An Easter Message
by Norman Grubb

(A message from Norman Grubb, dictated to a friend during a very recent visit in his home)

For many years I have puzzled over why Hebrews describes God as a "consuming fire" and why John describes God as "Light" until I saw that through Adam He as we had died completely out of a relationship expressed in its heavenly nature which must have been radiating through Adam and Eve in their creation. The nature really was Christ in His fixed expression of total love which is also His Father’s eternal expression of His fiery nature. All nature is, after all, fiery at its base, depending on which direction it is going. Thus, the Father’s fiery nature, going in the direction of Christ, becomes Light.

How did fire become light? By what we now know is the scientific process in the sun. When there is excessive heat, the proton particle fuses and out from it comes the X particle, whose nature is light. So that we all live in a light and not fire relationship to the sun in natural life. This is so adequately described to us in the Cross in the Heart of God. That transmission from fire to light is the Cross, and in the Father becomes the begetting of the Son, the light of the universe. So there are two natures which may be described as fire and light with a vast difference in their products. The choice between these two natures has to be made in every created being and thus the two trees-one of life and one of death in the Garden. This is the enormous final capacity of choice which we all have. These may be more simply described as the two forms of self. The fire self consists of "me for me" and shows itself in all our fallen fire-selves; the products of our taking Satan’s fire nature through the forbidden tree are covetousness, pride, envy and hatred. This came at once into light in the murder of Abel through Cain, and thus unto us all as children of Adam. Fiery self-for-self, that hell nature, the very opposite of the Son’s love nature-has captured the world with such subtlety of Satan that until we receive some necessary shock we are all blinded in thinking we are okay in our self-absorption to produce our self-ends. And this is hell.

Only then do we catch sight of a love of God which has no anger or sense of retaliation in it, but only how could He regain the vast human family expressing a hellish, godless nature in all forms of self-for-self, which clever Satan has made us think to be quite okay. And being a hellish nature, it can’t be improved by any forms of religious self-effort. For its only improvement would be a total transference in humans from our normal expression of a self-for-self life into an altogether opposite expression of a self-for-others life.

There lies God’s problem. In our ignorance all these years we have called the products of this Satan and hell type of nature (bringing all its sorrows and disasters) God’s wrath and infliction of judgement. Yet the whole marvelous truth is that on that very same day of the Fall, when God had to warn us humans of sin’s effects, what He really gave was His own inspoken word that there would come a man with no human father, but through a human mother, and He would bruise the serpent’s head of this Satanic being causing all this hellishness.

We follow in Bible history those years in which He brought a special covenanted nation into being called Israel, by which this Bruiser of the serpent’s head, called by them Messiah, would make His appearance and produce this marvelous overturn of humanity as Satan’s captives. Thus He at last came in simplest hidden way, not as the Son of God, which He really is, but calling Himself the Son of Man to identify Himself with fallen humanity, and is therefore called in the Scriptures the Second Adam, replacing and destroying the effects of that first Adam.

On that basis, we now see the Son of God as the human babe of Bethlehem and his whole life lived with all the normal human reactions of humanity in soul and body, but He with His heavenly spirit of love in disguise as it were, in Him, and never with that fallen Adam’s nature of self-for-self. How could He then rescue these vast millions of humanity all caught up by and living by Satan’s lying nature of self-for-self?

That is why that Son of Man, personally endued by His baptism by the Holy Spirit, was compelled to spend forty whole days alone facing that Satanic Messiah of Evil. But He did so. We can’t imagine the pressure on Him as a normal human self as Son of Man. Forty days without food and tempted every day to use His selfhood as self-for-self by some miracle of making bread. And then in those same days with every pressure to make Himself the noted person in those superstitious years in Israel and among the Romans with all their idol gods by this dramatic leap from a pinnacle of the temple and landing harmless. And once again, a forty days refusal of that easy way of becoming an outer object of adoration and gaining His many followers on that lying level. And then finally an exposure to which it looks as if He himself had not recognized the fierceness of the temptation to be given some place of leadership over the whole world by Satan, who had been given the right of lordship in world affairs. There was the special flash of light, He saw who His enemy was in all his hellish self-for-self nature, and spoke that word of such authority that Satan had to flee, and there was never any further evidence of Satan getting an inroad into the inner being of this "Son of Man".

So from then onwards, Jesus remained confronted with every form of threat and hatred and opposition, by the very ones who had been saying they were awaiting the Messiah. But of course that Messiah to them would mean false human lordship. There is never an evidence that Jesus, though he knew of their threats and plots to kill Him and officers to arrest Him, was moved a total inch. Because He had settled that once and for all in forty tremendous days face to face with His and our enemy, till the enemy had to take flight.

Then we follow through in those Gospels with all the different ways he had, by accusation, controversy, temptations, to make some impression of Himself, but He walked taking no notice except by such sayings "You who claim to be God’s covenant people are really of your father Satan, and it’s his lusts you are doing" (John 8:44).

So now we follow through these years of endless temptation, threat and plot without Him moving an inch in response to Satan’s strong pulling on Him to make some defenses of self-for-self, but saying the day is coming when there will be the final battle and final victory, including Him rising from the dead, though none believed it.

We meet the final crisis in such an amazing expression of God’s power that He raised Lazarus from the dead after lying dead for four days and this causing such amazement and excitement that the common people really did begin to proclaim Him as the coming Messiah. Jesus himself saw how this was God’s way to the final crisis, because the Jewish leaders could not stand that and even imagined it might make trouble with their overlords, the Romans. And so the decision was made to arrest and kill Him.

Now here again we see the crucial battle of self-for-self as its own will and thus also God’s opposite will. Can we imagine those hours when even the Son of God had to lie alone on His face in that Garden and sweat blood-for what reason? Not because He feared death, but because He came to be the founder of the restoration and regeneration of the human race out of Satan’s hands, and that could only be, not even by all the travail of His sufferings and crucifixion, but by an actual rising from the dead. That is what He had to believe in those three hours on His face, and He did believe it, and the simple proof is His total calmness and self-stability through all those preliminary insults, beating and final consignment to crucifixion. And there He went with that last word to His disciples: "The cup which my Father hath given shall I not drink it?"

And the calmness in which in those agonies and insults on the cross He could be saying to them, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do", and taking personal care of His mother by entrusting her to John’s care; also His final cry of "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" showing that He did actually go into a hell experience like a lost human, and then finally "It is finished". And then He rose again when none except himself believed He would do so, staying on earth long enough in forty days to manifest himself. Then the glorious ascension in the presence of five hundred brethren, revealed to us by Paul in his Ephesians letter, which meant Him taking the seat of authority at the right hand of the Majesty on High, and thus now able by the Holy Spirit to impart to us wretched humans His own new nature in its drive of self-for-others, the very opposite of the fallen nature in its drive of self-for-self.

And now all these years since, we are able to partake of this same new birth and life lived in the spirit of love by simple faith, but which must of course have behind it a radical insight into the horrible Satan-self condition in which we had for long lived as though okay. So we come to understand that this redemption was by no means merely one tragic incident, but a whole life lived as Adam the First was meant to live. In Jesus’ case the pressure of Satan’s methods to divert this Son of Man to take a bite of that false tree, failed: He never did. What a Savior!