ANOTHER LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

But then let us get this clear if we can receive it. These are our first halting steps in living in reality. We join Moses who 'endured as seeing Him who is invisible'. We have lived all our lives in the false habit of believing in what we outwardly see or feel as the real. It is a tremendous revolution to begin (what we did begin, as we have said, at our new birth) to live in the Spirit-dimension as the real; He, Father, Son and Spirit as the only eternal real, and we by infinite grace, in Him as body to Head, a true union.
And in this present second crisis of faith we are moving forward to a totally present-tense faith. No longer just that He took away our past sins or gives us assurance of future eternal life, but that He only IS, and we ARE in Him in the Spirit, and that this only is the real. Therefore even when He has given us evidence of our union relationship, we are now moving into a 'consciousness' which must not be confused with 'feeling' -- this subtle difference between soul (feeling) and spirit (reality). When a thing is, it just is, and all we do is recognize it and act on that recognition. We are selves for instance. We don't stop to ask: Am I a self? Am I here? I just am, and act on that fact. Now our eyes have begun to be opened to the one eternal fact -- that HE IS ('I Am that I Am' was the name by which He revealed Himself to Moses), and to this the added fact that WE ARE, in this eternal union with Him in Christ.
Put it this way again. You can't 'know' a universal. It is all there is. God is all there is. You may only know particular forms by which the Universal manifests Himself. So He gloriously and graciously manifested Himself in Jesus. But Jesus told His disciples it was necessary that He leave them in His physical form, so that He could come back to them and they find their eternal relationship to Him in Spirit. But Spirit is God the universal, and now in Christ we have moved back to union with Him the universal. And we don't know a universal, we can only be part of it. So in that sense we do not know Him on the outer soul-feeling level, and still less on the matter level. We just ARE in Him and He in us, and our consciousness is on that deep indescribable Spirit-level; as I say in the same sense in which we don't know ourselves, we just are ourselves, and that is the basic fact of our being and living.
I wonder if this makes sense to you. I am getting at the fact that we go through periods when we lose all 'sense' of God, all sense of Him being a peronal living Being to us. We are in the divine dark, as the old Mystics used to call it, dark with excess of light. Dark meaning that spirit is dark to matter and vice versa. So God being spirit, we don't know Him and feel Him by the same faculties by which we know and feel matter things. It is another level of consciousness, in which we are -- He is, we are -- eternally. And to settle in that, we have to go through educating periods where we have lost all outer sight or feeling of Him. Then we don't get all fussed up if we are not conscious of His presence or feel Him unreal to us or absent from us. We are not any longer living in that matter-believing dimension. We are, because He is, and we a part of Him, as a branch is part of a vine. And there we walk at ease and in confidence, for 'if I make my bed in hell, Thou art there'; indeed the Psalmist in that Psalm 139 puts it as well as anywhere else in the Bible.
But now here comes the paradox, which almost seems like a contradiction of all I have just said. Living in a visible and material world, really the world of shadows (just as in Hebrews it says the tabernacle ritual was 'the example and shadow of heavenly things', of which Moses was capable in the Spirit of being shown 'the pattern in the mount'), God does manifest Himself of course. The whole world is the manifestation of Himself. Therefore He does have ways in which He makes us know. There are the outer ways of answering our faith in the symbols of baptism and the Lord's Supper. There is supreme provision in the written word. There are the outer signs, the Spirit coming as a dove to the Savior, and in 'the cloven tongues like as of fire' and the speaking in other languages at Pentecost.
Yet we also know these are meaningless unless they are the outward stepping stones of faith which lead to the inner witness of the Spirit. So there is and must be this inner witness, whether accompanied by outer symbols or not. But then we are saying that even this necessary inner witness, which confirms our faith, is only the gateway into this wonderful fact of being. This oneness of the union, when we have been taken beyond the need of witness to spontaneous being.
An outward illustration which I have already used gives us some clue to what we mean. We sit on a chair by the act of committal (faith). The chair then bears its witness to us in that it is holding us. That is the substance of faith, and the evidence of its reality. But after that, we just forget we are sitting on a chair. We just are in that practically unconscious faith-relationship. That is about the best, though only partial way I can indicate by matter, what we are talking about in the Spirit-union.

fROM:  Who Am I?......By Norman Grubb