The Awesome Grace of Our God

In other articles, we’ve highlighted this fact: people can’t really grasp the meaning of God’s ‘Good News’ until they come to grips with the depths and dire consequences of the ‘bad news.’ So let’s ponder the following considerations in the hope that we’ll gain more insight into how bad our true state, before God, really is, so we can enter the Fullness of His marvelous, astounding, heart-melting Grace.

Romans 7:22-24

“For I joyfully concur with the Law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?”

Observe human nature carefully, and in time, despite how vehemently people proclaim otherwise, you will see the Sin-full human heart… as it really is. Regardless of which century, continent, country and culture we consider, human nature doesn’t evolve, or improve! Zebras can’t change their stripes or leopards their spots; and neither can people change what is in their innermost being. We may dress it up with superficial cosmetic adornments such as educating our minds or covering our bodies with exquisite finery and impressive trappings. We may toil to achieve exceptional academic and honorary degrees, titles and accolades to create the illusion of being ‘exceptional’ or ‘exalted’ or ‘advanced’ and ‘special.’ But even if we subject ourselves to extraordinary disciplines and rigorous training in various esoteric ‘spiritual’ pursuits and specialized skills in art, or the sciences, or spiritual phenomena, or the martial arts… what really lurks within our hearts will eventually rise to the surface, and the light of Truth will expose us.

Exposed!

Eventually, something will slip out from behind our concealments to expose and belie what our surface facades and cosmetic cover-ups once led others to assume. Sooner or later, it emerges… when our flesh is subjected to sufficient pressures, when it feels it is receiving harsh, abusive treatment and soul-grinding deprivation. All flesh becomes aroused and inflamed when it is attacked, shamed, tempted or threatened for long enough. Then it rears up and reveals its innate fury and self-adoring drives. The ‘flesh’ that Scripture talks about is the fallen human nature that we all share in common. And once it’s aroused and reaches its boiling point, all kinds of evil and destructive passions and desires spew forth and go into action. And then we reveal our true Adamic colors.

We see this repeatedly in the scandals that befall world leaders, celebrities, ‘superstars,’ and even the best, most ‘decent’ people among us are capable of descending to the depths of turning into brutal, merciless genocidal murderers! And the hyper-religious are not exempt either. Eventually, they too lose their grip and slip up and lose control. Then we see a side of them that no one suspected could be possible. Regardless of era, race, gender or creedal and philosophical trappings, sooner or later, our hearts find a way to expose us and prove that what God’s Word says about us is absolutely true:

Genesis 6:5-6

“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.” (Emphasis added.)

Jeremiah 17:9-10

“The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.” (Emphasis added.)

The sophisticated, educated, humanistic modern world scoffs at what Scripture says. Most of the world’s population ignores the Bible and, unfortunately, even many who claim that it is truly God’s Word, do not really ponder it and take it to heart. They give it superficial lip service, but mostly they feed off of worldly, man-made self-justifying sources that come primarily from fallen human intellects and their grossly limited perceptions and imaginations. But Scripture maintains that those sources are false and unreliable; they fall far short of the Truth of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So, disciples of the Word are caught between knowing, loving and obeying God, and the need they feel to get along with other people as they try to navigate through all the dangers they encounter in this fallen world.

And the closer we get to our Lord’s Return, the harder it will be for disciples of God’s Word to hold to His Truth and proclaim and defend it faithfully. We’ll endure many attacks and withering ridicule. But the Lord warned us that it would be so.

Matthew 10:22

“You will be hated by all because of My Name, but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved.”

So, in light of this, ponder what our Messiah once said about all flesh, to some hyper-religious fellow Jews who were part of Israel’s first century religious establishment. It was obvious that they did not understand what Scripture says about our nature, so this is what He told them:

Matthew 15:5-20

“But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, ‘Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,’ he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And by this you invalidated the Word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’

“After Jesus called the crowd to Him, He said to them, ‘Hear and understand. It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth; this defiles the man.’ Then the disciples came and said to Him, ‘Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?’ But He answered and said, ‘Every plant which My heavenly Father did not plant shall be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a pit!’

“Peter said to Him, ‘Explain the parable to us.’ Jesus said, ‘Are you still lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and is eliminated? But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders. These are the things which defile the man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile the man.” (Emphasis added.)

And in other texts, the Holy Spirit tells us:

John 2:24-25

“But Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, for He knew all men, and because He did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man.” (Emphasis added.)

Romans 7:17-19

“So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but Sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.” (Emphasis added.)

Beloved, we need a deep understanding of what Almighty God sees in us, and of what is really at work in the depths of our hearts. Scripture makes no exception: we all inherit this fallen, mortally wounded, enemy-of-God state of being. So whether worldly humanistic, self-righteous people like it or not, we disciples must see human nature for what it really is and admit what is at work in all of us. Salvation depends on whether or not we have an accurate awareness of the terrible disfiguring, mutilating damage that Sin and the fall of our first parents inflicted on us and our faculties and inner workings.

Lord, Give Us Eyes To See

So I urge you to ask the Holy Spirit to show all of us more about this so that God can redeem and purify us, and provide for us what we truly lack. Ask Him to show our generation more about how truly awesome God’s eternally perfect Love Nature is, as compared to what Sin and its lethal effects have made us to be! And once we receive insight into God’s nature as contrasted with ours, we’ll see the Truth – that no matter how hard we strive to conceal or make up for our condition, it is impossible for us to serve as God’s true image and likeness as long as we remain trapped in our original state! As long as we remain marooned in that natural radical independence and rebellion that we inherited from our biological parents, there is no hope; we’re lost! So we must see ourselves as we really are. Then we’ll see our desperate need for God to have mercy on us and, by His grace, come to our rescue and save us from ourselves!

Beloved, we are light years removed from the awesome glory in which God clothed our first parents in the beginning. When we see that, suddenly, a terrible chilling realization that the eternally perfect Almighty God will have to judge us by His Perfect Standards, on that terrible Day of Reckoning, will slam into us, full force! God’s lightning bolt of revelation will split our hardened hearts wide open… and we’ll see the Truth of His Majesty, and His Perfect Holiness, and Flawless, Righteous Glory, before which we are going to be judged! As soon as we see that, we’re finished! There can be no more crowing, boasting, strutting and ‘selfie posturing.’ Never again will we dare to crow about ourselves being ‘Number One!’ We won’t dare try to exalt ourselves at the expense of any other person! That God-given overwhelming blast of self-realization will blow every trace of arrogant self-reliance out of us and throw us to the ground, facedown… and all we’ll be able to say will be something like:

“My Lord and my God… I am totally bankrupt before YOU. In myself I am nothing, nor can I do any good thing in my own strength. I have no strength! O Lord God, I beg You… please have mercy on me! Put into me what You know I lack. Create a clean heart and a right spirit within me!”

Notice what happened to Job when (in chapter 42:1-6) he suddenly saw this Reality. It forced him to ‘repent in dust and ashes.’ And consider what Isaiah saw (in chapter 6:5) when he 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!”

And meditate on what Saul of Tarsus must have seen on the road to Damascus and immediately thereafter. After that, all he could do was sit in a room by himself, blind, and in total shock and stunned silence:

Acts 9:8-9

“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…” (Emphasis added.)

Before that happened, Saul would have been one of our most virulent critics, were he to hear us proclaim our Messiah and our understanding of what God was truly revealing about Him in the Torah! But after God’s bolt of revelation pierced his heart, Saul saw what God had begun to reveal to Abraham, the Father of our Faith, about His Living Word, as recorded in Genesis, and also to Isaac and Jacob and Moses. He saw that God was revealing Yeshua, our risen Messiah, and the Fullness of God that is in His Living Word, to all the prophets and to the other apostles before him, including John, the beloved apostle of Yeshua. The Holy Spirit inspired and empowered these men to forsake all of their former false idols, and attachments to this world, as they knew it, by progressively revealing Almighty God’s Living Word to them in a variety of ways. The Torah reveals what God’s Word said to Abram, and what impact that shocking revelation had on him:

Genesis 17:1-3a

“I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be blameless. I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will multiply you exceedingly… Abram fell on his face…” (Emphasis added.)

And, after the death of the Jewish New Covenant apostle Paul, God inspired his spiritual Jewish brother, the New Covenant apostle John, to write more about the Fulfillment of what His Living Word had first revealed to Israel, as recorded in the Torah. As the Holy Spirit was preparing him to write the Bible’s last book, the Book of Revelation, He gave John a fuller, even more overpowering revelation of His Living Word, the resurrected Messiah of Israel. He revealed Him as All of Creation will see Him, for all of eternity! John had to see this because he was being commissioned to assist in the preparation and training of the Lord’s Last Days disciples! Their task – our task – will be to do whatever will be necessary to provide the finishing touches on the ‘highway in the wilderness’ as prophesied by Isaiah in chapter 40! It is the long-awaited ‘point of entry’ in human history by which our risen Messiah will fulfill His promise to return physically to Earth! And just as the vision of Him overwhelmed Isaiah, so did it devastate John, even though no one had been closer to Yeshua, in the days before His Ascension, than he!

Revelation 1:12-19

“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. Therefore write the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which will take place after these things.” (Emphasis added.)

Beloved, have you received this kind of revelation yet? If you have, then you know… you know exactly what awaits all of the unsuspecting, unbelieving people around you who still assume they can be their own gods and run their own lives, and do as they please! You know the day is coming when they will be shocked and devastated by the awful realization of how grossly deluded and deceived they were throughout all of their earthly days! So now is the time for all of us to see this! By God’s grace, just as it happened to you, so must all people become aware of the gross spiritual blindness and deafness under which the fallen world system has been laboring. They must realize how much demonic deception they’ve accepted and how it has been drawing them to the edge of an eternal abyss! When they see it, they too will repent and cry out to Almighty God, their true Creator and Sustainer, to save them!

This is revelation that only God can give to us and it will always blast every delusion and pretense and impurity from our hearts. If you’ve already received it, you know that God’s awesome Reality has to hit those around you like the blast from a hydrogen bomb! Only after it hits them, will they see the horrible mutilated state from which God has to save them! And everything they currently think they know and everything they’ve been assuming… will suddenly evaporate! The glaring Light of Truth will expose and dismantle their false religion of Humanism, once and for all. It will strip away their man-adoring idolatry, and all the false gods that they previously conjured up and worshipped!

Deception Exposed

But, sad to say, even among those who call themselves ‘believers,’ much of that worldly mindset and self-sufficient smugness still remain. Here is an example of the deception that exists in Christendom:

‘The Old Testament is all about Law, but the New Testament is all about Grace. So, we don’t need Israel, or the Jewish people, or their Old Testament. God has given us His New Covenant Church and His New Testament. So we are now in the New Covenant Dispensation of Grace, which has replaced the Old Covenant Dispensation of ‘The Law.’ And, now that Jesus has fulfilled and abolished the Law, we don’t have to concern ourselves with all of that Old Testament Jewish stuff, or take it seriously. The Law is for the Jews. But for Christians, everything is about God’s grace!’

Beloved, beware of that demonic trap! All sorts of deceptions are embedded within it! We must realize that the entire Bible, every one of its books… including the Torah, (‘The Law’) and God’s Old and New Covenants with Israel that Torah reveals, are ALL about God’s Grace! From Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, everything revealed, commanded and promised, is the revelation of Grace. This is because, apart from what only Almighty God can do for us, as long as we retain our fallen state, none of us have a chance of being redeemed, restored and truly fulfilled! God chose to impart His Grace to the whole world… through the Blood Covenants He established with Israel! God’s Living Word emerged from Israel as her Messiah. And from that ‘Root’, that Israel-based starting point, God reaches out to the rest of the human race!

God gives Salvation to the world through His exclusive chosen instrument, Israel. He does everything by the absolute authority of Israel’s Messiah, who also happens to be God’s Living Creative Word and Perfect Atoning Passover Lamb, as His Father reveals Him in the Torah! Israel, and what goes on between God and her, is the God-given example and template that the rest of mankind must follow! Scripture reveals that poor little Israel is as dead and bankrupt as all the rest! Israel is God’s prime example of living death that continually messes up… and is thus always in endless need of Almighty God’s Grace! So God is showing us that He is ready to impart His Covenant Grace to the world, by the way He continually imparts it to Israel! He does this despite Israel’s endless failures and sins, AND, despite the sins of the Gentile world as well! Yeshua’s future disciple, Nicodemas, was unaware of all this when he first came to visit Yeshua at their first meeting. At that time, many Jews didn’t think God cared about saving the Gentiles; and today, many Gentiles don’t realize how much God cares about saving Israel! So this is why God’s Holy Spirit says this to both groups:

John 3:16-21

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the Name of the only begotten Son of God! This is the Judgment: that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the Darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the Truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God (by His Grace)!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)

Why Our Trust in God Can – and Must – be Airtight

God shows us, through Israel’s miraculous ability to survive the countless onslaughts from the unbelieving Gentile world, that the powers of Darkness keep throwing against her throughout the centuries, that, if Almighty God is this gracious, merciful and faithful to Israel, then the rest of the world can know that they too can trust in Him as well – solely and exclusively! No other false gods are needed! In fact, no other gods exist! This is Reality: All of mankind can safely and predictably rely upon the Grace of the one true God of Israel, by becoming part of the eternal Blood Covenant that God made with Himself. The rest of the world must realize that Israel, through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, was the first to be included in that Eternal Covenant, by God! And now, God can join the rest of the world to His Israelite Covenant Family, through Israel’s Messiah. All non-Jews, who repent of their self-life state of Sin, can turn to Israel’s Messiah and He will save and include them. And together with all truly repentant Jews, they can be part of God’s blessed Covenant Family. But, from start to finish, for Jews and non-Jews alike, it is all because of God’s awesome Grace, as given to us through His Living Word, Yeshua!

God commissioned His Word to become flesh and take on our human nature. So He placed Him into the womb of Israel, His original Covenant Nation. And He emerged, as Israel’s Messiah, to fulfill what the Torah had revealed about God’s Passover Lamb, whose Blood Atonement would set all who believed and obeyed, completely free. This is what God was revealing to Moses, when He inspired Him to write these words to His fellow Israelites:

Deuteronomy 18:15-19

“The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like (He raised) me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to Him! This is according to all that you asked of the Lord your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the Voice of the Lord my God, let me not see this great Fire anymore, or I will die.’ The Lord said to me, ‘They have spoken well. I will raise up a Prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him. It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which He shall speak in My Name, I Myself will require it of him!” (Emphasis added.)

Genesis 3:14-15

“The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life; and I will put enmity between you and the woman (Israel) and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise Him on the heel.’” ( Emphasis added.)

God’s own Word is mankind’s Perfect Eternal Blood Covenant Representative! So He is the Perfect Sacrifice that God had to supply on our behalf. And God expects Israel, and the rest of the world, to embrace and receive His Son, so that we can all offer Him back to God, knowing that He is eternally acceptable to His Father. And as God accepts His Perfect Lamb, He accepts those who are IN Him, in that New Covenant sense! This is how God finally covers mankind’s shameful nakedness! And this is why the rest of the world must learn to acknowledge and join Israel, who was the first to receive this awesome Gift of Grace from God. All of mankind must eventually join Israel, in repentant obedient Messianic Faith, so that we may all come together before God, and receive what His Perfect Living Word, the Son of Man, has done to fully cover, reconcile, regenerate, cleanse and restore us all… as One New Man in Messiah! This is the Good News we must proclaim to the entire world! God is here to transform all of mankind into His One Family!

It’s all about God… doing everything on our behalf by His Grace… by and through His Living Word, who came to the world through Israel. And this is the meaning underlying this awesome statement that Yeshua made to His disciples:

John 15:4-5

“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 (that My Father planted into Israel, and), 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!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)

This was true from the very beginning, when God’s Living Word created Adam, the first human, from a pile of Earth’s dust! It is all grace… grace… grace… and nothing but endless grace, from start to finish! This is the true revelation from the only True God… the Creator and Source of all things. And this revelation exposes arrogant demonic beings and how they continually delude and deceive fallen humans, and keep them trapped within the Serpent’s self-life coils, the coils of demonic radical independence from God! And it is also by God’s grace that we receive that blinding flash of revelation that penetrates and pierces our yielded hearts and demolishes our spiritual chains. God enables us to finally see and feel and grasp some of the enormity of our helplessness and our total dependency on our Creator. That, plus the realization and admission of the depths of our current fallen state, is what finally knocks us to the ground in stunned devastated silence… and forces sincere, totally heartfelt worship, praise and thanksgiving to start flowing out of us… before the Throne of the Lord of Glory!

Isaiah 6:1-4

“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!”

Beloved… God’s love nature is revealed in Scripture to be so enormously majestic, supreme, omnipotent and gracious, that it becomes obvious that He is mankind’s ALL, in all things and in every situation! That is why His Living Creative Word must increase in our estimation, and everything else must decrease, until His Eternal Light overshadows everything else! God’s story is all about His grace… given to us through His Living Word, in the midst of our abysmal, total bankruptcy and everlasting helplessness!

Everything Scripture reveals about God’s perfect standards of righteousness and justice… everything concerning the commandments He imparted to the human race through Israel, and everything about His Final Judgment of us, and what we have become, can only be resolved and made right… by God’s Grace. This is what the Torah (the Old Testament) is revealing! Only God can meet His own perfect standards perfectly. And that is what He has done, in our name. So… when we view our situation from an earthly self-centered perspective, God’s Holy Law exposes and condemns us and leaves us in a state of total bankruptcy and helplessness. And we have nothing to look forward to but hopeless, unredeemable gloom, frustration, devastation, desolation and eternal Death.

But… when we view it from the perspective of God’s New Covenant with Israel, as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures of Israel, it opens the way for those who repent, to turn to His beloved Son (our Covenant Representative Sacrifice)! He is shown throughout the entire Bible to be our Full Covering, our Reconciler, and Redeemer and Total Purification. He makes possible our complete Regeneration and full Restoration into His own Eternal Resurrection Life! God’s grace gives us a full share in our Messiah’s eternal inheritance and wellbeing! That’s why we say that in ourselves, we can do nothing to meet our needs! Beloved, this is not about the Law, and whether or not we’re good enough to keep it and meet God’s Standards. It is about the God who is GRACE, and whether or not we, who are the living dead, will allow Him, through His Word and Holy Spirit, the freedom to observe His own Law and satisfy His own Standards… as He lives within us and works to fulfill His Law, in our name!

Zechariah 4:5-7

“So the angel who was speaking with me answered and said to me, “Do you not know what these are?” And I said, “No, my lord.” Then he said to me, “This is the Word of the Lord to Zerubbabel saying, ‘Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord of hosts. ‘What are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain; and he will bring forth the Top Stone with shouts of “Grace, Grace to it!”’” (Emphasis added.)

Philippians 4:4-7

“Rejoice (with 100% exclusivity) in the Lord, ALWAYS; again I will say, REJOICE! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The (All-Sufficient) Lord is near (to you at all times), be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And (when you finally see the Truth of how completely His Living Word covers you)the Peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds IN Christ Jesus!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)

The Treasure of God’s Amazing Grace

Beloved, this awesome miracle that God’s Word makes possible for us, purely by God’s grace, is a Treasure that is never to be demeaned or marred by created demonic deception from which springs our deluded, ‘I can handle this myself’, arrogance. This is not to be taken lightly, or tainted by ignorant human presumption. We must see how false it is to assume that the Old Testament is about an angry distant God who gives us the Law, while the New Testament reveals another, gentle, loving God who shows us Grace. We must understand that it is the same God throughout! And we must grasp the meaning He wants to convey: the terms by which He must deal with us, and on what terms He makes it possible for us to receive and enjoy what His Grace makes possible for us all.

And this is the point where I believe many in Christendom veer from the Lord’s ‘narrow path’ and slip into a quagmire of serious error. They assume that since Jesus has set us free from Law, and everything is now about grace, our fallen flesh is ‘home free.’ They think that since God already did everything to supply what all of mankind needs, we aren’t obligated to do anything! We can relax and continue to be and do the ‘normal human things’ that are so natural to our fallen flesh. God loves us so much that He’ll ‘wink’ at our Sin and accept us anyway.

But that fatal error comes from profound Biblical illiteracy! Scripture never says or implies that God’s Grace is universally given! That is what the Father of Lies strives to get us to believe! His aim is to get people to reject, erase and bypass God’s Living Word and our desperate need to repent and seek the Redemption God sent His Son to be for us! And, as long as the Serpent manages to blind men to their need for Israel’s Messiah, he will keep them caught in their state of Sin! But God did send His Word to be our Redeemer and deliver us from the power Sin has over us! He will not disregard what He sent His Son to do and simply allow us to say to each other, ‘I’m okay and you’re okay, just the way we are.’ God won’t sigh, shrug, look the other way, and ignore our wretched sinfulness until we enter eternity. Our Father’s Word and Holy Spirit must do something awesome to us and in us, BEFORE we reach the destination point He has set before us. We must repent of all Sin… THEN… God can progressively and radically transform us into the image and likeness of our Messiah’s Perfect Resurrected Humanity!

So it takes a lot more than us saying a ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ and joining a ‘good’ church, synagogue, or mosque and getting involved in their activities. We dare not leave it at that! The True, Living God must act on our behalf, and work in our hearts, from start to finish! His Living Word must remove completely, every speck of the original state of Sin and fallen nature we inherited at conception! That is what keeps us separated from Him! Our innate lawless, self-life ways make it impossible for God to accept us as long as we choose to be at peace with and remain in, that corrupted state! God’s Word and Spirit are here to live and work in us, both to will and to do, according to God’s awesome specifications, from the time of our repentance, onward!

What we are, in ourselves, is the problem that God’s Word was sent to solve! Our original state IS the ‘Egypt’ from which God requires us to make a complete Exodus! So God must save us from ourselves. What we do is not the root of our problem. It is the symptom of something else. The problem is what we are, in our original fallen nature! That’s what God must deal with… by the Cross – our Covenant Representative and Messiah had to be the first to embrace! The Cross had to deal with our Representative first, so that the Atonement that would satisfy God’s Standards of Righteousness and Justice could be perfectly accomplished. And then, after that has been done, the Cross must now deal with us, to purify us of the Sin corruption in which we are all conceived. The Cross, when it is applied to us, removes from us whatever is unworthy of God. It takes all of that out of the way, so that our Messiah, in His resurrected state, can take over and live in us to meet God’s Standards, in our name! And this is the Revelation that the Serpent tries, so desperately, to cloud over and eliminate from our understanding, whether we be Jewish, or not! So understand what our Lord says when He compares what has to happen to us, to what has to happen to a seed, if it is to fulfill its purpose:

John 12:24-26

“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 (by sharing in My Death and Resurrection. He must embody and reveal that God’s Living Word is living within him); and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me , the Father will honor him!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)

People often reach this false, ‘cheap grace’ conclusion from two different directions: one group rejects, or is ignorant of, the Biblically revealed nature of Sin. Thus they do not understand the God-rejecting ‘self-life’ state that encapsulates us. They do not see what the Cross of our Messiah has to do to it because they remain unaware of the true extent of the damage that Sin did to our fallen nature. They insist we’re not really that bad! Thus they think along these lines:

‘Basically, I am a good person’. I have a noble, god-like spark in me. And if I educate myself enough and clean up my act with education and corrective discipline and occasional help from our very distant God, I can take care of my problems myself!”

That humanistic, self-improving urge is what is natural to fallen flesh. It drives us to try to discern between good and evil for ourselves. So we try to ‘lift ourselves up by our own ‘bootstraps,’ which is sometimes expressed by the phrase, ‘getting religion.’ But notice that all the while we indulge in this delusion… we are the ones who remain in control, in the spotlight… at center stage… as Number One! And our True Redeemer, and what He has done to redeem and save us, is ignored, removed from the picture, and bypassed!

And then, there’s another group that takes a less rosy view of our human condition. But they assume that God made us this way! And, that being the case, their Biblically illiterate attitude is:

‘Despite the commandments that are given in that outdated, irrelevant Old Testament section in the Bible, God must accept us, because He made us this way! We may be in a state of Sin-loving rebellion, but what can we do about it? It’s in our genes! We can’t help the way God made us! So, IF there is a God, and IF He is just, He must overlook the way we are. We can’t change what our genes and DNA force us to be and do! A just God wouldn’t hold us accountable or punish us for what we can’t help being and can’t stop doing!’

So this group selectively takes one part of God’s Revelation and tries to use it against Him! They demand that He accept us as we are because they blame Him, rather than Sin and the living death it caused, for making us the way we are. In either case, these ‘cheap grace’ teachings assume that our Lawlessness is an inescapable fact of life, because they refuse to acknowledge or accept God’s demand that we undergo an awesome ‘Life-Exchange’ with His Son, which our regeneration by the Holy Spirit makes possible! So beloved, we dare not assume that God will look the other way while we continue to sin! That delusion oozes out of some ancient heresies!

The Roots of Some Modern Heresies

One heresy denies the resurrection of our Messiah and ignores all the wonderful things that the Resurrection makes possible for us to receive from God’s Holy Spirit! And another strain comes from the roots of Gnosticism; and another comes from the teachings of an early Church leader named Marcion. And, another goes so far as to assume that there’s nothing special about the Bible, and that we can’t take it literally, because much of it is nothing more than ancient mythology and folklore. Therefore, since we can’t help what we are by nature… then those scary, outrageously unjust Biblical concepts such as Sin, Judgment, Satan, and Hell, are nothing more than the morbid scare tactics of uptight churchy people that are designed to make us feel guilty about our natural human urges and stifle our ability to enjoy what it means to be fully human! Nevertheless, none of these man-made dogmas are part of God’s revealed Truth. They are the wishful thinking of fallen, Sin-corrupted human flesh.

So, the ‘cheap grace’ people assume that at the end, all roads, regardless of which ones we have chosen to follow, will eventually lead us to God. And God, in His glorious Grace, will have to say, “Alright, come on in; I’m going to accept you anyway!” Do you see how deceitful that demonic delusion is? It always tries to erase our Redeemer from our minds, and draws us away from the revelation and commandments given to us by our one and only Source of Life! It strips us of our God-given Sin-Insulation Covering. It separates us from our God-sent Protector who is here to shield us from our guilt, condemnation and eternal judgment! He is our one and only Source and Provider! So how can we ignore or bypass Him and His Perfect Finished Work of Redemption? No beloved, God isn’t going to play games with us! He really does have an infinitely Perfect Righteous, Just, and Eternal Love Nature! And His Nature requires Him to hold to a Standard of Righteousness and Justice that is eternally Infinite and Perfect! He will never change or lower His Standard for anyone… not even for Himself! The indescribable agony that our Messiah had to undergo and endure, as our Covenant Representative, proves that!

Even God’s beloved Son, when He was acting as our Sin-less Covenant Representative, could not be spared! Because He was representing the rest of us, He had to endure the full brunt of God’s eternally just wrath against Sin and all the guilt and condemnation that all those who violate His Perfect Standards have coming! He in Himself was innocent and pure and devoid of all Sin! Nevertheless He had to agonize to the profoundest depths imaginable, in order to fulfill and complete the horrendous Atonement His Father required Him to make as our Covenant Representative! That is what it took! It cost God everything to make our Redemption possible! Infinite Atonement for an Infinite Offense was the full price. And God had to pay it to the last drop of His Son’s Life’s Blood, to satisfy His standards perfectly… in our name! No one but God could have done this! But He did do it; and that is what is so good, about the Good News!

If God really could ‘wink’ at Sin, He would not have required Yeshua to undergo such agony needlessly! What would have been the point of forcing the Humanity of His Sin-less Son to endure that? God would have most certainly spared Him, first and foremost! And that being the case, God will most certainly not stand by and allow men to trample His Son’s Atonement in the dust and ignore it as they go their merry way, continuing to revel in the Sin from which He died to deliver them! God’s Reality is real; and His Truth is true, and His Justice really is infinitely, perfectly just and fair! God will never violate or ignore His own Perfect Nature and Standards. His Infinite Righteousness and Justice require every speck of Sin and Death, and all of the corruption and imperfection that flow from them, to be dealt with and made right. Only then can God fulfill the perfect human ‘image and likeness of God’ nature and commission He has given to us!

So, because our Covenant Representative willingly took what was coming to us, upon Himself… He had to pay the full price. So our Redemption is given through God’s Grace… and our second creation (spiritual regeneration) is also pure Grace! Since God becomes our new Life and our Perfect Righteousness, isn’t that also just as much God’s Gift as our first physical creation was?

And, since this is the case, any ‘self-improvement’ initiatives we might try to come up with would be uncalled for and completely out of the question, wouldn’t they? There’s no way that we, who are already trapped in the state of living death, could do anything to ‘fix’ or ‘improve’ or make ourselves ‘right.’ It’s too late! What Sin has killed, is totally… Dead! So a true Solution requires a brand new act of Creation! Our state of self-life and Death must truly die, once and for all! And that must be followed by the Gift of full participation in our Messiah’s God-approved Resurrection Life. That is a complete, radical ‘do over’ process! God needed a ‘reset button’ that He could ‘hit’… a mechanism authoritative and powerful enough that would enable Him to start all over again with us — from scratch! And so He did it… through the Cross.

The All Sufficient Eternal Blood Covenant

God worked around every one of our profound limitations through His eternal Blood Covenant pattern. Before the foundation of the world, in the dimension of eternity, He had already made this Blood Covenant with Himself! And He brought Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all their Jewish progeny and their non-Jewish spiritual descendants into that Covenant! So, anyone who will believe and repent of their radical independence from God, and trust and obey His Living Word… and follow Him into God’s New Covenant with Israel, becomes one with God, through His Living Word! And that transforms them into brand new creations! They can thus receive God’s full pardon and acceptance and fellowship, not in themselves, but only IN their Perfect Representative, God’s Living Word, whom we know to be, Israel’s Messiah!

In blood covenants, chosen representatives must do everything. So, for example, every American citizen is not expected to deal with every other Russian or Chinese or Iranian citizen, by his or her own efforts and doings. Nations are not considered to be mobs of independent agents. Each nation, with its multiple millions or billions of citizens, is considered to be a corporate entity. Each corporate entity nation deals with all other nations and their multiple millions of people, on that covenantal basis. The nations act through their appointed heads of state. Those individuals represent and stand for all of their fellow citizens. The head of state is connected to his or her fellow citizens, the way the head of a physical body is connected to its living members. So, whatever the head does, the rest of the body does. And whatever happens to the head, or does not happen to the head, must be said of all the members. So members of each nation are not a mob of individuals, they are one corporate unit. So blood covenants unify their participants… the many become One!

And this is how our utterly Perfect God can deal with the utterly imperfect human race, and still be able to satisfy His Standards perfectly! Our Representative is Perfect; and so, In Him, we too are considered to be participating in His Perfection. God uses this pattern to set all repentant, obedient humans free from themselves and their unacceptable fallen Sin-loving nature! He made His eternal Covenant long before we even existed! He covenanted with His own Word! The Word contains all of God’s Fullness in Himself. He is perfectly one with His Father. Therefore He can represent His Eternal Father to us, as the Father’s Perfect Image and Likeness. And, in that capacity, He acts as ‘The Son of God.’

But this same Living Word of God was sent by His Father to take on our human nature and become one of us! So, He is legally able to act as our Representative before His Father, as well. In that case, He acts as ‘The Son of Man.’ So, God’s Word represents God to us; and He also represents us to God! The Word, representing both parties in the Covenant, joins God, and all repentant humans, to each other. Thus, whatever God’s Word does in our name, can be legally credited to us. We can’t do it in ourselves; but we do it IN HIM! Whatever pertains and belongs to our Covenant Representative also pertains and belongs to us. That’s why, apart from our Representative, we can do nothing that our infinite, Almighty God would find acceptable.

So, the Cross of our Messiah can be applied to us as well, when we believe and agree and choose, by faith, to join Him on it and identify with what He accomplished when He died on it. Thus, when He died, we died. When our Representative was reduced to the ‘zero point,’ He took every human He legally represents into that death zero point as well. And that is the Death that sets us free from what we originally were! The Serpent has us within his coils from the moment we are conceived! And we’re in the state of Sin from the moment of our birth into this fallen world. But, as soon as we join Yeshua in His crucifixion and He is able to take us into that ‘zero point,’ any hold the Serpent had on us in the past disintegrates and disappears! The Cross sets us free from any hold or legal claim or influence that Satan and his powers of Darkness may have had on us! Once we die with our Representative, there is nothing left of us to which our enemies can legally make any claim! And after that, by the Holy Spirit, God can transmit what only pertains to His Resurrected Son… into our innermost being. His Perfection is always His alone, but God can thus share that Perfection with every human that will be His.

John 8:31b-32

“…If you continue in My Word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free!”

By His death on the Cross, God’s Perfect Word made full Atonement to His Father, in our name. And any Jewish or non-Jewish person, who will believe and agree to join Him in His death, in this Covenant sense, identifies with Him and thus benefits fully from what Messiah Yeshua accomplished. His Cross becomes our Cross too, when we identify ourselves with Him and receive to ourselves what He has done. Thus, if we’re willing to forsake our worldly, man-inherited identities, ties and traditions, God strips away our original fallen, living death state of Sin, and its eternal consequences, and sets us free. His Perfect Life becomes ours as well.

Hebrews 13:20-21

“Now the God of Peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the Blood of the Eternal Covenant, even Jesus our Lord, equip you in every good thing TO DO HIS WILL, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the Glory forever and ever. Amen.” (Emphasis added.)

And because the Covenant enables God to join us to Himself, He can fuse His own Holy Spirit into our regenerated purified righteous spirits. Thus God’s Living Word begins to live and operate within us! And He can legally obey and please His Father and meet His Perfect Standards… through our yielded, obedient flesh… in our name:

John 16:13-15

“But when He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all the Truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you.” (Emphasis added.)

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

“…Do you not know that your body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a Price: therefore glorify God in your body!” (Emphasis added.)

Through the wonderful New Covenant that God sent His Word to implement and fulfill, God is able to make us one with Himself! We do not become God. But God shares His Life and what His Life produces, with us. This is done when His Living Word and Holy Spirit are able to abide and work and reveal God’s Glory to us, in us and through us! God does it all, from beginning to end! And this radical change that God Himself effects within us is enough to please and satisfy His Standards, and it sets us free from Sin, guilt, condemnation and Eternal Death!

Philippians 2:12b-13

“…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!” (Emphasis added.)

Humanity’s Absolute Need Is Absolutely Met, IN Yeshua

So, God’s Word, working in us, and through us, obeys His Father’s Law and fulfills its requirements, as only our Perfect God could do. This is the second phase of His all-encompassing Grace! He atones for what we were and what we did… then He becomes our New Life and the Righteousness that works from within us from that moment onward, by the Power of His Holy Spirit! So, this awesome Exodus Journey through which our Messiah leads us, requires us to embrace our absolute need for self-surrender, and, step by step and choice by choice, we can continue to affirm our absolute need for total identification with God’s Living Word, our Messiah… through God’s Eternal Blood Covenant with Israel. And as we draw from Him for all things, He will be all things to us and for us!

John 3:9-15

“Nicodemus said to Him, ‘How can these things be?’ Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you do not accept our testimony. If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into Heaven, but He who descended from Heaven: the Son of Man. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have Eternal Life!’” (Emphasis added.)

This New Covenant, born again, Israelite disciple lifestyle completely overrides and replaces whatever any Jewish or non-Jewish child of Adam used to be and do in this fallen world. So it’s false to assume that all we have to do is be born to a certain family with certain genes and DNA, and a certain religious tradition, or, in lieu of that, outsiders need only recite some kind of ‘magic prayer formula’ and join some religious organization and spend the rest of their days doing their best to ‘clean up their act.’ God won’t allow any of us to put any faith in ourselves and in what we think we are, or may currently be doing, or will do, to try to make ourselves acceptable to Him. We must all repent of that and die to it, by allowing our Messiah to take us with Him, into that Zero Point of Death by which all fallen self-life initiatives are removed. We must rest in God’s Living Word and in His Perfect Finished Work, and walk out the Salvation that God’s indwelling Presence will progressively make real within us, day by day and step by step. We must all be firmly grounded on the Rock of Almighty God’s Eternal Perfection… the Perfection of what He, through His Living Word and Holy Spirit, has already done… in our name. That is what He will be applying to us, from within, and revealing to those around us, from now on!

Now can you see why God has to do it all? We’re still required to please God and meet His standards! Not even a speck of Sin will be tolerated. So our fallen flesh is not ‘off the hook!’ This is why God has to crucify it, and why we must forsake it daily! God must empower us to believe, obey and embody His Perfect Living Word. God must be legally free to do what is right and good, on His terms and by His Perfect Standards, from within us! His Spirit must transmit all that belongs to Yeshua, into us! And we can then embody our risen Lord and display the Excellence of His Perfect Human Resurrected Life, as He works from within our thoughts, words, deeds, reactions, interactions and earthly situations!

The abode we become for our Master to abide in must be totally purified, cleansed and rendered as suitable for God. This New Covenant Temple, made by God, must be even more perfect than the Holy of holies in His man-made Temples used to be, as revealed in the written Word! The fruit of Yeshua’s Righteousness is what proves that God is present within us. And that must actually be produced within us in demonstrable, verifiable ways. This is the unmistakable New Covenant proof that God provides for the world. And so, we Last Days New Covenant disciples must prove that God abides within us, and that we have been transformed into a Temple that is worthy of God. Yeshua’s Fruit, appearing from within us will identify us to be a Temple not made by human efforts, but made by the Hand of God, according to His perfect specifications! And that beloved… is going to be nothing but GRACE!

John 3:29-31

“He who has the Bride is the Bridegroom; but the (disciple) friend of the Bridegroom, who stands and hears Him, rejoices greatly because of the Bridegroom’s voice. So this joy of mine has been made full. HE MUST INCREASE, but I must decrease. He who comes from above is above all, he who is of the earth is from the earth and speaks of the earth. He who comes from Heaven is above all!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)

Beloved, although we can’t accomplish any of this, what we receive from God is anything but ‘Cheap Grace.’ By no means is it ‘free’ or ‘without cost.’ God had to give His All to make this possible! And we must join God in His wholeheartedness! We must give up everything we used to be and have and do, in order to be free to receive the benefit of His Grace. From now on, we must never assume that we can think and live independently of God, and that everything is going to be about us, as heroes of the story and stars of the show. After we’ve reached the zero point, we must never again assume that it’s enough for us to try to live at a distance from God’s Word. Nor can we ever again religiously strive to ‘improve’ and ‘upgrade’ ourselves with occasional long distance nudges of ‘assistance’ from our very distant God, who is hiding somewhere in the remotest regions of His inscrutable Heaven! God gives 100%; we provide 0%! So who needs whom?

That crazy ‘I must do this myself’ notion does not come from the God of Israel! It comes from humanistic pagan, Greek philosophy and mythology! That is how the ancient pagan Greeks (including all the other types of idolators) imagined their many gods to be. The gods men conjure up in their fallen imaginations are cold, distant and uncaring. They are petulantly manipulative, just like their human creators! Because men create these false gods in their own imaginations, they fashion them after their own image and likeness! Thus the false gods lord it over their devotees and require them to ‘bribe’ them continually with all kinds of man-controlled religious rituals and offerings. If the humans keep trying to please these gods by their strenuous, never-ending efforts, the gods ‘might’ be appeased. But, because they are always just like the humans that fashioned them, they can change in a heartbeat and betray their devotees at any moment. So, ultimately, all false gods come from the delusion that the Serpent first managed to slip into Eve’s mind in the Garden. And all of mankind has been infected with it:

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.)

The True Living God wants to live with us and in us, here on Earth! But we must accept Him as He is and on His terms! Dead, radically independent, Sin-murdered human flesh can’t improve or save itself. So our original ‘Sin-murdered being’ must be eliminated and exchanged for the abiding Presence and Nature of the Resurrected Humanity of God’s Living Word, who represents us in God’s Eternal Covenant! This is what rebellious fallen flesh simply cannot grasp or comprehend, and adamantly refuses to accept:

Acts 17:22-31

“So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, ‘Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of Heaven and Earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in Righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead!” (Emphasis added.)

Yeshua, Our Risen Covenant Representative

Those pagan intellectuals refused to embrace God’s Truth, as Paul gave it to them. Nevertheless, God’s written Word reveals not only that God’s Living Word became human and lived and died… but that He was also raised from the dead! And, so we must realize that, at this point in our earthly Exodus Journey, Yeshua, God’s Living Word made flesh, is the only one among us that has that wonderful heavenly New Covenant Resurrection Life in Him! None of that is in any of the rest of us, YET! It is all still, only In Him! So, at this stage of our Journey, He is the only Source from which, and by which, this Life can embrace and include us. The rest of us are still trapped in our dying, temporary bodies. We have not yet entered into the resurrected glorified state our Covenant Representative now possesses. So, we can only participate in it, when our Covenant Representative can become one with us in the Covenant and fill us with His Holy Spirit. Then we too will be covered – through our God-given, Biblically-grounded Faith in the infinite Credibility of our Covenant-making-and-keeping God.

We must therefore stop trusting in our own grossly limited perceptions, feelings, impressions and circumstances. None of this depends on what is in us or what comes out of us. It depends on what is in our Messiah alone. We must learn to trust in what is in our Messiah, who, by the Holy Spirit, is able to indwell us and obey His Father from within us. That is why it is necessary for Yeshua’s Life to live and abide and work in us and through us, through the Holy Spirit! And so, His disciples must learn to draw from and partake of His Obedience to His Father, continually. We must learn to allow Him to, ‘take us all the way Home’ moment by moment, and step by step… not by how we feel, nor by how things seem to us, or by what our earthly circumstances happen to be. We must do it by absolute airtight faith in God’s airtight Perfection and Credibility and Faithfulness to us. We must fix our eyes upon our Covenant Representative and what He has already done in our name. We must abide in His Perfect Presence and draw everything we need from Him, by a military level of combat-ready Faith!

Revelation 3:17-18

“Because you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to buy from Me Gold refined by Fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see!” (Emphasis added.)

Beloved, while we are en route, we must enthrone God’s Living Word in our hearts and allow His Absolute Authority and Grace to cover and enfold and protect us. We must train ourselves to see and think about ourselves as being perpetually IN HIM. And we must realize that the Holy Spirit is continually ‘kneading’ all that He is into our souls, minds, imaginations, wills and earthly physical activities! If we remember this and abide by its Truth, God will keep us covered and He will supply all of our needs, regardless of how things may seem to us at any given time, or how ‘weak’ or ‘unworthy’ or ‘hopeless’ and ‘unsaved’ we may happen to be feeling at any point of our journey.

Colossians 3:1-4

“Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God! When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in Glory.” (Emphasis added.)

The job of the Last Days New Covenant disciples will be to demonstrate and prove, by their faith-fortified lives, that this is absolutely true and possible for all of us to have! We must teach it on a ‘watch us… now you’ basis, so that all mankind can come to grips with God’s Truth. God is not at all impressed with, or swayed by, our arrogant, self-adoring humanistic mentalities, cultures, religions and lifestyles. He is not impressed by our pathetic attempts to be ‘religiously good and proper.’ Only our risen Messiah impresses God! And by God’s Grace, He is impressing God from within us… in our name! So we learn to feed upon and absorb and embody Him, so that He can prove to the world that He truly did rise from the dead and is at work within those who are truly His own!

Isaiah 40:1-8

“A voice is calling, ‘Clear The Way for the Lord in the wilderness; make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; and let the rough ground become a plain, and the rugged terrain a broad valley. Then the GLORY of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together; for the Mouth of the Lord has spoken.’

“A voice says, ‘Call out!’ Then he answered, ‘What shall I call out?’ “All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, BUT THE WORD OF OUR GOD STANDS FOREVER!”

So, regardless of what kind of ‘fig leaf’ covering religious or atheistic humanists try to devise for themselves, the Truth remains: we don’t stand a chance of passing God’s Judgment, unless God has clothed and covered us with the Perfect Righteousness and Flawless Human Performance of His Son. When God has to judge us, He’ll expect to see the Redeemer He sent to us, living and working within us. And He will ask these awesome questions:

“How much of My Son is living and operating in you? Is He truly revealing Himself through you? Is He really your New Life? Are you actually IN HIM, enfolded and covered by His Righteousness? Are you really a part of the Fulfillment of My New Covenant… the renewed Covenant I made with My True Israel… or… are you still My unbelieving enemy?”

So, we Last Days disciples dare not ignore our ‘Marching Orders!’ We dare not live self-centered lives that reject, and operate independently of our risen Messiah. If He cannot really surround and cover and protect us on this Blood Covenant Representative basis… the Holy Spirit cannot really impart what pertains to Yeshua, and ‘knead’ His Perfect Resurrected Human nature, character and disposition into our fallen souls and brains. In that case, whether we are Jewish or non-Jewish, we will have missed the point that Scripture is making.

John 14:5-6

“I AM The Way, and The Truth, and The Life! No one comes to the Father but through Me!’” (Emphasis added.)

John 5:45-57

“Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

This is why our FMM material keeps going back to the foundational revelations of the Torah, from which all other Scriptures flow, and to our ‘Marching Orders’ that serve as this ministry’s mandate and commission.

Many of the world’s elite stars from the academic, journalistic, political, judicial, commercial, entertainment and athletic endeavors of this world, and those who indulge their passions in the lawless criminal underworld continue to sneer, scoff and hold those who proclaim these things in utter contempt. Nevertheless God has spoken and warned us; so I repeat:

Isaiah 40:6b-8

“All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever!” (Emphasis added.)

Beloved disciples: Stand fast! Hold your God-given Covenant Ground! Our Resurrected Messiah’s enemies may be gifted, brilliant and powerful… nevertheless, they are mortal. They come and they go. They are here today, pontificating and dogmatizing in living color on our TV and computer screens. But remember this: the death that was in them from their conception will eventually take them over completely. Their bodies will, like everyone else’s, soon give out entirely, and these worldly superstars will soon die and disappear from the current scene. Then the fallen world will go on and leave them behind. And a short time after that, they will be forgotten!

So don’t be deceived by how important they may seem to be in the present. They desperately need to know our Messiah, like everyone else! So, the Truth remains: the Living Word of God never weakens or dies. His Eternal Life is, even now, in our hearts and in our midst… and He will be with us long after His enemies and today’s superstar doubters have disappeared. All that really matters is whether or not His Eternal Life is free to abide in us, or not. Our Messiah is the only one that matters, because He is the one that will rule all of Creation, in His Bright, Shining and Overwhelmingly Authoritative Majesty… FOREVER!

The Awesome Grace of Our God