4.1 The God-Man Riddle
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
I have penciled out ten lessons, now, to somehow address the question – What is God? We enter this task in fear and complete surrender to the Almighty, in the joyous wonder of little children, and with the bold heart of a pirate. May I suggest that this is the most important question we will ever ask. Not Who is God, not Why is God, but What is God?
Let me base this claim on an absolute foundation. Two things central to God/Bible/Us are the New Covenant and eternal life. Both of those are centered on KNOW God.
We Have Not Known God
Now let me make another claim, an absolute that we must face and accept. We have NOT known God. Even though we have been born again, filled with the Spirit, and Christians for many years, yet we must say with all honesty that we have not known God.
I am convinced that one of the biggest reasons we have not known Him is that we have an immediate, definite, and INCORRECT answer to the question – What is God? And we place our immediate, definite, and incorrect answer against the question instantly without even knowing that we are doing so.
Let Us Follow on to Know
Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord: His going forth is prepared as the morning; and He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth (Hosea 6:3 - KJV). Hosea is not the most energetic writer in the Bible, but this line sweeps through my heart as strongly as any.
You might say, well Yordy, don’t you know what God is? No, I do not. – I do not write because I know; I write because I know where I am going. I follow on to know the Lord, and I invite you to run with me on this journey. You will do so ONLY if you also do NOT know. If you know, you will remain wherever you are.
How Do We Know God?
In the next lesson we will attempt to delineate all the various “definitions” of God that serve nothing more than to keep people far away from knowing Him. In the third lesson of this session, we want to define God as a Person with a Heart. What is a person? In the following two sessions, we will put in front of our eyes a view of God as He is as best we can, knowing that His unfolding of Himself to be known by us is forever.
But here we must address the question with which we ended Symmorphy I: Purpose – HOW do we know God? And for that we have to face the fact that God has given us, for an answer to that critical question, a DOUBLE RIDDLE!
The Riddle
God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24).
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness . . .” (Genesis 1:26a). – And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground . . . (Genesis 2:7a).
“He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” – Spoken by a man of flesh and blood.
For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God (2 Corinthians 2:11).
We cannot know what God is except by looking at a Man; we cannot know what a man is except by looking at God.
The Double Riddle
God, very definitely, invented this double riddle through which alone we can know Him.
Only a Man shows us what God is. Only God shows us what a man is.
Only the Spirit of God knows what God is. Only the spirit of a man knows what a man is.
We could actually add more to the riddle, more seeming contradiction, but we will leave it as a double riddle for now. God is NOT playing games with us. May I suggest that God becoming known is the MOST difficult and the MOST incredible thing in the universe!
God Not Being Known
Let’s put that thought front and center. God not being known is NOT man’s fault. God not being known is a condition of absolute reality. And even more absolute is this certainty – God wants to be known with more passion than the universe can contain.
Now, please understand, I have been pondering writing these lessons on this topic for about two years now. And through that time, things have been growing in me by the Spirit. Here is a line that has grown in depth and certainty, taking on meaning far beyond anything I have ever heard or considered. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17).
The Mega-Great Riddle
WHAT is God? – WHAT is man? One of these questions CANNOT be answered without a full and complete answer of the other.
He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. If we do not have a MAN fully in our view, it is not God we are knowing. If we do not have God fully in our view, it is not mankind, or ourselves, we are knowing.
And everyone agrees, mega-great is the RIDDLE of devotion: God appearing IN the flesh . . . (1 Timothy 3:16 – modified from the Greek).
“Deifying” Jesus
Later in this course we will explore the development of the hatred of human flesh in the first centuries of Christianity. By the AD 200’s, this hatred was full. Thus one of the primary base assumptions underlying the reasoning of the Nicene Council in AD 325 was that the flesh of Jesus and the flesh of all the rest of us MUST be severed completely and utterly.
The deification of Jesus is the primary means by which the evil one blocked God’s desire to make Himself known through these last two thousand years. Every element of Jesus’ weakness through which God revealed Himself, was deified and raised high above despicable man.
Turning Jesus into a “god”
Let me define deification as I am using the word.
But first, let me say that my understanding of things has changed since I first started writing. I knew that the prevailing definitions of Jesus and of “go to” heaven were false, so I made provocative statements against those things. I stand by those statements. But my own understanding of these things is now surprisingly different. Nevertheless, to say things about God that God does not say, things like “trinity” and “God the Son,” WILL prevent people from ever knowing God.
Deification is turning every element of God showing Himself through Jesus into an angelic, “god-heaven” form.
God and Man
Are God and man more alike than we have ever understood? He who has seen Me has seen the Father. – He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. God and man are more alike than we have ever understood.
Angels are spirits (Hebrews 1:7). Angels are CREATED. God is Spirit. God-Spirit is NOT created. Angel-spirit and God-Spirit MUST BE entirely different. Not so with our born again spirits. – The (one), however, being joined to the Lord, one spirit is (direct wording). Is the Holy Spirit and our spirit one and the same?
Joined Together
Now, it does not and never will enter my thinking that “I am the Holy Spirit.” That effrontery is not in my perception. The Greek word for “joined” is kollao. It means glued together, yes, but it was used by the Greeks to mean the two parts of a flesh wound growing back into each other by healing.
An angel is a fish swimming around in the water. Unregenerate human spirits are the same. You and I are a cup of pure water poured into a clear mountain pool of pure water. Once the immersion is complete, there ain’t no telling one from the other. Our connection of Sspirit with God is –! I mean to say – IS!!!
Substance Versus Appearance
Let’s return to the Man that shows us God, the appearance of God in creation. We have an entire session, coming up soon, in which we will attempt to define and to understand God’s order of substance versus appearance. Much of Christian confusion is not knowing there is even such a thing as a difference between the two. In our attempt to understand God-Spirit, I want to precisely define why God-Spirit MUST BE invisible forever. The form of God is formlessness; God cannot be known. Yet God appears inside His creation through one form only; God appears as a Man.
The Appearance of God
God IS Word. – And Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory (from the Thesis of the Universe).
Jesus did NOT “leave” His home in “glory” to come “down to” earth as a temporal expression of a God-Man. At the heart of all falseness is the driving wedge of separation, that is, death. Separating in any part of our thinking between the Substance of Father and the appearance of Jesus, a man, is Death.
In Substance – God the Father; in appearance – a Man, Jesus. Yet I reject the concept of “the Trinity” and have replaced it with a Biblical word – Symmorphy (coming up in Session 10).
We Begin with a Man
Let me set forth a postulate, that is, a defining assumption that must rule our thinking as we go on to know the Lord. Our knowledge of God cannot begin with God as Spirit. Our knowledge of God MUST begin with Jesus the Man. Jesus the Man, and specifically, His walk from Gethsemane to the Resurrection, must be the core and the beginning of every part of our knowledge of What God IS.
“Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” – “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me?” (John 14:8-10).
Meek and Lowly of Heart
How, then, must we know this Man? Three things.
I am meek and lowly of heart (Matthew 11:29). – My strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinth. 12:9). – The glory of this riddle – Christ IN you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). – Christ lives in your hearts through faith (Ephesians 3:17).
Our knowing of God, what God is, begins by knowing a Man. A Man who is inside of ALL that we are, especially our hearts. A Man who shows Himself through our weakness.
A Man who is meek and lowly of heart.