NO DOCTRINES OF DEMONS
29/12/24 12:33
An enjoyable discipline of our life in God is learning to live in the reality that is Christ while casting off the encrustations of religion. These may be encrustations that have no life and which are adept at insulating us from the direct life that is ours in the Christ who is mediated to our being by the Spirit. Some encrustations are outright lies, while others are the self-inflicted from belief in a limited atonement and a less than fulsome grace.
NOT OVERTLY DEMONIC BUT COVERTLY SO
‘False Christ’s’ are the product of distorted gospels. These gospels are not always obvious but can disguise themselves as ‘our perspective’ or the remains of truths that have been subverted by time and the human instinct to substitute Christ’s salvation for our own work.
HOW SIN DEGRADES
The original lie that led to the seduction of Adam and Eve and the separation that we call The Fall was less a full-on contradiction of their life in God. It was more a subversion of the narrative of life in God. A dilution by a subtle substitution of facts for fictions. Thus, today one of the signs of ‘other gospels’ is a reliance on fictions instead of the acts of God and the Word of God. The decision to rely on our own perspective rather than God’s provision is the essence of sin.
APOSTLE’S DOCTRINE
In our time the Gospel of Jesus, the apostles and Church Fathers is being recovered and we do well to understand what it is and align our lives with their truth. Our union with God and God’s presence in us is more real than many know. “Torrance speaks of the believer’s real participation in the divine nature, and not just of fellowship with God … By participating in Christ there is an ‘importation of another’s personality into him; the life, the will of Christ has taken over what once was in sheer antagonism to it, and replaced the power of sin by the forces of a divine life”. (1) We are in this life because Christ is in us and we are in Christ. Not because we have ‘kept close to Jesus’ or have an anointing by the Spirit but because God in Christ has created this reality of union with God for us, in which to live and be ourselves as sons. This is your ‘riches in Christ’.
We can if, we are remiss, suffer from emotional disease all our lives even if we operate in the gifts because the gifts are not the foundation of a healed life. Our union with God in Christ is the foundation and source of the healed life. The Bethsaida of a healed soul and re-awakened spirit is your present union with God. This is a reconciled oneness with God that is your healing and reestablished you in Christ.
RECONCILED -made one with God.
“Reconciliation thus refers to the real participation of believers in the divine nature made possible by the dynamic atoning union of Christ. Torrance contends this is atonement in effect. As a result of the incarnation, humanity is united to divinity in the hypostatic union.” * (2) We are in this union because God in three persons has reached out to us in Christ to draw us into the Communion that is God. We are in this union when we believe we are. But not in spirit when our mindset is one of law and separation. This is the curse Paul warns against.
OUR INHERITANCE
“In the Church of Christ all who are redeemed through the atoning union embodied in him are made to share in his resurrection and are incorporated into Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit as living members of his Body…Thus it may be said that the ‘objective’ union which we have with Christ through his incarnational assumption of our humanity into himself is ‘subjectively’ actualised in us through his indwelling Spirit, ‘We in Christ’ and ‘Christ in us’ thus complementing and interpenetrating each other.” (3)
SEIZE YOUR TREASURE
Our union with God has nothing to do with the law or the keeping of it and everything to do with our saying ‘yes’ to the life of Christ that He has already drawn us into.
It’s not complicated. Christ is either your life or you are. If the latter you are yet to be reborn.
We are in Christ and in God because God has made it so in His Son. We are one with God by relationship, not by performance. Because we could not be righteous or keep the law even though it only had ten points, God gave us Himself. He is our grace, our forgiveness and much more. We are graced by being enfolded in the trinitarian communion that is God. This life is in us, making us alive and agents of the new creation. Here is healing and the growing of the real you.
The Bible talks of doctrines of demons. Demonic influence is subtle. False and limiting doctrine originates from demons who seed diluted teaching into the minds of people and thence into entire denominations who begin teaching darkness as light. In this way entire communities can become demonic strongholds.
* Hypostatic union – the oneness of Christ and the Father having the same nature and the personal union of Christ’s two natures.
(1) Habets Myk, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance. P 102
(2) Ibid. P 106
(3) Ibid. P 106