February 14, 2014

 

Growing up in Eskimo villages in the arctic, snow storms were not unusual. If Sunday came along and we were in the middle of a blizzard, who cares! The only individuals who might stay home were the very aged and infirm. Brother, have things ever changed! After fairly light snowfall on Thursday and Friday a week ago here in the Yakima Valley which left us with an accumulation of perhaps four inches, we woke up Sunday morning with an overnight snowstorm that had dropped another seven inches on us.

 

With a fellowship of believers scattered across a distance of more than a hundred miles, highways and city streets clogged with thick snow, and warming temperatures that made things slick and treacherous for driving, we found it prudent to cancel our gathering last Sunday. (Several other pastors and church leaders let us know they had done the same thing.) Thinking back over the years, this has to be only the second time in memory we've ever canceled a Sunday gathering.

 

Guess that's part of the problems we have in our modern, civilized (?), technical age. In the arctic, folks just hitched up their dog teams (if they had any distance to travel), or they dressed up for the weather and headed out. Unless a person has chains or studded snow tires on their vehicles in this kind of weather, they consider it too risky to travel. [These are the kinds of times when I think back rather fondly to my dog-team days! :-)

OK. Let's get on with today's discussion.

 

John 3:47-51: Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

 

Jesus’ statement was predicated on the fact that His flesh would be resurrected flesh. He knew that he was about to be killed, but He also knew that they couldn’t keep him dead. He was going to rise from the dead.

 

Jesus was getting ready to keep our appointment with death. Because life — zoe life — was in Him already, He could, with absolute authority say, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever.”

For those of us as believers, when we obey Jesus’ command to be water-baptized, we show to Satan and to all his minions that we likewise have transferred our citizenship from that of this world to Heaven — to the Kingdom of God.

 

But the Table of the Lord doesn’t leave our feast at simply eating of Jesus’ flesh. We must also drink His Cup. Why? Take a look at a couple of statements that David makes.

 

Psalm 16:5: The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot.

 

Psalm 23:5: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

 

Psalm 116:13: I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the LORD.

 

The Cup represents the very life-force of God Himself. It is the life-force of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the moving force, the energizer of that life-force in us.

 

The Cup is the cup of life itself. For Jesus to instruct us to drink His blood — or to drink His Cup — was to drink of the energizing force that filled Him after the Holy Spirit manifested on and in Him. (The Greek word, erchomai, is used in Matthew’s text, and it literally means to appear from within, to manifest, to accompany, to appear, to enter).

 

Thus, Jesus was both baptized in water AND in/with the Holy Spirit. It mattered not — in the final analysis — that Jesus was going to be crucified; death couldn’t hang onto Him. He had drank of the Cup of the Spirit.

 

When Jesus died on the Cross and blood and water issued from His side, there was no need for blood in His being any longer once He was raised from the dead. When He appeared to the disciples after His resurrection, He said to them, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” (see Luke 24:39)

He didn’t refer to Himself as “flesh and blood.” The blood had been shed. The appointment with death had been kept by the shedding of His blood. Death was canceled. Now the Spirit of Life — everlasting — would make us free from the Law of Sin and Death.

 

Let me take another track with this for a minute to show you something.

 

There is are several rather fascinating scientific "white papers" which touch on the subject of blood. These "white papers" propose that blood is nothing more than congealed light. That's a rather bold concept and treatise, but for blood to be congealed light would mean that the light had slowed down rather dramatically. (That's a scientific discussion I don't want to get into today, but one that we may come back to some other time.)

 

Let me quote briefly from one discussion in the realm of quantum physics -- an area we've already touched on briefly as we talked about the aspect of faith.

 

"In [DeBroglie's] research, he observed that sub-atomic particles also displayed wave-like properties. Particles such as the electron and proton also had wavelengths. In other words, inside the atom – which earlier science described as absolute matter – there were non-material energy waves, contrary to materialist belief. Just like light, these minute particles inside the atom behaved like waves at times, and exhibited the properties of particles at others.

 

"Contrary to expectations, the absolute matter in the atom could be detected at certain times, but disappeared at others. This major discovery showed that what we imagine to be the real world were in fact shadows. Matter had completely departed from the realm of physics and was headed in the direction of quantum mechanics."

 

To sum up these conclusions, when you get to the core makeup of everything, there is light! Science can demonstrate that all matter is nothing more than congealed light! Consider this: light isn’t like the light you see from the sun or a lamp, but waves of energy. At the subatomic level, everything is energy waves – light. Recent discoveries have revealed that cells communicate with one another via light called biophotons.

 

You see where I'm going with this, don't you? You'll remember that Della and I have talked about our physicist friend, Dr. Joseph O'Neil. This is the man who discovered that he could convert the makeup of blood into sound and thereby determine a person's medical history and likely life-span based on the music produced when scanning the blood.

Since sound and light are all part of the same energy spectrum, it takes no great rocket science to figure out that if sound can be derived from blood, light is there as well.

 

What's the point of all of this? Consider again what we read in Genesis 2:23: "And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."

 

Juxtapose that statement against Jesus' Word to the Disciples: “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”

 

When you realize that we have no mention of blood at all in the Word prior to Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we first see blood as producing sound (Genesis 4:10) when Abel's blood "cries" out to the Lord, it provides us with the very unique perspective that Adam and Eve actually had light flowing in their veins prior to the introduction of sin and the contamination of their DNA.

If indeed blood is slowed-down and congealed light, it gives us a unique revelation of what Jesus did for us at the Cross, and why He gave us His Table as a picture of the restoration of our return to timeless existence in and through Him.

 

In Coffee Breaks published throughout past years, I've shared a tiny portion of my own set of experiences which took place back in 1996 when I transported in the realm of the Spirit outside of time, into eternity, and back and forth into various points in time going back to the Garden of Eden, into the future to see things during the thousand years of peace, and even seeing the "New Heavens and the New Earth" as John describes in Revelation when "time should be no more."

 

One of the things which became very clear to me was that until Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, time -- at least in the way that we know it -- was not measured. There is pretty clear evidence in the Word for this. Consider what Peter had to say about it in his second general letter to the body of Christ (See II Peter 3:5-8):

 

"For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

 

"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

Get it? He says, "by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water."

 

When He spoke, creation was old and aged by hundreds of thousands and millions of years (according to the way that science likes to measure things), but the age and all of the "periods of time" that geologists like to assign to the earth occurred instantly when the Word came forth.

 

OK, now! Don't go throwing rocks at me! I didn't say that: Peter wrote that under the inspiration of Holy Spirit. God spoke the Word. Age existed at the moment He spoke. Let me tell you why I believe this without a shred of doubt.

When you see creative miracles unfold before your eyes, when you see eyes form in eye sockets where eyes have been removed, when you see four inches of bone grow in seconds to replace bone which has been surgically removed, when you see an arm grow which had never grown because of a birth defect, and it changes from the size of a baby's arm to the size needed for a full-grown woman in a matter of seconds -- you get the idea!

 

When you see the dead raised to life -- and even experience being raised from the dead yourself -- when you experience instant dematerialization, or a reconstruction of your molecular makeup (or whatever you want to call it) so that you pass through a solid object in a split second and are instantly changed back, when you are transported physically, along with a group of other people, hundreds of miles in less time than it takes to blink an eye -- when you begin to experience these kinds of events for yourself, you suddenly realize that the creative power in the Word of God exceeds anything our natural, physical world can even comprehend!

 

Watching creative miracles take place in front of your eyes that happen either in seconds or virtually instantly, you suddenly understand the concept of God speaking the Word, "Light BE!" and everything materializing out of what seems to be nothingness in a split second as though it was fully grown, fully matured, with time and age built into its very existence!

 

Sorry! I'm getting off on a rabbit trail here. What I saw in the adventures experienced in those travels was that time was created specifically as an envelope or a container to hold death, sin, the curse and Satan. Here's how John (in Revelation 10:5-6) describes it:

 

"And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, And sware by him that liveth forever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer."

 

So what are we getting at here? Follow this sequence:

 

If (1) light was slowed in order to create this envelope we know as time, and (2) light was what Adam and Eve initially had flowing in their veins, and (3) sin/time caused such a slowdown in the flow of the light in their veins that it caused that light to congeal into what we now know as blood, then (4) we can easily conclude that the blood that Jesus shed for us -- both when he bore the stripes for our healing, as well as when he hung on the Cross -- was a demonstration of what we have in Him!

 

Did that come out right? Let's go through this one more time!

 

Jesus came into this world in the form of flesh and blood because he had to take on the form or the likeness of sinful flesh in order to begin the process of restoring us from time-space-based beings into eternity-based beings.

As time-space-based beings our ability to function from eternity was hampered and even prevented because the light and life of Father God which had once flowed in our beings had been retarded, slowed to the point of being congealed.

In order for the restoration to our former existence as light-based beings could happen we needed to be rid of the congealed light flowing in our veins. Blood sacrifices were established under the Law of Moses as an interim means of atonement for our sins -- and we all know that "atonement" is only a covering over, NOT an eradication of the sin, or forgiveness, or "remission" (aphiemi) and even the wiping out of the memory of our sins.

 

Jesus became the "once and for all time" sacrifice on our behalf, in the process suffering stripes and wounds to his physical body such that there was scarcely a square inch of his body that wasn't bleeding. Acting in His position as The Son of God (who Himself was legally free from the Law of Sin and Death), by taking our sins, our transgressions, our iniquities (or character traits that tended or bent towards sin), our sicknesses, our diseases, our infirmities, and everything about our flesh and blood-based frame that was death-oriented to the Cross, Jesus drained every vestige of blood -- that congealed light -- from His body and in the process made possible for us an end to our time-space-based existence.

 

When Jesus rose from the dead, there wasn't an ounce of blood flowing in His veins. The risen Lord had been returned to his Spirit-based existence with light being the very essence of His core makeup.

 

Are you beginning to get a better grasp now on the significance of the Cup at the Table of the Lord? Do you now begin to understand why Jesus said, "this do in remembrance of me"?

 

In the natural world, wine is often referred to as "spirits." By the same token, Jesus used wine in the Cup at His Table to signify the transition available to us from blood-based (congealed light) existence to Spirit-based existence. Let's wrap up today's discussion by again quoting Romans 8:2:

 

"For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death."

 

Are we good? Excellent! See you next week.

 

If you are in need of healing please join our prayer conference calls on either Monday, Wednesday or Friday of each week at 7:00 PM Eastern. Once again, the number to call is (805) 399-1000. Then enter the access code: 124763#. Let us minister to your need for healing!

 

Blessings on you!