RAISING THE DEAD
12/10/23 15:21
If in living you have been living in pieces of religion, now is a good time to come to terms with God and to understand what the cross and the incarnation means for your life. If you enjoy a robust life of spirit and life, now is a good time to dive deeper into the river and share rivers of life with those who have made do with rivers of sand.
ABOUT BEING
The quote below from Thomas Torrance may appear abstruse but we should not let that obscure the clarity that emerges – which is that the word of God is not words about God. The word of God is about ‘being’ – about being a truly alive you. Genuine life is holistic and the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
NEVER THE LETTER
The letter kills because it is nothingness and because it is toxic.
It’s significant that the Word of God is not words but the Christ - and the sons of God are not law aficionados but expressions of the Trinity. Of course, many end up as religious abstractions because they are in Adam/Moses and not incarnated with Christ as their life. Once Christ our life, is our life, is we have entered the genuine rebirth and left behind our life in religion. This is the path of sonship – an adventure as sons/daughters of God.
Jesus' image of the Vine and branches indicates that real selfhood is about union and growth. Union with God in Christ that is.
NOT GOSPELS
Gospels in which an attempt to make the parts the whole are deficient and ‘no gospel at all’. Every genuine rendering of the Gospel is based on the reality that Christ is all and in all.
The tragedy of the law and the deficit of Christianity that is an expression of the knowledge of good and evil is that it tries to make something whole out of parts. It’s like a car that always remains a pile of parts and never gets to be a BMW.
THE OFFENCE OF LIFE
Life in the Spirit, particularly the more authentic versions of it are described by the stubbornly religious as new age. Nothing new about this. Jesus was blamed for healing people in the power of Beelzebub. Anything that is not effete, ineffective and ploddingly religious runs the danger of being labelled as heresy by the spirit of anti-christ – a spirit that is not confined to wicked people but present in good people who accommodate themselves to religion.
OLD LIES FOR NEW
Once Satan had succeeded in seducing humanity from God in the beginning, the only alternative, post cross, was to attempt to continue the fall (separation) in disguise – by disguising religion as godliness. Understand that when we live in the law we are living in religion and when we live in religion we are living in the law and separation. It’s the culture of the knowledge tree and the way of lingering death.
PARADOX
There is no holism in the law. The law and a ‘whole person approach’ are a contradiction in terms.
The mystery of Godliness is that we are found as ourselves as we are lost in Christ.
God is whole in Himself and we are whole in the Christ of God.
You find yourself by being lost in Jesus.
LIGHT OF LIFE
The Living Word is the logos and Christ of God. All reality starts with the trinity and ends with the trinity – a circle of life in itself. Jesus is the alpha and omega because the triune God is the alpha and omega of all that is. The trinity is Persons par excellence and ‘being’ itself. As a result, all subordinate created things have their being in God as Paul declares in Acts, ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’
HOLISM
Torrance writes on the holistic nature of the gospel, “The account of the doctrine of the Trinity offered here is not analytical, deductive, or discursive, but holistic. It is an attempt to be faithful to the way in which the Holy Trinity is presented to us in the Gospel, if only implicitly, as a Whole but as a differentiated Whole.
This means that exposition must proceed in a circular way, in which understanding of the whole is not built up from a prior grasp of its constituent parts, but in which the whole while understood out of itself is nevertheless understood with subsidiary attention to its parts, and the parts are properly understood in the light of the whole.” (1)
MAKE US WHOLE
The triune God is the whole. This is the womb of reality.
The cross, the at-one-ment and the incarnation are all measures that make us one with the Whole who is the triune God. The three in one of God is WHOLENESS itself.
The genius of our salvation is that Adam’s separation has been undone and Christ’s union with Father and Spirit has become ours. Holiness is ours because oneness with God is our reality. It’s real in our lives when we believe it is. Rejoice in your inheritance.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
ABOUT BEING
The quote below from Thomas Torrance may appear abstruse but we should not let that obscure the clarity that emerges – which is that the word of God is not words about God. The word of God is about ‘being’ – about being a truly alive you. Genuine life is holistic and the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
NEVER THE LETTER
The letter kills because it is nothingness and because it is toxic.
It’s significant that the Word of God is not words but the Christ - and the sons of God are not law aficionados but expressions of the Trinity. Of course, many end up as religious abstractions because they are in Adam/Moses and not incarnated with Christ as their life. Once Christ our life, is our life, is we have entered the genuine rebirth and left behind our life in religion. This is the path of sonship – an adventure as sons/daughters of God.
Jesus' image of the Vine and branches indicates that real selfhood is about union and growth. Union with God in Christ that is.
NOT GOSPELS
Gospels in which an attempt to make the parts the whole are deficient and ‘no gospel at all’. Every genuine rendering of the Gospel is based on the reality that Christ is all and in all.
The tragedy of the law and the deficit of Christianity that is an expression of the knowledge of good and evil is that it tries to make something whole out of parts. It’s like a car that always remains a pile of parts and never gets to be a BMW.
THE OFFENCE OF LIFE
Life in the Spirit, particularly the more authentic versions of it are described by the stubbornly religious as new age. Nothing new about this. Jesus was blamed for healing people in the power of Beelzebub. Anything that is not effete, ineffective and ploddingly religious runs the danger of being labelled as heresy by the spirit of anti-christ – a spirit that is not confined to wicked people but present in good people who accommodate themselves to religion.
OLD LIES FOR NEW
Once Satan had succeeded in seducing humanity from God in the beginning, the only alternative, post cross, was to attempt to continue the fall (separation) in disguise – by disguising religion as godliness. Understand that when we live in the law we are living in religion and when we live in religion we are living in the law and separation. It’s the culture of the knowledge tree and the way of lingering death.
PARADOX
There is no holism in the law. The law and a ‘whole person approach’ are a contradiction in terms.
The mystery of Godliness is that we are found as ourselves as we are lost in Christ.
God is whole in Himself and we are whole in the Christ of God.
You find yourself by being lost in Jesus.
LIGHT OF LIFE
The Living Word is the logos and Christ of God. All reality starts with the trinity and ends with the trinity – a circle of life in itself. Jesus is the alpha and omega because the triune God is the alpha and omega of all that is. The trinity is Persons par excellence and ‘being’ itself. As a result, all subordinate created things have their being in God as Paul declares in Acts, ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’
HOLISM
Torrance writes on the holistic nature of the gospel, “The account of the doctrine of the Trinity offered here is not analytical, deductive, or discursive, but holistic. It is an attempt to be faithful to the way in which the Holy Trinity is presented to us in the Gospel, if only implicitly, as a Whole but as a differentiated Whole.
This means that exposition must proceed in a circular way, in which understanding of the whole is not built up from a prior grasp of its constituent parts, but in which the whole while understood out of itself is nevertheless understood with subsidiary attention to its parts, and the parts are properly understood in the light of the whole.” (1)
MAKE US WHOLE
The triune God is the whole. This is the womb of reality.
The cross, the at-one-ment and the incarnation are all measures that make us one with the Whole who is the triune God. The three in one of God is WHOLENESS itself.
The genius of our salvation is that Adam’s separation has been undone and Christ’s union with Father and Spirit has become ours. Holiness is ours because oneness with God is our reality. It’s real in our lives when we believe it is. Rejoice in your inheritance.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.