We Only Know Right Through Wrong
by Norman Grubb

The following excerpt from Norman Grubb’s Who Am I? explores the only way God could fully condition and establish His sons to be joint heirs in His Kingdom of out-poured love.

Now we come down to ourselves. We have seen God’s purpose–to "bring many sons unto glory," glory being to total fulfilment, a vast family of sons brought to their highest conceivable destiny as co-sons and co-heirs of the universe with His own Son. He had this in hand before the creation, "according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world," and this meant one thing–that the sons must be mature, capable sons, not a crowd of irresponsible little children, but knowing who they are as persons, knowing how to function as sons, and thus knowing their destiny and able to fulfil it. That means training and development from little children to sons, and thus to sons who can represent their Father and take over His business for Him. And this is the history of the human family.

There is one facet of mature experience which is often missed, yet it lies at the roots of capability on any level and none can be sure of himself and his proficiency in any profession without it. A thing is only a thing because it has its opposite. It has a right and a wrong, and the one has overcome the other. Sweet has over-come or swallowed up bitter, smooth rough, soft hard. Life swallows up death, said Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:4; and it gets its strength from having an opposite which it has swallowed up. You cannot say a certain yes in a decision, until you have first canvassed the alternatives and said an equally certain no to each of them. The strength of the yes is in swallowing up the noes! Not in having no noes, not in ignoring their existence, but in facing them and replacing them by the final yes. Then only is the yes a strong and certain one.

Proficiency is not in ignoring the wrong way of doing a thing, still less in denying that there is a wrong way; but proficiency is in having known the wrong way and tried it out and learning once for all that it doesn’t work that way. Then the yes has its strength in swallowing up its no. A carpenter, to be proficient, must first have learned that you don’t use your chisel this way, or make your measurements that way, but then these are the right ways. No housewife can be confident in her kitchen until she first knows you don’t cook that meat at this heat, or mix those ingredients in those proportions, then she is spontaneously at ease in her good cooking. And so through every conceivable activity of life. You must know the wrong way and have proved it wrong, before you are secure and confident in the right. The one must "swallow" the other up.

And here we have God’s perfect wisdom in the birth of the human race, and in having a convenient opposite, the wrong one, the evil one, through whom He would bring his vast family of sons to maturity. This was His first way of making the devil His convenient agent. To have sons, they must find themselves in their freedom. They must discover that to be a person is to be conscious that there are alternatives and make their free choice; and ultimately their right choice through having first made the wrong one, and tasted the consequences. And the wonder of our perfect God is that He knew this was the way His predestined family of efficient sons must take, from wrong first and then to right; and He knew the suffering that entailed for them with its possibility of a lost eternity. So he took it upon Himself to go that same way to its total final end, and in the person of His own Son, Himself in His Son form, to participate in the sufferings in their fullest measure. So Peter said we are redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world": and the writer to the Hebrews takes it even further by saying that this involvement to the full in the sufferings of humanity was the only way the perfect Father, to be perfect, could go so that "it became Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, to make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings." Tremendous!

So we find our first parents in the garden, and placed between two trees, one to give life and the other death. Why did not the Father just put them there conveniently with only one tree? It wasn’t very kind of Him to put the two! We might just have eaten of the tree of life–and then been what? A crowd of helpless babies who knew nothing and could do nothing! No, the first parents of these destined sons must first discover themselves, learn their potentialities, misuse themselves–and then they are ready to be reliable ones.

And at that tree of death the deceptive voice of that "old serpent, the devil" came to them, and what it did for them was to awaken them to discover what it is to be a self. Enormous awakening with its vast potentialities. Thank you, devil. Through those tempting suggestions to have what she would like, Eve found she was a person! She had appetites in wanting to eat that fruit,with all that goes with them in making us vibrant humans. She had the awakening adventure of new discovery through sight when she saw the fruit was "pleasant to the eyes," all the limitless avenues of exploration in the visual arts and sciences. And the awakened mind, the topmost of all, by which she would know the truth of things and at the end of the long trail would "know even as we are known."

Eve, as representing us all, could only find and know herself by being solicited to be herself for her own self-ends. But more than that. She took that dangerous step which cut her off from being what we were created to be, sons in spirit-union with the Creator Son and the Father, and thus sons of self-giving love. Instead, in chosen separation from God, she, her husband and we all, became self-loving children of the god of self-centredness.

We became misused selves. We had to discover and experience what it is to be a wrong self before we are conditioned to be a right self. We have to learn misuse before we can settle into right use. One Person became a real human and did not go that way, and that was God’s Son "manifest in the flesh." But He, to be a person had to be confronted with the devil and come under the temptation of the "evil" way of self-interest. By that means He found His human self as a self, with all its normal capacities and reactions.

Therefore we must say that Adam and Eve could have made the necessary discoveries concerning themselves by temptation without responding to it. They could have replaced the attraction of the wrong fruit by taking of the right one, as Jesus did by answering the devil with the word of God; but as they did fall, we need waste no time in theorizing!

So we partook of the tree which brought the human self into manifestation in the form it was never meant to be–the self-loving self, the evil self. Indwelt by the serpent-spirit of error, it appears as a rival and attempted conqueror of the human self in its true eternal form–indwelt by Christ as the self-giving self. It has reversed the true order in which the self-loving form is swallowed up and ultimately unknown to the self-giving form it becomes in Christ, and progressively in us as we find our-selves in Him.

This tree of death has divided between good and evil and put evil in the ascendency; but in so doing it has given us to drink of the full draught of its bitterness to fit us to reach out to the water of life. The tree of life, of which we are now able to partake, since that cherubim’s sword of judgement which kept us from it, was plunged in His side instead of ours, puts evil back into good. It restores us from the curse of the divided two-power outlook to the single eye, by the glorious discovery of how God uses the evils of this world to His and our good ends.

We have become children of the devil, who, we say again, is quite simply the created being who brought into manifestation the potential there must be in freedom, of being the opposite to God; and if God is self-giving love and love is good, then Lucifer, Satan, is that opposite self-loving love, the evil which, if it had not been exposed, lies hidden eternally, ‘swallowed up" in the good. And we have eaten by choice of that divided tree, and participated in this exposed opposite. But by doing so, we have gone along a necessary road by which a person must know and reject misuse before being established in the right use. And here is the meaning of the Fall, and its value.

What is God’s Wrath?
But it is important to realize that there is a fundamental difference between the fall of Lucifer and the fall of Adam and Eve, our fall. Lucifer had made his ultimate choice from his centre, his spirit, where he totally rejected God and replaced Him with himself. He chose to be his own god. But Eve was tricked by the serpent (1 Timothy 2:14). She did not intend to reject her Creator, but just to bypass Him with an act of self-indulgence, hoping He would not notice! Her sin was of the flesh, not spirit; and Adam followed. So, thank God, the human family are prodigal sons, and have never lost the inner consciousness of having missed the way, and knowing by the inner law of their being what they ought to be. Slaves of the devil, branches of the false vine, children of the devil, caught up in the devil’s destiny, but not yet sons of the devil who by free choice become devils like their father.

For this same reason the Father revisits them in their disobedience, I always like that beautiful statement: "They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day"; and because they were God-conscious, they "hid themselves." But it is our guilt that projects wrath on God, as if that was His chief characteristic, and which still so distorts our concepts of God as if He is a monster. Still our unenlightened eyes, including, I am ashamed to say, many liberal theologians, regard the Old Testament as the record of an avenging God, instead of the same unchanging God of grace shining through from the Garden of Eden, to the call of Abraham, and through Moses and the revelation of the Tabernacle of continuing grace, to the full sunlight of His grace in our Lord Jesus Christ. But the wrath of God is only manifest in those who have the wrong relationship to Him. It is not Him as He is, who is all love. But it is what He must appear to be to those who run counter to the law of His being. The wrath operates in them, not in Him. If I have a right relationship to an electric switch and turn it on as I should do, I get a pleas-ant light. If I defy any warnings and stick my finger in the apparatus, I get a nasty shock. The shock is what I feel within myself through my unlawful contact. So it was not God who hid from the disobedient couple, it was they who hid from Him. They projected on Him a rejection which was really in themselves. And this is the wrath of God. All He said was, "Where are you, Adam? Come out from your hiding, I haven’t changed." And when they came, He talked with them, not in judgement and wrath, but in mercy. All He told them was that they would experience the inevitable effects of the discords self-loving self always brings on itself. Sorrow was what they would have, sorrow in the man’s life, sorrow in the woman’s life. Sorrow is an inner reaction, for we are inner people. It is our inner response to suffering. Because we have fallen into our false material concepts of life in its outer forms, and have brought about total disruption in our outer living by our grab-and-hold and dog-eat-dog activities, life is a continual suffering: wars, diseases, poverty, anxiety, wrongdoings, and we regard it as if those sufferings are our problems, and why does God "allow" them? But we are on the wrong foot. Sorrow is our problem, for sorrow is our inner reaction to suffering, and we are inner people. Change our sorrow into inner joy, and outer sufferings are turned to praise.

So it was the Father’s special mercy, not wrathful judgement, when He told them three times over that they would have sorrow. Why? Because sorrow would mean dissatisfaction with their earthly conditions, and desire for a better way. Thank God for sorrow. Thank God the world is restless, fermenting, dissatisfied, rebellious at its present conditions. That is its hope. That’s the best thing the Father could predict for His fallen children: and thank God, behind the sorrow and at its roots lies guilt for not being what we know we should be. But that was not all.

From that first moment of the Fall and its consequences, there was the pronouncement of deliverance; and the deliverance is in the seed of the woman which would bruise the head of the serpent. God said to the serpent, "I will put enmity between thy seed and her seed." What is the serpent’s seed? The take-over of the human family created in the image of God by a false father who would express his nature of self-centredness in them. Thus they would be the seed of the serpent. But they are still the seed of the woman, created in God’s image, and into the woman’s seed would come The One capable of destroying the works of the devil, and turning the devil’s captives into His captives. And what is more, though He would come to do this in due time in human history, in God’s timeless sight He was already, in the remarkable phrase in Revelation 13:8, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." Therefore, He was already the true Adam, the last Adam, progenitor of the new race, and could be found in spirit, as the mercy seat for sinners, from that first day of the Fall. He was so found by Abel and by the countless thousands who, like the seven thousand in the days of Ahab’s apostacy God was pleased to tell Elijah, had not bowed the knee to Baal. Abraham rejoiced to see His day: Moses counted the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: Israel in the wilderness drank of that spiritual rock that followed them and that rock was Christ. So mercy flowed out from the Garden and has never ceased flowing.

So this first stage, downward, not upward, was the necessary preparation for that vast family of sons of God. By this they could learn once for all, and reject once for all, not to be fooled again, the wrong way before the right, the misuse of the glory of being created self before its right use. And it is as if God said to Satan, "You have deliberately turned your back on Me and founded this false kingdom of the negative, the power of darkness. So now I will use you to my great ends. Through you I will bring to maturity my vast family of sons to rule this universe. When they have well learned the lie from you, they will be safe followers of the truth, and not be fooled by you again. They may visit you at times, while within your reach on earth, but they will never live with you again. Thank you, devil."