LIVE IN YOUR RICHES IN CHRIST
Oneness with God is our post cross inheritance., As Paul said all existence finds it being in God. This ‘being’ is personal – the logos who is Christ, the source of all meaning, life and spirituality. The cool thing is that Jesus, the logos is meaning and purpose in Person. The even cooler thing is that Jesus Christ lives in you and that in Himself He has placed you in the fellowship of the trinity.
REALITY IS
Thomas Torrance wrote, “Behind and permeating all our scientific activity, whether in critical analysis or in discovery, there is an elementary and overwhelming faith in the possibility of grasping the real world without concepts, and, above all, faith in the truth over which we have no control but in the service of which our rationality stands or falls. Faith and intrinsic rationality are interlocked with one another.” Rationality is tied to an authentic union with the genuine Christ and His inclusion of us in the fellowship of the Trinity. This is what sons of God means.
PROGRESS
It was the implied faith in the intrinsic rationality of existence that enabled the scientific progress of Western Civilisation. This is a truth that some perceive but which some fundamentalists do not. This is because truth is not confined to words but is a state of being: THE WORD who became flesh and dwelt among us is the embodiment of truth and life. Ultimately truth is Christ. When Christ is our life we are incarnated with truth and liberated from specious ideas and populist nonsense.
CREATION IS
When Paul asserted that Christ is our life he was describing that which is more than salvation. He was alluding to the nature of creation. The declaration that Christ is all and in all is stating the same truth – that being is in God and that we are real and can perceive reality when we are in Jesus Christ. So ensure that you are part of a real gospel and not contained in a charade or devious adaptation.
REALITY – TRUTH - LIFE
Reality is the trinity and is defined by the trinity. As the representative of the trinity incarnated among us, Jesus Christ is the logos – the ultimate rationality, purpose and spirit of all that exists. Paul called this the law of the Spirit of Life. It has nothing to do with Moses’ laws as it is not a function of the dichotomised world of the knowledge of good and evil – which is an ordered confusion, resulting from the fall and our consequent separation from God.
THE PATTERN
The pattern of the trinity, its perichoresis, the action of the incarnation both as God with us and in us because Christ has come in our flesh – joins us to the real Word in the spirit and in science. This is the realm Paul refers to as the law of the spirit of life. The law of the spirit of life is personal, being Christ and the trinity. The realm of science is analytically distinct from the spirit but is not separate. It exists in the one being that is the life of God in Christ.
Torrance’s model for interaction between [science and theology] is based on the theological heart of the Church: the Incarnation.
THE INCARNATION
With the incarnation of Jesus Christ among us and now by the Sprit in us, we have been made one substance with God. This is sonship in spirit and in truth. We are not deities but we are sons/daughters of God. We can talk as much as we like about sonship but if we remain separated in the law, we have not entered sonship with God in spirit and in truth.
POWER FOR TOGETHERNESS
The Message that Jesus brought to us from God is that we belong. We have been drawn into the ‘belongingness’ of the trinity in Jesus. This communion is love personified. We have been drawn by the cross into love personified. This is the source of our peace in God, our healing, our ability to love self and others and our ability be a genuine community of Believers among ourselves. A Christianity that retains us in the law is means a false christ and a false gospel
‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14.23 NIV. His teaching is that He alone is our life.
LOVING BY BEING
Love is not something we copy. It’s something we become as expressions of Christ as we see in John 17. Jesus says ‘I am not asking on behalf of them alone, but also on behalf of those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.
I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one as We are one— I in them and You in Me—that they may be perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me.’
ALREADY BELONG
As sons of God, we belong with the Family of the trinity and are one substance with the Relationship that is God. God is not an abstraction but personal in Relationship that is the pattern for marriage, family and human relationships. Some say that the nature of the trinity is also the relationship at the core of physics. It probably is, which means that if we are to be one with the creation as human beings we need to enter our inheritance of oneness with God instead of living in compartments that might blind us to or justify our rape of the earth.
MAKE THE TWO ONE
“The communion-constituting activity of the divine ousia and its source in the mutual dwelling of the Father and the Son in one another, together with the oneness between the ‘I am’ of Yahweh and the ‘I am’ of the Lord Jesus, tell us that the Being of God is not undifferentiated in his oneness, but comprises a Triunity of relations internal to the Godhead. As Athanasius discerned, this was already evident in the Nicene concept of the homoousion which implied a distinction as well as a oneness in being between the Son and the Father, and, as he and Gregory Nazianzen also showed, between the Holy Spirit and the Father and the Son as well.
The homoousion, with its rejection of any notion of undifferentiated or of partitive relations between the three divine Persons or ὑποστάσ∊ις, carried with it the conception of eternal distinctions and internal relations in the Godhead wholly and mutually interpenetrating one another in the one identical Being of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” (1) What does this mean? It means that there is no separation in Christ Jesus. It means that you are included in the Holy Family.
It is this oneness that has enveloped us and this oneness that is active in us to be revealed as us. This is Christ come in our flesh. It is our interwovenness in God. This is our inner healing and our agency as Kingdom Representatives.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 124-125). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
