“ THE TESTIMONY AND THE WITNESS “
                                   By
                                    J W Luman

             Part 1 - Comprehending Christ as The
                      Testimony and The Witness

We’ll begin in John’s gospel chapter 11. We’ve all read this so many 
times I’m sure. We’re going to be looking at The Resurrection, but now 
we’re interested in the words that are exchanged between Martha and the 
Lord Jesus. Verse 21, “Then Martha said unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst 
been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, 
whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. Jesus saith unto 
her, Thy brother shall rise again.” Now a much better translation of 
that, in the literal translation is that Jesus is saying to her “your 
brother will be rising.” That is a literal translation of the Greek 
text and it brings such a living quality to the text. In the King James 
Version it is translated “your brother shall rise again” but the 
literal translation is an ongoing thing: “your brother will be 
rising.” “Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in 
the resurrection at the last day.” Martha is saying to Him, I am aware 
that he will be rising in the resurrection in the last day. Verse 25, 
“Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life; he who is 
believing in me, even if he should be dying, shall be living. And 
everyone who is living and believing in me should by no means be dying 
for the aeon. Are you believing this?”

What we want to look at now is just this statement of the Lord - I AM 
THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. And there’s no way, regardless of how 
we look at this that we can translate this as ‘I do resurrections’. No, 
“I AM the resurrection and the life.” As I was confronted by this over 
and over again, it challenged a lot of what I had thought resurrection 
to be. I want to consider this in light of the Administration of the 
Fulness of Time. It is in pursuit of The Resurrection that we are doing 
this. It is seeking to comprehend The Resurrection as it is in Christ 
Jesus. And if this challenges some of our thoughts - well, so be it, but 
we must come to understand in an ever broadening way The Truth that 
Christ Himself is the embodiment of, so that in our comprehending of Him 
we may experience more of Him. And so that which He is comes right in 
and finds expression and manifestation in our lives now. 

There is a tremendous area of study concerning the “I Am’s” Of Christ. 
And this is no different than any of the other “I Am’s” Of Christ. 
Jesus says “ I am the way” and we should understand that doesn’t mean 
He will show us a way. I AM THE WAY. It’s hard for the natural mind to 
get a hold of that because we want someone to show us a way - either a 
direction or a method or a manner. But Jesus says, “I am the Way, I am 
the Truth, I am the Life.” And He very emphatically brings those things 
into the very Person of Himself, and takes them out of the realm of the 
natural or what we would naturally think a way to be. Very few of us 
would naturally think of a way as being a Person, but He declares The 
Way as being Himself, and the Truth and the Life. 

He also says of Himself, “I am the Door.” It isn’t too hard for us to 
agree with or comprehend when He says, “I am the good shepherd”, but 
“I am the Door” is a little difficult. “I am the Way, I am the truth, 
I am the Life” - in that same respect and same relation He says, “I am 
the Resurrection and the Life.” He personifies these things. The Term 
“I” and “am” there are not pronouns as we might suppose; they are 
words, expressions that are only used in the very emphatic term, and it 
has to do with the Self Existing One. So Christ is incorporating into 
Himself these particulars - Way, Truth, and Life, The Door, and now The 
Resurrection.

We have spoken before of The Administration of the Fulness of Time where 
we come to see The Cross as being the center of all things with God. All 
things sooner or later must be brought into The Cross, and all that is 
of Christ proceeds forth from The Cross. The Cross is the very center of 
God’s universe; it is the very center of God’s plan and purpose. And The 
Cross is summed up in The Person of His death, His burial and His 
resurrection - not merely a place or a time or an object. The Cross - 
standing for Christ and Him crucified; incorporated into that is His 
death, His burial, His resurrection. 

So on one side of The Cross we have The Testimony, and that literally 
involves everything from Genesis to Malachi. And on the other side of 
The Cross we have what is referred to by the scriptures themselves as 
The Witness. The Testimony and The Witness. We’re going to bring into 
that Witness this business of The Resurrection, and we’ll see that they 
are not only very closely tied together, but in fact, The Witness is of 
the Resurrection, the Witness is by The Resurrection. The Witness that 
God is after in the earth is bound up with The Resurrection, and those 
who walk in Christ in that comprehension. But right now for purposes of 
this search I want to divide, in our hearts, The Testimony from The 
Witness so we can see they are distinguished one from the other, and you 
can not actually have one in truth without the other. As I said, The 
Testimony is everything from Genesis to Malachi. That word is used over 
and over again in the scripture. It begins as early as Exodus 16:34, 
“As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up (the manna) before 
The Testimony, to be kept.” It’s interesting that everything comes in 
contact with The Testimony - the manna was laid up before the Testimony. 
What is The Testimony? 

Exodus 25:16, “ And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I 
shall give thee.” The Testimony here is that which God with His finger 
wrote on two tables of stone. That’s called The Testimony. It answers 
directly to The Witness because everything of the Old Testament is 
summed up in The Testimony. It’s summed up in those two tables that God 
gave to Moses: everything from Genesis to Malachi is given meaning by 
what the scripture calls “The Testimony”. Let’s read some of it. 
Exodus 25:21, “And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; 
and in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee. And 
there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the 
mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the 
testimony...” See, when The Testimony comes into the Ark: from that 
time on, The Ark becomes “The Ark of The Testimony”. Exodus 26:33,  
“And thou shalt hang up the vail under the taches, that thou mayest 
bring in thither within the vail the ark of the testimony: and the vail 
shall divide unto you between the holy place and the most holy. Verse 
34, “ And thou shalt put the mercy seat upon the ark of the testimony 
in the most holy place. Exodus 27:21, “ In the tabernacle of the 
congregation without the vail, which is before the testimony...” Exodus 
30:26, “And thou shalt anoint the tabernacle of the congregation 
therewith, and the ark of the testimony”. Exodus 30:36, talking about 
the incense, “And thou shalt beat some of it very small, and put of it 
before the testimony in the tabernacle of the congregation, where I will 
meet with thee; it shall be unto you most holy.” Exodus 31:7, “The 
tabernacle of the congregation, and the ark of the testimony, and mercy 
seat that is thereupon, and all the furniture of the tabernacle.” 
Exodus 31:18, “And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of 
communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of 
stone, written with the finger of God.” Exodus 32:15, “And Moses 
turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the 
testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; 
on the one side and on the other were they written.” Exodus 34:29, “ 
And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two 
tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, 
that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with 
him.”

As you read these all you notice how the order has changed. When things 
begin to come together we go from The Ark to “The Ark of The 
Testimony”; and then we go from the Tabernacle, and even the Tabernacle 
of the congregation to Numbers 1:53 where it is “The Tabernacle of 
Testimony”. Everything wherein this Testimony dwells bears its name and 
its identity from then on. This is extremely important when it comes 
over to The Witness side for you and I. In the scripture you can see how 
The Testimony changed the name of everything, and that The Testimony 
determined the relationship of everything, and determined the camping 
order of all of Israel. EVERYTHING WAS DETERMINED BY THE TESTIMONY! 
This indeed must be a tremendously great Testimony if everything is 
determined by it. We see two stones with some writing upon it - God sees 
The Testimony. It is very much more than what is just obvious: The Ten 
Commandments. No, it is God with His finger writing upon two tablets and 
giving it to Israel as a Testimony. A whole piece of furniture was built 
that in it may be placed The Testimony. You say there were other things 
put in there. Yes, but they are always referenced to The Testimony, 
because the Ark is the place of The Testimony.

Then as The Ark of The Testimony, the Tabernacle becomes its resting 
place, so The Tabernacle becomes The Tabernacle of The Testimony. And so 
The Testimony and Tabernacle is placed in the midst of Israel and 
determines the encampment of the Israelites and indeed their marching 
order. So Israel becomes a Testimony unto the Lord in the midst of the 
earth. This is a scriptural line of thought, because of The Testimony. 
Consequently what we find is everything from Genesis to Malachi is of 
The Testimony, because it actually has The Tabernacle as its center 
piece. You can bring The Ark out of Genesis, out of the flood, right 
here and you can see that it is the same thing. It is what is being 
spoken of over and over again. Even in that Ark there was in fact a 
Testimony, and it was placed in The Ark. And what went in The Ark as a 
Testimony came out of The Ark as a Witness in type and in shadow.

So this whole thing is summed up as The Testimony. Then Jesus finally 
says, “You search the scriptures. I know that you do. You search the 
scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life, and they are 
they which testify of Me”. They are a Testimony of Me! It is important 
then that we understand that the one side of The Cross is a Testimony. 
And if we understand that any part of it is, we have to understand that 
every part of it is. And if you search it enough, any part that you 
might not understand, I guarantee that it will come into relationship to 
The Testimony. If you will follow it, it will all relate itself to The 
Testimony in The Ark in The Tabernacle in the midst of Israel, in the 
earth - God giving a Testimony of that which His Son not only would do, 
but what His Son would become; God giving a Testimony of The Cross, not 
as a place, not as an instrument, but as a reality established in a 
Person and worked in a people; God giving Testimony of that which would 
come by death, by burial, by resurrection - GOD TESTIFYING OF  HIS SON. 
If you’ll look into The Testimony you’ll see all of that. There’s no way 
that you can come to The Tabernacle and not see The Cross. There’s no 
way that you can come to the Feasts and the festivals of Israel and not 
comprehend His death, His burial and His resurrection as those three 
days, those three Sabbath days. There’s no way that you can look at the 
priesthood and their ministry here and not understand the working of The 
Cross. There’s no way you can do that if you look at it in light of that 
Testimony of God. 

So in the midst of all of this there dwells a Testimony, and so 
tremendous, so weighty and heavy is that Testimony that everything that 
it immediately dwells in, but that which that furniture dwells in, and 
that which that tent dwells in, and that which that nation dwells in - 
everything becomes The Testimony! This is so tremendously important that 
we understand that nothing escapes the attention of God. Nothing was 
without the order of The Lord, and he ordered it all according to The 
Testimony. Every part of creation He ordered according to The Testimony. 
The Testimony - that which God was seeking to set forth in open 
testimony of that which was predetermined and would be fulfilled in His 
Son. The Testimony of The Way, The Truth and The Life. Jesus says, I am 
that Way, that Truth, that Life. I am that death, that burial, that 
resurrection. I am that Door - The Testimony shows it to us. Jesus says, 
I am that Door. There is no other Door than The Door upon which the 
blood of the Lamb was placed back here in The Testimony. Jesus says I’m 
that Door! There is no other entering in, except the entering in that 
Israel did during that night of the death of the firstborn. Jesus says I 
am that Door. If any seek to come by any other way than Me, they are 
thieves and they are robbers. I AM THE DOOR - no man cometh but by Me!

What is He doing here? He is answering The Testimony, but the point is 
that the whole of Genesis to Malachi represents The Testimony. This is a 
tremendous thing that sums up not only the people, places and the 
things, but Jesus says the scripture that records those people, places 
and things, that scripture testifies of Him. I don’t know of any place 
where He limited that to a few scriptures. “You search the 
scriptures”, and there He is speaking about the volume of the Book, 
“and they are they which testify of Me. But you won’t come to Me that 
you might have life.” Where do you do that? By The Cross! THE TESTIMONY 
BRINGS US TO THE CROSS!

Now as regarding The Witness, let’s read Revelation 1:5, “And from 
Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the 
dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, 
and washed us from our sins in his own blood.” Revelation 3:14, “And 
unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith 
The Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation 
of God.” THE TESTIMONY AND THE WITNESS. What I’m talking about here is 
that each of these represents a comprehension of Christ. At one time 
Christ was nothing more than a Testimony - that’s all He was. He was a 
word of prophecy, He was a piece of furniture, He was an Isaac, He was a 
staff in the hand of Moses - He was a Testimony. He was a word in the 
mouth of the prophets as He whose right it is. But He who was a 
Testimony, when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son 
to answer The Testimony - made of a woman, made under the law, made for 
a little while lower than angels for the suffering of death, made 
Himself no reputation, but took upon Himself the form of a servant, was 
found in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, 
became obedient unto death, even the death of The Cross. CHRIST 
FULFILLED THE TESTIMONY, AND HE CAME FORTH AS THE LIVING WITNESS. 
The Testimony is in word, The Witness is in Spirit - there’s the 
difference between the two. The Testimony is no good without the death 
of the Testator. Having fulfilled The Testimony He came forth and now is 
The Living Witness. And He says to us, Ye shall be witnesses unto Me.” 

It is not Testimonies that the Lord is after on this side of The Cross, 
but living expressions of Himself! What is The Witness? It is the 
embodiment, in Spirit, in Truth of all that The Testimony spoke 
concerning. And where did He sum it up? Where does The Testimony bring 
you? The Testimony does bring you to death! There must be the death of 
the Testator, or all of this from Genesis to Malachi would have been 
worthless. What good are sacrifices if The Lamb does not come? What good 
would the priesthood have been if it was only summed up in the blood of 
bulls and goats? What good would it be? Take any aspect of The 
Testimony, and if Christ had not come, if He had not died, if he is not 
risen, then what good is it? What purpose does it serve? The Testimony 
comes to The Cross - it doesn’t go beyond The Cross; it comes to The 
Cross, and here in the death of the Testator - His death, His burial, 
His resurrection - in Him it is finished and it is fulfilled. And He 
comes forth in resurrection as The Living Witness, the faithful and True 
Witness - not as a Testimony, not as one speaking of something yet to 
come, not as one speaking of another to come, but as The Witness of all 
that has been spoken, as The Witness of all that has been testified. And 
where is it that He lives, except in you?

Let me rephrase that. How is it that we live except by Him? And why do 
we live then, except we be witnesses of all that He, The Faithful and 
The True Witness is? And in fact, how can you and how are we witnesses 
unto Him, except we be witnesses of all that He is? Now that term 
“Witness” is an interesting term. Basically there are two definitions 
of the term “witness” from the Greek. One of them is ‘an eyewitness’, 
distinctly referring to eye witnesses. This is tremendous because of all 
the references of the Apostles concerning that we are not telling 
fables, we are not telling stories - we beheld His glory, we saw Him! 
Paul, standing before King Agrippa, standing before the Sanhedrin, 
standing before whomever and wherever, declared The Resurrection, saying 
again, God revealed His Son in me. Oh, that the eyes of your 
understanding would be enlightened, that you may know Him, that you may 
see Him. You can not be witness except you are an eye witness - not in 
the term that “witness” is used. You must have seen Him in this 
instance. You must have seen Him in The Resurrection, because that’s how 
He appears - HE APPEARS IN THE RESURRECTION - HE IS THE RESURRECTION - 
He appears living! Look at Him appearing in the midst of the Throne in 
the book of Revelation. How did He appear? How did He appear to John? 
What did He say? “ I AM HE THAT LIVETH, was dead, I am alive forever 
more.” And then a little farther. In the midst of The Throne was a Lamb 
as though he were slain; and yet He was empowered with seven horns and 
with seven eyes and is very much alive! Who is this? It is He that comes 
by death, burial and resurrection. It is the appearing of The Lord - it 
is The Witness of God!

Now, all things are proved by The Resurrection. Look back here at the 
Testimony. One time a year the High Priest goes all the way behind the 
vail to The Ark of The Covenant, or The Ark of The Testimony - one time 
a year. This is the Feast of Atonement, and he goes back there with the 
blood of the sacrifice. We know that our High Priest entered not there 
by the blood of bulls or goats, but by His own blood. But the Priest 
goes there offering blood for the sins of Israel and his own sins as 
well. And as he does that all of Israel stands here - waiting. They are 
not out doing chores; this is a Sabbath day, but this is a particular 
Sabbath day. And they are all waiting. What are they waiting for? They 
are waiting to see if the Priest makes it out! They are waiting to see 
if everything is accepted by the Lord. And if it is, it will be proven 
in the fact that the Priest is able to get back out of The Tabernacle 
and appear before them. Now what would we think that this is in 
testimony of, except The Resurrection? He’s taken blood in there, 
symbolizing His death and the death of Israel. He has taken it to the 
very Throne of God and sprinkled it there. He does this in fear and 
trembling, that everything is exactly right; that the animal killed was 
the right animal, that he was slaughtered the right way, that he’s 
dressed properly. Everything has to be in absolute obedience to The 
Testimony, or he isn’t going to come out alive, because God refuses the 
sacrifice; something is not right about the blood, something is wrong 
with the procedure. Don’t we see what that is?

It’s a Testimony - of what? Of He who is obedient unto death, even the 
death of The Cross - absolute, perfect obedience. This is what God is 
looking for here in The Testimony, and this is why the Law is so rigid 
and stringent. That’s why if you are going to cut the animal in half, 
Jewish tradition will tell us you dare not get one too many hairs on the 
wrong half of the carcass! Why would it be that way? Because it is a 
testimony of a perfect death, testimony of a perfect offering, testimony 
of a perfect priest, testimony of a perfect obedience - that’s why it’s 
that way. In itself it’s not accepted, because The Testimony always 
points beyond itself! It’s no good without a Witness, it all falls 
through without a Witness. The Testimony must have a Witness. The 
Testimony is unto death; The Witness is unto Life - Resurrection. So 
that all things are proven by The Resurrection; that’s why the Apostles 
gave witness of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Acts 1:22, “Beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that 
he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness with us of 
his resurrection.” Acts 4:33, “And with great power gave the apostles 
witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus; and great grace was upon 
them all. All the way through this business of The Witness you will find 
that The Witness is connected to The Resurrection or the Life. Why? 
Because The Witness is unto Life. The Testimony is in Word, the Witness 
is in Spirit. The Testimony is true, but it is proven by The Witness. 
The Testimony is true, but it’s void without The Witness. I don’t care 
how much of The Testimony we preach - if we are not living Witness - it 
means nothing in our lives! God isn’t after Testimony; He’s gotten The 
Testimony. He has gotten the fulfillment. He is after expression of The 
Witness - the proof of the whole thing is set forth in The Witness. The 
proof of it all is set forth in The Resurrection. So much of our problem 
is we try to bring The Testimony over and replace with it, The Witness. 
Rather than be living witnesses, we’d rather say there’s a day 
coming...I’ve said before it’s a whole lot easier to talk about the 
judgment that is come than it is to bear the judgment in its coming. 
It’s a whole lot easier to talk about one day we’ll be with Jesus, than 
it is to live in Christ. All of that is in The Testimony. It’s 
established in The Cross and the world awaits a Witness. Christ is The 
Faithful Witness, He is The True Witness.

But where is His expression, except in His Body, because all bound up in 
The Testimony is The Body; all bound up in The Testimony is The Witness. 
There is Testimony of The City - where is The City? There is Testimony 
of The Body - where is The Body? There is Testimony of Zion - where is 
Zion? All of that is in The Testimony - where is The Witness? In The 
Testimony we find that God has chosen Solomon to build a temple - 
where’s The Witness? Now The Testimony was tremendous; the greatest 
building that probably ever was built upon the face of the earth was 
part of this Testimony. We can’t even imagine the splendor of that 
edifice that Solomon built. We can’t even imagine the greatness of such 
a man that had to command to do such a thing. What a tremendous thing it 
was - but all it was, was a Testimony of that Temple which is to come. 
In that day it was to come. Where’s The Witness? Because most of the 
Church world is still talking about a temple to come - where’s The 
Witness? That’s what I mean when I say we’ve brought The Testimony 
beyond The Cross. And when you do that you’d better be careful because 
you have no standard for it. Christ - The Cross - Christ crucified - His 
death, His burial, His resurrection is the standard for The Testimony. 
If you eliminate that, you can go anywhere you want to with The 
Testimony. You can imagine the temple to be anything you want it to be; 
you can imagine the City to be anything you want it to be - you can have 
ferris wheels in it, you can have gold ponds in it with real gold fish! 
You can have everybody living on a gold street with pearl door knobs. 
You can have everybody living in big mansions that would make anything 
on the French Riviera look like a pup tent!

You can go anywhere you want to go with it - if you don’t bring it here 
to The Cross. Why? Because if you don’t there’s no witness of it; 
there’s just vain imaginations concerning it. You are still preaching 
The Testimony, you’re still after The Testimony. But, The Testimony has 
come! The Testimony was finished in Him! The Testator died! And He rose 
again to bring forth in a people The Witness of all that is involved in 
The Testimony of Himself! He has already moved from the one side to the 
other. He who was just a Testimony is now The Faithful and True Witness! 
He Who was to come, DID, in the fulness of time, COME! And He fulfilled 
every jot and tittle, every person, place, thing - all The Testimony. 
There’s no part of The Testimony that in His death, burial and 
resurrection He did not fulfil, with the purpose of manifesting that in 
a people. So where’s The Witness? We still sing our songs - about there 
will be joy when we cross over Jordan. Now, when do you think that might 
be? Do you not know that Jordan is part of this Testimony? Do you not 
know that The Lord brought it into Himself, gathered it up in His own 
baptism, into His Self? Do you not understand that it is in Him - in His 
death, burial, resurrection we cross over Jordan? Now for us that is an 
act of obedience of divine comprehension, but do we not really realize 
that He summed all that Testimony up in Himself, and finished it? And 
then He pronounced Himself as The Way, The Truth, The Life? When is it 
we think we’re going to cross over Jordan? And what joy is it we think 
that we’re going to cross over into, if it is not the joy of The Lord 
Himself?

But it’s just a lot easier to sing there will be joy when we cross over 
Jordan, because that gives us a reason for being so sad now. But one day 
it’s all going to be different; listen, it’s all different now! It 
depends on what day you’re living in. It depends on your comprehension 
of Christ, it depends on whether He’s still a Testimony to you, or 
whether He is in you The Living Witness of The Testimony! It depends on 
whether God has revealed His Son in you or not. It depends on whether 
you have seen Him in the Resurrection. That’s an eye witness. 

The second thing a witness is, is a martyr. But we jump into the natural 
and say a martyr is someone primarily who goes out and dies for some 
cause; it could even be a wrong cause. But a true martyr - it all has to 
come to The Cross; to His death, burial, resurrection. God didn’t ask 
for me to go out and die for a cause. A true martyr is one who comes to 
death at The Cross, to burial at The Cross, and comes forth in the 
comprehension, I have no life but Christ! That’s a martyr; not one who’s 
willing to give a little time or give a little energy, or even give a 
natural life. But one who has laid down, in comprehending The Cross, his 
own life; one who has seen with his eyes that he is dead by Christ, made 
alive in Christ, through Christ; so that it is no longer he that liveth, 
but Christ who lives in him. That’s a martyr, because the standard of 
that martyrdom is Christ Himself. So it’s not those that would die for a 
cause that God is after. He is after living witnesses - living dead men, 
living witnesses; those who are dead to sin, but alive unto God through 
Christ Jesus the Lord, those who comprehend “I am crucified with 
Christ, nevertheless I live, yet, not I, Christ liveth in me.”

We must come from The Testimony to The Witness - from the words to the 
Spirit of the matter. Why must we? Because He did! He who was The 
Testimony of the whole creation, and then God just narrowed it down from 
the creation and the flood and all of that; Abraham - then He brings it 
down, brings it down... The Testimony. Finally The Testimony is put on 
two stones and put right in the center of the whole thing, and all of it 
becomes The Testimony of Him. Everything from Genesis to Malachi - they 
testify of Him! Man testifies of Him - He brings man into His death, His 
burial, His resurrection; because the first man is a Testimony, the 
second Man is The Witness. The first man is a Testimony of what God 
wants; but it’s not what God wants. The second Man is The Witness. A 
Witness is not a Testimony, a Witness is this expressive reality. The 
Witness is what God wants. The first is a Testimony of the second. When 
the second is come, we have no need of the first. Thus He comes to do 
the will of God, as it is written of Him, in the volume of the book: He 
taketh away the first that He may establish the second. The Testimony is 
the first and The Witness is the second; and the difference is THE 
CROSS. You can not pass from the first to the second but by The Cross. 

There’s no way you can do it! Now we’re finally coming down to what it’s 
all about! You can’t cross but by The Cross! You can’t pass over this 
Jordan but by His death, His burial and His resurrection. It’s the only 
way you can come from the first to the second. It’s the only way you can 
come from that which is a Testimony to that which is The Witness 
Himself. And my question is to you and I - when am I going to pass over? 
How many times am I going to go up there and look at it, and talk some 
more about it, and go around a few more circles? When am I going to pass 
over, and in fact, how do I pass over? We pass over in obedience to His 
death. We don’t pass over by any works. Look at Israel - look at The 
Testimony; it’s all in The Testimony. God brought them right up there, 
at that time in obedience to death... what death? Death of the Red Sea, 
death of the lamb’s blood on the door, death of their being buried in 
baptism in the Sea. They could have all passed over, but they disobeyed 
the blood on the door. They disobeyed the baptism into the Sea; they 
would not enter into His rest or His resurrection; it’s the same thing, 
because here none lives but Him, here all ceased from their works. They 
wouldn’t do it! There it is, but they wouldn’t do it! And then a few 
days later, they got all excited and said, let’s go over now! And you 
know what an absolute fiasco that turned out to be! 

Then how do you go over? You go over in obedience unto death. You go 
over in obedience to His death, and that’s why all of us come short of 
our comprehending the real truth of the Resurrection - we will not be 
obedient unto His death! We just want me to be involved in it. We have 
drummed up this doctrine on resurrection which centers around me and 
you, rather than around Him. You see, He couldn’t come from the one side 
to the other but through obedience unto death, even the death of The 
Cross - absolute, total obedience; that He learned through that which He 
suffered. What did He suffer? He suffered being made lower than angels, 
He suffered taking upon Himself no reputation, He suffered being in 
fashion as a servant. He suffered being in the likeness of men. He 
suffered being found as a man! The first man disobeyed; the last man 
obeyed! He gathered all men up into Himself and He became all men. See, 
all men were known in Adam, but all men came to be known in the last 
Adam - that’s what He suffered. And in that He learned, exercised or 
expressed obedience. 

“Let this same mind be in you which was also in Him” - obedient unto 
death. Whose death? The death of that which He became, the death of that 
which He suffered Himself to be made, the death of the first man who was 
disobedient to God. This Man was obedient, wherefore God has highly 
exalted Him and given Him a name above every name! Hallelujah! He came 
by obedience. The only way you and I can experientially come is by that 
same obedience. If not, we’re going to be hopelessly stuck in The 
Testimony until we die, and it need not be that way. It need not be that 
way because the Jordan is set before us. The Work is finished, He is The 
Way, The Truth and The Life, The Spirit is come to lead us there, to 
bring us there in full comprehension of Him. Why? That we may be 
witnesses - not dead testimonies - LIVING WITNESSES UNTO HIM in all of 
the earth! Now we do a lot of testifying - where is the Witness?

It is necessary to all spiritual truth that we come from The Testimony 
to The Witness. You can’t make a Testimony out of a Finished Work. The 
Testimony spoke of One to come - He has come, He has fulfilled it! The 
Witness is unto Life, The Witness is in Resurrection, The Witness is in 
the Spirit, The Witness is living, The Witness is real, The Witness is 
NOW! And if there be no Witness, The Testimony is for nothing! Paul says 
if Christ be not risen, then our whole faith is in vain. Paul proves 
everything by The Resurrection. He brings it all down - not to Moses 
coming back again; he proves it all by The Resurrection, which is 
Christ. “If  Christ be not risen...” And he reasons there. It is as in 
one man all die, so that in one man all live. Christ Himself is The 
Resurrection! And if that’s not so, then our faith is in vain, and what 
are we doing? Then we might as well be Buddhists, because everybody 
teaches some kind of an after life. Be a Hindu and come back as an 
earthworm!

Let me read this to you: the contrast between The Testimony and The 
Witness. How do we come from the law to faith? How do we come from the 
dead letter to The Living Word? How do we come from the types to the 
evidence, from the shadows to the substance, from the prophecies to the 
more sure Word of prophecy, or the prophecies made more sure? That’s 
what Peter is saying; not that we have another Word. He is saying we 
have the prophets made more sure. How? Well, we’ve had the prophets, 
we’ve got The Testimony - now we have a more sure Word or better 
rendition; we have the prophets made more sure. How? WE HAVE SEEN HIM! 
We have seen Him of Whom they speak. Where did you see Him? We beheld 
His glory! We see Him in The Resurrection!

How do we come from the realm that is of the soul into the realm that is 
of the spirit? How do we come from the man to Christ? From the first man 
to the Second Man, from soulishness to spirituality? How do we come from 
the first to the last, from the beginning to the end? How do we come 
from The Testimony that is to you, to The Witness that is in you? How do 
we come from the Promised Son to The Son of Promise? How do we come from 
the Promise to the very Person? How do we come from earth to heaven? How 
do we come from The Testimony to The Witness? From One to Come to He is 
Come? From He Whose Right it is, to The Heir of God? How do we come from 
The Testimony of One to The Witness which is One? How do we come from 
John to Jesus? How do we come from the Voice of One to One Voice?

We can all get together in The Testimony; it doesn’t seem like man 
could, but they could get together in The Testimony and become the Voice 
of One, but how do we become One Voice in the earth? How does it get 
beyond talking and become divine expression of Truth? How do we come? 
See, it’s far too easy to put that over in “gloryland”. When are you 
going to get to “gloryland”? Someone says, “When I die!” Yes, but 
here at The Cross is the only death that will get you there - His death! 
Listen, somebody cutting your head off, putting you in a grave and 
covering you with dirt gets you nowhere! That doesn’t get you into 
glory! If you’re not in glory when somebody does that to you, you’re not 
going to be there; that doesn’t get you anywhere. Here at The Cross is 
the death that gets you into glory, here’s the suffering that brings you 
into glorification, here’s the death that has attached to it the promise 
of The Resurrection. This is the only one that does. I’m telling you The 
Truth. Yes, search it out, but search it out in the scripture - go to 
The Testimony. 

There isn’t another death that has connected to it the divine promise 
and certainty of Resurrection except this death. That’s the reason He 
brought all mankind to this death; natural death has no promise of that 
to it. But this death, wherein He brought all mankind...the appointment 
that He kept has with it hope and certainty of Resurrection. And for 
those who will come by Him by this death, and will take this death as it 
is indeed to be their very own, and obey Him in this death, shall know 
Him in The Resurrection, because it’s the only death that will get you 
there.

How do we come from time to no time, from day to Day, from the God of 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to God, My Father; from the Living God to The 
Ever living One? Let me explain that. Revelation 1:18, He says, “I am 
He that liveth, I was dead, now I am alive forever more.” And that 
translation means “now I can never die again. It’s that One that can 
never die again whose Body we are. It’s That One who can never die again 
who is The Resurrection and The Life. We all know Him as The Living God, 
but how about The One who liveth in you, and shall never die again - do 
you know Him that way? When will we come from The Living God to The Ever 
living One? I’m talking about a comprehension. When will we come from 
The Testimony to The Witness?

Lastly, when will we come from the statement, “Sirs, we would see 
Jesus”, to the reality, “But we see Jesus.” When will we come from 
one to the other? It has to do with the obedience of your heart, it has 
to do with the obedience of our soul. The first man Adam was made a 
living soul and is disobedient. How can we be obedient? “Let this mind 
be in you which was also in Christ.” The very word “let” signifies 
the need for obedience. But I will tell you this: we come from the one 
to the other by the obedience of Him - obedient unto death, even the 
death of The Cross we cross over Jordan. That’s all Israel had to do - 
be obedient, and they would not do it. And God said, “Therefore I have 
sworn in my wrath, the disobedient one shall not enter into My rest.” 
His rest is entered into through obedience. It isn’t something He’s 
given us to do; we have to be obedient to what’s already done, what’s 
already established in Christ. He hasn’t left it for us to do; He has 
set it forth for us to be obedient to it. It is a working of the Spirit 
and it will bring you from the one side to the other. 

It is in the Witness that we come to face and come to comprehend The 
Resurrection as it is in Christ. We will look in the scripture that we 
may see The Resurrection as it is in Christ: as it is in The Testimony, 
as it is made manifest in The Witness, that we may then be witnesses of 
The Resurrection. It is the greatest desire of my heart to do that. I’ve 
found that it was the greatest desire of Paul’s heart to do that. His 
whole desire was summed up by: “If I by any means might attain to the 
resurrection from among the dead. Not as though I had already attained, 
but this one thing I do. I forget all behind, I press on, that I may 
comprehend Him as I am comprehended of Him.” Where do you think He 
comprehends you? “Oh, that I may comprehend Him in that same way.” 
This is what Paul is after. Let us desire to learn The Truth as it is in 
Christ.

Do you think it’s time that in some way we come from a Testimony to a 
Living Witness? How long can we say that we’re His Body without actually 
functioning that way? Don’t you think it’s time? It’s time with me. But 
it isn’t something we have to do, it’s that we must be obedient unto 
what He has done. It’s just obeying The Truth as The Truth is in Jesus. 
God didn’t ask them to build a land. He said just walk in it! He didn’t 
say create it - he said possess it! That was in The Testimony; it’s a 
thousand times greater in The Witness! If all of this bears the name of 
The Testimony, and He, The Living Witness is in you... My Lord! If this 
is the Tabernacle of The Testimony, surely you’re The Tabernacle of The 
Witness!
                 Part 2 - Taking Away the Veil

The Lord continues to enlarge my search into the view of Him as The 
Resurrection. In the midst of that search the Lord backed me up and 
brought coming from The Testimony to The Witness into that view: all 
things summed up in that. We have seen The Cross as the determining 
factor of all things with God, and I know we do not understand the full 
significance of that. And we will as we come to a greater view of 
Christ, an all encompassing view. It’s one thing to say, Christ is 
everything, but it’s another thing as The Lord reveals Him in us, to see 
all things gathered up in the light of Him. As the light increases, the 
fulness is seen - it’s been there all the time, but as the light 
increases, what is there is seen. IN Him dwelleth all the fulness - now 
it becomes apparent to us, and as it does, then we benefit from what’s 
there. It becomes experiential to us; we lay hold upon, we comprehend 
concerning Him. And as this comprehension grows in the Lord, The Cross 
just becomes more significant. We will look at the necessity of The 
Cross in relationship to The Resurrection, but even in seeing Him as The 
Resurrection, The Resurrection coming to be defined in the Person of 
Him, it has given greater emphasis and significance to The Cross. 

So as I was studying the scriptural references of “raised”, “risen”, 
“rose”, “resurrection”, and bringing that into Christ, the Lord began 
to speak to me that the essence of this whole thing is coming from The 
Testimony: of people who only know Him as a Testimony, even though it be 
a true Testimony; but they only know Him as that. The Testimony here is 
typed as that which is written on stone, parchment or paper: though it 
be real, there is a more significant writing, reality - not a different 
one, but The Testimony made more real. And that is Christ written in 
you! And The Testimony itself gives testimony of that reality. The 
question that the Lord posed in my heart is: has that in fact taken 
place in me? There’s no doubt that The Lord has come from the one side 
to the other: He has fulfilled it all in His death, burial, and the full 
significance of His Resurrection: what He has brought forth in Himself, 
including that Body, that people, that temple, that kingdom. He has 
fulfilled The Testimony. He has moved from the one, and He is The 
Faithful Witness of that. The Resurrection is the proof of all of that 
in that God raised HIM up from among the dead, in that HE was by the 
glory of the Father raised up from among the dead. These verses show 
that The Resurrection is the proof that Christ is the perfect 
fulfillment - nothing was lacking. 

He has come from The Testimony to The Witness, but do we know Him in 
that way? Is our experiential knowledge of the Lord still very much 
along the lines of The Testimony? Is it something that we with all of 
our hearts believe and are convinced they are true, but yet it is still 
very much a Testimony? And only you and I can answer that question as 
having to do with us. But I think we know whether it is one or the 
other; we know whether we are convinced of these things because they are 
written in the scripture only, or we are convinced of these things which 
are written in the scripture, because He is revealed in us. Those are 
two different comprehensions. The one says ‘I believe we are in Christ 
because the scripture says so over 230 times!’ Well, that’s admirable, 
but it still comes very much in The Testimony: it is still that we 
believe something that is written upon the parchment. I think much, and 
maybe most preaching is out from that kind of believing. It puts us in 
the position that we are continually “trying” to believe. When 
something happens and things go awry, we have to go back and read what 
is written and reread it, and convince ourselves and God that we believe 
it. And I’m not saying that this is not admirable or maybe even 
necessary, but I’m telling you it is still very much The Testimony. 

Jesus says it is. Speaking to the Pharisees, He said, “You do search 
the scripture. I know you do and I know you believe them because you 
think that in them you have eternal life. The problem is you haven’t 
come from that to ME! You will not come to me.” I think many believers 
have come to a belief in Jesus, rather than a revealing of Him. We must 
come from Testimony to being Living Witness: from those who believe and 
are convinced of it. And I know that this is a work of The Spirit of 
God: you could not believe except it be a work of the Spirit of God, but 
what I’m saying is that there is a greater work of that Spirit. He must 
convince us that The Testimony is true, but beyond that, He must reveal 
in us that of which the scripture does testify. It has to at one point 
in time become a Person - a reality; not just a writing, not just a 
doctrine sound and true, not just a teaching. It’s got to go beyond that 
with you and I. And I think with many believers it hasn’t gotten beyond 
that point. Many believers know a great deal, and preach it and teach 
it, but it’s a real effort for them to live it.

And if it’s that way, it’s still Testimony. But if it is Witness, it is 
an automatic expression of that which God hath revealed in us. In other 
words, it isn’t by effort, by power or by might. I am not trying to be 
what I think He is; but rather we are becoming expressions - something 
is really happening in me that I’m not doing, and I come to know that, 
and then I say, ‘My God, this thing is real!’ We witness that change, 
that transformation, we realize that there is a working in me beyond my 
effort, beyond my trying to live up to. And then we come from knowing 
that we are in Christ to  KNOWING we’re in Christ. Maybe we come from 
knowing we’re in Christ to the knowing of Christ working in us. Maybe we 
come from not apprehending to apprehending that for which God hath laid 
hold upon us. And this is a work of the Spirit. So this has come to me 
as coming from The Testimony to The Witness. And there’s not a good and 
a bad involved in this: there’s just a lesser and a greater. There is a 
Testimony that without the Witness is no good, because The Witness is 
the proof of it. The words of prophecy without the prophecy made more 
sure are no good; in other words, they must be fulfilled in Him. My 
point is that these things are so, but how is  it with us, how is it 
with our comprehension? Christ has done that - it is established in Him, 
but is it that way with us? And if we are to be witnesses, then there 
must be in us the revealing of The Witness; not just the believing in 
The Testimony, but the revealing of The Witness. 

That brings me to this: The Testimony is covered, it is veiled. The 
Witness is revealed, it is open faced. We want to look at what the 
significance of this is. Look at Leviticus 24:3, “ Without the vail of 
the testimony...” That means outside, it is talking about the 
arrangement of the furniture. “Without the vail of the testimony, in 
the tabernacle of the congregation, shall Aaron order it from the 
evening unto the morning before the Lord continually: it shall be a 
statue for ever in your generations.”Without the vail of the Testimony 
- the testimony is behind the veil. That is so tremendously important 
because we can think ahead and say: yes, and it stayed behind the veil 
until The Cross. It was His death, to be followed by His burial and 
resurrection that removed the veil. And when the veil is removed, The 
Testimony becomes The Living Witness: what was Testimony is transformed 
into Living Witness. When He died that very temple veil rent, and that 
spoke of something. Then Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:14-18 tells us it 
speaks of the veil being taken off of your heart. And when that veil is 
upon your heart - it is still testimony, it is still covered. What is? 
The Lord, the comprehending of Him, in reality; it’s still a very much 
covered thing. The veil is upon your heart. What veil? That veil of our 
own understanding, that veil of flesh, that veil of self, that veil of 
humanity. That’s what is rent - the veil of His flesh, that which speaks 
of the promise, and the veil in the temple did speak of it. It was 
embroidered all over it; but the very thing that spoke of it, hides it. 
As long as we are still in that; we are “speaking of it”, it is yet 
hidden, because we have not been brought into Christ, called of God in 
Christ Jesus to speak of it, but to give  witness of it. “It” now 
being the glory of God - Christ in you - The Witness!

I have wondered why The Testimony is behind the veil? There may be many 
reasons, but this one to me gets down to the heart of why God put the 
whole thing behind the veil. There is a tremendous thing being said 
here: this Testimony shall be veiled until the time of The Cross. It is 
in His death, burial and resurrection that the thing is veiled: that 
which has been hidden is unveiled, and He comes forth in triumphant 
glory! Now He’s not merely The Testimony, but The Witness of all that is 
testified! And the natural man could never perceive and has never 
perceived this. Paul gets that and says as yet the natural man can not 
perceive it, as yet the veil is upon the heart. But when it, the heart, 
shall turn to see the Lord, then with an open face - unveiled heart - we 
pass in our hearts from Testimony to Witness. They are not different, 
but two comprehensions of The Same One. And we must indeed pass from the 
one to the other, and it is with the taking away of the veil that we do.

So The Testimony is covered. Numbers 4:5, “And when the camp setteth 
forward, Aaron shall come, and his sons, and they shall take down the 
covering vail, and cover the ark of testimony with it.”It stays 
covered: The Testimony is under cover, under a vail. Let’s consider the 
word “hidden”. Look at 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, “Howbeit we speak wisdom 
among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of 
the princes of this world, that come to nought; But we speak the wisdom 
of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before 
the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: 
for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of 
glory.” Verse 10, “But God hath revealed (them) unto us by his Spirit: 
for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” 
Verse 14, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit 
of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know (them), 
because they are spiritually discerned.” This is that which is hidden, 
it’s the same thought. We speak the wisdom of God, but He hid it. He set 
it forth in a piece of furniture and then He put it behind the veil. He 
set it forth in a Tabernacle, in a tent, in the compartment thereof, and 
then He separated it with a veil, and it remained hidden. These verses 
are coming out from 1 Cor. 1:29, “That no flesh shall glory in his 
presence.” “We preach The Cross.” This is coming out from 1 Cor. 2:2, 
“I’m determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified.” He is bringing all of this into light by The Cross. 
This wisdom was hidden, but God ordained this before the world - unto 
our glory.

What was it that was hidden behind the veil? The glory of God. But where 
did that glory come from? It came into what the Ark of the Covenant with 
the cherubim on top represents. That’s where the glory of God was. And 
we know that the Ark of the Covenant represents that corporate work of 
the Lord Jesus Christ: you see it coming from the box to the Mercy Seat, 
to that which is pure gold and heavenly. You see the whole thing coming 
forth in a New Creation, a New Creation Man, in the midst of which 
dwells the glory of God. Surely we understand that was an expectation to 
Israel, but that in you, His Creation, that He has brought through all 
that the box represents, it is a New Creation and that He dwells in you! 
“The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ” - that’s where it’s all revealed, that being behind the veil. 
But we don’t go behind the veil: through His death, His burial and His 
resurrection, the veil is done away! Done away in our hearts that the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God, which is Christ in you, may 
literally fill our hearts and fill our souls. To what end? To the end 
that we become witnesses of Him, in His glory, witnesses of His glory - 
not some artificial light, but the reality of Christ Himself. 
To believe that is a Testimony, but to be partaker of that reality is to 
be a Witness. So it’s all spoken of in The Testimony, but Paul here is 
talking about The Witness, because he is saying here, “But we speak the 
wisdom of God, even the hidden wisdom; we’re talking to you about that, 
we’re declaring that to you.” It’s no longer hidden behind a veil, for 
the veil is done away in Christ Jesus, and Paul moves into that more 
thoroughly in his second letter to this same group, Paul never leaves it 
alone. There is a reference in 1 Corinthians 4:1, “Let a man so account 
of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of 
God.” Now Paul hasn’t changed subjects here. “Moreover it is required 
in stewards, that a man be found faithful. But with me it is a very 
small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment: yea, I 
judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by (or against) myself; yet 
am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord. Therefore 
judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring 
to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the 
counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.”

I looked at that in this light and realized I had never understood what 
it was talking about before. I always thought it was just talking about 
the things hidden in our hearts, but then I looked it up in the 
Interlinear version and did a search of this word by word, and I want 
you to see something here. I saw that the hidden things hasn’t changed 
here. It’s still speaking of that which is hidden under cover in The 
Testimony, that which has always been hidden; and that it is in His 
appearing that these things are brought to light. And in the light of 
these things the counsels of our hearts is made manifest. But the word 
“counsels” there means something that I really wasn’t ready for. 

All of a sudden I saw Paul is talking about the same thing. He’s not 
talking just about bad things in us being revealed: though that is true, 
but that’s dealt with in another place altogether as the man of sin. 
He’s not talking about that here. I have used this scripture many times 
to support the truth that Christ revealed in you brings everything to 
light; that nothing is hidden from Him. And indeed nothing is hidden 
from Him, but there is ample Testimony throughout the scripture that 
says that. But this refers directly to what is under the veil, what has 
been hidden from generations. We can go over to Colossians 1:26-29 and 
we’ll see the same language used with regard to the glory that is in 
you, but that is under a veil: it remains a Testimony even though you 
may say “I believe Christ is in me!” And I’m not making light of that, 
but there’s such effort on our part - “I believe it, I believe it!” 
Yet when faced with conditions that would require that realization - we 
don’t make it, we don’t give Witness of that in situations. We’re left 
standing there quoting the scripture and trying to control ourselves. We 
must move from saying “I believe He’s in me because the scripture says 
so”, to “I believe the scripture that says He is in me, because He is 
revealed in me, because I have seen Him with my own eyes; the eyes of my 
understanding have been enlightened, The Lord has appeared, The Lord has 
appeared in me!”

It has come from the effort to believe, to the revealing of the Spirit. 
And the greatest thing about this is that I’ve got a greater 
appreciation of The Testimony than I’ve ever had in my life. I am not 
like some who are ready to throw their Bible away because they 
themselves have become the Word of God! I am more dependent upon The 
Testimony than I ever have been, because it is confirmed in The Witness. 
It has become more sure than ever, because I have seen Him of Whom it 
speaks, and the more I search it, the more I see of Him. The Testimony 
is necessary to The Witness, but without The Witness do we not see The 
Testimony is in vain? Except He be revealed in you, then The Testimony 
is something we’re still trying to believe, because we believe it’s 
God’s Word. When we refuse to move from The Testimony to the Witness we 
leave ourselves open for so many wrong things and interpretations. The 
Testimony must be interpreted in view of The Witness; learning Hebrew 
and Greek won’t do it. It was written in Hebrew and Greek and they 
didn’t understand what they were writing about. That may help give us 
the proper wording for The Testimony and bring our thinking into line, 
but I’m telling you that the only true judge of The Testimony is The 
Witness HIMSELF! Oh, that Christ be revealed in us, that we behold The 
Witness who answers to The Testimony, that even The Testimony become 
even so much more confirmed in our hearts. That’s where it’s got to go. 

Let’s look at that which is hidden. 1 Corinthians 4:5, “...until the 
Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things...” Let’s 
think of the type of it. What was hidden behind the veil? The Ark of the 
Testimony. If you were back behind there, it would be the darkest place 
on the face of the earth, because there’s no natural light there: it’s 
just dark. My point is, you could go there and you don’t see anything. 
How is that piece of furniture illuminated; how is it seen? It is seen 
in the light of the glory that appears in the midst of it, that comes 
down and sets upon the covering, the Mercy Seat. He Who is the glory of 
God gives light to the things that are concealed, to the things that are 
kept secret - HE IS THE LIGHT! He is the light, the light of the 
knowledge of the glory. Paul brings this out more in the second letter 
than he does in the first. 

In the second letter he says, “God, who hath commanded the light to 
shine out of darkness...” See there was a time when I thought that was 
talking about creation, but then I had to go back and see that didn’t 
have to do with creation because He didn’t do that in creation. In 
creation God separated the light from darkness and there’s a great deal 
of difference in those words and the whole meaning. So, when did God 
command light to shine out of darkness? In the type that I’m giving you 
- the glory of God filling up the Holy of Holies; because Paul goes on 
to say, “Hath shined in (not into) our hearts, giving the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Paul is 
saying what happened in that Testimony happens in you in Witness: this 
thing moves from the one to the other. What God set forth in Testimony, 
in type and shadow, He hath in us performed in the revealing of His Son, 
He hath performed it in the face of Jesus Christ. And the word “face” 
in 2 Corinthians 4:6 comes right back to 2 Corinthians 3:18, “With open 
face beholding the glory of God”, and he just follows on with that. 
Paul is bringing it from Testimony to Witness - and why? That you may be 
Witnesses unto Him - not to what was said, but unto HIM!

Now back to 1 Corinthians 4. The whole point here is judge nothing 
until, or before - make no judgment in front of His appearing. So what 
is the judgment? It is the same judgment all the way along; it’s the 
same judgment the Lord brings right into The Cross, which is the place 
of judgment. Hebrews says it is appointed unto man once to die; 
connected with this, therefore, the judgment. To try to bring it down to 
the bear bone: The judgment is the act of dividing the living from the 
dead. That’s what it finally comes down to in all things. It’s not 
dividing what’s right from what’s wrong in those terms. It’s not found 
in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We try to judge good and 
evil; but it’s what is Christ and what is not Christ - that’s a much 
greater judgment. The one judgment says when man is right or when man is 
wrong, but the greater judgment says that the whole man must go! The 
greater judgment says the best you do is still you! And that judgment 
just comes right at The Cross and says it’s not whether you are right or 
wrong: the point is you are dead, and you have no life but Christ! 
That’s really the judgment. Even the term “crisis” that is translated 
“judgment” will bring us to that. It does mean a decision, a 
discernment, a discerning between. And it does also infer a penalty, but 
all of that is seen in The Cross. All of that is seen: it’s a death 
penalty, it’s a final penalty. It’s not the judgment of man; it’s the 
judgment of God which goes to the very bone of the matter and says - 
here is the judgment. I will divide the living from among the dead!

And when Christ appears, what is He doing in His appearing? He who 
judgeth between “the quick and the dead.” This is the same judgment. 
This judgment is spoken of again in a greater way in the second letter 
to the same Corinthians when in chapter 5:14 Paul says, “For we thus 
judge...” “The love of Christ constraineth us, for we thus judge, that 
when one died, all were made to be dead by Him.” And the conclusion of 
that judgment goes on: “Therefore we which live should not henceforth 
(since this discernment, this judgment) live unto ourselves, but unto 
Him who died, yes, but who rose again.” Wherefore - this is full of 
wherefores and henceforths. It sounds like a legal document, something 
that comes out of a judgment. “Wherefore know we no man after the 
flesh, nor Christ can we know Him any more after the flesh. If any man 
be in Christ Jesus...” This is the judgment coming right on down; it is 
dividing the living from the dead. It is the judgment that is 
established in our heart. It is coming from The Testimony to The 
Witness. 

So Paul is saying, I’m not judging whether I am right or wrong. I don’t 
know anything against myself, but I’m not hereby justified. He that 
judges me is The Lord! I’ll judge nothing until The Lord comes, judge 
nothing before the time. “The time” there is a set time. That was 
interesting to me because you can go back to The Testimony: Genesis 17. 
The setting there is that Abraham has made his “mistake” or a wilful 
act of an unsubmitted soul; whatever you want to call it. Abraham here 
has not yet been obedient unto death. Oh dear Jesus - that speaks 
volumes! Why do you think God let Abraham and Sarah, which was in type 
His Body - why do you think He let them get so old? So it could be a big 
miracle? No - it has to do with death and resurrection. He wanted them 
to see themselves dead, with no hope of life but through The Seed of 
God! That’s what it’s all about: you and I coming to this judgment - 
that by Him I am dead. Not of old age; it’s not a Testimony here, it’s a 
Witness; it’s not a type here, but a reality - WE ARE DEAD! We are by 
Him made death that we by Him may live! And there’s a tremendous 
obedience that has to come in there, because we’re going to try every 
way in the world to produce the promise of God without admitting that we 
are dead; without becoming obedient unto death. Abraham’s way out was to 
get a younger wife!

Don’t you see what was happening there? Rather than being obedient unto 
death - Sarah laughed at God and then lied about it! And the whole issue 
here was they would not come to that place where they said, Yes, we’re 
dead, we’re absolutely dead, we have to see that, we have to obey that; 
and therefore declare the only possible way is by The Seed of God. But 
they never quit trying after they had produced Ishmael - and had to get 
rid of him and his mother, and all that this represents. Well, this is 
you and I - you know it is, in our struggle. But it comes to this, and 
it is so beautifully written in Genesis 17:21 and then to Genesis 18:10 
and to 18:14, “But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah 
shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year.” Now I know 
what this means primarily, and in The Testimony, but I know also what 
this means in The Witness, and Paul is talking about The Witness. Here’s 
The Testimony of The Witness as it relates to time; as time relates to 
the coming of The Lord - in fulfillment of The Testimony.

We need to see this, because it is three fold. So in Genesis 17:21 it is 
the set time. In Genesis 18:14 it is, “ At the time appointed I will 
return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a 
son.” The set time, which is the time of life. It’s the time when life 
comes, it’s the summing up of all that is life! All of that is brought 
right over into The Cross when in “the fulness of the time” - the 
fulness of the set time, the fulness of the time of life, at the 
appointed time (verse 14), the fulness of the appointed time, God sent 
forth not an Isaac, but His Son! Where? At The Cross! Made of woman, 
made under the law, to redeem, to die - to bring us into the adoption; 
that the Spirit may work in us the reality of the adoption which is just 
this - bringing us from The Testimony to The Witness through the 
revealing of The Son in us. This time is unmistakably fulfilled in Him 
by His death, burial and resurrection - not just by His virgin birth. 
That had a purpose too - He was born to die. He was made of woman. Why? 
That He may die! We’ll see this more in The Resurrection. This is what 
we’re talking about - coming from the one to the other - by His death, 
burial and resurrection.

“Is any thing too hard for the Lord?” It’s so beautiful that this is a 
three fold time brought together and fulfilled in His death, His burial 
and His resurrection. Look at Genesis 18:10, “And he said, I will 
certainly return unto thee according to the time of life...” Genesis 
17:21, “But my covenant will I establish...at this set time...” And 
these relate to these different usages of set time, time of life and 
appointed time, but it’s all the same time, when it’s summed up in the 
Lord, and the covenant, and the return, and is anything too hard for the 
Lord? “ At the time appointed I will return to thee according to the 
time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.” Bless the Lord! This thrills 
me because I see it confirmed in the Lord. We’ve quoted Galatians 4:1-6: 
until the time appointed, in the fulness of time. The fulness of time in 
Galatians 4 means according to the time appointed, the set time; it 
means “the filling up”. The commentator says ‘SOMETHING PUT IN TO FILL 
UP.’ In our case it means someone coming down into time to fill it up, 
so that in Him the term “time shall be no more” doesn’t necessarily 
mean the doing away with time. Now I know that eternity is defined as 
“no time”, and we are not governed by time in Christ Jesus, but what 
‘time shall be no more’ means is that it shall no longer be restrained, 
but rather come to its fulness - that’s how it translates. Isn’t that 
tremendous? This is so in Him!

Let’s move on now to these different words in 1 Corinthians 4:5. 
“...until the Lord come...” The word “come” is translated “appear, 
bring to pass or to be set, to be set forth’. Until the Lord bring to 
pass. There are many translations of this word “come” and in one place 
it means one thing and in another place it means a different thing. One 
place it means “manifestly so”, another place it means “unveiled”. 
But here this appearing is that the Lord brings to pass this very thing, 
this very judgment - brings to pass. This brings us from The Testimony 
to The Witness: brings to pass. Here’s a little footnote. I did a search 
on the term ‘it shall come to pass’, and it came into my heart that at 
The Cross is where all things come to pass. Then it dawned on me that 
every place in the scripture where that term is used is there a 
Testimony of The Cross. Yes, it might primarily happen one place, but 
what it is signifying is guaranteed by The Cross. God looks ahead at The 
Cross and says, “in that day it shall come to pass that...” Yes, there 
may be a primary fulfilment of it: that king may actually die, that 
people may actually do this or that, but you see that the more perfect 
understanding is pointed right at The Cross where everything that comes 
to pass, comes to pass: that nothing really is perfectly done but by The 
Cross! And God talks about it and uses examples of it, and because The 
Testimony is true, primarily that does happen. 

When the scripture says, “Noah builded an ark”, that means he built a 
real big boat, but you don’t comprehend that ark perfectly except  in 
Christ Jesus. But The Testimony is true. And when God said it shall come 
to pass that such and such would happen...such and such did happen, but 
it perfectly happened in The Cross, and it is amazing to run references 
on this term and see that. And you see the dimension that it gives to 
The Cross, and that the guarantee of it, the guarantee behind what the 
Lord was saying in The Testimony was The Cross. It is a very little 
thing for God to say, “In this day that man will die.” But He’s 
talking about an altogether other man that this man is a type of; He’s 
speaking of something that is guaranteed by The Cross. He can speak of 
that because His Son is already committed to that. God is already 
committed to that; in His heart it’s already so, so He speaks of it. And 
you see how that by The Cross everything is determined in God’s dealings 
with man and everything else too. That just blew me away!

So the word “come” here means “to bring to pass”. This coming is to 
bring to pass that which hath been spoken, to bring to pass that 
judgment of which The Testimony speaks. That’s what the word means. Now, 
“...will bring to light the hidden things...” And I said I’ve come to 
understand it’s that hidden wisdom that the Ark represented; it’s that 
glory that is in you, not to be hidden, but revealed. The Testimony is 
hidden; The Witness is revealed. I say that because until He is revealed 
He is not Witness. It doesn’t mean The Witness is to be revealed. The 
Witness is the revealing of Him; it’s taking away the veil and what was 
Testimony becomes Witness. They are the same - the veil makes the 
difference. So, “will bring to light” means “enlighten”. That’s a 
word Paul used: “enlighten the eyes of your understanding.” “I pray 
that God would give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the 
knowledge of him; the eyes of your understanding being enlightened...” 
Will bring to light - will enlighten, or another term is “will make 
seen”. What? Hidden things - secret, mystery, things concealed. Now we 
may still say these are the things hidden in our hearts, but that’s not 
supported in the context of the scripture here. It is the things which 
are the mystery of God, that which is hidden as a Testimony, but when 
revealed becomes a Witness. He comes to bring you from The Testimony of 
it, which is of Himself to The Witness, which is Himself. 

“...the hidden things of darkness...” That simply means “obscurity”, 
things that have been made obscure, or things that are shaded. But it 
isn’t necessarily talking about things that are evil or things that are 
wrong, rather things that are obscure. “...will make manifest...” This 
is a Greek word “phaneroo” and it means “to render apparent, to 
declare, to show self.”  And “make manifest the counsels of the 
hearts” - He will render apparent, He will declare, show self, the 
counsels (which is translated as “purpose”). “He will declare the 
purpose of the hearts and then shall every man have praise, that is, 
recognition.” The term “shall have” means “to be brought to pass, to 
arise, to be showed.” And so this is my translation of this verse: 
“Then shall the purpose of every man be seen. Then shall God’s thought 
and purpose for all men be seen.” When? When the Lord shall appear, 
when He shall show the hidden things, when the light of the knowledge of 
the glory of God is shined in us in the face of Jesus Christ, then shall 
the purpose of every man, the thing that my heart has been gripped with, 
that my mind, my brain cannot understand; the thing that in me always 
says there is more to this - you are meant for something else. The 
purpose, God’s purpose, God’s divine thought concerning every man is 
seen in Christ Jesus!”

What does that mean? It means that He shows Himself to be God’s thought 
and purpose concerning every man! When, when is this? When the veil is 
rent, when the Lord appears and judgment is come. Now I’ve jumped over 
to 2 Corinthians 5:14, “...and we thus judge...” How does God show you 
and I His purpose for us, for man? He reveals His Son and in Him we see 
the divine purpose of God made real for every man. That which is hidden 
is brought to light - in the light of Him, enlightened. Our eyes are 
enlightened and in Him we see the purpose that our hearts have been 
after, that our hearts have been panting for. We see the divine thought 
of God concerning mankind. We see why God has “visited” man. Why have 
you visited man? What is your thought concerning man? It’s not seen in 
him yet. No - BUT WE SEE JESUS! We see Jesus who became that man - made 
a little lower. We see Jesus - magnified, glorified. We see Jesus - 
bringing many sons to glory. We see Jesus - in their midst not ashamed 
to call them brethren. We see The Man of God’s heart in Christ, and we 
realize it’s this New Man - that’s His thought, that’s His intention - 
that He bring forth One New Man in Christ Jesus. That’s God’s purpose 
worked in us. That’s the counsels, that’s the hidden counsels that are 
brought to light in the appearing of Christ. And it brings us from The 
Testimony to The Witness. 

The Testimony - hidden, veiled and covered; but when The Witness is 
come, come forth in judgment, by The Cross - the veil is done away, and 
we beholding in the vision, translated “in the seeing of God”, the 
glory and are changed. That is, transformed in the inner man from 
Testimony to Witness.


                 Part 3 - The Testimony is Unto Death

We’ll begin now in Hebrews 10 as we search these things concerning 
Christ. Things concerning The Testimony must be searched thoroughly; you 
see it is The Testimony that we search. As a result it is The Witness 
that is revealed in you. And where there is no searching of The 
Testimony, in spirit, in truth; there is no revealing of The Witness. 
Remember now The Testimony primarily is that which is written, the 
scripture, and that involves everything that is contained within that 
which is written. You read of creation - creation then is involved in 
The Testimony. You read of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you read of Israel, 
Moses, Joshua; you read of tabernacles, tents, temples; you read of 
feasts, priests, priesthoods; you read of sacrifices, you read of 
people, places, things - all that is embodied in the scripture becomes 
part of The Testimony that He is absolute finish and fulfillment of. We 
must search The Testimony that the Holy Spirit may reveal in us The 
Witness. You can not do with one, without the other, You can’t simply 
take The Testimony but not allow the Holy Spirit to bring you into the 
Living Witness of it, because then you would only have dead letter 
indeed - and a real hopelessness, because you just always will be 
looking for something that is never coming. On the other hand you can’t 
try to have The Witness at the expense of and by disregarding The 
Testimony, because then all you’re going to have is just the works of 
flesh - unrestrained works of flesh. 

I’m sure you are aware of some who seek to maintain The Testimony but 
never come to The Witness, never come to the real revealing of Christ. 
The Testimony is designed to bring you there, but we have to let all The 
Testimony that is embodied in the scripture do that. Hebrews 10:7, 
“Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of 
me)...” If you do not let that which is the volume of the book bring 
you to The Witness of Him, then you will come to absolute frustration, 
because The Testimony is designed not to show you and I how to live 
better, but to bring us to that Better Life, that One Life which Christ 
is. It isn’t designed to show us ten ways to happiness, and fifteen ways 
to love, and seven ways to The Throne. It’s designed to bring us to The 
Living Witness or to bring us to absolute frustration because we won’t 
allow the Holy Spirit to reveal in us Christ. Paul came to that 
frustration. In Romans 7 he speaks of that great frustration: “Oh God, 
I find that when I would do good, it just turns out to be evil. And the 
evil that I don’t want to do - I do.” Now don’t misunderstand. We 
haven’t got a bank robber or a rapist here. We’ve got a man seeking to 
be righteous, we’ve got a man who by keeping the law is ending up in 
frustration, seeing that his best efforts fall short of the 
righteousness that the law, The Testimony as a whole is pointing to. And 
he sees that the good that he would do is evil, and that the evil that 
he would not do, is present with him. 

And he just cries out in frustration - ‘Then God, what is it all about? 
I offer sacrifices, I do this and that, I kept the law, I’m a Pharisee 
of the Pharisees - what is it all about?’ “Who is it that will deliver 
me from the body of this death, from this humanity? I thank God through 
Jesus Christ the Lord!” It is Paul who determines that what is meant to 
lead him to life, first becomes unto him death itself; because The 
Testimony is unto death. There’s one reason for The Testimony, and 
that’s to work in us the obedience to His death, to work in us the 
realization - “My God, no matter what I do, I am not what This 
Testimony is speaking of. It doesn’t matter what I do, This Testimony is 
speaking of a righteousness, a holiness, a kingdom, a tabernacle that I 
am not. This Testimony is speaking of A Man beyond what I know man to 
be, beyond what I know myself to be. O God, what is this speaking of?” 
It brings us to that. It brings us to the realization that The Testimony 
is fulfilled in Christ - fulfilled in His death, His burial, His 
resurrection. The Testimony brings us to The Cross. It’s written that 
way. The Testimony is set forth in the scriptures that way. The order of 
it is in His death, burial and resurrection.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the first chapter of Genesis or the 
twelfth chapter through the fiftieth; it doesn’t make any difference. 
Over and over again you will find that The Testimony is unto death, and 
that its requirement is not that you be better, but that you become 
obedient unto death - that’s what it’s about. You can’t look at the 
tabernacle, you can’t look at the offerings without seeing that. 
Bringing a bullock did not make you better; it demanded that you lay 
your hands on that bullock, and identify with that bullock in death. THE 
OBEDIENCE WAS UNTO DEATH. The obedience was not bringing the sacrifice; 
the obedience was killing it! And many believers have not crossed from 
The Testimony unto The Living Witness, that is, we have not become 
obedient. We look at the scripture, “Present your bodies a living 
sacrifice...” We’ll gladly try to do that, we’ll bring the sacrifice, 
but somehow or another, it doesn’t work! We bring the sacrifice, then we 
don’t know how to give it. ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. 
I pray 30 minutes every day. I read my Bible 15 minutes every day, or I 
pray 12 hours or I read my Bible 18 hours! What am I supposed to do?’ 
How do you present your bodies a living sacrifice? See, we’ve got the 
sacrifice here, now what do we do with it? That would be like an 
Israelite bringing the bullock or the sheep, bringing it up there 
saying, ‘Now what am I supposed to do?’

Well, you’re supposed to KILL IT! Reckon it dead! ‘Now wait a minute, I 
don’t want to kill it! Do you realize this is the best I’ve got? You 
don’t understand how long I looked over my flock for the best sheep 
there. I could have brought any old cow - but no sir! I brought the best 
of the firstlings I had. Now what do you mean - kill it? Surely God 
wants the best!’ KILL IT! ‘Well, I don’t want to kill it; I want to give 
it to God’. Then - KILL IT! Identify with it, put your hands on it, and 
then kill it! Because all God is requiring of you is obedience unto 
death that Christ may become manifestly your life - not someone teaching 
you how to live; but Someone Who is your Life. All it requires of you is 
obedience unto His death, because His death embodies everything you as 
the first man are. “He that is dead is freed from sin.” Justified by 
His death, reconciled by His death - saved by His Life! All that is 
required is obedience unto His death!

That’s what we’re talking about: come to agreement with the scripture, 
come to agreement - all this of course by The Holy Spirit, but come to 
agreement with The Testimony by The Spirit that I have no life, that 
when He died, I died with Him - that’s what death is all about. In that 
He lives, I live by Him - he is my Life. You see that realization will 
come in you through obedience unto His death. And obedience unto His 
death is a work of The Spirit, but I’m telling you that The Spirit of 
Truth is ever willing and ever ready to bring us to that obedience and 
to that realization of Life: ever ready. And I believe He deals with 
every Christian, every believer. Why do we have a hard time believing 
that? If you witness to a person who is not born again, you’ll tell them 
that if they simply repent the Lord will become their Life. He is ever 
ready, you tell them. The Spirit of God is ever ready - and He is. Why 
is it so difficult for you and I who are born of The Spirit to believe 
The Spirit is ever ready to bring us from one comprehension of Christ to 
a greater comprehension; from The Testimony to The Witness? The reason 
it’s so hard for us to believe that is the same thing that was with 
Israel: the difficulty for them was not getting out of Egypt - Pharaoh 
was chasing them! They were seeking to save their own life! The 
difficult was going into Canaan where it would cost them the recognition 
of their own life. 

Now we have no doubt come out from Egypt; we’re born again believers, 
children of God. Why is it so difficult for us to pass over this Jordan, 
and live in the fulness of all that Canaan is a Testimony of? Because it 
takes a different kind of obedience. I’m just reasoning with us, because 
to most of us Salvation is not presented as a forsaking of OUR life; 
it’s presented as a saving of it. But then The Spirit of God begins to 
deal with us, when The Spirit of Truth comes and says, ‘Now let me show 
you the picture here...Here’s what really happened in the saving of your 
life; in you being saved - you lost it! You were crucified with Him - He 
is your Life. If you want to walk in this thing, you must walk in Truth, 
and you must become obedient to The Truth, and The Truth is when He 
died, you died with Him! The Truth is - Christ liveth in you; you have 
no life but Him!’ The Spirit of Truth will begin to deal with you that 
way; I know He will. The Spirit of Truth is always and ever on the job, 
but the problem is He hits these snags in us that would keep us from 
being fully obedient. Now I know that modern religion, if they haven’t 
put them there, has enforced them. We say, ‘I’m saved, sanctified, 
filled with the Holy Ghost and on my way to heaven, and I don’t really 
have time to think about this. I’m just going to go be with Jesus, I 
belong to the church, and I’m just as good as everybody else is.’ And we 
have a religious work that reinforces that kind of thinking, and builds 
congregations upon it, but it still isn’t The Truth!

The truth is still - WHEN ONE DIED, ALL DIED WITH HIM! The Truth still 
is - YOU HAVE NO LIFE BUT CHRIST! The Truth is still that this whole 
Testimony is to bring us to one obedience - the obedience unto death, 
even the death of The Cross. “Let this same mind be in you, which was 
also in Christ Jesus.” The Truth of the matter is - THE TESTIMONY 
BRINGS US UNTO DEATH, AND CHRIST BRINGS US FORTH IN HIS RESURRECTION 
UNTO LIFE. Paul pretty much sums it up when he says, “I am crucified 
with Christ. This is where The Testimony brought me, this is where the 
whole volume of the book that I’ve searched and studied has brought me - 
I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless I live, yet it is not me, but 
rather CHRIST who lives in me. And the life that I now live in the 
flesh, I live in the understanding of the Son of God. And that 
understanding is working in me a realization concerning Christ - My 
Life.” This is Paul’s Witness, and he was brought there by The 
Testimony, he was brought there by realizing Christ is the fulfillment 
of all of these sacrifices and all of this priesthood, and all of these 
feast days, and Christ is the fulfillment of all that The Tabernacle 
speaks of, and He’s the fulfillment of all that Canaan speaks of. HE IS 
THE FULFILLMENT OF IT, AND IT WAS ALL FULFILLED IN THE CROSS. So it is 
Paul who says it is the preaching of The Cross that is unto us the power 
of God; to the Jews a stumbling stone and foolishness to the Greeks, but 
to us it is the power of God. It is Paul who saw all of this, it is Paul 
who presents this to us in epistle after epistle - as it was presented 
to him by The Spirit of God and witnessed in the revealing of The Son. 
So that Paul literally came from The Testimony into The Living Witness; 
seeing everything of The Testimony fulfilled in Christ in His death, 
burial and resurrection; seeing that He brought us into His death, 
burial and brought us forth in His resurrection. And that now to live in 
His Resurrection; to live in Christ, all that is required is obedience 
unto tht work that Christ has done.

Obedience unto the fact that when He died, I died. Obedience unto the 
fact that I go down into His death, buried in the burial as one body, 
the body of humanity. And I come forth as a New Body, The Body of Jesus 
Christ! And that the bodies we have must become servants of The Body 
that we are. Now that’s how we present them as living sacrifices. It is 
not just in doing things, but it is in a divine comprehension that in 
burial I went down as one body. Didn’t Paul say this? “Thou fool, that 
which is sown, that which is buried is not that which comes forth. You 
go in as a natural body, you come forth a spiritual body. There is a 
natural body, there is a spiritual body.” So therefore Paul says, “It 
is written, the first man is after the earth, earthy. The second man is 
the Lord from heaven. As we have borne...” Where did we bear it? In our 
souls, in our hearts, in our inner most being. “As we have borne the 
image of the first, so must be bear...” (not “One day” we must) 
“...so must we bear the image of the second.” If we have lived as the 
body of humanity, if these bodies have served the body of humanity, the 
body of Adam, so now these bodies must serve The Body of Christ, which 
we are by His death, burial and resurrection. This is the gospel that is 
presented by Paul to us, bringing us from the temple that speaks of this 
to the Living Temple we are; Living Temple because He lives in us, and 
we, His Temple, live by Him!

So why are we still looking for a Living Temple? Because of this one 
issue: The Living Temple does not live by us - but by Him! We must be 
obedient unto His death. We must understand that first Tabernacle and 
all of that spoke of humanity in relationship to Christ. How is humanity 
seen in relationship to Christ? Humanity is always seen by The Cross in 
relationship to Christ. How does humanity relate to Him? Through His 
death, burial and resurrection. How did that happen? It happened because 
He came down: He became humanity. He related to humanity in His death, 
burial and resurrection. Therefore humanity can only relate to Him as He 
related to us. He is The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Humanity, except 
Christ had been made lower for a little while; except Christ had become 
obedient to the death of Adam; except Christ had identified with 
humanity - how would humanity ever had identified with Him? They never 
could have! That’s the hidden wisdom of God! That there’s no way you can 
identify with God; there’s nothing you can do that’s good enough. 
There’s no way you can ascend into heaven, there’s no way you can do it. 
Only One ever has! He that descended is the same that ascended!
He is Jacob’s ladder, not for us to climb up, but The Life that brings 
heaven to earth, and earth to heaven. He’s the bridge between humanity 
and eternity - He’s the bridge. So He comes into humanity, He takes upon 
Himself the very form of humanity, the very fashion - being found as a 
human, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death 
of The Cross. He did that for humanity. He was buried, He came forth. 
Paul says, “Do you not know that so many of us as have been baptized 
into Him...” We came by that Way that He is. “...we who have been 
baptized into Him have been baptized into His death, buried with Him by 
baptism into death, that like as He was raised up from among the dead by 
the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life.” So 
The Cross is where He identified Himself with humanity, that we may 
identify ourselves with Him in His death - which is our death; in His 
burial - which is where we were buried; in His resurrection - which is 
that by which we live. But Who is The Resurrection by which we live? “I 
AM THE RESURRECTION! I AM THE LIFE!” All that is required of you and I 
is that we be obedient to that, that Truth, that working of God, that 
divine operation of The Spirit, that Finished Work of The Son. We have 
to be obedient to the faith, obedient to the gospel - obedient to that 
whereunto He was appointed and to that whereunto we are called. OBEDIENT 
TO HIS DEATH. 

That obedience is the only thing that puts us to rest. Then we think, 
‘Oh God, I’ve tried to understand this for years, and now I see it. It’s 
not telling me how to live good, it’s telling me He’s the only good 
life! It’s not telling me how to be like Jesus, it’s telling me there’s 
none like Jesus, and He is my life! What a liberating realization, and 
it doesn’t liberate us to live like we want to, because the liberating 
factor of this is: I am dead, and He’s my Life! I’m not set free in the 
flesh: I am brought to a realization - I AM DEAD! It’s not ten things to 
control me: I am dead! It’s not ten things I can do and be good enough: 
I am dead! I have no life but Christ! It’s to that realization we become 
obedient. The Spirit is continually striving to bring us to that 
obedience...He hits one thing, then another thing; and He hits one 
thought, then another thought, but He’s continually working. How does He 
teach? Comparing spiritual things with He who is spiritual within us, 
comparing the things of The Spirit with The Spirit, comparing spiritual 
things with spiritual fulness. Bringing The Testimony to be fulfilled in 
Him, bringing us obedient to Him that He may be realized, revealed; that 
The Witness may come forth in us. The Witness - not of death; The 
Witness of Life. The Testimony has brought us to His death; it won’t 
take you beyond that. 

The prophets prophesy of this great gathering, coming from this 
direction and that direction, and this great glory. And we say, I want 
to see it, I want to be part of that gathering, I want to see that 
glory; one day He’ll gather us, one day we’ll see that glory. No, you’ll 
never do it until you realize that everything the prophets spoke of is 
accomplished in The Cross, and demands our death. When we’re obedient to 
death, then we’ll see that great gathering that we are part of - 
quickened together, raised together and seated together in heavenly 
places - whereby He gathers together all things in One. Then we’ll be 
released to see that great glory - when we’re obedient unto His death. 
The whole Testimony comes to that obedience - to The Obedient One, and 
the Spirit of God desires to bring us there, that we may be released 
into the fulness of His Life. 

So this brings us to Hebrews 10:7,8,9,10. Verse 10, “By the which will 
we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once 
for all.” See, this is a done deal! There’s only one way that you and I 
can be saved, and that’s by the blood of Jesus, accepting Him as a 
sacrifice for our sins, and receiving Him as our Savior. Well, having 
done that, there’s only one way you can walk in the fulness of Him, walk 
in the heaven, see the glory. There’s only one way you can do that; and 
that’s in obedience unto Him. If you come by His death, burial, 
resurrection, you can only live by obedience. You can’t come one way and 
then live disobedient to that very way. You can’t say, ‘Yes, I’ve come 
by the blood of Jesus; I’ve received Him as my Savior’, and then refuse 
to be obedient to that blood. Because sooner or later The Holy Spirit is 
going to say, ‘Look, the blood of Jesus in washing your sins away... 
what does that really mean?’ Wash my sins in His blood - what does that 
really mean? Then we begin to go back to The Testimony and find out. And 
we find all those washings have to do with His death. And you look at 
all those pieces of the sacrifices that were washed, and you realize He 
didn’t just wash me up and make me clean; He washed me up and presented 
me for sacrifice! We realize that being saved by His blood is actually 
coming to His death.

Now The Holy Spirit doesn’t require that obedience of a child, but 
sooner or later we say I’d like to be something more than a child, and 
The Holy Spirit says - then you must be obedient to this, you must be 
obedient to the very way that you came. If you come by the blood, you 
must become obedient to all that the blood speaks of. Because He died 
for us you must become obedient to the greater realization that is set 
forth in the scripture that He died as us. Sooner or later The Holy 
Spirit deals with all who receive Him as being in Him. Sooner or later 
The Spirit of Truth will deal with you as The Spirit of Truth, not just 
as a condemnation of sin and sinners: He will deal with you in the 
greater capacity of The Spirit of Truth. At that point we either become 
obedient or we become frustrated. And our frustration will either bring 
us back to obedience, or it will find a vent in carnality. But every 
time we want to grow in the Lord and grow closer to Him, we’ll come 
right back to that same point wherein we were frustrated - we’ll not be 
able to get beyond there. For there’s only one Jordan River; there’s 
only one realization - OBEDIENCE UNTO DEATH. God brought Israel right 
back to the same place, the same Jordan, during the same season. And He 
said - here it is! Now arise and pass over this Jordan. And you notice 
it didn’t roll back until the priests stepped out in it, in obedience 
unto faith, and then it rolled back. Did you notice that? The Red Sea 
rolled back before anybody ever did anything except Moses stretched 
forth his rod. But the Jordan didn’t stand up and roll back until the 
priests put their feet in it! This is obedience. You pass from death 
unto life, from Testimony unto Witness through obedience unto His death. 
This is where The Spirit of God is bringing us.

So Hebrews 10 tells us the first must die, that the second may be 
established. Look over in Chapter 9:8. There we are dealing very 
distinctly with the first and the second tabernacle. The first 
tabernacle is called that area, The Holy Place. The second tabernacle in 
this case is referred to as The Holy of Holies. Now the one is speaking 
beyond itself, but the writer of Hebrews is using these two parts of the 
tabernacle as the first, and the second the Holy of Holies. “The Holy 
Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all...” which 
is in verse 7. “But into the second went the high priest alone once 
every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the 
errors of the people.” Now verse 6 says that in the first tabernacle 
the priests ministered there every day, so that’s The Holy Place, with 
the candelabra and the bread table and the incense. But into the second 
went the High Priest just one time a year. Why was this? Verse 8, “The 
Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the holiest of all was not 
yet made manifest, while as the first tabernacle was yet standing.” Now 
look at verse 11, “ But Christ being come an high priest of good things 
to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, 
that is to say, not of this building.” Verse 24, “For Christ is not 
entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of 
the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God 
for us.” While the first tabernacle yet remained, the way into the 
Holiest of all is not made manifest.

What did Jesus say? He said, “Destroy this tabernacle”; speaking of 
the first. Where did He do that? The Cross! And with The Cross, in His 
death, burial and resurrection all that the first tabernacle spoke of 
was destroyed. And He said, “I will raise it again.” This He speaks of 
His resurrection, and He speaks of the more perfect Tabernacle which is 
The Tabernacle of His own Body, which By Him you now are! But until 
there is a doing away of the first, until there is an obedience unto The 
Cross, an obedience unto His death; the way into the second is not made 
manifest. While you and I are seeing the first man we can not see, 
comprehend The Second. While you and I are still embodied in the first 
tabernacle, and all that it stood for, which is the body of humanity, we 
can not comprehend, see a New Humanity, A New Man.

While the first was standing the way was not made manifest, it was not 
clearly seen, and it is not. So Jesus says in chapter 10, “I come to 
take away the first.” Why? That He may establish the second!  Do you 
understand that everything that He did as The Son of God must be done in 
us by the faith of The Son of God. What is the faith of The Son of God? 
It is comprehending Him by The Spirit in the fulness of what He has 
done. It is coming to realize when He died, He didn’t just die as some 
Jewish building, He died as everything that first tabernacle stood for. 
That first tabernacle stood for the body of humanity. That He may bring 
forth what that tabernacle and what the body of humanity points to, 
testifies of; that He may bring forth the greater tabernacle and the 
greater body of The New Humanity, which is The Body of Christ. It’s not 
just a tent that is done away, it’s not just some Jewish building that’s 
done away; but what it stood for. The first - creation. And that’s the 
reason here in Hebrews 10 it says “He taketh away the first”. The 
first - what? The first, the first creation, the first man. He taketh 
away the first. He takes away everything that simply points to the 
second. He takes it away. How does He do it? He fulfilled it in Himself. 
How? In His death, burial and resurrection. “By the which will, by the 
which doing, by the doing of which, we are sanctified through the 
offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” Brother, how do I 
walk in that? In obedience to His death! That His Life may abound in us. 
‘I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE.’

Now Hebrews 9:26-28, the writer here is showing that there is a better 
tabernacle, but that there is a better tabernacle because of the better 
High Priest; that the High Priest of one order had a tabernacle of that 
same order. In other words the High Priest wasn’t any better than the 
tabernacle, and the tabernacle wasn’t any better than the High Priest. 
The High Priest offered sacrifices for the people and himself also. But 
if there is a better High Priest, then it stands to reason that He has a 
Better Tabernacle. This teaching starts back in chapter 8. How do we 
know that you and I are a better Tabernacle? Because we’ve got a Better 
High Priest! Hebrews 8 says we have such an High Priest! He’s brought 
forth a better offering than goats and bulls - He offered Himself, once 
and for all! Better blood than that of lambs - His own blood, once and 
for all! A better death, for His death is not in type of mankind, but it 
is in fact the transition from the body of humanity, and He brings forth 
a Spiritual Body, which Body we are. A better resurrection - not men 
coming to life again, but Christ Himself living in men! A better 
Tabernacle - we are by Him what all the saints of Hebrews 11:35-40 
looked for, longed for, died for. And yet, could not receive without us!

Because we are that which comes forth by Him. We are not a tabernacle 
made by hands, but a Tabernacle made by God through The Spirit. For He 
has quickened us with His Spirit, raised us by His Spirit, established 
us in Christ by His Spirit; He dwells in us as His own House. We are a 
better House: not because we are better, but because our High Priest is 
better, because we have Him not by prophecy; we have Him by reality of 
Spirit. We have, and by Him we are made to be what the prophets saw and 
what the prophets spoke of - The Great City, The Tabernacle of God, The 
Mountain of The Most High. You have come there in Christ Jesus! And yet 
because of carnality that has come in, and the lie that has come in that 
has worked disobedience unto the reality of The Cross, we have 
multitudes of Christians looking themselves for what the Old Testament 
saints looked for. They looked for a city, and we’re still looking for a 
city! They looked for a temple, and we’re still looking for one! When in 
fact of the matter, they looked in obedience, and we’re looking in 
disobedience. They looked in faith; we’re looking because we don’t have 
faith. If we had faith we would manifest the reality of The City they 
looked for. That’s really what Hebrews 11:35-40 says; that they without 
us could not be made complete, because their completeness is The City we 
are. And they are made complete in that Resurrection of Christ that we 
are also partakers of. And yet somehow we’ve been robbed of that 
reality; so we’re looking for a better place to go and a better city to 
live in. 

And all of those things are in Him for those who have faith, for those 
who will be obedient - Unto His death, that they may live in the surety 
of His Resurrection and manifest the reality of salvation in the earth 
that every prophet saw and testified of, that every one of those saints 
of God listed in Hebrews 11 died for. They died in faith, waiting for 
the greater death of The Cross, the greater burial, the greater 
resurrection - all of which is to be witnessed in a greater City, a 
greater Country, a greater Mountain, a greater Body, a greater 
Tabernacle, which by Him - you are! So how is it we know what we are, 
who we are? Only in seeing Him! Now we have some today who have grabbed 
a hold of some of those truths - we are the Temple, we are the City - 
and have run out preaching “we are..., we are...” but never having 
seen Him, so it doesn’t work. On one side we have those still looking 
for a city, and on the other hand we have those who say ‘we are the 
city’, but there’s no light, there’s no evidence or witness. The key to 
it all is seeing Him. You’ll never know whose Body you are until you see 
the face of that Body; the light of the knowledge of the glory of God 
revealed in the face of Jesus Christ.

We can preach ‘we’re the city’ all we want to, but until The Lamb is The 
Light, what light have we? Where is The Witness? There’s not a whole lot 
of difference with those who say there’s a city still coming, than there 
is in those who say we are the city who have no light; whose light is 
themselves, whose declaration of the city is actually themselves. “Look 
what we are!” See. The Witness is not preaching “sonship”, but 
manifesting The Son. The Witness is not preaching “Kingdom”, The 
Witness is the sovereign rule of The King in a people. The Witness is 
not preaching “The Body”, The Witness is The Body exhibiting Christ. 
If we simply take these things of The Testimony and preach them as 
things, but never seeing The True Witness of them, then all we’re doing 
is still just extending The Testimony. It’s not a whole lot better than 
saying ‘one day we’re going to see a city and walk of streets of gold’, 
than to say ‘we’re the city of God’ - but where’s the light, where’s the 
nature, where’s the character of it, where’s the changes - where’s the 
light? Other than hearing us saying ‘we’re the city’, what is anybody 
seeing? 

The real Witness to all that He is, is seen in the revealing of Him. 
He’s the light, and that’s exactly what the scriptures say. In 
Colossians 3:1-4, and particularly verse 4 where it says, “When Christ, 
who is our life shall appear...” And that word “appear” means shall 
be made manifest, shall be manifestly seen. “...then shall ye also be 
made manifest - as being one with Him.” What is the scripture saying? 
It is saying when shall This City be seen? It shall be seen when The 
Lord is seen in The City. When shall this City be apparent? This City 
shall become apparent when The Lord becomes apparent in The City. When 
shall This City be seen? This city shall be seen when The Light is 
turned on in it, when He who is The Light shines forth, then The City 
will be seen as being One with Him. That’s exactly what that verse says. 
We want to show the City - “look at us, we’re the city.” No - it is 
The City showing HIM that gives The City itself visibility. It’s not The 
City preaching The City; it is The City showing Him that validates the 
existence of The City. He is The Witness, He’s the faithful and True 
Witness. “Ye shall be witnesses unto Me.”I keep saying this in many 
different ways, but I pray that if I say it enough there shall come a 
hunger in somebody’s heart to say, “Father, show me The Witness. If we 
are The City, let The Witness come forth in us. If we are His Body, 
reveal The One whose Body we are. Oh God, Father, bring us from The 
Testimony to The Witness.”

That’s what all of my talking is for. And if it doesn’t reach somebody 
in this way then it’s just in vain. I know that no matter what I prepare 
to cover in our studies, it all comes down to seeing Him or it’s just so 
many words. But I know there are hearts ever hungry to see Him more and 
more. And The Lord desires to bring forth great Witness and He does that 
in great revealing of His Son. So I’m not so much constrained in the 
area of obedience unto His death because there are a people who are 
disobedient, but rather that there are a people desiring to be obedient 
unto that death, and know Him in the power of His resurrection. There is 
a reality that The Spirit would work, a Witness that would come forth 
that together with the knowledge of Him would go virtually to the ends 
of the earth; that would empower and join itself with that Witness 
coming forth in others, that will virtually go to the uttermost parts of 
the earth. And that’s more than just sending out religious people and 
calling them missionaries. That doesn’t mean anything; it’s The Witness. 

So we need to come to determine what is Testimony and what is Witness, 
and understand that getting people saved and sending them out as 
missionaries does not constitute Witness, unless they indeed have come 
from words to Spirit, from what is said to what is real; from what is 
coming to He Who is come. Unless they are indeed eyewitness of Him and 
His Resurrection, and martyr Witness by understanding, by obedience unto 
death, having no life but Christ. That is the two fold meaning of 
Witness - eyewitness and martyrdom. Not the willingness to go die, but 
the realization I am dead, and He is my life. That’s the true martyr - 
not I’m hoping to see Jesus one day, but God hath revealed His Son in 
me. 

That obedience unto His death releases us unto the working in us by the 
power of His Resurrection. And we understand He is not in you and I 
working life - HE IS THE LIFE. He is in you and I working death; death 
to the first, that the second may become all the more apparent and 
manifest. He is in us working obedience to a Finished Work, that the end 
of that work which is Christ in Resurrection; that the end of that 
Finished Work which is the power of His Resurrection may work in us a 
manifestation of Him. Christ working in us - according to the power that 
worketh in you. Paul says, “according to that power that worketh 
mightily in me.” And in another place he speaks of “the power of His 
Resurrection.” You and I have not yet seen the power of His 
Resurrection that would be released in us through obedience unto His 
death. It is obedience that the Lord is calling for, that there may be 
as a result of that released in us the working of His Resurrection. 
We’ve not seen that. We can’t even imagine the transformation that would 
take place in us and in others around us, if we would be obedient to 
what He hath done. Obedient to His death, obedient to the end of the 
first, that the second may be made fully manifest in us, having 
expression through us. OBEDIENT, OBEDIENT, OBEDIENT!

We’ve all heard preaching on obedience, but obedience unto what? Paul 
said I’m going to obey the law, and he found that the law led him to 
death. So - obedience unto death. I’m going to obey the sacrifices - and 
they led him to death, because they speak of that. If we are obedient to 
The Testimony and stay honest and don’t try to find a way out, it will 
bring us to His death. Why? Because The Testimony is unto death; not 
simply because the Bible says that until there be a death of The 
Testator, The Testimony is not in force. The Bible does say that, but in 
fact and reality The Testimony itself is fulfilled in His death. So The 
Testimony is unto death, and The Witness is unto Life. So where is the 
end of The Witness? There is no end of The Witness. Where is the end of 
the Life? There is no end of The Life! We are missing the greater 
because we will not be obedient to the lesser. And we pray the Lord will 
work in our hearts this obedience. He will bring us there through The 
Testimony. 

I want to show you something. The first man Adam would not die. That 
thought came to me; that is, he would not lose or forsake his own life. 
So now God made man a soul living (that’s the original text - soul 
living). Genesis 2:7 says man became a soul. 1 Corin. 15:45 says the 
first man was made a soul living. Now in the literal concordant Greek 
New Testament in John 12:23 and 24 is where Jesus is introducing The 
Cross as being His death, His burial, His resurrection. These men come 
saying, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” So there came a time when the 
question was, what Jesus do you want to see - the Jesus after the flesh, 
or Jesus by The Spirit? He began to speak to them of the Jesus that He 
showed Himself to be to Paul. “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” 
What was he doing? Saul was killing the Body of Christ, he was rounding 
up Christians and putting them to death. “Why persecutest thou Me? Who 
are you, Lord? I am Jesus Whom thou persecutest.” The same Jesus, but a 
little different view than you would have in the flesh. Same Jesus, but 
a little different comprehension of Him; comprehending Him in a 
different Body. 

Here’s where He presents Himself that way. “Sir, we would see Jesus.” 
So what does He do? “And Jesus answered them, saying The hour is come 
that the Son of man should be glorified.” They’re saying, “Sir, we 
would see Jesus” and He’s saying you’re never going to see the Jesus 
that I would have you to see except I die! “Verily, verily I’m saying 
unto you, if a kernel of grain falling into the earth (speaking of 
Himself) should not be dying, it is remaining alone.” See, the Jesus I 
want you to see, He’s saying here, is not Jesus in a body to die; I want 
you to see Jesus in His Living Body, in His Body to live. I want you to 
see that which I bring forth of Myself through death, burial and 
resurrection. I’m not talking about a bunch of little Jesuses; I’m 
talking about One Body manifesting this same Jesus. I’m talking about 
One Body bearing One name - that Body which you are. I’m not telling you 
that I’m Jesus; I’m simply telling you I have no life but Jesus, and 
that I have been made to be with you a Body that has no name but Jesus 
either. And I’ve got to sacrifice the body that I have to The Body that 
I am. And the name that I have to The Name with which I am named.

I’m not telling you we’re Jesus Christ - No. I’m saying there is a 
greater work; I’m saying there is a Body that comes forth in The 
Resurrection and it’s this same Jesus but He’s in a different Body! He’s 
saying if a kernel of corn fall into the ground - He’s speaking of 
Himself. He fell into the lower part of the earth, He descended into the 
earth - not just simply being born of a woman, but taking that very body 
into the earth. But if that seed coming into the earth should not be 
dying; speaking of Him becoming obedient unto death, even the death of 
The Cross - it remains alone. Yet if it should be dying it brings forth 
much fruit. He is speaking that of Himself. This is the obedience. And 
it is this Jesus that comes forth - obedient unto death, even the death 
of The Cross. Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a 
name that is above every name. HE IS EXALTED IN THE RESURRECTION! He 
says I am The Resurrection, but He lives in you! God hath highly exalted 
Him and given Him a name above every name - whose name? My name! Your 
name! Above every name! Thank God that at the name of JESUS every knee 
shall bow - whose knee? Your knee, my knee, all our knees should bow! 
Writing HIS NAME IN US! Claiming us as His own Body, putting His Name 
upon us, that we become greater manifestation of Him; that we become the 
manifestation of His greater being, of His greatness!

I don’t know any other way to say it! But it was that Jesus that Saul 
persecuted, because he certainly wasn’t around when He was walking in 
the body of His death, throwing rocks at Him. But in that Saul 
imprisoned the saints - not the saints of old, but the saints who were 
alive in The Resurrection, by the Lord Jesus, who are His Body, and 
Jesus said, “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” No wonder Paul could 
never look at the Church as others did, at the Body as others did. He 
didn’t start off that way! Now the carnal mind can take that and say, 
‘O, I’m Jesus’, No you’re not! Only the flesh would be stupid enough to 
take that kind of a statement unto themselves. But that same 
Jesus...we’re His Body, we’re named by His name, He puts His name upon 
us because we are His. We live by Him; because He lives we live also. 
When He appears we appear to be One with Him. When He appears we see 
that as He is, so are we in this earth!

“He who is loving his soul is destroying it. He who is hating his soul 
in this world shall be guarding it for life aeon.” King James says 
“life”: our life is our soul. So I finally realized Adam would not 
surrender his soul. The first man Adam would not die, that is, he would 
not forsake his own soul life; which is what the Tree of Life spoke of - 
a life other than what his own soul life was, a life he didn’t have, 
other than his own soul life, which is what the Tree of Life demanded. 
So he chose the tree that did not demand the forsaking of his own soul 
life, but merely promised the knowledge of good and evil. And by the lie 
of the devil, he thought we’ll be like God - knowing good and evil. And 
what a lie that was! Because what Adam did was he disobeyed God. The 
tree gave him a knowledge of evil because he ceased doing good. He 
experienced evil in disobedience. Adam kept his own independent soul 
life and this is what the enemy would have us do: keep our own 
independent soul life. This is the grounds upon which the enemy tempted 
the Lord. 

And the Lord in John 12 is speaking of Himself as much as anybody else. 
“If I seek to save my life...but if I forsake it...” He is speaking 
here as The One going to The Cross. He is speaking as The One of whom 
the Psalmist cries out and says, “Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell 
nor suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption.” He is speaking of One who 
is about to absolutely and totally lay down His  soul life as a man - in 
obedience unto God. And in faith and truth, that The One to whom he laid 
down His soul would bring it forth again in union with that Eternal 
Spirit. Adam took one look at the Tree of Life and turned from it - he 
would not release his soul. God made him a soul - living, and that soul 
now could choose to release that back to God, and have it come forth in 
Spirit; or to keep it unto himself. And Adam kept it unto himself. The 
second man Adam was obedient unto death - he released that life that God 
had given, and it was restored by The Life Giving Spirit! “If that same 
spirit dwell in you that raised up Christ from among the dead...” 
That’s different than the soul; that’s The Living Spirit of God, and He 
is in you through obedience of the soul unto death - on behalf of 
Christ. So, how do we live by that Spirit? By bringing  our soul into 
obedience unto death, we experience the Life of The Spirit.





	



                  Part 4 - When The Light Comes:
                   Ye Shall Be Witnesses Unto Me

Blessed be The Light of God! HE IS THE LIGHT! The darkness can not 
withstand that Light. You know, back when I thought everything was a 
battle between God and the devil, that meant a certain thing to me. And 
I realize there is still a darkness that is without. But friends, there 
is a darkness within. The Holy of Holies, until there is made manifest 
the glory of God, is in absolute darkness. And I saw this more as I 
search the scriptures. Now there are verses that obviously have to do 
with the darkness without: “He hath delivered us from the power of 
darkness...”, “children of the night”. But there is a darkness that 
is only dispelled in the revelation of Jesus Christ; that darkness that 
is only dispelled in the manifest appearing of the glory of God Himself. 
We have to understand that in the Holy of Holies, sin was not the issue, 
Satan was not the issue. But the natural ability to see was the issue; 
the natural mind was the issue. And that room was so shrouded to forbid 
any light other than the glory of God having its penetration. And there 
is only One Light that overcomes that darkness. We need to think about 
this, because we kind of get upset when someone suggests that there may 
be darkness in us. But there is a place that is absolutely dark until 
the coming of Light. This place is not shades of darkness, and that 
place is the Holy of Holies. What that means is that you can not see 
there except by The Light that Christ is! You can not know there, you 
can not comprehend there except by The Light that Christ is. There is no 
provision in the Holy of Holies made for lampstands, oils, sun lights - 
none whatsoever. The only provision there is for The Light of The Glory 
of God!

And this answers directly to what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:6,  
“God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness...” And in 
searching the scripture I have found only one place that answers to, and 
it is there in the Holy of Holies. “God, who hath commanded the light 
to shine out of darkness (that is, in the midst of darkness), hath 
shined in our hearts...” And it is very distinctly not “into”. Hath 
shined in, as from within; hath shined in our hearts. Why? “To give the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ.” There is The Witness that answers to The Testimony; The 
Testimony being in the Holy of Holies, in the Tabernacle of The 
Testimony, concerning the Ark of The Testimony. And the glory of God 
descending and filling - becoming the light of that place, the light of 
that 10'x10'x10', that thousand cubit place. And yet it was a glory that 
came and went; it did not abide.  But in you the glory abideth! HE 
DWELLS IN YOU! Unfortunately it’s you and I who more or less come and 
go, rather than abide in Him.

The Lord says it both ways, “If my words abide in you, and you abide in 
my word, and you abide in me.” See, there is an abiding in Him. That is 
a condition of the heart, walking in the light as He is in the light. 
But it is in this Light that the darkness is dispelled; that darkness 
that is in us, that place in us that can not be lighted except by the 
revelation of Jesus Christ. It is reserved, it is made of God that way - 
that the light would not shine upon it, but would shine within it. And I 
think that may very well answer to John 1:4: “In Him was life, and the 
life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the 
darkness comprehended it not.” No, the darkness could not understand 
it, could not hold it back. My! My!

Look at Ephesians 3:17, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; 
that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend 
with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; 
And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might 
be filled with all the fulness of God.” The darkness could not 
withstand it. John 1:14, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among 
us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the 
Father,) full of grace and truth.” See it’s the glory that we’re 
dealing with here. Now I’m not telling you that there is not a world of 
darkness and a world of light. I am telling you in many of the 
scriptures concerning the darkness, the darkness is not an evil thing, 
but a place that can only be lighted in the revelation of Jesus Christ. 
It’s a place designed of God where none but His Son shall appear. And it 
shall remain covered, veiled, dark, obscure except His Son be revealed 
there. And in the light of The Son, in the knowledge of The Son, that 
place in you, prepared of God, in you, begins to be understood, begins 
to be seen - the abode of The Most High! And we begin to understand in 
the light that He is our relationship by Him with our Father. So there 
is that light that shines in - not into, not upon; from within darkness 
- the darkness of our own mind, that darkness that is behind the veil, 
maintaining the veil upon our minds. It is that veil of flesh which is 
done away only through obedience unto His death. 

This is moving from The Testimony to The Witness; moving from that place 
where the glory of God comes as a cloud, as a pillar of fire to that 
place where the glory of God is Christ revealed in you - the ever 
abiding One. And since He is ever abiding, then certainly we may ever 
abide in Him. But it takes that obedience unto death. For as we abide in 
Him who is The Light, that Light is piercing, uncovering, exploring, 
going to the depths of our soul, uncovering the thoughts and intents of 
our hearts, and exposing God’s purpose for man right in the midst of our 
soul. And who knows that this does not come to cross purposes with many 
of the purposes we have planned for ourselves, when we come to see God’s 
purpose. That’s what The Light does, that’s what Christ revealed in us 
does. And that’s why it takes an obedience unto His death, a willingness 
to forsake all; not all things - ALL  - ME - ALL, that soul life; that 
He may continue to abound and abound. And all that is brought to light 
that was formerly in that darkness; we face that in obedience. So that 
Light both uncovers the hidden thoughts of our minds, but it also 
reveals God’s eternal plan and purpose in the midst of our soul. We’ve 
looked at that. That Light brings us to purpose. 

You know, so many of God’s people are willing for the Lord to show them 
and give them provision, but they will not obey Him in purpose. 
Provision is for the wilderness journey, The Testimony will tell you 
that. He provided for them in the wilderness. God didn’t provide for 
them in Egypt; the Egyptians provided for them in Egypt. He provided for 
them in the wilderness. He gave them manna and all sorts of things for 
their provision. But because they would not obey God in purpose, they 
all died! And do you know, they all died eating manna! Those people that 
died had a big breakfast of manna; and later on in the day - they died. 
They died in provision - their clothes, their shoes, all of that; the 
cloud by day, the pillar of fire by might. All of that and they died 
anyway! Because they disobeyed God with regard to purpose; they wouldn’t 
enter into purpose. And I think sometimes you and I will obey God with 
regard to provision, which is basically things. But we balk when He 
begins to unveil in us His Eternal Purpose in the face of Jesus Christ. 
And, the provision for the purpose itself is Christ Himself. In other 
words, the ability, the provision to walk in purpose is Christ, the 
purpose itself; it is Christ working in you His divine nature. God 
doesn’t call you to do something that He will not do in you. He doesn’t 
call you to walk in purpose without working that very purpose in you - 
if you will obey.

All of that is set in type in The Testimony. God didn’t call them to go 
into Canaan without destroying the enemies in front of them if they 
would just be obedient. He didn’t call them to walk in a place that He 
would not lead them in, and go before them in. And God hasn’t called us 
to be conformed to the image of His Son, which is His divine purpose, 
without making provision for that. And the provision for that is that 
His Son dwells in you. And in the revealing of that Son, that divine 
purpose is worked out. Paul calls it “the power by which He worketh 
mightily in me”, and he refers to it again as “the power by which He 
is able to subdue all things unto Himself.” Again, “the working by 
which He worketh all things according to His will”, and “the power of 
his resurrection.” But it is all Christ working in you. It is not by 
might, not by power as we know it, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord. I’m 
just telling you that God has not called you into a purpose that He 
Himself will not perform - if we will be obedient. But many times we 
find ourselves like the Israelites in the wilderness, and our greatest 
concern is over provision as it relates to things, not purpose as it 
relates to Christ. The whole point is that when they got into Canaan the 
provision was there. See, the provision is in the possessing. They ate 
of the land, they ate what they possessed, they ate what they walked 
upon, what they laid hold upon! The Lord just deal with us.

Coming from Testimony to Witness. Now I want to deal more specifically 
with The Witness side of this. We’ve dealt mostly with becoming obedient 
to The Testimony, that is obedient unto His death, and by that we are 
released into the knowledge of His resurrection. As long as we are 
resisting His death, we are not going to comprehend Him as our life. 
That’s the truth. Why? Because to resist His death is to save your own 
life, to save your own soul. We read that out of the Greek text of John 
12:25, “He that loveth his life (his soul) shall be losing it, but he 
that will forsake it, shall be keeping it, or saving it.” And we’ve 
said that this was Adam’s act of disobedience. The disobedience was he 
wouldn’t die; he sought to save his own life, he would not release his 
soul for the greater realization in the Tree of Life. And then you have 
to follow that disobedience down the line, and as it comes down and is 
dealt with in Abraham, dealt with in Jacob, and comes on down, and 
finally is dealt with in Israel. Where do you think it came from? It 
came right out of Adam and it’s just enlarged and enlarged! The 
disobedience that Israel displayed in the wilderness was nothing more 
than the magnification, the increase of the disobedience of Adam in the 
garden. It’s not a different disobedience; they would not be obedient 
unto death. Israel would not be obedient to the death that got them out 
of Egypt; they were not obedient unto their baptism into the Red Sea. 
They never saw themselves as being dead, absolutely dead to Egypt; it 
was always a back door opportunity to them, a place they could return 
to. And finally it became so obsessively that, and they became so 
disobedient to the death of that they would not enter into life, rest, 
promise.

And the writer of the Hebrews simply says - disobedience, unbelief. 
Wherefore God swares in His wrath they shall not enter into my rest. Why 
did God get so upset? They didn’t want to cross a river? No, because The 
Testimony is so much greater than that. He’s seeing that same 
disobedience that He saw in Adam - they wouldn’t eat the right tree, 
because it would have had the same consequences. God had set it before 
him, but Adam chose the one of the lust of his own soul, the lust of the 
flesh and the pride of eyes, and he listened to the lie. And here is 
Israel: He brought them out with a mighty hand, brought them out 
testimonially by the blood of My Son, brought them out as My firstborn, 
born from among the dead; brought them out through baptism into the Sea, 
buried, brought them out. Over and over in the Bible God rehearses this 
Testimony. And here they get right up to the place where God had seen 
them, and had established in the heart of Abraham, that very faith - to 
Abraham He showed the seed in the land. And Abraham was obedient unto 
death, because that seed was known in Isaac. And God said, now give me 
that seed; surrender it to me in death, and Abraham was obedient. And 
because of that he saw The Resurrection. The writer of the Hebrews says 
He received Isaac back again in type of the Resurrection. He saw the 
greater than Isaac. So Israel was right up there, but they wouldn’t do 
it. It is just an increase of that disobedience of Adam to the Tree of 
Life - the saving of his own soul life, and losing his own soul. If you 
seek to save it, you will lose it!

So we come from a comprehending of Christ in The Testimony to 
comprehending Him, The Living Witness through obedience unto His death. 
It’s not comprehending Him outside, afar, but comprehending Him in us. 
When we come to comprehend Him as The Living Witness, then we shall be 
witnesses unto Him. The whole business is that He might have expression 
through a people in all the earth. This is that great mystery of God. 
There’s no mystery that there is a God; the mystery of God has to do 
with God dwelling in a people through death, burial and resurrection. 
The mystery of God is all wrapped up in a New Creation wherein dwells 
God. The mystery of God is all bound up in God revealing His Son in you, 
His Body, and that Body becoming an expression of Him in the earth - 
this is the mystery of God. God in you, the expectation of glory. Not 
your expectation; it was Israel’s expectation. Christ in you. See in The 
Testimony, Genesis to Malachi, He is the expectation of glory - 
everything is set forth in expectation of glory. The prophets talk about 
this glory; Ezekiel shows this house of glory, to Zerubbabel it is said 
the glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former. 
Everything is unto expectation of glory. 

Paul says, “Christ in you, the expectation of glory.” - not for you. 
Their expectation is the glory of God that is in you! Christ in you; 
that’s how the verse is written. But we look at it through the veil. 
We’re still trying to peep in through the veil of our flesh, which veil 
is done away by The Cross; because the veil is what makes the first 
tabernacle the first tabernacle. Here the veil is done away. Even in a 
very literal, physical, symbolic way when He died, the veil of that old 
building rent. But much more was rent than just that symbolic veil in 
that Jewish temple. That ended it alright, and that ended a lot of the 
prophecies of the scripture with regard to the ending of sacrifices. 
When the veil rent for all practical purposes the temple was destroyed. 
But there was a greater veil rent than that - the veil of His flesh, 
which is the veil of humanity, was rent. The veil of His humanity; His 
humanity was us! He took upon Himself humanity. Philippians 2:5-8. 
“...being found in fashion as a man...” The literal Greek says being 
found in fashion as a human. That humanity, that body of humanity that 
He took upon Himself was rent, and The Son of God came forth in The 
Resurrection!

And it is He who lives in you and me. It is He who dwells in clay pots, 
but the clay pot is not His Body. We who are quickened and livened in 
the inner man by Him - we are His Body. We have bodies; He has a Body. 
We submit the bodies we have to The Body we are by Him. The scripture is 
very clear on that. “Present your bodies as living sacrifices...” Why? 
Because He already had a body as a sacrifice; He laid it down. The Body 
He picked up,that He comes forth in; that Spiritual Body, that Spiritual 
Temple, which Body, which Temple you are, made so by Him dwelling in you 
- that isn’t going to be sacrificed again. So we sacrifice unto it, 
these bodies, which is your reasonable service. And all of that again, 
is  obedience unto His death. 

But here The Witness - everything that was an expectation in The 
Testimony becomes a reality in The Witness. Christ, the expectation of 
glory. But Christians get a hold of that and don’t have any idea what 
they are reading. See, we have a term for hope. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain. 
I hope it does rain. I hope...’ There is no Biblical term for that kind 
of hope. There is no word for that in the Hebrew. The word is 
“certainty”. It is a certainty, it is expectation; but it is 
expectation in view of certainty. Israel was in hope - expectation in 
view of certainty. That’s what faith is. Paul gets into that in Romans 
8. Expectation. But now here comes the glory that was expected. We all 
with an unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are changed. It is 
no longer expectation. So we move from the expectation to the glory - we 
shall be witnesses. This is important because we are witnesses of His 
glory, and His glory is manifested in His Resurrection. He is 
resurrected in glory.

Look at John 17. This is the summation of a narrative that was started 
back at chapter 12 - about this hour. “These words spake Jesus, and 
lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; 
glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given 
him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as 
thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee 
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have 
glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest 
me to do.” He speaks now about Himself in relation to His death, burial 
and resurrection. “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own 
self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” Now go 
to Romans 6, verse 4. “ Therefore we are buried with him by baptism 
into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory 
of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” We’ve 
said He was raised up in glory. His glory is manifested in The 
Resurrection. To see Him in resurrection - I AM THE RESURRECTION, I AM 
THE LIFE - to see Him that way is to behold Him in His glory. Where do 
you behold Him in resurrection? Where do you  behold Him in His glory? 
IN YOU! Because that’s where He is in His resurrection, and that’s where 
He is in His glory. What keeps us from beholding Him in His 
resurrection, in His glory? The veil of flesh that remains upon our 
hearts, because we won’t be obedient unto the death of the flesh; we 
won’t be obedient unto His death. If we were obedient unto His death, 
the veil that is done away, shall be taken away, and we beholding Him 
with an unveiled face, an unveiled heart and soul; beholding the light 
of the knowledge of the glory of God, beholding the glory of the Lord. 
The result of it is a tremendous transforming of the inner man by the 
glory of God.

So Colossians says in 3:4, “When He who is our life shall appear...” 
That’s talking about this same appearing that is spoken about in 2 
Corinthians 3:18, “When He appears... then we shall also appear with 
Him in glory.” That’s not a land somewhere; that’s a relationship. 
That’s a realization, that’s a transforming power of His Resurrection! 
He’s in you! John 17:5, “Father, glorify me with thine own self...” 
Romans 6,4, “Therefore...by the glory of the Father...” Here it is. 
“Now Father, glorify thou me with thine own self...” The Eternal 
Spirit! “...with the glory that I had with thee before the world was.” 
That glory that He left in order to be made lower for a little while. 
But why did He leave? Why was He made lower for a little while? Hebrews 
2:9, “...who (for a little while) was made lower...” Why? Verse 10: 
“For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all 
things, in bringing many sons unto glory...” Again, that’s not a place, 
that’s a relationship. You can say it’s a place if you understand the 
place He has prepared for us is a relationship in Himself, and with 
Himself by The Eternal Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord. What is 
all this about? He had glory; He left glory; now He’s going back to 
glory. It seems like a useless trip. Not at all! Not at all! There’s a 
reason for that, there’s a mystery to that. The mystery of God wasn’t 
the man created out of dirt. The mystery of God is The Man created, The 
Man coming forth in death, burial and resurrection. One comes forth; 
many who are made by Him to be One come back!

Paul says don’t you know that’s the whole thing of The Resurrection? He 
says it’s not the body that goes into the ground that comes out, but 
another body, altogether different! He came in one form, but in The 
Resurrection He comes forth in another. And when He said, “I am The 
Resurrection and The Life” it is eternal and ever ongoing. You can’t 
just pin that to some little event in the pages of history. It’s so 
today, and as we read this, He is The Resurrection - not the hope of it: 
He IS The Resurrection! He is the certainty, the assurance, but He’s 
more than these words can say. So He doesn’t say, I am the certainty of 
a resurrection. No, He says, “ I am The Resurrection, I am The Life.” 
Therefore our resurrection is sure and is certain because it is Him! 
He’s in you! And we see this here, because all of this isn’t for Him. 
John 17, 21, “ That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, 
and I in thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may 
believe...” Because He has said in verse 14, “I have given them thy 
word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of this world, 
even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldest take them 
out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They 
are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them 
through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the 
world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” YE SHALL BE 
WITNESSES UNTO ME. I sent them into the world. How? “As you have sent 
Me, I have sent them.” “And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that 
they also might be sanctified through the truth. Neither pray I for 
these alone (these that are presently at that time with Him), but for 
them also which shall believe on me through their word”. Now verse 21, 
“ That they all...” And that reaches out to right now. “That they all 
may be one... that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” You 
shall be witnesses unto me. Not that thou hast sent them; No - that thou 
hast sent Me. Jesus said, Ye shall be witnesses unto ME.

“And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be 
one, even as we are one.” Beholding Him in His glory; beholding Him, 
the One, the One glory of God, The One. We behold The One whose Body we 
are, we behold The One whose House we are. “The glory that thou hast 
given me...” What was that glory? “Glorify me with thine own self...” 
Coming back into that eternal oneness that He left to bring us back to 
the same place. “That where I am, there ye may be also.” “In that day 
ye shall know that I am in my Father, you are in me, and I am in you.” 
That’s from John 14 and now it’s repeated in this narrative. The glory 
thou hast given me I have given them; what’s that all about? “That they 
may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may 
be made perfect (whole, complete, finished) in one; that the world may 
know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved 
me.” YE SHALL BE WITNESSES UNTO ME.

Verse 24, “Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be 
with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given 
me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world. O righteous 
Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these 
have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy 
name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me 
may be in them, and I in them.” My Lord, moving you and I; coming to 
comprehend Him in this way - moving from The Testimony to The Witness. 
THE WITNESS - the living realization that as He is in us, and by virtue 
of Him being in us, we are in Him. Consequently, are made to be One Body 
by One life giving Spirit. This is the mystery of God, and it is wrought 
by The Resurrection. The Man cometh by resurrection. This One is not 
made out of dirt, This One is not made living soul, This One is made 
Living Spirit, to the satisfaction of our soul, to the salvation of our 
soul. He, The Living Spirit dwells in us, and it is by that Living 
Spirit we are made One Living Body, brought forth in The Resurrection, 
by The Resurrection. This in fact is The Resurrection of the dead. 
Christ was raised up from among the dead. Why? That He may be The 
Resurrection of the dead. What dead? The dead who will hear His voice 
and live! “The hour is coming and now is, that the dead shall hear my 
voice, and they who hear shall live.” “I am The Resurrection. He that 
believeth in me...whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. 
Believeth thou this?”

This that Jesus speaks of in John 17, this coming from Testimony into 
Witness, this coming from death into life, this being brought in Him is 
to the glory of God.”The glory that thou gave me I have given them, 
that they may be one.” Not one “something” - One, even  as we are 
one. “Thou in me, me in you, they in us” - they may be One, brought 
there by One Living Spirit, united by One Living Spirit. This is the 
whole mystery of God. The mystery of the resurrection is not dead men 
living again. The whole mystery of the resurrection is Christ living 
again in men! Making them One New Man - that’s The Resurrection! When 
Nicodemus questions Him about being born again, Jesus says, No, it’s not 
going back into your mother’s womb, or going back in time or eternity. 
That’s not it, Nicodemus. It’s not you going back and you coming again. 
“He that is born of the flesh is flesh.” I don’t care how many times 
he’s born - he’s still flesh! You must be born from above, you must be 
born as “original” (that’s the Greek word), as from the beginning, you 
must be born of The spirit. So it’s not men reproducing men, men being 
born again, but men born from above, a new birth, an absolutely new 
birth; Christ being birthed in you, being born again by the 
incorruptible Seed, by The Word of God which liveth and abideth forever 
- The Seed of God. 

“To Abraham and his seed were the promises made, not seeds as of many, 
but as of one, which seed is Christ.” “But if ye be Christ’s (that is, 
those who are born of Him), then you are one seed.” Herein is the 
mystery - CHRIST IN YOU! The glory expected has come, and He is in you! 
And by virtue that He is in you, you in your inner man have been brought 
unto glory, have been brought unto Him; are in union with Him. So that 
the veil may be done away and that you may behold not another soul, but 
that you, your soul may behold The Living Spirit; that you may behold 
your Life - what you were breathed of God for, created of God for! That 
you may behold Him Who is your Life, and that there may be a 
transforming of your soul, that Christ may be formed in you - a nature, 
a character, a substance. That as we have borne the image of the first, 
we may bear the image of the second. That’s the changing of your heart, 
that’s the transforming of your soul, that’s the growing up in Him, 
that’s the transformation of salvation; that’s what it is. 

From glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of The Lord. From the old 
glory that is established in Moses, from the Testimony to the glory 
which is Christ Himself. The Witness - from glory to glory. That’s clear 
to see there in 2 Corinthians 3. He starts there talking about the glory 
of one administration and brings it right into the glory of the greater 
administration. So we are brought from glory to glory. How? By beholding 
that glory - which is The Lord! We come from The Testimony of Him, to 
the reality of Him - He is in us! HE IS IN US! The Witness is in 
Resurrection, The Witness comes forth in The Resurrection, The Witness 
is The Resurrection; of the Resurrection comes forth in The 
Resurrection.
Look at Acts 1:22, “Beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same 
day that he was taken up from us, must one be ordained to be a witness 
with us of his resurrection.” Acts 2:31, “He seeing this before spake 
of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, 
neither his flesh did see corruption.” Acts 4:2,”Being grieved (the 
Jews) that they (the Apostles) taught the people (Israel), and preached 
through Jesus the resurrection from the dead.” Acts 4:33, “And with 
great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord 
Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.” Acts 17:18, “Then certain 
philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And 
some said, What will this babbler (speaking of Paul) say? Other some, He 
seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods; because he preached unto 
them Jesus, and the resurrection.” See, we read these verses and never 
see what they are saying. Paul, when he was accused - Acts 23:6, “But 
when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the other 
Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a 
Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee; of the hope and resurrection of the 
dead I am called in question.” Why? Because he was preaching to them 
that Jesus was the hope and the resurrection of the dead. Acts 24:15. 
He’s still arguing his case before Felix. “And have hope toward God, 
which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of 
the dead, both of the just and unjust.” Paul’s whole issue here is that 
I am preaching that - I’m preaching it - IN JESUS! I’m declaring it - IN 
CHRIST!
And his whole defense is I’m not breaking the law, I’m declaring what 
they themselves believe to be true. And Paul convinced Agrippa of it, 
and Agrippa was going to say, just let him go; but he had already 
appealed unto Caesar - for it must needs be that he go to Rome - as a 
prisoner of the Lord Jesus. 

I’m telling you, seeing Him as The Resurrection will bring the 
scriptures alive for you. It makes things alive! Paul wasn’t preaching 
some sort of a stupid doctrine. He was declaring The Resurrection, he 
was declaring the hope of Israel, he was declaring everything Israel had 
expected, he was declaring everything they had hoped for in God. Paul 
said this is the only question: I am here before you because I have 
declared to them The Resurrection that they themselves believe. Acts 
24:21, “Except it be for this one voice, that I cried standing among 
them, Touching the resurrection of the dead I am called in question by 
you this day.” He is preaching Christ as the resurrection of the dead, 
declaring that This One was raised up from among the dead by the glory 
of God the Father. Why? So that He might be The Resurrection of the 
dead; so that the dead may live by Him. And all who hear His Voice shall 
live. 

All who come in obedience to His death, reckoning it to be indeed their 
own, coming to the point where they indeed reckon themselves to be dead 
by Him and alive through Him unto God. Romans 6:11 says that very thing. 
Moving from The Testimony, from the expectation, from the prophecy, from 
the type and shadow to The Witness - Christ revealed in you. The Witness 
- The Resurrection Himself, the glory of the Lord and The Lord of glory! 
Moving from Isaiah’s prophecy to its fulfillment in the Temple of God in 
the Person of Jesus Christ. “I saw the Lord, high and lifted up, 
sitting on His throne, and His Train filling the temple” - glory 
filling it up! Moving from the prophecy to the realization of that in 
Christ Jesus - in His Temple. What is He saying here in John 17 more 
than what Isaiah is saying,”Oh Father, that they may see, that they may 
know, that this glory that thou hast given me, I may give them, that 
they may know, that the world may know that thou hast sent Me!”

It’s this Jesus, this same Jesus. Moving from “Sir, we would see 
Jesus” to “But we see Jesus.” Turn to John 12. This is right at the 
height of His ministry, this is during the Feast of the Passover. He has 
never had so many crowds, so many people following Him. He has never had 
such acceptance. This is after the raising of Lazarus. The Jews are 
planning and plotting His death, and there comes from afar Greeks. Verse 
20, “And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship 
at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida 
of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus.” And the 
Lord, knowing that it is not unto Himself in the body of His death that 
these are to be drawn, he hides Himself and He begins to speak of “The 
hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified.” See, for many of 
us the Jesus we want to see is that image of that one in the robe, that 
one in the sandals, that one walking about. But He understands, except 
this one die, He abides alone. But if this one die, He shall bring forth 
much fruit. He understands concerning Himself in this body I am made 
lower than angels, in this body I must die. But there is a greater 
witness of Me, a greater work that My Father has given Me to finish. 
That work shall bear witness of Me. “Ye are His workmanship, created in 
Christ Jesus unto that good work” - foreordained of God. Paul got a 
hold of this thing when God revealed Jesus in Him. The same Jesus - but 
not the same body! The same Jesus - but in a New Body. And it isn’t the 
body of these clay pots that we’re talking about. It’s that Spiritual 
Body that is more real, more eternal than these clay pots could ever be!

“We have this treasure in earthen vessels...” Why? “That the 
excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.” We have this 
treasure in earthen vessels. Why? “That no flesh should glory in His 
presence.” For He hath made us One Body. This is The Jesus He would 
have us see; that we would come from “Sir, we would see Jesus” to 
Hebrews: and you have to know that Hebrews is the letter that is always 
coming over from The Testimony to The Witness. In every chapter the 
writer of Hebrews brings you from a part of The Testimony to the 
fulfillment of The Witness. So in Hebrews 1 he’s brought us from God 
speaking in a Testimony to God speaking in Witness. “ God, who at 
sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers 
by the prophets, Hath at the end of those days (that’s the better 
translation) spoken unto us in Son.” The one time God gave a Testimony 
of Him - this way, that way, diverse manners. Now, He just reveals Him. 
God isn’t giving Testimony of Him any more - He’s revealing Him! God 
moves from Testimony to Witness. 

One place where Paul refers to the Testimony of God in 1 Cor.2 he says, 
I did not come to you in excellency of speech or in wisdom, declaring to 
you the testimony of God. He says there, I’ve determined to preach 
nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. That is The 
Testimony! That is right where The Testimony of God comes - right there 
to The Cross! But The Witness of God then is His Son living in you! It 
is The Testimony that brings you to The Witness. It always is that way. 
And The Testimony is of none but HIM! Therefore He is the only Witness 
of The Testimony. We are witnesses unto Him, but we are only made to be 
that when He is revealed in us. Otherwise we don’t have anything to 
witness of... we just run around quoting The Testimony. And The 
Testimony is true, but it’s only true if we see it finished in Him. 
Otherwise it becomes a perversion because we are declaring it is not 
true when we declare it is not finished. If it’s not finished then it’s 
not true. If the City of God is not come in Christ Jesus now, then The 
Testimony is not true, so you might as well forget about The Testimony. 
If we are still looking for a city based on The Testimony, we have made 
The Testimony to be perverted. Because the city that The Testimony 
declares is come in Christ! “Ye are come to Mount Zion.” In Him - ye 
are come to Mount Zion, the City of The Living God, the New Jerusalem - 
YE ARE COME! You are not come to this mountain of The Testimony; ye are 
come to this mountain - of The Witness, where God reveals His Son, where 
God sets His King upon His Throne and declares, This day have I begotten 
thee! This is where we are come in Christ Jesus; but we’re still running 
around quoting Testimony, when we are to be witnesses - manifestations 
of the reality of who and what He is. Coming from Testimony to Witness.

“Sir, we would see Jesus”; coming from that, desiring to see Him in 
that way, which can only bring us to death, to Hebrews 2:9. It starts in 
verse 5. “For unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world 
to come, whereof we speak.” “The world to come” means “the world 
which is certain, the world which is coming, not passing, The New 
Creation in Christ Jesus.” It is of the world whereof we speak. It is 
not unto angels. “But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is 
man, that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that thou visitest 
him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him 
with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands; 
Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he 
put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under 
him. But now we see not yet all things put under him.” Looking at man, 
the man of whom this psalmist asked this question. We see God’s 
intention for man not fulfilled in man as yet, as according to the 
psalmists in The Testimony. But he brings it from The Testimony and 
says, “BUT WE SEE JESUS...”

See verse 7: “made him a little lower than the angels” is speaking of 
man, speaking of Adam, no doubt. “But we see Jesus, who was made a 
little lower...” But He was made a little lower for the suffering of 
death. But how do we see Jesus? We see Jesus crowned with glory and 
honor! It’s difficult to get this in the King James version, but this is 
a better translation: “But we see Jesus, who for a little while was 
made lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with 
glory and honor.” There’s a parenthesis there: take it out and it’s 
just this: “But we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor.” But the 
writer puts the parenthesis in because it links Him with this man 
described in verse 6 and 7. We do not find in that created man what 
God’s purpose for him was, but we find it in Jesus! But we see Jesus, 
who for a little while became like that man. But we see Jesus, crowned 
with glory and honor. Where? In The Resurrection!

“For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all 
things, in bringing many sons unto glory...” “We see Jesus, crowned 
with glory and honor.” We see This New Man, we see Jesus, and in Him we 
see many sons, we see God’s intention for man fulfilled in Jesus. How? 
Through His death, through His burial, through His resurrection - WE SEE 
JESUS! We see Him crowned with glory and honor. “For both he that 
sanctifieth (that’s Him) and they who are sanctified (that’s us) are all 
of one (that’s John 17!); for which cause he is not ashamed to call them 
brethren.” We see God’s purpose for man fulfilled not in man, but we 
see Jesus! And this is not Jesus in the flesh - “Sir, we would see 
Jesus”; this is “We see Jesus”. We see Him as He speaks of Himself in 
John 12 - falling into the ground, dying, bringing forth much fruit. We 
see Him lifted up, drawing all men unto Himself. We see Him crowned with 
glory and honor. We see Him in whom many sons are brought to glory. We 
see Him in whom God’s purpose for man is fulfilled. So much so that they 
that are by Him sanctified, and He who is their sanctification, are One 
- all of One! Wherefore He is not ashamed to identify Himself with them. 

Now He was ashamed to identify Himself with Adam. The Bible says that. 
He took upon Himself no reputation. The Bible says that He endured The 
Cross, suffered the shame of it, for the glory that was set before Him. 
Now we see Him in that glory again! We see Him in  whom the plan and 
purpose of God is fulfilled. This is how we must see Him, because His 
robe and sandal days are over! There is a view that is gone, because it 
was unto death. There is a view that ever liveth because it is unto 
Life. This is how we must see Him. It’s the same Jesus - exalted up of 
the Father, given a Name above every name. What does that mean? Well, 
John in Revelation sees this same Jesus, he sees Him in the midst, he 
sees all of those in whom He dwells, in the midst, and all of those that 
are in Him. He sees that this name is given unto them. No, they don’t 
steal it, they don’t become Jesus. He writes His Name in them! They have 
no name, they are no one’s body but His Body! They belong to Him. They 
are for His expression; they would not exist except they exist by Him. 
They do not live except they live by Him - THEY BEAR HIS NAME! He writes 
it in them! This is the Jesus that we are to see - The One that God hath 
raised up and given a name above every name, that at that Name, every 
knee - beginning with mine - should bow and confess: LORD, THOU ART MY 
LIFE, MY EXISTENCE, AND MY RESURRECTION!