How the false concept of Dualism keeps us locked in stalemate for centuries.
Most struggles on this earth are left-brain antler locks.
The Devil who first got us to live Dalek-like, basing our entire existence and foundation on the left-brain, instead of living from a heart position of fluidity and trust, then provides each different party with the necessary material to get us all steamed up .
In the continuation of the Tuning series we will be looking how we tune with each other and construct the first octave, moving from one note to the first 12. But the first thing we need to establish is the most important Biblical principle which we learned in the second level, after being baptised in the Spirit:
Unity is established like this.In the Spirit first. "Maintain the Unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace....until you reach the unity of the faith."
Unity is never begun in the left-brain. Unity is a Spirit. We do not have it. Unity has us.Unity is asking us to join it. Unity is the family atmosphere of the Godhead. The three in one God. The Father. The Son.The Holy Spirit. And now, as Frank Viola's book from Eternity to Here describes so wonderfully, their arms are outstretched for us, the Bride, to share this with us.The book The Shack covers similar ground.
So if the devil can get us hooked into left-brain one sided positions of the glorious huge panoply that is Truth, he has got us!
The reality is that we don't have truth either. We can have truths. But really it is the amount Truth has us.In our innermost parts.
Before John Poole disappeared off the scene, just beforehand he was preaching a key message in the Kansas City Shepherd's Conference 1975.(The same conference that Ern Baxter shared the door opening word for a generation of us entitled "Thy Kingdom Come".)
John's theme was Unity. He said we have to pray the prayer of David. "Unite my heart to fear Your Name" Psalm 51.
It is useless to attempt a Christian unity if each individual is still divided within themselves.!!
Although I cannot match the articulation of a Packer or a Jersak, I thought it would be good practice to try. All I know in my spirit is both venerable guys are roaming around the same mountain, but without the one key that Norman Grubb has provided along with other "pressers into the truth" like Jacob Boehme, Madame Guyon and a handful of others, these guys could be nose to nose for a while to come.
Like Calvinism and Armenianism, (God's sovereignty v. our Choosing) this is another humdinger. If like Brad you have been recently blitzed by a revelation of how much the Father's heart is for ALL MANKIND, and personally for Brad himself and each of us in turn as individuals, you have to question what is going on in the idea of "Penal substitution?"
This angry voice from heaven "Convert or I'll bash you in" theology needs addressing. Because like the other chestnut for atheists "If the gospel is true, how come the Church has been and still is such rubbish, and a perpetrator of so much evil?", both have been used by the devil himself to deter so many from knowing the truth. So with an honest heart Brad wants to get to the bottom of it all, to really present God as He wishes to be known. The revelation has come first...he now wishes to articulate it with clarity.
Well, my heading refers to the fact that a dual system , so for the heading I changed that to binary, - a dual system where it is God and a separate self-powered me warps the whole system and forever puts people on either side of a chasm. Exactly the same occurs with Armenianism versus Calvinism.
It's worth stressing this point....if you put 20 believers of one persuasion together in a room with another 20 believers, while they remain in the left-brain....YOU SIMPLY HAVE NO MEETING.
Yet as they all focus on God, maybe singing " Turn Your Eyes onto Jesus,Look Full into His wonderful face, And the things of Earth will grow strangely dim, In the Light of His wonder and Grace."....About 10 minutes in, the Presence of the Lord will be amongst them. He will be speaking to and through them, and whether or not they get their full theological answer that week, they will all know they have been with the Lord of glory, and some element will be written across their faces.
For me this false dualism reached its zenith at the high point of the second level, the charismatic movement around 1990 in the title of Benny Hinn's book "Good Morning Holy Spirit". He didn't mean to do wrong. Anymore than Frank Sinatra meant for a 1000 sermons to be preached on him singing "I did it my way". Frank actually meant I did it according to my own style that God gave me when He made me. Benny really does say "Good morning Holy Spirit" just as many of us pray to a transcendent God. But what the book represents to me is the farthest point you can go, still believing you are "an independent self". You and the Holy Spirit. Whereas the whole reason why the 3rd level is unique is that God takes you back to Genesis to where the whole thing went wrong, so each individual can begin to rebuild his or her life again, as Christ as them.
Then onto this foundation He can bring a fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the Kingdom winds of the 2 winds prophecy** can really begin to blow. **post bottom
This Genesis rediscovery leads to a fresh understanding of theology which joins many who are currently divided. Actually in this new level there will be a whole compound explosion of glory as people begin to find each other again. Bad news for the devil!
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The recent acceleration in the revelation of God the Father
has forced Brad Jersak to seriously question the concept of Penal Substitution.
This is the post and many comments, below is my reply.http://clarionjournal.typepad.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2007/09/methinks-he-bud.html#more
http://www.theocentric.com/theology/gospel/cosmic_gospel.html is an interesting handling of universalism, balanced with individual response...but that is not the current discussion.
Here in a town called Liss,Hampshire UK a L'Abri (Francis Schaeffer) church has split into three over different variations of Calvinism and Armenianism. This type of debate has not been part of my Christian life. I was staggered to hear these things, two hundred years after the ping pong match between Whitfield and Wesley.I am grateful that the above discussions on this blog are carried out in a considerably less acrid manner.There are historic moments in our history which defy complete human analysis. Books and books have been written on the history of the Reformation: Its political and cultural effects.The reasons why Martin Luther's theses should have caused such a seismic shift from what was happening before. However we trace the origins of the change through to the aftermath, Christians would largely agree that something Divine was going on. A divine invasion into our natural order of things. A step change in our history.People are divided about whether the Azusa Street Revival was yet another step change. Certainly, in terms of numerical increase in the church worldwide,and therefore in terms of the corresponding cultural changes, caused by conversions numbering millions, Pentecostal and charismatic influences have had a much bigger effect than are currently acknowledged in universities. In the words of Anita Roddick of Body Shop: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance! Or if you think the church is small now, how do you think it would have been without the Pentecostal additions.Something new happened in the eighties and nineties as has been alluded to by Brad. A much greater revelation of God as Father is now sweeping the Church.This I believe is only the opening of the flower which awaits its full bloom. If my blog is accurate then what seems only to be a gentle murmur of considerably less import than the rush of Pentecostalism, is actually the still distant rumble of an imminent storm that will change history forever.There is a third level of revelation arriving which renders much of our present questionings totally mute. Questioning, debating, seeking out matters is the glory of kings. Our royal divine task here on earth.But there comes a time when you have sung " Blowing in the Wind" for 50 years, and played Moody Blues "Question" from "A Question of Balance" until the LP,cassette,CD now mp3 ceases to amuse, but now appears childish. Left-brain thinking for left-brain thinking's sake.A time when you just have to say "Bono...I have found what I am looking for and it is like this."Counter-intuitively, John Crowder states in his book " Miracle Workers, Reformers, and New Mystics" that each time he has laid down his conscious reasoning powers at the Cross, far from losing anything,he finds it is returned in greater measure, if anything with less looping, less short-circuiting around old thought patterns.The first commandment was always love the Lord first with all your heart,second with all your soul then third with all your mind.Somehow the order is crucial in the next step we are all about to take together. In fact it always was so, but somehow in these immediate days we are actually going to take this order to heart. And because we never did, we have spent far too long in the questioning stages. The truth is that both Packer's position and Brad's posits are simultaneously true.Armenianism also, is simultaneously as true as Calvinism.
part2This is how it works.While there existed a false dualism between the Creator and the creature, there was never an end to both dilemmas.But this dualism is false.It was inherited in the Fall.In Genesis 3:5 when the devil sold us a series of con trick lies the first one was that the Father was no good. He was as Ern Baxter said "holding out on us". And the remedy, the quick fix, was to become like Godknowing both good and evilmaking our own choicesas though we were beings in our own right.A lie being perpetuated even up to this present day by evangelical atheists Richard Dawkins and Brian Eno.We could however never exist as beings in our own right...for the scripture cannot be broken which saysIn Him we live and move and have our being.What evangelicals and Watchman Nee term conveniently as "soul power" is a complete fiction. When God stooped over us to breathe into Adam and he became a living soul, there was never any division that meant the soul had its own power. It needed spirit to drive it, and through the soul out to the body.As Ern Baxter memorably described in "Thy Kingdom Come", when we went as sheep each one to our own way...it actually was not completely true, as the devil subtly moved in unseen to become the new spirit operator.And this was a permanent change, throughout generations by inheritance.We were only ever containers for one spirit deity or the other, either the One true God, or the False usurping god, who actually is no god, but only a powerful angel.And it was only to be new birth that would exorcise permanently this false deity, and by it we would become Christ in our individual forms. Again so fused into our spirit and soul, then body, that people really would mistake us for being no different, just as they refused to believe that Jesus in His earthly form, having laid aside His own personal weight of glory and substance, to become only a vessel for the Father here on earth, was also regarded by unbelievers as being no different.This was true of those who knew Him best, His own brothers and sisters.You see if the Bible is true and we are only branches to His whole vine, (not just the trunk!). If we are just containers and vessels containing at one time the Devil, now by new birth Christ, this has ramifications both for the discussions on this post and for Armenianism versus Calvinism.When Satan rebelled he became the first and permanent child of wrath. This was such a terrible state of affairs, that when God was seeking brethren, and a Bride for His Son, He determined that they could never again be chosen from a state as permanent in its outcome as heaven. You rebel in heaven, and the effects are devastatingly permanent.Therefore an environment had to be created where failure was less permanent. You could only suffer a temporary death, not a permanent death like that of the angels. It is said that hell was not made for humans, unless we choose to go there.Here is the clever bit. The double blinder that God the Father has pulled.The wrath spirit that permanently rests on the Devil, who made his permanent and fixed choice to set himself against God...yet that has no intrinsic home in God's character, who is only love...this wrath spirit that mankind mistakenly chose when they chose this "false independent position" needed flushing away in a permanent bin.So Packer is right. God is permanently wrathful against this spirit that began its rebellion in heaven....but Brad is right because God the Father is looking down only in love on the human containers who were daft enough to fall for the Devil's con trick. What humans feel as wrath is God's ire at the inherited spirit of the devil that resides in every human container that has not asked Jesus in to their heart in order to drive it out.So yes we have a problem with condemnation.But not the problem we think we have.Rather than fess up to our false independence position which is really Satan in our members, we mope around in this needless mire of condemnation.
Part of the "false indepence" lie is to ascribe every problem to us. In an inverse kind of way it makes us look big. But it is utter balderdash.Jesus wants us to take the cross in all seriousness, have a total blood transfusion, and a body transfusion, in the sense that His own Body and Blood were used as trash containers to ferry all our Devil containing existences down to hell with Him, and to rise in complete victory, in order to enter into our containers as us. As our personalities. As our bodies.Looking to many as though nothing at all has happened. But those who are born again know something did happen. On their insides.That makes them totally different.So yes, the Father was totally angry. But not at the container. Only at the devilish spirit in the container. And as long as we remained containers for it, we were judged already, Jesus said. But He who believes on the Son is immediately not condemned.John3:18.A Calvinist and Armenian will battle on for millennia as long as they both fight their left-brain corners, but also cling onto their dual existence falsehoods, which are all part of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This notion that I could ever have a separate existence in my own right.Somehow now fused to Christ, my will is enfolded into His will. Indeed I am called by that very will. I am pulled by it like a magnet...but like love itself to a lover is drawn, it is not a concept that violates my integrity, but rather is warm and wonderful.Now as I am moved to speak a Word of faith, is it Him or is it me?As I do what he did for me: go to the Cross for others, to fill out what is lacking in His own sufferings. Is it Him or is it me?All this renders to nought hours and hours of fruitless discussion about faith, about will, about penal substitution.Instead we see the full import of how we, the whole Body of Christ on Earth become a display to principalities and powers...again making a show of them openly.Why. Because in the midst of glory indescribable, one worship leader rose up and took possibly a third of heaven's angels with him.Into rebellion.But we, in a cold harsh environment, surrounded by the devil's works and hurt and harm, choose to rise up instead and become containers for God's glory, when all is dark. This is the very fist that God raises towards the enemy in utter triumph crying "See! See! Behold what I have achieved through My outstretched arm. A people who know what it is to be delivered. Who in darkness have chosen Me, and whose glory far outsurpasses anything you ever had."see God's wrath chapter here:http://www.unionlife.org/yesIam#CH7
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reply on Facebook Group Theology Thoughts where also posted
Wow...not quite sure how to respond to this paradigm shift... but I like it :-) Thanks for putting this down. I feel closer to God for reading it. Julian Roath group founder.
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