We learned in Genesis that Sin is the state of being in rebellion against and disobedience to God and His living, creating and sustaining Word and Holy Spirit. This rejection of God takes place when, just like the Serpent, we exalt, adore and, yes, actually worship ourselves!
Genesis 3:4-5
“The serpent said to the woman, ‘You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and YOU will be LIKE GOD, knowing good and evil!’” (Emphasis added.)
Sin separates us from our true Life Source; it ‘decapitates’ us from the Word’s Authority, and thus separates us from our true Head. It locks us into a false, grossly limited view of who God is, and outrageously over-inflates our idea of what we are. Thus we lose sight of our real future outcomes and of the Horizon, to which God sent His Word and Spirit to restore us. But unless we see, embrace and own God’s Horizon, our range of perception, capability and our experiences will not reach the point where new God-ordained knowledge and experience can become real to us, in us and through us.
God’s Horizon reveals the actual realm of Divine Reality and Truth that He has created and in which He and those who are His, enjoy and abide together. That’s why allowing Sin to separate us from our Head is so devastating. The Word is our very Life. He is everything to us and when we are not united as one with Him, then spiritually speaking, we become as ‘the living dead’. And we’re forced to try to find alternate ‘sources’, we make ‘false gods’ out of created things that we choose for ourselves as our sources of provision and well being. Thus we enthrone our own self-devised autonomy and exalt it in the place that only the real, living God deserves.
That is idolatry…the worship of false gods which we exalt in our hearts in place of the one true God. You will see that this is the major issue between God and the human race throughout Scripture. The result that follows such incredibly deluded, self-destructive foolishness is, of course, Death! After that, everything about us comes out of Death and leads back to Death.
Genesis 3:17-19
“Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it,’ 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 tells us that this cataclysmic tragedy blew the entire human race out of the glorious Horizon of God…the Horizon in which His living Word is Preeminent over all things and is All in all. But, through Adam, our original covenant representative, the Serpent managed to lure the human race into decapitating itself from the true Head and the only Source of whatever is real, true and good…God’s living Word. In doing that, humanity departed from God’s Horizon of Truth and Reality and ‘migrated,’ following the Serpent into the unreality and insanity that prevail in his realms of Darkness.
So, we’re born dead. And the issue in Scripture is that God commands all living dead humans to return to God on the terms of His Truth and Reality, and allow Him to restore us to true Eternal Life. And unless we do submit to God’s Authority and Truth and allow Him to intervene and impart the Salvation that His Word made flesh was sent to be for us, we will remain trapped in our original dead enemy-of-God state. And we will languish and live out our miserable mortally wounded, broken existences on Earth doomed to a desolate eternity trapped in satanic Darkness. And while we finish our futile and frustrating existence in this world, we’ll be completely dominated and enslaved by the Serpent and his unreality, filled with falsehood…living out his evil agenda of destruction and Death.
In a real sense, that departure from union with God’s Word was mankind’s first exodus. By rejecting God’s Word and departing from His Kingdom, mankind left the Horizon of God and the Light of His Word. And we descended into the God-less realms of the Serpent’s Darkness. Sin destroyed our beautiful image and likeness of God human nature and grossly deformed and mortally wounded us. And now, the human race is far removed from what it was when God first created our first parents. What we are now is the creation of the Serpent’s insanity and destructive rebellion.
Discerning God’s Creation From Satan’s Counterfeit
The Serpent’s never ending agenda is to keep us separated from God’s Life-giving Word. As long as he manages to keep us trapped in our delusional state of ‘living death,’ we will not be saved from his coils and his eternal fate of doom. He will continue to ‘lord’ it over us and prevent us from being restored and made right and acceptable to our Holy, Righteous God. God is our one and only Designer, Creator and Sustainer. That is Absolute Truth! So even though we live as His rebellious enemies, and ignore and disobey Him, He still remains our only true Source and Sustainer. Only by Him and His creative Power can we do or have or be anything. By His grace, we continue to exist. So we must repent of our rebellion and idolatrous independence from Him before we can be restored to true humanity and realize our true Ultimate Purpose and fulfill our nature. But to fall short of that will ensure our eternal doom!
Exodus 34:11-17
“Be sure to observe what I am commanding you this day: behold, I am going to drive out the Amorite before you, and the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite. Watch yourself that you make no covenant with the inhabitants of the land into which you are going, or it will become a snare in your midst. But rather, you are to tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and cut down their Asherim —for you shall not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God— otherwise you might make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land and they would play the harlot with their gods and sacrifice to their gods, and someone might invite you to eat of his sacrifice, and you might take some of his daughters for your sons, and his daughters might play the harlot with their gods and cause your sons also to play the harlot with their gods. You shall make for yourself no molten gods.” (Emphasis added.)
Because all descendants of Adam inherit the terrible damage that Sin did to human nature, we are all born into that broken, living death spiritually ‘decapitated’ state. Thus we are born with terrible inherent neediness that we instinctively try to fill by seeking alternative sources of provision, protection and well being that do not really exist! The rest of Creation is as wounded, broken and bankrupt as we are! So our real need is to receive God’s Reconciliation, Redemption, Salvation and Restoration. We must all turn to Him, so that His living Word and Holy Spirit can restore us to His true ‘image and likeness of God’ level of humanity. We must receive from Him whatever is needed to reconcile us to Him so that He can apply the redemption, cleansing, regeneration, provision and restoration He knows we must have to be what He originally intended, designed and created us to be. Only God knows the depths of our true condition and what He has to do to restore us. Only He has the wisdom, ability, authority and power to do what must be done. In our Sin-damaged state, we do not have a clue as to what Sin is and what it has done to us. In that sense, we’re as helpless and clueless as a corpse with no head:
John 3:1-3
“Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; this man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, ‘Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.’ Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’”
This utterly profound and essential Salvation can only come from the real God, through His living Word and Holy Spirit. For us, Salvation is not an option; it is an absolute necessity! God, in His Perfect Wisdom, Order, Justice and Righteousness, commands us all to allow Him to save us from the Serpent’s Sin and eternal condemnation. His Word has come to restore us completely. There is only one way by which we can be saved…God’s way…through the perfection and authority of His living Word’s finished Work of redemptive Blood Atonement. He will freely apply it to all who come to Him and receive it, on His terms.
Psalm 119: 80-82
“May my heart be blameless in Your statutes, so that I will not be ashamed. My soul languishes for Your Salvation (Yeshua); I wait for Your Word. My eyes fail with longing for Your Word, while I say, “When will You comfort me?” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
John 14:5-7
“Thomas said to Him, ‘Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on (now that you know who I am) you know Him, and have seen Him.’” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
When we repent of our state of decapitation and rebellion, God willingly applies His Word’s Salvation to us through the agency and power of His Holy Spirit. This is why God chose the family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be the instrument through which the Word, who is our Salvation, could appear on Earth and do God’s Work of restoring His Creation to its intended Perfection. God’s living Word is the True Head and Source of all of Creation. And because God deals with us exclusively through His Word, the Word is also our Atonement, Redemption, Salvation and Restoration.
1 Corinthians 1:29-31
“…so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us Wisdom from God, and Righteousness and Sanctification, and Redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord!” (Emphasis added.)
The Word’s Essential Mission of Reconciliation
The Word became flesh and appeared in our midst as Israel’s Messiah (The Anointed One) for this very purpose. Yeshua came as the Ultimate Servant of God and of God’s Creation. And Israel, and all those who will allow God to graft them into the Root of Israel’s spiritual Commonwealth, are chosen to serve with Him as co-servants, embodying and expediting the Word’s mission of Reconciliation, Redemption and Salvation with the rest of mankind. Because God’s Word became flesh and is truly one of us, He is legally able to serve as our Blood Covenant Representative and intercessory Eternal High Priest before God and His Creation. Only the Word contains in Himself the Truth and Reality and Authority and Righteousness we lack when we’re conceived and born into this world. God creates, sustains, and protects us through His living Word. He also reveals Himself to us through the same living Word. And He saves and restores us and gives us what we lack, through His Word. Without the Word, we cannot be, or do, or have, anything. As long as we remain apart from Him, trying to maintain a false, ‘home made’ identity and agenda of our own…we remain dead!
First God sent His Word to Abraham and his family so He could forge them into this redemptive instrument. Then through them He deals with the rest of the human race. This is what the books of Genesis and Exodus tell us. God dealt first with Israel. And through Israel, God dealt with Egypt, thus revealing the pattern the rest of mankind must follow in order to be saved. Exodus chronicles and unpacks for us the essence of this world-redeeming pattern and its workings.
In the days of Moses, the time had come for God to separate His chosen people from the Egyptian nation that embodied the Serpent’s radically independent, idolatrous arrogance and kept them enslaved for several generations. God sent His living word to free Israel from slavery to the pharaoh…but more importantly, to free her from the coils of the Serpent and the living death into which all men, Jews and Gentiles alike, are born. Through Israel, His chosen servant, God began to reveal Himself and His ways to the pharaoh and the rest of his people. And from that initial example, the rest of the world can know what to expect.
Salvation, On God’s Terms
So now, thanks to Genesis and Exodus, God has spoken and revealed His Truth and Reality to the human race. He has set the terms for our Salvation. And we have all been fairly warned of the Judgment that is to come at the end of this temporary time and space existence. The culminating climax that the Last Days will usher in is much closer today than it was in the time of Moses. So it behooves everyone of this current generation to realize that the time for us to give an accounting to our Creator is very near…and God in His eternal Perfection does not change. We are the ones who must repent and allow God to change and transform us into His image and likeness, while there is still time for that to happen. That is why the summons of God’s Word for us to ‘follow’ Him is so urgent. We must draw everything we are going to need, from Him:
“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. 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.
Matthew 11:25-30
“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.’”
When the revelation contained in God’s Torah was given to Egypt’s pharaoh, he repeatedly refused to accept, believe and obey God’s Word. And God, in His patient mercy, gave him multiple chances to reconsider. He confronted and warned him again and again, through the plagues and calamities that battered his realm. God gave him repeated opportunities to repent and back down from his rebellious stance…and release his grip on Israel…to no avail:
Exodus 11
Now the Lord said to Moses, “One more plague I will bring on Pharaoh and on Egypt; after that he will let you go from here. When he lets you go, he will surely drive you out from here completely. Speak now in the hearing of the people that each man ask from his neighbor and each woman from her neighbor for articles of silver and articles of gold.” The Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Furthermore, the man Moses himself was greatly esteemed in the land of Egypt, both in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants and in the sight of the people.
Moses said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘About midnight I am going out into the midst of Egypt, and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of the pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; all the firstborn of the cattle as well. Moreover, there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt, such as there has not been before and such as shall never be again. But against any of the sons of Israel a dog will not even bark, whether against man or beast, that you may understand how the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.’ All these your servants will come down to me and bow themselves before me, saying, ‘Go out, you and all the people who follow you,’ and after that I will go out.” And he went out from Pharaoh in hot anger.
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that My wonders will be multiplied in the land of Egypt.” Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh; yet the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the sons of Israel go out of his land.” (Emphasis added.)
God intended for all of Israel to serve as His holy priestly nation. They were to minister to God as His Covenant friends and Family members and pronounce His blessings upon the rest of the human race. But many of them refused to serve God’s living Word in that capacity. So God later chose one of their tribes, the tribe of Levi, to represent the rest of Israel and perform the priestly functions in their name:
Numbers 3:12-13
“Now, behold, I have taken the Levites from among the sons of Israel instead of every firstborn, the first issue of the womb among the sons of Israel. So the Levites shall be Mine. For all the firstborn are Mine; on the day that I struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, I sanctified to Myself all the firstborn in Israel, from man to beast. They shall be Mine; I am the Lord.” (Emphasis added.)
Deuteronomy 10:8-9
“At that time, the Lord set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the ark of the Covenant of the Lord, to stand before the Lord to serve Him and to bless in His name until this day. Therefore, Levi does not have a portion or inheritance with his brothers; the Lord is his inheritance, just as the Lord your God spoke to him.)” (Emphasis added.)
Just as the fallen flesh of most of the Israelites continued to rebel, so will that of most of the fallen world and its humanistic, idolatrous system rebel. So God’s choice of the Levitical Priesthood is a revelation of the coming Messiah, the Word of God Himself. Because God’s commands to Israel are impossible for them, in their Sin-corrupted condition to fulfill, God is revealing that He Himself, through His Word made flesh, will have to do all of the necessary work.
And this is carried forward into the New Covenant era…at the end of which everything God has said will be fulfilled by His living Word, to Perfection. But He will include His New Covenant disciples…His living Body on Earth. He will be their true Head, and they will be His true Embodiment through the Power of the Holy Spirit. And together, as one, everything will be fulfilled and restored to Perfection:
Isaiah 66:1-2
“Thus says the Lord: ‘Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a House you could build for Me? And where is a place that I may rest? For My hand made all these things, thus all these things came into being,’ declares the Lord. ‘But to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My Word.” (Emphasis added.)
So in this day of the New Covenant, the disciples who follow the living Word of God made flesh (Yeshua, the risen Messiah) are commissioned and equipped by the indwelling Holy Spirit to fulfill God’s changeless desire to abide with His people and interact with them in an awesome, unique and intensely personal way:
1 Peter 2:4-12
“And coming to Him as to a living stone which has been rejected by men, but is choice and precious in the sight of God, you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual House for a holy (New Covenant) priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For this is contained in Scripture:
“Behold, I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious corner stone,
And he who believes in Him will not be disappointed.”“This precious value, then, is for you who believe (and obey); but for those who disbelieve (and therefore disobey),
“The stone which the builders rejected, This became the very cornerstone,”
“and,
“A stone of stumbling and a rock of offense”; for they stumble because they are disobedient to the Word, and to this doom they were also appointed.
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of Darkness into His marvelous Light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
“Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Points to Ponder As We Consider What We See In Exodus:
1. God is revealing that He will always separate the Light of His Word and what belongs to His Word, from the demonic Darkness and from those who have given themselves to it. He always sets Righteousness apart from whatever is Sin-corrupted. He removes what contains the Life that His Word gives, from what is trapped within Sin’s living death. He takes His Peace and Order away from the chaos, turmoil and destruction caused among men by the demonic powers. This separation takes place continually, not only all across the Earth, but throughout the heavenly realms of the universe. And this is what begins to take place in Exodus – the Separation by God, of His Light from the Serpent’s Darkness, starting with Israel.
2. Because God knew that the pharaoh was not going to repent and obey Him, God used him as an example for the rest of the world. And because Israel belonged to Him and had a God-given purpose, He summoned her to come out of Egypt and its slavery to Darkness. This was a second Exodus that was to undo and reverse the exodus the Serpent orchestrated when he deceived his fellow angels and Eve and Adam and all their offspring. He got them all to leave God’s Horizon and decapitate themselves spiritually from their Source of Life. Thus God shows to us all, the pattern we must follow in order to receive our Salvation. The process that led to demonic arrogance, pride and self-worship and self-exaltation must be reversed and killed by the total denial and crucifixion of radically independent self-exaltation and a total return to image and likeness union with and obedience to our awesome Creator. Only when God’s people make this Exodus out of the Serpent’s Darkness and back into the Light of His Heavenly Horizon and obedience to His Word can God begin to forge them back into His image and likeness. Then, they can become part of the True Remnant of Israel, serving as God’s instruments of Salvation. They will serve Him, by serving all the others who are yet to be saved.
3. And although the Serpent and his slaves refuse to obey God and cooperate in His plan of Salvation, despite their rebellion and resistance, God can and does break their hold on any human who will heed His Word and follow Him out of the Serpent’s Darkness. As long as we are doing what the living and written Word of God commands us to do, there is nothing the powers of Darkness can do to maintain their original hold on us. But our continued disobedience to God’s Word is what provides them with the legal hold they need to keep us enslaved. Whoever repents and begins to obey God’s Word can no longer be enslaved by the Serpent. He loses his former legal hold on them. This is how God’s Word sets us free.
4. The centuries of free slave labor that Egypt forced out of Israel’s children proved to be anything but free. God compelled Egypt to repay its former slaves in full…with sizable interest. God in His Perfection will always see to it that everything will be made right. No one will get away with anything in the end. So the payment Egypt was forced to make served as the ‘dowry’ for Israel, the Bride of God’s living Word. Note this well: there is Perfect Order, Justice and Righteousness in God and His Kingdom. In the End, whatever is brutally evil, unjust, corrupt and deranged in the horizon of Darkness is going to be made perfectly whole and orderly and set right within the Horizon of God, by the Absolute Authority of His living Word and the Power of His Holy Spirit (See Isaiah 61; Revelation 21, 22).
5. Although the pharaoh was blind and deaf to the Reality and Truth of God’s living Word as presented to him by the Word’s disciple, Moses – God’s work was not hindered. His Name and Fame began to spread far and wide throughout that whole region. After the plagues afflicted Egypt, the God of Abraham became well known, greatly feared and highly respected by many pagan idolaters throughout that entire ‘Fertile Crescent’ area of the Mid- East. (See Deuteronomy 4:1-8; Numbers 22:2-6; Joshua 2:8-13) What the Word of Israel’s God was doing to Egypt was spectacular and mind-blowing enough to ensure that His fame would multiply and belief in His Reality and Truth would increase in the minds and hearts of many pagan peoples and would spread far and wide. Only God knows how many idolatrous pagan Gentiles feared and believed and were drawn to God and to repentance and salvation. But through this, we learn how God works. We see that through Israel and what He does with and through her, God continually speaks and reveals Himself and communicates with and reaches out to the rest of the world. And nothing the Serpent tries to do can stop Him. No matter what Satan does, God uses it and turns it against him. Thus God’s process of Redemption and Retribution continues with invincible inevitability.
6. And we will also learn something about the significance of the ‘Firstborn’ in the mind and plans of God. The firstborn son, in the world of the Bible, had great significance and special position. He was given the place of authority over the rest of the family and was trained and required to assume a special place of preeminence over them. The firstborn received a double portion of the father’s inheritance. And now, God is revealing that within His Family of nations across the Earth, Israel is, and always will be, His ‘Firstborn.’ So in a very real sense, a Biblical Hebraic Blood Covenant sense, whatever is done to or for Israel, is done to or for her Covenant God, for she represents God and His Authority over the entire family of nations. It is the function and responsibility of the firstborn to continue to maintain unity, peace, cooperation and cohesiveness among all the siblings and their respective families. So the death of Egypt’s firstborn and the Passover redemption of Israel’s firstborn in Exodus 12 is a revelation of the true Remnant of Israel that will ultimately prevail and govern all the families of the earth at the very end of time. (See Revelation 21. There the living Word of God (The Ultimate Passover Lamb) will rule over all of Creation…with and through His Remnant…the obediently faithful disciples of God’s living Word.)
7. Those who embrace, believe and obey God’s living and written Word have the advantage of knowing the end of the Story of God’s Invasion into the realm of Darkness. It is this advance knowledge, given by the infinitely True and Credible and Reliable living Word of God and sealed in His Covenant Blood and ratified by His awesome Resurrection and Ascension into Eternal Glory, that His disciples are guaranteed ultimate and total Triumph when the story has finally run its course to the ultimate, eternal conclusion.
“I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire (the Fruit of My Perfect Finished Work) so that you may become rich, and white garments (of My Righteousness that I give to you) so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve (Holy Spirit Wisdom) to anoint your eyes so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears (and obeys) My voice and opens the door (surrenders his heart, soul and will), I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. He who overcomes (perseveres to the end), I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’” (Revelation 3:18-22 Amplification and emphasis added.)
The Total Separation Process Of Israel From Egypt Begins…
Genesis 1:3-4
“Then God said, ‘Let there be Light’; and there was light. God saw that the Light was good; and God separated the Light from the Darkness.” (Emphasis added.)
Within God’s eternal Kingdom and its Horizon, God reigns as the one and only true God and the only Source for whatever is real, true and good. Everything in God’s Horizon is in accord with His Perfect Nature. Everything is a reflection, or an image and likeness of His Truth, Reality and Perfection. All of God’s Heavenly creatures are made to abide in perfect alignment with God’s Truth and Nature. And when these conditions exist, the one true living God reigns supreme in all of His Glory and He justly receives all acknowledgement worship and praise from His creatures. And in the end, this is the state in which they will abide together with God, sharing in His Glory. They will be as one with God forever.
But the Serpent, the father of lies, refuses to acknowledge and worship His Creator and God. The absolute Preeminence that only belongs to the one true God is the very thing he desires to have for himself. So he rebelled even before the Creation of the time and space universe took place. And he convinced a third of his fellow angels to follow him instead of following God’s living Word! That was the original Exodus…the tragic descent from God’s Horizon of Light and Glory…into the Serpent’s realm of self-glorifying Darkness. The father of lies presumed to reign as God. But there is not a shred of Truth in his claims; nor is there any hope of success for his God-less agendas. He can only rule over what is unreal. He rules over the insanity of his dark horizon in which he continually pursues his own radically independent self-glorification. But he is powerless to change what is True or to have any real, lasting effect on God’s Reality!
No Compromise
And God makes it known right from the beginning of Genesis that there can be no compromise, no mixture of His Truth with the Serpent’s Unreality, none of God’s Good is to be mixed with Evil, none of God’s Truth can coexist with the Serpent’s lies. Spirit cannot abide together with fallen flesh. So God separates the Light of His Truth whose Fullness is contained in His living Word and Holy Spirit, from whatever unreal alternative the father of lies and those who labor under his delusions may try to concoct. If a creature is not truly living and operating according to the true Nature of the living God who is the only true Source of Reality, then in God’s sight it is evil, unrighteous and will never be allowed in His Presence or be part of His Kingdom of Light.
This is the eternal issue, the war, the conflict between Light and Darkness, Truth and Delusion, Life and Death and Righteousness and Sin. Satan and his hordes made the original exodus from Light into Darkness; and now God sends His living Word to the human race. Mankind is conceived and born into that Darkness and remains enslaved by the delusional alternate reality of the father of lies, the Serpent. And the Word summons us to follow Him out of our state of living death so that He can lead us back into the Exodus that reverses the works of the Serpent and frees us from his Sin-corrupted horizon. He leads us back into the Light-filled Horizon of God’s Eternal Kingdom. This is what it means to leave ‘Egypt’ and cross over into God’s ‘Israel.’
The Serpent took it upon himself to deceive our first parents. He got them to mistrust God and suspect His intentions toward them. He got them to take matters into their own hands and appropriate for themselves, the authority and dominion that rightfully belong, exclusively, to the one and only true God. They rejected their Light-filled, God-reflecting image and likeness level of humanity into which God created them, and began to strive to see, think, act, react and interact as radically independent agents, gods in their own right, autonomous, self-fulfilling and self-indulgent. They became their own center and source and created an alternate ‘Dark Horizon’ in which they focused exclusively on themselves and their attempts to try to own and run their own lives. That is how the Serpent captivated and trapped them in his coils and got them to begin to serve as his ‘image and likeness.’ And this is how the human race remains entrapped within his God-condemned realm of Darkness.
God’s response to the Serpent’s rebellion and self-adoring disobedience is to completely undo and destroy all of his works. The Serpent strives to exalt and worship his radically independent self and impose his God-rejecting lifestyle on his deluded slaves. From that mindset and attitude flow the urges of self-glorification, self-absorption, self-pity, self-assertion, self-reliance, self-protection, etc., etc., etc. But God sends His living Word after deluded human slaves to self – to pierce and penetrate them with His unchanging Truth and make them aware of His Reality. He does this in order to cut the coils of the Serpent away from their innermost being and set them free…to follow Him out of Darkness and Death…and into God’s Kingdom of Light and eternal Life. He did this with Israel first. And the rest of the world is commanded to join in with them and follow God’s Word with them.
The Gospel Of Salvation Begins In Genesis
This must take place with all of humanity. This is what Genesis and Exodus are telling us. This is the Gospel of Salvation that Moses, the prophets and the Messiah and His apostles continually proclaimed! Since Adam fell into Sin, we are all born citizens of the Serpent’s ‘Egypt.’ And God’s living Word will lead whoever hears His voice and submits to His Authority out of the Serpent’s self-life world which is the horizon of Darkness and Death. God’s Word intends to take us out of that and back into God’s Horizon, the Kingdom where God’s people serve as the image and likeness of His living Word, and abide with God as the Eternal Temple of His indwelling Holy Spirit, and share in Almighty God’s eternal Life, Righteousness, Glory and Fullness.
The living Word of God became one of us to serve as our Blood Covenant Representative and High Priest. He has accomplished our full Atonement and Redemption and makes them available to every child of Adam who will believe and obey and follow Him to where He must lead those whom He redeems and saves:
Romans 10:8-13
“But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, that if you confess with your mouth Jesus AS LORD, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says: “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, abounding in riches for all who call on Him; for “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Emphasis added.)
It’s not enough to ask the Lord to be our Savior. Unless He becomes our Lord first, He has no basis upon which to ‘save’ us. He has to save us from ourselves…from our own self-life! So it does no good for people to go through the motions of worshiping and acknowledging superficially the one true God in an attempt to improve, ‘spiritualize’, ‘save’ and perpetuate their self-life way of seeing, thinking and living. Religious activity and lip service do not constitute a true exodus from the Serpent’s horizon of Sin and Death. Radically independent self tries to become ‘acceptable’ by hiding beneath religious disguises. But that won’t qualify it to pass successfully through the Fire of God’s Judgment. The pathetic rags beneath which self tries to hide simply burn away and then the true nakedness of fallen flesh and the Serpent’s lies and self-indulging agendas are exposed, condemned, and rejected. We cannot improve or sanctify rebellious self and be saved. To be saved, we must totally deny and forsake it and leave it behind in favor of God’s living Word. He, our true Creator, must be our Lord and Master…with no competition or resistance or interference from anything that He has created!
The true Exodus which the Torah speaks about is one that is made internally, in our heart of hearts. It is when we acknowledge, embrace and obey the Truth and Reality of the one true living God, as revealed to us by His living and written Word, and made real and alive in our hearts by His Holy Spirit that shows us the Way out of Egypt and into God’s Kingdom. It is when our radically independent self-life is truly forsaken in our heart and mind and will. It is when we agree with Almighty God against our Sin-corrupted, self-glorifying flesh and surrender all of that to Him so that He can join it to the atoning death of His beloved Son, the Word made flesh who became Sin on our behalf, and made full Atonement for it by His death on the Cross.
The Cross of our Messiah, God’s living Word, undoes and reverses the works of the Serpent and strips off all of our false fronts and deceptive disguises. Radically independent self strives to attain divinity for itself by ignoring the True God and trying to create a false reality in place of His undeniable, Eternal Truth. Thus our self-life strains and scratches and claws in an attempt to make its way ‘to the top,’ to attain ‘Perfect 10’ status and worldly glory and honor and praise for itself…while completely rejecting and bypassing the one true God and Lord of all Creation.
So to reverse and undo the works of the father of lies, the Lamb of God submitted Himself in His Perfect Humanity, to be debased, humiliated and reduced to zero on His Cross. He did it to reverse and undo the destruction caused by the Serpent’s arrogance and pride. He did it for us all, in our name. He made Perfect Atonement to God by reducing Himself all the way to zero for our sake. In that way, by humbling and reducing His Sin-less, innocent human self-life to zero, He destroyed the self-glorifying arrogance and pride and world system of the Sin-loving human slaves of the devil.
And so God’s living Word calls us to deny ourselves, pick up our own crosses and follow Him so that we can become His image and likeness, sharing in the Glory of His Resurrection – which is the only Power that can equip and steel us to endure the fellowship of His sufferings with Him as we deny ourselves, embrace our own crosses, and die with Him…daily, constantly, to prove the authenticity of our salvation and demonstrate it to the rest of mankind, as members of Israel’s True Remnant:
2 Corinthians 4:7-11
“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. For we who live are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the Life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.” (Emphasis added.)
Philippians 2:3-18
“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant (slave), and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him The Name which is above every name, so that at the Name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
“So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. Do all things without grumbling or disputing; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding fast the Word of Life, so that in the day of Christ I will have reason to glory because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain. But even if I am being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all. You too, I urge you, rejoice in the same way and share your joy with me.” (Emphasis added.)
The true Exodus is made when we allow the Cross to do its work in us, in spirit and in truth. We make our Exodus from the delusional insanity of the Serpent who strives to be a ‘Perfect 10’ by his own efforts instead of being what Almighty God created him to be. When we forsake any share in Satan’s false preeminence and self-concocted worldly ‘glory’ in order to join our Master Yeshua in His atoning self-imposed humiliation and abasement and descent to utter ‘Zero’ by His death on the Cross, the Serpent loses his grip on us and we are free to make our true Exodus from Satan’s self-life ‘Egypt’…over to God’s True image and likeness ‘Israel’.
The Cross Is Revealed Throughout The Bible
So throughout the Torah and the rest of the Bible, I urge you to look for the Cross as God continues to apply it to His own so that it can do its work…undoing and reversing the self-glorifying ways of the Serpent that have been embraced and deeply embedded within the minds, hearts and aspirations within the fallen flesh of the decapitated people of this world’s system. The Cross is meant to set us free from all of our natural fleshly, Sin-corrupted impulses and aspirations to be ‘Number One,’ to ‘make it to the top,’ to ‘be all that we can be’ in our own strength and by our own devices, apart from the one true God and His living Word and Holy Spirit. Not one speck of that will pass God’s Judgment or be allowed entry into His Kingdom and Horizon of Light and Truth. We were created to be the image and likeness of His living Word, Yeshua the Messiah of Israel. And only what pertains to Him and comes to us from Him will be accepted by our Perfect God into His Kingdom. The Cross sets us completely free for all of that. The Cross kills our ‘living death’ state…and then the Perfect Resurrection Life of our Messiah is given to us in exchange.
When we understand the utter necessity for the work of the Cross to be accomplished thoroughly and truly in us, we will understand what God is talking about throughout the entire Bible. For example in the parable our Master gave to His original Jewish disciples about the ‘wedding feast,’ He was warning them and reminding them about what Moses and his Torah had already taught to Israel and required her to teach to the rest of the world:
Matthew 22:9-14
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king (our Father) who gave a wedding feast for his son (the living Word made flesh). And he sent out his slaves (prophets and disciples) to call those (Israelites) who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come. Again he sent out other slaves saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.”’ But they paid no attention and went their way, one to his own farm, another to his business, and the rest seized his slaves and mistreated them and killed them. Go therefore to the main highways (the rest of the world), and as many as you find there (Jew and Gentile alike), invite to the wedding feast.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.
“But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes (the Righteousness that only comes when we personally share in the Lamb’s atoning crucifixion of self-life and its death), and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes? (without the covering of your Covenant Representative and Substitute as revealed in Genesis 3:21; Exodus 12; Isaiah 52:13-15 and 53 and the Gospel crucifixion accounts of My beloved Son and Revelation 2 & 3)’ And the man was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Beloved, unless the Cross of our Messiah is allowed to do its work of reducing our radically independent self-life to zero (to death), we will be stuck with our original God-rejected radically independent, God-less existence. But if we forsake that and surrender ourselves entirely to God’s Lordship and Authority, He will give us the Righteous, Pure, Eternally beloved Life of His Son in exchange for our original living death. And when He becomes our Life, and we have forsaken every other possibility, we will be in position to appear before our Creator as His beloved ‘image and likeness.’ There will be zero self-life in us…and 100% of everything about us will have come from Almighty God Himself…through His living Word and Holy Spirit!
Matthew 10:34-39
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.
“He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Emphasis added.)
John 12:22-26
“And Jesus answered them, saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal. If anyone serves Me, he must FOLLOW ME; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.” (Emphasis added.)
The more this “my risen Lord must increase in me and my self-glorifying flesh must decrease” process continues and progresses in our daily lives, the more clearly, powerfully and purely will God’s living Word appear and function in our circumstances and actions, reactions and interactions throughout each day of our lives. Beloved do not be deceived by what you see in the religious and non-religious world of this fallen ‘Egypt’ that is all around us. Much of what proclaims itself to be ‘from God’ is carnal and unreal and of no Heavenly avail. Therefore it worships false gods…and as we already know, that is part of ‘Egypt.’
There are many Jews and non-Jews who remain uncrucified, self-life people. They mix and mingle with the myriads of pagan Gentiles that are of a like mind. They all participate in and rely upon the fallen world system that is all around us. Only the Cross of our Messiah can take us out of that world, and take that world and its ways out of us! There can be no unholy mixture of worldly, self-glorifying flesh mixed with traces and hints of the true God and His living Word. With God it is all or nothing. It must be 100% purely from Him and His Word and Spirit, or He will not accept it.
Deuteronomy 6:4-5
“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.” (Emphasis added.)
Any Jew or Gentile who will be truly saved, will have to make the Exodus of the Cross…from self-life over to Messiah-Life. Nothing short of that will save us (See Romans 2).
In the days of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses, there were thousands upon thousands of false, man-made gods. And there may be even more of them today! The Serpent doesn’t care which of them you choose for yourself. Worship and serve any of them that you please…as long as it isn’t the one True God, and His living Word and Holy Spirit. But if you do worship and serve the one true God and His living Word and Holy Spirit, you must forsake all of the others. There can be no unholy mixture of Spirit and flesh, Heaven and worldliness. God and self-made man do not mix. God will never allow that so be forewarned. The Cross and its work are inevitable. It will strip self-life away from us, with or without our willing cooperation.
Do not be deceived by flesh masquerading as ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’ or any other man-made, self-adoring religion. All of that is part of the ‘Egyptian System.’ It is idolatry, the worship of self. But God demands that we all come out of that and follow His living Word and Holy Spirit into the gut-wrenching experiences we will undergo in the ‘Wilderness of Transition.’ We must not only begin our Exodus…we must also finish it! We must be prepared to follow our Master all the way across the ‘Finish Line’…all the way into His True Israel, where He and He alone possesses all the Authority…and where God and God alone receives all of the Glory, Honor, Praise, Worship and Thanksgiving.
“Then I saw a New Heaven and a New Earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud cry from the throne, saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.’
Revelation 21:1-9
“And He who sits on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ And He said, ‘Write, for these words are faithful and true.’ Then He said to me, ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son. But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.’
“Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke with me, saying, ‘Come here, I will show you the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb!” (Emphasis added.)
In future articles we will say much more concerning God’s use of the Cross in dealing with the reality of Sin and its deadly consequences. Sin and Death cannot be improved. One of the Serpent’s deadliest deceptions is to beguile people into assuming that if they learn enough or pray enough or achieve enough and alter their behavior enough or go to synagogue or church or temple or mosque enough, their earnest efforts and noble intentions will redeem, exonerate and save them! But they forget, God has already revealed to us that we’re spiritually DEAD from conception! It’s too late! We’re too far gone. Sin has killed us already…in Adam. So the only real way this living death can be dealt with, is not by trying to improve it…but by declaring bankruptcy and looking to Another…to the one who is the eternal Source of Life…God’s living Word…by the Power of His Holy Spirit, giving Life to the dead, as only God Himself could do. Only the Creator gives us our lives in the first place…and after Sin killed us spiritually and physically, only He can restore it to us. He does it by sharing His Perfect, utterly Righteous Resurrection Life and Perfect Humanity with us.
So there is no substitute for God’s living Word made flesh. We must have Yeshua and allow Him to apply the benefits of His Perfect Finished Work of Redemption to us. Nothing short of Him, no created thing will ever be able to take the place of Yeshua the Messiah – crucified and resurrected from the dead! If God had to crucify and execute and reduce the innocent, Sin-less Humanity of His beloved Son, the living Word, to absolute zero when He acted as our Human Covenant Representative, how much more will we, who are called to serve as His disciples, be required to deny our fallen flesh and its sinful desires and passions? How much more will we be required to pick up our own personal crosses…and, follow our Master into His death…forsaking our personal radical independence from Almighty God and cleaving to our Perfect Messiah thereafter?
Matthew 26:39-40
“Then He said to them, ‘My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.’
“And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.’ And He came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, ‘So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour?’”
The True Exodus is not a mere physical migration, not relocating from point A to point B. The Exodus God has in mind is the death of our state of living death…and a regeneration and rebirth that enables us to share in His Son’s eternal Resurrection Life! So with this in mind, follow along in the books of the Bible. Understand what the real issue is about which God must deal with the human race, whether it is Jewish or non-Jewish.
Romans 3:23-31
“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Where then is boasting? It is excluded. Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since indeed God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith is one. Do we then nullify the Law (the Torah) through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we establish the Law! (The Torah!)”