25.1 Having Turned Around
© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
I realize fully that I have written myself about as far from the thinking of my fellow Christians that I could while remaining entirely with what God says at the core of the New Testament. Yet it is also clear to me that a statement I have made several times is fully true. – “The one difference between the manifest sons of God and you and me right now is that they believe what God says and we don’t.” – We are edging ever closer to the “believe what God says” side of the equation.
But just before we hit the Gate and the final signature of God upon us, the resurrection of our physical bodies, I want to assess what our use of Moses’ Tabernacle has done for us.
Accomplishing My Task. But first, I was just perusing through Lesson 1.2 Focus and Layout and realized that I will need to adjust what I said regarding the layout of the course. That is to be expected. However, I also realized that the guiding idea of this course is that Jesus is the Connection between us and Father. Thus it is inherent in this course to develop just how united with Father’s Person and He with our persons that we are. I feel that I have accomplished that task in wondrous ways on the one hand and failed to accomplish it in many ways on the other hand. I am greatly tempted to add another session or two to this course, a temptation I will resist because material that cannot be finished is of no value to a college course.
Symmorphy. Symmorphy is the Father sharing His Person with me, all through my person, and me sharing my person with Father, all through His Person. Jesus is the Connection that makes Symmorphy happen every moment. Covenant is the set-forth terms of that relationship of divine Oneness, how it works, what it’s for, how far it goes.
I have had such an overwhelming sense on occasion of Father’s Person utterly part of my person and mine utterly part of His. When I feel miserable, as I do this morning, I hold to that knowing and never let it go.
Our Assumption. Up until the last couple of months, we have known only being turned around inside the Holiest. Yet through Sessions 13-16 we began to dare something we have never thought about before – going with God through the Veil, now our flesh, into a way of living and acting that simply ASSUMES in ALL ways and in EVERY moment, that Father and us walk utterly as Oone Pperson together. We simply assume that we are seized into God and that God is now revealing Himself through us as His visible form.
And now, from Session 17 until now, we have considered what it means to be the appearance of Father outwardly towards His Church.
Covenant and Kingdom. As I look, then, at the first several chapters of Symmorphy III: Kingdom, I see that the topic of those chapters is mostly Covenant. Only as we established the Covenant of Jesus’ prayer in John 17 out from which Kingdom flows could we then look at the practical outworking of that Kingdom.
In the same way, most of this course has been Covenant. But Covenant cannot remain in itself only. Covenant always goes forth as Kingdom, and thus elements of Kingdom must be in our picture before we can identify the terms of the Covenant found in them. Covenant is always producing Kingdom; Kingdom is always coming out from Covenant.
In Father’s Purposes. In Session 28 of this course, it is my intention to attempt a specific and organized layout of what we presently know regarding our Covenant with God. In shaping that layout, I will need to include the three chapters on Jesus’ prayer from the Kingdom text, as they are an essential part of the Covenant.
What I mean to say is that, in considering every topic and truth we have explored, we are thinking in terms of one reality only, the complete union of Father’s Person with our person through the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is what I mean by “having turned around.” We live IN our Father’s purposes and He IN ours.
Carrying All Attributes. Now, we looked more specifically in earlier volumes of Symmorphy at the mechanism of Jesus as He connects between Father’s Person and our persons.
Let me sum that up. Father gives to Jesus the Father’s attributes inside Himself (as the Father has life in Himself, so He has given to the Son to have life in Himself). Then Jesus “bridges the gap,” so to speak, in a continuous all-here-now action between Father’s Person and our persons. Thus Jesus is continuously in us, that very same attribute that is Father. Yet Jesus also returns to Father, having taken all of our attributes upon Himself as Himself in like manner.
The DNA Connections. Thus Jesus, having become you and me as we are, then becomes that same thing we are inside of Father. You and I, then, are part of Father’s Being through the continuous active Connection of the Lord Jesus, and Father is part of our beings by that same action.Note the connections in the DNA diagram. Yes, Jesus is the same in us as He is in the Father, but the reverse is true as well. Jesus is the same in Father as He is having become us.
Indeed, this is like the homeopathic quality of water, able to take on the frequencies of its surroundings.
We Need a Connector. There are many reasons why God needs Jesus between Him and us as the Connecter. The biggest is that He is God in all that God means and we are little in all that little means.
But we also need Jesus between us and Father as the Connector. If we imagined that maintaining such a state of togetherness with God Almighty was up to us, we would be back laboring inside that awful mess in front of the cross. Because we know that Jesus is fully responsible for making Father’s Person part of our person and making our person part of Father’s Person, we simply rest and live by faith as Father’s revelation right now entirely as He wishes.
We live turned around.
Oour Jerusalem. I attended Lakewood Church again this Sunday with my family. It was a wonderful service. The truth spoken by both Victoria and Joel Osteen was God speaking to me. At every point, both directed everyone’s view towards the expectation of “all God intends.” They placed no limit on God. I saw God’s precious people, Oour Jerusalem, waiting for the Lord Jesus to take them by the hand into all the fullness of God.
Yet, as good as the service was, still, there was, in the singing and in the speaking an expectation that God is changing us into something “better” than what we are. And their “go up higher” in the song was the same thing as “I want to break through.”
As We Are Now. The problem with “go up higher” is that at the end of one’s life there comes the bitter realization that none of it happened the way one had hoped. And what such do not then realize is that they could have lived their whole lives in the present joy of perfect union with the Lord Jesus AS WE ARE now.
Waiting for God is the greatest obstacle to living IN God. The difference is faith, knowing that God IS. Yet, having turned entirely around, now living only in our Father and Father entirely IN us, we have discovered just how different everything really is, including every word in the Bible.
Knowing the Beginning. Normally, any teaching on our Covenant with God focuses primarily on the Sacrifice of the Altar. That teaching might then proceed on to the Bible as Covenant, but rarely does such teaching venture into the elements of the Holy Place, even when taught by Spirit-filled brethren. Yet I don’t think I presented as clear or true of a picture of the beginnings of our Covenant with God as I did on the way back out in the Sessions on Consuming Fire and Cleansing Water.
We know the beginning only from the completion. That’s easy to understand. When students begin to learn something complicated, they have no idea what all these “parts” are for. Only when they are masters of the subject do they understand what all the details really mean.
Salvation Revealed. You who are kept by the power of God having now penetrated all the way through faith into a salvation ready to be revealed in the most opportune time (1 Peter 1:5 – modified from the Greek).
As we walk among our brethren, no thought of any need “to be saved” enters our minds, for are we not fully one with Father and He with us? That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us… that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one… (John 17).
As we walk among our brethren, we are the Salvation now being revealed in this most suitable time in human history - Today.
Everything Is Different. But as we walk now, in the knowing that Father is part of our persons and we are part of Father’s Person, we recognize that the whole Bible and every expression of Christian truth means something quite different in its fulness than we ever knew.
And when we say “different,” we do not mean “something else” as the false “mystery” nonsense purports. Rather, we mean “turned around.” Everything is what it is at the level of those who first receive it; now it’s just turned around.
And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself… Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him; and He vanished from their sight (Luke 24:27 & 31).
Jesus’ Appearance. That’s very interesting. When they KNEW Jesus as He is, His outer appearance vanished. Why? Because the real Jesus is the One who would live in their hearts from the Day of Pentecost on. From that Day on, they would be His outer appearance.
Yet from this walk to Emmaus, these two, at least, understood that the entire Old Testament, every word in it, was talking about something entirely different than they had ever known. Every Word in the Bible was speaking of Jesus, this Jesus, now in our hearts, now the only life we are. To walk turned around is to walk KNOWING that we together ARE Jesus’ physical Body, His appearance forever.
Being Utterly Human. And inside of Jesus is Father and Jesus inside of Father. Simple and utter joy – the profound revelation of the Almighty – you and me, as we are now, the Salvation of God.
Veil – Door – Gate. Our flesh now the Face of God becoming God’s everlasting appearance in the resurrection of our bodies.
Yes, there is a change, but not the change most imagine. We will not become “superheroes.” We are simply becoming utterly real. The normal Christian life, the normal human life, is to be utterly human, that is, God revealed.
Organizational Patterns. Now, I want to defend our position way out here beyond the camp, far from where our brethren venture.
Organization of thoughts is a far more important element in carrying meaning from the writer to the reader than most understand. The organizational pattern of the four gospels and Acts is clear – a chronology of events. Nonetheless, the specific truths spoken here and there through those histories are not organized. And more than that, all the truths scattered through the epistles are utterly unorganized, with John’s vision making mincemeat out the whole mess.
This is deliberate on God’s part, His way of hiding in plain sight until the time.
The Skeleton. Consider organization. We have a bunch of meaningful verses, separate from each other and in no apparent order. How do we make sense out of this mess? Which verses are the larger categories and which are the supporting details? When we begin to organize these truths, what organizational structure do we use?
Consider the organizational structure of your body – your skeleton. Remove the skeleton and everything remains there, but only in a blob, with no form and no ability to move around. Now, consider a large dog and a boy about the same size. Switch skeletons. It would work, sort of, wouldn’t it, though poorly. Parts would be near where they should be, but nothing would be right.
Something Is Wrong. Think of the boy with all his parts draped over a dog’s skeleton, and the dog draped over the boy’s skeleton. All the parts are there (all the verses are there), and there can be some movement. But something is definitely wrong.
Now, think of the organization of Christian theology, all the truths of the Bible, hammered into their proper positions through the FALL into Roman darkness by the reasonings of great minds. In the end, they chose the Nicene Creed as the only accepted organizational pattern for all the mess of disconnected truth in the New Testament. And out from that organizational pattern, men like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin further arranged all the specific truths of the Bible. “This goes here and this other fits with that.”
A Very Different Meaning. And when I skim through the reasoning of these men, I see all the truths of the Bible fitted together. BUT – I spent years disregarding all those arguments even while eating into myself what God Himself actually says about everything.
Thus now, when I look at the organizational structure, which verses rule and which verses support, as found in “orthodox” Christian theology held by all, I see that everything is there, yes, but something is terribly wrong with how they fit together.
The wrong organizational pattern produces a very different meaning than what the original writer (God) intended. Yet, God Himself already provided clearly the organizational pattern He spoke all those “disconnected” words upon.
Restoring God’s Patterns. God restored to the Church His organizational patterns through George Warnock and his little book, Feast of Tabernacles. In my life, God restored the primary organizational pattern of the gospel, the Tabernacle of Moses, through Sam Fife. And the organizational pattern of the mystery of God, as I used in Symmorphy I: Purpose, He restored through me.
When I looked at John Calvin, whose organizational structure was very familiar to me since it was that used by Buddy Cobb, I saw all the truths of the Bible stuck in all the wrong places. But look what happens when we take specific New Testament verses that don’t seem to be connected and put them into their place in the organizational pattern of the Tabernacle of Moses.
See that you make all things according to the pattern shown you on the mountain of God.
Strong in the Knowledge of God. And this is the point I am making. Moses’ Tabernacle is clearly the organizational pattern used by the writers of the New Testament. And even though we find ourselves far away from the thinking of our brethren, at no point have we done anything except discover the ever deeper meaning of what God actually says in the key verses of the New Testament.
And we use the same verses as we did in Symmorphy I, BUT – because of where we place those verses in God’s pattern, they take on ever deeper meanings.
A strong man exercising from a strong skeleton is secure in his strength. – And so are we in the knowledge of God.