Yes I Am 14 - The One and Only Key Turned In the Lock

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 14

THE ONE AND ONLY KEY TURNED IN THE LOCK

These truths, thank God, are common knowledge to most of those who read this. But it is good to reiterate them, because they are always so precious.

Upon a life I did not live,

Upon a death I did not die –

Another’s life, Another’s death –

I stake my whole eternity.

However, we cannot enter into the final, total effects of the death and resurrection of our Christ until we see and share in its two processes, not just one. The first of these is the shedding of His precious blood; the second is the death of His physical body - which we shall look into later. Only by these two can this outer law of Moses become what it really is - the inner law of our spontaneous living.

But the key to entering in is faith. It is at our new birth that faith first makes its appearance in its true meaning in our lives; but we are, or at least I am, continually deepening my understanding and application of this fundamental principle of living. For all life is lived by faith and by no other way. That is why the Bible gives one whole chapter solely to its application - Hebrews 11. So we cannot spend too much time in re-examining it. Did not Jesus say plainly, "If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes"? And was He not always underlining faith, faith, faith? "Where is your faith?" "Your faith has saved you." "I have not seen so great a faith, no, not in Israel."

But we must see first that faith is the only means by which we operate in all life - not merely the spiritual, but also the material. Every action taken by man, from the action of the lungs in breathing to the sending of a spaceship to the moon, is nothing but faith in action.

First, something attracts our attention and is desirable. We then also see it is available. Faith is the inner action of our human spirits by which we inwardly decide that we will appropriate or experience this thing. We then speak a "word of faith": "I’ll go there," "I’ll do that," "I’ll take that," "I’ll make that." Inner faith then moves into outer action. We go there. We do that. We take that. We make that. Thus faith becomes substance. Faith is replaced by the fact, or rather, becomes fact: "I’ll go to that home" becomes "I’m in that home." "I’ll take that thing" becomes "I have that thing." What was first desirable to me, and then available to me, now by faith becomes actual and reliable to me. I experience it. Nothing in heaven or earth can be experienced or become knowingly reliable to me except by the inner and outer action of faith, which turns possibilities into actuality. That is also why all life is really adventure, for nothing is provable to me until I experience it. Reason can take me to the outer edge of reality, but I must then leap and take by faith. I cannot prove that a chair will hold me and not collapse under me until I sit in it! So we are all "faith gamblers."

Our everyday human experience of faith is what gives us our inner certainties (which we need, for we are inner people). We call this "inner know-how." The know-how then becomes such inner substance to you and me that, when learning a trade, for instance, we boldly adopt its name and call ourselves by it. We learn carpentry and call ourselves a carpenter. We learn medicine and call ourselves a doctor. In actual fact we are cheating! For what we take, in fact takes us, whether it is food or chair or profession! The knowledge of medicine or carpentry or cooking or teaching "takes us" as we move in by faith to acquire, it, and it becomes our know-how. We then apply our know-how, and call ourselves by its name - doctor, carpenter, cook, teacher.

So we see how fundamentally significant faith is to all life. Life operates only by faith. If this be true in the material realm, then how fundamental faith must also be in the spiritual.

That is why we can never be sustained or "held" by outer religious teaching, or even the Jesus of history - anything which is merely at outer contact level. We crave certainty! That is why Jesus told Nicodemus that it was no good, his coming to Him just as a teacher. If he was to see the kingdom of God, he must be born of the Spirit and thus have the Spirit’s inner-knowing and inner-seeing. Paul said that if we are in Christ we are a new creature; therefore we know no man "after the flesh," not even Christ: "Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him [that way] no more."

Here in the things of the Spirit we use the same faith process as in our daily life. Something is available to me from God’s Word... something is desirable to me because I see that it will meet my need. But this, of course, is not something tangible or visible which I can take hold of by reaching out my hands to receive it. This is something of the invisible world, something of the Spirit I’ve reached out for. So how do I now operate my faith? By the same process as in other matters - the spoken word of faith. I just inwardly say (and maybe verbally too), "I take this," or "I believe that." For now the substance must come from the Spirit - and as I affirm my taking or believing, the Spirit now is what the food or chair was to me in the visible. He gives the substance. He does that in my inner spirit-consciousness. He inwardly makes me know that I have what I’m seeking. The inner knowing is the inner spirit substance. So I operate by faith in the kingdom of Spirit precisely as I do in the kingdom of the flesh, and now faith is replaced in my inner consciousness by "spirit substance" - God-given assurance.

What makes the new birth, which leads us into the substance of the new creation, the greatest event of our human history? Simply because for the first time we have been impelled to use our faith-faculty on a spiritual rather than a material level.

At the time of conversion we have become so convinced of our lost condition, through the impact of the outer law, that we are willing to take a revolutionary faith-action. We become aware through the written word - the one material link in the process - of the offer of forgiveness, a removal of all that guilt which propels us to a destiny in hell. And much more, we hear of acceptance by a loving, uncondemning Father who offers the gift of eternal life, purchased by the historic event of His Son’s public death on our behalf. And that death, we discover, resulted in a further event which is "beyond human history," His bodily resurrection - attested to by numerous of His disciples; and His unconditional offer to be our Savior requires only that we believe and receive Him as alive from the dead! But that receiving means transferring our faith to the reality of a Person whom we can neither feel, see, nor touch, and who in His resurrection is an absurdity to material-world thinking. This is why it becomes a crisis moment. It is the absurdity of faith! Now is the first time we affirm that we are believing in One who was not only crucified - a fact verifiable in history - but who is living, risen from the dead - foolishness to the world, and impossible of material verification! That is why it is the greatest moment in our human history... when we, made desperate by our need, are moved by faith into a deliberate relationship with the universal kingdom of Spirit - and with the King of that kingdom.

How does that faith become fact? By an inner spirit-knowing. None on earth can say how we know… or if we really do know! But we know that we know. Into us has come an inner awareness, what Paul calls "the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit," that we are a child of God. And nothing can shake us.

Our inner eyes have been opened, as Jesus told Nicodemus they would be, to "see the kingdom of God." And if it is only those born of the Spirit who can see that kingdom, it can be no visible, earthly realm. It is the glorious kingdom of reality, for reality is spirit as God is Spirit, and we simply "know" that we are now members of the eternal reality - that realm where Father, Son and Spirit dwell, and we with Them, and where God has all resources, all wisdom, all power, and we with Him. Men now know that this outer universe is only energy or spirit slowed down to visible forms. So we have come home, and are now eternal participators in the resources behind the universe. Never again do we mistake or confuse the trivialities of the "bits and pieces" of material things as being the real and reliable, or irreplaceable. We look, as Paul did, "not at the things which are seen, but the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."

This is now more precious to us than gold that perishes. It is the inner realization, beyond human or rational description, which takes its first living form in the consciousness of the fact that Jesus really did love me and shed His blood to take away my sin; that He is now my Savior, God now my Father, heaven my home; that eternal life is my personal possession. With that blind man put on the spot by the angry Pharisees we say: "One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see." Spirit-reality is never provable to material sense, including our own soul-senses, so we always appear to walk, as Kierkegaard said, "on sixty-thousand fathoms of water." It is always the "adventure of faith," and we walk by faith, not by sight; but inner consciousness is the real stuff of life, and by that we know - with the outer Scriptures as our bastion of defense and confirmation. But we live because we know we know.

This spirit-knowing of the new creation has two confirming evidences. One is given the Bible name of "peace." "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God." It is precious indeed, but in its essence it still has a selfish element of satisfying me: I am so glad that I now have peace with God and there is nothing between us. Peace is the first baby-step of assurance given us by God, because as babes we are in a condition in which we have never yet desired anything except for ourselves, so can only be reached by an answer that will satisfy us. God’s love always reaches out to meet my need at its own level.

But the true new-creation reality is neatly packaged inside this gift of peace; for we might not take it were it publicly revealed at the outset. It is the fact of "other-love": that our new relationship is to the living Trinity - Father, Son and Spirit - which is a Lover- Trinity. And here is where we are taken unawares. We who have been compulsively self-lovers now find we can’t help loving the Son who died for us, and the Father who sent Him, and the Spirit who sheds this God-love abroad in our hearts; and this being other-love, we equally can’t stop wanting to share with others this ultimate reality which is now ours. We become other-lovers. Of course, we do not at first realize that this is not we loving (for the human self cannot love in this manner) but that He is loving by us. But we do learn that later.

This love is the one outer evidence to others that something new has happened to us, because our new out-going love (as well as our peace) obviously affects our daily lives. In that sense, the inner Spirit-awareness which cannot be proved in rational terms is incontestably demonstrated in our lives. Jesus is "seen" in us by others. The True Light has inwardly shone - of which material sunlight is only a rough outer symbol. This new Light becomes to us inner inspiration and ecstasy.

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Yes I Am 13 - The First Stage of Restoration

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 13

THE FIRST STAGE OF RESTORATION:

THE PRECIOUS BLOOD

We will now see the way by which this combination of the law given by Moses and the grace and truth by Jesus Christ is not only the Total Truth, but the Total Truth to me in my personal experience - see how it is the only answer with a totally workable application to every situation, whether mine or other folks’ - which makes it possible for me to say to myself, "Yes, this is it," and then declare it to the whole world within my reach.

If this takes further digging into details (with Paul as our guide) to find out the total solution, we will be like a German pastor wrote:

God needs men, not creatures

Full of noisy, catchy phrases.

Dogs he asks for, who their noses

Deeply thrust into - Today,

And there scent Eternity.

Should it lie too deeply buried,

Then go on, and fiercely burrow,

Excavate until - Tomorrow.

Some of us have been doing this for years. I could not stop. I must be satisfied. I must have the complete answer. It must be wholly workable in all of life. And we boldly say we have come up with the answer: not our own, but revealed in the Scriptures and confirmed by the Holy Spirit in personal inner revelation.

The law given by God to Moses in its outer written forms, underlining the outer standards of conduct such as the sins of stealing, lying, adultery, murder, malicious destruction of another’s character, is obviously intended to produce outer responses. So it does, and for the simple reason that in our blindness we cannot penetrate into sin at its source, but can only recognize its outer products of committed sins. So the first purpose of the Ten Commandments is to pinpoint our guilt before God and produce in us a realization of His wrath, judgment, and our coming condemnation. This it effectively does by awakening in us "the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom." Most of us were stirred from slumber by some person or event alerting us to the reality of our condition as lost, guilty, and hopeless sinners - unless there be some means of pardon. At such a time we neither considered nor were concerned about our inner sinful condition, but saw only our sins and their fearful aftermath. Verily, for this was the law established - that by it "all the world may become guilty before God."

Now comes the revelation by Paul of the first deliverance stage of the cross of Christ, the amazing but solid replacement of condemnation by justification, as if the sinner had never sinned - the overplus of grace by the shed blood of His crucified body. Paul speaks of Christ Jesus being "set forth" by God on that historic cross as a public, outward demonstration that He had truly died. That meant that as the penalty of sin is death, so He who "bore our sins in His own body on the tree" really died, having taken our place in death.

But bodily death is but an outer detail. The real meaning of death is not body but spirit destiny: Where do I, an immortal spirit, go? If lost, I shall be among "the spirits in prison"; if saved, among "the spirits of just men made perfect," Scripture reveals. So Peter proclaimed in his Pentecost speech (using David’s prophecy in Psalm 16) that the Savior went to hell where we were destined to go. But hell could not hold Him, for Satan had no hold on Him, and so His "soul was not left in hell." But He could not rescue Himself, for He was there representing us in our lost sinnerhood. He was "raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father."

So through the Lamb’s shed blood, death, and pangs of hell, all that should come to us by way of guilt, condemnation, curse, and uncleanness has disappeared forever for all men. "God was, in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them." So no man now goes to hell for his sins, but only because he has rejected the light of Christ as Savior - the light which has shone into the world. But until the Spirit does His convicting work in us, we love our darkness rather than that light and refuse to come to it.

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Yes I Am 12 - The Last Adam

Yes I Am byNorman Grubb 

Chapter 12

THE LAST ADAM

But with the law of exposure comes the grace of restoration... the "first Adam" being replaced by the "last Adam" (Rom. 5:12-21, 1 Cor. 15:45). We all have been born in sin and all have committed sin, and the evidence is seen in us all being under the reign of death, with no escape from its sentence of condemnation. Yet this very reality of sin, condemnation and death, making its appearance in the first Adam was - for any who have enlightened eyes to see and who know the character of the Father of Love - the necessary pointing finger to the first Adam’s replacement by the last Adam, who would blot out of existence this diseased condition of humanity. He would be the last Adam, not just the second Adam - as though the two are on a level with each other and a simple exchange made. He would totally dissolve the death-existence of the first Adam (and thus of us, Adam’s earth family) and, as the last Adam, bring into being the ultimate changeless reality of the eternal life-existence of the heavenly family. Where the first Adam was the parent of a human family of "living souls" (selves for self), the last Adam would be the parent of an eternal, unchangeable family of "quickening spirits" (selves giving life to others) (1 Cor. 15:45). And this would be the last family, with none ever subsequent to it - for Christ would be "the end of the law for righteousness." So in this sense the first Adam was only the shadow-figure of the last Adam (Rom. 5:14), this bright sun who would swallow up the shadow as if it had never been.

 the necessary pointing finger to the first Adam’s replacement by the last Adam, who would blot out of existence this diseased condition of humanity
 
 But with one tremendous difference. The whole human race is caught up from birth into the syndrome of sin and death. But the destined coming of the last Adam to transmute our living souls into quickening spirits was not a "had to be." It was a pure product of voluntary love. It only "had to be" in the sense that love by its very self-giving nature is always a debtor, and needs a creditor (which was why Paul the missionary called himself a debtor to the Gentile world). Christ’s coming was the spontaneous product of autonomous love, for He is love. So Paul, in this magnificent replacement declaration of the new creation for the old in Romans 5, continually repeats that what we have in our last Adam is "the free gift," "the gift of God," "the gift by grace," "the gift unto justification of life"; and coupled with that, says again and again that all of this has "abounded" to many with "abundance of grace," "grace that did much more abound." Paul was caught by the glory of the grace manifested through our "one man Jesus Christ"... and so are we!

So now we will take the first outward look into the details of this transition… which so totally solves the problems which prevent us from being real persons and living the real life we are meant to live.

I know I am writing to those who know the historical details of the coming into our space-time world of the Son of God, taking flesh as Son of Man (His favorite name for Himself). He issued from the womb of a virgin mother, with a Holy Spirit father. His early years were under the outer regulations of the law of Moses, during which He profoundly studied, absorbed, and understood the Old Testament Scriptures. His commissioning was at His water baptism, accompanied by the coming of a dove (seen only by Him and John) - and with the dove, the word of confirmation: "Thou art My beloved Son." His acknowledgement of that confirmation that He was the promised Savior, foreseen by the prophets in both His sufferings and glory, was by His public declaration of it in Nazareth. He was established as the unsullied pioneer of the eternal kingdom of Spirit, the kingdom of love - quite different from any earthly kingdom - by his rejecting, during forty days of testing, any self-centered life (Satan’s death-life, with which he infected the first Adam). His years of public ministry were of compassionate love combined with manifestations of the power of an unseen world in the visible form of healings, material provisions, counteraction of the force of gravity, and even of physical death itself. These He combined with His ruthless exposure of false, self-exalting presentations of the Living God under the guise of religious practices. He concentrated on training those whom He saw by faith to be His successors, constantly seeing them as what they would be by the coming of the Spirit, in place of their frequent displays of vacillating humanity. By faith He plainly accepted the known prophetic statements about the suffering Messiah, and recognized their truth in the obvious threatening clouds of opposition from the religious authorities which pointed to His coming death. In Gethsemane He took a final agonizing stand of faith: that though He should drink the cup alone, for us, His death would be surely followed by His physical resurrection. By faith - by a declaration which we may call a "word of faith" - He also plainly prefaced His ascension to the Father with a promise to His disciples of "another Comforter," whereby He would make His abode with them in His true Spirit-reality. By faith He commissioned them by the Spirit at Pentecost, and thus equipped them to be Himself... in His many body forms. Through their witness He has entered into millions of further disciples, making them also fellow sons by the Spirit and citizens of a new nation. These now await His personal return and the public joining of Head to body... then the marriage supper of the Lamb, Bridegroom with bride... and finally, His ultimate rendering up of the universal kingdom to the Father, who will then be seen to be what He actually always is to the seeing eye of faith - God the All in all.

All this is a mere repetition of glorious facts known to all of us. But these form the background, in outer fact and history, of what we must now see as totally applicable to our own inner selves!
Where the first Adam was the parent of a human family of "living souls" (selves for self), the last Adam would be the parent of an eternal, unchangeable family of "quickening spirits" (selves giving life to others)

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Yes I Am 11 - The Eye Opener About Our True Selves

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 11

THE EYE-OPENER ABOUT OUR TRUE SELVES

We shall now turn to the subject of the restoration of us humans to our true being, to the condition in which the Living God, as love, is naturally operative in us and we are "without blame before Him in love," as God originally intended (Eph. 1:4).

The first problem is our blindness. How can that be removed? A basic necessity is to recognize that the whole human family has always had its being in God. We were created in God’s image and likeness and are only Satan’s stolen property; and for that reason we all instinctively know that we should be living in the likeness of our Creator people of love as He is, love which fulfills all law. We all know the law inwardly before we come to know it in its outer written form. Genesis tells us that Noah was "a preacher of righteousness" in the years when "the wickedness of man was great upon the earth" - and this before the giving of any written law. Joseph, when tempted to commit adultery with Potiphar’s wife, answered her by saying, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" He, too, knew God’s law inwardly.

all men "know in themselves" what may be known of the invisible God

Glimpses of the reality of eternal law are in the writings of men of history like Lao Tse and Confucius of China; in the Vedas and Upanishads of India; in Buddha’s precepts; in Zoroaster and Jalal al-Din of Persia; in Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato of the Greeks; in Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus of the Romans, and countless others lost in the mists of time. Paul puts it in one word in Romans 1: that all men "know in themselves" what may be known of the invisible God by His visible creation, but "have held down the truth in unrighteousness" and so are without excuse. All the great religions of the world legalistically demand that their followers adhere to certain standards by their own self-effort. This is a total impossibility, for it is in direct contradiction to man’s fallen, self-loving nature, the nature of that spirit of error in the children of wrath, "fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind" (Eph. 2:3). So whether it is by Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or by Marxism or any other secular philosophy of life, we humans who know what we ought to be are more confirmed than ever in our blindness of heart by these self-effort religions and philosophies. We build up our own righteousness and call it the righteousness of God, while in fact it is only this same Satan-indwelt self-loving self producing its convenient good-and-evil fruit of the fallen self.

In Romans 2, Paul mentions both "the law written in our hearts" and God’s external, written law given through Moses. What was God’s purpose in giving us the Mosaic law? It was to prepare a way by which man’s blindness can be removed. In that unfathomable wisdom of His, He uses the pronouncement of an outward law not to falsely establish fallen man in a phony self-righteousness (as though he might keep it - a slave to Satan keeping God’s law!) but for a totally opposite purpose. The law was given to expose the deceit of man’s self-righteousness, thus stripping him naked of any righteous grounds for standing before God, outside of grace. So the sending of the outer law by Moses was actually part of God’s approach of grace to man! Paul’s inspired understanding focused Mosaic law to this.

We will follow this through now, both in its preliminary effects on us and to its ultimate completion. This makes Moses the greatest of the law age, to be replaced, as he foretold, by one "like unto himself," yet greater than he, as the son is greater than the servant in the house. The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

The outer law, given as a code of ethics on that mount to Moses, was not God coming in fullness of grace to His people, but was inserted as a necessary preliminary. God came to them at Horeb precisely as He eternally is - as the One who rescued them from bondage and brought them out "as on eagles’ wings" to be His peculiar treasure. But, even though they were His people, through the Passover and Red Sea deliverance, many of them were like carnal Christians today: they did not know the Lord in their inner consciousness as Moses did. These people, therefore, not yet realizing the exchange of deity in themselves, were wide open to the lying controls of Satan, their former indwelling deity, and thus "carnal, sold unto sin." So to expose their blindness to their Satanic slavery, God added the necessary demand which is the purpose of the outer law. God said to them through Moses that they would be His special people if they would obey His voice and keep His covenant - the very thing they couldn’t do, but this they did not know. And so they gaily responded, "Of course we will keep it." They had to respond like that, for this first claim of the law on them was precisely to expose their still unrecognized and therefore uncrucified self-reliance, which was Satan’s nature in them.

So the famous law followed on its tablets of stone... but significantly it was not given to Moses directly by the Lord Himself on the mount, but by angels (Gal. 3:19), because God Himself is the law lived as person and not in a demanding code with no power given to fulfill it. (It was later, in his second forty days on the mount, when Moses saw God’s glory pass by, that the "merciful, gracious, longsuffering, forgiving" nature of the Lord was revealed to him in its full reality - and no wonder his face shone!)

Now the years were to follow in which a few always saw through to grace - many thousands more than the record shows, as we can surmise by the seven thousand who were preserved by God’s enabling in the days of dark apostasy under Ahab. If thousands then, maybe tens of thousands in better days. But for Israel in general, sin was now exposed as sin by the law, and it is Paul who brings out the truth that "by the law is the knowledge of sin" and "sin is not imputed where there is no law." Under other dimmer codes, wrong might be recognized as against the doer and society. But only by God’s law through Moses did wrong have its total exposure as sin against God, leaving man on the eternal death-road unless there be some way back to total alignment with God. Only God’s law through Moses makes human wrongdoing totally serious. How significant it is that in these our days, wrongdoing is never acknowledged or confronted as a moral destruction, but only as a social inconvenience or human mistake. No secular nation calls sin by its true name, and that is why the only true light that can still come to our modern world is by the "holy nation," the church of the redeemed who still proclaim the total word of Scripture, and who are the only true nation there is.

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Yes I Am 10 - We Have Been Deceived About Ourselves

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 10

WE HAVE BEEN DECEIVED ABOUT OURSELVES

So we are seeing a tremendous revolutionary reality that humans never had a nature by themselves. They were both created and later redeemed to express in simple spontaneity and naturalness Him who is God in us and who, Scripture says, "dwells in us and walks in us" (2 Cor. 6:16). Likewise after the Fall, when we had freely joined ourselves to Satan, we had no nature of our own either. So there never has been a "human" nature. Therefore there is no point in considering whether we believers have two natures or one! No, we humans have none, but tragically or gloriously, spontaneously manifest the nature of the deity in us.

But as we investigate this actual, factual relationship between God and man in which man is nothing but the agency by whom God reveals Himself as God, and God in love-action - it becomes obvious that man is not a robot, with no free expression of himself as a person. It is precisely the opposite. We see the total freedom of the Divine Person fulfilling His love-purposes through the total freedom of the human person. And how can that be? It is no paradox when, as we have already seen, freedom must make its choices and the free will then loves to be controlled by its choice. We still do what we want to do. There is no need to force a person’s will. All the other person need do is to attract and captivate our "want," and then we will love to act in harmony with him. Give a child another toy, and his crying after the first one disappears. People often ask, How can we conceive of God changing a person’s will if he is free? The answer is that God changes our "want," and the will follows spontaneously. Once God has captured our wills by drawing us back to Himself through Christ, then it is He in us who "wills and does of His good pleasure" (and it is always good!) and it is we who naturally, gladly, freely work it out (Phil. 2:13-14).

He who is the "Freedom of the universe" can only be His free Self by His sons as they are free. Only with freedom can there be expansion and development, so God’s universe can only be entrusted as an inheritance to those free to develop it - to persons, not automata. If there are two freedoms, that of the Creator Person and that of the created persons, the one simple necessity is that the Creator and created be in such a love-union that the sons love to fulfill the will of the Father, and yet always are consciously free in working it out. It still remains an apparent contradiction to reason and logic, I realize, but there is no contradiction in daily living. We who are in this love-union know we are free, and we make our free decisions and carry them out into action, yet we equally laughingly and delightedly know we are doing what is worked in us to will and do. So here is the perfection of freedom which we who have found "the way" delight in, and in which we freely operate.

He who is the "Freedom of the universe" can only be His free Self by His sons as they are free.

This revelation from the Scriptures is so central to our very being that we will go over it again, for the repeating of something this important can only help settle the truth more firmly in us.

Our failure to recognize that we Christians are never independent selves and have no human nature of our own but are always, eternally, expressions of the Deity Person whose property we are, and that we manifest His nature, is the root of all our confusion and frustrations. All redeemed sons of God struggle with it in their newly awakened zeal to be the kind of people we know we ought to be. It is the root of our and Paul’s Romans 7 "wretchedness." It is the blank wall of obstruction we appear to be confronted with in all of life’s problems. It also appears to us as an immovable block in our bringing Christ to others, with their deafened ears or prejudiced hearts. The false concept of independent self is the all-round blockage; indeed, it is the only blockage of all life.

It is the great deception. The serpent deceived Eve; and sin, which is Satan’s garment of deception, the Bible says, deceives us. For sin’s principle is "I’ll do things my way, not God’s way" - the precise character of Satan. So what has happened is that Satan has tricked fallen humanity into thinking that we, like himself, are really independent selves, running our own lives in our own way. He has totally blinded us to the fact that we are merely expressions of him, the false deity - actually Satan in our human forms. Who among the millions of us in our lost condition ever thought that we were actually Satan manifesting himself by us? When we responded to the conviction of the Spirit - enough to know we were sinners, under the condemnation of the law, without God and without hope - we simply saw ourselves as slaves of Satan, doing his evil deeds; even children of the devil, having his character of self-loving self. But none of us recognized that actually it was he, the spirit of error, who was living his own life by us - he being the real sinner and we walking Satans (just as the redeemed become walking Christs). We were under this false conception that it was just we who were the sinners, and the sins our own evil deeds, and the self-centeredness our own distorted independent self. And it is because we did not know ourselves as "walking Satans" that we now have great difficulty in knowing ourselves as "walking Christs."

This is what ties us in knots. We have been so grossly deceived - and deceit is much more dangerous than blindness, because when blind we know we are blind, but when deceived we think we are what we are not. We shall be seeing in further detail how this illusion of our being independent selves - and so having certain responsibilities and the particular obligation to be the kind of people we know we ought to be (despite our constant failures) - is precisely what has so distorted our self-outlook. Does it not seem almost blasphemous, or certainly ridiculous and impossible, that we could actually be Christ expressing Himself in our human forms? Look at us! Yes, look at us through the illusion of being independent, responsible people who should somehow become like Him. Now contrast this with the "notion" that we are Christ in our human forms. It is blasphemy! But we will clear this hurdle, and the leap is clear, simple and sane.

So now we have had a first hard look at this revolutionary fact, plain in the Scriptures, yet hidden from (we may say) everybody who is not of the Spirit, and equally hidden from the vast majority of Bible-based believers. It is the fact of the deity-indwelt life being as much the condition of the lost as of the saved. Recognition of this is the key to living with all boldness the liberated human life.

So we will now give time to an examination of how God totally regains His stolen property, the countless millions of free sons who become the "riches of the glory" of His Son’s inheritance (Eph. 1:18). We will see again how He had this planned from eternity - the adopted family chosen before the foundation of the world. But it always has been the prime necessity that if they are to be competent, reliable sons by whom He may manage His universe in His own only-way of love-management, then that positive, perfect nature of self-giving love must first be built on the certainty of the swallowing up of their negative nature of self-getting love; for everything is established only by swallowing up or building upon its opposite. And in His eternal wisdom He has always had it planned that the swallowing up would be so complete that the misused negative could never show its head again. The predestined Seed of the woman would tread underfoot and crush the serpent’s head, fully removing his infection from His stolen precious sons and restoring them to their perfected sonship.

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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 8 - Humans Have No Nature

2 Timothy 19Nevertheless the foundation of God stands sure, having this seal, The Lord knows them that are his. And, Let every one that names the name of Christ depart from iniquity. 20But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, 

Yes I am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 8

HUMANS HAVE NO NATURE

We now come to what I think is the most important section of this Total Truth, because it has been missed in its completeness by nearly the whole of the Bible-believing body of Christ - a bold thing to say, but it seems to me to be the fact. It concerns what we call our human nature, and that is where our problems and entanglements lie. Even if new creatures in Christ with a new nature, we mistakenly think we have an old, scarred nature - we sometimes call it "the flesh" - which persists in being like an albatross around our neck, a constant rival distracting our attention and stumbling us in our walk. It is precisely that which made Paul cry out, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Wretched, yet redeemed!

It seems as if we acquired an old nature through the Fall, and now have a new nature in Christ, and the two remain deadly rivals, dog eating dog - a struggle from which we are never free in this life - the old man-new man syndrome... and the best we can hope for is a means of the new counteracting the old; and yet with a sense that the old always remains in us, though we are Christ’s - remains as a deadly element which Jeremiah calls "the heart deceitful above all things and desperately wicked."

By "nature" we’re not now meaning our natural faculties and capacities of body and soul. Our nature, in that sense, means the type of person we are, which is expressed through our soul and body. We may say someone has a kind nature or a harsh nature, a sensitive nature or an unfeeling nature, and so on. But the "old nature" or "new nature" is not the faculties and appetites of a person, but rather the expression of the true personality of the person.

The evangelical church seems divided between two convictions concerning these natures. Each persuasion is antagonistic to the other. One, by far the largest, maintains that we have two natures when redeemed; and we must live with that fact, battling away against the old nature as in Romans 7, and affirming that there is a deliverance in Romans 8 which we must daily apply to relieve us from the pressures of 7!

The other section of the body of believers is strong, persistent, and stoutly convinced that theirs is the truth -though they are in the minority in the whole company of believers and often are considered dangerous or suspect. They are given the general title of "holiness people." They use such terms as "entire sanctification," "perfect love," "full salvation," and are usually considered to be followers of the sanctification teaching that was reestablished in the church through John and Charles Wesley and John Fletcher. There are many precious people among them, with whom I have close links. Their conviction is that after the first stage of our new birth, which centers in justification, we must have a second radical experience of the fullness of salvation in Christ by the elimination of the old man and his total replacement by the new man "created in righteousness and true holiness" with "the heart purified by faith" - and that is the full application of our identification with Christ in His death and resurrection by the Spirit. 

By "nature" we’re not now meaning our natural faculties and capacities of body and soul. Our nature, in that sense, means the type of person we are, which is expressed through our soul and body.

Both say we have a human nature. One maintains that our old nature corrupted by the Fall is supplanted by a new nature in Christ, but that the old remains - so that our new way of living is by recognizing the two, the old being counteracted by the new. The other agrees that we all start with a human nature which has become corrupted through the Fall, but holds that the impartation of the new nature in Christ in its totality, by a second work of grace, totally replaces the old nature. The term "eradication" is sometimes used, though most "holiness teachers" regard that as an overstatement of their position, not sufficiently allowing for the continuance of "infirmities."

But I am saying that the true revelation of the Bible is that we humans have no nature. We’re not created to have a nature, but to be containers of a "deity nature," a divine nature, and we humans can only ever express the nature of the one within us. All the Bible symbols of our humanity are those of being containers and expressers of one who is not ourselves, but is a god. All that matters is, "Which god?"

The illustrations used of us in our humanity are vessels, branches, body members, slaves, wives, temples. In every case that means we are the agent by which the occupant operates. As vessels, we are said to be either "vessels of wrath" or "vessels of mercy," but we must be either one or the other. The vessel of wrath, of course, is a container of the god by whom we experience wrath; and the vessel of mercy of Him by whom we receive mercy (Rom. 9:22-23). So it is not the type of vessel that is of importance, but the nature of the liquid that it contains.

The branch illustration is even more explicit, for a branch is but part of a vine, the two being in life-union. A branch is merely the living means by which a vine reproduces itself in its fruit. A branch has no distinct nature; it has the nature of its vine. The fruit is of the vine, not of the branch. And when Jesus said "I am the true vine and you are the branches," He was obviously implying that there is also a false vine producing its fruit - one vine being He the true Life, and the other being the usurper (John 15).

 So it is not the type of vessel that is of importance, but the nature of the liquid that it contains.

We are called temples, and the temple was only the outer means by which the living God manifested His presence. Thus the Shekinah Glory shone through the tabernacle; and His glory is seen in us as His temples. In every case, a temple is only the dwelling place of a deity and reveals his presence, not its own. We are either a temple that contains an idol god, or one in which the living God dwells and walks. A temple has no nature but that of the god in it (1 Cor. 8:10 and 2 Cor. 6:16).

We are called married wives, and Paul distinctly says we all in the human race are married to the one husband or the other. According to Romans 7, the moment we recognize that in Christ’s death we are cut off from our old husband, Satan, then we are immediately united in a new marriage to Christ who is risen from the dead. No momentary gap between the marriages! And the point is that here he is speaking of marriage in what we might call a biological sense: the wife receives the seed of the husband and bears his children, whether "the motions of sins" or "fruit unto God." The wife is presented as merely the fruit bearer, not the fruit producer.

Then Paul, in Romans 6:16-23, calls us slaves (as it is in the Greek) and says all of us all the time are either slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness - slaves of Satan or slaves of Jesus. But slaves are merely the property of their owners, with no kind of a life of their own and doing only the work of their owner.

Finally, we are members of the body of Christ, and any body operates by the mind and will of the head, and nothing else. It has no body-led activity of its own.

So in each case the human is only the agent - as temple, manifesting the presence of the deity; as branch, expressing the nature and producing the fruit of the vine; as body member, set in action by the head; as slave, doing the will of the owner; as wife, bearing the children of the husband; and as vessel, only a container and nothing else.

2 Timothy continued...but also of wood and of earth; and some to honor, and some to dishonor. 21If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel to honor, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared to every good work. …

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Yes I Am 7 - What Is God's Wrath?

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 7

WHAT IS GOD’S WRATH?

The effects of the disobedience were the opposite to what the natural guilty world would expect God’s reaction to be. We would think God would, in anger and wrath, turn His back on the two. But it was precisely the other way around. It was Adam who hid from God, not God from Adam. Here was God "walking in the garden in the cool of the day" and looking for Adam. But where was Adam? Hidden in the bushes. Nor was God displaying some wrathful retaliation, but only questioning Adam…. to bring the reality of the disobedience home to him. For when He came face to face with the three, the serpent and Adam and Eve, there was not a word of condemnation or wrath against the two, but only His full curse on Satan. To Adam and Eve everything God said was to clarify to them the "beneficial" consequence which they, thankfully, could not escape - a way of life which always has sorrow at its roots. God said in effect, "Eve, you will have sorrow one way; Adam, you will have sorrow another way." That was all. And of course, the point of the sorrow would be that the whole human race through all its centuries of history would always he inwardly miserable, always knowing they were missing the mark and meaning of life, always seeking a phony happiness which would always escape them... and thus, always at the heart of every man, however covered up, is a sense of lostness and a longing for fulfillment. That alone was God’s judgment on His disobedient children, a judgment totally for their benefit.

Where then is what we would think of - and what the Bible often refers to - as God’s wrath? The answer is that the wrath is not in His eternal person, for He is only love. But it is in the human race, who all have their being in Him; for always, no matter how apparently apart from Him in their way of life they be, they actually live and move in His being (which was Paul’s unique revelation to the men of Athens, in Acts 17).

The consequence must always be that we, in our separation from God in His perfect personhood as love, have all the effects in our persons of our wrong way of living; and those constitute the wrath of God, experienced not in Him but in us. This was well put by Paul in speaking of the effects of certain sins in Romans 1 - that we receive in ourselves that recompense of our error which is meet. Quite naturally, to fallen man - seeing only with the external eye - it appears as though God is the God of wrath imposing punishment on us; and it is good in our blindness that we do see it as that, for then the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But to continue in that misconception of God as the God of punishment and wrath after we have become His children by grace, and so should know better, leaves so many people who are justified squirming under the misapprehension that God is punishing them or has deserted them. Even when we read the words of Moses or Paul about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart and that God raised him up to show His power through the hardening we should understand that the hardening was actually in Pharaoh’s persistent refusal to respond to Moses’ word of the Lord to him; so the hardening was of his own heart and in himself, as one who had his being in God and was misusing his being. That is the truth of God’s wrath in His rebellious sons, for as Paul said, the truth concerning Him is that "God has shut them all up in unbelief that He might have mercy on all" (Rom. 11:32, margin), not judgment on them.

But to continue in that misconception of God as the God of punishment and wrath after we have become His children by grace, and so should know better, leaves so many people who are justified squirming under the misapprehension that God is punishing them or has deserted them. 

Actually, what did God give Adam and Eve in that crisis interview? The answer is in what was addressed to the serpent: "You have sown your seed of enmity in My human family, so that they are your children. But I have a seed [one seed, Galatians 3:16] of this woman, My eternal Christ, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world; and in all who receive Him, that Seed will destroy your seed and crush your head, though wounded by you in the process." That promise was experienced in its truth by Adam and Eve’s second son Abel, to whom God first witnessed that he was justified with the offering of a slain lamb, the first symbol of an atoning death as the gateway to life. And Adam and Eve, as they covered themselves in the skins from slain animals, with which God provided them, must have seen this as the first symbol of atonement. So all God gave them, after this first disobedience that separated them and us from Him, was His all-conquering grace. That grace was in the One who, from that first moment, they could and did receive by faith, and who freed them from eternal death.

But the necessity still remained - again we say it - that for us to become reliable sons in the love-purposes of the Father throughout eternity, we must drink to its dregs the reality of the opposite - the misuse of the self in self-centeredness. We must so know it to the depth of its wrongness and misery that, once we are wakened from our blindness in seeking to make the false way be the true, our disgust and hate and disillusion are so total that, when and if there is a way of escape, we’re "not going to go back to that again." In that we have one secure basis for our new "reversed way" of life. Even if we visit the old haunts under the lure of temptation (as it were, when God is not looking), we’re not staying there. Guilt, shame, repentance, confession bring us shamefacedly back. Thank God, "once bit, twice shy." A competent professional has learned and discarded the wrong way of practicing his trade. And so have we! Once again it is Paul’s "O the depth of the wisdom and knowledge of God" - for God foresaw and provided for the necessity of the human race going the death-way and experiencing its vanity before we could confidently tread the life-way. We are safe as well as saved sons; not one stage in our history is out of place, the negative any more than the positive.

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Yes I Am 6 - Man's Fall Different From Satan's

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 6

MAN’S FALL DIFFERENT FROM SATAN’S

The full purpose of the serpent in the garden was fulfilled when he enticed Eve to the point of direct disobedience, by which she entered by experience into the death condition... and was followed, by free choice, by Adam. This was no unexpected fall. God intended it, in the sense that He created the human family knowing for certain that they would fall. The proof of this is in Peter’s statement that God foreordained His Son to be the Lamb slain for the sins of the world before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:19-20). He was the Savior in readiness before there were sinners to be saved!

Let us look at the progression of events during the serpent’s temptation of Eve. Eve’s first step toward capitulation was her acquiescence to Satan’s lie. Rather than simply trusting God, she believed Satan’s assertions and came to a decision. However, until she actually ate of the fruit, Satan’s control over her extended merely to the desires of her flesh and mind (body and soul), but not yet her spirit. Her true spirit-self was still in living relationship with the Father, for she was still capable of hearing His voice, and only spirit can hear Spirit.

In her spirit-center, where choices are made in the freedom of the will, she could yet have cried out to God, admitted the power of Satan upon her soul-body desires, and her inability to resist. Could He have rescued her? The answer was already there. He would have turned her attention to the fruit of the alternative tree which was within her reach, because the trees were side by side in the midst of the garden. If she had stretched out her hand to take that fruit, the Spirit of Christ would have taken her spirit captive (as He does ours when we cry to Him at our new birth) and the self-giving love of God shed abroad in her heart would have drowned out that false, deceptive, self-getting love.

But she did not, and we almost say could not, for we again repeat: We who are destined to be sons with the Son have to find out the strength and potentials of our created selfhood. This involves having to find the ultimately fixed condition which only comes by being confronted with the two alternatives, the one swallowing the other up - but only when we’ve experienced both. This, as we should thankfully see, turns out to be the one safe way for God’s vast family of sons. We first must taste the full effects of walking the hell way -with its guilt, deceits, sin, and all those lists of horrors enumerated by Paul in his Romans 1 catalogue. Then, when our blind eyes have been opened (first by law and then by grace), we have had such a fill of these ways of death that, once we find the way of escape, we are never going back to them. That is why we are safe sons, because we are thoroughly disillusioned sons. We may by temptation visit those old ways when no one is looking, as it were, but we are not living there again, thank you!

He intended not just to escape God’s notice in disobedience, but to replace God Himself and be a god of the opposite quality, of self-centered self. 

  A human illustration to this is the fact that in acquiring a profession, or becoming competent in any skill, we always have to learn the wrong way of using our tools and turn from the error before we can become competent in their right use. We call that "know-how." That is the purpose of a training or apprenticeship period. We mean by "competency" that the professional, whether a carpenter, pilot, doctor, or what not, knows by now the mistakes and misuses he must avoid, and so is reliable in his profession. If we call in a plumber over some tap out of order, we don’t pay his large bill for a simple turning of the tap but for his competency in knowing which tap to turn! In precisely the same way, God has His predestined son-family, reliable and competent, because they have been through their painful period of living their lives the wrong way, but have now found the right way and are competent in it.

But there is one historical reality for which we can all be endlessly thankful, and that is that Adam and Eve’s disobedience was not of the same quality as Satan’s. We have seen how Satan rebelled against God in a total sense from his central self - his spirit. He intended not just to escape God’s notice in disobedience, but to replace God Himself and be a god of the opposite quality, of self-centered self. Eve, on the other hand, was deceived and tricked into a self-gratifying action under the stimulation of her soul and body desires, but not from her total inner self, her spirit. She had no intention or desire to cast God out of her life, but merely, as it were, to do something she should not when He was not looking! Hers was sinning from soul and body influences and not from the central self. So she was within reach of the Father and, though a captive of Satan, was not like a son of Satan. 

Indeed, fallen men are called "children" of the devil, but never sons - though they may ultimately become that by free choice. And that is why, thank God, all members of the human race not only are guilty but, hide it how they may, know they are guilty, convinced by that light in their spirits which still lights every man. We all know we should live by brotherly love: all philosophies and political parties have that as their main objective. Thank God that though we don’t now know how to, we at least know we ought to. We love our darkness, but we know there is light.

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