![[The Good Seed]](../images/thegoodseed.gif)
Sharing the Mission of the Son
By Lloyd Ellefson
Greetings in the name of the Lord. It's good to share the enlightenment and insights which the Spirit progressively brings us. The Lord always brings us those things that are of the Father. We must follow Him and walk as He walks.
The grace of God has come to us through a physical vessel, namely, Jesus Christ. He approached us while we were still in our humanity, separation and darkness. The grace of God is for everyone! It is not for personal gain, nor for a select few. This is God's intention, because everything in God is universal. Man in his mortal state can never become a child of God by his own efforts, for God is immortal and His children must have His spiritual nature. Therefore nobody born of the flesh is born a child of God.
Religion only operates in the natural realm. A realization of God cannot be produced by human nature. Therefore the natural, soulish, intellectual human being can only partially understand forgiveness and acceptance. Understanding of God, Christ, forgiveness, grace, truth or charity that is received by the natural mind only operates in human nature. Sonship and forgiveness can only be realized by the spiritual revelation of Christ. There has to be a death to human nature and a quickening into the spiritual realization of God before we can understand the kingdom of God, the will of God and God's purpose for us.
God sent His Son into the world to reveal the Father God in truth. This was His mission. God would not have had to send His Son into the world to be abused, rejected, and crucified by human nature, if man's idea of God had been correct. Jesus came into our darkness to fulfill His mission from God. For this He needed God's grace. Throughout the Old Testament we see man rejecting the word of God because his understanding of God was wrong. The gulf between man and God could never be bridged by the activity of man's mind.
In John 17:14 Jesus said, "I have given them Thy word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." The world hated them because they had received His word. This was not a written word, for we have no record that Jesus wrote anything. Nor does this refer to the Bible. Jesus gave them a spiritual word! This word did not really bear fruit until the Holy Spirit came. God's word is not in writing; His word is truth, and we are sanctified by this truth.
The word of God brings life; this life cannot be put to death. "For you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is through the living and abiding word of God." (1 Peter 1:23) The word of God is a seed and that seed is Christ. (Gal. 3:16) Christ is the true image of God brought forth by the word of God. We too are born of imperishable or incorruptible seed; it keeps us alive forever for nobody can put it to death. It's easy to give mental assent to the fact that we have been born of God, without realizing the spiritual dimension of this truth. We are not generated or born again by anything perishable! Our new birth has come into being through seed that is imperishable; it cannot die, get sick, be corrupted, be seen, or pass away. It is not mortal, nor is it of this world. No wonder the world hates us for it cannot understand us!
The law came by Moses. Generally speaking, the legalism that is expressed in today's religious system, is actually good for the world, for it is a check upon the world's greed and selfishness which results in hate, fighting and killing. So it is good in one sense, but bad in another sense, for we are still left with the problem. If the law, given by Moses had been sufficient, we wouldn't have needed a different covenant, a different way of thinking, a different law with new information. Moses was not the Christ, so his mediation could not promote the truth and the realization of God; it could only be used as an instrument to minister death, and show the inability of human nature to fulfill the legal demands of the commandments of God. By setting up a standard so high that humanity could not attain to it, and with no provision for help, the message of Moses actually revealed the insufficiency of our human nature. It came to destroy man's image of self so man would recognize his need of Christ.
Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ! Grace is not for selfish personal gain; grace is for everyone! Anyone who wants to use the grace of God and the things of Jesus Christ, for personal gain and for the betterment of his own self-being, does not have a correct understanding of it; he is still feeding his self-life. This is the self-image that the law came to destroy. Jesus Christ came to introduce a new sense of being and a new self to us!
God prepared us by the law and the prophets to receive His Son. "But when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order that He might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons." (Gal. 4:4-5) "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..." (Rom. 8:3). The law was weak through the flesh. This shows that God's covenant with Moses was to be fulfilled by the flesh. This covenant was continually being broken for the flesh was too weak to keep it. Although it tried to meet the demands of God, it couldn't. This was impossible without the correct understanding of God for the natural man cannot receive revelation from God. His conceptions of God are formed in his human mind; they remain carnal! When man does not receive the truth in Christ, he reveals his unbelief and delusion.
God has given us a new covenant, not because we merited it, but because He wanted to give us a better one. If the first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no reason to establish a new one. The old one was faulty, growing old, becoming obsolete and passing away. (Heb. 8:13) The new one supersedes the old; therefore we must live in a new covenant relationship!
God sent forth His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh! The mission of the Son was to reveal the Father to humanity while He (Jesus) was in the form or likeness of sinful flesh! To do this, He had to live under the law for 30 years, then become the Christ as it had been prophetically predicted. He lived under the law as an ordinary person until He came to the Jordan River. There under the ministry of John the Baptist He repented even though He had not sinned. But the government in His life had been the law, and that is what He repented of. Here at the Jordan the government in His life was changed, and the Holy Spirit became His government. The government of law, of flesh and the physical, was changed to a spiritual one.
The Word became flesh; God sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. (Rom. 8:30) The Word produced the flesh of Jesus Christ; He was really the Son of God, operating within that veil of flesh, and people only saw the veil. They could not see the Christ, they could not see the Son of God. In their humanity they could only see the man Jesus, hear His words and understand the natural meaning of those words. That was not enough to cause anyone to follow Him to the cross. No one understood the spiritual truth embedded in the words that came from His relationship with God. The natural man was not able to comprehend the God that Jesus was proclaiming. If people had understood they would have followed Him - but they didn't! Although Peter did receive the revelation that Jesus was the Christ, he only received it in his carnal mind, for not long after that he cursed and said, "I don't know the man."
The government of the kingdom only began to operate in Jesus after He was baptized in the Jordan. There the Holy Spirit came upon Him, and He became the fulness of all those spiritual things which were symbolized in the Old Testament. Man failed to realize this, so Christ's ministry only incited the Jews to wrath. They crucified Him because they didn't want Him disturbing the status quo. Through death His spirit was released. Through the Holy Spirit we can now be conformed to His image. As we learn to hear the Spirit, we receive the realization that we are born of incorruptible seed - of the word of God. We learn that God is our Father and we are now the sons of God; we are no longer under Moses' covenant (the law). We have received a new government in our life - the same government that Jesus demonstrated while in His human form. It rules us in immortality - without end.
The Son of God made an appearance, but His appearance was hidden or veiled by the flesh, and man could not see beyond His veil of flesh. After Christ's veil of flesh was broken, the Holy Spirit was given. The flesh had to be rent (torn) in order that a mediation between God and man could be opened up. Man was unable to receive His mediation because of the veil hanging over man's heart. God gives us spiritual reality - a reality which is beyond the conception of natural man!
Jesus was really the temple of God. He was the fulfillment of the Old Testament law and the prophets. The fulness of the Godhead (the realization of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) dwelt in Him! This was the purpose of Jesus Christ's anointing - all these should dwell in the being of Christ, forming one body. As natural people, we always think of a physical body; but Christ's body is spiritual. The physical body of Jesus kept people from seeing the reality of His being; it kept them from seeing Him as the Son of God, the Word of God, and the revelation of the Father.
When the veil was torn, an opening occurred from the first holy place to the second holy place, and from the second to the first. Free access both ways was created. In other words, there is nothing now that restricts or obstructs the appearing of the Christ. When the Son of God appeared in the man Jesus, or the man Jesus appeared as the Son of God, the Son of God was there, because there cannot be an appearance of something without it being already there. To appear means to become visible, to come into sight or be in sight. It is not something or someone coming into being. Something already in existence simply comes into focus or into our view, and we realize it is there. However, the Holy Spirit does not come into the view of natural man, for he cannot see beyond the veil of the flesh. He only sees what his physical senses see and tell him.
The church system assumes that Jesus Christ can be received as a natural man with a physical form. People just see the physical form - the veil which hid the Son in the man Jesus. They do not see that the Son of God cannot have a physical form. So they do not see who the Son is, nor who the Christ is, for the Christ is just as invisible as the Son of God. The Christ cannot be seen because He is the Messiah - and Messiah means ANOINTING. It describes something. When a man is anointed, he is called the Anointed; he is the Messiah. Anyone who is anointed is a messiah; he is an anointed one. Most people think the anointing is an emotion, but the the anointing is a teacher. Jesus lived under the law for 30 years, but when the Spirit came, the government in His life changed. In the days of Joshua this change of government was symbolized by the stones which were taken out of the Jordan and the new ones put in. Jesus fulfilled that symbolism when the government in His life was changed from the law to the Spirit, from natural man to the spiritual man.
After that He began to confess that He was the Son of Man. The first man is of the earth; He is earthy in his conceptions, for his thoughts center around creation; the second man is a quickening spirit. A quickening spirit cannot be seen with natural eyes. The Holy Spirit is invisible. The Christ is the Holy Spirit - the anointing that came on the man Jesus.
At the baptism of Jesus only the forms of the reality were visible. John the Baptist, the water, and the dove are forms, representing Elijah, the law, and the Holy Spirit. These were only a summation of everything God had been doing - the stages of redemption and the prophets that prophesied until Jesus Christ came. Jesus Christ became the fulfillment because He was now operating under the government of the Holy Spirit - which is the true government of God. This occurs internally! God does not govern us externally. An external government through the law has to work through the flesh, and that doesn't work since the flesh is weak. God sent His Son to redeem us from our earthiness and natural thinking so that we can enter into sonship!
The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us! He was the glory of the only Begotten of the Father, yet His physical body veiled His true being. The understanding of God as Father came through Jesus Christ! No one before Him understood that. The Spirit in Him gave Him understanding, and He is our pattern! This is the mind of Christ that we are to operate in!
Therefore we no longer wait for the return of the Son of God who was veiled in flesh! The veil has been rent and we don't want the veil of flesh to appear again! (Heb. 10:20) Our flesh is also a veil. It can keep us from seeing who the Christ is, and it can keep others from seeing the Christ in us. The veil that kept us from receiving what was in Christ has been opened, so that which is in Him can now come into us through the Holy Spirit. This gives us a new realization of God and of ourselves.
The first man was made a living soul; the second man was a quickening Spirit. When we talk about man being in the image of God, we are not referring to the physical form, but to the spiritual image of God. This is who the true man is; he cannot be seen. The second man, the Son of Man or the image of God that was in Jesus Christ is from heaven; He is a quickening Spirit; He cannot be seen by the natural man.
We cannot have Christ in us in a form other than He is. Unless we receive Him as He is we can never be like Him. Therefore we cannot receive Him in His physical form. John 1:12 says, "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name." Jesus gave them the authority to become children of God! We understand that they were born of the Spirit, but to become a son they must come out of the law. Jesus was only manifested as the Son of God after His Jordan River experience, even though He was a child of God before that.
"As many as received Him." People say they have received Him, but have they received HIM or have they received the veiled image of who He was? Who is this Christ to whom we have opened the door of our heart and who has come in? Are we still looking for a veiled appearance, or are we looking for the reality of who He is beyond the veil of flesh? How can we say that we have received Him if we are still looking for a veiled form to come again? This idea that Jesus is coming again, veiled by a physical form, to finish what He failed to finish, is simply false prophecy. Regardless of how nice it sounds, or how wonderful your preacher is, this is not a true revelation of the way Christ comes to us. It is false prophecy, and there are many false prophecies that have come into the world. Christ is not coming again in a physical body, because that veil (His physical body) has been rent. No veil (physical body) is to come again. It has been rent in us and in God. If we have really received Him we become His children. Once we understand that we have received Him as a quickening Spirit, we will not look for His coming again in a physical form. It is the Spirit that brings us into sonship!
Rev. 3:20 says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock." If Christ is knocking at the door, He is asking for admittance. This is not the door of the church, but of the individual. "If any man hears My voice..." In John 5:25 Jesus said that if we hear His voice we will live. If any man hears His voice and knows that He seeks entrance, if he allows Christ to come in, the reply is, "I will come in to him, and will dine with him..." This has to happen spiritually, for no one can come in to us as a physical person. "...if any man hears My voice, and opens the door, I will come in to him..." The door has to be the entrance into our consciousness. The wisdom, knowledge and spiritual realization that is in the mind of Christ comes to us as we eat together! "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." Jesus the Son of God lives by the word. We also live by the word - not the letter of the Bible, for the word of God is not a written word!
When Christ comes, things change! "All things become new!" All things have to become new because we were all in death; we all died in Adam! The fact is that death is the punishment for sin; it's not hell! When Adam died, ALL died! Unless we believe that, we will think that we are able to motivate and energize our own mind and our own sense of being to do God's will. This information comes through our natural senses from the things we have read and have been taught. It does not give us a true understanding of God nor of ourselves, and causes us to believe the delusions of the natural mind.
Jesus Christ was separated from all earthly rule. After His thirty-year period of walking in the law, He walked in the Spirit. This was a new dimension for Him and it brought Him a new realization of God. He did that for us, because it was His mission to come into our realm of thinking and to bring us into His consciousness of God as Father. God is the Father of spirits - not of flesh. The Word was made in the likeness of sinful flesh. Before Jesus was crucified, He said (in effect), "It is necessary that I go away, for then you can no longer see Me in an earthly body; for when I am raised up from the earth, that is, from an earthly sense of being, I will draw all men to Me." This forms the basis for our being taken in and generated into the kingdom of God, so that God's rule can come to us!
The rule of this world has brought disease, poverty, evil, hatred and wars. Jesus Christ did not come to correct that world; He came to take us out of that system of rule - out of our idea of self-preservation and delusion, that He might bring us into the truth. Since Jesus is the truth, there is no other truth at all; everything else is only a testimony of the truth! Only Christ is the truth! If we are to come into truth we have to come into Christ. He always comes as the truth! There are many different interpretations of the Bible. To think that we have the truth just because we have the Bible, is deception. The very fact that there are so many different interpretations of the Bible and misrepresentations of Christ, shows the necessity of coming into the truth. Natural understanding is in the realm of death or the flesh; it is not based on spiritual reality.
It is very difficult for most people to give up their false identity. Many wonder why God made them in the first place, if their end is death. Our false identity did not come from God; it emerged from the lie, from satan (the adversary, the devil or dragon) in opposition to God. The old sense of being that we call the ME or the I, no longer belongs to us. Paul said, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me." This I does not live anymore, because Jesus Christ has brought us a new identity! The old identity had to be done away with for it was a false identity. It did not come from God; its conceptions of God were from the adversary of God. So it is to our advantage to be separated from our I, our ME!
Yet people don't recognize that. The delusion they are in causes them to desire the identity that thinks there is something good in them; they think God is going to save that identity. This ME that we think we are, is not in God's plan of redemption. His plan is that our old identity must be put to death!
The whole world lies in the wicked one and therefore needs a new rule. The rule of this world is rooted in living by the law, in the consciousness of sin and in the wrong idea of God. The law causes us to live in a sense of morality, of behavior patterns, of good or evil works; it gives us either a good or bad conscience. This is all in the death realm. When Christ came we got a new rule in which there are no fears, no concerns about tomorrow nor regrets about yesterday. This new rule can only be obtained by Jesus taking us out of the death realm and bringing us into the place where we DO NOT FEAR!
When we do not have the mind of Christ, we will fear sickness, disease, and evil. Our concerns about tomorrow and our regrets about yesterday are not to be in our consciousness now. Thinking that we have to die or be raptured and receive a new body before we can go to a new comfortable place called heaven is false. This thinking still has this ME in evidence. That old sense man will always live under condemnation, for there is no redemption for him.
The enlightenment of the day of the Lord should be ours upon waking each morning. Truth is in Christ Jesus. We have to be awakened into that and live in the same kind of day Jesus was living in - a day of immortality and true realization of God; a day in which material things, mental reasonings and emotional desires are not received as truth. In this sense of immortality our new realization will continually grow and expand. The great conflict between Jesus and the religious system of the Jews still exists. It extends to all the religious systems of the world. Many are satisfied with only a partial realization, and fail to go on to the fullness of it. They try to separate themselves from the world by not participating in wordly activities and various kinds of immoralities. However, the world is too strong for them, and their constant failures make it seem like a life of compromise. We don't want to be entangled with the world, neither do we want it to affect us. We abhor that. Those who are in Christ are being taken out of this more and more.
The fulfillment of the spiritual realities in Christ as revealed in the scriptures, has to come to us today - in the NOW - not yesterday, nor tomorrow! NOW is the day of salvation! It's not tomorrow; for yesterday's tomorrow is today. When tomorrow comes, it's today; it's NOW! Yesterday is past; tomorrow is not here. We live in the NOW. We are living in whatever sense of being we have NOW. It has to change NOW by the enlightenment of Christ - not tomorrow. Christ comes to us as the mind of the Spirit. He is a teacher; He is an anointing that teaches us things that the natural man cannot see, for man cannot see beyond the veil.
Jesus does not come tomorrow; He comes today. If we expect Him in the days, months or years to come, this time will never come, for He can only come to us today, in the now. As long as people predict that Jesus will come physically in the sky some day, it will always be a future event; it will never come, because that is not the way He comes. He comes IN THE NOW. The rapture, tribulation and millenium are not coming in the sense in which they are generally understood and preached. No rapture, tribulation, nor millenium will come tomorrow. They come in Christ and are fulfilled in Him because HE is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Christ is the sum of all things!
Though man would like to extol his accomplishments or offices, it is not good for him to do this. He gives himself credit for his achievements. He may think he has become a little better by receiving the Holy Spirit, or by becoming a preacher, etc. This culminates in labelling himself as pastor, teacher, evangelist, etc. If he is legalistic, he will proclaim his do's and don'ts, his virtues, his constant prayer life, and his readiness for Jesus to come and rapture him away. However this is not good. Eventually our inner integrity will deny it, because every man in his inner being knows (and he has to know), that he has failed God and will do so again. He also needs a hope for the future.
Jesus Christ is NOW! This undoes the whole system of rationalization. When we receive and retain the things of Christ in our own nature, they remain in mortality. If the realities in the Bible only come into our realm of reason, they do not come into life; they do not produce life, nor do they last. Christians will not live that way; they live by the Christ who is their life! He is their life NOW, because He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If we receive Him as our life, the change to become like Him begins by the fact of Him being here NOW.
We are constantly being bombarded with accusations. Learning and receiving the truth that is in Jesus Christ releases us from condemnation! There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus! (Rom. 8:2) So let's eliminate condemnation. Jesus is not going to condemn us for any sin. He said that He did not come into the world to condemn the world, because the world was condemned already. 2 Cor. 5:19 says that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their sins against them. As we understand and hear Christ, we will hear that God is not imputing our sins to us. But if we can't hear that we will hear something else. We will hear Moses, we will hear the law; we will hear satan.
The strength of sin is in the law, for through the law is the knowledge of sin! It teaches us what sin is, it makes us feel sinful and teaches us that we are sinners. This knowledge is to lead us to Christ. When we have come to Christ, He is the end of the law for righteousness, and we are no longer sinners. God is not imputing sin; He is taking sin away. He is doing away with that nature; satan, the accuser of the brethren, is cast out. The accusations we receive are not from God, for God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their sin, and there is no condemnation in Jesus. It makes a tremendous difference to know that the mind that was in Christ Jesus IS in us! If Christ is our life, there is no condemnation!
The reality of having our sins forgiven has to come from knowing that God is not imputing any sins to us! It has to be heard in Christ, for natural man cannot conceive this; he doesn't hear it! It is not God who condemns us, but it's the law (Moses) and satan working together that condemn us. Truth is not in natural man - it is only in Christ! Since He said that He did not come to condemn us, that must be the truth! There is no other truth! If we feel condemned when reading the Bible, we are hearing the letter and not the Christ. We are hearing a written word, but we are not receiving the Spirit's teaching on it. Christ in us brings us the truth, so whatever is true about Christ is also true about ourselves.
Jesus said, "He who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber...All that came before Me are thieves and robbers." (Jn. 10:1,8) Jesus said that all who came before Him were robbers. What did He mean by that? Can the message of the Old Testament actually rob us? We know that the scriptures did not provide spirituality for the Jews. Our human nature robs us of everything spiritual. As long as we are in our old nature, the message of the Old Testament will remain letter and keep us from seeing who we are in Christ. It will rob us of the life we have in Christ because the letter kills. The letter and the natural mind working together, will rob us of our true identity as sons of God. It will rob us by giving us wrong ideas - by giving us the idea that we are still sinners and under condemnation, that we can make right choices, etc. It robs us of life.
Jesus said, "Search the scriptures because in them you suppose you have life." (Jn. 5:39) They SUPPOSED they had life in them, but they didn't! They only had death! They had to come to Jesus to receive life, but because they thought they had life, they refused to come to Him. If the scriptures had been enough, Jesus would not have needed to come. Truth is beyond natural man's idea of truth. Christ came to reveal the Son in us and the Son reveals the Father. This was the mission of the Son. He came to reveal that there is no condemnation in Him - this was beyond the capability of natural man's understanding. Paul said we should walk in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.
In John 16:23 Jesus said, "In that day you will ask Me no question...but if you shall ask the Father anything, He will give it to you in My name." Asking in the name of Jesus does not mean using the expression, "I ask all these things in the name of Jesus" at the end of every prayer. Many take the name of the man Jesus (because it is all they have), and use it legalistically against demons, sickness, etc. That is not what it is all about. IN THE NAME means that we approach the Father in the nature of Christ. Now the Christ does it instead of us. It is the consciousness or knowledge of God that works in us, so that we can call God Father and ask Him in the name of Jesus.
The person we think we are and which we designate as the SELF or ME, does not have any authority of its own. When we come into the things of God, we realize that we cannot help ourselves, for we don't have any power nor morality in ourselves. These virtues are ours only in Christ. Since we are the body of Christ, we do not have a body of our own. A change has to take place in our thinking. A transition from the self to God has to be made. Instead of thinking that we have power and that life belongs to us, we now see that God is our life, Christ is our life, and that we are sons of God. We can entrust the length of our days and our health to Him. Jesus recognized His dependency on the Father. He said, "I can do nothing of Myself...the works are of the Father who dwells within Me...I don't bear witness of Myself..." He also discerned who He was spiritually. He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life; I am the resurrection."
I AM refers to the consciousness which was in Christ, the Son. The man Jesus had the same consciousness that is in God - the I AM, the truth and the resurrection! Jesus is the I AM who is in the midst of two or three who are gathered together in His name! He is the I AM - the resurrection, the life, the way; the I AM who prepares a place for us. He is the One who says, "Where I AM, you will be also." This I AM was rejected by the natural, carnal thinking of the world system of rule. The I AM was living in a relationship with God as a Son, as Spirit. His mission was to bring many sons into glory - the glory of the Father; not our glory, but God's glory. We are being glorified because we have been taken into the presence of God; into relationship to become the family of God!
The mission of the Son was to take us into a realm of realization and a oneness with God that was so awesome that it had never entered the eye and ear of natural man. People saying, "I hope I make it to heaven", have never conceived in their hearts what God has prepared for those who know Him. No eye, no ear, no heart has ever conceived or known what God has for us.
Since natural man can never fathom what God has prepared for us, it means we must STOP TRYING to figure things out in our natural mind. Let's not prepare a program for God to follow. Saying that He will rapture us and take us to heaven, to fly around, play on harps, see our loved ones, sit around with Abraham and Moses, etc., is conjecture, and is easily appropriated by the carnal mind. For example, envisioning the New Jerusalem with its streets of gold as a real city, is a picture received in the carnal mind, instead of understanding that it portrays the bride of Christ. Envisioning God sitting on high on the great white throne is another example. Jesus Christ came to take away those mental images.
We only need to be taken into the presence of God! He supplies everything we are, and everything we are going to be! The things that God has prepared for us have never entered mortal man's heart, nor have they been revealed to us in the Bible. The holy city, the great white throne, the sea of glass, the elders, the ark in heaven, etc., as described in the book of Revelation, are all figurative. They have to be revealed to us by the mind that is in Christ Jesus; they are not revealed by going anywhere.
1 Tim. 6:16, "Who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light." God and Christ are one; you can't have one without the other, if you have God you have Christ. When Jesus was on earth He did not leave God, for He said, "The Father and I are one." The Father was in Christ! Jesus said, "The Father in Me does the work...The Father and I will dwell with you." There is no separation there. Only He has immortality! We can't get immortality on our own - God is not going to give it to us without Himself. We have to die to the idea that in ourselves we can be something, handle something, perceive something, or operate in something. We are always strong in natural man's thinking. We have to understand that God supplies all our needs in Christ Jesus! Everything we are - our breath, life, consciousness, comfort and harmony - is all there in the presence of God. It is not ours to have as our own possession. That would never work.
Anything that is immortal cannot be separated, for separation brings death. Anything separated from God is death. All ideas of containing or receiving something from God in separation from Himself and heaven are in the death realm. All miraculous physical healing is still in the death realm because it is simply a reinstatement of flesh that is going to die again. Lazarus was raised to die again.
Only Christ has immortality. Only He lives in this realm of light that no man can approach. It is only approachable in Christ! We have to approach God in Christ - in His consciousness, in His name, in His nature and in His realization. Only in Christ can we be progressively taken into the consciousness of God our Father, and into the understanding of spiritual things. This understanding will usher out all the former ideas of joy, being healthy and wise, and having honor among men. These are all things that humanity likes to attain in its own self. All these earthly attainments can never bring us into immortality, because they are built on false desires. The only way we will ever be comfortable is when all desire for the false things is gone, and we only have the presence of God to supply these things.
God dwells in light that no man can approach. Man can never approach Him because He lives in light that is unapproachable by natural man. Man first has to go through death - death to his own sense of being. That is the only way he can get to know God, come into the life and true realization of God.
"...whom no man has seen or can see." (1 Tim. 6:16) No natural man has ever seen who God is. After Christ has enlightened our understanding we will be able to discern from people's conversation, whether or not they are operating in the same delusion, conception, and obstruction to truth that Jesus experienced in Israel. The people liked Jesus for what He did, but not for what He believed. People didn't want to be like Him at that time.
The mission of the Son is to bring us out of our wrong sense of being and into the true realization of who we are in the eyes of God. Natural man cannot accomplish this. He first has to lay down his own ideas, i.e. who God is, God's intention for him, how to approach God, who man is, and what the world is. All our ideas are in the death realm, so they have to be separated from us - and that is what death is. Then we can be separated unto God - and that is life!
Let's review this. Man's war is in the mortal mind for it plies its trade of death. This is very evident in all the wars, hatred, and evil things man does. Man is bent on evil for the preservation of self and goods and the desire for power! The mortal mind is death. Everything man does comes from his mortal mind - even his attempt to be good - so it is all in the death realm. All the advantages of scientific and medical knowledge eventually result in death. The power of bombs and guns results in death. "If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword." (Matt. 26:52)
It's wonderful to know that we don't have to have any power of our own, any health of our own, nor any morality of our own, because Christ has been made all these things unto us! "Your life is hidden with Christ in God...Christ is our life...Christ is all and in all." (Col. 3:3,4,11) Our natural mind does not want to receive this truth. This is evident when our minds begin to wander as we meditate upon these things. We believe what our natural minds tell us. The sin is in accepting the deception of the natural mind as truth. The consequences of greed, evil, hatred and disease are accepted as truth or some form of truth. We need to see that these consequences are the result of living in a delusion. Instead of dealing with the various effects of evil, we need to see that man's basic need is to come into truth!
There is no power outside of God's power! We need to see that our own assessment of our identity is not the reality; it is not valid. Therefore we have to realize that we are new creations, created in Christ Jesus! As we accept and live in our new identity in Christ, we are separated from our old understanding. This is the mission of the Son, expressed in the man Jesus, the Christ. God bless!