Back
to Saul's background and training as spoken of earlier as a portion
of teaching done by a friend, Lawrence Sloma in, "Why some Jews
Looked For Christ." God used Saul's training to aid Him, in his
efforts to bring God the Glory due Him, through the ontological
essence of Christ restored within Paul. Just as the Holy Spirit
brings us through His efforts of teaching, training and tutoring of
us to reveal Christ restored within each of us to God's praise and
Glory. This He accomplishes while we are in what I have called our
first estate, Redemption, where we receive our first greatest
blessing the gift of His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of all Truth as our
deposit and down payment. Which is not in those who will become His
constant nemesis, of constant resistance to God's Gospel, who try as
they will to frustrate God and His working to restore His divine
kingdom* in the souls of all men. Just as He worked in John the
Baptist and Jesus. I will pick it up just after Paul's confrontation
in Ephesus with the makers of images and worshipers of the pagan
goddess Diana. It is not my intent to cover every situation of abuse
of the Gospel which Paul suffered for the name of Christ that was
inflected upon Him but will seek to pull a few from the record after
laying a foundation from Acts 20 through 23 and then just highlights
after that. Because in each Epistle Paul warns of returning to our
old standard of life which amounts to returning to mans false system
of Religion and the spiritual darkness in that Religion. With the
Lord's help I will connect the dots by pulling from Paul's other
Epistles the evidence record of the abuse, of this Gospel of God's
kingdom and New Covenant of Grace. From which the familiar spirit of
Religion has taken great liberty, all in the name of mans Religion
known and ofter called, “the Christian Religion.” A Religion that
has sought to divide mankind into splinters and thusly bring down
God's kingdom, remembering that which the Lord Jesus said about a
house divided cannot stand. After this I will turn to the opposition
from the Religious-Hebrews and on rare occasions from Gentiles. For
Paul's revelation of Christ, is the record of hostility against God
and our Living in Christ and Christ now Living His Eternal Life in
Truth and Light restored within His people.
*Many
teach that a kingdom has to have real-estate and land mass to be a
kingdom, they do so not realizing that with God all things do not of
necessity require physical and material qualification because God is
Spirit and Spirit requires only spirit, to be a kingdom of dominion
rule. Because it is in mans own spirit that the kingdoms law is
written and then empressed on his mind. Just as with God all things
are a current NOW which means there is no past or future because time
does not exist where God is Present. Both time and the physical are
none-relevant terms because they are temporal and passing away with
use. Much like the old adage, does a tree when it falls in a
wilderness or forest, where there is no ear to hear, does it make a
noise when it falls? The other part of this is the fact that since
God sent us His Son in the person of the Spirit of Holiness and Truth
no one had need for another to teach him of Christ because Jesus'
name was spread aboard by word of mouth to the whole world.
Man
to this every day has abused God's nature and intended revelations of
His mystery hidden in Himself which is known as Christ, the anointed
messenger of this kingdom, which He brought to the forefront in the
history of man, through John the Baptist, Jesus, and then Saul/Paul,
as the main characters. Because He knew that those of Jesus'
Disciples would not take His revelation to the pagan Gentile world
(the nations and families of the earth of the OT in Gen. 12:3) around
them, as He had intended and commissioned them to do. John the
Baptist and Jesus brought about the change of direction from a works
of man and his flesh to that of the promised spiritual awakening of
which Jesus as the Son of man had happen within Himself, in fullness
of Spirit. John the Baptist had this same awakening but in part
because when still in his mothers womb received the Spirit Holy (this
happened to show our first awakening of regeneration in Redemption's
coming to operation within us), other than that there is no record.
Though John had meet a man of Spirit while in the wilderness who gave
him instruction as he himself testified and he then does all that was
told (revealed to) him (per Luke 1:76-79, John 1:8, 3:27-36). Sadly
it is my belief that Israel serves as a prototypical type of the
worlds churches which operate in unbelief, though they have a form of
Godliness but there is NO power therein. I
might say that man operates on his own latient power of the soul, as
Watchman Nee writes in one of his books titled the "Latient
Power of the Soul", in many of our current Religious
Instatutions.
God uses every word of His revelation to bring us to the Light of His
Truth whether we have a good (qualified) steward of His divine
revelation of the mysteries or not. What is required is our
redemption as the means of entry into the process of God's picking up
His promises to see them through with or without our best efforts.
Why did I say that? Because when I was a young man and after
repeating the sinner's prayer at the back of a military mans Bible
given me that day, I remember telling the Lord that I did NOT
understand the Bible and its message. I was nineteen then and had
been in church and gone through all its many forms and traditions of
man and still had no real knowledge of Christ, no understanding. Then
for the next forty-one years I sought God and His righteousness and
kingdom in a hit and miss kind of thing all the while attending
church. For years I would do as told, read the Bible through each
year and by so doing I did not prosper in this activity. Back on
track with Paul in Acts
20:1-12, 13-16, 17-23:11, 12-35.
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