KNOW JESUS. KNOW GOD
13/01/25 09:48
A woman at my workplace wondered out loud what God was like. I was disappointed that she, did not know that God was like Jesus Christ and by implication that Jesus was and is fully God as the author of Hebrews asserts: ‘In these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature Heb 1.1-4 NIV.
There are ‘gospels’ – ‘no gospel at all’, in which people are attached to a lesser christ and a crooked gospel, through no fault of their own or because they like it that way. It’s their brand.
God is not always known as God is - and many Believers have absorbed ‘false facts’ since their childhood resulting in a false christ and a deficient gospel.
Warped assertions that have twisted our view of God produce a less than joyful self. Thomas Torrance, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century writes, “When daylight filtered through, I came across a young soldier (Private Philips), scarcely twenty years old, lying mortally wounded on the ground, who clearly had not long to live.
JESUS IS GOD
As I knelt down and bent over him, he said: “Padre, is God really like Jesus?” I assured him that he was—the only God that there is, the God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Saviour.
As I prayed and commended him to the Lord Jesus, he passed away … That incident left an indelible impression on me. I kept wondering afterwards what modern theology and the Churches had done to drive some kind of wedge between God and Jesus.” (1)
ONENESS OF JESUS, GOD AND YOU
Jesus is also you and us.
The eucharist and our feasting at the Lord’s Table denotes that we are one substance with Christ. Not Gods but sons/daughters of God in His Person. The oneness of our Father and the Son is mirrored in the oneness of ourselves and Jesus Christ. It is through Jesus and because He is the Son of God and Son of Man that we ourselves are one with Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
PIETY IS NOT GODLINESS
Religion is not Godliness and not actually spiritual. Spirituality is the effect of direct union with God – a state of being that is ours in Jesus. We can be pious as in the law, but we will never be pious in oneness with God. In this we will be alive and sons. There is something unattractive and pathetic about legalism. To be one with Christ is to be the expression of Christ. This comes from believing it. The joy of this is that you already have it.
EAT AND DRINK HIM TO POSSESS LIFE
‘Oneness’ is not some holy mode of the super-spiritual. It’s the inheritance of all. The rite of the Lord’s Table does not make us one with Christ. It’s an assertion and declaration of what already is. We are already one. ‘Those who eat Me will live because of Me’. In the incarnation God manifests as God’s Sons. ‘Christ our life’ is incarnation realised as us and in our world.
‘When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory’ Col 3.4 NIV.
What is this glory? It’s less about our life in heaven and more about our life as sons/daughters in the present. But be clear. This is not about a Jesus Empowered Christian life. It’s about God AS YOUR LIFE. In Real Presence Leanne Payne explains the centrality of incarnational reality.
REAL LIFE, REAL GODLINESS
Real Godliness, the effect of being one with the real Christ is never found in constructing compartments of sacred and secular, holy and unholy, ‘woke’ and un-woke. Godliness is you as the manifestation of God in the world. It’s called the sons of God. Nhat Hanh writes, “People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality.” Real life is Christ come as you and as us all in our Everyday.
This is why we are never alive in the fragments of the law – but we are whole, holy and one with real life in the Real Jesus who is all God and all us.
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 5). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.