24. Using the Patterns

The word “pattern” and “type” are New Testament terms that are used to show how this event or that symbol serve the Spirit of God as He does His job of revealing Christ to us. We find, then, that the Bible is FILLED with patterns and symbols, all of which are clearly speaking of something deeper than the surface objects or events. We know that because the Bible writers are always using those patterns and symbols for that very purpose.

 Here is a simple and obvious example out from Jesus’ own mouth. And even as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, thus it is inevitable that the Son of man be lifted up, that everyone believing inside of Him might possess age-unfolding life (John 3:14-15).

Moses putting a serpent on a pole and telling the children of Israel to look at it was an event in time. Yet Jesus is using that object as a symbol and that event as a pattern in order to cause us to understand the meaning of Christ our only life.

But “cause us to understand” is too simplistic of a statement. What does that mean?

The human mind is capable of holding an enormous amount of information inside the small orb of the brain. You would be stunned if you could see just how much data you hold in your mind. And the incredible thing is, you have access to a whole lot of it. You see, you may think you have completely forgotten what your fifth-grade teacher told you on the tenth day of that school year, but the truth is, it is lodged in there somewhere among all the dusty piles of other seemingly useless bits of information.

The reason so much of what you actually know is not that accessible is that you know too much stuff and your brain has solved that problem by putting blinders upon the things you do not presently use. Nonetheless, the amount of stuff you can access is still ginormous.

Picture a warehouse filled with hundreds of filing cabinets, each one with four drawers filled with dozens of files, and in each of the files, papers in number from several to many and on each page many ideas written, just like are written on this page.

Consider the twenty books I have written over the last twelve years sitting on the shelf above my computer screen, along with the four books currently in progress inside my computer. A brother wants me to create an index of topics across all my writing so that he can easily find whatever he wants through every book. Say what? What an indomitable task. Yet I am game for it, at least to some measure.

Yet here’s the thing. I do have access inside my mind to most of what is written all through these two dozen books, some of which are not small, and I usually have a reasonable idea of where to find something I have written (although sometimes I’ve looked long and hard and not found it).

Now, in that same light, consider the Bible. We have guesstimated that the Bible contains more than 50,000 larger ideas, a number that would grow even more if we considered every name and every item mentioned as an idea in itself – which it is.

But the worst problem is this – the Word became flesh; that is, God must convey His word through limited and prejudiced human minds – many of whom had zero idea that they were writing “the Bible.”

More than that, Bible ideas cannot be the Word of God to us except they become Jesus Himself in Person written upon our hearts. And even more than that, I am convinced that God has placed the tree of knowledge alongside the tree of life all through the Bible itself. More than that, we see how Satan uses Bible verses to try to turn, first Jesus, and then us, away from life and towards human performance.

The Bible is a confused mess. The New Testament is a confused mess. The “gospel” is never spelled out, but is scattered throughout, split apart by other, sometimes very distractive words. And almost nothing in the Bible is more confusing and all mashed up as is John’s vision.

Let’s go back to the millions of ideas stored on the hundreds of thousands of pages stuffed into thousands of files tucked away inside of hundreds of filing cabinet drawers inside of that thing you call your brain. How on earth do you make sense of all of it? How do you access what you know?

You see, even though you do exactly that, all the time, almost automatically, there is a specific reason why you are able to accomplish such a wondrous thing.

You use patterns of thinking. You have your own labeling system developed in your mind, a labeling and ordering system of which you are probably unaware.

I have one room of filing cabinets titled “Construction Knowledge.” Another room is titled, “Teaching Knowledge.” Another room is titled, “All the Books I’ve Read,” and so on. And the large amount of stuff in each of these rooms is arranged, actually, in several different ways of access. I can access stuff in “Construction Knowledge” using the events of my life. I can also access it according to a specific department of information, such as plumbing, etc.

My point is this – we make sense of all this conflicting information filling our heads and filling the Bible, by one means only, by the use of patterns of thinking. In the educational and scientific realms, these patterns of thinking are also called, “theories,” that is, a way to arrange all the facts so that we can make sense of them.

We can make use of a pattern well-known to me in order to understand this arrangement of human thought, and that is, designing and building a house. The underlying base assumptions include the purpose of the humans for this house, the reasons why humans need a house, the elements of human life that need expression inside this house, and so on. These may seem generic, but any good home designer is always reasoning out from these base core assumptions more than they themselves might realize.

Then, the house plans are the theory, the pattern of arrangement by which the builders will assemble all the “facts,” that is, all the individual little pieces of material that make up the finished house. Some people disdain the use of theories to build from; the contempt is always apparent on their faces, however, out from which their disdain comes.

A brother in the move communities shared once, hilariously, how when they had first started in community, they decided to build a barn by following only the anointing of the Spirit of God, because they believed that they had no need of any theories, that is, any carefully drawn plans.

Their barn fell down.

The greatest work of my building career, the Graham River Tabernacle, almost fell down because of a fundamental flaw in my theory, that is, in my blueprints. It did not, and we were able to solve the problem, but it had shocked me to the core.

You see, I had drawn an L-shaped building, but then we decided to build it in parts, the larger rectangle first, and then they would add the smaller part of the L later. The problem was that, in my original drawing, it was the shorter wall of the L that would hold strong the end of the larger rectangle filled with windows. Because we did not build the L wall, there was no support for that large window wall, only the strength of the roof, actually. Yet it shifted, and that was horrific.

Bad things happen when the theories, the patterns of organization, the blueprints, are wrong.

Now, I have a definite reason for including these things before we even look at God’s patterns for our thinking. My purpose is that it is far more important for you to understand what is UNDERNEATH of everything than for you to be able to parrot back this fact or that fact or for you to describe this symbol or that pattern.

When the foundation is right, then the patterns you choose in order to arrange all the facts of your reality inside your knowledge of yourself and everything else, will be right, and your house will stand firm. But if your foundation is WRONG, then everything you build, no matter how well you build it or how beautiful it appears to you, it will all come crashing into ruin.

We build on one foundation only, and that foundation is Father’s Heart, Father’s Purpose, Father’s Intentions, Father’s Determination. And there is one Connection between Father’s Heart and ours, and that is Christ Jesus, written in Person and as every Word God speaks, inside and upon our hearts.

And I will not give voice to my personal and absolute rejection of anything built on anything else because I would not be using nice words.

God KNOWS that because His word comes to us through the lives and stories, the prejudices and viewpoints of many very different individual humans in many different times and circumstances, and since God KNOWS that the gospel of our salvation is laid out for us in a totally scattered and disjointed manner, He gave us several very specific patterns which He intended us to use in order to arrange all the Bible verses and all the truths of the gospel into His true arrangements.

Few ever have. In fact, “types and patterns” is considered by most to be an unimportant sideshow in Bible study topics. Yet it is FULLY evident that the New Testament writers used the layout of the Tabernacle of Moses and the layout of the Feasts of Israel by which they ordered and arranged and gave meaning to everything they were saying.

Yet most teachers of the word see little purpose in understanding these basic patterns, let alone using them. Why? Very simply – Nicene theology has created an entirely different order of arrangement, an order of confused human reasoning out from the words of the serpent in the garden and out from the base assumptions and definitions instilled by those words.

The three base underlying assumptions are that God knows good and evil and has created a universe in which good and evil oppose each other forever, that Jesus is far away from us right now, and the death is the only thing that will take us into Salvation and the true knowledge of God. And every verse in the Bible and every truth of the gospel are then arranged together upon the basis of these deep rules.

Yet I find that I cannot figure out what those arrangements and patterns actually are. And if I cannot figure them out, I can reasonably assume that no one else can either.

It is for this reason, then, that Christians cling to death, for only death can take them to where any of it actually makes sense. “We’ll know what it means when we all get to heaven.”

Now, I originally penciled in two letters, this one, “Using the Patterns,” and the next, “Using the Visions.” But I have given so much space in laying out this fundamental understanding that I have not gotten to my real purpose for these two letters. For that reason, I am expanding this little parenthesis of thought from two chapters to four before we return to that incredible space of our present experience, that brief period of time between the fulfillment of the Day of Atonement and the fulfillment of the First Day of Tabernacles. There, I have two letters penciled in, “The In-Between Days,” and “Building the Wall.”

Yet, even though I am writing with great intensity of excitement and adventure inside of our continued exercise of this incredible task God has given to us – to be a vital part of the deliverance of His Church into the joy of the Salvation in which she already lives, yet I also know that our understanding of these most basic of things, the patterns and visions of God, must be established in our hearts in permanent detail.

And I will include in a future email the prayers of deliverance together in one piece so that you might continue to speak them in full confidence with God but directed in one direction or another through your and Father’s intentions together.

Please do that. The time is now; the enemy is at the gate; the flood of evil is even now hitting the precious Bride of Jesus, though she hardly knows it; and the Day of His Power is inside of us. We are willing in the Day of His Power (Psalm 110). We will also be praying more along these lines together when we get to “Building the Wall.”]

In Symmorphy II: Essence, Lesson 3.3 “Replacing False with True,” I laid out the four primary patterns of God. I will give an updated rendition of them here.

Patterns of Truth
Pattern #1: The pattern of the reproduction of life. The primary metaphor in the Bible and in the universe is the reproduction of life by the planting of a seed, either a plant seed or a human seed. This is the most all-pervasive pattern from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 and its purposes are to be found in every chapter and verse in between. Those who do not use this pattern have no real idea what anything is about. This is Agur’s puzzle regarding the way of a man with a virgin (Proverbs 30:19).

Pattern #2: The patterns of the feasts of Israel, the tabernacle of Moses, and the journey of Israel. These patterns rule the layout of New Testament truths; that is, the New Testament was written upon the structure of these three patterns together, primarily the tabernacle of Moses – and three levels of knowing God. This is Agur’s puzzle regarding the way of an eagle in the air.

Pattern #3: The layout of story and how it works to show us God’s intentions for man on this earth. This pattern can be drawn from many great examples of the human story rendered in fiction as well as the stories of specific individuals recorded in the Bible and through Church history as well, as the story of our own lives as our own personal stories become to us one seamless story of Christ from the moment of our conception. Incredibly, this is Agur’s puzzle regarding the way of a ship on the sea – and we will see how that is so in the next letter.

Pattern #4: The pattern of mystery. The layout of the ten most important verses in the Bible solves for us the great mystery, Christ AND the Church, God manifest in the flesh – PROOF. Yet this pattern begins by the first words of accusation against God, creating a whole series of crimes that must be solved before the pattern is finished. This is Agur’s puzzle regarding the way of a serpent on a rock.

You see what I have done. I have taken Agur’s four symbols and used them to cast for us these four great patterns of God, and by Agur’s symbols, we will see wonders.

Listen to this guy. “Surely, I am more stupid than any man, and do not have the understanding of a man. I neither learned wisdom nor have knowledge of the Holy One” (Proverbs 30). Those are some of the most intelligent words ever uttered by a human on this earth. Everyone else is faking it and are too stupid to know that they are.

Then he says, “Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him. Do not add to His words, lest He rebuke you, and you be found a liar.” And so I have taught you to respond to what God actually says only with “Let it be to me.”

He also says, “Deprive me not before I die: Remove falsehood and lies far from me.” And I find tears in the corners of my eyes. I like this guy. Yet what am I doing? I am applying God’s pattern of story as Christ to my own life.

Now, as we look at each of these four larger patterns, we find many, many smaller specific patterns inside of each of them. More than that, we find many of these smaller patterns that actually function out from more than one of the larger ones.

Let’s take a simple pattern inside the feasts and journey of Israel to show just how this works. – For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us (1 Corinthians 5:7).

How do we use this pattern, then, as a means of arranging New Testament verses and gospel truths? Quite simple. We go back to Exodus 11-13 and we take every single detail of that first Passover and go searching in the New Testament for its expression as Christ, both as our Atonement and as our Life. What we find, then, is a series of corresponding verses and truths scattered from one end of the New Testament to the other.

Here are just two, very different verses. You were… redeemed …with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Peter 1:18-19). And – He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love (Colossians 1:13).

Yet we can take these two along with all the other scattered verses and see how perfectly they all fit together by the account in Exodus. But there is much more than that. You see, the Passover is just the first part of the journey of Israel and just the first two feasts of the seven feasts of Israel’s year. Because we see the larger overall patterns, then, we can take all these many scattered verses, having put them together, and see how they fit with other sets of New Testament verses and truths that are related to Pentecost or Tabernacles, but not Passover. We can see how God’s meanings of New Testament verses and gospel truths flow from one step to the next through the Tabernacle and through the journey of the Ark of the Covenant.

But it goes even further than that. For once we have arranged the truths of the gospel inside our knowing, using God’s overall fundamental pattern as our rule – the reproduction of life – that is, Christ lives in my heart through faith, that is, receiving the Seed of our Father into us through “Let it be to me” that we might bring forth His life through us – then we can take all these incredible patterns of our knowing of the Jesus of our heart back through the Old Testament to discover Him written there upon every page. And we can take these same things into the visions of God, and we are astounded by the glory and the power of those things that now fully belong to us.

Let me explain what I mean by that last statement. You see, it is by this means that I was able to write “Placing Revelation 11” and to show you in simple understanding how it is that Revelation 11 is talking about YOU, about the normal Christian life – which you are.

Let’s come back now to this vast store of data we might call “Bible truths” or “facts of God’s reality.” Because this Bible comes to us through many different humans over centuries, it is a MESS. And that mess is made even greater because Paul never actually thought to state the full dimensions of “his gospel” in written form, or to apply it consistently, or even to demonstrate that he actually understood what on earth was coming out of his lips. And even worse, to claim vehemently that James and Peter and all the other disciples of Jesus had it wrong!

Look through the four larger patterns above. We can break these four into nine patterns, simple patterns, each one of which is a process, and each one of which you yourself could easily write down the basic elements of that pattern.

In fact, I would recommend that you do just that. Take each of these nine simple patterns and write out the basic elements and processes of each, completely in the natural without any reference to New Testament truths. Keep your layout simple but be sure to include all the larger elements or larger steps in the process.

1. The reproduction of human life, from romance to the birthing of a baby.
2. The reproduction of plant life, from preparing the soil to eating the food.
3. The tabernacle of Moses and the movements of action inside and through it.
4. The feasts of Israel applied to the Church.
5. The journey of Israel from escaping Egypt to the glory of God upon Solomon’s temple.
6. The pattern of story.
7. The lives of Bible persons – Jesus, Moses, David, and so on, as well as of believers in Jesus.
8. The solving of a mystery, specifically, a crime.
9. The process of a courtroom trial from beginning to end and all the major figures in it.

That’s a lot of homework, so doing any two or three of these would be of great benefit to you.

What I want you to see is three things about these patterns. First, that these are all things inside of our world, known to each one of us. Second, that we are well able to write out in our own words the basic elements of each of these patterns and to know exactly what they are. And third, that each one of these patterns contains inside itself unending depths that we will explore forever, astonished over and over at how much more there is to be found in each one than we have ever known before.

Then I want to add four more – which is actually three, because number four in Agur’s list is also number 1 in the patterns of God.

1. The way of an eagle in the air.
2. The way of a serpent on a rock.
3. The way of a ship in the midst of the sea.
4. The way of a man with a maid.

Now, rather than writing anything out for these just yet, I want you to envision each one in your mind and think about what is really happening. I had thought to exclude #4 for you on terms of what is proper, but then I realized that, hey, it ain’t me, it’s God who has placed this one thing as the primary pattern of everything. Just read Genesis 1:1-3 and you will see the entirety of the way of a man with a maid.

In the next chapter, then, I want to bounce around from pattern to pattern using only those that fit our one purpose inside our present lives. That is, I am looking for two things. I am looking for the breaking of our brethren free from all that is not-Christ, and I am looking for their rushing into Tabernacles, God among us.

Yet we will also see this, that every one of these, actually twelve patterns, are found inside of the book of Revelation and are critical to any real understanding of what God means by those words. Only with God’s patterns fully in place in our knowing are we able to fit the individual facts and ideas into their true place.