22.1 God Is Great
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
The unfolding of the revelation of the gospel took place over a period of more than fifty years and passed through three separate stages. The first stage was those writers who knew only that Jesus had done something wonderful for us as the Savior of Israel, and the second was the gospel according to Paul.
But about thirty years after Paul, John added another dimension to the gospel and to our knowledge of God. It’s interesting that John wrote his gospel into Paul’s strongest churches, those in the province of Asia. You see, all the churches possessed only a handful of unbound letters as their knowledge of the New Covenant.
John Went Further
It’s a bit hard for us to conceive of vibrant Spirit-filled churches who did not possess anything from John, since John’s words fill so much of our Christian teaching.
However, John wrote only after spending more than two decades ministering in Paul’s churches and with his disciples. That means in everything John wrote, he drew his thinking out from an inner grasp of Paul’s gospel of union with Christ. Thus, in agreement with Paul, John went further than Paul.
Paul wrote his letters through a whirlwind ministry over the span of only fifteen years. John thought much and deeply over decades before he wrote.
Sonship
Thus we can expect to find elements of truth in John’s writings that take us further into the knowledge of God and our relationship with Him through Christ than Paul ever had time to discover. Possibly the biggest of those truths is the reality of sonship.
Paul saw only that our sonship was that of adoption. But John went way further than that; it was John who unveiled to the church that we have been, in fact, born a second time. No one knew that for the first fifty years of the church. Thus we understand now that John’s version of organic sonship stands above Paul’s version of adopted sonship.
Conceived of God
That knowledge does not remove anything of truth that Paul wrote about the qualities of sonship, but we now know that we were not born of another and then adopted by God. God IS our Father; we were conceived a second time. And our second conception is identical to the conception of Jesus inside of Mary’s womb. The only difference is that Jesus was in the womb of an individual woman; we are in the womb of the church.
We are conceived of God, but we are not yet born. We will speak of both church and son in upcoming sessions, however; here we want to know a God who begets children.
A God Who Begets?
What is a God who begets children? What is a God who begets multitudes of children on the one hand but only one many-membered Christ on the other? What is a God who makes humans just like Himself and then births His own genetic code inside of them that they might be of His same kind? And yes, this really is the gospel according to John.
What is a Fathering God? Wow. I have no idea. I hardly know where to start. The title of this lesson is “God Is Great.” Let’s start there; what does “great” mean?
High and Lifted Up
All through the Bible, we are presented with a description of God that He is “high and lifted up,” that He is “the Almighty,” “the Lord of hosts,” that He is “great” and “above all.” Yet you find me presenting a picture of a God who is meek and lowly of heart and who sees others as better than Himself. What gives? Am I seeing things upside down? No, I am standing upright; I am seeing God right side up.
You see, the word “great,” like most human words, has more than one definition. In actuality, “great,” when referring to persons, has three large and very different meanings.
Great by Show
The first meaning of great is the political meaning. George W. Bush and Barack Obama are perfect examples of “great” in the political sense. Both men are empty suits, having accomplished entirely nothing out from themselves their whole lives. If you had met them as the fellow next door, you would have been struck only by the size of their narcissism. Yet, because of the pulling of levers of power by others (not by themselves), both men were catapulted into the presidency of the United States where both strutted as if they were “great” and everyone said “Wow!”
The first meaning of great is the greatness of outward show.
Great by Inner Force
The second meaning of great is greatness of person. There are individual people who, when present in any company, simply command everyone’s undivided attention, not because of show, but because of the strength of certainty and the genius of wisdom that is who they are inside. These people command, and the rest of us run to follow. Examples include Genghis Khan and Napoleon, Elizabeth I of England and George Washington.
Most successful leaders in the church possess a measure of this quality of greatness. They speak, people are struck by the force of certainty coming out from them, and thus people follow. Sam Fife was such a man who caught my heart in his single-minded vision when I was but 21 years old.
God’s “Great”
Then there is a third definition of “great.” This third definition is very different from the other two, yet it, also, is great. The third definition is God’s definition.
You see, God looks at Himself, at His own qualities, and then says to us, “Look at this, this is GREAT.” Our problem is that we have always been living upside down. And so when God says, “Great,” instead of looking up to where God’s greatness resides, we look down at human greatness and call that human greatness “God’s greatness.” We are standing on our heads, seeing everything upside down.
Servant of All
Here is God’s definition of greatness.
And He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “If anyone desires to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.” Then He took a little child and set him in the midst of them. And when He had taken him in His arms, He said to them, “Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me” (Mark 9:35-37).
He who is greatest among you, let him be as the younger, and he who governs as he who serves. For who is greater, he who sits at the table, or he who serves? Is it not he who sits at the table? Yet I am among you as the One who serves (Luke 22:26-27).
Turned Upside Down
When God calls Himself great or any of the synonyms or expressions of greatness, He is never using man’s definitions of “great,” but only His own definition. Yet we try our best to turn God’s definition of “great” back upside down by the force of our own vision of human “greatness.” Thus we think, “Well, we will humble ourselves now so that we can be top dogs in the kingdom.” Or we think, “God wants us to be humble so He can be the one who is ‘great.’” Both of those thoughts are utterly upside down.
God is meek and lowly of heart, He thinks of others more highly than Himself – the GREATNESS and Majesty of God!
Meek and Lowly of Heart
As you can see, all thoughts of a “super-Christ” come from the human lust for angelic greatness.
But that is not our question; our question is What is a Fathering God? What is a God who begets sons? ONLY a God who is meek and lowly of heart, who thinks of others more highly than Himself, that is, a God who is great.
Men and women who possess a measure of human greatness and thus become leaders in the church can serve only a temporal purpose that hinders more than it helps. And most pastors also wear a face of “I am the pastor,” that is the greatness of human pretending and show. Neither form of greatness can show us our Father.
Looking Down
I’m getting right down to our definition of God. God is known only by a Man; how we perceive men and women is how we perceive God. He who has seen Me (a very human Man) has seen the Father.
Those humans now, at the end of the age of human folly, who are sons of the Father and who, by their outward appearance, show us the Father, cannot be pastors or leaders of the church, they cannot be the powerful ministries to whom everyone flocks to hear “great revelation from on high.” When such a man or woman comes into your life, you will NOT be looking up to see them, you will be looking down. You will see someone who sees you as Christ Himself.
Ones Like Himself
God has chosen the foolish things of the world… God has chosen the weak things… and the base things… and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not (1 Corinthians 1:27-28 condensed). But all the preachers will claim that God chooses these only so that God can be the great one, and not us. They claim that because they DO NOT know God. God CHOOSES the ones whom He has made just like Himself, something no successful church leader can ever be.
Does that mean there is no hope for church leaders? Not at all. Jesus is Savior, and He carries even them all the way through.
God Himself
You know, as I sit here looking at that question, What is a Fathering God, in terms of the being of God Himself, it becomes clear to me that I have zero idea nor any ability to come up with the slightest hint of an idea. Except this. God, our Father, the One who by His very Seed, His sperm, out of His own genetic structure, whatever that might be, births us as His literal sons, that God is, in His core essence, the fabric of His heart, meek and lowly of heart.
And thus the Seed of His loins and the nature of God Himself coming out from that Seed is also meek and lowly of heart. And God calls this quality of lowliness, of looking up when seeing other precious people, GREAT – the Almighty.
We Are Born of God
Except for that one quality of God-greatness, then, we do not look at God in order to know what is a God who begets sons out of His own fabric and being. Rather, we must turn and look again at the Seed as it comes forth from the Father to be the appearance of God to creation: He that has seen Me has seen the Father. Then we look at the Life inside of us that is Fathered by God.
You see, we are much more than Christ as us. Nothing exists for us except inside of Christ, but inside of our perfect union with Christ, you and I are born of God.
But as we look at Seed and Life, we continue to stretch our hearts towards the question, What is a Fathering God?