DEAD TREES AND BURNING BUSHES

The astonishing prophecy of the incarnation that Moses beheld appeared to him in the desert in the form of a burning bush. This was both a portent of the transfiguration of Jesus and the incarnation of each of us by the Spirit of Christ. A potent reminder that our God-life is not about life joined to the law, a confected contract or a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil.

PROPHETIC TREE
Karl Barth wrote, “Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way”. Jesus urged this Himself in the words, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ This is as comprehensive as we can get for doctrine, righteousness and epistemology.

Our treasure in when retrieved from the field is the incarnation of the self by the trinity. This is the pearl of great price.

IGNITED LIFE
The bush was aflame but not consumed. It was a picture of the coming Jesus of Nazareth who was fully God, yet a man and a picture of the Believer who chooses to live Christ their life, rather than Christianity their life. This is the mediation of Christ. Ultimate grace is Christ as you. Diluted grace is us adding a tincture of supposed entitlement to the completeness that is ours in Christ.

Mediation of religion is the hope that self-effort will mediate Christ. But it does not. Christ and Holy Spirit mediate Christ and they are as close to you as your breath. Real spirituality is personal, alive and alight. Never an abstraction or an ideology.

Life in the Spirit is the mediated Christ in you in spirit and in truth.

UNDOING ADAM TO REVEAL YOU
George MacDonald writes, “He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: he is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.”

NOT INTERMITTANT
‘The presence’ is not something that comes and goes. It simply is. It’s in you as a Believer. The illusion in some forms of charismatic religion is that we live from the anointing or that the presence comes and goes, or that we must continually strive for more of the presence. But the presence is in us and we are in the presence as the result of atonement and incarnation.

Real life is Christ come in you.
You can live in this ‘highest consciousness of life.’ It’s lived by agreeing with Christ and the apostles that Christ is your life. It’s not a new way of keeping the law. Beware the inherent Gnosticism in ‘new light’ and other gospels that reverse the cross and make Jesus a function of the law. In Christ we are alive. In the law we are ‘this body of death’.

Entire dysfunctional communities of faith have been built on the supposition that Jesus lives to make us people of the law. Jesus lives to make us expressions of Himself. Paul called this ‘Christ who is our life’. It’s the eucharist lived.

Humans can be addicted to the idea that we must add something to God and His provision for us. This started with the lie that precipitated the fall and continues in aberrant gospels that add and detract from the simple fullness of Christ our life. Legalism is an un-doing of the cross and a reversal of the Reformation.

NECROMANCY
Necromancy* is the attempt to get life and knowledge from a corpse. Paul likened this in another place to, ‘This body of death.’
Paul scotches ‘works-ism’ in Galatians when he asks ‘Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.  I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard?  Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?’ Gal 3.1-3 NIV.

Tied to the law in any way, we will not progress in the Spirit.
RICHES LIVED
A fulfilled life is found in the conscious living of Christ our life. Here the fact that Christ has come in our flesh means that the self is the expression of Christ – even a manifestation of Christ so that Christ is multiplied by the church in the world.

THE CHRIST FORMED YOU
There is a ‘you’ that was known by God before the creation of the earth. This is the real self you are designed to be and in the new birth of the self that you are becoming.
THE AFFRONT OF JUDAISING
To live in the law when we have the Spirit, meaning Christ as us, is an affront to ourselves and a crude side-lining of the prize of the cross – incarnation. God is I AM. But there is an I AM of you, when you eat and drink the Son of Man instead of the junk-food of law and religion. By the Spirit of Christ in you and as you – you are a new creation person. This is the Kingdom. Law-ism is not.

Those of us raised in the law and its non-power over sin would have been more victorious over the sins of our youth had we believed in Christ as our life and the transforming power of God as the basis of our being. Legalism does not prevent degradation. It enhances it.
PERICHORESIS IDENTITY
The burning in you of the Spirit of Christ will not consume the essential you, but it will consume all that is not you. It will burn away the false you so that you will proceed from glory to glory as you rest in Christ’s life as your life and allow Him to be the glorious you that is being revealed in your person.

* As a result John warns that the flesh come in the flesh instead of Christ come in the flesh is anti-christ. Reverence and reversion to the law contradicts the cross and endorses the culture of death originating in the lies that led to the fall.
(1) George MacDonald, by C. S. Lewis. P2.