imitations of the consistently purer good-
ness of Christ and of Jehovah, never offering the fullness of the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Biblical Christianity is not a religion. It is a relationship between two persons: The believer and Christ,
the human being and his or her Creator, a child and its Father, the worshipper and Almighty God.
And it is the community that consists of many such eternally paired persons.

And it was not created by man: It was created by God, and was given to man at His sovereign initia-
tive. Ours is a “revealed” faith. It is logical that a God who is in every way transcendent would have
to initiate contact with His creatures if any communication were to occur: This our God has done. We
who are beginning to know our Father through Christ are truly being taught to know that which is hu-
manly impossible to know. We are growing in this knowledge by the one way in which persons truly
come to know each other, through intimate communion and communication over a lifetime.

Our Maker has provided every necessary tool to us for this communication: He has initiated contact.
He has provided us a clear and complete written communication of His plans and purposes for us, a
“play book” and an “operator’s manual” that remains a constant point of reference for us under all cir-
cumstances and at all times. He has structured this communication in such a way that it shows
these plans and purposes in a progressive step-by-step manner. He has demonstrated and con-
firmed His written words through historical events which we can confirm so that we can be sure that
this offer of relationship is true and valid. He has Himself entered into our world in a form that we can
recognize and relate to and communicate with without fear or confusion, and in that form He taught
and demonstrated exactly what He expects of us. He then resolved the single greatest problem that
stood between Himself and each of us. He provided a guaranteed way for each of us to return to the
place and purpose for which we are created. He has provided all of the resources required for us to
accomplish that return and attain to that place and that purpose. He guarantees the result and asks
only that we agree with Him in His purposes for us and that we make every effort to cooperate with
Him and move together with Him as He moves His plan forward.

The only image we have ever been given of this God we are beginning to know is the Person of Je-
sus Christ in the Incarnation. And we do not have a physical image of Him… We have a biographical
record left to us by eyewitness companions with whom He walked and to whom He entrusted His
message, and we each one of us have Him as an invisible living companion. Such images as we
have are constructs from traditions, and in creating them we, too, risk becoming idolaters if we are
not careful. The images we create may be helpful to us, and I personally don’t believe that there is
anything intrinsically wrong with most of them, but they are also potentially snares: We must always
be aware of this. Christendumb has turned such images into dangerous traps throughout its history
because many religious believers find it difficult to exercise their faith apart from them, and many
church leaders have found it convenient to use the power of symbol and image to control the simple
minded who are too lazy or too fearful or too deceived to think for themselves.

310
Our Lord is far too complicated and wonderful to be limited in description as a portrait or a sculpture.
Jesus Himself came to reveal the Father: Jesus is the fullness of the invisible non-corporeal Almighty
God in skin, and to walk and talk with Him and to watch Him in action is to see the Father in a form
that we can in some measure identify with and relate to. We have this as our paradigm and our pat-
tern. Jesus Christ is the Pattern Son. It is to this pattern we are to aspire and to conform. Because
He has united His own Holy Spirit with our spirit we not only can read the written accounts of His so-
journ with us with the Author at our side aiding our understanding, but we can also experience our
own similar adventures as He empowers us to imitate Himself and to be His ambassadors continuing
and completing what remains of His work in our generation. We are expected to do this.

Biblical Christianity is not humanly derived: It descended to us from a higher realm, a dimension be-
yond those with which we are familiar, and by revelation, and it is by revelation alone that we can
comprehend what Christianity is about.

The Christian Religion (Christendumb) is a counterfeit of Biblical Christianity. It is the result of human
hands taking hold of Divine things and creating a copy or facsimile of them. It is, once again, man
seeking to reach up to God on man’s terms, rather than man approaching God on God’s terms.

What should have been no more than a simple organizational structure by which God’s church man-
ages its day to day affairs and maintains order when the Lord is not specifically on the move steadily
yielded ground to both well-meaning individuals and to power-hungry ambitious men and women,
and over time lost its way and became a human political/social construct that has continued to this
day in its myriad forms. Within this construct there has always been the true New Covenant Church,
which has either struggled to persist in spite of the human impedimenta around it, or has regularly
broken free of that prison and set off on its own. And almost without fail, each of these separatist
groups has also succumbed, over time, to the same corrupting process and to the uprising of human
ambition and pride. This is an age old battle that will not end until the end of the times of the Gentiles
and the Return of the Lord.

311
3 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right
hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

I have said before, and it bears repeating, that the battleground for the soul is the mind. And I would
point out here that in almost every thought that follows Paul uses imperative voice verbs (the impera-
tive voice denotes a word of command requiring action in Greek grammar): We are commanded by
the Lord to take the initiative and to do the seeking and the mind-setting and the putting on and the
whatever-we-are- instructed to be doing. Once we are liberated from the slavery to sin and are filled
with the Holy Spirit, we are free to make the choices at every temptation whether or not to yield to the
desires and lusts of the flesh or to yield to the higher ideals of the Kingdom, and it is our responsibility
to do so. Paul explains the difference between these attitudes very clearly as he continues.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
When Christ who is your life appears,

Here again is a clear statement of the vital union that is the heart of true Christianity. Please think
prayerfully for some time on these words: Paul is not speaking metaphorically of idealistic metaphysi-
cal concepts. He is speaking factually of supernatural realities. You have died (a past event). Your
life is now hidden with Christ in God (a present reality). You will be glorified at Christ’s appearing (a
future reality).

then you also will appear with him glory.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:

Because of these realities we are commanded to aggressively exercise the attributes of our new life
here and now. We are to begin to live according to Kingdom principles and to actively sever those
connections as they are revealed to us which bind us to the old life from which we have been liberat-
ed.

sexual immorality, impurity,passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the
wrath of God is coming.

It bears repeating that the Old Covenant deals almost exclusively with actions, behaviors, which are
the external manifestations of internal impulses and motivations….do this, don’t do that. This is be-
cause before the ascension of Christ the Holy Spirit’s access to our realm was very limited. Cf. John
7:37-39; John 16:7 Our world, as I have discussed at length in the Romans essays, was fully under Satan-
ic domination, and God’s own rules prevented Him from trespassing upon it.

However, after the Day of Pentecost everything changed, and with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit
upon “all flesh” that which had been limited to externals for generally ad hoc purposes became inter-
nalized and abiding. The “Law of Commandments”, which was designed for the mind of man to grap-
ple with, has been superseded by the “Law of Love” in Christ, which is written upon the heart and is
something that the Mind of Christ interprets to the soul of man through his reborn and awakened spirit.

For this reason, the New Covenant deals, not with the actions we commit, but almost exclusively with
the attitudes which lie behind and result in the actions; be this way, not that way…think these kinds of
thoughts, not those kinds of thoughts, and so on. And it very clearly insists that we have the power,
through Christ, to take authority over our thoughts and impulses and to make them conform to King-
dom standards.
312
I also want to note here that the five attitudes Paul identifies in this passage are all very contemporary and
endemic to Western society in the 21st century. And that they are generally as prevalent within the profess-
ing Christian community as without. There is very little standing at this time between our nation and the
judgments of God.

Paul writes in Romans:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and ac-
ceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the re-
newal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12:1-2

And in Phillippians:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my
absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and
to work for his good pleasure. Philippians 2:12-13

In Colossians:

In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath,
malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old
self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its
creator.

Since I have covered these thoughts at length in other places, here I want to notice again, as above, only
that the New Covenant is dealing with core issues, with our predilections or points of choice in our behav-
iors. In summary, the Old Covenant dealt with our actions, because it was able only to put limits on exter-
nals. The New Covenant, because it reaches to and transforms the spirit and the soul, can address the
heart of the matter of our sin.

For this reason the New Covenant also transcends and eliminates all outward distinctions and differences
between human beings…It is universal. At the core, all human beings are very much the same, though
we differ immensely in our cultures and societies. (You can explore this in the writings of C.S. Lewis,
among others. He argues in Mere Christianity and in The Abolition of Man for the similarity of the moral
core of all mankind regardless of ethnic or cultural dissimilarity.) The Old Covenant was necessarily given
to a very specific and limited group of people: It was far too complicated to try to impart to the larger popu-
lation of the world as an intellectual exercise and religious discipline. And, in truth, while Israel was sup-
posed to be sharing its message with the people-groups around them (a task they have failed at
miserably), the primary purpose of the Old Covenant was to prepare in Israel a heritage of faithful people
who would be able to bring Messiah into the world. It was then Messiah’s work and message, and the spir-
itual impartation that accompanies these, that would make the salvation and Kingdom of God truly univer-
sal.

Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is
all, and in all.

Paul’s own words are quite clear in the following verses, and can be taken at face value: Just note again
that he commands us to take action, writing in imperative voice verbs in the original Greek. These things
are not suggestions: These instructions are his expectations for the normal Christian life. (I should note
that through verse 4:4 Paul is speaking to Christians primarily of their behavior toward each other, not so
much of their behavior toward non-Christians.)

313
 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts,kindness, humility, meekness,
and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as
the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds every-
thing together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were
called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing
one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to
God.

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the
Father through him.

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh
with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke
your children, lest they become discouraged. Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters,
not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do,
work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as
your reward.

You are serving the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there
is no partiality.

314
4 Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.
Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us,
that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in pris-
on— that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.

Paul alludes here to intercessory prayer, the warfare prayer that drives back demonic opposition.
This is a primary duty of the Christian when moved upon by the Holy Spirit to do battle.

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare
are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 2 Corinthians 10:3-4

In Colossians:

Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time.

It is discouraging (appalling?) how much time we can waste in our day, especially in our continually
distracted American culture with all of its toys and entertainments and its addictions to leisure and
pleasure and adrenaline and endorphins. Paul admonishes the Ephesian church in much the same
way, but with a bit more detail:

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days
are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Ephesians 5:15-17

Here he clarifies his point by remarking that his readers were living in evil times and that it was foolish not
to be circumspect in such times. We, today, are certainly living in evil times, and the evil of our times is
often insidiously subtle and subversive and seductive. It is not just terrorists and serial killers and drug
cartels. It is also the sexual revolution, and internet pornography, and moral relativism, and the erosion of
the family, and the corruption of politics, and the breakdown of authority, and materialism, and scientism,
and humanism, and the coarsening of our culture and its pervasive sensuality, and a thousand other cor-
rosive influences permeating our media, our schools, our places of worship, our halls of power, our mar-
ketplaces. And it is the desensitization that we all undergo because of constant exposure to this
neverending assault and just to survive.

Each of us, if we are serious about our discipleship, must take Paul’s admonition to heart and do every-
thing we can to counteract this ubiquitous evil as it seeks to seduce and to corrupt and ultimately to de-
stroy us. From the moment we awaken to the last waking thought we have we need to be “wise”. We
need to “make the best use of our time”. We need to be advancing into the Kingdom. This doesn’t mean
that we have to become cloistered nuns or monks. But it does mean that we have to be actively building
our relationship with our Father through His Son on a 24/7/365 basis, and that we have to daily be evalu-
ating our progress in that relationship and our progress away from the world from which we have been
redeemed. If we are not daily making progress away from our past life and into our present life in
Christ…then something is very wrong. And the problem lays with us….not with God.

Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each
person.

Somehow Jesus was able to hang out with “publicans and sinners”, the street people of his day, and
to bring them up toward His level without sinking down to theirs.

315
The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of
tax collectors and sinners!’ Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:34

And Paul says that we ought to “become all things to all men” in order to bring the message of the
Kingdom to the world.

To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law
(though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became
as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those out-
side the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that
by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel,that I may share with them in its blessings.
1 Corinthians 9:20-23

In another place he says that we are not to withdraw from contact with the world.

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the sexually im-
moral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.
1 Corinthians 5:9-10

But we are always to be recognizably different from the world around us. We are “in the world, but not
of the world” (John 17). This does not mean that we have to wear weird clothes and long beards or car-
ry huge black Bibles and wear crucifixes around our necks. But it means that we should be offering
something so compelling in our presence, through our lives and our life-style and through our joy and
the way in which we deal with our affairs and the world around us, that those around us either desire
to experience what we have, or feel a need to run and hide from it. The “glory of God” should rest up-
on us (cf. 1 Peter 4:13-14). We are to be salt…a mineral that in measured quantities brings out flavor,
cleanses, heals, preserves…but in excess burns and poisons. Paul remarks that we are to be a
seasoning….not a poison.
Becoming “all things to all men” does not mean we return to the vulgar camaraderie of base humor
and heavy drinking or drugs or the other things that those who do not know the Lord regard as recre-
ation and pleasure or as “survival skills”. However, we need not necessarily stand in constant judg-
ment over them when we are around these folks either. Paul says as much in his letter to the
Corinthians, as I noted above. Until a person comes to know the Lord we ought not to expect them to
behave in ways other than those of the world with which they are familiar, and from which they have
little defense. We can explain to them our position, when they ask or when a compromising situation
comes up, but we do not have to beat them over the head with it. They simply can’t live according to
the rules we have been empowered to keep, and it is wrong for us to expect them to. Conviction of
sin comes from the Holy Spirit, not from us, as does any power to escape from the power sin has over
the human soul. Those who are in the world are doing what comes naturally, and really can’t be ex-
pected to be behaving otherwise. If we build relationship with a person, and they understand that we
are Christian but that we are not judging them or condemning them but rather are truly caring about
them as a friend, then our presence in their lives gives God the access He needs to work on their
hearts. And our job is to pray for them in order to keep that point of access open. They will certainly
be convicted by the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, even when we are silent, and either will be
drawn toward Him or will choose to end their relationship with us. If they are being drawn toward the
Lord, then over time we will have opportunity to begin to lead them out of the pits and snares of their
lives.

316
In today’s world, at least in Western societies, it is likely that many people would never find themselves
visiting a church because they have been inoculated against Christ by the public embarrassments of
Christendumb and the travesties and misinformation of the anti-Christian media and educational system.
That means that we are going to have to get out of the fellowship hall or the pew and seek out a lot of
folks on less than “holy” ground. We will have to bring the Gospel to them where they are.

Personally, I have no problem sitting with a friend in a bar, or even having a beer with them, and talking
about the Lord. I can attend at least some of their parties. I can join them in many of their recreations. I
will go to an “R” rated movie on occasion. I am an adult and am aware of the realities of the world around
me and am able to deal with them in a mature manner: There is little in most “R” rated movies that I don’t
encounter daily as I go about my personal and business affairs. I have spent years considering these
things, and have decided that if the acceptance of an offer of hospitality by someone requires me to enter
their world yet serves to open the door of their heart to hear the message of the Kingdom, there is quite
often no biblical restriction concerning it. There are certainly lines over which I will not step, and there are
temptations I will not expose myself to, but many of the lines which the church has drawn over the years
measure human traditions and not biblical boundaries, and I have little use for these, especially where
the salvation of souls is concerned. And if I do step over a line, that the Lord has drawn, and I certainly
have on occasion overstepped my liberty, He is very faithful to point this out and to call me back before I
have lingered long outside of proper bounds. He is a most attentive parent to His children.

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wed-
ding feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the wedding feast, but they would not come.
Again he sent other servants, saying, ‘Tell those who are invited, See, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat
calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding feast.’ But they paid no attention and went
off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them.
The king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city. Then he said to his ser-
vants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the
wedding feast as many as you find.’ And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both
bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests. “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there
a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’
And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer dark-
ness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” Matthew 22:2-
14

In Colossians:

Tychicus will tell you all about my activities. He is a beloved brother and faithful minister and fellow servant in
the Lord. I have sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are and that he may encourage
your hearts, and with him Onesimus, our faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you. They will tell you of ev-
erything that has taken place here. Aristarchus my fellow prisoner greets you, and Mark the cousin of Barnabas
(concerning whom you have received instructions—if he comes to you, welcome him), and Jesus who is called
Justus. These are the only men of the circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God, and they
have been a comfort to me. Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling
on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God. For I bear him
witness that he has worked hard for you and for those in Laodicea and in Hierapolis. Luke the beloved physician
greets you, as does Demas. Give my greetings to the brothers at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her
house. And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and see
that you also read the letter from Laodicea. And say to Archippus, “See that you fulfill the ministry that you have
received in the Lord.” I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you.

Paul ends this letter with his characteristic personal greetings and signature.
317
 Thoughts on Paul’s Letter to the

GALATIANS

318
The letter to the Galatian churches was most probably written toward the end of Paul’s third missionary journey
from Macedonia or from Corinth in 55 or 56 AD, and was written as a message to be shared among the several
regional fellowships that had been established through his ministry in Asia Minor. These fellowships were be-
ing invaded by the heretical party of conservative Jewish Christians from Jerusalem, called Judaizers, who were
following Paul and teaching that the salivation in Christ could only be received if a believer first submitted to
Jewish circumcision and kept the Law of Moses. Such a legalistic teaching completely undermined and discred-
ited the Gospel of liberty that Paul had preached when he brought the Kingdom message to the Galatian believ-
ers. Moreover, these false apostles openly accused Paul of preaching a compromised and cheapened way of
righteousness in order to gain converts to himself.

Paul, in this letter, strongly defends his own authority and brilliantly explains the Gospel of the Kingdom and
the righteousness that is by faith as opposed to works. He proves clearly that the Law is incapable of removing
the burden of sin and has always been nothing more than a “schoolmaster” or “guardian” to teach us what sin
and grace are all about. As always, he then concludes with solid, practical, applications of what he has been
teaching.

Galatians, in many ways, is a succinct companion letter to the much more in-depth and complete theological
treatise offered in Paul’s letter to the Romans, which was also written in this same time period.

319
 THE LETTER TO THE GALATIANS

1 Paul, an apostle—
not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father,

As always, Paul establishes the ground of his authority to speak of Kingdom things; He was writing to
a fellowship that had been infiltrated by a contingent of false “apostles” who claimed they had authori-
ty from the Jerusalem Mother Church, from Jesus’ revered half-brother James himself, and who were
undermining the doctrine of Christian liberty that Paul had taught to the Galatian believers.

A true minister of Christ is appointed and raised up by the Lord, not by any promotion of his own, or
by the approval or permission of any man or by the institutions of man. True ordination is the recogni-
tion of a divine anointing, which is an impartation from God to accomplish an assignment from God,
and not merely the conferring of a human certification of approval or achievement or of knowledge
gained through a program of study. Human honor and award have nothing in themselves to do with
Divine anointing or the call to ministry, though at times they may acknowledge and support these. As
often as not mainstream approval by organized religion is a sign that a Christian minister has compro-
mised his or her message and is no longer proclaiming the full Gospel. As Paul says in verse ten,
seeking the approval of men often puts us at odds with the Lord.

In every generation there are multiplied tens of thousands of voices competing for attention in the
marketplace of metaphysics and the world’s religions. (In spite of the loud noises made by atheists,
above 85% of the world’s people believe in some sort of religion, and of those who do not, the majori-
ty are agnostic: True atheists make up perhaps one or two percent at best.) I have tried to share in
these musings such wisdom as I have mined over the last three plus decades of my experience in
Christ as concerns our discerning among all this cacophony the voices that speak Truth. Those who
are truly called to be ambassadors of the Kingdom of God by our Father through His Son speak with
an authority that cannot be mistaken, once it is encountered, because the only True God Himself
backs them up. And those who “have ears to hear” will not be satisfied until they have found fellow-
ship with those who speak with this authority. (You are right if you realize that my voice is to be
counted among these myriad competing voices: It is your responsibility to take everything I have said
“back to the Book” to see if it stands the test of agreement with the “more sure word of prophecy”. Be
Berean! (2 Peter 1:19; Acts 17:11))

The prevenient Grace of God is such that those who are true seekers, though they might be journey-
ing toward the Kingdom from great distances and lonely places, and though they might stop at un-
wholesome way-stations along their various paths to rest and to eat, nevertheless will always
eventually discover the pallets at those hostels hard and the soups thin. These travelers will soon
enough grow restless and will once again move on in their search until they find an inn which offers
real comfort and rest and those innkeepers whose tables are set with meals of substantial foods that
stick to the ribs and truly nourish and satisfy; And Waykeepers and fellow pilgrims whose directions
send them further down right roads in their journey toward the Kingdom.

The same Holy Spirit who has now been poured out upon all flesh, who is ceaselessly calling to those
who have been known to the Father from before our world was forged, also fills and empowers those
who are authentic ministers of the Gospel so that when the Father’s lost children decide to come
home, they are able to run into protecting and nurturing and loving arms.

320
And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as
one who had authority, and not as their scribes. Matthew 7:28-29

I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will re-
ceive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes
from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on
whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if
you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” John 5:43-47

As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that
they also may be sanctified in truth. “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me
through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be
in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to
them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so
that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also,
whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you
loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I
know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to
make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” John 17:18-26

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the
age.” Matthew 28:18-20

Jesus told His disciples about His Father’s concern for a single sparrow. Most of us have probably
watched more than one National Geographic documentary or Discovery Channel special about pen-
guins or seabirds or sea lions that somehow are able to find their one hungry squawking chick or pup
or calling mate among tens of thousands of nests on a rocky island or in an Antarctic ice field when
they return from days or weeks of separation as they search for food. The children of Adam are more
precious to God than penguins. The Lord has said that His “sheep hear His voice”, and that all who
search for Him will find Him.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future
and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and
find me, when you seek me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:11-13
I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours.
All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. And I am no longer in the world, but they
are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that
they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given
me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture
might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my
joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of
the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them
from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word
is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate my-
self, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

321
“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be
one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that
you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are
one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me
and loved them even as you loved me. John 17:9-23
Both those who are called to minister and those to whom the Father is calling are being given continu-
al special and personal attention by the Lord, who confirms with evidences the ministry of those who
He appoints as His workmen, and who moves with redemptive power to heal and remake and liberate
those to whom they minister.

In Galatians:

who raised him from the dead—

Please note again the clear distinction Paul makes between the Father and the Son (also in verse 3
below). Paul did not have in mind to answer theological questions that would not be raised for sever-
al hundred years, so the issues of the Trinity and of which Person of the Triune Godhead acted in
which aspect of the Incarnation and Resurrection were not questions he tried to explain at depth, but
by thinking and praying through such repeated statements as these in each of Paul’s letters we can
begin to gain a richer insight into the ineffable nature of our Almighty God.

Paul seems as easily to have understood God as three differentiated unique Persons as he did under-
standing God as one supreme and unified Deity, and nowhere in his writing is there any indication of
conflict or confusion with these ideas. This is even more remarkable considering that Paul had been
a rabidly zealous monotheistic Jew until his encounter with the risen Christ on the road outside of Da-
mascus. If anyone should have had a conflict with the idea of a Three-personal God, it should have
been Paul. (cf. John 5:18) His monotheism would have been as deeply ingrained and as strongly held
as that of any Muslim fundamentalist toward Allah.

And it is equally clear from his writings that Paul did not make blind-faith simplistic assumptions about
his theology either. It is safe to assume that he fully understood and accepted that the God of the
Shema (“Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”) Deuteronomy 6:4 and the God he so clearly
differentiated as “God the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ” 2 Corinthians 11:31, who also is the Paraclete (one
who comes to one’s side as an advocate) Romans 1:1-4 , the abiding companion known to us as the Ho-
ly Spirit, are one and the same Sovereign Deity and Creator of all things. It is absolutely clear from
the body of Paul’s writings that his revelation of the Kingdom of God included an absolute transforma-
tion and expansion of his understanding of the nature of God Himself.

and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ,

Paul frontloads this letter to this mixed group of largely Gentile, with some Jewish, believers with re-
minder after reminder of the grace of God and the finished work of Christ because he is about to
come down on them like a ton of bricks about their rapid backsliding into the lies and snares of the
“Judaizers” who had infiltrated their fellowships after Paul and his team had shared the Gospel of the
Kingdom with them. These Judaizers were a divisive splinter group based in Jerusalem who perhaps
were originally associated with the very conservative Christianity of James, Jesus’ half-brother, who
had become one of the patriarchs of the nascent church and whose blood relationship to the Lord
gave him great authority with many in Jerusalem.

322
A faction of these extremists broke from the main stream of the Jerusalem fellowship and began to follow
Paul and his team, claiming that James had authorized them to do so (which he hadn’t, though perhaps
he hadn’t been strong enough with them either in shutting them down). They were religiously racist and
were unable to accept the idea that the Gentiles could be saved simply by faith in Christ, and they appar-
ently could not free their minds from obedience to the Mosaic Law, and they would invade young Gentile
fellowships and try to convince them that they had to become Law-keeping Jews in order to benefit from
the Gospel. (There is also an indication in Paul’s remarks that these Messianic Jews were having prob-
lems with the stigma that was attached with becoming a Christian, and that they were trying to avoid be-
ing ostracized by the Jewish community while still benefiting from the promises of the New Covenant.)

It is to counter this strengthening heresy that Paul is writing this letter. These troublemakers show up regu-
larly throughout the New Covenant writings, and not just in Paul’s letters. Elements of this prejudice still
exist in some measure even today among more extreme Messianic Christian groups, as do opposing ex-
cesses among Fundamentalist believers that reject everything that links Christianity to the Old Covenant
and to Israel: Both are heretical errors.)

The struggle has always been between Law and Grace, rooted in the compost of pride: It is very hard for
us human beings to accept the idea that we can do nothing of ourselves to earn the approval of God, but
that we must bow in humility and admit that we are both absolutely wrong and absolutely helpless and
that we must receive even the strength to give up from Him. We so desperately want to be someone in
ourselves; to say “Look at me, Daddy! Look at what I have done! Approve of me!” But that is not possi-
ble, because there is nothing we can do in ourselves that can repair the damage that has been created by
what we have already done in our own efforts. Only by accepting the Grace of God can we receive the
resources we need to accomplish anything that can rise to the standards of God.

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the
surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them
as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes
from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—  that
I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that
by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Philippians 3:7-11

In Galatians:

who gave himself for our sins

to deliver us from the present evil age,

Christ came in order to complete the task of delivering us from “the present evil age”. He had already giv-
en Himself for our sins when Paul wrote this, and Paul speaks in terms that indicate that we have been
delivered, not that deliverance is a future event. The emphasis of the rest of the letter is that we are free
to walk in liberty in the Spirit NOW. For the non- believer the “present evil age” is still continuing. For the
believer, we have been delivered into the “Kingdom age” even as we still walk through this world.) In
Ephesians, Paul speaks of this age and of “the ages to come” (Eph.1:21; 2:7) and the Greek word that we
translate “eternity” is more accurately rendered “ages of ages”. The biblical revelation is rich with the
promise of God’s unfolding purposes.

according to the will of our God and Father,

to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

I have written at length earlier about the precision and orderliness of the Father’s plans and purpos-
es: Nothing regarding the fall and redemption of humanity or the work of Messiah has been unexpect-
ed or unaccounted for.

323
 So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are
thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved
and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may
have life and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the
sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares
nothing for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows
me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold.
I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this rea-
son the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I
lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This
charge I have received from my Father.” John 10:7-18

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the
Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the
hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Fa-
ther is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and
truth.” John 4:21-24

One other thought about the Fatherhood of God. I ran across a quote from a commentator that gave
me pause:

“The rabbis welcomed a sinner in his repentance. But to seek out the sinner ... was ... something new
in the religious history of Israel.” (C. G. Montefiore)

The gods of the pagan world were capricious and often monstrous exaggerations and distortions of sinful
humanity. Those who came before them groveled in terror, bringing sacrifices of appeasement and some-
times performing unspeakable acts of obeisance in the hope that by doing so they might somehow escape
the wrath or curry the favor of their fickle tyrant overlords.

The majestic God, Jehovah (YHWH), of the religious Jews had become an awesome and intimidating dei-
ty guarded and made unapproachable by the priestcraft and ceremony of the Levitical Law and the Tem-
ple worship. Over time He had become the God of the nation, and of the privileged classes of that nation,
but was kept at a distance from the common people as individuals by the accumulated traditions of their
religion and by those who had turned the Law of Moses into an instrument of power and control.

The Father, who Jesus called Abba, reached out to the weakest and most broken and wounded of Jew
and Gentile alike with strong yet tender hands to offer them comfort and renewal. This was, and is, a total-
ly unique revelation to anyone who is honestly aware of his or her own sinfulness and need for redemption.
Jesus (Emmanuel –“God with us” Matthew 1:22-23) demonstrated the willingness of the Father to “seek and
save that which is lost” Luke 19:10 by such actions as his initiation of a conversation with the Samaritan wom-
an at the well, his touching of lepers to heal them, his eating with “publicans and sinners” in their own
homes, the willingness he had to violate religious law as he touched the dead to restore them to life and
return them to their families, his acceptance of women into his circle of fellowship.

In Christ we see the heart of God, desiring to woo us back to the place and purpose for which we are cre-
ated. Over and over again we read accounts of Jesus calling out to individuals themselves lost in crowds
of people, summoning them by name to come to Him. We see the Father in the parable of the Prodigal
Son Luke 15:11ff who, understanding that his wayward child would not listen to reason until the fires of his
rebellion finally burned out, nevertheless stood each day on the roof of the house watching the horizon,
always searching for that small spec of a silhouette on the distant road that would mean that his child was
finally coming home. And when that day finally came, that loving father ran to that weary and broken wan-
derer and embraced him and gathered him up and celebrated with joy. Such a Father is our God.

324
 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him (to turn from the Gospel is to turn from the true wor-
ship of God the Father: To turn back into the state of separation from the only source of spiritual life.)
who called you in the grace of Christ

It was inconceivable to Paul that anyone who had experienced the liberty of the Gospel would choose
to return to the bondage of legalism. But perhaps this is not so strange a thing as it first appears.
Deeply imprinted patterns are hard to erase. Most of us have heard stories of animals that have lived
so long in cages that when the cages are removed the poor creatures cannot step beyond the invisi-
ble lines that once defined their confinement. Plenty of human prisoners, when released from their
sentences, very quickly find their way back into a jail cell because they cannot cope with the larger
world outside the walls.

With liberty comes personal responsibility, and many people are uncomfortable with personal respon-
sibility. With liberty comes risk and the possibility of failure as well as the possibility of great success
and reward. And many people are afraid to take risks and to face failure, even when the rewards of
success are very great and very real. It is easier, and safer, for many to follow externally imposed
rules and to let others dictate and therefore bear responsibility for decisions and for consequences. It
is easier to say “I was just following orders” than it is to stand upon what is right and true in the face of
what is wrong but powerful. Many people will sacrifice the chance of great personal rewards and live
lives of mediocrity rather than take some risk and possibly suffer some setback or a failure with the
threat of being ridiculed and publicly humiliated.

Paul had clearly taught the Galatians that the salvation in Christ was the fulfillment of the Jewish Old
Covenant and that a New Covenant now prevailed: This was his message and it is clear from what he
writes in reminder in this and his other letters. He had taught them completely the details of these
things and had led them to a Spirit-filled relationship with Jesus Christ sealed by water baptism. He
had helped them structure a New Testament fellowship to continue their progress in discipleship after
he moved on. The fact that we have this letter indicates that he made efforts to stay in touch with
them.

But apparently some of them were still concerned about their connections to the Temple in Jerusalem
and the benefits that derived from these connections, and hadn’t understood that their salvation did
not depend in some way upon their genealogical relationship to “God’s Chosen People”, the Jews,
and the Temple rituals. Somehow, perhaps, some of them even had missed the revelation that God
was universal and omnipresent and not just living at the Temple in Jerusalem, even though they had
experienced the reality of the Holy Spirit under the ministry of Paul. And when the contingent of trou-
blemakers “from James” arrived, these were able to be convinced that they needed to keep some old-
order rules in order to be Christians … that the liberty in Christ was conditional.

How this went down probably occurred in steps: First the Jerusalem contingent persuaded the more
conservative Jewish members of the Galatian fellowship that they, being blood-line children of Abra-
ham, were the “true” Christians and that they needed to explain this to their Gentile friends. And then
these Gentiles, once they had folded under the pressure of their assault and been circumcised, in
turn leaned on their less theologically knowledgeable god-fearing non-Jewish neighbors and began to
pressure them. (Compare the way Peter acted at Antioch Galatians 2:11-13ff). This, of course, created
tension and confusion throughout the fellowship, and began to cause divisions in the church with
some persons following Paul’s teachings and others moving toward the Judaizers. Those who were
locked in to the Holy Spirit and were hearing from God remained in liberty. Those who were not men
and women of conviction and courage and were afraid of living with the responsibility of freedom
caved and went back under the Law.

325
and are turning to a (qualitatively) different gospel— not that there is another one,
but there are some who trouble you and want to distort (pervert) the gospel of Christ.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary(Opposed, as in character or
purpose: 2. Opposite in direction or position:) to the one we preached to you, him be accursed.
(anathema…separated to the eternal destruction of Hell) As we have said before, so now I say
again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to
please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

How many “other Gospels” are there? Paul is speaking against one here which, in the name of Jesus
Christ, seeks to make religious “works” the basis of salvation, instead of Faith through Grace.

It might be safe to say that “other Gospels” generally fall into a few categories: 1) Christ plus works:
errors that conflate the Old Covenant with the New 2) “gnostic” errors that separate the evil actions
of the material world from the pure actions of the spiritual realm and regard the sins of the flesh as
inconsequential and therefore teach spirituality without holiness 3) errors that elevate the forgiveness
in Christ too far above the seriousness of repentance (cheap grace) and teach salvation without Lord-
ship, conversion without discipleship 4) errors that fail to understand the Gospel of the Kingdom and
teach less than the full message of the New Covenant; distortions and caricatures of Christ 5) errors
that teach “another Christ”, either by redefining Jesus and His Messiahship or by offering another sav-
ior or path to God altogether.

Any preaching or teaching of the New Covenant which fails to fully speak the truth in love when truth
needs to be spoken, however controversial or potentially disruptive that truth-speaking might be, is a
failure on the part of the minister. We are called to deliver a timely message “in season and out of sea-
son” 2 Timothy 4:2 regardless of consequences whenever the Lord requires it of us, and it is not for us to
second guess His timings or His purposes. Acts 5:29 This is the “spirit of prophesy, which is the testimony
of Jesus Christ”. Revelation 19:10

If we are afraid of the results of such outspokenness then we need to step down from our assignment
as a minister to the Body until we have dealt with our personal issues and our fears. If we do not we
will be held accountable for our words, and our words will be at best ineffective. We are not called to
be friends with everyone, nor are we called to be at peace with everyone all the time. “As much as lies
within us, we are to be at peace with all men” Romans 12:18 must be reconciled in us with “I come not to bring
peace, but a sword” Matthew 10:34, because the King we serve is a warrior King, and we are His soldiers
in battle. And there will be times when the word that is a blessing to one person will inflame the an-
ger of another.

To be a manpleaser is to stand for nothing. It is to be a hypocrite, a wearer of masks. It is to always

try to run to the front of the herd and to convince them that you are in the lead. True leadership al-
ways is seeing farther than those being led, and is speaking of things which those hearing have not
heard and may not want to hear. True leadership is always going to be a disturbing and disruptive
element, at least to some.

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel.

For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

326
Paul is emphatic in his claim to authority. After his experience on the road to Damascus he spent a
period of time, probably some months, in a solitary retreat in the wild country to the East of the Jor-
dan River. By his own testimony it was there that he was instructed by the Lord Himself in the details
of the New Covenant and of the Gospel of the Kingdom and of the inclusion of the Gentile world in
the redemption made available through the Incarnation. He details this in the verses that follow. (Com-
pare this with 2 Corinthians 12:1ff). Paul was uniquely qualified, because of his brilliant mind, his lifetime
immersion in the study of the Tanakh including his studies at the feet of Gamaliel (the foremost con-
servative rabbinical teacher in Israel), and his cosmopolitan heritage, to breach the ancient theologi-
cal walls that Judaism had built around the Old Covenant and to rethink the entire system of the
Jewish religion in terms of the New Covenant, once it had been revealed to him by the resurrected
Christ.

I also want to point out that those who oppose the Christian message and who dismiss the docu-
ments that Christians claim as authentically proclaiming that message must therefore take such state-
ments as these in those documents (and there are many), written by men who give all indications of
truth, honesty, and integrity in their writings, and simply and directly call those men deceivers and
liars….an easy thing to do since the writers are no longer around to defend themselves.

For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to
destroy it.

Paul here refers to his activities as an “enforcer” for the Sanhedrin after the stoning of Stephen. (Acts
7:54- 8:3, Acts 26:1-23)

And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for
traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace,

Please read my thoughts on predestination and on the prevenient grace of God in the essays on Ro-
mans and Ephesians for a detailed exploration of these ideas.

was pleased to reveal his Son to me,

Paul writes “to reveal his Son in me”, not “to” me: This is significant. Again, modern translators tend
to put God “out there” somewhere, when choosing their words, when the scriptures teach us that the
King and the Kingdom are within. (Luke 17:21) We are, each one of us if we are Christians, bearers of
Christ, in intimate relationship with our Lord. We are united with Him, not separated from and reach-
ing out to Him. This is the blessing of the New Covenant; its radical difference from the Old. The
Lord is infinitely close to the New Covenant believer: He does not have to be sought out at a distance.
(Romans 10:8)

The God of the Old Testament was necessarily external. The intimate communion between Creator
and creature for which man was designed had been severed through the Luciferian deception of Ad-
am. But this has been restored through the Incarnation and resurrection. Jesus explained this to his
apostles prior to his passion (cf. John 14:16-17), and they experienced the reality of this with the outpour-
ing of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and afterward. Paul, receiving his understanding of the
Gospel by direct revelation from the Lord, was given the privilege of communicating this Truth in
depth for the permanent record.

327
However, and unfortunately, poor exegesis of the scripture and the marketplace of popular preaching
has run roughshod over sound theology, and even though a modern Evangelical Christian says that
he or she has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and has “accepted Christ in his or her heart”,
in practice it often seems that the God we serve is again somewhere “out there”. And it is unfortu-
nately true that in our modern world “perception is altogether too often reality”.

We gather at the church building to “meet with the Lord”. We stand in church and sing “Come Lord
Jesus”. We raise our hands to the ceiling and ask the Holy Spirit to “fill this place”. We cry out for
the “rain to fall” and for the anointing of God to “come down on” us. We move to the front of the sanc-
tuary because that is where “the presence of the Lord is”. We “shout to the Lord” and we “give the
Lord a clap offering” as if He were sitting on His throne at the front of the room. Sometimes we physi-
cally “dance before the Lord” or “bow down” as if He were on the stage reviewing our worship. And
this is not to detail the extravagant formalities of the religious rituals of the more mainstream “high
churches” like Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican.

These are all Old Testament paradigms. Some of them might have a value in that they are external
demonstrations of internal attitudes, and we, as physical beings, are sometimes aided and encour-
aged in our faith by such things. I don’t want to say that all us activities are wrong or that we all are to
sit silently in our services like Quakers. But for a New Covenant believer “the Kingdom of God is with-
in” us, and we are to go within to enter it.

We should not be gathering at a church “to meet God”: We each carry the Lord within our own spirits
to a meeting, and there, “where two or more are gathered He is among us”. The gathering of believers is a
place where Divine power is, and is, for lack of a better word, “concentrated”, because it is there that
we can agree together in worship and in prayer, and therefore can accomplish greater works than
individual believers might be able to accomplish alone. (Matthew 18:18-20) In our assemblies we encour-
age each other and build each other up and an environment of corporate faith is created which is
magnitudes greater than the faith any one of us might be able to exercise as an individual.

We, as New Covenant believers, are each one of us the Temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:19;
3:16) The Holy of Holies, that place where God is, now resides in each one of us. Paul says this clear-
ly every time he writes of such things by using such prepositions as “in” (as above), and “of” (in verse
2:20 below), and in many other ways. And unless, and until, we understand this we are going to be
trying to live out the New Covenant, at least in part, according to Old Covenant rules.

At the least this will leave us in a confused and weakened state, unable to walk out the full life and
power available to us through our relationship with our Lord because we are trying to resolve mutually
contradictory Old Covenant and New Covenant principles. We will be “double minded” and therefore
“unstable”, as James puts it. This happens every time we find ourselves second-guessing our mo-
ments of liberty in the Lord by constructing some theological cage of verses from the scripture to dial
back the moving of the Spirit of God in the assembly or in our own lives and keep our service to our
Lord “respectable” and dignified. It is much easier to keep order in a service if there are rules to follow
than it is if we allow the supernatural to prevail.

At its worst we will end up once again under law, trying to gain our salvation through some discipline
of our own works. And by so doing we will fall under the condemnation that Paul is invoking upon
those of the Galatian churches who have opted to accept circumcision and to return to living as law-
abiding Jews. Ultimately we will either live fallen from Grace and become religiously Pharisaical, or
we will fall away entirely from religion in discouragement and frustration and return to a reprobate life-
style.

328
in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go
up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to
Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas (Peter) and remained with him fifteen
days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother. (In what I am writing to you, be
fore God, I do not lie!)

Here again Paul bears witness to the truth of what he is writing. Those who would question these ac-
counts must be willing to stand in front of this man, hypothetically at least, look him straight in the eye,
and call him a bald-faced liar.

It is very easy to sit in a LazyBoy at a distance of a couple of thousand years and make stupid, arro-
gant comments about dead people, isn’t it? Paul had his life as a rising Jewish superstar and his aspi-
rations to worldly success utterly ruined when he became a follower of Christ. He spent over thirty
years enduring extremes of hardship and persecution as he traveled on his missionary journeys, and
he ultimately was beheaded for his faith at the whim of the lunatic emperor, Nero.

Intelligent people do not make such personal sacrifices for something that they know to be a lie.
Could he have been laboring under a delusion? If so it was a delusion that thousands of others of his
contemporaries, many of whom had been with, or at least around, Jesus himself, also became con-
vinced was true and worth dying for. All of the other apostles, save for John, died as martyrs after
embracing lives of hardship and persecution. And tens of thousands of converts also gladly suffered
ostracization, loss of property, physical abuse, imprisonment, and often cruel deaths because they
chose to follow a Lord they proclaimed emphatically to be risen from the grave and alive, not crucified
and dead.

All the enemies of the Gospel had to do was to produce a body! And this rag-tag rabble of a move-
ment would have died in a heartbeat. They could not!! Even though they were the ones who had
sealed and guarded the tomb in which the body of Jesus was buried after his execution…they could
not. The Great Sanhedrin of Israel that had sentenced Christ to death and had stood witness over
every moment of His execution was unable to dispel the rumor that Christ had risen from the grave.
It is on the record that just three days after the mutilated corpse of Jesus was sealed into an officially
secured sepulcher owned by a prominent wealthy merchant it was necessary for those temple sol-
diers who guarded that grave to be bribed to lie by the most powerful men in Jerusalem to explain
why the tomb was empty. And for two thousand years now, everyone who has tried to explain this
little problem has failed. Romans 1:1-4

Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea
that are in Christ. They only were hearing it said, “He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he
once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God because of me.

329
2 Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. (Acts 15)
I went up because of a revelation

and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influential) the gospel that
I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain.

But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek.

After almost a decade and a half of working independently, Paul was instructed by the Lord to recon-
nect with the Jerusalem leadership core. This was a time long before our easy communications, be-
fore I-phones and computers and e-mail, and the work Paul was doing among the Gentiles to the
North was known only by hearsay reports to the predominantly Jewish Christians to the South. Paul
had years earlier checked in with the apostolic leaders and had received their blessing, but his mes-
sage had broadened and deepened in the time that had passed since that meeting, and he knew full
well that he stood at odds with those ultra-conservatives who still held the Law of Moses equal to or
above the Gospel of Christ. Evidently he was already aware of the so-called “circumcision party”:
Perhaps they had already tried to infiltrate his fellowships and were already stalking him. So Paul
needed to determine if he and the Jerusalem leaders were still on the same page, or if, perhaps, he
had learned more of the liberty that is in Christ than they were willing to let themselves embrace. It is
evident from his language below that he was prepared to continue with his own work regardless of
what Peter and James and the rest said to him, but it was his hope that they would be in agreement
with the revelation that he had received.

Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in
Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery— to them we did not yield in submission even for a mo-
ment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

Titus, a young Gentile convert, accompanied Paul on his trip to Jerusalem, probably as an example of
the fruit of Paul’s ministry as well as Paul’s protégé. The right-wingers there were offended when
Paul brought a non-Jew into their fellowship, and they demanded that this outsider be circumcised if
he wanted to be included among the believers. Paul faced these extremists down and successfully
argued his case that Gentiles are not bound by the Law of Moses and do not have to conform in any
way to it in order to receive the Grace of God.

It is of importance to note that when the same issue arose concerning Timothy, whose mother was a
Jewess, Paul assented to Timothy being circumcised. (Acts 16:3) He did this, not because it was nec-
essary for Timothy’s salvation, but because Timothy, as the son of a Jewish mother and a Gentile
father, was a Jew according to Jewish law (his lineage being authenticated maternally), and by being
circumcised Timothy gained acceptance by and access to a whole people group by whom otherwise
he would have been shunned as an unclean half-breed. His circumcision was a pragmatic political
and social decision by Paul to further the work of his ministry. This is in contrast to Titus, who had to
remain uncircumcised in order to prove Paul’s point that Gentile circumcision was not a requirement
of salvation.

And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no
partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me.

330
Of note here is Paul’s personal consistency: He would respect people who deserved or whose posi-
tion or rank required respect, but he would not ever curry favor with or suck up to those who might be
power brokers. When he went to Jerusalem, he went with the hope that the leadership there would
support him in his efforts, but it is clear from the tone of his letter that had they not done so, Paul
would have continued to do the work the Lord had assigned to him regardless. As is recorded below,
Paul had no trouble confronting even the chief apostle when Peter vacillated in his commitment to
Christian liberty.

On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter
had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter for his apostolic min-
istry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles),

Again it should be noted that there is a distinction between Peter and Paul: This difference in empha-
sis must also apply to their writing and to the way in which we today understand what they have writ-
ten. Peter and those who wrote from Jerusalem were writing with attention to “the circumcised”, the
Jewish Christians. Paul was writing with attention to “the Gentiles”. We who are of “the Gentiles” are
those to whom Paul’s apostolic commission directly applies, and had we been living in the First
Church era, it would have been the Gospel as Paul preached it which would have most directly affect-
ed us.

Paul, in the second letter to Timothy, speaks of “rightly dividing”, of correctly handling or reading intelli-
gently and wisely, the Word of God. If we do not approach our study of these writings with intelli-
gence and respect for their purposes and their contexts, then we will certainly create from them
fantasies of our own imaginations and will always fall into error in our understanding of the Lord and
of the Kingdom of God.

Paul was the “apostle to the Gentiles”. Peter was “the apostle to the circumcised…the Jews”. It is, I
think, right to say that Paul’s writings, therefore, will speak more directly and more clearly of the Law
of Liberty and of the end of the Old Covenant in its entirety than would the writings of Peter and those
with him (e.g. James and Jude and John, though John’s writings are a bit different and more univer-
sal). Peter, on the other hand, would be very interested in establishing the connections between the
Old Covenant and the New Covenant so that his Jewish converts could clearly see the continuity of
God’s purposes and the rightfulness of Jesus’ claims to be Messiah.

To this end, when we today are reading the scriptures, and especially when we are reading in the
New Testament, we need to keep clearly in mind which writer we are reading and to whom they are
writing. I have already argued, in my appendices to the Romans/Ephesians commentary, that there
are elements of the four Gospels which, because they record sayings of Jesus made before the Res-
urrection, are actually statements made under the Old Covenant rather than under the New. I also
would argue that there are statements in the New Testament letters which might be more appropriate
for Messianic Jewish believers than for non-Jewish believers because the Messianic believers are
returning to the Lord from a different and unique heritage and have a different and unique part to play
in the fulfillment of His Plan as the age comes to its close.

and when James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me,
they gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the
circumcised. Only, they asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do. (cf. 6:10)

331
 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before cer-
tain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated
himself, fearing the circumcision party.

And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their
hypocrisy.

Paul is here more concerned with the damage caused by hypocrisy than he is with the idea that differ-
ent people may hold different personal theologies about how they live out their faith and work out their
salvation in Christ. Elsewhere he speaks at some length about these things: (Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8).
We are each unique as we stand before the Lord, and this certainly influences how we personally inter-
pret many of those portions of scripture which are open to variations in interpretation. (It is, in part,
because of this that Paul says that factions must exist (1 Corinthians 11:19), and it is because of this that
there are so many Christian denominations and sects.) Hypocrisy, the saying of one thing and the
doing of another, however causes uncertainty and confusion in the minds and hearts of those before
whom it is displayed who are not strong enough in their own understanding and character to deal with
it, and confusion in matters of faith usually leads to stumbling and to sin…(Romans 14:22,23)

Peter has always had a character flaw that has caused him to drift toward self-preservation and to-
ward pleasing whatever “side” of an argument seemed to be strongest. Here, even after all he has
experienced in the Lord, including his own revelation about the inclusion of the Gentiles, (Acts 10,11)
that weakness shows itself again as the risks of creating tensions and divisions at the predominantly
Jewish Jerusalem mother church are pitted against the New Covenant’s very “un-lawful” and “un-tradi-
tional” liberties that Paul and the Antioch leaders were allowing in the predominantly Gentile church in
Antioch. Peter apparently had been perfectly willing to freely associate with everyone at Antioch, until
the contingent that claimed to come from James’s conservative clique arrived. When these men
showed up and the possibility of Peter’s egalitarianism being reported by them in Jerusalem became
a problem, Peter pulled away from the Gentile believers and started to behave like a good Jew. In so
doing he effectively denied the Gospel that Paul was teaching, and which he himself had been in
agreement with since his experience with Cornelius the Centurion years earlier, and sided with the
Judaizers, and was adding the authority of the Twelve to the heresy that Gentiles had to first become
Law abiding Jews in order to be saved. Paul had just recently returned from Jerusalem with the mes-
sage that Peter and the rest of the Jerusalem elders had affirmed that the Gospel of Liberty in Christ
was valid and that they supported Paul’s preaching. Now the most revered of all the Apostles was
publically denying by his actions what Paul had said that he had said. This could only cause confu-
sion in the minds of everyone who was present. And his actions coupled with his authority began to
split even the leadership of the Antiochian church. This is why Paul had to resort to the very extreme
measure of a public rebuke.

But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them
all,

“If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
We ourselves (I, Paul, and you Peter) are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we (both of us) know
that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ,

so we (both) also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works
of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

332
But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too (again) were found be sinners, is Christ then a servant
of sin? (Did Christ move me to do this thing? Are you listening to the Holy Spirit, Peter?!) Certainly
not!

It is the Law that convicts me of sin, not Christ. Christ offers me the only solution to the verdict that
the Law declares and the sentence that the Law imposes.

For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. (This is not something that Christ in me
has led me to do: I have stopped listening to Him and have returned to the place that He has made every
effort to call me away from.)

And if I abandon the Grace of God in Christ and return to living by the Law after having heard and under-
stood the verdict of the Law that by the Law I am as condemned as a sinner as the Gentile who never
had the Law, I only succeed in making even more clear the hard facts of the Law’s judgments and of my
need for the Grace of God. This is what the writer of Hebrew’s refers to as “crucifying again the Son of God
and putting Him to an open shame” Hebrews 6:6. Having understood from the Law that I am guilty, and having
received and accepted my pardon from this guilt by embracing Christ, I then am choosing to reject the
pardon and the sacrifice made to secure it, and to claim again my guilty status and the ritual actions that
once had been required to defer the punishments rightly deserved for my guilt but which, as testified to in
the letter to the Hebrews, no longer have any validity.

I am choosing to negate the Cross. It is not Christ who is motivating my actions: I am doing this by my
own choices, and against the will of the Spirit of God now within me, and against His word which I have
been given, and which He now shares His mind with me to help me understand.

For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.

The entire purpose of the Law was to bring sin to light, to isolate and to draw out the infection in order that
it could be lanced and cleaned away so that the wound could finally be healed. To return to the Law is to
reopen a healed wound, even to desire to reintroduce the infection that has been once and for all eternity
cleansed from that wound.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now
live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

by faith in • the Son of God,

  (ἐν16 πίστει17    ← τῇ19 τοῦ20 υἱοῦ21    → ‹τοῦ22 θεοῦ23›)

This is the heart of Paul’s Gospel distilled here into a single profoundly simple sentence. Paul is not
speaking of some theological theory, some mental shift that is made when a person decides to be-
come religious and starts to go to church. He is talking about the fact of Christian regeneration, of
spiritual rebirth, of being “born again” as a “new creature” in Christ as a result of the confession of sin
and of true repentance and the acceptance of the terms of the New Covenant.

In the context of this letter he is contrasting the absolute separation away from the Old Covenant and
its rules with the symbiotic joining of the believer with Christ through the indwelling personal presence
of the Holy Spirit. The finished work of Calvary provides the entrance into the Kingdom of God for
every person who is willing to accept Christ’s sacrifice as a sufficient solution for their own alienation
from God and are willing to follow Him in His obedience.

333
When a person enters into the Kingdom on these terms according to the Gospel the “old man” dies.
This death is real and is instantaneous upon the act of confession, repentance, and acceptance, and
occurs when the Holy Spirit resurrects the spirit of the penitent person and they are reborn as a Chris-
tian. Obviously, the mortal body still exists, and its frailties still affect us, but according to Paul’s
teachings we are instantaneously liberated from our lifetime of slavery to sin and are now able to free-
ly choose to resist the temptations of the flesh to sin and to serve the Lord obediently and righteously
because the indwelling Holy Spirit has empowered us to do so (cf. 1 Peter 1:3,4). In fact we die and
Christ becomes the life by which we live. (Read my Romans/Ephesians and Colossians essays.)

The theological terms that are used for this are justification and sanctification.

Justification occurs at the moment of spiritual rebirth and is the action of God that breaks the power of
sin over the life of the believer, removing all burden of guilt and past history of sin and providing a
fresh starting point.

Sanctification is the lifetime outworking of the life of Christ in the life of the believer as he or she
grows in grace and stature before God and man and learns to choose away from sin and toward righ-
teousness in every aspect of the day-to-day of Christian living. It is the process of the growth and mat-
uration of the New Creation man, the Kingdom believer. From the moment of justification the
Christian is called to grow up into Christlikeness, a walk of discipleship that is increasingly sin free
and righteous in every aspect. (cf. 1 John 2:1)

There is a problem I have found in most modern translations of the original Greek of this verse which I
think reflects our protestant Evangelical bias more than anything else, but which I think also may lead
us to a faulty theology that can weaken our effectiveness as Kingdom Christians and, in extreme cas-
es, even lead us into serious errors.

Most modern translations translate the phrase “en pistei tei tou houiou tou theou” as “ by faith in the
Son of God “. Some translate it as “by faith that is in the Son of God”, which is better. But the Greek
grammatical construction actually means “by the faith of the Son of God”. Paul consistently teaches
throughout his writings that even our faith is predominantly a gift from our Creator; that it does not de-
rive from within ourselves but rather that it is an infusion of Divine faith into our own meager efforts to
believe.

Yet, many believers struggle with the issues of faith perhaps more than with any other issue. And
questions about “having enough faith” dominate Christian conversations and sermons throughout the
Christian world. “Lack of faith” is blamed for unanswered prayer and adverse circumstances more
than anything else. This is because in our general teachings and practice we tend to equivocate on
the definition and concept of biblical faith. And in the minds of those who do not study the Word deep-
ly for themselves this results in a confusion, leaving them subconsciously “double-minded” and there-
fore “unstable” and unable to hold securely to the Lord. (cf. James 1:6-8)

“We are saved by Grace, through Faith, and this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God.” Christ is our life. The
faith of Christ Himself is our faith. We are asked of God to believe and to trust, but beyond this the
faith that has the power to move mountains is His faith….It is His confidence in Himself, not our confi-
dence in Him! He asks us to have “mustard seed” faith, a faith that is vital and alive and able to grow,
but not faith that is in itself large. (Matthew 17:20, etc.)

He has faith that is large, and He inhabits us. If we are supposed to somehow come up with the kind
of faith that produces miracles out of our own efforts to believe, then faith becomes a work, and we
are back to trying to please God by our own efforts. It is a slippery slope that ends with our salvation
also depending upon us having enough faith. We are back to Law. We have fallen from Grace.

334
And we become slaves once again under increasingly unbearable burdens of guilt over our failures of
faith which lead to condemnation and ultimately to despair. Our loving Father becomes to us a tyrant
and an abusive parent, and we live in constant fear of Him, or we run away. This is not the “Abba
Father” whom Jesus came to reveal to us!

We are to operate from a position of “rest” (Hebrews 4:9). To rest is to “cease from our own labors”, to
cease striving “in the flesh”, to stop trying to “work it up”. Even Jesus did only that which He first re-
ceived permission from His Father to do or say John 5:19; John 5:30; John 8:28. Should we be trying to do
more.

This is also the clear and simple meaning of the parable of the Vine and the branches. Branches and
the fruit that they produce do not “do” anything: They “abide” (The old meaning of this word is “to wait
in expectation with great patience”). The vine supplies the life to the branches and the branches in
their turn and in the proper season bear fruit…This is a process that cannot be hurried up; It can only
be carefully watched over and sometimes assisted with wisdom, as is done by a husbandman/farmer.
There is a life in the branches, and the leaves on the branches are an essential contributor to the vital-
ity of the vine, but the branches are derivative: They do not exist independently of the vine and its root.
We are branches of the Vine: Our life flows to us as naturally as water and nutrients flow up from the
roots of any plant to its topmost twigs and leaves.

The contemporary Evangelical church is a very busy church, and this isn’t in itself a bad thing. But we
have allowed our zeal and business to become conflated with sound biblical theology until we are
preaching and teaching many things which are much more the traditions of men than they are the
teachings of the scriptures and especially the teachings of the New Covenant. We need to return to a
sound exegesis of the text of our charter once again, and to try to forget for a long season much of
the chatter of popular theology and mass media preaching that has promulgated so many unsound
ideas to so many people. In today’s world an idea, sound or unsound, can far too easily catch on and
be spread widely, without exaggeration globally, in a matter of moments and without reflection or peer
review. God’s ideas, however, still require much reflection, and must also pass the biblically mandat-
ed bar of accountability and spiritual judgment by prophetically mature and biblically wise leadership.

At the end of the age there shall be a “famine of the hearing of the words of the Lord” that is concurrent
with the increase of knowledge that identifies our age of information. (Daniel 12:4; Amos 8:11, 12) This
prophecy is now in the time of its second fulfillment as there is far too much purporting to be biblical
teaching available today, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff
as the “winds of doctrine” Ephesians 4:14 are blowing so strongly that even the wheat is being blown
about. The teachings about faith certainly seem to have become such a contaminated sack of grain.

I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

There are only two choices for the children of Adam: Salvation and the liberty of restored relationship
with our Father through the finished work of the Cross, or eternal independence and separation from
our Creator. No one can be saved from the consequences of sin in creation by their own efforts. Sal-
vation is through Christ alone. This does not necessarily mean, however, that a person has to be-
come a “Christian” in the sense that they have to “accept-Jesus-Christ-as-their-personal-savior”, be
sprinkled, dipped, or dunked, and join a local denominational church like the Lutherans or Methodists
or the Baptists or the Assemblies of God or the Two Seed in the Spirit Fire-Baptized Pentecostals.
Paul makes a statement later on in Galatians that leaves open the gates of the Kingdom to “sheep
not of these folds”. He remarks further along in Galatians 4:8,9

335
Formerly, when you   did not know God, you   were enslaved to those that by nature   are not gods.  But now
that you have come to know God, or rather   to be known by God,   how can you turn back again to   the
weak and worthless elementary principles of the world……

Here, and in many other places throughout his letters, Paul alludes to the reality that much, perhaps
most, of the action and initiative leading to our salvation rests in God, and not in us; That it is God
who is seeking out the lost who He has identified as Kingdom seekers among men, that it is God who
desires to know us infinitely more than we desire to know Him.
Yes, there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ. But it does not immediately follow that one must
“be a Christian” in the popular Evangelical sense of the term in order to be saved: The Father God
whom Jesus came to reveal to us is bigger and more loving than this exclusive parochial viewpoint.
The world is too large, and the human souls in the world too precious, for God to consign the respon-
sibilities for their eternal destinies only to the temperamental and vacillating moods of His many often
irresponsible and insular children. When a church claims such a “gate-keeper” role (as has the Ro-
man Catholic Church, for example), it is falling into the same pit that Israel fell into in the generations
after the Babylonian captivity. Christ did not consign Himself to that pit.

Paul does argue (Romans 10) that it is by the foolishness of preaching that men hear the word of the
Lord, but in the context of his statement he is referring specifically to Israel, which had had the Law
and the Prophets for a millennium and a half, and in the same breath he says that the “Word has gone
out into all the world” and implies that those with hungering hearts in all the world have heard it. A
careful reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans leaves the reader with the understanding that Paul,
who was called to bring the Gospel of the Kingdom to the Gentile world, had received revelation that
the Spirit of the Lord can and does move upon human hearts independently of the ministries of the
Body of the Church. (cf. the words of Jesus recorded in John 15:26,27)

I have tried to explore this Pauline “universalism” in depth in my essays on Romans, Ephesians, and
Colossians. (And please!!!!! Allow me to use the word “universalism” specifically and with great care
here: I am not…I repeat…NOT… saying that anyone can be saved apart from a relationship with
Christ, nor am I saying that all human souls will be saved. 1 Timothy 2:3-6

I am saying that Christ is able and willing to reveal Himself to sincerely seeking hearts apart from the
“normal” channels of missionaries, witnessing, pulpit preaching, evangelistic outreach, etc., and I be-
lieve that a careful study of the New Testament strongly supports this position. God’s ideal and pre-
ferred vehicle for the Gospel is the Church, but it is not His only vehicle for the Gospel. Paul, himself,
is sufficient proof of this. (There were no believers on the Damascus road. Ananias, the believer who
prayed for Paul, was sent to Paul three days AFTER Paul met the Lord!)

I have noted before that today, in “closed” Muslim nations as an example, myriad testimonies of con-
versions to Christianity are coming to light where men, women, and children who have never met a
Christian or touched a New Testament are meeting the Lord in dreams and visions and other sover-
eign visitations as they search for Truth that is more substantial and consistent and liberating than
the life they endure under Shariah. These accounts can be discovered by anyone who makes the
effort to search them out in Christian missionary publications and through the Internet, as can similar
testimonies from many other places around the planet. Such accounts are not only a contemporary
phenomenon, but are common throughout the long history of the Church.

336
3 O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly por-
trayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing
with faith?

When the Gospel is preached and is received with the “hearing with faith” (this is better translated the
“hearing of faith” – also in verse 5), there will be evidence of the transformational event in the life of
the newly reborn believer. The forms that evidence takes is a subject for another discussion, but the
truly converted person will begin to become “Christian”…a “little Christ”. Positive changes in behav-
ior and in attitude will begin to occur and to progress over time. If this evidence is lacking then some-
thing is wrong. (2 Corinthians 5:17; Romans 8:9-11, etc.)

Paul here uses the word “bewitched”. I don’t think he is speaking particularly metaphorically: He is
being quite literal. He comes from a culture that accepts the reality of the supernatural as a common-
place, and he is very aware of the great spiritual War that is raging in the dimensions of angels and
demons that both transcend and intersect our own. And he writes much in other places about spiritu-
al delusions and demonic deceptions and the mind-games of the devil. There is a blurred line be-
tween the lies and heresies of men and the doctrines of demons, and in the realm of religion, which
binds human beings with the fear of death and damnation, the demonic certainly often crosses over
that line and uses self-serving men and women to lead foolish and unwary souls first into temporal
bondage and ultimately into eternal loss.

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Paul had introduced the Galatian believers to the New Covenant liberty of the Law of Love in
Christ, and they had been rejoicing together freely in that liberty when he had moved on to continue
his missionary work. But at some point not long after, as I have said above, his Judaizing enemies
had arrived at the young fellowship and, claiming the weighty authority of Jesus’ own half-brother
James, had first intimidated the Jewish believers in the fellowship into returning to their practice of
the Law of Moses, and then had gone about persuasively teaching the less biblically knowledgeable
Gentile Christians that they also needed to follow the appropriate “biblical” path through Moses to
Messiah in order to properly approach God. Without Paul’s strong personal presence and clear scrip-
turally grounded refutation to counter these persuasive legalistic arguments, most of the fellowship
was succumbing to the intimidating pressure to return to the Old Covenant form and practice, and the
Holy Spirit, grieved and stifled, was being quenched.

Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain?

Apparently there had been local persecution of these Christians because of their public confession of
Christ.

Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law,

I want to note here that the Galatian fellowships were lively fellowships. Where the Holy Spirit is free
to move miracles happen. This is the way it was in the First Church as a normal state of affairs. This
is the way it should be today. Nothing has changed…. Except, perhaps, we don’t believe as we
ought. (Ps. 89:33-34; Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8; Matthew 13:58)

or by hearing with faith— just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?
Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.
337
I have explored the faith of Abraham at depth in the Romans/Ephesians essays, and I don’t want to
reiterate what I have said there. As a reminder, I believe that Paul makes it abundantly clear that
God has not changed His terms for the restoration of the souls of men since Abraham’s day. Christ
has been crucified “since before the foundation of the world”….the Lamb has been slain, the Sacrifice
made. Revelation 13:8; 1 Peter 1:18-20 Abraham saw the Day of the Son of Man, and was glad. John 8:48ff
That Day abides still in God’s time, not ours.

The Gospel of Grace both preceded and terminated the Law of Moses. God has not changed His
terms for redemption. He has only clarified the Revelation and progressed in His Plan and Purposes
along our timeline. And it is because of this that I say emphatically that the same “faith of Abraham”
is available today to those who know no more of the True God than did Abraham, a Chaldean raised
to worship the moon god, Sin, and a man who did not even ever come to know the Name of Jehovah
(a Name not revealed until it was shared with Moses). Abraham (Abram), the pagan from Ur, was
accounted righteous according to the light which he had.

It is according to this same unchanging mercy that God today will reach down to every seeking soul
among men regardless of where they are and whether or not a bible-toting Christian missionary man-
ages to get them to say a sinner’s prayer. Paul’s extended argument in Romans establishes this
truth. Again I emphasize: No man comes to the Father except through Christ, but this does not mean
that every man who comes to Christ has to be a card-carrying Evangelical Christian. To argue that it
does means that many bent reeds would be broken, many smoldering embers would be extinguished,
and the Lord doesn’t do either of these things.

“Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,

my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.
            I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not quarrel or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not quench,
until he brings justice to victory;
            and in his name the Gentiles will hope.” Matthew 12:18-21

In Galatians:

And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to
Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” (The redemption of all mankind is the Gospel of
the Kingdom)

Paul is saying here that the prophetic texts, the scripture, which God had given to the Jews to stew-
ard, clearly revealed the fact of the universality of the Gospel of the Kingdom and of justification by
faith, not works, in the same Torah that held the Law of Moses. There was no excuse for the rabbini-
cal scholars not to have known of this from their microscopic study of these texts.

However, the biblical texts, being more than human in origin, do not lend themselves to “man-han-
dling”. Unless they are approached humbly and prayerfully they will, at best, be understood as books
of ancient history; at worst, as arcane myths and occult lore. God will not reveal Himself to insincere
persons. (1 Corinthians 2:6-16; 2 Corinthians 2:16; 2 Peter 3:14-18; Luke 10:21-22)

338
The fact that there were those teachers (e.g. Nicodemus) in Israel who did recognize Jesus as Messi-
ah proves that the Gospel message was clearly in view in the Law and the Prophets, and was avail-
able to those who rightly divided the Word. Maji came from Babylon to worship at Christ’s birth
because they had the legacy of Daniel as well as the Hebrew Tanakh and understood from these the
coming of Messiah: If they could understand this, so also could the scholars of Jerusalem. The fact
that Gentiles responded to Jesus spontaneously and that He received them testifies that the Gospel
message was clearly in view in the Law and the Prophets because the prophecies contained in the
scriptures were in fact the Word of God and came to pass in real time as He walked among us. The
fact that Paul, as an Old Testament scholar, was able to so completely reinterpret the Old Covenant
into the New Covenant without distortion and without radical editing proves that the Gospel was clear-
ly and completely contained in the Law and the Prophets and was only awaiting the coming of the
Messiah to be realized into its fulfillment. Jesus opened the Old Testament to the disciples he walked
with them on the Emmaus road after the Resurrection, and connected all the dots for them (Luke 24:27):
Paul was given the task of doing this in greater detail through direct revelation for the permanent re-
cord.

So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.
(This is “the Israel of God” referred to below.)

For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not
abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.”

Paul wraps up his argument against the Judaizers conclusively: The very book of the Law from which
they were arguing that the Gentiles must become Jews and must keep the Law of Moses in order to
be Christians and be saved preceded in its own texts the Law of Moses with the Covenant of Grace as
it was revealed to Abraham. The Gospel encloses, like a pair of parentheses, the Law of Moses, with
the Abrahamic covenant before, and the empty tomb at the end. He doubles down with greater force
as he goes on.

(I want to note here also that in both Hebrew and Greek the ideas of the Blessing and the Curse hold
in them the larger meanings of “words of power”, that is that behind and beyond the words spoken or
written are inevitable and inexorable metaphysical consequences which those words when acted upon
invoke.

We, today, at least we of the “enlightened” West, tend to scoff, but this is because we have a diminished
respect for the reality of the realms of the spiritual. Here Paul is saying that when the soul responds to
God in Faith through the work of Christ the blessings of Grace follow, but if that soul then returns to
seeking to approach God through the religious rituals of the Law that soul once again has chosen to
try to keep the entire Law in all of its details in order to be pleasing to God, and that that soul, therefore,
has come in reality under a spiritual bondage with psychological and spiritual effects.)

Paul begins to argue in specifics, with scriptural backing, his case for the New Covenant. This is the
earlier of his two polemics on the Law of Liberty superseding and transcending the Law of Moses, the
second more detailed and complex argument being that which he has written in the first 12 chapters
of the letter to the Romans. The two letters, Galatians and Romans, together contain the full revela-
tion of the Gospel of the Kingdom as Paul received it and should be studied together.

Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Ha-
bakkuk 2:4) But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” (Leviticus 18:5)

339
 Christ redeemed us (Jews, to whom the Law was given) from the curse of the law (The curse of the
Law is the knowledge of sin and the promise of judgment. The “sting” of sin is death, which comes to
every human being whether or not they know of sin. Christ put an end to the ultimate victory of death,
and therefore rendered the Law unnecessary for the Jew, for whom it was a “stop-gap” measure by
which the curse was deferred, and for the Gentile, to whom the Law never was applied but whom
death still ultimately conquered .) by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is
hanged on a tree” (Deuteronomy 21:23)— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the
Gentiles, so that we (Jews) might receive the promised Spirit through faith. (Christ had to fulfill the Law as a
Jew for the Jews so that it could be legally and finally moved “off the table”. It had served its purpose
in preserving and preparing a “womb people” through which the Messiah could be born into the world.
He then fulfilled its terms in Himself so that Satan no longer could hold it against God’s people. It nev-
er directly applied to the Gentiles. They stood condemned by the Adamic curse of original sin to
death, and, as we have established, God held them accountable only for those sins which they under-
stood according to whatever light they had. Christ’s self-sacrifice on Calvary also resolved the Adam-
ic curse of sin and death for all mankind. So, Paul is able to write the above verse as he does.

Paul keeps trying to break through the fog of deception that has begun to cloud the minds of the be-
lievers in Galatia. The Gospel is not, in its fundamental premises, complicated or “mysterious”, but
the fact that we are spiritual beings poured into material stuff, and the fact that we are living in a spiri-
tual war zone in the midst of the enemy camp and surrounded by enemy agents and sympathizers
makes it, oftentimes, difficult for us to hear the Truth, especially when we are less familiar with the
ways of the Lord than with the ways of the world from which we have just begun to escape. So the
message of the Bible necessarily must be repeated over and over again in as many ways as possible
in the hope that somehow its Truths might cut through the static and distractions and take root in our
souls. )

To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has
been ratified.

Contracts once cut are not usually modified or canceled or annulled. (And if they are, it is only by
complex and highly detailed renegotiation.) Primarily the way a contract is closed is by its fulfillment.
This is exactly how God has dealt with the sin problem and with the Old Covenant: It was “finished”,
or “accomplished”, or “fulfilled” on that late Friday afternoon on Golgotha. This is also exactly how
the Lord is dealing with His earlier separate promise to Abraham. It is the Covenant with Abraham
which contains the promise of Messiah; the Mosaic Covenant deals with the preparation of the womb
out of which Messiah would be born. The earlier and greater Covenant by promise is now the one
that applies.

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. Genesis 15 It does not say, “And to offsprings,”
referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. This is what I mean: the law,
which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as make the promise
void.

The Gospel covenant (vs.8) is a completely separate covenant from the Mosaic Covenant with Israel.

For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but gave it to Abraham by a promise.

Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions,

340
 (The Law was given specifically to Israel to keep them on track in order that they might bring forth
Messiah/Christ at the appointed time. Once it served its purpose it passed away, as is stated in He-
brews, and has become an archive of Divine History, a book of inspiration, and a record of promises
both kept and yet to be kept to Israel because of the Patriarchs. Romans 11:28;cf. Deuteronomy 7:8 For the
“Nations” (the Gentiles) the Gospel is found in the New Covenant, as is also the actual salvation of the
Jews, which is what Paul is arguing here.)
until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made,

and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary. (That is, Moses…the Law of Moses works on an
“if you do this, then I will do this” basis…tit-for-tat. But the promise is a face-to-face interaction be-
tween Father and Son. Dad says, “Son, I promise you that I will do this for you as soon as the time is
right.” Calvary was the right time. Galatians 4:4; Romans 5:6; 1 Timothy 2:6 There are no other conditions to
be met. Dad is keeping his promise to his Son. We simply have to join ourselves to the Son to enter
into the promise. That is the Son’s promise to us. This is why it says in Hebrews that God, in con-
firming the New Covenant promise to Abraham, swore by “two immutable things”: First He swore an
oath by His own Name, since there is nothing higher by which to swear, and second He swore that
oath by His own character; He cannot lie. (Genesis 22:15-18; Hebrews 6:13-20)

Now an intermediary implies more than one

(Intermediaries intercede between two or more parties to arrange agreements with terms that bear on
all and require mutual participation), but God is one (the most fundamental premise of Judaism…the
Shema. Deuteronomy 6:4 God included Abraham in the promise, but the terms of the promise did not
ask anything of Abraham; he was present as a witness. ( Abraham actually was in a “deep sleep” at
the time, a Divinely induced trance of some sort.) God made a determination within Himself to bless
Abraham because Abraham had already been accepted by God because of his faith. The promise
was a decision among the Persons of the Trinity.)

Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could give life,
then righteousness would indeed be by the law.

(The Law was given as a detailed explanation or “object lesson” of why the Grace of God is required
for man to approach God. It is in the heart of man to deceive himself that he is somehow worthy
enough, somehow significant enough, somehow important enough in his own stature and accomplish-
ments to stand boastfully, or at least proudly, before God Almighty. This is a legacy of our fall. (Re-
member, the temptation was “…you shall be like God” Genesis 3:5). We have an irresistible compulsion
to present ourselves as worthy. This is also precisely the symptom of our great problem, which is
self-centeredness…the essence of sin. The Law was given in order to convince us that even at a
relatively simple level we are unable to meet God’s expectations consistently. We might keep some
of the Law some of the time, but the Law describes in piecemeal detail the whole cloth of Divine holi-
ness. It is a stitch-by-stitch examination through examples of obedience and the living of life of the
intricately woven tapestry of the righteousness in which our Creator designed us to live, and which is
required of all human creatures if they would be fit to dwell in the Kingdom of God. God said that to
break one of its precepts is to fail entirely. Deuteronomy 6:25;James 2:10; Galatians 5:3

These are two of the reasons why He gave the sacrificial code along with the Law…to provide a pres-
sure valve for the guilty conscience that realized that it could not attain to the Law’s standard, and to
help us to understand that something other than the keeping of rules of conduct and behavior would
be necessary for us to be able to resolve our spiritual angst, and that that something else was costly,
requiring the death of an innocent life. The Law is not contrary to the promises of God: Rather it is
the backdrop which gives the clearest perspective to the Grace of God in the Gospel.)
341
 But the Scripture imprisoned everything under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be giv-
en (it has always been the Father’s intention to GIVE the Kingdom to His children: but He has had to
do it in His time and according to His plan) to those who believe.

Now before faith came, we (Jews) were held captive under the law, until the coming faith (Paul again
speaks of faith as a substantial objective thing the coming of which could be anticipated in time, not
just a subjective mental acknowledgment of a belief in something) would be revealed.

So then, law was our guadian (it is interesting and significant that Paul equates captivity and guardian-
ship here: The Law held the Jews in a “protective custody”) until Christ came, in order that (for a specif-
ic purpose that was always in God’s mind) we (Jews) might be justified by faith. (cf. Romans 9-11)

But now that faith has come, we (Jews) are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you (Jews
and Greeks) are all sons of God, through faith.

For as many of you (Jews and Greeks) as baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor
Greek (answering the Judaizers), there is neither slave nor free (answering status and class), is no male
and female (removing misogynistic prejudice), for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (cf. Colossians 3:11)

And if you are Christ’s, then you (all together; plural) are Abraham’s offspring (singular, referring to our
unified identity in Christ and to our individuality before God), heirs (Jew and Gentile alike and equal)
according to promise (as a gift, not by any work or terms of agreement).

Paul seems here to turn his attention to those Galatian Christians who have converted from Judaism
and who are now being pulled back into the circle of the Judaizers and away from the Gentile Chris-
tians with whom they had been sharing fellowship freely.

The Judaizers were teaching that salvation belonged to the children of Abraham and that in order to
be a child of Abraham one first had to be a Jew, that is, had to submit to circumcision (women were
not really being included in their thinking except as carry-on baggage through marriage, much as is
taught by Islam). Paul here is arguing that the promise of God came to Abraham BEFORE he was
circumcised, not after, (Genesis 15 then Genesis 17) and that it was given to Abraham on terms of faith, not
law. Because of this, Paul argues that the distinctions Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, etc. have
no legitimacy or bearing on the issue of salvation or forgiveness of sin or entry into the Kingdom of
God.

342
4 I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything,
but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father.

(Paul implies that children are properly beloved slaves in the household until they grow up and show
adult maturity…This is the proper order for the family…as well as the proper paradigm of relationship
between slave and master (the social norm of his world). Hence his equation of captivity with guard-
ianship above. When a person holds absolute power over someone, under God he or she is obligated
to act with wisdom, good will, mercy, compassion, and restraint at all times.)

In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.

(Here Paul means the Law, for the Jews, and probably also pagan religious rituals for the non-Jewish
converts in the Galatian church, but not sin: He is saying that until we have the Holy Spirit within, we
necessarily require the heavy hand of the Law or the rituals and formalities of pagan worship (for
what they may have been worth) from without to keep our passions and unholy tendencies in check.)

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law (A clear
statement that Christ, until the resurrection and ascension, was a practicing Jew and that the record
in the Gospels records this), 5 to redeem (this is a direct allusion to the role of the kinsman/redeemer,
which anyone familiar with the Old Covenant would have understood. (cf. Leviticus 25:25) It also would
have resonated with the non-Jews because they were familiar with the practice of redeeming and
freeing beloved slaves.) those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. (A be-
loved slave sometimes would be adopted as a son into the family of his former master and would be
given the full rights and privileges of a blood son. Sometimes this meant the former slave would be-
come the firstborn both du jure and de facto and would receive the inheritance, as in the case where
the master might be childless.)

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you
are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

(Paul switches from plural to singular cases here and makes this thought personal and individual to
each of his readers. Each one of them as an individual has moved from being a minor child/slave
with no rights to being an adult son with the promise of inheritance. (Cf. Romans 8:17))

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods.

Human beings are created to be servants. We are created to be servant sons of God, and to find our
purpose and fulfillment in that service. We are created to live in a symbiotic relationship with a spiritu-
al source of life larger than and outside of ourselves.

In right relationship to our Creator this servanthood is not in any way burdensome or restrictive, but
rather it is liberating. No sentient being is happier or more fulfilled than when it is being and doing
exactly what it is meant to be being and doing. But outside of that relationship we are not designed to
function as independent self-directed beings.

It bears repeating: When our first parents rebelled and severed the spiritual bond between man and
God that had sustained them in relationship with their Creator they began to wander without map or
compass in a world already darkened by the presence of the first rebel, Lucifer, and those disgraced
angels who had rebelled with him against God and suffered the banishment from the higher dimen-

343
sions of Heaven into the realms that include man’s dominion of Earth. No longer under the protection
afforded them through Divine communion, Adam, Eve, and their children after them were without de-
fense against such powerful spiritual forces. The children of men are still designed to be servants,
vessels meant to contain and to work in relationship with another, greater, Spirit. This has always
been, as it is now with Christians, the Spirit of God. But for those who are in the world and do not
know Christ, it defaults to the spirits of fallen angels…what the Bible refers to as demonization.
This is what Paul is alluding to, for example, in 2 Timothy 2: 22-26 when he speaks about the Devil being
able to take persons “captive at his will” or “to do his will”. Demonization extends along a continuum
from merely a nudge toward doing something self-destructive that we might have in our mind to full
blown “demonic possession” where the will is overwhelmed by a malevolent spirit; nevertheless every
human being is subject to it. The Bible is clear in its statements that “the whole world lies in the wicked
one” (1 John 5:19) and that he is “the prince of the power of the air” (A biblical term for the spiritual realm
that intersects with the world of man.) (Ephesians 2:2)

Before a person becomes a spirit-filled Christian, “born from above” John 3:3, they are unable to resist
these dark forces, except perhaps for short periods and with mixed results. The lusts of the flesh will
always drive them, through fixations upon material things or upon sensual fulfillments, into sins which
become idolatries. Idolatries, whatever may be the form they take and whether or not they define
themselves as “religious”, attract demonic “gods” that demand worship and work through the lust to
addict the person to their obsession. They are “enslaved”. James 1:13-15 cf. Romans 1:18-32

After a person “meets the Lord”, this inexorable cycle is broken. But the Christian does not become
“independent”. In a very real sense he or she remains a slave. The New Covenant uses the word
“doulos”, which means “bond-slave”, the most menial of slaves, chattel property, when it speaks of
believers. However, the new believer is no longer a slave to sin, and through sin to Satan. He or she
is now a slave to Christ and through Christ to God. The Bible uses such phrases as “slaves to righ-
teousness” and similar expressions. Our first act as we repent is to surrender unconditionally to a victo-
rious conquering King to become His prisoners of war, which meant in the days of the Bible, His
slaves.

Beyond this the scriptures develop the word picture of the beloved slave who is adopted as a son into
the household and becomes an heir to the riches of the inheritance. In the biblical worldview, a son
carried on in the legacy of a father, walking in loyal obedience while the father lived and, with honor
and respect for the work that his fathers before him had accomplished, then building upon the founda-
tions that those who had gone before him had laid down. He was always a servant son.

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, (1 Corinthians 8:3; 2 Timothy 2:19)

I noted earlier that in this deliberate remark Paul is revealing his deeper theology of the “soul seeking”
loving God. There is poem by Francis Thompson, a tortured genius and opium addict found and re-
deemed by the Lord, published in 1893 that speaks of this inexorable pursuit:

344
 The Hound of Heaven

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat - and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet -
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me'.

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities;
(For, though I knew His love Who followed,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.)
But, if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of His approach would clash it to:
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateway of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.

345
 I said to Dawn: Be sudden - to Eve: Be soon;
With thy young skiey blossom heap me over
From this tremendous Lover -
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or, whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:-
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat -
'Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.'

I sought not more after that which I strayed

In face of man or maid;
But still within the little children's eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
They at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.

346
 Come then, ye other children, Nature's - share
With me (said I) 'your delicate fellowship;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured dais,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring'.
So it was done:
I in their delicate fellowship was one -
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
I knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumed of the wild sea-snortings;
All that's born or dies
Rose and dropped with; made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful divine;
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine:
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
And share commingling heat;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
For ah! we know not what each other says,
These things and I; in sound I speak -
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.

347
 Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts of her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
And past those noised Feet
A voice comes yet more fleet -
'Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me.'
Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou has hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amidst the dust o' the mounded years -
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have cracked and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amarinthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
Ah! must -
Designer infinite! -
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;

348
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippins stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
'And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing!
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said),
'And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited -
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'
349
how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you
want to be once more?

To Paul it makes no sense that someone who has experienced the liberty and the joy of the Kingdom
would chose to return to a life of bondage.

But for some it is easier to be enslaved than it is to be free. Slavery means freedom from responsibili-
ty for one’s decisions and actions, from one’s choices and the consequences of one’s choices. Slav-
ery means that you can pass the burden of blame onto someone else.

In the movie, The Matrix, there is one character, Cypher, who desires to return to the dream, and in
so doing imperils the lives of those who would live in liberty and in the truth outside the dream. He
even kills to be able to return to the dream. In the end he, himself, is destroyed by the false promise
of the dream. According to the parables of the Lord, and in many other places throughout the New
Covenant writings, there is a significant number out of those who hear the Gospel message who for
many varied reasons turn back to the world from which it calls them to escape. According to the Para-
ble of the Soils, this number may be as high as seventy-five percent, which is appalling, considering
the rewards awaiting those who follow after the Lord. Such is both the compelling strength and the
insanity of deception.

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, ac-
cording to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of
deity dwells bodily , and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. Colossians 2:8-10

This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame,
by triumphing over them in him. Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or
with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the sub-
stance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on
in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from
whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is
from God. If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the
world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that
all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance
of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in
stopping the indulgence of the flesh. Colossians 2:14-23

the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might
that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly plac-
es, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only
in this age but also in the one to come. Ephesians 1:19-21

350
In Galatians

You observe days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain.

Paul now broadens his appeal to both the Galatian Jews who had begun to experience the liberty of
Christ and to the Galatian Gentile believers who were beginning to question their liberty and to drift
back into the practices of ritual Judaism under the persuasions of the Judaizers….

Brothers, I entreat you, become as I am, for I also have become as you are.

(Become free in Christ’s liberty as I have shown you by my own life in Christ: Remember, I am…I
was…as Jewish as anyone could possibly be Philippians 3:4-6 , but when I came to you I became one
of you…I did not ask you to become a Jew: I taught you to be free. Now I ask you to return to the
freedom I demonstrated to you by my own life among you. “Follow after me as I follow after the Lord!”) 1
Corinthians 4:16; 1 Corinthians 11:1

You did me no wrong. You know it was because of a bodily ailment that I preached the gospel to you at first,
and though my condition was a trial to you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of
God, as Christ Jesus. What then has become of the blessing you felt? For I testify to you that, if possible, you
would have gouged out your eyes and given them to me.

(Paul seems to be saying that when he first came to the Galatians, apparently as a very sick man,
they warmly embraced him: Had he not been ill, he seems to be saying that it had not been his inten-
tion to stop in the region. They took him in, ministered to him and in return he shared the Lord with
them, and there was sweet fellowship between them in full Holy Spirit liberty, but now, and without
good cause, Paul was being spoken of as an enemy by a faction of them, and those false brethren
who had come from Jerusalem were hardening the Galatian church into a legalistic pseudo-Christian
sect.)

Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?

They make much of you, but for no good purpose. They want to shut you out, that you may make much of
them. (They want to gather you into a closed group around themselves so that they can claim you as
their own, make a trophy out of you.)

It is always good to be made much of for a good purpose, and not only when I am present with you, my lit-
tle children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!

Paul was an intercessor who carried in his heart those who he midwifed into the Kingdom. He was in
constant prayer throughout his life doing spiritual battle as a watchman over his many fellowships, for
specific individuals, and seeking the heart of God as he wrote his letters.

I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you.

Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? (Torah/Pentateuch) For it is
written that Abraham had two sons, by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But son of the slave was
born according to the flesh, while son of the free woman was born through promise.

351
 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants.

This is one of the sections of scripture that we know we can assign deeper spiritual meaning to be-
cause it assigns that deeper meaning to itself. The scriptures are inspired revelation from God and as
such do embody meaning far more profound than that which lies on their surface. In many places we
are given clear indications that such deeper meaning exists in the body of the text; In other passages
we must wait humbly upon the Lord and employ time tested and proven methods of study to “mine”
the treasures of the Word. A specific portion of these methods of study belong to the Church exclu-
sively and reach beyond merely human scholarly disciplines, but all time-proven critical tools of schol-
arship also apply, for the text of scripture as well consists of documents written by the hand of man. (2
Peter 1:20) In no case will we discover the Truths of God by our own striving: If we use our own minds
and our own methods unaided by the Holy Spirit to contrive to shape the revelation of God and His
plans we will inevitably “wrest the scriptures to our own destruction” 2 Peter 3:16 and fall into error.

Paul now, under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, interprets the allegory. In an allegory every object or
event is assigned a consistent specific significant meaning:
One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia (the
place where the Law was given); she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, (Religious Judaism = Old Cov-
enant) for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above (Spiritual Judaism = Christianity=
New Covenant) is free, and she is our (The Israel of God mentioned below) mother. For it is written,

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;

break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than those of the one who has a husband.” (Isaiah 54 and the surrounding chapters)

That which is written before, the prophetic stream of the Old Covenant, is given to us to
(2 Peter 1:19)
both as a lamp that can be a guide into the future, when the Lord chooses to use it as such, and more
often as a seal of authenticity and a guarantee that He is keeping His word and moving steadily for-
ward according to His plans and purposes. It is not a Ouija board or a crystal ball given to us for our
amusement or to satisfy our curiosity. The prophetic spirit is the testimony of Jesus Christ, of His vic-
tory over sin and death, of His ascendency to the Throne of Creation and of the coming of His King-
dom and His righteous rule. (Revelation 19:10) Paul here pegs the legitimacy of the Church to a particular
declaration by Isaiah, again proving that the Judaizers had a clear foreknowledge available to them of
the Truth they were now opposing, and that therefore they were without excuse before God.

Now you, brothers, like Isaac, (Isaac is a type of the Church and his biography should be studied with
this in mind) are children of promise. But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh (Esau is
a type of the Judaizer, the religious law, the anti-Christ spirit) persecuted him who was born according to
the Spirit, so also it is now. (By referencing Isaac and Esau in this way, Paul extends the allegory into
the story of Israel and the children of Esau, which today is the Israel/Arab conflict and is also the larg-
er conflict between Judaeo/Christianity and Islam. This age-long conflict is a visible sign of spiritual
realities, and what is occurring in the natural is both a shadow of more substantial spiritual things and
a timepiece indicating where in God’s timetable events are as His purposes are outworking.

352
Because Paul extended the allegorical interpretation forward we who hunger after all that God would
offer should feel free to approach our study of the scriptures with these “spiritual” interpretations also
in our view. But not arbitrarily; There are disciplines and guidelines for meditative bible study which
have protected those who would pursue the deep things of the Spirit of the Lord, and which, when
abandoned, expose spiritual persons to great errors and dangers. Humility and contrition of soul are
first among these disciplines, as are diligence in rightly dividing the Word of God…and in making a
full and complete understanding of our most holy faith the most important pursuit of life. )

But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman
shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” (Genesis 21:10, John 8:35) So, brothers, we are not children of
the slave but of the free woman.

There can be no compromise with the religious spirit. The liberty of Christ cannot co-exist with legal-
ism. And a compromise will always end with the triumph of Law, because it is Liberty that is flexible
and that tends toward tolerance, while legalism will never yield ground. But here Paul is saying that
Liberty should be the pro-active and aggressive force in a fellowship where Law is trying to invade
and take territory: It is Liberty that should cast out Law, not Liberty that should leave or submit. When
a fellowship begins to move into the Life of the Spirit, and when there is a group in that fellowship
who begin to resist that move, then they first should be encouraged in love to enter in to the Life, but
if they continue to resist the Spirit, then they must be turned away from the fellowship so that their
influence does not quench the move or cause conflict and division in the body. And if they are so en-
trenched that they cannot be moved, only then should those who are free in the Spirit, in a spirit of
love and goodwill (as much as lies within them), pack up and go elsewhere to prevent the legalistic
leaven from infecting and poisoning their freedom in the Lord.

353
5 For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again (active resistance to
false ministry) to a yoke of slavery.

Christ’s purpose is to put an end to the entire cycle of bondage caused by sin in the world: This cycle
includes our congenital separation from God, our bent toward willful rebellion, our lusting nature and
the inability we have to control it, our continual personal sinning, and God’s imposed laws (the primal
or natural law of conscience in all men and the Law of Moses for the Jews) which have been given to
restrain the pace of sin’s terminal malignancy. Once these issues have been resolved through Christ,
the cycle has been eternally broken: To return to Law is both pointless and is a denial of the efficacy
of Christ’s intervention. (As in the movie, The Matrix, it is a deliberate choice to return to the dream.)

No one can force us back into religious legalism. If we return, it will be a choice; a choice away from
Christ and toward a “form of godliness that denies the power of God”. This is a choice that marks those
who are judged unworthy of the Kingdom in the last days. (2 Timothy 3:1-7)

Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again
to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law.

Paul is writing to a Christian church. Therefore he is saying that if a man (or woman) who is a Christian
turns back into religious forms and practices as their method of approaching God they have fallen from
Grace and rejected the terms of the Cross…They have lost their salvation. You cannot simultaneously be
saved by Grace through faith and be seeking to be justified under the Law any more than you can simulta-
neously be enjoying an all-expense paid vacation in the Caribbean while at the same time be working late
at your desk at your job. Some teach that once you are saved you cannot lose your salvation, but Paul
does not teach this, (he uses the word “severed” below), nor do any of the New Covenant writers, nor
does Jesus. “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” Matthew 6:21 A fall from Grace is not easy
and God does not let go of us without a fight, but He will not force us to remain with Him when we don’t
want to be with Him, and if we ultimately decide to turn away from Him, there is a point beyond which He
will not continue to follow down whatever road we might decide to wander, though He will always be wait-
ing for us should we ever decide to turn around and come back. Only those who desire His presence will
know His presence.

You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law

(The direction in which our will is pointed determines our destiny: With our will we seek reward for our ef-
fort, which at its best is only superficial and always flawed and self-aggrandizing and cannot please a Holy
God, or with our will we surrender to God’s judgment against our sin and His sentence against us. That
sentence is and always has been a death sentence, but it has been executed once for all of us in Christ.
Hebrews (chapter 6) makes it very clear that if we once understand these things and come to Christ, but
then turn back from Christ and choose to substitute religious ritualistic worship for Christian liberty once
again, then we have once again left Christ hanging on the cross without burial and resurrection and ascen-
sion, and our curse remains. Paul here is indicating that salvation can be lost.)

you have fallen away from grace.

“the Law gives neither the desire nor the power to obey it’s commandments, and on the other hand, uses
the evil nature as a means by which to bring sin into the life, since the evil nature is aroused to active re-
bellion by the very presence of the law.” The Law does one thing, it awakens the awareness of failure; it
shows us that we are wrong. And if we then choose to live superficially and manage to convince our-
selves that our outward actions are actually fulfilling the Law, as did the Pharisees, then, if and when God

Wuest, Kenneth S.: Wuest's Word Studies from the Greek New Testament : For the English Reader. Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, 1997,
c1984, S. Ga 6:1
354
finally breaks through our self-deception and we read again the Law at its true depth we discover that
we have fallen into its deepest condemnations; pride, hubris, self-righteousness. The Law was given
only to condemn us so completely that we would have no other recourse but to cast ourselves with-
out condition or reservation upon the mercy of a loving God.

For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness.

Waiting is the antithesis of striving….

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working
through love. (the love of God to us, healing and transforming us, and through us to others)

And I might note here that the converse must also be true that where there is not love, faith will not,
cannot, work. A hardened heart, an adamant will, is the one thing in all creation that can successfully
oppose God. If we will not, He will not.

Paul is alluding here to the Law of Love as opposed to the Law of Works.

set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, con-
cerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God
in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through
whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name
among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, Romans 1:1-6

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according
to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the
prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring
about the obedience of faith— Romans 16:25-26

In Galatians:

You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who
calls you.

A little leaven leavens the whole lump.

(“this persuading influence is not from Him who is calling you…A little leaven is leavening the whole lump of
dough”)

Paul here is saying that if a corrupting influence is left unchallenged in a fellowship it will eventually
infect the entire fellowship. It is the responsibility of those who are mature and in leadership to identi-
fy and confront all potentially corrupting and divisive elements which might seek to gain ground in the
fellowship and to deal with them according to the guidelines set forth in the scripture, first making ev-
ery effort to balance and correct that which is not in harmony with the Lord’s purposes and then, if
necessary, rebuking and removing the troublemakers from the fellowship.

I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view than mine, and the one who is troubling you
will bear the penalty, whoever he is. (it almost seems as if there was just a single individual poisoning
the well in this fellowship…one whispering voice spreading a doctrine of demons. But below Paul
speaks of a group, so more likely there was a group with a persuasive leader.)

355
 But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the
cross has been removed. I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves!

The words cut off are from apokopto (ἀποκοπτο). The word refers to bodily mutilation. Paul express-
es the wish that the Judaizers would not stop with circumcision, but would go on to emasculation.
The city of Pessinus (in Southwestern Galatia) was the home of the worship of Cybele in honor of
whom bodily mutilation was practiced. The priests of Cybele castrated themselves. This was a recog-
nized form of heathen self-devotion to the goddess and would not be shunned in ordinary conversa-
tion. This explains the freedom with which Paul speaks of it to his Galatian converts. In Philippians 3:2,
the apostle speaks of the Judaizers as the concision that is, those who mutilate themselves. Vincent
expresses his conception of Paul’s words as follows: “These people are disturbing you by insisting on
circumcision. I would that they would make thorough work of it in their own case, and instead of mere-
ly amputating the foreskin, would castrate themselves as heathen priests do. Perhaps this would be
even more powerful help to salvation.” He says that this is perhaps the severest expression in Paul’s
epistles. The great danger in which Christianity was placed by the Judaizers, made such a severe
statement necessary. The man who could beseech his converts with the meekness and gentleness
of Christ, could also deal in a most severe way when the occasion for such treatment presented itself.
The whole expression shows that circumcision had become for Paul a purely physical act without reli-
gious significance, and, performed for such a purpose as that for which the Judaizers used it, it be-
came a bodily mutilation not different in character to the mutilations of the heathen mystery cults.
Thus, by glorying in the flesh, the Galatians would be returning to the bondage of their former heathen-
ism.

For you were called to freedom, (full freedom from religious law and any salvation through works or
ritual direct or implied) brothers.

Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.

(If you say you are a Christian and you are no longer entangled in religious forms then your life must
be bearing fruit in terms of Christlikeness toward those around you and in terms of personal lifestyle,
or your testimony is a sham. The indwelling Spirit of Christ is a constraining influence in the life of the
Christian: There are motivations and limitations arising from our union with Christ which guide our
thoughts and actions and define the boundaries of our liberty. We can overstep these boundaries by
exercises of our own will, but the Mind of Christ will challenge us and the indwelling Spirit of Christ will
resist and oppose us. However, if we persist in our resistance to Him, eventually He will let us go our
own way and if we grieve the Holy Spirit overmuch, eventually I believe the scripture indicates that He
will leave us once again alone and on our own.)

For the whole law is fulfilled in one word “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.

(The imagery of cannibalism was every bit as horrifying to ancient sensibilities, and especially to an-
cient Jewish sensibilities, as it is to us today. There were several times in their own history where can-
nibalism had occurred within cities in Israel during sieges that the scriptures attribute to the judgments
of God against the gross sin of His people. The idea of cannibalism triggers a moral revulsion at the
deepest level of our humanity in anyone we would define as a normal psychologically healthy person.
It is, perhaps, the most bestial behavior that can be attributed to a human being, and is a peeling back
of our veneer of civility that reveals the demons within fallen man. This is a terribly strong statement
ending a terribly strong and passionate paragraph.)

356
 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

Even after we are reborn and renewed we are still going to be in a struggle with the “old man”
24/7/365: We are to “reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ”, Romans 6:11 but the gray matter of
our brain has been shaped and raped by every thought and experience of our lives up to the moment
of our conversion, and many ghosts will linger in the crevices of its convolutions. We are no longer
defenseless against their influences, and we have power to offensively drive them out as they reveal
themselves to us, but we are still “in their world but not of their world” John 17 as long as we are in skin.
This struggle will diminish steadily as we mature in Christ, but will never end as long as we are in this
body in this world. Nevertheless, if we cultivate our spiritual life, Paul says here we “will not” fall into
fleshly behaviors. (This is one of the major points that Paul argues forcefully in the first twelve chap-
ters of the letter to the Romans, which ends with the instruction to “present ourselves as a living sacri-
fice to God so that our minds can be renewed.” Romans 12:1ff The brilliant light of the Son will vaporize
all ghosts.)

For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these
are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.

James talks about being “double-minded”. To be double-minded is to be trying to do two opposite

things at the same time…to be conflicted. It’s like trying to go up a hill and down a hill at the same
time, or like trying to turn left and turn right at the same time. It doesn’t work. At best the two choices
cancel each other out and nothing gets done. At worst the wrong choice is made, and bad stuff hap-
pens. Much of the time we end up in indecision, confused, going around in little circles or paralyzed.

James says that “double-minded man is unstable in everything” James 1:8 and that his prayers don’t get
answered. How can they? How can we have substantial faith if we are not certain of what we believe
or desire? Cf. Hebrews 11:6 Jesus, Himself, said that He prefers that we be either “hot or cold, but not
lukewarm” (Revelation 3:16).

Paul goes on to say that the believer must live from within and from above:

But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.

The law is for lawbreakers…if we choose to live sinfully then the law and its consequences bear down
upon us. “Those who will not be governed from within will be governed from without.” (Paraphrasing
William Penn, who said, “Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.”) If
we choose to walk submissively, guided by the Holy Spirit then “love God and do as you want” (Au-
gustine of Hippo) applies to us. If we stumble, we ask forgiveness, repent, deal with the problem area,
and continue on.

The Spirit-filled Christian may experience a sense of conviction, when his or her life is out of sync with
the life of the Holy Spirit within, but no Spirit-filled Spirit-led Christian should ever labor under a weight
of guilt or condemnation. Guilt and condemnation comes when the heart is being accused by the
harsh voice of the Law, which has no mercy in it and which offers no way of escape from its penalty.
Christ has dealt with this. It is not Christ who would use the Law to remind His children of the paths
of righteousness.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn
from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my
burden is light. Matthew 11:28-30

357
In Galatians:

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality (all sexual activity outside of the boundaries of
marriage), impurity (lusts of the flesh/fantasies), sensuality (shamelessness, wantonness), idolatry
(holding any “thing” between the self and God), sorcery (the Greek pharmakia includes the use of
drugs and poisons: here it primarily means enchantments employed in witchcraft), enmity (any form of
hatred or animosity), strife (quarreling, contention, causing discord) , jealousy (personal envy and cov-
etousness toward that which others’ have), fits of anger (outbursts, rage, temper-tantrums), rivalries
(self-seeking selfish behaviors), dissensions (that which causes factions or divisions or cliques: party
spirit), (more specifically emphasizing false and heretical doctrines in the church), envy (class/social
jealousy/nationalism/racism), drunkenness (the word used speaks more of wild parties than of strong
drink alone. The scriptures speak elsewhere of over-indulgence with alcohol/substance abuse), orgies,
and things like these.

I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things (as a lifestyle) will not inherit the kingdom
of God.

This is as straight forward a statement as can be made. Each believer needs to take it at its face val-
ue, to go off into a quiet corner somewhere and honestly check themselves against Paul’s shopping
list above (and the other such lists that he provides in several other letters), and decide whether or
not they are really up to the challenge of being a Christian; Because God isn’t playing games. It will
probably be better to be a sincere sinner than it will be to be an insincere Christian when you stand
before the Throne and are asked to justify your life.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
self-control

Again Paul speaks of our Christian attributes as fruit, that which grows naturally from a branch that is
connected to (in union with) the vine and the root.

Self-control has always been regarded as a noble virtue by philosophers and moral teachers in virtual-
ly all cultures and at all times, perhaps the primary virtue. There is at least one sense in which all the
other virtues mentioned here are really specific attributes of Christian self-discipline and arise from it.
Jesus taught nothing new here, though He taught with greater authority than anyone before or since.
He did raise the bar to impossible heights, because He expects us to aspire to exercise these attri-
butes perfectly. But He also provides the power and enablements we need to accomplish the stan-
dards He set.

against such things there is no law.

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live
by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying
one another.

358
6 Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression (in the context Paul is speaking both about the accep-
tance of the Judaizers’ teachings and about the passions and desires of the flesh), you who are spiritu-
al should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.

Law can only deal with externals, with actions. It can only identify them and judge them as right or
wrong. It can do nothing to prevent them or to change the motivations behind them. Virtually every-
thing Paul lists as the “works of the flesh” are internals…. The attitudes out of which actions proceed
and which, therefore, are beyond the reach of Law. This is the problem with Law, and the problem
which the Gospel of grace in Christ resolves.

Law can only point out the actions which are the evidence of deeper heart issues: It cannot offer any
remedy for those heart issues and has no power to correct or heal them. And the sharp voice of Law
is almost always only noticed under negative circumstances, when the Law is broken. Its approvals,
when they are heard, are those of a tyrant and are never given without a cost, a “bit of flesh” in pay-
ment. As Paul says in the letter to Colossians:

If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you
submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they
are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in pro-
moting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the in-
dulgence of the flesh. Colossians 2:20-23

The Gospel of the Kingdom deals entirely with internals by transforming the “inner man” and by bring-
ing into existence “a new creation in Christ” who has the “mind of Christ” and the “Spirit of God”, and
who therefore has a completely different set of attitudes as well as the power by which to embrace
them. This is clearly seen in the New Covenant which, as in verses 22 and 23 above, deals primarily
with attitudes and motivations, and in almost every case regards any actions that an individual might
take as symptomatic of deeper issues.

The issue here, with the re-introduction of the Law, was that as “religious” form once again replaced
spiritual reality in the lives of those who were embracing the teachings of the Judaizers, these were
allowing themselves to become inwardly more and more sinful as they were allowing themselves to
become outwardly more and more self-righteous. They were apparently beginning to act out in the
various ways Paul lists, probably because the Law, as they were being instructed in it, was not specif-
ically dealing with those areas and they were not being challenged to address them. They had
stopped nurturing the life within and it was withering away.

As had the Pharisees who condemned and crucified the Lord in Jerusalem, those in the Galatian fel-
lowship who were returning to the corrupted gospel were becoming harder in conscience and more
judgmental toward the others in the Body. Law tends to make its practitioners prideful and conten-
tious: It is easy to see whether or not others are conforming to outward standards of practice and to
commend those who are and condemn those who are not. Paul urges those of the fellowship who
were spiritually strong and wise enough to do all they can to restore these confused believers to right
understanding, and he cautions them to be careful that they not get sucked in themselves by the per-
suasive arguments of the Judaizers.

359
When we stop living by the Spirit and begin again to live by outward rules and precepts, we will more
and more find ourselves “caught by….. transgression(s)”, because on the one hand we do not have
the strength in ourselves to resist the temptations that assail us from every side in this world, and on
the other hand there are not enough laws on the books to cover every contingency we might run into
even if we could manage to keep them. When the Israelites tried to run their lives by keeping the Law,
they ended up producing the Talmuds, which were the Rabbinical commentaries that tried to apply
the Law to every possible circumstance of life. By the time Jesus began His ministry these extra-bibli-
cal writings would have filled a small library and had become the “traditions of the elders” that the
Lord railed against so passionately. Because of these myriad rules and rulings mercy and compas-
sion and the knowledge of God was lost while rich Pharisees and Saducees kicked beggars out of
their way and counted out ten of every hundred seeds that they planted in their fields to bring to the
Temple as tithes.

Nothing has changed really in the two millennia of the Church, and Christendumb has in many ways
repeated the same pattern as Israel. Only by living the Spirit-formed, Spirit-filled, Spirit-led life can
the Christian avoid being pressed into this same mold. Paul here is exhorting those who are spiritual-
ly strong and mature to do all they can to guide those who have slipped into legalism back into confi-
dent faith in the Grace of God.

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. (In Christian love watch out for one another)

For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.

(But not in a boastful or judgmental way. Look first to yourself to be sure that you are walking humbly
before the Lord. Those who were infiltrating the fellowship were claiming to be superior in their au-
thority, knowledge, and righteousness.)

Promotion comes from the Lord, and it is the Lord who authenticates and validates our ministry in His
name. Psalm 37:34;James 4:10 We have nothing that we are not given through our union with Him, and
therefore we have nothing to which we can lay claim or in which we can boast as our independent
accomplishment.
But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neigh-
bor. (Here “neighbor” specifically refers to those who are Christian) For each will have to bear his own
load. (Ultimately, each one of us is going to stand before the Lord alone. We will not be able to shift
the responsibility for our lives and how we lived them to another person. There is only one other per-
son who has been given as mediator and advocate for each one of us before God. That person is
Jesus Christ. No one comes to the Father except through Him.)

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus who gave himself
as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an
apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. (1 Timothy 2:5-7)

We are not going to be judged on how many trophies we are able to present when we stand before
the King…on how many sales we have closed. We are going to be judged against the measure of
Christ. We are going to stand, as mirrors, and what will be looked for is the clarity of the reflection of
the Son in us.

One who is taught the word must share all good things with the one who teaches.

360
Paul is not speaking of material things but of spiritual things here. If the teacher is walking in Truth,
then those whom he teaches will reflect in their own lives the Truth that they are being taught. The
teacher will be known by the fruit he produces both in his own life and in the fruit that grows from the
seed he plants. He will not have to boast or brag about this; it will be self-evident and others will point
it out.

Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.
For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit
will from the Spirit reap eternal life.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.

(This is not the same as Karma, though the idea of Karma may be a dim and broken reflection of this
truth. Karma has some complicated explanation that deals with never-ending spiritual progress and
with lessons to be learned in each cycle of reincarnation, and has nothing to do with good or evil,
right or wrong, righteousness and sin. What Paul is speaking of here is the fact that our choices and
our actions have consequences, and that at a specific point in time these consequences become eter-
nal. The cycles of Karma have no end: The Bible teaches that there will be a terminal point where
that which is good will be rewarded and that which is evil will be condemned.)

So then, we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of
faith.

(Again, Paul makes a distinction: Christians are first to minister to and meet the needs of those within the
Body of Christ. And by this, in my opinion, he means first their immediate circle of fellow believers. It is
clear from his letters that he commends and expects that Christian charity will naturally overflow from the
local church to other Christian fellowships when they have needs.

Because we have the resources of Christ to draw upon and because the love of God toward all men is
moving through and constraining us we then are to continue this overflow to the world around us. Never-
theless, the Church is not to become an NGO of some sort and it is not our primary mandate to try to alle-
viate the hardship and poverty of the fallen world apart from the preaching of the Kingdom of God. It is
never our job as Christians to enable a sin-sick and dying world. As Jesus Himself instructed, we are to
“Let the dead bury the dead.” Our outreach and ministry to the world is only to be in terms of the Gospel of
the Kingdom of God, and if they are not willing to come to terms with the Kingdom, then we are to leave
them to themselves. If the world wants the blessings that we have received from the Lord, it must be on
our terms…never on theirs.)

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fel-
lowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an
unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,
“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Therefore go out from their midst,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.” 2 Corinthians 6:14-18

361
In Galatians:

See with what large letters I am writing to you with my own hand.

It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in
order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. For even those who are circumcised do not
themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh.

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been cruci-
fied to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new
creation. (a creation of an entirely new kind) cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17

And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

(The Israel of God is that body which is constituted of faithful believers in contrast with the Israel of
the flesh or the Jerusalem from below, the son of Hagar. This multitude consists of those of blood
Israel who are of the faith of Abraham (see Romans 9-11) and of all the Gentiles who also have living faith
(“other sheep not of this fold”) John 10:16 . The Bible speaks of this number as being both large and
small. I would offer that out of the total number of human beings that have ever lived it is a large num-
ber of individuals, but that as a percentage of all mankind since Adam it is the “little flock” Luke 12:32 of
which Jesus spoke. It was Christ Himself who said that, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Matthew
22:14 And it was Christ who told the Parable of the Soils in which fully three-fourths of the seed scat-
tered failed to produce its crop. The Father “desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the
Truth” 1 Timothy 2:4, but each one of us has the option to reject His offer, and the scripture seems to
indicate that a very significant number of us do.)

From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

By this Paul is making an allusion to circumcision of the heart, the true circumcision, and also to the
many scars and other physical evidences on his own body of the price he has paid for the choice he
has made to serve the Lord and preach the Gospel. 2 Corinthians 11:21-12:5 The Judaizers could offer
no such credentials….Their “gospel” preserved them from persecutions.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.

362
 ~APPENDICES~

A: PERSONAL INTRODUCTION

B: PROGRESS OF REVELATION

C: SUGGESTED READING LIST

363
 INTRODUCTION

Before I inflict my ruminations upon any of you who have the courage and the patience to take up the challenge of
this bit of prose, I feel it only fair to honestly introduce myself, so you have an idea, up front, of who it is with whom
you are sitting down to chat.

I might be a somewhat successful artist/sculptor. I have been entrepreneurial for the past 25 years, having slowly
navigated my way out of the landfill existence of the starving artist to, now, the notoriety of being able to take my
wife out betimes to the Tandori buffet for a date.

I am also a completely convinced Christian. I have a profound and immutable testimony that began over 35 years
ago with a personal and very supernatural miracle that saved my life and released me from serious drug and life-style
problems, and I have as many years since of formal academic study (including a summa cum laude degree in
Biblical Studies, with minors in World Religions, Sociology, and Philosophy from a very fine private Wesleyan
Methodist college), a bit of seminary work (cut short by the responsibilities of actual life), extensive ministerial
training, and considerable practical teaching and ministry experience as well.

I once almost destroyed, and have worked very long and hard with my wife to completely rebuild our marriage, have
three adult children, and five grandkids. On our tenth anniversary there was nothing left of our relationship except
our vow before the Lord that “divorce was not an option”. Our marriage is now, according to my wife’s reckoning,
about an 8/9 on a scale of 10. We just celebrated our 34th anniversary. I am amazed that Marilyn will say this,
because I still don’t think I have come so far in my own transformation…but who am I to argue with my wife?

Rabbit trail…

Don’t let anyone say to me “We just aren’t compatible anymore” or “We just don’t love each other the way we used
to”: That’s bullcrap. One or both of you are lazy, or cheating in your heart because you haven’t got the courage or
the integrity or the maturity to truly love one another all the way.

(True love is not a feeling…it’s a promise, a covenant: here’s a scary old fashioned very unpolitically correct
word….True Love is a “COMMITMENT”: “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in
health, until death do us part”.

There is no escape clause in the official traditional VOW! A vow is “a solemn promise or assertion: specifically one
by which a person is bound to an act, service, or condition. A solemn or earnest pledge or promise binding the
person making it to perform a specified act or behave in a certain way”: Webster . A vow used to actually mean
something: it was more than just words before the big party and the first legitimate romp between the sheets.)

Anything else is a hookup of desperation, or of convenience, or of design, or, worse yet, simply horny lust…dog
stuff. People who approach sex the way animals approach sex are no different from animals… and that is nothing to
be proud of. God made us to be better than that.

Marilyn and I give the credit for this success entirely to the Lord and to our cooperation with His program, which we
COMMITTED TO (in spite of the fact that there were no feelings left) in July of 1986, instead of breaking up the
family. Emotional love rekindled and has matured over time, as it always will. Our partnership is incredibly strong
now, and growing stronger. We work on it every day. And if He can do this with us, He can do it with you. It is
certainly not easy, it took us close to fifteen years to even begin to get maturing fruit, and it hurt a lot
sometimes,…but there aren’t any valid excuses either.

End of rabbit trail….

364
However, I am ‘way outside the “traditional” box in the way I approach my faith, and can be unexpectedly fair-
minded and freethinking and compassionate, though I am certainly orthodox (that is, according to the clear teaching
of the New Testament, not of the myriad opinions of the academics who have spent the last 1800 years obfuscating
it) at the core. I don’t believe myself to be overly predictable.

I consider myself to be respectful of most opinions with which I have disagreements, unless they violate God’s
clearly stated positions on the way He expects His Cosmos to behave. You have every right to be wrong. I have little
patience with loudmouths and wise-asses and over-educated armchair philosophers and theologians who are “ever
learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the Truth.” I despise arrogance, narcissism, and hubris. (And I
do know how to discern the difference between these and true confidence and authority, at least most of the time.)

There are lines over which I will not cross and at which I will make a stand, especially pertaining to issues of
morality and character. I do not abide perversion and blatantly immoral or reprobate behavior. You can do what you
want to yourself, but do not impose your immorality or excess on me, or inflict it upon others who are innocent or
unwilling. I do not tolerate injustice and bullying. I detest liars and deceivers. If I see you hurting a child I will hurt
you. I believe in the right to keep and bear arms. I will defend my family, and the innocent or the helpless. In some
ways I am a conscientious objector, but I am not a pacifist.

I like to push the envelope in conversations just to see what might happen, or to provoke people to actually start to
think meaningful thoughts. I am more tactful now than I used to be. It has become painfully clear to me that a
substantial percentage of people actually think no more than three or four truly significant thoughts a week…if that.
Let me see what TV programs you watch and what you read, and I will know whether you have a working brain, or
some sort of a hardwired neural net. I am quite convinced that many modern people would not be able to function if
they didn’t receive their daily data-stream from some remote server somewhere in cyberspace. Many do not seem to
have a mind of their own. Cultural programming is ubiquitous, and it appears that a large percentage of people are
completely unaware of how brainwashed they are. A “Jersey Shore” level of consciousness is far closer to reality
than our minority of normal mainstream Americans might want to believe, and “Snooki” isn’t all that different from
your average girl next door. (I realize that I have just painted with a rather sarcastic broad brush; please sprinkle
some salt on that last statement. I apologize to every woman, man, and child who watches (thoughtfully) the Fox
News Channel at least as part of his or her daily intake of information. I applaud Gretchen Carlson and Megyn
Kelly and most of the other Fox women as stellar role models to every American girl. This means to a progressive
liberal that I do not think: I cheerfully return the compliment.)

I have spent the majority of my Christian life within the boundaries of the mainstream charismatic evangelical
conservative church, but, as my adviser at one school once pointedly accused me, I have “no institutional loyalties”,
and I do not claim membership in any particular mainline denomination, having found virtually all of them to have
grown narrow-minded and self-serving to a lesser or greater degree. (I can’t say “all” inclusively because I have not
been associated with all of them. But I have been part of a number of different organizations, and all of these appear
to have succumbed in some measure to politics, and have lost touch with the heart of the Gospel.) At the moment I
am rather disgusted with a fair percentage of the organized church, though not with all of it. I haven’t decided what I
am going to do about this yet, as I also very much am opposed to “lone wolf” Christianity.

I have found certain independent fellowships and organizations to be very much in tune with what I believe to be the
purposes of the Lord for the present time in history, and Marilyn and I keep in communion with these and support
them. Historically (and with some rare exceptions), a group usually bears its torch faithfully and vigorously for, at
best, two generations before it ossifies the vision of its founder(s), and begins to become increasingly irrelevant (or
counterproductive) while the Lord moves on to fresh wineskins with New Wine, and finds clean vessels to fill and
use.

My loyalties are to God and the agenda of His Kingdom first, my wife and family second, the demonstrably
Christian and global SPIRITUAL “community of believers” third, people in general next, nations and political
systems and causes last, and very much least. It can be no other way: True Christians are “in but not of this
world”, and are, first, citizens of our Father’s Kingdom, of which the systems of this world are vassal tenants.

365
I very much believe in judging persons and organizations by the fruit of their lives and efforts, not by their hype and
flash… sometimes it takes quite a while for me to decide whether or not someone or some group has integrity to its
core, because quality fruit takes a long time to grow and mature. It is relatively easy to put on a good front and keep
up appearances, often for some time, before the masks begin to slip.

I believe that the Bible is the ONLY inspired Revelation of God to the human race. I know without any reservations
that Jesus Christ is the Almighty Creator God fully revealing himself to us in human skin, and that intimately
knowing Jesus Christ as a Person is the only means by which we can return to our proper relationship with our
Creator. (I met Him personally on the evening of Sunday, May 19th, 1974 in an encounter that began around 5pm
and lasted for an hour and a half.) You can believe this or you can choose not to: I was there. My testimony is on-
line at www.rstoman.com

I believe that without this personal relationship each one of us is doomed to eternal separation from our Creator and
to spiritual death.

I also know absolutely and through 35 years 5 months 4 days and 13 hours (today is the morning of October 24,
2009) of personal experience that Jesus is a lot bigger and more fantastic than the “Four Spiritual Laws” printed in a
tract, or a street corner revival service, or a life of Sunday morning pew sitting.

I am not a Fundamentalist, but I am Evangelical, if that word has any useful meaning left to it. I really do care that
you “get saved”! If you are not a Christian I would certainly encourage you to do all you can to learn about Jesus
Christ, because I know that He has clearly said that you are in ultimate eternal peril if you don’t come to terms with
Him. At this moment, if you do not know Him, and you decide to die, you will spin off into Forever, alone and
spiritually dead, but very aware because the human soul is an immortal thing: That will be Hell! His words, not
mine. It was never supposed to be that way. He has provided a way of escape, but you have to decide to take Him
up on the offer.

He is the single most significant Figure in human history, and you are foolish to deny it or to ignore or mock His
challenge. PLEASE DON’T LET ANYONE CONVINCE YOU OTHERWISE!

Rabbit trail…

The Apostle Paul wrote, in his letter to the believers at Rome which we will explore in depth, that he was
commissioned by God to preach and teach the message of the Gospel of the Kingdom,

“ CONCERNING GOD’S SON,

JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD,
WHO WAS DESCENDED FROM KING DAVID OF ISRAEL, ACCORDING TO HUMAN GENEOLOGY,
AND WAS PROVEN TO BE THE SON OF GOD IN POWER ACCORDING TO THE SPIRIT OF HOLINESS
BY HIS PHYSICAL RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD.”

This is either true, or it isn’t. As C.S.Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity”: Jesus is either an evil liar, a madman, or
the Lord of the universe…there are no other options, because He didn’t leave us any other options. The one thing
He isn’t is a “great religious teacher”…not with the claims He’s made. And Paul is either telling the truth, or he is
not. (You can read his words for yourself in my commentaries .)

It is intellectually dishonest to argue that the writers of the New Testament documents were disingenuous as they
documented what they were experiencing. The evidence for the integrity and authenticity of these documents is
overwhelming. The evidence for the history of the events that they record and expound as eyewitnesses is equally
overwhelming. No events of ancient history have been more extensively studied or better documented. ( Please
invest in a copy of The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell to verify what I am saying for
yourself.)

366
Jesus Christ demands that you do business with Him now, while you have skin on, or you will perish. (There is no
Karma or reincarnation…no second chance or “do over”. The Bible is absolutely clear about this. Please don’t kid
yourself.) He gives you every opportunity of a lifetime to make the decision to do so. And, deep down, you know it.,
whether or not you want to accept it. (You are reading this: This is YOUR time.)

The Bible teaches that knowing Him is the ticket to the best trip in the entire Cosmos, and that not knowing Him is
the biggest mistake that you will ever make. It will cost you your soul. The Bible uses the word “torment” to
describe this condition. God does not want you to make this mistake. You already have tasted the cold fear of that
abyss: We all have at one time or another….. That gut wrenching vertigo feeling, in a nightmare, or a near-death
car wreck, or a drug OD, or just a panic attack, is God’s mercy to help us turn back from the edge of the pit.
Thankfully, if you are reading this, you still have time to consider the options. Of course, you could step in front of a
bus or gag on a crouton (I once did in a Red Lobster…It was an odd experience, slowly realizing that I couldn’t
breathe) in the next five minutes.

I believe that much (certainly not all) of the contemporary American Christian church is failing miserably in its
mission to clearly declare the message of the Kingdom of God and to fully present Jesus Christ as the Lord over both
Heaven and Earth, and because of this it is offering less and less of effective spiritual relevance and hope to the
world in its obvious death spiral into chaos.

We Christians are supposed to be beacons of light, not bearers of confusion. Instead, we have flooded already
bombarded and confused ears and minds with a very mixed and incoherent message. Many of us have been
blatantly hypocritical. And we have openly fought among ourselves, behaved disgracefully, and let you watch the
soap operas of our lives, all the while telling you that we are better than you are.

This is shameful and tragic, and the church needs to be held to account for its failure. The Lord is presently judging
His people for this sinful disrespecting of His Grace to us. I am so sorry if you have been slimed by our garbage.

I apologize to those who have been burned by bad “Christians” and have been turned away from the joy of knowing
the Lord because of our misbehavior. I hope that something I say in these pages might persuade you to take another
look at Him, because He is still “white as snow”. God forbid that my lousy witness, or that or some other
misbehaving Christian, should condemn you to an eternity of agonizing isolation from the most loving Person in the
Universe.

I believe that the essential Truth of the Christian message is clearly written in the biblical documents, which are
demonstrably authentic, absolutely accurate, entirely supernatural in origin, and 150% relevant for our world today.
If their message were actually embraced by the majority of people virtually every problem over which the world is
now fighting would be resolved. This can be proven if you visit any biblically balanced Christian community in the
world.

True Christianity works! EVERY TIME!!

This message is most clearly detailed in the thirteen letters of Paul, to whom the task of explaining the “theology of
Jesus, the Christ” was given, and is augmented and nuanced by the other apostolic writers, and is fully revealed as
the New Covenant established through Jesus Christ and His ministry, His death, and His physical resurrection from
the grave. Jesus, Himself, is biographied in the four Gospel accounts. This New Covenant is what is commonly
called the New Testament or New Covenant of the Christian Bible, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the
jargon. (It is a collection of 27 first century documents communicated by God to us, and written down through the
hearts of a select group of persons who personally knew Jesus Christ.)

There are no other such Divinely inspired writings on the planet. The Bible is the ONLY Word of God to mankind.
It was given to us as the only correct guide and map provided to human beings, to avoid confusion as God works to
lead us out of the mess we, as a race, have gotten ourselves into. This mess is what the Bible calls “sin and death”.
(This situation is clearly explained in Paul’s letters.)

367
I do believe that “all Truth is God’s Truth”. Therefore, wherever Truth (capital “T”) shows up it indicates that God
has made an effort to reveal Himself to us. (God-quality Truth comes to us ONLY by REVELATION ~the word
means “unveiling”…something that only God can do. When something is “revealed”, it comes from outside our
view, from beyond our line of sight…We cannot discover it from our end because our science and we ourselves are
confined to the natural realm, and God, by definition, is super-natural.)

There are a lot of sincere “god-fearing seekers” on the planet who have yet to fully encounter the Lord, and to whom
the Bible has not yet been able or permitted to reach for one reason or another, usually because arrogant men have
tried to destroy or silence the message. God certainly hasn’t forgotten about these seekers: He has promised that He
will reveal Himself to everyone who sincerely wants to know Him, because it is His intention that everyone who
desires to return to fellowship with Him will be able to do so before He finally judges all those who have willfully
chosen to oppose Him.

And because of the Resurrection of Christ, the Spirit of God is moving 24/7/365 to help all who are sincerely
searching to find their way out of whatever swamp they are in so that they can do business with Him.

So there is certainly some Truth in the Qu’ran, in the Bhagvad Gita, in the thoughts of the Buddha and of Confucius,
and of Socrates, and wherever an honest search has been or is being pursued…a heartfelt prayer prayed.

(God is Just, God is Merciful, God is Faithful, and above all else, God is Love at His core…He has committed
Himself to seeking out every person who desires to know Him on His terms before He wraps up this phase of His
Plan. Every human being will have a fair opportunity to do business with the Lord before he or she dies.)

But no other “holy books” are inspired (God Breathed) in the sense that the Hebrew~Christian Scriptures are
inspired. Only the Bible is the Living Word of God…a love letter from Daddy to his kids. Most other such
religious or spiritual writings are nothing more than the efforts of men and women to explain their spiritual
experiences. Some are demonically “inspired”, unholy things of real and diabolical dark power: Deceptive
counterfeits created to lead human beings away from Truth.

Think about it…If, as I am arguing and as the Bible itself proclaims, there really is only one truly safe escape route
out of Hell, and God cannot force us to take it because to do so would violate His foundational principles and our
core essence of personal autonomy, (Paul will discuss this in his letters), THEN IT IS HIS MERCY TO MAKE SURE
THAT THERE IS ONLY ONE SINGLE CORRECT MAP OF THAT ESCAPE ROUTE. All other “maps”, being false, would
lead into confusion or worse.

People argue that Christianity is too exclusive: But that very exclusivity is the Love of our Father in its most
wonderful and fullest expression….He has made the answer to the deepest dilemma of the human race as simple as a
prayer of surrender, an admission of our need for Him, with no other conditions attached.

Every other “religious” system on the planet is incredibly complicated to the point of being stifling and even
arcane… The New Covenant in Christ offers absolute guilt-free liberty exprssed in simple others-centered love.
This is why there are no other inspired “holy books”. And it is our own self-delusion, our unwillingness to submit to
God’s Authority over our lives, and the subtle mind-control of Satan, that compels in us the fascination with all the
mysteries of the world’s “religions”, and of the “dark side” of things mystic and occult. We want another option:
One that leaves us more in charge. And we are willing to believe any lie to find such an option.

BIBLICAL CHRISTIANITY IS NOT A RELIGION: It is a COVENANT RELATIONSHIP between a High King and
His subjects. (And it is NOT a democracy! NEVER A DEMOCRACY!!) Democracy always leads to anarchy and
chaos and finally to tyranny and slavery and death.

We are creatures conceived and given our existence by a Sovereign God….We do not stand before Him on any equal
ground. We are a little like Him: He is not like us.

368
We are created in His image: He is not created in our image…to “imagine” God is to risk creating an idol. (This is
why He has revealed Himself so intimately and specifically in the Bible, and especially in Jesus Christ, but has never
left us a portrait.)

In a very real sense we are involved with an Alien encounter of the 3rd or 4th kind. Basically, as with all Fealty
relationships, we give everything to the King with absolute loyalty and obedience, and the King commits to taking
care of us completely and forever. He is a good and loving King, and he loves to talk things over with us…but He is
an Absolute Sovereign and we are His subjects. We belong to Him. We do not have “rights”, in an absolute sense:
We have privileges. In a Kingdom the King lives for His people and the people for their King.

Oh yeah…It just so happens that He also has decided that He wants to adopt each one of us into His family and call
us His kids, which adds a whole bunch of perks to the relationship. But He is Always and Forever the High King!
Before Him we always bow.

All religions are human efforts to justify themselves to some distortion or human imagination of God…to try and
buy Him off.

Therefore, all religions are idolatries to a lesser or greater degree, the worship of some god figure(s) made up by us
in the “image of man”. All of them break the first three commandments of the Ten Commandments.

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them
or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the
children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to
thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who
takes his name in vain.

So, as the Bible says, “ EVERYBODY HAS SINNED AND FALLEN SHORT OF GOD’S GLORY.” We are all without
excuse from the poorest to the richest, from the pervert to the Pope. We all stand rightfully judged before the bar of
His Law, and condemned.

The relationship with Christ is God’s offer of peace to us and of forgiveness for our rebellion, as a race and as
individuals, against Him (Romans 8). Biblical Christianity has nothing to do with religion, though the ancient
“Christian religion” has certainly co-opted its vocabulary and imagery, and sometimes does have a positive
connection to biblical Christianity…The “Christian religion” is most certainly populated, in part, by Christians.

If going to church helps you meet the Lord and doesn’t lead you into bondages and confusion and spiritual
entrapments, then by all means go to a church, but you don’t have to be in a church to be in intimate fellowship with
Jesus Christ.

The true Church is the “family” of the people who are spiritually “born again” (or better, “born from above”) by the
Holy Spirit of God in Christ, and who live in submission and practiced obedience to Him as Lord.

You can do that on your own with a Bible and through prayer and worship, though good fellowship with likeminded
believers certainly is a refreshing and strengthening experience, and the New Testament writers often encourage it,
even with the force of a command. “Do not forsake the gathering together of yourselves, as some are in the
habit of doing!”

369
It is very easy to become isolated and discouraged if you remain alone and without fellowship, especially with a
demonic enemy gunning for you, so find a good church or home group to hang out with, once you decide to live and
not die. Just make sure that it is a GOOD fellowship, and not one that will ultimately suck the life out of you!

End of Rabbit Trail

I am a biblical creationist, but I am not a “young earther”. I have no trouble with the idea that the earth is four and a
half billion years old or that the universe is 13.73 billion years old (or 14.5 billion if the latest calculations are more
accurate): My God transcends our limited time dimension, is not defined or constrained by it, and 13.73 billion years
is still a trillion years too short a span of time for Darwinian evolution to have had a snowball’s chance in Hell of
taking place, so that straw-grasping pseudo-science notion is put to silence.

We can still talk about a guided evolution of life and about natural selection, if you want to: There’s room for such a
discussion among intelligent people. Micro~evolution is obvious. Macro~evolution is bad pulp science fiction with
no unchallengable supporting evidence. You may be convinced that you’re a monkey’s uncle. My Daddy is God
Almighty. The same data that the Darwinists think shows a progress of evolution simply tells me that when you have
good design principles to work with you stick with them. God is the Author of Common Sense. And nobody but
God has ever explained how Life itself happens, what Life actually is. Materialists can’t even resuscitate a defunct
planarian. And when they do it will only prove that it takes intelligence to create Life. Darwinists themselves are in
the process of going extinct, because their theory really isn't fit to survive...They’re just not evolved enough to
realize it yet.

In my humble opinion, “Young Earth” theology is unhelpful and divisive and adds nothing of value to intelligent
discussion in the 21st century. It has lacks elegance and makes dialogue impossible with many intellectually
sophisticated people. Real science will do nothing but declare the Glory of God, and the church need not be afraid
of it. Eventually it will catch up to the Truth. Fundamentalists who fear science seem to be admitting that they don't
really believe God is big enough to win a debate against the puny intellect of His own creature, man. That's silly.

It is simply stunning how the most recent discoveries of honest science, real science, and especially of cosmology,
overwhelmingly confirm the biblical revelation that God has given us of Himself. I am not a scientist or a
mathematician, but I enjoy the implications of general relativity and multidimensional reality in-so-far-as I can
reflect upon them from a theological perspective. I can clearly see the hand of God in the Big Bang, the Lorenz
Butterfly, and the Mandelbrot Set. I see Order so complex that we rather stupid humans perceive it as chaos. ( Rather
like blind men examining the proverbial elephant.) I accede to Intelligent Design and the Anthropic Principle. The
evidence for fine-tuning in the Universe is mind-boggling, and humbling, and is mounting by the hour in ways that
defy comprehension and the normal rules of statistical probability, and which even still crash our most powerful
super-computers. “The Heavens declare the Glory of God.”

I regard atheism as an irrational and untenable position based solely upon personal bias and a rebellious antinomian
spirit. Agnostics can be honest in their doubts, and I can respect that: Atheists are arrogant and willfully blind,
whether they realize this or not or can admit it, and are in rebellion against the very idea of Authority, or anyone
being smarter than themselves. There is hope for the agnostic. There is little hope for the atheist, because he or she
has no humility and cannot be taught…He thinks he knows everything: Indeed, he must know everything, since
obviously he has explored the entire universe, and has discovered that there is no God hiding anywhere in it, or he
could not be so sure of his assertions. Richard Dawkins, Steven J. Gould, Carl Sagan and their ilk, IMHO, are
sophomoronic over-educated pride-bloated blowhards: Wordsmiths contributing nothing of enduring significance to
the human condition. They are filled with themselves. They have spoken and written volumes of idle speculations,
and left us all with nothing to believe in or hope for or care about.

Jesus, whose simple words were kept for us by his friends and not even by his own hand, has changed the world for
the better in every generation for 2000 years. Like the signals from SETI, the hubristic strident voices of these ivory
tower airsacks will soon enough be lost in the vastness of the interstellar void and forever forgotten. “Professing
themselves to be wise, they have become fools,” and they will have no lasting name.

370
I am not particularly political, though I do like to poke barbs into the fray, but if I were to put on a label I think I am
a Libertarian, with some reservations (I have my biblical moral boundaries which are universally binding). Upon
reflection, I am finding myself to be a Constitutionalist in today’s volatile political climate. Like the Bible, I think
the Constitution is just fine the way the Founders wrote it: It is not a “living document” (sic), subject to arbitrary
manipulation by legal weasels.

I am viscerally opposed to the philosophy of Progressive Liberal Socialism or any of its neo-Marxist permutations,
but more on philosophical grounds than those of partisan politics.. I very much resent the idea of someone telling me
how to think, or to whom I must be charitable, or what is best for my family to eat or drink. The only thing PC about
me is my computer. I work for myself, don’t mind paying reasonable taxes for reasonable services, and I am very
willing to share out of what I make. I don’t make all that much, but I know for a fact that I gave more away in 2008
than did Joe Biden…except I didn’t write it off because I give for reasons other than personal advantage.

I don’t need “Big Brother” telling me how to redistribute whatever little “wealth” I might manage to create! Giving
is a personal heart issue, not a function of government, and selfishness and greed operate in every social strata. I
think that a lot of people should get off their blobular buns (or their anorexic vegan butts for that matter), and try
actually working at a productive job for a living instead of grousing so much…and maybe they should dial down
their expectations a bit and shred their credit cards as well.

We certainly live in a nation of hyper-educated busybodies, deadbeats, and/or self-centered crybabies and whiners
who think they are entitled to a lot more than they actually deserve. A lot of folks don’t deserve squat because they
are simply lazy and parasitical at their core. I recommend watching Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs” for a month or two as
a healthy therapy, so they can learn what real work and community looks like. And maybe a hitch in the Army for
the whiners, so they can get the spoiled brat beat out of them and grow up into useful human beings, or get removed
from the gene pool by natural selection at least. (No matter: The hard times just ahead will cull the herd quite
quickly.)

Dennis Miller said something in a conversation with Bill O’Reilly: “ I love to help the helpless: I don’t care about
the clueless.” I don’t think I have a problem with this down-to-earth philosophy.

Rabbit trail…

I like my meat rare, on PETA bread…. and I like to shoot it myself with my handguns. And I like to cook it over an
open hardwood fire when I can…just to annoy tree-huggers. These kind of extremists are weird and potentialliy
dangerous because they seem to fall within Paul’s defined subset of reprobates in Romans 1:18-32. I believe in
Climate Change. It happens. I also have determined that the Sun is the most sinister contributor to Global Warming
in our era, next to the hot air spewing from Al Gore and his cult followers, and that we can do much to solve the
world’s energy crisis by harnessing the belches and farts of bracycephalic lap dogs and obese couch potatoes
drinking Coronas and eating nachos while watching American Idol and RAW and Survior Tahiti and The View in
front of their HDTV’s. The world changes according to cycles far grander than we can comprehend: We might
affect it a little bit, but not all that much, and we certainly should respect it more than we do, but we must not
worship it. If we don’t each one of us deal with our heart problems, it’s not going to matter whether or not we “go
green”. It’s all gonna burn.

End of Rabbit trail…

And I certainly do not appreciate a bunch of elitist ivy-league politicians trying to dismantle the core principles that
have permitted America to be as creative and entrepreneurial as it has been for the past two centuries, our historical
dirty laundry notwithstanding. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, some of them really bad, but “We the people” can fix
our own problems without the “help” of the corrupt power-hungry morons in Washington and the puppet-masters
pulling their strings who are trying to nationalize and castrate the “free enterprise” machine that built this unique
nation over the past 235 years.

371
(I realize that there are some brave heroes inside the Beltway who do not fall into this category, and I applaud them,
but they are still a minority. They very much need our prayers at this time.) We need to radically reduce the size and
power of the Federal Government and return the governance of this country to the States, and to the People, where it
rightfully belongs, and where our Founders, in great wisdom, designed it to remain.

I am, at this time at least, part of the ever-growing “Angry Mob”. Practically speaking, we are still the best corrupt
nation that has ever happened among all the corrupt nations that have arisen on this fallen planet: There’s no point
in chucking our admittedly flawed but demonstrably successful system for something that has already proven to be
more flawed and less successful, (That is EVERY other system on the planet!) when we can still work to clean out
the scum that’s gumming up the works, and get our system running more effectively by getting big government, and
corrupt big business, and the union thugocracy out of the way. And by letting common people with common sense
clean up the mess at the community level where the solutions will do the most good. I certainly have no desire to
return to being like the Europe that our fore-fathers gave their lives and pledged their “sacred honors” to be free
from. Especially when it is so obvious that European socialism is totally failing and is about to fall apart and revert
to nationalist infighting. . Personally, I just want to be left alone so I can do my art and help folks who need helping
and want to work hard to improve themselves. However, it doesn’t seem like the progressively minded folks who
have taken the bit in their teeth at the present time have the good sense to leave me, and others like me alone....And
that is a mistake. They are not going to be permitted to destroy this Republic that so many have lived and died to
create and preserve!

We need to dust off the old slogan “Power to the People” and invest it with some magnum cojones. We post-
modernists aimed at too many targets too indiscriminately back in the ‘60’s, and we started a real mess-up: In the
name of personal freedom and individual expression we stepped ‘way over the lines into licentiousness and the
abandonment of ethics and morality and personal integrity. We cut loose too many mooring lines in our generational
rebellion. As the Bible says: “We sowed to the wind and now we are reaping the whirlwind.” We were
rebellious and stupid kids.

Now we have to deal with it, but what the arrogant progressive liberal jerks in Washington don’t realize is that we
are the one’s who taught them how to be radical, and a lot of us have gotten some common sense over the last 40
years; we are older, smarter, and a whole lot more focused now than we were then. They do not know with whom
they are messin’. We stopped a war then: We can start one now. They have awakened a very dangerous sleeping
Lion: They are fools if they don’t do all they can to make peace with that Lion very quickly, because there are still
true Americans at the heart of this nation and we both outnumber them and surround them, and we will not go down
without a fight.

I believe that personal human Liberty and free will, especially when under Divine and self discipline, are the most
wonderful and supremely valuable gifts God has given to us, and that they are worth fighting and dying for, if it
comes to this. I have five grandbabies that will not be slaves in the future if I have a breath left in my body to keep
them free, and unless the Lord restrains me.

I believe that the individual as a free and unique person is fundamentally more valuable than the society that is
constructed by the community of individuals, because the health and progress of any society is completely dependent
upon the unique creativity and initiative of each of the individuals of which it is comprised.

The whole, in this case, is not necessarily stronger, or at least not necessarily smarter, than the parts that make it up,
because the composite group tends to be weakened by compromise and corruption, the larger and more unwieldy it
becomes, and tends to degenerate toward the least common denominator as it tries to accommodate the majority will.
Compromise can be functional, but it is usually regressive and uncreative.

History demonstrates conclusively that simple majority rule generally and quickly degenerates to mob rule governed,
not by common sense, but by the passions and peer pressures of the moment. Ultimately the collective always
succumbs to the tyranny of a few, or of one dictatorial individual who rises to dominate, because this is the only way
to get anything accomplished efficiently that equally affects the whole of the collective, if that is the goal, as it is
with socialism or communism, but as it is not in a free enterprise meritocracy.

372
This is why American is a Republic and not a democracy, and must remain so. There is an added layer of
protection provided by the structures of law and process of the republican form of government established by our
Constitution.

(This argument about almost unlimited individualism is not true of biblically Christian groups operating as
theocratic organisms, by the way, where prayer, corporate anointed leadership submitted to each other in humility,
and unanimous spiritual agreement upon all decisions allow God to guide the community, also bound together in
love and humility, as the Head of His Body. But America is not a theocracy.)

Returning to the discussion of secular government, pragmatically, there can be no individualism in such a
collectivized system, because individualism is potentially disruptive and unpredictable, and cannot be easily
manipulated or controlled. Therefore individualism, uniqueness, creativity, initiative, spontaneity, and inspiration
must be suppressed, uncooperative individuals eliminated, and all progress will eventually cease. And because of
sin and lust, those in control will wax fat and oppressive while those under their control will become only the source
of their supply and will be expendable. All growth and development will stagnate, brutality will increase, and hope
will die. History bears witness to the fact that this is ALWAYS the pattern.

Government should exist only to ensure that the individual has the maximum opportunity to express his or her
individuality and creativity without jeopardizing or infringing upon that same right for any other individual, and
government therefore must be limited in the extreme, because without severe checks and balances it will always seek
to accumulate power and control to itself to the subjugation and supression of the individuals being governed. We
need only enough government to prevent anarchy and chaos, to regulate the fair interaction and commerce of our
society, and to protect the individual from enemies. Everything else should be a function of creative communication
between private individuals. This is the way the Founding Fathers designed our Constitution in their wisdom.
(Unfortunately, the Founders assumed that a Christian conscience would remain the dominant national social norm,
finding it very difficult to imagine a world without such assumed standards beneath it. We may be proving them
wrong. They, themselves, said that our Constitution could not work for a non-Christianized people who are not able
to exercise moral self-control.)

I believe that socialism and communism or government nationalization and oversight (which leads to fascism) all
deprive the individual of incentive to take initiative and to be creative, while free markets and individualism are
inspirational and liberating. Outside of Christian community, I believe that enlightened self-interest under law acts
as a sufficient check and restraint upon excess and greed in a well-balanced free community living under limited
government. God has ordained limited human government for this purpose, in order to mitigate the effects of the Fall.

I like Glenn Beck. (I also think that John Stewart is hilarious...just dead wrong.)

I believe that Christ and His true spiritual Church (NOT the institution of the church in any of its myriad forms:
Catholic or Protestant!) stand above all human governments to hold them accountable to the Law of God:

The Prophets of the Sovereign God have always held Authority over the petty kings of men!

This is the Divine Order of creation and is the ordinance of the High King: Deal with it. No human
government has any authority except it be given from above.

This law is as immutable as the Law of Gravity. The state has NO authority over the true Church in matters
regarding Truth, Faith, and Morality, and must be challenged whenever it seeks to usurp such authority! (This does
not mean that the Pope is the supreme authority! Roman Catholocism IS NOT the true Church on earth...nor is ANY
organized denomination of Christendumb! God inhabits His temple, which is His people, and He moves through
those He chooses to anoint and appoint at any moment to do a task at hand, whether they are a lettered sage, a
celbrated saint, or a humble janitor or housewife or even a child. God backs up His ministers with signs and other
operations of Divine power, including miracles.)

373
The authority of human government was given by God to men solely for the purpose of limiting the damage we will
inflict upon ourselves because of sin if we are left unrestrained, until we are brought back under the legitimate Rule
of our Father/Creator.

(The ACLU can go to a very deep place in Hell where it most emphatically belongs: They arrogantly tread on
ground that does not belong to them as they seek to define the ground of human rights! The bit of good it might do
is more than offset by the evil it routinely traffics in. Human Rights come from God alone, not governments or
courts of law.)

Our rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are extended to us by our Father/Creator, and not by any
human agency. In America (and everywhere else, for that matter) the government is only to be a humble servant of
the people, nothing more,

and it is time, once again, for that lesson to be relearned. Our public servants have become very uppity and
disrespectful. Many of them need to be publicly flogged, tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. Very few
are qualified to be in the office they hold...Unfortunately, our electoral process has devolved into little more than a
typical high-school class president dog-and-pony show, so such results can only be expected. We have gotten the
representatives we deserve.

In our Republic (not democracy!) it is the duty of the responsible and informed activist citizenry to restrain or
replace any government that oversteps its Constitutionally defined boundaries. (See the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution…cf. the Constitution of New Hampshire.)

(I just realized that according to paranoid rules of today’s PC culture, while Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the Fort
Hood jihadi, is being pitied in the media as only a stressed out and conflicted victim of harassment and cultural
prejudices who finally snapped because of contagious Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder (sic), I, on the other hand, am
a Right Wing Extremist Religious Nut who could be potentially very dangerous, and should be put on some sort of
terrorist watch list. Be careful, I might blow up a balloon, or incite someone to think or something. Bring it on,
BB.)

I also believe that we are now in a time of very real spiritual war. ( the Bible talks about such things, you know). It is
quite obvious to anyone with eyes that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, Saint Barack and Hope and
Change notwithstanding. Those who believe that the hope and fate of the human race lies with humanity, and not
with God, are rightly in panic that their world is coming apart at the seams, because it is. We are all flying in a
DreamLiner at 38,000 feet and the rivets are popping out of the walls and zinging around like bullets from a Mac-10.

And, in all honesty, all the brilliant talking heads on all the HD channels on DirectTV haven’t got a clue how to fix
the plane.

Those who fancy themselves our global lifeguards and Councils of Wise Persons are desperately afraid, and are
going to increasingly extreme measures to try and save themselves and the human race from what increasingly
appears to be pretty much certain extinction by any of a dozen different horrible fates. I suppose it is a noble effort,
and they have no other option, since they are rejecting the Lord’s terms.

It ain’t gonna work. Human nature and the immutable record of history guarantee that the cork is going to blow
again, and probably quite soon. It is inevitable. And it is going to be incredibly bad. We do it bigger and better
every time it happens. It’ll make 2012 in IMAX-3D look like Mary Poppins. The whole world is living on a
humongous fault-line....And we are overdue for “The Big One”.

The worst of the black heart of man is now being exposed, and confusion and insanity are becoming the new normal.
Nothing is making sense anymore, and everybody is going crazy and obsessing on bizarre things to escape the
Reality Show that is breaking on them like a tsunami. What does the bible say? “ Let’s pig out, get high, and party
down…for tomorrow we’re all gonna’ die?”

374
The gray-zones are being eliminated and, for those who are not deluding themselves, black is becoming blacker and
white is becoming brighter and brighter.

“Be afraid…Be very afraid.” And buy lots of Charmin and Fruit-of-the-Loom’s.

Fear is a good thing, when there is a good reason for it, and if it doesn’t paralyze you, but rather motivates you to
take action.

You need to wake up and smell the coffee: The emperor has no clothes.

Things are NOT going to get better and better, because human nature is what it is; and you are DUMB if you think
they are.

It is time for thinking people to come to grips with reality, with themselves, and with Truth, and for those who are
willing to do so to get right with God. It’s the only way you’re going to have any personal power to change anything
at all.

If you have a better idea, give it your best shot. But another definition of sin is “to fall short of the target”, which is
what your best shot is going to do.

UNTIL YOU CHANGE THE INDIVIDUAL HEART OF THE INDIVIDUAL MAN OR WOMAN OR DRUG DEALER OR GANG-
BANGER OR TERRORIST, YOU STILL ARE GOING TO BE TRYING TO MAKE SELF-CENTERED PEOPLE UNSELFISH,
GREEDY PEOPLE GENEROUS, OUT OF CONTROL PEOPLE SENSIBLE, ANGRY PEOPLE PEACEABLE, HATE-FILLED
PEOPLE LOVING…

And as we all agreed ‘way back in the ‘60’s (and seem to have forgotten), “You can’t legislate morality.”

“The lust of the eyes, the lust of the heart, and the pride of life”: These are the core corruptions that suck the
soul out of man…..greed and envy, sensuality and addictions, hubris and me-ism and “looking-out-for-number
one”…… they have no respect for gender, race, class, or status... they belong to the children of Adam and Eve.

By the time you get done trying to fix these things, except through the transforming power of Christ, these self-
serving people either will have robbed and/or killed you for your efforts to be nice to them, or you will have become
as evil as they are in the solutions you have come up with for the problems…

Nothing has changed in the forty-five years since Woodstock (or in the two thousand since Jesus was born…or in the
history of mankind). One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different
outcome. Human nature is corrupt…And only biblical Christianity has ever changed or will ever effectively
change human nature.

The only sane human being that has ever walked the planet is Jesus Christ: He is the exemplar for mankind and will
be the judge of each and every one of us.

If you want to live like the devil, then you best hope that the devil will save you when you find yourself in deep doo-
doo. But Satan very much wants to see you suffer and die, so I wouldn’t count on it. The Titanic hit the iceberg
long ago: the lifeboats are leaving and the water is very deep and very, very cold. The world of men is sinking.
Politics is a joke and a lie; philosophy only asks questions and offers no answers; honest Science admits that it
doesn’t understand most of what it is now discovering; dishonest “science” is sending you bogus emails and lying
about the data so people like Al Gore and “Big Pharma” can get rich; and “popular religion” offers rituals and chains
and appeal letters without substance or real power to transform our lives.

Only the Christian Gospel and a heart-born relationship with God through Christ can transform the human heart,
resurrect the human spirit, and rebuild the human soul: It works every time that it is truly implemented.

375
This is a brief introduction to who I am and the gauntlet I have decided to toss into the ring. I have been sitting in
my cave for a long time keeping my own counsel, reading my books, doing my art….

Over the past four years I’ve been quite intensively focused on the writings of the Christian Rabbi, Paul. I’ve been
enjoying the New Testament on CD as I drive and as I work. I’ve lost track, but I’m fairly certain that I have now
listened to the theological letters of the apostle being read aloud in full much more than 2000 times. It’s been quite a
profound experience, almost like having Paul himself explaining his deepest thoughts at length.

The New Covenant has opened up to me in ways that I could never have imagined possible through this exercise.
I’ve come to the realization that much of what much of the popular church has been preaching has radically
diminished and understated the Truths that Paul and the other New Testament writers were declaring….the full
Gospel (“Good News”) of the Kingdom of God that was established by the death and resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth, the Christ. (“Christ” is the Greek word meaning “God’s Chosen Champion”. The Hebrew word is
Messiah which means “anointed or chosen savior” “God’s Man” “The God/Man”)

There are basically three groups of folks in the world: Those who have sought after Truth with their entire heart and
soul and have found it in Christ and are now living full and expanding lives through Him, those who are in willful
rebellion against Truth because they prefer irresponsible independence and the physical pleasures of their addictions
and lusts to a life of self-discipline and an intimate relationship with their Creator, and those who are seeking after
Truth because they know that something is missing from their lives.

These last can be found mingled among every people group and thoughtful crowd on the planet, from the simplest
hunter-gatherer society to the most sophisticated Mensa cafe'. It is this last group, these sincere seekers, with whom
I have found I can have some of my best conversations.

This commentary started out as a journal to put my own thoughts in order, which then began to evolve into the
outline of a possible blog on the two things that are never supposed to be talked about in polite conversation:
Religion and Politics. But because I have spent so much time immersed in the letters of Paul, it has turned into a
collection of essays or short sermon-like observations which are rooted in his thoughts and theology. Since I am
publishing this on a “blog” website, you are, of course, welcome to comment and converse as you might feel
inspired to do so, within the “rules” that I have asked everybody to abide by.

You know where I am going to be coming from. I am, as I said, free thinking, but I am adamant about my Christian
convictions as well, as you can see. There is nothing that will move me from my confidence, since I am standing
upon a personal experience with my Lord, and not just an idea.

I have been in the Manifest Presence of my God and heard His voice audibly, so you won’t argue me away from my
testimony. You can’t: The experience was as real as your eating breakfast this morning. I wanted to be up front and
honest with you at the git-go. By a lot of peoples’ definitions I am a “religious nut”. Those of you who have met
my Lord on similar ground, of course, understand that I am not. We who know the Lord will not be so easily
dismissed.

Politically, I am not as immovable, but I am conservative. I am quite confident that I can defend my positions
intelligently and fair-mindedly. I am not bigotedly dogmatic. If we do start a blog conversation, I might be
persuaded to change my mind, if your argument is well enough reasoned. I am not partisan; I am thoroughly
disgusted with both major parties and most minor ones, and I am not particularly confident that there is a political
answer to our present global crises. I have little hope that there is a political solution to America’s present problems.

I think we may have passed a tipping point. I do believe that the Bible speaks of a terminal point to human history
as God progresses through the phases of His Plan, but I am not a date setter. However, I also believe that the world
has never before been so intricately and subtly aligned with the prophetic texts of the Bible as it is at this present
time. We are certainly capable of bringing about our own demise, and are stupid enough to try to do so. The Bible
says that God will stop us just before we do this, but not before we really make a mess of things.

376
But as an American citizen I have a Constitutional duty to be aware of and actively attentive to the process of our
government, so for the moment I am making some effort to do this. The scriptures instruct me to be a good citizen
of my country, in so far as my obedience to man doesn’t interfere with my obedience to my Lord. There may come a
time when I will simply drop out of the political thing altogether, if I decide that there is no longer any hope America,
or if it threatens to compromise my faith in some way, but I’m not quite there yet.

Finally, I am, I believe, qualified to write this commentary. Above all, I am a Christian with a clear and valid
testimony and a fruitful life. You can read the testimony at www.sonrisewoodcarving.com. I will gladly let you
talk with my wife and others who can vouch for my life. I have spent several years at Pinecrest Bible Training
Center (now Bethany Bible Training Center). I have a Summa cum Laude degree in New Testament Studies from
Houghton College (with minors in sociology and world religions and a concentration in philosophy). I participated
in a three year ministerial internship at Tulsa Christian Fellowship. My wife and I pastored a small church for two
years near Binghamton, New York. I have taught at the seminary level at Tulsa Christian Fellowship. I have spent
the past 22 years in continuing study on my own.

R. Stephan Toman ~ Master Woodsculptor

377
 CONCERNING THE PROGRESS OF REVELATION

Something that has troubled me for years, increasingly as I have grown in my relationship with
the Lord and in my depth of understanding of the New Covenant, has been the acceptance, at
least at the popular level, of the entire Bible, as “The Word of God”, without attention to the
very real theological concept of progressive revelation, or at least with a completely haphaz-
ard and piecemeal approach to the application of the principles of progressive biblical revela-
tion and the increase impartation of Divine wisdom and insight over the ages as God unfolds
and outworks His Plans and Purposes in our timeline.

In some instances we, as Christians, fully embrace and preach the New Covenant in Christ and
virtually discard the entire Old Covenant…“You are not under Law, but under Grace” , “Be-
lieve in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved”, “You are saved by Faith, through
Grace”, “If Christ has made you free you are free indeed” , “Old things have passed away, all
things have become new” , “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.” There are doz-
ens of such verses that we apply to our lives in Christ to guarantee our separation from such
legalisms as we feel restrict us, dependent, of course, upon our doctrinal and denominational
persuasion.

Then, almost in the same breath, we reach back into the Old Testament and preach its texts as
if they were as applicable and valid for us today as they were to the Jews living under the Pro-
phetic rule of Moses or under the leadership of Ezra as he re-built the Temple. “You have to
tithe…bring your tithes to the storehouse”, “You need to keep the Sabbath”, (These work
very well to fund the business of the Church). “You shouldn’t get a tattoo,” (exactly why
not?). “Don‘t drink alcohol” (did you know that there is a text in Moses that tells the Israelites
to buy hard liquor with their tithe money and party down at the temple? Deut.14:24-26...and why
was Jesus accused of being “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” if he
was a teetotaler?) , “You need to pray early in the morning and when you go to bed” (but Paul
says “pray 24/7)”), “Let‘s celebrate the Jewish Passover this year”, “You should shout to the
Lord in a loud voice,” “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” “Let’s give the Lord a clap offer-
ing”, “Come Lord and Fill this Place” (But Jesus revealed to us that because of His Incarnation
the Kingdom of God is WITHIN us, not “out there”!). Our sermons on a Sunday freely flow
between Old and New Testaments without pause, and we regularly apply Old Testament texts
to our lives with assumed full New Covenant authority, whenever they seem to make our homi-
letic point well, albeit all the while carefully editing around all those portions that are too in-
conveniently archaic to in any way bear up under reinterpretation or spiritualization into
contemporary forms. (For example, some groups might insist on keeping the Sabbath, but they
certainly don’t wear pomegranates on the hems of their robes anymore: There is no consisten-
cy. A fairly extreme example might be the Old Order Amish, who have devised myriad ways
to live in two worlds, but I will be generous and extend my beef to most Evangelical fellow-
ships, where bits and pieces of Old and New Testament liberties and legalisms are cobbled to-
gether in near infinite unchallenged ways. And we all are supposed to be keeping the Ten
Commandments, but I am a professional woodcarver and sculptor, and I absolutely believe
that the Lord guided me into this profession some 27 years ago, so what am I supposed to do
with the part of the commandment about not making “graven images“?
378
 Or how many of us are having a problem coveting our neighbor‘s ox or ass in today‘s
world….Do we have the right to simply retranslate the original Hebrew for “ass“ into BMW or
Lexus and keep the rest?…We do tend to read the scriptures piecemeal, don‘t we? God‘s Word
is far deeper and more profoundly complicated than this: It is a living thing…not a dead
document…and in our time in His Plan it is a Person with whom we are supposed to have a
dynamic ongoing conversational relationship, not just an historical document on expensive pa-
per.)

Christians all have their “favorite” texts, as freely dipping into the Psalms and Proverbs and oth-
er stories and profound sayings from ancient and even Antediluvian epochs as into the Gospels
and the letters of the Apostles, and trying to apply what insights they think they have received
(“God told me”, “this is what the Scripture means to me”, “Well, I know what my heart tells me
is true”, etc.) on a moment-by-moment basis, most often steeped in unguarded emotion. Most
of the time most Christians are truly, and only possibly accurately, “familiar” with only a small
handful of scriptures that make some sense to them, almost always taken out of context and rote
memorized. “Deeper” and more complicated and difficult texts are generally left unexplored
and unpenetrated. Few Christians ever spend the required time and energy, or pay the price in
repentance and humility, to truly understand the more difficult areas of Scripture, of which
there are many. Yet there are some 36,000 verses in the Bible…over 1100 pages….and it is (if
we are biblical believers) ALL the inspired “God-breathed” Word of God to us, speaking not
only of history and of pragmatic issues of life, but of multidimensional eternal realities and pur-
poses and far reaching Divine goals and Purposes and ends-in-view, and is more than worthy of
our lifetime of absolute attention before all other things. Certainly God did not waste His
breath in transmitting any of this information to us, and we are being irresponsible and lazy if
we do not invest the very best of our lives in seeking to fully understand Him through what He
has provided to us. ( Paul speaks often of coming to both a full knowledge and a full under-
standing of our God. These are different from one another. Knowledge is a thing of the mind.
Understanding is a condition of the heart and spirit. Understanding is related to wisdom, which
is the right application of knowledge. In the Old Covenant there is a verse that says that the
“People of Israel knew the works of God, but Moses knew His ways.”….We are to grow inti-
mate with our Father…to know His ways….who He is and why He does what He does.)

And we all find ourselves mesmerized by the occult fascination of prophecy, and many spend
countless hours and tens of thousands of pages of questionable popular reading material obsess-
ing on the prophetic texts of the Scriptures… most of the time without sufficient regard for the
fact that these prophecies also are spiritual artifacts from outside our familiar dimensions,
which have everything to do with progressive revelation and the very linear and purposeful and
deliberate larger plans of God. We are altogether too flippant and irreverent too much of the
time as we touch these amazing treasures.

But there is a deeper issue. I believe that we are failing to really understand what Paul, especially,
has been trying to communicate to us about the New Covenant. I would argue that not only is
there a progress of revelation…that the Old Covenant spends its time more and more clearly focus-
ing in on the coming of Christ (to the Gentiles) and Messiah (to the Jews), but that the four Gospels
themselves are a TRANSITION, and are NOT themselves fully part of the New Covenant
379
 (except perhaps in the very last chapters of the post resurrection counsels of Christ), and that
the terms of the New Covenant are fully defined by Paul, who received them from Christ
after his encounter outside Damascus, when he went into the deserts of Arabia alone for
three years and met personally with the Risen Lord in a series of supernatural visitations.

By this reasoning, I would argue that many of the instructions of Christ in the Gospels, are
NOT directly applicable to the Church but are, by CHRIST’S OWN WORDS for “the lost sheep
of the House of Israel”, the Jewish Christians to be.

He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

This is not to say that His words are not spoken to us, as Gentile Christians, but I would argue
that until He cried out “IT IS FINISHED”, Jesus Christ was fully a practicing Jew, living as
a Jew UNDER THE LAW, because until that victorious moment on the cross the Law
had not been fulfilled.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to ful-
fill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the
Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches
others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them
will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the
scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Therefore, everything that He spoke, and which we have on record in the Gospels, which was
recorded by His chosen men in the Gospel accounts, was spoken to Jews who were still under
the Law and bound by the Law, as was Jesus Himself, until the veil was torn in the Temple.

I would argue that it is wrong to directly apply many of the statements in the Gospels to the
New Testament Church, without taking into consideration this fact, that Jesus was speaking
as an obedient Jew to Jews. He had not yet fulfilled the Law. He was quite willing to over-
throw the “traditions of the Elders”, and to correctly interpret the Law as His Father intended it
to be understood, ( for example: Mark 2:25-28, Matthew 15: 1-9) but He was not willing to break “one jot or
tittle of the Law until EVERYTHING” was fulfilled. (Matt.23:1-3)

Once He had fulfilled the Law through His self-sacrifice, those things which He instructed
His followers to observe which were observations of Jewish Law no longer applied to them or
us as necessary conditions of their relationship to their Father or as ritualistic forms for their
worship. True “religion” had now become absolutely relational and internalized.

Once He completed His mission and after the Temple curtain was torn from top to bottom
(from Heaven to Earth), the Law was fulfilled. This is clearly discussed in Hebrews. The en-
tire Old Testament typology reverted (or metamorphosed) to its Heavenly archetype. At this
time, and especially after Pentecost, (when “Jacob’s Ladder” was completed and “the angels of
380
 God began to ASCEND and descend upon it - John 1:51) the New Covenant absorbed and ended
the Old Covenant. (note the direction here...it is profound..)

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple
was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were
opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after
his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were
with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and
said, “Truly this was the Son of God!” Matthew 27:50-54

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he
will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak,
and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and de-
clare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to
you. John 16:12-15

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything writ-
ten about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened
their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and
on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his
name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending
the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” Luke
24:44-49

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when
he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had cho-
sen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days
and speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jeru-
salem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with
water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” So when they had come togeth-
er, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for
you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when
the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a
cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood
by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who
was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Acts 1:1-11

Jesus then raised up Paul (1 Corinthians 15:8) and through Paul explained all of this clearly. Paul quite literally rein-
terpreted the entire Old Covenant through the Person of Jesus Christ. (And therefore, the terms of the New Cove-
nant for the Gentile Church are most clearly to be understood from Paul’s writings, with Peter carrying the ball
for the specific terms that apply to the Messianic portion of the Body. Galatians 2:7 )

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did
not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to de-
stroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous
was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me
by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did
not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I
went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Galatians 1:11-17

381
 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the
Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written,
“The righteous shall live by faith.” Romans 1:16-17

Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according
to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and
through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the
eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith— 27 to the only wise God be glory forevermore through Je-
sus Christ! Amen. Romans 16:25-27

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did
not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For
you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy
it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was
I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by
his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not
immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I
went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit
Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s
brother. (In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!) Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cili-
cia. And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only were hearing it
said, “He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” And they glorified God
because of me. Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with
me. I went up because of a revelation and set before them (though privately before those who seemed influen-
tial) the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in
vain. But even Titus, who was with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. Yet because
of false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so
that they might bring us into slavery— to them we did not yield in submission even for a moment, so that the
truth of the gospel might be preserved for you. And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were
makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to
me. On the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as
Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised (for he who worked through Peter for his apostolic
ministry to the circumcised worked also through me for mine to the Gentiles), and when James and Cephas
and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given to me, they gave the right hand of fel-
lowship to Barnabas and me, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. Only, they asked
us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before cer-
tain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated
himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that
even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the
truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a
Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works
of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by
faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. Galatians 1:1-16

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is ev-
eryone who is hanged on a tree”— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gen-

382
tiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. Galatians 3:13-14

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the
working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to
the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mys-
tery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of
God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according
to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access
with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you,
which is your glory. Ephesians 3:7-13

Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was
appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith
and truth. 1 Timothy 2:6-7

When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known
to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by
the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the
promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of
God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all
the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring
to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so
that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and au-
thorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ
Jesus our Lord, Ephesians 3:1-11

Salvation of the soul is entirely based upon New Covenant terms: Certain aspects of the Old Testament
still are in play as regards blood Israel “for the sake of the Fathers” and the promises made to them, which
are immutable and which will be kept, but the sacrificial system and the Levitical Law are over. Every-
thing prior to the revelation of the Kingdom covenant through Paul must be viewed through the Pauline
lens or it is going to be misunderstood because it still is a record of statements made under the Old Cove-
nant.

This includes many of the statements of record of Jesus Himself in the four Gospels. I will moderate this
by saying that even though Jesus was an obedient Jew speaking to Jews under the Law, He also was fully
aware of what was about to happen and was speaking of things to come, which while He walked among us
before the resurrection had not yet been brought into being. As His words are read, some of them do reach
ahead, but not all of them. Even Christ could not arbitrarily move ahead of His Father’s appointed times.
However, because of the reluctance of the Jewish element of the First Church to let go of its ancient heri-
tage, and because of the rapidly rising domination of Romanism, which is really a Christianized conflation
of Judaistic Temple ritualism and the Roman love of law with the new Faith, these Old Covenant residues
have never been purged from much of Christendumb, and having become reified, remain to this day.

Think of it this way. When we first had kids we had certain rules and methods by which we raised
them…When they were infants we, as parents, virtually were God to them. When they were toddlers we
were benevolent tyrant legalists. As they grew we moved more and more into dealing with them as reason-
ing adults. As they became more mature and self-aware and demanded more freedom and responsibility
the rules continued to change and we gave them more freedom and responsibility and they had to accept
both the rewards and the consequences that come with these things, some of which can be terribly signifi-
cant. And now that they are fully adults they are raising their own children in much the same pattern.

383
The words we spoke and rules we invoked are still valid, and are still our words. We even, in
some measure, might invoke them upon our grandchildren, when we are with them, as their par-
ents permit. But there has been a “progressive revelation” in the lives of our children over the
years. It is not that the things we tried to teach them as infants and as toddlers are no longer true
or even authoritative. Rather, these things have been fulfilled and absorbed into larger
lessons…have become parts of a foundation that no longer, in themselves, are visible or neces-
sary to be invoked. My grown children no longer require a spanking, or a time out.
(Actually…sometimes I wonder about this….but that is another essay.)

However, their toddlers do, and these words and rules are certainly applicable and appropriate
for them. The wisdom in them has not changed. They will work as well for my grown chil-
drens’ little ones as they did for them, and then will be passed on in their season. At all stages,
the words are true. They are not, however, equally applicable…equally congruent for the time
or season or situation.

This is a very poor illustration. But it might help make my point. The Word of God is the Word
of God in its entirety…unbroken and inerrantly inspired . But the progress of revelation is clear-
ly evident in the Word. We have a record of Divine communication given to us spanning over
3500 years, and dealing with eons more than that. It deals both with the whole plan of God for
the Cosmos and for the race of Man, and also for the “day to day” affairs of generations of fall-
en humanity from Adam through the last generation of Christians on the planet, and at every
level of spiritual awareness and spiritual maturity or lack thereof. It deals with everyone from
entire nations and empires to every individual that has ever or ever will live.

There are hundreds of passages in the Word itself which directly and indirectly indicate that God
is moving His plans forward in stages and that as those stages unfold those that are unfolding
generally fulfill and supersede those that preceded them, most of the time obscuring or erasing
most or all of the effects of the earlier stages from the arena.

It is silly and illogical to try to think of this vast multidimensional communication as somehow
being equally weighted in its injunctions from its earliest pronouncements to its last, and for the
infant believer to be regarded in the same way as the matured saint, especially when we know
that there is an absolute termination of one of its Covenants and the inauguration of an entirely
separate and entirely New Covenant to replace it on entirely different terms.

The Letter to the Hebrews is absolutely clear that there is a totally new priesthood, a totally new
ORDER of worship and obedience, in place after the resurrection of Christ, and that the Church
belongs to that new order and not to the old.

Now if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law),
what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than
one named after the order of Aaron? For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change
in the law as well. For the one of whom these things are spoken belonged to another tribe, from which no one
has ever served at the altar…. For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness

384
and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through
which we draw near to God…. This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant…. Now the point in what
we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majes-
ty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. Hebrews 7:11-8:2

But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he medi-
ates is better, since it is enacted on better promises…. In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one
obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away…. Therefore let us be grate-
ful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with rever-
ence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. Hebrews 8:6;Hebrews 8:13;Hebrews 12:28-29

We, as the Church, have a mandate to honor and respect Israel, and Israel will receive the prom-
ises made to the Fathers according to the Word, but this has nothing to do with us having to
abide by any of the terms of the Mosaic Law or to overly focus upon the Old Covenant.

Our attachments to the Old Testament are listed as ones of encouragement and hope…in it are
stories of faith, of courage, of the power and faithfulness of our God, and of the confidence
God has in Himself and in His plan. And these are supernaturally inspired and empowered re-
cords filled with Divine Life.

Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on
whom the end of the ages has come. 1 Corinthians 10:11

No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to
God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to
him as righteousness.” But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but
for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was
delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. Romans 4:20-25

But our mandate is recorded in the New Covenant, and especially in the Epistles of Paul, to
whom was given the privilege of revealing the Risen Christ to the Gentile world.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days
he has spoken to us by his Son, Hebrews 1:1

THE HUMAN LIVING WISDOM OF THE SCRIPTURES IS AGELESS. THEREFORE

THE ANCIENT JEWISH WISDOM IS AS FULLY APPLICABLE TO OUR LIVES AND
THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN TODAY AS IT WAS IN MOSES OR SOLOMON’S DAY.

IT IS THE PROGRESS OF REVELATION WHICH IS TIME-FULL, IS MOVING FOR-

WARD, AND WHICH DOES ADVANCE AND EVOLVE. THIS REVELATION IN-
CREASES, MATURES, IS FULFILLED. IT IS LIKE A PLANT: IT STARTS AS A SEED,
GERMINATES, SENDS DOWN A TAP ROOT, SENDS UP ITS SHOOT, GROWS, FLOW-
ERS, BEARS ITS FRUIT, PRODUCES MORE SEED, INCREASES…..

THAT WHICH PERTAINS TO HUMAN BEINGS EACH OF US IN OUR BRIEF LIFE-

TIMES IS PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN…WE DON’T

385
CHANGE, THOUGH OUR ENVIRONMENTS DO, AND THE PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN
EXISTENCE REMAIN THE SAME…WE ARE BORN FALLEN, INTO EVIL, WITH INFI-
NITE PROMISE, AND WE MUST DISCOVER THIS AND ACCEPT OUR REDEMPTION
AND BE TRANSFORMED.

ALSO, THERE ARE BILLIONS OF US. GOD HAS MADE EACH OF US UTTERLY
UNIQUE. OUR MINDS ARE NOT ONLY UNFATHOMABLY COMPLEX, BUT HOW
EACH OF US USES THEM IS ABSOLUTELY INDIVIDUALIZED. BEFORE WE MEET
THE LORD HUMANITY IS CHAOTIC AND ANARCHISTIC. AFTER WE MEET THE
LORD, IF WE TRULY GROW IN HIM, HE DOES NOT ASK US TO CONFORM TO A
RULE, OR TO EACH OTHER, OR TO AN ORGANIZATION, BUT ONLY TO HIM.

“LOVE GOD, AND DO ANYTHING YOU WANT” (Augustine of Hippo).

ONCE THE LOVE OF GOD AS HE HAS REVEALED HIMSELF TO US IS CONSTRAIN-

ING US, WE ARE ABSOLUTELY FREE TO DO ANYTHING AT ALL; WE WILL NOT EV-
ER WANDER OUTSIDE OF HIS WILL, OR IF WE DO, WE WILL ALMOST INSTANTLY
BE DRAWN BACK FROM OUR WANDERING. THERE WILL BE LITTLE NEED FOR
EXTERNAL CONTROLS: WE HAVE THE BOOK AND THE ABIDING COMPANION-
SHIP OF THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOK. BEYOND THAT JUST WISE COUNSEL FROM
THE MORE MATURE TO THE YOUNGER, AND HUMILITY ON THE PART OF THE
YOUNGER TO RECEIVE THAT COUNSEL ALONG WITH SELFLESSNESS AND OTH-
ERS-CENTEREDNESS AS A FAITH COMMUNITY WILL GUARANTEE THE WELL-BE-
ING AND PROTECTION OF ALL.

386
Here are some authors and some sources that I recommend to begin your discipleship
journey: The richest treasures of the thoughts of mankind are hidden away in good
books, to be pursued and mined. You won’t go wrong wrestling with these great
Christian minds: Never stop learning ( 2 Timothy 2:15).

CHALLENGING AUTHORS:

C.S.Lewis (Mere Christianity)

Lee Stroebel
Dr. Hugh Ross
Josh McDowell
John Ankerberg
Chuck Missler
Charles Colson
Ravi Zacharias
Dr. Jack Hayford
George MacDonald
Rick Joyner

FABULOUS FICTION:
Stephen R. Lawhead
J.R.R. Tolkien
C.S.Lewis
Frank Peretti

WEBSITES WITH EXTENDED BOOKSTORE OFFERINGS of

SIGNIFICANT VALUE:
Wallbuilders ~ www.wallbuilders.com
Morningstar Ministries ~ www.morningstarministries.org
Reasons to Believe ~ www.reasons.org
Glenn Beck ~ www.glennbeck.com

EXTRORDINARY CHRISTIAN MYSTICS

Sadhu Sundar Singh
Madam Guyon
Fenelon
Brother Lawrence

VERY UNIQUE CHURCH HISTORY PERSPECTIVE

(Difficult to find book)
The Torch of the Testimony - F. Kennedy

387
 R. Stephan Toman
107 East Ann Street - 1st Floor
Milford, Pennsylvania 18337
570-409-4346

WWW. SONRISEWOODCARVING.COM

EMAILS:
SONRISEWOODCARVINGSTUDIO@POBOX.COM
STEPHAN@SONRISEWOODCARVING.COM

388