5. Moses Enters ‘Boot Camp’
We saw in Genesis that from as far back as the days of Noah, God seems to delight in leading His Word’s disciples into situations that are totally untenable and humanly impossible!
Put yourself in the place of Noah and Abraham and consider how high, deep, wide and broad their obedient faith in God’s living Word had to become in order to obey God’s living Word ‘blamelessly’, at a level that would lead to God considering them to be righteous. Imagine your situation if God told you to do what He put before Noah to do. And imagine how deep Abraham’s faith and trust in God’s Word had to be when He promised that he and Sarah would have a son through whom he would become the father of many nations! Abraham was 75 years old when God’s Word made that promise! Then he had to wait another quarter of a century before the promise was fulfilled! So why does God do this to His Covenant friends? Why must everything He requires be so far beyond the reach of His Word’s disciples to accomplish? Oh, of course…the answer was revealed to us in the first three chapters of Genesis:
“Then the Lord God formed man of DUST from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7 Emphases added.)
So what can dust do by itself, for itself? What is more bankrupt and helpless than that? From his very first instant of existence this ‘living being’ that was made from dust, continues to be totally dependent upon God’s living Word for everything! So God is revealing that this helplessness is built into the nature of every created person or thing! Even the dust was created out of nothingness! So for dust to initiate anything by its God-given will, or do anything by any independent device of its own is a metaphysical impossibility that is absurd even to imagine! It is insanity to assume that we or any other creation of God could, by nature, be radically independent, self-sufficient and self-actualizing. Whatever we are going to be or do or have, must first come to us from the Creator of all things – God’s living Word! So when it comes to having a life of our own, in ourselves, we are always – dead! And so is any other created thing that we might look to as a source for our provision, protection, enhancement and ongoing well being.
On top of that, the first two helpless humans that came from that original pile of dust were spiritually decapitated from the Source of all things when they joined in the Serpent’s rebellion and disobeyed Him. Sin severed them from God’s Word…their Source of Life. He was their Head, and their Lord. But the humans believed and obeyed the word of the Serpent, thereby submitting themselves to his murderous coils:
“…from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die!” (Genesis 2:17 Emphasis added.)
So not only are we talking about bankrupt, helplessly dependent dust, but now we have dust that is in even worse shape than that because it is relationally separated from the Source of everything that is real, true and good! That is living death for sure! And so as early as Genesis 3 we learn the true state of every human being born into this world…dead, isolated, helpless dust! The bodies of the humans continued to exist and function for a time because they continued to be held together and supplied by the mercy and grace of God. His Word sustained them to give them time to come to their senses and repent and allow Him to restore them back to true humanity – back to being His image and likeness! And so is He doing for us all.
So whatever decapitated humans do in their original living dead state will be a manifestation of their spiritual death. But God is the Source of Life. He is infinitely perfect, true, just and righteous. So He never accepts anything that is dead or that comes from something dead. He only accepts what His own Word and Spirit originate. So radically independent humans are a gross departure from what God created us to be. We were made to be His image and likeness…and He is the Source of Life! But thanks to Sin, we’ve devolved into being the image and likeness of the Serpent from conception. This is the awesome shocking Reality that Genesis reveals.
Fallen Humanity’s Basic Problem
This presents the fallen human race with an enormous problem. Sin has destroyed our true identity, purpose and destiny. Now there’s no way we can find our way back to being what we were designed and made to be. And so now we begin as the image and likeness of God’s enemy…the Serpent! How could God ever accept that? And of course the answer is…He won’t! And now that He has revealed this to the world, and the revelation has been around for millennia, it will do us no good to plead ignorance. We have been warned by the Creator of all things. So as long as we remain in that decapitated state, even on our best day, even if we’ve become supremely religious, we continue to fall infinitely short of being the original, pristine, image and likeness of God. So if we are to be redeemed, forgiven, regenerated, sanctified and fully restored, God Himself must do everything. That’s why He sent His living Word after Adam and Eve…to be whatever they and the rest of us would ever need for Him to be. Because apart from Him, there is no way we can be made right in God’s sight.
“And the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering; but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.” (Genesis 4:4b-7)
Dead, radically independent human dust must die to trying to embody Satan’s lie. To truly live, we must forsake the natural decapitated state we inherited from Adam! Somehow, we must allow the truth about ourselves to sink in and pierce us so that it can open our dead spiritual eyes and penetrate their tightly clenched ‘lids’. Only this Truth will be able to set us free from the delusions into which we are conceived. We must die to self-life and be ‘reborn’ to ‘Word of God-Life.’ And after our new birth, we must learn to depend on and receive everything from God’s Word…at all times. We must acknowledge Him to be our one and only true Source for everything on a permanent basis. Therefore Scripture tells us:
“…let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the Cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself (in order to cover and rescue us), so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” (Hebrews 12:1b-3 Amplification and emphasis added.)
‘Living death’ is what the human race has toiled and struggled with ever since Adam rejected our Head and decapitated us. When we are disconnected from God’s Life-giving Word and Holy Spirit, we are enslaved and pressed into service on behalf of the Serpent. Thus we toil…against God and His purposes. So the Head-less world system that is created and maintained by decapitated people is always at war with God. And an infinite chasm always separates the two races…in this world. It separates those that believe and obey God, from those that reject and disobey His living and written world…in this world, and also in the one to come.
So now we know the Truth: by essence, the fallen nature we inherit from the fallen flesh of our parents keeps us severed from God. We start out in the state of ‘living death’ and so, unless we hear, believe and obey the Truth, we are left stranded in demonic Darkness…desolate…with nothing but an eternity of endless discontent, frustration and utter desolate emptiness before us.
So what do we think we could be capable of, as long as we’re separated from Life Himself? What can the dead be, other than…dead? What can the dead do for themselves? And the answer is – NOTHING! And this is why God’s Word, our Source of Life, Truth and Reality, warns us with these words:
“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do NOTHING!” (John 15:4-5 Emphasis added.)
God Himself is the Only Source of Life!
Genesis and Exodus reveal this basic fact that the proponents and custodians of the world system are always unwilling to face, admit and come to grips with. Regardless of what they insist on telling us about how great and self-actualizing man is…they remain decapitated and not truly alive at all. And nothing but God can ever give them life and true value, meaning and a real purpose and destiny that will avail for eternity. Nothing we try to be or do or have in our dead disconnected state will pass God’s righteous judgement. Everything we will ever be or have or do…must first come to us from God. Only then are we equipped to reflect what He gives us, back to Him as His image and likeness. He must be the Source of those who serve as His image and likeness. Apart from the Source, the image and likeness cannot even exist, much less act independently:
“What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious 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 with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: ‘He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us’? But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, ‘God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit 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 miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.” (James 4:1-10 Emphasis added.)
And even after God regenerates us and reattaches us to our true Head, the Sin residue within our mortal flesh continues to entrance and drive most of us to keep seeing ourselves as ‘independent’ and ‘alive’ and ‘free’ and ‘capable’ of being ‘captains of our own Serpent-dominated, fallen souls.’ We remain convinced that we’re the center of our universe and that everything is about us and that we can become whatever we can imagine…and get away with it. And so we strive to be a ‘success’ in this fallen world, which is like choosing to remain aboard the Titanic hoping to have a ‘nice life’. But the Truth is, when we’re in that decapitated state, even if we decide to become hyper-religious, we try to patronize God…‘allowing’ Him to come into a little corner of ‘MY LIFE,’ expecting Him to sit in the background waiting until such time as we may have occasional need of His assistance. This is the ‘gospel’ that proponents of the ‘World Religions’ embrace, including large segments of ‘Christendom’. And then they try to palm home made versions of ‘the gospel’ off on other decapitated and deluded people:
“You’ve tried everything else…drugs, sex, money, fame and status…but that’s not enough is it? So why not get a real ‘high’…why not try God? Ask Jesus to come into YOUR life so that He can help you live YOUR life better!”
That is an expression, in religious terms, of the same, Serpent-induced delusion that Eve fell for in the Garden…radical independence, autonomy, self-direction and determination leading to an ongoing program of self-education, self-enhancement, self-direction and ultimate self-determination. That is the futile quest of dead, already condemned dust…to try to be ‘my own man’ or ‘a self-reliant woman.’ This is the delusional state into which all fallen human flesh is conceived. So it doesn’t matter whose DNA we inherit or what color or nationality or culture or creed or last name we receive or adopt. No matter which tribe and region we’re born into, the Sin-state of living death we inherit twists and drives the calculations of our brains and minds to assume that somehow, someway, ‘we truly can be as God, knowing good and evil’! (Cf. Genesis 3:5)
The ‘Egyptians’ mentioned in the book of Exodus, as well as their downtrodden Hebrew slaves all started out ‘in that same boat!’ But God sent His living Word after the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He came into that generation just as He does for every generation, to do the same thing for them that He had done for Adam and Eve and Abel, Enoch and Noah. He covered the shameful spiritual nakedness of the Family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with His own Eternal Righteousness. For, like all the rest of us, they had none of their own. But He wasn’t doing that just for the salvation of a selected few; He selected a few to train them to serve as His instruments so that through them, He could save, regenerate and restore – every last one!
Humanism – the Big Lie
The humanistic, radically independent viewpoint, attitude and life-thrust are the mainstays of the world system. They leave people laboring under the delusion that it’s up to them to be in complete control of whatever happens in their personal experience. This is the lie from which the false religion of ‘Humanism’ emerges – the idolization and worship of man. Humanism proclaims that: ‘Man is the measure of all things. Man determines what is true and false and right and wrong. Therefore, Man needs only to answer to himself… or to other dead dust that is just like him.’
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses, like all the rest of us, were born into this insanity. And that is the system that Genesis exposes and counters. The fathers of the Faith had to deal with it just as much as we do. And although God has exposed that system, He must do it again and again for each succeeding generation that emerges. Over the centuries men try to take radical independence deeper and farther than the generation before it managed to do. But the Kingdom of Heaven operates solely by obedient faith and trust in the living creative Word of God. And this is what God had to train our forefathers to learn and to do.
So when God promised the aged Abraham and Sarah that He would give them a child of their own and that the Land of Canaan would be a perpetual inheritance for their future family, they naturally assumed He had to be joking. Fallen flesh assumes that what it deems to be impossible to itself is something that cannot possibly happen. That’s because they habitually and naturally leave the living God out of the picture and their calculations. And so Abraham and Sarah politely and discreetly tried to help God out of the corner into which He had apparently ‘painted Himself.’ They brought Hagar and Ishmael into the picture. To help God fulfill His promise, they produced a child from their own fallen will and flesh.
God had promised to give them a child that would come from His will and His promise…a living child…but because they chose to act out of their self-life, they added a dead ingredient into the mix. That caused an unholy mixture to take place…death was mixed with Life. And that is always unacceptable to God. God is the only true Source, and He is Perfect. His standards are eternally Perfect. That’s why He must originate everything for those created to be His image and likeness. So no false sources are ever allowed by the Creator of all things. Nevertheless, Sarah, Abraham and Hagar introduced this contamination into God’s Covenant Family.
That is why the Lord ordered Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. The two incompatible elements had to be separated from each other because Life and Death can never coexist peacefully. They will never be able to ‘work things out’ between each other. Just as Health and Cancer cannot co-exist, neither can Righteousness and Sin abide together. This is the principle at the heart of the Exodus pattern God sets before us all. He will never allow an unholy mixture of Life and Death or Spirit and flesh to abide in His Perfect Presence! And this is what He revealed to His prophet Isaiah…and to Saul of Tarsus…and to the Apostle John:
“In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said,
“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of His Glory.”
And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of Him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:1-5)
“As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’ And he said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, but get up and enter the city, and it will be told you what you must do.’
“The men who traveled with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; and leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.” (Acts 9:3-9)
“Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking with me. And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands; and in the middle of the lampstands I saw one like a son of man, clothed in a robe reaching to the feet, and girded across His chest with a golden sash. His head and His hair were white like white wool, like snow; and His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze, when it has been made to glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters. In His right hand He held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength.
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.’” (Revelation 1:12-18 Emphases added.)
God’s Answer – Eternal Life!
This is why it was necessary for God to take Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Rachael…into His arduous, rigorous, highly disciplined and demanding, disciple training ‘Boot Camp.’ He had to ‘sweat’ their addictions to radical independence out of them. This is what He has to do for all of us. We must be able to see and submit to the requirements of His awesome holy Righteousness and bow before the infinite, eternal Truth, Reality and Authority of His living Word and Holy Spirit. God’s Word must re-train us completely and wean us of our addiction to Death. He must ‘drill The Truth into us and retrain us to receive everything from Him so that we can operate only in and from what is truly Alive…that which comes to us only from God’s living Word. We must learn to believe, and obey and abide in God’s infinite Perfection and draw from the Perfection of His Word’s Finished Life-giving Work, and learn to enjoy His Eternal Sabbath Rest with Him. We must learn that in God’s eternal Heavenly dimension, everything is finished! God’s Word has already done everything for all of us. And so we must learn to allow God’s Holy Spirit to reprogram our fallen, Serpent-deceived souls and rewire our misguided brains with the Heavenly Truth concerning the infinite, eternal Perfection and All-Sufficiency of our awesome God:
“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.)
“But when I speak to you, I will open your mouth and you will say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ He who hears, let him hear; and he who refuses, let him refuse; for they are a rebellious house.” (Ezekiel 3:27)
The realities of Isaac, God’s Child of Promise, and His True Israel and True Land of Promise, and the ultimate and perfect restoration and fulfillment of the Serpent-bitten, mortally wounded, broken human race, have always been present and waiting with God in His eternal dimension in the Kingdom of Heaven! Even before Sin and the fall of Adam took place, God had already foreseen and created and factored in everything each one of us would ever need on Earth, in our time and space ‘walk with God.’ And so regardless of how fractured, broken and inadequate we and everything around us may be as we make our way through this time and space temporal fallen Earth, and no matter what our fallen souls may think or perceive and what our fallen senses may be feeling, God’s Truth stands:
Everything we need already exists in God’s Word in His Eternal Kingdom! The Word contains all the Fullness of God! And in Him, everything is already done and is ready to be given…to those that will believe, obey and receive it from Him!
So God requires us to believe and trust and obey His Word and rest in His infinite, eternal PERFECTION! He promised that He would send His Eternal Word into our space and time to be EVERYTHING we will ever need Him to be!
“…I will put enmity between you (the Serpent) and the woman (Israel), and between your seed and her seed; He (Israel’s Messiah) shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise Him on the heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
In God’s Eternal Perfection, everything necessary has already been done. Everything we’ll ever need already exists in His Word. And His Holy Spirit is here ready to release and apply it to us in space and time! God revealed this in Genesis through His living Word who is The Original Blessing God pronounced over Adam and Eve and their descendants:
“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ Then God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” (Genesis 1:27-31)
God’s promises to Abraham carried that Original Blessing forward. Isaac and Jacob and his twelve sons and Joseph and Moses and the deliverance of the Exodus and every other blessing and provision and protection and supply that every human being will ever need until the end of time were all included in that Original Eternal Blood Covenant Blessing. And that is what God brought forward for Abraham. So He didn’t need any help from the fallen flesh of Sarah, Abraham and Hagar. He already had everything covered. This is what He had to teach them.
The Original Blessing from God is Perfect. And that is what Abraham was given and what he was commissioned to pass on to Isaac. Then Isaac was commissioned to pass it on to Jacob. And Jacob was commissioned to pass it on to Judah…and it was to be passed on and on, from generation to generation. Everything was already given to Adam and Eve and the human race, through God’s Perfect Word. The Perfect Word was to be the redemptive Seed of the Woman (Genesis 3:15)…and the Seed and Heir of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David. He was to be the true Moses, the Eternal Deliverer. He was to be the Passover Lamb and the Kinsman Redeemer and the High Priest Deliverer of Israel. He was to be The Conqueror of all of Israel’s enemies. He would be the Pillar of Cloud by day and the Pillar of Fire by night that would protect and guide God’s people. He is the Full Eternal Restoration of all Mankind…the Messiah…the Good Shepherd…of the entire human race and their world. He is everything to us. And all that He is was already included and given to us by God…in His Original Blessing. And His Name is, Yeshua, the risen Messiah of Israel.
God’s living Word is God’s Perfect All-Sufficient Love for His Creation. And through Him, our awesome God has done everything necessary for every helpless pile of Sin-corrupted dust. That is why human ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘radical independence’ are such wretched delusions. And that’s why God’s Word had to become one of us, and abide as one with us. He had to become as helpless and dependent on God as the rest of us are in order to represent us. He had to live the Perfect Life of Obedient Israelite Faith, in our name, so He could lead the rest of us all the way back…to full redemption and restoration…back into the embrace of Almighty God and His Eternal and Perfect Satisfaction and Rest! And He had to enter into the Death we all had coming to us…so that His Perfect Righteousness and Authority could face Death and overcome it once and for all…in our name!
So amid all of our human impossibilities and criminal, Anti-God activities, including those that Moses and the enslaved Israelites were responsible for and were surrounded by, this living Word, God’s ‘Perfect Finished Work’ came to rescue them. He is the Life-Reality God provides for every generation of Adam’s ‘living dead’ children. And the book of Exodus unpacks and unfolds the meaning of this. As God’s plan of Salvation progresses, God’s Word will reveal more and more of Himself to the enslaved children of Jacob, and through them…to the rest of the world.
The Seed of God’s Word is Planted into Israel’s Impossibilities
The infant Moses was also as weak and helplessly dependent as dead dust. But even then, God’s living Word was at work, doing everything His Father had promised. The Word of God had been passed on from the time of Joseph to each generation of Israelite slaves. The Seed of the Word was in their hearts. And now that seed had to be planted into the heart of this little infant, Moses.
God knew that the Serpent would try to kill the Life God had put into His chosen people. He knew that the Serpent would manipulate Pharaoh, who was the mightiest false god in the region at that time, to order the death of all male Hebrew infants. And that set the stage for the Exodus pattern and all the lessons contained within it to begin to unfold. Moses and God’s chosen people were the epitome of total helplessness. They were all utterly dead and as helpless as ‘dust.’ BUT, they belonged to Almighty God. He had chosen them for His personal service. And Moses and his fellow Israelites, had no way of knowing what God was about to do. So God took the initiative. He insured that Moses would be kept safe and that his needs would be met. He saw to it that Moses would receive the strategic upbringing in Pharaoh’s house that he would need later on. And He made sure that, even in these impossible circumstances, he would also receive the Word of God and be made aware of his Abrahamic, Covenant Family identity.
“Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got him a wicker basket and covered it over with tar and pitch. Then she put the child into it and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to find out what would happen to him.
“The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile, with her maidens walking alongside the Nile; and she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid, and she brought it to her. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the boy was crying. And she had pity on him and said, ‘This is one of the Hebrews’ children.’ Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women that she may nurse the child for you?’ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Go ahead.’ So the girl went and called the child’s mother. Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, ‘Take this child away and nurse him for me and I will give you your wages.’ So the woman took the child and nursed him. The child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. And she named him Moses, and said, ‘Because I drew him out of the water.’” (Exodus 2:1-10)
God’s Pattern – Death Leading to Resurrection and Eternal Life
So to reveal His awesome limitless wisdom and creative ingenuity, God used the household of the Pharaoh to protect, nurture and educate the little boy that would later serve as the instrument of Egypt’s downfall. A tiny seed of the Life that comes from God’s Word was going to be planted in the helpless dust of that infant. This is God’s Resurrection-out-of-Death pattern. God puts His Word into helpless babes. And He puts the babes at the greatest disadvantage possible in this fallen world. Then the Seed of God’s Word grows and produces its unstoppable Fruit…and the powers of Darkness can do nothing to stop it. And God is glorified forever.
“…so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 3:10 Emphasis added.)
This is what began to take place…even in Pharaoh’s own household! Moses was fed, protected, nurtured and prepared for his future destiny right under the Pharaoh’s nose! He was unwittingly assisting in the grooming of this instrument through which God’s Word would expose and discredit his successor and all the rest of Egypt’s false gods and cause them to crumble into dust at Moses’ feet.
So, just as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph had to enter God’s disciple-training ‘Boot Camp,’ now it was the turn of Moses and his generation. God had to drill and train this generation to remain focused on His living Word and to trust Him no matter what happened. He had to prepare them for the inevitable spiritual combat the Serpent and his powers of Darkness would unleash against them to stop the fulfillment of God’s Plan of Salvation from reaching and delivering any of the generations that were yet to come.
Disciple Boot Camp
Disciple Boot Camp training must take place amid our weakness…so that the Perfection of God’s Finished Work of Creation in Heaven can be displayed in all of its Glory. So in order to learn the lessons that all disciples must learn, we must be experientially reduced to total dust-level helplessness. Our self-life must truly die and be taken out of the picture. We must begin at zero…so God places us into the impossibility of our inherited Death…and transforms it into a ‘birth canal’ that will lead us beyond and into the Eternal Life God has waiting for us at the other end of the process.
This is the true wisdom of the Cross. The Cross eliminates all unholy mixtures and only what is of God remains. Only when we see the purpose of the Cross will we be able to truly grasp our true human condition, and allow ourselves to be completely purged and delivered from humanity’s ‘I shall be as God’ delusional insanity.
That’s why even as Abraham was enjoying the elation of finally having Isaac, his promised son, alive and standing before him, God’s Word suddenly stepped in and demanded that Abraham give him back. This reduced Abraham’s hopes and dreams that his natural flesh would have instinctively put into Isaac. God brought that back all the way back to zero…back to the death state level. Abraham had to give his beloved son back to God. Isaac was a created gift from God. But He was not God, not The Source, nor the Fulfillment. So Isaac had to be wrenched from Abraham’s heart, hopes and expectations, so that Abraham’s faith and expectations would be firmly, perpetually fixed on God and His Word alone. Abraham had to learn to die to hoping in anything but God…So his eyes would always remain on God’s living Word…forever.
Isaac had to learn the same thing. Yes, he was the son of God’s promise to Abraham. But in himself, he too was as dead and helpless as dust. So Isaac had to die to looking to himself and trusting in the created things God had promised to give him and to his own devices and in anything else that was created. He had to learn to look to God alone, at all times, for all things. And when Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses finished their boot camp training, and entered into God’s awesome Perfect, Eternal Rest and All-Sufficient grace, for real…God began to reveal the Resurrection Glory on the other side…the glorious, perfect, living fulfillment of His Word that can only come from the Living God of Abraham.
Following God’s Pattern, this revelation of the All Sufficiency of the Fullness contained in His living Word, emerged from with the utter helplessness of their crucified flesh. It came forth from the Resurrection side, the Heavenly side of the Cross. That Pattern is the only way we can we get in touch with the Eternal Kingdom of Heaven. We must first pass through the ‘birth canal’ of our death to Death. We will only find what we seek and desperately need, coming to us from God, who abides in eternity, on the Resurrection side of our Cross. Then we too will receive the knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven…the knowledge that what we really need has nothing whatever to do with anything in this fallen world that is created by false, God-less idols (Matthew. 13:10-17). And so the Seed of the Life of the Word of God began to work in them…and eventually, God revealed His beloved Son to the rest of the living death world…through their yielded, crucified flesh!
This is what disciple training boot camp is all about. It transforms radically independent ‘civilians’ who have exempted themselves from obedience to God’s Word…into the Word’s very image and likeness. They know Him in the fellowship of His Resurrection because they first come to know Him in the fellowship of His sufferings. Their demonic, Sin-generated self-life delusions and all their faith and hope in temporary, created things must first be dealt with. The Serpent’s Lie and what it causes must die in all of us. And we must die to it, in spirit and in truth. But that proves to be excruciating to our fallen flesh. What must die is what the fallen world system insists is most dear, precious and beneficial to human beings. The world conditions us to believe in living death and to put all of our hope and trust in it. That is what is most natural, instinctual and familiar to us. And that’s why its pull is always tugging at us, trying to get us to revert to its familiarity!
So, fallen flesh never surrenders its innate agendas and cravings voluntarily. It never occurs to us to do that on our own initiative. God’s Word has to invade our space and confront and warn us of what is really involved and at stake. Then, if our hearts and minds open up to His Truth, He ‘conscripts’ or ‘drafts’ us into His service and put us in a position where we will have no other choice but to submit to His requirement of total repentance. So in the beginning, He seeks us out, like He did Adam and Eve before us. Any relationship that dead, helpless, condemned dust can have with Almighty God, will always be initiated by His living Word when He sends Him to come after us. And not only must He begin that relationship…He must also protect and maintain it and bring it, step by step, to its ultimate and eternal completion:
“You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you” (John 15:16)
And just as Adam and Eve once did, we too hide from Him. We try to get lost amid the crowds of the other living dead people that are all around us. But He comes after us and picks us out and summons us by name. Then He says, “Follow Me!”
We Must Hear and Obey His Call
And once we hear and obey His call – life as we knew it in the past is over. We know in our heart that violence will be done to what we hold most dear and that our comfort zones are going to be destroyed. And we know that the Word of God is going to require us to follow Him into brand new territory and the unprecedented, never before experienced crucifixion of what we hold most dear. He will lead us back to the actual experience of our total death state…the state we have denied and for which we substituted the false label of, ‘MY LIFE’. It was never actually ‘life.’ It has always been just the opposite…Death:
“And He was saying to them all, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save HIS life will lose it, but whoever loses HIS life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.” (Luke9:23-24 Emphasis added.)
“As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments, ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’ And he said to Him, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth up.’ Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, ‘One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.’ But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property.” (Mark 10:17-22)
Fallen flesh must die to the demonic delusion of ‘self-life.’ We must wake up out of our hypnotic, Serpent-induced trance that convinces us that, at least in part, our lives can be radically independent of God’s Word. When He summons us, we must follow our Lord and Master out of demonic Darkness and Delusion and into the Light of His eternal Reality and Truth…where He is our ALL in all. And that is why the Lie of the Serpent and the living death trance into which it imprisons us…must DIE. It must be crucified and killed and stripped from us by the Truth of God’s uncreated living Word. He alone is the only Source of all created Life. And we must allow Him to reforge and reconfigure and realign us to His image and likeness, so that we can truly LIVE…ETERNALLY!
Abraham had to give back what was most precious to him. Isaac had to be ready to offer himself totally as a sacrifice to God! And Jacob had to be detoxified of his controlling nature and self-serving addictions. So God used his wily uncle Laban as an instrument for his crucifixion. And that was followed by Jacob being forced to face his angry, vengeful brother Esau, who had promised to kill him! And that stage of his crucifixion had to be followed by having his beloved Rachel die and laboring under the assumption that God had allowed his favorite son Joseph to be killed by a wild animal!
In each instance, these fathers of the faith followed God’s living Word, Yeshua, into the Reality of His crucifixion and death. They followed and joined Him in it, even before His incarnation took place. They allowed Him to break every bit of self-life in them and to teach them the lessons of Eternity that all of His true, authentic disciples must learn. The Boot Camp trains all those that enter it, to become impervious and immune to the allure of the Serpent’s worldly bait and the deadly barbs concealed within it. Disciples are taught to hold their God-given Ground of Truth and Reality at all costs…it is the Ground contained within God’s living and written Word. This is what was restored to them. And they will be drilled and drilled and drilled until they become conditioned to keep their eyes trained and focused on God’s Word and His Eternal Covenant Faithfulness. Then, regardless of what may happen, they will not be pulled off of the Ground of the Covenant promises God made to us all and which He sealed in the Blood of His own Word, the Lamb of God! They will be trained until their faith is as airtight and eternal as is the nature of the God upon whom they are learning to place their trust. And nothing of this world, nothing that is temporary, will be able to lure them off of the Ground of Eternity that makes them one with their Master…God’s Living All-Sufficient Word. (See Ephesians 6:10-20)
Boot Camp trains disciples to trust and believe God even when their situations appear impossible and hopeless and even when it seems as if God has disappeared and abandoned them completely. They learn to hold their ground by faith in His Perfection, rather than by what they see and feel through their fallen intellects and senses. They learn to do this under the most excruciating combat conditions. Even in the darkness of the tomb of the living dead…the trainees must learn to wait upon God…and stand their ground…and wait to hear His Voice…so that when He calls, they will be ready to follow Him out of the tomb…and into the Glory of His Eternal Life and Light.
“…He cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus *said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go!’” (John 11:43b-44)
This is why God’s living Word had to become flesh. From eternity past, our Eternal Blood Covenant Representative had to be the first to enter and learn the lessons of the Boot Camp that awaits all the rest of us. In His perfect, Sin-less humanity, He had to be sent from His Home in Eternity…to enter our time and space earthly human life. As our Representative, He had lead the rest of us into the Crucifixion and Death of all fallen flesh. He was the ‘Azazel’, the ‘Scapegoat’, the ‘Substitute Lamb’ the ‘Peace Offering,’ the Perfect Covering that saved us from ourselves. He has to lead. And we must learn to follow the Last Adam into perfect trust in God alone. And we too will learn to do it in the Boot Camp that teaches disciples to allow the living Word of God to do the impossible…as He lives and works from within our crucified flesh. Yeshua, our Eternal Covenant Representative and High Priest stands before God…AS US! That is why He was not exempt from having to go through what our fallen flesh must go through. He represented us in the midst of it and made Perfect Atonement to God’s Perfect Justice and Righteousness for all that we allowed Sin to do to us as a race and as individuals. Now it is our glory and privilege to stand before the rest of the world…as His image and likeness, and to speak and act and pray to God…in His Name!
Transformation Begins at Zero
Because He came to represent us, everything in His perfect Sin-less Humanity had to be reduced to zero…crucified…and executed. Even He, who is the eternal Source of all Life, had to die to Death in our name, so that those of us who follow Him could have an open way to Total Deliverance. So He was rendered unable to do anything for Himself, by Himself. He too was crucified and executed. This is the Death and Resurrection pattern of God’s Eternal Salvation. What is decapitated and dead and separated from God’s Life-giving Eternal Living Word can never be saved or improved. It is already lost. It is living Death! So all that it is and does must decrease in us…all the way to zero…to death so that what remains can only come to us from God Almighty Himself who awaits us on the Resurrection side of the Cross. Once we have crossed over from Death to Eternal Life, in Spirit and in Truth, our Exodus is complete. And then we can freely follow our Master into His Eternal Kingdom…as His true image and likeness:
“Pilate came out again and *said to them, “Behold, I am bringing Him out to you so that you may know that I find no guilt in Him.” Jesus then came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate *said to them, ‘Behold, the Man!’ So when the chief priests and the officers saw Him, they cried out saying, ‘Crucify, crucify!’ Pilate *said to them, ‘Take Him yourselves and crucify Him, for I find no guilt in Him.’ The Jews answered him, ‘We have a Law, and by that Law He ought to die because He made Himself out to be the Son of God.” (John 19:4-7 Emphasis added.)
“…After this, Jesus, knowing that all things had already been accomplished, to fulfill the Scripture, said, ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there; so they put a sponge full of the sour wine upon a branch of hyssop and brought it up to His mouth. Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, ‘IT IS FINISHED!’ And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.” (John 19:28-30 Emphasis added.)