Beloved Family… here’s another text that we would do well to ponder… and ponder… and ponder again… with utmost sincerity. Let’s begin with these verses:
Isaiah 55:6-9
“Seek the LORD while He may be found; call on Him [for salvation] while He is near. Let the wicked leave (behind) HIS WAY and the unrighteous man HIS THOUGHTS; and LET HIM RETURN TO THE LORD, and He will have compassion (mercy) on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.
“FOR MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS, NOR ARE YOUR WAYS MY WAYS,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts.” (AMP Emphasis added.)
Do you see what we are being told here dear ones? This is truly amazing… and sobering. Father is once again warning us, in unmistakable terms, against trusting in our own understanding. He says that because His perspective on everything and His way of thinking and judging are light years beyond our ways of doing those things, if we go off on our own, and disregard what God’s Word reveals, commands and promises to us, we’ll be completely off track! We’ll be wrong in the sense of trying to navigate through the pitfalls of this fallen world by using a map that is deceptive and does not conform at all to the reality that actually lies before us!
That is what it means to feed from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil! Eve did that; and Father is telling us here, through Isaiah, to avoid repeating her tragic mistake. Instead of taking to heart the Truth of God as revealed to her by His Living Word, she trusted and relied upon the Serpent’s deceptive suggestions. In other words, she ended up relying upon her own very limited and instinctive perspectives, feelings and opinions. She followed the promptings she picked up from her subjective level of understanding. That caused her to mistrust and defy the objective Truth that God established through and by His All-Authoritative Living Word. She chose instead to place her opinions, thoughts and feelings above God! And thus she ignored the Authority behind what His Word had revealed and warned her not to do.
God warned Eve that as soon as she or Adam ate of the fruit of that tree, they would surely die! So do you see what He was saying? He was revealing that His living creative Word is our sole Source of life and only true Provider of everything we need! In that sense, God’s Word is our Head. Any true Life we will ever have can only come to us from Him! So if we reject and sever ourselves from His Authority and Fullness, we’re actually decapitating ourselves! And decapitation is always fatal, isn’t it?
Why did Eve do that? She did it because she chose to disregard the warning God’s Word gave to her. She did it because of the incredibly devious and alluring promptings of the Serpent. God’s demonic enemy tempted her by making his suggestions appear to be so wonderful and so liberating. That compelled Eve to decide to mistrust and disregard God’s Word and to begin consulting with created things. Thus she began to move and navigate according to her own viewpoints instead of trusting in God’s All-Authoritative Word. So she chose to believe and obey and follow her own subjective level of understanding. That’s how the Serpent infected, twisted and severely damaged her mind with his lying deceptions. As a result, false data began to appear habitually on the viewing screen of her internal onboard computer:
Genesis 3:4-6
“The serpent said to the woman, “You most assuredly won’t die! For God knows that WHEN YOU EAT OF IT, YOUR EYES WILL BE OPENED AND YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD, KNOWING GOOD AND EVIL!”
“Now THE WOMAN SAW that the tree was good for food, and that it was a thing of lust for the eyes, and that the tree was desirable for imparting wisdom! So she took of its fruit and she ate. She also gave to her husband who was with her and he ate.” (TLV, Emphasis added.)
Beloved, do you see how vastly different the thoughts expressed by God’s Word, really were, from the information that the Serpent dangled before Eve? Can you see why she was persuaded to mistrust God and His intentions toward her, and was driven to believe and trust in her own thoughts instead? But of course many people in our modern world will ask:
“So what’s so wrong with trusting in yourself and using your own God-given equipment to figure things out? Why shouldn’t we rely upon what appears to us to be real and obvious? Why can’t we trust our personal independent senses? Why shouldn’t we be free to arrive at our own conclusions and try to figure things out for ourselves and arrive at our own opinions? It’s my life, isn’t it? Shouldn’t I have the right to live it as I see fit to do and not do?”
Well, the answers to those questions should be obvious! We can only capture and process tiny slivers of what is actually a vastly larger and more complex panorama of factual Truth and Reality! Our Sin-corrupted, aging, failing faculties and senses and the ability to reason that we derive from that can never lay before us the complete array of all the Truth and Reality that there truly is to know. When we operate out of radical independence as autonomous agents, most of actual Reality and Truth will lie far, far beyond our ability to grasp. So we’ll end up with an abysmally partial and microscopic ‘speck’ of the full, vast panorama of Truth. We’ll always end up with just a shred, a tiny part of all there really is to know! The distortion with which we’ll be left will be enormous. It will be like knowing all about a person we’ve never met or known by being limited to seeing a picture of his or her right eyeball! So our partial perspectives on everything will force us to form warped, incomplete assumptions that will lure us into grossly subhuman levels of understanding, awareness and existence!
Human beings are designed, created and intended to serve as the image and likeness of God! But we can only be united and bonded to Him by being continually fed and led and completed through, and by and in His Living Word! Even if we study and ponder God’s written Word with utmost diligence… if we do it by relying solely on our fallen, Sin-damaged natural equipment to fathom the meaning of it, we’ll end up missing the point completely! We are made to be reflections and living revelations of God and His Presence operating from within our heart of hearts! And for that to be able to happen, we must first know enough about God’s Word made flesh so that He can unite us to Himself and equip and empower us to realize who He is. And when we do that, we will naturally and automatically acknowledge Him and prostrate ourselves before His Majesty and Glory, and defer to Him, so that He can finally be Himself and live His Life from within us, as He really and truly IS! But this can only be done when we operate in the obedience that comes from true faith in what God has given to us through His Word. Then we are free to worship Him in full and proper acknowledgement that He and He alone is God, and He and He alone has the Authority to serve as our exclusive Source of Truth, Reality, Wisdom and Direction.
We were designed and created specifically to serve as His image and likeness and to testify to Him and to His Truth and Reality, by living according to the faith-based Order He established throughout His universe! Apart from Him revealing His Truth to us and guiding us through each step and phase of our earthly existence, we remain blind, deaf and clueless. And we descend to that dismal level of spiritual blindness and deafness that inevitably leads to eternal Death.
When Eve decided to act as an independent agent… she died to being the human being she was created to be. She descended to the level of the instinct-driven animals and she could no longer be aware of who and what she really and truly was. To be trapped in the state of living Death is the disastrous result that ensues when humans trust and follow the Serpent’s promptings. There is only one true God and there will never be another being that can be equipped or able to take His place as the Supreme Authority and Lord over all of Creation.
All of God’s Authority resides in and operates from His Living Uncreated Word! And since we’re designed and made to be the image and likeness of that Word, we’re designed and intended to embody His perfectly accurate and all-encompassing viewpoint and understanding and His perfect thoughts and ways… not those of any of His very limited and imperfect creatures! So reconciliation and reunion with God, through being united to His Word, is our only Hope of Eternal Life! Our thoughts, by the inherent limitations of our created nature, fall far short of the perfect comprehension of God’s infinitely perfect mind. So, even on our best day, what we puny little radically independent mortals can see and grasp and comprehend, will fall disastrously short of and directly contradict and often deny and defy, God’s thoughts and God’s will. For us to dare to try to usurp God’s rightful place and live as if we were His equals or replacements, would be even more ludicrous than a tiny thimble daring to contain the seven seas that cover this planet! This is why every religion, philosophy and movement in human existence is filled with myriads of varying opinions, positions, and squabbling denominations, sects, cults and jostling factions! When we continue to dare to ignore and bypass the revelation that only personal interaction with God’s Word and Holy Spirit give to us, we are cut off from His Perfect thoughts and ways and remain blind to God’s Infinitely Perfect and All-encompassing viewpoint.
So we’re always left with a tiny insufficient scattering of facts that we can pick up on our mental viewing screens that appear, to us, to be comprehensive and convincing. And we assume that we’re actually seeing and knowing all there is to see and know. But that is a fatally deceptive error that will lead us over the edge of an unimaginable abyss of destruction and desolation. Beloved, there can be no substitute for Almighty God and His Truth and Reality! We must be privy to the mind of our resurrected Messiah!
As soon as Eve began to be fascinated by her own perspectives and thoughts and ideas, she began to assume the illegitimate right to try to act as if she had ‘arrived’ at full wisdom and discernment and had nothing more to learn. And thus, assuming she was just like God, she assumed she had the right to decide what was real or unreal, true or false, good or bad, and right or wrong! And, of course, she failed miserably and opened the floodgates of all the fatal consequences of her foolish humanistic act:
Jeremiah 17:5-10
“Thus says ADONAI: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, and depends on flesh as his arm, and whose heart turns from ADONAI; for he will be like a bush in the desert. He cannot see goodness when it comes, but will dwell in parched places in the wilderness—a salt land where no one lives.”
“Blessed is the one who trusts in ADONAI, whose confidence is in ADONAI. For he will be like a tree planted by the waters, spreading out its roots by a stream. It has no fear when heat comes, but its leaves will be green. It does not worry in a year of drought, nor depart from yielding fruit.”“The heart is deceitful above all things, and incurable—who can know it? I, ADONAI, search the heart; I try the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” (TLV)
Proverbs 3:5-6
“Trust in ADONAI with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.”
So beloved, consider what all of this is telling us about how skewed and off the mark our natural ways of seeing and thinking and judging truly are. This is why we dare not trust any man or woman that ignores God’s Word and devises his or her own subjective version of truth and reality. And we dare not trust entirely even the opinions of sanctified, Spirit-filled people, because even on our best day, we are all terribly limited and fallible. As the Lord warned:
Luke 6:39-45
“And He also spoke a parable to them: A blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Will they not both fall into a pit? A pupil is not above his teacher; but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye. For there is no good tree which produces bad fruit, nor, on the other hand, a bad tree which produces good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they pick grapes from a briar bush. The good man out of the good (God-imparted) Treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the (Self-devised) evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart.” (Amplification added.)
If God’s Word does not reveal Himself to us, we have no way of knowing these things! But once we know and obey Him, we can operate out from God’s Wisdom which highlights the differences between humans that reject and defy God’s Word, as opposed to those who believe, repent of their radical independence from God, and choose to allow His Word to become one with them, in Spirit and in Truth. The first group tries to navigate through life by consulting their own very faulty and grossly deceptive faculties and sensations. And the second group is trained and disciplined to stand firm in the obedience that is required by having faith in God, and in His Word alone. They learn to ignore the world’s ‘experts’ and ‘gurus’ and pundits instead of ignoring and forsaking God’s Word. Thus they are equipped to avoid being deceived and sucked into devastating errors that are God-less and demonically deceptive.
Those who remain separated from God are doomed to abide in a subhuman state that offers nothing more than living Death and total frustration and desolation. But those who abide in God’s beloved Word are able to embody Him through their spirits, souls and bodies. And they remain filled with their Messiah who imparts to them a share in His Eternal Life! In other words, if we’re willing to forsake our radically independent existence from God… and actually die to it…and embrace His Word instead, the Fullness of God and the Eternal Resurrection Life that is in Yeshua’s Perfect resurrected Humanity will be freely shared with us, and we will be able to experience God’s Fullness as co-heirs with our risen Lord, forever! And this is why disciples must embody what is contained in these words that were written to New Covenant disciples:
Colossians 3:1-4
“Therefore, if you have been raised up with Messiah, keep seeking the things above—where Messiah is, sitting at the right hand of God. Focus your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Messiah in God. When Messiah, who is your Life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him, in Glory!” (TLV.)
Dear ones, can you see that the words above that describe those regenerated New Covenant disciples that are trained to serve as the image and likeness of God’s Living Word, are elevated and positioned far, far above and beyond the curses that God pronounced over those rebellious humans that insist on defying and ignoring the Word and who refuse to embody Him but choose instead to serve as the image and likeness of the Serpent?
Genesis 3:13-19
ADONAI Elohim said to the woman, “What did you do?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me and I ate.”
ADONAI Elohim said to the serpent, “Because you did this, cursed are you above all the livestock and above every animal of the field. On your belly will you go, and dust will you eat all the days of your life. I will put animosity between you and the woman—between your seed and her Seed. He will crush your head, and you will crush his heel.“
To the woman He said, “I will greatly increase your pain from conception to labor. In pain will you give birth to children. Your desire will be toward your husband, yet he must rule over you.”
Then to the man He said, “Because you listened to your wife’s voice and ate of the tree which I commanded you, saying, ‘You must not eat of it’: Cursed is the ground because of you—with pain will you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles will sprout for you. You will eat the plants of the field, by the sweat of your brow will you eat food, until you return to the ground, since from it were you taken. For you are dust, and to dust will you return.” (TLV)
Through His written Word, God shows us the true Order and Authentic Reality that He has created and established throughout the dimension of space and time and on every level of the universe that He designed and made. He tells us what He thinks and how He sees and judges things. And He reveals what He intends to do for those of us who repent of and die to our former radical independence so that we can become one with His Living Word. And then, once we become one with God’s Living Word, He Himself begins to live His Life through our yielded flesh! And we offer Him no competition or opposition by clinging to what we once used to see and think and do when we lived apart from Him!
The Living Word became flesh at the proper designated time, so that He could become one with us and we could become one with Him in God’s Eternal Covenant. And this lets us know that God commissioned His Word made flesh to represent us before God and Man, once we allowed ourselves to decrease so that He could increase. And, I believe, Yeshua was alluding to all of this when He said the following to His disciples:
John 14:8-21
“Philip said to Him, “Master, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Yeshua said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time, and you haven’t come to know Me, Philip? HE WHO HAS SEEN ME, HAS SEEN THE FATHER! How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on My own; but the Father dwelling in Me does His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me—or at least believe because of the works themselves.
“Amen, amen I tell you, HE WHO PUTS HIS TRUST IN ME, THE WORKS THAT I DO, SO HE WILL DO; AND GREATER THAN THESE HE WILL DO, BECAUSE I AM GOING TO THE FATHER. And whatever you ask in My Name, that I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. IF YOU ASK ME ANYTHING IN MY NAME, I WILL DO IT!”
“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper so He may be with you forever—the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him. You know Him, because He abides with you and will be in you. I will not abandon you as orphans; I will come to you. In a little while, the world will no longer behold Me, but you will behold Me. Because I live, you also will live!
“In that day, you will know that I AM IN MY FATHER, YOU ARE IN ME, AND I AM IN YOU! He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me. He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and reveal Myself to him.” (TLV, Emphasis added.)
So in the light of what Genesis 3 tells us about our earthly fallen and mortally wounded condition, we see that God’s indicts and condemns Man’s rebellion and the radically independent existence that keeps us trapped in our state of living death. We see that by God’s reckoning, living apart from the Word of God is totally unacceptable to Him. And thus we can also see how necessary it is for God to send His Word after us, to seek us out and reveal His True Reality to us, so we can be totally reconciled to Him and reunited with Him. But if we foolishly choose to remain in that humanistic, ‘I shall be as god’ mindset and state of being, we are eternally doomed to total subhuman devastation, and deprived forever of the Blessing and Inheritance God intended for us to have in the Beginning:
Genesis 1:27-28
“God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the land, and conquer it. Rule over the fish of the sea, the flying creatures of the sky, and over every animal that crawls on the land.” (TLV)
John 17:20-26
“I pray not on behalf of these only, but also for those who believe in Me through their (My New Covenant apostles’) message, that they all may be one. Just as You, Father, are in Me and I am in You, so also may they be one in Us, so the world may believe that You sent Me. The Glory that You have given to Me I have given to them, that they may be one just as We are one—I in them and You in Me—that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me and loved them as You loved Me.
“Father, I also want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, so that they may see My Glory—the Glory You gave Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, the world did not know You, but I knew You; and these knew that You sent Me. I made your Name known to them, and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” (TLV, Amplification and emphasis added.)
So we only abide in actual Reality and Truth when we’re one with God’s Living and written Word! We must be fulfilling the purpose for which we were created… serving as the image and likeness and living embodiment of God’s Living Word. When that happens, His Eternal Life is our Life too. And when the Word is our Life, the Serpent and that Death that he inflicts upon the gullible humans he manages to deceive, can no longer have anything to do with us. We die to the Serpent’s lies and traps and his coils are severed and Sin and its lethal consequences can no longer maintain their grip on us. Any authority he may have had over us disappears when we die to him and his influence and begin to live only by, and for God… in and through His beloved Son, Yeshua. All of this is the result of our submission to God’s Word. When we submit and believe and embrace Him, we’re allowing Him to permeate and enfold and cover us by His Life-giving Authority. When we have God’s Word, we are thus privy to all of the Fullness of God that eternally abides within Him. And that brings us to the point I wish to bring to your attention today:
People who disregard God’s Word and the awesome Revelation that it contains will naturally abide spiritually, mentally, and emotionally in that utterly dismal and hopeless state of Death that automatically follows when Man is separated from the Word of God, His Life-giving Head. So the impending demise of their fallen flesh becomes a constant terror and dread to them. As long as they ignore God’s revealed warnings, they remain trapped in the dismal subhuman level described in Genesis 3… under the curses that God pronounced over the Serpent, and over the recently fallen Eve and Adam, and their natural offspring. They will languish under that sentence of death, desolation, and hopeless desperation that befalls us as soon as they’re conceived. And if they continue to reject God’s Word and opt instead to remain as radically independent agents, they’ll remain trapped in that rebellious state, and will not allow God’s Word to reunite with them. The minds and hearts of such people will continue to be filled and driven and entrapped by the Self-adoring identity paradigm of the Serpent.
And as long as that’s where they remain stuck… the thought of the impending death of their fallen flesh will be utterly terrifying. From that radically independent perspective, their state of subhuman living death seems to be normal humanity and a good path to pursue. Self-direction will appear to be true freedom. But as the end comes closer it will terrify those who cling to it. And they will realize that they are about to enter the eternal ‘meat grinder’ that will inflict the eternal desolation of living Death! Thus the impending demise of their mortal flesh will terrify and devastate them. The closer they get to losing everything they thought they were and all of those fleeting, temporary riches and pleasures and joys to which they aspired and managed to hold in their grasp, the more horrified they’ll become. And their approaching death will finally draw them into that absolutely inescapable desolation that will prove to be the end of whatever hope of peace, joy, happiness, well-being and contentment they may have tasted and known during their short stay in this fallen world. Beloved, such a dismal prospect truly is cause for terror and despair. If that’s all that people can anticipate, how could they not scream and kick in protest at the thought of Death inevitably inching its way closer and closer to where they are?
That is what radically independent rebels against God have waiting for them at the end of their earthly journey. But how marvelously different it will be for those who have repented of their original state of Sin and radical independence from God! How wonderful it will be if they believed and submitted to the Absolute Authority of God’s Life-giving Word! Because they’ve become one with God’s Word, the Word’s Salvation will fill and enfold them and protect them from the inevitable impending curse of suffering the demise of their fallen mortal flesh. For them, losing that flesh will be a wonderful liberation! I say that because when it is gone, the way is clear for God to give them a new Resurrection body that will be forever incorruptible, and perfectly complete in every way, just like Yeshua’s risen body already is.
This is the Exodus that God made possible for the children of Israel when He set them free from their slavery and led them out of their place of bondage in Egypt. He was leading them out of Death-inflicting Self-life, and drawing them into total freedom and fulfillment.
John 15:4-11
“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the Vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.” (Emphasis added.)
And if we learn the lessons God was teaching His people in and through the Exodus pattern and its application for us, the loss of what we were and what we had originally will be as if our inherited death shroud is finally removed from us. And real Life comes into us and takes us out of Death’s Darkness and into our Creator’s Eternal Light! For us the death of what we once were will mean something completely different! It will be Resurrection Glory… Life from the Dead… Light replacing Darkness… and total Restoration to full God-given Resurrection Life Humanity.
Yes… to the fallen rebellious people of this world, the demise of their fallen flesh means utter DOOM and DESOLATION. But to those who belong to God’s Living Word, it means ULTIMATE FREEDOM… and JOY… and PEACE! It means ETERNAL ONENESS WITH GOD AND ENDLESS UNION WITH ALL OF HIS FULLNESS!
This is the Fruit of God’s Gifts of Salvation, Redemption, Reconciliation and Restoration that He sent His Word to be to us. And these things are implied in Yeshua’s call to anyone who is blessed and honored enough to be summoned into His service as disciples. If we choose to follow Him, those are the wonderfully awesome things into which He intends to lead us!
Matthew 16:24-27
“Then Yeshua said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to follow after Me, he must deny himself (his earthly state of living death and enmity with God), take up his cross, and follow Me (into My State of Resurrection Life). For whoever wants to save his (radically independent, temporary earthly) life will lose it, but whoever loses his (original) life for My sake will find it (completely restored to him by My Eternal Life that I will share with him)! For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is about to come in the Glory of His Father with His angels, and then ‘He will repay everyone according to his deeds.’” (TLV, Amplification and emphasis added.)
Beloved… did you receive the call of God’s Living Word to follow Him? Did He invite you to allow the cross to peel away from you that ‘cocoon’ of Sin-corruption and living Death into which you were conceived? And did you follow Him so that He could lead you into the ability to share perpetually in His Everlasting Life? If you received that call, and obeyed, then please understand the glorious purpose of the cross that you were commanded to pick up and bring with you. That is the instrument that the Holy Spirit must use to strip Death and all of its results away from you! The cross sets us free from our inherited state of living Death… and opens the way in to the Eternal Life and Inheritance that Father has always intended for you, and all the rest of us, to have and to enjoy with Him!
When we hear Yeshua’s call to discipleship through natural, earthly ‘ears’ and try to process and understand it by using the ordinary, worldly, humanistic, ‘Me first’ paradigm by which to grasp its meaning, we will miss the real Truth and the Glory of our calling – by multiple trillions of miles! The summons to pick up our crosses is not a death sentence. It is just the opposite. We were already under an eternal death sentence before we were even aware of God or His Word! But God sends His Living Word into this fallen world to seek us out… and to summon us to forsake our addiction to Self-worship… so that we can be free to unite and bond with Him! And by bonding with God’s Living Word… we bond with Almighty God Himself… and thus we are restored to what we were designed and intended and created to be from the very beginning:
Revelation 21:1-7
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I also saw the holy city—the New Jerusalem—coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I also heard a loud voice from the throne, saying,
“Behold, the dwelling of God is among men, and He shall tabernacle among them. They shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them and be their God. He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.Nor shall there be mourning or crying or pain any longer, for the former things have passed away.”
“And the One seated upon the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new!” Then He said, “Write, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
“Then He said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will freely give from the spring of the water of life. The one who overcomes shall inherit these things, and I will be his God and he shall be My son.” (TLV)
So dear ones… God is letting us in on the most wonderful secret imaginable! The Love and Faithfulness of God, and His indwelling Presence within us, makes us immune to all the things that terrorize the people of this world! To them… Death means Eternal Desolation. But to us, Death means Entry Into ETERNAL ONENESS WITH ALMIGHTY GOD HIMSELF! The demise of our fallen flesh means that we’ve finally reached the Entryway to Everlasting Consummation and Fulfillment. It means we’re HOME FOR ALL OF ETERNITY… where we truly belong! It means we can finally know Almighty God Face to face and abide with Him as a completely satisfied and fulfilled Bride abides as one with her Perfect beloved Husband. And so it can’t be any better or more satisfying than that! How could our joy and peace and rest not be satisfying, when we know that there will never be an end to the Fulfilling Fullness that will be ours at last?
1 Corinthians 15:50-58
“Now I say this, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, and what decays cannot inherit what does not decay. Behold, I tell you a mystery:
“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last shofar. For the shofar will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruptibility, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this corruptible will have put on incorruptibility and this mortal will have put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O Death is your victory?
Where, O Death is your sting?”
“Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the Torah. But thanks be to God, who keeps giving us the victory through our Lord Yeshua the Messiah! Therefore, my dearly loved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord—because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” (TLV, Emphasis added.)