6.3 Death as Salvation
© 2019 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Inside of the minds of our fellow believers in Jesus, death rules over the wondrous gospel of Jesus Christ alive inside of us, now our very and only LIFE.
It’s easy to exchange not-Christ for Christ in the minds of humans, all you have to do is keep using the exact same words, just change their definitions inside the human mind. Or, conversely, take two words that are utterly unrelated and switch their definitions. We see this practice growing in our world today to disastrous results. More and more, we see the word, “Christian,” coming to mean “hater” in the public discourse.
And so the serpent gives to his master, death, a different name.
Going Blind. In the minds of almost all Christians, death, our great enemy, is now called “heaven” and being dead is called “salvation.” How is this; how did it happen?
After Adam’s rebellion in the garden, God removed humans from any knowledge of the tree of life until such time as Jesus came to show us the Father through His life laid-down. And God did something else for humans, out of His great hope in Jesus. God placed upon Adam and Eve and all humans with them the skin of an animal, that is, an outer covering of animal ignorance. In that moment, Adam and Eve could no longer see the heavens in which they lived, but only the outer appearance of material things. The human spirit became blind to heaven and to life.
Heavenly Blindness. Because the human spirit is blind to heaven and to life, we have imagined that “heaven” is far away and that visible material things are the only things real.
We know, of course, that we live in heaven right now as much as and even more than earth, because heaven and earth are one place, intrinsically tied together. We know that our earthly bodies could not live without the imbuing of life coming to them from our heavenly spirits. A person who is physically blind has not left earth, even though they cannot see anything material. We humans who are blind in our spirits have not left heaven, even though we cannot see the heavenly things in which we live and move.
Defining Death. God had said to Adam, “In the day that you eat of the knowledge of good and evil, in dying you shall die.” “In dying you shall die” denotes a process of dying, step by step.
Adam’s spirit “died” the moment his teeth pierced the fruit of becoming his own decider between right and wrong. That does not mean “cease,” rather, it means a hardened hostility against God and an openness to the worship of heavenly creatures. For the rest of his life, then, Adam’s soul was dead in the telling of a false story of self, unthankfulness married to accusation. Paul called this state as being “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), a “living death.” Finally, after 930 years, Adam’s physical body died.
The Meaning of Physical Death. James stated briefly what anyone watching a human die physically knows firsthand. – The body without the spirit is dead (James 2:26).
Death, then, is the splitting apart of heaven and earth. In order for any human to “die,” the human spirit must be ripped apart from the human body, an action of violence contrary to everything that God is.
Dead humans continue, then, in the heavens, with spirits wrapped in chains, hostile to Christ and open to demons, but as continuing souls, as stories of self endlessly repeating all accusation and unthankfulness. The Hebrew word for this state of being dead in the heavens is “Sheol,” and the Greek word is “Hades,” a wandering in darkness. But Sheol/Hades is not a separate “place,” rather, it is a condition of endless muttering, sealed in ignorance, inside the same heavens in which we live right now, all around us.
Hope beneath of Boasting. Adam and Eve, then, driven away from any ability to connect with the Lord Jesus Christ as their life, lived their remaining lives in the horror of their own self stories, in self-exaltation and self-loathing, in abusing and being abused.
Adam was not ignorant that he had lost everything he had imagined he might gain in trading with the serpent, except for his own grandiose self-boasting, but underneath that self-boasting a hope in the goodness of God remained. Their first child, Cain, was a man of earthly self-boasting only, with a heart that continued hard against God. But their second son, Abel, placed his hope into the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.
Nonetheless, the words of the serpent now ruled inside the self-story of all humans.
Re-Defining Death. In response to the horror God had warned Adam against, the serpent had said, quite blatantly – “In dying, you will not die.”
Why? Because death is not death. Death is not bad at all. Death is arising into “the higher LIFE.” Your spirit did not die, Adam, it just came alive to the endless possibilities of the human self. Your soul is not a story of living death, Adam, don’t you just enjoy arrogance and contempt, exalting yourself in the face of others and treating other people badly? Can’t you see how perfectly matched your unthankfulness and my accusation really are? And physical death? That’s way in the future, but even still, it’s only after you die that you will truly “begin to live.”
What Is He Thinking? The fact that the serpent is lying in every word does not mean that humans do not believe him, for they have nothing else to believe in except for a distant hope in a “faraway” Christ. When God placed “a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life,” humans could no longer know the good words of Christ always sustaining them, that is, not until they see a Man laying down His life for them.
We are not looking at humans in general, however, but at the imaginations against the good-speaking of Christ going on inside of Christian’s mind. What is he thinking? Jesus has already given Christian to eat of the tree of life, of His Life now Christian’s only life. But instead of Christ as His self-story, Christian continues to spin his own story of self.
“You Will Not Die!” Why is Christian not eating of LIFE?!!??? Why is he not putting the Lord Jesus Christ upon all that he is? Christian does not eat of life because the words of the serpent continue to rule inside the imagination of his intellect, words that have now become “Christian” thinking.
And the single most powerful set of serpent words that BLOCK Christian inside his mind away from knowing only the good words of Christ sustaining him out from the Jesus of his heart, the Jesus he knows and loves, is this – In dying, you will not die. Salvation is “going to” heaven after you die – a distant “heaven,” and a someday “salvation.”
Waiting inside of Christ. You know, of course, that nowhere in the Bible does God ever equate salvation with being dead in heaven. Christians who have experienced their spirits and bodies being ripped apart contrary to God continue in safety, as Paul assures us, inside of Christ, just as we also live inside of Christ. But they are dead, as Paul also said, that is, they do not have physical bodies, they are not whole, they are not complete.
And there, tucked inside of Christ, they wait in hope of becoming real humans again, living as the revelation of Father in the full reality and experience of heaven and earth married together forever. But they cannot know Jesus as He IS, not before God releases that wondrous revelation of Christ through you and me, Jesus here, Jesus now, Jesus personal through us His Body.
“Someday.” In that day you will know that I am inside of the Father and you inside of Me and I inside of you (John 14:20). We know that Today is the only day that exists, the Day of Salvation. But in the Christian imagination, the serpent’s words, “You should be like Christ,” alter just the first part of that little word, “day,” from Today to “someday.”
“Not here, not now, and definitely not you.”
And so Christian sits and waits for “someday” when he can live inside of Jesus and Jesus inside of him – someday. And the Jesus of His heart, generating and sustaining him every moment by all good words, fades into the background in the violent presence of a “Jesus” faraway, an above-you “Jesus” now ruling in Christian’s mind.
True Salvation. Salvation is the full knowledge of Christ Jesus sent into you, now you living in person inside of Him and He living in Person inside of you, sharing life together as one, that is John 14:20. And age-unfolding life, as Jesus said, is knowing the Father inside of knowing Jesus Sent, that is, John 17:3. This knowledge of Father through Jesus Sent into your heart is all that Salvation and LIFE is, especially as Father shows Himself to others through you.
Christians who are dead are safe inside of Christ, but they cannot know the life of Jesus revealed in their mortal flesh. This ruling definition, then, the changing of Today to “someday,” sits as an absolute rule in Christian’s mind altering every single verse he reads in the Bible.
Unbelief. The terrible horror of altering Today into “someday” sits as unbelief, blocking every word God speaks from entering into Christian to become Christ written upon his heart. Instead, every word God’s speaks is held at arm’s length, as ideas in the intellect, words that can be God only someday.
The practice of turning Today, Jesus here and now, Personal inside of us, into “someday” is the greatest evil force inside of Christian’s mind, a force that violently strikes down every word that is Christ. – Today, if you will hear His voice… they would not enter into His rest {that is, Christ our only life} …those having refused to be persuaded? And we see that they were not able to enter in through unbelief (Hebrews 3:7 & 18-19).
A “Ticket” Only. The fundamental unbelief in Christian’s mind (not his heart) is that “salvation” means that he has a “ticket,” so to speak, so that when he dies, he can show his ticket and be allowed “into” heaven and not be cast “into hell,” that is, good and evil forever. And he is convinced that only then can he see and know Jesus as He is.
All branches of Christianity, from the most sedate of eastern orthodox to the wildest of deeper truth and everything in-between hold this same fundamental mental image regarding “salvation.” All argument between groups, then, is over one thing only – who has the ticket and who does not.
The real Jesus, Savior and Salvation, is not in their minds, though He utterly carries them. And all Christians lust after the image of a super-Christ, just like Adam did, and just like Adam, they hate themselves, the image and likeness of God. They refuse to believe that humans right now, walking together, loving one another with a pure heart fervently, are the revelation of God to all creation.
A Terrible Quest. Age-unfolding life is to know God our Father and to know Jesus Sent into our hearts. As long as Christian believes by mental imagination that this “life” becomes his only after physical death, he will never seek to know the Father now through the real Jesus alive in His heart. And he will never be part of the revelation of Jesus Christ right here on this earth. He will never threaten the rule of the evil one; he will never set creation free.
We have before us, then, a terrible quest for understanding.
How could it be that the glorious gospel of the revelation of Jesus Christ through us, His body, the fulness of Christ who fills all inside of all, walking upon this earth, should be replaced in the minds of all Christians with the arguments and psychology of the ruling verse of the evil one found inside the Bible?