Going to Jesus

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God Had a Son Before Mary Did

The Significance of God’s Revelation of His Son

By John D. Clark Sr.

©2026

I am indebted to many for their contributions to this work, that is, for their contributions to my life. Some have gone on to be with the Lord and cannot see this fruit of their labor. To those who are still here, I offer my sincere and humble thanks. Without them, this book would not be what it is, for I would not be who I am.

My love and gratitude go out to my wife, Barbara, and our four children, Token, Rebekah, John David, and Elijah, without whose help this would have been a poorer work. I also thank my Greek and Hebrew students who helped in the translation of the scriptures used in this book, especially Damien Callaghan and Aaron Nelson. Sincere thanks is also offered to my secretaries, Amy Boveia and Token Embry, whose zeal for this project at least matched my own, to Lyn Hammonds, whose proofreading was invaluable, and to all the wise and faithful saints whom God has sent to support me in my labor for God and His Son. Their help was invaluable, and their discerning observations inspired many portions of this book. God bless them all.

Of those who played a part in shaping me and, so, this work, most important was “Preacher Clark”,^[1] who was both my pastor and my father. He led me to Christ, “whose I am and whom I serve.” I am who I am because of him. And I am

Your servant in Christ,

John David Clark, Sr.

Preface

In 2007, I became acquainted with a group of sincere believers who taught that, other than in the mind of God, the Son of God did not exist until the birth of Jesus. They rejected the notion that in the beginning, the Son of God existed as a person alongside the Father, and inasmuch as the Bible exhorts us to “prove all things”, I carefully considered their teaching. I read a couple of their books and even traveled with some friends to visit a leading proponent of that doctrine. We all came to love that brother and his wife, and we still honor them as we honor everyone who believes in Christ Jesus our Lord. However, I could not make their doctrine agree with the Bible’s teaching concerning the Father and the Son, for I could not deny the Bible’s clear teaching that from the beginning, the Son of God existed with the Father in heaven as a fully rational being. Nevertheless, I still “rejoice in hope” that God will someday bring us and all His people together in “the unity of the Faith”.

My brief association with that group of believers prompted me to conduct a Bible study with my congregation on the subject of the Father and the Son. This book is the result of that study.

Introduction

Three truths serve as the foundation for everything revealed about God in the New Testament. When understood, they reshape our perception of the Divine. The first truth is that from the beginning, God kept His Son a secret from all creatures, both in heaven and on earth (Col. 1:26), and so, no one knew that God was really a Father until the Son was revealed. The second truth is that God hid all true wisdom and knowledge within His Son (Col. 2:3), so that no one could truly know God before He revealed His Son. The third truth is that the Son was not revealed while he walked on earth in the person of Jesus; he began to be revealed only after he ascended into heaven and the Spirit was poured out on Jesus’ followers. It is as Paul said: “No one knows the things of God, except the Spirit of God” (1Cor. 2:11). The Spirit alone reveals the Son (Jn. 16:13), and through the Son alone is the Father revealed. Jesus said, “No one knows the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son may choose to reveal Him (Mt. 11:27b).

The revelation of the Son was the revelation of God as He really is. It revealed, first of all, that God is a God of relationships, for in the beginning, out of all the possibilities available to Him, God chose to create Someone to love, and He loved that Someone so dearly that He gave him all power in heaven and earth. The Son was God’s first and only creation, the beginning and the end of His creative work (Rev. 3:14; 22:13). Everything else was then created by the Son that He loved (Jn. 1:3). The revelation of the Son’s existence also teaches us that the Son was created with God’s kind of life, the holy Spirit, and that only with that kind of life can anyone ever know either God or His Son.

The revelation of the Son compels us to consider difficult questions such as this: If all wisdom and knowledge was hidden in the Son until the Spirit came, then what did the righteous who lived before Pentecost, including Jesus’ disciples, know about God before they received the Spirit? Or this: If the Son was hidden even from heavenly beings, then who did Satan think Jesus was when he met him in the wilderness Temptation? These questions, and many others like them, we will answer. My hope is that you will experience the power and light with which my congregation and I were blessed as we pursued the knowledge of God contained in this fundamental New Testament revelation: God had a Son with Him in heaven long before Mary had a son born to her in Bethlehem.

Part One:

“In the Beginning,
the Word Was There”

Chapter 1

“He Was Before I Was”

In the beginning, the Word was there, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
John 1:1–2

The Beginning and the End

The truth that John was attempting to convey in the opening lines of his gospel is also the essential point of this book, and of the gospel itself, namely, that God had a Son with Him in glory from before the beginning of the world. For His own wise purposes, God kept the existence of His Son secret until “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4). Then, when God’s appointed time came, His revealing of the Son became the foundation for a new and everlasting covenant between God and man.

We are all familiar with the lovely way John 1:1 is translated in the King James Version: “In the beginning was the Word.” That simple translation is accurate; however, it does not quite communicate the revelation John was declaring. Literally, the Greek text says, “In the beginning, the Word was being.” Other possible translations include the following: “In the beginning, the Word existed,” or even, “In the beginning, the Word already was.” John’s point was that the Son existed before anything else did. The Son was not merely there at the beginning; he was there before the beginning began.

In the book of Revelation, the Son referred to his pre-existence with the Father when he said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13). He also told us what he was the beginning of, when he called himself “the beginning of the creation of God” (Rev. 3:14). In other words, the Son was “the first and the last, the beginning and the end” of the Father’s creative work, which means that the Father created the Son, and then the Son created everything else, just as John said: “All things were created through him, and without him was nothing created that was created” (Jn. 1:3).

The following scriptures, written by New Testament men of God, proclaimed the astonishing and thrilling revelation that from the beginning, there had been a Son in heaven with God, a Son who had been God’s agent in creating all things:

Colossians 1

15. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature,

16. for by him were all things created, things in the heavens and things on earth, things visible and things invisible; whether thrones, or dominions, or rulers, or authorities, all things were created through him and for him,

17. and he is before all things, and all things are held together by him.

Hebrews 1

1. After God spoke in many and various ways to the fathers in olden times by the prophets, He spoke to us in these last days by a Son,

2. whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds.

Hebrews 1 (quoting Pss. 45:6–7 and 102:25)

8. To the Son, God said, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness.

9. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore, God, even your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your fellows.”

10. And [still to the Son], “You, Lord, in the beginning, laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands.”

Throughout the New Testament, we are alerted when a writer’s meaning differs from what he appears to be saying (e.g., Mt. 24:15; 1Cor. 10:15; Gal. 4:24), but never did a New Testament writer alert his readers that he was speaking figuratively when he declared the Son’s pre-existence and creative work. They all spoke consistently of the Son as living with the Father from before the foundation of the world. Not once does any biblical writer veer from that simple, clear course. All of them would have agreed wholeheartedly with what John meant when he wrote, “In the beginning, the Word was there.”

“Us”

The Father and the Son are the “us” of Genesis 1:26, as well as of Genesis 3:22 and 11:7. In Genesis 1:26, when God said, “Let us make mankind in our image”, He was not speaking to angels. To create is not a function of angels; they are messengers only, as is indicated by the fact that in both Hebrew and Greek, the word for “angel” means “messenger”. Sometimes, “angel” refers to heavenly messengers, such as the messengers Jacob saw in a vision (Gen. 28:12) or Gabriel, who spoke to Daniel, Zacharias, and Mary (Dan. 8:16; 9:21; Lk. 1:19, 26–27). But “angel” can also refer to human messengers, such as the servants Jacob sent to meet Esau (Gen. 32:3), or the two messengers whom John the Baptizer sent to Jesus (Lk. 7:19, 24), or even John the Baptizer himself (Mt. 11:10; cf. Mal. 3:1a). Whether heavenly or earthly, then, angels are just messengers, and they are never said to have participated to any degree in the act of creation. The notion that it was to angels that God said “Let us make mankind” ^[2] is simply indefensible.

To create what God wanted created was the Son’s function in creation. When the Father said, “Let us make mankind”, He was speaking to His Son, who then created man according to God’s expressed will. God had said, “Let us make”, and so, the Son made.

Where He Was Before

While on earth, the Son of God spoke openly about having been with the Father in glory before he came to live among us:

John 16

28. I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father.

John 6

61. Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Does this offend you?

62. Then, what if you see the Son of man ascending to where he was before?”

Strict logic would lead us to conclude that if in the beginning, the Son was merely “the first creative thought in the mind of God,”^[3] then for him to “ascend to where he was before” would mean that when the Son ascended back to heaven, he returned into his Father’s head! That is an absurd conclusion, of course, and nobody teaches such a thing. However, it is a conclusion which logic demands if the Son was only a thought in the mind of God before he came to earth.

Before returning to the Father, the Son prayed that He would restore to him the glory that he had before the world began: “Jesus lifted his eyes toward heaven and said, ‘Father, glorify me to be at your side, with the glory I used to have with you before the universe existed’” (Jn. 17:1a, 5). Before this universe existed, the Son lived in happy, open glory with the Father (Prov. 8:22–31); it was only when rational beings were created that God hid him. The Son prayed for the glory he used to have because he knew it was time for him not to be hidden any longer; however, if the Son had not lived in open glory previously, then this prayer to do so again would make no sense.

Sent From

During the time of the Old Testament kings, God sent Amos from a Judean village called Tekoah to the idolatrous sanctuary at Bethel to prophesy against the apostate northern tribes (Amos 1:1; 7:15). But the thing that made it possible for Amos to be sent from Tekoah was that he existed in Tekoah before he was sent. At another time, God sent Elijah from Gilgal to Bethel (2Kgs. 2:2), and again, it was possible for Elijah to be sent from Gilgal only because Elijah existed in Gilgal before God sent him. Neither Amos nor Elijah came into existence when they arrived in Bethel. So it was with the Son. He did not come into existence when he arrived on earth. He existed in heaven before he was sent to earth, and that made it possible for him to be sent from heaven.

Dozens of times in the gospel of John alone, the Son of God testified that God had sent him from heaven, and even more specifically, that he had been sent down from heaven (e.g., Jn. 6:41). Nothing like that was ever said about any man sent by God, and no other man of God ever spoke of himself as being sent down from heaven the way Jesus did. Nor did any man of God, when his time came to die, claim that after his death he would be returning to heaven, where he was before. No man had such a testimony because no man had ever lived in heaven with the Father before the Father sent him. But the Son did. And one reason the Son was able to reveal the Father as no one else ever could (Jn. 1:18) is that prior to coming to earth, he had been with the Father since before the foundation of the world.

Why the Son Is the Greatest

When John the Baptizer prophesied to the Jews that someone mightier than he was coming, he was speaking by the unction of the Spirit of God. He could not have known the meaning of his own words when he first saw Jesus and proclaimed, “Behold! The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn. 1:29). John had no knowledge of the Son of God, much less of the Son’s future crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension into heaven to make an eternal sacrifice for the sins of the entire human race. Nor did John understand the prophetic words that came from his own lips when he said, “After me comes the one who is greater than I, for he was before I was” (Jn. 1:15, 30).

In saying, “He was before I was,” John could not have been speaking of Mary’s son, for John was born about six months before Mary bore Jesus (Lk. 1:26–36). So, if John had been speaking of physical age, John would have said, “I was before he was,” but because God’s Son existed first, the Spirit moved John to say the opposite. Like all the prophets who spoke of the Son before he came (1Pet. 1:10–12), John did not understand what he said; even seeing Jesus face to face did not reveal to John the meaning of his words. The truth would be revealed only by the Spirit when it came (Jn. 16:13), and the Spirit was not yet given (Jn. 7:39).

The central revelation of the New Testament is that God really is a Father and that He was a Father before the world began. This means that God had a Son a long, long time before Mary did. It also means that the Son is “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36) because he existed before everything and everybody (except, of course, the Father who created him). John had it right. The Messiah is the greatest of all creatures because he was the first of all creatures. Those who teach that God had a Son only when Mary gave birth to Jesus will admit that Satan existed before Jesus was born. That being so, and if John the Baptizer’s standard for preeminence holds true (that is, whoever exists first is greater), then Satan would have to be considered greater than the Son of God, which is obviously not the case.

After the Spirit came, other men of God would proclaim that the Son is greatest of all because he existed before all, but unlike John and the old prophets, these men understood what they were saying. They wittingly taught what the prophets had ignorantly proclaimed:

Colossians 1

17. He is before all things, and all things are held together by him.

18. He is also the head of the body, the Assembly of God; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that in everything, he might be preeminent.

Why the Son Is Not the Greatest

As has been mentioned, the Son of God declared himself to be the first of all that God created: “To the messenger of the Assembly in Laodicea, write: ‘The Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God, says these things’ ” (Rev. 3:14).

With that declaration, we are offered two of the bedrock truths of the New Testament. The first is that the Son of God was the first thing created. The second is that the Father is greater than the Son because He existed before the Son did. Both the Oneness and the Trinity doctrines contradict these truths. The former claims that the Father and the Son are one and the same being, and the latter makes a similar claim, that the Father and His Son are co-equal and co-eternal. But Jesus knew nothing of such doctrines. He said that his life had been given to him by the Father (Jn. 5:26), and he also said that the Father was greater than he (Jn. 14:28). The gospel preached by the apostles took both those facts for granted.

Paul saw no problem in the Son bowing before the Father – something impossible for the Son to do if he were the same person as the Father, and illogical for the Son to do if he were his Father’s equal:

1Corinthians 15 (referring to Ps. 8:6)

27. He [the Father] has subdued all things under his [the Son’s] feet, but when it says, “all things are subdued”, it is obvious that He who subdued all things under him is an exception.

28. And when all things are subdued under him, then will the Son himself submit to Him who subdued all things under him, that God might be all in all.

When the Son said, “The Father and I are one”^[4] (Jn. 10:30), he did not mean that he and the Father are the same person; he meant that they are in such spiritual harmony that nobody can have one without the other. This is made obvious when Jesus prayed that those who believe in him might be one as he and the Father are one (Jn. 17:22). Obviously, we who believe cannot become the same person, but we can be one in spirit. We can be, as are the Father and Son, “like-minded” (2Cor. 13:11), “perfectly united”, “speaking the same thing”, with “no divisions” among us (1Cor. 1:10), “thinking the same thing” and “having the same love” for one another (Phip. 2:2).

“Why Call Me Good?”

The unity of the Father and the Son does not imply equality of the Father and the Son any more than the unity of believers and Christ implies equality of believers with Christ. Christ is greater than believers, and the Father is greater than the Son. And because the Father is greater than the Son (Jn. 14:28), the Son feared and obeyed the Father (Heb. 5:7; Jn. 15:10). Jesus has been given “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Mt. 28:18), but the Father, who gave it to him, remains the one true God to whom the Son bows. When Hebrews says that the Son is the one “through whom He made the worlds” (Heb. 1:2), the “He” in that verse is the Father. The Son was God’s agent in creation, but the Father is the Creator, as Jesus himself said (Mk. 10:6; 13:19).^[5]

When a certain young man excitedly greeted Jesus with the words “Good teacher!” Jesus replied, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except One, that is, God” (Mt. 19:17). Jesus trusted in the righteousness of God alone and put no confidence in human righteousness, including his own. Though the Son is the greatest of all creatures and Lord over all creation, he considers himself to be but a servant of the Father (Isa. 49:4–5), and that is in accord with the Father’s frequent reference to the Son as His servant (e.g., Isa. 42:1; 49:1–3, 6). When the Son came to live among us, he still possessed the power with which he was created; at his word, raging storms instantly became calm (Mk. 4:37–39) and the dead were brought back to life (e.g., Jn. 11:43–44). But the Son dignified his majesty and power by being faithful to the One who gave him majesty and power. He loved and reverenced his Father, and he always did what pleased Him (Heb. 5:7; Jn. 8:29), completely without sin (Heb. 4:15).

At the same time, the Son keenly felt the foolishness and sinfulness of the fleshly nature he had taken on. Psalm 69 is quoted twice in the New Testament as a prophecy of the sinless Son of God (Jn. 2:17; Rom. 15:3); and yet, within that psalm, we hear the Son crying out, “O God, you know my foolishness, and my offenses are not hidden from you” (Ps. 69:5). We would not expect such a confession from the holy Son of God because we know that he was not foolish and that he “committed no sin” (1Pet. 2:22). But part of the Son’s becoming one of us is that he experienced the shame of the foolishness and sinfulness of our fallen nature.

The same kind of confession from the sinless Lamb of God is found in Psalm 41. At the Last Supper, the Son quoted what he had spoken through David in that psalm a thousand years before, explaining that it was a prophecy of his betrayal (Jn. 13:18b; Ps. 41:9). Yet, in verse 4 of the same psalm, we hear the Son pleading with God, “O Lord, have mercy on me! Heal my soul, for I have sinned against you!”

Our natural response to this is to ask, “How could this prayer have belonged to the sinless Son of God?” The only reasonable answer is that the Son of God really did become one of us. He really did take on the corrupt nature of man, and he really was “tempted in every way that we are” (Heb. 4:15). He really felt the desperate sinfulness of the fleshly nature that he took on, and he earnestly prayed for deliverance from its power. For the Son to feel the shame of our sinfulness and to cry out to God for mercy was only a consequence of his taking on himself a fleshly body with its desperately sinful nature. In sum, when God’s Son, “who knew no sin, was made sin for us” (2Cor. 5:21), the awful feelings of guilt and shame came with it.

His Own Thoughts in Heaven

The verses below, from Hebrews 2, reveal thoughts, words, and deeds that belonged to the Son before he came to earth. They show that the Word who was with God in the beginning was a thinking, feeling, speaking being who loved both his Father and us and who desired to heal the breach between us and his Father which our sins had caused, regardless of what it cost him personally. The author, quoting Old Testament scriptures, tells us that the Son, while still in heaven, thought on us with great affection and spoke of us to the Father:

Hebrews 2

11. Both he [the Son] who sanctifies and those who are sanctified [those who believe in the Son] are all of One [the Father], for which reason, he [the Son] is not ashamed to call them brothers,

12. saying [in Psalm 22:22], “I [the Son] will declare your [the Father’s] name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation will I sing you praise.”

13b. And again [in Isaiah 8:18], “Behold, I and the children whom God has given me!”

The indispensable basis of the scriptures quoted here is that the Son was alive in heaven with the Father, with his own feelings and thoughts, before he took on a human body. In verses 12 and 13, above, the Son is the speaker, and his words communicate no embarrassment at the thought of one day having us as brothers and sisters because we all would be sanctified by the same Father (Jn. 10:36; Jude 1:1). Clearly, the Son in heaven was looking forward to that day – this day! – when others would be children of God with him.

The Son and His Earthly Temple

In Hebrews 10:5, the man of God wrote, “When coming into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifice and offering have not pleased you, but a body you have prepared for me.’” This verse shows us that when the Son of God came into the world, he was aware that the Father had prepared an earthly body for him. That body became the “temple” in which the Son lived from the time he came to earth until that temple was crucified. Then, when his temple died, the Son, still very much alive, left it for a few days to go to the heart of the earth to preach to the spirits imprisoned there (Mt. 12:40; 1Pet. 3:19). Three days later, he ascended from the heart of the earth, re-entered his crucified temple, and walked out of the tomb, just as he had said he would do:

John 2

19. Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll raise it up.”

20. Then said the Jews, “For forty-six years was this temple under construction, and you will raise it up in three days?”

21. But he was talking about the temple of his body.

The following prophecy, quoted in the book of Hebrews, shows that as he was coming into the world, the Son was talking to the Father. This tells us that when the Son was leaving heaven, he was aware of what was taking place; otherwise, he could not have been talking to his Father about it. And not only was the Son aware of what he was doing, but he was also committed to his Father’s purpose for doing it:

Hebrews 10 (cf. Ps. 40:6–8a)

5. When coming into the world, he said, “Sacrifice and offering have not pleased you, but a body you have prepared for me.

6. In whole burnt offerings and such for sin, you have taken no pleasure.

7. Then I said, ‘Behold, I go (in a roll of a book it is written of me) to do your will, O God!’ ”

Since the Son was speaking of his purpose for leaving one place and going to another as it was happening, it is obvious that when he came to earth, he had full knowledge of where he had come from and where he was going. Just the fact that the Son knew anything at that moment tells us something significant about him, for if when he came, the Son knew that he was coming, and if when he came, he knew his Father’s purpose for sending him, then when he came, he was already a living being with a mind of his own. And if he had a mind, then he was much more than a mere thought within the mind of God.

In the prophecy from Psalm 40, just quoted by the author of Hebrews, the Son added this: “I delight to do your will, O my God, for your law is in my heart” (Ps. 40:8). So, as he was entering into the world, the Son was joyfully determined to do the Father’s will because love for God’s law was already in his heart. And if that simple statement is true, then the Son already had a heart as well as a mind when he left heaven; otherwise, there would have been no heart in the Son into which God could have put that love for His law.

Love for the Father and doing His will consumed the Son when he was on his way to earth because it had always consumed him, and it continued to consume him after he came to earth (Ps. 69:9a; fulfilled in Jn. 2:13–17). There has never been a moment when the Son was lukewarm about pleasing the Father. To do the Father’s will was so important to the Son that he considered it essential to his life, just as food is essential to human life:

John 4

31b. His disciples kept asking him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”

32. But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you don’t know about.”

33. At this, the disciples began saying to one another, “Has anybody brought him something to eat?”

34. Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work.”

To do the will of the Father was the Son’s entire purpose for coming to earth. He spoke of it when he was leaving heaven, and he spoke of it repeatedly while he was here, warning his followers that the only people he considered to be his family are those who do the will of God as he did (Mt. 12:48–50). The Son absolutely loved his Father and was absolutely devoted to Him before, during, and after he came to earth.

The Father Spoke, Too

The love that the Father feels for the Son and that the Son feels for the Father is profound. John’s famous statement “God is love” (1Jn. 4:8, 16) sprang from the revelation that the first thing the Father created was someone to love. We can see how very much the Father and the Son enjoy each other’s company in such verses as Proverbs 8:30, where the Son describes their life together before the world began: “I was at His side, like a master workman, daily His great delight, always laughing in His presence.” And that being the case, it must have grieved the Father deeply to send His Son away from Him.

When the Son left his happy home in glory to come to this cruel world to suffer and die, his devotion to the Father was revealed in his parting words: “I go to do your will, O God!” But the deep emotions which filled the Father’s heart were revealed when He responded with parting words of His own. Both Mark and Luke tell us that at that painful moment, “a voice from heaven came, saying, ‘You are my beloved Son; in you, I am well pleased’ ” (Lk. 3:22b). The story of the gospel is a story of love, not just God’s love for fallen man but also, and primarily, the deep, abiding love that exists between God and His Son.

We should also note that the Father speaking to the Son when he left heaven shows us that the Son was a fully conscious being when he came into the world; had he not been, the Father would not have been talking to him. Surely, when the Father said, “You are my beloved Son,” He was speaking to someone who was really there, someone whom He dearly loved, not just to a good idea that was in His head. Otherwise, He would only have been talking to Himself.

“Suddenly”

Malachi prophesied of the day the Son would come from heaven and enter into the temple which the Father had prepared for him. He said, “The Lord whom you seek [the Son] shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant whom you desire. Behold, he is coming, says Jehovah of Hosts” (Mal. 3:1b).

Inasmuch as Malachi said that when the Messiah came to his earthly temple, he would come suddenly, the virgin Mary could not have been the temple that God prepared for His Son. It took about nine months for the baby Jesus to be formed within Mary, and no one would call that sudden – least of all Mary. If, however, the Son of God suddenly came from heaven (in the form of a dove) and entered his temple when the son of Mary was baptized in the Jordan River, then “Jesus” is the name of the earthly temple that the Father had prepared for His Son. All four gospels record the moment:

Matthew 3 (cf. Mk. 1:9–11; Lk. 3:21–22; Jn. 1:32–33)

16. And after he was baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God, in the form of a dove, descending and coming upon him.

Found as a Man

The difference between the pre-baptism Jesus and the post-baptism Jesus was extraordinary, and it was extraordinary because the extraordinary Son of God now occupied the ordinary human temple that Mary had borne for God. The Son had transferred his life out of his heavenly body into the earthly body that his Father had prepared for him! Paul described this event as the Son “emptying himself ”, or “divesting himself ”,^[6] and taking on a human body:

Philippians 2

6. [The Son,] existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped after.

7. Instead, he emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, made in the likeness of men.

8. And being found as a man in appearance, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death – the death of a cross.

That last verse emphasizes the fact that once the Son had come into the world, he was “found as a man”; he was not found as a fertilized egg in Mary’s womb. The child that Mary bore was created in her womb by God, and so, Jesus was physically God’s son. But the Son of God through whom God “made the worlds” did not spend nine months as a fetus in Mary’s womb. He created Mary, not vice-versa.

Paul refers to Christ as a second Adam (1Cor. 15:45–47). One reason that analogy is appropriate is that the Son of God began his life on earth as a fully formed man, just as the first Adam did, and he began his earthly life when he took upon himself the fully grown, earthly body of a man – Jesus.

Taking Us On

Hebrews 2

14. Inasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he likewise partook of these, so that by means of death, he might destroy the one who held the power of death, that is, the Accuser^[7],

15. and set free those who through fear of death were subject to bondage their whole lives.

16. (For he certainly did not take on himself the form of angels, but took that of the seed of Abraham.)

Now, if the Son of God took on man’s nature, then on what did he take it? There can be no answer to that question if God had no Son before Mary did. If the Son did not exist until Mary conceived and bore her child, then the Son could not have “taken on” man’s nature because people who don’t exist can’t take on anything. But Hebrews 2:16, above, tells us that the Son of God took the nature of man on himself, which means that the Son had a “himself ” on which to take the nature of man, which, in turn, tells us that the Son of God was himself before he was a man.

The hidden Son of God could not die for our sins in heaven because up there, he was living in the incorruptible spiritual body given to him by his Father when He created him. He had to come down and take on a mortal human body in order to “taste of death” for us (Heb. 2:9). The Son of God was created immortal, like his Father (cf. Heb. 7:3). He was also created as the “King of righteousness” (Heb. 7:2), and “in the way of righteousness is life; yea, in that pathway there is no death” (Prov. 12:28). To die, he had to come live as a man on earth.

“He Is with Me”

More happened at the Jordan River than the Son coming as a dove to his temple, for as we are told several times, the Son was in the Father, and the Father was in him (Jn. 10:38; Jn. 14:10–11; 17:21a). Therefore, when the Son came, the Father came with him, in spirit. Near the end of his earthly life, the Son told the disciples that the Spirit was with them but would soon be in them (Jn. 14:17), and he promised that when that happened, both he and the Father would dwell within them, too: “If anyone loves me, he’ll obey my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn. 14:23). This precious promise, that the Father and the Son would come dwell within believers, is the thing that moved Jesus to pray his earnest prayer that the Father would bless all those who believed in him with the same sweet unity that he and his Father had always known:

John 17

20. I am not asking for these alone, but also for those who believe in me through their word,

21. that they all might be one,^[8] just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be one in us, so that the world might believe that you sent me.

22. And the glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they might be one, just as we are one:

23a. I in them, and you in me, so that they might be perfected in unity.

Jesus’ prayer began to be answered when the disciples received the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. From that day on, the disciples dwelt in the Father and in the Son, spiritually speaking, and the Father and the Son dwelt in them.

The holy Spirit is the Father, minus His celestial body. It is also the Son, minus his celestial body, for the Spirit is the Father’s life, which He shared with His Son. When Jesus said, “He who sent me is with me” (Jn. 8:29), the people probably looked around to try to find the man who sent him. But Jesus was referring to the Father who was living, by the Spirit, within him, and at that time, no one could understand what he meant because no one but Jesus knew what it meant to have God living within.

Jesus’ declaration of the Father being in him and he in the Father was neither a Trinitarian nor a Oneness confession. The Father is in His Son because He shared His life with the Son, and the Son is in the Father because he shares his Father’s life. It is the same with all who believe in Jesus and receive the Father’s kind of life; He is in them, and they are in Him. It was Jesus’ greatest desire, indeed, his very purpose for suffering and dying, to make it possible for him and his Father to dwell within those who believe, and for those who believe to be in him and his Father. Jesus promised his wondering disciples that when that glorious day came, they would no longer be in the dark about what he was saying: “On that day, you will know for yourselves that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (Jn. 14:20).

These were mysterious words, to be sure, impossible for the disciples to comprehend at the time they were spoken. However, after the Spirit came, they began to understand what it meant to be “in Christ” and for Christ to be in them.

The People’s Confusion: Two Sons

Everyone who was acquainted with Mary’s son knew where he came from:

Matthew 13

54. When he came to his hometown, he taught them in their synagogue, and they were astonished and said, “Where’d he get this wisdom and miracles?

55. Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary, and his brothers, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?

56. And his sisters, aren’t they all with us? So, where’d he get all these things?”

The Jews of Jesus’ time had been taught that when the Messiah appeared, no one would know where he came from, and since they knew where Mary’s son came from, they were certain that Jesus could not be the Messiah: “We know where this man’s from, but when the Messiah comes, nobody will know where he’s from” (Jn. 7:27). And in the very next verse, the Son of God admitted to the people that they knew where his temple came from: “You know me, and you also know where I am from ” (Jn. 7:28a). However, everyone became confused when God’s Son spoke of his homeland, where he had lived from the beginning with the Father:

John 6

32. Jesus therefore said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, Moses did not give you that bread from heaven, but my Father is giving you the true bread from heaven.

33. For the bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

34. Then they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

35a. Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life.”

. . . .

41. Then the Jews started grumbling about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

42. And they kept saying, “Isn’t this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? So, how does he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

Every time the Son spoke of coming from God in heaven instead of from Mary in Nazareth, his words provoked turmoil:

John 7

28b. “I have not come on my own, but the One who sent me is true; Him you do not know.

29. I know Him because I am from Him, and He sent me.”

30a. Then they tried to seize him.

It is little wonder that even Jesus’ relatives thought he had gone insane: “And when his kinsmen heard of it, they came out to take him, for they were saying, ‘He’s lost his mind’” (Mk. 3:21).

Persecution notwithstanding, the Son of God never stopped testifying that he came from heaven instead of from Nazareth and from God instead of from Mary, which completely bewildered those who had heard him say previously, “You know me, and you also know where I am from”:

John 8

14b. Jesus answered them and said, . . . “You do not know where I come from or where I am going.

. . . .

17. Even in your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true.

18. I am one who bears witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me.”

19. Then they began to say to him, “Where is your father?” Jesus answered, “You do not know me or my Father; if you had known me, you would have known my Father, too.”

So, according to Jesus’ own words, the people knew him and his Father, and they did not know him and his Father; and they knew where he came from, and they did not know where he came from. So, what can we say about this, except that the people were confused and that they were not confused? They knew what they thought, but what they thought they knew was right only when speaking of Mary’s son. Of God’s Son, they knew nothing.

Jesus understood their predicament. And he loved them.

Chapter 2

God’s Kind of Life

“. . . having their understanding darkened, being aliens to the life of God.”
Ephesians 4:18

Section 1: Alienated

Kinds of Life

God’s Spirit is God’s life (Rom. 8:10), just as your spirit is your life (Jas. 2:26), but God is not a big one of us. His kind of life is completely different from and infinitely superior to our human kind of life, and to all others as well. God is so wise and so powerful that in creation, He not only conceived of different kinds of life, but He was able also to bring those different life forms into existence. It is clear, even to children, that the kind of life God created in plants differs from the kind of life God created in animals. He also created heavenly beings with their own kind of life, and lastly, He created us humans with our kind of life, which though a little inferior to that of angels (Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:7, 9), is very much superior to plants and animals (Gen. 1:26, 29). It may be true that humans were originally created to live forever, like the angels, but even so, neither humans nor angels were created with God’s kind of life. Therefore, even if in the beginning, men and angels^[9] were created to live forever, it was not given to them to live forever with God’s kind of life, but with their own.

Plants can vary widely in physical appearance and other attributes; still, they all share the kind of life that makes them plants. Thus it is with the animal kingdom. Whether land animals, sea creatures, or birds that navigate the sky, all animals share the kind of life which makes them animals instead of plants, humans, or angels. Notwithstanding physical differences which may exist among plants, animals, humans, and angels, the kind of life which God created in each group is unique to that group.

With each kind of life comes its own kind of knowledge. A plant can draw nutrients out of the soil because of its “knowledge” of what is useful for food. Admittedly, that kind of knowledge hardly qualifies as knowledge at all; nevertheless, though plants do not make conscious choices, their selective drawing of nutrients out of the soil requires a kind of knowing, even if it is one of the lowest kinds of knowing in creation. Animal life is superior to plant life, and in that superior kind of life is a superior kind of knowledge. While plants are not conscious of animals, animals are very much aware of plants. Plant-eating animals possess knowledge from their Creator which enables them to recognize one plant from another and to discern what is edible, as well as where and when those plants grow. And while plants have no awareness of humans, animals are in some cases aware enough of humans to form relationships with them.

As for us humans, the kind of life with which God created us makes it possible for us to observe and study plants and animals, nurture them, and even train them. Likewise, angels, created with a kind of life superior to human life (cf. Ps. 8:5), have knowledge that is superior to human knowledge. They are more aware of us than we are of them, just as we are more aware of plants and animals than they are of us.

Let us suppose that you are a blade of grass growing in a cow pasture. Grass neither thinks nor sees, of course, but just imagine that you, as a blade of grass, saw a herd of hungry cows coming your way. If you and your fellow blades of grass could reason, you would all agree that it would not be right for grass to be eaten. You would probably even pass laws against eating grass. But cows have a completely different and higher standard for determining right conduct, and they would not even acknowledge grass law. Unlike grass, cows can see and think, and when they see grass, they rightly think “food”, for they were created to eat grass, and in spite of any laws which grasses might pass against eating grass, it would not be “unrighteous” for cows to eat it.

Of course, if cows were capable of our kind of reasoning, they would outlaw the eating of cows, just as grasses would outlaw the eating of grass; they, too, would outlaw the slaughter of their own kind. But humans, with our superior kind of life, would not acknowledge such cow laws any more than cows would acknowledge grass laws. We were created with a superior understanding of proper conduct which allows us to plant, nurture, harvest, and consume plants, as well as to breed, care for, slaughter, and eat animals – all in perfect innocence before God.^[10]

Continuing up the ladder of the kinds of life that God created, angels, being created with a kind of life superior to human life, are not governed by human laws any more than humans are governed by animal or plant laws (if there were such things). Human laws against killing humans apply only to humans; such laws mean nothing to angels. Angels have killed many thousands of humans (e.g., 2Kgs. 19:35) yet have remained guiltless before God. Angels can fly (e.g., Rev. 8:13; 14:6); angels are invisible to us, but can appear (Judg. 6:12; 13:3); and, remarkably, angels can leave their bodies and enter into the bodies of lower creatures at will (e.g., 1Kgs. 22:22–23), though for them to do so is evil.^[11]

God’s life is, of course, the highest form of life, and in it are the highest forms of knowledge and righteousness. God is not subject to any law devised by any of His creatures, and He is much more aware of His creatures than any of His creatures are aware of Him. He can, in perfect righteousness, sustain or destroy plants, animals, humans, angels, or any other of His creatures, as He will. His knowledge is infinitely superior to all other kinds of knowledge, and no creature can judge His actions. He is perfect in righteousness and knowledge, regardless of what any of His creatures think is right or wrong.

Before the Son came to earth, he and the Father knew us, but we did not know them. They had powers and knowledge we never dreamed of. We were at least as ignorant of God’s kind of life as animals are of ours. Animals were created with the capacity to understand things pertaining to animals; humans were created with the capacity to understand things pertaining to humans; angels were created with the capacity to understand the things of angels. The Son alone was created with the capacity to understand the things of God (Lk. 10:22). With our kind of life, we humans could not think God’s thoughts or feel God’s feelings. Just as it is now with plants in regard to us, before the Son came, we did not know that we did not know. Mercifully, God let us know what we were missing:

Isaiah 55

8. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways,” says Jehovah.

9. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

When God said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways,” He was speaking to man. The angels, though to a lesser extent, could have said the same thing to man, and man can say it to animals, and animals can say it to plants. That is the order God has established throughout creation, and it cannot be abrogated.

All creatures except the Son were “aliens to the life of God” (Eph. 4:18). When the Son of God came and walked among us, he said that he had come to earth so that we humans “might have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10). We were already alive, but we were alive with our kind of life; we were aliens to the life of God. Moreover, our kind of life was under the curse of death (Gen. 3:17–19; Heb. 9:27). But even if human life had not been cursed, it would have been pointless for the Son to come and give us more of the kind of life we already had. No amount of human life could make us holy or give us the knowledge of God – no, not a billion years of it. Indeed, no amount of any kind of life except God’s can make us His children (Rom. 8:9b) or enable us to understand Him (1Cor. 2:14). With their own kind of life, no plant, animal, human, or angel will ever know God (1Pet. 1:12), not even if they live forever.

The Father’s eternal life is perfectly holy and had no beginning. Being created with that kind of life made the Son infinitely greater than the angels (Heb. 1:4), but to him, it is everlasting life instead of eternal life because with him, it had a beginning, and that beginning was when the Father created the Son with His kind of life. The Son spoke of this when he was here among us: “Just as the Father has life in Himself, so He has also given to the Son to have life in himself” (Jn. 5:26).

Likewise for us, the beginning of everlasting life is when the Father gives us His eternal kind of life, as He gave it to the Son when He created him. As with the Son, that life is everlasting to us because with us, too, it had a beginning.

The Light of God’s Life

The knowledge of God can be possessed only by those who possess God’s kind of life, and the Father’s purpose for sending His Son from heaven was to pay the price to make God’s kind of life available to us – not to plants, animals, or angels – so that we might know God and partake of the fellowship that He and His Son have always enjoyed. We cannot understand God without a miracle of communication from heaven, and Jesus said that those who follow him would experience that miracle when they were enlightened with God’s life: “Jesus again spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of [God’s] life’ ” (Jn. 8:12).

How honored we are that God loved us! It is humbling to consider that of all the creatures God created, He chose to give us His life and to show us His ways: “Unto you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the children of Adam” (Prov. 8:4).

God set His love on us! John confessed, “We love Him because He first loved us” (1Jn. 4:19) because John understood that the only reason any of us love God is that God loved us first and revealed Himself to us. Love is God’s idea, and He sent His Son to show us that. This is the beauty and the glory of the gospel, that we mortals can now, with the Son, share in the Father’s perfectly holy kind of life and know His thoughts, His kind of love, His kind of righteousness, and walk in His ways. That is why Jesus came.

Natural Men

Because of Jesus, we may now be filled with the kind of life we once knew nothing about but that knew everything about us. Paul explained this to the saints in Corinth:

1Corinthians 2

11. Who among men knows the things of man except the spirit [the life] of man that is in him? Likewise, no one knows the things of God, except the Spirit [the life] of God.

12. Now, we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we might know the things freely given to us by God.

13. These things we also speak, not with words taught by human wisdom, but with those taught by the holy Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people.

14. A natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot comprehend them because they are spiritually discerned.

From creation to Pentecost, everyone, including the ancient prophets, were “natural men”, and the hidden things of God would have seemed foolish to them all, even if someone had been able to teach such things. But nobody could teach the hidden things of God because nobody knew about them. The prophets spoke the things of God, and those who heard them heard the things of God; however, neither the prophets nor those who heard them had the kind of life that would have enabled them to understand what the Spirit was talking about (1Pet. 1:10–12).

“Natural men” are proud by nature, and although they are completely ignorant of God, some of them unwisely speak as authorities on what God will or will not do. One such man, an erudite professor of the New Testament, told us seminarians that God would never kill an innocent child. He did not explain why the Bible plainly states the contrary, one example being the child born of David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba:

2Samuel 12

13. David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against Jehovah!” And Nathan said to David, “Jehovah has put away your sin; you shall not die.

14. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of Jehovah to blaspheme, the son that is born to you shall surely die.”

15. And Nathan went to his house. And Jehovah struck the boy that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it was very sick.

. . . .

18a. And it came to pass on the seventh day that the child died.

God’s ways and thoughts are far beyond what we can understand with our kind of life. If we succumb to our natural tendency to judge all things according to our own understanding, we may find ourselves deciding, as my seminary professor did, what God will or will not do, and we are warned not to do that (Prov. 3:5). God does “all things according to the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11), not according to how His creatures think He ought to do them. Faith in God creates in our hearts the understanding that God is good and right, no matter what He does, and no matter what we think. He was good when He cursed Adam and Eve with death; He was good when He destroyed the earth with a flood; He was good when He sent foreign armies against Israel to take His people into captivity; and He was good when He sent His precious, hidden Son to this wicked world to be abused and crucified. Humans are the ones lacking in goodness, and nothing in our makeup as human qualifies us to judge anything our Creator does. Without God’s kind of life, we are all – even the very best of us – just “natural men”.

The Body and Nature

A creature’s body determines the nature of the creature.^[12] This is true throughout creation, in both heaven and earth. A creature with animal life that has the body of a fish has the nature of a fish. It behaves as a fish, and it can only do what a fish with that kind of body can do. If you had the body of a fish, you would be a fish; you would think and act like a fish, and you could do nothing else. Paul touched on this issue when he categorized God’s creatures, including even inanimate heavenly objects, on the basis of the kinds of bodies they possessed:

1Corinthians 15

39. Not all flesh [the body] is the same flesh; there is one kind for humans, another flesh for land animals, another for fish, and another for birds.

40. There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one sort, and that of the earthly, another.

41. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.

It is unnatural for creatures to behave contrary to the kind of bodies they possess. Paul taught that if people behave contrary to the nature belonging to their body, they not only dishonor the Creator, but they also dishonor the body that the Creator gave them (Rom. 1:24–27). Nevertheless, some of the most celebrated men in history, aware that spirits could possess their bodies with super-natural powers, prayed to be possessed by spirits foreign to their bodies so that they could do things beyond human ability – spirits they themselves called demons.

In the ancient world, the word “demon” had no intrinsically evil connotation,^[13] and poets such as Homer and Virgil began their epic poems with a prayer for demons to possess them and give them superhuman knowledge and eloquence so that they could tell their tales convincingly.^[14] In ancient Philippi, for another example, the owners of a demon possessed slave girl felt blessed that she was possessed by a demon because the supernatural knowledge which the demon revealed through her brought them much gain. When Paul cast the demon out of the child, the citizens of Philippi were outraged, and city officials had Paul and Silas flogged and thrown into prison because of it (Acts 16:16–23).

The most remarkable case in the Old Testament of someone’s body having a foreign nature control it is that of King Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel warned the proud king to honor God for the power and glory that he possessed, and the king humbled himself and heeded that warning for about a year. But then one day as Nebuchadnezzar was walking in his magnificent palace, he began again to boast of his power and majesty (Dan. 4:27–30), and while the king’s proud boast was still on his tongue, God’s wrath came upon him and replaced the human kind of life in his body with that of an animal for seven long years:

Daniel 4

31. While the word was in the king’s mouth, a voice fell from heaven: “They have spoken concerning you, O King Nebuchadnezzar. The kingdom is departed from you!

32. They will drive you away from man, and your dwelling will be with the beast of the field. They will feed you grass like oxen, and seven times will pass over you until you know that it is the Most High who rules in the kingdom of man and that He gives it to whomsoever He will.”

33. That very moment, the thing was fulfilled concerning Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven away from man, and he ate grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven until his hair grew long like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.

The body and the nature being mutually inclusive, the change in Nebuchadnezzar’s nature to that of an animal wrought animal-like changes to his human body. And once God restored to Nebuchadnezzar his human nature, the king’s body lost its beastly qualities, and he could once again act according to the nature that belonged to a human body. Then, as Daniel had pleaded with the king to do eight years before, Nebuchadnezzar humbled himself to God: “I, Nebuchadnezzar, now praise and extol and give glory to the King of heaven, all whose works are right, and His ways, just. And those who walk in pride, He is able to abase” (Dan. 4:37).

Corrupted, Not Changed

For God to punish a man by changing his nature is extremely rare. Usually, God’s chastisement comes in milder forms. For example, Adam and Eve’s punishment for corrupting their nature with sin was to be cast out of the garden of Eden, and to labor hard for their sustenance, and eventually to die. That was a severe punishment, but their human nature, corrupted though it was, remained human, and they continued to act and think like humans even as they suffered their punishment.

Before Adam and Eve’s fall, Satan corrupted his nature, too. He was created as an upright, anointed cherub,^[15] “perfect in beauty”.^[16] His nature was corrupted by pride (Ezek. 28:12–15, 17), but not changed; he continued to act and think like a cherub. His perfect beauty also remained unchanged; he still appeared to be the holy creature he had always been. This is why the Son of God called Satan the father of lies (Jn. 8:44). Through Satan, creation was introduced to a creature who was not what he appeared to be, a creature who was a lie, whether he said anything or not. From the moment Satan became proud, God saw him as a hideous creature, but God was the only one to see him that way because to see into hearts is impossible without God’s kind of life.^[17]

When the Son of God came and walked among men, he was able to see men’s hearts as God saw them because he possessed God’s kind of life. And seeing the hearts, Jesus called some men “sons of Satan” because they, like Satan, were not good as they appeared to be:

Matthew 23

27. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear to be so very lovely, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

28. Yes, that is how you are! You outwardly appear very righteous to men, but inwardly, you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

The nature of these men had been corrupted by sin, but it had not been changed. They were still human, but they were evil.

A Good Difference

When we look at a tree, we recognize it as a tree because of its “body”. Likewise, when we see a horse, an ant, or any other creature, we recognize it as being what it is because of the body we see. The body tells us, first, what kind of life is in it and, second, what kind of nature to expect. That is the natural order of things, and whenever a body is taken over by a kind of life foreign to it, an unnatural and bad thing has happened. But God made an exception to that, for even though it was unnatural when the heavenly Son of God entered into the body of Mary’s son at the Jordan River, it was a good thing.^[18] It was, in fact, a very good thing, for it was “God with us” in human form (Isa. 7:14; Mt. 1:23). Jesus’ experience wrought so dramatic a change in him, the son of Mary, that he described it as being “born again”^[19] (Jn. 3:7). King Nebuchadnezzar’s experience, as well as the experience of others whose bodies were possessed by spirits other than their own, was also dramatic, but it was bad.

Because of the Son, God’s kind of life became for us what Jesus, Peter, and Paul called “the gift of God”,^[20] and the giving of that gift to humans in Acts 2 is the watershed experience in human history. The gift of God’s kind of life was the “new thing” that God mysteriously promised through Isaiah (Isa. 43:19), and it is available now to everyone on earth because of the Son’s sacrifice of himself, made before the Father in heaven after his resurrection and ascension (Heb. 10:10).

When Adam and Eve had children, their fallen, sinful nature passed on to their offspring, which is the natural order of life throughout creation. The one thing that parents of every kind pass on to their offspring, in addition to their kind of life, is their kind of body and the nature that goes with it. It is impossible for eagle parents to produce anything but eagles, or for flowers or humans or any other creatures to produce anything but their own kind.

When Jesus was born to Mary, his fleshly body defined him. It defined him first of all as a human being, just as all humans since Adam had been defined. It also defined him as male instead of female. And finally, when his infant body was circumcised, it defined him as a Jew. However, when the Son of God from heaven entered into Jesus’ body, that fleshly, circumcised body no longer defined Jesus. Nor could it. His body was still earthly, but the life of God that was now within it was heavenly.

To everyone on earth and in heaven, it appeared that Jesus was still merely the son of Mary, and that is the basis on which everyone except the Father judged Jesus. That is also how the world looks at all who, like Jesus, are “born of God” (1Jn. 3:9; 5:1). From Pentecost morning until now, whenever a person is born again, his unchanged earthly body gives the impression that he is still merely human, like everybody else on earth, but he is not. He is “a new creature” in Christ Jesus (2Cor. 5:17), a child of God (1Jn. 3:1), and an alien to this world (1Pet. 2:11). And his spirit begins to yearn for the new, eternal body God has promised all His children, so that who they really are may be manifest:

Romans 8

19. The earnest longing of the [new] creature is eagerly awaiting the manifestation of the sons of God.

2Corinthians 5

2. In this house [this body] we groan, longing to be clothed with our home that is from heaven.

Until the day that Jesus returns with our new bodies, we wait patiently and rejoice just to be children of God, even if the world does not recognize us:

1John 3

1. Behold, what great love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God! The reason the world does not know you is that it did not know Him.

2a. Beloved, we are now children of God, but what we shall be is not yet made manifest.

In God’s family, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor freeman, nor male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Like Jesus after the Son of God entered his temple, the earthly bodies of those who are born again no longer reveal anything about them. As long as God’s children are in fleshly bodies, they will appear to the world to be either Jew or Gentile, male or female, old or young, or white, red, black, or yellow, and that is how the world will judge them. But Paul said, “We do not look at things that are seen, but at things that are not seen, for things that are seen are temporal, but things that are not seen are eternal” (2Cor. 4:18). When God shares His kind of life with us, the Spirit’s entrance “circumcises” our hearts from worldly connections which men can see, making us brothers and sisters of Christ, for Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt. 12:50).

The souls of those who possess God’s kind of life have already been delivered from death (Jn. 5:24; 1Jn. 3:14), and the fear of it (Heb. 2:14–15). The salvation Jesus will bring with him when he returns is for the body, not the soul. The new bodies that Jesus will bring to God’s children (1Cor. 15:35–44) are bodies appropriate to their new nature; they are the reward Christ will give to those who are faithful to him in this life (Isa. 40:10; 62:11). Paul spoke of the day Jesus would return to “transform our lowly body into the likeness of his glorious body” (Phip. 3:21), and that glorification of the body is the hope of everyone who has been born again.

Changes Made by God’s Life

Here are several qualities of our heavenly Father that are generated within us by the entrance of His kind of life:

Understanding. It is impossible for humans to think the thoughts of God. However, humans who receive God’s kind of life can think His kind of thoughts. It is true that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him,” but it is also true that “God has revealed them to us by His Spirit” (1Cor. 2:9–10). Nobody knows all that God knows, not even the Son (Mk. 13:32), but that kind of ignorance does not come from sin; it comes from not being God, which is a condition shared equally by all creatures. The entrance of the Spirit empowers a person to view things from God’s perspective and to understand things in ways that humans cannot comprehend on their own.

Righteousness. The new nature created in humans by God’s life includes a kind of righteousness that is different from and infinitely superior to all human righteousness. Human righteousness is doing good according to a set of rules (cf. Dt. 6:25); God’s righteousness is doing good out of a good heart. About half a century ago, my father, “Preacher Clark”, made this perceptive comment in a sermon: “When a person receives the holy Ghost and walks in it, he can do anything in the world he wants to do and thank God for it because the Spirit brings with it God’s nature, and God’s nature only wants what is good.”

God’s kind of righteousness equips men to do as God would do in every situation. It is not a philosophical concept; it is a practical way of living in God’s wisdom and goodness. With God’s life and the new nature it brings, a believer is made holy as God is holy, though still living in this unholy world:

Titus 2

11. For the saving grace of God has appeared to all men,

12. teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, and righteously, and godly in this present world.

Prophetic Insight. Jesus told his disciples that when God gave them His life, it would show them things to come (Jn. 16:13). This is one reason the Spirit we receive from God is called the Spirit of prophecy (Rev. 19:10). Now that the Spirit has come, we have been made like God in the sense that we are given godlike insight into the future. We know how the world will end, even if we do not yet know when. (While here among us, the Son said that he did not know when, either – Mark 13:32.) And knowing how the world will end, we can follow events that transpire among nations with an understanding that even the wisest rulers of this world do not possess.

Righteous Judgment. “The entrance of your words gives light,” said the psalmist (Ps. 119:130), and when the Spirit makes the law of God part of our heart (Heb. 8:8–11), it circumcises us from earthly partisanships so that we can judge all things without partiality. It is impossible for humans without God’s life to rightly judge those whom they love or their cherished causes because human love perverts human judgment. God’s life can circumcise our hearts from earthly entanglements and personal preferences, and replace those things with godlike love and impartiality. Then, as creatures living among lower life forms, saints on earth are able to judge all things, both people and situations, the way God does, as Paul said, “A spiritual person judges everything, yet he himself is judged by no one” (1Cor. 2:15).

Authority. The apostle Paul taught that God “made us alive together with Christ, . . . and raised us up together, and sat us down together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:5–6). Consequently, whenever God’s children gather in Jesus’ name, that is, in the fellowship of God’s life, it is an authoritative event. In Psalm 133, David prophesied of New Testament saints, saying that when they come together as one, their fellowship carries authority like that of Israel’s high priest – and every Israelite had to submit to the judgment of the high priest or be put to death (Dt. 17:8–12)! Psalm 133 must have been a prophecy because such was unknown under the law. No number of Israelites, regardless of how much harmony they had, equalled the authority of God’s high priest. But in this covenant, since the least of the saints is greater than the greatest saint who lived before Jesus (Mt. 11:11; Lk. 7:28), the judgment of a body of righteous believers can now be opposed only at the risk of one’s soul (Mt. 18:15–17). The authority that comes with the anointing of God is so magnified in this covenant that heaven stands behind the judgment of even two saints who gather in Jesus’ name (Mt. 18:18–20). Indeed, Jesus promised Peter – one man – that heaven would stand behind any judgment he would make (Mt. 16:19) – after he received God’s life, of course.

Deathlessness. When we receive God’s kind of life, we are re-created as beings who will never die, for in God’s life, there is no death. Jesus said, “I give them eternal life, and they will never, ever die” (Jn. 10:28), and, “Everyone living and believing in me will never, ever die” (Jn. 11:26).

But God’s life actually has nothing to do with time. Eternal life is a way of living; it is the way God lives, whatever time it is, or is not. Jesus described that life as “a pearl of great price” and said that wise men would be willing to give all they own to obtain it (Mt. 13:46). Paul, too, described God’s kind of life as a treasure, even though at the present time it be hidden within our “earthen vessels” (2Cor. 4:7).

Our physical bodies will die; nothing the Son did for us reversed the curse of death that God placed on Adam and Eve and their descendants (Gen. 3:17–19). Jesus himself had to die. Everyone on earth is born under the sentence of death because humans are all born with a sinful nature (Rom. 3:23; 5:12; Ps. 51:5), and “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). To deny that truth is to deceive ourselves (1Jn. 1:8–10). Everyone on earth will at some point face the enemy called death (1Cor. 15:26), and lose the battle. Long ago, Solomon pointed this out: “There is no man who has control over the spirit, to retain the spirit; neither has he control in the day of death. Yea, there is no discharge in that war” (Eccl. 8:8).

What Solomon said, however, applies only to descendants of the first Adam. In Christ, our second Adam (1Cor. 15:22, 45), we have been discharged from that war! In him, we are freed from a sinful nature and the curse of death which attends it. By the first Adam’s sin, we were made sinners, but by the second Adam’s obedience, we are made righteous (Rom. 5:19) with the righteousness of God (2Cor. 5:21).

God’s children in this covenant are created to live forever with Him, just like the Son, through whom we have been given the inestimable gift of God’s kind of life. And when our liberty from death is proved in the resurrection, how greatly we will rejoice!

1Corinthians 15

54. When this corruptible puts on incorruption and this mortal puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will come to pass: “Death is swallowed up in victory.

55. O Death! Where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?”

. . . .

57. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!

Pleasing God

The qualities of our Father’s nature described above are ours in Christ, and if we live according to that new nature, we will please God just as Jesus did (Jn. 15:10; 1Jn. 2:6). Before we received God’s life, it was impossible for us to live according to God’s nature and please Him (Rom. 8:7), but with that life, it is possible. Paul told the saints in Colossae that the very reason they were given God’s life was “that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10). Paul explained it this way to the Philippian saints: “It is God who is working within you, both to will and to work according to His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13).

God Himself is in heaven, sitting on His throne, with the Son at His right hand. There is nothing holy on this cursed earth except the Spirit He sent and the people who have received it (Jn. 14:23). And with His Spirit working within us, we do fully please God. But only by His Spirit can that happen. This is why Paul taught that whoever is without God’s Spirit has no hope of salvation (Eph. 2:12). But with God’s Spirit, we have a great hope, for Christ in us is the hope of eternal glory (Col. 1:27).

Section 2: History’s Turning Point

The New Nation

After the resurrected Son offered himself to God as a sacrifice for our sins, and God accepted his sacrifice, God shared His kind of life with those on earth who believed in His Son:

Acts 2

1. When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all in one accord, in one place.

2. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven like a violent, rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.

3. And there appeared to them divided tongues like fire, and it sat upon each of them,

4. and they were all filled with holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit moved them to speak.

As necessary as the Son’s coming to earth was, his coming was not the turning point in human history. The turning point took place after Jesus ascended into heaven, when God’s purpose for the Son’s coming was fulfilled and God shared His Spirit with humans. It was essential that the Son come and suffer, of course. And it was essential that he be resurrected and ascend to offer himself to God for our sins. But all that would have been for nothing if God had not accepted the Son’s sacrifice, for the purpose of all that Jesus did was to purchase with his blood the Father’s kind of life for men. That is the promise that the Son obtained for us (Acts 2:33; Heb. 9:11–12), a baptism with life instead of water, and it produced a new nation, a nation of new creatures, human in form but with God’s kind of life within, the nation of the children of God.

This new nation would eventually be comprised mostly of Gentiles, to whom God offered His Spirit after first offering it to Jews (Acts 13:46; Rom. 1:16). Even after the nation of Israel began hardening its heart to the gospel, no one expected God to do that for Gentiles. The Jews considered Gentiles to be so unclean that they were unfit even to visit (Acts 11:2–3). Jesus himself even called them “dogs” (Mt. 15:22–26). God, too, likened the Gentiles to beasts, but beasts who would one day respond to His offer of mercy, and honor Him for it:

Isaiah 43

20. The beast of the field will honor me, the wolves and the unclean fowl, when I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people, my chosen.

21. I planned this people for myself; they shall declare my praise.

22. But you did not call on me, Jacob. You grew tired of me, O Israel.

Prophets had been foretelling of the coming of a new nation for centuries, though nobody at the time, not even the prophets themselves, understood those prophecies:

Psalm 102

18. This is written for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created will praise Jehovah.

Psalm 22

30. A seed shall serve Him, and it shall be accounted to the Lord^[21] for a generation.

31. They shall come, and they will declare His righteousness to a people that shall be born, that He has done this.

Isaiah 66

8a. Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall the earth^[22] be born in one day? Shall a nation be born at once?

To stress the supreme importance of God’s life being given to man is not to diminish the importance of the Son’s coming to earth. Everything the Son did was important, but his accomplishment of God’s purpose for sending him to earth is the most important accomplishment of all. That unparalleled blessing is what makes the Pentecost experience in Acts 2 the turning point in human history.

Paul spoke of three distinct groups of people on earth: Jews, Gentiles, and the nation of God’s children (1Cor. 10:32), which is neither Jew nor Gentile (Gal. 3:28). This new nation is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), and as the prophet foretold, the world does not even acknowledge it as being a nation (Num. 23:9). Men cannot acknowledge God’s nation because it is not of this world (Jn. 18:36), and no creature, as we have shown, can comprehend anything beyond the realm of its own kind of life.

The world does not believe in the Son and, so, cannot acknowledge those who, like him, are born of God, as John explained, “The reason the world does not know you is that it did not know Him” (1Jn. 3:1b). Jesus forewarned his disciples of the misunderstanding and hatred they would face as God’s sons in this world (Jn. 15:20), and John later passed that warning on to others, telling the children of God that only those whose hearts have been touched by God will be able to receive their testimony (1Jn. 4:6).

Indeed, it is only because God has touched their hearts that the nation of new creatures is able to understand the gospel. Plants cannot understand it; animals cannot understand it; and humans cannot understand it (1Cor. 2:13–14). Even angels cannot understand it (1Pet. 1:12), for God’s children are created in Christ Jesus superior to them (cf. 1Cor. 6:3; Heb. 1:14). The time is coming when the children of God will be revealed for who they are (Rom. 8:19; 1Jn. 3:2), and on that day, they will be appointed their places in their Father’s kingdom and reign with Jesus (cf. Rev. 20:4). Until then, however, the existence of a nation of holy creatures on earth will remain as unbelievable to this world as was the Son of God when he was here.

The Sprinkling of Blood

Just as the Old Testament did not begin in Genesis, the New Testament did not begin in Matthew. The Old Testament began in Exodus 24, when Moses sprinkled “the blood of the covenant” on the people whom God had chosen and prepared (Ex. 24:6–8). The author of Hebrews refers to that momentous event:

Hebrews 9

19. When every commandment of the law had been spoken by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of bullocks and goats . . . and he sprinkled both the book itself and all the people,

20. saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for you.”

The scriptures leading up to Exodus 24 are important because they tell us why a covenant between God and man was needed and how God prepared a people upon whom to sprinkle the blood of the covenant. However, the covenant remained unratified until that sprinkling of blood took place. The New Testament followed this pattern of ratification by the sprinkling of blood upon chosen and prepared people, but this time, the mediator was Jesus, not Moses, and the blood that he “sprinkled” on people was the Spirit of God.

The blood is what gives life to the human body (Lev. 17:11), and since the Spirit is what gives life to the body of Christ, the apostles routinely referred to the Spirit as the blood of Christ.^[23] This is the blood that is “sprinkled” on the hearts of sinners who repent, purging them from their sins, as the man of God said, “Let us draw near with a true heart, in the full assurance of faith, our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience” (Heb. 10:22a).

Differences of opinion abound concerning when the initial sprinkling of the holy Spirit took place, but the truth of the matter is simple. We know that the Spirit was poured out from heaven after Jesus ascended and was glorified (Jn. 7:39), and since Jesus ascended in Acts 1, the Spirit must have first been “sprinkled” on believers in Acts 2. That truth alone shows us that the New Testament was not ratified when the Son came to earth or at any time while he was here, but in Acts 2 when the life-giving blood of Christ was sprinkled from heaven upon the believers huddled in an upper room in Jerusalem. That is the day the New Testament began.

The author of Hebrews taught that “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness” (Heb. 9:22), and it is more than a coincidence that in Peter’s first sermon as a born-again man, he used this “shedding of blood” imagery:

Acts 2

32. This Jesus has God raised up, of which we all are witnesses!

33. Moreover, being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the holy Spirit, he has shed forth this, which you now see and hear.

Filled, Not Touched

It was on the day of Pentecost, for the first time ever, that God shared His kind of life with someone other than His Son. In the millennia before Pentecost, on rare occasions, God granted to special individuals a taste of His kind of life, but He never shared it with them as He shared it with His Son. If He had shared His life with them, they would have been transformed into new and holy creatures like the Son, but the Father was reserving for His Son the honor of doing that.

King David was one of those privileged individuals. He tasted of New Testament mercy when God forgave him of adultery and murder (2Sam. 11:1–12:13), sins which could not be forgiven under the law of Moses (Ex. 21:14; Lev. 20:10; cf. Acts 13:39). His experience of tasting New Testament mercy made David a stranger to his fellow Israelites, and it led to a civil war that pitted Israelites who loved David against those who did not. Job was another example. God crushed that “perfect and upright man”, forcing Job into such lowliness of heart that he was able to taste a different kind of righteousness, the righteousness of God that was beyond perfection.^[24] And God, covering Moses with His hand on Mt. Sinai, passed by and then took His hand away so that Moses could catch a glimpse of God’s glory from behind (Ex. 33:17–23). Just that glimpse of God’s glory made Moses’ face shine so that his fellow Israelites could not bear to look at him; Moses had to cover his face with a veil to protect their eyes (Ex. 34:29–35). On their own, none of those righteous men could have attained even to the tiny bits of God’s kind of life they tasted, and they were all permanently changed by the bits of eternal life they experienced.

In stark contrast to these ancient brushes with God’s kind of life, Jesus’ disciples were filled with God’s life on the day of Pentecost, not just touched by it. God’s love, righteousness, glory, power, and wisdom – God’s kind of life – became theirs. Before Pentecost, God had only one Son with His kind of life, but after Pentecost, He had many (Rom. 8:29), none of them as great as the Son, but all of them greater than anyone who had ever lived before (Mt. 11:11; Lk. 7:28). It took time for the apostles to comprehend the magnitude of that amazing grace from God, but they felt it the moment the Spirit came into them, and they greatly rejoiced in what they felt.

To receive God’s kind of life is an astonishing grace. It is God’s greatest gift, purchased for us by the sacrifice of His Son. God’s life makes those who receive it His children (Rom. 8:14), citizens of a heavenly country (Heb. 11:16), and “foreigners and pilgrims” in this world (Heb. 11:13). Misunderstood just as Jesus was, God’s faithful children are routinely slandered and persecuted by ungodly people (1Pet. 3:16; 2Tim. 3:12); yet, the benefits of possessing God’s kind of life far outweigh the sadness of being hated for it (Rom. 8:18). In the midst of great persecutions, Paul could still write, “Thanks be to God for His inexpressible gift!” (2Cor. 9:15).

Filled with His Fullness

When the life of God enters someone, he becomes a partaker of God’s nature (2Pet. 1:4). He is no longer sinful by nature, but holy, as God is holy. From the moment God’s nature enters into someone, it becomes as natural for him to do good and to know the truth as it is for the Son of God. Those who have received God’s life have been “delivered from the domain of darkness and translated into the kingdom of [God’s] beloved Son” (Col. 1:13). Because of their new kinship with God, odd as it may sound, Jesus’ followers had more fellowship with him after he left and the Spirit came than they did while he walked among them. Being Jews, they belonged to God because of their first birth, but having fellowship with God began when they received His kind of life and were born again.

Those of the Oneness and Trinitarian faiths misinterpret Paul’s statement that in Jesus “dwells all the fullness of God’s nature, bodily” (Col. 2:9; 1:19). They quote such verses as proof-texts for their competing doctrines, both of which, in their own way, hold that the Father and the Son are co-equal in all respects. Paul never taught such a doctrine, nor did he intend such phrases as that one from Colossians to be interpreted as meaning that the Son is equal with the Father. None of God’s children, including the Son, could possibly be as great or as good as their heavenly Father. Thus, the Son could say to his disciples, “My Father is greater than I” (Jn. 14:28), and to the rich young ruler, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except One, that is, God” (Mt. 19:17).

When Jesus’ followers received God’s kind of life in Acts 2, they received some of God’s Spirit, not all of it (Acts 2:17). So it was with the Son. In creating the Son with His kind of life, the Father did not give the Son everything that was in Him. Moreover, if the fact that God’s fullness was in Jesus is to be interpreted as meaning that the Son is equal with the Father, then what are we to make of Paul’s exhortation for believers to be “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19)? Was Paul teaching that those who receive God’s Spirit are equal with God? Of course not. For God’s children to be “filled with His fullness” does not mean that they are equal with God any more than the Son being filled with God’s fullness means that he is equal with God. To be filled with God’s fullness means only to be filled with His Spirit so that our words and our deeds reflect His holy nature.

“The Prince of Life”

The Father created the Son as such a perfect reflection of Himself that the Son has the power to create. The Son holds all power in heaven and on earth (Mt. 28:18), and by his word the universe was not only created, but it is also still being held together (Heb. 1:2; Col. 1:17). He mirrors the Father in everything:

John 5

19. Jesus answered and said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing of himself, but only what he sees the Father do, for whatever things He does, these things the Son also does, in the same way.

20. For the Father delights in the Son, and He is showing him everything that He is doing, and greater works than these will He show him, so that you will marvel.

21. For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whom he will.”

Peter walked and talked with the Son for several years, but only after being born of the Spirit did Peter refer to Jesus as “the Prince of life” (Acts 3:15). Before God’s kind of life entered into Peter and began revealing the Son to him, Peter would not have dared to refer to anyone but God as the “Prince of life”. The startling revelation which God’s life brought to the disciples was that there was someone at God’s side in heaven who had been with Him from the beginning and was also to be praised and worshipped. And after Pentecost, they began to preach that astonishing message without fear of provoking God to jealousy! With the revelation of that other divine being, righteous men began to honor both the Father and the Son, proclaiming that the revealed Son was the Prince of life, but never forgetting that the Father remained the King of it.

God’s Gods

Throughout history, whenever God spoke to men and women, His voice changed them by elevating them above the ordinary course of human life. They became different from the people to whom God had not spoken, and they could never go back to who they were before. And because of the great difference which God’s voice made in the lives of those who heard it, God called those people “gods”. Among these gods were Moses (Ex. 7:1), Israel’s judges and elders (Ex. 22:28; Ps. 82:1, 6), and the prophets.^[25] When certain rulers of the Jews condemned Jesus for referring to himself as God’s Son, Jesus quoted what his Father had spoken to Israel a thousand years before:

John 10 (cf. Ps. 82:6)

34. Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said you are gods’?

35. If He called them ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came – and the Scripture cannot be contradicted –

36. are you telling the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?”

If “gods” was an adequate term for those under the law to whom the word of God came, then how much more appropriate is the title “gods” for those who are given God’s kind of life? As I have said, it is a simple, unalterable principle of creation that children are whatever their parents are, even if on a smaller scale. Animals receive animal life from their parents, plants receive plant life from their parents, and God’s children receive God-life when they are born of Him.

God’s is the most extraordinary kind of life that exists, and when He created the Son with His kind of life, the Son was made the same kind of being his Father is, which made it possible for John to say the Son was both with God and was God (Jn. 1:1). The Son, in turn, loved us so much that he was willing to die to make his Father’s kind of life available to us so that we, too, would be like the Father. As with the Son, when we received God’s life, we became the same kind of being the Father is, so that John could say, “As He is, so are we in this world” (1Jn. 4:17).

How Did He Do It?

We never escape mystery when we are dealing with the things of God because His kind of life is far above ours. Even when He chooses to reveal one of His mysteries to a man, that man is hard-pressed to adequately convey the revelation to others. When John attempted to explain the mystery of the Son coming from heaven, even he, an uneducated fisherman, began to sound like a philosopher:

1John 1

1. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we beheld, and our hands touched: the Word of life.

2. And the life was revealed, and we saw it, and we are bearing witness and showing you the eternal life which was with the Father and was revealed to us.

What mysterious language! John’s “eternal life” which was with the Father in verse 2 is also the Word which John said “was with God and was God” in the first verse of his gospel. And at the end of the first verse above, John combines these two terms, “Word” and “life”, to refer to the Son as “the Word of life”. The Spirit that entered the son of Mary as he came up from the Jordan River was that “Word of life” who from the beginning “was with God and was God.” In the above verses, John says that eternal life is the Son, but he stated in the opening of his gospel that God’s life is in the Son (Jn. 1:4). In both cases, John was laboring to describe a reality of God’s kind of life that is beyond all experience and comprehension, whether in heaven or earth.

What the Father did in sending His Son to become one of us demonstrates the supreme superiority of His kind of life over ours. We humans have no power to take on the form of a lower kind of life, such as plant life or animal life, and to live as one of them. We can, for example, love horses, own horses, and train and ride horses. We can even move into the barn and sleep with horses. Still, we have no power to become horses and share horse life with them. However, such limitations do not apply to God. And the Son, having been created as the exact reflection of God, had the power to take upon himself our lower kind of existence and become one of us! The Son “emptied himself ” of his heavenly glory (Phip. 2:7), came to earth, and blended himself with Mary’s son. “With men,” as Jesus would say, “it is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God” (Mk. 10:27).

No human explanation is adequate for what took place at the Jordan River when the Son of God descended upon the Son of Mary, forever becoming one person with him. But God does the same thing every time that He and the Son, by the Spirit, come take their abode within a believer (cf. Jn. 14:23). That experience is a new kind of birth into a new kind of life that is beyond the power of man to comprehend. The blending of two spirits within one body is not in the realm of ordinary human experience. God just does it, and God alone knows how.

“In the Spirit” or “In the Flesh”

Paul is credited for coining the phrase “in Christ”. He certainly used it often, and effectively. Another well-known phrase associated with Paul is “in the flesh”. Paul used “the flesh” in two ways. First, he used it as a reference to the human body, but secondly, and more importantly, Paul used it to refer to the nature that is in the human body. In the following verses, every time Paul used a phrase like “the flesh” or “after the flesh”, it is replaced with “human nature” or “according to human nature”. And wherever he mentioned “the Spirit” or “after the Spirit”, it is replaced with “God’s nature” or “according to God’s nature”. You will see how much clearer these verses become when we do that:

Romans 8

1. There is now, therefore, no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus who do not live according to human nature [the flesh] but according to God’s nature [the Spirit].

. . . .

5. Those who live according to human nature mind the things of the flesh, but those who live according to God’s nature mind the things of the Spirit.

. . . .

7. Human nature is enmity against God. It is not subject to God’s law; neither, indeed, can it be.

8. So then, those who live according to human nature cannot please God.

. . . .

13. If you live according to human nature, you will die, but if by God’s nature you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

Galatians 5

16. Live according to God’s nature, and you will not carry out the desire of human nature.

17. For human nature desires what is contrary to God’s nature, and God’s nature desires what is contrary to human nature. These are opposed to one another, so that things you may desire, you do not do.

18. But if you are led by God’s nature, you are not under a law.

19. Now, the works of human nature are obvious, which are: adultery, immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness,

20. idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, emulation, angry outbursts, rivalries, disputes, divisions,

21. envy, murder, bouts of drunkenness, revelings, and things like these, concerning which things I forewarn you, as I also warned you previously, that those who practice such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

22. But the fruit of God’s nature is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, faith,

23. meekness, self-control. Against such, there is no law.

Philippians 3

3. We are the circumcision who serve God according to God’s nature, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in human nature.

The saints’ kind of warfare, the warfare of the flesh against the kind of life that is now within it, was first fought by Jesus, and he won the battle in just forty days. Jesus the Son of God, who was from both Nazareth and heaven, went into the wilderness, overcame the nature of the flesh, and returned from the wilderness “in the power of the Spirit” (Lk. 4:14). Preacher Clark once told me that it took him forty years, not forty days like Jesus, to completely subdue his fleshly nature, and then he told me, “It needn’t take you that long.” It need not take any of us that long. Whether forty days or forty years, however, it must be done. Paul’s warning in Romans 8:13 was directed to the children of God, not sinners: “If you live after the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”

Everyone with God’s Spirit within them, like Jesus in the wilderness, does battle with the flesh because, while inwardly they are new creatures, they are still covered with a fleshly body, as Paul said: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels” (2Cor. 4:7). The saints’ flesh no longer defines them; yet, as long as the flesh has its life, it will try to. The Son’s greatest challenge was not to overcome Satan; it was to remain who God created him to be in the face of opposition from the human nature that was in his fleshly body.^[26] This is the greatest challenge of anyone who is born of God, even if they do not realize it – or perhaps especially when they do not realize it. Decades after receiving God’s kind of life, Paul was still wrestling his flesh into submission to the Spirit: “I discipline my body and make it obey, lest after I have preached to others, I myself be rejected” (1Cor. 9:27).

God’s life makes us foreigners to our old selves, our own human nature, and as new creatures in Christ, the warfare of God’s children on earth is a warfare against who they used to be and who their fleshly nature tells them they still are. As it was with Jesus, our warfare is not against any worldly power; it is a battle against the spirits of this age, including our own, to remain steadfast in who we are after we are created as God’s children in Christ (Eph. 6:12).

A New Creation for New Creatures

In the end, this entire universe will be destroyed and replaced by a new one suited to the new creatures that we are in Christ (2Pet. 3:7–14). Jesus told his disciples that the present heaven and earth will pass away (Mt. 24:35), and later, John was allowed to see the new heaven and earth that God has prepared for His people (Rev. 21:1). Peter exhorted the saints to live according to their new nature so that they would be found worthy to live on the new earth:

2Peter 3

10. The day of the Lord shall come like a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the elements, consumed with burning heat, will be destroyed, and earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.

11. So then, seeing that all these things are to be destroyed, what kind of people ought you to be in all holy conduct and godliness,

12. looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God,^[27] in which the heavens, being on fire, will be destroyed, and the elements, consumed with heat, will be dissolved?

13. But we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

14. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot, and blameless.

To obtain that promise, Paul was willing to endure any amount of suffering:

Romans 8

18. I consider the sufferings of this present time to be unworthy of comparison with the glory that shall be revealed to us.

Philippians 3

8. I consider everything but loss for the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of everything. But I consider it all dung, that I might gain Christ,

. . . .

10. that I might know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings – changed by his death to be with him –

11. if by any means I may attain to the resurrection of the dead.

If God’s children belonged in this cursed creation, God would not replace it, but such a polluted universe is unworthy of Him or His children. God humbles Himself to even look at what is in heaven (Ps. 113:6), for the heavens themselves “are unclean in His sight” (Job 15:15). So, when the resurrected Son ascended to the Father, he did more than enter into heaven. He was exalted “far above all heavens” (Eph. 4:10; Heb. 7:26) because the Father considered His Son to be worthy of greater glory than is found in heaven. “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him” (1Cor. 2:9) because the glory waiting for those who are holy as God is holy is found nowhere in this doomed creation.

Section 3: No One Knew

Loving Ignorantly

The disciples loved Jesus, but they were mystified whenever Jesus tried to explain what God was doing in him. Because they only had their kind of life, they could not understand the things of God, no matter how plainly Jesus spoke to them:

Luke 9

44. “Let these words sink down into your ears! The Son of man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men!”

45a. But they did not understand this saying, and it was hidden from them so that they should not comprehend it.

Luke 18

31. Taking the twelve aside, he told them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything written by the prophets concerning the Son of man will be accomplished.

32. For he will be turned over to the Gentiles, and he will be mocked and shamefully treated and spat on.

33. And after they scourge him, they will kill him, and on the third day, he will rise again.”

34. And they understood none of these things, and this saying was hidden from them; neither did they comprehend the things that were spoken.

Jesus loved his disciples, though he was sometimes exasperated by their ignorance (e.g., Mt. 16:8–11; Mk. 8:21), and he promised them that God’s life would come to them and that when it did, they would understand the things he was telling them:

John 14

25. I have spoken these things to you, being with you,

26. but the comforter, the holy Spirit which the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will bring to your remembrance everything that I have told you.

Jesus promised his disciples that the life they were soon to receive would teach them everything they needed to know: “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16:13a).

But it was not merely the coming of the Spirit that led the disciples into all truth; it was the coming of the Spirit into them. Those who did not love Jesus were not given the Spirit when it came and were not led into all truth. To them, the Spirit’s coming was a non-event. God’s life came, but it did not come for them. Jesus explained that loving him is what leads to receiving God’s kind of life:

John 14

21b. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.

. . . .

23. If anyone loves me, he will obey my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

Even in their spiritual blindness, the disciples loved Jesus, and others would likewise love him before they received the Spirit. The reality is that everyone who has ever loved Jesus before receiving God’s Spirit has loved him ignorantly because no one can truly know God or His Son without the Spirit. Everything recorded in the four gospels demonstrates this.

Peter’s human love for Jesus led him to rebuke Jesus for prophesying of his approaching death (Mt. 16:21–22). And later, in the garden of Gethsemane, Peter loved Jesus so much with his own kind of love that he opposed the work of God by attacking Malchus, one of the men who came to arrest Jesus (Jn. 18:10–11). Both times, Jesus reproved Peter for loving him the wrong way! Peter rebuked Jesus and attacked Malchus because he did not want Jesus to be hurt, which is a feeling we cannot condemn. However, his actions were contrary to the will of God because they were motivated by love that sprang from Peter’s kind of life. Jesus’ approaching death was God’s will, but Peter did not understand God or His will. He did not have God’s kind of life and, therefore, did not have God’s kind of love. Peter, the other disciples, and everyone else on earth at the time had only a mind for “the things of men” (Mt. 16:23).

For another example, a multitude once became so enamored of Jesus that they decided to make him king, in spite of him refusing that earthly honor (Jn. 6:15). They wanted to make him king without understanding what kind of king he already was. To say it another way, they wanted the kind of king that Jesus was not. Without God’s kind of life, they were ignorant of God’s kind of kingdom, and their carnal concept of a king and their human love for Jesus led them to work against the will of God, not with it. The very next day, after that adoring multitude would have forced Jesus to be their king, his doctrine so displeased them that instead of wanting Jesus to be king, many of them rejected him “and walked with him no longer” (Jn. 6:66).

Without God’s kind of life, humans can bear with His Son only for so long; sooner or later, he is going to do or say something that displeases them too much to stay with him. Jesus’ disciples did very well to love him so much that they stayed with him until the night he was arrested; only then did the situation prove to be too much for them, “and they all forsook him and fled” (Mk. 14:50). That was the best that anyone without God’s kind of life could have done.

If Jesus had yielded to those who wanted to make him king, or if he had accepted Peter’s offer to rescue him from the cross, all mankind would have perished. Their human kind of love would have ruined everything. That love was as ungodly in trying to exalt the Son before God’s appointed time as was the human hatred of those who tried to kill the Son before God’s appointed time (e.g., Lk. 4:28–30; Jn. 10:31–39). The kind of death that men finally dealt to Jesus could not hold him (Acts 2:24), and the kind of honor that men wanted to bestow upon Jesus did not suit him (cf. Jn. 2:23–25).

None of Jesus’ followers knew how to love him in a way that forwarded God’s purpose because no one possessed God’s kind of love. That would happen only after they received God’s kind of life, as Paul said, “the love of God is poured out within our hearts by the holy Spirit which is given to us” (Rom. 5:5b). Paul, the man who wrote that verse, knew by his own past behavior how much damage a man can do when he attempts to love and serve God without God’s kind of life. Paul’s bitter memory of loving God so zealously with his own kind of love that he participated in putting innocent souls to death inspired him to stress man’s desperate need of the Spirit. He wrote to the saints in Rome,

Romans 8

13. If you live after the flesh [as I once did], you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body [as I am now doing], you will live.

14. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.

Jesus warned his disciples that the time would come when men would persecute and even kill them, thinking they are “offering a service to God” (Jn. 16:2). Before the life of God was given to Paul and changed Paul’s nature, he was one whose misguided devotion to God proved that Jesus spoke the truth.

Hating Ignorantly

Those who loved Jesus were not the only ones who did not know what was happening; those who despised Jesus did not know, either. The revelation of the existence of the Son of God should have been the happiest moment for the human race since creation, for the existence of the Son revealed truth about God that could have been a great comfort to a world plagued with sin and suffering. Instead, the revelation of the Son provoked outrage from many, especially leaders of God’s people. Consider this example of how such misguided wrath was stirred up by Jesus’ humble confession at his trial:

Mark 14

61b. The high priest questioned him, and told him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?”

62. Then Jesus said, “I am. And you will see the Son of man seated on the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

63. Then the high priest, tearing his garments, said, “What further need have we of witnesses?

64. You heard the blasphemy! How does it appear to you?” And they all condemned him as being worthy of death.

The high priest was wrong. It was not blasphemy for the Son of God to testify that he was the Son of God. However, all that the judges of Israel could see standing before them was the thin, bloodied, and weary son of Mary, and he was nothing to be accounted of. Venomous hatred arose at other times against Jesus, not only at his trial, when men were confronted with the revelation of God’s Son. Here is a scene from early in Jesus’ ministry:

John 8

56. [Jesus answered,] “Your father Abraham was overjoyed that he might see my day, and he saw it, and rejoiced.”

57. Then the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?”

58. Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, before Abraham came to be, I was.”

59a. At this, they took up stones to throw at him.

Such misunderstanding and violent reaction to the revelation of the Son of God seems inexplicable until we remember that everyone then was without God’s life, and so, no one understood what God was doing in Jesus. But the worst of reactions came from Israel’s leaders, for they, like Satan, were proud of the knowledge and fellowship with God they thought they had, when they really did not have any. Little hope exists for those without God’s life who are confident that they know Him. What need for repentance can such people feel?

Jesus understood fallen man’s awful predicament; the very reason he came was to help us to escape it. In the face of great cruelty from us, he loved us and refused to become bitter. He was too happy being God’s instrument for saving mankind to hold a grudge against us. Unjustly condemned by his fellow Jews and crucified by Gentiles, Jesus prayed for them all as he suffered on the cross, “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing” (Lk. 23:34). And after fearful Peter was transformed by God’s life on Pentecost morning, he boldly stood before the Jewish multitude and rebuked them for betraying and killing their Messiah, and yet he judiciously added, “Brothers, I know that you did it ignorantly” (Acts 3:17).

Lest we judge those who were guilty of Jesus’ death too harshly, we should keep in mind that until the Spirit came, they were still living in Old Testament time. We have the advantage of reading their story from a perspective that only God possessed then, knowing who it was that was walking among men. And if we had lived in their time and place, how would we have reacted to Jesus? In a gospel tract written long ago, Preacher Clark told us how we may answer that question:

During the trial of our Lord, thousands of people knew there was a great injustice taking place before their very eyes, but they did not speak out against it. Think how few rose up in protest, and ask yourself this question: “What would I have done, had I been there?” We can only answer that question by answering this one: “What am I doing about it now?”^[28]

Believing and Confessing Ignorantly

John 9

39. Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might be made blind.”

40. Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard these things, and they said to him, “We are not blind, too, are we?”

41. Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin, but now you say, ‘We see’; therefore, your sin remains.”

It is foolhardy to claim to know God without possessing His kind of life. Anybody who thinks he knows God without having His kind of life has more in common with Satan than he knows. Satan had nothing but his own cherub life with which he was created, and he knew nothing about the Son; still, he was absolutely confident that he knew God. That kind of confidence is the worst kind of blindness.

When the Son of God confessed who he was before the judges of Israel, they denounced Jesus’ confession as blasphemous because it was contrary to what they thought they knew.^[29] But they were blind to God’s Truth, who was standing in front of them, because they claimed to already know the truth. “Claiming to be wise,” Paul would later say, “they were turned over to foolishness” (Rom. 1:22). Whoever hungers for God’s kind of righteousness is blessed because those who feel their need of His righteousness will receive it (Mt. 5:6). On the other hand, whoever thinks he is good and wise enough without God’s kind of life will remain spiritually blind (Jn. 9:41).

Men’s ignorance of God led to misunderstanding the Son, and misunderstanding the Son led to hatred of him. That was one reason Jesus commanded demons to keep silent about him:

Luke 4

34. [The demon said,] “Agh! What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know you, who you are – the holy one of God!”

35a. But Jesus rebuked it, saying, “Shut up, and come out of him!”

And later in the same chapter . . . ,

41. Demons came out of many, crying out and saying, “You are the Messiah, the Son of God!” But rebuking them, he would not permit them to say that they knew him to be the Messiah.

These two scenes seem to suggest that demons knew the Son, but the fact that demons cried out that Jesus was “the holy one”, “Messiah”, and even “the Son of God” does not mean that they knew the Son. Those were titles used, in heaven and in Israel, to refer to the anointed man who was expected to come and deliver Israel.^[30]

Everyone in heaven knew that God caused Mary to conceive a child and that her son was to be Israel’s Messiah. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, God’s angel proclaimed to some shepherds that the Messiah had been born (Lk. 2:8–11). But that angel knew nothing of the Son who was still in heaven with the Father, waiting to be sent to earth. Nor did he understand what the word “Messiah” meant in God’s mind, even though God had sent him to say it. As for demons, whenever Jesus drew near them after the Son had entered into him, the power of God that was then in Jesus moved those demons to declare things beyond their understanding, just as the power of God moved Balaam’s donkey and Israel’s prophets to speak things beyond theirs.

The Son of God said plainly that no one knew him except the Father (Mt. 11:27), and we should hold on to that truth regardless of how some things appear. Otherwise, we may become confused when we see that certain men or demons of that time spoke as if they knew him. Jesus is our example, and he was never confused:

John 6

68. Simon Peter answered him, “Master, who will we go to? You have words of eternal life.

69. And we have believed and have come to know that you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”

70. Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you twelve, and one of you is a slanderer?”

On the face of it, it appears that Peter understood what he was saying at Caesarea Philippi when he exclaimed, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!” (Mt. 16:16). However, just moments later, Jesus rebuked Peter sharply, saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt. 16:23). Peter knew nothing about the hidden, pre-existent Son when he called Jesus the Son of God; he was thinking only of the anointed man whom God had promised to send. Peter called Jesus the Son of God only because, as Jesus said, God had touched Peter’s heart (Mt. 16:17). Peter was giving expression to something he felt, not to something he understood.

If we, on this side of Pentecost, impose on the pre-Pentecost disciples, or on angels and demons, a knowledge they did not possess, we miss so much of the story! We are blessed to understand the truth about such terms as “Messiah” and “the Son of God”, but what did those terms mean to Jesus’ disciples? Even after the resurrection, they were expecting the Messiah to reign as an earthly king and to restore Israel’s former glory (Acts 1:6). Many in Israel believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but when they professed faith in Jesus, “he did not trust himself to them because . . . he knew what was in man” (Jn. 2:24–25). More to the point, he knew what was not in man – his Father’s kind of life. Jesus did not trust even his Spirit-less disciples’ testimony when they claimed to believe in him:

John 16

29. His disciples said to him, “Behold! Now you’re talking plainly and using no figure of speech.

30. We know now that you know everything, and you have no need for anyone to question you; by this, we believe that you came from God.”

31. Jesus answered them, “Do you now believe?

32a. Behold, an hour is coming, and has now come, for you to be scattered, each to his own house, and to leave me alone.”

Universal Spiritual Ignorance

While he walked on earth, the Son of God had to deal with people who hated him with human hatred, some of whom even said that he was demon possessed (Jn. 8:52). He also had to deal with people who loved him with human love, such as those who tried to force him to be their king. He dealt with angels who called him Messiah and ministered to him (Lk. 2:11; Mk. 1:13), and he dealt with demons who called him the “Holy One of God” and trembled at his presence (Lk. 4:34). But no human, angel, or demon knew that from the beginning there had been a Son with God in heaven who alone possessed God’s kind of life and who had been God’s agent in the creation of all things. While the Son walked on earth, then, regardless of what anyone said or thought about him, pro or con, nobody knew what they were talking about because nobody had God’s kind of life.

A perceptive brother, Damien Callaghan, summarized this thought so well that I felt it would be better to quote him than to paraphrase his comments. We must understand, he said, that the universal spiritual ignorance which existed before the day of Pentecost “allows the seemingly endless contradictions and impossibilities to be true. Every pre-Pentecost event or story that we read about occurred with zero knowledge of what God was doing. To truly understand those stories, there cannot be an ounce of human pride that allows us the thought, ‘Well, they understood something.’ No, they didn’t. Everybody was profoundly ignorant of God as this all worked out. It is breathtaking.” Yes, it is, brother.

When Jesus commanded his disciples not to talk about who he was (e.g., Mt. 16:15–20; 17:1–9), he did so because he knew that when they saw him perform miracles, they were likely to say too much in their excitement, especially concerning who they thought he was. The Son of God had come to rescue fallen man, and he did not want anyone, whether disciples or demons, to talk much about him because nobody really knew what to say. Whether they loved him or hated him, they were only loving or hating who they thought he was.

Dead

Comparing his Father’s kind of life to man’s life, Jesus described all humans as “dead” (Mt. 8:22; Lk. 9:60), for everybody on earth was completely ignorant of, and so, “dead” to the things of God. On the day of Pentecost, however, the Spirit made new and living creatures out of the “dead” followers of Jesus, and as they grew in grace, the disciples began to sound like Jesus, proclaiming truth which, before Pentecost, had come only from the Master’s lips. The post-Pentecost John wrote, “No one has ever understood God; the unique Son who is next to the Father has made Him known” (Jn. 1:18).

Until the Son was revealed, no one even knew that God was a Father, except in a rhetorical sense (Dt. 32:6; Pss. 68:5; 103:13; Isa. 64:8; Mal. 1:6; Jn. 8:41b, etc.), and without knowing that God was a real Father, with a real Son, it was impossible to truly know Him. The Son alone could reveal the Father’s hidden thoughts and ways because the Son was the only one who knew Him. As Jesus said, “No one really knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone really know the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son may choose to reveal Him” (Mt. 11:27b), and when attacked after confessing that truth, the meek Son of God replied to his adversaries, “If I say that I do not know Him, I will be a liar like you!” (Jn. 8:55).

This means that Abraham, “God’s friend” (Jas. 2:23; 2Chron. 20:7), did not really know his Friend, and that David, “a man after God’s own heart” (1Sam. 13:14), did not know the God whose heart his was like. Moses often conversed with God as friend would speak with friend (Ex. 33:11), but Moses did not know the One who spoke with him. Daniel, “greatly beloved” by God (Dan. 9:23), did not know the God by whom he was loved, and Isaiah, who saw Jehovah in His temple, “high and lifted up” (Isa. 6:1), did not know the God he saw. They were all dead to the God they served because none of them knew the Son.

Truth Jesus Could Not Tell

The night before he died, Jesus gathered with his beloved disciples for his final Passover meal and spoke with them of many things, but there were some truths so foreign to humans that Jesus could not speak of them, not even to his disciples who had been with him for so long. God’s ways and God’s thoughts are so foreign to humans that they can frighten people and trouble their spirits, and Jesus loved his disciples too much to put that burden on them. He just told them, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now” (Jn. 16:12).

Jesus tried to comfort his disciples by telling them that when the Spirit came, it would bring to their remembrance everything he had told them and would guide them into all truth (Jn. 14:26; 16:13), but they could not understand that, either. As an apostle, Paul, loving God’s people as Jesus did, likewise held truth back from saints who were spiritually immature (1Cor. 3:1–2). Moreover, he told them that with the ordinary human mind, people often judge holy things to be foolishness (1Cor. 2:12–14). Paul’s point was that only by receiving God’s kind of life and developing what Paul called “the mind of Christ” (1Cor. 2:16) can anyone understand the things of God.

God is not human, and there is nothing human about Him. The Son, created as “the exact representation of God’s being”, was also fully divine and was not the least bit human either – until he came to earth and blended with Mary’s fully human son. That blending of God’s Son with Mary’s son resulted in the creation of a second Adam (1Cor. 15:45), the first of a new kind of man, and those who receive God’s life become the new creatures of which Jesus was the first. Having been “born of God”, they are no longer merely human, for they are now children of God, partakers of His divine nature (2Pet. 1:4). Through Christ, by the Spirit, God has created a family for Himself, and His family is like Him in at least this respect: it is not human! This was John’s meaning when he wrote, “as He is, so are we in this world” (1Jn. 4:17). Before receiving God’s kind of life, John would have considered such a statement to be blasphemous. After Pentecost, John himself wrote it.

Referring to the coming of the Spirit, Jesus told his wondering disciples that “on that day, you will know for yourselves” (Jn. 14:20). Until then, however, Jesus could only tell them that something glorious was coming, and he labored constantly to persuade them of it so that they would be present when God sent it. It was impossible for the disciples to comprehend the kind of life they were about to receive or how much it would change them. Here are some of the things Jesus could not tell his disciples at that time:

• The law of Moses, which the disciples and all the upright in Israel loved, would soon be fulfilled and brought to its intended end.^[31]

• God would soon welcome the Gentiles into His kingdom without them being circumcised, as God required of the Jews.

• After his experience at the Jordan River, Jesus was neither Jew nor Gentile. The son of Mary was as much a Jew as the disciples were, but the Son of God was not, and neither was the new creature that Jesus became that day.

• After that day, Jesus did not belong here in this world. He fit in with humans not much more than he did with plants and animals. If he had told his disciples that truth while they were still merely human, they would have agreed with Jesus’ earthly relatives and adversaries that he was deranged.

• After they received the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the disciples would not be human either, but citizens of a heavenly country and foreigners to this world of sinners.

As I said previously, the spiritual condition of Jesus’ disciples until the day of Pentecost was that they loved the Father and the Son but did not really know either of them.^[32] The same is true of sincere followers of Jesus today who have not yet experienced their own Pentecost. And even for those who have, entanglement in false religion can prevent growth in the knowledge of the Father and the Son.

Growing in Knowledge

Even with God’s kind of life, Jesus’ disciples were challenged by the truths into which the Spirit wanted to lead them, for it led them into places they never dreamed they would go. Peter would never have gone to the house of the Gentile Cornelius if the Spirit had not made him go (Acts 10:9–20). Nor would Paul ever have gone to the Gentiles with a gospel different from Peter’s if the Spirit had not taken him into the third heaven and revealed truth to him that was “unlawful for a man to speak” (2Cor. 12:4). When Paul said, “I know that nothing of itself is unclean” (Rom. 14:14), he was teaching a doctrine that he previously would have condemned as heresy. God’s life has the power to lead us into truth which we would otherwise condemn. God’s thoughts really are not our thoughts, and His ways really are not our ways, and it is only as we humble ourselves to His thoughts and His ways that we grow in grace and knowledge after we receive His kind of life.

Even with God’s kind of life, we must labor to grow in the knowledge of our Father (2Pet. 3:18; Col. 1:10). Preacher Clark taught us that the day we receive the Spirit of God is our first day of school in God’s kingdom, for when we are born of God, we know our heavenly Father no better than we knew our earthly fathers the day we were born naturally. And if we do not grow in the knowledge of God after receiving His Spirit, we will end up among those in the family of God who are spiritually feebleminded.

Those whom the Son has set free are so free that they may choose to rebel; they are free either to grow or to refuse to grow in the grace of God. Only the souls touched by God can choose between good and evil. Sinners have no choice but to sin until God opens the door into His righteousness. Jesus said that everyone who seeks the kingdom of God would find it, but he did not say that everyone who finds it would like what they find. Peter could have clung to his respect for the “traditions of the elders” and refused to go to Cornelius’ house when God sent him, but the word of God that came to him trumped everything else in his heart, and he obeyed the heavenly Voice.

Paul, too, could have argued that the gospel revealed to him was contrary to the law and refused to face the dangers of preaching his new gospel for the Gentiles. But Paul valued that revelation too much to do that, and he considered all that he had previously believed to be nothing but dung in comparison (Phip. 3:7–8). It would have been unwise for Peter or Paul not to obey the word of God that came to them, but they were free to refuse it, and both of them could have come up with biblical reasons not to follow the Spirit into the truth to which it was leading them. It was not God’s grace alone that made them what they became; it was God’s grace plus their courageous response to it that enabled them to grow into the mighty men of God they became. Grace alone does not save us; there must be a response of faith.^[33] That is why Paul taught that we are “saved by grace, through faith” (Eph. 2:8), not by either grace or faith alone. It takes both.

“The Thoughts of Many Hearts”

After Pentecost, some people hated the revelation of the Son so much that they chose to kill the servants of God who proclaimed that revelation rather than receive it. Others loved the revelation so much that they chose to suffer and die rather than deny it. What was it that provoked some to kill in order to silence those who believed in the Son, while others considered it an honor to die for believing in him? The answer lies hidden in men’s hearts, and only God can either see or expose it. None of us can know ourselves or what is in our hearts until we meet the Son. It is only God’s light that enables us to rightly see ourselves or anything else.

When the infant Jesus was brought by his parents to the temple to be circumcised, an old prophet named Simeon was waiting for them. The Spirit had sent him that day to see the child whom God had ordained to be the Messiah, and when the godly old man took the infant from Mary’s arms, what he told her about her child and herself must have given her pause:

Luke 2

34b. Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign spoken against –

35. [then, to Mary] a sword shall pierce even your own soul! – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

Whenever God’s servants bring the light of God’s Son into the arena of human society, those who sincerely desire truth and goodness rejoice at the light and honor God’s messengers. Those who do not sincerely desire truth and goodness do not embrace the light, and they persecute God’s messengers. As the following verses from the Last Supper show, Jesus labored to prepare his beloved disciples for the cruelty and hatred they would face after they began to live as sons of God in this wicked world:

John 15

18. If the world hate you, know that it hated me before it hated you.

19. If you were of the world, the world would befriend its own; but since you are not of the world – on the contrary, I have chosen you out of the world – the world hates you.

20. Remember the statement that I made to you: “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they obeyed my word, they will also obey yours.

Because the Son was like his Father, the Son was in danger on earth, for his sinless presence exposed hearts, and wicked people do not like that. A thousand years before he came, the Son foretold of that danger when he spoke to his Father through David, saying, “The reproaches of those who reproach you fell on me” (Ps. 69:9). But the opposite was also true. The love of those who truly loved God also fell on the Son when he came. The light that the Son brought “sheds light on every man” (Jn. 1:9), and by that light, every man’s true feelings and thoughts about God are exposed. It is impossible for those who hate God to hide hatred of the Son, for he is the perfect reflection of God’s being (Heb. 1:3). Likewise, it is impossible for those who love God to hide love for the Son, even if they do not understand him and even if sometimes they inadvertently get in his way.

The same holds true now. Anyone who walks in God’s life reflects His nature among men, and when God’s nature is manifested, it brings out what is really in men’s hearts, whether it be good or bad. That is an inescapable fact of spiritual life. When the light of God’s life shines in us, we know by people’s reaction to us whether they love God or not. Righteous people who lived before Pentecost knew nothing of the Son, yet the love they felt for the law and the prophets was love for the Son, though they did not know it, for the law and prophets spoke of him. Jesus told the rulers of the Jews,

John 5

46. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.

47. And if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

Moses was reared in the sumptuousness of Pharaoh’s palace, but he chose to associate himself with the downtrodden people of God rather than to enjoy the advantages of his status as an Egyptian prince. Moses’ high regard for God’s people is described in the New Testament as Moses “esteeming the reproach of Christ to be greater riches than the treasures of Egypt” (Heb. 11:26). But Moses knew nothing of Christ! He loved God and His people; therefore, he loved the Son, even though he knew nothing of him.

One cannot love either the Father or the Son without loving the other; they are too much alike for it to be any other way. The unveiling of the Son brought all things to light, even the secret thoughts of men’s hearts, and in that light, there is nowhere for anyone to hide. Because the Son is a perfect Son, just as God is a perfect Father, a person’s response to the Son reveals perfectly his heart’s real attitude toward God. And the light of the Son is so great that people cannot refuse to respond, one way or the other, even if they do not intend to. When we meet the Son of God, we have not come to a crossroads, but a T-intersection, for we cannot continue to be the same as before; at that point, we must turn either right or left. This is true for all people, whenever and wherever the light of the Son shines.

He Died for Us All

Regardless of what anyone in the ancient world said – prophets, angels, disciples, or demons – no one truly knew the Son. Whether they called him Lord or called him demon possessed, they had no idea who Jesus really was, once the Son blended with him. The love for him that some felt was as inconstant as they were, as it was their kind of love, and Jesus put no confidence in it (Jn. 2:23–25). Even as great a man who ever lived, John the Baptizer, who boldly declared before the multitude that Jesus was the Lamb of God (Jn. 1:29), later doubted that Jesus was the one (Mt. 11:3). John knew what he was saying when the Spirit moved him to speak boldly of Jesus not much more than Balaam’s donkey knew what he was saying when he rebuked that prophet (Num. 22:28–30). And the hatred for Jesus that some felt was also inconstant, for it was human hatred, subject to change, as in the case of Saul of Tarsus. They could only hate who they thought Jesus was, and their thoughts often changed.

Until we come to know the Son, we cannot know the truth about anything, including ourselves. In the gospels, both those who loved Jesus and those who hated him had to repent, that is, turn from their own thoughts and ways, in order to receive God’s kind of life. And they all could be forgiven because Jesus understood them, and loved them, and died for them all.

Part Two:

Concealing & Revealing

Chapter 3

A Revealer of Secrets

There is a God in heaven who reveals secrets.
Daniel 2:28a

The secret things belong to Jehovah our God, but things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.
Deuteronomy 29:29a

God’s Glory

Solomon said, “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing” (Prov. 25:2), but it is also the glory of God to reveal a thing. God has covered Himself with the glory of hidden truth and the glory of revelation. Hardly a chapter can be found in the Bible that does not in some way demonstrate that from the beginning, God’s way has been to conceal and to reveal all things in His time. God hides things from every creature, even from His Son (e.g., Mk. 13:32). At this very moment, He is hiding many things from each of us, and He is doing it for our good as well as for His glory.

Here are just a few of the many scriptures that declare God to be a God who conceals and reveals:

Psalm 25

14. The secret of Jehovah belongs to those who fear Him, and He will reveal His covenant to them.

Isaiah 45

15. O God of Israel, Savior, you truly are a God who hides Himself.

Jeremiah 33

3. Call upon me, and I will answer you, and I will show you great, inaccessible things that you do not know.

Daniel 2

27. Daniel answered before the king and said, “The wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, and the soothsayers cannot reveal to the King the secret which the King has demanded.

. . . .

29b. He who reveals secrets has made known to you what will come to pass.”

. . . .

47. The king answered Daniel and said, “Truly, your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing that you are able to reveal this secret.”

Sometimes, when Jesus thought on the suffering that lay in store for those whose hearts were blinded by the Father, he wept over them (Lk. 19:41–44). At other times, however, when he thought about how his Father had blinded the proud, Jesus could hardly contain his joy: “Jesus rejoiced in spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the learned and intelligent, and revealed them to babes. Yes, Father, for such was pleasing in your sight!’” (Lk. 10:21; cf. Mt. 11:25–26).

God is good to condescend to reveal Himself to whomever He chooses, but He is just as good when He hides Himself. Jesus rejoiced in all of it because he trusted his Father’s choices.

God’s Choice

When men hide things, they put them out of sight, but when God hides things, He lays them out in full view and then does not allow those looking on to understand what they see. We all have experienced this, whether we realize it or not. We all have been among those who “seeing, do not see, and hearing, do not hear” (Mt. 13:13). Even Jesus’ disciples, forgetting that he had just fed a multitude with seven loaves and a few small fish, worried about not having enough food:

Mark 8

17a. When Jesus knew this, he told them, “Why are you talking about not having bread? Do you not yet know, or understand?

18. Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?”

The heavens are seen around the world (Ps. 19:3–4); they cannot be hidden. Or can they? One man looks at the stars and says, “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1), while another looks at them and “says in his heart, ‘There is no God’ ” (Ps. 14:1). What makes the difference? The Bible is consistent with its answer: God has opened the eyes of the first, but He has blinded the eyes of the second. It cannot be a matter of intelligence, for as a rule, the ungodly in this world are more intelligent than God’s children, as both Jesus and Paul admitted (Lk. 16:8; 1Cor. 1:26–27). Saints and sinners alike see the heavens, but only those whose hearts are touched by God have the kind of wisdom that enables them to really see what they are looking at.

Jesus often spoke to the multitudes in parables that contained hidden lessons concerning God’s kind of life, thus fulfilling what the Son promised through the prophet that he would do: “I will open my mouth in a parable; I will pour out dark sayings from of old” (Ps. 78:2). But Jesus’ disciples, seeing that no one was understanding his parables, asked him why he spoke in parables to the people. His answer was both terrifying and glorious:

Matthew 13

11. He answered and said to them, “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to those, it is not given.

. . . .

14. In them is Isaiah’s prophecy fulfilled which says, ‘You shall hear, but you will not understand, and you shall see, but you will not perceive.’ ”

That is a terrifying answer for those to whom it is not given, but it is a glorious answer for those to whom it is given. It is God’s choice alone whether to shine His light into our hearts or to leave us in our darkness. Human willpower, ability, and effort does not and cannot make it happen (Rom. 9:16). This truth gives us reason to both love and fear God, as Jesus did (Heb. 5:7; Jn. 14:31), for God alone decides who will see and who will not see. Then, who can demand an account from Him for His choices? God is advised by no one, and He answers to no one. In creation, He did only what it pleased Him to do (Ps. 135:6), and in each of our lives, He has done the same. It is the nature of man to question the justice of that, but Paul responded to such fleshly wisdom:

Romans 9

14. What shall we say, then? Is there injustice with God? Absolutely not!

15. For He said to Moses, “I will show mercy to whomever I show mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I have compassion.”

16. So then, it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God, who shows mercy.

17. For the scripture says that God said to Pharaoh, “This is the very reason I raised you up, that in you, I might demonstrate my power, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”

18. So then, to whom He will, He shows mercy, and whom He will, He hardens.

19. You will say to me, then, “Why does He yet find fault? For who has resisted His will?”

20. Hold on there, O man! Who are you who talks back at God? Will the thing shaped say to Him who shaped it, “Why did you make me like this?”

21. Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?

Paul said his mission was to proclaim to the Gentiles the once-hidden mystery of the Son and to lead them to him (Eph. 3:8–9). Many Gentiles rejected his message, but Paul remained encouraged because he knew that everyone who hungers and thirsts for God’s righteousness will be filled with it (cf. Mt. 5:6) because the hungering and thirsting itself comes from God, not just the righteousness. This is the critical point: the desire to come to Christ is itself a gift from God. Jesus plainly said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (Jn. 6:44a).

The earliest believers understood this. For example, when the Gentiles first received the life of God, the elders among the believing Jews said, “Well, then, God has granted repentance unto life to the Gentiles, too!” (Acts 11:18). They understood that if God had given His Spirit to the Gentiles, then He must have also granted them the repentance required to receive it.

Paul concluded that “if our gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who are being lost” (2Cor. 4:3). If people reject the gospel, it is only that God, for whatever reason, has rejected them and hidden the saving gospel of His Son from them. And in such cases, faithful believers can do nothing but pray that the Father will have mercy on those who are lost in sin, and then live so as to show them the right way.

Concealing and Revealing Himself

Isaiah was right to say that God hides Himself, but in doing so, God does not crouch behind a rock or crawl under a bed, the way we humans hide ourselves. When God hides Himself, it is only that He refuses to allow men to find Him, “although He is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27). Job was one who understood that God does not go anywhere when He is hidden. When Job was desperately searching for God but could not find Him, he still knew that God was close, watching everything that was happening:

Job 23

8. I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

9. on the left hand where He is working, but I cannot behold Him; He is hiding Himself on the right hand so that I cannot see Him.

10a. Still, He knows how it is with me.

In the Old Testament, whenever God did not bless or protect someone, it was said that God had “hidden His face” from him (e.g., Mic. 3:4), and Job felt the helplessness of having God hide His face: “When He orders peace, who can make trouble? And when He hides His face, who can see Him, whether it be a nation or a single man?” (Job 34:29).

On the other hand, when God blessed and protected a person, it was said that God’s face was shining on him. This is why the high priest’s ritual blessing of Israel concerned itself mostly with God’s face being turned toward the nation:

Numbers 6

24. Jehovah bless you and keep you.

25. Jehovah make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you.

26. Jehovah lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.

The greatest expression of God’s countenance shining on mankind was when He sent His Son to rescue man from sin and death. This is why Paul spoke of the revelation of the Son as he did, saying, “The God who commanded light to shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2Cor. 4:6). Regardless of how brightly God’s face shined on anyone before the Son purchased God’s life for men, God’s true character remained unknown to them. If those who now have God’s kind of life know God only in part (1Cor. 13:12), then those who lived before the Spirit came did not know God at all, and neither does anyone know Him now who has not received the Spirit.

But not only they, for until the Son of God’s existence was revealed, angels also had no knowledge of God. Even now, after the Son has been revealed, angels still do not possess the knowledge of God that God’s servants possess (1Pet. 1:12) because they still do not possess God’s kind of life. “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God” has not shone in their hearts, and it never will because God chose to bless humans, not angels, with His kind of life.

Concealing and Revealing What God Says

Even when God speaks, the meaning of His words will remain hidden unless He reveals it, as happened regularly to the ancient prophets when they spoke of the coming Messiah:

1Peter 1

10. Prophets who prophesied of the grace that has come to you searched for and diligently inquired about this salvation,

11. trying to determine who or what time the Spirit of Christ which was in them was indicating when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and of the glory that followed.

Many times throughout history, God has spoken and not been understood. To this day, the gospel of Christ is proclaimed openly, and yet, it remains a hidden thing to millions. That is because God gives understanding to some, and not to others. When He called Isaiah to be a prophet, God said this to him:

Isaiah 6

9. He said, “Go! And say to this people, ‘You will certainly hear, but you will by no means understand. And you will certainly see, but you will by no means perceive.’

10. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears dull, and make their eyes blind, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and repent, and He heal them!”

If we understand anything God has ever said, it is only because He has given it to us, and we owe Him praise for it. God must help us to understand what He says. Without that, hearing God’s word or seeing a vision will bear no fruit in us. As previously noted, people all over the earth see the heavens every day without understanding that the heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1). Only some see that glorious truth because it has been given only to some to see it.

Concealing and Revealing the Son

It is astonishing enough to learn that from the foundation of the world, God had kept all men, even the wisest and holiest of them, from knowing about His Son, but that heavenly beings were also kept in the dark about the Son challenges some common conceptions about life in heaven. Nevertheless, it is true that no creature anywhere knew about the Son until God’s appointed time came:

Ephesians 3

3. By revelation, the mystery was made known to me, even as I briefly wrote before,

4. concerning which you are able, as you read, to perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ,

5. which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

. . . .

8. To me, the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach among the Gentiles the incomprehensible richness of Christ

9. and to enlighten all men as to what is the plan of the mystery that has been hidden from the Aeons by the God who created all things through Jesus Christ.

The Greek word aeon can refer to a long period of time, but in this passage from Ephesians, it refers to supernatural beings.^[34] Paul’s teaching concerning these Aeons is continued in the next verses, and it reveals even more fully the astonishing truth that heavenly beings, the Aeons, learn wisdom by watching those who live in God’s kind of life:

Ephesians 3

10. So that through the Assembly of God, the multifaceted wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities among heavenly beings,

11. according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Notice that in verse 10, Paul made the stunning statement that the Aeons actually learn of the wisdom of God through God’s chosen people. This is in harmony with what Peter said concerning angels, to wit, that the angels, being ignorant of our life in Christ, are curious about it: “[The prophets prophesied of] things which are now reported to you by those who preach the gospel to you by the holy Spirit sent from heaven, into which things angels long to look” (1Pet. 1:12b).

It is a remarkable concept, that those who walk in the life of God are living revelations of the Son to heavenly beings as well as to people on earth!Nevertheless, it is a doctrine that Paul was sure of, and he repeated it in his letter to the saints at Colossae:

Colossians 1

25. I was made a minister by the commission of God which was given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God,

26. the mystery that was hidden from the Aeons and from generations of men, but now is revealed to His saints,

27. by whom God has willed to make known among the Gentiles what is the richness of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So, even the creatures of heaven were kept in the dark about the existence of a Son until “the fullness of time”, when the Father shared His Spirit with men and revealed him. This must be why Paul made the arresting statement that the Son (here called “God”) was seen by angels only when humans saw him, that is, when the Son took on a visible, earthly body:

1Timothy 3

16. The mystery of godliness is great: God was made manifest in the flesh, was justified by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the Gentiles, was believed on in the world, and was taken up into glory.

If the angels had seen and known the Son before he came to earth, Paul would not have told Timothy that the Son “was seen by angels” after he was “manifest in the flesh”. But if the Son was revealed when he took on a fleshly body, then what Paul said makes sense. And beyond that, when men and angels were allowed to see the Son, they were also being allowed, for the first time ever, to see the Father as He really is (Jn. 14:9).

Where the Son Was First Revealed

When “the fullness of time” came, the Father did not summon the multitudes of heavenly beings and somberly announce, “It is now time for me to tell you all something important that I have kept hidden from you from the beginning.” Instead, He chose to reveal the existence of His Son first to chosen men and women on earth.

John the Baptizer was chosen and anointed to introduce the Son, and that alone made John so great that no other person in history was greater than he (Mt. 11:11; Lk. 7:28). But being ignorant of the Son, John did not know whom to introduce. God had to give him a sign to look for: a dove that would descend from heaven and remain upon the one chosen to be the Messiah. Later, when Jesus came to John to be baptized, John saw the sign that God had given him. He heard God’s voice speak from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:17), and John cried out,

John 1

32. “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove, and it remained on him.

33. And I did not know him, but the One who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘Upon whomever you see the Spirit descend and remain on him, he is the one who baptizes with holy Spirit.’ ”

34. And I have seen, and I testify that this is the Son of God!^[35]

John’s baptism was not an introduction to baptism; it was an introduction to Christ, the Baptizer who would follow John (Jn. 1:30–31). Likewise, the Father’s voice that came out of heaven at Jesus’ baptism was not an introduction to Jesus. Mary’s son had already been introduced to men by angels singing and praising God in the night sky above Bethlehem as they announced his birth. The Father’s voice at the Jordan River was an introduction to His Son, not Mary’s, and He was speaking to man, not angels.

The Hidden Son in Heaven

The controlling factor in all of life, in heaven and on earth, is that God hides everything until He decides to reveal it. Only with that knowledge can we perceive how it could be that from the beginning, the Son dwelt with the Father in heaven without angels knowing who the Son was. But then, being in the presence of God’s Son and not knowing him is exactly what a couple of Jesus’ disciples experienced after Jesus rose from the dead:

Luke 24

15. And it came to pass that while they talked and reasoned together, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them.

16. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

It has already been shown that the Son’s existence was hidden from heavenly beings as well as from humans. He was a mystery, Paul said, “hidden from the Aeons [heavenly beings] and from generations of men” (Col. 1:26). Likewise, to the Ephesians, Paul wrote that throughout all previous generations, the Son was “hidden from the Aeons by the God who created all things through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 3:9). It is difficult for us on this side of Pentecost to imagine the Son of God being anywhere without being known, for we picture him as the glorified Lord of heaven whom John saw:

Revelation 1

13. In the midst of the seven lampstands was one like a son of man, wearing a robe extending to his feet, and girded about the chest with a golden sash.

14. His head and his hair were white as wool, like snow, and his eyes were like a flame of fire,

15. and his feet were like fine brass glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters.

But that is not how Jesus looked while he walked among us; he looked just like one of us. Whether or not the Son, before he came to earth, shone in heaven the way John saw him shine in Revelation is completely irrelevant. God’s will is all that matters, and until He sent His Son to earth, it was not His will that anyone should know him. The Son may have dwelt among heaven’s inhabitants as a gloriously beautiful creature, but then, he may have dwelt among them as a rather ordinary-looking being. That is certainly how it was for the Son when he was on earth, for the human body that the Father prepared for His Son was unattractive and awkward (Isa. 53:2–3). Regardless of whether he dwelt among the angels in majesty or was not seen by them at all, however, the reason the Son was unknown to them is only that the Father did not allow them to know him. The Son was hidden whether he was seen or not, for God had determined to keep His Son a secret, and the Son’s visibility in heaven is not relevant to the issue. The Father’s Son was the Father’s secret, and until He revealed His secret, that is all there was to the matter.

Concealing Angels

God hides His angels. God is hiding angels (and other spiritual beings, good and evil) from our eyes this very moment. His angels are always near, watching over us, but we see them only when He allows us to see them. Jesus taught that those who are newly born of God have angels that are especially attentive to the Father for their sakes: “Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven, their angels are always watching the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Mt. 18:10).

David said that unseen angels from God are stationed around all who fear Him, to protect and deliver them (Ps. 34:7). A most stunning example of this is found in 2Kings 6 when the servant of Elisha saw the city surrounded by the army of Syria. Terrified, He ran to wake up his master, saying, “Alas, my master! What should we do?” Elisha, unperturbed, answered the trembling servant,

2Kings 6

16. “Don’t be afraid, for there are many more with us than with them.

17. And Elisha prayed and said, ‘O Jehovah, I ask you, open his eyes and let him see.’” And Jehovah opened the young man’s eyes, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was filled with horses and chariots of fire surrounding Elisha.

If our heavenly Father were a “publicity hound”, He would let us know about all the trouble from which His protecting angels save us. But our Father, as Jesus demonstrated, is “meek and lowly”. He hides from us not only His protecting angels but also most of what those angels protect us from. I suspect that what we are saved from daily would overwhelm us if we knew about it. Besides, we know of plenty for which to praise God without knowing everything He is doing for us.

It may be that God keeps certain angels, or information about them, hidden from other angels as well as from men. After all, Jesus told John in Revelation that in the end, each of his saints will be given a stone with a name on it which no one will know except the one to whom the stone is given (Rev. 2:17). Both Michael and Gabriel were allowed to reveal their names (Dan. 10:13, 21; Lk. 1:19, 26), and the angel named Abaddon is mentioned in Revelation 9:11. But of the myriads of angels that exist, they are the only ones whose names are revealed in Scripture.^[36] The rest are like the angel who visited Manoah, who refused to divulge his name:

Judges 13

17. And Manoah said to the angel of Jehovah, “What is your name, so that when your sayings come to pass, we may do you honor?”

18. And the angel of Jehovah said to him, “Why do you ask for my name, seeing it is secret?”

Even if God opens our eyes to see an angel, He must still reveal to us that it is an angel that we are seeing, for angels do not have wings. They look human and are generally the size of humans (Rev. 21:17). Because God does not always reveal to us that angels are in our presence, “some have unwittingly entertained angels” (Heb. 13:2), and I suspect this has happened more than any of us know.

Concealing the Saints

God hides His people. He can hide them physically, as when He physically carried the young priest Ezekiel from Babylon to Jerusalem to let him observe the wickedness of his fellow Jews. God did not allow anyone in Jerusalem to see Ezekiel standing in their midst, watching their idolatrous activities (Ezek. 8–11). God also hid Jeremiah and his scribe, Baruch, when the wicked King Jehoiakim wanted to arrest them (Jer. 36:26). And several times, God hid Jesus from outraged mobs who were determined to kill him before the appointed time. The first instance took place after Jesus’ first and only sermon in his hometown of Nazareth:

Luke 4

28. When they heard these things, everybody in the synagogue was filled with rage,

29. and they rose up and threw him out of the city, and they led him to the brow of the mountain on which their city was built, to throw him off the cliff.

30. But he passed through their midst, and went away.

Beyond this, God hides His children spiritually. They are now kings and priests in the kingdom of God (Rev. 1:6), but the world does not and cannot acknowledge them as such. Paul longed for the day when the identity of God’s children will finally be revealed to the world (Rom. 8:19), which will happen when they take their place in God’s order and reign with the Son over the earth. The apostle John also spoke of God’s children being hidden from the world and of the coming revelation of who they really are:

1John 3

2. We are now children of God, but what we shall be is not yet made manifest. But we know that when it is made manifest, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

The world does not know the children of God because the world does not know God (1Jn. 3:1). The lives of God’s children are “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3), and no one outside the “secret place of the Most High” (Ps. 91:1) can see them as they really are, for under God’s wing, they are kept safe from the base designs of the world: “You will hide them in the covert of your presence from the schemes of man; you will hide them secretly in your pavilion from the strife of tongues” (Ps. 31:20).

David called God “my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower” (Ps. 18:2), “a rock of refuge for me, to which I may continually resort” (Ps. 71:3), “my high tower and my way of escape in the day of my distress” (Ps. 59:16), and “my hiding place and my shield” (Ps. 119:114). The world, and most of Israel, did not understand David’s relationship with God, especially as it existed after God forgave David of his adultery and murder. Nevertheless, to know where to go to be hidden from sin and death is great wisdom, and David had it.

Concealing Our Fellowship in the Spirit

The things of God are a mystery to men who do not possess God’s kind of life because their hearts are covered with the blinding veil of the flesh and its nature, which can be removed only if they turn to Christ (2Cor. 3:14–16). Our heavenly Father has so completely hidden the fellowship which He enjoys with His children that its very existence is denied by the world; nevertheless, it is real and it is sweet. Everything about the life which God shares with those who love His Son is a mystery to creatures who do not have His kind of life, whether they be plants, animals, angels, or men.

The term “mystery” is repeatedly used in the New Testament in reference to the life that God and His children share. Jesus spoke of “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 13:11), John wrote of “the mystery of God” (Rev. 10:7), and Paul mentioned the mystery of God’s will (Eph. 1:9), “the mystery of the gospel” (Eph. 6:19), “the mystery of Christ” (Col. 4:3), “the mystery of the Faith” (1Tim. 3:9), and “the mystery of godliness” (1Tim. 3:16).

The very thought of God excluding us from the fellowship of His life is terrifying, but it is a daily reality for millions on earth as they plod along, knowing nothing of the kind of life they are missing. Men without God are “like beasts that perish” (Ps. 49:12, 20), completely ignorant of God’s kind of life and devoid of desire for it. But fellowship with the Father and the Son holds so much promise and provides so many benefits that the dearest hope of the apostles was that the saints would enjoy that holy, spiritual harmony to the fullest extent:

1Corinthians 1

10. I urge you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing and that there not be divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in the same mind and in the same judgment.

Philippians 2

1. If, then, there be any comfort in Christ, if any solace of love, if any fellowship in spirit, if any tender affections and mercies,

2. make my joy complete, that you think the same thing, having the same love, as united souls, thinking one thing.

1John 1

3. That which we have seen and heard we are showing you, so that you may also have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.

Fellowship with the Father and the Son means to feel their feelings and to think their thoughts. It means to understand God because your spirit has been made like His. This unbelieving world is scornful of the notion that such unity is possible, but it is the will of God that His children show the world that such fellowship with Him is real. This perfect harmony in God’s family is the very thing for which Jesus prayed after his last meal with his disciples (Jn. 17:20–23), and it is a fundamental purpose for God giving us His Spirit (cf. Zeph. 3:9).

A Testimony About Jesus

Our fellowship with God and with one another makes for an irresistible testimony to His Son. For his disciples, Jesus earnestly prayed to the Father “that they might be one, just as we are one . . . so that the world might know that you sent me” (Jn. 17:22b–23). The fact that believers are now divided and are not serving God together as one is a testimony to the world against Jesus, not for him. Division in the body of Christ is a great reproach on Jesus’ name.

The disunity of God’s New Testament family on earth may be the greatest tragedy in history, even surpassing the tragedy of the original fall in the garden of Eden. In that first case of sin, Adam and Eve did not have God’s kind of life within them to teach and guide them. But what excuse can we who have God’s life offer for our divisions? Moreover, we are all less than we could be in Christ because of division, and only God knows how much less. If we are wise, we will do as the Spirit advised and mingle our worship with fear (Ps. 2:11), lest on the Day of Judgment, God find any of us responsible for the divisions that exist among His children.

We should note that even though Jesus said that unity among believers would help others to believe in him, that does not deny the Father’s determining role in souls coming to believe in the Son (Jn. 6:44). The Father will use the unity of His people to convict sinners of their need of Him, but He still must create the desire within those sinners for fellowship with Him, no matter what they see. Even if all God’s children walk perfectly together in the Spirit, sinners cannot desire the saints’ sweet, mysterious fellowship with the Father and the Son unless the Father touches their hearts.

Chapter 4

The Son in the Old Testament

Their minds were blinded, and even until this very day, in the reading of the Old Testament, the same veil remains, not taken away, which thing is removed in Christ. Yea, to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart. But if ever their heart turns to the Lord, the veil will be lifted off.
2Corinthians 3:14–16

Since the World Began

The ten chapters of Isaiah 40–49 are filled with pleas from God to His people Israel to forsake the worship of heathen gods and to understand the difference between Him and them. In those chapters, Isaiah emphasized God as Creator, and one of the most distinctive differences between the Creator and the gods of the Gentiles was that the Creator told of things to come, far in advance. Isaiah mocked the gods that most of his fellow Israelites were worshipping, challenging those gods to predict what would happen in the future, the way God did: “Tell what is coming in the future, that we may know that you are gods!” (Isa. 41:23a).

God pleaded with Israel to consider this great difference between Him and the gods they were worshipping:

Isaiah 46

9b. I am God, and there are no other gods. There is none like me,

10a. revealing the end from the beginning, and from ancient time what has not yet happened.

Isaiah 48

3. I revealed past events before they happened. Yea, they went forth from my mouth, and I caused them to be heard. I acted suddenly, and they came to pass.

4. Knowing that you are stubborn, and that your neck is sinew of iron, and that your brow is brass,

5. I told you of them ahead of time. Before it came to pass, I made you hear of them, lest you should say, “My own effort brought those things about,” or “My graven image and my molten image ordained them.”

God not only reminded Israel of the events He had foretold and which had already come to pass, but He also let Israel know that He was still telling them of things to come: “Even now, I am causing you to hear new things, even hidden things that you do not know!” (Isa. 48:6b). Those “hidden things”, for the most part, concerned His Son, and they were things impossible for anyone to understand before God revealed His Son’s existence. Thankfully, in this covenant, we can see how completely God described His Son before sending him here, and when our eyes are opened to all that the ancient prophets said about the hidden Son, we stand in awe of our heavenly Father’s wisdom.

I said in a previous chapter that the entrance of the Spirit empowers a person to view things from God’s perspective and to understand things in ways that humans cannot comprehend on their own. This includes being empowered to understand the Old Testament now the way God alone understood it then. In Christ, it is as though we are sitting with the Father in heaven, as “gods”, viewing things of earth from His perspective, looking down at humans, even the wisest of them, as they stumble around in the darkness of vain imaginations and guesswork trying to find truth. This is true even when – no, especially when – men study God’s holy Scriptures. The truth is still hidden from humans, and it will never be found unless the Spirit reveals it. As Job’s friend Zophar once said, “Can you by searching find out God?” (Job 11:7). And once Paul’s eyes were opened by the Spirit, he exclaimed, “Oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and inscrutable His ways! Who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Rom. 11:33–34a).

Solomon made the observation that a “wise man’s eyes are in his head” (Eccl. 2:14), and to that, one might respond, “Well, of course they are.” But Solomon was speaking spiritually, his point being that a wise man is one who really sees what he sees, that is, God has given him the ability to understand what he is looking at. That is true wisdom, and the coming of the Spirit is what put the disciples’ eyes in their heads, so to speak, concerning the Father and the Son. Their “veil” of ignorance began to be removed from their hearts on the day of Pentecost when they received God’s kind of life.

The day Jesus rose from the dead and approached two of his disciples walking along the road to Emmaus, he asked them why they were sad. They told him they were sad because they had thought Jesus was the Messiah, but the Romans had executed him. Then they told him that certain women they knew were now claiming to have seen Jesus alive again. They were confused and troubled; however, the Lord showed them no sympathy:

Luke 24

25. He said to them, “O fools! So slow in heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!

26. Didn’t the Messiah have to suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

27. And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he began explaining to them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures.

Not long afterward, in one of Peter’s first sermons as a born-again man, he also referred to the prophets’ ancient testimonies when speaking of the risen Messiah. Of them, said Peter, “God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets from time immemorial” (Acts 3:21). Even in the years just before the Son came to earth, the Spirit was still speaking of him through holy men such as the elderly priest Zacharias, John the Baptizer’s father. He, too, testified that God’s prophets had been prophesying of the coming Messiah for a very long time:

Luke 1

68. Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel, for He has visited and brought redemption to His people!

69. And He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of David His servant,

70. as He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from of old.

God’s prophets spoke of the Son in such detail that when reading their prophecies, it is easy to forget that they had no knowledge of the Son, not even that he existed. The only thing that God allowed them to understand was that their prophecies would not be fulfilled in their day:

1Peter 1

10. Prophets who prophesied of the grace that has come to you searched for and diligently inquired about this salvation,

11. trying to determine who or what time the Spirit of Christ which was in them was indicating when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that followed.

12a. To them it was revealed that they were ministering those things not to themselves, but to you.

So, the only knowledge the prophets were given concerning their prophecies of the coming Messiah was that those prophecies were not for their own time. God’s prophets had to resign themselves to life within an enigma in which they could feel the Son, be moved upon by the Son, and even have the Son speak through them, without even suspecting that there was a Son.

A Master Workman

Examples abound of the Spirit moving on the ancient prophets to declare the Son’s coming in the future, but Proverbs 8 looks in the opposite direction. It reveals something of his past. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he refers to Christ as “the wisdom of God” (1Cor. 1:24). In Proverbs 8, the Son of God also refers to himself as “Wisdom”, and then he goes on to describe his happy life with the Father before the creation of the world and afterward:

Proverbs 8

22. Jehovah created me the beginning of His way, the first of His works.

23. I was formed before eternity, before the beginning, before earth existed.

24. I was brought forth when there were no depths of the sea, when there were no springs abounding with water.

25. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was brought forth.

26. When He had not made the earth, and the open fields, and the first elements of the world,

27. when He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He decreed a circle on the face of the deep,

28. when He established the thin clouds above, when He made strong the fountains of the sea,

29. when He made His decree for the sea, that the waters should not disobey His word, when He decreed the foundations of the earth,

30. I was at His side, like a master workman, daily His great delight, always laughing in His presence,

31. rejoicing in the world, His earth, and my delights were with the sons of men.^[37]

It is because the Son was the one through whom God created all things that he described himself as a “master workman” (verse 30, above). Still, every creature, including the Son, owes all glory to the Father for creation, and it should cause us no theological problem that the Son spoke here as if the Father is the Creator. The Son always gave the Father credit for creation (e.g., Mk. 10:6). Although he was the Father’s agent for creating everything, he knew that creation was accomplished only through his Father’s will and wisdom and power. The Son of God freely and humbly admitted that he could do nothing without his Father’s guidance and aid (Jn. 5:30).

God’s Fellow

Jesus was quoting Zechariah at the Last Supper when he told his disciples that they would all desert him. And he made it clear to them that Zechariah’s prophecy would be fulfilled that very night: “Tonight you will all be offended because of me, for it is written, ‘I will strike the Shepherd, and the flock will be scattered’” (Mt. 26:31). None of the disciples believed what Jesus told them, and they all insisted that they would never desert him (Mt. 26:33–35), even though within hours, they all did just that.

But there is more to Zechariah’s prophecy than what Jesus quoted that night, and it is good that he did not quote the whole verse. Doing so would have given his disciples an even greater problem, for in that other part of Zechariah’s prophecy, God referred to the smitten Shepherd as Hisfellow:

Zechariah 13

7. Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, even against the mighty one who is my fellow, says Jehovah of Hosts. Strike the shepherd, and the flock will be scattered. Then I will turn my attention toward the little ones.

No one in heaven or earth could imagine God as having a fellow; such a thing seemed impossible. A fellow is one who shares a certain kind of life or experience with another. Animals share a kind of life that makes them fellows; angels share a kind of life that makes them fellows; but God? How could the Almighty have a fellow, a companion who understood His thoughts and ways, and shared His feelings? Nobody could have answered that question before the Son was revealed. Or rather, everyone would have confidently given the wrong answer, that there could never be anyone enough like God to be His fellow. But God Himself, through Zechariah, said He had one! And if God said He had a fellow, then who would dare say that He did not?

What made the Son the “fellow” of God is that God created him with the same kind of life He had (cf. Jn. 5:26), and having the same kind of life, the Son knew God, and he alone, as Jesus said, “No one really knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone really know the Father except the Son” (Mt. 11:27b). Before God shared His life with men on the day of Pentecost, no one but God’s Son had God’s kind of life, but after that day, God had other sons and daughters with whom He could enjoy fellowship because He had given them, too, His kind of life: the holy Spirit.

The Son’s Fellows

In Psalm 45, the Father promised His hidden Son that he would one day have fellows and that he would be the happiest of them all:

Psalm 45

7. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore, God, even your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows.

What makes this such an astonishing prophecy is how great the Son is, being the perfect reflection of God’s person. The only way God Himself could ever have had a fellow was to create one, and this He did when He created His Son. Likewise, the only way the Son could ever have fellows was for God to create fellows for him, which He did when He gave Jesus’ followers His kind of life, as He had given it to His Son in the beginning. And to do that was not an afterthought; from the beginning, it was God’s plan “to bring many sons into glory” (Heb. 2:10), as Paul said: “Those whom God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son so that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29). And God not only foreknew His many sons, but He also wrote their names in His Book of Life “from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8; 17:8).^[38]

The Father began fulfilling His promise to create fellows for His Son on the day of Pentecost, and He has continued to fulfill it ever since. Every time the Father baptizes a repentant soul with His kind of life, another fellow is created as a precious gift for His beloved Son. The apostle John marveled at this: “Behold, what great love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God!” (1Jn. 3:1). Within John, the Spirit had created fellowship with the Father and the Son, and it was a matter of the greatest joy to John to be able to say, “Our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ” (1Jn. 1:3b). Paul also felt profound gratitude for the fellowship which God had created in believers. He wrote to the Corinthian saints, “I thank my God always for you, for the grace of God which is given to you in Christ Jesus, . . . by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1Cor. 1:4, 9b).

He Had to Go Away

It was not the Son’s coming to earth which made humans his fellows; his physical presence here did not create fellowship between God and man. The Son becoming human and sharing with them their kind of life gave him fellowship with men, but it did not do the reverse. No one had fellowship with the Son in his kind of life while he was still here. That is why men killed him; they had no fellowship with him.

The Son had to die, be resurrected, and ascend into heaven to offer himself as a sacrifice to God before humans could receive the Spirit and enjoy fellowship with him. Knowing that, Jesus told his disciples, “It is better for you that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. . . . I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter so that He might abide with you forever, the Spirit of truth” (Jn. 16:7; 14:16–17a). The disciples did not understand Jesus when he said this and had no fellowship with him until after he went away and the Spirit came; that is why Jesus said it was better for them if he went away. After Jesus left and sent back the Spirit, the disciples had more fellowship with him than they did while he was here among them, for they were then, at last, fellows in the life of God with the Son.

When the Messiah Would Come

The angel Gabriel revealed to Daniel the precise year when God would send the Messiah, using the term “week” to represent seven years instead of seven days:

Daniel 9

22. [Gabriel] caused me to understand, and he talked with me and said, “O Daniel, I have come forth now to give you wisdom and understanding.

. . . .

25a. Know, therefore, and understand that from the going forth of the commandment to return and to rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince will be seven weeks, and sixty and two weeks.”

Sixty-nine weeks of years (69x7) gives us 483 years. Precisely when to start counting those 483 years is unclear because of a lack of adequate historical sources; however, all available evidence points unmistakably to Jesus’ time. The Jews would have known of Daniel’s amazing prophecy, and the wisest among them must have been expecting the Messiah about the time Jesus was born. The appearance in Jerusalem of “Magi from the East” looking for the newborn king of the Jews certainly led King Herod to think that it was time for the advent of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah (Mt. 2:1–3, 7).

God revealed to an old prophet named Simeon that before he died, the Messiah would be born (Lk. 2:25–26). He also revealed to Simeon that if he went to the temple in Jerusalem on a certain day, he would see the chosen one:

Luke 2

27. And he came by the Spirit to the temple, and the parents brought in the child Jesus to do as was the custom of the law for him,

28. and he took the child into his arms, and blessed God, and said,

29. “Now, Master, let your slave go his way in peace, according to your word,

30. for my eyes have seen your salvation,

31. which you have prepared before the face of all peoples,

32. a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel!”

Had Simeon read Daniel’s prophecy and realized that he was living in the time when God said His Messiah would appear? We cannot know for sure, but it is altogether possible.

Where the Messiah Would Be Born

Through Micah, in about 700 BC, the Father revealed the name of the town where Jesus would be born (Mic. 5:2). Micah’s prophecy was well known to the Jewish elders, and when the Magi came to Jerusalem and asked King Herod where to find the child who was “born King of the Jews” (Mt. 2:2), the paranoid king then asked some elders of Israel where their Messiah would be born. They knew immediately to quote Micah’s prophecy:

Matthew 2

5. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for so it was written by the prophet,

6. ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, you are by no means least among the rulers in Judah, for out of you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ”

Hebrews 7:3 tells us that Melchizedek was a figure of the Son of God in that there is no record of the beginning of either of them. But there is a record of the beginning of Mary’s son; his birth is recorded in both Matthew and Luke. If the birth of Mary’s son in Bethlehem was the beginning of the Son of God, then the author of Hebrews completely missed the mark by comparing the Son with Melchizedek. But he did not miss the mark. God’s Son did not begin in Bethlehem or anywhere else on earth; he existed before the earth did and was God’s agent in creating it. As Micah said, “His goings forth are from ancient times, from the days of eternity” (Mic. 5:2).^[39]

Hebrews 7:3 also tells us that no record was made of the end of the Son of God. Yet, the record of the death of the son that was born to Mary is found in all four gospels.

The Messiah Would Be a Virgin’s Son

Perhaps the best known prophecy about the Messiah is the one concerning a virgin miraculously giving birth to a son who would be called Immanuel, a name that means “God with us”.^[40]

Isaiah 7

14. Therefore, my Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the pregnant virgin! Yea, she is bearing a son, and she will call his name Immanuel.

This prophecy was fulfilled after God sent Gabriel to speak to Mary:

Luke 1

26. In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a city of Galilee called Nazareth,

27. to a virgin who was betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.

. . . .

30. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary. You have found favor with God.

31. Behold, you shall conceive and give birth to a son, and you shall call his name ‘Jesus’.”

Luke 2

6. And it came to pass that . . . the days were fulfilled for her to give birth,

7. and she gave birth to her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, since there was no room for them in the inn.

Mathew 1

22. This all happened so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled:

23. “Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel (which is translated, ‘God with us’).”

Where the Messiah Would Grow Up

Double meanings for words are common in the Old Testament because God was hiding His Son and yet speaking of him at the same time. The word “Nazareth” can be used to show this. In Isaiah, God said, “I am causing you to hear new things, even hidden things that you do not know” (Isa. 48:6b). In Hebrew, the word for “hidden things” is also the word for “Nazareth”. God knew, of course, that “hidden things” was identical with “Nazareth”, and He knew that Jesus would grow up in a village by that name. He artfully chose the word for Nazareth as an example of the “hidden things” that He was causing Israel to hear, and He knew that after His Son was revealed, believers would see “Nazareth” in Isaiah 48:6 because they would know then that Jesus grew up there.

Perhaps the most amazing prophetic use of the Hebrew word for “hidden things” came when Jesus was crucified. With grim wit, Pilate provoked the rulers of the Jews by ordering his soldiers to nail a title above Jesus’ head on the cross which read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” (Jn. 19:19–22). With that sardonic title, Pilate was showing his deep disdain for the Jews who had demanded Jesus’ death. But God, by moving Pilate to add that title to Jesus’ cross, was once again cryptically declaring who His dying Son really was: “Jesus the Hidden One, King of the Jews”.

What the Messiah Would Look Like

Through Isaiah, God said that the body which he would prepare for His Son, and which His Son eventually came to earth and took on, would be unattractive: “He will have no form or majesty, and when we see him, there will be no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2b).

Where the Messiah Would Preach

When we study the geography mentioned in the four gospels, we learn that Jesus spent most of his time ministering in and around Galilee. That is what Isaiah prophesied the Messiah would do, and Matthew quoted Isaiah’s prophecy when he told Jesus’ story:

Matthew 4 (cf. Isa. 9:1–2)

13. Leaving Nazareth, he went and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali,

14. so that what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled:

15. “O land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles!

16. The people who sit in darkness saw a great light, and for those sitting in the region and shadow of death, a light has dawned.”

The Father Would Encourage the Son

The hidden Son spoke of the day when he, as a servant of God on earth, would experience the very human feeling of despair, fearing that he would fail in his mission to convince the Jews of the light of God’s love and salvation. But then, he went on to say that the Father would encourage him with a promise, the incredible promise that even if the Jews rejected him, he would still be God’s chosen one, the one anointed to bring the light of salvation to the whole world:

Isaiah 49

4. As for me [the Son], I said, “I have labored for nothing; I have spent my strength in vain. For nothing! Yet, my judgment is surely with Jehovah, and my reward with my God.”

5. And then Jehovah, the One who formed me from the womb as His servant to bring Jacob back to Him, said that even if Israel is not brought in, I will yet be honored in Jehovah’s eyes. My God is my strength!

6. Yea, He said, “It is too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, to bring back those of Israel who are preserved. I have appointed you to be a light for the nations, to be my salvation to the end of the earth.”

One of the most undervalued prophecies about the Son in the Old Testament is the following prophecy from Isaiah. In it, one can sense the Father’s great love for His Son:

Isaiah 42

4. He will not fail, nor be discouraged, until he has established justice on the earth, and the isles will wait for his law.

5. Thus says Jehovah God, Creator of the heavens, and He who stretched them out, He who shaped the earth and that which comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it, and breath to those who live in it:

6. “I, Jehovah, have called you in righteousness, and I will hold your hand and keep you hidden. And then, I will give you for a covenant for the people, for a light of the nations.”

God let it be known that although He would give His Son to be ostracized, tortured, and slain, He would not forsake him, but would show him great compassion and kindness, once the Son fulfilled the holy purpose for which he had been sent to earth:

Lamentations 3

28. He will sit alone and keep silent, for He has laid our iniquities upon him;

29. He will put his mouth in the dust, that there may be hope [for us];

30. He will give his cheek to the one striking him; He will be filled with reproach.

31. Yet, He [the Father] will not cast off the Lord [the Son] forever.

32. For though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion [on the Son] according to the abundance of His lovingkindness.

Through the prophets, the Father often proclaimed that the torture and killing of His Son would accomplish the purpose for which He sent him to earth, namely, that the sins of many people would be washed away and the knowledge of God would be granted to them:

Isaiah 52

15. He shall sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at him, for that which had not been told them, they shall see, and that which they had not heard, they shall understand.

The Son Would Ride into Jerusalem on a Donkey

Before Jesus made his last entry into Jerusalem, he sent two of his disciples ahead of him to “find a colt” (Lk. 19:30b) and bring it to him. “So, the disciples went, and they did just as Jesus had instructed them” (Mt. 21:6). Then they brought the young donkey to Jesus, “and they threw their own garments on the colt, and then put Jesus on him” (Lk. 19:35). This fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah who said,

Zechariah 9

9. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold! Your King will come to you, righteous and victorious! He will be meek, riding on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of an ass.

The Son Did Not Want to Come

Everyone knows that the Son of God did not look forward to the horrific death his Father had determined he should suffer, for his agonizing prayers in the garden of Gethsemane are recorded in all four gospels. He so desperately begged his Father to find some other way to save mankind that “his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Lk. 22:44). However, it is not well known that before coming to earth, the Son pleaded with the Father not to send him into the body of a Jewish man. He said, “Oh, do not put the life of your turtledove into a creature, a creature among your afflicted people!” (Ps. 74:19a). But as the author of Hebrews says, “He had to be made like his brothers in every way, . . . so that by means of death, he might destroy the one who held the power of death, that is, the Accuser, and set free those who through fear of death were subject to bondage their whole lives” (Heb. 2:17, 14b–15).

The hidden Son also foretold a prayer that he would pray, asking God not to end his life at an early age, and then foretold his Father’s comforting response:

Psalm 102

23. He weakened my strength^[41] in the way. He shortened my days.

24. When I said, “O my God, do not offer me up in the midst of my days,” He said, “Your years are throughout all generations.

25. In the beginning, you established the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.

26. They will perish, but you will continue, and all of them will grow old like a garment. Like clothing will you change them, and they will be changed.

27. But you will be the same, and your years will have no end.

28. The sons of your servants will dwell, and their seed will be established, in your presence.”

Even though he would have preferred not to be crucified, the Son, as always, chose to do his Father’s will instead of his own. In Gethsemane, he repeatedly said, “Not my will, but yours be done” (e.g., Lk. 22:42), and in heaven before he came to earth, he said, “I go to do your will, O God! I delight to do your will, . . . for your law is within me” (Ps. 40:8; Heb. 10:7, 9). Then, again submitting to the Father’s will, he added, “I will declare your name to my brothers. In the midst of the congregation will I sing you praise” (Heb. 2:12). Jesus does this through believers whenever the Spirit moves God’s people to sing Him praise.

Thirty Pieces of Silver

The priests and elders of Israel paid Judas thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus. At an opportune moment, away from the crowds of ordinary people who loved to hear Jesus (Mk. 12:37), Judas led the priests and elders to the garden where Jesus had gone to pray. Afterward, the repentant Judas returned to the same elders, confessing that he had done evil to an innocent man. Those revered leaders of God’s people then gave Judas what was, considering the circumstances, the coldest response ever given by men to a confession of sin. They mockingly replied to Judas’ terror and tears, “What is that to us? You see to that” (Mt. 27:4). Judas then threw the bag of silver pieces onto the floor of the house of God, and ran out and killed himself. The priests, not wanting to pollute their temple with blood money, decided to use the thirty pieces of silver to buy “the field of the potter” as a place to bury non-Jews (Mt. 27:7).

The prophet Zechariah was moved by the hidden Son of God to foretell this:

Zechariah 11

12. And I [the Son] said to them [the chief priests], “If it seems good in your eyes, give me my price, and if not, don’t.” So, as my price, they weighed out thirty pieces of silver.

13. Then Jehovah said to me [the Son], “Throw it down (the very high price at which I was appraised by them) for the potter.” So, I took the thirty pieces of silver, and I threw them down for the potter in the house of Jehovah.

This prophecy reveals that the Son was not a victim. He and his Father were in complete control of what was taking place, even to the point of determining how much money the priests would pay Judas and what would be done with that blood money. Jesus told his wondering disciples,

John 10

17. “The Father loves me because I lay down my life that I might receive it again.

18. Nobody takes it from me; I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I received this commandment from my Father.”

But the disciples could not comprehend what he was saying.

The Son’s sacrifice was altogether the plan of God, and no man, nor Satan, nor any other creature possessed the wisdom, love, or power required to take credit for it. To help us understand that, the Father declared through the prophets all that would happen to Jesus, and that He would be the One doing it! Even Jesus’ crucifixion was so filled with God’s purpose that God alone is credited as being responsible for it: “It pleased Jehovah to crush him,” said Isaiah; “He has put him to grief” (Isa. 53:10a).

The Messiah’s Suffering

Through Isaiah, the Son foretold the abuse he would suffer when he came to earth: “I gave my back to the strikers, and my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard. I did not hide my face from shame or spit” (Isa. 50:6). And so, Jesus’ face was spat upon and beaten by those who arrested him (Mt. 26:67–68; Mk. 14:65). Micah, too, prophesied of the Son being struck in the face, adding one gruesome detail, which is that Jesus’ tormentors used a rod to do it: “They shall strike the Judge of Israel upon the cheek with a rod” (Mic. 5:1c). To fulfill that prophecy, after Jesus had been turned over to the Romans, the soldiers plaited a crown of thorns, placed it on Jesus’ head, and then drove the thorns into his head with blows from a rod (Mk. 15:17–19). Then, Jesus’ flesh was ripped off his back with a lash that was probably tipped with bits of metal and glass.

By the time the Jews and the Roman soldiers finished with him, Jesus’ face and body were so battered and bloody that he did not even look human. The Father foretold this, too, first speaking to His Son and then about him: “Many shall be aghast at you. So great shall be the disfigurement of his visage that it will be beyond human, and his form, beyond the sons of men” (Isa. 52:14).

In Psalm 69, the Son described more of the cruel abuse he would suffer at the hands of God’s people.^[42] He told of how his beloved Israel would hate him for no reason (v. 4) and how all the people, including Mary’s other children, would treat him like a foreigner (v. 8). He said through the prophet that the pain of his reproach would send him to God with weeping and fasting but that his fellow Israelites would mock him even for that (vv. 3, 10). He also spoke of how he would be a public joke among the people (vv. 11–12). Finally, he revealed that men had tried to poison him and that their cruelty would continue even after he was nailed to the cross:

Psalm 69

21. They put poison in my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

Luke 23 (cf. Mt. 27:33–34)

36. The soldiers were also making fun of him, coming up and offering him vinegar,

37. saying, “Since you are the King of the Jews, save yourself !”

The Messiah Would Die for Us

Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would be tortured and killed for our sins, even though we considered him cursed by God:

Isaiah 53

4. He took our sicknesses and bore our sufferings, yet we considered him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

5. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; chastisement for our peace was laid upon him; and by his wounds, we are healed.

6. We all, like sheep, have gone astray; every one of us has turned to his own way, and Jehovah laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

The angel Gabriel told Daniel the same thing, with the added detail that Jesus would die without possessing anything on earth: “The Messiah will be cut off and will have nothing” (Dan. 9:26a).

Isaiah 53 rivals the Psalms in giving details about the Messiah. In that prophecy, Isaiah spoke of the Messiah’s persecutions (v. 3), his humility (v. 7), his unjust trial (v. 8a), and his innocence (v. 9b). It also revealed the reason the Messiah would suffer (vv. 8b, 11b, 12b), that he would be buried in a rich man’s tomb (v. 9a), and that God would accept the Son’s sacrifice and reward him (vv. 10–11a, 12a).

Isaiah 53

3. He [the Son] was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He was like one hiding his face from us. He was despised, and we did not value him.

. . . .

7. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. (Fulfilled in Mk. 15:3–5)

8. He was taken from prison and from justice, and who will speak of his generation? He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

9. He made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, although he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. (Fulfilled in Mt. 27:57–60)

10. Yet, it pleased Jehovah [the Father] to crush him; He has put him to grief. When He [the Father] has made his life an offering for sin, he [the Son] shall see his generation. He [the Father] shall prolong his [the Son’s] days, and the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand.

11a. He [the Father] will see the travail of his soul and be satisfied.

The Father then speaks:

11b. By his knowledge, my righteous servant shall justify many, for he will bear their iniquities.

12. Therefore will I divide to him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong because he exposed his soul to death and was numbered with transgressors. Yet, he bore the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

The Son bore those sins because he loved the sinners and was willing to die for them. Speaking of the terrible, gaping wounds his hands received during the crucifixion, the Son expressed his great love for Israel when he said, “I have engraved you upon the palms of my hands” (Isa. 49:16a).

Conditions on the Day He Died

The Son revealed through David that his Father would bring darkness over the land and bend the heavens low to be near him as he suffered on the cross. He said, “He bowed the heavens, and came down, and thick darkness was under His feet” (Ps. 18:9). The Son also foretold the earthquake that attended his death:

Psalm 18

6. In my distress, I called on Jehovah; yea, I cried out to my God for help. He heard my voice from His temple, and my plea came to Him, into His ears.

7. Then the earth shook and trembled, and the foundations of the mountains moved; they were shaken because He burned with anger.

A thousand years later, these things came to pass, just as the Son said they would:

Matthew 27

45. From the sixth hour on, darkness came over all the land until the ninth hour.

. . . .

50. Then Jesus, again crying out with a loud voice, let go the spirit,

51b. and the earth shook, and the rocks were split apart.

Details of His Crucifixion

In Psalm 22, the Son revealed the cruel manner in which he would die (v. 16) and described his desperate thirst on the cross (v. 15). He foretold some of the very words he would speak while writhing in agony (v. 1), as well as what his adversaries would say to him as they gloated over his death struggle (vv. 7–8). He also spoke of the Roman soldiers who crucified him and of their casting lots for his clothing (v. 18). He even revealed details about himself and his crucifixion that are not found in the New Testament, such as the fact that his joints separated as he was hanging on the cross (v. 14) and that by the time of his crucifixion, his body would be so emaciated by fasting and labor that his bones could be counted (v. 17).

Psalm 22

1. My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from delivering me and from the words of my anguished cry? (Fulfilled in Mt. 27:46)

. . . .

6. I am a worm, and not a man, a reproach to men, and despised by people.

7. Everyone who sees me ridicules me. They smirk; they shake the head,

8. saying “Trust in Jehovah! Let Him deliver him. Let Him rescue him, seeing He delighted in him.” (Fulfilled in Mt. 27:41–43)

9. You are the One who took me out of the womb. You made me trust in you when I was on my mother’s breasts.

10. I was cast upon you from the womb. From my mother’s belly, you have been my God.

11. Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.

. . . .

14. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; it is melted within me.

15. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue is stuck to my palate; yea, you have brought me to the dust of death. (Fulfilled in Jn. 19:28)

16. Dogs encompass me; the congregation of the wicked encircle me. They pierced my hands and my feet.

(Fulfilled in Mt. 27:35a)

17. I can count all my bones. They gaze and stare at me.

18. They divided my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. (Fulfilled in Jn. 19:23–24)

19. But you, O Jehovah, do not be far off!O my Help, come quickly to my aid!

The Messiah’s Descent into Sheol

God must have revealed to Habakkuk something about the death His Son would suffer, for Habakkuk was moved to pour out this earnest plea: “O Jehovah, I have heard your message, and I am in awe. O Jehovah, restore to life in the midst of the years the one you created! In the midst of his years, make him known. In wrath, remember mercy!” (Hab. 3:2). The Father foretold that He would bring His slain Son back to life and that the Son would remind Him of that precious promise even after he was dead. “My soul cleaves to the dust”, he said, “Restore me to life, according to your word!” (Ps. 119:25).

Jesus said that Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale was a figure of the time he would spend in the heart of the earth (Mt. 12:40). But a thousand years before he lived on earth, the Son spoke through David about that descent into Sheol, confessing faith in his Father, that He would rescue him from that awful place quickly, before his earthly body would begin to decay:

Psalm 16 (Acts 2:25–27)

9b. My flesh shall rest in hope,

10. for you will not leave my soul in Sheol; nor will you allow your holy one to see corruption.

The Messiah’s Resurrection

After God did as He had promised and raised up His Son from the grave, the Son praised God for doing it, and he invited all who belong to God to join him in doing so:

Psalm 30

3. O Jehovah, you have brought up my soul from Sheol; you restored me to life from the depths of the Pit!

4. Let His holy people sing to Jehovah and praise His holy name,

5. for His anger is but for a moment, and in His favor is life. Weeping may last the night, but in the morning will come a shout of joy.

The Messiah’s Ascension into Heaven

In Ephesians 4:8, Paul quotes another prophecy from Psalms to show that when Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he received from the Father gifts of the Spirit for men:

Psalm 68

18. You have ascended on high! You have taken captivity captive, to procure gifts for men, even the rebellious, so that Jehovah God might dwell with them.

Note that this prophecy also spoke of the Son “taking captivity captive”, which was a prophecy of Jesus’ transfer of Paradise from the heart of the earth into heaven. Before Jesus, everyone, whether righteous or not, went to the heart of the earth when they died. There, in the place called Sheol, the dead were separated – the ungodly were cast into the part of Sheol called Torment, and the righteous were taken to the part called Paradise. Those in Paradise could see and speak with those in Torment, and vice versa (cf. Lk. 16:22–31), but no one could cross from one place to the other. After Jesus ascended, as the prophecy said, he took Paradise out of Sheol so that the righteous could be with him in heaven. And now, instead of going into the heart of the earth when they die, righteous souls go to where Paradise is, in heaven with Jesus. When ancient souls came to the time of their death, they would say things like, “I go to be with my fathers [in Sheol]” (cf. Gen. 47:30), but now, for God’s children to die means “to be at home with the Lord [in heaven]” (2Cor. 5:8).

The Restoration of the Messiah’s Glory

The night before he died, Jesus prayed that God would restore him to the glorious existence he shared with the Father before the world began:

John 17

5. And now, Father, glorify me at your side with the glory I used to have with you before the universe existed.

The Father had already promised by the prophet Amos that He would raise the Son from the dead and restore to him the glory he once enjoyed with the Father:

Amos 9

11. In that day, I will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and I will close up its breaches, and I will raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in days of old.

The apostle James confirmed for us that this promise was made by the Father concerning His Son, that He would raise him up, heal his wounds, and restore him to his former glory (Acts 15:16).

But the Son trusted God to do much more than raise him up and restore him to his former heavenly glory; he looked for God to increase it!

Psalm 71

20. You who have shown me many and grievous troubles will bring me back to life and cause me to rise again from the depths of the earth.

21. You will increase my greatness and comfort me again.

The Messiah’s Coronation and Blessing

Jesus made an important distinction between him and the Father in Matthew 22:41–45. There, Jesus showed that he was greater than David, though not as great as God. He did this by quoting David’s famous line, “Jehovah said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool’ ” (Ps. 110:1). In that verse, what the Spirit meant by “Jehovah said to my Lord” was “the Father said to the Son.” But at the time, the Son’s being Lord was God’s secret; David knew nothing of it. He only knew that the Spirit spoke those words through him, as David said on his deathbed, “The Spirit of Jehovah spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue” (cf. 2Sam. 23:2).

In Psalm 2, the Son tells of what would happen to him after his ascension into heaven. He says that he and Jehovah will laugh to scorn the men on earth who tried to destroy him (v. 4), and he tells of the Father placing him on a heavenly throne and giving him great promises:

Psalm 2

David:

1. Why do the Gentiles rage, and the people [the Jews] imagine a vain thing?

2. The kings of earth set themselves, and the rulers [of Israel] assembled themselves together against Jehovah and against His Messiah, saying,

3. “Let us tear off their bands and cast off their cords from us!”

4. He who dwells in heaven [the Father] will laugh. My Lord [the Son] will mock them.

5. Then, He [the Father] will speak to them in His wrath, and in His furious indignation will He discomfit them:

6. “In spite of you, I have enthroned my King upon Zion, my holy mountain.”

The Son:

7. I will declare Jehovah’s decree! He said to me, “You are my Son. Today, I have begotten you!

8. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for an inheritance, even the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession.

9. You shall break them in pieces with a rod of iron; like a potter’s vessel shall you smash them.” (This will be fulfilled – Revelation 19:15.)

David:

10. So, O kings, be wise now. Be instructed, O judges of earth.

11. Serve Jehovah with fear, and rejoice with trembling!

12. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish from the way when his anger is kindled but a little. Blessed are all who seek refuge in him.

What David thought when the Spirit said through him, “Kiss the Son,” we can only imagine. All we know for sure is that the Son was still hidden and that David did not know that the Son was there to kiss, even though the Son had spoken through him.

The Messiah Would Have Children After He Died!

In Isaiah 53:8, the prophet was moved by the Spirit to cry out against the unjust execution of the coming Messiah. Part of the reason for his lamentation was that the Messiah would be killed before he fathered any children. The Reader will remember that Isaiah rhetorically asked, “Who will speak of his generation?” That is, who would be able to record the names of the Messiah’s children, since he would “generate” none? And yet, Isaiah’s question had already been answered, hundreds of years before it was even asked! God provided the answer through King David:

Psalm 22

30. A seed shall serve Him [the Father], and it shall be accounted to the Lord [the Son] for a generation.

31. They shall come, and they will declare His righteousness to a people that shall be born, that He has done this.

The followers of Christ who gathered in Jerusalem became the “people that shall be born” when they received the Spirit of God in Acts 2. They became the children whom the Son wanted Israel to notice and to consider (Isa. 8:18). Born of God, they were counted as the Son’s children, and they became the ones who declared the righteousness of God to others who were also born “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1:12–13).

So, Isaiah said the Messiah would have no children, although centuries before, David had said they would be born. But for Isaiah himself was the mystery magnified when immediately after saying that the Messiah would have no children, the Spirit spoke through him again and said that the Messiah would have children, once God had made him an offering for sin: “When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his generation” (Isa. 53:10b).

It is easy to see why the prophets were puzzled by their own prophecies and “searched for and diligently inquired about this salvation” (1Pet. 1:10). Isaiah must have wondered how it could be that the Messiah would die without children, but after he died, he would have some. But that is what happened. Jesus died so that those who believed in him could be born again and become children of God with him.

The disciples did not understand Jesus when he told them at the Last Supper that they were like a woman about to come to the hour of birth (Jn. 16:20–22), but not long afterward, as Isaiah said would happen, the Messiah saw his children, for the disciples were born of God when the Spirit came with its baptism of regeneration (Acts 2:1–4; Tit. 3:5). What an amazing family! It is no wonder that the Son of God exclaimed, “I and the children Jehovah has given me are for signs and for wonders in Israel!” (Isa. 8:18).

The Son and those who believe in him are the love of God’s life, and since the Son is “most blessed forever”, believers are most blessed with him. We are blessed that we have the Son as both a father and a God (Isa. 9:6) and that we have him as our brother (Rom. 8:29), our High Priest (Heb. 2:17; 4:14), our counsellor (Rev. 3:18), our life (Jn. 6:57), our friend (Jn. 15:13–15), and our Savior (Acts 5:31; Eph. 5:23). The Son of God is all things to us who believe, just as the Father is all things to the Son.

The Key of David

The glory that the Father gave the Son includes the authority, the “key”, to admit souls into the kingdom of God or to refuse them. Through Isaiah, the Father spoke mysteriously of the great authority which He would give to His Son, using a man named Eliakim as a prophetic symbol, a name that means “God will raise up”:

Isaiah 22

20. It shall come to pass in that day that I will call for my servant Eliakim ben-Hilkiah.

21b. I will commit your authority into his hand, and he will be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.

22. And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder. He will open, and no one will shut; and he will shut, and no one will open.

Jesus mentioned this authority in his message to the pastor of the congregation of Philadelphia:

Revelation 3

7b. These things says the one who is holy, who is true, who has the key of David, who opens and no one closes, and closes and no one opens.

In the Old Testament, the key of the house of David was the key to the king’s palace. The man to whom it was entrusted was the man of highest authority in the kingdom, next to the king himself. The management of all the king’s treasure was the responsibility of the man who held that key. He was in complete charge of the king’s household (2Kgs. 18:18). When Paul said of Christ Jesus, “In whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), he was speaking of Jesus’ power not only to admit or deny men entrance into God’s kingdom, but also to open or shut to them the riches of God’s wisdom and knowledge once they are in it.

The Burden Is Removed

Isaiah’s prophecy goes on to foretell the Son’s complete authority over Israel, then of his being killed, and finally, of God’s rejection of Israel:

Isaiah 22

23. I will fasten him [the Son] like a peg in a sure place, and a glorious throne over his father’s house shall be his.

24. And they shall hang on him all the glory of his father’s house, the progeny and the products – every little vessel, from all the bowls to all the pitchers.

25. In that day, says Jehovah of Hosts, the peg that was fastened in a sure place shall be removed, and be cut down, and fall. Then, the burden that was on him shall be cut off, for Jehovah has spoken.

The authority over Israel which God gave Jesus while he was here on earth was sure. “If you do not believe that I am the one,” he told the Jews, “you will die in your sins” (Jn. 8:24). Then, when Jesus was killed, “the peg [Jesus] that was fastened in a sure place” was “removed and cut down.” And after God raised Jesus up from the dead and the Jews, as a nation, refused to hear the gospel, the burden for Israel that had been on Jesus’ shoulders was “cut off”, and instead of Israel, God gave His Son the Gentiles, who began to believe the gospel (Acts 13:46; 18:6).

While here ministering to the Jews, Jesus warned Israel’s leaders that God would cut them off and turn to the Gentiles if they rejected him (Mt. 21:33–43), but they rejected him anyway, not fearing the consequences. Jesus’ love for Israel was so strong that, at times, he broke down and wept for them (e.g., Lk. 19:41), and he still loves them. But when everyone in Israel who would believe had done so, Isaiah’s awful prophecy came to pass, and the burden of the Jews was removed from Jesus’ shoulders.

Near the end of his life, Paul warned the Jews that this was happening, that God was closing their door and turning to the Gentiles:

Acts 28

23. When they [the Jews] had appointed him [Paul] a day, many came to him at his lodging, to whom he expounded upon and testified about the kingdom of God, persuading them from morning until evening of things concerning Jesus, from both the law of Moses and the prophets.

24. And there were some who believed the things he said, but some did not believe.

25. And being in disagreement among themselves, they began to leave, after Paul made one statement: “The holy Spirit spoke rightly to our fathers by Isaiah the prophet

26. when it said, ‘Go to this people and say, “You will certainly hear, but you shall not understand, and you will certainly see, but you shall not perceive.

27. For the heart of this people has become dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and repent, and I heal them.” ’

28. Let it be known to you, therefore, that the salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles, and they will hear!”

It was not unusual for any prophecy to be concealed within a real-life situation. In the Old Testament, God frequently brought about historical situations and then used them to provide hints about His Son. Of course, the ancient people who lived out those prophetic events did not see them as prophecies of the Son. They were like Abraham, who never dreamed that two thousand years after he died, the apostle Paul would see in Abraham’s two wives, Sarah and Hagar, figures of the two covenants that God would make with His people (Gal. 4:21–31). But then, Paul had the great advantage of having received the life of God, and with that life, Paul’s eyes were opened to see Israel’s history the way God saw it as it was happening, that is, as a testimony to His hidden Son.

Daniel Saw the Messiah

As we have now abundantly seen, the Father painted a perfect picture of His Son in the Old Testament, providing Israel with many hints concerning their Messiah. Nothing, however, quite compares with two experiences of Daniel, a young Jew taken captive into Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar and made a eunuch for the king’s service. God loved Daniel very much (Dan. 9:23), and He allowed him to actually see the hidden Son, twice!

Daniel’s First Vision: “The Stone”

In Daniel 2:1–5, King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed a dream which troubled him. He commanded his counsellors, astrologers, and sorcerers to tell him what the dream meant. The only problem was that he could not remember the dream which he wanted them to interpret. When they humbly asked the king to tell them the dream so they could interpret it, he was enraged and said to them, “The thing is completely gone from me! Now, if you do not tell me the dream, with its meaning, you shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill!” (Dan. 2:5).

Of course, the king’s counsellors could not tell him what he had dreamed, and so, Nebuchadnezzar gave the order to execute “all the wise men” in his kingdom. Unfortunately, Daniel and his three Jewish friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, fell into that category, and when the king’s executioner appeared at Daniel’s door, Daniel managed to persuade him to allow him to go to the king and ask for a little time to seek God for the answer. The king agreed, and Daniel went home to seek God. “Then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision” (Dan. 2:19a).

In the morning, Daniel returned to the king. What God had revealed to Daniel, and Daniel now told Nebuchadnezzar, was that the king had gone to bed the previous night wondering about the future (Dan. 2:29) and that the dream he had was God’s response to the king’s desire to know what would come to pass after he died. Daniel then told the amazed king that in his dream, he had seen a giant image made, from the head downward, of gold, silver, brass, and then iron mixed with clay. This represented, said Daniel, the four kingdoms that would hold sway in the earth, one after the other, until God at last would establish an eternal kingdom that will be ruled by a mighty figure called “the Stone”:

Daniel 2

34. You watched until a Stone was cut out, without hands, which struck the image on its feet which were of iron and clay, and it broke them to pieces.

35. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were altogether crushed and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors, and the wind carried them away so that no place was found for them. And the Stone which struck the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

. . . .

45b. The great God has made known to the King what shall come to pass hereafter. And the dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.

God revealed to Daniel the king’s dream and its interpretation but kept the identity of the main character, “the Stone”, a secret. Daniel saw the Stone and was told that the Stone would destroy the kingdoms of man and replace them with an eternal kingdom of his own (Dan. 2:44). The Stone was the most important and intriguing person in the dream, yet nothing about him was revealed to Daniel.

Even more remarkable, however, is the fact that Daniel did not ask anything about the Stone. But then, the understanding of the vision that Daniel saw did not belong to him or to anyone in his time; it belongs to us, the children of the dead man who rose from the dead and gave us a new birth. God gave Daniel the vision, but He kept its ultimate meaning secret until He created us, the people for whom Daniel was writing (cf. Rom. 15:4; 1Cor. 10:11). Daniel was one of those holy and wise men of whom Jesus spoke when he told his disciples, “Many prophets and righteous men longed to see the things you are seeing, and did not see them, and to hear the things you are hearing, and did not hear them” (Mt. 13:17). What Jesus could have said about Daniel is that “he saw, but he did not see, and he heard, but he did not hear,” for seeing and hearing was reserved for us who know and love His Son. As Hebrews says, “God provided something better for us, so that they [including Daniel] should not be made perfect without us” (Heb. 11:40).

The young prophet Zechariah, too, saw the Stone, and like Daniel, he did not understand what he saw. The Stone in his vision had seven eyes (Zech. 3:9a), just as the Lamb of God in John’s vision had seven eyes (Rev. 5:6). And when God told Zechariah that He would engrave the Stone and then take away man’s sins (Zech. 3:9b), the prophet could not have understood that God would use Roman whips and spikes to engrave that Stone with our names, or that the “engraving” would lead to many sins being forgiven.

Daniel’s Second Vision: “One Like the Son of Man”

In the next vision of the future that God gave to Daniel, the same four kingdoms of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream were represented by four beasts, rising from the sea:

Daniel 7

1. In the first year of Belshazzar, king of Babylon, Daniel saw a dream and visions of his head while on his bed. Then, he wrote down the dream and told the sum of the events.

2. Daniel began, and he said, “In my vision during the night, I was watching, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the Great Sea.

3. And four great beasts came up from the sea, different from one another.”

Daniel described in detail these four beasts, which represented the four great world powers of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.^[43] After seeing them, Daniel saw “one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven”, as Jesus said he would do (Mt. 24:30; 26:64), and when he approached God, he was given a kingdom that will never pass away:

Daniel 7

13. In the visions of the night, I was there, watching, and behold, one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven, and he approached the Ancient of Days [the Father], and they ushered him in before Him.

14. And dominion was given to him, and majesty, and a kingdom. And all peoples, nations, and languages will serve him. His dominion will be an eternal dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall not be destroyed.

But the mysterious nature of the vision left Daniel troubled.

Daniel 7

15. As for me, Daniel, my spirit was overwhelmed within me, and the visions of my head terrified me.

16. I approached one of those who stood by, and I asked of him the meaning of all this. And he told me, and made me understand the interpretation of these things.

Not quite. The angel did not give Daniel understanding concerning the most important part of the vision, the identity of the “one like a son of man” who approached “the Ancient of Days” and received an eternal kingdom. That omission is understandable, though, when we remember that God was keeping His Son hidden from heavenly beings as well as from men. The angel did not reveal to Daniel the identity of that mysterious figure because he could not; he did not know who it was that received an eternal kingdom from God any more than Daniel did.

It was as if the angel altogether forgot about that person when he explained the vision to Daniel. And it was as if Daniel also forgot about that person and did not even ask who he was! God prevented both their minds from pursuing the matter. It was obvious that the “one like a son of man” was not God, for God was “the Ancient of Days” to whom that mysterious figure came. So, who was this “son of man”? Perhaps Daniel was too overwhelmed by the experience to even think to ask. He said, “As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly troubled me, and my color changed, but I kept the matter in my heart” (Dan. 7:28b).

No doubt, it was at least in part because Daniel felt that something was incomplete about his understanding of the vision that he was left with such troubled thoughts. So, again, Daniel had been allowed to actually see the hidden Son of God, and again, God did not allow Daniel even to think to ask who he was. As has been said, when God hides a thing, He hides it in plain view.

The Messiah’s Return to Israel

The last few chapters of young Zechariah’s prophecies concern events that will transpire at the end of this age when the Son returns to Israel to reign over the earth. Zechariah foretold of the trying time that is coming when the whole world, in a final effort to exterminate the Jews, will unite behind an evil ruler called “the Beast” (Rev. 19:19). The brutal armies of the Beast will seem unstoppable as they march through the land of Israel, but when the desperate prayers of the Jews touch God’s heart, He will send His Son from heaven to take up once more the burden of the Jews which had been taken off his shoulder, and rescue the beleaguered nation (Zech. 14:3–4; cf. Rev. 19:11–21).

Jesus will quickly destroy the Beast and his army, and come into what remains of Jerusalem, and when he does that, he said through Zechariah that “they will look on me whom they pierced” (Zech. 12:10b). Someone among the Jews will notice that the hands of their heavenly Rescuer are scarred and will ask him about it. The tenderness in Jesus’ answer is overwhelming:

Zechariah 13

6. One will say to him, “What are these wounds in your hands?” And he will answer, “Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends”.

Zechariah then prophesied about the brokenness of the Jews when they realize that their Deliverer is Jesus and that he still loves them. It will crush them to realize that their fathers had killed the Messiah, who had come to do them good, and that now, he had mercifully come back to them – again, for their good:

Zechariah 12

10b. And they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only son, bitterly crying out for him as one would bitterly cry out for a firstborn.

11a. The wailing in Jerusalem that day will be great,

12a. and the land shall cry aloud in sorrow.

The first time the Son came to Israel, “his own people did not receive him” (Jn. 1:11). But this time, the Jews will receive him, and the Son will grant them repentance: “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the spirit of grace and of supplication” (Zech. 12:10a), and the Jews will at last receive the kind of life God has so long wanted to share with them.

His Fathers Will Become His Sons

All the righteous from the beginning of the world will return to earth with Jesus to reign with him, including the men who were revered in Israel as “the fathers”. Men of faith such as Abraham, Joseph, and Moses will be among them, subject to Jesus along with everyone else. The Spirit spoke of these “fathers” being subject to Christ and reigning, under him, over the earth when it said through David, “Instead of your fathers, they will be your sons, whom you will make princes over all the earth” (Ps. 45:16).

Two Israels

The Old Testament nation of saints was called Israel because that was the name God gave to Jacob, the father of that nation (Gen. 32:28). The New Testament nation of saints is called “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16) because “Israel” is a name God also gave His Son, the father of the New Testament nation of saints. The Son spoke of this through Isaiah:

Isaiah 49

1. Hear me, O isles! Listen, people from afar! Jehovah called me from the womb. From my mother’s belly, He made mention of my name.

2. He made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of His hand, He hid me. He made me a polished arrow; in His quiver, He has hidden me.

3. He said to me, “You are my servant Israel, for in you, I will glorify myself.”

Two Holy Ones

In Isaiah 49:7, two holy ones are mentioned. One is the Father’s holy one, the Son, and the second is the Son’s Holy One, the Father. Notice, too, that in this prophecy, the Father appears again to be calling His Son “Israel”:

Isaiah 49

7. Thus says Jehovah, the Redeemer of His holy one, Israel [the Son], to the one despised by man, the one abhorred by the nation, the servant of rulers: “Kings will see and arise, and princes will bow down because of Jehovah [the Father] who is faithful, Israel’s Holy One, who has chosen you.”

Which God Did It?

In the case of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Father consistently declared through the prophets that the Son (“God”) is the one who destroyed those cities. Speaking to the rebellious earthly nation of Israel, the Father said,

Amos 4

11. “I have overthrown some of you, as God [the Son] overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . Still, you did not return to me,” says Jehovah.

Jeremiah 50

40a. “God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah and their neighbors,” says Jehovah.

Again, in Isaiah 13, the Father declares that He will “stir up” the Medes against Babylon. But then, He refers to God as if that God is someone else! And it was someone else – the hidden Son:

Isaiah 13

17a. I [the Father] will stir up the Medes against them [the Babylonians].

. . . .

19. And Babylon . . . shall be as when God [the Son] overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

In the prophets, the Father did not hesitate to refer to His hidden Son as God (e.g., Ps. 45:6), and neither should we. After the disciples’ eyes were opened to see the Son for who he was, and who he had always been, they also referred to the Son as God, for the Spirit revealed to them that the Son was God’s agent in creation (Jn. 1:3), and “he who built everything is God” (Heb. 3:4).

“I Will Shake the Heavens”

While here among us, the Son of God said that heaven and earth will be destroyed (Mt. 24:35), but through Isaiah, the hidden Son had already foretold of that cataclysmic event. When he spoke through Isaiah, however, he added some mystery to the prophecy, for the one speaking said that he would destroy heaven and earth in the wrath of Jehovah:

Isaiah 13 (cf. Hag. 2:6; Heb. 12:26–27)

13. Therefore, I [the Son] will shake the heavens, and the earth will move out of its place in the wrath of Jehovah of Hosts and in the day of His fierce anger.

Isaiah must have been puzzled by his prophecy. Who but Jehovah Himself could shake heaven and earth? And yet, the voice that spoke through him said that he would shake heaven and earth in the wrath of Jehovah. Who was this, Isaiah must have wondered, who would shake heaven and earth with Jehovah’s power instead of his own? It was the hidden Son of God, who said on the one hand, “Of myself, I can do nothing” (Jn. 5:30), but on the other, “All power in heaven and on earth is given to me” and “The works that I do in my Father’s name, these bear witness of me” (Mt. 28:18; Jn. 10:25).

“The Earth”

It will help to understand the next prophecy to know that “the earth” is sometimes used prophetically as a reference to God’s people, just as “the sea” is sometimes used as a reference to people of the world.^[44] For example, Isaiah prophesied of the nation of saints being created in one day, the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:

Isaiah 66

8. Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall the earth be born in one day? Shall a nation be born at once? For even as she travailed, Zion gave birth to her children.

And in Revelation, John saw God’s people, “the earth”, help Israel with her mouth (prayer and teaching) to escape the slander of Satan against the Jews: “The earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the river [lies and hatred] that the Dragon spewed out of his mouth” (Rev. 12:16).

In Isaiah 49, the hidden Son revealed that the Father would answer his prayer and give him power to raise “the earth” from the prison of death and give God’s people an eternal inheritance, never again to suffer hunger or thirst, or any such thing, but to drink of the water of life:

Isaiah 49

8. This is what Jehovah said: “In the acceptable time, I will answer you [the Son], and in the day of salvation, I will help you. And I will watch over you and give you for a covenant of the people, to cause the earth to rise to inherit desolate inheritances,

9. saying to the prisoners, ‘Come forth!’ And to those in darkness, ‘Show yourselves!’ They shall feed along the roads, and their pastures shall be in all the high places.

10. And they will neither hunger nor thirst, and heat and sun will not beat upon them. For He who pities them will guide them, and by springs of water will He refresh them.”

This prophecy will be fulfilled in the end, when Jesus has raised up all God’s children and given them an eternally peaceful inheritance:

Revelation 7

16. They will not hunger any longer, nor thirst any longer, nor will the sun ever beat down on them, nor any heat,

17. For the Lamb . . . will be their Shepherd, and he will guide them to fountains of living waters, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Revelation 21

4a. God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more. Neither will there be sorrow, nor crying, nor pain anymore.

But this wonderful blessing will come to pass for God’s people, according to James, only when believers produce the kind of spiritual fruit to God that He is looking for:

James 5

7. Be patient, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, patiently waiting for it until it receives the early and the latter rain.

The apostle Paul said the same when he told the Corinthians that God was ready to avenge all disobedience when the obedience of His own people was fulfilled (2Cor. 10:6).

Through the Same Prophet, at the Same Time

Nothing quite demonstrates the astonishing power and unity of the Father and the Son like the prophecies in which the Father and the Son speak through the same prophet during the same prophecy!That sounds strange to us because it is foreign to human experience, but it is not strange to God. As we have said, God’s kind of life is different from and superior to ours, and He can do things that humans cannot even think to do. Coming across such extraordinary prophecies as these makes reading the Old Testament prophets a thrilling and educational adventure.

Example #1: Isaiah

In the following scriptures, the Father speaks of sending His Son to rescue fallen man, and then the Son speaks of his existence from the beginning of creation and his mission to earth:

Isaiah 48

The Father:

15. I, even I, have spoken! Yea, I called him; I sent him; and he will make his way successful.

The Son:

16. Draw near to me! Hear this! From the beginning, I have not spoken in secret. From the beginning of time, I was there. But now, my Lord Jehovah has sent me and His Spirit.

Example #2: Malachi

In Malachi’s prophecy of the Son’s entrance into the world, it is clear when the Son is speaking because he uses the word “I”, as opposed to the Father, who refers to the Son as “he”:

Malachi 3

The Son (to Israel):

1a. I will send my messenger [John the Baptizer], and he will prepare the way before me.

The Father (to Israel):

1b. “The Lord [the Son] whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant whom you desire. Behold, he is coming!” says Jehovah of Hosts.^[45]

The “I’s”

Whenever the Father spoke through the prophets in the first person (“I”), it was because the Father Himself existed, a fully alive and thinking being. That is never disputed. But as Malachi 3:1 shows us, the Son also spoke through the prophets using the pronoun “I”. Why, then, should we not think that when the Son spoke, he also existed as a fully alive and thinking being? Everyone will agree that when the Father spoke through the prophets, it really was the Father. Why, then, should we not think that when the Son spoke through the prophets, it really was the Son? Why should we think, as some teach, that it was only the Father speaking as if He were the Son because the Son didn’t really exist yet, except as an idea in God’s mind? Or why should we think, as Trinitarian believers would have it, that in the prophets, there were two co-equal and co-eternal hypostases of a triune Being speaking through the prophets, first as one person and then as another, back and forth? Or again, why should we think that the Father and the Son are the same person altogether, as those of the Oneness faith teach, so that God was speaking through the prophets in a way that made it seem as if two people were speaking instead of one? What would be the point in doing that?

Nothing in the writings of the prophets or the apostles would lead an impartial seeker of truth to any of the three conclusions described above. No scriptural basis exists for thinking that the Son’s “I” means something different from the Father’s “I”. Therefore, I have concluded that in the matter of whether or not the Son existed from the beginning as a separate person with the Father, the “I’s” have it!

The Messiah’s Name

It seems that almost everything about the Son is revealed in the Old Testament except his name. However, if we read the story of Moses and Joshua as God intended for it to be read – in the light of God’s life – we even find the Son’s name in those ancient scriptures.

Moses’ failure to bring God’s people into the land of promise was a figure of the law’s inability to lead God’s people all the way into eternal life. God’s command to Moses to anoint a young man named Joshua to finish the work was a prophecy of the Son, for Jesus’ name in Hebrew is virtually the same as Joshua, and in order for the saints to attain to the eternal place of rest God has promised them, Moses (the law) had to be replaced by the “Joshua” of the New Testament: Jesus.

God’s Challenge: Who Is He?

In some prophecies concerning the hidden Son, God challenged men to tell Him who He was talking about. After speaking of the end times and the work that He would send His Son to do, God asked, “Who is the chosen one whom I will appoint for it? Yea, who is like me? And who will determine the time for me? Yea, who is this, the Shepherd who is standing before me?” (Jer. 49:19). And the Spirit moved Solomon’s friend Agur to mock man’s pride with an impossible challenge: “Who has gathered the wind in the hollow of His hands? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name? And what is His Son’s name? Surely you know!” (Prov. 30:4).

Strange Tongues

Many prophecies had a dual meaning, one which applied to that time, and another which would only come to light in the future, as in the case of Sarah and Hagar (Gal. 4:21–31). For example, Isaiah prophesied that a foreign army, speaking a foreign language, would bring relief to righteous souls from the oppression of wicked rulers:

Isaiah 28

11. He will speak to this people with stammering lips and another tongue,

12a. to whom He said, “This is the rest with which you will cause the weary one to rest,” and, “This is the refreshing.”

No doubt, Paul read that prophecy many times as a young Pharisee, but after receiving God’s kind of life, he read with enlightened eyes Isaiah’s prophecy of a people speaking a language which could not be understood, and he realized that God had something more than foreign soldiers and wicked rulers in mind when He spoke through Isaiah. Paul explained that Isaiah was prophesying of the miraculous New Testament experience of speaking in tongues:

1Corinthians 14

21. In the law it is written, “With strange tongues and other lips will I speak to this people, and even at that, they will not listen to me, says the Lord.”

22a. This means that tongues are for a sign.

Two Cryptic Verses

“Behold This One! He Is New.”

I have chosen not to include some of the scriptures in the Old Testament which can be translated in a way that would refer to the hidden Son, but would seem out of context to do so. To give the Reader an idea of what I am describing, I offer the following example. Notice how verse 10, below, seems to interrupt the flow of thought of the verses before and after:

Ecclesiastes 1

9. Whatever has been, the same shall be, and whatever has been done, the same shall be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

10. (There is a Word of whom He says, “Behold this one! He is new.” He already existed from eternity, he who was before we were.)

11. There is no memory of former things. And of the things which will follow, there will also be no memory among those who come afterward.

Most translations make the first half of verse 10 into a question, the King James Version included: “Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new?” But nothing in the Hebrew indicates that a question is being asked; it is only a statement. Admittedly, our translation of verse 10 interrupts a logical sequence of thought, but there are many such statements injected by God into otherwise cohesive messages.

For example, verse 8, below, has no connection whatsoever with the verses before and after. It comes in the midst of John’s testimony of his astonishing experience on the Isle of Patmos:

Revelation 1

7. Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. Yes, Amen!

8. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, the One who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty!”

Then, John continues with his testimony as if nothing unusual has happened.

Revelation 1

9. I, John, . . . was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and because of the witness of Jesus Christ.

Revelation 1:8 is the kind of verse Ecclesiastes 1:10 seems to be, that is, an unexpected, divine interjection interrupting the flow of the narrative. What follows is another example.

“Because He Wanted a Divine Child ”

The first half of Malachi 2:15 is very difficult for translators to decipher, as a survey of modern translations will show. It comes in the middle of God’s rebuke of Israelite husbands for being unfaithful to their Israelite wives. Most translations, therefore, force the translation to fit in logically with that subject. We chose not to do that, but to see it as an interjection of God concerning His Son, since that also fits in with the idea of having a holy seed:

Malachi 2

14. Jehovah has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, that you have dealt treacherously with her, yet she is your companion, and the wife of your covenant.

15. (Has He not created one in whom is the fullness of the Spirit? And why him? Because He wanted a divine child.^[46]) Take heed to your spirit, and let no one of you be unfaithful to the wife of your youth!

It being the case that God created everything He created only because He wanted to create it, it is reasonable to conclude that God created the Son because He wanted someone to love, “a divine child” for Himself. And that is true, regardless of how we translate Malachi 2:15a.

I have omitted from this chapter other such verses in order to avoid an appearance of manipulating the Scriptures to argue a point. The Old Testament contains enough indisputable references to the Son to suffice for my purpose. I just wanted the Reader to be aware that the scriptures included in this chapter are by no means exhaustive. The Old Testament is filled with references to the hidden Son, some less obvious than others, but all of them real and wonderful.

Until the Spirit Came

Shortly before the Spirit came, Jesus opened the minds of some of his disciples so that they could see him in the Old Testament (Lk. 24:25–27, 32, 45). They must have been amazed at what they could then see in the law and the prophets. They must have wondered, as many of us have wondered who knew the Bible before our eyes were opened by Christ, “Have these things been in the Bible the whole time?” How thrilling an experience it must have been for believing Jews to read their old, familiar Scriptures and to have them transformed into a new and refreshing message from their God, the message of His Son. But it was only when the Father sent His kind of life to Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost that they truly began to know the God about whom the Scriptures had told them and to know the Son who had just been on earth and walked among them.

But after God shared His life with man, angels remained without it, and so, they remained without the knowledge of God. They knew that God existed, of course; they had beheld His face in heaven for ages. But they did not know Him; they did not share His thoughts and feelings, and they never will because the Son did not die for angels to have God’s kind of life; he died for us. The angels know now that the Son exists, of course, but they will never know him as those with God’s life can know him. God’s fellowship with His children is forever a complete mystery to both men and angels (1Pet. 1:12).

Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. All of heaven’s creatures knew about God, having lived in His presence and spoken with Him face-to-face, but they did not, and they still do not, know Him. Israel’s religious leaders strove to become experts in the Bible, and they still do, but without God’s life, they, too, can only know about God. They will never rightly understand the Scriptures to which they are devoted without the Spirit, for it takes the same kind of life to understand the Bible that it took to write it.

Paul said that “whatever was written before was written for our learning” (Rom. 15:4); however, “what was written before” could only tell men about the Son; the life of God alone reveals him. The Son walked among men in plain sight. John said that they saw him with their eyes and touched him with their hands (1Jn. 1:1). The Son performed thousands of miracles and sometimes plainly stated who he was; still, everyone, including John, had to wait until the Spirit came to give them understanding of what their eyes had seen and their hands had handled. Neither the Son’s physical presence nor the Scriptures that spoke of him gave men the knowledge of God.

Now that the “light of life” has come into the world and “enlightened all men” as to the existence of the Son, people can see references to the Son in the Old Testament without having God’s life within them. Apollos, for example, even before receiving the Spirit, “powerfully and publicly confuted the Jews, showing by the Scriptures that Jesus is the Messiah” (Acts 18:28). Not long afterward, however, Apollos received what he needed in order to truly know the Messiah, and he became one of Paul’s trusted helpers (1Cor. 3:6; 16:12). Many devout people know about the Son and have read about him in the Bible, but they have not humbled themselves to him and received from him God’s kind of life, as Apollos did. To such people, Jesus once said, and is still saying,

John 5

39. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but they are they which testify of me,

40. and you do not want to come to me, that you might have life!

Apollos was a good example for all who have been enlightened to the fact of the existence of God’s Son. When he learned that the Messiah would give him a baptism of life, he was wise enough and humble enough to repent and come to the Son to receive it (Acts 18:26). He did not trust his prodigious knowledge of the Scriptures to save him; instead, he put his trust in the Son of whom the Scriptures spoke.

The Son Is the Point

It is certainly true, as I have previously stated, that when God hides things, He lays them out in full view and then does not allow those looking on to understand what they see. In the Old Testament, it is as if God hid the Son in such plain sight that it blinded us. When we read the Old Testament books in the light of God’s life, they become, in their entirety, books about His Son. In the New Testament, the apostles referred constantly to the writings of Old Testament men of God because with minds enlightened by the Spirit, they saw the Son in everything those ancient men wrote. The apostles had only those ancient Scriptures, and yet, they fully preached the gospel of Christ because the Spirit revealed to them what God had hidden in the Old Testament. Those men were neither foolish nor gullible. They were filled with holy life and were anointed to understand the mysteries of God. It was revealed to them that God ordered Old Testament events so that they bore witness to His Son, even as He withheld all understanding of those events until the appointed time. How wonderful is the grace that we have received, to see and to understand what was hidden from so many righteous and wise saints of old!

The Father was thinking of His hidden Son when He told the Serpent that Eve would produce a “seed” that would crush his head (Gen. 3:15). He had His Son in mind when He commanded Moses to lift up the brass serpent in the wilderness so that those who were suffering could look upon it and be healed (Num. 21:8–9; Jn. 3:14–15). He had His Son in mind when He commanded Israel to make certain that not a bone of the Passover lamb was broken (Ex. 12:46; Jn. 19:36). He was thinking of the day that He would send the Spirit to earth to find a bride for His Son when He put it in Abraham’s heart to send his steward to the city of Nahor to find a bride for his son Isaac (Gen. 24:1–10). When God commanded Israel’s high priest to take the blood of animals into “the Most Holy” room of the temple to offer it for the sins of the people, He was thinking of His Son, whom He would command to do the same with his own blood in the most holy place in heaven for the sins of the whole world (Lev. 16:14–15; Heb. 9:11–12). The Father was thinking of His Son when He sent to Israel the pillar of fire by night and the pillar of a cloud by day to lead them to the Promised Land (Num. 9:15–23), for He would later send His Son to guide His people through the wilderness of this world (cf. 1Pet. 2:21). God was thinking of His Son when He promised that a “righteous Branch” would come to execute righteous judgment among His people (Isa. 11:1; Jer. 23:5; Zech. 6:12). God was thinking of His Son when the Spirit prompted Isaiah to cry out, “Behold my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom my soul delights! I have put my Spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa. 42:1). God was thinking of His Son when He promised that the upright, in a land very far away, would one day see “the King in his beauty” (Isa. 33:17). God had His Son in mind when He put it into Pharaoh’s heart to exalt Joseph to the highest place in Egypt, next to himself. Pharaoh handed over all power to Joseph in Egypt, saying to him, “Only in the throne will I be greater than you” (Gen. 41:40), and God has likewise given to the Son “all power in heaven and on earth” (Mt. 28:18), next to Himself.

The Father was thinking of His Son when He created a wife for Adam. He could have instantaneously created the entire human race from dirt, just as He had created Adam, but that would not have prepared us for the revelation of the Son. God wanted us to procreate so that we might experience the deep love of a parent for a child, so that when His Son was revealed, we might be able to comprehend His love for the child He created for Himself. If all human beings had been created from dirt, the concept of having children and the deep emotions that parents feel would be unknown to us. What, then, would God have called His Son so that we could understand who His Son was and what His Son meant to Him?

The Father was thinking of His Son when He gave Moses this warning for Israel:

Deuteronomy 18

18. I will raise up for them, from among their kinsmen, a prophet like you, and I will put my words into his mouth, and he will tell them all that I command him.

19. And it shall be, that whoever will not listen to my words which he will speak in my name, I will require it of him.

Peter tells us that God was thinking of how His Son would bring us God’s kind of life when He said through the prophet Joel, “It shall come to pass in the last days that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy” (Acts 2:17a; Joel 2:28a). Matthew tells us that God was thinking of His Son when He moved Zechariah to proclaim, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold! Your King will come to you!” (Zech. 9:9a; cf. Mt. 21:2–5). Jude tells us that God was thinking of His Son’s return to earth to reign with his saints when He said through Enoch, “The Lord is coming with ten thousands of his saints!” (Jude 1:14). Paul tells us that God was thinking of His Son when He parted the Red Sea (1Cor. 10:1–4), when He made Abraham a father (Gal. 4:22–28), and when He cursed whoever was nailed to a tree (Gal. 3:13). Jesus said that his Father was thinking of him when He moved David to say, “The Stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner” (Ps. 118:22; Mt. 21:42a). And when Jesus told the leaders of Israel that their scriptures testified of him (Jn. 5:39–40), he was only confessing the truth, that he was the point of the Scriptures that they claimed to love.

The entire Bible, indeed life itself, is pointless without the Son. The Son is the one who gives meaning to Abraham’s circumcision, and Moses’ law, and Joshua’s possession of Canaan’s land, and the labors and sufferings of the saints. The Son is the wisdom in Solomon’s proverbs and the music in David’s songs. He is the reason Job waited, the reason Daniel prayed, the reason Jeremiah wept, and the reason Abraham left his kindred behind to find a city “whose Architect and Builder is God” (Heb. 11:8–10). The Son is the reason for every book in the Old Testament. God designed it all to proclaim His Son, but in shadows and figures which men could not understand.

But it is given to us to know him! The Son is our rainbow in the heavens, a living promise that we will never be destroyed. He is our Passover Lamb, whose blood is spread on the doorposts of our hearts. He is our Adam, the first of a new race and of the nation “born in one day.” He is our Noah, preparing a way to escape the coming wrath of God. He is our Melchizedek, meeting us with bread and wine to bless us. He is our Star who came from Jacob (Num. 24:17), by which we safely navigate through the darkness of this world. He is our Joshua, leading us into our eternal possession. He is our David, sitting on the throne in heaven. He is our Boaz, redeeming us foreigners and making us part of the Israel of God. He is our Jonah, back from three days in Sheol. He is our “Sun of righteousness”, who rose from the grave “with healing in his wings” (Mal. 4:2). By the grace of God, we see the Son everywhere that God placed a sign of him, and that is in every utterance of the prophets, every ceremony of the law, and every ancient story of faith.

Chapter 5

Two Kinds of Righteousness

The righteousness of God without a law has now been revealed, being borne witness by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God which is by faith in Jesus Christ.
Romans 3:21–22a

“With Men, It Is Impossible”

When Jesus told his disciples that the Spirit would guide them into all truth (Jn. 16:13a), he said “all truth” because everything true about God is communicated through, and only through, the Spirit. Without the Spirit, no one can either know or please God (1Cor. 2:11–12; Rom. 8:7–9), and because the entrance of the Spirit makes us new creatures capable of knowing and pleasing God, Jesus’ promise of the Spirit for those who believe in him is the most precious promise ever made to mankind.

Paul taught that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), and everyone who truly believes that all wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ will, like Paul, believe whatever Christ says. We have all no doubt thought at some point that God can be known, at least in part, without the Son, but that thought is a product of human pride. James said that to break one of God’s commandments is to be guilty of breaking them all (Jas. 2:10), and it is likewise true that if we think we can know one thing about God without His Son, we are guilty of thinking we can know everything about God without His Son. To think that is to imagine God as a big one of us, which concept has been around a very long time, and it is the fundamental reason that through the millennia, so many have assumed that we humans can know God with our own kind of life. We cannot.

To liberate us from our darkness, God must first make us want to be free from it. This He does by creating in our hearts an awareness of our blindness so that we can feel our need of a new kind of life. When we receive that mercy, it creates in us the faith in Jesus that we need, but without that mercy, we cannot believe in him, as Jesus said: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (Jn. 6:44).

We cannot escape our own understanding or our ways because on our own, we cannot stop being who we are, even if we try. But with the sharp sword of truth, Jesus comes and cuts the cord that binds us to our fallen nature, and he is the only one who can. It is as Paul told the saints in Rome: true righteousness “is not of him who wants it or of him who strives for it, but of God, who shows mercy” (Rom. 9:16). With that, Jesus agreed. He once told his disciples, “With men, it is impossible, but not with God, for all things are possible with God” (Mk. 10:27).

God’s Unique Righteousness

We saw in Chapter 2 that God created different kinds of life, but that God’s own life is uncreated and is different from and infinitely superior to all others. The same is true of all that pertains to God’s life. There is no goodness like God’s kind of goodness, no wisdom like His wisdom, no power like His power, and no righteousness like His righteousness. Everything about God is unique because His kind of life is unique.

Before the Son was revealed, animals, men, and angels had their own kinds of knowledge. God gave to birds the knowledge of flight and of seasons; to beasts, the knowledge of which plants to eat and which to avoid; to angels, the knowledge of how to appear or disappear from human sight; and to men, God gave such knowledge as how to sow and harvest crops (Isa. 28:24–29). All knowledge, in all its forms and degrees, “comes from Jehovah of Hosts. He has provided wondrous counsel; He has given great wisdom” (Isa. 28:29). But when Paul said that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in the Son, he was referring to God’s kind of wisdom and knowledge. Before the Spirit was given, nobody possessed any of God’s kind of wisdom and knowledge, and even now, without the Spirit, nobody possesses any of it. Extreme as that may sound, this is a fundamental element of the gospel.

Both my congregation and I had questions on this point. We wondered how there could have been no knowledge of God until the Spirit was given, since God spoke to people in ancient time and told them what was good and what was evil. But what Jesus helped us to see is that there is a vast difference between being told what is good and evil and having a nature that senses what is good and evil without being told. The knowledge of God is in the feelings. Being told what to do produces the righteousness of man; sensing what to do is the righteousness of God. The former can prick someone’s conscience if he acts contrary to what he has been told, but the latter empowers people to live according to the will of God to begin with. These are the two kinds of righteousness found in the Bible, man’s and God’s.

In the Old Testament, people were righteous if they did what the law told them was good and refrained from what the law told them was evil. That is man’s righteousness. But God’s righteousness is altogether a matter of the heart. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus contrasted his Father’s righteousness to man’s:

Matthew 5

21. You have heard that it was said to those of ancient time, “You shall not murder,” and, “Whoever commits murder will be liable to the Judgment.”

(man’s righteousness)

22a. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause will be liable to the Judgment. (God’s righteousness)

. . . .

27. You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” (man’s righteousness)

28. But I say to you that every man who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (God’s righteousness)

Many in Israel considered Jesus to be cursed by God (Isa. 53:4), but that was only because they did not recognize the kind of righteousness and wisdom that was in him. They even judged Jesus to be unfit to live (Mt. 26:65–66), as they also did later to those who followed Jesus into God’s righteousness (e.g., Acts 7:57–60; 22:22). But the Jews’ spiritual blindness was not unique to them; it is a condition they shared with all mankind. Whenever carnally minded people hear God’s wisdom, they consider it foolishness (1Cor. 2:14), and when they see God’s righteousness, they consider it wickedness. And the root of that error is the self-righteousness of those who fastidiously observe religious rites and obey the accepted rules of conduct. Paul said that was the reason for the Jews’ rejection of Jesus: “Being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and striving to maintain their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God” (Rom. 10:3).

“As He Is, So Are We”

Men were far better off with the law than without it. As Paul said, the law was “holy, and just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). No matter how holy, just, or good the law was, however, it could not make the people to whom God gave it holy, just, and good because the law simply told them what to do; it was not inside them as part of their nature. What the law told people to do was right, but the fact that it had to tell them what to do was the problem.

Jesus exhorted his followers to “be perfect, just as your Father who is in heaven is perfect” (Mt. 5:48), but people cannot live the kind of life God lives without having the kind of life God has. Without God’s Spirit, people can believe that He exists, and admire His works, and behave according to rules that He sets for them. But obedience to a set of rules, even if they are divinely revealed, is our kind of righteousness. Moses told Israel: “It will be our righteousness . . . if we are careful to do all this law just as He has commanded us” (Dt. 6:25; cf. 24:13).

God’s kind of righteousness has nothing to do with obeying rules, and only after God shared His kind of life with people could they go beyond behaving in a holy manner to being holy by nature, as God is. The best that Moses could do was to command Israel to be holy because God was holy (Lev. 11:44–45; 20:7) and to be perfect with God (Dt. 18:13), that is, to keep His rules perfectly. But the Son of God’s exhortation to his disciples was to be perfect the same way God is perfect (Mt. 5:48), and by walking in the kind of life that Jesus’ sacrifice purchased for them, they did it! After receiving God’s kind of life, John made this arresting statement: “As He is, so are we in this world” (1Jn. 4:17). That was not a vain boast or an exaggeration; it was John’s excited confession of the grace of God given to him!

Jesus promised his disciples that he and the Father would come and dwell within them (Jn. 14:23), and when they entered them on the day of Pentecost, they brought their clean desires and their pure, wise thoughts into the disciples’ hearts. But more than that, they gave the disciples the power needed to put those holy desires and thoughts into action. That is God’s righteousness.

How good God is! He knew that we could not with our kind of life be holy the same way He is holy, and so, He sent His Son to make the way for us to have His kind of life! Paul reminded the saints in Philippi that “it is God who is working within you, both to desire and to do according to His good pleasure” (Phip. 2:13). Paul taught his converts in Galatia that if they lived in the Spirit, they would not live as human nature would have them to live (Gal. 5:16). And when he learned that there were divisions among the saints in Corinth, Paul gave them this stunning reproof: “You are still carnal! For as long as envy and strife and dissensions are among you, are you not carnal, and behave like a human?” (1Cor. 3:3). For God’s children to think and act like normal people in this world is sinful, for in a world where sin is the norm (cf. 1Jn. 5:19), normal people are sinners.

An Astonishing Change

Paul understood that with God’s kind of life, believers may partake of God’s nature, which senses what is good, loves it, and has the power to carry it out. In the nature of God is “love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, faith, meekness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23). God’s nature is the law of His kingdom; it is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” which liberates souls “from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2), and it is perfect (Jas. 1:25). That law, written on the hearts of those who receive the Spirit, is far better than any handwritten law, even a “holy, just, and good” one. Wise children of God make time for prayer and study in order to know the law that has been written on their hearts! They strive to find out what is in the life they have been given!

The Father wrought an astonishing change in the hearts of Jesus’ disciples when He gave them His kind of life. Nobody but God could have done it. Nobody but God even knew it needed to be done. No Old Testament prophet or wise man ever spoke of entering “the kingdom of God”; nor did they ever try to explain the righteousness of God. They did not understand the uniqueness of God’s kind of life, and so, they did not understand His kind of kingdom or righteousness.

Standing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus testified, “My kingdom is not of this world,” but Pilate did not believe that Jesus was a king. Jesus certainly didn’t look like a king or act like any king Pilate had ever known. Ancient Israel honored God as a King (Ps. 5:2), even as a great King (Ps. 47:2); still, to their minds, He was the kind of king they already understood, just greater. They also knew that God was righteous (Ps. 119:137), even that He was the most righteous of all (Pss. 36:6; 111:3), but they thought He was righteous with the kind of righteousness they already knew about. Everything of God, His kingdom, His righteousness, His love, His wisdom, etc., was completely unknown in heaven and earth until the Son of God came and revealed it. And it is still unknown, except to those who have not only received the Spirit, but who live in the feelings and thoughts it gives.

“It Is Better”

Jesus’ disciples were already righteous by the law’s standard when Jesus told them that they must seek “the kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Mt. 6:33), but seeking is all they could do at the time. Neither God’s kingdom nor His righteousness was yet available. “The kingdom of God”, wrote Paul, “is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17), and the terrible price for that kind of righteousness and peace and joy was not yet paid while Jesus was here on earth.

The Son of God was as helpless as Moses’ law in imparting to people the nature of God as long as he, like the law, was on the outside of them. The disciples were obeying the commandments of the law and the commandments Jesus gave them, but they were still living in their own righteousness because they were still being told what to do by an external source. Jesus had to die and then offer himself to God as a sacrifice for their sin in order to internalize for them God’s kind of life. “It is better . . . that I go away,” Jesus explained, “for if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you” (Jn. 16:7). He then went on to tell them that the Spirit would soon come to them (Jn. 14:16–20) and that when it came, both he and the Father would enter them with it (Jn. 14:23), bringing, of course, their holy nature with them. Without that, the disciples would have remained carnally minded and died in their sins, along with the rest of humanity:

Romans 8

6. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace,

7. for the carnal mind is enmity against God. It is not subject to God’s law; neither indeed can it be.

Men with carnal minds were certainly subject to Moses’ law, for a carnal mind was the only kind of mind anyone on earth had before the Son was revealed. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had carnal minds. All the prophets had carnal minds. Even Moses, to whom God gave the law for Israel, had a carnal mind. No other kind of mind was available to them. But a carnal mind is absolutely worthless for understanding or obeying “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” That is God’s law for His people now, and that is why Paul said the carnal mind “is not subject to God’s law; neither, indeed, can it be.”

No matter how many years Jesus might have stayed among them, as long as his disciples did not have the kind of life that he had, they would have remained ignorant of God and powerless to please Him, and Jesus would have remained a confusing mystery to them. God could have given a million rules through Moses, and sent a million prophets, and His Son could have stayed on earth a million years, but without God imparting His kind of life into the disciples, they would never have known Him.

“Fear of Death”

Some who lived under the law lived just as the law told them to live, and were therefore considered “righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and judgments of the Lord blamelessly” (Lk. 1:6). Even for them, however, living as they were under a “law of commandments contained in ordinances” (Eph. 2:15), the fear of failing to keep some element of the law correctly and being condemned for it was an inescapable fact of life, until the Son came and “set them free who through fear of death were subject to bondage their whole lives” (Heb. 2:15).

John spoke of the wondrous liberty which is given to God’s people in this covenant, to sense what is right so that in any given situation, God’s will is done. “The anointing that you received from him abides in you,” John wrote, “and you have no need for anyone to teach you” (1Jn. 2:27a). Such knowledge, said Jesus, is eternal life itself: “This is eternal life, that they [believers] may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (Jn. 17:3).

It was to prepare His people to receive His kind of righteousness that God gave them the rites and rules of Moses’ law. That law enabled people to attain to the heights of human righteousness, for it revealed to them a better way of living than they could ever have devised for themselves. Paul said that if there were a law that could make men righteous, Moses’ law would have done it (Gal. 3:21). But it didn’t, not with God’s kind of righteousness. Still, every soul who humbly obeyed Moses’ law was prepared by that law to receive the Son, and to receive the Spirit when God sent it.

God’s Righteousness: No Rites or Rules

There are no rites or rules in heaven, and there never have been any. God’s nature governs everything in His presence, even if the creatures who are there do not understand it. It is God’s nature to live righteously, without rites and rules. God is holy by nature; He needs no rites or rules, and those who walk with Him in His kind of life need no rites or rules, either. God’s righteousness is ritelessness, and in His kingdom, an unruly person is someone who performs rituals and lives according to a set of rules. Paul told the saints, “Walk in the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). He did not say, “Keep the rules, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” because he knew that he himself carried out the desire of his flesh while he was keeping the rules (Rom. 7:5–23).

Those who live in the Spirit live in constant fellowship with God’s feelings and thoughts, and Paul labored greatly to persuade God’s people to be content with that, for it honors God when His children live and worship “in spirit and in truth” and do not trust in rites and rules. Those who have the faith to live that way are “the Israel of God” that Paul preached (Gal. 6:16). To the saints in Rome, Paul wrote that in this covenant,

Romans 2

28. One is not a Jew outwardly; nor is circumcision outward in the flesh.

29. On the contrary, one is a Jew inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not the letter, whose praise is not of men, but of God.

That was also Paul’s message to the Philippian saints when he said,

Philippians 3

3. We are the circumcision who serve God in spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh.

Paul’s was an astonishing gospel, that God’s Spirit sets souls free even from the rites and rules that God Himself had commanded! This “new and living way” of the Spirit (Heb. 10:20), the way of living a holy life without ceremonies or a set of instructions, was the heart of Paul’s gospel for the Gentiles. Sadly, at his end, Paul had failed in his mission to persuade the saints of the revelation given to him; or rather, his converts had failed to grasp the beauty of his revelation and, so, added the law’s ceremonies to their faith. The Galatian saints were among them:

Galatians 3

1a. O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth?

2. This only would I learn of you. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by the preaching of faith?

3. Are you so foolish? Having begun in spirit, are you now perfected by flesh?

Human Righteousness: Rites and Rules

Adam and Eve were not made sinful by eating the forbidden fruit; they ate the fruit because they had become sinful. Sin is a matter of the heart, and their decision to disobey God was the sin; eating it was merely the product of their sin.

The knowledge which Adam and Eve obtained by eating the forbidden fruit was real knowledge, but it did not deliver them from their sinfulness, for it was not the knowledge of God. Likewise, the knowledge that Israel received from the law was real, but it did not deliver them from sinfulness, for it, too, was not the knowledge of God. Neither the knowledge that Adam and Eve received from the fruit nor the knowledge Israel received from the law made them evil; after all, God Himself possessed that knowledge, and He was perfectly good. But neither of those kinds of knowledge could ever deliver man from his fallen nature. In both cases, it was sinfulness, not the kind of knowledge received, that was the problem. Paul touched on this point in his letter to the believers in Rome:

Romans 7

7. What, then, shall we say? “The law is sin”? Absolutely not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin, were it not for the law. For example, I would not have known covetousness, had the law not said, “You shall not covet.”

. . . .

12. Therefore, the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.

. . . .

14b. But I am carnal, sold under sin.

Little children are innocent before God, and Jesus told his followers that they must become like little children if they hoped ever to see God’s kingdom (Mt. 18:1–3). But when children come of age and learn what sin is, they realize their faulty nature and “die” to their innocence. Paul experienced this as a youth:

Romans 7

9. I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

10. And then, the very commandment that was ordained for life was found by me to be for death.

The commandments of Moses’ law, being holy, were contrary to man’s sinful nature, and so, even if someone kept the law, his righteousness was a righteousness based upon maintaining a proper form. Moses and the prophets longed for the day when the hearts of God’s people would be circumcised, and not just their flesh (Dt. 10:16; Jer. 4:4). For that, the Son of God would have to come to earth, take on flesh, suffer and die, and then ascend to offer himself to the Father. But of that sacrifice, Moses and the prophets never even dreamed.

Religious Pride

To come to know God is a humbling experience. Nobody walking in God’s kind of life is proud of being or doing good, for pride is not in God’s nature. When Paul was convicted of pride in his own righteousness and repented of it, it became his greatest joy to be filled with the righteousness of God:

Philippians 3

7. What things were gain to me, these I have counted as loss for Christ.

8. But more than that, I consider all things but loss for the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of everything. But I consider it all dung, that I might gain Christ,

9. and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is by law, but that which is by faith in Christ, the righteousness of God based on faith.

For those like the young Paul, the more strictly they observed the law’s rites, the prouder they became, and the prouder they became, the more antagonistic they were toward God’s kind of righteousness. Sometimes, they became so proud of knowing the law that they even lost sight of the need to actually keep it:

Romans 2

17. Behold! You call yourself a Jew, and you rest in the law, and boast in God,

18. and you know His will, and being instructed by the law, you put things that differ to the test,

19. and you have convinced yourself that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those in darkness,

20. an instructor of the ignorant, a teacher of little children, possessing the form of the knowledge and the truth that is in the law.

21. Well, then, O teacher of others, do you not teach yourself ? O man who preaches not to steal, do you steal?

22. O man who says not to commit adultery, do you commit adultery? O man who abhors idols, do you commit sacrilege?

23. You who boasts in the law, do you dishonor God by transgressing the law?

24. For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” just as it is written.

Religious pride is the most difficult kind of pride for people to recognize because it is based on agreeing with what God has commanded, not rejecting it. The reason Jesus told the devout leaders of Israel that harlots would enter into the kingdom of God before them (Mt. 21:31) is that harlots know they are sinners and, so, are more likely than religious folk to repent when called upon by God to do so. The Son of God came into this world to bring sight to the blind (Jn. 9:39), but the Pharisees claimed not to be blind to the things of God. So, Jesus let them know that he did not come for them: “You men say, ‘We see’; therefore, your sin remains” (Jn. 9:41).

Israel’s leaders had no means of overcoming pride once it took root in their hearts, for it grew greater the more they performed the law’s rites. Observance of the law, for them, proved to be a deadly trap, the trap into which Paul fell as a young man. Every time young Paul obeyed God’s commandment not to steal, he became prouder of not being a thief. Each Sabbath day which Paul observed made him prouder of being an observer of the Sabbath, and more contemptuous of those who were not observers of it. Afterward, as an apostle, Paul described what had happened to him:

Romans 7

8a. Taking advantage of the commandment [the law, which I was keeping], sin produced in me every evil passion.

. . . .

11. Sin, taking advantage of the commandment, deceived me, and with it, killed me.

Nothing can puff up men more than something that truly is from God. That is the most precious and most deadly thing in existence. In the Old Testament, the holy water from God’s sanctuary had the power to justify or to curse a person accused of a crime if that person drank it (Num. 5:11–31). In the New Testament, the holy Spirit does the same things to those who drink it, and Paul warned the saints

1Corinthians 11

27. Whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in a manner unworthy of the Lord shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

28. Let a man examine himself; only then is he to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

29. For he who eats and drinks unworthily, eats and drinks condemnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

An Example of Religious Pride

This is the story of two women from my hometown, both about five years older than I. One of them, Victoria, I knew from my earliest years, and the other, Sadie, I met only after I had married and moved to another city.^[47]

It was a pleasure getting to know Sadie. She believed in Jesus and was a happy person with a good understanding of spiritual things. Although her husband was not a believer, they had been happily married since before they graduated from high school, and they had successfully reared two children. Sadie had been filled with the Spirit years before I met her, and not long after we met, she began attending our home prayer meetings and eventually became a part of our family in Christ. One day as Sadie and I talked, she told me that she remembered Victoria from high school. They had not been close friends, but were in the same graduating class.

Upon learning that, I looked forward to seeing Victoria again. Only occasionally did I see her after she moved from our hometown, but I wanted to be the first to tell her the good news, that I had met her former classmate Sadie and that Sadie was filled with the Spirit and serving Christ.

Victoria herself had always been a morally upright person. She was filled with the Spirit while in college, and in her spiritual journey, she had become an exemplary Christian, an outstanding member of a large church in her community. She and her husband were nearing retirement, both having enjoyed successful careers. Their only child was now grown, as were Sadie’s two children.

Months passed, and I finally saw Victoria again, at a function in my hometown. I was excited for the chance to tell her the good news about Sadie. After some small talk, I told Victoria that I had met Sadie and that she was now serving Christ and. . . . I had hardly gotten those words out of my mouth when Victoria shot back a response that floored me. Actually, she replied so quickly that it was as if she had been waiting for decades for someone to mention Sadie’s name. She turned her head from me and muttered, “She got pregnant in high school.” That was all. And her expression made it clear that she did not want to hear anything else about that sinner. I was left speechless. Victoria exhibited no joy or thankfulness that her former schoolmate had been born again and was happy in Jesus. Her demeanor did not suggest the slightest interest in Sadie’s wonderful story, whom she obviously still thought of as a bad person. I stood there, wondering what to do or say next. Victoria just turned and continued mingling pleasantly with others, as if nothing had even happened.

Jesus revealed the fact that the angels in heaven rejoice when a sinner repents (Lk. 15:10); however, in a heart filled with self-righteous pride, no such joy is felt. It is a good thing that Victoria had kept herself pure as a young woman. I encourage all young people to be morally upright. But it would have been better for her to have committed fornication a thousand times than for her to be so proud of never committing fornication that she would sneer at a soul that Jesus loved and had made pure by his blood.

We are not righteous in God’s sight because of the sins we do not commit. Men may be impressed by such behavior, but God is not, for avoiding wrongdoing is the kind of righteousness we can achieve with our own kind of life, provided we have the willpower to obey the rules. It is the kind of righteousness the Pharisee possessed who prayed, “I thank you, O God, that I am not like the rest of men, robbers, crooks, and adulterers. . . . I fast twice a week and render tithes on everything I gain” (Lk. 18:11–12). If righteousness is based on not committing sins and not transgressing the commandments, then some old trees and buildings are more righteous than anybody living, for they have been here for centuries and have never transgressed God’s commandments.

None of Us Can Do Anything!

In this covenant, we are righteous only as we live our lives the way God lives His, that is, from the heart, effortlessly doing good. That is what is meant by being “led by the Spirit”, and according to the apostle Paul, those who live that way are the only children God acknowledges as His (Rom. 8:14). If you have done a good deed today, or have had a wise thought, or have felt a right feeling, thank God for it. He has blessed you! He is the Giver of every good and perfect gift (Jas. 1:17), and any time He creates a right desire in us so that we think, say, or do what is good, He deserves the credit. Without Him, we can do nothing that is holy, just, and good. Jesus said so:

John 15

4. Stay in me, and I will in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it stays on the vine, so neither can you, unless you stay in me.

5. I am the vine; you, the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit. Without me, you can do nothing.

Jesus openly confessed his complete dependence on his heavenly Father for the strength and wisdom needed to accomplish his purpose. Jesus publicly said, “Of myself, I can do nothing” (Jn. 5:30; cf. v. 19). It is as if Jesus was telling his disciples, “Without the power of God’s life within, none of us can do anything!”

Spiritually speaking, Jesus lived by consuming the things of his heavenly Father. He once told his disciples, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work” (Jn. 4:34), and after telling his followers, “I am the bread of life,” he let them know that if they would inherit eternal life, they must depend on him the way he depended on his Father: “Just as the living Father sent me, and I live by the Father, so also, he who eats me shall live by me” (Jn. 6:48, 57).

“Filthy Rags”

By the time of Jesus, many leaders of Israel, like Victoria, had become proud of their faithfulness in following the rules. No people on earth were more attentive to rules, and none trusted more in ceremonial correctness. The common folk in Israel would have thought they could never be as righteous as the scribes and Pharisees, and Jesus’ disciples were no doubt stunned when he told them, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:20). They must have wondered how they could possibly be more fastidious than the scribes and Pharisees in observing the rites and rules of the law. The answer was that they could not, and in their hearts, they knew it. Jesus knew it, too, but he was speaking of another kind of righteousness, one that would so exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees that man would not even recognize it as righteousness. Indeed, they would hate it because God’s righteousness exposes all forms of human righteousness to be as “filthy rags” before God, as Isaiah said:

Isaiah 64

6. We are all like an unclean thing, and all our forms of righteousness are like filthy rags.

A dear sister in Christ, Donna Nelson, heard something from Jesus very similar to what God spoke through Isaiah. At the time, she was a fine Christian woman, and even had a college degree in Christian Education. But Jesus wanted her to know him, and later, she gave us this testimony:

As I walked into my room, the Spirit spoke directly to me, saying, “Every way you think of me is filth before me.” I did not have to ask what He meant. I knew in that instant the he meant EVERY way, just like He said. All my “good” intentions, all the “good” things learned through my life from well-meaning people around me, were 100% filth before Him! And in that instant, I fell on my bed crying and repenting. I 100% let go of every thing, every thought, every way I had believed [about Jesus] and held onto for my entire life. After a short while, I realized I felt empty inside. I lifted my head and said in my heart to the Lord, “I feel empty. Now what?” His reply: “Now you can be born again.” From that point, I earnestly sought the Lord, and a few months later, I received the baptism of the holy Ghost.

On the day of Pentecost when the disciples received the baptism of God’s life, they began walking in Jesus’ kind of righteousness, which most certainly exceeded that of the scribes and the Pharisees. That is why proud zealots like young Paul persecuted those who had received God’s life. What they saw in believers was a way of life and worship that was contrary to the law as they understood it, but it was not contrary to the law as God intended it; on the contrary, the way of the Spirit fulfilled the law (Rom. 8:4). And when Paul received God’s kind of life from God, he became one of those righteous saints who were persecuted as evil:

Acts 9

23b. The Jews plotted among themselves to kill him,

24. but their plot was made known to [Paul]. Then they began to watch the gates closely, day and night, so that they might kill him.

25. But the disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a large basket.

Paul escaped on that occasion, but they caught up to him at other times.

2Corinthians 11

24. Five times, I received forty lashes, minus one, at the hands of the Jews;

25a. three times, I was beaten with rods.

Paul’s testimony of being caught up to heaven to hear from God “things which are unlawful for a man to speak” (2Cor. 12:2–4) impressed relatively few people in his day, especially certain of the Jews. Nor did his spectacular experience shield his converts from the influence of Jewish believers who insisted that Gentile believers must add Moses’ law to their faith. Those teachers argued persuasively that Gentile believers must live under the law as the believing Jews did, as Jesus himself had done, and as all the original apostles were still doing. Paul fiercely contended with them (Acts 15:1–2) and was unwavering in his insistence on the liberty of Spirit-filled Gentiles from all rites and rules, whether from Moses or anyone else. Paul refused to compromise “even for a moment” the revelation given to him so that the truth would continue for God’s children (Gal. 2:4–5).

The Guardian

Paul described the law as “our guardian, until Christ” (Gal. 3:24). He acknowledged that for that time, God still required the Jews who believed to continue living under that guardian (Gal. 5:3), even though he also knew that when anyone in Israel received the Spirit, the guardian’s work was fulfilled for him (Gal. 3:25). Paul taught that for “everyone who believes, Christ is the end of a law leading to righteousness” (Rom. 10:4) and that everyone who had been baptized into the body of Christ was “dead” to that ancient guardian:

Romans 7

4a. My brothers, you were made dead to the law through the body of Christ.

Galatians 2

19. Through the law, I died to the law, that I might live to God.

As mentioned above, the Jews feared that they would face eternal damnation if they lived without that dear old guardian. After all, had not God commanded them to obey the law, on penalty of death? They could not imagine being considered righteous if they did not keep the law’s rules for conduct and worship. Everyone in Israel to that point in history who had disobeyed the law had been condemned by God, while all who had kept it had been blessed. Who in heaven or earth, then, except a fool or a madman, would think that anyone could be righteous without observing the guardian’s rites and rules? But God did. And when God revealed His thoughts to Paul, Paul passed on that astonishing revelation to others, proclaiming that “the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us who do not walk after the flesh but after the Spirit!” (Rom. 8:1).

Moses had told Israel,

Deuteronomy 4

5. I have taught you statutes and judgments, as Jehovah my God has commanded me, to do in the land which you are entering to possess.

6. And you shall keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the nations which hear all these statutes. And they will say, “Surely, this great nation is a wise and understanding people!”

. . . .

8. What great nation has righteous statutes and judgments as all this law which I am setting before you today?

Moreover, God Himself spoke through Moses to Israel, saying, “You must keep my statutes and my judgments, for the man who does them shall also live by them. I am Jehovah!” (Lev. 18:5).

But Paul told the believing Gentiles in Galatia who had turned to the law,

Galatians 5

4. You are estranged from Christ, you who are justified by law; you have fallen from grace.

5. For we await the hope of righteousness by faith in the Spirit.

Paul’s doctrine seems to contradict Moses, but it does not. And if Moses had lived in Paul’s day, he would have given Paul a hearty amen. Each man in his time and to his audience was telling the truth.

The Manna Jesus Enjoyed

Jesus once told his disciples, “I have food to eat that you do not know about” (Jn. 4:32), explaining, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me” (Jn. 4:34). Sensing God’s will, the way Jesus did, and having the power to do it, the way Jesus did, is to partake of the food which Jesus was talking about, and at that time, the disciples had never even tasted it. Eating the hidden manna which Jesus enjoyed means to live in God’s kind of righteousness, about which the whole world of Jesus’ time, including his disciples, knew nothing. But on the day of Pentecost, when Jesus’ disciples were filled with the Spirit, they partook of heavenly manna and began to enjoy with Jesus a righteousness which so far exceeded that of the law that Israel’s elders condemned it.

In spite of those leaders, however, every soul in Israel who hungered and thirsted for true righteousness was filled with it, just as Jesus promised: “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Mt. 5:6). No man, indeed, no power in heaven or earth, can prevent God from answering the prayer of a sincere heart and feeding the hungry soul.

“The Strength of Sin”

The law of Moses not only made the greatest human righteousness possible for Israel, but it also made it possible for them to commit the greatest human wickedness. The law itself was holy and good, but man’s sinful nature is “more deceitful than anything” (Jer. 17:9), and it found ways to use that holy and good thing to commit worse sins than were possible without it. The sin of Israel’s leading priests and elders in rejecting their Messiah was far greater than any sin the lawless Gentiles could commit, for the Son was not sent to the Gentiles (Mt. 15:24), and so, they could not commit it. Their sin was also greater than that of rank sinners in Israel such as drunkards and harlots, for those religious leaders could sense that Jesus did not hate sinners, and in return, sinners did not hate him (cf. Mt. 11:19). That is the principal reason Jesus told Israel’s elders that harlots would enter into the kingdom of God before they did (Mt. 21:31–32).

The proud leaders of Israel haughtily condemned those who did not know and keep the law (Jn. 7:49), but it was they, not drunkards, harlots, and other social outcasts who committed the great sin of despising and abusing the innocent Son of God. They were more concerned with being right than being good, and anyone like that despises those who are not as right as they are. And it was making so sure they kept the law and their traditions rightly that gave Israel’s elders the strength they needed in order to commit the gravest of errors. Their great pride in being right grew within them and brought them more fully under sin’s dominion every time they obeyed one of God’s commandments.

Paul explained that “sin, that it might be revealed to be sin, worked death in me through what is good so that through the commandment, sin might become exceedingly sinful” (Rom. 7:13). That is why Paul taught that “the strength of sin is the law” (1Cor. 15:56b).

Blameless Wickedness

The law taught what was right, but man was weak and could not escape the sinfulness that governed his will. Paul exulted in the love of God, who saw our need of His strength:

Romans 5

6. When we were without strength, at the appointed time, Christ died for the ungodly.

7. Rarely will someone die for a righteous man, though for a good man, one might possibly bring himself to die,

8. but God commends to us His kind of love, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Before Jesus came to his rescue, Paul struggled in vain to resist the power of his corrupt human nature:

Romans 7

21. I find this law, that evil is present in me even when I desire to do good.

22. With the inner man, I joyfully consent to the law of God,

23. but I see a different law in my members [my flesh], warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in my members.

Sin is so ingrained in human nature that even when following the holy law of Moses, people could still find themselves opposing God and proudly persecuting those who were upright before Him. As a young Pharisee, Paul was a prime example of this, but as an apostle, he understood perfectly what his proud self-esteem had been based upon:

Philippians 3

4b. If anyone else thinks he has reason to trust in the flesh, I have more:

5. circumcised the eighth day; of the nation of Israel; of the tribe of Benjamin; a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee;

6. concerning zeal, persecuting the Assembly of God, being blameless according to the righteousness that is in the law.

Note Paul’s statement that while persecuting God’s people, he was still blameless according to the righteousness of the law. It was that very blamelessness which was the source of his great pride and the strength of his greatest sin.

But Paul obtained mercy from God, even though he “was a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and a violent man” because he did all that “ignorantly in unbelief” (1Tim. 1:13). Had he known what wickedness he was doing, God would never have forgiven him. The law provided no means of forgiveness for sins committed knowingly:

Numbers 15

30. The soul who acts defiantly, whether native-born or a sojourner, he is blaspheming Jehovah, and that soul shall be cut off from among his people.

31. Because he has despised the word of Jehovah and broken His commandment, that soul shall surely be cut off; his iniquity shall be upon him.

Blaspheming can be done without the mouth. Paul said he was a blasphemer before he was converted (1Tim. 1:12–13), and he always spoke well of God. Jesus told his disciples that in time to come, “anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God” (Jn. 16:2b), but God will see that service as blasphemy.

“Not Even One”

One of Paul’s themes throughout his letters is that in spite of how superior to Gentiles he once felt, he and his fellow Jews were by nature no better than they. He even pointed out that sometimes, Israel was worse than the Gentiles (Rom. 2:24). Indeed, Israel’s wickedness was at times so vile that it even embarrassed the heathen (Ezek. 16:27). God said through Ezekiel,

Ezekiel 5 (cf. 2Chron. 33:9)

6. [Jerusalem] has rebelled against my judgments with more wickedness than the Gentiles, and my statutes with more than the nations that surround her, for they have rejected my judgments and have not walked in my statutes.

7. Thus says my Lord Jehovah: Because your confusion is greater than that of the Gentiles who are around you, you have not walked in my statutes nor carried out my judgments. Yea, you have not even done according to the judgments of the Gentiles around you!

In Romans 3:19, Paul emphasized that it was of Israel, not of the Gentiles, that the Spirit spoke when it said through David,

Psalm 14

2. Jehovah looked down from heaven upon the sons of man to see if there was anyone with understanding, anyone who was seeking God.

3. They have all turned aside. They have all, alike, been corrupted; there is no one doing good, not even one!

God, Paul said, “locked up everyone together in disobedience so that He might have mercy upon everyone” (Rom. 11:32). And having learned that lesson through bitter personal experience, Paul boldly taught that no one, Jew or Gentile, can justly boast of being good (1Cor. 1:29).

A Respectable Kind of Wickedness

When Christ revealed himself to Paul, it utterly astounded the young zealot to learn that even though he had dutifully observed the law from childhood (Acts 26:4–5), he was a wretched sinner in God’s sight, in desperate need of mercy. Though blameless in the righteousness of the law, he discovered that he was an enemy to those who were blameless in the righteousness of God. When he was without Christ, the sinful nature in Paul’s flesh was, he said, continually “working through the law, and bore fruit leading to death” (Rom. 7:5). He told the Galatians,

Galatians 1

13. You have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, that I ruthlessly and relentlessly persecuted the Assembly of God and was trying to destroy it,

14. and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many my own age in my nation, being much more zealous for the traditions of my fathers.

Young Paul’s respectable kind of wickedness was the same wickedness that motivated the priests and elders of Israel to persecute and kill Jesus. They were all in bondage to a sinfulness that was so sinful they did not even recognize it as sin. The sin embedded in human nature deceived them as it shamelessly used the holiest thing on earth, Moses’ law, to make them more and more sin’s slaves.

“The Law of the Spirit of Life”

The seventh chapter of Romans contains Paul’s description of his miserable spiritual condition when he had nothing but rites and rules to live by. Before he received God’s kind of life, no matter how much good he wanted to do or how much good he did, his fleshly nature held him fast in an inescapable “law of sin and death”. Paul concluded that chapter by saying, “Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24). But then he rejoiced at the answer: “I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:25), and he went on to give a thrilling testimony of the liberty that Christ had brought him:

Romans 8

1. There is now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus who do not walk after the flesh but after the Spirit.

2. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death!

3. What the law could not do, in that it was powerless because it was of the flesh, God did, after He had sent His Son in the form of sinful flesh to deal with sin.

The law of Moses was indeed powerless, but not because it was wrong. It was powerless because it was on the outside of man and had no power to change human nature and make it holy. The great joy and excitement Paul expressed in Romans 8 was the result of the Spirit of God changing him and liberating him from the dominion of his human nature. Sin had held him captive his entire life, but now it did not, and Paul was thrilled about it.

The new nature created in believers by the Spirit is no more subject to sin than human nature is subject to the law of God (cf. Rom. 8:7). Paul reminded the saints in Rome that they were “completely dead to sin, yet alive to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace. You used to be slaves of sin, but then, made free from sin, you were made slaves to righteousness. And being now made free from sin and slaves to God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and in the end, eternal life” (excerpts, Romans 6).

A Far Holier Thing

When Jesus’ followers received God’s kind of life on the day of Pentecost, they not only received power to exceed the righteousness made possible by the law, but they also received the power to exceed the greatest wickedness if they became proud of having the Spirit. Just as Moses’ law empowered Jews to be more righteous or more wicked than the Gentiles, God’s kind of life empowers God’s children now to be more righteous or more wicked than anyone on earth, Jew or Gentile. Peter warned the saints not to abuse their liberty in Christ, exhorting them to live “as free men, and yet, as slaves of God, not using liberty as a cover for evil” (1Pet. 2:16).

The righteousness of those who receive the Spirit and are like Christ is far greater than the righteousness of those who received the law and were like Moses. Likewise, the sin of those who receive the Spirit but are not like Christ is far greater than the sin of the Jews who received the law but were not like Moses, for they are unfaithful to a far holier thing:

Hebrews 10

28. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy, by two or three witnesses.

29. Of how much worse punishment, do you think, will he be worthy who has trampled under foot the Son of God, has regarded as a common thing the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has done outrage to the Spirit of grace?

It is difficult to imagine a punishment worse than “dying without mercy”, but the man of God said that disobedient saints in this covenant will face such a judgment from God.

Such scriptures show us that God’s people in this New Covenant are capable of a degree of wickedness not possible for those under the Old Covenant, just as they are capable of a greater righteousness. The value in loving Jesus enough to live the sinless way he lives is that loving him keeps us in the greater righteousness of this covenant and saves us from falling into the greater transgression. John wrote, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we are lying and not living the truth,” but “if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1Jn. 1:6–7).

The apostle Paul warned the saints to avoid the appearance of evil (1Thess. 5:22), but it is just as true that God wants His children in this covenant to avoid the mere appearance of good (cf. Mt. 23:27–28). To be good is better than to appear to be good, and our heavenly Father has provided all the power we need to be good just as He is good.

Brokenhearted and Outraged

God used Paul’s experience with the craftiness of his own human nature to teach him that without God’s kind of life, even the best of men are helplessly trapped in sin. Many times as a youth, Paul had no doubt read what the Spirit said through David, “Every man, in his best state, is altogether vanity” (Ps. 39:5b), but only when Christ opened his eyes and showed him himself did Paul understand it. What an overwhelming realization it must have been for him to realize that even as devoted to the law as he had been, he was still “sold under sin” (Rom. 7:14). God’s life brought into Paul’s heart God’s wisdom, and then he saw what sin had done to him. Afterward, pondering over the self-righteous life from which he had been rescued, he joyfully declared, “We are released from the law so that we now serve God in the newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of a document [i.e., the law]!” (Rom. 7:6). It is no wonder that Paul exhorted the saints to “rejoice always” and “in everything give thanks” (1Thess. 5:16, 18a), for that is what he himself was doing!

When Paul’s Gentile converts were persuaded to add the law’s ceremonies to their faith, his joy was turned to sorrow. Paul was both heartbroken and outraged. He pleaded with the Galatians, “This persuasion is not from the One who is calling you!” (Gal. 5:8), and he called on God to damn the men who were persuading them to submit to the law (Gal. 5:12).

It was never God’s will for Gentile believers to worship with ceremonies after they received His kind of life. That was the gospel revealed to Paul for Gentiles. Ceremony is an imitation of life, and the ceremonies of Moses’ law were given by God as an imitation of His life until the Son came and did what needed to be done for the real thing to be given. God intended all along for the law’s holy imitations to be discarded after the Spirit came, and Paul was the first man on earth to understand that.

The Lost Gospel of Paul

Part of the revelation given to Paul was that the law which God gave Moses was intended only for the nation of Israel (Rom. 3:19). He condemned as “false brothers” (Gal. 2:4) and “false apostles” (2Cor. 11:13) the men who pressured his Gentile converts to submit to the law, for they were leading God’s children away from God’s life, back into human righteousness. Once, Paul even had to rebuke Peter for making Gentile believers feel less holy than their circumcised brothers:

Galatians 2

11. When Peter came to Antioch, I withstood him to the face because he was blameworthy.

12. For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he ate with the Gentiles, but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those of the circumcision.

13. And the rest of the Jews played the hypocrite with him as well, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy.

14. But when I saw that they did not walk uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, why are you putting pressure on the Gentiles to become Jews?

15. We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles,

16. knowing that a man is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have trusted in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Therefore, by works of the law will no flesh be justified.”

God’s life is beyond all ceremony. Neither God nor His Son have ever conducted a ceremony in heaven, and Paul warned his Gentile converts that by adding ceremonial works to their faith, they had “fallen from grace” (Gal. 5:4). Faith in ceremonies is a denial that Christ, all by himself, “is able to save completely and forever those who come to God through him” (Heb. 7:25). Of believers who resorted to the works of the law, Paul wrote, “They profess to know God, but by works [of the law], they deny Him” (Tit. 1:16). Those kind of works, by which Israel attained to the heights of man’s righteousness, are useless in this covenant for obtaining eternal life (Eph. 2:8–9). Paul told Titus,

Titus 3

5. Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but in His mercy He delivered us by the washing of the holy Spirit that brings about a new birth and restoration,

6. which He has poured out upon us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior.

Is it any different now? What is the point of serving God with rites and rules, as Jews under the law of Moses did, when even those rites and rules did not deliver them from the dominion of sin? Paul asked the saints of his day that question, and it is a question which should be asked of every generation of believers.

Tragically, Paul’s message fell on deaf ears, and the majority of believers decided to follow the law-keeping example of Jesus and his disciples. Paul was unable to convince them of his revelation, that Jesus lived under the law so we would not have to, that living in God’s righteousness is the best way to thank Him for His mercy, and that walking in the Spirit which Jesus purchased for us is the only way to please God. Eventually, almost everyone Paul ever led to Christ rejected his gospel (cf. 2Tim. 1:15),^[48] and since that time, little evidence has been found of believers who have understood and proclaimed Paul’s gospel.^[49] He taught that those who are baptized by God’s life into Christ are “complete in him” (Col. 2:10), but the historical record indicates that over the centuries, few of God’s children have found rest in that wonderful truth.

No Works of Any Law

The Reader may have noticed, above, that the word “the” in our translation of Galatians 2:16 was italicized. Here it is again:

Galatians 2

16. knowing that a man is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have trusted in Christ Jesus that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law. Therefore, by works of the law will no flesh be justified.

The italics indicate that the has been added to what Paul actually wrote. Literally, what he wrote is, “a man is not justified by works of law,” which means, “a man is not justified by works of any law.” Moses’ law was the big issue of Paul’s time, and so we added “the” to our translation; however, Paul’s larger point was that no law, that is, no set of rites and rules, can justify sinners before God. Only faith in Christ Jesus can do it. Paul’s gospel could not have been simpler: “If you are led in spirit, you are not under a law” (Gal. 5:18).

Simple as it is, this foundational truth of Paul’s gospel has throughout the centuries proved to be difficult for believers to receive, beginning with the believers whom Paul personally taught. Human nature’s strong desire for ceremonial form resists Paul’s revelation that walking in the Spirit is all that we need to do, or can do, to please God. Our fleshly nature desires rites and rules so that it can boast itself in how well it observes them, but both that desire and that boast are completely contrary to the righteousness of God.

Moses’ Law Was Not for Dead People

Another revelation Paul received is that all who are born of God are new creatures, which means the old creatures they used to be are dead (Rom. 6:6; Col. 3:3). Paul made the seemingly unnecessary point that when someone under the law died, he was no longer required to keep the law. He asked the Jewish believers in Rome, “Do you not know, brothers, that the law has dominion over a man as long as he is alive?” (Rom. 7:1). With that, he was reminding them that no dead man was ever circumcised, or was ever commanded to offer sacrifices, or keep the Sabbath. So, when Paul’s Gentile converts in Colossae began to be persuaded to add those rites to their faith, Paul asked a penetrating question:

Colossians 2

20. If you are dead with Christ to the elements of the world [which the law made use of], why then, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to ordinances, such as,

21. ‘Do not touch! Do not taste! Do not handle!’

22b. after the commandments and doctrines of men?

In Christ, God’s children are not dependent upon carnal things to serve God, for in Christ, they are dead to the world with him: “Do you not know”, Paul asked the saints in Rome, “that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3). Jesus was alive to God and dead to sin before he went to the cross. That is the death into which we are baptized when we are baptized by the Spirit into Christ.

No Longer a Jew

The Son of God came to earth and lived as a Jew only “for the sake of the truth of God, to confirm the promises made to the fathers” (Rom. 15:8), but now, with that purpose accomplished, the glorified Son is no longer a Jew:

2Corinthians 5

16. From now on, we know no one after the flesh. Though we have known even Christ after the flesh, yet now, we no longer know him that way.

17. Therefore, if anyone be in Christ, he is a new creature [like Christ]. Old things are gone; behold, all things are new.

It is true that Jesus, as a good Jew, submitted to the rites and rules of the law while he was here in the flesh, but as Paul insisted, “We no longer know him that way.” The reason that those in Christ are neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28) is that Jesus, sitting now at God’s right hand, is himself neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, male or female. Believers are who and what they are because they are in Christ; the Lord and his people are one. “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit,” Paul declared (1Cor. 6:17), and John agreed when he said, “As he is, so are we in this world” (1Jn. 4:17).

Out of His Mind

The Corinthian saints must have been told by someone that Paul was out of his mind to teach such things. Rather than deny it, Paul responded by saying, “If we be out of our mind, it is to God, or if we be in our right mind, it is to you” (2Cor. 5:13). That scripture reminds me of the experience of my father (“Clarence” in the following story) when he began his journey with the Lord:^[50]

In spite of Clarence’s humble efforts to testify to his family of his miraculous experience of being born of the Spirit, they held staunchly to the belief that to live as a Baptist and a Democrat was the only right way to live, and not necessarily in that order. For many Southerners after the Civil War, being a Democrat was more important than one’s brand of religion, Baptist or otherwise. But now, young Clarence was neither. On several occasions, his distraught mother and wife begged the young man to reconsider his ways, suggesting to him that he was suffering from a serious mental disorder and in need of professional counseling. They even persuaded the family doctor to come to the house and talk to Clarence.

It was clear to the happy young saint what everyone thought. The doctor’s visit, coupled with his relatives’ worry, troubled him, and as soon as he could, he found old Brother Paramore to tell him about the doctor’s visit and the uncertainty he was beginning to feel. He told Brother Paramore that his family had told him outright, and now a physician had strongly intimated, that he was losing his mind.

Brother Paramore calmly replied, “Praise God! Yes, I think you are.”

“What?”

Brother Paramore explained. “How can we ever have the mind of Christ if we don’t lose ours? Yes! You are losing your mind, and you can thank God for it!”

As an elderly man, Preacher Clark, noting that Jesus commanded us to agree with our adversaries (cf. Mt. 5:25), said that is what he did in that situation, agreeing with his adversaries that he was losing his mind. I know that was not what Jesus was talking about; nevertheless, it brought my father some relief. And wasn’t Paul really doing the same thing when he said, “If we be out of our mind, it is to God”?

Jew and Gentile Alike

With an ever-growing number of ministers declaring Paul’s doctrine to be wrong, it was very difficult for him to establish his Gentile converts in his gospel of liberty from rites and rules. He could tell them, “I have had a revelation from Christ” (cf. Gal. 1:11–12), but other men could say, “So have we.” And when Paul taught his Gentile converts that God’s kind of circumcision is now circumcision of the heart by the Spirit (Rom. 2:28–29), other ministers, well-meaning as they might have been, would remind them that Christ himself was circumcised (Lk. 2:21). Or when Paul taught them that the only baptism that counts in God’s kingdom is the baptism of God’s life (Eph. 4:5; 1Cor. 12:13), other ministers would remind them that Christ himself was baptized with water (Mk. 1:9), as were his disciples. Or when Paul said that it was by the power of the Spirit, not by performing ceremonies of the law, that God’s servants heal the sick (Gal. 3:5), other ministers would point out that Jesus commanded those he healed to go to the priests and make the sacrifices Moses commanded (Lk. 5:12–14).^[51] And when Paul taught that the law’s holy days were merely a shadow of Christ (Col. 2:16–17), other ministers would point out that Christ himself kept the feasts (Jn. 7:1, 10, 37). Moreover, those other ministers would point out that Jesus’ disciples, most of whom were still living, were still keeping the law.

Paul himself, being a circumcised man, was obligated to keep the law (cf. Gal. 5:3),^[52] and during Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem to keep the Feast of Weeks, elders among the believing Jews told him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews who believe, and they are all zealous for the law” (Acts 21:20). Then they asked Paul to publicly demonstrate that he was a faithful Jew by offering sacrifices because, the elders told him, the saints in Jerusalem “have been informed about you, that you teach rebellion against Moses to all the Jews who are among the Gentiles, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to live according to the customs” (Acts 21:21). Paul gladly agreed to do that because the very reason he had come to Jerusalem was to do as the law commanded. But when Paul went to the temple to make a sacrifice, he was viciously attacked by an angry mob who had believed the slander against him, and he would have been killed if Roman soldiers had not rushed in to rescue him (Acts 21:30–36).

Paul’s gospel was not well understood, even by believing Jews, and Peter admitted that Paul was sometimes hard to understand (2Pet. 3:16). As for non-believing Jews, they utterly despised Paul’s gospel. Their hatred of Paul was expressed by the mob that attacked him when they screamed at the Roman tribune who had rescued Paul, “Away with such a man from the earth! He isn’t fit to live!” (Acts 22:22). It is more than likely that some of the believing Jews felt that way, especially those who went out as missionaries among Paul’s converts, hoping to deliver them from Paul’s doctrine. As the New Testament books show, those men were very successful in persuading Gentile believers of their need of Moses’ law. Paul was frustrated, but he could do nothing to stop them, and he saw the tide turning inexorably against him among all believers, Jew and Gentile alike.

Some Basic Elements of Paul’s Gospel

Paul’s gospel is repugnant to those who will not humble themselves to the invisible righteousness of God because they cannot use His kind of righteousness to make an impressive show (cf. Gal. 6:12). But for souls who are hungering and thirsting for true righteousness, Paul’s gospel is incomparably simple and sweet. These are some of its basic elements:

Element #1: Christ Jesus lived in the flesh under the law of Moses, and when his flesh died, the law that his flesh had kept died with it.

Ephesians 2

14. He is our peace, who made the two [Jew and Gentile] one and destroyed the middle wall of partition,

15. having abolished in his flesh the enmity, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that he might create of those two [Jew and Gentile] one new man in himself, making peace,

16. and that he might reconcile both to God in one body [the body of Christ] through the cross [not through Moses’ law], having, by it, put to death the enmity [the law].

Colossians 2

14. He blotted out that which was against us, the handwriting of ordinances that was contrary to us, removing it from between us when he nailed it to the cross.

Romans 10

12. There is no difference between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord of all is rich toward all who call upon him.

Element #2: Whoever is in Christ is dead with Christ.

Colossians 3

3. You are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

Romans 6

3. Do you not know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

Element #3: Moses’ law never applied to dead people.

Romans 7

4. My brothers, you were made dead to the law through the body of Christ so that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit to God.

Element #4: Those who are dead with Christ are liberated from dead works to live and worship according to God’s natureinstead of man’s.

Romans 6

20. When you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness.

. . . .

22. But being now made free from sin, and being made slaves to God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and in the end, eternal life.

Colossians 2

16. Do not allow anyone to condemn you in matters of eating or drinking, or in regard to a feast, or a new moon, or a Sabbath,

17. which are a shadow of things to come, but the reality is of Christ.

The author of Hebrews posed this question to the saints:

Hebrews 9

13. If the blood of bulls and of goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the defiled sanctifies for the purification of the flesh,

14. how much more does the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve a living God?

Those whose conscience has been “purged from dead works” no longer trust in rituals or fear being condemned for not practicing them. They walk with God in the Spirit, worship “in spirit and in truth”, and are content with that, just as God is. For that sweet, liberating doctrine, Paul was hated and abused, and it remains so to this day for all who stand for “the same precious faith in the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (2Pet. 1:1).

“Things They Are Content With”

The law was intended to lead Israel to God’s righteousness, but they didn’t understand it, and because they rejected Jesus, the law which should have been a blessing for them became their prison. The law became Israel’s idol, and clinging to it too long prevented them from receiving the Messiah of whom the law spoke. They loved the law more than they loved their Messiah, and so, their temple, their holy days, their priesthood and sacrifices, their lovely candlestick and golden table, which were all given for a blessing, became their curse. The persecuted Son asked the Father for that justice:

Psalm 69

19. You know my reproach, and my shame, and my disgrace. All my adversaries are before you.

20. Reproach has broken my heart, and I am distraught. I longed for someone to show pity, but there was no one, and for comforters, but I found none.

21. They put poison in my food, and for my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.

22. Let their table be a snare before them, and the things they are content with, a trap.

The Son foretold that God would answer his prayer and reward the Jews with utter spiritual blindness for rejecting him:

Lamentations 3

59. You have seen, O Jehovah, the wrong done to me. Judge my cause!

60. You have seen all their vindictiveness, all their machinations against me.

61. You have heard their reproach, O Jehovah, and all their thoughts against me;

62. the lips of those who rise against me and their murmuring are against me every day.

63. Behold their sitting down and their rising up. I am their song.

64. You will return, O Jehovah, a recompense upon them according to the work of their hands.

65. You will give them hardness of heart, your curse upon them.

God’s dread curse, hardness of heart against His Son, has sealed within Israel’s heart a contentment with rites and rules to this day. But Israel’s leaders are held chiefly responsible for the people’s contentment with death. Paul’s being misled as a youth by his elders was not a rare event. The Bible is replete with stories of God’s Old Testament people following their leaders into evil, sometimes great evil, thinking they were doing good. Said Isaiah, “The leaders of this people make them err, and those who are led by them are ruined” (Isa. 9:16). And when Jeremiah’s prophecies were not believed because of the influence of prophets whom God had not sent, he was crushed: “My heart within me is broken because of the prophets!” (Jer. 23:9). That is how it has always been. God’s servants are most often rejected because of the influence of men who claim to speak for God when God has not sent them.

“Continual Sorrow”

A few days before his crucifixion, Jesus stood within the gates of Jerusalem grieving because he saw that the Jews were so addicted to their own kind of righteousness that they would never receive the righteousness he so much wanted to share with them (Mt. 23:37). Paul was once a prime example of Jewish resistance to God’s righteousness, but when he received God’s righteousness and was delivered from his pride and fear, he grieved for the Jews just as Jesus did. He wrote, “I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. There have been times I prayed to be accursed from Christ for my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are the Israelites” (Rom. 9:2–4a). Jesus was also willing to become accursed for us, and God made him a curse when He sent him to the cross, for in the law, Paul said, “it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’ ” (Gal. 3:13).

God’s Love for the Jews

The many thousands of born-again Jews who were still dedicated to Moses’ law in Paul’s day were not being rebellious in keeping it, for God’s will at that time was for Jewish believers to continue in the law. He had a loving purpose for keeping Moses’ law in effect in Israel for a time after the Spirit came. God wanted the Jews who received His life to be effective witnesses to the Jews who had not yet received it, and if those with His life stopped keeping the law, other Jews would not listen to their testimonies. God’s love for the Jews is also the reason Jesus kept the law. If he had not kept it, his own disciples would have left him; indeed, they would never have followed him. The Son of God had no need of the law’s rites and rules, of course, for he was filled with God’s kind of life, but he did not live for himself any more than he died for himself. The love that is in God’s kind of life compelled Jesus to live the way God’s Old Covenant people needed him to live, and that was to bind himself with them under the law, even as he was making a way for them to escape it.

Although Jesus kept the law out of love for his fellow Jews, many of them cursed him, considered him insane (Mk. 3:21), and even accused him of being demon possessed (Jn. 8:48). How much worse would it have been for Jesus if in addition to what he was already teaching, he had preached Paul’s gospel, that God’s Spirit alone, without the law, makes souls righteous (Rom. 14:17; Gal. 2:21; 3:21–22)?

Jesus knew that, and he told his disciples, “I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them right now” (Jn. 16:12). Years after Pentecost, when Paul came preaching, those things were still hard for them to hear. Nevertheless, Paul stood fast, and he exhorted his Gentile converts to also “stand fast in the liberty with which Christ has made us free, and do not submit again to a yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1) – the bondage to rites and rules.

To preach that gospel, God needed a man who had not walked with Jesus. Walking with Jesus and keeping the law with him had made Jesus’ first disciples doubly sure that God would always require the law. Then, when Paul came with a doctrine that was contrary to the way the Son of God himself lived while on earth, even Jesus’ disciples had to have help from God to believe Paul (cf. 2Pet. 3:15–16). Whether or not anyone believed his gospel, however, Paul was unmovable. Jesus had revealed to him that God’s purpose for him coming to earth was to make the way for men to enjoy the liberty that he had always enjoyed with his Father, from before creation, and Paul would not give an inch to the men who argued against it. He stood his ground

Galatians 2

4. in spite of false brothers stealthily brought in, who slipped in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus so that they might enslave us,

5. to whom we did not yield in submission even for a moment so that the truth of the gospel might continue for you.

Moreover, Paul pointed out for his Gentile converts in Galatia that the elders of the Jerusalem Assembly acknowledged his gospel for the Gentiles:

Galatians 2

7. Once they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel of the uncircumcision, as the gospel of the circumcision was to Peter,

. . . .

9. and acknowledging the grace that was given to me, James, [Peter], and John, who were esteemed as pillars, gave right hands of fellowship to me and to Barnabas, that we should go to the Gentiles, but they, to the circumcision.

Beyond Man’s Wildest Dreams

To partake of God’s kind of righteousness was beyond the wildest dreams of Jesus’ disciples, indeed, of all people. Nobody ever even prayed for it because nobody knew such a righteousness existed. All of Israel was familiar with the prophecies of a time coming when the law’s kind of righteousness would end (e.g., Isa. 66:1–3), but no one realized it would be the coming of God’s kind of righteousness that would end it. The followers of Jesus were amazed, after it was done, that God, of His own will, and just because He loved them, had wrought such a wondrous salvation. Paul spoke for them all when he asked, “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded!” (Rom. 3:27a). And he reminded the Corinthians that “It is because of God that you are in Christ Jesus, . . . as it is written, ‘If any man glories, let him glory in the Lord!’ ” (1Cor. 1:30a, 31).

The liberty which Paul preached was liberty from ignorance and spiritual weakness. It was the liberty to know God’s will and be able to do it. The liberty that God’s life brings is incomparably glorious, as joyous to the souls who enter into it as it is strange and frightening to the souls who will not. In a powerful sermon in the 1970s, Preacher Clark summarized Paul’s message this way:

God cannot use you as long as you are living by a set of rules. I don’t care whose rules they are. God is going to give you His law now, today, and His law will be in your heart. It will make you free from the law of sin and death, and you will be willing and able to do whatever God wants you to do, without a set of rules to go by.

The Son of God came to set us free from our fear of breaking a rule and being damned, and he accomplished that purpose by recreating us as people to whom rules do not apply, holy people who live and worship in God’s perfect law of liberty, the precious “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”. That law, man cannot keep by his own will or effort; such things are worthless in the kingdom of God. The only way to keep the perfect law of liberty is to walk in the life God gives to those who believe in His Son, the life that knows no rules and fears nothing but the God who gives it, our heavenly Father, who loved us so much that He sent His Son to die in our stead and, someday, to carry us home to Him.

Chapter 6

All Wisdom and Knowledge

“. . . the mystery of God, even the Father, and of Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
Colossians 2:2b–3

Both Good and Evil

The truth that the Son reveals will make us free (Jn. 8:31–32), but the truth he reveals is the knowledge of both good and evil as God sees them, and we must see them both as He sees them in order to see either of them rightly. Even when they were giving close heed to the law and the prophets, it was impossible for ancient Israelites always to know if any particular deed was good or evil because no deed is either always good or always evil. Sometimes, prayer is good (Prov. 15:8), but prayer can also be evil (Prov. 28:9). Sometimes, killing is evil (Ex. 20:13), but killing can also be good (1Sam. 15:32–33). Mercy is only sometimes good, for one of Israel’s kings sinned by showing mercy when he should not have (1Kgs. 20:30–43), as Israel’s foolish King Saul also had done (1Sam. 15:2–3, 8). Then again, Joab, the general of David’s army, sinned repeatedly by not showing mercy when he should have (2Sam. 3:27–28; 18:14; 20:9–10). Cruelty is usually evil, but then, God Himself can be very cruel (Isa. 13:9; Jer. 30:14). Worship can be good, of course, but sometimes, worship offered to God disgusts Him (Amos 5:21–24; Isa. 1:11–17). So, who knows when praying or showing mercy is evil or when killing and being cruel are good? No one knows, or can know, except God. The good news of the New Testament is that because Jesus gave his life for us, we may now have God’s kind of life within us as an internal gauge to let us know what is good or evil in any given situation.

Appearances can deceive, and humans without God’s Spirit guiding them are routinely deceived by appearances; indeed, to be deceived is the normal course of human life (cf. Rev. 12:9; Jer. 17:9). Jesus warned us that the final test for God’s children on earth will be the appearance of an evil which will seem to be so good that, if it were possible, it would deceive even the very elect of God (Mt. 24:24). (The “elect” have learned to recognize and rely on the Spirit’s judgment.) The warning is clear. The only two options we have are (1) learn to rely on the Spirit of God for judging good and evil or (2) be deceived. If we do the former, we will be safe. If the latter, we will certainly make the mistake of embracing something evil because it appears to us to be good or of rejecting something good because it appears to us to be evil.

The process of maturing in Christ is not complicated; it is simply learning to trust the feelings and thoughts that are implanted in our hearts when we receive God’s kind of life. Trusting those thoughts and feelings instead of our own is what it means to “walk in the Spirit”, and as we learn to do that, God purges our minds, “a little here and a little there”, from the wrong ideas we have absorbed from our culture, the end result being that we live in and trust “the mind of Christ”.

Only those who continue in humble obedience after receiving the Spirit come to the true knowledge of God. Paul earnestly exhorted his converts to persevere in the Faith so that they might “attain to . . . the true knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). The author of Hebrews was likewise exhorting the saints to do that when he told them, “Everyone who lives on milk is unskillful in the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for those fully grown, who by experience have their senses trained to discern both good and evil” (Heb. 5:13–14).

The Wheat and the Tares

With his parable of the Wheat and the Tares, Jesus was doing more than telling his disciples that they would have to deal with good and evil here on earth; he was revealing to them how the Father had been dealing with good and evil in heaven for a very long time. Typically, good and evil are associated only with life on earth, but with the revelation of the Son came the knowledge that both true and false religion had existed in heaven for millennia, for all heavenly creatures worshipped God, though hypocrisy was among them as well as sincerity, lies as well as truth, and pride as well as humility. God knew evil was there, of course, but He used it to try the hearts of heaven’s creatures, just as He tries the hearts of believers on earth now by the evils around them.

Matthew 13

24. Another parable he put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field,

25. but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went away.

26. And when the crop sprouted and produced fruit, then the tares also appeared.

27. And the landowner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Master, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did the tares come from?’

28. He said to them, ‘An enemy did this.’ Then the servants said to him, ‘So, do you want us to go out and pull them up?’

29. But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering up the tares, you uproot the wheat with them.

30. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest-time, I will tell the reapers, “Gather up the tares first and bind them into bundles to burn them up; then, gather the wheat into my storehouse.” ’ ”

In this parable, the owner of the wheat field (God) would not allow his slaves (His ministers) to pull up the tares (the ungodly), but commanded them to allow the tares to remain until the time of harvest (the return of Jesus). Throughout the growing season (the present time), the owner’s protection and care of the wheat was also a blessing for the tares, for they were both growing in the same field (this world). Rains fell and the sun shone on the wheat and tares alike, and the owner patiently watched over them all, “waiting for the precious fruit of the earth” (Jas. 5:7). Before the harvest, an unknowing observer might have thought that the owner of the field valued the tares as much as the wheat. But at the harvest, the owner at last showed that he hated the tares and loved the wheat, for he commanded his slaves to pull up the tares and burn them, but to gather the wheat into his storehouse.

Nothing but goodness exists in heaven now, but as long as the Son remained hidden, God allowed evil in His presence, in the hearts of Satan and the angels who were like him, but He kept His hatred hidden from everyone.

Terrifying Patience

God has not changed since the day Jesus spoke this parable. With Him, “there is no variation, nor shadow of change” (Jas. 1:17). He is still patiently tolerating ungodliness, but no longer in heaven, for now, the ungodliness is among His earthly sons. The tares are here, being blessed along with the wheat. That is why an unknowing observer of the family of God on earth might think that God values them all the same, for they all are being blessed together. But at the time of harvest, God will again prove that He hates the tares and loves His wheat. The ungodly will be removed from among His people and thrown into the fire, while the upright will be gathered into the safety of the Father’s presence (Mt. 13:40–43).

The parable of the Wheat and the Tares reveals a most terrifying aspect of God’s nature, namely, His extraordinary patience. God’s patience is terrifying because when God is silent in the face of ungodliness, His patience can be mistaken for His approval. When God does not give immediate vent to His wrath against sin, the foolish among God’s children always assume there is no wrath to fear. Solomon noted the human tendency for sinfulness to increase when punishment for sin is not swiftly administered. He said, “Because sentence against evildoing is not carried out quickly, the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Eccl. 8:11).

That happens because men often assume that if punishment for sin does not come quickly, it will not come at all. False prophets in Israel, making that assumption, taught that God would never condemn His people, even if they sinned, but God hated that doctrine:

Malachi 2

17. You have wearied Jehovah with your words. Yet you say, “How have we wearied Him?” When you say, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of Jehovah, and He delights in them!” Or when you say, “Where is the God of judgment?”

It seems that in every generation, God’s people have had to deal with ministers who teach that God will not condemn them regardless of how they live, simply because they belong to Him. Everything in the Bible screams that such doctrine is abhorrent to God, but that has never prevented false teachers from teaching it, or foolish believers from believing it. In his time, God pleaded with His people to stop trusting the false prophets who had persuaded them of that lie:

Jeremiah 7

8. Behold, you are trusting lying words that cannot benefit you.

9. Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods whom you do not know,

10. and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are saved so that we may do all these abominations”?

God Himself, speaking directly from heaven to all Israel (Dt. 4:36), warned the people on the day He made a covenant with them that He would condemn anyone who entered His covenant and then was unfaithful:

Exodus 20

7. You shall not bear the name of Jehovah your God in vain, for Jehovah will not hold him guiltless who bears His name in vain.

Cursed Children

Peter warned the saints that just as there had been false prophets among God’s Old Testament people, there would arise false teachers among them (2Pet. 2:1). When that happened, and the same old lie began to be taught – and believed by many saints – Jude reminded them that God has always required those who belong to Him to be faithful:

Jude 1

5. I want to remind you, though you once knew this, that the Lord, after He saved a people out of Egypt, later destroyed those who did not believe.

6. Moreover, angels who did not keep to their own domain, but left their proper abode, He has kept in eternal chains, under gloomy darkness until the Judgment of the Great Day.

The goodness of God, which includes His patience, creates a testing ground for the heart. God “makes His sun to rise upon the evil and the good, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust” (Mt. 5:45b), and in His Assembly, He pours out blessings the same way. That goodness motivates the wise to fear God and to grow in His grace (Rom. 2:4). The foolish, however, misinterpreting God’s goodness, continue in their own ways until they are destroyed. This is why God’s patience is so terrifying; it is easy to misinterpret it, as did Satan and his angels in heaven.

Speaking of tares within the body of Christ, Peter said this:

2Peter 2

13b. They are spots and blemishes . . . reveling in their deceitful ways while they feast with you,

14. having eyes full of adultery and that cannot cease from sin, seducing unstable souls, having a heart trained in covetousness. They are cursed children,

15a. having forsaken the right way and gone astray.

These “cursed children” of God go astray, but they do not go away; they still drink of the Spirit with all His children. They are the third kind of soil in Jesus’ parable of the Four Kinds of Soil (Mt. 13:3–9, 18–23), and in another parable, they are the “foolish virgins” (Mt. 25:1–13). They have too much love for the world to completely depart from the world, and too much love for God to completely depart from Him. Imperfect in holiness, they never develop the mind of Christ, but they do not return wholeheartedly to the world because they know better. And along the way, except in extreme cases (cf. 1Cor. 5:1–8), God does not allow His ministers to remove them from the congregation because He uses the foolish to try and to train the upright in heart.

Sons and Bastards

As many chastened saints have learned, the Father’s chastisement may sting for a while, but receiving it leads to great benefits. David learned that lesson well, and he sang about it:

Psalm 94

12. Blessed is the man whom you chasten, O Jehovah, even him whom you teach by your law,

13. to cause him to rest during evil times until the Pit is dug for the wicked.

To stubbornly refuse God’s correction is a fearful thing, for it may eventually lead to an irreversible judgment:

Proverbs 29

1. He who, being often reproved, stiffens his neck will suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.

Israel stiffened her neck, refusing and persecuting God’s prophets, one after another for generations, until God turned her over to her enemies.

2Kings 17

6a. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria and carried Israel away into exile in Assyria.

. . . .

13. Yet, Jehovah had testified through every prophet and every seer in Israel and in Judah, saying, “Turn from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to the whole law that I commanded your fathers and that I sent to you by the hand of my servants the prophets!”

14. But they would not listen, and they stiffened their necks like the necks of their fathers who did not trust in Jehovah their God.

15. They rejected His statutes, and His covenant that He made with their fathers, and His testimonies that He testified against them, and they went after vanity and became vain themselves, and followed after the nations that were around them concerning whom Jehovah had commanded not to do like them.

. . . .

18. Therefore, Jehovah was very angry with Israel and removed them from His sight, and none were left, but the tribe of Judah only.

Paul said that what happened to the Israelites “happened to them as examples, and they are written for our admonition” (1Cor. 10:11), and what happened to them happened because they refused the correction God patiently offered. Jeremiah stayed frustrated because of Israel’s resolute resistance to the truth:

Jeremiah 5

3. O Jehovah, are not your eyes upon the truth? You have stricken them, but they have not grieved; you have consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction. They have made their faces harder than a rock! They refuse to repent!

Jeremiah 7

28. This is a nation that does not obey the voice of Jehovah their God, nor receive correction. Truth has perished, and it is cut off from their mouth.

It is instructive to see that even though Israel did not adhere to the rites and rules of God’s law, they never stopped worshipping God. They just added other gods to their worship schedule. There was never a rejection of worship in Israel; there was just a rejection of worship according to the will of God. Indeed, except for atheists, there has never been a rejection of worship anywhere on earth. The important point, so often missed, is that God accepts no worship except the worship of His people, and among them, only the worship of those who receive His correction and order their lives according to His will. God considers those obedient saints to be His sons (Rom. 8:14); the others, He considers bastards:

Hebrews 12

7. If you endure chastisement, God deals with you as with sons, for what son is there whom a father does not chasten?

8. But if you are without chastisement, of which all have been partakers, then you are bastards, and not sons.

The kingdom of God has for ages had within it many bastards. The great difference between our time and the time before the revelation of the Son is that now, none of those bastards are in heaven.

Tares in Heaven:Satan and His Angels

It was only after receiving God’s Spirit that the apostles began to speak with knowledge about the Accuser^[53] (Satan) and “the angels who sinned” (2Pet. 2:4).^[54] Only then could they understand why Jesus spoke of “the Accuser and his angels” (Mt. 25:41; cf. Rev. 12:9). Before Pentecost, it was known that evil spirits existed, but Satan was never said to be one of them. Nor was it known that those evil spirits were angels who had sinned, but were still allowed in heaven.

It is at first hard to see how so many heavenly beings could have erred so badly, who had seen God face-to-face, but the answer is simple, to wit, even though they were heavenly beings, they did not know God. Not having God’s kind of life, they could not know Him. And since they did not know God, they could not know what was truly holy and truly good, for God alone is holy (Rev. 15:4) and God alone is good (Mt. 19:17).

There must have been times before the Son was revealed when faithful heavenly creatures such as Michael and Gabriel felt uneasy around Satan and the angels who were like him, but they, too, did not know God, and so, they could not have understood why they felt uneasy. And looking at God would not have helped them. God’s demeanor never changed when Satan and those angels were present; He never made a public display of animosity toward them and never openly condemned them. He gave Michael and Gabriel no reason to think that He judged Satan and his angels to be evil; to reveal that truth is another honor He was reserving for His Son.

Satan’s Names

The name, Satan, is not found in any literature outside the Bible before Jesus’ time. In the Old Testament, depending on the version used, he is mentioned by name about twenty times, but there are other references to him. Moses wrote of a serpent in the garden of Eden; in Job, God described a creature called Leviathan whose heart was “as hard as a millstone”; Isaiah spoke of a “light-bringer” who wanted to be “like the Most High”;^[55] and the Spirit spoke through Ezekiel about an anointed cherub who had been in the garden of Eden. However, no one made the connection between all those characters. Only after men received the life of God in Acts 2 did they begin to realize that Satan was Leviathan, Light-bringer, and the anointed cherub, as well as “the ancient Serpent”, “the great Dragon”, and the Accuser (Rev. 12:9).

Satan was created “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty”, but he became proud of his gifts and judged himself to be worthy of the highest heavenly honor (Ezek. 28:12–19). That sacred place belonged to the Son, but God was still hiding him, and Satan believed that he was the one God would promote to sit at His right hand and reign with Him over creation (Isa. 14:12–14).^[56]

Impossibly High

A popular Christian myth holds that Satan once tried to overthrow God, but that is a silly notion. Only humans are so ignorant as to think that God can even be challenged, much less overthrown. Satan certainly never thought that. Being “full of wisdom” (Ezek. 28:12), he knew better. Isaiah’s prophecy revealed that the one called “Light-bringer” expected to reign with God, not replace Him. In that exalted position, all God’s creatures would be compelled to honor Light-bringer as they honored God, but Satan was a fool to think he was worthy of such honor. He did not know that God had a Son to whom that place already belonged (Jn. 5:22–23). It was pride that was Satan’s fatal flaw (Ezek. 28:15–17), not thinking that God could be overthrown.

Jesus warned his disciples not to covet a position higher than that appointed to them, concluding with the famous line, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk. 14:7–11). But Satan did not think the way Jesus did, and he coveted a position which was, for him, impossibly high. Had Satan perceived how God really felt about him instead of assuming that he was God’s favorite, he could not have entertained the hope of being promoted to reign with God.

With perfect patience, God kept everyone in the dark, and without anyone realizing it, He was using them all to fulfill His purpose, which was to create the perfect situation for the Son to be revealed and glorified. God had determined that only through His Son would anyone come to know Him, His unique power, wisdom, and goodness, and experience the very great love which the Father and the Son shared and which they both felt for mankind. There is no such love on earth; it is not a part of our kind of life.

In God’s appointed time, Satan was cast out of heaven. And at the same moment, all the tares in heaven’s wheat field were plucked up – a third of God’s angels (cf. Rev. 12:3–4, 9) – and were cast out of heaven with Satan because they didn’t think the way Jesus did, either.

——

To fully understand the following Old Testament stories, one must keep in mind the spiritual darkness that was everywhere in creation before God revealed His Son, so far as truly knowing God is concerned. To read the following stories from the perspective of people living in those ancient days, we must lay aside the knowledge of God that the Son brought to us. Otherwise, we may find ourselves imposing upon them motives and thoughts that were impossible for them, and more importantly, we may miss the greatest lesson these stories teach: the supreme value of God’s Son!

Tares in Heaven: Satan and Job

The First Gathering of the Sons of God

Of the forty-two chapters in the book of Job, Satan figures in only the first two. In them, as throughout the Old Testament, Satan is depicted only as an obedient servant of God. If we think of Satan as wicked when we read Job’s story, we are right; at the same time, if we think that Job or anyone else at that time saw Satan that way, we are mistaken. The Son was still hidden, and within him was hidden all wisdom and knowledge of God, which includes the knowledge of what was good and evil in God’s mind.

Nothing in Job’s story suggests that Satan was obsessed with Job, or even that Satan was particularly interested in him. God is the one who brought up the subject of Job and sent Satan to earth to afflict him, and Satan did exactly as God commanded, nothing more or less. That done, Satan is no more mentioned. The book of Job is a story about God and Job, not Satan and Job.

If we read the story of Job with this in mind, we will see that nothing in it would have revealed to anyone that Satan was evil. Here is the opening scene of Job:

Job 1

6. Now, it came to pass on the day when the sons of God came in to present themselves before Jehovah that Satan also came in among them.

7. And Jehovah said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” And Satan answered Jehovah, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

8. And Jehovah said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and eschews evil?”

9. Then Satan answered Jehovah and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing?

10. Have you not made a hedge around him, and around his house, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

11. But stretch out your hand now and strike all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”

12. Then Jehovah said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not put your hand on him.” So, Satan went forth from the presence of Jehovah.

Allow me to emphasize again the universal ignorance of the time by revising verse 6 to read like this:

6. Now, it came to pass on the day when the sons of God came in to present themselves before Jehovah that Gabriel also came in among them.

Nothing in that revised verse suggests that Gabriel is evil, does it? Just so, nothing in the original verse 6 suggested to ancient readers that Satan was evil. We have a sense of Satan’s wickedness when we find him in the Old Testament only because the Son has come and revealed that Satan was evil, but we should not impose that knowledge on those who lived before the Son came.

By all indications, this gathering of the sons of God was not a special or unusual event. When God asked Satan where he had been, Satan calmly replied that he had come “from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” Such a conversation was probably routine. God was known to send heavenly beings to “travel about on the earth” (Zech. 1:10–11), and presumably, He would afterward ask them questions about their earthly visits, just as He asked Satan here. Moreover, Satan had responsibilities on earth that demanded his attention, for it was his duty as “god of this world” (2Cor. 4:4) to know what was going on among the nations. The sons of God in that heavenly meeting no doubt expected God to ask Satan about his visit to earth, and in essence, Satan’s reply was, “I have been going to and fro in the earth, carrying out my regular duties.”

Next, God brought up the subject of Job. He asked Satan if he had considered Job, describing him as “a perfect and upright man”. Satan did not respond by asking God who Job was. He was aware of who Job was, and he stated his opinion, without fear of being rebuked for it, that Job would not continue to be perfectly upright if God took Job’s blessings away. Satan was not disagreeing with God’s judgment of Job. Everyone in heaven knew that God’s judgments are perfect, and Satan would not have been so foolish as to dispute anything God said. Satan’s reply to God was only an opinion that Job would abandon his righteousness if God stopped blessing him.

Further, in their conversation, not only did Satan not disagree with God, but God did not disagree with Satan! There in that heavenly assembly, there was no quarrel or debate between God and Satan. Therefore, nothing said by either party would have revealed to the sons of God that Satan was evil, or even that his thoughts were different from God’s. To at least some of God’s sons, if not all of them, it must have appeared that God and Satan agreed that even the best of humans were contemptible and that God was handing Job over to Satan in order to watch him bring Job down.

We know that God cared deeply for Job and that He loved him, but we know that only because the Son has revealed to us that God is the embodiment of love (cf. 1Jn. 4:8, 16). Had any one of us been in God’s place in Job’s days, we would never have treated Job the way God treated him. No one in heaven or earth understands that kind of love. To God’s heavenly sons, it would have seemed obvious that He had no concern at all for the horrific pain and suffering that He was about to pour out on helpless Job. Where was the love in that?

All God’s sons knew that God knew the future, including whatever would happen in the end with Job. They, like Satan, likely thought they knew, too. But they had no idea what it really would be, and they still don’t because they still do not have God’s kind of life. God initiated this conversation with Satan because He had an incomprehensible blessing in mind for Job, and He had chosen Satan to be His agent in initiating the process. Then, He sat quietly on His throne, patiently allowing everyone to think whatever they wanted to think about what He was doing.

God’s Plan, Not Satan’s

Because we know Satan is evil, it is easy for us to overlook the reverential deference that Satan showed God. He was not hasty to talk in God’s presence, but remained silent until he was spoken to, respectfully waiting for God to choose whether or not to speak, and if He spoke, to choose the subject of the conversation. We also tend to assume that Satan wanted to hurt Job, but nothing Satan said or did indicates that he even considered Job worth hurting. Besides, as the Reader has seen, Satan expected a promotion from God, and he would not have put that promotion in jeopardy by hurting someone whom God did not want to be hurt.

There would have been no question in heaven that God was the One who wanted Job to suffer, or that it was God’s plan, not Satan’s, that Job would suffer. Satan expressed an opinion about what Job would do if he suffered, but after expressing it, he respectfully waited for God’s response, if any, to his opinion. Satan had no plans for Job and may even have been surprised that God’s response was to send him to earth to ruin Job financially and kill his children. Here again is the scene, this time with some clarifying commentary:

Job 1

8. And Jehovah said to Satan, “[Since you have been on earth, fulfilling your obligations, tell us,] have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and eschews evil?”

9. Then Satan answered Jehovah and said, “[Yes, Master, I have, and he is indeed a perfect and upright man. But we all know how men are.] Does Job fear God for nothing?

10. Have you not made a hedge around him, and around his house, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

11. But stretch out your hand now and strike all that he has, and [we all know that] he will curse you to your face.”

12. Then Jehovah said to Satan [God does not express any disagreement with Satan], “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not put your hand on him.” So, Satan went forth from the presence of Jehovah [to do the harm to Job that God commanded him to do].

Satan swiftly accomplished the cruel mission laid upon him by God. But what else would any of God’s sons have done? If God had sent Gabriel to afflict Job, would Gabriel have refused to obey God’s command? Of course not. Then, how could Satan’s carrying out the mission God gave him have revealed to anyone that he was wicked? Indeed, it would have been wicked if he had not brought disaster upon Job. Even if someone on earth at that time somehow knew that Satan existed and that he brought those disasters upon Job, they would have seen him only as a fearsome and obedient instrument of God, not an evil one.

Neither Job nor his three friends who came to him during his suffering ever blamed Satan for Job’s afflictions. Job and his friends did not agree on much, but they always agreed that it was God who was afflicting Job. It was clearly irrelevant to them which agent, if any, God had used in the process; they blamed Satan no more than they blamed the storm that killed Job’s children or the Sabeans and Chaldeans who killed Job’s servants and stole his herds. We do not know whether Job and his friends even knew that Satan existed, but if they did, they were still wise enough to know that God alone is responsible for what happens to His servants.^[57]

The Second Gathering of the Sons of God

At an unspecified time after Satan performed his gruesome duty, stripping Job of all that he possessed and killing his children, there was another gathering of the sons of God. Satan, as usual, was among them. By this time, Job’s humble attitude through his suffering may have earned him some respect in heaven; Satan himself must have been impressed, at least a little, that Job had not become bitter against God, as his wife had (Job 2:9); instead, Job clung tenaciously to his righteousness. As in the first meeting of the sons of God, Satan respectfully waited for God to initiate any conversation, which God did again, asking Satan where he had been. And again, God, not Satan, brought up the subject of Job. With a few clarifying comments, here is the scene:

Job 2

2. Jehovah said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” And Satan answered Jehovah and said, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

3. And Jehovah said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and eschews evil? And still, he holds fast his integrity, even though you moved me against him to destroy him without cause.”

4. And Satan answered Jehovah and said, “[Yes, Job is holding fast his integrity. Still, we all know how men are. They love themselves and will do anything to save their own necks.] Skin for skin, yes, all that a man has, he will give for his life.

5. Stretch out your hand now and strike his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.”

6. And Jehovah said to Satan [as before, God neither rebukes nor expresses any disagreement with Satan], “Behold, he is in your hand. But spare his life.”

7. So, Satan went out from the presence of Jehovah [to do as God commanded him], and he struck Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.^[58]

It is instructive to note that in neither of the conversations between God and Satan in the opening chapters of Job did Satan ask permission to afflict Job; he did not even speak as if he wanted or expected God to use him to do so. In both conversations (1:11 and 2:5), Satan said that if God afflicted Job, then Job would turn against God. It was altogether God’s decision to send Satan – and to send him instead of anyone else – to do what He wanted done. Paul said that whatever God does, He does according to His own will (Eph. 1:11), and that is as true of His choice to send Satan to afflict Job as it is about anything He has ever done.

Those two heavenly scenes are remarkable for their relaxed atmosphere. God was pleasant and courteous with Satan, as Satan also was with God, and God left the door open for Satan to express his thoughts. Again, God’s sons witnessed no conflict between God and Satan, no debate, no contradiction, and no difference in judgment concerning Job’s character. Instead of exposing Satan’s wickedness, Satan’s apparent respect for God and his unhesitating obedience to God’s commands would have commended him to the other sons of God as a dutiful agent of the Almighty. If you think something in those two opening scenes reveals that Satan was evil, then you should reread them, and this time, try not to carry back into Job’s time the knowledge which the Son brought to earth when he came.

What Satan did to Job was undeniably cruel, but God had commanded it to be done in an open assembly of His sons. Who in heaven, then, would have seen Satan as evil for his cruelty to Job when he was only carrying out God’s command to be cruel? Had the sons of God judged Satan to be wicked for his cruel treatment of righteous Job, they would have had to judge God as the source of that wickedness, and that was unthinkable. God was trying all their hearts by hiding His thoughts.

“I Will Not Let It Go!”

Job’s horrific ordeal continued for months, and if there were any in heaven observing him, they must have been impressed with Job’s determination to maintain his righteousness:

Job 23

11. My foot has held fast to His steps. I have kept His way, and I have not turned aside.

12a. Nor have I departed from the commandment of His lips.

Job 27

5b. Until I die, I will not forsake my integrity!

6a. I will hold fast to my righteousness, and I will not let it go!

So Job thought. God’s secret purpose for Job’s great suffering was to compel him to let go of his righteousness so that he might be honored with a taste of God’s kind of righteousness, long before the hidden Son would come and reveal it! Because of Job’s strong determination to stay right with God (as Job understood what “right with God” meant), that purpose was not easily accomplished. But Job cannot be blamed for resisting what God was trying to do for him. The thought of being without righteousness terrified him, and he clung to it as his most precious possession, more precious than life itself !

The Struggle Not to Struggle

Years ago, I had a dream from the Lord related to this. In my dream, I was in a trench at night on the front lines of a fierce battle. Smoke thickened the darkness, and gunfire and bursting shells provided flashes that revealed a devastated landscape. Suddenly, I found myself engaged in bitter hand-to-hand combat with a strong enemy soldier. He got me on my back in the dusty trench and gripped my throat with his powerful hands. Desperately, I struggled to twist away from the death-grip, flailing with my fists, kicking, grabbing for his face or hair – anything that I could do to get him off me. In the midst of my struggle, I looked up into his face, and to my utter surprise, I saw that it was Jesus. His face showed no sign of the hatred that I expected to see. His look was solemn and determined but not angry. Then I understood. I was fighting against the blessing of dying to self and living to God, and, realizing that, my struggle then turned into an internal one. It became a struggle not to struggle against what the Lord was trying to do for me. Everything in my flesh wanted to fight against Jesus and stay alive, but everything in my spirit wanted Jesus to win. At the end of my dream, I was there in the trench, struggling to make my flesh cooperate with Jesus and let him kill me.

That was Job’s struggle, but he did not have the knowledge of the Son of God to help him with it, the knowledge that we on this side of Pentecost possess. For me, it was a choice between my righteousness and the righteousness of God that Jesus wanted me to have. In Job’s mind, it was a choice between righteousness and nothing, and Job trembled at the thought of standing before God with nothing.

Opinions

Satan would not have been the only one in heaven who expected Job to become bitter and turn from righteousness, for by Job’s time, they all had doubtless seen human integrity crumble many times under the weight of sufferings much lighter than Job’s. Job’s steadfast patience and faith may have caused some of the sons of God to wonder if they had all been wrong about him. Even at that, however, Job’s patience would not have made Satan, or them, appear wicked. The holding of an opinion is not sin, even if the opinion is proved wrong.

If ignorance were sin, then every creature in heaven and earth would be sinning merely by not being God, for only God knows everything. Even when Satan and his angels were at last cast out of heaven, the faithful angels who were allowed to stay remained ignorant of many things, as Paul and Peter both plainly taught (Eph. 3:9–10; 1Pet. 1:12). Moreover, if ignorance were sin, then the Son himself would be a sinner because even he does not know all that the Father knows (Mk. 13:32). Satan’s opinion of Job, no doubt shared by many others in heaven, is completely understandable, and nobody was condemned by God for holding it. God knew from the beginning what Satan would think Job would do if He took away his blessings, and rather than become indignant at what Satan thought, He used it to accomplish His inscrutable purpose.

God has no opinions, only knowledge, and Satan understood that. If God had rebuked Satan and told him, “You are wrong, Satan. Job will stand firm, no matter what happens,” Satan would have believed God. That would have been the end of the matter, and the story of Job would not be in the Bible. But God did not tell what He knew. He had something wonderful in mind for Job, and God used ignorant creatures, Satan in heaven and humans on earth, to accomplish His purpose. That is how God always worked before the Son was revealed. Since the day the Spirit was poured out on man, God has had children who know Him, but before the Son was revealed, ignorant creatures were the only kind of creatures available for God to use. And throughout the process, God calmly sat on His throne, satisfied to let everyone assume whatever they wanted to assume about Him, what He thought and what He was doing.

God’s patience is terrifying.

Job’s Judgment Day

The most trying part of Job’s suffering was not the unparalleled afflictions of his body and mind that God sent upon him, but the refusal of God to communicate with him. The God whom Job had grown to love and trust ceased speaking to him, and Job did not know why. His tears and desperate cries for help from God were met with stone-cold silence for months on end. What could heaven have thought but that God was indifferent to human suffering? And what could men on earth have thought, even the best of men, but that Job had sinned in some way and provoked God’s wrath?

If anything could have pushed Job over the edge to follow his wife’s counsel to “curse God and die” (Job 2:9), his sense of being forsaken by God would have done it. But Job was determined to hold on to his righteousness, even to the death, and even if it felt as if God was no longer holding on to him:

Job 23

8. Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

9. on the left hand where He is working, but I cannot behold Him; He is hiding Himself on the right hand so that I cannot see Him.

10. Still, He knows how it is with me, and when He has tried me, I will come forth like gold.

Throughout his terrible suffering, Job begged for God to come to him, and after Satan failed to break Job, God did. However, one of the mystifying elements of Job’s story, until we understand it, is that when God finally did come to Job, His tone was very harsh. Job had been a stellar example of steadfastness in righteousness in the midst of the greatest suffering, and so, we would have expected God to come to Job with words of comfort, even praise. Why, then, did God add to Job’s awful burden by attacking him with pitiless verbal abuse?

Even in the middle of God’s thunderous, final speech, when Job surrendered all claims of purity and cried out, “I am insignificant!” (Job 40:4), God mocked him for contradicting God’s judgment that Job was a “perfect and upright” man:

Job 40

7. Gird your loins now, like a man! I will ask you, and you teach me!

8. Would you really annul my judgment‽ Would you condemn me so that you may be justified‽

Who was Job, to say that he was not what God said he was (even if he did not know that God had said it)? Satan never once argued against God’s judgment like that. How dare Job do such a thing? It was to Job, not Satan, that God was referring when He demanded, “Who is this who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2). And then, to further complicate the matter for the Reader of Job’s story, as well as for any heavenly observers, God threatened Job’s friends with this assessment of Job’s words: “My wrath is kindled . . . , for you have not spoken what is right about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7).^[59]

Who in heaven or earth could have figured this out? How could God say that Job had “spoken what is right about me,” and at the same time say that he had spoken “words without knowledge”? And complicating the matter even further is the fact that while God seemed warm and courteous with Satan, He seemed cold and harsh toward Job! Judging by appearances, one would have thought that God and Satan were alike and that Job was evil. But judging by appearances is an error that Jesus warned us not to make (Jn. 7:24; cf. Mt. 7:1).

God’s stern response to Job’s humble confession sealed everyone in darkness as to His purpose, including poor Job. Job had just spent months defending himself as pure. Then God showed up and seemed to be very displeased with Job for doing that. So, Job humbly confessed what he thought God wanted to hear, namely, that he was vile. But God then rebuked Job for saying that, too! God intentionally made it impossible for Job to know what to do or say, or even what to think. If both “Yes, I am” and “No, I’m not” are wrong, what is left?

It was an utterly terrifying, Judgment Day kind of moment for Job, with his soul seemingly hanging in the balance. He had said that if God would come to him, he would fill his mouth with arguments (Job 23:4), but when he finally heard from the Almighty, Job was left speechless. Through long months of unrelenting agony, Job had begged for God to come to him because he expected God to affirm and comfort him when He came. Instead, God came fiercely, condemning whatever came out of Job’s mouth, demanding a multitude of impossible answers from Job, and saying nothing good about him. Job simply collapsed in utter confusion, not even sure of who he was anymore:

Job 42

1. Then Job answered Jehovah and said,

2. “I know that you can do anything; not even an intent can be kept from you.

3. Who is this man^[60] obscuring counsel without knowledge? That is why I went on, making declarations. But I have no understanding of things too wondrous for me. No, I do not know.

4. Hear, I beg you, and I will speak. I will ask you, and you teach me.

5. I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.

6. It makes me despise myself, and I repent in dust and ashes.”

Forced into a Blessing

God had to crush Job to make him willing to receive the unheard-of blessing that God had for him. God pressed Job so far down that Job tasted the humility found only in God’s kind of righteousness, and in that humility, Job saw everything of earth, its yes and its no, its good and its evil, the best and the worst of it, as filth before God (cf. Isa. 64:6). Having touched upon God’s kind of life, Job now sensed that he knew nothing, indeed, that he was nothing, and he gave in to a new kind of surrender; it was what amounted to repentance for being merely human.^[61] He stopped struggling against the One trying to force him to give up on himself and all that he knew, and to taste eternal life. And when he surrendered, that single taste of God’s life created within Job the realization that nothing he could do or say would justify him before God, no matter how perfect he was in the righteousness he knew. That is the New Testament revelation given to Paul, not yet revealed because it was hidden in the Son, who was still unknown.

Job was not made a “new creature in Christ”, for the Son had not yet made God’s kind of life available, but he was blessed to feel, as no other human had ever felt, the absolute hopelessness of man. His heart now knew, even if his mind could not fathom it, the sobering truth that Jesus would one day speak to his disciples: “With men, [escape from damnation] is impossible” (Mk. 10:27a). But to get Job to that place, God had to crush Job’s spirit under a double terror. First, God forced Job’s eyes open to the blinding brightness of the knowledge that no degree of righteousness on earth will ever justify a man before God. Second, God forced Job to behold the equally terrifying truth that there is no earthly way for man to obtain a righteousness that will save him. Job felt hopeless. He stood naked before God with no means of covering himself, and with only the mercy of God in which to hope. Job suddenly knew, as no other man had ever known, that God alone has to save, or no one can be saved. God compelled Job to taste the sweet rest that comes with abandoning hope in anything but the grace of God.

Job’s forced awareness that his righteousness was nothing in God’s sight is the only thing that could have made him willing to let righteousness go. He was forced to conclude, if righteousness was nothing to God, what was the use of clinging to it? In the end, no option remained for Job but to surrender all claims of righteousness and to put all his hope in the mercy of God. Then, and no doubt to his very great surprise, Job learned that God takes pleasure in those who put their hope in His mercy (cf. Ps. 147:11). And in knowing that, Job discovered an unknown peace.

With the Son still hidden, Job could not have understood all that he was feeling, but he did feel it. He did not understand God’s ways or God’s thoughts; it is doubtful that Job ever understood, as long as he lived on earth, what God had done to him, but Job had been fully rewarded for his great devotion to God with a taste of God’s kind of life before the Son paid the price for it to be given.

Forever Changed

Job’s confession of self-abhorrence and repentance (Job 42:6) contradicted his previous confessions of purity. God had forced him to abandon his righteousness and confess himself to be unclean, which was basically what Satan had meant when he said that Job would “curse God to his face”. To God’s heavenly sons as well as to men, righteousness was righteousness, no matter whose righteousness it was; they had no knowledge that God had His own kind of righteousness. Therefore, they would have seen Job’s confession of the worthlessness of his righteousness as a rejection of righteousness altogether, rather than see that he was being touched by God’s righteousness, which to them meant that Satan’s expressed opinion had not been far off the mark. What they did not know, and what Job also did not know, was that in confessing the uselessness of his righteousness, Job was only responding to the glory of God’s righteousness that he was feeling. Job really was “a perfect and upright man”, but God had transported him beyond perfection, to a place far beyond the uncleanness of perfect human righteousness.

Until God showed up, Job stubbornly insisted that he was pure because it is as ungodly for the righteous to say they are sinful as it is for the sinful to say they are righteous (cf. Isa. 5:20). All along, Job felt compelled to confess his righteousness because he would not lie, and he knew that he had been perfectly righteous according to the standard of righteousness he knew. When his sufferings were past, Job still possessed that kind of righteousness, in that he still did not sin, but to Job, that righteousness was no longer worth much. God’s love was his hope.

Beyond Perfection

God is so holy that it is beneath Him to behold what is in heaven, much less what is on earth:

Psalm 113

4. Jehovah is high above all nations. His glory is above the heavens.

5. Who is like Jehovah our God, who makes His home on high?

6. He abases Himself to look at what is in heaven as well as on earth!

God was right when He testified of Job that no one on earth was like him, but then, there was no one like Job in heaven, either. Who among the billions of heavenly creatures was so loved by God that God permitted him to feel the uselessness of his righteousness and be made more than perfect with God?

The only way a perfect man like Job could go beyond perfection was for God to interrupt the normal course of life and take him there, and that is what God did. He came to Job and to a very few others before the Son was revealed, and He carried each of them to the door of His most holy place, a place which no one in heaven or earth knew existed. None of them, of themselves, made the journey; God took them there simply because He chose to. He knew, though they did not, that their hearts were yearning for His kind of life, and every person He took to the door of that hidden place was forever changed by the experience. It was a place of such frightful holiness that they knew that no righteousness known to man could protect them, and after visiting that holy place, they became mystery figures, somewhat like the hidden Son, but in their cases, they became a mystery even to themselves.

When God unlawfully forgave David of adultery and murder (2Sam. 12:13), it was a taste of New Testament mercy, forbidden by the law (Lev. 20:10; Num. 35:31), and it made David an unwanted alien to this world, even to most of Israel (cf. 2Sam. 20:1–2). Moses glimpsed the glory of god on Mount Sinai (Ex. 34:5–8), and no one ever could bear to look upon Moses’ shining face again (Ex. 34:29–35). David and Moses survived their experiences, but they were transformed by them into something beyond the ordinary state of man. Just a touch of God’s kind of life made them aliens in this world, like the Son of God when he came to earth (Ps. 119:19a).

Made Willing

Job cursed his own life (Job 3:1), but the principal reason Job did not curse God, too, once he relinquished faith in his righteousness, is that by that time, God had beaten Job so far down that he could not even think to do it. A man must have a vestige of self-esteem left in him to feel wronged and to complain about it; he must think enough of himself to think that his complaint is worth uttering and his integrity is worth defending. Job did not; he had been driven too close to the abject humility of Christ than to think that he was worthy to judge anything, least of all the works of God. Through David, the hidden Son of God foretold how he would be made to feel as a human on earth:

Psalm 22

6. I am a worm, and not a man, a reproach to men, and despised by people.

7. Everyone who sees me ridicules me. They smirk; they shake the head.

Job knew how that felt.

Job’s sense of unworthiness before God, though being perfectly righteous, was an impossible conviction for his time. It was a New Testament kind of conviction for a righteousness that comes only by receiving the Spirit of God. It is the “godly sorrow” that produces repentance spoken of by Paul (2Cor. 7:10). That kind of conviction was given only in measure to men until the Son came and made the Spirit available; otherwise, men’s souls would have been tormented, as Job’s was, by perpetual hunger with no possibility of relief. Job’s torment not only left him more confused than humanly possible, but it also left him more humble than humanly possible, and therefore, more like God than humanly possible, and more in love than humanly possible with the God he still did not know. Thousands of years after Job died, God was still praising him (Ezek. 14:14, 20), but even then, no one understood what God had really done to Job because no one yet had God’s kind of life.

God Took Him There

When Jesus took on our sinful nature and became a curse for us (2Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13), he knew what he was doing, but Job was made willing to stand before God without human righteousness and be cursed without knowing what was happening to him. Only God could have made Job confess to being wrong when everything Job had ever known told him that he was righteous and that he must under all conditions stay that way. Nevertheless, when God did so and Job surrendered his claim to righteousness, Job found to his astonishment that he was not cursed, but blessed with a closeness to God that surpassed all human understanding, even Job’s.

So, in spite of how it appears, God did come to Job with comfort and peace, and even praise, but that kind of comfort and peace, and that kind of praise, is so foreign to this creation that creatures within it perceive it as a curse. Men likewise thought Jesus was cursed by God, even though he did nothing but good:

Isaiah 53

3. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He was like one hiding his face from us. He was despised, and we did not value him.

4. He took our sicknesses and bore our sufferings, yet we considered him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

How far from God’s thoughts humans are! I mentioned earlier that when God said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways,” He was speaking to man. Moreover, humans are so far from His thoughts and ways that they don’t even know what He was talking about. The only way for human beings to know God’s thoughts and ways is for God to reveal them. And even then, the revelation has to be believed, or His thoughts and ways will remain unknown.

None of us, in ourselves, can desire God as He really is, for what He really is, is contrary to everything in our nature. God has to make us willing to come to the real Him, and sometimes, like Job, it takes quite a while for us to be willing. Yet, God is patient with us because He is so determined to bless us, just as He was determined to bless Job. His terrifying patience is, in fact, our hope (2Pet. 3:15).

It took months of horrific pain and sorrow for Job to become willing to let God take him beyond perfection. God patiently watched and waited as Satan and men did His bidding, and after He came and Job gave up and became willing, but could go no further by himself, when Job had to be picked up and carried to the threshold of the “secret place of the Most High”, God came and picked him up, and took him there. And in truth, to be carried by God is the only way anyone ever gets there. Jesus told his disciples, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (Jn. 6:44), and, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” (Jn. 15:16).

None of us who now have God’s kind of life have it because we wanted it; we have it because God wanted us. We sought God only because He put it into our hearts to come to Him, often by sending affliction or trouble into our lives, waking us up to our need of Him. God has to create in us a hunger for His kind of life, and when He does that, we fall on our knees and seek Him for the relief from ourselves that His Spirit brings, the relief most people fear, or even hate, preferring to cling to their own kind of life and righteousness instead, as Job did for so long.

Poor Job?

I have used the phrases “poor Job” and “helpless Job”, but both are an assessment of Job from the standpoint of this world. From a human perspective, suffering Job was pathetic, and even the basest of men despised him:

Job 30

1. Those younger than I mock me, whose fathers I would have refused to put among the dogs of my flock.

. . . .

8. Fools, worthless people, they are driven out of the land with whips.

9. But now, I have become their song. I am a byword to them.

10. They loathe me; they keep far from me and do not hesitate to spit in my face.

From Job’s wise friends to the basest of men in Job’s community, everyone was certain that Job was worthy of contempt. That is what all people of the world, even the best of them, have always thought of those who were close to God. From the beginning, God determined that the pathway into His kingdom would be fraught with suffering (Acts 14:22), and those whom God calls to walk that path are blessed, regardless of what it looks like to men. “We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good,” wrote Paul (Rom. 8:28). And that was one truth that some men grasped, to an extent, before the Son was revealed. Joseph understood it, and it made him able to tell his brothers that God, not they, sold him into slavery in Egypt and that through that cruelty, God had positioned him to become ruler of Egypt next to Pharaoh so that he might save their lives (Gen. 45:7). Paul knew perfectly well that God sent him to Rome in chains so that he could testify about Jesus to Caesar (Acts 23:11). If Paul had traveled to Rome on his own as a free man, Caesar would never have granted him a hearing. Even the most righteous souls on earth are blessed with suffering designed by God so that they might be made more like Him and bear more fruit, as Jesus told his disciples:

John 15

1. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.

2. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and He prunes every branch that does bear fruit so that it might bear more fruit.

And the author of Hebrews gave this exhortation to suffering saints:

Hebrews 12

9. We certainly have had fathers of our flesh who chastened us, and we reverenced them. Shall we not much rather submit ourselves to the Father of spirits, and live?

10. They, for just a short time, disciplined us as it pleased them; but He for our benefit, that we might partake of His holiness.

If those who are chastened are blessed, as David said (Ps. 94:12–13), then David was being blessed with chastisement when wicked Shimei stood on the hill cursing him and throwing dirt and stones down upon him and his men (2Sam. 16:5–8). David certainly saw it that way, and he told his angry companions to leave Shimei alone, that God had sent him to do those things to him (2Sam. 16:9–10). Because of Jesus, who suffered for us, we now know that only those who suffer will be saved (Rom. 8:17; 2Tim. 3:12). Sometimes they will suffer for righteousness, sometimes for the lack of it, and sometimes simply to increase in it, but the wise humbly submit to whatever suffering they must face, knowing that in Christ, it always has a good purpose. “If we persevere [with Christ],” wrote Paul, “we will also reign with him” (2Tim. 2:12), and we will persevere in God’s righteousness if we, like Paul, consider our sufferings in this world to be “unworthy of comparison with the glory that shall be revealed” (Rom. 8:18).

Job, after his suffering, would certainly have agreed with Paul, that the glory into which God pressed him was worth all that he had suffered, and more. God loved Job as much as He could love him without revealing His Son. For the fullness of God’s love, Job would have to wait until the Son’s unveiling. Had the men who despised Job known God, they would have much preferred Job’s lot to theirs, for with each new sorrow, Job was being forced closer to the greatest blessing possible before the day of Pentecost: a taste of God’s kind of life.

Man in His Best State

Jesus equated the knowledge of God with eternal life (Jn. 17:3), and no price can be too high for us to pay to obtain it. God certainly thought that no price was too high for us to have it, for He purchased it with the life of His beloved Son. After Jesus brought the haughty young Paul down from his Pharisaic perch into his kind of humility, Paul valued more than his own life the knowledge of God which the Son had compelled him to find:

Philippians 3

8. I consider all things but loss for the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of everything. But I consider it all dung, that I might gain Christ

9. and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is by law, but that which is by faith in Christ, the righteousness of God based on faith,

10a. that I might know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings.

People who feel that living and worshipping with their own kind of life is sufficient for salvation, as Job once did, often feel unjustly attacked, as Job also did, when they come face-to-face with the truth of God’s kind of life. The wisdom in God’s life exposes even the wisest of men to be foolish; His power exposes man’s need; and His righteousness brings to light what Job’s heart learned, which is that “every man in his best state is altogether vanity” (Ps. 39:5b). Nothing but God’s kind of life reveals the worthlessness of man in his best state, that is, a man living in perfect human righteousness, like Job.

Neither Job nor his three friends were fools. Job would not have had fools for friends. They were, much like Job, shining examples of man in his best state, and their unjust condemnation of Job was the best judgment that man in his best state had to offer. Job agreed with his friends that his suffering was the work of God; however, Job was the only one wise enough or humble enough to admit that he did not know why God was doing it. They assumed, based on their own knowledge and wisdom, that God was afflicting Job because Job had sinned, and they challenged Job to name one righteous person in all of history whom God had afflicted as He was afflicting him (Job 4:7; 5:1, 27). But Job, with the same kind of knowledge and experience his three friends possessed, argued just as passionately that he was pure, until God appeared with His kind of righteousness, making Job’s argument seem as foolish to Job as theirs had previously seemed to him.

Like a Slave

Man’s view of God is in a direction different from the direction to which Jesus pointed them. That is why men always look the wrong way when they search for greatness. God had to beat righteous Job down in order to get him to look in the right direction. What God sees as up, men see as down, and they avoid it; and what God sees as down, men see as up, and they pursue it. Preacher Clark said in a sermon many years ago, “The way up is down, and the way down is up.” With that, he was echoing the hidden wisdom of the Son of God, who said, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Lk. 14:11).

When Jesus said, “I am meek and lowly” (Mt. 11:29), no one understood his kind of meekness. How could a meek and lowly man overturn the money-changers’ tables in the temple, dump their money out onto the floor, drive out the animals with a whip, and their owners, too, and angrily command them, “Get these things out of here! Don’t you make my Father’s house a marketplace!” (Jn. 2:14–16; cf. Mt. 21:12–13). Jesus was continually demonstrating God’s kind of meekness (e.g., Lk. 14:7–10), and men were continually confused by it. Once, when his disciples were quarreling over which of them would be the greatest, Jesus took a little child, stood him before them, and warned them that if they did not become like that child, they would never enter his Father’s kingdom, much less be the greatest in it (Mt. 18:1–3). They did not understand that admonition; man’s spirit cannot take it in. Even at the Last Supper, they fell into a quarrel over who would be greatest (Lk. 22:24). Then, Jesus again explained to them that God’s kind of greatness is different from man’s, saying, “He who is greatest among you must be as the youngest, and he who rules, like one who serves. . . . I am in your midst as one who serves” (Lk. 22:26–27; cf. Mt. 20:28). Then Jesus wrapped a towel about him, bowed down as a slave would do, and washed the disciples’ feet (Jn. 13:2–5). None of them believed, however, or could have believed at that time, that in doing this, Jesus was showing them the heart of God.

After Job’s suffering ended, he was once again blessed in ways that men could see and understand, but until the end of his earthly life, Job could never again be impressed with human righteousness, nor could he have understood altogether what had happened to him. As much as God loved Job, He was determined that His Son would have the honor of revealing His kind of love and righteousness. Until then, God did not allow that knowledge into any man’s heart:

1Corinthians 2

9. As it is written, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him.”

10. But God has revealed them to us by His Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

Satan Was Pleased

God knew Job’s confession of vileness might lead some in heaven, especially Satan, to believe they had been right to think Job would forsake righteousness if enough pressure was applied to him. Job did stop trusting in his righteousness; indeed, he came to despise it, and seeing that, many in heaven would have assumed that Job was despising God, for God was the source of the only righteousness they knew about. They did not know that God’s thunderous condemnation of Job came from a righteousness far beyond the perfection they knew about, a righteousness known only to God and His Son. They had no way of knowing that God’s “condemnation” was actually an invitation to the broken man to come visit “the secret place of the Most High” where the Son was hidden, to breathe in its sweet aroma and feel its power.

We are not told what took place at the next gathering of the sons of God, but Satan must have walked into the meeting with satisfaction. In his view, God’s rebuke of Job, together with Job’s confession of wretchedness, had proved him right. Though he himself had been unable by any means to compel Job to surrender his tight grip on righteousness (and so, “curse God”), he now thought he perceived what God’s point had been all along, to wit, Job was so strong-willed that only God could make him turn from righteousness, which Satan had believed Job would do if enough pressure was applied. Satan’s statement that Job would “curse God” was figurative speech meaning that Job would forsake righteousness, which Job did when pressed hard by God. Satan and others, then, would have equated Job’s rejection of righteousness with rejection of, or “cursing” God.

That only God could bring Job to do such a thing would not have embarrassed Satan in the least; everyone in heaven knew that God was greater than all, and if God had wanted to use a strong-willed man on earth to demonstrate again that only He had enough power to expose Job as vile, then so be it. Instead of hanging his head in shame, Satan would have basked in the glory of having been right about Job, even though it took God’s personal intervention to prove him right. That would have made Satan prouder than ever.

Satan, gratified, no doubt praised God more than ever in the heavenly Assembly. When all was said and done, the only conclusion Satan could have reached was that God had known from the beginning that nothing Satan did would make Job turn away from righteousness and that from the beginning, God planned to do it Himself, thus to demonstrate once more to all of heaven that He was the greatest. Satan was sure that God was just like him, proud of His glory and power, and willing to destroy the lives of innocent souls like Job in order to demonstrate His superiority. Didn’t God sometimes speak contemptuously of humans through the prophets?

Isaiah 2

22. Cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils! For wherein is he to be accounted of?

Isaiah 40

15. Behold! The nations are as a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as fine dust on a balance. Behold! Islands are as fine dust floating in air.

. . . .

17. All the nations are as nothing before Him. Less than nothing! They are considered nothingness before Him.

Satan was pleased. God was patient.

Leviathan

In the last part of God’s fierce address to Job, He spoke of a creature He called “Leviathan”. No one knew that God was referring to Satan. Not even Satan would have guessed it as he smugly watched God pummel Job with unanswerable questions about this mysterious creature. He knew what God was saying, but did not know what God was thinking:

Job 41

1. Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which you let down [as I drew Satan into a conversation about you, Job]?

2. Can you put a hook into his nose, or bore his jaw through with a thorn [as I hooked Satan and manipulated him to accomplish my will for you]?

3. Will he make many supplications to you [as Satan makes requests to me^[62]]? Will he speak soft words to you [as Satan speaks to me]?

4. Will he make a covenant with you [as Satan does with me^[63]]? Will you take him for a servant forever [as Satan serves me]?

5a. Will you play with him as with a bird [as I am toying with Satan this very moment^[64]]?

It is easy to imagine Satan listening in the background, pleased to see God beating Job down with impossible questions, totally blind to the meaning of God’s words. But then, no one in heaven or earth understood God’s words because what God was doing for Job was entirely a matter of the heart, and God alone knows the heart (Acts 15:8).

The Third Option

God’s eventual restoration of Job’s health and possessions would have been seen by Satan as no more than a meaningless consolation prize for the loser, given to Job only after he broke down and forsook his righteousness. And if the Son had not come and given us an understanding, Job’s repentance and restoration would have appeared the same way to us. Without the Son, we might also have thought that God sent Satan to afflict Job because He agreed with Satan about him. We might have concluded, like Satan, that God’s plan all along had been to glorify Himself by making the best man on earth confess his worthlessness after even the wise and powerful Satan had tried and failed. And we might also have thought, as many still think, that God sent Satan to test Job. Even Job thought he was being tested (Job 23:10), as did the wise young man Elihu (Job 34:36). But Job’s ordeal was not a test. It was a reward.

Job was driven by God to repent for being human, even though before the Son came, there was no cure for that disease. God’s presence made Job feel deeply the vanity of his kind of life, the only life he knew, but mankind would have to wait until the coming of the Spirit, purchased by the sacrifice of the Son, to be delivered from bondage to their kind of life, from both its sinfulness and its righteousness.

A dear brother in Christ, Gary Savelli, once remarked that one of the beautiful things about the truth is that it liberates us from taking either side in the controversies of this world. The truth provides a heavenly third option, for it is neither the way good people of the world see life nor the way evil people see it. The truth is “a new and living way” which no one can see. We all know that God is neither male nor female, neither young nor old, and so forth. But God is also neither wise nor foolish, the way the world knows wisdom and foolishness. Nor is He right or wrong, or good or evil, the way the world thinks of right and wrong, and good and evil. God is completely other than everything we know with our own kind of life. When God said, “Your ways are not my ways” (Isa. 55:8), He meant all of our ways, whether they be what we think is good or what we think is evil.

Thoughtless

The glory of the place to which God took Job left Job more than speechless; it left him thoughtless. What can one think when confronted with a completely unknown kind of life? In the presence of that life, Job was forced to be still and to experience spiritual rest, that is, the absence of all human ways and thoughts. In the blinding beauty of God’s kind of life, Job might not have been able to see it clearly, but he could sense the vanity of human life, and Job felt an abhorrence of himself because he, like Solomon, felt it so strongly. Job and Solomon’s shared hatred of earthly life (cf. Eccl. 2:17) was exactly what Jesus later would say that every person must feel before they can become his disciple: “If any man comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, and his wife and children, and his brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14:26). That kind of hatred is possible only in hearts in which God creates a desire for His kind of life.^[65] This is why Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him” (Jn. 6:44a). No one can even want to come to Jesus until God creates that desire within him (cf. Phip. 2:13).

Satan may have rejoiced that God brought Job down to the dust where Satan thought he belonged, but in bringing Job down to the dust, God had actually raised Job up so high that Satan couldn’t see him. Job had repented for things beyond his power to change, such as for not having the true knowledge of God, for being merely “perfect and upright”, and for not seeing beyond his perfect righteousness. Job’s mind was useless to help him understand what he was repenting for, but his broken heart knew that he must, and so, he humbled himself in the sight of God, and God – not any of the many works of righteousness that Job had done – lifted Job up. That is the common experience of New Testament believers (Tit. 3:4–6; Jas. 4:10), but in Job’s time, it was unheard-of. Job never confessed to any specific sins because he had not committed any. He repented and abhorred himself only because he had been ushered into a place of such holiness that it made the righteousness he knew feel unclean.

“Wash Me, Not the Animals!”

Long after Job’s ordeal, King David, also broken in spirit, pleaded for the same relief from human nature which Job was also made to feel:

Psalm 51

2. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,

3. for I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is continually before me!

. . . .

7. Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.

. . . .

10. Create a clean heart for me, O God, and make within me a new, steadfast spirit!

David’s cry for God to wash him was not a cry for another ceremony but for a washing of his soul, which was not available in his time. Under the law, priests could wash themselves (Ex. 30:18–21) and wash the sacrificial meat (Lev. 1:9, 13, etc.), but the law did not provide for anyone to wash another person. Until John the Baptizer was sent to introduce the Messiah to Israel (Jn. 1:31), God never ordained anyone but Moses to wash another person, and Moses did that only once, when he consecrated Aaron and his sons to begin their Levitical priesthood (Lev. 8:1–6). Later, when Moses prophesied of the coming Messiah, he told Israel to look for a prophet like him (Dt. 18:15), that is, someone who would wash people, not things.

That washing of others, the washing of their souls, was what David and Job were crying out for and what John the Baptizer declared that the Messiah would do (Mt. 3:11). The washing of the spirits of men, the answer to the prayers of Job and David, would be the Messiah’s credentials, God’s proof that Jesus was the One (1Jn. 5:6b–10). On the day of Pentecost, when the resurrected Jesus began washing souls from sin (Tit. 3:5–6; Rev. 1:5b–6a), God was giving proof, His personal testimony, that Jesus was the Messiah, and John said that to refuse that holy testimony, the baptism of the Spirit, is to call God a liar:

1John 5

10. He who does not believe God has made Him a liar because he has not believed in the witness that God has given concerning His Son.

Others besides Job and David longed for the grace that God would one day give. Nevertheless, “these all died in faith, not having received the promises; however, they saw them far away, and welcomed them, and confessed that they were foreigners and pilgrims on the earth. . . . And these all, given a good testimony because of their faith, did not receive the Promise” (Heb. 11:13, 39). That Promise, God’s kind of life, was the relief that Job and David prayed for, the relief brought to mankind by the sacrifice of the Son. Just days before that relief was first given, Jesus commanded his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for it:

Acts 1

4. Being assembled together with them, he commanded them not to leave Jerusalem but to await the Promise of the Father, “which”, he said, “you have heard about from me.

5. John indeed baptized [your flesh] with water, but you will be baptized [within] with holy Spirit not many days from now.”

Until the Son came, those who were touched by God to feel a longing for the Promise neither understood their longing nor knew that a relief from it would someday be given. However, just feeling it made them blessed above all others.

Fellowship with God

Until the Spirit was given, no one possessed what Paul called “the mind of Christ” (1Cor. 2:16), who alone had fellowship with God. Jesus’ followers could not have understood him when he declared, “No one really knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone really know the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son may choose to reveal Him” (Mt. 11:27b). As with everything Jesus spoke, that was the truth, and all wise men pray that the Son will choose to reveal the Father to them.

We continue now with other biblical stories in which Satan was involved, reading them the way ancient people read them, seeing Satan with God in heaven as a stern and obedient servant, not as an enemy of righteousness.

Tares in Heaven: Satan and the High Priest

Heaven’s Accuser

The young prophet Zechariah was given a vision of a trial as it took place in heaven. On trial was Joshua, Israel’s high priest, who had in some unstated way failed to keep the law. Although his life, maybe even his soul, hung in the balance, the high priest himself, down on earth, may not even have known that this heavenly trial was taking place.

Zechariah 3

1. Then the angel showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of Jehovah, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.

2. And Jehovah [speaking through His angel] said to Satan, “Jehovah rebuke you, O Satan, even Jehovah who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this man a brand [a scorched stick of wood] plucked out of the fire?”

3. Now, Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and he stood before the angel.

4. And the angel of Jehovah answered and spoke to those standing before him, “Take the filthy garments away from him!” And to Joshua he said, “Behold, I have made your iniquity to pass from you, and I am clothing you with stately robes.”

A careful analysis of these verses reveals much about Satan’s status in heaven before the Son was revealed.

Verse 1: Satan’s Office

Here, Satan is functioning as Prosecutor, or Accuser, in God’s court for crimes committed on earth. Satan, being “the god of this world” (2Cor. 4:4), had authority from God to prosecute transgressors of earthly laws. In Revelation, John described Satan as having carried out this responsibility with diligence, bringing accusations against transgressors day and night in God’s presence (Rev. 12:10b). Here in Zechariah’s vision, Satan is performing his task in the expected manner, standing at the right hand of the accused, bringing charges against him.

The title “Accuser” may strike some as a title appropriate only to the wicked, but that opinion has no biblical basis. Jesus told the Jews that in the Final Judgment, Moses would be their accuser (Jn. 5:45), and when he said that, no one took him to mean that Moses was wicked. On the contrary, everyone understood Jesus to be emphasizing Moses’ great authority in God’s kingdom. Just so, serving as heaven’s Accuser could only have indicated to those in heaven that Satan had great authority, not that he was evil. Of course, an Accuser can be evil, but Moses being Israel’s Accuser proves that the title, in itself, does not speak to an Accuser’s character.

Before the Son of God was revealed, no one except God had grounds on which they might accuse Satan of being evil, and God was keeping His reasons hidden with His Son. Satan was the Accuser of evildoers, not the accused, even watching the Israelites to make certain they obeyed the law of Moses. But God “committed all judgment” to the Son (Jn. 5:22), and when the resurrected Son ascended into heaven, he became Satan’s Accuser, and Satan was exposed, condemned, and forever cast out of God’s presence, along with the angels who were like him.

The beloved disciple John was given a vision of that epochal event, and when it happened, heaven rejoiced, but John heard a loud voice in heaven cry out, “The Accuser of our brothers has been cast out! Woe to the earth and the sea! For the Accuser has come down among you!” (Rev. 12:10b, 12b). It was only because of Jesus that Satan lost his exalted office in heaven’s court, and when he lost it, he was livid (cf. Rev. 12:12b). To this day, he hates Israel because Jesus came from that nation, and he hates with a passion those who receive the Spirit which God sends as proof that Jesus is Lord (Rev. 12:13, 17).

Verse 2: The Verdict

In Zechariah’s vision, the presiding angel’s rebuke of Satan was stern, but it would not have revealed to anyone that Satan was wicked. To the heavenly court, the angel’s rebuke only meant that God had ruled against Satan in his case against Joshua. Hundreds of years before this trial took place, Michael had used the same phrase to deny Satan his desire for Moses’ body (Jude 1:9), but that rebuke did not expose Satan and cost him his place in heaven; he still occupied, after all that time, his prestigious office. Besides, with which of God’s servants has God not been stern, even severe, including Job, whom God loved? Jesus had no qualms about calling his disciples “fools” (Lk. 24:25), and his frustration with their unbelief once grew to the point that he cried out against them, “O faithless and perverse generation! How long shall I continue with you and put up with you!” (Lk. 9:41). Jesus reproved Peter with withering harshness (Mt. 16:23) and hotly rebuked James and John (Lk. 9:52–56), and they were the three disciples closest to him! Eliphaz, one of Job’s friends, observed that in God’s sight, even angels are foolish (Job 4:18) – and Eliphaz knew nothing about fallen angels; he was talking about all of them!

So, the presiding angel’s blunt rebuke of Satan did not reveal the knowledge hidden in the Son, that God saw Satan as wicked. Moreover, it was known in Israel, even before Zechariah’s time, that God corrects whom He loves (Prov. 3:12) and that “open rebuke is better than secret love” (Prov. 27:5). Therefore, an open, harsh rebuke from God could have been taken as evidence that God loved Satan.

Verses 3–4: Merciful Judgment

Nowhere in the Old Testament is Satan found intentionally making a false accusation against anyone. To do so would have been an obvious evil, and Satan’s kind of righteousness precluded him from that.^[66] Indeed, Satan would have prosecuted anyone in Israel who made a false accusation, for the law of Moses forbade it (Ex. 20:16). Satan misjudged the strength of Job’s character, to be sure, but misjudging someone is different from bringing phony charges against him. That, Satan did not do.

Satan certainly did not bring charges against Joshua the high priest for doing good deeds. Not in God’s court. That would have made no sense at all. Nor did he accuse Joshua for transgressing the laws of heathen countries. God did not require Joshua to live by foreign laws; as an Israelite, Joshua could only be judged by the law God gave to Israel. So, the charges that Satan brought against Joshua were for a real transgression, or transgressions, of Moses’ law. The fact that Joshua truly was guilty is indicated by the “filthy garments” Joshua was wearing in the vision. Throughout Scripture, dirty clothing symbolizes sin (Rev. 3:4; Jas. 5:2), just as clean clothing symbolizes righteousness (Isa. 61:10; Rev. 19:8), and when the presiding angel commanded the other angels to take away Joshua’s filthy garments, he declared that by doing so, he had taken away Joshua’s iniquity.

So, in Zechariah’s vision, Satan was not a transgressor; he was prosecuting one. He was much too wise to risk his reputation by accusing someone in heaven’s court without an airtight case of provable, damning facts, and if God had not overridden the penalty prescribed by Moses’ law, Satan would not have lost the case. The presiding angel’s judgment was not supported by the law of Moses; however, Satan and everyone else present knew, even if they did not understand it, that the acquittal came from God and that God’s judgment is final.

It was fortunate for Joshua (not to mention for the rest of us) that God is above any law, including the law He gave to Israel, and that God will forgive even when the law condemns (Acts 13:38–39). God loves mercy; it is always His first choice to forgive. He was grieved when some of His people chose to die in sin rather than repent and live: “I swear on my life, says the Lord, Jehovah, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! For why will you die, O house of Israel?” (Ezek. 33:11).

In acquitting Joshua, God took into account the fact that Joshua and his fellow Jews had recently returned from captivity in Babylon and that they were few in number, poor, and struggling against strong heathen opposition. Further, and most importantly, God knew their hearts, that they were willing to observe every ordinance of the law exactly as it was written, but time was needed for them to prepare. When Zechariah saw this vision, the Jews did not yet even have a temple where they could perform the required rites. The presiding angel’s comment to Satan, “Is not this man a brand plucked out of the fire?” reflects the fact that God understood how difficult Joshua’s situation was. God could have agreed with Satan and condemned Joshua, but He is not quick to do that. He understood Joshua’s difficult situation, as He understands everyone’s, and sympathized with him. He is patient, as Peter learned after he was forgiven of his sins, including the sin of swearing with an oath that he did not even know Jesus (Mt. 26:72). God, he later said, “waits patiently for us, not wanting any to perish, but for all to come to repentance” (2Pet. 3:9).

Unlawful Mercy

A similar instance of God’s preference for mercy over judgment took place during the reign of Hezekiah, when the young king invited the Israelites who lived in northern Canaan to come to Jerusalem to keep the Passover. Many of them scoffed at Hezekiah’s messengers, but a few humbled themselves and took advantage of the king’s invitation (2Chron. 30:6–11). The northern tribes having been without Moses’ law for centuries by that time, the few Israelites who came showed up ritually unprepared. No doubt, Satan would have zealously prosecuted them in heaven’s court, but down on earth, good King Hezekiah pleaded with God to show them mercy (2Chron. 30:18–19). In response, God not only forgave their failure to keep His law as written, but blessed them with healings because they humbled themselves to come to Jerusalem to try to honor Him (2Chron. 30:20–21).

Satan would have judged them by appearances, that is, by how badly they failed to follow the rules governing the Passover, but God judged their hearts. The impoverished Israelites who responded to Hezekiah’s call and made the rigorous journey to Jerusalem were making an effort, though ignorantly, to do the right thing. Their ceremonial conduct was undeniably improper, and Satan’s case against them, if there was one, was as airtight as was his case against Joshua the high priest. Nobody could have successfully argued against the case that Satan could have brought into God’s court, and he might actually have done so. But God is patient, quick to forgive (Ps. 86:5, 15), and loves to show mercy (cf. Isa. 55:7). Through His prophets, He often pleaded with backslidden Israel to let Him forgive them:

Isaiah 1

15b. Your hands are full of blood!

16. Wash yourselves! Make yourselves clean! Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes! Stop doing evil!

. . . .

18. Come, I pray you, let us reason together, says Jehovah. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool.

Satan never had such feelings for people, and he never understood them. A merciless law-and-order Prosecutor, Satan could not take into account God’s compassion for Joshua and others like him, who were willing to do what was commanded but found themselves in situations that prevented them from doing so. Satan, unlike God, took pleasure in the death of the wicked (cf. Ezek. 33:11), just as humans do who have hearts like his (e.g., Jn. 8:1–11). Yet, while anyone could see that Satan’s attitude (and that of others) toward sinners was different from God’s, nobody at that time knew that in God’s sight, such lack of mercy was evil. Nobody but the Son knew that to be unlike God is to be ungodly, or what being unlike God truly meant.

Satan thought he would be “like the Most High” if his throne were exalted to be next to God’s throne on the mountain where the sons of God met (Isa. 14:14). He did not understand that being like God is a matter of the heart, not a matter of geography; he was utterly blind to the fact that there was no similarity between his heart and God’s. That truth was revealed only when the meek and merciful Son of God came and showed us what being “like the Most High” really means.

There are other examples of God’s forbearance with deeds which were strictly forbidden by Moses’ law. In one case, after God healed the Syrian general Naaman, God even gave Naaman permission to bow in the temple of Rimmon, a heathen god, when he returned to his duties in Syria (2Kgs. 5:1–19). Another time, when young David was fleeing for his life from the increasingly mad King Saul, God helped the hungry fugitive by allowing him to eat the holy “bread of the presence” (1Sam. 21:1–6) which, under the law, God’s priests alone could eat (Lev. 24:5–9). God knew the hearts of those two men, Naaman and David, and He graciously suspended the rules for them when they were in situations beyond their control.

Tares in Heaven: Satan and the Hidden Son

The Son Asked for Satan

Psalm 109 contains the Son’s terrifying, prophetic prayer for vengeance against both Judas and his persecutors. When this psalm was first sung, the Son was still hidden, and so, no one could have known it was the voice of the Son prophesying of feelings he would one day have on earth. We know it was the Son crying out for vengeance because Peter quoted from this psalm and then said, “This scripture must be fulfilled, which the holy Spirit foretold through the mouth of David concerning Judas” (cf. Acts 1:16–20).

Verse 6 of Psalm 109 is remarkable because it reveals that the hidden Son knew what Satan’s office was. To ancient readers, however, it was just the plea of a godly, abused man for justice from God’s heavenly Prosecutor:

Psalm 109

2. The mouth of a wicked man and a mouth of deceit are opened against me; they speak of me with a tongue of falsehood.

3. They also surround me with words of hatred, and they make war against me without cause.

4. In return for my love, they become my adversaries. But I give myself to prayer.

5. They have repaid me evil for good, and hatred for my love.

6. Set a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand!

Zechariah was given his vision of Satan standing at the high priest’s right hand several centuries after David wrote Psalm 109, and Job’s story took place centuries before Psalm 109 was written. So, the picture of Satan presented to us throughout biblical history is consistent; he was a mighty instrument of God, anointed with authority to enforce righteousness and to avenge unrighteousness. Even if someone in those times had dared to think that there might be some “tares” in heaven, he would never have guessed that Satan was one of them.

Tares in Heaven: Satan and David

Numbering Israel

Man does not need Satan’s influence either to be or to do evil. If God were to destroy Satan today, humans would still be sinful and in need of a Savior. At first blush, this seems to be contradicted by the story of Satan moving David to number Israel:

1Chronicles 21

1. Satan stood up against Israel, and he provoked David to number Israel.

2. And the king said to Joab and to the rulers of the people, “Go, number Israel, from Beersheba to Dan, and come back to me that I may know the number.”

. . . .

7a. But this thing was displeasing in the sight of God.

David’s numbering of Israel was indeed a great transgression which provoked God’s wrath.^[67] However, 1Chronicles 21:1 does not tell the whole story. The same event is related in 2Samuel 24:1, and it adds a critically important detail:

2Samuel 24

1. The anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and He provoked David against them, to say, “Go! Number Israel and Judah.”

The above verse, taken together with 1Chronicles 21:1, shows that Satan was working with God, not against Him, just as in the story of Job. The two accounts even use the same Hebrew verb in describing what both God and Satan did, to wit, they “provoked” David to sin.^[68] Therefore, what God did to David in 2Samuel 24 is exactly what Satan did to David in 1Chronicles 21. No one could have concluded that what Satan did in 1Chronicles revealed him to be evil, when in 2Samuel, God did the same thing. If both did the same deed at the same time to the same person, who would have deemed Satan to be evil for doing it, but not God?

Unlike the story of Job, we are not told of any conversation God had with Satan before He sent him to provoke David. Nor are we given the specifics concerning how Satan accomplished God’s will in David’s case. But as in Job, what Satan did is irrelevant, for God determined everything: the sin, the punishment, and in the end, the mercy. Also, to rightly understand this story, we must acknowledge that what David did was David’s sin, not Satan’s or God’s. David was not a robot; he had a choice, and he chose to number Israel. The only unknown is how he was moved to do it.

A Merciful Heart Like God’s

One can only imagine how much Satan wanted to prosecute David when he committed adultery with Bathsheba and murdered her righteous husband, Uriah, a foreigner who had become one of God’s most devoted and capable soldiers (2Sam. 11; 1Chron. 11:10–11, 41). If Satan ever had an open-and-shut case against anyone, that was it. David committed adultery with and impregnated Bathsheba, and then, to cover up the crime, he had Uriah murdered. Moses’ law strictly forbade mercy to be shown to either a murderer or an adulterer (Ex. 21:14; Lev. 20:10), and everyone who knew Moses’ law knew it, including Satan.

After David committed those two great sins, God sent the prophet Nathan to David’s court to publicly confront the king. The disgraced, distraught king knew his situation was hopeless, for the law he loved provided for no sacrifice that would atone for his sins. To add to David’s consternation, he remembered what God had done to Israel’s previous king after he sinned (1Sam. 16:14). Now, he found himself in an even worse position, and he cried out in his hopelessness, “I have sinned against Jehovah!” But then, Nathan pronounced an impossible judgment: “Jehovah has put away your sin; you shall not die” (2Sam. 12:13). It was unlawful mercy, and most of Israel did not believe God really had sent Nathan to decree such mercy for the king. How could David be allowed to escape death, they would have reasoned, since God clearly commanded it in the law?

Nathan’s declaration of God’s unlawful mercy on David ranks with Job’s experience as one of the greatest demonstrations of grace shown to man before the Son was revealed. Such unlawful mercy must have surprised and confused the inhabitants of heaven as much as it did the Israelites on earth. We are not told what heaven’s reaction was, but so many in Israel doubted that God sent Nathan to David that almost the whole nation revolted against him (2Sam. 20:1–2), the rebellion being initiated by one of David’s own sons (2Sam. 15:1–12). David and his kingdom survived the challenge, but he was forever changed by the touch of New Testament mercy that he received.

One of the reasons David received that incredible mercy must have been that he was so willing to show mercy to others. When God first chose young David to replace King Saul, He told Samuel that He had found a man with a heart like His (1Sam. 13:14). Afterward, David’s willingness to forgive the way God forgives was demonstrated on several occasions when, according to the law, David had justifiable reasons to kill, but chose to show mercy instead. He spared Shimei; he spared mad King Saul twice; merciless Joab three times; his ungodly sons, Amnon and Absalom; and probably others. Early on, David understood that God shows mercy to merciful people (Ps. 18:25), and he was keenly aware of his own need of mercy from God.

God Chose to Honor Satan

It was not unusual for Satan to be entrusted with important missions, those which dealt with God’s most valued earthly servants, such as Job, David, and Israel’s high priest. If anything, that would have augmented Satan’s status among God’s heavenly sons. In each case, God could have chosen others to carry out the mission, and they would have done it, but He chose to honor Satan with those tasks. And Satan was happy about it, becoming prouder of himself each time he was chosen.

Before God sent His Son to earth, He created an atmosphere in heaven in which all His sons, good and evil alike, felt at liberty to think, say, and do as they would. They even felt that freedom, with God’s permission of course, when it involved God’s chosen people Israel, as the Reader will shortly see. And all the while, God sat on His throne patiently observing them all, and remembering everything.

“You Thought”

Satan, being full of pride and assuming too much, misjudged everything badly, but his worst error was in assuming that God was like him. Psalm 50 mentions a similar wrong assumption made by an unnamed, sinful man. After listing the sinner’s evil deeds, God exposed what that man had been thinking: “These things you have done, and I remained silent. You thought that I was altogether such a one as yourself” (Ps. 50:21). The only way Satan could have hoped, as he did, to be elevated to reign with God was for him to think that God was “altogether such a one” as himself. Actually, though, Satan was more like God, as he thought God was, than any other creature; he just didn’t know God.

What Satan did know is that God knew everything, including what was in his heart. And as time passed and God did not rebuke him for thinking he was so much like God that he would be exalted to sit at His right hand, Satan grew increasingly confident of that expectation. It is impossible to believe that Satan thought his desire for the highest of honors was hidden from his Maker. Satan’s biggest error was thinking that since he was blessed, he was good. But God blesses both the good and the evil.

As an elderly, experienced man of God, Preacher Clark testified that the Lord had recently told him that from then on, if he did anything that wasn’t perfect with God, God was going to chasten him with blessing. He said that God told him that He could not treat most of His children that way because they would mistake His blessing for His approval of their thoughts and ways. Shortly after the Lord told him that, Preacher Clark was walking in his apartment when, all of the sudden, the Spirit of the Lord began blessing him for apparently no reason. But then, a recent conversation came to mind in which he had spoken in a way that had displeased God, and he realized that God was doing what He said; He was chastening him with blessing.

Only some of God’s children mature to the place where they can be perfected with blessing because they have developed the mind of Christ and understand the Father. This is what was in Paul’s mind when he asked the saints in Rome, “Do you despise the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?” (Rom. 2:4). We want to grow in the grace of God to receive the blessings of God as encouragement to become more like Him as He really is.

Satan despised God’s kindness by assuming he was blessed because he was good instead of being thankful and repenting. He would have reasoned that God chose him over all others to prove the faith of Job, the most perfect man on earth because he was the most perfect creature in heaven. And had not God chosen him to provoke King David, the man after God’s own heart, to number Israel? And was he not the one appointed to stand up for God’s law when Joshua the high priest failed to keep the law? And in Psalm 109, was he not the one called for, when an Accuser against a wicked man was needed? And there must have been many other times when God used Satan to carry out His designs and many court cases in heaven that Satan did not lose, all of which would have made Satan think more highly of himself.

Of course, Satan’s dream of sharing in God’s glory was the ultimate self-delusion. He was nothing like God, in his heart. God did seem to have a close relationship with Satan, but that was only because God was not letting anyone know what He really thought about anything. He had ordained a specific time for His Son to be revealed, and with him, the truth.

God’s patience is terrifying.

Tares in Heaven: The Lying Spirit

Joyfully Returning to Heaven

In the book of Job, as we saw, Satan was introduced as one of the sons of God, perfectly relaxed as he conversed with God. The following story shows that Satan was not the only evil spirit that felt at ease in heaven.

During the reign of wicked King Ahab, God gave the prophet Micaiah a vision of a gathering of the sons of God in which God patiently consulted with them concerning how to kill Ahab. Then, one of them volunteered to go to earth and speak to Ahab through his prophets and deceive him:

1Kings 22

19. [Micaiah] said, “. . . I saw Jehovah sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing about Him, on His right and on His left.

20. And Jehovah said, ‘Who will deceive Ahab that he might go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one answered this way, and another answered that way.

21. Then a spirit came forward and stood before Jehovah, and he said, ‘I will deceive him.’ And Jehovah said to him, ‘How?’

22. And he said, ‘I will go forth and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And He said, ‘You will deceive him. Yea, you will succeed. Go forth and do so!’ ”

A superficial reading of this scene might lead one to think that God was asking for advice, but in spite of how He made it seem, God does everything “according to the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11). What God was doing in this meeting was creating another situation that would bring out what was in the hearts of the spirits around Him. As previously mentioned, God always made those around Him feel free to express what they truly felt.

It is important that we see this scene rightly, for what it shows is that the angels that sinned were not coerced to do so; they freely chose the wrong path. Far from forcing them to do evil, God liberated them with His patience and humility to be who they really wanted to be. Faithful angels were not forced to make their choice, either; they, too, were liberated to be who they wanted to be.

In the heavenly meeting that Micaiah saw, each spirit’s suggestion about what to do, whether good or evil, exposed what was in his heart, for “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks” (Mt. 12:34). What each one said became a matter of record so that when the Son finally made known the mind of God, all of heaven’s creatures would understand why some were cast out and others were allowed to stay.

The crafty spirit that volunteered to be a lying spirit to Ahab’s prophets had no idea how contemptible he was in God’s sight. No doubt, he congratulated himself all the way from heaven to earth because God had chosen him over all others to accomplish that important mission. And after he succeeded in deceiving Ahab by lying to him through his prophets (a case of what we now understand to be demon possession), there was nothing to prevent that spirit from joyfully returning to heaven to bask in the glory of his success. How could he possibly have known that God saw him as evil? God did not tell him, and the Son was still hidden. He no doubt assumed, as Satan did, that God was like him.

“I, Jehovah, Deceived That Prophet”

Confirmation that this sort of thing took place in heaven before the Son was revealed is found in Ezekiel 14:1–11. There, when some hypocritical elders came to Ezekiel, making a show of wanting to hear the word of Jehovah, God was indignant. He told Ezekiel that when the disobedient came to hear from Him, He would not answer, except to send a lying spirit to deceive the prophet. Then, He said He would destroy them all, the prophet for lying and them for believing the prophet’s lie:

Ezekiel 14

9. As for the prophet, when he is deceived and gives a message, I, Jehovah, have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him, and I will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.

10. And so, they will bear their punishment. The punishment of the one who inquires of me will be the same as the punishment of the prophet.

The unspoken message in this is that God was showing mercy to His true prophets when He poured out His Spirit of truth upon them.

“A Strong Delusion”

God did not change in this regard when He established the New Testament. Paul warned the saints that at some point in the future, God would weed out the tares from among His people by sending a lying spirit to them

2Thessalonians 2

10b. . . . because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

11. And for that reason, God will send them a strong delusion so that they will believe the lie,

12. so that they all might be damned who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness.

That is what the lying spirit from heaven did to Ahab’s prophets. And when he moved upon them, they knew they were experiencing something real from God. Men can delude themselves and each other, and then free themselves of it, but a delusion sent by God is too strong for men. They will cling to that delusion to the death, knowing it came from God.

“Evil Angels”

The Hebrew word for “evil” (rah) is used very often in the Old Testament. As an adjective, rah can mean wicked (Esth. 7:6), but it can also mean deadly (Ezek. 14:21), displeasing (Gen. 28:8), ugly (Gen. 41:19), or even sad (Prov. 25:20). As a noun, rah can mean wickedness (Ps. 52:3), but it can also mean trouble/calamity (Ex. 5:19), or injury/harm (Gen. 31:29). God is said to have done rah to people, or brought rah upon them, a number of times (e.g., Ex. 32:14; 1Kgs. 17:20). So, rah, “evil”, does not always suggest wickedness.

Several times, the Old Testament mentions “evil angels”, and it is easy to assume that these are wicked angels, but “evil” in those cases means “destructive”, not immoral, and whenever evil angels are mentioned, God is said to have sent them:

Judges 9

23a. God sent an evil [trouble-making] spirit between Abimelech and the leaders of Shechem [to turn them against each other].

1Samuel 16

14. The Spirit of Jehovah departed from Saul, and an evil [tormenting] spirit from Jehovah began tormenting him [to drive him insane].

15. And Saul’s servants said to him, “Behold now, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you.”

And of the plagues of Egypt, David said,

Psalm 78

49. [God] loosed on them the fierceness of His anger, fury, and indignation, and vexation, a detachment of evil [destructive] angels.

Every “evil angel” is under God’s control. That is why God could say through Isaiah, “I formed the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil. I, Jehovah, do all these things” (Isa. 45;7). Before the Son was revealed, no one knew about wicked angels, but they certainly knew about evil ones being sent to execute God’s righteous judgment against the disobedient.

Tares in Heaven: The Angel and Balaam

“On Satan’s Behalf”

The Hebrew word “Satan” may be translated “adversary”, as is found in many translations of the story of Balaam. As we have shown, to choose “adversary” instead of “Satan” in Psalm 109 would have suggested that the Son was only asking his Father to send a prosecutor, not that he was asking for Satan by name. That seemed unlikely, and so, after much consideration, we opted for the translation we have. Likewise, in translating Balaam’s story, as the reader will see, we opted for “Satan” as a better choice than “adversary”.

The prophet Balaam was a genuine prophet of God, though not an Israelite, and his fame spread beyond the borders of his Mesopotamian homeland. However, Balaam succumbed to the lure of the riches and high honor offered to him by Moab’s king, Balak; consequently, when Balaam left Mesopotamia to go to Moab, “God’s anger was kindled because he went” (Num. 22:22a).

God’s anger came in the form of an angel who was sent to kill him (Num. 22:33). We are told that the angel “positioned himself in the road against him, for Satan” (Num. 22:22b). Later, the angel made this remarkable statement: “Behold! I have come forth for Satan because your way is perverse before me” (Num. 22:32b). That an angel would come “for Satan”, that is, on Satan’s behalf, makes biblical sense. Since Satan was god of this world, ruling over certain angels, he had authority to send them forth to carry out the decrees of God that were issued to him. In this case, God had given the command to slay Balaam for exploiting his gift from God for the sake of earthly gain.

I should point out that there is another, equally plausible translation of Numbers 22:32. If the angel who met Balaam was proud, as Satan certainly was, the Hebrew preposition in this verse allows for him to have said, “I have come forth like Satan.” It was tempting to translate the verse as if the angel was proudly comparing himself to the great one, Satan, but in the end, we decided not to go that way. Whether for Satan or like Satan, however, the angel was clearly functioning as Satan functioned, that is, as a stern adversary to those who erred from the right path.^[69] Balaam was doing evil, and this angel, acting on Satan’s behalf, had come to punish him for it.

Tares in Heaven: Satan and the Sons of Zeruiah

“Acting Like Satan”

In the following story, as in the previous one, most translations use “adversary” instead of “Satan”. However, when Satan’s office as Prosecutor is understood, the name “Satan” seems to fit better than “adversary”.

The three sons of David’s sister Zeruiah were highly regarded officers in David’s army who saw themselves as David’s greatest defenders, exercising merciless hatred toward David’s enemies. When David was fleeing Jerusalem just ahead of his son Absalom’s attacking army, a wicked man named Shimei watched from the top of a hill as the despairing king hastened through the valley. Shimei angrily mocked, cursed, and pelted the barefoot and weeping king and those with him with stones as they passed below (2Sam. 16:5–13). Abishai, one of Zeruiah’s sons, was indignant at this insult to the king and asked permission to go “take that dead dog’s head off,” but David refused to allow him to do it, and humbly walked on.

Later, after David’s army defeated Absalom’s army and David returned to Jerusalem, Shimei came meekly to the king and knelt before him, begging for mercy,

2Samuel 19

21. but Abishai the son of Zeruiah answered and said, “Should not Shimei rather be put to death for this? He cursed Jehovah’s anointed!”

22a. Then David said, “What is there between you sons of Zeruiah and me, that you should act like Satan on my behalf?”

No doubt, Abishai was disappointed that David again refused him permission to kill Shimei; at the same time, he very likely felt flattered by being compared with Satan. It was not every day that a man was compared with that mighty servant of God. But the comparison was just.

Joab, the highest ranking of Zeruiah’s three sons, consistently demonstrated Satan’s merciless zeal against transgressors, even after those transgressors repented. He shocked David by killing both Abner and Amasa after those two generals ceased fighting against David and offered to join forces with him (2Sam. 3:12–39; 20:9–10). That mercilessness was like Satan’s, but Joab’s unwillingness to forgive past transgressions was not only like Satan; it also matched another heavenly servant of God. God told Moses when He was leading Israel away from Egypt,

Exodus 23

20. “Behold, I am sending an angel before you to protect you along the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.

21. Beware of him, and obey his voice. Do not provoke him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him.”

The similarities between this angel and Satan are striking. Both were used by God in matters concerning His people, both had great power, and both were merciless. Most of us would consider this merciless angel, sent from God to protect and guide Israel, to be holy; at the same time, most of us consider Satan to be wicked, although nothing indicates wickedness in either of those heavenly servants of God. Again, the only reason we think of Satan as evil is that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding” (1Jn. 5:20). Ancient readers were not given that understanding, and there is no other way anyone could have known it.

If this angel would not forgive transgressions because he had God’s name in him, that is, God’s authority, then who in David’s time would have seen Joab as evil for not forgiving transgressors? The answer is no one. What they all would have seen is that although David did condemn some of Joab’s actions, he allowed Joab to continue in his high position as general of David’s army and did not punish Joab for his satanic zeal against those who had in the past fought against David.

David had a heart like God’s. He was patient. On his death-bed, he commanded his son Solomon to execute righteous judgment against Joab and kill him (1Kgs. 2:5–6), just as God would later command His Son to execute righteous judgment against Satan and cast him out of heaven.

Tares in Heaven: Satan and the Avenging Angels

More Destructive Than Satan

Satan was not the only heavenly being God sent forth to execute His judgments. In addition to the angel who opposed Balaam and the stern angel God sent with Moses, we see in the prophecy found in Psalm 35 that the Son prayed for the Father to send an avenging angel against the men who schemed to have him killed:

Psalm 35

4. Let them be disappointed, and let them be confounded who seek my life! Let them be turned back and put to shame who devise my harm!

5. Let them be as chaff before the wind, with the angel of Jehovah driving them away!

6. Let their way be dark and slippery, with the angel of Jehovah harassing them!

Notice the vengeful nature of the acts that the Son prayed for God’s angel to carry out. If we compare what this angel was called upon to do with what Satan was called upon to do in Psalm 109, this angel comes across as more destructive than Satan. In Psalm 109, the Son asked only that God send Satan to prosecute a transgressor, but here, he asks that God send His angel to execute vengeful punishments.

The awe which God’s avenging angels inspired among ancient people, and perhaps even among some heavenly beings, may have surpassed the awe which Satan inspired. As far as the biblical record is concerned, those angels afflicted far more people, far more often, and far more cruelly than Satan ever did. The cruelest of Satan’s activities recorded in the Old Testament are those we have already discussed. They are:

• He obeyed God’s command to afflict Job.

• He sent an angel to kill Balaam when God wanted him dead.

• He and God moved David to number Israel.

• He strictly enforced the law, even prosecuting Israel’s high priest when he failed to keep it.

Which of those activities could be considered evil? Moreover, Satan never inflicted the massive damage and destruction the Bible attributes to God’s angels, such as these:

• Destroying four populated cities with fire from heaven (Gen. 19:1–25; Dt. 29:23).

• Striking Egypt with horrific plagues (Ps. 78:49).

• Killing seventy thousand Israelites with a plague (2Sam. 24:15–16).

• In one night, slaughtering 185,000 Assyrian soldiers (2Kgs. 19:35).

The Bible commends all those deeds as righteous judgments of God. How, then, could the acts of Satan be looked at differently? Before the Son exposed Satan as the liar and murderer he is (Jn. 8:44), no one associated Satan with either lies or murder because the Old Testament record never states that Satan was guilty of such sins. If wickedness is to be determined on the basis of the degree of pain and death inflicted, then when we compare what humans and angels did in the Old Testament to what Satan did, we must conclude that humans and angels are more wicked than Satan!

Other Agents, or None

God did not limit Himself to the use of Satan and angels to execute His judgments. He used nature (Ezek. 13:10–14), animals (2Kgs. 2:23–24; Joel 2:25), and both righteous and unrighteous men (Samuel in 1Sam. 15:32–33 and Baasha in 1Kgs. 15:25–27). He also used nations to destroy other nations, as when He sent Israel to brutally conquer the wicked Canaanites (Dt. 9:4–5; Josh. 10:40), then sent Assyria to destroy Israel (2Kgs. 17:5–8) after they had become wicked, and then sent Babylon to conquer Judah for the same reason (2Kg. 23:26–27).

In many instances, the Bible states that God brought about terrible suffering and death without any mention of agents, whether heavenly or earthly. In the first book of the Bible, God is said to have destroyed the earth with the Flood, all but wiping out the human race (Gen. 7:21–22). In Numbers, God is said to have created a new way to kill men by opening up the earth beneath the tents of Dathan and Abiram and carrying those wicked men and their families alive down into the Pit (Num. 16:28–33). Hundreds of verses in the books of the prophets tell us that God sent or threatened to send all sorts of miseries on mankind, Jew and Gentile alike. God may have used agents in all those events, but even if He did, the fact remains that God is responsible for the sufferings His agents bring about. So then, if causing greater damage equals greater wickedness, what are we to think about what the Bible tells us God did (and will do) in comparison to what it tells us about Satan? Who, God or Satan, has inflicted the greater amount of suffering?

Again, my point is not that Satan is good; he most certainly is not. My point is only that until the Son came and paid the price for men to receive God’s kind of life, no one saw or could see that Satan was evil. In hiding the Son, God was hiding the truth about everything and everybody, and most of all, the truth about Himself. And in hiding Himself, God was concealing not only what He thought of Satan and the angels like him, but also what He thought about faithful angels such as Michael and Gabriel; no one knew that God saw some as good and others as evil.

A New Birth Is Required

The plain truth of it is that no one in heaven or earth rightly understood anything before the Son came and paid the price for others than himself to share in God’s kind of life. How foolish it is, then, for anyone to refuse the Spirit Jesus died for us to have, for those who do not have the Spirit now cannot know God any better than those who lived before it was given!

That is why Jesus said, “You must be born again” (Jn. 3:7), which is to receive the Spirit of God (cf. Jn. 3:8 with Acts 2:4). Paul emphasized the fact that “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him” and “as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God” (Rom. 8:9b, 14). The Pentecost experience is the door to fellowship with God, not joining a church, or just believing in God, or repeating a few scriptures. There is no such thing as joining the body of Christ; we must be baptized into it (1Cor. 12:13). And believing in Christ is but the first step toward receiving that baptism (Mk. 16:16; Heb. 11:6). Believing is good, but by itself, it cannot save (Jas. 2:17, 24); even demons believe (Jas. 2:19). And repeating scriptures is nothing; Satan himself repeats scriptures (e.g., Mt. 4:6).

God alone “knows the secrets of the heart” (Ps. 44:21), and when a person is sincere and his repentance pleases God, then God will bear him witness by baptizing him with the Spirit into the body of Christ (Acts 15:8). Without that experience, a person can only live in the kind of righteousness that Job had, and although Job was perfect in it, he learned that such righteousness is as filthy rags before God.

Tares in Heaven: Satan and Eve

Improving the Fellowship

Perhaps the most puzzling story in the Bible concerning Satan is that of the serpent and Eve in the garden of Eden. I associate Satan with the serpent because of four reasons:

• Satan is called “the ancient serpent” (Rev. 12:9; 20:2) and “the crooked serpent” (Isa. 27:1).

• Ezekiel said that Satan was “in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezek. 28:13).

• Jesus called Satan “the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).

• Paul was concerned that Satan’s ministers would lead the saints in Corinth astray “the way the serpent led Eve astray by his craftiness” in Eden (2Cor. 11:3; 13–15).

How Satan and the serpent were connected, we are not told; that is one of the mysteries involved in the story. But there was certainly a connection, and so, though being unable to explain that element of the story, I will speak of the serpent as being Satan himself.

After Satan became proud and was no longer the upright cherub he was created to be (Ezek. 28:14–17), he had a self-serving motive for doing whatever he did, even when God sent him to do it. And thinking that God and he were alike, he would have believed he was telling Eve the truth when he suggested to her that God had a self-serving motive for keeping her and Adam from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Whatever he was doing, it is certain that Satan was not trying to “go behind God’s back” to accomplish some clandestine, wicked deed; he knew very well that it is impossible to do anything without God knowing it. Nowhere in the Bible do we find Satan trying to sneak around God with what he does, not even in the New Testament. Sinful people may think that God does not see them, but Satan never did.

The typical Christian view of Satan in the garden is that he was scheming to do evil, trying to undermine God’s fellowship with Adam and Eve. But, by far, the more likely scenario is that God sent Satan to the garden, as He later sent him to Job. What Satan thought God sent him for, we are not told, but he may have been thinking God wanted him to help improve Adam and Eve’s relationship with God by ushering them into the kind of fellowship Satan thought he had with Him. Whatever his thoughts were, it is remarkable that there was so much truth in what Satan told Eve:

Genesis 3

Satan to Eve

5a. “God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened.”

And just as Satan said . . .

6. And the woman . . . took some of its fruit and ate it. Then she also gave it to her husband with her, and he ate it.

7a. And the eyes of them both were opened.

Genesis 3

Satan to Eve

5b. “and you will be like God [and me], knowing good and evil.”

And just as Satan said . . .

22. And Jehovah God said [to Satan?], “Behold, the man has become like one of us, to know good and evil.”

It must be noted that the knowledge that Adam and Eve gained by eating the forbidden fruit was not the knowledge of God. Eating the fruit did not reveal to them the mind of God and His hidden Son. The kind of knowledge they received was only an ability to judge something to be good or evil by what can be seen or heard – the same kind of knowledge Satan had – and when the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened to that kind of knowledge, they realized, to their great embarrassment, that they were naked (Gen. 3:10). When Jesus commanded his followers not to judge anything by what they heard or what they saw (Jn. 7:24), he was telling them not to judge good and evil the way Adam and Eve were made able to do. Theirs was not revelation knowledge; it was the kind of knowledge that all the sons of God, including Satan, possessed, based upon keeping or breaking rules and maintaining or failing to maintain proper conduct. At doing that, Satan was expert.

God’s warning to Adam had been that on the day he ate the forbidden fruit, he would die, but Satan assured Eve they would not die (Gen. 3:4). That seems blatantly contrary to what God had said, but in a way, even that proved to be true, for after Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they did not die on that day. On the contrary, they lived a long time afterward and had many children:

Genesis 2

God to Adam

17. “From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”

But after they ate the fruit . . .

Genesis 4

1a. And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.

2a. And again, she gave birth to his brother, Abel.

. . . .

25. And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son, and she called his name Seth.

Genesis 5

4. And the days of Adam after he fathered Seth were eight hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.

5. And all of the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

On the day Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they must have deeply felt the awful change it made in them, for the process of their dying physically had begun. More importantly, they immediately died to innocence, and lost a genuine closeness to God (cf. Gen. 3:8). Satan did not understand that kind of death, for he was already dead that way, and God would not allow him to realize it. God hated Satan, but He still loved Adam and Eve, and so, He let them feel the shame of their sin. That is mercy, the blessing which Paul described as “godly sorrow” after he had reproved the Corinthian saints, and they repented:

2Corinthians 7

9. I rejoice now, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you sorrowed to repentance, for you were made sorrowful in a godly manner so that you were not harmed in any way by us.

10. For godly sorrow produces repentance unto an irrevocable salvation, but worldly sorrow produces death.

Christianity’s Satan

The traditional picture of Satan in the garden of Eden as a conniving miscreant changes substantially when all things are considered. The mythological Satan of medieval Christianity is a hideous creature with a long tail, horns, and a pitchfork, but that view of him is completely foreign to the Scriptures and has badly distorted people’s perception of Satan, and therefore, their perception of good and evil, right and wrong, etc. Those who do not see Satan as he really is do not see God as He really is, either. It must have been an astonishing revelation to the disciples when Jesus declared that God’s fearsome and obedient servant Satan was evil, but Jesus came here to reveal who God really is, and that truth was part of it.

Christianity’s Satan is altogether a human invention. The real Satan was created wise and beautiful, with great power and authority, and he willingly worshipped God along with all the sons of God in heaven. “You were perfect in your ways”, Ezekiel said, “from the day you were created until unrighteousness was found in you” (Ezek. 28:15). That unrighteousness, pride in his spectacular beauty (Ezek. 28:17), must have been found soon after he was created, for Jesus said he did not continue in the truth, but became “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44). But that assessment of Satan’s character was hidden until the Son was revealed. Before then, God did not rebuke Satan for his thoughts, and Satan assumed that God approved of them. Satan was excited about his future. God was patient.

Tares on Earth: Judas

A Man My Own Equal

Jesus knew all along that Judas would betray him (Jn. 6:71); nevertheless, the other disciples never saw Jesus treat Judas any differently from the way he treated them. They never suspected that Jesus was demonstrating, the whole time, the Father’s terrifying patience with wickedness. Judas was taught as they were, was anointed as they were, and was sent out as they were with power to work miracles (Mt. 10:1–4). And as they also did, Judas no doubt did good deeds during the years he traveled with Jesus. If anything, the disciples held Judas in special regard because Jesus seemed to. After all, Jesus had chosen Judas over Matthew, a professional money-handler, to carry the moneybag and to distribute the funds that were in it (Jn. 12:4–6). So, it must have appeared to the other disciples that Judas held a special place in Jesus’ heart, and judging by what the hidden Son of God prophesied through David about Judas, such was indeed the case:

Psalm 55

12. It was not an enemy who reproached me; then, I could have borne it. Nor was it one who hated me who puffed himself up against me; then, I would have hidden myself from him.

13. But it was you, a man my own equal, my intimate friend, and my companion,

14. for we took sweet counsel together, and walked among the throng in the house of God.

The parable of the Wheat and the Tares was intended by Jesus to alert his disciples to God’s fearful patience with evil, a patience that God had quietly exhibited in heaven for thousands of years. Now, in his dealing with the wicked Judas, the Son provided his disciples with a similar example on earth.

Diabolos

The Greek word often translated “devil” is diabolos. It is the New Testament equivalent of the Old Testament word “Satan”, and it can be translated as “Accuser” or “Slanderer”. A frustrated Jesus once used diabolos to refer to Judas:

John 6

66. At this, many of his disciples went back to former things, and walked with him no longer.

67. Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Don’t you want to leave, too?”

68. Then Simon Peter answered him, “Master, who will we go to? You have words of eternal life.

69. And we have believed and have come to know that you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”

70. Jesus answered them, “Didn’t I choose you twelve, and one of you is a diabolos?”

At the Last Supper, just after Jesus told his disciples that one of them would betray him, Jesus looked at Judas and said, “What you do, do quickly” (Jn. 13:21–26, 27b).^[70] Knowing what we on this side of Pentecost now know, we see Jesus’ statement to Judas as an obvious giveaway that he was the betrayer. At that time, however, the other disciples did not see it, for they considered Judas to be above suspicion. Instead, they all assumed that Jesus had sent his close friend Judas on an errand (Jn. 13:28–29), just as the angels in heaven had often watched God send His servant Satan on errands.

The Son was always the perfect reflection of the Father’s being (Heb. 1:3), and in no way did the Son more perfectly reflect the Father than in his handling of his Satan-like disciple, Judas. The Son’s patience is also terrifying.

Tares on Earth: Satan and the Pharisees

Sons of the Accuser

It is dangerous to presume to act on God’s behalf without having a heart like God’s. Jesus warned his disciples that they would suffer at the hands of men who believed themselves to be acting on God’s behalf but were not like God in their hearts (cf. Jn. 16:1–2). Such men are the Satans of this world, so to speak, religious leaders devoted to God as they think God is. During the two millennia of this New Testament era, men of this sort have plundered, brutalized, and killed many an innocent saint, thinking they were doing a service to God. The plaintiff cry of murdered saints rises continually in heaven, saying, “How long, O Master, holy and true, will you not judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell on earth?” (Rev. 6:10), but for now, they are being told to “wait for a while” (Rev. 6:11). In other words, they are being told to be patient, like God.

The tares on earth often occupy high positions among God’s people, and when tares occupy positions of authority over God’s people, they often reflect the merciless spirit of Satan:

John 8

2. Early in the morning, Jesus went again to the temple, and all the people came, and he sat down and taught them.

3. Then the scribes and Pharisees led a woman to him who had been caught in adultery, and when they had stood her in the midst,

4. they said to him, testing him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery!

5. In the law, Moses commanded us that such women are to be stoned. Now then, what do you say?”

These scribes and Pharisees were acting exactly as Satan did in Zechariah’s vision. They were doing on earth what Satan did in heaven’s court, working with God, not against Him, and in their enforcement of righteousness, they used the same thing that Satan used, the holy law of Moses (Lev. 20:10).^[71] Their office, and Satan’s, required them to enforce the righteousness of the law, and when they caught a woman “in the very act of adultery”, they hoped to “kill two birds with one stone”: the unfortunate woman and Jesus. They stood, as it were, at the woman’s right hand, accusing her, demanding a judgment from Jesus. She was undeniably guilty of transgressing God’s law, and their case against the poor woman was as airtight as were Satan’s cases against Joshua and David. It is little wonder that Jesus called such men sons of the Accuser (Jn. 8:44).

It is often overlooked that at the end of the story, Jesus actually agreed with those hypocrites that the woman should be stoned; he only added the requirement that no one but sinless men should carry out the execution. That is what stopped them (Jn. 8:7–11). Jesus’ God-like compassion for the guilty woman found a way to put her accusers to shame, and they turned and went away, leaving her alone with the Lord (Jn. 8:9). He was the only one present who was qualified to throw a stone at the woman, and he would not.

Who at the time would have seen the scribes and Pharisees as evil for upholding the standard required by the holy law of Moses? The people looking on certainly did not. Otherwise, those men could not have continued to enjoy a wide following in Israel. On the contrary, they retained their high standing despite their hearts being like Satan because the Son was still hidden, even though he was here on earth. It was only after he sacrificed himself that people could receive God’s kind of life so that they might know God’s thoughts concerning good and evil.

The Tradition of the Elders

Even among his followers, Jesus had to deal with sons of the Accuser. These men revered, along with the law, rules which they called “the tradition of the elders”. Sons of the Accuser from an earlier time had devised those rules for Israel, and most of the people adhered to those rules as if they were as authoritative as the law itself. This was the case when some devout Pharisees, followers of Jesus, condemned other of his followers for plucking and eating some grain as they all passed through a field on a Sabbath. The law of Moses allowed for that (Dt. 23:24–25), but the tradition of the elders did not. This is how Jesus responded to their accusations:

Matthew 12

3. He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those with him,

4. how he entered into the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those with him, but only for the priests?

. . . .

7. If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.”

Jesus’ point was that the law was made for man, but in the view of Satan and his sons, man was made for the law, and they despised anyone who did not keep it precisely. Pride in one’s own righteousness blinds the heart to the love of God, and those who are righteous and proud of it always feel contempt for those whom they deem less righteous than themselves. God referred to such a smug attitude as being “at ease”:

Job 12

5. The one who is ready to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease.

God hates such an attitude, and He sent prophets to warn His people against it:

Amos 6

1a. Woe to those who are at ease in Zion!

Because they think it pleases God, self-righteous souls are dutiful in maintaining the kind of righteousness that is meant to be seen. Satan did it first, he did it in heaven, and he did it for a very long time in the presence of a very patient God. In God’s time, however, the Son was revealed, and the truth about good and evil came to light. In heaven, God’s faithful servants were relieved of the burden of the presence of evil when the resurrected Son returned to heaven and cleansed it. Likewise, God’s faithful servants on earth will be forever relieved of the presence of evil when His Son’s eternal kingdom is established on the new earth, as Peter said, “We, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2Pet. 3:13). And we need not fear the reappearance of evil, for God promised through the prophet that “He will make an utter end. Trouble will not rise up a second time” (Nah. 1:9b).

When God Is Quiet

Like tares growing in the midst of heaven’s wheat field, creatures whose hearts were evil were allowed to continue in heaven for a very long time before the Son was revealed. God quietly watched them rejoice and worship before Him with creatures whose hearts were upright in His sight. His quiet patience determined everything by providing all His sons with liberty to be who they really wanted to be. God’s demeanor created the situation in which the heart of every creature in heaven was tried, without them even knowing they were being tried. They felt completely free, and yet, God was always in complete control.

Romans 11

33. Oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and inscrutable His ways!

34. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counsellor?

God’s withholding of correction, His silence when sin is committed, is a most fearful form of divine wrath. David was right when he said that whoever is corrected by God is blessed (Ps. 94:12). And by whatever name God’s correction is called – whether discipline, chastisement, or instruction – to be shown it is to be loved, and it is a precious gift that the wise pray for. It is impossible to know whom God loves by seeing whom He blesses; it is only by seeing whom God chastens that we may know who He loves.

Proverbs 3

11. My son, do not despise the chastening of Jehovah; neither be weary of His correction,

12. for whom Jehovah loves, He corrects, even as a father the son in whom he delights.

Revelation 3

19. As many as I hold dear, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent!

It is also true that we cannot know who loves God based upon who worships Him. Everyone in heaven worshipped God, but through the ages, God did nothing to indicate that the worship of some of His heavenly sons was not acceptable. All heavenly creatures knew that God hated and was angry with the wicked every day (Pss. 5:5; 7:11), but none of them knew that some among them were wicked in God’s sight. God did indeed hate the wicked; He hated them with perfect hatred (Ps. 139:22). But perfect hatred can wait, the way Absalom patiently waited two years before killing his hated brother Amnon (2Sam. 13:22–29). It is perfect love that rebukes and chastens (Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:6; Rev. 3:19); perfect hatred is perfectly patient.

Hated Worshippers

To this day, evil spirits, including Satan, worship God. Paul said as much when he said that (1) demons devise doctrines about God and His Son that appeal to many of God’s own children (1Tim. 4:1), and (2) “Satan transforms himself into a messenger of light” and “his ministers also transform themselves to be like ministers of righteousness” (2Cor. 11:14–15a). Heaven’s creatures were created to worship, and they cannot alter that work of God (Eccl. 3:14). Satan and his angels were cast out of heaven, but they cannot cease from doing what they were created to do, even if the way they do it is unacceptable to their Creator. It may help the Reader to understand this if it is remembered that Jesus never called harlots and drunkards “sons of the Accuser”. He reserved that title for those who appeared to be good. Satan and his sons embrace religious observance, and they thrive in a morally correct environment. Satan encourages humans to dutifully observe solemn, religious practices and to uphold standards of proper conduct. That is what he did in heaven, and he has not changed.

Jesus criticized certain men he called Satan’s sons for doing what Satan wanted done (Jn. 8:44). But what were they doing? According to Jesus, they fasted twice a week (Lk. 18:12), made long prayers (Mt. 23:14), spent great sums on missionary work (Mt. 23:15), and gave tithes of everything that came into their possession (Mt. 23:23). That is what Satan’s sons did, and they were pillars of the community; they would not have robbed a bank or committed adultery for any amount of money. Their righteousness was seen and known by all. (They made sure of that.) They strictly observed the law’s rites and rules, as well as the traditions of their elders. However, their maintenance of proper form masked the wickedness of their hearts, just like their father, Satan.

That some men were so much like Satan – outwardly impressive but ungodly within – that they qualified as Satan’s offspring was God’s long-hidden judgment of them. Being proud in their own kind of righteousness, they would not believe the Son when he brought God’s righteousness to light. Nevertheless, the Son boldly warned them:

Matthew 23

23. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You tithe on mint, and dill, and cumin, but you have left off the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. These things must be done, and not leave those off !

24. Blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow down a camel!

25. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but inside, they are full of greed and injustice.

26. Blind Pharisee! Clean first what is inside the cup and dish so that the outside of them may also be clean.

27. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear to be so very lovely, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

28. Yes, that is how you are! You outwardly appear very righteous to men, but inwardly, you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Jesus knew that the scribes and Pharisees were always watching him like a hawk circling his prey, waiting for a word or deed which they could use against him (e.g., Mt. 19:3; Mk. 8:11; Lk. 11:16; Jn. 8:3–5). But in boldly declaring God’s judgments in spite of the threat, Jesus was following the sage advice he gave to me when I was young in the Lord. He said to me, “When you’re being watched like a hawk, don’t act like a chicken!”

Jesus loved the truth that His Father taught him, and that love motivated him to say plainly to those who were watching him, to find fault with him, “You are they who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts! That which is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Lk. 16:15). Nothing is more highly esteemed in this world than man’s lofty religious creeds and ceremonies. Jesus told me when I was very young in the Lord that the closer something comes to being the truth, without being the truth, the more evil it is. So, without the life of God, the more eloquent and lovely a religion is, the more of an abomination it is because the greater number of unwary souls it can deceive.

By all appearances, the scribes, Pharisees, and priests were good men, doing the will of God, but then, by all appearances, so were Satan and his angels in heaven. We must heed the warnings not to be fooled by appearances! Solomon warned his son that there are ways that seem right, but they only lead to death (Prov. 14:12; 16:25). Yet, in spite of such godly warnings, our fleshly nature would have us to choose the righteousness that seems good over the righteousness that is good. It is our human nature to deceive ourselves and “love the honor of men more than the honor of God” (Jn. 12:43).

Paul acknowledged that some people thought it wrong to teach that God used the wicked, while quietly watching them delude themselves and go on in darkness (Rom. 9:19), but then he answered that if God chooses to be patient with the ungodly, it is no one’s business but God’s (Rom. 9:20–21). The sum of Paul’s argument was this: “So what, if God, desiring to demonstrate His wrath and to make known His power, bore with great patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction?” (Rom. 9:22). Who is man, Paul would have asked, to grumble about what the Creator does with His creatures?

The inescapable reality is that God is using all of us all the time, the proud and the humble, the rebellious and the obedient. May we all find grace to be used as “vessels of honor” rather than of dishonor (2Tim. 2:20–21), for the vessels of honor will be saved, but the vessels of dishonor, even if after a lifetime of service to God, as they think He is, will be rejected and cast away (cf. 1Cor. 9:27).

When God is quiet, what do we think? If we dare to think that we know what to think when God has revealed nothing, we are foolish. When God has revealed nothing, nothing is known, and the sooner we learn that, the better off we will be.

Influence

Because of the Son, we now know that Satan and some of God’s angels were wicked. But our knowledge of their wickedness is not the point; the point of this chapter has been to emphasize the knowledge that God had, specifically His knowledge that “tares” were growing in His heavenly wheat field. Until God revealed His Son, no one else in heaven or earth, except the Son, knew that God was purposefully allowing them to grow. Indeed, until then, no one anywhere knew what God really thought about anything. So great was the blindness in heaven that the fellowship which God appeared to have with Satan secured for him a prominent reputation among the sons of God. All God’s sons heard God say that Satan had moved Him to afflict righteous Job without a cause (Job 2:3), and who, some no doubt wondered, could move the Almighty to do anything but an exceptionally wise and powerful being? God knew they were thinking wrongly about Satan, but God was waiting for His Son to reveal that truth, and God is very patient.

On earth, the fallen human race is, in one respect, better off with Satan’s influence than they would be without it. Satan’s desire to reign with God shows that he values order, for God’s kingdom has perfect order. Jesus himself stated that Satan’s kingdom was orderly (Mt. 12:25–26), and the order imposed on man by the governments and religions of the world (all of them under Satan) benefit mankind by restraining man’s unruly nature. Satan cannot purify man’s nature, but through earthly authorities, Satan can influence even wicked men to behave better than they would without those authorities.

“I Am with You Always”

On this side of Pentecost, the tares in God’s kingdom are His uncorrected children. Often, their ungodliness is not apparent, and they escape notice. They may have some knowledge and wonderful experiences, as well as gifts and testimonies which can make a grand impression. They may also be very confident, as Satan was, that God approves of them. In no Old Testament story do we see Satan doing anything contrary to what God wanted done; and yet, God saw him as wicked. Similarly, tares in the body of Christ may prophesy, cast out demons, perform miracles (Mt. 7:22; Lk. 13:26), and feast in the Spirit with fellow believers (2Pet. 2:13). Nevertheless, when they feast among the saints, they are eating and drinking damnation upon themselves because they are feasting “unworthily” (1Cor. 11:27–29), and in the end, they will be damned:

Matthew 7

21. Not everyone who says to me, “Lord! Lord!” will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

22. Many will say to me in that day, “Lord! Lord! Haven’t we prophesied in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and performed many miracles in your name?”

23. Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you. Go away from me, you who work lawlessness!”

To this warning, Paul added one of the most sobering exhortations found in the New Testament: “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1Cor. 10:12).

Thankfully, God has given us much reassurance of His care, “for He has said, ‘I will never leave you, nor forsake you,’ so that we may boldly say, ‘The Lord is my helper, and I will not be afraid of what man will do to me’ ” (Heb. 13:5b–6). Let us, then, rest in the love of God’s Son Jesus, who “is able to save completely and forever those who come to God through him, seeing that he is living always to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:25a). “All power in heaven and on earth is given to me,” Jesus said, and then he repeated the promise made by his Father: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world” (Mt. 28:18, 20b).

A Brief Personal Note on Chapter 7

Before entering into this challenging chapter, I must remind my Reader, because it bears repeating, that Paul plainly taught that the existence of the Son of God was hidden from all creatures from the beginning of the world and that in him was hidden all true knowledge of God. In each chapter, we have been building upon that revelation, bit by bit. In this chapter, we consider the earthly life of Jesus, asking the question, “Being without the knowledge of God, what did those who were around Jesus think he was doing and saying?” For example, we are told that God sent Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, but as has been said, nobody, not even Satan, knew what God was doing. So, what did Satan think was happening in the wilderness Temptation? What did Satan think God’s purpose was for sending him from heaven to meet Jesus in the wilderness? And if the Son was still hidden, what did Peter think he was saying when he confessed that Jesus was the Son of God? The answers to such questions will be given in this chapter.

The apostles had to be willing to think new thoughts in order to receive revelation knowledge; let us be the same way. Jesus said that the truth would make us free (Jn. 8:32), but the truth does not make us free unless we are willing to receive and follow it, wherever it leads. So, let us courageously allow the truth to think the next thought for us as we read the story of the Son of God on earth.

Chapter 7

The Son in the World

Inasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he likewise partook of the same.
Hebrews 2:14a

Section 1: The New Man

Put on the new man, who in God’s likeness is created in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:24

“A Man in Appearance”

From the moment God’s Son came from heaven and took on the body of Mary’s son, there was never again a Son of God/son of Mary difference. God’s Son was completely blended with Mary’s son “so that he might create of those two one new man in himself.”^[72] Jesus of Nazareth became forever the Son of God from heaven, and the Son of God from heaven became forever Jesus of Nazareth. Paul was right to say that God’s Son was “born of a woman, born under a law” (Gal. 4:4), and the author of Hebrews was right to say that when the Son came from heaven, a man’s body was already prepared for him (Heb. 10:5). Jesus was right to tell Pilate that he had been born (in this world) and that he had come from heaven into the world (Jn. 18:37). All those statements are true because that “one new man”, created on the bank of the Jordan River, had two histories, an earthly and a heavenly one. All four of the gospels tell of the epochal moment when the Son of God descended from heaven, in the form of a dove, to enter into the body which His Father had prepared for him:

Matthew 3 (cf. Mk. 1:10–11; Lk. 3:21–22; Jn. 1:32)

16. After he was baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God in the form of a dove, descending and coming upon him.

17. And behold, a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

This was the moment the hidden Son of God “divested himself ” of his heavenly glory and came into this world, “taking on the form of a slave”, and was “found as a man in appearance” (Phip. 2:7–8), which is to say, he became a man. However, the man he became looked the same as he looked before the Son became him. Nothing about Jesus’ appearance was altered by his experience at the Jordan River to show that the Son of God had come and entered his earthly temple, even though when the Son did it, a new kind of creature was introduced into the universe, one with a corruptible human body filled with God’s incorruptible life. No such being existed before that day. Moreover, even though the Son had come, he remained unknown, for men could only see the body that he had taken on, and that body was still human.

The “incarnation”, that is, the heavenly Son’s entering into flesh, did not happen when Mary became pregnant. When the Son of God began his life on earth, it was not as an infant in a manger, and certainly not as an embryo in Mary’s womb. Instead of entering Mary’s body when he came, the Son of God entered the body of her grown-up son. Mary was not the mother of the hidden Son of God through whom God created the universe; she was the mother of the earthly son that God created in her womb. The Son of God was never Mary’s baby; he was her creator. God had a Son long before Mary herself was born.

“As He Is, So Are We”

When the dove from heaven entered into Jesus as he came up from the Jordan, Jesus experienced what he would later call being “born again”. After his resurrection, when he ascended into heaven and offered himself to God for us, and secured for us God’s kind of life, Jesus became “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29), for others began receiving the same new birth which Jesus had experienced. Jesus’ new birth at the Jordan had signaled the dawning of a new and eternal age, when humans could, with him, be sons of God, but no one at the time understood the signal.

In Acts 2, on the day of Pentecost, the Son of God came again to earth, as he had promised he would do (Jn. 16:22; 14:23), but this time he did not come like a dove, but “like a violent, rushing wind” (Acts 2:2). When he did that, the humble souls who had been huddled together in Jerusalem awaiting “the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4) were born again, just as Jesus had been on the bank of the Jordan River. When Jesus told Nicodemus that people must be born again (Jn. 3:7), he was only saying that we must experience what he experienced: the baptism of God’s Spirit. As I previously said, when Jesus asked James and John, “Are you able to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” (Mt. 20:22), he was not speaking of water baptism, for he knew that James and John already had that kind of baptism. Later, after John received the kind of baptism Jesus was talking about and had himself become “a new creature in Christ”, he exclaimed with great joy, “As He is, so are we in this world!” (1Jn. 4:17).

On the day the Spirit was poured out on John and the others, the new nation about which Isaiah prophesied (Isa. 66:8) was instantly “created in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24). Those followers of Jesus were recreated by God in the image of His Son when he was on earth, with fully-grown, mortal bodies filled with God’s eternal life. They were not born again as little babies any more than the Son of God was; they were born “as [adults] in appearance”, though they were newborns in the kingdom of God.

To make that precious blessing, that “pearl of great price”, available to fallen man was God’s purpose for everything the Son suffered on earth. What can we say of that blessing but “thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift!” (2Cor. 9:15). Understanding what God and His Son did for us “leaves us with nothing but a mouthful of thank you!”^[73]

“Son of God” Among the Gentiles

The Gentiles believed that gods and goddesses sometimes mated with mortals,^[74] producing demigods, that is, human offspring with divine attributes.^[75] Believing this, they were prone to suspect that someone was an offspring of one of the gods if he was involved in an extraordinary event, as the centurion did when he witnessed the unnatural darkness at Jesus’ crucifixion (cf. Mt. 27:54). And if someone performed a miracle, Gentiles might even consider him to be a god come down to earth, as they did the apostle Paul on at least two occasions (Acts 14:11; 28:3–6).

When King Nebuchadnezzar saw a fourth man walking about in the blazing furnace with the three young Hebrews he had cast in there, he had no reason to say that the fourth man in the fiery furnace looked like the Son of God, as Christian translators usually have it. It is much more in keeping with the times for the king to have said that the fourth man looked “like a son of the gods” (Dan. 3:25),^[76] and that is exactly what we find in the original language.^[77]

Occasionally, it is necessary to add the to a phrase when translating the Scriptures, but by adding the to “son of God” at the wrong time, translators miss an opportunity to communicate the ancient, universal ignorance of the Son. An example of this is the aforementioned centurion who oversaw the crucifixion of Jesus. Awestruck at the unnatural darkness and the earthquake which attended Jesus’ death, he responded exactly as Nebuchadnezzar did, and exactly as one would expect of a Gentile: “The captain and those who were guarding Jesus with him, seeing the earthquake and the other things that happened, were very frightened and said, ‘This really was a god’s son!’ ” (Mt. 27:54).

Christian translators, knowing about the Son of God, usually add the to what the centurion said, but that leaves the impression that ancient Romans knew about the Son of God. They did not. No one did. Paul pointed out the obvious fact that if men had recognized the Son of God, they would not have crucified him (1Cor. 2:7–8). In his gospel, Luke describes the scene at Jesus’ crucifixion in a way which communicates much better what the centurion was actually thinking: “When the captain saw what happened, he honored God, saying, “Surely, this was a righteous man!” (Lk. 23:47).

“Son of God” in Israel

By the time of Jesus, the phrase “sons of God” had long been in use in Israel as a reference to heavenly beings, as we saw in the book of Job, but it was only a figure of speech used to express God’s fatherly authority over His heavenly court. Nobody in Israel believed that God had actually fathered those sons, and it would no doubt have been considered disrespectful of God to suggest such a thing.^[78]

The title “Son of God” was also used in Israel in reference to the expected Messiah. And, again, no one believed that God would be his actual Father. It is never explained in the Bible why the Israelites who looked for the Messiah felt that “Son of God” was an appropriate title for him, but before Peter received God’s kind of life, he is one who used the term that way:

Matthew 16

16. Simon Peter answered [Jesus] and said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”

Israel’s high priest also referred to the Messiah as “the Son of God”:

Matthew 26 (cf. Lk. 22:66–70)

63b. The high priest answered and said to him, “I adjure you by the living God that you tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God!”

Neither Peter, the high priest, nor anyone else in Israel ever used “the Son of God” as a reference to the Son who was hidden in heaven from the beginning of creation and “through whom God made the worlds” (Heb. 1:2). Nobody knew about that Son.

No Old Testament prophet referred to the Messiah as the Son of God. So, just as we do not know how the Jews came to believe that no one would know where the Messiah came from (Jn. 7:27), neither do we know how the Jews came to believe that the Messiah would be so powerful and wise that the term “Son of God” should be applied to him, and to him alone.^[79] For the Jews to attribute such a title to a man indicates that they expected their Messiah to be extraordinarily great, “bordering on the Divine”, as Alfred Edersheim pointed out: “The cumulative evidence . . . must leave on the mind at least this conviction, that the Messiah expected was far above the conditions of the most exalted of God’s servants, including angels; in short, so closely bordering on the Divine, that it was almost impossible to distinguish Him therefrom.”^[80]

Such a view of the Messiah was closer to the truth than the Jews knew. So much like the Father is the Son, so perfectly does the Son reflect the mind and character of God, that it is indeed “almost impossible” to distinguish him from his Father. That is why Jesus reproved Philip when he asked Jesus to show them the Father: “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” he said. “So, how is it you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (Jn. 14:9).

When the Son Was Revealed

When Jesus came up on the bank of the Jordan after he was baptized, John the Baptizer must have been deeply impressed when he heard the voice from heaven say, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Yet, John could only have thought that God was speaking of the son of Mary, naming him as the Messiah. John did not even imagine that the dove he saw coming down and lighting on Jesus was the hidden Son of God, for God was still hiding him. Even during the years the Son walked on earth, he remained unknown, for people without God’s kind of life cannot know the Son, no matter where he is. The Son came into the world, but “his own people did not receive him” (Jn. 1:11) because they did not know him; they knew Jesus, but not him. He was revealed only after he returned to heaven and sent back the kind of life that enables people to know him and his Father.

Mary’s son is all that heavenly beings saw, too. If Satan also heard God express His pleasure on the day the Son entered into his earthly temple, then Satan may have been impressed, as John no doubt was. But seeing only Mary’s son, he would not have been intimidated in the least. Satan himself was a son of God, and he was certain that God was more pleased with him than He was with any of His other sons, including this Messiah from Nazareth. Besides, he knew that he existed long before the man Jesus did, and like John the Baptizer, he understood that whoever existed first was greater.

As miraculous as Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem was, relatively few in Israel knew about it, and nobody who knew about it saw anything miraculous about Jesus after he was born. The pre-baptism Jesus was entirely human, living as a human in a world of other humans. Nothing about him stood out (cf. Isa. 53:2). No halo encircled his head; his hometown was insignificant; his parents were ordinary folk; and contrary to Christian mythology, the pre-baptism Jesus performed no miracles and had no special knowledge of God, although even as a child, he loved Him. Jesus’ comment at the age of twelve, “I must be about my Father’s business” (Lk. 2:49), was a sweet statement, but it was not earth-shattering. Young children who are taught about God often feel a deep, innocent love for Him, and when they feel those feelings, they can make some arresting statements. It was only after God’s Son came from heaven and blended with Mary’s son that Jesus began preaching astonishing doctrines and performing miracles. Before that, such things were as impossible for Jesus as they were for any other man.

So, that God had a Son in heaven from the beginning of creation was revealed neither by the birth of Mary’s son in Bethlehem nor by the arrival of the hidden Son at Jesus’ baptism. Nothing before Pentecost, not even Jesus’ resurrection, gave men the knowledge of God’s Son. As I said earlier, even after the Son lived and labored on earth for years, his disciples did not know him (Jn. 14:9), for the revelation of the Son could not come before God’s kind of life came. And because of that, ironic as it sounds, the disciples came to know the Son only after he was gone.

The Virgin Birth

We began this chapter at the Jordan River instead of the city of Bethlehem because the hidden Son of God made his advent into the world there in the form of a dove, not in Bethlehem in the form of an infant. Jesus’ physical birth was glorious, but his spiritual birth was more glorious. The virgin birth had to take place, of course, but it took place only as part of God’s preparation of an earthly temple for His Son, who came to earth about thirty years after the birth of Mary’s son (Lk. 3:23).

It should be emphasized that Mary’s son was fully human, with human eyes and ears, hands and feet, heart and mind – and a fully human spirit. He was fully one of us, sharing in our fallen human nature. He was an obedient child and a good Jew, and though he had been created within his mother’s womb by the power of God, he was to no extent a divine being, possessing divine power and wisdom. He received his fleshly body from his mother, and as I have said before, the body determines the nature.

Essential as Jesus’ physical birth was, it is unwise to esteem that physical event more highly than the spiritual event of God’s Son entering into the world. It will help put the birth of Jesus into perspective if we remember that Gabriel’s appearance to Mary was not the first time that God sent an angel to earth to tell a woman that she would bear a son. Over a thousand years before Mary’s visitation, God sent an angel to Manoah’s barren wife to tell her that she would bear a son, Samson, who would deliver Israel (Judg. 13:2–5). Even before then, God was known as a God who miraculously gives children to women, as in the cases of the elderly Sarah and barren Rebekah (Gen. 21:1–2; 25:21). And He later did the same for both Hannah and the Shunammite woman who helped Elisha (1Sam. 1:1–2, 19–20; 2Kgs. 4:14–17). Lastly, about six months before God sent Gabriel to Mary, God sent him to the old priest Zacharias to tell him that he and his elderly wife would have a son (Lk. 1:5–13). So, God was known in Israel for His power to give children to those who could not have them, and David rejoiced in that:

Psalm 113

5. Who is like Jehovah our God, who makes His home on high?

. . . .

9. He makes the barren woman to keep house and to be a joyful mother of children. Hallelujah!

Much of what humans think is impossible is the norm in the spiritual realm. The words impossible and miracle probably do not even exist in the vocabulary of angels. Nothing that God has ever done, as far as we are told, has caused His angels to marvel, with the one exception that they wonder at the life of God which believers receive; they would love to understand that (1Pet. 1:12). When the heavenly host rejoiced in the night sky at the birth of Jesus (Lk. 2:13–14), they were not rejoicing because God had somehow managed to make a virgin have a baby; they were instead rejoicing because the child was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah:

Luke 2

8. In the same area were shepherds, staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night.

9. And behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were very afraid.

10. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! Behold, I am bringing you good news of great joy, which shall be for all the people!

11. For unto you, in the city of David, a Savior is born today who is Messiah and Lord!”

Mary’s virginity presented God with no more an obstacle than did Sarah’s age or Hannah’s infertility. John the Baptizer even declared that God was able to raise up children from stones (Mt. 3:9). The angels, of course, knew that before John said it; they had witnessed what God did in the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37:1–10). So, to them, Mary being both a virgin and a mother would not have been astonishing. Her virginity was only a sign that God had told Israel to look for.

Exactly what the angels expected the Messiah to do is unknown, but they certainly were not rejoicing in the night sky because they knew what God had in mind; that was a secret He was keeping from everyone. They probably were thinking what both Satan and Jesus’ disciples thought, which was that Jesus would soon drive out the Romans, take over the world, and “re-establish the kingdom of Israel” (cf. Acts 1:6). None of them had any idea that God had a Son before Mary did and that the honor He would bestow upon His Son was infinitely greater than the relatively small honor of ruling over this little planet.

God’s Lamb, Not Joseph’s

God had to be the actual Father of the one He would sacrifice for the sins of the world because it would have been unjust for Him to sacrifice someone else’s son. According to the law that God gave to Israel, whatever was offered in sacrifice had to belong to the person who was offering it. If you took your neighbor’s lamb to make a sacrifice for your sin, you would not be forgiven; indeed, you would be more guilty than before because you had stolen a lamb. In creating a son for Himself in Mary’s womb, God was being merciful to every father on earth by leaving their sons alone. The virgin birth assured that Jesus was God’s sacrifice for sin, not Joseph’s. That is why the Spirit moved John the Baptizer to exclaim, “Behold! The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn. 1:29), instead of saying, “Behold! The Lamb of Joseph!”

Understanding this principle, King David refused Araunah’s generous offer when the king needed animals for sacrifice in order to stop a plague:

2Samuel 24

21. Araunah said, “Why has my master the King come to his servant?” And David said, “To buy this threshing floor from you, to build an altar unto Jehovah so that the plague may be stayed from the people.”

22. And Araunah said to David, “Let my lord the King take and offer up what is good in his sight. Behold! The oxen for a burnt offering. And for the wood, threshing sledges and instruments of the oxen.

23. All these, O King, does Araunah give to the King.” And then Araunah said to the king, “May Jehovah your God accept you!”

24. But the king said to Araunah, “No. I must buy it from you for a price. I will not offer to Jehovah my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” So, David bought the threshing floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.

David knew that if he did not own the oxen he offered, God would refuse the sacrifice and the plague would continue.

The Owner Had to Kill It

Another requirement of the law was that the owner of the sacrificial animal had to be the one who killed it. God knew man. He knew that if a man fell on hard times, he might regret the sacrifice he had brought to God, and if the priest had been the one who killed the animal, the man might well become bitter against the priest. The law protected God’s priests by requiring each man to kill his own animal; only after that was the priest allowed to perform the sacrifice:

Leviticus 1

4. He [the owner] shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it will be accepted from him to make atonement for him.

5a. And he shall kill the bullock before Jehovah. Then the sons of Aaron, the priests, shall bring the blood.

Those who crucified Jesus were not struck dead by God for killing him because the Lamb was His, and He was the One killing him (Isa. 53:10). Wicked men were only doing what the Lamb’s Owner had determined should be done (Acts 4:28). It was because Jesus knew who was killing him that he did not waste time by pleading with his enemies and Pontius Pilate to spare him the agony of crucifixion; instead, he pleaded with his Father:

Mark 14

35b. He fell to the ground and began to pray that if it were possible, the hour would pass from him.

36a. And he said, “Abba (that is, ‘Father’)! All things are possible with you. Take this cup away from me!”

When Jesus ended his agonizing prayer that night in the garden, he told his disciples that what he was about to suffer was the cup his Father had given him to drink (Jn. 18:11). The following day, on the cross, Jesus remembered that his tormentors were ignorant of what God was doing to him, which meant that they were also ignorant of what they themselves were really doing, and being full of God’s love in spite of his agony, he prayed, “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing” (Lk. 23:34a).

The Owner, Willingly

Another of the law’s requirements for sacrifices is that they had to be willingly offered.

Leviticus 1 (cf. Lev. 19:5; 22:29)

3. If his offering be a burnt offering from the herd, he shall bring it . . . of his own will before Jehovah.

No sacrifice which someone was forced by another to make was acceptable, and since the law was the pattern for the sacrifice of Christ, we know that it was of His own free will that “God gave His only Son, so that every one who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16). What love the Father has for us!

If Jesus had belonged to Joseph, even if Joseph had the ungodly notion to offer him up as a sacrifice for the sins of others, he would hardly have done so willingly. Besides, anyone in Israel familiar with the law, as Joseph no doubt was, knew that God abhorred human sacrifice. Not only did God strictly forbid that cruel practice, but He even threatened with damnation anyone who concealed a person who had sacrificed a human (Lev. 20:2–5). God hid much in Old Testament time, but He did not hide His indignation when Israelites sacrificed their children to bloodthirsty Gentile gods:

Jeremiah 19 (cf. Jer. 32:33–35)

4. They have forsaken me, and have estranged this place from me. They have burned incense in it to other gods, whom neither they, nor their fathers, nor the kings of Judah have known, and they have filled this place with the blood of innocents.

5. They have also built the high places of Baal to burn their sons with fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command, and did not speak, nor did it come into my mind!

That is, it never came to God’s mind for humans to sacrifice their children. God did have in mind the sacrifice of His Son, but no one knew about that because no one knew that God even had a Son. Who, then, would have believed that a human could be an acceptable sacrifice for sin, since the prophets had made it so clear that for men to make human sacrifices was an abomination to God? It is true that Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac, but that was only at God’s command. Abraham was surely greatly relieved that God put a stop to that sacrifice and that it proved to be just a test of his faith.

No sane father in Israel would have believed that he could sacrifice his son, as God did, to atone for the sins of everyone on earth, including all the sins the world had ever committed (cf. Jn. 3:16; Rom. 3:25; Heb. 9:15). But even if a father imagined that he could offer his son as a sacrifice for the world’s sins, he would not willingly offer up his only son, especially a dutiful and wise son like Jesus (cf. Lk. 2:40).^[81] But God, for our sakes, willingly made His precious Son, in whom He was well pleased, a sacrifice for our sin.

Romans 5

7. Rarely will someone die for a righteous man, though for a good man, one might possibly bring himself to die.

8. But God commends to us His kind of love, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Even if a man on earth was foolish enough to offer up his son as a sacrifice for the whole world’s sins, it would have been unacceptable to God because all humans, including Mary’s son Jesus before God’s Son came, had a sinful, human nature, which alone would have made the sacrifice unacceptable. Only God’s hidden Son was sinless, both before he came to earth and afterwards.

Once when I asked Preacher Clark if Mary’s son was sinless before God’s Son entered into him, he replied, “It doesn’t matter. After the Son came, Jesus was a new creature. It only mattered what he did after that.” As it was with Jesus, so it is with everyone who is baptized by the Spirit into Christ (1Cor. 12:13):

2Corinthians 5

17. If anyone be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are gone; behold, all things are new.

Nothing that anyone does before he is born of the Spirit matters to God. The past is erased because we are entirely new creatures, sons of God and innocent before Him.

Section 2: The Temptation

Immediately, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness.

And he was there in the wilderness forty days,

being tempted by Satan.

Mark 1:12–13a

No One Knew God’s Purpose

To say, as Paul did, that Jesus was born under the law (Gal. 4:4) is to say that when Jesus was born, the law of Moses was still in effect. Three decades later, at the time of Jesus’ baptism (Lk. 3:23), nothing had changed with the law. Nothing with Satan had changed, either. He was still one of the sons of God who stood in God’s presence, he was still a fierce Prosecutor of the law in heaven’s court, and he still did not know that God saw him as evil. And he certainly did not know that God, through Jesus, would soon redeem mankind from sin.

In the event called the Temptation, Satan was on a mission from God, and he did his duty in the wilderness with Jesus as diligently as he had done it with Job, just as he had always done his duty. God could have chosen any of His heavenly servants to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, but as always, He chose the one with the qualifications and disposition fitted to the task, and Satan was perfectly equipped for this one. He had the wisdom, the power, and the ambition fitting to the assignment.

All that Satan and the angels could have known was that God had sent Satan to earth on another important mission, this one dealing with the long-awaited Messiah. No human knew even that much. While Jesus was being tempted, everyone on earth went about life as usual in fields and in towns, unaware of the extraordinary event taking place in the Judean wilderness. Yet, the Temptation was a monumental event in salvation history, one deserving close examination, not only to show its importance, but also to dispel wrong ideas about it.

The Bible provides no evidence that anyone on earth knew that the wilderness Temptation took place until after God shared His kind of life with humans on the day of Pentecost. More significantly, however, not an iota of scriptural evidence suggests that anyone in heaven, including Satan, knew that God’s purpose for sending Satan to earth was to tempt Jesus. God did not reveal His purposes to Satan; He revealed them only later, and only to those He blessed with His kind of life. It is a tribute to God’s fathomless wisdom that Satan thought he was tempting Job when he was not and that he did not know he was tempting Jesus when he was.

When God sent Satan from heaven to the Judean wilderness, Satan could only have known what God told him about his mission, and God would not have explained to Satan that He was sending him to earth to meet with a new kind of man or that through that man, a new and eternal covenant would be established. To explain those things, God would have had to reveal the existence of His Son, and it was not time for that. Heavenly beings knew more about spiritual things than humans knew because humans were created “a little lower” than they (Ps. 8:5; Heb. 2:7),^[82] but they did not know the Son of God, who was created a little lower than no one except the Father who created him.

Only if we keep in mind the universal spiritual darkness of the time can we see Jesus’ Temptation as the mysterious, astonishing event that it was. Otherwise, the Temptation is reduced in our minds to nothing but an attack by the bad guy, Satan, on the good guy, Jesus. But it was not an attack at all.

Designed by God

Satan did not trick God’s Son into going into the wilderness; nor did he ambush him once he was there. Instead, “Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted by the Accuser” (Mt. 4:1; cf. Lk. 4:1–2). Or as Mark, in typically blunt fashion, said it, “The Spirit drove him out into the wilderness” (Mk. 1:12). So, God sent His Son out into the wilderness to meet Satan, and He sent Satan to the wilderness to meet His Son. God was in command of them both. They both were servants of God who had come down from heaven, and they both were sent into the wilderness. Each was obeying the command of God, but only one of them was good. The other was cursed and did not know it.

God determined everything about the Temptation, including when it would take place. When Mary’s son came to the Jordan to be baptized by John, he was about thirty years old, and at no time during those thirty years had God sent Jesus anywhere to meet with Satan, and with good reason. If Mary’s son had gone out to meet Satan in the wilderness before God’s Son came into his temple, he would have been overcome, for human nature is powerless to resist such mighty temptations, and a human nature is all that Mary’s son had. The Temptation took place when it did because the Temptation was for God’s Son, not Mary’s, and God’s Son had just arrived on earth. Moreover, the Temptation took place when it did because the first order of business for the Son, once he was here, was to bring into subjection the body of flesh in which he now dwelt. With the Temptation, the Father was providing the Son the opportunity to become master over his newly acquired body of flesh.

Nothing bad was happening to God’s Son in the Temptation. God is good, and His purposes are “holy, and just, and good,” regardless of whom He uses to accomplish them. As my wise father often pointed out, God used both righteous Moses and wicked Pharaoh to get the Israelites out of Egypt, one to pull and the other to push. God chose that particular Pharaoh and raised him up to accomplish His good purpose (Ex. 9:16), and Pharaoh’s wickedness did not make God’s purpose evil. Just so, the fact that God used wicked Satan to tempt holy Jesus does not mean that something evil was taking place. When did God ever use Satan for a wicked purpose? On the contrary, Jesus’ Temptation was a holy event designed by God for His Son, who at that time was the only creature living in a fleshly body who possessed the kind of life that could subdue it.

Again, I am not saying that Satan was not evil. He most certainly was, and still is. I am merely saying that Satan had not yet been exposed as evil, that he was still doing God service, and that he did not understand God’s purpose for sending him to meet Jesus in the wilderness.

When Satan saw Jesus walking out into the wilderness, all he saw was the man who had come from Nazareth to be baptized by John. Satan met him in the wilderness; he spoke with him; he even picked Jesus up and carried him places (to the pinnacle of the temple and onto a high mountain); but Satan did not know this new man because, first of all, he was ignorant of the Son of God, and secondly, he could not see past the flesh where the Son now dwelt. When Satan looked into Jesus’ eyes in the wilderness, he had no idea who was now looking back at him. Seeing nobody but Mary’s son, he thought he was dealing with nobody but Mary’s son. Satan was confident he knew God and His truth, but he was never farther from God’s truth than that day in the wilderness when he was looking at Truth himself, in the face of Jesus Christ.

Still God’s Servant

Matthew and Luke give us details of the Temptation, and they agree that Satan suggested two things to Jesus and made one unheard-of offer. The following is Matthew’s version. Remember as you read the conversation that at this time, the term “Son of God” was used in reference to the mighty Messiah that Israel expected, not to the hidden Son of God:

Matthew 4 (Lk. 4:3–13)

3. The Tempter came to him and said, “Since you are the Son of God,^[83] command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

4. But he answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of God.’ ”

5. Then the Accuser carried him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple,

6. and he said to him, “Since you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command His angels concerning you, and they will bear you up with their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ”

7. Jesus told him, “It is also written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”

8. Again, the Accuser carried him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory.

9. And he said to him, “All these things will I give you if you fall down and worship me.”

10. Then Jesus told him, “Get behind me, Satan!^[84] For it is written, ‘The Lord your God shall you worship, and Him only shall you serve.’ ”

11. Then the Accuser left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him.

If Satan had known the Son, he could not possibly have said and done to him what he did in the wilderness, for had he known the Son, he would have known that the Son was the one through whom God created the universe (Heb. 1:2). And if Satan had known that, he would not have been so foolish as to make any suggestions whatsoever to the Son, much less offer to make him ruler over one of the worlds that he had created. That would have been like trying to bribe the owner of a lumberyard by offering him a toothpick. If Satan had known that he was talking to the one through whom God created “things in the heavens and things on earth, things visible and things invisible” (Col. 1:16), he would not have invited Jesus to bow at his feet. In short, the Temptation, as it is commonly understood, would not have taken place if Satan had known with whom he was dealing. Satan was being used by God, as God had used him throughout history. He was still God’s servant, speaking only what God gave him to speak, and what God gave Satan to say during the Temptation was supremely cunning. It could only have come from God.

The World That Jesus Conquered: “All That Is in the World”

If any trial could have overwhelmed God’s Son, the wilderness Temptation would have, for by God’s design, it appealed in an unprecedented manner to the three basic components of human nature, the nature of the flesh with which the Son now found himself covered. John told us what these three components are:

• The desire of the flesh

• The desire of the eyes

• The pride of life

1John 2

16. All that is in the world – the desire of the flesh, and the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life – is not of the Father, but is of the world.

That is every man’s “world”; every sin that man commits falls into one of those three categories. At the time of the Temptation, Satan did not understand this; only God did.^[85] The Son of God, now the man Jesus Christ, resisted the inclinations of the nature of his newly-acquired fleshly body, and by doing so, in just forty days, he overcame his entire world. Thus it was that there in the wilderness, for the first time since the foundation of the world, God’s kind of righteousness was given open expression by someone who possessed it. And Satan, the ultimate fool, was chosen to be the first one to witness it. God’s kind of righteousness was strange to Satan, and he misunderstood it and hated Jesus for it. Afterward, when Jesus left the wilderness and began preaching, that kind of righteousness was strange to humans, too, and many in Israel also misunderstood it and hated Jesus for it. A number of Jews even concluded that Jesus was cursed by God to say and to do the things he did (cf. Isa. 53:4).

In the garden of Eden, Eve gave in to the same “world” of human nature which Jesus overcame in the Temptation:

Genesis 3

6. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food [desire of the flesh], and that it was a delight to the eyes [desire of the eyes], and a tree to be desired to make one wise^[86] [pride of life], she took some of its fruit and ate it. Then she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate.

The Serpent may have led Eve astray in the garden of Eden, but in the wilderness, Satan was not dealing with Eve. He was dealing with the Son of God.

The World That Jesus Conquered, #1: The Desire of the Flesh

The Tempter came to him and said, “Since you are the Son of God,

command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

No one in heaven or on earth would have seen unrighteousness in anything Satan said or did during the Temptation. After all, if the Almighty sent Satan to do what he did, how could anyone have seen it as evil? On the contrary, as in the case of Job, David, and others, the sons of God in heaven would have considered it evil for Satan not to do it! But even without knowing that God sent Satan, and if one did not know beforehand that Satan was evil, he would not have seen anything wrong in what Satan said and did during the Temptation.

Where was the evil in encouraging Jesus to eat if he was hungry? In a deserted place, with a Messiah who had the power to do so, even the most righteous people on earth would have thought it was good for Jesus to make himself some food from the material at hand: stones. Both Satan and Jesus knew that God once told the Israelites that they were free to eat what they wanted to eat when they were hungry (Dt. 12:15). Besides that, one might have thought, What kind of God would want the Messiah to starve?

To rightly understand the event called the Temptation, it is imperative that we be honest with ourselves and admit that without the knowledge of God, we would see no evil in Satan suggesting to Jesus that he make himself some food. Confessing that is part of speaking the truth in our heart, which David said we must do if we hope to see God (Ps. 15:1–2).

Satan did not know that the Son was waiting for his Father to let him know it was time to eat. That is God’s kind of righteousness: being led by the Spirit instead of by the desire of the flesh. The Son refused to be led by his flesh’s craving for food, and in choosing to do the Father’s will concerning food, even after long days without food, the Son overcame the temptation to give in to the desire of the flesh.

The World That Jesus Conquered, #2: The Pride of Life

“Since you are the Son of God, throw yourself down,

for it is written, ‘He will command His angels concerning you,

and they will bear you up with their hands, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’ ”

Those who loved God and Jesus, without knowing them, would have thought that the goal of this suggestion was especially good. Only someone who hated Jesus – and that would have been no one at this time, including Satan – would have disapproved of it, for no one knew Jesus as he really was since the Son of God had come from heaven and blended with him. With that suggestion, Satan had only told Jesus how he might prove to Israel that he was their Messiah. His idea was that if Jesus hurled himself from the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, God’s people would see him be rescued by angels and, so, believe in him. Satan reminded Jesus of God’s promise to appoint angels to watch over him and to hold him up if he so much as tripped (Ps. 91:12), and if the angels would catch Jesus if he tripped, they would certainly catch him if he was falling from a tall building. Satan’s point was that such a public, miraculous escape from death would certainly convince the Jews that Jesus was their Messiah. Who would not want that for Israel, and for Jesus? Hadn’t God’s prophets foretold of the great joy of Israel when their Messiah would come and bless them?

Isaiah 25

9. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God! We have waited for Him, and He has saved us. This is Jehovah! We have waited for Him! Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation!”

Jeremiah 31

12a. They will come forth and shout for joy on the height of Zion.

13. The virgin, together with young and old men, will rejoice in the dance, for I will have turned their mourning into joy, and I will comfort them and give them joy for their sorrow.

14. And I will satisfy the soul of the priests with abundance, and my people will be sated with my goodness, says Jehovah.

But the Spirit within Jesus would not yield to his flesh’s desire for recognition, nor yield to Satan’s suggestion that he seek it. Jesus chose again to wait for his Father’s direction, this time concerning when and how to make himself known. That, again, is the righteousness of God. It chooses the will of God over all things, the good things of this world as well as the bad.^[87]

To rightly understand the Temptation, we must acknowledge that what our fleshly nature wants is often the same as what Satan wants for us. Satan’s suggestion to Jesus was not merely a suggestion from outside of him; it connected with what Jesus’ fleshly nature wanted. It was a good idea, and there were many scriptures that could be used to justify it. It was the sort of suggestion that David’s men made to him when they encouraged him to kill King Saul, referring to the prophecies of David becoming Israel’s king (1Sam. 24:4). Wasn’t that what God and David both wanted? And wouldn’t it be good for Israel if David was king? But David knew that killing Saul was not the way God wanted him to become king, and he refused (1Sam. 24:6–7).

Jesus indicated the harmony of human nature with Satan on the day he rebuked Peter for wanting to save Jesus from the suffering which God had appointed for him:

Matthew 16

21. Jesus started showing his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day, be raised up.

22. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Master! This shall never happen to you!”

23. But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You’re a stumbling block to me! Your mind isn’t on the things of God, but the things of men.”

Both Satan and Peter had a mind for the things of men, but in the wilderness Temptation, as always, the Son’s mind was on the things of God.

A New Kind of Warfare

Satan was no challenge for Jesus; but then, he did not come to the wilderness to be a challenge to Jesus; in his mind, Satan came to guide Jesus into the fulfillment of wonderful promises. In short, Satan came to the wilderness to bless Jesus, not to attack him, and everything Satan suggested to Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus’ flesh wanted. Contrary to how the Temptation is usually depicted, there was no contest, no battle in the wilderness between Jesus and Satan, and neither of them looked at their meeting that way. By God’s design, though completely unknown to Satan, the battle was entirely within Jesus himself. It was the battle Paul described as the flesh desiring what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit desiring what is contrary to the flesh (Gal. 5:17). Paul could just as well have said that what the Spirit desires is contrary to what both human nature and Satan desire.

According to Jesus, all sin comes from the heart(Mk. 7:18–23). James agreed, saying that if anyone goes astray, it is only that he has been drawn away by his own desire (Jas. 1:14). A man can sit in his chair at home and overcome the whole world, or he can sit in his chair and commit every sin that exists. Both righteousness and wickedness are altogether a matter of the heart, and although no one at the time understood him, Jesus declared that new, internal standard for judging right and wrong:

Matthew 5

21. You have heard that it was said to those of ancient time, “You shall not murder,” and, “Whoever commits murder will be liable to the Judgment.”

22a. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause will be liable to the Judgment.

. . . .

27. You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.”

28. But I say to you that every man who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

God’s purpose for His Son was not that he overcome Satan or anything else outside his body, but that he overcome the “world” of his sinful human nature. Nothing outside the Son’s fleshly body was ever a challenge for him. Nor is anything outside our bodies a challenge for us. Paul confirmed this when he said, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood [i.e., other humans], but against the authorities, against the powers, against the dark world rulers of this age, against evil spirits among heavenly beings” (Eph. 6:12). Our enemy is not other people; our enemy is the appeal of unseen spirits to the desires of our flesh, as Satan appealed to Jesus’ fleshly desires in the wilderness. Yet, as with Jesus, if we choose God’s will over our own, we will win the battle against our fleshly nature and overcome the only world that matters. A man who brings himself to submission to the will of God is master of his entire world. Jesus did this first, and he did it in the wilderness by following God’s Spirit instead of his flesh.

In his wilderness trial, the Son of God was “tempted in every way that we are,” and yet, he did not sin (Heb. 4:15). He exited the wilderness as conqueror of the world because he had mastered himself; he had won the battle between his holy nature and the carnal nature of the body in which he now lived. Jesus Christ was the first person ever to engage in this kind of warfare, the warfare of a fleshly body against the Spirit of God within it, and he won the battle by following the Spirit. And having done that, he “returned in the power of the Spirit” to finish his work of redeeming mankind (Lk. 4:14).

Peter told the saints that Christ left them an example, “that you should follow in his footsteps” (1Pet. 2:21). But it can hardly be overemphasized that Jesus is our example because he overcame the world by being led by the Spirit – the same Spirit he made available to us. If Jesus overcame the world because he had access to spiritual power which is not available to us, or if Jesus overcame the world by virtue of who he was rather than by the power of the life God gave him, then he is no example for anybody. If Jesus overcame the world because he is the Father himself (the “Oneness” doctrine) or because he was part of a triune God (Trinitarianism), then he is no example for us. But if he overcame “all that is in the world” by being filled with God’s kind of life and walking in it, then when Jesus made God’s life available to us, he made the same power over sin available to us that he and the Father have. Paul emphasized the very great benefit of living in that strength:

Galatians 5

16. Walk in the Spirit and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

Romans 8

2. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death!

The World That Jesus Conquered, #3: The Desire of the Eyes

The Accuser carried him to a very high mountain

and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory.

To complete the mission on which God had sent him, Satan made an offer to Jesus that appealed powerfully to this component of human nature. He took Jesus to a very high mountain, showed him the spectacular glories of the world’s kingdoms, and then offered it all to him (under Satan, of course). And again, we should ask, where was the evil in offering to make Jesus ruler of the world? Had not the prophets repeatedly proclaimed that God would give the Messiah rule over the nations (Ps. 72:11; Isa. 2:2; Jer. 3:17)?^[88] Later, at one point during Jesus’ ministry, a multitude in Galilee, wanting what Satan wanted for Jesus, decided to take Jesus by force and make him king (Jn. 6:14–15). And even after his resurrection, before Jesus ascended back to his Father, Jesus’ disciples were excited at the prospects of him leading a rebellion against their Roman overlords and restoring Israel’s former earthly glory (Acts 1:6). But God had not sent His Son “to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt. 20:28), and that was what Jesus was determined to do.

The disciples and the multitude would have deemed Satan’s offer to make Jesus king of the world to be an exceptionally good one, fulfilling the promises of God to Israel. They would not have been able to conceive of a reason for Jesus to refuse Satan’s amazing offer. But Jesus did, for he was being led by his Father’s Spirit, and the Spirit was not leading him that way at that time. He understood that anything not done God’s way or in God’s time is sin.

Jesus Won the Battle

When the Son of God overcame all that was in his fleshly nature, he had overcome “all that is in the world”. After the Temptation, when Jesus told his disciples that he had overcome the world (Jn. 16:33b), that was the world he was talking about. Moreover, Jesus warned all seven of the pastors to whom he spoke in Revelation that eternal life will be given only to those who overcome the world as he did (Rev. 2:7, 11, 17, 26–28; 3:5, 12, 21).

Paul called the corrupt nature of our flesh “the old man” (Rom. 6:6; Eph. 4:22), and he warned us that our “old man” cannot please God (Rom. 8:7–8). He exhorted us to “put on the new man, who in God’s likeness is created in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24). Jesus did that in the wilderness; he refused to allow the old man, with his “deceitful desires” (Eph. 4:22), to determine his decisions.

Only the death of our fleshly body will put a permanent end to the warfare between the old man and the new man, for neither the flesh nor the Spirit of God can ever be other than what they are. When Paul said, “I die daily” (1Cor. 15:31), he was referring to denying himself, that is, dying to the will of his “old man” so that he, as a new man in Christ, might do the will of God.

Crucified, But Not Yet Dead

I remember struggling against the flesh when I was young in the Lord, feeling ashamed because it was such a struggle. One day, as I was on my knees praying, with my Bible in a chair in front of me, I opened my Bible and began reading in Galatians, praying as I read. Then I came to this verse: “They who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh, along with its passions and its desires” (Gal. 5:24). In despair, knowing that my flesh’s “passions and desires” were still there, I slumped down in despair and cried, “Then, Jesus, I just don’t belong to you.” But the Lord mercifully let me see the truth of the matter.

What Jesus showed me is that to be crucified does not mean to be dead. Crucifixion will always cause death if allowed to run its course; still, it is not death itself. Jesus was crucified six hours before he died. Crucifixion itself was a relatively quick process, but dying from it took some time, several days in some cases. Pontius Pilate was surprised at how quickly Jesus died after being crucified (Mk. 15:44). In ancient literature, there were even accounts of crucified persons being taken down before they finished dying, and being nurtured back to health.^[89]

Spiritual crucifixion takes place instantaneously when a person receives the Spirit of God. At that moment, one’s human nature is crucified; the death blow has been given, and that “old man” will certainly die if he is not rescued and revived. Our old man will squirm and struggle and do its best to stay alive, and Jesus helped me see that such was the death struggle I was experiencing. My old man had been crucified; he just wasn’t dead yet. It may be that I was unknowingly feeding him while he was on the cross and keeping him alive by continuing in an old habit; I do not know. But that happens a lot. An old preacher once told me, “The problem with many of God’s people is that they don’t kill the old man; they just bring him to prayer meetings and get him beat up. The rest of the time, they work on patching up his wounds.” It is a dangerous thing to drink just enough of the Spirit to make the old man sick.

Those who are established in the Faith obey Paul’s exhortation to stay in the Spirit and let the old man die, every day (1Cor. 15:31; Gal. 2:19–20). Paul taught that it is essential that we do that, for “if you live after the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13).

Jesus’ human nature was crucified when he was baptized with the Spirit as he came up out of the Jordan River, and through the Temptation, his old man died. My father once told me that it took forty years to overcome all that was in the world, that is, for his “old man” to die, but that Jesus did it in forty days. Then, he looked straight at me and said, “It needn’t take you that long. I never had a pastor.” It need not take any of us that long if we are blessed with guidance from wise elders in the Faith. The victory over sin and death is not secured merely by receiving the Spirit; it is secured by walking in the righteousness of God after receiving it. That is why Jesus commanded his followers not only to seek God’s kingdom, but also His righteousness (Mt. 6:33).^[90]

In receiving God’s Spirit and then holding fast to God’s righteousness, Jesus overcame the domination of human nature over his will. And he suffered to make that same strength available to us. What a precious opportunity is ours in Christ, to partake of God’s nature and to overcome the world as Jesus did, that we might walk with God and His Son in their kind of life!

Satan’s Offer to Jesus: The World

If what Jesus was tempted with was not real, or if Jesus did not desire what Satan offered him, then there was no real Temptation. Jesus really wanted to, and could have, turned stones into food; he really wanted to do something that would make Israel acknowledge him as their Messiah; and Jesus really wanted the prophecies about him ruling the earth to come true. The Temptation really was a temptation to Jesus.

An understanding of Satan’s offer to make Jesus the king of the world, and Jesus’ refusal of that extraordinary offer is critical to a right perspective of Jesus’ ministry, suffering, and resurrection, for his victory over that element of the Temptation, especially, set the stage for what followed in his life.

Princes over the Nations

Daniel, living as an exile in Persia, once prayed and sought God three weeks before receiving an answer. When the answer came, it came by the hand of a resplendent heavenly messenger that I assume was an angel. The angel told Daniel that when he had first begun praying, his prayer had been heard, but, he said, a spirit which he identified as “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” had delayed his arrival,^[91] adding that he was able to complete his journey only because the archangel Michael had come to his aid. This is the Bible’s first mention of Michael, and it revealed to Daniel that Michael was “one of the chief princes” among angels. Here is the story:

Daniel 10

2. In those days, I, Daniel, was mourning three full weeks.

3. I ate no delicacies, nor did flesh or wine come into my mouth, nor did I anoint myself at all until three full weeks were completed.

4. And on the twenty-fourth day of the first month, I was on the bank of the great river, that is, the Hiddekel.

5. And I lifted up my eyes and looked, and there was a man wearing linen clothes! And his loins were girded with gold of Uphaz,

6. and his body was like beryl, and his face had the appearance of lightning, and his eyes were like flaming torches, and his arms and his feet were like burnished bronze, and the sound of his words was like the sound of a multitude.^[92]

. . . .

12. Then he said to me, “Do not be afraid, Daniel. For from the first day you set your heart to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard. And I am come because of your words.

13. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me for twenty-one days, but, behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there, beside the kings of Persia.”

We all know that the nations of earth have governments, but the government of nations includes more than meets the eye, for there are invisible powers over them directing their course. No human prince could have delayed a divine messenger from coming to Daniel as did the “prince of the kingdom of Persia”. That prince was a powerful spiritual being who had been set over the Persian Empire by Satan, the god of this world. The spiritual prince over Persia obviously had the authority to refuse admission into his realm, where Daniel was at that time, and he used it in the case of Daniel’s heavenly visitor. Later in that chapter, the angel informed Daniel that he was leaving to do battle again with the prince of Persia, perhaps to fight his way out of that prince’s territory and return to his place. He also informed Daniel that when he was gone, “the prince of Greece” would come (Dan. 10:20b).^[93] And lastly, he revealed to Daniel that Michael was the one appointed to be prince over the Jewish nation (Dan. 10:21).^[94]

Levels of Authority

In the Temptation, Jesus did not dispute Satan’s claim to have the power to appoint over the nations whomever he would because Jesus knew that God had appointed Satan to be god over this world. Jesus referred to Satan three times as ruler of the entire world (Jn. 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). He also said that Satan had angels under him (Mt. 25:41), which are the “authorities, powers, and dark world rulers” mentioned by Paul. Under Satan, archangels over nations would have angels under them ruling over smaller areas, such as regions, states, counties, and towns. Jesus revealed the truth about this invisible government when he said that Satan’s kingdom was organized (Mt. 12:25–26).^[95] So, there are levels of authority throughout creation, among spiritual beings as well as men; even some animal groups are known to have societal order.^[96]

It is by the influence of their spirit that angels direct the course of nations, including its cities (cf. Ezek. 9:1). Influence is a reality in every sphere, and the influence of a spiritual being who has authority over an area of the earth is significant and pervasive in that region. We all know by experience that our behavior can be influenced, either for good or for evil, by the spirits around us, and those spirits may be human or otherwise. The reality of influence moved Solomon to warn his son that “he who walks with wise men will also be wise, but a companion of fools will be destroyed” (Prov. 13:20). It is the same with nations. The character of a ruling angel influences the area of the earth over which he rules.

Michael Stands Alone in Satan’s Realm

At the end of Daniel’s visitation, mentioned above, the angel said, “I will tell you what is inscribed in the writing of truth, and there is not one who holds with me in these things except Michael, your prince” (Dan. 10:21). That none of the spiritual princes were standing for the truth except Michael makes perfect biblical sense. Israel has always stood alone in a world of Gentiles, and so, as the angel told Daniel, Michael stands alone for the truth in a realm of “dark world rulers of this age, evil spirits among heavenly beings” (Eph. 6:12). In Revelation, John saw that at the close of this age, Satan’s spiritual princes will move their nations to unite behind Satan’s greatest servant in history, “the Beast”, in order to destroy Michael’s nation (Rev. 16:13–16; Zech. 14:2). But God will reward Michael for his faithfulness by giving him and his angels a major role in end-time events, acting, as the angel told Daniel, as “the great prince who is appointed over the children of your people” (Dan. 12:1).

We are not told many details concerning the working relationship of Michael and Satan, the god of this world under whom Michael serves. We can say, however, that every other spiritual prince, many of them princes over nations far larger and more powerful than Michael’s tiny Israel, has followed Satan’s lead. But the angel who came to Daniel let him know that Michael, alone among all the world’s spiritual princes, stands firm for Israel and what is true. It seems that along the way, there must have been some situations which caused Satan to be displeased with Michael, and vice-versa, but after God gave Michael a leading role in casting Satan out of heaven, it is certain that Satan came to hate him bitterly:

Revelation 12

7. There was war in heaven, Michael and his angels warring against the Dragon, and the Dragon waging war, and his angels,

8. but the Dragon did not prevail; neither was there place found for him in heaven any longer.

9. And the great Dragon was cast out, the ancient serpent who is called the Accuser, and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

Michael still occupies his position as Israel’s prince, just as Satan, though cast out of heaven, still occupies his position as god of this world (cf. 2Cor. 4:4). The fact that Michael is one of the archangels ruling the nations under Satan need not cause us a theological problem. For Michael to operate within Satan’s realm does not pollute Michael any more than it pollutes God’s children to submit to human rulers, as the apostles exhorted them to do. Peter gave the following exhortation to the saints even though, being God’s sons and daughters, they are superior to the men who rule over them in this world:

1Peter 2

13. Be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to a king, as supreme,

14. or to governors, as those sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good.

. . . .

17. Honor all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.

Paul taught the same thing:

1Timothy 2

1. First of all, I exhort that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all men,

2. for kings and for all who are in authority, that we might lead a tranquil and well-ordered life in all godliness and dignity.

3. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior.

Our Dangerous Liberty

For us who belong to God, “the man, Jesus Christ” is the only mediator between us and God (1Tim. 2:5), not Satan and his angels, or men who rule the nations, for God “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of His beloved Son” (Col. 1:13). But the world does not understand that. So, if we do not submit ourselves to man’s government, then people without God’s life can only see us as rebels; they can think nothing else. We who are “born of God” are born as citizens of a heavenly country and are free to live according to “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:2). We are not bound by any earthly law, but are created in Christ as sons and daughters of God, superior to every creature in heaven and earth, and whatever rules and rites they may demand. Because of Christ, even the angels are our servants (Heb. 1:14). God’s children are free even from the obligation to pay taxes to earthly governments, but, Jesus said, for the sake of others, we should pay them:

Matthew 17

25. When Peter came into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, “Simon, what do you think? From whom do kings of the earth take customs or poll-tax, from their children or from others?”

26. Peter said to him, “From others.” Jesus said to him, “Well, then, the children [of God, the great King] are free.

27. But lest we be a stumbling block to them, go to the sea, cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you’ve opened its mouth, you’ll find a stater.^[97] Take that and give it to them for me and you.”

Therefore, even though God’s children are superior to all earthly law, we are subject to the law of God, who loves mankind and does not want His family to be a stumbling block to sinners. In Christ, we are free to do whatever pleases God, free to obey or disobey any law in this universe, whether laws of man or of nature. Jesus could walk on water because he was free to do so. And because Jesus made them free, Peter could heal the sick, and Paul could be bitten by a venomous serpent and feel no harm. Life in God’s Spirit is an impossible life, but it is not impossible for those whom Christ makes free.

Ours is a dangerous liberty; it can be misused. It is true that Jesus sets us absolutely free (Jn. 8:36), and it is true that we are to “stand fast” in the extraordinary liberty we have in Christ (Gal. 5:1), but our liberty is, above all else, the liberty to live so that others, seeing our lives, will speak well of our heavenly Father (Mt. 5:16). “Everything is lawful for me,” wrote Paul, “but not everything is beneficial” (1Cor. 10:23). If we abuse our liberty and live for ourselves, we may provoke the world, as some have done, to speak evil of God (cf. Rom. 2:24; 2Sam. 12:14). Paul gave this exhortation to the Galatian saints:

Galatians 5

13. You were called to liberty, brothers, only do not use that liberty as a pretext for the flesh; instead, through love, live as slaves to one another.

14. For the entire law is summed up in one statement, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus liberates us from a sinful nature so that we might love people the way God does, “especially those of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10b).

No Authority but of God

Every righteous man and woman in history has submitted to the earthly authorities over them. Daniel and his three friends refused to obey Nebuchadnezzar only on rare occasions, when the king’s command contradicted God’s. They always obeyed the “higher power”, holding fast to God as highest of all. The few times they did not obey the king make for wonderful Bible stories, but Daniel and his friends did not live as rebels; they willingly bowed before the king and almost always obeyed his commands. Even Jesus acknowledged and submitted to wicked Pilate’s authority over him on this earth:

John 19

9. [Pilate] went again into the Praetorium and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus did not give him an answer.

10. Therefore, Pilate said to him, “You do not speak to me? Do you not understand that I have authority to crucify you, and I have authority to release you?”

11a. Jesus answered, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it was given to you from above.”

While on earth, Jesus, the “King of kings and Lord of lords”, submitted to earthly authorities such as Pilate because God had sent him to earth to live as a human and be an example for us. Jesus understood that all earthly authorities were under Satan, whom God had appointed to be god of this world. Paul was adamant that believers follow Jesus’ example and submit to earthly rulers, and he warned them that rebellion against those authorities could cost them their souls:

Romans 13

1. Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there is no authority but of God; the authorities that exist are ordained by God.

2. Therefore, he who opposes the authority is resisting the ordinance of God, and they who resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

. . . .

4. For he is the minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is a minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon the one who does evil.

5. Wherefore, it is necessary to be subject, not just because of fear of wrath, but also for conscience sake.

It is important that we take to heart what Paul said about earthly authorities:

• Earth’s rulers (both visible and invisible) are higher than God’s people as far as earthly authority is concerned.

• Earth’s authorities are ordained by God.

• Whoever opposes earthly authorities opposes God, and will be damned.

• Earthly authorities are God’s ministers for the good of His people, ordained to execute His wrath on evildoers.

• One cannot have a clear conscience without submitting to earthly authorities.

Being a ruler of this earth does not make one holy, nor does it mean that a ruler belongs to God in the sense of belonging to His family. But it does mean that he is God’s servant, even if he does not believe in God, for no ruling power exists except that which God has raised up. The fact that earthly rulers are sometimes very wicked does not at all negate the fact that God has ordained them to be rulers. This is seen in God’s statement to Pharaoh, the wicked ruler of Egypt: “I have raised you up, to make you see my power, and so that my name is proclaimed in all the earth” (Ex. 9:16).

So then, as long as we are in this world, and as long as Satan is the god of it, we are to submit to his legitimate authority. Satan and the world rulers under him are in their place because God put them there, and rebellion against God’s order is sin. Paul plainly warned us that “for conscience sake”, we must submit to the authorities who rule the earth because our God has ordained them to be in those positions. It is impossible to have fellowship with God and Christ if we do not acknowledge Satan’s God-given authority and submit to it, as long as Satan’s rulers do not demand that we disobey God. For example, Peter commanded the saints to “be subject to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to a king, as supreme, or to governors, as those sent by him . . . for such is the will of God” (1Pet. 2:13–15, excerpts). However, when the Sanhedrin commanded Peter never to preach again in Jesus’ name, Peter humbly and boldly replied, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:27–29; cf. 4:18–19). And as an example to us, when the Sanhedrin condemned and beat Peter, he submitted to their abuse without complaint and even rejoiced that he was counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus (Acts 5:40–42).

Under the law of Moses, the leaders of Israel exercised secular as well as religious authority (e.g., Ex. 21:5–6, 15–17). Jesus himself acknowledged their authority, just as he did Satan’s, and he told his disciples to obey them on everything (Mt. 23:1–3), which they did, as far as the Spirit would allow them to.

To make this perfectly clear, we will add a few explanatory words to the previous scriptures from Romans:

Romans 13

1. Let every soul [on earth] be subject to the higher authorities [including the ones who are under Satan], for there is no authority but of God; the authorities that exist are ordained by God.

2. Therefore, he who opposes the [earthly] authority [of Satan] is resisting the ordinance of God, and they who resist will receive to themselves damnation.

. . . .

4. For he [the ruler appointed by Satan] is the minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is a minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon the one who does evil.

5. Wherefore, it is necessary to be subject [to Satan’s worldly authorities], not just because of fear of wrath, but also for conscience sake.

According to Paul, then, when it comes to earthly governors, rebellion against them is rebellion against Satan, and rebellion against Satan’s governors is rebellion against God! Peter agreed, saying that one of the ungodly qualities of foolish believers is that they “despise government” and “do not tremble when speaking evil of authorities” (2Pet. 2:10). Paul exhorted us to pray for all earthly authorities (1Tim. 2:1–2) because he knew they were ordained of God.

It is instructive to consider the archangel Michael’s position. He knows that God has ordained Satan to be the god of this world, having under him angels, the spiritual princes of the nations, and he knows that God has not changed that order. Therefore, Michael still conducts his business for Israel under Satan’s authority. Likewise, believers conduct their business under the authorities God has established over the earth, obedient to them in all things up to the point that their commands contradict the expressed will of God, of course.

Satan’s Business

Saints in this covenant are not to meddle in Satan’s business, for he is God’s business. We are not to “entangle” ourselves in earthly social, political, or military affairs. All such matters are in Satan’s hands, and they were put there by God. Neither Jesus nor the apostles gave instructions to New Testament saints on how to exercise earthly power because the body of Christ is not an earthly nation, as Israel was. God’s Old Testament people had an earthly nation with earthly ambassadors, an earthly army, and an earthly judicial system to manage earthly affairs. In this covenant, however, prudent believers follow Paul’s counsel to young Timothy:

2Timothy 2

3. Patiently endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

4. No one who goes to war entangles himself in the affairs of this life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.

Wise believers’ refusal to entangle themselves in social movements or to become embroiled in political and military disputes is a major reason they are misunderstood and persecuted. Nevertheless, they will not do so because they understand that all such activity is carnal; it is “in the flesh”, and it belongs not to the kingdom of God but to the kingdoms of this world. “The weapons of our warfare”, said Paul, “are not fleshly. . . . For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh” (2Cor. 10:4, 3).

The World That Jesus Has Yet to Conquer

The world that Jesus conquered when he came the first time was the world within himself, the world of his human nature. When he returns the second time, the world that he will conquer is the world outside himself, the world that humans see, and those who in this life also conquer the world of human nature will reign with Jesus over this earth for a thousand years (Rev. 20:4).

The world does not recognize God’s children as the “kings and priests” they are (Rev. 5:10), but when Jesus returns to reign over this world, they will be manifest, for they will reign over the world with him. I suppose that men like Paul, Daniel, and Job will be given king-like authority over large portions of the earth, for the saints will be given authority, each according to his ability (Lk. 19:12–26). Moreover, they will not only judge the world; they will also judge angels (1Cor. 6:2–3)! May God grant us the grace to grow in the knowledge of God so that He will find us worthy to reign with Christ when that day comes!

After the thousand-year reign, God will destroy this heaven and this earth (Isa. 65:17; Rev. 21:1) and provide for His children “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2Pet. 3:13). On that happy new earth, God will still ordain authorities, but it will be a government of saints reigning over other saints (Rev. 21:24), just as some saints rule over others now in the body of Christ (Heb. 13:7, 17, 24).

But for now, let’s return to the Temptation.

Satan’s Big Chance

Satan offered Jesus his position as god of this world, but that offer would have been made only by the will of God. Satan would never have done such a thing on his own. But what would Satan have thought God’s purpose was for having him do that? To him, the only reasonable explanation would have been that the time had at last come when God would promote him to the position he had for so long desired:

Isaiah 14

13. You have said in your heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God [heavenly beings], and I will sit on the Mountain of Assembly, on the far north side.

14. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High.”

What other reason could there be, Satan must have thought, for God to send him to offer Jesus his position as god of this world, except that Jesus, the Messiah, was to fill a position that would soon be vacant? With that in mind, it appears that rather than coming into the wilderness to attack Jesus, Satan came to elevate Jesus to fill Satan’s exalted position as god of this world. Satan would have been pleased to do that if Jesus’ promotion meant an even greater promotion for him. He would have been happy for God to exalt Jesus to take his place, so long as God promoted him to reign with Him over all creation. From that perspective, we can see that Satan was not antagonistic toward Jesus during the Temptation, for he was, as has been mentioned, completely unaware that God was using him for the blessing of His Son.

Blind to the Father’s purpose, how proud Satan must have been to be playing a role in fulfilling the prophecies about the Messiah! How eager he must have been to see Jesus use his power to turn stones into bread, and to leap to what men would think was certain death, only to be miraculously rescued! Satan must have been very excited to show Jesus the kingdoms of earth that he was about to turn over to him. And, oh, the anticipation Satan must have felt as the moment drew near for Jesus to signify his acceptance of the position by kneeling before his new master! Satan had worked and waited a long time for this moment, and now, at last (he thought), the Dispensation of Satan was at hand!

Both God and Satan were eager to set in motion the events that were about to transpire, but for very different reasons: God, because He was about to reveal His beloved Son and bestow upon him the greatest glory, and Satan, because of the great glory he thought God was about to bestow upon him.

Satan was thrilled. God was patient.

The Act of Bowing

Lest too much be read into Satan’s suggestion that Jesus bow to him, we should note that biblical examples abound of both righteous and unrighteous people bowing before beings other than God. Bowing as a sign of submission to authorities was a common cultural practice, acceptable to both God and men. So, the act of bowing before someone other than God was not necessarily sinful. On the contrary, in many cases it was sinful not to bow.^[98]

It must also be remembered that Satan came to the wilderness as God’s representative, not as a sneaky rebel. Everyone involved in the Temptation – God, Jesus, and Satan – knew that in suggesting that Jesus bow to him, Satan was not expecting Jesus to bow to him instead of God but to bow to him under God as an acknowledgment of Satan’s new position as co-regent with God. Satan would have thought that the Messiah’s stepping into the role of god of this world was the only thing lacking in God’s plan to elevate Satan to reign with Him in glory, to reign directly under God in the universal chain of command, for if Jesus bowed, it meant that he accepted the new position and acknowledged Satan as the higher authority. What God had in mind was different, but He was saying nothing. He was patient.

Old Testament Figures of the Son

Paul said the ancient Scriptures were “written for our learning” (Rom. 15:4) and that the Old Testament provided shadows of New Testament realities (Col. 2:16–17). One Old Testament shadow of Jesus’ refusal to bow to Satan is found in the book of Esther. Esther’s cousin and guardian, Mordecai, refused to bow before Haman, who was second to the Persian king, Ahasuerus (Esth. 3:1–5). Mordecai’s reason for refusing to bow to Haman is not given in the book of Esther, but it was a good one. He refused to bow to Haman because he knew what the Scriptures said God thought about Haman, and since Mordecai believed what the Scriptures said, Mordecai knew Haman better than Haman knew himself. Haman was an Amalekite – in the book of Esther, called an Agagite^[99] – and the Scriptures said that God hated the Amalekites and swore that He would fight against them in every generation until He eradicated them from the earth (Ex. 17:14–16).^[100] But it so provoked Haman that Mordecai would not bow to him that he determined not just to kill Mordecai, but to rid the earth of Mordecai’s whole race, the Jews:

Esther 3

5. When Haman saw that Mordecai was not bowing or doing him obeisance, Haman was filled with wrath.

6. But it was not enough in his eyes to lay hands on Mordecai alone (for they had denounced Mordecai’s people to him), and Haman set about to exterminate all the Jews, Mordecai’s people, throughout the whole kingdom.

For lowly Mordecai, living as a captive in far away Persia, it required great faith to believe God’s thousand-year-old promise that He would make perpetual war against the Amalekites. Yet, Mordecai had that kind of faith, and out of his faith sprang a righteous disdain for Haman which made Mordecai unwilling to bow to that very powerful, very wicked man.

The reason for the meek Son of God’s refusal to bow before Satan is not given in the Bible, but it is basically the same reason Mordecai refused to bow before Haman, that is, the Son knew what God thought about Satan. The Son, like Mordecai, was far from his homeland, yet, also like Mordecai, he had great faith in God. On the other hand, Satan, like Haman, was provoked by Jesus’ refusal to bow to him, and he, like Haman, determined to exterminate all the Jews, not just Jesus. And so it is to this day (cf. Rev. 12:15–17).

It was not a rebellious spirit that kept Jesus from bowing to Satan. Twice during the Temptation, the Son of God humbled himself to allow Satan to transport him out of the wilderness to other places, just as he would later humbly allow wicked men to abuse and crucify him. Every moment, in every situation, the Son’s attention was fully given to doing his Father’s will. Jesus refused to bow before Satan for the same reason he allowed Satan to carry him places; it pleased God for him to do it.

The response of Jesus to Satan in the Temptation was also foreshadowed by the faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who bowed before King Nebuchadnezzar in recognition of his God-given authority, but then refused to obey his command to bow to an idol that Nebuchadnezzar had erected (Dan. 3). Both in bowing to Nebuchadnezzar and in refusing to bow to the idol, those three young men were doing the will of God.

God used many righteous people in the Old Testament as figures of His Son, without any of them truly knowing Him. But Jesus knew God; therefore, he obeyed the powers that God had ordained over the earth. Satan, Pilate, and Israel’s priests and elders had authority from God, and Jesus submitted to them all. Still, they would have been the ones bowing, had they known who Jesus was.

When Did the Son Know?

Everything the Son is, the Father was first. Everything he knows, the Father knew first. The Son freely admitted that he could do nothing without the Father (Jn. 5:19), and the concomitant to that is that the Son can know nothing without the Father. Everything the Son taught to men was first taught to him by God (Jn. 8:28; 12:49). Even before the Son came to earth, he confessed as much through the prophet: “My Lord, Jehovah, has given me the tongue of the learned, that I might know how to help the weary with a word” (Isa. 50:4a).

The Father’s education of His Son continued after the Son came to earth; Jesus said so: “The Father delights in the Son, and He is showing him everything He is doing” (Jn. 5:20). The author of Hebrews agreed that the Son was still learning while he was among us (Heb. 5:8), and of course, it would have been the One greater than the Son, the only One greater than the Son, who was teaching him.

The Son truly knew God, and that was true the entire time he walked among us. But we have seen that the Father conceals and reveals all truth and that until He reveals a thing, it is unknown to everyone. So, when did the Father reveal to the Son that the once-upright Satan had become wicked? We know that the Son created Satan (Jn. 1:3; Col. 1:16) and that when he created Satan, he created him perfectly upright (Ezek. 28:15). But did the Father, the Son’s sole source of knowledge, let the Son know about the change in Satan’s heart when it first happened, or at some other point before, or even later, after He sent him down to earth? And could there have been a real temptation if the Son knew that Satan was wicked when he met with him in the wilderness? Or would the Son have cried out through David for Satan to avenge him of Judas (Ps. 109:6) if the Son had known in David’s time that Satan was wicked and would one day inspire Judas to betray him (Lk. 22:3–4)?

Admittedly, it is difficult to imagine the Son of God not knowing that Satan was wicked before he came to earth, but if the story of the Father and the Son teaches us anything, it teaches us that our assumptions are often clouded by wrong ideas and that no one in heaven or earth, including God’s Son, knows anything until God reveals it.

It could certainly be that the Father revealed to the Son that Satan was wicked before He sent the Son to earth, and if He did, then in the Temptation, Jesus was following his Father’s example of not letting Satan know how He saw him.^[101] Be that as it may, it is obvious from the preaching Jesus did after the Temptation that by then, at least, he knew very well how wicked Satan was. Perhaps the Father revealed it to him during the Temptation itself, when Satan asked Jesus to bow before him, for the Son would have known that no messenger sent from God had ever asked those to whom he was sent to fall down and worship him.

Men had fallen down, of course, when angels visited them (Num. 22:31; Josh. 5:14; Judg. 13:20). Ezekiel became so weak that he fell and could not stand back up, even when God told him to (Ezek. 1:28–2:2), and Daniel passed out completely when Gabriel started talking to him (Dan. 8:16–18). In none of these cases, however, did the angel ask men to bow. Those men fell down because they were overcome by the angels’ powerful presence. Even Balaam’s donkey fell down when he saw an angel from Jehovah (Num. 22:27).

By way of contrast, the Son of God felt no awe in Satan’s imposing presence. Terror would have seized any normal human being, but the Son of God, though in a human body, was more than a normal human. Jesus quoted scriptures when refusing two of Satan’s suggestions. However, when Satan asked him to bow down and worship him in addition to the Father, Jesus shot back a barbed, non-scriptural arrow from the quiver of the Spirit: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Lk. 4:8). Satan must have marveled at the sternness in the voice of Mary’s son. As far as we know, no human had ever spoken to Satan at all, but even if someone had spoken to him, it was not like that.

Satan knew the Scriptures well, and knowing that mankind had been created lower than heavenly beings (Ps. 8:5), he saw his offer to Mary’s son to be made king over the whole earth as very generous, even if Jesus was the Messiah. But the Son of God was not created lower than heavenly beings; he created the heavenly beings, including Satan. The Son was hidden now within a fleshly body instead of where he had been hidden before, but he was still the Son of God, and Satan still had no power over him whatsoever.

The Report

Immediately after the Temptation, Satan departed from Jesus “for a season” (Lk. 4:13). When he left Jesus, he no doubt returned to heaven as he had returned to heaven after being sent to earth on other missions, and when he returned from the wilderness to report to God, he must have felt the way the officers of the chief priests felt after they returned from their failed assignment to arrest Jesus. When the priests who sent those officers asked why they had returned empty-handed, the embarrassed officers could only respond, “Never has a man spoken like this man” (Jn. 7:46). Satan may have even reported to God, “This Messiah is more hardheaded than Job!” We can only imagine what the conversation in heaven was like. Supremely confident of God’s favor, Satan would have had no reason to hide his displeasure at Jesus not bowing to him. God, as usual, would have kept His thoughts to Himself, and Satan, as usual, would have assumed that God felt as he did. Perhaps Satan’s report before the heavenly council contained the statement, “Jesus did not bow to me!” God’s secret thought would have been, You did not bow to my Son!

But God was patient.

God and Satan Agree That Jesus Must Die

In the story of Esther, the Persian king asked wicked Haman, “What shall be done for the man whom the King delights to honor?” (Esth. 6:6). Haman, assuming that he was the one in whom the king delighted, suggested several rare honors, which the king gladly and quickly bestowed – upon Mordecai, whom Haman hated because Mordecai refused to bow to him! On occasion, as we saw in Chapter 6, God would put forth a question to His heavenly council, and it is easy to imagine God asking Satan, “What should be done to him who refuses to bow before the one I have chosen to reign with me?” Stern creature that he is, and assuming that he was the chosen one, Satan might have suggested great suffering for that person and an eternal death of relentless, excruciating pain. If he did, God would have agreed to it, which would have filled Satan with greater pride than ever, not knowing that God had determined before the world began that all who refused to bow to His Son would be eternally damned in a “Lake of Fire” (Rev. 20:10, 14–15).

In whatever way Satan’s report played out, at its end, all of heaven knew that God’s will was for Jesus to die. If anything, God would have been more insistent than Satan that Jesus must die, and afterward, Satan would have congratulated himself that, once again, his thoughts and God’s were alike. Was there anyone else in all of creation so much like God as he? Anyone so worthy to sit at God’s right hand? Since God had never explained what He had really done to Job, Satan still thought God had proved him right about Job. And in spite of the contrary evidence, it was still widely held that God would not afflict the righteous. John the Baptizer, for example, as great a man of God as he was, did not expect the cruel abuse he suffered, and even he began to doubt that Jesus was the Messiah as he languished in prison (Mt. 11:2–3).

When God sent Satan back to earth to make sure Jesus died, Satan left heaven knowing that it would please God for him to carry out the mission of killing the Messiah. God had, of course, planned from the beginning for His Son to die (Acts 4:27–28), but no one even knew that He had a Son, much less that God would send him to earth to suffer and die for sinners.

Romans 11

33. Oh, the depth of the riches of both the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgements, and inscrutable His ways!

The prophets had spoken mysteriously about a righteous man who would suffer and die, and after God agreed that Jesus must die, Satan probably realized that those ancient prophecies were about Jesus. But he would have seen that truth through the prism of his own delusion, and he would have admired God again for having seen, centuries ahead of time, that the Messiah would have to die. Moreover, when God made it known to the heavenly council that the Messiah must die, it would have seemed obvious to them that God did not love Jesus as much as He had loved Job. After all, God strictly commanded Satan not to kill Job.

God had it all under control. The Son’s death was not Satan’s plan; Satan would never have smitten God’s Messiah on his own initiative, for he was still entertaining hopes of being exalted to God’s right hand. And God putting Satan in charge of killing the Messiah would have been seen by the sons of God in heaven as more evidence of the high regard in which the Almighty held that anointed cherub. It certainly would not have indicated to anyone that Satan was evil.

Section 3: The Son’s Ministry

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with holy Spirit and power,

who went about doing good and healing all who were

oppressed by the Accuser, for God was with him.

Acts 10:38

Accomplices

After reporting to God about Jesus’ negative response to him in the wilderness, Satan returned to earth and found among God’s people many willing accomplices for his new mission from God to kill Jesus. Satan knew that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, and although those accomplices did not believe it,^[102] Satan cunningly used them to achieve his purpose. Here are a few examples of what Satan found when he returned to Israel:

• People in Jesus’ hometown attempted to kill him the first time he spoke in their synagogue after the Temptation (Lk. 4:16–30).

• Jesus’ brothers did not believe in him (Jn. 7:5).

• Jesus’ relatives, including Mary, thought he was insane (Mk. 3:21, 31).

• People considered Jesus to be demon possessed (Jn. 10:20).

• People considered Jesus to be cursed by God (Isa. 53:4).

Men in high position repeatedly schemed to kill Jesus (Mt. 26:3–4; Mk. 3:6; Lk. 22:2; Jn. 19:7), but they could not do so until the pre-determined hour (cf. Jn. 7:30). The Spirit of God even moved Israel’s high priest, who hated Jesus, to prophesy of the necessity of Jesus’ death:

John 11

47. The chief priests and Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we to do? This man is working many miracles.

48. If we allow him to go on like this, everyone will believe on him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”

49. Then one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest at that time, said to them, “You know nothing at all;

50. neither do you understand that it is better for us that one man should die for the people, and the whole nation not perish.”

51. Now, this he did not say of himself, but being high priest at that time, he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation.

Though the Sanhedrin thought the Spirit had decreed that Jesus must die in order to save Israel from the wrath of the Romans, God was actually decreeing through Caiaphas that Jesus had to die in order to save Israel, and all mankind, from the wrath of God.

Satan’s accomplices in his mission to kill Jesus almost never included social outcasts such as harlots and drunkards. Common folk and social outcasts gladly heard Jesus (Mt. 11:19; Mk. 12:37); they didn’t want to hurt him. Satan’s most useful tools in his deadly mission were high-ranking, deeply religious men who studied the Bible and were proud of how well they kept the commandments. That is how hopeless the human condition is. The best that even the best of us do is contrary to the will of God, and the best that the best of us are, is wrong. David was moved by the Spirit to say so: “Every man, in his best state,” he said, “is altogether vanity” (Ps. 39:5b). When Paul learned that truth about himself, he made this confession: “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing” (Rom. 7:18a).

In Chapter 2, Section 3, referring to the multitude that wanted to force Jesus to be their king, I made this statement: “If Jesus had yielded to those who wanted to make him king, or if he had accepted Peter’s offer to rescue him from the cross, all mankind would have perished.” The same may be said of Satan’s offer to Jesus in the Temptation. If Jesus had accepted that offer and settled for earthly power and glory – the same glory that those who loved Jesus wanted for him – he would never have become a sacrifice for our sins, and we all would have perished. If Jesus had gone along with the will of Satan and those who loved Jesus, that would have done as much damage as Satan and those who hated Jesus would have done, had they been able to kill Jesus and keep him dead.

On the last night of Jesus’ life on earth, even the most devoted of Jesus’ disciples were overcome by fear of being arrested with him, and “they all forsook him and fled” (Mk. 14:50). At that point, when Jesus’ closest friends had forsaken him, it must have appeared to Satan that everybody now was ready. And Satan was right. The appointed hour had come; it was time for the Messiah to die.

Suspicions Confirmed

Over the course of Jesus’ ministry, in Satan’s view, and in the view of the men Jesus called Satan’s sons, Jesus had given ample reason to conclude that he deserved death. Hearing Jesus preach after he left the wilderness, it must have sounded to Satan as if Jesus turned down the office of god of the world because he coveted a higher office – the office which Satan expected to receive! But that was only one of the reasons Satan came to hate the Messiah he had tried to promote.

To begin with, Jesus openly condemned Satan as evil, accusing him of being a murderer and the father of lies (Jn. 8:44). That was new. Such criticisms had never been leveled against Satan, and he would have scorned those accusations as base slander. What else could he have thought? God had never said such nasty things about him, nor had anyone else. Why, then, would this Messiah do so? Who did he think he was?

Jesus also said these new things about Satan, provoking him all the more:

• Satan stole the word of God out of people’s hearts (Mk. 4:15).

• Satan was Beelzebub, the ruler over evil spirits (Mt. 12:24–26).^[103]

• There was an everlasting fire waiting for Satan and his angels (Mt. 25:41).

• Jesus had seen (in a vision) Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Lk. 10:18).

“Preposterous!” Satan must have thought, “This Messiah thinks he is the only one right! He acts as if all wisdom and knowledge is hidden in him!” Satan didn’t know how true those thoughts were.

Everything Jesus said was true, but at the time, only he knew it. God, whom Satan had been serving for thousands of years, had always seemed to approve of Satan, for Satan had always carried out God’s commands exactly as he received them. As for the humans who disobeyed God, Satan despised them and vigorously prosecuted them in heaven’s court. And if Satan knew that God had created, as Jesus said, an everlasting fire for the wicked, he did not imagine that it was created for him and his angels. That knowledge was hidden in the Son, and now, for the first time in history, the mind of God was being revealed. However, not believing that it was God’s mind that was being revealed, Satan and wicked men hated Jesus’ teachings, and they thought that God would be served by their killing him.^[104] Later, Jesus warned his disciples that men would treat them the same way they treated him:

John 16

2. They will put you out of the synagogues. In fact, the hour is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.

Matthew 10

25b. If men have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more those of his household?

A Shadow

King Saul’s suspicion that innocent David coveted his throne provides an Old Testament shadow of Satan’s suspicion that Jesus coveted the throne that Satan expected to be given:

1Samuel 18

6. When David returned from slaying the Philistines, the women joyfully came out from all the cities of Israel to meet King Saul with timbrels and three-stringed instruments, singing and dancing as they were coming.

7. And the women answered one another as they played and said, “Saul has slain his thousands, but David, his ten thousands!”

8. Then Saul became very angry, for this saying was evil in his eyes. And he said, “They ascribed ten thousands to David, but to me, they ascribed thousands! And only the kingdom remains for him.”

9. And so it was that Saul eyed David from that day onward.

Before this, Saul had loved David and was happy to promote him to high office, but afterward, he hated David and attempted to kill him several times (1Sam. 18:10–11; 19:9–10). So it was with Satan and Jesus. At their first meeting, Satan was eager to promote Jesus to be king of the world (because of what he thought it would mean for himself), but when Jesus refused that offer and began to preach, Satan must have begun to think something like King Saul thought about David: “I offered him the whole world and he turned it down. What more could he want but to sit on my throne at God’s right hand?” So, after Jesus turned down Satan’s offer to be god of this world and began saying bad things about him, Satan eyed Jesus with the same malicious suspicion that King Saul felt toward David, and Jesus’ preaching continually added fuel to the fire.

Ambition or Humility?

The Classical world, including those in Israel who had been influenced by that world, considered it honorable for a man to seek glory and to aspire to high position.^[105] Satan thought that way, too. Life without self-aggrandizement made no sense in the Classical world or to Satan, and so, Satan could not have seen Jesus’ refusal of the honor of being god of this world as an act of humility. On the contrary, Satan could only have deduced from that refusal that Jesus wanted even greater glory. Of course, it would have seemed absurd to Satan that a human, even if he was the Messiah, would hope to sit at the right hand of Almighty God, but assuming that was Jesus’ objective, Satan would have held Jesus in great contempt, not because he saw Jesus as a threat, but because he saw him as mad with pride and wicked ambition, and unappreciative of the very great honor he and God had offered him.

Israel’s leaders hated Jesus for much the same reason. They, like Satan, thought Jesus was in competition with them for their position (cf. Jn. 12:19). But even Pontius Pilate saw that Jesus was innocent and that Israel’s elders wanted him crucified because they envied the people’s high regard for him (Mt. 27:18).

Jesus was completely innocent of ungodly ambition, of course. Unlike Satan, who coveted glory, the Son of God “divested himself ” of his heavenly glory to come to earth and suffer (Phip. 2:7). Satan had no knowledge of that kind of humility, nor did he understand that when Jesus spoke of his future glory, his words came from a humble, thankful heart.

More Provocative Statements

It was not just what Jesus said about Satan that provoked him; Jesus made a number of provocative statements about himself. According to Jesus,

• No one could come to the Father but by him (Jn. 14:6).

• All authority in heaven and on earth was given to him (Mt. 28:18).^[106]

• He and God were in perfect accord (Jn. 10:30; 17:22).

From the beginning of the world, certain men (and angels) had been moved by the Spirit of God to declare truth, but Jesus was the first person in history who spoke the truth about God and understood what he was saying. What a wonderful feeling it must have been for the Son, after being hidden for so long, to be permitted to declare the truth about himself and the Father he loved so much! How liberated he must have felt as he made the way for us to escape our spiritual darkness! And yet, regardless of how plainly the Son spoke the truth, as long as he lived within a human body, he could not liberate anyone from that darkness. He first had to offer that slain body to God as a sacrifice for our sin. Those who followed Jesus believed in him as much as they could, but without God’s kind of life, they could not understand him. Until the Spirit came, the only hope Jesus’ followers had was to keep trusting that whatever he said was true. Some did that; many did not.

When Jesus and Satan Agreed

As has been suggested, there was some common ground between Jesus and Satan. They agreed that there was but one God and that He was omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, and good (they would not have agreed on what “good” meant). They also agreed that mankind was pathetically weak and ignorant. As we have seen, Jesus trusted no human confessions of faith (Jn. 2:23–25), not even those of his own disciples (Jn. 6:69–70; 16:29–32), and he told his disciples that without help from God, there was nothing man could do to escape damnation (Mk. 10:26–27). Satan’s utter contempt for even the best of men was shown in his low opinion of the “perfect and upright” Job. The great difference between Jesus and Satan in regards to human beings was that Jesus loved them as he knew God did, while Satan held them in contempt as he thought God did.

Jesus and Satan also agreed that Satan was the god of this world. They also agreed that through Israel, the Messiah would come who should rule over the nations and that Jesus was that Messiah. The priests and elders were angered when Jesus made that confession (Mk. 14:61–64), but Satan was not; he knew better. He just wanted Jesus to be satisfied with his part and not to covet the position that Satan thought was his. It must have puzzled Satan when Jesus said that one day he would sit on a throne judging the nations (Mt. 25:31–32), since that is what Satan had offered him in the wilderness! And though it provoked some of Israel’s leaders for Jesus to say so, Satan would have agreed with Jesus that, as God’s Messiah, he was greater than anything or anyone who had come before him, including the temple (Mt. 12:6), the Sabbath (Lk. 6:5), the prophets (e.g., Mt. 12:41), Solomon (Mt. 12:42), and even Abraham (Jn. 8:53–58).

Jesus and Satan also agreed that Moses’ law was holy and must be observed, and Satan probably agreed with Jesus’ refusal to honor the “tradition of the elders” as highly as he honored the law (cf. Mt. 15:1–6). They also agreed that the Scriptures were true and that they prophesied of Jesus. Jesus did not dispute it when, during the Temptation, Satan said that Psalm 91:11–12 was a prophecy about Jesus; however, Jesus responded by quoting another scripture which was more in line with God’s will for him at that moment (Mt. 4:7; cf. Dt. 6:16).

There were issues concerning which it cannot be said with certainty that Satan and Jesus agreed, but one in particular should be mentioned. When Jesus claimed authority to forgive sins, it infuriated Satan’s sons who were there (Mk. 2:5–7); however, Satan may have agreed with Jesus about that, for he, unlike his sons, knew that Jesus was the Messiah and that, as the Messiah, Jesus possessed God-like authority and power.

Light-bringer

After Satan’s disappointing encounter with Jesus in the wilderness, and especially after hearing some of Jesus’ preaching, Satan would have seen Jesus as the “Light-bringer” of whom Isaiah prophesied:

Isaiah 14

12. Oh, how you have fallen from heaven, O Light-bringer, son of the dawn! How you are cut down to the earth, O weakener of the nations!

13. You have said in your heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the Mountain of Assembly, on the far north side.

14. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High.”

15. Oh, but you shall be brought down to Sheol, to the recesses of the Pit.

Try to imagine how Satan must have read the preceding scriptures after Jesus began declaring that he was the bringer of light to mankind:

John 8

12. Jesus again spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”

From the tone of Isaiah’s prophecy, it was clear that the boast of “Light-bringer” displeased God, and Satan would have been eager to destroy this human from Nazareth who repeatedly claimed to be the bringer of light and who openly aspired to reign with God. Satan knew the Scriptures well, and he remembered God’s condemnation of false teachers who ignited sparks of zeal in others and then basked in the light of their fiery followers:

Isaiah 50

11. All of you who kindle a fire [devise a doctrine], surrounding yourselves with sparks [disciples]! Walk by the flame of your fire and with the sparks that you ignite! But this you will have from my hand: you will lie down in a place of torment.

In Satan’s eyes, this prophecy fit Jesus perfectly, for Jesus not only said that he was the light of the world, but he also told his followers that they were lights in the world (Mt. 5:14). So, those who followed Jesus were, in Satan’s eyes, sparks ignited by the Light-bringer and condemned by God, and Satan would have felt honored to be the one to put Jesus down and extinguish the sparks who followed him. But as the time for his death drew near, Jesus encouraged those sparks of his to continue in the light they had been given.

John 12

35. The light is with you just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you, for he who walks in darkness doesn’t know where he’s going.

36. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may be sons of light.

Satan heard these statements, and he judged Jesus’ heart to be black as night, but that is only because the Son of God was a mirror, exposing the heart of everyone around him. How anyone judged Jesus was a reflection of who he himself was. Jesus truly was bringing God’s light to mankind, and after John received that light, he rejoiced that God had sent His Son to bring it, though it was misunderstood:

John 1

4. In him was life, and the life was the light of men,

5. and the light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

The light which the Son of God brought was the life that the Father had given him (Jn. 5:26), and which the Father also gave John, and which He still gives to all who obey Him, as Peter told the judges of Israel after he had received it:

Acts 5

30. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you killed, hanging him on a tree.

31. This man God has exalted to His right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.

32. And we are his witnesses of these things, and so is the holy Spirit, which God has given to those who obey Him.

Satan, Not Jesus

The wicked Light-bringer of Isaiah’s prophecy was Satan, not Jesus,^[107] for Satan considers himself to be a bringer of light (2Cor. 11:14). But his kind of light is a delusion; it is darkness that calls itself light. Satan is so cursed by God that he believes that the darkness within him is light. Satan’s kind of light persuades men to believe that God thinks things He does not think, that they are who they are not, and that God will someday give them what He never will give them. Satan and his sons are the ones who will “lie down in a place of torment”, not Jesus and those who love him.

Satan’s “knowledge” is no knowledge at all. It is worse than ignorance, for those who are confident in a lie do not hunger for truth. Satan’s knowledge is the kind of light spread by his sons, persuading those who do not know God that they know Him, and carrying those poor souls farther from God while assuring them that they are drawing closer to Him. In his day, Jesus condemned Satan’s sons for doing that: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You compass land and sea to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twice as much a son of Gehenna^[108] than yourselves! You snakes! You offspring of vipers! How can you escape the damnation of Gehenna‽” (Mt. 23:15, 33).

Ministers ordained by men instead of God are the “blind who lead the blind” (Mt. 15:14; Lk. 6:39), and they all live together in a pit they call a mountain. They believe that God is the kind of God that He is not, and they look forward to being rewarded with eternal life for their religious activities. The prophet Amos warned such ministers: “Woe to you who desire the day of Jehovah! Why should you want the day of Jehovah? It will be darkness and not light” (Amos 5:18).

Paul gave this description of Isaiah’s Light-bringer and his sons:

2Corinthians 11

13. Such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ.

14. And no wonder, for Satan disguises himself as a messenger of light.

15. So, it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves to be like ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their works.

Ministers who think they represent Christ and who speak on his behalf without being anointed by God to do so are the Light-bringer’s sparks, and the light they bring is the worst kind of darkness (Mt. 6:23).

Wrong About Everything

Everything that is true about Satan, who he really is and where he will spend eternity, is based on his relationship with God’s Son, and having no relationship with the Son, he has no hope; his future is supremely dismal. The same is true about every one of us. Everything about us, who we really are and where we will spend eternity, is determined by our relationship with God’s Son. Thank God for being invited to kneel at Jesus’ feet! Nothing about God is revealed and nothing from God is possessed except through His Son, but in the Son, we have fellowship with God and hope of eternal life.

Once Jesus had refused Satan’s offer to be god of this world and Satan brought that report back to God, Satan would no doubt have begun to think he understood what God had said through the prophets, that they predicted the Messiah would experience great honor (or at least had it offered him) and then great suffering (because he refused the honor). He was right that the prophets foretold the Messiah’s honor and suffering, but he was wrong in assuming that the honor and suffering would happen in that order. The right order was given by Peter:

1Peter 1

10. Prophets who prophesied of the grace that has come to you searched for and diligently inquired about this salvation,

11. trying to determine who or what time the Spirit of Christ which was in them was indicating when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and of the glory that followed.

Jesus’ suffering came first, as a despised servant of God in this wicked world. His glory came afterward, with his resurrection, ascension, and glorification to sit at God’s right hand as Lord of all. To understand that order is to understand what God was doing in Christ.

Satan was wrong about everything. He was wrong to think that Jesus was the boastful Light-bringer about whom Isaiah prophesied. He was wrong in heaven when he thought God would promote him. He was wrong in the wilderness when he thought he was meeting only Mary’s son. He was wrong about the reason he was sent to the wilderness in the first place. He was wrong about who he was, who God was, and who we are who walk in the light of the Son. And he continues to be wrong as he walks about on earth “seeking whom he may devour” (1Pet. 5:8). He is just wrong, and God will never allow him to feel his wrongness so that he might repent and be made right.

Promotion

When Jesus ascended and was glorified, he was not promoted to sit at God’s right hand. That was Satan’s kind of thinking. In God’s order, plants are never promoted to be animals; animals are never promoted to be humans; humans are never promoted to be angels; and cherubs, such as Satan, are never promoted to be God’s Son sitting at the Father’s right hand. Plants can only be plants; cherubs can only be cherubs; and only the Son can reign with the Father.

If God ordains that a certain child should one day become a pastor, and then that child grows up and becomes a pastor, it is not that he has been promoted; it is that he has become who he was ordained to be from the beginning. That child can grow in wisdom and strength, and he can receive spiritual gifts to enable him to occupy his appointed office, but he can never become other than what God ordained him to be. It is possible for him to fail to become what God ordained him to be, or even for him to be removed by God from his office, as Judas was, but never will he become other than who God created him to be.

When the Son of God returned to heaven and sat down at God’s right hand, he was only doing what he had been created to do. His glorification to sit openly at the Father’s right hand was his appointed place from before the world began, and it is his unshakable place forever. Satan had never seen a promotion given to any creature in God’s kingdom, yet he somehow came to expect one. It should have been obvious that one can function only within the boundaries of one’s own kind of life, but apparently, Satan thought he was an exception. It is foolish for anyone to strive for a promotion from God. God doesn’t promote; He creates.

It is foolish to envy someone who receives a higher calling in God’s kingdom. If one has been ordained by God to occupy a position, no one can take it from him, and if he has not been ordained to a position, no one can give it to him. As John the Baptizer said, “A man can receive nothing unless it be given to him from heaven” (Jn. 3:27). Nevertheless, Satan’s sons, like their father, strive for promotions instead of “seeking the honor that comes only from God” (Jn. 5:44), and in human religious institutions, they may be given one. Such institutions have no part with Christ, and the titles and offices they grant are a lie.

Through the millennia, hoping to be promoted to sit at God’s right hand, Satan labored to be counted worthy of that supremely high office, and God used Satan’s blind ambition to accomplish His holy purposes. Ministers who are like Satan likewise labor to be counted worthy of a promotion, but the desire for promotion leads to competition, and competition, to envy and strife. It is all vanity, for the promotions which man’s religions offer do not make anyone anything in God’s kingdom, despite what their grand titles suggest.

Korah

Moses’ cousin Korah foreshadowed how the sons of Satan think. Though his family had been honored to be chosen to handle the most holy things in the tabernacle, Korah envied Aaron’s priesthood. In order to obtain the priesthood, Korah slandered Moses and Aaron, telling his fellow Israelites that they had promoted themselves to the offices they held:

Numbers 16

2. [Korah] took two hundred and fifty leaders of the congregation, chosen men of the Assembly, men of reputation, and they rose up before Moses.

3. And they assembled against Moses and against Aaron, and they said to them, “You take too much on yourselves! For the whole congregation is holy – all of them! – and Jehovah is in their midst! Why then do you exalt yourselves above the Assembly of Jehovah?”

Korah and his men presented themselves as defenders of the Assembly of God, as protectors of God’s people against men who had puffed themselves up to rule over them. But Moses was the meekest man on earth (Num. 12:3); he was willing for someone else to lead Israel if that is what God wanted. His humble response to Korah was that they should all meet at the tabernacle and let God make it clear who should be leader of the people (Num. 16:4–7). But first, he bluntly exposed Korah’s envy, which was the real reason he was leading that rebellion:

Numbers 16

8. Moses said to Korah, “Hear now, you sons of Levi!

9. Is it a small thing to you that the God of Israel has separated you from the congregation of Israel to bring you near to Him to do the work of the tabernacle of Jehovah and to stand before the congregation to serve them?

10. He has brought you, Korah, near, and all your brothers, the sons of Levi, with you, and you are after the priesthood as well?

11a. That is why you and your congregation have assembled yourselves against Jehovah!”

When Korah and the two hundred fifty princes came to the tabernacle, God did make it clear whom He had chosen by killing them all and leaving Aaron alive (Num. 16:35). Too late, Korah learned the lesson. Only Moses could be Moses. Only Aaron could be Aaron. And Korah and his fellow Kohathites could only occupy the place appointed to them. Everyone who is thankful for his place occupies it with joy, and everyone who is not thankful, like Korah, grows discontent with their blessing and wants someone else’s place instead.

Only God can be God, and no one can do what God does better than God can do it. He is perfect in all His ways. To envy someone whom God has placed in a higher position is to think that God made a mistake by putting him in that position. It is to consider oneself wiser than God, who places “the members, each one of them, in the body as He pleases” (1Cor. 12:18). Paul cautioned the saints to do “nothing through strife or vanity, but with humility, regard one another as more important than yourselves” (Phip. 2:3). That wise counsel can be followed only by those who, unlike Satan and his sons, are content with and thankful for their place in the household of God.

Jesus’ Crimes According to Men

The Law and the Tradition of the Elders

As a meticulous Prosecutor, Satan would have been attentive to everything Jesus did, in hope of catching him in some infraction of the law and using that as further justification for destroying him. His sons were of the same mind. We often find Israel’s leaders watching Jesus carefully in order to catch him in some error (e.g., Mk. 3:1–2; Lk. 14:1; 20:20), which was hard to do, for Jesus studiously observed the law. He was an obedient servant of God who dutifully kept the commandments and taught others to do the same (Mk. 10:17–19). Moreover, whenever a tradition developed by Israel’s elders did not contradict the law, Jesus observed it as well (e.g., Jn. 10:22–23), and he told his disciples to follow his example (Mt. 23:1–3).

The only thing Jesus ever rebelled against was the pressure to abandon his Father’s righteousness in order to meet a standard established by men. Jesus was led by the Spirit in everything. But his faithful observance of the law, and the tradition of the elders when it was consistent with the law, did not prevent his enemies from accusing him of being a transgressor.

Crime #1, According to Men: Breaking the Sabbath

God ordained the weekly Sabbath as a day of rest for His people (Ex. 20:8–11), but by Jesus’ time, Israel’s elders had changed it into a day of worship. And to assure that God’s people used that day for worship, the elders devised a host of Sabbath rules which made it illegal for them to do much of anything but worship. In Acts 1:12, for example, we learn that the elders had imposed upon Israel a rule restricting the distance a Jew could walk on the Sabbath,^[109] which means that if someone got his rest by taking a long stroll on the Sabbath, he was out of luck. He’d have to get his rest some other day.

In a religion of rites and rules, things are always elevated above people. Ministers of such religions weigh people down with traditions, rituals, and doctrines that do not minister to their spiritual needs; they serve only to perpetuate the religion. Jesus angrily condemned Satan’s sons for doing that to God’s people: “Woe to you experts in the law! You load people with burdens hard to bear, but you yourselves do not touch the same burdens with one of your fingers!” (Lk. 11:46). God’s heart is for His people, to make them free and happy, not to laden them with rites and rules.

Tragically, Israel’s leaders also elevated their traditions to a level of authority that belonged solely to God’s commandments. At times, they even honored those traditions above God’s commandments (Mt. 15:1–2). That, Jesus would not tolerate, and he boldly rebuked them for making the word of God of no effect by their tradition (Mk. 7:13).

Once, some scribes and Pharisees who were following Jesus through a wheat field criticized him for not reproving his disciples for transgressing the tradition of the elders which forbade plucking and eating heads of grain on a Sabbath (Mt. 12:1–2). Jesus tried to explain to them that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk. 2:27), but they did not understand. Jesus was unmoved by their grumbling because he knew that Moses’ law specifically allowed hungry travelers to do what his disciples were doing, with no restrictions concerning the day:

Deuteronomy 23

24. If you go into your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat grapes, as much as you like, but you may not put any into your vessel.

25. If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck ears of grain with your hand, but you may not wield a sickle on your neighbor’s grain.

Jesus refused to acknowledge any tradition that encroached upon the liberty that God had granted to His people, and Satan, knowing the Scriptures, may have agreed with Jesus on that point. Using biblical examples, Jesus tried to help his upset followers see that God cares more about people than ceremonial correctness:

Matthew 12

3. He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those with him,

4. how he entered into the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those with him, but only for the priests?

5. Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath day, the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath [by offering sacrifices, lighting candles, etc.] and are guiltless?”

Jesus went on to tell them, “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless” (Mt. 12:7), but when things become more important than people, innocent people always end up being condemned.

Jesus concluded his conversation in the wheat field by telling the frustrated Pharisees, “The Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mt. 12:8). He could have said it this way: “If I say that what someone is doing is okay, then it is. You don’t get to make rules for my Sabbath.” But at that time, a comment like that would have been too much for any of his disciples to bear, those who were eating the grain as well as those who were upset about it. Jesus had to be patient, like his Father.

Crime #2, According to Men: Healing on the Sabbath

Jesus was frequently condemned by sons of the Accuser for healing people on the Sabbath, but he refused to stop doing it. He even dared to heal people on the Sabbath before their very eyes, not just on the Sabbath, but in their synagogue!

Mark 3

1. He went again into the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand.

2. And they were watching him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath, that they might bring an accusation against him.

3. But he told the man who had the hand that was withered, “Get up in the midst!”

4. And then he asked them, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do harm? To save life or to kill?” But they were silent.

5. And when he had looked around on them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their heart, he told the man, “Stretch out your hand!” And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored, as healthy as the other one.

6. And the Pharisees went out immediately and began to take counsel against him with the Herodians, how they might destroy him.

By healing on the day God set apart for rest, Jesus was breaking no commandment of God; it was Satan’s sons who forbade healing on the Sabbath. That was another of their traditions which elevated a thing, the Sabbath day, above the needs of people, for being healed is one of the best forms of rest. They were intelligent and well-meaning men who devised Israel’s traditions, but they entertained wrong ideas about God, and wrong ideas about God can lead sensible people into spiritual darkness. A wrong idea about God has power to blind the mind to the simplest of truths.

In Jesus’ time, most of Israel had been taught wrong ideas about God, and as a result, they were blinded, not by a witch, but by God, for He had turned them over to their own ideas:

John 12

37. Although so many miracles had been done by Jesus in their presence, they did not believe in him.

. . . .

39. The reason they could not believe is that, as Isaiah said,

40. “[God] has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see with their eyes and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I heal them.”

Crime #3, According to Men: Claiming Equality with God

Jesus confessed to being God’s Son, but he never committed the blasphemy of claiming to be God’s equal. Nevertheless, his enemies accused him of doing so:

John 5

17. Jesus answered them, “Up until now, my Father has been working, and so, I work.”

18. Because of this, the Jews then wanted all the more to kill him, for not only was he breaking the Sabbath, they said, but he was also calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

How they came to the conclusion that Jesus calling God his Father meant that he was claiming to be equal with God is hard to see. When I call George Clark my father, I certainly am not claiming to be His equal. But then, spiritual blindness causes men to draw erroneous conclusions from innocuous statements. The men who made this strange accusation against Jesus made it in spite of Jesus’ confession of dependence upon God for everything, even his life (Jn. 6:57). Jesus plainly said that the Father was greater than he (Jn. 14:28), and he never felt or acted any other way.

Satan knew that Jesus had not claimed to be God’s equal, but some men’s pathological hatred of Jesus compelled them to accuse him of doing so. Satan hated Jesus, too, but in God’s court, as always, he would have “gone by the book”, and his charges against Jesus would have been based on the law of Moses, not emotion.

Jesus’ Crimes According to Satan

Crime #1, According to Satan: A New Standard

In one of Jesus’ earliest sermons, he proclaimed new standards for Israel which appeared to contradict the law which God had given them:

Matthew 5

21. You have heard that it was said to those of ancient time, “You shall not murder,” and “Whoever commits murder will be liable to the judgment.”

22a. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause will be liable to the Judgment.

. . . .

27. You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.”

28. But I say to you that every man who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

. . . .

33. You have heard that it was said to those in the past, “You shall not forswear yourself, but you shall pay your vows to the Lord.”

34a. But I say to you, do not swear at all.

. . . .

38. You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

39. But I say to you, do not resist the evildoer. On the contrary, whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.

. . . .

43. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”

44. But I say to you, love your enemies; bless those who curse you; do good to those who hate you; and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you.

Satan, a strict law-and-order Prosecutor of the law, would have considered Jesus a criminal for teaching other than what the law said. However, Jesus wasn’t preaching contrary to the law; he was preaching the righteousness of God, which is beyond the law. Satan did not know that Jesus was about to initiate a new covenant, the standard for which would be the Spirit, not Moses’ law. Ignorant of that, Satan could only have concluded that Jesus was a false teacher.

If Jesus had been trying of himself to establish a new standard in Israel, it would indeed have been a crime, but he was doing it because God wanted it done. Jesus said, “I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me, He gave me a commandment, what I should speak and what I should say” (Jn. 12:49). But who could believe that?

Crime #2, According to Satan: Drinking Blood

As I said, man’s injustice against Jesus was transparent, but when Satan condemned him, his accusations were founded on Scripture; they were not irrational. God’s commandment to Israel prohibiting the consumption of blood is a case in point. That commandment was so plain that the meaning could not be missed:

Leviticus 7

26. You shall not consume any blood in any of your dwellings, whether of bird or beast.

27. Any soul who consumes any blood, that soul shall be cut off from his people.

Leviticus 17

10. If any man of the house of Israel or of any stranger who dwells among them consumes any kind of blood, I will set my face against that soul who consumes the blood, and I will cut him off from among his people.

No one in Israel could have doubted the meaning of those commandments; under penalty of death, no one was to consume “any kind of blood”. But Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Capernaum and made this astonishing declaration:

John 6

53. “Truly, truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

54. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

To many of Jesus’ disciples, and no doubt to others in the synagogue that day, it seemed that Jesus was forcing them to choose between him and God, for he was clearly contradicting God’s commandment forbidding the consumption of blood. Some of his disciples were outraged, and they “went back to former things, and walked with him no longer” (Jn. 6:66). As for Satan, this was just the sort of thing he was looking for. He was the Prosecutor of Moses’ law, and the law was clearly on the side of the offended disciples. And according to the punishment prescribed by God for drinking blood, what Jesus said was clear justification for getting rid of him.

Before the indignant disciples stormed away, Jesus tried to explain to them that he was speaking spiritually and that he was not saying they should drink his physical blood. He told them, “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The things that I am telling you, they are spirit, and they are life!” (Jn. 6:63). But they would not listen. They had heard all they wanted to hear from this man, for his doctrine was, to them, an obvious crime against the law of God, and Satan agreed. God had forbidden the consumption of any kind of blood, so why would that not include the kind of blood Jesus was talking about, whatever it was?

It was because those who walked away from Jesus knew and were devoted to the law that they were so offended by Jesus’ teaching. “What sane man would teach such a doctrine?” those disciples would have thought. But the disciples who stayed did not understand Jesus any better than those who went away. Nobody understood Jesus. And we would not have understood Jesus any better than they did, had we been there with them. Paul exhorted the saints to humbly examine themselves (2Cor. 13:5a), so it may be worthwhile to consider whether we would have stayed with a man we did not understand or been offended and walked away, Bible in hand.

Feeling the Truth

Jesus, unmoved by the desertions, asked his twelve disciples if they wanted to go away, too (Jn. 6:67). Peter’s reply to Jesus, “To whom shall we go?” reveals something important about Peter and the few other disciples who stayed. Although Peter was as much in the dark about what Jesus meant as the ones who left, his reply reveals that he loved what he felt when he was with Jesus so much that he could not leave him. In this, Peter was doing what some Christian ministers tell their congregations not to do; he was going by his feelings. What else could Peter have done? He was certainly not “going by the Bible”; the disciples who forsook Jesus were doing that.

It is important to understand that the offended disciples were not judging God’s truth; no man can do that. Rather, the truth was judging them, for every man’s reaction to the truth is God’s verdict on his soul. The disciples who walked away from Jesus saw evil in his words because evil was in their hearts. They did not feel the truth of Jesus’ words, as Peter did, because God would not allow them to feel it. They could no longer stay with Jesus because God judged them unworthy to stay with His Son. They felt they had to leave, but that was God’s decision, not theirs.

The Word of God cannot be judged by man; that Word created man, and man cannot judge his Creator. Whenever God’s Word comes, it comes not to test man’s head, but his heart, and Jesus’ twelve disciples passed the test. And because others failed the test that day and walked away, the number of Satan’s accomplices increased.

Crime #3, According to Satan: A Friend of Sinners

Satan would also have seen justification for killing Jesus in the fact that wherever Jesus went, he had more in common with rank sinners than with the more respectable members of society (Mt. 11:19; Mk. 2:15–16). He would have agreed wholeheartedly with Solomon’s sage advice to his son: “He who walks with wise men will be wise also, but a companion of fools will be destroyed” (Prov. 13:20). Those whom Jesus called Satan’s sons,^[110] highly regarded men all, were also indignant at Jesus’ association with sinners (e.g., Lk. 7:36–39). But Jesus saw through their appearance of righteousness and boldly assured them that God would welcome sinners into His kingdom before He would welcome them (Mt. 21:31b). Satan and his sons would have confidently condemned that as heretical nonsense, based on the law’s clear judgment of harlots, drunkards, and the like as worthy of death (e.g., Lev. 21:9; Dt. 21:18–21).

When Satan’s sons complained that Jesus was not maintaining an appropriate distance between himself and sinners, he did not back down:

Matthew 9

10. As he was reclining for a meal in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and reclined with Jesus and his disciples.

11. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples, “Why is your Teacher eating with tax collectors and sinners?”

12. But Jesus, hearing that, told them, “Those who are well do not need a doctor, but those who are sick.

13. But go learn what it means, ‘I delight in mercy, and not sacrifice’. For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Sinners who came to Jesus found welcome and hope, but what was especially meaningful to them was that in Jesus, they found someone with the courage to love them publicly, even in the presence of men considered to be the most respectable in Israel:

Luke 7

36. A certain man [named Simon], one of the Pharisees, asked him to eat with him. And so, he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at table.

37. And behold, a woman of the city who was a sinner, having learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of perfume.

38. And as she stood behind, at his feet, crying, she began to wet his feet with the tears, and she wiped them dry with the hair of her head, and then she tenderly kissed his feet and anointed them with the perfume.

39. Seeing this, the Pharisee who had invited him said within himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.”

40. Then Jesus answered and said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he said, “Teacher, say on.”

41. “There were two men in debt to a certain lender. The one owed five hundred denarii, and the other, fifty.

42. When they had nothing to pay, he freely forgave them both. So now, tell me, which of them will love him more?”

43. Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one to whom he forgave the more.” He said to him, “You have judged rightly.”

44. And then, turning to the woman, he said to Simon, “See this woman? When I came into your home, you provided no water for my feet, but she washed my feet with tears and dried them with the hair of her head.

45. You gave me no kiss, but she, from the time I came in, has not stopped kissing my feet.

46. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with perfume.

47. I tell you, it is because her sins, which are many, have been forgiven that she has loved much, but the one who is forgiven a little, loves a little.”

48. Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Finally, Jesus fearlessly provoked Satan’s sons when he declared, before the people, what their spirits were really like:

Matthew 23

25. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You make the outside of the cup and dish clean, but inside, they are full of greed and injustice.

26. Blind Pharisee! Clean first what is inside the cup and dish so that the outside of them may also be clean.

27. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear to be so very lovely, but inwardly are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.

28. Yes, that is how you are! You outwardly appear very righteous to men, but inwardly, you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

The Pharisees, priests, and scribes were more useful to Satan than were harlots and drunkards because they were so much like him. They diligently maintained proper form by fastidiously following the rules, as Satan had always done, and they, like him, trusted in that kind of righteousness. The sins of harlots, drunkards, and the like, on the other hand, could not be hidden, which made them easy targets for hypocrites. But Jesus never shot at easy targets. He didn’t have to because such sinners already know they are guilty, and in Jesus’ presence, many of them sensed a peace they could feel nowhere else. Satan and his sons never felt that way.

Crime #4, According to Satan: What Defiles a Man

Jesus knew truth about God that was so foreign to his followers that if he had preached it before they received God’s kind of life, they could not have borne it. He told them so during the Last Supper,

John 16

12. I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them right now.

13a. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.

It was not time for certain New Testament truths to be revealed, and it would have been sin to teach them before God’s appointed time because those truths would have destroyed souls, not saved them. For example, before God revealed it to Paul, the doctrine that the rites and rules of the law were “dead works”, useless for salvation, was a damnable heresy, for if Israel had believed that and ceased from the law, they would have been damned. It is sin not to do what God requires, and He required the law, until He did not. True doctrine, then, is false doctrine until God ordains it to be preached, and knowing that, Jesus kept certain truths to himself while he was here, for the good of those who believed in him.

But there was a day when it appears that Jesus did not do that. It was a day when Jesus was especially exasperated at the blindness of people’s hearts and weary to the bone from years of dealing with disciples who understood nothing. In that state, Jesus proclaimed a doctrine that clearly contradicted God’s prohibition concerning eating unclean meats (Lev. 11). As in the case of the commandment not to consume blood, the law was perfectly clear on this point:

Leviticus 11

42. Everything that moves on its belly, and everything that moves about with four or more feet, of every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, you shall not eat, for they are an abomination.

43. You shall not make yourselves abominable with any swarming thing that swarms, and you shall not make yourselves unclean with them and defile yourselves with them.

44. I am Jehovah your God, and you shall sanctify yourselves, and you shall be holy, for I am holy, and you shall not make yourselves unclean with any swarming thing that creeps upon the earth.

However, one day, extremely irritated, Jesus blasted the scribes and Pharisees who condemned his disciples again, this time for not keeping their tradition of washing one’s hands before eating. Jesus angrily summoned the people to him, and that was the moment Jesus came closest to destroying people with knowledge that was ahead of its time:

Matthew 15

10. He called the multitude to him and told them, “Listen, and understand!

11. It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth! That defiles a man!”

Jesus’ disciples knew, as did the Pharisees and Satan, that the law plainly stated that people would be defiled if they ate something unclean, but here, Jesus was saying something different. Satan was glad to have this ammunition against Jesus, and his sons grumbled so bitterly about it that Jesus’ disciples were troubled:

Matthew 15

12. His disciples came to him and said, “Did you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard that?”

13. But he [still angry] answered and said, “Every plant that my heavenly Father did not plant will be uprooted.

14. Leave them! They are blind guides of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

Peter, sincere as ever, then spoke up. He assumed that Jesus must have been speaking another parable, for, surely, he did not literally mean what he said:

Matthew 15

15. Peter answered and said to him, “Explain this parable to us.”

16. But Jesus [still angry] said, “Are you still without understanding, too?

17. Don’t you yet see that everything that goes into the mouth passes on to the belly and then is discharged into the latrine?

18. But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart; those things defile a man!

19. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, immoral acts, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies.

20. These are the things that defile a man. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man!”

We know that Jesus never did evil, for he was without sin (Heb. 4:15), and that is true even here, when he angrily declared New Testament truth to the helplessly ignorant multitude. I can explain how Jesus was not contradicting the law when he said we must drink his blood, but I cannot explain how his teaching in this case did not contradict the law. The law plainly stated that eating unclean things would defile a person, and Jesus’ doctrine that day plainly said otherwise. It was the truth, but it was truth that belonged on this side of Pentecost (cf. 1Cor. 6:12–13a; 8:8; 1Tim. 4:4).

Contrary to the Law

In Jesus’ defense, if the worst thing he ever did was tell God’s people too much truth one day, that alone would make him the holiest person ever to walk the earth. But that defense leaves us with unanswered questions. It is better just to take into consideration the fact that God Himself once grew so frustrated with the wickedness of His people that He commanded Hosea, contrary to the law, to find a harlot and marry her, to show Israel what they had done to Him (Hos. 1:2–3). And later, for the same reason, He told Hosea to take a man’s wife away from him and live with her in adultery (Hos. 3:1–5). And at about the same time, God commanded Isaiah to take a certain prophetess and, in the presence of witnesses, father a child by her (Isa. 8:1–3). All those acts were, under normal circumstances, immoral deeds which God’s law strictly forbade (Lev. 19:29; Ex. 20:14). But God commanded them to be done.

Also, and again contrary to the law but as a prophetic warning to Israel, God once commanded Ezekiel to use human feces when he cooked his meals:

Ezekiel 4

10. “Your food, which you will eat, shall be by weight twenty shekels each day. From time to time, you will eat it.

11. And you will drink water by measure one-sixth of a hin each day. From time to time, you will drink.

12. And you will eat it as a cake of barley; before their eyes, you will bake it, using human dung.”

13. And Jehovah said, “Thus will the children of Israel eat their polluted bread among the nations where I will banish them.”

The old saying applies: “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” That is the only way to explain God commanding Isaiah to commit fornication, Hosea to commit adultery, Ezekiel to eat unclean food, and Jesus telling people what really causes souls to be defiled.

Throughout salvation history, God made exceptions to His rules when it was needful. It is true that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” but that is not all that was made for man. The entire law, not just the Sabbath, was made for man, not vice-versa. God demanded that His people always keep the law; however, on the rare occasions when souls were benefitted more by not keeping it, God was all for it. Merciless Satan, on the other hand, saw man as having been made for the law and, so, were required to adhere to every precept under all conditions. To Satan, for men to behave contrary to any of the rules was the very definition of wickedness, without exception.

Anger and Hatred

A man of God who never reaches the level of frustration with Satan’s sons that Jesus reached has never seen how much harm they do to God’s people. In our time, for one example, many of Satan’s sons “quench the Spirit” within God’s children by teaching them that anger and hatred are sinful emotions. If that were true, even God would be a sinner, for He has been very angry (Jer. 7:20; 2Cor. 5:11), and He not only hates, but abhors certain people and deeds (Hos. 9:15; Zech. 8:17; Rev. 2:6, 15). Anger and hatred are holy emotions if they are God’s, and God’s children are free to feel what their Father feels when He feels it. It is the wrath of man that does not work the righteousness of God (Jas. 1:20); the wrath of God always works His righteousness. And what Jesus was feeling that day was the fury of God.

The Fig Tree

Jesus seemed to buckle a little under the weight of his burden one other time before the heart-rending scene in the garden of Gethsemane. It happened the morning after Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem (Mt. 21:7–11), just days before his crucifixion. When he first entered the city, Jesus had gone directly to the temple, “and when he had looked all around, it already being evening, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” to spend the night (Mk. 11:11). What Jesus saw in his Father’s temple when he looked around must have eaten at him all that night, for early the next morning, he went back to the temple in Jerusalem,

Mark 11

15b. and when Jesus had gone into the temple, he began to cast out those who were buying and selling in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves,

16. and he would not let anyone carry a thing through the temple.

17. And he began teaching them, saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of thieves’?”

Jesus’ indignation is understandable under the circumstances. Any of God’s prophets might have done something like Jesus did if sufficiently provoked. But the particular act that suggests most that Jesus was struggling under his heavy load is what he did earlier that same morning. Mark tells us that while on his way to the temple, Jesus grew hungry,

Mark 11

13. and seeing in the distance a fig tree with leaves, he went to it, if perhaps he might find something on it. But when he had gone to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not time for figs.

14. And Jesus answered and said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” And his disciples were listening.

The unfortunate fig tree quickly withered and died (Mt. 21:19).

Now, it was unreasonable for Jesus to become angry with a fig tree for having no figs when it wasn’t even time for fig trees to bear their fruit. But it wasn’t the tree’s fruitlessness that made Jesus angry. Throughout the night before he cursed the fig tree, his mind was haunted by the scenes which had confronted him the previous afternoon when he “looked all around” his Father’s temple. Had Jesus made it all the way to the temple the next morning with that fury still burning within him, and if he had vented that wrath on the merchants there, none of them would have survived. They would all have withered up just as the poor fig tree did. Fortunately for them, Jesus came to save, not to destroy (Lk. 9:56), and he vented the worst of his fury on a tree instead of them.

Section 4: The Last Supper and Jesus’ Arrest

Must I not drink the cup that my Father has given me?

John 18:11b

An Orderly, Measured Manner

Like King Saul, who attempted and failed several times to kill David, angry men made several unsuccessful attempts to kill Jesus (Lk. 4:28–30; Jn. 8:59; 10:31–39). None of those attempts had a place in God’s plan; they were merely spontaneous acts of human rage, and each time, God made a way for Jesus to escape. Satan had no part in those attacks; he was following God’s directives, not man’s, and he would have known it was not God’s appointed time for Jesus to die. Besides, it was beneath Satan’s dignity to take part in the rash actions of enraged humans; he is much more organized and deliberate than that. Satan despises anarchy and disorganized hotheads.

Satan never failed when God sent him on a mission. The mere fact that several attacks on Jesus failed is evidence enough that Satan was not involved in them, and it is unlikely that he even approved of them. It would not even be surprising to learn that he played a role in helping Jesus to escape those attacks. When Satan finally became involved in an attempt to kill Jesus, he succeeded, for he operated with great wisdom and God’s anointing (Ezek. 28:12, 14). As long as he was in heaven, he did service for God, not against Him.

Satan went about his assigned mission against Jesus in an orderly, measured manner, as he had always done his work, mindful of how his status before God would be affected. On occasion, his sons did likewise, taking time to plan their moves against Jesus (Mt. 22:15; Mk. 3:6; Jn. 11:53), mindful of how their status before the people would be affected (cf. Mt. 26:5; Mk. 11:18).

Sincere hatred, like sincere love, can wait. It watches and thinks as it moves in for the kill. Satan knew it when the right time came for Jesus to die. Jesus knew it, too (Jn. 12:23; 13:1; 17:1). Everything was in place. Jesus was ready to take on the cross and finish his work, and Satan was ready to take possession of Judas and finish his.

Satan in Judas

Satan knew that Jesus was a holy, anointed man, but knowing that would not have prevented him from killing Jesus any more than it prevented him from afflicting the perfect and upright Job or moving King David to sin. What difference would it have made to Satan for God to send him against Job, David, or Jesus, except that Jesus was greater than the other two, being the Messiah? They were all just humans in his sight. At the Last Supper, Satan knew he was doing God service when he possessed Judas and moved him to go to the chief priests (Lk. 22:3). Jesus knew that Satan was doing God service, too, but the difference was that Jesus knew God’s purpose for the service being done.

Luke tells us that Satan entered into Judas a few days before Jesus’ last Passover meal, when Judas made his deal with the chief priests to betray Jesus (Lk. 22:1, 4). John says that Satan entered into Judas during the Last Supper, immediately after Jesus handed Judas a piece of bread (Jn. 13:27). Both were right. No rule requires an evil spirit that possesses a person to stay inside that person continually. It is the person, not the spirit, who is in bondage. Once Judas was taken over by Satan, Satan was free to come into him and go out of him as he pleased.

Satan’s original sin was pride at being “perfect in beauty” (Ezek. 28:12), and he would never have left his perfectly beautiful body to possess a human except in hope of receiving something greater than his body. It may even be that Satan thought that if he was granted to sit at God’s right hand, he would be given a body more glorious than the one he first had. That may not be the case, but either way, the promotion he hoped for was of such glory that whatever was lost in the process of attaining it would be worth it. That hope is the only thing that could have lured Satan out of his perfectly beautiful body to possess the lowly body of a mortal man.^[111] The significance he attached to this mission is revealed in the fact that Satan had never before abandoned his body to personally possess anyone. Sensing that it was a mission of unparalleled importance to God, it would have been a mission of unparalleled importance to him, as well.

Judas

The Scriptural perspective on Judas directs us away from a simplistic answer as to why he betrayed Jesus. It is easy to dismiss Judas as a man bereft of conscience, or so covetous that he sold Jesus out for nothing but money. However, it is much more in keeping with the biblical description of Judas that he betrayed Jesus because he was frustrated with Jesus’ lack of progress in becoming king of the world. Judas did have a weakness for money (Jn. 12:6), but by all accounts, thirty pieces of silver, Judas’ reward for information on Jesus’ whereabouts, was not so great an amount that it alone would have persuaded Judas to betray his Messiah.^[112]

From the Scriptures, we learn, first, that Judas and Jesus were very close. The Son prophesied through David of the sweet fellowship he and Judas would enjoy:

Psalm 55

12. It was not an enemy who reproached me; then, I could have borne it. Nor was it one who hated me who puffed himself up against me; then, I would have hidden myself from him.

13. But it was you, a man my own equal, my intimate friend, and my companion,

14. for we took sweet counsel together, and walked among the throng in the house of God.

Second, as has been said, although Matthew was a “publican”, that is, a professional money handler, Jesus chose Judas rather than Matthew to carry his money and manage expenditures (cf. Jn. 13:27–29). That choice tells us something important about Jesus’ estimation of Judas’ ability.

Third, Judas believed, along with the other disciples, the general public, and all of heaven, including Satan, that when the Messiah came, he would quickly take over the world, as the prophets said. Those who believed that Jesus was the Messiah, as Judas did, and those who knew he was the Messiah, as the angels and Satan did, expected that of Jesus. But Jesus would not do it. Even after Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples continued to expect him to set up an earthly kingdom (Acts 1:6). In that regard, Jesus was a disappointment to them all.

So, rather than Judas hating Jesus or merely betraying him for money, it is better to see Judas as betraying Jesus to force his hand, that is, to put him in a position of having to publicly prove he was the Messiah, or die. And since it was unthinkable to Judas that Jesus, with all his power, would allow men to arrest him, much less abuse and kill him, it probably seemed like a good idea to force Jesus to do what the prophets said he would do. Moreover, Judas would not have forgotten the promise Jesus made to him and the other eleven disciples:

Matthew 19

27. Peter said to him, “Behold, we have left everything and followed you! So, what will happen to us?”

28. Jesus said to them, “Truly, I tell you that you who have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man sits down on his glorious throne, you will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

A Heavenly Experience

When God sends an evil spirit upon someone, it is an experience which that person knows has happened. Whether he knows it is an evil spirit or not depends entirely on whether or not God allows him to know it. When God took His Spirit from King Saul and sent an evil spirit upon him instead (1Sam. 16:14), those in the king’s court recognized that it was an evil spirit which had come upon the king (1Sam. 16:15–16). Later in Israel’s history, when God sent an evil spirit from heaven upon a group of false prophets, they interpreted that experience as holy, and the lie which that evil spirit “revealed” to them, they confidently repeated as a message from God (1Kgs. 22:19–23).

When Satan entered into Judas during the Last Supper (Jn. 13:27), he felt it, and it is obvious that he interpreted what he felt as heavenly encouragement to carry out the plan that Satan had already inspired him to make with the chief priests to betray Jesus (Lk. 22:3; Jn. 13:2). And indeed, it was heavenly encouragement, for it was God’s will that Jesus be arrested, and He had ordained everything Satan was doing. If Judas had known that, instead of godly strength, something evil had possessed him, he could not have willingly completed the treacherous act. It was his supreme confidence, shared now with Satan, that he was doing a good thing and that God would be pleased which gave Judas the boldness to act, a confidence created in him by his experience. Judas knew the experience was from God and was real, even if he didn’t know anything else.

This is the experience Paul described as “a strong delusion”:

2Thessalonians 2

8. And then, the lawless one shall be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of his mouth and destroy with the appearance of his coming,

9. him whose coming is by the work of Satan, with every miracle and deceptive signs and wonders,

10. and with every unrighteous deceit among those who perish because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

11. And for that reason, God will send them a strong delusion so that they will believe the lie,

12. so that they all might be damned who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness.

A real experience from God empowers a person to give themselves to what it brings to them in a way previously impossible. If the experience comes as a blessing from God, it anchors the soul in righteousness as never before, but if the experience comes from God as a curse, it anchors the soul in darkness, and there is no escape. When Satan possessed Judas, both Satan and Judas thought it was a good thing, but with that experience, God was sealing the gate of eternal damnation for them both.

Judas’ Expectation

Judas had every reason to expect that if Jesus would just do what he was supposed to do and take over the world, Judas would be given a princely throne! And considering how close he seemed to be to Jesus, Judas may have expected to receive the throne located at Jesus’ right hand! Such an expectation, based on the solid ground of Jesus’ own words, is much more likely to have motivated Judas than a measly thirty pieces of silver. It is also possible that Judas expected to sit at Jesus’ right hand because he saw himself as the only disciple wise enough or courageous enough to do what needed to be done to make the promise of God come to pass.

Had Judas betrayed Jesus for no reason but financial gain, or if he was a degenerate man with no conscience, he would not have so deeply regretted his actions and tried to repent when he saw that Jesus was not going to resist his captors:

Matthew 27

3. When Judas, the one who betrayed him, saw that [Jesus] was condemned, he felt remorse and returned the silver pieces to the high priests and the elders,

4. saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood!” But they said, “What is that to us? You see to that.”

For Jesus to be condemned struck Judas’ heart; it was not how he expected events to unfold. He knew that Jesus was innocent, and he probably doubted that the high priests and elders would be able to convict Jesus of any wrongdoing. He credited them with more integrity than they possessed. Also, his return of the thirty pieces of silver shows that money was not his motivation. If all Judas had wanted was money, he would have just walked off with it and been content; instead, “He threw the silver pieces down in the temple and ran off, and went and hanged himself” (Mt. 27:5).

When it became obvious to Judas that his plan had failed, he could not live with himself. “What have I done?” he no doubt thought. And being as close to Jesus as he had been for several years, he knew enough to realize that there was no hope of forgiveness for him. He would have remembered Jesus’ words, and for the first time taken them to heart: “The Son of man is going away, just as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed!It were good for him if that man had not been born” (Mk. 14:21).

Opinions

When Judas betrayed Jesus, he was not trying to do something he thought was evil. Rather, he was thinking to do God service (Jn. 16:2) by forcing Jesus to do what everyone who believed in Jesus thought he should do. I said earlier that “the best that even the best of us do is contrary to the will of God, and the best that the best of us are, is wrong,” and nothing shows this better than Judas’ effort to do what he felt was a very good thing.

Judas was not trying to do evil because he did not have to try; his heart was not right with God, and so, whatever he did was going to be evil without him trying. Life is a matter of the heart; what you are in your heart determines the quality of whatever you do, no matter what you think you are doing. That is why David gave this wise counsel to his young son Solomon: “Above all else, guard your heart, for out of it are the issues of life” (Prov. 4:23).

When I was young in the Lord, I often unexpectedly found myself praying earnestly that God would rescue me from my own opinions. I knew it was a good thing for which to pray, but I wondered why the Lord put that prayer in my heart. Now, I know. Peter prophesied of false teachers rising up among believers, who would “introduce opinions that lead to damnation” (2Pet. 2:1). He was speaking of opinions taught as gospel by men who believe that Jesus is Lord. But the true gospel is not an opinion; it is a revelation. God has no opinions, and neither do the men He sends, for revelation delivers men from their opinions. Paul was not an exception to this; he was an example:

Galatians 1

11. I would have you to know, brothers, regarding the gospel preached by me, that it is not according to man.

12. For I neither received it from a man, nor was I taught it, but I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

There is no way but by revelation that the gospel can be preached (cf. 1Pet. 1:12). The truth cannot be found by study, not even by studying the Bible. It is not to the least extent of men; it is altogether of God. If the doctrine of Christ is not revealed by God, it cannot be known. The body of Christ, itself, is a family created by the power of God, impossible for man to enter except by the baptism Jesus gives (1Cor. 12:13). The love of God is infused into our hearts by the Spirit, or we do not have it, no matter how nice we are. Every element of the kingdom of God is altogether in the Spirit, and no man, of himself, can contribute to it, take from it, or participate in it. And every time a man tries to help God run His kingdom, as Judas did, he sins.

There is nothing more dangerous to your soul than a good idea put forth as gospel. Opinions about God are heresies. Every Christian church on earth originated with someone’s good idea, someone’s opinion who was thinking to do God service, and every one of them is a lie. None of them can save because all of them are heresies. God has no ministers except those he sets on fire with his power (Heb. 1:7) and has no children except those who are led by His Spirit (Rom. 8:14). Life in the Spirit is an impossible life for man, but Jesus made the impossible possible for us.

Satan Asked for the Disciples

Something Jesus said during the Last Supper reveals that Satan still had access to God in heaven:

Luke 22

31. The Lord said, “O Simon, Simon! Satan has earnestly asked for you men, that he might sift you like wheat.

32a. But I have prayed for you [this “you” is singular, referring only to Peter], that your faith will not give out.”

To be sifted means to be put through a hard trial, which is what Satan suggested to God in the book of Job when he said, “Stretch out your hand now and strike all that he has, and he will curse you to your face,” and later, “Stretch out your hand now and strike his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1:11; 2:5). In both those scenes, Satan was politely suggesting that God sift Job like wheat.

The important point, however, is that when Satan “earnestly asked for” Jesus’ disciples, it was God that he asked. There would have been no point in him asking Pontius Pilate or Caiaphas; the disciples did not belong to them. No one but God could have granted Satan’s request because the disciples belonged to Him (Jn. 17:6–9). Jesus’ statement also suggests that God granted Satan’s request for the disciples, for Jesus did not say to Peter, “I have prayed that you will not be sifted.” Rather, he said, “I have prayed that your faith will not give out [when Satan sifts you].”

Unlike what we saw in the book of Job, we are not told how the heavenly conversation between God and Satan went, but God’s care for His people makes it certain that, as in the case of Job, it was actually God’s idea to sift the disciples, not Satan’s. God may even have initiated the subject of the disciples, as He initiated the subject of Job. If so, the conversation would have been something like this:

God: “Where have you come from?”

Satan: “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

God: “Have you considered the Messiah’s twelve disciples, how much they love him and how faithful they are?”

Satan: “You know how men are. You have blessed them greatly, but stretch out your hand and put them in fear for their lives, and they will abandon Jesus and curse and swear that they never knew him.”

God: “Behold, those disciples are in your power, only do not kill them.”

We are not told if Satan had any other thoughts about what would be sifted out of the disciples, but whatever Satan thought doesn’t matter. What determined everything is that God had mercifully decided to sift pride out of Jesus’ disciples, Peter especially, and He chose Satan to get it done.

The Disciples Did Not Believe Jesus

When Jesus warned his disciples during the Last Supper that men would cruelly persecute and kill them, thinking they were doing service to God, he knew that Satan and his sons, Judas now among them, were about to do that to him. Knowing that Satan was, at that very moment, in the process of gathering the priest’s officers to come arrest him, Jesus calmly said to his disciples, “The ruler of this world is coming” (Jn. 14:30). It is revealing that Jesus did not say to his disciples, “Judas and the officers are coming.” That is what anyone else would have said because that is all that anyone else would have seen, but Jesus knew better.

While Satan was shrewd enough to use men, he knew them, and he put no trust in them. Jesus also knew men, and he put no trust in them, either, because “he knew [better than Satan knew] what was in man” (Jn. 2:25). But men do not know themselves. Jesus, gathered around the table with his beloved disciples, told them that later that night, they would all forsake him (Mt. 26:31), and he told Peter that he would outright deny him (Mt. 26:34). But the disciples could not imagine themselves doing such a thing, and they did not believe him:

Mark 14 (cf. Mt. 26:35)

27a. Jesus said to them, “Tonight, all of you will be offended because of me.”

. . . .

29. Then Peter said to him, “Even though all [these other disciples] be offended, I certainly won’t!”

30. And Jesus said to him, “Truly, I tell you that today, this very night, before a rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times.”

31. But he said all the more vehemently, “If I have to die with you, I will never deny you!” And then they all began talking like that.

Jesus didn’t argue with them about it; there was no point. He knew they could not see it. They would have to be sifted. So, he finished what he had to say to them, and then prayed earnestly for God to save them (Jn. 17). After that, when they had sung a hymn of praise (Mt. 26:30), Jesus led them out of Jerusalem, across the Kidron Valley, and into a garden on the Mount of Olives. There, Jesus got alone with God and poured out his heart to Him.

The Arrest

The disciples’ sifting took place in the garden of Gethsemane. Judas, knowing that Jesus frequented that place, led the officers there to arrest him.

Matthew 26

47. Behold, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a large multitude, with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and elders of the people.

48. Now, the one who betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, “Whomever I kiss is the man. Arrest him.”

49. And he went up at once to Jesus, and said, “Hello, Rabbi.” And he kissed him affectionately.

50. Then Jesus said to him, “Friend, why are you here?” At that moment, they came forward, laid hands on Jesus, and arrested him.

Satan was looking at Jesus through Judas’ eyes as Judas walked up to Jesus and kissed him on the cheek. Satan knew Jesus, and Jesus knew Satan. (Judas didn’t know either one.) They had met face-to-face before, several years prior in the Judean wilderness. What were Jesus’ and Satan’s thoughts as they looked knowingly at each other, surrounded as they were by ignorant humans, the terrified disciples and the officers with their flickering torches? Was it actually to Satan, not to Judas, Jesus was speaking when he said, “Friend, why are you here?” Satan must have been gratified that he was accomplishing another important task for God. Jesus was resigned to do his Father’s will and “was brought as a lamb to the slaughter” (Isa. 53:7b).

Jesus’ Friends

In a stirring testimony many years ago, an old saint we called “Uncle Joe” explained why Jesus greeted Judas as “friend”. He said, “I’ll tell you who your real friends are. Anyone who does something to you that causes you to press on and be obedient to the will of God is your friend.” That night, both Judas and Satan were fulfilling their appointed roles in God’s plan, and in doing that, they were unwittingly helping Jesus accomplish God’s will for his life; therefore, by Uncle Joe’s definition, they were his friends. When a man’s ways please God, He makes even his enemies his servants, using them only to do him good (cf. Prov. 16:7). Satan hated Jesus, but his hatred determined nothing. It was God’s love for us that determined everything. Jesus’ suffering and death was God’s will, and everything that Satan, Judas, and the chief priests did only forwarded God’s wondrous work in him. God made them all Jesus’ friends, no matter how much they hated him.

Jesus proved the truth of the apostle Paul’s exclamation, “We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are the called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

When the torch-carrying posse laid hands on Jesus, Peter pulled out his sword and attacked them, trying to stop Jesus’ friends from helping him accomplish God’s purpose. That was Peter’s good idea, but Jesus rebuked Peter for it, saying, “Put your sword in the sheath! Must I not drink the cup that my Father has given me?” (Jn. 18:11). That statement challenges us with a question: If Jesus saw Satan and the mob as God’s servants, delivering God’s cup of suffering and death for him to drink, how can we see it any other way? What better idea would we have had than what God was doing?

The Sifting

When the officers from the priests arrested Jesus, the disciples forsook him and fled for their lives (Mk. 14:50), just as Jesus and Satan both knew they would. But Peter’s sifting did not end in the garden. He followed the officers and Jesus “at a distance” into the courtyard of the high priest (Mt. 26:58), where a little slave girl recognized Peter. She came up to him and said, “You were definitely with Jesus of Galilee” (Mt. 26:69).

Matthew 26

70. But [Peter] denied him before them all, saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

71. But after he went out to the entranceway, another girl saw him, and she said to those who were there, “This man was definitely with Jesus the Nazarene.”

72. And he again denied it, with an oath, saying,“I don’t know the man!”

73. Then, a little while later, those standing there came up and said to Peter, “Surely, you are also one of them, for even your accent gives you away.”

74. Then he began to bind himself under a curse and to swear, “I don’t know the man!” And immediately, the rooster crowed.

75. And Peter was reminded of the saying Jesus had spoken to him. . . . And he went outside, and wept bitterly.

The Peter who rebuked Jesus when Jesus spoke of his approaching death and who audaciously suggested that he would save him (cf. Mt. 16:21–23), the Peter who declared that he would never deny Jesus even though the others did, and swore that he would die for him – that Peter – was sifted out of Peter’s soul in the high priest’s courtyard. It was painful, but his proud self-confidence was finally sifted out of him, just as it would later be sifted out of young Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). But Jesus had prayed for Peter, and that prayer saved him. Peter would never have recovered after so vilely denying the Lord, but for the intercession of the Lord whom he had denied.^[113]

Peter had so little self-confidence remaining after God sifted him that he could not say yes when the resurrected Jesus asked Peter if he loved him more than the other disciples did:

John 21

15. When they had eaten, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me more than these men do?” He said to him, “Surely, Lord, you know that I’m your friend.”^[114] He said to him, “Feed my lambs.”

16. Again, he said to him a second time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me?” He said to him, “Surely, Lord, you know that I’m your friend.” He said to him, “Tend my sheep.”

17. The third time, he said to him, “Simon, son of Jonah, are you my friend?” Peter was grieved because the third time, he said to him, “Are you my friend?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I’m your friend.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”

Peter could no longer boast of utter devotion to Jesus. He did love Jesus, but the excessive self-confidence which had formerly tainted his expression of that love was now sifted out of his soul.

Section 5: The Crucifixion

“My God! My God! Why Have You Forsaken Me?”

Matthew 27:46

God Did Not Answer

After Jesus was abused and condemned in the house of the high priest (cf. Mt. 26:57–68), he was led to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. Pilate discerned that Jesus was innocent, and he said so (Mt. 27:24), but when he could no longer resist the Jews’ demand that Jesus be crucified, he turned him over to his soldiers for execution.

John 19

16b. And they took Jesus, and led him away.

17. And bearing his cross, he went out to the place called “Place of a Skull”, which is called in Hebrew “Golgotha”,

18. where they crucified him, and two others with him, on the right and on the left, and Jesus in the middle.

Typically, it did not take many hours for crucified men to die, but for any of them, death was too long in coming, for crucifixion was excruciatingly painful. Jesus, writhing in agony on the cross, felt utterly deserted by God, and he pitiably cried out to Him, “Why have you forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46; Mk. 15:34). But God did not answer. The men standing there took notice of Jesus’ despairing cry (Mt. 27:26–49), but what would have stood out to Satan was God’s refusal to answer. He could only have taken that as confirmation that God had indeed rejected Jesus and was pleased with his death, as the prophet had foretold:

Isaiah 53

10a. It pleased Jehovah to crush him; He has put him to grief.

11a. He will see the travail of his soul and be satisfied.

If at any time during Jesus’ suffering, God had given an indication that He was displeased with what was happening, Satan would have put a quick end to it, but not out of compassion or a sense of justice. Satan had a self-serving motive for everything he did, and he would have gladly stopped men from killing Jesus if that is what he thought God wanted. He was motivated more by what he thought would please God than by personal hatred of Jesus.

Some services to God must be rendered, such as the crucifixion of Jesus, but God will not ask good people or good spirits to do them. He did not put it on Peter, James, and John to crucify Jesus because He loved them and had chosen them for salvation. Instead, God used Satan and wicked men to crucify His Son, and they were glad to do it.

Observers

Watching the crucifixion from a distance were women who had followed Jesus from Galilee. They were also disciples, who at their own expense had ministered to the needs of Jesus and his disciples as they traveled (Mt. 27:55; Mk. 15:40–41; cf. Lk. 8:1–3). Close by him, at the foot of the cross, was Jesus’ mother with her sister and John, the disciple whom Jesus especially loved (Jn. 19:25). Mary was so close that she could hear her son’s groanings and see his tears. When Jesus turned his head and saw her, he pulled up on the spikes in his hands and pushed on the spikes in his feet to position himself to speak, paying a price in pain to ask John to take care of his mother for him (Jn. 19:25–27).

Strangers passing by were not so kind. They joined the priests and elders in mocking Jesus’ torment, not only daring Jesus to come down from the cross, but also daring God to come down and rescue him:

Matthew 27

39. Those passing by were reviling him, wagging their heads

40. and saying, “You who are going to tear down the temple and in three days raise it up, save yourself ! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!”

41. And likewise, the chief priests also, mocking him with the scribes and the elders and Pharisees, kept saying,

42. “He saved others; himself, he cannot save! If he is the King of Israel, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him!

43. He trusted in God; let Him deliver him now, if He wants him! Didn’t he say, ‘I am God’s Son’?”

God Bowed the Heavens

God saw it all, and though He remained silent when Jesus cried out to Him, He bent the heavens so that He would be close to him. Through David, the Son had foretold that the Father would do this:

Psalm 18

6. In my distress, I called on Jehovah; yea, I cried out to my God for help. He heard my voice from His temple, and my plea came to Him, into His ears.

7. Then the earth shook and trembled, and the foundations of the mountains moved; they were shaken because He burned with anger.

8. Smoke went up from His nostrils, and fire from His mouth devoured. Coals were kindled by it.

9. He bowed the heavens also, and came down, and thick darkness was under His feet.

It was not a secret in heaven that the Messiah was special to God, and if nothing else had done so, this astonishing event, the bending down of the very heavens, confirmed it. That, the unnatural darkness,^[115] along with the trembling earth, persuaded one of the Roman soldiers at the scene that Jesus was special to God (Mk. 15:39). It may have also revealed to those within the bending heavens that God’s heart was breaking. They would certainly have seen God feeling something they had never before seen Him feel.

God’s self-restraint while watching His beloved Son suffer saved us.

Pleased and Satisfied

Satan no doubt also saw that God was grieved, but even so, God’s insistence on the Messiah’s death would have meant to Satan that God required that justice be done, regardless of how it made Him feel. The disobedient Messiah, Satan would have thought, had to pay the penalty for his high-minded refusal to accept the honor that God, through Satan, had offered him. To Satan, Isaiah’s prophecy meant that even if God was grieved, indeed, even if He had tears running down His holy face, He still was pleased and satisfied with Jesus’ suffering and death. And in thinking that, Satan was right, but not for the reason he supposed.

Satan was also pleased and satisfied, but he would not have been so pleased if he had known who Jesus really was, or what God was doing in him. Paul was speaking of more than human rulers when he wrote that “none of the rulers of this age understood, for had they understood, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1Cor. 2:8). No one knew what was really happening at Calvary; everyone there, including the Roman soldiers, were being used by God for a purpose so profound that no one could perceive it. Knowing this, Jesus prayed for them all as he suffered on the cross, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing” (Lk. 23:34). He could have just as well said, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what we are doing.”

God’s patience determined everything.

An Abject Failure?

As I have said, throughout the whole process – the arrest, the sham trial, the cruel abuse, and the gruesome crucifixion – God never indicated to Satan that He wanted the process to stop. And the suffering Son, whose only remaining joy was in knowing that he was doing the Father’s will, did not cry out for the process to stop. Jesus was determined to follow the Father’s lead. In Satan’s eyes, Jesus was an especially anointed man of God, indeed, the mightiest man of God ever to have walked the earth. But he also saw Jesus as a proud transgressor who was now facing God’s perfect justice at the hand of the law’s stern Prosecutor, the soon-to-be co-regent with God.

No one on earth would have believed that Jesus had any favor with God. People were aghast at his hideous appearance on the cross (Isa. 52:14). The blood that covered his beaten face was mixed with spit from his tormenters (Mt. 26:67–68); portions of his beard had been ripped out (Isa. 50:6); his head was swollen from the thorns that had been driven into it (Mt. 27:29–30); he was so emaciated that all his bones could be counted (Ps. 22:17); his skin and flesh had been ripped off his back by the Roman lash (Jn. 19:1), and the blood and gore ran down and covered his legs. He no longer looked like a human being, as Isaiah said,

Isaiah 52

14. Many shall be aghast at you. So great shall be the disfigurement of his visage that it will be beyond human, and his form, beyond the sons of men.

Beyond the physical suffering, Jesus was mocked (Mt. 27:41–43), despised, and rejected by many of God’s own people (cf. Isa. 53:3), considered insane by his earthly family (Mk. 3:21), and forsaken by even his closest friends. And now, he was being executed by the cruelest means possible. By any standard known to man, Jesus was an abject failure as Messiah.

Jesus Had a Choice

We have emphasized the fact that God was in complete control of Jesus’ suffering and death, but because Jesus was devoted to doing God’s will, Jesus was equally in control. He once told his disciples,

John 10

17. “The Father loves me because I lay down my life, that I might receive it again.

18. Nobody takes it from me; I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I received this commandment from my Father.”

When Jesus rebuked Peter for attacking the men who were arresting him, Jesus asked him, “Do you think that I cannot call on my Father right now, and He will send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Mt. 26:53). His question reveals something often overlooked, namely, while the Father did not accept Jesus’ desperate plea to find some other way to redeem mankind, He did tell Jesus that He would send angels to rescue him if he could not bear what he was about to suffer. Then, to confirm for Jesus that he had a choice, the Father knocked down the men who had come to Gethsemane to arrest him:

John 18

4. Jesus, knowing all things that were coming upon him, went out and said to them, “Who are you looking for?”

5a. They answered him, “Jesus the Nazarene.” Jesus said to them, “I am he.”

6. Then, when he told them, “I am he,” they went backward and fell to the ground.

Jesus did not do that to those men. The Father did, to assure Jesus that he had a choice. The Father would not force His Son to go through what lay in store for him, but for our sake, the Son humbled himself and surrendered to Satan and his wicked band. “And so, the cohort, and the tribune, and the officers of the Jews took Jesus” (Jn. 18:12) and “led him away to Caiaphas the high priest, where the scribes and the elders were gathered together” (Mt. 26:57).

Nobody heard God promise Jesus that He would send legions of angels to rescue him if he asked for them, and of those who heard Jesus say He did, how could anyone have believed that God really made him such a promise? In the Temptation, Satan spoke of God assigning angels to watch over Jesus in case he so much as tripped over a rock (Lk. 4:10–11). Now, instead of sending angels to protect Jesus, God had sent Satan to kill him. How evil must Jesus have been in God’s sight, Satan and his sons thought (cf. Isa. 53:4), for God to change so drastically from His original, wonderful plan for the Messiah!

Selfless Love

God’s willingness to patiently bear His deep grief as He watched His Son’s agony is the most incredible expression of selfless love there has ever been. His great desire was for His Son to come back home and take his place openly beside Him, not only because they would then be reunited, but also because the life they shared would be shared with us. The Father would then have many sons and daughters, and Jesus would become, as Paul would say it, “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29).

The reason that Satan was so sure he was pleasing God by killing Jesus is that Satan was pleasing himself by killing him, and he saw God as “altogether such a one” as himself. In this, Satan’s sons were just like him. They, too, were certain they were pleasing God because they were pleasing themselves.

God was pleased with Jesus’ suffering and death, but it was not for the reason Satan and his sons thought. God was pleased because He knew that by the death of His Son, many would be delivered from spiritual darkness and come to know and love His Son and Him. God loved His Son beyond all measure, and His Son’s agony and cries from the cross tore at His heart, but the Father was willing to give him up for us, and Jesus was willing to be given. There is no greater love than that, no greater demonstration of goodwill toward us who were lost in sin. The depth of such love cannot be measured:

Romans 8

31. What, then, shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

32. Indeed, He who did not spare His own Son, but gave him up for us all, how shall He not also, with him, freely give us all things?

33. Who shall bring an accusation against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies.

34. Who is the one that condemns? Christ is the one who died, but more than that, who was also raised up, who also is at God’s right hand, who also is making intercession for us.

35. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

36. (As it is written, “For your sake, we are put to death all the day long; we are thought of as sheep for slaughter.”)

37. No! In all these things, we do more than conquer, through him who loved us.

38. I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

39. nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord!

Holding the Door Open

When the disciples were sifted, they learned an invaluable lesson of spiritual life, namely, that we humans have no strength against either the spirits of this age or our own sinful nature and that the only appropriate attitude for us is abject humility and thanksgiving to God that “when we were yet without strength, . . . Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). Without help from God, we can see nothing rightly, not God, not Jesus, not Satan, not even ourselves – perhaps especially ourselves, in the light of such scriptures as Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is more deceitful than anything, and it is incurable. Who knows it?”

After God humbled Saul of Tarsus, he passed on a valuable warning, to wit, we must not trust in our own judgment of anyone or anything, including ourselves:

1Corinthians 4

3. To me, it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you, or by any human judgment; indeed, I do not even judge myself.

4. I am conscious of nothing against myself; however, I am not justified by that. The Lord is the one who judges me.

5. So, judge nothing before the time, but wait until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and expose the intentions of hearts, and then from God will praise be given to each one.

God has never allowed Satan to learn this lesson, and He never will. Satan has always judged himself instead of waiting on God, and his damnation is set. God delivered Peter from his misguided opinion of himself, and Peter became a new man in Christ, but He has condemned Satan to remain as he is forever. Most important, however, God is still God, and He is still, at this moment, holding the door open to us, full of compassion.

All Things Are Yours

Paul admonished the saints that God will turn over to Satan those of His household who persist in rejecting His gentler corrective measures. That may seem harsh, but such chastisement has a healing purpose. In one case, Paul turned certain men over to Satan for teaching a particularly bad doctrine, but then he said that God’s purpose for turning them over to Satan was to teach them not to do what they were doing (1Tim. 1:20). In other words, there was hope for them, and the punishment was intended to do them good by making them see they needed to change. The same may be said of the young man in Corinth who was living in sin with his stepmother (1Cor. 5:1). Paul commanded the elders there to turn him over to Satan, “for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1Cor. 5:5). For such believers, it was good that Satan was around for them to be turned over to him if they learned from it to repent and do God’s will, which seems to have been the case with the young Corinthian (2Cor. 2:6–11). In Christ, not only do God’s faithful angels minister to us (Heb. 1:13–14), but Satan and his angels also are our servants; they are never our masters. Paul told the Corinthians,

1Corinthians 3

21b. All things are yours,

22. whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things that are present, or things to come; all things are yours,

23. and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

God is still God, and He still, even in this covenant, uses Satan to accomplish His purpose, whenever He chooses to do so. Paul told the Corinthians that “a messenger of Satan” had been sent to trouble him with a “thorn in the flesh” (2Cor. 12:7b), but with that, Paul was not glorifying Satan’s power. He knew that God ordained that messenger to be sent, for that “thorn in the flesh” had a holy purpose, namely, to prevent Paul’s spirit from becoming puffed up by the many great gifts given to him (2Cor. 12:7).

So, even though God cast Satan and his angels out of heaven, God and they are still themselves. We humans are the ones who can change, but only because God is still willing to change us. And we should be very thankful for that; it will not always be that way. After the Final Judgment, no more changes will be allowed anywhere.

Section 6: The Glorification of the Son

We see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor, . . .

holy, innocent, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.

Hebrews 2:9a; 7:26b

The Preeminent Multitasker

I doubt that God has ever done only one thing at a time. His wisdom is so great that whenever He does anything, many things are being accomplished. God is the preeminent multitasker. Especially is this true as regards the work He accomplished in His Son. So many things were accomplished when God accepted the Son’s sacrifice and glorified him to sit at His right hand that it is impossible to list them all. Below are just some of the results of God’s glorification of His Son.

“You Gave Them to Me”

Before God accepted the Son’s offering of himself as a sacrifice for sin, Israel prayed to no one but God, but from that point on, Israel was required to honor the Son just as they honored God if they wanted to remain in covenant with Him. Jesus told his disciples, “The Father does not judge anyone, but has committed all judgment to the Son, so that all should honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (Jn. 5:22–23). Jesus referred to this monumental change in the heavenly order when he said in prayer to God, “They were yours, and you gave them to me” (Jn. 17:6).

When Paul said that all things in this creation are held together by Christ (Col. 1:17), he really meant all things, not just the universe that we can see. And Peter was just as inclusive in his meaning when he declared to Cornelius and his household that Jesus is “Lord of all” (Acts 10:36). Jesus is Lord of everything and everybody, visible and invisible, good and evil, living and dead, whether in heaven, on earth, or beneath the earth. This is what Jesus was talking about when he said, “All power in heaven and on earth is given to me” (Mt. 28:18).

Preacher Clark used to compare this change with a business when it is sold. The employees of that company must acknowledge the new management if they hope to retain their positions. If they refuse to acknowledge the new management, they are fired and have no further association with the company. So it was with Israel. They entered into a covenant with God at Mount Sinai, but God told them that one day, He would make a new covenant with them, spiritual in nature instead of carnal:

Jeremiah 31

31. Behold, the days are coming, says Jehovah, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,

32. not the kind of covenant that I made with their fathers in the day I took their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, even though I was their Husband, says Jehovah.

33. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says Jehovah: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their heart. And I will be their God, and they will be my people.

God made Jesus the chief executive, so to speak, of that new covenant, and everyone in Israel who acknowledged Jesus as their new boss retained their position as members of what Paul called “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16). Those in Israel who did not acknowledge the new management were dismissed from the company and had no more connection with God, even if they claimed they did. In this new order, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me” (Jn. 14:6). That is the way God has set up His new business, and the new business has a new name: “God & Son”.

Another name for the new company is “the body of Christ” (Rom. 7:4; 1Cor. 10:16; 12:27; Eph. 4:12), and one is brought into the company by receiving the Spirit of God which Jesus purchased for us (1Cor. 12:13). That is why Paul taught that “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:9b). Without the Spirit, a person is without God or Christ, for when the Spirit comes, the Father and the Son come with it (cf. Jn. 14:23).

Restructuring Everything

The glorification of the Son resulted in a restructuring of things above the earth in heaven and of things beneath the earth in Sheol, but not of things here on earth. Before Jesus was glorified, good and evil dwelt together everywhere. Wicked spirits mingled with good spirits in heaven; wicked men intermingled with righteous men on earth; and the wicked and the righteous continued to be together in Sheol after they died. When the wicked died, they were carried into the part of Sheol called Torment, separated by an uncrossable chasm from the righteous dead in the part of Sheol called Paradise. They were close enough to see each other and even to converse across that chasm, but they could not cross it (Lk. 16:23–31). However, when Jesus was glorified, he purged heaven of all who were wicked, casting out Satan and his angels forever (Rev. 12:5, 7–9), and beneath the earth, he purged Sheol of all who were righteous, transferring Paradise into heaven (Ps. 68:18; Eph. 4:8). But on the earth, nothing like that took place. This world is still a place where good and evil exist together.

By purging heaven of all evil, Jesus made it a fit place for the righteous when they die, and by purging Sheol of all good, he made it a fit place for the wicked when they die. Before those changes were made, God loved His dead saints too much to bring them up to heaven, for great evil was there, and they had struggled enough against sin already. Instead, God kept them safe in Paradise, in the heart of the earth, within sight of the wicked but safe from them and the tormenting flames.

The Son not only arranged but also maintains the present state of things in creation. By the will of God, the Son, the living Word of God, created these heavens and this earth, “and by the same Word, the heavens and the earth which exist now are being kept in store, reserved for fire until the Day of Judgment and the damnation of ungodly men” (2Pet. 3:7). In God’s time, the Son will destroy these heavens and this earth and provide God’s obedient children with a new heaven and earth, where nothing but righteousness dwells (2Pet. 3:10–13; Rev. 21:1). The first time the Son came, he set things aright everywhere except here, where we live. When he returns, he will reign over this wicked world for a thousand years and then set things aright everywhere. For now, however, the righteous must continue in a world that “lies in wickedness” (1Jn. 5:19). That is one reason we needed Jesus to teach the parable of the Wheat and the Tares; it shows us how to deal wisely with the evils around us.

Judgment Day in Heaven

The purging of heaven after the risen Son was glorified was heaven’s Judgment Day. Michael, Gabriel, and others like them were spared God’s wrath, but not Satan and his angels. Until that moment, when the Son was crowned by God, there was no judgment for Satan and his angels to face, for the Father had determined that once the Son was revealed, he would be the Judge of all, whether in heaven or on earth, living or dead (Jn. 5:22; 2Tim. 4:1). Peter warned the saints that Judgment begins at the house of God (1Pet. 4:17), and it began with God’s house in heaven when Satan received from the Son the merciless judgment that he had so many times demanded for others.

In the book of Job, Satan said that God had erected a hedge around Job, protecting him and his family from harm (Job 1:10). What Satan did not know is that God had also erected a hedge around him, protecting him and his angels from the judgment which His hidden Son would one day execute against them. That protective hedge was removed when the Son took his place beside the Father. He then accomplished what Job spoke of: “By His Spirit, heaven will be clean, for His power will have pierced the fleeing Serpent” (Job. 26:13). Jesus once told his disciples that he saw Satan “falling like lightning out of heaven” (Lk. 10:18), but that was in a vision of things to come, for Jesus later made it clear that it had not yet happened (Jn. 12:31). He knew that the hedge which was protecting Satan would be taken away only when he was glorified.

“Rejoice, O Heavens! Woe to the Earth!”

Among faithful heavenly beings, there was rejoicing when Satan and his angels were cast out (cf. Rev. 12:12a). For them, heaven must have suddenly felt cleaner. There had been wickedness in their midst for thousands of years which they must have felt, but could not understand. Remarkably, a Voice commanded them to rejoice when it happened, and perhaps they needed to be told to rejoice and to have it explained what was making them feel better:

Revelation 12

10. I heard a great voice in heaven saying, “The Accuser of our brothers has been cast out, who prosecuted them day and night before our God!

. . . .

12a. For this, rejoice, O heavens and those who dwell in them!”

Then, from the same Voice came a lament for us, the inhabitants of earth, for the Accuser’s new home would be here:

Revelation 12

12b. “Woe to the earth and the sea! For the Accuser has come down among you, having great anger, knowing that he has little time.”

Because the Son of God cast Satan and his angels down to earth instead of to somewhere else, we now have to deal with the crafty spirits that heaven had to deal with for a long time. However, with the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, Jesus gave us some insight into how the Father dealt with evil while it was in His presence, and with Jesus’ patient and kind treatment of Judas, he showed us how to follow the Father’s example.

Satan Lost His Job

Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and the Tares helps us understand that Satan was not cast out of heaven merely because he was wicked. Satan had been wicked in heaven for thousands of years before he was cast out. God cast Satan out of heaven because a new covenant of “grace and truth” had replaced the law, as John said: “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (Jn. 1:17). The law of Moses was glorious so long as it was in effect, but when the Son of God was revealed, his glory surpassed the law’s glory to such an extent that the law was left with no glory at all (2Cor. 3:7–11). And when the law lost its glory, Satan lost his job as heaven’s Prosecutor of the law.

To use Preacher Clark’s parable, the new manager of the company, Jesus, eliminated Satan’s position. A prosecutor of the law was no longer needed because observance of the rites and rules of the law was no longer the standard by which God’s people would be judged. Now, instead of a Prosecutor in heaven, we have “an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1Jn. 2:1), and that single change makes this covenant far better than the old one, being “established upon better promises” (Heb. 8:6). God’s people are still governed by a law, but it is “the perfect law of liberty” (Jas. 1:25), which means that we will be judged by what the Son has liberated us to do, namely, to live without sin in God’s kind of righteousness.

As long as Satan was heaven’s Prosecutor, the standard for judgment was how well people observed rites and rules. Proper form was crucial to Satan because proper form provided him with a standard by which he could make judgments, but that standard of “commandments contained in ordinances” is what Jesus abolished on the cross (Eph. 2:14–15; Col. 2:14–15). And when Jesus did away with handwritten rules and rites, he rendered Satan useless as a Prosecutor. Isaiah did not understand any of this when the Spirit moved upon him to prophesy that the Messiah would not make judgments based on what human senses can perceive:

Isaiah 11

2. The Spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah,

3. and He shall make him discerning in the fear of Jehovah. He will not judge by what his eyes see, nor will he make decisions by what his ears hear.

Jesus condemned the leaders of Israel because they made their judgments based on appearances (Jn. 8:15), and he commanded his followers not to do that (Mt. 7:1), telling them to make “righteous judgment” instead (Jn. 7:24). Righteous judgment is never wrong, for it comes from God’s Spirit. When Jesus commanded his followers to make righteous judgment, he knew that they could not yet do so, but he also knew that he would soon make it possible for them to obey that commandment.

If we judge by what we see and hear instead of by the Spirit, we can only make judgments “in the flesh”, as Paul would say it. With our own kind of life, it is impossible to judge otherwise. But to judge on the basis of what can be seen or heard is to judge on the basis of form, not substance. God sees what is behind the mask. He once told the prophet Samuel, “God does not see as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but Jehovah looks at the heart” (1Sam. 16:7b). The eye and the ear cannot detect the condition of someone’s spirit.

The Prosecutor Becomes a Persecutor

The Accuser being castout of heaven does not mean that Satan stopped accusing; it just means that his accusations are no longer made in heaven’s court. As I have said, God is still God, and Satan is still Satan. Paul taught that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29), and God has not revoked Satan’s calling or his anointing to be an Accuser of those who err. The difference is that now, he does his work on earth. Peter warned the children of God that Satan is wandering about the earth, “seeking whom he may devour” (1Pet. 5:8), and the part of the anatomy that devours is the mouth. So, it is with accusations that Satan turns both the world and unwary believers against God’s faithful servants.

The hearts of new believers are prime targets of such slander. Their purity is often “devoured” by Satan and his sons when they feed them information about past errors of elders in the Lord who are now clean in God’s sight. That is why Paul straitly warned young Timothy never to receive an accusation against an elder unless two or three witnesses were present (1Tim. 5:19).^[116] Whenever information about an elder comes to you, you should ask yourself, “Why is this being told to me?” And it would be wise to suggest to the person bringing the information that he follow Jesus’ instructions concerning how to deal with a brother who has erred (Mt. 18:15–17).

Righteous men may fall seven times, Solomon said, but God will raise them up every time (Prov. 24:16) because they hope in His mercy. With compassion that is new every morning (Lam. 3:22–23), God forgives and renews the joy of the fallen, and buries their sins in the fathomless sea of His love.

Micah 7

18. Who is a God like you, taking away iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance? He will not retain His anger forever because He delights in mercy.

19. He will repent; He will have compassion on us; He will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea!

But Satan does not forgive and forget. He brings to light past errors of cleansed saints and then watches those provable facts poison souls against them. Men’s accusations are often completely untrue, but to fabricate accusations has never been Satan’s style. He has always been wiser than to make false accusations that can be disproved, and he has always prided himself on being correct. When someone transgresses, Satan sees a hopeless and damned soul, but not Jesus; all he sees is another opportunity to demonstrate his Father’s goodness, and he is eager to do it.

My father taught me that when someone errs and does not repent, for anyone to bring up that error against him may be considered prosecution. However, when someone errs and does repent, then to bring up that error against him is not prosecution; it is persecution. Paul, for example, did much evil to the saints before Jesus washed his sins away, and Satan and his sons used Paul’s former evil deeds to slander him to believers who were not yet established in the Faith. They persecuted Paul with factual information about his past. This is how heaven’s former Prosecutor, in doing what he had always done, persecutes those who have been cleansed by the blood of Christ. He is cursed to be unable to do good, not even with facts that he can prove. In his mouth, even accurate information is transformed into slander.

Jesus Is for Us

No one in God’s presence now feels superior to His people, as Satan did. Since Jesus purged heaven of all evil, every creature in heaven is for us, and a most important task God gives His angels now is to minister to us who believe in His Son (Heb. 1:14; Mt. 18:10). Most of all, Jesus is for us. He does not accuse us to the Father or demand merciless justice when we fall. On the contrary, he intercedes for us (Jas. 5:11; Heb. 7:25), for he knows what it is like to live in this world, surrounded by wicked spirits:

Hebrews 4

14. Having, therefore, a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.

15. For we do not have a high priest who cannot be touched by our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in every way that we are, without sin.

16. Let us, then, boldly draw near to the throne of grace, that we might receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

So what, then, if Satan is still Satan? Jesus is still Jesus. And if Jesus has the ear of God and is for us, who can be against us?

The Life of the Creator

On the day of Pentecost, God’s life completely recreated those who received it. The first evidence that Jesus’ followers had received a new kind of life is that they began to miraculously magnify God in languages they had never learned (Acts 2:1–11).^[117] But speaking in unlearned languages was just the beginning. Nothing is impossible in God’s kind of life, and with that life, Jesus’ disciples began performing miracles, just as Jesus had told them they would do (Jn. 14:12; Mk. 16:17–18), so that the miraculous became the norm among those earliest believers:

Acts 5

12a. Many signs and wonders were continually being done among the people through the hands of the apostles.

. . . .

15. And the sick were carried out into the streets and were laid on beds or pallets so that when Peter came by, his shadow might fall on some of them.

16. And a multitude from the surrounding cities also came to Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those troubled by unclean spirits, and they were all being healed.

With a word, the apostles could give life (Acts 10:44–47), and with a word, they could take life away (Acts 5:1–11). But more importantly, after receiving the Spirit, the apostles began to truly know God. Jesus promised that when the Spirit came, it would guide them into all truth and remind them of things he had told them (Jn. 16:13; Jn. 14:26). The phrase, “Then I remembered the word of the Lord,” was undoubtedly said by the apostles more than the single time it is recorded (Acts 11:16). As the disciples grew in knowledge of God and His Son, they must have lived in a constant state of amazement. The scriptures they had known since childhood became new, for they could see the Son everywhere in them.

A Shadow of Heaven

The sanctuary of God in the Old Testament was a most important shadow of the Son. The author of Hebrews calls the Old Testament sanctuary “the figure of heavenly things” (Heb. 9:23, 24), for it was designed by God as a replica of heaven, where Christ now serves as High Priest. Once the sanctuary was consecrated, a sin committed within it brought a swift and severe judgment (e.g., 2Chron. 26:16–20), even death (Lev. 10:1–2). Nothing unclean was allowed within God’s sanctuary.

One brother, upon learning this, asked how the Old Testament sanctuary could have represented heaven if evil beings lived in heaven for millennia without being harmed by God. Wouldn’t God have punished them, he asked, if sin was punished in the earthly replica? The answer is that the sanctuary was a shadow of heaven as it would be after the Son purged it. Since the Son consecrated heaven with his blood, nothing unclean has ever been allowed in it.

Purified by Blood

Moses’ purification of the earthly sanctuary with animal blood prefigured Christ purifying heaven with his own blood:^[118]

Hebrews 9

19. When every commandment of the law had been spoken by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of bullocks and goats, along with water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and he sprinkled both the book itself and all the people,

20. saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for you.”

21. And both the tabernacle and all the utensils of the ministry he likewise sprinkled with the blood.

Hebrews 9

11. But Christ, as a High Priest of good things to come, appearing in a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made by hands (that is, not of this creation),

12. neither with the blood of goats and oxen but with his own blood, entered once for all into the sanctuary, obtaining eternal redemption.

The author of Hebrews further explained that

Hebrews 9

22. Under the law, almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.

23. So then, it was necessary that the figures of heavenly things be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

24. For Christ did not enter into holy places made by hands, the figures of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.

Another Kind of Fire

The consecration ceremony for Aaron, Israel’s first high priest, was another Old Testament shadow of the Son. Aaron went through seven days of consecration in Moses’ tabernacle before he began his ministry, offering his first sacrifice before God (Lev. 8, 9).^[119] So, Jesus spent seven days of consecration in God’s true tabernacle before he began his ministry, offering himself as a sacrifice to God.

At Mount Sinai, when God accepted Aaron’s first sacrifice, “fire came out from before Jehovah and consumed the burnt offering. . . . And all the people saw it, and they cried out and fell on their faces” (Lev. 9:24). But when God accepted His Son’s sacrifice, another kind of fire came out from the Lord, the fire of the holy Spirit, and it consumed the sins of the disciples. They, too, cried out, not in terror but in joy, and not because the fire was consuming a dead animal but because the fire of the Spirit was consuming them! David considered the animals blessed that were placed on God’s altar and consumed (Ps. 84:3). He never dreamed that a man might one day be blessed to be “a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1), consumed by an invisible fire from heaven.

Everything Ruined

The Spirit prophesied through David several times about the Messiah being made King by God, as in the following scriptures:

Psalm 2

2. The kings of earth set themselves, and the rulers assembled themselves together against Jehovah and against His Messiah,

. . . .

4. He who dwells in heaven will laugh. My Lord will mock them.

5a. He will say to them in His wrath,

6. “In spite of you, I have enthroned my King upon Zion, my holy mountain.”

Psalm 110

1. Jehovah said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”

The moment that coronation took place, Satan was confronted with the fact that God was not the kind of God he had always thought Him to be. In an instant, his dream of a co-regency with God vanished. Satan’s prosecution of transgressors of the law and all his other efforts to maintain God’s favor and the admiration of heavenly beings had been done with all his heart, but his heart was perverse. Everything he had done, he had done out of love for himself, not God. And now, with Jesus seated on the throne which he had thought would be his, Satan did not feel that he had been treated fairly. But then, what fool ever thinks that he has been treated fairly when he reaps what he has sown?

The resurrection and ascension of Jesus ruined everything, from Satan’s point of view, and when he was cast out, Satan was neither afraid nor ashamed, but furious (Rev. 12:12). He had zealously done everything God had ever told him to do, and he saw himself as having been perfectly righteous. But the Son knew his heart, and he judged Satan according to God’s kind of righteousness, not the kind Satan knew, that is, maintaining a righteous appearance.

If righteous judgment ever seems right to a fool, it is only when it is applied to someone else. Rather than humbling themselves and crying out to God for mercy, proud fools like Satan respond to God’s righteous judgment by pitying themselves as victims of it. And seeing themselves as victims, they can justify an angry response to it, even acts of retaliation. Heaven’s former Prosecutor pities himself as mistreated and misunderstood. If he were a human, living in modern Western culture, he would bring a lawsuit against God for entrapment . . . and win.

“Treason! Treason!”

What could Satan have thought when Jesus came back from the dead? He must have been confused. It does not appear that he was afraid, though, for he did not flee from heaven during the forty days that the resurrected Jesus walked on earth. Besides, he had seen other people raised from the dead (e.g., 1Kgs. 17:17–24). Nor did he know that Jesus would ascend into God’s habitation; no human had ever done that (Jn. 3:13). If Satan and his angels had known that Jesus would ascend into heaven, and if they had known what he would do to them when he was glorified, it is unlikely that they would have stayed around in heaven waiting for it to happen. But they were there in heaven when Jesus ascended, and they were still there a week or so later when Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice to God; otherwise, they could not have been there to be cast out.

One can only imagine how Satan’s countenance fell when the Son of God, for the first time since creation, took his place at his Father’s right hand. Satan probably felt betrayed, the same way Queen Athaliah felt betrayed when the righteous high priest Jehoiada revealed to the people that a descendent of David named Joash was alive and had been in hiding in the temple. That murderous woman thought she had rid the earth of all of David’s descendants so that she could reign unmolested in Judah. When she saw Joash standing there wearing the crown, Athaliah indignantly tore her robes and screamed, “Treason! Treason!” as though she was the victim of a crime (2Kgs. 11:14). Satan probably felt similarly wronged when the Son was brought by God out of hiding, wearing a crown, and took his place at the Father’s right hand. Why else would he have been angry?

Mysterious Fellowship

What angers Satan most is something he cannot understand, namely, the mysterious, sweet fellowship of the Father and the Son, which they also share now with those who “walk in the Spirit”. Ungodly people are like that, too. They hate the fellowship of the saints, but without understanding what it is they really hate. They imagine a host of wrongs in believers, just as Jesus said they would do:

Matthew 5

11. Blessed are you, when people revile and persecute you, and say every evil thing against you falsely, for my sake.

12. Rejoice, and be glad! Your reward is great in heaven, for that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

There is nothing Satan or the world would not do to destroy the fellowship of the Father and His children. At the same time, there is nothing they can do to destroy it. They don’t even know what it is, for they have never experienced it, and never will. It is as David told young Solomon, “The way of the wicked is like darkness; they do not know at what they stumble” (Prov. 4:19).

Jesus told his beloved disciples,

John 14

16. I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Comforter so that He might abide with you forever,

17. the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot receive because it neither sees it nor understands it. You know it because it abides with you, and it shall be in you.

This invisible fellowship in the Spirit is what Paul was speaking of when he told the saints, “Your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). John also spoke of this hidden fellowship when he said, “Behold, what great love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called the children of God! The reason the world does not know you is that it did not know Him” (1Jn. 3:1).

The wicked want God’s children to feel about themselves the way they feel about them, that they are misguided and missing out, but it is the ungodly who are misguided and missing out, for they are missing out on life itself: fellowship with the Father and the Son.

Haman

Earlier in this chapter, I suggested that in heaven God engaged Satan in a conversation that was foreshadowed by the Old Testament conversation between Persia’s King Ahasuerus and wicked Haman. In that conversation, King Ahasuerus asked Haman what should be done for the man whom the king had chosen to honor (Esth. 6:6). Wrongly assuming that the king had him in mind to honor, Haman proposed several grandiose honors (Esth. 6:7–9), which the king then bestowed upon Mordecai, whom Haman greatly despised. If God and Satan did have such a conversation, it would provide us with yet another justification for the book of Esther to be in the Bible.

What a prophetic conversation it would have been between Haman and the Persian king if God did ask Satan to suggest honors that He might bestow upon the one He wanted to especially honor, knowing that Satan would expect himself to be the one! And if so, did Satan suggest that God exalt such a one “above the heavens”, and give him “a name above every name”, and grant him “all power in heaven and earth”, and command that “every knee should bow, and every tongue confess” that such a one was “Lord of all”? And did he suggest that God exalt that person so highly that there would be no access to God except through him and that no worship of God would be acceptable except it be in the name of that special, chosen one? Those are certainly the sort of honors Satan wanted for himself.

But alas, we are told nothing of such a conversation in heaven, and so, we will deny our imagination any more of its pleasure for the time being.

Paul

After giving his Spirit-filled disciples time to mature in knowledge, God called a young man named Saul of Tarsus and filled him with the Spirit. Then, not long afterward, He carried Saul, now called Paul, up into heaven and revealed to him a gospel which the apostles did not anticipate. Paul called that new gospel the “gospel of the Gentiles”, and it was so advanced in the knowledge of God that it challenged the faith of even Jesus’ apostles. Peter acknowledged the great anointing that was on “our beloved brother Paul,” but at the same time, he admitted that Paul taught some things that were hard to understand (2Pet. 3:15–16).

Paul’s gospel was the next step in the knowledge of God. It was knowledge which Jesus’ own apostles did not have until Paul brought it to them. The best among them, such as Peter, James, and John, acknowledged the unexpected truth which Jesus had revealed to Paul (Gal. 2:7–9), but others struggled with it, and a number of them outright rejected both Paul and his gospel.^[120]

“The Witness That God Has Given”

A primary purpose for God sharing His life with mankind was to provide proof of His acceptance of the Son’s sacrifice. “The Spirit is the witness”, John would write, “because the Spirit is truth” (1Jn. 5:6). No news reporters were in heaven, of course, when the Son offered himself to the Father as a sacrifice for our sins. No cameras or microphones recorded that awesome, holy moment. According to the Old Testament shadow, when Israel’s high priest went into the Holy of Holies to present the blood of sacrifice for the sins of the nation, no one, not even the other priests, were allowed in the tabernacle (Lev. 16:17). In the Son’s case, then, even the holy creatures of heaven would have been barred from witnessing the event. Otherwise, the Spirit would not be the witness, as John said. It would only be one of many.^[121]

The love for mankind that attended the grace given at Pentecost came at such a price, and the mercy shown was so completely undeserved, that to refuse it is a damnable offense. John said that whoever refuses to receive God’s witness to His Son, the baptism of the Spirit, is calling God a liar: “He who believes in the Son of God has the witness within him; he who does not believe God has made Him a liar because he has not believed in the witness that God has given concerning His Son” (1Jn. 5:10). On the other hand, wrote John, whoever humbles himself to receive Jesus’ baptism of life “has set his seal that God is true” (Jn. 3:33).

The Scriptures tell us that God is love (1Jn. 4:8). That means that God wanted a personal relationship with us, and He made that relationship possible through the Spirit that His Son purchased for us. God never delighted in sitting on His throne and watching His people perform ceremonies. The prophets were moved by the Spirit to say as much, though none of them understood what the Spirit was moving them to say:

Psalm 51

16. Truly, you do not delight in sacrifice; otherwise, I would offer it. Burnt offering does not please you.

Micah 6

6. With what shall I come before Jehovah and bow myself to the most high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with year-old calves?

7. Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, with myriads of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression – the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

Hebrews 10 (quoting Ps. 40:6–8)

5. This is why, when coming into the world, [the Son of God] said, “Sacrifice and offering have not pleased you, but a body you have prepared for me.

6. In whole burnt offerings and such for sin, you have taken no pleasure.

7. Then I said, ‘Behold, I go (in a roll of a book it is written of me) to do your will, O God.’ ”

God sent His Son to make the way for us to worship God the way He always wanted to be worshipped, spiritually and truly (Jn. 4:24). Isaiah prophesied of the coming time – our time – when performing carnal ceremonies in a sanctuary built by men instead of worshipping God in the Spirit would be a capital offense:

Isaiah 66

1. Thus says Jehovah: Heaven is my throne, and the earth, my footstool. Where is this house that you would build for me? And where is this resting place for me?

. . . .

3a. Slaughtering one of the herd will be like killing a man; sacrificing one of the flock, like breaking a dog’s neck; offering up a gift, like offering up blood from a pig; burning incense, like blessing an idol.

Jesus told the elders of Israel (Mt. 12:7) that if they understood this one statement from Hosea 6:6, they would never again misjudge or condemn an innocent soul: “I delight in mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Christians’ ignorance of that verse has resulted in them devising a multitude of lovely Church ceremonies, but they are all as abominable to God as they are appealing to the flesh. Satan’s ignorance of the meaning of that verse from Hosea is the reason he never understood why God called His seat in the sanctuary the “mercy seat”. Had it been up to Satan, he would have called it the “judgment seat” instead.

Knowing, Not Believing

The plethora of religions on earth is proof enough that humans can be talked into believing almost anything about God, and they can be passionate about what they are taught, as history’s many religious wars demonstrate. Throughout history, millions have given their lives and/or taken the lives of others because they believed the wrong ideas about God which they were taught. By receiving the life of God, however, those who believe in Jesus can know the Jesus in whom they believe. Without God’s life, we can sincerely believe in God, but we can never know Him. This is why Paul said that without the Spirit, no one can say (and know it to be true) that Jesus is Lord (1Cor. 12:3).

Jesus baptized Preacher Clark with God’s kind of life in 1925 when he was a Freewill Baptist minister, and after he was expelled from that sect for receiving God’s life, he grew in grace and in knowledge until his death in 1989. One of the many lessons he learned from his long years of experience, he said, was that anything we believe can be a lie as far as we know, and so, he exhorted us to strive to know God rather than merely believe in Him. He often quoted the apostle John: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you might know” (1Jn. 5:13a). He taught us that a newly born child of God knows his heavenly Father no better than a newly born human knows his earthly father and that we must pursue the knowledge of God after being born again if we hope to ever know Him. “The day you receive God’s life,” he would tell us, “is your first day in God’s school.” The apostles were grieved when their converts did not grow in the knowledge of God (cf. 1Cor. 3:1–3; Gal. 4:19–20; Heb. 5:12–13), and they were thrilled when they did:

1Corinthians 1

4. I thank my God always for you, for the grace of God which is given to you in Christ Jesus,

5. because in every way, you are enriched in him in all speech and in all knowledge.

3John 1

4. I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in truth.

Accepting the Son

I have emphasized repeatedly the importance of what took place in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, when God first shared His kind of life with man. However, God’s life being shared with men on earth was not the result of the Son’s sacrifice alone; God’s acceptance of it was required. Everything depended on that. Without the Father’s acceptance, there would have been no glorification of the Son, no sitting at the Father’s right hand, no outpouring of the Spirit, no purging of heaven, and no redemption of fallen man. Everything depended on the sacrifice being accepted.

Nowadays, two popular pleas of Christian ministers are for sinners to “accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” and to “make Jesus Lord of your life.” But neither of those pleas makes any biblical sense. First, no human can make Jesus Lord of his life. God has already made him Lord of everybody’s life. God has given Jesus “a name that is above every name” so that he is “most blessed, forever.” We can add nothing to the Son, much less make him anything. Nor is it possible for us to accept the Son of God because the greater does the accepting, not the lesser. The only One who has ever accepted the Son is the Father, for He alone is greater than the Son (Jn. 14:28). And it is because God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice and anointed him to be Lord of all that refusal to submit to Jesus is a damnable crime.

We have no power to make Jesus anything; we can only submit to who he is. And it puffs us up to think that we can accept Jesus; rather, Jesus makes us acceptable to God (cf. Eph. 1:3–6; 1Pet. 2:5).

Chapter 8

The Revelation of the Father

The Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we might know Him who is true.
1John 5:20a

“No One Knows the Father”

We can no more write a chapter about the true God without reference to His Son than we can write about the sun without reference to its light and heat. The sun is more than the light and heat it produces, but without the light and heat, we would not even exist to know there is a sun. Likewise, the Father is more than the Son He created, but without the Son, we would not exist to know there is a Father. We could not even look at the sun to learn about it without its light and heat showing us where in the sky to look, and we cannot see God and learn about Him without Jesus pointing the way. “No one”, Jesus said, “comes to the Father except by me” (Jn. 14:6). That is fundamental to the gospel and to this book: “No one really knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone really know the Father except the Son, and he to whom the Son may choose to reveal Him” (Mt. 11:27). It was unheard-of for a man to claim that he alone knew God and that no one else could know God unless he allowed it, but Jesus made that claim, and it is true.

God created the Son so much like Himself that as we learn about the Son, we learn about the Father even if the Father is not mentioned, and our knowing the Son is the only way we will ever know the Father. Without the Son, there is no knowledge of God as He really is. As much as people talked about God before the Son was revealed, no one knew Him. The Jews themselves did not know God, even though He had chosen them to be His people and entered into covenant with them. Not even the prophets, through whom God spoke, knew God, nor did any of the righteous men and women in ancient Israel. Knowing this, Jesus told his disciples,

Matthew 13

16. Your eyes are blessed because they see [me], and your ears, because they hear [me].

17. Truly, I tell you that many prophets and righteous men longed to see the things you are seeing, and did not see them, and to hear the things you are hearing, and did not hear them.

The Passion for Praise

In God’s kind of life, as we saw in Job’s story, there is a kind of humility that is beyond human experience and imagination. It is a humility that seeks the blessing of those over whom it reigns and loves them more than it loves itself. This paradoxical blend in God’s character of supreme humility and supreme power is completely out of step with the world’s concept of greatness. Paul is often quoted as saying, “The love of money is the root of all evils” (1Tim. 6:10), but that is not precisely what he wrote. His actual statement was, “The love of money is a root of all evils.” Other roots of evil exist, as Paul well knew, and perhaps the deadliest of them all is the desire for fame, that is, the honor of men.

Paul exhorted the saints to do nothing in pursuit of earthly glory (Phil. 2:3), and those who humbly obeyed Paul found themselves strangers in the world. In Classical culture, to covet worldly honor was not considered evil; on the contrary, the pursuit of worldly honor was considered laudable.^[122] Highly regarded figures in antiquity, both mythological and real, were comforted in their deaths by knowing they had secured lasting fame for themselves.^[123] Deeds performed by wealthy Greeks and Romans which we might now consider charitable were always motivated by the desire for recognition and praise, never by compassion for the poor. The rich were considered virtuous if they funded public works such as roads, temples, baths, public games, and the like, thus increasing their city’s stature, and with it, their own.

The passion for earthly fame was so prevalent in the ancient world that by the time of Jesus, even Israel’s leaders had succumbed to it (cf. Jn. 12:42–43), and Jesus, seeing the influence of that pagan spirit on those leaders, commanded his disciples not to follow their example:

Matthew 6

1. Beware not to do your alms before men, to be seen by them; otherwise, you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

2. So, whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you the way the hypocrites do in the synagogues and streets so that they might be honored by men. Truly, I tell you, they have their reward.

3. But when you are giving alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,

4. so that your almsgiving might be in secret. And then your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you in the open.

In Christian cultures around the globe, ambition for the praise of men is widely considered shameful, but that is only because of the influence of the gospel of Christ. A famous American novelist described the lust for earthly glory as “the most secret of all passions”,^[124] but that passion became secret and shameful only because the Son of God came and revealed that the desire for earthly glory is vain. Even so, human nature has not changed, and often, people still pursue fame and the admiration of men as the ancients did, by making sure their giving is publicized, though the influence of the gospel causes some to feel the shame of doing so.

The Mind of Christ

Far from pursuing greater glory for himself, the Son of God humbled himself and surrendered all, including his life, for the sake of others. Paul exhorted the saints to follow that supremely meek example:

Philippians 2

5. Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus,

6. who, although existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped after.

7. Instead, he divested himself [of his heavenly comforts], taking on the form of a slave, made in the likeness of men.

8. And being found as a man in appearance, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death – the death of a cross.

Following in Jesus’ footsteps, Paul wrote,

Philippians 3

7. What things were gain to me, these I have counted as loss for Christ.

8a. But more than that, I consider all things but loss for the surpassing value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of everything. But I consider it all dung, that I might gain Christ.

How very strange it must have sounded to the ancient ear for Jesus to say, “I do not accept honor from humans” (Jn. 5:41). People of Jesus’ time must have wondered what Jesus wanted out of life if not worldly honor. Many of them considered him deranged, as we have seen. Even his earthly relatives, including his mother, Mary, thought he had lost his mind (Mk. 3:21, 31–35). God’s humility exposed the madness of men, but they blamed the madness on Him.

Two Kinds of Honor

As explained previously, the lust for fame played a part in the Temptation when Satan suggested that Jesus throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple (Mt. 4:5–6). Satan was not suggesting that Jesus commit suicide; he knew that angels would save Jesus if he jumped. What an impressive show that would have been! And Satan was not the only one who thought Jesus should put his specialness on display and put men in awe of him. Jesus’ siblings also felt he should do it:

John 7

3. His brothers said to him, “Leave this place and go to Judea so that your disciples may also see these works of yours that you do.

4. Nobody does anything in secret when he wants to be publicly known. Since you do these things, show yourself to the world!”

Jesus’ brothers were right to think that those who desire acclaim do not perform their good deeds in secret; however, they did not understand that Jesus was doing good deeds because he felt compassion for lost and hurting souls; he never did anything in order to win the admiration of people.

The kind of honor God gives is reserved for the lowly; the kind of honor men give is reserved for the proud. Those two kinds of honor are so different that no one can seek them both at the same time. And there is no fence between them on which one may sit; every man is after one or the other. Jesus condemned certain elders of Israel for seeking the wrong kind of honor: “How can you believe while receiving honor from one another and not seeking the honor that comes from God alone?” (Jn. 5:44).

Both Satan and Judas were seeking a higher status, which would elicit greater honor from their fellow creatures. Jesus, on the other hand, said, “I am meek and lowly in heart” (Mt. 11:29), and, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn. 14:9).

For Selfish Reasons

None of Jesus’ disciples, especially Judas, whose heart was most like Satan’s, could conceive of anyone submitting to public disgrace and an ignominious death when he had a choice not to, especially if he could choose great glory instead. None of them imagined that Jesus, if forced to make a choice, would choose to be arrested and brutalized rather than use his great power for self gain. A disgraceful death was the opposite of the glory which all of Jesus’ disciples wanted, and they assumed that Jesus wanted it just as much as they did.

Desiring to share in the worldly glory they expected Jesus at some point to seize for himself, the disciples vied with one another for his favor, competing for the highest offices. But competition breeds strife, and the disciples quarreled bitterly at times because they each wanted more glory than the other (Mt. 18:1; Mk. 9:33–34). Even at the Last Supper, after following and listening to Jesus for years, the disciples fell into a quarrel about who among them deserved the most prestigious offices (Lk. 22:24).

It was for selfish reasons that the disciples wanted Jesus to reign in great glory on earth, for he had told them that when he reigned, they would reign in great glory with him (Mt. 19:28). The mother of James and John even came to Jesus to make the case for her sons to be given the seats of highest honor in his kingdom (Mt. 20:20–21). The disciples strove constantly to win from Jesus the most honorable positions the same way Satan strove to win from God the most honored seat in heaven. Jesus’ teaching, that the kingdom of God was spiritual, not worldly (Lk. 17:21), and that it was reserved exclusively for the meek (Mt. 5:5) did not fall on ears that were deaf; it fell on ears that were altogether dead to the ways of God.

God’s patience with Jesus’ disciples determined their fate, just as it determined Satan’s, and just as it determines ours. God’s patience determines everyone’s fate. Peter exhorted those whom God had chosen to “consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation” (2Pet. 3:15a). But for those “born to be caught and killed” (2Pet. 2:12), His patience is their gate to damnation.

Last-Ditch Effort?

In dark Gethsemane, while Jesus prayed and his disciples slept, Satan was no doubt watching Jesus as he fell on his face and cried out, “O my Father! If it is possible, let this cup pass from me” (Mt. 26:39). And later, hearing Jesus tell Peter that God was ready to send twelve legions of angels to rescue him (Mt. 26:53), he must have wondered if the pressure was finally getting to Jesus. During the years of Jesus’ ministry, Satan had heard him speak rather boldly on a number of occasions about having to die (e.g., Mt. 16:21; 20:28; Lk. 18:31–33), and on those occasions, Jesus was not weeping and crying out to his Father for a way of escape. But now, with death at his doorstep, Jesus’ resolve seemed to be crumbling, which, to Satan, would have been an encouraging sign. Was Jesus finally becoming willing to use his power to do such things as turn stones into bread, or hurl himself from the pinnacle of the temple, or fly, or do some other amazing trick to dazzle men and win Jesus the earthly glory that both Satan and those who loved Jesus wanted him to embrace?

But knowing that his heavenly Father never pursued earthly glory, and determined to follow His holy example, Jesus chose to suffer and die rather than to cease being like Him. Jesus’ statement to his disciples, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” holds true even when applied to Jesus’ suffering. The love that motivated Jesus to choose death over his own well-being was a reflection of the Father’s love for us, which tells us that although the Father Himself cannot die (1Tim. 1:17), if He could have died for us, He would have.

It is possible that Judas’ betrayal was a last-ditch effort engineered by Satan to compel Jesus to accept the position of god of this world. If so, when Jesus still refused and let himself be arrested, Satan could then return to heaven with the report that he had done all that he could do to save the Messiah. He had threatened Jesus with torture and death if he did not accept God’s offer to be king of the world, and when Jesus would not yield, torture and death was all that was left for him – by God’s own decree!

Later, after the Spirit came, Jesus’ disciples finally understood that Jesus’ suffering had been the plan of God, and they glorified Him for it:

Acts 4

24a. They lifted up their voice with one accord to God and said,

. . . .

27. “Against your holy child Jesus, whom you anointed, Herod and Pontius Pilate truly were gathered together with Gentiles and people from Israel

28. to do everything your hand and your purpose predetermined to happen.”

The Greatest Is the Humblest

Without grace from God, no one in this world would have believed in Jesus, for his perfect selflessness was contrary to human nature; it would have seemed wrong-headed to any of us. Nor could we have believed, without God’s grace, that when Jesus said, “I am meek and lowly in heart”, he was revealing something wonderful about the Creator. None of the gods worshipped by the world were meek and lowly. It was impossible for men to perceive it until the Spirit came in Acts 2, but while the Son was here among us, he was demonstrating the Father’s great humility as well as His mighty power. That provided men with an undreamed-of perspective on God, to wit, the greatest One of all is also the humblest One of all.

The Father could have justly demanded all glory for Himself, but He freely shared it with the Son, and the Son then with us (Jn. 17:22). The Son learned meekness and goodness by imitating what he saw in his Father, and we may learn the same from the Son’s example. The Father sends rain and sunshine upon both the good and the evil and asks nothing in return (Mt. 5:45), and so, the Son suffered and died just in the hope that someone would value it. They both just love, and move on. Regardless of whether or not people love Him in return, God continually blesses them all because He is by nature good, and the Son followed that example. Said Jesus, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but only what he sees the Father do, for whatever things He does, these things the Son also does, and in the same way” (Jn. 5:19).

In agony on the cross, Jesus prayed for those who were killing him because he was like his Father. And in response to Jesus’ prayer, when the Father poured out His life on the day of Pentecost, it was offered even to the murderers of His beloved Son – if they would only humble themselves to the one they had just killed. Peter delivered God’s incredibly merciful offer:

Acts 3

13. The God of our fathers, has glorified His child Jesus, whom you betrayed and whom you repudiated before Pilate when he was determined to release him.

14. But you denied the holy and righteous one, and asked for a man – a murderer! – to be granted to you instead,

15. and you killed the Prince of life, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses!

. . . .

19. Repent, then, and be converted, that your sins might be blotted out!

Without the Son, without his wondrous story, no one even to this day would believe in a God who is that forgiving. Before the Son came, men everywhere were saying that God is good, as men everywhere still do, but only when we perceive the mercy that God extended to the ones who killed His beloved Son can we perceive how good God truly is. He is supremely kind and loving, just as David often said:

Psalm 36

7. How precious is your lovingkindness, O God! Yea, the sons of men seek refuge in the shadow of your wings.

Psalm 57

10. Your lovingkindness is as high as heaven, and your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Psalm 63

3. Because your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips will praise you.

Such scriptures notwithstanding – and there are many of them – we never could have known how loving and kind God is without the Son coming to earth and demonstrating God’s love for us so that we could understand it.

Honoring the Son as God

One of Jesus’ most astonishing revelations was that it is God’s will for all creatures, not just to honor His Son, but to honor His Son as they honor God ! Jesus said,

John 5

22. The Father does not judge anyone, but has committed all judgment to the Son,

23. so that all should honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son [as he honors the Father] does not honor the Father who sent him.

Because the apostles learned to do that, we find in their writings the Son’s name appearing many times where “God” would normally be. “The gospel of God” is also referred to as “the gospel of Christ” (Rom. 15:16; 1:16); “the day of God” is called in other places “the day of Christ” (2Pet. 3:12; Phip. 1:10); “the Spirit of God” is also called “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom. 8:9); “the doctrine of God” is also “the doctrine of Christ” (Tit. 2:10; 2Jn. 1:9); “the grace of God” is also “the grace of Christ” (Acts 11:23; Gal. 1:6); “the law of God” is “the law of Christ” (Rom. 7:22; Gal. 6:2); “the truth of God” is “the truth of Christ” (Rom. 15:8; 2Cor. 11:10); “the Assembly of God” is “the Assembly of Christ” (1Cor. 11:16; Rom. 16:16); “the mystery of God” is “the mystery of Christ” (Col. 2:2; Eph. 3:4), “the love of God” is “the love of Christ” (Rom. 5:5; 8:35), “the knowledge of God” is “the knowledge of Christ” (2Pet. 1:2; Phip. 3:8), and “the word of God” is “the word of Christ” (Acts 4:31; Col. 3:16). In Philippians 3:8, Paul said that he counted everything in this life as dung just to know Christ. Paul did not say “just to know God” because he understood that to know Christ is to know God, for the Son is the perfect reflection of the Father.

Before the Son was revealed, to honor anyone as God was honored would have been sin, but now, because it has been revealed that the Father desires that His Son be honored as He is honored, it is sin not to. The apostles would never have done such a thing without a convincing revelation, but when the Spirit brought it to them, they rejoiced to know that the name of the Son should be attached to everything that is of God, for everything that is of God comes through him (cf. Jn. 1:3). That there existed someone with God worthy of such honor was the most unexpected revelation in the history of salvation.

The gospel of John begins with a declaration of that astonishing revelation:

John 1

1. In the beginning, the Word was there, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2. He was in the beginning with God.

3. All things were created through him, and without him was nothing created that was created.

The Father’s Humility

Perhaps the most incredible expression of the Father’s humility is that in order for a sinner to be forgiven and cleansed from sin in this new covenant, He requires only that the sinner honor His Son as God. The Father will receive into His kingdom anyone who honors His Son as God, regardless of what that person believes about the Father. A person may be a Trinitarian, believing that the Father is part of a triune God, the first of three equal persons of a Holy Trinity, or he may be of the Oneness faith, believing that the Son is himself the Father, or he may understand the truth of the matter, that there is a Father in heaven with His Son at His right hand. None of that seems to matter to God, as far as forgiveness of sin is concerned, so long as His Son is honored as God. In every culture around the world, people who repent and honor the Son as God may receive the baptism of the Spirit, while others who do not honor the Son as God are not granted that grace – regardless of how highly they speak of God. God will receive no praise, no prayer, no worship, and will accept no repentance unless it comes through His Son.

John wrote, “He who believes in the Son has eternal life” (Jn. 3:36a), but John never wrote, “He who believes in God has eternal life.” 1John 2:23b reads, “He who confesses the Son has the Father also,”^[125] but no verse states that he who confesses the Father has the Son also. Conversely, John also said: “Everyone who denies the Son does not have the Father” (1Jn. 2:23a), but no verse states that everyone who denies the Father does not have the Son. We can have the Father only if we have the Son, which is why it was sufficient for Paul to tell the Colossian saints that it was Christ in them, not God in them, that was their hope of glory (Col. 1:27).

Both Trinitarianism and the Oneness faith deny that the Father is a real being, distinct from His Son, but God does not take that into account since they honor His Son as God. This means that if they come to Jesus, they may receive the cleansing baptism of life without acknowledging the Father, and many of them have. However, the opposite is never true. No one has ever received forgiveness of sin without honoring the Son as God, and no one ever will.

The New Thing

When the terrified Philippian jailer ran into the prison and begged Paul to tell him how to be saved from the wrath of God, Paul said to him, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). There was no mention of God in Paul’s reply. Of course, when Paul then went to the jailer’s house and preached the gospel (Acts 16:32–34), he told him the whole story, but the point is that Paul’s answer was all the jailer needed to know in order to be saved. No apostle ever taught that those who confess faith in God will be saved, but they all taught that those who confess the Lord Jesus will be (Rom. 10:9). In that, Paul was not saying that God does not count; he was saying that God is so incredibly humble that He does not count Himself.

Solomon declared, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), but centuries after Solomon, God promised to do a new thing (Isa. 43:19), and in revealing His Son, He did it, putting to shame even the wisdom that He had given to Solomon. The possibility of salvation in the name of Jesus without mentioning the Father, or even believing in Him as a separate being from the Son, is the “new thing” that God did, and without grace from God, even Jesus’ disciples could not have believed it.

How could our heavenly Father be any humbler or less demanding? Of all the many gods that ancient men imagined, they never imagined a God so meek that He would forgive the worst of sinners if they would only honor someone else. That kind of humility and love is so far beyond the imagination of humans that it confused and challenged the best of them when it was revealed.

“Many Gods and Many Lords”

Believing in God will save no one. James pointed out that even demons believe in God (Jas. 2:19). This whole world, which “lies in wickedness” (1Jn. 5:19) and is deceived (Rev. 12:9), believes in God and worships Him. But to the world, Jesus would say as he said to the Samaritan woman, “You do not know what you are worshipping” (Jn. 4:22). The apostles’ mission was never to convince either the Jews or the Gentiles to believe in God; they already did. Rather, their mission was to proclaim the Son, for the revelation of the Son is the gospel. And if men believed that gospel and repented, the Son would then sanctify them by giving them the Spirit, thus making their worship of God acceptable (cf. Rom. 15:16). At Mars’ Hill in Athens, Paul noted the Athenians’ extremely religious mindset, but his message to them was that their worship was in vain because they were not sanctified by God’s resurrected Son (Acts 17:22–31).

The world believes in and worships “many gods and many lords” (1Cor. 8:5), and it always has, but one of the more unsavory truths found in the Bible is that the gods whom people of this world worship are actually demons (Dt. 32:17; Ps. 106:37; 1Cor. 10:20). That was true in the ancient world, and it is true today wherever God is worshipped in a way He does not accept. As we have seen, the Son revealed how God demands to be worshipped: “God is a spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:24). Yet, ignoring that most valuable revelation, Israel and all mankind continued to believe in God as they imagined Him to be and to worship Him as they thought best. But numbers mean nothing to God; what is wrong is wrong, no matter how many people believe it to be true, as Solomon said: “Though hand join in hand, a wicked man shall not go unpunished” (Prov. 11:21). If people are not worshipping God the way God requires, their worship is of the flesh, not the Spirit, and it is demons, not God, who are honored by their worship.

They Will Love Him

If in this book, we were never to mention the Father, but spoke only of the Son, we would still be talking about the Father because the Son is His exact representation. It would be foolish, of course, to intentionally avoid the mention of the Father, for He is there. He is the Father of the Son, and He is wonderful. We want to speak of Him; we want to extol His wonderful works and to serve Him acceptably. Nevertheless, were we to speak only of the Son and omit all mention of the Father, this book would still be about Him, whether we knew it or not.

If those who believe in Jesus but do not believe there is both a Father and a Son are judged worthy to be raised with the righteous dead when Jesus returns, then the Son whom they have loved will present them to his Father (cf. Rev. 15:2), and they will love Him, too, even if they are surprised to meet Him.^[126] The Son told his disciples that “he who hates me, hates my Father also” (Jn. 15:23). But it is also true that whoever loves Jesus loves the Father also, even if he does not believe that the Father exists as a person separate from the Son.

The Son Will Bow

To honor the Son as God does not mean that we honor God less. On the contrary, honoring the Son as God is the only way that we can honor God at all, for God made His Son “the way [to God], the truth [about God], and the life [of God]” (Jn. 14:6). Far from being provoked to jealousy, God is glorified when people humble themselves to His Son. Paul said that in the end, it will be “to the glory of God” that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord (Phip. 2:10–11). This is true if for no other reason than that at the close of this age, the Son himself will bow, along with us, before the Father and turn everything over to Him:

1Corinthians 15

24a. Then comes the end, when he will hand over the kingdom to God the Father.

. . . .

27. He [the Father] has subdued all things under his [the Son’s] feet. But when it says, “all things are subdued”, it is obvious that He who subdued all things under him is an exception.

28. And when all things are subdued under him, then will the Son himself submit to Him who subdued all things under him, that God might be all in all.

The Father and the Son do not compete for praise or glory. The Father has given it all to His Son, and the Son, being like his Father, will give it all back to Him. Moreover, it is the Father’s will that all His children follow their example. Paul gave these exhortations to the saints:

Romans 12

10. Be devoted to one another with brotherly love, preferring one another in honor.

Philippians 2

2. Make my joy complete, that you think the same thing, having the same love, as united souls, thinking one thing,

3. doing nothing through strife or vanity, but with humility, regarding one another as more important than yourselves.

Two Camps

Jesus is the only person in the New Testament books who commanded others to have faith in God (Mk. 11:22). But in omitting the mention of God when speaking of having faith (e.g., Eph. 1:15; Col. 1:4), the apostles were not saying that men should have faith in Jesus instead of God, but have faith in Jesus along with God, as His Son and Servant. Over time, as believers grew less spiritual, they began to analyze the gospel instead of obeying it, and so, they struggled to understand how the apostles could have spoken of Christ Jesus as they did if he were not God Himself. Consequently, they devised various doctrines to explain it and were eventually divided into the two main theological camps previously mentioned: the Holy Trinity camp and the Oneness camp. The simple truth missed by the originators of both those doctrines is that the apostles honored the Son as God only because it was the Father’s will that they do so, not because the Son was equal in any respect with the Father.

When it came to John’s attention that a doctrine had emerged (whether Trinitarian or Oneness in nature, we are not told) which denied that there is both a Father and a Son, John responded by warning believers to refuse it:

1John 2

22b. He is anti-Christ who denies the Father and the Son.

23. Everyone who denies the Son does not have the Father. He who confesses the Son has the Father also.^[127]

24. Let what you have heard from the beginning continue in you. If what you have heard from the beginning continues in you, then you will continue in the Son as well as in the Father.

Anti-Christ

In the first century AD, when the New Testament books were written, the Greek word anti meant “instead of ”, not “against”.^[128] For example, Jesus once asked this question:

Luke 11

11. What father among you, when a son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or also a fish, he won’t give him a snake instead of [anti] a fish, will he?

So, when John spoke of an anti-Christ spirit, what John meant was an “instead-of-Christ” spirit, an alternative to the real Christ and the real Spirit of God, and even in John’s day, there were many of them being offered to people (1Jn. 2:18). Paul also warned the saints that some had begun to proclaim an alternate gospel, which included an alternate Jesus and an alternate holy Spirit (2Cor. 11:4; Gal. 1:6). That has not changed. In offering different rituals and teachings, Christian sects are offering differing gospels, with different Jesuses and spirits for each one. “Denomination” is just another way to say “division”, and God is not divided. The question “To which church do you belong?” is actually this: “In which Jesus do you believe?”

Not Anti-God

Though Satan and his sons in Israel had no love for Jesus, they loved God as they thought God was. This is the reason that the apostle John called Satan’s sons “anti-Christ”, not “anti-God” (1Jn. 2:18). Satan never has been anti-God. Satan’s dream was to reign with God, not instead of Him, but Satan never knew God as He really is. The god Satan loved and served was only a god of his imagination, a god who had no Son from the beginning, a god who loved himself and held Satan in great esteem.

Neither Satan nor his sons knew the real God or His Son, or ever will. Working together in the darkness of their shared ignorance, they eventually devised a religious institution with the word “Christ” in its title. That religious system, Christianity, honors a son that is different from the one who “suddenly came to his temple” at Jesus’ baptism, and it honors a god other than the One who sent him. And in their Babel of spiritual confusion, Satan’s ministers are as confident of God’s approval and as eager to do God service as Satan was, and perhaps still is.^[129]

God’s Humility Saved Many

It was in the early fourth century that those who believed that God is a Trinity of persons joined forces with the Roman Empire and imposed Trinitarianism upon civilization. But God was prepared. His love for souls had already made the way for sincere believers to be saved in spite of the darkness imposed upon them by the new, Christianized Roman Empire. Even though believers were forced by Rome to live according to standards set by Christian rulers, God’s standard did not change, and to be forgiven and cleansed from sin, men still needed only to honor the Son as God. Had God required people to confess the truth, that He is a separate person from the Son, few would have survived, for the Empire outlawed that truth in AD 325 at the Council of Nicea.^[130] Thereafter, to confess the truth and resist Trinitarianism was to court death. However, since the Trinity doctrine does honor the Son as God, and honoring the Son as God is all that God requires, sincere souls could believe that doctrine and still be saved. How good and wise God is! He made a way for His children to live in a corrupt culture run by wicked men, and yet, still please Him enough to be saved.

Jesus once commanded his disciples to do whatever the scribes and Pharisees told them to do, though he forbade them to live as they lived (Mt. 23:2–3), and the disciples who did as Jesus said found favor with God. That wise counsel served many a soul well after the gospel was twisted by Rome into the religious system called Christianity, for many honored Jesus as God in the way that Christian leaders demanded but did not live the way those leaders lived, and so, they also found favor with God. Thus, God’s humility, His willingness to receive into His kingdom anyone who honors His Son as God, saved many, in spite of the Empire’s heavy-handed perversion of the gospel.

Higher Than the Heavens

Much knowledge about God may be gained from the revelation that God began creation with a Son, for the revelation of the kind of Son that God created tells us what kind of God that the Father is. He created the Son with such majesty that the heavens themselves cannot contain it. With the poor instrument of human language, the apostles struggled to adequately describe the glory which God bestowed upon His Son:

Hebrews 7

26. [Jesus is] a High Priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.

Philippians 2

9. God has highly exalted him and bestowed upon him a name that is above every name,

10. that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, of heavenly beings, and of earthly beings, and of those under the earth,

11. and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

When Jesus told his disciples that all power in heaven and earth had been given to him, he was not boasting. He was just telling them how good God had been to him. There cannot be a greater goodness, a more selfless act, than God (1) giving to His Son “all power in heaven and on earth” (Mt. 28:18; cf. Jn. 3:35) and then (2) giving him up for us. The only honor the Father withheld from the Son when this world was created was immediate recognition, and He withheld that only to bless His Son with even greater glory “in the fullness of time”.

It pleased the Father very much to bless His Son with every possible blessing and to make him “most blessed, forever” (Ps. 21:6). The Father’s happiness was to make the Son happy, and the Son was very happy indeed:

Psalm 21

1. The King [Jesus] rejoices in your strength, O Jehovah, and in your salvation, how greatly he rejoices!

2. You have given him his heart’s desire, and you have not withheld the request of his lips. Selah.

3. For you will meet him with blessings of goodness [when he ascends back into heaven]; you will set upon his head a crown of pure gold.

4. He asked life from you;^[131] you gave him length of days forever and ever.

5. His glory is great in your salvation; you will bestow upon him majesty and honor.

6. For you will make him most blessed, forever; you will make him greatly rejoice with your countenance.

7. For the King trusts in Jehovah, and through the lovingkindness of the Most High, he will not be moved.

The Son will never be moved from his happy, honored place beside the Father, and his kingdom will never end (Dan. 2:44; 7:13–14) and will always increase (Isa. 9:7a).

The Happiest Participant

When the Son was first created, he felt how much he was loved and wanted. Trying to pass along to his disciples that sense of being loved and wanted, he told them, “Do not be afraid, little flock; your Father is very pleased to give you the kingdom” (Lk. 12:32). But at the time, his disciples did not even know what the kingdom of God was, or how God would give it to them. What Jesus was telling his bewildered disciples is that it would very much please the Father to share with them His kind of life. And though the Bible does not explicitly say so, we can be sure that when the disciples received God’s life on Pentecost morning and were born of God, the happiest participant in the event was the Father Himself. Since He was in heaven, His great joy is not recorded in the Bible the way the ecstatic joy of the disciples is recorded, but He was probably jumping up and down with joy. We know that the angels were rejoicing because Jesus said they rejoiced when anyone bound in sin is delivered (Lk. 15:7, 10). But it can only be that the angels rejoice because God does. Jesus’ disciples, overwhelmed with the power of God’s kind of life, staggered out into the streets of Jerusalem, drunk with joy and proclaiming God’s greatness in languages they themselves did not even understand (Acts 2:4). And the Father in heaven was having a glorious time as well; it was, in fact, His joy that the disciples were experiencing. His Son was back home, and with His Spirit, He had finally created the family He had always wanted, brothers and sisters for His Son.

The Target of the Arrow

As we have seen, the Son spoke through the prophets many times about his hidden life with his Father. But there is something especially charming about the instance from Isaiah in which the Son described himself as an arrow hidden among other arrows in God’s quiver, waiting for his turn to be taken out and sent by God on his appointed mission: “He made me a polished arrow; in His quiver, He has hidden me” (Isa. 49:2b).

When that very sharp arrow struck its target, heaven and earth were moved, and the pent-up, holy love of God poured from His heart like a river, for the arrow’s target was not man, but God. It was His heart that was pierced by the Son, not ours. We love God only because He first loved us, and His love touched us and changed us only because the Son’s suffering first touched God.

As I have said, the central message of the gospel is that God is a loving Father, and it was His great desire to have us as His children which moved Him to send His beloved Son into this dangerous world to rescue us who knew nothing about Him. The Father loves us more than He loves Himself, and we know that because the Son is His perfect reflection, and Jesus loved us that way. That astonishing truth makes the story of the gospel altogether a story of love.

Simple and Available

The revelation of the Son provides us with a way of escape from vain intellectualizing about an unknowable, remote God. Without receiving that revelation, the best that any of us can do is to pontificate about how incomprehensibly great God is. But such theological blather takes men “away from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2Cor. 11:3) and into the realm of philosophy, which is a corrupting influence on the Faith (Col. 2:8). What draws us back from the brink is the Lamb of God. Jesus Christ is not an idea. He is real, and he really was one of us. He stood where we stand, he felt what we feel, and he showed us how to live God’s kind of life in this sinful world. He came to show us that God is more than incomprehensibly great. He showed us that God is so great that He can make Himself simple and available, so great that He can make Himself known to us, and He makes Himself known to every soul who honors His Son as God.

It is man’s carnal nature to stress God’s inaccessibility, but men do so only to excuse their bondage to ungodliness. Eloquent expostulations about God’s “unsearchable ways” may impress, but they can never deliver from sin and death. If we declare that nobody can ever really know God, then what are we saying but that God has not sent His Son to reveal Him, or that if He did, His Son failed. Genuine faith comes by hearing the genuine word of God (Rom. 10:14–17), but if nobody knows God, then who can preach His word so that people might believe? The doctrine that God is unknown and unknowable sterilizes the ground out of which saving faith should rise; it poisons the souls of men with wrong ideas.

Belief in Christ is belief that the Father is so good and so great that He found a way to make Himself known. Unbelief is the refusal to believe that God is that good and that great. Only fools are content to speak of God as extraordinarily great and let it go at that, but to do so is what our fleshly nature wants. Following that nature, the vast majority of people in this world choose to live out their lives in self-will and die in their sins rather than to believe the simple gospel of Jesus, receive God’s gift of eternal life, and experience His goodness and greatness for themselves.

What love the Father had for us who believe in His Son, to transform us from the desperately sinful creatures we were into saints, and to recreate us as His children, able to know Him and worthy to live with Him and His Son forever! How great and good God is, to make us worthy to stand before Him “without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing” (Eph. 5:27) and to call us “out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1Pet. 2:9). We were “dead in transgressions and sins” (Eph. 2:1), but God sent His Son to give us life so that we might know Him, and by revealing Himself through His Son, God accomplished the impossible in us.

Part Three:

Life in the Father & Son

Chapter 9

The Love of God

The love of God is poured out within our hearts by the holy Spirit which is given to us.
Romans 5:5b

Relationships

David wrote, “All that Jehovah pleased, He did in heaven, and on earth, in the seas, and all deep places” (Ps. 135:6). And according to Paul, we can learn much about God by paying attention to what He was pleased to do: “From the creation of the world, His invisible attributes (namely, His eternal power and divine nature) are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20). Seeing, then, that we may learn about God from what He did in creation, what does it tell us about God that the first thing He created was someone to love – the Son? If in creation, God did only and exactly what He wanted to do, as David said, then His creation of a Son before anything else must mean that God wanted most of all to have someone with Him, someone with whom to share His kind of life.

God could have created everything without a Son, of course, but what can we learn from the fact that He did not want to do that? Instead, He wanted to create a Son as “the reflection of His glory and the exact representation of His being” (Heb. 1:3), giving him the power to create whatever else the Father wanted. The author of Hebrews said that it was through the Son that God created the universe (Heb. 1:2), and John wrote of the Son that “all things were created through him, and without him was nothing created that was created” (Jn. 1:3). The Son was first.

The importance of that revelation can hardly be over-emphasized. It is fundamental to the Faith that God is, first of all, a God of relationships. In the beginning, the Son was there with the Father, not as an idea but as a dearly loved being, and that fact teaches us that before the beginning, God desired a loving relationship, and that holy desire lies at the heart of everything God has ever done. Nothing in creation contradicts that truth, and nothing confirms it so conclusively as does God’s choice to begin creation by creating someone to love, and then loving that person so much that He made him Lord of all and “most blessed forever” (Acts 10:36; Ps. 21:6).

Love

When John wrote, “God is love”, he put into words the meaning of God’s choice to create a beloved Son before anything else. To say that God is love is only another way of saying that God is a God of relationships, for love always has an object. Actually, John’s powerful, simple statement, “God is love”, seems like an understatement when God’s love is experienced and understood. John himself was overwhelmed by the holy love of God revealed in Christ Jesus:

1John 4

7. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

8. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

9. By this was the love of God made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, that we might live through him.

10. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the propitiation for our sins.

11. Beloved, if God loved us like this, we also should love one another.

12. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.

I could go on, as John did, but the point is made. In his short, first epistle, John used the word “love” or one of its forms fifty times, which means that John used “love” about every other verse in that book. John fully understood what the pre-existence of the Son reveals about God, stressing to his readers that they should walk in love because he understood that to be like God, we must live as God does, that is, live in a way that makes for wholesome, loving relationships. God’s love motivates us to take care of each other’s heart, “regarding one another as more important than yourselves” (Phip. 2:3b).

The Ten Commandments

Every commandment, story, prophecy, and wise saying in the Bible was designed by God for the one purpose of leading us into right relationships with one another and with Him. Not one sentence in the Bible was written merely to entertain or inform. If people had not fallen into sin and ruined their relationship with God and with one another, there would be no need for a Bible. But we did fall, and to whichever page in the Bible we turn, we find guidance from God that will restore us to the holiness of right relationships.

The first four of the Ten Commandments direct us toward a right relationship with God, the first and most important of them being that we are to have no other god besides God. The remaining six commandments direct us toward a right relationship with one another. Stealing, for example, is not the way to have a right relationship with one’s neighbor. Stealing hurts people, and so, God said, “You shall not steal.” Likewise, such deeds as adultery and murder ruin relationships, and so, God forbade them. The sins forbidden in the Ten Commandments are so contrary to good relationships that people in virtually every culture who are concerned for the well-being of others agree that those deeds are evil.

The Greatest Commandment

Once, a crafty expert in the law of Moses attempted to engage Jesus in a theological debate. When he asked Jesus which of God’s commandments was the greatest,

Matthew 22

37. Jesus said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

38. This is the first and great commandment.”

Then Jesus volunteered some additional information:

39. “But the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

40. On these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets.”

So, all the commandments of God, according to Jesus, are summed up by this: “Love God completely, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” That answer left the crafty expert speechless. He had not wanted the answer; he wanted a philosophical debate.

The apostle Paul agreed with Jesus; he wrote, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10). But love is the fulfillment of the law only because the law came from a loving God. To put Paul’s thought into modern terms, one might say, “Love does not hurt people; therefore, love is what God’s law was all about.” Had God been, above all else, a God of power, then the exercise of authority over others would have fulfilled His law instead of love. Or had He been most of all a God of wisdom, becoming a philosopher would have fulfilled the law. Or if He had been a God of splendor, then spectacular architecture would have fulfilled the law. But because God is a God of relationships, love is what fulfills the law. It is only because God is “the God of peace” (Rom. 15:33; Heb. 13:20) that peacemakers are blessed (Mt. 5:9). If God were a God of strife, peacemakers would be cursed instead.

Occasionally, Jesus would find an elder in Israel who sensed what was truly important:

Mark 12

28. When one of the scribes drew near and heard them reasoning together, seeing that Jesus answered them well, he put a question to him, “What is the first commandment of all?”

29. Jesus answered him, “The first of all the commandments is, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God. The Lord is the only one!

30. And you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and with all of your soul, and all of your mind, and with all of your strength.’ This is the first commandment.

31. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

32. And the scribe said to him, “Well said, Teacher! You have spoken truthfully, for there is one God, and there is no other but He,

33. and to love Him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love a neighbor as oneself is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

34a. And when Jesus saw that he had answered with discretion, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

No one is far from the heart of God who considers people to be more important than things.

Defining Sin and Righteousness

It will help illuminate the mind of Christ on this issue if we define sin as “wrong relationships”, for all unrighteousness expresses itself in some attitude or action that undermines right relationships. Righteousness, on the other hand, always contributes to right relationships. But we must not be fooled by the world’s definitions of right and wrong. Even among God’s people, there are “those who call evil good, and good evil; who put forth darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put forth bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter” (cf. Isa. 5:20). Jesus never sinned, and yet, many hated him and considered him to be evil.

In a world like this, it is impossible for even the most upright of God’s children to enjoy peaceful relationships with everybody; however, anyone who is like God strives for good relationships, just as He does. This is why Paul exhorted the saints, “If possible, as much as it depends on you, live peaceably with all men” (Rom. 12:18). Multitudes in this world don’t have peace and don’t want it, but wise children of God live so that they have a peaceful relationship with whoever does want it. Walking in God’s kind of life, faithful children of God “follow after things that make for peace, and the things that make for the edification of one another” (Rom. 14:19). As much as we wish it were not so, it is not possible to safely trust everybody in this world; in Christ, however, it is possible to be the kind of person everybody else can trust.

If everyone around you lived the way you are living, would they be free of sin and happy in the love of God? The Son of God surrendered himself on the cross of Calvary so that he would not be the only one able to answer yes. When the Father and the Son enter into our hearts by the Spirit, their holiness and strength empower us to live so that if any of our relationships are bad, they are not bad because of anything we are doing.

The Only Way

In the Old Testament, God’s true ministers cried out for God’s people to heed the law of Moses, stressing to them that living by the law was the only acceptable way for them to serve God. In this covenant, God’s true ministers cry out for God’s people to heed the Spirit, stressing to them that living by the Spirit is, in this covenant, the only acceptable way to serve God. The law provided Israel’s only access to God, and every true man of God of those days taught that. Now, the Spirit is the only access to God (Eph. 2:18), and every true man of God today teaches that.

Moses and the prophets emphasized to God’s people that the law was their life (Dt. 32:46–47), and everyone in Israel who believed Moses and relied on the law to guide them pleased God and will live forever. Likewise, Jesus and the apostles emphasized to God’s people that the Spirit is their life (Jn. 6:63; cf. Rom. 8:10), and everyone who believes what they taught relies on the Spirit to guide them, and they, too, please God and will live forever.

The Greatest Testimony

As good as any individual’s fellowship with God may be, it cannot compare to the beauty of a group who live together in harmony with Him. The greatest testimony about Jesus that the body of Christ can offer the world is to walk together in the light of God’s life, that is, to enjoy as a body a right relationship with God and His Son, and with one another (Jn. 13:34–35). On the other hand, the worst testimony about Jesus that God’s people can offer the world is to be divided, as they are now, by Christian doctrines and traditions. The lack of unity among believers, the absence of fellowship, darkens their light and prevents them from being the saving witness that they could be. Note that John emphasized the community, not the individual, in the following exhortation:

1John 1

7. If we [not “I”] walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and [if we have fellowship,] the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

This is a humbling truth. The body of Christ may be cleansed from all sin only if members of the body have a right relationship – fellowship in Christ – with one another. Only where fellowship in the Spirit exists can there be God’s kind of government among believers, and only where God’s government is in force can there be peace. And only where peace reigns can children of God learn and grow in true holiness. Fellowship in the light of God affords extraordinary blessings and is greatly to be desired.

Jesus’ last prayer before he withdrew to the garden of Gethsemane was a plea for the Father to grant unity to those who believed in him. Knowing the benefits that would come to a united body, and knowing how effective the testimony of a united body would be to the world, Jesus prayed fervently for us to have it:

John 17

20. I am not asking for these alone [his disciples], but also for those who believe in me through their word,

21. that they all might be one,^[132] just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be one in us, so that the world might believe that you sent me.

22. And the glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they might be one, just as we are one:

23. I in them, and you in me, so that they might be perfected in unity, and so that the world may know that you sent me and have loved them just as you loved me.

When Jesus prayed that prayer, he knew that he was about to die, and for him to take time out of his last few hours to plead with the Father to grant us fellowship with one another tells us that our unity was of paramount importance to him. I believe that it still is.

The Light of the World

It is true that Jesus said, “I am the light of the world,” but to quote only that part of what he said is to misrepresent the point he was making. What Jesus said was, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (Jn. 9:5). So, inasmuch as Jesus is no longer here in the world, he is no longer the light of the world. It is a mistake for believers to point to heaven and declare to sinners that the light of the world is up there. If we could see him, Jesus would be pointing back at us, saying, “I’ve had my turn; now, it is yours.” To sinners, a distant, invisible Being in heaven is no more than an abstract idea, and ideas provide no deliverance from sin and no hope for salvation.

Since the day Jesus’ followers received God’s kind of life, God has had other sons besides Jesus to be lights in this world, for it is God’s life that is the light of the world, not the fleshly body in which it dwells, as John even said about Jesus: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men” (Jn. 1:4). When Jesus ascended into heaven, that light of men left earth with him; there was no light of God’s life remaining in this world because nobody on earth had it. But on Pentecost morning, the light returned! For God poured out His life on believers, just as Jesus had promised, saying, “He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12). In this covenant, either the light of God’s life is shining through us who have received it, or this world has no light. People must see the light, not just hear about it, and they can see it only in someone who is here with them. Neither the Bible nor Jesus is the light of the world – the Bible, because it is a thing, and Jesus, because he is not here.

Paul exhorted the saints to follow him as a faithful servant of God (Phip. 3:17; cf. Heb. 13:7). He could have told them to follow Jesus, but in order for them to do that, they would have had to build another tower of Babel to try to get up to where Jesus is so that they could see him. Christ did not send Paul to tell people to follow a light they could not see. That is not the gospel. Christ expects his ministers, and all God’s children, to be lights so that people may have something to follow. The Spirit’s light, shining through God’s children, can save people from yielding to the temptation to try to make their own way to heaven. In ancient times, men built a physical tower to reach heaven; in modern times, men devise spiritual towers to get there, that is, “commandments and doctrines of men” (Col. 2:22) which produce religious sects. But they are all as vain as was the tower of Babel.

Being the Truth

A messenger from God cannot be separated from the message he brings. When false teachers won the hearts of Paul’s converts in the ancient Roman province of Asia, the grieving apostle did not tell young Timothy, “All they in Asia have forsaken the truth.” Instead, the aged man of God said, “All they in Asia have forsaken me” (2Tim. 1:15). Jesus bore witness to the truth (Jn. 18:37), and he was the truth (Jn. 14:6). The apostles likewise bore witness to the truth, and they were the truth to their generation. God’s servants are called to be His message to the world more than they are called to speak it.

If a minister is not, himself, the light, then he is spreading darkness wherever he goes, no matter what he does; and if he is not, himself, the truth, he is lying, no matter what he says. When demons proclaimed Jesus to be the “holy one of God” or “Son of God” (Mk. 1:24; Mt. 8:29), Jesus ordered them to be silent and cast them out (Mk. 1:25). It was not because they were making false statements that Jesus commanded them to be silent. Every statement that demons made about Jesus was factually true, but the demons themselves were not the truth, and God hates for those who are not the truth to speak even true things about Him: “To the wicked man, God says, ‘How dare you declare my statutes, or take up my covenant into your mouth!’ ” (Ps. 50:16).

Satan quoted from the Bible during the Temptation, but the holy verses he quoted became lies when he spoke them because he is a liar. Men without the Spirit, likewise, can quote the Bible, and often do, but never rightly, even if they think they are doing good. As we mentioned earlier, Satan thought he was doing good in the Temptation of Jesus, and Judas thought he was doing good when he betrayed him. In every case, it is not what one thinks about himself but his spiritual condition which determines the value of what he does. In the hands of those without the light of God’s life, the Scriptures cannot be rightly used. It has been proved a thousand times over that in the hands of ungodly men, the holy Bible is transformed into a tool of deceit. Without the Spirit, no man belongs to God (Rom. 8:9b), and if a man does not belong to God, He cannot rightly use what comes from God.

The Bible needed to be written, but it is only ink and paper. The Bible is “flesh”, that is, a physical thing. It is precious, and God uses it just as He used the law of Moses; nevertheless, whatever is fleshly is contrary to the Spirit (Gal. 5:17). Paul was referring to the Bible, not to pagan writings, when he said, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2Cor. 3:6), and Jesus warned his adversaries that they were foolish to trust the Scriptures to save them. The Scriptures, he told them, point to him, but they did not believe him and would not come to him for the kind of life they needed (Jn. 5:39–40).

Chapter 10

God’s Order: Government

Section 1: Visible Representatives

A child is born for us. To us, a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulder.
Isaiah 9:6a

Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities, for there is no authority but of God; the authorities that exist are ordained by God. Therefore, he who opposes the authority is resisting the ordinance of God, and they who resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
Romans 13:1–2

The Hidden Order

The term “government” is an appropriate term for the kind of relationship enjoyed by the Father and the Son. The Son humbly confessed, “My Father is greater than I” (Jn. 14:28), and in living out that confession, he spoke only what God gave him to speak (Jn. 8:28; 12:49) and did only what God gave him to do (Jn. 5:19–20, 26). And without question, where one is greater than another and has authority to give directives to another, there is government. But the order of the Father and the Son was unique because of the extraordinary love between them (cf. Jn. 3:35; 14:31). That love did not exist between God and the angels or any other of heaven’s creatures; the order they knew was entirely different. Theirs was, and still is, strictly an order of servant and Master. The Father’s spiritual kinship with His Son made it a hidden order that was unknown and unimagined by anyone else.

I explained in Chapter 4 that to aid us in understanding the unique relationship between God and His Son, we humans were created with the capacity to procreate. Having children prepares us to comprehend the revelation of God as a Father, a revelation offered only to us humans. But even if we have no children, we all, from the earliest stages of life, must have had a higher authority, a parent or a guardian, watching over and caring for us. Otherwise, none of us would have survived infancy. So, by God’s design, and though we could not realize it at the time, our experience of being born and cared for laid a foundation in our spirits to understand the Father and the Son’s unique order: government by love in the Spirit instead of by rules. Jesus prayed earnestly for us, that God would admit us into their hidden order so that we might know that love:

John 17

11b. Holy Father, keep them in your name which you have given to me, that they may be one, just as we are.

. . . .

20. And I am not asking for these alone, but also for those who believe in me through their word,

21. that they all might be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be one in us, so that the world might believe that you sent me.

22. And the glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they might be one, just as we are one:

23. I in them, and you in me, that they might be perfected in unity, and so that the world might know that you sent me and have loved them just as you loved me.

Paul’s great desire also was for us to experience the blessing of unity that had for so long a time been known only by the Father and the Son:

1Corinthians 1

10. I urge you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing and that there not be divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in the same mind and in the same judgment.

Philippians 2

1. If there be any comfort in Christ, if any solace of love, if any fellowship in spirit, if any tender affections and mercies,

2. make my joy complete, that you think the same thing, having the same love, as united souls, thinking one thing.

John’s hope for the saints was the same as Paul’s:

1John 1

3. That which we have seen and heard we are showing you, so that you may also have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.

It was the fellowship of a shared kind of life which made the order of God and His Son a secret from all creatures. Except for the Son, no one in heaven or on earth ever had fellowship with God or even knew that such fellowship existed until the Son was revealed, and even then, it was revealed only to those who believed in the Son and received God’s kind of life:

Colossians 1

25. I was made a minister by the commission of God which was given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God,

26. the mystery that was hidden from the Aeons [heavenly beings] and from generations of men, but now is revealed to His saints.

A Who, Not a What

The world fails in its pursuit of truth because people seek the wrong thing – or to state it more correctly, they seek a thing. They seek a what instead of a who. God is so completely a God of relationships that even His truth is a who, not a what. Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (Jn. 18:38) because he did not imagine that the truth could be a who, especially the pathetic-looking who standing before him at that moment. When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father but by me” (Jn. 14:6), it should be noted that he said, “by me”, not “by it”.

In this covenant, nobody comes to the living God by means of a dead thing, a what. Under the law of Moses, dead things were of use in the worship of God, but after the Son was revealed, those works of the law were stripped of their glory (2Cor. 3:7–10) and became useless “dead works” (Heb. 6:1; 9:14; Gal. 2:16). No “thing” is sanctified now, only people, and we have access to God only when we receive His life, which sanctifies us (cf. Eph. 2:18). In God’s presence, nothing dead is allowed,^[133] and everything that is of God is hidden in His Son.

John said that the Word of God is a who (Jn. 1:1). Paul said the power of God, the wisdom of God, and the Spirit of God are all a who, the Lord Jesus (1Cor. 1:24; 2Cor. 3:17). The aged prophet Simeon called Jesus the salvation of God (Lk. 2:30), and the Spirit moved the prophets to refer to the hidden Son as the Name of God.

Isaiah 30

27. Behold, the Name of Jehovah will come from far away, burning with his anger and a heavy burden. His lips will be full of indignation, and his tongue will be like a devouring fire.

Isaiah 60

9. Surely, the isles will gather them for me . . . to bring your children from afar . . . to the Name of Jehovah your God, even to the Holy One of Israel, because He will have honored you.

None of the prophets suspected that the Name of God of which they spoke was a living Being whom God would someday reveal, but after the Son was revealed, the apostles knew it, and John also referred to him as “the Name”:

3John 1

5a. Beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the brothers,

. . . .

7. for they went out on behalf of the Name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles.

The government of God is also a who, for Jesus was the living expression of God’s order. When he said, “He who believes in me is not believing in me, but in Him who sent me” (Jn. 12:44), Jesus was only confessing his place in the order that God created.

Even the gospel is a who. Paul’s phrase, “preach Christ” (1Cor. 1:23; 2Cor. 4:5; Phip. 1:15–16) tells us that for Paul, the gospel is Christ and to preach Christ is to preach the gospel. Paul magnified God for revealing His Son to him “so that I might preach him among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:15–16). Before the Son was revealed, no one could preach the gospel, except in veiled language (cf. Heb. 4:2), because no one knew who the gospel was.

The Higher Power

While acknowledging God as the higher power over him (Jn. 14:28), Jesus pleaded with skeptical fellow Jews to acknowledge, before it was too late, that he was the higher power over them:

John 8

23. He said to them, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world.

24. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I am the one, you will die in your sins.”

Jesus’ disciples and others in Israel acknowledged him as the higher power, and after Jesus ascended into heaven, many acknowledged his disciples as the higher power over them. Since that time, through the millennia, wise souls have likewise acknowledged the ones sent by Christ as the higher power. Foolish souls do not acknowledge the order of God; consequently, they live in spiritual darkness, even if they think they are in the light, as did the Foolish Virgins of the following parable.

The Wise and the Foolish

The necessity of knowing the Son, the most important who in creation, is the basic point of Jesus’ parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.

Matthew 25

1. The kingdom of heaven at that time will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.

2. Five of them were wise, and the other five, foolish.

3. Those who were foolish took their lamps without taking oil with them,

4. but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

5. When the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and fell asleep.

6. But in the middle of the night, a loud cry was made: “Behold! The bridegroom is coming! Go out to meet him!”

7. At that, all those virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps.

8. Then the foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil because our lamps are going out!”

9. But the wise answered, saying, “No, lest there not be enough for us and you. Go instead to those who sell, and buy some for yourselves.”

10. And while they were gone to buy oil, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding feast, and the door was shut.

11. Later, the other virgins also came, saying, “Lord! Lord! Open up for us!”

12. But he answered and said, “Truly, I tell you, I do not know you.”

The most important question concerning this parable is, “What was the difference between the wise and the foolish virgins?” The difference lies in what having those extra vessels of oil represents, for other than that one difference, the virgins were all very much alike:

• They all were invited to meet the bridegroom.

• They all knew the time that the bridegroom was expected.

• They all knew where to go to meet the bridegroom, and they all went there.

• They all expected to be allowed into the wedding feast with the bridegroom.

• They all knew to bring lamps.

• They all grew tired and fell asleep as they waited for the bridegroom.

• They all were awakened by the midnight cry, and arose to go meet the bridegroom.

• They all trimmed their lamps so that they could see their way to him.

If you had been looking on at this scene, you would not have seen two groups of five virgins. You would have seen one group of ten, and you might not have even noticed that some were carrying extra oil. They were all no doubt dressed alike, ready for a wedding reception, and were all doing the same things. Jesus called five of them wise because their extra oil meant that they knew the bridegroom would do what he was pleased to do – even if that meant he would do other than what he previously said he would do. So, they brought extra oil in case the bridegroom decided to delay his coming. In doing that, they were saying, “We do only what pleases the bridegroom, and he does only what pleases himself.”

Everything the foolish virgins did was right. They were foolish because of what they did not do, to wit, they did not bring extra oil. And they did not bring extra oil because they did not really know the bridegroom. They acknowledged his authority to give commandments, and obeyed them; they did what he told them to do, when and where he told them to do it. However, they did nothing else because they viewed him not as free to do as he pleased but as obligated to do what he said. They thought that if the bridegroom said it, then he had to do it.

The foolish were those in Israel who thought that God lived by the law which He gave to Israel to live by. The lesson for us is that the Bible as a whole was written for us (Rom. 15:4; 1Cor. 10:11), not for God. He does as He pleases, no matter what the Bible says, and God’s great desire – His very purpose for sending His Son – is that we learn to be led by His Spirit so that we are as free to do His will as He is. This is why Paul said that those who are led by the Spirit are the true children of God (Rom. 8:14) and that to be led by the Bible instead of the Spirit leads to death (2Cor. 3:6). Jesus warned the leaders of Israel to trust him, not the Bible, to save them:

John 5

39. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but they are they which testify of me,

40. and you do not want to come to me, that you might have life.

That is how the foolish thought of God. They would have described the bridegroom as faithful to them, but the wise would have described him as faithful to himself. The foolish pinned their hope on what the bridegroom said, but the wise pinned their hope on who he was. The foolish trusted his words completely; they would have claimed, as a popular Christian phrase goes, that they were “standing on the word”. But the wise trusted him completely; they were standing on knowledge of the Word himself. The foolish knew only what he had said, but the wise knew him who said it.

While the foolish trusted the bridegroom to do whatever he said he would do, the wise trusted him to do whatever he wanted to do, and if on the way to meet them, the bridegroom was pleased to stop and do good for someone, which they all must have known he was wont to do, it was none of their business. Their business was to be ready whenever he came. The foolish knew his words, trusted his words, and staked their lives on his words, but the wise knew him, trusted him, and staked their lives on him. The foolish knew and trusted the what, but the wise knew and trusted the who.

This critical difference between the wise and the foolish means that, in reality, the wise were going out to meet a bridegroom different from the one that the foolish were going out to meet. The foolish were going out to meet the bridegroom as they imagined him to be, a bridegroom made after their own image and “altogether such a one as themselves” (Ps. 50:21). The wise were going out to meet the bridegroom who really was.

Perfectly United

Just as God did not create the Son equal with Himself, so the Son did not create others equal with himself, or equal in all respects to one another. Within the body of Christ, among heavenly beings, earthly nations, and even among animal groups, the Son created levels of abilities and authority. Paul pointed out that even the stars were created with various degrees of glory (1Cor. 15:41). In setting up creation this way, the Son was duplicating the order into which he himself had been created, and it is a hallmark of righteous people that they acknowledge and faithfully occupy their place in the order into which they are created, just as the Son did.

Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the life” for his followers (Jn. 14:6), and the apostles were the same for those to whom they were sent. Every minister of Christ is anointed and sent to be the way that others should follow, to be the truth they should believe, and to be the life they should be living. We are blessed if God grants us the grace to know who in our time is the way, the truth, and the life, for in the kingdom of God, it is not what you know but who you know that matters.

God cannot be separated from His messengers any more than His messengers can be separated from their message. God’s kingdom is perfectly united in a way that the world cannot comprehend. During the Old Testament, the hidden Son of God declared through David that “he who sins against me wrongs his own soul. All they that hate me love death” (Prov. 8:35–36). Paul, John, Peter, and others sent by God could have said the same thing, for the Son sent them just as the Father had sent the Son (Jn. 17:18; 20:21). Anyone who sinned against the apostles wronged their own soul, and anyone who hated them loved death. Just so, anyone today who sins against a messenger of God wrongs his own soul, and anyone who hates God’s messenger loves death.

Immanuel

Whenever God’s order is present among men, it is in the form of a person, and because a person is visible, visible responses will follow. A representative of God is a light from which no one can hide because his visible presence forces a visible response. As long as men think of the Almighty as being far away, in heaven or somewhere like the top of Mount Olympus, they can boast of being devoted to God without being devoted to God at all. When God makes Himself real by sending a real person as His visible representative, it forces the issue and brings to light the spiritual condition of people’s hearts.

The religious leaders who conspired to kill Jesus claimed to be good and faithful stewards of God and even insisted that others should love and serve God, too. When the Son came, his presence gave those leaders the opportunity to prove their love for God by loving him, but they did not. They were committed to God only as a distant Being. As long as they tended the vineyard of God within the confines of their traditions and ceremonies, they could continue to maintain an appearance of devotion. But a messenger from God trumps every element of institutionalized religion because life takes precedence over form; a who is superior to a what. In His kingdom, we humble ourselves to God in heaven by humbling ourselves to a god on Earth, that is, a fellow creature anointed by God to exercise authority among His people (e.g., Ex. 7:1; 22:8–9, 28).^[134]

It is the presence of God, not His absence, that most frightens people. Mankind fears God’s life more than they fear death; that is why most people die in their sins rather than repent and receive His life. Only the wise fear the absence of God’s presence, for they know that without God’s presence, the human condition becomes miserable (Jer. 23:33–40; Hos. 5:15; Amos 8:11–14). When God’s life is near, it convicts people of sin (Jn. 16:8), and people feel that conviction in the presence of visible representatives of God because God’s life is in them. People may not like it, and may not admit it, but they do feel that conviction.

The fundamental reason that people rejected the Son of God is that he was here, with God’s life in him (Jn. 1:4). If the Son had remained hidden or if he had just been a theological idea, something to be discussed in the parlor after supper, he would not have been rejected. But he “was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14), and fallen man does not want God that close to him. Christ Jesus was hated because “God was in Christ” (2Cor. 5:19), and men’s hatred of God was exposed by the way they responded to Jesus. This is what the hidden Son was foretelling when, through David, he said to the Father, “The reproaches of those who reproach you fell on me” (Ps. 69:9). And those same reproaches fall on every messenger whom Christ sends.

Because God’s kind of life was in Jesus, he was the Immanuel (“God is with us”) of whom Isaiah prophesied (Isa. 7:14), and when Jesus left Earth and ascended to the Father, that would have been the end of “God is with us” if God had not sent back His life, the life that was in Jesus. Through the men and women who received God’s life on the day of Pentecost, God began again to be with us. On that day, the body of Christ was created as another Immanuel, another visible representative of the invisible God, and God continues to be with us today through those who have received His life. God will not accept anyone who rejects the body of Christ, for the body of Christ is “God with us” just as Jesus was “God with us”. Men can no more get to God by going around the body of Christ than they can get to God by going around Christ himself (Jn. 10:36).

Persecution

From almost the foundation of the world, those whom God has sent have found themselves in difficult, if not dangerous positions because their clean spirits exposed man’s sinfulness. Jesus’ parable from Matthew 21 sums up the nation of Israel’s maltreatment of God’s visible representatives, but it does more than that. It captures the typical attitude of humans toward those who are God’s visible representatives:

Matthew 21

33. There was a man, a landowner [God], who planted a vineyard, and he hedged it all around, and dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower, and leased it to vinedressers [Israel’s leaders], and then went on a journey.

34. Now, when the season for the fruit was at hand, he sent his servants to the tenants to receive his fruit.

35. And the vinedressers seized his servants; one they beat, and one they killed, and one they stoned.

36. Again, he sent other servants, more than the first, and they treated them the same way.

37. Then, finally, he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.’’

38. But the vinedressers, seeing the son, said among themselves, “This is the heir. Come on! Let’s kill him and seize his inheritance!”

39. And they seized him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him.

As long as the owner of the vineyard was far away, the husbandmen could boast without fear of contradiction that they were good and faithful stewards. But there was no visible representative of the owner with them to put their assessment of themselves to the test. Only when those husbandmen came face to face with the owner’s visible representatives were they exposed for who they really were. The husbandmen hated the son more than they hated the owner’s other representatives because the owner’s son more perfectly represented his father. The murderous envy hidden in their hearts was fully exposed when the son came because he fully reflected his father’s authority and will.

When Peter said that some in the family of God would go astray and “despise government” (2Pet. 2:10), his phrase, “despise government”, meant more than to despise a what. It meant to despise those whom God sent to govern them, for the government of God is always a who. To despise government always means to despise somebody. Those who sincerely desire a right relationship with God will embrace the order of God, and in doing that, they honor the One who determines the order. Jesus repeatedly made this point, as he did in this scene:

John 8

42. Jesus said to them, “If God was your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here, and I have not come on my own, but He sent me.”

. . . .

48. The [rulers of the] Jews answered and said to him, “Don’t we rightly say that you’re a Samaritan, and you have a demon!”

49. Jesus answered, “I do not have a demon! No! I honor my Father, and you dishonor me!”

When “the love of God is poured out within our hearts by the holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5), what is poured into our hearts is the kind of love that is in God’s heart, and His greatest love is His Son. No one filled with the Spirit can say, think, or feel anything derogatory about God’s Son (cf. 1Cor. 12:3) because God never does. Everyone filled with the Spirit happily confesses Jesus as Lord because that is who God has made him (Acts 2:36). That is the order of God. The love created in us by the Spirit loves whoever and whatever God loves, and it hates whoever and whatever He hates.

Encouragement

It is not submission to God that fallen man resists so much as it is submission to God’s representatives. The world does not despise the concept of a distant, invisible God, but it always despises and persecutes the visible fellow creatures whom God has sent to represent Him. Jesus labored constantly to prepare his disciples for that harsh reality:

Matthew 24

9. They will turn you over to persecution, and they will kill you; you will be hated by all nations because of my name.

John 15

20. Remember the statement that I made to you: “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they obeyed my word, they will also obey yours.

John 16

1. I have spoken these things to you so that you will not be offended.

2. They will put you out of the synagogues. In fact, the hour is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God.

When Jesus told his disciples, “He who hates me hates my Father also” (Jn. 15:23), he could just as well have told them, “He who hates you hates my Father also.”

Shortly after Jesus met Paul on the road to Damascus, he warned him of the persecutions he would face if he became one of his visible representatives (Acts 9:16). Paul probably understood well the warning Jesus gave him, for he had himself once hated the visible representatives of Christ. Later, as a seasoned apostle, Paul passed along what he had learned:

Philippians 1

29. It is given to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him but also to suffer for him.

2Timothy 3

12. All who are willing to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

With this, Paul and Peter, with all the apostles, offered the saints encouragement to endure the suffering, that they might obtain the prize of eternal life:

Romans 8

18. I consider the sufferings of this present time to be unworthy of comparison with the glory that shall be revealed to us.

1Peter 4

12. Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which is coming to try you, as though a strange thing is happening to you.

13. On the contrary, rejoice, inasmuch as you are partakers of Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also rejoice and be glad at the revelation of his glory.

14a. If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.

Jesus also encouraged us to overcome the sufferings we must face in this world, just as he overcame them, when he said to the pastor in ancient Laodicea,

Revelation 3

21. He who overcomes, him will I grant to sit with me on my throne, as I also overcame and sat with my Father on His throne.

The Only Credentials for Ministry

Just as in ancient time many claimed to speak for God without being sent by God to do so, many in this covenant claim to speak for Jesus without being sent by him. The essential question for ancient Israelites was, “Whom has God sent to speak in His name?” And the essential question for God’s people now is, “Whom has Jesus sent to speak in his name?” We must know who the Son’s representatives are! We must find them because those whom Christ sends are the door to him, just as Christ is the door to God.

It must be noted that even without an anointed minister, or with an unfaithful one, every one of God’s children may have a direct relationship with the Father and the Son (cf. Rev. 2:18f; 3:1f; cf. 1Cor. 3:22–23). At the same time, it must be remembered that no child of God has ever come to Him except by a man anointed by God (Rom. 10:14–15). Nor will children of God grow in the knowledge of God if God sends them a man and they ignore him.

It is true that Paul said, “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men – the man Christ Jesus” (1Tim. 2:5), but he also said, “We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us” (2Cor. 5:20a). Paul could truthfully say he was an ambassador for Christ only because he had been sent by Christ. God accepts no volunteers for the ministry. Paul went on to say, “We beseech you in Christ’s stead” (2Cor. 5:20b), but he could not have truly besought anyone in Christ’s stead if Christ had not sent him. In order to be a genuine representative of Christ, one must be chosen by God to be one, as the author of Hebrews said:

Hebrews 5

4. No one takes this honor upon himself, but one called of God, as in the case of Aaron.

5. Likewise, Christ also did not glorify himself to be made High Priest, but He who said to him, “You are my Son; today, I have begotten you.”

No one legitimately rules over God’s saints unless God anoints him to do so; God is the source of all genuine authority (Rom. 13:1), especially among His saints. No title bestowed by human institutions, including religious ones, is relevant to God’s kingdom. Some years ago as I was praying, God rather indignantly demanded of me, “What difference does it make, what men say about anything? If men call a man a prophet, does that make him a prophet? Or if men call a man a pastor, does that make him a pastor?” After several such questions, He concluded by saying, “Am I confused by your delusions‽” The obvious answer was no. We may confuse one another with talk, but never God.

Christian ministers often speak of when they were “called to preach”, but Jesus has never called anyone to preach. He called his first disciples to follow him (e.g. Mt. 4:18–19; 8:21–22; 9:9), and then he chose some of them to send to preach. The others proved to be unworthy. The apostle Paul asked the question, “How shall they preach except they be sent?” (Rom. 10:15). The answer is, they cannot. When Jesus calls a man, he calls him to be quiet and listen, and learn from him, not to talk and try to explain the mysteries of God.

One great benefit of possessing God’s kind of life is that we may have His strength to be unmoved by human claims and unimpressed with the grand titles which men bestow upon one another. The only credentials for ministry in the kingdom of God, the only credentials wise saints will acknowledge, is the anointing of God. Human wisdom is foolishness to God, and human abilities can never accomplish His righteousness. There is nothing humans can add to the gospel because there is nothing that humans can add to Christ.

At least twice when Jesus was alone with his disciples, he told them of the powerful position which God had chosen for them within His order, the first time being when Jesus sent them out in pairs to preach in the villages of Israel: “He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the One who sent me” (Mt. 10:40). The second time was at the Last Supper, and in this case, Jesus did not limit that authority to those disciples: “He who receives anyone I send receives me, and he who receives me receives the One who sent me” (Jn. 13:20). That truth applies to anyone God sends. To receive God’s messenger is to receive God, and to reject God’s messenger is to reject God. God’s ministers are God’s order, His government, in visible form, and to honor His ministers is critical to our spiritual well-being because it is critical to our spiritual well-being to honor God.

This was emphasized by Jesus when he told the elders of Israel that on Judgment Day, his disciples would be their judges (Mt. 12:27; Lk. 11:19). Jesus was revealing God’s government to those elders, and he was doing so by pointing to his disciples. He was warning them that his disciples stood between them and God. Unfortunately, they refused to believe him and dishonored his disciples, taking shelter instead behind the whitewashed walls of their religious institution, that is, behind men not chosen by God.

The Right Who

The only way to grow in the knowledge of God is to follow the right who, for God has chosen from the beginning to reveal Himself through a who. Solomon saw that God conceals wisdom deep in the hearts of certain people, like water in a deep well, but prudent individuals, he said, will find a way to draw up that wisdom so they may share in it (Prov. 20:5). Wisdom is something that is acquired (Prov. 1:5), and one acquires it by searching for it in the right place, that is, by mining the hearts of the right people. The Ethiopian eunuch’s question when Philip approached his chariot shows that he knew the importance of finding the right who:

Acts 8

30. Philip heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and he said, “Well now, do you understand what you are reading?”

31. And he said, “How can I, unless someone guide me?” Then he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

Whatever truth you know about God and His Son, you know it only because you heard someone who was sent by God. Every bit of godly wisdom you have gained and every experience you have ever had in Christ is the result of being influenced by the right who, someone who had himself been influenced by the Son, the first and only who that God Himself ever created.

Paul told God’s children, “The things you learned and received and heard and saw in me, these things put into practice, and the God of peace shall be with you” (Phip. 4:9). That statement forced the saints in Philippi to make a decision. Was Paul boasting of his own greatness, or was he confessing, for their good, the who that God had made him, the who that he truly was? They had to decide whether Paul was a spiritual wolf or a genuine man of God. Paul was exhorting them to follow him as Christ’s representative (1Cor. 11:1), but the believers in Philippi had to decide if that was really the case. Merely hearing Paul say so would not benefit them, not if they merely assented that it was true. They had to follow the man.

God’s children are happiest when they occupy their appointed place in the order of God and acknowledge the places occupied by others. When you are in the place that you were created to be, you feel contentment, for your place is not an it. Your place is a who – you! The “place” God has for you is your life as the person God intended you to be from the foundation of the world. Only in that place, only in being yourself in Christ, will you ever experience perfect peace and joy. That is why envy is compared with cancer (Prov. 14:30); it eats away at a person’s gratitude for the who that God has made him. Envy is a tacit way of grumbling about God’s order, and it stirs up strife (Rom. 13:13; Phip. 1:15). To avoid envy and strife, we need only be thankful for who God’s order is and for where we belong in that order, for as we follow the right who into the knowledge of God, we stay content with our portion from God.

Who Is Your Who?

God alone is God and His Son alone is Lord and Savior. God has made Jesus King of kings and Lord of all, but that does not mean that no one but the Son is to be honored. Because the Father and Son are who they are, their choices are to be honored. God’s servants, then, are to be honored, not because they are servants but because of whose servants they are.

Jesus said that many whom he would damn in the Final Judgment would greet him that day as “Lord” (Mt. 7:21–22), but the Lord they believed in will not have been the right one; it will have been one of the Jesuses that the wrong whos taught them. They never knew the real Jesus because they trusted the wrong who and refused to believe the who that God sent. Jesus’ response to those poor people on that day will be harsh: “I never knew you. Get away from me, you who work lawlessness!” (Mt. 7:23).

For those who work righteousness, however, the Son being the Judge is the best news they could have, for he will save every soul who obeys his Father. Speaking for the obedient children of God, the prophet Habakkuk said, “We will not die, O Jehovah, for you have set him on the seat of judgment, and you have ordained him, the Rock, to judge” (Hab. 1:12b).

In every generation, the children of God are called upon to answer the question, “Who is the order of God?” The short answer is Jesus, of course, but if that is all that is said, problems arise because Jesus is no longer here. Jesus was the Father’s who while he was here on Earth representing the Father (Jn. 9:5), but since then, Jesus has sent other whos to represent him. Those whos are God’s order, His government, and the body of Christ needs them.

But who are they? Who we believe is God’s government on Earth in our time is more important to our souls than believing that God is real and that Jesus is the Christ. Even demons believe that God is real and that Jesus is the Christ (Acts 19:13–15; Jas. 2:19). In fact, they know it (Mk. 1:23–24; 3:11). But who influenced them so that they erred and became the damned creatures they are? Who was their who when it came to the things of God? It was Satan, who also knew that God was real and Jesus was the Christ. He influenced their judgment and their conduct most; therefore, Satan was the who of God to the angels that fell, and Paul said that Satan is also the who of God to men who claim to speak for Christ, but do not:

2Corinthians 11

13. Such men are pseudo-apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ [i.e., declaring that God is real and Jesus is the Christ].

14. And no wonder, for Satan transforms himself into a messenger of light.

15. So, it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves to be like ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their works.

Shadows of the Rock

Whenever God wanted to provide the righteous with a place of safety, He did not look for a cave in the mountains; he looked for a man willing to stand up and be the truth, the standard, for his generation. At crucial times in biblical history, God is found searching for a man to use, not a religious institution. Sometimes, He found a man willing to be a light for the people (e.g., Isa. 6); at other times, He did not: “I searched among them for a man who would build a wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it. But I found none” (Ezek. 22:30).

Foreseeing the time when He would send His Son as His representative and His Son would then send others to represent him, the Father promised this:

Isaiah 32

1. A King [the Son] will reign in righteousness, and princes [the Son’s ministers] will rule justly.

2. And a man [the Son’s representative] will be like a shelter from the wind, and a covert from the storm, like streams of water in parched ground, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

The “great rock” is Christ (1Cor. 10:4), and the shadows of that great Rock are the men he sends to represent him. By God’s design, the representatives of Christ, not Christ himself, are now the earthly shelter for God’s people and a covert from spirits of this world. Like Jesus, they are “a spring of water” and are “like a watered garden” (Isa. 58:11) because from them, souls who hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness may eat the living bread of Christ (cf. Jn. 6:51, 58) and drink the living water of the Spirit (Jn. 4:10; 1Cor. 12:13). God’s ministers are not “wells without water”, boasting of a gift they do not possess (Prov. 25:14; 2Pet. 2:17). They truly possess the gift of God.

Jesus exhorted his disciples not to be ashamed to be the light of God for others:

Matthew 5

14. You are the light of the world; a city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

15. Nor do people light a candle and then place it under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and then it gives light to all who are in the house.

16. Let your light shine like that before men so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

In a measure, this exhortation is for all of God’s people. They all are called to be God’s righteousness (2Cor. 5:21) as well as His light for the world to see.

No Way Around John

No one can get to God by going around those whom He sends, for God always stands behind them. He stood behind Moses, the judges, the prophets, His Son, and now, He stands behind the Son’s representatives. Moses was sent with God’s law, the judges were sent with God’s power, and wise men and prophets were sent with God’s wisdom and word. Jesus was sent as the sum of them all; he is God’s law, God’s Word, and the power and wisdom of God (1Cor. 1:24), and his messengers bear his authority. None of God’s messengers have ever been optional for the people to whom God sent them, and in standing behind them, God honors Himself and His authority to ordain whom He chooses to rule in His kingdom. Indeed, if He did not stand behind them, what point would there be in sending them?

Once John the Baptizer was anointed and sent to the Jews, the Jews’ path to eternal life went through John, not around him. John became the way for the Jews to obtain eternal life because his message was the way for them to obtain it. It was as impossible for a Jew who rejected John to escape damnation as it was if he refused Christ, for submitting to John was the only way for Jews to submit to God and His Son. Even though a Jew diligently observed the law’s rites and diligently kept the rules, if he did not believe and submit to John, he was guilty before God. He was like the rich young ruler, who in but one thing fell short of obtaining eternal life (cf. Mk. 10:17–22; Lk. 18:17–23).

John’s message and baptism with water were not optional for the Jews because submission to John himself was not optional for them. Likewise, Jesus’ baptism with the Spirit is not optional for anyone because submission to Jesus himself is not optional for anyone. John and his baptism prefigured Jesus and his baptism (Mt. 3:11; Mk. 1:8; Lk. 3:16). Those who truly believed John repented and received his baptism with water; likewise, those who truly believe in Jesus repent and receive his baptism with the Spirit.

The only way anyone could know who had believed John is whether or not he baptized them when they came to be baptized. John knew it when someone came to him for baptism but had not repented: “When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he told them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’” (Mt. 3:7). Likewise, the only way we can know who has believed Jesus is whether or not he has baptized them with the Spirit. This is what the apostle John meant when he wrote, “the Spirit is the witness” (1Jn. 5:6b), and “He who believes in the Son of God has the witness within him” (1Jn. 5:10a).

Jesus knows who has repented and who has not, just as John did. John granted his baptism to show that a person had believed in him, and Jesus grants his baptism to show that a person has believed in him. John was never moved by the claims of a man that he had repented, and neither is Jesus. Men claim much, but God knows the heart. The Spirit alone led John, and the Spirit alone leads Jesus now to know whom to baptize. Theirs are the only two baptisms God has ever ordained,^[135] and in both cases, the anointing to baptize came with the discernment to know who was worthy to receive baptism.

Whenever God’s Old Testament people followed the wrong who, they went astray from God’s law, and for them to forsake the law meant that they had forsaken Moses, even after Moses was dead (Acts 21:21). Likewise, even after John was beheaded by Herod, John’s work still had to be done because God still required the Jews to believe John, that is, to repent and receive John’s baptism. That is why Jesus’ disciples took up John’s mantle after he was executed and continued baptizing Jews with water in Jesus’ name (Jn. 4:1–2; Acts 2:38). The Jews were not allowed to get around John, even after he was dead, because the God who sent John was still alive and He still required them to believe John.

In truth, we all must still believe John, in the sense of believing the messenger that the Son of God sent before him to prepare his way (Mal. 3:1). The gospel of John begins with a declaration that John came to bear witness to the Son of God:

John 1

6. There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

7. He came as a witness, to bear witness of the light so that through him, all men might believe.

8. That man was not the light; rather, he came to bear witness of the light.

It is the same with Moses. Without believing what Moses wrote, it is impossible even for us to believe in the real Jesus. To some of Israel’s leaders who claimed to represent Moses, but who wanted to kill Jesus (Jn. 5:18), the Lord said,

John 5

46. “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.

47. And if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

Moreover, as with John the Baptizer, even after Moses died, there was no way for the Jews to get around him. And just as God sent prophets to Israel over the centuries to continue the work of Moses, Jesus sent his disciples to continue the work of John after his death, preaching John’s message to the Jews and baptizing those among them who repented (Acts 2:38).

As with John and Moses in Israel, after Jesus died and went away, God raised up men to continue Jesus’ work, and that holy work continues to this day through anointed men and women all over the world because the covenant Jesus initiated is an eternal covenant for all people. To teach, as many ministers do, that Jesus’ baptism is no longer in effect is to teach that he is no longer in effect, and to teach that his baptism is unnecessary, as many do, is to teach that Jesus himself is unnecessary.

False Teachers

As has been said, no one has authority to do anything in God’s kingdom unless God anoints him to do it, but if God does anoint someone, that person has real authority. He must be listened to, for to hear him is to hear God, as the beloved disciple John said, “He whom God has sent speaks the words of God” (Jn. 3:34a). And it is sobering that John also said that “he who is not of God does not listen to us” (1Jn. 4:6a). May God grant us the grace to acknowledge His servants when we hear them!

You will never be deceived unless you honor the wrong who, and you will never come to know God unless you honor the right who. It is unwise to trust a minister who has not been sent by Christ, but it is equally foolish not to trust a minister who has been sent by him. Paul told the saints in Corinth that much of their suffering was the direct result of failing to discern who is who in the body of Christ (1Cor. 11:29–30). They had begun to honor men whom Christ had not sent and to dishonor Paul (cf. 2Cor. 11:15). God’s children must be warned that false teachers will say some true things about God and use the name of Jesus (Mt. 7:15; 24:5), but they have no authority from God to do so.

It can hardly be overemphasized how astonishing it must have been to the Jews for Jesus to call Satan a murderer and the father of lies (Jn. 8:44). There is not an instance in the Old Testament of Satan doing anything other than what God wanted done, and doing it swiftly and well. Satan had every appearance of a dutiful and faithful servant of God; otherwise, he could not possibly have deceived a third of God’s angels (cf. Rev. 12:3–4). So it was with the false prophets in ancient Israel. They maintained an appearance of sanctity and authority; otherwise, they would not have been so successful. And so it is today with false teachers in the body of Christ; otherwise, they could not persuade so many of God’s unsuspecting children to follow them. One wonders how impressive the false teacher Diotrephes must have appeared in order for him to be able to convince his congregation to condemn even the apostle John:

3John 1

9. I wrote to the Assembly, but Diotrephes, who likes to be chief among them, does not receive us.

10. For this reason, if I come, I will remember his deeds that he does, disparaging us with evil words; and not satisfied with these things, he does not receive the brothers, and he forbids those who would and expels them from the Assembly.

The apostles warned the saints that false teachers would proclaim that Jesus is Lord (2Cor. 11:13; cf. 2Pet. 2:1–3); however, what exposed them as false was not that they did not believe in Jesus but that they did not believe in Paul. Paul was God’s order for them, His government in human form, and no one could get past Paul to Jesus any more than someone can get past Jesus to God. Unfortunately, most believers of that time were eventually persuaded by false teachers to honor them instead of Paul, but in rejecting Paul, though they would not have believed so, they were rejecting Christ – the same Christ they thought they were serving.

Throughout history, multitudes of priests and prophets around the world have falsely claimed to speak for God, and they have destroyed countless souls. This happened even in ancient Israel:

Jeremiah 23

16. Thus says Jehovah of Hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you! They are making you vain; they declare a vision from their own heart, not from the mouth of Jehovah.

. . . .

21. I did not send these prophets, but they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied.

. . . .

32. I am against those who prophesy false dreams, says Jehovah, and then tell them and cause my people to err by their lies and by their bravado when I have not sent them or given them a commandment. Yea, they do not benefit this people at all, says Jehovah.

Men who claim to speak for God are a dime a dozen; seminaries around the world manufacture them by the thousands each year. In spite of any august titles they are given, without the anointing of God’s Spirit, they are frauds. Jesus told some self-righteous Pharisees who were offended by such teaching,

John 10

7. Truly, truly, I tell you that I am the gate [to God] for the sheep.

8. All who have ever come [claiming to be a gate] are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them.

Paul reproved the saints in Corinth for believing in the Jesus that false teachers proclaimed (2Cor. 11:4); he knew that God had not sent them. Only those sent by the true God can preach the true Jesus, as Paul said: “How shall they preach [the true Jesus] except they be sent [by the true God]?” (Rom. 10:15a). In this world, he wrote, “there are many gods and many lords” (1Cor. 8:5); so, the wise should examine themselves, asking the question, “Which God am I really serving and which Jesus is my Lord?” When people believed Paul, they believed in the right Jesus, and in believing in Paul’s Jesus, they were believing in the right God.

When the Galatians began honoring false teachers instead of Paul, he pleaded with them to reconsider his testimony:

Galatians 1

11. I would have you to know, brothers, regarding the gospel preached by me, that it is not according to man.

12. For I neither received it from a man, nor was I taught it, but I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

Every soul who really loved the true God rejoiced at Paul’s testimony, but in the end, they were very few.

Paul repeatedly exhorted the saints to have a mind like Christ (Phip. 2:5), that is, to demonstrate respect for God’s choices concerning who rules in His kingdom:^[136]

1Thessalonians 5

12. We beseech you, brothers, to acknowledge those who labor among you, and who rule over you in the Lord and admonish you,

13. and to esteem them as highly as possible in love because of their work.

1Timothy 5

17. Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in word and in doctrine.

18. For the scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while he is threshing,” and “The worker is worthy of his pay.”

Hebrews 13

17. Obey those who rule over you, and submit to them, for they watch over your souls, as those who will render an account, that they may do it with joy, and not with sadness, for that would not be good for you.

Frustrated

Before Acts 2, when the Spirit came, the battle for the hearts of God’s children centered on one issue: Who visibly represented God on earth? Was it Moses or was it Balaam? Was it the prophets of the Institution or was it Jeremiah? Was it Jesus or was it the elders? But not long after Christ returned to the Father, spiritual warfare changed from who visibly represented God to who visibly represented the Son, and so it has been since that time. There must be men alive now who are anointed to represent Christ and to govern among the saints. The love of God for His family assures us of that. Wherever they are, the greatest obstacle to their being heard is the influence of Christian ministers who claim that they represent Jesus, but do not. Old Testament servants of God like Jeremiah were frustrated by such men.

In one instance, professional prophets persuaded God’s people not to believe Jeremiah’s claim that Nebuchadnezzar’s invading Babylonian army was the expression of God’s wrath against them for their sins. Jeremiah knew that if Jerusalem’s inhabitants would repent and surrender to King Nebuchadnezzar, God would let them live, but the professional prophets undermined Jeremiah’s influence with false counter-promises. Heartbroken, persecuted, and lonely, Jeremiah wept and prayed:

Jeremiah 14

13. Ah, my Lord, Jehovah! Behold, the prophets are telling them, “You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you lasting peace in this place.”

Jeremiah 23

9. My heart within me is broken because of the prophets!

In this New Testament, God’s servants have to deal with the same problem. Paul grieved for his beloved Galatian converts who were being led astray by false teachers:

Galatians 1

6. I marvel that you are turning away so quickly from Him who called you by the grace of Christ to another gospel,

7. which is not another, but there are certain men who trouble you, determined to alter the gospel of Christ.

Peter warned the children of God:

2Peter 2

1a. False prophets were among the [Old Testament] people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will introduce opinions that will lead to damnation.

2. And many will follow them in licentious ways, because of whom the way of truth will be spoken evil of.

Jesus, foreseeing this development, warned his followers to guard against such men:

Matthew 7

15. Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

Matthew 24

4. Take heed, lest someone deceive you.

5. Many will come, using my name, saying that I am the Messiah, and they will deceive many.

Were it not for ministers with titles and authority bestowed upon them by Christian organizations, the true representatives of Christ would have a far greater impact in the world. I say again, the greatest hindrance to God’s work on Earth has always been men who claim to speak for Christ without being sent by him. Their appearance of authority is a snare that God’s children have always had to overcome, and the only way they can overcome it is for them to recognize the order of God.

Section 2: Judgment in the House of God

The appointed time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God,

and if it begins with us, what will be the end of those who refuse to obey the gospel of God?

1Peter 4:17

Behold, therefore, the goodness and the severity of God; toward those who have fallen, severity,

but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness.

Otherwise, you, too, shall be cut off.

Romans 11:22

The Privilege of Every Believer

The basic function and greatest benefit of government is to provide for the establishment and maintenance of right relationships. This is what Jesus accomplished in heaven when he cast Satan and his angels out, and in Sheol when he transferred all the righteous out of that dismal place to be with him. It is also what he accomplished on Earth in the hearts of those who received him; he created the way for them to obtain a right relationship with God and with one another by purchasing for them the Spirit, that is, God’s kind of life.

By nature, both men and animals are wild (cf. Jer. 10:14; Prov. 12:1), and fleshly nature will oppose God’s order as long as the flesh is alive. The similarity between human nature and wild beasts prompted Peter to say that men who live according to their fleshly nature and “despise government” are “like unreasoning beasts” (2Pet. 2:12, 10). The best that human governments can do is to muzzle the dog so that it won’t bite, but they cannot change the nature of the beast. It is the nature of the flesh, whether human or animal, to resist being governed because it thinks of being governed only as being controlled. However, God has no interest in controlling human nature. His form of government is to replace our nature with His so that we are freed from our natural rebelliousness and have the strength both to want to do His will and to do it, as Paul told the Philippians, “It is God who is working within you, both to desire and to do according to His good pleasure” (Phip. 2:13). God’s Spirit is the only source of righteousness in this covenant.

Paul wrote, “The flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is contrary to the flesh” (Gal. 5:17), and what the flesh desires more than anything else is to live according to its own will, and it will do anything to keep living. The warfare Jesus fought and won in the wilderness was to subdue the will of his fleshly body and do God’s will instead, and it is the privilege of every believer to fight the same battle and to win it. When Paul said, “I die daily” (1Cor. 15:31a), he was not complaining; he was rejoicing in his daily victory over his fleshly nature, won by the power of God’s life within him.

Romans 6

6. Our old man is crucified with Christ so that our sinful body might be rendered powerless, to the end that we are no longer slaves to sin,

7. for he who is dead is freed from sin.

. . . .

11. Think of yourselves as completely dead to sin, too, yet alive to God through Christ Jesus our Lord.

Colossians 3

1. If you be raised up with Christ, seek things that are above, where Christ is sitting at God’s right hand.

2. Keep your minds on things above, not on things on the earth.

3. For you are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

Only the gospel of Christ can make it good news that we are dead, for if we are dead in Christ to sin, we are alive to God, and that is very good news indeed! To be alive to God means to know what God thinks and feels. No one is alive to God who is ignorant of what He thinks and feels, and that is what the Spirit brings when it enters into us: God’s thoughts and feelings. When we listen to the Spirit, we are listening to God, and when we follow the Spirit, we are following God, as Paul told us to do (Eph. 5:1).

All who are alive to God have fellowship with Him and His Son, and with one another. That is the happy, peaceful life that God has always enjoyed with His Son, and in His Son, God has now made the way for us to rest with them in their joy.

God Is a Living God

Wherever the Son is, God’s government is, because wherever the Son is, he is himself. He does not have to try to be Lord and Judge of all; he reigns simply by being the person that the Father created him to be. He does not wrestle against anything in order to be Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. For him to live is to be God’s Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords. Whenever Jesus spoke, “the multitudes were astonished, for he taught them as one having authority” (Mt. 7:28–29a), and it was natural for him to speak that way; he did not study the art of oratory. When Jesus preached in the villages of Galilee, or healed the sick by the sea, or taught in the temple in Jerusalem, he was only being himself, and those who saw him were seeing God’s government in action. But that, in itself, was not a new thing.

God has always expressed His will and His judgments through a living being, that is, when He was not expressing them through nature. Noah, for example, was the expression of God’s government in his time, and he built an ark “by which he condemned the world” (Heb. 11:7). God’s government in the person of Noah put the world on trial and condemned it to death! The prophets, too, were visible expressions of God’s government. The words they spoke carried authority equal with the law of Moses, and sometimes were superior to it (e.g., Lev. 20:10 vs. Hos. 3:1–3). It has already been shown that God, on occasion, commanded prophets to do deeds blatantly contrary to the law, such as sending Isaiah into the temple to father a child by a prophetess to whom Isaiah was not married (Isa. 8:1–3). God had authority to command such things because He is a living who, whereas the law of Moses was a dead what. God is perfectly free to do as He will, and whatever He does is good and right, even if what He does today is different from what He did yesterday or different from what He commands man to do.

A message God sends today takes precedence over any message He sent in the past. A story from 1Kings 20:35–36 emphatically makes this point. Long before that story took place, God sternly warned His people never to harm His prophets (Ps. 105:15). That was a standard almost everyone in Israel would have known about. On this occasion, however, God sent a prophet to a certain man commanding him to strike the prophet and wound him. The man refused to obey that new commandment, and as a result, he was cursed by God for not harming His prophet!God’s commandment on that day was more authoritative than His previous commandment simply because it was newer; it was what God said that day as opposed to what He had said before.

The lesson that story teaches is that God’s government is new each day because God is not a rule book. He is alive, each day observing and judging all things, and giving guidance as the situation requires. Being alive to what God is saying today is to know the truth, for the only truth that exists is what God is thinking right now. To live that way is what Paul called “walking in the Spirit”. It is a life of complete liberty from all rites and rules, a liberty so free that it frightens many of God’s own children. But to make God’s kind of liberty the law for us is the very reason Jesus came and suffered, for when God’s life enters into us, His liberty comes with it, and it comes with authority. As James said, the children of God will be judged according to “the perfect law of liberty.” That liberty, ordained by God in this covenant, is that His people are completely free from fleshly rites and rules, just as He is. As John said, “As He is, so are we in this world” (1Jn. 4:17b). It is, in fact, the law in God’s kingdom that His children in this covenant are to be like Him (cf. Mt. 5:48; Eph. 5:1). It is no wonder that when the Galatian believers began observing the Old Covenant’s rites and rules, Paul was indignant:

Galatians 3

1a. O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth?

2. This only would I learn of you. Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by the preaching of faith?

3. Are you so foolish? Having begun in spirit, are you now perfected by flesh?

God’s principal purpose in blessing us with His kind of life is that we may truly know Him, so that we no longer need consult a dead what, not even the Bible, to know what God’s will is. Jesus did not tell his disciples, “When the Bible is printed, it will guide you into all truth.” Rather, he said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16:13). We know the truth only as we are led by the Spirit, for the Spirit alone knows the mind of God:

1Corinthians 2

10b. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

11. For who among men knows the things of man except the spirit of man that is in him? Likewise, no one knows the things of God, except the Spirit of God.

We cannot truly know or acceptably worship the living God while depending on a what to guide us. God is a living God, and only when we are alive to Him can we distinguish His voice from all others. His is the tender voice about which Isaiah prophesied: “Your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’ ” (Isa. 30:21a), and every who sent from God echoes that voice.

As It Is in Heaven

As previously discussed, Jesus purged heaven after he ascended so that only right relationships exist there now. He brought all of heaven into his new order when he cast Satan and his angels out. And John’s description of Satan’s fury when that happened to him (Rev. 12:12–17) teaches us that establishing a right relationship is not always a pleasant experience for everyone concerned. Nevertheless, God was pleased when Jesus established a right relationship – a very distant one – between Satan and heaven’s faithful inhabitants. Likewise, recalcitrant believers often become angry and vindictive when Jesus, through his visible representative, puts them out of an Assembly and establishes a right relationship – a distant one – between them and the rest of the Assembly. That is, in fact, one way that Jesus’ prayer is answered for God’s will to be done on Earth as it is in heaven (Mt. 6:10).

When Satan was cast out of heaven, the angels who were faithful to God were relieved and rejoiced at their improved situation (Rev. 12:12a). Likewise, obedient children of God feel relief at the improved situation in their Assembly when an ungodly spirit is removed. Unfortunately, some of God’s ministers are not Christ-like enough to put the ungodly out of the Assembly and give rest to the upright. When the apostle Paul learned of a case of gross immorality in the Corinthian Assembly, he sternly reproved them for offering polluted worship to God by tolerating such sin. He demanded that they put the young man out of the Assembly in order to save the Assembly from his evil influence:

1Corinthians 5

1. An immorality among you is widely reported, and such an immorality that is not even mentioned among Gentiles, in that a man has his father’s wife!

2. And yet, you are puffed up, and have not mourned instead, so that the one who has done this deed might be put out from your midst.

3. As for me, absent in body but present in spirit, I have already judged, as if present, the one who has done such a thing.

4. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,

5. turn such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

6. Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

Verse two tells us that the Corinthians had become proud of how tolerant and forgiving they were, but in their case, that was foolish. God is incomparably patient; were it not so, none of us would be saved. Peter plainly said so: “Consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation” (2Pet. 3:15a). That wonderful truth notwithstanding, in the appropriate time and in every case, God will prove Himself to be perfectly intolerant of wickedness among His people, and He has never forgiven anyone who did not first repent. Forgiveness without repentance is not forgiveness at all; it is an invitation to more sin.

When Peter said that judgment begins at God’s own house, he was echoing Jesus’ arresting statement that before he returns, the body of Christ will be purged of every ungodly soul:

Matthew 13

40. Just as the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be at the close of this age.

41. The Son of man will send forth his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and those who do lawlessness.

Note that it is the household of God, not the world, that Jesus was also describing in this parable:

Matthew 13

47. The kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet cast into the sea, and it gathered some of every sort,

48. which, after it was full, they drew onto the shore, and when they sat down, they collected the good ones into vessels, but threw the bad ones away.

49. So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will go forth and separate the evil from among the righteous.

God is pleased when His ministers are enough like His Son to cast out a stubbornly wicked person so that the fellowship of the remaining believers is unsullied. Christ is coming again, not for a mixed multitude of faithful and unfaithful believers, but for “a glorious Assembly without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing” (Eph. 5:27b). Jesus would not have the body of Christ in the divided, confused state it is in today. Jesus is better than that, and he expects better than the present mess from us who believe. To teach that Jesus is coming back at any moment, as many do, is to hold him in very low esteem.

Paul was referring to the purging of the body of Christ before Jesus’ return when he told the Corinthians that God was ready to avenge all disobedience when the obedience of His children was complete (2Cor. 10:6). But the obedience of God’s representatives is key. His Corinthian ministers had failed miserably to execute the righteous judgments needed to keep that Assembly pure, and Paul was displeased. “I say this to your shame” he told them. “Is it really so, that there is not a single wise man among you who is able to judge between his brothers?” (1Cor. 6:5).

Jesus was also displeased with such failures, and through the apostle John, he sent messages sharply rebuking certain of his ministers. To the pastor at Pergamon, who otherwise had done well, he said,

Revelation 2

14. I have a few things against you because you have there some holding the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to lay a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat food offered to idols and to commit fornication.

15. And you also have there some who hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans.

16. So, repent! Otherwise, I will come to you soon, and I will wage war against them with the sword of my mouth.

How was this minister of God to repent? The problem was that he was allowing believers to continue in his congregation who were promoting false doctrines. Therefore, the only way for him to repent for that error was for him to put those believers out of his congregation.

For another example, Jesus sent this message to the pastor in Thyatira, whose domineering wife was out of order:

Revelation 2

20. I have against you that you put up with your wife – Jezebel! – who calls herself a prophetess, and teaches and seduces my servants to commit fornication and to eat things offered to idols.

21. And I gave her time to repent, but she will not repent of her whoredom.

In this case, the pastor had allowed the situation to continue too long. The time for repentance was passed. The pastor’s wife had refused the Spirit’s invitation to repent too many times, and now, a severe judgment was unavoidable. “And all the Assemblies will know I am the one who examines the minds and hearts, and I will give to each of you according to your deeds” (Rev. 3:23).

Paul once asked the question, “If someone does not know how to govern his own house, how will he take care of the Assembly of God?” (1Tim. 3:5). The answer is, he cannot. A basic requirement to be in a position of leadership in the body of Christ is that a man “govern his own house well, having children in subjection with all gravity” (1Tim. 3:4). Preacher Clark taught us that one can tell how close to God a man is by how well he handles his money and his young children, and I have witnessed the truth of that statement many times.

Judgment among the Saints: Chastisement

The suffering that follows disobedience is classified as chastisement if the suffering is intended to correct and restore. John said that “all unrighteousness is sin” (1Jn. 5:17), and all sin has unsavory consequences. However, the love of God assures us that the consequences are always appropriate to the transgression. The consequence may be a gentle admonition, or it may be something much worse. Regardless of how harsh the consequence is, however, as long as it has a healing purpose, the souls who are facing the consequence of their error have hope. God loves His wayward children and will administer whatever correction is needed to bring them back into fellowship with Him. Jesus told one pastor of his who had become particularly slack, “As many as I hold dear, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent!” (Rev. 3:19). Jesus wanted him back.

Once wise children of God have tasted the sweet fellowship which Christ creates among them and have experienced the manifold blessings it brings, the thought of losing that fellowship is such a dreaded condition that they strive to preserve it at all costs. Still, it sometimes happens that believers are lured away from fellowship and become entangled again in the defilements of the world (cf. 2Pet. 2:20–22). However, Solomon said that even if a righteous man falls seven times, he will not stay down (Prov. 24:16a). He loves the family of God too much to stay in sin and be a stumbling block to others (1Jn. 2:10).

One of the severest forms of chastisement is sickness, or premature death. Some saints in Corinth were severely chastened with sickness and death because they had failed to acknowledge God’s order. Of them, Paul wrote,

1Corinthians 11

30. Because of this [not discerning the Lord’s body], many are feeble and sick among you, and quite a few have fallen asleep.

31. If we would judge [correct] ourselves, we would not be judged [by the Lord],

32. but when we are judged [by sickness or death], we are being chastened by the Lord so that we might not be condemned along with the world.

In such cases, the chastisement is the entire punishment, for it is intended to save the souls being chastened. In spite of the severity of the chastisement, such believers may still be saved in the end, according to Paul, for he said that the misguided souls in Corinth were being chastened so that they “might not be condemned along with the world.”

Years ago, I went to see a sweet older saint who was being chastened with premature death. She was but 57 years old, but cancer had spread throughout her body, and she knew that her time was short. When I entered her hospital room, she wanted me to read the scripture that Jesus had given to her that morning, a scripture which comforted her greatly. It was the confession of an Old Testament servant of God who knew what it meant to be severely chastened: “Jehovah has chastened me sore, but He has not given me over to death” (Ps. 118:18). We said nothing about it, but she and I both knew she was dying because she had stubbornly resisted for years the Lord’s call for her to repent. I think she also felt, because of the comforting scripture the Lord gave her, that she was still loved by the Lord and that her physical death would be her entire punishment. She would be spared from suffering the Second Death, damnation in the Lake of Fire (Rev. 20:14; 21:8).

Another of the severest forms of chastisement is to be put out, temporarily, from an Assembly of believers. To be put out from the safety of the Assembly of God is to be turned over to Satan, and Paul exercised that authority on at least two occasions. He turned the immoral young man in Corinth over to Satan (1Cor. 5:5), and he also turned over to Satan two ministers who were subverting the faith of God’s children with false teaching (1Tim. 1:20). As horrible as that sounds though, in both cases there was still hope. Concerning those two ministers, Paul said that his purpose for turning them over to Satan was that “they may be taught not to blaspheme.” Based on that, it appears that it was still possible for them to learn, and if they did, they would see their error and repent, and be received again into the Assembly. And if in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians he was referring to the immoral young man who was turned over to Satan, then the young man had learned his lesson and repented, for Paul exhorted the saints in Corinth to welcome him back into the Assembly:

2Corinthians 2

6. Sufficient to such a man is this punishment, inflicted by most of you,

7. so that you ought rather to forgive and comfort him, lest such a man be swallowed up by excessive sorrow.

8. So now, I urge you to reaffirm your love for him.

Judgment among the Saints: Punishment

In extreme cases, when rebellious believers have repeatedly rejected God’s call to repent, Solomon’s observation applies: “He who being often reproved stiffens his neck will suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy” (Prov. 29:1). God can be so provoked that He no longer offers forgiveness. Worse than being turned over to Satan so that one may learn and worse than being chastened with sickness and premature death is to be punished by being altogether rejected by Christ and left to oneself. According to Paul, Christ is no longer in such a believer, and he is now a reprobate, damned while still living:^[137] “Put yourselves to the test, whether you are in the Faith; prove your own selves! Or do you yourselves not know that Jesus Christ is in you – unless you are reprobates?” (2Cor. 13:5).

Concerning the transgression which is “without remedy”, the apostle John wrote,

1John 5

16. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin that does not call for death, he shall ask [God to forgive him], and He will give him life for those who commit sins that do not call for death. There is a sin that calls for death; I do not say that he should pray for that.

It is the worst of judgments in this life to be expelled permanently from God’s Assembly and yet continue to live on earth. To suffer that punishment is to be condemned to live out one’s life in a state of sin, apart from the body of Christ, and it is greatly to be feared. It is not considered chastisement because it has no healing purpose; it is simply punishment, and it is reserved for self-willed and arrogant transgressors who have been close to God. The author of Hebrews wrote,

Hebrews 6

4. It is impossible for those who once were enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift and made partakers of the holy Spirit,

5. and have tasted of both the good word of God and the powers of the age to come,

6. but then have fallen away, to renew them again to repentance, seeing they are re-crucifying the Son of God in themselves and exposing him to public shame.

And in another place, he added this:

Hebrews 10

28. Anyone [among God’s Old Testament people] who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy, by two or three witnesses.

29. Of how much worse punishment, do you think, will he be worthy who has trampled under foot the Son of God [in this covenant], has regarded as a common thing the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has done outrage to the Spirit of grace?

. . . .

30. For we know Him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord.” And again, “The Lord will judge His people.”

31. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Jesus mentioned but one sin that is always unforgivable (Mk. 3:28–29); however, any sin has the potential to be unforgivable, depending on the circumstances. For example, God refused to forgive the high priest’s sons for causing God’s people to dread coming to worship Him (1Sam. 2:12–17). Likewise, when Isaiah gave Judah warning of impending disaster and “called for weeping and mourning,” some in Jerusalem threw what might be called “an end of the world party”, saying, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we will die!” And God’s response was terrifying: “I will damn myself if atonement for this iniquity will be made for you until you die” (Isa. 22:12–14).

Under the law, no forgiveness was granted for any sin that was knowingly and willfully committed:

Numbers 15

30. The soul who acts defiantly, whether native-born or a sojourner, he is blaspheming Jehovah, and that soul shall be cut off from among his people

31. Because he has despised the word of Jehovah and broken His commandment, that soul shall surely be cut off; his iniquity shall be upon him.

The Goodness of Fear

Just knowing that severe judgments are possible instills in believers a healthy fear of the Father. Paul said that “the terror of the Lord” motivated him to fulfill his office and warn men of the coming wrath (2Cor. 5:11), and he knew that only in humbling himself to obey the gospel which he preached would he himself be saved: “I discipline my body and make it obey, lest after I have preached to others, I myself be rejected” (1Cor. 9:27).

The fear of God keeps us clean (cf. Ps. 19:9); it motivates us to obey God (1Sam. 11:7), to hate evil (Prov. 8:13), and to receive God’s wisdom and knowledge (Job 28:28; Prov. 1:7; 9:10). People who have no fear of living without fellowship with God and His saints are wicked (Ps. 36:1), and it is that lack of fear which makes them so. Satan had no fear of God before he was cast out of heaven because he thought that God was like him, and many among God’s people have made that same fatal mistake (cf. Ps. 50:21). Eventually, like Satan, they will all be cast out forever from the presence of God.

It is true that the love of God casts out fear (1Jn. 4:18), but the fear which God’s love casts out is the fear of everything except God. Jesus himself feared God (Heb. 5:7), and he sternly warned his disciples to do the same (Mt. 10:29; Lk. 12:5). The concomitant to that is that the fear of God creates a healthy fear of those whom He sends. God’s warning, “Do not touch my anointed ones, and do not harm my prophets” (Ps. 105:15) is superfluous to those who fear God; they already know better than to do that.

Both the Goodness and the Severity

The fact that God is love does not suggest that God’s government is to be toyed with. God’s government is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it yields the incomparable blessings of life and peace to those who submit to it, but on the other hand, it yields “indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish upon every soul” who refuses it (Rom. 2:8–9). God’s kingdom is a kingdom of perfect, enduring joy and righteousness. At the same time, it is a kingdom with an order: visible representatives who cannot be opposed or rejected except at the risk of one’s soul.

Paul counseled the saints that in order to have a right view of the Almighty, they must consider both “the goodness and the severity of God” (Rom. 11:22). God is a God whose mercy reaches the clouds (Ps. 36:5), but He is also a God before whose fury no one in heaven or on earth can stand (Nah. 1:6). When God’s goodness is downplayed, His government seems arbitrary and cold, and when God’s severity is downplayed, His government seems optional, a suggestion instead of a necessity.

Section 3: A Man or an Institution?^[138]

I will give you shepherds after my own heart,

and they will feed you knowledge and understanding.

Jeremiah 3:15

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture, says Jehovah.

Jeremiah 23:1

God-sense

Pastors, or shepherds, who serve religious institutions routinely exhort believers to join their institution, and they frown upon or pity anyone who follows a man instead. Such a somber warning may have an appearance of wisdom at first, but it is, in fact, self-serving nonsense. The only people on earth who can possibly be doing things God’s way are those who are following a man. Paul was not misleading God’s saints when instead of saying, “Follow Christ”, he exhorted the saints to follow him and others who were like him (Phip. 3:17; 2Thess. 3:9). He knew that believers need examples they can see and that those sent by God are examples to be followed. Peter said to the shepherds among believers,

1Peter 5

2. Shepherd the flock of God that is with you, exercising oversight not under compulsion but willingly, neither for sordid gain, but eagerly,

3. nor as lording it over those assigned to you, but by being examples for the flock.

4. And when the Chief Shepherd is revealed, you shall receive an unfading crown of glory.

By exhorting the saints to be followers of him (1Cor. 4:16), Paul was not contradicting Peter by denying that Jesus is the Chief Shepherd; he was only pointing out his place in God’s order, under Jesus. Paul knew that the only way his converts would please God was to follow him, the man God had sent to them. People who become members of a religious institution cannot possibly be doing things God’s way because God has never sent a religious institution to do anything. God only anoints a who, never a what.

Peter said, “If any man speak, let it be as the oracles of God; if any man minister, let it be with the strength that God supplies so that in all things, God might be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1Pet. 4:11). No institution has ever spoken “as an oracle of God” or ministered grace to believers. Only those who are chosen and sent by God can speak God’s word (cf. Jn. 3:34a), and He sends no one whom He has not filled with the Spirit. No institution has ever been given the Spirit (Jesus did not die for institutions), and no institution possesses the power to minister the gospel or to ordain anyone to do so. Seminaries can teach subjects such as biblical history and languages, but such education cannot to the slightest degree make a man a minister of Christ. Only “the strength that God supplies” can do that.

It is not uncommon for people who are searching for the truth to search for it in a religious institution, or several of them. It is also possible to follow the wrong who for a time, but everyone who persists in seeking the truth will find the right who;Jesus will not fail them. When God calls for us to “come out from their midst” (2Cor. 6:17), He is not just calling us away from the wrong who; He is calling us into fellowship with the right who. Even intelligent sinners know that nations do well only when they follow leaders who have good sense. The spiritual equivalent to that carnal wisdom is to follow men who have God-sense, that is, men “who by experience have the senses trained to discern both good and evil” (Heb. 5:14).

Whenever righteousness has been accomplished on earth, it has been accomplished by individuals anointed and sent by God, in spite of religious institutions, not because of them. Religious institutions have always been the greatest stumbling block for those who are sincerely seeking God and have provided the greatest cover for the persecutors of those who find Him.

Balaam

An old saying goes, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Satan’s version of that saying is, “If you can’t beat ’em, invite ’em to join you.” That is to say, if you can’t stop God from sending servants to His people (and no one can), then warn believers not to follow a man and invite them to join your institution. That tactic has often succeeded, the Old Testament event at Baal-Peor being a notable example.

After Moab’s King Balak failed in his plan to beat Israel, the prophet Balaam counseled the king to use Moabite women to invite Israel to join them:

Numbers 25

2. And the Moabite women invited the people [Israel] to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people feasted and bowed themselves to the gods of those women.

3a. And Israel joined himself to Baal at Peor.

Balaam devised that crafty counsel (Num. 31:16; Rev. 2:14), but for him, the gold he was paid for doing so was not worth it, for he lost his soul in the process. From that time on, God no longer considered Balaam to be a prophet, but a soothsayer (cf. Josh. 13:22), and his crime was so great that Jesus is still speaking of it in the last book of the Bible (Rev. 2:14).

King Balak triumphed over Israel with friendliness after failing to have a curse put on them (Num. 23–24). That crafty tactic is described in another place as destroying souls with peace (Dan. 8:25), and in part, it is because men of the Institution are so successful in winning hearts with friendliness that James scolded certain wavering saints, “You adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that the friendship of the world is enmity against God? Therefore, whoever would be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God” (Jas. 4:4). The erotic lifestyle and worship of the Moabites was certainly “enmity against God”, and when the Israelites “began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab,” they became enemies of God, “and the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel” (Num. 25:3).

Which God and Which Jesus?

Moved by the Spirit to see the sinful conduct of his fellow Israelites, Isaiah said, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray; every one of us has turned to his own way” (Isa. 53:6a). He saw that most of God’s people were living by whatever standard suited them instead of by God’s law. But why did so many in Israel do that? Why did they trade their hope of eternal life for the vanity of heathen traditions and myths? The answer is that God’s way is simple and unadorned; it does not attract the flesh. Instead of the simple standard of holiness found in the law of Moses, the Israelites, in the main, followed their false prophets who, in turn, were following the heathen, whose grandiose ideas about divine things were more accommodating to man’s fleshly nature. Man’s way is intricate and stylish; it is altogether of the flesh. King Ahaz’ admiration of an ornate heathen altar provides an excellent example:

2Kings 16

10. When King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-Pilesar the king of Assyria, he saw an altar that was in Damascus. And King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest [in Jerusalem] a pattern of the altar and its design, with all the workmanship of it.

11. And Uriah the priest built the altar. In accordance with all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, so Uriah the priest made it before King Ahaz came from Damascus.

Ahaz ordered God’s plain altar to be moved from its place in front of God’s temple so that the fancier one might be placed there (2Kgs. 16:14). To Ahaz and those like him, God’s altar was embarrassingly simple (cf. Ex. 20:25; Dt. 27:5), too plain to be worthy of a God who was truly mighty. It could not compete with stylish heathen altars. But God does not compete with men; He makes the way for their sins to be forgiven, and they can take it or leave it. Jeremiah pleaded with Israel, “Do not learn the way of the Gentiles” (Jer. 10:2a), but they learned it anyway and, so, worshipped the gods of their choice rather than the God who had chosen them.

God’s New Testament people have done the same. Instead of simply worshipping God in spirit and in truth, as Jesus said, believers join the church that seems best to them. What the false prophets once exhorted God’s people to do is comparable to what men of the Institution now exhort God’s people to do, using such phrases as “join the church of your choice”.

There is no difference between “join the church of your choice” and “worship the god of your choice.” The God and Jesus of Catholicism cannot be the God and Jesus of Mormonism any more than the gods of the Egyptians were the gods of the Moabites. Nor can the God and Jesus of Presbyterianism be the same God and Jesus of Pentecostalism. Common sense, if nothing else, tells us that the God and Jesus of one Christian sect cannot be the God and Jesus of another, for those Gods and Jesuses demand different doctrines, different qualifications for ministers, and different rituals for worship. Christianity is a madhouse of confusion, just like the polytheism of the ancient world.

The spirits which inspired the formation of Christianity and the sects within it proclaim, as being the gospel, doctrines and traditions that are not only different from each other, but are also contrary to the simple way of Christ. All of them. In the kingdom of the one true God, there is but one true Jesus, one holy Spirit, one body, one faith, one baptism, and one hope (Eph. 4:4–6). And, as has been said, there is but one acceptable manner of worship: “in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:24). To worship as minsters do who serve the Gods and Jesuses of Christianity is to honor those Gods and Jesuses instead of the living God and His Son.

Let me restate a previous question: Which God and Jesus do you believe in? Which bridegroom are you going out to meet, the one who is really coming again or one who is proclaimed by men of the Institution? Which God is the God of your manner of living and your worship? Is it a god that you have chosen, or is it the God who chose you, “the One who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1Pet. 2:9b)? It is better to be chosen than to choose, for we cannot trust our own wisdom to choose the right thing, or the right who. Jeremiah warned us that the human heart is not merely deceitful, but that it is more “deceitful than anything” (Jer. 17:9). At the Last Supper, Jesus told his disciples, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” (Jn. 15:16). That is God’s way.

The human heart is unwilling to believe this truth because man’s corrupt nature demands a distant god, one that cannot truly be known, for with that kind of god, the flesh does not have to inconvenience itself to learn His ways and walk in them. That is, in fact, the only kind of god our fleshly nature will ever willingly serve. Speaking for us all, Paul confessed that “in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing” (Rom. 7:18). Based on that spiritual reality, we know that whenever man’s worthless flesh finds a god it is pleased to serve, that god is as worthless as the flesh that chose it.

Any god we loved while living “in the flesh” had to be a god we had no hope of knowing, and we liked it that way. That is the kind of god that sinners have always preferred and have flattered as being a god so profound that He is unknowable. But we knew in our guilty hearts that as long as we clung to that kind of god, we did not have to inconvenience ourselves with striving to know and to please him. None of us would have chosen the real Jesus to be our Messiah, nor would we have chosen his Father to be our God. We are neither wise enough nor good enough to have done that. God had to choose us.

God’s kingdom is a kingdom of the heart, a spiritual kingdom that no one can enter by his own will; we must be invited to come (Jn. 6:44; 15:16). Those who are invited into God’s kingdom (Mt. 22:1–4) are given a choice that the world, on its own, does not have, to wit, either to come into the kingdom or to refuse. Without that invitation, sinners have no option but to remain in the sin of their choice.

Human Praise

It is not possible to safely trust any human claim, including our own, until the life of God transforms us into the kind of people who can be trusted. That is the blessed place to which God’s representatives lead us so that we can serve God acceptably and be blessed. But if after we are converted, we choose to join a church and become a member of the Institution, then the Institution will get the glory for the good that God has done in us, and we will get the curse for the evil done by the Institution (Rev. 18:4b–5).

God accepts no praise from humans except the praise that comes from sanctified souls. If we would offer the Father acceptable worship, we must first be made acceptable to Him. This truth applies to everyone, everywhere. Human praise comes from the human spirit, and it is impossible that the human spirit can worship God acceptably, or please Him (Rom. 8:8). In his time among us, Jesus knew that human praise could not be trusted because he knew that, at that time, all humans were still merely human (Jn. 2:24–25).

Just a Few

Since nothing good dwells in us, as Paul said, it follows that if anyone feels guilt for doing wrong, it is never that he is convicted by his own conscience, for conviction for sin is a good thing, and nothing good is in us. Conviction for sin is a gift from God, an invitation to be forgiven. Without it, one can only live in sin, follow forms, and trust in appearances. The holy Spirit alone convicts of sin (Jn. 16:8–9), not the human conscience. Without the influence of God’s Spirit, man feels neither guilt for evildoing nor fear of the coming Judgment. It is only because God loves people that He makes them feel bad when they do evil, for in feeling bad about their sin, they may develop a desire to stop sinning. Likewise, if anyone ever feels good after doing what is right, he feels good only because God makes him feel good, and He does so in order to encourage that soul to keep doing what is right. If untouched by God’s Spirit, humans are dead to both the love and the fear of God, and as history has shown, the evil which humans without a conscience may do is horrific. Goodness holds no charm for the soul that does not love and fear God.

When God sends conviction on people, offering them the gift of eternal life, most of them push past both the conviction and the offer and continue on the path of sin. Only a few respond to God’s call and turn from evil:

Matthew 7

13. Enter by the strait gate because the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to damnation, and there are many who enter by it.

14. How strait the gate and narrow the road that leads to life! And few there be who find it.

Behaving Like a Human

Within decades after the Spirit first came, those who had received it drifted into sectarianism, forming religious clubs. Paul crushed those buds of religious institutionalism when he saw them sprouting in God’s garden:

1Corinthians 1

11. It has been reported to me concerning you, my brothers, by those of Chloe’s household, that there are contentions among you.

12. What I mean is that each of you says, “I am of Paul”; “I am of Apollos”; “I am of Cephas”; “I am of Christ.”

13. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

1Corinthians 3

3. You are still carnal. For as long as envy and strife and dissensions are among you, are you not carnal, and behave like a human?

4. For when one says, “I am of Paul”, and another, “I am of Apollos”, are you not carnal?

Modern believers should ask themselves what the difference is in saying, “I am of Paul,” or “I am of Peter,” or “I am of Apollos,” and saying, “I am a Lutheran,” or “I am a Catholic,” or “I am a Baptist,” or, for that matter, “I am a Christian”? It is all wrong. The spirits which inspire the formation of sects and adorning them with religious titles are evil. It is the way of the world. It was ungodly in Paul’s day for believers to divide themselves into religious clubs, and it is ungodly now, even if believers do not call them clubs but denominations. Division is division, no matter what label men put on it.

The Great Apostasy

In spite of their efforts to establish believers in the Faith, when the apostles grew old and began to die out, they were forced to admit that false teachers had won the battle for the hearts of God’s people:

2Timothy 1

15. You know this, that all they in Asia have forsaken me, among whom are Phygelus and Hermogenes.

1John 2

18b. As you have heard that the anti-Christ is coming, even now many have become anti-Christs.

Jude 1

4a. Certain men have crept in who were long ago designated for this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into licentiousness.

In spite of that reality, God’s representatives continued to labor until the end to save whoever would listen to them:

Jude 1

3b. I felt constrained to write you, exhorting you to earnestly contend for the Faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

. . . .

5. I want to remind you, though you once knew this, that the Lord, after He saved a people out of Egypt, later destroyed those who did not believe.

2Peter 1

13. I consider it a righteous thing to stir you up by reminding you, as long as I am in this tabernacle,

14. knowing that the departure from my tabernacle is imminent, as our Lord Jesus Christ has shown me.

15. Moreover, I will make every effort to see to it that after my departure, you always have these things in remembrance.

2Peter 3

1. This second letter I am now writing to you, beloved, in both of which I am stirring up your pure minds by way of a reminder,

2. that you should remember the words spoken before by the holy prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles.

Paul’s heart was broken when he saw the great apostasy beginning to take place (cf. Phip. 3:18–19). His converts everywhere had begun to follow ministers who were leading them into a carnal religion. In that carnal religion, as the apostles knew would happen, ceremonial form quenched in believers the Spirit of life for which Jesus had suffered and died. “False brothers stealthily slipped in,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “in order to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might enslave us” (Gal. 2:4). The slavery about which Paul was speaking was slavery to rituals which use carnal elements, such as water, bread and wine, and incense:

Galatians 4

8. Formerly, when you did not know God, you lived as slaves to things which by nature are not divine [carnal rituals],

9. but now, having come to know God, or rather, having been known by God, how is it that you want to return again to live – again! – as slaves to weak and worthless elements?

The apostles were frustrated in their purpose, just as the ancient prophets were, by men who preferred an institution to the whos of God. Paul bitterly expressed his wish that the men who were leading his converts that way would be cut off from God (Gal. 5:12), that is, that they would be damned. And he pleaded with his converts not to fall into their trap, for their doctrine was not from Jesus:

Galatians 5

7. You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth?

8. This persuasion is not from Him who calls you.

Scriptures such as those above show us that even in the days of the apostles, Satan was working through unwise believers to form an institution to which he could invite all believers, and thereby separate them from men who were the government of God. In that effort, Satan succeeded spectacularly in the early-fourth century by inspiring men to establish the Institution of Christianity, and later in that century, by imposing Roman Church religion upon all of society. Christianity is completely foreign to Christ; though it bears his name, it is only a blend of Roman traditions and doctrines of apostate believers.^[139]

Many leaders of God’s children were seduced by the gifts and promises from Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, to blend with the Roman Empire,^[140] and the Institution that was formed from that unholy alliance named itself “Christianity”.^[141] Holy men were sent from God “not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power” (1Cor. 2:4), but they were supplanted by men ordained by the Institution, with its doctrines and rites enforced by the State. But in replacing true servants of Jesus, the Christian empire replaced the true Jesus with a false one, and in replacing the true Jesus, Christians replaced the true God with one more to their liking.

When Satan offered Jesus the world, he turned it down, but when Rome offered the world to believers, they accepted it. Those who didn’t were persecuted. The body of Christ was lured into bed with the world and was transformed by her treachery against Christ into “the Great Whore” of John’s Revelation (Rev. 17:1), the mysterious “Babylon the Great, the Mother of harlots and abominations of the earth” (Rev. 17:5). When John saw her in his vision, the woman was “drunk on the blood of the saints and on the blood of the martyrs of Jesus”, which would prove true in the centuries that followed. The sight astonished John (Rev. 17:6).

The lie upon which the Great Whore is founded is that to belong to her means to belong to Christ. She never stopped claiming to be the bride of Christ, even after giving herself to Rome, and carnally minded men believed her claim, and still do. It is not true that Christianity represents Christ, but Satan has deceived the whole world in thinking that it does (Rev. 12:9). Sadly, most of God’s own children believe that lie, and they join Christian churches because of it, thinking that joining a church demonstrates the sincerity of their faith. The very title of the Institution, “Christ-ianity”, attracts God’s children and makes them want to join her. So, when God calls them out of sin, they innocently go about looking for a “good church” to join. They do not know that when God calls us out of sin, He is calling us only to Himself, not to Christianity. All anyone needs is to be in Christ. In him, we are righteous in God’s sight, needing nothing else, for we are “complete in him who is the head of every ruler and authority” (Col. 2:10).

It grieves our heavenly Father for us to hear His call and then, thinking to please Him, make ourselves members of the most wicked thing on earth. The darkness of the world at large cannot compare to the darkness of the Institution of Christianity, for it is “the dwelling place of demons, and a prison for every unclean spirit, and a prison for every unclean and loathsome bird” (Rev. 18:2).

Finding Glory

Many of God’s children who join a Christian church live unsatisfied lives, unfulfilled in Church religion, but thinking they are pleasing God, they go along with the program. They do not know that the perfect liberty and joy Christ purchased for them can be had in this life. As one dear sister in Christ told me after she discovered the truth, “I thought we had to wait until after death to be this happy and free.” This brings to mind an old camp meeting hymn:^[142]

Ellen Payne, my sister-in-law, once testified that “you get what you settle for.” And Preacher Clark often lamented that, as he said it, “God’s children are living far below their privilege.” The traditions and doctrines of Christianity force those within it to settle for far less than is available in Christ Jesus, and it is the privilege, if not the duty, of all God’s children to hear the Savior’s call to “come out of her,” and to follow his representatives “outside the camp, bearing his reproach” (Heb. 13:13).

Using the Dead

When God’s prophets labored among God’s Old Testament people, false prophets slandered them and praised the long-dead “father Abraham”. Later, when the prophets were safely in the grave, deceivers praised both Abraham and the prophets, but slandered Jesus. Later still, after Jesus was gone, false apostles praised Abraham, the prophets, and Jesus, but persecuted Paul and denounced the gospel Jesus gave him. Within a few generations more, as the Institution of Christianity developed, its ministers praised Abraham, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul while slandering and persecuting the who of God in their time.

Men of the Institution have always praised dead servants of God; it’s the living men of God who give them problems. Dead prophets are gone, and their words can be twisted into new meanings. They no longer pose a threat to the Institution because they are no longer here to denounce those who pervert their words, as Paul, while still alive, condemned some who perverted his (Rom. 3:7–8). Peter did not preach Paul’s gospel for the Gentiles, for he had a different gospel for the Jews (Gal. 2:7); nevertheless, he acknowledged Paul’s gospel as being of God and condemned those who were distorting Paul’s words:

2Peter 3

15. Consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul has also written to you according to the wisdom given to him,

16. as also in all his letters when speaking in them about these matters, among which are some things hard to understand, which those who are ignorant and unstable twist to their own damnation, as they also do the other scriptures.

A later generation of false teachers began to claim both Paul and Peter as their spiritual fathers, for those two were then safely in the grave. And so it has continued to this day. Men of the Institution claim to be the spiritual descendants of such men, using the blessed memory of true men of God to legitimize themselves. But they use their words only to benefit their Institution. Jesus did not spare such hypocrites his wrath:

Matthew 23

29. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees! Hypocrites! You erect the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous,

30. and you say, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the murder of the prophets.”

31. Thus you bear witness against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets!

32. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers!

33. You snakes! You offspring of vipers! How can you escape the damnation of Gehenna!

Writing this reminds me of an elderly, righteous woman in my hometown. She was, in the early 1900s, a founding member of a local holiness church. During one of my visits with her, in which we would enjoy sweet fellowship in the Spirit, she told me a story of “takin’ in washin’ ”, that is, washing neighbors’ clothes by hand on a scrub board, to earn an extra dime a week to contribute to the church’s building fund. Her humble home was close to the church that was eventually built; however, in her last years, she was too feeble to walk that far, and no member of the church, no relative, and no church official would respond to her requests to be carried to church meetings. They all knew (because she let them know, as she did me) that if she went, she would reprove the entire congregation for their increasing worldliness, and she would have been right to do so. Years before, as a teenager, I attended that same church, and so I knew many of its members well. The errors in the congregation that she was seeing were serious ones, and as a godly elder, her feelings and thoughts would have benefitted them if she had been given an opportunity to express them. But at no time in her last years was she allowed to attend their church meetings to testify about what she saw.

When this precious old saint died, I made the 120-mile trip from my home to be at her funeral, which was attended by a large number of people. I sat near the back of the church, and the scene before me nearly took my breath away. Some of the same people who had for so long refused to allow this dear mother in Christ into their church while she was alive were praising her to the highest for her holy life and her long-standing loyalty to their church. They told stories about her, including her work to establish the church in that city. Had I not known better, I would have thought she all but lived in that church building and did little else but work for its success. Before the funeral service even began, two middle-aged men sat in the pew in front of me talking aloud about their connections with the dead saint. The first, a part-time minister whom I knew and who had grown up in that church, spoke in glowing terms of how much the deceased saint had helped him and his young bride when they first married. The other man responded, claiming with evident pride that when he was an infant, she had nursed him from her own breasts when his mother was sick.

It was a heart-rending scene. Now that the old saint was dead, she was useful. With her voice stilled by death, her body was allowed into the building. Now, to be known to have been close to her was to have status in the Assembly, and that status was a prize for which people strove with competing tales. That is how dead servants of God are used by those of the Institution. My heart was broken, and I could not stay. When the pastor of the church had everyone bow their heads in prayer, I quietly left the building and traveled back home.

The wise take advantage of God’s servants while they are still alive. They draw wisdom from them and follow them, even if it means that they are persecuted for doing so.

God Is Winning

Falling asleep in Jesus without persuading others of the truth does not make a man a failure, even if religionists use the dead saint’s name to bolster their status in the world. Jesus failed to persuade Israel that he was their Messiah and was crucified; yet, through death, Jesus accomplished his mission to purchase the life of God for us. No one could prevent it, not even by killing him, and no one has ever been able to undo it, not even by teaching that the days of the miraculous have passed. Later, when religious leaders persecuted those who received God’s life, their cruelty had an effect similar to that of trying to stamp out a fire in dry brush. It only spread the flames: “On that day, a great persecution broke out against the Assembly in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1b). Every moment, in every situation, God is winning, and eventually, He always makes it obvious. So, let us “rejoice in hope” and echo Paul’s praise: “Thanks be to God who, in Christ, always leads us in triumph” (2Cor. 2:14a).

Chapter 11

Life vs. Form

“I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”
John 10:10

Pentecost is an experience, not an organization.
Preacher Clark in a 1974 sermon

Section 1: Institutions

“Contrary to Us”

All institutions, whether organized for political, religious, or social reasons, are defined by their forms, that is, by the rules that those institutions require of those who belong to it. Some forms provide benefits, such as respectful behavior in a library that some schools require; or the good conduct required by laws of a country, such as honest business dealings; or the upright conduct required by certain religions, such as showing mercy and helping the poor. Other institutional forms do harm, such as the forms of cruelty that some Islamic schools teach children; or the immoral forms authorized by evil governments such as Nazism, which turned neighbor against neighbor; or the gruesome forms of some ancient religions, such as human sacrifice and temple prostitution. In all cases, the forms defined the institution, and every institution is sustained by adherence to its forms. If people cease practicing the forms of an institution, that institution will cease to exist.

The law of Moses, being an institution, was also defined by its forms. Observing holy days was a form; offering animal sacrifice was a form; circumcision was a form; even having commandments written down in a document was itself a form. Those forms, being from God, were the most beneficial forms mankind had ever known, and Moses’ law was a unique institution in that regard, for it was uniquely able to guide fallen man into a lifestyle which pleased God. Paul said if there had ever been a law that could impart life and righteousness, Moses’ law would have done it (Gal. 3:21), but it could not.

The reason Paul said that the law was “contrary to us” (Col. 2:14) is that its commandments were holy and we were not (Rom. 7:12, 14), and living according to commandments that were holy was contrary to our sinful nature. That is what made the law of Moses, in Peter’s words, “a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear” (Acts 15:10). Likewise, when Paul spoke of the enmity between God’s Spirit and our fleshly nature (Gal. 5:17), he was talking about the difference between God’s nature, which is good, and human nature, which is not good and can do only what it thinks is good by complying with acceptable forms.

The Law

Moses’ law, though from God, was a physical thing and, therefore, could not enter human hearts and change human nature. The law could only give commandments from the outside of man. But in the appointed time, through His beloved Son, God made a way to put that law where we needed it to be, namely, within us. God gave this precious promise to Israel:

Jeremiah 31 (Heb. 8:8–10)

31. The days are coming, says Jehovah, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,

32. not the kind of covenant that I made with their fathers in the day I took their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. . . .

33. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says Jehovah: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their heart.

That covenant is not in form, but in life, the abundant, holy life for which Jesus gave himself so that we might have it. Before that eternal life was given on Pentecost morning, the entire human race had no choice but to live in a world of forms.

God gave Moses ceremonial forms that would be a light to the nations as long as the forms were faithfully observed. Moreover, the forms of Moses’ law were designed by God as prophetic “shadows” of the coming Messiah (Col. 2:16–17). Without the Son, those shadows would have been no shadows at all because there would have been no light behind them. It was the principal function of the law’s forms to be prophetic symbols to Israel of God’s Son, their Messiah. That is why the Son’s coming fulfilled the law, as he told his disciples, “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Mt. 5:17). Then, when the resurrected Son of God ascended into heaven and offered himself to the Father for us, the Father sent the Spirit down to earth as witness that He had accepted the Son’s sacrifice, and the Son’s glory, being seated at the Father’s right hand, was so great that it reduced the glory of the shadow, the law, to absolutely nothing:

2Corinthians 3

7a. If the ministry of death by letters engraved on stones [Moses’ law] came with glory,

8. how shall the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?

9. For if the ministry of condemnation be glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness overflow with glory.

10. Indeed, that which was once made glorious [the law] has been made not glorious in this regard: on account of the surpassing glory [of Christ].

The authority of Jesus to change God’s covenant with Israel is astonishing. Solomon said that nothing God does can be changed (Eccl. 3:14), but by bringing the law of Moses to a conclusion, Jesus proved that anything God does can be changed if God sends someone to change it. Christ made the holy law of Moses non-holy – an unthinkable accomplishment – and those who continued in the forms of the law after the Spirit was given were actually dishonoring the God who gave them! The author of Hebrews said of Jesus, “This man is worthy of as much greater glory than Moses as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house” (Heb. 3:3). Moses gave Israel holy rites and rules, but Christ makes man himself holy the way God is holy, that is, holy by nature (2Pet. 1:4), without any rites or rules.

There are no holy places or times in heaven because the whole thing is holy, all the time. Nor has God or His Son, in all eternity, ever performed a single ceremony because they are filled with life; they are too busy living to stop and act out a ceremony. And if we stay filled with God’s life, we will also be too busy living to waste time performing ceremonies. Filling people with so much life that they cannot stop living is another way that God answered Jesus’ prayer for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Mt. 6:10). And to bring that about was God’s purpose for sending His Son into the world. Jesus said, “I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10).

Using Dead Things

At God’s command, Israel’s priests used dead things in their ministry.^[143] Those things were prophetic symbols, but they themselves had no life, and they gave none. The priests used dead flesh and dead blood of dead animals in sacrifices; they washed themselves with dead water; they ate dead food, clothed themselves in dead garments, and observed dead holy days. But now, also at God’s command, our heavenly High Priest, Jesus, ministers eternal life to us, and the eternal life that Jesus gives so far surpasses what forms can do that it stripped even the law’s holy forms of their glory and made them useless. How great is the Son! Just his shadow was the holiest thing the earth had ever known, and yet, after he came, the once holy shadows of the law were made useless “dead works” (Heb. 6:1; 9:14), worthless as dung in comparison to the life Jesus gives (Phip. 3:5–8).

God’s life makes the law something that we no longer learn about by reading from a dead book. With His life, we feel the law of God; we sense what pleases God when we partake of His nature. With God’s Spirit in us, we love Him by nature and our neighbors as ourselves, which the law of Moses could only command people to do (Lev. 19:18; Dt. 6:5). How much better is this covenant, in which we may know within ourselves what is good, and have the strength to do it, instead of searching in a book for the proper form to follow, without having spiritual strength!

Paul rejoiced that “when we were yet without strength, at the appointed time, Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6). Early in his life, he was among the ungodly, though striving to observe every form of the law, he yearned to be delivered from his ungodly nature, and was thrilled when Jesus delivered him:

Romans 7

22. With the inner man, I joyfully consent to the law of God,

23. but I see a different law in my [bodily] members, warring against the law of my mind and taking me captive to the law of sin that is in my members.

24. Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death?

25a. I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Romans 8

2. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death [that is in my flesh]!

3. For what the law could not do, in that it was powerless because it was of the flesh, God did, after He sent His Son in the form of sinful flesh to deal with sin.

An institution is a what, a dead thing. Israelites like Paul needed a who to help them, someone who was alive to God, and before the Spirit was given to men in Acts 2, no one was alive to God except His Son. Before that day, no one but Jesus knew God’s thoughts or felt His feelings, but on that day, everything changed.

Alive to God

The message of the gospel is that in order for us to be given true life, a true life had to be given for us, and Jesus did this when he “gave himself for us as an offering and a sacrifice to God for a fragrant aroma” (Eph. 5:2). “By this,” John said, “we have come to know love, in that he laid down his life for us” (1Jn. 3:16a) so that we might receive the life of God.

By the Spirit, God changes our nature so that we can be holy as He is holy (Mt. 5:48) and live holy lives naturally, as He does, without reliance upon forms. That holy nature, purchased for us by the sacrifice of Christ, brings with it the knowledge of God, making us alive to God’s thoughts and feelings. It is utterly free from form because God is. He is the great “I Am” (Ex. 3:14) because He is perfectly free to do as He will in every situation. In other words God is whatever we need Him to be. God does all things, Paul said, “according to the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11), and everything He does is perfect.

We cannot predict what God will do next because He has no habits or style. He may do differently in situations that are virtually identical. For example, in Exodus (17:5–6), when Israel begged for water in the wilderness, God commanded Moses to strike a rock on Mount Sinai, but later, in Numbers (20:7–8), when Israel again begged for water, God commanded Moses to speak to a rock instead. So, we cannot determine God’s will today based on what He did yesterday; His will is new each moment because He is a living God. Where the Spirit of God rules, there are no rules because God is free to do as He will, and His people are free to follow Him. No institution has the power to reveal God’s will to us, for no form can create within us the knowledge of God. Regardless of the forms we observe, without God’s Spirit we are as dead to Him as forms are (cf. Mt. 8:22). No institution, whether its forms be those of the law that came from God or the forms that men have devised, can ever make us alive to God.

The nature of fallen man prefers form over life because with form, he can continue in his sinful ways while maintaining an appearance of goodness. When Jesus said that those whom he made free would be “free indeed” (Jn. 8:36), he meant that they would be liberated from bondage to the sinful nature that desires form, set free to live the way God lives:

Romans 6

20. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness.

. . . .

22. But being now made free from sin, and being made slaves to God, you have your fruit unto holiness, and in the end, eternal life.

Israel’s First Self-Willed Institution: A Kingdom

Paul said that true faith looks to what cannot be seen rather than to what is visible, “for things that are seen are temporal, but things that are not seen are eternal” (2Cor. 4:18). To carnally minded people, God’s kind of government, that is, someone with an invisible anointing, does not seem as dependable as an earthly institution because the flesh trusts more in what it can see than in what it cannot see. When Israel first took possession of Canaan, God’s way of governing Israel was to anoint individuals, such as Deborah, Gideon, and Samson, to deliver the nation whenever it fell into trouble. That way of governing Israel never failed, but many in Israel wanted the kind of government other nations had, which to them seemed more dependable. They did not understand that their demand for a king amounted to a demand for something more dependable than God, not just more dependable than the men and women God raised up for them. Their rejection of God’s judges and prophets was, in reality, a rejection of God Himself:

1Samuel 8

6. When they said, “Give us a king to judge us,” the thing was evil in Samuel’s eyes. And Samuel prayed to Jehovah.

7. And Jehovah said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.”

It is only of God’s mercy that Israel’s rejection of Him as king was not the end of Israel’s story. What a humble God! He was deeply grieved for His people’s choice, and yet, He still loved them enough to tell them how to reject Him the safest way. Centuries before this event, knowing that His people would one day reject Him and demand an earthly king, God took the time to tell them, through Moses, how to reject Him so that the nation would not immediately collapse:

Deuteronomy 17

14. When you come into the land that Jehovah your God is giving you and have possessed it and settled in it, then you will say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me.”

15. You must set over you a king whom Jehovah your God will choose; you will set one from among your brothers as king over you. You may not appoint over you a foreigner, one who is not your brother.

16. He shall not multiply to himself horses, nor return the people to Egypt in order to heap up horses, for Jehovah has said to you, “You are never again to return by this way.”

17. Nor shall he multiply wives to himself, so that his heart will not turn aside, and he shall not greatly multiply silver and gold for himself.

Time after time in the Old Testament, God showed Himself to be supremely meek, so meek, in fact, that He prefers that we have our way instead of His, except that He loves us and knows the trouble into which our ways will lead us (Prov. 11:19; 14:12). But those who walk in the Spirit think the way God thinks; they prefer to do His will instead of their own. That is far better for us, and our well-being is God’s great desire.

Over and over, Moses told Israel that the reason God was giving them His law was for their well-being:

Deuteronomy 4

40a. You shall keep His statutes and His commandments which I command you this day so that it may go well with you and your children after you.

Deuteronomy 10

13. Keep the commandments of Jehovah, and His statutes which I command you today for your good.

Deuteronomy 12

28a. Take heed and hear all these words which I command you, so that it will go well with you and your children after you forever.

Samuel pleaded with the people not to insist on having an earthly king (1Sam. 8:10–18), but Israel refused to hear him. Samuel warned them that a king would oppress them: “You will cry out in that day because of your king that you have chosen for yourselves,” he protested, “but Jehovah will not answer you in that day!”

1Samuel 8

19. But the people refused to heed the voice of Samuel, and they said, “No! But a king shall be over us,

20a. so that we may be like all the nations.”

After this meeting with the people, Samuel, heavy-hearted, returned to Jehovah and told Him what the people had said. And Jehovah said to Samuel, “Listen to their voice, and make them a king” (1Sam. 8:22). So, Israel demanded and obtained a kingdom such as other nations had (1Sam. 8:5, 20), an institution that would represent them to the world, instead of being content with an anointed man who represented God to them.

Paul said that the stories written in the Old Testament were written so that we could learn from them (Rom. 15:4). Israel’s example is a warning that God will allow us to reject Him and form an institution for ourselves instead, if that is what we want. Many early New Testament believers did not learn from Israel’s example, and they failed to trust the invisible Spirit of God to lead them. So, God let them have their own way, to choose their own ministers, formulate their own doctrines, and set their own standards of conduct and worship. So it is today. The Father does not force Himself on His children. But at what price do we spurn Him?

Israel’s Second Self-Willed Institution: Judaism

When the Son of God came, the kingdom which Israel had demanded and obtained was long gone, for foreign powers had conquered the nation, with Rome at that time imposing its will on the Jews. Unable to keep its kingdom, Israel instead developed a culture, Judaism, which blended the ceremonial forms of Moses’ law with forms which Israel’s elders devised, forms which Israel often honored above the ones that came from God (Mt. 15:1–6; Mk. 7:9–13). That was the culture into which the Son of God was sent, and it was the end result of centuries of sinful self-will.

When worshippers are sinful, God detests whatever form of worship they offer Him (cf. Prov. 21:27). The law was intended to guide Israel in righteous living so that they could worship God acceptably and, in God’s time, recognize His Son when he came. God bitterly complained when Israel lived immorally but used the law’s ceremonial forms as a cover for their sin. In doing so, they made the holy forms which God had ordained for their blessing to be a stench in His nostrils:

Isaiah 1

11. What is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? says Jehovah. I am glutted with burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fatlings, and I take no pleasure in the blood of bullocks, and young rams, and he-goats.

12. Who has required you to trample my courts when you come to appear before me?

13. Stop bringing worthless offerings! Incense is an abomination to me. New moon, and Sabbaths, and the calling of a convocation, I cannot bear. The sacred Assembly is nothing to me.

14. Your new moons and your appointed feasts, my soul hates! They are a burden to me. I have worn myself out bearing them.

15. And when you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you. Though you make many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood!

God had commanded Israel to perform those sacrifices, burn that incense, observe those holy feasts, honor every Sabbath day and new moon; make those prayers; and have holy convocations in His holy place, the temple. But Israel disgusted God because while they were observing those forms, they were ignoring His moral commandments, excusing their immorality because they had obeyed the rules concerning ceremonial form. And God hated it.

The Illusion

Contrary to what one might expect, as the Israelites drifted from God’s moral commandments, they became more religious, not less, more devoted to ceremonial forms. But by no means is that a characteristic unique to ancient Israel; it has been the way of fallen man from the beginning. Historically, the greatest wickedness on earth has always been found in cultures devoted to religious form. And seeing that has made some men reject religion altogether.

Seeing religion as nothing more than ceremonial forms which provide man an illusion of happiness, Karl Marx said, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”^[144] If we define religion as Marx understood it, that is, as an empty exercise “providing man an illusory happiness,” then he was right to view religion as the opiate of the people^[145], for he saw that people clung to ceremonial religion as desperately as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a piece of wood.

Ceremonial religion is a placebo for the ungodly; sinners perform rites to relieve their conscience and imagine they are better for it, when nothing has changed. But unknown to Marx, and to most of the world, there is a “pure and undefiled religion before God” (Jas. 1:27), and that religion is no illusion at all. It is instead the end of man’s illusions and the beginning of true life for him. With his blood, Jesus purchased true happiness for us, and he invites all people to abandon the illusion of happiness provided by ceremonial form so that their feelings of guilt, Marx’ “condition which requires illusions,” is done away with, and true happiness is found.

The New Option

The longer an institution stands, the more stable and secure it appears to be. Very old religious institutions, like old-growth forests, exude an aura of sanctity, which is, perhaps, why ancient Israel felt the urge to worship “under every green tree” (Jer. 3:6; 3:13). Such institutions provide their members with a false sense of security, “the illusory happiness” of which Marx spoke. Each generation faces a greater temptation to go the way of institutions instead of following the messengers of God because with each generation, institutions grow older and more revered. Regardless of how long institutions exist, however, and how stable they appear to be, they cannot replace God’s representatives because God does not anoint and send institutions; He anoints and sends people.

When the Son came into the world, the elders of Israel were devoted to their Institution and were neglecting, said Jesus, “the weightier matters of the law: justice, and mercy, and faith” (Mt. 23:23). The elders of Israel had become representatives of an institution rather than of God. Just as the Son represented God and was God, Israel’s leaders represented the Institution, Judaism, and were the Institution.

In the centuries when “the traditions of the elders” were in development, the people of Israel grew accustomed to the Institution. They were taught by the men of the Institution that the Institution was of God, and so, the people supported both it and them, thinking to do God service. Those men maintained their influence over people by convincing them that God wanted them to live within the confines of the Institution’s forms and traditions. When the Son of God was revealed, however, he broke open the gates of the Institution and offered the people an option they had never had, the option of receiving God’s kind of life instead of continuing in a life of forms! For that, men of the Institution hated Jesus.

New Testament Believers’ Self-Willed Institution: Christianity

As we have seen, even during the days of the apostles, believers began to drift away from life in the Spirit toward institutionalism (cf. 1Cor. 1:10–13), but after the apostles, those who wanted an institution became much bolder, as Paul had predicted:

Acts 20

29. Now, I know this, that after my departure, vicious wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock.

30. Even from among your own selves shall men rise up, speaking perverse things in order to draw away disciples after themselves.

Jesus foretold that the love of many for God would grow cold (Mt. 24:12), and the tendency of love for God, when it begins to die, is to turn to ceremonial form in order to make a show of devotion and conceal the death of love. Shakespeare described this tendency well:

When love begins to sicken and decay,

It useth an enforced ceremony.

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith;

But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,

Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.^[146]

Such “hollow men”, taking advantage of believers’ decaying love, succeeded in leading God’s New Testament people into institutionalized religion and away from life in the Spirit. In spite of the fact that they had forsaken the way of Christ, they considered themselves his representatives and boldly issued commandments to believers, which commandments Paul judged to be on a par with “Jewish myths” (Tit. 1:14). The title that those apostate believers claimed for themselves was “Christian”, and the name they gave to their Institution, Christianity, was itself a lie, for it was not of Christ at all. During the first three centuries AD, Rome persecuted both true and apostate believers; it was all the same to pagan Rome. But the Emperor Constantine’s blending of Roman religion with the faith of apostate believers in AD 325, the epochal event I call the Synthesis^[147], relieved believers of fear of persecution – so long as they submitted to Constantine’s new Institution, the Christianized empire.

The apostates who partnered with the Roman Empire were beside themselves with glee at the development,^[148] but believers who refused to join them continued to suffer. Indeed, Constantine’s Christian ministers, now with the might of Rome at their disposal, became the most zealous persecutors of faithful believers ever seen. Just a few years before the Synthesis, believers suffered terribly at the hands of Roman authorities, from 303 to 311 AD, but after the Synthesis of 325, believers were the authorities and “had only themselves to fear.”^[149]

The Roman Church has undeniably proved to be history’s most vehement adversary of true servants of God. At the direction of the Roman Church, laws were passed declaring that any believer not in line with the Institution was a heretic, and because the Church and State were now one and the same, to be a heretic meant also to be an enemy of the State, liable to execution. That definition of heresy was enforced in Christendom for many centuries, and it led to cruel, legal abuse of many a saintly soul. Foreseeing this, John wrote, “I saw a woman drunk on the blood of the saints, on the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marveled with great wonder” (Rev. 17:6).

Once Christianity was established by Roman law as the norm for the empire, it was just a matter of time before the whole world accepted the idea that Christianity represents Christ. The world was naturally inclined to do that because the god of Christianity is one of their own, that is, he is a god of form. The fact that Satan “deceives the whole world” (Rev. 12:9) does not mean that he has persuaded the whole world to be Christian; it means that he has persuaded the whole world to believe that Constantine’s Institution, Christianity, represents Christ. But because the world is thus deceived, Christ’s true representatives are frowned upon, not just by Christians but also by the world, because they do not represent an earthly Institution, but God. Preacher Clark once told his congregation, “I’m just a sheep in wolf’s clothing.” In other words, “I know how wrong I sound, but if anyone will look beyond appearances, he will see that God sent me.” Paul knew how that felt:

2Corinthians 6

4. In everything, we commend ourselves as ministers of God, with much perseverance, in persecutions, in hardships, in distresses,

5. in beatings, in imprisonments, in riots, in labors, in sleepless nights, in times of hunger,

. . . .

8. through honor and dishonor, through evil report and good report, as deceivers and yet true.

Paul, too, was a sheep in wolf’s clothing. That is how it is in this world for every messenger sent by God, and when such evil is institutionalized, it is doubly evil.

The Lord taught me some years ago that when a lie becomes the norm, normal people become liars. That is true because when a lie becomes the norm in society, people behaving normally live as though lies are the truth. And when normal people become living lies, God’s messengers are condemned merely because they are the living truth.

Institutionalized Slander^[150]

The mere existence of the Institution, with age lending weight to its claims, condemns true men of God without words. Ministers of the Institution do not even have to mention them by name; they trust the revered forms they perpetuate to speak for them, for by promoting the Institution, they share in its reputation for righteousness. This is what I call “institutionalized slander”, which is when people let the Institution do their thinking for them. The Institution itself, by its mere existence, condemns those sent by God (and anyone else who is not of the Institution), thus relieving its members of the burden of seriously considering the message of God’s true servants. The persuasive power of such Institutionalized slander is enormous, and it has always been the world’s most effective weapon against true ministers of Christ.

Ungodly men who claim to represent Christ may hide their lack of ordination from God behind forms, and from their lofty perches within the Institution, with an appearance of fatherly concern, they caution their flocks against going beyond the whitewashed walls of the Institution. They point to the vast multitudes who belong to the Institution, and to the vast multitudes who have belonged to it over the millennia, and then ask, “How could so many people be wrong?” But the answer to that is, “Jesus said that just a few would find the way of life (Mt. 7:14); so, how could so many people be right?”

The Simplicity of Christ

Professional religionists have always known, far better than God’s children know, how to make an impressive show (cf. Lk. 16:8) because form is what sustains them, and so, their attention is given to perfecting and maintaining a good show. As we have pointed out, the simple forms that God gave to Israel could not compete with the grandiose displays of devotion found in heathen cultures. To those in Israel who wanted to be like other nations, the simple forms of God’s law were an embarrassment, but those who were content with God’s law were valuable examples of humility, for the pride in human nature demanded much more pomp and ceremony than God ordained. Israel, in the end, failed in her walk with God, not because God’s law was so demanding that they could not keep it; Israel failed because God’s law was so simple they did not want it.

God didn’t want it, either, but for an entirely different reason, to wit, He wanted His Son to be revealed and to become the sacrifice which would bring us His life, as the prophet said,

Hebrews 10 (Ps. 40:6)

5. When coming into the world, [the Son] said, “Sacrifice and offering have not pleased you, but a body you have prepared for me.

6. In whole burnt offerings and such for sin, you have taken no pleasure.”

When the Son of God brought about this New Covenant, the way of salvation did not become more stylish and sophisticated; on the contrary, it became simpler than ever – so simple that even fools need not err if they walk in it (Isa. 35:8). In this covenant, we are judged on the basis of our hearts, that is, what we want to do. How much simpler could God make the way of salvation than to require no ceremony, no special form, no social status, no talent, no physical strength or beauty, and no money? All that is required in this New Covenant is faith in God’s Son, Jesus.

The animal and food sacrifices God required of Israel were few and simple, but the very simplicity of those sacrifices challenged the pride of man. How much more, then, does the simplicity of Christ challenge human pride! How much easier it was for those under the law to offer dead animals to God than for people in this covenant to offer themselves to God as “living sacrifices”! As an elderly saint whom we called “Uncle Joe” once put it, “It takes more humility to be a sacrifice than to make one.”

It was because God’s way in the Old Testament was an embarrassment to some in Israel that they strove “to be like all the nations,” and because God’s way in the New Testament is an embarrassment to some in the body of Christ, they strive to be like all the denominations. They build churches; they declare certain days to be holy; they set their own standards for qualifying for the ministry; they devise their own ceremonial forms; they formulate their own doctrines; and they write all these forms in a book. That is the carnal style of worship which is now an abomination to God, yet loved by men who justify it by saying it is all done to honor Jesus, when the truth is, ceremonial forms deny him (cf. Tit. 1:16). Every one of the multitude of Christian sects is a repudiation of Christ and the way of the Spirit which he purchased for us with his blood.

Christianity, in its entirety, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is “the broad way that leads to destruction” (Mt. 7:13), and because so many choose to go that way, the simple way of Christ is spoken evil of (2Pet. 2:2b). Only the few who choose life over form are satisfied with the unpretentious “strait and narrow way” of Jesus. As Keith Hinnant, a faithful brother, once testified, “If you want to be right with God, you have to want to be right with God more than you want to be right.” Choosing God’s life over ceremonial forms will never seem right to our fleshly nature because human nature craves status, and it has no influence in the kingdom of God. The ways of man are left out altogether. That is why so few will choose life over form and walk with Jesus in the “strait and narrow way”.

The Fundamental Difference

between the Old and the New Covenants

God’s children who join the Institution do not understand the fundamental difference between the two covenants, and the principal reason they do not understand the difference is that they believe that the Institution, Christianity, represents Christ. Believing that lie, the most destructive lie in history, they are robbed of the knowledge of their heavenly Father. Today, Paul would ask believers who would join a Christian church the question he asked his beloved Galatian converts when they turned from worship in life to worship in form: “Having begun in spirit, are you now perfected by flesh?” (Gal. 3:3).

The Israel of the Old Testament was an earthly nation that worshipped in carnal forms and fought its battles with carnal weapons. The New Testament “Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16) is a spiritual nation that worships in spirit and whose battles are fought with spiritual weapons (2Cor. 10:4). The ceremonial forms of the Old Testament prepared God’s people for the first coming of the Son if they observed them; the Spirit of life in the New Testament prepares God’s people for the second coming of the Son if they walk in it. Under the law, men served God by their own will and strength, but in this covenant, men can serve God only by His will and strength. As Preacher Clark once said, “What God requires, requires God.” Israel’s example proves that ceremonial forms do not require God’s strength; even godless, wicked men performed them in their own strength (Prov. 15:8; Isa. 1:11–17).

Paul described fallen human nature as “the old man”, and our new nature in Christ as “the new man”:

Ephesians 4

22. You are to put away, as concerns your former conduct, the old man who is corrupted by deceitful desires,

23. and be renewed in the spirit of your mind,

24. and put on the new man, who in God’s likeness is created in true righteousness and holiness.

Colossians 3

9b. You have put off the old man with his ways

10. and have put on the new man, who is renewed in knowledge in the likeness of the One who created him.

The old man was justified by adherence to the law’s holy forms, but the new man is justified by the holy Spirit of God. Preacher Clark explained the difference this way: Under the law, the “old man” got everything. His flesh was circumcised; his flesh ate and drank on the feast days; his flesh rested on the Sabbath day; his flesh was clothed for worship; his flesh was sanctified with earthly materials; and so forth. Now, however, in Christ, that old man is put to death and gets nothing, and the new man gets everything. The new man gets circumcised (Rom. 2:29); the new man feasts on the bread of life and drinks of the Spirit (Jn. 6:56; 1Cor. 12:13b); the new man puts on as a garment Christ himself (Gal. 3:27); the new man is sanctified by the Spirit (1Cor. 6:11). “If any man be in Christ,” Paul said, “he is a new creature” (2Cor. 5:17), and that new creature lives and worships in “a new and living way” (Heb. 10:20), a way which is impossible for the old man.

Although the ceremonial forms of the law were given by God and had to be performed during the Old Testament, none of the ceremonial forms practiced by Christians have come from God. They are all man-made, and they are all “in the flesh”. In the way of Christianity, the old man gets everything again: a baptism of water for his flesh; days set apart for his flesh to rest; communion meals of carnal bread and wine; religious garments to cover his flesh; and earthly places declared to be holy for his flesh to visit and admire.

Regardless of where the forms came from, whether they be the Old Testament forms given to Moses by God or the forms in Christianity invented by men, to worship in form in this covenant is to miss the whole point of Christ. The Son of God came to give men life, not more symbols of it, and we submit to Jesus as our Lord only as we walk in the life he gives. We deny him when we worship in ceremonial form (Tit. 1:16), for by such works we are saying, in substance, that the true Messiah has not yet come and fulfilled the law.

Nailed to the Cross

In the law of Moses, God went into great detail when He told His people how to worship Him (Ex. 25–31). He gave them commandments concerning the size and shape of the tabernacle, its furnishings, the materials to be used, and how much of each. He mandated how the priests’ garments should be made, the ingredients of the holy anointing oil and the incense to be used in worship, adding that “whoever compounds or whoever puts some of it on a stranger, to smell it, shall be cut off from his people” (Ex. 30:33, 38). When Aaron’s two oldest sons tried to honor God by offering a different kind of incense, God struck them dead (Lev. 10:1–2).

So, God was very serious about how He was worshipped in the Old Testament. But He is even more serious about it now because He loves His Son and cares for us. How we worship shapes everything about us (Pss. 115:4–8; 135:15–18). Worshipping in God’s life makes us ever more alive to Him (Prov. 4:18; Jn. 16:13), but worshipping in form makes us deader and deader to the things of God; it distorts our understanding of everything that is holy. And God wants us to know Him!

Paul labored constantly to remind his Gentile converts not to submit to ceremonial rites and rules, as they were being pressured to do, but to live and worship only in the Spirit. He taught them that Jesus, through his agony on the cross, brought the need for all ceremonial forms to an end, in particular, the ones that God gave to Israel:

Colossians 2

14. He blotted out that which was against us, the handwriting of ordinances [the law] that was contrary to us, removing it from between us [Jews and Gentiles] when he nailed it to the cross.

Ephesians 2

13. In Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near [to God] by the blood of Christ.

14. For he is our peace, who made the two [Jews and Gentiles] one and destroyed the middle wall of partition [the law],

15. having abolished in his flesh the enmity [between Jews and Gentiles], the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that he might create of those two one new man in himself, making peace.

When Jesus’ Jewish body was nailed to the cross, the law of Moses was nailed there with him. It is true that Jesus died for us, but it is equally true that he lived for us. He was circumcised on the eighth day for us; he kept the law’s feasts and Sabbaths for us; he offered the law’s sacrifices and observed its dietary laws for us. If we are in him, therefore, we are justified before God, for we are in him who did all those things for us. This is the reason it is so important to be in the body of Christ:

Romans 7

4. My brothers, you were made dead to the law through the body of Christ so that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bear fruit to God.

The author of Hebrews says that Jesus is the mediator of a better covenant (Heb. 8:6), which must mean that worship in this covenant is more pleasing to God, since it comes to Him through His Son. If this New Covenant were a covenant of form like the Old Covenant, Jesus and the apostles would surely have given us more rules than Israel was given so that we might offer God better worship. But not a single instruction is given to us in the New Testament books concerning how to carry out a ceremonial form, and the reason there are no such instructions is because in this covenant, there are no ceremonies to keep.^[151] On the other hand, we must emphasize the undeniable fact that not one of the many ceremonies practiced by Christians is found in Scripture; they were all devised by men, and to practice those ceremonies honors only the men who devised them, not God.

“Taste and See”

The Old Testament ceremonies were like candy wrappers, which have no value except for what they conceal. Once a wrapper is opened and the candy revealed, sensible people discard the wrapper and eat the candy. Likewise, with the Son revealed, wise believers cast aside ceremonies and eat and drink of the Son, as he told us we must do:

John 6

53. Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

54. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I’ll raise him up on the last day.

55. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”

The Son has been revealed! Eat him up! The Spirit has come! Drink it up!

It is as foolish to continue to worship in ceremony as it is to eat the candy wrapper instead of the candy. But beyond the senselessness of it, as Paul told Titus, to worship in ceremony now that the Son has been revealed is to deny him, for it denies that what he did for us is sufficient (Tit. 1:16). The essential element of Paul’s gospel was that faith in Jesus Christ alone is sufficient for salvation. If God commanded Israel not to add one word to the law that Moses gave them (Dt. 4:2; 12:32), how much more does He not want us to add anything to the Spirit that His Son has given us (cf. Rev. 22:18–19)!

The wrapper of the law has been opened! The sweet Son of God is no longer hidden! The wrapper is not better than the candy; it has no power to satisfy a hunger and thirst for the sweetness of God and His righteousness. And because the Son is revealed, all men everywhere are now commanded to repent (Acts 17:30) and to “taste and see that Jehovah is good” (Ps. 34:8).

Jesus Is Good Enough

If we are wise, we will put our trust in Jesus alone and refuse everything the Institution has to offer – its ceremonies, its doctrines, and its traditions. When Paul told the saints in Colossae that they were complete in Christ (Col. 2:10), he was telling them that Jesus, all by himself, is enough, for only what Jesus had done for their souls was worth anything to God.

Uncle Joe once testified that God stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac (Gen. 22:10–12) because Abraham was making God jealous. He said, “God knew that He was the only one with a Son worthy to be a sacrifice for sin.” It is from that perspective that Paul asked, “Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?” (1Cor. 10:22). We risk provoking the Lord to jealousy when we add to the Son’s baptism of life the Institution’s baptism with lifeless water, or when we add to the Son’s communion in life the Institution’s communion with lifeless food and drink, or when we add to the Son’s spiritual garments of praise and righteousness the Institution’s carnal ceremonial robes. In this covenant, only God’s Son has the authority to baptize, to give communion, and to clothe the saints for worship. Therefore, men of the Institution who employ such carnal things in worship exposes them as attempting to usurp the Son’s authority. And for those with the Spirit to join them in that foolishness is treason against the Christ who has bought them, as Paul said,

1Corinthians 6

19. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit that is in you, which you have from God? Moreover, you are not your own,

20. For you were bought with a price; so then, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.

1Corinthians 7

23. You are bought with a price; do not be the slaves of men!

Under Moses’ law, God sanctified people, but He also sanctified lifeless things such as water, clothing, oil, and incense, etc., to be used in the ceremonies which the law required. But in this covenant, God sanctifies nothing but people. That is why in this covenant there are no holy places on earth, no holy days, no holy garments, and no holy instruments of ministry. That is also why ceremonies are no longer acceptable to God. To be holy, a ceremony needs holy things, and in this covenant, God has made no “thing” holy, just people.

If Jesus has made you holy by baptizing you with the Spirit, he has enabled you to offer holy worship to God – the only kind of worship now acceptable to Him (cf. Jn. 4:23–24) – and you have something to praise Him for! He has appointed you to eternal life!

“The Cup of the Lord and the Cup of Demons”

While on earth, the Son told his disciples that he was living on a kind of food they knew nothing about (Jn. 4:32). He stunned his disciples on one occasion by saying that he lived by eating the Father and that whoever wanted to live forever would have to eat him (Jn. 6:56–58). What a strange doctrine that must have been for them to hear! Who could believe such a thing? But Jesus did not leave his disciples to wonder about his meaning. Seeing their confusion, he went on to explain that he was not speaking of eating his fleshly body but of consuming the life that was within it: “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The things that I am telling you, they are spirit, and they are life!” (Jn. 6:63). But Jesus’ effort to explain things of the Spirit to people without the Spirit only made matters worse. His explanation was harder on them than the parable itself. If Jesus had left them puzzled, as was usual, they might have stayed with him longer, but as it was, “many of his disciples went back to former things and walked with him no longer” (Jn. 6:66).

This is the rock of truth that causes many followers of Jesus to stumble, and to turn back to the Institution, preferring the wrapper over the candy, that is, preferring form over life. They are offended, as those long-ago disciples were, when they hear the truth. Nevertheless, regardless of how many walk away, it is true that communion with God is spiritual and has nothing whatsoever to do with carnal wafers and wine. Communion with God is sharing in His thoughts and feelings, and it is always in spirit, never in the flesh. Throughout history, carnal ceremonial meals touted as communion with Divinity have been practiced by religions around the world, and with its communion meals, Christianity is continuing that vain ancient tradition. But a communion using dead things is a communion unwittingly shared with demons, not with Jesus, and Paul warned God’s children to stay away from such religion, telling them, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” (1Cor. 10:21).

The cup and table of the Lord is fellowship with God’s feelings and thoughts, and the cup and table of demons is fellowship with demonic feelings and thoughts. The Institution’s communion cup is a mockery of the communion which Christ died for us to enjoy with him. Stay away from it.

We worship God acceptably only as we worship in life because the Son ministers only in life. He baptizes us with God’s life (1Cor. 12:13); buries us in that life and raises us up with him into more life (Col. 2:12); and with the sharp sword of life, he circumcises our hearts from faith in form (Rom. 2:28–29) and “purges our conscience from dead works to serve a living God” (Heb. 9:14). The Son washes our souls with God’s life so that we may stand “blameless in holiness before our God and Father” (1Thess. 3:13). No ceremony can do that for us.

A purged conscience is unafraid to leave off dead, fleshly works; on the contrary, it rejoices in its freedom from them. Paul rejoiced in that knowledge, and it motivated him to boldly proclaim, “We are the circumcision who serve God in spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh” (Phip. 3:3). And because Paul understood and enjoyed true communion with Christ, he ended his second letter to the Corinthian saints with this: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.” (2Cor. 13:14).

The apostle James was not talking about ceremonial works when he said that “faith without works is dead” (Jas. 2:20); rather, he was talking about deeds of a godly life. Paul agreed. He also taught that good works are necessary for salvation (Rom. 2:5–10), though ceremonial works are not, for we will all be judged according to our deeds (Jn. 5:28–29; Rom. 8:13; 2Cor. 5:10). So then, James’ doctrine was sound. Faith without works is dead, but it is the lack of knowledge that actually kills it. Even in the Old Testament, God was both grieved and indignant that Israel had rejected the knowledge He had so freely given them. He said through Hosea,

Hosea 4

6. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge! Because you have rejected knowledge, I will reject you from being a priest to me. Inasmuch as you have forgotten the law of your God, I, even I, will forget your children!”

Section 2: Hypocrisy

Acting

The ancient Greek word hypocrite referred to a stage actor. In acting, the character the audience sees is not the person who is really there, and his actions are an imitation of life. The words an actor speaks are not his own, for they are not from his heart; they are words that the author of the play gave him to say. Likewise, an actor’s deeds on stage are not done from his heart; they are deeds he is told to perform. An actor is not really living; he is imitating what is real. The real person on the stage is hiding behind a form; his body is seen, but his personal thoughts and feelings are not expressed.

All acting is form, and the ceremonial forms God gave to Israel made them all holy actors, and the acts they performed were holy because they were prophetic symbols of the future deeds of the hidden Son of God. No one in heaven or earth knew that the Israelites were acting out parts in a holy play; everyone, everywhere, thought that the play itself was the thing because God had repeatedly said that the play would continue forever (e.g. Ex. 12:24; Lev. 6:22; 16:29). But from the beginning, God had His Son in mind, and in His mind, “forever” meant only until His Son came to fulfill the prophecies and transform them into an eternal covenant. The apostle Paul gloried in being anointed to reveal the great mystery of the play God had given to Israel:

Ephesians 3

8. To me, the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach among the Gentiles the incomprehensible richness of Christ

9. and to enlighten all men as to what is the plan of the mystery that has been hidden from the Aeons [heavenly beings] by the God who created all things through Jesus Christ,

10. so that through the Assembly of God, the multifaceted wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities among heavenly beings,

11. according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord,

12. in whom we have boldness and access to God, with confidence, through faith in him.

The ceremonies of the law were holy, prophetic imitations of the life that Jesus purchased with his blood for man, and those who carried out those ceremonies, unknown to them, were merely actors in an elaborate, holy play written by God. The law of Moses provided fallen men with a way to be hypocrites and please God at the same time. The law was the perfect hypocrisy, and God greatly rewarded those who kept it. And yet, the law’s holy imitations of the Son had no life in themselves and could impart no grace. As the apostle John said, “The law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (Jn. 1:17).

God ordained no such prophetic imitations to be performed in heaven. Yet, in heaven, Satan became an actor, a hypocrite, the moment he became proud and what he appeared to be was no longer what he really was. His appearance of humility before God became a mask for what was really in his heart, just as the holy forms of Moses’ law masked what was really in the hearts of those in Israel who performed them. The difference between Satan and them was that Satan’s putting on an act, his appearing to be one thing but really being another, was self-willed; it was not a divinely ordained prophecy of the Son. Rather, it was a pit into which Satan fell the moment he first left a wrong impression about himself.

James cautioned the saints not to be like Satan and put on an act when worshipping God:

James 3

14. If you have bitter envy and strife in your heart, do not glory [in spite of it], and, so, lie against the truth.

15. This wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.

This wisdom is unspiritual because it is the wisdom of carnal men; it is demonic because it is the wisdom of demons; and it is earthly because it is in this world, where men and demons live together. James was warning believers of the behavior of some who, though not perfect with God, rejoice in the Assembly of saints as if they were, the way Satan and his angels did in heaven before they were cast out (cf. Job 1:6; 2:1), singing God’s praises with the other sons of God (Job 38:7).

Satan’s continued obedience to the commands of God to him while he was still in heaven made him appear to be sincere, and millions of angels admired him because of it. However, the real Satan was the one not seen, the one who loved himself and coveted God’s glory. That hypocrisy is what Jesus cast out of heaven because it never was of God, and since Satan’s expulsion, every creature in heaven has been completely what he appears to be. Whatever any heavenly being says or does now is said or done sincerely. There is no more play-acting where Jesus has set things in order: in heaven, it is Paradise; in hell, it is Torment; and in the lives of Spirit-filled saints, it is God’s righteousness in the flesh (2Cor. 5:21).

Becoming a Lie

Satan deserves the title, “the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44) because he was the first to tell a lie,^[152] but Satan became a lie before he ever told one, for he continued to appear to be a humble servant of God after his heart became proud. However, since the knowledge of what was truly good and evil was hidden in the Son, Satan did not understand that he was a contemptible lie after he became one. For thousands of years, Satan believed that he was in good standing with God after he became evil.

The same is true of people who become a lie. They believe themselves and do not know how God sees them. From the moment someone becomes a lie, even true words that he speaks are lies because his use of those words leaves the impression that he himself is truthful. This is what I meant before when I said that if a man, himself, is not the truth, he is a liar no matter what he says. Such a man is lying even when he quotes the Bible because truthfulness is a matter of the heart, not of the words that proceed from the mouth. After all, Satan accurately quoted scriptures to Jesus in the wilderness, but was he not lying when he did so? If Jesus had believed Satan when he quoted the holy Scriptures, we all would have perished. And in the garden of Eden, the Serpent told Eve the truth, factually speaking,^[153] but the Serpent himself was a lie. Therefore, everything he said to Eve was a lie, and Eve’s life was ruined because she believed him.

The ceremonial forms of all human religions are a mockery of Christ; none of them were given by God as prophecies of him. The acting out of Christianity’s ceremonial forms is a mockery of life in the Spirit, not a prophecy of it. Membership in Christian churches is a mockery of membership in the body of Christ; Christian communion ceremonies are a mockery of spiritual communion with God; and Christian baptisms in water are mockeries of the spiritual baptism of Christ. They all were instituted by apostate believers (with the aid of Rome) who were not content with worship in spirit and in truth, and it is a tragedy that they are practiced to this day by many in God’s family, the ones who do not yet possess the knowledge of God.

Worldly Wisdom

To know how to put on a convincing act requires a certain kind of wisdom. For example, the actress whom Joab hired to fool King David was called “a wise woman” (2Sam. 14:2–3). The Bible does not deny that worldly people have wisdom; in fact, Jesus said that in worldly wisdom, sinners exceed the righteous (Lk. 16:8). At the same time, the Bible is clear that worldly wisdom will not save a soul from sin and death and that few who possess it are called by God into His kingdom: “You see your calling brothers, that not many are wise in the flesh, not many are powerful, not many are of noble birth” (1Cor. 1:26).

Men and Satan both possess the kind of wisdom esteemed in this world, the kind that leads to acting good without being good, but Paul warned believers of the danger of employing that kind of wisdom in the worship of God:

1Corinthians 11

27. Whoever eats this bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in a manner unworthy of the Lord shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

28. Let a man examine himself; only then is he to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

29. For he who eats and drinks unworthily, eats and drinks condemnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

Jesus also warned his followers that they must have a clear conscience when they come to worship God:

Matthew 5

23. If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you,

24. leave your gift there before the altar and go your way; be reconciled to your brother first, and then come offer your gift.

Hypocrites have been in the Assemblies of New Testament people almost from the beginning. Ananias and his wife Sapphira paid the ultimate price for their hypocrisy (Acts 5:1–10). And near the end of his life, Peter warned the saints to beware of fellow believers with worldly wisdom who would make themselves out to be ministers of Christ:

2Peter 2

13b. They are spots and blemishes, . . . reveling in their deceitful ways while they feast with you.

14b. They are cursed children [of God].

. . . .

17. These are wells without water, clouds driven by a storm, for whom is reserved the blackness of eternal darkness.

18. Making pretentious, vain speeches [sermons], they entice to sensuality, through lusts of the flesh, those who once had truly escaped from those who live in error,

19a. promising them liberty while they themselves are slaves to corruption.

Ministers such as this train people in worldly wisdom, in hypocrisy, by teaching them ceremonial forms. For millennia now, with promises of eternal benefits for those who participate in their carnal ceremonies, Christian ministers have seduced multitudes to choose form over life, that is, to choose the appearance of righteousness over the righteousness of God. It is especially egregious when ministers who have the Spirit, add to the world’s pressure on God’s children to trust in the Institution’s forms.

Half Good

Worldly wisdom makes God’s children half good, but the half that it makes good is what is seen instead of what is within, and in God’s eyes, being half good is worse than being no good at all because it is less honest (cf. Mt. 6:22; Lk. 11:34). Entirely back-slidden souls are obvious, and they pose no real threat to God’s children, but half-good believers make Jesus sick, and he will at some point cast them out of the kingdom of God. Jesus warned the half-good pastor in Laodicea,

Revelation 3

15. “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I would that you were either cold or hot.

16. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am about to vomit you out of my mouth.”

To be vomited out of Jesus’ mouth is to be cast out of the body of Christ, which is the ultimate – and irreversible – curse in this life. The fact that Jesus threatened one of his servants with such a curse reveals how much he abhors half-goodness.

Half-good believers have enough love for God to repent and receive His life, but not enough love for him to continue in his word and be made free (cf. Jn. 8:31–32). Satan is the father of all half-good believers because (1) he was the first of their kind and (2) like them, he did not continue in the truth he once knew (Jn. 8:44). It is better never to have belonged to God than to belong to Him and fail to continue in holiness. When Peter wrote the following, he was speaking of children of God who had become half good:

2Peter 2

20. If after escaping the defilements of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, their last state is worse than the first.

21. It would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them.

22. But it has happened to them according to the true proverb, “A dog returns to his own vomit, and a washed sow to wallowing in the mud.”

Satan was vomited out of heaven because he was half good. His greatest achievement while in heaven was to maintain an appearance of goodness while having a heart corrupted with pride (Ezek. 28:17). He obeyed diligently every command that God gave him, but he had a self-serving motive for doing so (cf. Isa. 14:13–14). The same is true of ministers who are like him, and Paul warned the saints of such men:

2Corinthians 11

13. Such men are pseudo-apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ.

14. And no wonder, for Satan transforms himself into a messenger of light.

15. So, it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves to be like ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their works.

Such men diligently maintain proper form, yet, in their hearts, they are far from God (cf. Lk. 11:39). They have “a form of godliness”, but they refuse the power and truth of God which would make them godly (2Tim. 3:5). They seduce innocent people into their net with false promises (e.g., Amos 5:18; Jer. 6:14), and then exploit for self-gain the souls they ensnare (2Pet. 2:1–3). They insist on obedience to ceremonial forms as if they were equal with God’s commandments, and they sometimes revere those forms even beyond that (cf. Mt. 15:1–6). The leaders in Israel whom Jesus called sons of Satan were not physical descendants of Satan; he called them Satan’s sons because they acted the same way Satan did, proudly serving God in proper form and condemning those who did not.

No Fence

No common ground exists between the Spirit of God and the Institution because there is no common ground between life and form, and where no common ground exists, there can be no influence. The truth makes us free because the truth removes from our hearts all common ground with whatever is a lie. When Jesus said that Satan had nothing in him (Jn. 14:30), he meant that he had nothing in common with Satan. He could have also said that the fleshly nature of man had nothing in him. Being filled with the Spirit, Jesus was free from all ungodly influences.

We often hear the phrase, “sitting on the fence”, but in the spiritual world, no such fence exists. Jesus said this two ways: “He who is not with me is against me” (Mt. 12:30a) and “He who is not against us is for us” (Lk. 9:50b). James also knew of no fence between truth and error. He said that if we break just one of God’s commandments, we are guilty of breaking them all (Jas. 2:10), and between spiritual darkness and spiritual light, Paul likewise left no fence for us to sit on:

2Corinthians 6

14b. What is there in common between righteousness and lawlessness? What fellowship has light with darkness?

15. What harmony exists between Christ and Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever?

16a. What compact does the temple of God make with idols?

Every creature is either good or evil, or very evil. As we have shown, lukewarmness is not a spiritual condition somewhere between good and evil. Lukewarmness is evil of the worst kind; it is an evil that is like Satan’s evil in heaven, and when God’s people are spiritually lukewarm, that condition qualifies them to be called Satan’s sons. Saints who are openly good or sinners who are openly evil are real, but believers who have become lukewarm are a dangerous stumbling block for others and an abomination to Christ. Jesus would rather people be honest and open about who they are, whether good or evil, than to hide an ungodly spirit behind an appearance of good.

Hypocrites will not confess, even to themselves, what they are, and without confession, there can be no forgiveness (cf. Prov. 28:13). Lukewarm believers love and fear God too much to give in completely to the world, and they love and fear the world too much to give in completely to God. To believe in Jesus with fifty percent of one’s faith is to be 100 percent foolish. We are to be followers of God and Jesus, and there is no “maybe” in either the Father or the Son, no hesitance, no iffiness:

2Corinthians 1

19. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the one preached among you by us – by me, and Silvanus, and Timothy – was not yes and then no. Not at all! In him is yes!

20a. For however many are the promises of God, in him, they are yes.

The righteous are those who completely trust the Son of God, and the wicked are completely against him, but the lukewarm are worse than wicked. They are hypocrites, a stumbling block and a snare for souls seeking the way of life. To those who trusted in appearances, Jesus said,

Matthew 15

7. “Hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy concerning you when he said,

8. ‘This people draw near to me with their mouth, and with their lips they honor me, but their heart is far from me.

9. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ ”

Reliance upon Appearances

People often become devoted to the forms they prefer, and there are countless forms from which to choose: political forms, social forms, and religious forms. Men have even fought wars over their competing forms, each claiming that their form was the right one. History is replete with examples. Jesus would say that such men don’t need to kill each other because they are already dead – to God.

Nothing but God’s life can deliver us from our natural attraction to form, our predilection for reliance upon appearances. When Paul said that Christ died for us “when we were without strength” (Rom. 5:6), the strength to which he was referring was the strength to live sincerely and escape the flesh’s love of form. The pressure of this world for us to put on an act is too great for any of us to withstand. God gave His Son so that we might be free, who all our lives were afraid to cease from forms, lest we be condemned in the Judgment. The author of Hebrews said that the Son of God came to us just for that purpose:

Hebrews 2

14. Inasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he likewise partook of the same, so that by means of death, he might destroy the one who held the power of death, that is, the Accuser,

15. and set them free who through fear of death were subject to bondage their whole lives.

After Christ delivered him, Paul saw clearly the bondage of mankind to form, the bondage he once was in, and he exhorted his converts to hold on to the precious liberty Christ had given them: “Stand fast in the liberty with which Christ has made us free, and do not submit again to a yoke of bondage!” (Gal. 5:1).

In the end, false teachers won the day who taught believers to add ceremonial forms to their worship, which led directly to the formation of Christianity, but no one could blame Paul for the loss. He had labored earnestly to rescue his converts from false teachers and save them from abandoning their liberty in Christ to return to their former bondage:

Galatians 4

8. When you did not know God, you lived as slaves to things which by nature are not divine,

9. but now, having come to know God, or rather, having been known by God, how is it that you want to return again to live – again! – as slaves to weak and worthless elements‽

Yet, false teachers managed to persuade these and other believers that they were still slaves, that they were still required, in spite of all that Paul had taught them, to perform carnal ceremonies, using physical elements of the world such as water for baptism, fire for burning incense and sacrifices, natural food and drink for religious meals, special clothing for worship, and churches and other “holy” sites for gatherings and pilgrimages.

God sent His Son to earth to give us life, not form. Jesus said, “I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn. 10:10). And a prime reason for God giving us His kind of life was to deliver us from our fallen nature, with its bondage to form, so that we might live and worship Him acceptably, in spirit and in truth. The author of Hebrews explained:

Hebrews 9

13. If the blood of bulls and of goats and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctifies for the purification of the flesh [as Moses’ law required],

14. how much more does the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve a living God!

A purged conscience rejoices in Christ and has no fear of living and worshipping without fleshly, ceremonial form. As Paul said it, “We are the circumcision [the Israel of God] who serve God in spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh” (Phip. 3:3). In his time, Paul’s doctrine was astonishing, and it was dangerous to preach it in some areas (e.g. Acts 21:27–36); yet, he held fast to the truth Jesus had shown him, to wit, physical circumcision is now a worthless form, a dead work, and in God’s sight, a Jew is now someone who has received His Spirit:

Romans 2

28. One is not a Jew outwardly; nor is circumcision outward in the flesh.

29. On the contrary, one is a Jew inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not the letter [rites and rules], whose praise is not of men, but of God.

Jesus promised his followers that he would liberate them, though at the time, they did not know what they would be liberated from. They loved with all their hearts the ceremonial forms of Moses’ law and never dreamed of serving God without them. Moses’ law was a light (Ps. 119:105), but the light of God’s Son robbed the law of all its glory and changed its light to darkness (cf. 2Cor. 3:7–11). Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12), and in hearts where the light of God’s Son shines, faith in forms is quickly cast out, just as Satan was cast out and “fell like lightning” out of heaven.

The One the World Wanted

By nature, fallen humans love form for the same reason Satan does, to wit, the careful maintenance of proper form puffs them up and makes them appear to be good. In that regard, nothing changed on earth when Satan was cast down to earth; men already loved Satan’s ways, and he already loved the ways of man (Mt. 16:23). Satan was not cast down here as a stranger; he was cast down to a place where he fit in well, and he still does. “The whole world lies in wickedness,” John said (1Jn. 5:19), but not because Satan was cast down here. The world was wicked before Satan was cast out of heaven; that is what made it a fitting place for him.

Satan was able to deceive the entire world (1Jn. 5:19) because when he was cast down to earth, hypocrisy was already the norm; men were already devoted to form, trusting in appearances, just as Satan had been doing in heaven for millennia. The ungodly were as prepared to follow Satan when he was cast down to earth as the righteous were prepared to follow the Son when he was sent here.

Immediately after Satan was cast out, a voice in heaven cried out, “Woe to the earth and the sea! For the Accuser has come down among you!” (Rev. 12:12b). That sympathetic cry, however, did not come because innocent earthlings were about to be attacked by the big bad wolf; rather, it came because the people of earth were being given the one they really wanted, the god of proper form, the master of appearances who would inspire half-good believers to devise the most deceitful Institution in history: Christianity. Christianity claims to be the only way to God out of all the religions on earth, but it is, in fact, the darkest of all religions, for unlike any other religion, it offers its dead forms in the name of the Prince of life. Jesus taught me long ago that the closer a thing comes to being true without being true, the more evil it is because the more people it can deceive.

Forms may be carried out with no repentance toward God, no humility, no love for truth, and no hunger for God’s righteousness. Institutionalized religion, thriving as it does on form, requires no spiritual life; it requires only that its forms be carried out. The most ungodly of humans may perform ceremonies and call that the worship of God, but calling it worship does not make it acceptable to Him. Neither does the form of using the name of Jesus during a ceremony sanctify Christianity’s forms; it only makes the performers half-good. To use Jesus’ name gives the ceremonies an appearance of legitimacy in the eyes of those who do not have the knowledge of God, but it means nothing in heaven.

The typical Christian justification for ceremonies is that they are “an outward expression of an inward experience.” But ceremonies are an outward expression of the lack of an inward experience. The Old Testament was a covenant of symbols because the Son of God had not yet paid the price for men to receive the inward experience of God’s life. At the Last Supper, Jesus had the disciples to drink a symbol of his blood only because they lacked the experience of being cleansed by his true blood, the holy Spirit.^[154] The inward experience of Jesus’ baptism of life is expressed outwardly in holy living, not in performing a ritual symbolizing Jesus’ baptism.

There has never been a ceremony performed in heaven, and in this New Covenant, unlike the old one, God instituted no ceremonies on earth. This is a covenant purely of the Spirit, sealed with the blood of Jesus. Everything offered to God now must be offered in the Spirit, and everything Christ does for our souls, he does through the Spirit. The Spirit is God’s conduit for His care for us, and it is our access to Him (Eph. 2:18). If the Spirit is not in a thing, Christ is not in it, and if the Spirit is not in a person, he does not belong to Christ (Rom. 8:9b).

Ceremonial religion is a substitute for life in the Spirit; it is a spiritual placebo that cures nothing. It is because God’s Spirit is not involved that men of the Institution perform ceremonies; if the Spirit were involved, the ceremonies would get in the way. Most importantly for the world, including Christians, ceremonial forms provide an appearance of righteousness so that the Spirit might be respectably rejected and, so, one’s status in society is preserved.

All Who Are Willing

Both Satan and the world hate those who are not of the world, but are called of God and led by His Spirit:

John 15

18. If the world hate you, know that it hated me before it hated you.

19. If you were of the world, the world would befriend^[155] its own; but since you’re not of the world – on the contrary, I’ve chosen you out of the world – the world hates you.

Revelation 12

9. And the great Dragon was cast out, the ancient serpent who is called the Accuser, and Satan, who deceives the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

. . . .

13. And when the Dragon saw that he was cast down to the earth, he persecuted the woman [Israel] who had given birth to the boy [Jesus].

. . . .

17. And the Dragon was furious because of the woman, and went to make war against the remnant of her offspring, those who keep the commandments of God and have the witness of Jesus.

The witness of Jesus is the Spirit (Rev. 19:10), and those who receive it are made foreigners to this world. With the new birth, they become citizens of a heavenly country, and Christ sends his ministers as ambassadors of heaven to a lost world (2Cor. 5:20; Eph. 6:20). People of the world can sense this dramatic difference between themselves and God’s children, though they cannot understand it:

1Peter 4

3. The time that is past is sufficient for us to have done the will of the masses, walking in licentiousness, lusts, drunkenness, banquetings, carousings, and lewd worship of idols,

4a. concerning which they think it strange that you do not run with them to the same excess of debauchery.

God’s kind of life makes no sense to the world, and sinners often assume that those who are filled with it are deluded or evil, or both. Carnally minded men can believe, in a philosophical sense, that God is holy and unlike humans, but they cannot believe that God’s kind of life changes sinners into holy beings whose manner of life reflects God’s character the way Jesus did. As a seminary student, when I testified to my class about something Jesus had shown me, my professor scoffed at the idea. “So,” he sarcastically replied, “you think you have heard something from God?” He was adept at ceremonial form, but he did not know God. God’s kind of life was strange to him, and he was suspicious of it. But man’s unbelief changes nothing. God communicates with His children every day, all day long, guiding them through this wasteland of wickedness called earth. If He didn’t, we would all be lost.

Jesus told his disciples, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn. 14:9), and referring to that statement, Preacher Clark once asked a congregation, “Has anybody seen God in you lately?” When anyone who loves this world sees God in any of His children, they hate what they see, and that is why Paul assured Timothy that “all who are willing to live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2Tim. 3:12). Paul was speaking from experience.

“Works of the Accuser”

In Jesus’ day, sons of Satan the Accuser were leaders of Israel who were looked upon as pillars of the community and paragons of righteousness; however, like Satan, they did all their good deeds in order to be seen as good (Mt. 23:5). Inwardly, where men could not see, they were “fools and blind” (Mt. 23:17), “ravenous wolves” (Mt. 7:15) whose hearts were full of all uncleanness, hypocrisy, and lawlessness (Mt. 23:27b, 28b). Jesus bluntly told them, “You are of your father, the Accuser, and you want to carry out the desires of your father” (Jn. 8:44a), for they were doing what the Accuser was doing – relying on appearances and enforcing the forms of the law. Like Satan, they were anointed by God to occupy high positions in God’s order, wielding authority which Jesus acknowledged: “Jesus spoke to the people and to his disciples, saying, ‘The scribes and Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat. So, whatsoever they tell you to observe, observe and do’ ” (Mt. 23:1–3).

It must be stressed that Jesus called those men sons of the Accuser because they were so much like the Accuser. They thought and behaved the way Satan would have thought and behaved if he were a human, and by paying attention to their works, we learn what “works of the Accuser” are. Jesus mentioned some of their activities:

• They called attention to their almsgiving (Mt. 6:2).

• They made long, public prayers (Mt. 6:5–7).

• They occupied special seats at public meetings (Mt. 23:6).

• They held prestigious titles granted by the Institution (Mt. 23:7).

• At much expense, they traveled to distant places to convert others to their Institution (Mt. 23:15).

• They built tombs and monuments in honor of dead servants of God (Mt. 23:29–31).

Doing those kinds of things is how Satan would have lived if he had been a human. They had every appearance of righteousness, but without any of the righteousness of God. Those deeds were impressive to God’s people in Israel, and it must have stunned those who heard Jesus condemn the men who did them.

John said, “For this reason was the Son of God revealed, to destroy the works of the Accuser” (1Jn. 3:8b), and the religious deeds we just listed were some of those works. Making long, public prayers, occupying seats of honor, and holding prestigious titles are all works of the Accuser, for they are forms, not life. As contrary to human thought as it is, evangelizing for an institution of form and building churches are works of Satan, and men praise one another for doing such things. However, the life of God precludes the need for such works. Jesus has destroyed them.

The works of the Accuser cannot be murder, thievery, fornication, and the like, for the men whom Jesus called Satan’s sons despised people who did those things, even to the point of wanting to kill them (e.g., Jn. 8:1–11). Those in our time who call themselves Satan worshippers are a pathetic joke to Satan, and his ministers despise them. The way of Satan is the way of the Institution, not debauchery and disorder. What is called Satanism is no more the way of Satan than Christianity is the way of Christ. If Satan were your neighbor, you’d like him. If he were human, he would be a clean-cut, law-and-order guy who would feed your dog and watch over your property when you go out of town. Satan is much more like respectable men than anyone knows without help from God.

The religious forms of men, including some of the forms in Moses’ law, are very lovely, just as Satan’s body was:

Ezekiel 28

12b. Thus says the Lord, Jehovah: You are the epitome of symmetry, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

13. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering: sardius, topaz, and diamond; beryl, onyx, and jasper; sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle. Your timbrels and your pipes, gold workmanship, were set in you the day you were created.

. . . .

15. You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created until unrighteousness was found in you.

. . . .

17. Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; you have corrupted your wisdom because of your brightness.^[156]

The Satan the world hates is the hideous Satan that Medieval Christian myth-makers invented. He is a repulsive figure who breaks all the rules and torments souls in the afterlife.

Men pride themselves for hating that Medieval Christian Satan, but they do not hate the lovely, anointed Satan who is revealed in Scripture. The Satan of Scripture is a well-organized creature who maintains order in his domain. Jesus said of him,

Mark 3

24. “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

25. And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

26. And if Satan is risen up against himself, he is likewise divided; he cannot stand, but is finished.”^[157]

The traditional Christian depiction of Satan as a repulsive figure who goes around trying to lure people to commit adultery, murder, etc. is ludicrous. How could that Satan deceive anyone, especially God’s children? Christianity’s creepy image of Satan is an image which carnally minded people accept without question because if Satan is like that, they can congratulate themselves on how good they are by comparison. As long as people believe Satan is like that, they will never believe how much he and humans have in common, nor will they see ceremonial works for what they really are: dead, useless works devised by men who are like the Accuser.

Fear

Life, by definition, is sincere. It is not form; it is real. Life and form are opposed to one another, just as God’s Spirit and the flesh are opposed to one another (Gal. 5:17). True life is found only in God’s Spirit because His Spirit itself is life (Rom. 8:10), and all forms on earth are “in the flesh”, as Paul would say it, because the flesh itself is a form.

When John the Baptizer was born, his father Zacharias prayed a stirring prayer in which he expressed the deep desire of God’s people everywhere. He said that in sending the Messiah, God would make it possible “that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life” (Lk. 1:74–75). Fear is a paralyzing force, but it is an inescapable part of the human condition; people everywhere feel the fear of death, of disapproval, and of suffering. But people hide behind forms because they fear real life more than they fear death. However, in love for us, God sent His Son to deliver us from our bondage to human fears (Heb. 2:14–15), and that liberty is such a gracious gift, and it came at such a price, that it is sin to refuse it. The apostle John said that those who remain fearful will be damned along with murderers, fornicators, and other wicked people (Rev. 21:8).

To hide behind forms is learned. Babies are not born with that knowledge, nor was Adam created with it. In the garden of Eden, Adam had not learned to put on an act when he ate the forbidden fruit and fear replaced the joy that he previously felt in God’s presence. Therefore, he was sincere and confessed what he was feeling the next time God came to visit him and Eve:

Genesis 3

8. They heard the voice of Jehovah God as He walked about in the garden in the evening breeze. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the face of Jehovah God among the trees of the garden.

9. And Jehovah God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”

10. And he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

That was an honest confession. Fear was a new feeling for Adam and Eve, and they hid from God because they felt it. There were no hypocrites in the world to teach Adam worldly wisdom; and so, Adam confessed the truth, to wit, he was afraid and was hiding from God. In his guilty bosom, there remained enough childlike simplicity to keep him from putting on a happy face and walking out to greet God as if all was well with his soul. But while Adam was devoid of that kind of wisdom, his son Cain was not.

Cain was an evildoer (cf. 1Jn. 3:12), and somewhere along his ungodly path, he began to hide his sinfulness behind an appearance of uprightness because he feared the real life of being exposed. After Cain murdered his brother Abel and God asked him where Abel was, Cain put on an act of innocence and impertinently replied, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He was saying, in effect, “I have no idea where Abel is,” pretending not to know. There was nothing wrong with the question itself; it might have been asked in all innocence under different circumstances. But in this case, the question was a lie because Cain himself had become a liar, and he was acting. He was hiding behind an appearance of innocence, unlike his father Adam, who admitted to himself and to God that he was guilty.

In a previous chapter, I said that it is the presence of God rather than His absence that most frightens men. That is the default condition of the human race, for all mankind inherited from Adam and Eve not only a sinful nature, but also the fear that goes with it. And as Cain’s behavior indicates, humans quickly learn to hide their fear behind an appearance of good.

David was declaring liberty from fear when he declared, “I will not fear what man can do to me!” (Ps. 56:11), but that was not David speaking; it was the sinless Son of God speaking through David describing the way he would live in this world of sinners. The Son did not want to suffer, but he made the choice not to allow fear to cause him to act the way men wanted him to act so that he could escape suffering. Nor did he want to die, but he loved his Father more than he feared death; so, he prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Lk. 22:42) and went to the cross.

It is human nature to give in to fear and put on an act, but it is godly to overcome human fears, and with the strength which God’s kind of life provides, we can be like Jesus and overcome the temptation to put on an act. Without the strength of God’s life, our words, like a stage actor’s, are determined by what others want us to say and our deeds are determined by what others want us to do, while our true selves remain hidden behind the expected forms.

Trained

As newborns, we were all sincere. We cried unashamedly when we were hurt or disappointed, and we welcomed compassion when it was offered. If a little child is frightened, he cries and runs to his mother. He is too busy living from the heart, too sincere to pause to consider what others may be thinking about his tears. But the world took that innocence away from us; it trained us to hide our feelings and thoughts, and it does not take long for children to figure out how to act so as to please others and avoid the consequences that they fear. Children being teased by other children on the playground is one of the thousands of ways they are trained to conform, to act the way others want them to act. They learn to survive by hiding their hurts, fears, and disappointments, and as time passes and the pressure continues, sincere feelings and thoughts are driven deep into children’s hearts so that acting becomes their norm, too.

Words from “Rescue the Perishing” written by Fannie Crosby touch on this human condition and God’s merciful response to it:

Down in the human heart, crushed by the Tempter,

Feelings lie buried that grace can restore.

Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness,

Chords that are broken will vibrate once more.

Hiding behind form being the default condition of human society, the entire world trains us all to subsume our thoughts under acceptable forms. There are no exceptions. It is the way of the whole world. When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” he was describing this truth. Every person on earth, whether intentionally or not, is putting on an act, except for the few sincere souls who have received God’s kind of life and are walking in it.

We were all trained from our earliest years in the art of hypocrisy. With even the best of intentions, the humans around us pressured us to put on an act and to hide sincere feelings behind forms. At home, at play, at worship, and everywhere in public, everyone in this cruel world is taught that hypocrisy, or hiding behind acceptable forms, is less painful than sincerity, and we all have passed our hypocrisy on to others. Moreover, those who are generally considered in this world to be good people do the most effective job of teaching hypocrisy to others, for they know the most acceptable and beneficial forms to follow.

Every newborn is by nature self-centered and demanding. Nothing – absolutely nothing – matters to an infant but his own fleshly comfort. Teaching children to act out an acceptable form is the world’s way of managing children’s natural self-centeredness. Parents are teaching their children hypocrisy when they teach them to be courteous and dutiful, according to societal norms, and there are benefits to doing so. But following proper form cannot create righteousness within a child, for it cannot change human nature.

Following proper form is an imitation of righteousness which “good” children learn to act out. School teachers are teaching hypocrisy along with other lessons when they enforce order in their classroom, for the self-restraint and submission to authority which they enforce are contrary to human nature. They are merely forms which children are taught, and smart children quickly learn to use those forms to avoid shame or punishment and to gain favor with the adults who can give them what they want. The hearts of courteous and obedient people, whether young or old, who have not received God’s life are still self-willed and self-centered; they have only learned to act contrary to their fallen nature; which is still beastly, for all its appearance to the contrary (cf. Jer. 10:14a; 2Pet. 2:12).

The “bad” people in society are those whose fallen nature is not restrained by form. They are not the accomplished hypocrites that the “good” people are, for they do not put on an act and hide their true nature behind acceptable forms. It is for that reason that they are frowned upon and ostracized by the “good” people. In extreme cases, authorities must intervene and punish them.

Because the harlots and other social outcasts of Jesus’ time were more real than the “good” people who despised them, Jesus got along with them better than with the “good” people who had learned how to act. Drunkards and other social outcasts are sinners, but they do not hide it. The “good” people of this world are also sinners, but they know how to hide it. Many of the “good” people in Israel despised the “bad” people for the same reason that they despised Jesus, namely, neither Jesus nor the “bad” people were hiding behind acceptable forms.^[158] Jesus was truly good and was open about it, and the “bad” people were truly bad and were also open about it.

Many “good” people in this world still despise “bad” people^[159], and many of the powers on earth still intervene and punish “bad” people. Nevertheless, “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) because no one is born into this world with God’s kind of life. We are all bad people in God’s sight until He shares with us His good Spirit and cleanses us. It is just as the man of God said in the book of Psalms: “Every man, in his best state, is altogether vanity” (Ps. 39:5b), and

Psalm 53

1b. There is no one doing good.

2. God looked down from heaven upon the sons of man to see if there was anyone with understanding, anyone who was seeking God.

3. Every one of the them had turned away. They have all, alike, been corrupted; there is no one doing good, not even one!

Isaiah 53

6. We all, like sheep, have gone astray; every one of us has turned to his own way, and Jehovah laid upon him the iniquity of us all.

Restraints

Though forms are contrary to the life of God, in a world of sinners, forms are needed and helpful. A society’s required forms concerning fair business practices and etiquette, for example, are beneficial because they help avoid conflict. They compel people to act as though they love one another. Religious, political, and social forms play crucial roles in restraining fallen man from acting according to his fallen nature, the way a fence or a chain restrains an aggressive dog. Such forms can prevent rash actions springing from passion, or actions based on maliciousness, covetousness, or the like. Throughout history, every time governments or societies have become unstable or collapsed, the restraint of forms has been loosened and the beastly nature of man emerged from behind the forms. In even the most civilized of societies, whenever forms cease to be enforced, fear is diminished, anarchy is the result.

Political forms, such as peace treaties between nations, are beneficial because they keep nations from waging war against one another. But earthly peace treaties are only a form of peace, not real peace. God said, “There is no peace to the wicked” (Isa. 48:22), and God is right. The condition which nations call peace is a form beneath which seethes the same envy and strife which led them to war in the first place. That scenario has been repeated many times in history; nevertheless, most humans still trust in form and will not repent and turn to God for real peace, but sign peace treaties instead. No war on earth has ever ended by the warring nations coming together to plead with God to give them His kind of life so that wars will not return. Instead, men sign treaties and trust again in the form of peace, restraining for a while the hatred and strife that is still in their hearts.

No matter what men claim, strife is embedded in human nature, and man’s kind of peace only appears to be peaceful. When sinful men cheat or fight, they are being true to their fallen nature; when they smile and shake hands, they are lying because that appearance of friendship is contrary to what is really in their hearts. Knowing this, Jesus refused to trust human confessions of faith in him because he knew what was in man (Jn. 2:23–25).^[160] Still, so long as earthly forms of peace are maintained, people benefit because fewer people get hurt.

It is to restrain passions that societies attach ceremonial form to significant events in life – birth, death, marriage, graduation, retirement, etc. Anniversaries of the birth or death of notable figures, dates of significant national events, and religious holidays are celebrated with special forms in order to direct and control the energies of the masses – a parade for this event, costumes for another, feasting and gift-giving for another, and so forth. None of it is real life; it is all form, an empty appearance of goodness; nevertheless, it does help to stabilize societies.

Little Children

In revealing His Son, God ended His act and fully opened His heart to us, and it is ungodly for us to hide any longer behind forms because God no longer requires them; He has revealed His Son who revealed His heart toward us. Now, we are called to be “imitators of God, as dear children” (Eph. 5:1), and God is no longer hiding from us. He is altogether who He has revealed Himself to be in His Son. The abundant life that Jesus suffered for us to have is life that gives us power to live from the heart again, like a little child. In fact, Jesus insisted that unless this happens, unless we stop acting and become as sincere little children again, we will never enter the kingdom of God:

Matthew 18

2. When Jesus had called a little child to him, he stood him in their midst

3. and said, “Truly, I tell you, unless you are converted and become like little children, you will never enter into the kingdom of heaven.

4. Whoever humbles himself like this little child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

God’s life gives us the courage to resist the intimidation of the world and be ourselves, as we once were when we were little children, but to have it be truly good this time, not self-willed and self-centered. We are to grow in the knowledge of God, but at the same time, we must return to child-like innocence, as Paul exhorted the saints in Corinth, “Brothers, do not be children in your understanding; rather, be children in evil, but in understanding be mature” (1Cor. 14:20).

When “the love of God is poured out within our hearts by the holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5b), it draws us out of our hiding places to live again in childlike sincerity. The Spirit of God re-creates us as children of a Father who will not fail us, as siblings of a big brother who will always be with us and watch over us, and as members of a family whose influence is the opposite of that of the world. For when we as the family of God walk together in our Father’s love, we encourage one another to live without fear of ridicule or betrayal.

Jesus overcame the world by living sincerely, by steadfastly being the person God created him to be. In spite of all he suffered, he remained determined to feel the feelings and think the thoughts that are in the kind of life God gave him and to finish the work God sent him to do. Jesus was childlike in that regard, and his meek, sincere attitude was an essential part of his overcoming the world. We will suffer the ridicule of the world, as Jesus did, if we follow his example; however, if we persist in childlike sincerity as Jesus did, we will be received by the Father, as Jesus was, and enjoy perfect peace and joy forever.

Like many young men in this culture, I once prided myself for being “cool”, that is, I was proud of how well I could suppress my true feelings and of how convincingly I could act unconcerned about the feelings of others. As a young man, sometimes I would not – no, I was trapped by pride and I could not – let my own mother kiss me, for I lived in fear of sincerity, and her open, tender feelings were too real to fit into my act. They were embarrassing to me, even though they were showing me the way of life in Christ. Soon after she died, I, as a chastened and hurting young man, wrote this poem in her memory:

I Prided Myself

Those who walk in God’s life with Jesus do not wait until it is too late to show their love for others. They cannot wait because God’s kind of life compels them to live from the heart, and it teaches them that waiting to love is to not love at all. God is not waiting to pour out His love for us; He did that when He opened His heart on the day of Pentecost, pouring out eternal life from His bosom like rivers of living water into human souls. Now, God is only waiting for us to become childlike enough to open our hearts to Him and to one another, and to ask for His kind of life.

Jesus tried to persuade his disciples of God’s love for them, saying, “Don’t be afraid, little flock; your Father is very pleased to give you the kingdom” (Lk. 12:32), and he challenged them to dare to think that God would grant their request:

Luke 11

9. Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.

10. For everyone who asks receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened.

11. What father among you, when a son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or also a fish, he won’t give him a snake instead of a fish, will he?

12. Or if he asks for an egg, will he give him a scorpion?

13. If you, then, being evil, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father who is in heaven give the holy Spirit to those who ask Him?

Sincerity

The most undervalued fruit of the Spirit is sincerity. Sincerity is as contrary to hypocrisy as God’s life is. A sincere person is truly living because he is living truly, but a person who is living a life of hypocrisy, a life of appearance and form, is not living at all. He is dead to the thoughts and ways of God. We are truly living when we are living honestly with our neighbors, when what our neighbors hear from us comes from our heart, and when what they see in us shows how we truly feel. Especially is this needed in believers’ relationships with one another. Paul gave this exhortation to God’s family: “Putting away lying [hypocrisy], speak the truth, each one with his neighbor, for we are members of one another” (Eph. 4:25).

Sincerity is a fruit of the Spirit that Paul, surprisingly, did not mention in his well-known list of spiritual fruit:

Galatians 5

22. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, faith,

23. meekness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

Without sincerity, none of those fruits of the Spirit can be used rightly. Patience is a fruit of the Spirit, but insincere patience has a devious motive. Wicked Absalom was patient. He waited two years before springing his trap and murdering his half-brother Amnon (2Sam. 13:23–29). Faith is a fruit of the Spirit, but insincere faith can be used to seduce souls, as the existence of “false apostles” proves. And Solomon warned his son to beware of insincere kindness, telling him, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Prov. 12:10). But sincerity’s omission from the Galatian list of spiritual fruit does not mean that Paul failed to recognize its importance. In other places, he emphasized it greatly:

1Corinthians 5

7b. Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us,

8. so that we might keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

2Corinthians 1

12. Our boast is this: the testimony of our conscience, that with simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have conducted ourselves in the world, and all the more toward you.

The Greatest Hypocrite of All

Hypocrisy is the opposite of sincerity; it is the hiding of what is within. It is not only the norm in this world, but before the Son was revealed, hypocrisy was also the norm in heaven. Before the Son was revealed, God hid His innermost feelings and thoughts because He was determined that His beloved Son would have the honor of revealing them. As long as God kept His Son hidden, nothing anywhere, including God Himself, was exactly as it appeared to be. God, as it turns out, was the greatest actor of all. That is what made the people who were acting out the law holy; they were following God’s example, without even imagining that was what they were doing.

Everything that men or angels saw and heard from God before the Son was revealed was only part of an incomparably cunning performance by which God kept all the treasures of His wisdom and knowledge hidden until the appointed time. For millennia, God patiently and politely received wicked Satan into His presence, sending him on missions that were clearly important. Judging both God and Satan by appearances,^[161] many creatures in heaven came to the conclusion that God and Satan were alike, but they were fooled more by God’s hypocrisy than by Satan’s. God’s holy and wise act, His magnificent performance, concealed the truth about Himself – and everybody and everything else – until the Son was revealed.

God’s hypocrisy sprang from a humble heart full of love for His Son and for us; human hypocrisy sprang from fear; and Satan’s hypocrisy sprang from pride and love of self. Because humans were hypocrites, they were lost souls; because God was a hypocrite, lost souls were forgiven and cleansed from sin; and because Satan was a hypocrite, he was cast out of heaven, along with the millions of angels who trusted him. It was all a matter of the heart.

Paul wrote, “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure” (Tit. 1:15). Because God is pure, everything He does is pure regardless of how bad it looks to humans, and because Satan is evil, everything he does is evil regardless of how good it appears to humans. Humans are not the standard; God is. As a dear brother in Christ, James Hammonds, once testified in our Assembly, “God can be right any kinda way He wants to.” That is sound doctrine.

God is neither foolish nor weak. Nevertheless, Paul felt free to say, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1Cor. 1:25). In the same vein, we may say that the hypocrisy of God is more trustworthy than the sincerity of men, and any act that God puts on is more truthful than the honesty of man.

Anything

It is one of the most difficult lessons to learn, that nothing is unclean of itself (Rom. 14:14). Whether a deed is good or evil is altogether a matter of the heart; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the visible form. Being a hypocrite does not make one either good or evil; the only question is, what kind of hypocrite are you: a hypocrite like God, for the good of others, or a hypocrite like Satan, for the good of self? Being a hypocrite is a holy condition if the hypocrite himself is holy, that is, if he is led by God’s holy Spirit to put on an act (e.g., 1Kgs. 20:38–43). But a hypocrite who is not holy is a dangerous snare.

Anything can be sin because anything can be a form. Even prayer can be a form hated by God (Prov. 28:9). Playing loud, fast gospel music, raising one’s hands to heaven, and shouting “Hallelujah” and “Praise God” can be as lifeless a form as a Roman Catholic Mass. The value of worship is not determined by its volume, whether loud or quiet; every style of worship is a form when the worshippers are not being led by the Spirit. God’s people are exhorted to shout His praise and to worship Him with music and dancing (Pss. 33:1–3; 150). They are also exhorted to “be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Without the Spirit, no one knows when to do either. We must be led by the Spirit in order to please God in anything.

Paul said that “whatever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23b). On the other hand, whatever is done by someone led by the Spirit is holy because the Spirit is God (minus His body), and God is holy. Hosea’s adultery with a married woman was holy because God commanded him to do it (Hos. 3), and so was Isaiah’s fornication with a prophetess at God’s command (Isa. 8:1–3).

What men call lying can be holy, too. God sent Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint David to be Israel’s next king, but Samuel knew that King Saul would kill him if he found out that he had done that. When Samuel pleaded with God to consider the danger He was putting him in, God told the reluctant prophet to lie (as humans would see it) about his reason for going to Bethlehem:

1Samuel 16

2. Samuel said, “How can I go? When Saul hears of it, he will kill me.” But Jehovah said, “Take with you a heifer from your herd, and say, ‘I have come to make sacrifice to Jehovah.’

3. And call Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do, for you shall anoint for me whomever I tell you.”

God cannot lie (Tit. 1:2) because He can create. Whatever He says becomes the truth when He says it, even if it was not true before. Samuel’s reason for traveling to Bethlehem was not to make a sacrifice, before God said it was. When God told Samuel to say that he was coming to Bethlehem to make a sacrifice, that commandment created a reason for Samuel to go there. After that, to make a sacrifice was Samuel’s reason for going, and he went to Bethlehem, offered a sacrifice there, and sent for Jesse and his sons to come to it (1Sam. 16:5). Samuel could not lie any more than God could when he said what God told him to say. It can hardly be overstated: A lie is a matter of the heart, not a matter of the syllables that proceed from the mouth, and God’s heart is always pure.

Whenever something proceeds from God’s mouth, it creates reality; the very breath of His mouth creates what it says (cf. Ps. 33:6). In the beginning, God said “Let there be light!” (Gen. 1:3), and light came to be because God cannot lie. When He said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of heaven to separate the day from the night” (Gen. 1:14), the sun and the moon appeared, but only because God cannot lie. It is good to know that God cannot lie, but it is better to know Him so that you understand why He cannot lie.

Courage

God’s Spirit does not lead men to sin, no matter what it leads them to do, because God is without sin; still, it frightens God’s children when the Spirit begins to lead them away from forms. Growing up in Christ requires courage, but that need not be a problem, for God will supply abundant courage to any of His children who will have it. Courage from God creates in us the faith we need to believe everything the Spirit says to our hearts and to do everything the Spirit leads us to do. Many a child of God has not believed the Spirit’s voice because what it said did not agree with the Institution’s form. How many, to this day, have not followed after the Spirit because to do so would have meant to leave the Institution and its forms! The man of God’s exhortation to be fearless is as needed today as it ever was:

Hebrews 13

12. Jesus, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate [of the Institution].

13. So then, let us go to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach.

We will bear Jesus’ reproach, especially from men of the Institution, if we dare to go to him “outside the camp”, just as Jesus bore his Father’s reproach by staying filled with His holy Spirit:

Psalm 69

8. I have become a stranger to my brothers and an alien to the children of my mother

9. because jealousy for your house consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach you fell on me.

Jesus is calling upon us to believe that every word and work of God is holy, whether it be destroying the world with a flood, opening the eyes of the blind, or calling His children out of the Institution. As the Son joyfully testified through David, “The judgments of Jehovah are true; they are altogether righteous” and “the works of His hands are truth and judgment” (Ps. 19:9b; 111:7). When we believe God as Jesus did, we will follow Jesus wherever he leads, even if he leads us away from the forms we have been taught are holy – and he will certainly do that, so that we might truly live.

Nothing that humans do in their own wisdom and power, even the best of them, is either holy or eternal. “Surely, men of low status are vanity, and men of high status are a lie. Laid in a balance together, they are lighter than vanity” (Ps. 62:9). When men boast of anything they have done, they are like a turtle on a busy highway boasting of its mighty shell. Romans were boasting of Rome as “the eternal city” before Christians began to do so,^[162] but nothing on this earth is eternal. God alone has a place of eternal rest for His faithful children, and they will not be disappointed, for God “has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16).

Righteousness is always and only a matter of the heart, and God’s heart is perfectly pure all the time. In God is not even a hint of unrighteousness (1Jn. 1:5), and if we think we see any, it is only because we are judging Him by our own faulty standard. Even the heavens are unclean in God’s sight (Job 15:15), and compared to Him, heaven’s holy creatures are foolish and blind (Job 4:18). God humbles Himself to even look at things in heaven, much less at this wasteland of wickedness called Earth (Ps. 113:6). God is the greatest of whatever exists, and He is completely unjudgeable because His thoughts and His ways are infinitely above the thoughts and ways of all His creatures, not just man’s. The best that we can ever do is to believe and obey God, and the best that we can ever be is to be like His Son, but we can do neither without the Spirit.

Control

Man is in control of every god that is worshipped with form because man is in control of the form. Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, etc., tell their Gods and their Jesuses when and how often they will have communion and whether they will use real wine or grape juice. They set the date and the time for their Gods and their Jesuses to baptize someone with water. They tell their Gods and their Jesuses who will be pastor, what doctrine the pastor will teach, and for how much money he will teach it.^[163] They also tell their Gods and their Jesuses who can and cannot be a church member. But the living God is in command of His kingdom.

In God’s kingdom, God alone decides when and how often He has communion with His people, and it is always in the Spirit. He alone decides who and when to baptize with His life. He decides whom He will ordain to minister to His children, what those ministers teach, and how much money they will have for their labor. And He decides whom He will take into His kingdom and whom He will cast out. The true God sets all the standards for His kingdom. He takes orders from nobody, for He “works all things according to the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11), and He does all those things by His Spirit.

Even if we do not understand it, whatever God’s Spirit is doing is good and right. Some Corinthian believers apparently were concerned that when the Spirit spoke in tongues through them, they might be saying something bad about Jesus, but Paul let them know not to worry, for “no one speaking in the Spirit is saying, ‘Cursed be Jesus’ ” (1Cor. 12:3). Those who speak in tongues might not know what they are saying (1Cor. 14:14), but whatever the Spirit is saying through them is good (Rom. 8:26). When the Spirit is in control, God is in control, and it is God’s control that the flesh does not want.

Section 3: God’s Testimony to His Son

Which God and Which Jesus?

Men honor one another for showing respect to “God” – any God. Notable ministers from differing faiths, such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., sometimes gather publicly to demonstrate their common faith in “God”. On such occasions, these worldly wise men avoid mentioning their differences; the emphasis is strictly on what they have in common. What they want the world to see, and to admire, is a united front of tolerant, inclusive belief in “God”. The Christian ministers who are present, from what I have witnessed, avoid the word “Jesus” lest the other ministers there take offense and retaliate by calling God by their preferred names.

Conservative Christians who reject that degree of inclusiveness and insist on speaking aloud the name “Jesus” are often looked down on by liberal Christians, but the degree of their disdain depends upon which of the many Christian Jesuses those conservatives mention.^[164] The Jesuses of wealthier Christians are typically more worldly than the Jesuses of poorer Christians; therefore, liberal Christians are more tolerant of them.

The Jesus that repulses liberal and conservative Christians alike is the Jesus that manifests himself through the power of the Spirit of God and the truth it reveals. That Jesus is not welcomed anywhere in Christianity any more than it is welcomed by the world, and it is that reality to which Jesus was referring when he told his disciples, “You will be hated by all nations because of my name” (Mt. 24:9). To his followers now, Jesus could say, “You will be hated by all denominations because of my name.” Without exception, every soul who follows the real Jesus suffers for it, as Paul told young Timothy, “All who are willing to live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2Tim. 3:12).

Whoever hates the real Jesus also hates the real God, for the Son is “the reflection of His glory and the exact representation of His being” (Heb. 1:3a). That may not be what people think they are doing, but it is what is in their heart. Without God’s help, all of us are blind to ourselves, for God alone knows the heart (Acts 15:8; Jer. 17:9). For millennia, Satan worshipped God in heaven, thinking he was good in God’s sight, and except for the blessed souls whose hearts God has touched, humans often do the same. Satan and those who are like him approve of belief in and worship of God; indeed, they frown upon those who do not believe and worship. Ungodly religious souls do not hate God, as they think He is, but when it comes to the true God, their hatred of Him is hidden behind the appearance of good which proper form provides.

Getting Rid of the Son

By “getting rid of the Son”, I mean getting rid of his influence. Nobody can get rid of God’s Son because nobody can get rid of the One who created him. Ungodly, religious men first tried to get rid of Jesus’ influence by killing him physically, and they succeeded, except for the resurrection. Death could not hold the Prince of life (Acts 2:24), and so, his influence continued. Not long after the resurrection, Gentile believers who did not grow in grace began to diminish the influence of the real Jesus by receiving physical circumcision and adding the law’s ceremonies to the gospel. Paul was deeply troubled by that:

Galatians 1

6. I marvel that you are turning away so quickly from Him who called you by the grace of Christ to another gospel,

7. which is not another, but there are certain men who are troubling you, determined to alter the gospel of Christ.

Heartbroken and outraged, and hoping to save those who had not yet fallen into that error, Paul gave this sobering admonition:

Galatians 5

2. Behold, I, Paul, am telling you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will become worthless to you!

. . . .

4. You are estranged from Christ, you who are justified by the law; you have fallen from grace.

5. For we await the hope of righteousness by faith in the Spirit.

Nevertheless, the false teachers prevailed, not only in Galatia, but also throughout the Assemblies of God, which resulted in generations of lukewarm believers whose faith was divided between fleshly and spiritual things. Corresponding to that, the influence of the Son of God over the body of Christ dwindled until, in the early fourth century, apostate believers had gained sufficient worldly status to form an alliance with Rome under the emperor Constantine. The synthesis of Roman culture with doctrines of apostates produced a powerful Institution, the Roman Church, which then propagated and enforced a twisted gospel.^[165] Man’s first attempt to get rid of the Son was made using a Roman cross; man’s second attempt was made using a Roman Institution: Christianity.

Today, that warfare against the Son is waged by all branches of the Institution, from the most liberal wing to the most conservative. Liberal Christian theologians try to get rid of the Son in various ways, sometimes saying that the biblical writers invented the very idea of a Son dwelling with the Father from the beginning or that the doctrine of Jesus being the Son of God was fabricated by Jesus’ followers after he died. Most conservative Christians try to get rid of him by blending the Son with the Father and the Spirit, either with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity or with the Oneness doctrine. Both doctrines deny that the Father created the Son.

Liberal and conservative Christians may oppose and sometimes despise each other, but they all agree that there is not a Father and a Son. They all, in their own way, hold that in the beginning, there was no Son existing as a separate person from the Father. John saw that error as fundamental to the spirit of anti-Christ:

1John 2

22b. He is the anti-Christ, who denies the Father and the Son.

Notice first of all that John used the term “anti-Christ”, not “anti-God”. Satan and his sons have never been anti-God, at least in their own minds; the true Son of God, the Son whom the Father created, has always been the target of their contempt. Secondly, note that John exhorted the saints to hold fast to the original gospel, which was the revelation that the Father had a Son:

1John 2

24. Let what you have heard from the beginning continue in you. If what you have heard from the beginning continues in you, then you will continue in the Son as well as in the Father.

Nowhere within the Institution of Christianity is the truth about the Father creating His Son allowed. Indeed, Christianity was founded upon a doctrine which denies that the Father created the Son,^[166] and so, Christian ministers cannot teach the truth because the truth about the Son’s creation would destroy the Institution’s foundation and cause it to fall. But to deny that the Father created the Son is to deny that the Son exists as a real person, and to deny that Son is to deny the true God who created the Son in His image.

Getting Rid of the Sons

Nobody can get rid of God’s sons any more than one can get rid of God’s Son, and for the same reason: nobody can get rid of the One who creates them. We are as secure in God’s love as the Son is.

When the Father shared His life with Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost, that “incorruptible seed” of God created many sons of God on earth, which was a problem for men who were like Satan. Their efforts, and Satan’s, were then redirected from getting rid of God’s Son to getting rid of God’s sons: “The Dragon saw that he was cast down to the earth. And the Dragon was furious and went to make war against those who keep the commandments of God and have the witness of Jesus” (Rev. 12:13a, 17). John said that the witness of Jesus is the Spirit (1Jn. 5:6b); so, the target of Satan’s wrath now, and the wrath of all who are like him, is those who have received the Spirit of God and are walking in it.

Church history, the history of the Institution, abundantly demonstrates that no punishment is too cruel, as far as men of the Institution are concerned, for God’s sons who prefer life in the Spirit to the Institution’s forms of godliness. The historical evidence for this is abundant and undeniable. They were sons of Satan who persuaded the Romans to put Jesus to death, and since that time, other sons of Satan have done similarly to other sons of God, male and female. The resurrection of the Son thwarted their evil purpose against him, and their evil purpose against God’s other sons will also fail because another resurrection is coming. Death cannot hold anyone who is filled with the life of God. Jesus was the first to prove that (Acts 2:24), and the rest of God’s sons will prove it when their turn comes to rise from the dead, as Paul said,

1Corinthians 15

22. “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

23. But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then they who belong to Christ at his coming.”

Through the centuries, it has been a challenge for men of the Institution to maintain a convincing appearance of goodness while cruelly abusing and killing innocent souls, but they found ways to justify it with convoluted theologies, declaring that in some cases, the cruel use of earthly power is a praiseworthy act of devotion to God. They even gave a holy-sounding title, auto de fé (“act of faith”), to their public ritual of humiliating and burning alive those whom they condemned as heretics. The public typically watched the barbarity in silence, lest they, too, face the wrath of the Church. Even to shed a tear for the condemned could bring one under the scrutiny of the Church’s inquisitors.

Over time, the savagery of torture, public degradation, and execution went out of style, but the craftiest method of killing the influence of God’s sons continued: slander. The easiest and most effective way of getting rid of the sons of God while maintaining an appearance of righteousness is by killing their influence instead of their bodies. Slander is murder by another name; the same spirit inspires slander that once inspired public executions. Those who are slandered might as well be dead, as far as their influence on others is concerned.

The New Testament books show that the process of degeneration from the pure Faith of Jesus to the abomination of Christianity began very early, before the apostles all died. The apostle John was still living when at least one leader among God’s people refused to even read his letter to the congregation (3Jn. 1:9), and there must have been others like him. Paul, too, as an old man, found himself unwelcome in any of the congregations he, himself, had established in the province of Asia (2Tim. 1:15). Such was the condition of the body of Christ at the close of the apostles’ era, and it grew worse with the passage of time.

The slander of misguided ministers against faithful sons of God, such as Paul, succeeded principally because they were able to persuade believers of the continued value of ceremonial forms. Then, having captured believers’ hearts, they warned them with an appearance of fatherly concern to be suspicious of anyone who taught differently, which included Paul. In response, Paul pleaded with his wayward converts to remember how much they once loved him for bringing the gospel to them and to reconsider the path they were now taking:

Galatians 4

15. Who was the source of your blessedness? For I bear you witness that if possible, you would have dug out your eyes and given them to me.

16. Have I now become your enemy because I tell you the truth?

17. They [false teachers] make much of you [with flattery], but not for good; they want to exclude you [because you are not Jewish] so that you will make much of them [look to them as your teachers].

. . . .

19. My little children, for whom I am suffering labor pains again until Christ be formed within you,

20. I desire to be with you now and to change my tone, for I am unsettled about you.

Since the birth of Christianity in the fourth century, false teachers have been telling their congregations that only the wicked do not belong to the Church, but the truth is that to join the Church is itself wickedness, for in this New Covenant, church-based religion is not of God. That is the Old Testament way of service to God, and there was only one church on earth that was of God: the church that Solomon built in Jerusalem.^[167]

Getting Rid of the Witness

The principal means employed by men of the Institution to kill the influence of Christ and all God’s other sons is by diminishing the influence of the real Spirit of God, for the Son is the Spirit (2Cor. 3:17), and God’s sons are the ones led by it (Rom. 8:14). The key to successfully doing that is to confuse people as to who is a son of God and who is not, that is, by confusing people as to who has received the real Spirit of God and who has not. Christian ministers have accomplished this by teaching that the Father’s witness to His Son, the holy Spirit, is no longer received the way Jesus said it would always be received, that is, with a sound: “The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear its sound. . . . So is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8; cf. Acts 2:4; 10:44–46; 19:6).

Even though the Spirit spoke through the followers of Jesus when they received it,^[168] many ministers of the Institution teach that such is no longer the case, but that a person receives the Spirit when they say so. However, if that were the case, the only way for us to determine who has received the Spirit would be to trust the word of a man. This is, in fact, the foundation of Christianity: one man telling another man that he is right with God and has received the Spirit. The Institution depends upon that error more than any other for its existence. Its ministers must teach it to preserve the Institution, for (1) if the body of Christ is made up only of those who have received God’s Spirit, as Paul said (Rom. 8:9b), and (2) if the Spirit speaks through every person when it enters, as Jesus said, then Christianity cannot be the body of Christ and is exposed as a fraud.

To those who tell me they know they have the Spirit because the Bible says so, I reply that the Bible has never said anything; it is the Spirit that speaks, not paper and ink. Everything anyone has ever gotten from the Bible, he has read, and whether or not a person understands what he reads is the only issue. If one could put all the theological debates among believers into a pot and boil them down to their essence, a single issue would remain, to wit, does the Spirit of God always speak when it enters into a human heart? If the answer is yes, then Christianity is a lie. And the answer is yes.

People can believe strongly that the resurrection and glorification of Jesus happened even if they do not have the Spirit, just as people without the Spirit may believe strongly that George Washington was the first President of the United States. However, no one can know that the Son is risen from the dead and is sitting at God’s right hand unless they receive the Father’s witness of it: the Spirit, which is why Paul wrote that “no one is able to say, ‘Lord Jesus’ [and know it to be true], but by the holy Spirit” (1Cor. 12:3).

Jesus and the Apostles: Pointing to a Sound

Jesus coined the phrase “born again” when he spoke with the Jewish elder, Nicodemus, using the analogy of the ever-shifting wind to reveal the God-given sign which attends every new birth experience:

John 3

7. Do not marvel that I told you, “You must be born again.”

8. The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it is coming from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

With that analogy, Jesus revealed that although no one can know where God’s Spirit has been or where it will go, everyone can know when the Spirit has entered a heart by the sound it produces. The disciples received this experience on the day of Pentecost when “there came a sound from heaven like a violent, rushing wind” and “they were all filled with holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit moved them to speak” (Acts 2:1–4). This sound of God’s wind was never intended for just a few believers, for Jesus plainly said this is how it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

Paul was teaching the same revelation when he said that the Spirit bears witness when it comes in, comparing the Spirit’s witness with the cry of an infant when it is born:

Romans 8 (cf. Gal. 4:6)

15. You did not receive a spirit of slavery, leading back into fear, but you received the spirit of adoption, by which we cry out, “Abba!” (that is, “Father!”)

16. The Spirit itself bears witness, together with our spirit, that we are children of God.

The sound of the Spirit is not only God declaring someone to be His child, but it is also that person’s response to God, springing up like a fountain from a clean conscience, declaring Him to be his Father:

1Peter 3

20. In the days of Noah the long-suffering of God waited while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water,

21. corresponding to which, baptism now also saves us (not a removal of filth from the body, but a pledge to God from a good conscience), by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Only one baptism was made possible by the resurrection of Jesus: the baptism of the Spirit.^[169] Water baptism, which washes only the flesh, had been practiced for years before then.

When the apostle John explained how to tell the real Spirit of God from the “holy spirit” of false teachers, his doctrine matched that of Jesus and Paul. He told his readers that they could always tell when someone has received Christ because the real Spirit of God confesses Christ when it enters a heart:

1John 4

2. By this, the Spirit of God is known: every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ when he has come into a person is of God,

3a. and every spirit that does not confess Jesus Christ when he has come into a person is not of God.

John was right. The real Spirit of God speaks; it bears witness to Christ when it enters a person. As Preacher Clark once said, “Jesus cast out dumb spirits; he doesn’t give one.”

All four of these servants of God, Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John, pointed believers to a sound as the sign that one has received the Spirit: Jesus, the sound of the blowing wind; Paul, the cry of a newborn baby; Peter, the response of a clear conscience; and John, the testimony of the Spirit. Today, however, multitudes of Christian ministers teach that the sound of the Spirit is no longer heard, leaving people with nothing but the word of those ministers to assure them that they have received the Spirit. That is spiritual madness! No human has ever been ordained by God to tell another human that he has received the Spirit. That is God’s prerogative, not man’s.

What were these men of God referring to if not the Spirit speaking through those who receive it? If no sound is produced by the Spirit when it enters a heart, then what was the confession of the Spirit that John mentioned, or the response to God from a clear conscience that Peter mentioned, or the cry of a newly born child of God that Paul mentioned, or the sound the wind of God makes when it blows into a soul that Jesus mentioned? Without the Spirit speaking through a person who receives it – the moment it is received – there is nothing else those men of God could have been talking about.

From Deep to Deep

Paul acknowledged that believers yielding to the Spirit and letting it speak through them would provoke ignorant and unbelieving onlookers to say they are crazy. He told the Corinthians,

1Corinthians 14

16. If you give thanks in the Spirit, how will the one who occupies the place of the ignorant say amen to your thanksgiving, inasmuch as he does not know what you are saying?

. . . .

23. If the whole Assembly comes together in the same place and everyone speaks in tongues, when ignorant or unbelieving people come in, will they not say that you have lost your mind?

The sound of the Spirit does not attract the fleshly nature of man; indeed, it repulses fallen man. But it is the voice of God, calling from deep within His heart to the depths of man’s heart, and souls who long for relief from sin are attracted to it even if they do not understand it. The mysterious experience was foretold by David when he said, “Deep calls to deep at the sound of your waterspouts” (Ps. 42:7a). The sound of the Spirit is the sound of the water of life erupting like a river from deep within those who receive it, as Jesus promised would happen:

John 7

37. On the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!

38. He who believes in me, as the scripture said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water!”

39. But he spoke this about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were going to receive, for the holy Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Every soul whose heart is touched by God is drawn to the sound of the Spirit when he hears it. It is the deep of God calling to the deep of man; the mind is not involved (cf. 1Cor. 14:14), for it is altogether a spiritual event, a mystery of godliness and contrary in all respects to the flesh.

Convincing Evidence

The earliest saints were not confused about the importance of the sound of the Spirit, and that knowledge played a critical role in Peter convincing the doubtful leaders of the Assembly in Jerusalem that Gentiles had received God’s Spirit. Peter and the six Jewish brothers with him knew that God had given Gentiles the Spirit because they “heard them speaking in tongues and magnifying God” (Acts 10:46). They were astonished to hear the sound of the Spirit coming from the mouths of uncircumcised Gentiles, but that sound is what compelled them to believe what God had done, and when Peter brought his report back to Jerusalem, it also compelled the elders of the Assembly there to accept it. They were, at first, displeased that Peter had gone to a Gentile’s house (Acts 11:2–3), but they could not deny Peter’s testimony when he told them,

Acts 11

15. “As I began to speak, the holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning.

16. Then I remembered the word of the Lord, how he used to say, ‘John indeed baptized with water, but you will be baptized with holy Spirit.’

17. Inasmuch, then, as God gave them the same gift He gave to us who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could withstand God?”

18. When they had heard these things, they fell silent, but then they began glorifying God, saying, “Then, God has granted repentance unto life to the Gentiles, too!”

The above is an observation brought to my attention some years ago by a dear brother, Jerry Durham, whose testimony was sent to me in an email, a copy of which follows:

One morning, I was getting ready for work, making my lunch for that day, and as I began crossing the kitchen floor, the Spirit of God started preaching in my inner being. It wasn’t audible in the room, but it was loud and clear to me. So I just listened. This is what I heard: “What was it that convinced the Jews that the Gentiles had been grafted into Christ?”

God’s people at that time, the Jews, knew that the Gentiles did not belong to God; in the minds of Jews, that was an impossibility. Jesus himself had called us Gentiles “dogs” (Mt. 15:26), and He sent His disciples only to the house of Israel (Mt. 10:5). And so, the Israelites – all Israelites – knew that the Gentiles did not belong to God – and we truly did not (Eph. 2:11–12)! If any Gentile had claimed to belong to the God of the Jews, that Gentile would have been laughed at, at the very least.

It is impossible that any Gentile, or “dog”, as Jesus had called Gentiles, could have persuaded a Jew that he was in covenant with the God of Israel simply by claiming it was so. And a Gentile surely couldn’t have persuaded a Jew that he belonged to God by claiming that he “got saved” or that he had “accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior,” as Christians say now. There was absolutely nothing that would have convinced a Jew that any of the Gentiles were also the children of God. Both God and Jesus had taught them otherwise.

When God grafted us Gentiles into this New Covenant in His Son, He had to send the Jews a convincing witness from heaven that such a thing had taken place; otherwise, who among them would believe such a thing? God had to send a “testimony,” a “sign,” from Himself that nobody could doubt, an irrefutable sign so that His people, the Jews, could not deny it.

Now, for that sign!

When Peter was sent to Cornelius the Gentile’s house to preach the gospel of Christ, it says in Acts 10:44–46, “While Peter was still saying these things, the holy Spirit fell on all those who heard the Word. And those of the circumcision who believed, as many as came with Peter, were astonished because the gift of the holy Spirit had also been poured out on the Gentiles! They knew this because they heard them speaking in tongues and magnifying God.”

So, a sign, God’s proof from heaven, was given that day which astonished those Jews, something that caused Peter to confess in verse 47 that the Gentiles had received God’s Spirit, as well as the Jews. That sign is what proved to Peter and the Jews with him that something impossible had just happened.

The Scriptures tell us that tongues are a sign for unbelievers (1Cor. 14:22). Who could have been in a state of unbelief more than those faithful Jews with Peter on that day? That is, unbelief that God would give Gentiles – “dogs”! – His holy Spirit. But God sent the Jews a sign that day, an irrefutable sign that their God, Jehovah, had done it, so that they would not stumble in their faith at the mercy of God which had been poured out on us poor Gentiles!

God poured out His sign of this covenant on the Jews first, in the second chapter of Acts, and they staggered under the power of God. Then, after the Jews were fully saturated with the truth and convinced of how the Spirit is received, He poured it out on us Gentiles, His adopted children (cf. Rom. 8:15–16). He washed us Gentiles of our sins and gave us the same sign, in love, for the whole world to understand. And how we need the same type of conversion today for the body of Christ, staggering under the power of God, the kind of conversion that would convince even an unbelieving Jew!

God taught me this in my kitchen, brother John. I can tell this truth, for it is my testimony.

The Old Testament: Pointing to a Sound

The Old Testament contains many prophecies concerning the Spirit speaking when one receives it, but especially clear is this prophecy from Isaiah:

Isaiah 28

11. He will speak to this people with stammering lips and another tongue,

12a. to whom He said, “This is the rest with which you will cause the weary to rest,” and, “This is the refreshing.”

The apostle Paul said plainly that this prophecy from Isaiah was a prophecy of the Spirit speaking through believers (1Cor. 14:21–22), and so, we can say that this is the rest which Jesus promised to those who believe in him:

Matthew 11

28. Come to me, all who labor and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest!

Even before the first apostles finished their course, however, apostate believers began laying the foundation for Christianity by teaching that the Spirit could be received without the evidence foretold by Isaiah. The apostles labored earnestly to protect the saints from that doctrine by affirming God’s way of making it known when His Spirit enters a person’s heart. It was a critical issue, for it is essential to the well-being of the body of Christ that they know who is born again and who is not.

Making God a Liar

John not only taught that the Spirit “is God’s witness which He has borne concerning His Son,” but he also said that everyone who truly believes in Jesus receives it (1Jn. 5:9–10a), concluding with this arresting statement:

1John 5

10b. He who does not believe God has made Him a liar because he has not believed in the witness that God has given concerning His Son.

That is a harsh but true statement. Whoever does not believe in the witness God has given of His Son, the baptism of the holy Spirit and the sound that comes with it, is calling God a liar. Psalm 14:1 says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” A fool may be the man standing in a pulpit declaring that Jesus is Lord, but if he has not received God’s witness of the Son, he is saying in his heart, “There is no God.” His heart is calling God a liar, no matter what his mouth is saying, for anyone who refuses the Spirit of God is treating God’s testimony to His Son as false.

On a happier note, John wrote in another place that those who do receive God’s testimony, the baptism of the Spirit, have declared God to be true (Jn. 3:33). This is the case because when the Spirit enters a person and speaks through him, the Spirit is not only bearing witness to the Son, but it is also bearing witness to that person, that he is cleansed from sin and now belongs to God. When a controversy arose among believers in Jerusalem concerning Gentiles who believed, Peter settled the matter with this:

Acts 15

7. When there had been much disputing, Peter rose and said to them, “Men and brothers, you know that a good while ago, God made choice among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles were to hear the word of the gospel, and believe.

8. And God, who knows the heart, bore them witness, giving them the holy Spirit just as He gave it to us.”

It is the witness of God, not the witness of man, that settles the matter of who is born of God and who is not. Every one of us should ask ourselves this question: Who told me that I received God’s Spirit? Was it a man of the Institution, or did the Spirit itself bear witness through me that Christ had entered my heart? If it was anyone on earth, we were lied to. What are we to think, then, of men who teach that the Spirit does not speak? What are we to think of men who say that the Spirit does not testify when it enters in and that people should trust a man’s testimony instead of God’s concerning when a person is cleansed from sin?

By providing the sign of a sound when someone receives His Spirit, God offers us all relief from the enormous burden of trying to determine for ourselves who is born again and who is not. It is a blessing to understand that God knows the heart, for with that understanding, we will wait on God to testify with the sound of His Spirit before declaring someone to be in God’s family. Saving faith is faith that rests in God’s judgment, and wise saints are like Jesus in that they trust God’s testimony, not man’s (cf. Jn. 2:23–25). John said, “If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater, for this [the Spirit] is the witness of God that He has given concerning His Son” (1Jn. 5:9).

The Son’s Credentials

No one from earth was in heaven to actually see the risen Christ glorified by the Father. Therefore, it is only by receiving the Father’s witness of the event that anyone can really know that Jesus’ sacrifice was accepted and that he was glorified to sit at God’s right hand. The Bible is evidence, but it does not prove it; an empty tomb is evidence, but it does not prove it. Only an experience from God, the baptism of the Spirit, proves it.

John the Baptizer proclaimed that the baptism of the Spirit would be the unique credentials of Israel’s Messiah. His baptism in water, he said, was but a symbolic precursor of it:

Luke 3

15. “Now, the people being in expectation of the Messiah, and everyone wondering in their hearts about John, whether he might be the Messiah,

16. John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to loosen. He will baptize you with holy Spirit and fire!”

So, whoever baptizes with the holy Spirit and fire is the Christ, the promised Messiah whom God sent to Israel! Nobody does that, or can do that, but Jesus.

Speechless Gods

In every place where ministers of the Institution have persuaded people not to believe in the sound of the Spirit, they have thereby persuaded them to reject the real Spirit of God and, thus, make God out to be a liar. But it has not been a difficult task. When given a choice, fallen man will almost always reject the real Spirit of God and opt for the speechless one which the Institution’s ministers offer instead. God freely gives His Spirit to every soul who obeys Him (Acts 5:32; 10:34–35), but fallen man would rather not obey God, receive another spirit, and just call it God’s.

Paul reminded the Corinthians that before they came to Christ, they served speechless gods but that now, they served a God whose Spirit speaks:

1Corinthians 12

2. You know that when you were Gentiles, you were led, but misled, to voiceless idols.

3. Wherefore, I give you to know that no one speaking by the Spirit of God is saying, “Cursed be Jesus.” And no one is able to say, “Lord Jesus!”, but by the holy Spirit.

Something More Certain

Peter, James, and John were on a mountain with Jesus when they saw him transfigured and then heard God’s voice (Mt. 17:5; Mk. 9:7; Lk. 9:35). Peter was referring to the sound of the Spirit when he told of that day, saying that those who receive the Spirit have something even more certain than hearing God’s voice coming out of heaven:

2Peter 1

16. We did not follow cunningly fabricated myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; on the contrary, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

17. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

18. And this voice, we ourselves heard coming from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.

19. And yet, we have something more certain that was prophesied about, to which you will do well to give heed as to a light shining in a gloomy place until the day breaks and the Morning Star rises in your heart.

Peter heard God’s own voice bearing witness to Jesus, and yet, he said that believers now have a “more certain” witness to Jesus than that! What could possibly be more certain than hearing God’s voice coming out of heaven except to hear God’s voice coming out of our own mouths, as the Spirit moves us to speak?

Satan and his angels heard God’s voice many times when they were still in heaven, but it was always outside of them. They never received the “more certain” thing God has given to us who love His Son, and they never will. Neither did John the Baptizer. He heard God’s voice, too. God told him that the Messiah would soon appear and that he was to look for a sign by which he would know who the Chosen One was (Jn. 1:29–34). But later, languishing in prison, John began to doubt that Jesus was the Messiah and sent two of his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is coming, or should we look for a different man?” (Mt. 11:2–3). Hearing an external voice could not establish John’s faith, and it cannot establish the faith of anyone else.

God’s voice from heaven, like the ancient prophecies, was external to those hearing it, but the sound of the Spirit is produced by an inward experience: the baptism of the Spirit. That testimony from within is much more certain than any external testimony. The sound of the Spirit coming from a newly sanctified soul is still God speaking from heaven, but in this case, He is speaking through a man, not to him. As I said, we are straitly warned to heed that sound:

Hebrews 12

25. Beware that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they [the Israelites] did not escape when they refused the one on earth who instructed them [Moses], much less shall we escape who turn away from the One [who speaks through us] from heaven.

Denying the Lord Who Bought Them

It is only to be expected that ministers without the real Spirit of God should claim to have it and that they would teach others without the Spirit that they have it, too, but the great tragedy of this covenant is that many who have received Jesus’ baptism of the Spirit with the Spirit speaking through them teach the same error. In order to fit into the Institution, many Spirit-baptized ministers also deny that Jesus’ baptism of the Spirit always comes with the very sound which they themselves have experienced. They do not know that when they deny that God’s Spirit comes with a sound, they are denying the real Spirit of God, and in denying the Spirit, they are denying Christ, for “the Lord is the Spirit” (2Cor. 3:17a).

Peter prophesied that such ministers would come:

2Peter 2

1a. There were false prophets among the [Old Testament] people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will introduce opinions that lead to damnation, even denying the Lord who bought them.

When Peter prophesied that false teachers would “deny the Lord who bought them” (2Pet. 2:1), he was not saying that they would stop saying good things about God and Jesus. If they did that, they would deceive none of God’s people. Instead, they define God and Jesus according to their own ideas, denying the real Jesus, the Lord who bought them. Their being bought by the Lord means that they had truly repented and were washed from sin by the Spirit. They really are members of the body of Christ, and they worship God rightly . . . some of the time, when the Institution allows it.

The doctrine of those men, that the sound of the Spirit is not always heard when the Spirit is received, has emboldened multitudes to claim to be born again without the Spirit’s sound, and because so many people have believed that lie, the truth is scorned, as Peter went on to say: “Many will follow them in their licentious ways, because of whom the way of truth will be spoken evil of” (2Pet. 2:2).

God warned Israel through Moses not to follow a multitude in an evil way (Ex. 23:2), but to follow Christian multitudes in promoting a speechless spirit as being God’s is to do just that, and many of God’s precious children have been persuaded to do so. Solomon taught his son that regardless of how many join together in an evil thing, it is still evil, and God’s punishment for it is certain (Prov. 11:21). Even if the whole world were to agree that a lie is the truth, it would still be a lie, and even if the whole world were to agree that the truth is a lie, it would still be the truth. God is not confused by man’s delusions, and there is no escaping His righteous judgment.

Conclusion

The Son is the Foundation

David prophesied that the New Testament house of God would be built upon “seven pillars”:

Proverbs 9

1. Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out her seven pillars.

2. She has slaughtered her beasts [our fleshly nature]; she has mixed her wine [the “new wine” of the Spirit]; and she has set her table [for communion with the Father and the Son].

Paul was the one anointed to reveal what those seven pillars are:

Ephesians 4

4. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were also called to one hope of your calling,

5. one Lord, one faith, one baptism,

6. one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in us all.

These seven pillars are foundational to the New Testament, and Paul, “as a wise master builder,” laid out that foundation for the saints (1Cor. 3:10). Jesus did not lay the foundation; he is the foundation. Paul was the one sent by God to lay it all out for His children.

This is the one faith of Christ:
the one Lord’s one baptism of the one Spirit
of the one God puts us into the one body
and gives us the one hope of eternal life.

No earthly institution is, or can be, built upon these seven pillars. Nor can any religion of earth bless us as these seven pillars do when we understand and live by them. Putting these seven pillars into practice would purge the body of Christ from every “spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing” (Eph. 5:27), and it would bring God’s people out of the Institution that falsely claims to be the body of Christ, for, other than the children of God who have joined it, the Institution is altogether barren of the things of God. And because it makes those who join it spiritually barren, Daniel prophesied of it, calling it “The abomination that makes desolate” (Dan. 12:11). And Jesus, speaking of the same thing, referred to it as “the abomination of desolation” (Mt. 24:15). John rightly described the Institution as “a dwelling place of demons, and a prison for every unclean spirit, and a prison for every unclean and loathsome bird” (Rev. 18:2).

It is as wrong to believe in a baptism other than the one baptism of Christ as it is to worship a god other than the true One. There is only one holy Spirit because the One God alone is holy (Mt. 19:17), and there is but one body of Christ because the body of Christ is made up only of those whom Christ has baptized into it (1Cor. 12:13). The one Hope of believers is the return of the one Lord Jesus to give us the crown of eternal life (Rom. 8:23–25). All other hopes are earthly and vain. The one faith is the sum of the other six pillars, and to teach any other faith is sin. Upon these unshakable seven pillars, the body of Christ is built up as a spiritual temple in which are offered “spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1Pet. 2:5).

May God give us the grace to build wisely upon the foundation Paul laid, for there will be a good reward for doing so. One thing is certain, that is, whatever we build will be judged by God:

1Corinthians 3

10. According to the grace of God that is given to me as a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, but another builds upon it. But let each man take heed how he builds.

11. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

12. If upon this foundation, anyone builds gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw,

13. each man’s work shall be made manifest. The day of God will disclose it, for it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will prove each man’s work, what sort it is.

Where the Father and the Son Are: “Outside the Camp”

Because the Institution weakens, divides, and confuses God’s children, God is pleading with them to come out of it:

Revelation 18

4. Then I heard another voice from heaven, saying, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not participate in her sins, and receive of her plagues!

5. Her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her unrighteous deeds.”

God does not want His children to share in the Institution’s guilt, for whoever shares her guilt will also share her judgment and “receive of her plagues.” God’s children must come out of Christianity, regardless of which sect they have joined, because everyone who joins that “Great Whore” (cf. Rev. 17:1) participates in her sins against Christ, such as the following:

• Falsely claiming to be the body of Christ.

• Promoting form after Jesus suffered and died to give us life.

• Teaching false doctrines in the name of Jesus.

• Persecuting God’s faithful children.

• Slandering God’s true ministers.

Christianity claims much, but it has never given anyone God’s kind of life, never cleansed a soul, and never created within anyone the knowledge of God. From its inception, Christianity has only produced strife and confusion, and until God destroys it, that is all it will do. God is not in it, never has been, and never will be. Christianity cannot be healed, for it is the disease itself, but God’s children can be healed of that disease – if they will believe and obey the truth.

Many a precious child of God, sensing the vanity of church religion, have followed the Spirit to begin meeting in their homes. But without knowing why the Spirit is leading them out, they often carry the disease with them when they go. The disease is the mindset of church religion, the spirit of it, which expresses itself by faith in ceremonial forms along with faith in Jesus. That was the original error of believers, the error instituted by Constantine when he blended pagan religion with that of apostate believers.

If we ever hope to truly know our heavenly Father, we must abandon Christianity and go to where Jesus is. The Father is not calling us to “go out of her” but “come out of her” because He is calling to us from where He is – outside of her. The Father and the Son are outside the Christian camp. They dwell in life, not form, and they are calling us to come dwell in life with them. Those who have chosen ceremonial form over life may think it strange that we would leave the apparent safety of the Christian camp, but we left because we wanted real safety, not the appearance of it.

Where the Father and the Son Are Not: The Church

Church religion is religion centered around a building built by men and dedicated to God. As I previously explained, that was the Old Testament form of religion. The temple in Jerusalem was Israel’s church, and it was the heart of the religion prescribed by Moses’ law. Virtually all the law’s ceremonies were performed at that church. Moreover, the temple in Jerusalem is the only church God has ever ordained. In AD 325, one of the first acts of the Emperor Constantine after adopting belief in Jesus was to adapt that belief to his Roman-style church-based religion. That religion, later called Christianity, was not ordained by God. It was, and is, a thoroughly pagan version of the gospel of Christ.

The Spirit within God’s children who are in the Institution is grieved for the confusion and division to which they have joined themselves. Many of them sense what their heavenly Father wants, but do not understand what the Spirit is saying. Surely, they think, God does not want us to come out of church religion! But why not? The Greek word for “church” is found nowhere in the New Testament. It has been imposed upon the text by Christian translators so as to make it appear that church religion is of God.

Men of the Institution consistently mistranslate the Greek word ekklesia as “church” in order to legitimize their church-based Institution. William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) refused to mistranslate ekklesia as “church”, using “congregation” instead, and for his efforts to produce a faithful English translation, Churchmen hunted him down and had him executed. Later, to secure the political support of such powerful Churchmen, King James commanded his translators to mistranslate ekklesia as “church”, forbidding the correct translation of “assembly” or “congregation”.^[170]

Christianity, the Church, is an evil Institution. It has never been of God, and God wants His people out of it. Over the centuries, God’s children have needed a who from Christ to show them the way out of the what of man, the Church. Christ has supplied those ministers, and they have suffered at the hands of Churchmen for the truth they told, but those who stood fast and weathered the storm received a good reward for their labor, and they will be blessed forever. Let us join them.

We Need Nothing More

The Father is a person, and the Son is a person. The holy Spirit is the Father’s life, the kind of life He gave to the Son when He created him, long before Jesus’ mother Mary existed. Jesus was confessing his utter dependence on his heavenly Father when he said, “Just as the Father has life in Himself, so He has also given to the Son to have life in himself” (Jn. 5:26). In the predetermined time, the Father sent the Son He created to earth to pay the price for us to receive the holy life which they shared (cf. Jn. 10:10b), and we need nothing more than that. To live forever, we need nothing but what the Son has provided, namely, access by the Spirit to God (Eph. 2:18), for with that, we are fully able to stand “blameless in holiness before our God and Father” (1Thess. 3:13). That miraculous blessing, Jesus accomplished for us by his sacrificial death, and to all who believe, he ministers his kind of life: the holy, eternal life of the Father, the Spirit of the living God.

Appendix

“Son of God” in the New Testament
Verse	Speaker	with “the”?	pre- or post-Pentecost?	a son of God	Messiah	pre-existent Son
Mt. 4:3	Satan	No	Pre		✓
Mt. 4:6	Satan	No	Pre		✓
Mt. 8:29	Demons	No	Pre		✓
Mt. 14:33	Disciples	No	Pre		✓
Mt. 16:16	Peter	Yes	Pre		✓
Mt. 26:63	High Priest	Yes	Pre		✓
Mt. 27:40	Passersby	No	Pre		✓
Mt. 27:43	Priests, scribes, and elders	No	Pre		✓
Mt. 27:54	Centurion	No	Pre	✓
Mk. 1:1	Mark	No	Post			✓
Mk. 3:11	Demons	Yes	Pre		✓
Mk. 5:7	Demon	No	Pre		✓
Mk. 15:39	Centurion	No	Pre	✓
Lk. 1:321	Gabriel	No	Pre		✓
Lk. 1:35	Gabriel	No	Pre		✓
Lk. 4:3	Satan	No	Pre		✓
Lk. 4:9	Satan	No	Pre		✓
Lk. 4:41	Demons	Yes	Pre		✓
Lk. 8:28	Demon	No	Pre		✓
Lk. 22:70	Priests, scribes, and elders	Yes	Pre		✓
Jn. 1:34	John	Yes	Pre		✓
Jn. 1:49	Nathaniel	Yes	Pre		✓
Jn. 3:18	John	Yes	Post			✓
Jn. 5:25	Jesus	Yes	Pre			✓
Jn. 6:69	Disciples	Yes	Pre		✓
Jn. 9:35	Jesus	Yes	Pre			✓
Jn. 10:36	Jesus	No	Pre		✓
Jn. 11:4	Jesus	Yes	Pre			✓
Jn. 11:27	Martha	Yes	Pre		✓
Jn. 19:7	Priests and officers	No	Pre		✓

¹ Son of the Highest

“Son of God” in the New Testament
Verse	Speaker	with “the”?	pre- or post-Pentecost?	a son of God	Messiah	pre-existent Son
Jn. 20:31	John	Yes	Post		✓
Acts 8:37	Philip	Yes	Post		✓
Acts 9:20	Luke	Yes	Post		✓
Rom. 1:4	Paul	No	Post			✓
2Cor. 1:19	Paul	Yes	Post			✓
Gal. 2:20	Paul	Yes	Post			✓
Eph. 4:13	Paul	Yes	Post			✓
Heb. 4:14	Paul?	Yes	Post			✓
Heb. 6:6	Paul?	Yes	Post			✓
Heb. 7:3	Paul?	Yes	Post			✓
Heb. 10:29	Paul?	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 3:8	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 4:15	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 5:5	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 5:10	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 5:12	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 5:13a	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 5:13b	John	Yes	Post			✓
1Jn. 5:20	John	Yes	Post			✓
2Jn. 1:3	John	Yes	Post			✓2
Rev. 2:18	Jesus	Yes	Post			✓

² “the Son of the Father”

The Spiritual Condition of the Disciples

before Pentecost

Jesus and his disciples lived under the law of Moses, and they studiously kept the law’s commandments. However, while Jesus was here with them, the disciples did not have the qualities of God’s righteousness that the Spirit brings. The Spirit had not yet been given because the awful price for it had not yet been paid.

So, before the Spirit came upon them in Acts 2, the disciples were righteous by the law’s standards, but they were not righteous by the standards of the New Covenant that Jesus’ sacrifice inaugurated. The following scriptures show what the spiritual condition of the disciples was, before they were born again on the day of Pentecost:

• They were clean (Jn. 13:10–11; 15:3), but they were not sanctified (Jn. 17:17, 19).

• They believed in God (Jn. 2:11; 17:8), but they did not believe (Jn. 14:12, 29; 16:29–33; 11:11–15; Mk. 16:17–18).

• They loved Jesus (Jn. 16:27), but the love of God was not in them (Jn. 17:26; Rom. 5:5).

• They belonged to God (Jn. 17:6), but they did not have the Spirit within them (Jn. 14:15–17). (Notice the New Testament standard for belonging to God, found in Romans 8:9.)

• They believed that God sent Jesus (Jn. 17:8, 25), but they did not know Jesus (Jn. 14:7–9).

• They were not of the world (Jn. 15:18–20; 17:14), but they were not in Christ (Jn. 17:21–23, 26).

• They were chosen and ordained (Jn. 15:16), but they could not bear to hear all the truth (Jn. 16:12). Nor could they ask anything in Jesus’ name (Jn. 16:23–26).

• They were like unborn babies (Jn. 16:20–22).

Proverbs 8: The Son as Wisdom

Note: The Hebrew word for “wisdom”, being a feminine noun, is referred to as “she” and “her”, but when Wisdom begins to speak, it is Christ, the wisdom of God, speaking.

Proverbs 8

1. Does not wisdom call? And understanding give her voice?

2. At the top of high places, along the road, at the crossroads, she stands.

3. Beside the gates, at the entrance of the cities, at the doors, she cries out,

4. “Unto you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the children of Adam.

5. Understand subtlety, you simpletons! And you fools, be of an understanding heart!

6. Listen! For I speak of excellent things, and from the opening of my lips come right things.

7. My mouth speaks truth, and wickedness is an abomination to my lips.

8. All the words of my mouth are in righteousness; there is nothing twisted or crooked in them.

9. All of them are right to the one who understands, and upright to those who find knowledge.

10. Receive my reproof and not silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold,

11. for wisdom is better than rubies, and nothing that is desirable can compare with her.

12. I, wisdom, dwell with prudence; I uncover knowledge of cunning ways.

13. The fear of Jehovah is to hate evil. I hate pride, haughtiness, an evil manner, and a perverse mouth.

14. Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom. I am understanding. I have strength.

15. By me, kings rule, and rulers make righteous decrees.

16. By me, princes and nobles reign, and all who judge rightly.

17. I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently will find me.

18. Riches and honor are with me, enduring wealth and righteousness.

19. My fruit is better than gold, even pure gold, and my revenue better than choice silver.

20. I walk in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of justice,

21. to cause those who love me to inherit substance; I will fill their storehouses.

22. Jehovah created me the beginning of His way, the first of His works.

23. I was formed before eternity, before the beginning, before earth existed.

24. I was brought forth when there were no depths of the sea, when there were no springs abounding with water.

25. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was brought forth.

26. When He had not made the earth, and the open fields, and the first elements of the world,

27. when He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He decreed a circle on the face of the deep,

28. when He established the thin clouds above, when He made strong the fountains of the sea,

29. when He made His decree for the sea, that the waters should not disobey His word, when He decreed the foundations of the earth,

30. I was at His side, like a master workman, daily His great delight, always laughing in His presence,

31. rejoicing in the world, His earth, and my delights were with the sons of men.

32. “‘So, children, listen now to me, for those who keep my ways are blessed.

33. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not let it go!

34. Blessed is the man who listens to me, keeping watch at my gates every day, waiting at the posts of my doors.

35. For he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from Jehovah,

36. But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul. All they that hate me love death.’”

Jewish Teaching about Satan Before Jesus

Of the two major sources of Jewish thought at or near the time of Jesus, the earlier of them, if we accept the standard dating of 150 BC to AD 70, is the Dead Sea Scrolls.^[171] The Scrolls give us insight into what some radically devout Jews thought about evil spirits around the time Jesus lived. As the list below shows, the authors of the Scrolls were aware that evil spirits exist. They even called evil spirits by name, “Belial” being the name most frequently used. That name was not new; it had been in use for more than a thousand years when the Scrolls were written (e.g., Dt. 13:13). However, like the Old Testament, the Scrolls never associated Belial with Satan. Indeed, of the many wicked spirits named in the Scrolls, not one of them is linked to Satan.

Some modern commentators make that connection, speaking of Satan when referring to the Belial of the Scrolls as if Satan’s name is there,^[172] but it is not. They are able to make the connection only because they have been influenced by the truth revealed by the Son, not because the Scrolls do it.

Here is a list of the names and titles for evil spirits found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the name of the scroll in which they are found. Note that Satan is not among them.

The Damascus Document

• Guardian Angels (who fell and mated with women on Earth)

• Belial

• Yannes and “his brother”

• The angel of Obstruction

Tales of the Patriarchs

• The Watchers (another name for the Guardian Angels, above)

Charter of a Jewish Sectarian Association

• The Angel of Darkness

The Ages of the World

• Azazel and the angels

The Book of Enoch

• Shemihaza

A Paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus

• The Prince of Malevolence (Mastemah)

The Songs of the Sage for Protection against Evil Spirits

• The destroying angels, spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers, and [desert dwellers . . .]

The Vision of Amram

• Malki-Resha, the ruler of wickedness

An Exorcism

• The male Wasting-demon and the female Wasting-demon

• Fever-demon and Chills-demon and Chest Pain-demon

• The male Shrine-spirit and the female-Shrine spirit

• Demons who breach [walls . . .]

The writings of Josephus provide us with a second potential source for determining the thought of Jews concerning Satan and evil spirits at about the time of Jesus. Except what is found in Josephus’ two books, hardly anything is known about Israel’s history in the years following the apostles. It must be remembered, however, that Josephus’ facts, not to mention his character, are questionable and are never to be accepted without corroboration. Still, what he says or does not say about Satan and evil spirits probably reflects the views of the more cosmopolitan Jews of the time.

Like many others of his day, Jew and Gentile alike, Josephus believed in the existence of harmful spirits (Jewish Antiquities, V.166), but as with both the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls, he never made a connection between those hurtful spirits and Satan. It is by noticing what Josephus omitted that we gain the greatest insight into what he thought about Satan. For example, he went into some detail in relating the story of the Serpent’s seduction of Eve, but he never indicated that he thought of the Serpent as anything other than an animal (Antiquities, I.40–51). Josephus did not mention Satan’s prosecution of Joshua the high priest in God’s heavenly court or the sufferings of Job.

The English word “demon” is derived from the Greek word Josephus used for “spirit”: daimon. It is sometimes translated, “evil spirit”, but that translation is the result of the influence of the Son; it is not necessarily how Josephus thought. To him, daimon meant only a spirit. He even spoke of the daimon of a dead man (Jewish Wars, I.607) the way people today speak of someone’s ghost. He knew, of course, that spirits can be helpful or harmful. He reported that Herod the Great lamented that some desolating daimon was working against him (Jewish Wars I.628). On the other hand, it was well known that the city of Alexandria erected a prominent shrine dedicated to “the good daimon”, a minor snake god associated with the founding of the city, and in ancient Athens, the second day of each month was set aside to honor the local good daimon. Josephus acknowledged that daimons can cause physical and psychological harm, as one did to King Saul (Antiquities, VI.166⁽²⁾), but that is no more than what anyone in the ancient world would have thought. It does not mean that Josephus understood demons to be what Jesus revealed them to be.

Josephus used every term for spiritual beings, including those for God and Deity, as we would expect of a Jew who had a close relationship with Gentiles. Josephus was thoroughly a product of his time and place, speaking at times of the biblical “angel of God” (Wars, V.388), while at other times acknowledging the Roman goddesses, Fortune (Wars, IV.40) and Fate (Wars, VI.267). That blend could only have been willingly made. Miss Fortune did not make Josephus do it. Ignorance of the Son did.

Names and Titles for the Son of God

Advocate Job 16:19; 1Jn. 2:1

The Alpha and Omega Rev. 22:13

The Amen Rev. 3:14

The Apostle of our confession Heb. 3:1

Arm of Jehovah Isa. 51:9; 53:1

Polished Arrow Isa. 49:2

Author and Perfecter of our faith Heb. 12:2

Author of eternal salvation Heb. 5:9

The Beginning of the creation of God Col. 1:18; Rev. 3:14

The Branch Jer. 33:15; Zech. 6:12

The Bread of God Jn. 6:33

The Bread of life Jn. 6:35

The Bridegroom Mt. 9:15; Rev. 21:2

The Bright and Morning Star Rev. 22:16

Captain of our salvation Heb. 2:10

Chief Shepherd 1Pet. 5:4

Chief Cornerstone Eph. 2:20

Christ Mt. 1:16

Comforter Jn. 14:16

The Coming One Mt. 11:3

A chosen and precious Cornerstone 1Pet. 2:6

Counselor Isa. 9:6

David Ps. 89:3; Ezek. 37:24

Deliverer Rom. 11:26; 1Thess. 1:10

The Desire of all nations Hag. 2:7

The Door Jn. 10:9

Emmanuel Isa. 7:14; Mt. 1:23

Everlasting Father Isa. 9:6

Faithful and True Rev. 19:11

The Faithful and true witness Rev. 1:5; 3:14

The Farmer Jas. 5:7

The First and the Last Rev. 2:8

The Firstborn Heb. 1:6

The Firstborn from the dead Rev. 1:5; Col. 1:18

The Firstborn of every creature Col. 1:15

The Firstfruits 1Cor. 15:23

Our Forerunner Heb. 6:20

Friend Prov. 18:24

The Guarantor of the New Covenant Heb. 7:22

God Ps. 45:6–7; Jn. 1:2

The Good One Ps. 31:19; Hos. 3:5

The Good Shepherd Jn. 10:11

Great Priest Heb. 10:21

The Head of the body Col. 1:18

The Heir of all things Heb. 1:2

High Priest Heb. 2:17; 3:1

The Holy and Righteous One Acts 3:14

The Holy One of God Mk. 1:24

The Horn of David Ps. 132:17

The Image of the invisible God Col. 1:15

Israel Isa. 49:3

Jesus Mt. 1:20–21; Lk. 1:31

Joshua Zech. 3:8–9

The Judge Jas. 5:9

Judge of the living and the dead Acts 10:42

Justifier Romans 3:26

King of glory Ps. 24:10

King of Israel Mk. 15:32; Jn. 1:49

King of kings 1Tim. 6:15; Rev. 19:16

King of the Jews Mt. 2:2; 27:37

Lamb Rev. 15:3; 17:14

The Lamb of God Jn. 1:29; Jn. 1:36

The Last Adam 1Cor. 15:45

The Life Jn. 14:6; Col. 3:4

The Lifter Up of my head Ps. 3:3

The Light of the world Jn. 1:17; 8:12

The Lion of Judah Rev. 5:5

The Lily of the valley Song of Solomon 2:1

Lord Jn. 13:13; Phip. 2:11; Heb. 1:10

Lord of all Acts 10:36

Lord of glory 1Cor. 2:8

The Lord of the harvest Mt. 9:38

Lord of lords 1Tim. 6:15; Rev. 7:14

Man of sorrows Isa. 53:3

Master Jn. 13:13

Mediator between God and man 1Tim. 2:5

Mediator of the New Covenant Heb. 8:6; 9:15; 12:24

Messiah Lk. 9:20; Jn. 20:31

Mighty God Isa. 9:6

Minister of the true tabernacle Heb. 8:2

Morning Star 2Pet. 1:19; Rev. 22:16

The Name of Jehovah Isa. 30:27; 60:9

Nazarene Mt. 2:23

The Offspring of David Rev. 22:16

Our Righteousness Jer. 23:6

Our Passover 1Cor. 5:7

Physician Lk. 4:23

The Power of God 1Cor. 1:24; 2:7

Prince of life Acts 3:15

Prince of peace Isa. 9:6

Prince of salvation Heb. 2:10

Prophet like Moses Dt. 18:15

The Propitiation for our sins 1Jn. 2:2

Rabbi Jn. 9:2; 20:16

Redeemer Isa. 59:20

The Resurrection Jn. 11:25

Rock 1Cor. 10:4

The Root of David Rev. 5:5

The Rose of Sharon Song of Solomon 2:1

The Ruler Mic. 5:2; Mt. 2:6

Ruler over kings of the earth Rev. 1:5

Salvation Lk. 2:29–30

Savior Lk. 2:11; Phip. 3:20

The Scepter Num. 24:17

The Seed of the woman Gen. 3:15

Shepherd Zech. 13:7;

Heb. 13:20

Shield Ps. 84:9

Shiloh Gen. 49:10

Shoot from the stump of Jesse Isa. 11:1

Son of David Mt. 1:1, Mk. 10:47

Son of man Mt. 2:10; Jn. 1:52

Son of the Blessed Mk. 14:61

Son of the Highest Lk. 1:32

Star Num. 24:17

The Stone Ps. 118:22; 2Pet. 2:7;

Dan. 2:34–35;

The Sun of righteousness Mal. 4:2

Teacher Ps. 84:6; Mt. 8:19

The True Light Jn. 1:9

The True Vine Jn. 15:1

The Truth Jn. 14:6

God’s Turtledove Ps. 74:19

The Way Jn. 14:6

Understanding Prov. 8:14

The Wisdom of God 1Cor. 1:24

Wonder Ps. 89:5; Isa. 9:6

The Word Jn. 1:1

The Word of God Rev. 19:13

The Word of truth Jas. 1:18

This book was eighteen years in the making, but there is no end to the love of God for His Son, and there is so much more He has to teach us about him. The Son’s story will be a never-ending one, for “of the increase of the his government and of peace, there will be no end” (Isa. 9:7).

Author’s Notes

• In English, the singular and plural forms of “you” are identical. However, in biblical Hebrew and Greek, the differences are obvious. Therefore, to more perfectly convey the biblical writers’ messages in verses where the word “you” appears, I have italicized the “y” of all plural forms, such as you, your, yours, yourselves.
• Translations of Old and New Testament scriptures are my own. Following standard practice, whenever a word is added to the translation for clarification, that word is italicized. However, within regular paragraphs, whenever a verse is quoted as part of that paragraph, italics are used only for emphasis.
• Conflicting rules exist as to how punctuation should be used, hardly any of them being adequate for every situation. I subscribe to a freer punctuation style. Of special note, I do not, as a rule, include within quotation marks any punctuation that is not a part of what is quoted. To do otherwise, in my opinion, leaves too much room for misrepresentation of the original author’s intent.
• The subject of this book being what it is, a few references are necessarily made to “the Holy Trinity” and to the doctrine called “Oneness”, but my purpose is not to debate doctrinal issues; it is only to declare the meaning of the revelation of God’s once-hidden Son.
• In many translations, the Old Testament name Jehovah is translated “the Lord” (with small caps). I have opted to follow the Hebrew and retain the name Jehovah. In New Testament scriptures which quote verses from the Old Testament where “Jehovah” appears, I followed the Greek and used “the Lord”, adding small caps.

Footnotes

^[1] George C. Clark (1901–1989). You can read of his life at PioneerTract.com.

^[2] Joel Hemphill, To God Be the Glory: Examining the Bible View of God (Joelton, TN: Trumpet Call Books, 2006), 43.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Here, the Greek word for “one” is neuter, not masculine (cf. Jn. 17:11, 21–22). When God is referred to as one person (Mt. 19:17; Gal. 3:20), the Greek word for “one” is masculine.

^[5] The one who commands an act to be performed is the one responsible for it. For example, Solomon is said to have offered burnt offerings (2Chron. 1:6), but only God’s priests could do that (Num. 4:5–15). The priests were the people’s agents for making sacrifice, but those who brought the sacrifice were given credit for having made it. Just so, the Father commanded the Son to create all things, and He is credited with it, even though the Son did the actual work.

^[6] That is, he left his spiritual body in heaven empty and entered into a natural, fleshly body on earth, thus laying aside his heavenly comforts and privileges.

^[7] “Devil” is the name usually employed here, but that name carries so much mythological baggage that it should be used sparingly. The Greek word for “Devil” is best translated “Accuser” or “Slanderer”, as biblical scholars since at least Lactantius (circa 240–320) have been known to do (e.g., The Divine Institutes II.ix). Also, “Accuser” more accurately reflects Satan’s character and the heavenly office he once held (cf. Zech. 3:1).

^[8] Cf. footnote 4.

^[9] Angels are not the only species of heavenly creatures, but for brevity, I am using “angel” to represent them all.

^[10] The consumption of animals began, with God’s permission, after the Flood (Gen. 1:29–30; cf. Gen. 9:3–4).

^[11] One of the reasons the earth became so wicked before the Flood is that angels (“the sons of God”) lusted after beautiful women on earth (Gen. 6:1–7). Based on what Jesus said (Mt. 22:30; Mk. 12:25), the only way those angels could have accomplished their lust was to abandon their heavenly bodies with which they were created (“their own domain” – Jude 1:6) and possess men, whose bodies were able to mate with women. The union of women and demon possessed men (and perhaps demon possessed women with attractive men) produced “mighty men, men of renown from long ago” (Gen. 6:4b). In doing that, those angels went “after strange flesh” and gave themselves over to immorality the same way the Sodomites did (Jude 1:6–7). Since no such people were taken into Noah’s ark, the human race was able to begin again as purely human, though the same wickedness no doubt happened again after the Flood. Jude also said that God has damned forever the angels who dared to leave their “proper abode” (Jude 1:6), that is, the bodies with which they were created, and God will not allow them to re-enter the heavenly bodies they abandoned.

^[12] Differing body shapes and sizes among creatures with the same kind of life indicate different natures, not different kinds of life. A snake, for example, has as much animal life as a dog, but its nature differs from that of a dog because it possesses a different kind of body.

^[13] Over a thousand years after the Son of God exposed demons as wicked, Dante, perhaps the greatest Christian poet, still called on demons to help him tell his tale (e.g., Purgatorio, 1:7–12; The Inferno, Canto II.6–8).

^[14] E.g., Homer, The Odyssey, 1.1; Virgil, The Aeneid, 1.8.

^[15] Satan is not an angel. Cherubs and seraphs, etc., are species of heavenly creatures different from angels.

^[16] Medieval Christian myth-makers, with their invention of an ugly Satan who went about encouraging immorality and disorder, did a great disservice to the world by helping disguise the real Satan.

^[17] We are not told when the Father shared that knowledge with the Son.

^[18] The Son of God did what many angels had done before (cf. footnote 11), that is, he left his heavenly body and took up residence in an earthly body. He was not cursed for doing so, as those angels were, because God sent him to do it. The angels who, without God’s permission, possessed earthly bodies were never allowed to return to the glorious bodies God had given them in creation, but the Son prayed while on earth that he would be restored to his former heavenly glory (Jn. 17:5), and he was.

^[19] Or, “born from above”.

^[20] Jesus, in John 4:10; Peter, in Acts 8:20; and Paul, in both Romans 6:23 and 2Timothy 1:6.

^[21] This refers to the Son.

^[22] Sometimes in prophecy, the word “earth” refers to the body of Christ, as we will later show.

^[23] E.g., 1Cor. 10:16; Heb. 9:14; 10:29; 12:24; 1Pet. 1:2; and Rev. 7:14. See gospel tract, “The Blood of Christ”, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[24] More on Job’s story in Chapter 6.

^[25] Among other scriptures that refer to humans as gods are Genesis 3:5 (with Gen. 3:22); Exodus 4:16; 7:1; 22:8–9; 1Samuel 28:13 (one of the gods being Samuel the prophet); Psalms 97:7; 138:1.

^[26] More on this in Chapter 7.

^[27] Paul agreed with Peter, that believers could hasten the day of God’s judgment with their obedience to His will (2Cor. 10:4–6).

^[28] See the gospel tract, “The Sin of Silence”, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[29] Some in the Trinitarian camp hold what amounts to the same position, that is, if the Son is a created being, then he cannot be divine. But why should anyone think that a God of infinite wisdom and power could not create a divine being who is “the exact representation of His being” (Heb. 1:3)? Gabriel told Mary that nothing is impossible for God (Lk. 1:37), and Jesus, of course, agreed (Mt. 19:26; Mk. 10:27).

^[30] In the Appendix, it is shown how and by whom the term “Son of God” was used. See the chart labelled “Son of God in the New Testament”.

^[31] The law of Moses was not destroyed (cf. Mt. 5:17); it was made spiritual. Jesus brought the law to an end physically by “nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:14), but he established it as a spiritual law. See chapters 2–4 in my book, Spiritual Light, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[32] For more on this, see “The Spiritual Condition of the Disciples before Pentecost” in the Appendix.

^[33] See the gospel tract, “The Way of Grace”, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[34] Extra-biblical examples abound. For one, an early Christian funerary inscription called the “Flavia Sophe Inscription” declares that the departed woman desired to look upon the faces of the Aeons. And for another, “The Gospel of Truth”, part of the Nag Hammadi library, uses Aeon repeatedly in reference to divine beings, including God Himself (19.1; 23.1; 24.15).

^[35] John was a prophet speaking by the Spirit. He knew nothing about the pre-existent Son of God. As has been noted, the term “Son of God” was used by Jews as a term of respect for an especially anointed man, the Messiah, not as an acknowledgement of the Son’s pre-existence with the Father. Even the sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, although saying that God would father the Messiah (1Q28a), spoke of the Messiah only as a man. See the chart labelled “Son of God in the New Testament” in the Appendix.

^[36] Apocrypha excepted. Satan’s name is also revealed, but as I said before, he is not an angel. He is a cherub, the only cherub whose name is revealed in the Bible.

^[37] See the Appendix for the first half of Proverbs 8, in which the Son speaks of himself as God’s Wisdom.

^[38] These souls may have their names removed from His Book (Rev. 22:19; Ex. 32:33), but contrary to popular Christian myth, no new name is ever added.

^[39] One may ask, “If the Son of God did not come to earth by entering into Mary’s womb, then how could God refer to the baby born in Bethlehem as originating ‘from ancient times, from the days of eternity’?” The answer has been given at the end of Chapter 1, in “The People’s Confusion: Two Sons”.

^[40] In the Bible, when a name was prophetically given, it foretold the child’s character or appointed function. While Christ walked on earth, God was with us (“Immanuel”) because God’s life was in Christ (Jn. 1:4; 2Cor. 5:19). In this covenant, God is also with men now because His life is in believers (1Cor. 3:16; 2Cor. 6:16).

^[41] Or, “his strength”.

^[42] See also Psalm 109, in which the Son speaks of his future persecutions and foretells the terrifying prayer he would pray against his enemies, especially Judas the betrayer.

^[43] There have been other significant cultures in the world, but these are the kingdoms principally involved in salvation history.

^[44] The phrase, “many waters”, refers to the world’s “peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and languages” (Rev. 17:1, 15). The Beast who will lead the world in the final attack on Israel will arise from the sea (Rev. 13:1), but he will be supported by a man called “the false prophet” who will come from the earth (Rev. 13:11), that is, he will be a man of God from the body of Christ who has turned to evil, like Judas.

^[45] It is noteworthy that in this prophecy, two messengers are mentioned. The messenger whom the Son would send before him would be John the Baptizer, but the messenger whom the Father would send would be His Son.

^[46] If this is for those of Malachi’s time, then the first half of verse 15 would be something like this: “But did He not make [of a man and a woman] one? And the rest of the Spirit was His. And why one? He was seeking a godly seed.”

^[47] These are not their real names.

^[48] For more, see Part 5 of The Jerusalem Council at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[49] Fragments from a few men suggest that such groups did survive. See Book 6 of The Iron Kingdom series, Montanus: Prophet to an Apostate Body of Christ, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[50] See George Clarence Clark: Pioneer of the Faith is available for reading at PioneerTract.com.

^[51] Instead of going to the priest as Jesus commanded, one of the ten lepers he healed returned to thank Jesus, and Jesus was pleased with him for doing that (Lk. 17:12–19)! This was a clue that Jesus was living a kind of life beyond mere obedience to the law; however, at the time, none of his followers perceived it, nor could they have.

^[52] Paul’s unnamed “thorn in the flesh”, which he prayed repeatedly for God to take away (2Cor. 12:7–8), may have been his own circumcision, so that he could be an example to the Gentiles of what he taught them: “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing” (1Cor. 7:19).

^[53] The Greek word is often translated as Devil. It is the equivalent of the Hebrew word for Satan. Both words mean “Accuser” or “Slanderer”. See also footnote 7.

^[54] See footnote 11.

^[55] In the King James Version, the Hebrew word is translated as “Lucifer”. Modern versions translate it as “morning star”, “shining one”, “day star”, etc., comparing this mysterious being to the sun bringing light to the earth.

^[56] We do not know what rabbis taught about Satan before the Son of God came, for the earliest collection of rabbinical teachings is from the late third century AD. Some Apocryphal books, purportedly written before the time of Jesus, do refer to Satan, or “the Accuser”, as evil (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon 2:24; The Ascension of Isaiah 2:2; 2Book of Enoch 18:3), but they are corrupt documents. There are two sources which reflect Jewish thought from about the time of Jesus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the writings of Josephus, and neither of them speaks of Satan as evil. See “Jewish Teaching about Satan before Jesus” in the Appendix.

^[57] For more on this issue, see my book, Suffering and the Saints, available for reading or download at www.GoingtoJesus.com.

^[58] Job’s sufferings were many and extreme. Besides the boils that are often spoken of, Satan afflicted Job for months with horrific ailments, both physical and mental. The tormenting role that Job’s three friends played suggests that even they were inspired by Satan, not by compassion, to come to Job.

^[59] God spoke these words to Job’s friends before Job’s sufferings were completely ended (Job 42:7–10), but after He had finished His lengthy address to Job. I use them here to help show how utterly hopeless and helpless God was making Job feel at this point.

^[60] That is, “Who am I?”

^[61] This kind of surrender is what God demands in the New Testament, with the result of a repentant soul becoming no longer merely human, but a new kind of creature, one with a human body but with God’s kind of life in it.

^[62] See Luke 22:31, where Satan had asked God for permission to sift Jesus’ disciples.

^[63] As is suggested in Isaiah 43:3–4.

^[64] Cf. Ps. 104:26.

^[65] This kind of hatred is not malicious; it means only to prefer someone else (cf. Mal. 1:2–3; Rom. 9:13).

^[66] Satan’s suggestion to Eve, that God had self-serving motives, was false. However, he may have believed he was telling the truth. Would Satan have seen any wrong in suggesting that God was self-serving if that is how he himself was and he thought that he and God were alike?

^[67] The law required an offering from each person numbered (Ex. 30:11–16). So, David may have been numbering Israel for the money. Whatever his motive, David later confessed that he had committed a great sin (2Sam. 24:10).

^[68] Hebrew: סוּת, meaning to incite, allure, or instigate.

^[69] Satan would not have seen any wrong in Balaam using his prophetic gift to gain money and prestige. And since God would not have confided in Satan as to His reason for wanting Balaam dead, Satan may have assumed that God wanted Balaam dead for entering Balak’s employ, using God’s gift to him in the service of Balak, who wanted to harm the people God had chosen for Himself.

^[70] Jesus was no longer talking merely to Judas, for Satan had just taken possession of his body (Jn. 13:27a).

^[71] Both the adulterer and adulteress were condemned to death by the law. We do not know why these hypocrites did not arrest the man with the woman, for if they caught her “in the very act”, there must have been a man involved.

^[72] The phrase is from Ephesians 2:15, where the “two” are two groups of people, the Jews and the Gentiles. I borrowed Paul’s phrase here to describe the “new man” who was created by the blending of God’s Son with Mary’s.

^[73] Thanks to Willie Mae Walker, one of my mothers in Christ, for this phrase.

^[74] The earliest stories found in Genesis pre-dated Gentile cultures. Knowing the stories, Gentiles polluted them with their imaginations. Babylonians produced several versions of the Flood story, most notably, the one found in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

^[75] Such myths were based on the true story found in Genesis 6:1–4, concerning heavenly beings who lusted after beautiful women on earth (cf. Jude 1:6–7). Hercules and Achilles are two of many examples. Hercules was believed to have been fathered by the supreme god, Zeus, with an earthly female, Alcmene. Achilles, on the other hand, had an earthly father but a goddess mother, Thetis. Gentiles also believed that a few humans, by virtue of extraordinary deeds or gifts, were taken away to be numbered among the gods. For instance, Zeus was said to have elevated Ganymede to become a god because the youth was so handsome that Zeus wanted him as a lover.

^[76] Or, “a son of the gods”.

^[77] Hebrew: לְבַר־אֱלָהִֽין

^[78] The Koran insists that it is supremely disrespectful of God to say that He begot a son: “Christ Jesus the son of Mary was (no more than) a Messenger of Allah. . . . Allah is one Allah: (far Exalted is He) above having a son” (4:171). “Praise be to Allah who begets no son, and has no partner in His dominion” (17:111). “No son did Allah beget, nor is there any god along with Him” (23:91). Hafiz Abdullah Jusef Ali, trans., The Holy Qur’an (ware, UK: Wordsworth Ltd., May 2000).

^[79] The plural “sons of God” is applied to humans in Hosea 1:10, but that was a prophecy of God’s New Testament people, who were not yet in existence. The phrase “sons of God” typically referred to heavenly beings.

^[80] Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers Inc., June 1992), 126.

^[81] Mary’s son was an exceptionally good child and young man (Lk. 2:40–52), but whether or not he was sinless prior to God’s Son blending with him is irrelevant. Whatever sins are on someone’s record before being born again, as Jesus was, are erased when he receives the Spirit and he becomes a new creature, blameless before God.

^[82] Literally, Psalm 8:5 says that man was created “a little lower than the gods”. I assume that “the gods” refers to all the heavenly beings God created, including Satan, the “anointed cherub”.

^[83] The word “the” is absent here and in verse 6. Satan may have only been saying, “since you are a son of God.”

^[84] Unless Satan expected the Messiah to have super-human knowledge, it may have surprised him that Jesus knew his name.

^[85] It is possible, of course, that the Son also understood this. However, the Son went through a learning process after taking on a human body (Jn. 5:20; Heb. 5:8), and we are not told when the Son learned what.

^[86] The Hebrew word translated here as “wise” implies a worldly kind of wisdom. It could be translated, “successful”. Satan thought that the wisdom to be successful in this world was God’s kind of wisdom and that those who possessed it, as he did (cf. Ezek. 28), were like God. That is what tempted Eve. Satan thought that he himself was like God, and he expected the wisdom he had to bring him great success in the future (cf. Isa. 14:13–14).

^[87] Jesus faced a similar temptation while on the cross. There, everything in his flesh was screaming for relief from the awful pain when the chief priests, scribes, and elders (Satan’s sons) promised to believe in him if he would do the miraculous and come down from the cross (Mt. 27:41–42; Mk. 15:31–32).

^[88] The prophets also said that the Messiah would rule very harshly (Ps. 2:8–9; cf. Rev. 19:11–15), which was just the sort of ruler that would suit Satan.

^[89] http://thebriefing.com.au/2013/05/crucifixion-historicity/. Accessed July 22, 2024.

^[90] The kingdom of God is “righteousness and peace and joy in the holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). Jesus was telling his disciples that they needed the Spirit and that they needed to obey it.

^[91] The fact that the “prince of Persia” opposed Daniel’s visitor would not have revealed to anyone that the prince was evil. Jacob wrestled with an angel all night to prevent the angel from going where he wanted to go (Gen. 32:24–29), but no one considered Jacob evil for doing so.

^[92] This is similar to how the glorified Jesus is described in Revelation 1:14–15.

^[93] The Greeks under Alexander the Great would later come and conquer the Persian Empire.

^[94] Daniel, a Jew, was within the territory of Persia, and the prince of Persia would not allow the heavenly messenger to enter his territory to visit a Jew. Then, Michael, prince of the Jewish nation, intervened, insisting that God’s messenger had authority to come to Daniel, even in that prince’s territory.

^[95] Conflicts arise among the nations within Satan’s well-organized kingdom because mankind is rebellious and self-willed. Humans do not by nature submit to any authority, be it good or evil.

^[96] There are dukes and bishops, with archdukes and archbishops over them. Just so, there are angels with archangels over them. Moreover, rulers in a group have authority over all groups below them. An archangel rules over humans and animals as well as other angels in their domain. Likewise, high-ranking humans rule over animals and plants as well as other humans. It is never the other way around. Even the highest of animals do not rule over the lowest of men, and even the highest of humans do not rule over the lowest of angels (cf. Heb. 2:9).

^[97] A stater was exactly enough to pay the temple tax for both Jesus and Peter.

^[98] Some examples: Abraham bowed before angels and before some Canaanites (Gen. 18:1–2; 23:7). Both the wicked prophet Balaam and righteous Joshua bowed before angels (Num. 22:31; Josh. 5:14). Jacob and his family bowed before Esau (Gen. 33:1–7). Ruth bowed before Boaz (Ruth 2:10). David bowed before both King Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan (1Sam. 20:41; 24:8). Mephibosheth (2Sam. 9:6–8), Joab (2Sam. 14:21–22), Absalom (2Sam. 14:33), Ahimaaz (2Sam. 18:28), and Araunah (2Sam. 24:20) bowed before David. Bathsheba also bowed to David “and did reverence” (1Kgs. 1:16, 31), and Solomon showed respect to her by bowing to her (1Kgs. 2:19). Nathan, the great prophet, bowed to Solomon (1Kgs. 1:23), as did Solomon’s traitorous brother Adonijah (1Kgs. 1:53).

^[99] Agag was a famous king of the Amalekites (1Sam. 15:8).

^[100] The Amalekites were cruel and cowardly people. Every time Amalekites appear in a biblical story, they are seen abusing defenseless people (e.g., 1Sam. 30:11–13).

^[101] In that case, Psalm 109:6 would have been a prayer of the Son for any prosecutor, not just Satan. See the discussion in Chapter 6 under Tares in Heaven: Satan and the Hidden Son.

^[102] With the exception of Judas. He truly believed that Jesus was the Messiah.

^[103] With this, Jesus was also condemning Satan’s angels as evil, with the exception of the archangel Michael and his angels, of course.

^[104] God’s purpose was indeed served by Jesus’ death, but not as Satan and wicked men supposed.

^[105] A good source of information on this topic is Arjan Zuiderhoek’s The Politics of Munificence in the Roman World: Citizens, Elites and Benefactors in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Sandy Grant, “Crucifixion History”, The Briefing, May 24, 2013, http://thebriefing.com.au/2013/05/crucifixion-historicity/.

^[106] Note that Jesus did not claim power over the earth only, which Satan had offered him, but power over heaven as well, which Satan expected for himself.

^[107] For many of the biblical names for the Son of God, see the Appendix.

^[108] Gehenna refers to the Lake of Fire, the place of eternal torment for the wicked. See What the Bible Really Says about HELL at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[109] This was probably based on a misapplication of Exodus 16:29b: “Let every man remain in his tent. Let no one leave his place on the seventh day.”

^[110] Jesus called those men Satan’s sons, but Satan was contemptuous of even the best of men. He did not claim them as his sons, and they did not claim Satan as their father (cf. Jn. 8:41). Nor did Satan always agree with those men. They and Satan had hearts that were alike in evil, though none of them saw it; that is what made them Satan’s sons.

^[111] One other time, Satan wanted a human body, that of Moses (Jude 1:9), but we are not told why.

^[112] What those thirty pieces of silver would be worth in modern currency is unknown and greatly debated.

^[113] In an odd twist, Judas was damned after he confessed to knowing Jesus, while Peter was saved after he denied knowing him. It was a matter of the heart.

^[114] Jesus used a word for love (ἀγαπάω) that implied, in this case, steadfast devotion. Peter responded with a word (φιλέω) that meant only the love of a friend.

^[115] In the Bible, the earth was made dark every time God personally came near it (e.g., Gen. 15:12–18; Dt. 5:2, 23).

^[116] For more on how slander works, see my book, Slander, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[117] For more on this, see my book, The Sound of the Spirit, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[118] The Spirit is the blood of Christ. It was by the power of the Spirit that Christ purified heaven. For more, see the gospel tract, “The Blood of Christ”, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[119] Aaron’s sons had to be consecrated with Aaron because someone would have to take over as high priest when he died, but Jesus was made a high priest forever “by the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16).

^[120] For more, see my book, The Jerusalem Council, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[121] When the Spirit re-creates humans, it makes them witnesses to the Son (Jn. 15:26–27; Acts 5:32), but human witnesses pass away. The Spirit is the only witness that is available to every generation.

^[122] This epitaph was found on the tomb of Agreophon, an ancient Roman nobleman. Among his laudable qualities was this: “Ever since he was a boy . . . , Agreophon has shown his love of honor [emphasis mine]” (Zuiderhoek, Politics of Munificence, 124–125). The same book (p. 126) tells of a “decree of the council and people of Kyme . . . in honor of the benefactor L. Vaccius Labeo that was set up somewhere between 2 BC and AD 14: ‘Labeo, who is worthy of all honors, should further be praised for his dignified way of life, his love of fame [emphasis mine], and his attitude of liberality towards the city, and he should be held in the highest esteem and be most highly appreciated.’ ” Arjan Zuiderhoek, The Politics of Munificence in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 124–125.

^[123] Given the choice between a long life without fame and a short life with everlasting fame, Achilles chose to die young (Homer, The Iliad, 9.410–416). Centuries after Homer, the same sentiment was expressed by the philosopher Heracleitus: “The best men choose one thing rather than all else: everlasting fame among mortal men.” Kathleen Freeman, trans., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 26.

^[124] Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001) chap. 28.

^[125] The last half of this verse is from the UBS Greek text and is included in most translations of the New Testament.

^[126] This assumes that in the Final Judgment, God will receive into His kingdom those who deny the existence of both the Father and the Son, but the apostle John casts some doubt on that assumption (1Jn. 2:22b).

^[127] See footnote 125.

^[128] H. E. Dana and Julius Mantey, A Manual of Greek Grammar of the Greek New Testament (Toronto: The MacMillan Company, 1955), p. 100.

^[129] It may be that Satan still hopes to receive the promotion he desired. In the darkness of Satan’s cursed soul, it is possible that he sees his expulsion from heaven and Jesus’ glorification only as a great test, worthy of the one who will be exalted to the highest place available in creation. If he does think that way, then he is still striving to please God, as he thinks God is, just as his sons do.

^[130] The Council of Nicea was convened and presided over by the Roman Emperor Constantine, and it condemned the teaching that the Father and the Son were different persons.

^[131] Jesus also asked God to share His life with us, and on the day of Pentecost, God did. Peter said that Jesus “having received from the Father the promise of the holy Spirit, has shed forth this which you now see and hear” (Acts 2:33).

^[132] This Greek word “one” is not personal. Jesus was not praying for the disciples to be one person, but one in spirit, just as he and the Father were one.

^[133] When John was taken into heaven, he heard even God’s throne and altar speak (Rev. 16:17; 19:5; cf. 9:13; 16:7). Paul said “Death reigned from Adam until Moses” (Rom. 5:14) because in the service of God before the Spirit came, dead things were required, such as slaughtered animals, altars made of stone, fire, and circumcision of the flesh. Jesus brought heavenly life to men.

^[134] Since the term “god” may apply to all God’s people (Ps. 82:6; Jn. 10:34–36), believers are exhorted to humble themselves to one other (Phip. 2:3; 1Pet. 5:5).

^[135] The forms of baptism which come under the umbrella of “Christian baptism” are found nowhere in Scripture, except perhaps the baptism which Apollos practiced before Paul’s fellow-workers taught him better (Acts 18:24–26).

^[136] Paul also exhorted the saints to live within the order that God ordained for the home: “I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God” (1Cor. 11:3).

^[137] This condition is to be “tartarized”, and it is explained in Chapter 3 of my book, What the Bible Really Says about Hell, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[138] By “Institution”, I am referring specifically to the religious Institution known as Christianity, the Church, which is fragmented into thousands of sects, or denominations, which may themselves also be called institutions. There will be much more on the Christian Institution in Chapter 11.

^[139] See Book 4 of The Iron Kingdom series, The Synthesis, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[140] Constantine made the Roman Empire’s proposal of marriage to the body of Christ, but it was the Emperor Theodosius who consummated the marriage of apostate believers and the world. His law code forbade the practice of any religion other than the one that the Empire and those believers produced: Christianity (The Theodosian Code, 16.1.2; 16.5.1; 16.5.6; 16.10.4).

^[141] This officially took place in AD 325 at Nicea, in what is called The First Ecumenical Council.

^[142] “I’m Finding Glory All Along the Way” by Herbert Buffam (1879–1939).

^[143] The one exception to this was the living goat that bore the sins of the nation into the wilderness as part of the Day of Atonements ceremony (Lev. 16:21–22).

^[144] Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 131.

^[145] Marx, introduction to Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”.

^[146] Brutus, in Shakespear’s “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar”, Act 4, Scene 2.

^[147] This is fully explained in Book 4 of The Iron Kingdom Series, The Synthesis, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[148] In his sycophantic “Oration in Praise of Constantine”, Eusebius, the father of Church history, linked in an intimate way the rule of Rome with the rule of God. Eusebius’ euphoria over the Emperor Constantine’s exaltation of himself to a position equal with the apostles borders on the hysterical.

^[149] Desmond O’Grady, The Victory Of The Cross (London: Harper Collins Religious, 1992), 179.

^[150] For more on this subject, see Book 1 of The Iron Kingdom Series, Slander, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[151] Christianity uses the fact that Jesus himself was baptized in water and that Jewish saints of the time continued performing John’s baptism to justify water baptismal rituals, but see the gospel tract, “Baptism”, at GoingtoJesus.com. Also see the gospel tract, “Communion”, for a proper perspective on Jesus’ last supper. That supper is used by Christians to justify their various versions of a meal ceremony, often called the Eucharist.

^[152] There is no scripture which records Satan, by name, misstating a fact.

^[153] It was true, as the Serpent told Eve, that if she ate the forbidden fruit, her eyes would be opened and that she would be like God, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:5, 7a, 22). Even the Serpent’s lie that she would not die if she disobeyed God (Gen. 3:4) was in a way true, for neither she nor Adam dropped dead when they ate the fruit. We are not told how long Eve lived after she ate the fruit, but Adam died at the age of 930.

^[154] For this, see the gospel tract, “The Blood of Christ”, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[155] The Greek word (φιλέω) means to love as a friend. But James warned us that to be friends with the world is to be an enemy of God (Jas. 4:4).

^[156] Even without Satan’s beautiful body, which he abandoned to possess Judas, his great wisdom remains, along with his anointing to be god of this world.

^[157] Some demons within Satan’s realm do move people to commit base evils. To the proud higher-ups in Satan’s kingdom, however, those demons are contemptible (Cf. Howard Pittman, Placebo: What is the Church's Dope? (New Philadelphian Publishing House, 1999), 22), and ministers who are like Satan rail against the poor souls who are under their power.

^[158] “Bad” people sometimes live by forms that differ from the forms “good” people live by. For example, street gangs and terrorist organizations may have their own rules and their own strictly enforced codes of conduct.

^[159] Believers who are like Jesus are often also considered “bad” by the “good” people of the world.

^[160] Neither Jesus nor humans have changed. It is the Spirit’s witness, not man’s, that lets us know who has been born of God and partaken of His nature. See the book, The Sound of the Spirit, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[161] Jesus warned his detractors not to make judgments based on appearances (Jn. 7:24).

^[162] The Latin poet Tibullus (c. 54–19 BC) may have been the first to use this phrase. Tibullus, II.v.23.

^[163] For a complete treatment of the subject of a pastor’s wages, see the book, Tithes and Offerings, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[164] Paul mentioned the reality of different Jesuses being proclaimed in 2Corinthians 11:4.

^[165] See Book 4 of The Iron Kingdom series, The Synthesis, at GoingtoJesus.com.

^[166] The founding document of Christianity, the Nicene Creed of AD 325, states that the Son was “not made”.

^[167] Moses’ tabernacle was also a church, but that only prefigured the church that God revealed to David and that Solomon built in Jerusalem.

^[168] From instances in Acts of people receiving the Spirit without the mention of a sound, it cannot be argued that the sound of the Spirit was not present.

^[169] The baptism of the Spirit is when the Spirit is received. Pentecostals and Charismatics make a distinction between being baptized with the Spirit and receiving it, but that is patently false. There is no biblical example of a person receiving the Spirit and later being baptized with it.

^[170] Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 75.

^[171] Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, Edward Cook, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005).

^[172] E.g., Ibid., p. 55.