"Surely
the end of mankind as a vessel for my
Word is come before Me."
Fri.,
May 5, 1990
This
is the word of the
Lord sparked in me as of Thursday night
through a phone conversation. As we
discussed the "super revelation" mentioned in
the last letter, this
word came clearly to my heart. Its awesomeness
is stunning. Please read on as I
attempt to express its meaning to you.
The
one common
denominator that has characterized the
revealed Word of God throughout history
is that, except for Jesus Christ (the
Incarnate Word), God's Word has been
mediated through corruptible flesh and blood.
I quote now from a
letter I wrote
you all on Feb. 23, 1989:
This brings me to…now trace the forms of God's Word
to their
root essence. So far we've looked at the Law
of Moses and also New Testament
Scriptures. But if we trace these forms back
to their lowest common
denominator, what do we find? We find that
the root form that clothes every Word
of God is:
Flesh and Blood
All Word of God that comes to us through any form
that our
minds can apprehend ultimately comes to us
through the form of some
human personality….
The living Word of God is eternal... But! The human personality through whom it comes is finite.
This limitation is what
distinguishes form
from reality,
and law from grace. "Law"
is nothing more than the
limitation of human personality that clothes
the Living Word and gives our
minds something to grasp it by while the
Life works silently in our hearts.
Once the work of grace is done, the "law"
passes away.
Do
you remember this? Do
you understand it? If so, then you can begin
grasping the monumental
significance of the word from May 5. What God
is saying is that, even as the
Law of Moses came to an end, ushering in Jesus
Christ, so now the Law of
Mankind (whereby God speaks through the
limitation of flesh and blood) is
itself come to an end.
God's
6,000 year history
(the number of man) of relating to man through
the veil of flesh and blood is
over. And once again, the Manifested Word of
God is at hand in a new way and
will come to take over guidance of the planet.
This new Manifested Word will
fulfil all that the Law of Mankind failed to
fulfil "in that it was weak through the flesh" (Rom 8:3), even as
Jesus first fulfilled where Israel
failed.
The
significance of this
word from May 5 is seen when we begin
comparing realities between the Law of Moses
and the Law of Mankind. Consider: The Law of
Moses carried instructions for the
people to fulfil. But what happened? All that
the Law served to prove was that
the people could
not fulfil the
instructions.
Indeed,
Paul says this
was the Law's only
purpose—to expose
human inadequacy (Romans 7). The Law's
instructions could not be obeyed or give life. It required the Savior, the
Incarnate Word, to deliver the
people from their own miserable failure
exposed by the Law of Moses.
Now
compare therefore.
What was true of Israel as the stewards of the
Old Covenant in microcosm has
proven true of the worldwide Gentile Church
(focused these last centuries in
America) as stewards of New Covenant through
the Law of Flesh and Blood, the macrocosm.
So long as the Word of God has been mediated
in any way through corruptible flesh and blood, mankind has proved
himself completely
incapable as the
vessel for its fulfilment.
The
failure of Old
Testament Israel is the failure
of New Testament mankind to
this very hour (a failure against which Paul
prophetically warned— Rom
11:13-23; I Cor. 10:1-12; Gal 3-5; see also
Heb 4,6, and 10). The Gentile world
has been unable to fulfil anything of the Word
of God that has come through the
Law of Flesh and Blood since Jesus Christ,
whether by apostolic scripture or by
present revelation—either on the personal
level, corporate level, or world
level. All that we have proven by our
possession of this "treasure in
earthen vessels" is that we cannot fulfil the
commands of that treasure!
[For
more consideration
of the weakness of the gospel under mortality
and its true mission, please see
the mini article "Has the Gospel Failed?"]
Another Look at the Great Commission
What
has been the
hallmark command of the Gospel Age entrusted
through flesh and blood? "Go
into all the world and preach the gospel
to every creature." And now we see after
2,000 years where the
fulfilment of that command is. Answer:
Nowhere. Just as Israel was to
be a light to the world and failed, so the
Church was to become the light to
the world, this time through Gentile blood
instead of Jewish blood. But blood
nonetheless, blood still permeated
with sin nature.
Like
Israel, the Church elected to take focal shape
in the world through a political entity (what
is now known as the USA). Yet as
Isaiah lamented, "We
have brought no
deliverance to the earth" (26:18), so
now the Gentile Church under the Law of
Flesh and Blood must lament the same thing
after 2,000 years of opportunity.
So
what has the
"Age of Grace" proven? It has proven that so
long as God's Word is
mediated through the Law of Mankind of any
race at any
time, man
cannot fulfil its requirements.
The Word of God can only be fulfilled
when it is manifested through its own incarnation—such as Jesus Christ. It
cannot be fulfilled when it must borrow a
sinful habitation. It cannot be
fulfilled as long as it is cloaked in a
perishable human wineskin, whether
Jewish or Gentile.
How
clear this has come
to me
over the last year
especially. Now I even look back at my
manuscript Flight
From Babylon. What a message! And
yet, it is just one more limited appeal by God
through flesh to flesh—utterly
incapable of fulfilment through the
human body.
Last
year, I personally
reached the limits of fulfilling that message
to which my weak body was able to
take me. I virtually collapsed into a nervous
breakdown. My spirit was willing,
but my
flesh is too weak to serve as a
vessel for fulfilment of that message.
Like all messages mediated through the law of
our being, it shows us what is
wrong with us and points us the way to go, but
cannot take us there.
People,
I am now of the
mind that we cannot fulfil the Great
Commission so long as we are strapped to
legal bodies, nor were we meant to. The
Commission served to show us that, tied
to the law of these bodies, we can't. We need
something more. And now the
words, "Surely
the end of mankind as
a vessel for My Word is come before me."
Personally,
I believe we
have gone as far as we can under the Law of
Mankind. Through our revelation, we
have come to see our total corruption and
inadequacy as human beings. As human
law unto ourselves, as limited legal
repositories for the Living Word of God,
we have proven our total inability to fulfil a
single command of God through
scripture or revelation.
In
place of this, we
have filled the world with Baal worship which
is about to climax in the
appearance of the man of sin. We are
surrounded by Delusion Unlimited and
hatred of truth. This is what God has proven
after 6,000 years of entrusting
His Word to mankind, first on clay tablets,
then directly into human bodies. Now
it is time for a new incarnation of the
Word of God.
More on the Coming Super Revelation of the Gospel
This
new incarnation
which will replace the Law of Mankind will
also be the fulfilment of the coming
super revelation of the Gospel I addressed in
my last letter. This New
Incarnation will bring to fulfilment all that
the Law of Mankind was unable
through the flesh to fulfil. Everything that
was ever commanded or promised in
the New Testament will come to fulfilment by
this new super revelation of the
Incarnate Word. This includes the Great
Commission. Read on carefully...
Jesus
said He would not
return till first the gospel had been preached
in every nation (Mt 24:14).
Please note, however. He did not specify how
that message would be preached. In Rev 14:6,
John sees an "angel" fulfilling
the Great Commission. Who is this "angel"?
If
you read the first
five verses of Rev 14, you see that the
discussion immediately preceding this
word about the angel is the description of the
144,000 followers of the Lamb on
Mt. Zion. I
personally believe these are the new
Word-incarnated believers who have put
on new bodies referred to by
brother Leland Earls in his prophetic
writings.
I
believe that it is these
people who as a body are the
"angel" of verse 6 who fulfil the Great
Commission. I
also believe that these people are the fulfilment
of the super revelation and new
incarnation of the Word together
with Jesus
Christ who will bring to
fulfilment the New Testament even as Jesus
Himself alone brought to fulfilment the Old
Testament.
What
will this super
revelation be like? As I said in my last letter, "I don't know."
This has never happened before. If I knew, it
wouldn't be a super revelation.
If you want to know, wait till I've put on
immortality and I will tell you.
Better yet, put it on yourself!
Solving Two Nagging Mysteries
Though
I don't know what
this super revelation of the gospel will be
like, my hope for this New
Incarnation answers two life-long questions
I've had about my own walk:
1.
How come that, in
order to learn from God, all my life I've had
to learn in spite of people instead of directly from them?
Everything
I've learned
from God since I can remember has been "how
not to do it" by watching
other people's mistakes. Now I know why. It's
because people are laws
and we were never designed to learn
directly from law. The purpose of law is to
expose how not to do things by
watching man.
Even
when we think we
are learning from people, it is not so. In
such cases, the words of man only
illumine what God
is
already saying inside us by grace. For
instance, if my
letters "teach" you, it's only because they
illumine what God is
already saying to you (see Jn 6:45; 7:17). But
you don't learn anything
directly from me. You may however learn a lot
in spite of me!
That's
the way it is with
law. You don't learn from it. You only learn
in spite of it or incidentally to
it. Since flesh and blood is the ultimate law,
that's the way it is with
people. We either learn in spite of each other
or indirectly by one another
what God is already saying to us.
2.
How come all my life,
despite all my faith for God's promises and
all my obedience to His commands,
I've rarely seen outward fulfilments for it?
Instead, I've received mostly
hurts and failures which produce only inward
deepenings of worship, love for God,
love for truth, and understandings
such as these letters.
Answer:
God's promises
and commands are not ultimately
given
to be fulfilled for us or in us on the level
of our present legal humanity, but
on the coming level of our new
incarnation in grace. That New
Incarnation comes from the inside-out. The
hurts and failures we experience
over God's words on the plane of our legal
humanity work the work inside
us
that culminates in our transmutation to the
plane of New Incarnation where
we shall receive all the promises and have all
the commands fulfilled in us
from our former legal life.
As
I then daily put off
my legal self through daily releasing what
remains of my first humanity into
His hands, I have been increasingly freed from
my intensity of expectation
which hopes for the promises here and now, and
also from the intensity of
obligation of seeing the New Testament and the
Great Commission fulfilled
through me now.
Soon,
I will be transmuted,
clothed with a New Incarnation of the Word
Itself, walking with the Lamb on Mt. Zion.
There I will receive the promises and see all
the commands fulfilled. There I
will also have my deep life-long loneliness
quenched, a loneliness experienced
only by those who esteem the love for Truth
above every present human
relationship.
Meanwhile,
I no longer
have to lament over my inability to learn
directly from other people, wondering
if there must be something wrong with me. Nor
do I feel any more disgust over
the epidemic idiocy of people around me and
the American Baal-worship scene. I
realize now that it is all "par for the
course" under the Law of
Mankind. What else should be expected?
Fret
not, 0 my soul. (Ps
37). Just enjoy God and walk above it. Right
now, rest in this with me. The
"show" is almost over... The 6th day is
closing... The time is at
hand... Relax... Rejoice.