Sons of Light - The Language of Redemption - Part 4

March 2, 2012— updated 15.9.2016

An Essay of Definition in Seven Parts

PART FOUR

The Language of Redemption

Sons of Light

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Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. (Heb 9:22)

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In the language of redemption, to be born again is to receive a second breath of life—the breath of God [pneuma Theou] in the breath of Christ [pneuma Christou]. This is what to be gennethe ’anothen (“born again” from John 3:3) means when moving procreation by the Father from physical referents to heavenly referents; for the icon phrases of being “born from above” or “born of spirit” or “born as a son of God” all refer to receipt of the spirit of God, a holy spirit [pneuma ’agion], and to receive the spirit of God is to receive life outside of space-time. To receive live from outside of the four unfurled dimensions will the inner self of the person born of God being a son of light; for God is Light. His sons are, therefore, sons of Light.

In 2012, the language of redemption had not matured sufficiently that the spirit of the person [to pneuma tou ’anthropou] could be separated from the soul [psuche] of the person. Therefore, the dynamics of spiritual birth, while known, were not presented with enough clarity for Christians speaking the language of the oppressor to grasp how far they were from understanding being again-born [’anagennesas] (from 1 Pet 1:3), or from understanding being sons of Light (from John 12:36, the direct translation of which is, While Light you have, walk in the light that sons of light you may become). And the author of John’s Gospel says of Jesus, “All things were made through Him [’o Logos], and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:3–5).

Receipt of the spirit of God, a holy spirit, in the spirit of Christ, also a holy spirit, causes spiritual conception inside the soul of the person, in a way analogous to a husband in his wife conceiving a new human person in the womb of the woman. The new person, a human child, when conceived does not “look like” either the man or the woman even through the embryo is fully human and will grow to be either like the embryo’s father or mother. Likewise, the Apostle John said of sons of God, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when He [Christ] appears, we will be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2). And if we are like Him, we will be sons of Light that darkness cannot overcome.

Today, being truly born of God is a rare happening. But there is no need for the Father to draw many persons from this world and out of the Adversary’s demonstration of the superiority of bottom up governance in transactional economies. He only draws those for whom He has a task that needs done; for every time He draws a person from this world (John 6:44) and delivers the person to the Son to call, justify, and glorify, Christ Jesus has to relive being crucified … Paul wrote, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:6–8).

Greater Christendom reads, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, in a superficial way; for in the language of the oppressor, every person is guilty of “original sin” [the unbelief of Adam] and every person has an immortal soul that was lurking somewhere in the Garden when Eve gave forbidden fruit to Adam and he ate. Therefore, Christ could die at Calvary—die one time—and pay for the price for the unbelief of Adam that caused every person since to transgress the Law … the only reason for a person to transgress the Law, really, is unbelief of God. Sin is unbelief (read Rom 14:23 in Greek). If a person were to “believe” God, the person would keep the Commandments.

Unbelief blocks the Light that is God from reaching into a person, therefore preventing the person from becoming a son of Light … hold this thought for a couple of paragraphs—

Paul wrote his treatise to the saints at Rome a quarter century after Calvary. Paul might well have been alive in 31 CE, but I wasn’t. So for Christ to die for me before I was conceived; before I was a sinner, a different set of time-dynamics have to be in play than Jesus dying for all of humanity on the First Unleavened in 31 CE. And there is: in the timeless heavenly realm, the moment when the Logos [’o Logos] died is when the Logos entered His creation. This moment—the same moment--still exists presently, the basis for the author of Hebrews writing, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). He is the same for the heavenly moment is the same. The moment is unchanging, the reality of timelessness, therefore in heaven, He cannot die as a man dies. But as “God,” having equality with “the God” [ton Theon — from John 1:1] the Logos died spiritually when He emptied Himself of His divinity and entered His creation as His unique Son, the man Jesus the Nazarene. And about this, Paul wrote,

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5–8)

The Logos cannot “die” in the heavenly realm. However, He could leave the heavenly realm and “die” spiritually through being born as a man—He didn’t leave the heavenly realm as a deity, for then He would not have died and would not have entered space-time as His unique Son … the man Jesus the Nazarene was NOT the Son of God the Father until the spirit of the Father [pneuma Theou] descended upon Him in the bodily form of a dove and entered into [eis — from Mark 1:10] Him about where a whale would breathe. And when born of spirit through receipt of a second breath of life, the breath of the God of dead ones, inside the physical man, Jesus was born of God as a new man, the Christ, a root shoot from the stump of Jesse. Hence, the Christ was not the descendant of King David, but was/is the firstborn Son of God the Father, with His ancestry predating the foundation of the creation.

A salmon will jump and jump and jump, the thump of falling back into the water breaking up egg skeins as the fish readies itself for its act of procreation … its element is “water,” not air. And in a somewhat similar manner, a son of God can mentally “leap” into the timeless realms of heaven, but cannot stay there, falling back into time with a “thump.” For the element in which breathing creatures [nephesh] belong is space-time, abbreviated as time. So even when a Christian can mentally escape from time, the thoughts of the Christian almost instantly inject the concepts of “future” and “past” into the spirituality of the moment; thus Christian’s mental escape from time is always exceedingly brief.

What’s not brief is the unbelief of greater Christendom, unbelief that prevents Christians from “seeing” the Light that is God; however, Christian unbelief isn’t so severe that greater Christendom cannot see the reflected light that shines from the silver arms and upper torso of the spiritual king of Persia, a demonic king in the Adversary’s presently reigning hierarchy. And because Christians can see this reflected light, they worship this demonic king as their triune God.

So it’s not difficult to understand why Emperor Constantine, knowing three isn’t one, was baptized by an Arian bishop, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and why his son was an Arian Christian, or why today, neo-Arian sects are the fastest growing sects within greater Christendom. But, sadly, their theology is idolatrous for they are without spiritual understanding, with the evidence of their spiritual ignorance being their identification of Jesus as the Christ before the spirit of God entered into Him.

The man Jesus the Nazarene was not a physical man like other men are for His father was the Logos [’o Logos], the Creator of all things physical (again John 1:3), including the man Adam. Because He, Jesus, was only the second human person to be fathered by the Logos, He functions in the plan of God as the second Adam. He is also the last Adam; for He could not return to heaven as the Logos to father or create another Adam, but could only return as the Firstborn Son of God the Father, the reason for Him asking to have returned “‘the glory that I had with you before the world existed’” (John 17:5). He could not, himself, take this glory back but had to have it given to Him.

Now, theological heaviness: when the spirit of God [pneuma Theou] entered into the man Jesus, this breath of God didn’t give physical life to a man who already had physical life, but raised from death [the state of being without life] the spirit of Jesus that was in His soul, thus making the “Christ” analogous to Jonah—there should be no narratives about the Christ prior to the spirit of God entering into the man Jesus, for until then, there was no “Christ.” Therefore, once made alive through the man Jesus being born again, the Christ as the living spirit inside the soul of the human man Jesus was analogous to Jonah, a human person brought back to life inside the fleshly body of a whale [great fish]. The Christ was spiritually alive inside the fleshly body of the man Jesus. And about this Peter tells the lambs of God in feeding them,

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through water. (1 Pet 3:18–20)

In the language of redemption, to be born of God causes the inner self of the person to be like Jonah was inside the whale, Jonah being a human person and thereby qualitatively different from a whale. The living inner self is qualitatively different from the fleshly body of the person. And this is what Nicodemus could not understand: to be born again wasn’t a second entering of the womb, but receipt of a second breath of life, thereby having a second life inside the fleshly body as the prophet Jonah was a second life inside the whale.

Jesus gave one sign that He was from heaven, the sign of Jonah … the whale puked Jonah out, landing Jonah on dry land [like the salmon, the whale’s element was water], from where Jonah went to Nineveh as a recognized messenger from God—recognized because one of the gods Nineveh worshiped was Dagon, the fish god, and apparently someone saw the whale spew out Jonah and believed Jonah was from Dagon, which is sort of sad for the men of Jerusalem didn’t recognize Jesus as being a messenger from the Most High God whereas the idolatrous people of Nineveh recognized Jonah as a spokesman for one of their gods.

The men of Judah and Jerusalem wouldn’t have repented even if they had recognized Jesus as being from God; for in John’s Gospel we find, “Many even of the authorities believed in Him [Jesus], but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue” (John 12:42). These men of Jerusalem were more afraid of the Pharisees and fearful of losing their social status than they were afraid of God.

The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son (John 5:22, 27); yet when the Father foreknows a person then numbered among the spiritually dead ones of this world and predestines or predetermines that the person will be glorified while the person continues to live physically, the Father causes the person to pass from death to life. And to pass from death to life in the heavenly realm is to receive indwelling eternal life, thereby becoming a son of Light—to become a son of Light that actually bypasses judgment, the reality of Jesus telling Jews seeking His life, “‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life’” (v. 24).

A couple of citations need to be revisited: after Jesus entered Jerusalem as the paschal Lamb of God, Jesus said to the crowd that followed Him, “‘The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light’” (John 12:35–36).

John says at the beginning of his Gospel: “All things were made through Him [’o Logos], and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:3–5).

The author of Matthew’s Gospel has His “Jesus” say to Sadducees, “‘And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: “I am the God [Theos] of Abraham, and the God [Theos] of Isaac, and the God [Theos] of Jacob? He is not the God [Theos] of the dead (ones), but of the living (ones)’” (Matt 22:31–32).

Putting John’s Gospel together with Matthew’s Gospel, we can make a definitive declaration. The Creator of all things physical was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And this God was with (or “of” — Gr: pros) the God [ton Theon] (from John 1:1), thereby textually creating two deities, one the God of the living ones (of Abraham, when he lived), and the second, the God of dead ones—of the man Jesus, with the glorified Jesus telling Mary Magdalene in John’s Gospel, “‘Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

The God of living ones ceased to “live” when He divested Himself of His deity and entered His Creation as His unique Son—He died in the heavenly realm, and would not again serve as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In the language of redemption, there is, for sons of God, one “God,” the Father of the son. Christ Jesus is the Elder Brother of the son of God. He is not “the God” of the person born of God … He is today the High Priest of sons of God as Aaron was the high priest of Israel, with all sons of God serving in the spiritual temple that today stands (see 1 Cor 3:16–17) as Levities served as priests in the earthly temple while it stood. Hence, sons of God will today pray to the Father, asking to be heard in the name of their Elder brother and high priest, Christ Jesus. They will not pray to Christ Jesus as if Christ were their God. To do so would be idolatrous. And if they do not pray in the “name” of Christ Jesus [that is, by the authority given Christ], it is unlikely that their prayers will be heard, let alone positively addressed.

But in the language of the oppressor, it is blasphemous to lift from Scripture the unambiguous claim that with the receipt of the spirit of God in the spirit of Christ, a human person is again-born, but this time as a son of God, becoming individually and collectively the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27) and thereby becoming to Christ Jesus the Bride of Christ, or becoming like the wife is to her husband. This person becomes “Christ”—the Body of Christ—through the person becoming a son of Light.

For pedagogical redundancy, because every human person was born with a spiritually lifeless [dead] inner self, the God of every person can only spiritually be the God of dead ones. And with the Logos, Yah, having entered His creation as His unique Son, and having left His creation as the Firstborn Son, the Beloved, of God the Father, no longer does the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob exist, a reality Islam will have to face when filled with spirit.

Both Trinitarian and Arian Christendom pray to Jesus; Islam accepts Jesus as a great prophet, but not as the Son of God. But all three theologies have the God of Abraham—the Creator God—being God the Father, with this “mistake” identifying the Book of Acts as fiction (cf. John 1:1–3 with Acts 17:22–31). The real “Apostle Paul” knew better than to make such an egregious theological error. Only a person not born of spirit would have his Paul commit this error.

In a rhetoric of redemption, human sons of God are asexual “gods” as angelic sons of God are asexual spirits [pneumata — from Heb 1:7], created to serve God … in their fleshly bodies, humans are servants, or better, bondservants [slaves], as angels are servants. For greater humanity has been consigned to disobedience from birth (Rom 11:32), being born as sons of disobedience (Eph 2:2–3) enslaved by the passions of the flesh and hormonal desires, with the Adversary’s broadcast of rebellion embedded in the thoughts of the mind.

Rebellion against God is the antithesis of belief of God: rebellion blocks that Light that is God, thereby permitting the person to dwell in spiritual darkness with cluttered thoughts and entangled emotions

Jesus told the crowd that followed Him to and in Jerusalem,

Whoever believes in me, believes not in me but in Him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees Him who sent me. I have come into the world as Light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my words has a judge; the word [’o logos] that I have spoken will judge him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has Himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak. And I know that His commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has told me. (John 12:44–50)

Again, the Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son (John 5:22), who in turn will judge no one for the person who will be judged on the last day already has a judge, the logos [’o logos] of the Son … this should concern all of greater Christendom; for Jesus said that the Light would be among them yet a little time, implying that there would shortly be a time when the Light was not among them and that darkness would overtake those who were not already walking in Light as sons of Light, and once darkness overtook the crowds seeking Jesus, the ones walking in darkness would not know where the person goes.

As the Light and Life of humanity, Jesus came so that Israel could finally see God the Father, the God of the dead ones, with the dead knowing nothing (Eccl 9:5) and therefore knowing nothing of the Father even to this day; for every Christian who insists that the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob was the Father is a spiritual bastard, a son of the Adversary that claims the Father as his or her parent, a cowbird fledgling, fed by 1^st-Century Christians in the nest of grace but an imposter.

When Jesus prayed to His Father so that His disciples could hear, He said, “‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given Him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given Him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’” (John 17:1–3) … neither Trinitarian nor Arian Christendom know the Father and/or the Son—and certainly Islam knows even less than Arians, both theologies worshiping a single deity, unfortunately the wrong deity.

The Son gives eternal life to those who know the Father and Christ Jesus whom the Father sent into this world as the Light by which He would be seen—and why would He need to be seen when He hadn’t previously been seen by Israel, or by any peoples of this world? He needed to be seen for He was doing a new thing: He was making a species adaptation, not something usually discussed in theological rhetoric.

Sons of light do not choose Christ Jesus, do not choose to be Christians, do not choose to even be religious. Rather, the Father chooses the person (cf. John 6:44, 65; 15:16) and draws the person from this world, then delivers the person to Christ Jesus to call, justify, and glorify …

The nation of Israel was the firstborn son of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Ex 4:22). Israel was a physical people, visible in this world, and as such, an easy target for the Adversary to deceive. But when a figurative species adaptation occurred, “Israel” was no longer a physical nation seen by the eyes of other men. Rather, Israel became an invisible, non-physical nation without any “presence” in space-time. And when cloaked by the garment of Christ’s righteousness—grace—this Israel became invisible to even God the Father; for when He looks on His sons, He sees the righteousness of Christ Jesus. Thus, this Israel is certainly concealed from the Adversary, who had not expected any human person to be “glorified” without coming under judgment at the end of the age.

In the rhetoric of oppression, Christians speak of Satan tempting the saints; of the Adversary hindering a Christian, hindering many Christians, preventing them from accomplishing this or that. And those who speak the language of the oppressor—even Sabbatarian Christians—are quick to blame anything that goes wrong on the Adversary … the Adversary caused the storm that prevented the mail plane from landing this week. No, he didn’t. That’s giving the Adversary credit for power he doesn’t have. What caused the storm was the seasonal chilling of the Bering Sea, and its colder waters mingling with the still warm waters of the Pacific Ocean, thereby causing an energy release along the contact line as Pacific waters became colder, this energy release manifesting itself as a storm.

To give the Adversary credit for everything that goes wrong in a Christian’s life is superstition run amuck … the Adversary doesn’t know what occurs under the cloak of Christ’s righteousness—and what occurs is the son of Light learning to walk uprightly (as a spiritual biped) and be blameless in all the person does.

Under this cloak of grace and upon the inner self of the person—this inner self constituting the son of Light—will be fore-written the history of the Millennium.

When the glorified Jesus appeared to His first disciples on the afternoon of the Wave Sheaf Offering in 31 CE, He said to them,

“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy spirit [pneuma’agion — breath holy, no definite article thus not a definite thing or person]. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.” (John 20:21–23)

When Jesus’ first disciples received the spirit of Christ [pneuma Christou], a holy spirit [pneuma ’agion — no definite article], they were born of God and as such, they were sons of Light—and as sons of Light, they had the authority to forgive sins [unbelief] or to not forgive.

The sin offerings of ancient Israel did not truly forgive the transgressions of the sinner, but covered these transgressions with a garment of blood, thereby sanctifying the person and superficially purifying the flesh … if the transgressions of Israel had been truly forgiven [forgiven inside the mind of the transgressor], there would have been no repeat of a sin offering; no need for annual sacrifices for unintentional sins: “According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation” (Heb 9:9–10 — read verses 6–14).

To give to a human person authority to forgive transgressions of the Law is to give to this person the authority of Christ Jesus.

Judgment is of the living that die, or that can die; thus, judgment pertains to the living that can be condemned and not to the already glorified son of Light, clothed in light.

When updating a work four or more years old, I occasionally find that I need to rewrite, rework the piece, not just update what I have previously written. This is the situation I am presently facing … I’m on page 7 of 19 pages in Part Four, and I have briefly scanned the remaining 12 pages of this Part Four and have concluded there is enough material in the 12 pages for an Eighth Part, but much of the material has little to do with Sons of Light yet is nevertheless important enough to stand alone. Therefore, with authority to manipulate Part numbering, readers will find two Part Seven’s, “a” and “b.” If more parts are needed, more letters of the alphabet will be added; so that this essay will conclude with Seven Parts even if “seven” is “ten.”

[To be continued in Part Four - Addendum]

Homer Kizer