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The Nature of Christ
By Lloyd Ellefson
Since we have the name of the Lord the Spirit of God should be our Lord! When the Spirit becomes our Lord, a big change takes place in our lives! What a relief to know that no pastor, denomination, organization, set of doctrines, nor the law is our Lord! The law no longer rules us for Christ is our righteousness! He takes care of us at all times!
Today we want to look at who Christ is. We rarely differentiate between Jesus and the Christ. The complete name of the man from Nazareth was Jesus Christ, and it means God's Savior, the Christ. His name is His nature. We understand that the words CHRIST, ANOINTING, and MESSIAH, are all translated from the same root word. When the Hebrew word is translated as Messiah (noun), it speaks of the anointed one. When someone is anointed, he becomes the anointed one. He becomes the Messiah. We call that Christ, because that is the Greek word for the anointed one. He is the Messiah. The New Testament doesn't use the word MESSIAH that much, but the words CHRIST and MESSIAH and ANOINTING are exactly the same because they are all translated from the same root word. This anointing came on the man Jesus at the Jordan!
In the first chapter of John, Jesus is called the true light that lights the whole world. Yet the world did not like the light. Isn't it strange that people still have a problem with receiving revelation of the God who made them! This is because they do not understand the concepts of the truth and the lie, life and death, immortality and mortality. They think they understand, but they only understand from their own perspective. Their ideas remain the same and they believe their understanding to be correct. True light reveals error, but people would rather continue in error than admit error.
1 Timothy 6:16 says that Christ alone has immortality and He dwells in light that no man has ever perceived or can perceive. Christ is the immortal One and there is no immortality outside of Him! Therefore, if we want to have immortality, we have to be united to immortality; we have to be merged with it! We cannot obtain it by ourselves! Neither can we obtain Godhood by ourselves, because God is immortal and God is the life. We can only have the life which proceeds out of Him, for it is not distorted by human nature nor by satan. We have to participate in the life and the divine nature of God. His gifts operate in the mind of Christ; they are not ours to do with as we please. If we are functioning in the mind of Christ we are minding (obeying) the Spirit of God - and only Him. We don't mind (obey) the I, the ME, the flesh, nor our old sense of being!
The two kinds of light, natural and spiritual, are illustrated in Genesis one. In verse 3 God commanded the light to shine forth. This was spiritual light and it differed from the natural light of the sun, moon and stars created on the fourth day. "For God who said, `Light shall shine out of darkness,' is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." (2 Cor. 4:6)
Since Christ lives in unapproachable light, it cannot be any type of natural light. This puts man into a dilemma. How can he be enlightened, for the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God? Natural enlightenment comes from one's own reasoning and intellect and is therefore darkness. Knowledge of the Bible that has only been processed by the human intellect is also darkness. If the light in man is darkness, how great is that darkness! If man does not know that his light is darkness, his light will seem like truth to him, and he will be content with it.
Jesus Christ is the true image of God - that is, He represents God exactly. Now an image is not God. When Christ came into the world as a human being, humanity saw an image of God. But humanity did not recognize the image because it was contrary to its wrong image of God. So it did not think it saw an image of God. Although Israel thought they knew God, they had never seen His shape, they had never heard His voice; they didn't know the Father, they didn't know the Son, and they did not even believe Moses. (John 5) They did not believe the testimony of God that was in Jesus Christ!
God is the source of all things; He is all in all. In the beginning was God - there was no one else; there was no other consciousness and no other mind in the beginning. Since everything has to come from Him, there is no way that He can ever receive something that did not come out of Himself. It's impossible! We cannot give Him anything that did not first come from Him. Even our tithes have come from Him. Our false ideas, like honoring Him in order to get something from Him, or thinking that our prayers can change God's mind, have to go. The Holy Spirit has to help us in our praying so we pray according to the will of God. Our wrong ideas will pass away as we receive revelation knowledge of the Father in Christ Jesus.
God is so all-encompassing that heaven and earth cannot contain Him! He is omnipresent! So it may puzzle us why He doesn't do something to stop all the evil in this world. This world is being ruled by the darkness of man's natural reasoning, and it lies in the evil one. The truth is that God's kingdom is not of this world. Christ is representing the Father. God is known as the Father because He has the Son! For a man to become a father, he has to have a child. A child needs to know its father in relationship. In Christ's Father-Son relationship, the Son needed to know His Father and the necessity of complete obedience to Him. In this relationship with His father He learned to understand Himself.
The Israelites did not understand this. Their confusion was evident when they argued with Jesus about their genealogy from Abraham. According to the flesh they were descendants of Abraham, but their nature was of their father the devil, and they were doing the works of their father. Their father is a murderer and the father of lies. Everything they represented was based on lies. Lies operate against the truth. Jesus is the truth, and truth is spiritual. You can't put a finger on truth, you can't contain it, you can't own it, you can't see it. Truth has to rule us because it will rule everything. A lie is exposed and dispelled when truth comes. So when Jesus Christ, who is the truth, comes and expresses Himself, the lies are uncovered and our whole idea of being is changed by the truth. Our old image of ourselves was conceived by our father the devil, and therefore our old man must be crucified. That applies to every person! That is why everyone in Israel, and every natural person - whether circumcised or uncircumcised, Jew or Gentile - is an antichrist. In his own thinking he fashions his own god, and it takes the place of Christ. God is only a concept to him.
When Jesus was on earth, God was only a concept to the Israelites, but God was a reality to Christ! So we can readily see the conflict that emerged. The lie is always an adversary to the truth. It wasn't long until these people wanted to kill Jesus Christ because of His testimony. This is the groundwork for understanding what was happening.
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself! Jesus did not reconcile the world to Himself, nor did He reconcile the world to God by Himself. God was asking man to receive the testimony of Jesus and be reconciled to God. Jesus recognized His dependency on the Father, for He said, "The Father in Me, does the works...whatever I see the Father doing, I do...the Son can do nothing of Himself...if I alone bear witness of Myself, My testimony is not true." Jesus came to present a testimony of God that we might receive the Spirit!
At the time Jesus taught in Israel, the people refused to hear Christ. Natural man had not yet had his spirit quickened, so he could not hear Christ. Since Israel was not hearing Christ, they were not hearing God; this showed that they were hearing some other voice. This is very serious! At one time all of us were dead in our trespasses and sins, living according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air. (Eph. 2:1-2) Now Christ has destroyed all this, and has put all men together in one Man or in one image of God.
The flesh opposes both God and His Son, so we are to repent and turn to God. (Acts 26:20) Jesus is the power that gathers us after the law has caused us to repent. The enlightenment of Christ replaces the mind of the flesh.
Paul said, "The fulness of the Godhead dwelled in Him bodily." (Col. 2:9) The Concordant reads, "For in Him the entire complement of the Deity is dwelling bodily." What is the Godhead? Eph. 1:3 explains it by saying, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." So we have God and the Father and Jesus the Christ (Holy Spirit). This is the Godhead! If we were to take this literally, it would mean that the Godhead dwelt in the physical body of Jesus; this would be an impossibility! God could not be put into the physical body of Jesus Christ, for He fills all things, even the whole universe. Having the Godhead dwell bodily in Jesus, meant that God (the Father), the Son, the Holy Spirit (the Christ) were all one body in the Spirit that operated in the Lord Jesus! Everything God represented was in these forms of the Godhead. Everything in God is available through Christ Jesus!
Rom. 8:3. "For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh..." God sent His Son. God was a Father when He sent His Son because having a son is a prerequisite to being a father. So we see that the Son establishes the Father, and the Father establishes the Son. God sent the Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. When the Son took on this flesh, He became in all points as we are. (Heb. 2) Yet at the same time He was manifesting the Godhead through a physical body. People could see and hear Him, but they could not understand Him! Jesus went through His whole 3 1/2 years of ministry alone; no one understood the spiritual words He spoke. His own words bore testimony to the fact that He went to the cross alone, for He quoted Zechariah 13:7 and said, "I will strike down the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered." (Matt. 26:31) This was in the foreknowledge of God; He knew what was in man's heart - and so did Jesus.
Gal. 4:4-5, "But when the fulness of time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order that He might redeem those that were under the law." Why? "That we might receive the adoption as sons." The law made us servants; we are no longer to be servants but sons! The coming of the Holy Spirit in redemption delivers us from the law and places us as sons who are no longer under anything except God Himself!
Jesus came in the likeness of sinful flesh. He did not take upon Himself the nature of angels, but of the seed of Abraham. (Heb. 2:16) The promise was to the seed of Abraham. So He was made in all points like us - like we were in Adam, but not like we are after we are saved or redeemed. But His identification with us when we were in separation from God, was without sin. We know very little of His life while He was under the law. Only one incident when He was twelve years old is recorded. When Jesus walked under the law, He was circumcised; He sacrificed and observed the holy days. But when the fulness of time came, He was baptized into the baptism of John - a baptism of repentance. The government of law in His life was exchanged for the government of the Holy Spirit!
John represented repentance, and repentance is the fruit of the law. It causes us to turn from the government of the law and self. This is not a repentance from sin; it is a turning from the old government which caused us to sin. Repenting from sin will not do anything for us, except give us a sin-consciousness when we do it again. That is the old covenant. We can't get anywhere that way. The church and the religious systems are struggling with this as they preach righteousness, yet they aren't living it themselves. It's an organized ignorance. John said, "The axe is now laid to the root of the trees." God is not trimming us any more - He has now laid an axe to the root of our existence, our formation, our identity, our I's and ME's that we think we are.
Jesus said, "I am the way." There is no other way to God than through Him. He is our pattern. His repentance was not based on trying to get rid of sin, but on getting rid of the Adamic nature which He had taken on. In Adam all die; He partook of this death that through death He might destroy the works of the devil. All the work of satan is in the death realm! The carnal mind is death! The mentality that identifies with our temporal sense of being is death; it comes from this body, from creation, and through the lies of satan. This mentality was not dwelling in Jesus Christ.
Jesus submitted to baptism; the Holy Spirit came down upon Him, and He heard a voice from heaven saying, "This is My beloved Son." God's witness of Jesus Christ did not change His being. Nothing had ever changed Him from being the Son of God. However, after He had been under the law for thirty years, He presented Himself as an Adamic man to have the government of His life changed. So the government of the law was displaced by the government of the Holy Spirit. This brought Him into Sonship. He was demonstrating what happens to us when we follow the purposes of God. Through the law and repentance, which is turning away from our carnal sense of being and from our old government, we become children of God. Before, we were actually children of satan, children of disobedience because our thoughts and our ideas of God had been implanted by satan.
Acts 10:38 says, "Jesus of Nazareth was anointed of God by the Holy Spirit and went around doing good." Jesus, in His human form, received the anointing of the Spirit, and from then on He began His ministry - not as an Adamic man, but as the Son of God ministering spiritual realities. That is when His problems started! When He did the wonderful works of God, men had it in their hearts to kill Him. Numerous references in the gospels give testimony to this. It was a well-known fact as the following verses indicate: "Why do you go about to kill Me?..But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me...Isn't this the One they are trying to kill?...The Jews took up stones again to kill Him...And they sought occasion to kill Him." He was put to death in the hearts of men long before He went to the cross. It was in their hearts because the devil was their father; he was a murderer from the beginning and there is no truth in him. This accounts for the opposition to Christ in men's hearts. This is also evident in the religious systems of today - Christ is still regarded as a physical man; separation between God and man still exists in their thinking. They seem to have the same false concept of God that Israel had. It is still used as an implement to destroy His testimony.
Man was taken captive by satan through a delusion, so man operates in ignorance. That's why on the cross Jesus said, "Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing." Those who crucified Jesus were pawns of satan, because it says in 1 Cor. 2:8, that if the rulers of this age had understood, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. They didn't know; those that are deceived bring deception. They themselves have to be deceived before they can present the deception. So satan is deceived; he doesn't understand God, he doesn't know who God is, amd he doesn't know who Christ is.
Even though people crucified Jesus, the Son of God was not killed. If the life in the Son of God could be killed, then our life in God could also be killed, and we wouldn't have any guarantee of eternal life. God did not kill His own Son and people couldn't. God knew that nobody could kill His life in the Son - nobody could kill His Son, nobody could kill His testimony, nobody could kill anything of God. It's ridiculous to think that anything of God can be killed. But people didn't know He was God! They were ignorant, and in their carnal, pride-filled idea they thought they could get rid of God's Anointed. But they couldn't! God was in Christ RECONCILING the world - NOT APPEASING their sins. Jesus Christ did not die as our substitute; we were crucified with Him!
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ demonstrated human nature's rejection of God. Jesus Christ, the exact invisible image of God the Father in human form, was rejected! He came to redeem us from the law which had caused us to have a sin-consciousness. We were to understand our inability to do the will of God and to keep His covenant. Without the law we could never have understood this. So the law is a wonderful stage in the process of redemption!
In John 4:34 Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work." God fulfills His word! When He sent Jesus to fulfill the work, Jesus said, "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill...not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished." (Matt. 5:17-18) Jesus Christ came to finish the work of God; when Jesus died on the cross, He said, "It is finished." So Christ is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.
The law and the prophets operated under the old covenant. In Hebrews it says the old covenant is passing away. It's gone. God has no obligation to fulfill the old covenant because that covenant has become obsolete. Man always broke it because he could not perform its demands, no matter how much he tried. So God said, "I'll give you a new covenant, which does not depend upon you. I promise that I will fulfill this new covenant." That does not leave anything for you or me to do; so we rest in the work of God! He not only gives us a promise, but He also fulfills the promise.
On the day of Pentecost, Peter got up and said that this Jesus of Nazareth had been exalted by God and was now on the throne of David. (Acts 2) He was fulfilling the promise given to David to rule God's people. "Therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear." (v.33) This was the Holy Spirit coming in a wind with tongues of fire, and people speaking in other tongues or languages, giving a great testimony about the wonderful works of God! The Father anointed Jesus - He poured out the Spirit upon Him; now Jesus poured the Spirit out on people. John the Baptist said that he baptized with water but He who would come after him is mightier...and He Himself would baptize them with the Holy Spirit and fire. Even as the Father poured this out on Christ, He has poured it out on us!
Peter preached the first message to the church - the first testimony of the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. When the people "heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, `Brethren, what shall we do?' And Peter said to them, `Repent...'" Repenting means turning away from the government in your life - which is satan. "Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." (v.38) We have to undergo repentance and forgiveness before we receive the Spirit! Forgiveness of sins does not give us the assurance that we are going to heaven, neither does it make us new creatures. It forgives the sins of our old Adamic nature, but we have to be made new creatures in Christ!
Receiving the forgiveness of sins does not change people. They keep on sinning and praying for forgiveness, over and over again. This is because they are still identifying with the old government in their lives; it tells them they are sinners - some day they may be sons of God if they can just hang in there. They continue to have a sin-consciousness. Where does the sin-consciousness come from? Whom are they hearing? God is not imputing sin. To the woman caught in adultery Jesus said, "I don't condemn you."
There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. If we have Christ in us as our life, as our consciousness, as our Lord, as our revelator, we have been joined to God; we have been separated from the old man - not from God! We are no longer joined to the old man, the old consciousness, the old idea of God, and the old mind of death. People have thought (superficially) that if they are forgiven they'll have salvation and go to heaven. Unbelievers are often asked, "Are you sure you are going to heaven?" Actually, we're BORN into the kingdom of God through the operation of God; we're regenerated into spiritual things - which is heaven. You don't have to go anywhere for that.
We have passed from Adam to Christ. Our sins and trespasses have been forgiven, we've been raised from the dead, we've been made new creatures in Christ, and we are the sons of God! So instead of minding the law and the flesh, we now have the mind of the Spirit to mind those spiritual things that come through the Holy Spirit. Although we would like to be finished with the old mind, it constantly infringes on our times of trying to hear the Spirit. So what happens? Many give up. Others continue to meditate, but when they don't hear anything from God, they get into wishful thinking and dream up all kinds of weird things. The fact is that we cannot control our Lord. He will answer us at the right time; sometimes the answer is delayed because we are not ready to receive it. To demand immediate answers or anything else, is putting ourselves up as His lord. HE is our Lord! We are not an entity that makes demands - we're in a rest, in a trust and in complete submission to His timing and will!
Let's just have a short review. The Father sent the Son in the likeness of sinful flesh by giving Him a physical body. The Word was made flesh. In this likeness of sinful flesh He looked like everybody else. He didn't look like a superman - six foot two, flaxen-haired and a perfect complexion; He looked like every other Jew. In Isaiah it says that He did not have any comeliness for which we should love Him. He operated in the limitations of the flesh. He didn't use special power to go from place to place; He walked like everyone else. At thirty years of age, He was baptized in the Jordan. He turned from the old government of His life, and God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit. He became a new creature; He became a new man and brought forth a new image of God. This transformation took place in Jesus when He went through His repentance and received the Holy Spirit. "As we have borne the image of the earthy, so we shall bear the image of the heavenly." It also takes place in us when we receive the government of the Holy Spirit - not when we go to heaven.
"...and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear." (Acts 2:33) God gave the Holy Spirit to Jesus Christ, and He gives it to us. Jesus Christ baptizes us with the same Holy Spirit that He got from the Father. The coming of the Messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament. But they did not know that the fulfillment of this prophesy was for all who would believe. Christ is an anointing of the Spirit, so the Christ was in the prophets.
Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth in John 14-16. His function is to teach us all things. "The anointing you have received teaches you all things." He that is anointed is of God. If you are anointed, you are actually a messiah, a christ. We have perverted that and taught that Jesus was the Christ before He received the Holy Spirit. Jesus was prophesied to be the Christ, but people have not explained that the fulfillment of this did not really happen until the man Jesus received the Holy Spirit at the Jordan. Years before, in typology, Israel came to the Jordan and exchanged 12 stones from the Jordan to the new land and from the new land to the Jordan. This symbolized a change in government. They weren't slaves anymore; nor were they lost in the desert; they had come into their own land! That was the typology that Jesus fulfilled when He became the Christ!
He has poured out the Spirit on all flesh even though everyone hasn't received the Spirit. In Acts 2:16 Peter said, "This is that which was predicted by the prophet Joel." The coming of the Holy Spirit was a fulfillment of that prophecy. So when the Holy Spirit comes on people, it's the Christ! You are receiving the anointing which is the Christ, the Messiah. The good news is that the Messiah has come! The Messiah is here! But the Messiah is not received by everybody, because it takes a repentance from who you are in the Adamic man, so that you become a new person, a new creature in Christ. We are now the one new man of Ephesians 2, 4, and Colossians 3.
The Messiah is here. It's the Christ who comes and He is present in the Spirit. By receiving Him we can become members of the body of Christ. "You are Christ's body, and individually members of it." (1 Cor. 12:27) The body of Christ consists of all those who participate in His anointing. We have been baptized into the body of Christ. Since we are the body of Christ, then He must also come in His body. This is not a fleshly body, but a body of His anointed ones. That means we are delivered from the body of this death - of which Paul speaks in Rom. 7:24. We have received another body - the body of Christ. I thank God that in Christ Jesus, in the Spirit of Christ, we have a body!
What about the soul? We have been redeemed by the blood of Christ. (1 Peter 1:18-19) The soul is in the blood, so we have been redemed by His soul. See also Isaiah 53:11. We are new creatures, spirit, soul and body. (1 Thess. 5:23) Our growth takes place in the new creation man. But Christ is unseen; Christ is an anointing; Christ is a body of truth and life. He is also the way to God. He gives us the correct direction; this is the way out of our separation from God because of the natural thinking of our carnal minds. He brings us into a oneness with God! Jesus prayed that we might be one; as He was one with the Father, so we are to be one with the Father!
Jesus said that it is the Father who does the work. The natural man cannot receive this. People say so many things ignorantly or unthinkingly. For example, they say, "I gave my heart to Jesus...I gave my life to you Jesus." By saying this, they claim to own their hearts and lives and can do with them as they please. These expressions come from the Adamic man in a pseudo-humility to hide his pharisaical attitude. It doesn't work! What does Christ want with your heart? The heart is utterly deceived. It is deceitful above all things, it's desperately wicked. What does Jesus want with your life? He's got a life of His own. As a matter of fact, He said, "I came to give you life." God gave us a NEW heart. We have nothing to give God - nothing, absolutely nothing! About the only thing we can do is to release ourselves to Him so His word can come into us and change us. We can't change ourselves, we can't be good Christians, and we can't save people. All we can do is testify! An exchange of thoughts won't change anybody. Even forgiveness of sins does not give us a new nature. Our sins may be pardoned, but we are still the same person who committed the sins. God deals with sin through the Christ who makes us a new creature and gives us a new nature, a new concept, a new realization, a new sense of being, a new identity, and a new conception of God. "Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come...Behold I am making all things new!" (2 Cor. 5:17; Rev. 21:5)
I don't believe that the new creation man (that we are) is living in time anymore. Jesus makes the ages. (Heb. 1:2) It says WORLD in various translations, but the Greek word is EON. All these designations of time which we call days, weeks, seasons, years, and the millenium, are simply measures or stages in the progression of the truth and enlightenment Christ brings us. The law of Moses was abolished in Christ, for He is the end of the law for righteousness. Trying to keep the law of commandments isn't going to make us more righteous; in fact, we can't be more righteous. If God has made us righteous, we can do nothing that makes us more righteous! Obeying the law won't do it; positive thinking won't do it; saying we don't sin won't do it either. It is only when we are ruled by the Spirit that we do not sin. Jesus Christ was delivered from the law when He was anointed by the Spirit. So He becomes the end of the law to all those who believe - to all who have faith in Him.
The Adamic man ends in Christ, so Christ is the last Adam. In typology Adam was a figure of Him who was to come. (Rom. 5:14) The figure dies when the reality comes. Christ is the reality! I don't believe that the Adamic man goes to heaven. God expelled him from the garden and put a sword at the entrance so he could never return. When Jesus was on the cross, He said to one of the evildoers, "Today you will be with Me in Paradise." Jesus did not say He was going to Paradise; He said the evildoer would be with Him in Paradise. That means Jesus was still in the Paradise or garden of Eden relationship with God. He never left that relationship. But Adam left that relationship with God and was expelled from the garden. The garden was not for him; he couldn't live there. He was cast out and not allowed back in. This is exactly why our old Adamic man simply has to be put to death; he CANNOT BE JOINED TO AN EXISTENCE WITH GOD! He can't move in the life of God because he's full of sin-consciousness, self, pride, self-reliance, etc.
In Heb. 7 we read about the new priesthood of Christ according to the order of Melchizedek. He did not become our high priest as a result of any physical requirement and lineage, but according to the power of an indestructible life! This required a change of law - for the old one ministered sin and death. Christ ministers an endless life! All that the Old Testament priesthood foreshadowed is fulfilled in Christ, because Christ is the mediator of a new covenant. The old one is passing away and is becoming obsolete.
We have to be careful to read the Old Testament in the Spirit of Christ, or we'll think everything will be fulfilled some day IN TIME, instead of seeing that the FULFILLMENT IS IN CHRIST. All the typology of the temple, sacrifices, offerings, holy days and Sabbath days, have their fulfillment in Christ. THEY END IN HIM! Christ is the substance of these things. (Col. 2:17) That is why Paul says we don't have to observe days anymore. Peter writes about the day dawning and the morning star arising in our hearts. (2 Peter 1:19) This is not in time, but in our hearts!
The covenant given to Moses ends in Christ, for Christ is the mediator of a better covenant with God! Therefore if we don't put the old one away, we can't have the new one. Actually the new one ends the old one because Christ is the Alpha (the beginning), and the Omega (the end). Sin-consciousness ends in Christ. He has no sin-consciousness, no condemnation. We know that the natural nation of Israel ends in Christ, because Jesus said to the Jews, "the kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and be given to a nation producing the fruit of it." (Matt. 21:43) The old priesthood ends in Christ. The generation of the flesh that has an earthly father ends in Christ. We are a new nation, a holy people, a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a new generation; once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God. (1 Peter 2:9-10)
"...that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil." (Heb. 2:14) The devil has been destroyed through the death of Christ. Christ identified with our death in Adam; He became dead with us, when He said, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" God is not human; He does not have a body of flesh. So when Jesus received a human body, a separation took place. In His identification with us, He came in the likeness of sinful flesh, but He never sinned; He became a sin-offering! Through His death, He broke death for us. When we have Christ's Spirit, we have a Spirit that cannot reside in death. Death cannot hold it!
Time and place end in Christ because He brings us immortality. Condemnation ends in Christ, for in Him there is only the law of the Spirit of life; there is no other law to contend with and no law to condemn us! Our ignorance of God and self ends in Christ. This is because Christ has been made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption. He is our wisdom from God! It's Christ! The world system's rule ends in Christ! All the corruption, evil, perversion of sex, murders, hatred and greed in this world is a result of this world's evil rule. It obviously is not of God. Christ's kingdom is not of this world. So we have to be transferred out of this world into Christ's kingdom to receive the truth of God that's in Christ Jesus.
All the promises of God have their yes and Amen in Christ! (2 Cor. 1:20) All error ends in Christ because Christ is truth, and truth does away with error. What happens to error and the lie when truth comes? They disappear because they have no substance. There is nothing to sustain the lie; when truth is accepted, the lie is gone. Jesus Christ said, "I am the truth." If we love truth, we love Christ; if we don't want truth, we'll have delusion. If we live in the flesh, we'll reap delusion. The generation of the flesh ends in Christ. Man, who was lost in error, delusion and ignorance, now finds truth. We learn that we are the sons of God and that our true identity is Christ! This knowledge cannot come from people nor from books; it only comes in Christ. He knocks at the door that we might open it so He can come into our heart and consciousness.
Man had already been persuaded by satan to incriminate and kill Jesus, long before He was crucified on the cross. The public crucifixion of Jesus was the result of the crucifixion which had transpired in man's heart. The Romans didn't have any law that would incriminate Jesus, but they did have the power to sentence someone to death. The Romans couldn't care less about what Jesus was teaching. When the Jews took Him to Pontius Pilate and demanded His death, Pilate said, "Deal with Him after your law." That was not good enough for the Jews because they wanted Him killed. So the Jews, being in bondage to the Romans, had to use their own law as a contrivance against Him, and turn Him over to the Romans for the death sentence. Their misrepresentation of Moses (the law) indicted Him. It was their own pharisaical pride and reasoning of who God was that actually caused them to hand Him over to Pilate. Therefore the Jews had the greater sin! So it is worse to be a pharisaical Christian than a Pontius Pilate!
"And as for you, the anointing which you have received from Him...will teach you about all things..."(1 Jn. 2:27) The law is a teacher; it brings us to repentance that we might receive Christ. It taught us morals but didn't give us strength to keep them. Now that we have received another teacher, the Holy Spirit, the law is no longer our teacher. The Holy Spirit is the strength and power to do the will of God. If we abide in the vine His words will produce the fruit in our lives.
Christ is often misrepresented. Since He is the exact representation of the Father, a wrong understanding of Him also brings a misrepresentation of God and of who we are in Him. If we don't have the truth that is in Christ Jesus, we won't know God nor ourselves correctly. So we'll be lost - we won't know our true identity, nor will we have a true consciousness of God. We won't know the process of redemption - that we are being redeemed out of the lie into the truth, out of flesh into spirit, out of mortality into immortality, out of darkness into light! It's the coming of truth which ushers out the old. Christ "is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." He is the end because the old man ends in Christ. When truth comes against the lie, the lie ends.
I hope you are hearing this testimony, and receiving the truth and the realization that can only come from the Spirit. Consider what I say, and may the LORD give you understanding. God bless you.