Christian love always embraces the cross that ceases you.
Love that allows the flesh to stay, “just as I am,” is antichrist and satanic. Antichrist means “against Christ.” The meaning of “satanic” is explained below. “The flesh” means whatever default is living in us from birth.
Apostasy is losing this relationship to love defined as Jesus no longer breathing on the cross.
The sign of apostasy in the church is loving people without leading them to their co-crucifixion with Jesus. In Galatians 2:20, Paul says he is co-crucified with Christ and in 1 Corinthians 2:2 Paul says he only wants to see that reality operating within a church.
A sign that a body of believers is apostating is when they lack reference to the cross – not the event, but the daily reality that keeps your flesh ceased, because Jesus did it already.
Discipleship always begins with this reality of the cross.
Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26
A discipleship program that does not begin with this defining statement, or worse, makes no reference to it, is antichrist, and consequently satanic.
Shocking? Do you not recall how Jesus defined it after calling Peter “Satan?” In Matthew 16:21-23, Peter tried to hinder Jesus from going to the cross.
“Get behind me, Satan! For you have the things of mankind on your mind.”
The phrase “the things of mankind” exceeds the scope of this post. But I hope you can see that it is fundamentally allowing humanity to remain in its default state inspired by Satan and with no savior. The default human state began by being tricked into disobeying God through reaching out to attract what is apparently good while simultaneously displacing what is apparently bad. The nature of the “tree of knowing both good and evil relative to a finite individual” is also beyond the scope of this post, but has been addressed in my other posts and books. “Satanic” means to trick or deceive simple minds into complexities, especially generative complexities like sexuality. “What is Satanic” uses this domain of attracting the good and pushing away the bad as a logic base.
The Savior hung on another tree, the cross, to show the way out! The fleshly paradigm instigated at the forbidden tree in Genesis 3 was “mapped over” by Jesus hanging on the cross to transcend the default human nature by ceasing it, putting it out of sight, and then to allow God to be life out from this place of cessation. The cross takes what is default in humanity and makes it all cease in Jesus’s body both good and bad. As Jesus gets closer to his last breath on the cross, default human flesh is becoming nullified and the entrapment of Genesis 3:1-7 overturned.
Those who are Jesus’s have crucified the flesh. Galatians 5:24
Have a young love-pair memorize that next time they come for Christian counseling on relationships, love, and marriage. How is shacking up having crucified the flesh?
Love and marriage without the cross that crucifies the flesh is antichrist. At the end of Ephesians 5, Paul frames love and marriage in the context of Jesus Christ as The Second Adam and the Church as a second Eve. He does this by quoting from Genesis 2 of how Eve was made from the side of Adam – literally from a hole made in his side taking stuff from within him. Eve was the bride from his side. Paul says the new Eve is the bride from Jesus’s side. You know what I am referring to from John 19:34-35; the spear hole and the water and blood that came from Jesus’s side at the place of ceased breath in the flesh fulfills the picture of Adam put deep down under for his operation to gain a bride like him.
…the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:31-32
Genesis 2:24 refers to Christ and the church. Eve is composed of this very heart that made the flesh cease within it. You can see this foreshadow of the cross in Genesis 2. Adam is a lone seed, like Jesus in John 12:24. And just like any lone seed, in order for there to be increase and multiplication, a seed needs to go into an opening in the earth and be buried. And out of an opening will arise life from that place of death just like Eve is formed from Adam going down into a ceased state. Adam is even made of adam-ah, the dirt, and Eve is called “mother of all living” in Genesis 3:20 to show she is the risen reality of Adam’s pictured death in the earth.
Eve’s “of-ness” is from Adam in this ceased state of fleshly living. Likewise, the church’s composition is supposed to be from Jesus’s defining act of love on the cross where the flesh was made ceased. Anything other than that is satanic, for it has the things of humanity in mind, keeping active “just as it is” and calling that love. In other words, making a claim to be the church that lacks the “of-ness” of Christ ceased in the flesh “he was made with” is fake, false, deceptive, antichrist, and consequently satanic.
Satan masquerades as an angel of light according to 2 Corinthians 11. Peter perfectly depicted how it is done by claiming closeness with Jesus. But Greater Love came into definition by Jesus laying down His life to cease the flesh with breath in it (John 15:13). It God’s weakness in the flesh that subverts human strength in 1 Corinthians 1.
Look at the church around you. How are they doing on the definition of love himself as seen on the cross? Is their emphasis loving everyone just as they are so that they flourish in that default flesh without ceasing daily by the cross’s end to the flesh? Do churches hide the cross from seekers? Either way, it amounts to the same. A crossless church projects the same message as loving a seeker without leading them to their end of the flesh where Christ ended it.
Deceptions work because people do not realize they are being deceived. When are the sheep going to wake up to the wolves in sheep’s clothing who are intent on redefining love without embracing the cross? This is the era when it will happen: global telecommunications and mass-marketing. Never before has there been an opportunity for thieves and the wolf! Would a thief really pass on such an opportunity? Can a wolf really restrain itself from eating a helpless little lamb?
I am The Door…My sheep hear my voice (John 10).
Embrace The Door. Embrace the cross’s openings in Jesus’s flesh. Jesus ceased the flesh and out of that place of cessation is Life, Him as The Life! “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe” (John 20:27). Do not think that there is eternal life apart from Jesus Who is this Reality. Christian love always embraces the cross that ceases you, because of the One Who overturned “just as we are.” By exploring these openings Jesus made in His flesh on the cross – these “out from death” life portals that connect Old Testament stories to Himself like we saw in Genesis – we discover Jesus as the key for freedom, justice, and love. The bride says that love is the cross that includes you ceased where Jesus ceased, so that “born that way” can be put out of sight and buried away to form a bride “reborn of The Way.”
Seeing Jesus as The Life of The Bible Stories 