12.3 The Highway Prepared
© 2019 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
God’s desire is to be seen and known, touched and heard inside of His creation through you and me together. Each one of us must sing the Song of the Lamb as ourselves; nonetheless, we are one body together by one Spirit. The voice of Jesus through His body is the sound of many waters (Revelation 1), a great symphony of sound through which Father is known.
We are the way for Father to enter His creation. We are the highway turned in the right direction. And here is what we MUST know. Our Father is a very different sort of Fellow than we once knew when we defined Him by the image of the serpent.
Our Exuberant Father. Father is exuberant. Just read the Parable of the Exuberant Father in Luke 15:11-32 to see just how extravagant Father is. Yet here is the clearest description of Father in the Bible.
Father suffers long and Father is kind. Father is not envious; Father is not boastful; Father is not puffed up. Father does not act improperly; Father does not seek His own interests at the expense of others; Father is not easily provoked. Father keeps no account of wrongs, for He knows no evil. Father does not rejoice at injustice, but Father rejoices together with the truth. Father covers all for all; Father believes all for all; Father hopes all for all; Father carries all for all. Father never fails (1 Corinthians 13:4-8 – adapted).
God is Love.
Reciprocal Love. This is the God who would reveal Himself as He is through you as you are and through us together as we walk as humans together. Here is God-Revealed. – Love one another in exactly the same way that I am actively loving you. That reciprocal love, you and me sharing LIFE together, IS God among us; it is the revelation of Father. It is the Salvation already given to all Christians.
Our job, then, is to work with God, our confidence with the power of His Spirit, to turn the thinking of many into the thinking of Christ, to turn the unnecessary false notes of our fellow Christians into, as they are, the Song of the Lamb.
A Great Symphony. And yes, God is BIG on weaving all kinds of different metaphors together; it’s called a GREAT Symphony. The highway prepared is the river flowing is the Singing of God is the revelation of Jesus Christ is you and me loving one another with pure hearts fervently.
And what happens when you and I sing together as God Energeoing all that is our humanity? The discord goes silent, the darkness vanishes away, and death is swallowed up by Life. Turn back to Lesson 1.1 A World of Life and consider again the diagram of the “Two Rivers.” A World of Life comes out from you and me speaking and thus seeing Christ alone.
The Way for God. Here is what we said in that lesson regarding this river of life, this way for God into His creation, three things inside this calling that is upon us now as Isaiah expressed it.
1. Turn the path in front of God into the right direction.
2. Raise up what is perceived low and bring down what is perceived high.
3. Make crookedness straight and roughness smooth.
The end result of this task is that God Himself comes through us to make Himself visible and known inside His creation, resulting in a creation, a world of life. This is not a way for us into God; this is the Way God would go placed for Him by humans through faith.
Accepting the Atonement. Look around you at this world as it appears right now, a world of darkness and death. How, exactly, does this world of death become swallowed up by a world of life arising from beneath of it? First, we know this – when Jesus is all, first, then all that is not Christ, that is, all that is not God becoming known, simply vanishes away.
We accept the Atonement as absolute, total, and finished (Galatians 2:20), and thus the rough places preventing God are made smooth. We accept that our human weakness is how God made us as His image and dwelling place (Ephesians 3:19). We accept that God is the All-Carrying One, not the “all-controlling one”; and the high places come down, and the low places are lifted up.
Being Part of Christ. God brings forth life by the planting of a Seed and then by the planting of many seeds just like the first (Romans 8:29 – John 14:20). – By this we know love, because He set forth His soul for us, and we also are committed to setting forth our souls for our brothers and sisters (1 John 3:16).
First, we see Jesus planted in our earth, He in us and we in Him, then we know that we are just like Him, that God is in us reconciling first His Church, and then the world, to Himself. Then, as God shows His love through our love for one another, the witness of Christ goes forth; Jesus is faithful and true.
How do we know that God has chosen us to be His firstfruits of Christ? – Because we want to be. – Because any alternative is utterly unacceptable to us. We are part of Christ because we are confident that we are part of Christ (Hebrews 3:6 & 14).
God through Us. We enter boldly into all that is God by the public speaking of our faith (Hebrews 10:19-22). And there, inside of our Father, we recognize the authority He has given to us (Revelation 12:10-11) to call forth the knowledge of God into creation. And we recognize the power God reserves entirely to His Spirit, now flowing out from Christ Jesus living in our hearts (John 7:37). It is God alone, then who sets creation free (Romans 8:21).
You and I are free to meet with God inside of Christ Jesus, and then we turn and provide God with hearts filled with confidence that He joins with others inside of Jesus inside of us into the sending forth of His Spirit who alone causes anyone to know God. This is our ministry – BE reconciled to God. – And all know Father.
Knowing Father. What is a world of life? For it is as we KNOW Life that all thought of death disappears. What is a universe knowing only the Tree of Life? It is a universe in which Father Himself is known as He is by every created entity.
And Father can be known as He IS only through humans loving one another. We together are God made visible. And thus, every created being inside of creation KNOWS through faith that they are coming out from Father through the good-speaking of Jesus sustaining them every moment. They KNOW that Jesus is every Word God speaks, now becoming them.
All Creative Expression. And knowing that their entire life is one facet of the great Story of God that is Christ Jesus, they give thanks for every moment, for every limitation, for every achievement, for every “mistake,” and for every triumph.
You see, knowing that our every moment is God revealing Himself through us right now exactly as He wishes in no way limits or confines human achievement in all creative expression. Quite the contrary. We will discover that giving thanks with joy in every mundane daily task of life together then gives space to human achievements and excellence as we have never imagined. God is not dull. When God is known as the only source of every particle of creation, then creativity expressed through humans will know no limit. Yet the joy of meeting the simple daily needs of others remains.
NO Accusation; No Contempt. The first extraordinary realization that will astound every individual person who steps into this new world arising inside the old is that here no accusation exists. There is NO accusation against God; there is NO accusation against self; there is NO accusation against others.
That extraordinary silence will be the sweetest of “sounds.”
And no one is lusting after a super “image” of themselves, for all are joyously content with God through them as they ARE. Instead of holding others in contempt, every individual will treasure the high value and honor of every other individual as one more facet of the beauty and glory of our Father.
What treasures all will possess, even as each sets all others free!
No Hurt; No Curse. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). When you and I cannot be hurt BECAUSE we know that whatever happens, God and us together are synergeoing all things good (Romans 8:28), then the most amazing thing happens – we no longer find any need to hurt others. We bless, and there is no hint of curse in our thoughts or words.
How could we humans accept Jesus as our full and active connection with Father every moment? We are able to accept Him because we know that He traded Himself for us upon the cross. A world of life knows the Life of the Blood, the Safety of the Cross and the Joy of Living only inside of the Resurrected Christ of God.
NO Death; NO Masks. There is no more death, no more “driving God away,” inside of a world of life, for death is swallowed up inside of Victory. Because there is no more death, there is no more hiding from God or from one another.
And this will be the second most astonishing quality that will overwhelm us as we step into the world of life arising beneath of all. We will be astounded by the complete absence of wearing masks, of putting on a show to impress others falsely. It will seem, at first, a most unusual place!
And it is a world where we hear no one saying to another – “Step away from your fake ‘struggle against sin’ and into all the fulness of God” – for all will know only the Father.
Christian Community. But at the center of this universe of life is the Church, millions of Spirit-filled believers in Jesus, no longer looking for death to take them to see the One who already fills them with His glory. And out from her life together in every local place there flows the river of the knowledge of God into the knowing of all.
Christian Community IS the highway prepared for God, our life together as the Church.
You cannot “get there” without “getting there.” Our destiny is the Church, the temple and body of God, that family of humans in every local place living life together, loving one another with a pure heart fervently, showing Father as He IS to all.
Loving One Another. And what is the one mechanism that makes this all happen. – Our faith – that is, the faith of the Son of God now our only life. We enclothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus by our confidence that He already enclothes us. In just the same way, we enclothe our interactions together with FATHER by our confidence that God is already all our connections together; that is, God IS Love.
Our faith IS the “return” of Jesus, the unveiling of His glory. Our faith together IS the Doorway and the Path through which God enters His creation by knowledge at every point forever.
The highway prepared for God into a World of LIFE is our commitment to the full completion of Jesus, that is, to our loving one another as Jesus actively loves us, nothing more and nothing less.