|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
HOW THE BOOK OF LIFE IS WRITTEN
by Preston EbyI want to help you grasp why you are here – you are being prepared to reveal the invisible God to the visible creation. God created all things in all the unbounded universe and the last, crowning work of creation was the bringing forth of man into the world. God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion" (Gen. 1:26). No man has seen God at any time. He is the immortal, the invisible God. He is the eternal mystery. No material substance is able to penetrate Him. Thoughts tumble into confusion, whenever they wish to approach Hiss nature. He is the shaper who has no shape. He is the former who has no form. He is the speaker who has no audible voice. His incomprehensibility lies in His shapelessness. In His shaping lies His revelation. Man in God's image is the shaping of God, giving God form, that His nature can be expressed on the physical and visible plane. Man in God's image was the government of God established over all things in the heavens and in the earth. And the government of God over the material creation, including all life forms, was the image of God in man. Thus man was the connecting link between the invisible and unknowable God and the visible creation. Man as God's image was the revelation of the invisible God to the visible world. Jesus Christ, the last Adam, is the express image of God's person and in Him you are the image of God, the government of God, the revelation of God, the Book of the Life of the Lamb to be known and read of all men and every creature everywhere.
You are not just anybody. You came out from God. There is a strange and wonderful statement in Hebrews 10:7. "Lo, I come (in the VOLUME OF THE BOOK it is written of me) to do Your will, O God." These words are attributed to Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. This is, however, a quotation from Psalm 40:7. Therefore, the "volume of the book" referred to was written before the Psalms. The five books of Moses were written before any others, except, perhaps, the book of Job; and in these earliest books of the Bible Moses pled for God to have mercy upon the children of Israel, "and if not, blot me out of YOUR BOOK which You have written" (Ex. 32:32). These words speak of a Book written by God Himself which was older than Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers or Deuteronomy. God wrote the law of His life in His Christ (Head and body) long before the Bible was written! The scripture indicates that the revelation Jesus was sent to bring to pass on earth was fully recorded in the "Volume of the Book" long before Jesus ever started to walk out His script in the earth realm. The nature of God written in the Christ, the Logos, the Word, which was in the beginning with God, was the heavenly reality of that Book of Life that would be written and opened on earth. Each elect member of the Christ body has a ministry to fulfill which was fully recorded in the "Volume of the Book" a long, long time ago. In that long ago your spirit rejoiced in celestial realms with your heavenly Father. Obviously you did not exist there in your present physical form in that time when "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). And yet you were there – in spirit – because you are a son of God. Locked within the mind of the spirit within you is the secret knowledge of that primordial time and all that transpired there in the counsels of God, but the outer mind of soul and body remembers nothing of that realm, for these are formed in and of the earth. We can identify with the prophet David when he said by the Spirit, "Your eyes did see my substance (embryo), yet being imperfect; and IN YOUR BOOK ALL MY MEMBERS WERE WRITTEN, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them" (Ps. 39:16). Unfathomable mysteries lie locked up within these enigmatic words; but it is clear that all you were to be in the earth realm was written, encoded, programmed in your spirit before the foundation of the world. Before there was a physical embryo of Jeremiah in his mother's womb, there was a spirit Jeremiah that God knew. "Before I formed you in the belly I knew you, and before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you" (Jer. 1:5). I believe the same thing is true about every member in God's great family of sons and daughters, for He is the Father of the family both in heaven and in earth; you have a great past and a marvelous future! You came from God. You were with God in spirit when all the sons of God shouted for joy at the announcement of God's great plan – His election in man. You have no remembrance of it in your conscious mind, but sometimes you know things that you have no way of knowing. In those times our dull mind receives the signal from the eternal knowing within beyond the powers of the brain, and we know that we know though there is no physical evidence for our knowing. When our spirit was quickened by His Spirit that hidden inner life began to fructify and we were quickened to that world from whence we came. There is a spiritual knowing without any mental input. As soul and body are brought under the influence and rule of the spirit within the message of the Book of Life, the Volume of the Book, is transcribed from the spirit onto the fleshy tables of the heart of the outer man. The Book of Life from heaven is thus published in an earth-edition capable of being seen and known and read of all men.
Your calling, the reason Christ quickened you, was to make you consciously a part of Himself, to bring you into a calling unto glory, to a place where God by His Spirit could express Himself through you, so that you could bring the revelation of God into the earth. Your life and everything that is happening to you is designed to train you for a royal position in God. The only reason God sent you here from the realm of Spirit, lowered into the bondage of corruption, was to process you that in your visible, physical, material form you might become the image of God, the revelation of the invisible God to the material world. As one brother said, "God didn't send you here to make you happy, although joy is certainly a fruit of His Spirit. But Jesus didn't come to tickle you and make you happy – that's what you do with babies – you tickle them to get them to laugh. When you do this you are saying, Listen, little one, there is no way I can intelligently communicate with you, there is no way we can have conversation, so just let me make you laugh. If you are still wanting God to thrill you, excite you, fill you with Pentecostal exuberance and Charismatic effervescence, and make you laugh you are demonstrating the fact that you still have no ability to think or act in the Kingdom of God." You are being groomed to occupy a position in God. There is a people in this hour that is being raised – raised how? – not out of the cemetery, but out of the grave of the carnal mind (for to be carnally minded is death), out of the grave of soulish consciousness, out of the grave of sin, weakness, limitation, fear, and frustration, raised up into the place where they can become the manifestation of the total personality of God in a physical body upon this earth. This is what Jesus Christ came into this earth to reveal. He came forth "the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person" (Heb. 3:1). And we note that this word "person" is actually the Greek word HUPOSTASIS meaning the substance, or the substratum, what lies under. All the life and inner nature of the Divine was expressed through our Lord Jesus Christ, all of God's mind, will, emotion, attitude, desire, nature, character, wisdom, knowledge, power, authority and glory. It is as though the Divine was clothed in a garment and you must unbutton it to see the reality that lies beneath. And yet there is no need to unbutton it for the glory erupts, it breaks through, it emanates and radiates through the outer form. This is the glory of sonship. This is the opening of the Book of the Life of the Lamb that His life may be seen and known and read of all men.
The Lamb's Book of Life-Part 1 (2nd) - BACK
Spirit of the Word - Covenant Eschatology - Introductory Note - New Stuff
