Yes I Am 10 - We Have Been Deceived About Ourselves

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 10

WE HAVE BEEN DECEIVED ABOUT OURSELVES

So we are seeing a tremendous revolutionary reality that humans never had a nature by themselves. They were both created and later redeemed to express in simple spontaneity and naturalness Him who is God in us and who, Scripture says, "dwells in us and walks in us" (2 Cor. 6:16). Likewise after the Fall, when we had freely joined ourselves to Satan, we had no nature of our own either. So there never has been a "human" nature. Therefore there is no point in considering whether we believers have two natures or one! No, we humans have none, but tragically or gloriously, spontaneously manifest the nature of the deity in us.

But as we investigate this actual, factual relationship between God and man in which man is nothing but the agency by whom God reveals Himself as God, and God in love-action - it becomes obvious that man is not a robot, with no free expression of himself as a person. It is precisely the opposite. We see the total freedom of the Divine Person fulfilling His love-purposes through the total freedom of the human person. And how can that be? It is no paradox when, as we have already seen, freedom must make its choices and the free will then loves to be controlled by its choice. We still do what we want to do. There is no need to force a person’s will. All the other person need do is to attract and captivate our "want," and then we will love to act in harmony with him. Give a child another toy, and his crying after the first one disappears. People often ask, How can we conceive of God changing a person’s will if he is free? The answer is that God changes our "want," and the will follows spontaneously. Once God has captured our wills by drawing us back to Himself through Christ, then it is He in us who "wills and does of His good pleasure" (and it is always good!) and it is we who naturally, gladly, freely work it out (Phil. 2:13-14).

He who is the "Freedom of the universe" can only be His free Self by His sons as they are free. Only with freedom can there be expansion and development, so God’s universe can only be entrusted as an inheritance to those free to develop it - to persons, not automata. If there are two freedoms, that of the Creator Person and that of the created persons, the one simple necessity is that the Creator and created be in such a love-union that the sons love to fulfill the will of the Father, and yet always are consciously free in working it out. It still remains an apparent contradiction to reason and logic, I realize, but there is no contradiction in daily living. We who are in this love-union know we are free, and we make our free decisions and carry them out into action, yet we equally laughingly and delightedly know we are doing what is worked in us to will and do. So here is the perfection of freedom which we who have found "the way" delight in, and in which we freely operate.

He who is the "Freedom of the universe" can only be His free Self by His sons as they are free.

This revelation from the Scriptures is so central to our very being that we will go over it again, for the repeating of something this important can only help settle the truth more firmly in us.

Our failure to recognize that we Christians are never independent selves and have no human nature of our own but are always, eternally, expressions of the Deity Person whose property we are, and that we manifest His nature, is the root of all our confusion and frustrations. All redeemed sons of God struggle with it in their newly awakened zeal to be the kind of people we know we ought to be. It is the root of our and Paul’s Romans 7 "wretchedness." It is the blank wall of obstruction we appear to be confronted with in all of life’s problems. It also appears to us as an immovable block in our bringing Christ to others, with their deafened ears or prejudiced hearts. The false concept of independent self is the all-round blockage; indeed, it is the only blockage of all life.

It is the great deception. The serpent deceived Eve; and sin, which is Satan’s garment of deception, the Bible says, deceives us. For sin’s principle is "I’ll do things my way, not God’s way" - the precise character of Satan. So what has happened is that Satan has tricked fallen humanity into thinking that we, like himself, are really independent selves, running our own lives in our own way. He has totally blinded us to the fact that we are merely expressions of him, the false deity - actually Satan in our human forms. Who among the millions of us in our lost condition ever thought that we were actually Satan manifesting himself by us? When we responded to the conviction of the Spirit - enough to know we were sinners, under the condemnation of the law, without God and without hope - we simply saw ourselves as slaves of Satan, doing his evil deeds; even children of the devil, having his character of self-loving self. But none of us recognized that actually it was he, the spirit of error, who was living his own life by us - he being the real sinner and we walking Satans (just as the redeemed become walking Christs). We were under this false conception that it was just we who were the sinners, and the sins our own evil deeds, and the self-centeredness our own distorted independent self. And it is because we did not know ourselves as "walking Satans" that we now have great difficulty in knowing ourselves as "walking Christs."

This is what ties us in knots. We have been so grossly deceived - and deceit is much more dangerous than blindness, because when blind we know we are blind, but when deceived we think we are what we are not. We shall be seeing in further detail how this illusion of our being independent selves - and so having certain responsibilities and the particular obligation to be the kind of people we know we ought to be (despite our constant failures) - is precisely what has so distorted our self-outlook. Does it not seem almost blasphemous, or certainly ridiculous and impossible, that we could actually be Christ expressing Himself in our human forms? Look at us! Yes, look at us through the illusion of being independent, responsible people who should somehow become like Him. Now contrast this with the "notion" that we are Christ in our human forms. It is blasphemy! But we will clear this hurdle, and the leap is clear, simple and sane.

So now we have had a first hard look at this revolutionary fact, plain in the Scriptures, yet hidden from (we may say) everybody who is not of the Spirit, and equally hidden from the vast majority of Bible-based believers. It is the fact of the deity-indwelt life being as much the condition of the lost as of the saved. Recognition of this is the key to living with all boldness the liberated human life.

So we will now give time to an examination of how God totally regains His stolen property, the countless millions of free sons who become the "riches of the glory" of His Son’s inheritance (Eph. 1:18). We will see again how He had this planned from eternity - the adopted family chosen before the foundation of the world. But it always has been the prime necessity that if they are to be competent, reliable sons by whom He may manage His universe in His own only-way of love-management, then that positive, perfect nature of self-giving love must first be built on the certainty of the swallowing up of their negative nature of self-getting love; for everything is established only by swallowing up or building upon its opposite. And in His eternal wisdom He has always had it planned that the swallowing up would be so complete that the misused negative could never show its head again. The predestined Seed of the woman would tread underfoot and crush the serpent’s head, fully removing his infection from His stolen precious sons and restoring them to their perfected sonship.

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