This Changes Everything Part 5 (#963) — https://www.thegodjourney.com/2024/10/04/this-changes-everything-part-5-962/

Outside the box of religious obligation lies a road less traveled into the heart of the father's affection. Slinging freedom all over the place, this is the God channel. Well I went to a Mormon luau on Saturday night. Uh, okay, so many questions, okay. Give me one! First of all, how did you land in an LDS luau? And then secondly, what were the refreshments that were served? Because they're pretty limited on what they're allowed to be able to serve and consume. Well, it was no chocolate, that's what you mean. It was no Diet Coke. It was no coffee. No caffeine. No tea. None of that. No, our neighbors next door who were getting to know, they, they invited us to come to this luau thing, which we knew was a recruitment tool for the, the group. But you know what? We could go. Okay. So we decided, yeah, let's go over and just have the evening to talk with them. So we did. I noted it the whole thing. You couldn't, except for the constant mention of the word ward, you would not have known you weren't at a Baptist luau. You know? Okay. Yeah. The prayers, the stuff going on around it, just all the same as you would be any place else as I've grown up in those kind of things. Yep. So that was, I, I was looking for, is there anything different here? Even we're the visitors. So they bring the pastor or the Bishop by to meet us and says, okay, we weren't recruited very hard, which was kind of nice. The show was actually some talented Asian Samoan singers, dancers, whatever, actually the show was pretty decent. Nice. But sitting around the table, just like most congregational activities, there's no talking about Jesus or spiritual stuff. It's all weather football teams. It's just, it's just all that. So at one point I just said to, I said to my neighbor, I said, hey, Ron, you know what I've been thinking about these days? He goes, what's that? I said, I'm thinking about how righteous this is in the Bible. And so it kind of gives me the side eye and he kind of, what? I said, yeah, my, my same thought when I first heard it is like, I can think of a lot of scriptures. He could tell he wasn't wanting to necessarily go into this theological conversation. But his wife was very interested and so I kind of went to a little bit of Toby stuff and we got talking about it and she was really, she's, man, this would change a lot. And I said, yeah, it would change a lot. If the invitation was into the justness of God's kingdom, rather than how personally pious we need to be. And so that was a lot of fun. I thought I'd take Toby with me if I got to pick me. Well, I could have given you a lot of ammo for some other conversation starters in my family and domestic violence class. We've been exploring the LDS community and in my sociological principles class, we've been exploring the LDS community as well. There's a fairly high LDS community, large LDS community in Wyoming because we're so close to Utah. There has been a couple of tsunamis in the culture as of late, one of them being the secret life of Mormon wives. It's a Hulu documentary that came out featuring these TikTok influencers that are Mormon wives and they all have their brands and they all were showing their lives. Well, then it came out. There's quite a bit of scandal, just say, that has been surrounding their lives and it's been causing quite the sociological ripples, both in Wyoming, Utah, et cetera. Needless to say, it has gotten very spicy because I've had some LDS community members that have been in my class and in the discussions as well as some people from more mainstream traditional cultures. It's been very intriguing to see the conversation that's arisen from those. I bet it has. I didn't, however, go to attack. I went to invite. So I figured this could lead to more conversation in the neighborhood. That's fair. Yeah. And then a neighbor from across the street were over on Sunday because we kind of introduced this to them a couple of weeks ago and they wanted to come back. Let's explore some scripture together. So we sat down for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon and just kind of went through the sermon on the Mount, how that would change our perspective on things. It's a much better invite, I think, into a conversation that revolves around Jesus than the other stuff we do, which kind of doesn't lead to easy conversations if you're not on the same page. That sounds like a really interesting weekend. It was. So anyway, I'm Wayne Jacobson. And I'm Kyle Reis. And we're going to have Toby join us today. We kind of gave him a short shrift last time. We were busy talking about Toby and some of his thinking. And we've got a little bit more audio left from him to here. And this is a different side of it, I think. This goes from just the justice, righteousness argument to really going back to Genesis and talking about how God's justice manifests itself in our humanity. And I think it's pretty fascinating. So you ready? Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump in. Here he is. Here's Toby Vander, West Hazen or West Something. Someday, Toby, I'll get it right. You know, there's a there's another element to this. This could generate a whole new discussion. You know, it's one of the one of the doors down this passage that if you open it and you pick in there, you think, OK, well, I can spend a lot of time here. It's the link between justice and life. The words of Paul in Galatians, when he says, if the law could give life, then justice would have been by the law. That is a massive statement, because that tells me that at the heart of all justice lies the force of life. This has been something that has helped me a lot to distinguish between the justice of God and the justice of man is the life aspect. And when Christ said of come that they may have life and have it abundantly, you know, I don't think that is a statement that one should interpret in isolation from of come to fulfill the law. You know, it is the life that fulfills the law, because it is the life that provides us with the divine dynamic that is necessary to live this life of justice. So the justice from God is a life infused justice. And that is why it bears fruit. It does not conform to a norm. And fruit bearing is completely different to trying and live up to a standard that is externally imposed. And there you have the magnificence of the rest and just really being your age, wherever you are, and being content with your calling because you are infused with life and this life will manifest itself in the way that the giver of life sees fit. He gives the grace that to me was important development in my understanding of justice, that that justice is linked to life. And then when you go back, you read the prophets and you read passages that says justice will flow like a river. You know, the many references to the waters of life and how that eventually manifests as fruit. And you realize, but this has got to do, you know, the problem with with human justice is that the life of God is absent. That's the problem. And when the life of God returns, then justice becomes alive. And the sort of the dead, civil or legal connotation to justice disappears. The link between justice and life and the biblical, the price filled justice equals a link to life versus the human link of justice. In my mind, when I think about justice in the past, especially human justice in the past, it's largely linked to death, whether it be incarceration or actual actual execution. That's what I think of when we think about, OK, well, this person murdered X, Y and Z or this person committed X, Y and Z atrocity. Then we're going to exude a certain amount of force on them in order to get justice for the victims of whatever atrocity that person committed. And so when I think about that, like often, especially when I think about the human form of justice, man, it largely ends in death. There is not a lot of life that's there. Even our Christian view of it does it. God's got to somehow the price to be paid is death. And Jesus took it for us. So we get an exemption, but it's still it still aims that way. And I love to get on the other side of justice. And I know some people who listen to this podcast are going really struggling. I didn't necessarily like righteousness. I'm not sure I get justice yet, because I think we're thinking about it in human terms and someone getting what they deserve. And I love this emphasis on life, because ultimately what what Toby's going to say is when we choose for justice, the choice you're making is choosing life or choosing death in how I relate to my spouse and how I relate to my job at work and how I relate to people around me. The choice is not what I want versus what they want. It really is the choice is life. And how does this life come and flow through us? Which is what he's going to develop in this part of his conversation with me. OK. And when the life of God returns, then justice becomes alive. But now it becomes a tree that is alive and vibrant. It becomes a tree of life. And something that just blasted me is when I reread the famous statement that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Right now, let's change it to fit discussion. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as justice. What did he believe God for? He believed him for a life from above. That's what he believed him. And the fact that he looked away from his own body that was as good as dead from Sarah's barren womb to a source of life that was divine. That was the thing that created the justice effect in him. You know, it was a return of life. You don't always think they resemble Adam and Eve in their deadness. But here's somebody who has given the opportunity to go back to the tree of life and to believe. And as they believe, they become recipients of the divine life and channels of the divine life for it to flow in and through them and out of them as fruit. And so they become just because they become givers of life, which is the essence of justice. Even secular theories of justice is fixated on the giving of life. You know, we go and give soup in the townships over here or we visit those in hospital or, you know, we go up to the Gaza Strip and we assist people who are bombed to shreds. And all of that is linked to justice. So the link between justice and life is actually not that foreign. You know, it exists even in our secular definitions of justice with its police force, with its military. All of it is actually to sustain life, which is the highest principle. But I love how he's beginning to flip the conversation. He's going back into more about Adam and Eve and Eden and how all of that came to be just to capture the flavor that the source of God's justice is found in his life. It's not found in punishment for our sin. It's not found in all the places where my past teaching has put it. To think back, the story that he referenced where he was credited, he had faith and it was credited to him as righteousness versus it was credited to him as justice. Well, if when I think of righteousness in that story and there's this whole idea of, well, OK, he was he's now righteous, right, how is that going to produce the errors that they were hoping to be able to have and to be able to continue on to be the fulfillment of the prophecy that they got to give them? But when I think about the term justice in that idea, no, here is a here's a writing, here's a renewing, here's a restoration, here's an embodiment of life, a giving over of life that they didn't think was possible that they didn't think they could fathom, like my womb's dead, like there's no way I'm well beyond childbearing years. And yet justice would say, no, we can restore that. We can bring life anew into this space. For sure. This is how it all began. One morning, I'm reading Genesis. I read these words in Genesis chapter two. The river flowed out of Eden to water the garden and they were divided and became four rivers. And suddenly I realized for the first time in my life, when I hear Eden, I used to think of trees and waterfalls and two nudists, you know, and little beady eyes staring from the bushes from the serpent. And I realized, but Eden was another place. And there's a river that flowed through Eden and God planted a garden in the east of Eden. So the garden's not Eden. You know, the garden was in the east of Eden. Eden was something else altogether with another locality, but it had a river flowing through it. And the interesting thing is the moment that the river hit the garden's boundary that burst into four rivers. I thought, wow, the garden is the place of dissemination. It's the place where the singleness of life splits up. It explodes. I suddenly realized that as the river does this, it gives. Now you turn to Revelation and you see the same river of life flowing from the throne of God. So God is obviously the source of this river. And he creates the garden as the place where the life is made manifest and it bears fruit. The architecture of the river is replicated by the trees. So there's the flow of life. There's the distribution of life. And then there's the transfer of life. You know, from there it flows into the man. You've got this beautiful picture of a tree in the human lungs. There's the flow. There's the distribution. There's the transfer and the blood vessels, same thing. And then you go to the, it goes to the woman. And I realized this river keeps on flowing. You know, it flows from God through the trees, through the man. And when he says for the man, it's not good to be alone. He's not saying to him, there's something lacking in your constitution that it must be filled or repaired by the company of a woman. You know, I believe he was saying, the thing that's lacking with you is that you've got life and you can't give it. And I'm going to make you a helper so that you can give the life. So the helper will enable you to become like the river and like the trees to bear fruit and let your river flow into her. And you look at the placenta and there is the tree of life. And the woman receives the life. Then she's called to give it. You know, this is just a flash of revelation of this, the flow of God's life. And every time it seeks not a source, but a recipient. This is the natural order of creation. Don't you love that? The difference between life seeks a recipient, not a source. And that's a great way to even contemplate, am I living inside that flow? Because if I'm seeking a source, any kind of source to bring life to me, then obviously I'm not in that flow. But if I'm in that flow, then the thing is, who can I give this to? Who can I share this with? Which is a very different way to look at it. Well, no, I mean, I just, especially when you think about how desperate people are when they are looking for life in other places, when they're still looking for source, there's a different flavor to their life. There isn't a subtleness, there's a deeper level of anxiety or depression or irritability that's still a part of just who they are. Because you can tell there's this lack of satisfaction. They don't know, they haven't connected with the authentic source of life. And so they're still looking, they're still scrambling for it, versus people who are very giving into the world that bring the essence of the kingdom into the world. You don't have that sense of urgency or angst of trying to feel completion or trying to feel life again, because they've already connected to that source and it's flowing through their life and now they want to be able to be a doorway for that to enter the world instead of a desperate secret that's going to drill into that source of life so that they can hopefully find something. I see this as a secret of what Paul talked about, being content in every circumstance. It's not contentment because I have all my ducks in a row, I have everything I wanted and I don't need anything anymore, but I am full of life and I'm looking for a way to pass that on, even in the midst of desperate situations and circumstances. So even while chained to a Roman guard. Yeah, or hanging from a tree. Yeah, it's a different way to see God's beauty taking shape in our lives. And if we can find our contentment in his life, then we're not one of those desperate people trying to pull it out of others around us. Let's continue. And the moment that the curse takes place, you know the tree of life obviously is a fractal that symbolizes this dynamic of the flow, the distribution, the transfer. And it coincides with the calling to bear fruit. When they choose the wrong tree, though the life gets cut off, and the curse in each and every way, the curse is a representation of an obstruction in the flow of life between one of these two links in the chain. So nature no longer provides its life freely to the man. The man was now in pain, trying to force the life out of nature by working in the sweat of his brow. The woman now desires the man in the sense that she wants to force the life out of him, so to speak. Her birth pains, her giving of life is obstructed. It becomes painful and difficult. And then I think the most significant, which is to me the symbol of all of this, is that the thorns and the thistles literally represents aborted branches. You know, it's a manifestation of stunted growth in the sense that, you know, and this is what botanists call a thorn. It's a branch that suddenly just died. And the difference between the thorn and the branch is that the branch gives life, but the thorn seeks life. So the thorn sheds blood and it causes pain. It's almost like it's looking for its lost source. And maybe this is a bit philosophical, you know, but in my understanding, when I looked at it, this is what we're looking at here, is that the human race became like thorns. In other words, they appear for the sake of finding their lost source. That's what they do. And this is the problem of human conflict. And this is why injustice throughout scripture is associated with the shedding of innocent blood and why the thorn has become the symbol of brokenness. And the only way that this can be rectified is for the thorn to be clipped so that the life can flow again. And I really understood that to be the symbol of circumcision where the Lord is saying, there where your fountain of life is, it's been covered. All right, you want to pierce for your own satisfaction instead of give, the flesh must be cut off. But in my understanding, what happened when desire entered the world is that our appetite for life was misdirected to things outside of God. And that became the curse in the human race. That is the essence of idolatry. That is the essence of relational breakdown. That is the essence, according to James 4, of every single war and every conflict is that I desire and I harm other people in the process of wanting to fulfill my desires. And the problem of desire is the problem of injustice because where people desire against one another, they're going to end up acting unjustly. So that opened to me Roman 7, where Paul says in Philippians 3, as far as legalistic righteousness is concerned, I'm faultless. In Roman 7, the much debated Roman 7, he says, Richard, man that I am, if I want to do the good, I can't. And I believe the key to the dilemma of Roman 7 has got to do with one commandment that he said he couldn't keep the prohibition to desire. He wasn't a thief or adulterer or whatever, disobedient to parents. He was perfect as far as the law was concerned. But when he came to the injunction not to desire, because desire requires not willpower to be overcome, it requires a filling, it's an appetite. And you can say to somebody, don't eat as a rule and they can comply. But you cannot say to them, don't be hungry. It's impossible. They need a filling. And the filling comes in Romans 8. The problem of Roman 7 is the problem of the man who's a thorn. He's constantly seeking life. And he can align himself with the external code 100%. But inside there's going to be a God sized vacuum, so to speak. And he's saying the answer to that is the Spirit of God. And the Spirit of God fills you at a level where your desire is no longer your master. Where I don't desire any longer because my desire is for God. Here, my desire is for him. I love him. So I am completely liberated from any need or drive to ever treat people unjustly. Because the essence of injustice is guessing for the sake of the self. I don't want to do that now because he flows in me and I become a fountain of life again. You know, I resemble the tree of life in my fruit bearing. That's pretty powerful. The whole thorn is a branch cut off. And so life can't flow through it. So instead of, it becomes a seeker of life. And I got a bulging veal you bush out here that if I play with it much and I try to stay out of it, man, the thorns just shred your arms. And it really, I never have thought about this being a thorn is a dead branch that's seeking life, seeking blood. It's not having life. It doesn't have it inside of itself. That sets up for the redemption story that he's going to unfold as it comes out that it begins to hint at here, the fullness. When there's fullness, then you don't have to seek life anywhere else. But if you tell people just don't seek life or don't use other people, if the desire is there becomes the issue, which we can't fix. Not without fullness. Fulness will displace it. But without fullness, you can't change someone's desire. Well, and even the necessity for the desire to be filled. Because especially when I think about the evangelical Christian world, there was a lot of negative conversation when it came to desire. Kill your desire, smash it down, get rid of it, whatever, because it's going to lead you astray. And yet, to try to do that, I mean, both the psychological science research shows that's not possible and human history shows that's not possible, but it has to be filled. There has to be an answering to that deep longing, that deep heart question, that deep desire, that God-sized need, as Toby referred to. There is that God-sized space in our hearts that is desperately in need of that outpouring, that fulfilling of his life. And if we don't have that, then, yeah, desire can definitely lead us awry. And I get why the old biblical mind, or the old Christian mindset was kill desire at any cost so that it doesn't lead you astray. And yet, man, that also led to some big messes in the evangelical Christian world. He talks about all conflict, war. I mean, Middle East is gearing up as we speak right now again for a full-on war, which is this unmet desires and various groups of people that have gone forever, and both sides screaming justice at the other and gets to the point of, and I just unmasks how empty humanity is to find justice apart from fullness, which is what he's going to go on and talk more about. That as we find fullness in God, now we become the givers of life instead of out seeking it at the level of being a thorn in the world or a thorn in someone else's flesh, and instead being a branch that distributes that life to other people. And Toby and I were talking on Monday, and he was talking about six times Jesus is referred to as the branch. He's the flow of life from the Father to the people. And that branch, I mean, so much more hearing this idea of branch versus thorn and contentment inside God's filling, or I'm still trying to get my desires. And that's the thing that keeps creating conflict, frustration, anguish, stress is when we're trying to fill up a desire, we can't stop and we can't fill. But we keep trying to do both. And the irony of when he was being crowned at the crucifixion, what did they use? They used a crown of thorns as a mocking icon to you say you're the Messiah, you say you're the giver of life, you say that you are the source of living water, and yet we're going to put a crown of thorns on your head as a representation of a branch that is not bearing fruit anymore or never bore fruit. Because Jesus wasn't fulfilling their desires. So he throws thorns on me. He talks more about that desire. This is an important step in this whole process. Here's more on that. So Jesus says the water that I will give you will become in your fountain of life. He says with thirst again, all the language in the New Testament has got to do with being filled and being satisfied and being content. Even the end of Revelation, come to me and drink without cost, the water of life is free. And the issue of desire is a very big discussion. We didn't get to it. If you look at the 10 commandments, the 10th commandment is different to the first nine. The first nine prohibits actions. In other words, the consequences of injustice or the acts of injustice, but it prohibits actions. The 10th commandment prohibits the intention that precedes the action. So we are told not to commit adultery with the sixth commandment. And then in the 10th commandment, we are told not to covet the neighbor's wife. And then I think it's the eighth commandment that says you shall not steal. The 10th commandment says you shall not covet your neighbor's goods. If you analyze it, you realize you break the 10th commandment every time before you break one of the first nine, because you first want to do something before you do it. So the first nine commandments prohibit the deeds. The 10th commandment prohibits the intention that precedes the deeds. And that's why I think it's very significant that Paul, the greatest legalist, who did all these contemporaries when it came to legalistic righteousness, that he tells us in Romans 7 that when he hit the 10th commandment, he came up against something that he couldn't keep. And that is what made him realize that to conform to the law of God is more than conforming to a certain lifestyle externally. It has to do with being transformed within. That's the only way you can keep the commandment. And the great light bulb moment in all of this is if you can get somebody to keep the 10th commandment, you won't need the first nine to regulate him. Because if you don't cover somebody else's goods, you're never going to steal it. You always want before you do. The fulfillment of the law very much has got to do with the cessation of desire. And as such, the injustice that follows desire will no longer be there. Paul's references to desire, I believe, confirm this. He says the whole world is corrupt through desire. Ephesians 4, 22 says the old man is corrupt through desire. Peter says the whole world is corrupt through desire. And then Galatians says that the old man is crucified with his desires. So desire is literally, in the Bible, desire is the root of all injustice. And the justice of humanity cannot quench that thirst that leads to us robbing other people. We see that at the moment what's happening in Ukraine, in Gaza. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's James chapter 4 all over again. We want, but we can't get. So what do we do? We remove the obstacle in order to get. We fight. And injustice can only curb the violence, but it cannot change the heart. And this is a very important part of the discussion. But it wouldn't be all desire, would it? I mean, we have legitimate desires, wonderful desires that got. So we're talking about the twisted desires, the desires that come from being unprovided for. Gina, this is, yeah, yeah, we've got a problem with translation again because we got the word lust. And the word lust, like righteousness, you know, I mean, we can write the book on that as well. The word lust doesn't appear in the Bible. You know, the Greek is epithumia. Epi is the preposition on or upon. And thumia is thumos, which means passion. So it's literally focused on passion. Now we translate that oftentimes as lust, but it's a neutral word in scripture. Paul uses it when he says, my desire is to be with Christ. Jesus used it when he said, I have greatly desire to have this meal with you. Nothing wrong with desire as the object of my that corrupts the desire. And this is something that I began to see is that we preach against desire, which is incredibly wrong, because what we do is we take away people's hope of finding fulfillment and happiness by doing that. It's an incredibly restraining experience to hear that you're not supposed to desire. The Bible never does that. What the Bible does is the Bible says, come to me and drink and you will be full. You know, and that is literally also the theology of the New Testament. I say to people that it's quite shocking that in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul's answer for sexual lust, and that would include addiction to pornography, his answer is not to become a very holy individual, but to become celibate. His answer is sex. He says, get married. That's what you should do. In other words, a legitimate way to fulfill the desire. He says, it's better to marry than to burn with passion. He doesn't say it's better to train yourself in becoming completely resistant to these animal impulses. He says, get married. You know, God designed what you are struggling with. He's the initiator. He made it. He made the body of a man and a woman, and he designed everything around it, but it's corrupted because of desire. And I fully agree with you. So, desire must be redirected to its rightful object. And that is the New Testament. And that is why I say Roman 7 hints at a filling. I can keep the whole wall, but I can't quench this appetite. But when the Spirit falls me, oh boy. And that is, to me, the key to human relationships is I no longer want anything from you, not as some other noble decision of the wall, but as a direct logical consequence of having been filled. So, you can't fill me and you can't empty me. I've never appointed you as my source. So, whatever you do, you can't make me mad because even if you nail me to a cross, I'll use my last breath to pray for you. So, forgive him. He doesn't know what he's doing. But I'm not going to be mad at you. And I believe that's the answer to the problem of loving your enemies. That should never be a rule or a law. It should be the natural consequence of not seeing them as having robbed you of your life source because you've never invested in them in the first place. You are invested in God so nobody can do anything to me. Even if they kill me, I can just love them. And I don't think this is so difficult, but I never thought of it like that for many years. And it's helped me endlessly to understand how the whole thing fits together. Like you say, the whole puzzle falls into place. And you end up living a life of love without having to attend the course on how to love because it's just the natural inclination of the person who is filled with the spirit, this river of life that seeks to distribute itself to us. And the problem of injustice is solved in the process. It's really simple, almost so much so that a child can understand it. You know, what is so difficult about finding your life in God being transformed by that life in the way that we've just unpacked you? That's pretty powerful stuff. Even just that last statement of what is so difficult about finding your life in God. We can spend a lot of time hanging out there. And unfortunately, largely because of imposters or because of counterfeits that bear his name, that bear the name of Christ or bear the name of Christianity, the life. And yet they don't provide life. They're not providing any kind of hope or they're not pointing towards the access point for the living water to flow into somebody and fill them up in such a way that they don't need to serve out of obligation every Sunday. They don't need to read their Bible every day. They don't need to do like because there's that fulfilling that it's a no, I want to. I have a longing to because I already have a relational connection. I have a feeling so it's not coming out of a place of necessity or obligation. It's coming out of a place of longing and love. But that's not always been the purpose of salvation. That's where Christianity has really harmed itself because it was just going to give out get out of hell free cart. So just jump through these hoops. Now you're golden and now try to live better. Even though my desires haven't shifted. There's no filling. There's no presence. There's nothing that is fulfilling those desires. So without that, I'm right back to doing a New Testament law. Right back to that. I've got these desires, but I'm supposed to deny these desires to try and do good things for God. And this to me, if we really understood what he's saying, then the source of salvation or the purpose of salvation was not just to resolve our guilt and get us out of hell free. It's to open the door to a relationship with Jesus. And I get email all the time from people who've been on this journey, 30, 40 years in terms of the religious journey and feels like there's nothing of God. I don't know him. I don't feel him. I don't see him. I don't have my desires fulfilled in him. I can pretend. I can use the language because that's what people want me to say. But if the real start was we know that you've passed from death until life when you've passed from death onto life, not because you've done these three things. So you're in. And it would have changed discipleship and ministry so much because it would have been, we're not done until fullness appears, until connection appears. And we're not trying to earn that or perform it, but we're also not leaving it out just to kind of pass on. And this is what I want people to hear mostly. This is where the Jesus journey begins. It begins with the connection. It doesn't end there. It's not my whole life was to try and deny my desires and try to find this relationship with Jesus. No, this is the beginning. Your source has been cut off and you've lived that way in the world. And religion is another thorn. It promises what it can't deliver. And instead of giving to you, it seeks from you. It seeks your money, your attendance, your notice, your membership, your whatever. And it becomes a thorn as well. And man, just looking at that in our own lives, you can see the difference between those who have life, who distribute it freely, and those who are always trying to manipulate circumstances to get the life they don't have, or they live in the despair of emptiness and not having the life that they want. And I love that, again, coming back to Toby's comment about how if you live loved, if you live in the love and the fullness of Christ, this is the book that you don't need to read to get it. Because I mean, I think about all the different conversations that we've been having even over the last couple of years that are in exact alignment with this understanding in this part. Yep. And it's like, okay, even the desire to be, if I'm fulfilled, if I'm living out of a wholehearted identity, if I'm living in a Christ one over life, the characteristics of that, right? Of a life that's been one over by Christ. Those same characteristics start showing up, not as an obligation, not as I dedicated myself to developing these disciplines in my life. No, they're a byproduct of the relational reality that I'm living in. It is changing my life for the better. It is ratifying and reforming all that is in me for the life of Christ. Yeah, and let me give you a prayer for those of you that are really going, okay, this life, this fullness I want to experience. Maybe one of the prayers might be, Jesus, I don't know you in this way. Just the honesty of that. And would you show me how your fullness begins to fill in my life and flow out of my life to other people? Might be very helpful. Let's finish up. He's got a little bit more to go. Yeah, and you know, the beauty of it is, it does not challenge anything that we have come to cherish when we think about righteousness. It plans it. You know, and I say to people, you can't reduce the justice process to the intention of bringing amnesty to the perpetrator. You know, if Batman existed to get the Joker of the hook, he would have been a very bad Batman. The Joker can get off the hook. I think we saw that in the Lego Batman movie, which is for kids, you know, and kids maybe have a bigger understanding than what we have or a greater understanding of justice because in the end, they sort of reconcile. But the point is, he's got to stop his behavior in order to find that. And it's, you know, you know, what's fascinating is our concept of the Euro throughout our childhood stories, the fairy tales, it's the guy that manages to outsmart death and he saves people from death. And he's a fighter for justice. And there's the link between life and justice. The moment that I can overcome death and I can save people from death, I'm somehow part of the Justice League. That's what God was saying. He was saying the issue with the blood that runs throughout Scripture has got to do with the restoration of life. To me, that is significant. That's why the cross is redemptive. Yeah, it's not a bribe to try and shield us from vengeance. That is, though God wants to wipe us out, it's redemptive. If you think of the analogy of the life that flows, you know, from the throne through the river, through the trees, through the man, through the woman, into the child, you know, there you have the unit, the household, so to speak. They're all bound together by the same life. They partake of the same meal. The orphan in the widow throughout Scripture are the main symbols of the recipients of life where the life has been cut off. It's significant that the orphan in the widow is a negative reflection or a negative representation of the bride and the child. Because those are the two words that God gives to sort of characterize the church. You know, the bride and the child of God. So when we are severed from God, we become like a widow and like an orphan. The call to do justice to them is to restore life unto them. Christ having, you know, when he dies, what he does is he's not demanding blood to flow to him, but he's allowing his blood to flow to us. We're the ones, we pierce him. You know, we pierce him with a nail, we pierce him with a thorn. So he took our vengeance. Isn't that he got vengeance? He took it. You took it, yeah. He took it and showed us how to reverse it. And then he tells us to drink the blood. To me, that was a massive development in my understanding of imputation versus, call it infusion or impartation. You know, the forensic thing versus partaking of is that, you know, we've got such a big thing about the Passover and the blood of the lamb in Exodus on the doorpost. And when the angel of death sees it, he passes over. And that's where we stop. So the blood becomes the receipt that the penalty has been paid, like we always say. So now the price has been paid and God is happy and the angel of death passes over. The point is, something that we've neglected to emphasize is that they were inside the house and they were ordered to eat the lamb. So the blood was not an impersonal payment or a receipt of a penalty that was paid. The blood was the evidence that in that house, the life of the lamb had been transferred into the people. They were taken of the life of the lamb. And the reason why the angel of death went over is because there was life in those people. So you could not claim people who had life. They're not under the curse of death because they had been given the life of the lamb. They were alive. So the blood was not a sign of death, it was a sign of life. And I think that to me was a paradigm shift, because that changed the way that I did communion, goodness. Because I'm thinking, wow, that is why Christ said, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part of me. So it's useless to plead the blood as a type of atonement in order to turn away God's wrath. He said, but I want you to partake of this life that flows for people. Like I take your vengeance. You can take the vengeance of other people. You know, if they hit you, you don't hit them back because this life is giving. So the cross becomes a continuation in the community of the crucified. We extend that to the world. And that is not far-fetched to say that we should live as Jesus lived because that is the life of Jesus. It's not some other unattainable moral standard. It's just letting the life inside of us flow out of us. And that's what fruit is. It's life flowing out for the sake of others. Wow, that's... I know we've rushed through a lot today. This is the last bit I have of the recording that he and I did that we're going to share. And I know we're way over time, but this whole idea of the blood being the evidence of life, not the blood being, okay, the punishment's been solved so God can like you now. His argument flips everything on its head in the favor of life, in the favor of how God engages us and how we can participate with Him. And even when we talked earlier about others maybe not knowing that life, we're called to give it to those who don't know it. That's how they might find their way to God because they're receiving a life that they hunger for flowing through us. And then we also give them the source of it so that they can find it for themselves and Him. Yeah, I love the comparison. I've never even thought about it that way, but the terms that he uses for us, bride and child versus widow and orphan, that when we're cut off from his love, when we're cut off from his life, we become a widow, we become an orphan, we are no longer a bride or a child. And that, oof, that's... The implications are deep on that one. Oh, my gosh. I want to just say a thing, and I think when I grew up in a thing that talked about women having to draw their life from men, it's in a general thing of the gender thing. And so you're going to hear some of that. If you have that bias coming at it, you're going to miss hear what Toby's saying. And I want to just make a lounge for that. The woman's life is not found in the man. He's talking about the metaphor of how the life of God was distributed through man, through the woman, through child, through fruitfulness. But that's not a general statement that all women derive their life from men. And just so because, I know there's been a lot of bad teaching about that and some women feel like, well, without a man, I'm not complete. None of that is true. And I wouldn't want anybody to go away thinking, oh, that's what they're talking about, because that's not what we're talking about. But the life of God, the justice of God that comes from that life, man, that's so different than so much of justice in our world comes from anger and hurt and pain. And that's why it doesn't work and that's why people get hurt. But the justice that flows from life, the justness of how we engage the world and people around us, this is where the kingdom of God makes access to the world. And somehow by changing some words in Scripture, we aborted all of that. And now it's time to embrace it again. Thank you for traveling with us today on The God Journey. You can join this conversation by visiting thegodjourney.com.