By Fred Pruitt
Continuing from Part Four
Inquirer: The day I gave my life to the LORD I consciously and purposely placed my will in his hands. I knew I could later choose to abandon the faith and turn back to what I used to be; so, I wholeheartedly and freely gave God my permission (with my human will) to ‘do whatever it takes to keep my on the path that You have ordained for me’. I meant it and made it irrevocable before Him. Over the past 35 years I’ve taken some lumps upside my head, so to speak. He has been faithful to keep me and I KNOW that he will continue. He has to and I don’t really have a choice either – it’s a covenant thing. I am confident in His leading including our communications here.
Fred: We have been translated, from one kingdom to another, and don’t bounce in and out of God’s kingdom into the devil’s and then back again all day long every day.
Inquirer: I agree. It’s a done deal. Our citizenship is in the kingdom of heaven.
Fred: We are instead pulled and poked by the tempter, to prove (solidify) our faith, every day. And that poking simply reminds us to speak the truth when confronted with opposites. Remember, we don’t make the truth true by believing it. We instead experience the truth when we believe it, and the truth is not visible in the outer world, but “known” inwardly, and little by little the Spirit reorients our entire person in this direction, and by the trial of our faith over and over, we are realizing that life emanates from inside us out into the world, rather than from outside in, and that the inner Spirit reality which God speaks in us is THE truth, and nothing else is.
Inquirer: “Little by little the Spirit reorients our entire person in this direction”. Can we instead take giant steps?
Fred: We take our leaps to the uttermost by faith. It is God who determines our times and for most of us there is a period of years when we settle into the totality of He as us. I wouldn’t limit anyone however on the basis of human time and in my experience we fellowship on an equal footing as well with beginners in union reality as with those who have been many years in this awareness. Still, this is for most as great a change in consciousness and understanding as when the scales dropped from our eyes when we were born again. And that kind of change takes some settling and reorientation, which the Spirit is very good at accomplishing.
Inquirer: Any why should we take any evil at the hands of the devil? The Bible speaks otherwise:
Fred: What Bible have you been reading? If it pleased the Lord to bruise Him, have not you realized we are part of that bruising, and in Him continue to receive the bruising at the hands of the devil? Sheep for the slaughter, laughingstock, fools for Christ’s sake, stoned, tortured, shipwrecked as Paul?
I have not had the same exact experiences as Paul but certainly I have not been spared from the difficulties of life in pretty much every regard. “The rain shall fall on the just and unjust alike.” When the scripture says, “the wicked one toucheth him not” it is talking about who we are, not anything that might happen to our body or earthly existence.
I take nothing as if it were only at the hands of the devil though, not one thing. Everything that comes to me, even if it were a cross engineered by a satanic plot, I would take, and do take, as the hand of the Father. Jesus was, “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” delivered to Pilate. Satan entered Judas to engineer the whole thing — as well as Pilate and Herod and the Sandhedrin and High Priests, but it was the Father who sent the Son, who delivered His Own Son to be killed — by Satan — that Satan’s kingdom might be defeated.
And in the same way the wicked one attempts to touch us, because the wicked one not only thought to destroy the Holy One’s body, but he also thought to take Him into Hell with him, in order to finally demonstrate to the whole universe, from the depths of hell to the highest heavens, that Hell is stronger and greater than Heaven, that self-might and self-pride and self-loathing are mightier and more powerful than the Deity Who manifests Himself in the pathetic death of a helpless lamb.
But of course He took everything on Himself that we were, all of sin and became it!!!! We were sin by virtue of being indwelt and run by sin, i.e. the devil, and Christ Jesus on the tree was made sin. (2 Cor 5:21)
And then in death He was taken into the deepest depths, where every despair, every cry, every fear, every shriek of pain, every spiteful word, all the hatred, all the agony, all the evil, all the selfish needy grasping unrelenting unfulfilled desire of every human son of all time was put upon him, that he might know and experience and groan and moan with us in the deepest separation from God, where there is no hope, no respite and no light forever.
And in that being put upon him, by the hand of the Father and power of the Spirit He was raised, to show eternally that there is no pit too deep, no despair too black, no deed too heinous, where He has not been in our hell with us. By His descent to the pit He demonstrated that the devil’s hold on us is now non-existent: it is a lie.
Whereas the devil continually in his deceit testifies to us that he has a firm hold on us at least in our flesh, and that we will continue to do his selfish deeds and we cannot help it. But his grip is forever broken in the resurrection of the Son, and we no longer are held in the devil’s captivity.
Then we realize we have entered a new captivity, which is freedom in the innermost center of us. By the Spirit we have given up what we have all our lives thought to be our essential selves, not by our doing but as a gift of His grace, to die a real death in Him.
But “death” is just the preamble to the Resurrection, for we are then raised again not just ourselves alone, but forever He and we as one person in us, so that we living is He living. We see that it is fixed in us that He dwells in us and walks in us and IS our God, as Ez 36 promises in the new covenant, and HE CAUSES US to walk in his ways.
So we gladly therefore testify of, like Paul, walking around experiencing the afflictions of Christ in our bodies, that the life of Jesus might be manifest in our mortal flesh. And THEN we know the scripture, “He that is born of God sinneth not,” because we have seen His keeping in us, when we gave up our own efforts to keep ourselves.
End of Part Five
Voice in the Wilderness 