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Fulfilling the New Covenant

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Building Bridges between God and Man

Love Prepares the Way

Bonnie Morris

Daniel,

  I am writing this, hoping you know me well enough by now to know that I am searching for an answer to what has bothered me forever...

  I am not writing to correct you, because maybe you are right.  There are so many who see it the way you do.  Please hear my heart!

  Love says – “I lay before you life and death, choose life.”  Scriptures tell us that He subjected us to vanity in the hopes that we would choose rightly.  He did this when He told us NOT to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Simultaneously, He told us to eat of the tree of life.  Thus the statement: I lay before you life and death.

Yet, (some) say Love purposely intended for Adam to choose death.  This contradiction has been incomprehensible TO ME.  I have never been able to put this together.

It would be like telling my son not to touch a hot stove but all the while I am planning for him to burn himself.  How could he ever trust me? 

First let me say the word "plan" is not in the bible.  Some concordances include the word plan in the word purpose, but having viewed this from the 3rd realm, it doesn’t fit.  Many concordances fall short once we see more clearly.  The reason it doesn’t fit is that the word plan has to do with 1 + 2 = plan and the word purpose conveys relationship.  For instance if I plan to drive to New York, I may break down in Chicago... My plan is shot.

However, if I purpose to drive to New York and I break down in Chicago, I will stay on course and continue on.  So, most people would say that they really “purpose” and make very few plans when they understand the difference.  Why is this important to me?  Because, for me, the journey of our life with God is completely about a love relationship!  The image of Love is the image of relationship.  It is not about a plan.  This is demonstrated in the scripture that says “take no thought for the morrow”....  We are beginning to see the NOW of this life and no “plan” making in our progressive revelation.

What makes sense to me is the following: The reason I am showing you how I see this at the present time is because I trust you enough to help me see where my understanding is not correct if, indeed, everyone else is right and I am wrong.  Which, I understand, may very well be the case and I just can’t seem to get this.

God’s purpose was for Adam to express His image (Love) could have happened because He made Eve.  When Eve sinned, Adam could have been the savior, but no, he joined her in the transgression. 

At this point, the Bible does not say that Love cursed them.  Love does not curse.  No, it says that “because you have done this, this is going to happen”...  It is like the stove example... If my son touches what I told him not to touch, his hand gets burned... Did I, therefore burn his hand? Love, forbid!

So, they chose to NOT believe Love’s word.  Love put the hedge of His word around them, and they chose to rebel against it.  I believe this is all Love expected.  Just believe my word. 

This disobedience caused all the heart-ache throughout time.  But, Love never changed His purpose.  He worked this situation after the counsel of His own will as Love continues to do the same thing in our lives today.

One could ask, well how can Love be in control if He didn’t purpose for Adam to fall.  I specifically heard the following once... (At the time, everything that I know to be God, I believed it was Love’s voice)... “I control you on the basis of your choice.  I gave you this choice, but not the results of it”.  The results of choices, most of the time, are based on the law of sowing and reaping.  They were established laws from the beginning.  This is why Adam was told not to eat “for in the day that you do, dying thou shalt die”.  Love only gave Adam the choice, not the circumstances around the choice; not the results of the choice.  Keep choosing death in your circumstances and you keep burning yourself. 

Because of the choice in the garden, affliction came.  Everyone suffers affliction today.  Remember affliction is not our teacher.  The Holy Spirit is our teacher.  Some listen in the midst of their affliction and some don’t.  Affliction is not, nor ever has been our teacher or Love’s will.  Keep ignoring the Holy Spirit in the midst of your affliction and you will not learn. People only think their situation teaches them because they learn from the Holy Spirit in the midst of it.  Could they have learned another way?  Yes, they could have believed Love’s word.  But, now because of the fall, horrible situations come into our lives.  It is still a matter of searching out Love for an answer.  Truth comes through Him, not our situations.  He succors us out of them.  He is beautiful for situations because Love is capable of working them after the counsel of His OWN will. 

We say Jesus suffered and then use it as a cop-out for the entire affliction that comes upon us.  Jesus’ life as our example for our suffering is this:  Jesus suffered being tempted and he suffered so great a contradiction of sinners.  The suffering he suffered at the cross was not for him, but for us.  We should replace the word suffering with endure to gain better insight into the example of what is suffering for righteousness sake.  Most of our suffering is a result of the fall and personal sin/faults, not Love’s. 

We say: Jesus was slain from the foundation of the earth.  I say: Yes, because Love had foreknowledge of what Adam and Eve were going to do and just like a good parent would have salve in the cupboard for the son who disobeys and touches the stove,  Love was prepared with help for them.  Love made provision for Adam’s choice the same way we buy insurance.  The only difference is that Love, in His foreknowledge, knew He would need it.

But, I believe Adam did not have to fall to express Love (the image of God).  He could have become that life-giving spirit.  The same way a son could grow to understand why he should never touch the stove, Adam could have grown to understand why not to touch it and gone on to be everything Love purposed in the beginning.  But, Adam couldn’t wait.  He was like the 13 year old who knows the car is in the garage and that he has been told not to drive it.  But, he can’t wait.  It isn’t that his parents would never let him, but he didn‘t know he wasn’t mature enough yet to partake of all they could provide for him. The son wanted it before his time.  Adam could have become what Love purposed without the fall.  He just didn’t want to wait.  He tried to grow up his own way and man has been trying to do the same thing ever since.

Jesus proved that sin was NOT needed to be made in the image of God.  Jesus is the example.  I protest this....that Love could ever be accused for all the heart-ache in the earth.  There was a better way – but man blew it, not Love. 

How could I ever trust my parents if they told me not to touch the stove; that I would burn my hand if I did, and then secretly be planning for me to do it? Where in love’s description do we find this whole idea that Love would do such a thing? 1st Corinthians Chapter 13!

Would you plan to put your child in jail so he could learn from it?  He could learn another way.  He could BELIEVE his parents.

This is now, and has always been Love’s desire: to believe Him.

This whole subject has torn at my heart.  I have cried and cried over it.  I have tried and tried to see it differently.  Please don’t tell me it’s okay where I am, that Love will help me see.  I am asking you to help me see this.  Sometimes, we need someone else to explain where we are missing it.  If I am wrong, why can’t I get the revelation?  I am not insensitive to the Holy Spirit.  I receive revelation.  This is why I put my thoughts down on paper for you, Daniel.  Maybe you can see something I need in order for me to see it differently.

I would not ask you this except that I have come to respect you through your writings and conversations.  I would not have gone on your website except that I could sense the authentic manner in which you search out Love.  This is not a debate; I sincerely want to know if I am wrong and where. 

Love, Bonnie

Bonnie,

Thank you for this letter - I would love to post it on the website. When one writes personally, the heart seems to be more revealed.

I read nothing in your letter that I would change or correct. And in fact, I would see your sharing as a vital and necessary companion to what I have shared.

Here are the words in my last letter that, I believe, you are responding to.

"Without the fall of Adam, there could not have been a furnace of affliction and a vale of tears. And without a furnace of affliction and a vale of tears, God could not have together with us formed His Heart in you and in me.

But more than that, the son God will have, the son God has purposed and determined to have to reveal Himself through, to give as an inheritance all that He is and all that He has, that many-membered son, Jesus the head and we the body, that son cannot come into all that God is in us without open and deadly OPPOSITION."

More the first paragraph than the second. Your letter fully recognizes the opposition, but you cannot place man's reckless sin into that equation.

I think I stress all the time that it is not any form of suffering that transforms us, but rather, our response, together with God, to any suffering no matter the reason for it.

Now, though I do hold firmly to the second paragraph, and even the second sentence of the first paragraph (sin and death were in the garden facing Adam before He rebelled against the word God spoke that could have taken him to life and I suspect that the tree of life was not an easy tree to climb nor the fruit easy to reach.) Yet, I do not hold to that first sentence. (Note to the reader: I agree with what Bonnie says Love being separate from man's reckless choice and I have corrected the wording in my previous letter that seems to indicate some part of God in Adam's fall.)

But we see this, God is birthing His heart inside of us, and He is doing that inside this shattered arena in which we find ourselves. So we must then acknowledge that He does all things perfectly. If this path of travail is not necessary, if there is no point in it, then what is that but mindless insanity? What about the entrance into the holy city being a pearl, if no response to internal pain was ever really needed?

And I think I do understand the issue you have grappled with. Let me make a few comments.

First, a male perspective is different from a female, mother's perspective. In the north country we would use this illustration. The father says, "Son, it's 50 below out and we have no firewood. You must go and get some." The mother says, "Son, let me wrap you up warmly before you go out." The father sees the reality of the need and knows that the hardness must be endured. The mother accepts the reality of the need, but does all she can do to mitigate the hardness. Both natures are in God and express two sides of who He is.

Second, this is not an issue I have spent much time on. The issue God has given me to travail over the last few years is the issue I raised in "Do Not Love the World," that is, this incredible contradiction I see in the word and in the church concerning the love of the world that fills the church versus the obvious reality that God's love and grace continues with them regardless - yet His warning cannot be set aside.

On the other hand, this is the issue God has given you to travail over, seeking for an answer. And it is a great contradiction. I believe that your understanding that you shared in this letter is the truth and I witness to it completely. That doesn't then mean that what I share about the role of opposition and difficulty, of walking out of the wildnerness leaning on our Beloved is not also true. And it is NOT a matter of agreeing to disagree. Rather, I find such extreme contradictions all through the Word. This is why many who have sought to know the Lord end up going off the deep end and it is why so many conflicting sects are birthed in the church.

I can come up with many verses in the New Testament that speak the truth I share. Yet there are many others that seem to contradict it, and to indicate more what you share in your letter.

For instance, you say that the curse was not "imposed" by God, but rather the consequences of what Adam sowed. I believe that completely, but I also believe the other, that God Himself "subjected the creation to vanity in hope." Jesus was already fully slain before Adam was created. I'm not convinced this reality was for "coming sin," I believe it is rather the nature and heart of God. These can become just mental conjectures, yet God lays upon us individually a particular contradiction that we seek Him for understanding on. I believe that God's intention is for us to lay what He teaches us personally and deeply alongside what He teaches the other. Not as contradiction or correction, but as wondrous facets of a complicated God.

If the Electrical Universe Theory is correct, then the universe consists primarily of massive electrical currents that always go together in pairs. Two. These two currents are separated from each other by what electrical engineers call a "double layer." Just like a magnet, there is a negative and a positive that cannot be joined, yet are always together. When these double "Birkeland" currents are pinched, a galaxy and then a star is born.

God is light, yet He wraps Himself in darkness and cannot be seen. God is love, yet He lays upon His own Son all the consequences of His anger. But no shadow of sin ever enters into God; He cannot know it, nor beget it.

However, I do not subscribe to the idea that Satan is the negative to God's positive. Or that the darkness of evil is in any way the darkness in which God wraps Himself. Negative and positive are qualities of God; sin and rebellion are not. Rather, love with its assurance is God's positive and holiness with its jeopardy is God's "negative."

It is inconceivable that God would intend for Adam to sin and to fall. He did not.

It is inconceivable that God, knowing beforehand that Adam would fall in a particular circumstance, did not proceed with His purpose without deviation in setting up all the circumstances that led to that fall.

And it is inconceivable to us that both are true, and yet we know that they are.

And so here is what I would do. I would not use my statement to correct your letter in any way. But I would not necessarily use your letter to correct the deeper truth I shared - that God purposes affliction and opposition, fully separate from the fall of Adam, in which to shape the Holy thing He is birthing inside of us. Rather, I would lay the two side by side and hold both before the Lord. This is why there is a body of Christ with many members and a plurality of ministries.

James wrote his letter before Paul received the revelation of Christ in us, and the two never did get along that well. I place Paul's teaching way above James's, yet here I am, quoting from James a whole lot lately!

It is impossible that God would conceive sin. And that is why I do not agree with those who claim that Satan was created evil and not that Lucifer fell by the choice of his own heart.

It is impossible that God has not ordained every particular of my present life from the beginning and that all of His ways concerning me are not perfect. I have always held fully in my heart the conviction that not one thing ever comes my way except by the counsel and determination of God for my life as He has held in Himself from the beginning. God did not "intend" Adam to fall, but He intended to birth me as a son inside the consequences of Adam's fall. (I just added this last sentence after I finished this letter, is this the answer to the dilemma? Yes, somehow, I think that this is how we must understand this whole issue.) Yes, yes. my beginning was not in Adam. My beginning is in Christ, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. The one who was born of Adam is not. God did not intend Adam to fall. But God, drawing me out of Christ, not Adam, did intend to place me inside of Adam's wreckage, just as He placed Christ there, and by passing up through Adam's wreckage, birth the purpose and determination of God. Does that make sense? It is a wonderful way to see it. (Now you are reading on to what I wrote before this last bit.)

And so the truth is, I can find places in my writing, I believe, that say very much the same as what you say in your letter, though I have not emphasized it.

I hope this makes some sense. Here is a God who purposefully subjects the creation to vanity, yet no sin was ever conceived in His heart. His ways are past finding out. Yet He puts in our hearts the deep longing to know those ways.

Thank you,
Daniel

P.S. Now, after my parenthetical ramblings just above, and drawing in my response to another sister on Facebook, I realize that my next letter needs to be "I Am a Son of God." And in it I will try to distinguish between the thinking of a son sent into the world by the Father, versus a worldling seeking to be redeemed out of the world of Adam's wreckage. So many times, what I share is read as a "means to draw near to God," when it is not that at all, rather, it is the view of a Son set on the purposes of his Father. I will try to draw on the truth you share in this letter, and will link to it, in arriving at the view of a son sent into the world by the Father.

And suddenly, I am looking at all those "Be just like God" statements I quoted in my previous letter and seeing them from an entirely different perspective. Of a truth, I was still seeing them as an earthling approaching nearer to God. No, no, no. I think that the pinch of these conflicting truths is birthing a star. This is new to me. I will let the Lord draw me further along this path when next I write.