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

I want to go back to find an answer to that. I want to go back to the day or the time when God made the man. Now, we’re going to take the clay and we’re going to shape it. And this man, by the way, probably wasn’t over five feet five. We seem to have been a very short creature until this century. We got tall. And the Caesars had statues made of them that were exactly their size. They were all about five feet tall.

God made the man in his own image, and that means when God made him, when God created this man out of earth or formed him out of the earth, you might say God was looking at Himself. Now, when you look at a human being, even though we’re fallen, we have a cracked, distorted view of God. God was looking at Himself when he made man, and he made him in His own image, and he made him alone. That speaks volumes of His purpose.

And when I wrote The Divine Romance, I got several letters saying God could not need anything. He was self-contained, and Gene, you were wrong to say that God needed something. I don’t have any problem saying God needed something. I bet I could find a verse for it. Everybody else can find a verse for whatever they believe. I bet you I could find a verse for it, that God had a need. Well, then, if I say He was alone, then the reply is, oh, but Gene, He was Father, Son, and Spirit, and he was not alone. So no, he was not alone. It was the fellowship of the Godhead. But I am driven by the fact that he was not neuter, that this God of ours, who had no beginning, was male. And he has no counterpart.

Now, if I look at all the Scripture, and I look at the end of the Scripture, and I look at Paul speaking in Ephesians, and Colossians, and Corinthians about ultimate and final things, I come to one conclusion, and that is, and John, the book of John, excuse me, I left that out completely, the book of John, I can come to but one conclusion, and that is God is driven by the fact that He wants to be one with somebody, something, somewhere. He wants to add to. He wants children, you can say that. He wants sons, you can say that. He wants daughters, you can say that, but it gets beyond being a family.

And it comes to a matter of oneness. Over and over again, it comes back to that. That they might be one, even as we are one. Father, as I am in you and you are in me, so may I be in them and they in me, that we might be one. And something’s driving God here, and if you feel He doesn’t have any needs, fine, but something provoked Him to create. And I don’t know what it might have been, but I can tell you this: his ultimate point in all of this is oneness.

You remember I brought a message earlier? It’s not on video at this moment. It’s only on audio because the video broke down. I spoke on God’s eternal purpose and said, I don’t know what it is. I’ll turn it around. You tell me why God created it.

The Presbyterians, the Reformed Church says, He created us that He might have fellowship with us and that we might worship Him. I’m a little pressed with that.

When I see Paul talking about all of creation coming back and dissolving back into God, and He becoming the all in all, I see a lot more than just a group of people worshiping God. There’s something very profound going on here. And when God made man, he made him in his image. And when God made man, he made man alone. There was no girl. There’s a point here. If Adam had died, there would have been no race, and if Adam had lived without a woman, a wife, a helpmate, there would have been no race. Today, there would be one very ancient man ruling this universe, and a lot of animals that had lived and died, or that had at least multiplied, and there was a male and a female in all of them. I want you to remember this: when God created the cattle and the birds, it was God who created, and it was God who thought up female; man didn’t think up female. There was no female in the Godhead, and all of the eternals that had rolled on when there was the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, there was no girl present.

There were three males. Well, you say the Holy Spirit, we don’t know His gender. We can’t call Him an it. There’s no girl, but when God began to create, He created a girl. A girl lion. A girl tiger. A girl bull. Doesn’t fit too well, does it? A girl parrot. A girl canary. He created a girl. God is the author of girls. Now that was a new thought to this universe. The angels are neuter. Man was a male like God, but there were an awful lot of animals running around who had a something or other.

I hear tremendous pathos, by the way, there’s a point in all this, I hear tremendous pathos when God says it’s not good for man to be alone. When I told the story of the Divine Romance, Adam and Eve go off joyfully together, and Adam says all things are good, and Eve says all things are good, and God, standing there watching, says, No, all things are not good, for it is not good that God should be alone.

I have no scripture to prove that, but I have this knowledge that there is an ultimate consummation, and I know this, that Jesus Christ existed before Adam existed, and He was a bachelor, and I know that he did not have a wife, and he was alone. And I know that at the end of the ages, that changes. And Jesus Christ, the Son of God, He who is divine and divinity and deity, has a wife. When the curtain closes and it says, The End, or To Be Continued, or They Lived Happily Ever After, or whatever, when that curtain closes, there’s a man whose name is Jesus, Lord of Lords, King of Kings. He’s got a bride. He’s got a wife.

And that’s significant to me, Jonathan. That is very significant to me. And in Ephesians, don’t get too tied up with the submission and love stuff, because it’s not talking about marriage. “And I am not speaking about marriage” – it was like Paul knew that it wasn’t going to do any good to speak of a husband and his wife about this. But I am speaking of Christ and his wife.