21. The Communion

After writing most of the last letter, I have been pondering for the first time what the “knowledge of good and evil” might mean. Everything I have considered about it prior to now has been about what it does, what effects come out of it as a cause, but never what it is in itself.

The tree that grows this fruit was created by God and placed before mankind by God. And God placed His most anointed servant as the covering of that tree. God does not know evil and, according to James, God cannot tempt or even “test” anyone. God proves, yes, but He does not test, two very different things.

But look at this statement. – You shall have no other gods before Me (Exodus 20:3).

Is that not a true word, the first of the ten commandments? Is it not pure and holy and good? Where is there any evil in the speaking of this word? There is no evil found in the speaking of this word; but evil must come out from any human eating of it.

Why? How? How does a word that is, in itself, without any shadow of evil become evil in the human who eats of it?

A commandment to do what is good and pure and holy creates two things in any human who eats of it, two things that are not actually in the word itself. What human, reading those words separately from Christ our life would NOT think – “Other gods? You mean I can have other gods?”

Honor your father and mother. – “You mean I can dishonor my father and mother?”
But notice the “I-Not-Christ” appearing immediately in the human mind as a result of this response to God’s good idea?

Then, a further question develops immediately out from the first. – What is “dishonor?” Do you see how this mind is following the serpent’s words, not Christ? There is no evil in the word God speaks, but the result in any human responding to the word God speaks from the serpent’s question WILL create evil inside an evil self by that word.

And so discussion begins. “If I owe my dad ten bucks, but then if I put that ten bucks in the offering plate at church, am I off the hook as far as ‘honoring my father” is concerned?” (This is what the Pharisees were doing 2000 years ago. They’ve gone far beyond that today.)

But when we say, “Let it be to me according to Your word,” no such response happens inside the human soul. In complete contrast, that same word enters into us as Christ Himself, the only One who knows what God means by what He speaks, since He is God-speaking.

The law itself does not contain breaking the law; neither is such a thought in the mind of the God who set it forth. And thus, we must conclude that in reality a “knowledge of good and evil” is not something that exists in itself. And then we realize that God did not place “knowing good and evil” before man as the serpent assumed. Rather, He placed a tree of knowing good and evil containing fruit that can be eaten by the human. The fruit itself is not evil, for God created it; that’s why touching the fruit is not, actually, a problem.

The problem is found entirely inside the human imagination of one eating of God’s commands separate from Christ our only life. By eating of God’s word separate from Christ alive in our hearts, the human discovers the wonderful option of imagining him or herself as his or her own person. – A life, that is, a substance of my own.

And this is the greatest evil of all in the Nicene gospel.

Okay, wow. I see the sleight of hand. The magician gets you looking at the wrong thing in order to keep you from seeing the important thing. The matador gets the bull to charge the red flag as its “enemy” when it is the matador himself killing the bull.

And that is exactly what happened with Eve. – So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate (Genesis 3:6).

The problem isn’t the tree itself, the problem is eating of “it.” There is no such thing as a “knowledge of good and evil.” The problem is the eating.

There is nothing wrong with food; there is nothing wrong with beautiful appearance. In fact, God is big on both. “To make one wise,” then, means, “to make yourself an entity, a self of your very own, as if it is not the good-speaking of Jesus always sustaining you.”

“To make one wise” is imagination only. The human “self” is not any life of its own; it is nothing more than a figment of the human imagination. The law does not create that imaginative fiction. The human creates that fiction by eating of the word God speaks as ideas separate from Christ.

8. Knowing good and evil. – Knowing an imaginative self; knowing “I-not-Christ.”

God does not know good and evil, God does not create the possibility of good and evil, and God does not place good and evil before humans. “Good and evil” is a creation of human fantasy, imagining a “life” separate from God’s thoughts concerning us.

The problem is eating. What does it mean to eat?

“Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). – Versus – “The one eating of My flesh and drinking of My blood possesses age-unfolding life… Indeed, my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. The one eating My flesh and drinking My blood abides inside of Me and I inside of him [symmorphy]. As the living Father sent Me, and I live through the Father, so also the one feeding on Me, even he will live through Me” (John 6:54-57).

Eat of ideas to imagine yourself to be your own isolated substance – OR – eat of a Person to know the Life inside of Father always becoming your only life as well.

We eat of food that will become our body. In just the same way, we eat of ideas that will become an imaginative self-story. Or we eat of Christ who becomes our only thoughts.

The Nicene Creed is all about the “right” ideas. As ideas they might be mostly true. But as ideas entering the human mind to be adhered to by the human, they cannot place Jesus Himself inside the self-bubble of that human. In complete contrast, ideas separate from Jesus in Person inside our bubble of self can do nothing for us except increase and strengthen the meaningless imagination of “I-not-Christ.”

R.C. Sproul, in his book, Knowing Scripture, presented the entire Bible as ideas only, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Never once in his treatment of the Bible does Sproul ever discover the Person of Jesus becoming our only life inside of us. To Sproul, the tree of life does not exist, not here and not now. He holds even the tree of life only as an idea in his mind.

Look at the translation of the word “homologia,” speaking the same word that is Christ. Most every time the Calvinist translators see homologia, they translate it as “confess,” a word that means to everyone “acknowledge the right ideas when you are investigated.” And, of course, a majority of Christian “right ideas” come from Augustine’s explanation of the ideas we must have in our heads before we read one word in the Bible.

In fact, ask any Christian what it means to “eat Jesus’ flesh and drink His blood” and they will tell you what they “believe” those words mean. Almost always they will present to you only ideas that they hold in their mind.

When God forbade me to formulate ideas in my mind about what His words might mean, but only to hide all that He speaks inside my heart, He was turning me away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and preparing me for the arising of the tree of life inside of me.

When I heard Joel Osteen say, “Speak what God says you are,” an enormous amount of word was waiting inside my heart to be birthed as Jesus Himself inside of me, the only life I am. And when my ears heard that word – oh the explosion of growth that began inside of me!

Let me define death. Death is knowing what God means by what He says separate from Jesus alive inside your heart as all that any Word God speaks might mean.

As we eat of a Person, the Lord Jesus, so that Person enters into us as our only life.

Yet this wondrous Person inside of our bubble does not, then, banish our own self-story, as in “You are bad.” Instead, He does something most incredible. He draws into Himself, into His own story, every particle of our own story, making it His – that is, Jesus eats of us. That’s what He was doing in Gethsemane. And He gives us in turn every particle of His own story, making it ours. This is symmorphy, not One replacing the other, but two together as one, sharing sweet communion.

And there is no greater method of practical “spiritual” eating than homologia-parrhesia, speaking boldly out loud the same words that are Christ Jesus as our only life.

I have been thinking about the communion service, drinking of the same cup and eating of the same loaf. Suddenly, I understand what the ritual of remembering Jesus as we drink and eat really means for us.

Jesus was giving us a tangible, visual, and sensual form of speaking Christ, a form of speaking Christ our only life centered around His laying down His life for us and our response inside of love.

Jesus did not “have to die” for any reason except for us. It’s the only way He could win our hearts, the only way He could convince us to open the doors of our self-bubble to let Him come into us and to be all of who and what we are. He died upon the cross to convince us that we have no need to consider a “life” that is not Christ. He shed His blood to convince us that we are not fallen short of God.

Jesus has been out to win our hearts from the very beginning.

And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” Likewise He also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:19-20)

Remember Me. – The Greek word anamnesis means to bring into one’s mind.

But what is it we bring into our minds? Ideas about Jesus or Jesus Himself? But how could Jesus Himself in Person enter literally into our minds to become our very thinking?

And so the power of the serpent’s first words RULES – Jesus is His own entity far away from you; He is NOT Himself inside your mind. God’s words are instructions, ideas for you to consider, not a Person Himself.

And this is why Christians read John 14:20 a gazillion times and never notice the words or what they must mean.

Ideas about Jesus are found only in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus Himself in Person is found in your heart.

I love the word “transubstantiation.” Look at that – the transference of substance from one to another. Is that not exactly what Jesus said? – As the living Father sent Me, and I live through the Father, so also the one feeding on Me, even he will live through Me. And again – Indeed, just as the Father possesses life inside of Himself, so also He gave to the Son to possess life inside of Himself -with- In this same way, the Son also gives life to whomever He desires (John 5:26 & 21).

LIFE inside of Father comes through Jesus living in us to be that exact same LIFE inside of us.  And we can say all of that with one big Latin word – transubstantiation.

And notice that God has given us a very active role in this transfer – the one feeding on Me. Feeding is the action of faith – Let it be to me according to Your Word.

For thirty years I hid God’s Word in my heart until, in one flash of light – Speak what God says you are – all that Word came alive as Jesus Himself inside of me.

Here is the Catholic definition of “transubstantiation,” from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1376.

– Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.” –

But the Catholics fail to complete this transference. For does not that same substance, then, become the substance of the one eating the bread and drinking the cup?

Substance is LIFE inside of Father. As we “eat of Christ,” so we are partaking of that same Substance, and so that same LIFE becomes our own life. Jesus’ Body transubstantiates into our own physical body – flesh of His flesh, and Jesus” Blood transubstantiates into our life.

But neither blood nor body nor life transfers into our blood and body and life separately from the Person of the Lord Jesus.

It is easy to see that the Catholics hold this entire idea only as death inside of their minds by observing the contempt with which they hold the “lowly” human who is eating the bread and drinking the wine. They are not even allowed to touch it lest they “dirty” Christ.
The one feeding on ME will live through Me.

We are talking about SUBSTANCE, not appearance.

I want to turn, now, from feeding on Christ to feeding on death. We understand what it means to feed on death only as we know for real feeding on Christ.

The lie is one thing – Christ is NOT your life, that is, not your substance. You are not being sustained every moment by the Word of His power. God’s thoughts concerning you are not what you are or what you are becoming.

But the lie is tiny in the appearance of the imagination of our false story. In fact, the moment the words “Let’s talk about God’s ideas” are given heed in the human mind, Christ Jesus in Person fades away and by the time “Christ is not your life” is accepted, Jesus Himself disappears into an imaginary “heaven.”

It is the curse, then, that becomes the story of the human soul – “You have a life NOT Christ.”

In other words, God is over here in His own substance. Jesus as “God the Son” is over there, right next to God the Father, possessing, according to Augustine, His own substance, that is, co-substantial, co-equal, a “God” in Himself. And MOST OF ALL, here you are, little you, all by yourself. You also possess your own substance. Now, that is the curse planted into all humans. – “You have a life of your own; you get to create your own self.” But to the believer in Jesus under the whips of a Nicene “gospel,” the serpent adds this line – “and your substance is rotten.”

Of course, Adam had embraced fully the belief that the way God had made him was rotten before he ever ate of imagining his own substance.

Now, we say “an enemy has done this” so that we do not impart shame to our brethren. Yet eating of Christ begins only when we admit to ourselves that “I am the only one responsible for building my own imagination of my ‘self.’”

I do not know that there is anything more wicked in all the universe than teaching a Christian that they have a life that is not Christ. I have never known anything more awful than the horror of living in such fear.

What does it mean, in practical terms, for a Christian to eat of the substance of not-Christ? What is the practice of taking into one’s Christian self-story the horror of “I have a life of my own, a life that is hostile to God?”

Here is Christ – He is NOT you. Here is you, you are NOT Christ. Then there is a third little person, the “you” that runs back and forth, chained always to I-NOT-Christ, longing to know Christ Jesus, but seeing only an arrogant and separate Christ-NOT-I.

I was that third little guy – and I lived in a very “Christian” place; I lived in Hell.

You see “knowing good and evil” is knowing a separated Christ-NOT-I and a substantial I-NOT-Christ. “Knowing good and evil” is the horrific end of what began in “Did God indeed say,” that is, driving Jesus away.

Knowing so-called “good” is knowing (quivering under) the seperate Christ-NOT-I, the supremacy of arrogance. And knowing “evil” is knowing “I-NOT-Christ” as our unchangeable and ongoing substance. Knowing “I-NOT-Christ” at first seems “liberating” to the human, but to us who longed to know Jesus, it was unfixable bondage.

[Only as I am writing this now, am I also writing out the “Rules” in the last letter. Understanding these things in exact specificity is a process.]

Let me draw again from the first part of this letter to show this same thing from a slightly different angle.

In essence, Adam was looking at the Bible in front of himself, the Word God speaks. The difference between the two trees was not the Word, but rather, the opportunity for human response to that word.

God also has made us sufficient servants of a new covenant, not of letter, but of Spirit; indeed, letter kills, but Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6).

The words of the Bible are not meant to be “letter,” but only Spirit. And this huge contrast is how we receive the words. That puts Mary's response to Gabriel 4000 years later as the real response that the serpent is edging aside with "Let's talk about what God said."

What if Mary had gone to every single Bible scholar and theologian in human history wondering how she should respond to what she had heard? Every single one would have given her, in one form or another, “Well, my dear child, let’s talk about what you think you heard.”

The Greek word translated "obedience," if translated exactly, should actually read in English – “submit to hearing,” and that's how I put it in the JSV. But look at the two responses – Let it be to me - vs - I will do. One says, “You are my source,” the other says, “I am my source.” The first is submission to hearing (even while remaining completely free), the second is lawlessness, the assertion of self, even while coming under the bondage of pretending.

And that's really what Adam and every other human thinks. - "I am a substance in myself." In the Christian mind it becomes, "I have a fallen human nature." In other words, "I am my own source; I am my own god."

It really has to be that simple.

And now we understand 2 Thessalonians 2. As well as our ruling verse of confidence.

“You have a fallen human nature. You are responsible for yourself. You are your own source. You are your own god. If you are going to be like Jesus, you have to fix yourself since you are the only source of you.”

Here is how I have now worded it in Serpent Rule #2, the heart of all rebellion.

– You have a life of your own (Christ is not your life.) You are your own substance; you are your own source; you generate what you want yourself to be. –

This is the man of sin standing in the place that belongs to Jesus alone.

Any Christian saying, “I have a sin nature” is placing self as source and thus as “god.”

The confession of the mouth, “I have a sin nature” is the cause of all the horror we knew the decades of longing to know Jesus but kept chained by imagination only. We thought it was “God’s word” to us, but only because we believed the preachers. The Jesus we loved, we always knew, alive inside our hearts.

The fruit of the two trees represent two responses to the same word.

The truth is, I never fully understood what was meant by “the false human self.” Yes, I saw it as spinning a false story, but now I know exactly what it means. It is the belief that “I am my own substance, my own source.” And it is formed entirely by the words, “All that the Lord speaks, I-I-I will do.”

In complete contrast, “Let it be to me,” recognizes inside of God, all of those thoughts concerning us on their way into our lives and it recognizes Christ Jesus, carrying those God-thoughts into us becoming us. The Father is our only source through Jesus speaking us.

That is all that God is after, that’s all He wants – that we would connect ourselves, through faith, to our real source, our real self, inside of God, coming into us as the speaking that is Jesus.

And so, through the years of my Christian life, most correction that came to me came in the assumption that I am my own source, and that I need to fix myself. Every one of those corrections was teaching me to be a “god” in my own right, to be my own self. We are talking about the restraint that keeps all Christians from seeing what the “man of sin” really is.

In complete contrast, those few “corrections” that were life to me came from a totally different perspective (including all that John Eldredge taught me). In essence, the corrections that were life to me were saying to me, “Jesus as life and goodness is already in you, - you are good, your source is GOOD, let me show you how your knowing of goodness could work its way into these difficult things.”

Why have I always connected speaking Christ, the eucharist, eating of Jesus, bringing Him in person into our beings, and Mary’s response of asking and believing we have received – together with the rule of Hebrews 3:6/14? It was always instinctive. Now I know exactly why.

Indeed, we have become partakers of Christ IF INDEED the source and beginning of our substance [our assurance] {meaning, in opposition to any present outward appearance} we should hold firm until completion or perfection.

The Greek word “arche” should not be translated as any “beginning in time,” but rather as “source.” What is our source?

We are part of Christ, that is, Christ becomes us, as we acknowledge our source as being found ONLY in God’s Pro-Knowing.

What am I doing, every night, when I awake in the night, and say, regardless of what I “feel” like, “Father, You fill me full with all that You are?” I am saying to myself that God alone is the source of all that I am. I do not have a “life” of my own.

And so I have taught you to eat of Christ from the start, to eat by speaking Christ, to eat by giving thanks and speaking good grace, to eat by asking and believing you have received. And how is that eating? Because every good WORD of your human design is thus coming into you to make you all that you are already inside of God’s Pro-Knowing.

Isn’t that cool. The entire transformation of the human soul is found in five little words – “Let it be to me.” Are they not the entrance of Jesus through Mary into God’s creation?

Yet we also must frame those words, for this is the Communion. First, we speak them continually, as our direct and constant response to every specific word God speaks, that it might pass into our knowing of who and what we are. And second, we speak them KNOWING, as Mary did, that it is Jesus Himself in Person coming into us to be our only life.

It is another Person, Jesus, who is in me as those Words, shaping me Himself by His own wisdom, and sharing with me everything I am.

It is Jesus whom I have brought into my mind and heart and soul, Jesus Himself in Person.

Jesus is inside of my own bubble of self. I walk with Him and I talk with Him and He shows me all that He is living now as me.