A GENERAL DULLNESS CALLED LEGALISM

There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. The essence of sin is separation from God. Sins are what we do to be human and righteous in this separated state. Jesus undid our separation, forgave for our separated adamic life and re-created us in Himself as true sons/daughters in union with God. In the New Covenant Christ is our life – which means that in our oneness with God, won by Jesus we become the expression of God in the world – incarnation.

HOLLOW GOSPEL
We have exposed the hollow gospel of ‘contract’ in which I do this so that God will do that. This is skeletal religion based on the notion that we must earn union with God, when God in Christ has earned by the cross this union by atonement and incarnation. This attitude accounts for the weedling and begging type liturgies aimed at persuading Christ to be who He already is to us and do what he has already done.

Many Christians assert they are not legalists, even when living out of the cultural legalisms of the church. My daughter who spent her early life in a culture that found its identity in law observance – was surprised that legalism amongst the general population of Believers was all too common in the broader Christian community. Earning righteousness and even earning Christ is the adamic way. But it’s not the living way that is Christ your life. You enter this way by simply agreeing with Jesus that in Him, you are included in God.

SUBVERTED GOSPEL
The implication of a diluted gospel is that many are attached to is not the gospel of Jesus or Paul but a decayed version that has been re-absorbed into the culture and system of the knowledge of good and evil.  

To live Christianity as a religion is to denude our inheritance of what it is: An incarnation. This is why Gregory Boyd talks of Repenting of Religion, why Leanne Payne wrote about living in the Real Presence instead of substitutes and why teachers like Baxter Kruger utilising the teaching of Thomas Torrance and the Church Fathers emphasise a spirituality of UNION WITH GOD rather than making religion out of separation and the attempt to overcome that separation which Jesus has already overcome. We are not separated. WE ARE INCLUDED IN GOD.

DUALISM AS RELIGION
The knowledge of good and evil is the separated system and culture of the fall. The Kingdom of God is our living in the undoing of Adam – the union with God that is ours since the cross. Rick Joyner’s vision, The Torch and the Sword gives a telling description of the stench and blindness of Christianity lived in the mode of the knowledge of good and evil. For Joyner, the Presence is everything, as it should be.

NOT A GNOSTIC PHENOMENON
But The Presence is not some special entity, not something that is separate to us. Jesus and the trinity by the incarnation make their abode in us in a way in which we are woven into God and God is woven into us.

Joyner is somewhat askew in attributing union with God and spiritual discernment to the presence of the Spirit. Our union with God was achieved by Jesus Christ and is already ours. Enlightenment and obedience is walking in what is already ours. IT’S LIVING INCARNATION. With Christ our life we do not live in dichotomies and compartments. The world is not split into a duality. The notion of a great controversy between Christ and Satan is a myth. If this were true there would be no salvation, no wholeness, no holiness and no victory over sin and death.

NEW COVENANT COMMUNION
Our new covenant life is one of interwoveness with God, a fact of our oneness with God achieved by Jesus Christ. The anointing is an expression of the incarnation but never a substitute for it. Without it the excitement of the Spirit fades and people can become receptacles of nonsense. Leanne Payne observes that practises that are not based on the incarnational reality of our interwoveness with Christ can become substitutes for that which is already our inheritance and end up insulating us from God.

ONE SUBSTANCE
Christ is all and in all. He is not somewhere else but us in you and all who make the incarnation the core of their life in God. This is the meaning of the Lord’s Table.

For the Believer, Christ is woven into us and our existence. This is us and our life as part of the divine nature. Not because we are morally perfect or because we have ‘moved to another level’ in the Spirit but because we are ourselves who are sons of God in spirit and in truth. Christianity is less a religion and more a state of being.

CHRIST IS OUR BEING
Myk Habets observes that “For Torrance, a Christocentric understanding of creation is formed around the ontological claim that Christ is the meaning and purpose of creation.  In this way Torrance appropriates key Barthian insights.  The soteriological objectivism within Barth sees everything that takes place in creation as being subordinated to and proleptically conditioned by the incarnation of the Son of God and the redemption he brings.  Torrance develops this theme in his own distinctive but no less Christocentric way.  Jesus Christ himself is the true Image of God to which all creation will one day be confirmed.

“In The Christian Doctrine of God Torrance wrote concerning Christ: ‘We can also say in the light of the incarnation that as the Word made flesh, the Word by whom all things that are made were made, Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of God’s eternal purpose for his creation, that it is in Jesus Christ himself that all things in heaven and earth are reconciled, and that the whole created universe consists in him as its Head.’”

You are joined to God in the Person of God – Jesus Christ.

SUPREMACY OF CHRIST
These last few lines are the foundation of our holiness, of our lives and our fruitfulness as ministers of new covenant spirit and life. Incarnation means that you are one with this Christ, the expression of this Christ and one with God as a result of this Christ. In Christ we are woven into God and God into us. This is the soil of the anointing and the gifts. It is life in the Spirit. The joy of being received into God and loved by God.