15.4 The Ascent of Death
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Notice that through this entire definition of Salvation there is not one thought of a “place” where dead Christians are kept safe as they await Salvation fulfilled upon this earth.
We will see in an upcoming session exactly how Roman Catholicism, in AD 385, merged Christianity and paganism utterly together as one. Part of that merging was to take the Roman statute of the Roman god, Jupiter, the equivalent of Zeus to the Greeks and Baal to the Phoenicians, and to give that stone idol a new name, “Peter.” And thus Christians have kissed the toes completely off of Peter/Jupiter/Baal in the centuries since.
Death as Jesus
Yet calling a demon idol, a god of stone, “Peter,” was only the outward appearance of a far more demonic exchange of names that had already ascended in the church of Christ across the whole Roman world, east and west. You see, the church had already changed the name of another demon idol, formerly called death. Death, from the AD 200’s on, would be called, “Jesus.” And being dead would be called, “Salvation.”
So when we hear them say, “Jesus is the only way to heaven,” we know they are not referring to the Jesus alive in our hearts at all, but rather to death, death which is, in actuality, the only way into heaven-only.
The Curse of Death
No one goes to heaven-only except by the curse of death. Death, the physical death of the human body, is the triumph of evil and the only expectation of the rebellion of Adam. “Jesus died” means that Jesus became that curse FOR us; Jesus dies no more.
But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep… For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus. …We who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout… And the dead in Christ will rise first (1 Thessalonians 4:13-16).
Why Would the Dead Return?
1 Thessalonians is the first letter Paul wrote; he had not yet heard Galatians and Romans flowing through his lips, nor basked in the quiet glory of his prison cell as he wrote Ephesians and Philippians.
As Jesus stated, everything concerning God in the Bible is figurative, everything except the Walk of the Atonement. The Lord “descending from heaven” means Jesus appearing visibly as His glorified and many-membered body, the unveiling of Jesus Christ, when the cover is taken off of all eyes and they see what has been already true all along.
Why would the dead in Christ return to physical bodies if they are already whole and already in possession of salvation?
In the Flesh First
But you have come to… the spirits of just men made perfect (Hebrews 12:22-23). All Christians who are dead, remain inside of Christ in the heavens; “asleep” is the figurative expression Paul uses, meaning they continue to rest in Christ. Christians in heaven possess as we do heavenly bodies, their spirits, which are made perfect. Thus they are capable of interacting with heavenly reality, just as we are.
BUT!!! My contention is that they do not and cannot know the Father and Jesus Sent as They ARE before we who remain in the flesh know Them. The full knowledge of God comes forth in the flesh on this earth entirely by faith FIRST.
God Manifest in the Flesh
Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given you (Joshua 1:3). – All the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever (Genesis 13:15).
Heavenly glory does not reveal God. Only man reveals God, man in full as God created us, with perfected spirits filled with the Spirit of God, with Jesus alive in our hearts singing all of our own self-stories, and with our physical earth bodies, incorruptible and immortal, the flesh and Body of Jesus. God manifest IN THE FLESH. God has no other appearance.
And the dead in Christ know God no further than what they walked in or what they saw while alive in their bodies of flesh.
Being Dead Is No Problem
To us, Salvation is Christ in us, His life revealed in our mortal flesh. To most of our brethren, Salvation is being dead, the triumph of death over human flesh.
Being dead is no problem; our brethren who are dead rest utterly inside of Jesus, just as we do. The problem is calling their WAITING TIME “salvation” and “eternal life.”
The dead cannot be “alive” forevermore; only the living can be alive. Thus the beginning of the new creation in appearance is marked by God raising His dead elect to life again.
The Greatest Evil
The great EVIL, then, of calling Death, “Jesus,” and being dead, “Salvation,” is not that it alters the rest our brethren find inside of Jesus after they lose their lives. The great EVIL, the greatest evil upon this earth, is that such a re-defining of Christ and Salvation places a mighty, impassible barrier between our brethren and the real Jesus alive in their hearts and the real Salvation flowing out through them.
And this redefining of death, calling death, “Jesus” and being dead, “Salvation,” has perverted all of Christian thinking and theology. Death has effectively replaced Christ in the mind of our brethren, in actuality, new age Gnosticism.
The Exaltation of Death
The exaltation of death has raised human flesh to a “god-like” status. The exaltation of death has turned the cross from being the wall of our freedom against sin and death into the whips of bullies driving the church of Christ into slavery to their “anointed” religious whims.
The exaltation of death has merged the definitions of God utterly together with the definitions of the serpent, of Satan, into one confused mess and with it all the outward trappings of the occult. Why else would every Baptist pastor place a penis above the entrance into his church if death were not ascendant?
The Triumph of Gnosticism
The exaltation of death has driven the Lord Jesus Christ far away from us humans walking this earth. It has turned Him into a demi-god, a “heavenly” thing like Apollo or Thor or Superman, just bigger and more super, yet tiny and limited and impotent – not at all the Jesus we know, this One who fills our hearts with His glory.
The exaltation of death has placed the triumph of Gnosticism, “flesh is evil – heaven is pure – Christ is heaven-only,” the spirit of anti-Christ over all Christianity and Christian theology. Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ IS come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of anti-Christ (1 John 4:3 – partly from the KJV).
The Spirit of Anti-Christ
Although this spirit of anti-Christ, as John also said, was “coming, and is now already in the world,” in the first century AD, yet it’s triumph over the church of Christ is marked outwardly by very specific historical events. The greatest of those historical events, the bottom of the fall of the church into Roman darkness from which she has not recovered, the ascendancy and triumph of death over the body of Christ, spans the darkest of centuries, from AD 311 to AD 410, from the conquest of a brutal psychopath to the publishing of Augustine’s City of God.
We will explore these events through five sessions, primarily because we must be saved from death, but here we want to pose a most important question. – Why?
For Judgment
Why, God, does the revelation of Your Salvation include centuries of the triumph of death over the church of Christ? I have no answer to this question that has troubled and shaped me from the start; all I can do is give some perspective.
God is determined to prove His Word against all accusation; the proving of God’s Word is called judgment.
By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world (Hebrews 11:7). Our walking in all Salvation revealed now through us, BY FAITH, while we do NOT see, brings all things into judgment.