Images Of Sleeping

As we conclude, what has your faith allowed you to know and receive? Do you know that you have been released from all the dark evils of self? Does your faith allow you to receive all that our miracle working Lord has offered, is offering and continues to offer?

You have been led through four actions, four works of the angel of God. God’s angel is whomsoever, and whatsoever He has chosen, to come to us. He has come to me and some of you, in this, His specifically given Word. I also know this about Him. However He has come to you, our Lord will make Himself felt and known and as you obey and follow, you will be free from all the chains which bind you.

As promised, we are being exposed to deeper, spiritual understanding of sleeping. When you are sleeping, you are not awake. When you are not awake, you are dead to all the responses required of you. That’s obvious, you say. True, but do you realize that when you are spiritually asleep, you cannot respond to the Lord? Do you know that when you are asleep to Jesus, you cannot respond to Him? This is what I mean. We have already noted that heavenly light came into the prison cell where Peter was held and bound. He was sleeping when the heavenly light entered that cell, but he did not know. He could not know.

Are you asleep, dead to Jesus’ light? Let’s look at some religious people and how they were all asleep to Jesus and His teachings. The illuminating light of His Word, the freeing light of His Way, the revealing light of His Works, were all lost to them. We are gleaning all of this from John 9: 13 – 34.

Jesus had just given sight to a blind man, one who was born blind. When some Pharisees are told of the freeing works of Jesus, they call the healed man and ask him all sorts of questions about how he was made to see. He reported all that had transpired. Some of the Pharisees said, This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath. But others asked, How can a sinner perform such signs? So they were divided. John 9: 16. Pharisees are believers in the One God and faithfully serve Him. Can you dare tell such people that they are dead in the sleep of self-righteousness, ignorance and folly?

There is the sleep of ignorance. Ignorance has these religious people dead to Jesus the Light, in their midst. They hear and see what the Man Jesus has done, as the blind man now stands seeing, before them, but because Jesus has done this freeing act on the Sabbath, they have openly and publicly accused Jesus as not from God. Others, on the other hand throw out this weighty question, How can a sinner perform such signs? We know that we are sleeping and totally dead to Jesus the Light, with us, when we make distinctions between Jesus and God, based on the observance of religious days and suchlike.

There is the sleep of folly. The Pharisees summon the healed man a second time and command him to, Give glory to God by telling the truth, John 9: 24b, because they know that this Man, who freed him from all blindness, is a sinner. Listen to the utter folly and stupidity of these people of God. They, who are examples and teachers of the law, are trying to force one who stands in the Light of Jesus, to change and become as they are, blind leaders. Where are you in your blindness, your sleeping and your deadness to truth? Are you insisting on those who are not standing in the dead light of law, as being sinners, people who do not know God or belong to God?

There’s the sleep of self-righteousness. The Pharisees are now badgering the now freed man, wanting him to confess that Jesus is not of God. The man is stubborn in his new found faith and is sticking to one fact and one fact only. Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see. John 9: 25. The Pharisees persisted in their harassment of the freed man, asking him the same questions over and over again about his healing. The one, now freed from blindness, an ordinary man with no credentials to his name, like the Pharisees have, in Spirit-uplifted boldness, spoke with daring to those teachers and leaders. Do you want to become his disciple too? John 9: 27b. Self-righteousness takes and fills the platform here, lashing out in unabashed shamelessness at the freed, now seeing man. They hurl insults at the man and place themselves in high position and good standing as disciples of Moses. They judge him in really poor standing, as a disciple of Jesus.