Loving Like God

Some time back, I shared some thoughts about our being one in and by the Spirit. At that time I used a pond as a word picture of the point I was wanting to make, contrasting the intimacy that is possible when we are immersed together in the Spirit, “the pond,” with what we are able to experience while remaining on the shore, dry land. See Post from June 6, 2012, “The Pond”.

On that occasion my hope was to describe Spiritual intimacy in something closer to its ultimate expression or place in the New Jerusalem. Today, I want to address the matter of Spiritual intimacy in another place and with another word picture, a “Foxhole.” I am not speaking of a fox hole in the way that Jesus referred to it, but spiritual intimacy surrounded by warfare.

A pond suggests a tranquil place where the war is over, and a foxhole suggests the reality of the war in and around intimate spiritual relationship. On the one hand we are surrounded by the war around the foxhole, and on the other, we become more and more aware of the inner war going on inside of each another. In the foxhole of intimate relationship there is a war going on against our staying in that place of intimacy. The war gets more intense the deeper into the hole we go.

The only way for the intimacy of relationship to survive in such an environment is to know God’s kind of love, the kind that is good for enemies, both perceived and real. The lovers in a foxhole have to rest in the knowledge that they are secure in one another’s love. This requires great confidence in the Love of God to survive all that knowledge. Perhaps this is a good place to point out that:

God’s kind of love is not delusional.
He knows exactly who we are!

The intimacy we are talking about is not delusional. It is made possible and energized by a Love that is so great it covers a multitude of sins.

This post has to do with sharing the lessons of Life, (He is The Life.) especially with those who are in the foxhole of love with us. Perhaps this is what Paul was thinking about when he prayed “… that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:17-19

For a relationship to survive in a foxhole there must be a love that surpasses knowledge, in both a good and bad sense. This kind of love doesn’t come by teaching or even knowing in the carnal sense, but by revelation in the most Spiritual sense. Actually, it turns out that the most confined space in the flesh is the most infinitely spacious, in the Spirit.

“The Truth Hurts,” at least in the beginning. We need a love that can survive the hurt.

“No discipline seems good at the time…” Hebrews 12:11.

What is it that makes intimate conversation so difficult, even hurtful?

For one thing, it’s being known on a more intimate level, without my ‘coverings’ or ‘illusions.’  It is someone (other than the Lord) spiritually smelling me, when I have B.O. – Tasting me, when I am covered with sweat or worse – Seeing me, without my disguises.  It’s someone finally knowing me at a base level, not an illusionary level.  This kind of exposure  keeps people out of foxholes.  Not that we can go there with just anyone.

Another danger is that a hole is dark.  Raw emotions and passions arise.  And there’s no way of putting distance between you, except getting out of the hole entirely, in a sense  ‘gaining’ one’s life to only lose it.  This is why religion wants to keep people out of foxholes.  This is why religion abandons sex, even its spiritual equivalent, to the world.  Religion is in the fig leaf business – rather than being gender neutral, it concentrates on separating the genders.

In short there is warfare in and of the flesh surrounding the foxhole – surrounding the possibility of both spiritual relationship, and spiritual intimacy. This side of ultimate fulfillment, and complete oneness, (the oneness that Jesus prayed and died for, John 17:21) the line between the passion of the flesh and of the Spirit is a fine line.  This is a big part of the warfare down in the foxhole. This is the warfare between flesh and spirit, which must determine the line between the lust of the flesh, and the passion of The Christ at work in the parties to the conversation. It is impossible to win this war, except by the Grace of God.  Only by His Grace is it possible to stay in the foxhole long enough to become one spiritually, without any rise of the flesh to frustrate and hinder.

It is in our first exposure to the worst that is in each other that the truth is most hurtful. It is just here that we discover His love in us is sufficient to take us beyond that confusion – that hurt, and through it in unbroken intimacy.

“…  Afterwards it produces the peaceable fruit of righteousness,” Hebrews 12:11.

A pond is more heavenly than a foxhole – even more communal.  We may swim in the pond from time to time, but a foxhole is like a crucible where intimacy (like gold) is refined and tested.

“The LORD says, ‘Suppose you have run in a race with other men. And suppose they have worn you out. Then how would you be able to race against horses? Suppose you feel safe only in open country. Then how would you get along in the bushes near the Jordan River?” Jeremiah 12:5

A foxhole is not only a place to live together, also a place to die together. It is a burial place of sorts – a complete dying to self.  It is also the fertile ground out of which resurrection life is nurtured. With seeds of all kinds, something is accomplished in burial that cannot be accomplished anywhere else.

If that is so, then it remains that “surface relationships” do not bring forth life. About the best we can do on the surface is “news weather and sports.”  Though we can include all sorts of other ‘spiritual talk’ there, the surface is still too safe and sterile a place to bring us to the necessary depth where seed can be planted, and take root.

“The Disciples came to Him…” in private, Matthew 13:10-36

Love!

• By Jay Ferris, originally published December 2012

For more reading, see previous intimacy level post, “Motivations“

Money represents the keeping of this world. The keeping of this world ultimately represents the keeping of the central authority of this world. The central authority of this world has a beast as his agent. For those who are kept by this world, the 23rd Psalm is sung to the glory of the beast: The beast is my shepherd; I shall not want. . .

We have a history of putting the images of our worldly authorities on money. So it should come as no surprise that the name of a beast on us winds up as the final money of the world.

It is not always apparent when the Bible is talking about money, although money is the number one idol of man. What the Bible does talk openly and often about is the subject of idolatry, and does so almost exclusively using sexual images, analogies, and terminology. As a result, what has been calling itself “church” has not only missed the point about money, but has had a rather unhealthy and skewed view of sex.

The “church” has, in all too many cases, abandoned sex to the world, while at the same time embracing the world’s graven images–especially money. In effect, we have been taught that if we keep our noses clean with regard to sex, we can get away with just about every harlotry where the keeping of this world is concerned.

Most every time Eve is presented in the media, it is as a “sex kitten.” The Original Sin was not sex; it was idolatry! For too long, what’s calling itself “church” has implied—if not outright taught—that men and women should not desire one another sexually. Sex has been cast into outer darkness, only to be retrieved as a necessary evil for procreation.

So we have the spectacle of latter-day Pharisees, self-righteous in their vaunted avoidance of “sexy” thoughts, while mortgaged up to their ears in the keeping of this world. Lusting after monetary tithes for the support of bigger and better buildings and programs, latter-day Pharisees abandon the poor and needy to the kingdom of the beast.

The most substantial, most powerful, and most pervasive parable in the Bible—one that has been built into creation—is sex. The point of the parable is “Christ and the Church,” Ephesians 5:32. Until we get the point of this parable, not only are we left hung up on the plumbing, but we can’t seem to see the problem where spiritual prostitution is concerned.

What a bride does for love
a prostitute does for money.

Parables are stories from life illustrating truths about God or spiritual truth, perhaps not so easily understood without the word picture the parable provides. The way I am using the word “parable” here, it is God who is telling the story, not with spoken or written words, but with His material creation designed in such a way as to illustrate truth about the spiritual creation that is His ultimate intention.

With this in view, we understand what is written in Romans 1:20 to be saying that “… the things that are made… – the “things” – of the original creation are His parable illustrating otherwise invisible truth about God and His ultimate intention or purpose. In this sense then, Adam was made male and female to illustrate the otherwise invisible truth about God, that God is relational. Male and female, taken together are a parable of spiritual relationship. This is the “sexual parable.”

Gold is a parable of provision. Gold is a vehicle of provision, one that in the material creation serves as a medium of exchange. At the same time, gold illustrates the ultimate medium of exchange, the supply of The Spirit of God. This is our ultimate provision. In its highest revelation, it is the provision of God’s love, and not the provision in or of a market place. The first market place that has to go is the one between our ears that is constantly calculating “what’s in it for me?” When our revelation of The Love of God is great enough, the “what’s in it for me” question goes away, and without further calculation, we become the provision and expression of that love to and for others. (“It is not as though I have already attained all this…” only that this is the understanding that my own study and experience has found to date.) This is the provisional truth or exchange truth that the parable of gold illustrates. Actually it is a very strange and wonderful exchange.

The cross is God’s “foreign exchange window.”

Jesus, The Messiah is the teller. We can always find Him there. It is there that we exchange our fallen “tender” for the legal tender of God’s love. The legal tender of heaven is the Love of God.

Love is the only legal tender in
In The Kingdom of heaven.

This point is stressed, not because of a preoccupation with sex or even gold, but in order to get the proper focus on money and what that focus implies in terms of our relationship with God. God has used sexual terminology in His description of idolatry, not to degrade sex, but rather to reveal its importance is a parable that illustrates the fullness of the spiritual relationship God offers us with Himself.

• This post is excerpted from Jay Ferris’ book, For Love or Money, currently out of print. If you would like a Word file of the book, contact Pamela.

Within a couple of days of 9/11, I got the following revelation:

Intimacy in relationship has driven me to consider the revelation of the Scripture at a depth I would never have considered. Certainly it has brought me to a place of discovering what should have been obvious all along and to all who believe. And that is:

Before there can be intimacy, there must be circumcision.

God is after intimacy. This has been his purpose from the beginning. The early church didn’t fully understand, and Jesus couldn’t tell them while He was still in the flesh. He said that they were not ready to hear it yet. Their Jewish roots made it too difficult to believe. It remained for Paul to receive the revelation of Christ IN him, and the New Testament makes very clear what a very difficult time those from the Jewish culture had with understanding and receiving what Paul had been commissioned to say, “first to the Jew, and then to the Gentile,” Romans 1:16.

What is or, what was it, that made the intimacy that God was after, so difficult to attain? It was the flesh:

“Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh;” Hebrews 10:19, 20.

The problem or barrier or hindrance was flesh, even His flesh, certainly our flesh. Galatians 5:24: “And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” Colossians 2:10-15: “And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power: In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.  And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses; Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

I should include the elaboration of Ephesians 2:13-19: “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God;”

This just to point out, that God didn’t just provide a knothole through the veil; He “broke it down;” He “took it out of the way;” He “abolished” it; He nailed it to the cross! It’s gone. He left no room for the flesh to do anything. Everything that would be done from now on would be done by His Son in the hearts of those who received Him.

God’s Son was the last Adam. There are no more, and there haven’t been since Jesus. They were all wiped out at the cross, past present and future. Christ in us the hope of Glory is all that remains for both Jew and Gentile. In Him, and He in us everything we used to be has been done away; Jew, Gentile, male, female, slave, free. It’s all gone, because He is the point of it all. And we still don’t get it.

We are still peeking through a knothole.

It was in the furnace of relationship that I came to understand:

The crucifixion of Christ is the circumcision of God.

That was very important. The word that I got as I lay awake in my bed thinking about all of this was:

“HOLOCAUST.”

According to Webster: “a whole burnt offering,… burnt whole,….An offering the whole of which is burned; burnt offering…great or total destruction of life, especially by fire.”  1 Peter 3:18: “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:”

Speaking of the Passover: “And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire; his head with his legs, and the purtenance thereof. And ye shall let nothing of it remain unil the morning; and that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn with fire,” Exodus 12:8-10.

“Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth,” 1 Corinthians 5:7, 8

I cite these last two passages to make the point that another way of looking at the cross is that it is the fire of God on His own burnt offering. The Passover commanded in Exodus is only a shadow, the “reality is found in Christ.” But the description of the shadow gives us a rough idea of what was going on at the cross. Christ is our Passover. The “HOLOCAUST” is what happened to him.

Why did it have to happen?

It had to happen because God was after intimacy, and to do that there had to be a cutting off of the flesh. Paul said to the Corinthians, “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” 1 Corinthians 2:2. There is a new morning coming, and by that morning, all that is flesh shall be utterly consumed as by fire.

I would like to paraphrase for present purposes: “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him circumcised.”

Paul, a Jew, was the one who God chose to bring this message, and the price he paid was enormous.  What I think I saw this morning is that the more recent holocaust, also very Jewish, was for the purpose of making the same point. One has to wonder in our own day how many more have to die to make the point.

If God is the blessed controller of all things then:

Why?

The answer is intimacy, and there is no other way except Jesus, and Him circumcised. The holocaust then is a sign, a very costly sign, but then so was the cross, and so was the suffering of Paul. The sign is first for the Jew, the religious, and then for the Gentile, the clueless, (Ninevah) whose crime was that they didn’t know their left hand from their right, Jonah 4:10. In each case, God used those who had the sign of outer circumcision already in their body. Was it a sign of the failure of the Jews? The answer lies in asking a couple of other questions. Was it a sign of the failure of Jesus? Was it a sign of the failure of Paul? Clearly the answer is. No! In Jesus’ and Paul’s case it was more a sign of God’s love. Is that too big a sacrifice to even consider in the most recent instance? Perhaps only because we haven’t yet grasped what God is really after in those who are His.

The real point was another circumcision – a circumcision of the heart – a cutting off of the old man completely. I should also note that even among the latter day Gentiles, Germany was particularly uncircumcised even in the flesh. Where could the point be better made for the Church than in Germany, the home of Luther?

In fact where and when could the point be better made to the Church, as it presently exists and is understood by the world, then in Europe, where Germany, the seat of Protestantism and Italy, the seat of Catholicism, were allied together against the Lord, and against his anointed. We have got to get beyond Catholicism and Protestantism where Luther left us. A continued preoccupation with externals is just not going to do it.

If I have seen it right, then the circumcision message is very important,
and it is for now.

The cross, alone was not enough to explain what God was really after in us. It remained for Paul to experience and explain it. Only someone who knew the law as he did could have any hope of understanding and explaining it to the Jews. It was not Peter who had the last word on the gospel, it was Paul who got to say, “If anyone comes to you with any other gospel than the one I preached to you let him be accursed.”

Peter could not say that about his gospel, because the only true gospel was yet incomplete until Paul saw it and explained it. Peter, however, did get the last word, and he used his last word to affirm what Paul had already written.  At least, that’s the way God put it together for us on whom the end of the age has come.

The question is, “Is the Holocaust enough to finally get through to the Church that God is not interested in outer circumcision, not interested in religion, but only in the reality of His Son.” If we are ever going to understand His love, we are going to have to love as he loved us. You can’t do that alone, and if we only do it vertically in relationship to God, we are kidding ourselves. It is quite obvious that we are no longer kidding the Ninevites. You can identify a Jew by outer circumcision. You can identify a Christian by inner circumcision.

“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love by our love,
and they’ll know that we are Christians by our love.”

Where the business of religion is concerned, the real money is to be made by concentrating on the outer things. If the Holocaust is not enough to make the point, what is it going to take?

We could repent now and avoid the rush.
God help us.

Love!

• By Jay Ferris, originally posted Dec 2012