THE LAW-MONGERS HERESY
30/12/24 10:42
GOD IS NOT A FIGMENT OF THE LAW. Neither are you because you are a son/daughter of God. The essence of right living is not the law. Neither has the substance of Godliness ever been to compensate for a lack in our being that God has surreptitiously denied us – the lie that Satan insinuated. Right living is much more than being right. Being right with God is found in being one with God. Christ has made a life for you so that this is your reality.
Realising the truth of your oneness with God is the start of your new birth.
‘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 beginning of our excelling in the righteousness and life that is Christ our life as He imparts Himself to us. ‘Born again’ is not a bunch of religious items. Born again is Christ your life. We are talking the incarnated life in which we live the eucharist.
THE LIE
The lie insinuated by Satan to Adam and Eve was that ‘you are not enough’. So you must add something to who you are in God. The truth was that they already were one with God, they were sons of God and their identity was certified and glorified in their oneness with God.
SAME OLD, SAME OLD
Satan’s ploy today is similar. He wants to dilute Christ’s gift to you by getting you to dilute it with something of your own. Self-effected moralism. But the gift that is already yours is that Christ is for you and lives in you to impart Himself to your being. To live the law is to deny Christ and degrade the self. Paul wrote, ‘If righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ Gal 2.21 NIV. Clearly, he is saying that if we are of the law, then we are not of Christ and not strictly Christian.
OUR SELF-OBSESSED ENTITLEMENT MODE
We can continue adherence to the law/lie by refusing to live from the radical grace of the incarnation – because such grace is too radical for us to accept and because we think we need to be in charge and cover our bases by continuing to live in bits of law and segments of the knowledge of good and evil. Our assumption is that we think our Lord is a hard man because ‘He reaps where He did not sow’. He does. He made pregnant the barren Sarah and incarnated the Virgin Mary with the Son of God. Jesus incarnates you by manifesting Himself as your life. Live this and stop fluffing about!
THE LIFE
We may choose to ignore this mystical union that manifests in our flesh thereby defining ourselves as Children of the slave woman (Gal 4.30) and examples of the attempts of the flesh to manufacture life in the spirit by the works of the law. This is our choice if we are people who cannot be taught. You will not be a son/daughter by trying to rub the spirit into the law.
SONS ARE THE EXPRESSION OF THE FATHER
Christ come in our flesh means Christ come in our being. This is a reality by way of the Spirit. Thomas Torrance urges that “A merely representative or a merely substitutionary concept of vicarious mediation is bereft of any actual saving significance. But if representation and substitution are combined and allowed to interpenetrate each other within the incarnational union of the Son of God with us in which he has actually taken our sin and guilt upon his own being, then we may have a profounder and truer grasp of the vicarious humanity in the mediatorship of Christ, as one in which he acts in our place, in our stead, on our behalf but out of the ontological depths of our actual human being.” (1)
WHY THE LETTER IS DEAD
Legalism is about words. Christ our life is about being and infinite life in our person. The Word is Him. Should we clutch our legal blanket to our torsos, we continue the fall in our own lives by inventing a form of godliness that is not Christ come in our flesh but the flesh come in our flesh. The denial of the incarnation on religious grounds is an agreement with the anti-christ spirit who is anti-God and anti-life and full on in maintaining the knowledge of good and evil in a Christian guise. None of us need live a subverted gospel.
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p.81