STEPS TO YOU AND US
14/12/24 12:30
We should know that God is for us. God has taken steps to achieve the trinitarian vision of sharing the joy of life with daughters and sons made in their image. These steps initiated and carried out by God in Jesus Christ have woven God into us and us into God. This is entirely the enterprise of the trinitarian God and has been achieved already in Jesus. When Jesus cried out, ‘It is finished!’ the separation of man and God was finished and the communion of God with His daughters and sons in fullness – a fullness known as the new creation had begun. The words ‘keeping close to Jesus’ are redundant when we realise that Jesus is with us and woven into our being.
‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV. This is the say we are born from religion to union with Christ. Dualism be gone!
THE LIVING WAY
Are you living in separation from God or union with God?
Myk Habets observes that “Torrance’s articulation of theosis presents a theology of both reconciliation and redemption, adopts the language of personal and cognitive union with Christ, and outlines the progress the believer can make in partaking of the divine nature. Each of these features is compatible, Torrance believes, with the Reformed tradition.. By ‘redemption’ Torrance means the emancipation of humanity from bondage, corruption, and nothingness; that which is often synonymous with ‘atonement.’” (1) Redeemed to sonship indeed!
AN INVERTED GOSPEL
We can live our Christianity as workers or sons. When we live Christ come in our flesh we live sonship. When we live law, itty-bitty regulations we live the knowledge of good and evil and slavery. ‘But what does Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son” Gal 4.30 NIV.
God has taken steps to you to enfold you in God ‘Steps to Christ’ is a misnomer. The implication of the words ‘Steps to Christ’, is that not only are we as sinners responsible to make ourselves right with God. We are responsible to access Christ, be accepted by Christ and ‘keep close to Jesus’ as some like to say. This is about as close as one can get to a non-gospel and is a gospel robbed of real content. In ourselves we are incapable of making steps to Christ or being Christ-like. When we do good things as Believers we are expressing Christ in us. When Jesus said that the flesh accomplishes nothing for the Kingdom He was warning us against legalism and works oriented service. A lived union with Christ makes us channels of His life.
NOT COMPLICATED
In Christ ‘the two have been made one.’ The bifurcated world of Adam is no more and the non-dualistic relationship of Jesus with Father has become ours. Living intentionally in this mode of union with Jesus makes us agents of Christ’s spirit and life. Thus we are representatives of the Kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of some institution or personal need to assuage guilt.
YOU – ONE WITH GOD IN CHRIST
The separation of Adam’s race is undone in the Christ of the cross. Before His passion Jesus prayed, ‘That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ John 17.21 NIV. It is accomplished. We are one in Christ – one with God, one with ourselves, one with others and one with the creation – which should alert us to the fact than in consuming the creation we are consuming ourselves.
We are invited to participate in Christ. This life in Christ is His life in communion with Holy Spirit and Father. People talk about ‘receiving Christ.’ It is more apt to live from the fact that we have been received already into Christ’s life of oneness with God. The steps have been taken. You and Father are one. Now we are life-givers because our spirit is alive.
(1) Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, p.94.