Christ and the Father in Eternity (DCLC – July ’87, Part 2)

Now listen to this. Your natural habitat, where is man’s natural habitat? What did God say? Alright. Tell us, brother. You know so much. (laughter) What is man’s natural habitat? Oh, I’m talking about Adam. Well, the earth is right? Is the Earth his natural habitat? Brother, I hate to tell you, but that’s wrong. Now, I did that to him deliberately. Uh, I’m sorry, Tom, forgive me. I know we all think that our natural habitat is the earth; that is not correct. And our natural habitat is not heaven; that is not correct. Listen to the Lord. He said, “Come and live in the garden.” The garden is man’s natural habitat, and it was a place where the realm of the spirit and the realm of the physical, the realm of the unseen and the realm of the seen, the realm of the invisible and the realm of the visible. The realm of the spirituals and the realm of the physicals; a place where they joined, a common ground. Angels played there, and so did Adam. God was there and walked in that garden with man. Man could stand there with his living, pulsating spirit and see the unseen. He was in his natural habitat, for he is of both realms, and he was in the garden where he would live forever in a place that matched him. Angels match the heavens, cows match the earth, man matches both, and God gave him a place to live that was a matching place to him, the spirituals and the physicals. Praise the Lord.

And what is your final destiny? Why, my final destiny is heaven. Gene, your final destiny is that garden. Your final destiny is not the heavens, and your final destiny is not the earth. Take your choice. We’re going to die and go to heaven. You’re going to be very lonely up there. Oh, and God’s going to have a new earth, and we’re going to live on earth, make up your mind. Now, are we going to go to heaven or are we going to live on a new earth? Neither one.

Listen, you’ve always heard heaven described, haven’t you? Well, go reread it again. Listen to the words of John the Apostle. He said, “I looked into the heavens, and I saw the new Jerusalem coming down out of the heavenlies, and I saw a new heaven, and I saw a new earth.” And that Jerusalem, that new Jerusalem, has in it a tree, the tree of life. What does the garden have in it? A tree of life, it had a river. The garden had a river of life. What has Jerusalem got in it? The River of life, and it goes on and on and on. Their garden became a spiritual city. It descends out of the heavens. I assume it comes to a new earth, and I will not live on that earth, and I will not live in the heavens. I will live in that place that is natural to me, a place where it is both the spirituals and the physicals. And God will dwell in that city, and the Son will dwell in that city, and you will dwell in that city, and I will dwell in that city, and we will be spiritual creatures on this earth and that realm. Are you clear? Praise the Lord. I hope you mean that.

Now, if you can comprehend what I have just said, then you will grasp just a little bit more that you are a being; I can’t tell you that you’re a spiritual being, but you’re part spiritual. Are you there? You understand? This is a history of the deeper Christian life. Isn’t this exciting? Then came the fall. Man’s spirit died within him. In the Old Testament, God spoke audibly outside of man. Man could no longer see the invisibles. He was cut out of the garden. Do you understand that he was cut out of the garden? He was cut out of the garden because his radio receiver was dead. He could no longer pick up the heavenly places. He was pushed out of the garden into the earth, which is not his natural habitat. Things are bad, folks. Things are bad all over.

One day, His Son came to introduce the deeper Christian life. I’m glad you laughed. You understand what I’m saying? This is all new to Him. You know, none of this has ever happened to Him before. He’s just been fellowshipping with the eternal Father for eternity, that’s all. He’s been living the Christian life for all eternity. He comes to earth; I’m going to clip out the next hundred years, we’re going to come back to them later. Actually, about 300 years. What happened to the deeper Christian life after the Lord Jesus and after the apostles? Something very tragic.

Now, I’m in church history. It’s really hard to explain what happened; boy, it’s a tragic thing and very complex. We think the Christian gospel somehow managed to get through the time when Constantine came to the throne, outlawed all the other religions, and Christianity became a political force, totally became one with paganism, keeping the Christian vocabulary, and we’ve been fighting that and seeking a restoration back to first things ever since. It’s a noble and glorious history of men who, throughout the ages, have sought to restore that first-century experience, not a New Testament church, first-century relationship, individual and corporate.

Well, let me explain to you what happened for the next thousand years. I’d like for you to see Plato over here, who’s a Greek, and he’s talking about ascending through stages until you come to the knowledge of the good. Okay, whatever that means. And I want you to look at the Christian experience over here. The one thing that gets lost in early Christian literature after the first century is that you no longer see “in” God. You no longer see “in” Christ and Christ in you, in the spirit; all those words disappear, and we’re back to performance. Do it, don’t do it. And I want to just stop and pause and tell you, brothers and sisters, these terms being in God and in Christ, which seem to be so mysterious to all of us, those things were not invented by men. This is a description of a relationship that I have just described to you that has an eternal ring to it; it’s of the eternals.

It’s an effort in human language to describe the things I’ve just been talking to you about. “In Spirit” is a place, a geographical place. “In Christ” is a geographical place. “Christ in you” is a geographical place. Eternal life is a form of life, a life form in you. A foreign life form from another realm that has come and been placed into you. These are the terms first-century Christians used in order to express the mystery of God. The wonderful mystery hidden from the foundation of the ages is now revealed and made manifest. Now made visible in you. In you. In you.

Well, the tragedy of the fallen church was that man began to think in terms of this escalating scale to God. They picked up Plato’s vocabulary and his concept, and today, as we look back in history, it’s called Neoplatonism, and the Roman Catholic saints, you know, the old, the old saints, St. Francis of Assisi, you remember him? Do you know that there used to be a sister Therese who lived back in the 1500s, not the one who lives in India, who was this glorious Christian? Have you ever heard of the two Catherines? There were two devout individuals, Michael Molenos, and I’m sorry, my mind fails me, but there were slews and hundreds of them. There was John of the Cross. How do you say it in French? Your hometown. The man. Okay. … was one of these kinds of people. And there was also the other Francis. All these men were called by the Roman Catholic Church “mystics.” Frightening word. It never has a good, clear definition. Frightening word, because there are the mystic religions, all this. It simply meant these mysterious people who seemed to know God, and they had spent their lifetimes praying to get to know Him, and they were trying to use this escalation up. There’s meditation, then contemplation, and then there’s something else, and then there’s finally union, and this takes about 70 years. It’s true, and it can only happen to a few special people. This is what the Roman Catholic Church taught and they built these monasteries and these nunneries in order to give people plenty of time to do nothing but sit there and pray and pray and pray and pray hoping they would get out of meditation in the contemplation from contemplation into something else and from there to union, and only a few managed after 50 and 60 and 70 years of beating themselves with ropes and eating almost nothing and stay in these monasteries and some of them never taught for a whole lifetime. Some of them never saw another human being outside those monasteries, seeking to find God. How sad.

That became the deeper Christian life. That is pitiful. Oh man, isn’t that a departure? Okay, what happened next? Well, along came the Reformation, and Martin Luther was right up to here with these Catholic mystics, and he said, and this is, you can find this in his writings. I have a copy of it in my home in my files. He said, “We will no longer allow these teachings in the church. We will come to an understanding of scripture.” That sounded great, but boy, he tossed out the baby when he tossed out the bath water. He was so determined to keep out Catholic Neoplatonist mysticism that he left the spiritual things out.

From a purely historical viewpoint, the Protestant movement is an intellectual movement. It says basically learn the Bible, learn the doctrines. This is what God wants of you, and this is what you’ll get. And that’s why you have a few problems. And this is why Pentecostalism just sells like crazy; people want a little reality with their Lord. And they have this ecstatic experience of speaking in tongues, and this gives them a little of that reality. And then a whole doctrine is built around the simple experience, and it’s made mysterious and powerful, and all of these other trappings get hung on it when, in my personal judgment, it is simply a way of touching the Lord, and it is not for everybody. And if you just have one way for touching the Lord, it gets worn out in many, many cases, and many of you can verify this through your personal experience, can you not? It really gets worn out.

All right, that was the end of the deeper Christian life right there. Now, since then, there’s come up something called the evangelical, but right alongside the evangelical has come the fundamentalist. And so, we have the evangelical, and then we have the fundamentalist evangelical, and we have the charismatic Pentecostal evangelical, and then you have these people with their tongues hanging out. Give me the Lord. Please give me the Lord. Call me anything you want to call me, just give me the Lord. So, we go out and we buy E. M Bounds’ book on how to pray. R. A. Torrey’s book on how to pray, how to be filled with the Holy Spirit, how to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, how to speak in tongues, and where is the deeper Christian life today? The deeper Christian life is stuck somewhere out here in the ectoplasm. You know, the reason many of us read Nee’s books is because there’s spiritual content to them, but we’re still looking for handles. Lord, how can I grasp for myself, personally, some meaningful reality?