CHRIST OUR LIFE IS ALL OF OUR LIFE

There is the bent story of the split god, the bifurcated reality and the Tweedledum and Tweedled-dee of the reality that is not Christ. Jesus Christ was one with God. He is God. Oneness is the characteristic of the trinity. Oneness is the new creation becoming the Kingdom of God. Oneness is yours in Jesus Christ. Thus, those who eat Christ live because of Christ.

‘And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth’ Eph 1.10 NLT.
In Christ all has become one. That’s the now. The not yet is the oneness that awaits the living out of the incarnation in the everyday by the sons and daughters of God.

DUALISM
There are middle class people on more than adequate incomes who think themselves poor. They live from a poverty mentality because they were once poor or were brainwashed into thinking they were poor in their families. The point is they are not poor now. But this is the mindset of those who live from the law. Your proper mindset is union with God. This is your wealth.

Your wealth is that His life is your life.

ARIAN MINDSET
Much of Western Christianity is dualistic in contrast to the Kingdom of God presented by Jesus, the apostles and Church Fathers. If the defeat of Arianism was a narrow escape from a false separatism between Jesus Christ and Father God, legalism is captivity TO SEPARATION from that which many have never been released.

Legalism is obvious in faith communities that have made their religion out of the law and particularly in that group that has made ‘The Great Controversy’ their hermeneutic of the cosmos and of salvation. Nevertheless, most separationism is more subtle than this. It is hidden in in plain sight in common moralism and legalism – regarded by many as sound Christianity. Real life/holiness is not stepping about on a draft board of the knowledge of good and evil. Holiness is the union with Christ/God that is already ours.

SEMI-ALIVE IN THE CAGE OF RELIGION
Legalism is dualism practiced as Christianity. Many Christians earnestly believe that they are separated from God and that the Christian life is earning the approval that undoes this separation.

POVERTY MENTALITY
Legalism and law sacredness splits the person of Jesus from His works and nullifies or at least dilutes the reality of the incarnation. Legalism and moralism while accepted as sound in much Christianity is not the life in God that that Jesus gave us as the pearl of great price. This is the pearl that we are advised to sell all we have to possess because it is the only entity that is life itself -  being Christ come in our flesh. Anything else is fool’s gold.

DUALISTIC HUMBUG
Myk Habets observes that “Torrance has continually stressed the redemptive significance of the incarnation because he perceives a neglect of this theme as a particular weakness of Western theology.

“This accounts for his sustained polemic against any form of dualistic christology that would split the person of Christ from his work. … According to Torrance atonement cannot be confined simply to what Christ achieved on the cross (his passive obedience), nor can the incarnation (his active obedience) be regarded simply as the prelude to the cross … ‘Atonement is inseparable from the Incarnation, for what constitutes atonement is not the death of Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ per se’.  As with his doctrine of union with Christ, it is not union that is most important but Christ. So too with the cross: what is of utmost importance is the Christ of the cross, but this does not entail a diminution of the centrality of the cross as the determinative climax of Christ’s saving work.”

BENT VIEW
I have met people who are persuaded that the proper attitude about the Lord’s Table is mourning about the cross. The cross is something to be thankful for but the cross itself is not what brings us life and joy. The meaning of the bread and wine as consumed by us is that it becomes our being. It reminds us that Christ has become us – that we are one substance with Him and that incarnated with His life we express Jesus in everyday life because Christ has come in our flesh.

This is why Christ Himself is our life and why adherence to religion is not.