Our Spiritual Richness

Our Spiritual Richness is to grow by revelation of GOD and His now dealing within us as HE did Jesus and then Paul, among a host of others over the past 2000 years. For this I have turned to Norman Grubbs and his thoughts on this revelation. As taken from Romans.


Romans
By Norman P. Grubb

"Now the ninth chapter moves us into the necessary effect of this union relationship. If the Being of God and the delight and fulfillment of God is to give Himself for His creation as being Love, and His fulfillment that He may be the means by which His creation has their fulfillment, their happiness, their completion, their activity and their responsibility, whatever it is, all so that they become the true beings they are meant to be on all levels. O...ne day the animal creation, as seen by the prophets, will love its antagonists—which really are product of our own self-antagonisms. And somewhere it says, “Harmony on every level of creation.” Because God is harmony. Harmony means things work together, live together, cooperate together. And this is God in completion—when he can be the means by which His whole universe operates like that. What He gets back is the joy and the love of the whole universe by whom this has become the fact.


And so, that is the nature of God. If there then I boldly say, “I am no longer I, but I am the Deity which is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit within me,” I must be that. I can’t be anything else. I don’t have to try and be; I am. Remembering, as we always say. It hasn’t come up particularly in this Roman letter. It comes out more in the Hebrew letter, and so on. We have learned the differentiation between the reactions of the outer form and inner self. The outer form in Hebrews consists of the soul and the spirit—our emotions, our reason, our bodies. They can deceive us, because they can cause us to think we are what we feel we are. And then we may feel absent from God, we may feel weak, we may feel so and so and of course that is an illusion.

We, therefore, cannot be whatever we think we are. We cannot be a person—a replaced person in whom our real self is, “Not I but Christ,” without being a person who cannot help being involved in others. Whatever my situation is, this is in me now, I cannot be for myself but for God. I cannot be anything but somebody which is for others, so that other people should have this secret of Eternal release, which is Eternal Life, that I have. So I become. I can’t help it. I am an out-goer. There again I don’t go back to this other. There is no such thing in this life as “trying it out.” That is the danger of saying, as I say the soul may say, “You don’t look like it.” That is not the point. Other people may say it. We live on the affirmation that we are. If we are, if that is what is so, we are. And if we say, “I don’t see it” then He puts that in to order causing us to know in what way we can’t help but being—“Of course we know we are.”
So our lives in the Bible terms become outgoing streams to rivers. It is said in John, first it is like a well of water totally supplying us, springing up into everlasting life, but that same well of water now is continuously an outgoing river. And, we don’t question it, we are. And that is not for us to know how, because our outgoing river is He by us. So, we don’t question how or we will get back on this self effort and false self examination. We just say it is so. And, somewhere or other we each of us know how that is coming out in our lives. Now this is what we might call the sad example of it, because this is the great letter which has taken us through the whole progress of what it is to be a true human.

And, here we move into Romans 9 and say the very person who would affirm to us that you can’t be separated, which was the last final paean of magnificent glory, he said you cannot be separated. Neither man nor devil can separate you. No man nor devil can accuse you. In God’s sight you are His precious perfected person in Christ and you stand there. The very person who said that turns around here in the ninth chapter, saying, “I would be glad to be separated from Christ, if that would be the means of my brother’s salvation.” Now we are moving into “other love.” He is speaking here about his concern over his brothers—beautiful tenderness—because they were the ones who had persecuted him to death. They stoned him; they beat him up and did every mortal thing a person could do and yet, his total concern was, “Oh, I would do anything if my brothers could see the true Messiah.” We may say, “It is a strange thing.”

You would think that Paul would have great prejudice against his people for the persecutions. We all have prejudices in our own types, in our own lives. From this distance, it is all right, “Is it possible for a Jew, knowing the proper Jew had been this perfect person that anybody who does not believe in the Deity of Christ would at least see that they couldn’t get away from the perfection of Jesus. There has never been a person who has spoken the kinds of things He has and done the kinds of things He has and loved and been as un-blamable as He has. You would think no one could deny that this is so. There was never a more perfect man even if they don’t believe He is God. To us this is strangest thing—that they wouldn’t be proud of this greatest product of their race. It shows the great blindness and it shows how we don’t understand what prejudices are. We have our own prejudices. So it is easy for us to judge other peoples’ prejudices, because they don’t. And this blindness as we have seen in these chapters has come upon Israel. And here Paul is speaking about the privileges of the Israelite. They had the adoption of God, they had the glory of the covenants, they had the giving of the law. They were the servants of God, promises piled on. God had piled Himself on in His grace and glory and beauty and promises to these folk. And then finally the Christ Himself had come through them and they don’t see Him. And so in the flesh Christ came. It was God’s blessing in Verses 3 and 4. It was there that he said in Verse 3, “I could wish myself accursed from Christ.” It sounded like a wish. That is a strong thing to say. “I could wish I was separated from Christ,” which was his very life, for his brother’s sake. “This love in me now has moved in this direction.” It is a big thing to say that I would even go to hell.

Two men are known to have said that. Moses said that when he was tested about the golden calf. God has to use negative methods. This is why God disguises Himself. We often see, especially in the Old Testament, God is in disguise, because we can’t see any other way. So He has to put Himself, as it were, in a rough character to stir up its opposite in us. That is why it appears to be anger and so on, because His anger really is only His concern for us to get us out of our foolishness and corruption and so on. It looks as if He is the angry one.

Now on this occasion, Moses was the leader and prophet of these people in the wilderness. In order to stir Moses to what he was. God appeared so angry when these people who had been given the law and proceeded to forget all about it and Moses. They had gone after the golden calf and they were doing their lewd dances and so on—doing all their idolatrous stuff around the golden calf. He said to Moses, “I’ll destroy these people; I will make a new nation of you.” As if God had no use for His own people. That is His clever way in which He stirs the opposite—stirs the reality up in us. So God does deliberately take unpleasant disguises upon Himself to help us into reality. That was what helped Moses into his reality. “Oh, You couldn’t do that God. Why Your name is linked to these people. If you destroy them, the whole of the Egyptians will say You couldn’t keep the people.” Moses was fighting for the people as if it was against God. Of course that is what God wanted, because God must come through humans."