28.1 Cutting the Covenant
© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. – And it came to pass, when the sun went down and it was dark, that behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a burning torch that passed between those pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying: “To your Seed I have given this land…” (Genesis 15:12 & 17-18).
Read all of Genesis 15 until you know it. This is the same Covenant God affirmed in Christ, the only Covenant through which Father relates with us. Yet the real cutting of this Covenant foretold in Genesis 15 began in Gethsemane and was made complete by the resurrection out from an empty grave.
Feed My Sheep. I now understand the Covenant. I understand the Covenant because last night my Father asked me to step through the Veil together with Him – and I agreed. And all I could hear this morning was “Feed My sheep.”
But let me explain myself. My intention in this chapter is to specify and to simplify the Covenant as we have learned it through the breadth of this course. Then I realized that I had left out of this course the most important session – Gethsemane. I attempted to fit Gethsemane into an earlier place in the course, but realized that it does go here at the end.
Gethsemane is the only place we can understand the Covenant.
In That Day. Four or five hours before Jesus dropped to His knees in Gethsemane, He prophesied, that is, set before us His calling of us into Himself that would take place during those three hours of the real cutting of the Covenant.
In that day you shall know that I am in the Father and YOU IN ME and I in you (John 14:20). “You in Me” is Gethsemane.
In that day – you shall know. What day? God tells exactly the day of which He is speaking. In that day God made a Covenant with Abram. “That day” is the today in which we agree with God at every step of agreement in the signing of this Covenant.
Dip Seven Times. And “that day” comes to us seven times. Here is God’s picture of those seven moments of agreement with God, a picture that He deliberately crafted (and made sure Jesus mentioned it) to demonstrate that the Seed of Abraham includes those formerly Gentiles as well as those formerly Jews.
Then Naaman (a Syrian) went… and he stood at the door of Elisha’s house. And Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored to you, and you shall be clean.” – So he went down and dipped seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God; and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean (2 Kings 5:9-10 & 14).
Agree Seven Times. Go to the lowest place on earth and there dip yourself seven times into the finished work of the cross. One sacrifice for sins forever – It is finished. Agree with God seven times, “Yes, Lord.” And the final dipping is the resurrection of our bodies, our mortal flesh brand new, swallowed up by life.
These moments of agreement come only by the seasons of God in our lives and not by our doing, but when they come, we respond only with, “Yes, Lord.” And as we agree with God, embracing with all our hearts one sacrifice for sins forever, so God and us together are sealed together in that signing of the Covenant.
The Fifth Signing. The fifth signing has come upon me over the last few days. Let me explain. The Lord anointed me to write and to send to my readers a letter titled, “Give Me a Place to Stand.” In that letter I entreated my readers to extend to me, in whatever way their hearts agreed, a place, a land and a people, a Community of Christ, out from which I could share this word of Christ our only life.
That was Sunday. Early Wednesday morning the Lord raised in my heart the question – You, Daniel, should be the one who provides for them. “I would love to,” was my response, “but how, Lord, when I have no provision to give?”
Bearing All for All. That night, in the middle of the night when I awoke, my Father raised the same question again. I saw Jesus receiving the little offering given to Him, blessing it, and multiplying it to the feeding of thousands. I saw Moses with his little stick raised up into the air – Stand still and see the salvation of God. And I saw the Church of Christ, hundreds of millions of believers in Jesus all across this earth. And I saw the priests bearing the Ark of the Covenant upon their shoulders standing in the midst of the Jordan until every person had passed through into all the fullness of Christ.
God asked me again, “Will you take My Church upon your shoulders? Will you bear all responsibility for My people?”
I Saw Gethsemane. Again, my own lack of everything remained in my awareness. Yet I saw the heavens and I saw my heart and I saw the rivers of God’s provision and all I could say was, “Yes, Lord.” It is I, Father and me together, who will provide for you.
In that moment I saw Gethsemane and I understood the Covenant and how I would write this session. To step through the Veil with Father as the Ark of the Covenant is to take upon yourself (Father as you) His Church, every single little one who calls upon Jesus in some way, to take all responsibility for them before God, to carry them upon your shoulders, upon your heart. To feed His sheep, to nourish His Bride in her hour of need.
Only One Acceptable Fire. Dip seven times into the Jordan. Why the Jordan?
Let’s go forward several hundred years to that same Jordan River where the Ark had stood firm until every person had crossed over into Christ, to a voice crying in the wilderness. …God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees… I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3:9-11).
Just as there was only one river that God accepted, the Jordan, so there is only one Spirit and one FIRE. It is the Fire in the Covenant that makes all the difference.
Energeia. When the sun went down and it was dark, behold, there appeared a smoking firepot and a fiery torch that passed between those pieces. This is how Abraham remembered the fire of the Covenant as it passed between the cut-open sacrifice; these are the phrases he chose to share his experience with Isaac and Jacob.
Yet this is the same pillar of fire/pillar of cloud that touched down upon the Mercy Seat when Moses assembled the Tabernacle in the wilderness. And this same pillar of fire we have discovered hidden all through the New Testament, hidden until now as God has given us the central word of His Covenant – energeia/energeo.
Two Opposing Fires. He will baptize you with fire. – It is God who energeoes in you both to will and to energeo for His good pleasure. – According to the energeia by which He is able even to subdue all to Himself (Philippians 2:13 & 3:21b).
The issue is the fire; the issue is always the fire.
There are two fires; there are two energeias. For the mystery of lawlessness is already energeoing – according to the energeia of Satan – for this reason God will send them a wandering energeia, that they should believe the lie (2 Thessalonians 2:7 & 9 & 11). There is no “human” fire – this energeia of angels is the only strange fire.
Our Only Life-Force. Those who “seek God’s will and not their own” are operating out from this strange, wandering energeia; their purpose is to boast in their flesh before God – “I (not Christ) did what You said, God, now pay me what I have earned.”
We have seen that God is very clear – NO ONE seeks His will; NO ONE does what is right (Romans 3). There is only ONE energeia – It is God who energeoes in you both to will and to energeo for His good pleasure.
Every one of the seven signings of the Covenant is an agreement at some level that God Himself in Person alone is the life-force generating all that we are as we find ourselves to be in every present circumstance.
No Sufficiency. And so you see, when I say, with Father, that “I” will provide for you, all of my own former imaginary “energeia” is long gone. I come to this place only because I have long since found NO sufficiency in myself. And only because, sitting here upon the Mercy Seat inside of my Father, sharing Hheart with God, I see you, and I see my great treasure in you.
You see, “I” have no love for you. I don’t need any, for my “love” would be worthless anyhow, a pretending show that, if I had such a pretense, would seek its own exaltation. Yet I believe these words with all my heart. The love of God has been shed abroad in your heart through the Holy Spirit (the God-Fire) who is given to you (Romans 5:5).
My Epistle. You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tables of stone, but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart. And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the New Covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter (human intellect – strange fire) kills, but the Spirit (God Fire) gives life (2 Corinthians 3:2-6).
I am sufficient as a minister of the New Covenant towards you because I have agreed with God as His flesh that He is the only Energeia I know – and that entirely and only through faith.
Three Agreements. I intend to write this session longer than the normal limit. In the next three lessons I will share a simplified, step-by-step rendition of our Covenant with God. And I have divided those lessons by John 14:20/17:23.
In each day of Covenant, KNOW that I am in the Father and (1) you in Me and (2) I in you – that (3) they may be made complete in one.
“You in Me” is Gethsemane. “You in Me” is the three times Jesus fell to His knees, saying, “Not My will but Thine be done.” “You in Me” is our first three agreements with God, our signatures upon a God who has already written His own name upon us, signed with the Blood of His Son.
Gethsemane. Gethsemane. Gethsemane. How we must know this Man on His knees as He called you and me out from all that is hostile against God and into Himself, that He Himself might carry us all the way through death and into LIFE. Go back to Symmorphy I: Purpose and read Chapter 15, “One Day in Gethsemane” again. But read it inside all you have learned in this course. Read it as you lay yourself inside of God inside the Holiest as Aaron’s stick of wood – all night long.
There is only one place where God energeoes in you both to will and to energeo for His good pleasure, and that is Gethsemane.
God in You. At no point do I ever take you into ideas about God, for such a place is death. At every point, I take you by the hand into that ENERGEIA which is God Himself in Person, that He might ENERGEO as Himself in you. The Covenant is God in you.
Those who look at Jesus from afar imagine that God wants us to produce, out from our own workings, a fake parroting of “Not my will, but thine be done.” – And always falling short of God.
Three times Jesus spoke as us, “Not My will, but Thine be done.” Three times we said those words to Father inside of Jesus. As we are willing to agree that God alone energeoes His will, at three ever deeper levels, so we enter into knowing that Jesus already took us into Himself – there in Gethsemane.
A Pit of Quicksand. An illustration came to me that describes for us our placing of ourselves utterly into this One who trades His life for ours.
I read a story years ago about a young man who grew up in the woods of southern New Jersey. He shared a friendship with a young Indian boy who had been taught how to escape from quicksand. The two boys decided to prove that they could do it. They went to a known pit of quicksand and leaped in.
All lostness is NOT knowing God; knowing God is all salvation. Think of the quicksand as not knowing God. Think of the place these boys must find as Gethsemane.
The two boys did as they had been taught; they went quiet inside and out.
Escaping Sin and Death. When you fight against quicksand, it will suck you into itself. But when you enter into perfect rest inside and out, something happens. Your body is lighter than the heavy quicksand and you WILL float.
In twenty to thirty minutes the boys were lying flat on their backs on top of the quicksand, remaining perfectly still. Then, so very slowly, they did the backstroke, gently drawing their arms in across the top of the mud. Slow stroke after slow stroke, they pulled themselves across until about twenty to thirty minutes later they were at the edge and arose from the pit.
The pit of quicksand is not knowing God, yes, but such is never a vacuum. We know it as sin and death. The strength of sin is the law (1 Corinthians 15:56).
Enter His Rest. When you measure your mistakes and foolish decisions by the law, you struggle against sin. Your struggle against sin will kill you. Sin, by the law, is far stronger than you will ever be. You find yourself sinking into sin and you fight to overcome it; in so doing you guarantee your own destruction.
Stand still and see the Salvation of God – hold your peace – be silent before Me. Yet we are created like God and thus unable to be silent. Gethsemane is our only way out of the pit. Jesus, our Savior, drawing us into Himself that He, HIMSELF in Person, might carry us through death and into life. Enter into His Rest – Abide in Me – Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Sink Utterly into Jesus. To cease all attempts to please God in ourselves is to go silent in the quicksand. Then the slow and gentle backstroke is enduo – PUT ON, as we sink ourselves utterly, every moment, into Jesus.
And all this is our agreement with God, three times, that Jesus trades His life for ours, there, on His knees in Gethsemane. Jesus alone is now all that we are as we find ourselves to be in the present moment. And the only Fire – Energeia by which we live, the only will operating inside our being, is God Himself, and entirely because we BELIEVE that He IS.
This is the Covenant, that God alone is our Energeia because we have abandoned all and any sufficiency in ourselves.