GOD INCARNATED IN YOU

CHRIST YOUR LIFE

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JESUS IS OUR SEEING AND OUR LIFE


To live from the law is to live from a parody of the light and life of life Christ. The incarnation means that Christ’s being becomes one with your being.

It’s amazing that people can believe that the Son of God was incarnated among us as Jesus of Nazareth but resist the notion that His incarnated life as our life is better than a truck-load of law and pieties.

When Jesus cried, ‘It is finished!’ separation from God was finished and union with God began.

Paul’s ‘Christ our life’ is a statement about our acceptability and inclusion in God’s company. It’s a universalist pronouncement that speaks of our renewed oneness with God. Christ our life is the effect of the cross, and our position of at-one-ment that flows from it. Our life and our righteousness is the realisation of the mediation of Christ’s life into is and as us. We are one with God because Christ has made it so.

ONE SUBSTANCE

We celebrate this fact at the Lord’s Table and remind ourselves that the incarnation is our oneness with God in everyday life – life that is not ordinary because we are sons of God in the Son of God. We can believe this or let it go. If the latter is our stance, we are saying to God and ourselves that the serpent in the tree was correct and that we need to take it into our hands to be as Gods (to be Godly) to earn acceptance and worth in God’s sight. This is the position of those who cling to the law.

We can do this because we have the ability to choose. But it pays to choose life and truth. Something is not so, just because our parents believe it or we think it is. Our ideas are not as good as someone else’s if we happen to be dim-witted and uninformed. Our gospel is not a good gospel if it is ‘another gospel.’

BIGOTRY IS A REFUSAL TO LEARN

As Isaac Asimov wrote in 1980, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” This thinking has become common in this season. It has come to fruition in the deluded masses and in Mr Trump.

HOW THE LIE BEGAN

A lie claiming to be truth was seeded into the creation by the father of lies. The shifting of trust from Father to the self, resulted in separation from God and entry to the knowledge of good and evil with its culture of ego, self-righteousness, guilt and bone-headedness.

Folly eventually surfaces as nakedness. Not surprisingly one of the first things the fallen pair noticed was their nudity. Jeff Turner observes, “Their nakedness, something that God had declared to be good, and something formerly of no concern to them, suddenly became something about which they felt profound shame. They believed it needed to be hidden from God’s sight, and so not only did they cover themselves, but they did so with leaves from the Garden’s trees, the very things which they were appointed to work and take care of.

WORKS OF OUR HANDS

“I believe that this is the very first instance of man attempting to shield his perceived uncleanness with the works of his hands. For the first time humankind suspected that there was something wrong with them, believing that because of their faults God’s mood had changed. Adam’s knee jerk reaction was to try to prove to his God that he was still good and of use, and he did so by proudly and prominently displaying the works of his hands. Because of the knowledge of good and evil, the inherent goodness of Adam and Eve’s design now appeared evil to them, causing them to feel the need to improve upon it by adding to it their own accomplishments.”

This is the stance of those who exchange Christ our life for adherence to the law. It subjects folks to the curse of ‘another gospel’ because it insulates them from God. Self-effort always does. Our rest in Christ is our Sabbath Life.