Galatians 1:18
"Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days." We don't want people to say, "Well, that's what Bill says." We want people to say, "My Bible says such and such." We're to be able to confirm whatever we may be sharing with someone from the Word. This Book is the authority; this is the only thing that we have to go on, short of divine illumination or inspiration of revelation breathed into us by God through the Spirit of Christ who is one with us and in us. We MUST allow and then learn the workings of the Holy Spirit within us to become dependent upon Him in total trust, for this is the Way of the New Covenant and our second blessing. The inward workings of God within those who have chosen the right path of death into Eternal Life and walk with the Holy Spirit. What do we mean? Well for example take the ark of the Covenant which was set in the center of the heart of the Temple. The entrance to this room had the veil which the Lord tore from top to bottom, when He was crucified. The ark remember was covered with pure gold, it had seated on top two cherubim facing each other with their wings stretched toward each other. Then within where the manna, the ten commandments on stone and Aaron's rod that budded. This whole thing was a symbol of both mans heart and God's, for remember it was in the center of the room and the room was surrounded by two walls or courts each having an entry point. The outside covering of the arch is a symbol of God's heart and mans re-birthed heart washed with pure water and Blood and by the Word, through a death. The cherubim reflect God's righteousness (mans redemption and salvation), fulfilled purpose ( God's Will through death, death of all self-will and to the influence of the spirit of the world, the prince of the power of the air, our willful turning of our will against the evil of sin and the power of death) and majesty reestablished in man (the perfecting of God's Will, the Fathers, nature infused back within us). The heart now being the place of meeting, which also now contains the Law of God, impressed on our heart and written in our minds, the meat of worship or bread of New Life, and that New Life is seen in the almond branch or rod which had budded because of the power of and Endless Life which it symbolized. This is an example by way of inspiration of revelation of the Spirit of Christ. We always emphasize that we are firm proponents that this is the inspired Word of God from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. Remember when Paul speaks in the first person it is still inspired of God, and it is God's Word and we can rest and place our trust, confidence and hope upon it.
So let's begin our study, at verse 18, where Paul had just finished his 40 day or one year hiatus, with the Lord alone down in Mount Sinai in Arabia. Think on this a moment, Why would it take 40 days to a year to get the revelations? Well, it probably took 30 days to 6 or 7 months to get Judaism out of his system. Does that makes sense, because it took the Lord a short time to get our old religious thinking out of our system. And this is a possibility because Saul of Tarsus had been a Jews' Jew, a Hebrew of the Hebrew, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and educated at the feet of the greatest rabbi of that time. So we know he was saturated with Judaism. He was more religious than many of his peers, and he was human. We're all human, and when we've had something drummed into us for years and years, it takes the power of God to cleanse us. To delete the old junk and then reprogram us into His way of thinking and seeing things. Remember that He's not looking to make us into robots or any such thing but is rather bring us back into what Adam was before he fell into sin and death.
There is such a stark difference between Judaism (and all of it's rules and regulations and Law-keeping, and Phariseeism on the part of Paul) and the Grace of God (receiving all of this free for nothing without lifting a finger). Hey, that flies in the face of human thinking, and our old religiousness and our old legalism (what ever form it has taken) but this is where we have to begin. Now we don't stay there (in the influence of the first covenant because it of lesser degree than the better one of promise), but that's where we begin. That's where redemption comes in, which takes us or brings to salvation, when we just say, "Lord there is nothing that I can do, but I believe You've done it all, and I believe that on top of dying for me, You also rose from the dead. I believe it with all my heart. I receive the benefit of being counted as in You on that tree hung, shed blood, died, was buried, was resurrected and then ascended in You and I'm now in You at the Fathers right hand. I receive it as done, Thank You" Then, yes, God expects us to sit under Him listening and then to live a life of divine service, and that's the thrilling part of it. We are then within the New promised Covenant which has many names associated with it within the Old Testament writings, but does not have this title Covenant of Grace though that is what they are in totality. But before we can get to this point we are placed into Israel's first estate under the Law as our tutor at conversion and with the indwelling Holy Spirit as our trainer and teacher of all Truth. The every person Israel did not receive or have, except a few in number, the prophets. The person of the Holy Spirit the Spirit the world can not receive because they know Him not, why because He's invisible to the eye of natural sinful man. He trains and teaches us by many ways and through many means all leading us to a knowledge of God and the revealing of our need and then desire for righteousness and holiness. How by the conviction of the evilness of sin to the point of wanting death, yes death because we learn that through death we are separated from the spirit of the world, the secret of religions hold and then the power of death which is sin and the benefit of our benefactor Newness of Life. This is the message that the church is to be sharing and bring us all to the knowledge of, but is it?
There is a man, we bumped into at a book store the other day, who had come out of one of those binding religions, and he is so thrilled. He's just amazed every time that he sees another Truth. He can't get over the fact that he'd been blind to all this for so long. Well that's the way it goes when we come out from underneath all that pressure of a religion of having to do something. Then, to step into the freedom of Grace, it's just like setting a bird free out of its cage. We just struck up a conversation as we seemed to know each other but in fact we had never meet, we just shared Christ's Spirit. We stood there in the book store and had fellowship with each other and Christ Jesus for more than one hour. Life giving Living water just flowed and flowed and believe us when we say we all drank of our fill. It was so refreshing.
Now this is where the Apostle Paul is coming from. He has been weighed down with Judaism and all of its demands on a religious leader, and now he's been set free. So Paul has had sometime to yield himself to the Holy Spirit to rid him of all that, and to absorb the mysteries. We feel that the things that he shares with us in the prison Epistles of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon, he probably had revealed to him while in prison in Caesarea before he got to Rome. Because, by the time he gets to Rome, all these new inspirations of revelation are fresh on his mind as he begins to write those letters. But back here in his earlier Epistles we think of all of these tremendous doctrines that are so separated from religions legalism, and Judaism, and yet they all fit. It isn't something that's just like a thorn in all the rest of scripture. No, it all fits so beautifully. Now we'll look at Matthew 19:16-17.
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