“the revelation of the mystery” (Rom. 16:25, NKJV)
The last four teachings have included a great variety of important anchoring points and implications that stem forth from them, with regards to the subject we are currently concerned with, namely the Bride’s Godly identity before time. Before we continue, a brief summary of a few core elements of the larger argument, so that we can clarify “the revelation of the mystery” (Rom. 16:25):
• The root truth of this process is that each believer who searches out God with his whole heart, will find Him (Jer. 29:13).
• In accordance with a number of Scriptures we described the process between Wonderful and the anointed beloved from His side, as also being wonderous. Wonderful speaks to the wonderous and reveals his wondrousness within us. Based on both what can and cannot be traced, the revealed and the hidden, we know that the cumulative process of our Christ-identity will be a testimony, “a perfect [wonderful] example of a particular quality, a person or thing viewed as a model of excellence,” or then: a sign of wonder.
• Through His Spirit God initiates prayer and intercession WITHIN US.
• The Bride was designed for our discovery and exploration. This means that the discovery of the numinous WITHIN OURSELVES must necessarily occur. Numinous means that God has designed it in such a way that you and I are able to discover the fearful and fascinating mystery of ourselves within ourselves.
• This transcendence is facilitated by the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit is, in all experiences of meeting and acknowledgement, always the go-between who creates awareness. This awareness (logos, used in the widest possible sense of the word), is always directed by the Spirit of God as go-between. The Spirit is that with which we observe rather than whom we search for. When the Spirit intercedes for us, He prays the orderly, complex and precise blue print of God in our lives. These “unspeakable words” are rhema words! The disclosure of these identity words brings life and light and allows your Godly identity to wondrously unfold.
• Everyone in the Bride must thus become acquainted with the mind of the Spirit. The question then remains: how are these “hidden” words translated or understood in the Spirit by our minds?
• In and through the unfolding of your rhema word all doubts, suspicions, dreams, wishes, the complete sum of your searching, culminates in a process of transcendence through which God streams your unique position in Christ from before time. This literally becomes the connecting link or synergy of the interaction between the heavens and the earth, and through this streams of living water, which is to say primordial waters, are opened from before time, full of proverbs and riddles that stream from before time, so that a deeper manifestation can emerge from this
fearful and fascinating mystery. Initially this is just a slight bit of moisture, later water that reaches the ankles; then water that reaches to the knee; later water that reaches to the hips. And then it becomes a stream that is too strong to move through! The waters have risen – waters in which to swim, a stream through which one cannot walk (Ezek. 47:3-5).
• This process of logos-based thoughts is almost impossible to articulate in language. We learnt that language and thought are two sides of the same coin. For this reason, all thoughts or facets of Logos are closely linked to language. We need a process through which the hermeneutics of the unsaid can be discovered.
• If the Holy Spirit directs this process of transcendence throughout, we will learn how to map the “utter things kept secret from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35) and be able to reveal the hidden things.
• The Wonderful that we discover in our search, is the unexpected appearance of the unfathomable Origin itself, also WITHIN us and in our circumstances. This transfiguration is wonderous and the characteristic nature of Wonderful. During this meeting a wonderous wise identity and Godly nature is imparted.
We concluded the previous teaching with the promise that we will explore the deeper manifestation of this fearful and fascinating mystery within us. I couldn’t find anything concrete anywhere about this path back to paradise, where the hidden character of our rhema words can become clear: not in theology, or philosophy, or in literature or any other discipline of the humanities. There is thus a certain lacuna of any systematic theorisation of these “great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jer. 33:3).
These things, which different translations offer as “inaccessible” (ROTH), “inscrutable” (LITV), or “unsearchable” (NIV), are indeed not that, because they are actually revealed. [Compare, for instance, Ps. 25:14 – “The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him, and He will show them His covenant.”] In the Holman Christian Standard Bible, it is translated more correctly as “wondrous things” (notice WONDERFUL within this), and elsewhere as “great and hidden things” (ISV), which is closer to the truth.
In the pictorial Hebrew (AHLB) the word is presented as an enclosure: “a walled, fenced or fortified place for storing up the gathered crop or people”, but also, importantly:
“a walled place of protection”, literally a bastion that cannot be penetrated. For this reason, the best possible translation of this verse is found in the YLT: “Call unto Me, and I do answer thee, yea, I declare to thee great and fenced things–thou hast not known them.”
Ponder this for a moment – what is the origin of the characteristic nature of our identity, which is apparently no longer accessible, hidden behind the proverbial lock and key?
Obviously, paradise! Gen. 3:22-24: “And now, lest he [= the man] put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever – therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.” There is a way back to that enclosed consciousness of eternity and glory. Spatially speaking we refer to this as paradise; temporally speaking, we refer to it as before time, but it is strictly speaking neither time nor space as we know it. It exists in the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages, for our glory (1Cor. 2:7).
The great mystery that you and I as born-again believers should realise, is that that consciousness is WITHIN us, but also EXTERNAL to us. Through the Spirit of God’s groans that are interceded WITHIN us and move to the world OUTSIDE of us, something that is locked up within us, hidden away, is revealed and unlocked.
The notion of groaning has the connotation of being dispirited, but the original Greek carries more nuance. The Scripture that most clearly points this out is Mark 7:31-37, when Jesus moved from the area of Tyre and Sidon to the sea of Galilea, through the area of Decapolis. Both Tyre (= Rock = Christ – 1Cor. 10:4) and Sidon (= fishing space = fishers of men; 153) points explicitly to the manifestation of the Christ. Galilea means circular, and Decapolis means ten cities, where it points to a collective marked by “a completed course of time or completeness in divine order”. This specific deictic concept needs to be read in typological terms, as a process of moving to and fro, a spiritual area in which Christ is manifested in and through a circular Godly order that brings completion and perfection as the movement groans forward in the Spirit. The individual that is brought to Jesus is a deaf person who struggles to speak, a symbolic type of the natural (believing) person of which Isa. 6:9 notes: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’” IT IS FOR THIS REASON THAT JESUS notes in Matt. 13:13: “Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” The parables or secret language of HIDDEN MEANING is precisely so that they can begin to see and hear!
Jesus takes the deaf man aside, away from the people, sticks His fingers in the man’s ears, spits, and touches his tongue, and “Then, looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ Immediately his ears were opened, and the impediment of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke plainly. Then He commanded them that they should tell no one; but the more He commanded them, the more widely they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done all things well. He makes both the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’”
The gematria of the phrase He sighed is 1136. What is absolutely wonderous about this is that there are four other words that have the same gematria, namely “heartily”, “help”, “fore-knowledge”, and “quicken.” If we were to fence in these words, string them together, they wondrously form a key of/in this process of revelation: these groans are a way in which the Holy Spirit provides hearty help to believers so that hidden fore-knowledge can quicken their spirits!
There are also three verses in the Bible that have a combined total gematria of 1336, and if we read them together – not contextually linked to one another, but linked based on this shared gematria – it is amazing what extra value is added to this process of making meaning:
• “His pails are full of milk, and the marrow of his bones is moist.” (Job 21:24). Various teachings here have discussed the symbolic value of milk and marrow, but it is the substance of pure word and life which “the hidden person of the heart” (1Pet. 3:4) receives. It is truly “the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16).
• “Then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision. So Daniel blessed the God of heaven.” (Dan. 2:19). The groans of the Spirit also reveal visions, dreams, secret languages, in short: all that is hidden.
We continue this glorious unfolding in the next teaching.
• Selah: Explain the process of to and fro to someone. (Why do we use this term?).
• Read: 1 Sam. 1-9
• Memorise: 1 Sam. 3:7 (Try to understand this verse typologically, in the light of this teaching.)
