23. The Bible Explains Genesis
The basic issue of obedience to His Word that God requires is revealed in Genesis and further amplified in Exodus and in the rest of the Torah, as well as in all other books of the Bible. In His perfect justice and wisdom, God gave His Self-revelation right at the beginning. He revealed His perfect nature and perfect standards of Righteousness and the absolute authority of His Word to Adam and Eve. So from the beginning, the human race had His revelation available to them so they could know exactly where they stood with God, and why.
This is vitally important. God has given the human race fair warning of its true spiritual state and what God has to do about it to save us. This information supplies mankind with the ‘magnetic north’ standard of Truth and Righteousness coordinates from eternity that we need in order to navigate properly and safely through life in this time and space dimension. By following the course headings God has given in each generation, we have an authentic accurate guidance structure that will channel us right to the fulfillment of our God-given identity, purpose and destiny.
Genesis and the other books of the Torah gather into one source the foundational revelation God has given. It is absolutely essential for our eternal salvation and fulfillment. So the first five books reveal a pattern that is based on God’s perfect nature. His changeless nature requires a changeless standard of righteousness that will always apply to all of mankind. So if we’re going to allow God to save us, we must know what He has to do, and how, so we can submit to His wisdom and authority and receive what He sends His Word and Holy Spirit to give to us.
All children of Adam are born into living death. That is, they are dead to God because they’re trapped in a state of Sin and spiritual Death. God’s Salvation Pattern reverses this and removes us from that hopeless state. But that requires us to die to our original existence and lifestyle in Sin and living Death. We must be regenerated spiritually so that we can live only to God and from God. The new life and nature He will give us restores and empowers us to live as the image and likeness of His Word.
So, to be saved, we must make a total Exodus…out of the Serpent’s deceptive Darkness and his decapitated realm of Sin and Death and into a new spiritual ‘Land of Promise’ we’ve not seen or experienced before. It is not a mere matter of us improving our original lives; this requires a total death to the original existence we pursued in the past and a resurrection entry into a completely new level and state of life. We die to our state of living death in order to receive a share in God’s own Eternal Life! Once that happens, we become utterly new creations. God in His Perfection does not ‘retread’ beat up, worn out humans. He regenerates their spirits first and makes them brand new. So, although our mortal bodies remain for the time being, they are occupied by brand new spiritual beings that share in and reflect the Glory of God!
“Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on Earth. For you have died; and your (new) life is hidden with Christ in God! When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.” (Colossians 3:1-4 Amplification and emphasis added.)
The above text isn’t requiring us to become otherworldly ‘zombies’ that are disconnected from the realities of the world in which our bodies must still abide. It doesn’t mean that we should stop caring for this world and the people and concerns that surround us. We must begin to care even more for it…with God’s own true and selfless love motive. That is something we were never capable of having before. But now, our new life in our Messiah and its nature can equip and empower us to reflect God and His ways. That’s why He commands us to love and care for the world and its people.
Now, we no longer have to depend on the fallen world system that is all around us. We are citizens of Heaven and co-heirs with our Messiah. Our Heavenly Father wants us to start drawing everything needed on Earth from His indwelling Holy Spirit and the endless, infinite Inheritance He is here to transmit to us. In this way, the Fullness and Perfection of God, that is already ours in Heaven, can be transmitted to us on Earth and shared through us…with all of God’s beloved humans. None of us deserve it, but God is Love and His nature never changes, wavers or stops being what it is. And that is how He can do what is impossible to us…through our yielded flesh:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt. 5:43-48)
So when we pass through the Portal from life in this world, to eternal citizenship in God’s Eternal Kingdom, we must forsake our radically independent self-serving lifestyle and citizenship in this fallen world system. We must allow the Cross of our Messiah to strip away the residue of Sin-domination that dominated our mortal flesh in the past. Now we must leave that Darkness behind as well as the living Death existence it imparted. And we must learn to operate as citizens and heirs of God’s Eternal Kingdom of Light, Righteousness and Perfect Well Being.
God sent His living Word to draw us to follow Him into this Exodus. He became one with us by virtue of God’s eternal Covenant. That enables Him to share the rewards of His perfect human life and atonement and eternal Resurrection Life with us. But that can’t happen until we truly forsake our former self-adoring decapitated way of life that ignored and bypassed God in the past and identify with Him and become as one with Him and His obedience to the Father, as He has already become with us and our guilt and condemnation over Sin.
And once that exchange has been made, God’s Word will abide within us and all around us…to train us to live as His ‘Covenant friends’. He will teach us to look to and depend only upon Him. He has become our new eternal Life and our Lord and Master. When we learn to live as one with Him we are restored to God’s original true level of humanity…His image and likeness. This is what God’s Word was sent to reveal and give to Abraham and our other forefathers in the Faith. The Word also taught and entrusted this pattern to the people of Israel so they could demonstrate and share it with the rest of the world, in each succeeding generation.
All the other books of Scripture continue to explain, amplify and unpack this Exodus pattern and its dynamics. But God first revealed it to Noah and then to Abraham. And through him, to his Covenant Family. God will continue to follow this pattern and fulfill His time table and make good on every prophecy and promise He made to Israel and the human race. By the end of the Book of Revelation, everything will be done to perfection and the fulfillment of God’s warnings and promises will be eternally, perfectly complete.
So the Exodus Pattern leaves nothing to our imagination. It is clear, definite and intended for each human being with no exceptions. It requires a clear unmistakable response from disciples of His Word that decapitated devotees of this fallen world’s system consider to be preposterous, insane and impossible to do. So that makes believers unique and at odds with the norms of this fallen world. Most of the people around us wallow in their rebellion against God, but we must exchange our lives, identities and lifestyles with His living Word, Yeshua. That exchange requires us to change dimensions…from the worldly time and space focus, to an eternity focus…from the world system, to God’s Kingdom of Heaven system…from independent flesh and self-driven soulishness, to permanent and exclusive Holy Spirit guidance and empowerment.
We have described this awesome Exodus transition in these meditations as, passing through ‘Abraham’s Portal.’ This Portal, or Gateway, opens up before us when, like Abraham, we too begin to become aware of and heed God’s Word. When we hear the summons of our Master to follow Him…He intends to lead us through that Portal and beyond. So, to follow Him, we must let go of our current life and its priorities, ties and attachments. We can’t have both. So we must choose between the two. No one exchanges lives and destinies and enters God’s Heavenly Kingdom…by accident.
The ‘customs checkpoint’ we must pass through before we can go through that Portal is very demanding. Its requirements are like a ‘narrow gate’. And passing through it requires that we be stripped naked…naked of any created, independent, Sin-corrupted, God-less initiatives.
And that narrow gate is only the beginning. Beyond it, a narrow path stretches before us…we must walk out our future lives along that Path, under the authority of God’s Word. God Himself will take us the rest of the way into eternity. The narrow path differs greatly from the broad path the decapitated, radically independent sons of Adam follow. But that broad path leads to eternal perdition! This is why God’s living Word was so insistent when He first revealed this to Abram in the beginning:
“I am God Almighty; walk before Me and be blameless…” (Genesis 17:1b)
To walk before the Father blamelessly, we must always be following and obeying His living Word. His Word (Son) must become our Life and our Master and our Righteousness. And He, through His Holy Spirit, must train and teach us to do the exact opposite of what the rest of the world does.
Centuries after the He appeared to Abraham, our Master became flesh and appeared to Israel as her long-awaited Messiah. Then He amplified what He told Abraham by saying these words to His first century disciples:
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to Life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14 Emphasis added.)
Eve and Adam had reversed God’s original plans for humanity. They left their God-given image and likeness position and passed through the Serpent’s broad gate. In other words, they rejected and disobeyed God’s Word and substituted their own perceptions, opinions and feelings for God’s Revelation and Authority. The broad gate they passed through leads to ‘the knowledge of good and evil.’ And that ‘broad path’ is the death trap that the Serpent set before Adam and Eve and all of their descendants. That path makes sure that we will remain decapitated or cut off from the Word of God who is the only Source of Life. Thus, if we refuse to follow Him, we will remain spiritually dead, just like the Serpent that trapped us.
The Broad Path Must be Forsaken
So the broad path is the way of ‘Head-less’ or God-less living, where people ignore, reject, misrepresent and in general, disobey, God’s living and written Word. Instead of obeying God’s Word, the Serpent’s deluded victims follow their radically independent subjective desires, urges, viewpoints and opinions as ultimate sources of knowledge and guidance. Such things become false gods that lead us to eternal separation from the true, Living God who is the Creator of all things. And the reason why the Serpent’s path is so broad is that it accommodates the myriads of angels and humans that live and do as they think best. That is the path of idolatry and there are many who pursue it as they try to live as gods unto themselves.
The broad path offers myriads of options and choices for those that follow it. But the narrow gate and narrow path offer only one option: Death to disobedience to God! That death must take place in our heart of hearts. It happens when we repent of our Head-less condition and lifestyle. That is the first step. Then God’s living Word can connect you to Himself and become your new eternal Life! After that, He will become your new Path. From then on, you follow only Him because you have died to your former rebellion against Him.
Then God’s Holy Spirit will continually make God’s living Word alive and real and fruitfully active within you. And then the Word of God becomes your true Life and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob becomes your one and only God. That is how it must be on this narrow path. The only option offered by the menu of the Kingdom of Heaven is wholehearted service and devoted obedience to the King of the Kingdom of Heaven…God’s living Word, our Master.
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 Emphasis added.)
Everything We Need is Found in God’s Living Word!
This Exodus path requires total, exclusive reliance and dependence upon God’s perfect, All-encompassing, All-Sufficient Word. He contains in Himself, all the Fullness of God. He is the perfect image and likeness of the Father. He creates and sustains everything that exists apart from God. And God requires the fallen human race to be transformed…back into His Word’s image and likeness. The Word is our Provider. He contains within Himself everything we will ever need to fulfill our God-given purposes and destinies. He is God’s eternal Treasury in the Kingdom of Heaven. He is the Fullness from which God covers, supplies, protects, redeems and sustains us, as we make our way through the dimension of space and time. So God’s Word must become everything to us and for us after we join Abraham’s Covenant Family and make our way through that Portal.
God’s Word must become our eternal Vine and we must learn to serve as His living branches on Earth. As we follow Him along the narrow path, He will teach and train us to live as His disciples and to abide in and receive everything from Him, at all times. And His Father will ‘prune’ away anything left in us that creates blockage or resistance to what He wants His Word to do to us…in us…and through us on the Earth. Then we can receive everything from our Master and give it out to the rest of the world, as He directs. In other words we allow our Master to reach out and affect whatever and whoever He places under our care. In that sense, He can ‘water His Garden’ through us. His Spirit continually fills us with all that He is, and we continually give out what He is – to whatever and whoever is around us.
“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:12-15 Emphasis added.)
This disciple lifestyle requires us to receive our Head to ourselves, on His terms. Then He is able to give of His Fullness to us. So we must learn to receive everything from our Head, the Word of God, and release what He gives to us, to the people and circumstances that are all around us. We do this by faith in the Perfection of the Word who reveals the Father and His Covenant promises to us. To say the least, this is a unique way to live!
Disciples who live like this are continually being filled up and emptied out at the same time! Everything must come to us from our Master. We are dead to trying to generate and possess anything by any independent, self-generated source, means or devices. In ourselves we are nothing and have nothing. That’s because our God-given nature is to be His Word’s image and likeness. The Word of God is our only true and real Source. So all that we are and have and do must come to us first from Him. Then, as He directs, we give back out what He first gives to us. So in ourselves we always remain empty and we keep looking to Him to keep filling us so that we can freely release and share what He gives us, at His command. This happens again and again and again, moment by moment, and step by step.
It’s like ‘breathing’. We inhale what He gives us and exhale it into our daily lives. Our Master is always filling us with Himself; and we are always releasing Him into our circumstances. As long as we do that, there’s no chance for any radically independent self-life initiatives to develop in us. So the continual crucifixion and death of our former self-life initiatives, clears the way for us to partake of our Lord’s eternal, Spirit-given Resurrection Life…and all of the Fruit He is here to produce through it.
Our Master is our one Source. He is the Narrow Gate through which we must pass if we’re going to transform into the image and likeness of God. In that sense, He is the Author or Creator of our faith. He supplies everything we will need to cross the finish line into God’s eternal Land of Promise. So He is also the ‘Narrow Path’, the Completer or Finisher of our faith. That’s why we follow and look to Him for everything…step by step, moment by moment.
We Were Designed for This!
This is the life for which God designed and created Adam and Eve! So you can see how different this fallen world and its citizens became after their fall into Sin. Compared to the way it was before the Serpent damaged God’s original plan and purpose so severely, it’s the difference between day and night! And because God is eternally perfect, and never changes in His will and purpose, His beautiful original plan for us will stand forever. He will bring it to pass and have things the way He wants them to be. So He sent His Word to restore and fulfill the plan. And He is here to lead our generation along the path to that Fulfillment. That’s why He must take us through the narrow gate and along the path of obedience to His Word. The Word leads to Eternal Life because He IS Eternal Life!
This is what God sent His Word to restore when He came after Adam and Eve when they were hiding from Him. He covered their naked Head-lessness and re-united with them. And this was also what He came to restore when He appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And now, He has called us too – to follow the very same pattern that will enable us to live the original God-ordained human lifestyle. God will train and ‘prune’ us, just as He did for our spiritual forefathers. Like them, we too must forsake all former allegiance to, and reliance on, the fallen world and its system. We too must enter by the narrow gate, and allow our Master to be our ‘Narrow Path’. Our cross empties us of our former rebellious Sin residue and joins us to our Master’s obedient crucifixion, death and burial. Then His indwelling Resurrection Life and Sin-less human nature, character and disposition take over in us and produce God’s supernatural Fruit from within us.
- Obviously this begins when God reveals this to us through His Word.
- We must believe and admit that when Adam died, we died with him and have been, from conception, separated from God’s Word, and trapped in living death.
- We must acknowledge that living death human nature can only produce the corruption that always comes from death.
- We must realize that God’s pure, perfect nature will not accept or use a speck of our living death corruption.
- We must agree with God’s condemnation of Sin and its effects, and pick up our own cross, and join our radically independent mind and lifestyle to the Lamb’s crucifixion, death, and burial.
- Then we must look to God’s Word – our risen Lord – and depend on and receive from Him, everything we will ever be or have or do, from then on.
- The Holy Spirit will transmit into us what pertains to our Master, and through us, our Master will reach out to and bless whatever and whoever may be around us.
- So with Him, from Him and by Him we will ‘water’ the world around us by releasing our Master’s perfect indwelling Presence into everything we encounter.
Because our Master was utterly Sin-less throughout His human life on Earth, He, as the Son of Man, remained pure, holy and free of any curse. There is no Sin-guilt in Him. He is the only human in whom Father is well pleased. The Serpent and the powers of Darkness can’t accuse or condemn Him of violating God’s Law. He is God’s living Word made flesh, the perfect human image and likeness of God. So unlike us who were conceived into Adam’s death, He is not under Sin’s death sentence. And in obedience to His Father, He willingly laid down His human life and offered it as our perfect Sin-Atonement. He died on the Cross. But since the Serpent and Sin and Death had no legal claim on Him, they could not accuse or hold Him for any legal reason. So God’s Holy Spirit summoned Him out of the grave. And there was nothing the world system or the powers of Darkness could say or do to prevent His release. The Spirit of God restored the human Son of Man and imparted Resurrection Life to His flesh. He emerged from the tomb as the ‘First Fruits’ of the redeemed human race that is following Him along the ‘narrow path.’ We too will join Him in His Resurrection, as living members of His one Body. We will receive new, glorified bodies like His and abide and serve under Him. He will be our Head, and we will share in His eternal Glory:
“I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given Me to do. Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” (John 17:4-5 Emphasis added)
As we accompany our Master along the narrow path, He strips off the rebellious uniform and trappings we once wore in the Serpent’s service. He detoxifies us of our addictions to that former life and its ties and priorities. He purifies us, continually crucifying the Sin-residue that still abides within our mortal flesh. It remains nailed securely to our crosses. Thus we follow our Lord as He leads us further away from the eternal Darkness and closer and closer to eternity in God’s Kingdom of Light.
The Narrow Gate and Narrow Path
“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Galatians 2:20 Emphasis added.)
“…For we do not preach ourselves; but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.” (2 Corinthians 4:5-10)
Throughout the world system, we hear slogans and statements like the following: “Be the captain of your own soul.” “Be all that you can be.” “Nothing will happen until you get out there and make it happen!” “Don’t just stand there, DO something!” And then of course there’s that one that is perhaps the most famous one of all: “God helps those that help themselves!”
Freedom Increases…in proportion to our Awareness and Obedience
Analyze the ‘mind picture messages’ that the worldly, radically independent statements listed above are conveying. Who is the hero in every one of those pictures? What kind of message do these pictures give? Can God be seen in those pictures? No, He is totally ignored and excluded and His Word erased. In fact, God may as well not even exist! So in those scenarios…who is responsible for doing all the work and getting all the results? Can you see how self-centered those ‘you shall be like God’ messages are? It’s always about us. We have to be the heroes and stars of the show. These pictures reveal a humanistic universe in which man is everything and everything remains incomplete, unfinished and pending. Since God is not in the picture, it is always up to us to figure out what to do and how to create or fix and manage, control and improve, finish and finalize each of those scenarios. And that exemplifies the ‘decapitated’ identity, lifestyle and destiny we inherited from Adam. In these pictures everything is ‘up in the air’ and ‘unresolved’ and ‘incomplete.’ The pictures are filled with anxiety, desperation and endless insecurity. So we must control and manipulate everything. Therefore, precisely according to the Serpent’s original suggestion to Eve, whoever buys into the lies embedded within these pictures must begin to strive to be ‘like’ or ‘as’ God. These pictures reveal the world’s wretched endless treadmill-life of anxious striving and futility. This is what our Master was sent to save us from. So now look at what a different picture God’s Word presents to us:
“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from ALL His work which God had created and made.” (Genesis 2:1-3 Emphasis added.)
Who is in this picture? Who did all the work? How much work is left for Adam and Eve and the rest of us, to do? God’s Word has already done everything necessary, hasn’t He? And He is the true Hero of the story and the only Star of the show, isn’t He? He is so perfect, so eternally thorough and comprehensive in foreknowledge and wisdom and ability, that everything was covered and supplied from the very Beginning! There’s absolutely nothing left for any human to do…except to join Him in His joyful Sabbath Rest celebration and enjoy the endless stream of eternal, all-sufficient fruit and the beneficial results of all that God’s Word has provided for His beloved Creation in Eternity! All that remains is that it be transmitted by the Holy Spirit, from Eternity…to our time and space Earth. That is what Scripture is saying. And since all that we will need comes from His Word and Holy Spirit, we must look to and depend upon God’s Word and Holy Spirit at all times, for all things.
So in worldly, man-centered mind pictures, success, fulfillment and finality are always yet to be attained. Maybe we’ll be okay, and maybe not. We never know. And since we’re the only ones in the picture, it’s up to us to do everything. So, if we don’t pull through and get it right, we’re doomed! Thus the Godless scenario pictures us to be like donkeys, endlessly chasing after a carrot on a stick! It condemns us to a life sentence of slavery and toil. And that perfectly depicts the curses that followed the first Adam’s fall into Sin and radical independence…and death and corruption:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you will eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17b-19)
In our ‘unsaved’, God-less, radically independent, self-centered mind pictures, everything we need for safety, provision, protection and well being is kept away from us. Those things are always shown to be beyond us, waiting for us to find ways to catch up to them in the dim and distant future. They are like so many carrots, tied to sticks and dangled before the eyes of deluded, unsaved donkeys. The donkeys spend their lives chasing after the carrots but the carrots always elude them… keeping just ahead of them …always in the future, but never attainable in the present. The poor donkeys never get to enjoy the fruit of their endless labor in each here-and-now present moment. The fruit and rest are in the future; but the future never comes because the poor donkeys are always locked into the present moment. And so, beloved…is that not a formula for total frustration, emptiness and burnout? Is that not the way it will always be in Hell?
Complete and Finished – to Perfection!
But God’s Genesis mind picture shows God creating and bringing the first man and woman into a universe that was already completely created and finished perfectly, by Him! Everything was ready and waiting for the human race to enter into and enjoy as soon as they appeared. We were all born into God’s eternal all-encompassing abundance and Perfect Sabbath Rest! He did everything before creating us, to make sure everything we would ever need would already be eternally present and waiting for us to enjoy upon our arrival into space and time! Can you see what God revealed about Himself to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear what His Word is saying to the Serpent’s captives? He is PERFECT!
If you believe the Serpent’s lies, you can’t trust and rest in God’s eternal Perfection. Instead, you will follow his set of mind pictures and become a ‘carrot-chasing donkey’ for your entire existence on Earth. You will stagger under the curse of self-centered fear, fretting, toiling and slaving all your days. Your atheist mindset will contaminate and waste every one of your precious moments. You’ll never be able to enjoy God’s Fullness at any time. You’ll be entranced and locked into a futile obsessive pattern of endless striving…hoping one day, to catch one of those carrots that maddeningly manage to stay just a few inches beyond your reach…always in the future…but never in the present.
But if you believe, obey, embrace and continually draw from God’s Word and what He reveals…you’ll be able to join Him in the enjoyment of His eternal Sabbath Rest. You will be able to enjoy God and be one with His eternal Word. Together, you will have the joy, peace and rest that the Perfection of God’s Presence supplies to those who are as one with Him.
“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. Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you (Sabbath) Rest. Take My yoke (Torah Revelation) upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart (crucified to radical independence from My Father), and YOU (as you transform into My image and likeness) WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS.” (Matthew 11:27-29 Emphasis and amplification added.)
If you believe and abide in the Word of God, you know that you were born to be a royal child of God and that it is your destiny to grow to be a full-fledged son and heir of God. When you know who God made you to be, you’ll be able to enjoy your incredibly rich and lavish birthright Inheritance. This Inheritance is not worldly. It’s not a treasure chamber filled with temporal money and costly gems and metals. God Himself is Your Heavenly Treasure and Treasury. And our eternal Blood Covenant union with Him ensures that He is and will always be everything we will ever need Him to be to us.
“‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord. ‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will put My Law (Torah) within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,’ declares the Lord, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’” (Jeremiah 31:31-34 Amplification and emphasis added.)
“Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law (Torah), so that He might redeem those who were under the Law (and its condemnation of Head-lessness), that we (who now live under our Head) might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.” (Galatians 4:1-7 Amplification and emphasis added.)
In baseball terms, it’s as if Adam and Eve were born on top of ‘home plate.’ We must know that once His Word is our true Head and Lord, God already places us, there! We do not have to do anything to strive to ‘get there’ or try to ‘run the bases’ to work for it or earn it. We are ‘there…in His Word!’ God’s Word tells us that being ‘there’ is not a wage you can earn by doing work that is your responsibility. When you understand what Genesis says you will know that being ‘there’ is our God-given birthright inheritance! The Serpent’s lies blind us to this Treasure and steal it from us.
But the Truth is that we don’t have to try to get a series of hits or steal any bases or run our heads off and try to slide into home ahead of someone’s throw. We score and win the game just by embracing God’s Word and letting Him regenerate us and make us one with Himself! The new life He gives us is His own! And so, we are born ‘At Home.’ Even as we arrive as newborns, we have already won the game. In God’s awesome grace, He creates us to be His image and likeness. So what is His – is also ours! And He happens to be the Ultimate Winner of all winners!
Even now, after the fall of our first parents in the dimension of space and time, and after all the horrendous damage and disfigurement Sin and its lethal corruption inflicted on us, the fact remains that in eternity…in God’s Heavenly Kingdom…God’s complete Creation and provision are eternally present. Everything is there, waiting for us and it is completely complete…in God’s Word. And when we become one with His Word, we are in position to receive and enjoy what has always been ours in the Word. And once we’re in the proper position, and the Word is truly our Head, our Master becomes our Treasure. And God wants us to learn to STAY there…and not look anywhere else or stray away, looking for some other, non-existent alternate ‘source’. The Spirit of God is responsible for making God’s living Word real, alive and active within us in very personal, life-changing ways. He transmits all that pertains to God’s Word, as He reigns in eternity at Father’s right hand in eternity…into our space and time lives and our needs, cares and concerns on Earth. He transmits them to us right on time, and our faithful obedient cooperation with Him is what it will take for us to walk out the stories of lives on the ‘Narrow Path’. So, thanks to the Covenant and the Holy Spirit, we are in our Messiah with Father in Heaven…even as He is in us through the Holy Spirit, here on Earth!
Our Firm Foundation
The world system teaches people to believe that God can’t be trusted and that nothing is finished or good enough. Those lies make people assume it’s up to them to figure everything out and make sure everything happens according to their self-devised plans and projects for which they strive endlessly…so that, some day…they might make ourselves to be ‘good enough’, rich enough and safe enough.
But God tells us that is ‘God-less Law-lessness’! The Truth is that even amid such awful wicked, brutal Darkness that covers this poor fallen world like a death shroud, everything we lost due to Sin, and everything we will ever need as we make our way through space and time…has been restored to us by God’s Living Word, The Lamb. And it is always available to us by the Authority of the Covenant Blood of God’s Lamb with which He has sprinkled us. The Lamb has already atoned and earned and paid for everything in our name. And all the rewards are already given to us in the Kingdom of Heaven. There, everything exists for us…in Him. And it is waiting to be transmitted and applied to us…by the Holy Spirit of our awesome Heavenly Father God…as soon as our obedient faith puts us in the proper position to receive it and become one with it and share it.
So our challenge is to ignore the lies of the Serpent and his powers of Darkness. We must remain focused on God’s revelation of His Truth. That is the Narrow Gate – total acceptance of God’s Perfect Truth and Finished All-Sufficient Work. Then we must follow our Master, the living Word of God, along the narrow path. We are to be blameless, like Abraham, by abiding in the Perfection of God’s Word in the way we see, think, act, react and interact in daily life. We are to receive only from Him and discipline ourselves to learn to ignore and bypass all the worldly ‘carrots’ that the powers of Darkness keep dangling in front of us to get us to stray off God’s path, and back onto the broad path that leads to perdition.
We must be trained to remain focused only on our Master…waiting upon Him to meet all our needs. The Holy Spirit will transmit to us all that God’s Word has created and earned for us, not according to our independent wishes, but according to Father’s Eternal Plan. God’s Perfect Creation and Perfect Original Blessing and His Perfect Atonement Sacrifice are already ours. And we know, by His glorious Resurrection from the dead, that Father accepted His atonement on our behalf and loves, accepts and approves of us eternally. Our Master is with us to cleanse us continually of every speck of sin guilt and condemnation. He covers us with His perfect Righteousness moment by moment. And we are His full-fledged Spirit-filled eternal co-heirs. Everything that is His…is ours! So compared to the ‘orphan-like’ way in which the fallen world system lives, we must learn to follow a very narrow path indeed.
“If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us.” (1 John 1:8-10)
Notice the Original Disciple Training Conditions
To understand Abraham’s Pattern with greater clarity, keep in mind what the conditions of Abraham’s world were. When our Master revealed Himself to him, their relationship and life together were as simple and pure as could be. God’s Word initiated and directed and maintained their relationship. He was the same Word that God spoke in the beginning, the Word through which God created the universe and everything each creature would ever need to fulfill its purpose and destiny. He is the Word that created the Serpent and all the other angels and gave them their free will. He created the heavens and the Earth. He created the human race and abided with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He came after them after they fell. And He ensured the salvation of Noah and his family and sent the flood that cleansed the earth. He confounded the decapitated rebels at Babel and…and now, He appears to and interacts with the moon god worshipper who later became, Abraham.
At that time, no Bible existed. Ponder that! There was no ‘written’ Word of God that Abraham and his family could study, consult and discuss. There were no spiritual gurus to preach at them or to give them counsel. And there were no other believers with whom they could have ‘fellowship.’ All they had was the ‘Living’ Word of the living God. And obviously, He was all they needed. He was always with them, personally teaching, directing, correcting and guiding their steps. And He was and is, and always will be, more than enough to meet everyone else’s needs too. He was and is, the Narrow Gate and Narrow Path. He leads His people through the a world full of countless numbers of Headless people. They follow the broad path, putting their faith and hope in myriads of false, man-imagined gods. But Abraham and his authentic Covenant Family keep their eyes exclusively on God’s living Word…believing what He reveals, and doing everything He says. And that living Word they knew later became flesh and appeared as ‘Yeshua the Messiah’…and He is the risen Lord that abides within us, as our Master. He is the One that we all ‘follow’, regardles of which generation we belong to.
Abraham did not receive a created ‘menu’ to tell him about the real Uncreated Feast…the real living Food and Drink that God had available. He didn’t need a menu because God was already serving His real Food and Drink to Abraham! The Living Feast was already before him, filling him and the others with His Presence and Eternal Life! It was centuries after this when God first began to provide written Scriptures and all the other aids and tools that people of today consider so necessary and indispensable. But in the beginning, all Abraham had, was the real, living Word of God. He didn’t need theoretical books from which to study about God’s Electricity. He had the real, Live Cable in his own hands…and the ‘Electricity’ of God’s Presence was surging into him with unspeakable Force and world-impacting Reality!
Abraham actually lived and interacted with God…through His perfect, living, uncreated Word. He lived with the Creator and Sustainer of all things! He was the Feast Abraham enjoyed and knew so well. And that has changed the entire world! So what else did Abraham need? And what else did He have to teach to Isaac and Jacob and the rest of his household, except his own relationship and interactive lifestyle with the living Word of God?
“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-7)
In addition to the fact that there were no written Scriptures in Abraham’s day, there were also no Jewish people. The nation of Israel did not yet exist. And there were no such things as ‘Judaism’ or ‘Christianity’ or ‘the Church.’ There were no temples, synagogues, cathedrals or church buildings. There were no man-dominated, organized religious theologies and denominational structures or religious book stores or ministerial empires to compete with each other for the attention of the decapitated world. None of that highly structured, organized, man-dominated Judeo-Christian system existed at that time. At that time, Abraham’s Covenant family and their relationship with God’s living Word was ‘The Root’ into which Jews, Christians, Judaism and the Church that came later had to be ‘grafted’ (See Romans 9, 10 &11 and Ephesians 2-4).
Abraham and his family had the Treasure that matters and without which nothing else has any value. God restored to them what Adam and Eve originally lost in the Garden. They knew and interacted with God’s living Word and Holy Spirit. God Himself was abiding and interacting with them and teaching them to be His image and likeness, at all times! They learned to abide in His living Presence and to do what He said! So the living Word of God communicated Himself to them personally, directly, without any religious ‘go-betweens.’ There were no man-made partitions between them. God taught them personally, in ways they could easily understand and follow. And together, they created The Disciple Pattern that the rest of the world will have to follow if it is to be saved. This pattern is to be restored in the New Covenant that God promised to make with Israel! The New Covenant is the Ultimate Restoration of that original, changeless spiritual relational foundation upon which every human life must be grounded in order to be redeemed, restored and eternally re-connected with God.
Disciples are not ‘Big Shots’
God did not create Abraham’s Covenant Family to become ‘religiously elitist’ or arrogant and self-satisfied. They had no right to look down their noses on the other peoples of the Earth. By natural birth and fallen human nature, they were like all the rest, serving as slaves to the Serpent and his powers of Darkness. Their task was to learn to repent of that…and to look only to God’s living Word. They had to learn to receive from Him everything they were to be and have and be able to do on Earth. The living Word had to become their one and only Source. He would supply them with everything needed…from moment to moment. And as they received that provision from His Holy Spirit, they were to give and release all that He was to them, into their daily lives and situations, according to His commands.
And this is exactly what God’s risen, glorified Word meant to do with and for His New Covenant disciples, after He ascended back into Heaven. Through the gift of the indwelling Spirit of God, He was able to be with them again, in an even better way than He had been with Abraham and all the others before them. Now He was able to live IN and THROUGH them much better than ever before! And that is the fulfillment of the narrow gate and narrow path kind of life to which we are now called. This is the Last Days kind of ‘Follow Me’ disciple-life that will have to be as pure and electrifyingly real and simple at the End as it was in the Beginning. This is the world-changing Life that disciples will have to receive from God’s Word Himself, as we all move into the Last Days era of God’s love story with the human race. Notice what the risen Lord of Glory said to His apostle John in Revelation:
“When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I AM the First and the Last and the Living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Therefore write the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which will take place after these things.”
So the relationship God has called us to share with Him in the New Covenant is like a ‘breathing in and breathing out’ type of dynamic. God’s Word is to be our ‘Life-giving Oxygen.’ We are to depend on and receive everything from Him and give it all back by doing with it what His Father sends Him to do in us and through us. This is what God began to teach His friend Abraham to do – to receive everything from Him and give it back to Him in the form of obedience. God’s Family members are meant to be His ‘Reality gardeners.’ We receive the Living Water of His Word and use it to water His Garden, according to His directions. The Garden that Sin devastated and turned into a barren desert, can become a Garden once more (as soon as we all learn to allow the Last Adam to do through us, what the first Adam refused to do). As we learn to abide as one with the Last Adam, He will transform the desert into God’s Garden once more. The desolation will begin to turn green, lush, beautiful and incredibly fruitful once more…just as God always intended the World of Man to be.
God’s Living Word – A ‘Disciple’s Only’ Source
Disciples are unique. We are being continually filled by God’s living Word; but at the same time, we are continually being emptied by our personal crosses. Our crosses prevent us from returning to self-life independence. They keep ‘killing’ the Sin-Death corruption residue that seeps up from deep within our mortal flesh. The Cross continually uproots our natural fallen tendencies and urges that try to get us to slide back into radical independence and Sin. And as that emptying continues, God’s Holy Spirit continually transmits and fills us with the pure, holy, perfect life and nature and character and disposition of the resurrected Son of Man. So now we can ‘radiate’ and release Him into every situation, circumstance and interaction of our lives.
Nothing God gives to us belongs to us. It belongs to Him. So we do not maintain an independent life and treasury of our own. Everything we are, and have and do comes to us from God’s Word. It all belongs to Him. So we do not hoard anything nor can we boast about what we have or brag about how wonderful we have become. We are the Word’s bond slaves. He supplies everything we use and He is what we share with the world around us…as our Father directs. In this way, God is able to do the impossible through us. He transmits the Life of His Word into us and His Word transmits the Heavenly fruit of His finished work to decapitated people, through our flesh…while we rest and rejoice in Him. God’s Word, our Master, is the eternal, Heavenly Vine and we are His living human branches on Earth. We have the privilege and honor of being able to transmit His Life and Light into the world we live in…for the sake of all the Headless people that our Master is sent by His Father to save, just as He once saved us.
There is no substitute for the Presence of the living Word of God Himself. God did not give the world His written Word so that it could eventually replace His living Word and draw all attention to itself. The written Word was given to be an aid that would remind us to stay focused on His living Word and to continually interact with Him as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were taught to do before the Word was ever written down. The written Word and organized religious practices serve like a menu…they are not meant to draw our attention away from the living Word of God, over to themselves. They always direct our attention to ‘The Real Feast’, to our risen Master, who dwells within each one of His people. We fall dismally short of God’s purpose as soon as we forget the living Word and obsess instead over created things that are ‘ABOUT’ Him… things that describe or explain Him, but are not THE LORD HIMSELF! The things of the Lord must never overshadow or replace The LORD of all things!
Our beloved Master is the Real Food…He is God’s living Word…He is the Salvation Abraham knew. He taught Abraham the Exodus Pattern in its purest, simplest form. We are to follow Him like Abraham did. He is our Map and GPS guidance system. He is our Path and Destination. Nothing can replace Him. Could a menu ever take the place of real food? Are people supposed to eat or drink menus? Can any created thing ever serve as a substitute for the Creator of all things?