LAW AND SPIRIT ARE ANTITHETICAL
23/12/24 10:14
Let’s begin at the beginning. Life in the Spirit is not the gifts bolted onto the law and its religious culture of legalism. Life in the Spirit is Jesus incarnated in our being to be expressed as us.
COMPLETED ONENESS
Our salvation is complete in Christ. Because Jesus Christ is all God and all man we are made one with God in Christ’s Person. Jesus undoes Adam and joins us to God. He is our at-one-ment. The fall is undone and the restoration of our union with God is accomplished in His Person. Humanity is joined to God and God to humanity in Jesus Christ. This is the One Spirit of the universal Church. If we are not Catholic in this sense (as distinct from Roman Catholic) we are possibly not part of the Christian Church.
IN THE ONE SPIRIT
‘Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in the one Spirit, striving together as one for the faith of the gospel’ Phil 1.27 NIV.
A BAPTISED ADOPTION
We are not just adopted in Christ. An inter-woveness has taken place between Father and the sons/daughters of God. Myk Habets observes that “According to Torrance, .. we must give greater place in our understanding of atonement to the concrete conception of substitution together with incorporation. The Word did not enter history as a third party but as an historical individual, Jesus Christ. Christ entered our state of alienation from God and stood under the curse of the Law, he ‘stepped into the conflict between the covenant faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man and took that conflict into His own flesh as the Incarnate Son and bore it to the end.” (1) There’s a lot in ‘Christ come in the flesh’. By the Spirit Jesus comes in our flesh in the Everyday. Thus a fulfilled life is walking with the Lord in the Everyday.
‘Through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death’ Rom 8.2 NIV. We are never fully alive when attached to the law. We are growing in life when we live Christ incarnated. Our hearts experience joy in the presence of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is not with us only when there is some Holy Spirit manifestation. The trinity is with us and in us because they are in us and with us.
ESCHEW NON-LIFE RATIONALISATIONS
A religious attachment to all or any commandment ties us to Moses, to Adam, to separation from God and a culture that is the law of sin and death. Christ’s grace dilutes this separation – but grace and truth us more alive than grace by itself.
In Christ God has done away with the law and replaced it with Himself. The law was always an interloper as an effect of the false narrative of the father of lies. When Paul speaks of the law of sin and death, Paul is speaking of this law. When Paul speaks of THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE he is denoting our inclusion in the Communion that is God. We are in this life.
The crux of the cross is the undoing of our separation from God in Adam and the securing of union with God in Jesus. To understand this is to have embraced authentic Christianity and rejected aberrationist humbug.
WHAT IS LIFE IN THE SPIRIT?
If raised in a law-culture with its legalistic epistemology and addiction to externalities, we may have difficulty in understanding what life in the Spirit actually is. ‘Spirit’ is a flow of life and truth that comes from the throne of God. It’s the difference between ‘talk’ and words of spirit and life. It is the difference between religion and actually being alive in the flame of Trinitarian Being. It’s the true essence of sonship – the difference between a normal tree and a burning bush. In this mode we are life givers while in the law we are restricted to dribbles of life. Why be a keeper of the lame when you can be a flame?
We have a union of being with God that is ours because Jesus Christ is both God and us. Not only has Christ come. He has come in our flesh. He forgives our flesh, graces our flesh with His own body manifesting Himself in us – in Jill and George by incarnation. This is life in the Spirit – a practical life of Godliness described by one saint as life with the ‘God of pots and pans’.
YOU ALIVE IN THE SPIRIT
How does this affect you? God is never somewhere else. He is not more on some days than other days. There is not more of Him because you have done a good work. He is not in celebrity preachers but not in you. He is not more in Paul and John than you. Christ is with you and in you. So it’s not about ‘keeping close to Jesus.’ It’s about living in the oneness that is yours at all times and in all places. Don’t leave you inheritance in the ground like the unprofitable servant. Live in what you have. It’s presumptuous to live in separation when God has given us union in Jesus.
(1) Habets Myk, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, p70.