Yes I Am 9 - The Only Two Natures

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 9

THE ONLY TWO NATURES

Now after this Biblical revelation of what we humans are -containers and agents - we find the Bible distinctly says that we have no nature of our own but express the nature of the particular deity indwelling us. On the one hand, Paul says in Ephesians 2 that while we were in our unredeemed condition, dead in trespasses and sins, we "walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience... and were by nature children of wrath" - not some nature of our own but of our satanic parent, his children in his wrath nature. Then on the other hand, regarding the redeemed, Peter tells us that by receiving "exceeding great and precious promises" we become "partakers of the divine nature." Quite obviously then, it’s not some human nature, but God expressing His nature by us. Here are the two deity natures expressed in our humanity.

This could not be more explicit than it is in the Biblical account about the Garden of Eden. There we are told life and death were symbolized by the eating of the fruit of the trees. The Bible tells us that if Adam and Eve had eaten of the right tree they would have received eternal life. Yet we know that eternal life is not in a fruit but in a Person - in Him who said, "I am the life." Therefore, if eating the right fruit means that into our first parents would have come the person who is eternal life, eating of the wrong fruit means that the false deity, the spirit of error, entered in and they became his dwelling place.

Now here is the point, the nitty gritty of the reality. All we redeemed humans recognize, when our eyes have been opened by grace, that we were sinners, were under the power of Satan, did his works, were his children. But do we realize that we actually were he, in the sense that humans are always manifesting the deity who expresses himself by us? Did any of us know, while unsaved, that we were Satan walking about in our human forms, or that the redeemed are Christ walking about in their human forms? We should know it now, for we are plainly told this.

I remember the surprise when I first read in 1 John 4:4, "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." I knew that "He in me" was the Holy Spirit, but I suddenly woke up to the fact that there was equally "he in the world" in fallen humans, just as much as the Holy Spirit is in us when redeemed. And two verses later John is saying, "Hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error." That began to open my eyes, and I began to relate it to the symbol of the fruit of the garden.

Then I became alerted to Jesus’ words as He confronted those opposing Him, as recorded in John 8:38-44. "I speak what I have seen with My Father: and you do what you have seen with your father," stated Jesus. As religious Jews they resented that, and indignantly responded, "We’re not born of fornication. We have one Father, God." Jesus answered, "if God were your Father, you would love Me." Then He broke the truth wide open and declared outright, "You are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do." When I read that, my eyes were opened to the second phrase as well as the first. The first says that we humans - all of us who have not yet become children of God by faith in Jesus Christ have Satan, not God, as our father. But the second phrase especially struck me: ".... the lusts of your father you will do." Not that we are doing our own lusts, but the lusts of our father. Then all we are doing as humans is not a product of some supposed human fallen nature, but actually Satan himself expressing his own lusting nature by us! All we are, therefore, is merely the outer expression of this spirit of error, this god of this world, living his own Satan-form of life by our humanity. That was revolutionary. I had always thought I was fulfilling my own natural desires; but not so, because we have no nature of our own. We have all been fulfilling the lusts of the god of self-centeredness, and what we think are just our sins are ours only in the sense that we are joined to Satan as branch to false vine, expressing his thoughts and deeds. So when the Bible says "All have sinned," the real inner truth is that the sinner is Satan, and we in a secondary sense are participating in his sinning.

I remember the surprise when I first read in 1 John 4:4, "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." I knew that "He in me" was the Holy Spirit, but I suddenly woke up to the fact that there was equally "he in the world" in fallen humans

This is the major area in which sin - or Satan, as the Scripture has said - has deceived us; and deceit means making us think that we are what we are not. Satan has played his greatest trick on us in making us think that life is "doing our own thing" - our own self-expression. Who of us in the wide world would ever suspect that we were not just "ourselves" in our self-activity but Satan operating in our form? Of course, Satan himself is the fundamentally deceived one, for he vainly imagines that he made himself independent when he rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven. He imagines himself to be Mr. Independent Self, though actually he is still eternally and totally dependent on his Creator, and doing His will - as we see so clearly in the history of Job.

 
 the spirit of error, the spirit of self-centeredness, can look highly respectable.*


It is this same false concept of independence with which Satan has infected the human race. We just naturally think we are independent and doing our own thing. Independence is the huge lie swallowed by fallen, blinded, deceived humanity, and the great delusion from which we have to be finally and fully delivered before we can be our true selves. That is what Paul so perfectly explores and aims to deliver us from in Romans, chapters 6 to 8. That is the winning of the final battle over the delusion of the Fall. Our whole life has been built on the false assumption that we are just our own responsible selves, and when changes are needed they are needed in us. We can see it in our false self-righteousness, in our fallen days, when we imagined that we ourselves were living our own lives of good and evil (which we thought mainly good, with a few evil touches). Actually, all our "good" was evil, for it was a product of the spirit of independent self, the spirit of error. Self-effort good is no better than self-effort evil, being only Satan’s self-effort produced by us. It is one thing to regard ourselves as humans merely influenced by Satan; but quite another matter to realize that it is actually he just being himself and living his own quality of life by me... and I merely his vessel, branch, slave, temple. I am Satan in my human form.

Our whole life has been built on the false assumption that we are just our own responsible selves, and when changes are needed they are needed in us.
One reason why the natural man cannot easily accept this fact is that he regards Satan’s activity to be mainly the grosser evils like murder, theft, etc. But when our inner eyes are opened, we fully see that the spirit of error, the spirit of self-centeredness, can look highly respectable. We recognize that the self-loving self is usually disguised to make a nice appearance. So, for us who are enlightened, it is not hard to see that fallen humans are Satan - Mr. Self-centeredness himself - in his physical form. It is a profound eye-opener to realize that all forms of our apparent self-activity - even if good, helpful, and beneficial to others - are expressions of our self-loving self and thus, in actual fact, expressions of that Satanic spirit of self-centeredness in us. Good deeds are merely a product of the "good" part of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Two other scriptures also brought this into focus for me. First was 2 Corinthians 4:4, which speaks of the lost as those "in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds"; so there he was within us, in our unbelieving condition. The second is 1 John 3:12, in which John exhorts us to love our brothers, and adds, "Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother." When I read that I asked myself, why are the words "of that wicked one" inserted? Why not just say, "Don’t be like wicked Cain who slew his brother"? Because it was not "wicked Cain" who was the murderer, it was "that wicked one" who Jesus has said was "a murderer from the beginning," and he murdered Abel by Cain’s hands. "The lusts of your father you will do."

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* No one was harmed in this picture. The man in the suit is from a bow tie advert,the bathroom is from a bathroom brochure,the door is from a lounge picture, the dead man is someone visiting an old murder scene and re enacting it, and the blood is drawn in by me.

Yes I Am 5 - The Necessity of The Negative

Yes I am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 5

THE NECESSITY OF THE NEGATIVE

The first necessity, then, in the coming into being of the human family in God’s own image, predestined to be His sons and co-heirs with His own Son, is that we know and understand what it is to be a person. A person must know how he functions as a person, and with what faculties and capacities, before he can take his place in the scheme of things and fulfill his appointed destiny. Hence the old Greek aphorism, "Know thyself."

So from the beginning, Adam and Eve were in a garden where all things were provided by their Father’s love; but until they were confronted with alternatives and had to make an independent choice, they were not yet self-conscious persons. (The nearest parallel we have is a newborn infant who knows nothing except his parents’ tender care.) Therefore, there had to be in the middle of the garden the two trees with the special instruction given concerning one of them: "Everything is yours; use freely. But don’t eat of this one tree."

But more than merely the existence of the forbidden tree, there was already the serpent (who was one of God’s creations), and we are told who he is: "That old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan." So God deliberately planned that man should be confronted by the author of evil in the midst of the garden in which all is called very good. This is our first evidence, which appears later all through Scripture and experience, that Satan, though the enemy, is in fact God’s convenient agent, always doing precisely what God determines he should do. That makes a great difference in our attitude toward and our handling of Satan, and of all the situations and people by whom he is operating; for we then start not negatively - looking at his lying, bluffing appearance as independent power - but positively, by always recognizing that he is merely God’s servant, unwittingly fulfilling God’s purposed will in his activities.

So here it is Satan, the false god of self-centeredness, put by God in the garden to be the tempter, who first awakens Eve to the consciousness of the total oppositeness between God and devil, between self-centered self-interest and God-centered other-interest. But the significant first fact is that by no other means than to be enticed to satisfy her own self-interest could Eve be awakened to her own self-potentials. Only when Satan said "Look, God is forbidding you to have something you would really like" was she awakened (and thus all humanity) to the reality of human appetites - with the fruit looking so good to eat, and she forbidden to have it. If she could have had it anyhow, like all other fruits, then she would not have recognized the power of physical appetites; but only when she could not have it, but was tempted to want it, did she suddenly see her physical drives. (The same with all that appears to our eyes as so attractive to possess.) She was awakened to a whole range of fascinating observations when she saw something pleasant to look at but which she must not have. And finally, the lying statement that God was withholding from Eve the knowledge of the meaning of life in its variety, awakened her dormant mind to its vast possibilities. She had discovered herself as a person with all the potentialities of personhood with which God had created her - all of such unlimited use as can only be suggested by what man in his fallen condition has discovered and developed. How much more surely awaits us when the sons of God operate in their full potential! It will be, as Paul says, like "life from the dead." Flesh, sight, mind are all marvelous gifts of God. Having been misused, as in "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," these gifts are restored to us in all the adventure and delight of their right use when we are back again as whole persons in Christ. But again we say, Only through the enticement to be self-loving selves could we know ourselves as selves. As Paul says, "O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God."

 We wrongly tend to label outer negatives, such as darkness, hardness, and hate, as evil; but they are not so in themselves.

Concerning this devil, Satan, who Jesus said was "the father of lies" and John said "sinned from the beginning," we are given two glimpses by prophetic revelation of who he is and why he is the enemy. In Isaiah 14, under the temporary symbol of the King of Babylon, this far greater person of angelic status is shown us in his determination to overthrow God Himself and take His place. In Ezekiel 28, when the prophet is speaking locally of the King of Tyrus, this Lucifer, "son of the morning," is shown in his downfall through love of his own beauty. "Lust of the eyes and pride of life" took him all the way to becoming the god of a kingdom of self-centeredness which should never have been in existence. He is that self for self which, we have seen, our God, who is the Self for others, cannot be. He is that light in reverse which Jesus spoke of when He said, "If the light which is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!" He is the one whose label is sin: for John says, "Sin is the transgression of the law," and Satan is the one who first deliberately defied the one law of the universe, our God who is other-love. And if our God of other-love is the light and life of the universe, His opposite, who is self-love, must be darkness and death. Yet he had to be, for nothing can come into existence which is not God’s determined will; and we are beginning to see that we can never be reliable sons of God in a world which can only be manifested by opposites unless we have been confronted with and involved in the opposites to which God has "died," and have ourselves experienced a transformation to the same fixity.

But we must keep it clear that, because there can only be manifested life by the fact of opposites, neither side of a thing is valueless, but each is necessary to the other. We wrongly tend to label outer negatives, such as darkness, hardness, and hate, as evil; but they are not so in themselves. What then is the good and evil of which we became conscious through the eating of the forbidden tree? It is not in the outer forms of our existence: neither in material things nor in our created selfhood, neither in our soul emotions nor body appetites. It is purely spirit. The name given to Satan is "the spirit of error." God is "the Spirit of truth." Good is the true God in the universe, evil is the false god. Knowing good and evil, therefore, is knowing either the one or the other in operation in our human form or material surroundings. Evils are but misused forms of good. In that sense, John said not that the world is wicked but, rather, that it "lieth in the wicked one" (1 John 5:19, Amplified).

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LWWW4 - Body,Soul, and Spirit by Page Prewitt

[Part 7] Body, Soul and Spirit
Once I came to accept this biblically-validated truth as the foundation for my own Christian experience–that I am in union with Christ and am thus one spirit with Him–I still had questions that had to be answered. (Let me interrupt and say that it is my experience that most people have these same questions.) Does the Holy Spirit take us over in our union with Him and automatically eclipse our freedom to choose and thus make it impossible for us to sin? Or can we say that because of our oneness with Christ, He is somehow responsible for our sin? Of course we must say NO to both of these suppositions. From Scripture and experience, two things are very clear: Christians (union people) do sin, and Christ has never sinned and never will sin. Another question that plagues us as Christians regarding sin is this: Do we have to go Satan's sinful, anti-God way?
To gain clarity on these questions, we must understand our humanity and how it functions. To do that, we must first gain an understanding of the difference between body, soul, and spirit. Each of these is part of every individual and each has its distinct and separate function, but all work together to make us the very glorious creatures that we know ourselves to be.
Following is a simple drawing which, along with the others presented earlier, has helped me and many others understand the inner make-up of the human self. Of course, these diagrams can only give an idea of what we as persons look like and how we function. No human explanation can adequately portray spirit truth. Please note that a true grasp of these truths only comes to the honest seeker by Holy Spirit revelation.
The outer circle represents our body, the middle circle our soul, and the inner circle our spirit. The body is the outer clothing or the outer expression of the soul and spirit.
DIAGRAM HERE

 Desire or love 

 is at the center

 of the human spirit.

[Part 8] Soul—The Troublemaker
Our soul is where emotions and reasoning take place–where we feel and think. It is very important that we understand and accept that our thoughts and feelings (fear, happiness, sadness, shyness, etc.) are morally neutral; all feelings are necessary components of the human personality.
But they are a huge problem because until we know differently, we believe that our feelings are not only how we are but who we are, and we operate (make our choices) based on this misconception. We are overcome with guilt and defeat at not being able to change or, better still, eliminate either our negative thoughts or feelings. The truth is that neither needs to be changed. They both originate in the soul, and as we said, they are morally neutral. Neither affects our inner spirit reality unless or until we believe them and act on them.


[Part 9] Just What Is Spirit?
Spirit, which is our real self, is represented by the inner circle. Spirit has three basic faculties–desire/love, mind/knowledge, and will/choice. Desire or love is at the center of the human spirit. Sad to say, in our lost state we are self-love, with Satan expressing his self-for-self love through us. But as we touched on earlier, when we become born again, the glorious exchange takes place whereby our sinful operator, Satan, is cut off from our human spirit through the body death of Christ and, in turn, He (Jesus Christ) joins Himself to our human spirit, and we become “one Spirit with Him” (1 Cor. 6:17). As we said earlier, we are the vessels through whom He expresses His selfless love–spirit love, the term for which is agapé.
Mind is our second spirit faculty. It is where we know things–not what we think about things (that is a soul function) but where we know them. Ideas belong to the soul realm; knowledge belongs to the spirit. For example, we may know a lot about God and Jesus on a soul level, but we can only know them and matters of the spirit by means of the indwelling Holy Spirit who is the Knower in and through us.
The third faculty of the spirit is the will, and it is here that our spirit choices are made. Our love and knowledge (the other spirit faculties) both help shape these choices which are, in turn, expressed through our soul and body. The will is the arbiter of our destiny: our God-ordained freedom to choose for God or against God exists in our will.
Because soul and spirit are so closely linked, it takes a revelation of the Spirit for us to know the difference between them. Hebrews 4:12 gives us an illustration of their closeness: For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
The writer to the Hebrews is saying that the two are as closely connected as the marrow is to the bone. Like the marrow, spirit is the life of the body. The soul, like the joint, is the vessel for the marrow and is the means by which the inner spirit life expresses itself.