GRACED TO BE ALIVE
29/11/24 07:27
The is a better life available to all. It’s the banquet of the Lord’s Table lived. ‘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. The day we realise this is the day we begin our re-born life. This is the day we begin to live Jesus’ Gospel instead of some dilution and or a variety of the knowledge of good and evil, aka any form of legalism.
This scripture is written by the same Paul who wrote, ‘Christ who is our life.’ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Acts 17.28. We are His offspring by genealogy and the expression of Christ in the Spirit.
SEPARATIONIST IDEAOLOGY
Christ has opened the Door of Himself into non-dualistic living, aka union with God and the creation. We are not out of dualism just because we are eclectically well-read and have dipped into many sources of truth. An eclectic viewpoint is not necessarily non-dualistic. Dualism is the redoubt of simple-minded politics, mind/body separation, fundamentalism and truncated religion.
“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen’ Rom 11.36 NIV. All life is in the Christ of God. To be in Christ is to be one with life.
FABRIC OF DICHOTOMIES
The fabric of much Western thinking, especially in regard to certain forms of Christianity, imagines a demarcation between good and evil. Lying and murder are always evil but the cause of evil or a dulled Christianity is separation from God – in a dualistic mindset God is contained in a realm of piety and churchianity. Here Sabbath is seen is a holy day and the rest of the week as secular. But with the atonement of Christ’s cross and the incarnation of His Spirit, all of life is holy. By Christ we are able to live a whole and holy life mediating the Christ in us to our surroundings.
Dualism is the epistemology of the knowledge of good and evil mindset. It surfaces in political correctness and cancel culture. In Christ we have a sacred week, a sacred year and a sacred life. In Christ there is no ‘great controversy’ as some would have it, because Christ has drawn all creation into Himself.
NON-DUALISM
‘For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him’ Col 1.16 NIV.
We live in non-dualism when we live in the oneness with God that is ours in Jesus Christ. We are not pantheists but as a true non-dualist we live, move and have our being in God whose creation is a witness to Himself and His love of life. Oneness with God as an actuality is the Living Way of integrated thinking and living.
‘Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ John 1.1 NIV. The fragmentation of humanity did nor come from God.
UN-WARRANTED DISTORTION
Legalism is non-integrative. It’s the attempt to make oneself whole by living in bits, pieces and parts. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole for the Believer is oneness with God in Christ.
INCARNATION
Legalism is an unwarranted post-cross way of interpreting salvation, given that the law/knowledge of good and evil has been replaced by the mystery of Christ our life, aka oneness of God. This is ours in the being of God woven into our persons and we into God.
FALL UNDONE
Thomas Torrance has enlightened us about the nature of God and God’s undoing of the fall and done it in a way that goes to the core of what the fall was – the separation of our being from God’s being and the drawing of humanity back into the communion that is God in the person of Jesus Christ. The fall is maintained in the law. Thus, the law is for sinners and Christ our life is for daughters and sons. ‘The law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners’ 1 Tin 1.9 NIV.
POVERTY MENTALITY
Thus, the difference between life and un-life, aka the Being and Communion of God and separation from God is contrasted with the niggardly existence of life in the semi-life and death that is legalism. This is the posturing of a withered life in the letter of proof-texts, definitions and positions. The ‘letter that kills’ has its own perspective. It has a threadbare epistemology because it is the child of the knowledge of good and evil. It is characterised by its dualistic/bisected patterns that separate life from life and manufacture darkness as light.
SPLIT LIFE, SPLIT THINKING, SPLIT BEING
Torrance writes, “Dichotomous ways of thinking .. 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…
[There are] damaging effects of these ways of thinking upon our understanding of Christ and his Gospel. They lead to a detachment of Christ from the context of God's covenant relations with his chosen people, Israel, to a detachment of Christ from God, and then subsequently to a detachment of the Gospel from Christ or a detachment of Christianity from the person and work of Christ.”
DEGREES OF BELONGING
It's possible to be married to the ‘husband’ of our inherited beliefs in the illusion that this is marriage to Christ. This is why Believers can convince themselves that they belong to the Body of Christ when there is little content to their belonging. Only smatterings of belonging because the old covenant attachment to the law blinds us in a separation mindset even though we have inherited oneness with God. A oneness which the religious rationalise away on account of the law and their ‘earning acceptance with God mentality’.
CHRIST INCLUDES US IN GOD
‘I in them and you in me--so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ John 17.23 NIV.
The oneness of God in three persons, one God - is the living pattern of the extension of Godself over humanity via the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we have been enfolded in the Fellowship of The Trinity so that oneness with God has been restored and the fall has been undone.
‘And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth’ Eph 1.10 NLT. We can live this now.
