JESUS DREW A LINE

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What line did Jesus draw? He drew the dividing line between God’s Kingdom of Light and Satan’s dominion of darkness. He didn’t draw this line philosophically—leaving it open to discussion or to the shifting definitions of human opinion and religious ideology. Because Jesus was the Messiah King, His arrival on the scene of human history created the real, spiritually tangible existence of that dividing line. His incarnational coming inaugurated the earthly debut of the Kingdom of God, and that Kingdom’s ongoing spiritual presence calls for human wills to respond. Putting off or making excuses to avoid a decisive response was then and is now to make a negative choice.

John the Baptist—sent by God as a prophetic voice to prepare people for receiving the coming King—preached, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” Jesus preached exactly the same message with another intent. He was now calling people to participate in that Kingdom by putting their trust in Him. True repentance or metanoia [“change of mind”] is not an emotional sorrow over personal sins or an intellectual adaptation to a new concept. It’s the full human person—body, soul, and spirit—fully surrendering to Jesus Christ as the Savior King. The choice of repentant faith in response to the Good News of God’s Kingdom initiates in the believer’s heart the actual Reign of Almighty God, “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (James 1:17). Forgiveness of sins and a renewed mind are the results of that surrender, for both are found only in the King.

Satan is at work 24/7 to prevent sinners from crossing over that dividing line by their surrender to Jesus. For all human history, he’s avidly studied our fallen nature, learning how to play every field in order to cater successfully to each human inclination. “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), not pure and holy light, but creational forms of light and enlightenment tinted to individual human taste with various degrees of darkness. He offers as many shades of gray as there are human personalities to be duped by them. He still uses his old forbidden-fruit promise that “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5), and it still yields the deadly blindness of multiple moralities, all independent from God. Long before humans fell into it, the devil chose this path to moral independence from God. By leading us into it too, he became “the god of this world” who not only “blinded the minds of the unbelievers” in Eden, but continues to blind all the unbelieving, “to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Cor 4:4).

Scripture reveals that by God’s Son “all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.” (Col 1:16). Jesus drew a line symbolically in the beginning when He “divided the light from the darkness,” (Gen 1:4). But in the human birthright of moral conscience, from the beginning until now, He has faithfully been “the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.” (John 1:9). All creation, including those made in His image to be servant-leaders and caretakers of creation, were described by God as “very good” (Gen 1:31). All creation, including us, would have remained “very good,” if human leadership had remained living in the truth, walking in the light of the Lord. But we listened instead to the liar Satan and were deceived into the spiritual death and damning darkness of his lies.

Jesus described the deceiver: “… He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies,” (John 8:44); and He contrasted the deceiver’s works to His own: “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly,” (John 10:10). Satan extends his own rebellion against God through us by luring us to sin against the God of light, thereby capturing us as prisoners in his dominion of darkness. Jesus unmasked the devil’s goal in tempting us to sin—“Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin,” (John 8:34)—and the Apostle John told the end result: “He who does what is sinful is of the devil.” John continues by telling why no human can enter the territory of self-will and autonomy from God without falling under Satan’s influential power, and sometimes, his full control: “because the devil has been sinning from the beginning.” Because he got there first and is the mastermind of rebellion against God, he rules over the domain of sin. But these explanations from 1 John 3:8 conclude with the divine intervention that is humanity’s only hope: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.”

Why does God’s work of salvation boil down to this one thing: destroying Satan’s work? It’s because sin means “missing the mark,” and the divine mark, God’s true target for humans, is to walk in truth by living and thriving in the God of truth. Through lies, Satan tempts people to use their God-given desires in God-forbidden ways. He uses creation itself, or his manipulations of created things, to lure those “good” human desires into “missing the mark.” And the result? “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death,” (James 1:15). The incredible but inconceivably gracious response of our loving God to our sins and spiritual death was the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. By personally paying for our sins on the Cross, Jesus drew a line in human history between sin’s damnation and sin’s forgiveness. By His Resurrection, which completed His work on the Cross, Jesus drew a line between the spiritually dead and the divinely alive, between slavery in Satan’s dominion of darkness and the abundant life in God’s Kingdom of light.

The vicarious Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross went beyond taking away sins. It also put the sinner to death. A crucial dimension of destroying “the devil’s work” was for Jesus vicariously to take into His own death the false humanity that Satan had fashioned with lies: “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin,” (Rom 6:6). But, while the forgiveness of sins is God’s instantaneous act, the emancipation from slavery to sin is chronological, progressing in earthly time as rapidly as believers in Christ let the truth of Christ set them free. In promising believers this liberation, Jesus inferred this progressive pattern: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” (John 8:31-32).

Many have knelt at the Cross of Christ for forgiveness without completely surrendering to the abundant life He brought to them by His Resurrection. Death to the “old self”—the false self created by Satan’s lies—is not a one time event. In Galatians 2:20, the Apostle Paul made an amazing claim based on Christ’s work on the Cross: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” In this statement, he was describing his victorious walk “by faith in the Son of God”—his experiential journey in daily manifesting his new life in Christ. In our union with Christ, we can live life “more abundantly,” but not automatically. Day by day, even moment by moment, we must choose to follow Him, choose to obey Him. In the same way, while we have been “crucified with Christ” we do not automatically die to the individual lies that shaped the false self. We must, by a choice of our new will in Christ, reject any lingering lies. This is why the Apostle Paul exhorts us, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry,” (Col 3:5).

Placing our faith in Jesus brings us across the line from death to life, because “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new,” (2 Cor 5:17). But Satan doesn’t easily give up on repentant sinners who were once his slaves. If he can’t keep us in his realm of darkness with the old lies he once used to enslave us, he invents a million others—appealing half-truths, innocent-looking gray areas—to lure us back across the line into his territory. This is why Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” (Mat 10:34). He came to draw a line that meant spiritual warfare for the rest of this fallen world’s history. Believers are to be warriors commissioned to help others find their true selves in Christ. In order to do that, without themselves becoming spiritual casualties in the battle, they must keep their minds and hearts fed on the truth God has revealed in His Word. They must become skilled in resisting satanic lies with “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” (Eph 6:17).

This dividing line is absolutely precise. There is no middle ground, no room for a mixture of the brightest light of truth with the faintest tint of shading. Divine truth has no tolerance of a compromise between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the most appealing precepts of ancient or modern wisdom. Therefore, it can never ever be Jesus plus something else, for the very person and presence of Christ the King defines the Kingdom of God. He alone is the King of Kings, Who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6). From that exclusive stance, Jesus drew a line, and everyone’s eternal destiny depends on what side of the line they choose to be on.

[If you found this helpful, you might also want to read, Finding and Becoming Our True Selves, “Question Autonomy!” and Identity Amnesia.]

DEATH IS REAL

The title is a no-brainer, but necessary. Almost universally, we avoid contemplating the obvious fact of universal mortality. But ignoring death’s inevitability can’t make it go away or help us face it. The following free verse poem (rare for me) is my attempt to emphasize the utter finality of eventually arriving at our individual earthly end point:

TERMINUS

Hourglass empty;
Measured cord cut;
Opportunities passed;
Possibilities exhausted;
Game over. . . .

End of discussion:
No more opinions;
All choices chosen;
Personal history frozen:
The last period
Forever terminating
The last sentence
In each autobiography
(Once partly private,
Hereafter an open book).

End of the trail,
Concluding all steps
Down all forks in the road
To finish the journey;
Point of no return;
The ticket’s last stop;
End of the line
At the final destination,
Where earthly life stops
And afterlife begins.

Whether delight,
In reward and rejoicing,
Or disaster,
In retribution and regret:
Gate shut. . . .

— David L. Hatton, 8/28/2015
(from Poems Between Here and Beyond © 2016)

As a Gospel preacher, my wish isn’t to create a morbid focus on death. I want to remind everyone to take their life-decisions seriously before death. But not all reminders about death do this equally well.
 
Inundation with news of death can be a blessing or a curse. Hearing of others dying warns us to prepare. We’re mortal, and sooner or later, we’ll leave this life for the afterlife. But a constant media stream—announcing the passing of faraway people unrelated to us—can numb our perception. Tragic stories of freak accidents, lethal illnesses, merciless homicides or desperate suicides may shock us, but to preserve mental hygiene, we dare not dwell on daily mortality reports too long. Yet dismissing them too quickly can dull us to what news of any death ought to instill: a resolve to be ready to face our own.

If media journalism fails, sometimes literary fine arts can succeed, especially when poets or novelists adeptly develop believable characters. Edgar Lee Masters showed this skill in his Spoon River Anthology—a free verse chronicle of an early 1900s Midwest community. Masters had the deceased of a fictitious village speak their own brief, autobiographical epitaphs from the grave. The voices of each terminated life stirs reflection, draws sympathy, or offers a cautionary reality-check. In the latter case, the message usually gives an alert or an advisory about life, as exemplified in the following excerpts from two of the poems, “Harold Arnett” (a suicide) and “Lucinda Matlock”:

I pulled the trigger… blackness… light…
Unspeakable regret… fumbling for the world again.
Too late! Thus I came here,
With lungs for breathing… one cannot breathe here with lungs,
Though one must breathe.…
Of what use is it
To rid one’s self of the world,
When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?
    *    *    *
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you—
It takes life to love Life.

Recently, I finished the murder mystery Deadline, a page-turner by novelist and Bible teacher Randy Alcorn. His credible characters allowed him to weave much into the story to provoke serious thought about living right and dying well. Such novels can change a person’s perspective on how to live and how to die. Certain readers might evade Alcorn’s intent by claiming the obvious: “It’s only fiction.” But this novel’s moral imperatives are not make-believe, and its decisive fork in the road at Christ’s Cross leads either to the heavenly bliss of eternal life or to the ultimate death of everlasting separation from God.

Death in fiction and poetry can be powerful and moving, but when closer to home, it’s another matter. At the passing of neighbors, friends, relatives, a parent, our spouse, a son or daughter, we mourn more deeply and ponder our loss much longer. Over time, grief may subside, but reminding memorablia in our immediate environment frequently resuscitate and extend the pain of the parting. Achieving a complete goodbye may take years, or we may still be in the process when it’s our turn to depart. While some call belief in an afterlife superstitious, the goodbye intrinsic to grief may unconsciously express the hope contained in the contracted phrase from which it derives: “God be wi’ ye!” Almost as a cultural reflex—and perhaps even contrary to one’s personal doubts or unbelief—the human tendency is to add to “God be with you” the colloquially familiar phrase “till we meet again.”

Because these nearer and dearer incidents of death are not quickly forgotten, the personal message they offer is not as easily brushed aside. Our thoughts linger on missing faces. We reminisce about lost embraces. I believe there’s a built-in human longing—an afterlife hope, stated or unstated—for a heavenly reunion, where we regain the presence of our departed loves ones and again feel their warm hugs.

The sterile worldview of modern philosophical materialism—a belief that time, space and matter are all that exist—cancels any hope for an afterlife. It evaluates personal individuality after death as “dust in the wind.” Religions envisioning God as a moral scorekeeper, who tallies our successes against our failures in life, provide no assurance that we’ll make it to such a reunion. But the Gospel call to follow Jesus Christ is relational. His personal promise is certain, inspiring confident faith. In John 14:2b-3 (NKJV), Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”

Many years ago I wrote a poem to contrast what philosophies and religions offer with what the Gospel of Christ proclaims. I think it presents a perfect appeal on which to conclude these thoughts about the inevitability of death and what we need to decide before we meet it:

THE ANSWERING

Is there any meaning, a purpose why we’re here,
A reason for our living and dying day by day?
Could there be a message that comes from the beginning,
Outside our world of striving? Is someone there to say?

If it is all illusion, if we are just machines,
How can we measure value? Are we worth more or less?
If we are merely atoms that clumped by time and chance,
Why deem ourselves so precious upon vague hope and guess!

If only Someone’s out there to speak His love by word,
To tell us who we are; if only Someone came,
Then we’d have an answer. (Religion gave too many—
Science forgot our souls), but He’d have to leave His name.

Science said, “Keep searching.” Religion said, “Try harder.”
Some said, “Do your own thing.” And others said, “Be brave!”
But tell me how to listen. The voice of pain is loud!
The wounded scream around us. We face an open grave. . . .

But One came speaking purpose  and wept at pain and death
And healed the brokenhearted. “A lunatic,” said some.
But He said Someone sent Him named Father God and Love.
He claimed to seek the lost ones; that One who came said,
“Come.”

— David L. Hatton, 8/23/1978
(from Poems Between Heaven and Hell ©1991, 2014)

IDENTITY AMNESIA

When we, as sinners, get concerned about our standing before God, we usually think first about our sins. We’ve broken laws, transgressed commandments, trespassed forbidden boundaries, omitted obligations and in many ways “missed the mark” (the literal meaning of sin in the Bible, from how poorly aimed arrows miss targets). This initial concern is natural for humans, and God may use it to get our attention. In John 8:24, Jesus told those who doubted that He was God’s Son, “if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.” But earlier, in the same chapter, His words to a woman caught in adultery clearly expressed His Father’s attitude: “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”

Because God is gracious to repentant sinners, He forgave sins and transgressions in the Old Testament, long before Jesus became the sacrificial Lamb of God. But, while guilt for sins was one problem the Cross addressed, God’s major target was the sin nature: our disposition to sin. Because God created us with an intrinsically united body-spirit nature—the human body created to be spiritual and the human spirit created to be incarnate—Adam and Eve could not help but genetically pass on to all their descendants this bent toward sinning. We all inherit it, and receiving pardon for sins doesn’t eliminate it. Genesis 3:1-7 tells how Satan strategically worked to get this functional source of sins inside of us as a race. But 1 John 3:8 proclaims that the Son of God showed up on earth to destroy “the works of the devil.” This was His pragmatic purpose, but not His motivating goal.

The motive of His heart was revealed when Jesus said in Luke 19:10, “the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” We lost much in the Fall of our first parents, but the most crucial loss was in the memory of our created identity. Personal sins, whether in thought, word or deed, do not cause this spiritual amnesia. Sinning is a developed habit, bred and fed by deeming ourselves independent from our Creator. Yet this way of thinking seems to come naturally to us. We are born with no memory of our absolute and total dependence on God. Complaining that this ignorant situation isn’t our fault will change nothing. The effects of this missed mark on the human condition are universally persistent. The personal multiplication of sins, in acts or attitudes, continues to confirm this race-wide matrix of sin, which functions in this absence of an authentic, dependent relationship with our Maker.

Mark 1:4 states that “John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins (plural).” But when John the Baptist saw Jesus coming to him, he said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin (singular) of the world!” (John 1:29). Oswald Chambers explained this theological difference between sins and sin extremely well:

The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin; but that the disposition of sin . . . entered into the human race by one man, and that another Man took on Him the sin of the human race and put it away (Hebrews 9.26)—an infinitely profounder revelation. The disposition of sin is not immorality and wrong-doing, but the disposition of self-realization—I am my own god. This disposition may work out in decorous morality or in indecorous immorality, but it has the one basis, my claim to my right to myself. (My Utmost of His Highest, October 5th)

By a preoccupation with sins instead of a focus on sin, many have misconstrued what happened in the beginning. We know from Genesis 1:31 that after completing creation, “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” This divine evaluation included “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9), even though its early misuse derailed its “good” purpose from being revealed. God merely told Adam to take care of it, to guard it, but not to eat from it, warning that, if he did, it would kill him. When Adam and Eve ignored this warning and ate that tree’s forbidden fruit, they immediately died spiritually, and afterwards, physically. What they took into themselves had the deadly effect of making them morally independent from God. Once ingested, it gave them their very own “knowledge of good and evil”—an ability to determine right and wrong for themselves. This laid the groundwork for humans to develop a myriad of conflicting personal and cultural moralities down through history, each relying on a knowledge not directly received from God.

When a father warns his child, “Don’t play with the gun . . . it can kill you,” and the child disobeys and dies, the disobedience may have led to the death, but a bullet killed the child. Similarly, when Satan duped Adam and Eve into ignoring God the Father’s warning, they disobediently consumed something that had the power to separate them spiritually from Him and from the divine life He wanted for them. The ultimate effect of imbibing moral independence from God was to kill themselves and us, their descendants. Incorporating this spiritually lethal fruit into their lives and into the human race was the precise point where “sin entered the world, and death through sin,” as described by Romans 5:12-19. But in that same passage, God’s gracious solution to the sin problem is also explained.

Any possibility of having restored human bodies, souls and spirits with clear memories of our original role in servant-leadership required a new humanity. This hope materialized when God’s Son became a body-spirit human being. Christ’s unique conception (Matthew 1:20) from one of Mary’s ova and from the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing (Luke 1:35) combined both the necessary genes of the sin nature, which Mary inherited from Adam, and the essential “seed” of a new human race, which the Holy Spirit’s breath freshly created from earthly matter (as God had first done in Genesis 2:7).

God’s Son becoming a human being is the greatest of all cosmic and celestial miracles. This marvelous Incarnation initiated a new human genome, one with an intrinsically divine nature. But the genetic presence of the sin nature in Jesus, and its utter defeat throughout His earthly life, allowed Him to take this disposition for sinning to the Cross. Paul describes this incredible fact in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” It’s the theological ground for his insistence that “our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be rendered powerless so that we may no longer be enslaved to sin,” (Romans 6:6). This amazing facet of the Incarnation enables both Paul and us to say, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me,” (Galatians 2:20).

Because it’s our self-life of sin that produces sins, God’s goal in salvation was not just forgiveness but renewal. The DNA of the old Adam was nullified by Christ’s bodily death. But the new human genome, the immortal DNA in His resurrected body, made Jesus “the firstborn from among the dead” (Colossians 1:18), with many others to follow. Resurrection introduced a new order of human life, a new humanity destined to reign forever over “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), led by Christ the Savior and King.

Our upbringing in a world alienated from God’s will and ways confirms and nurtures our sin-bent false self in sinning. God’s plan for us is that we stop being sinners and remember our true selves. Christ’s saving gift of new birth begins a new creation in us that reinstates our lost memory. By indwelling us through the Holy Spirit, He facilitates our growth in remembering and living out our true identity as servant-leaders, created “in the image of God,” the Supreme Servant-Leader (Genesis 1:26-27).

If you’re not a Christian, you’re still suffering from spiritual amnesia. God wants to remedy that, but He will not override your personal will in order to do so. You must freely choose to surrender yourself to Him, the Lord of heaven and earth Who came to restore your spiritual memory loss. Heed Christ’s warning in Mark 8:36, “For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” Nothing is more eternally precious than the true self God intended you to manifest in creation. He calls you to forget your false identity of a self-directed self-sufficiency, so you can discover your forgotten identity as a uniquely designed servant who depends on divine guidance. Your success in that holy remembering is enabled by the special grace that accompanies your choice to obey Christ’s familiar invitation, “Follow Me.”

If you’re already a Christian, but have been so preoccupied by worldly concerns or distractions that you have forgotten “your first love” (Revelation 2:4), then you also must surrender. Choose to remember who you really are. Don’t let the world define your identity. Only your Maker and Lord can tell you who you are. If you wake up each day with your Christian memory foggy or fading, then realize your need for forming new habits. Start spending more time talking to God in prayer, more time reading His Word, more time focusing your mind on Christ and listening for His voice in your daily activities. Memorizing Scripture is one of the best habits to develop, and modern technology has brought modern help in that area (Google “the Verse-Locker app”). There’s really no such thing as a once-for-all surrender. The NKJV of Luke 9:23 records Jesus instructing each disciple to “take up his cross daily, and follow Me.”

The following verses offer a concluding summary and poetic reinforcement of these finals exhortations.

SURRENDER

Never wait until disaster
wraps your body in a ball,
or your limbs get set in plaster
after feeble flight and fall:
cease today to flee the Master,
slowing down to heed His call.

Boast no sinful self-reliance
to disparage Heaven’s Throne;
wave no scepter of defiance,
proudly claiming, “I’m my own!”
or you’ll drown in dark compliance
to a demon’s rule alone.

Inner conscience is observant,
when away from God we swim:
our Creator is a Servant,
calling us to image Him
with devotion full and fervent,
waylaid not by wish or whim.

God won’t confiscate decision . . .
we must relegate our will
to His radical excision
of the sin that made us ill.
Dream no shallow, quick revision:
we’ve a void He longs to fill

When a sinner’s heart is willing
to become a saintly soul,
Christ indwells by Spirit filling,
making broken places whole.
Even angels find it thrilling,
watching Jesus meet His goal.

— David L. Hatton, 10/17/2020

UNION LIFE’S INCARNATIONAL SPIRITUALITY

Everyone who knows me knows that the doctrine of Christ’s Incarnation blows my mind![1] But, a few months ago, my understanding of it took another gigantic leap. Actually, it was a return to a crucial insight I met some years ago. It began to take root, but the rigors of ministerial preparation, while employed full time, blocked my grasping its full impact. Perhaps, also, I was not yet ready for such a radical view of incarnational spirituality.

After more than a 2-decade hiatus, I was challenged at a Pastors’ Encounter retreat [2] to find a new spiritual discipline to help me move from “working for the Lord” to “working with the Lord.” Unwilling to alter my already fruitful quiet-time pattern, I chose to start a 2nd daily quiet time, using different devotional material. Back home, I felt led me to an unread book: Infinite Supply–The Best of Union Life 1976-1980 [3]—a compilation of the earliest articles from Union Life magazine, a vehicle for spreading the theological insights of British missionary, writer, and teacher, Norman Grubb.[4]

Before beginning ministerial studies, I found an issue of Union Life on a family-camp book table and subscribed to it, until its publication ceased in 1998. Despite my exposure to this magazine, its main theme both attracted and eluded me. But, while focused on learning to minister with instead of for Christ, this book’s first chapter was an epiphany. It went beyond proposing a life operating with the Lord. It described an incarnational spirituality: Christ’s life lived in us.

These early Union Life articles reintroduced a sacred seashore where I’d once barely waded in the shallows. I now realized it was time to plunge into the depths. An avalanche of insights into an array of familiar Scriptures burst on my mind—Bible passages I’d taken by faith for years without practically applying them to my thought-patterns in daily living. Previously, my highest idea of spirituality had been to become an imitator of Christ. This radical concept of union life called me to recognize that “he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Corinthians 6:17, ESV). Because Jesus and I have become “one spirit,” Christ’s relentless incarnational intent is to live His divine life in, through and as mine, while He, at the same time, directly and personally experiences all the uniqueness of my own human individuality.

By the Incarnation, God became our human Messiah and Savior. But His fleshly embodiment was also the Prototype of a new humanity, showing us our true calling and destiny. Jesus—God in flesh as an authentic human being—lived His earthly life in union with His Father, as He told us in John 14:10 (ESV), “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” But, from His perspective in that union, His calling was one of submission, as seen in His Gethsemane prayer: “Not my will, but thine be done.” This pushes His meaning in “Follow me” beyond walking in His footsteps or imitating His behavior to that of living in union with and in submission to Him, as He had lived in union with and submitted to His Father.

The 1st Adam, created to do God’s will, failed. The 2nd Adam, incarnated to do God’s will, succeeded. The difference was not in their humanity; both were fully human image-bearers of God. But Jesus fulfilled His human mission by submissive union with God the Father who indwelt Him. He allowed the life, will, and love of His Father to be so clearly manifested in His life that He could ask an inquisitive disciple in John 14:9 (ESV), “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

We often use that striking verse as evidence for Christ’s identity as God, due to His unity with the Father as the 2nd Person of the Trinity. Truly, that is His personal identity, and He never lost it by becoming one of us. But He had so fully “emptied Himself” (Philippians 2:7) by becoming “the son of man” that His name, “the name that is above every name,” was only returned to Him after His redemptive work on earth was accomplished (Philippians 2:9). The awesome reality is that this Name —“LORD” [kurios], which is “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” in the Greek Old Testament—has been “bestowed” on a resurrected and glorified human being. He is the “firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18), implying that He is the first one, with more humans to follow. But, even before the Resurrection Day comes, His exalted but ongoing humanity gives the Church something that was impossible for Old Testament saints: union life.

Jesus is God, the 2nd Person of the Trinity, who left Heaven to become a man. But, in being fully restored to Trinitarian fellowship, He did so as a real human being. Out of everything in cosmic or celestial creation, only human nature is privileged to inhabit the Godhead. Though He remains Deity, Christ’s true humanness allows Him to unite as “one spirit” with other humans. Eventually, this union will join the Church, the corporate Bride of Christ, to the Trinitarian family as an “in-law” by marriage. But during our earthly lives, this means what it meant to Jesus in His earthly human life and ministry: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Repetitively in the New Testament, this incarnational language now describes our relationship with the exalted and glorified Christ. For instance, Romans 8:1 (ESV) says we are in Him: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” And Colossians 1:27b (ESV) describes Him being in us: “. . . the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

While we anticipate physical resurrection at Christ’s 2nd Coming, Jesus has already returned to us personally through the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Even now, both He and the Father spiritually inhabit believers, as He promised in John 14:23 (ESV), “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” This means that Christ’s Incarnation—once limited to one body, in one cultural location, and in one short period of time—began and continues to multiply incarnationally through an ever increasing number of believers across centuries, countries and cultures. Once Jesus started manifesting the glory of God the Father in human flesh, He has never stopped and never will. He’s still doing it in us, when our attitude is: “Not my will, but thine be done.”

What does all this mean practically? It means so much more than this little blog article can describe! But primarily, it means that following Jesus is a daily death to self so that our union with Christ can manifest His life through us the way He manifested the Father through Himself. It means that Jesus was serious when He said in John 20:21b (ESV), “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” It means that Paul was describing reality, when He said in Galatians 2:20a (ESV), “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

As Christians, we confess belief in these statements and even affirm the wording in them that disallows evading or explaining away such extravagant claims. Yet we tend to avoid personalizing a mindset that we, by being “joined to the Lord” become “one spirit with him.” We may even doubt the possibility or practicality of a lifestyle matching the clear implication that “as he is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). But once we start thinking and living as if these statements are reality, many Scriptures come alive in a new way.

One of my favorite messages left by Jesus is in John 16:33 (NASB), “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.” As much as I’ve loved this verse, I always wondered how Christ’s success in overcoming the world directly applied to my own earthly journey. The concept of personal union with Him explains it: “so that in Me you may have peace.” Christ, the Overcomer, lives in me and I in Him. Anything happening to me happens to Him, or rather, to us. If I live the truth of this reality, listening for His voice in every sorrow, every situation, then no trial, trouble, or tribulation can ever steal my peace or courage.

In union with Christ, the Anointed One, we too are christs, anointed by the same Holy Spirit as He was. Our union with the supreme Prophet, Priest and King makes us also prophets, priests and kings, for “as he is so also are we in this world.” Union life with Jesus means that we are not tools in His hand or material for His workshop, but “heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17, NKJV). A concept of Christian life or service based on anything less than incarnationally being “one spirit with him” misses God’s mark and falls short of the “glory of God” inherent in our union with the indwelling Christ.

I’ve been exploring this theme of union life for a few months now, but the following poem spurred me to write down some of my thoughts. If you have begun to see their practical direction, then you will see why I am concluding with this poem-prayer by George MacDonald:

          The Carpenter

O Lord, at Joseph’s humble bench
Thy hands did handle saw and plane;
Thy hammer nails did drive and clench,
Avoiding knot and humouring grain.

Lord, might I be but as a saw,
A plane, a chisel, in thy hand!—
No, Lord! I take it back in awe,
Such prayer for me is far too grand.

I pray, O Master, let me lie,
As on thy bench the favoured wood;
Thy saw, thy plane, thy chisel ply,
And work me into something good.

No, no; ambition, holy-high,
Urges for more than both to pray:
Come in, O gracious Force, I cry—
O Workman, share my shed of clay.

Then I, at bench, or desk, or oar,
With knife or needle, voice or pen,
As thou in Nazareth of yore,
Shall do the Father's will again.

Thus fashioning a workman rare,
O Master, this shall be thy fee:
Home to thy father thou shall bear
Another child made like to thee.

-----------------------
NOTES:
1. See my blog post "THE FIRST ADVENT: THE INCARNATION"
2. A recurring retreat in Northern California (https://www.rhythmsofgraceca.org/encounter/).
3. Almost all the articles from Infinite Supply–The Best of Union Life 1976-1980, an out-of-print book, are downloadable from http://www.christasus.com/InfiniteSupply.htm.
4. Links about Norman Grubb’s life, work, and teachings:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Grubb
  http://www.normangrubb.com/
  https://www.lighthouselibrary.com/about-norman-p-grubb/

PANDORA’S BOX & THE EMPTY TOMB

Greek mythology tells about a woman named Pandora who received a box that was supposed to remain closed. When curiosity got the best of her, she yielded to the temptation to lift the lid. Before she could shut it, a swarm of disastrous curses instantly escaped from the open box, filling the world with tragedy. In the Garden of Eden, Eve did essentially the same thing by eating the forbidden fruit.

These similar stories have another crucial similarity. God told Eve that the “offspring” of a woman would someday defeat the devil, whose deception brought death into the world. The other story tells of what was left behind in the bottom of Pandora’s box. Still awaiting release was something the world—now plagued by sickness, suffering and sorrow—desperately needed: hope. Jesus Christ fulfilled both of these expectations.

The Bible explains the nature of this fulfillment: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil,” (1 John 3:8b, ESV). It also describes how it was accomplished: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil,” (Heb 2:14, NIV). Through the Incarnation, God’s Son became a true human being to defeat death by His Cross. His empty tomb became the symbol of Christ’s victory over death and His proven promise of our access to eternal life.

As hope was finally released from the open lid of Pandora’s destructive box, so

“Hope beckons to a death-bound human race from the open doorway of Christ’s empty tomb.”(DLH)

Forbidden fruit from a lethal tree had led humanity into death’s tomb. The promised Fruit from Mary’s womb died on Calvary’s Tree to liberate us from the realm of death—starting now by giving us spiritual life by new birth, and finishing up later by sharing His own bodily resurrection with us for eternity. This is humanity’s ultimate hope declared by history’s most human-friendly faith!

The ancient Christian salutation on Easter morning, “Christ is risen!” declares this awesome hope. The responsive return-greeting echoes our resounding faith in it: “He is risen indeed!” I pray that this hopeful faith be both in your heart and on your lips!