PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE ONENESS TRUTH

Michael F. Blume

Jesus Christ as Son of God was a man as much as any other man could possibly be.  But that is not all He was.  He was also God.  God did not send anyone besides Himself from Heaven to the earth.  God, Himself, manifested in the flesh.  He did not become flesh, but manifested in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16).  He dwelt or "tabernacled" among us (John 1:14).    Jesus referred to His body as His temple when He said, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up."  His body was the temple of the divine Father who dwelt in that body.  This is the same with every born again believer.  Our Bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost. The deity that Jesus Christ had within His Body was the Father, because we read "God was manifest in the flesh."

There is more than the great plan of redemption that was in Jesus' mind when He came to earth and incarnated.  He, being fully man, was also our perfect example of how believers should live in victory and in the intended manner in which God wanted mankind to live.  By observing how His life is our example to a successful and victorious life, we realize that the truth of the Oneness of the Godhead has many implications that affect our practical living as believers.  No other concept of the Godhead so perfectly lines up with the practical side of Christianity in implications as much as Oneness.  In fact, we will see that other concepts of the Godhead only confuse the thought of Christ being our example.

Many doctrines have arisen that teach ideas concerning the man Jesus Christ that inadvertently leads people down a pathway that never encourages them to see Jesus as our example.  For example, the doctrine of the Trinity teaches that there is not an absolute Oneness of God's person.  It teaches that God is a composite One, of three eternal persons.  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three separate and eternal persons who supposedly  have loved one another for all eternity according to this doctrine.  This is simply error.  God is One.  He is one in the most basic understanding of one.  He is not a composite One.  He is an Absolute One.  So the idea of an "eternal Son of God" distances from us the thought that we can live in as much victory as Jesus Christ the Son lived it.  Trinitarian ideas make one think that nobody could live like Jesus the Son of God because that is the so-called "eternal Son."  They reason, "Who can live that good?"  They imply that one can no more have that kind of victory than one can hope to be God.  True, Jesus is God, but His Sonship was as human as our's is.  And we are as much sons of God as He was!

There is only One great Spirit of God, and that One Spirit fills all the heaven of heavens.  Trinitarian doctrine is in grave error.  It is God's will to be all in all with humanity and the physical.

Man is a vessel created by God to contain God's Life in him.  God made man in His image.  All that he needed after having been created was God's Life in himself.  The fruit of Life in the Garden of Eden represented that element of God's Spirit which man required to put within himself.  But we read that man received into himself the wrong "filling."  As a result, a wrong "nature" entered into mankind and self-promotion became man's character.  Since the serpent urged man to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we discern that it was the serpent's nature that Adam received.  Self-exaltation filled Adam and we see evidence of this in his immediate reaction when he recognized his nakedness.  He attempted to solve the problem by himself.

The man immediately died the day he ate the fruit, just as God said he would.  God seemingly warned him that the thoughts of self-promotion independent of God would never benefit him.  God did not mean that He would kill Adam as a penalty when He told the man he would die, but He informed man the natural results of what walking away from God would be.  The nature of self-promotion is deadly and will not bring the desired results of true life, but will bring death instead.  The apostle Paul discovered this as he wrote Romans 7:9-11.
 

The filling of oneself with the knowledge of good and evil was basically what Paul described in this passage.  It is the fulfillment to promote self using self-ability.  God warned Adam that self-ability is non-existent because self simply cannot promote self to betterment.  One who seeks to know what is good and evil is one who seeks to improve oneself.  Why else would one want information regarding what is good and what is evil?    After attaining such knowledge, the individual hopes to avoid that which is evil and do that which is good -- through self-effort and no reliance upo God.  Knowledge replaces God.  One is supposedly not in need of looking towards God and His strength.  One is relying upon self and self-ability.  The serpent told the woman she would be as wise as gods; so, in other words, who needs God?  One is unintentionally trying to make oneself like God by living upon knowledge of good and evil alone.  Lucifer himself tried to live in independence of God.  This tells us that it is the nature of the devil that Adam received when he partook of the forbidden fruit.  No wonder it was forbidden!

We see this nature again when God confronted him and interrogated him as to how he knew he was naked.  Adam replied in a manner that reveals his attempts to preserve himself safe from rebuke and "pass the buck"  to blame the woman.  He even implied God was to blame since he said, "The woman you gave to me, she offered me the fruit and I did eat."  The woman likewise responded in  self-preservation by accusing the serpent as the actual reason for her failure, rather than admit self-error.

Plainly, man was not acting very godly by any means.  What a paradox!  In trying to become more godly, man's route through self-effort actually caused man to oppose godliness.  Had man instead received God's Life into himself, man would have acted godly.  God's nature would have filled him.  In no other way could man be made godly than by having God within himself.

He already received the knowledge of good as well as the knowledge of evil, so the awareness of godliness was certainly packed inside that fruit.  Is not godliness a "good" thing?  Was the fruit not the knowledge of "good" as well as evil? The problem was not the awareness of godliness, but how to achieve that lifestyle.

Religion throughout the world today, for the most part, is basically the promotion of the thought that self can make self live in a godly manner.  This is utter folly.  It is no more than a repetition of Adam's error.

Man needs direction from God.  Man needs God's Word and God's Spirit. God's Spirit guides us to all truth.

Paul repeated Adam's folly by studying Law and gathering all its information of what is good and what is evil.  He said that sin used that information and killed Paul.  God told Adam he would die should he take the forbidden fruit and eat it.  Paul repeated Adam's mistake.

Please do not confuse the issue at this point.  The Law of God is not the devil's nature.  And the Law of God is not evil.  The reason God sent the Law, knowing full well that man could not obey it with sin in his flesh, was to help man see his own inadequacy to do good and avoid evil.  It was meant to show man that man needs God's strength.  Paul explained that the Law would stop the mouths of all the world, Jew as well as Gentile, and convince man that he is in need of salvation from sin (Romans 3:19).  Law came so that sin might abound (Romans 5:20).  What this implies is that we would never know the plight we put ourselves into unless God sent a Law, as He did, which we could only keep if we had no sin and were each  a God who needed no other Deity to rely upon.  Well, we have sin in our flesh, and we are not Gods.  So we could not keep law.

God knew that the evil nature in mankind would react violently when a holy law was given to people to try and make themselves do good.

Adam's sin was disobedience and ultimately in thinking himself a distinct being that did not require God's life nor strength.

The serpent managed to get the woman to desire the fruit in order to make herself like a god.  The sin on her part was lusting after godhood.  It was putting herself in a position where she would not need God.  Was this not Lucifer's original sinful thought?

Sin was activated when the man and woman ate the fruit and then they died.  Paul saw that sin was revived when he received the law and he, too, died.

Mankind did not get the opportunity to put God's Life into him again until Jesus Christ came.  Jesus came in Adam's place as a man but also possessed the Life in Him upon His birth.  Adam did not have that life.  This is one major difference between Adam and Jesus Christ.  Another difference was that God did not produce this Son of God by taking some more soil and forming Him.  Adam was of the earth, earthy.  But Jesus was the Lord from Heaven.  God, Himself, manifested in flesh.  But do not let us remove ourselves from the truth that Jesus is still our example as a man.

Realizing that Jesus is God is a good thing to do.  Only God, Himself, having manifested in flesh could bring about a Son of God into the world since Adam's time.  God was fully capable of taking more soil and forming it into another Adam, but where would that leave the rest of the former humanity?  Had God begun anew and had a second Adam and in the manner in which the first Adam was made, and hope this next one would not fail, He would have to dispose of the rest of the humanity to which we belong.  And that would not save us, but replace us with another race of humans.  If a second Adam came into this world by God, after the first one failed, and God decided to use this new Adam to be progenitor of a new race of people, leaving the older race in sin, this new Adam would father many sons of God, and the rest of us who came from the first Adam would be a bunch of renegades in their midst.  We would have to be destroyed and we would be without hope.  God did not want this.

The only way God could start again, but yet rescue us from the state of sin into which Adam put us, was to manifest in flesh as the Last Adam, Himself.  Let me explain why Oneness is the only doctrine that fits the entire message of God for mankind.

Imagine God's desire to pick one of us and use one of us as the New Adam.  He would require one who is not at all sinful.  One would have to be sinless.  Now that immediately presents a problem, because mankind is born in sin.  Adam made many people sinners (Romans 5:19).  There would not be a single human being whom God could choose to begin anew.  We are all sinful.

We already discussed that the idea of beginning a new race from another made from the dust would leave us without hope.  So the only way for God to start anew, and yet save us in the process, was for Him to incarnate Himself.  He had to be wholly man without sin, and yet He was God at the same time.  This is the doctrine of the Oneness.  There was no "eternal Son" as the trinity doctrine would imagine, because the only purpose for a Son of God, as was Adam (Luke 3:38), was to head humanity up under his leadership and act as King under God.

God told Adam to multiply and fill the earth.  Adam would beget many such sons of God, so they would have the same nature he had, and likewise do the Lord's will.  Mankind was meant to fill the earth with glory.  God's life would be inside man and man would allow himself to manifest God's nature in the world.  God would then be "all in all."

Since all people born into the world are already Adam's sons,   he could not have a Son of God by picking one of them.  He would have to incarnate Himself.  But that is not all.  The death of this Son of God would also be necessary, for that is how we would become sons of God, too.  In order to become a Son of God, something must be done about our state of being a son of Adam since birth.  It was birth that brought us into this race of Adam, so only one thing can remove us from it -- death.

Death was a twofold necessity.  We have to die in order to leave this race of humanity.  And we also had to die because we have sinned.  The soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:20).

Normally, if we died to pay the penalty of having sinned, though death would free us from this race of Adam, we would be non-existent in this world.  We could then never enjoy membership in another family.  What good would we then be?  We would simply be dead.  We would have left the human family and paid the penalty of sin, and that would have been it.  But God did a wonderful miracle for us.  Nobody said we could not have another sinless human stand in our place and die for us and as us.  And once dead by proxy, nobody said we could not be adopted into another family of new humanity.  In fact, the principle of sacrifice was "the death of another in the place of oneself," so that oneself could be free from the penalty of sin.  And this is exactly why Jesus Christ died as us on the cross.  By proxy we died.  This is called the vicarious atonement found through Christ's death.

Though we know a man can be born again and removed from Adam's race into Christ's new humanity, God could not choose one of us and ignore the sin and cause him to be born of His Spirit, and with him begin a new race.  That would leave out the need for man's proper "exit" from Adam's race.  It would violate God's own rules.

The only way God could have a race of sons of God transformed from Adam's race of sons and truly begotten of His Spirit would be for Him to become that new Adam Himself.  He would be "kin" to humanity, since a "present-race" human mother would birth Him, and that would allow Him to stand in our places.  But yet He would be without sin, because God would be the Father of this Son, and God's NATURE would thus be in him.  One's nature is received from one's father.  That is why God cannot simply speak and thus "create" sons as He spoke and created the animals and waters and light.  God must "beget" sons.  Even Adam was not created by the spoken word alone.  God "formed" man of the dust of the earth and breathed His life into him.  Man only needed to receive the fruit of life and be partaker of God's nature.

Since Jesus Christ was the Lord from Heaven, He already had that nature in Himself upon birth.  Since Adam was of the earth he had to go to the tree of life and eat in order to receive God's nature.

As Son of God, Jesus had authority and was Head of new humanity.  Now, when Jesus died, He died having not committed any sin.  And since death is only the penalty for the soul that sins, Jesus died an illegal death.  He resurrected from the dead, as His right to do so was certainly valid, and claimed that all who would accept His death as their own would thus be already removed from Adam's race.  They might still walk and talk and breathe air,  but they are removed from Adam.  And because they still walk and talk, they can receive God's Life in the form of His Spirit inside their bodies.

And all such believers have the ONE, SINGLE SPIRIT OF GOD in them.

The Baptism of the Holy Ghost is the reception of the ONE SPIRIT of God.  It unites all believers into one Body.  And any thought of a trinity of God, as though Son is a person distinct from the Father and is Spirit, and Father is Spirit, and Holy Ghost is Spirit, sends the whole picture into utter confusion and nonsense.  We do not receive three spirits!  We do not manifest three persons!  We manifest ONE SPIRIT and ONE PERSON.  In fact, you could say the Person of God is the only real person in the entire universe!!  We manifest His person. And the Son of God is not a person aside the Father, but rather a human person intended to manifest God's Spirit.  Trinity doctrine befuddles the entire point of God manifesting Himself in flesh.

Jesus was the express image of the Father's PERSON.

Jesus did not manifest his own person, but the person of the Father. And the practical truth about this most Oneness concept of Jesus is that we, too, must manifest the person of the Father. Though Jesus is God manifest as a man, and the Almighty Himself, He was yet totally man at the same time.  And as man, He knew His purpose was to manifest the Father within Him.  That is our purpose.

For the present, the manifestation of God lets the unsaved world see God.  As we love one another, the world indirectly sees God.  But the eternal purpose of this manifestation of God through humanity is so that God will be "all in all."

When it is all said and done, God desires to fill all in all.  He wants to be all and He wants to be all "in all".

There is no eternal Son because the only purpose of a Son of God is to have a human in this earth who manifests the person of the Father.  God needs a vessel for His Spirit to indwell in this physical plain.  Adam was called a son of God (Luke 3:38) for this very reason.  Romans 5:12 reads that Adam was made after the likeness of him that was to come.  God knew Adam would fail, and when Adam was created, Adam was made with the plan in mind for a future Son of God who would be none other than God Himself manifested in flesh.

A son of God requires both a Father and a mother.  The Father must be God since the child is a Son of God.  But the mother must be of this earth in order for the child to indeed be human.  Adam was birthed from the earth, itself.  The earth is not our mother in the sense that the New Agers blaspehmously call earth mother, as though the mother deserves worship.  Earth deserves no more worship than Mary.  And Mary deserves no worship.  Jesus' mother was Mary.   The worship goes to God the Father alone, for the mother only is the means to effect the existence of a Son by the Father's life.

There was no Son of God before Adam.  God's Spirit was intended to indwell Adam, the son of God.  God planned to manifest thousands of years later in flesh a Son of God, and according to that pattern, God made Adam.  This is not unlike the tabernacle.  There was no heavenly tabernacle as such before Moses' tabernacle.  But the pattern from which Moses' Tabernacle was made was a plan that God would have a CHURCH thousands of years later.  The tabernacle, then, was made in the likeness of that Church that was to come.  Man is a tabernacle or Temple.  The spirit, soul and body of a man correspond to the holiest place, holy place and outer court  in the tabernacle.

Some proponents of the Trinity doctrine teach that man is spirit, soul and body because God is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and God was so for eternity.  Yes, man is made in God's image.  However, man is not three persons, but one person with one name.  Man is made this way so as to be able to manifest the Person of God, which Person manifested thousands of years later in three mannerisms.  Since Adam was made in the likeness of "Him that was to come," we see that the reason God made Adam with the faculties of spirit, soul and body was not because because God was already manifesting as Father, Son and Spirit.  Son had not yet been begotten!  The very meaning behind SON implies a beginning by reference to the fact that a Son is a CHILD.  A child is by reference in existence soley because of two parents -- a mother and a father.  But Adam was created "after the pattern", or in the likeness, as what God Himself would manifest in flesh.

We must see there is only one true Spirit of God.  There is only one true Person of God.  We are intended to be members of the Body of Christ as Adam's descendants would have been of Adam's body, per se.  We are meant to be expressers of God's single person.  As a whole, the Church expresses God's Single person. The idea of mankind being vessels, including Jesus Christ the Son of God, completely destroys the doctrine of the trinity and manifests its grave error of errors.

Jesus Christ the Son of God expressed the Father.  The Father manifested in Jesus' life on the earth.  The Father literally, despite trinitarians' objections, indwelt the Son as much as the fruit of Life would have indwelt Adam had he eaten it. The aspect of indwelling the Son is contrary to trinitarian doctrine, but is essential to the understanding of Christ as Son and our example of how to live and what we were created to live like.

Before the cross, the Father only had one single human being to manifest Himself through perfectly.  Therefore that Son had to multiply and fill the earth by bringing forth MANY SONS OF GOD.

Jesus then said... This is filled with insight!  We must see that "our" life is fallen and devilish-natured.  We manifest the lusts of the devil.  We do not even manifest our own lusts, since we are expressers and vessels that manifest that which we "house."  We must have GOD'S LIFE.  Adam required God's Life from the tree of life. Jesus said the lusts of their father they will do.  Not their own lusts.

God told the serpent that the seed of the woman would be at enmity with the seed of the serpent.  There are only TWO SEEDS in this world.  The seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.  We know that the Seed is Christ.  God even spoke to Abraham and his "seed" singular, in this context.

Revelation speaks of the seed of the woman again. It is the seed of the woman because through virgin birth would Christ come, and His Father would be God and not a human man.  Since someone in this world had to bring Him forth, and since the Father had to be God, He is called the seed of the woman.  Since we must be born again to be of the Seed of the woman, Christ the Last Adam,  and to have God as our Father, we know that children of God are of the "good" seed.  That makes it stand to reason that the rest of unsaved humanity are actually of the seed of the devil.  All who are born in sin are of their father the devil.

If born-again people alone are of the woman's seed, then what about the world?  They all must be of the serpent's seed.

I do not promote the carnal version of this thought that is popularly called "Serpent Seed doctrine" as promoted by William Marrion Branham in the fifties.  That false teaching proposes that the devil had literal sex with Adam and Eve.  That is nonsense.  It seems there no more a literal fruit of the false forbidden tree than there was a literal male seed from the serpent that impregnated Eve.  Both are outward and literal and miss the mark.  The Bible says we are begotten of God by the incorruptible seed of the Word.  The WORD OF GOD is a seed.  And Jesus is the WORD MADE FLESH.  He is both the Father, in His deity -- the seed -- and the expression of that Father, the Son and child begotten of that Seed.

We, however, are merely the begotten children of God.

That SEED of Christ died and was planted to arise as many Sons of God.  As Adam lay down and slept and awoke to find that He had multiplied and another human was alive, so are there many sons of God begotten of the Father since Jesus Christ died on the cross.

Jesus is increasing in the form of many like sons of God across the world.  The Kingdom is spreading.  Jesus said the Kingdom is in you.  And since there are more and more sons of God as time goes by, and seeing that the Gospel is being preached to more and more nations, causing more and more children to be born into the Kingdom, we can see that "the Lord" is increasing.  Jesus is increasing.  When we read of the Kingdom consuming all other kingdoms, we are reading about many sons of God.  There will be more citizens of the Kingdom of God than of any nation on earth.  Saying "the Kingdom is in you" is saying "the more sons of God there are across the world, the more the kingdom spreads."

The single Spirit of the Father now indwells many vessels all over the world, and the Last Adam has multiplied greatly.  His Spirit operates simultaneously throughout the world in various locations, whereas before the cross Jesus could be the only vessel through which God could manifest at one time.  In this manner of Jesus increasing, God's glory would fill the earth.

Jesus perfectly expressed the Father to such a degree that He said, "If you have seen me you have seen the Father."  The fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Him.  The one Single Person and Spirit of God Almighty dwelt in that human.  Jesus is the express image of the Father.  These statements clearly reveal the truth and implications of the Oneness doctrine.  The Church is now God's Temple, whereas Jesus Christ was the temple before the cross.  Though they destroy the temple, in three days He would raise it again and it would multiply!!!  Together, we house the single Person of God.

The Oneness truth, therefore, has practical -- the most practical -- implications.  It implies there is only One Person and Spirit who must indwell us as a single Body of believers, and express Himself through us.  Since it teaches that Jesus Christ is not eternally a Son of God, but is God the Father who began to manifest through the Son for the purpose of expressing His Fatherhood in this world, the Oneness truth confirms the truth of all of mankind's need to express the Father as many sons of God.  Why else would Jesus as "Son of God" hold the same title that all true believers have as "sons of God"?    Why else would Jesus be not ashamed to call us "brethren" (Hebrews 2:11)?

I, through the example of Jesus Christ, the non-eternal Son of God, am ordained to express and manifest God's Spirit in this world.  Before the world began there was no Son of God but in God's mind and forethought. God manifested and expressed Himself when He created the world by SPEAKING it into existence.  See Genesis 1.  This is the true meaning behind the thought of John 1 where we read that the Word was in the beginning, and all things were created by Him and for Him.  And this word was with God and was God.  It is God's expression.

Sons of God, including Jesus the Son, are humans who express the Father.  The Son of God is never referred to outside the thought of the incarnation.  The reason this is so is due to the fact that Adam failed, and God, Himself, had to manifest in flesh to begin a new creation of sons of God all expressing the Father.  He was the Head and example for all humanity who would be heir to Sonship.

The principle and fundamental truth of Oneness teaching is that there is only One absolute God -- one and only one omnipresent Spirit.  There are not two or more persons that comprise the Godhead.  Only One.  There is no eternal Son, but the One who became Son is eternal.  The Son of God had a beginning in the manger.  Gabriel revealed to Mary that God's Spirit would Father a child through her, and the child would therefore be called "the Son of God."  No other reason is ever given in the Bible for Jesus being called "the Son of God."  And since this reason alone involves a point in time and space, then there is no eternal Son.

Since Jesus was our example, as well as our means of redemption, we see that Oneness implies the very key to our purpose in God -- to be expressers of the Father.

We do not express three persons, but one Person of God's Spirit.  Some would seek to confuse and befuddle the entire plan of God with a trinity doctrine that  proposes that God is three persons and that the eternal Son is one of them alongside the Father.  Though the Bible never does say that the Son pre-existed the incarnation as Son, but only as Logos, and though the Bible does say that the Son reveals His lesser greatness than the Father, Trinitarians will still teach a pre-existent Son who is eternally co-equal with the Father.  They say He only became less great during the time after the incarnation.  The truth is that there is no eternal Son of God that makes us lose sight of our compatible sonship, and was not until, as Gabriel told Mary, a child would be literally begotten of God's Spirit through a human mother.

If Trinity should be true and we must manifest God, then in confusion we must manifest three different persons.  This very thought contradicts all Biblical teaching.  Trinity must simply admit their doctrine has no implications as does the Oneness towards the practical side of Christianity.

Trinity also must concede that there is an eternal mother, since eternal Son demands an eternal mother as well as an eternal Father.  By definition, as son cannot exist with out being born of a mother and begotten by a Father.  If the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, then he is eternally born of an eternal mother.

Trinity teaches that we receive Jesus' Spirit, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit (another person) and we can have the Spirit of the Father in us (even another person).  They can deny it all they want, but they are inadvertently teaching that we receive three persons into our beings and thus three spirits.

We do not manifest three persons.  Just one.  There is One Spirit and One Body and one hope of our calling.  These three units are relative.  The one Body manifests the one spirit, and as members of that body, we each have the same single hope of being called to manifest God that He might be all in all in this world.

To believe in three eternal persons of the Godhead is to confuse the beautiful clarity of the expression of the Single Person of God's Spirit through humanity.  What a ploy of hell to sidetrack man from victorious living!  If Trinity doctrine were true, and Jesus was our example, showing us how we can manifest the Father as He did, then what about the other two persons?  What about the Son and the Holy Spirit?  We would manifest the Father but never the Son and Spirit. And they are supposed to be co-equal?  Talk about an unequal equal-opportunity!

The enemy's plot in concocting a trinity doctrine was to remove the essential teaching of the Oneness that implies our need to manifest the Single Spirit and Person of God through our lives.  If our eyes could be removed from looking at Jesus as our complete and entire example of how to manifest God's Spirit, then we would be rendered weak an ineffective having not fulfilled our purpose.  Can you see how the trinity doctrine veers man away from this great truth of Spirit-led living?  Can you see how Oneness fully confirms it!!!

Thank God for Oneness truth!