IN PRAISE OF THE REAL GOSPEL

I didn’t always know there was a ‘New Covenant.’ The New Testament to my knowledge was just life after Jesus. But salvation history is not a seamless whole. It is radically different after the cross to what it was before the cross. The dichotomies, compartmentalisations and bitty-ness of the law is dead after the cross and now Christ as you is alive. Christ has come in our flesh.

There is no separation in Christ Jesus, which means that dualistic religion is dead and we should stop living the compartmentalised life because in Christ we are one with God. It is this oneness that links us to real life, the real self, to society and the Earth.

The new wineskin is not just salvation per se. It’s Christ our life and oneness with God’s creation.

RELATIONSHIPS
Relationships vary. We can be an acquaintance with Bill or we can be part of Bill’s life. A marriage might exhibit genuine oneness or be an arrangement of togetherness that has no real content as a marriage. We can be of the Body of Christ in in the mode of ‘the letter’ that lacks life, or we can be one with God in the person of Christ participating in His relationship with the trinity and be alive in our spirit.

HEIRS
‘Now if we are children, then we are heirs--heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory’ Rom 8.17 NIV. Paul is talking a oneness of being with Christ.

People had a relationship with God before the cross. Moses did, but he saw God’s hind-parts. David had a close relationship with God – so close that he was a prophetic harbinger of the coming Christ. Yet he had no oneness with God and neither did any pre-cross hero of the faith. That had to wait for the Messiah. Firstly, as God with us and secondly as God in us, manifesting as us as the sons of God. This is incarnation. It’s new covenant in spirit and in truth.

ONE SUBSTANCE
‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ 1 John 3.2 NIV.
Jesus, the Christ of Nazareth was one substance with God. In Jesus Christ, a human being who is God, you are one substance with God. We are not deities but we are ‘sons.’ ‘Now we are the sons of God’ because the separation of Adam has been undone and we are one with God as the sons and daughters of God.
‘Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father” ‘Gal 4.6 NIV.
We are not one with Christ because we have cited a scripture or ticked a box. We are one because our being is one with God’s being in Jesus. God’s life in you cannot be found in fundamentalist statements. It is found in being. Being one with God.
WOVEN INTO GOD
The true representation of the bread and wine of the Lord’s Table is Christ as you, which Paul calls Christ our life. John calls this Christ come in our flesh. The Lord’s Table is not a representation of religion. It is the representation of our union with God. You eat the bread and drink the wine and it becomes you. Simple. Real. The Gospel in Essence. You are not graced to live religion through Jesus. You are graced with His life to be your life.
KNOWING GOD
“This incarnate embodiment of the fullness of God in Christ has opened up for us an astonishing way of knowing God personally in himself, which was not available to the chosen people of God within the covenant relation which God established with them even when he made himself known to them as Yahweh, as he who he really is and will be as their Lord and Saviour. While this grace was not yet present to Israel in very person (αὐτοπροσώπως, as Cyril once expressed it24), that is precisely what took place through God’s personal self-communication and self-donation in ‘the concrete Jesus’. (1)
Christ is your life if you believe He is and you are living in the communion of the trinity that has reached out to embrace you. Your life in God is less about you receiving Christ and more about the fact that you have been received into His life.
There is no need to be wooden people of a wooden religion. ‘And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ 2 Cor 3.18 NIV. This is us living spirit and life in our flesh.
 
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 143). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.