Can Two Equal One?
“Let us make man in our image.”[1] God states. So what of it?
We just went through a study showing that God is one, and we even discussed why
God would reveal himself as 3 separate individuals, but how do these three
separate individuals reveal to me who God is?
“For
there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy
Ghost: and these three are one.”[2]
Jesus
Himself says, “I and my Father are one.”[3] How does this make sense?
How can you be separate and apart of the same at the same time. Timothy calls
this the great mystery of God,
“And without controversy
great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in
the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the
world, received up into glory.”[4]
Paul
says that Jesus,
“Who, being in the form of
God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no
reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the
likeness of men.”[5]
This is the craziest of all doctrines in the
entire bible. Follow me very closely as I try to unfold this amazing God into
our dimension, in a way we can understand. For all eternity, God has existed. God’s
existence is not like we understand existence, He has just been. There was
nothing before God because He causes all things to be. For all eternity passed
Love has been the experience of God. “…God is love.”[6] God’s character is so
multidimensional that He cannot be explained by just stating He is one.
When God created His first creation, He was
faced with a problem. How does He relate to His creation when He himself is not
created? How could He bring his creation into a loving friendship with Himself
if His creation could have no grasp of what He is? God made a decision before
creation began that He would “create” Himself in a way to relate to the
created. And so, as God created marvel after marvel, Jesus was made the representation
of God to His creation. The angels knew Jesus as Michael the Arc Angel.[7] You see, it is because it
is relationship that God desires. He wanted friendship with His creation. God
did not create beings because He needed something to worship Him, God created
beings for communion, for friendship and love. Jesus embodies that character of
God that desires intimacy with all of creation. To the Angels, God revealed is
Michael, to Humanity, He is Jesus, to the unfallen worlds…Well I’ll leave it up
to your imagination to picture what He may be. This is the mystery of God, that
while relating to us in our creation, He remains God.
I like to use the analogy of a computer. You can
take a computer and copy the hard drive exactly, so that it is the exact same
computer, but as soon as someone uses the original or the new one, it becomes
separate, while still having the same information as the original. Yet, to keep
these computers the same, updates must be made regularly so that they will not
become out of sync with each other. Jesus is an extension of God into humanity,
He is fully God, but made into the likeness of humanity. This is why Jesus was
in constant communion with His father, because that connection had to be
maintained in order that the will of God could remain one. The act of prayer
brought Jesus back into the collective mind of God. Jesus did something special
with Humanity that He did not do with the angels He became fully human. Why?
Because of one creation in particular.
The First Of All Creation
Lucifer, Son of the morning. Not
just A son of the morning, THE son of the morning. Lucifer was the beginning of
all creation, the first of God’s creative acts. The Bible gives a startling
picture of Lucifer,
“You have been in Eden the
garden of God; every precious stone was yout covering, the sardius, topaz, and
the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald,
and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of your tabrets and of thy pipes
was prepared in you in the day that you were created. You are the anointed
cherub that covers; and I have set thee so: you were upon the holy mountain of
God; you have walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. You were perfect
in your ways from the day that you were created, till iniquity was found in you.”[8]
Lucifer was perfect, created by God
to be the most beautiful of all created beings. And when he came into existence
what was the first thing to meet him? It was Jesus, Michael, God. Lucifer was
created to be the friend of God, the crowning act of all creation up to that
point. So Lucifer became the friend of God, continually standing in the
presence of the almighty. He knew the character of God better than anything
ever created. He led the angels and all of heaven into praises to Him. If
Lucifer was all that, how did he fall? How did something that knew the
character of God so well, fall? He was daily in communion with God, if any
angel in the universe knew who God was, it was Lucifer, how could he be so
wrong? That no doubt is the very question angels asked themselves the day
Lucifer fell. Isaiah asked the same question. He stated,
“How art thou fallen from
heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground,
which didst weaken the nations!”[9]
The Bible says that Iniquity was found in him. What
was this iniquity that was found in Lucifer? How it happened will forever
remain a mystery because sin has no logical cause, but Lucifer became jealous
of Michael, the arc angel, the presider over the congregation of heaven, God
himself. Lucifer saw Michael entering the presence of God the father. He saw
God leave created form and re-enter at will as he went back and forth in
communication with His Father, and Lucifer desired that position. He saw that
he had been there at the foundation of creation. He watched as worlds,
creatures, galaxies, and possibly universes were created, and he began to
question the foundational understanding of God. He no longer saw God as giving
him everything possible for his pleasure, but began to imagine that God was
withholding a dimension of reality from him. Lucifer did not realize that to
enter the reality of God would be to cease to exist since God does not exist
inside a created universe. Lucifer some how missed the point that his very
existence was housed inside the intellect of God, and that to be outside of the
presence of God would be to not exist at all. For instance, if I asked God to
take my body and remove every particle of energy from it, I would cease to
exist entirely because my body is made entirely of energy. It is the same with
desiring to be outside the presence of God. To do so would cause me to no
longer be since all of reality is constructed by the energy that flows from God
himself.
Yet Lucifer, who became Satan, began to view God
as a part of his creation. He misconstrued the friendship he had with Jesus and
started to view the greatest gift of God as weakness. God became something that
he could attain to. No longer was he satisfied with being the friend of God,
continually standing the presence of the almighty, and always in communion with
Michael, the image of God in created flesh. Lucifer made the same mistake many make today, he made God in to his own likeness and started to see God as nothing more than a created entity. He attributed to the creator created attributions. As we will see throughout the remainder of this book, this is precisely what humanity does on a daily biases, constantly construing God as something to be grasped and attained to. The Bible documents his fall in
this sad account:
“How art thou fallen from
heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground,
which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will
ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit
also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will
ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”[10]
Lucifer committed the unpardonable
sin, a sin that not even a forgiving God could forgive. Lucifer blasphemed the
Holy Spirit. Jesus says,
“Verily I say unto you, All
sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever
they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath
never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.”[11]
What
is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and why is it so bad that God cannot
forgive it? To answer that question we have to find out who the Holy Spirit is.
This is one of the most amazing truths about the God I believe exists. Hold on
as we explore the next dimension of God’s character.
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