Dangerous Virus

Acts 5 – Great fear came on the church and over everyone who heard about how deadly serious and honest one had to be to be able to participate in fellowship with God's family. A very strong natural polarization took place but not artificially like the Jewish religion had done. “None of the rest” dared to associate with them, yet they held them in high esteem. Yet at the same time multitudes were constantly being added to their number. These must have accepted the whole truth (v. 20) about God and taken the risk of honesty and vulnerability in fellowship with the saints. The polarization was real and life-threatening. This is a community of healing so full of the presence and passion of God that to hide anything in your heart from exposure was to invite death by glory. No wonder anyone who did not want to be transparent dared not associate with them. The choice had become clear. If you wanted to maintain the status quo system and keep up your fragile balancing act between deception and honesty, you could not associate with these believers. They had become a deadly threat to the very system that keeps the world functioning. If allowed to spread and infect society the whole power and economic infrastructure of the entire world would begin to crumble and disintegrate. These people did not relate to each other according to all the carefully assembled rules, strictures and laws worked out over centuries. Their economy violated all of societies value tables and charts. They didn't subscribe any longer to the human hierarchy flow charts of pride and shame assigned to different positions and classes of people. They didn't participate any longer to the craving for wealth and status and greed. Instead their hearts and their hands were opening wide and they were living within a new social structure totally foreign to this world. It was as if a strong virus had fallen to the earth from outer space and was rapidly infecting more and more people. The men responsible for maintaining law and order and protect the world's societal system felt compelled to impose an antidote quickly to inoculate the masses with fresh transfusions of fear so they would not be suckered into this “dangerous” infection of the mind. The leaders felt compelled to quarantine this virulent infection until it would run its course and die out. And they had to resort to the strongest means at their disposal – fear, intimidation, shame and violence. These are the primary fundamentals of Satan's kingdom to prop up his carefully assembled system of deceptions and keep in place the lies about God embedded in men's hearts.

Salvation Equation

The understanding of what Jesus experienced when He felt our sins and the effect of sin on Himself from the garden to the cross has an interesting application to our santification. He not only received the legal penalty, but during that time He actually felt and experienced in full within His emotions, feelings and sensations everything that we feel, sense, experience when we suffer in sin, shame, fear and guilt.

The amazing flip side of this is that we are to live our lives experiencing in exactly the same way and to the same degree the feelings, emotions and reality of His perfect righteousness that has no causative within ourselves other than our belief in His provision. We are asked, even expected, to indulge ourselves by means of trust in God's promises, to actually experience in every way the daily life that Jesus lived as a perfect human vicariously including His emotions, feelings and sensations. To the same degree that He experienced my sin I am expected and privileged to experience His perfection.

By the same principle, just as He never shoe to sin and therefore had no trace of cause in Himself for the effects of sin that He suffered; just so I am not to choose to be righteous in any respect as a cause for the experience of and effects of being a righteous being. If I believe that even one thread of my righteous “robe” is of my own making then by the law of equation I am implying that maybe at least one thread of Jesus' suffering and punishment was caused by some little sin He committed.

Arm of the Lord

This Well-being keeps showing up in Isaiah, sometimes translated that way and sometimes as peace. Well-being is a call to focus more dominantly on Being rather than Doing. This of course makes obvious sense when acknowledging that we are human beings and not human doings, although that distinction is fast being lost sight of by the way we think many times.

There is an interesting study potential emerging about the ARM of the Lord. It is always associated with might and strength. But God's ways are not like ours and He does not use force so strength is used differently than what we normally would expect. The right arm is strong but also skilled and coordinated. Isa. 40:10,11 – His arm rules, tends His flock, gathers His lambs into His bosom. God's strength is not in His ability to force His own way against our free choice but to skillfully coordinate all events and choices to take full advantage of every opening to pour in His grace and redeeming power. His right arm will not triumph by violating-type force but by infinite love and passion drawing everyone through incomprehensible wisdom and skillful guidance of all circumstances born of free choices no matter how evil, to ultimately work together not only for His glory but for the good of every trusting child of His.

Significance of Dream Discovered

This is in response to the assignment given me in a dream 3/24. I was to be alert to the meaning of 2 things – Messenger and Well-being. This morning in my meditations through Isa. 51-53 I suddenly came across both of them quite unexpectedly. It might help to explain the context. I have been feeling somewhat despairing lately about my lack of progress in personal spiritual growth. My head is filling with wonderful truths but my heart (and its seems my household) seems to be quite unfruitful and unchanged. We are all suffering very strongly under the addiction to TV which consumes a great portion of our attention. This baffles me as to how to relate to the problem both myself and how to relate to the rest in my home also caught in this trap. It feels like a catch 22. If I talk about it a feeling of condemnation and strong resentment immediately rises up in our minds. If I keep my silence the damage continues to our spiritual sensibilities and probation time is squandered away. I feel damned if I do and damned if I don't. This has all the hallmarks of a trap designed by Satan himself. I do not want to react in legalism like as was done to me as a child. I now know this is one of the old problems God brought me back here to face and be repaired. But I have been baffled as to any other options since my mental solution database is empty of appropriate and God-like responses to this situation. That is the context. I cannot claim to have a complete grasp on an answer but something is emerging from the fog and taking shape from what I observe in Isaiah. I have been trying to perceive with my heart and mind and spirit all working together to perceive what God may be really trying to convey to us in these ancient revelations. Particularly in the light of recent reworking of the big picture of the Great Controversy I am alert to observe and pick up on passionate expressions of God's heart and desires. The book of Isaiah seems to be full and throbbing with these kind of communications and it is exciting to uncover and decode them with the guidance of His presence. I have been compelled to make notations in the margins to flush out the underlying emotions and messages from the heart of God to humanity. I see God's great frustration in trying to reorient our thinking and paradigms and try to overcome or undermine our religious bigotry and our angry assumptions about Him. Repeatedly He returns to two main things – the great and final resolution at the end of the millenium (but enacted in various degrees at different times before then), and His trump card to bring this about – Jesus. Isa. 50:1-3 The rift between you and Me was not my idea. Verses 4-8a Jesus – the One who clings to God while receiving abuse from us. Verses 8b-11 You can still come to Me even if you hate Me and have issues about Me. You have a choice and here are the consequences. 51:1-3 Focus on Me more than your ancestry. Verses 4-6 Focus on Me more than your physical surroundings. Verses 7,8 Focus on Me more than social intimidation. Verses 9-11 I am the God of mighty acts of power and deliverance. Verses 12-16 I am the Creator God who comforts you, not your oppressor. Verses 17-20 Our concept of God falsely views Him as angry, the source of our disasters, the one who afflicts us. Verses 21-23 God will cause us to realize He is for us, not against us. Then we will not be tormented by what we perceived as His anger but those who still believe the lies about Him will suffer in their perception of His “wrath”. 52:1 Wake up and realize who you are in Christ. Don't be self-actualized in lies about God but be Christ-actualized. Verse 2 Loose yourself from the chains of lies about God that bind your neck. Verses 3-5 My people were innocently made slaves without even being paid for. They were oppressed and deceived by the enemy without cause and the result is My reputation is continuously maligned and slandered. Verses 6-10 Here is what God wants – people who know the truth about God through intimate relationship with Him will be His Messengers to bring good news, peace, happiness, salvation, joy... (peace in the margin is Well-being) His messengers will shout joyfully together the truth about God. The revelation of God's ARM (51:9, 52:10, 53:1) is the truth about how God exercises power – not using force on our wills but using skill to coordinate everything to finally work together for our best and to vindicate His reputation before the whole universe – God's salvation. Verses 11,12 These messengers need to distance themselves from everything that confuses them about the truth about God. They are vessel-bearers for God. They will walk in very close synchronization with God's walk. God will walk both in front and back of them as they learn to walk in lockstep with Him. They learn not to walk too fast or too slow or in fear. 52:13 through chapter 53 Jesus is the model demonstration of walking in perfect lockstep with God. He is also the Saviour and Redeemer who is completely devoid of external beauty so we would focus on God's real beauty of character. Further than this, He took on all our oppression and all the consequences of our separation from God and our lies about God. The punishment that undeservingly fell on Him that was destined for us empowers us to have the Well-being, the peace of God. This enables us to be His messengers to expose the truth about God to others while enjoying the fruit of Jesus' righteousness because He ate the fruit of our rebellion. If God had not given me this assignment in my dream 3 nights ago I might never have seen much of this. I am amazed that He desires to talk about these things with me when I don't deserve the time of day from Him. God, Your gentleness is making me great – and opening my heart. Thank-you! The life of Christ was an ever-widening, shoreless influence, an influence that bound Him to God and to the whole human family. Through Christ, God has invested man with an influence that makes it impossible for him to live to himself. Individually we are connected with our fellow men, a part of God's great whole, and we stand under mutual obligations. No man can be independent of his fellow men; for the well-being of each affects others. It is God's purpose that each shall feel himself necessary to others' welfare, and seek to promote their happiness. Every soul is surrounded by an atmosphere of its own – an atmosphere, it may be, charged with the life-giving power of faith, courage, and hope, and sweet with the fragrance of love. Or it may be heavy and chill with the gloom of discontent and selfishness, or poisonous with the deadly taint of cherished sin. By the atmosphere surrounding us, every person with whom we come in contact is consciously or unconsciously affected. (COL 339)

Hot springs of the mind

My heart is like a minefield with triggers hidden on the surface attached to pockets of gunpowder buried underneath – lies embedded in old memories. Anther analogy would be like hot geysers that unexpectedly explode and have the potential to scald those nearby. The hot springs and exploding geysers have the stench of rottenness along with the heat. They make for very colorful life sometimes but also can be just boiling mud pots.

The problem is not the water however. The water was meant to be life-giving. But there are deep crevasses of pain through which the life-giving springs are sabotaged by lies implanted by the devil of hell. This super-heats and corrupts the life-giving water on its way to the surface and by the time it reaches the realm of demonstration it has turned into dangerous outbursts of wrath, seething cauldrons of bitterness or mud pots of shame where boiling water keeps the filth of lower passions continuously stirred and stinking.

Jesus offers to make me a spring of living water, a cool, refreshing source of life to all around me. To accomplish this He has to identify the deep pockets of heat produced by the embedded lies about Him and myself buried under years of life as well as those passed down from my forebears. As He seals each fault line in my foundational crust with the cement of truth mixed with abounding grace, the outlets began to transform and cool and smell sweet again for the first time. One by one the healing progresses as the foundation is repaired and sealed.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind – making new the old memories.