This Post comes from Chapter Twenty-one of my book Is There An Elephant In YOUR Church?

Walking by biblical faith

As always, those who risked walking by biblical faith received the truth of who Jesus is and experienced the unseen benefits that Jesus came to offer. Those who walked by sight only saw and experienced the limits and distortions of what the Seen Realm of this world and the flesh and the devil could offer. The same is still true today. The sure way to see and appreciate and benefit from what God offers in Christ Jesus is to meditate on the profound revelation of the following pivotal scripture from 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, which explains Jesus’ Divine Exchange that made our entrance into the Unseen Realm possible. I am presenting it yet again because it also shows to what outrageous lengths Father-God was willing to go to in order to include all who freely choose, by faith, to be received into His everlasting family.

And so, from now on we know no one according to the flesh. And though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. So if anyone is in Christ (by rebirth), he is a new creature; the old things passed away (the old Adam nature is gone). Behold, all things have become new. Now all this is from God, having reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and who has given us the ministry of reconciliation. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not reckoning their sins against them. And He has placed in us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, so that God is beseeching you through us. We beg you (those yet not reborn of God) on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God. For God made Him (Jesus) who did not know sin to become sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Can you sense the passion in Father-God’s heart to welcome and include every man, woman, and child into His arms, now that Jesus’ sacrifice has removed all barriers to relationship with Him – from His all-knowing viewpoint? All He is waiting for is each person’s acceptance of His invitation and blessings. The next scripture from Romans 5:9-11 mirrors that same stupendous revelation that has been mostly eclipsed by the Elephant of mixture for 2000 years:

Therefore, having been justified now by His (Jesus’) blood, all the more so shall we be saved from (God’s just) wrath through Him (Jesus). For, when we were still enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son. All the more so, having been reconciled, shall we be saved by His life. And not only that, but we also glory in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

Father-God’s love for mankind is so magnanimous that He sent Jesus to become like us in all things except sin. Then Jesus became sin in order to crucify the Adamic nature and, thereby, eliminate the three things that prevented relationship with Him:

1) our fallen nature in Adam

2) all the sins of all mankind for all time and

3) all the curses caused by Adam’s fall.

None of those evils were God’s fault but He justly and totally paid our debt through Jesus. Why? In order to restore the option to us to choose to believe and receive eternal oneness with Him and His family. Jesus exchanged all the privileges and blessings that He, as God’s beloved Son, deserved with all the bad that we, as God-hating rebels, deserved. Consequently, all reborn saints are new creations, made righteous and totally accepted and approved by Abba-Father forever. What does this accomplishment of God’s extravagant love through Jesus demonstrate about His nature? It demonstrates Father-God’s unselfish nature of Agape love when He gave His best Gift to us helpless sinners, lost in Adam, to offer each of us His divine, unending life and sonship in Christ.

… God demonstrated His love for us in that, while we were yet sinners (in Adam), Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

Mercy, Not Justice

So rather than justifiably exacting judgment and destruction on mankind for executing His Son, God actually sent Jesus to purposely go through all the horrors of Calvary – and even be forsaken by God, His own Father, when He became our sin. Why? To demonstrate His love and commitment to Their divine plan to include into His eternal family whosoever is willing. Even before Calvary, Jesus demonstrated His Father’s gracious love for all those He encountered while on earth in countless ways.

We know that because Jesus said that He only did what His Father told Him to do. So by following Father-God’s instructions, Jesus forgave some people’s sins even before they asked. He healed their bodies, raised dead people to life, supplied wine to keep a wedding celebration going, fed thousands of hungry listeners, saved an adulterous woman from a Law-required stoning and did not condemn her, touched and healed lepers, healed blind and deaf and crippled people, went out of His way to impart a word of life and hope to a licentious Samaritan woman, freed a man of 2000 demons, delegated authority to His in Adam disciples to go out and do some of these same things (pre-cross), calmed a raging storm, enabled Peter to walk on water, loved His disciples enough to put up with their ignorance and antics and unbelief for three years, and far more. In fact, John comments in John 21:25 that:

Now there are also many other things that Jesus did, which, if each of these were written down, the world itself, I suppose, would not be able to contain the books that would be written.

At first glance, the focus of the four gospels seems to be on what Jesus said and did. But actually He was acting as an Ambassador of His wonderful Father, demonstrating how loving, merciful, powerful, forgiving, gracious, committed, faithful, friendly, empathetic etc. Father-God has always been because He is love by nature. Jesus’ life here is a peek into the unseen quality of the family life that the Trinity has always enjoyed and what all who have been reborn of God have inherited as the DNA of Jesus’ Divine Exchange with us. Do we have to wait to physically die before we can experience this Unseen Reality in Christ? Well Jesus reveals to Paul some of what is possible to us even now in 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 and in 4:6-7:

Now the Spirit is the Lord. And wherever the Spirit of the Lord is (inside each believer’s spirit-self), there is liberty. Yet truly, all of us, as we gaze upon the unveiled glory of the face of the Lord, (the unseen, exalted Christ Jesus), are transfigured into the same image, from one glory to another. And this is done by the Spirit of the Lord (not by our doing).

… For God, who told the light to shine out of darkness, has shined a light into our (new) hearts to illuminate the knowledge of the splendor of God, in the person of Christ Jesus. But we hold this treasure in earthen vessels (our seen, outer tent), so that what is sublime may be by the power of God, not by us.

Now, just in case you missed it, I will repeat Jesus’ secret to knowing God and experiencing the life and liberty that He walked in:

…as we gaze upon the unveiled glory of the face of the Lord, (the unseen, exalted Christ Jesus), we are transfigured into the same image, from one glory to another. And this is done by the Spirit of the Lord (not by our struggling efforts).

One Thing Is Needful

It boils down to one thing that is “needful”: focusing on the love and goodness of Father-God, revealed through Jesus’ earthly life and the Finished Work of His Divine Exchange on Calvary that has made all things new for those in Christ. That was the essence of Jesus’ loving rebuke to Martha when she complained to Jesus that her sister Mary was absorbed with listening to Jesus instead of helping to serve Him a meal, Luke 10:38-41. And it was Mary who was with Jesus when it mattered to Him the most – at Calvary. What better things or events or persons are there for you to focus on than on Father-God and Jesus and on His whole Grace Gospel, which enables us to partake of His own divine nature as part of His family?

So why don’t we see more of this heavenly life manifest down here? It’s certainly not because God is holding anything back. He gave His best gift – Jesus – to us 2000 years ago. Rather, it is most often because we are relying on our religious efforts to accomplish what Jesus has already done for us in His Finished Work. A major premise of this book is that, by and large, the church has been tricked into looking at everything else but at Father-God and Jesus and what He has done on our behalf. And the biggest culprit is the devil who uses the law as a veil over our eyes and as a club to fool unwary believers like he did in the Jerusalem church.

The futile and failed tradition of trying to fix our earthen vessel – our outer man – through religious law-keeping and self-help books, has kept us focused on the elephant of mixture. Ironically, that focus distorts our concept of Father-God, Himself, so that He seems to be a distant, angry, hard, demanding, perfectionistic Judge. These are behavioral traits that we sometimes see in ourselves, our parents and other authority figures all around us. So, we tend to project them on to God, causing confusion and frustration. But that is all a distraction by the seen world, our flesh and the devil, using law and condemnation to distort the truth and causes us to forget how good, loving and faithful Father-God really is.  Read the whole book on Kindle for only $.99, found here.