Designed by Word

This text, Designed by Word, is my "writing to learn" those things that must go into the more focused book, Set My People Free.

Note:

I had titled this next topic I hope to address as "Let My People Go." 

I have been unable, however, to formulate a specific outline for that title and my first attempts at writing it seemed to go nowhere. Nonetheless, the concern of this topic has continued. For that reason, I have been "writing to learn," just rambling on about how we help our brothers and sisters in Christ to know the wondrous Salvation in which they already live.

As I have been writing, then, my approach to this topic has clarified. I realized the "Let My People Go" is addressing the evil one, something we have no need to do. In complete contrast, "Set My People Free" is addressing those sons of God who demonstrate to the Church the reality of their present salvation. Thus, my point of view has changed to equipping God's holy ones for the purpose of setting millions of Spirit-filled believers in Jesus free into the full knowledge of God.

The several articles now showing up in the menu "Designed by Word" on the right are becoming the raw material of my stated book, Set My People Free. That book is writing to teach, and so I will re-write much of what is found in these rambling letters into a more focused form. Nonetheless, this rambling "writing to teach" has also become its own book, Designed by Word. The two will cover the same topic, just from two different approaches, thus I am leaving them both togther inside this one zone, at least for now.

More than that, I have found that the seven articles I wrote prior to starting Symmorphy are on this exact same topic, for I had the same concern then. I had not included them in any book, so they are found in the "Additional Material" zone, under "The Song of the Lamb." I am now re-doing them slightly and inserting them where they go into Designed by Word.



Introduction

I asked Jesus into my heart when I was seven years old. Through my youth I did not seek the Lord, but at age 19, Jesus turned my heart back to Himself. I have known His unwavering grip upon my life ever since, regardless of my own foolishness.

When I was 53 years old, I learned that I am Asperger’s, that is, high-performing autism. What relief that understanding brought, because it gave full answer to thousands of unanswered questions through all my life. Asperger’s is both a gift and a disability. The gift is that Asperger’s see patterns that others miss and become obsessed with what interests them to the exclusion of all else. The disability is that they cannot pretend to be what they are not.

In other words, the difficulty in which Asperger’s individuals live is that they don’t know how to be successful in this world or how to give people what they expect. Rather, they are so busy inside their own obsessive interests that they fail to see those “others” all around them.

But you would be mistaken if you imagined an Asperger’s person to be unfeeling or without compassion. We feel too much, rather, and thus learned in our youth to disconnect from overwhelming agony. And you will find depths of compassion inside of those who are Asperger’s, compassion that often cannot show itself outwardly.

If you met me, you would think me no different than anyone else; I do not act “weird.” At the same time the Lord gave me a strong literary mind, and I am an effective teacher of English and of writing, having a master’s degree in Education. I also designed and built many buildings in my younger years.

I am sharing these things with you for a very definite purpose; please bear with me. At age nineteen, when Jesus turned my heart back to Himself, I became obsessed with several strange ideas that worked together to create in me a life-long intensity of pursuit. And as an Asperger’s, all blinders are on, and I busy myself utterly with my obsession.

I want to share with you those several strange ideas.

The first weird idea that became the center and drive of all the others was that I wanted to live and not die, inside the belief that knowing God was to live and not knowing God was to remain in death. The second was that I had a Bible of my own, and, by gum, I was going to know what God says in the Bible. The third was that hearing the words, “Well done” was the most important thing in all human life and hearing the words, “I never knew you” would be the greatest of awfulness, that is, the idea that upon that moment would hang everything. 

The fourth was that I could not create my own “god.” I needed to know God as He is, as He speaks regarding Himself. The fifth strange idea I had was that the words God Himself actually says in His Bible are truth, not what people say about God. In other words, if God says something in the New Testament, that counts big time. And the sixth really weird idea that I became obsessed with is that God is a Person, and if I wanted to know Him, I had to deal straight with Him, face to Face, eye to Eye, forehead to Forehead.

Now, I had no idea what other people thought about these things; actually, I had little idea of what “other people” were. Nonetheless, I loved being with God’s people and I loved sitting under the preaching and teaching of the word. I estimate that I have spent, now, more than 30,000 hours in the study of the Bible, in my intense NEED to know what God is saying to me.

In my mid-twenties, I was still, at times, trying to “figure out” what the Bible means. God rebuked me of doing any such thing, and I have not done so since. Instead, I have done one thing with every word God speaks; I have hidden His word, from Genesis to Revelation, all through the pathways of my heart. I don’t know what it means, but God does. And God alone can do what He says inside of me.

Then, at age 41, I came to the absolute realization that I was never going to “make it.” That if my hearing Jesus say, “Well Done,” was up to my ability to perform, then I had no hope. I NEEDED a Savior, One who would carry me through.

I have shared all this to give you a background for my intentions in this short book. I want to be straight with you regarding what God actually says in the Bible in a way that no one else has.

Now, please bear with me, I know that is a provocative “claim,” but I hope to show you what I mean. Because, you see, when you discover what God actually says in His Word regarding you, you will laugh with joy as you have never known, and your overflowing joy will increase forever.

Our present Salvation is more glorious, almost, than our human capacity can handle, yet God designed us for that very glory.

Now, I seem to be contradicting myself. I stated that I have not tried to “figure out” what the Bible means, but only to hide it in my heart. Yet the Bible says that the Bible shows us Jesus and that this Jesus is not only every Word God speaks, but that this same Jesus lives inside my heart.

In my early years, in order to know what God actually says, I wrote Bible verses in endless word studies, writing out whole chapters and books, writing verses over and over again. But over the last twelve years, I have written an expression of understanding the Bible, not because I know what I am talking about, but because I want to know. I write so that I might know God; I write because when I am writing, I hear Jesus singing in my heart.

All through the years, whenever I have heard any preacher say anything about God or the Bible that I did not know, I was thrown into intense agony. I had to know. I had to know what God does say. I have a Bible; I could not rest through hours of intensity until I KNEW what God says.

You see, Asperger’s also carries with it depths of agony that God does not share with most.  And my agony over many years has included the growing realization that what God says in the Bible and in the gospel in particular, is not the same as what “Christianity” teaches. Somehow, something got messed up somewhere along the way.

And so, in the early years of my strange obsession, I would show a fellow believer a wonderful verse I had found in the New Testament. They would look at the words and not see them at all. They could not see those words because that line did not fit with their denominational beliefs or their theology. And that always made absolutely no sense to me.

Then, during my early thirties, I began to realize that God’s definitions of so many Bible things, things like “salvation” and “purpose,” even topics like “What is Christ,” what God Himself actually said about those things was quite different from accepted “Christian” thinking. And by my late thirties I became so weary with how preachers would bend the words of the verses in order to fit their prescribed theology.

Sir – what are you doing with the words God speaks?

Yet they spoke under the anointing and the power of God moved out from their ministry. – "What does this mean, dear Father?"

You see, one more strange thing about Asperger’s, at least about my own version of it, is that I must know where every little thing fits into the larger picture. I have gotten in trouble with others, in construction, in school, because I have to have everything fit. I simply cannot stand anything that does not make sense.

And that brings us to the seventh really strange idea I have held to since I was nineteen, and that is that God gave us the Bible so that we COULD KNOW God, so that we could know what He means by what He says.

I have never bought into a God who “can’t be known.” I have never tolerated the idea that God does not fulfill what He speaks in our lives on this earth and in this age. This is eternal life, that they may KNOW You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent (John 17:3). We have to know.

But this book is not about what the Bible says. This book is an attempt to lay before you the horror of “Christian theology.”

WE HAVE BEEN ROBBED!

The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

For several years, now, I have been convinced that the rule underlying much of “Christian” thinking and theology is governed almost entirely by the words of the serpent in the garden, beginning with “Did God indeed say?” 

At the same time, the understanding that Christ Jesus sustains all things by the Word of His Power (Hebrews 1:3) has grown larger and larger until I can’t see anything outside of that reality.

And so this text is a weaving together of three things. First is an attempt to understand what God means that Jesus sustains me with words. Second is an attempt to delineate the meaning of the serpent’s words in the garden and how those ideas rule so much of Christian theology. And third is an attempt to understand the thinking of our brethren, that they, living in all the glory of Salvation right now, know little of it.

I would ask you, then, to read this book in its entirety with an honest heart before God. I am convinced that the things you read here will both shock you and fill you with overwhelming Joy – His name is Jesus.


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