ALIVE IN GOD’S REALITY
14/08/24 12:52
We can deny climate change and we can deny Christ’s real Gospel in a similar way - because our identity is invested in what we have now. If we resist Christ’s fullness of life we risk ‘losing even what we have’.
IT’S CHRIST IN YOU
We are fortunate that the Word of God is not just information about God but is The Being who is fully God and part of the trinity as well as a human being. Legalism distorts God and sells us short for just this reason. Words about God are not God and not by nature ‘Godly’ in the same way that religion in itself is not Godly. Not Godly, even though the Christ of the Christian religion is. The homoousion* means Jesus is not just like God but that He is God.
Christ is in you/us, means that we are not God, but we are sons/daughters of God in spirit and in truth. We were created by God and have been redeemed in our new Father of the Human Race – Jesus Christ,
THE OPIATE BUBBLE
We can, if we choose live in a cultural bubble of shared meanings that support a view of reality that is misguided and distorted. In the world of atheism an imagined cosmos has been created that has no need of God because many people choose a reality in which Christ is not because it suits them. Others drift in this soup of belief because they follow the crowd yet are obsessed with inventing the secular legalisms that we know as political correctness. Others, in the Christian camp may hold to their formula and contract, their self-made grace that they think affords them acceptance with God. But it does not. Christ gives us God’s acceptance and he makes us alive in our spirit.
THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY
Iniquity can be sincere Believers walking in delusion. The sociology of knowledge explains how people create and maintain their own reality and why there are subcultures of belief that can resist reality. Those who do best in coping with life are the ones who value evidence-based knowledge and the opinions of the informed. We see this bubble of futility being lived out in the populism of today. These warped world views encourage people to give allegiance to demagogue messiahs. The inevitable result will be the implosion of their culture.
MONEY-CHANGERS
We need to adjust our world view to align with that of Christ and the apostles. Wisdom and expanding life are found in this Gospel of the Kingdom – not in the gospels of mercenaries and sellers of religious brands. To live in a faith community that is contained in a misguided gospel does not make us agents of Christ’s life. To live among God incarnated people does.
WORD OF WHO GOD IS – IS CHRIST
The Word of God is not just words or scriptural assertions, because Christ the Word of God is the Reality in whom all things have their purpose and meaning. We and the earth have our being in Christ. We enter this reality by the Door who is Christ and in doing so we begin fellowship with the triune God and become privy to increasing degrees of light and life. We enter Being itself. We can be very active in good works, yet dead in our spirit. Even missionaries can be like this. Real life is the eucharist lived – so that we are ignited with spirit and life and we impart this to all we do.
KNOWING IS UNCONDITIONAL DISCIPLESHIP
Thomas Torrance illustrates this in his observation that, “A deeper appreciation of the fact that God himself is the content of his revelation, and that the Word of God is not just a Word about God but God addressing us in person and communicating himself to us… there is no way of really knowing God without being reconciled to him.” (1) The true Gospel is Christ and the real you is your life in the real Christ and His true Gospel.
GOD INCARNATED PEOPLE
We know God better in the post cross age than Godly people knew God in the pre-cross age. Which is why Jesus announced that any person who lives by faith in Him is greater than John the Baptist. Not greater in character but greater in privilege because, God lives in us in Christ and in Christ we are in God.
God has been revealed to us in Christ’s person. The identity, nature and wonder of Christ is revealed to us directly to our hearts and spirits by the indwelling Jesus. This occurs less from ‘words’ from God and more by the truth that is God residing personally in our being and revealed into our soul. To read the scriptures ‘In Christ’ is to read them in the spirit of this revelation. To contemplate in Christ is to absorb the spirit of wisdom and revelation into our being. This does not negate the ‘gifts’ but it is the ‘ground’ of the gifts and the life of God in us.
Torrance continues, “So far as belief in the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour is concerned it is clear that unless there is an unbroken continuity of divine presence and activity between Christ and God, then in the last analysis, Jesus Christ, with all he stands for, is irrelevant for the ultimate destiny of men and women.” Christ is one substance with God, which means that you are one with God by atonement and incarnation. The mediation of Christ to you is also the mediation of you into the communion of the trinity.
FALSE GOSPEL FUTILITY
Paul argues in Galatians 2.21 that to remain in the law when Christ has given us Himself to be alive in the Spirit makes Christ irrelevant. Thus it is possible to live a christ absent Christianity.
THE APOSTLE’S DOCTRINE
There’s a reason why correct theology has a bearing on our salvation and our infusion with God’s presence. It aligns us with who Christ is and situates us in the provision He has made for us in the presence of God.
THE CHRIST OF GOD
“Unless Jesus Christ is God himself, God the Son incarnate, then the God proclaimed to us in the Gospel is not a God who loves us to the uttermost, but a God whose love falls short of identifying himself with us in Jesus Christ to the extent of actually becoming one with us in and through him. Only God can forgive sins, so that unless Christ is God, his word of forgiveness is empty of any divine substance. Unless Christ is of one and the same being as God, as well as of one and the same being as ourselves, then the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross for us and our salvation is in fact without divine validity or saving power.” (2) This is why false gospels and false christs are to be avoided and why Arian tainted gospels and law-concocted teaching must be exchanged for Christ our life.
‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV.
CHRIST FOR YOU
Christ’s atoning sacrifice has validity and agency because Christ is one with us and one with God. Thus, we are joined to ultimate life, to infinity in Jesus Christ. This joining to God in Christ, this unbroken communion that is now ours has been achieved by Christ in the nature of God, so that our continual acceptance and fellowship in God is as real as God is real and has the same substance as the I AM of God. You are because God is. There is no separation in Christ Jesus.
In Jesus the kind of union the trinity have with each other is the kind of union with God that Christ has given you. You are included in God in Jesus and participating in this life you are alive with spirit and life.
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ. P.123
(2) Ibid. P.124
*The Son is of the same substance of the Father.
