GODLINESS IS CHRIST IN YOU
20/02/24 14:30
One could live by the decalogue as a commandment keeper yet be a minimalist human being. The Ten Commandments can allude to but not encompass what it means to be human, let alone a son of God. A dead body has almost all the features of a live one – except spirit and life. This is why Paul insists that living from the law is living in this body of death.
YOUR RESURRECTED LIFE
It’s significant that Paul’s words, ‘Christ our life’ are as opposite as one can get from the corpse of legalism.* They denote the spirit and life that is us in Christ’s spirit of resurrected living.
Externalities can give the impression of being alive spiritually when one is actually dead. We are not alive in spirit and life because we are busy or have a ministry. Spirit and life is ours when Christ is our life. We mean incarnation. Life in the Spirit is life in oneness with Christ – never an old covenant existence with the gifts added.
FIRST BORN FROM THE DEAD
The starting point of the new you, the new us, the church and the new creation is Christ’s rising from the dead. Out of Adam’s body of death and by way of the cross, metamorphosed the body of life that is both the body of Christ in His person, the re-born you, and the church alive in His spirit and life. Jesus in His humanity is the new Adam who lives forever and the vicarious humanity who imparts infinite life to all. This is our eucharist life.
ONE JESUS, ONE GOD, ONE LIFE
Karl Bath was emphatic that there is only one God – states as a bald command in the decalogue and revealed in the fullness of time in the person of Jesus Christ.
FALSE GOD/FALSE CHRIST
Only Christ is our life and only Christ is God. Nothing else is god, yet people consistently make gods out of something and nothing. This is a natural consequence of the fall. With trust removed from Father and a sense of being loved replaced by fear, people began making their own gods. Some of the most subtle of these non-gods are the distinctives and icons to which we can attach ourselves as denominational Christians.
THE NON-LIFE, LIFE
To ascribe life to some distinctive is to create a ‘messiah’ who has no life. On this theme Barth writes, “The Commandment does not state simply that those other gods have no reality. On the contrary, it assumes that they do have a definite reality just as it assumes that there are people who have them as gods, who give their hearts to them. Precisely where that occurs there are gods…” (1)
That such ‘gods’ do have reality enables these effigy gods to be empowered by religious spirits who construct strongholds in the church and rob believers of sonship.
ONE GOD, ONE CHRIST, ONE GOSPEL
In citing the reality of these ‘gods’ Barth writes, “God reveals himself as the sole god. God reveals all other gods as nothings. Their reality fades away before God’s revelation. Only in giving God and God alone fear, love and confidence do those people know God as the sole god and all other gods as nothings, despite their reality.” (1)
THE BUBBLE OF RUBBLE
Indeed, the addiction of the religious to religion is why his ‘nothing does not fade,’ why his heart is not enlightened and why Christ does not become His life. People immunises themselves against Christ’s revelation of the truth of His reality and the revelation of self-constructed false realities. It’s mostly the reason why the religious believer neither knows God or knows that what he is joined to – is not God.
Barth also affirmed that Christian belief had to be interpreted according to revelation and not the other way around. This is to say that the Believer finds her real identity in Christ alone, her proper faith in the gospel of Jesus and the apostles and the witness to these facts in the scriptures as interpreted by the church at large. But not in some peculiar niche interpretation that undoes our inheritance in Christ in the conceit of revelation.
(1) Hunsinger, George. Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed (p. 90). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
* We are living in the law if we are keeping one law or ten; if we are living in as a belief system, with Jesus added as a construct.
Hunsinger, George. Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed (p. 89). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
YOUR RESURRECTED LIFE
It’s significant that Paul’s words, ‘Christ our life’ are as opposite as one can get from the corpse of legalism.* They denote the spirit and life that is us in Christ’s spirit of resurrected living.
Externalities can give the impression of being alive spiritually when one is actually dead. We are not alive in spirit and life because we are busy or have a ministry. Spirit and life is ours when Christ is our life. We mean incarnation. Life in the Spirit is life in oneness with Christ – never an old covenant existence with the gifts added.
FIRST BORN FROM THE DEAD
The starting point of the new you, the new us, the church and the new creation is Christ’s rising from the dead. Out of Adam’s body of death and by way of the cross, metamorphosed the body of life that is both the body of Christ in His person, the re-born you, and the church alive in His spirit and life. Jesus in His humanity is the new Adam who lives forever and the vicarious humanity who imparts infinite life to all. This is our eucharist life.
ONE JESUS, ONE GOD, ONE LIFE
Karl Bath was emphatic that there is only one God – states as a bald command in the decalogue and revealed in the fullness of time in the person of Jesus Christ.
FALSE GOD/FALSE CHRIST
Only Christ is our life and only Christ is God. Nothing else is god, yet people consistently make gods out of something and nothing. This is a natural consequence of the fall. With trust removed from Father and a sense of being loved replaced by fear, people began making their own gods. Some of the most subtle of these non-gods are the distinctives and icons to which we can attach ourselves as denominational Christians.
THE NON-LIFE, LIFE
To ascribe life to some distinctive is to create a ‘messiah’ who has no life. On this theme Barth writes, “The Commandment does not state simply that those other gods have no reality. On the contrary, it assumes that they do have a definite reality just as it assumes that there are people who have them as gods, who give their hearts to them. Precisely where that occurs there are gods…” (1)
That such ‘gods’ do have reality enables these effigy gods to be empowered by religious spirits who construct strongholds in the church and rob believers of sonship.
ONE GOD, ONE CHRIST, ONE GOSPEL
In citing the reality of these ‘gods’ Barth writes, “God reveals himself as the sole god. God reveals all other gods as nothings. Their reality fades away before God’s revelation. Only in giving God and God alone fear, love and confidence do those people know God as the sole god and all other gods as nothings, despite their reality.” (1)
THE BUBBLE OF RUBBLE
Indeed, the addiction of the religious to religion is why his ‘nothing does not fade,’ why his heart is not enlightened and why Christ does not become His life. People immunises themselves against Christ’s revelation of the truth of His reality and the revelation of self-constructed false realities. It’s mostly the reason why the religious believer neither knows God or knows that what he is joined to – is not God.
Barth also affirmed that Christian belief had to be interpreted according to revelation and not the other way around. This is to say that the Believer finds her real identity in Christ alone, her proper faith in the gospel of Jesus and the apostles and the witness to these facts in the scriptures as interpreted by the church at large. But not in some peculiar niche interpretation that undoes our inheritance in Christ in the conceit of revelation.
(1) Hunsinger, George. Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed (p. 90). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
* We are living in the law if we are keeping one law or ten; if we are living in as a belief system, with Jesus added as a construct.
Hunsinger, George. Evangelical, Catholic, and Reformed (p. 89). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
