Category Archives: forgiveness

December 11, 2008 · 5:24 pm

Conversations With the Seer–“I Am the Vine; Ye Are the Branches”

(Formerly in Israel, if a man went to inquire of God, he would say, “Come, let us go to the Seer,” because the prophet of today used to be called a Seer. I Samuel 9: 9)

“How can we tell a false prophet?”  I asked the Seer.  We were all sitting around the wood stove, enjoying a cup of hot tea.

He opened the door to the cast iron box heater and threw  in another log.  “This I can tell you; the Master said that they will end up like this log, ‘hewn down and cast into the fire.’   This is how you can tell them from the true man of God:  Christ said, You shall know them by their fruits.  A false prophet or a false teacher will not bear good fruit; they will bring forth evil fruit.  A good tree will bring forth good fruit.  A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit (1).

“What is the fruit that He is talking about?”

“The words that Christ spoke were spirit, so it is spiritual fruit that a person brings forth, be it good or bad.  The good fruit is ‘the fruit of the Spirit,’ which is ‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance’ (2). ”

“How do we bear this good fruit of the Spirit?”

“It’s a walk with Him.  It takes time to learn to walk with Him.  After our death, burial, and resurrection experience with Him, He gives us a small portion of His Spirit as a down payment towards the purchased possession–us.  He urges us to grow, or rather, allow His Spirit to grow in our mortal bodies by means of prayer and study and putting into practice His way of life.  He frees us from sin and sinning; this is what allows us to grow.  This is when He tells us to abide in Him.”

“How do we abide in Him?”

“Christ likens Himself as being the true grape vine.  The Father is the Spirit, the invisible Sap that flows up through the vine Christ, and on into us the branches.  Christ commands us, Abide in me, and I in you.   He says that those of us who do this will bring forth much fruit–much love from above, much joy, and much peace, and much of all the rest.  We do this by being channels of His love, joy and peace.  We are not the objects.  That is the key (3).

“What’s the first step?”

“We must first reach out to Him and abide and remain in Him.  How?  In our thoughts.  We match our thoughts to His.  Remember: In the beginning was the Word, the Logos.  And the Logos is the Thought or the Concept that the Father had in the beginning.  And that Word/Logos/Concept/ Thought  is Spirit.  And the Word was made flesh and dwelt amoung us.  Christ is the living Thought and Plan of God.  We must make His Eternal Thoughts ours.  That’s the secret.  That’s the Truth.  He is the Truth, and we can handle the Truth because He has ordained us that we should bear this fruit of His Spirit.  And His Thought made flesh is the the Light of the world.  When we have His mind, then we are the light of the world, too, because His Spirit will be abiding and remaining in us for all to see (4).”

“Christ really wants this for us, doesn’t He?’

“He’s all about multiplying Himself throughout a body of people whom He has chosen and elected for this honor.  That’s grace.  But we’ve got to get a hold of what He’s offered to His followers.  We need to abide in Him by thinking on the Word/Logos/Thought of God, which is contemplating His love for us and the whole world.  We can start here: He forgave all of us our sins, so now we need to forgive those who have sinned against us.  This is how we continue in His love.   Christ gave His life, so now we give up our selfish old life and take on His life within our hearts.  He gave us another commandment: Love each other as I have love you (John 15: 12).  You cannot love someone with His agape love without forgiving them first.  Forgive everyone everything.  It is possible with His Spirit helping us.”

“And the bad trees won’t be able to do this?”

“A bad tree won’t be able in the end to forgive, for they will not truly have Christ’s Spirit.  They will come on in sheep’s clothing, looking very righteous, but they are still being motivated from their sinful, selfish hearts–hearts that do not have His Spirit.  Your powers of discernment will grow as you abide more in Him and He in you.  Just remember that we are the branches; He is the vine through which we receive His Spirit, and it’s His Spirit that makes it all possible to grow up into Him.”     Kenneth Wayne Hancock       {For more on this, check out my books here:  https://immortalityroad.com/donate/ }

(1) Matthew 76: 15-20   (2) Galatians 5: 22  (3) John 15: 1-14   (4) John 1: 1, 14

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October 28, 2008 · 2:43 pm

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden–The True Story

     Their cries cut through the trees of the garden.  “Help us, please!  Don’t cast us away.  Please forgive us, for we’ve sinned against you.  We are sorry.  We want it to be like it was before.  Don’t forsake us!”  Thus Adam and Eve did moan their fate after their sin and banishment by God from Eden.  Where once they walked in splendid innocence with their Creator in paradise, they had found themselves in solitary anguish, awash in tears of guilt and shame. 

     And what really had they done to bring such swift retribution by the hand that yesterday had been so kind?  Yes, they yielded to temptation and disobeyed the only commandment that God had given them, albeit through the auspices of one smooth character.  For the serpent had convinced them that they needed the knowledge of good and evil, that experiencing this knowledge was the road to real wisdom.  And so they partook and sinned.  Why was the anguish and alienation of this sin the direct fruit of their gaining knowledge?  The transformation from happy innocents to sin-guilty initiates took place because it was supposed to take place; it was in the master plan of the Creator.

Their Fall Was Not an Accident

     However, conventional wisdom teaches that the Fall in Eden was an accident, that somehow the experimenting Creator had the wrong mix of variables present and things went bad. A deadly accident occurred unforeseen by the Architect, and his prototype house fell down.  Now He would have to change His original plan in order to fix what He did not get right at the first.  That does not sound like the omnipotent and omniscient Being the ancient Hebrew writers portrayed their God to be.  In fact, the Genesis account shows a Creator with an acute and meticulous hand, setting everything in perfect order.  “And he saw that it was good…it was good…it was good.”  

     It was good at every phase of creation.  Are we to believe that a smooth talking serpent figure, made also by God (3:1), could accidentally appear in Eden to thwart the plan of the Almighty?   This is not the case of the farmer fretting about the fox in the henhouse.  This is the Creator of the fox, the hens, and the henhouse.  He knew the vulnerability of Adam and Eve because He made them that way, and He created the serpent to be a lying seductive trickster.  In effect, God had put the fox in the henhouse, for he certainly would not have been there without God’s tacit approval.  

     Furthermore, the serpent lied to Eve and enticed her to partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Some writers such as Garrison Russell in SonPlacing propose that the serpent was a man and was the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  “Trees” are types of men throughout the Hebrew literary tradition (Daniel 4 with Nebuchadnezzar as the “tree whose branches reached the heavens”).  Since when does a white oak or an ancient apple tree “know” anything?  The Hebrew prophets continually rant against idol makers who carve their gods from the dumb stump of a tree, “that can neither hear nor see.”   Also, the Savior, “who was the expressed image of the invisible God” of creation, called the Pharisees of His day, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers.”  
     And so they both partook and were initiated into a carefully prepared hothouse of emotions, “and the eyes of them both were opened.”  And the first thing that they “knew”—the first jewel of knowledge taken from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that “they knew they were naked.”  To be frank, they became aware that their genitals were exposed and opened to the world.  And the first action that they took after gaining this knowledge was that “they sewed fig leaves together” to cover the shame of their nakedness. 

       And like the picador enters right on cue for the second act of the bullfight ballet, they heard Yahweh’s voice as He called out to them in the garden (“YHWH,” the tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of the Creator, translated “LORD” in most translations).  “Where are you?” was the rhetorical question spoken by the All-Knowing.  Adam responded,  “I was afraid, because I was naked; and hid myself.”

      Wait a minute, Adam.  “Naked” was not even in your vocabulary before all this knowledge you just gained.  “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”  God asked.  Somebody has been talking about sex to you, haven’t they?   Did he tell you about getting naked? 

       And then Adam blames the woman, and the woman blames the serpent.  Yet all this does not surprise Yahweh in the least.  For it was all in His plan and purpose for mankind to sin and to suffer that vacuum of fear, alienation, sin, and shame.  For then mankind would need someone to save them from this abyss of depravity.  They would need a Savior.

       He set them up to fall in order to save them?  The irony is rich in this mother lode of wisdom.   God’s nature is love, for “God is love.”  But He could not express the perfection of His essence unless He had something to forgive.  He would incarnate Himself later in history and provide Himself as the Lamb sacrifice for Adam’s sin.  This is alluded to in Genesis 3:15.  Speaking to the serpent, He said that He would put hatred between the serpent and his offspring and Eve and her offspring.  As almost universally accepted, Eve’s offspring is Christ, who would “bruise the head” of the serpent, thus “destroying the works of the devil.”  And yet, the serpent’s offspring would bruise the heel of the seed of the woman, indicating the death of the Lamb at the hands of the Romans and Pharisees and his subsequent resurrection. 

        Yahweh’s plan was all along to reproduce Himself.  The law of “each seed bears its own kind” attests to this.  He likens Himself to the Seed, the Word.  But in order to reproduce Himself, He would have to create a need in mankind for Him.  Innocent fleshy robots have no need of a Savior, and Yahweh is the Savior (“I, even I, am YHWH, and beside me there is no Savior,” Isaiah 43:11).

 Adam and Eve’s shameful fall into sin and despair was carefully choreographed by a loving Creator.  He set them up to Fall so that they would have a need for His forgiving love.  “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  He would become Immanuel, “God with us,” coming “to take away the sins of the world.”  This would fulfill the Edenic promise of Genesis 3:15.  As in the parable of the creditor and the two debtors in Luke 7:41-48, the one who owed the most when the debt was forgiven, was the one who loved the most.  Hence, sin and guilt entered the equation so that forgiveness could come, yielding gratefulness and love in the heart of the forgiven.  Each seed (love and forgiveness) bears its own kind (gratefulness and love).      Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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October 18, 2008 · 8:06 pm

The Unforgiveable Sin–The Blasphemy of the Holy Ghost

     I was worried sick that I had gone and done it.  So I went to a wise man who listened to my concern.  I told him how empty and far away I felt from God, and how I felt that I had irreparably damaged myself with my Maker.  “Do you think there’s any hope for me?” I finally asked.

 

     He just smiled and said, “The very fact that you are here asking me about it shows that you have not committed the unforgiveable sin.  Those who have committed it are so prideful and so full of themselves that they would never humble themselves to ask.  They wipe their mouths and say, I have done no wrong.”

 

     “It’s just that I feel terrible about the things that I have done.”

 

     “It is a good thing to have godly sorrow about the sin in our lives.  Those sins are easily forgiven by God.  The unpardonable sin is another thing.”

 

     “It must be pretty bad for God to not ever forgive it.”   

  

      And then he told me the story of the Pharisees, the religious hypocrites in Christ’s day, the ones who committed the unforgiveable sin:

 

     –The Pharisees could only see the Savior after the outward appearance.  All they saw was his flesh and blood body.  They could not see the Spirit inside of Him.  They did not believe that the Father Yahweh was residing in Him. 

 

     They were always looking for ways to discredit the Son of God.  One day He and His disciples went out on the sabbath day and picked corn to eat.  The Pharisees chided Him for it.  The Savior showed them that David and the levitical priests profaned the sabbath day and yet were blameless in God’s sight (Matt. 12:1-5). 

 

     And then He drops a bombshell that was totally lost on them.  ‘But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple.’ Look, you hypocrites, He was saying.  The old temple and tabernacle were only types and shadows of the reality to come.  The true  temple of God is his people; that is His body.  And God, who you say you worship, is speaking to you right now through His very temple and you cannot even see or hear it.  The Spirit of Yahweh Himself is standing right in front of you in His very temple, and you can’t see, for you are blind!  The “Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath,” for the Creator Himself is residing in the Son and He created the sabbath.  So how can He profane it (Matthew 12:6-8)?  Later he goes into one of their synagogues and heals a man with a withered hand and declares that it is indeed lawful to do good on the sabbath day.  This incenses the Pharisees even more, and they get together to find out how they might kill him (12: 10-14). He gets away, and great multitudes come to him, and he heals all of their sick.  Then they brought one ‘possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw.’  This, of course, infuriated the Pharisees and they said that He cast out the devils by a bigger devil inside of Jesus (Yahshua)—the prince of the devils named Beelzebub.

    

     In other words, they said that it wasn’t the Father doing the miracles; it couldn’t be, they thought, for they did not believe that the Father was actually in the Son doing the miracles.  They were calling good evil.  They were blaspheming the Holy Spirit that was in the Son by saying that the Spirit, who is the Father, was not God but a devil.  This is the one and only sin that cannot be forgiven–not in this world or the world to come.

 

     The Father was the Spirit inside of the Son.  The Son was the “expressed image of the invisible God.”  The Son said that the works that he did was done by the Father within him.  When the Pharisees said that it was a devil inside the Son of God doing the miracles and not the Creator God, the Holy Spirit, then they had blasphemed God.  They had crossed the line; they had sealed their fate.  They had blasphemed the Holy Ghost.  This is the one unforgivable sin–

 

     When the wise man finished the story, I told him I was relieved.  And then he said, Yes, the truth will make you free, and he went on his way.                      Kenneth Wayne Hancock

 

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October 1, 2008 · 4:25 pm

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

     Why does God let the righteous and innocent suffer?  I have learned that bad things happen to the innocent because God allows it–for a very specific purpose.  It is a tough concept for us to swallow because we would not, of course, do it that way.  “Our thoughts are not His thoughts; our ways are not His ways.”  But “one event happens to them all” (Eccle. 2:14).  And that event is the suffering, usually at the hands of others.

     God allows bad things to happen to us so that we will have something or someone to forgive.  We are to be like Him; therefore, we need something to forgive. 

     We have to enter into the mind of God as seen in the scriptures in order to see His purpose, which is to make us His sons and daughters.  First, we are born of God.  He is our Father.  And then the law of harvest says, “Each seed bears its own kind.”  

     So if we indeed are His children, then we will have to do what He did, which is to forgive. If no one ever wronged us, we would never have an opportunity to forgive someone for the betrayals, lies, cheats, thefts, broken promises, et al, that we suffer at their hands.  Even when “acts of God” happen to us, we must forgive this “perceived wrong” that “God has done to us.”  If we don’t forgive, we harden into a bitter knot of gall that rises up in the center of our being and ruins us and those around us.

     I searched for this answer for 30 years before God was gracious enough to show me.  For, you see, I was accused wrongfully by someone that I loved, and it hurt with a pain that surpassed mere heartbreak.  This about forgiveness was not learned from a book, for one cannot take this in intellectually.  It was a revelation to me one day while I was, as Emerson and Thoreau said, in a receptively transcendental mood. 

     This knowledge healed me of the pain.  “The truth shall make  you free.”  Free from the wondering why, free from the tricks our hearts and minds play on us, free from the imaginations, doubts, and recriminations. 

     And so I pass this on to you.  Hope this helps.  Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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July 26, 2008 · 7:25 pm

“Overcome Evil With Good”–Forgiving One Another

     Been betrayed lately?  Lied to?  Cheated on?  Robbed?  Beaten up?  Victimized?  Abused mentally or physically?  

     Have you ever wondered, Why do good-hearted people suffer at the hands of evil ones?  It is the age old question explored in the Book of Job in the Bible.  Why do the righteous suffer?

     The short answer: God allows it.  For a very good reason.  He wants us to be like Him, but to be like Him, we must have something to forgive.  If this does not make much sense, we need to remember that “HIs ways are not our ways, His thoughts not our thoughts.”  We must look through His eyes to comprehend the answer to this one. 

     His eternal purpose is what He is about from the very beginning before time as we know it.  And it is this: He is in the process of reproducing Himself.  He is the Seed, the Word, and He is multiplying Himself in us. 

He Is the Forgiver

     We receive His Spirit within our hearts and begin to grow.  One of His major traits that He is keen on passing on to us is that He is the Forgiver.  “To forgive a wrong” is an attribute of God, for only He can do it; only He has a heart big enough for it. 

     We, in order to be His sons and daughters, should now forgive.  The English poet Alexander Pope wrote, “To err is human; to forgive is divine.” 

     But it is not in the old nature of man to forgive.  We hold on to things that people do to us.  We hold grudges and forge weapons of revenge, or harbor little agonies about wrongs committed aganist us.  

     And since forgiveness is not a natural human trait, we then are forced to go to God and ask Him for His Spirit-of-forgiveness to be channeled through us to the one who wronged us.

     This has a powerful impact on both the forgiver (us) and the forgiven (them).   We will have contacted God and witnessed His Spirit of forgiveness flowing through us, and the forgiven knows now that something greater than a victim stands there–in peace.

     This is how we are delivered from the evil done to us by others–when we forgive their sins toward us.  We have that power with God.  In fact, He wants us to forgive others, for it shows the world that we are His offspring.

     We are to “be partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4).  By forgiving, we show His godly nature in us.  This gives God glory.

     Forgiving will not put an end to “people hurting people.”  The old nature will sin against others. But we can transcend this lower, earthy, devilish cycle of hurt-for-hurt and an eye-for-an-eye.  With God’s help, this we can do to end the cycle of sin.  We forgive and thereby join the ranks of God’s princes and princesses who have now partaken of His divine nature–the nature of forgiving.

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