Facet 3: The False Solution - Transcript
Welcome back. We’ve been talking about the story of God and the story of us; how we were made from the dust and yet we are so much more than dust. We are the divine children of the Trinity, who is a joyful and wondrous Family who conceived each one of us in love.
But we’ve learned how mankind has fallen from that reality. We have fallen into a lie about ourselves and about our Creator, and because of that, our minds became corrupted. And that influenced our emotions and behavior, which has then influenced the entire world.
Because of this original lie, this false identity, we basically embraced the mindset of “survival of the fittest,” which is not how we were made to live. We were made for love, but we kind of accepted a life of pure survival because we came to think of ourselves as orphans out on our own.
So that meant a lot of things. It meant that man started to use his personal strengths to have dominance over one another. And as a result, the earliest beginnings of civilization involved things like slavery and prostitution.
Also, because we lost sight of the love of our Creator, the Divine Family, we also began to create new gods of our own making. We worshipped what we could see—the sun, the moon, and the stars—instead of living out of the heart and out of the spirit. And so even religion itself was birthed because of this original lie.
Now—all of this stemmed from that ancient story of man and woman eating from “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” I called it the Tree of Right and Wrong in the last Facet, and I’ll explain that more in a moment.
For now, you need to know that that story is not about some bad apple with evil powers inside of it. This story is uncovering something much deeper in the human heart.
That Tree of Knowledge represents our desire to live independently from God according to our own strength and ability and morality. And that type of lifestyle produces what the Scriptures call the “self-life.”
So in the book of Galatians, in the New Testament, it says that, “The cravings of the self-life are obvious. (It then lists some of those things… It says…) Sexual immorality, lustful thoughts, pornography, chasing after things instead of God, manipulating others, hatred of those who get in your way, senseless arguments, resentment when others are favored, temper tantrums, angry quarrels, only thinking of yourself, being in love with your own opinions, being envious of the blessings of others, murder, uncontrolled addictions, wild parties, and all other similar behavior…”
That is some of the fruit that comes out of this choice of doing things on our own. It’s not that we necessarily intended for that, it’s just that is what happens when you separate yourself from the source of joy and love and peace, which is God.
But the good news, as we started to see in the last Facet, is that even though we walked down this destructive path away from that original blessing of our true identity, the Divine Family has continued to pursue us. They did not reject us even though some people interpret the Bible that way. They miss the fact that from the beginning, from the moment of our rebellion, God had a plan to rescue us from this empty life we were choosing.
So I want to talk more about that plan… This plan that God had was originally kept hidden from our eyes. So, it was kind of like a secret mission that God embarked upon in order to save humanity. And it was secret for a few reasons.
First of all, our hearts were now in open rebellion against love and truth. We had embraced a lie about ourselves and God, and that became our reality. And so anything that spoke against our reality, we would fight and reject.
And so God needed to bring the truth to us through a backdoor. Because at the front door of our lives, we were ready to resist anything that went against our choice. And that’s the power of having free-will.
But God went on a secret mission of healing, because while He honors free-will, at the same time He won’t stand by and let us utterly destroy ourselves.
Ok, imagine for a moment there’s a doctor who’s trying to save the life of a mentally ill patient who has this horrible disease that’s making both their body and mind deteriorate. Let’s say that one of the symptoms of this disease is intense paranoia. That patient might see the doctor coming with a scalpel in his hands and believe, in his reality, that that doctor is evil and is even out to kill him… Their paranoia would make them dream up all kinds of false ideas as to why the doctor is holding that sharp scalpel.
Well, if that doctor is good and wants to save this person, they’re not going to reason with them. If they want to save their life, and the family’s in agreement, they’re going to put them under some kind of anesthesia and save them from the inside out.
That, in a way, is what God began to do with the human race. And this involved a plan that would take thousands of years to fulfill. And that might seem like a lot to you, but it’s really not in the grand scheme of things. It’s actually very quick.
If you ever get the opportunity to talk to a person who’s over 100 years old, they will often tell you that their life went by incredibly fast. Like it was just a vapor… I have a theory that if you were to talk to someone who was 200 years old, they would tell you the same thing. Even someone 500 years old; they would say it went by very fast.
It feels long when you count the minutes, but the average human life span is actually very quick. And a lot of people want a god who will wave a magic wand and make everything ok instantaneously. But when you’re dealing with beings created in His image, beings with eternal depth and free-will within our souls…that is more than a one-day surgery.
So, God began his secret mission of healing and this mission began to kick into gear thousands of years ago just as human civilization began to advance ever so slightly. It began with one man who was a pagan worshipper from the Middle East in the cradle of civilization.
Here’s what went down… God entered our false reality…our dreamworld. Through that backdoor, He slipped into our darkness and began to re-engage in relationship with us.
And He came to a man named Abram, who would later change his name to Abraham. And God told this man to follow Him, to enter into relationship with Him. And He began to teach Abraham to trust Him, which was, in a way, the beginning of calling humanity away from that Tree of Right and Wrong back to the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, the good tree, that represents the life we were made for. It’s a life of relationship and rest; not one of heavy rules and punishment and fear.
So anyway, God comes to Abraham and says, “I’m going to make a great nation out of you and in you all the other nations of the world are going to be blessed.” He basically says, my children who have scattered to Africa, those who went deeper into Asia, those who are moving across the continents in the north. I’m going to reach everyone through you.
In other words, Abraham, my Original Blessing is coming back to every people group through you and one of the nations that will come out of your loins.
And then God does the impossible. He raises up a nation through Abraham which becomes the longest lasting, most enduring, and yet the most persecuted nation in the history of the world. The Hebrews.
And a few centuries after Abraham, God continues this secret surgery-mission and comes to one of Abraham’s descendants who is called to be a prophet. His name was Moses.
Moses, of course, leads Abraham’s family, which is now massive, out of slavery in Egypt, which is where they had landed for a long time. And that’s the story of the Exodos, where God takes that nation out of Egypt and establishes them in their own territory.
Now obviously I’m skipping over a lot of detail, but that’s because I’m trying to get to the next major part of this secret plan God was unfolding within humanity.
You see, soon after Abraham’s tribal family was released from slavery, the people of Israel, as the nation was called, they were given a Law. The Law of Moses, it would be known as.
Now here’s the deal with this Law. This was a social and religious law with hundreds of commandments behind it on how to live the right way. It dealt with everything from the people’s diet, to how they treated their neighbors, to how they treated the immigrant, to how they handled finances and sacrifices.
Now at the time, the people of Israel believed that this law would bring them back to that place of Original Blessing: the way of the Tree of Life. It even seemed to communicate that in the Law. It said that if they would obey every single one of these commandments of right and wrong, they would be blessed.
It said they would be fruitful and have a joyful life. But if they didn’t follow the Law, they would find themselves under a curse. And more destruction would be the result.
So, it seemed like this was somewhat giving them a ticket back to Eden…back to where we came from…
But remember how we keep saying there was a secret mission going on… God was doing surgery in the midst of our insanity. It turns out there was more to the purpose of this Law than meets the eye.
This Law was really like a scalpel; like a sharp, two-edged scalpel that cut and revealed the disease and the lies that had been built up within us.
You see, the Law of Moses in the Old Testament was specifically designed to show us that the mindset of independence and self-effort does not work. In fact, it only leads to destruction—to a curse. Because no matter how hard we tried to keep the rules and to be “perfect,” we still fell short over and over again. Israel, the nation of Israel, demonstrated this throughout their entire history and much of the Old Testament is one giant picture of this problem. And you have to understand something here—this wasn’t just the problem of the Jews. This special nation was called to be an illuminating light for the whole world. The prophets in the Scriptures talk about that. Israel was called to teach all of us something very important.
So their life became a message for humanity, who was learning the same lesson in different ways. Every other nation and tribe out there had their own religious rules. And even if they didn’t, at the very least, everyone had a law of conscience; of right and wrong.
So here’s what’s going on, I hope you’re tracking with me… Over thousands of years, the Law of Moses with its rules and regulations, was ripping open and exposing the deeper problem in humanity—which was our embrace of that Tree of Right and Wrong… The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Law that was given to Israel in the Old Testament was like a different version of that Tree of Knowledge stretched out over hundreds of years to show each us that we can’t attain Godlikeness on our own. We can’t attain that original blessing and our true identity through our own willpower and independence.
A simpler to say all of this, is that we were not made for external rules and laws. We were made to live from the inside out, from a pure heart. And we were made for trust…for relationship.
So the book of Galatians, which I mentioned earlier, says that the Law was given to show people their sins. The people’s failure to keep the Law revealed this problem, that the way of self-effort and law-keeping and independence does not work.
And with that, it also revealed where sin came from. As we said in the last Facet, all of our destructive ways truly come from that original lie that says we are not like God in the first place; and so we need to do something to become like him; and we need to do this in our own strength, by exterior things, instead of that Godlikeness coming from the inside out—from our true identity—and from God himself with us and within us.
This was our problem—and it needed a solution. We were made for that blessing of life and identity. But we lost that, so we were given the Law to supposedly get back to that blessing.
But it turned out the Law was a false solution. It didn’t work. And all along, that was part of God’s plan. God gave the Law to Israel to expose our insanity. In the New Testament it actually says in the book of Romans that the law increased sin. It actually increased our sense of separation from God.
Now that doesn’t seem to be fair or even make sense, but remember God had a secret mission of healing going on. To use a different medical analogy, the Law was giving us something like an x-ray of the heart, showing us the deeper problem.
Listen carefully, a hidden disease needs to be exposed before it gets removed. So, pre-op and x-rays need to happen before a person is willing to embrace surgery. That’s essentially what happened with Abraham and his family, the people of Israel…and that was a message for all of us. We all need healing. And we all need to realize we can’t do it on our own. We need help.
We need a Savior.
And that takes us to the real beauty of this whole Facet called The False Solution… There was something else hidden in the Law all along.
All through the history of Israel, and throughout the whole Old Testament, you will find there was a promise of something greater to come.
There was a promise that one day, a new law, an inner law of love and freedom would be re-awakened in humanity… Now again, we might have wanted that to happen more quickly—why did it have to take thousands of years—but, again, God was working with humanity. And humanity wasn’t ready for the full surgery yet. Our paranoia and our insanity would have rejected it.
So our consciousness as a species had to evolve. And in the meantime, God was showing us the stupidity of a life of self-effort and law-keeping. He had to expose it. And he has to do that to the whole world… And oftentimes he has to do that for us as individuals; where we fail over and over again until we swallow our pride and realize we need help outside of ourselves.
So the Law exposed this problem, but along the way it also gave tremendous hope. Over and over again, there are prophecies and hidden pictures in the stories and even within the rules of the Old Testament that all pointed to a Messiah—a Savior.
And it also spoke of how God Himself would come to earth to give us the true solution—the true healing we need to find freedom and to find that original place of our identity as the beloved children of God.
So, the Law and the prophets who upheld the Law, they spoke of One who would be born in the town of Bethlehem; a man who would suffer for his people; a king who would reign in true justice. A shepherd who would lay down his life for the sheep.
All of these prophecies in the Old Testament were about Jesus, and so you can think of the Old Testament as having two layers to it. On the top layer you have what was written at face-value. You have the letter of the law. But underneath that is a deeper message, a hidden message for those with eyes that are willing to see. And that deeper message pointed to the true solution.
Whenever you read the Old Testament now, you want to uncover that deeper layer—that hidden message that points us to the person of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem and who fulfilled every one of the prophecies.
This happened through His life, His death, and His resurrection—and that provided the True Solution and the true way back to the life we were originally designed for. That is how the secret mission of God would really come to a head. And so that is where we’re headed next…
Welcome back. We’ve been talking about the story of God and the story of us; how we were made from the dust and yet we are so much more than dust. We are the divine children of the Trinity, who is a joyful and wondrous Family who conceived each one of us in love.
But we’ve learned how mankind has fallen from that reality. We have fallen into a lie about ourselves and about our Creator, and because of that, our minds became corrupted. And that influenced our emotions and behavior, which has then influenced the entire world.
Because of this original lie, this false identity, we basically embraced the mindset of “survival of the fittest,” which is not how we were made to live. We were made for love, but we kind of accepted a life of pure survival because we came to think of ourselves as orphans out on our own.
So that meant a lot of things. It meant that man started to use his personal strengths to have dominance over one another. And as a result, the earliest beginnings of civilization involved things like slavery and prostitution.
Also, because we lost sight of the love of our Creator, the Divine Family, we also began to create new gods of our own making. We worshipped what we could see—the sun, the moon, and the stars—instead of living out of the heart and out of the spirit. And so even religion itself was birthed because of this original lie.
Now—all of this stemmed from that ancient story of man and woman eating from “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” I called it the Tree of Right and Wrong in the last Facet, and I’ll explain that more in a moment.
For now, you need to know that that story is not about some bad apple with evil powers inside of it. This story is uncovering something much deeper in the human heart.
That Tree of Knowledge represents our desire to live independently from God according to our own strength and ability and morality. And that type of lifestyle produces what the Scriptures call the “self-life.”
So in the book of Galatians, in the New Testament, it says that, “The cravings of the self-life are obvious. (It then lists some of those things… It says…) Sexual immorality, lustful thoughts, pornography, chasing after things instead of God, manipulating others, hatred of those who get in your way, senseless arguments, resentment when others are favored, temper tantrums, angry quarrels, only thinking of yourself, being in love with your own opinions, being envious of the blessings of others, murder, uncontrolled addictions, wild parties, and all other similar behavior…”
That is some of the fruit that comes out of this choice of doing things on our own. It’s not that we necessarily intended for that, it’s just that is what happens when you separate yourself from the source of joy and love and peace, which is God.
But the good news, as we started to see in the last Facet, is that even though we walked down this destructive path away from that original blessing of our true identity, the Divine Family has continued to pursue us. They did not reject us even though some people interpret the Bible that way. They miss the fact that from the beginning, from the moment of our rebellion, God had a plan to rescue us from this empty life we were choosing.
So I want to talk more about that plan… This plan that God had was originally kept hidden from our eyes. So, it was kind of like a secret mission that God embarked upon in order to save humanity. And it was secret for a few reasons.
First of all, our hearts were now in open rebellion against love and truth. We had embraced a lie about ourselves and God, and that became our reality. And so anything that spoke against our reality, we would fight and reject.
And so God needed to bring the truth to us through a backdoor. Because at the front door of our lives, we were ready to resist anything that went against our choice. And that’s the power of having free-will.
But God went on a secret mission of healing, because while He honors free-will, at the same time He won’t stand by and let us utterly destroy ourselves.
Ok, imagine for a moment there’s a doctor who’s trying to save the life of a mentally ill patient who has this horrible disease that’s making both their body and mind deteriorate. Let’s say that one of the symptoms of this disease is intense paranoia. That patient might see the doctor coming with a scalpel in his hands and believe, in his reality, that that doctor is evil and is even out to kill him… Their paranoia would make them dream up all kinds of false ideas as to why the doctor is holding that sharp scalpel.
Well, if that doctor is good and wants to save this person, they’re not going to reason with them. If they want to save their life, and the family’s in agreement, they’re going to put them under some kind of anesthesia and save them from the inside out.
That, in a way, is what God began to do with the human race. And this involved a plan that would take thousands of years to fulfill. And that might seem like a lot to you, but it’s really not in the grand scheme of things. It’s actually very quick.
If you ever get the opportunity to talk to a person who’s over 100 years old, they will often tell you that their life went by incredibly fast. Like it was just a vapor… I have a theory that if you were to talk to someone who was 200 years old, they would tell you the same thing. Even someone 500 years old; they would say it went by very fast.
It feels long when you count the minutes, but the average human life span is actually very quick. And a lot of people want a god who will wave a magic wand and make everything ok instantaneously. But when you’re dealing with beings created in His image, beings with eternal depth and free-will within our souls…that is more than a one-day surgery.
So, God began his secret mission of healing and this mission began to kick into gear thousands of years ago just as human civilization began to advance ever so slightly. It began with one man who was a pagan worshipper from the Middle East in the cradle of civilization.
Here’s what went down… God entered our false reality…our dreamworld. Through that backdoor, He slipped into our darkness and began to re-engage in relationship with us.
And He came to a man named Abram, who would later change his name to Abraham. And God told this man to follow Him, to enter into relationship with Him. And He began to teach Abraham to trust Him, which was, in a way, the beginning of calling humanity away from that Tree of Right and Wrong back to the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, the good tree, that represents the life we were made for. It’s a life of relationship and rest; not one of heavy rules and punishment and fear.
So anyway, God comes to Abraham and says, “I’m going to make a great nation out of you and in you all the other nations of the world are going to be blessed.” He basically says, my children who have scattered to Africa, those who went deeper into Asia, those who are moving across the continents in the north. I’m going to reach everyone through you.
In other words, Abraham, my Original Blessing is coming back to every people group through you and one of the nations that will come out of your loins.
And then God does the impossible. He raises up a nation through Abraham which becomes the longest lasting, most enduring, and yet the most persecuted nation in the history of the world. The Hebrews.
And a few centuries after Abraham, God continues this secret surgery-mission and comes to one of Abraham’s descendants who is called to be a prophet. His name was Moses.
Moses, of course, leads Abraham’s family, which is now massive, out of slavery in Egypt, which is where they had landed for a long time. And that’s the story of the Exodos, where God takes that nation out of Egypt and establishes them in their own territory.
Now obviously I’m skipping over a lot of detail, but that’s because I’m trying to get to the next major part of this secret plan God was unfolding within humanity.
You see, soon after Abraham’s tribal family was released from slavery, the people of Israel, as the nation was called, they were given a Law. The Law of Moses, it would be known as.
Now here’s the deal with this Law. This was a social and religious law with hundreds of commandments behind it on how to live the right way. It dealt with everything from the people’s diet, to how they treated their neighbors, to how they treated the immigrant, to how they handled finances and sacrifices.
Now at the time, the people of Israel believed that this law would bring them back to that place of Original Blessing: the way of the Tree of Life. It even seemed to communicate that in the Law. It said that if they would obey every single one of these commandments of right and wrong, they would be blessed.
It said they would be fruitful and have a joyful life. But if they didn’t follow the Law, they would find themselves under a curse. And more destruction would be the result.
So, it seemed like this was somewhat giving them a ticket back to Eden…back to where we came from…
But remember how we keep saying there was a secret mission going on… God was doing surgery in the midst of our insanity. It turns out there was more to the purpose of this Law than meets the eye.
This Law was really like a scalpel; like a sharp, two-edged scalpel that cut and revealed the disease and the lies that had been built up within us.
You see, the Law of Moses in the Old Testament was specifically designed to show us that the mindset of independence and self-effort does not work. In fact, it only leads to destruction—to a curse. Because no matter how hard we tried to keep the rules and to be “perfect,” we still fell short over and over again. Israel, the nation of Israel, demonstrated this throughout their entire history and much of the Old Testament is one giant picture of this problem. And you have to understand something here—this wasn’t just the problem of the Jews. This special nation was called to be an illuminating light for the whole world. The prophets in the Scriptures talk about that. Israel was called to teach all of us something very important.
So their life became a message for humanity, who was learning the same lesson in different ways. Every other nation and tribe out there had their own religious rules. And even if they didn’t, at the very least, everyone had a law of conscience; of right and wrong.
So here’s what’s going on, I hope you’re tracking with me… Over thousands of years, the Law of Moses with its rules and regulations, was ripping open and exposing the deeper problem in humanity—which was our embrace of that Tree of Right and Wrong… The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
The Law that was given to Israel in the Old Testament was like a different version of that Tree of Knowledge stretched out over hundreds of years to show each us that we can’t attain Godlikeness on our own. We can’t attain that original blessing and our true identity through our own willpower and independence.
A simpler to say all of this, is that we were not made for external rules and laws. We were made to live from the inside out, from a pure heart. And we were made for trust…for relationship.
So the book of Galatians, which I mentioned earlier, says that the Law was given to show people their sins. The people’s failure to keep the Law revealed this problem, that the way of self-effort and law-keeping and independence does not work.
And with that, it also revealed where sin came from. As we said in the last Facet, all of our destructive ways truly come from that original lie that says we are not like God in the first place; and so we need to do something to become like him; and we need to do this in our own strength, by exterior things, instead of that Godlikeness coming from the inside out—from our true identity—and from God himself with us and within us.
This was our problem—and it needed a solution. We were made for that blessing of life and identity. But we lost that, so we were given the Law to supposedly get back to that blessing.
But it turned out the Law was a false solution. It didn’t work. And all along, that was part of God’s plan. God gave the Law to Israel to expose our insanity. In the New Testament it actually says in the book of Romans that the law increased sin. It actually increased our sense of separation from God.
Now that doesn’t seem to be fair or even make sense, but remember God had a secret mission of healing going on. To use a different medical analogy, the Law was giving us something like an x-ray of the heart, showing us the deeper problem.
Listen carefully, a hidden disease needs to be exposed before it gets removed. So, pre-op and x-rays need to happen before a person is willing to embrace surgery. That’s essentially what happened with Abraham and his family, the people of Israel…and that was a message for all of us. We all need healing. And we all need to realize we can’t do it on our own. We need help.
We need a Savior.
And that takes us to the real beauty of this whole Facet called The False Solution… There was something else hidden in the Law all along.
All through the history of Israel, and throughout the whole Old Testament, you will find there was a promise of something greater to come.
There was a promise that one day, a new law, an inner law of love and freedom would be re-awakened in humanity… Now again, we might have wanted that to happen more quickly—why did it have to take thousands of years—but, again, God was working with humanity. And humanity wasn’t ready for the full surgery yet. Our paranoia and our insanity would have rejected it.
So our consciousness as a species had to evolve. And in the meantime, God was showing us the stupidity of a life of self-effort and law-keeping. He had to expose it. And he has to do that to the whole world… And oftentimes he has to do that for us as individuals; where we fail over and over again until we swallow our pride and realize we need help outside of ourselves.
So the Law exposed this problem, but along the way it also gave tremendous hope. Over and over again, there are prophecies and hidden pictures in the stories and even within the rules of the Old Testament that all pointed to a Messiah—a Savior.
And it also spoke of how God Himself would come to earth to give us the true solution—the true healing we need to find freedom and to find that original place of our identity as the beloved children of God.
So, the Law and the prophets who upheld the Law, they spoke of One who would be born in the town of Bethlehem; a man who would suffer for his people; a king who would reign in true justice. A shepherd who would lay down his life for the sheep.
All of these prophecies in the Old Testament were about Jesus, and so you can think of the Old Testament as having two layers to it. On the top layer you have what was written at face-value. You have the letter of the law. But underneath that is a deeper message, a hidden message for those with eyes that are willing to see. And that deeper message pointed to the true solution.
Whenever you read the Old Testament now, you want to uncover that deeper layer—that hidden message that points us to the person of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem and who fulfilled every one of the prophecies.
This happened through His life, His death, and His resurrection—and that provided the True Solution and the true way back to the life we were originally designed for. That is how the secret mission of God would really come to a head. And so that is where we’re headed next…