By Daniel Yordy
www.dyordy.com

"The way of the wicked, He turns upside down." Solomon

No Christian is an any danger whatsoever of becoming deceived. But all of us are in great danger (not really) of remaining deceived. (When I say, not really, I mean that Jesus is our Savior and He is well able and certain to finish the work He has begun.) My point is this: as believers in Jesus, we are coming out of a world of deception. If we continue seeing things as we always have seen them, even (especially) as Christians, then we stand in great jeopardy.

Right now, over and over, you should be seeing as you have never seen before, you should be discovering that all of mankind, and all of the church in this world has had this whole thing backwards, upside down, completely wrong. And should that surprise us? Tell me, in all of my life as a Christian up till now, other than His goodness, what part of my experience is the full and utter fulfillment of the New Covenant? It's not hard at all, for me anyway, to accept the idea that the years of my walk seeking after God have been guided by a completely erroneous understanding of everything. Backwards. Upside down.

Here is the problem. When God begins to turn you right side up, everyone else, including most of your brethren, and even, your own 'rational' thought, are now convinced that you are standing on your head, that you are falling into deception.

"This is crazy!" I tell myself.

Why don't I listen? Because the closeness of Jesus that I have come to know in recent months is everything I have ever longed for, He fills me with His gladness, and no argument will entice me away from living in the full consciousness that I am in Him and that He is in ME. I am simply not interested.

Let's go back to the garden. Always, we must go back to the garden to understand the place from which we fell. The garden is not our destiny; we are going way beyond the garden. Adam failed to eat of the tree of life.

"Look, look," they cry. "You are trying to be like God, this business of claiming that you have no life other than God's life in you. That's the same lie that Satan tempted Eve with in the garden."

What is this argument of the religious man really claiming? It is really claiming that Satan was telling Eve the truth, that he was, in fact, enticing her to "want to be like God."

May I suggest to you that Satan was offering a crock of bull.

What should Eve's answer have been? Here it is:

"I really don't know what you're talking about; I am already just like God."

Tell me, if you would, that Eve was not created in the image and likeness of God.

The truth is, Eve was already more like God than she, in an eternity of beholding His glory inside of her, could ever comprehend.

Satan's offer, was pure, unadulterated nonsense.

The church teaches that Satan's sin was that he wanted to be like God. Isaiah did not say that Lucifer wanted to be like God. If Lucifer had wanted to be like God, to love as He loves, to show mercy as He shows mercy, to be kind as He is kind, God would have been thrilled. Isaiah said that Lucifer said in his heart, "I shall be like the most High." At what point is Satan not blowing smoke?

The life that was in Adam was the very life of God breathed into him. Adam had no life of his own. He was not a 'self' separate from God, operating out from his own existence. Now, we know that Adam was not yet manifest as a son of God because he had not yet eaten from the tree of life. By that we understand that Adam was in the place of development. But Adam had no life of his own. The life that filled him was God Himself. It was not possible for Adam to become more like God than he was, except in this way - to eat of the tree of life and to step forth in all the revelation of the God who was in him.

The one thing Satan cannot stand is this whole business of God living His life inside of human flesh. The triumph and victory that God is after is: God forever revealed in and through human flesh.

The last thing Satan wanted was for Adam and Eve to continue being like God. His goal was to get them to think in their own minds that they were a being, an entity, a 'self' separate from God and that the burden of being good instead of bad now rested on them. Any Christian who believes that they are one and God is another, and that God (up there) has told them what to do and that now it is up to them to do what is good and to not do what is evil, has bought the lie of Satan and is living in the realm of death. This is the carnal mind. This is the way of thinking that is always at war with God. This kind of thinking is a repudiation of the gospel, it is a mockery of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

The moment that Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of knowledge, the first thing that changed was their minds, the seeing of their minds, their imagination. Suddenly they saw themselves. Suddenly, the idea that they were one thing and God another seized their thinking. Suddenly, the idea that they had better choose to do what is good and not do what is evil became the only way they could think.

And instantly, they were ashamed.

They had not become like God, they had become like Satan, imagining in their minds that they were a 'self' separate from God and that now, the issuance of life must proceed out of them. And all of this was 'imagination' only. "Alienated from the life of God in their minds." as Paul said.

And so, falling back into that same ridiculous 'imagination,' Christians convince themselves that they are a 'self' separate from Jesus. That Jesus is up in heaven, and not their life, right now filling not only their hearts, but all of their being. That their 'life' is 'bad' and must die. That they should always be weeping before the cross over sin. That they must make sure they hear something from someone outside themselves so they can be sure to do it.

Again, it's a crock of bull. It always has been and it is still so today. It never has been true. At what point has Satan ever said anything that was true?

This way of thinking is completely contrary to the gospel.

Try this. "For ye are dead." What self can we conjure up in our imagination out of that? Then this: "Christ, who is our life." What life of our own, separate from Jesus have we created in an imagination that gives weight to a crock of bull?

The lie is not something in itself. The lie is simply pure, unadulterated nonsense. It was not true then, it did not become true when Adam believed it (except in his own imagination), and it is not true now. The concept that I am a self separate from Jesus, that I must "decrease that He might increase," that I must bring myself into alignment with God, this is nothing more than fiction conjured up in our imaginations. It opposes everything the gospel says.

[When John the Baptist said, "I must decrease that He might increase," he was not giving us a formula for Christian living; he was not even born again! John the Baptist was speaking of himself as the ending of the Old Covenant.]

Let's look more closely at the 'lie' Satan offered Adam and Eve. First the words he chose: "God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." First, God knew nothing of the sort, second, they became blind (watch The Matrix), third they were instantly no longer like God, and fourth, God is love, not knowledge. But we will not find Satan's lie in these words. Adam and Eve received something from the serpent. We must look at what they received to understand what he really offered man.

xxxxxxxx
Genesis 3:7 on: "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings . . . and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden."

In an earlier letter, I talked about the importance of what God asked Adam, "Where are you?" The ensuing conversation tells us exactly what the lie is that man has believed from the serpent.

"I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself."

And God said, "Who told you that you were naked? [This is one of the most important questions in the Bible] Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?"

Then the man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate."
xxxxxxxx

The entire question here is what do you do with the 'I,' the ego, the self? We have two options. The first is the lie of Satan. We can hide it, cover it over, drag it to the cross, die to it, suppress it, get it under foot, make it obey, make it look good, make it do good instead of bad, etc., etc., etc.

- Remember that the lie of Satan is that Adam could imagine himself to be a self separate from God with the duty of making himself good instead of bad. -

Or we can place the 'I' right in the center of Almighty God. I am in Jesus and Jesus is in me.

"But there is sin in the 'I,'" you might imagine.

Jesus became my sin. He took all of my sin into Himself and He has never offered to place any of it back upon me.

Understand that between us and this disaster stands the fullness of the death and blood of Jesus inside of us. Everything we embrace as truth comes out of His sacrifice as it is in us. I am clean by Jesus' blood and nothing more need be said. If we fudge on this point, where is our salvation?

My entire Christian experience and the entire Christian theology under which I have lived my life until these last few years has been entirely inside of option ONE. I abandoned that whole way of life a few years ago because I had come to the utter end of the uselessness of wearing masks, putting on faces, trying and pretending. What a hell! I had thought it was cutting edge Christianity, I did not know it was gross unbelief.

"Who told you that you have a carnal mind, I told you that you have the mind of Christ."

"Who told you that you are in the flesh, I told you that you are in the Spirit."

"Who told you that your heart is evil, I told you that Christ lives in your heart and that My love overflows from your heart."

"Who told you that you have a life separate from Jesus?"

"WHO? WHO told you that?"

"I told you that Christ is your life. I told you that all things are brand new, that all things in you are of God. I told you that your life is hid with Christ in God." [Let God speak to you.]

We can spend our Christian lives trying to do something with the 'I.'

Or we can take the 'I,' the ego, the self, and boldly place it in the very center of the light and life of Almighty God. Is that a dangerous thing to do? Absolutely! God is a consuming fire.

But everything is now God's problem. Everything.

And out of the center of God, we do that which God created us to do.

We show His creation just exactly what God is like. God reveals Himself through us.

xxxxxxxxxx

Go back to Fulfilling the New Covenant