Salvation Surprise: This Is The World Of The Pummeled Christ, The World That Rejects Christ

It was simple enough. I went forward to accept and confess Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. About eight days prior I had been in an occult meditation exercise, and my mind's eye was opened to see the demonic spirit which had been influencing me, trying to wrangle my lowering my authority over it so that it could enter my mind. It took like zero IQ to realize that I must then be of higher authority than it, and that whoever had opened my mind's eye with out my permission had higher authority than me.

Although I had long since left Christianity, I figured It was Jesus. I went to tell my mother's best friend (we lived very close to each other in Honolulu, Hawai'i). She excitedly greeted me with a story of a miraculous response healing at the name of Jesus, and took me to the House of Praise. So I had evidence that Jesus Christ was what the Bible says he is when I went forward. I had no ecstatic experience when I went forward, but the other guy who got up broke down sobbing, raised his hands, and then broke out in tongues. I had a little catching up to do.

While I walked back to my seat, my mind tripped on the fact that this world is not as I had assumed from all my experience in it, and as all my education had taught me. This is not the world of science and physics and matter and gravity: this is the world the Bible speaks of, of God and Jesus and angels and demons. THOSE are the real things going on while we deal with this world as though it were all there is.

I sat down. In the parlance of modern Christians, I had accepted Christ and had become a member of the church. In reality, though, Christ had not yet accepted me. Because I had not really gone to him. I held myself in reserve, a distance between me and him. God was still "other"; if I did not like what he did with me, I was going to take myself back. It would be a few more weeks before I would be confronted by God mano y mano and become, by real repentance and submission and his baptism, the body of the First Born.

The First Born is the surprise I want to talk about. We figure that because he took our punishment, thus paying the price for our salvation, we can pretty much do anything we want. Some time after my baptism, I saw Jesus scourged, beaten, going into shock carrying the cross, and the act of his crucifixion. My fantasy. In this act he turned his face to me and said, "Come unto me." That I audibly heard a voice not of my own imagination is not my point here. Jesus just highlighted for me the fact that that Jesus I am to go unto was pummeled. Symbolic or historic, he was stressed, arrested, spat on, slapped, beaten, his beard pulled out, tried, insulted, crowned with thorns, whipped, harassed, intimidated, made to carry weight almost to the point of death, made to lie on his scourged back on a rugged timber -- to which he was spiked, given vinegar to drink -- virtually suffered all hell could throw at him, for me. It lasted hours, to exhaustion. Jesus was pummeled, tormented, and tortured. He DIED. He took my punishment, and believe me, I deserve quite a bit. If he took all that for me, can't I do whatever I can for him?

It is the pummeled Jesus who says, "Come unto me." Not the bright and happy Santa Claus Jesus. We are not here to get whatsoever we want. We are here to pay him, the Passover Lamb who gave himself for us, back. To love him like he loves us is to love who he loves like he does. "I went through that for you. Can you help me out with this?"

So what is our relationship to him now? We are the body of the First Born. WHAT DOES HE DO? The name Jesus means "God (Yah) saving us." How do we do that? We do that in his world, the Bible world, where our hearts and minds and tongues are. We are its (Yah saving us') agents, his body. We are not representatives of a secular history. We represent a living, conscious Power present and active in the here and now. We give him voice; he gives them evidence. Irrefutable evidence that this is indeed the Bible's world.

At least that is what I am SUPPOSED to be doing. I wish I was actually living it. Some can get right into it. I wish I could. I know what I OUGHT to be doing: "He made his angels into spirits and his servants into a burning light" (Hebrews 1:7 Alexander, italics mine). I/we should be flaming beacons. Blogging is not enough. Consecration is required. Pray for flames for the harvest of the field.