14.1 Vanity
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Let’s get our picture clear. Take a moment to look around the room in which you are sitting. Consider slowly what you see.
Then consider God in this manner. God is thick, thicker than water, but not as thick as syrup. Living blood is close to the thickness I want you to picture a God in whom we freely move. This thick God FILLS the room in which you sit and everything in it. He FILLS all the spaces in between all the atoms. And at every tiny point that is God, that point is ALL of God. And Personal and Father, real and Holy. Inside of this thick God, all the tiny atomic particles that make up your world in that room are so small they hardly exist. The bonds between your atoms have no meaning to God, for they have no effect on Him.
An Ecosystem God
Now, let’s get a clearer picture of what we mean by “God.” And we are thinking of God as Kingdom more than God in Essence. This Kingdom God, this outward-oriented, ecosystem God, is FIRE; you are swimming IN a Lake of Fire. And when we say fire, we think of electricity, the constant hum of powerful electrical current, not as momentary zaps, but as constant discharge, like in an electric motor. Except this “electrical discharge” is also a Person, the Holy Spirit, carrying Word, also a Person, out from God everywhere God is. And this Word, the coded Message inside the flow of Fire that is God becoming known, is causing everything in you and in that room to exist every moment by POWER and by LIFE.
A Lake of Fire
But our picture of this thick God, this Lake of Fire, is not complete. For, you see, the strongest and most important image God gives us of Himself is the beating of a Heart. And this Beating Heart Lake of Fire who causes you to exist inside Himself every moment sees you as more important than Himself. – And He tells you to call Him, “Father.”
The primary nature of this Beating Heart Lake of Fire Living Blood in which you move about is Abundance, the overflow of all things good, of unlimited plenty, a God who is, in all ways and in every direction, far more than we need. And inside this BATH of Living Fire Blood there is no thought of evil, but only the most tender regard and the deepest respect.
No God at All
Now, look around the room again. This time, erase all thought of God – ALL. Picture yourself in your worst whining, not-enough-not-enough-not-enough mood, the condition of heart and mind and soul of which you are the most ashamed. I’m finding it hard to sink back into such a mood, but I do remember it quite well – poor me, poor me, poor me.
Look around now. There is no God. All that exists is you, the walls and objects in the room, this foolish letter on your computer screen, and your whining self at your very worst. Look – where is God? Don’t be ridiculous! All that Blood/Fire/Love stuff was just the imagination of a silly man whose fantasy is so strong he once “walked with Bilbo Baggins.”
Defining Vanity
Rather than defining vanity, I have taken you into its heart. Now let me define vanity. Vanity is not knowing God. Not knowing God is vanity.
But as essential as that working definition is to us, we must comprehend far more the extent, the nature, the depths, the awfulness, the imbecility, the breadth, the endurance, of this most incomprehensible condition, a creation existing IN the overwhelming reality of God without knowing God AT ALL. We are creatures without sight, without hearing, without smell, without touch, and without taste wandering around in thick and hyper-ABUNDANCE crying, crying, “Not enough, not enough, not enough.” – This is vanity.
How Much Is Enough?
All “Christian” theology, not coming out from the ten most important verses in the Bible, is the description of a God who is NOT enough, who looks always at us as NOT enough.
As I consider, now, the teaching of the move fellowship of which I was a part, I see that our belief system became a God whose salvation is never enough for us, demanding of us an obedience that is never enough for Him. – Vanity. How many consistent and full-hearted acts of obedience over how many days of life must we perform before God decides that our obedience is “enough for Him,” so that He will then reveal Christ through us? Is 3,427 consistent acts of obedience with no in-between dis-obedience ENOUGH FOR GOD???
That’s not just vanity; it’s evil, putting the serpent upon Father.
Vanity Becomes Idolatry
BUT!!!! – If God is REAL, then why does He not make Himself known? Because God cannot. If God were to become “seen,” He would now be formed and men and angels would fall on their faces and “worship” that formed image, an idol, seeking to control it.
Vanity, then, becomes idolatry. Vanity is always becoming idolatry, placing anything formed into the “absence” of God. And the purpose of all idolatry is to manipulate and control, to make use of this “image” as a means of self-gain, of winning an advantage over other people. The only “god” who would prove himself in that outward way is the serpent, the highest of all “transcendent” beings.
An Intriguing Man
God is not “transcendent.” God is beneath your feet. Look down, the streets upon which you walk are Father.
But let’s look more closely at how idolatry is so quick to enter the picture even with a visible Jesus. To His disciples, Jesus was a man, just like themselves. He was only a few years older than most of them; some of them would have known Him from His youth. He was just another fellow down the street. Yes, He was intriguing, comforting, and amazing, and they were drawn to something REAL inside of Him. Something Holy flitted around their consciousness as His words entered into them – but He was just a man.
Drawn out of Idolatry
Then Jesus rose from the dead. Men do not rise from the dead.
Consider Thomas. Thomas was the one who said, “Let us also go (up to Jerusalem), that we may die with Him.” He was the one who asked, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” But when Jesus first appeared to His disciples, Thomas was not there. The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” So he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).
You see, Jesus was deliberately drawing Thomas out of idolatry.
An External “God”
Then He said to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.” And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:27-29).
Earlier, when someone tried to call Jesus “good,” Jesus had rebuked them, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God” (Mark 10:18). Thomas was speaking out from human idolatry, turning a formed image he could touch and see into “God.”
Helping Us to Know God
Jesus rebuked Thomas in a different manner than His previous rebuke. You see, Jesus was drawing Thomas into the revelation of Himself – the revelation of Father THROUGH faith. Just a few days before this, Jesus had said, It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you (John 16:7).
Now, IMMEDIATELY place this word into our picture of God, a BATH of Living Fire Blood in which we live and who is always generating us by this Spirit Word, All Here Now. When Jesus said, “The Helper will come to you,” He meant into our knowledge, not “from far away.”
A “Jesus” Idolatry
Why do Christians cry for and long to see a “Jesus” outside of their own hearts? – Idolatry. They will not believe the revelation of Father through them; they just want something they can “fall down and worship,” that is, manipulate for their own self-gain over others.
Next time you go into your bathroom in the middle of the night, turn on the light and look in the mirror. Ask yourself this question, “Who, in their right mind, would worship this image as ‘God’?” Then answer yourself – “Not one single solitary soul, thank God.” God reveals Himself ONLY through a many-membered body of silly, foolish, bumbling human beings like you and me.
God Is Not Known
The end of this session is halfway through the content chapters of this course. We are come to the heart of this present age.
God is not known. After two thousand years of an in-part church, God seems to be less known today than ever before.
God is not known. Christians do NOT know God. This absolute dilemma is the heart, the turning point, of all that is Kingdom arising now through us. God would be known. Jesus spoke the Kingdom of God into existence with these words: That they may KNOW You, the only true God…
A Strange Doctrine
I want to refer back to the statement I found in the Amazon reviews, by “Pshdsa.” “She (Madame Guyon) does not believe in the transcendent God… but … it was this strange doctrine of finding God inside us…” This “strange doctrine” of being filled with all the fullness of God. This “strange doctrine of “I (Jesus) in them (that’s us), and You (Father God) in Me” (John 17:23a).
“Does not believe in the transcendent God.” Let’s consider this word “transcendent.” What does it mean in the minds of most? We are getting right at vanity, the very womb of the Kingdom – a God known by all as Himself.
What Is Exalted?
Transcend (ence) (cy) (Webster’s 1926): 1. To ascend, to mount up. 2. To rise above or beyond; to overpass. In theology – the doctrine that God is prior to creation in his essential nature, that he is exalted above it, and that he has real being apart from it; – opposed to immanence.
Now, God is certainly real in Himself, without reference to the electrical charges swirling around inside of Him that constitute creation. But those electrical charges that are you and me have no reality except inside of God. More than that, if God is “above,” what is it, about God, that is exalted? That is, WHAT is exalted.
But here is a mental deficiency in human reasoning. Why can’t God be real in Himself AND immanent at the same time?
A Lowly Heart
Transcend means the same as to ascend, that is, to rise up, to ascend from a “lower” state to a “higher” state, to be superior and exalted above all.
Now, all this is true – but what is superior? You see, as we learned in the lesson “God Is Great” in Symmorphy II: Essence, God’s superiority is a lowly heart. To God, the highest ruling quality in the universe is thinking of others more highly than thinking of one’s self. True ascendancy is the qualities of God operating in His creation as we described in the lesson “Father as Quality.” Always taking the lowest place is, to God, the highest expression of exaltation.
Arrogance
Sadly, none of this is what our brethren mean when they say, “transcendent.” What they really mean is “a God who thinks more highly of Himself than He does of anyone else.” The central quality of their “transcendent,” that is, faraway, God, is arrogance.
To understand how God became arrogant, we must have a clearer understanding of the vanity of not knowing God. Vanity is also a momentary picture, a single photograph. Vanity never remains as “not-knowing God.” Not-knowing-God always becomes knowing something that ain’t so. Not-knowing God always becomes knowing a “god” who looks like the highest of the angels, that is, idolatry.
Two Lenses
There are two lenses through which Christians look at God. In both cases, it is the same God, yet a very different sort of God according to which of the two lenses, only two, through which we look.
The more familiar lens is to look at God through the heavenly serpent: For you have said in your heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven… I will be like the Most High’ (Isaiah 14:13-14). Those who look at God through the serpent, the one who established himself from the beginning as the “image and likeness” of God to humans enslaved by the tree of knowledge, find many Bible verses to support their definitions of God. But always, the center of this “God” they find is the superiority of arrogance.
The Less Used Lens
The less used lens is to look at God through the human Jesus. Those who look at God through the eyes of a human Jesus, a Man stumbling under a cross He cannot carry, find many Bible verses to support their descriptions of God. Those verses speak of a God who pours Himself out, who carries the hurting, who fills us full with all of Himself, who delights in being known as He is by all.
Yet the two sets of verses and how they are read, seeing through the serpent or seeing through the human Jesus, would appear to a disinterested person as two entirely different “Bibles.”
It would be better not to know God at all, than to see a “God” through the image presented by the highest of heavenly angels.