The Mystery of the Gospel, Part 5: No More Separation

This is from the book The Mystery of the Gospel:

No More Separation

"Many of us have grown up with the idea that Jesus of Nazareth somehow wasn't quite 'for real.' Sure we know that He was a man, but in the back of our minds we suspect that He wasn't quite human.

"Despite the artists' impressions of Jesus as a 'holy man' with a halo about His head and a beatific look on His face, Jesus was an ordinary human being who had a great deal in common with the average man-on-the-street in first-century Palestine. He wasn't an apparition. Nor was He an other-worldly being in the guise of a man. He was every bit as real as you or I. He was an inner person expressed through outer soul and body just like we are.

"From eternity past Jesus had been the image of the invisible God. He was part of the 'I AM' through whom all things exist. But when He was born of woman, He did not continue in His former role and simply disguise Himself in a human body. We are told that He completely gave up what He was:

Although He existed in the form of God [He] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Philippians 2:6, 7

"The newborn Jesus began like every other baby. As He grew, His self-awareness gradually developed, and He began to realize who He really was. It was only as He grew, with the teaching of His mother and through reading the Scriptures, that His role as the Last Adam began to dawn on Him.

"By the time He was thirty, Jesus had a pretty good idea of His identity. But still He wasn't so certain that there couldn't be a shadow of doubt, for all three of the devil's temptations focused on the question of whether He was really who He believed Himself to be.

"There was one major difference between Jesus and ourselves. As the Last Adam, He had to begin with the same sinlessness as Adam had when he was first created. So He wasn't indwelt by the god of this world as all since Adam have been. He never became a child of the devil. When the devil offered himself as a candidate for the one who would indwell Christ, promising Him power over the nations as God in the flesh, Jesus chose to be obedient to His Father.

"It may be strange to think of Jesus as being 'indwelt.' But in fact He was indwelt by the Father just as we must be. Notice what He Himself said:

I can do nothing of my own initiative, as I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just; because I do not seek My own will but the will of Him who sent Me. John 5:30

For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent me has given Me commandment, what to say, and what to speak. John 12:49

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. John 5:19

"Jesus, then, was a container to express His Father. Instead of asserting Himself, He was willing to empty Himself of His own initiative and become God in Jesus of Nazareth form. All that He said and did then manifested the Father.

"But how could Jesus only speak what the Father commanded and do what the Father did? Did Jesus receive a script to learn every morning? Did He have a fresh list of miracles each day, like a shopping list?

"'Let's see, Son, today we'll heal a leper, cast out a few demons, and turn water into wine. Now here's what You say to the leper . . . .'

"No, Jesus didn't receive His commands externally. He didn't read them in a book, or have them handed to Him on parchment by an angel. Look at what He said: '. . . whatever the Father does, these things the Son does in like manner.' He was simply a manifestation of the Father. The Father expressed Himself through Jesus, so that although it looked like Jesus saying and doing these things it was really the Father in Jesus form!

"Jesus' life wasn't based on religion. He didn't copy someone else or try to follow external instructions. He just lived spontaneously, and because He was one with the Father--His human spirit in union with His Father's Spirit--when He lived, it was the Father living as He. He expressed His Father's nature and thus was the Father manifested to the world.

"So Jesus was able to say of Himself:

. . . He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how do you say, 'Show us the Father'? 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 in Me; otherwise believe on account of the works themselves. John 14:9-11

"The simple fact is that Jesus Himself couldn't do a single miracle! Remember, He had given up His right to equality with God. He had become human, and He could no more perform miracles than you or I. He was powerless, unable to do a single thing more than any other common piece of human clay. He could of His own self do 'nothing.'

"Yet Jesus did do miracles, because He was a container for the Father's life. He was in union with the Father--so much so that to see Him was to see the Father manifested. But, and this is the staggering truth that revolutionizes the believer's life, Jesus said that in the precise manner that He manifested the Father through union, so also we are to manifest Christ.

"Immediately following His statement that to see Him was to see the Father manifested, Jesus went on to make an even more incredible claim. He included us in the picture!

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father. John 14:12

"Probably most of us have looked back on the life of Jesus and thought, 'What a marvelous time in history that must have been.' Those were 'Bible times,' and who could have wished to experience anything better than being right there with Jesus? But Jesus said that it is better now that He has gone! He said that if we really do believe in Him, we will do greater works than He Himself did!

"To 'believe in' Jesus as Savior has two aspects to it--it is more than simply believing in and accepting His shed blood for the forgiveness of sins. There is also the body side of the Cross. And it is through the body of Christ that we are identified with Him so that we are made one with Him in His resurrection life. A new creature has been formed. And what people see when they look at us is actually the manifestation of Christ through us! We are Christ expressed in His human forms--in His Bob, Peter, Linda or Sue forms.

"We were created to be visible expressions of the invisible Christ, manifesting Him in this world. If we truly lived from an awareness of this, the problems we have been fussing about ourselves would evaporate. We would know that we are no longer separate selves, but indeed we are one with God through Christ.

"In His beautiful final prayer, Jesus asked that we might know union with Him just as He knew union with the Father--that we might function as one life as He did. He wanted us to experience that identical oneness:

That they may all be one, even as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us . . . that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them, and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity. John 17:21-23

"Jesus meant for us to know that same union He had, so that just as He manifested the Father we might manifest Him.

"Some have thought Jesus was talking about the various churches all being one church. But trying to become 'one' externally without knowing our inner union with Christ, and therefore with one another--since we all collectively make up His Body, as various expressions of Him--is putting the cart before the horse. Unity can only be manifest to the world when we know union within.

"Prior to the death of Christ, most of mankind was kept at a distance from God. Only a handful knew a real relationship with Him. Compared with the Gentiles, Israel was 'near,' and the Gentiles were 'far off.' Yet this nearness was not oneness with God, as He had to be approached through an external mediatorial priesthood and system of rituals.

"Because even the Israelites knew only the God 'up there,' sin could easily rupture their arms-length relationship with Him. Isaiah said that their iniquities made a separation between them and their God, and their sins had caused Him to hide His face so that He did not hear them.

"But under the new covenant, God is no longer just 'up there'; He comes to make His abode in us. Paul said that 'the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him'--so much one that for one of us to cohabit with a harlot is tantamount to taking Christ into an illicit relationship! (1 Cor. 6:15-17)

"No wonder Jeremiah said the new covenant would eliminate the need for us to urge one another to 'know the Lord'--to get closer to the Lord. From the least to the greatest we are one with Him, rendering null and void the need for priests and mediators.

"We have entered into the holy of holies in heaven. Where Jesus is, we are. He is seated at the Father's right hand, and we too are seated in these heavenly places. There is no more separation. As Paul concluded, there is nothing past, present, nor future that can affect our relationship--neither temptation nor sin, neither trial nor tragedy, neither Satan nor his demons (Rom. 8:38. 39).

"All our sins are dealt with in full, removed from God's sight. He no longer takes note of them. There is no condemnation whatever! Christ settled the sin problem once and for all. 'God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns?'

"Though we might have feelings of guilt, separation and condemnation when we sin, all we need to do is acknowledge our foolishness, and thank Him for His provision for us. The realization of 'no condemnation' is not something we have to duplicate every time we sin. This is the difference between the old and new covenants. The first held man at arms-length and merely allowed him to come 'near to God'; in contrast, the new covenant makes us 'one with God.'

"Every time Israel sinned, they had to be forgiven and the relationship had to be restored. So God instituted a daily sacrificial system that would serve for the nation, since not every individual could sacrifice each time he went astray. But what Christ Jesus did was once for all time. He paid the price of every sin that would ever be committed. That is why there is no need for further offerings for sin (see Heb. 10:10-18). We have been sanctified by that one offering, 'perfected for all time.' So we rest in what Christ has fully accomplished. His sacrifice has been accepted once and for all by the Father, and we do not need to be washed anew and have our sins removed from us each time we fall short.

"Notice, Jesus prayed that we might be 'perfected in unity'--no longer separate, needing to draw near, but one. God no longer sees us as sinners, but as the righteous--as saints!

"This is the whole force of Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians Six concerning why we should no longer live sinfully. Murderers, thieves, adulterers, and the like will not inherit the kingdom of God: 'And such were some of you,' he adds. But we are no longer the unrighteous; we are saints. He continues: 'But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified'--so why live any longer as if you were still one of the unrighteous? Because we have been born as entirely new persons, we are no longer liars, cheats, drunkards or covetous people, and therefore are under no compulsion to live as if we were.

"We are now sons of God expressing His divine nature. Christ Himself, the very image of the Father, is our life. And since the old man is no longer alive, so that there is really only Christ living through us, there is no way we can ever be separated from God again!

"The apostle Peter said that Christ is our 'example,' and that we are intended 'to follow in His steps.' Paul said something similar when he told the Corinthians, 'Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.'

"Do these statements mean that we are to copy the lifestyle of our Founder as if we had a religion? Do they mean we are to try to act as He acted, imitating His behavior?

"Not at all, for true Christianity is not a matter of following rules or moral principles. It is not religion. Jesus isn't our example in the sense that we are meant to try to live as He lived, subscribing to His philosophy and copying His concepts.

"He is our example of how the divine life is to be reproduced in a human being. We do not imitate His moral behavior, but we imitate His willingness to simply allow God to be Himself through our human flesh. Jesus pioneered the method, setting us an example of the indwelt life. To imitate Him or to imitate Paul is to be indwelt as they were indwelt.

"Unlike the founders of other religions, Jesus is not dead. He is alive. And Christ in us is able to duplicate the same spontaneous life that the Father expressed through Him.

"Jeremiah foresaw the day when men would have the divine nature within them so that the external law would no longer be necessary. Ezekiel said that, from within, God would cause us to walk in His ways. The old covenant was external, but the new is the life of Christ springing up from within us like rivers of living water.

"There is nothing wrong with the Law. Who can fault the Ten Commandments, the annual holy days, the food laws, the instructions about tithing, the agricultural laws, or any of the other commandments? Paul rightly called the Law 'spiritual' and the commandment 'holy and righteous and good,' for it reflected something of the character of God.

"But the external rules which God gave Israel (they were never intended for Gentiles) were only the ABC's of God's nature of love. The Law expressed love in a childlike form which humans without the indwelling nature of God could understand and to some degree perform.

"The Law said, 'Worship God.' But how could carnal humans worship a holy God? Only in shadow form--by not having other gods, by not making idols, and by setting certain periods of time aside to concentrate on the things of God. That was the closest they could come, and that was all God required under the terms of the external Law.

"When you were a child, your parents and school teachers placed you under rules. You lived an externally regulated life. You were told when to go to bed, when to get up, how to dress, what to eat, what to study, and a host of other instructions. Paul explained the purpose of the old covenant:

Now I say, as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by the father. So also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental things of the world. Galatians 4:1-3

"Early in life, a child learns the elementary principles of life, such as: getting sufficient sleep, eating a balanced diet instead of only sweet things, washing behind his ears and cleaning his teeth regularly, and studying and working instead of just playing. These disciplines are instilled into him from outside, enforced through a system of reward and punishment.

"When we are young, we are restricted to the playpen. We learn the ABC's--just the elementaries--of living. But when we mature and come of age we begin to function as adult sons. Though we were under orders and no better than slaves, now we become lord of all--masters of our own lives--no longer requiring the restrictions of the playpen:

And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. Galatians 4:6. 7

"The external has become internalized. Only now, instead of a set of rules, it is the spontaneous outflow of a mature life. So the adult doesn't have a set bedtime; he is free to go to bed early when tired, or stay up into the early hours of the morning, perhaps even working a night-shift and sleeping through the day. Yet if he wishes to stay healthy, he fulfills the intent of the external law which he was under as a child. Though free to live spontaneously, he gets enough sleep to stay healthy; and that was the aim of the external law imposed by his parents.

"Only as adults, with God joined to our spirits, can we fulfill the law of love. Trying to be loving like God will never make us loving persons. Trying to please God will never fulfill His will. The external commandment only demonstrates our inability to do these things. But when God lives through us, He will fulfill in us all that the external 'ought to's' of the law attempted to inculcate. Thus, 'what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did'--and this was 'in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit' (Rom. 8:3).

"God is a specialist in simply being. He does not live by commandments. He just lives, spontaneously. He is the 'I Am.' He is what He is. When Jesus walked this earth He kept His Father's commandments. But it wasn't external law that He lived by. He simply allowed Him who is the Law personified to 'be' through Him.

"Jesus told the Jews, 'I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.' Here is a major clue to understanding how this indwelt life works. Just as Satan's nature was expressed through us spontaneously, without our having to try to be sinners, so God's nature was expressed through Jesus without any effort on His part. It just came naturally. Because He was in union with the Father, so that the two were one, He manifested the Father's life.

"We are to 'imitate' Jesus by being conscious of the fact that we are indwelt as He was, and when Christ indwells us there will be a spontaneous flow of obedience to His will. We formerly expressed the lusts of the god of this world quite effortlessly, and now we express the divine nature in precisely the same manner. Like Jesus, we can do nothing of ourselves--the nature of God will be seen in us only as Christ manifests Himself through us as vessels.

"So we are obedient, and we do fulfill His commandments. But not because we try to do His will. We simply find that we are His will, because He is our life and expresses His nature through us.

"Most of us have spent a lot of energy and patience trying to 'find out' God's will in various circumstances. But isn't this akin to astrology and divination--this peering into the future?

"God does not want us to know His will; He wants us to live by faith. He is not in the business of fortune-telling; rather, we are called to walk by faith, not by sight. He doesn't show us the way and then tell us to walk in what He has shown us. He tells us that we should step out in faith, trusting that He walks in us. Though He may occasionally give us an overall glimpse of what life has in store for us, mainly He wants us to know His will today. It is the kind of 'knowing' which is moment-by-moment experiencing of His will.

"This means that we don't emphasize 'discovering God's will for my life' in the sense of trying to find out what the God 'out there' has planned for us. Instead, we are content to be the will of God each moment. As we live boldly, trusting that we are human expressions of Christ, we find that we do know His will in every situation--not ahead of time, but minute by minute.

"John in his first epistle said that the lawless person is a liar when he claims to know Christ. Although under the new covenant we do not live by external law, paradoxically anyone who is in union with Christ will find himself fulfilling the essential aim of the Law--without needing constant 'ought to' admonishments--because the divine nature is flowing through him.

"It was this spontaneous reproduction of the divine nature in human lives that Jesus intended when He said, 'If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.' He had just explained how He Himself manifested the Father's nature on a moment-by-moment basis, as a natural flow of the life of God through His flesh, and He was showing that if we abide in Him--if we know union with Him--we will manifest His nature (John 14:7-15).

"The commandments of Jesus are not written laws. They are an internal urge. In a thousand different ways each day we find ourselves living the life of Christ as He lives through us. And when we love, we have fulfilled everything that the external commandment of the old covenant tried to show in its limited form.

"We walk the ascended life of Christ, receiving His commandments in our innermost heart and mind from moment to moment. Thus we are the will of God in every situation that faces us from day to day. And though we cast out the external 'ought to'--for it has no place alongside the freedom of this spontaneous life of Christ (Gal. 4:21-31)--we do not make void the Law, but establish it and fill it up to the full, living at a level far above what the written Law could ever achieve.

"The Law, then, led us to the realization of 'I can of my own self do nothing,' so that in spirit we might see ourselves as complete in Christ. He is sufficient not only as Savior, but as our present righteousness and our very life. The new way, unlike the old, does deliver the goods!

"When we were married to the Law, though we sought to obey the commandments of our 'husband,' we found that we couldn't--and condemnation and death were the only fruits of that relationship. But when Jesus was crucified, we were crucified in Him so that we died to the Law. The marriage was ended, and the external commandment no longer had any claim over us. We were now free to remarry, to be 'joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit for God.'

"In the new marriage, we do not go back and obey the commandments of the first husband. In fact, it would be adulterous to do so, for we are free of all the requirements of that first marriage. We are no longer married to the Law now, but to 'another'--to the living Christ who reigns within us. We do not return to living 'in oldness of the letter,' for 'we serve in newness of the Spirit' (Rom. 7:1-6). That is why we must 'cast out' the old if we are to bear fruit in the new--for the external 'ought to' will always render Christ of none effect (Gal. 5:1-4).

"The old way was indeed glorious, surpassing any other religion on earth. But the Ten Commandments and all that God gave Israel at Sinai have a faded glory compared with the new internalized life of Christ. (See 2 Cor. 3.) The Law brought only death because of man's failure to keep it perfectly, and so God introduced the much more glorious life-imparting new covenant:

[He] made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. 2 Corinthians 3:6

"As the Law is fulfilled in us, so we find we live a changed life. But it is not the container that has changed--it is not improvement of the vessel--it is simply the glory of the One who is in us filling His earthly temple and making it radiant with light in a dark world. This is the mystery of Christ in us, our hope of present glory (Col. 1:27)."