Author: Richard Graham
This is my statement from the Bible, which is the Yoke Partnership.
This new list replaces both TULIP and the Five Principles:
AUTHORITY IN FLUX: From the day of Genesis 1:27-30, neither God nor Satan have been the sole authority of the world, nor in full control. Mankind was. But since the fall, neither is mankind. Satan became the god of this world, but does not control all human choice. Now, almost all of creation follows the instinctive laws God put in nature and creatures. We humans have the majority of all human authority, but God can and will overrule us at rare times, and Satan can get us to follow him at any time we yield to him. This flux is a constant spiritual battle at all human levels—individual, family, groups, regional, national, and worldwide. The Bible says the devil is god of this world, who deceives mankind. But we humans still can resist him and his temptations, and especially as we rely on the Word and the Holy Spirit. Two examples are Cornelius and the Ethiopian whom Philip met on the desert road. We decide, as God told Cain.
FREE WILL: Since the day of Genesis 1:27-30, mankind has always been in primary human control due to our free will. We are in control of our thoughts, decisions and actions, but our carnal nature affects all that we think, say, and do. However, we can still choose to do the good. God also retains the right and ability to intervene (*see note at the end of this list) when He deems it important enough to do so.
SIN INCREASES, BUT: The more we sin, the more we and the world sink into evil. More sin, more evil. We see this in an increasing way up to the point of Noah. At that point in the days of Noah, God had to kill off all breathing creatures, in order to get the world back on track. However, this progression is not in just one direction. Persons, groups, nations, and mankind can reverse evil’s progression, if we make the effort with God’s help. This is the Yoke Partnership pattern. It takes prayer, repentance, calling on the name of the Lord, etc. We choose. E.g., World War II to stop the Axis nations. Note especially the prayer battles by Howell Rees and other believers at that time. Other examples include abolition of different kinds of slavery, child labor laws, medical eradication of disease, and many more examples.
AUTHORITY RESTORED: By His sinless death on the cross, and His resurrection from the grave, Jesus won back full authority over the world as the perfect God-man. He is now King and Lord. He will make all things new at the end. Praise Him!
DESTINY OF GOD’S CHILDREN: By our Christ-bought salvation, we become God’s children, destined to be His co-heirs, and to co-reign with Him in the New Age. His authority, and everything else in Christ, is ours as well. Thus, we believers are made partners in the family business, the Kingdom of God, in this age and the one to come. This is the Yoke Partnership, to which we are called and welcomed.
[*Examples include God blocking Adam and Eve out of the garden, the tower of Babel, Noah and the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, God’s selection of various people (Noah, Abram and his line, Jacob and his line, Moses, the anointing of various leaders such as David, the Biblical prophets, etc.), the writing of God appearing on the wall at the feast of Belshazzar, the incarnation of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection, et al.]
A shortened summary of the Yoke Partnership.
Authority in flux.
Free will.
Sin increases, but.
Authority restored.
Destiny of God’s children.
Let me expand further on the theology of The Yoke Partnership.
1. God created all of us for an eternal partnership with everyone of us. Sin disrupted that, and we became rebels against Him, and in a sense, against each other of the human race. Through Jesus' cross, burial, and resurrection, we are saved, and made to be His children. Our repentance and asking for forgiveness is out of our free will, which God gave us as part of being created in His image. He has free will, and so we do, too.
Our free will continues after salvation, as He works through the Holy Spirit to sanctify us to become more and more like Christ. He almost never violates this free will, because He is training us to be like Christ, who, out of His own free will, always obeyed His Heavenly Father, up to and through His death on the cross. As we continue to obey the leading of the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures, we become more and more like Christ. This is training for both this age and the age to come. It continues all through our earthly lives. Only in certain extreme cases does God violate a person's or group's or nation's free will (collective in the last two cases). Some examples are the flood story of Noah, stopping Abimelech from having sex with Abraham's wife Sarai, and the tower of Babel. These cases are when God's inaction would stop His plan for redemption through the Messiah from being accomplished. So He intervenes.
2. Free will. Let me use a common example to explain what the Bible describes as free will. Many of we men are blessed with marriage to wonderful women. Do we order our wives to obey us? I don't, and I certainly hope you do not as well. Why? Because that would violate their free will. We men were given them for them to love us, and follow us as their men, husbands, and fathers of our children. They as women were given us for us to love them, and meet their needs as women, wives, and mothers. That is why they are told to respect us, because men were created with a need for respect. That is why we are told to love them (although they are also later told to love us), because they were created with a need for love, expressed at the least through affection, tenderness, protection, and provision. Both we as men and they as women have free will, and we (both sexes) are to respect that, and rejoice in it. We husbands are not their bosses and/or dictators. How horrible that would be! They are not ours as well. We both do many things for each other, out of love, respect, and free will, even sometimes things that we would rather not, as an expression of respect, appreciation, and love.
In the same way, God is sovereign, but He does not want to be our dictator or boss. He wants to be, and created us so He would be, our Heavenly Father! Do we fathers order our children around? No, that would be brutal. There are moments when we are to be firm with our children, and in a crisis, step in to stop a child from accidents or harm, but we want them to know we love them as a responsible parent, not a dictator. In this way, He, the Holy Spirit, wants to lead and guide us day by day to be like Jesus, and to be His partners and witnesses in this world. It is through this interaction of our and His free wills that we learn to be His partners in this life, and this interaction is the training for the age to come. We (hopefully, soon) learn to discover that it is a joy to obey Him, and to discover also that at times He will say to us, "Go for it!" when we have a desire in our hearts. My sweet wife and I have enjoyed experiencing both sides of this: times in which He says go for it, and times in which He says no or wait awhile. I would expect that you, fellow believers, have experienced this as well in your lives. In that sense, we do have full autonomy, within the limits of our creatureness and God's plans for the age to come. God literally respects our free will, except when our choices violate His future plans for us and eternity. Of course, exercising our free will also mean we will experience the consequences—good, bad, and neutral.
Does this combination of God and free will bother you? Here is what C. S. Lewis once wrote about it: The sin, both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will: thus surrendering a portion of His omnipotence (it is again a deathlike or descending movement) because He saw that from a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the reascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit. —C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study. [Please note: ’reascent’ means ‘the act or an instant of ascending again: a second or subsequent ascent, his reascent .’]
3. I consider the Yoke Partnership a third way, like Calvinism and Arminianism, in that it is a full theology, not just a way of looking at our relationship with God. I wrote this book partly to emphasize the idea that we scholars and theologians too often create vast theologies that do more to magnify ourselves as great thinkers than humble servants and witnesses to the Lord. That is why I gladly called myself a donkey at the beginning of this book. That is the kind of yoke Jesus called and calls all believers to take on ourselves in Matthew 11:28-30. Although He loves us so much He died on the cross for us, we are His servants, His donkeys, His partners in this age and the age to come.
I have not fully explained the Yoke Partnership in this book. That is partially deliberate for the sake of the length of the book. It is also partially deliberate for the sake of further writings or books. These will be necessary to fully explain what Jesus meant, and means, when He calls us to take up His yoke.
Welcome to The Yoke Partnership! It is the greatest privilege, opportunity, challenge, and joy that any human being can have. Enjoy! Hee-haw!
