Thoughts on Moses

By Norman Grubb
(taken from a talk given in the 70’s)

"Moses was born during a darkened period for the growing nation of Israel. God continually does things that way to keep us from assessing things in temporal terms and being deluded into thinking the devil is a power. The devil is only an agent. God puts us into situations so that we may know how, as people of the Spirit, to operate as channels by which God brings spiritual deliverances in devilish situations."

Speaking of Moses' parents he says .... "The king's commandment was very tough, but this couple didn't fear the power of an earthly king's commandment. One of the great lessons we have to learn is that we fear because we believe evil to be evil and it controls us. This couple transferred their fear into believing that God would do what He said He would do. That's what faith always is, believing God instead of believing evil. Faith is relaxed and just goes along free of any law, asking, 'What is the next thing to do in this situation?'"

"That's what Moses had. Moses' dedication was to take the glory of a Cross, not the glory of a better human life. Hebrews 11 is perhaps the greatest presentation of a total commitment ever given. 'By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasure of sin for a season.' This was not replacing pleasure by pleasure as we call pleasure, and saying, 'Well, God will do me well in this life if I give up certain things.' Instead, it was, 'No, I can have the glory of being involved in all kinds of tough spots, and some of those tough spots are God's power and grace being manifested.' To suffer affliction with the people of God is my privilege, that I might have a tempestuous life under all kinds of tests and trials and pressures because I see how God comes through in forms of deliverance, that's my glory.... So you see, committal isn't committal to an easier life down here, it's committal to the glory of a harder life. Don't ask for an easy life. Ask for the glory of permanent pressures because permanent pressures are permanent springboards into faith."

'"Therefore, the next stage of the preparation of the Spirit in this man by whom God was to be great was to go through the negative process. That was to be the final form of self-operating. You see, it isn't God in the foreground through eternity, it is man in the foreground, God manifested by man. The Father is manifested through the Son and we are the sons, and for all eternity we are to function as real persons. We are free people and we will think, act, will, and act as real people. If we are going to be real persons God has to take considerable pains for us to find out how to function as right persons so that we may be perfectly free right persons. Then that right person isn't really you, it is really the One to whom you are joined, expressed by you, and appearing to be you. That is the paradox."

'What Moses went through was the end of that illusory separated relationship to God. Through the revelation of the burning bush, the truth dawned on him that the Living God speaks through human agencies, pictured in a common wilderness bush because God does speak by common people. This was when Moses graduated out of the school of faith and moved into the life of faith. The school of faith is where we are learning what the completion of that faith relationship is. This is that by which we receive, recognize, and experience who we really are, not who God is, because we have had a mistaken concept of ourselves. We have now moved into a properly focused consciousness when we discover that a real human is in a permanent inner union. This is not a union which destroys the personality but liberates it, so that he is conscious that the One who is really thinking, willing, and acting in him is the Living God in permanence. There is a consciousness of something which is indissoluble and nothing can ever change it or shadow it. The shadows are only in our imaginations or in our false sense of guilt. That is the real importance of the impartation of the consciousness of union. We are spirits so we live by consciousness. Consciousness is what we just know to be a fact about ourselves. You don't have to find a consciousness, you just ARE THAT and recognize it, if necessary."

"The second phase is when we are conscious that we are redeemed selves and it has been imparted to us to us because faith is knowledge. Faith is only faith when it becomes to us that to which it has committed itself. It produces a union with that to which we commit ourselves.... It is a consciousness that is perfectly natural and which you are perfectly at ease with. You never have to think about it again except to delight, if you like, or remind yourself of maybe in this world of pressures we may for a moment forget who we are. The point isn't that it has been a fresh revelation of God to us, it has been a fresh revelation of who we are, God in human form in an unchangeable permanency, living as we do by inner consciousness, all we ever have to do it recognize it when necessary, but largely we can just forget it. The point of being is to forget your consciousness and BE. You function on the basis of being a person. The point of life is to have what we may call a subconscious permanent realization which we forget because we are involved in that to which our lives are being given. To a large extent life is forgetting self and forgetting God because He is me and I am He. It is a permanent fact. When necessary I remember that it isn't really I, it is He expressing His mind through my mind and His will through my will, His emotions through my emotions. We are free people because we are living out the God relationship which is ours within."

"The first confirmation was that God revealed to him a strange name. This new name, the 'I AM,' is the name that Jesus took, 'Before Abraham was, I AM,' and then he tacked on to it, 'I AM the way, I AM the truth, I AM the Light.' 'I AM' really is a statement of being to which you tack any name, anything you like to it. I AM everything. This really is God saying, 'I AM the universal and you are now operating on the resources of the universal.' The universal 'I AM' is present tense because there is only one tense. There is no past or future for those are only human conveniences just the same as there is no here, or there, or space, or time. They are simply Einstein's tricks, conveniences. There never has been with God, only the eternal Now. I AM. I AM the sufficiency NOW. That's why God tells us not to take thought about tomorrow because there is no tomorrow. It's a phony, a joke, because when you get to tomorrow, it's today again. You never catch up. Don't fuss about a possibility, in actuality what happens tomorrow is a possibility, TODAY IS the actuality. Jesus said, 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' because this world is evil, it comes to us in evil form. You turn it to good. You can turn into good the evil which is in reach of you by saying, 'Oh, praise the Lord, you are handling that.' .... So live in today and be sure you don't see as evil what always in this evil world coming to us as evil. Be sure you turn it around and see it only as an expression in which God is showing you some new phase of His goodness. Through the Spirit of praise, you may do the works of God. That's the I AM. SO the I AM is the eternal now and he eternal total sufficiency because you can tack any name you like after I AM, just as Jesus did. We are now the I AM's. He is the Father I AM, we are the son I AM. This is the wonder of the liberation, 'I AM.' And, of course, I have found the secret now. My I AM is His I AM, expressed by my I AM. This is the hidden paradox."

"The purpose of this covenant (old) with a condition was to expose the self-sufficient self. One thing we need to watch against is all the psychology which speaks about improved self. There can't be an improved self. It is putting a cloak over what we really are. So now the first necessity of God's self-revelation to this nation who was to be His agency of revelation in the world must be law. He must plant on them the law of what they are not to be and spell it out in black and white so that everybody could know now, because where there is no law there is no knowledge of sin. Where there is law there is knowledge of sin. He has to change His approach and now it say, 'The Lord said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud that the people may hear when I speak with thee and believe thee forever.' He came to them in a thick cloud because fallen self cannot unite with God. If the fallen self thinks it isn't the fallen self, then it has to be buried. It has to find out it doesn't know God. That is what we can find with legalism, whether it is Christian legalism or of other religions. They can't know God because God is not legal. IF you know God you just are automatically what He is. If there is one iota of legalism, you don' t know God. There is NO legalism in God. It means you are not there, and therefore you cannot know Him. …. So God now had to change His form of self-revelation and had to manifest Himself in a thick cloud with thunder and lightning and burning of fires because it had to symbolize the fact that self reality is burning itself. So the law was, 'Don't let a person touch that mountain or they will be struck and killed.' That is because all that self can have is its self-effort. Self-effort is the fallen world, the fallen condition, which is the fire within. This was symbolized by the fact that they must not touch this mountain because this mountain was the mountain of God. Moses could live on the mountain and in the fire because he was part of it. We live in God when we are part of Him. We are one love. In John and Hebrews God is represented symbolically in terms of fire and light. Hebrews 12:9 says, 'Our God is a consuming fire,' and John 1 calls Him the 'Light of men.' Now the relationship is very interesting. Light is the product of fire. Fire consumes, light blesses, and yet the light is a product of the fire because there is a death in the fire to give the Light. The fire is consumed to let out the light. We see that in the sun. It is known that the sun is made of hydrogen atoms under intense heat. When they fuse they become heat atoms. In the fusion energy is released, that is light. So light comes out of a burning sun by a death. There is a death in the sun when it dies to its original consistency of the one for of atom to another form of atom and releases that which becomes light to us. So you see, fire only dies to itself and produces light for others. When fire remains in itself, it consumes itself. That is why God is a fire and a light."