|
By Norman Grubb
I have this last intercession to share;
and probably I can say it is the last, now being 95 years of age. Yet
this the mightiest, because it is the first streams of what is to
become a world flood. It was as simple in this beginnings as all
the others. Once again, it all stemmed from the originality of the
Spirit, totally unplanned and unpremeditated by me or any.
Having
handed on the general secretaryship of the WEC to younger man just
suited for it, I was now free to pour myself into my main absorption—the
sharing with my fellow believers of Paul’s (and my!) revelation of that
mystery once hidden “but now made manifest to his saints” (Col. 1:26).
That revelation is of a total present “Christ in you, the hope of glory”
(Col. 1:27). He is the perfection in us, and we in Him are His human
manifesters.
The
radicalness of what a number of us call our Total Truth Message to the
Whole Church in the Whole World is not in what Paul called his once
hidden, now manifest “mystery” (Col. 1:27). That tremendous reality is
becoming more commonly known by faith by us the redeemed. We do say
with Paul in his Galatians 2:20, “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
But where we have been held up, and I for long, is with the previous
statement of “I am crucified with Christ.”
What is
that “I” (or “me”)? That is the point. And what does it means when I
say “I am crucified”? For evidently the “I” continues in living
existence when Paul goes on to say, “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me” That is the “me” back again! So what was crucified? And in what
sense am I a “crucified me, who now comes back as a “resurrected me”? I
was not clear about that for a long time.
Romans Makes It
Clear.
But at last
I saw the truth about ourselves through Paul’s Roman letter. He
constantly underlines that our human “I” is nothing but a vessel that
contains, a branch producing its vine’s fruit, a servant (slave) working
only at the becken call of his owner, a wife reproducing the seed of her
husband, a temple indwelt by it god. Our human selves never were
self-operating or self-relying, but only express and reproduce the
products of our owner.
I saw that
my “I” that was crucified with Christ was an “I” that was expressing its
owner and operator. My “I” had been the expresser of that false “god of
this world” and “spirit of error,” which works in all the children of
disobedience (all of us while unsaved). So when Paul says that I am
crucified with Christ, he means that my “I” went into death and
resurrection with my Intercessor Savior, who was “made sin” as me on
Calvary (II Cor. 5:21). In His death I am freed forever from the false
spirit of error indweller; and by His resurrection I am now occupied,
when I have responding faith, by the Spirit of Truth as fixed, eternal,
total Indweller.
What is so
radical, and meets with so much questioning and opposition as even
heretical, is that my crucified “I” is the very same “I” that now
lives. The difference is not and never was in the human “I” container,
but wholly in the deity-spirit in possession of my “I.” But that is
hard to recognize and accept because of the false concept of my “I”
being independent and self-operating.
Really, we
have been run since the Fall by that false Satan-deity (Rev. 12:9).
That includes much of the lives of us newborn ones, until through sheer
desperation we have moved in by faith from our first saved and justified
relationship to our real reality of now being indwelt vessels by our
Christ-Indweller. Only by His body-death did He cast out forever the
false indweller. So it never was a change in our beautiful God-created
“I” with its great potential, but only an exchange of who is operating
our “I.”
We Have Never Been
Self-Operating.
This then
brings me to the problem of resistance from my fellow believers, who
have known themselves ads Satan-stained by their sins. While caught in
this lie of a seemingly self-acting self which they think can pray more,
resolve more, try more be better, etc., they are horrified and regard as
dangerous heresy the total giving up of their “duties” in
self-activity. But at last they must come to what Paul did by much
travail: the plain giving fact of the human self never having been
self-operating. And then they can realize that human self-relying
activity through past years actually has been the “error spirit,” with
his nature of self-for-self appearing as them.
When I am
at last exhausted enough by the failure of my self-effort, as was Paul
in Romans 7, I am ready and conditioned to recognize with great relief
and daring faith that I have “died” to this long accepted concept of
being self-operating. By faith I see that my false owner and
Satan-Sin-operator, with his nature of self-for-self, has been replaced
forever by my True Owner, with His nature of self-for-others.
As in
Romans 8:1-2, I can now accept myself with all my human faculties as
permanently operated by, expressing and manifesting my Christ-Indweller
in His self-for-others nature. I go free. Then delighted I find myself
a willing slave-servant to Him who gets busy giving me my intercessory
life’s opportunities of being Himself-for-others by me. All who will
receive can find and know that they too are Christ-I in place of Statan-I,
and never were the delusion of being just an I-I!
The Radical Core
In a real
sense, there is not a new word in what we are saying—not a sentence for
which we cannot present Bible authority and not a thing new to take to
any born-again believer. All we do is tell our fellow redeemed who they
really are and already are!
But what is
the radical spot which causes us to talk of “total truth”? Simply put,
it is that there is no such thing as independent self in the universe.
There is only One: “I am the Lord; and there is none else” (Isa.
45:18). All creation is derivative, operating by God’s creative life in
some basic form in it. And so all men, made in His image, naturally
(except as hindered by unbelief) express by their created selfhood Him,
their Creator. We humans have our wonderful being as selves “in Him”
(Act 17:28); but the nature that is being expressed is His, not ours (2
Peter 1:4). But because consciousness necessarily comes through the
fact and knowledge of opposites, the one utilizing the other to express
itself (like light “swallowing up” dark), so there came into existence
this false “god” with the opposite nature to the One Living God, and
having the deceived imagination that he is an independent self. That is
what sin is (I John 3:4).
This was
also that we might know the false opposite, since through the Fall we
have been deceived by Satan as if we were independent selves, having
received his spirit of error into ourselves to express his self-for-self
nature as us. The Last Adam—God’s own Son taking Flesh as us—removed
that spirit of error from us by His death and resurrection as us (2 Cor.
5:14, 21; Rom. 6P:19), so that the deceiving spirit is replaced by the
Spirit of Truth expressing His other-love nature as us.
The snag
and snare is that by Satan’s deceit we humans think we are independent
selves with a self-operating nature of our own. This has to be, so we
learn once for all that lying deceit of being independent. The reason
Romans 7 appears to be such a difficult chapter is that the final depth
of this revelation is found there.
Through
conditioning we have to become desperate enough to see through and
discard the one thing we humans cling to: that deceived idea that we
have a nature of our own and run our own lives. Only then can we settle
into the wonder of the old Satan-nature which he expressed as us (Rom.
6:21; 7:5) being now replaced forever by the glory of Christ, our “True
Vine” expressing His True Vine nature by us, the branches (Romans
6:22). Thus we move fixedly into the glory of the affirmation of Romans
8:2 and its spontaneous consequences in verse 14 through 16 and onward
through the whole chapter. But the Truth is
Resisted
So it is
the fact of our having no human nature, but self only being an expresser
of the deity –spirit nature (formerly the false one and now the true
one) and our claiming this to be biblically true, that makes our “total
truth” so radical. It leaves no more room for human self-activity,
except as expressions of a deity.
Here is
where we have to ask where are the preachers or the writers of spiritual
books who make this radical fact the fact, and thus give no more room
for exhortations to self-betterment? Actually, all the commands of the
Scripture have become automatic action: “Of course that is how we live,
because it is He fulfilling ‘the righteousness of the law!” Romans 8:4;
Ps. 119:97).
Why can few
pastors accept this truth in its reality? Because it exchanges pastoral
management of the flock for direct management by the Chief Shepard, and
the pastors leading the sheep to His direct leadership. Why will all
believers start by opposing and resenting this radical reality? It is
because we live under the delusion of being self-operating selves merely
helped by the Spirit, until that final delusion is exposed in Romans 7
and replaced in Romans 8.
How truly
that great George Muller, the father of all present-day faith movements,
once said, “There was a day on which I died!” And theirs is no other way
but that such a day comes in all our lives. But we fight and resist
until at last we “see” it.
Others Have Seen and
Said it
John in his
First Epistle repeated it over and over again. We walk in the light, as
He is in the light (1:7). We walk as He walked (2:6). We know as He
knows (2:27). We live holy lives, as He lived (3:7). We love as He
loves (4:16). We have a faith that becomes inner knowing as He has
(5:4-5), 18-20). And summed up, “As He is, so are we in this world”
(4:17), for the very same Spirit who caused Jesus to know and say who He
was (John 14:9) now causes us to know who we are (Rom. 8:11; John 16:7).
Inner truth
was always known through the centuries (read such a book as The Pilgrim
Church by E. H. Broadbent), but these true ones were consistently
martyred by the external church. They were intercessors for us and did
the dying. Now in our generation it is not physical martyrdom and
cutting off of heads for most of us, but plenty of cutting off of our
reputations as sound or sensible Christians. So we are left physically
free to go to the who Church in the whole world.
My Summit, My
Hope, Glory and Ostracism
My one hope
is that we who are linked in this co-knowing remain as structureless as
possible. Being joined to One Body only, the precious redeemed Body of
Christ, we have no need for membership, joining or official
subscribing. We know only one truth: Christ Himself now living His own
life in millions of bodies by the Spirit, until “we all come in the
unity of the faith,” in understanding as well as a present
Spirit-oneness, to that Perfect Man of Ephesians 4:13.
This last
intercession is glorious indeed, but it also includes its very present
dying that others may live. There is ostracism and opposition by many,
even of the precious people of God, who remain in this confusion of and
clinging to the false independent self. The Spirit has to make us ready
for that final and highly dangerous looking death, where it remains only
He as us.
That
unpredictable Wind “blows where it lists” in our newborn lives, as I can
plainly see in the marvelous unplanned events of just my own life. You
may also see where the Spirit has already gained intercessions by you in
your own experiences; and you will thus be alive to the glory of such
further intercessions, with their commission, cost and completion.
The
death-resurrection principle of intercession see John 12:24) as the
highest of our earthly callings is still known and entered into by only
a few of the redeemed members of the Body of Christ. Plainly enough,
though, Paul gave us his own experience in Romans 6-8. As he found so
painfully and with difficulty in his Romans 7 travail, the “death” of
that lie of our being independent selves comes to those of us who will
stop at nothing in going what he called that perfect way of Christ as
us.
But as we
move in by the bold choice of faith (as by the affirmation of Galatians
2:20), the Spirit will bring us that same light of revelation which Paul
had. Inwardly we will “see” our wonderful God-made human selves as
solely expressers of His Spirit of Truth in place of that false spirit
of error. And we will settle into our true God-ordained condition, as
out from us shall flow the river of the Spirit, as in John 7:37,38.
Nothing then can stop us from joining what Peter calls “the royal
priesthood” of intercessors with, as Paul said, “death working in us,
but life in you.”
Published by: Christ, Our
Life Ministries |
|
|
