1.4 Christian Imagination
Consider carefully the power of the following verses. 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… (2 Corinthians 5:17-18).
You have already set aside, concerning your former way of life, the old and worn out ‘man,’ which becomes corrupted according to false desires, being already renewed in your spirit mind. And you have already actively put on and enclothed yourself with the new man, which according to God has already been created inside of the just innocence and devotion of truth (Ephesians 4:22-24).
The Great “In-Between.” Do not share the same outward pattern of expression with this age, but be metamorphosed [that is, share the same pattern of expression with Christ Jesus] by the renewing of your mind, into proving out God’s desire, that which is good, well-pleasing, and complete (Romans 12:2).
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, enclothe yourself with Him, and do not give thought [one way or the other] concerning the desires of the flesh (Romans 13:14). My little children, for whom I travail in birth again, until Christ shall have been formed inside of you (Galatians 4:19).
We are looking at the great “in-between,” which Peter calls “the salvation of our souls.”
Learn of Me. Our spirit is conceived of God in a moment and we are given the ability to know God. Our physic is swallowed up by life in a moment, and the ability to “not-know” God is removed from us forever. Both of these events are acts of God, but they come ONLY through our permission.
And in between these two mighty God-events, Jesus lives inside our hearts, in Person and for real, and He speaks to us continuously, with tears of earnest longing and with all confidence of joy, “Learn of Me. Eat of Me. Drink of Me. Put Me upon yourself. Bring Me into your mind. Look into My eyes and hear Me speak into you, for I am the completion of every Word God speaks. Speak the same Word that I am. Receive Me into yourself and sup with Me.”
Why “Learn of Me?” When they tell you that “God can do anything,” they are not speaking the Bible to you. God not only can do, but IS and DOES every Word that He speaks. But there are many things that God CANNOT do. God cannot sin. God cannot fail His Word. God cannot violate your human choice. God cannot force His way into your mind. Such things never enter God’s mind; He does not know them.
Why does Jesus say to one who believes in Him, “Learn of Me; bring Me into your mind?” Very simply because we Christians KNOW so many things that are just not true. Even more than that, we have spent our entire lives working hard on our own self-story – “This is me.”
A Far Greater Evil. And we tend to get nasty towards anyone, including Jesus, who suggests to us that our interpretation of everything in our lives and world is mostly nonsense. Yet there is a far greater evil in which we have been ensnared.
We have received, from the church in this world, a “Christianity” and a “theology” of God and salvation that is fabricated entirely inside of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We have received most every verse in the Bible inside the structure of “our great struggle against sin,” void of any realization that LIFE is something entirely different, void of knowing that Life is living inside of another PERSON who also lives, in Person right now, inside of us.
The Sowing of Tares. We have received Bibles translated into our modern languages by individuals who hold to the theology of knowing right from wrong and of “trying to do better,” the theology of a “Jesus” far away. And just as Jesus said they would in the parable of the tares, they have altered the very words God spoke through the writers of the Bible so that the words might line up with their gross unbelief – not Jesus, not now, not here, not you.
We have received Jesus, most certainly, and our hearts are drawn to a gospel of LIFE. Yet so many Bible verses continue to speak to us out from the darkness of the tree of knowing good and evil where they have been forced by minds at war with God. Yet there is a far greater evil in which we have been ensnared.
The Root Assumption. We have received, from this world and from the church in this world, the root underlying assumption that the devil spoke the truth in the garden! That the devil’s accusation defines “God,” the devil’s ‘temptation’ defines “man,” the devil’s offering defines “salvation,” and the devil’s arrogance defines “Christ.”
To prove that I am telling you the truth, let me make an explicit and very LOUD statement. I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE GOD! Consider the following two responses. See if you can tell which one is “God” through Satan and which one is God through Jesus. Let’s start with the most commonly heard response.
Can You Tell the Difference? “You have fallen for the temptation of the devil, for you want to be arrogant and self-exalted, so that you might control other people, just like I do. Now you are accursed.”
“I am so glad that you want to love your brothers and sisters and lay down your life for them. You are already just like Me, for I would be Love through you.”
John Calvin of Geneva said that when you see God, you will KNOW just how wicked you really are. John ‘Zebedee’ of Galilee said that when you see God, you will be just like Him. One of these two is giving you “God” through the devil and the other is giving you God through Jesus. See if you can tell which is which.
Your Imagination. Having set the stage thus far, I want to talk about Christian imagination, how it is that we can live utterly inside of LIFE and yet see and know mostly death.
As a human and as a believer in Jesus, you are always coming out from God’s thoughts concerning you through the good-speaking of Jesus and from nowhere else. There is no such thing as “a sinful human nature.” God is your only Source; you have no other source. Your imagination contrary to reality begins, however, with your own personal choice. You are not “bound” to Adam’s sin. The problem is that you commit the same sin Adam committed for the exact same reasons, even though God has given you an entirely different way to live, that is, the Lord Jesus Sent into you.
Unthankful. Paul said that Adam’s sin began before his teeth bit into “knowing” all about good versus evil. Paul said that Adam knew God, that he was not deceived, that he understood everything, all the issues of life and death, the promise of Jesus and the lies of the serpent.
Standing there, KNOWING God, Adam was unthankful (Romans 1). – What does that mean? God told Adam, “You are My image and likeness. You are My appearance in creation. When people see you, they are seeing Me. They are seeing what I “look like” towards all created things.”
Adam Despised Weakness. Adam looked at God, knowing God. He looked at Jesus in the Tree of Life, his heart drawn so deeply. Adam looked at the serpent in the tree of ‘God’s word under my control,’ and he knew the lie. Then Adam looked at himself and he saw weakness and inability; he looked again at Jesus and saw no beauty, he saw a man stumbling under a cross he could not carry, hanging naked and exposed for all to see, and he looked again at the serpent in the tree and saw such great beauty and wisdom, glory and power.
In that moment, Adam despised his weakness and insufficiency; he hated looking like God. He was unthankful. He lusted after being better than God, of being superior in the heavens. Yet he had not yet sinned.
Sin and Death Enter. Then Adam looked at his wife. He saw that she had fallen so foolishly for deception, and in his heart he despised her. Then, in his contempt for this other weak and foolish human, Adam understood that the serpent was offering him God’s word under his control so that he might rule over his wife. In that moment, sin and death entered into creation for the first time.
Nonetheless, Adam was not yet sealed into death, for God came calling to him. What then was that moment when Adam sealed himself and all his children into death and plunged the entire creation into slavery to decay?
The Spin of a False Story. Let me paraphrase Adam’s words that sealed everything into the outpoured vomit of death, for they are HORRIFYING words. “It’s not my fault; it’s this woman’s fault. And it’s Your fault, God, for putting her in my life.”
What is the source in a Christian of the spin of a false story of self contrary to Christ our only life? It begins with hating the way God made us, of despising our weakness and the lack of any sufficiency in ourselves. It begins with the rebellion of “wanting to be better,” the determination to “prove myself,” the rejection of “we have this Treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power might be of God and NOT of us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).
Contempt. What is the antidote? That’s easy. Give thanks inside of and for the sake of all things.
Yet it doesn’t stop there for the Christian, for God has made us members of one another and “Church” is a bunch of weak and foolish humans saying one thing and doing another. The Christian imagination becomes death inside of a believer when we look at our brother and sister and despise them.
You see, another word for death is contempt. Yet we know from Psalm 22 that Jesus also felt contempt inside His confused human soul, contempt for Himself, “I am a worm and no man,” and contempt for others, “dogs surround Me.” But Jesus never spoke out from that contempt.
The Words of Our Mouth. And the antidote for us is the same as for Jesus, that is – Hebrews 5:7-8. We cry out to God, with strong crying and tears, that God would save us from death, that God would save us from giving voice to contempt. And God hears us because we fear Him.
Yet Christians, in their false imagination go right ahead and speak that contempt anyhow, speaking not-Christ and sin, sin, sin, into their brothers and sisters and into themselves. Sadly, they reap what they sow. As James said, the words of our mouth direct all our thinking and all the pathway of our lives. But that isn’t the worst part of Christian imagination, not yet.
The Worst Part. Even worse than speaking not-Christ into our brothers and sisters, out from the seething contempt of our hearts, we then take the Bible under our control so that we might use it and God as our whip, so that we might beat our brothers and sisters with “the Bible this” and “the Bible that,” with the terrible lie that, “you are in trouble with God.” The practice of using “the Bible” as an intellectual fortress and using verses as clubs is far too prevalent among Christians.
But that isn’t the worst part of Christian imagination, not yet. The worst part is when we sit in our contempt, for no reason at all, and blame God and everyone else for our troubles. As Jesus said, “They hated Me without a cause.”
A Son of Perdition. Let me ask you an important question. Name the man who first put into our Bibles that the completion of God is a universe split forever between all good and all evil. Name the man who first put into our Bibles the accusation against God that He, our Father, KNOWS good and evil? Wicked, wicked things that were NOT known by anyone in the first two hundred years of the Church. There is no evidence that this man knew the Lord Jesus. Yet he sat in his contempt for his fellow Christians, blaming them and God for everything he hated about himself. And he found his inspiration in the fires of pagan Rome, the imagination of Virgil. Yet they call him “Saint” Jerome.
But do you know what the craziest thing about all this Christian imagination really is?
A True Salvation. The crazy thing is that NONE of it is true. All of it is made up nonsense, found only inside a fearful mind, living entirely inside of Jesus, inside of All Salvation now, but afraid to believe in Jesus.
Yet there is something even crazier than all that. This Salvation in which we live and who lives in us is so Complete and so Glorious and so All Right NOW and so Father at Home with us and so God through us in mighty Rivers of Spirit flowing out. The Salvation of God through us is so crazy that before this thing is over, the ONLY thing anyone will be talking about on this planet is JUST HOW MUCH these Christians LOVE ONE ANOTHER.
And do you know what’s crazy about all that? - It’s the only thing True.