WISDOM IS THE KINGS REAL CLOTHES

I absorbed the idea in my youth that scientific advance occurred as a result of an epistemology founded in the belief that in God we live, move and have our being. Thus, if we believed we would be in the heart of wisdom, imagination and vision. Negativism in politics or in anything is anti-life – a degree of death because it is anti-christ. Jesus did not leave us a religion. He bequeathed us Himself in our inner being by the Spirit. Living this is the difference between being dormant and alive with Christ’s Spirit.

WISDOM IS CHRIST IN YOU
As I got older I realised that Descartes ‘I think, therefore I am’ was an inversion of this ontological reality. It is more truthful to say, ‘What I think is the effect of who I think I am.’ For this reason, we need to live from the mind of Christ rather than from deficient/incomplete gospels that distort Christ and cripple us.

POPULIST HUMBUG
‘Being’ in Christ is the source of creative thought. An accurate sense of being is the frame of wisdom and real life. A broken sense of being promotes confusion and futility. The advance of folly and the multiplication of intelligent people with stupid ideas in this season, is the effect of a progressive distancing from the Reality that is Christ and the seeking of redress in false messiahs and superficial/debilitated versions of Christianity. Mark Twain is supposed to have written, ‘Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.’ But we do not need to be super intelligent to live Christ our life. His atonement has included us in the Family of God.

FULLNESS OF BEING
Our inheritance is more than forgiveness of sins. It is our growing restoration to a state of being – namely sonship. Paul writes, ‘For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,  from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,  that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love,  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,  and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God’ Eph 3.14-19. So why be a blow-up doll when you can be a son/daughter of God with fullness of being human?

ONTOLOGY – ABOUT ‘BEING’ FULLY ALIVE
Reality is Christ. Jesus is the starting point to discernment, wisdom and being robustly human. Intelligence and education is an advantage when joined to a humble spirit and a resolute discipleship of Jesus. Jesus without these is a handicap that can promote boorish self-deception.

Life did not appear out of puddles and neither is it to be found in abstractions and a puddle of legalism. Spirit and life, which is the life and discernment of God in people comes from the trinity, via Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit into you.

PRIMACY OF PERSONS
The primacy of persons is realised in the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. Wisdom and the Spirit of life is in you when you agree that Christ is your life.

Thomas Torrance asserts the primacy of persons and the trinity as the universal source of being and of truth and life. “It is interesting to note that a way of thinking in terms of onto-relational structures first developed out of Christian theology, out of Christology and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

JESUS
“This is very evident in the emergence of the concept of person, which was not found before Christianity, for it is the direct product of the way in which the Church found it had to understand Jesus Christ and the distinctive relations in the Triune God as intrinsically personal. Thus, there arose the concept of person, in its supreme sense in God and in its subordinate sense in human existence, in accordance with which the relations between persons belong to what persons really are in their own beings.” This is to say that valid, worthwhile thought is found in a lived oneness with God in Christ.  Also to say that to know yourself as a person and to relate to others as real persons begin in our lived oneness with Jesus.

IT’S ABOUT BEING
“The relations which persons have with one another as persons are onto relations, for they are person-constituting relations. That was a concept and a way of thinking developed through the understanding of the Holy Trinity as a Communion of Love in whom Father, Son and Holy Spirit mutually involve and coinhere in one another in the profound onto-relations of that Communion, without any blurring of their hypostatic distinctions or properties as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” (1) The creation is an expression of God, and the Logos who is Christ. In Christ we participate in the Light of Jesus’ perceptively knowing the world and knowing people and the self. Oneness with Jesus in the inner-person is the key to be alive and a life-giver rather than our taking up space as a dead person talking.

GOSPEL OF JESUS AND THE APOSTLES TEACHING
We are joined to wisdom in Jesus Christ which is why we must ensure that our Christ is the Christ of God and our Gospel is the Gospel of His Kingdom. We have union with God in Jesus Christ. It’s a relationship of oneness with God in which we are one with God yet ever growing into the fullness of ourselves as sons and daughters of God.

YOUR REAL SELF-LIFE IN WISDOM
We can by living a generalised Christianity with no real affinity to the person of Jesus in the inner life be more dead than alive. John Powell uses the words, ‘Fully human, full alive.’ This will be us in as we live Christ in our inner person.

In his excellent book, Patmos, Baxster Kruger observes that there is a life that is ours in Christ in union with God and union with 0ur real selves. ‘Jesus has united human life, the life of God, the life of heaven and earth in Himself… The truth of all truths is that Jesus is in His Father and we are in Jesus. This is the crux of Jesus’ prayer in John 17.23. ‘I in them and you in me--so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.’ If you love people and do not despise the world or wear the clothes of negativism and stagnation, you will live that which is yours. This is Christ your life.

(1)  The Mediation of Christ, p.49.