Debrecen Messages #11 – The River of Life Within: Christ as Living Water (Genesis to Revelation)

And the New Jerusalem is a finished city. The difference between the church and the New Jerusalem is this – the church, right now, belongs to this year, March of this year, it doesn’t belong to the year 1500 or 1300 or the year 3000; it belongs to now, it’s a building process. The new Jerusalem is all of those years and peoples brought together as one. We don’t know true church life until we know the church of Jesus Christ as a building process. There’s gold, there, there’s silver there. You are the stones; He is the gold. There’s water to drink. There’s food to eat. His name is Jesus. May God give you a revelation, I cannot. And may that revelation … to be very strange.

Lord Jesus, this is all I can do. Your Holy Spirit has to do the rest. Oh Lord, give us the building. Give us the water and the food. We’re never going to know how thirsty we are until we start being built together. God be our mercy, Lord be our revelation, Holy Spirit be the …

We’re talking to you from Debrecen, Hungary. This morning, we have perhaps the smallest number we’ve had. Our brothers are out in places where they have to be this morning.

We’re in Genesis, we’re on the track of a revelation of Christ, and everything in Genesis 1 and 2 is becoming clearer and clearer – it is a reflection of Him who is, and that He is written even into creation. I’d like to remind you, listening to these tapes, that a lot happened before creation took place. And a lot of it had to do with you. And in fact, a lot of it was you. And now, we are looking at Genesis 1 and 2 to discover His purpose in His creation, purposes that have nothing to do with sin and the fall. And we’re coming to perhaps the clearest of all statements concerning that. And I would like to read with you Genesis 2, beginning with 18, and I’m not really clear where I’m going to stop.

Then the Lord God said, It is not good for this man Adam to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field.

Seems as though the writer changed the subject, didn’t he? We would have thought the rest of that sentence would say he formed a woman. But out of the ground the Lord formed animals and every bird of the sky. And he brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.

And the man gave names to all the cattle and all the birds of the sky and to every beast of the field, but for Adam, there was not found a helper suitable for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and the man slept. And the Lord took one of the man’s ribs and closed the flesh of that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib of which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man.

And the man said, This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called out of man, because she was taken out of man. And for this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And when this is quoted by Paul in Ephesians, they shall become one, is what it says. And the man and the wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Okay, I feel in some ways, I feel like I have pretty well told the story in The Divine Romance. Do you remember it? God kept looking at things and saying, This is good. And then he asked the man about creation, and the man said, Everything is good. But God didn’t really agree. And quite frankly, I don’t think the man did either. And there was one thing that was not good. The man was all alone.

Now there seems to be such deliberation, deliberateness in all of this that you have to question why God went to the trouble of asking man what’s good and what’s lacking and for him to declare it’s not good for man to be alone.