Our Spiritual Richness

Continuing with 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

"So He must have His human intercessor who would die for the people as did His own Son later on. Then Moses having gone back, as he did—he dealt strongly with the people, as he should do. He brought them to repentance and they came back to God. In order to fulfill the thing up on the mount, he said, “God, You can’t leave these people.” God had said, “My Presence will dwell with you.” “I don’t want Your Presence, we want you with us.” And that is what ...he said when he said, “Look here, God, these people are guilty. If You can’t forgive their sins, don’t forgive mine. If You turn Your back on them, blot me out too.” That is intercession. That is this person who says, “If I am identified with these people and I don’t want to go on being what I am now, blot me out with them, if You can’t forgive them.”


You see God uses negative pressures to bring out of us the real person in us. Of course that was God in Moses really. That was the Spirit of intercession in Moses. It was God’s own character expressing through Moses. So, God has to take us through processes like that sometimes. This is the only other case in the Bible, where a man in actual words says the same kind of thing. “I would renounce my privilege of going to heaven, if by that means I could be the means by which my brethren could go to heaven.” We don’t use those terms now, because we think of heaven as present Eternal Life. In the future heaven is going to come, but we are more concerned with the heavenly spirit now. But, that comes to the same thing. His passion for these very people who chased him and chased him again and again until they could kill him. But, love does not see the enemy. Love has no enemies. God’s love sees everybody as God’s person. So when you see right, you see every person as a form of God, even if they don’t. Even the redeemed form of God, if they knew it. But, mind you, you can reject being the redeemed form of God. You can’t see enemies—because they are just those who miss the way, and I missed the way, too. So, this transferred to how you can help the person even though the person may be the one who is wronging you, antagonizing you, etc.


Then Paul goes into a phase which is very interesting. That is to say that whether the Israelites appear to reject Christ or accept Him, God’s will takes place anyway. Paul now moves into the total sovereignty of God. He stops in Verse 6 where he suddenly says, “I said that about the children of Israel who reject Christ and so their backs are turned to the Messiah and the Redeemer when He comes.” The he says, “Not as though the Word of God hasn’t taken effect.” He will defend the perfect way of God on every level. So, he says the reason that we say that is—that in actual fact all Israel are not just all the physical Israel. They are that part of Israel, as a nation which has moved into a relationship of grace and salvation with God, which of course is true today. I would say of our own churches that the churches are those who have entered into what we speak of as the new birth, a new creature relationship. There may be many who use the name and title of Christian in different ways. We know the difference, we who have been that way ourselves. Paul is defending that by what appears to be a strange way. He says some appear predestined and others do not appear so. It works out that way. Then he goes back and says—You can see it in Abraham’s children. Isaac was the seed through whom God’s purposes were fulfilled. Ishmael was the one who left the family and went out into the desert and became the progenitor of the Arab race.

That incidentally is why it is so interesting to find in Isaiah, that great prophecy, where it says—The days are going to come, when Assyria and Egypt would be back again in brotherhood with Israel and the three together, the people of God. But, in this chapter it appears as if there are those whom God had appointed and those whom God had rejected. That is a tough saying. That isn’t actually said of Isaac and Ishmael but it was said of Jacob and Esau. And, it is distinctly said here, before they had done good or evil, while they were still in Rebecca’s womb. In Verses 11 and 12: “For the children being not yet born, neither having done good or evil that the purpose of God, according to election might stand, not of works, but of Him that calls. It was said unto her, ‘The elder shall serve the younger.” Now watch that!!! That didn’t say they were rejected. It only said that it will work out in that relationship. Well, they had relationships.

Of course, when you are in Christ, places don’t matter. When you are a love-servant of Christ, you are a love-servant of the people. So it doesn’t matter to you whether you are the top or the bottom, because all you will do is fulfill your love-service. So the apparent superiority or inferiority in the operations of life don’t matter when you are really in grace. All Paul said was, that this was going to work out—that the elder would serve the younger. As a matter of fact that is true of all the world. The flesh world is the elder and we are the younger and the world serves us, not we the world.

If you watch through history you will find the world has been serving the growth and progress of the people of God. It might look the other way around. It is good to remember that. The flesh world is only the servant of the spirit world. And, the flesh world crucified Jesus Christ. They don’t even know that they are in Jesus Christ. He has become world conqueror because they crucified Him. He is now winning back thousands of the world and “leading captivity captive.” And so, it always is so. As we read before, it is God in people. People have God who reign in Christ. They are on top of their reigning and what is happening is only bringing out more of the reign of Christ in them—more of the manifestation of Christ and His love. They are really the people who are the leaders of the world, which is the reverse of what it looks like."