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Wednesday June 8, 2022
Revolutionary Truth
“Now after the Biblical revelation of what we humans are–containers and agents–we find the Bible distinctly says that we have no nature of our own but express the nature of the particular deity indwelling us. On the one hand, Paul says in Ephesians 2 that while we were in our unredeemed condition, dead in trespasses and sins, we ‘walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience…and were by nature children of wrath’–not some nature of our own but of our satanic parent, his children in his wrath nature. Then on the other hand, regarding the redeemed, Peter tells us that by receiving ‘exceeding great and precious promises’ we become ‘partakers of the divine nature.’ Quite obviously then, it’s not some human nature, but God expressing His nature by us. Here are the two deity natures expressed in our humanity.
This could not be more explicit than it is in the Biblical account about the Garden of Eden. There we are told life and death were symbolized by the eating of the fruit of the tree. The Bible tells us that if Adam and Eve had eaten of the right tree they would have received eternal life. Yet we know that eternal life is not in a fruit but in a Person–in Him who said, ‘I am the life.’ Therefore, if eating the right fruit means that into our first parents would have come the person who is eternal life, eating of the wrong fruit means that the false deity, the spirit of error, entered in and they became his dwelling place.
Now here is the point, the nitty gritty of the reality. All we redeemed humans recognize, when our eyes have been opened by grace, that we were sinners, were under the power of Satan, did his works, were his children. But do we realize that we actually were he, in the sense that humans are always manifesting the deity who expresses himself by us? Did any of us know, while unsaved, that we were Satan walking about in our human forms, or that the redeemed are Christ walking about in their human forms? We should know it now, for we are plainly told this.
I remember the surprise when I first read in 1 John 4:4, ‘Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.’ I knew that ‘He in me’ was the Holy Spirit, but I suddenly woke up to the fact that there was equally ‘he in the world’ in fallen humans, just as much as the Holy Spirit is in us when redeemed. And two verses later John is saying, ‘hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.’ That began to open my eyes, and I began to relate it to the symbol of the fruit of the garden.
Then I became alerted to Jesus’ words as He confronted those opposing Him, as recorded in John 8:38-44. ‘I speak what I have seen with My Father’ and ‘you do what you have seen with your father,’ started Jesus. As religious Jews they resented that, and indignantly responded, ‘We’re not born of fornication. We have one Father, God.’ Jesus answered, ‘If God were your Father, you would love Me.’ Then He broke the truth wide open and declared outright, ‘You are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father you will do.’ When I read that, my eyes were opened to the second phrase as well as the first. The first says that we humans–all of us who have not yet become children of God by faith in Jesus Christ–have Satan, not God, as our father. But the second phrase especially struck me: ‘…the lusts of your father you will do.’ Not that we are doing our own lusts, but the lusts of our father. Then all we are doing as humans is not a product of some supposed human fallen nature, but actually Satan himself expressing his own lusting nature by us! All we are, therefore, is merely the outer expression of this spirit of error, this god of this world, living his own Satan-form of life by our humanity. That was revolutionary.”
Pages 50-52
By Norman Grubb
