Loving Like God

In response to my last post, someone commented: “Absolutely fabulous! Speaks to me on multiple levels :)”

For me, “many levels” were part of the inspiration for that post as well.  Encouraged by this friend’s comment, I would like to touch on a few of them.

Perhaps the most fundamental level is the one touched on in my Christmas post: “What does God take for Pain?”

”But when the set time had fully come,
God sent his Son,
born of a woman,
born under the law,”
Galatians 4:4

It’s worth reading the full context! But for now perhaps it is enough to focus on the “set time that had fully come.”  This refers to a time when the object of God’s affection was under the law, and miserably unable to keep the law, making not only herself miserable, but God miserable as well.

While God’s love for us is so GREAT he could have kept on waiting, could have kept on going in His pain and ours, but enough time had gone by to make a point. Enough time had gone by to have the woman He had been waiting for – the desolate woman of Isaiah 54:1. This is the woman, who Paul goes on to explain is our mother.  This is the woman with whom God was intimate even in her desolation.  He took her to put her out of her misery.  He saw something that none of us had ever seen nor could ever have seen that one day she would be the wonder woman of heaven.

She was the most miserable of the Jews of her day.  She is all of us today.  She is you.  She is me.  She was the source of His pain, and he took her in her pain, and in His pain so that one day she might be the surpassing glory of the apple of His eye!

As for what it took to get rid of her pain, it took even more pain on God’s part. He sent his own Son into the slaughter of the innocents, a slaughter that was directed toward His very own son. Jesus, as John Eldridge has so beautifully pointed out in his book, Beautiful Outlaw, was a “wanted man” in every sense of the phrase, even before he arrived here on earth.

The worst of the pain, however would have to wait for the climax of the cross to be fully realized. This is the pain that He took to have you and me. This is the pain that he recalls for us in his New, only, and everlasting Commandment:

“As I have loved you, so ought you to love one another.”

Key word for present purposes, “As.”  We wants us to take one another for pain in the same way that He did – redemptively!  Of course that’s not going to happen if we remain clueless about how He has first loved us.

Perhaps that’s enough of a “level” for now.

Love!

• By Jay Ferris, originally published December, 2012.

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.