![[The Good Seed]](../images/thegoodseed.gif)
Who Adam Is
By Lloyd Ellefson
Greetings in the name of the Lord! In Luke 4:18 Jesus opened the scriptures to Isaiah and read, "The Lord has anointed Me." Who is that Lord who anointed Jesus? Paul said, "The Lord is the Spirit." (2 Cor. 3:17) The words CHRIST, MESSIAH, ANOINTING are from the Greek words CHRISTOS (meaning anointed - Hebrew Messiah) and CHRIO (meaning to anoint). They are very closely related in meaning. The Messiah (Hebrew) or Christ (Greek), is the one who has received the anointing. This is a title applied to someone who has been officially anointed with oil. He is the Anointed one, for he has received the anointing.
People today are waiting for the coming of the Messiah. Many are praying on hands and knees, crying for Jesus to come back physically. Their desire is that they be taken out of this world. These people have never come into the true knowledge of God, nor do they realize that all things are finished or fulfilled in Christ Jesus. If they ever had this knowledge, they lost it.
"Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty." Where the Spirit IS there is liberty - not where He WAS, OR THE PLACE WHERE HE WILL COME. And the Spirit of the Lord is here! God has poured out His Spirit on all flesh, but flesh cannot receive Him. The anointing first came upon the Son of God; for when Jesus began His ministry, He said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me..." (Luke 4:18) Later on, in Acts 2:33 Peter said, "...and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which you both see and hear." He fulfilled that promise! After Jesus had been exalted to the right hand of God (the spiritual fulfillment for Christ to sit on David's throne), the Father gave Him the promised Holy Spirit. This same Holy Spirit Christ poured forth at Pentecost had been given Him by the Father!
God gave Jesus of Nazareth an anointing, and He became the Christ at the age of 30, when the Spirit came upon Him at the Jordan. This was the receiving of the Christ, which is the Holy Spirit. At this time He began to manifest the Christ. It says that "In Him all the fulness of the Deity dwells bodily." (Col. 2:9) The Father God and the Spirit were all one body in Christ Jesus. From then on He was called the Christ. The religious world is looking for Jesus to come again historically. People are looking for a Jesus whom they will know by the nailprints in His hands. They want to see Him coming down on the Mt. of Olives and check Him for the nailprints. If they are not at the scene of action, they may have to rely on television and radio reports. To check Him out personally would be pretty impossible for the average person. You can't even get close to the pope!
Jesus said, "It is not yours to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority." (Acts 1:7) This knowledge belongs to the Father only; it is not for us to know! Yet people are trying so hard to figure out when the Lord will come again! They say the coming of the Lord is imminent because the world is so bad; they use mathematics to figure out the times and the seasons when the promises shall be fulfilled. They even foretell the exact date of His coming. A book was written in which were cited 88 reasons why He would be coming in '88. All of man's calculations have been proved wrong; they have never come to pass; none of them have borne the fruit of true prophecy!
Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, "As to the times and the epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you." (1 Thess. 5:1) Why? Because they already knew what they were supposed to know. Anything more was not for them to know - and neither is it ours to know! It really doesn't make any difference to us, does it? Since we are in the Father's hand and we trust Him for everything, we rely upon Him to do what is best!
Let's see what happens to us in Jesus Christ. Once Christ has come to us and we have been put in Him, we have become new creatures in Christ, and this new creation is really not subject to time and place anymore! Jesus preached, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the gospel." Paul said, "The consummation of the ages is upon us." (Heb. 9:26) He also wrote that in the fulness of time, or when the time was fulfilled, God sent forth His Son. (Gal. 4:4) Because Christ is infinite, He has a ministry that is endless; He is a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. The Melchizedek ministry in Christ is an ongoing spiritual ministry. Time and geographical location do not apply in the spiritual realm of God's activity.
We have been given Christ; we have been put into Christ; we've been anointed; our old man has been crucified on the cross; we are new creatures in Christ; we are living in a new and different dimension from our former way of life! Now we are growing in things that have already come to pass! In God they are already done! Jesus said we were to pray God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Therefore the will of God is always done in heaven before it is ever administered in revelation in the earth. His will is always done in heaven before it ever comes forth in the earth as a testimony. That is why Jesus said, "Whatever I see the Father doing that is what I do."
In Matt. 16 Jesus asked the disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" They had all kinds of ideas. Some said He was a prophet. They actually thought that He was one of the prophets like Jeremiah, Elijah, or John the Baptist. But then He asked them, "Who do you say that I am?" Peter answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven." This revelation came from His Father in heaven; it was the Father who revealed it to Peter! This knowledge did not come to Peter because of his tremendous reasoning ability (the flesh), nor was it his bloodline (being a Hebrew or Jew). It came from His Father in heaven! Jesus called God His Father. "MY FATHER in heaven told you this." This revelation is the rock upon which God builds His church (His body - the body of Christ)! The body of Christ is built upon the rock of this revelation that God gives to man.
It may surprise and astonish us that not long after he had received this wonderful revelation, he emphatically denied his knowledge of Christ - even by cursing! After Jesus was taken captive, Peter was confronted by a maid who asked if he was one of Christ's disciples. Fear of consequences caused him to deny Jesus. How could he do that after he had heard an incorruptible and creative word of God? At that time Peter had not yet received the Holy Spirit; he had not yet repented and been converted in the sense of putting away his old mind and receiving a new one. So this revelation was resident in Peter as Peter - and not in the Christ who was in him! This shows that the revelation of God can only be received by the spiritual man, by the regeneration of the spirit that is in us!
We are tired of organized Christianity which professes to tell us about God, but only presents its own idea of God! Its ministers are not hearing the Spirit. In the true sense of the word, it is an organized ignorance. It embodies the Adamic religious concept of God and His Christ; it has the same concept of God that the Jews had and still have! The Jews are at the wailing wall waiting for Christ, and the churches are in their place of prayer, waiting and wailing for Jesus to come again to save them from this terrible world! They want Him to change it and make everything right - including us. He is not going to do any of these things, because His kingdom is not of this world and redemption is not for the Adamic man - the carnal mind. It has suppressed the regeneration of spiritual realization from the beginning of time. God is not redeeming that mind; He's putting it away, separating it - putting it to death. Our old man is crucified with Him!
In 1 John it says, "...We know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is...as He is, so also are we in this world." (1 John 3:2b; 4:16b) We will see Him as He IS; there never was a time when He was not. Nor is He ever only going to be. Christ always is, just as God is. We can't say that He was, nor that He is going to be; it is only in our realization that a change occurs. God never was; He always is! Back there in what we call WAS, God was IS at that time! We have to be careful that we don't put God into our concept of human nature, otherwise we will worship our own ideas of God. That is where all these different ideas of who God is, and who Christ is, come from.
Christ is the light and the life. Christ is our life! He doesn't come to begin a life in us. He doesn't come to give us a life, but He who is life gives us Himself! He is that life that comes to us in our consciousness! Many of the things that we prayed for and thought God was going to give us, like the wisdom of God, the life of Christ, the light of Christ, health, etc., we no longer pray for. In our new stage of realization we pray for the realization of God's presence as our being! Once we come to the realization that God is our being, then God is these things in us! He is our wisdom, He is our righteousness, He is our truth, He is our infinity, He is our life! We are growing into a deeper realization of the creativity of God and His Spirit.
This cannot be analyzed in our carnal spirit, nor by letting our carnal mind interpret the Bible. It is not given to man to know the times and the seasons. Yet people keep thinking that Jesus hasn't finished the work, that God has to do a further work by having Jesus come back to deal with sin, abolish death and do away with the devil. All these ideas are stages of unbelief.
It says, "As He is, so are we in this world." How can we be as He is in this world? Who is Christ in this world? He is the way, the truth and the life through us, or as us. We are the sons that evidence the Father, we are the tabernacle of true witness, and we are the word of God in the world! The Bible, called the scriptures, is a testimony. The Christ is the Word of God! Peter received this revelation from God! Jesus said that the Father in heaven had revealed to Peter that the Christ is the Son of the living God. Therefore it is the truth! This means that Christ and the Son are the same. Other scripture passages also say that God and the Son are the same. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (Jn. 1:1) So the Word, the Christ, and God the Father are the same! They were one body in the man Jesus - the Godhead in one body! God, the Father, the Son, the Christ and the Word are one. They are one - they are one and the same!
In order to better grasp the meaning of this, let's look at it in the following way. The Holy Spirit is bringing us the knowledge of the oneness of God, for there is no permanent being other than God. Everything in creation - the animals, the earth, sky, etc. - is temporal. Everything that is made, everything we can see, is made of the unseen. (Heb. 11) The basis and true activity of everything that is seen, has its source in the unseen realm. Paul said, "We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." (2 Cor. 4:18) When this temporal body of ours is torn down, we already have a building of God, eternal in the heavens. (2 Cor. 5:1) Before we can understand this, we have to be awakened and arise from the dead; then Christ will shine on us. (Eph. 5:14) Adam experienced this in reverse - he was awake and then put to sleep. When we are awakened from this sleep (death), our eyes and minds are opened to see spiritual realities. It is wonderful to understand this!
Jesus made some severe indictments against the Jews. He said they did not know God; they had not heard His voice nor seen His form; they did not know the One He sent; they did not believe Moses; they received honor from men and did not have the Word of God dwelling in them! (John 5:37-47) These are not new indictments against them. The prophet Hosea said there was no mercy, truth nor knowledge of God in the land. (Hosea 4:1,6, etc.) He said that because the people were fighting; they didn't know God! They didn't even know His Christ when He came! Since Christ was the exact image of the Father God, they obviously were worshiping a different god. They didn't recognize God in Christ because He did not line up with their own idea of God. So they were actually slaves of their delusion!
Satan is actually ignorant; he lacks knowledge. In his darkness he is separated from God and has no conscious presence of God. Therefore he lacks mercy, righteousness, and a correct idea of God. Don't our wrong thoughts also lack mercy, grace, God's righteousness, and a correct idea of God? Where do they come from? From where do demons get their wrong thoughts and delusions? I think all of them come from the same source, because they always produce death and bondage. They dwell in ignorance, lack of knowledge and mercy - and that is separation from God.
Jesus said, "All that came before Me are thieves and robbers." What did they rob us of? They robbed us of our true identity, the truth of who we are spiritually, the fact that we are eternal beings, that God is our being, that God is our life and that He has brought us into being! They robbed us of a true knowledge of God - who God is and who Christ is. It is our consciousness of earthy things that keeps us separated from God, and it will continue to do so as long as we live in it. That is why we need a new consciousness - one of heavenly things.
In Genesis 1 we read that God made man in His own image or likeness. How can man be made in the likeness of God? What is God like? Can there be a physical likeness of God or must this likeness be spiritual? Since God is spirit and incorruptible, and He made man in His own likeness, He must have made man incorruptible from an incorruptible seed, and made him a spiritual being - one who could correctly portray God because He was in the image of God. People don't want to believe that, because they believe man is a human fleshly being. Therefore man's image of God is physical - they think God is a Being who sits on a white throne, and His Son Jesus has the form of a man. This could not be farther from the truth!
In Gen. 2 a man was formed out of creation; he was earthy, being formed from the dust of the earth and water. He was totally dependent on the earth for everything - for his physical well-being, his realization and sense of being. This made him vulnerable to believe a word that did not come from God. In the garden the crafty serpent came to Adam and Eve and confronted them with a lie - a new belief or persuasion. The serpent said that if they would eat of this tree, this knowledge of good and evil, they would not die; in fact they would become like God, knowing good and evil. We know that God is the only truth there is; He is the source or beginning of all being or life. There is no other true being but God, and His expression comes in His Word. Nothing from any other source is the truth - it's a lie.
Why would Adam listen to a voice other than God's voice - especially a voice that said he could be like God? If he had realized that God was his Father, that he was a son of God, one with God, and an infinite eternal being, would he have listened to the lie? Obviously he wouldn't have. He couldn't have known who he was! He didn't know he was a son of God - that God was his being, that he lived and moved and had his being in Him. Had he realized who he was, he would never have listened to a voice that said in effect, "Hey, do you want to be like God? If you are going to be like God you are never going to die."
Since then the Adamic man functions in this ignorance: he thinks he can be like God if he knows what is good and evil, if he chooses the good and not evil, and if he can destroy the bad people - his enemies. The self-preservation of human nature seeks immortality by keeping healthy, eating healthy food, excercising and availing itself of medical and scientific knowledge. While keeping fit and healthy benefits the physical body, it has no merit towards immortality! Its efforts to achieve immortality are useless, for it is functioning in a lie!
In John 8 Jesus said to the Jews, "You are of your father the devil." They had been fathered by wrong thoughts and opinions of God, so they were attacking Jesus. Jesus told them that they were doing the works of their father; they could not hear His word, for they did not know Him. "You want to do the desires of your father...He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him...for he is a liar, and the father of lies." In other words, he is not a good guy. There is no truth in him; he is the father of all lies! HE WAS NOT THE RESULT OF A LIE - HE IS THE FATHER OF LIES! Lies have no foundation, no truth. There is only one true Father! That is why Jesus said, "Don't call any man on earth your father." Since the Jews were being fathered by the father of lies, it meant they were operating in a delusion.
Let's go back to the Genesis account of Adam's disobedience. I believe the serpent's voice came to Adam inwardly. I don't believe there was a form of the devil there; I think a suggestion came through their body that was formed of the dust of this creation, their body of flesh. The fruit looked good to Adam and Eve because they were guided by their sense knowledge. Their ignorance of who they already were, made them vulnerable to the lie. They readily received the delusion that knowing good and evil would make them wise like God. This idea was fostered by a lie! Ever since that time, the Adamic man's consciousness has been fathered by the idea of good and evil. He thinks God is good and evil, and does both good and evil things. We get this idea from the Old Testament even though it says that He only does good things. That is why we have to learn to know God through Christ who is the exact representation of the invisible God!
Jesus Christ is the truth. Sin is the result of having believed a lie. After Adam and Eve believed a lie they didn't feel comfortable; they felt naked because they had received a consciousness of having done something wrong. They tried to cover themselves with the work of their own hands and tried to hide from God. Obviously God knew where Adam was, so God went to him and said, "Adam, where are you?" By that God was really asking, "Who are you? Who are you in your consciousness? Are you separated from Me? Have you got wrong ideas of yourself?" Adam answered, "I'm naked." God said, "Who told you that you are naked?" This information had not come from God; God had not told him that! Nakedness is the lack of righteousness. Adam began to be conscious of the physical body and of being one with creation; he thought that God was a God of good and evil, and that God was going to punish them.
Paul said, "Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey." (Rom. 6:16) When Adam yielded himself to this delusion, this lie, he became a slave of the lie; he was in bondage to the lie. His refuge was lies, his life was lies, and he was estranged from God. Ever since that time, humanity has been fathered by a lie - not only about God, but about Christ and self. This is hereditary. Everyone has a wrong consciousness of God, self and creation, because he is living in a delusion of who he is. Man thinks he is a temporal being; he thinks he is born a separate entity and is going to die. This kind of thinking crucified Jesus, the truth, when He came to do away with the lie. This understanding does not belong to a son of God.
Peter's revelation of, "Thou art the Christ the Son of the living God," means that every man who has the anointing (the Christ) is a son of God. There is only one God and only one Son. We see God as an individual being, and the Son as an individual being, but they are ONE. HE IS THE I AM! His offspring become part of the I AM, the infinity, the nature of God. Because God is omnipresent, He is present in everything! This is the consciousness and realization we are to receive.
Because of our delusion we have seen creation (the effect of God's work), in the wrong sense. Jesus Christ came out of heaven to take us into the consciousness of heavenly or spiritual realization. This is the gospel. Adamic thinking would have us believe that God killed His Son. It is only interested in personal advantage and in residing in beautiful mansions up in the sky. This is a perversion of the gospel.
Man's thinking does not change who God is. God is true! By true subjection to the Holy Spirit, we will be rewarded with a true consciousness of who we are and who God is. Repenting of our sins is not enough; we must also repent of who we are in the Adamic man and of who we thought God is. The Adamic man was crucified on the cross as a corporate man - not a physical man. We have been crucified with Christ because our whole consciousness and realization of God was in delusion and ignorance. This delusion and ignorance was put to death through the work of Jesus Christ.
Adam is called a figure of Him who was to come. The serpent in Genesis 3 is also a type or figure. Jesus called some of the people in Israel "a generation (brood) of vipers." (Matt. 23:33) These are the offspring of the serpent; out of their being comes the sting of death. Their words are always in the death realm. There are many serpents about us even today - people whose words produce a venom of death instead of release. These keep us from receiving the life of God - endlessness, eternity and immortality. They attempt to keep us from knowing who we really are, and use the same ploy used by the serpent in the garden.
That which is begotten of God cannot sin. When we are born again we have been born of incorruptible seed! (1 Peter 1:23) The incorruptible seed of which we have been born is NOT corruptible! That which has been born of the Spirit is incorruptible! Before Adam was submerged in delusion and ignorance, God looked at His creation and said, "It is very good." (Gen. 1) This was said after the image of a man had been made. The creation that was made of incorruptible seed has never entertained corruption! It is made of an incorruptible word!
The problem lies in the delusion and ignorance that dwell in us; they have brought humanity into a bondage of death. Death assumes a beginning and an ending, and brings everything into the time realm; this includes ourselves. It keeps us from entering into the endlessness and immortality that God has for us in Jesus Christ and in His Word. Christ came to take us out of the bondage of death. He is changing our thinking; we are beginning to believe that we are a new creation. We are a spiritual image of God - the man of Gen. 1. Within this human body we carry a testimony of sonship, immortality, and infinity - a testimony of God, the only Being there is. Everything that opposes this idea of God is anti God and anti Christ; it comes out of delusion and ignorance.
That which is born or begotten of God is incorruptible. Being born of God of an incorruptible seed gives us an inheritance, for we are joint heirs with Christ. Through God's seed we have inherited a likeness of God the Father; this is not a physical likeness - it is a spiritual one. We have been made one with Him! Therefore our heredity and inheritance is truly infinite and immortal. But that which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of an incorruptible seed is incapable of sinning, and that which is born of flesh is incapable of not sinning. Therefore we have to know and express our true identity.
Many people constantly confess that they are sinners. They seem to take a morbid delight in confessing that they are sinners saved by grace; they seem to think this is true humility. They have a complete disregard for anyone who confesses what God has said, what the Spirit has said, what God has made us, and what our true being is. They consider those people to be full of pride, exalting themselves to a position they can only have after they get to heaven; they accuse them of lacking proper humility. If they were humble they would constantly confess that they are only sinners saved by grace, that they will go to heaven sometime, and that God isn't finished with them yet, etc. They do not recognize that we are complete in Christ. "In Him you have been made complete." (Col. 1:28;2:10)
Adam's fall was not the direct result of eating from the forbidden tree, but eating from the tree was the evidence that he had received the lie. He ate in ignorance of his true nature; he didn't need the knowledge of good and evil. Had he known his true nature, he wouldn't have eaten of that tree! I don't think Adam knew that God was his Father, and that he already was a son of God. He lacked the consciousness of his heavenly origin and oneness with God, so he expressed his origin from the earth. When Adam and Eve accepted the seed of a word that was not from God to be on par with God's word, they accepted a lie. Now they could not tell the difference between the truth and the lie. Satan's word looked more attractive than God's word to them.
There is no consciousness without being. If we are not something, we can't have a consciousness of being. Whether we like the word "consciousness" or not, we still need it. We may call it awareness, realization, truth, etc., but we are not a being unless we have a consciousness of being. Our consciousness of being really determines our relationship with God, the presence of God, and how meaningful Christ really is to us.
Jesus said that we are to seek FIRST the kingdom of God. It does not say that we are to seek first the coming of Jesus, the rapture, going to heaven, or even getting rid of our sins. We are to seek first the kingdom of God! "`Come now, and let us reason together,' says the Lord, `though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool.'" (Is. 1:18) If we let God reason with us, it will become evident that God is not imputing any sins to us. If He is not imputing them to us, then we really don't have any. He has a reason for this, but we can't get into that right now. Suffice it to say, that we are slaves of the one we obey; we are in the hand of God.
We recognize that Adam was deluded and ignorant. He didn't know who he was, so he gave himself to the lie; he yielded himself as a servant to obey the lie. The penalty of sin is death, so in Adam all die; yet very few people really believe they are dead in Adam! At the time Jesus went to the cross everybody except Jesus was dead in Adam. 2 Cor. 5:14 says, "...having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died." That means all were dead! Our natural, physical consciousness given us when we were born, is in the death realm. It's terminal; it is very evident that everyone has to die. The source of our natural consciousness is in the mortal, finite realm; it is not in God. It can only be terminated by death to that thinking. We have to be regenerated and receive a revelation of the Christ, the Son of God. This brings us to the beginning of the gospel.
In order to enter into a relationship with God we have to enter the kingdom of God, for it is God's rule. His rule acquits us of all guilt, all sin, and all responsibility for sin. It is not a rule of good and evil; He does not impute sin. He takes over our whole sense of being so it is in harmony with our actual life in Christ. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, He identified Himself by saying, "I AM WHO I AM." Only God can identify Himself as the "I AM"! Whenever we think of ourselves as individuals who are separated from the life of Christ, we should realize that Jesus Christ was crucified in order to put that old identity to death! That identification was put to death by His Spirit, His realization, His understanding of God, His relationship, His presence, His immortality! It's the Christ, the spiritual Word, the Anointing that destroys the lie! His relationship with God destroys the old man.
It's the spiritual realization of what Christ has done for us that brings us a release of our old identity! It is not just a mental acknowledgment of the fact that Jesus died on the cross many years ago; this does not bring us a release. If it did, there wouldn't be any sin around where the cross of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed. Our idea of self is a mistaken sense of being; it's a delusion to think of self as a separate being or entity (an "I am"), because only God can identify Himself as the I AM.
People often ask, "Who are you?" They may refer to ethnic origin or religous affiliation. From the natural standpoint we may express our identity as an ethnic being (German, English, etc.,) or according to church affiliation (Catholic, Lutheran, etc.,). From the spiritual standpoint this is not our true identity. Our identity is in Jesus Christ! He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." When He comes to us as our life, we have a true identity! Christ as our life is our true identity! Learning this is walking and living in life!
We need to lay down our desire for self-identification and be willing to have everything in our lives exchanged for the truth. All our natural thinking, our own ideas of God, everything we thought we were has to be laid down. This does not come by works, study, nor reasonings; it can only happen through repentance. It is not a repentance from sin but from who we consciously thought we were as an I or a ME. Everything comes by the grace of God, and He rules by His grace. We are invited to come to the throne of grace. (Heb. 4:16) A throne is a rule. In God's rule of grace everything is from God and everything goes back to God; everything is sustained by God; God is the only TRUE BEING that IS. Our sense of being has to be sustained by God; it is being in Him and one with Him. When His grace rules us we are undone in self and in our own ability - our ability to reason, to be anything, or even to understand or figure out who God is. We are as little children, helpless and dependent. That is what the kingdom of God is all about.
Jesus Christ is the truth! Since we were all in darkness, death and delusion, a correction of everything we thought we were, we thought was right, or thought God was, has to come through Jesus who is the truth! He said, "For this reason I came into the world to bear witness to the truth." And He bears witness to the Holy Spirit whom we receive and He becomes our Lord!
May God bless you as you meditate on the truth!