The Axe Laid to the Root

Living by the Law is Separation

The law presupposes the separate self to obey it. The fact that we see the law outside us as something we have to attain to, something which we are not now but should or ought to be, is our perpetual admission that we are lawbreakers and in separation from God. In this separation, we can only hear the law as if it is coming from outside us and therefore we are apart from it, so that we are bound to both the demands of the law and to the separateness in which to do them.

This separate outer law demands that we live up to the reality that we are the image of God. That is an impossibility, because we are only an image, and not God Himself. Only God can be God. An image does not create or sustain itself, but is dependent on the object of which it is an image. We are images that have come out of the breath of God, and so we have some measure of life and will in ourselves – for we are persons in His image! As persons, we have all been tempted to try to become God ourselves by trying to be like Him, whether knowingly or unknowingly. It is the most absurd thought that ever came into the temporal universe. Still, we have all tried it. Like Lucifer, we have all said, “I will be like the Most High.” (Is 14:14).

Nevertheless, the very attempt to emulate God, even if out of a supposed good motive – to do “good” – is the point of separation from God, because no separate will can work in Him. A will that says, “I will be like Him,” is already separated unto itself and not to God, because no created being can be like Him. He is Himself and there is no other. However, He has created us that through Christ in us we would be the visible expression of which He is the invisible reality, so that our lives are what they are supposed to be when we are one with God. Something that is one with something has no need to become or change into something else – to “be like” something, because it already IS a perfect expression of that with which it is “one.” It just is itself, and thinks and wills as one with its source. As a branch of a vine lives only from the sap from the vine, and therefore bears the fruit of the vine through its organic oneness with the vine, in the same exact way we bear the fruit of Christ since we are one with Him and are living branches on His vine.

….

The reason why everything changes at this point is that we have changed our focus. The law only operates in separation. We have viewed the self (ourselves) as if we were separate from God and therefore we are supposed to add something more to the work God has already accomplished. However, the Spirit is continually saying inwardly in the self, “Be still, and know that I AM God.” But the law says the opposite of, “Be still.” Instead, the law, speaking to us as if we are alive and separate, says, “YOU must get up and do, accomplish, fulfill, obey, resist …” And in that separated consciousness, we try to comply, which is all we know to do, since from birth the focus of our spiritual sight has not been God in ourselves, but on ourselves as if we are alone and everything is up to what WE do about ourselves. It is all about us and nothing whatsoever we can do will rescue us from that self-focus.

….

What happens as we discover our release by death from this false self-relying self, this false “I” that set itself up as God within us, is that we are overtaken by a new reality. We realize that through baptism into Him we have gone into His death and our old self – whatever it was – has died. It is a new self that rises in His resurrection, a self that is not just me alone trying to do God’s will or to resist the devil. He has come into me to be one person with me! There is a new “I” – a new identity – a new person, consisting of an organic union where two have become one. I do not become “like” Him, but instead He has come to live in “me” to be the “real me,” and in “you” to be the “real you.” He and I live as one person together in spirit and function. (1 Cor 6:17).