CAREFUL WHAT YOU PICK

The Bible is not a tree from which we pick cherries to support our view of Christ and our version of His Gospel. The Bible is a witness to the being of God and the living way in which He has embraced us into Himself in Christ. In Jesus to in order to carry out the original plan – that God would have daughters and sons with which to share the joy of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

THE WHOLE INFORMS THE PART
When Paul declares that ‘In Him, we live, move and have our being’ Paul is saying that we have our identity, persona, agency and ability to comprehend truth in God and His creation in oneness with Him.

LIGHT IS TRUTH
Baxster Kruger puts it well in his essay, ‘The Light of the Cosmos, when he writes, “In the Bible, the universe is not eternal. It has not always existed side by side with God. There was a time, so to speak, when the universe was not. The universe, the earth, and all things outside of God had a definite beginning. God called it all forth. “In the beginning, God created,” not manufactured, “the heavens and the earth” (GEN 1:1).

CREATES ALL THINGS
The transition from the Old Testament to the New, from Judaism to Christianity, lies in the fact that the apostles saw that Jesus Christ was right in the middle of the creative action of God. Christianity affirms Judaism’s fundamental belief in creation and in the Creator, but it parts company with Judaism when it insists that the Creator is Jesus Christ. All things were created not only for Jesus Christ  but also in and through and by him.”
This is why the best seeing, the best knowing and the best being as a human being who is a son/daughter of God, is found in oneness with Christ.
REALITY IS CHRIST
“In Him.” Since this is the nature of the Christ of God it is the frame in which scripture is to be read if we are to obtain a meaning  true to God and to ourselves. The Fatherhood of God and the revivified sonship of human beings in the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles is the Frame of informed Biblical interpretation.
FAILURE OF ‘BITTY’ RELIGION
Since we were made to live in God and have been re-positioned in God by the atonement, incarnation and ministry of the Spirit, the attempt to construct a whole by looking at the pieces is inadequate. The frame always precedes the whole for it is the frame that gives meaning to the whole. When we try to make the parts the interpreter of the whole we get distorted gospels, false christ’s and crippled Believers. We get legalism and rivers of sand.
NOT A BUTRESS TO SECTARIANISM
Whole theologies have developed, and denominations have begun on the basis of chains of scriptures that have no relationship to each other. According to some, “The purpose of theology is to take .. sentences and form doctrines or propositions from them. … this is the “concordance conception of theology.” But this project can be like the bid to put a jig-saw puzzle together that has a distorted over-arching picture.
WHOLENESS AND HOLINESS
Confusion and fragmentation is what happens when the law and the keeping of it is made the key issue. The law reduces God to an abstraction and the Believer to a fundamentalist.
Moralism is the child of legalism and fundamentalism. We are not saying that morals are irrelevant. We are saying that holiness comes from oneness with Christ, as does the wisdom of God and an authentic understanding of the Bible and its testimony to God and our salvation. This is why we are well advised to refer to the Nicaean Creed rather than the self-serving preoccupations of marketers of doctrinal brands.
ATONEMENT/INCARNATION
Heaven came to earth in the incarnation and was joined to earth by the atonement of Christ’s cross. Heaven comes to earth in you when you agree with Christ that He is for you and in you. The fruits and the gifts are rooted in the atonement/incarnation. They are not stand-alone elements. A gospel of anointing and gifts not rooted in the reconciliation of Man with God in Jesus, is no gospel at all.
ENCOUNTER
Darren Sarisky holds that fruitful Biblical interpretation comes to us as a result of an encounter with God. “Depth exegesis is .. necessarily non-dualistic, for it unites the literary, historical and doctrinal aspects of Scripture… Behind this assessment of the Biblical text’s nature and function is .. the doctrine of the Trinity, according to which God reveals himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The text is drawn into the dynamic of God’s self-revelation and serves as its written medium.” (1) Immersion in the trinity through Christ brings sharp seeing and knowing. Containment in the law brings confusion and nonsense.
TO SEE WELL
Here we might remember Jesus’ remark to Nicodemus to the effect that if we are not born again, we cannot see the Kingdom of God.
The essence of new birth is not moral reform. It’s our transition from our separation in religion to our union with God in Christ. Jesus has included us in what is His as John 17 attests.
NOT FISH WITHOUT EYES
It is in this oneness that we see the light and know the meaning of the light to which scripture points. We release spirit and life in union with God. We see spirit and light in oneness with God. This is particularly so in our understanding of scripture. With our being in God, we join the dots in new and many ways because we are joined to the Father of life, light and knowing. This is the difference between a flat reading of the words and penetrating understanding of the Word in which our being is united to the spirit of truth in scripture.
The words inspired by God are not just words. They have a life of their own that is the effect of their union with God. They are spirit and life when read in Christ our life.
ALIVE
‘For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart’ Heb 4.12. NIV. This is the words read in oneness with Christ – a non-dualistic, unseparated relationship with God in which we enter the life of the text that had its source in the being of God
 
 
 
(1) International Journal of Systematic Theology doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2009.00447.x