God's Bafflement

In 1977 John Whittle--a former missionary with the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade--wrote an article called "God's Bafflement." This is that article:

"Jesus was an extremist. Yet we insist on trying to modify and make sense out of His radical statements. What we call balance is frequently a matter of unbelief. In reality it is the third dimension refusing to take the fourth dimension seriously. Jesus did not encourage us to be merely influenced by the fourth dimension, but to become it. 'Ye ARE the light of the world', etc. We are to incarnate the fourth dimension.

"Can you imagine the butterfly feeling that it must not take its new state and condition of flight too seriously--that after all it was really only a grub, a mere caterpillar, and that it must be balanced about this whole thing? Hardly: it has become this new dimension, the embodiment of flight, and must always act accordingly.

"In order to initiate us into this new attitude of life and being, God has a way of inviting us out on a limb with Himself and then turning around and sawing it off! Perhaps we have created a 'garden path' of miracles for ourselves, thinking that was God's way and doings. Not so. THE miracle often is to be sustained when there is no miracle in the third dimension for us to rely upon. For instance, 'I am come to bring fire on the earth', said Jesus. Then when one of the disciples wanted to bring fire down from heaven (was it not perfectly scriptural?) in order to consume their religious competition, He said, 'You don't know what spirit you are of!' Quite baffling.

"Then again, He said 'I have come to bring a sword,' and when a disciple took the sword to use it in His defense He told him to 'Put up the sword, for they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.' How easy it is to misunderstand Jesus. But that is part of the education. As Oswald Chambers [sic] said, we are 'baffled to fight better.'

"Another baffling and unnerving statement of Jesus is 'There is none good but one, that is God.' After all, we do have the lovely devotional thought expressed by David, 'The steps of a GOOD man are ordered by the Lord'! How baffling of Jesus to say such a man is non-existent. All right, we understand there is no innate goodness in man. Then how is a man made 'good'--by divine assistance? The implication is that there is nothing in man to be 'helped' to be good, nothing for God to work on. Again, out on a limb of God's providing, the limb of divine incitement to be what we cannot be.

"So we have to conclude that the only good man is a God-Man--a man that is a fourth-dimensional being, rightly related to God the good One, indwelt by God, not assisted by Him. The 'good man' is a manifestation of the Good; he is only the means of manifestation and never essential goodness in himself. Jesus demonstrates this clearly because He never claimed any goodness other than the goodness that was the Father in Him. So also Paul, delightedly explaining the inexplicable in Galatians 2:20, mixes up the third and fourth dimensions and demonstrates the new type of humanity, the God-Man, the 'good-man'. Paul also asserts that the man in Christ is 'glorified'. This obviously is not the human body, to which we usually apply this term. Jesus backs up this allusion to man's present condition in His prayer in John 17 by saying, 'I have glorified them . . . I in them and Thou in me.' Our present glorification is our indisputable union in Christ.

"The Union-life man is therefore permanently on a sawed-off limb. He is totally unable to go back to the bondages and limitations of the past 'balanced' life. He is always an extremist, because he is sustained like the butterfly by nothing but air, and open to the criticism that he should be more 'down to earth.' But he can no more be down to earth than the chicken can again become the egg after it has once broken out of its early beginnings. We are not intended to be the egg; that was only a stage in the unfolding life. The new dimension has taken over.

"One is constantly struck with the fact that the 'balanced' ones are the popular ones. My close association with Norman Grubb, and through him a knowledge of his controversial father-in-law, C. T. Studd, has given me a glimpse of extremists moving out on their respective limbs, with only a small number of people able to see and accept the position it brought them to. Such men are totally in the world, but have a fourth-dimensional view of it. Their answers are different, for Spirit is dominant and they expose the revolutionary nature of Christianity. C. T. Studd moves us with his hilariously sacrificial and soldierly devotion to the task of worldwide evangelization--doing it and not talking about it. N. P. Grubb follows with his declaration of the nature of God and His unique incarnate relationship with man. These are radical elements in the whole spectrum of living truth. What is the 'limb' God is luring you on to? What 'bafflement' is yours by which God is training you to manifest the powers of the world to come?"