1. We Do Not Know

When God spoke, “Subdue,” to Adam, according to the writer of Hebrews, He placed all authority over creation, both heaven and earth, upon mankind. God’s intention was to work together with humans to turn all created things into the knowledge of God and into goodness. God’s intention was for Adam to eat of the tree of life, that is, to eat of Christ Jesus, and then, from Adam would flow the River of Life across heaven and earth bringing life, that is, the knowledge of God, to everyone.

God is not known. Nothing created can be good in itself. God created humans and put us into our place so that His knowledge could flow through us to cause all to know Him and to turn all things towards the good purposes for which each is created.

Adam hated being like God, however, and cast off the wondrous relationship of being part of the Lord Jesus and Jesus part of him. Instead, Adam preferred an image of high heavenly glory, of outward perfection, and of control over others. Out from his unthankfulness, Adam ate of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, the law, the words of God as human intellectual property and under human control. By the law, Adam could build his own world without needing Jesus to live inside His heart and to be his only life.

Nonetheless, the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable. Once having given all authority in the universe to Adam, it never enters God’s mind to remove that place from humans. Nonetheless, inside of God’s holiness, He is free to transfer that authority from Adam to the Lord Jesus and to all humans living inside of Him.

From Adam, however, instead of a River of Life flowing out from his belly to turn all created things towards life, being defined as “God seen and known,” there flowed a river of death. Sin and death flowed out from the eating of Adam, shattering both heaven and earth and catching both humans and angels in its darkness.

It is impossible for the serpent to have sinned before Adam, for Adam was the master and nothing could occur in creation apart from his authority.

The world in which you and I live, the world which we see outwardly by appearance, is a world and a universe of death. Everything in it is split apart by good versus evil. And inside this universe of death, God is not known. Instead, a hideous caricature of “God,” coming through the image of the serpent, fills the imagination of the human mind, Christian as much as unregenerate.

We are living in a fake universe, a world God never intended.

A normal creation, a universe of life, is a world we do not know.

A world coming out from the tree of life, being turned in every moment by God seen and known through us His Body towards the knowledge of God and of goodness, that is, by the River of Life flowing out from us, is a world we do not know.

Yet we are talking only about appearance, and not about the substance out from which all things come. Jesus continuously and actively sustains all things by the good words of His power being spoken into each created thing. All things exist inside of and by the Spirit of God, for there is no other place. And God fills all things with Himself, all here now, and Personal in each one.

That is substance. By appearance, however, God is not known at all.

God, by substance, is not life, per se. Jesus said that KNOWING God is life.

God is not known. We do not know God.

If we knew Jesus as He is, we would be just like Him. If we are not just like Him, then it is evident that we have zero idea who and what He is. We do not know.

Here is the Scripture that shows us this relationship between the substance and reality of everything versus the present appearance of everything. Substance is what is real and true; appearance is found only in the fake imaginations of the human mind.

We are not looking at or regarding the things being seen [by outward appearance], but we are looking at and regarding the things not being seen [the substance of God]…  And so, being inside of this tent, we groan with great pressure of travail and grief, being weighted down, not that we desire to be unclothed [lose our physical bodies] but to be clothed, that what is dying may be swallowed up, drunk down and consumed, by LIFE. The One having now prepared us, that is, having achieved and worked out already for this same thing is God, having given to us the earnest payment of the Spirit, the security of the whole… For the things being seen are temporary, but the things not being seen are age-unfolding; for we walk through faith, not through sight…

… if One has died for all, then all have died. And He died for all, that those living should no longer themselves live, but rather the One having died and having been raised again for their sakes [in trade, life for life].  Therefore, from now on, we do not perceive or identify anyone according to the details of the flesh. Though even Christ we have known according to the details of the flesh, yet now we know Him in that way no longer. Therefore, if anyone is inside of Christ, he is a New Creation. The old things are already gone; look and see, the New has already become. And all things are out from God the One who has already reconciled and reconnected us to Himself through Christ… God was inside of Christ reconciling and reconnecting the world or cosmos to Himself, not counting to them their false steps, that is, their disconnection from God, and [this same God] has set forth and placed inside of us the Word of reconciliation and reconnection with God (2 Corinthians 4:18 – 5:19 – condensed).

To walk through faith is to walk in the full knowledge that God is telling us the truth, that all things are, in fact, brand new, that the old creation is no more, even though it lingers in outward appearance. God does not impute sin or any disconnection from Him to anyone. The only problem is that they do not know.

How, then, will a world of life, sustained by rivers of living water flowing out of the tree of life through humans, God’s image and form, come into the outward appearance of everyone?

Paul said – that what is dying may be swallowed up by life.

Life, a world of life, arises from beneath of all things dead in appearance, and swallows up all that does not know God by the manifest knowledge of God.

Man is God revealed; God appears inside of creation only through a family of humans walking together in love. In fact, it is the love flowing back and forth among silly and weak humans, filled with all the fulness of God, that IS God made visible.

~~~

I want to switch tack, now, before I present the primary focus of this book, for we are not looking at the River of Life by itself. There is, inside the minds of all created beings, including all Christians, a knowledge “about” God that is not God. The knowledge of God-as-He-is comes first, yes, but, as Paul said, it is only as the presence of Jesus is made visible in and through us that all that is not-Christ will then vanish away.

There is an “image of God” in the minds of all humans that must be cast down.
The Lord walked with me through a difficult press recently, and as we came out of it, He placed in my view this topic about which I know next to nothing, but which is pressing hard upon us in this year of our Lord, 2019.

The last large topic I have written was the question of how we enable our brethren to know the Salvation in whom they already live, along with the role of the serpent’s words as the veil of darkness that rules over how they read every word in the Bible. In introducing that topic, I set in front of us the view of a world of life, a world and universe that has never before existed.

We have no clear picture about what such a reality might be, for we do not know any such thing. And so, in this book, I plan to write about a topic of which I know nothing. This is not the blind leading the blind, but rather, a blind man placing what God says and is in front of himself so that he might believe that God IS telling us the truth.

The probability that our support system in this world will be broken through the coming months is very high. The US dollar that has ruled as an octopus over the whole world since 1942 is about to become worthless as more and more countries turn away from its use and all those trillions held in overseas banks come back home. The support system in this country cannot continue with a defunct currency.

What that means is that the chances that we will find ourselves quite soon thrust into a reality of no food in the grocery stores, no gas at the gas stations, and no income, while surrounded by millions of desperate people in the same horror is pretty high.

There is no recourse. To deny such a probability is to deny normal human history in this world, something Americans love doing. To say, “We’re just trusting in Jesus,” is not enough; that is, it is probably a dishonest claim.

I had made an attempt to have survival food and supplies tucked away so that we would not be starving or dying of cholera in the first few weeks of a shutdown, but we have needed to make use of those supplies over the last year and they have dwindled. In other words, we are facing great difficulty woefully unprepared.

When I sent out the letter, “Give Me a Place to Stand,” a while back, God spoke to me. “You give them a place out from your own belly.” I have known miracles many times, but I am not a “man of faith”; neither do I look towards the view of “miracle working” as it is held by many living inside a world split between good and evil.

Now, my purpose in this text is not to write about “difficult times ahead.” Those things are real, and our inability to cope and our unpreparedness are also real. Nonetheless, that is simply the setting and context, the travail through which God is bringing forth a universe of life, a reality that has never before existed.

Since I and my family are woefully unprepared for any kind of disaster and since I no longer have the strength to make the effort to become prepared, I will do the only thing I can do. I will write my way into knowing Father with and through me and together with you.

“Heaven” as it is envisioned by most, is very much inside the framework of a universe of death, and there is almost zero idea inside that whole way of thinking of what I, in my blindness, am reaching to know. The Bible as well is written inside of a universe of death, a reality of a heaven and earth that knows only the split-apart-ness of good and evil and has no knowledge of what a universe of life might even be. The problem is not the Bible, of course, but of the humans who read it. Yet God has placed inside His word a view of what life is and means that can be seen only by those whom He has chosen.

Let me give a for-instance. Here is one of the most profound statements in the Bible, a word out from which the governance of the life of God never ends. – And I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was committed to them (Revelation 20:4). We will spend time with this line in the letters ahead. The depths of meaning inside of it are without limit.

Here is what we are facing. There is a very real sense, inside of the reality of God fitting Himself into space and time to be part of our lives, that God is as ignorant of this world of life as we are. Yes, it’s all there as substance inside His Pro-Knowing, but it is a reality – Symmorphy inside of Koinonia, that has never been expressed in any outward appearance. God has not been a part of such a thing inside His creation.

God is not known. We do not KNOW God, not as He is.

Now, let me ask you a simple question. What does the following verse mean? – He who believes into Me, out from His heart will flow rivers of living water.

I have been teaching this line as the “third” most important verse in the Bible for over ten years now. I have no idea whatever what it means. Everything I might know about it is found only inside a world of death split by good and evil. And every miracle I have experienced or seen has been nothing more than a momentary and typically surprising ZAP that served only to provide a temporary fix to a problem found inside this world of death.

Fixing the problems of death is certainly a wonderful side-effect of a world of life, but it has nothing to do with that world otherwise. Every person Jesus healed got sick again. Every person Jesus raised from the dead died again. Nothing really changed.

Here is my present understanding of the transition between a world of death and a world of life as going forward from this present moment. This is neither a prophecy nor a certainty. I cannot know what I do not know, and since I have not already lived through the next few thousand years, I recognize my ignorance fully.

1. The time between right now and the resurrection of our bodies.

2. Our mortal bodies swallowed up by life.

3. A long time period of God’s firstfruits learning to be the source of a universe of life while still operating inside the limited hangout of this world of death.

4. The release of demonic hordes back into the human experience and the full cessation of this universe of death as it relates to this specific heaven/earth in which we live inside this solar system.

5. A universe of life that is the only thing known by all except for those then being drawn out from hades into submission to Jesus.

6. That moment when every knee bows and every tongue confesses Christ, including all angels, as Paul indicated. This is stated as a momentary action; nonetheless we see it as the description of a continuing reality that knows nothing about any kind of death.

7. The ages to come that issue out from the final fulfillment of Jesus Sent.

In this book, we are concerned primarily with the first point, but we see the second point, our dying bodies swallowed up by life, as the immediate goal and that point of singularity that changes everything for us personally. But here is my assumption – that the resurrection of our bodies changes ONLY our bodies, it does not change the world in which we live.

Let’s delineate, then, the first point, the time between right now and the resurrection of our bodies. And there is a specific reason why we keep our focus upon our bodies being swallowed by life, of our putting upon ourselves immortality and incorruptibility.

Consider this moment right now as I am writing this chapter or as you are reading it. Let us then also assume, just for the sake of understanding the word God would have us to live out from, that the moment of the resurrection of our bodies is about ten years away.

Now, I am NOT talking about the “return of the Lord.” The Lord returned to His Body on the Day of Pentecost – The church, which is His body, the fulness of Jesus who fills all inside of all – and the church through the centuries has neither known it nor believed it, exactly as Jesus said. Actually, Jesus did not say, “know,” He said that no one would be aware of the Day (Matthew 24:36). Christians are certainly not aware of the fact that they together ARE Jesus walking this earth, having already returned.

So, right now, utterly vulnerable in complete weakness – to – “ten years from now” our bodies swallowed up by life. That moment is also called the unveiling of Jesus, that moment when the false cover is removed and everyone can now see what has already been the only thing true.

In 1 Peter 1, Peter talks about two things entering into our lives, two things that neither he nor Paul nor John knew anything about, coming into our present experience inside of one larger thing. The first thing Peter asserts is a Salvation ready and complete and the second is a grace we have not known, a pheron grace, a grace carried to us. These two things are found inside of the larger thing, which is the unveiling of Jesus Christ.

The most important of the things Peter describes for our practical experience right now is this grace never before known by any created being. Here is how the NKJ words it, slightly modified. Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you inside of the revelation of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 1:13).

There must come a moment when we no longer “rest our hope” upon that grace, but rather switch fully over to living by that grace as it has already come. That moment is now. We cannot live in the “hope of” a grace to come; we live in that grace to come NOW.

Of course, the word translated “to come” is pheron, which does not mean “to come,” but rather carried and sustained – sustaining [pheron-ing] all by the word of His power.

Of truth, the grace and the salvation Peter speaks of are simply two ways of looking at the same thing. But here’s the deal. Peter said that no angel of God in the heavens, including Michael or Gabriel, has any knowledge whatsoever regarding this grace and this salvation. They cannot teach us anything about it; we are the ones who will be teaching them.

More than that, the writer of Hebrews is very clear that dead Christians in heaven, though found inside of Christ, just as we are, cannot know anything about this grace and this salvation never before known. – God, having perceived inside the core of His being [pro-seeing] something better for us, that apart from us they {dead Christians in the heavens} will not come to completion (Hebrews 11:40).

In other words, neither Paul nor Peter nor John right now know this grace and this salvation before we know it. We know it first in all of creation. They get their new bodies first, moments before we get ours, but we know the grace and the salvation out from which that life comes before they have any idea.

This grace and this salvation are not known – and no one in heaven or earth can teach it to us, for no one else knows it either.

Here is a part of what Jesus really said in John 7:38.

Everything you need to survive the next ten years. Everything you need to provide for all of God’s people across this earth through the next ten years. Everything you need to establish the Church as local communities of Christ. Everything you need to cast down all the raging screams of evil assailing everything holy through the next ten years. Everything you need to birth into this universe a world of life, a world no one has ever known and concerning which hardly anyone has a clue. Everything is right there, inside your heart, inside your belly, inside your innermost being.

Let’s make this a list.

1. Personal survival through the next ten years even as people are dying by the thousands and tens of thousands all around us.

2. Full provision for the survival of all those whom God is giving to us.

3. Full provision to establish Christian communities for self and for others.

4. The wherewithal to birth the knowledge of Christ our life in many including the power to stand against all the naysaying hurled against us by theologians with strong foreheads who imagine that “God” is a bunch of ideas in their heads.

5. The authority and power to bind the violence of evil from crossing the barriers of protection we have set.

6. The grace to walk as if we are already fully resurrected, as if the power of the age to come is already our full possession.

7. The power and faith to put immortality and incorruptibility upon ourselves.

Jesus said that all this is inside of our own bellies and that all of it flows out from us as rivers.

~~~

Next, let’s come at this whole question from another direction.

Why is it that my heart just sings with overwhelming joy every time I have read J.R.R Tolkien’s essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” along with other similar expressions?

Here’s the thing. For almost two thousand years the Church of Jesus Christ, living inside the reality of all Salvation, knows nothing of that Goodness in which they live, but rather, has created endless fantasy scenarios out from the practice of horrifically twisting Bible verses, and as they are ruled by the thinking of Jerome, Dante, Calvin, and Milton.

The fantasy worlds inside of which the Christians down the street imagine themselves to live are staggeringly absurd and grotesque. Yet they love Jesus, and He lives in their hearts.

I read just a couple of months ago a news article with a picture concerning a large evangelical church somewhere in the U.S. The pastor had rigged up a guy wire from the top back wall of the large auditorium, large enough to hold several thousand people, down to the wall behind the podium. After the praise service, the pastor sailed down the wire on a pulley, landed behind the pulpit, turned, and breathlessly announced to the congregation – “That’s how Jesus is coming back! Any day now!”

These people do not know God, even though Jesus lives in their hearts. But they have put the same WAY in front of God that the Pharisees did, the only “way” He is allowed to show Himself inside His creation. And when God comes through His own way, that is through humans, meek and lowly of heart, the evangelicals will respond the same way the Pharisees responded.

They will take God out with pitch forks.

The fantasy of a world of death.

And so, since the passing of John, the Bible has been read out from a mind of death, ruled by the hounds of hades driving every good word God speaks into the travesty of the serpent’s deceit.

I do not, then, seek for the knowledge of God inside of fairy tales. I will not teach anything other than what God Himself says in the Bible. Nonetheless, there is a quality in many fairy tales that speaks more of truth than the nonsense of Christian theology. And Jesus is well able to use that truth to unveil to us what God means by what He actually says.

Here is the first verse of this text, that is, the source out from which everything of life comes.

The one having an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one presently and actively overcoming, I will give him to eat out from the tree of life, which is inside the paradise of God (Revelation 2:7).

What is it that is coming out of our bellies as we eat of the tree of life given to us by Jesus?

It is a realm of reality unknown in this present heaven and earth of death.

It is what must be described as “a fairy tale,” that is, that “fairy story” as is defined by Tolkien and others.

It is a world we do not know.

Then, here are the two primary verses of this text, the third and fourth ruling verses of the Bible. These are the two actions of God through us setting creation free.

In the last day, the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus stood {in the moment of complete silence} and shouted loudly, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come towards Me and drink. He who believes into me, as the Scripture has said, “Rivers of living water will overflow out of his belly [his womb, his innermost being].” Moreover, this He said concerning the Spirit, whom those having believed into Him were about to receive… (John 7:37-39).

And I heard a great voice in heaven saying: Now have come the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ, because the accuser of our brothers and sisters has been thrown down, the one accusing them before our God day and night. And they have overcome him through the blood of the Lamb, and through the word of their testimony; and they have not loved their souls unto death (Revelation 12:10-11).

Of truth, we will spend chapter after chapter on these two realities of our normal human existence, rivers of life flowing out of our bellies and casting down in our weakness all that contradicts the Word God speaks. But in doing so, I can assure you, we will hardly scratch the surface.

One final thought before we get started on what will be, I promise you, the most incredible journey any human has ever been granted the privilege to walk, not the reading of this book, but the fulfillment in our lives of the wondrous things God is causing us to know.

Consider what is a popular theme in modern books and movies, that is, placing the characters of a story into what they term a “post-apocalyptic” world. In the human delusion, a “post-apocalyptic” world is a world of death and devastation, because they know nothing of life. A world of death and devastation is entirely “pre-apocalyptic.”

We know that a “post-apocalyptic” world is a world of life, a world we do not know – just yet.

It is a world that, according to Jesus, is right now flowing out from our bellies, our hearts, our innermost beings, swallowing up all that is dying with LIFE.

I promise you this, as you continue reading this book, you will find great glory ahead, glory coming entirely out from the words of the gospel and by the Spirit of God, that is, the normal Christian life.