FREED TO BE FULL HUMAN, FULLY ALIVE

‘May they be one as we are one.’ This post is about the primal transgression and its cure. Sin is much more than transgression of the law. It is a lived separation from God and the abrogation of the law of the spirit of life – which was never words on stone but the relationship of oneness that was ours before the fall.
 
Deep sin involves the side-lining of Christ and the dilution of His vicarious humanity for us and its replacement with the law, legalism moralism and the various expressions of the knowledge of good and evil that suffocate Christ’s real Gospel of the Kingdom. Fullness of life is a lived union with God in Christ. We are talking the kind of oneness that is the trinity and the similar oneness that is now ours in Christ as sons and daughters of God. These passages are not about trying harder to be the community of the Church. They mean that we have the inheritance of living in the togetherness of the trinity with the result that this kind of communion will be reproduced in our human relationships.
 
IN CHRIST
 
The words ‘in Christ’ are far more than a pious utterance.  They refer to the vicarious humanity of Christ by which He represents us to God entirely and by which all that is His becomes ours.
 
PRIMAL SIN
 
Sin is what people do in separation from God. The most subtle and pernicious sin is to think to earn union with God, when only God can create union with God. Thus, to assert that something like the religious icon is rest for human restlessness when Christ alone is rest for human restlessness is misguided and a lie. Rest for human restlessness is ours in union with God – which is what we have in the Lord of sabbath rest.  You have the oneness with Christ that Eucharist represents. As the bread and wine become you so Christ has become you and you enter His fellowship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
 
DEEDS
 
The fact of accounted righteousness is very old. ‘Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.’ Abraham’s belief in God was graced to him in the coming Messiah.
 
This does not mean that we can give ourselves over to a dissolute life. It means that a righteous life comes from a relationship with God, from a relationship of oneness already ours. Doing good and abstaining from evil does not make us Godly. Through the cross, God has made us Godly by drawing near and drawing us into Himself. Sons in spirit and in truth do sons of God things because this is the state of their being. We are the branches and fruit of Christ’s Vine.
 
PRIMAL SIN
 
The primal transgression was to disbelieve God and believe a lie. But the transgression was not just in the lie. It was being seduced into a lesser view of God and lesser view of us that resulted in separation from God.
 
 We were not abandoned by God. But we lost the oneness with God that the trinity intended to be ours. The oneness that they enjoyed together. Kingdom Life is living in this restored togetherness in God in Christ.
 
LIE EMBRACED
 
The primal sin was believing the lie that Father was not enough and that we were not enough – that we were less than we could be - less because Father had been remiss or sneaky in not revealing the whole truth and ourselves being less because we were not Gods. But in fact we were and are God’s Daughters and Sons.
 
The primal transgression was to distrust God and be seduced into trusting ourselves. This resulted in taking things into our hands. But the result was separation from God – not spatially but in spirit and life. Agree with Christ that He has included in His life and don’t live the lie of the fall any longer.
 
SPIRIT AND LIFE
 
Jesus ministered spirit and life because He was spirit and life, as a result of the fact that He and Father are one. In Jesus our primal sin is undone and we enter the kind of oneness with God that Jesus enjoys with Father. This is ultimate grace.
 
PRIMAL TRANSGRESSION UNDONE
 
Athanasius writes, “He might offer the sacrifice on behalf of all, surrendering His own temple to death in place of all, to settle man's account with death and free him from the primal transgression.” (1)
 
CHOOSE LIFE
 
The new covenant of Christ our life is our freedom from the primal transgression. Continuing in old covenant mode is perpetuating it. Don’t make futile religion out of trying to undo the separation from God that no longer exists. You are one with Christ and in His fellowship with Father and Holy Spirit.
 
You are freed from the primal transgression if you believe you are. You are freed if you don’t believe it but not free in your mind. Take up the mind of Christ and live in your inheritance as Jesus urged. ‘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. This is the day that we are born again and the day that you come alive in spirit and life.
 
(1) St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation - Enhanced Version (pp. 21-22). Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Kindle Edition.