IT'S A STATE OF BEING ONE WITH GOD
25/04/24 12:33
‘But what does Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son’ Gal 4.30 NIV. The slave woman’s son is imprisoned in the law.
DISCIPLES
It’s not uncommon for people to think more of their version of Christ than of Christ Himself. This is to say that not a few will follow Christ and be His disciple up to the border of their inherited beliefs and comforting ideas. And then they stop and remain in this bubble for the remainder of their lives. Where they remain apologists for the leeched life that they exemplify.
Believers can be tied to half-gospels as a result of poor teaching or because they have invested themselves in fictions that offer a false identity/status. This is their identity they think they have in their faith community. But this is not the only reason.
TINCTURE OF ‘AS GODS’
Some are fixated on a self-help style gospel in which we retain a semblance of human dignity and self-worth by accumulating our own version of worthiness. We call this righteousness by works and legalism. But this is the culture of the lie and the living-out of the fall. Why do this when we have a resurrected, risen life in Christ’s life? Why indeed? It appeals to our sense of entitlement?
CROSS IS STRENGTH
But it is not through the status of our denomination that we gain spirit and life. And not from an identity we think we have in belonging to a sect or adhering to a partisan gospel. It is through the weakness of the cross and the mystery of the incarnation that the life of God becomes the life of men and women who are insightful enough to believe.
UNPOPULAR STRENGTH
“It is through the weakness of the man on the Cross and on the ground of reconciliation wrought out there that God meets, suffers, and triumphs over the enmity entrenched in human existence and history and over its distortion of the socio-political patterns of human life. This is not, of course, what the world today wants to believe, any more than Jesus' contemporaries in Israel wanted to believe it, for the Cross has the effect of emptying the power-structures that the world loves so much.” (1)
‘Therefore, brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman’ Gal 4.31 NIV.
Enmity of man, entrenched self-sufficiency and unbelief in the spirit robs life from the Slave Woman and her offspring. Who would have thought? Alexandra Radcliff observes that, “An external paradigm presents Christ merely as an example that we must follow rather than as our Head in whom humanity died and was resurrected. It cannot truly transform humanity and therefore demands our own impossible efforts.” One can live a respectable Christian life outside our inheritance. But it is not one in which we are truly live; not a life that is ignited with Christ’s spirit and life. Not a burning bush but a dead tree.
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ.
