Some years back a friend handed me a book on the benefits of Sabbath-keeping. There would have been a time when I would have opened the pages of such a book with interest and pleasure. Here was a book that promised to improve my Sabbath-keeping and favour me with more life. Not any more.
Jesus is rest, just as He is communion and community. Jesus is life and all lesser things like grace and peace. When Jesus is your life you become rest.
So I let such ‘should do’ books slip by me today. Since my aim is to live in God rather than in the knowledge of good and evil, I regard them as the irrelevance they are. Why? I view all of life as a sacrament to be lived to the full in Jesus. Each day and each encounter becomes an adventure with Him. Secondly, I believe it better to be peace and rest rather than attempt to use something external to Jesus and to me to attain it. In this age the essence of life and Godliness is Christ in you. That’s why Jesus came.
The miracle of the sons born supernaturally by the Spirit is that they become one with God. By having Jesus as our life because He is in us and one with our being, rest and peace is what we are.
‘In Christ I am rest and peace.’
Jesus does not beckon us to an ideal. He draws us into Himself so that He becomes us. By means of the Righteousness from God (Jesus) we live ideals because we are sons and daughters of God. Now in a frazzled world I become a ‘Sabbath rest.’ I become peace, grace and a giver of life in world of frenetic doing.
Hey! No longer must I lurch to the end of the week and gasp, ‘Thank God for the Sabbath’ because as well as being creative and productive with His life, I AM PEACE, REST AND WORSHIP.
God said ‘Be Holy because I am Holy.’ The one way to be whole and holy is to have Christ as our life. By the miracle of the incarnation and the ministry of the Holy Spirit Christ becomes us. We eat Him. In the Spirit Jesus becomes bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. But this is far from understood by much of the church. Many of us have turned Jesus on His head to aid and abet ourselves as a human doing. The result. We weaken our authority over circumstances and the Enemy. Let me explain.
Some people attempt to make a distinction between black magic and white magic. But there is none since both come from the same source. Similarly disobedience as evidenced in immorality has the same source as a Christian life lived in Adam’s realm of the knowledge of good and evil. Only the appearance is different. A life of ‘doings’ lived from all my ideas of right and wrong is not a life in God. It’s a life lived in me. It’s a life lived in Adam.
The result? I remain in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil even if I do look religious. The result is the perpetuation of bondage and fatigue. To represent the Kingdom of God by living as sons we must move from living in Adam to living in Jesus. Adam lived in Himself. Jesus lived in His Father. We live in Jesus. Christ in you is the Kingdom of God in the world.
‘To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ Col 1.27 NIV.
In Jesus we become the ‘one new man’ or the man who is one. No longer are we divided between the ideal and the real. We become peace, we become rest, we become a Sabbath surrounded by a vortex of doing where knowledge is increased and people’s hearts fail them for fear.. The life of the Son of God manifests as His daughters and sons.
‘By abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace’ Eph 2.15 NIV.
To live in the knowledge of good and evil, no matter how well intentioned is to live robbed. Gordon Boyd writes,
“The result is that God’s goal of acquiring for himself a bride who knows what it is to joyfully receive, rejoice in, and mercifully display God’s unsurpassable love has been hindered. God’s bride does not adequately know or experience the joy of living in union with God, loving people unconditionally and outrageously, free from all judgment. Rather, to a significant degree, God has a bride who is like the sociopathic husband, trying to do all the right things to fill a hole in his soul while lacking the one thing that makes a husband truly good. To a significant degree, God has a bride who squelches the free love and abundant life that could flow to her and through her, for he has a bride who to a significant degree lives off the goodness of her morals and rightness of her theology.”
If there are degrees of sin there is a kind that is ‘more wicked’ than immorality. It’s living separated from God while doing it in the name of Christ (Chron 7.14)
Again Gregory Boyd writes, “Because we have rarely taken seriously the specific nature of our separation from God as depicted in the Genesis narrative, we have often trivialized sin by understanding it merely as that which is evil rather than as disobeying God by trying to get life from knowing good and evil.
“Consequently, the church has to a large extent continued to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil without realizing it. Indeed, sometimes we have been guilty of unwittingly promoting the fruit of the forbidden tree as though it were salvation. We have too often defined ourselves as the practitioners and defenders of the good, the judges and conquerors of evil, and the saviors of people and society. We churchgoers not only eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we do it better than others!”
‘If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land’ 2 Chron 7.14 NIV.
Keith Allen
Daring Adventist.com 