BEYOND THE BUBBLE OF A SHRUNKEN LIFE
22/11/24 11:27
We can, if we are obtuse. live in our own bubble-opiate of the people that denies the full Gospel of Jesus in favour of a supposed perspective that makes us feel special and clothes us with a self-made status and identity that is no identity at all.
The beauty of our salvation is that it is much more than salvation from death and the degrees of un-life. It is liberation from the false self and the cultural disease of a perverse and distorted society. Our role as disciples of Jesus is to be Recreators of society, not endorsers and lackeys of Babylon. The culture of Egypt and Babylon is not limited to the ungodliness of unbelief and Trumpism. It is embedded in versions of Christianity that have a smothered Christ and reveal a commonality with those who would extinguish truth in the same way as the Vested Interests murdered Truth in Christ when He was among us.
WHOLE
Nothing compares to our being a life-giver in collaboration with Christ in this life in the Body. We are healed in Christ and our healing to wholeness is assured as long as our Christ is the Christ of God and our gospel is Christ’s Gospel of the Kingdom. If we are followers of a distorted gospel and have joined ourselves to a false christ, we will become crippled rather than healed and dead rather than alive, oppressing people and justifying it with distorted religion. As a result we will head relentlessly into the futility that misguided Evangelical Christians have helped to precipitate in the United States.
PHANTOMS
Self-centredness is a lens that prolongs the fall beyond its time and gives encouragement to the spirit of anti-christ. This is why the Gospel of Jesus, Paul, John and the Church Fathers is a must if we are not to plant paddocks of tares and curse ourselves with ‘other gospels.’ We can belong or the Fellowship of the Ring or the bent kingdom of the orcs.
BEING – BEING ONE WITH GOD AND EACH OTHER
Myk Habets outlines the Gospel of the Kingdom with reference to Thomas Torrance. “Because of sin and the Fall the onto-relations that exist between all personal beings – God-humanity, humanity-God, and humanity-humanity – have been radically ‘disrupted’, resulting in the breakdown of personal relationships on both the horizontal and vertical levels. This disruption affects the ‘transcendental determinism’ of human beings. As fallen humans refuse to listen to the Spirit (of God) ‘transcendental determinism’ is replaced with self-determinism. As a result only through the mediation of Christ can the Holy Spirit be poured out on human beings so that they can reflect the imago Dei as God intended.
HUMANISED BY CHRIST
Given this definition of the imago Dei, one that is restored through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ and mediated to us by the Spirit who unites us with Christ, we can see what Torrance means when he uses the concepts of theosis. As Colyer helpfully summarises: ‘Theosis or theopoiesis is not the divinizing or deification of the human soul or creaturely being, Torrance contends, but rather is the Spirit of God humanizing and personalizing us by uniting us with Christ’s vicarious humanity in a way that both confirms us in our creaturely reality utterly different from God, and yet also adapts us in our contingent nature for knowledge of God, for communion with God and for fellowship with one another.’”
To be made Christ-like is to be made more gracious, less selfish, liberated from greed, made wise and not foolish and to be made totally life-giving. It is to be son/daughters of God in spirit and in truth.
