little messiahs: living in the reality of a desire fulfilled

The new creation reality made available in Jesus, is intended to empower the potential of an extravagant exploitation of the the kindness extended toward us.  My brother says it like this: “If I preach a message on grace to a company of people who are likely to take it as a license to sin, and they don’t take it as a license to sin, I haven’t preached true grace.”  I have heard my entire christian life that “sloppy grace” is what is causing all the “problems” in the church.  It’s a lie.  True grace is offensive, in every way, to the systems of belief most of us have been endoctrinated with since our birth.  I want to suggest that religion is a demonic spirit, and IT is causing every problem in the church.  The cross of Jesus Christ offends for the same reason it brings pleasure…because on it He FINISHED the work, and condemned sin.  In essence, it thwarts every one of our attempts to prevent one another from abusing grace.  If it is not doing so, it isn’t becuase it doesn’t, its because we have yet to understand it.  The word “Christian” is more literally translated “little Christ”; “Christ” ,meaning anointed one, and is the English adaptation of the Greek word “Cristos”, which is drawn from the Hebrew concept of “Meshiach” (Messiah).  We are little messiahs.

The present and potentially most important manifestation of the ressurection of Jesus among humanity is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in all those who believe on His sacrifice.  I say that because I believe it to have always been the highest intention of God in redemption.  This is why (Levi’s opinion) redemption is more beautiful than the original perfection.  In Genesis 2, God walked with man in the garden of Eden, and gave it to Him to tend and keep.  It was the garden of their intimacy in the land called “pleasure”.  In otherwords, on the terrain of pleasure, by the nourishment of ther river of life, God established the place of their encounter; the place where they would know Him.  It was there that they lived in perfection; unadulterated intimacy with God; true righteousness.  So when Jesus came, condemning sin in the flesh at His death, and restoring the innocence of righteousness at His ressurection, He brought us back to the garden.  The difference, and permanence, of this time around is that He didn’t just put us back in the garden…He put the garden inside of us.  In John 20:19-23, the disciples are visited by the ressurrected Lord Jesus.  He showed them the holes in His hands and side, and scripture says they were then glad to see Him.  He had taken the punishment, condemned sin, and conquered death: thats good news.  In verses 22-23, it says “And when he had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any they are retained.’ ”  I don’t know about you, but I was never told (and have yet to be, aside from this scripture) that I had the power to forgive sin…to set the captive free.  Little Messiah.  When God made man, His original design for us was in His own image.  When we broke relationship with Him in the garden, we were led away by imposed sin to the path of death.  Then God took on the likeness of man in the flesh, so that He could lead flesh back into the likeness of God.  The gift of the cross is the Spirit of God inside of us.  This is a far more daunting reality than we have been willing to consider for many centuries.  But much is changing.

Proverbs 13:12 says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”  The longing within the heart of every man is eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11).  The only way that eternity is characterized is that it is evidenced by an eternally existent reality.  There has to be something or someone that existed before in order for there to be a foundation for present existence.  In otherwords, God wrote the desire for Himself on the hearts of men.  While this truth from Proverbs 13 is pertinent in every spiritual and natural circumstance in life, I want to propose that its ultimate reality has to do with our relationship with and identity in God, and all that surrounds it.  We know from Genesis 3:22 that the fruit of the tree of life was immortality.  Man was always meant to live forever.  God placed both the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden, but only the tree whose fruit lead to death was forbidden.  I believe that the fruit of the cross of Jesus, the messianic tree of life, is a desire fulfilled; it is freedom from the knowledge of good and evil; salvation from the bondage of death.  While most of us would agree with that language, it is in what it implies that most of us will begin to shake in our religious boots.

The extremely challenging reality of the cross of Christ is this: the believer is sinless, and has power to forgive all sin.  In Galatians 2:20-21, Paul writes “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.  I do not set aside the grace of God; for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died in vain.”  We know that righteousness is right relationship with God; this is why we “sinned” in the garden…we broke relationship with Him and forfeited our fullfillment.  In his article “The Nature of Sin and Repentance”, Scott Miller says this:

“The bible tells us that God breathed into Adam and he became ‘alive.’ It was the very Spirit of God that originally animated the man, and if this is true, what animates the man when God has been removed from the throne of man’s heart?  At this point it is the “void” that animates mankind, the emptiness created by God’s absence. That void, that emptiness, is sin. Adam and Eve had already left the Father in their hearts when they chose to believe the liar. The outward act of eating the forbidden fruit was just the manifestation of the sinful state in their hearts, the emptiness created by God’s absence. Sin is a state of being not just an outward act. This is further shown when we understand that the Greek root that we get the word evil from is also the root from which we get the words pain, poor and poverty. On its face it denotes a state of lack.”

The infilling of the Holy spirit was a long awaited yearning in the heart of God.  God breathed into Adam (“Ruach Hakodesh” – [Hebrew] breath of God; Spirit of God), and He was brought to LIFE.  Jesus came to give us life and life abundant.  The Spirit of God was leaning over the edge of heaven, waiting to be welcomed back into the heart of men by one who would choose love, unlike Adam, even unto His own death…the death that condemned sin.  This is the greatest expression of “a desire fulfilled”…the desire of God, and the desire of mankind.  As discussed already, sin is not an action.  The greek word for sin is “harmatia”, and it is defined as “an inward element that produces evil acts”.  Jesus final judgement of sin on the cross removed its dominion over men, if they would only recieve it as recompense for sin (Romans 6:14).  This is the grace of God.  Sin was determined by God, not men, and the expressions of it as wicked by His written law.  HIS heart on the matter is all that makes it what it is.  If sin (the state of unrighteousness; the void of the absence of God) was condemned on the cross and can have no dominion over us, it means only one thing: we cannot sin.  Not that we are not ABLE to engage in unrighteous activity, but rather that as far as God is concerned, it is impossible altogether.

The tempation of the garden was a forbidden fruit, wherein man dethroned God from His place of preeminnece within them.  The power of sin, what gave it life and influence, was that it was “wrong” (the law).  Romans 7:7-9 says, “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died”.  The knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge that determines what is wrong for us to do in the mind, gave power to sin.  My brother says it like this: If you are walking along a road, it isn’t wrong for you to cross the road.  As a matter of fact, its your good right to do so.  However, as soon as the county you’re in places a crosswalk there with cross-signals, if you don’t obey them, you break the law.  The rule made it wrong, thus empowering your ability to break the rule.  If the ordinance isn’t there, there is no rule to break; crossing the road is no longer wrong.  This is why it says that Jesus was the fulfillment (target) of the law.  Its no longer an external law, its an inward nature.  I would like to suggest then, that if sin lies dead apart from the law (or the knowledge of good and evil), how can we who are also dead to the emptiness of its nature engage in it?  For too long, we have been taught to fight sin as opposed to recieve grace, which is the only power to never sin again.  And this is grace; sin is no longer alive, and we are one with God.  We will never be devoid of God again if we believe in Jesus, and therefore will never be subject to sin.  We can, however, make choices in presenting our members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, allowing it to perpetuate a measure of destructive influence (Romans 6:11-13).  But the key is that we are no longer the ones who live, but Jesus Christ within us, by the indwelling Holy Spirit.  We have died, and are therefore dead to sin.  We have been saved from the power of sin to bring us to death and maintain a state of emptiness or separation from God within us.

If we are still able to access and engage in the destructive processes of unrighteousness (finding temporary and broken fulfillment in something other than the love of God), this reality of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the condemnation of sin is the only way we are free from the dominion of it.  If its dominion is in our doing it, or engaging in it in any way, most of us will have to confess that we are still slaves to it.  Sin was never what we did, it was how we were.  Hebrews 10:14 says “For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.”  We are sinless, and are re-learning to live like God.  This is why Jesus breathed on the disciples, saying “recieve the Holy Spirit” BEFORE He told them they could forgive sins.  When God filled them, made His home in them, they were no longer separate from Him.  They were not empty; they were once again “like God”.

If sin is the “don’t do’s” we’ve been taught it is, if it is a list of actions, then we are incapable of being free from it.  You do not reform your nature and your thinking with your actions, you reform your actions by way of your nature and thinking.  This is why it is Christ who lives in us (new nature) and we are transformed by the renewing of the mind (Romans 12:2).  We are perfect (sinless; one with the living God), and being sanctified; made holy; re-trained to live from the life of God within us, as opposed to for it.  Thus, we are filled with the authority to do all that Jesus did on the earth: cleanse the leper, heal the sick, raise the dead, bind and loose angels & demons, and forgive sin.

It isn’t that we can’t do unrighteous things, its that we aren’t filled with unrighteousness anymore.  It is not our nature, and has no bearing on our relationship with God.  The journey now is about learning how to be little messiahs.