Beloved, think of people you know who claim to be Christian… those who regularly frequent church services and activities and respond affirmatively when pollsters ask them: “Are you a follower of Christ?” Many of us claim to be His followers… but what do we mean by that? Is our understanding the same as God’s? Are our claims true? How can anyone know for sure? Against what changeless criteria will God measure such responses? According to the following Scripture text, God requires us to actually prove that our claims to be His are true! So let’s ponder what our Master said on this matter:
Matthew 7:15-20
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good (Word-embodying Heavenly) tree bears good fruit, but the bad (Sin-corrupted radically independent) tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits! (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Can you sense the depths of what He is saying? We can know who is real and who is not by the unmistakable, supernatural signs that will emerge in the wake of Godly people. They will be filled with God’s Holy Spirit… God Himself will be at work from within them! And God will provide the proof that His Living Word is actually living and working from within such people!
Philippians 2:12-13
“So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure!” (Emphasis added.)
The Lord’s true followers aren’t identified because they regularly frequent man-made houses of worship and participate in scheduled religious activities, or because they believe certain doctrines in certain ways or worship in a particular style. The reality Yeshua spoke of is God’s own Eternal Life, living and working from within us! The Reality of God Himself, living and being what He is within us is what produces the ‘good fruit’. And, if His supernatural Life is not actually in us, His ‘fruit’ will not appear. What will appear will be what our Master called ‘bad fruit.’
From this we can see that true disciples do not merely ‘go’ to church to seek God’s Presence. They ARE His living Temples; they contain and manifest God’s awesome dynamic, productive Presence! Yeshua continually demonstrated this awesome New Covenant Reality when He walked the earth. And that is what He was teaching and training and preparing His disciples to embody after His Ascension throughout the Gospel accounts. Notice how often He made shocking statements and claims about Himself. He claimed to be the prophet, the Messiah! In other words, He was saying that Moses had written about Him, in the Torah (See Deuteronomy 18 and Matthew 5:17-20)! But not only did He make His claims verbally, He proved that they were true, by the Fruit His Father’s Spirit-imparted Presence within Him kept producing! That was the supernatural good fruit! It gave clear testimony that God was with Him… guiding, backing, empowering and endorsing Him. Those signs and wonders gave unmistakable evidence that what He claimed, promised, did and taught, originated in God!
John 14:10-11
“Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves!”
Beloved, do you see it? He was demonstrating this one more time to His disciples during that terrible storm on the lake in Matthew 8. The Authority to unleash Almighty God’s Power upon that destructive wind and the tumultuous waves that was given to Him proved that God Himself was abiding and working from within the Lord’s Spirit-filled Humanity! Notice also that the Fruit of God’s Life that was at work in Him differed greatly from whatever it was that was producing its fruit in the darkened, uncomprehending souls of those terrified disciples who were in that boat with Him. Wouldn’t you agree?
How much more will He have to teach the same lessons to His Last Days disciples? Will they not also have to learn to live the Spirit-empowered life, just like their Master! Won’t they have to transform into His image and likeness on the earth during the awesome climax of human history? Yes, we too will have to get to know Him, and His ways, at that intensely intimate, personal and world changing level! We too will have to learn to absorb and master His Spirit-obedient ways, and display the same ‘from God’ lifestyle that He was displaying in that boat!
Those men who were with Him that day finally did learn this, in God’s good time. The fruit that God’s Spirit produced in their Master also began to appear in them, once they had become His New Covenant image and likeness! In light of this awesome Reality, I ask you to ponder what He added to what He told them during that storm:
Matthew 7:15-23
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven (that is, complete their Exodus Journey), but he (will finish his Exodus) who does the will of My Father who is in Heaven (faithfully and consistently). That is the person who will enter.
“Many (hyper-religious people) will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your Name, and in Your Name cast out demons, and in Your Name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice Lawlessness!’” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Our Master is the Living Word of God! And we know that God’s Living Word always aligns with and follows and fulfills His Father’s written Word. Strictly speaking, the Torah (The Law) consists of the first five books of the Bible. It is the absolute foundational basis for God’s written revelation. And all the other Scriptures flow out of it by way of amplification and explanation. Messiah Yeshua, God’s Living Word made flesh, came to Earth to embody and explain and fulfill everything that Moses had written! And what He said about people who practice ‘Lawlessness’ or ‘Torah-lessness’ will identify those who claim to follow Him, but who are actually not one with God’s Living and written Word. Their fruits will expose them and show them to be distant from God and disobedient to His Word. Are you getting this? Yeshua was giving the ‘earmarks’ or ‘telltale signs’ by which His authentic New Covenant disciples could be known!
Matthew 5:17-19
“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My Holy Name, which you have profaned among the nations (pagan Gentiles by breaking My Sinai Covenant every) where you went. I will vindicate the holiness of My great Name which has been profaned among the nations, which you (unrepentant Israelite children of Adam) have profaned in their midst. Then the nations (the whole pagan idolatrous world) will know that I am the Lord,’ declares the Lord God, ‘when I prove Myself holy (by manifesting my own Holiness and Righteousness as I live within and) among you, in their sight! For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own (Kingdom of Heaven, one with God) land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your (radically independent self-life) filthiness and from all your (man-devised) idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove (circumcise) the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a (God-imparted, repentant) heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause (empower) you to walk in (obediently embody and fulfill) My (Word-revealing and embodying) statutes, and you will be (lovingly, obediently) careful to observe My (Biblical) ordinances. You will live in the (Kingdom of Heaven) land that I gave to your forefathers; so you (truly and actually) will be My People, and I will (truly) be your (one and only Living indwelling) God!” (Ezekiel 36:22-28 Amplification and emphasis added.)
“Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished! Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
Beloved… ponder the awesome Transformation and Restoration we have every right to expect! Yes, we’re still en route, still on the way to our Eternal Home, and at this time, we are still ‘under construction.’ But, by the end of the Journey, we living dead, Sin-loving, Self-serving, sons of Adam’s disobedience will be fully regenerated, renewed and transformed into the Eternal image and likeness of God’s Word, our resurrected Messiah! The Glory of the Resurrection that is now His, will also be given to us at that time! And, even now, Yeshua, the Perfect Image and Likeness of our Heavenly Father, is living within us, by the Power of the Holy Spirit! And, it is His Fruit, the Fruit of God’s Living creative Word that the New Covenant Gospels are promising to reveal to the world… through us! If that fullness is not reserved for the Last Days disciples of the Lord, for whom then is it being reserved? If not through them, then through whom will God fulfill His promises?
Lawlessness occurs when people remain severed from Yeshua, because He is God’s Word. They may hear and give lip service to this or that part of the written Word, but they fail to know, embrace and unite with God’s Living Word, the One that the written Word is meant to reveal. In that case they remain spiritually ‘decapitated’ and therefore, dead! Only Yeshua embodies and fulfills what the Scriptures require of the rest of us. Only He produces the ‘Good Fruit’ that Father is looking for in us. So, when we remain severed from Him, the same old ‘bad fruit’ we formerly produced, remains and continues to pollute our present and future. Remember this issue when you read the Gospels. When the Lord and His disciples lived and walked across the Land of Israel in those first century days, He was training them to identify with and rely upon Him, completely, to the same extent that He, as Israel’s New Covenant Representative and Messiah, had already identified with them! So notice how close to us God has always intended to be, and how united to His Word He desires us to be at all times. We are designed and created and intended to be Almighty God’s image and likeness, so how could He not expect us to think and live and act as one with His Living and written Word at all times?
So why did God require this New Covenant to come into being? It is needed because Scripture reveals that, throughout her history with God, Israel could not stop violating her Sinai Covenant with God. In that Covenant, people with fallen Adamic flesh were striving to meet God’s infinitely Perfect Standards of Righteousness by the good intentions and well-meaning efforts of their fallen souls! But the Torah revealed that all fallen human faculties have been mortally wounded and corrupted by Sin and Death! We are conceived in and born into that fallen living dead state! So we could never pass God’s Judgment as long as that is the case. And the Sinai Covenant was intended to demonstrate and prove to us that we cannot meet God’s standards by our own effort and striving! And so, after even Israel failed to observe her Sinai Covenant with God, God made it clear to the whole world that He would have to meet His own Standards! So, He sent His Living Word to serve as our Covenant Representative. He came and lived and underwent His atoning death and entered into His glorious Resurrection… in our name! He did it AS US! That is exactly the same extent that we must learn to identify with Him!
Jesus Trained By Demonstrating
And this is part of what He was demonstrating so repeatedly and dramatically to His disciples. He was training them, by demonstrating the difference between what was in His own Spirit-empowered Righteous Life, from what was in their spiritually disconnected, soulish, flesh-driven existence. God already knew this was so. But the human race does not know it, or admit it. So God had to prove and demonstrate it to us all. He wasn’t disappointed in Israel’s poor performance; that didn’t take Him by surprise! He wasn’t berating His chosen people for not being good or strong or skilled or sincere enough. He knew they were stuck in that living dead state of Sin. And He was making sure they understood the difference between radically independent self-life, as opposed to what it means to have God’s Word and Spirit actually living and working, as Lord, from within a New Covenant person.
At that time, the disciples were not able to do any better in their own strength than any other Israelite had been able to do. But Yeshua was showing them how different it was going to be, after they received the Gift of the Holy Spirit. Then… the Spirit of God would be just as free to live and act and work from within them, as they saw Him working from within their Master, Yeshua! The Lord was preparing them to make the mental and emotional quantum leap from the Sinai Covenant of their forefathers to the New Covenant His Heavenly Father had sent Him to institute in their day. This first group of disciples was commissioned and destined to become the first New Covenant disciples of God’s Word. He was showing them the supernatural level into which God would have to take them and what they would look and sound like, after they had the training needed to grow and mature and develop, after they received the promised Gift of the Holy Spirit, ‘Power from on high,’ that God imparted to them in the book of Acts.
And when the time for that finally arrived, they too were empowered by the Holy Spirit to bear that good Fruit that God would produce through them. They too had the God-given authority to announce this wonderful news to Israel, and to begin to prepare the rest of the world to receive this same awesome demonstration of God’s Mercy! That is why the Lord disciplined and trained them so rigorously and, at times, so severely. They had to know the difference between the Sinai Covenant, and the New Covenant in order to proclaim and demonstrate and prove by their own lives, that this is truly God’s Truth and Reality!
In the Sinai Covenant, the commandments were written on stone tablets. But in the New Covenant, God’s Living Torah, Yeshua, the Living Word Himself, is imparted to us. And He abides within our spirits to pierce, penetrate and impregnate each believer’s innermost heart with His own Resurrection Life and Perfect Presence! Prior to His death and resurrection, Rabbi Yeshua was the only human who was filled and empowered by God’s Spirit. He was showing them the difference between the two Covenants, and also demonstrating what they would soon be equipped and empowered to be and to do as His image and likeness. God was going to allow His Eternal Word’s Life and Authority to begin to work and produce His supernatural Fruit… in them! And this is the awesome Fruit that the Lord had in mind when He told them, “you will know them by their fruits!”
So no wonder He said that the Gate and the Path His disciples would have to travel was extremely narrow and exclusive! Most of Israel was not yet ready or predisposed to receive this at that time, much less the rest of the world! And no wonder He said that very few would find that Gate and actually follow the God-embodying Path onto which it leads! But that is what the New Covenant makes possible! So… when they were caught in that storm on the lake, we can see how unprepared they still were at that time. But in a relatively short time, their Master had them ready for that awesome day when the Gift of the Holy Spirit was imparted to them. And we see the enormous difference that took place in them throughout chapters 2-5 of Acts! By that time, the New Covenant had become Reality for God’s people, even in this fallen world! It hit these pre-trained Israelite disciples like an enormous Salvation Bomb! And it is that same Bomb that God began to drop on the rest of the human race through them! It is the Bomb that destroys and devastates and neutralizes all the works of the Serpent and all of the demonic realms of the Serpent’s Darkness and Death!
Genesis 3:15
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise Him on the heel.”
Was our Master telling us that we have to do a better job of trying to copy and duplicate Him than Israel was able to do? Was He training His disciples to study their heads off, and punish and force their minds, wills and bodies with torturous exertions until they achieved superhuman levels of strength and ability that would enable them to ‘earn their black belts’ and finally be able to equal what He was, and imitate what He did, to perfection? Were they to be His clones? If that was what He meant, then, thanks to the Sin-corruption into which they had been conceived and born, neither they nor any one of us could have any hope of ever being redeemed and saved! Sin had already killed us!
So no, that wasn’t it. The brutal terrifying truth remains: every human being – every one of us – were all born dead in trespasses and sins, except for one of us. And that one Human is God’s Living Word who became flesh. But all the rest of us will never be able to come close to passing God’s Judgment on our own merits! If even Israel, of all people, has not been able to honor and keep the Sinai Covenant… what chance will the poor pagan, Sin-corrupted, ignorant Gentiles have of doing it? No, we all fall miserably short of God’s Perfect Standards! We don’t have a chance unless God, in His Mercy and Grace, does something that would be impossible for us.
At the Final Judgment, God will not say: ‘How well were you able to imitate and duplicate what My beloved Son, the Son with whom I am well pleased, was able to do? Did you please Me as well as He did? Did you believe, trust, love and obey Me as perfectly as He did? If not, I want nothing to do with you!”
No, He won’t say that. This is what He’ll say: “How much of My Living Word, My Son, were you willing to accept and embrace and take into yourself? How much of Him have you allowed to live and work within you? Is He pleasing Me from within you, or are you still ignoring, rejecting and bypassing Him?”
Do you see the difference? In the Sinai Covenant, man has to try to do the work. But in the New Covenant, God has already DONE all of the work! What an enormous difference that makes! The Fruit produced by the Living Word of God is all that God will accept! Nothing short of His Work will do! So can you see what Yeshua was saying about those who will not be allowed into God’s Kingdom? The people He will reject may have been as religious as humans could possibly be! But they were still spiritually naked, just as Adam and Eve were after they fell into Sin and Death, because they rejected the Salvation God is offering to us all through His beloved Son. God knew the way fallen men strive to flaunt and exalt their self-satisfied flesh. That’s what Cain had done. On the surface, such people try to appear religious and spiritual. But inside, in their hearts, they reject and spurn God’s Word and are a far cry from what God wants to see and have.
Luke 18:9-14
And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
This is extremely important for all Last Days disciples-in-training to know! We will have to know the difference between true and false, genuine and fake. We don’t live in the first century religious atmosphere of Peter, James, John and Paul. We live in a world that has moved far, far away from God’s standards as revealed to and shared with the world through Israel. Nevertheless, God has not changed. His standards of Righteousness are the same as always. And today our world is every bit as secular, humanistic, and Sin-loving as the Egypt of Moses’ day ever was! Even our modern religious elements, for the most part, reject and ignore the standards that God revealed and entrusted to Israel. Even most of modern Israel is far removed from what was commanded by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob! The people of this generation have replaced God’s Word and His ways with alternatives of their own choosing!
Remember the other warnings our Master gave – He said that when the end was near, the world would reproduce the horrendously evil and wicked ways of the men who existed during the days of Noah, just before God destroyed the world with the Flood. And He also said the world would also be immersed in the deviant lifestyles and priorities that were so prevalent in the city of Sodom in the days of Lot! And beloved, isn’t that exactly what is happening in the world in which we now live? Many people of today are hard wired with alien humanistic attitudes and mindsets that reject and deny what God has revealed about Himself in His Scriptures. Many in our world pursue Sin-promoting priorities, and God-less hopes and dreams and aspirations that habitually defy God’s commandments. The lifestyles many among us embrace are what God calls ‘abominations!’ So, doesn’t this mean that as God’s Judgment approaches, we disciples are in for a lot of trouble? Won’t the world hate us and try to stamp us out with an ever increasing and intensifying fury? Yes, beloved, it will. God warned us that it would be so. So the fulfillment of our God-given commissions will prove to be extremely dangerous and increasingly difficult.
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.”
Consider all the ‘flack’ that the first century disciples had to face and endure! If that’s what happened at the beginning of the New Covenant Era, what do you think will be happening by the time we reach the end of all human history? So I ask you to ponder the meanings of what took place during that storm incident on that lake that we’ve been considering. If that wasn’t a perfect ‘boot camp’ training session the Lord took them through, I don’t know what else we could call it! And, if His disciples were so dense and unprepared at that time, I ask you to consider this: Are we any different? At this point in time, are we more advanced in our level of training and preparation than they were? During the Last Days intensity level of conflict, what do you honestly think our chances will be, considering our current level of ‘getting it right?’ Can you see why the Lord was giving those men such undivided attention and taking such great pains to enable them to see and understand and move into what the New Covenant was all about and what it would require of them when their training days were over? All the while He lived with them, He led them into one gut-wrenching combat training drill after another. He drilled them with massive repetition so they would finally understand who He really is, and what He was forging them to be, and do and teach to all the others when the time would come for the Holy Spirit to begin to bring countless numbers of Jews and non-Jews under their care and teaching. He had to get them ready to know God so well, that they would be blown away by His immensity, Glory and Majesty, rather than continuing to be intimidated and manipulated and pulled down by the powers of Darkness and the Sin-loving people that those powers were manipulating and arousing and sending against them.
The Lord demonstrated, by personal example, that even though He too lived in the weak helplessness of a mortal human body, and He too was utterly dependent upon God, just as we all are, He knew something they did not yet know. And He had a most wonderful, infinite, endless Resource to draw from to which they did not yet have access! And that secret Resource was what He had to make them aware of and demonstrate for them repeatedly, so they’d be ready when the time came for Him to say to them:
Matthew 10:7-10
“You’ve seen Me dance with the Holy Spirit in the Arena of Testimony many times. You’ve seen how I always defer to Him so that He can lead Me and impart to Me whatever My Father wants to send into this world, through Me. You’ve seen how I always follow His leading. So now… it’s time for you to give it a try!”
“And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give. Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two coats, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worthy of his support.”
That storm on the lake caught the disciples off guard because they were still Old Covenant Israelites. They were not yet equipped to move into the New Covenant’s Reality! Yes, they knew the Hebrew Scriptures. And they had the genes of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and were quite religious and very well versed in the history of their chosen people. But… they did not yet have what Yeshua had. They had not yet received the New Covenant Fullness of the Gift of the Holy Spirit. So Yeshua was demonstrating the great difference between them and Him. He was showing them the before and after difference between what Sinai Covenant people can do, and what New Covenant people are equipped to do.
So let’s consider that ‘good fruit vs. bad fruit’ once more. During that storm, the disciples produced their kind of fruit… terror, panic and weak, clueless victimized helplessness. And Yeshua produced His New Covenant, Spirit-imparted Fruit. His Fruit was Almighty God’s actual Presence and Spirit-imparted Authority, Peace, and outrageous Confidence in God’s Perfection! That truly was Supernatural Fruit! Yeshua was so utterly calm, peaceful, confident and sure of His Father’s nearness and Covenant Faithfulness that He was able to sleep like a baby in its mother’s arms! And, when they woke Him, He was immediately eminently authoritative and effective when He spoke to the wind and the waves in the Name of His Father! Thus He showed them the huge difference between the kind of fruit that will be acceptable to God at the Judgment, and the sort of fruit that will be rejected.
So, beloved, have any among us received the kind of training and preparation that our Master gave to His first century disciples? Have we been trained, drilled and conditioned to react to demonic turbulence and malice, and the worldly hatred and opposition for which the Lord trained and prepared them? Many of us have been trained to ‘say the Sinner’s Prayer’ once, and we’ve been taught to ‘find a good church’ and ‘get plugged into it.’ And, in their own way, that is exactly what those first century disciples had been trained to do too! They attended temple and synagogue services; they observed the Biblical commandments and tried to live as ‘good Israelites.’ But still, the Lord chided and corrected them for the way in which they reacted during that terrible storm.
So I ask you: would we have acted any differently? They were doing much more as Israelites than most people do today. They took part in the Scripturally commanded temple feasts and studied the Torah and observed the commandments and regulations required by the Torah. They regularly participated in temple and synagogue services and lived as faithful Israelites. But obviously, as was true with all previous generations of Israelites, that was not enough! They were not yet predisposed and ready to ‘take a little Peace and Rest Filled nap with Yeshua,’ even in the midst of that terrible storm!
The Powers of Darkness Will Know You by Your Fruits!
Here is the question we should ask ourselves: “How many of us (had we been in that boat with the Lord and His disciples) would have reacted any differently than the way the disciples reacted? Are we ready to embody Yeshua and His demeanor? Are we ready to embody the Lord who slept so peacefully and who took total control over that storm? Is He actually living and operating from within us at this time? Will He be the one that we manifest when it’s time for us to deal with the demonic storms that await us? The Gospel accounts are demonstrating the difference between the best that the Covenant of Sinai can enable men to be and do, as opposed to what the New Covenant will enable God’s people to be and to do… once they truly repent of what they were, and forsake their self-reliance and allow it to be crucified, executed… and exchanged… for YESHUA HIMSELF!
In the Sinai Covenant, God wrote His commandments on tablets of stone. And the people tried to learn and study them. They did their best to try to observe them to God’s satisfaction. But their best was not enough. Time and again, century after century, Israel tired, wavered, faltered and failed! All their efforts and revivals and renewals ended in disappointment and failure! But that was no surprise to God! He knew that would happen. But He had to demonstrate and prove it to His people, and to the rest of the smug, self-righteous world! The Sinai Covenant was doomed to fail and end the way it did because the living dead fallen flesh of Adam’s children were going to try to make it work! And that is the level from which the disciples were working at that time.
But fallen flesh does not have what it takes to replace or duplicate the Living God of Israel! We will never, ever ‘be like’ or as Almighty God! Radically independent, self-sufficient, self-reliant people will never serve as God’s image and likeness! They are the opposite of what God requires! We were made out of nothingness and formed out of dust, and that’s where we will return… to dust! So the Truth is that we will always be totally dependent upon the One True God. This was the essential Lesson of the Exodus Boot Camp training God had to give to Israel… in the sight of the entire pagan, idolatrous world, where it was natural, common and to be expected that men would have many different gods. Every region and nation had their own versions and pantheons of man-made gods. Almost anything could be elevated to ‘god status’ – the sun, the moon, insects, rivers, animals, emperors, sexual pleasures, and revelries of all kinds. If Almighty God created it then, sooner or later, some deluded human would begin to worship it.
That was the condition of the world in the days of Noah, and of Abraham, and of Moses. And it is the condition of the world all around the nation of Israel, in the midst of which the Word made flesh appeared in the first century. And that’s the way that the world around us is today! The Serpent and Sin never take a vacation or a break. But neither does God, or His Word and Spirit! His Truth remains: there is a huge difference between the kind of fruit that dead fallen flesh living in that world can produce… and the totally acceptable Fruit that Almighty God produces… through His Living Word and Holy Spirit, as He abides within the yielded, repentant, weak, bankrupt disciples, who believe and serve His Word and defer to Him at all times, so that He may life His Life from within their ever-crucified flesh! The difference between what comes out of those who look to Him, and those who look only to themselves, is enormous… And that is what God will sort out at the final Judgment, when we all stand before His Awesome Presence to give an account to Him of what we chose to be and to do in the short fleeting time that was allotted to us on this earth!
That was the condition of the world in the days of Noah, and of Abraham, and of Moses. And it is the condition of the world all around the nation of Israel, in the midst of which the Word made flesh appeared in the first century. And that’s the way that the world around us is today! The Serpent and Sin never take a vacation or a break. But neither does God, or His Word and Spirit! His Truth remains: there is a huge difference between the kind of fruit that dead fallen flesh living in that world can produce… and the totally acceptable Fruit that Almighty God produces… through His Living Word and Holy Spirit, as He abides within the yielded, repentant, crucified flesh of those who believe and serve His Word and defer to Him at all times, so that He may life His Life from within their ever-crucified flesh.
The Covenant of Sinai represents fallen worldly people and what they can do. And the New Covenant God made with Israel, introduces what only God can do, through the Salvation and Liberation and Healing and Restoration that can only come when Almighty God joins Himself to us, through the Eternal Life and Perfect Righteousness and Value of His Living Word. In Yeshua’s Human existence on Earth, God’s Living Word temporarily laid aside His Divinity. He did it so the Serpent would never be able to accuse God of wrongdoing, or being unjust. He did it also so the Serpent could never continue to accuse us of still being under his domination and slaves to Sin and Death. He became one of us, except for Sin. So that He could represent us as the Son of Man. So He took upon Himself all that is true of us, except for Sin. Thus the Creator humiliated and debased Himself so that He could share our weak, helpless dependent creature condition before God.
That day, when the storm overtook them, the Living Word of God made flesh was just as weak and needy and dependent upon His Father as the disciples were! BUT… He was filled with the Fullness of God’s Holy Spirit! Thus He always remained as one with His Father. And His union with the Father, through the Holy Spirit, made Him to be one with God, and it made God to be one with Him. And that union was what empowered His weak, helpless and totally dependent humanity to react to the storm with such supernatural peace-filled calm and confidence and authority. The Spirit imparted the Eternal Word’s absolute Authority to Yeshua’s helpless human flesh… and that is how He had the Authority of God working in Him. The Spirit empowered Him and led Him to command the wind and the waves to be still, in His Father’s Name!
John 5:19
“…Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner.”
The difference between Yeshua and the disciples was that Almighty God Himself, in all of His Eternal Fullness, was abiding within Yeshua’s human spirit, soul and body! The spirits, souls and bodies of the disciples were like miserable hovels, filled with nothing but dead fallen flesh and the fear and helplessness that Sin and Death impart. But Yeshua’s spirit, soul and body were always filled to the fullest possible extent with His Father’s Holy Spirit! The disciples were examples of Israel, working out from the Covenant of Sinai – the Mosaic Covenant. God’s people kept breaking and failing to fulfill it in the past, and many continue to violate it in the present. But Yeshua, Israel’s Messiah, was demonstrating what the disciples would be changed into, when the time arrived for God to impart His Holy Spirit to them too. Then, the Holy Spirit would impart to them the living Presence of their resurrected Messiah… and He would reveal and establish His Eternal Glory on the Earth, and His Eternal Union with His Father, through the yielded flesh of those men, and the others who would follow that narrow New Covenant Path with them! And then God would be legally free to unpack and unfold for Israel, and for the repentant, believing non-Jewish world, the New Covenant’s Legacy of Total Fulfillment! This is why God’s Word is among us now… to be the Living Fulfillment of these prophetic words:
Isaiah 61:1-3
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to bring Good News to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to (Sinai Covenant) captives and freedom to prisoners (of the fallen world system); to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God (against the lying Serpent); to comfort all (repentant children of Adam) who mourn, to grant those (repentant children of Abraham) who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting. So they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”
Galatians 3:6-14
“Even so Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith who are sons of Abraham. The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the Gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the nations will be blessed in you.’ So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer. For as many as are of the works of the Law (that fallen men try to observe in their own strength) are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not abide (perfectly and wholeheartedly) by all things written in the Book of the Law, to perform them (in keeping with God’s Perfect Standard of Righteousness).’
“Now that no one (who was conceived in Sin and is born dead in trespasses) is justified by the Law before God (in His Perfection) is evident; for, ‘The righteous man shall live by faith (in God, and not by trusting in himself).’ However, the Law (of Sinai) is not of faith; on the contrary, ‘He who practices them shall live by them.’
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’— in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the Promise of the Spirit through faith (in the Perfect New Covenant Covering provided by God’s Lamb).” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
In those first century pre-Ascension days, the Mosaic Covenant was all the disciples had to work with. They knew very little about the New Covenant God had promised to make with Israel. So, during that storm, Yeshua was the one and only example of a New Covenant Israelite on Earth. He was one of a kind, the only Spirit-empowered, God-filled Israelite in existence. And God had to show these disciples the enormous difference between what Yeshua’s New Covenant Humanity was, and what the religious fallen flesh of all the rest of us still is. And now that we have the benefit of hindsight and centuries of experience, we can learn from the mistakes of the disciples who went before us. Now, we also have the responsibility of taking the glorious New Covenant Truth and Reality, and learning to believe and rely upon Him through it, with all our heart, soul, might and strength. The privileges and God-imparted Authority it gives is now available to anyone who will believe, repent and obey God’s Word, following Him into the unprecedented level of Fulfillment that God’s Final Thrust into this fallen world makes possible for us.
The Fruit our Lord repeatedly manifested while He was on the earth was supernatural and Heavenly. It was the New Covenant Fruit that people who insist on trusting in their own strength and devices will never attain or duplicate. And so our task as His ‘Last Days disciples’ is unique and specific. We too must begin to live with our Master day and night. In the Eastern, Hebrew world, the ‘disciple job description’ is clearly understood. Everyone knows that disciples are invited to follow their master so that he can teach them to become his ‘image and likeness.’ They live with him continually, as members of his personal family and household. That’s how they get to know him and his ways. That enables them to imitate, follow in his steps, learning his ways and mannerisms. And after years of following him as their ‘template’ or ‘pattern’ the disciples gradually transform into living reproductions of what their master is and what he stands for. Then, they can begin to teach new recruits who gather around them, and show them how to be and do the same thing. That was how masters developed their own ‘schools’ and ‘traditions.’ And now it’s our turn to grow and reproduce and develop His Body on Earth, the way the originals did.
Now… thanks to the Power of the Holy Spirit, God has begun to abide within us New Covenant disciples. The Holy Spirit imparts the Perfect Presence of God’s Resurrected Word made flesh… and causes Him to become real, alive, and dynamically Fruitful from within our yielded, crucified fallen flesh! Messiah Yeshua died to make it possible for us to move from Death to Life… and now we have the privilege of surrendering our fallen flesh to the same Death… so that He can come into us and live His Resurrection Life in us and through us, and obey His Father to Perfection… in our name.
Jeremiah 31:31-34
“‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a New Covenant with the House of Israel and with the House of Judah, not like the (Sinai) Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My Covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord. ‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will put My Law (Torah) within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they will all know Me (personally, directly and intimately), from the least of them to the greatest of them,’ declares the Lord, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
God Himself promises to equip us to bear and offer our Messiah’s level of supernatural fruit that is always acceptable in His sight. But, just as the first century disciples found out through gut-wrenching boot camp experiences, we will never be ‘like God.’ His ways are never our ways, or His thoughts our thoughts! So this is a most crucial point: Since only our Messiah, God’s Living Word, is one with His Father and the Holy Spirit… He must be the one who lives and abides and works from within us! If only He can produce the kind of Fruit that is Perfect and Totally Acceptable in His Father’s sight, He must abide within us… to do it in our name! He always produces the Fruit, but we have the privilege and honor of bearing it for Him in our Father’s sight!
Colossians 3:1-4
“Therefore if (since) 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!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)