NO NEED TO REMAIN BLIND IN YOUR BUBBLE OF SELF-DECEPTION
11/06/24 13:25

‘We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers’ 1 Tim 1.9 NIV. We might also add for the smug and the religious.
NON- GOSPEL
Not a few Christians have made a version of Christianity out of moralism while others have formed themselves into a denomination based on the law of Moses. Both kinds are a Christianised version of the knowledge of good and evil and both kinds leave adherents bogged in a lesser atonement and a scarcely existent incarnation. It’s what Paul called ‘another gospel’ and it attracts a curse because it undoes the genius of Christ come in the flesh. It replaces it with that which God had done away with in Christ – the law, the separation and the abstraction of the knowledge of good and evil come into our persons as fake spirituality.
‘All who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law” Galatians 3.10 NIV.
A law-gospel is the fall endorsed by errant thinking.
CURSED WAYS OF BEING
It’s possible to belong to the Body of Christ yet belong to an upside-down gospel. The Lord showed a friend of mine a picture of such a gospel. The cross inverted. God has made the two, one in Christ. He has made humanity one with Himself. There is no separation between God and ourselves in Christ Jesus. The law led to life in the Spirit. But Christ does not lead to the law. Sons of God are the expression of Christ come in our flesh. In the latter we live as a burning bush. In the law we live as dead trees.
ONE WITH GOD
Jesus Christ penetrates our being individually and socially by the Great Exchange. Paul calls this Christ in you and John calls it Christ come in our flesh. God achieves this by Himself entering us in the person of Jesus Christ and our entering the communion that is God via the person of Jesus.
In Christ we have joined the Holy Family.
Thomas Torrance describes our salvation and transformation as follows. “It was precisely into the midst of that depraved and dehumanised humanity that the Son of God penetrated by his Incarnation in Jesus Christ, that is, into the very split in our human nature where we are not and cannot be what we ought to be, and where we manipulate moral righteousness in the protection of our selfish ends. Through hypostatic union and atoning union inter-penetrating each other he laid hold of both sides of that split and brought them together in his own Person, removing the sin and guilt which perpetuated the split, reconciling man to God and God to man in such a way that he set the whole moral order upon a new basis.”
A STATE OF BEING ONE WITH GOD
The new moral order is Christ in us. It is what Paul calls Christ who is our life. It is for this reason that Paul states that the law is made for sinners. Christ, however is for the sons and daughters of God who are holy because they have been made part of God – daughters and sons. Justification and sanctification are not abstractions in separation from each other. Justification and sanctification, though distinct are ours in the one person of Christ.
‘For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law” Gal 3.10 NIV.
Live Christ our life for genuine sonship. Live the law if it’s ok to be a caricature of yourself. Good people have devoted their lives to putting a decent face on a gospel that is no gospel at all. The sad thing about them is that they never got to be their true selves.