8.2 An Arrogant Christ
© 2019 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Church historians will assure you that the issue of the Nicene Council and Creed is whether Jesus is and was “God” or whether He was “just a man” who talked about “God.”
They are lying to you, that is not God’s issue at all. What good is it to call Jesus “God” as a mental idea, even while refusing Him entrance into one’s heart? That is called death. God’s issue is life – knowing God through knowing Jesus Sent into our hearts, versus death – knowing everything except Father Himself.
This is the same thing in the garden. The last thing the serpent wanted was for Adam and Eve to eat of being-like-God, that is, to eat of life.
Being Like God. Being just like God in all ways expresses itself in one way – Loving one another with pure hearts fervently. So, when these same theologians tell you that man’s sin was “wanting to be like God,” they are lying to you as well. No one wants to be like God. All humans want to be anything but “like God.” All humans want to be better than that. For that reason, all humans lust after a superior “Christ.”
Consider Superman or Batman, the great “super-heroes.” What did they actually accomplish? They used their own strength and violence to destroy their enemies. Jesus laid down His life through weakness to win His enemies into thankfulness and into sharing His life with Him. – No one wants to be like Jesus.
A Mental Image. What, then, do I mean by “the arrogant Christ?” – I am speaking entirely of an image held in the mind.
The real Jesus we know by heart, Jesus in Person, now our only life, and we receive the increase of the knowledge of Father, by receiving the words that Jesus speaks through “Let it be to me.” But the image of “Christ” held in the minds of most Christians is something entirely different. The image and definition you hold in your mind is entirely your own creation. And Christians who join with Adam to despise their lowly frame and to lust after heavenly “superiority” will create a mental image of “Jesus” that corresponds with their rebellion.
A Humanoid Demigod! Consider the image of “God the Son” that most Christians hold in their minds. This entity, by their pictured definitions, is, in fact, the image of a humanoid demigod, small, weak, faraway, and fairly irrelevant.
There is no ability or capacity in this imaged “Christ” to live in Person inside the hearts of each believer and to connect each one in every moment together with Father. Neither is there any ability or capacity in this image to sustain all created things, here and on the other side of the galaxies, every moment by every word of His good speaking. This mental “Christ” is not all, He is not here, He is not now, and He is especially not Personal as the present and continuous Life of each believer.
An Incapable “Jesus.” But the boundness and impotence of this imaged “Christ” doesn’t stop there. You see, by his imagined mental “Christ,” Christian supposes that Jesus is incapable of fulfilling all Salvation in the life of any believer on this planet and in this age. More than that, Christian supposes that Jesus is incapable of drawing anyone to Himself after they have died.
In fact, if you probe deep enough you will discover that this imaged “Jesus” has very little to do with anyone’s salvation now. Rather, each person must image the “right” mental ideas about a very limited Jesus in order to be “saved” someday. Yet they call this incapable “Jesus” – “God the Son.”
An Image of Superiority. But how does “arrogance” come into the picture? The root is one thing – unthankfulness, that is, “God, I hate the way You made me; I refuse to call my lowly form to be Your image.” Yet unthankfulness is a negative, the absence of the joy of being a weak human as God’s expression of Himself to creation. The positive that always takes its place is arrogance, that is, “I deserve better; I ought to be superior.”
On that basis, Christian concocts in his mind the same image standing before Adam in the garden, a superior heavenly being of outward lights and perfections, bright, shiny, and dazzling. And because this imaged “Christ” must be “above” human weakness, then, by definition, the image despises human weakness as much as Christian does.
The Jesus of Our Hearts. Now, you know that the true image of God – what God looks like – “has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief… Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” (Isaiah 53:2-4).
This is the human Jesus living in your Heart, a Jesus who is without limit or boundary, all here now and Personal inside of everyone who believes into Him, connecting each one with Father in every way in continuous energeia. This Jesus is more than capable of carrying You inside Himself in every step. And living as every Word God speaks written all through the pathways of your heart is a simple task to Him.
Lawlessness. But lawless men and women, lusting after the image of a superior Christ, then use the word God speaks in outward form as mental ideas, that is, the law, for lawless purposes contrary to God. They use the law and the commandment – “hear and obey” – in order to gain a momentary victory over the flesh of other Christians whom they secretly despise.
We will look more closely at lawlessness as it works in Christian’s mental imagery in the next lesson. Here we want to understand this imaged “Christ” who, supposedly, wields this unlawful use of the Word God speaks. He is a “Christ” who says to you, “You will obey me with your own performance.”
Hating God Revealed. And thus, in refusing to hear the law, Christian tries and tires and tries again to “obey” this superior “Christ,” and always fails and then lies about it, and then cries before “trying” again. Trying, lying, and crying, and calling it “God’s way” is the false human energeia or fire that rejects the Jesus written upon the heart in favor of an image of a superior “Christ.”
What is arrogant about this image is that it does not carry Christian in all that he is, having become his life. Rather, this “Christ” stands above Christian, requiring him to rise up out of his stupid weak form and pretend to be superior, BEFORE Christian can ever see or know Jesus. The arrogant “Christ” teaches Christian to hate God revealed through his present human weakness.
Pretending against Weakness. This image says, “Since ‘Christ’ has no limitations, then you should not have any limitations either. God did not make His image weak and limited. Your weakness is your fault.”
Let me give an example. – “Let the weak say, ‘I am strong.’” Now, with an honest and true heart, you think out from these words in this way. – “Thank God I am weak in every way, just as God designs and sustains me, because now Christ Jesus fulfills all strength through my humanity.” But that is not the thinking going on in Christian’s mind. Instead, out from the root of his own unthankfullness married to the accusation of the evil one, Christian imagines that he must pretend to everyone that he is not weak at all.
Implacable. Now, the horrifying thing about this wicked image of “Christ” is that Christian cannot then know and rest in the Jesus who already lives inside his heart and who always carries him. For his own self-concocted mental image of “Christ” will always require him, as an implacable taskmaster, to “do better.” “Implacable” means never pleased, never satisfied, never finished, an unending horror of disconnection from God.
And the reason Christian requires his mental image of “Christ” to be never satisfied is that Christian is never satisfied with a God who reveals Himself through present human weakness. It’s called rebellion, the marriage of human unthankfulness with satanic accusation.
A Very Christian “Hell.” Tantalus is a New Testament word that describes a Christ always just beyond our reach; the Bible translators choose to translate “tantalus” into the Germanic pagan goddess, “Hell.” Sisyphus is a modern version of a Greek myth in which the human is given a task that cannot ever be accomplished but must always end in frustration and then be started again. Gehenna is the Hebrew name of the garbage dump of the city of Jerusalem, where the fire is always burning the trash and dead carcasses are always being eaten by worms.
None of these three terms is referring directly to the condition of hades, of human souls wandering in darkness after death. All three are referring first to the mental image of “Christ” in Christian’s mind, a very “Christian” hell.
“Woe to the Shepherds.” The next chapter is directed towards those preachers and Bible translators who use their place to keep God’s people away from eating of the tree of life, away from Jesus alive in their hearts.
I intend to begin that chapter in kindness and understanding; I intend to end it with no consciousness of sins, with a Jesus who carries even His enemies all the way into life. But in-between I intend to strip the false cloaks away from these conmen and imposters to show the true hardness of their hearts.
“Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! {by controlling the flesh through an unlawful use of the law} Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” {with the bread of Christ Jesus, already their only life} (Ezekiel 34:2).
Turned Away from Life. You see, the most virulent of these false shepherds are those who stand in the altar of incense, presenting it as a false and unending “dealing of God” and instructing God’s people that if they enter into the Holy of Holies now, that is, their full and personal union with Christ, then God will reject them. They keep God’s people away from eating of life and direct their attention to the commandment – eat of your own doing before God.
It is these preachers and Bible translators who paint the brightest picture of an arrogant Christ, twisting even the words of the New Testament into saying the opposite of their normal human meaning, making Christ here and now to be a Christ faraway, coming only “someday.”
The Pillars of Mental Fear. Our goal, however, is to understand the condition of Christian’s mind and the fear and terror in which he lives because of these false images of Christ and of Father. And yes, I lived for many years under the whips of this false image of “Christ,” as presented by “deeper truth” preachers, scared out of my wits that I could never please God or measure up, never knowing that it was all a made-up fantasy.
Christian is terrified that God will destroy him if he forsakes his mental image of this arrogant “Christ” in order to know the Jesus of his heart.
And the two pillars of his fear and his mental imagination are the Nicene Creed in its definitions of “God” and the words of the serpent in the garden, claiming that “God” knows evil.