CHRIST HAS GIVEN US ABUNDANT LIFE

The deception of Satan that precipitated the fall stemmed from the original lie. Firstly, that Adam and Eve were not one with God as sons, secondly that Father was deceptive in robbing Adam and Eve of themselves and thirdly that they would improve their state of being by disregarding God’s instruction and taking it upon themselves to work-up Godliness.
 
This separation is what people join themselves to, when they remain in the law and eschew the oneness with God that is already theirs in the incarnation.
 
THE OLD, OLD STORY
TO BE YOU
 
When we reduce life in the Spirit to legalism and turn Christ our life into the law our life with Christ’s help - this is the fall extended. Religion is a subtle form of law and outside of Christ is an expression of the knowledge of good and evil. The Son of God was not incarnated as a man and then incarnated in you so you could play nicely doing religion, moralising or law-keeping. Christ is incarnated in you to be you. But not you as a law construct. You as a daughter/son
 
The truth is that you are a son/daughter and as such part of God. There is no separation between you and God (except in our minds when we believe a lie) You have a similar oneness with God as a result of the atonement and incarnation that Jesus has with the other members of the trinity. You are included in God to be revealed as your True Self.
 
THE DOOR AND LIVING WAY
 
Union with God does not come by way of the law. Condemnation and separation does, however. You have union with God in Jesus Christ. Don’t pollute the Gospel of the Kingdom and the Apostle’s teaching with the foreign virus of the law.
 
HUB OF RELATIONSHIP
 
“The communion-constituting activity of the divine ousia [God’s substance] and its source in the mutual dwelling of the Father and the Son in one another, together with the oneness between the ‘I am’ of Yahweh and the ‘I am’ of the Lord Jesus, tell us that the Being of God is not undifferentiated in his oneness, but comprises a Triunity of relations internal to the Godhead.
 
“As Athanasius discerned, this was already evident in the Nicene concept of the homoousion [Jesus is one substance with God] which implied a distinction as well as a oneness in being between the Son and the Father, and, as he and Gregory Nazianzen also showed, between the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son as well.
 
INDIVIDUALITY AND COMMUNITY
 
“The homoousion, with its rejection of any notion of undifferentiated or of partitive relations between the three divine Persons .. carried with it the conception of eternal distinctions and internal relations in the Godhead wholly and mutually interpenetrating one another in the one identical Being of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” (1)
 
NOT AN ABSTRACTION
 
What does this mean? It means the oneness that is God as the trinity, draws you into this oneness as a way of life. You now possess a similar kind of oneness with God that is the oneness that is the trinity. This is the source of our ability to live the community of the church.
 
Compared to this oneness, a law-based gospel is a lie and a farce. It’s just a cunning perpetuation of the fall. I am sorry for young ministers who take on this bent gospel as if it is Christ’s Gospel. In doing so they multiply a form of christianity in which everyone is in a wheelchair. Many grow to retirement trying to make something good out of this bent gospel. But they cannot because it’s not a tree of life. It’s a tare.
 
YOUR POST CROSS BEING AND THE GOSPEL OF THE BIBLE
 
It is this INTERPENETRATION of God with you and us that Jesus prays for in John 17 and which He urges us to embrace in John 14.20. You have a union with God that you cannot earn. It just is and it is yours. Obedience is agreeing with Christ that this is so.
Obedience is defined in living in it rather than being absorbed in the pieties of separation amelioration and knowledge of good and evil ‘behaviors.’
 
ONE GOSPEL
 
Believing God and obeying Jesus in the New Testament has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with agreeing that Jesus is our grace and our union with God. This is the meaning of post cross obedience. It’s the undoing of the separation caused by the fall.
 
‘Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14.24 NIV.
 
Douglas Campbell notes that, “Paul is well aware that this divine dimension is nothing short of mind-blowing. So he even prays at one time that we will be granted the capacity to begin to grasp it with the help of the Spirit. Without this revelation, effected by God, we lack the ability to understand the enormity and power of the divine compassion. We are both too limited as creatures and too resistant as hostile sinners [ Eph 3.4-19].”  (2) To be in the Spirit means to agree with Christ and to join the oneness with God that is already ours.
 
(1)    Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 124-125). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
(2)    Douglas Campbell. Pauline Dogmatics The Triumph of Gods Love. P 56.