WHY BE DECEIVED?
15/04/22 16:03
Once the hurdle of Arianism had been overcome the remaining obstacle to Godliness and a maturing sonship was the ever surfacing penchant to legalism in the church. Legalism today can take the form of reducing the Gospel to moralism or the more overt route of imagining that Jesus came to help us keep the law. Both are heresies that debilitate individuals and hinder the advance of the new creation.
Legalism comes from the same delusion as Arianism – the deception of separation from God and the notion that what we do is separate from who we are and that holiness is somehow separate from everyday living. Religion too often assumes a compartmentalised life. Oneness assumes the artificial compartments of the knowledge of good and evil have ceased and the oneness of life in the life of Jesus Christ has begun.
ORIGINAL LIE
The original lie was the insinuation that God was in a sense separated from Adam and Eve in that behind Himself and behind our backs God was impeding us from being our real selves. But we were already as ‘gods’ since we were the sons and daughters of God. ‘Knowing good and evil’ does not make us ‘as God’s. It traps us in relativisms and dichotomies, absorbs us in triviality and turns us into sinners, since we are captured in separation from God.
‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20.
A FOLLY
We have been made one with God in Jesus Christ. So the attempt to be one with God when we are not separated is an all too common religious deception that needs to be repented off so that we can enjoy the oneness and recreation of the self and the world inherent in the incarnation.
‘That all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me’ JOHN 17.21. NIV.
FABLES
Law-religion and any kind of legalism is the attempt of those who live in separation from God to achieve union with God by actions that they define as Godly. But today as in the Beginning, separation from God is an illusion. In Christ you are one with God. Jesus is our oneness with God. He is the Door who joins us to the oneness of being that is the trinity.
Jesus Christ is fully God. He is also fully Human. Just as Jesus Christ is one substance with God, so He is one substance with us. There is no dualism in God and no dualism in our salvation and fellowship with God.
UNBROKEN RELATIONSHIP
“The New Testament does not present Christ in contrast to God or alongside of God, or argue from one to the other, as in Ebionite and docetic Christology’s, but presents him in the unbroken relationship of his incarnate life and work to God to the Father, and thus in the undivided wholeness of his divine-human reality as the Son of God become man. It is as such that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour apart from whom there is no way to knowledge of the Father.(1)
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 115). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.