16. Honor Dispels Dishonor
© Daniel Yordy – 2020
| Honor: The full embracing of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus as absolute and profound, as all-encompassing, unlimited, and finished; the expression of standing firm upon that Atonement as the ONLY place our steps can walk. | Dishonor: The effort to place a measurement upon the Atonement of the Lord Jesus, exercised in order to maintain one’s sense of aggrieved superiority and its consequent license to treat others with contempt; the bringing of reproach upon the Atonement in order to maintain a sensation or outward appearance of control over others deemed inferior. |
This is the door of completion (or measurement); that is, Door 3 is Completion.
And this is why God placed the most important verse in the Bible as the ruling verse.
Those whom He has called and justified, He has already –.
Two views or causes of completion – a completion that we are just like Jesus now caused by an absolute atonement – or – back then, up there, someday, a completion we cannot know in the flesh because the atonement is so small and limited.
Is the Atonement a declaration of lack regarding us, as Nicene Christianity teaches? Or is it a declaration of completion?
The Door of Completion closed is dishonor, that is, a tiny and limited atonement; but the Door of Completion flung wide open is Honor, counting the sacrifice of Jesus as total, profound, absolute, and finished.
What does that Door of Completion wide open to God mean in our lives? And what is God free to be inside of and through us as He enters as that Door?
Think about the meaning of unfinished and incomplete. In some ways this is the most powerful doctrine in Nicene Christianity. You see, the declaration to self and to other Christians that “you are fallen short,” is not a definition of the Christian, but a definition of Christ in His Atonement. “Sorry, Jesus, but Your sacrifice has fallen short of my requirements.”
When someone looks at another Christian and thinks, “You are unfinished; you are incomplete; you are not yet the image of God,” this one is lying to themselves about who and what they are judging. In reality, they ARE judging the Atonement of the Lord Jesus, that it is unfinished and incomplete; that it has not done what God claims.
I don’t know that there is any greater dishonor created beings would be capable of expressing.
Then think about the meaning of finished and complete, as in – You ARE complete inside of Christ (Colossians 2:10). Now, the word translated “complete,” here, is not “telos,” typically translated “perfect.” It is “pleroo,” that is, filled to full measure.
When Augustine set the standard for all Christianity of drawing near, but refusing to believe, he based his claim that he could NOT be filled (pleroo - complete) with all the fullness of God now, because, to his eyes, he was still evil, that is, he believed he lived by his own source of wrongness. He made this determination by his view of his outward appearance; it did not appear to him that he could be without consciousness of sins.
But Augustine was 100% mistaken in his judgment. He was not judging himself falsely; rather, he was judging the Atonement of Christ falsely.
And so, to be complete inside of Christ means to be filled to the brim and overflowing with all that the Atonement is and means – absolute, finished and complete, and all-inclusive. There is no greater honor that could be given by any created being to God than to declare the absolute completion of the Atonement. This is the meaning of honor.
We declare this absolute completion towards ourselves, of course, but the greater honor is that we declare this absolute completion towards all who belong to Jesus, especially when their outward appearance remains offensive to us. It is in doing so that we express what it means to be like Jesus.
Defining the Open Door:
Virtue #3: The proof of Christ through me, the knowing that Jesus completed all in order to restore each created being back into full connection with God through His one UNLIMITED sacrifice for sins. The utter certainty that, regardless of any outward appearance, all things are brand new and all things are now out from God. This enlargement of the Atonement in our eyes and in all our definitions grows and grows until it swallows up into itself, in our knowing, all that exists, yet even that growth of knowing the meaning of the Atonement will increase forever.
Virtue # 3: One unlimited sacrifice for sins – how I define all things that exist.
Yet this Door immediately becomes something far greater, something we had not known before we embraced an infinite Atonement. You see, in that definition is “sacrifice for missing the target.” We now understand that to mean “disconnection from God.” And thus we know Jesus as the opposite, as our ever-hitting-of-the-target, Jesus as our always-connection with the Father.
This Door of Completion, then, allows us to consider, for the first time, Father with us, that we live utterly inside of all that is God and that God our Father fills us full with all of Himself in Person. This is really what it means to be “complete inside of Christ.”
God-in for Us:
The first thing the words “Speak what God says you are,” the very moment I heard them, reached into my knowledge of God and His word to grab hold of, that first thing I grabbed was the core of the Covenant – that my completion is to be just like the Lord Jesus Christ. For that reason, I wrote every confession of faith in The Jesus Secret I out from the hope that I, in my finished state before God, am just like the Lord Jesus and that right now I call that completion to be true, even though I see none of it outwardly.
Why was I free to grab the core of our Covenant with God as my definition of completion? Because I had long since accepted the absoluteness of the Atonement. Nonetheless, I did not yet know it, not really.
But I knew with all certainty that an absolute Atonement was the reason why I could dare all the accusation through months in order to keep tight hold of my new-found union with Christ, Jesus, now living as me. No matter how loudly the voices against me screamed, I held the Atonement of my Savior as greater. The thing is, those who would speak against Christ my life now have no idea how puny and ridiculous their words are to me. They are dishonoring the Jesus who carries them; they cannot dishonor me.
And so I wrote such letters as “The Profundity of the Atonement” and “It Is Sufficient,” and I filled all my letters with an application of that Atonement to our lives. Nonetheless, it was not until I opened the Door to a Father who carries me in all things, that the Lord Jesus was able to introduce me truly to a God who filled me full with all of Himself. I had spoken those words, of course, but only now could I begin to know them as my life.
And how could I know a God who carries me? I knew such a God the very moment my eyes opened to the meaning of a Man on His face in the dirt under a cross He could not carry. It was in that moment that the Sacrifice of Jesus left forever the realm of “something done for me” and became, as it is, the very revelation of God, the one time and place that our Father is showing Himself as He IS – for real.
Defining the Door Closed
Keeping the Door of Completion closed against God is the single most terrible work of Nicene theology, for it is a “spitting upon” the meaning of Jesus’ Sacrifice. In fact, the words hurled against us for the audacity to believe that we are just like the Lord Jesus, one with Him, are the very same type of words hurled against Jesus as He hung upon the cross.
Door 3 closed is a taking of contempt to its deepest core and expression. It is dishonor, even betrayal. Limiting the Atonement is the “son of perdition,” the betrayer of Jesus.
Door 3 closed is the personal declaration and response to the Salvation of God, the definition of Christ in His Atonement. “Jesus, although I image you as “God the Son,” still, your sacrifice falls woefully short of my requirements. Jesus, I accuse you of not making me ‘better.’”
But then, keeping the Door of Completion slammed shut in the face of the Father, allows the individual to see all others as woefully incomplete and inadequate as well. – “You, congregation, have fallen short of MY ‘godly’ requirements.”
Keeping God Out
This is quite something, for of truth, we are looking, here, at the depths of “Christian depravity.” The Door of Completion slammed shut in God’s face is the harshest accusation ever spoken against God. “God – You have sinned against me; You have fallen short of me. You may have shot Your best arrow, the walk of Jesus through the Atonement, but Your arrow fell far short of my mark. I expected better of You!”
Keeping God out as Door 3, then, is the trade made by Christian thinking, trading Jesus now for death to come as the meaning and goal of “salvation.” “Let’s all go to heaven after we die, for that is the only way God can make us into the superior beings as we require of Him.”
We are not yet bringing in Death, however, for that is a closed Door 4, the Door of Source, the Door of from whence we come. Yet the Door of Death slammed in God’s face can happen only as the Door of Completion is first kept closed against God.
The most effective way, then, to keep Door 3 closed is by calling the Sacrifice of Jesus to be a “limited atonement,” that is, the L in the Calvinist “TULIP.” “Oh yes, oh yes, the Sacrifice of Jesus did a little bit, most certainly. But you can see so very clearly, loser, that it did only a little bit for you. Now, its up to you to do the rest.”
A limited Atonement was not known in the first two hundred years of the early church. Hades to them was just a time of waiting inside of loss and ruin until the seasons of God were complete. It was the Romans, then, who brought their favorite pagan doctrine, that God fries His enemies in hellfire forever into the picture. But such an idea cannot enter except by the Atonement already dishonored.
Indeed, it was Jerome, a man not born-again, who placed the fires of hell as depicted by the pagan Virgil, upon our New Testament, partly because it sounded poetic, but mostly because he despised Christians, that is, Christ.
The False Call
What, then, is the “God” who is called falsely through an otherwise closed Door 1 into the knowledge of Christians?
Calling God in falsely through a closed Door 3 is every element of the Nicene definitions of “redemption.” Yet all of those definitions are nothing more than a smokescreen that hides the true purpose of calling a “God” through this closed and locked door.
What is actually eliminated is any thought of the existence of an organic and personal connection between God’s Person and our persons. It is Door 3 closed, then, that blocks out from the Christian mind, as they are reading their Bibles, any seeing of the incredibly large number of times it says “we in Jesus and Jesus in us,” or even further, “we in God and God in us.”
It is staggering to realize that those hundreds of clear statements all through the New Testament are simply not seen or recognized or known. People read them over and over, and they DO NOT KNOW what they are reading. They do not know because they have defined the Sacrifice of Jesus as “not enough.”
A “God” through the closed Door of Completion is a “God” who requires penance, but then is never ever satisfied, not until we are dead.
The True Call
Let’s spend a bit of time on the true call, then, before we compare it with the false. In fact, let’s bring in our diagram of John 14:20 to understand the true call.
Salvation is God with us as part of our persons connected utterly together by the Lord Jesus Christ. Redemption is the rapid introduction to us of this reality by our Savior, moving us through the process depicted by the Tabernacle into the full knowing of God with us. Redemption is entirely for us, to persuade us of what is already true. Everything Jesus did was so that we might believe that God is in us and we are in God.
This diagram, then, depicts you and me in our makeup and being. The role that Jesus plays is to be the full connection between you and me as humans and Father as God. This is the role He will serve forever. Here is the one time that hitting the target is used in the New Testament. – Wherefore also, He is able to save into all salvation [that is, one with the Father as depicted by John 14:20] those approaching God through Him, always living into hitting the mark [that is, full connection with God] for them, for their sakes (Hebrews 7:25).
The true call of Door 3, then, is to call our brothers and sisters in Christ by a completed redemption, to see them as finished and complete. This true call is not “positive thinking” or a mental mind-game, for it is based utterly and only upon a Man having already carried each one all the way through death and into life, stumbling every step of the way. – It is finished.
The true call of Door 3 is the hope of the Jesus Secret.
Comparing False with True
And so calling God in falsely through Door 3 begins first with a massive redefinition of the “Christian” from one filled with Christ Jesus, to a fleshy human, still under the weight of sins. From this limitation comes the exaltation of the flesh as closer and more powerful than Jesus.
Then it goes on to limiting the Atonement to a small number of selected people and removing the Atonement from everything else. People read 1 John 2:2 – the propitiation, not for our sins only, but for the sins of the entire cosmos – and tell themselves, “But we know that’s not really true.” Except they don’t say it quite like that but in this way – “You don’t really believe that?” – and their tone is in that of a hostile challenge.
Finally, Door 3 ends with a redefinition of the Atonement as an “appeasement” of a hostile “God,” based upon the requirements of heathen deities and not on the Scripture, and making redemption to be only a temporary and weak absolution of sins. This false call, then, allows for sin to continue as our primary “connection” with God. “Remember Me” becomes a “continual remembrance of sins.”
Instead of the real “formula” for our equation – GodChristMan, we have GodSinMan.
Two types of calling God-IN. You are still in your sins; you prove yourself to God by struggling against sin; you are in-part until you die – or – the Atonement means you ARE just like Jesus now; you walk with no consciousness of sins; your task is to know Father and Jesus Sent.
To a false prophet of Door 3, Christians are fleshy and sinful and in dire need of being contained and directed by “more anointed” people “above” them. We see this in the Roman definitions of the Eucharist as the bread and wine being holy, but the lowly Christian as being unworthy. Protestants change the form, but not the meaning.
To a true prophet of Door 3, every believer in Jesus is complete inside an absolute Atonement, just like Jesus as their completed state. And thus the true prophet calls them to be so.
To a false prophet of Door 3, Christians are to be reprimanded for their continued sinfulness. They are to be called out by their sins and constantly warned of the fate of all non-believers. This powerful whip, sometimes called “penance,” keeps everyone in line with the hierarchy of “ministry.”
To a true prophet of Door 3, there is no consciousness of sins. The true prophet calls each believer by a completed Atonement and sets before them the true calling of the gospel, that we are to set all creation free, leading each one into giving thanks for every moment of their lives, each in their season. To a true prophet of Door 3, the utter removal of sin and death allows the reality of a God who is meek and lowly of heart to show Himself through us as we are.
To a false prophet of Door 3, sin is always disconnecting the Christian from God and the redemption of Jesus does little more than keep an angry God at bay. To all of them, from the blank, lifeless face of the Orthodox priest to the fiery, spit-flinging deeper-truth preacher, sin is the ISSUE and Jesus is far away.
To a true prophet of Door 3, Christ Jesus inside of us is everything, always connecting us with God, regardless of whatever. Inside this calling of God into the human experience, the true prophet sets before God’s people the truth that every particle of their ongoing lives is about something entirely different, about God sharing all things with them.
The True Dispels the False
How, then, does the true calling of God into ourselves through Door 3 dispel as a meaningless vapor the unbelief of a limited atonement?
I think that the key stance of our victory over all dishonoring of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ is to savagely ignore all utterances found inside the definitions of a “limited atonement,” to give those arguments and ideas no heed at all.
You see, HONOR, when it stands firm in itself, by its unturned face, forces dishonor to shrink away into the less-than-nothingness that it is.
Joel Osteen was an example to me of this important stance. Joel teaches as if the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ is complete, and that we now have a continuous relationship with God that does not regard sin as having any place. Inside this assumption, the Blood and Cross of Christ, and the honor of both Jesus and Father are continually spoken in the Lakewood services.
Nonetheless, the false prophets of Door 3 loved to stand outside the entry to the church and wave their placards of Joel with devil’s horns driving all of us sinners into hellfire, shouting at us on bullhorns, as we passed by with our children into an anointed praise service of honoring the Blood of Jesus, that we were all on our way to eternal damnation.
Joel taught us a number of times on how he responded to such accusation, and that is, to pay it NO mind, as if it does not exist. This was not a quality that I possessed, and so each time Joel shared these things, I pressed them to my heart as is my wont, and asked God to make them real as part of my life inside of Jesus. I am fully confident that when the time comes for me to stand openly against such hurled abuse, my face, both inside and out, will be gentle and true, as if the false does not exist.
Let us Pray
“Lord Jesus, I place myself before You in complete silence, awestruck inside the absolute finality and the infinite breadth of the Atonement that You are inside of and towards all created beings, each one in their season. Lord Jesus, I place You as my utter connection with God, for You always live to make me part of my Father and He part of me. I allow You, Lord Jesus, to connect me with God All-Carrying as One who shares everything of life together with me.
“Out from Your UNLIMITED Sacrifice, then, Lord Jesus, I see all my brethren in Christ as already complete, already just like You in all ways, already the revelation of Father through them. I am aware that such completion does not appear outwardly, but I give outward appearance no heed, for I know that You are Faithful and True, that You are Savior and all-Salvation.”
The Meaning of God-Through
What does this wide open Door 3, the Door of Completion, mean, then, for God’s entrance into His creation through and then beyond us.
We are stunned with the powerful and overwhelming meaning of calling God through the Door of Completion. To see ourselves as complete is the Jesus Secret I, the mystery of Colossians, that is, Christ made known in me. But to see all other Christians as complete, and to call them to be so, in ongoing personal relationships, that is the Jesus Secret II, the mystery of Ephesians, that is, God made known through us.
It is our bedrock faith in the Atonement of Christ – upon firm we stand, that allows us to grapple with what it means to turn around inside the Holiest and to be, as we are, Father with us. And even more than that, as we turn around for ourselves, knowing that we are COMPLETE and FILLED FULL, knowing that Father’s Purpose is the whole meaning of our lives, we are able to know the True Source from whence we have always come, and all creation as well.
And even more than that, we are able to look upon a creation still groaning in the agony of bondage, still refusing God in every way, and see them and call them all to be already complete. As we call God into an already completed creation of life, then, we have no problem with the mess of the process or the lack of knowing that all things are sustained every moment by the good-speaking of Jesus.
The quality of not imputing sin, even in the midst of dealing with the fallout of continued offense, but imputing only the completion of Christ, that all things are reconciled to God, is the single most important quality of a true prophet of God.