7.2 Driving Jesus Away
© 2019 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
You know that LIFE is one thing only, knowing the Father through knowing Jesus Sent into our hearts. And inside of this continuously energeoing LIFE, you rest utterly in the absolute redemption of Christ and in the love of your Father directing your every step.
You know that Jesus is your only life and that the weak and mortal body in which you live is His flesh entirely, flesh He shares with you as one form together. You know that the One who fills your heart with His glory is fully responsible for all that you are, leading you always in triumph, carrying you into the knowledge of God, regardless of your own stumbling weakness. And the proof of what you know is your confidence that Jesus IS what God speaks.
A Different “Christ.” More than that, you know that everyone who belongs to Jesus, small or great, down through the centuries, lived their entire lives embedded utterly inside of all goodness and salvation, though they did not know it in their minds. And the incredible thing is that, in spite of all the mental ideas taking the place of Jesus in the mind, every single one who belonged to Him knew also the Jesus of their hearts.
Our question in this chapter is this. How, then, did the Jesus of their hearts become replaced with a mental image of a different “Christ,” not only in the Christian mind, but also in all Christian theology, such that generations of believers imagine that they must know a mental image of “Christ” taking the place of the real Jesus of their hearts?
Desecrating the Cross. To answer that question, we must start with the brutal Roman dictator named Constantine, a man who murdered his way to power and succeeded because he saw in popular Christianity a means for domination over all.
The early church had seen the resurrection of the Lord Jesus as the emblem and center of their faith. The cross was that which had set them free from sin, but the resurrected life of Christ was their salvation. Constantine took the cross and made it the emblem of his rule, his battle signa by which he inspired men to hack other men’s flesh to pieces. In this manner the crucifix replaced the resurrection as the emblem of Christianity, the exaltation of death without fruit.
A Death that Never Ends. The crucifix cannot be Christ, for Jesus rose from the dead never to die again. Christ Jesus is LIFE. The death of the crucifix, however, is a death that never ends, a death that never causes anyone to enter into life. Yet this false image of the death of Christ requires all humans to weep before it in condemnation of themselves.
You see how effective the serpent’s response to every word God speaks really is? God teaches us to say, “I am crucified with Christ, yet I live.” The serpent says, “You should be crucified with Christ – why are you not on the cross?” An ineffective cross, requiring the believer to die and die and die, is the most effective means of mind control ever devised.
What Is Christ? But turning the cross into an instrument of satanic mind control in the church – “Die, brother, die” – is not enough, something must be done about Jesus as well. Jesus must be driven as far away from the Christian as mental images can attain. Jesus must become permanently SUPERIOR in all Christian theology.
You see, after using the cross to kill all of his opponents, Constantine released all the Christian leaders from the prisons and made Christianity the religion of his empire. Immediately, Christians went back to arguing with one another, especially over the question of – What is Christ? Among Christians then, as now, there was every kind of sect and practice, from Holy Ghost filled to strictly legalistic.
Forced Unity. Jesus’ question of each one of us personally is – Who do you say that I am? And that question requires an answer of intimacy, of knowing Him as He knows us. Yet the question – What is Christ? – requires only an intellectual response, a definition everyone can hold in their minds, and that can be enforced by the point of the sword.
In order to gain his forced unity, then, Constantine ordered the bishops and theologians of the Church from all across the empire to gather in the town of Nicaea, near Ephesus. Sadly, one-sixth of them came. And in the gathering of the Nicene Counsel under the eye of a psychopathic dictator who saw himself as “Apollo the sun god,” a definition of Christ was hammered out, a faraway, far above “God the Son.”
A Man in the Form of God. You know that Christ Jesus can be known personally and for real only by heart. You know Him as the One who fills your heart with all that He is. You know Him as your life. And in knowing Christ by heart, you have learned to refuse all mental images and all intellectual definitions; rather, you receive Him into yourself only through what God says.
There is one God, the Father, and one Mediator between God and man, the Man, Christ Jesus. – This Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down in the right hand of God (1 Timothy & Hebrews 10).
Yet you also know that this Man, in whose image you are made as the revelation of Father, also exists in the form of a life-giving Spirit, that is All-here-now and Personal in each one who knows Him, as God also says.
Preferring Superiority. Thus you know that God fills humans with all of His fulness, and when God reveals Himself as He is to His creation, He appears first as a Man, another Person, filled with His Person, and then, through Him, God appears as His Church. As Jesus said, “Do you not believe that I am inside of the Father and the Father is inside of Me?” Then Jesus also said, “Know that I am inside of the Father and you inside of Me and I inside of you.”
No one in that council knew or wanted to know Paul’s gospel of Christ in us, Christ our only life. They wanted a deity whom they could exalt, a far superior Being whom they could pretend to “worship,” and thus could maintain their place of control over God’s people. And so they all turned to Constantine, the man who had freed them from prison and made them the leaders of the world.
A “God” in their Midst. Here is what one of them wrote about this “god” walking through their midst. Constantine “proceeded through the midst of the assembly, like some heavenly messenger of God, clothed in raiment which glittered as it were with rays of light, reflecting the glowing radiance of a purple robe, and adorned with the brilliant splendor of gold and precious stones.”
And so Apollo the sun god became “God the Son,” the spitting image of the highest of heavenly beings, now the lens and image through which we must “see” God. Constantine got from the Nicene Council what he needed, a single definition of a mental image that could be called “Christ Jesus,” which he then used to unify his dictatorship.
Unthankfulness. Understand this. It’s not that these capable people in Christianity read the words of the serpent and decided to implement those words into Christian thinking. Rather, the same issues confronting Adam also confront every human, and especially every Christian since.
And so men, continuing unthankful for their lowly estate, lust after a “heavenly” superiority and domination over others. Constantine provided them with that very image. But – they worshipped “Christ.” If their desire was for heavenly superiority, then this “Christ” they worshipped must also be an image of superiority far above the common masses of humanity. – Humans as “we are” cannot be the image and revelation of God.
Exalting the Flesh. You would be right to wonder if there were not something deeper working in these men besides the outward show. How can you overturn these words? – By this we KNOW love, because He laid down His life for us – a Man laying doing His life for His friends.
Long before the gathering of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, the whisperings of the accuser in the hearts of every Christian had established the firm belief that “I am a sinner on my own. I have a sinful human nature. I am my own source, my own god.” Long before Constantine, the flesh of the Christian had been torn away from Christ in Christian thinking, placed upon a pedestal, and exalted as “the great enemy.”
Breaking the Covenant. Christians refused point-blank to place their sins and their sinfulness into the Lord Jesus, into His death and into His life, now living as them. You know that it is either Christ our life or the flesh our life. Never can there be a mixture of the two. By choosing “flesh my life,” Christians everywhere, by necessity, were already driving Jesus far away.
The Nicene Counsel gave them the theological reasoning that allowed Christian thinking to maintain the fantasy of sinful flesh as our life, that is, UNTHANKFULNESS married to ACCUSATION by turning Christ into “God the Son,” a mental image and definition that broke the New Covenant. If Jesus is the image most hold in their minds, then the Covenant, that we humans, in our weakness, are just like Him, cannot be true.
Accusing God. But another factor must also have already come into the definitions in the minds of all those church leaders gathered in Nicaea. “God” must also have become arrogant, one who thinks more highly of himself than of anyone else. We know for a fact that the dominant argument by this time in the great fall into Roman darkness had fully placed upon God the knowledge of good and evil.
And the terrible thing is, this is one accusation against our Father that these men did get by reading the words of the serpent in Genesis 3 and believing those words. The foundation of Nicene theology is the fundamental belief that the serpent spoke the truth in the garden, that “God” knows evil and has split the universe between good and evil forever. And that any human who believes he or she is the revelation of this “God” through weakness must be a blasphemer.
“No Weakness for Us.” Here is the core argument, the answer of “Christian theology” to Jesus’ pressing question – Who do you say that I am?
In their hatred for human weakness as the image and revelation of God, before they gave their definitions of “God” known as “the Nicene Creed,” the leaders under Constantine made this absolute declaration. – “The Son, just like the Father, was beyond any form of weakness.” – “Jesus” could not have sinned nor did He know weakness. “God” despises human weakness. “God” despises you. – A Man stumbling under a cross He cannot carry CANNOT be what God looks like, Father revealing Himself to all – especially when we have this wonderful image of “God the Son” before us in the form of Constantine.
Ruling Assumptions. Here, then, are the foundational assumptions beneath of all argument, one way or another, through the Nicene Council.
- 1. God is completely separate, distant, and cold, a judge with no heart of purpose.
- 2. Jesus is far away from us on this earth, leaving us to figure out how we are to be “saved.”
- 3. The ideas a person holds in his mind are the only means to salvation. Wrong ideas take you out; “right” ideas take you in.
- 4. Christians are flesh and must be controlled by a sanctioned elite if they are to be “saved.”
- 5. Man in weakness is not the image of God. If “God” should appear – in the sky, He would look like the image of Constantine.
- 6. Jesus’ walk of stumbling was not showing us God’s heart, but rather, the wickedness of man against God.
Our next question is – How did the rebellion of Adam and the accusations of the serpent become the fabric and argument of all “orthodox” theology from then until now? This would be the work of several men in this darkest of centuries from the year AD 311, when Constantine turned the cross into a weapon for hacking men’s flesh, until AD 410, when Augustine’s City of God was published, his final text of several that would rule the minds and thinking of all Christians since.
These are some dark days indeed, and we must know them a bit further.