From the booklet "To All Believers... It's As Simple As This" by Norman Grubb (n.d.)
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It's As Simple As Thisby Norman Grubb (continued)
God All In All
I have to start, however, with theology, for I have no understanding of man except in his relationship to God. I understand that God is the One Person in the Universe. Besides Him there is no other. He is Power, Peace, Joy. Christ is the Way, Truth, Life. He is made unto us Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification. His name is "I AM", not "I HAVE". Finally He is declared as "All in all" (I Corinthians 15:28). So He can only manifest Himself in all these and a hundred other characteristics by being Himself expressed in infinite variety of forms, not a Giver, but an Is-er.
God created man in His own image that He might have a visible means of expressing and manifesting Himself, The Invisible in visible form. Jesus said, "I am the light of the world", and then He also said, "Ye are the light of the world" (Matthew 5:14). On the material level, light is invisible electricity which can only manifest in visible form by a lamp, and in so doing, so possesses the lamp that we don't say, "Turn on the lamp," but, "Turn on the light". Thus we humans express Him in a union relationship.
Jesus, The Second Man
Jesus, as God manifest in the flesh, is called "The Second Man" (I Corinthians 15:47), thus the perfect form of redeemed man. As such, He was His Father in manifestation. The Spirit of God in the visible form of a dove was seen by John to descend upon Him. From that time onward, it was the Spirit speaking and acting by Him (Luke 4:14 21). It was the Spirit who took Him to Calvary (Hebrews 9:14), and by the Spirit He rose again (I Peter 3:18). At the supper table when about to leave His disciples, He said the purpose was that the same Spirit should possess them which was fulfilled at Pentecost and is spoken of by Paul in Romans 8:11 as dwelling in us. Thus, if He spoke of Himself as only seeing and speaking and doing what the Father was doing by Him, and doing nothing of Himself, and finally saying that, "if you see Me, you see the Father", then it is now the same of us, and those who see us see Him. So Paul says, "We have the mind of Christ" (I Corinthians 2:16); "God works in you to will and do of His good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13); Christ "our life" (Colossians 3:4); and John, in his first epistle, caps it all by saying, "As He is, so are we in this world" (I John 4:17); and thus we are "in the light as He is in the light"; we "walk as He walked"; we "know as He knows"; we are "righteous as He is righteous"; we "love as He loves"; we "believe as He believes". Therefore, our humanity is expressing His deity in all the forms of His nature.
We Humans Have No Nature
We humans are symbolized in the Scriptures as being containers, expressors, developers, but not originators. We have our "being" in Him (Acts 17:28); the quantity, the potential (much like a computer); but, the quality of what is expressed by our being is not we, but He in His nature (like the programmer by the computer). Thus He is named "All in all", not just the One being invisible, but having derived created beings by whom He can express His Allness. Not just "The All", but "in all", which is why the coming of His Son taking flesh, and now, in the resurrection, still being "the man Christ Jesus", confirms the eternal truth as being The Person in the persons, and not some vague dissolution of essence into essence as in a religion without an incarnate Christ.
These symbols used to describe us humans are all those which express no nature of their own but as means of expressing that to which they are attached. Vessels contain the liquid, but are not the liquid; the cup is not the coffee. We don't speak of a cup and coffee. So we are branches; but the branch is not the nature but the vine which reproduces itself in leaf and fruit form on the branch. Thus in Romans 6:20-22, we were bearing fruit of which we are now ashamed, but now the same branch (no difference in that) is bearing "fruit unto holiness" -- solely vine-nature expressed by branch which has no separate nature of its own. So we are called Temples; in Old Covenant days the tabernacle by which God manifested Himself in Shekinah Glory, or alternatively a temple of Baal. The emphasis is not the nature of the temple, but of the deity who manifests himself by it. And now in the New Covenant, our bodies are the temple of the Spirit, and God is spoken of as "dwelling in us and walking in us" (II Corinthians 6:16). We are the body of Christ, but the nature is the Head, not the body and its actions; and in that sense the body is called "Christ" (I Corinthians 12:12). We are "slaves" (mistranslated in the King James Version as "servants"); but a slave has no operating nature of his own in relation to his owner, but solely reproduces the activities of his owner, whether of Satan (sin) or Christ (righteousness) (Romans 6:16). We are the wives reproducing the nature (seed) of the husband, and in that sense with only the husband's nature (Romans 7:4,5).
Pairs Of Opposites: The Operating Law Of The Universe
All the Universe, from God Himself down through all His manifestations, only operates as pairs of opposites, and the one expresses itself by utilizing the other to manifest itself (e.g., II Corinthians 5:4), and there is no consciousness except by opposites. Light can only be seen by "swallowing up" dark; sweet/bitter; heat/cold; yes/no; hard/soft, and so ad infinitum. In an armchair, the soft must utilize the hard framework to make a comfortable chair. So too in a bed. A cook can only make a dish sweet by the sweetness overcoming the non-sweetness. Our decisive "Yes" only has its strength by swallowing up the alternative "No". Electricity only functions by the interaction of positive and negative; the atom by the combination of proton and electron. And so, in our personal consciousness, we cannot let an infant go near a hot stove or he will burn himself, or near a pool of water, when he doesn't yet know the difference between water and dry ground.
But as this is so on every level of our material world, it is equally and fundamentally true of our inner selves. We are only conscious of ourselves when we have discovered we are either expressors of a self-getting nature (Satan), or a self-giving nature (Christ). Our human "being", with all its potential, can only express in its quantity the quality of the spirit nature which indwells it, either that of "the spirit of error" or alternatively "the Spirit of Truth" (I John 4:6). Blake, the poet, describes a tiger and lamb as having the same physical makeup but different types of nature manifested by them. We have already mentioned a modern illustration of this: a computer with untold potential but only operating and expanding the nature of the subject the programmer has put into it. And we humans only become consciously functioning humans when we have been confronted by the two trees in the Garden, and made our fateful choice.
Behind that fact about us as created persons, Paul states that God Himself has a limitation: "... God ... cannot lie..." (Titus 1:2). In other words, He has from eternity been The Trinity, in His Father-Son relationship of love, each for the other, and the Spirit being the Reproducer of Him (them) in His nature in the Universe. If God had remained just a "One" in all His Almightiness, as a Loner He would have been a Self-for Self, compared in Scriptures to a self consuming fire. But by a "death" to Himself as a Loner, He brought His beloved Son into Being, to use a human expression (the spoken word which proceeds from a thought thus through to a manifestation), as His "express image" (Hebrews 1:3), and thus He moved into an other-love relationship, just as fire becomes light. Fire consumes. Light blesses. We now know that that outer "fire", the sun, consists of hydrogen atoms which fuse into helium atoms, and the energy released in the fusing is the light by which we live.
So, if the Eternal One is only The Love Person by virtue of a "death" to one alternative of being by Himself as a consuming fire, and a "life" in an eternal love interchange with His Son, so surely all created persons in His image as persons can only be conscious selves by being confronted with the possibility of expressing a self-for-self false spirit nature, or the self-for-others God-Spirit nature. That is why the Scripture says God "created evil" (Isaiah 45:7). Evil is only a person expressing self-for-self and good is a person expressing self-for-others. If God Himself had to have that settled for Himself (when it says He "cannot lie" and thus express a Self-for-Self), so every created person must confront and have those opposites fixed in the one potential "swallowing up" the other. Therefore, when God created persons, He could only do so by persons having their freedom in those alternative choices. Thus, He "created evil" as the other necessary alternative which was "swallowed up" in Him, and He cannot create persons as persons without their having their freedom of choice as persons. Lucifer was the first person revealed by the Scriptures as made perfectly in God's image (as we all are). By being so entranced by his own perfections (Ezekiel 28:11-17) that he chose to be a self-for-self, even to appropriating the throne of God (Isaiah 14:12-15), he became the exposer of the necessary opposite swallowed up in God. Thus, he was named "the spirit of error", and in his nature as the opposite of God, was "cast out of heaven".
No Such Thing As An Independent Self
Here also we see this great fundamental truth that there is no such thing as an independent self, for there is only One Self in the Universe; but Lucifer, now called Satan, was self deceived into imagining he was independent. In actual fact, he forever remains God's convenient agent, fixed in his negativeness. Therefore, cast out of heaven, God uses him in His vitally necessary preparation of what He had planned from before the world's foundation -- to have a vast company of sons, created persons like Himself, by whom He would manage and develop by inheritance, the Universe, together with His Son (Hebrews 1:2; Romans 8:14). These sons must come to their consciousness of being persons by being confronted with these same necessary opposites.
So, while given all God's riches of goodness in the Garden, there was one tree they must not touch or they would die to their created privileges as His sons. God intended and purposed, by the fact of the presence of this cast-out devil in the form of a wily serpent, to entice these first two, Adam and Eve, to choose Satan's self-for-self way and take what Eve was deceived into thinking would be beneficial to herself, though against the word of her Creator. By this means, the human family would learn to its depths the opposite nature, not ours, but the nature of the "god of this world". This happened to them by receiving and eating of that false fruit, just as it was said that to partake of the other Tree of Life and eat its fruit would mean receiving eternal life (Genesis 3:22), showing that fruit to be symbolic of receiving Christ, our eternal life. Eating the false fruit meant receiving this opposite form of life which is really death, the nature of self-for-self; and Paul describes in Ephesians 2:1-3 how that becomes a fact of us fallen humans, expressing, not a nature of our own of which there is no such thing, but the nature of our false father, expressing his lusts.
Jesus turned the spotlight on that fact when He told the self-righteous Pharisees (of whom we all were in our Satan-in-dwelt days), "Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do" (John 8:44). Thus, Jesus exposed once for all that we humans by our faculties and appetites never have had a nature of our own, but either "take their nature from God and are His children," or "take their nature from the devil and are his children..." (I John 3:10 Amplified). Therefore we were expressing Satan's lust nature in all its forms (the works of the flesh), which were not ours but his. In our fallen days we readily cooperated ("the lusts of your father ye will do"). He, Satan, is the sinner, but we are wholly accessory to the fact and have a like destiny.
But here we see the subtle deceit of the devil which is our vital spot in our coming to a final understanding of Who we really are. Satan deceived us into thinking that we are independent selves, even as he deceivedly thinks he himself is. Revelation 12:9 is a key Scripture on that, where Satan's chief operation was "deceiving the whole world", making us think we are who we are not. So we think we are committing those sins, being possessed by those lusts and negative responses, and we are deceived. They are his expressed by us. He imparts that deceit into us as if it is us, but it is he masquerading as us. God's sole purpose is to expose the lie of independent self. Because we are God's sons and His means of expressing Himself in the Universe, we have to learn and drink to its bitter depths that great lie of the independent self -- that lie of the author of lies with which he himself is self-deceived. The fact is we can always transmit what we are or think we are, and so Satan did that transmitting to us, his fellow creatures, and we all normally think we just run ourselves, do our own things (Isaiah 53:6), make up our own minds, and "naturally" operate as self-relying. We have to learn and experience it as The Lie, so that once really seen as The Lie and the remedy in Christ, we shan't be fooled again. We may slip by temptation (we speak later of this), but we know our slip and how to return. We thus become not only saved, but safe sons. Once bit, twice shy!
  
This page Copyright © 1999 Peter Wade. The Bible text in this publication, except where otherwise indicated, is from the King James Version. This article appears on the site: http://www.peterwade.com/.
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