New Book Coming–Eli and His Sons

Though the book is still being completed and there are many things that may yet change, I am excited about it and want to share some excerpts from time to time until it is published. I am looking to having it completed and published by the end of the year.

 

From Chapter titled:”Cain and Abel”

Therefore, we start with Cain and Abel. Cain is the firstborn, the first strength of the father and mother. Cain is a hard worker, tilling the land, working the crops, earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. That is an honorable thing. What parents would not be proud that their son was such a hard worker and that he earned an adequate living? In addition, this is the one task that the Lord God names for man as he shuts Adam and Eve out of the Garden — that man should now till the ground from whence he was taken.

We understand that this is more than farming the earth. To “till the ground from which we were taken,” is another indication that Adam (we ourselves) turned away from God toward the outer world. In that outer world, we seek our sustenance and our lives.

God, Who is ever within us, is our true sustenance and our true life even in our ignorance and darkness of spirit. In the freedom that we as living expressions of Him were given, in Adam we experimented with turning away from God Who is inward in us. We turned from Him Who is already All and in all, in us, toward the outer land, starting with our own bodies and souls. Tucked somewhere in there we found a false identity, complete with nametags with our own names on it, a façade to myself and the world, projecting a persona that becomes an impregnable citadel, where all intruders are kept at bay.

But who can live out of his true self anyway, because until we find our lives which are hidden with Christ in God (Col 3:3), we can do no better than to think in ourselves that we are alone in the universe, caught in good and evil – responsible to both!? That false persona then extends itself outward into the whole outer world. That is where the satanic false light, the dark light that entered our first father and mother in the fruit of the Tree, sets up shop. That dark light feeds and fuels this persona it has created with proud lies, that it is itself alone, entitled to what it wants, and that it only takes its own effort, ingenuity and whatever personal disguise is necessary to get it.

This “outer world” toward which we turned, is only a shell of the inner, and as is any shell, it has no real sustenance (ability to sustain and grow life) in it. Therefore, this “outer world” of our bodies and souls, the false sense of “self” the dark light uses our bodies and souls to generate, and all the “stuff” we think we need to preserve and add to our lives, is the ground we were sent out to till.

Farming the earth is only a temporary sustenance. The “temporary” has never been what the Lord God was looking for. “Temporary” is not the ultimate plan. All these histories in Genesis are talking less about individual histories, earthly real-estate or moral lessons, as they much more are presenting Christ to us in every facet.

God is not after, primarily, that we get our temporal sustenance. Certainly, He maintains us in every way in this temporary world, but that is not the point. Eternal Sustenance, farming of the Spirit, is His point. This type of farming can only come out in the new birth, and all these lessons are to awaken and enlighten that man. The old man does not get it. It is impossible for him. However, we are not the old, but the new, if we have been born again in Jesus Christ. We are in the fellowship of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This new man is what we are addressing and describing.

As we are in the “Temporary” in the moment, it is also true that we are in the Eternal in the moment. The Lord God purposely through the fall sent us out to till that particular land, to the intent that we might find, by earnestly tilling that ground, the absurd futility of it. We are farming in soil that is spent, and will never bear fruit.

Of course, we find it is God’s perfect purpose that we come to know that the “shell” bears no real sustaining fruit, nor is it able to produce the satisfaction of life that we were seeking in it. It is like a meal that fills but has no lasting nutrients. It seems to fill us up, but after a time we feel the emptiness and the gnawing hunger again.