No Such Thing as an Independent Self

To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This

BY NORMAN GRUBB

No Such Thing as an Independent Self

Now we see this great fundamental truth that there is no such thing as an independent self, for there is only One Self in the Universe; for Lucifer, now called Satan, was self-deceived into imagining he was independent. In actual fact, he forever remains God’s convenient agent, fixed in his negativeness. Cast out of heaven, God uses him in His vitally necessary preparation of what He had planned from before the world’s foundation—to have a vast company of sons, created persons like Himself, by whom He would manage and develop by inheritance the universe, together with His Son (Heb. 1:2; Rom. 8:14).

These sons must come to their consciousness of being persons by being confronted with these same necessary opposites. So, while given all God’s riches of goodness in the Garden, there was one tree they must not touch or they would the to their created privileges as His sons. God intended and purposed, by the fact of the presence of this cast-out devil in the form of a wily serpent, to entice these first two, Adam and Eve, to choose Satan’s self-for-self way and take what Eve was deceived into thinking would be beneficial to herself, though against the word of her Creator. By this means, the human family would learn to its depths the opposite nature, not ours, but the nature of the “god of this world.” This happened to them by receiving and eating of that false fruit, just as it was said that, to partake of the other tree, the Tree of Life, and eat its fruit would mean receiving eternal life (Gen. 3:22), showing that fruit to be symbolic of receiving Christ, our eternal life. Eating the false fruit meant receiving this opposite form of life which is really death, the nature of self-for-self. Paul describes in Ephesians 2:1-3 how that becomes a fact of us fallen humans, expressing, not a nature of our own (of which there is no such thing) but the nature of our false father, expressing his lusts. And Jesus turned the spotlight on that fact when He told the self-righteous Pharisees (of whom we all were in our Satan-indwelt days), “Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8:44). Thus, Jesus exposed once for all that, we humans by our faculties and appetites never have had a nature of our own, but either “take their nature from God and are His children,” or “take their nature from the devil and are his children…” (1 John 3:10, Amp.). Therefore we were expressing Satan’s lust nature in all its forms (the works of the flesh), which were not ours but his. In our fallen days we readily cooperated (“the lusts of your father ye will do”). He, Satan, was the sinner, but we were wholly accessory to the factand were headed for a like destiny.

But here we see the subtle deceit of the devil, which is our vital spot in our coming to a final understanding of who we really are. Satan deceived us into thinking that we are independent selves, even as he deceivedly thinks he himself is. Revelation 12:9 is a key Scripture on this, showing that Satan’s chief operation is “deceiving the whole world”—making us think we are who we are not. We think we are committing those sins, being possessed by those lusts and negative responses, and we are deceived. They are his expressed by us. He imparts that deceit into us as if it is us, but it is he masquerading as us.

And God’s sole purpose is to expose this lie of independent self. Because we are God’s sons and His means of expressing Himself in the universe, we have to learn and drink to its bitter depths that great lie of the independent self—that lie of the Author of Lies with which he himself is self-deceived. The fact is we can always transmit what we are or think we are, and so Satan did that transmitting to us, his fellow creatures, and we all normally think we just run ourselves, do our own things (Is. 53.6), make up our own minds and “naturally” operate as self-relying. The Lie! We have to learn and experience it as The Lie, so that once really seen as The Lie and the remedy in Christ, we shan’t be fooled again. We may slip by temptation (we speak later of this), but we know our slip and how to return. We thus become not only saved, but safe sons. Once bit, twice shy!

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• At Last Operating as a Truly Liberated Self

ntinue Reading

At Last Operating as a Truly Liberated Self

At Last Operating as a Truly Liberated Self

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So we pass through the gateway of Romans 6 via Romans 7 into Romans 8! Romans 6 was the application of Paul’s second radical revelation about Christ on Calvary (Gal. 1:11-12), and the meaning of the two levels of remembrance at the Lord’s Supper—the wine symbolizing the blood shed for sinners, the broken bread symbolizing the body dead and risen for the saints. Paul ran from Damascus because, under fierce pressure, he didn’t, know how to stand as a Christ-in-him for deliverance, and his friends had to help him out by a rope-basket.. He was “driven” into Arabia for three years as a result. There Paul saw and learned identification with Christ in its full meaning only given us by him in Corinthians 5:14, 21. If He hung there on the cross as us, His body represented our bodies. But what do our bodies express? The nature of its indwelling spirit., which was sin. So Paul actually said that God made His sinless Son “sin for us.” By His shed blood He “bore our sins,” which were not His, and atoned for them in His blood. But now Paul was saying He actually was made sin in that holy nature representing ours, because our bodies express that sin nature and are thus “sin.” No wonder He cried out, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” But, as Paul said, if Christ died as us, expressing the spirit of sin in His body, then when He died, out went that sin-spirit fromHis body, for a dead body has no spirit. And so too, therefore, out went that sin-spirit from ourbodies. And into the dead body in the tomb came His own Spirit, and thus also into our bodies. So Paul could say in Romans 6:10, “…in that He died, He died unto sin once,” and so our bodies were annulled as occupants of sin (Rom. 6:6), and we reckon ourselves “dead indeed unto sin.”

If Romans 6 is the presentation for us all of the fact of our deliverance, by Christ’s body-death, from the sin principle indwelling us, and we who believe are to state that to be so of ourselves, then we faithfully do so. But we say within ourselves, “I say that, but it: isn’t working well in me!” “Reckon” means I count it as so and say so, but that is different from realizing. There is a difference between me saying I reckon I have a book in my hands and saying I have a book in my hands! “Reckon” means that I’m not really sure. So honest Paul, and honest us with Paul, come to the desperate cry of Romans 7: “I say I’m dead to sin, but it isn’t working! Wretched man that I am. What’s wrong?” Calvary fact is no good to me unless it becomes Calvary experience, and in Romans 7. it doesn’t. That’s why Romans 7 is written in the present tense (Rom. 7:7-24), although Paul had just said it was a past fact for him (Rom. 7:4-6). Because all of us go through Romans 6 via Romans 7 to get to Romans 8, and only those who have come through can honestly give the glory statements of Romans 8:1-2, Paul must not say it for us, so he identifies himself with us in our stumbling, searching, faltering walk until we ourselves can say those “1 and 2” verses with him.

At last, by this second travail of the believer, the light is lit, and very simply. “Why do I keep doing things I have been doing, and not doing what I want to do?” cries Paul in agreeing with the tenth commandment not to covet, setting himself not to do it, and then finding “sin wrought in me all manner of lusts.” Now here is the secret and the answer. It was sin that wrought these in me and caused me to do and have them. Yes, sin, but not I!! That was the flash of Spirit-light. “Why,” Paul says, “I didn’t want to do those things, so it wasn’t I doing them!” Then who was it? Why, obviously that intruder who first got into me through the Fall mid made me his dwelling place. It was not I, but “sin that dwelling in me,” which he repeats twice for emphasis in Romans 7:17 and 20. It was sin, Satan in his nature, operating in me, but by his supreme deceit, he has made me, from Adam onwards, think it. was I doing it, as if I have an independent, nature of my own. But I am only a vessel, branch, temple, slave, body-member. The doer is the one I contain!

And so Paul saw it. He had, as in Romans 6, seen in his Arabia visit this total meaning of Calvary—that Christ’s body represented ours and our body expresses the sin-spirit. So did His on the cross! But, as He died, out went that sin-spirit from His body as ours, and in His resurrection in came His Spirit of Truth in place of that false deceiving spirit cast out forever. So, Paul moves on with his exclamation of delighted thanks in Romans 7:25 to his total statement, of who he now is with no further condemnation, but set free by the law (the fixed principle) of the Spirit of life by Christ in him, from that former law (fixed principle) of sin and death, that lie of independent, self-relying self. Now it is Christ dwelling in him (Rom. 8:8, 9) where it had been sin dwelling in him.

The whole key to this lies in the understanding that we humans never had a self-operating, self-relying nature, but were solely created to express God in His nature. But we only became conscious, functioning humanity when we were voluntarily, though deceivedly, taken captive by that spirit of error, so that we each were Satan-I. Then, through our Last Adam and His Calvary death and resurrection, we change back to our True Owner-Creator and are Christ-I. Many believers know and claim the reality of Christ in you, as in Ephesians 3:17, but because we never knew the basic reality of formerly being Satan-sin dwelling in us, and mistakenly living in the deceit, of a self-acting self, we have been falsely taught that we have a deposit of sin in our human selves (soul and body) and must, therefore have some continual forms of warfare for the rest of our lives. Yet the glory of the revelation is that there never has been anything wrong with our human selves (spirit, soul and body) which God created as “very good.” All that happened to our selves was the misuse of self by the Satan-god, and now right use by our true Christ-Indweller. This means that we can boldly accept ourselves as always having been right, selves, only formerly in wrong hands but now in right hands.

The flesh, Paul’s common term for our humanity, is right in its right ownership, as with Jesus (“God manifest in the flesh”). With us, it had become “sinful flesh,” but then in Christ the sin was condemned in the flesh (Rom. 8:3), and “they that, are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts” (Gal. 5:24); and “the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God” (Gal. 2:20). Flesh as humanity is, of course, always available to temptations by its appetites (Gal. 5:16-18), and can catch us out if we foolishly go back to struggle with self-effort. But if we fully recognize the Spirit expressing Himself as us/by us, then that old pull of sin and the “you ought not” law on our deceived self has no further power (Gal. 5:18). Flesh is not in itself an evil tiling any more than the eye is evil. It is the lusts which are evil, not the flesh or the eyes (1 John 2:16).

We need expanded understandings of the completeness of Christ being expressed by our humanity, with a growth as in 1 Peter 3:18, and an ever-expanding conformity to His likeness expressed in our humanity (2 Cor. 4:19 and Rom. 8:29). We thus have rescued and regained our human selves from any blame in themselves and those false condemnations we lived in while in a Romans 7 deceived consciousness of our guilt We walk blameless and sanctified as Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 5:23. We regain our human selves, mortal in the physical and thus remaining in our world to be a light in it, but holy in our spirit-selves expressed in our souls and bodies (Heb. 10:14-22).

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• The Way Is the Obedience, Not of Words, but of Faith

The Fallacy of Having Two Natures

The Fallacy of Having Two Natures

In our first “little children” stage (1 John 2:12, 13), we only have our eyes opened by the law and Spirit to our outer sinfulness, made plain by our committed sins. Therefore, our only understanding of Christ’s atoning sacrifice is of Him being “evidently set forth crucified among you” (Gal. 3:1; Rom. 3:25), and being seen by us sinners as a person separate from us, dying on the cross. 

His death was evidenced by the shedding of the blood, going to hell for us (Acts 2:23-24, 27) and being “raised from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Rom. 6:4). As we receive Him and confess Him by faith (John 1:12; Rom. 10:9), the Spirit bears witness to us (Rom. 8:16) that we are “justified by faith,” and thus have peace with God.

But much more important than this, God immediately begins to bring into being His eternal purpose by and as us by the Spirit beginning to express His other-love nature in our form. In our ignorance and our deceived ideas that we have a nature of our own, we think it is we loving Him, which is an impossibility because we humans only have a love faculty. The other-love nature is that of the Spirit-Deity now indwelling us and manifesting His nature through our faculty. What we think of in Romans 5:5 as our new birth experience is us loving Him. When our eyes are open to that Scripture, we see it is His Spirit-given love by which we are loving Him. He has begun to be Himself in our form, “The love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us.” We are “new creations” (2 Cor. 5:16, 17), and by His operating nature in and as us, we no longer live self-for-self, but self-for-Him. By His Spirit we see all men, even Jesus Himself as spirit (not flesh) people and, indeed, all things are seen in a new light as material manifestations of the Invisible One (2 Cor. 5:15-17).

However, now begins our real problem. Sins are put out of sight forever, but what about the self that appears to keep sinning? Sins, the product, are no longer our problem. The sinner-producer is—which appears to be our sinful self. We who are desperate for the fullness of God in our lives start a second and deeper misery. The misery of the convicted sinner is his sins. The deeper misery of the born-again saint is his apparently inconsistent self! A radical discrepancy increasingly distresses him. He thankfully recognizes goodness (righteousness) proceeding from him in new love, joy, peace and self-control, etc., and he is quick to say they are not from him but are the fruit of the Spirit now being manifested in his newborn life (Gal. 5:22, 23). Good things proceed from him which are the fruit of the good Spirit, but then bad things are also evident which must mean he has some bad nature expressing them. So then he says that he is twofold. That is where the fallacy, which has so taken over the evangelical church, is believed and accepted by the believer. If the good is from the Spirit, where does the bad come from? The answer supposedly is a bad nature still in me. But there is the fallacy and deceit.

We humans never had a nature of our own but were created to contain and manifest God in His divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). Temporarily, unless we choose to remain so, we manifest, through the Fall, our badness which we falsely attribute to our human selves. But our question should be, if we don’t attribute our goodness to ourselves but to the Spirit of Righteousness, why then don’t we attribute our badness to the spirit of badness? Why put our human selves in? We have been bemused and muddle-headed. So here is our agony, and we see the perfect purpose of God. Unless we see and experience the sin of sins, the lie of the independent self, and have come to a disillusionment and hatred of it (as Paul in Rom. 7:14-24: “O wretched man that I am… ”) as deep and thorough as our disgust and hatred of our old life of sins, we might revert to it again. Once we know the total truth of ourselves, we shall not revert to the falsity of independent self an)’ more than a saved sinner reverts to his sinful condition (1 John 3:9). (We can be caught up again in a particular sin, but never again into occupation by that sin nature of Satan—the difference between sins and sin. We must get this clear.)

Therefore, it has been of necessity that we humans, if we are for eternity to be spontaneous expressers of the God of self-giving love in His nature, must, first have tasted to its roots the deceiving nature of the god of self-getting love, that god of deceived independent self (Is. 53:6 “ .. every man turned to his own way… ”) and, at. all cost., have sought, deliverance from it—that “hunger and thirst after righteousness” of Matthew 5:6. Even the perfect human, Jesus, the Son of God, called the “Second Man” as the ideal of humanity, was confronted for forty days with the spirit of error, being “driven” to that confrontation by the Spirit of Truth just entered Him (Mark 1:12). And it. took Him that long time, of such intensity that He didn’t even miss food (only “afterward was He an hungered”—Mt. 4:2) to be confronted and finished with these temptations to be self-sufficient and self-acting. Even He had to “taste”
that deceitfulness of sin, which we humans swallowed.

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• No Such Thing as an Independent Self

Pairs of Opposites: The Operating Law of the Universe

To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This

BY NORMAN GRUBB

Pairs of Opposites: The Operating Law of the Universe

All the universe, from God Himself down through all His manifestations, only operates as pairs of opposites. The one expresses itself by utilizing the other for its manifestation (see 2 Cor. 5:4), and there is no consciousness except by opposites. Light can only be seen by its “swallowing up” dark; sweet by bitter; heat by cold; yes by no; hard by soft, and so on ad infinitum. In an armchair, the soft cushion must utilize the hard framework to make a comfortable chair. So too in abed. A cook can only make a dish sweet by the sweetness overcoming the nonsweetness. Our decisive “yes” only has its strength by swallowing up the alternative “no.” Electricity only functions by the interaction of positive and negative; the atom by the combination of proton and electron. So it is with our personal consciousness. We don’t let an infant go near a hot stove or he will burn himself, or near a pool of water when he doesn’t yet know the difference between water and dry ground.

But as this is so on every level of our material world, it is equally and fundamentally true of our inner selves. We are only conscious of ourselves when we have discovered we are either expressers of a self-getting nature (Satan) or a self-giving nature (Christ). Our human “being,” with all its potential, can only express in its quantity the quality of the spirit-nature which indwells it, either that of “the spirit of error” or alternatively “the Spirit of Truth” (1 John 4:6). Blake, the poet, describes a tiger and lamb as having the same essential physical make-up but with different natures manifested by them. We have already mentioned a modern illustration of this: a computer with untold potential but only operating and expanding the nature of the subject the programmer has put into it. And we humans only become consciously functioning humans when we have been confronted by the two trees in the Garden, and made our fateful choice.

Behind that fact about us as created persons, Paul states that God Himself has a limitation: “… God that cannot lie… ”(Titus 1:2).’ In other words, He has from eternity been the Trinity, in His Father-Son relationship of love, each for the other, and the Spirit being the Reproducer of Him (Them) in His nature in the universe. If God had remained just a “One” in all His Almightiness, as a Loner He would have been a Self-for-Self, compared in Scriptures to a self-consuming fire. But by a “death” to Himself as a Loner, He brought His beloved Son into being. To use a human expression (the spoken word which proceeds from a thought thus through to a manifestation) the Son was His “express image” (Heb. 1:3), and thus He moved into an other-love relationship, just as lire becomes light. Fire consumes, light blesses. We now know that that outer “fire,” the sun, consists of hydrogen atoms which fuse into helium atoms, and the energy released in the fusing is the light we live by.

So, if the Eternal One is only the Love Person by virtue of a ‘death” to one alternative of being by Himself as a consuming lire, and a “life” in an eternal love interchange with His Son, so surely all those created in His image as persons can only be conscious selves by being confronted with the possibility of expressing a self-for-self false spirit nature, or the self-for-others God-Spirit nature. That is why the Scripture says God “created evil” (Is. 45:7). Evil is only a person expressing self-for-self mid good is a person expressing self-for-others. If God Himself had to have that settled for Himself (when it says He “cannot lie” and thus express a self-for-self), so every created person must confront and have those opposites fixed in the one potential “swallowing up” the other. Therefore, when God created persons, He could only do so by persons having their freedom in those alternative choices. Thus, He “created evil” as the other necessary alternative which was “swallowed up” in Him, and He cannot create persons as persons without their having their freedom of choice as persons.

Lucifer was the first person revealed by the Scriptures as made perfectly in God’s image (as we all are). By being so entranced by his own perfections (Ezek. 28:11-17) that he chose to be a self-for-self, even to appropriating the throne of God (Is. 14:12-15), he became the exposer of the necessary opposite swallowed up in God. Thus, he was named “the spirit of error,” and in his nature as the opposite of God, was “cast out of heaven.”

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• The Fallacy of Having Two Natures

To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This

While I was having lunch with a pastor of a large denomination, he mentioned that their main differences “are between theology and anthropology.” “We all have some agreements on our understanding of God,” he said, “but many disagreements on our understanding of man. At his request I have written what follows. I have no trained theological background and only give what is my understanding of the Scriptures, as made plain to me by the Spirit, and helped by various writers who have influenced me through the years. I have written on this in more detail in my previous book entitled Yes, I Am.

BY NORMAN GRUBB

Table of Contents

• God All in All
• Jesus, the Second Man
• We Humans Have No Nature
• Pairs of Opposites: The Operating Law of the Universe
• The Fallacy of Having Two Natures
• No Such Thing as an Independent Self
• At Last Operating as a Truly Liberated Self
• The Way Is the Obedience, Not of Words, but of Faith
• Then Daily Living
• Trials Are Adventures, Temptations Are Opportunities
• When Temptation Becomes Sin
• The Difference Between Soul and Spirit
• The Finality! We are Royal Priests
• Death in Us, Life in Others
• God Meaning Evil for Good
• Speaking the Word of Faith
• The Lamb on the Throne
• The Spirit’s Drive in Us
• The Gaining of Specific Intercessory Objectives
• Children, Young Men and Fathers
• A Missionary Mother’s Intercession
• To Sum Up

God All in All

God All in All

I have to start, however, with theology, for I have no understanding of man except in his relationship to God. I understand that God is the One Person in the universe. Besides Him there is no other. He is Power, Peace, Joy. Christ is the Way, Truth, Life. He is made unto us Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification. His name is I am, not I have. Finally He is declared as “All in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). So He can only manifest Himself in all these and a hundred other characteristics by being Himself expressed in an infinite variety of forms, not a Giver, but an Is-er. God created man in His own image that He might have a visible means of expressing and manifesting Himself, The Invisible in visible form. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world,” and then He also said, “Ye are the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14).   On the material level, light is invisible electricity which can only manifest in visible form by a lamp. In doing so, the light so possesses the lamp that we don’t say, “Turn on the lamp,” but, “Turn on the light.” Thus we humans express Him in a union relationship.

Jesus, the Second Man

Jesus, as God manifest in the flesh, is called “The Second Man” (1 Cor. 15:47), thus the perfect form of redeemed man. As such, He was His Father in manifestation. The Spirit of God in the visible form of a dove was seen by John to descend upon Him. From that time onward, it was the Spirit speaking and acting by Him (Luke 4:14-21). It was the Spirit who took Him to Calvary (Heb. 9:14), and by the Spirit He rose again (1 Pet. 3:18). At the supper table when about to leave His disciples, He said the purpose of His leaving them was that the same Spirit should possess them. This was fulfilled at Pentecost, and the Spirit is spoken of by Paul in Romans 8:11 as dwelling in us.

Thus, if Jesus spoke of Himself as only seeing and speaking and doing what the Father was doing by Him, and doing nothing of Himself, and finally saying that “if you see Me, you see the Father,” then it is now the same of us. Those who see us, see Him! So Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16); “God works in you to will and do of His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13); Christ, “our life” (Col. 3:4); and John, in his first epistle, caps it all by saying, “As He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). Thus we are “in the light as He is in the light,” we “walk as He walked,” we “know as He knows,” we are “righteous as He is righteous,” we “love as He loves,” we “believe as He believes.” Our humanity is expressing His deity in all the forms of His nature.

We Humans Have No Nature

We are called temples. In the Old Covenant days that could have been the tabernacle by which God manifested Himself in Shekinah Glory, or alternatively a temple of Baal.

The emphasis is not the nature of the temple, but of the deity who manifests himself by it. And now in the New Covenant, our bodies are the temple of the Spirit, and God is spoken of as “dwelling in us and walking in us” (2 Cor. 6:16). We are the body of Christ, but the nature is that of the Head, Christ, not the body. Only in the sense of the whole body and its actions (the Head included) is the “body” called “Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). 

We are called “slaves” (mistranslated in the King James Version as “servants”). But a slave has no operating nature of his own in relation to his owner, and solely reproduces the activities of his owner, whether of Satan (sin) or Christ (righteousness) (Rom. 6:16). We are the wives reproducing the nature (seed) of the husband, and in that, sense with only the husband’s nature (Rom. 7:4, 5).

We humans are symbolized in the Scriptures as being containers, expressers, developers, but not originators. We have our “being” in Him (Acts 17:28) —the quantity, the potential (much like a computer). But then also, the quality of what is expressed by our being is not we, but He in His nature (like the programmer of the computer). Thus He is named “All in all”—not just the One being invisible, but having derived created beings by whom He can express His Allness. Not just the “All,” but also “in all,” which is why the coming of His Son taking flesh, and now, in the resurrection, still being “the man Christ Jesus,” confirms the eternal truth as being the Person in the persons, and not some vague dissolution of essence into essence as in a religion without an incarnate Christ.

These symbols used to describe us humans are all those which express no nature of their own but the nature of that to which they are attached. Vessels contain the liquid, but are not the liquid; the cup is not the coffee. We don’t, speak of a cup and coffee. So we are branches, but the branch is not the nature. Rather the nature is that, of the vine which reproduces itself in leal7 and fruit, form on the branch. Thus in Romans 6:20-22, we were bearing fruit of which we are now ashamed, but now the same branch (no difference in that) is bearing “fruit unto holiness” —solely vine-nature expressed by the branch, which has no separate nature of its own.

We are called temples. In the Old Covenant days that could have been the tabernacle by which God manifested Himself in Shekinah Glory, or alternatively a temple of Baal. The emphasis is not the nature of the temple, but of the deity who manifests himself by it. And now in the New Covenant, our bodies are the temple of the Spirit, and God is spoken of as “dwelling in us and walking in us” (2 Cor. 6:16). We are the body of Christ, but the nature is that of the Head, Christ, not the body. Only in the sense of the whole body and its actions (the Head included) is the “body” called “Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). We are called “slaves” (mistranslated in the King James Version as “servants”). But a slave has no operating nature of his own in relation to his owner, and solely reproduces the activities of his owner, whether of Satan (sin) or Christ (righteousness) (Rom. 6:16). We are the wives reproducing the nature (seed) of the husband, and in that, sense with only the husband’s nature (Rom. 7:4, 5).

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• Pairs of Opposites: The Operating Law of the Universe

The Centrality and Universality of the Cross-Chapter 5=FINAL

The Centrality and Universality of the Cross (1927)
by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 5

"Now unto the principalities and powers."

At length we come to consider the meaning of the Cross in its vaster ranges and its initial and final impact which is back of the universe and of history. It requires but little spiritual insight to recognise that the whole background of what is recorded from Genesis to Revelation is spiritual and not merely historical. The historical is but the effect in a limited degree of what is going on behind. This earth after all only receives a faint echo of what is taking place beyond. The more spiritual the Lord's people become the more they realise the true nature of the battle (Ephes. 6:12), the more they feel the impact of a super-kosmic conflict, and the more possessed of the secrets of spiritual effectiveness they become. Moreover, the more spiritual they become in all their conceptions of the methods and means by which the ends of God are to be obtained or attained unto.

The Church which is Christ's spiritual Body is a heavenly organism, not an earthly organisation. While it is represented here on the earth, it is universal in its range (Heb. 12:22-24).

The whole Church in heaven and on earth is interested and concerned in the battle which rages. The issue is the outworking of Calvary's triumph. It is not a matter of whether Calvary is victory, that was settled in eternity past and transacted literally on this earth by the Son of Man. It is the progressive realisation of all the content and implications of the Cross which is being challenged so fiercely.

Now this brings us to the deep significance of spiritual truth, and we must seek to keep clearly before us the difference between a mental enquiry which may be merely speculative, and a spiritual understanding which is essentially practical and potent in its effect. Firstly as to this earth. It must be remembered that this earth is not isolated and self-contained. It is part of a system. While this is true in other respects it is especially true spiritually. How far this is so is not revealed, but it is made clear that other realms and orders unto the "heaven of heavens" and the "far above all heavens" encircling "the heavenlies" where "principalities, powers, world rulers of this darkness, and hosts of wicked spirits" have their present abode are all interested in and have their eyes directed toward this earth because of some special vocation which rests upon it relative to all these. It does not make much difference to the essential truth whether there be material worlds involved, and it would be going beyond our present specific purpose to discuss it. The truth is that some mighty, eternal, and universal purpose has been related for its decision and outworking to this earth, and this earth is central to a purpose which is as wide and inclusive as God Himself.

Then as to man. So far as we know, man is an unique creation and the only being in the universe who combines in his own nature the intuitional faculties of a spirit with the reasoning powers of a mind. "God is a spirit," and the angels are spirits. In creating man God determined to have a race at the centre of whose being, as the supreme and dominating reality, was Himself in life and nature. The life of His creation when it attains to His intention is a reproduction in finite form of the elements of His own life and being. To this end He gave man a spirit, in order that He, being a Spirit, might reside within man and reproduce Himself in the human spirit. Thus in carrying out and perfecting His purpose in the creation of man He subjects Himself for a time to the limitations of humanity, but by the incarnation of Himself in the Person of His Son He will lift humanity out of those limitations with which we are familiar into greater infinitudes of spiritual capacity.

But our theme holds us especially to the other phases of man's being. This is the psycho-physical (physical and soulish) body with the power of procreation ("Be fruitful and multiply"): the man who thinks and loves and determines. The entire government, and therefore all the issues of this man should, according to the Divine intention, be in and through his spirit and spirit faculties which linked him with the spirit or spiritual world, and it all depended upon how faithful he was to this law of his spirit as to what the result would be immediately. If his spirit walked after "The Spirit" Who is God there would be spiritual growth in the Knowledge of God and in the capacity for fulfilling the purposes of God. His seed would also have been a spiritual and God-controlled seed. By this course he would have held Divine and spiritual sovereignty in the earth.

But there were other possibilities and this really brings us to the main point of our theme.

The spirit as the "inner man" could listen to the psycho-physical or outer man and conduct himself accordingly and not after his spiritual Head. In this case all the issues would be psychical or soulish and not spiritual. This possibility made room for another element and this is the key to the whole situation.

At this point the theme opens out in several directions or along several lines. In all, however, we accept without discussion the presence of Satan in the universe and especially interested in what is taking place on this earth.

Satan now approaches in the knowledge that if he can fertilise this beginning of the race with a seed from himself, he can capture and be the God of the race. This seed, which is known throughout scripture as "the lie," of which Satan is the father, he presents to the psycho-physical man, the man who reasons, loves and determines. Instead of in turn testing it by the spirit at the court of God, the inner man capitulates and the outer man takes ascendency. Do we see what has happened? The lie has entered by consent in the place of the truth. The false word has taken the place of the true. The seed of Satan has been sown in the race, it has its lodgment in the psychical man, it is a blinding and paralysing and fatal lie, and the blindness and paralysis and death have slain man's spirit Godward, that he cannot know God's mind or will or purpose or fellowship.

But this is not all, there is a positive as well as a negative element. Man thus incapacitated is called "the natural (psychical) man."

There is, however that which is called "carnal." This is the flesh principle, not mere incapacitation, but positive enmity to God and His Things. It only requires a sufficiently divinely spiritual presentation to make it manifest as being in every member of the race. This is the Satanic element as in the entire race in Adam. Those most conscious of this element are those who have been spiritually quickened, and such know best the warfare of flesh against spirit and vice versa. Before following this line further, let us return to take up another, which really is not another but only a different aspect.

This interference of Satan with the psycho-physical man had to do - as we have seen - with the power of procreation and therefore in the covenant of life in blood. Blood was from the beginning recognised as life, its outpouring as the pledge and gift of life, its interchange as a life covenant between those who shared its substance. The function of procreation could only be fulfilled by a shedding and encirclement of blood. Thus the shedding of blood became the door or threshold of life by a covenant in blood on the part of the first parents. From that time onward the significance was given to all kinds of thresholds. The threshold of life and death in sprinkled blood is one of the most familiar things of the Bible. We have the shedding of blood to secure a covering for the fallen pair doubtless at the gateway of the garden. God's answer to Cain's complaint is that "if thou doest not well a sin-offering is at the door." Then we have the encirclement of blood at the door of Israel's national life; the passover being to them "the beginning of months." This was not only a covenant of life against death on the ground of judgment and the threshold of their national life, it was also a spiritual marital covenant, between Jehovah and Israel by which He would propagate a race for His own glory. He that day betrothed the virgin daughter of Israel unto Himself (Jer. 31:31, etc.). Judgments were always "in the gate," in Israel. And so from the time when first a twain were made one in a covenant of blood, thresholds, doors, gates, were places of altars and a spiritual significance was attached to them. The altar was at the door of the Tabernacle and there the blood of the covenant which was taken into the holiest was shed. All this is very important when we come to consider Christ's work in the Cross by which He was indeed the "Door" and place of the covenant of life. We leave this, however, till later.

The covenant sign with Israel was circumcision, an encircling of blood at the beginning of life. It represented a cutting off from all the uncircumcised and a cutting off unto Jehovah for His peculiar possession and purpose. It pointed to a spiritual truth, even the putting away of the whole body of the flesh by the Cross - even the flesh in which Satan had actual and judicial place and hold (Col. 2:11). Circumcision took place on the eighth day. Eight is the resurrection number in Scripture. By the resurrection of Christ it has become the first day of the week. It is in the resurrection of Christ that there is a specific Divine declaration as to His Sonship - see Rom. 1:4, Acts 13:33, etc. Our sonship is on the ground of resurrection union with Christ as begotten from the dead, the whole body of the flesh having been cut off.

What we want to see is that the nature of sin and the nature of the fall, the basis of Divine judgment, the ground of the awful wrath of God, and the background of all, is spiritual fornication. Satan had a hand in the functioning of procreative capacity and inoculated the race with evil, his own nature. It is not difficult to trace the fact by its fruits, although many might find difficulty in understanding the term "spiritual fornication." All forms of Satan worship have had a sensual element strongly developed.

In Israel the constant deviation from spiritual loyalty to Jehovah was marked by the setting up of groves with "pillars" or obelisks, male symbols, and Asherah, female symbols (Exodus 34:12-15; Deut. 16:21-22, etc.). This was a projecting of the Satanic system on one of its sides. Jehovah never treated these or any other forms of idolatry as just acts of innocence or ignorance, and smile at the foolishness of it all. He took it very seriously and destroyed the people with their idols if they forsook them not. He knew what was behind all this and what this implied on Satan's part. It was an abiding testimony to what Satan had done at the beginning, and of his footing in the nature of the race.

Without accumulating the vast evidence in the Word of God as well as outside of it we are surely by this able to see that by reason of an interference to which Adam gave way, Satan has in a very real sense captured the race and propagated a seed with his own nature. In what we have said about spiritual fornication in Israel we have only intended to illustrate the truth. The issue is the same without any Obelisks and Asherah. To summarise this - to the soulish-physical man possessing pro-creative powers, Satan presented a false gospel, a system of lies beautifully and attractively adorned with a view to obtaining an opening for himself to capture the race and by men's consent hold judicial and actual ground in man's nature. The offer of Satan being entertained and acted upon brought about the immediate rupture of fellowship with God in spirit and the suspending of the Divine intention through Adam. This act of spiritual fornication slew man's spirit in its relation to God, and deadened his capacity for the spiritual interchange with God by which all the purposes of God could be realised. God was infinitely removed from man in fellowship, knowledge, likeness, and co-operation.

Man became another species than that intended. A foreign and sinister element leavened the race. Satan installed in man that which would be suitable to his government and which would answer to his suggestions (the entire range of deception), and which would make possible his entrance into man for his own incarnation. All this does not necessarily mean that man realises or believes it. He may have highly developed religious feelings and sublime ideas and conceptions. He may even be given much to religious activity and service, and yet he is still the natural man, repudiating the demand for being born again, and becoming "a new creation." However fine a specimen a man may be of this species the word still holds that "that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." It is the nature of man, not his positive attitude which is enmity. It is in the light of this interference in the propagating powers of the first parents and the result in polluted, tainted soul in the blood that the true nature of those new born sons of God are said to be "begotten, not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13).

Now we are ready to see how initially and basically the Cross is central to the spiritual universe. There God in Christ, incarnate with a sinless human soul, by the Eternal Spirit poured out that soul in His blood unto death. On the one hand He took on His soul all the pollution of the race - as only God could do - and carried it away into a land of forgetfulness. Only a sinless soul could do this voluntarily and effectually, for corruption by pollution has no native inherence there, therefore it can be flung off as not constituent.

So the works of the devil are nullified and for man by the Cross in the power that is in that blood, even the fleshless, enmityless, sinless soul of the Son of Man, there is

"Remission." - "This is My blood shed for remission." - Matt. 26:28.
"Redemption." - "In Whom we have redemption through His blood." - Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, 1 Peter 1:19.
"Reconciliation." - "Peace through the blood of His cross, to reconcile all things unto Himself." - Col. 1:20.
Justification. - "Being now justified by His blood." - Rom. 5:9.
Purging. - "How much more shall the blood of Christ purge." - Heb. 9:14, Rev. 7:14.
Nearness. - "Made nigh by the blood of Christ." - Eph. 2:13.
Access. - "Boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus." - Heb. 10:19.
Liberty. - "Loosed from our sins by His blood." - Rev. 1:5.
Sanctification. - "That He might sanctify with His own blood." - Heb. 13:12.
Cleansing. - "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin." - 1 John 1:7.

But there is more. On the other hand not only Satan's works but Satan himself met the impact of Christ. The whole Satanic hierarchy was dealt with when "He stripped off principalities and powers and made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in His Cross," Col. 2:15. It is in that reality that the supreme significance of the Cross is found and its transcendant power is felt.

Back of Egypt and the Egyptians were "the Gods of the Egyptians." Every judgment was ultimately against the deity represented by the symbol. The "sacred" Nile, the frog, the beetle, the lice, polluting altars, priests, and sacrifices, etc. Jehovah went behind the symbols to the spiritual system. "Against all the Gods of the Egyptians." So with the Canaanites. They, like the Egyptians, knew of Jehovah, and recognised His supremacy, but continued in a system which was spiritualistic at root. There were the rites of initiation into occultism as in "passing through the fire," the worship of demons, all working out in the grossest uncleanness.

In like manner the events of Daniel 3 are the challenge of the false spiritual system through the great image - the symbol and representation of the fire God Isbah. It is not Nebuchadnezzar, or Babylon as such, but Satan behind, and the tenth chapter exposes the real seat and nature of the conflict. "World rulers" of this darkness are behind, and these marshalled and directed by him who was - before calvary - called "the prince of this world," and is still "the god of this age," "the prince of the power of the air."

The whole mighty thundering of God against idolatry has as its reason this false and antagonistic system of Satan whereby he would "be as the Most High," worshipped as God, sitting in the Temple of God, swaying the race and the world.

The persistence of the forces of Satan by every conceivable means - in prosperity or adversity, in false prophets in whose mouths were lying spirits, by bribe, by fear, by impatience, by subtle and almost imperceptible assimilation, by false charity and sympathy, by fleshly passions, to institute idolatry was ever with a view to necessitate Israel's casting off by God and the ruin of their witness and testimony to His sovereignty.

Keep this well in mind, for the device did not cease with Israel after the flesh.

Such as work in heathen countries know only too well the truth of this. The idol or fetish is not the ultimate, it is the spiritual system behind which the heathen are held in chains of iron. It is not such a far cry from this to the cultured, educated, civilised capitulation to the revival of spiritualism and occultism.

The whole subject of total abandonment and utter consecration to Christ is not merely something extra to "Christianity" or the Christian life. Its appeal has its strength in the tremendous fact that anything which limits the Lordship, Sovereignty, Proprietorship of Christ in any life is an ally to him whose eternal quest has been to capture the place of the Son as given by the Father, and at least to divide the honours. This is idolatry. Not necessarily acute forms of devotion to other objects of worship, or initiation into occultism, but a divided heart, a reservation from Christ. In the long run it will be manifest that such gave the enemy his ground for wrecking the whole Christian life, drawing right away from the Lord.

Chapter 1 

Chapter 2 

Chapter 3 

Chapter 4 

Chapter 5 

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