18.3 Driving Jesus Away
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Let me define political government. Political government is the possession of a license to inflict pain on those who disagree with you.
The very gathering together of power figures in the church at Nicaea, under the command of the infliction of pain to get one’s way over others, was a full declaration that Jesus is NOT Lord, that He is absent from the earth, derelict in His duties as Savior, and very much in need of political power and the infliction of pain to have any success here in this earth. The claim that these men were very much concerned about establishing Jesus’ divinity is entirely bogus. If we cannot be just like this Jesus they have defined, then, according to Paul and John, they have defined another “Jesus.”
The Goal of Evil
The evil one has one goal in the church. That goal is to drive as far apart as he possibly can in the minds of Christians between Jesus and human flesh.
Constantine’s cross was the device by which the evil one splits Christians apart in their imaginations into “Jesus in my heart” versus an evil, fallen, human self. There is no need to get rid of the righteousness of Christ as a concept. If evil Lord Flesh is fought against, it will always win out over Christ. If you want Lord Flesh to win over Christ, then all you have to do is honor it by fighting against it.
Christ must be ALL first before not-Christ could ever vanish.
A Serpent on a Rock
Agur, the writer of Proverbs 30, stated that there were four things which he did not understand. Number two was the way of a serpent on a rock.
A serpent sleeps in the sun upon a warm rock in order to draw energy from both sun and rock into its cold-blooded body. The goal of the serpent is to sleep in the church, unnoticed and undisturbed. (Far more demons attend church than go to bars.) The hatred of human flesh, originating from the envy of the serpent and the jealousy of Adam, must permeate the minds of Christians first, as the warmth of the rock.
The real effort of the serpent in the church, however, is to drive the “sun,” Jesus, far away from human flesh, that His light might not be too hot for the serpent’s repose.
Ideas in the Mind
Here is what we must understand about the Nicene Creed. Some of the ideas in the creed may be “correct” ideas. But, as we have seen, ALL knowledge any human being possesses is found entirely INSIDE the mind of that human, by his or her own structures of knowing created by the emotional experiences of life.
You and I have NEVER known anything outside of ourselves. The only thing we have ever known are the ideas about things rolling around in our own heads. If Jesus Himself in Person is not part of what is rolling around in our heads, then all the ideas “about” Him we might hold can be nothing other than our own imaginative creations.
Their Last Day
Thus the goal of the serpent is to eliminate all chance for Paul and John’s gospel of our complete union with Christ ever to take root in the hearts of Christians. The goal of the serpent is to prevent Christians from ever noticing John 14:20, let alone believing it to be our entire reality NOW.
In that day you shall know that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you. The Day we KNOW for real is the last day the serpent and all his angels have inside the human experience. Notice the two entities in this equation: “I,” Jesus, and “you,” Christians, married utterly together by the word IN.
No IN’S with Jesus or Us
You can see how the exaltation of the flesh and the perversion of the cross have successfully removed the Christian from any IN’s with Jesus. The purpose of the Nicene Creed is to eliminate Jesus from any IN’s with us. And the serpent rolls contentedly as he sleeps upon the rock.
Constantine’s cross and the Nicene Creed have so separated God and man, that God can say “Man is what I look like,” and Jesus, a Man, can say, “Seeing Me IS seeing God” all they want. Those words have no application to us, for man and God are so completely OTHER that there can be no such thing as God in the flesh ever again.
Christian Accusation
“But Jesus was God” is the accusation of the Christian against God, that God is not telling us the truth about Christ revealed through us. “But Jesus was God” is the accusation that allows the Christian to argue that Jesus revealed God, okay, but we can’t. “But Jesus was God” is the accusation Christians use to drive Jesus far away from themselves and to pen Him up over there in “heaven” somewhere.
Jesus could say, “I am in the Father and the Father in Me,” because He was “God.” BUT!!! Even though He says the same thing about us being in Him in the Father, that means absolutely nothing because Jesus is God and we ARE NOT.
Where Is Jesus?
The serpent always has the same reason as to why he speaks what God speaks, the same in the garden as now. His purpose is always to get every individual person who will hear him speak “truth” to turn their backs on the tree of life and to face the image of a separated Christ.
And thus we must look briefly at one of the most important teachings of the New Testament, the parousia of Christ. The question is, entirely, Jesus IN me or Jesus somewhere else.
There are few statements more effective at driving Jesus far away from our hearts than this: Jesus IS coming back. Parousia (wrongly translated “coming”) does not mean a solitary figure “returning someday.”
Far Away from Me
A couple of years ago at church a powerful speaker in a moment of great excitement shouted by the anointing “Jesus IS coming back bodily!” And those words, because of the memory of imagination remaining in my brain, caused Jesus to vanish from my own heart, and all I could see was this tiny image of Constantine riding his white horse up there, far away from me. It was a brief moment of utmost despair.
There is nothing more gut-wrenchingly horrifying than to see Jesus outside of me separate from me; it is departure. In order for such a deadly thing to happen two things must have taken place first.
Depart from Me
First, before Jesus could be separate from me in a solitary body IN which I am not and which is not IN me, I must have driven Him out, expelled Him by hard volition from my heart.
And for me not to be inside of this Jesus entirely, looking out only through His eyes, He must have vomited me out of His mouth. “Depart from Me, I never knew you.”
Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him (Revelation 1:7). There is nothing more horrifying than for a Christian to see Jesus outside of themselves; it is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Christ in Me
Before we can understand any form of reality, we must understand heaven/earth first. Heaven and spirit are synonymous, the same thing, and heaven and the atmosphere are congruous, existing in the same location. Christ “in heaven” is the only way Christ can be in me, and Christ in me is my only hope of glory.
The second Man is a life-giving Spirit. If Christ is physical and solitary, then He cannot be IN us and we cannot be IN Him. However, Christ IS physical – For in fact the body is not one member but many (1 Corinthians 12:14) – Christ as us.
Never Alone
Christ is physical because He is in us and we are His body, but Christ is NEVER alone or solitary. – Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain (John 12:24).
Christ Jesus determined, that is seized hold of never being alone, there in Gethsemane, when He drew you and me into Himself never to send us away. And as we breathe air in and out, so we breathe Spirit in and out. Jesus remains in our hearts, but the Spirit of Christ is the sending forth of God. You and I are IN heaven IN the Spirit IN Christ right now.
Looking for His Appearing
I want to point you now to a very important study done by Preston Eby of El Paso, Texas, titled Looking for His Appearing. This study is well worth the time to carefully read through it; it will place inside of you a vital understanding of Christ as He is.
Eby’s primary teaching on the six Greek words referring to the “coming” or “return” of the Lord begins in chapter 9, “The Parousia of Jesus Christ.” I suggest you start reading there. Those six Greek words are parousia, apokalupsis, epiphaneia, phaneroo, erchomai, and heko. You will find much agreement between the things you have learned regarding Symmorphy and what Preston Eby teaches; in fact, extracting a condensed version would be of great value.
The Lord Has Come
The presence (not coming) of the Lord, His parousia, is His entrance into our knowledge, personal and real inside of us. Jesus is the becoming known of God. All six of those words point to some aspect of Jesus making God known to us inside of us and out from our own hearts.
In other words, the “coming” of the Lord is the same thing as the only definition in the Bible of age-abiding life: knowing God and knowing Jesus Sent. Without any question, the Lord has come again in us. He came into our hearts when we asked Him to, and He appears, phaneroos Himself to us as we speak Christ alone, becoming our only life, making us just like Himself.
Jesus Is Not Dead
Alas, this lesson is not on the presence of Jesus Christ in our hearts, but the driving of Jesus far away from His body. A Jesus separate from His body and a body separate from its life-giving Spirit are dead, both are dead. Jesus is not dead, and we are very much alive unto God.
But that is not what our brethren believe. Every plaintive cry of dismal hope, “Jesus is coming soon,” is an expression of deadness, the deadness of the Christian and the deadness of Jesus. And so our brethren trudge ever forward in the line of death, convinced their flesh must be executed, convinced they can know this far-away Jesus no other way.
On This Earth First
Again, the Lord Jesus Himself meets each one who belongs to Him exactly where they are and walks with them in what they presently see and know even through death. But after their deaths, Jesus continues to limit Himself in their knowing by what they want and by how He is known here on this earth.
And all these (who have died), having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us (who remain alive) (Hebrews 11:39-40). Perfection comes upon this earth first and entirely by our faith that Jesus has come and we are His Body.
Strong Contradiction
Except – you know well the desperate contradiction in the hearts of our brethren that Jesus is NOT here now. This contradiction is so strong that they will seek to exclude Jesus as He reveals Himself again on this earth and will rejoice with all joy when Christ, as His second witness, is put to death again. – His own receives Him not. Yet He carries them utterly inside Himself and Jesus and us together lay down our lives entirely for their sakes.
Jesus, Salvation, is simply bigger than everyone and everything, swallowing up all that is old, swallowing up death, and bringing forth all things new. That God might be all in all.