Do you realize the entire Bible, all 66 books, is a prologue of your life. Each person is a consequence of divine creation and the primary object of the biblical story. It started before the foundation of the world and it is about lambs! Check out these two passages:
“And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ’My father!’ And he said ‘Here am I, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.”
“…everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.”
Existing in eternity before the clock of time even ticks is paradoxical. A book existed before they were made? Names of people like you and me are in a book before there is paper? We were in the book before the earth we stand upon was formed? A Lamb’s Book of Life before there were lambs? Our personal context is written in a pre-creation reality! If you are not in Christ, its mystic. If you are in Christ, it is existential and practical … and wondrous, and glorious, and given freely to us! “God will provide for himself (and Abraham and us) the lamb.”
It is hard to imagine anything before time. Yet in John 1:1 we read “In the beginning”, the advent of time, “was the Word and the Word was with God.” In the Greek it reads, in the beginning “God was the Word.”
Our scriptural perception is vital in order to see God clearly. How we think about God matters because we are objects of His love. He desires us to know Him and make Him the object of our love. We have been created in Christ Jesus and thereby provided access into His grace and to His absolute, eternal nature.
In Christ we breathe pure eternal air while residing in polluted temporal space. We witness and participate in this paradoxical truth with His living presence in us: “I in you and you in me.”
Our personal existence is before Adam is created! Not an academic abstraction, it goes directly to the nature and character of our sovereign Lord. God’s grace gifted us with faith to understand beyond our vocabulary, beyond the boundaries of time and things. Faith conveys knowledge to our heart beyond the reach of reason or even knowledge. It is faith that opens doors of our mind to receive things of the Spirit and it is grace flowing out of God Himself, enabling us to unite by faith into His glorious being so that we participate being who He calls us to be.
God brings unseen things into us and makes them visible. We are created new into eternality, a place outside of time. It is here, before time, where our identity came into being and the prologue of our life begins. Through faith we begin to see and know God’s timeless reality. Faith draws God’s reality into our reality and into our conscious experience. God’s provision of grace reaches into our space so we can live and walk in His righteous purity of truth and love.
Faith reaches out of time bringing eternity into living experience. Does that sound mystic, metaphysical or just plain wacky? Well, does raising people from the dead challenge your boundaries of reality?
Faith is an exotic place. It is a “journey” and at the same time more than a “journey,” it is a destination where we have already arrived. Faith is a gift allowing our destination to be realized without understanding all that has been gifted. The practical side of heaven is bringing absolute truth and resurrection life into our earthly circumstances. He is the Perfector of our faith as we grasp qualities and power of His eternality. What seems like a space-journey is really discovering a destination so new and different, … discovering truth, absolutes and righteousness in faith is itself a trip.
Our access into this pre-creation existence is not only scriptural, it is fundamental to who we are in Christ. The message of salvation is about God reaching into time and lifting us out while at the same time ministering to us in time giving us ministry participation. We are witnessing His sovereign purpose in action in us.
To be sovereign means having authority, control and power to exercise the will to do and be. This is who God is. He describes Himself as “I AM.” He is the One who created the laws of physics and the One who makes us objects of His love. He is sovereign God, He is our sovereign God!
This same sovereign God is our prologue dwelling in our center. Our existence comes out from Himself. Believers have been created twice. First, we were created as children of Adam. Second, we were created again in His image, “born from above,” and given the resurrected life of Jesus Christ. His Spirit is constantly wooing us into the things of God, growing us into eternal values, placing grace within our grasp by faith.
There are only two groups of people, those who are in Christ and those who are not. Those who choose not to be subjects of God’s grace will be subject to His righteous judgment. We are either hostile to God or we have accepted His grace by faith placing us into His grace and Kingdom.
In His grace and His Kingdom, we are growing our participation in His life. We are living in clay containers of earthen soil that are hostile to our Living Lord. This temporal experience in Christ tests our eternal metal, growing faith and fruit in grace and knowledge of God.
In Christ, we are compelled to blend into our temporal calling our eternal being. We are called to replace our temporal experience with faith and fruit. It is a divine provision making possible the impossible. Our created minds cannot contain, nor our hearts hold love so profound! It is an essence and purpose of grace. Jesus, the last Adam, has equipped us with His resurrected life so that we can replace our temporal experience with His eternal, resurrected life of truth and αγαπε love… by faith.
Our temporal world is full of change. It is often observed change is our only constant, change doesn’t change? In God’s eternality it is just the opposite. God’s pre-creation state or condition is righteous, absolute and unchangeable. God does not change. His eternal truth is absolute and revealed in the form of Jesus, God manifested in flesh, and get this … revealed in us through a second creation! Amen? The Holy Spirit, our gift in Christ, reveals Christ’s absolute truth to our corrupted heart and mind. This is fundamental for those whose name is written in the Lamb’s book of life. (Our new creation is Spiritual. It is up to us to bring His righteousness into our clay, temporal world. Another wow!!!)
The “born again” story is God’s transforming work in our clay container with resurrection power through our new spiritually created life. It is the story of replacing temporal, carnal hearts, minds and wills with God’s eternal, absolute righteousness sealed in us by His Holy Spirit. It is our spirit joined to His Spirit manifesting new life through His Son Jesus, the Son of Abraham who is also the Lamb.
God is the author and finisher of our temporal experience regardless of which group we belong, those who believe or those who don’t. The contradictions in our human experience will disappear like vapor when we bathe in God’s grace. Faith is grasping God’s grace and submitting our life to God’s power working in us. This is faith working, changing us into who we already are spiritually created to be.
Grace not only is available, it reigns because we are justified by faith and so much more. God’s grace provisions us with communicable absolutes of His character, i.e., love, righteousness, truth and goodness, joy and peace. God is piercing time with His love in us.
Our physical life begins in time. Yet, it anticipates time. This is extraordinary! The biblical record declares a life thread showing us on a “journey,” or should we say in pilgrimage. A “journey” is a feeble attempt to describe reality without buildings or walls. Any travel word, like pilgrimage, describing timelessness, a place without barriers common to human thinking, falls short of what this reality really is! And yet, we do live in buildings and contend with walls even while placed in this wall-less reality, not virtual, but totally absolute. Traveling from time, rooted in temporal culture, into a grace culture of spiritual absolutes like righteousness, truth and love is only possible in Christ. It starts in eternity, passes through time, then, back into eternity exposing us to a God like Life.
Feeble is where we are contained within these vessels of clay. Constrained within the pollution of human authority, power and special interests, man feels compelled to enter the fray, asserting his human identity. Man’s human choice yields to the finality of our frail dilemma. It acknowledges sensual experience as sovereign, man a supreme authority. It denies a higher order, not only the design of our personal physiology, but the grandeur of creation seen both in microscope and telescope. It is hostile to God and cannot please God. This great deception says, “We are human beings with dignity!” The journey of natural man without Jesus is blinded by the morality of a self-god.
New believers are in a quandary to handle this internal conflict. Their soul is vetted with values of a worldly wisdom saying, “we have to take care of our self because nobody else will.” The worldly system fights faith, our own clay vessel lusts with worldly values.
Scripture not only reveals our “Personal Prologue” but also provides spiritual light for believers struggling without an Eternal-view of God. A distorted grace relationship is often with Christ rather than in Jesus. This is what we need to realize in order to consume grace with faith. We need to know Him in the power of His resurrection. We need to eat His flesh and drink His blood. We need to understand “greater is He that is in you, then He that is in the world,” 1John 4:4. Know yourself in Christ, Accept yourself in Christ, Be yourself in Christ!
Our “journey” in faith is described by revelation in the knowledge of Christ, having our hearts enlightened by the hope He has called us to individually, knowing the riches of the inheritance in us by experiencing His resurrection power according to His will for us, Ephesians 1:15ff.
If we live in Christ, we need to also walk in Christ, Gal. 5:25. This is our journey, walking in the Spirit of Him with whom we have to do!
“Journey” is an ok word because it is like a launching pad. Bound by launching pad rules, we are free to “journey” into divine space. We label this “journey” with common temporal references but the “journey” is about unlocking limitations and barriers of personal culture by God Himself. Anchored to our frailties, because of sin in a world that continues to degrade, we learn to abandoned self in order to thrive in Christ. This process itself is a large part of the journey. The mystery of possessing the eternal mind of Jesus while at the same time living with the pollution and hostility of a self dominated natural world is amazing and exciting. Not only amazing, it is extraordinary and incredible all rolled into one! Being in the world but not of the world is a reality, a reality absolutely true in Christ.
This kind of “journey” calls us to fight a war which is already won. How can a war exist if the battle is already won? Its an oxymoron. Remember
the story of a shepherd boy, David. His battle was already won before he picked up the five stones. Remember Jericho, the first city the Israelites confronted after crossing the Jordan River, into the promise land. Remember Elijah confronting the wicked King Ahab and his wife Jezebel. He called down fire that consumed the sacrifice. The key to these victories is faith. These conflicts were not conflicts at all because they were already won in FAITH. Our “journey” is faith. But the truth is, it is not a journey in the sense of travel because we have already arrived. This “journey” is discovering the eternality where we already are! Faith takes reality outside of time, bringing it into our personal living space while providing joy in our struggles. Yes, it is paradoxical, but true!
Our battle tests faith so our soul will experience God’s power. His inheritance in us is tested by conflict and suffering. He glorifies Himself in us while at the same time we put to death the death residing in our clay flesh. How is this possible? The cross made it possible, the blood of the Lamb. This is the “journey” we are all called to travel as believers in Jesus Christ, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’
We start with milk, understanding who we are in Christ, being rooted in the person of Jesus. We are transferred from one kingdom to another, not only by the position of new birth, but being in Christ, by drinking the water of the word, which is Jesus Himself, eating His flesh, drinking His blood, living by faith in grace He Himself supplies. We can live in the law of the Spirit of Life because He has set us free from the law of sin and death. By increasing our faith we decrease the “journey.”
When we see the prologue to our life, and we add the context of Romans 5, where grace reigns in which we stand, replacing the reign of sin and death, and so much more, then we begin to see there is now no condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus, Romans 8. This is accepting who we are in Christ, realizing our provisioning is already won because He is in us! “I in you and you in me.”
Old Testament scripture defines “boundaries.” In Christ we find them pulled down because faith removes mountains. This is the terrain we are called to walk, in the dessert of faith because in it, we can be who we are called to be, overcomers! (Rev. 3:21)