Early this morning I awakened suddenly from a very vivid dream that I immediately knew was of spiritual significance.
I was with my husband in a house busy doing something unimportant (I don’t remember what) when all at once I remembered that we had a baby that we hadn’t seen or heard for a very long time.
I was afraid to go look in the crib because I knew I was going to find our dead baby. Of course I had to do it; but when we looked, there was no baby there. Now I knew I had to report it to the police, who would ask all sorts of questions. How could I tell them that I had just forgotten the baby?
That’s when I awakened from the dream. The first thing I thought about was how many times I had felt judgment coming from myself and others upon hearing that a mother had left her baby in the car and it had either been kidnapped or had died from the heat. We all knew that we could never do that! I also remembered how critical I am about people who never seem to think or talk about anything but their ailments.
I remembered the scripture, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged” (Matthew 7:1-2). I knew in my heart that there is absolutely no occasion where we are justified in our judgment of others; for it is only by the grace of God that we aren’t guilty of the same action.
But I also knew that we are not to live in fear or guilt on any level. Jesus took our humanity into His own body and died with it. Because He died for all, then we are all dead (2Corinthians 5:14). I don’t have to fear judgment because I have been guilty of judging. I can know that God’s grace is always available and can know with confidence that I won’t forget my baby, nor will I experience illness, when I totally depend upon God and not my own self-righteousness to protect me.
More importantly, I can come to the realization that I am not the woman in the dream, that in my true identity I am spiritual being, born not of woman but of God, and therefore can never sin (1John 3:0). It is only in my false mind-formed identity living in a mind-formed world that is not created by God that any of these painful things can occur. I must ascend into the realm Jesus prepared for me, the kingdom of heaven that is within me; and I don’t have to wait for the death of this physical body (which is not my body) to do that.
I must recognize that we are all living in a dream that has no reality in God, no more reality that the dream I had this morning. God Himself in the form of Jesus also descended into this dream world in order to experience this dream (that’s the only way He could know anything about it) and, more importantly, provide a way out of it by showing the unreality of it and taking it to the death.
He experienced the same sense of separation that we experience, but He was able to rise above that sense and know that, in truth, He was one with the Father within, that He was not a Jew born of a woman but was in God from the beginning (before Abraham was, I am), and that death could not hold him because Spirit cannot die. Only his humanity could die, and that is what he sacrificed (God did not require His blood as a sacrifice to appease His wrath) so that our humanity could also die and we could know that we are also spiritual being, one with the Father just as He is. The Hebrew man Jesus was not raised from the dead. No, He was raised as life-giving Spirit that fills every man with Himself. That’s why He had to go away—so the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, might come and live in us and as us, guiding us into all truth.
(John 16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. . . . 13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth:)
But Jesus was resurrected into the spirit realm and into His spiritual body long before He was resurrected from the grave. He was operating in that realm and body when He walked on water, when He walked through the crowds unobserved (Luke 4:30) and when He fed the five thousand. He even gave Peter, James and John a glimpse into that realm and a look at that body (that is invisible to the human eye) on the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter also experienced the spiritual realm (where the laws of matter do not apply) and his resurrection body when he walked out of prison (Acts 12:5-10) and when he walked on water, as well as when his shadow healed people. The apostle John lived in that realm and wrote about it extensively when he was banished to the Isle of Patmos. And of course Paul lived there on a pretty consistent basis.
And so can we—right now. It is imperative that we experience our resurrection into the spiritual realm and the spiritual body if we are going to take the gospel to the world and do the works that Jesus did and said we would do. We have to take Paul’s advice to look not at the things that are seen and temporal but at the things that are unseen and eternal (2Corinthians 4:18). The invisible body and world (the “above”) has to become our reality, the place of our “affections” (Colossians 3:2).
When Paul speaks of this “earthly house” being “dissolved” and our having “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2Corinthians 5:1), we have thought he was referring to the death of our physical body and its resurrection into a spiritual body. Indeed he is, but not as we have believed. Since the physical (mortal) body is mind-formed and is not a creation of God, it has to be “dissolved” in our minds, ceasing to be our reality, so that we can “be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven” (v 2), the body that can never die. The mortal body came into manifestation when Adam said “I’m afraid” because he felt “naked” before God because of his sense of separation. But we who have lost that sense of separation no longer feel naked and afraid (v 3) because our “mortality” has been “swallowed up of life” (v 4)—the life of God that is now living as us:
Galatians 2:20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
Paul goes on to say that “whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord,” that we are “willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (vv 6, 8) interspersed with the statement that “we walk by faith, not by sight” (v 7). We have interpreted this to mean that after our physical body dies, we will then be “present with the Lord.” That cannot be, for, as Paul says and Jesus prayed in John 17, He is already in us and living as us and will never leave us. We mustn’t be “at home” in this mortal body; when we are, we don’t sense the Lord’s presence because we are living by “sight,” putting our attention on the mind-formed appearance world which God did not ordain.
We must, as Paul admonishes us, “put on immortality” (1Corintians 15:53). Please stop now and read Putting on Immortality. And we must do it now. Resurrection does not refer to a future time when this physical body is going to rise out of a grave. Everything that is “mortal” (mind-formed, not God ordained) died in Jesus on the cross (including the Hebrew man Jesus), never to be resurrected. Everything that God ordained (the Christ of Jesus and of you and me, the “body not made with hands) is eternal (can never die) and therefore has no need for resurrection, except in our mind that was also in Christ Jesus.
As I said earlier, Jesus was resurrected when he came to the realization that “I and my Father are one” and that in His true identity he was begotten of God, not Mary. This recognition occurred long before the crucifixion. He showed Himself to us after the crucifixion to demonstrate to us the unreality of death and also to show us that the resurrected body has “flesh and bones,” hands and feet, and can eat fish—that it is a body that can be seen and touched, not just spirit floating around in the ether (Luke 24: 36-40). But He also showed us that it was not the physical body of the Hebrew man Jesus that was resurrected, although it could appear as that body to the doubting Thomas who had to see the nail prints to believe. He appeared “in another form” (Mark 16:12) on the road to Emmaus.
The resurrection body is different from the mortal body, not because of its appearance, but rather because it is not subject to the physical laws of matter that we believe ourselves to be subject to.
It is now time we get our attention off this physical appearance world and cease believing in a future resurrection of this mortal body. Let us, as Jesus and many coming after Him did, experience resurrection into the spiritual realm and spiritual body NOW:
John 11:25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: 26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
If you believe this, you will
Ephesians 5:14 . . . Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.