The Gourmet Gospel Collection: A Better Eden/ It Was for Freedom/ Foes to Grace

By A LeRoy

Breathe Freedom in Christ's Love

Sweeter than honey is this revelation of Grace, the "unmerited favor of God", he who is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in love.

In this three-book testament, the author sets you free in every aspect of life, while chronicling his former struggles with an eating disorder, along with condemning church messages, that prompted his quest to reclaim forgotten truths.

"There is nothing you can do to avert God's loving disposition towards you nor his plans to prosper you, to give you hope and a future. So steadfast and unshakeable is he in his love for you that you could never succeed in deterring him. So set your heart at rest!"

Weaving deep analysis from the Bible, Shakespeare, and literary greats of the ages, The Gourmet Gospel Collection is a warm hug of support and reassurance, a testament to Christ's healing power, and a work of vast literary achievement. Above all, it is an embrace of infinite love!

Descriptions of the three individual books follow…

1/  A Better Eden: Where Sin Is Neither Possible nor Perceived

What if it were impossible to sin? What if all notion of "good" and "evil" were banished from our choices? What if the will of God were so embedded into our spiritual DNA that his point of view has become our point of view, his will our will? Then what freedoms would ensue.

Well, all of this is true! You are a "slave to righteousness", meaning someone naturally aligned with the will of God. So when the apostle Paul said, "The old has gone, the new has come," he was talking about you. As was Martin Luther when he declared, "No sin is perceived" when God looks on us.

Nor can you ever be in bondage to addiction, "because the addict died with Christ on the Cross!"

Drawing on a rich vein of wisdom throughout the ages, A Better Eden restores you to that state of innocence bestowed on Adam and Eve before the commandment came, "Do not…".

The result is transformational!

2/  It Was for Freedom: Our God-Given Liberty in Thought, Action, Feeling, Unforgiveness, Sex, Idleness, Art, and Eating

Building on the foundational principles mined in Book 1, the author unveils the breadth and depth of height of Christ's liberation in our lives, from how we think, feel, and act, to what we do with our bodies and with whom! Fear, worry, and condemnation are driven out, and in their place reign love and grace.

The result is a beautifully crafted and deeply researched work of literature and liberation, a love letter in service to peace and joy.

3/  Foes to Grace: Satan in the Court of Heaven, His Servants in the Corridors of Earth

"We are not unaware of the devil's schemes," wrote the apostle Paul. What are they? Masquerading as an angel of righteousness, accusing the faithful, and of course being the father of lies.

Satan presents his evidence against us in the court of Heaven, summons his witnesses, and cites chapter and verse to condemn us. But we have an advocate in Heaven, our friend, our intercessor, and witness for the defence. How will this courtroom drama play out?

Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?

You will be entertained, enlightened, and above all, empowered by the author's prophetic vision.

"A majestic flow of words."
Amy's Bookshelf Reviews

"Abdiel LeRoy shares that bliss of freedom of conscience in everything we do. He is one of our treasured spiritual guides—a man who cares deeply about setting us free from the unnecessary restrictions imposed on us, as well as those that are self-imposed!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unparagoned
• Release date: Apr 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973521372

Book preview

The Gourmet Gospel Collection

The Gourmet Gospel Collection

A Better Eden/ It Was for Freedom/ Foes to Grace

A. Le Roy

Unparagoned

Copyright 2018  A. LeRoy

---

License Notes

---

This book is copyright material and registered with the U.S. Library of Congress. It must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, resold, licensed, or publicly performed except as permitted in writing by the author. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text is an infringement of the author's rights. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

Unto

In dedication to Christ Jesus

You wrote no words except those traced in sand,

Though four loyal scribes have set your speeches down,

Nor did you need to, being the Word made flesh,

Incarnate role, wearing thy unseen crown.

---

That Word, as seed, sown in a faithful heart,

May grow to yield the harvest you would reap,

Receiving sunlight, rain, thy love unearned,

'Til touching Heaven were an easy leap.

---

Enthroned there, you saw Satan fall like lightning;

The angels, saints, and elders bow to thee.

That you would call me brother, friend, and ally,

And more, that you would intercede for me,

---

Is wonder that surpasseth understanding;

Nothing demanded, I only believe,

Wherein you hold my empty-handed hand;

My only gift to thee is to receive!

May 2020

Contents

Get the Audiobook!

Preface

A Better Eden

Introduction

I—The Return to Eden

Law Is Our Enemy

II—No Law = No Sin!

Death to the Decalogue!

Faith = Righteousness

Ignorance is Bliss?

III—In Christ

… And in His Merits

Christ Our Champion

The Gospel of Immaculate Intention

A Life Retold

Holiness for Heathens

IV—The Slave to Righteousness

Dead to Sin

I Am…

The Law in Our Hearts

Libelous Labels

Immutability

V—The Law of the Spirit of Life

Confounding the Crippled Covenant

Our Singularities

The Laws of Men

It Was for Freedom

I—An Otherworldly Freedom

Imagination and Intuition

Freedom in Thought

Freedom in Action

Freedom in Feeling

Freedom in Balance

II—The Fruits of Freedom

Freedom in UN-Forgiveness!

Freedom in Sex

Freedom in Idleness

Freedom in Art

III—The Gourmet Gospel

Down With Diets!

Food, Glorious Food!

Foes to Grace

Introduction

I—Satan in the Court of Heaven

Counsel for the Defense

Evicting the Evidence

The Vindicating Verdict

II—The Pharisees

Straining Gnats

Pharisees in the Bedroom

Pharisees in the Church

Pharisees in the World

Conclusion

The Christian Reveries Collection (Sample)

Shepherds and Wise Men

From the Author

Books by A. LeRoy

Epic Poems

Fiction

Poetry Collections

Non-Fiction

Bibliography

Appendix

Notes

Get the Audiobook!

Hear a sample from the author’s audiobook narration, and find purchase links, at geni.us/GraceofGod.

Preface

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Grace as 'the free and unmerited favour of God'. The implications of this simple phrase are unfathomably wonderful and illuminating, with the power to transform lives and even all of humanity. Yet the human race has barely begun to grasp its import, and our churches certainly haven't helped!

Setting itself up in opposition to Grace, is Law, for which I will use a capital L (except in quotes). I do not mean man-made acts of legislation, though these can be vicious enough, but a general polarization of life into ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

In conceiving this series as a champion of Grace and a dispeller of Law, I embrace the wondrous tautology coined by the apostle Paul that It was for freedom that Christ has set us free. ¹

Though my thesis is largely derived from the Bible, you don't have to consider yourself a Christian to benefit. In any case, my conclusions are often at odds with most preaching you'll hear in churches.

Broadly speaking, the first book in this series, A Better Eden, sets a foundation of understanding on which the second book, It Was for Freedom, builds. The final volume, Foes to Grace, examines how the various advocates of Law attempt to undermine this God-given freedom.

Before I proceed, a note about my use of the pronoun he throughout to describe a generalized third person, implying of course that it stands for he or she. I do so for economy of language and assure the reader the male pronoun is used to describe the villains of this piece just as much as the heroes!

Abdiel LeRoy

A Better Eden

Where Sin Is Neither Possible nor Perceived (Book 1 in The Gourmet Gospel Collection)

Introduction

I have known what it is to live under Law's tyranny, to be a sponge for every facile commandment. There were the ‘spiritual’ ones: thou shalt dedicate each day to God; thou shalt pray at the same time each day for the same duration, and thou shalt do so before breakfast; thou shalt read thy Bible every day; thou shalt intercede for thy parents every day, and for anyone else whose problems thou learnest of.

Then there were the sacrificial commandments: thou must give away every possession; thou must give up thy seat on the train to others; thou must never refuse anyone anything (except sex, of course); thou must not take pride in any achievement.

But decrees about eating were the most condemning of all: thou shalt ask for the Lord's blessing on every morsel of food thou tastest, but thou shalt not eat or drink during prayer; thou shalt consume no more than one chocolate bar per day; thou shalt fast regularly and take no honey during said fasts.

And then the Law would seize on scriptures that would intensify the burden: I will not eat until I have told you what I have to say. ¹

In this most legalistic phase of my life, I would busily look for ways to prove to myself and others that I was a loving person by carrying out ‘good deeds’. Meanwhile, I continually denied myself things I wanted and, worse, starved myself and engaged in other outrages of self injury. But my sacrifices had no power to perfect, and led only to feelings of bondage and despair.

I was in such fear at the time that I couldn't even take up my Bible in peace, for fear of reading a passage that condemned me or told me to do something I was not doing. My eyes darted across the page trying not to hover near such traps. I wrote at the time:

I have put aside the porn mags, the alcohol, the masturbation, the New-Age literature, the harsh words and gossip, the dirty jokes, screened out bad television and movies from my life. And still the call comes through: Be holy!

So I set disciplines and rules to waste less time, read more, meditate more, pray more, intercede more, eat the right food, deny myself things I enjoy, give away more of my possessions. I effectively said, O Lord, give me some rules to follow that I may be holier. And I merely sank further into misery and despondency. And I am heartily sick of it.

I came to realize that my suicidal sacrifices were thwarting the Spirit's fruit of peace and joy in my life, and replacing them with slavery; that no self-injurious gesture could improve me; that I was, am, and ever will be in Christ with nothing to prove; that his love flows through my veins as sap through a vine; that the fruit of the Spirit is my natural output; that I am, at my core, a being of love.

I could now see how Law had usurped the natural guidance of my own heart and replaced it with a regime of rules, timing devices, and calorie counters, putting me at war with myself! And I came to understand how Law had inflicted devastating condemnation not just on me, but on humanity in general and church communities in particular.

Ever heard of the Gordian Knot? It was a knot of such unfathomable complexity that no-one, however wise or learnèd, however dexterous, had been able to untie it. According to legend, it was the conqueror Alexander who put the knot's torment to rest by slicing through the whole thing with a sword.

Well, Law is like the Gordian Knot. So if life feels burdensome to you, as if it is tying you up in knots, may this book be a sword to set you free!

Abdiel LeRoy

I—The Return to Eden

Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into the field of opposites… the Tree of Knowledge, not only of Good and Evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, of light and dark. Everything in the field of Time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and non-being, is and isn't… Heraclitus said: For God, all things are good and right and just, but for man, some things are right and others are not.… Good and evil are simply temporary apparitions.

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it."

Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

The first millennium was the age of gold.

Then living creatures trusted one another;

People did well without the thought of ill:

Nothing forbidden in a book of laws,

No fears, no prohibitions read in bronze

Or in the sculptured face of judge or master. ¹

Ovid, Metamorphoses

I dare say you are familiar with the first Bible story in which, after each day of Creation, God saw that it was good. Then, after he created humanity, male and female, all was very good. What if he stopped there, before any mention of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and before the prohibition against eating its fruit?

Then we would know nothing of evil, not even its existence, nothing of right or wrong or sin. There would not even be any opportunity to sin, because there would be no law to break, no mechanism for disobedience, no boundary to cross. We would not have a care in the world.

But as we know, the Book of Genesis does not stop there, for in the second chapter, God says, Thou must not… ² In other words, he introduces Law!

Law Is Our Enemy

All prohibition seems to evoke the contrary effect. All prohibition, what it does is to bring more interest in going for the apple, in the case of Adam and Eve, or to go for the cigarette, or the alcohol in Chicago.

Vicente Fox, former Mexican president, in 2010, backing the legalization of drugs.

Forbid a man to taste a thing and he

craves it with all the greater vehemence.

Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered

The tree

Of prohibition, root of all our woe.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Humanity is surrounded by man-made laws. They may be adopted to protect people from each other and even from themselves, or they may be instruments of oppression. But for now, I am talking about Law in a broader sense, that pretentious authority, often derived directly or indirectly from religious or moral code, that purports to instruct us in what we can, must, or should do or not do. For that type of Law, I am using a capital L (except in quotes).

To that Law, another artificial construct known as sin owes its very existence. As the apostle Paul notes in the Book of Romans, when the commandment came, sin sprang to life, and I died. ¹ Law, he says, gives power to sin ² and would even make sin our master. ³

In Paradise Lost, where John Milton masterfully retells the story of Genesis, Eve says to the outlawed tree that God's forbidding/ Commends thee more. ⁴ In these few words, she encapsulates the entire problem of imposing religious codes on people whose birthright is freedom—freedom in thought, freedom in choice, freedom in action—and who must therefore resent, whether consciously or not, externally imposed strictures.

The ‘Eve Equation’, if you will, wherein Law guarantees its own violation, wherein rules were made to be broken, is amply explored in Scripture, especially in the epistles of Paul, who tells us that Law arouses sinful passions ⁵ and makes sin increase. ⁶ Thus Milton's Eve, having taken her first illicit mouthful, does not stop there, but greedily ingorg'd without restraint. ⁷

In his Confessions, written around AD 397, Augustine describes a similar phenomenon in the famous pear-stealing incident of his boyhood. He stole the pears not because he was hungry but because he sought to do something illicit. As Christian-History professor Morwenna Ludlow puts it, it's a delight in doing the wrong thing because it's wrong. ⁸

Law is also a goalpost-shifting trickster or, in Milton's words, dark,/ Ambiguous and with double sense deluding. ⁹ Hijacking thought, it presents a white place before you and says, Step here to be righteous. But when you arrive, it casts a shadow over it and bellows, Sin! Sin! Sin!

Or it will present a bar for you to jump over: Jump! Achieve! it shouts. For then you will be righteous! Off you go, racing toward the easy height, and leap. But as you are in mid-flight, Law raises the bar, tripping you, and sending you tumbling in disarray and confusion.

The Law ties up heavy loads and puts them on men's shoulders, without lifting a finger to help them. ¹⁰ Nor can Law bring about a change in anyone's character, nor can it perfect behaviour. ¹¹ Conforming with it will find no-one to be righteous. ¹² It is, at best, weak and useless, ¹³ and can do nothing to clear the conscience. ¹⁴ As Martin Luther put it, Law is not able to quiet a troubled conscience, but increaseth terrors, and driveth it to desperation. ¹⁵

That is why Law may be aptly personified as a villainous dramatic character, as in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where he beats the protagonist's friend, Faithful, and says in reply to Faithful's plea for mercy, I don't know how to show mercy. ¹⁶

Have you ever played that game in fairgrounds where you try to run a loop from one end of a curving wire to another without touching? If you do touch the wire, however slightly, a buzzer goes off, and all is lost. That is what Law is like. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point, is guilty of breaking all of it. ¹⁷

In short, Law's ministry is to condemn men. ¹⁸ It is a curse, ¹⁹ against us, opposed to us. ²⁰ It chokes the fruit of the Spirit of Life ²¹ and ultimately leads to slavery ²² and death. ²³

II—No Law = No Sin!

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I rather like this… Outside all laws except gravitation and germination.

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Billy in many respects was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much as Adam might have been ere the Serpent wriggled himself into his company.

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

What are we to make, then, of this terrible thing called Law? Are we to be shackled so? Are we to stagger under its dismal, oppressive, and condemning yoke? And must we forever wrestle in a losing match with its offspring, sin? Can we ever be sprung from the Law/sin trap?

Sin has no other root but Law, ¹ no other means to exist. Where there is no law, there is no transgression, ² said Paul. Apart from law, sin is dead. ³

Herein lies our great hope. If we can live apart from Law, then all the power of sin, along with its condemnation, is removed. We may enjoy a better Eden, not just the Law-tainted Paradise from which mankind was evicted, but the pre-Law state of innocence described in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, in which there is no Law to ensnare us, no forbidden fruit, no knowledge or even potential knowledge of evil, no concept, no idea, no notion, no possibility of wrong.

Are we permitted such a freedom? Yes! And on the Cross is the crux of the matter decided.

I shall now quote a key truth from the Bible that informs this entire book, a colossal declaration from the Book of Colossians, a testament of such power, magnificence, and glory that it may transform the entire human race. For it says Christ cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. ⁴

That quote comes from the New International Version of the Bible, but I also love the following translation from the Phillips Bible:

Christ has utterly wiped out all the damning evidence of broken laws and commands which always hung over our heads, and has completely annulled it by nailing it over his own head on the cross.

I shall return to this passage often, for its implications are wonderful. Elsewhere in the Bible, the message is reinforced, telling us that Law no longer addresses us; ⁵ we are no longer under its supervision; ⁶ we have been released from it; ⁷ we too died to it that day. ⁸

And so, returning to our metaphor of the fairground game with the wire, we can now play the game with the electricity turned off! We can proceed from one end to the other as carelessly as we like, guaranteed to win, without any danger of ever being buzzed out of the game!

Or we could compare Law to an electromagnet. When power runs through it, those who have one kind of polarity are pulled toward it, forced to obey the Law; others with the opposite polarity repelled by it, forced to disobey. Neither is free. But we who are not under Law are neither attracted nor repelled. With no power running through it, the magnet is deactivated, and in any case we have no polarity for it to act upon.

Alternatively, observing the Law may be likened to walking a very high tightrope without a safety net. One slip, and you're dead. But, where Law is absent, we are walking safely on solid ground!

Death to the Decalogue!

That stony law I stamp to dust, and scatter religion abroad

To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall gather the leaves.

William Blake, America a Prophecy

Haven't you heard the old proverbial saw:

Who ever bound a lover by a law?

Love is law unto itself.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales—The Knight's Tale

Though Love

Alone fulfil the law.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Now that we are freed to live Law-free lives, what are we to make of the Ten Commandments, otherwise known as the ‘Decalogue’? Are they not Law? Were they not also nailed to the Cross with Christ? It may be easy to dismiss the more obscure Old-Testament strictures in the Scriptures, such as prohibitions against cutting hair or clipping beards, ¹ but can we be so dismissive of those sacred stone tablets that Moses lugged about on Mount Sinai to the accompaniment of earthquakes and thunderbolts? The short answer is yes!

The Two Commandments

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you seems to be one thing you can just grab hold of, and it's really good… And you don't need anything else… Do unto others is a self-policing rule.

Eddie Izzard, Stripped stand-up comedy show

Let us consider what Jesus has to say on the applicability of the Ten Commandments. When a crowd ask him what they must do to accomplish the works God requires, he simply answers, …believe in the one he has sent. ² And, at the crucifixion, the mere request to be remembered is enough to bring into Paradise the man condemned beside him:

One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: Aren't you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!

But the other criminal rebuked him. Don't you fear God, he said, "since