Wednesday, January 18, 2006

My thoughts too (pretty long post)

Jake posted his thoughts on his blog and that got me thinking (of course not as much as Jake does!) so I wanted to jot my thoughts too I would read his blog So here goes:

I belieive that most Christians don't really see the difference life and death. They haven't come to see, from their heart, not their mind that "you have died and your new life is hidden in Christ." The whole point of us humans is to die and for us to live by, and abide in, take part of Christ's life. Christ as our Life, not our own. Until we see that, we have the same experiences in the world. We still have pride, condemnation, and all the things we as christians don't want to do. but we continue to stuggle because we are still trying to live out of the old man, the flesh. When we abide in Him, in the new Life, "there is no condenmation in Chirst", in the new covenant, in the New man. So here is more of my friend Jason to help explain it. and by all means go to his website to hear or read a lot more on Christ as your life and what it means to really die and to live by a diffrent source. Because that is the answer to Jake's comment on why christians and non-christians pretty much act the same. All the barna stats are true, divorce, porn, etc are the same because christians today and trying to live out of their own source, trying to do something out of their own power, not dying and having a new Life expressed though them, manifesting Jesus' Life. Living and abiding in Christ, not living and abiding in this world, in the flesh. And I don't mean all the nasty sins that you think of when you read flesh. All flesh is of the old man, the of the adam nature, yes all that gross sin is in there too but, the whole nature, the entire adam nature is gone, dead completely erased. That is what Jesus did on the cross, he erased the old adam nature, so that we could abide is His life, period. not our own, not of the world, but His life.There, I am done and here's Jason.

This is another excerpt from Jason; again you can access his stuff from here. I think Jason explains a bit better than I would, but this is just a snippet of what the Lord is showing me. I think this answers the statements that Jake said in his post “Honestly many Christians don't act much differently from their counter-parts” Here you go:

Matt 11:25 ¶ At that time Jesus said, "I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from {the} wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. 26 "Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. 27 "All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal {Him.}

And what I want to focus in on for a minute are these phrases “nobody knows the Father except the Son” and “Nobody knows the Son except the Father”.

This is a very interesting thing for Jesus to be telling the Jews, the people of the book. He’s telling the people that had 2000 years of Holy Spirit inspired writings about God, that nobody knows God. I can picture the Jews wondering what He meant by this, because they had so diligently studied the Scriptures which were the oracles of God. And yet He says “NOBODY knows the Father”.

And then He says to the very ones that have been traveling with Him, living with Him, sleeping near Him, ministering with Him, that “nobody knows the Son, except the Father

So when Jesus says “nobody knows the Father or the Son” I think He is teaching us here about the absolute blindness of Adam. The absolute blindness of the flesh without revelation by the Spirit. What is Jesus saying here? He is teaching that, though the flesh, the brain, can know a lot about God. In fact, the human brain can memorize the entire Bible…its been done. But that entire nature, that flesh-life cannot, despite any efforts whatsoever, know God.

It is completely outside the realm of possibility for our old man, our flesh self to know God. I love the way T Austin-Sparks says it “Adam is utterly blind, utterly ignorant, utterly helpless, altogether ruled out, and needing the grace of God for the very first glimmer of light” … “We must therefore face the fact and recognize its implications, that here is a land which is completely locked up, into which we cannot enter, and for which we have no equipment. There is nothing in us of faculty to enter into the realm of knowing Christ.”

Now, don’t hear what he’s not saying. He’s not saying that humans cannot know God. Far from it! Its our very calling. But he is making a distinction between where the knowing comes from, how it comes, and it what realm that knowing exists.

Friends, if we don’t see the contrast between the old self (the flesh, Adam life…not just how you used to ACT before you got saved) and the new self (in union with Christ), it is impossible to understand the New Testament. If we don’t understand the new “I” of the Scriptures, in contrast to the old, none of this will make sense.

So, anyway….to the flesh, the knowing of Christ is a locked up land. An inaccessible treasure. And that is why it is impossible for us to grow, and it is impossible for us to mature unless we come to Christ like a little child and ask Him to bring us out of darkness and into light. Which is why He said in the verse quoted above that God has hidden it from the wise and learned and revealed it to babes.

In fact, the whole first creation, the whole Adamic race, lies in great darkness. Deep darkness. And the best that Adam can do is talk about Light, learn about light, but never, apart from God’s doing/revealing, partake of light. Which is why the Old Covenant is the covenant of the promise and prophecy, and the New Covenant is the covenant of the witness. Old Covenant is type and shadow of something coming that cannot be seen, and the New Covenant is the witness of the Light that has dawned.

Isaiah 60 talks about this beautifully. Lets look at this for a minute.

Is 60:1 "Arise, shine; for your light has come, And the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. 2 "For behold, darkness will cover the earth And deep darkness the peoples;(Its not talking about evil here, but blindness. The blindness of the peoples, all of the Adamic kind) But the LORD will rise upon you And His glory will appear upon you. (Here is the breaking in of the New Light…as John 3 says, “light came unto the darkness, but men preferred darkness” 3 "Nations will come to your light, And kings to the brightness of your rising. 4 ¶ "Lift up your eyes round about and see; They all gather together, they come to you. Your sons will come from afar, And your daughters will be carried in the arms. 5 "Then you will see and be radiant, And your heart will thrill and rejoice.

I used to believe that that was a second advent Scripture…and now I’m quite convinced that it is quite literally exactly what Jesus and the Apostles taught happened at the first coming.

And so I’m trying to be very clear about the blindness of that Adam race. I’m trying to cause us to see the horrible, deplorable, utterly blind condition of our flesh. That in us, in our flesh, apart from God revealing reality to us in the newness of life, there is a blindness. And I want us to see that so that we can see how our enemy works.

So now we come to the kingdom the darkness. What is the kingdom of darkness? Most people, when they hear that phrase, think almost entirely about evil spirits. They think of the hierarchical kingdom of demonic beings that attack the purposes of God on earth.

Now, I’m not saying that that is untrue, but I think that Scripture has something else for us to see about the kingdom of darkness. Jesus and the apostles use that term darkness 43 times in the New Testament. And, believe it or not, it is more often used with reference to blindness than to evil spirits, Satan, etc

Matt 4:16 "THE PEOPLE WHO WERE SITTING IN DARKNESS SAW A GREAT LIGHT, AND THOSE WHO WERE SITTING IN THE LAND AND SHADOW OF DEATH, UPON THEM A LIGHT DAWNED."

John 8:12 ¶ Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, "I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life."

John 12:46 "I have come {as} Light into the world, so that everyone who believes in Me will not remain in darkness.

Now, of course there are several Scriptures that make plain that this darkness is the realm in which Satan lives and moves, but lets try to get a clear definition for “darkness” so that we can understand these Scriptures better.

I would suggest to you, that, rather than just being the demonic powers themselves, the “Kingdom of Darkness” is really the realm of blind Adam, the entire first creation with its inability see Light, over which the enemy has authority. And our enemy operates in the darkness, with the darkness, meaning he has power in our blindness, and his goal is to maintain and spread blindness.

So Satan has authority over a realm. We know this from several Scriptures. He has authority over “all of the world” 1 John 5:19 says. Meaning, the first creation. The realm of Adam life. Satan tells Jesus in Luke 4 that all of the earths kingdoms lie in his power, and Jesus doesn’t argue with him. He knows its true.

Satan has authority over that realm, the realm of the first creation. The realm of blind Adam. And His kingdom, is a KINGDOM OF BLINDNESS. And its aim, is the spreading of blindness

Col 1:13 For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son

And that Kingdom is a Life. It is a new life. It’s the very life of the King. And in that life we can see. Apart from that life we see nothing.

So now we get to spiritual warfare. We’ve heard a lot of teaching on spiritual warfare, some of it helpful, some of it probably not. Because if we don’t understand the primary goal of Satan, we will not be able to say with Paul that “we are not ignorant of his schemes”.

In light of all of this, what is the primary preoccupation of Satan? It is maintaining the blindness of Adam. This is his primary goal. This is his ONLY HOPE. He knows that the truth is so unbelievably powerful, that His only hope is to keep the world, and the church acting like “mere men”.

And, if you were to ask me what is his most successful doctrine of demons, I would say it is teaching the body of Christ that they are “mere men” trying to live for God when really they are temples of the living God. That deception, in my opinion, is responsible for the current state of the church. Rather than “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me”….we have learned “I no longer am supposed to do what I want, but I do what I think Christ wants” And so we remain in the flesh, and, though we are born of God we abide in death.

So what is spiritual warfare? Well, yes it is combating everything from the enemy. But I would say, from Scripture, that in Satan’s bag of weapons there is one really big sword. And that sword is the darkness that is blindness.

Lets look at a couple Scriptures, because the New Testament bears this out quite plainly.

2 Cor 4:3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, 4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

So here we see His strategy. The god of this world (that is, the first creation, the world of Adam-life) has blinded minds so they could not see the light. Now this is true of unbelievers, and it keeps them from coming to Christ and receiving salvation.

BUT…this is true of believers as well in that, once we have received the New Life, we are kept from growth by being convinced that we are something we are not. And this is the primary issue that concerns Paul in his letters to the Corinthians. Though they had been given everything in Christ, they continue to abide in and manifest blindness.

Look at these verses:

1 Cor 6:3 Do you not know that we will judge angels?

1 Cor 3:3 for you are still fleshly. ..and are you not walking like mere men?

1 Cor 3:21 …For all things belong to you, :22 whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come; all things belong to you

Paul is saying to them over and over again, “you are being robbed of your inheritance. You are being kept from the hope of your calling. Not because you aren’t trying something hard enough. No, because the god of this world is blinding your eyes from seeing who you are in Christ.

There is warfare going on, Corinthians! And Satan is fighting against the renewing of your mind.”

Then Paul says it even more clearly in 2 Corinthians 10:4.

2 Cor 10:3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh,

Though we live in this body, it is not really this body that is doing the fighting. It doesn’t generally receive most of the blows, and it doesn’t give most of the blows. (though there is warfare in the flesh in the form of sickness)

2 Cor 10: 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.

But we have weapons from another realm. From the realm of God. They are weapons of a different nature.

2 Cor 10:5 {We are} destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and {we are} taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,

And how are we fighting? Where is the warfare most intense? What does our enemy look like? He looks like the king of blindness, trying to maintain the blindness of a fallen nature in the lives of new creations.

How is he doing it? Three times in this one verse Paul tells us what the battle is for. “speculations”, “knowledge” , “thoughts”. It’s a battle for the mind.

The goal of the Holy Spirit is to “cause us to know the things that have been freely given to us by God”. The goal of demonic spirits is to “maintain this present darkness”. To maintain the deep darkness of Adam.

God is saying “everything pertaining to life and godliness has been given to us through the true knowledge of Jesus Christ”

Satan is raising up “lofty things against the knowledge of God”

God is renewing the mind. Satan is bringing speculations.

And what is the overall purpose? Not to keep us from becoming something we’re not. No, to keep us from seeing who we are, so that what we are will not come forth.

Satan knows that if he can keep us in the blindness of the flesh, the helpless state of Adam where “nobody knows the Son or the Father”, then the only thing expressed on earth will be the life of Adam, the life of flesh, the life that is death.

Here is our warfare. Here is the great warfare of the ages. Over this issue there has been raging a 2000 year old battle. The great battle over what is seen and therefore expressed. If darkness is seen, then darkness is expressed. If Light is seen, then Light is expressed.

1 comment:

delilah said...

I think I have to read this a few times before I really digest it. Good stuff.