JESUS IS YOUR ‘RIGHTNESS WITH GOD’

How are humans made right with God? They are made right with God by the atonement - Christ’s life for our life, Christ’s righteousness in place of our unrighteousness, Christ’s relationship with Father as our relationship with Father and Christ’s Spirit manifest in our flesh.

RECONCILED
Reconciliation is more than sins forgiven. It’s the achievement of oneness of being with God. Thus, the answer to the question, ‘How can we be right with God’ is that in Christ, God stands in for us, God forgives us, and God expressed Himself through us. The bottom line is that Christ is us.

REALIZE
‘On that day you will realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. The day we realise this is the day we transition from pseudo-gospels to the full gospel. Its’s also the day we are born again because we are living the Eucharist as our life rather than as a rite.

FALSE
Some of the most perverse versions of the gospel have it that we must not only be Christ-like. We must be worthy of Christ’s company. This is to say, we must earn Christ. This is a false christ and a false gospel.

Myk Habets following Thomas Torrance writes, “There is no life without the Source of Life, no resurrection without the resurrected One, and no theosis outside of the incarnate Son of God. Thus, theosis is not, strictly speaking, the ‘divinisation’ of the human person as such but the ‘personalising’ of the human being in the Person of the incarnate Son.” Christ is expressed as George and Mabel.

WHOLE PERSON LIVING IS CHRIST
“This is the meaning behind the words of Torrance, ‘for man to live in union with God is to become fully and perfectly human’.  .. It is from Christ alone, the one through whom creation came and the one for whom humanity was created, that men and women are radically made persons in the divine image.” (1) When Christ is our life we live in His Presence and are made human and Godly as Christ is incarnated in our being.

For this reason, Holy Spirit and the anointing is not a substitute for a new covenant life in oneness with Christ. For this reason, Holy Spirit and the anointing bolted on to the law and a culture of legalism does not facilitate a flow of divine life into our being. The soil is Christ from which we grow. The rock-strewn paddock of the Sower in the Field is our neglected inheritance. It’s us when marooned in the law and making our own steps to Christ.

LOVE DEATH MORE THAN LIFE?
Christ our life is our life. This is the doctrine of the apostles and the teaching of the Christian Church. We can represent the teaching of Jesus and the apostles/church Fathers and Reformers as people who are pure in heart. There are those who are resolute in rejecting depleted/distorted gospels by not indulging in rationalisations, denial and spin. They do so at great cost to themselves – due to reproach from  their relatives and the hostility of the political hirelings and carpet baggers/vested interests in marketing degrees of death as a substitute to  life to the full.

(1)  Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, P.39.