JESUS - WHOLE PERSON WHOLE LIFE
26/02/24 14:53
Jesus is neither liberal or conservative. He simply is. The world is not divided into ‘left’ and ‘right’. People are. Things are not evil or good because they are old and or new. They are good when they are life-giving. Jesus is the Lord of life-giving policies.
Jesus is not among us by the Spirit to give us ‘some life.’ Or the kind of life allowed by our ‘denominational truths.’ Or a life defined by the right or the left. Jesus is life and He offers us life without limit.
The solution to social fragmentation and climate chaos is not better education or some new version of the knowledge of good and evil – which all political correctness is. The solution is people made whole by Christ imbued in their being.
Any politically correct solution is only a band-aid. Any version of Christianity that dilutes or adds to the Christ of God dilutes you as a person and hinders life to the full.
SPECIOUS REASONING
People have been naïve enough to imagine that Jesus supports capitalism or that socialism is His Way, or that Jesus endorses the status quo and the social structure that we know and are familiar with.
Not so.
If this were so, what we would get is not the Kingdom of God and certainly not the new creation. But just another version of the Kingdoms of this world inhabited by winners and losers. This would be a miserable dystopia where the fit survive and the ‘unfit’ become the means of the well-being and justification of the privileged few.
SURVIVAL OF THE FIT AND SO-CALLED DESERVING
Ivan Krastev quotes the findings of a casual researcher in former communist countries in the years following 1989. ‘People realized suddenly that in the coming years it would be decided who would be rich, and who would be poor; who would have power and who would not; who would be marginalized, and who would be at the centre. And who would be able to found dynasties and whose children would suffer.’ (1) This is the motivation of the survival of the fittest and why people are willing to claw and scratch or just be self-interested in the name of economics in order to be found among the so called economic elect.
FORM OF GODLINESS CULT
This kind of world is as a far from the Kingdom of God as one can get, and it has to be said, it is the result of a civilisation that has largely ignored the Prince of Peace who is the New and Living Way in person.
The new Creation is the new and living way of life in which society is incarnated with Christ. This is the Christ who by the incarnation transforms society into the way, the truth and the life. It’s the Christ whose multiplication in people becomes the Kingdom of God whose spirit and life comes in the flesh of all and restores the earth.
CULT OF RELIGIOSITY, GREED, UNLOVE AND MATERIALISM
Christianity that is imprisoned in the church but which is dismissive of the poor, the marginalised, the soil, the bush, the animals and the earth is both a faint Christianity and a negation of the Kingdom of God. We need to do better than Christianity that supports a materialist cult. We need Christ incarnated lives as Believers so that people can see that God is real in us.
At the present time we are doing a good job of killing the earth. Human beings are not only good at killing each other but we live in a political economy that turns life into money and is obsessed with power for the benefit of the few.
CULT OF KILLING THE EARTH
‘The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth’ REV 11.18 NIV.
This is a scripture that those who justify stupid ideas with the words, ‘there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus’, would do well to understand.
Those who committed genocide on the Jews are not different to those who are committing genocide on the earth. If the Kingdom of God is about life to the full – and it is – don’t think that Jesus is about to excuse those, who excuse greed and earth genocide, in the name of religion or the ‘economy.’
CULTISH BABYLON AND STERILE EGYPT
This is the cult of greed and materialism. Don’t be so dim that you are persuaded by the carnal and greedy that a love for the earth, animals, trees, people and living things is a cult. Think like this and you are deceived by the cult of this world.
VESTED INTERESTS
When Life in Person came among us vested interests killed Him. People kill life in various ways because that’s who we in Adam. This is the original cult, the original witchcraft that grew from the lies of Satan and his insinuation that humans can possess life without God. If our Christianity has nothing to say about kindness to the poor and kindness to the earth then it is either a nonsense or we are.
The ‘one way’ is to multiply life-gives because Christ is us. In Him we become Resurrection and Life.
RESTORE THE EARTH
As disciples of Christ, we must cast in our lot in dying to selfishness and precipitate resurrection. There are solutions for the current crisis. The sky will not fall in if we adopt them. Renewables will create wealth and a new way forward. Humanity in Christ has the capacity in Christ to restore the earth.
There is a new and living way in the spirit and in the flesh. It’s the opposite of Babylon and Egypt and it’s called the New Creation. ‘Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation’ Gal 6.15. Clearly for Paul the new creation is not about religiosity. It’s about a new us and a new world.’
Heaven does not invade earth if all we can do is wave our arms in praise and worship in church. Such an invasion is of faint import if healing only occurs at the front of the church, when healing is really a sign of Jesus power to heal the world of its chaos – to heal it of the Babylon that results from the unhealed wound of populations living in separation from God. Heaven invading earth means the healing of the earth in every way – through you and through us all.
(1) Krastev, Ivan. The Light that Failed (p. 20). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
