WHEN WATER IS NOT LIFE

There is much good that can be done in towns, cities and nations. It’s quite apparent that this good is often obstructed by vested interests, nepotism, cronyism and the lie that the Economy is life. I read a piece in The Age in which a man opined that talk of climate change was a form of child abuse. Strange talk indeed from the promoters of a kind of Economy that is killing the earth. Refusal to live oneness with Christ can at best leave us without wisdom and at worst make us voices of stupidity.

So who was being abused when families lost their homes, businesses in towns burnt in the recent fires, or drowned in recent floods with muddy water at unprecedented heights that inundated businesses in places like Lismore, NSW? Reminds one of the people drowning outside the Ark gurgling, ‘We don’t believe in floods!’ Or covid sufferers on their deathbed breathing their last and uttering,  ‘I don’t believe in covid.’

DYSTOPIA
Not a few youth expect a dystopian future. They are right – unless we take measures to be industrious in ways that do not suffocate the Environment. There are solutions to the current challenges that can preserve the earth and produce much wealth. Except that Babylonian confusion is the culture, selfishness the ethos and Christianity rather than Christ the opiate of the people. Don’t expect a living way to emerge from Christianity until the church lives – not as a religion – but as the society of the incarnated Christ.

WITH SUBSTANCE OR NOT?
All who take the name of Christ, looking to Him for salvation, belong to the Body of Christ. The curious part is that we can belong to the Body of Christ yet own a gospel that is not Christ’s Gospel, Paul’s or John’s, but ours. Ours, because we have a vested interest in believing what we have always believed, cronies to please and the habit of doing what we have always been doing even as we fade into impotence.

Reminds us of one of the first major heresies – the distorted doctrine of Arianism that denied that Jesus was fully God rather than one substance with God. This would have made a christianity of form without substance, for it is Jesus who is God and Man and Jesus who joins us to our Father in Heaven and God to each one of us.
Satan lives to take the substance out of our inheritance. Jesus and apostolic teaching aims to multiply our riches in Christ and undo the work of The Thief.

HERESIES OLD AND NEW
Complementary to this this deformed thinking was the heresy of Docetism that denied that Jesus was really a human being. Both heresies, if believed would hollow out the efficacy of Christ’s life for ours as all heresies do. Paul implies that we can have a faith, yet live as a dead man walking.

CANCER OF LEGALISM
Particularly debilitating is the continuing heresy of legalism that establishes the law as an adjunct of Christ – a christ whose job under this pygmy gospel is to help people keep the law in ‘His strength.’ ‘Law’ is a function of separation from God. It was a schoolmaster to lead to Christ as our life. Not Christ as chief law-helper. Our treasure in our jar of clay is God incarnated in our being. This is the seed that fills the entire earth – not with religion but with the new creation kingdom of God people.

THE CLICHE
Holiness in this hybrid gospel is a work of the flesh. It is a ‘work’ that is contra to the real holiness that is Christ as us – that would have been ours had we lived in the incarnation instead of the law. Our post cross life should not be some of law and some of Christ because our life since the cross is none of Adam and all of Christ.
It is fruitful to live out of the Gospel of Jesus, Paul and John rather than from some misguided variation.
THE LIVING WAY
‘Christ come in our flesh’ is the expression of Christ as John and Mary as well as Peter and Gretel. It may be argued with some justification that those beholden to the legalist heresy belong to the Body of Christ – even though Paul asserted that maintaining oneself in the law was to enclose oneself in this Body of Death. All belong. Some belong better than others.
Jesus alluded to the effect of distorted gospels within the body as Tares – weeds that look like wheat and weeds because they are the effect of uniting with a distorted gospel rather than a complete gospel. A tare does not have the same status in the Body as the Wheat. It produces no bread and is good at making poisoned soup.
WHOSE SONS?
Explaining the parable of the tares to the disciples, Jesus described those who were tares as sons of the evil one as compared to those who flourished in His Gospel as sons of God. The kind of sons we are depends on our version of truth. It is a grave ignorance to imagine that we are free to invent our own gospel and imagine that we are full members of the Body of Christ.
LAW ABSTRACTIONISM
Thomas Torrance writes, “I referred to the problem that results from the analytical tradition of thought when dichotomous ways of thinking arise which disrupt and distort the very things we seek to understand and explain in any field of human inquiry.
We isolate things from the matrix of natural relations to which they belong, abstracting their external pattern from the ground in which it is embedded and tearing their phenomenal surface from the objective frame which holds it together, thereby disintegrating them in the very way we handle them .. I pointed out the damaging effects of these ways of thinking upon our understanding of Christ and his Gospel.”
This is the effect of law-based gospels. They are anti-life and those that run them are never fully alive.
CALLING THE PARTS THE WHOLE
Growing from the law in this kind of epistemology is the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is innately contradictory and dichotomised – which is why Paul asserts that the ‘law is for sinners’ while Christ is for life.


POISONING THE POT
Belonging to the Body and crafting our own gospel is a contradiction in terms – which Paul resolves by rightly describing an immersion in the culture of the law as ‘this body of death.’ All who believe in Jesus are included in His belonging. But not all believe His Gospel. They don’t believe it because they have not been taught and, in some cases have not been taught the true gospel because they have been immersed in the propaganda of a false gospel. Or because they have not been diligent enough about life to pursue life with the passion it deserves.