The Invasion Of The Original

Transcription

1 The Invasion Of The Original RT Nusbaum

2 Let s Start Fresh Sometimes fresh terminology can be helpful in breaking us out of religious ruts that can be connected to specific words or terminology. In such cases, when we hear a certain word or phrase, we go to what we know or think we know concerning that word or phrase, instead of what might be new in it. May the Holy Spirit touch our hearts and draw us away to the Lord in a manner that will begin something new and fresh in us. With that established, let us begin to examine the invasion of the Original. A Sweet Savor In Genesis 8:20-21, it says, And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a sweet savor; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done. What is going on here is more than an event. Eternity has touched down at this place. At this very point in time the reality of the Original, the genuineness of the Eternal, is rising from the earth into the nostrils of God. The being of God is receiving His Original from a place and point in time, and it is bringing Him pleasure. More than that, it changes Him. It changes the way God decides to proceed from that point on, because of this! This incredible essence that has risen to Him from the earth has so affected Him that He responds differently. Here is the change: I will not again curse. He has, in the past, but He will not do it again. Something of what pleases Him, but that is beyond human explanation, has touched Him and He is making declarations: and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done. He will not curse again and He is not going to smite anymore. Those are powerful changes being brought about in the God of heaven. There Is Something Sacred to God What could have wrought such a change? There is that which is sacred to God. It is actually sacred to Him. He holds it in high esteem. We call it Christ and Him crucified. But it is not the manifestation of that in time (the crucifixion at Golgotha) or manifestation of Christ in our lives that I am referring to, but rather the eternal essence of that. And here with Noah the cross is being manifested before the historical cross has even taken place, and yet it is the cross nonetheless. It is the essence of the cross. The altar is set up, and the death is enacted. The essence of the cross fills that manifestation and those objects, giving them meaning and Life with the result that it rises out of the realms of the earth! God is not saying, Oh! I like the way the wood was set in order. I like the particular lamb that you picked there. This is such a special event! He is not caught up in the earth. The essence of this thing starts rising to Him. The true essence of Christ and Him crucified. We are not referring to the teaching of Christ and Him crucified or even the event that took place, but the Original essence of the self-giving Son in His eternal Being. Consider that the Eternal One is defined as a Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world (Rev.13:8). He was exalted in the Father s heart before the event and will continue to be enthroned as Lamb long after the event. There is a reality that was and is and is to come! It is above all time, all space, and it can go up anywhere. It is what will be when there is no time and what pleased God before

3 the foundation of the world. Again, consider that He was a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. There is a spirit and an essence that filled Calvary. It filled Noah s moment when he built the altar and offered burnt offerings, and it filled Abraham s moment when he offered Isaac up. It was more than deeds and alms. It was something of heaven touching down on the earth, giving everything meaning. God is not taken with an event, but with an ever-present reality that transcends all time. In His heart this reality is the Original. No matter where it shows up, it is always the Original. The Eternal Spirit of Christ crucified is never just a copy, but always the Original from which all else must be derived. From the foundation of the world, this Lamb was slain, and throughout the ages He will abide the Same (Heb. 13:8). For our lives to have any real meaning they must be invaded by the thing that is sacred to God s heart. Otherwise, we are just going through the motions. We are speaking of the very essence, not the trappings that we see, or feel, or taste, or touch. We are speaking of Christ Himself released through us in His eternal essence. Not Deeds or Things, but Essence Most of Christianity believes that the acts and deeds they do for God have great value to Him in and of themselves. In other words, it is the work or the deed that has the value. This is what many Christians believe. They believe that just by doing that act they are counted as holy, or looked upon as above normal activity. Therefore, they count these deeds as sacred. They assume that if you pick the right act or do the right deed, you and it are sacred. But God is telling us that there must be an essence that fills that. There are some that even believe in certain objects, and think their involvement with those holy objects brings God pleasure and gives them honor with God. However, God finds more value in the motive behind the deed over the use of the object. Motive is tied to source. Source points to the origin of the action. What is its source? For example: a Buddhist may pray or serve others, but the source of this act is not Christ. Praying in and of itself has no intrinsic value. All religions pray. Is that our claim in itself? No. It had better be touched from something above. It better have the Reality or it is not real to God. Religious activities do not have an autonomous standing with God in themselves. They are like husks that are empty. It all depends on what seed we put inside of the deed. Again, it all depends on what seed we put inside of the deed. If you put a Buddhist seed in there, it has no value. If you put Christ in there it rises as sweet incense. In other words, if we think by doing things a certain way or doing certain things we are gaining value, standing, and weight with God, then we are wrong. We are offering an empty husk without the seed. It is without the Original. It is without the Eternal. We are just going through the motions. For any deed or object to become valuable it must participate in something that is higher than itself. For us, the things of God are not rituals and events; they are a participation in something that is higher than those things. Participating in something that is above the rituals and events themselves gives them meaning. It is Christ being released as Life that rises to the Father and is a good pleasure to Him. The transcending reality is the inner Seed of Christ, not the activity, and that makes even minor activities valuable and meaningful to God. Human acts are just that. They are human acts. Whether that involves religious activity or daily tasks, they are received or rejected by God based on the motivation and source behind them. We must ask ourselves, Are they of human origin, or do they originate in the Eternal, that which

4 transcends the act itself? You see, we do not have to be confined to just doing the right thing; we can be involved in something that from all time has pleased the Father. Here and now we participate in that which is Eternal when we express Christ and Him crucified. We are speaking of the manifestation of Christ that God brings forth from us. The activities are not holy in themselves because they are not counted as something in themselves. Anywhere you go, if they are having services, there will be people watching kids, a preacher, and worship. What makes those activities glorious to the eyes of God? The Original must appear. His Son must fill all those things. Just a Piece of Brass We should not give homage to any act or object that does not stem from a higher reality. Man s ingenuity may create many religious objects, such as crosses, sanctuaries, altars, etc. The value is not in the glorious idealism that created it, but in the spirit and reality with which it is approached. An example is the bronze serpent on the pole that God used with Israel in the wilderness (Num. 21:8). They sinned and God sent serpents among them. The people cried to Moses and Moses cried to God. So God said, Get a piece of brass, make a serpent and put it on a pole, hold it up and everybody that looks at that will be healed (will not die of the snake bite). Years later, they pulled the pole with the bronze serpent out again. They began holding it up in an attempt to get it to do stuff! But when King Hezekiah was destroying the altars that Judah had made to other gods, he also destroyed the bronze snake, calling it Nehushtan (II Ki. 18:4), which means: a piece of brass. It was just a piece of brass. The object had meaning only when used as representative of faith in the work of Christ on the cross. Then it had power! But really it did not have power. Originally what brought the power was the essence that was touching them, and not the objects or events. Israel used it as if the object itself was holy. They left the original meaning. It no longer partook of a holy, transcendent reality. Well, we could be that object. A group could be that object. There could be a place, people or method that was used of God, where He manifested, and yet we could lose that if we begin to make something on the earth the reality instead of remembering it is only the tool for manifesting the Eternal reality of Christ Himself. To give our lives to a cause only has meaning to whatever extent it participates in the Eternal reality of Christ crucified. The spirit of the reality must fill this husk! The deed, or the object is just a husk. The spirit of the reality must fill it or it is Nehushtan. The spirit of this reality must fill the husk or its identity as seen by God is simply that of a secular task. This explains why certain things or activities become an explosion of manifest reality. One church prays for revival for years yet nothing happens. Another simply prays, and God breaks forth! Why? Neither the act of prayer nor the amount of times you pray has value if it is devoid of the heavenly reality that God embraces with his whole being. When seeing God move on behalf of another group but not their own, some would say, Why?! Why would that happen for them? They become confused. This is because they think it is the prayer in and of itself that has power. There are prayers going up everywhere! Prayer changes things is a common phrase quoted among Christians. Yet I believe that God Himself changes things and is the change, therefore we pray to Him. James epistle tells us that we receive not either because we ask not or because we ask amiss, desiring to consume it upon our own flesh (James 4:3). When done in this spirit, we are not participating in an eternal reality with the intent that Christ crucified be manifested and break forth in our time; we just want God to do something for us. This is not a very good basis on

5 which to approach Him. But that heart that cries out, Your Son is everything to us! moves the very heart of God. The Original Throughout Time In a way, we are involved in a repeat of the timeless reality of Christ and Him crucified that activated and animated those before us and that activates us now. It is a timeless manifestation that is rolling through time but is never bound by it, rolling through different places on the earth, yet never existing only in that place. It is affecting anyone who will live beyond and look beyond themselves to find the thing that is sacred to the heart of God and say, I am with you in that! Those involved in such activities are doing more than carrying out a symbolic ritual. They are participating in the Original. And in the eternal reality of the Original, the One who was and is and is to come! He is the beginning and the end (Rev. 22:13). Jesus is even before the beginning. John 1:1 explains that. John 1:3 talks about creation, but John 1:1 says, In the beginning was the Word That is not creation. Creation does not happen until verse 3: All things were created by Him In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning it was Him; not just the person Jesus but the essence of His being! That moves God! Not just the shell that we call Jesus! We may say to the Lord, You are Holy! without being aware of His essence or the nature of His being and how lovely that is to the Father. It is who He is in the essence of His being that moves the heart of the Father, and we are joined to Him in oneness. We are not joined to an object or a doctrine, but to the person of Jesus. We are not referring to the human man who existed in real time, but to the essence of the person of Jesus that existed before the creation of the world as expressed in John 1:1! New Terminology, Same Truth This is more than just carrying out symbolism. This is participating in the eternal reality of the Original. The Eternal Prototype quickens our deeds and activities. The Eternal Prototype. Christ, the Eternal Prototype, the Original, in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27)! Many are familiar with the terminology: Christ in you, the hope of glory. This is the same thing, just in different terminology, which hopefully can shake us free from our own ideas of what that means and bring us into a sphere where the Holy Spirit can breathe the breath of life and take us somewhere we couldn t have even imagined. Have you ever been to a flea circus? They have a little box and the fleas will jump around and do little tricks. When they first put the fleas into the box, the fleas jump and bump their heads on the lid. The fleas keep trying to jump and they keep hitting their heads. Finally the fleas realize they can only jump as high as the lid before they bump their heads, and thus they are trained to jump that high and no higher. Then, when they are put into the box without the lid, even though they could actually jump much higher, they only jump as high as the box they were trained in. Terminology can do that sometimes. Terminology can be of God, but God does not want us bound by it. We can get to the place where every time someone says a certain word we agree with it based on what that word has meant to us in the past without any continuing openness towards the Holy Spirit to reveal Christ in more fullness.

6 The Eternal Counterpart Through Christ being our Life, we can know that the heavenly is given place in the earth. The reality that the Eternal is given manifestation in time shouldn t be that foreign. In Christ and through Christ we can make that leap! The virtue that is found manifested in time has drawn its source from a heavenly Eternal counterpart above. The earth then becomes the present day vessel for the Eternal reality. This concept was set forth to us in the Book of Hebrews. The earthly tabernacle had an Eternal counterpart in the heavens. God showed the real, the Original, to Moses and told him to build the tabernacle according to the patterns he saw from God above (Ex. 25:40; Heb. 9:24). That was the real! That was the Original being manifested in time and space. I will manifest my reality right here in this tent! God said. My presence will dwell in this place! Here and now! But the Eternal reality did not stop when they moved out of the tabernacle into the temple that Solomon built. Some people may have been resistant to building a temple because God first manifested in their midst within the tabernacle. But such an attitude would be making the kind of building more important than the Eternal One who will be manifested within it. Eventually, God did leave the tabernacle, even before the temple was built. David, a man with a heart after God, did not replicate the tabernacle of Moses when he brought the ark into Jerusalem. David made his own tent, called it Zion, and God was in there (II Sam. 6:17)! David would just walk in there and tell the Lord how much he loved him! Even though the presence of the ark made the tent like the Holy of Holies, and even though the tent was not set up like the tabernacle, God did not tell David, You are not supposed to be in here! You are not the high priest! or This shouldn t be here! This is not the tabernacle! God said, That man has a heart for me! David s focus was on the Lord, his heart was for God to appear, and so He did. The Original or A Shadow? Even before the city of Jerusalem was established as His own, God knew the city He was building was only an earthly reality of an Original that already existed; the earthly was only a shadow. When Israel inhabited Jerusalem, there was already in the heart of God something more real than that. The earthly representation would reach its fullest significance as it participated in the heavenly reality. For David and those by whom it was originally established, it was the City of God. They did not view it as an original entity in itself, but as a shell for housing God s Eternal reality. Sometimes we tend to make the work everything. We think God thinks the work is holy. We build a building and think it is better than any other building. But if we are participating in the Eternal reality and God s essence is filling the building, then it is as holy as the temple ever was because it is containing the Eternal! It is being filled with what God holds sacred to His heart. They had eternity in their hearts and in their days they were able to see eternity manifest through the acts, deeds, and objects that were set forth by God for them at that time. The Original manifested because they had eternity in their hearts, not because they did it the right way. What was eternally sacred in God s heart was honored by them as the absolute, immovable reality out from which their efforts would be blessed. They found what was of God s heart. Once again, we are speaking of Him Who was and is and is to come; the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world; Christ crucified. Consider this picture of Jesus sitting on the throne. Many people are coming to Him saying, Bless my job, give me this, give me that. Then all of a sudden He gets this big smile on His

7 face. In order to discover what is causing Him to react like this you would have to follow His eyes. His gaze was focused on The Bride of Christ. This was not a bunch of people with prayer requests. She is one, and made of the ones who have together dedicated their whole existence to being joined to Him in what pleases Him and going with Him in the direction that He wants to go. The Bride of Christ. The Sacred is the Original It is common for religious people to simply set out to do the right thing with the hope that God will bless their efforts. Many organizations have been around for years but they have lost what should be the center, as God sees it. They do not seek to find true meaning where God would have them pursue it. They believe the sacred is gained by certain methods, spiritual steps, and ways of proceeding. They hope that God will bless what they perceive as sacred. They hold to the illusion of what they think is sacred instead of discovering what is sacred by beholding it and entering into the Holy of Holies of God s heart. Well, what else could it be? We can make it some object in the earth, but the Holy of Holies of God s heart involves entering into the very thing that is most precious to Him, His eternal Son. It seems that we will enter into every Holy of Holies we can think of but that one. Yet that is the one that every minister and every believer ought to be pursuing, because only seeing Him by God s revelation will animate us. Remember when Israel sent the 12 spies to go into the land to search it out, and they brought back the big grapes of Eschol? They brought them back and set them before the people, and all of the people who had never entered in said, This is good! This is wonderful! Give me more! But they did not go in! They ate of it, but they did not go in and see it for themselves (Deut. 1:24-38). I do not want someone else doing that for me. Thank you Joshua and Caleb, but I want to go in! May God allow me entrance into the Holy of Holies of His heart to see for myself what cannot ever be fully explained in words. Reality Brings Stability Some may have heard teaching from others and thus embraced in their minds a line of truth that points toward the truly sacred as God knows it. But they may be holding a truth that does not yet hold them. Have you ever held some of these things that are true in Christ, the true reality that seemed so stable in you, and then one day you somehow lost it? God showed you something in the Word and it changed your life until a week later when you forget it. You may have actually looked at the scriptures where you saw it and could not remember what God shared with you. This should challenge us to know the truth in a way that cannot be lost with time. We may be holding a truth that does not yet hold us. What we need is something that has us and cannot be taken away. If we have it, than it can be grabbed out of our minds, but if it has got us there is stability. The Original or A Copy? Our pursuit of God might be based on the belief that the holiness of a message as communicated between believers is what adds virtue to us. So we read the Bible and listen to ten conferences to gain the holy. But time and space should not be the realm of our pursuit. We must go back to the Original. When found, only then will it manifest in your time period and in your activities.

8 By it I mean Christ. He is the Original that satisfies the heart of God throughout all time wherever He manifests! That is what we are talking about. Nothing we do can endure if it is not animated by the very Life of Christ. That means that without animation the actions are simply human activities, though the doctrine may be true. Then it is not a manifestation, but only a copy. Israel is nothing but a copy without being filled with the true. The Original Appears Over and Over Again Throughout Time There is a difference between describing the Bridegroom of heaven and a life-long relationship with Jesus as your Bridegroom! In one sense you cannot acquire this great Reality; it must be experienced. However, your experience is not you gaining something, but the Eternal repeating itself in your realm and using you and your circumstances. In other words, Christ gets manifested in the place, or in you, in time. It is a repeat of His selfless, self-giving life over and over and over in different places, showing up here, showing up there! Through the manifestation, you actually participate in the Great Reality in a practical way. Through Him, the Original, you begin to experience on earth as it is in heaven. Any other approach is devoid of true meaning. What makes our actions and involvements real is the realness of the Eternal and the degree to which He is involved. We cease from the pursuit of things for God based on our perceptions to what is sacred, and our identity becomes wrapped up in Him. We become content to be united to the Celestial Reality that has its own predetermined path. It is as if we discover this wonderful reality that the earth does not just spin on its own axis but is actually centered on the Sun. The Sun is the center of the solar system! Even so, God s SON is on His own path throughout the cosmos and we are connected to Him! It is not just that we are centered on the Son, it is not just that we are Christcentered, but that we are joined with Him in His path throughout the cosmos! The sun is just a physical manifestation of a spiritual truth. His path (the SON) is totally hidden from those who will not allow their life on earth to give way to the Eternal reality. We want God to bless our sacrifice, but how can He if there is no reproduction of the Eternal Sacrifice at work in and through us? Every act of sacrifice should carry the air and essence of the Original. It carries that essence if it is Christ. He is always the Original! He just manifests in different times and places. It is Him living, just through a different person, a different vessel (II Cor. 4:7). But it is always the same Person: Christ, the Eternal, touching down in our reality, being more real than our reality. No More Human Sacrifice Many times we offer human sacrifice, meaning that we offer up our sacrifice instead of the sacrifice being a result of the Eternal manifesting in us. Yet what God had in mind was for our sacrifice to be an exact reproduction of the Original working into our lives. The reproduction we are speaking of is not an imitation of the Original, but allowing Him to reproduce in and through us that Same Nature that has existed before us, the nature of the Lamb. Our world, time period, and deeds (with all that is secular and nominal about them) are transformed by what is sacred to God invading us. This is more than just having Eternal concepts in mind as we do things. Eternal meaning is not derived from concepts but from the Eternal reality, The Original Himself, breaking into the now. We try to take the concepts of reality and stuff them into our minds and into our passions so that our lives are ordered by them. But what remains is our life! We are stuffing them

9 into our life. It (our life) becomes empowered and impassioned by truths, but we must allow for the Eternal Himself not just to empower us but to be the reality of it in us. Anything of our earth history that is devoid of The Eternal, of His selfless nature filling different shadows or vessels through time, is devoid of the essential element in God s view and is therefore ultimately meaningless. It is not true history, it is a vacuum. It is wasted time lived in meaninglessness. Even if it becomes respected or popular it is still not true as God understands true because He does not live down here. He is not caught up in earth activities. He just knows what is true, and that is Christ; the very essence of Christ, the person with whom we are joined and in whom we participate in oneness. Even if what we see or are is formed after the image of the real as an accurate copy, it is not the real in manifestation. The ability to conceptualize the true is no substitute for the entrance of the True into our realm. Many times we begin to conceptualize the true. But the entrance of the true kicks out all of the walls. Jesus reenacting the regal-ness of it in our time and in our being is what experiencing transformation is really all about. HE must appear in His essence, in His selfless, self-giving Life. Many of us have felt that there needs to be a new break into the reality of the Son. Our hearts are crying out for Jesus. Not just for more knowledge but for the life of it that animates us, that causes the Eternal to ring! To ring! To literally shake the Eternal realms and move the Father s heart by the Son that is in us as His Body will require a new view; a new seeing. May the Holy Spirit go beyond the boundaries of what we have already known of Him. May He bring forth the Eternal in us, in this place, in our homes, in our lives, in our deeds, in our activities! That it would be more than just the secular or the nominal. It will be the essence of Christ filling us, the husk. May we press past the gravity of earth and the pull of all that is earthly and break out into the Eternal heavens of God s heart, into the Holy of Holies. May we behold what it is that resides there that causes such pleasure to the Father.

10 This article is by Life in the Spirit Ministries. P.O. Box 2696 Denton, Texas Dying Seed Publications 2013