20. The Rules of Serpent Thinking
© Daniel Yordy - 2018
I wrote out the “rules” of serpent thinking a bit quickly in Symmorphy V: Life, 27.2 The Anti-Design. After working with it over time I began to think that my rules “1” and “3” were quite similar or mixed together. I had not yet taken these words of the serpent apart piece by piece as I am doing now. For that reason, we might adjust these three a bit as we go forward.
Here is my original layout, but just with the rule and the image.
The Three
Serpent Rule 1: “God” requires human achievement, that is, humans must “make themselves better” (self-improvement) by human performance.
Image: Death – and the Myth of Sisyphus, an unending labor that never arrives – presented as The Way.
Serpent Rule 2: Christ is not the life of the believer; believers possess a life not His.
Image: The Lie and the Crucifix – an unending dying that never dies. Tantalus – a life always just beyond our reach – presented as The Truth
Serpent Rule 3: Aspire to and worship superior exaltation. Desire to “ascend.”
Image: Gehenna, an unending false story of self. Tantalus again – ever reaching, never obtaining – presented as The Life.
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We must establish this fact. The setting in the center of the Garden into which Adam and Eve were drawn was created and positioned entirely and only by God. For that reason, we are looking at essential elements in the nature and being of God that are required of Him before He can reveal Himself to His creation through man.
I now understand what God’s “holiness” is, something I never understood before, having rejected the Nicene definition completely. God’s holiness is that doing what is wrong NEVER enters God’s mind. God cannot do wrong because He cannot think of doing wrong or of what “doing wrong” might even be.
Not only is God incapable of using force, the use of force never enters His mind. God never entertains force as an option; He does not know what it is of Himself.
The so-called “holiness of God” presented by John Calvin is, in fact, gross unholiness, a “God” who knows and sees evil and thus despises the lowly worms that are mankind.
In “My Yoke Is Easy” I laid out five actions continuously being performed by Jesus the Word always coming out from God. Those actions are 1. Creating. 2. Sustaining. 3. Setting Free. 4. Winning by Love (what God means by “subduing”). 5. Restoring. Of truth, I should add two more actions – 6. Making God Known to Us. 7. Revealing God through Us.
If forcing people to “do His will” was an option for God, then no sin and death would ever have occurred. We would all be happy and obedient slaves without any self-expression. But when you see a movie scene of enforced “happy and obedient slaves without any self-expression,” you are struck by how in-human and ungodly such a reality really is. Creating such a universe has never entered God’s mind.
Yet this is the quality of “being a son of God” that I was taught and that exists in most people’s definitions of what God wants, that is, being a happy and obedient slave without any self-expression. And of truth, my memory of those who did their best to fulfill such a definition became unwholesome to me in undefinable ways. Such a state of being never showed me the Father I longed to know.
No human before or since has ever fulfilled such a definition better than Saul of Tarsus even as he was murdering Jesus all over again.
We must know that the Word God speaks is ALWAYS in every way in every moment setting every created thing free of itself. Never will this quality of God cease or bend or alter. Faith is not a temporal connection to God. Faith is as forever as God’s setting free is forever.
And this is exactly what is happening in this setting set forth by God. The issue is always the Word God speaks. The decider is always the human.
In essence, what the serpent said was, “Let’s talk about what God says.” Set against that suggestion was the speaking of Jesus in the tree of life – “I am what God says; I would live inside of you.”
Here is what I teach. – The word God speaks, in whatever form it appears, is meant to enter into us through “Let it be to me according to Your word,” that is, through faith, to become Jesus Himself in Person written all through our hearts, our only life. – I do not know of that full understanding being taught anywhere else of which I am aware.
What, then, was the rule of the Nicene Counsel? Was it “I am what God says; I would live inside of you?” Or was it “Let’s talk about what God says?”
The entire essence of everything John wrote during the A.D. mid-90’s was “I am what God says: I would live inside of you.” Everything John’s disciple, Ignatius, wrote beginning in the early A.D. 100’s was “Let’s talk about what God says.”
“Let’s talk about what God says” puts man in charge of the words of God, places those words under man’s control and allows those words to be used by man to create his own self-identity. Yet the result is always bondage and separation from God, the only source of our life.
“I am the Word God speaks; I would live inside of you” puts the Word God speaks in charge of the human and releases all of God’s thoughts concerning the human into the unfolding of their lives. Yet that Word never binds the human under falseness; rather the Word is always joining the human to the Father by symmorphy, by causing the expressed will of the human and the expressed will of God to be in complete harmony separate from any “force,” but only as faith working through love.
I am sitting here thinking of the exact parallels between the entirety of the serpent’s words in the garden and the establishment of Nicene theology from the Nicene Counsel in AD 311 to Augustine’s City of God in AD 410. Of truth, I am finally beginning to understand the specifics of how on earth I can claim that the Nicene Counsel and Creed are false. Explaining that would take more than one chapter which I have not inserted into the outline of Designed by Word at this point. I do have it in the outline for Set My People Free, but my rendition in Symmorphy II: Essence is complete, and I can draw from it.
So – I still want exactly three “rules.” Yet those rules must include in themselves all of the ideas inserted by the serpent into human thinking. Can I divide those ideas into three broad groups? Let’s list and briefly define the several things the serpent says.
1. Did God indeed say – “Let’s talk about the words God speaks.” – God’s words are for human discussion and implementation. (Those two things, however, are in two entirely different categories, the first defining the Word and the second defining salvation.)
2. You shall not eat of every tree in the garden? – “Don’t consider the tree of life.” Twisting the words of the Bible in order to hide Jesus Himself living inside of us.
3. You shall not surely die. – “Being dead is actually being alive!” I expand on this more clearly than I have ever seen before in the upcoming lesson, “Opposing the Ten.” Here we can see that this idea fits into the definition of man and the definition of salvation – that is base humans ascending into a “superior” life.
4. For in the day – “Today” is the one thing holding true in both God’s economy and the serpent’s. The serpent requires the action of human response in every present moment in the same way that Christ does. This is very telling, for it means that the serpent’s offer continues in every present moment for every human being in order to counteract the good-speaking of Jesus always sustaining them. This is definitely part of the “salvation” issue. – Today, if you will hear His voice.
5. That you eat of it – “Eat of God’s words now under your control.” – “Eat of the law,” which, in fact, is eating of lawlessness, for the human never uses the law to know Christ (and cannot), but only to know self. This is central to the issue of salvation, which I hope to develop more in the next letter, “The Communion.” In essence – “Eat out from your own judgment and self-effort.”
6. Your eyes will be opened – “You will see and understand everything, and thus you will be able to make proper judgments concerning everything.” – “You will be sufficient in yourself.” – Note that man was already, like God, a judge, as David said, “You are gods,” that is, you are judges. And thus, this becomes the same as the next point – “You are not a judge like God now, but you can be.”
7. And you will be like God – “You are not like God, not yet, not at all – but you can be.” This is the root of everything in the serpent’s words and intentions and in all human rebellion and awfulness. – “Christ is NOT your life; you have a life NOT Christ.” – But also, “You will be like me, the true image of what God ought to look like.”
8. Knowing good and evil. – What are these words really saying in terms of our present layout? Of truth this is very much a definition of both God and man. Yet it is also defining word, for God is, in fact, word, and word is what designs the human. This is what Adam is to “eat of.”
I have not yet written “The Communion,” so I had better write it before I can place the real immediate meaning of these last words as the serpent spoke them.
Nonetheless, we are seeing three differing things inside the serpent’s words, with each part contributing to one or even all of those three things. We are looking at three definitions – What is Christ? What is Salvation? And What is God and man? Those last two must fit together into the same category for the false definition applies the same to both.
Rule 1 must define “Christ” as the serpent means. Rule 3 must define salvation in both its implementation and its goal as the serpent means. And Rule 2 must define God and man as the serpent wants humans to “know” both.
Why do we need “three rules?” As you can see, “the one verse to rule them all and in the darkness bind them” is huge and it alters everything in human and even Christian thinking. Then, we will see in “Opposing the Ten,” that every verse in the Bible is kicked into the wrong place by this false thinking. Thus what we are looking for is three massive underlying definitions that are capable of twisting every verse in the Bible into the mind of the serpent’s tree.
The verses of the Bible, the specific words God speaks, are the facts of Christian thinking. The patterns by which those verses are arranged is pictured by the serpent’s tree. Same verses, wrong structure. This is what is staggering about Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He had all the right verses and he understood them individually in similar ways as to how we understand them, that is, John Calvin was born again. BUT – as I read his use of each of those verses filling his argument, all I felt was horror, for he was placing them into the wrong place and using them for the wrong purposes.
So, the Bible verses are the facts, the serpent’s tree is the theory or pattern or structure of thinking by which all those facts are arranged to say something quite different from God’s intention. And the power houses that drive every one of those “facts” into the wrong place are the essential underlying definitions of three things – Christ, Salvation, and God/Man as mirror images of each other.
These three definitions, then, stand at the gate of the Christian mind, intercepting every word God speaks, every verse they read in their Bibles, and driving those verses into a framework of thinking that is death.
At the present moment, I have 4,699 “friends” on Facebook, a number that goes down regularly, no matter how many new “friends” I add. What I share has gone by the sight of every one of those individuals, including another 1,098 individuals whom I did not “friend,” but towards which I placed the FB settings that they would continue to see on their main pages what I share. Well over 6,000 individuals, then, across the English-speaking world, have glanced across the things I share. I suspect that at least 97% of them have tuned me out.
One of those is a former student of mine at the local Christian school who always in the past liked to chat with me. I saw him at the grocery store just a couple of months ago. When he saw me, his face was immediately masked by a quite familiar to me “Christian” look, that of, “Let me get away from this heretic just as fast as I can before he tries to snare me with his deception.” I know how frightened of “deception” most evangelical Christians are.
BUT – what I share is filled with Bible verses, and I draw out through faith from exactly what God says. So, what is the problem?
The problem is my underlying definitions. I define the Word as the Lord Jesus in Person alive inside of my heart and now the only life I am. I define Salvation fulfilled as Christ revealed through me together with His entire Church and salvation implemented as living inside of Jesus and Jesus inside of me. But worst of all, I define man as God’s appearance in creation, Father revealed, and God as one who is meek and lowly of heart and who sees all others as better.
For that reason, to the thinking of most Christians, I am the one driving all those good verses into all the wrong places.
– I must say this, laying this out is so helpful to me; I hope it is the same for you. But, before attempting to spell out a clear rendition of each of the three rules of serpent thinking, I want to look more closely at the BIG question of the Bible – Who do you say that I am?
We must understand Christ first, because this is the rule that drives everything else.
He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:15-16). – In Mark, Peter says only, “You are the Christ,” but in Luke, Peter says only, “The Christ of God.” Matthew’s rendition, then, is more complete.
When Peter spoke, however, he did not and could not know the Christ of Paul’s gospel, the One who lives inside of us and we inside of Him, the One who is our very and only life.
By “deifying” Jesus, the Nicene Council took Peter’s meaning, however, and turned it entirely around. In fact, my daring statement “turn around” is the most defiant statement uttered today against all the world of death.
Peter MEANT that this man in front of him was God revealed, that man is the appearance and revelation of God in creation, that God is showing Himself as part of us, that this particular man shows us what God, meek and lowly of heart, is and does. The Nicene Council turned that meaning entirely around, separating Jesus from us by making Him a humanoid version of God Himself.
Now that council’s definition must begin for us with the description Eusebius, in attendance, gave of Constantine, a pagan who saw himself as the embodiment of Apollo, the god of the sun and who had called that council together for the sole purpose of controlling Christianity. – After allowing the bishops to be seated, according to Eusebius, Constantine “proceeded through the midst of the assembly, like some heavenly messenger of God, clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple robe, and adorned with the brilliant splendor of gold and precious stones.” (The serpent in the garden.)
By defining Jesus as “God,” and by using this description of Constantine as the “definition” of Jesus, the Nicene Counsel did exactly the opposite in the mind of all Christians from then until now. This “definition,” in fact, turns both Father and Son into being creatures of time and space.
Calvin’s entire definition of “God” was of a Being bounded by both time and space. Every theological effort to “separate” God from His creation accomplishes the very opposite in human thinking. By driving God away from all-here, “God” becomes bounded by space. And by driving God away from all-now, God becomes bounded by time. Even the term “omnipresent” is known only as pertaining to a separated God. Why? Because – the one place God cannot be is in my heart!
– God does not make Himself visible through man; man is not God-revealed. –
But what about God as a very private, very personal Person? How is that reality placed?
There are two very different separations taking place in all human thinking between a personal God and a God all-here and all-now. The more popular view is of a personal God far separate from the human, and thus bounded by space and time, a “God” who can be personal because the devil as the image of that “God” is a person. At the same time, a large segment of humanity, including Buddhists, Marxists, and New Agers, see “god” as all-here and all-now, but refuse to know any Personal God. To them, “Christ” is just a pervasive spirit-quality. And yes, I put Marx into that group because Marxism erases the person – you are only a reflection of your “group”; that is, the Marxist “group” is all-pervasive and all-inclusive.
The removal of the individual Person, whether of God or of humans, is the removal of respect. Those who desire to be a “Christed one” are capable only of loving themselves. They want to “ascend” because they despise being human and are convinced they deserve better.
When I first began to write, I knew that I must break the Jesus of our hearts away from the false “deification” of the Nicene “Christ.” The New Testament writers were NOT arguing that “Jesus was God.” They argued continuously that Jesus was a man, that God shows Himself through humans.
The most amazing thing happened in my understanding, however. As I sought to know Jesus as He is through what God speaks made alive and Personal inside of me, I began that process, yes, by having severed the image of a humanoid demigod that most people imagine when they picture Christ Jesus right now. But the most amazing thing happened in that Jesus CHANGED HIS FORM in my thinking. Jesus, remaining utterly human, began to be known by me as a Man existing in the form of God, that is, all-here-now and Personal in every heart that believes in Him.
When I say Jesus is human, I think of One who is all-here-now and utterly Personal, that is the form of God. When most Christians call Jesus “God,” they think of a tiny, limited, and fairly irrelevant humanoid demigod, bounded by space and time.
It is inside of this context, now, that I have finally come to understand, in wonder and awe, a most strange statement inside Paul’s definition of the Ekenosis. Here is the larger context.
…Christ Jesus [a Man] {that is, a life-giving Spirit}, who, existing in the form of God {that is, all here now and Personal in us} thought [in His gut] {in the essence of His inward story} that being equal in substance with God was not something to be actively held onto. Thus, having willingly taken to Himself the form of a servant, Himself ekenosen, Himself called forth an invisible God into visibility, and became [through the faith of others] the likeness of men, and having been found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself {He acted just like God} (Philippians 2:5-8).
Part of the “figurative speaking” of the Bible is the use of past tense verbs in any description of God. In order to know the Father by “plain speaking” we must convert all past tense into the continuous present action of Christ making Father known.
The strange phrase that I did not understand until recently is this – who …thought [in His gut] that being equal in substance with God was not something to be actively held onto.
What this statement means in our ever-present reality makes us laugh right out loud with overflowing JOY. Let’s word all this, then, into our present reality.
Christ Jesus, a Man just like us, upon whose breast we are always leaning our heads, is existing continuously in the form of God, that is, all here now and Personal in each one of us. Yet Jesus never holds onto that “form” as if He should remain as God’s “equal,” rather, in our every present moment, Jesus is always releasing Himself from that form of an all-pervasive life-giving Spirit to become us as we are in our present humanity. Having willingly, then, made Himself a servant, connecting us with God and God with us, Jesus, through our faith, reveals God Himself through our human appearance.
In other words, Jesus is always taking what God is in substance and making it what we are in appearance. Jesus never holds onto being Himself inside the substance of God, but is always humbling Himself by becoming us as we are, as we find ourselves to be. And this transition Jesus undergoes, from Father to me, is continuous, an action of who He is, a calling forth accomplished in all overflowing delight.
Of truth, I do see “Christ as us” more and more in the context of what God actually says, yet not as one “merged together person,” but in the full honor of each person, including the Father, Jesus Himself, and you and me, walking together in this wondrous symmorphic relationship.
This version of the Ekenosis, then, is inside of my answer to “Who do you say that I am,” a slightly larger rendition of “Jesus lives in my heart.”
Now, among other elements inside the serpent’s words, I know at present that I will be developing a further understanding of “you will not surely die” in “Opposing the Ten,” and a further understanding of “eat of it” in “The Communion,” as well as that most horrifyingly hellish Christian hell, that most wicked and anti-Christ definition of the Christian – “you have a life NOT Christ.”
Before we do that, however, let’s set forth our present understanding of the three rules of serpent thinking, the three watchdogs driving every word God speaks into the tree of death. (And I did look it up after writing this sentence and am astounded, though I won’t develop it here. – Cerberus, the three headed-hound of Hades, confining all into death.)
The Three
Serpent Rule 1: Christ is separate and “superior.”
You are on your own. Figure it out yourself. Jesus is far away, away back then, away up there, away in the future. Think for yourself (these Words are not Jesus in you). When you think of Jesus, think only of someone far above you, far superior to you, someone who requires you to come up “where he is.”
Serpent Rule 2: God and Man are mirror opposites and live by different substances.
God is transcendent in every way. You are weak, tiny, and stupid. You are not like God; God is not like you. In fact, 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.
Serpent Rule 3: Salvation is correction and betterment.
God has given you instructions to live by, do them and you will live by them. If there is a problem with you, then get with the program, idiot, fix it yourself. You are a sorry person, you know. Jesus is so superior to you. If you want to be “like Him,” you are going to have to do a whole lot better. (John 14:20 does not exist.) You must become a better person. BUT – you are such a failure that the only thing that will make you better is death. Die, loser, and then, I “promise” you, you will instantly become a “better person.”
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The righteousness which is out of faith speaks this: “You should NOT say inside your heart ‘Who will go up into heaven?’ that is, to bring Christ down. Or, ‘Who will go down into the place of the dead?’ That is, to bring Christ up out of the dead. But what says it? “The word {Christ, the Word God speaks} is near you in place and time, inside your mouth and inside your heart; that is, the word of faith which we proclaim. That, if you speak the same word in your mouth, speaking the Lord Jesus indeed… (Romans 10:6-9).
God’s antidote to ALL of the deception of the evil one working in the Christian life is so very simple. Christ Jesus is not far away, He lives in Person inside your mouth and inside your heart.