The Radical Core

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In a real sense, there is not a new word in what we are saying—not a sentence for which we cannot present Bible authority and not a thing new to take to any born again believer. All we do is tell our fellow redeemed who they really are and already are!

When any say, “So you think you are holier than we [really than we believe ourselves to be] or regard yourselves as The Elite,” we say, “Yes, but that is just what you are also! ” Can you be more holy than a walking Christ in your human form, which you are when you recognize who you are by the obedience of faith in His declared word? Can you be more elite than “now are we the sons of God” (1 John 3:2)?

Our one reason for existence as Total Truth witnesses and being so bold about it is that though it is nothing but unrecognized truth about who
every redeemed person really is, we have very regretfully to say that, whether in victorious life books or evangelical pulpit preaching, we do not
find the total truth often given. Wherever we see even a glimpse of it, we jump to acclaim it. The last tiling we wish to be is sole purveyors of it.

But what is the radical spot which causes us to talk of “total truth”? Simply put, it is that there is no such thing as independent self in the
universe. There is only One: “I am the Lord; and there is none else” (Isa. 45:18). All creation is derivative, operating by God’s creative life in some basic form in it. And so all men, made in His image, naturally (except as hindered by unbelief) express by their created selfhood Him, their Creator.

We humans have our wonderful being as selves “in Him” (Acts 17:28); but the nature that is being expressed is His, not ours (2 Pet. 1:4). But because consciousness necessarily comes through the fact and knowledge of opposites, the one utilizing the other to express itself (like light “swallowing up ” dark), so there came into existence this false “god” with the opposite nature to the One Living God, and having the deceived imagination that he is an independent-self. That is what sin is (1 John 3:4).

This was also that we might know the false opposite, since through the Fall we have been deceived by Satan as if we were independent selves,
having received his spirit of error into ourselves to express his self-for-self nature as us. The Last Adam—God’s own Son taking flesh as us removed that spirit of error from us by His death and resurrection as us (2 Cor. 5:14, 21; Rom. 6:19), so that the deceiving spirit is replaced by the Spirit of Truth expressing His other-love nature as us

The snag and snare is that by Satan’s deceit we humans think we are independent selves with a self-operating nature of our own. This has to
be, so we learn once for all that lying deceit of being independent. The reason Romans 7 appears to be such a difficult chapter is that the final depth of this revelation is found there.

Through conditioning we have to become desperate enough to see through and discard the one tiling we humans cling to: that deceived idea that we have a nature of our own and run our own lives. Only then can we settle into the wonder of the old Satan-nature which he expressed as us (Rom. 6:21; 7:5) being now replaced forever by the glory of Christ, our “True Vine5′ expressing His True Vine nature by us, the branches (Rom. 6:22). Thus we move fixedly into the glory of the affirmation of Romans 8:2 and its spontaneous consequences in verses 14 through 16 an onward through the whole chapter.