9.3 God's People
© 2019 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Let me give you my rendition of something profound C.S. Lewis wrote in his introduction to The Great Divorce. – Everyone who comes to know Christ as their life will look back at their entire life and see every moment as part of Christ, a necessary step on their path into the knowledge of God. And everyone who remains in unthankfulness will look back at their entire life and see all of it as offense and loss. – The only difference between the two is in their seeing.
That is part of the reason why we see every single person who calls upon Jesus in some way, including the preachers who oppose Him, as our fellow believers in Jesus, Christ living now as them, regardless.
Value Beyond Measure. God’s people are precious to Him and to us and of value and weight beyond measure. When we look at anyone who belongs to Jesus, we are never looking down; we are always looking up, for it is the resurrected Christ of God, the King of all, who is the One we see as them.
In this lesson, we want to look at two more things that are part of the serpent’s victory over the Church before we look again, in the next chapter, at the thinking in the minds of Brother A and Sister B, that series of mental responses that prevents them from knowing the joy and glory of their Salvation. The first thing to look at is the sadness of Eve, translated now as all Christian people, a Bride who should be able to trust the preachers. And the second is the translators of the Bible who deliberately and subtly alter the words to fit their Nicene and Calvinist theology.
Eve Was Deceived. Paul said that “Eve was deceived” (1 Timothy 2:14). Eve had every reason to believe that this mighty being, anointed of the Spirit of God, in a world of innocence and joy, should have been speaking the truth of God to her.
Because the serpent presented the word of God to Eve as something to talk about, Eve engaged with him regarding the word as if it is only mental ideas. The fact that his continued conversation contradicted God’s word was no different to Eve than the same thing in that large Spirit-filled congregation when the preacher contradicted God’s statement that as He is now, so are we in this world. How could lowly humans be the image and revelation of God?
Keeping Them in Death. It was the serpent who deceived Eve, but it was Adam, her husband, who killed her. In the same way, the words preached by the confidence tricksters might be the words and ideas of the serpent, but it is those human “leaders,” who should be leading God’s people into life, who are the ones confining them inside of death.
Yet when Paul mentioned to Timothy that mothers would be helped in childbearing as they place themselves inside the love of God, he was also referring back to God’s promise to the woman, that Christ would be formed inside of her, that the Salvation of God would come forth out of her belly. This is the doing of our Father, that this precious woman, millions of people who love Jesus, would bear and bring forth the very Salvation of God.
The Issue of Trust. Here is what I am saying. Regardless of any need to understand those ideas that oppose the life of Christ inside His people, we never lose sight of the absolute reality that the church IS the fullness of Christ who fills all inside of all (Ephesians 1:23).
What we are looking at, then, is the issue of trust. The Bride of Christ looks to her pastors to lead her into marriage with her Beloved. But her pastors confine her to death instead. Can they claim ignorance? No, they cannot, for they have the same Spirit and the same Bible you and I have. What they have not done is to place their faces on the ground before the Holy with their Bibles and hearts wide open and their mouths tight shut. Instead they justify themselves even when they KNOW that they are contradicting God.
Translation. It is not possible to translate the exact meaning and intent of an author’s words from one language to another or even to know the idioms and innuendos of a local speech unless you are personally immersed in that locale at that time. For that reason, translators can only try for approximation. Translators typically follow the same rules as dictionary writers, however, and that is they determine the meanings of words by how they are used in context, that is, by context clues.
Bible translators, however, do not follow those normal rules of translation, not when dealing with the Bible text. Instead, they follow Augustine’s injunction to all Christians, and that is, to have the correct Nicene definitions firmly in your mind before you open your Bible and then to impose those definitions on what you read.
Calvinism. More than Augustine, however, almost all translators of the Bible into English were disciples of John Calvin, or Calvinists.
John Calvin created a most magnificent intellectual arrangement of Bible verses and gospel truths, weaving the redemption of the gospel upon the definitions and arguments of the serpent in the garden. Calvin defined God and Christ Jesus by the serpent’s outward appearance. He rejected humans as being the image of God with utmost contempt. He limited the Atonement, even while weaving the verses of our redemption with serpent definitions. Calvin’s primary assertion, then, is that, because God “knows good and evil,” when we humans see God made visible, we will KNOW how wicked we are. – By God is the knowledge of sin!
A Profound Disquiet. For years I drank the Bible into myself through reading it from beginning to end, through writing out endless notebooks of verses and books of the Bible over and over, through sitting under much good Bible teaching. I have read the entire Bible 24 times, the New Testament 47 times, most often in the King James Version, but I read through many other versions as well.
Early in my Bible study career, the Lord spoke to me quite profoundly that I was NOT to “figure out” what the Bible meant, but only to hide it in my heart. And so I did. Yet through the years a profound disquiet began to grow inside of me, as I saw that what God actually says and what Christianity in this world teaches are NOT the same.
My Own “Translation.” Then, in order to write the Symmorphy teaching texts, and in order to know exactly what God said in what I have called “the ten most important verses in the Bible,” I began to look closely at the Greek words of the New Testament.
Again, what I began to see disturbed me even more deeply, for I saw specific instances, such as Genesis 3:22, where the translators willfully and deceitfully altered the meaning of the words in order to place Calvin’s version of the serpent’s definitions upon even the Bible itself. Finally, I tackled my own “translation” of portions of the New Testament into English, using primarily the resources found at www.biblehub.com, that is, primarily Strong’s Concordance and dictionary of Greek definitions.
Deliberate Mistranslation. Please understand, I am a rank amateur at translation with no formal training in New Testament Greek. Yet when I look at such formal training, I see men who are steeped in Calvin’s intellectual definitions and with no knowledge of the Spirit. These men do not find Jesus either as every word God speaks or as the One living inside of them BECAUSE they are not looking for any such thing.
Yet I would make this assertion, that I do not “see” in the Greek words of the New Testament something they do not see. Rather, the meanings on the page are clear, but since those meanings contradict the serpent’s definitions of a Jesus faraway, the translators deliberately change the meaning, even turning “present now” into “coming someday.”
All Must Be Biased. All translation is biased; that’s part of what it means to be human. All translation is inaccurate; that’s part of the nature of completely different languages. “Bias” means “to bend,” that is, a translator bends the meaning towards his own pre-conceived definitions.
I freely confess that I bend the translation in the direction of Paul’s gospel of Christ our life, by the good-speaking that is Jesus alive in our hearts, and by the rules of Christian thinking found in the ten most important verses in the Bible. Yet I do NOT bend the translation nearly as much as the Calvinist translators who have to contort and twist many phrases in order to fit Calvin’s theology of the serpent.
Christ Cannot Be Removed. Because we choose to receive every word in the Bible as Jesus Himself entering our hearts and being all that Father means by those words, we are not concerned with any mistranslation, for we do not trust in human mental ideas. In fact, the truth of Christ cannot ever be removed from God’s words, only hidden and obscured. Those who seek Jesus alone will find Him in their hearts even by the Calvinist translations.
Nonetheless, the altering of the meanings, meant to hide from God’s precious people the truth of Christ alive inside of them, makes the heart of our Father very sad, and our hearts as well. And the primary purpose of these translators, men of the outer court with no knowledge of an infilling Holy Spirit, is to drive Jesus as far away from His Church now as they can.
A Bewildering Mixture. And so when God’s people read their Calvinist Bibles, trusting these confidence tricksters, they find a bewildering mixture of blessing and cursing, of a gospel of faith and a gospel of human performance, of hope and discouragement, of Christ and not-Christ.
Those who seek for Jesus, find Him, yet they are also deeply troubled by the things they think God says that contradict. Those who seek for intellectual ideas find many things God does not actually say that they are then able to use to beat down those who dare to find Jesus in the Bible and in their own hearts. This dilemma is exactly as Jesus warned, the tares and the wheat growing side by side – an enemy has done this.
Life versus No-Life. Yet when the servants asked the master if they should pull out the tares, Jesus gave what seems to us a terrible answer. He said, “No. Do not pull out the tares, but let them grow side by side with the wheat.”
And think of the tares as the same as those fake fat molecules, the mistranslations seem to fit as if they are things God said, but they have no life of Christ in them. This is why we can hear any preacher and draw life from his words, even as we allow other things he says to go out the other end, as Jesus said.
Why? Why does Jesus allow such false words to exist side by side in His Church with Himself as every Word God speaks?
God Seen and Known. Alas, I am unable to answer that question. In fact, in the end, I suspect that it will be in that large bunch of false questions that need no answer, questions that simply vanish away. What I am able to do is to give God’s people hope by showing them Jesus Himself, now their only life, and by showing them a New Testament that simply sings with the revelation of Jesus Christ.
But the primary issue before us and before all creation is that God is not known. This is why we do not fault the preachers or the translators, for God is not known.
And God seen and known happens in only one way – through a family of people, God’s people, living life together loving one another with a pure heart fervently.